Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #766 What Your Vote Reveals About The State of Your Soul: St. John Paul II, Blessed Fulton Sheen and Karl Marx

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#766 What Your Vote Reveals About The State of Your Soul: St. John Paul II, Blessed Fulton Sheen and Karl Marx · Claymore: Become Who You Are

0:00
SPEAKER_00: What your vote reveals about the state of your own soul with Saint John Paul II, blessed Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Karl Marx.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Become who you are.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: It's from Saint Catherine of Siena, who said in essence, if you understood who you are, a beloved son or daughter of God and became who you are, that you would set the world on fire.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: We are sons and daughters of the living God.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Have you accepted that heritage and set the world on fire with truth, goodness, beauty, especially the beauty of love and the world?
0:37
SPEAKER_00: Or have you rejected that divine identity and instead allowed another label to define you?
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Instead of the fire of love, you burn it down, you destroy, you participate in the culture of death and destruction.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Much can be known about the state of your soul and your heart in the way you plan to cast your ballot in the midterms here.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to discuss that and a lot more.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: But before we dive into it, let's play a clip from Vice President JD Vance answering the very reason that Claymore is important.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: It is truly a blessing to be here in front of you.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: Um when I was in high school, my father walked out on me, and that was something that I really had to deal with with trauma-wise.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: That taught me early on to lean on my community and the people around me.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's why today I mentor you young black, Hispanic, and white males without father.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Without fathers, sorry.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: What I see every day is that there's a lot of resources out there for young women to succeed, but there's not too many for young men to succeed.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Without someone in the call, violence or sat on criminal records before their life even gets started.
1:47
SPEAKER_01: So what I would like to know is what is your plan to invest in the young man in America, especially in the energy community?
1:53
SPEAKER_02: Well, let me just say first, sir, thank you so much for doing the work that you're doing.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: I really do believe that is the Lord's work.
1:59
SPEAKER_02: And you know, kids, teenagers in particular, have a way of never saying thank you, but I guarantee those boys know that without you, they would be lost in the world, and eventually they're gonna realize it, and eventually they're gonna say thank you.
2:13
SPEAKER_02: And I just hope you know you have transformed lives, and that's the very, very best thing that you can do.
2:19
SPEAKER_02: And so I'm I'm proud of you and I'm rooting for you.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: But let me just say that the there was this thing in our country for a long time, and there was a recognition that obviously a lot of our young girls, a lot of our young women were being left behind, things were unfair.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: But if you look statistically today, who is more likely to go to prison?
2:37
SPEAKER_02: Who is less likely to graduate from high school?
2:39
SPEAKER_02: Who is less likely to graduate, whether it's a trade school or college beyond that, who is more likely to suffer from the effects of violence in their community?
2:48
SPEAKER_02: It's our young boys.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: And I do think that something happened weird with American leadership, where justifiably they wanted to make sure that our young girls had an equal playing field, but in the process, so many of them completely ignored our young men.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: And I think that one of the most important things that we can do is just give young boys the resources, young men the resources, in order to overcome those disadvantages.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: And part of that's gonna be a grandfather stepping up in their life.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: Let's support those grandfathers.
3:16
SPEAKER_02: Part of it's gonna be somebody like you stepping up in their life.
3:19
SPEAKER_02: Let's support them.
3:20
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, sir.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Vance is just so good.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: He can just come off the cuff with that.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: And in that clip, he said something I hope you caught.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: He said, This is the the Lord's work.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: This is the work of the church, of other men, this is the work of Claymore.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't pull a DSA, right?
3:38
SPEAKER_00: The Democratic Socialists of America, which is the label, by the way, that the Democratic Party here in the United States has given itself.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: So what would the Socialists of America do?
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know what they would do.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: They'd start a new program that would soon be corrupted, run by a bloated bureaucracy and totally ineffective or worse.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: You see, it's not the job of the government to raise you.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: It's the job of your family first, the church, your community, and then you have to take responsibility.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: And Claymore Apostolate shows you exactly how to do that.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: We are truly in what seems to be some type of a decisive battle here.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: You can sense that the forces of good and evil are rising up to meet in this major class.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: You can feel this all around you.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: Everybody senses something like that, right?
4:25
SPEAKER_00: With that said, I hope everyone's staying in shape, staying sharp, physically, mentally, spiritually.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: Also have a common sense plan.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Have some water, food, a way to protect your family.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: And with winter coming here in the Midwest, a way to stay warm in the event the grid goes down.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: It's just common sense.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: And next, we have Claymore, it starts with these two ass, right?
4:48
SPEAKER_00: Every morning, before you look at that phone, go to go to your knees, get down and pray that the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Simply download the Claymore Battle Plan outline for free from our website, or a printed version of that outline comes with the Claymore handbook that shows you how to do that.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: And an important aspect of that is learning to pray with temptation and using temptation as an invitation to pray.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: And Act 11 of the handbook tells you exactly how to do that.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Claymore 10-minute morning ritual in the morning, knees before the fall in this simply read, meditate on, and share one act with another brother or sister from the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: It's very short, very quick reads, right?
5:30
SPEAKER_00: You meditate on that and you fill up your heart.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: So one near-term warning, things will get crazier as a November election takes place here.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: And after that, too.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: It's clear that those participating with Satan and the demonic forces of evil, they're reaching a fever pitch.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: You see this all around the world.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Saint Paul understood this very well, didn't he?
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote in Ephesians six, and I'm going to read you from that right now.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: You have to put this in perspective.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Finally, he said, This is from Ephesians six, verse ten, finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might, put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, take the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done so, to stand up in righteousness, right?
6:32
SPEAKER_00: To stand up for the truth.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: This is what we're doing right now.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: This is what we're feeling right now.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: This battle has been going on for a long time, and the roots of this ancient battle are reaching some type of a climax in our day.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: And it's written right in the book of Genesis.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Everything that God created was good.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Yet Satan was lurking somehow right on the peripheral of that garden.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And Adam, who was there to protect it, instead he let his guard down.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: The following Eve ate from that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, we know that Satan lied, there's no surprise, and sin and death entered human history.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: This is the battle we're in.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Today, as men throughout history have learned, we must take a stand before that tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Do we embrace our true identity then as sons and daughters of God, or do we fall for the lie and reject God?
7:22
SPEAKER_00: Brothers and sisters of Claymore, Jesus tells us in Matthew thirteen, a man sows good seed in his field, but while everyone is sleeping, an enemy comes and sows weeds among that wheat.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: As the plants begin to grow, the servants discover what's happened, and they see the weeds growing up with the wheat, and they ask the master whether they should pull up the weeds.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: But the master tells them to allow both to grow together until the harvest, when the wheat will be gathered into his barn and the weeds will be separated and burned.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: This is going on today, right?
7:54
SPEAKER_00: The weeds and the wheat are growing up together.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Later on, when his disciples ask him to explain that parable, Jesus leaves little doubt about its meaning.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, huh?
8:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, God's word is being sown that good seed.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: The field, of course, is the world.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: The good seed represents the children of the kingdom, while the weeds represent the children of the evil one.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately they're out there.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: The enemy who sows them, of course, is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: But the end of our age is what's important to us too, right?
8:30
SPEAKER_00: We are deciding right now where we're going to spend eternal life, but we also affect the ones that come after us too.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: Brothers, this is what we're living in right now.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: We're living in that field.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: The wheat and the weeds are growing side by side, and we see the enemy at work all around us.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: But perhaps the most troubling aspect of this parable is that the enemy does his work while people are sleeping.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: How often has evil taken root in our own culture and our institutions and our families and even in our churches while good men remain silent and different or simply fail to recognize what's happening all around them?
9:07
SPEAKER_00: We're supposed to be standing guard here in this world with our families, with our marriages, etc.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: But what do we do?
9:13
SPEAKER_00: We fall for those temptations.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: And that brings us to the approaching midterm elections.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: We hear constantly that politics and religion should be kept separate, huh?
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Our faith is a private matter.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the devil loves when we do that.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: But can a Christian really separate his political decisions from his moral convictions?
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Can we profess to believe in the dignity of every human person, the sanctity of life, the truth about marriage and the family, our responsibility to defend the innocent, and then enter the voting booth as if those truths have no bearing on the choices we make there?
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Of course they do.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: The ballot box is not a confession, of course, but it can reveal something about the conscience of the person standing before it.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: It can reveal what we value, what we're willing to defend, what evils we have learned to tolerate, and perhaps most troubling of all, what have we gradually stopped recognizing as evil?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Now let me be clear.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: No political party is the kingdom of God, no candidate is our savior, no single vote gives us the authority to judge the eternal destiny of another person's soul.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: But as Catholics and Christians we must exercise prudence, examine candidates and policies very carefully, and form our consciences in accordance with the truth of things.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: But neither can we pretend, right, that our political choices are morally neutral.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: They're not.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Our decisions have consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable among us, and we will ultimately be held accountable for God for the choices we freely make.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: The question then is not simply which political party will prevail on election day.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: The deeper question is whether we have allowed the world to shape our consciences or whether we have allowed Jesus Christ to transform them.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: Have we learned to recognize the wheat and weeds?
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Have we become so accustomed to living among the weeds that we no longer recognize the difference?
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Or worse, have we begun calling good evil and evil good?
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Brothers of claim or the harvest is here.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: When the Son of Man sends his angels to separate the wheat from the weeds, and on that day, it will not matter whether we call ourselves Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, or liberals.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: What will matter is whether we belong to Jesus Christ or not.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: And this is why the decisions we make today, including the decisions we make in that voting booth, deserves far more serious examination than the political slogans and the partisan loyalties that so often guide them.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: I remember this from Blessed Fulton Sheen.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: He said this back in the 70s.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: He said this, a nation always gets the kind of politicians it deserves.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: He said if a time ever comes when the religious Jews, the Protestants and Catholics ever have to suffer under a totalitarian state which would deny them the right to worship God according to the light of their consciences, it will be because for years they thought it made no difference what kind of people represented them in Congress.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: And because they abandoned the spiritual in the realm of the temporal.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: The battle lines are clear, and how you vote in the midterms will reveal the state of your own soul.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: We look at the midterms as a political struggle, but let's be clear up front.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: It's that, but a whole lot more because your soul is being contested for.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: Let's take a look at the insanity of the coalitions that have formed between the Marxists, you can call them socialists, communists.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: They join with the neo Marxists, critical race theory, critical gender theory, try to separate us all by race and by gender.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: Islam has joined the fray now, right?
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Who blames the infidel for everything?
12:58
SPEAKER_00: They don't all believe in the same things, but this coalition has come together.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Why?
13:03
SPEAKER_00: It's another revolt against God and the human person created in the image and likeness of God.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: See, that plot has never changed.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: We go back to Genesis three again.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: You will be like gods who can decide what is good and what is evil.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: So let's look at the reality of the battle, where the weeds of this modern era were sown.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: Karl Marx and Frederick Ingel wrote the Communist Manifesto in eighteen forty eight.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: In it, Marxism claims that some groups and classes of people are good and some are bad.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: In this case it was the business owner, the bourgeois who was who was bad, and the laborer, the proletariat who was good.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: So to perfect itself, humanity, they contended, must isolate and eliminate the bad groups of people.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: But of course it was Marx and Ingel who would decide who was good and who was bad.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Sound familiar, right?
13:54
SPEAKER_00: From Genesis three?
13:56
SPEAKER_00: You will be like gods who can decide what is good and evil.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: So are all business owners bad people?
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Are all laborers saints?
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: And to do something as absurd as to destroy your own economy as you destroyed those people around you harmed everybody.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Seeking to make sense of this, the great Soviet writer Alexander Schotzenitson, who spent years in the communist gulags or part labor camps, came to realize instead that the dividing line between good and evil lies within every single individual human heart.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: This is so important to remember.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: The first battle we fight is on the battlefield of our own hearts, John Paul said, between becoming a person of love and becoming a person of lust, and this is the first battle that we fight.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: But when you no longer seek redemption first, you play the ancient blame game, right?
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Don't you find it a bit interesting that as soon as Adam and Eve fell and turned away from God, that blame game started already?
14:57
SPEAKER_00: God, as he always does, came looking for them, offering reconciliation, love, and mercy, calling them back into relationship.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: God calls out, Adam, where are you in Genesis chapter three?
15:09
SPEAKER_00: The man replies, The woman who you put here with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, so I ate it.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Adam in one sentence blames both the woman and God.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: And what does Eve do?
15:21
SPEAKER_00: She turns and blames Satan.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: The serpent tricked me, so I ate it.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: Today that blame game has accelerated.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: First Karl Marx introduced the economic blame game, again, worker against employer, but that didn't work well in the United States because the middle class was very strong and the people still believed in God, family, and a dream that they can move up economically.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: The socialists and the Marxists adapted that then by expanding the basic Marxist theory to critical theory or cultural Marxism, white versus black, man versus woman, trans versus straight.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Today the divisions are sown and ever expanding, hype.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: You're an L, a G, a B, a T, a Q, an I, an A, S plus, right?
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And these labels stuck like targets on everybody's back.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: Boom.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: People are further divided to intersectionality.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: Now one is not only defined as an oppressed woman, but as a black oppressed woman, right?
16:20
SPEAKER_00: And the narrative through the control of mass media, keep the masses in continual fear by means of a pandemic or distracted by pornography, video games, mindless vitrol on social media, or literally made numb by drugs and alcohol and distractions.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: The world rulers of this present darkness can manipulate the masses almost at will, blinded by pride and weakened by lust, oblivious to the fact that every man made utopia throughout history has ended in disaster, but they still cannot help themselves, and seeing that mad chorus that saving man begins by destroying him and everything around us.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: And perhaps most troubling are so many bishops and cardinals in the church who also reject Jesus Christ as Savior and who no longer believe in the possibility of redemption.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Behind all of these ideologies, what brings them together as a coalition has become very clear.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: The enemy are those who believe in Jesus Christ, who believe in life, natural marriage in the family, and in their country, patriotism.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Men and women who seek to protect the unborn are the enemy now, who seek to protect the old, the weak, disabled, who hold up the reality that a man cannot become a woman, and that children have a basic right to grow up in a home with a mom and a dad, who believe that parents have the right to direct the education of their children, who believe in religious liberty and who want to live in a country that reflects those virtues and values back and supports marriage in the family religious freedom.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: For Christians and patriots, in this war on the human person, we have before us the spiritual horizon of hope.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Thanks to the help of what?
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Divine grace, and with the cooperation of human freedom.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: It's the saving cross of Jesus Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments which flow from the pure side of the Redeemer.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: This is the picture of divine mercy, Jesus giving himself to us.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: We find there the grace and the strength to always keep God's holy law even amidst the greatest hardships that we see all around us.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: We see clearly that the root of what we call the deep state or the deep church is a force for evil that seeks to eliminate religious freedom and then to turn the attack on what?
18:38
SPEAKER_00: The innocent, the child in the womb, marriage and the family created in the image and likeness of God.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Once that foundation, made up of the two of the three necessary societies, right?
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Marriage and the family, Christ and the church, once those are weakened, then it's very easy for that third necessary society, which is polity, the way we organize our society, that becomes a tyrant to rule over the whole structure, which all becomes corrupted and will all die in time.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Once again, it was Bishop Fulton Sheen who explains the times we're living in.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Let me read you something that he wrote back in 1974.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: He said, first of all, we're at the end of Christendom.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Now not Christianity, not the church itself, this is the positive faith that comes down to us.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: Remember what I'm saying, he said.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: Then he defined what he meant.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Christendom is economic, political, and social life as inspired by Christian principles.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: That is ending, he said.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: We have seen it die.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Look at the symptoms, the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: That was in 1974.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Today we know it's even worse with the redefinition of marriage and gender drawn into this picture, and the crisis within the church has only gotten worse.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: He reminded us that of twenty two civilizations that have decayed since the beginning of the world, nineteen of them rotted and perished from within.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: We live in it day to day, he said, and we do not see the decline.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: We take it for granted, we get used to things, almost accept them as the rule.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: How many Catholics and Christians accept the counter message?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: What the ideologues who seek to be to be free to express themselves however they want, what they don't acknowledge, what they'll never acknowledge, is the number one liberation, and the only liberation that truly sets us free is liberation from sin.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: When instead grace is rejected, that the fall position for a human being can summed up using this formula, that the fall position for a body and a soul for each one of us without grace is sin and death.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: For the power of Satan is then given rule over you by you yourself.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Look at the COVID pandemic and how easily most people were manipulated to the point where 70% of the world's population took an experimental jab that's becoming so obviously harmful to so many of us.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Where even Pope Francis had mass shut down all over the world.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Sacraments were withheld.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: He just gave in to this ideology.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: He pushed the jab himself, and COVID restrictions throughout the Vatican.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of Saint John Paul II's reflection on the twentieth century, which began, he said, with the hope of unlimited progress, but ended as the bloodiest century known to history.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Modern man had placed his hopes for a Messiah, he said, in his own genius in science, technology, medicine.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Whenever man loses sight of the great mystery and sets his sights on this world, he always meets disappointment, even despair.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: The world is not capable of making man happy, it's not capable of saving him from evil in all its types and forms, illness, epidemics, cataclysms, plandemics, I add, catastrophes, and the like.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: The world with its riches and his wants needs to be saved.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be redeemed.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: He wrote That and crossing the threshold of hope, an incredible book.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: It seems that we should all have caught on to this cosmic story by now good versus evil, light versus darkness, love versus lust, and seek the better way that's been revealed to us.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: Yet somehow each generation comes along and we do the same thing we miss the larger story.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: We get caught up in a much smaller one of our own making.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: We get stuck in that proverbial pot, don't we?
22:27
SPEAKER_00: And the result is always the same, a broken heart.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: As I was wrapping up a presentation with a group of young people, I asked them if they had anything else that they would like me to address before I left.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: The topic they requested?
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Mental illness.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Why they wanted to know?
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Do so many of their friends and family suffer from anxiety, depression, gender dysphoria, even suicidal thoughts.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: They've heard the culture's message or lack of coherent message loud and clear.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: There's no truth beyond your truth or my truth.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: There's no meaning and purpose for your life beyond the one that you invent for yourself.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: They are sensing, though, in their pain, in their anxiety, that which mankind has known since the dawn of history, the human heart was made for more, and it doesn't function well in a world void of meaning and purpose.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: What if the anxiety and the darkness you're experiencing is trying to tell you something?
23:25
SPEAKER_00: What if there might be something good because the mental illness is in the world and your heart is telling you something is wrong?
23:33
SPEAKER_00: A world without God.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: We grew up in this toxic sludge of a materialistic worldview, the age of moral relativism, where there is no truth, only my truth, your truth.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: And when that answer did not satisfy and you went out looking online often in search of the truth and a way to escape the pot, the algos simply manipulated back to the proverbial pot and destroyed what?
23:58
SPEAKER_00: Destroys your hope, your faith, that the truth even exists.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Then finally you meet someone, you hear something that touches your heart.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: Ooh, what is that?
24:08
SPEAKER_00: The good news of the gospel.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: And then in the midst of your brokenness, and we're all broken in one way or another, right?
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Along comes this very good news.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: The path to meaning, healing, and hope which leads to authentic love and profound happiness can be found.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: First know that there is a reason for your deep ache and your thirst for something more.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Alexander Scholzenitson pointed this out.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: What is the problem here?
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Men have forgotten God, he said.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: And we think back to Saint Augustine, right?
24:39
SPEAKER_00: In the third going into the fourth century, our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: Doskayevsky, another great Russian writer, has this great quote in his book Brothers Korasmizov, where the pious brother in that story, who's a Christian named Aloisha, says men must be resurrected in the truth or they will perish in their own hatred.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: The truth that will raise us up is the gospel, the truth of the good creator, the Father, who sent his only son to die for us and cause us to live like him.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: It is at the level of the individual human heart, your heart, my heart, that the battle to reform the world begins.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: This is what the socialists and the communists, the neo Marxists and Islam does not understand, and why they have their anthropology wrong.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Anthropology, of course, is the study of mankind.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: Instead, according to Marxist philosophy, human beings are alienated by their products, right?
25:33
SPEAKER_00: Their economic and political systems, their property, their work.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Marx also included religion in that category.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: Such a formulation of the problem leads, of course, to the conclusion that all we have to do then is transform the world of products, change the economic and political systems, rally against religion into the neo Marxists, it's to do what?
25:56
SPEAKER_00: It's to get rid of the burden of children, be free to engage in sex in the pursuit of pleasure for your own sake.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: And then the age of alienation, they say, will come to an end, and a reign of freedom will ensue, bringing with it complete self actualization for one and all.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: Notice that to end the age of alienation and bring about their utopia, that all one has to do is transfer the problems beyond ourselves is not our problem of redemption anymore.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: It's the other problem, it's the blame game.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: If we just change the structures around us, everything will turn into this utopia.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: Today, with no hope for redemption, those people have become rude and vulgar in their speech and actions.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: Take a recent example.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Here's a podcaster, Jennifer Welch, host of I've Had It, playing the blame game, this time targeting J.D.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: Vance, recently urging listeners to keep firing pistols all the time toward JD Vance, and calling JD an Antichrist style psychopath, a failed drag queen, unfit to be a father, husband, or vice president.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: She tied the remarks to opposing him for his twenty twenty eight bid maybe for presidency, and closed by saying that we should go to the polls and kick their asses.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: Political hyperbole, perhaps?
27:17
SPEAKER_00: Yet it illustrates the coarsening of public discourse and the ease with which dehumanizing language about political opponents, fathers, husbands circulates without consequence.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: Another example, this time a prominent churchman, Cardinal Blaze Supic, a member of the Should Know Better Club, who for the second year in a row is celebrating pro abortionists with an award.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Last year it was Senator Dick Durbin, remember?
27:44
SPEAKER_00: This year it's Michael Sachs.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Pro abort guys that he's going to give an award to.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it doesn't surprise any of us.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: I remember being at a pro life rally where this virtue signaling cardinal came to the podium wearing a mask and was promptly booed off the stage by pro life veterans who actually know better and where he actually stood on all these issues, and they were in no mood to hear any hypocrites or heretics that day.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: Now we're approaching the crux of the matter for historical man, the crux of human practice.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: How are we to live?
28:17
SPEAKER_00: How is man to live?
28:19
SPEAKER_00: God who has fatherly concerned for all of us, has willed that all of us should constitute one family, treat one another in the spirit of brotherhood.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: For this reason, love for God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Sacred Scripture teaches us that the love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: That means the child, the unborn, huh?
28:40
SPEAKER_00: The old, the weak.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law, Saint Paul says.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when he prayed to the Father, that all may be one as we are one in John seventeen, does that open up vistas close to human reason, for he implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the unity of God's sons and truth and love.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: Contrast this with Karl Marx, who envisioned a merely materialistic world in which religion is the opium of the people, he called it, and nothing matters but matter.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: But Marx was not an atheist.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: He is one that sold out his soul to the devil.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: Marx wrote in an in an eighteen thirty seven poem, Thus heaven I forfeited, I know it well.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: My soul, once true to God, he said, is chosen for hell.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: Marx and Ingalls went on to write the Communist Manifesto that they initially referred to literally as the Communist Confession of Faith.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Truly their manifesto was their catechism.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: It was their Bible.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: When finally thrust on the world, though, no other theory in all of history has led to the torture, starvation, and murder of so many innocents.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: One hundred million people killed, mostly their own citizens, slaughtered in the last century, in country after country, implemented in various forms across wide ranging nationalities, traditions, backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities, communism coldly and consistently violated the full sweep of most basic human rights, from property to the press, from speech to assembly, from conscience to religion.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: So restrictive is communism that its implementers even today routinely refuse to allow the citizens the right to leave it to escape the destructive systems imposed within their own borders.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: They erected walls topped with bobwire patrolled twenty four seven by police with automatic weapons to do what?
30:37
SPEAKER_00: To herd and fence in the masses they claimed to champion.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: They gotta lock us in.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: All in the pursuit of a secular utopia, they sought heaven on earth without religion.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: They did so without realizing that utopia is not only elusive, but such a literal self contradiction that it doesn't exist.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: The Greek roots of that word utopia are utopos, or no place.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: That's what it means.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: In other words, there is no utopia.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: What a paradox, huh?
31:08
SPEAKER_00: And yet the communists will pursue this no place with religious like zeal.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: So how is man to live?
31:16
SPEAKER_00: John Paul II went on to call Karl Marx a master of suspicion.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: A master of suspicion is a person who does not know or does not fully believe in the transforming power of the gospel.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: So he projects the same onto everyone else.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, if I can't be redeemed, if I can't be saved, then nobody else can I project this into the world.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: So in his heart, it's in a state of continual and irreversible suspicion.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: So their fatal flaw is that they stop at the accusation, they reject redemption, and with their own hearts in a state of continual and irreversible suspicion, can see no other way forward than to perpetually tear down and then attempt to build up their new man-made systems.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: This happens over and over throughout history.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Christ's words then do not allow us to stop at that accusation of the heart and cast it into a deep state of continual suspicion.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says there's something more, and I'm going to give you the power, right, to be redeemed.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: This derives from the very nature of redemption, on the foundation of that mystery which Saint Paul defines as the redemption of the body in Romans 8 23.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Redemption is a truth, a reality, in the name of which man must feel himself called, and John Paul said called with effectiveness.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Is this not true in our own age and in every age?
32:38
SPEAKER_00: Saint John the Evangelist wrote this, do not love the world or the things in the world.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and here's the threefold concupicence, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world, and the world passes away in the lust of it, but he who does the will of God abides forever.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: History shows that each generation and each individual person within that generation is confronted with the joys.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: Today as we approach the midterms, we stand in a sense once again before that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we have to decide.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: The question put to every generation and to every individual is do I use my intellect and reason to build my life and the world around me on eternal truth, on God, or do I squander my freedom and choose instead to be like gods who know what is good and what is evil?
33:36
SPEAKER_00: John Paul II said it would be a very serious error to conclude, as we find in the Synod of Synodalities, this ongoing craziness in the church, and the teaching of the Father James Martin types of the should know better club.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: The church's teaching, they say, is essentially only an ideal which must then be adapted, proportioned, graduated to the so-called concrete possibilities of man.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: What are we what can we really do?
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Right?
34:04
SPEAKER_00: They're just like Marx.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: They're projecting the idea that we can't be redeemed and saved.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: According to an ever changing definition of truth, they say we just have to define it ourselves.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: But instead, John Paul asks, what in fact are the concrete possibilities of man?
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Of which man are we speaking?
34:23
SPEAKER_00: He said.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: A man dominated by lust or a man redeemed by Christ.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: This is what's at stake, the reality of Christ's redemption.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: Christ has redeemed us.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: This means that he has given us the possibility of realizing the entire truth of our being.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: He has set our freedom free from the dominance of this concupicence, and if redeemed man still sins, this is not due to an imperfection of Christ's redemptive act, but to man's will not to avail himself of that grace which flows from that act.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: God's command is, of course, proportioned to man's capabilities, but the capabilities of the man to whom the Holy Spirit has been given, of the man who, though he has fallen into sin, can always obtain pardon and enjoy the presence of the Holy Spirit.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: There is a voice that the faithful hear, that Karl Marx and the tyrants of the world have rejected.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: And he who sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new, and write this, this is Saint John in the Book of Revelation, for these words of mine are trustworthy and true, and he said to me, It is done, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God, and he shall be my son, but for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all the liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: We are living, brothers and sisters in turbulent times.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: The battle is real, yet for those of us who believe that the world is within God's providence and he loves his children, we hear the voice of John Paul II, who understood these times very well.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: Be not afraid, be not afraid.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: John Paul II, pray for us.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Hey, God bless you.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: Go out and vote.