Latest / The Catholic Current / Tyranny and the End of Days (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 5/8/26

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Tyranny and the End of Days (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 5/8/26 · The Catholic Current

0:00
This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague.
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She's like, I'm a Christian, but I'm not a nut like Matt.
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You wouldn't know it from the way I act.
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And I was just like, oh, that is the worst thing.
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And I was actually worried about her.
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Like, don't even say that, because I just feared that'll play on the movie screen of your life.
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When the judgment comes, yeah.
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Wow.
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I'm a vegetarian, but you wouldn't know it by what I eat.
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Praise be Jesus Christ.
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This is Father Robert McTague of the Society of Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current,
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where we bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
0:41
You're listening to us from the station of La Crosse Studios, your local radio station,
0:45
and the iCatholic Radio mobile app, where we proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
0:50
As always, let's start with a prayer.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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Almighty God, through the intercession of St. Ignatius of Loyola, we ask that you pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us,
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a spirit of discernment that might hear your voice and obey your command.
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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1:07
Hey, friends, by popular demand, we are continuing our series on tyranny for yet another Friday episode.
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Let's talk about this.
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We walk through a complex issue together.
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I want to talk about tyranny and the end of days.
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And I want to do that with considerable caution.
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You know, I say very often I'm a dark-brooding, melancholic Irishman with an apocalyptic imagination.
1:30
And that is certainly true.
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And I also want to be clear that I'm not saying,
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I figured out when Christ is coming back, it's going to be on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.
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That's not what I mean by the end of days.
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And when I was in the novitiate in 1990,
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there was a book that came out written by an evangelical called Soothsayers of the Second Advent.
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And it was about people who make a living predicting the end of the world.
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And he was embarrassed that in 1988,
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the most popular book in the evangelical world was called 88 Reasons Why He's Coming Back in 88.
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And it was outsold the following year by an even bigger seller called 89 Reasons Why He's Coming Back in 89.
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He said presumably the 89th reason was because he didn't come back in 88.
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So we're not doing that.
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That's not what I mean.
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You know, our Lord is clear.
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No one knows the day or the hour but our Heavenly Father.
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And he's not telling, at least not right now.
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So what do I mean by the end of days?
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Well, I took that title because of an author.
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I recently rediscovered Nikolai Berdjeev, a Russian author with a name like that, died in 1948,
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saw a lot of the ugly of the 20th century growing up in Russia,
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saw the First World War, the Russian Revolution, World War II.
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And he wrote a book called The End of Our Time.
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What does he mean by that and why is it related to tyranny?
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He says that we are coming up on a change of era or epoch.
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And we've heard this sort of thing before.
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You've heard about the fourth turning, the end of empire, historical cycles that are 80 or 50 or 250 years,
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and is America a declining empire in the model of the fall of Rome, all those things.
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But he makes a very interesting claim when he talks about the end of our time.
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He says, and I agree, that the high point of human existence was medieval Christendom.
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Now let me pause so people can scream and holler because people think they know about the Middle Ages when they really don't.
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And yes, they didn't have indoor plumbing and they didn't have painless dentistry and they didn't have free Wi-Fi.
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They had Christ.
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And yes, there were sinners who were involved, all those things, all those stipulations granted.
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But you had a culture that certainly put Christ first, center, and everywhere else.
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And it produced beautiful civilization.
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It produced great art and architecture and literature.
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And it generated lots of communities.
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Father Fessio used to know, or told me, better said he knows, and he told me and I forgot,
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but the number of just Benedictine monasteries across Europe at the high point of the Middle Ages was something unbelievable,
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like 10 or 20,000.
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Christendom produced saints.
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It produced people who gladly took centuries to build magnificent cathedrals.
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I want to be a part of that.
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And he said things started to get shaky with the Renaissance.
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And you might say, Father, but you know, the Renaissance, you know, Michelangelo, da Vinci.
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Yes, I've been to Florence.
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I've been to the Uffizi Gallery.
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I love the great paintings and all that good stuff.
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But the problem with the Renaissance was the focus was shifted so that you had, who was it?
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Montaigne, who said that the proper study of man is man.
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It might have been Alexander Pope.
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I'll have to have Mr. Engineer look that up.
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But certainly you had the beginning of a kind of humanism.
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Now, there's a good humanism.
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There's a specifically Christian humanism that was certainly promulgated and promoted by the founding fathers of the Society of Jesus, my community.
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But in Christian humanism, the emphasis is not simply on man as such, but also man in relation to Christ.
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It was a humanism that had as its focal point the word made flesh.
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And the Renaissance shifted and began to talk about man himself.
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And then we start to move away specifically from Christianity, from Christ, the word made flesh, to man himself.
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And then you move from theism, the personal God, who is the creator God, who is provident and involved in the world.
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And then you begin to move away towards deism, towards the blind watchmaker who designed the watch, by which he means creation.
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Put it together, wound it up, and then let it go.
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And once you take your eyes off the prize, once you shift away from man in Christ to man in himself, you inevitably begin to move away from theism to deism to naturalism.
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And once you move into naturalism, it is inevitable that you end up with nihilism.
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That you end up with, you know, you start with Psalm 139,
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You hear the psalmist say that the heavens are telling the glories of God.
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You have man at the center of the universe, and then man is just a sack of nerve endings and appetites waiting to be tickled and fed.
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We're just on a rock hurtling through the abyss.
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And then human life is just a chapter between two oblivions.
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And that's the direction that I think we are trending towards.
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And so, Nicholas Brzeev, in the 1940s, said we are witnessing the end of the Renaissance.
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Now, the Renaissance had a rather elevated view of man, drifting away from God.
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And it was inevitable that once man is untethered from God, you end up having a lower and lower view of man.
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Brzeev writes this,
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Man's intellectual vagrancy, where he knew nothing of an authority higher than his own, has not strengthened his belief in himself.
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On the contrary, it has irremediably weakened it and compromised even that knowledge he had of his own identity.
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And he says that ours is a time of spiritual decadence and not of ascent.
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Pow! This is powerful stuff.
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And he says the promises of humanism, really secular humanism, has not been fulfilled.
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He said,
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Man is tired to death and is ready to rest upon any kind of collectivism that may come, and then human individuality will vanish once and for all.
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Modern man cannot stand up against his own loneliness and his own dereliction.
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And he will say that man did this to himself.
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So we had the boldness of Renaissance humanism, and then we had the smugness of Enlightenment humanism,
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and now we have the decadence and despair of a nihilistic anti-humanism.
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And Brzeev is claiming that this movement is just running out of momentum.
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Well, what happens then?
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Well, he claims we have an opportunity for a new kind of middle age, a new medievalism, a renewed commitment to Christian humanism.
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And I have it on good authority that on May 15th, Pope Leo is releasing his first encyclical called Magnificent Humanity.
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We'll have to wait and see if that's a cause for celebration or not.
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I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day at the Catholic Current.
11:00
We are talking about tyranny and the end of days.
11:03
Remember, our rallying cry here at the Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo, bringing Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
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12:55
Here we are this Friday, let's talk about this.
12:57
By popular demand, we're continuing our series on tyranny.
13:02
I'm talking about tyranny in the end of days, and I'm using as a point of departure a book by the Russian author,
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Nicholas Brejev, called The End of Our Time.
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And he claims that our age, which has been kind of moving from the Renaissance to the so-called Enlightenment,
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secular humanism, it's dying, it's collapsing.
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And this is a man who survived World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II.
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And he says something very interesting.
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He says this,
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And I want to say, well, yes, of course.
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Paganism couldn't offer redemption.
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You'd bargain with the gods.
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You'd try to get leverage over the gods through superstition.
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But there wasn't redemption.
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Now, what happens if you know that you need redemption, but you really, really, really like your sin?
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I mean, you want to keep your sin.
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Well, then you've got to get rid of Christ, because Christ is the ultimate buzzkill, because Christ can't tolerate sin.
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Remember that scene from The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, where there is this lizard wrapped around the neck of this young man,
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and it's a symbol of lust.
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And his angel keeps saying to the guy, you know, I can help you with that.
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And the lizard whispers in his ear, he says, he's not kidding.
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He'll do it.
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He'll kill me.
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He'll kill us both.
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And that's what secular humanism offers, is you get to keep your sin.
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Well, gosh, you can understand the appeal.
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Well, he says that that recognition that we still need redemption, that doesn't go away.
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And we need to come to terms with that awful fact, and then embrace the happy, if blood-soaked remedy, was Christ crucified and risen.
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And I agree with Brzev that the secular humanism we've been living with for the past century, that's run out of gas.
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It's falling down.
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It's been parasitic on the corpse, now the husk of the West, which is really Christendom.
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And it doesn't have anything left to offer.
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Well, what do we do about that?
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Well, this is not an entirely new observation.
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There's an author I like very much, and he is a great curmudgeon, and I am desperate to interview him.
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But unfortunately, he says, I'm not doing interviews.
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It interferes with my writing.
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He wrote a book called The Year of Our Lord, 1943.
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This is by Alan Jacobs, and it's a fascinating, fascinating book.
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And the subtitle is called Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis.
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And he says, well, what's going on in 1943?
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Well, there is the horrors of the Second World War, of course.
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By 1943, America has entered the war, and people have pretty much figured out that thanks to the entrance of America in the war, it's only a matter of time before the good guys win.
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And what about that?
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Well, where do we go from there?
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Well, he says that there was a group of scholars and thinkers in 1943 who worked both individually and sometimes collectively, or at least simultaneously, to talk about how to make sure this doesn't happen again.
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So he cites T.S. Eliot, the poet W.H. Auden, the crime novelist and theologian Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, and then a little-known French mystic and philosopher named Simone Weil.
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And they all admit that secular humanism has failed, and that's why they're in the mess that we're in of this horrifying world war, and that we need to replace secular humanism with a distinctively Christian humanism.
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And they say this is the only way to avoid the horror again.
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Well, by the time World War II ended, that just got kicked away.
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We were not going to do that.
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Instead, the post-war conclusion was, look, the trouble with the world so far is that people believe in some things so ardently that they're willing to kill for them and willing to die for them.
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But what if people were just comfortable and satisfied and glutted and didn't really believe in anything in particular?
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Then there wouldn't be any wars.
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And so if we have, you know, you turn to people like Karl Popper and you have kind of a relativism, you have your truth, I have my truth, can't we all just get along?
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Heath Ledger's The Joker from Batman.
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Why so serious?
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And you cut yourself off from history so you don't owe a debt of gratitude to your ancestors, and you cut yourself off from the future so you stop having kids, and you just live large in the here and now, in which case war and disagreement and violence,
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that's just a buzzkill, and we're going to make everyone dumb, fat, and happy.
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And, you know, if you want to do the God thing, we encourage you to be spiritual but not religious.
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And you don't want to have what some thinkers called the strong gods.
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So religion, a sense of ethnic identity, if you're European, populism, national pride, we're going to get rid of all of that.
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And so Robert Reno wrote a book, a fascinating book, I very much recommend, I've interviewed him about it, called The Return of the Strong Gods, Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.
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And it says, well, it turns out that people really do want to have transcendent commitments, and they do want to be something other than just dumb, fat, and happy.
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There are people who do have a sense of gratitude towards their heritage, towards their identity, towards their ethnos, and some of them are European, wait for people to scream, because apparently everyone can have hometown pride except Europeans and North Americans.
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What's that all about? Well, that's a big topic for another several times.
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And there are people realizing that a thin, pale, anemic Christ, and this very vaguish sense of Christianity as a contributor to the cult of my self-esteem, that's not enough.
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And there are people who think that Christian identity and Christian people should extend into the future so they have a debt, they believe, to future generations.
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So they do crazy, wild things like make babies. Can you imagine? And they make babies the old-fashioned way, and not in the lab.
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I wonder if that will ever catch on again, but I digress.
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And they want their children to be proud, grateful Christians who will live and die as saints and become citizens of heaven.
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And you know what? These wild, crazy, radical ideas, they used to be called by another name.
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They used to be called normal.
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And some people want to make humanity, Christian humanism, normal again.
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That it's good for men and women to marry each other and stay faithful to each other and make babies with each other and make more than one or two or three.
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They think it's good for a man to work with his hands, start a small business, support a family.
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They think it's good that mom turns the house into a home, becomes the heart of the family, and loves her children so much that she wants to spend the majority of her time with them and fosters their education.
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In conjunction with her husband and a wider community, of course, of course.
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So you see where I'm going with this?
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There are people who realize that the grand experiment of rejecting both God and man leads to horror and the abyss.
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And they say, yes, we know you can't turn back the clock, there was never a golden age since Adam and Eve, yes, okay, all that is true.
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But they say, you know, there are some seeds of wisdom and best practices that we want to plant in the soil of our own here and now.
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These are the tens of thousands of people who every year make the pilgrimage from Notre Dame to Chartres.
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There are people who want to pray in the manner that the majority of Catholic saints would recognize.
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They know what men and women are without being biologists, can you imagine?
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There are people who want Christendom again.
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And I think that is a really good idea.
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I think we can learn ever so much about leading a dignified human life and building a civilization worthy of God and man.
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And we need to learn from our ancestors and we need to prepare the future generations.
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And we need to do that specifically as Christians, precisely as Catholics who are imbued with tradition.
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And making the best of the here and now.
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And you know who I think would agree with me? Fulton Sheen, who is going to be beatified shortly, which I think is a good thing.
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And my goodness, he knew how to make use of technology and communications and he was a learned, prayerful man.
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And he was calling shenanigans on the sickness of the 20th century back in the 20s on radio.
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So we're going to be hearing from him in the next segment.
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And I've got some recommendations of my own, so please do stay with us for the whole hour.
24:58
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day of The Catholic Current.
25:01
We are continuing our discussion on tyranny.
25:04
We're talking about tyranny and the end of days.
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Well, here we are, Friday. Let's talk about this.
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We're talking about tyranny and the end of days.
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I want to suggest that we're under the sway of a tyranny that is a secular...
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it's not even enough to say it's a secular humanism.
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It's a secular anti-humanism.
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And I'm so much a Christian, so much an enthusiast for the Incarnation,
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the Word made flesh, that I will say that whatever is anti-human is also anti-Christ,
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because the Christ of God enmeshed Himself into the full human condition,
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and He is the Lord of history.
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So it is anti-human as anti-Christ.
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And so the authors I've been referring to, Robert Reno, Alan Jacobs, Nikolai Brzeev,
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have all said the same thing, that moving away from the Christian humanism of the Middle Ages
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that built Christendom led to the naive humanism of the Renaissance,
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still with Christian influence, into the secular humanism of naturalism,
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and then the despair and nihilism of postmodern secularism.
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And this is not good, and we've got to wake up.
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And I'm going to put myself in good company by suggesting the soon-to-be-blessed Fulton J. Sheen would agree with me.
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I'm going to read you some quotes from Fulton Sheen from the first half of the 20th century.
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Fulton Sheen was a smart man, a brilliant man, and a man of very deep prayer.
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And he could read the signs of the times.
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He releases this.
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Oh my gosh! Can you imagine being able to write like that?
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I can imagine writing a paragraph like that and saying,
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Okay, guy, kill me now. It's not going to get any better than that.
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I can go for hours just on this paragraph.
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During the time of the Cold War, he said,
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We see this in churches that have been recoveted or built from scratch,
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where you've got the Jumping for Joy Jesus, the Resurrection fix.
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I won't mention any names, but I know of a chapel of a certain religious community,
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which I have some familiarity, and suspended by wire over the altar,
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it looks like Christ being assumed into heaven.
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He's very bodily, except for this modest cloth.
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And so you're thinking, well, maybe it's Christ crucified and risen ascending into heaven.
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But no, he doesn't have scars.
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Well, what's that about?
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Who decided that was a good idea?
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So if we're going to save ourselves from ourselves,
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we have to let ourselves be saved again by Christ crucified, risen, reigning, and returning.
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We have to recover human dignity by relating fallen humanity to the incarnate Christ.
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That also means we have to take up our cross,
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and it also means we can't tolerate or love our own sin.
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That's going to be a hard sell.
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Fulton Sheen continues. Listen to this.
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A sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supra-individual goals.
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In other words, communists, they got a job to do.
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And we're not just talking about kicking back cocktail communists.
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We're talking about people who get work done.
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I mean, let's face it, it was disciplined leftists who won the election for the new communist Muslim mayor of New York City.
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They're the ones who get organized in colleges and universities and riots on the street and so on.
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Antifa is organized.
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He goes on to say,
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But the cross without Christ is sacrifice without love.
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Hence, communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom,
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filled with concentration camps, firing squads, and brainwashings.
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And yet, and yet, a few years ago, a Catholic bishop in full communion with Rome,
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who offers a very reverent Novus Ordo Mass, you know,
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he was with the Department of State with the Vatican,
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and he said that it was the Chinese communists who best embodied the church's social teaching.
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If you get misty-eyed about communism, and you think that communism and Catholicism can fit together well,
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you know who you need to talk to?
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You need to talk to Vietnamese Catholics.
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You need to talk to Vietnamese Catholics who got on anything that would float
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and paddled away from Vietnam when the communists took over.
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A Jesuit friend of mine was talking about meditating for Christ in the tomb for three days,
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and he said his experience of Holy Saturday was being in the Pacific in a leaking boat,
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wondering who would get to them first.
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Would it be the communists hunting them down?
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Would it be the sharks surrounding the boat as it was sinking?
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Or would it be the Australians who would bring them to safety?
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So if you want to have an utterly non-romantic, not-naive view of what communism is like,
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talk to Vietnamese Catholics.
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I got to know a number of Vietnamese Catholics when I was in Texas.
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My hat goes off to them.
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They have suffered for the faith, and they have no doubt about what communism is capable of.
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Let's continue with Fulton Sheen.
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He talks about the decadent West, what I would call the secular West.
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The West is really a parasite living off the patrimony of Christendom,
34:43
and we do have to break that relationship between parasite and host,
34:48
or we're going to die.
34:50
We're going to die.
34:52
He says,
34:53
The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without his cross,
34:59
but a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God
35:03
is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher
35:10
who deserves to be popular for his great Sermon on the Mount,
35:14
but also merits unpopularity for what he said about his divinity on the one hand
35:19
and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other.
35:23
Fulton Sheen continues,
35:25
The sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces,
35:30
sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the word for the letters,
35:37
or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle
35:41
that anything which is divine must necessarily be a myth.
35:46
Without his cross, Christ becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy
35:53
or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.
35:58
So says Fulton Sheen.
36:01
What a rock star that man is.
36:05
How?
36:07
And friends, we have some choices to make.
36:13
We have some choices to make.
36:18
We have to raise the question of who's going to teach our children
36:25
and what are our children going to be taught.
36:28
We have to answer the question, do we owe a debt to our ancestors?
36:34
If you have the faith, you have to understand that the faith was handed to you
36:41
by missionaries and mystics and unsung heroes and blood-soaked martyrs.
36:50
What do we owe to them and to our children, to the future generations,
36:58
God who desires to bring them into the world so that they may become citizens of heaven?
37:06
We can set them out on the road to eternity, well or poorly.
37:11
That is up to us.
37:13
And we get to decide what will happen to our civilization,
37:19
whether the people who hate us will stand on our graves
37:25
and on the smoldering ruins of Christian civilization and mock us,
37:31
or whether we'll say, no, should the Son of Man return now in our time,
37:36
he will find faith on the earth.
37:40
And I want to give a shout out to artist, art historian, commentator,
37:46
Maureen Malarkey of Studiomatters.com, God bless her,
37:50
because I know that people would intervene and say,
37:52
oh, no, Father, I know how the story ends, Christ wins, ha, ha, ha, take that, gates of hell.
37:58
Yes, I know the gates of hell won't prevail.
38:01
It doesn't mean what you think it means,
38:03
and it certainly doesn't mean that we get to kick back and do nothing
38:07
and then dance in the end zone with Christ when he comes in glory
38:11
to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.
38:13
Because Maureen Malarkey, writing about the gates of hell trope,
38:18
said whatever the gates of hell means,
38:21
it doesn't mean that St. Peter's Basilica won't suffer the fate of the Hagia Sophia,
38:30
and it doesn't mean that Rome won't fall as Constantinople fell.
38:39
Pow, what a punch in the face that is.
38:43
Yes, Christ will ultimately be absolutely victorious.
38:50
That is not in doubt.
38:52
The doubt is whether or not you and I are going to have a share in his victory,
38:58
and that happens only to the degree that we carry our cross,
39:03
that we renounce our sin, that we proclaim Christ to our very last breath.
39:09
Christ is not one voice among many.
39:11
The Catholic Church is not one church among many.
39:14
Christ is unique.
39:17
The deposit of faith was entrusted whole and entire to the one church he founded,
39:22
and I will not be quite about that anymore.
39:27
And you shouldn't be either.
39:31
Friends, we have work to do.
39:34
The faith is handed on via culture and civilization.
39:40
Doug Walson was right.
39:41
It's men who have families who build cultures and civilizations,
39:46
and civilization worthy of the name, worthy of God and man,
39:51
must, must, must be Christian.
39:56
Humanism is dying.
39:59
What will replace it?
40:01
It's going to be Christ, or it's going to be nothing.
40:06
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague,
40:08
your host here every day of The Catholic Current,
40:10
and you want to stay with us for the rest of the hour.
40:12
Coming up next, Weekend Readiness,
40:14
reviewing the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday Scriptures,
40:17
so we'll be all prayed up for Sunday Mass.
40:19
Be part of the conversation.
40:20
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40:24
That's G-A-B.com.
40:26
The channel is The Catholic Current,
40:28
and you can influence the conversation.
40:30
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40:35
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40:39
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40:40
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40:42
Back in just two minutes, please do stay with us.
40:44
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41:04
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41:07
Go to thestationofthecross.com
41:11
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41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ.
41:21
This is Fr. Robert McTague of The Society of Jesus,
41:23
your daily host for The Catholic Current,
41:25
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41:27
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41:29
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41:32
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41:36
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41:39
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41:42
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41:43
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41:47
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41:52
Support us, please, at thestationofthecross.com.
41:55
Well, here we are.
41:56
It is the last segment of our Friday.
41:58
Let's talk about this.
41:59
You and me reviewing the headlines of the week
42:01
in light of upcoming scriptures.
42:04
So we all prayed up for Sunday Mass,
42:06
but here is the challenge.
42:08
Because of my travel schedule,
42:10
I am recording this not on this Friday,
42:13
so the headlines of the week haven't really happened yet.
42:18
So I'm going to share a good news story,
42:21
because I try to do that,
42:22
and then I'm going to talk about some events
42:24
that are taking place during the week,
42:26
and we're going to jump up into the scriptures.
42:29
So the American Association for Cancer Research
42:32
has announced that there has been a breakthrough
42:35
in the treatment of bowel cancer
42:38
and that there have been zero relapses for patients after 33 months.
42:42
So that is a very good thing.
42:45
Yay, science.
42:46
Hey, you know,
42:47
proponent of the scientific method,
42:48
Christendom did.
42:50
Yeah.
42:51
So yay us.
42:52
So some good news for a change.
42:54
What else is going on?
42:55
Well, people are still killing each other.
42:58
In the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Russia, Yemen,
43:02
sub-Saharan Africa,
43:04
lots of the streets of the United States.
43:06
God save us all.
43:08
There has been a very terrible 12-alarm fire
43:12
in the town where I grew up, Belleville, New Jersey.
43:15
I hope that does get under control and sorted out.
43:18
As of this recording, no loss of life has been reported.
43:22
Thanks be to God.
43:25
Apparently, Rome is releasing a book of essays
43:30
written by the former Robert Francis Prevost.
43:34
I don't know if it's properly the 14th.
43:36
Essays he wrote in his 13 years
43:38
when he was the director of the Augustinian Order.
43:41
I certainly want to get a copy of that.
43:43
And it's been announced that May 15th,
43:46
which is usually the date when social teaching encyclicals
43:50
have been released, like Rerum Novarum, etc.,
43:53
the Holy Father is going to release his first encyclical
43:56
called Magnificent Humanity.
43:58
You can be sure that we're going to be talking about that as well.
44:02
So, in other words, life goes on.
44:06
I said Mass this morning.
44:09
The sisters I care for prayed, worshipped our Lord,
44:13
and then went out to proclaim Him in the apostolate.
44:16
There are good things happening.
44:17
There are crazy things happening.
44:20
I want all of us to play our part in cooperating with Christ
44:26
for the greater glory of God, the love of our neighbor,
44:29
and the salvation of our own soul.
44:31
The Easter season is winding down.
44:35
We are coming up on the sixth Sunday of Easter.
44:39
If you're following the Novus Ordo calendar,
44:41
or the Pauline, right, we're looking at Lectionary 55.
44:45
So this is the sixth Sunday of Easter.
44:48
We're getting ready for the Ascension.
44:50
We're getting ready for Pentecost.
44:53
We're looking at what the church has been doing since our Lord is risen.
44:59
The apostles are going out.
45:01
They're preaching.
45:03
They're healing.
45:04
They're driving out evil spirits.
45:07
They are continuing the work of Christ.
45:12
Now it's our turn.
45:14
The church has cleared the most reliable path to happiness,
45:17
to holiness, better said,
45:20
is to do the duties of our state in life to the best of our ability
45:24
and for great love.
45:25
So if you're a parent, parent.
45:26
If you're a teacher, teach.
45:27
If you're a priest, priest.
45:29
These are the things that we're all called upon to do.
45:32
Each one of us has, in some way or another,
45:35
met the risen Lord and needs to act accordingly.
45:40
What we have received as an amazing and liberating grace,
45:44
we have to, have to, have to hand on to others.
45:49
And I know that people, I mean,
45:51
do they still get misty-eyed and excited about the new evangelization?
45:55
Because I know synodality is kind of, seems to be the sunrise,
45:59
and maybe new evangelization seems to be the sunset.
46:02
But I want to talk about where new evangelization came from.
46:05
It didn't originate with John Paul II.
46:09
It originated with Paul VI.
46:10
And it wasn't, gosh, you know,
46:12
we're just so full of zeal and we're ready to encounter
46:15
and accompany modern man,
46:16
so we're going to have a new evangelization.
46:20
Yay, us.
46:21
No, that's not what new evangelization meant at all.
46:25
It was a recognition by Paul VI and later by John Paul II
46:30
that a lot of baptized Catholics
46:32
are either drifting or stampeding away from the faith
46:36
and the life of the church.
46:38
And we have to find a way to bring them back.
46:42
So the new evangelization wasn't about being missionary disciples,
46:46
because yay, us.
46:47
Here comes more inclusion than ever.
46:51
Because participation.
46:53
No.
46:54
It was search and rescue.
46:57
It was, oh man, we screwed up.
47:00
And people are leaving us.
47:03
We have to repent, learn our lessons, and go get them.
47:08
And I think that we still need to do that.
47:13
We still need to do that.
47:16
And so that's what we see in the epistle for today
47:19
from 1 Peter 3.
47:22
He says, Beloved, sanctify Christ as the Lord in your hearts.
47:26
Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone
47:29
who asks you for a reason for your hope.
47:32
And I think back to when I was a new priest
47:35
and I was asking my students about their religious identity
47:38
and many of them said, Catholic, I guess.
47:41
If you're Catholic, I guess,
47:44
you're not going to be able to give an explanation
47:47
to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope,
47:49
because you probably don't have hope.
47:52
Ouch.
47:54
Ouch.
47:56
And so that brings us to the gospel, John 14.
48:00
Our Lord is getting the disciples ready for his ascension.
48:04
And he says this, If you love me,
48:07
you will keep my commandments.
48:11
What were his commandments?
48:13
Well, there are things like don't lust.
48:16
And also, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them,
48:21
teaching them everything I have taught you.
48:24
That's a commandment.
48:26
And the way we know we love Christ
48:28
is we either keep his commandments
48:30
or we know that we don't love Christ because we don't.
48:34
It's really not that hard.
48:39
We don't have to guess whether or not we're doing it right.
48:45
And he says, Whoever has my commandments and observes them
48:48
is the one who loves me.
48:52
And he goes on to say, Whoever loves me
48:55
will be loved by my Father,
48:57
and I will love him and reveal myself to him.
49:03
Friends, how could we not want that?
49:07
Does it really make sense to have this revelation of the Trinity
49:13
and intimacy with the incarnate guide,
49:15
and ask, Is this going to take long?
49:18
What else you got?
49:20
I'm Catholic, I guess.
49:22
I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.
49:26
Well, I don't agree with everything that the church teaches.
49:31
It doesn't make sense.
49:32
Friends, let's agree to leave the madness behind.
49:39
Anything other than union with Christ
49:43
leads to madness and worse.
49:47
Belloc was right.
49:49
It really is Christ or chaos.
49:53
There are no other options.
49:57
May God's holy name be praised now and forever.
49:59
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague,
50:01
your host here every day of The Catholic Current.
50:03
Join us on Monday for another episode of The Catholic Current.
50:06
Great topic, great guest, lively conversation.
50:09
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50:12
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50:14
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50:19
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50:22
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50:25
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50:29
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50:30
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50:32
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50:35
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50:37
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50:39
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50:40
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50:42
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50:50
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50:54
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