Latest / The Catholic Current / A First Look at Pope Leo’s First Encyclical (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 6/5/26

Transcript

A First Look at Pope Leo’s First Encyclical (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 6/5/26 · The Catholic Current

• 0:00
  This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert Matej.
• 0:04
  People who are inclined to traditional liturgy, are inclined to traditional spirituality,
• 0:09
  are inclined to traditional morality.
• 0:11
  And you don't get invited to the cool kids table when you have those kinds of commitment.
• 0:16
  That's my hermeneutic of suspicion at work.
• 0:17
  Is that too darkly cynical on my part?
• 0:20
  Not all dark cynicism is wrong, I can tell you that.
• 0:23
  Could you put that in writing?
• 0:24
  I want to have that calligraphy, thank you.
• 0:28
  It's sort of like when there's a storm cloud, it's not rude to say, gee, I think the storm
• 0:32
  is about to hit.
• 0:33
  Praised be Jesus Christ, this is Father Robert Matej of The Society of Jesus, your daily
• 0:38
  host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world, and the world to Christ.
• 0:42
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• 0:46
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• 0:51
  and charity.
• 0:52
  As always, let's start with prayer.
• 0:53
  In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• 0:57
  Holy God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, we ask that you pour
• 0:59
  forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment that might hear your voice and
• 1:04
  obey your command.
• 1:05
  In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
• 1:08
  Well, here we are.
• 1:09
  It is Friday, The Catholic Current.
• 1:11
  You know what that means, you and me, with Let's Talk About This, walking through a complex
• 1:15
  issue together.
• 1:16
  You want to stay with us for the whole hour?
• 1:17
  We end up with weekend readiness, reviewing the headlines of the weekend in light of the
• 1:21
  upcoming Sunday Scriptures, so we'll be all prayed up for Sunday Mass.
• 1:26
  I want to have a first look at the new encyclical from Publio XIV called Magnifica Humanitas.
• 1:35
  We're going to need a second look, and maybe even a third.
• 1:38
  There's a lot here.
• 1:39
  It's a long document, 80-some pages.
• 1:43
  Where to begin?
• 1:44
  I was just telling Mr. Engineer that someone made an app, and it's kind of a choose-your-own-adventures,
• 1:51
  cherry-pick-the-data.
• 1:53
  You pick your worldview, your modernist, your trad, your sedevacantist, whatever, and it
• 1:59
  will find words in the papal encyclical to support your worldview.
• 2:05
  I've seen a lot of that going on as well.
• 2:09
  Either, oh my goodness, it's after 1958, so everything is horrible, or oh my goodness,
• 2:15
  it's after 1965, so everything is wonderful, and all that stuff.
• 2:20
  There are people who do that, and I commend them all to God's mercy.
• 2:24
  When someone gives me a big, fat document, I put on my professor hat, and I get out my
• 2:29
  red pen, and I start underlining and circling and asking questions.
• 2:33
  If we were going to go line by line through this document, we would be here for quite
• 2:39
  some time.
• 2:40
  I think it would be the triumph of the Immaculate Heart would arrive before we finish.
• 2:44
  Just getting into the first couple of sentences of the first paragraph.
• 2:47
  Here's what I want to do instead.
• 2:48
  I want to find a set of tools that we can use to begin to get into the meat of this
• 2:56
  document.
• 2:57
  Now, up front, it does say true things.
• 3:03
  It does.
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  It says things that are troubling.
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  It says things that, how shall I say this delicately, lend themselves to misinterpretation.
• 3:16
  I know there are some commentators who have been doing something like this.
• 3:20
  Well, yes, that's what the document says, but what it really means is ... I said, well,
• 3:28
  how about having the document say what it means?
• 3:32
  I don't think it's a good fit for papal documents to ... Well, if you stand on one foot and
• 3:40
  close one eye, and you look at it through the light of the silvery moon during the vernal
• 3:45
  equinox, then you can see that really ... I don't want to do that.
• 3:52
  I don't think that's good for us.
• 3:53
  Now, I'm going to give you an example of my gift of not prophecy.
• 3:59
  I remember years ago, I got a text from a friend living in London that said, what's
• 4:03
  this about the pope resigning?
• 4:05
  I said, well, that's ridiculous.
• 4:06
  Popes don't resign.
• 4:07
  I can't believe everything you hear on the internet, and it turns out Benedict did resign.
• 4:12
  The question was, well, who's going to be the next pope?
• 4:15
  I said, well, whoever it's going to be, it's certainly not going to be a Jesuit.
• 4:19
  Well, we got that wrong.
• 4:21
  Then, well, who would you like to be pope father?
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  I said, well, I would be happy if somebody took the name Leo.
• 4:27
  I think that's very unlikely, but here's something you can really count on.
• 4:30
  It's not going to be an American.
• 4:32
  My only good bit of prophecy was when John Paul died, I said that Ratzinger would become
• 4:39
  pope and he would take the name Benedict.
• 4:41
  I think that was easy.
• 4:42
  That was slow pitch, if not t-ball, in terms of prophecy.
• 4:47
  One of the reasons I said that I would like to see a pope with the name of Leo is because
• 4:53
  Leo XIII is one of my heroes.
• 4:56
  He was a prolific writer, and his stuff was solid.
• 5:02
  He was a fighter.
• 5:03
  He was bold.
• 5:04
  He was fearless.
• 5:05
  He knew which side he was on, and he knew who was on the wrong side of the line and
• 5:11
  who was on the right side of the line.
• 5:13
  I'd like to see more of that.
• 5:16
  Well, here comes Cardinal Robert Prevost from Chicago, takes the name Leo XIV, and the suggestion
• 5:25
  was, well, because Leo XIII is kind of considered the big granddaddy of the church's social
• 5:32
  teaching.
• 5:34
  I have to offer some comments about that in a moment.
• 5:39
  The original big text was called Rerum Novarum, and that was supposed to be the text that
• 5:46
  really inaugurated, for the modern world, the Catholic social teaching, at least the
• 5:52
  basic principles.
• 5:53
  Rerum Novarum says, oh yes, that means new things, because he was talking about industrialization
• 5:59
  and urbanization and unions and responding to Marxism, you know, new things.
• 6:04
  Well, if you dig a little deeper, and you realize that in the 1890s, when Rerum Novarum
• 6:12
  was released, the clergy would have been classically trained in Latin, they would have known Cicero,
• 6:19
  and they would know that these new things, Rerum Novarum, isn't talking about novelties,
• 6:26
  it's talking about violent upheaval.
• 6:30
  It's talking about revolutions, and it's about responding to that revolutionary upheaval.
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  So Leo was trying to put out a conflagration.
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  He wasn't in dialogue with anybody.
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  He was correcting people, putting the smack down, and laying out the truth that is the
• 6:54
  saving truth that is the content of the deposit of faith.
• 6:59
  This document doesn't do that.
• 7:03
  It doesn't.
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  Now, if there are things you want to criticize, then by golly, you can find something to criticize.
• 7:10
  I know someone who's popular line, he says, well, you know, as a graduate of the Wharton
• 7:14
  School of Business from the University of Pennsylvania, where I got my MBA, I'm here
• 7:18
  to tell you this is the best criticism of capitalism I've ever seen, ha ha ha.
• 7:23
  No, no, no, not so fast.
• 7:25
  Not so fast.
• 7:26
  So the title itself, Magnifica Humanitas, there's also some problems with that as well,
• 7:34
  which I'll get to in the next segment.
• 7:37
  But the very idea that Robert Prevost took the name of Leo, and therefore we should get
• 7:44
  our hopes up because he's going to be a real successor of Leo XIII in terms of content,
• 7:51
  tone, and style, that's just not happening.
• 7:57
  This isn't happening.
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  Leo XIII and Leo XIV are very, very different.
• 8:04
  They're using different vocabulary.
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  They're using a different set of tools.
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  And we have to acknowledge that.
• 8:12
  We have to acknowledge that.
• 8:14
  So where do we go from here?
• 8:16
  Where are we to understand?
• 8:18
  Well, I think there's some background that's necessary to really understand what's going
• 8:25
  on with this encyclical.
• 8:29
  This is a document that I believe could only have come from the Church as it has been existing
• 8:38
  after the Second Vatican Council.
• 8:42
  This is a post-conciliar document, not only in terms of chronology, but in terms of its
• 8:51
  foundation.
• 8:52
  There's style, approach, tools, and tone that are drawn very directly from the Second Vatican
• 9:00
  Council, which, by the admission of the greatest advocates of the Second Vatican Council, are
• 9:10
  not readily synchronizable with the writings of Leo XIII or Pius IX.
• 9:18
  Leo XIII would never talk about shared discernment, dialogue, and process.
• 9:26
  In some ways, reading this document gave me flashbacks to when I was growing up in the
• 9:31
  70s.
• 9:32
  When I was a kid in the 70s, a big retreat program for high school kids was called Search.
• 9:40
  This great, big, dramatic, very, very emotional thing.
• 9:44
  And over the years, I said, you know, searching is good, but no one ever talks about find.
• 9:51
  And that's part of my concern with the way this document is set up, is there doesn't
• 9:57
  seem to be really fixed moral compass points.
• 10:04
  Now there's going to be references to principles and so on, but as soon as you enunciate the
• 10:09
  principle, it's put into the context of process and dialogue and shared discernment and reading
• 10:17
  the signs of the times.
• 10:18
  So it's like, well, here's true north, which is subject to infinite negotiation.
• 10:25
  Well, if you don't have fixed compass points, if you don't have a reliable map, you don't
• 10:33
  know where you're going.
• 10:35
  You don't know if you're moving forwards or backwards, if you're making progress, if you're
• 10:39
  heading off a cliff, or you're just going in circles.
• 10:44
  So the idea that this document gives us the wise guidance that we need right now, I'm
• 10:51
  not seeing it.
• 10:53
  Candidly, I'm not seeing it.
• 10:56
  We'll deal with that in more detail in the next segment.
• 10:59
  This is Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host every day here at the Catholic Current.
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  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
• 12:04
  O Saint Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of
• 12:11
  God, I place in thee all my interests and desires.
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  O Saint Joseph, assist me by thy powerful intercession, and obtain for me all spiritual
• 12:20
  blessings through thy foster Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that, having engaged here below
• 12:27
  thy heavenly power, I may offer thee my thanksgiving and homage.
• 12:32
  O Saint Joseph, I never weary contemplating thee and Jesus asleep in thine arms.
• 12:38
  I dare not approach while he reposes near thy heart.
• 12:41
  O Saint Joseph, impress him in my name, and kiss his fine head for me, and ask him to
• 12:46
  return the kiss when I draw my dying breath.
• 12:49
  Saint Joseph, patron of departing souls, pray for me.
• 12:53
  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
• 12:59
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  to mention the Station of the Cross.
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  Here we are, and let's talk about this Friday at The Catholic Current.
• 13:57
  We're talking about the New Papal Encyclical, and this is just a first look.
• 14:02
  We're going to have to add a second look as well, and maybe a third.
• 14:10
  I want to draw an analogy here.
• 14:12
  I saw a video recently, and it was a priest who's a chaplain at a self-identified Catholic
• 14:18
  university, and he likes to show himself on social media, interacting with students, and
• 14:23
  I guess that's a thing that you have to do, and there was a group of female athletes who
• 14:29
  were going on some team venture to play field hockey or basketball or some such, and the
• 14:37
  young ladies asked him to offer their prayer and a blessing, and he gave Sally a piece
• 14:46
  of paper to read and said, okay, Sally, you're in charge, and she offered the prayer and
• 14:56
  the blessing, focused around hoping that everyone would learn to accept themselves
• 15:01
  exactly as they are, because that's how God accepts all of them.
• 15:06
  Now, putting the parentheses, that rather dubious suggestion, I was thinking to myself,
• 15:13
  what if I were a young man, and I was discerning priesthood, and I saw a father who is ordained
• 15:21
  after a long formation process and a long and expensive education, completely hands
• 15:28
  over all of his spiritual and teaching authority to this female undergrad who gives bromides
• 15:39
  about self-esteem.
• 15:40
  Now, could I really go to the young man and say, isn't that exciting?
• 15:45
  Isn't that thrilling?
• 15:46
  Isn't it worth giving up the great natural goods of marriage and family life and autonomy
• 15:53
  so that when the time comes for you to exercise spiritual authority and leadership, you hand
• 15:58
  it all over to a 19-year-old girl who gives fortune cookie theology?
• 16:03
  Want to sign up for that?
• 16:04
  You get to say the magic words at mass.
• 16:08
  I think that crushes any inspiration for, I mean, why would a young man want to embrace
• 16:17
  a sacrificial style of life so that father can just call a meeting and give somebody
• 16:23
  unqualified authority to do what needs to be done?
• 16:27
  So now let's take that on a grander scale.
• 16:31
  If the church says we are recipients of the great commission, we're to make disciples
• 16:38
  of all nations, we must hand on everything that our Lord has entrusted to us, gifts that
• 16:46
  have come to us first from the hands and lips of our Lord and then through the hands of
• 16:50
  the apostles and the blood-soaked hands of testimony of the martyrs, that's compelling.
• 17:00
  A man could be willing to lay down his life for that.
• 17:03
  On the other hand, we can present the church as just one voice among many, a dialogue partner,
• 17:13
  someone who is accompanying humanity on its journey through history.
• 17:19
  And my goodness, is there going to be a lot of talking and there's going to be process
• 17:28
  and shared discernment and historical mediation and more dialogue and there's going to be
• 17:37
  searching for new paths.
• 17:42
  But when does somebody make a decision?
• 17:47
  When does someone say, this is okay, this is not, this is required, that's forbidden.
• 17:55
  And abortion is referred to as a grave evil, well yes, a grave wrong, a grave sin, but
• 18:04
  not intrinsically evil.
• 18:09
  Didn't talk about abortion as the premier moral issue of our time.
• 18:12
  I need to double check the numbers, but I've seen from a number of sources that in recent
• 18:16
  years the leading cause of death in the world is abortion.
• 18:25
  And so yet, here we are with a document talking about the autonomy of earthly realities.
• 18:33
  And we have to clarify the way the church exists in history and relates to the world.
• 18:40
  So rather than being mandated by Christ the King to be teacher of all nations, we're just
• 18:49
  kind of chummy.
• 18:51
  And then of course there has to be the fatuous statement of, nobody has a monopoly on truth.
• 18:56
  I don't know what a monopoly on truth means.
• 18:59
  I don't even know if that's a meaningful phrase.
• 19:02
  And just because you're faithful to Christ doesn't mean you know how to rebuild an aircraft
• 19:07
  engine or know how to safely remove an appendix.
• 19:11
  Okay, fine, we accept all that, but let's go back to that initial image I had about
• 19:18
  the retreat from the 70s for high school called Search.
• 19:22
  So everybody's searching, but nobody's finding, in which case, why bother?
• 19:30
  So my concern is the way this document is set up, you don't really get anywhere.
• 19:41
  You don't make any final strong judgments.
• 19:46
  And I also wonder, because look, this is a document that was obviously written by a committee,
• 19:52
  and okay, and sometimes popes have ghostwriters, and that's fine too.
• 19:57
  I get that.
• 19:58
  But again, I want to draw an analogy.
• 20:02
  When I was in business and we would have proposals for government contracts, et cetera, someone
• 20:08
  would write up the scientific methodology and the proposals and the cost structure,
• 20:12
  et cetera, et cetera.
• 20:13
  And then someone else was called the red team or the tiger team or the op for the opposing
• 20:19
  force and try to poke holes in it, look for the opportunities that would lend itself to
• 20:26
  misunderstanding or misinterpretation or that would expose us to avoidable criticism.
• 20:36
  And I just got to wonder whether or not anybody played that role in the development of this
• 20:44
  doctrine.
• 20:45
  Let me give you an example.
• 20:48
  The Old Testament figure Nehemiah, and we see this in segment eight, paragraph eight
• 20:56
  of this document, Nehemiah is presented as a model of synodality.
• 21:05
  And I want to say, oh, oh, really?
• 21:08
  I said, look, I think Nehemiah was pretty authoritarian, and we know authoritarian is
• 21:14
  a dirty word in the new synodal church that we've just come up with.
• 21:20
  It says, he did not impose solutions from above.
• 21:25
  I said, oh, really?
• 21:27
  Oh, really?
• 21:28
  I said, well, look, he acts under Persian royal authority.
• 21:31
  He issues unilateral commands.
• 21:33
  He closes the gates of Jerusalem by force.
• 21:36
  He threatens merchants.
• 21:38
  He tears out the hair of men who had married foreign women, and he enforces an ethnic exclusivity
• 21:45
  in the restored community.
• 21:48
  And yet, the encyclical presents him as a paradigm of consultative, participatory, bottom-up
• 21:57
  governance.
• 21:59
  And I think this is just a distortion of what the scriptures actually said.
• 22:11
  And I can go through this again and again.
• 22:13
  Something similar with the Tower of Babel is misrepresented.
• 22:19
  Later on in section 57, women are presented as implicitly a minority.
• 22:28
  And I said, well, 50% of the human population, how does that work?
• 22:37
  What does that mean?
• 22:38
  So there's a category error here.
• 22:39
  So it seems to me that there were lots of opportunities for somebody to double-check
• 22:47
  and say, hey, you forgot to carry the two here.
• 22:49
  You're not doing your math right here.
• 22:52
  And there are places where our shoelaces are untied, or our fly is open, or something like
• 22:57
  that.
• 22:58
  Or, well, we got spinach between our teeth.
• 23:00
  Let's clean this document up.
• 23:03
  And it wasn't there.
• 23:05
  It wasn't there.
• 23:06
  So even if the church was going to be, as the document claims it is, a claim that I
• 23:14
  have reservations about, this great dialogue partner, well, you know, if you don't have
• 23:22
  your act together, I'm not going to be interested in you as a dialogue partner.
• 23:28
  So what we have here is, as one critic called it, a form of ecclesiastical jello.
• 23:37
  So we've got this process of managed ongoing ambiguity rather than clarity.
• 23:47
  You've got movement, but you never know if you're facing in the right direction or not,
• 23:53
  because everything is subject to renegotiation.
• 23:57
  It reminds me of a friend of mine years ago got a master's degree in theology, and she's
• 24:03
  telling about her final project for this class.
• 24:06
  And the class was called Reimagining the Eucharist.
• 24:10
  And I'm always suspicious whenever anyone talks about reimagining, because you have
• 24:14
  what I call nominal transubstantiation, where you keep the name of the thing, but everything
• 24:21
  else changes.
• 24:24
  And so part of the final project for this class on reimagining the Eucharist was, how
• 24:29
  would you rearrange the sanctuary?
• 24:31
  Where would you put the altar and the ambo and the presider's chair?
• 24:36
  Where do you think is the best place to hide the tabernacle, etc.?
• 24:40
  As if we're all our own project, as if there was nothing definite that we had received.
• 24:48
  And this is what concerns me about this document, is that the perennial wisdom of the church,
• 24:56
  including its principles regarding the social teaching of the church, it's all up for grabs.
• 25:04
  We never really nail things down solidly.
• 25:09
  We're always talking about talking about talking, and we're only one voice among many.
• 25:17
  And the question becomes, where is the authority of the church?
• 25:24
  When our Lord says, who hears you, hears me, where is that church?
• 25:30
  The church that confronted revolutions with truth and the call to conversion?
• 25:38
  The church that was made brilliantly, brightly clear in the writings of Pope Leo XIII?
• 25:47
  Where is that church now?
• 25:52
  Can it be found in the current encyclical?
• 25:55
  We'll deal with that in the next segment.
• 25:57
  I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day of the Catholic Current.
• 26:01
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  Current, where we bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
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• 27:55
  Here we are, the third segment of a Friday.
• 27:58
  Let's talk about this.
• 27:59
  We're having our first look at Pope Leo's First Encyclical.
• 28:03
  Supposedly it's about AI.
• 28:06
  I think it's about a lot of things.
• 28:08
  It's kind of a grab bag.
• 28:10
  It tries to do an account of the Church's social teaching as a precursor to talking
• 28:21
  about artificial intelligence.
• 28:22
  I know Dr. Edward Faser, whose work I admire very much, and his work on capital punishment
• 28:28
  is excellent, he's turned out to be a strong defender of the encyclical.
• 28:34
  I'm still critical of it, but I have to read Dr. Faser's document more closely.
• 28:39
  When I have a second look at this document, I'll let you know what I found.
• 28:46
  Here's what I find, what's the word I'm looking for, perturbing, unsettling about this document.
• 29:00
  It doesn't quite ring true for me.
• 29:07
  It says a lot of things, and it says some true things, and it says we should know well
• 29:15
  what the Catholic Church's social teaching is, and that is certainly true.
• 29:21
  I don't think it does a really great job of doing that.
• 29:29
  It lends itself to misinterpretation, it can be clumsy, and there's a lot of distractions
• 29:36
  in there.
• 29:37
  These rather offhanded remarks about just war theory, about the papacy and slavery,
• 29:46
  women as minority status, it seems to be this grab bag of issues that you would imagine
• 29:56
  being near and dear to the hearts of those who go to some faculty seminar on social justice.
• 30:07
  But does it have a clear beginning, middle, and an end?
• 30:10
  Can you read through and say, I know where I've been, and I know what I need to do next?
• 30:16
  I don't think so.
• 30:18
  And then there's some unfortunate references as well.
• 30:25
  Role models for our time who were champions of dialogue and social justice, etc., Martin
• 30:32
  Luther King was invoked.
• 30:36
  Now leaving aside some now documented elements of Dr. King's moral failings, including plagiarism,
• 30:48
  he said some really sketchy things about the faith.
• 30:54
  He was not an orthodox small-o Christian.
• 30:58
  I don't know that he could have signed his name to the Apostles' Creed.
• 31:04
  I'm going to have Mr. Engineer link to some notes about that so you don't think I'm having
• 31:10
  a stroke.
• 31:12
  And then Nelson Mandela?
• 31:16
  Was he really a champion of dialogue?
• 31:21
  Didn't he say, I would rather sit in prison than forswear violence against my political
• 31:30
  enemies?
• 31:32
  Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan?
• 31:35
  We've got nobody else to refer to?
• 31:37
  And then some random reference to Gandalf?
• 31:42
  So the document doesn't have the gravitas or the vigor that I think a papal document
• 31:49
  requires.
• 31:52
  And we seem, we're left in this loop of constant discussion.
• 32:02
  Dear Jesuit friend of mine said, dialogue, that means we have to keep on talking until
• 32:06
  I agree with the liberal.
• 32:10
  And it seems to me that this is what we have set up here, that we've agreed to keep on
• 32:16
  talking about talking, but there's no clear teaching, there's no definition.
• 32:25
  I also think that we have to be really candid about who's going to be impressed by this.
• 32:36
  As you can imagine, someone in my position receives a lot of different documents, a lot
• 32:42
  of different oral traditions, and somebody anonymously sent me a document.
• 32:47
  I haven't been able to track down where it's from, I'm going to try to post it in the show
• 32:51
  notes with the help of Mr. Engineer, because it says some challenging things, but the essay
• 32:56
  is called Stars and Souls, Tech Oligarchs' Intergalactic Dreams vs. a Vatican Bereft
• 33:03
  of Moral Authority.
• 33:05
  And the author says some really challenging things.
• 33:10
  The billionaires who are pulling the strings of the world these days, as far as we can
• 33:13
  tell, you know, we think of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and so on.
• 33:25
  The poobahs of Silicon Valley who are leading the charge for artificial intelligence, one
• 33:31
  of them, I forget the name, was asked, does God exist, and he said, well, not yet.
• 33:37
  Are these people really going to have, are they going to hit the pause button and have
• 33:46
  an examination of conscience, because the church has produced a sloppy document?
• 33:53
  Because it is a sloppy document, it is not a rigorous document.
• 33:57
  If this was submitted to me as a senior thesis or a master's thesis, I wouldn't accept it.
• 34:04
  So these, you know, billionaires, with their plans to go to Mars and transhumanism, etc.,
• 34:15
  etc., would they stop and listen, even for a document that was rigorous and challenging
• 34:23
  and well-written?
• 34:24
  I'm not sure.
• 34:26
  And one of the things that I found in this anonymous document, I really do want to try
• 34:30
  to track down who wrote it, is does the church have the moral authority to grab the attention
• 34:41
  of the Silicon Valley masters?
• 34:43
  I would phrase it another way and say, does it have the moral credibility?
• 34:49
  I mean, let's be clear, we haven't had a full, complete, honest reckoning of the Ted
• 34:56
  McCarrick legacy, and a lot of his protégés are in places of very significant influence
• 35:07
  within the church.
• 35:11
  And so the idea that we're going to throw our weight around and have the billionaires
• 35:17
  of Silicon Valley and the mandarins of the Chinese Communist Party stop what they're
• 35:24
  doing and sit and listen, I think what this author is saying is, that's fanciful.
• 35:36
  It seems very unlikely.
• 35:39
  So I see this, now again, the document says true things, and I want to go through my friend
• 35:46
  Michael Bacallek's essay on what we owe to papal encyclicals, but as it's written, it's
• 35:56
  a jumble, it's a grab bag of some favorite issues, it says some not very compelling things
• 36:06
  about artificial intelligence, but it seems to secure in place this methodology of endless
• 36:17
  dialogue and accompaniment and negotiation, and there's not a lot of teaching going on.
• 36:25
  So if I make the bold claim, this is really not the document that we needed right now,
• 36:32
  it's not unreasonable to ask, alright Father, well what could that be?
• 36:38
  The document that we did need, what would that look like?
• 36:43
  Well if we want to take as a frame of reference, this is the church's, this is a compendium
• 36:49
  of the church's social teaching, we could do that, but that needs to be rooted in a
• 36:56
  specifically Christian anthropology, and that Christian anthropology needs to be rooted
• 37:05
  in a Christology.
• 37:08
  So that means we have to go back to the word made flesh.
• 37:15
  And if we start doing that, and we recognize ourselves as creatures, created ex nihilo
• 37:25
  by a creator who's intelligent and good and wise and provident, then a lot of popular
• 37:33
  pet projects, transhumanism, posthumanism, transgenderism, how to say this delicately,
• 37:44
  the celebration of conjugations obviously contrary to nature, especially during the
• 37:50
  month of June, they'll become very, very dubious.
• 37:56
  And if we're going to talk about our ethics is rooted in our nature, which is rooted in
• 38:03
  the person and mission of Christ, eventually we'd have to start talking about Christ as
• 38:11
  king, Christ as reigning.
• 38:17
  And then we would have to talk about the church being mandated to be the teacher of
• 38:23
  all nations, bringing Christ to the world and the world to Christ, using an oddly specific
• 38:28
  formulation.
• 38:29
  We would have to take up a phrase that will embarrass many contemporary churchmen, namely
• 38:38
  we would have to talk about the social reign of Christ the king.
• 38:42
  We would have to start referring all of human efforts to Christ as he has revealed himself
• 38:48
  to the one church he founded.
• 38:51
  And to be merely a companion of humanity through history, and to be one dialogue partner among
• 39:02
  many apologizing along the way and misquoting its own scriptures, that's not how you enhance
• 39:12
  credibility.
• 39:13
  You know, I've met a number of millionaires in my day, I've met a few billionaires too.
• 39:17
  They're busy people.
• 39:19
  They don't have time to mess around.
• 39:23
  And this document presents an uncertain voice that doesn't cohere.
• 39:31
  And so the people who most need to hear what the church has to say on these matters, we
• 39:37
  just don't have credibility with them.
• 39:41
  So I hope someone will say, oh gosh, you got a draft of the document, we're working
• 39:46
  on a final draft, it's going to be better.
• 39:49
  Trust me.
• 39:50
  I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day of the Catholic Current, and
• 39:54
  you want to join us for the rest of the hour, because coming up next, Week in Readiness,
• 39:58
  you and me reviewing the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday Scriptures.
• 40:02
  So be all prayed up for Sunday Mass.
• 40:04
  After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list, download our audio
• 40:10
  as a podcast.
• 40:11
  Be part of the conversation, we're following by following us on Gab, that's G-A-B.com,
• 40:18
  the channel is The Catholic Current, and you can influence a conversation.
• 40:22
  You can contact us at thestationofthecross.com, back in just two minutes, please do stay with
• 40:57
  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
• 41:02
  O Saint Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of
• 41:09
  God, I place in thee all my interests and desires.
• 41:13
  O Saint Joseph, assist me by thy powerful intercession, and obtain for me all spiritual
• 41:19
  blessings through thy foster Son Jesus Christ our Lord, so that, having engaged here below
• 41:26
  thy heavenly power, I may offer thee my thanksgiving and homage.
• 41:31
  O Saint Joseph, I never weary contemplating thee and Jesus asleep in thine arms.
• 41:37
  I dare not approach while he reposes near thy heart.
• 41:40
  Press him in my name, and kiss his fine head for me, and ask him to return the kiss when
• 41:46
  I draw my dying breath.
• 41:49
  Saint Joseph, patron of departing souls, pray for me.
• 41:53
  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
• 42:00
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• 42:06
  Go to thestationofthecross.com slash askfather and help influence the conversation.
• 42:19
  Praise be Jesus Christ.
• 42:20
  This is Fr.
• 42:21
  Robert McTigge of the Society of Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current, where
• 42:24
  we bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
• 42:26
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  Support us at thestationofthecross.com.
• 42:51
  Here we are, the last segment of our Friday.
• 42:53
  You know what that means, Week in Readiness, you and me reviewing the headlines of the
• 42:56
  week in light of the upcoming Sunday Scriptures, so be all prayed up for a Sunday Mass.
• 43:00
  What are the stories we're following?
• 43:02
  Well, the response to Pope Leo's First Encyclical is continuing to unfold.
• 43:09
  Cardinal McElroy, the Archdoge of Washington, removed from his position as exorcist Monsignor
• 43:17
  Stephen Rossetti, because apparently Monsignor Rossetti said that UFO activity and aliens
• 43:24
  is really probably demonic activity, and apparently he shouldn't have said that.
• 43:35
  There is a new prefect for the Dicastery of Communications in Rome, who was a news anchor
• 43:42
  at EWTN. I'll have some things to say about that in the future when we have more time.
• 43:50
  Looking at political news, Southern Poverty Law Center is hit with another grand jury
• 43:55
  indictment. President Trump includes the Democrats of quote, big cheating unquote with mail-in
• 44:01
  ballots in the California primary elections. House passes a resolution to end the war with
• 44:06
  Iran. SpaceX's IPO is set to be the biggest ever and could make Elon Musk a trillionaire.
• 44:14
  So, the world is, you know, humming along, doing what it does. I don't know that anybody
• 44:23
  slammed on the brakes and said, wait a minute, let's stop everything and have a look at this
• 44:28
  new encyclical. Meanwhile, if you're following the Novus Ordo calendar of the Pauline Rite,
• 44:35
  this Sunday is the Solemnity Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, also known as the Solemnity
• 44:41
  of Corpus Christi, and we're looking at Lectionary 167. And the readings are beautiful. In particular
• 44:54
  we have from the Gospel, John 6, where he says, you know, my body, my flesh is real
• 45:02
  food and my blood is real drink. It's not just a symbol.
• 45:10
  And I have published, in fact I'm going to ask Mr. Engineer to look for it, Mr. Engineer,
• 45:18
  March 2023 issue of Homiletic and Pastoral Review, I have an article called What Many
• 45:23
  Priests No Longer Believe. And it's about the fact that many priests no longer believe
• 45:30
  that their people have the faith. And the reason that many priests no longer believe
• 45:36
  the people have the faith is the way they behave at Mass. Now I can go on and on about
• 45:42
  the way people dress and arriving late and leaving early and the irreverent way they
• 45:46
  receive Holy Communion, the banal music, the insipid, I mean there's plenty of blame to
• 45:52
  go around everywhere. So how do we fix it? Well let's kind of do things simple. If you
• 46:00
  wouldn't behave that way at a crucifixion, don't behave that way at Mass. Let's start
• 46:07
  with that. Because the bold Catholic claim regarding the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is
• 46:15
  that it makes present again, under the appearances of the elements of the Last Supper, it makes
• 46:23
  present again Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. That should be very sobering. Let me add something
• 46:33
  else. I've said this before and some people find it controversial, inflammatory, or even
• 46:40
  incomprehensible. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is not a communion service. The purpose
• 46:48
  of Mass is not to distribute Holy Communion in a way that makes Holy Communion seem to
• 46:56
  be your liturgical proof of purchase or your liturgical participation trophy. It's to make
• 47:02
  present again the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary as the one and only act of worship fully acceptable
• 47:10
  to the Father. Because on our best day, and I don't know about you, I don't have a lot
• 47:17
  of best days. I know Mr. Engineer has more best days than I do. But on our best day,
• 47:24
  the best we can say to God Almighty is, imperfectly, I offer you my imperfect love. And God will
• 47:32
  say, God, to be honest, thanks very much. That's not good enough. Of course not, because
• 47:39
  He's infinitely holy, He's infinitely good, He's infinitely just, and we need to thank
• 47:44
  and praise and worship Him because of His infinite generosity in calling us into existence
• 47:50
  out of the nothing. Then He also says, I offer you my imperfect love. That's not good enough.
• 47:57
  Out of the nothing. Then He also saved us from ourselves, from our wickedness, our rejection
• 48:04
  of Him, at a terrible cost to Himself, namely the sacrifice of His only begotten Son. And
• 48:10
  so if we want our worship to be acceptable to the Father, we have to kind of piggyback
• 48:17
  on to Christ's self-offering and say, me too, me too. Take my broken, messy life and
• 48:27
  offer it imperfectly, and scoop it up in that perfect offering of Calvary, so that
• 48:36
  our Heavenly Father, when He looks at me, sees and loves in me what He sees and loves
• 48:43
  in His only begotten Son. That is the primary purpose of the Mass. And for those who are
• 48:56
  properly well-disposed, in a state of grace, having observed the fast, having made one's
• 49:03
  Easter duty in the past year, and if you're married in a marriage recognized by the Church,
• 49:09
  ahem, then one may rightly present oneself to receive Holy Communion. And if one presents
• 49:20
  oneself for Holy Communion and doesn't meet those criteria, not only do you receive no
• 49:26
  grace, you incur the penalty of sacrilege. Which is why frequent sacramental confession
• 49:34
  is so important, and my brother priests need to preach on that more often.
• 49:40
  So, what's the moral of the story here? God Almighty loves us. He is just. He is merciful.
• 49:51
  And in His mercy, He offers to us, at a terrible cost to Himself, the one form of worship that
• 50:01
  will do justice to His grandeur and His goodness. And that is to make present again the perfect
• 50:10
  act of worship and sacrifice, which is Christ's self-offering on Calvary. So understood, how
• 50:21
  could we tolerate arriving late, leaving early, and not giving our best? How could we tolerate
• 50:31
  ringing phones at Mass? How could we tolerate applause at Mass? It's been my privilege recently
• 50:43
  to offer Mass with the religious community, and here's what I say about them. They love
• 50:48
  our Lord so much that they want to worship Him. I hope at least once you'll be able to
• 50:56
  attend a Mass like that. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day of
• 51:00
  The Catholic Current. Join us on Monday for another round of The Catholic Current. Great
• 51:04
  topic, lively guests. That's how we roll here at The Catholic Current. Remember, our rallying
• 51:10
  cry at The Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo, bringing Christ to the world
• 51:14
  and the world to Christ. We want Christ to be known and loved. We want Him to be worshipped.
• 51:19
  We want Christ acknowledged as Christ the King. That's why we do what we do here at
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  The Catholic Current and the Station of the Cross, because we are committed to being more
• 51:28
  than merely relevant. The Leader's Session of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. May the mighty
• 51:32
  God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in peace, and please do pray for me, for
• 51:36
  I am a sinner.
• 51:54
  you