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#759 The Spirit of New Things: Pope Leo XIII, John Paul II, and the Battle for the Human Person · Claymore: Become Who You Are

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Yesterday I had a meeting with Jeff Gallish, president of the John Paul II Renewal Center, which is our umbrella organization that both Love Ed for parents and children and Claymore Militants, Christy, for the young men that I love working with, fall under.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: He's leading part of our team to the Bishop Fulton Sheen beatification happening this week.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: And since I was not going, he wanted to review Claymore.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: He specifically wanted to review the Claymore three-step battle plan again, just to get it the best way, the quickest way to really get this point across what this is all about.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: And uh so we went over the outline and the handbook and the community that we're building.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: And I want to take time with you here today to share with you what I shared with Jeff so you get a really understanding of how solid this formation is, where it all began, and where did it all begin?
0:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, since I was a young man, I had faith in the United States that we had enough faithful, morally decent people that would hold up the core of our country.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: But then the alarm bells started to go off, and I started to read Pew reports that we had crossed the 50% line of people who belonged to and attended a church, and it went under 50% that were attending church on a weekly basis.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: I knew when that happened that the dominoes would begin falling at our country.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Freedom would be taken away from us.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Look, I'm a student of history, and I've seen this happen over and over again.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm a student of the gospels, and I understand what goes on.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: We're in a real spiritual battle, and when that happened, I realized, ooh, you know, we're taking too much for granted.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: I knew that the dominoes would begin to fall.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Freedom would start to be taken away from us, which was already happening years ago, but it would start to accelerate.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Evil would begin to rain in our country because it starts to rain in the individual human hearts.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: We allowed God then to be taken out of our culture.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: We see that.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: And this is going back already when I when I was still in school.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Then the teaching of Jesus Christ were watered down even in our churches.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: And then as the faith was no longer being passed down from generation to generation within our homes, within our churches, God was basically taken out of our hearts.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And in the past decade, then I saw this acceleration in the United States, the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, in world history, that had lifted more people all across the world, including my grandparents who came from all different countries out of poverty, out of persecution.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And I saw that begin to crumble.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Was it ever perfect?
2:30
SPEAKER_00: No.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And you know why?
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Because it's a country made up of people, and people aren't perfect.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: But it's also a country for the first time in history that based its whole foundation and its whole foundational principles, its laws on Judeo Christian principles, bringing God into our hearts, into our families, into our culture then, and we were patriots, huh?
2:53
SPEAKER_00: We loved our country.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Did everybody have faith in God?
2:56
SPEAKER_00: No, not all, but most, certainly enough did to base the country under God, and so God protected us.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Not without pain and struggles throughout our history, but in our sins and in our faults, we grew and strove as a as a whole to extend basic dignity, human dignity to all of our citizens and around the world too, acknowledging higher moral authority and natural law they governed us.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Small government by the people, for the people, under God, who guaranteed our inalienable rights that nobody could take away from us.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: But now, and again, this has been going on for some time, we let our guard down, didn't we?
3:38
SPEAKER_00: We took it all for granted.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: And evil, it's going to fill that vacuum when God has taken out.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: Until today, evil reigns in so many human hearts.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: That's why Bishop Fulton Sheen, I just mentioned him in his beatification, he was such a patriot.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: He said, only those who live by faith really know what's happening in the world.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: The great masses of people without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on because they've lost the vision from the heights from which they're falling.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: You see that, right?
4:09
SPEAKER_00: You see our inherent human dignity given to us by God as a gift, and that's what separates us from the power of evil.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: But when human dignity is no longer connected to its source, to God Himself, we become like cut flowers, huh?
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Like the branch cut off from the tree.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: We no longer are open to the source of divine life and love.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Our human dignity has its foundation in the fact that we are eternal children of God.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: I remember God me at Spez number thirty six, it just always stuck in my mind when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible to the point that today we as a people no longer know who we are.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: I can say this bluntly because you can see and sense the evil out in the world that the dominoes are falling.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Our schools and our institutions have been captured.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Evil reigns, the murder of the innocent, breakdown of marriages in the families, the corruption deeply entrenched at all levels of government from the Fed, the state, the local levels.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: So what's going to happen?
5:15
SPEAKER_00: I hope nobody is surprised here.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: If this doesn't change, if we don't stand up and turn back to God, Metanoia is the word for that, it's not going to end well.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: This is just a fact of history.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: As Bishop Fulton Sheen had articulated so well, of the twenty one major civilizations throughout human history that fell, nineteen of them did not fall from an outside force coming in.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: They fell from the moral rot that had started from the inside.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: My biggest fear in life, and I've told my son this many, many times, and it reminds me of this.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: I used to tell him when he was young, is that I'm going to be an old man sitting on a rocking chair at, say, 85, 90 years old, sipping a lemonade on a porch somewhere, probably with a little brandy in it, maybe, right?
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Thinking back in my life and thinking, what did I do when I was tasked with proclaiming the gospel?
6:06
SPEAKER_00: When I was asked to stand up for what's true, good, and beautiful.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: What was my life all about?
6:11
SPEAKER_00: Did I have the courage to stand up for the culture of life and love, building up unity?
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Again, what's true, good, and beautiful in the world?
6:20
SPEAKER_00: This is how and why Claymore came about.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: I saw these young men starting to respond, and I was not going to go down without a fight and without declaring the gospel.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And then two things happened almost simultaneously that gave me a lot of hope.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump became president, led in not by the Democrats or Republicans, but by a populist movement, the MAGA movement, we call it now.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump gave that name, Make America Great Again.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: I put up the hat.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump is not Jesus Christ, but he came in and he had a sense of this, right?
6:52
SPEAKER_00: So the MAGA movement, though, that got him elected, is made up of Christian patriots, Christians who love their country, men and women who loved and followed Jesus Christ and also wanted to restore this country.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: And then that was number one.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Number two, the young men we were meeting over the last decade or so, but even accelerating now, who are waking up and asking, what is the truth of things?
7:17
SPEAKER_00: And sense that something was deeply wrong, but they hadn't got that foundation passed down to them.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: This is where Claymore came about.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: So I met and worked with these young men, and they were asking for more.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to build, as Jesus taught, to build their lives and homes on solid rock, on all that's true, good and beautiful, not that shifting sand that they experienced all around them.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Claymore was developed from the gospel and Catholic social teaching to show them how to do that to guys that weren't formed, to fathers that weren't formed, that are trying to form their sons and mothers and daughters too.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: This is for everybody.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: The Claymore Battle Plan outline lays this out, and you can view this for free.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: And you almost should pause and just look at that or print it out if you don't have one already.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: I know many of you have already printed that out, or you bought the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook from us and we send it to you with that.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: But but certainly just go to our website, Claymore Militis Christie.com.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: It'll be in the show notes.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: And just look at that.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: That lays that whole thing out.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: It's very, very short.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: And then the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook takes this outline and incorporates all of this into a practical total formation framework that men can build their lives upon solid ground, solid rock.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: I and I can say this without reservation.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing quite like it because I searched and searched before realizing that there was no place, no one place that these men could be formed all in one place.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: And I realized I was looking around for some something, and I realized I was the one being asked to write the darn thing myself.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was overwhelmed by that thought at first.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: I just didn't seem like I had the time to do that.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: But then I realized that God had provided me throughout my life, and especially this last two decades with everything.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: And when I found that John Paul II provided even the framework for the book in this, which is dear friends, this apostolic letter he wrote to young people to launch World Youth Day in 1985, then I just started to fill in all of that framework.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: And as a side note, what was fun for me to discover, and what surprised me the first time I read the book that I wrote, because you know you I wrote 52 short acts over almost two years.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: And so I had never read the whole thing in its entirety.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: But what surprised me, and I was really uh tickled by, was that almost every saint that I had become friends with during my lifetime had made an appearance in that battle plan handbook.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And you may note, including Bishop Fulton Sheen, uh, quite a few times.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: And so, again, when you're starting to wonder what is the truth of things, how do I lay this formation?
9:58
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want you to get overwhelmed because when you're starting to build your life back, you'd say, where do I start?
10:03
SPEAKER_00: How do I start to build my life on the rock?
10:05
SPEAKER_00: How do I understand this whole structure, what's going on around me in my heart, marriage in the family?
10:11
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be united to Christ and the church, and then to go out and restore the culture and the country?
10:15
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot there, right?
10:17
SPEAKER_00: It's not that it's not that difficult to start.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Just two simple asks, things that we ask when you start.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Number one, from that Claymore battle plan outline, first thing in the morning, knees before the phone, always.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: That's number one.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: And simply follow the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Ten minutes or less in the morning.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then at some point you read one of those acts from the handbook, very, very short, just a few pages.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: I like to do it at night, you know, and to meditate it in that.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: So I got 10 minutes in the morning, five, ten minutes at night, and then the rest of the day just goes so much better.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's it.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And from there you start to build a community of your own friends and people that are asking, and you start to build that community up, and you'll see this happening right in front of you.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, so here's a history lesson on the origins of the Claymore three-step battle plan.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: I just wrote an article, I'll put it in our newsletter, so make sure that you subscribe to our newsletter.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: It's called The Spirit of New Things Pope Leo XIII, John Paul II, and the battle for the human person in an age of cultural and technological revolution.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: There are moments in history when the world does not merely change around us, but the very way people understand the human person changes, the family, society, freedom, authority, and even reality itself begins to change.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: We are living through such a moment.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: Artificial intelligence is developing at an astonishing speed.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: Social media has transformed the way we communicate and increasingly the way we understand ourselves.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: Smartphones place nearly unlimited information and temptation in the palm of a child's hand.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Technology is changing work, education, relationships, our sexuality, economics, politics, and even our understanding of what it means to be a human being.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: For many young people, this is simply the world they inherited.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: But the Catholic Church has confronted revolutionary change before.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: More than a century ago, Pope Leo XIII looked upon a world being being transformed by the new industrial age, revolutionary politics, economic upheaval was happening, socialism was coming in, capitalism.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: What is capitalism and is it a good thing?
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Urbanization, you know, going off the farms and moving into the cities and the growing power of the modern state.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: A hundred years later, Pope John Paul II looked back upon Leo's response and recognized something remarkable.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: The particular circumstances had changed now, but the fundamental questions had not.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: How does the church then engage a rapidly changing world without losing sight of the permanent truths about the human person?
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Because that doesn't change.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: And how do we distinguish between those things society is free to change and those realities society must first receive and then recognize?
13:12
SPEAKER_00: That question is as urgent today as it was in 1891 when Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Nivarum.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: And then a hundred years later in 1991, commemorating that hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's great social encyclical, Reum Navarum of New Things, where the title for this article came from, John Paul II wrote Centesimus Anus a Hundred Years.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: And he said towards the end of the last century, the church found herself facing a historical process which had already been taking place for some time, but which by then was reaching a critical point.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And John Paul II described radical changes in politics, economics, society, science, technology, together with the growing influence of powerful ideologies.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: But then he identified something deeper.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: These developments were producing a new conception of society and of the state, and consequently of authority itself.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: A traditional society, he wrote, was passing away, and another was beginning to be formed, one which brought the hope of new freedom, but also the threat of new forms of injustice and servitude.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Read those words in light of the world in which we now live.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: A traditional society was passing away.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: Another one was being formed.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: New freedoms were appearing for us, but so were new possibilities for servitude.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: Don't we see this?
14:39
SPEAKER_00: And not to get into the weeds too much here, but it was true in Leo XIII's time, it's true in John Paul II's time, and it's certainly true in our time.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo XIII began Rerum Nabarum by speaking of this reumnabings, the spirit of revolutionary change disturbing the nations of the world at that time.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: The Industrial Revolution had transformed economic life, the masses of people again moving from farms and villages into industrial cities, traditional relationships between workers and owners were changing.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: Enormous concentrations of wealth were being created while many laborers lived in miserable conditions.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: So socialism came in and promised one answer, and economic individualism and capitalism another.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the modern nation state was becoming increasingly powerful, and the relationships among the church, the state, the family, property, and individual liberty were all being renegotiated in a sense, trying to find their place.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Lille therefore faced a question that was simultaneously philosophical and intensely practical.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: He asked, How do we civilize this situation?
15:56
SPEAKER_00: What kind of social order serves the human person?
16:00
SPEAKER_00: What can legitimately change what has been lost?
16:04
SPEAKER_00: What should be recovered, and by what standard are we going to judge any of it?
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Leo offered a wonderfully realistic principle.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Nothing is more useful than to look at the world as it really is.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Start with reality, and at the same time he said to seek elsewhere for the solace to its troubles.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to find a solution, you know, wit within systems and ideologies, right?
16:29
SPEAKER_00: That sentence, nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, tells us something important about Catholic social thought.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: Christianity is not utopianism, right?
16:42
SPEAKER_00: We don't begin by imagining perfect human beings inhabiting a perfect society like they do with promise in socialism and communism.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: And then we would go to attempt to force reality into our theory, isn't that what Marx does and socialism does, etc.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: We begin with reality, with the human person as he actually is, created in the image and likeness of God, possessing extraordinary dignity and freedom, capable of heroic love, and yet wounded like we all are by sin.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: We begin with man and woman, marriage and children, families and communities, and the human person's natural need for friendship, association, worship, work, property, justice, political community.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: We begin with what is before, what came before, what were things were solid before, what are necessary for human flourishing.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: Before we decide what's going to be legislated, what kind of laws we're going to pass?
17:45
SPEAKER_00: We do the opposite sometimes today, don't we?
17:48
SPEAKER_00: The philosopher Russell Hittinger describes Leo's approach as a kind of nearestilian effort to put the spirits of the age into perennial wineskins.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
18:01
SPEAKER_00: To take the spirits of the age, what we see around us today, right?
18:04
SPEAKER_00: And say, okay, how does it fit into perennial wineskins that have been here all the time, the basic essence of who we are?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: See, it's a wonderful image.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo XIII did not pretend industrialization wasn't happening or propose turning the clock back several centuries.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Neither did he conclude that because society was changing, human nature itself had changed.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: It didn't.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he examined new realities through enduring principles.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: The circumstances were new.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: The principles were perennial.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Industrialization could change, economic systems, political institutions, and technology could change, but certain questions remained.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: What is a human person?
18:48
SPEAKER_00: What is freedom for?
18:50
SPEAKER_00: What are marriage in the family?
18:51
SPEAKER_00: What is property for?
18:53
SPEAKER_00: What do parents owe their children?
18:55
SPEAKER_00: What does society owe the worker?
18:58
SPEAKER_00: What authority properly belongs to government?
19:01
SPEAKER_00: And what authority does not belong to government?
19:04
SPEAKER_00: These questions cannot ultimately be answered by technology, economics, or political power because they're questions about human nature, about the human good.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: This brings us to an important but largely forgotten element of Catholic social thought.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo XIII's framework would be developed by Pope Paul XII around what he called the three necessary societies.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: Pope Pius XII wrote there are three necessary societies distinct from one another and yet harmoniously combined by God into which man is born.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Two, namely family, marriage and family, and then civil society, our government, the way we organize our government, they belong to the natural order.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: The third, the church, to the supernatural order.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: They should be connected, but they've been separated, right?
19:56
SPEAKER_00: But those are the three necessary societies.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Notice the expression into which man is born.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: You see, we don't invent these realities from scratch.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: The first is marriage and the family.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: We always start with marriage and the family.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: That's where we all come from.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: The second then how we organize ourselves, political or civil society, the civitas, it's called, and then the third is the church.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: Pius immediately clarified the relationship.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: The family instituted by God, and this is so important to remember this.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: Once you break down marriage in the family, guys, there's no way to institute anything else.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: And that means that has to be connected to Christ and the church.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: The family, instituted by God for the generation and formation of offspring of children, has priority of nature and therefore of rights over civil society because it came first.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: Yet the family cannot by itself provide everything necessary for the wider temporal common good for all of us.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: So we form political society.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: We have from the beginning, we're political animals, aren't we?
21:03
SPEAKER_00: Social animals, human beings are.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the political society has its own legitimate authority and responsibilities, maintaining justice, public order, providing for those dimensions of the common good that families and smaller associations cannot accomplish on their own, say self defense, right, for the whole nation, those types of things.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: The church in turn possesses her own proper authority in the supernatural order.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: The point is not that civil society is perfect in the ordinary sense of being flawless or morally superior to the family, no.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: But rather each of these societies possesses a proper sphere of authority corresponding to its particular purpose.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: The priority of the family does not mean that the state has no genuine competence.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: It means that the state encounters realities it did not create, and it must govern them according to justice.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: Other associations are Are generally social as well, right?
22:01
SPEAKER_00: We have business associations, labor unions, schools, charities, clubs, professional associations, apostolates like the John Paul II Renewal Center, like Claymore.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: A healthy society depends upon them, but their particular forms are more contingent.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: They can shift around a little bit.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: A corporation can dissolve, a labor union can disappear, a school can close, an association can reorganize, and another organization can take its place.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: The family is something different.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: So is the political community.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: And within Catholic theology, so is the church.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: They're different.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Their demise would not simply mean that another organization had gone out of business.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: It would represent a social calamity.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: If any of those are taken out, marriage and the family, we've seen how that's been twisted and distorted, right?
22:53
SPEAKER_00: We've seen how the church has been watered down, and we've seen how the political structure has been corrupt, huh?
22:59
SPEAKER_00: And so if any of those three are uh taken out, it would be a social calamity, Pope uh Pius the XI said.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, all three of those were really from today.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: So here we arrive at an idea essential for understanding Pope Leo XIII.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: Not everything possessing authority or social reality was created by the state.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: Don't we have the state overreaching now, powerful?
23:26
SPEAKER_00: It's grown so big, it's like a cancer now.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: They want to control everything.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: So let's consider these.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: Consider marriage in the family.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Governments did not invent mothers, fathers, children.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: They did not create the natural responsibilities parents have toward their children.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: So marriage in the family existed before the modern state, before modern legal codes, in philosophical language, these realities precede positive law.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: In other words, it comes first.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Here we arrive in an idea essential for understanding Pope Leo XIII.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: Not everything possessing authority or social reality was created by the state, right?
24:04
SPEAKER_00: The state came after some things.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: Marriage in a family existed before the modern state and before modern legal codes.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: In philosophical language, these realities precede positive law.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: What is positive law?
24:18
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean good law.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: It means that law that has been posited, formally established by human authority.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: Congress passes, for instance, legislation.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: Legislators enact statutes, courts issue judgments, governments promulgate regulations, municipalities pass ordinances.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: These are forms of positive law done by human authority.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: Natural law asks a more fundamental question.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: What is already true about the human person before the legislator and the legislation meets, right?
24:49
SPEAKER_00: Before the laws are passed down, the human laws.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: We already have laws that have been in existence by God, in other words, marriage in the family being one of those institutions that he created right from the very beginning.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Nature itself does not tell us whether a speed limit should be fifty five or sixty five miles per hour, for example.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: Human authority must prudently determine such factors.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: But the relationship between parents and the children is not created in the same way.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: Parents possess responsibilities toward their children not primarily because government delegated those responsibilities to them, but because they're parents.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Leo described the household as a true society older than any state.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: This distinction is enormous.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: The state encounters the family, it does not manufacture it.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Positive law, right, by human authority, can regulate aspects of marriage and family life like inheritance, property, taxation, custody, protection of children, and other civil consequences.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: But within Leo's natural law framework, government does not create the underlying human reality out of nothing.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: Its task is to first recognize reality and govern in accordance with justice.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: This raises one of the most important questions confronting every generation.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: What does the state create and what must the state recognize?
26:11
SPEAKER_00: See, this is the big problem with socialism and communism.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: We put the state first, and that's telling us how to live, how to run our families, what marriage is about, what children are about, and they take away your rights just like this and like that.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: Our nation has inalienable rights given to us by God.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: You see the difference?
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Leo's social analysis therefore recognized several distinct spheres of social authority.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: The family, these voluntary associations that I mentioned, the church and the state, or civitas again, each possesses its own proper competence and responsibilities, and inevitably they all overlap.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: Marriage and the family, though, sit into center because they touch virtually everything else education, economics, property, religion, culture, and political society.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: And because the family produces and forms the next generation.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Without the marriage and the family, you don't have human beings.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: And if human beings come into the world without marriages, without families, I mean you create this dysfunction within the human heart.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: So debates about marriage and the family, therefore, are never merely private debates.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: They concern the architecture of our whole society, the basic building blocks of every civilization throughout history.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: This is also why the Catholic principle known as subsidiarity becomes so important.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Subsidiarity means bring the power down to the lowest level that works.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: Higher authorities should assist those lower communities when necessary, but should not simply absorb responsibilities properly belonging to persons, families, and smaller associations.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: You get that?
27:52
SPEAKER_00: What happens when we see this breakdown in the society?
27:56
SPEAKER_00: The state wants to control everything.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: And these young people, if they don't understand this or come from dysfunctional families, they allow that because they didn't grow up in any structure.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: And so they look at the state like their parents almost, right?
28:09
SPEAKER_00: So the state is necessary, but the state is not everything.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: For much of the modern era, the church experienced tremendous pressure from above, from revolutionary governments coming in and confiscating church property.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: Religious orders were suppressed.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: Catholic schools and institutions, they they faced restrictions, and the government sought greater control over Catholic education, over marriage, over church appointments, property, public religious activity.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: We see that now, right?
28:39
SPEAKER_00: This attack.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: From the perspective of what Pius XI called his political watchtower.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: So he's in Rome.
28:47
SPEAKER_00: He called it his political watchtower.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: He said the church spent enormous energy struggling to secure and preserve her church, her ecclesial we call it, but church's social and educational liberties, the liberty to live out your faith, right?
29:03
SPEAKER_00: Not to mention her very pro her property, because the states always wanted that property, right?
29:08
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to take that property to enrich themselves and also weaken the church.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: So this church had to ask what property belonged to Caesar, what belonged to the church, what belonged to parents, and where the boundaries of political authority should lie.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: But something else was coming to even make this more complicated.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: By the time of Pope John Paul II, disruption was increasingly coming from another direction, not only from the state trying to get power, but from below from culture itself.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: We had two revolutions in particular that transformed the landscape.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: The first was the cultural revolution that I grew up in, interrupted with extraordinary force during the nineteen sixties, the sexual revolution, right?
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Changing attitudes towards sexuality, marriage, family, authority, tradition, personal autonomy, morality.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: And the second was the technoeconomic revolution.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: These global markets expanded, communications accelerated, economic relationships changed, and technology increasingly penetrated everyday life.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: John Paul II therefore confronted what he called a two ended disruption.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: Pressure continued to come above through the states, through laws, political institutions, systems of power, but enormous pressure also came from below through the culture, economics, technology, entertainment, changing conceptions of the human person.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: John Paul, when he became Pope, had much to contend with, and so do we today.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: These young people that I'm speaking to grow up in a vice, right?
30:43
SPEAKER_00: The pressure from the outside, the pressure from the culture, and it twists and distorts their hearts.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: No wonder they're anxious and depressing.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: It's so important to get this teaching down so they understand what's going on.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: If John Paul II witnessed the beginning of the technoeconomic revolution and the sexual revolution, we're living inside its extraordinary acceleration.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: The internet came, followed by smartphones, social media, algorithmic feeds, right, designed to capture and hold human attention.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Pornography became instantly accessible, exposing many children even to sexual imagery long before they possessed the maturity to understand even what they were seeing.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: Entertainment became nearly continuous.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: Children entered digital environments.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Previous generations could scarcely have imagined friendship itself increasingly migrated into screens.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: It changed the way we date, courtship, the way we work, shopping, news, politics, and education.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: They all changed.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: And now comes artificial intelligence.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: AI promises enormous benefits.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: It can assist medicine, scientific research, education, engineering, communication, productivity, and countless other human endeavors.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: But Leo's question remains the same.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: What is our standard of judgment?
32:00
SPEAKER_00: The fact that we can do something does not tell us whether we should do something.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: Technology or technological capacity cannot define the human good because technology itself requires a definition of the human good by which its uses can be judged.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: We have to judge, right?
32:18
SPEAKER_00: Technology could be good or evil.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: And so the old questions suddenly become new again.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: What is a human person?
32:25
SPEAKER_00: What makes human intelligence distinctive?
32:28
SPEAKER_00: What is work for?
32:29
SPEAKER_00: What is education for?
32:31
SPEAKER_00: What constitutes an authentic human relationship?
32:35
SPEAKER_00: What do parents owe their children in a digital world?
32:38
SPEAKER_00: What authority should corporations possess over our attention and personal information?
32:43
SPEAKER_00: What should governments regulate?
32:45
SPEAKER_00: And what should they leave to families in civil society?
32:48
SPEAKER_00: What does human freedom mean when sophisticated systems can predict, influence, and monetize our very behavior?
32:55
SPEAKER_00: These are not merely technological questions, they're anthropological.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: What do I mean by anthropological?
33:02
SPEAKER_00: They're human questions, right?
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Anthropology is the study of the human person.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: So they're questions about man, who are we?
33:10
SPEAKER_00: We have to get back to that basics.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: So this brings us back to John Paul II's striking warning in centesimus anus.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: The new society being formed carried the possibility of new freedoms, he said, but also new forms of injustice and servitude.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: That is a remarkably useful lens through which to view technological development.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Technology can liberate, it could also enslave.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: We see that, right?
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Again, pornography, etc, etc.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Social media can connect people across continents while isolating a teenager sitting alone in a bedroom.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Artificial intelligence can augment human creativity while tempting us to outsource activities essential to our intellectual and moral foundation, and even to simulate companionship and intimacy without another person.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: The Catholic response therefore cannot simply be reject everything new, but nor can it be everything new presents progress because it doesn't.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Leo offers something wiser.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: Look upon the world as it really is, what's going on in the human person, what's going on in your heart, my heart, what's going on in our marriages and our families, and then ask what these new things are doing to that human person, to that human heart.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, however, the decisive battleground, it's why Claymore is a sword, right?
34:30
SPEAKER_00: This is a battle.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: It's not technological, economic, or even political.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: It's fought on the individual human heart, on the battleground of the individual human heart.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: Every social system ultimately rests upon some understanding of the human person.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: If man is merely a consumer, society will organize itself around consumption.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: If he's merely an economic unit, society will organize itself around production.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: If man is merely an autonomous will, freedom will increasingly mean removing every limitation upon personal choice.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: If I decide to kill a baby because that baby is just going to burden me, right?
35:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to be able to do everything I want, then we just snuff out the life of the child.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: If man is merely biological material, right, technology will eventually regard the human body as raw material to be manipulated.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Don't we see this in the trans movement?
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Christianity begins somewhere radically different.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: The human person possesses a dignity neither the market nor the state confers, and therefore neither can legitimately take away.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Freedom is not simply the ability to choose, it is order to what is true, what is good, what is beautiful.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: We want to choose the good.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: Marriage is not merely a government contract.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: The family is not merely a collection of autonomous individuals sharing a residence.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: Children are not products to be bought and sold like commodities with surrogacy and IVF and all these things that are coming out.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Parents are not merely temporary agents of the state.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: Work is not merely economic production.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: It has to be meaningful.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Technology is not the measure of progress, and government is not the source of every human right.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: All of these must be measured against something deeper.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: What is the truth of things?
36:21
SPEAKER_00: And especially what is the truth about the human person?
36:24
SPEAKER_00: Why are we created, right?
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And this brings us directly to the young person holding a smartphone today.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: He or she may have never read Aristotle or heard of Rerum Nabarum or Centesimus Aunus, but that young person is living inside the questions the Pope Leo XIII and John Paul II were asking.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Inevitably they have to ask these questions themselves or they'll never find their way.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: Every day something is telling him what a man is, what a woman is, what sex is, what freedom means, and what will make him happy.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: Something is forming that young person's imagination.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: You see, the formation crisis does not strike only young men, it forms young women as well, marriage in the family, and it cannot be rebuilt from just one sex only, like these critical gender theories say.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: The question is not whether the next generation will be formed.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: The question is who or what will form them.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Will it be TikTok, pornography, YouTube, Instagram, advertising, political ideology, consumer culture and algorithm, whose purpose is to maximize engagement, or will it be artificial intelligence?
37:33
SPEAKER_00: Or they deliberately seek what is true, good, and beautiful.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: This is why formation matters.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: It's why fathers and mothers matter, why families matter, why friendship and community matters, and why the church matters.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: The young must learn not merely to consume the culture, but to discern it, challenge it where necessary, and help build something better.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: The older thirteenth principle remains an excellent place to begin.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Look upon the world as it really is.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: What is going on out there?
38:04
SPEAKER_00: What's going on in your own heart and seek somewhere else for the solace of its troubles?
38:09
SPEAKER_00: We don't need nostalgia, utopianism, or fear.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: We need clear eyes.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: Technology is not going away.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Artificial intelligence isn't going away.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: The cultural revolution cannot simply be wished away, and the modern economy isn't going to become the economy of eighteen ninety one.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: Our task is not to pretend that we live in another century.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: Our task is to bring these perennial truths into this one.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: That's what the gospel is all about.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: This is what Pope Leo XIII attempted, what Pius XI developed, and what John Paul II carried into the twentieth century.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: That responsibility has now been passed to us.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: This is what Claymore is all about.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: We must ask, of every new ideology, technology, political proposal, economic system, and cultural revolution, does this serve the human person or does the human person become its servant?
39:04
SPEAKER_00: Does it strengthen marriage in the family or does it weaken them?
39:07
SPEAKER_00: Does it respect the property authority of parents?
39:10
SPEAKER_00: Does it encourage genuine community or does it encourage isolation?
39:14
SPEAKER_00: Does it strengthen our capacity to know the truth?
39:18
SPEAKER_00: To have our freedom, to actually choose the good?
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Do we understand our responsibility?
39:24
SPEAKER_00: Do we understand what sacrifice and love is?
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Or does it make us increasingly dependent, distracted, manipulated, and alone?
39:32
SPEAKER_00: These questions cannot be answered by an algorithm.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: They require wisdom.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the Christian cannot remain a spectator.
39:41
SPEAKER_00: Saint Paul tells us take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: We receive truth so that we can live it out.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: We are formed so that we can act.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: We strengthen our families so they become places where the next generation encounters truth and love.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: We build friendship so no one has to fight alone.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: We enter our communities because Christians cannot abandon the culture and then complain about what fills the vacuum.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: We engage political and social life not because politics can save us, but because love of neighbor requires concern for the common good, and we use technology without allowing technology to use us.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: That's why we start in the morning, right?
40:22
SPEAKER_00: Before you look at those phones, before you let the world in, drop down to our knees, go to the source of things, right?
40:29
SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo XIII confronted the spirit of new things.
40:34
SPEAKER_00: John Paul II confronted a world in which a traditional society was passing away, another was being formed.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: Today, another transformation is underway.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: The question facing us is not whether the world will change, it will change.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: The question is whether amid all that change we will remember what cannot change the dignity of the human person, the truth about man and woman, the importance of marriage in the family, the responsibility of parents, the necessity of genuine human community, the proper limits of political authority, the difference between freedom and license, the responsibility to seek truth and above all the truth that man does not create himself.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: He receives life himself as a gift.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: That may be the great challenge of the technological age.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: It may also be our great opportunity.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: The world does not need people who run from the future.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: It needs men and women capable of entering into it with wisdom, people who know what technology can do but also understand what technology can never tell us, who understand the difference between what society can legitimately change and what it must first recognize, who know where authority property belongs, who are capable of defending the innocent child in the womb, the family, strengthening the church, rebuilding civil society, serving the common good, and forming the next generation.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: People willing to look at the world as it really is and then act.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: Because someone God has already placed on your path and my path is waiting.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: We must inherently understand these things and then go on and pass it to the new generation.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: And if we don't do it, who's going to step forward?
42:20
SPEAKER_00: We're the only ones left to do that.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Claymore was established for that.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: Go to Claymore Militus Christie dot com to our website, download that Claymore Battle Plan outline.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: It's very short, it'll give you the whole view of what I just unpacked, and then the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook fills it all in, right?
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Ten minutes in the morning, we're going vertical.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: We're going right to the source of things to get the grace.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: And then we're going more horizontal to fill it in with these stories, right?
42:48
SPEAKER_00: That's been passed down to us.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: This gives us this formation.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: And I'll leave you with this the human heart, marriage and a family, it's like a triangle in front of you, right?
42:57
SPEAKER_00: Hold up this corner.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: Christ in the church, hold up this corner.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: When they come together, we get, we understand what's true, good, and beautiful, and we live that out in our lives.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: This is how you go out into the culture and change the culture, one person at a time, and to understand the love of our nation, right?
43:13
SPEAKER_00: That this nation is made up of people.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: The culture, the soul of the nation is made up of all these people coming together, united with a vision.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: But if we lose that vision, we lose our ourselves, our marriages, our families, and we lose the country itself.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: So go to the Claymore Militus Christi website, get that, reach out to us right on that website.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: There's a place for contacts.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Email us.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: We can have a phone call.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: We can get on a Zoom meeting.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: Or if you if you're somewhere where I'm speaking, I'd love to meet you, hear your story.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: Hey, God bless you.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: Talk to you again soon, everybody.