Latest / The Catholic Current / Novel Prophecies Pt. 4 - Benson’s “The Dawn of All” (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 8/7/26

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Novel Prophecies Pt. 4 - Benson’s “The Dawn of All” (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 8/7/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert
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Matthei. When I think back to the Apostolic Fathers,
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those who learned at the feet of the Apostles,
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I mean, imagine hearing the voice of Saint John
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describe embracing the risen Lord. That would be a
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life-altering thrill. But to quote the poet, the thrill is gone,
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isn't it? You're right. And you know, I often think of The Church Is One
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Foundation where it talks about how the Church victorious will be the Church at rest.
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We've decided to skip ahead and become the Church at Praise
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be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTaggart of the Society of Jesus, your daily
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host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and the world
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to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios, your local
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radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the
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fullness of truth with clarity and charity. As always, let's start
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with prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Almighty God,
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through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola, we ask that you pour forth your Holy
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Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment them might hear your voice and obey your
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command. Name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Here it is,
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a Friday. You know what that means, uh, Friday it's
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you and me. Let's talk about this. We walk through a complex issue together.
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We're on part 4 of my ongoing series called
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Novel Prophecies. I've been looking at apocalyptic
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and dystopian literature written by Catholics.
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It's not going to be only Catholics, and I'm trying to read them more or
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less in chronological order. And as I said, I'm very clear.
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You know, our Lord says in the scriptures, no one knows the day
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or the hour but, but our Heavenly Father. So I'm not going to say it's
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going to be this rainy Wednesday afternoon, you know, in September,
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that's when the world ends. That's not what I mean. That's not what
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this is about. People have embarrassed themselves over
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the centuries and millennia talking about the world ending, and, and yet
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here we are. There will be consummation.
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It is certainly true that Christ already was victorious
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on Calvary, and that victory was ratified with the
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empty tomb on Easter Sunday. But we who live in time and
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space have not yet seen the fullness of Christ's victory
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made present to us. So we're still kind of working things out here.
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You know, last week I looked at the novel by Robert Hugh
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Benson called The Lord of All, and And yeah, it was dystopian
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apocalyptic literature. Uh, it was about the, the end of the
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world. It was very well written. Now, as I say that, a friend
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of mine who read it said, you know, there's not very much in the way
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of character development. And that's true. This is more of a plot-driven
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novel. And Benson wanted to say this, hey, if symptoms
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persist, in other words, if the advent
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and ascension of modernity is not checked, if the
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lukewarmness is not corrected, if the betrayal
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of Christ isn't impeded in some way,
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what could we look like in the future? So he's writing, I think,
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1907, thereabouts, and talking about
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things happening in the '60s and the '70s and the '80s.
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And again, try not to give spoilers, but Christ
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does win. But the physical earth does not do so well.
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Now, some people complained to him that, gosh, you know, this is—
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there is a final victory, but it is kind of rough
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getting there. And so people said, well,
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what if symptoms did not persist?
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What if the betrayal of Christ stopped?
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What if the lukewarmness was replaced with fervor?
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What if people stood up to the Marxists
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and the Darwinists and the relativists and the Nietzscheans
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and the socialists and the revolutionaries?
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What if Catholics found their manhood again,
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reclaimed their patrimony, and lived
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not only natural law but revelation to the fullness?
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And what if faith and worship and Catholic identity
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were not just a private thing you did furtively on
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a Sunday for 53 minutes. But what
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if the faith pervaded everything?
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Politics, economics,
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universities, the arts.
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What if civilization and culture were Catholic
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through and through? There were some awkward exceptions,
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but it was, it was complete. What would that
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world look like? And I I mentioned to a young
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friend of mine who's a great student of history and a great fan of Charles
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Colombe, kind of an advocate of Catholic monarchism,
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and I said it's like reading Charles Colombe's dream journal.
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I say that because in the book, the church and the state have
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restored pageantry, a sense of vocation.
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Nearly every public event is liturgical
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in some way. And it's ordered towards beauty and
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dignity and inspiration. And that was actually pretty thrilling
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to be around. So how does the novel start? Well, the main character
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is an English Monsignor, Masterman,
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and he wakes up and he's at an outdoor Mass
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in England and his memory is gone.
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He doesn't know how he got there at that Mass, and it seems almost
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as if it's not just his memory is gone, but that wherever he's from,
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he's from a different world. So he doesn't
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know that, you know, the so-called Reformation
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failed. He doesn't know that the
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monarchies in Europe were restored,
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that the English king is Catholic,
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that the French king— that's right, the French king is
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Catholic, that the Pope is really the Pope.
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And as you begin to read some of the initial things
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about the, the pageantry, the liturgy,
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and also the cultural confidence of
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Catholics— nobody sounded like
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my students from all those years ago said, I'm Catholic, I guess.
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They knew what they were about. They knew what
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they had overcome. They knew what they had rejected,
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and you almost felt sorry for the
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doubters and the handful of socialists,
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etc. And by the way,
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big surprise, the troublemakers again are the Germans,
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especially the socialists who've kind of overtaken Berlin,
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and even the Kaiser, even the German Emperor,
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has become Catholic. Wow.
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And people just took for granted, well, of course there's a harmony
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between faith and reason. Of course there is a harmony between
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science and theology. Of course the state
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must consult with the church regarding matters of
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morality. And so what you see is,
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you know, projected into the mid-20th
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century. This book is written around 1911, just before
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the start of the tragedy of the First World War. And so this is being
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projected into the '60s and '70s as kind of a different
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timeline from The Lord of All. And it's asking, what if
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modernity grows up specifically Catholic
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rather than the enemy of the faith?
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What would politics look like? What would the arts look
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like? How would churchmen and believers talk about
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themselves and amongst each other and about those who are not yet on
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board? And I'm really struggling here because I, I don't want
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to give away spoilers. I, I don't want to ruin it for you, so I'm
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going to have to choose my thoughts very, very carefully. So rather than a
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dystopian novel, this is a utopian
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novel. And the word utopia is a play
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on words because there's utopia spelled with a U,
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U-T-O-P-I-A. So a topoi in
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Greek is a place, a utopia is nowhere.
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But there's also a play on words because eu-topia,
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eu is the prefix meaning good. So we have Eucharist,
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good gift, thanksgiving. So utopia is
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an idealized place. And so it seems this
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Monsignor with this memory loss, who has vague
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recollections of a troubled, conflicted world
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with a receding Catholicism— that sounds
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an awful lot like reality in the very early
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20th century— he wakes up in a utopia
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where nearly all the world is actively
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fully Catholic. And so much of
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the novel is the shock
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to the system that all the things that he had somehow took
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for granted were in error,
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that what modernity said to us in fact in the
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early 20th century and throughout the 20th century is not inevitable,
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is in fact a lie. And it
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really could be different. And then Benson says, let me tell
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you how different it could be, how different
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it could look and feel. And so if you ever
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wondered what would it be like to live in
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a fully, thoroughly Catholic world—
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now the sinners still sin, uh,
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people make stupid choices regarding prudential decisions, etc.,
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etc. But the environment,
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that which is taken for granted,
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is thoroughly Catholic. And Benson, I think,
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plausibly describes what life in that world
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would be like. So that's what I want you to think about.
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What would a thoroughly Catholic world look
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like? What would happen to the arts,
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to worship, to parish life, religious life,
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Nearly all of the inhabitants of Ireland have expatriated
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themselves to Australia, Canada, and the United States in this
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novel, and the entire island has become basically
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a monastery with tens of thousands
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of contemplatives. It's a startling idea,
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friends. We come back, we are going to continue our conversation. We're in Part
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4 of our series Novel Prophecies, looking at Robert Hume Benson's
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utopian novel called The Dawn of All. Remember,
11:25
rallying cry here at The Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo— bringing
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Christ to the world and the world to Christ. We do it because
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our Lord says so, for the greater glory of God, the love of our neighbor,
11:35
and the salvation of our own soul. Take this to your family and friends.
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Together we'll take it to the whole world. Back in just 2 minutes. Please do
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You're listening to The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague
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Current.
12:21
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of
12:24
Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ
12:28
to the world and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station
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of the Cross Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app.
12:34
We proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
12:37
It's Friday, another round of Let's Talk About This. We walk through complex issue together.
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We are in part 4 of our series
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called Novel Prophecies. We're reading some great
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novels, uh, mostly from Catholic authors, some not,
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roughly in chronological order. And we're reading, if you
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will, not so much the sequel to Robert
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Benson's Lord of the World, which we looked at last week, but an alternative
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called The Dawn of All. Because remember, in Lord of the World,
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Benson was predicting what life would look like if
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we didn't wake up and see the danger that modernism
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was presenting to us. In this book, he said, well, what would the world
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look like if we learned our lessons, if we got our act
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together, if we drew the right conclusions from philosophy and theology
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and scripture and history and the good Catholic
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arts? What would happen then? So the, the main character,
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Monsignor Masterman, wakes up and
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it seems like he has amnesia, but it also
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seems that wherever he was before the novel
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started, it looked like but wasn't the world
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he's living in now. Is he in a different timeline?
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Is it alternate universe? It's, it's kind of sci-fi.
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Benson doesn't lean into that very much,
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but he does explain the Monsignor's
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confusion, because, you know, there's still an England and a France and a Germany,
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and there's still a Pope, and they're still in America,
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there's still electricity, etc., etc.
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And yet something is different. So listen to this: For
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somewhere in the back of his mind, why he knew not,
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there lurked a sort of only half-perceived assumption
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that the Catholic religion was but one aspect
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of truth, one point of view from which,
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with sufficient though not absolute truth,
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facts could be discerned. He could not understand this,
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yet there it was, and he understood,
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at any rate intellectually, that if he could once realize that
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the dogmas of the Church were the dogmas of the universe,
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and not only that, but the world convincingly
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realized it too. Why then the fact
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that the civilization of today was actually molded upon it would
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no longer bewilder him. So here's the challenge.
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Masterman, who we suspect grew up in a world
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that would be very familiar to you and me, finds himself
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in a world that sort of kind of looks like our world,
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And yet he discovers that everybody is thorough— well, 99% of
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the people are really thoroughly Catholic.
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And so Catholic isn't one flavor among many.
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It's not one opinion among many. It's not a perspective.
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It's the truth, like the law of gravity and the speed
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of light and the law of non-contradiction.
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It's a fact about how reality
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is. Is, and everybody knows
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it and strives to act accordingly.
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So, here's the thought experiment for us.
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How would the world be different if
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98% of the people of the world took for
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granted that Catholicism is absolutely
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fully true and that
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the only, the only sane
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option is to live as faithful Catholics,
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not only in our private life, what we do on Sundays
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and when we say our prayers in our room,
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but everywhere. How we purchase,
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how we vote, how we travel, how we treat our neighbor,
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how we think of war and peace, Oh my goodness, how we
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think about capital punishment. My goodness, there— I know
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a lot of people whose heads would explode when they
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read what Benson has to say about capital
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punishment. It's breathtaking. And sad
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to say, I'm pretty sure that most people
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never give much thought to what the world
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would look like if the great majority were thoroughly,
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fully, and convincingly Catholic. Yes, there's sin.
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Yes, there's struggle. Yes, people need to go to confession.
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But you know what they do? Then they go to confession.
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Can you imagine if people who knew they needed to go to confession
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went to confession? That would make the world a very different place.
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So he's starting to see that the assumptions
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that he kind of took for granted, that he kind of half
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remembered, that nobody really,
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really, really takes the church
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seriously, even within the church, and it's not really,
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really, really something that can be lived
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except privately. If we're disabused of
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that notion, What would life look like?
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Well, you know what? I've been thinking about it. I think
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I'd like to give it a try. I think I'd like to
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live in a civil society where
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those who governed were morally certain that
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at the end of their days they would be answerable to God
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Almighty for how we govern. Now,
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Saint Louis IX of France thought that.
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Blessed Karl of Austria thought that.
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I would like to, you know, I think I'd like to live in that world.
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I'd like to live in the world where everyone took for
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granted that men are men and women are women,
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and men and women are made for each other, and family life
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is the basic building block of all human society,
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and to be fruitful and multiply is a really,
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really good thing. I'd be willing to give
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that world a shot. I really would. I would like
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to live in a world where it's taken for granted that of course the church
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should be in charge of education.
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Of course There is a superabundance
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of vocations. And of course,
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beauty is important for human life.
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Where people would be considered a barbarian and
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reprobate for graffiti and for
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littering, and people would be embarrassed
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and walk away, if other folks started shouting untrue
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things about marriage, for example. I'd be willing to give
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that world a fair shake. I want to talk a little bit about
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his view of politics. He says something really interesting here.
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Let me jump ahead. This is from page
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81. The Monsignor has
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just met somebody important. Oh,
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so he's met the Pope, and he goes, gosh, he looks quite ordinary.
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It's like the face of a businessman. And his friend
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says, oh yes, he's ordinary. He's an extremely good man and quite intelligent.
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He's never had any great kind of crisis to face, you know. They say he's
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a good financier. His friend says, you look disappointed.
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Monsignor says, I hadn't expected him to look like that.
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His friend answers, why not? Monsignor says, well, he seems to have an
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extraordinary position in the world. I would have expected more of a
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And his friend says, more of a great man?
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Monsignor, don't you think that the average man makes
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the best ruler? And Monsignor gasps and says,
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but that's democracy! And his friend says,
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not at all. Democracy doesn't
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give the average man any real power
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at all. It swamps him among his fellows.
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That is to say, it kills his individuality,
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and his individuality is the one thing he has which is worth anything.
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So on this view, you know, more democracy,
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more democracy, more democracy. Well,
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that's kind of— that can be rule by
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the lowest common denominator. It can be rule by the mob.
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And, you know, supposedly in the United States we live in a democratic
21:48
republic, and yet We've
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got people in their 80s who are obviously demented who
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are still being elected every couple of years.
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You know, oh gosh, Mr. Engineer, which senator
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is it who hasn't been seen in weeks and months and
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then keeps sending proof of life pictures and he's in a hospital
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bed with his wife standing next to him and he's holding the day's newspaper.
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He's in a hospital bed with no IV units. Stuck in his
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arm, and he's wearing jeans and a button-down shirt.
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Mitch McConnell. Thank you, Mr. Engineer. So Mitch McConnell.
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Do we really want to say that Mitch McConnell represents
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the best interests of the people? Members of Congress
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who have the American flag and a foreign flag outside
22:41
their door, do they represent the best interests of the American people?
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Do they represent the best interests of the voters? The people who
22:48
want both welfare state and open borders,
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do they represent the average man, the ordinary American?
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I don't think so. See, one of the things that Benson does in
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this novel that's really smart is there's, there's a
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tension that doesn't go away. There is the sanctity and
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the uniqueness of the individual And at the
23:16
same time, there is the larger
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body, the society, the polis,
23:23
as they'd say in Greek, and there is a common good
23:28
that has to be reconciled with the sanctity of the individual. Now, when I
23:31
use the word common good, we have to be really careful because a
23:35
lot of people who are Catholic members of the People Who Should Really Know Better
23:40
Club They think that the common good is access to
23:44
the public purse, and you definitely want to be
23:48
on the receiving end of the public purse. And if you can't
23:52
do that, then you want to be one of the distributors of
23:55
the contents of the public purse after you take your cut off
23:59
the top, and that's the common good. Well, no. And then in the Catholic tradition,
24:04
the common good ultimately is arranging
24:09
civil society to make it easier for
24:13
individuals and communities to live and die as saints.
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That's the common good. We don't talk
24:23
like that though, do we? I mean, there's an American archbishop
24:27
who was talking about Muslims in the United States have a God-given
24:31
right to build mosques. What if you
24:35
really believed that when Jesus of Nazareth said,
24:39
I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father
24:43
but through me, if you really thoroughly believe that
24:47
and you thoroughly believe that the common good is helping people
24:51
to live and die as saints, would you make a statement
24:55
like that Archbishop made recently? I just
24:59
wonder. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTeague, your host here every day at The Catholic
25:03
Current. After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com,
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that defend our Catholic faith. We are making our way through
26:55
the novel The Dawn of All, Robert Hugh Benson's utopian
27:00
novel written after his dystopian novel called
27:04
The Lord of the World. Again, I want to be so
27:07
careful because I, I don't want to spoil it for you,
27:11
so I'm just going to make sections of the book appealing to
27:15
you And also, I want to make Benson's purposes
27:19
appealing to you. He doesn't just want to
27:22
tell a story. He wants you to
27:25
engage in a thought experiment and say, you know,
27:29
if the whole world really became
27:33
Catholic, that would be a good thing,
27:37
and it would make people happier, healthier, more holy,
27:41
more fully human. Lives would be saved and
27:45
souls would be saved, and best of all, God would be glorified.
27:50
And what would it be like to live
27:54
in a world where Catholicism was taken for granted? I'm going to
27:58
give you a little vignette from my own life. I came
28:02
back from Southeast Asia in the summer of 2007.
28:06
I was in the missions there. And I found myself moving
28:11
to the big campus of Ave Maria University.
28:14
That's back when it was a university that had a town. I think now
28:18
because of growth, it's a town that, that has a university.
28:22
But Catholic culture was very much taken for granted. So on
28:27
Valentine's Day, all the young ladies stood in
28:30
the quad outside of the girls' dormitory,
28:36
and I led a Eucharistic procession with all the young men
28:39
on campus, and we all went to
28:43
them, and the young men got down on their knees and promised in the presence
28:46
of the Eucharistic Lord that they would honor the virtue and
28:50
chastity of the women on campus. That actually happened.
28:55
I saw that with my own eyes.
28:59
I don't think that's a common experience in the 21st
29:02
century in North America. But I actually
29:07
saw it, and I, I liked living in that environment.
29:11
So that's why I want you to engage. I want you to read
29:15
the novel because it's a good novel. Uh, I also want you to consider
29:19
that thought experiment of what life would look like if
29:23
the whole world were thoroughly Catholic. And Benson makes a really
29:27
good case that life makes a lot more
29:32
sense when everything and everyone is acting
29:37
upon Catholic principles and Catholic truths,
29:40
just like when we act in harmony with the law of non-contradiction
29:44
or, or gravity, for example. So I'm going to read to you an
29:48
excerpt about what people take
29:52
for granted and what that means, and you ask yourself whether
29:56
or not you'd want to live in this world.
30:00
He— so the Monsignor who thinks he may
30:04
have lost his memory, but then you also begin to suspect
30:08
that maybe he's from a parallel world, and he
30:13
begins to say, well, you know,
30:16
but it was taken for granted in the universities, etc.,
30:19
etc., that everybody knows that the
30:24
Church is hostile to education. Everybody knows that celibacy is
30:30
stupid. Everybody knows that there's no harmony between
30:34
faith and reason, science and theology. And his companion
30:38
laughs and says, of course, I remember from reading history that those things
30:42
used to be said. And then he adds, and I suppose socialists
30:46
say them now. He goes on, he says, but you know,
30:51
no educated man ever dreams of such arguments
30:55
now. Nor indeed do the uneducated.
30:59
It's the half-educated, as usual,
31:03
who's the enemy. He always is. And this is the punch
31:06
in the face: the wise men and the shepherds
31:11
both knelt in Bethlehem. It was
31:14
the bourgeois who stood apart. Pow!
31:19
And then he goes, all right, let's talk about celibacy. Let's talk
31:22
about family life. And this is where Benson
31:27
is speculating about what an absolutely Catholic world would look like.
31:31
He said, well, let's see, so the priest could humor this. This is his priest
31:34
friend talking to the Monsignor. We'll begin with celibacy. Now, it's perfectly
31:38
true that it's thought almost a disgrace for a man to not have a
31:42
large family. The average is certainly not less than
31:45
10 children. Well, in civilized nations.
31:49
But for all that, a priest is looked upon without any contempt at all.
31:53
Why? Because he's a spiritual father,
31:57
because he begets spiritual children to God and
32:01
feeds and nourishes them. Of course, to an atheist this is nonsense,
32:04
and even to an agnostic it's a very doubtful benefit. But my dear Monsignor,
32:09
you must remember that these hardly exist among
32:12
us. Heaven and grace and the Church and the havoc that
32:16
sin makes, not only as regards to the next world but also to this
32:21
So absolutely convinced that he perf— he
32:24
understands perfectly that a priest is far more productive of general
32:28
good than a physical father possibly can be.
32:31
It's the priest who keeps the whole thing going, don't you see?
32:35
And then in a Catholic world, the instinct that the man who serves
32:39
the altar should be without physical ties, well, it's, it's simply
32:43
natural. Isn't that breathtaking?
32:46
Isn't that breathtaking, that it could be taken
32:50
for granted that spiritual fatherhood
32:54
is a very great good? Now,
32:57
biological fatherhood is an indispensable good, but the
33:01
crowning good, the perfecting good, is spiritual
33:06
fatherhood. And yet so
33:10
many today including Catholic members of the People
33:15
Who Should Really Know Better Club, and sadly, sadly, sadly,
33:18
senior Catholic cadres of the People Who Should Really Know Better Club
33:22
would find this statement unintelligible.
33:26
And the only reason that would make sense would be if they don't
33:30
take spiritual fatherhood seriously.
33:35
And then they begin to talk about education, because after
33:39
the French Revolution, one of the things that revolutionaries would do was they
33:43
would take education out of the hands of the church.
33:47
So here's Monsignor, who we think at first
33:51
has amnesia, and then you realize he's from kind of a parallel universe, and he
33:55
now finds himself in Catholic world. So he goes, all right, the way
33:59
that I remember it, in the world that I think I grew up in,
34:01
he says, the church was always viewed with suspicion. I remember,
34:05
uh, my good friend Father Robert Spitzer was at some very high-end higher education
34:09
meeting, I think for Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society,
34:14
and some woman was talking about why Catholic institutions
34:18
should be disbarred from Phi Beta Kappa because
34:22
everybody knows the church hates education.
34:26
And Father had to give her a little history lesson as to who founded the
34:30
universities. So the Monsignor, the confused
34:34
Monsignor, asks Father Jervis Go on, what about education?
34:38
Father Jervis continues, my dear friend, the church
34:42
controls the whole of education, as she did in fact up
34:46
to the very time when the state first took it away from her and then
34:49
abused her for neglecting it. Nowadays,
34:52
practically all the scientists, all the specialists in medicine,
34:56
chemistry, and mental health, 9/10 of the musicians,
35:00
3/4 of the artists, practically all those are religious.
35:05
Now, religious with a capital R. In other words, you know, monks and
35:09
nuns and priests and brothers. It's only the active
35:12
trades which are incompatible with religion that are in the hands of
35:17
the laity. And by incompatible with religion, he means consecrated life.
35:21
It's been found by experience that no really fine work can be done
35:25
except by those who are familiar with divine things,
35:29
because it's only those who see things all around who have,
35:32
that is to say, a really comprehensive
35:37
intuition. Now, that's a startling thing
35:40
to say, but from a Catholic point of view, it can
35:45
make sense. If we don't have faith,
35:49
if we don't look at things through the eyes of faith,
35:54
then life is— life is
35:57
flat. It's like looking at pixels
36:02
at a screen. Apart from the life
36:06
of faith, our lives is— it's
36:10
just an episode between 2 oblivions. As Shakespeare said,
36:13
history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
36:18
and fury, signifying nothing.
36:22
Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation,
36:26
and what Benson is yelling from the rooftops of those books is Catholics
36:30
don't have to. And there was a time
36:35
when Catholics were much more confident,
36:40
and when they were confident, they built monasteries and cathedrals
36:44
and great art and
36:48
great communities. And there
36:52
was brilliant philosophy and theology and literature
36:56
and jurisprudence. And family
37:00
life was considered sacred and reverenced.
37:03
Yes, there were sinners. Yes, there were
37:07
stupidities, because whenever you involve finite fallen human beings, There's gonna
37:12
be a mess. But there was no doubt
37:15
as to what the compass points were, and there was no
37:19
doubt about what the destination was.
37:24
And we had the Benedictine movement.
37:29
There was a time when there were more Benedictine monasteries in
37:33
Europe than there were parishes in the United States.
37:37
By far, by far.
37:41
When was the last time an ordinary
37:45
parish church was built from scratch in your
37:49
lifetime, in my lifetime, starting in 1961,
37:53
that can be considered glorious and a church
37:56
for the ages? There was a time
38:00
when Catholics had the confidence to influence
38:04
the whole of culture and the whole of human life.
38:09
And yes, there were mistakes, and yes, there were sinners, but that clarity
38:14
and that charity brought about beauty
38:18
that honored truth and cultivated goodness.
38:22
And I think what Robert Benson is saying, and what I'm asking you now,
38:26
is don't you want to live in that world rather
38:30
than this, where we don't know what a man is, don't know
38:34
what a woman is, that you've got deans of medical schools testifying
38:38
before Congress that men can give birth.
38:41
You want to live in that world? Really? You want
38:46
to live in a world where, uh, the church is going to gather in
38:49
Rome to have conversations about how to be church
38:53
better, and the religions of the world are invited to give
38:57
us advice? Do you want to live in that world,
39:01
or the world where the church is once again
39:05
the teacher to all the nations.
39:10
I want to live in the world where Catholics say without
39:14
hesitation and with intelligence and gratitude
39:18
and joy, Christ is King now.
39:22
Christ crucified and risen, Christ who will return to
39:26
judge the living and the dead and the world by fire, he reigns
39:30
now. And we offer him worship we
39:35
offer him obedience, and we offer him our first
39:39
fruits. History records what
39:43
that world was like. I think we
39:47
can have something similar. We're gonna have to work
39:51
towards it. It's not gonna happen overnight, and a revival every 3 years
39:55
isn't gonna be enough. But that's a story for another time.
39:59
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTiger, host here every day of The Catholic Current.
40:03
After the broadcast today, go to the station of the thecross.com. Get our resources
40:06
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40:11
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40:22
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40:25
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40:29
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40:33
We read everything that you send us. Let's do this good work
40:37
together. Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
40:59
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41:03
about today's episode? Want to suggest a guest or a future
41:07
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41:13
help influence the conversation.
41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
41:24
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
41:27
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios,
41:30
your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the fullness
41:34
of truth with clarity and charity. Well, here it is, the last
41:38
segment of Friday. You know what that means— weekend readiness. You and me looking
41:42
at the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday scriptures, so you'll
41:45
be all prayed up for Sunday Mass. I resolved quite some time ago, actually,
41:50
that I wanted to have a good news story included
41:54
in the headlines. And I always look it up. Mr. Engineer and
41:59
I, we go to the Good News Network and we try to find something that
42:02
involves a human being rather than an inspiring story about a species
42:06
of snail darter that no one had heard of before. And very
42:09
often I forget the story. So we're going to have the good news story
42:13
up front. So here's the headline: After
42:17
a stranger gives a boy a piano, A Mozart level is revealed
42:21
in spite of autism. So in Colorado,
42:24
somebody found what could be a child prodigy.
42:29
Somebody gave him a piano and he has just come to life,
42:34
uh, with that. And nobody knows where this insane
42:37
talent comes from. So he's
42:41
started off as a 9-year-old prodigy, now he's a 14-year-old touring maestro,
42:46
and he's got his own album called Introducing Jude Kofi.
42:49
So We got the good news story up front.
42:53
Let's take a look at the other things Father is concerned about.
42:58
Wars and rumors of wars, people doing stupid things,
43:02
people thinking that having welfare states and open borders is going
43:06
to bring about a good end. That's still taking place.
43:10
We know that Canada leads the world, or thereabouts,
43:14
in medically assisted dying,
43:18
also known as euthanasia. So there's a Canadian grandmother,
43:21
she's 80 83 years old. She's in the hospital and she's
43:25
got late-stage stomach cancer. And they said, you know,
43:29
do you want us to put you down? And she said, no,
43:32
that conflicts with my faith. And her
43:37
daughter had durable power of attorney. She says, my mother doesn't want this. I'm not
43:41
consenting to it. Don't do it. Uh, the daughter went away for
43:44
a few days and apparently without consulting
43:48
any family members, which you're supposed to, they asked her,
43:52
you want us to, to take you out, right? And there is
43:56
no record of the grandma changing her mind,
44:00
and every indication was, don't do this, uh,
44:03
that conflicts with my Christian faith. And she got euthanized
44:09
even though there was clear evidence that she
44:12
didn't have dementia. But she was euthanized. And why?
44:16
Well, I think 2 reasons. Well, first of all, End-of-life care
44:20
is expensive, and somebody's got to
44:23
pay for that free healthcare. That's number one. Uh,
44:27
number two, they want to normalize it.
44:31
So you remember reading Benson's novel, uh, last week, uh,
44:35
The Lord of the World, where, uh, the ministers
44:39
of euthanasia were always welcome at every accident scene?
44:44
And so they want to normalize euthanasia.
44:48
They want to normalize other people affiliated
44:53
with the state can decide that your life isn't
44:57
worth living. And it's a startling
45:01
percentage of deaths in Canada the past few years,
45:04
like 5 or 7%, I think, come from doctor-induced
45:09
euthanasia. And that's That's
45:14
horrifying. As we're talking about medical things, uh, U.S. Senate Homeland
45:18
Security panel votes to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt,
45:23
and Senator Paul refers charges to the Department of Justice.
45:27
You know, his— he's been testifying before Congress
45:31
about his behavior during the COVID interruption,
45:35
the reign of King COVID that he was very much a part of. And somebody
45:39
said, well, isn't it horrible that his private diary was entered
45:43
into as evidence? Well, I wouldn't want my diaries entered into evidence for anything.
45:46
But here's the thing. These— this wasn't his private
45:50
thoughts before God. These were notes for his memoirs
45:54
that he was going to cash in when he retired. And he wrote
45:58
over 1,000 pages of his memoirs
46:02
on a government computer on government time
46:06
and then backed it up on a government server.
46:09
So, that is government property.
46:13
And by all accounts, I hope to interview Jeffrey Tucker from the Brownson
46:17
Institute who took the trouble to read all 1,000 pages. Man sounds like
46:21
a real narcissist and a fame hound who lied.
46:25
Lied to the American people, lied to the government, lied under oath.
46:29
And remember, he got a blanket pardon for unspecified
46:33
crimes from former presidential candidate Joe Biden.
46:36
And he still invoked the Fifth Amendment 111
46:40
times? I'm not sure if that's
46:44
how the Fifth Amendment works. I'm not a constitutional attorney, but it all seems kind
46:48
of fishy and sketchy for me. And then something church-related.
46:53
Rorate Caeli has a report that was originally written in
46:57
German, and it turns out, according to this study,
47:01
2/3 of the College of Cardinals have
47:05
no familiarity with Latin at
47:10
all. Is that a good
47:14
thing? You know, there— I remember seeing some
47:17
historical documents. There were bishops who attended the Second
47:22
Vatican Council who would write notes in the margins of
47:26
documents like they were annotating a college text, and it was
47:29
all in Latin. It was just taken for granted. That you were fluent
47:34
in Latin. And for cardinals, most of whom are
47:37
bishops, to have no access to Latin
47:41
at all, I— that doesn't,
47:44
doesn't sound like winning to me. All right, with that in mind, let's turn
47:48
to the scriptures. This is the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time,
47:52
Lectionary 115 if you're following the Novus Ordo calendar of
47:55
the Pauline Rite. Uh, first reading is from 1 Kings
47:59
19. God wasn't in the whirlwind, and he wasn't in the earthquake,
48:03
and he wasn't in the fire, but he was in the tiny whispering
48:07
sound, the still small voice.
48:11
And that's kind of a rallying cry for the Carmelites. There are
48:15
things we can hear from God only when we're quiet,
48:21
and we live in the anti-quiet.
48:24
I've complained many times that Mass at St. Tipico's on Sundays is
48:29
like live radio where there can never be dead air.
48:32
That once Mass starts, there's either someone strumming a guitar,
48:36
playing a piano, playing an organ, somebody talking, somebody singing,
48:40
but there must never ever ever ever ever be silence.
48:44
And that's really bad for your soul, and that's also inimical
48:49
to worship. And then from Matthew 14, uh,
48:53
our Lord walking on, uh, the water, and Peter
48:58
says, Lord, if it's really you. And so he steps out of the boat,
49:01
impulsive Peter, and he's walking to our Lord.
49:05
And what does he do? He takes his eyes off our Lord,
49:09
and then he begins to drown. And that's the moral of
49:12
the story for us, isn't it? My goodness, we are living in
49:16
stormy times. And if we take our eyes
49:21
off the Lord, odds are we're gonna drown.
49:25
And yes, we do need quiet so we can
49:28
learn to hear the shepherd's voice.
49:33
Our Lord never stops offering himself to
49:36
us. Our Lord never withholds grace
49:42
from us. God is always at work in the
49:45
world asking for our time, our energy,
49:49
and our attention. How do we respond to that
49:53
fact? May God's holy name be praised now and forever. I'm Jesuit
49:58
Father Robert McTeague, your host here every day at The Catholic Current.
50:01
You want to join us on Monday for another episode of The Catholic Current.
50:05
Great guest, great topic, great conversation. And here's my promise
50:08
to you, next Friday we're going to continue. Let's talk about
50:12
this. We're going to continue with Novel Prophecies Part 5. This is
50:16
going to be our first non-Christian author, Aldous Huxley's
50:20
book written in the 1930s called Brave New World.
50:23
If you haven't read it, my goodness, you need to read it. I used to
50:27
have my medical ethics students read it. It is a prescient book.
50:31
Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may God our Lord surround you
50:34
with the lead of guardian angels with flaming swords to light your path, to protect
50:39
you from all harm and every evil, to reach the happiness of heaven. Mighty God
50:43
bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in peace, and please do pray for
50:46
me, for I am a sinner.