Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #679 Gen Z and the Latin Mass: Growing Numbers of Young Catholics Seeking Beauty, Silence, and Order

Transcript

#679 Gen Z and the Latin Mass: Growing Numbers of Young Catholics Seeking Beauty, Silence, and Order · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast, a production of the John Paul Toury Newell Center.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I am excited to be talking to Jacob Plant today.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is a special Friday edition for our men from Claymore Militas Christie.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Again, for all of you guys, that's the big Claymore sword behind me, the two-fisted sword made famous by William Wallace and Braveheart.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gruesome sword, man.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was really made because the English came over and invaded, and the Scots were poor.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't have horses.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: That can take out the, as gruesome as it sounds, the leg of a horse.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Claymore, Militas Christi.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's inspired by the teachings of St.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: John Paul II.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Started out with the Lectia Michi, dear friends.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everything he wanted to tell young people when he started World Youth Days, then all his encyclicals, the revolutionary teaching of theology, the body.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a movement of young men, men of courage, reason, intellect, and will that are doing what all great men did throughout history, which is seek what's true, what's good, what's beautiful, especially the beauty of love.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when they discover that treasure, they're sharing it with others because we know in order to keep this nation, in order to build this up and in order to build a culture of life, they have to get their hearts back.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what this is all about.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Very exciting time to be working with young guys.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing I would rather do.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So with that, I'm welcoming Jacob Plant today.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob just wrote an article recently that caught my eye in the Catholic Exchange, how the Latin Mass is bringing Gen Z.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob is a Catholic writer, photographer, and college student pursuing his bachelor's degree at Florida International University.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's involved in a number of different activities.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob, welcome and tell us a little bit about what you're doing down there.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: What are you studying?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm studying digital communications and media.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to work in video and photography and and really create content that glorifies our God.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at my LinkedIn, the first thing I have under my name is Catholic Creative.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then I have, you know, videographer, photographer, writer, everything else.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's the primary thing that I attach myself to is being a Catholic creative.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, my faith is indelible to the work that I do.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, where did that faith come from?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a cradle Catholic.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: My uh grew up going to mass, but when I really started to take it seriously for myself, I was going into high school and I was a teenager, and I was just noticing because when I when I started high school, it was 2020.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was COVID, it was lockdowns and zooms and masks.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Gosh.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Crazy times.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think at the time.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, I was in formation to get confirmed.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: I was doing my catechism classes, and there was a certain point where I really started to say, you know, that maybe there really is something to this.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm looking around, seeing how broken the world is.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, There's gotta be something better than this.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's gotta be something more to to life than than just all this despair and and sin and pain.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that was when I started I I stopped kind of looking inward and I started to look upward.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I really started to say, well, maybe, maybe there is something to all this all this church stuff, all this God stuff.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: And uh from that moment on, I really that was the start of a long journey to um, you know, allowing Christ into my heart and being transformed by him and and conforming myself to him instead of trying to conform him to myself, you know.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's so beautiful, man.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what this Claymore battle plan, Jacob,'s about.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a handbook for young men and spiritual warfare.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's a two-edged sword.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: One edge fights on that battlefield of the human heart between love and lust, between be kind of a self-giving person and a grasper, a taker.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one, then it's once you understand that you gotta go out and you and you gotta you it's your action in the world that's gonna make a difference.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that me really makes that grace within us efficacious, right?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: It comes alive within us.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're finding.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: These young guys, Jacob, you you said it perfectly.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking for something more.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: They don't even know what it is.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's the guys that came out and voted for Trump in the last election, and now they're asking me, Jack, you know, now what do we do?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's still dark out there.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's a battle going there.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I still feel the battle here, and that's what it's all about.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us before we get going a little any deeper than this your uh organizations that you're that you're you're in.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: I am a member of the uh chaplaincy of the Holy Face of Jesus, which is the Latin Mass community here in Miami.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're a apostolate of the priestly fraternity of St.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Peter under our chaplain, Father Zachary Akers.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it's uh a really beautiful FSSP community.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: We uh we celebrate Mass at uh a beautiful chapel called Our Lady of Balein.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's a huge growing community of of a lot of young people, but people of all ages, who are devoted to these to this beautiful prayer and and liturgy.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also a member of some other ministries in the diocese and as part of my university, I'm uh a member of Students for Life, which is the chapter at FIU.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a pro-life organization.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we advocate for the unborn, for the most vulnerable in our society.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the vast majority of us also, you know, just happen to be Catholics within the club.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we do a lot of work.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, the vast majority of of my pro-life club at at FIU are Catholic.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: FIU is a very Catholic campus, you'd be surprised.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that's a pretty big campus, isn't it?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it is a lot of people.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a couple thousand.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: More than that, I think, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: At least like a maybe ten thousand?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's a huge campus.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a huge chunk of Catholics.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, our campus ministry is huge.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh how about the bishop must be okay down there, huh?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Archbishop Wensky, he's wonderful.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, I guess I can share this.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: We we plan on having him celebrate uh traditional pontifical high mass here in Miami at Our Lady of Balein sometime later this year.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was wondering whether that was confidential or not, but I realize Father Akers has said it in his sermon, so I realize I'm looking at it.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: He just turned 75.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, see, that's my that's I was hoping he'd be 65, right?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because you want him to stick around there, you know.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: You hopefully somebody.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's been around a long time.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you this.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: We want to talk a little bit about the traditional Latin Mass and why that that means something to you, especially for we we have a lot of young guys, just they're Catholic.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, the majority are Catholic.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: But some of them are just coming back into the church, you know, and they're only used to the Novus Ordo Mass, but they're hearing a lot about the traditional Latin Mass.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: We want you to to say why that's important to you.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But what do you find, uh Jacob, uh, when you look around the world and you see even shepherds in the Vatican pushing back on this l traditional Latin Mass, bishops all over the the diocese in the United States especially pushing back on this.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Does that worry you at all?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's it's a very uh it's a sad thing to see how, you know, uh there's been a lot of uh controversy surrounding it because, you know, I don't see it as an ideological thing really.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: I see it as shouldn't be just a beautiful, a beautiful thing of our faith.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, I I I know there are a lot of people out there, especially within the older generations, who um they feel a certain animosity towards it because of what it might represent to them.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, there's a lot of sort of stereotypes attached to the kinds of people who go to the traditional traditional mass.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh when I was younger, that was something that actually originally was keeping me away from uh coming to the Latin Mass was all these stereotypes and and people I would see on the internet who would say all kinds of crazy things.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: But when I actually said internet Jacob.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: When I decided to to go to, you know, the traditional mass and and actually interact with the people there, I realized, wait a minute, these are normal people.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're regular Catholics just like me.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so it's uh it's a tough situation out there.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not too different from our political situation, you know.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: We have all these notions about what the other side might be like, but once we actually talk to somebody, we realize, you know, we're all just people.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I have this I have this nefarious sense, especially during the last pontificate, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I I have this nefarious sense that they saw the young people grab it, you know, gravitating to the traditional Latin mass that were very reverent, very prayerful.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel I I don't think it was an ideological thing.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think they just wanted to squash those those seeds, you know, and and and I and I think still there's some you know, some shepherds in the church, unfortunately.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Look at you're a young guy, so I don't want to get you in a quagmire here.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But that was my feeling that you know I I you know I've been around for a long time.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, when I was a kid, uh I it w the traditional Latin Mass is what I attended, kneeling at the at the altar at the communion rail and etcetera, etc.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I remember it and then it was taken away.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the change for me, you know.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: But but I see that.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: But but what are your thoughts on that?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you you know and again you don't have to answer this if you don't want to.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to get you in any kind of trouble here.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Attack on reverence, attack on the sacred, you know, attack on young people that are looking for something more to your earlier words.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think um I think uh behind a lot of it is sort of uh, you know, a lot of these people they were formed either during or after the the sort of the sixties and seventies era within the church, which brought a lot of um of change and a lot of sort of upheaval, both within the church and without.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I think there was this um not spirit, but this sort of do you know what I mean?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was sort of the spirit of Vatican II, which is which is basically saying, I you know, let's take moral relativism into the Catholic sphere, and let's just take what we want to do already and let's use this as an excuse.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So so it was this this not the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of the age, really.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the spirit of the age is what I was the spirit of the age was the term that I was thinking of.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, I think a lot of our a lot of people, both within the clergy and you know, within a lot of laity as well, are sort of still kind of stuck in this spirit of the age of a previous age, really, which I would argue is a is a dated viewpoint because it really is is something that, you know, the the 70s are over.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: The sixties are over.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're we're past that point.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, unfortunately, Jacob, we're feeling we're feeling that brokenness though and that decline.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I I really have a sense, and I'm very excited when I talk to young Catholics that are getting this, there's something more.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean they have it all and they understand it all.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Look at I I'm I'm I'm a little older than you, and look at we're on a journey, right?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're on a journey.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: But that journey is toward what's true, good, and beautiful, isn't it?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you gotta seek that, you know, because it they could be a dark place today.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what are you finding?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: You you quote some stats.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you happen to have those in front of you, I especially the the Harvard stat you quoted, um some other countries.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're not the only ones.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: You you you mentioned the UK, France, Australia in there.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: The these are declining, the Western civilization is declining, especially in Europe.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're feeling that, of course, in the United States.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think the only difference between us and them at this point was this crazy Donald Trump uh getting in and giving us a little breathing space here and a couple of good bishops and cardinals that are allowing uh you know people uh to celebrate, say, the Latin the traditional Latin Mass.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Look at I I don't have one uh that I can go to regularly, so I go to the Novus Ordo.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Novus Oral can be very beautiful if they do it right.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the traditional Latin Mass is something different, isn't it?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: It really is.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's it's you're stepping into a different realm almost, you know.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's just it's like nothing that you're gonna encounter anywhere else.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, when when I put that cassock and that surplus on and yeah, talk about that a little bit because you're you're you're serving now.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, talk a little bit about that.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And also I just mentioned your YouTube channel because if people want to see what that looks like, you've done some good work on you know, kind of comparing it.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think our young audience especially, I think everybody though, our whole audience, this is gonna go out to everybody, I think they might be interested in that.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So those two things, Jacob.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my YouTube channel is called Altare Dei, which is Latin for altar of God.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it comes from the opening line of the traditional mass, which is Intro Ibo ad altare dei.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I will go into the altar of God.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: How beautiful.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's really good.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um I when I when I started learning the prayers of the Mass when I first started going, that that line always stuck out to me, that line, because that's when you say the prayers at the foot of the altar as the altar server, you you say that line, and then you pray Psalm 42 in the in the Due Rheims, but in the most Bibles it's forty-three, Psalm 43.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and then at the end of the Psalm you say it again, and it's this emphasis on I'm going into the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it's this it's it's this really is this expression of joy and and and hope.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Coming to the altar of God, you know, you can always come to that altar and just lay yourself down, kneel down at at that altar of God, where that where where our Lord lays himself down for you and you can lay yourself down for him.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just this expression of love, pure love for the the joy that lies within the Holy Mass.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll put make sure I'll put that link uh to YouTube if somebody wants to see that.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: If they haven't exposed to the Latin uh traditional Latin Mass, you might want to see that.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: The concern at Vatican II, if you if you take out the spirit of the age and actually uh understand what they were trying to accomplish with Sacrosanctum Concilium, which is which is one of their four constitutional documents on Vatican II, the four main ones, let's call them, was about the liturgy.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what they wanted to do, and I remember this, uh and I agreed with it because I remember my grandmother who came from Poland, very close to where John Paul was, close to Krakow, uh suburb actually of Krakow, and and uh where he was bishop and and anyways, she used to pray the the rosary while the mass was going on.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was a little bit it wasn't total, but it was a little bit of a disconnect in certain spots.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that what Vatican II was giving us an option to do was to try to get that engagement going because you I this is why I bring it up, Jacob, because you described an intimacy in that mass when you walked in, an intimacy that you experience.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what they were trying to do is is make a connection with everybody with this intimacy.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: That Sacrosanctum concilium, if somebody really reads it, that that that that mass that came out of there uh from Pope Paul the the the sixth later on was not that mass that's described in there.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was just very small changes actually.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Gregorian chant was supposed to stay in, Latin was supposed to stay in, facing east was supposed to stay in, and a couple other things.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was supposed to be just some vernacular we added in, the priests would turn a little bit more often and engage, right?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what happened.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So here here's my question to you.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do the young people they must feel this intimacy, this connection with the mass.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So how are they bridging that, Jacob?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: How are they bridging that that that gap?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, are they learning Latin or learning to follow the missile well?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or what is it to you?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's the key to these young guys to say, hey, go to the Latin Mass?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: You'll feel a little awkward at first, but this is what I experience, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I remember my first time going to the Latin Mass.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was totally lost.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was completely fish out of water, not knowing what I was doing, what was going on.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know, are those bells because of the consecration or are they something else?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on here?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it really was, you know, my first time stepping into this this otherworldly thing.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was so used to hearing everything in my own language and knowing exactly what was being said.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: But when I started going to the Latin mass, actually the after that first time, I we I mean, I was just in a daze, in a stupor.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I was I was you know I was brought to tears, even though I was so confused.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like I I had the the missile open on my phone and I'm like scrolling through and I'm scrolling up and down trying to figure out where the heck we are, and I I never I never did figure it out, but um I came out of that mass that mass thinking just wow, this is you know, this this is what heaven feels like.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I I dedicated a lot of time after that to learning what that mat the order of mass, what everything means, what's going on, and uh learning the Latin language, which is I would say now is my second language, even though I'm not I wouldn't say I'm fluent in it, but you study in it, can you study it down there?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: I uh I I pray the Divine Office in Latin, I pray the Mass in Latin.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it's uh it's a language that it's fairly easy to part of the curriculum.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can you actually take a course in Latin down at Florida?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not at FIU.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, okay.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe in Ave Maria, but that's uh that's a Catholic university.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was just curious.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was just curious.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you're doing it on your own.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: If there was, I would take it.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, no, totally self-taught since high school.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: I've just been uh you know, because priests don't even know it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're I've met young priests that didn't take it.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is insane.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: I yeah, it you know, you talk to a lot of priests and and they barely can the few times where they do use Latin in in a prayer, they'll they'll be stumbling through it, and I'm like, it's insane when some 19-year-old college kid knows more Latin than a Catholic priest.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's pretty crazy.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I I taught myself a lot of the Latin and and the structure of the Mass.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, I knew that I I always knew that I wanted to serve that mass.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because I I've been an altar boy for the Novus Ordo for for a long time, and so I've always valued that participation in the mass in a special way.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: So the Latin Mass, I I saw what all these altar servers were doing, and I'm like, even this is different, you know.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's this I like to call a regal sort of sense of it's almost like you're a soldier in the king's court, you know, but the court is heaven and the king is God, and uh the soldiers are like angels, you know, this liturgical worship, it reflects the worship of God in heaven.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I just I wanted to be a part of it.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I own a missile.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: I uh ironically, I bought the actual well, I received the missile as a Christmas gift from one of my friends after I started serving, but I would always print out the little proper prayers before I even had my missile so that I could could read along and and kind of catch up with with what was being said, and a lot of it just stuck, you know, and and so I can go to most Latin masses that I could go to, I would probably be able to understand the majority of what was being said without needing a translation.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because when you've really sat down and looked at, okay, what does this say in Latin?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: What does it say in English, and how do these Latin words become these English words?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: It just starts to make sense.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so I can listen to a lot of Latin words and Latin phrases, and they just make sense to me because I've uh you look at the definition of each word and and the translation, and maybe this is just how I study things, but it was something that just it just clicked, you know?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Latin Mass, I mean the proper prayers and the readings, they change every day.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: So that's something that I I that's why I use the missile.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the the ordinary of the Mass, you know, all the prayers that are said that don't change, those I uh I understand because they've I've I like to say that I've sort of the liturgy is up here and I was down here, so I kind of had to bring myself to the liturgy.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think what happened after Vatican II, sadly, was the liturgy was up here and the people were down here, and instead of you know trying to teach people the liturgy and teach people the Latin and help them help them to engage with the mass, we did the opposite.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: We brought the liturgy down, so we brought it into English and uh with with not necessarily the best translations.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we changed the structure of the mass, we made the mass more oriented around the people instead of being oriented around God.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's I mean that's the crux of it.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, look, and I I remember, like I said, when I was a kid bringing I was came into the Latin Mass and a month later there was a rock band in there, and it was a different story, uh Jacob.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, listen, I would love to talk about this longer, but let's talk about Gen Z.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you mentioned some stats, and if you have them, let's just talk about that a little bit.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what are you seeing?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: What are you seeing with Gen Z?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, what kind of movement is this?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we we're starting to see a movement, we know that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a mass migration, but it certainly is on a positive level.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: But but what are you seeing and where can you see this going?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I mean, if you're if you're a young Catholic who goes to a big parish, you've probably noticed this.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a Catholic in college, you may have noticed this.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: I started researching for a class of mine in my first year of college, last January, because we were writing research papers for our English class.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I decided, well, you know, this is something that I think about all the time, so I may as well do a research paper on it, which is Gen Z and Religion.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on with Gen Z?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: And when I started my research, the articles that came up in my feed were completely different from the articles that you would find today.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: There was this big wave between then and now of articles that came out which ultimately confirmed what I had always felt.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: So when I started my research, it was uh, you know, Gen Z is the least religious generation.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Generation Z is going to be minority Christian within the next couple decades.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: We're done.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Christianity's done because if you lose that last generation, Jacob, you're done.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we were hearing, right?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we were gonna be we were gonna be an old remnant with nobody young coming in.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what we heard.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Something happened.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think that was maybe a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of the media, too.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: But when I started researching And again, these crazy broken shepherds, and those are my words, not yours, uh Jacob.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's unfortunate.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: But we look at the um the Pew Research study that was driving a lot of this sort of pessimistic media about religion in America.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: When I started my my paper, there was this Pew Research study called Modeling the Future of Religion in America.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it was based on the assumption that Generation Z was going to continue switching from Christian to none, no religion.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it was there was no scenario presented where the switching reversed, where the disaffiliation reversed.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because the whole study was just if this continues at any rate, what's it gonna look like?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the best case scenario, I believe, let me take a look.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: The best case scenario was 54% Christian Generation Z.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, yeah, that's it.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, that's that's all Christians, 54%.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Generation Z less than that was less than that.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Generation Z was I think about 20%.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm looking through the study right now, but anyway.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was a bl very bleak, very bleak prediction that was being made.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: The media took this and ran, right?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: So every article that I saw was linking back to this study and was saying, you know, Generation Z is walking away from church, churches are dying, churches are shutting down, which to some extent was true, right?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: But it continues to be true in general, yeah.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, especially in places like Europe.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: But as I was researching this, I'm looking at all these articles that are are, you know, the sky is falling.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, you know, that doesn't sound right.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm every week, multiple times a week, I go to my my youth and young adult ministries at my parish, and they're growing and they're huge.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, the summer before I had gone to the student.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: When you say they're growing and they're huge, give us an an idea of an age age range, just where you see the biggest spark.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: The biggest spark I would say is in uh teenage and college age.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: So high school and college, I would say, is the biggest spark.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um as someone who has been in both high school and college, um, and and deals with both of those ministries.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I went to the Steubenville Youth Conference in Orlando uh the year before, and it was this summer conference here in Florida, and there were almost 2,000 kids there.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: There entirely because they wanted to be there.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: They were dancing, they were singing, they're praising the Lord and adoration, they're all reaching out their hands, they're they're all crying, they're they love Jesus so much.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm seeing all this, and I'm saying, This is the dying church?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I I knew by instinct, by both my parish, by the ministries that I'm a part of, and you know, eventually by my own campus ministry here at FIU as well, which is also growing, flourishing, that all this stuff that I was reading online, there's something not right here.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: These people are not caught up with what's really going on, and why is that?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that started to change on February 26, 2025, when Pew Research, the same people, put out a new study with the exact opposite headline.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: So here you had before this 2022 this this prediction, which in no case was this disaffiliation stopping.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: And now you have a headline from the same publication three years later, the exact opposite thing.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: It may have stopped.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: It may have leveled off.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: There it there was a lot of um like articles that were reporting this, like, wait, what's going on?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we were so sure that this was a a one-way street, that this was dying, that it was it was completely gone amongst the younger generations.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: But this was a uh a statistic from Harvard University from their cooperative election study that uh got picked up by uh I think it was first by Fox News or Yahoo, where they started saying that the Gen Z Americans identifying as Catholic went from 15% in 2022 to 21% in 2023.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's a jump of six percent, which would make up four point two million people in the United States.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that sounded more like something that I was that I sounded more like reality to me, right?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was watching this happen in real time, and it was well underway by the time that the media picked it up.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that they took a little while to pick it up.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they were a little too scared to admit it.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder with the Latin mass and what some of the things that we're talking about with with our apostolate for young men with Claymore, is that you know, this is the human heart, right?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: The human heart seeks something more.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that what happens with AI, what happens with all this propaganda, with all these lies, if you can get somebody to settle down just for a little while and quiet, I think that the traditional Latin mass in these quiet times, it's not a disconnect.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're actually connecting with their heart, you know.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're actually taking time off.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a little difficult.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just say this to young people that are listening now.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you try to be quiet for a minute, it's hard.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes a little, I'm bringing this up because it can be a little uncomfortable.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm sitting in silence, sometimes uh Jacob, it's the f and I want to hear you know your comment on this, but it's a little uncomfortable for people that are always, always, always scrolling, texting, and scrolling.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when you get into that silence, not only do you see the sacred, not only do you feel like you're being lifted up, but you're quiet for the first time, and you actually can hear somebody speaking to you.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I and and There's loved Latin in a way because they call it a dead language, but that means you can't twist and distort it with all kinds of sounds and abuse of the language, right?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: That we find today.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: People told me, uh just make it digital, uh, just put it out in videos.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, no, I want something they could hand they could hold in their hand and say, no, these words, I'm reading scripture here, I'm reading this, I'm reading this story, and it and it ain't gonna change.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got something solid.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll see if it works, uh Jacob, or not.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I have an idea.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's written not in long chapters.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it I know a lot of guys that don't read uh books right now.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna try to change that, but these are I call them acts, and they're very short, just like a sh like an article with QA, and they're meant for you and I to discuss.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so it's not like you got to sit down and read for hours, you know.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's 52 for 52 weeks, and so all of those things I'm throwing at you because I think it's the silence.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's getting away from all this noise.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I don't have to completely get away from my phone, you know, but I have to take time every day to get away from all of that noise, right?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Think about me.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: I live in Miami.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the noisiest, this is one of the noisiest cities in the United States.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, you can't you can't go five minutes without hearing somebody's you know, Bluetooth speaker playing salsa music or whatever it is.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: Or some reggaeton or something, you know.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's uh it's a it's a crazy going on down there, yeah.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: And there's some hustle and bustle everywhere you go.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I live in uh the suburbs, and even so it's it's it gets pretty loud.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: So imagine, you know, I grew up here.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: I was born and raised here.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: So everywhere you go, it's it's street noise, it's loud music, it's loud people.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's everything you could imagine.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's LED lights and screens and and billboards, and everything's right here.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: Everything's right here, right in your face.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's loud, it's bright, it's colorful, it's uh stimulating, and you even see that, you know, in a lot of the the churches that are, you know, Protestant mega churches that are very popular down here, ironically.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: You'll have your pastor and you'll have a big jumbotron behind him, you know?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: You'll have these LED lights and a rock band, right?
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who said that she she when she was younger, she went there once and she almost started crying because of the sensory overload.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a that's a phrase that we're gonna hear a lot more, and we've we've already started hearing it a lot from from people my age, is the phrase sensory overload.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we're just so sick of the dopamine and the just the stimulation every five minutes, every five seconds, you can't even watch a video online without another video under it playing at the same time in case you get bored.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's it's ridiculous.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's extreme.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what I love about the Latin Mass is that it takes that and it strips it all away.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, especially especially one of my favorite parts about the Latin Mass, which is that the Eucharistic prayer, the Roman canon, is said by the priest, but it is whispered.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you and I sitting in the pews won't really hear much, if anything.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so after the Sanctus, everything just goes quiet, and all you hear are the bells.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, people talk about wanting to to actively participate in the mass.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: I don't feel any closer to God at any other point than at that very moment, in that silence when the priest is saying those words quietly, and I see him lean over to consecrate that host, and that's when God speaks.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: God speaks in the silence, just as you were saying.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: For the same reason I love going to adoration.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Our adoration chapel at my parish is 24-7.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: So at any time, it could be 3 a.m., it could be, you know, 7 o'clock in the morning, it could be, you know, 3 in the afternoon.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: There's always that chapel open and ready to receive, and there's always somebody there.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh you should see it, you know, it gets packed sometimes.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's hardly any space sometimes because so many people.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: People, young people and so so young and old.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what happens, I think, uh Jacob, is that and and this is what's exciting to me, right?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Is that with this young generation growing up in the most toxic culture you can imagine, really the most toxic culture.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, from the sexual revolution, you mentioned the 60s and the 70s.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was alive then, and I I was, you know, it was alive and well, the sexual revolution, the wars going on.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: I had friends coming back from the Vietnam War that with no legs, one of them, and the other one on heroin.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, these were atrocious things.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't we didn't trust the government, we didn't trust anybody.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember just the confusion, right?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now it's even worse.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And but here's what excites me.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just like me, just like we talked about men throughout the ages are looking for the truth.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: What is the truth of things?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you see the human heart in action with these young guys, and this is why I started this apostolate.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's nothing I would rather do than journey with young men who are are starting to say, okay, what's going on?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to know the truth.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is in our DNA.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: We forget that we're created by God to seek the truth.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Re- our reason, intellect, seeks the truth, and then hopefully our will is like John Paul would say, a motor to the to to choose the good.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what you're finding, but it's very difficult.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and before you go, we can't numb ourselves anymore.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they're they're finding this out.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what would you say?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is impossible.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're saying that you know these numbers went from you know 15% to 21%, which is a big jump, like you said, 4.2 million people, it's a lot of people.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Will that trend?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm asking you to to prophesize here, which is is is impossible really, but do you think that trend will continue?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and the reason I the reason I'm asking, when we're sp out speaking, and let me ask you this is that trend mostly men, or would you say the majority are are men?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's what we're finding that the men not in maybe you you don't see this in the traditional Latin mass so much because we know that those women are s are coming to that.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: But in average, I'm I'm finding young men waking up faster than the young women who just seem like they're just caught up in this toxic culture.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well interestingly enough.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I understand what you mean.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: We're at a time, statistically, I don't think I talked about this in my article, but it was something that came up a lot in my research, even before the big wave of Gen Z flocks to Catholicism articles on Fox News and CNN, even was I was already seeing articles saying young men in Gen Z, and I think some millennials as well, were for the first time more religious than young women.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: That young women were leaving the church at a faster rate, and that uh young men were coming back to their faith at a faster rate.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think to some extent that is true.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I have seen it with men and women, especially in my own communities, but I will say when you see it amongst the men, it is very, very clear.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's very tangible, it's very, you know, there's no confusion about what's going on here.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: These young men are are wanting something deeper.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you talked about the 60s and you talked about just the the the sort of just the the despair and just all the terrible things that were going on.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was a time of cultural upheaval and and wars and all these horrible things.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: I personally I think that the time that we're going through right now is a lot like that time.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if it's if Fulton Sheen were alive today, I think he would have said a lot of the same things that people needed to hear.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because yeah, you're right.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: It is a it is a late it is a late stage version of this, but I think there's there's a lot of parallels between the time that you were growing up in and the time I'm growing up in is you know, protests every other week, and there's a new war every five minutes, and you know, nobody trusts our politicians, nobody trusts the government, no one knows who to trust.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: And there's these warring factions of people, and there's these competing views about what what the what life is, what what you know a family is, what the marriage is, what a woman is.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and people are just questioning their their own realities.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, for a lot of people this has led to a very existential crisis.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, people get led to to things like uh, you know, thinking that they are transgender or or you know, just depression and anxiety.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I went I I I saw all of it when I went to my high school.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was a middle high school, so I was there from sixth grade to twelfth grade, and it was an arts school.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you can imagine.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: I saw all of it.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: People who when you mix create I mean, you have create creative people who can take that in a lot of ways, can't you?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: That creativity.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, the devil can't create, he can only corrupt.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have his own clay, brother, does he?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: God gives us the clay, and it's uh it's you know, it's up to us.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the art, but it's in the artist's hands.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: The artist, the artist that you're going to school with, right, and the people that you're going to school with, God, God gives you those hands to make him visible.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can also make some pretty dark things.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: What did you find there?
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: And continue with your your thought there where you when you say that.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can be a great artist, I think, in in this with with talent, but you still have to find some light, don't you, you know?
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh or you can go to some dark, crazy places, huh?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I saw all of it growing up, but I I found that I, you know, going into high school, you know, coming back to my own testimony, going into high school, you know, this was such a low point for our society to be, you know, in this state where everyone was just messed up from what happened.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was unquestionable the the the psychological effects that it had on our our society.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember Now are you specifically talking about COVID now, or are you thinking about a a number of different things?
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think the time period, time when COVID came, it uh accelerated a lot of things that were already there.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: COVID, I don't think, created the the social anxieties that my generation experiences, for example, but I think it absolutely brought them out into the open and uh definitely evil was no longer hiding, Jacob, was it?
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's what it is.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think everybody just let's just pop up and see how much power, money, sex we can grab from everybody, you know, and it was nuts.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was nuts.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: And to come back to that point, I think, you know, a lot of the same feelings were there, you know, from from your generation and mine was this, you know, what's going on?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: We've got all these problems, we've got all these wars, we've got all these these crises.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: Really, it was just it's just a time of crisis.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: And in all this chaos, we've got to find some order, right?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think my generation is the one who's really digging for that order rather than just trying to numb the pain, because you can only numb the pain for so long.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh well, I know in my own life in my own life, looking for that order, it just led me to God, the author of order, you know?
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's what happens here and and the statement.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's an important statement, what you just said, Jacob.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I think we we we look over that too much, you know.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think we don't spend enough time in nature.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: We don't spend enough time not only at at mass or in prayer, but just walking through a forest.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think what you see in a forest, especially when you look around, is you see order.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, who created this order?
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever it was was an artist, was creative, but he had an order.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think that's what a good walk through the forest does.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, you you experience some quiet, and you know, all philosophy starts with awe and wonder, doesn't it?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what I think we connect to.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and it doesn't it's not a big leap, Jacob, is it?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you can get in the right frame of mind, get the garbage out for a little while, your heart can connect to God pretty fast if there's an urgency within you.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean you talk uh to people who are not even religious, and they'll say that.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: They'll say that there's something spiritual about that forest, those mountains.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up uh since my childhood going up to my dad's hometown in Vermont, visiting family, walking through those those liberal state, but beautiful.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: But it's beautiful, you're right.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it is, and there's just so much just peace and beauty in those areas.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: And you you walk down, you know, I I actually I I have written about this a little bit as well.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: Is just walking down like last year when I went up there, I went up there to Newport with my dad, and we were walking down this what I think used to be train tracks.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think they turned it into a bike trail.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we're just walking down it, and it's autumn.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's the height of autumn in October last year.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: Gorgeous.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it was my first time, you know, as a as a flatlander gr seeing some autumn leaves, and I was just awestruck.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm I'm looking around at the the leaves are just falling, and it's just it's just so beautiful, you know.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: This is natural beauty is is the the the it's just this beautiful standard of of of beauty.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you just you watch how the the orange leaves fall off and and the red squirrels running around and the the birds are singing, and there's just nothing like it.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing like it.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, that's totally spiritual.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: You walk around and you say, God, you're so good.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know St.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: John Paul II talks about that a lot, you know.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's not the only one, of course.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: But he loved to be in nature, right?
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: This handbook that I just wrote has a couple of acts, I call them, again, short chapters, X, that talk about nature and reconnecting.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, listen, we're starting to wind down on time, Jacob.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't I it's we should just leave it there because we're talking about beauty, and I should leave it there.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I have a I just had a call and the on the call it said, Jack, can you can you consider coming down and talking to this group of young men?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Yeah, of course, you know.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh but he said they have a problem.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the and and the problem is with pornography.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: And here here's what I want to ask you.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to talk about pornography.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: We all know the issues there, but most of the men that we meet have had they've all been exposed to hardcore porn.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's they've I almost I don't I don't think there's anybody that I met that hasn't been exposed, mostly by accident, when they were young.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've got some angry young men that I work with that were that are mad because their innocence was robbed from them.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: But here here's the point.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: This particular group, and here's why I want your advice this particular group of young guys are are coming back into the church, and this is a deacon that's kind of mentoring them, but they're having a hard time wondering what's wrong with pornography.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were me going down to talk to those guys look, and I speak about theology of the body all the time, and I I tend to do that.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Any advice for me?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: I here again, it's not just the problem isn't just pornography.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is they want to come back into the church, they don't see a problem with pornography, and there's a dislocate, like, and I and and I have a hard time myself just wondering why they wouldn't see that, but they're missing something, and I need to bring that piece into them.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Any advice?
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I'll be honest.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: As a as a a young man, I struggled with it at one point too.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, when I was in high school, that was a huge battle for me was overcoming that.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: And thank God it's been a long, long time since since I overcame that.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: But I I always, and I think every man truly does have this intrinsic feeling that they know it's wrong.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's something that they they have to hide.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, even you know, I would talk about it to other people in my in my school when I was when I was in high school.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: I would we we would talk about, yeah, you know, there's this, there's this shame that that you feel intrinsically, that you know that this is something you gotta hide.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's your conscience, that's the Holy Spirit is convicting you.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um when I finally decided that I wanted to be free of this this demon, I uh I really said, you know, God, I I don't want to do this anymore.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want you.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want I want to be uh a good Christian, and I know that this is something that is is going against my conscience, and I want to be free of this addiction and and to truly be, you know, my master of my impulses.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so ultimately gaining that self-control and uh putting my trust in God that you know I was gonna be able to pull through those temptations, that was a big deal for me.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and once I was free of it, my life changed forever.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: When this when this deacon and and and it came to me second uh through a second person, somebody that works with us said, Hey, here's this call that just came in.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: I I was wondering the same thing myself.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, I wonder if he got that wrong.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: In other in essence, I wonder if those guys weren't saying to him, look at we don't understand what's wrong with this.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because to your point, they they have to sense this, right?
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: They have to have a sense of this.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so what would you do to break that open and just say, you know, I mean, to bring them, hey, I've done look at this, isn't my first rodeo, you know?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm always looking for for angles and twists and and different things to say, guys, you know, you said this that you don't see anything wrong with it, but I I don't think you're being honest with yourself or with uh with us.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, or or is there another approach to that?
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great way to do it because I think, you know, as much as a person thinks that they want that, you know, it is a a disordered desire.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we have this desire to be.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that's what it is, Jacob?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think it's they just don't want to give that up?
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I I mean, in essence, I think they want to come back into church and say, you know who wrote about this was C.S.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, the Great Divorce.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh if anybody wants to take it, it's the lizard of lust.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great I don't have time and I don't want to keep you too long, but if you get a chance, the great divorce, it's a little bit rough to read at first, but it's this busload of people getting a second chance, and they're bringing them toward heaven and this bus.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: These are like ghost, wispy people that are gonna go to hell if they if they get this last chance.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy has this lizard of lust on his shoulder, and there's the he's getting close to heaven.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: This bus is dropping, some guys are off, and and they're getting close.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Oh, let's not get any closer.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: These whispering to them, let's not get any closer to this, you know.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be good, I'll be quiet, I won't bother you anymore.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and and one of the big angels is coming down and he said, Hey, come on a little closer.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy's whispering, no, I don't want to get any closer, you know.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be quiet, I'll be good now.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so this wispy, kind of uh oily uh ghost of a man looks up at the angel and he goes, No, we're gonna turn around now, you know, we we're not gonna get too serious about this.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: I brought this guy with me, I should have never brought him with, but he goes everywhere with me, lust, right?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: The lizard of lust.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the big angel says, uh, Jacob, he says to him, Do you want me to kill him?
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, No, don't kill him.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want, and this is the point, right?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to kill him.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just want you to have him, you know, just be quiet when I'm close to you and stuff.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I better just turn around and go back down the mountain, you know?
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Let me kill him.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let me kill him.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then he starts to grab him and he says, but you have to say yes.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: You have free will, you have to say yes.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: But if you say yes, I'll kill him.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he and he says, Okay, okay, do it.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm kind of cutting to the chase, right?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: So the angel grabs the lizard and he and he starts to hurt himself.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: This man starts to hurt in inominably, just to his heart.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, I thought you said it wouldn't hurt.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I didn't say it wouldn't hurt.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: I said I'm going to kill him.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: I said it won't kill you, but I didn't say it wasn't going to hurt.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: So he takes the lizard, he breaks his back, he throws him down.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the end, Jacob.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to tell you about it because in case you don't get a chance to read it.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a somebody that's writing this down, you know, an outside person that was also on the bus, and he's the eyewitness.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, So I thought it was all done.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I look over, and all of a sudden, that wispy, oily ghost, ooh, he's got a big shoulders.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he's he's he's growing some, he's got legs.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a muscular, strong man.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's almost as big as that angel that was there.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Then I looked over at the lizard and I go, I thought he something went wrong.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's not dead.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he's got I see a uh a golden tail coming out of him.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: I says, What is that?
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's still not dead.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: The angel must not have killed him.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I look back again, he's grown to a stallion and he grows into this beautiful stallion.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this man looks up at the stallion that used to be lust, that was untwisted, undistorted now by God, right?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: And now that same power, that same what he was trying to push down or trying to get rid of, or indulging that same Eros, Plato would call it, huh?
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: That eros, that desire now is open.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's the third way, open to God.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the most important thing we could tell young men, and what I would tell them, is don't try to push those passions and desires down.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: God gave them to you.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is with your twisted, distorted passions and desires.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: Don't indulge.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: You already did that a million times.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't work.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is the third way.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned this already, to be in prayer, to open up and just say, God, come into those temptations.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: Temptation's not a sin, Jacob, is it?
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: God Jesus himself was tempted.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: Invite God into those, invite Christ into those temptations, and you'll you'll be praying.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's an invitation to prayer.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I'm tempted, look at I'm tempted not only with those kind of things, but you know, I'm tired, I don't want to get up, I don't want to go to mass, whatever.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a million things, right?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'd rather scroll on my phone.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: But those temptations, if offered up, can actually be an invitation to prayer and get you going to heaven.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing how it works, you know.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we got to untwist those desires.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: I I think all of those things can happen.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And reason I want to bring that up at the end, because if these guys are sitting in prayer, Jacob, and I'll give you this last word, if they're sitting in the traditional Latin mass, these temptations are gonna flood into their brain because they've been in they've been inundated with this stuff.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't come out.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: What I would just say to help these young guys is those are not temptation is not a sin.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: Just you can't do nothing.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Offer them up, and every time you offer them up, you have an invitation to prayer, and when you see the next young lady that you see or an image comes in your mind, you pray with them and for them.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't try to stuff them down.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: I say I see the beauty of that woman.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: I pray for her, with her, and I and I and I pray for my heart to lift her up to you.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna take work, Jacob.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't happen overnight, does it, brother?
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, yeah.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's a struggle.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's one that's worth the worth the f yes it is, because that's freedom, isn't it?
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's true freedom to be able to look outside, uh, walk through a force, but also walk through a crowd of of beautiful people, including women, and not have to look down or anything, right?
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: And just say, Oh, thank you, Jesus, for the beauty of that woman, you know.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's freeing, my brother.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh really freeing stuff, you know.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Jacob, you're you're you're you're a gift.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're a gift, man.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Keep it up.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you have any uh articles that you're writing, any new videos, shoot them my way.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully you have my contact information there.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: If not, I have your email and I'll shoot it to you when I put this up and uh stay in contact with you.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: We need good young guys like you to stay in contact with.