Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #571 Navigating Spiritual Warfare 2025: Ground Zero "The Attack on Marriage and the Family"

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#571 Navigating Spiritual Warfare 2025: Ground Zero "The Attack on Marriage and the Family" · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Good to be with you.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me as we start 2025, amazing, buckle up, huh.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I think we all have a sense that we're in for quite a ride here.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I think we dodged a bullet.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: I think we all have a sense of that.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine if, on the 20th, that, kamala Harris was going to be the president of the United States and the most powerful person, in essence, over the whole world and you can see, man we were spiraling down into abyss?
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: There's some craziness, this battle between good and evil going on all around us.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: We sense that it's standing up.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Evil's no longer lurking in the shadows, it's out in the open.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: It's almost mocking humanity, and so I wanted to do a series on spiritual warfare.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: I've done this over the years, once a year at least.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: I really feel that 2025 is a time for the laity.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: The laity, the average person who?
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: There is no average person, of course, in God's plan.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: We're all unique, unrepeatable.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: There'll never be another Jack in the history of the world or another you in the history of the world.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: We all have a role to play, whatever that is.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Some of the beautiful saints and mystics Sister Faustina, st Therese of Lisieux they lived these small lives.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: They would call them these humble, small lives, convents.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: The world didn't know who they were, and yet they made these profound statements in the world god will take the smallest, most humble person and do great things with their lives.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: So we all have to stand up and realize that we're all created sacred.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: We're all created for eternal destiny.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Every child that's born huh is an being, and eternity doesn't mean tomorrow.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Eternity means forever.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: We're already eternal beings.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: So, to understand what's going on, you have to understand spiritual warfare, and I want to bring it down to the very basics, because when you start to talk about all the things that are going on in the world, you can think that they're all these loose pieces.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: And they are in essence, because there's a lot of people in the world and you can either bring good or evil into the world, and we see this playing out all around us.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Sister Lucia said it so well, the main visionary of Fatima, who said that the last great battle, though and here's the final thing, and here's what I want to really address when I'm going through the spiritual warfare series is the last great battle between our Lord and Satan is happening now, and it's over marriage and the family.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: It's the fight of marriage and the family.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Can you believe that when you start to think about all the things that are going on in the world, you go what does that have to do with marriage and the family?
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: So this is what I want to bring down to you, because once you understand the basics, the basic foundation, and you have a lens to see this through, you can start to put these pieces in place and start to understand how important each one of us is.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: At the John Paul II Renewal Center, I meet countless individuals, both young and old, who bear the weight of the pain and suffering that we all seem to face and we all will face at some point in our lives.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Right, some face physical ailments, as we know, especially as we get older, but far more common, as I meet people every day, as we meet people in the John Paul II Renewal Center every day, the emotional turmoil, the anxiety, confusion, heartbreak stemming from broken relationships.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Often For older generations that we meet, it's from failed marriages, dysfunction that they see, if it's not in their own marriages, in their children's marriages, family marriages, and all those broken relationships come down in these fractured families and all the turmoil that causes and the dysfunction.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: For the young, it's the deep scars inflicted by this culture, steeped in dysfunction.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: They came into a world not really understanding it and very few got the faith passed down to them.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: So they can't put this in context.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: And this is what I want to try to do to help all of us put this in context and allow God to come back into our hearts.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: So this is a culture that has distorted love itself, and this is affecting so many young people Reduce love to a feeling, to an emotion, and they're told that we can further reduce this down to sex, sex activity, sexual activity, so basically, fleeting pleasure.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Basically, lust is now getting confused with authentic love, and it's very confusing to people, and this is the basis of what we see all around us today.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Many fail to see the connection between the relational dysfunction and the broader societal decay caused by the ongoing attack on marriages and the families.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: The spiritual has been stripped from the temporal.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: In other words, we've taken God out of the temporal space, out of the families.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: The spiritual has been stripped from the temporal.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: In other words, we've taken God out of the temporal space, out of the world.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Many no longer attend mass, receive the sacraments.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Many people are not even baptizing children today, they're not getting married in the church.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: This is having a radical effect on all of us.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Marriage in the church has become very rare now, and I'm talking about in generalities, among the whole population of the United States and Western civilization as a whole, and so the recognition between this profound link between man and woman, marriages, families and Christ in the church.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: So, in essence, the human heart separated from the heart of God.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: We have rejected God and because God is love, we're trying to capture the sacred.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: We're trying to capture this yearning, burning desire in our heart for love, to love and be loved, disconnected like the branch off the vine right.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: So we have this triangle.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: To put it all in perspective.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: We have a triangle.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Catholic social teaching does such a great job at this.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: John Paul II brings it down from Leo XIII, who really spoke of this A hundred years before John Paul wrote Centennius Annus 100 years dedicated to that and brought it up into the modern age.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: But basically it's like a triangle, like a pyramid in front of you if you think about it, and it offers profound wisdom for human flourishing and when you envision this pyramid with marriage in the family and in Christ and the church.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: This is the triangle.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: So the triangle's here and at the bottom of this triangle holding the whole thing up marriage in the family, christ in the church, and these are linked and this forms the whole foundation.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: When this breaks down and the cultural Marxists know about this, the socialists knew about this, the socialists knew about this, the communists knew about this very, very well, and I've spoken about all this before, but in essence, without going too far today, if you break down this foundation, then of course everything else that builds up into this triangle, which the church would call polity, the way we organize ourselves in society, politics of course we think about that, the laws, the morality that we live out, but also includes the culture, the music, the art, everything that is created because of our taking this marriage and the family, christ and the church and the beauty of that.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: You saw Western civilization how it was built up on so much beauty, the churches themselves, the music, the art.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: That was gone on at that time.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: So when the foundation crumbles as it has in Western civilization and it was happening in the United States very rapidly, we were always behind Europe as far as taking God out and all these institutions starting to crumble.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: But then it happened very, very quickly.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Our institutions followed, became not only corrupt but weaponized, as we saw what they did to Donald Trump, it was very, very clear.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: But this has been happening for many, many years.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Again, I don't want to take a lot of time to go into it right now, but we see our CIA and FBI and stuff.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: I mean the CIA has been starting wars all over and we know all this right, we thought it was for our own good, huh?
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: So, without going too far, we've corrupted other cultures, other countries, taken away their duly elected leaders themselves because we think it's in our best interest.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: I mean, what pride that we have, right, that we thought, man, we can rule the world.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Well, when we become corrupt ourselves and then we go out, then we bring corruption into the world, we bring pornography into the world, abortion into the world, et cetera.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, so again, when those very pillars that were to uphold everything else, which is the nuclear family and religious freedom at the base, our founding fathers, knew that what's happening, it all starts to crumble down.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Bishop Fulton Sheen warned us about this 50, 60 years ago, and I'll just read the small part to you.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: He said a nation always gets the kind of politicians it deserves.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: If a time ever comes when religious Jews, protestants and Catholics suffer under a totalitarian state that denies them the right to worship God according to their conscience, it will be because for years they thought it made no difference who represented them in Congress, and they abandoned the spiritual in the realm of the temporal, and they allowed our leaders to take God out of schools, out of the culture right, push God out of the way.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And you saw this.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: What happened even before the Biden administration came in?
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Of course, this has been happening for a long time, but then you saw the acceleration of this First day in office executive orders to expand abortion I mean, how could he not even wait till the first day was over and expanding abortion rights, expanding contraception, expanding a breakdown of the nuclear family.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: You saw this attack, this affirming cure right, going after the trans you know these kids that were confused about being trans, et cetera, et cetera, and so I've talked about that many, many times.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: But again, you saw this breakdown right, this attack on marriage and the family, coming all the way from the Biden administration, all the way down.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: This would have been continuing to accelerate, as it has around the world where you can't even pray in Britain in front of an abortion clinic by yourself, silently, by yourself, and you'll be harassed.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: It's really something.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So today this warning has become a reality from Bishop Sheen right Evil no longer lurks in the shadows, but mocks humanity openly.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: As we witness heartbreaking events like what just happened in New Orleans, we pray for those victims and their families enduring unimaginable pain.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Run over by a terrorist.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: You can imagine just the destruction, the evil in someone's heart to do that right.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: These tragedies reflect the deeper loss, the confusion and despair so many young people feel in today's world.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: So this is a crisis of young hearts I want to talk about.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Today.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: There is a I've talked, spoke about this many, many times, but there is a clip on X and I'll put it in the show notes.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: I think I can find that for you.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: I'll put it in the show notes.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Watch the clip.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: It's very, very short, but it's a young woman, woman, and I've spoken about this again myself many times.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: So this is something I'm very common with.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: But when it's captured on video, I think it's really important to see a young woman crying beautiful young woman, by the way, and you can see it go viral these videos, these real-life conversations.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: And tearfully she asked what kind of world do we live in?
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: She said, and she lamented how difficult it is to find a man to share we live in.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: She said and she lamented how difficult it is to find a man to share their lives and their values with.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And she said we no longer live in a world where a regular woman can find a regular guy to date.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Men don't want real women anymore, she said.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: They'd rather indulge in a fake fantasy, watching pornography and then, do you know, masturbate into pornography, watching robots on the screen, she said, to navigate the complexities of a real relationship with a real woman.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: How sad is that, how just tearful.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: And I meet so many of them.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: It's very common now today to say Jack, are there really young men out there yet?
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: And we're starting to see now there's a little spark.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: We start to see that with the Generation Z going up to say, 27 years old and down maybe into 12, 13 years old, but the voters there, so the older ones of them, voting for Donald Trump, seeing the dysfunction.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: So this is a very good move.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: You know, when young men start to sense there's something wrong, you know we should be idealistic at that age.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: We should be looking for what's true, good and beautiful and understand, you know, this beauty, the awe and wonder of what it is to be a human being.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: But this is being stripped from them and it's our responsibility as the lady, our parents and family to be able to speak the truth to them.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Somebody needs to speak the truth to get them through this period in life, so they have choices at least.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: So here's what I want to talk about in spiritual warfare.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Number one Rediscovering awe and wonder of human sexuality.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The sexual union of a man and a woman is a profound mystery, a sacred act of awe-inspiring beauty.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Yet society has reduced it to a mere transaction devoid of meaning.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Today, to understand the crisis we face, we must reflect on this loss.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: We have to open up our hearts to the wonder of God's design, right through our bodies, for human love and share this with young people.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: It's not enough to know this.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: We have to share this and take this out to young people.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: See, in the coming weeks, I'm going to share stories that both eliminate this truth, both on our website and through these podcasts.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: This is part one in this series.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I've already written many articles on this.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: This is the core to this.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: I'm going to share one of those articles with you.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Already written many articles on this.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: It's the core to this.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: I'm going to share one of those articles with you.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: I'm posting it on our website, so go to our website.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: I've already posted the core part of this short articles, so I put up one, two and three.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: You can look at it.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Under contraceptive mentality spiritual warfare, you'll see part one, part two, part three.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: If you have any problem with that, email us and we'll find it for you.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I'm also publishing it at Catholic Exchange.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: We've published article one already, but we'll be publishing article two January 7th, so you can go there too to find them.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: So part one of this series is now available.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: I encourage you to read it with an open heart.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: I'm going to go over it today.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: I'll put a link in to our website so you can come find it, along with that link for that young woman.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: So let us approach these topics not with a defensive attitude, but with a heart open, a desire for understanding, because otherwise we're going to push back.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: When I talk about contraceptive mentality, oh, you want to talk about contraception, whatever people are afraid to talk about it, but there's reasons.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: We need to talk about it because we have lost the sacred through that contraceptive mentality.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Sister Lucia, fatima again, she says the last great battle between good and evil, between our Lord and Satan, will be over marriage and the family.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: We're living through that battle now.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: To overcome it we must return to prayer.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: The awe and wonder of connecting the human heart, our human heart, with God's heart.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: That's really what prayer is, where we go beneath the surface of this noise into the silent, deep place called the human heart.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: And there, in that depth, you meet just two people there, you and God, and you sit there and converse together.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: That's really what prayer is.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Now, god, of course, brings all of heaven with him, and I bring, of course, all of my family, my friends, my grandparents, all these people that have brought me to this point.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: They're all there with me, but just God and I can converse there about all of those things.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: This is the beauty of prayer, right?
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Only then can we start to rebuild what has been lost.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: So let me just start with a little bit of a philosophical event on this.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Things are not always as they appear, and I knew that as a young man.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: I left home very early looking for the truth.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: I knew it.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: I was looking for the truth.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: I grew up in the sexual revolution, when it was just getting really going and we fell for the lie and I looked around.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: I said there's got to be more to this.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: I just saw the awe and wonder of the beauty of a woman.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: It would take my breath away and I'd say no, no, no, something's wrong here, right?
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Aristotle thought that philosophy begins with wonder.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Wonder is something children do quite well, right, I have seven grandchildren.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Six of them are girls.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: That's why I'm going to continue to do this, because we have to get this down to them.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: They're so beautiful.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: And to steal and rob them of their innocence and take away their dreams of finding a young man in their life, it's really sad.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: And so, with children, it comes natural to them.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: When I bring my wife and I bring out, we do this thing where we call, we kidnap them on their birthdays or close to their birthdays and we just bring them out one at a time and we tell stories and we go out for dinner we usually go out to a play or something age-appropriate stuff and then we read some good books at night when we're after dinner and different things, and they just talk and you see their creative imaginations go.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: It comes natural to children.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, as we grow older, we stop wondering and stop questioning and stop attempting to look at things in new ways or non-traditional ways.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: We say, right, well, the culture itself?
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Right, we lose that awe and wonder through this culture, again, nothing's been attacked more than sexuality.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: It says no, there's no traditional ways.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Now you can't just throw out tradition, because tradition comes down and flows down to us and we have to look at it through a lens that, like I said, this pyramid lens, this Catholic social teaching that says okay, let's look at it through the lens of all, through human history man and woman, marriage and family.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: That's the bedrock of every single civilization.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: That's where we all came from Christ in the church, where it purifies, that gets us out of our brokenness, redeems and saves us, saves our marriages, saves our families.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: And then we go out into the culture and build a culture of life.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: When we take God out of our own hearts first, we come into a culture of death.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: We'll abort our children, have children out of wedlock, get divorced and all those things affect children and these young people.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Right, stop bringing them to mass and the sacraments.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: So we stop wandering, we get busy, we get in dysfunction, we get on these phones all the time.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Right, we spend so much time on our phones that we disconnect from our own hearts.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Not everything we believe is true.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: We found that out too right.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: So philosophy begins with the sense of awe and wonder.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: It begins when we wonder about what otherwise is taken for granted or assumed to be true.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Wonder is a marvelous thing that we should cherish and hold on to as long as we can, and we should be able to hold on to it and always walk outside on a beautiful sunlit day or watch the sun go down.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: There's nothing like nature to bring that back right.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: It's one of the hallmarks of youth.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Small children are filled with wonder.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: That's why Jesus Christ always said bring the children to me and all of you have to become like children.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Why it's the awe and wonder of the sacred.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Don't lose that.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: He said.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: So I can have that wonder, awe and wonder of a child at my age today.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: And if I lose that, ooh, I can get down.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: We're going somewhere.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: We're going somewhere.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ himself said blessed are the children, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: And he also said to enter the kingdom of heaven, you should have the mind of a child.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: What is it about the mind of a child that merits such high value?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Is it curiosity, inquiry, open-mindedness?
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: It is Not just open-mindedness to nothing, though.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Gk Chesterton said at some point your open-mindedness has to start to grasp things, and then you close up on what you find is the truth, what is true, what is good, what is beautiful.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Then you have to close on that, otherwise everything comes out of your head and you become empty.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: I want to read you most of an article that I was just alluding to a little while ago.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: I called this the contraceptive mentality, ground zero in spiritual warfare.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: So this is part one.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: God created man.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Now think about awe and wonder.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Now, right, no defensive posture on this.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Just open yourself to awe and wonder.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: God created man in his image, the divine image.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: He created them, male and female.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: He created them Be fertile, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: This is from Genesis, chapter 1, right off the bat.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: God creates us in his image and likeness, how Male and female.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: This is the beauty of our sexuality that we don't understand that.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: We're a tiny sacramental sign.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: God is not a sexual being, but he created in this creative space.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: He created our sexuality to express what?
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: To express eternal exchange of love.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: That's what God is right, and I've gone over this before so I'm not going to the time on it, but I just wanna say this to you.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: That's the very first thing that God chooses to say about us in the whole Bible, that he created us in his image, in the divine image.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: He created this.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Male and female were created from the beginning as the crown of all creation, invited to what, to become one flesh to join in sexual union.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: So they're no longer two, but they're one, to bring forth new, what Eternal life.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Sexual union is about bonding so that the two become one, the physical bonding right.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Sexual union is a sign in the truth of our bodies, of what we feel inside, authentic love being expressed not to use somebody, not as just an emotion, but to say I give my life to you, you receive it, my wife receives it and gives it back to me, and we make a statement there and then we're open to life.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: Right, fill the earth and subdue it.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Be open to life, that sacramental sign when the two become one is sacred, it's holy.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: John Paul said to young men, young married men, at a conference before you make love to your wife, take your shoes off.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: You're entering unto holy ground.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: This is what that young girl that I mentioned earlier is lamenting.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: She can't find a young man that looks at her, looks at the marriage bed as a holy, as a sacrament, as a sacrament to express love and to bring God right into this relationship, to link again this marriage of a man and a woman directly linked to Christ in the church, when all the smoke and fog clears, our great desire to love and be loved, to nurture one another, to be there with one another, to share friendship with a woman and a man together and to be open to children.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: This is the incredible awe and wonder of this tiny reflective sign of eternal love.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: John Paul II wrote the human body with its sex.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Sign of eternal love.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: John Paul II wrote the human body with its sex, its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation, as in the whole natural order, but contains from the beginning the spousal attribute that is, the power to express love, our sexuality, and the act, the marital act, expresses love, authentic love I give myself totally freely, faithfully and fruitfully to you, and you say yes, and we come into this dance of awe and wonder.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: It's a sacred act, not some way to use and abuse one another.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And so it's precisely that love, john Paul said, in which a human person becomes a gift a gift to one another the spousal analogy he would call it and through this gift fulfills the very meaning of his being and his existence.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: We are created to become persons of love, to be filled with divine love and to give this to one another.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Now, you don't have to be married to do that, right?
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: I'm not talking about sexual union, mother Teresa, john Paul II, these were celibate, chaste, celibate people, but they knew this power of love, right?
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: This power of love, this sign within our body to love all other people.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: Mother Teresa was called a mother because she was a spiritual mother.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: Now, we all are called to be mothers, spiritual mothers.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: We're all called to be brothers and sisters to one another, to love our neighbor.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: But in a marital act where the two become one, become three, that's a special, sacred sign, isn't it, not to be played around with.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, all of civilization comes when we miss the beauty of that.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of modern men and women have lost the glorious vision from the heights from which they've fallen Tragically.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: This includes their sense of the awe and wonder of the human body and of its sex, its masculinity and femininity.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Today we, as men and women, can't even define what a woman is right.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: We have a Supreme Court justice today that says she's not a biologist, so she can't define what a woman is.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's how twisted this gets when we start to walk away from it.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Somehow, what was obvious to us, to humanity, throughout human history, has become quite confusing.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Take the battle of the bathrooms being fought in the US Capitol today You've probably heard about this, you've probably heard me speak about this where Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Southern Carolina Republican, has introduced a resolution to ban transgender individuals in the US Capitol from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity instead of opting for biological reality.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: In other words, men dressing as women were coming into the woman's washroom and she said no, no, no.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Now she had been raped as a younger woman.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: She said what is this?
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: This is insanity.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: A man can say he's a woman, anyways.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: So there was a battle going on.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: She put a resolution together and man did she take the heat for that.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: This is a crazy society that we live in, right?
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: How do we get here then?
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: So that's the question how do we get here?
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Because you can argue those things till the cows go out.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: But the answer how do we get here?
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: The answer is slowly, beginning with the sexual revolution and even before that, with Adam and Eve, when they put loincloths on and hid from God right in the beginning of human history.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: But then, slowly and then all at once, it accelerated, especially again when Biden and Kamala Harris came in.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: That election was taken from Trump, and now you saw the evil accelerate In a way.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Not happy with evil, of course, not happy with the human suffering that that causes, but happy, I guess.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's the wrong word, but somehow, when I saw evil stand up and become so obvious, I thought now everybody's going to see this, and it wasn't quite true, but it was certainly true that people that had eyes of faith certainly saw this, this sense of evil just standing up, mocking us, standing right in front of our faces, and mocking us and say you shut up, right, us standing right in front of our faces and mocking us and say you shut up, right, be quiet, shut up.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: Of course a man can become a woman.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: The queering LBGTQ is for queering.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: Queering just basically means take all this heterosexual, let's call it nuclear family, take it out, throw anything that's normal is out and we bring the abnormal in.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Right, we'll make it up as we go.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: So, for instance, republican Nancy Mace made the statement on social media.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: She said we support gay marriage.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: She said and voted for the Respect for Marriage Act twice, which is everybody can get married, which is craziness.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Right, we've redefined marriage, but she accepts that.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: She said.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: However, if you think protecting women is discrimination, you are the problem.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: So she accepts marriage as undefined, or we can define it any way we want.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: So she accepts that.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: She doesn't see it through the lens that we're trying to talk about here today, that when you take away that basic foundation of marriage and the family, you take God's plan out of it.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Right, you've ruined the base and everything starts to come in.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: Well, she doesn't see that yet, and that's something that's common for many of us.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: But while she doesn't see that, she says this if you think protecting women is discrimination.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: You're the problem.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: In other words, we have to stop at this allowing men to come into women's bathrooms.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: We don't care if you're trans, but if you have balls, we don't want you in the women's bathroom.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: To which pro-life advocate?
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Now Abby Johnson replies who does see it through this lens that we're talking about today.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't matter in marriage, you're saying, but it matters in the bathroom.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter in a holy sacrament, but it matters where you urinate.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: No, nancy, it matters everywhere.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: You've missed the lesson on the slippery slope.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: And Abby Johnson is right.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Of course, she used to work for Planned Parenthood.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: She saw abortion.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: No, she came out of that.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: She had abortions herself.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: So don't think that this is some self-righteous woman that's speaking here.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: No, this was a very broken woman, right, that's got into sin and this culture of death, herself, just like so many people I meet all the time.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: So you know, god, the beauty of God is divine mercy.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: This is Sister Faustina.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, had the image of the divine mercy, which is right there.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: See it over my shoulder, there, the two rays coming out of Jesus' heart, one is white and one is red, baptism and the Eucharist.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: So, jesus, this is the divine mercy.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: Jesus, I trust in you, he says.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: You know the worse sinner you are, the more you have a right, he said, to come into my divine mercy, that God looks for each person.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter who you are, what you've done in the past.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Abby Johnson totally came in.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: She's had so many beautiful children since then.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: She's been a pro-life advocate.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: So when she's speaking about these things and speaking about the slippery slope, she knows this very well, as I do too, for all kinds of reasons I've talked about in the past.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: So first it happens slowly, then all at once.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Well, katie Faust, someone else that supports the Catholic teaching on this, says now she goes further.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: She says if gender doesn't matter in marriage, it doesn't matter anywhere.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: You got the trans madness because of gay marriage.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: Now she's trying to show Nancy that they're linked.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Once you go down that slippery slope, once you can redefine marriage as anything at all, then it's nothing right, it's nothing, it's meaningless, and this is what it's become to young people today.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: That's why they're not getting married, say in the church, this pornographic culture that we're in, because if marriage doesn't matter, if our sexuality doesn't matter, if the two becoming one open to life, becoming three doesn't matter anymore.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Then anybody can marry anybody.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: What difference does it make?
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: You know, two women, two, whatever?
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: And so she says, when that happened, then you come into the trans madness because you've opened that up, so why not?
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Why can't a man just become a woman?
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: Then sex doesn't matter, marriage doesn't matter.
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: You see, we go down that slippery slope.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: So now to get to the core of this.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: I responded to all of them and I said it goes even deeper.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: It all comes down to the contraceptive mentality.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: If sex doesn't lead to babies and bonding, it leads to anything and everything and in the end, nothing.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: It's nothing.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: It's the culture of death where, if a man and a woman do conceive a child, as Mother Teresa would say, it's a poverty to decide that a child must die now so that I can live as I wish.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: We've become very selfish, you know.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: So, of course, pope Paul VI warned about the slippery slope years ago in Humanae Vitae in 1968, right during the sexual revolution.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: So this short encyclical rejected by most Catholics at the time that embraced contraception I mean, most people did, because we don't really understand what we're talking here about today.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: So it was not originally written to be a prophetic, but a clarifying document.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: He wasn't like saying I'm a prophet, I'll tell you what's going on, but to clarify it, well, amazingly it contained a clearly prophetic vision of what would happen to marriages, families and civilization as a whole if they fell under the spell of the contraceptive mentality.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to expand on this in future articles, but in brief, pope Paul VI made four general prophecies about what would happen if the Church's teaching on contraception was ignored.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Think about this.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: All in wonder now, right, all in wonder of the beauty of the sexuality and what would happen if we accept this contraceptive mentality, that sex itself between a man and woman is not for bonding forever.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Right To say you know, this is my vows to you, my wedding vows, being consummated to the language of the body.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: And if it's not being open to life, to babies.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: So you take either one or two of those out it changes everything.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: So he said.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Number one it would lead to infidelity and a general lowering of all morality.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: So if I start contraception, I start to cheat, I start to go out.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: Well, did we see all that happen?
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: Of course we did.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: Beginning with sexual morality, he said.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Second so not just sexual morality, general morality would fall.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: This is what we're seeing, isn't it?
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: Number two, it would lead to a loss of respect for women this young girl right.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Third, the abuse of power by the state and public authorities would follow.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: Nobody saw that.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: They all said you're crazy, pope right.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: And fourth, the final warning that contraception would lead man to think that he had unlimited dominion over his own body.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: Now, this is where we see the trans movement In the querying of society.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: I can be anything I want, and we have all these labels now.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: So we've witnessed all four of these prophecies come true, and none are more startling than the darkened state of modern man who's confused by his own biological sex and no longer knows which bathroom to use.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: This reflects the distressing perplexity of a man who no longer knows who he is, where he came from, where he's going.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Hence we not infrequently witness the fearful plunging of the human person into situations of gradual self-destruction.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: Isn't that what we're seeing?
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: According to some, it appears that one no longer needs acknowledge the enduring absoluteness of any moral value.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: We don't need to accept any objectively true moral value anymore.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: We just throw it out.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: All around us, we encounter contempt for human life, don't we?
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Abortion, euthanasia, pornography, the selling and buying of babies as commodities.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Don't we see that with surrogacy, we're just buying babies?
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: How about for their body parts?
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: It's amazing stuff that's going on right now the children that are being killed for vaccines and stuff.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Something Indeed, something more serious has happened.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: Man, meaning men and women now is no longer convinced that truth even exists and that only in truth that he can find salvation.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: He doesn't believe that anymore.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: The saving power of the truth is contested and freedom alone, uprooted from any objectivity, is left to decide by itself what is good and what is evil.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: It's my freedom to decide my body, my choice, etc.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: Etc.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: Etc.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: When man rejected the simple, unchanging and eternal truth that marriage is a sacred sign and that the one-flesh marital union joins the couple, bodies and souls with divine grace as a holy act meant for babies and bonding, man no longer knows who he is or for what purpose he exists.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: The fact remains that until Christians return to the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman and a one flesh union as a free, total, faithful and fruitful act of life-giving love, then our culture and way of life will continue to decline.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: It is inevitable, as the recent history has made abundantly clear.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: You don't have to believe what I'm saying in words.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: Just look around and see what's happening to the human heart first, and then how that manifests out into the world.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: So someone at that point in a talk that I was giving, asked Jack, what are the odds of that happening, that we accept the sacredness that we're talking about?
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: To which I replied with men, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: From Matthew 19, verse 26.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: So with man, it's impossible.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: Without the light of the truth, without God, without an understanding of the awe and wonder of the sacredness of how we're created, it's impossible.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: But with God, without an understanding of the awe and wonder of the sacredness of how we're created, it's impossible.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: But with God, all things are possible.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: And I think the more people that are waking up, that are not afraid to at least dialogue about this right.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Don't be afraid to dialogue with your neighbors about it.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: Share this podcast with them.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: It might make it easier to unpack and share it in a way that you're not putting people on the defensive, not pushing back on them, but leading them to prayer, leading them to the awe and wonder of authentic love itself, which is not easy.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: This is very difficult in this time.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: It's going to take a heroic effort to become persons of love, especially in this crazy, broken world.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: But this is the beauty of the battle and we have to share this with young people, because they're idealistic and they're willing to go to battle if they understand why.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: Hey, god bless you.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Talk to you again soon.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: Everybody, thanks for joining me.