Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #742 Family, Culture, and Patriotism--The Soul of a Nation

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#742 Family, Culture, and Patriotism--The Soul of a Nation · Claymore: Become Who You Are

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast production of the John Paul Toury Newal Center.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm Jack Riggridge, your host.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: As we approach the 250th year anniversary of our nation's founding, there's a battle going on for the soul of our country.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: And I want everybody to understand it.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: This episode is titled Family Culture and Patriotism: The Soul of a Nation.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: And before I go any further, I just want to remind everybody that I'm going to be in Bridgeport tomorrow night, Wednesday, and I want to invite you to join us for an event.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a fun event.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: It's called America's Catholic Comeback.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a live podcast that I'm going to record with John Kruger, who's a Gen Z author and speaker, a very dynamic person, is going to address the movement of young people, especially young men, into the Catholic Church.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: So tomorrow night, Wednesday, June 24th, 6 o'clock p.m., St.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Mary, a perpetual help Catholic Church.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: They're in Bridgeport, Illinois.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: I'll have a link in the show notes.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: And uh we're in the catacomb.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: It's really, it's been newly done.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: It's fantastic.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: It's a great space down there, a great place to meet.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: We're going to have mass at 6 o'clock.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: If you can make mass, make it.
1:10
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, at 7 o'clock, we'll be down into the catacombs.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: We're going to have uh reception, dinner, bourbon, wine, cigars.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: Of course, you've got to be over 21 to do all those kind of things, even though you can be 18 to 21 to get in there.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: So I hope I get a chance to see you all there.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: All right, as America approaches its 250th anniversary, we the people find ourselves a divided nation engaged in a spiritual civil war.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: This conflict echoes our original struggle for independence and that war, the civil war between the North and the South.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Yet its roots reach much deeper to humanity's first appearance in the ancient deception in the Garden of Eden.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: The battle we are now in for our country has deeper roots that go all the way back to the level of the individual human heart, your heart, my heart, the battle between truth and falsehood, good and evil.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: It's as old as humanity itself.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: Yet many Americans have been stunned to witness a nation once known as the land of the free increasingly embrace secular and atheistic assumptions.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Freedom can't last in a secular world like that.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: We've seen that over and over again.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: Yet the neo Marxist ideals are celebrated while Judeo-Christian values and moral truths are often ridiculed or pushed to the margins of public life.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: After decades of cultural revolution, God has been driven from many schools, institutions, the centers of influence, replaced by moral confusion, relative relativism, disorder, despair.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: We see this.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: For those of you who you are young, especially, you know, you grew up with that proverbial frog and you don't know any difference.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: But yet somehow the human hearts of these young people we're meeting are waking up.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Yet, what's new in this battle now, what's historically new between this truth and falsehood, good and evil, was summed up by Father Gerald Murray the other day as he reviewed the Vatican study group number nine that I recently covered on an earlier podcast.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: So for today, I'll just say essentially it promotes homosexuality and features moral relativism that we're going to build the city of man in essence.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, basically God has put on the sidelines.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: We don't understand what he meant, but we're going to discern this by the spirits of the age, whatever spirits they're listening to, right?
3:34
SPEAKER_01: And so it features in there Vatican study group number nine, promoting this homosexual ideas and ideals, features the detailed testimonies from two men, two different couples living in civil same-sex marriages, presenting them as models of our faith journey.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: Father Murray, who's a canon lawyer and a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, was direct.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: He said in a written response published at the Catholic Thing, he declared the Vatican-sponsored destructive subversion must come to an end.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: It must come to an end now, he said, because souls are endangered by the scandalous false teachings being propagated by the Synod.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: This endless synod of synodales, this talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, right?
4:21
SPEAKER_01: In essence, God out, man's going to figure this out.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: And these are these are the prelates.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: These are our shepherds sitting here in a big uh kumbaya circle, figuring out how they feel about things.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, you you can't make this stuff up.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: Pope Leal, he said, needs to strengthen.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: This is Father Murray again.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: Pope Leal needs to strengthen the brethren in the faith by putting an end to this poisonous betrayal of God's truth.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: Father Murray added that while the church has always endured attacks from outside, and this is what's historically different, you guys, it's only been in the recent years that many Catholics have witnessed sustained challenges to settle doctrine emerging from within the church herself, particularly through the synod process, he said.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Yet aboard a recent papal flight, instead of defending the truths of our faith, when asked about Cardinal Reinhardt Marx's authorization for blessings for same-sex couples in Germany, and remember these the Germans have been off the reservation for a long time, especially from a moral sexual uh standpoint.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: Ask like how is unity within the church going to be preserved if you allow this to go on and this crazy synod, uh Vatican group number nine.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, Pope Leo the 14th responded, which shouldn't surprise guys like uh me or the audience that's been listening to me for many, many years, because Pope Francis, of course, started this, and Leo was very clear on this, even though we hoped for something different.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: He said he was going to follow, follow Hindus and even refine all of these all of these twisting and distortion of doctrine.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: And so Pope Leo the Fourteenth responded this way.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: First of all, I think it's very important to understand that the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And in reality, I believe there are much greater and more important issues such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, uh freedom of religion that would all take priority before that.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: First of all, I think it's very important, he said, to understand that the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: I believe there are much greater and more important issues such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion that would all take priority before that particular issue.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: If you listen to those words, huh?
7:00
SPEAKER_01: Equality, you know, social justice.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: You can twist and distort those things very, very uh quickly.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Freedom of religion.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, you're not going to have freedom, any kind of free freedom, unless we have liberation from sin.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: That always starts there.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: And human sexuality is the primordial sacrament.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: This is the most basic.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: Marits in the family is the most most basic basic building block of every civilization.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: And it was, as Jesus pointed it back to in Genesis chapter one, in the very, very beginning.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: This is the most important thing.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: So what did he do?
7:33
SPEAKER_01: He steps back from that, says, hey, it's not about sexual morality.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: It's about social justice, it's about equality.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: Basically, a DEI uh revolution of man, you know, we'll figure this thing out.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: We got this thing covered.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: The heck what the Bible says, the heck with our faith says.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: And I get a little mad at that, you know, because what he did is he set up everything that's following right now, and it's following very, very quickly.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: This pushing of Father James Martin and the gender ideologies and whatever you think about all those things.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: This is not Catholic teaching.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: And so what happens with Catholics and these young Catholics striving to live out their faith, especially these young people entering the church, this is a deliberate downplaying of sexual morality, and it creates profound confusion.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: And it rests on a false separation between sexual morality and justice, a division that Catholic tradition has always rejected.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: Pope John Paul II taught that chastity and justice, so chastity and living according to nature's laws, natural law, natural moral law, the moral law written on our hearts.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Just nature itself would tell you that it takes a man and a woman to have a child and bring life into the world, right?
8:47
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II said, look, you can't take that away from justice and social justice and all those things and equality.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: They all come together.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: You don't just take pieces out and say, no, forget about this.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: We can do anything we want here.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: And look at he didn't just come right out and say that, but this is what what they're teaching.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: And he didn't push back against this, right?
9:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh these are uh a lot of prelates in the church that who are practicing homosexuals, and some just give in to moral relative relativism, some just don't have their faith.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's all kinds of reasons for this.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: Some are maybe just confused, you know.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: I I don't think they can be naive.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, they're the most well-educated people on the on the planet.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: So again, you don't separate all these things.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: This is all basically just who we are as human beings.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: And so John Paul II wrote about the human person in Evangelium Vita, which is the gospel of life, and he warned this.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: He said it's an and he's really concentrating on young people again, too, but all of us.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: He said it's an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of life, of human life, if we do not help the young to accept and experience their sexuality and love according to their true meaning.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: Only a true love is able to protect life.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: And he was really talking about uh a number of things there, but especially abortion.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, if it's not true love, we'll even demand the right to kill our own children.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: We're seeing that.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, when sexuality, our sexuality or human sexuality, is detached from truth, procreation, self-giving love, the consequences are never private.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: And here's why it's important.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: You can say you can be pastoral, and of course we all want to be pastoral.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: In other words, Jesus, you know, out through the gospel, he always said, I don't condemn you.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: I came to save you.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: And he would heal them, uh, he'd bring them into the gospel, into his life.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: But then he would always go out and say, But then go out and sin no more.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: And this is the difference.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Don't say go out and sin no more.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: They say there is no sin, everything's fine, it's kumbaya, right?
10:51
SPEAKER_01: But here's what we see, and and and look, and I'm preaching to the choir, I know, but just if there's any confusion, when our sexuality is detached from the truth, procreation, self-giving love, the consequences are never private.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: They radiate through the whole culture.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: And you see this in our in our culture today in so many different ways as playing out, right?
11:13
SPEAKER_01: And the young people are feeling this.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: The cultural battles now dominating a public life were all often described as fights over policy, rights, left versus right, uh, Democrat versus Republican, or personal identity.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: But beneath all the slogans, uh love is love and the LBGTQ flags lies a more fundamental question.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to be human?
11:37
SPEAKER_01: When a society loses its confidence in the meaning of the human person, male and female, embodied, rational, ordered toward family and responsibility, it does not merely revise a few moral norms.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: It begins to erode the foundations on which justice, freedom, social trust depends, all those things that that Pope Leo mentioned after sexual morality.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: But again, when when when you take down marriage in the family, when you when you when you tell a person it doesn't matter uh if you're male or female, that sexual relations you could have at any time with anybody, it doesn't merely revise a few moral norms.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: It erodes the foundations upon which all those other words that that Pope Leo and these others are mentioning, justice, freedom, social trust depends.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, you you lie about what it means to be a human person.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: There's no truth that comes out in anything else.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: And so the deepest casualties are not the loudest activists or the most powerful institutions.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Who are they?
12:43
SPEAKER_01: The victims are children and young people who inherit this confusion, where they should have received clarity, formation, and hope.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: This is what Father Gerald Murray was calling Pope Leo XIV out.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: Bring clarity, formation, and hope to these young people who are experiencing anxiety, depression, even some suicidal thoughts.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: Well, where do they get that from?
13:07
SPEAKER_01: The mental illness isn't in their hearts.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: The mental illness is out there trying to get into their hearts, and we have to stand up for the truth.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: So where are we?
13:15
SPEAKER_01: As Sister Lucia, the main visionary of Fatima, only died in 2005, not so long ago, same year John Paul II did.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: And she wrote what?
13:25
SPEAKER_01: We are in the last great battle.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: And this last great battle between our Lord and Satan is going to be over what?
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Marriage in the family.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: This is what we're seeing playing out today.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: For Christians, this is not primarily a matter of partisan alignment, cultural nostalgia.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: It's a question of truth.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: Whether human beings are created with meaning and purpose, or whether it's just accidents, atoms hitting atoms hitting atoms, whether identity just can be endlessly remade by desire, technology, power, dissonative synodalities.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: The Christian tradition insists that freedom is not self invention without limits.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: It's the capacity to live in accordance with what's true, what's good, what's beautiful.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: That conviction has consequences.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: It means that the moral life cannot be reduced to just private preference, and it means the body, sexuality, marriage, family are not secondary topics to be set aside.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: Whether they become inconvenient or controversial, the truth is the truth.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: Some church leaders, including Pope Leo XIV, now suggest that debates over sexuality should take a back seat to supposedly greater concerns such as justice, equality, and freedom.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: This is a false separation.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: Sexual morality is not a distraction from justice.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: It's one of the places where justice begins.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: If the body has no stable meaning, if marriage is detached from its unitive, right, coming together the bond, and procreative, bringing new life in the world, if motherhood, fatherhood, childhood are treated as negotiable constructs that we just make up, then the language of rights and equality quickly comes what?
15:08
SPEAKER_01: It becomes unmoored from reality.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: This is what we're seeing today with abortion, the same-sex marriage.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: We've redefined marriage in the family.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: We're now buying and selling kids.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, you don't know how tragic this is until you meet some of these young people that have gone through some of this stuff.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: The result is not liberation, but fragmentation, a society less capable of protecting children, sustaining families, or teaching sacrifice and responsibility, responsibility to say as a father, to father a child, then to be their support, raise them.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: So many of these young people, like in the inner city of Chicago, are born without fathers in the home.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: And how do we expect them to know how to behave, how to succeed in life, how to bring love and truth into the world?
16:00
SPEAKER_01: This is why the modern state's growing role in redefining human identity should alarm all of us, religious or not.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: Again, I start out with the 250th anniversary of our country.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Now why am I bringing all these issues in?
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Because if we don't get this right, it won't ripple in and create a culture of life and a nation of life.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: A political culture that normalizes abortion, commercial surrogacy, gender medicine for minors, a reduction of the family life to a lifestyle preference instead of what nature is built it on, and natural law has built it on.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: And revealed truth, of course.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: It's not just neutral.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: It's teaching a worldview, one in which the strong decide what bodies mean.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: And the institutions ratify those decisions.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: We saw this with Biden.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: Remember he brought in Richard Levine, a man who thinks he's a woman, put him in charge of our mental health and health for the whole nation.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: This is the insanity of this.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: And he was pushing these gender ideologies on our children.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: And again, it's when those institutions ratify those decisions, the children always bear the cost, the most innocent among us.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: However, these policies are marketed, they leave behind real consequences.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: You see it in the culture today, instability, fatherlessness, loneliness, demographic decline, the generation increasingly formed by what?
17:29
SPEAKER_01: Screens, ideologies, bureaucracies rather than families, faith, and local communities.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: These attacks on the human person began all the way back in the Garden of Eden.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: But what finally woke up so many is the reality when it became upfront and personal, when the COVID era, right, just five, six years ago, dramatically accelerated this war on both God and man made in his image.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: Few have forgotten the World Economic Forum's chilling proclamation.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: Remember this?
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Especially the young people, you will own nothing and be happy.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, isn't that where they are right now?
18:06
SPEAKER_01: They can't afford a house.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: They can't afford so many different things that they want, you know, so they put off marriages and the families.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: This is something, right?
18:15
SPEAKER_01: You will own nothing and be happy.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, they own nothing, but I don't see a lot of happiness coming out of that, right?
18:21
SPEAKER_01: It's no coincidence that as secularist and atheistic ideologies have spread, individual liberties have come under increasing pressure.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: Many people around the world now feel what?
18:33
SPEAKER_01: Powerless, governed by elites?
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Look at in Europe right now.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: They're arresting more people per capita than any country in the world, in the UK, for social media posts that they don't like.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: So what happens?
18:46
SPEAKER_01: These elites are totally disconnected from the people they claim to serve.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget Pope Francis himself.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: He took this opportunity during COVID to shut down mass across the world for the first time in human history.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: This is new.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: He pushed the jab in the Vatican against Catholic teaching and the freedom of conscience.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: He participated in the worship of the Pachamama, an earth goddess, a wooden carved man-made idol, and prayed it around St.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Peter's Square.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: You can't make this stuff up.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: He would not see in at the Vatican faithful bishops who wanted to see him to question him on all these things, including the twisting and distortion of marriage, etc.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: But yet he promoted at the very same time heretics like Father James Martin, who pushed radical gender ideologies.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: And when we see the men he promoted, the cardinals, putting them in highest positions even here in the United States.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: And these are his voices here in the United States to promote that same agenda.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: Nobel laureate Alexander Schultzen, you've heard me talk about him on a number of occasions, endured eight years in the Soviet gulags, and he understood this dynamic immediately.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: In 1983, he gave Templeton addresses, and he had one that he called godlessness, the first step to the gulag, and he traced the Russian Revolution and the communist tyranny to a long process of secularization, taking God out of the culture that severed the people from God and traditional Christian morality.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: His conclusion was simple yet devastating.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: What happened?
20:26
SPEAKER_01: How did this happen?
20:27
SPEAKER_01: How did the gulags and the communism come, taking away human rights?
20:31
SPEAKER_01: He said this simple thing.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: Men have forgotten God.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: That's why all this has happened.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: In the gulags, Solskjaer Nitsan discovered that the line dividing, and this is so important, this is so important.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: You say, where did all this come from?
20:47
SPEAKER_01: Well the line dividing good and evil runs not merely through systems or ideologies, but through the heart of every human being.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: Evil is not only out there external, it's confronted and it must be resisted first within ourselves.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: The parallels to America's current moral and cultural struggles are striking.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: As Christ warned, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: Saint John Paul II, who lived under both Nazis, their Nazi occupation first, and then when the Nazis were forced out, the communist oppression came.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: He understood he grew he was twenty when all of this happened.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: He had lost his family already, and he understood how evil takes root, how it grows, how it eventually unleashes suffering among all the people, especially among the most innocent and the faithful.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: The communists always did what?
21:40
SPEAKER_01: They weakened marriage in the family, they took out the churches, and they allowed things like abortion.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: This is always the anti creation.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: You know, Satan doesn't have his own clay.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: He can only twist and distort what God has created good, and he starts with our own hearts.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: Godlessness, John Paul II warned, is often the First step toward tyranny.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And in his last book he wrote, so he died in 2005.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: This was published in 2005, Memory and Identity.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: Incredible book.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II reminds us that every nation possesses a soul.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: And again, if you have the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, this is in there too.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: A nation is not defined primarily by borders, he said, or armies or economic systems, but by its people, their shared memories, their traditions, their faith, sacrifices and hopes.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: He wrote a nation is a community of people bound together by culture, their history, their common good.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: What binds that all together again is our Christian faith here in the United States is what made us the most prosperous, successful country in the history of the world.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: So the health of any nation therefore rests upon the moral vitality of its citizens.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: A society that forgets its spiritual roots eventually decays from within, regardless of how prosperous it may be on the surface.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Culture is the vessel that carries a people's soul.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: What is culture?
23:10
SPEAKER_01: Things like language, art, literature, customs, moral vision.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: Culture transmits the collective memory of a people's encounter with truth, beauty, and goodness.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: So all of us, right, with this moral moral underpinning of Christianity, take our skills, whether we're writers, architects, um, whatever we do, you know, even creating businesses out in the world, we also bring justice with them.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: We bring what's true with us, we bring what's good with us and how we treat our employees, how we build our businesses, etc.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: When a culture then severs itself from moral truth, it becomes hollow and vulnerable to manipulation by ideologies and raw political power.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, in the United States during COVID, you saw this with the with the really a corrupt Biden administration was amazing.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: And don't forget they didn't start this thing either.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: Obama was worse than him, and this is this battle's been going on a long time, both in the church and in the circular world.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II witnessed this reality firsthand in Poland.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: It was conquered, it was partitioned, it was occupied for generations, but the Polish people never lost their identity.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: Their Catholic faith, their family life, their language, songs, and prayers sustained them like a hidden heartbeat.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: They went underground, right?
24:28
SPEAKER_01: Foreign armies could occupy their land, but they couldn't conquer their souls.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: This principle applies to every nation, including our own.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: When families, cultural virtue, schools teach the truth, and the arts reflect beauty and moral order, a nation flourishes.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: When truth is mocked, when vice is celebrated, the foundations begin to what?
24:50
SPEAKER_01: Crumble.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: It can't stand up.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: Remember this this pyramid in front of you, like a two-dimensional triangle held up by the individual human heart coming out of marriage and the family on one end, Christ and the church on the other end, they're united and form that base and everything else that Pope Leo was talking about flows from here.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: Without marriage and the family, united to Christ and Church, it all crumbles.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: So of course what he's saying is just in essence is a mockery of Catholic social teaching.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: But when truth is mocked and vice is celebrated, the foundations begin to crumble.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: Disorder in the individual heart weakens the family, weaken families fractures society, and social chaos invites those who create power to impose greater control.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: This is why the Democrats love this, right?
25:42
SPEAKER_01: Create chaos, and then you become the solution to the chaos that you created.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: It's unbelievable, huh?
25:49
SPEAKER_01: But this is how tyranny always starts.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II repeatedly warned that belief in a perfect social system, like we say socialists or the Marxists, you know, the vote for Mom Donny, say as a mayor in New York.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, they they think they're capable of eliminating evil.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, it inevitably leads to coercion, deception.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: Politics then becomes a substitute for religion, promising an earthly paradise.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that what the communists and the socialist always promise?
26:20
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to work, we don't have to be responsible.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: It's them, it's the rich.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Tax the rich, take their money, etc.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: No political order, however noble its aspirations are, can ever replace the kingdom of God.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: This is how I link again how I started to now.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Patriotism, the love of country as we approach our 250 years, rightly understood is the love that binds us to our moral and cultural inheritance, what's been given to us, it's gratitude for gifts and sacrifices we did not create ourselves.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: Authentic patriotism inspires service, generosity, humility, and fidelity to human dignity.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: It seeks to build and heal rather than nearly boast.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: The love that begins here in the family with gratitude for parents, grandparents, ancestors, the land that they helped form us in.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: A man who rightly loves his homeland, his country, learns to cherish what's is good without arrogance, and to reform what is corrupt with courage and humility.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: We stopped doing that for too long.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: We just took these gifts given to us and we just took them for ourselves, and we squandered it, and now we live in a cr in a nation of corruption.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: Patriotism thus becomes a moral discipline, the responsibility to preserve what is noble and to purify what is flawed, starting in our own hearts, and then taking this out into the world, wherever we go into the world.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: Yet John Paul II also cautioned us that patriotism that we're talking about here is never just an ideology either.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: Because love of country detached from truth and justice, and I just love this country no matter what they do.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: We have to be careful, right?
28:07
SPEAKER_01: Because we don't love our laws that give us the right to murder our own children, we can't go along with that.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: So we have to make sure it's it's not detached from truth and justice.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: It can mutate into what's called nationalism that exalts one people at the expense of others.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: No, we can't take advantage of others either.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean we have to support everybody else, but we can't just use them either.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: If we we no longer have a gratitude for our country, a love for truth and justice and the way we treat each other and other people, it gives way to an arrogance with a nationalism.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: This is the difference between patriotism and nationalism.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, patriotism says, hey, we're thankful for all these gifts, and we want to add to those gifts.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: We are responsible for that.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: Nationalism says, hey, I'm arrogant.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, we built the greatest country.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, did you, maybe you're a little part of it, but the founding fathers have been passing this down to us with heavy sacrifice, personal sacrifices.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: And so we give way to arrogance.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: Unity dissolves into division.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: You take God out, there's nothing to hold us together anymore.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: Everything becomes moral relativism, right?
29:16
SPEAKER_01: Poland again offers a powerful example.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: During the darkest years of occupation, Polish patriots risked everything, not merely for political independence, but for the nation's moral soul.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: Underground schools taught forbidden history and also literature.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: Priests celebrated the Eucharist in secret, in apartments very quietly.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Parents whispered prayers to their children by candlelight.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: This was patriotism in its purest form, quiet fidelity to truth amid oppression.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: We have to keep this in mind, no matter who's oppressing us or when, and how bad it could get, we have to remember to do these things.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Don't give up.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: Don't give up.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: This life is very, very short.
30:00
SPEAKER_01: In this light, patriotism is not merely political, right?
30:04
SPEAKER_01: It's profoundly spiritual, and it unites love of homeland with love of God, recognizing that every culture has a place within the divine plan.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, if you read the catechism of the Catholic Church in number two hundred two two three three nine, read number two two three three nine.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: It calls love of country a duty of gratitude and an order of charity of love.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: For today's young people, the challenge is to rediscover this noble vision amid cultural fragmentation and moral relativism.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: They must learn once again to love what is true, good and beautiful in their heritage, not by ignoring the faults, by confronting them with hope and conviction.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: They become a catalyst for true change.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: To be a patriot today means defending the family, enriching culture, and striving to live virtuously.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: It means loving one's country enough to call it to greatness through holiness, courage, and sacrificial service.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: Patriotism, rightly lived, becomes an act of discipleship, grounded in the gospel, modeled by Christ Himself who wept over Jerusalem and longed for its renewal.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: When nations remember that they possess souls, and that those souls must be nourished by truth, goodness, and beauty, renewal becomes possible.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: Transformation always begins in the interior life of its citizens.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: As John Paul II famously taught, the future of humanity then will pass by way of the family.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: If we don't have strong families, everything unravels.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: When families though are strong, culture is virtuous, and citizens love their country with ordered charity.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: The nation will not then merely endure, it will flourish once again.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: Here's your action steps.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: Renewing our nation begins with renewing ourselves, our families, and then going out and renewing our communities.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: If you're concerned about the future of America and the next generation, don't remain on the sidelines.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: We've been doing that for too long.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: How do you do this?
32:04
SPEAKER_01: Read and share the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook for young men and spiritual warfare.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: Use it with your sons, your grandsons, your friends, your parish, your groups, all the people that are in your social circle.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: And don't forget that young women are attracted to young men.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: This is for them too.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: The battle for our culture will not be won primarily through politics or programs.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, when you listen to the socialists and the Marxist promising these things, it's just an illusion.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be won by forming men and women of virtue who are grounded in truth, strengthened by faith, committed to living the gospel.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Join the growing grassroots roots movement here with Claymore Militus Christi, soldiers for Christ.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: Together we're building a network of families, mentors, leaders dedicated to restoring human dignity, strengthening the family, and renewing our nation, one soul at a time.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: It's just a person passing to the next person, passing to the next person.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: We make it easy to share it.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: And the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook has the whole thing, all three of those steps in.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Get your heart back, understand marriage and the family, make that strong, united to Christ and the church, and then like Jesus said, go out into my vineyard to restore the culture and the nation.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: And it's all in there.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: It's beautiful.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: Claymore Militus Christie dot com.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: Visit the website.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: The battle for the next generation will be won one soul at a time.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: Someone God has already placed on your path is waiting.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: And if not you, then who's going to step forward and save them?
33:36
SPEAKER_01: Save our soul, save our country.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: You do it.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: God will show you.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: You just take the Claymore Battle Plan handbook and God will just put the people in front of you.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: It's happening all over the place.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: By the way, a lot of this material, if you have the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook already, go back and review it in Act 47.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: All right.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions, let me know.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: And hopefully I see some of you tomorrow, Wednesday, Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Bridgeport, Chicago, Illinois.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: And uh say hello to me.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: Hey, God bless you.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for being with the 10 years.