Latest / Regina UNSCRIPTED / Is the Catholic Church Failing the West? | 'In Conversation' with Fr Robert McTeigue

Transcript

Is the Catholic Church Failing the West? | 'In Conversation' with Fr Robert McTeigue · Regina UNSCRIPTED

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in kind of a crisis right now.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think something like 57% of the French GDP goes into taxes to support basically the economy of benefits, and there's nobody to pay for them anymore.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: So even if there weren't a whole lot of cultural enrichers violating churches and women and so on, even if there weren't blackclad Antifa folks setting fire and spouting Marxist theory, demographically uh French would still be in a steep decline.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to Regina Unscripted.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine Bennett.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Mark Lambert.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we're delighted to be joined again by our friend Father Robert McTaig.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're very welcome.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Very glad to be here.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations on your upgrade.
• 0:57
  unknown: Yeah.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Although we're just laughing because despite our upgrade, we've just had a few technical, technical hitches, which I know you're familiar with too, Father Robert.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and people can will know why.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because you spend uh some of your time online as we do teaching, and uh you've got some fantastic videos.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you, Father Robert?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um my podcast can be found at thestationofthecross.com.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's called the Catholic Current, and you can find it on every podcast platform.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: My videos can be found on YouTube on a channel called iCatholic Radio, and all of my everything, my writing, my speaking, my interviews, my preaching can be found at my website, heraldofegospel.org.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was Harold Father, not Harold, wasn't it?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Harold, yes.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Who's this Harold fellow you keep talking about?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's Harold of the Gospel, yeah.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the things you've been speaking about lately are the terrible scenes that we have over here in Europe, not quite on the on the shores of uh Britain yet, but certainly across France, Belgium, Italy.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And first of all, to anyone watching who may not be aware of what's going on, can you let us know what scenes we've seen?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, gosh, uh it's uh supposedly started out as high school students being indignant because of uh budget constraints and lack of air conditioning and an insufficient number of teachers.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then um apparently cultural enrichers from faraway lands who don't have a lot of respect for French symbolism started vandalizing uh churches and setting fire to buildings and desecrating public monuments.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then it looks like Antifa types, black clad professional agitators have been stirring up the mix.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a uh leftist French political leader whose political party I think is French Unbowed.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't studied French in a long time, so I won't try to pronounce it.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it turns out it's it's a perfect mix and uh very major cities.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's been extraordinary violence, there's been looting, there's been desecrating of churches, and it seems to be contagious and it's been spilling over into Belgium, into Italy and Albania as well.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: It really is shocking, isn't it, Mark?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the scenes that we've seen.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite frightening.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's very hard for our leaders to just say this is a little fringe group, there's nothing to see here.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's becoming unignorable, really, isn't it?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just French, are they?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's what the French do.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: There is that.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: What are you on about?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: They are just French, yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Any excuse.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see um did you see someone put the Benny Hill music to some of the riots the other day?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say that did improve the situation somewhat.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was quite amusing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not funny though, it's awful.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um Father, obviously we can see this is a terrible crisis, a lack of meaning, a lack of leadership.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: We've been through crises before.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one of the things that you might want to speak into is how the church might respond, how Christians respond.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: How have Christians responded to this type of crisis in the past?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and what do you think um maybe isn't being done now that should be being done?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I know that the the French bishops uh released a statement the the other day, and uh there were very stern words, you know.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I said I was, I think it was analogous to a husband telling his distressed wife to calm down.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you you'd expect similar results.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't see anything about fasting or the rosary or invoking Christ or proclaiming Christ crucified.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I believe in our time we're dealing, as we've always been dealing with, an intractable evil.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when you were confronting intractable evil, uh firing up the mighty engines of dialogue and listening is probably not going to be the go-to remedy.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think of you during the Soviet occupation of Vienna in 1955, that got to a fever pitch, and the nation decided to pray the rosary.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And inexplicably, the Soviets uh up and left.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: We think of the Holy Father calling uh all of Italy to pray, and especially Rome to pray the rosary during the Battle of Le Pantro, et cetera, et cetera.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we could be calling for prayer and fasting and tenance and reparation and sacrifice and examination of conscience and treating this as an opportunity for a teachable moment and evangelization.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, granted, I'm only reading things in translation, but it looks like that hasn't been spoken of yet in Italy or Belgium or France.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: I also love your analogy for the Bishop's Conference, which is the people who should know better club.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think the thing is we're not gonna see that, are we?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we not gonna see that?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like it seems so obvious that the that we should be speaking into the culture, and I think especially on the back of the Pope's visit, which I know that you know part of your part of your um commentary on this is that you you're not incredibly impressed with that.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: But for a lot, I think for a lot of us it was an in you know an important sign of hope, as well as the fact that you did see um France come alive.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: It seemed like the corpse had been brought back to life.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we constantly hear that secular France is, you know, fully dominant and that there is no Catholicism left in France.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: But there there were signs in the old, you know, there was life in the old dog yet, as we said.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, and when the Pope goes to France, I'd rather see large crowds than no crowds, uh, certainly.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I'm still scratching my head as to why Pope Leo spoke positively about liberty, equality, and fraternity, because in the context of French history, they were spoken during a chapter of the history of France known as, you know, the terror, which brought together a lot of martyrs and so on.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I might have, I might have chosen other words myself, but I'm not a papal ghostwriter.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so what do I know?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I think I I've been I have to release another video shortly about these very topics.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking about two movies.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: One might be better known.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: It came out a couple years ago called Nefarious, and one from the the early to late sometime in the 90s, with Jeff Bulk Goldblum called Mr.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Frost.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: In both cases, you had obvious significant evil, and people of a modern frame of mind, uh, social psychologists in the first movie, a psychiatrist, and even a priest in the second movie, were just utterly ill-equipped to deal with intractable evil, unreasonable evil.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas a St.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ignatius Leola or a Saint Benedict would have broken up the holy water and the crucifix immediately.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: That stuff was just kind of left in the background.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: If we really do believe that our daily lives are marked by relentless spiritual conflict, we'd be sounding a lot more like Ephesians 6, I believe.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that they this is it then?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: That your diagnosis is basically that they don't believe it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know, I don't know their souls.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: I would just I would be more inclined to believe that they believed if they were invoking Christ crucified explicitly, if they were saving Ave Crux bez unica, hail to the Christ, our only hope.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would be more inclined to have a claim on understanding what they believe.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: But here, I I don't know.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I've never been a diplomat.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: That may surprise you.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been a diplomat, I've never been in charge of anything.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is how diplomats speak, but I would like somebody uh with some sort of hierarchical gravitas to begin to invoke Christ crucified and to name this as evil.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say there was a really interesting event here that you might not have heard of at the March for Life, um where the the there's a it's become kind of a habit now where the the you know the pro the pro-death protesting group uh sort of gather on Parliament Square.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: So when the march arrives, they're they're there shouting abuse, and they've the last couple of years, they've formed a sort of guard across the main stage, um, with and you know, sort of screaming loudly, uh, so that it's become difficult that if you're at the front, that you can even hear what's going on.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: But this year, something really incredible happened, father, and that was that we had 15 bishops turn up to the March for Life for the first time.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: And when the 15 bishops came on stage at Parliament Square, these rabid protesters literally downed tools and just walked away for no discernible reason, no one told them to.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this was commented on, this was remarked on by a number of numerous people who were there of some amazement.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: And right what struck me about it was that even if those men have don't understand the power of their office, the demons who are driving this understand the power of their office.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: What more clear example of that could you get, really?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we we have to enter this fray with confidence.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're fighting against not just flesh and blood, and we don't have to rely on on our own strength, wisdom, virtue, or goodness.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, God, our Lord, picked out the arms and armor himself.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so we should don those.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he really does invite us to to be happy warriors and fight at his side.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, as a Jesuit who answered the call to Christ the king, that sort of thing appeals to me.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it can appeal to more people if they heard the appeal.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you heard it right, folks.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Father Robert is a Jesuit, so don't switch off.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's a he's a he's a good egg.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um Father, there is a connection, it might seem tenuous, but can you draw a line between the I'm gonna put you on the spot now, between the introduction of the contraceptive pill and the riots that we're seeing in France.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: What is it?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, uh, well, a number of things.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh our our economic system since the end of World War II has been a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme, that you invite more and more suckers to pay in with the promise when it's their turn, there'll be great cadres of people behind them to pay.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that didn't happen because courtesy of the pill, and we all know the pill isn't perfect, so you need abortion as a backup contraception, as noted in our Supreme Court decades ago.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: We've been aborting and contracepting the new cadres of payers into the system for decades now.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're a gerontocracy, we're top-heavy with age.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: There are more people who look like me with this kind of hair rather than young strapping men who are starting businesses and families to pay into the system.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in kind of a crisis right now.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think something like 57% of the French GDP goes into taxes to support the basically the economy of benefits, and there's nobody to pay for them anymore.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So even if there weren't a whole lot of cultural enrichers uh, you know, violating churches and women and so on, even if there weren't blackclad Antifa folks setting fire and spouting Marxist theory, uh, demographically uh French would still be in a steep decline.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happens when you move to cities and put people in small apartments and have them work in offices.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Children become an expense rather than a blessing.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we've we've got a demographic death spiral, and uh that was very much urged on uh by the pill.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, uh it treated the pill separates sexuality from fertility and separates sexuality and fertility from marriage, which crushes families.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: People are isolated, they need to depend on state rather than families.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're setting up a dependent class, which politicians really, really want to have.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: They want to be their sugar daddy because nobody votes Father Christmas out of office.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's human nature.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: But now there's nobody left to pay for it.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: On top of that, because you have to have abortion as backup contraception, we've really cheapened the sanctity of human life as well.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So absolutely, the pill to 1968 to where we are now, yeah, it's it's an unbroken line.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I feel, Mark, I that we should be talking about the the church should be speaking into, that our leaders should be talking about, that we should be covering.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think it's easy to look at those terrible scenes and rightly um talk about immigration and the problems of lack of assimilation and the problems of the religion of peace, which isn't peaceful.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: But to to talk about only those things and not look at what opened the way for this destruction of the West, it's like a cell phone, isn't it?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, hang on, we we what we gave up on having families, we have we shoved women into the workplace, we doubled the workforce, halved the value of labour, and um rewarded families for breaking up, uh rewarded divorce, introduced same-sex marriage, as if that's actually a thing.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying is all these social problems are at the root, and if we're just talking about what's on the branches, we're missing something.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I feel like I would like to see more from the leaders of our church saying we have to speak into where we failed that it got to this place in and not just look at the problems that exist today.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Or give us a decent explanation of why we're wrong.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, on both sides of the pond, we've got them the members of the men who should know better club saying that you know, migration is the greatest thing that ever happened to the world.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, those of us who have studied a little bit of theology know that that's not, you know, that's not all of what the church teaches on this.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, those of us with common sense know you don't know, I mean, yeah, those who study theology, but those of us who are human and still have or the passion familiarity with history, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And but the problem is that it's the accelerant, isn't it?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like that.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: That isn't the root problem.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: You've just explained what the root problem is, and this is just the accelerant that's been poured on top of the the you know, the the sort of embers that were smoking all there.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's you know, what we've seen now in France and Albania and Spain as well is like it's erupting into some sort of bonfire.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it feels the problem is that it feels like our bishops have got no answer for this, or no, you know, that they're they're they're off in cloud cuckoo land talking about why we should welcome the stranger, and to the normal people on the street, it just seems like complete irrelevant nonsense, doesn't it?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: In in my book, Real Philosophy for Real People, there is McTaig's axiom, which states most institutions would rather die than admit that anyone ever made a mistake.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's McTeague's corollary, which states most people haven't matured past the age of 15 and are still desperate to be invited to sit at the cool kids' table at the high school cafeteria.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: You will not become popular with Caesar and the court gestures if you begin to talk like that.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you something that a well-placed churchman said to me many years ago.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Father, there is no money in fighting abortion.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of money to be made processing uh immigrants.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the USCCB's own paperwork on finances, the last year of the Biden administration, 80% of the USCC budget was through processing migrants.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if that has effects on things they say and do.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Who can say?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's terrifying.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: That is the case, isn't it?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like for all of our spiritual welfare, you know.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: It really is worrying.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: And like, what do we do about that?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we can't, we have to just be faithful, don't we?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, the like what do we do?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we get on the internet and we we moan.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: We get on the internet and moan, but also uh, I think I think Michael Hitchbourne at um Le Panto has covered this really well.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: We we do have to think carefully about where we give money, because if the money that we're giving with good intention is actually being used to support some of these things, that that's something we should stop to think about rather than just blindly give.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think, Father?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: It it's true.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of the precepts of the church is to supply for the material needs of the church.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, that is absolutely necessary.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, none of us are infinitely wealthy.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's, you know, there's there's only one Elon Musk.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to really be prudent and careful and responsible with how we we share our tithe.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we always say be an informed consumer, be an informed benefactor uh as well.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Read the details, read the fine print before you make donations.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, be charitable.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: The corporal works of mercy are as indispensable as the spiritual works of mercy, but we also have an obligation to be prudent uh in our donations as well.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Father, you were just saying when we uh jumped on air this afternoon that you've given a talk at your alma malta called The Scandal of Mediocrity.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right, yes.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm a three-time alumnus of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and the School of Philosophy.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And recently, the Catholic Art Institute is a very fine group.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: You should feature them uh in your magazine and your program.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: The president is Kathleen Carr, noble soul and an artist herself.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they have an annual conference.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And this year, it was about uh redeeming culture, beauty as a path to evangelization.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that just didn't sit right with my Irish melancholy.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: It sounded entirely too cheerful.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I talked about uh the scandal of mediocrity.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, beauty and truth are goodness are inextricably interrelated, and mediocrity is the scandal on the stumbling block uh between uh people and the God whom they're called to worship.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And when we tell our children the Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives, they don't believe us, and rightly so, because we make it clear that we don't believe it either.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we did believe, for example, that the Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives, you wouldn't be handing me sweat-stained polyester vestments from the 1970s.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: You wouldn't be having me offer the holy sacrifice on a table from IKEA using glassware from Home Depot, and we wouldn't be tolerating uh insipid music and banal preaching.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yet we do.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say there are alternatives.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the fact that you've got children, you know, this is documented in France, children desecrating churches in the Vendée, which had been heroic in its resistance to the point of shedding their own blood, resistance against the French Revolution, and they're singing in a rap song, uh, celebrating, shall we say, a misunderstander of the religion of peace, infamous for murdering children, and they're singing that while desecrating the church.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it was children liturgies and full active unconscious participation that led them to that point.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the privation of the salt and light that they needed, and that included beauty, truth, and goodness.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And all levels of the cadres of the people who should really know better club, uh Catholic division, had failed those children.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think we done this is the problem, really, and this is what we should be talking about in the Blooming Synod on Synodality, is you know, if we want to talk about mission and how to change our society, this is what we need to be talking about, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: We need to be giving our, you know, giving our children the tools.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: I I love what you just said there about uh like the mediocrity at the bland mediocrity of the liturgy.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: And we've got these things in the catechism that say, you know, this is the source and summit of our Christian lives.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And as you say, we just don't act like that.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when I was teaching um the like the confirmation class in my parish, this is one of the things that I would always emphasize is that you become an adult of the church, and the way that you go forward now to receive our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is pedagogical.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're giving you teaching everyone who's watching you what you believe about that act.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And we all have a duty, don't we, Father?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, to act in that way.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um at a minimum, can we agree that adult men over the age of 30 should not be receiving?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Communion wearing a t-shirt uh celebrating television cartoon characters.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And can we agree that if women have shoe options other than the shoes worn by pole dancers, those are to be preferred if you're going to mass?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Can we have that as a baseline?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: If not, why not?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Be specific, use both sides of the paper if necessary.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, can I just can I just say my 92-year-old dad picked up a cap in a charity shop and it had on the back of it a cartoon character with a big joint saying spliff me up and he wears it to church, right?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: But he's got no, he's half blind and he had no idea what he was wearing.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in church and I was going, Dad, Dad, should we talk about the cap?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll we'll allow for some innocent mistakes, shall we?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, some.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some, yeah, occasionally.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you're over 90, so that's over if you're over 90, then then yeah, then we can talk.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, fair point.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, we've got, I mean, this week we've got Cardinal Grec um addressing the Irish bishops.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's not the Irish bishops, it's the National Synodal Committee or whatever nonsensical thing that's done nothing and achieved nothing and will achieve nothing.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And uh talking about gradualism.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this seems to be the main focus of the synod now.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: This seems to be the direction of travel, and not in the distinctions made by John Paul II, i.e., that you know, that like that you can't have gradualism of the law.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's it is gradualism of the law.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what we seem to, what it seems very clear to me, and I'd love to know what you thought about this, is that there seems to have been promoted uh uh you know, whole generation of prelates now who are in charge of things.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I've you know, I'm I'm gonna tie this down to Pope Francis, was who was the guy who was putting all these people in places of prominence because it was convenient to his ideology to do so.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: And what we're seeing right baldly in front of us is really horrendous theological takes with no basis in what the church has ever taught before.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Complete novelty.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we saw it today from a bishop.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there was another bishop today who has basically said that the Assisi meetings, I'm just gonna look it up for us.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, exactly.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Oh see, look, you're there ahead of me.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Cardinal George Jacob Kouvarkad, who says that um the 1986 Assisi gathering basically is part of the magisterium, and you're worse, you're a schismatic if you don't agree with him.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: I I I don't know how actions become part of the magisterium.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that that's that's one thing.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, uh Francis talked about you know be being wary of of armchair theologians.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, fair enough.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: But with with large swathes of Christendom on fire, what we're talking about is gosh, if we synodal just right, we can talk our way out of dogma.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, people have been talking about that way already.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Was it you know, somewhere in in Belgium, I think, which is on fire, says, well, you know, if we don't start ordaining married men, we don't start ordaining women, synodality will lose its credibility.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, you know, uh Nemo.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can't lose what you don't have.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, the there was there was a confabulation recently for the 10th anniversary of a Morris Letitse.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, no meeting for the centenary of Quas Prima celebrating the solemnity of Christ the king, but every couple of years we have another feather for La Dato C or for Morse Letice.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, apparently, the the final document from this meeting is not going to be made public.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, all right.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the title?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: All right, but but who paid somebody because Mark, when you talked about these people meet and nothing happens and nothing will happen, but you know what?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody paid for it.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody paid for the transportation and the coffee and the sandwiches and the folding chairs and the electricity and so on.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and everyone who shut up had their travel expenses paid for.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: So but it this defies caricature, you know, uh rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, fiddling right while Rome burns.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't know what how how to lampoon it anymore.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, didn't Malcolm Luggeridge give up editing Punch magazine because he said there's no point in doing satire anymore?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I think this is this is where we we are.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I'm blanking on the author's name, but he said, as I write, I see the flames licking the pages.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I see a lot of what we're doing here.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: My own work I see is I'm scribbling notes, stuffing them into bottles, and throwing them out into the tides of time, hoping that someday somebody will find them and can use them to help rebuild from the rubble that we're going to be living in soon.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: And is that that prophecy of the church, you know, that it it may have to descend into the catacombs, it may have to die, you know, to be resurrected again.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and as Cardinal George, you know, prophetically sort of predicted, didn't he?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: That um, you know, his predecessor, like and people don't often quote the full quote, but right at the end of it he says, you know, that they'll that the his predecessor will build up the church again as the church has always done, you know, from the there will be a successor who will rebuild from the ashes because that's what the church does.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: The church has a very long memory.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, better said, it has a very long history.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Some people would have us believe that the memory doesn't go back before year zero, also known as 1965 BCE, best council ever.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the church's history really does predate 1965.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we have survived calamities before.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're experiencing calamity now, and we're not equipping people for it.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that concerns me very greatly.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's a disconnect as well with young people who seem to be joining the church, you know, according to you can in England, it's the gov.uk figures, you know, will demonstrate that there's a real re-engagement from Gen Z.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: And what they're obviously looking for, it's really clear if you go to your local church and speak to the young people who are turning up for the RCIA course, is a deeper, more transcendent reality.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we like, you know, we're not like the Vatican, aren't they aware of that?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: They're not giving them that, they're giving them dialogue and and and uh cooperation with the zeitgeist, which is exactly the thing that they're rejecting.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: But they've they've lived in this culture, they've recognized the fact that it's empty, and they've seen in the Catholic Church the answers to the questions that tug at their heartstrings, haven't they?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not long ago, a prominent member of the Catholic Commentariat who's been in the business uh even longer than we have was saying, yes, you know, in the United States, there are converts coming into the church and they are younger, but are they the right kind of converts?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and the short answer was no, because they tend to be more traditionally minded.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the lie of the postmodern world is that you could be promiscuous and be happy.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the lie of the postmodern world is you can consume infinitely and be happy.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that hasn't played out at all.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and the party is over.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: The party is over.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: The boomers ate the seed corn.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: They had they threw a heck of a party.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: They had Woodstock for about 40 years.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're retiring, they're dying, and there's there's nothing left.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: There, there's nothing left.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: In the United States, in the 1950s, over 70% of people by the age of 30 in the 1950s in the US were married, had children, and owned their own home.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's down to about 12% in the United States.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons why that number is so low is because we've been promoting an economic and immigration and tax system that actually crushes people from starting businesses and supporting families.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: So where's the pro-life angle in that?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm that I you see, and that's what I was trying to get to when I was asking you about the contraception, the the the the drawing that line to contraception.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I just was away on uh on a trip to France a couple of weeks ago, just before all this broke out, and I was with three boomers.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm sorry to say boomers, because I'm not, you know, not all boomers are bad, just most of you.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um hopefully they're not watching.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm I'm one of the better boomers.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're a better boomer but um but and and a younger girl I was with said, What's what bit of advice would you like to pass on to my generation?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I kid you not.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Each of them gave some variation of tolerate everything and everyone.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I just thought, get out of town, boomers.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sorry about this.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the and and that's what Mark's saying.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: We when young people are uh recognize the lies of the world, the flesh, the devil recognize the emptiness of it and are yearning for something more, something deeper, something richer, they are finding that in the tradition of the church.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: They are they are getting married, they are staying married, they are open to life, they are having big families, they are, by God's grace, they are raising Christian children, and that's that's what will make a difference.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: We can talk all we want, but we have to really participate in the truth and the goodness and the beauty of our faith and not be sold these wet compromises that that we have been for too long.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, Boomer's Last Dance.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, guys.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'll quote a line from uh poet E.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Cummings here's the root of the root and the butt of the bud.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Satan hates God.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And because Satan hates God, he hates human creatures who are made in God's image and likeness.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: He wants us to betray the first commandment.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: The easiest way for Satan to do this is to hook us on the bad end of the sixth commandment.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: So so much of the hand waving, the nonsense, et cetera, it it it's it's just liberteenes with PhDs, spinning theories to excuse their bad behaviors and their bad consciences, and then it just trickles down to the popular culture.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And someone has to stand up and say, no, you're wrong.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the late Cardinal Powell said the proof of the truth of the church's sexual ethic is the misery of the people who don't live it.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's that simple.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, wonderful.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Father, well, we're short of time today, and we're going to have to rack it up there.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But you are always great for a sound bite.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're very kind.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: The libertines.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm gonna have to go back and grab it.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: That was brilliant.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're very kind.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Join us again soon, please, Father.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, to all of you watching, go and visit Father's own channel, and you won't be sorry you did.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the Catholic Current.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic Current.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic Current.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget the the.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: But for now, thanks for watching.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you to Father.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Goodbye.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: Great.