Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #390 Archbishop Fulton Sheen's Warning of a Crisis in Christendom

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#390 Archbishop Fulton Sheen's Warning of a Crisis in Christendom · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, the production of the John Paul 2 renewal center.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Rigor, your host, and yep, you got it right.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I'm making this easy for you, right?
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I'm happy that you're here with me.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: You know, john Paul II would say he's reading the sign of the times.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: That's what a good prophet did.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: That's what the prophets in the Old Testament did.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: They read the signs of the times.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: So they're not always prophetically looking way ahead, they're just reading the signs of the times and they can tell you what's going on today and where we're going to probably end up tomorrow if we don't change our ways.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: That was part of the story.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Bishop Fulton Sheen said the same thing.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: So this is a continuation of a podcast that I did on Friday Finding Family, faith and Strength amid a cultural crisis, a cultural disaster, with Bishop Sheen and Scripture to guide us.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: And this will be continuation Archbishop Sheen's warning of a crisis in Christendom.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Try to explain everything.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: And again, a prophetic voice again doesn't always say I can predict the future.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I could tell you what's going on now and from that we can logically conclude what's going to go on if we don't change.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: With that said, I want to point out a song, a protest song Rich Men North of Richmond that exploded on the scene last week, I believe, by Oliver Anthony.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: It's really a rare song.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: It's really a powerful song and I really suggest that you listen to it.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I'll put it in the show notes.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: So here's a young artist.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: He was struggling with some mental illness, even, and some alcoholism, and he got on his knees.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: He wasn't a religious man, prayed to God to help him with what he was going through and he comes out with this song shortly after.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: So it's really a powerful story.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: So if you're following me on Twitter JP2Renewal at Twitter I put this in the links and a little bit of his story.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: But listen to that song.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: It's really something and really what happens.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Again, it's touching hearts, people that want to, they feel something in their heart, they sense something going on and they want to express it.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: And then boom, this prophetic voice comes in.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: This artist comes in and helps them do this.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Well, this is what Bishop Sheen, john Paul II, so many of the prophets again in Scripture, and Jesus Christ himself are telling us what's going on.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So that's what we're going to do today.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: We're going to make sense of some of the stuff going on today that you see in the call.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: So buckle up and get ready for today's episode.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to talk about a saintly long-ranging spiritual vision of Bishop Fulton Sheen, and he saw the roots of today's crisis firmly planted and growing in 1974 when he gave speeches.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: I was just getting ready to age myself, I was getting ready to get out of high school.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: I graduated in 1975, so you can do the math on that.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: But it was a good time actually, now that I look back because I came up through the sexual revolution.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: It was already going on.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: It had some history behind.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: You know the hippies and the peace movement and we got caught up in this.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: When I went to register for the draft, the Vietnam War had just gotten over and none of us had to go, anyway, so a lot of things going on.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: I saw the protests from the college kids and all kinds of different things, and so again, as I'm looking back at the sexual revolution, what it's done and how it's taken down, marriage and the family, and then that had to do with some of the changes going on in the church and then we had the sexual abuse crisis there and you see the power when you undermine marriage and the family, when you undermine the true message of Christ and the power of that, and how evil starts to seep in.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Well, what happens when that starts to crumble?
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: That's the base right.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Marriage and the family is the building cell of every single civilization throughout history and that's infused, that's linked to the church.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: You know how do I live, where do I get my morality and principles from?
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: And this is what goes on into the community.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: You see what happens when you take that out, the culture, and then it affects the government, because evil gets into all different phases there and it always ends up in the totalitarian system.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: They create chaos.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: You know this is so by evil, but by evil men doing the work of the devil, of Satan himself.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: It's amazing how this goes on and we see this throughout history through these various cycles.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: You see this today.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: People will ask me Jack, what's going on today?
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: You know we see these guys pulling up to postal workers now on the street and just running up to them and robbing them.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: We see these stores being looted by just mobs and gangs, people hijacking cars with people still in them.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: They're filling them up with gas and the Sorrel funded DAs that just let these criminals out.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: It calls it the fund, the police, and somebody said to me Jack, isn't this stupid, we're just creating chaos.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: You know, how can they be so dumb?
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: I said they're not dumb.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: They're not dumb.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: You're naive to think that this is just stupidity.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: This is a systemic and a strategic attack on marriage and the family, on God, his morality, and also to break down.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: You know, neo-marxists whether they were atheists, of course always want to break down the culture and then rebuild back better, right.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Well, underneath all of that, it's just an attack on humanity.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: So you see, middle class now just getting pulverized.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Now, and that's where the song comes in.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: You know, we're at the middle class.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: Most of those people came from just hard work and then they teach their children morals, principles, virtues, way to live, and then they become good citizens in the country.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: They become good citizens in the government and jobs all throughout.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: They don't rob, they don't steal.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: You know they go to work every day.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: This is what that song brings out that the dollar is getting eroded.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: You know they always borrow, borrow, borrow.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: You know, give it away and so people don't have to work or on welfare, etc.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: And then what happens.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: So we get into so much debt that they have to raise inflation.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: This gets back.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: You repay two cheaper dollars.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: This goes over and over again.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: But this also undermines who, the middle class, and so people are getting frustrated and they say well, what's going on?
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Why this sexual exploitation and robbing our children's innocence in schools?
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Well, again, this is the attack on the natural family and the twisting and distorting of these beautiful children.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, think about the attack on the most innocent among those children.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: You know, we're going to destroy them in the womb and if they make it out of the womb we're going to render them sterile.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: And if we don't render them sterile, we're going to twist and distort their minds so that they get used sexually in the culture.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: And you know what?
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: You start to twist that and you take away their moral base, their principal base, their understanding of their identity, of meaning and purpose in their life, the meaning between a man and a woman and that marriage and the beauty of children that come out of that.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: And if we miss that sacramental sign that points right to Christ and his church, you know we take that out and everything will start to crumble.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Well, the Marxists knew about this.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: I mean Carl Marx talked about this, lenin talked about this, you know, ingalls and all the group, and then that infected our schools and etc, etc.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: And so, at the end of the day, this is a systemic attack.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: And you say, well, well, who could coordinate all of this?
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: You know, with the World Economic Forum, and you know, and the ESG scores and corporations, and, of course, the climate scare and the COVID lockdowns, and then lockdown the mass all the way up in the Vatican.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Who could coordinate all this?
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: It just seems like it's crazy that all these currents of evil are coming all at once.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Well, guess, who, guess who's smart enough to use all the human pawns that are willing to choose evil?
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Well, satan, of course it's Satan.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: You know, this is a spiritual battle, as you've heard me say many, many times.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: You know, saint Lucia, saint Sister Lucia, you know, the last visionary of Fatima, the main visionary of Fatima, said the last great battle between our Lord and Satan is going to be over marriage and the family, and, and, and, and, of course, this is an attack on Christ and the church.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: And again, what we see is we see when that gets twisted and distorted, and, and, and, this positive faith, this beauty of faith, morals, principles, values no longer gets passed down from the church into the, into the family, then the family no longer has these tools to pass down to their children and what do you have?
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: You have chaos.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: You have evil come into the world.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: So this is where Bishop Sheen, he saw all this coming in.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: So first of all, he said we're at the end of Christendom.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: We're at the end of Christendom.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: So Bishop Fulton Sheen said during a television show of his in 1974, don't forget, he had the number one rated TV show and he talked about communism and the conscience of the West.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: And he actually there's a book out by that name communism and the conscience of the West.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: If anybody wants to grab it.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: It's not.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: It's not a real easy read in that you know he really, you have to really think about it, you have to dwell on some of the things that he's saying there.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: But it's a beautiful read.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: And what did he say there?
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: He says now, when I say that we're at the end of Christendom, he said it's not, not now Christianity, not the end of the church.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Remember what I'm saying here.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: He said.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Then he defined what he meant Christendom is is the economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: That's ending.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: We've seen it die.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Look at the symptoms again the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Where did that all come from?
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Kind of backed up into what I just said.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: You know, when Christ is taken out of the, the political life, out of your social life, out of the human heart, out of the schools, what do you, what do you think is going to fill that up?
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's what we're seeing today.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: So, when God has taken out, you know, the creature itself grows unintelligible.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: We no longer know who we are.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: We don't even know what gender we are anymore.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: It's amazing today, right.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: So Bishop Sheen reminded us that, out of the 22 major civilizations that have decayed since the beginning of the world, 19 of those 22 rotted and perished from within.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Now the United States is becoming the 20th one.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Right, we live in it from day to day and we don't see its decline.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: He said how many people do I meet today?
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: And I would say it's.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: It's maybe 50, 50 today, Maybe it's even more than that of people sitting in that pot just stewing in this, who have normalized the fall and remember when, when he said this.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: We live day to day and we don't see the decline.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: That was 1974.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: We take it for granted, we get used to things he said and almost accept them as the rule, despite the decline blurring.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Today, isn't that what's going on again?
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: We're like that frog sitting in that one and and that water is boiling.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: This reminds me of my, my own grandfather, my dad's dad.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: He was a classy, wonderful guy, a wonderful chef, who, who was a wonderful French chef, and he was German, swiss.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: He was Swiss, but he had from the German side of Switzerland.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: See, always good, he could cook German foods well too, but he was a classic, a French chef, and just.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: He was a wonderful Storyteller.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: And toward the end of his life he began to appear.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: My brothers and I am the oldest of five boys when I was just young, maybe six, seven years old for his impending death.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: He was a 93 when he died, and when he got close to that he began to ask us you know he was telling us different stories he would.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: He began to ask us.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: He says you know what the monkey said when it got it, when it got its tail caught in the lawnmower?
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: What, grandpa, it won't be long now, he said, and he was preparing us for his death.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: We didn't catch on at first, but later on we said, ooh, you know what grandpa's telling us.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: He would tell us other stories and he wouldn't do it in a, you know, in a downer type of way, right.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: So today we can say the same for the Western civilization and North America along with it.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: It won't be long now.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Sheen pointed out you know the press that we read.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: He said that.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: And now think about.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: This is 1974.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: The press reread.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: The television that we see is in no instance inspired by Christian principles.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, there is on the part of many of us the tendency to go down to meet the world, not to lift the world up.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: We're afraid of being unpopular, so we go along with the mob.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Isn't that amazing?
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Well, history doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: The Old Testament tells the story over and over Throughout history.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: God's people unite it with God through a covenant where God says I will be your God and you will be my, my people.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: And when you think of, when you hear covenant, think about marriage.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: You know God wants an intimacy, want with us, he wants to walk with us, talk with us.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: That's why I brought up in you know Part of the reason I brought up that song in the beginning by Oliver Anthony, because you could see, when he turned to God, how God can take away alcoholism and the substance abuse you know pretty quickly with, with, with a lot of people.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, right.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: Well, god wants to walk with us and again, think marriage, intimacy, and so what comes out of here, you know, out of God's Walking with God?
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: Well, you have law, you have truth, you have a way to live.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: You know, and in they prospered.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: And then what happens?
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: The people walked away from God and they got conquered over and over again by some worldly power and then God would go, look for them and draw them back in.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: And this is the story, this ebb and flow of God Trying to bring his people back in.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: His people Moving away, get defeated, they get demoralized and then finally on their knees.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: You know, just like Oliver Anthony, you know they start to look for God again and then and you know, you think about the humility of God, right to allow you, you know, time after time walking away, but yet he wants us.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: You know, he knows we came into a broken world.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: He knows that we came into a world that's fallen from original sin.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: We know.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: He knows we have this drag of, of the threefold concupiscence Pulling us down, pulling us down, and we need grace to be lifted up and sometimes this grace has never been passed down.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: The God, because the gospel has never been passed down.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: You know how many people today are not even baptized or getting married with you know, outside of the church and stuff.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: This is just a, this is a downhill Spyro, we're in and.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: But listen to this, listen to Isaiah 54, just verses 5 to 8, and and and this is God, you know, looking for his people again, and he says this and so so this is the prophet Isaiah, and again, you know, here's the prophet telling you.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: You know what's going on today.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: This is where God is, you know, and we project this into our own lives, for he God who has become your husband.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Right, this is all spousal language.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: So.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: So, when you think about marriage and the in the family, that's a tiny sign again of trinitarian love, of God's love itself, and so God's united with us.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: You know, christ is the bridegroom who gives up his life for his bride right, an Intimacy.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: So marriage is that icon, that little sign pointing to the type of relationship God wants with us?
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Again, I said covenant, think marriage.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: So again here, for he who has become your husband is your maker, your creator.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: What's an intimacy with you?
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Isaiah says his name is the Lord of hosts, your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, called God of all the earth.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: The Lord calls you back like a wife Forsaken and grieved in spirit, a wife married in youth and then cast off, says your God.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So he's talking about you.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Know this, this wife, this relationship?
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: Right, they were married in the youth of of this new people that God's gathering for himself.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: And then, boom, they walk away.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: And so they're cast off.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: For a brief moment, god says I abandon you and he has to abandon us, and this is what he's gonna do.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Today we're banning God.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: He has to let us go because if we don't, you know, love has to be free.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: God has to free us to walk away.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: So he says this in Isaiah for a brief moment I abandon you, but with great tenderness I will take you back.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: In an outburst of wrath, for a moment, I hid my face from you, but with enduring love, I take pity on you, says the Lord, you're redeemer.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Wow, there are many such periods in the Old Testament, aren't there?
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: You know, as we move to the signs of the time and we move into the New Testament, after the church is established, christ comes in, establishes his church.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen points out that today we're living in the fourth 500-year period of church history.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: So we're just over that right, so that would have been in the year 2000,.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: That fourth 500-year period and we're part of that, really Explaining that church is not a continuing thing.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: It dies and rises, just like I just explained.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: And Bishop Sheen said, you know, it proceeds on the principle of Christ himself as priest to victim.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: And so what he did in his book again, which is called Communism, the Conscience of the West, he describes these four different 500-year periods and he says at the end of or during each one of these five-year periods, there comes a defeat, the seeming decay, we're put in a grave and then we rise again.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: And so far there's four times we had these deaths in Christian history.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: And he very briefly describes the first three getting to where we are now.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: The first time, just really briefly, was the dire straits with the fall of Rome, the first 500-year period.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: It had a rebirth when great missionaries like Augustine in England not Saint Augustine, but Augustine in England, saint Patrick in Ireland spread the faith and rekindled again and it came back alive.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Then a second decay around the year 1000, with the Muslim invasions, and we had the split of the church into east and west, and then it seemed like that was the end of everything.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: And then it came back to life again.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: In the third 500-year period, he said, the church became rotten, actually inside, as nuns and priests were defecting and it needed to be renewed, didn't it Our church?
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: You know, when the Reformers came, when the Protestant rebellion came in?
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Well, the church actually needed to be renewed, but it didn't need to.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: You know that.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: What happens is and this is what Bishop Sheen says then came the Reformers, who always reformed the wrong things, and they began reforming the faith.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: But there was nothing wrong with the faith.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: It was the morals that needed to be reformed.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: That's not renewal, it's really a moral reformation.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: That's needed today too.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Remember that was 44 years ago.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, isn't it?
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: So again, you know, when we had the Protestant Reformation, yeah, the church needed to be renewed from a moral standpoint.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: You know, since that, they broke off and we see what happened now.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: You know, we have, you know, protestant churches now that you can walk into and again, I'm not condemning all of them.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: You know I have some beautiful Protestant friends, evangelical friends, that are on fire and we saw the power and the passion behind some of these courageous pastors in Canada, the United States, that stood up against these lockdowns and COVID-vaxxers and all this kind of stuff, and I've talked about this all before.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, you can walk into some Protestant churches and they've got the LBGTQ flag up there and they have no idea what the gospel means anymore.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: You know, it's like they're preaching a different gospel.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: And so he said, bishop Sheen said and now we're at the fourth period and we're rotting, we're spoiled.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: No great zeal, no great learning, no great fire.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Yet there's hope, because anyone who knows history is not particularly disturbed.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: He's reading the signs of the times.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen said the church always had enemies during these 500 year cycles, some from without, some enemies from within.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Today, in this fourth period we've just completed and we're actually going into the fifth now, he explains that our enemy today is the world, the spirit of the world.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: He said today we have to conform to the world or we're branded.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: He said we must be politically correct.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: Our Lord said I have taken you out of the world.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: We say no, we have to win the world and to win it you have to be one with it.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Don't you hear pastors say in this?
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: You know, I walk into churches and I've warned sometimes when I'm going to give a presentation you know, be slow with these people, don't really?
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: You know kind of water on the gospel a little bit.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: They don't know about marriage and the family and how that's intertwined with Christ in the church.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: And I said you're kidding, right.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So you want me to, instead of bringing the gospel to the people, so that we can take some of that infection and out of our own hearts and out of the culture and go in and ripen the culture and ripen what's true, good and beautiful in the culture and drain the infection out.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: No, you want me to just go kumbaya and put a bandaid on top of an infection.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: I said you know that's not the gospel, that's not what Christ said, right.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Our Lord said I've taken you out of the world.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: We say again we have to win the world and to win it you have to be one with it.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Well, what is our Lord reply to that?
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: He says in John 17, verse 9, I'm not praying for the world, father, he's praying to his father, but for those you have given me, for they are yours, he says.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: You know, he says this over and over again.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Right, you are in the world, but not of the world.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: That's what we find ourselves today.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: By the world, jesus means the city of man, who are building a world without God, and this is what we see from close swab in the world economic forum and the Bill Gates of the world, and even up into the Vatican.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Now, you know, you know we're building a world without the gospel.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: St John Paul II often spoke of this when he asked about the great eruption of evil.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: When he was asked about the great eruption of evil in the world today, he said people are easily taken in by the promises of the modern age, with advances in science and technology, and that has yielded many fruits.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: John Paul II says this is actually characteristic of evil as understood by St Thomas Aquinas, who was following the tradition of St Augustine.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Evil is always the absence of some good which ought to be present in a given being.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: It's a privation, so it's never a total absence of good.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: And so that's, when you look out into the culture, you have compassion and empathy for people.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: That's okay, you know we should, but at the end of the day, what do they have to be liberated from?
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: You know what we're saying is, you know when, when somebody suffers from whatever they're suffering from sexual confusion, let's call it.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: You know we just have to be empathetic and compassionate with them.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: We have to affirm them in their brokenness and Christ comes in and he says no, you know, I came to heal, right, I came with power.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: I didn't come to manage people's sins, I came from power, right to bring them into again, into a relationship, into a marriage with me.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: See, this is an eternal story that he's telling.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: We just had this little time on earth called a dash, right between the day you were born the day you die, you got this little dash called life and he's always after us, always trying to bring us into this.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: And so, again, what John Paul was saying, understood by St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, is that the evil that we see in the world is always some absence of good that should be in there.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: It's a privation, it's never a total absence of good.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: You know see, satan's too smart for that.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: There's always some truth that's been twisted and distorted and used for evil.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Remember, satan doesn't have his own clay, he has to take us.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: He has to take our bodies, our minds, our souls, and twist and distort them, and this isn't what we're seeing today, and we're allowing this, even this indoctrination, which is really sad, to go on, even in our school systems.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: Right, the way in which evil grows from the pure soil of good is a mystery.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: We know this.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: It's John Paul would call this, and again following church tradition, the Mysterium and Equitatus, the mystery of evil.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: But another mystery, though, is God, who can turn this evil into good, as we see it again in the songwriter that I mentioned in the beginning, who got into alcoholism and then some mental illnesses out of that, and who has given this, opened this up, right, this mystery of evil that can take over someone's life.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: There's always an element of good, and he finally gets down on his knees, he opens himself up to God, who's always standing there and can turn that evil into good.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: The Mysterium Piatatus, right, the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord, jesus Christ.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: It gives us the power to turn evil into good.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: This mystery is the element of good which is never destroyed, at least in the human heart.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: John Paul would always say so.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: He said no matter how twisted and distorted a human heart has become, there's always a little element there.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: So you're always responsible for your own heart.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: You can't just say, well, evil's in the world and look at how, so how many young people have been brought up in dysfunctional families and dysfunctional marriages and thrown to these wolves that prey on them.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: It's disgusting stuff.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Who never heard the gospel?
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: We have to proclaim this gospel to them because it'll be just like the song it may touch that goodness in their heart when, in the time is right.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: God is always going to try to seek them, always going to try to touch them, and you could be the one that touches them and just bring the gospel of life and love into their hearts.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: And a lot of it's going to be by your actions, by your kindness.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, but at the end of the day, we have to bring grace back into their lives if we really want to change it right.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: Because that evil that's in the world, well, it keeps growing, doesn't it, if we don't stop it.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: But also what keeps growing is the good, when we allow that into our heart.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: And so you have this battle, sometimes from the same soil.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: So the good parable of the good grain in the weeds comes to mind, doesn't it?
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: You know, this is Matthew 13.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: I mentioned this in the last episode.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: And when the servants asked the householder, do you want us to go out and gather the weeds?
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Right, somebody had sown weeds into the, into the wheat, and his reply is highly significant Jesus says.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: He says this is the householder.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: But Jesus is telling this parable.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: He says no, don't, don't go out and pull the weeds, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Let both of them grow together into the harvest.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: And at harvest time I will tell the reapers collect the weeds first and then bind them in bundles to be burned, but rather the wheat into my barn.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: In this case, the reference to the harvest points to the final phase of history, the eschaton.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: So so Jesus is saying no, we're going to let this all grow together.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: You're going to always see evil and good growing together, even in the individual human heart.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: Give that over to me, let me heal that.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: And so you know we're always aiming.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: We're in a battle right now.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: We're in a battle in the outside.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: You know you could see this.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: You know these currents of evil is attacking us, but all those currents of evil started in the, in the individual human heart.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: You know Joe Biden calls himself a Catholic and yet he's pro-abortion affirming and bringing this brokenness of these sexual confusions and in this trans issues all the way down to to really make it a public policy.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: You know, attacking parents that are standing up for education versus indoctrination and suddenly FBI there I mean it's amazing broken as well.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: His, his heart didn't start out just full of evil.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: You know his heart started out, you know, within this battle and slowly, slowly, slowly through whatever I don't know his whole story, but slowly giving it to evil, choosing evil, small things first, probably, and then you become evil.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: You start to do evil and you become the evil that you do.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: I am evil.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: You know, when we see these gangs of young people robbing people, they're doing evil and in their hearts will actually change Pretty soon.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: They don't even see the human being standing there anymore.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: You know they can just come up and just whack and just as hard as they can, just blind sight an elderly person and put them down on the ground so they can rob, you know, steal their purse and stuff.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, you know, lack of human.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: What happens to the human heart when you take God out?
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: You know we're no longer human.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: You know, what makes us human is God, you know.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: You know, remember, from Genesis, in the beginning he takes the clay.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: You know this biology that all the rest of creation is made out of, and then he blows.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: He blows the essence of himself into that gives us reason, gives us free will, gives us the ability to find the truth and to choose the good.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: This is what separates us from everything else.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: Well, also, that human heart, when it's twisted to evil, can do great evil, and we're seeing that right.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: So John Paul would say, the history of mankind is this theater of this coexistence of good and evil, the weeds and the wheat that go alongside each other.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: So, even if evil exists alongside good, good perseveres besides evil and grows too, so to speak, from the same soil.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: What's that soil?
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: Human nature, our human nature is this soil, and so we have to be able to nourish the good side of our human hearts.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: And this is what John Paul and Bishop Sheen and the prophets and the gospel is all about right.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: We stand at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and we have to choose the good.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: We have to choose God.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Only God is good.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Jesus said in the gospels Our human nature, no matter what happens, has not been destroyed.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: It's not become totally corrupt.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Despite original sin, nature has retained its capacity for good, as history confirms, and John Paul wrote about this in memory and identity, the last book.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: It's a kind of a conversation, as the editor is asking him questions about some of the most profound things in life.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: You know about evil.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: It starts out right away with evil.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: So memory and identity it was published in 2005, the year John Paul the Second died.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: So this is his kind of final look back on things, and some of the quotes right here are just from the early pages.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen then goes on to say this is the easiest kind of way to fall off the log worldliness.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: Give yourself over the worldliness, he said.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: It's so simple and it can be justified for a thousand reasons.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: And he talks about how Vatican II said we need to go into the world, indeed, but not of the world, but bring the gospel into the world.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: Again, the gospel presupposes that there's a culture, and it goes in and it opens up that culture, a little bit like a slice, a culture that's infected and allows some of that infection to start to drain out and it ripens what's good, what's true, good and beautiful in that culture.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: If you take the gospel out, that infection will finally just get to the point where the whole culture will come down.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: And this is what the Marxists know.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: The Neo-Marxists come in all the way down through history.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: They're atheists.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: You know, really.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: You know Marx.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: You can read about Marx.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: He sold the soul to the devil.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: He says it clearly in his writings.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: And so when you do that, you bring evil in, you try to push out the good, and what happens?
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: We allow it to happen, all of us.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: The solution to this is I am, you are.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: We have to just stand up and do our part.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: We have to move, always, always, always go closer to Christ, closer to Christ, closer to Christ when you feel evil around you, right, and so Bishop Sheen saw this as one of the basic causes of our degeneration, of our death.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: We're dying, and what about it?
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: What's the answer then?
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: The answer is there are great, wonderful days in which to be alive, he said.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: This is what his answer was these are great and wonderful days to be alive.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: I thank God.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: He says that I can live in these days because they are days of testing.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Days of testing.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: This was in 1974 and the testing pressure has increased, hasn't it?
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Sheen explains it this way it was easy to be a Christian in the three decades before his talk.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: So he's talking about the, you know, the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, and the atmosphere was Christian, morals were Christian.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: And don't forget, there was, you know, there were wars and stuff going on, but he's talking about mostly the United States here too, and Western Europe, that even during the wars and the evil, people were Christians.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: The atmosphere was Christian, morals were Christian.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: There was no great problem in adapting ourselves to a Christian society, like in the United States.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: Right Again, we're built on a Judeo-Christian principles, whether you are a Christian or not.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: That's where the country came from and that's why the country became the most successful country in the world.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: It wasn't without sinners, but the Constitution, the US Declaration of Independence, these are great, incredible documents.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: They give everybody free rights.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Now, do we always live that out?
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: No, because we have sinners in the world.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: These are the weeds and the wheat.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: But again, the country needs to be renewed.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: But again, just like I said earlier with the Reformers in the 1500s, with the church, what needs to be renewed is not a throwing out with the baby with the bathwater, but it needs to be renewed from a moral standpoint.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: We need to bring God back in right, we need to be liberated from sin.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, all these other programs, nothing will matter.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: And people say, why doesn't anything matter?
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: We're going to more and more and more debt.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: These are people just grabbing power with their immoral people.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: It'll never work Without God.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't work.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: That's just the reality of this, you know.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: So, again, the atmosphere he said three decades before this talk was Christian and it was easy to be Christian.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: Well, today the current is against us, he said.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: And today the mood of the world is go with the world, go with the spirit of the world.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: This is, as Saint Paul would say, this is life in the flesh, which he means life in the world.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: You know, we've just accepted that.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Listen.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: He said Bishop.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: She said dead bodies float downstream.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Only live bodies resist the current.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: And so the good Lord is testing us and he is testing Western Christians now with worldliness.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: And Bishop Sheen said this in 1974.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: And he said how many of us are falling?
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Well, would Bishops sheen be surprised at how far the decadency, corruption, have piled up today?
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: And he gives us the example of the Israelites being tested in the desert.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: You know, when they turned away.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: So God rescues them from Egypt, brings them into the desert and they're grumbling and grumbling and grumbling.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: And don't forget, moses went up the mountain.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: And here's God taking them out of slavery and they start to grumble and he takes too long up in the mountain and they have a golden gaff they're worshiping.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: You know, it's amazing how quickly we can turn away from God and find other idols.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: Isn't that something that is what he's doing with to us today?
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: We've all turned away from him and we're finding different idols to run after and we're allowing this evil to come not only into our own hearts but then into our marriages and our families, and it's infecting the church.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: And what will happen to the culture then?
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: You know, the Marxists of the world, the atheists of the world, you know, infused by Satan himself.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: You know he easily can take all these institutions down.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Look how he's infected the FBI, the CIA.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: You know homeland security.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: You know how they go after parents.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: You know Mark Hauke again.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: You know praying outside of an abortion clinic.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: I mean it's amazing how it goes.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen also says St John says in his epistle they did not really love us from the very beginning.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: That's why they left us, and so the souls that are falling away have failed to meet the test.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: It's very much like the test that the Jews had.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: Bishop Sheen said.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to start to wind up here and I'll continue this in an episode on Friday, and so I'm going to stop there.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: That's enough to kind of dwell on.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: But this gets really good and we're going to find some really good solutions in here and what to do and how to do it.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: So watch for this on Friday and make sure to join Linda and I on Wednesday.
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: Last Wednesday, with John Paul's theology, the body that we unpack every Wednesday, linda's sister has passed away, so keep Linda and her sister in your prayers.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: But we'll be back in action, I think, on this Wednesday.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: And again all of this fits in.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: You know the awe and wonder of John Paul's theology the body, this time bomb that George Weigel said is going to go off.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: And it's going off right now because we it's just like this song touching so many hearts when the great yearning, burning desires of the human heart for love, for life, for meaning, meets the gospel in such a way that you have that encounter moment with the lover of all lovers, who created you, that aha moment that changes your life.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: And John Paul did such an incredible job with this and this theology, the body, and it also gives us the answers for our families and our culture and to show this childhood innocence and to be able to tell them a story that that can bring them back, you know, in touch with their hearts and get them away from all these gender ideologies and indoctrinations.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: The culture is really after our children, after our marriages.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: We all have to be really careful about this.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Hey, god bless you.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: Talk to you again on Friday and and on Wednesday, of course, with theology, body.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Bye, bye everyone.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining.