Latest / The Catholic Current / Novel Prophecies Pt. 12 - Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength” (Fr. Robert McTeigue) 10/16/26

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Novel Prophecies Pt. 12 - Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength” (Fr. Robert McTeigue) 10/16/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert
0:04
McTeague. One of the reasons we read these great stories
0:07
is because it can expand our moral imagination and help
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us to expect more of ourselves and one another, of God. The key thing about
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literature in general, it shows us not merely who we are,
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but who we should be and who we shouldn't be. I can't remember who it
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was who said, I read the newspapers avidly, it's my only source of continual fiction.
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If you want truth instead of fiction, don't read the newspapers,
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read the great novels.
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Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTagg of the Society of
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Jesus, your daily host for the Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
0:43
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
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Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the
0:50
fullness of truth with clarity and charity. As always,
0:54
let's start with prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
0:58
Almighty God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola, we ask that you pour forth
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your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment, that you might hear
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your voice and obey your command. Well, friends, here we are Friday in the Catholic
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Current. You know what that means— you and me, let's talk about this and
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we walk through a complex issue together. We are up to part
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12 of our ongoing series called Novel
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Prophecies, where I've been looking at futuristic,
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apocalyptic, or dystopian literature, Christian and non-Christian,
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in roughly chronological order to try to help us understand
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human nature and divine nature, neither of which changes
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even though we find ourselves in changing times
1:44
and circumstances. And what we're finding over time is
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that liars continue to lie, and Christ offers
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us himself for the sake of our salvation,
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and we have to choose whether to say yes or
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no. Today we're going to wrap up the 3rd volume in
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the trilogy, the science fiction trilogy, uh, by C.S.
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Lewis. The 1st volume was called Out of the Silent Planet, 2nd volume
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was called Perelandra, and the 3rd is called
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That Hideous Strength. And this volume also bears
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a subtitle called A Mod— A Modern Fairy
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Tale for Grown-ups. Now, a couple challenges:
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I don't want to have to read all 400 pages to you, and I also
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don't want to give any spoilers. I will say that the overarching story
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arc for the trilogy has been innocence and original
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sin, and what would happen if sinners began to move
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among people who were innocent. So in this 3rd
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account, which I believe C.S. Lewis described
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as a fictional expression of his book The Abolition
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of Man, which is in our show notes, and if you haven't read that,
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you really should. He's saying, look, what happens if
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there is, if you will, if not an absolute
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final conflict, at least a truly decisive
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conflict between original sin,
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fallen human nature, and man who
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accepts Christ's offer of redemption?
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And the, the second half of the book is— of the trilogy,
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I think this is the best written, even though C.S. Lewis preferred Perelandra.
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After I read it, and the second half was thrilling, I got in touch with
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a dear old friend of mine who's a member of the
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Royal Academy of the Arts in Britain.
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And I said to him, I said, you know, David, I've had an excellent education,
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but there are places where my education is thin.
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And C.S. Lewis reminded me of
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this because I need to dig deeper into literature,
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and I need to dig deeper into poetry as well. He himself
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is a man of letters and was very happy to hear that.
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I want to draw an analogy because the other day I was asked
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to celebrate a votive Mass of the Angels,
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which I was very happy to do. I like to talk about angels, and I
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noticed that, you know, Saint Thomas Aquinas is
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called the Angelic Doctor, and Saint Bonaventure,
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his contemporary, was called the Seraphic Doctor.
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Now, angels and seraphic
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and seraphim are different ranks of
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angels, different types of angels, if you will. And so I said,
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well, why did they get those names? Well, because Aquinas
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is a doctor of the light.
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He illuminates the structure of
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creation. He illuminates the structure of the
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orders of nature and grace. Saint Bonaventure—
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remember, the, the seraphim are the highest of the angels,
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and they are often depicted as fire because
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they burn as love for God.
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And I believe that we need to bring the two together.
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We need to have the clarity of Aquinas
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and the passion, the burning charity of
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Bonaventure. So I want to have the clarity
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and the structure that philosophy and theology can
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give, and yet I want to have the passion,
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the ardor, the burning of what C.S.
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Lewis would call myth and what
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Tolkien would call fairy stories. So it—
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we want it to be the complete package. And against all
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of that, according to both Lewis and Tolkien,
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is this exaggerated modernist—
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and by modernist, I don't necessarily mean recent— but this exaggerated
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sense of science,
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of the empirical only,
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and that's a mistake. It's dehumanizing,
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and you've heard me say this before, whatever is anti-human because
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of the incarnation is also anti-Christ.
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So C.S. Lewis has an organization
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called NICE, N-I-C-E, the National
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Institute of Coordinated Experiments, and reminds me
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of what happens and has happened happening in Canada now called
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MAID, M-A-I-D, Medical Assistance in
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Dying. So you've got all these clever little euphemisms
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to hide an ugly reality. So the backdrop
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of the story is this little college called Bracton College
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in a little town called Edgestow. And the
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National Institute of Coordinated Experiments wants to set
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up a satellite office and basically ruins everything.
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But it's going to be okay because of the science.
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And one of the main characters is a professor of sociology at the college
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named Mark Studdock. And Mark Studdock wants
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to belong to what Lewis calls the
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inner circle. And this is what I would call
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the cool kids' table, because we know McTagg's Corollary, which states
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most people haven't matured past the age of 15 and are still
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desperate to be invited to sit at the cool kids' table. At the high school
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cafeteria. So you've got Mark
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who desperately wants to belong. He's very proud of
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himself that he now belongs to the progressive element of the college,
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and it took him 18 months to get there, but he's there at last.
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So Mark wants to be part of the inner circle.
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He wants to be part of the cool kids. He craves
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human approval. His wife,
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Jane, really wants to belong only
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to herself. Many times throughout the
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novel, she says, well, one has to live one's
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own life, doesn't one?
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She doesn't want to be part of
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anything, and she really doesn't want to be
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committed to anything. So here's Mark,
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desperate for the approval neither of, of God nor of his wife,
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and Jane, who just wants to keep possession of
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herself at all costs. And left
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to their own devices, they will be
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powerless to resist the
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modernist depredations of this institute, the National
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Institute of Coordinated Experiments. Nice. So What we have
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here is the brutal,
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logical extension,
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the reductio ad absurdum, but soaked in blood,
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of fallen man left to his own devices,
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where he's nothing but rational,
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nothing but scientific,
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nothing but a cog in a machine, an agency
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with a set of tools. Mark doesn't know how to do that,
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and Jane doesn't know how to resist that either.
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And then the question becomes, well, what about us? What does
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this have to say with our here and now? I have had to resist
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mightily temptations to avoid spo—
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you know, I have to avoid spoilers. And I will say that a trusted
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friend of mine who read this before me said, Father, please let me know when
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this is finished so we can talk about it without spoilers.
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I'll just say this much: if you're concerned
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about artificial intelligence, then this is the
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book for you, because I think that C.S.
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Lewis might have foreseen over 80 years ago the
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dangers that we're living in right now.
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And I think we need to push very hard
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against the illusion that technology and technology
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alone is going to save us, and technology
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and technology alone is going to have
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all the answers. I think we need to push against that, and I
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think we need to push against that very, very hard.
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I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTeague, your host here every day at The Catholic Current.
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Remember, our rallying cry at The Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo—
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Here it is, Friday, The Catholic Current. Let's talk about this. We are up to
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part 12 of our series Novel Prophecies.
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We're wrapping up the science fiction trilogy of C.S. Lewis, the Space
13:09
Trilogy, and we're there at the last volume now, That Hideous Strength.
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So what we have here is a conflict between
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fallen man unchecked and man
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who decides to cooperate with God's grace.
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And the, the villain, if you will, of the story is called
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NICE, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments.
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And here's how— and again, I'm going to talk about this book related
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to our times, and I'm going to strive mightily not to risk any
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spoilers. But I want to look in this segment at the book
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in terms of technology, bureaucracy,
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and violence. Now, since the time of
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Francis Bacon— Bacon had, you know, and what was that,
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15th century, 16th century? Mr. Engineer,
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could you look that up? One, one with the dates of, uh, Sir Francis Bacon.
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He says that the, you know, knowledge is power.
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And I think it was Bertrand Russell who said the role of science
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is to get nature to sit up and
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beg. And so there is a member
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of the Institute with the app name Feverstone,
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and he says man has got to take charge of man.
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That means, remember, he,
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he says that some men have got to take charge of the rest.
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You find how to do it, and then you go ahead.
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So man is simply a problem to be solved.
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He's just one of the things in the world.
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And since we're very good at making and using tools,
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we're going to treat man as one of the tools that we can make and
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use. Thank you, Mr. Engineer.
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Francis Bacon, born 1561, died 1626.
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I was pretty close to that. And he wants to— Feverstone
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wants to break down ordinary human limits. He says,
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we've learned how to handle the machine.
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Now we must learn how to handle the engineer.
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We must take human nature into our
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own hands. Now,
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Doesn't this sound a lot like eugenics
15:38
and IVF and making
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children basically, you know,
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on demand? Doesn't it sound like transgenderism
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leading to transhumanism? That we're going to transcend
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human limitations Not by expansion,
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but by reduction, by making
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him non-mysterious,
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purely material,
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and subject to our will.
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And keep in the back of your mind the word magic.
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So how do we enforce This ongoing
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reduction of the human,
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the lowering of sights away
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and down from the transcendent, well, that's going
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to be the power of the bureaucracy.
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This is going to be the institute and forms
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and paperwork and regulations
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and programs. And how do you
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win or drive people over to that? Well,
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bureaucracy is going to need propaganda,
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and you're going to push that propaganda more
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and more and more. And this is where Orwell is going
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to come in and said, first, first the truth, was erased,
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then it was forgotten, then there was nothing
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but the lie. And that's the work of bureaucracy
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and propaganda. And for those who
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don't want to play ball, those who don't want to sing
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along and do what all the cool kids are doing,
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well then, of course, there's violence.
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And violence is embodied by the head of the nice
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police, Miss Hardcastle.
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And my goodness, what a piece of work Miss Hardcastle
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is. And let's take a look at the bureaucracy first.
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One of the people from the institute has the app name
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Mr. Wither, and one of the reasons I like reading Lewis, especially this
18:08
novel, is that he knows the language of bureaucracy,
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and he knows the power
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of bureaucracy to seduce scholars,
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reducing scholarship to mere academia.
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So listen to this, this is regarding Mr. Wither. Lewis writes,
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Mr. Wither's voice had that quality
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which makes it almost impossible to remember what was
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said leaving behind it only an impression
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of immense urbanity, immense readiness
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to oblige, and an infinite vagueness.
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So says C.S. Lewis. And you know what I wrote in the margins when
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I read that sentence? Synodality?
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Question mark. So when we hear the synodalists,
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the extreme synodalists, talking about inclusion
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and welcome and listening and the
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pastoral approach and change.
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It's these very soothing words that
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kind of rock you to sleep so
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you don't see what's coming Next.
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Now, so that's Mark Studdock, the guy who wants to
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belong, who is being seduced by
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the Institute. And his wife Jane, she goes off in another
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direction because she's having what she thinks are nightmares but are actually prophetic visions.
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And she starts hanging out with Christians, and she gets
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scared, not so much of the power of her prophetic
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visions and what they mean, but if she takes it seriously in a Christian
20:00
sense her life won't belong exclusively
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to her. In other words, she won't be her own god.
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So her husband is willing to have a pantheon of idols,
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whereas Jane wants to be her own idol.
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So there's a woman named Miss Ironwood, and she
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is trying to help Jane come to terms with the fact that she's
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having visions and not just nightmares. And she says,
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you're not going mad, Jane. You have an inherited
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gift. The human mind is not an isolated consumer
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of sensations. It is placed in a
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real universe. Pow!
20:44
But isn't that part of what AI
20:47
and the cyberculture wants to promote?
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That making us isolated consumers of sensations?
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Isn't that what virtual reality is supposed to
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be doing for us? Didn't E.M.
21:02
Forster see this in 1909 with his
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short story The Machine Stops?
21:11
So remember the 3 together: technology,
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bureaucracy, and violence. So technology
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is going to do the work of
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reducing man's— that's going to be the foundation.
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And then the bureaucracy enforces it by
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keeping people busy filling out forms and standing in
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line and then making the sale through propaganda.
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And let's talk a little bit about the propaganda because Miss Hardcastle,
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who's the police enforcer, 'Cause remember, if you don't cooperate with
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the technology, the bureaucracy, and the propaganda, then there's
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violence. And she says this,
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don't you see that the best condition for us is when
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there are lots of lies around? If you make people
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believe that something is true when it isn't, they'll believe
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the opposite the next day. It doesn't matter what people
22:11
believe. Provided they believe something
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we tell them. I saw this just the other day,
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and this is in terms of American politics, where people are losing their minds
22:23
because the price of gas is going up, and this is all absolutely,
22:26
positively Donald Trump's fault. He's running around
22:31
to every gas station in America jacking up the price. But you
22:34
go back just a couple, 2, 3 years, and the Secretary
22:38
of Energy for the previous administration said the president
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has absolutely nothing to do with the price of of gasoline. Don't blame
22:46
rising prices on him. Remember,
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the propaganda says it doesn't matter what people believe,
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provided they believe something that we tell them.
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So the paradigm shift that is taking place now
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is that human beings aren't really
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anything special. That it is okay
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for some people to decide that other
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people's lives aren't worth living,
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and that for reasons of efficiency or
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commerce or economics,
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we can get rid of the elderly,
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the chronically ill, the profoundly
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handicapped, and certainly,
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certainly, certainly the inconvenient.
23:46
They can all go. And if
23:50
you don't play ball with that, if you raise questions about it,
23:54
you get shot like Charlie Kirk.
23:58
You have churches burned down or vandalized.
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As happened when Roe v. Wade overturned,
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or you're banished from polite society, social media,
24:11
and college campuses because you say things like men
24:15
are men and women are women and they shouldn't be in each other's
24:19
locker rooms, showers, or sports teams. And that's
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the situation that we're in now, but with a type of,
24:27
of aggression that I think C.S. Lewis would have been gobsmacked
24:31
by. And the question is, well, Father, well, what do
24:35
we do about that once we
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see the, the conspiracy of the technology,
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the bureaucracy, its propaganda, and the
24:47
violence? How do we begin to resist
24:52
that? Well, it's got something to do with grace.
24:56
And hear me out, it's got something to do with myth,
25:00
which is what we'll talk about in the next segment. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTaggart,
25:04
your host every day of The Catholic Current. After the broadcast today,
25:07
go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list,
25:10
download our audio podcast. Wherever you can find audio, you can find
25:14
us. Follow us on your favorite platform, write a 5-star review. We need to attract
25:18
the attention of the listeners that these conversations get the attention they they deserve.
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Take us to your family and friends. Together we'll take it to the whole world.
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We can do it with you. We cannot do it without you. Let's do this
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good work together. Let's strive together to be so much more than merely relevant.
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Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
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Here we are, we are wrapping up C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.
26:56
We're looking at the 3rd volume, That Hideous Strength. As we said before,
27:00
the whole story arc is what do we do about
27:04
original sin and what happens when original sin meets innocence?
27:07
And that's the first 2 volumes. This is what happens— what does original sin do
27:12
when original sin meets sinners, and what happens when you have
27:15
recourse to grace, and what happens when you
27:19
don't. And what we see is there
27:23
are real temptations,
27:27
and the temptations become even more subtle when
27:31
there's bureaucratic manipulation. So on the one hand,
27:34
uh, there's a subtle mechanics of sin based
27:38
on compromise. C.S. Lewis talks about this in The
27:42
Screwtape Letters. They said, you know, you know, the demons would like us to do
27:46
these really spectacular sins where we fall off the cliff,
27:51
but in falling off the cliff, we might become aware of danger
27:54
and repent. And he said, so much better is the
27:58
slow downward slope with
28:02
no warning signs along the way where you
28:06
get to the bottom just as surely as if you fell
28:09
off the cliff, but there was never any resistance. You know,
28:13
the story I'm going to tell next is when I was a new priest preaching
28:16
at a parish mission and it was time for confessions, and this woman said
28:20
to me, you know, Father, I haven't been to confession in 17 years, but that's
28:24
okay because I'm basically a nice person. Oh my goodness.
28:29
So regarding original sin and compromise.
28:33
Lewis writes this, he says, it is the greatest of all
28:37
mistakes to imagine that the human being gets an opportunity
28:42
to choose between good and evil only once
28:45
in a lifetime. It comes again and again,
28:51
and every time the choice becomes subtly easier to
28:55
make on the wrong. Side. And Saint
28:59
Ignatius Loyola would agree with that because he has 2 sets of rules
29:03
for discernment. There's what they call the rules for the first week, where you
29:08
really are choosing between obvious gross temptation
29:11
and the call to grace. And then when you've really had your conversion
29:16
and the things that you used to fall for don't quite work the
29:20
same way, then this would equal the rules for discernment for the second
29:24
week, which have to do where, all right, if the enemy can't convince
29:28
you to, you know, rob a bank or sell drugs to children,
29:33
you know, he'll have you do good things that God didn't ask
29:37
you to do. And this is where he masquerades as an angel
29:41
of light. So one of the main characters, Mark— this is
29:44
the guy who wants to be invited to sit at the cool kids' table desperately.
29:49
He desperately wants to be approved by the pantheon of idols.
29:54
Lewis says this: It was not that Mark was consciously
29:58
choosing evil. He was only
30:01
drifting, terrified of
30:04
being left outside.
30:09
Oh my goodness. Now,
30:12
at the same time, his wife Jane,
30:15
her idol is herself. She wants absolute
30:20
self-possession. My will be done. One does
30:24
have to leave— live one's own life, doesn't one?
30:28
And she begins to see the world
30:32
is bigger, wider, richer,
30:36
deeper. There's grace, there's the transcendent,
30:41
there's— Lewis hints at it by what he calls myth,
30:45
which is the power of truth and beauty
30:50
and goodness that's not irrational. In other words,
30:53
it's not anti-rational. It's not
30:57
anti-logos, which would be anti-Christ,
31:01
but it is, uh, non-rational or supra-rational,
31:07
beyond what reason can reach, but the soul can
31:11
still see as true. And again, I'm trying to be so careful
31:16
not to give spoilers. But when she begins to understand
31:20
this through contact with it,
31:24
Lewis writes about Jane, for the first time in
31:28
all her life, the name of the King meant
31:33
something to Jane. She had lived in a world where authority
31:37
was annoyance or an intrusion. Here it
31:41
was an illumination. A grace.
31:46
And that's so different from what
31:49
she had had before, because again, Lewis writes, Jane was not
31:53
a Christian. What she resented was the idea of being
31:57
under someone else's authority. She wanted to belong
32:01
to herself. Pow! And then she
32:06
sees there is something bigger.
32:10
Now, for, uh, for Mark, he's working
32:14
with the materialists who say birth and death, digestion,
32:17
reproduction, all this is obsolete. This is the
32:21
Silicon Valley geniuses, so-called,
32:25
uh, panting over AI. When they were asked— oh
32:29
gosh, I forget which one it was— uh, does God exist?
32:32
One of them answered, not yet. And so Mark
32:37
begins to suspect that there's
32:42
something else going on here. He begins to suspect there's a dark
32:46
reality behind the scientific pretensions. Lewis writes,
32:51
it was not a scientific miracle. It was a
32:54
doorway. The thing that sat there was not a man kept
32:59
alive by machinery. But a corpse inhabited
33:04
by the abyss. And that recognition,
33:08
that shock, made Mark realize that
33:12
he was a hollow man, what Lewis calls
33:16
in his essay The Abolition of Man as men without chests.
33:21
And Mark says this about himself: he saw that he
33:26
had never possessed a real conviction in his life. He only possessed
33:30
a set of social fears and social ambitions.
33:34
So the fear was, you know, the FOMO, fear of missing out,
33:39
a fear of cancel culture. And the social ambition was
33:43
to belong to the cool kids' table.
33:47
And that is really frightful.
33:51
And so what does What does Lewis
33:56
offer? Well, this is where his language becomes
34:01
poetic. It becomes mythological because it wants to
34:04
appeal to the imagination.
34:08
And here I want to draw a parallel between what C.S. Lewis is
34:11
doing and classical rhetoric.
34:15
Aristotle says that rhetoric has 3 dimensions.
34:19
Uh, there's ethos, pathos, and logos.
34:23
And remember, rhetoric is about reasoning regarding
34:28
things that can't be proved. For example, you don't use rhetoric in
34:32
favor of the Pythagorean theorem, for example,
34:36
but you, you reason about things that
34:40
can't be proved, practical matters, in the hopes
34:44
of urging people to do the right thing. And so
34:48
the first dimension is logos. You want to have the truth,
34:53
because if you're not using rhetoric in service of the truth, then you're
34:57
propaganda. You're a sophist.
35:01
And then you want to have ethos, and that's the reputation
35:06
of the speaker for being a stand-up guy, for moral rectitude.
35:09
For example, I can write a pro-life speech
35:14
and have it read by Hillary Clinton,
35:18
and it would be true because I wrote it, but it wouldn't be credible because
35:22
Hillary Clinton was reading it. I could write a pro-life argument,
35:25
it would be true, and then give it to James Talarico, that lunatic
35:30
who's running for Senate in Texas,
35:33
and it wouldn't be credible because it would be he,
35:37
that truly hollow man, who, who was
35:41
reading it. So you've got to have credibility.
35:45
And then you've got to have pathos. You've got to move people
35:49
passionately. So rather than saying, nice speech,
35:54
you want people to jump and say, oh my God, we've got to do something
35:58
about that. And the way to engage emotion
36:02
is through the appeal to the senses and
36:06
the imagination. Vivid, bright pictures.
36:10
You know, in, in the movie Excalibur, which is one of my favorite movies,
36:14
By the way, there's about 2 and a half minutes in the movie that give
36:18
it its R rating. But that one scene where the young Merlin draws
36:22
the sword Excalibur from the stone, realizes what
36:25
he's done, acknowledges what God has put in his hands,
36:29
and jumps up on a horse and says, any man who would
36:33
be a knight and follow a king, follow me.
36:37
And I was watching that movie and I was ready to run down the aisles
36:40
of the theater and say, take me, Take me! I want to go! I want
36:44
to go! I want to be a knight and follow a king.
36:49
And that's so different from the bureaucracy of the European Union.
36:53
No one goes to battle for diversity,
36:57
inclusion, equity, paperless offices, and recycling.
37:04
It just doesn't happen.
37:07
And oh, it's so hard not to give spoilers now.
37:12
It's so hard. So where do we go from here?
37:16
We have to recognize that sin destroys
37:20
itself. Lewis writes, the hideous strength
37:24
of their own imagination had been turned back upon them.
37:28
They were devoured by the beast that they had made
37:32
of themselves. And that's what always happens to evil.
37:36
Evil eventually turns in on itself.
37:40
So Mark and Jane both
37:45
recognize that they were wrong,
37:48
that Mark saw there was a wrong kind
37:52
of belonging. There was the belonging
37:56
to the lie, the yielding to the bureaucracy, the propaganda,
38:00
and the violence. And Jane saw that there
38:04
was a wrong kind of self-possession,
38:08
uh, that we're not meant to be self-contained.
38:11
But one of the reasons why I joined the Society of Jesus, honestly,
38:16
was because it gave me an opportunity to scoop up all of
38:19
my life all at once and to hand it over.
38:23
And that was so different from living the life of quiet
38:27
desperation where you were just reduced and drained drop
38:32
by drop, one moment at a time,
38:36
until you thought it just didn't matter anymore.
38:41
And I didn't want to live and die that
38:45
way. I didn't want that kind of a living death.
38:49
And Lewis says you don't have to accept
38:54
the kind of living death that bureaucracy,
38:58
technology, and artificiality offer.
39:03
I mean, listen to the way that Lewis describes the alternative. He says
39:07
it was the giant jovial laughter of an unfallen
39:11
world, a weight of joy that pressed upon the spirit
39:15
like a mountain of wine. So Mark
39:18
and Jane both realize that
39:22
they could give and receive love.
39:26
And that reality was so much bigger, wider,
39:30
deeper, more true, more good, more beautiful than they
39:34
had hitherto imagined. And there was a
39:38
King above it all and behind
39:42
it all and within it all. And they decided
39:46
to live and die for the King. I wish I could tell
39:50
you how, but that would really ruin the rest of the story.
39:55
Please, friends, take the time, read this story now,
39:58
and then let me know what you think of it. Jesuit Father Robert McTeague,
40:02
your host here every day at The Catholic Current. You want to stay with us
40:06
for the rest of the hour? Coming up next, Week in Readiness, you and me
40:08
reviewing the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday scriptures.
40:11
So be all prayed up for Sunday Mass. Be part of the conversation.
40:15
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That's gab.com. The channel is The
40:23
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40:30
Take us to your family and friends. Together we'll take it to the whole world.
40:33
Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
41:00
Have a question or feedback about today's episode?
41:04
Want to see suggest a guest or a future topic, go to thestationofthecross.com/askfather
41:12
and help influence the conversation.
41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
41:24
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
41:27
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios
41:30
local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the
41:34
fullness of truth with clarity and charity. Here we are, Week in Readiness,
41:37
reviewing the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday scriptures
41:41
so we'll be all prayed up for Sunday Mass. I'm going to go bottom line
41:44
up front today. I'll explain this in a moment. We're looking— if you're following
41:48
the Novus Ordo calendar of the Pauline Rite, we're looking at the 29th
41:52
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lectionary 145,
41:55
zooming in on the Gospel, Matthew 22 Our Lord
42:00
says, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to
42:04
God. And with that in mind, I'm going to focus on one headline.
42:08
And this is not a partisan political issue. This is a
42:12
moral issue. The gentleman named James Talarico, who's running
42:15
for the U.S. Senate from the great state of Texas,
42:19
and, uh, he says things that are bizarre. He says Our
42:24
Lady was pro-choice. He said God is non-binary.
42:27
He says interesting things. And he was in a format the
42:30
other day that I can only describe as, I don't know, political speed dating,
42:35
where for 3 minutes somebody gets to ask him a question and for 3 minutes
42:39
he gets to respond. There was a woman who described herself as a theologian.
42:43
I'm not going to mention her name because candidly, I just found
42:47
her— I found her to be disappointing. And I
42:51
think she missed an opportunity.
42:55
So, Talarico's like, well, of course, of course, he's, you know,
42:58
he's pro-abortion, but by golly, we're all Christians. And,
43:01
you know, rather than treating abortion as one
43:04
of those, you know, cultural war issues, it should just be a public policy issue.
43:08
And, you know, we could— let's all agree that we want to reduce the
43:12
number of abortions. And I'd say, look, I know why I want to reduce the
43:16
number of abortions. Why do you want to reduce the number of abortions? I want
43:20
to reduce the number of abortions because I know it to be murder.
43:24
You say it's not. I want to reduce the
43:27
number of abortions because it physically and emotionally and spiritually harms women and others.
43:32
You say it doesn't. So, be specific. Tell me right now,
43:36
Mr. Talarico, candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, why you
43:40
want to reduce the number of abortions. Be specific.
43:44
And speaking of abortions, how do you know when an abortion is successful?
43:48
What's the undeniable indication that the abortion has succeeded?
43:53
And then he says, well, you know, let's treat this as a policy issue rather
43:56
than a cultural or moral issue. No, no, policy issues are moral issues.
43:59
That's why they're important. That's why they're important.
44:04
And, uh, he says, well, you know, the Bible is silent on abortion.
44:07
And she pointed out, you know, the commandment, thou shalt not kill.
44:11
I'd also, you know, bring in Psalm 139.
44:16
You knit me in my mother's womb. But I say, hey, you know what?
44:19
It's too damn easy to say, well, you know, abortion or philosophical
44:24
theologians, it's really hard. We can agree to disagree.
44:27
No, no, no, no, no.
44:31
Start with biology.
44:34
And once you clear the biology hurdle, sir,
44:38
then you can get to philosophy and theology. From the moment of
44:42
conception, what do we have?
44:46
It is undeniably human. Doesn't become a
44:50
giraffe or a unicorn at any time. Never happened.
44:53
It's undeniably genetically human from the get-go.
44:57
Oh, but maybe we don't know if it's a person, blah blah blah.
45:00
Let's grant for now that we don't know that it's a person. Let's draw an
45:04
analogy to hunting. You know, you and your theologian friend
45:08
are going hunting. You hear rustling in the woods. Could be a deer. It could
45:11
be Farmer Jones. Do you even put your finger on the trigger?
45:15
No, of course not, because it might be a human out there.
45:19
So you keep your finger off the trigger, and you're a reprobate if you
45:23
start blasting away, because it might be a deer, it might be a
45:27
human, and you don't know. So unless and until you can absolutely
45:31
prove that the child from the moment conception is not human
45:35
and not a human person— good luck with that— then the morally safer course
45:40
is to honor life from the moment of conception.
45:44
Well, the Bible doesn't say for us. Well, even if it didn't, you know,
45:48
the Bible doesn't talk about a lot of things. It doesn't talk about the merits
45:52
of indoor plumbing, right? It doesn't talk about how dangerous it is
45:55
to put thumbtacks in the microwave and hit the on button. Doesn't mean it's a
45:59
good idea. So stop
46:03
it with the you know, the Bible doesn't say much about.
46:07
All right, we'll just stop that.
46:11
So, the burden of proof is on the advocates of abortion,
46:15
and he says, well, you know, to be really completely pro-life, you also have
46:19
to take these positions on, and he talks about war
46:23
and capital punishment and climate change, all of which are prudential issues.
46:28
There are just wars. Capital punishment
46:33
is included in the natural law tradition. When,
46:36
how, where, why honorable people may disagree,
46:40
abortion is not, is not,
46:43
and cannot be a prudential issue.
46:47
It is an intrinsic evil because it always
46:51
is the deliberate taking of an innocent human life,
46:55
which is the very definition of murder.
47:01
So it was really disappointing with this woman who described herself as a theologian,
47:05
is that she let him get away with murder and then suggested that
47:08
they have a podcast together because obviously they had such great
47:12
chemistry. Oh my God. Oh my
47:16
God. If you're a
47:20
Catholic, if you're a Catholic theologian,
47:24
I don't know how you can be warm and chummy and laughy with
47:28
someone who's willing to tolerate child murder.
47:33
I don't know how that works. I don't know how that
47:38
works. Remember,
47:41
this man wants to enshrine in
47:45
law child murder.
47:49
He wants to reduce the number of child murders for reasons he never gives
47:53
and can't really give. Render unto Caesar
47:58
what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. Well, you know what is
48:01
owed to God? Obedience and
48:05
worship. And it's very clear by anyone
48:09
who's got 2 brain cells to rub together that God has embedded in nature that
48:12
human life is good. And it
48:16
is to be reverenced from conception to natural death,
48:21
and we put ourselves in terrible
48:26
peril and in danger of divine judgment
48:29
and wrath— wrath— when
48:34
we countenance the murder of
48:38
children. The Bible is really full of lurid
48:41
details of what happens to people who murder children. Especially murdering the infants
48:46
and the unborn. So, Talarico is
48:49
intellectually dishonest. I suspect morally a snake. Maybe he'll
48:53
prove me wrong. But my God,
48:56
people, it's 2026.
49:00
Are we still so naive
49:05
that we're willing to let people who want to have the grasp on state
49:09
power tell us, we can agree to disagree about
49:13
abortion, tee-hee-hee? Really? I don't want to
49:16
believe that we can be that naive anymore. I hope this poor woman— she
49:20
may be a saint, maybe she levitates when she prays, I don't know. But I
49:24
do know that she failed that night.
49:28
And someone needs to sit down with Mr. Talarico and say,
49:32
look, answer these questions honestly or go hang
49:36
your head in shame. And any adult
49:40
Catholic who's not able to do that is not adequate for the task.
49:44
Of being an adult Catholic.
49:48
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It is not Caesar's power
49:53
to define when human life begins.
49:57
May God's holy name be praised now and forever. I'm Jesuit Father Robert
50:01
McTaggart, your host here every day of The Catholic Current. Join us on Monday
50:05
for another round of The Catholic Current. You know how we roll here— great topic,
50:08
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50:13
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Together, let's take it around the world. Let's strive mightily to be so much
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50:37
of Mount Carmel. May Almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in
50:40
peace, and please do pray for me, for I am a sinner.