good evening thanks so much for joining us this evening I'm Philip Munoz I'm the director of the potential on a program in constitutional studies and the director of our Tocqueville program here at Notre Dame it's my pleasure to welcome you here for an event I've been looking forward to hosting for four months now I'm gonna introduce one of our student fellows who's going to introduce our speaker just a few announcements for any undergraduates here I know you're about to register for class if you're interested in the constitutional studies minor we have some information out on the table there come talk to me afterwards come talk to Jen Smith who's floating around in the back there she she helps me run the program if you're visiting and we have a number of visitors the best way to find out about our programs is actually our Facebook site Khan studies at NDTV you follow us on Facebook we put up all of our advertisements or just go to the Khan studies web page or the Tocqueville web page and that's how you can find out about all of our events you're always always welcomed as I said I've been looking forward to this event for some time since I first read about mr. Dreier I knew the book was coming out I had a chance to talk to him before the book came out and I told him as soon as that book comes out we're gonna we're gonna bring you out then he told me what the speaking fee was and I said well we have to wait a few months a few months and then we'll bring you out but we're really happy that you're that you're here one of my favorite parts of being director of the of the programs is we have a group of undergraduate fellows we call them our Tocqueville fellows and they help us plan events they help us host the events tomorrow morning they're gonna have breakfast with mr. Dreier and they also introduce our speakers so it's my pleasure to call to the podium Soren Hansen Soren's a junior here Lewis hall a pls major but really she's a constitutional Studies minor and so our neural energy star speaker [Applause] hi everyone and welcome and thank you professor Munoz it is my esteemed pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker Roger hails from Baton Rouge Louisiana and he's a graduate of Louisiana State University he's a writer by trade and he writes mostly on religion politics film and culture he's also a blogger at the American Conservative and author of several books all with particularly great titles so I'm going to read you a couple of them the first from 2006 is crunchy Khan's how Birkenstock berkians gun-loving organic gardeners evangelical free-range farmers hip homeschooling mamas right-wing nature lovers and their diverse tribe of counter cultural conservatives plan to save America or at least the Republican Party another great one another great title from 2015 and as a POS major great books major I especially like this one how Dante can save your life and the book that we are going to be hearing about this evening the benedict option which was put out in 2017 just benedict option a strategy for Christians and a post-christian nation and interesting fact about this book is that it has been translated into seven different languages so with that short and sweet introduction please join me in welcoming Roger right it's great to see such a big turnout tonight thank you for for coming let me move this up a little yeah it is fascinating to me too that this book is it has been translated or will soon be translated into seven different languages which tells me that the the sense of crisis that I try to address in the book is it's something global or at least within the West although I have to say that it's going to be published in South Korea too so who knows where this is it's going to go it's a pleasure to be at Notre Dame for a couple of reasons first I'm going to the football game this weekend and as as an LSU fan as a graduate of LSU and as somebody who lives in Baton Rouge it will be a pleasure to go to a football game with the winning team this year something unusual and it's also more seriously to me it's great to be here because if you've read the Benedict option you know there are four Notre Dame professors who were key to this book and its thesis I'm not claiming that they they are they would want to be associated with the book necessarily but they meant a lot to me and first of course is Alistair McIntyre then professor Christian Smith the sociologist Patrick Dineen and the historian Brad Gregory so I want to thank them and thank this university for for their scholarship and what they've what they've contributed to my understanding of the time we're in and what we might do about it as Christians well by now if you've heard anything at all about the Benedict option you will have heard that it's alarmist about the condition of the church in the West and you know what I'm not going to deny that I'm going to own that in fact let me affirm the accusation the Benedict option is alarmist but that's because there's a lot to be alarmed about if you are Christian in the West today who is not alarmed then you're not paying attention in fact I believe that in the West we are living through the religious and cultural equivalent of the great flood of the Bible it is a time of catastrophe yes but it's a particular kind of catastrophe one that is obliterating the old order including and especially Christian faith the floodwaters are liquid modernity this is a phrase coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to describe the constant change that's characteristic of our time for bellmen modernity was solid in the sense that a definite and radical change had been set in motion by the Enlightenment but change happened at a rate that was absorbable that is people could get used to the changes such that life itself felt solid comprehensible but at some point probably of a 20th century the rate of change sped up so fast that modernity became liquid that is before this or that change took solid form things changed again to live in liquid modernity then is to experience life as having no fixed landmarks or pathways you can go wherever your desires take you bellman said that the kind of person who thrives in liquid modernity is one who has no fixed commitments that would impede his autonomy if before we thought of ourselves as in some sense on the grand pilgrimage through life moving in a definite direction with everyone else today we experience life more as tourists tourists travel with their chosen parties they go where they want to go they drop in and out of places long enough to drain them dry of interest and then move on guided by their individual whim with no purpose other than keeping themselves from being bored now please understand that I'm speaking of tourism in this context mostly in terms of a metaphor the places that tourists in the sense I mean visit or marriages religions jobs communities and so forth I myself have been quite the tourist in the course of my life and I'm not proud of that fact that that's that's the modern condition and it's something that I one of the reasons I've tried so hard to figure out how to escape this cycle that seems to trap so many of us anyway liquid modernity has brought about the loss of traditions religious and otherwise it has fomented the dissolution of bonds among people it has caused a loss of a shared sense of authority as well as a sense of connection to the past and to the future and it has terribly compromised the ability of people to reason together and therefore to live together in peace people have come to see truth these days as what feels true for them this is as most of you no doubt know what Alastair MacIntyre calls emotivism you cannot argue with someone's feelings and if you can't argue about someone's feelings then how can you settle disputes you really can't accept through the raw exercise of power and I think our politics are strongly tending in that direction the experience of rapid fragmentation that America is going through did not start with Donald Trump nor did it start with the 1960s which is the conservatives like me love to point to the 60s I got hot that they did it well yeah they did it but it didn't start with them it has been underway for a very long time but it's now reaching critical mass in fact MacIntyre famously compared our civilization at this point in time to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West I think he's right about that and that the most important thing for believing traditional Christians to do is to stop caring so much about shoring up the Empire but which I mean dedicating their primary passions their primary passions to reforming and renewing an order that is probably at this point beyond saving instead they we should focus primarily but not exclusively on shoring up communities of faith for the long Dark Age ahead MacIntyre said of course that we await a new and doubtless very different st. Benedict for me as a Christian I interpret this as saying that if we want to be faithful to the truth in this chaotic time we laypeople have to look to the example of the early Benedictine monks for inspiration and direction and how to live out our beliefs in community on this shortly the fact is we live in a post-christian civilization in the sense that our civilization no longer understands itself by the biblical narrative that would be challenging enough to the Christian Church if the church were in good shape but the church in the West not the global South in the West is in terrible shape and our inability to recognize this and to face the facts squarely without sentimentality only makes it worse the churches are in a state of rapid decline both in terms of quantity and quality by quality I mean the number of people who claim to be Christian as we all know in Europe the Christian faith is flat on its back in both Protestant and Catholic countries I saw the other day that just last year the Church of England lost 34,000 people 34,000 in just one year as a matter of fact pope benedict xvi who i like to call the second benedict of the benedict option like in europe's spiritual crisis - yes the fall of the roman empire in the united states we thought for a long time that we were an exception to this trend but that's simply no longer the case the bottom has fallen out with the millennial generation a couple of years ago two of the leading sociologists of religion surveying the most recent social science data concluded that the United States has at long last joined Europe on the steep downward slide - unbelief now by quality I'm talking about the nature of Christian belief and the fidelity to Christian orthodoxy as it has been broadly understood for centuries as many of you who follow my blog know I draw the bulk of my diagnosis from the research of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith he and his colleagues over the years have found overwhelmingly that the de facto religion of American young people is what he calls moralistic therapeutic deism it's a shallow feel-good form of Christianity that has very little to do with the biblical historical biblical faith MTD tells us that God exists and he to be nice and happy we don't have to consult them unless we need something good people go to heaven and except for Hitler we're pretty much all good Smith and his team have found that the majority of young Christian adults deny that their moral beliefs are grounded in the Bible or traditional Church authority for them truth is what feels right to them as autonomous choosing individuals a faith that is not grounded in anything other than a motive ISM cannot survive and it won't survive and note well we older Christians absolutely cannot blame young people for what they believe and don't believe as Christian Smith points out these young people were formed intellectually morally and spiritually by moralistic therapeutic deists I'm 50 years old I was raised in the 1970s when I first read about MTD around 2005 the year I believe that Professor Smith first defined the concept I recognized that bland and offensive let's just be nice cultural Christianity in which I had been raised was in fact moralistic therapeutic deism again it has been with us for a very long time now when I traveled to Christian colleges both angelical and Catholic around this country I always make a point to talk to professor's and campus ministers as well as students about what camp what life is like on campus I hear the same thing without fail no matter where I go the young people are coming to college straight out of high school Christian high schools including Christian high schools and church youth groups knowing almost nothing substantive about the Christian faith worse they don't even know how little they know or they don't know what they don't know and they don't know why it matters MTD then is the last stop before apostasy I would say to you young Christians in the audience tonight your elders may have done a terrible job in catechizing you and forming you but now that you're adults you have a very serious responsibility to make up for it if you don't you're probably going to lose your faith you really will the pressures from the post-christian culture are just too strong a little side anecdote I remember back in what about the year 2000 I was living in Brooklyn then and working for the New York Post and I was a Catholic in those days a pretty militant serving of Catholic and I love to sit around with my fellow conservative Catholic friends and complain endlessly about what the church was not doing complain about the bishops complain about the sermons and the church and on and on and on one night we were having dinner in my apartment having this usual conversation and one of our the people at our table was a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Brooklyn and he said you know what guys he was about our age is our age I said you know what guys everything you say is right I was raised in the 70s too and it was if you can believe it it was even worse back then he said but my parents knew what they were up against and what we kids were up against and they took it upon themselves to catechized us and it was so much more difficult for them back then to do it than it is for you with your children today he said you can go online on amazon.com tonight and have sent to your house within a week a library that Thomas Aquinas could could hardly have dreamed of said all it takes is the will to do it you've got the Catechism you've got the tools you've just got to do it stop sitting around waiting for somebody to come save you well I remember we looked at him and said wow wow and then we went right back to complaining about the bishops endlessly anyway moralistic therapeutic deism is the perfect faith for liquid modernity according to zygmunt bauman the kind of person who will thrive in liquid modernity as I said earlier as one who has no fixed commitments or no fixed beliefs or commitments beyond desire I believe that in general in this culture the process of dissolution is too far gone to stop it has too much momentum as a result Christians are facing and will continue to face these two social facts some summarize like this by the Christian writer and Andy Crouch one social hostility and legal restrictions will undermine the viability of many Christian institutions and significantly limit individual Christians participation and many professions and aspects of public life in the United States within a generation or so - due to a lack of meaningful discipleship and accommodation to various features of secularized modernity and consumer culture the collapse of Christian belief and practice is likely among members of the dominant culture and many minority cultures in the United States within a generation or so those Christians who go with the flow of liquid modernity and who live like balance ideal liquid modernist are going to be washed downstream and over the falls I wrote the benedict option to address these two basic social facts and to try to find another way a way out of this fate so it's here that we turn for rescue to the rule of Saint Benedict written by the monastic founder in the early 6th century in the prologue of the rule Benedict calls the sixth century monastic version of balance liquid modernist a guy reveille which he denounces is absolutely the worst kind of monk the gyri vague flits from monastery to monastery with no sense of stability or commitment therefore he cannot hope to grow spiritually or otherwise I think this is clearly true for us 21st century Christians as well to be a guy reveille now is to be completely in sync with our time but it is also to accept the death of Christianity as a living faith within your own heart and your own life whether you know it or not say Benedict's rule and the monastic communities that grew out of it offer the the antidote to gaurav agree if I can use that word they did it back then and they still do and I believe that Benedict has the secret for the church's survival in this new Dark Age let me explain why and before I do that I want to say simply that before I read the rule of Saint Benedict I always imagined that it would be some very thin rulebook of mystical teachings of the Desert Fathers that sort of thing when I actually picked it up and read it I thought this so boring there's it's just a manual for how to live daily life and a monastery but that's really deceiving it's actually an amazing book that talks about the day in and day out meat and potatoes practices that you have to do in order to live out the faith in community again none of us are called to be monks so I wouldn't say that we need to take it literally but the the secret of the rule of st. Benedict is its everydayness and that's what I think makes it so it one of the things that makes it so attractive and possible for us to to adapt anyway the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West did not happen overnight but it was a terrible shock all the same when it came Benedict was born in the year for 84 years after the pathetic abdication of the final Caesar when he came of age Benedict's Christian parent sent him down from their Italian mountain village of Nursia to complete his education in the city of Rome young Benedict was so disgusted by the chaos and the decadence he found in the Eternal City that he abandoned his studies and retreated to a cave in Subiaco there he fasted and he prayed and he sought God's will when he emerged he went on to found the religious order that today bears his name he wrote his rule and when he died he left behind twelve or thirteen I can't remember the exact number of monasteries in the vicinity of Rome now Benedict did not try to save Roman civilization he did not try to make Rome great again all he wanted to do was to put God first in his life in a radical way and to serve God in community when Benedict died in the year 547 he could not possibly have foreseen what God was going to do with that little mustard seed of faith that he planted over the next few centuries Benedictine monasticism spread like wildfire across dark ages Europe slowly almost imperceptibly the monks built monasteries that served as sanctuaries of light of peace of stability and simply by being faithful to and disciplined in their calling in sharing the fruits of their prayer and their work with those outside the monastery the Benedictine monks laid the groundwork for the rebirth of civilization almost two years ago I spent a week at the Benedictine monastery in Norcia which is what st. Benedict's hometown is called today praying with the monks who are live there now eating with them and spending time and long interviews with them about their way of life from those conversations and from studying the rule I discerned a number of ways we Christians who live in the world Catholic Protestant and Eastern Orthodox can adapt monastic insights to our way of life out here these involve a mixture a prayer of contemplation of Scripture study of ascetic practices like fasting of work and a building local community I don't have time tonight to discuss them in depth it's all in the book but I will say that the ultimate goal of all these practices is to bring us closer individually and in community to a transformative union with God the Benedict option is not the gospel nor is it a Pelagian strategy for earning merit we can do nothing without the freely given grace of God but there are things we can do to keep the ground of our own spirits tilt to be receptive to God's grace there are things we can do to practice the presence of God for the Benedictine monks religion is not part of life it is a way of life it has to be the same thing for us the Benedict option then is a way of structuring our lives to keep God always before us it's a kind of spiritual training through which our hearts and minds will be formed by the Holy Spirit I wrote the Benedict option for all small Orthodox Christians what do I mean by small Orthodox Christians I mean all Christians again Catholics Protestants in Eastern Orthodox who believe that there is an unseen order surrounding and embracing us that that order is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ but also through scripture through the church the Church of the centuries a church of tradition and indeed in some mysterious sense through all things Christians are intended by God to conform our lives to this order in his new book God is not nice the Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner he teaches a Marquette says that the major decision in everyone's life is whether or not we approach the world as if there is an inherent objective order that we can know and relate to or that the world outside ourselves is meaningless except for the meaning we project onto it that's the big decision we have to make well small Orthodox Christians that is to say Christians who still find themselves rooted in the great tradition of the first thousand years of Christianity and you and I by that includes some reformation Christians too who draw heavily on st. Augustine we believe that truth is objective and that religious faith is a way by which we order our own lives to know that truth and to live in that truth more and more the truth which is complete in Christ Jesus by contrast modernists Christians believe that religious truth can more or less be changed to suit our felt needs in a particular time or place that kind of Christianity I believe is a house built on shifting sand and it will simply not survive this time of testing the reformed theologian Hans Boersma he's the guy I get the phrase the great tradition from Bosma says our modern condition makes it hard to perceive the unseen order we're not just called to trust in Christ for eternal salvation but we are called to participate in God's existence and do that in part by recognizing him everywhere present in filling all things the world itself creation is not dead matter but a sacrament it's a sign through it and signs through which God mysteriously reveals himself to us this was generally speaking the patristic view the view that was universal in Christendom until around the 14th century one of the monks of North just said to me that we Christians all of us have to order our lives so that we become icons through which the light of God the radiance of God can shine now one of the particularly dicted virtues worth mentioning here is stability each mark of the Benedictine Order when he makes his final profession vows to stay in that monastery until the day he dies barring some unforeseen circumstance this is called the vow of stability it made an enormous difference in the world of the early Benedict ins as I've said this was a time of massive civilization wide chaos the Benedictine values stability made individual monks and their monasteries andhra gnostic communities still points in a fast hurting world professor russell hidden jur who's a Benedictine table told me that the valise stability was central to the Benedictine orders civilization transforming work in the early Middle Ages for example when the monks would go out into a rural area and build a monastery say a band of barbarians would come in and slaughter all the monks and sack the monastery well the Motherhouse would just send more monks eventually the peasants came to understand that these monks these men of God were not going to abandon them so the peasants would settle near the monasteries because they knew them as a place of order stability peace and love if we adapt some form of stability in our own lives living in a 21st century world we will not only show or give a powerfully countercultural witness but I believe we really will in the communities we establish whether it's in our parishes our schools what-have-you that we will draw refugees from this world of chaos and pain to our communities and through us to Jesus Christ but the point cannot be made strongly enough Saint Benedict did not set out to save civilization rather he only to serve God with all his heart sold in mind and do it in community everything else followed from that so anybody today who characterizes the Benedict option as a plan to take America back for Christ or any such thing should set that notion aside this is about protecting and saving and continuing the work of the church which is the work of Christ in history think of it like this in the culture war the church has lost decisively we have been isolated on Dunkirk Beach so to speak so we have three choices we can launch a frontal attack on the enemy and be annihilated we can sit still a mind our own business and hope that the enemy leaves us alone and be annihilated or we can climb aboard that little flotilla awaiting us in the channel and cross over to England they're within relative underscore relative safety we can spiritually regroup and retrain and prepare to rejoin the battle when the opportunity presents itself when the British Army retreated from Dunkirk it was not to leave the war that wasn't even a possibility but rather it was to rebuild their ranks for the long struggle ahead that's how it has to be with us I should add to that I talked to Professor Michael handy at the John Paul to Institute in Washington before I started the book project he's a friend and has been an inspiration for this project and I asked him for some words of advice for proceeding he said I would tell you to ask yourself at every turn what would Boyd tivo do like wait what do you mean he said I'm not talking about Pope John Paul the second I'm talking about before he became Pope before he became the Cardinal Archbishop when he was just károly Teva and studying in the seminary I'm talking about World War two he said well cuz when the Nazis occupied Poland they didn't just intend to administer Poland they intended to obliterate Polish national culture and the Catholic Church the Catholic faith in the hearts of poles Carol what IVA and his circle knew that there was no point in taking on the Nazis directly but they also knew that their form of resistance had to be keeping cultural memory alive in that dark night of Nazi occupation so one thing they would do would be to write plays on Catholic themes or polish patriotic themes and perform those plays underground and underground theaters if the Gestapo K knew about this they could come and arrest them all have them all killed they were risking their lives to perform plays but cultural memory keeping cultural memory alive was a powerful form of resistance professor Hanby said it has to be that way with us too even though we're not we're not obviously not facing Nazi tyranny nevertheless we're facing the dictatorship of relativism as Pope Benedict said and a time of forgetting that's what modernity is a time of forgetting anyway it should be clear now that this is not what I talking about is not a head for the hills strategy we have to stay involved with the world to some extent if we are going to be faithful to the Great Commission but if we are going to represent Jesus Christ faithfully to the post Christian world we have no choice but to spend significantly more time away from that world in prayer in worship in contemplation in thickening our communal ties for the sake of building spiritual resilience in other words we have to spend more time away from the world so that we can go into the world as faithful Christians let me use another analogy a lot of people under snow about Jeremiah 29 what God said to the Hebrew exile in Babylon through the Prophet Jeremiah he told them that he brought them there to exile for his own reasoning for his own reason but he had he told them to settle there in the city established families pray for the peace and prosperity of the city and a lot of people know about that and they see that I think correctly as our calling in this world in this post-christian world as exile here but also we have to keep in mind Daniel three the story of the three Hebrew men Shadrach Meshach and Abednego that's a story that's not told us often they were servants of the king high officials of the King but they were also Hebrews when King Nebuchadnezzar built a golden idol and ordered everybody to bow down and worship it they refused and they refused to the point of being willing to die in a fiery furnace God worked a miracle and they weren't consumed by the flames but the point is they were ready to die before apostatize though they were deeply embedded in the state and in the culture of Babylon we have to live out Jeremiah 29 but do it in such a way that whatever it was Shadrach Meshach and Abednego did the way they lived in their religious communities to always and people for us and to form ourselves so that we will not apostatize when we're put to the test it may not be a test where our lives are at stake that we will be put to the test now a couple of weeks ago here on the Notre Dame campus the Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro very close advisor to Pope Francis denounced the Benedict option as a quote Masada complex if you don't know Masada was the mountain stronghold in which Jewish rebels hit off from a Roman siege and all committed suicide rather than surrender to Caesars troops Father Spadaro in other words was saying that this is a fortress christianity a hysterical fortress christianity he condemned alarmist like me who in his view are spreading worries that quote have no basis in reality the benedict option he went on to say is contrary to Pope Francis's vision of engagement with the world the church is not a fortress he said but rather in Francis's phase phrase a field hospital will allow me to offer a fraternal correction to the good father it is true that the church is a field hospital but what kind of doctors and nurses and medics our kind of staff that field hospital we Christians today are not ready to do so we cannot share with the world what we do not have in our present state it would be like going out into a field hospital in the middle of a war with no medical training at all just good wishes are in armed with nothing but a sack full of oxycodone pills to take away the pain of the people suffering without any real healing a Russian Orthodox priest friend of mine also says the church is a field hospital but he says lots of people come to the church complaining of pain but they only want a pill to make the hurting stop what they really need is surgery and deep therapy for the sake of true healing sometimes it's got to hurt for a while in order to get truly better this is real authentic spiritual medicine and I know it works because this priest was my own priest and he used it on me when I was deeply broken from problems I was having with my father and reconciling myself to my father my priest would not let me rest on anger and he even though I wanted him to soothe me in my own anger at my dad he's like yeah your dad treated you badly but you cannot rest in anger Christ will not allow it you're not being faithful and because I took that hard medicine I was around for to hear my father say to me before he died the words I'd waited all my adult life to hear that he was sorry and I was able to spend the last eight days of my dad's life in home hospice care with him living and living in his bedroom with him reading the Psalms to him reading stories to him praying with him rubbing lotion into his dry feet and holding his hand when he breathed his last I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that if I had not taken that hard painful medicine of denying myself to take up my cross and to learn to love my father even though he didn't love me as I wanted him to I would not have been there for that enormous blessing the ever being able to hold his hand when he died and to dive with peace between us a piece that had not been there for most of my life so it's real it's serious we need this real healing this painful medicine I want to share some insights with you some facts to counter fathers fedoras Candide Catholicism these come from the work again of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his teams of sociologists over the years I can't recommend to you strongly enough his work in 2011 he published a book called lost in transition the dark side of emerging adulthood it's about the moral lives of 18 to 23 year olds it makes for very depressing reading but again it's truthful reading it's stuff we have to face and deal with among his findings 60 percent of this group say the morality is entirely a personal choice they make no appeal to religion tradition or philosophy as an external guide to inform that choice most of these people professor Smith said are not restricting moral relativist but they can't explain or justify their beliefs and they certainly don't want to impose those beliefs on others an astonishing 61% of the emerging adults again 18 to 23 year olds have no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism and added 30 percent expressed some qualms who figured it was not worrying worth worrying about and this view say Smith and his team quote all that society is apparently is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life this is not their fault necessarily these young people as I said earlier were failed by parents churches schools and other institutions that offer them nothing but feel-good platitudes adults like to tell themselves that the kids are okay that they're nice hard-working committed to social justice and so forth but says professor Smith it's simply not true the data do not bear that out well we older Americans are just as bad as them it's not that we have something good and useful to teach the young but we're just failing to communicate it in too many cases we are just as lost as they are now this is all Americans but things are as bad or even worse with Catholics in particular sorry father Spadaro and 2014 Christian Smith and his team published a book focusing exclusively on young people in the u.s. Catholic Church it's extremely grim reading I hate to tell you but again it's stuff we need to know if we are going to treat the actual problem for most young Catholics the faith the Catholic faith does not set them apart in any way from the secular world they have been almost entirely assimilated most do not accept the church and the Magisterium is their authoritative teacher I don't consider the church to be particularly necessary for their spiritual lives at all young people raised in liberal Catholic homes are abandoning the faith in massive numbers it looks better significantly better for those raised in traditionally Catholic homes but the picture is still pretty shaky when Catholics look and think like the rest of the world what does father Spadaro think they have to share with the world well I wrote the Benedict option for Catholics and other Christians who prefer to see the world as it really is and not through the gauzy haze of failed the failed sentimentality of 1970s Catholicism contrary to father Spadaro diagnosis the problem is not that Catholics aren't going out enough into the world the problem is that the world is too much in Catholics Catholic leaders who are trying to turn the church into a romanized version of mainline Protestantism are not helping to turn the tide of liquid modernity or to help the faithful understand what's going on and to hold on to their faith in spite of it but rather they're channeling liquid modernity right into the heart of the church these people are not the future the future of the church in fact is in the distant past there has never been in a golden age of Christianity heaven knows but our fathers and mothers in the faith had resources that we do not we can find them again in the Benedict option I write about this mmunity this magnificent community of lay Catholics in Italy who call themselves the tippy low ski which means the usual suspects it gives you an idea of how seriously they take themselves but they are they are serious about their faith they're deeply Orthodox but they're not angry about it in fact the the leader of the group as a head of Italy's chesterton society so that gives you an idea of how jolly they are and their Catholicism Marco cerini is his name and he's probably the greatest man I know and I'm not not kidding one bit he told me when I interviewed him this is in the book you know I asked him how is it that you do this you and your and your your community here has done this you have your teaching the faith to your children they're excited about it it's as a thick community that does works of mercy and charity out in the community but you also have Bible study here you have feast here you have community gardening you have it all and you have a close relationship with the monks of Nohr Chia who come down here all the time your kids go to confession and I actually like it how did you do this he said rod we didn't invent anything new we just rediscovered what was there all along but we had forgotten about father kasi and Folsom the man who refunded the monastery in Norco which had been closed for almost two hundred years here II founded it in around the turn of the century he was the prior of the monastery for the first prior for a long time and he told me that Christians who don't do something like the Benedict option communities they're not going to make it through what's to come the trials to come I think that he's right about that obviously I wouldn't have written the book but I also think that we need to look to those but that particular group of monks the Benedictine monks in Norcia as a son to the world they have become a sign in ways I didn't anticipate when I began writing the Benedict option in August of 2016 a few months after I had been there a devastating earthquake shook that region around Norco when the quake hit in the middle of the night the monks were awake Mountains and they ran to the monk from the monastery out into the Piazza there for safety sadiq a.cian later reflected that the the earthquake symbolized the crumbling of the less Christian culture but that there was a second hopeful symbol that night the second symbol he said is the gathering of the people around the statue of Saint Benedict in the Piazza in order to pray that is the only way to rebuild he wrote to supporters well the tremors left that Basilica church to structurally unstable for worship and it left most of their monastery which is right there in the middle of town uninhabitable they saw the cracks in the wall and said it's not safe to be here so they evacuated a town and moved to their land on the next nextdoor mountainside just outside the North Shore walls they pitched tents in the ruins of an older monastery and they continued their prayer life interrupted only by visits to the town to minister to the people the monks received distinguished visitors in their exile including the Prime Minister of Italy and Cardinal Robert Serra who heads the Vatican's liturgical office Cardinal Serra blessed the monks temporary quarters celebrated Mass with them and told them that their tenth monastery quote reminds me of Bethlehem where it all began I am certain said Cardinal Serra that the future of the churches and the monasteries because we're prayer is there is the future five days later more earthquakes shook nortre the cross atop the basilica's facade toppled to the ground and then early on the morning of Sunday October 30th 2016 the strongest earthquake to hit Italy in 30 years struck with its epicentre just north of the town the 14th century Basilica of Saint Benedict the patron saint of Europe fell violently to the ground only its facade remained not a single Church in Norton not a single Church remain standing with dust still rising from the rubble Father basil one of the monks there knelt on the stones of the Piazza facing the ruined Basilica and company by nuns and a few elderly people from town including one in a wheelchair I saw this on YouTube he prayed it was an amazing witness later you could see amateur video posted to YouTube showing father basil father Benedict and father Martin three of the months they are running through the streets of the town with dust still in the air from the earthquake looking for the die who needed last rites by the grace of God nobody had died there but it was put an amazing witness these monks rather than taking care of themselves they ran into the town to look for people to minister to to pray with and to comfort in their last days and their last what they thought would be their last moments those monks ran toward danger if this is not withdrawing from the world back in America father Richard Chipola a Catholic priest in Connecticut who's an old friend of Father Benedict's emailed father Benedict never caught the sub prior of the monastery when he heard the news of the latest quake is there damage what's going on father Chipola wrote yes damage much worse father Benedict replied but we're okay much to tell you but just pray I am well and God continues to purify us and bring very good things think about that they've just seen everything they own destroyed and yet he gives thanks to God for Pierre at the purification the next morning as the Sun rose over Nora father Benedict the sub prior sent a message to the monasteries friends all over the world I'm on their email list too he said that no nor Cheney know people of Nora had lost their lives in the quake because they had heeded the warnings from the earlier tremors and left town in other words they read the signs of the times and got out of town quote God spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patrons church so that when it finally happened we would watch it in horror but in safety from atop the town he wrote father Benedict added these are mysteries which will take years not days or months to understand surely that's true but notice this the earth moved and the Basilica of Saint Benedict which had stood firm for many centuries tumble ground only the facade the mere semblance of a church remains because the monks headed for the hills after the August earthquake they survived God preserved them into holy poverty of their canvas covered Bethlehem but they continued to live out the rule in the ancient way by chanting the old masse now they can begin rebuilding and had begun to rebuild in the ruins their resilient Benedict in faith taking them to receive this catastrophe as a call to deeper holiness and sacrifice God willing new life one day arise again from the rubble father Benedict wrote we pray and watch from the mountainside thinking of the long three years Saint Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world beyond fee I'd let it be let it be he who has ears to hear let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches to you to me to all of us God is speaking to us I believe through the monks of Nora and their example and the example of faithful Christians all over the West who can read the signs of the times and are preparing thank you very much and I look forward to your questions like to say by the way please don't hesitate to ask critical questions I don't want to present myself as somebody who has all the answers I say in the book that we're gonna have to work this out together as Christians and community talking with each other because we haven't faced a situation quite like this ever I mean the only thing I can think about is to follow the Roman Empire but that's forever ago we not have no lived experience of this so if I'd get something wrong I want to know about it because I've got skin in this game I've got children I want my children to grow up in the faith and I want the people in my parish to be able to hold onto the faith and raise their children in the faith so if you've got a good idea let's hear it okay we want to hear as many ideas as possible and that means you everyone needs to be efficient in their questions and our speaker has to be efficient in his answers oh yeah well you I write such such crisp blogs that are short sweet we have a tradition here at the program which is we always ask our undergraduate students to ask the first set of questions and so I see a bunch of undergraduates yeah also please stand up it's a large room stand up and tell us who you are and you're where you are at Notre Dame we're in the community I'm the junior and the double a low-velocity major so Donny okay I have two questions I will try to be very brief the first is that you've talked a lot about you your conversion from Protestant descent to results is amended later to Russian orthodoxy and in your description of converting from Catholicism chants Russian orthodoxy it seemed like it was more of a reaction and of converting away from the Catholic Church rather than a converting to and I was wondering how like aside from the emotional part how you dealt with the change of doctrine like the Filioque and things like that like the actual parts of the liturgy which changed rather than just the people and then the second question was I know that the philosophy section in your book the chapter was sort of cosmic short he said begin to pare it down and I was wondering why you thought that poem was so important and was more important in developing liquid modernity than continent to you it doesn't have to be like a PhD thesis I just want to know about maybe nice well the first question is probably more important answer and the question is I was raised Protestant converted to Catholicism in my 20s was a Catholic for many years but I converted to Russian orthodoxy in 2006 and how do I deal with the change of doctrine I'll be brief but this is an important Benedict option point I converted I met Christ seriously as an adult as a Roman Catholic and I was back in 1993 I came into the church as I was coming into the church I was a woman in my office said oh I hear you're becoming a Catholic why don't you come work with me I Mother Teresa's soup kitchen missionaries of charity soup kitchen this weekend and I thought what a great Catholic thing to do I think I will and I spent the Saturday afternoon scrubbing pots peeling potatoes and all that and after it was done I said you know that was nice but really I'm more of an intellectual my time would be better spent reading books of theology and that would be bad I never went back so but I came into the church and I was working in Washington by there and it became really pretty militant in my conservative Catholicism very political time marches on I moved to New York City I'm working at the New York Post as a columnist and I start writing about the abuse scandal a pretty far the Tom Doyle told me when I interviewed him he said hey you know I can tell you're serious about your faith I just want to warn you that if you continue down this path of investigation you're going to go to places darker than you can imagine and I said well I feel like I have to do it anyway as a matter of justice and I'm a Catholic and I'm a journalist and I'm a father and blah blah blah he said oh I want you to do it but I just want you to also be aware of what you're going to face well I wasn't aware of what I was going to face I I thought that as long as I had the argument straight at my head my faith would be safe it was I was not prepared for the drip drip drip of three years of this caustic acid from the things I was learning and reporting in the scandal things I couldn't even write about because nobody would go on the record but I knew they were true and it was like having my fingernails pulled out it was the most painful experience of my life I finally got to the point my wife and I did where we lost our ability to believe as Catholics I couldn't imagine this would happen but it did happen and as Catholics we figured the only place we had to goes to the Orthodox Church because they had real sacraments we didn't intend to convert we just wanted to go worship in the real presence without having this constant anger and anxiety and fear and eventually we never went back doctrinally I say that I the thing that I never did subtle in my mind for good whether the Orthodox had the best argument for authority or the Catholics do but I also realize that this was one of the reasons why I got myself in so much trouble as a Catholic I thought back to the time when I never went back to the soup kitchen I thought that I was becoming a good Catholic and building myself up in the faith by studying and through intellection alone I needed more balance I should have instituted practices in my life if I had done that over the years instead of spending all my time just talking about about the ideas I probably would have had a more resilient faith I don't know that I thank God for my Orthodox faith God saved me from a complete spiritual shipwreck in orthodoxy but I came to realize that the truth that we worship that saves us is a man Jesus Christ and if for whatever reason I could not relate to him in any way through the Catholic Church anymore then I was gonna go to orthodoxy because I needed him above all things but I was a very different kind of Orthodox Christian than I was a Roman Catholic I I hope to god that I haven't been as prideful and triumphalist I was very triumphalist as a Catholic that's not the Catholic Church's fault that's my fault I don't want to be that kind of Orthodox Christian again so I don't get involved in doctrinal arguments anymore I just try to say my prayers say the Jesus Prayer and build my own faith and family and parish up because getting involved in church politics was a ruin for me that doesn't answer the nitrile question but I'll it's more important to me that I live out the truth of Christ then I settled that for good within my own mind okay Claire we're gonna light you and and rod hammer out akhom aquamarine the book signing yeah okay Geoff Jack Jack Marissa okay same question other undergraduates please stand up tell us tell us [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] like to live [Music] [Music] [Music] okay the rule of Saint Benedict the questioner says it works with celibate people but how can I asked non celibate people to live it out well the answer is I'm not saying we have to live it out word for word that would be impossible to do the rule of Saint Benedict is written for people living in monastic community vowed men or women living in monastic community but I say in the book though as we look at examples at the example of their lives and find ways to adapt it into our lives for example the regular prayer fasting I mean there's no reason why we can't do that in our lives adapted to life in the real well fasting sanctifying our work this is not anything hugely special by the way I mean Lila Briscoe is in my blog she's just such a wonderful Catholic she says quoted in the book because you're only asking the church to be the church but if you say it if you don't give it a special name people aren't going to do it I'm like you got it exactly right you know I just want the church to be authentically and committed to being the church but that also involves practices the reason I brought up the fact that I think my failure to have an adopted practices like regular prayer fasting things like that as a Catholic left me especially vulnerable when I was when I'm at a time of testing in a ways in ways that it did not leave other Catholic friends imine who were just as upset as I was about the scandal they weren't vulnerable I'm determined not to let that happen again and I would say to you to very briefly when I was when I was researching the book I ran across a volume called how societies for member by an anthropologist cultural entrepot cultural anthropologist named Paul Connerton is not a Christian he writes about society traditional societies that manage somehow to hold on to their faith in in modernity or hold on to their their traditional ways in modernity he said they had several factors in common first they had a sacred story second they told the sacred story in ritual communal ritual third the communal ritual in some sense was understood as taking him out of time and connected them to the transcendent and fourth they worshiped they celebrated the ritual in some sense in their bodies and you read this and this is an anthropologist writing about all kinds of communities you know like this is Catholicism this is Orthodoxy you know we have what it takes right here we just have to embrace it and embrace it in community and stay with it not just embrace it notionally but stay with it we have a group of students from Hope College that they drove all the way down from hope so I want to invite them to if any of the hope kids have a question any more undergraduate questions okay John [Music] okay the question is if we're retreating what do we what about the people who are on the margins who won't hear the message of Christ because we're retreating and the answer is there's a reason I call it the strategic retreat it's because we're not running for the hills we are retreating so to speak into deeper contemplation deeper prayer deeper of communal fasting so when we go out into the world as we must we will do so as faithful Christians we will be able to represent Christ authentically I simply don't think that in a in our culture as hostile as it is today to to the Christian faith and values that we will be able to hold the line if we don't do much greater training so to speak asceticism comes from the word Jesus which means training if we think about about spiritual training like athletes do if we were asked to run a long race an endurance race you would have to do training for that well spiritually and morally this is the world we're in now this is not about earning merit it's about knowing who we are going deep in the scripture taking a deep dive deep dive into tradition I teach my own kids for example about the wearied lives of the saints and I especially talk to them about 20th century Christians who are in 21st century Christians who are suffering right now for the faith or within living memory for the faith because I want my kids to know that it's possible that we live in a very comfortable society now but things could change very quickly and we can only make the right decisions as these these martyrs and these confessors did if we're put to the test if when we're put to the test if we make those small decisions day in and day out now of spiritual training but I absolutely believe that we have to evangelize and by the way with the hope college kids here I should say this is what I think how I think evangelicals have a special gift they can give to the whole church right now by your zeal for evangelization I'm not quite sure how Angelica's are going to make it through the Benedict option without the strong liturgical sense that Orthodox and Catholics do but I believe that you're gonna have to figure it out you can figure it out I was asked by al Mohler leading Southern Baptist evangelist oh the Baptist theologian he asked me in his radio show do evangelicals have what it takes to do the Benedict option I said you know honestly I don't know I don't know a whole lot about the of angelical world but you better have what it takes and he looked at me and said no I can tell you we don't have what it takes now but if we will go back to the fundamentals of the Reformation that's where we of Angelica 'ls will find the resources to do the Benedict option I said good on you good on you you know may your tribe increase because I'm not trying to win converts to my particular church here I would love it if everybody would be Orthodox but more than anything I want people to hold on to some form of smaller Orthodox Christianity and I want to help them do it let's get a question from one of the kids from hope any please sweep loud so we can hear you [Music] [Music] the question is with reference to Tim Keller or the very successful Presbyterian pastor in New York City he's become a real like if you don't know his work he's become a real icon for evangelicals for his successful work in in big cities which are very secular and the questioner wants to know you know how does a Benedict option how can you reconcile that with Tim's Keller success I would say that um I don't it's funny you ask that question about Tim Keller I was just out in California Pepperdine and I was trying to talk to some PCA Presbyterians that's Tim Taylor's Presbyterian Church about why it is that Tim Keller followers tend to react very negatively to the Benedict option even though they share a lot of the the critique of the culture and I'm still not quite sure I understand it except for they are a lot more optimistic about the prospects for conversion and for revival and evangelization in this society I've heard it said I don't know Tim Keller I admire the work he's done from afar but I've heard it said that by some people within his own church that he has compromised too much for the sake of being heard in a secular environment like New York City again I don't know that this is true I know I've read these criticisms of him and I think that that's something we always have to be afraid of you know when it's it is true that we have to work to be heard with the people we're among you know when we have to be able to speak to them in their own language but I think there's a real danger of trying so hard to be winsome that we shortchange the gospel and maybe even sell out our own witness for the sake of being nice I hate the word winsome by the way that's a big word among a lot of Angelica 'ls it means that thinking that if we just were just nicer and show that we're not like those angry fundamentalists the secular world will like us more and will listen to us I just don't think that's true anymore I think that it's not that they they don't dislike us and even in some cases hate us because we're not packaging our message in a friendly manner they dislike us and even hate us because of what we believe and I don't think that gives us license to be nasty to people I'm just not that way naturally and I would never endorse that sort of thing but I think that um I think that the danger from the Tim Keller kind of approach is that it will concede too much to to the secular world for the sake of spreading the gospel and in fact they will not be spreading a transformative gospel but a form of moralistic therapeutic deism again but I think that's a danger okay let's stand up and tell us your name I was 7 years on the ground and after the end of communism I became officer and Chapel of the University and I was very close to trump all the second and also with Pope Benedict and I have died since it's 20 years 25 years after the fall of communism around 2,000 students after two years at the human aid so I know what it is the Church of katakana I spent every year five weeks in a solid mood Hermitage for meditation all my books I have written there but I think it's something different they are the moments in history when the church must go to the counterculture to the underground but I know also the federal side days so I'm afraid I absolutely disagree with your panic box and actually teachers will take this direction it will be disaster it will destroy the authority of the church the church became sacked I remember how the default termination many christians with the worst enemy and and how the atmosphere was poisoned by this lack of the open of the mutual interaction with the culture different phonetic option was the Pope Benedict before one year before I became home he was his famous dialogue with here in our mouths and he said that the second humanism in Christianity each other to the danger of science and for Benedict always the compatibility between the secular culture and the Christianity was very important not be the same the dialectic the dynamism and I think it is also a great gift of the American church to the world Catholicism the American church in has the different historical experience and of religious experience that is able to live in the powerful Democratic free floristic society and this is very good and influence [Music] okay let's get let's get a response yeah okay let's get it let's get a response okay well the the the comment er is a priest a priest who is secretly ordained in under communism in Czechoslovakia and lived in the underground Church he has a says he has a strong objection to the Benedict option because he believes it's separatism and that it'll be a disaster for the church if we go this route and he says that it's much better to live in the open in dialogue with the secular world is that a fair characterization of what you said yeah and he thinks the American church is a good example right well I would say to that it's interesting you bring up the the Czech example because in my book I draw in vatsala benda and the example of the box lot Havel and the resistors the dissenters under communism and building a parallel polis which is to say if they were not allowed to participate in fully and check society under communism then they said that it's not enough to go to the you can't just withdraw and hide in your own house which Vaslav Bendis said a lot of Catholics were doing then because they were so oppressed by the government you have to stay involved in some way if you are not allowed to participate in political life then then do things like creates institutions informal institutions of civil society like underground classes to teach real literature things like that I don't believe that we are facing anything like you know what what they had to face nevertheless I think that's a there's there is hope there in that example in that if we feel if we're pushed further and further to the margins of public life as is happening especially in Europe we that's no excuse just to to sit at home but it just means we have to be creative minorities it's still political when you do something that involves other people locally now I would say that I think that you if we're going to interact with the secular world we have to bring something to that to that conversation and if we so many of us American Christians not only Catholics but Christians as I said in the talk we don't even know our own history we the secular world is so powerful now and they know what they believe in why they believe it I think that we're gonna get bowled over and assimilated if we don't bring real knowledge from theological knowledge and knowledge of church history and tradition to this conversation because I believe I don't think the American Church is actually a good example at all when you look at what Christian Smith has discovered about how little American Catholics and other Christians know about our own our own faith and how if you look at the numbers of how we're falling away to it then the membership in the church is collapsing there's got to be a reason why I don't know that the Benedict option is the answer but I know we cannot continue business as usual because it's not working ok let's try to get a couple short question no no sir [Music] it's talking to people going away from the church he said 45 or to 4000 England spot on the church that doesn't mean there's 35,000 lost souls they just don't want to go to church and pay the money but they still believe how do you move this please do how do you know and.and youryour benedict options because against straps pope francis engagement why do you say that it's against your against Pope your coming the milder day and you're saying that Pope Francis should not why your that is wrong your dickham no you're completely wrong I mean you if you're gonna criticize me criticize what I actually said not what you think I said somebody else please let's get a question let's get another student question way in the back [Applause] startled [Music] there yeah yeah I think so I hope I got the question right you said your questioners doing her thesis on the Hyattsville Catholic community which I write about in the book around the around the parish they're in the school there and she wants to know what about economics since economics touches every aspect of life how do we approach that as Christians in the Benedict option I you know I am NOT I don't think economically I think more in terms of morality and culture but I think this is an absolutely fruitful and necessary area to talk about because our the one of the reasons that our communities have fragmented so much this this is late capitalism you know and we can't I think there's a tendency of some of us to blame blame others for for for this fragmentation but it's also the case that I very much liked to have choice back in the 70s when I was a kid we didn't have the kind of choices we did we had crummy cars and you just made do with them so I like having this choice but there's a cost for that and the cost is to community I be I'd be lying to you if I tried to pontificate about what I thought the economic the economic solution is here but I do think and I've told this there's a guy Kayla Byrne a CEO who has he's you know he and I talked about this but he he's a real critic of the Benedict option because he says it doesn't pay enough attention to economics and I say you know what you're right about that this book does not pay enough attention to economics but that's not where my gifts are I want this book to be an inspiration to people who do understand economics and who do understand these other areas of specialty to bring what you know to it and let's let's hammer out this models within community because economics are really you're absolutely right they're vital I just wish I knew more about it myself maybe you're the one who can who can add something here okay the economics has the whole third floor maybe they can make themselves useful Paden [Music] [Music] our questioner is Greek Orthodox and he wants to know if the Roman Empire is falling in the West the contemporary Roman everyone's falling in the West where's the eastern Roman Empire today because you may or may not know that when Rome fell in the West it continued on for over a thousand more years in Constantinople and I think if I'm understanding you correctly you're saying what role does orthodoxy have to play in this I have tried very hard not to get involved in Russian politics because you're talking about the role of the state and the rebirth of the Russian Orthodox Church I know that a number of Catholic friends of mine looked at what's happening in Russia and approve of it and I say well you know I'm glad the church is being reborn in Russia but we have to keep in mind too that it's so tied into the state and that can be really unhealthy for the church but I live in the West I'm a man of the West I mean I'm an Orthodox Christian I worship here but I I believe that the if I were waiting for the West to become Orthodox I don't think it's going to happen but I'm so encouraged by the the reproach from all that's happening between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches it started under John Paul really picked up under benedict and continuing under Francis because I agree with Pope John Paul the church needs both lungs to breathe I don't I doubt very much you and I are ever gonna live to see them the church is reunited I hope we do it may not happen until Christ returns but that doesn't mean that we can't help each other I think that the church in the West could use much more the liturgical discipline and the mystical spirituality of the East and people in the East Orthodox Christians could use much more the catholicity of the west of a sense of the we are we're not just a parochial tribe at prayer but you know we we are Christians you you know who share something more Universal but I I was just in Paris for the French publication of the Benedict option went to liturgy at the new Russian Cathedral there and was really surprised and pleased to see young Catholics who don't intend to come Orthodox they're interested in Orthodoxy because they want to know what they have been denied by the by history from from the or the Orthodox faith what of Eastern Christianity that they can take into their own lives now and accept as part of their own history - I think that's really encouraging and I hope that in Russia I don't know I would hope that we're in Russia and Greece there's more of an openness to more traditional minded Catholics in the West because there's a lot that we have in common and that we can share together and I saw it happening in Paris and it made me really excited okay let's get to more questions but we'll make them things like that the call of the vanity option was to take one's Christian tradition we still have kind of cultural distinctions I am wondering what if you could give a specific concrete example of cultural practice is informed by this ecumenical that would mark us different from the modern okay the ideas about the questions about acumen ISM this quote-unquote small Orthodox Christianity that I'm talking about and how are there any examples of this spirituality or this sort of this accumulation that we can point to in the modern world is that is that fair something is reducible I can act which will actually reduce you across a whole collection that is reducible across all or that are small Orthodox Christianity the thing that comes to mind straight away or classical Christian schools that are happy I don't know how many of you know about the model but it's it's a form of Education that follows the Trivium and it's becoming more and more popular among Catholics and evangelicals and reformed Protestants and so forth in some places like in Hyattsville it is done in a fully Catholic they have a school there's one hundred percent Catholic follows a classical model that's how it is in san benedetto del tronto to then Italy the tip ellos ski there are others that are fully Protestant within the reformed tradition but then there are schools like the one my kids go to and my wife teaches in in Baton Rouge which is is ecumenical in the sense that it's it's mostly Protestant but there are also Catholic families there and our family which is Orthodox we're really fortunate in that the the headmaster has a real generous orthodoxy about him he wants to make Catholics and Orthodox feel welcomed in that school even though its ethos is part predominantly Protestant and and he it succeeded and I think what's happening now is a lot of the the people there the school the parents are starting to realize that you know what those Catholics are in those Orthodox are not what we thought they were and we untorn we Catholics and Orthodox I realize you know what those dev Angelica's not what we thought they were we realize we have so much more in common now because we all agree even though we differ or precisely on church authority we all believe in a traditional expression of the faith against the more the modernists even within our own tradition and it's it's not so much running away from the modernist and our own tradition as running toward each other and looking for for solidarity practical solidarity what Timothy George the Southern Baptist theologian called Anna cumin ism of the trenches this is the the cooperation that Catholics and evangelicals found outside abortion clinics you know they realized that you know what we we're actually closer more brothers and sisters in Christ than we might have thought because we're going to stand here witness against the evil of abortion and I think in general that is that is we don't need to to get our hopes up too high because I'm not asking Southern Baptist to convert and I'm not planning to convert either but when we can work together to support each other we should I've found much more excitement for the Benedict option among evangelicals than among Catholics even though Saint Benedict is recognized as a saint by the Catholics and the Orthodox and that's ok you know I the of angelical is I know who are interested in this want to know more about church history they want to know more about liturgy and and again I've learned a lot from them too so it's a practical accumulate all Tunisian of the churches but in projects like schools and forming the next generation and in forming that solidarity those networks of solidarity across denominational lines to help each other in practical ways ok let's get one final question here despite the center for ethics and culture gear go ahead [Music] which university in some respects trains and students to enter those sectors of society that are certain integral to personally as you want so excuse me les it's a great question to end on the question is what is the role of a place like Notre Dame which trains its students to go into the world into these these hostile professions but also I didn't catch the very last it's also a place to foster conversations for maybe building local Benedict option communities I believe that Christians will continue to go out into the world into law into medicine into the professions and so on and so forth and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that but I also believe that if we are going to do that we have to go as fully-formed deeply formed Christians so a place like Notre Dame by giving not only spiritual formation but a deep intellectual formation in the Catholic tradition can prepare its students to be real witnesses in these professions it's also the case that they if they have real spiritual formation they will have the courage I think to walk away from those professions when they are asked to do things that they can't do I in my book I have a quote from a doctor a very prominent Catholic physician in the country who I named I wouldn't use who told me that he would not want his children to go into medicine I'm like really why is that he said because I can see what's happening now he's at a very senior level in the medical establishment he said we can already see movements within the profession to refuse to licensed physicians if they won't perform abortions or or do you thin Asia and and other things that could violate their conscience he said my generation we've been able to fight that off for a while but he said I can see it happy now with the younger generation of people of doctors who have no experience of faith at all don't know why religious liberty is important and feel that they are doing the right thing by compelling doctors to do these things he said so why wouldn't you want your kids to go into it and fight that he said because they'll have to acquire like $400,000 worth of debt for medical school and I don't want them to be in a position of being told oh if you want to pay this debt off you have got to agree to do abortions or euthanasia so you know whether that's realistic I trust this guy because of who he is and the authority with which he speaks but um he because he is a Catholic first and foremost a lifelong physician but a Catholic he knows that this he can see the dangers coming and wants to steer his kids to some other way to serve God in a profession I think a place like Notre Dame especially in the law school by giving young people here an understanding of what's happening in the world and what is likely to happen and how to prepare for it I think they can do a tremendous service it's also the case too that by fostering these small communities of faith and fellowship that are brought together purposefully that um you can learn how to be in community together and that will be something that can you can take into the world I'll end on this at the University of Virginia I write about this in the book around the Christian Study Center it's a an evangelical thing but they have a group of houses privately owned how residences for students males and females and the people there the kids who live there have loved so much living in community together that some of them has stayed behind in Charlottesville after they graduated because they've gotten so involved in their local church and community that they want to stay it's more important to them to have that community than to go to Washington or New York and pursue their career or if they have moved to Washington they form group houses there and they want to continue the experience of life and Christian community because it gave them something that they never had growing up and I think that's a wonderful thing and to the extent that notre dame having this concentration of intelligent idealistic i hope young Catholic students and even non Catholic Christian students can can give them give you that experience too and inspire you go out into the world and be a witness by the lives we lead Pope Benedict the 16th said that the great witness the greatest witnesses the greatest arguments the church has for itself are not so much the arguments but the art it produces and the Saints in other words beauty the beautiful cultural forms that come out of Christian faith and holiness embodied in service and and sacrifice these are the sort of things that I think are going to convert hearts in the future and so learnt start learning how to do it right here right now and and then go out there and make converse of the world thank you [Applause]
