Latest / The Catholic Current / Father McTeigue Sounds Off (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 9/10/26

Transcript

Father McTeigue Sounds Off (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 9/10/26 · The Catholic Current

0:00
This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert
0:03
McTague. I don't see a lot of heroes in
0:08
this story, and I see a lot of people who can't wait
0:12
for the next round of beat up the church. Am I just too
0:16
jaundiced and cranky today? Well, it's possible to be jaundiced and
0:20
cranky and correct, so both of them— alas,
0:24
your mileage may vary, but that's been my experience. Uh,
0:27
yeah, there's, there's no one on the side of the church
0:31
as far as the government's concerned.
0:34
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of
0:38
Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
0:41
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
0:43
Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app, and we proclaim
0:47
the fullness of truth with clarity and charity. As always, let's start
0:51
with prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Almighty God,
0:55
through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola, we ask that you pour forth your Holy
0:58
Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment that might hear your voice and
1:02
obey your command. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
1:05
Amen. Well, friends, if you looked at the schedule for the Catholic Current
1:08
earlier, you were expecting a guest,
1:12
but human nature being what it is, and we live in a fallen
1:16
world, and someone said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your
1:20
plans, or life is what happens while you're making other plans,
1:23
uh, the guest couldn't make it. And our
1:27
go-to guy for, hey, our guest canceled, can you step up? He wasn't
1:31
able to do it, so you have to settle for me.
1:34
I'm gonna tell you a story. When I first started the Catholic Current way back
1:38
in the day, it was live. Oh my goodness,
1:42
I used to be over 6 feet tall and didn't have gray hair, and then
1:45
I did live radio for a year and a half and look at me now.
1:48
Well, anyways, um, we're going to interview a priest
1:53
who is an academic and a religious, and he had this great book about a
1:55
saint and the producer is calling him,
1:59
and not Mr. Engineer, someone from way back in the day,
2:03
and oh my goodness, it turns out Father forgot he
2:07
had a class that he was walking into, and I said to
2:11
the engineer-producer guy, well, I guess we'll just have to do a rerun. He goes,
2:14
no, Father, the clock has started, the music's playing, you got a hot mic.
2:18
And then I had an hour to kill, so I said,
2:21
hey, we have an unadvertised special on aisle 12 of of the Catholic
2:26
Current. I'm going to talk about life, the universe, and everything for 12 minutes,
2:29
and then we want to hear from you. We give a call-in number. And then
2:32
I started texting all my friends saying, you owe me money, you better call this
2:35
number, or if our friendship ever meant anything to you, you will call
2:40
this number. And somehow we soldiered on. And so here I am now.
2:43
It's just me. Thank you, Jesus. Uh, the mic is hot, but we're not live.
2:48
And I decided we're going to call this episode Father McTague Sounds
2:52
Off. Now, you know When I have a guest, I'm very focused
2:55
on the guest. And even when I do the Friday
2:59
show of Let's Talk About This, I focus on
3:03
the topic and I try to leave myself out of the equation.
3:07
I play my cards close to my vest. So I decided to
3:12
tip my hand a little bit more, speak a little bit more personally.
3:16
Now, I remember when I was talking about doing the Friday shows,
3:19
Let's Talk About This, some of my friends in the media business said, no,
3:22
no, Father, you don't understand. No one can be interesting nonstop
3:26
for an hour. And I talked to some friends of mine, they said, well,
3:29
they obviously haven't had you in a class for 75 or 90 minutes. So it's
3:33
just going to be you and me for an hour, and I think we can
3:35
keep each other's attention. I want to show my age by making a reference
3:40
to Dennis Miller. Dennis Miller was on Saturday Night
3:45
Live back in the day. Mr. Engineer, can you check and see when Dennis Miller
3:48
was on Saturday Night Live and then when he hosted his, his talk show?
3:52
Now, when he hosted a talk show, get this, he would give homework to
3:56
the audience in advance. He'd say, tomorrow I'm gonna talk about X, Y,
3:59
and Z. Read this. And what I really liked best was when he would
4:03
do his monologue, and he would set up the monologue, and then the
4:07
lights would dim and a spotlight would go on him, and he'd say, I don't
4:11
wanna go off on a rant here, and then he would go off on a
4:14
rant. So I'm kinda gonna go off on a rant on a few things,
4:18
and I'm also going to invoke another comic who— I'm really
4:23
showing my age now, 'cause he was popular when I was a kid, and his
4:26
name was Alan King. And every year he would
4:30
do a show called Alan King's Final Warning. And you know,
4:33
folks, now that I, I've gotten older, I seem to be doing a lot of
4:37
that these days. You know, August 29th, the Feast of the Beheading of John the
4:40
Baptist, was my birthday. I turned 65.
4:43
Thank you for your well-wishing. I had a wonderful day. A large
4:47
number of the faithful remnant, we got together and we did
4:51
guy stuff, and it was, it was very good.
4:54
And, um, I see that I'm starting to connect the dots
4:58
more. Oh, like this note from Mr. Engineer. He was a
5:02
host on Saturday Night Live from '85 to '91, and he hosted his own
5:06
show, a talk show, from 2007 to 2015.
5:10
So it was back in the day now. All right, that having been said,
5:14
I'm starting to see how things fit.
5:18
And I want to throw you in a couple other images. One I may have
5:21
used before. You know, writing is very, very important to
5:25
me. I'm on the verge of sending 2 book manuscripts out
5:28
to the publisher, so of course life, the universe, and everything conspires
5:32
against me. And then I have another book in my head
5:36
and some other writing things in mind. My point is this: here's how I
5:40
see myself. I am scribbling messages furiously
5:45
and stuffing them into bottles and tossing them out onto
5:49
the tides of time. In the hopes that someday somebody
5:54
will find them and use them to help rebuild
5:58
civilization. And that puts me in mind of the late Cardinal George,
6:02
or the Archdiocese of Chicago. There's a famous quote,
6:05
and they don't, uh, give the full quote. He says,
6:09
regard— as speaking as a status as Archbishop of Chicago,
6:13
he said, I expect to die in my bed. I expect
6:16
my successor will die in prison, and I expect that his successor
6:22
will die in the arena. And they end there,
6:26
but he goes on to say, and that one's successor will
6:30
help rebuild civilization from the rubble, because historically that's what the
6:34
Church does. Now, whether or not your imagination is sparked when he says, my successor
6:38
will die in prison, that means Cardinal Cupich might be looking at a jail cell.
6:42
But that's what Cardinal George said, and, and not
6:46
me, so don't attribute that to me. God bless Cardinal Cupich.
6:50
So that, that's the image of throwing messages out into the bottle, on a bottle,
6:54
putting them out on the tides of time. And I'm more convinced this
6:58
is the right thing to do because if you remember a week or so ago,
7:01
I said I found a short story by E.M. Forster that pretty
7:05
much predicted the internet and how dysfunctional life would be thanks to social media.
7:10
It was published in 1909. But I also want to add
7:14
in a German author who had a very complicated history. His name
7:18
was Ernst Jünger. A World War I vet, fought in World War II,
7:22
lived to be 103. And when he was writing in the
7:26
'30s and things were really falling apart aggressively in the '30s,
7:30
he said, even as I write this, I see the flames licking
7:34
the page. And my consolation with, uh,
7:38
the reception of my writing, and candidly with all
7:41
of you here at The Catholic Current, is people seem to
7:45
be listening. People seem to be taking it seriously. People keep asking
7:50
me for more, so I show up every day.
7:53
And that's so different from— I think it was a short
7:57
story, an essay that the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
8:02
wrote. By the way, if you don't know anything about Kierkegaard, he makes me look
8:06
giddy happy. I'm Rainbow Brite compared to
8:10
Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard tells a story of an
8:14
actor waiting to go out on stage to play his role, and the stage
8:18
manager runs up to him and says, the building's on
8:22
fire. Go tell the audience to leave
8:26
the theater. And he does that. He interrupts the play to say, the building is
8:29
on fire. Please exit. And people laugh and clap because they think
8:34
it's part of the performance. They think it's part of the show. So,
8:37
uh, you don't do that. You seem to take seriously what I
8:41
say, and I'm really grateful for that. And honestly, I'm,
8:44
I'm concerned for souls. You know,
8:48
part of what spurs and feeds— I don't
8:53
know what the right metaphor is— of my melancholy, my sorrow, my grief is
8:57
that, uh, there are a lot of Catholics who were poorly formed
9:03
and informed and at least apparently are not transformed.
9:06
And I worry about their salvation. Now make no mistake,
9:10
I work out my own salvation, as Saint Paul said, in fear and trembling.
9:14
But I worry about their salvation. I worry about the people who are
9:18
told by Catholics who should know better that you don't need to
9:21
worry about becoming Catholic, just, you know, you do you.
9:25
I think of the people who seem to be really
9:29
comfortable with the merest,
9:32
thinnest, most lukewarm living of
9:36
Catholic discipleship, as if that is going
9:40
to sustain them in the trials that are coming.
9:44
And as if that will be sufficient to gain
9:48
the happiness of heaven. Apparently they've never heard of narrow gates,
9:53
and they've never heard of carrying crosses, and they've
9:57
never heard of being hated by the world.
10:01
So what I want to do for the rest of this hour is, um,
10:04
start pulling some alarms and pointing towards
10:08
exits and really pointing towards a way forwards.
10:12
I want to connect the dots. I'm— as you can imagine, I've got lots
10:17
and lots of opinions, and I'm going to opine
10:21
pretty much as things come to me. You know, even when we do the Friday
10:25
show, Let's Talk About This, I'm focusing on one topic.
10:29
And some people said, Father, I'd love to have access to your inner monologue.
10:33
And I said, well, you need to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and you
10:36
also have to promise not to sue me because my inner
10:40
monologue has been known to give people screaming nightmares. But as I said,
10:44
guests have canceled and substitutes couldn't be found,
10:48
so it's just you and me, and I'm going to sound off about life,
10:52
the universe, and everything, and the things that concern me greatly.
10:56
I hope to inspire you, and maybe, just maybe, I might even make you
10:59
laugh. Please do stay with us for the rest of the hour. I'm Jesuit Father
11:03
Robert McTeague, your host here every day of The Catholic Current. Remember, a rallying cry
11:06
of The Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo— bringing Christ to
11:10
the world and the world to Christ. We do it because our Lord says so,
11:13
for the greater glory of God, the love of our neighbor, and the salvation of
11:17
our own soul. After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com,
11:20
get our resources list, download our audios, podcasts— wherever
11:24
you can find audio, you can find us. Follow us on your favorite platform,
11:28
write a 5-star review. We need to attract the attention of the listeners
11:31
so these conversations get the attention that they deserve.
11:35
Take us to your family and friends. Together we'll take it to the whole world.
11:38
Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
12:00
You're listening to The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague from
12:04
the Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network. Stay connected with the show
12:08
and our guests and topics by following the show on Twitter
12:12
and Gab. Just search for The Catholic Current.
12:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
12:24
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
12:27
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
12:30
Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app, where we proclaim the fullness
12:34
of truth with clarity and charity. Hey friends, did you know iCatholic
12:38
Mobile supports only Catholic causes? iCatholic Mobile offers unlimited
12:42
5G data, text, and talk, and iCatholic Mobile gives a portion of
12:46
every dollar earned to the Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network.
12:49
By subscribing to iCatholic Mobile, you help fund programs that defend
12:53
our Catholic faith. We're doing something different today. This episode
12:58
is called Father McTague Sounds Off. Why are we doing it this way?
13:02
Well, because unfortunately a scheduled guest had to cancel. That had
13:05
to cancel in Dublin, unfortunately. Uh, folks we usually
13:09
turn to to fill out the last minute couldn't make it, so it's just you
13:12
and me. And rather than focusing on just one topic
13:16
as I do on my solo show on Fridays, I'm just speaking off the cuff,
13:20
the, the things that are on my mind these days. I am sounding
13:24
off. You know, I describe myself on the air as a dark, brooding, melancholic Irishman
13:29
with an apocalyptic imagination. And one of the reasons
13:33
I describe myself that way is because I think I see
13:37
things pretty clearly, and I'm at a point now,
13:41
I guess I'm getting older, I seem to be doing that a lot more these
13:43
days. I now qualify for senior citizens discounts, yay me.
13:48
I find that we're not learning our
13:51
lessons. We seem to
13:55
be acting as if there's nothing to be learned from
14:00
history. Let me give you an illustration.
14:03
Recently, It was the feast day of Saint
14:07
Peter Claver, a heroic
14:11
Jesuit from Spain, worked in Latin America during the
14:15
slave trade, and he was known as the Apostle to,
14:19
to the Slaves. Now ordinarily, I'm very
14:22
glad to preach about my brother Jesuits.
14:26
It gives me inspiration, it gives me aspiration, and it makes me want to go
14:30
to confession when I realize how holy they were and I am not.
14:34
And somehow we all wear the same uniform. But something
14:37
about Peter Claver hit me extra
14:40
hard this year, and I'm pleased to say that I have
14:44
the audio for that sermon. Mr. Engineer, would you run that sermon for us now,
14:47
please? I find it difficult to preach about Saint Peter
14:52
Claver. Why is that, you might ask? He's a fellow Jesuit.
14:55
Yes, he is. Very great zeal for souls. Yes, and Indeed,
15:00
heroic in his generosity in the corporal and spiritual works
15:05
of mercy. What's not to like?
15:08
What's not to like is the context in which he served.
15:13
He was the apostle to the slaves.
15:17
And the legacy and nobility of St. Peter Claver
15:20
of the Society of Jesus remind us
15:23
of that stain on human honor.
15:29
That we take our fellow man, our fellow man made in the image and
15:33
likeness of God, who has a dignity and
15:37
a destiny unimaginably elevated because of the Incarnation,
15:41
and we say, you, you, and you, we're going to treat like
15:45
property. We're going to buy and sell you
15:49
like an animal. Use you as an instrument until you're no
15:54
longer serviceable and then discard you.
15:58
And if for any reason I choose to kill you, I will without consequence.
16:04
And so to be honoring the Apostle to the Slaves reminds us of that horrible
16:09
stain on human history that chattel slavery
16:12
was practiced everywhere and in every age.
16:16
By every group and nation. And we might take some
16:20
consolation and say, well, yes, Father, but it was the
16:25
Western nations of the Christian West who
16:30
spilt blood and treasure to bring the
16:33
international slave trade to an end.
16:38
And now we don't need St. Peter Clavers anymore.
16:42
But I'm sorry to say that's not true.
16:45
We do need another St. Peter Claver. In fact, we need many more.
16:50
As I speak, at this very moment,
16:53
there are open-air slave markets in Libya where another
16:57
human being can be bought and sold for $400.
17:02
Now, it's not enough to say that because that's— Libya's
17:07
far away. And Libya is not the
17:10
only place where human beings are treated like chattel.
17:15
Recent federal records show that in the past several years,
17:19
hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors—
17:23
we would call them children— entered the United States,
17:27
and then we don't know.
17:32
We don't know. Know what became of
17:36
hundreds of thousands of children.
17:41
No one knows where they are, what happened to them. I'm going to go out
17:44
on a limb and say that as I speak, they're almost certainly not being
17:48
homeschooled.
17:51
Who will be the apostle to those children?
17:56
But it's not enough to say that because we can imagine a child,
18:00
you know, yay big, with a name and a face and hair
18:05
and eyes and fingers and toes.
18:09
But children are still being bought and sold
18:13
and discarded and murdered. As I speak, there are at
18:17
least a million of our fellow human beings with bodies
18:21
and souls made in image and likeness of God, whose dignity has been elevated
18:25
by the incarnation And they are in a frozen limbo in
18:29
a Petri dish. Over a million,
18:34
probably closer to 2, and a non-trivial percentage
18:38
of them, 5 to 20%, are simply abandoned.
18:43
No one claims them. No one says these
18:47
are mine, as St. Peter Claver
18:50
could. But the trouble with thinking about that is
18:55
we can locate them.
18:58
In this vat of liquid nitrogen here are the children.
19:03
But what about the children who will never be
19:07
seen, never remembered, never registered?
19:13
For at least the past 10 years, the leading
19:17
cause of death isn't war or democide
19:21
by government or cancer or starvation.
19:27
It's abortion. By far,
19:30
by far, by far. Who will
19:34
be the apostle for vulnerable children
19:40
who are casually, thoughtlessly murdered?
19:44
For profit. We live in
19:48
very sad times. And I
19:51
fear we may have to face Peter Claver and his companions and say,
19:56
we didn't learn our lesson from you. We let it happen
20:01
again and again in unimaginably horrible ways that
20:04
you could never have dreamed of. We didn't learn our
20:08
lesson. So we need,
20:12
with a firm purpose of amendment, with a spirit of reparation
20:17
properly understood, with a spirit of penance,
20:20
we need to raise up more Peter Clavers
20:24
so this litany of horror need not be repeated again.
20:29
And through his intercession and the intercession of those heroic souls who worked
20:33
with him, We need to recall that yes, indeed,
20:37
God is merciful, but God is
20:40
also just.
20:44
And we are running out of time and into eternity.
20:47
So I think it's providential that the reading we hear from St. Paul to
20:51
the Corinthians, I tell you, brothers, the time
20:55
is running out. From now
20:58
on, let those who have wives act as not having them. Those weeping
21:03
as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing,
21:06
those buying as not owning, those using
21:09
the world as not using it fully.
21:13
For the world in its present form is passing
21:18
away. May God's holy name be praised now
21:22
and forever. That was my sermon on the Feast
21:27
of Saint Peter Claver. And it was hard to preach.
21:31
By the way, the scriptural reference there is from 1 Corinthians 7,
21:37
last few verses there. It was
21:40
hard to preach because it seems to me we
21:45
live in a world that has not benefited from the
21:49
good example of Saint Peter Claver. I have to be careful
21:53
never to turn a sermon into an editorial, and not
21:58
turn a pulpit into a blog. But one of the things that I thought about
22:02
as I was preparing for that sermon was to ask, where are the new
22:06
Peter Clavers going to come from?
22:09
Those who will say, let's secure our borders so that
22:13
children won't be trafficked. Let's help
22:16
form a culture of life so that aborting
22:20
our children will be unthinkable.
22:23
Let's agree that the desire to have a child is not a medical
22:27
condition, and we shouldn't be making children in
22:30
the lab and abandoning the ones we don't like.
22:34
Who will be the Peter Clavers that we need
22:38
now? Will it be those who talk very much about
22:42
social justice but also don't
22:46
talk about contraception abortion,
22:50
the definition of man and woman, the definition of marriage?
22:54
Will it be those who will gladly talk about slavery
22:58
in the past but not slavery in the present?
23:02
Will it be those who talk about how we and the religion of peace worship
23:06
the one God? Will it be the Catholic hierarchy
23:11
who said that he never felt such warmth and fellowship as he did
23:15
in a newly opened mosque, a mosque opened in his archdiocese
23:19
where he himself is closing churches and
23:24
forbidding the Latin Mass. Will he ask
23:27
his new friends what they think about,
23:31
I don't know, child marriage? What's the
23:35
minimum age for a girl to be given in marriage?
23:38
Will he ask them about genital mutilation of
23:41
prepubescent girls? I don't think
23:45
Peter Claver is going to come from the people who fall silent
23:50
before both the understanders and the misunderstanders of
23:53
the religion of peace. As I think about where the next generation
23:57
of Peter Clavers is going to come from, I think of a gentleman
24:01
I met who had worked behind the scenes at kind of the
24:05
home office, if you will, of a very large body of
24:09
senior Catholic cadres, of the people who should really know Better Club.
24:13
And he said this to me, I'll never forget. He said, Father, you have to
24:16
understand, there is a lot of money
24:21
to be made processing people who come across the southern
24:25
border. There is no money to
24:29
be made in fighting abortion.
24:34
You know, friends, the basic principle of organizational psychology is the
24:38
purpose of a system is what it does. And it seems to me
24:43
some of these ecclesial systems I'm observing, their primary purpose
24:47
is to keep the bureaucracy alive,
24:51
and you need money for that. And when Uncle Sam gets good
24:55
and liquored up, he gets really generous with his checkbook.
24:59
That's the world we live in, and the people who profit from that dynamic are
25:04
not likely to produce very many Peter Clavers.
25:08
I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTeague, your host here every day of The Catholic Current.
25:12
After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources
25:15
list, download our audio as podcasts. Wherever you can find audio,
25:19
you can find us. Follow us on your favorite platform, write a 5-star review.
25:23
We need to attract the attention of the listeners so these conversations get the attention
25:26
they deserve. Everything you need to take us to your family and friends, we give
25:30
to you. Together, let's take it around the world. We can do it with you.
25:33
We cannot do it without you. Let's do this good work together.
25:36
Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
26:00
This is The Catholic Current from the Station of the Cross Catholic Media
26:04
Network. Catch up on an episode you've missed or share them with your family
26:08
and friends. The Catholic Current is podcasted wherever you
26:12
enjoy listening: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, TuneIn,
26:15
and the iCatholic Radio mobile app.
26:19
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society Jesus,
26:23
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
26:26
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from The Station of the Cross studios,
26:29
your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the
26:32
fullness of truth with clarity and charity. Hey friends, if you
26:36
value thoughtful Catholic analysis, help sustain this work at thestationofthecross.com.
26:40
Here in The Catholic Current, we engage issues seriously and faithfully,
26:44
and that intellectual freedom exists because we are listener-funded.
26:48
Support us, please, at thestationofthecross.com. Very unexpectedly,
26:53
my guest for today canceled. My backup people couldn't make it,
26:56
so it's just you and me. We're calling this episode Father McTague
27:00
Sounds Off. If you think this was the stuff of nightmares and we should never
27:03
do this again, please let us know. And then if you think, yeah, this is
27:07
a good idea, you know, Fridays are nice, Father's talking about one topic, but here
27:11
it's just kind of Father's grab bag, um,
27:14
You know, let us know. That's thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
27:18
Years ago, I was getting ready for my final vows way back
27:22
in 2010, a couple, 2, 3 lifetimes ago. People were talking about reserving a website
27:27
for me called The Cranky Jesuit, and I could have daily
27:30
updates on why I'm cranky today. So today,
27:34
on why I'm cranky today, I'm cranky because— and
27:37
so I thought we might have, uh, have a go at that.
27:40
What are some of the things that are making me cranky today. So just
27:45
a random bit of headlines here. Pro-abortion protesters
27:49
disrupt Catholic Mass at Westminster Cathedral in London,
27:52
England. About 9,000 people
27:57
had gathered for a pro-life march in London. They had a Mass there
28:00
at the cathedral. It's a beautiful cathedral. They had 15
28:04
bishops there, and a bunch of people
28:07
disrupted the Mass. And someone
28:11
said, imagine hating us this much simply because we believe babies deserve
28:16
to live. Speaking of deserve to live,
28:20
I have to say something about the Lindsay Clancy trial.
28:24
I mean, this is, this is a tragedy, and I've been modest about what
28:28
I've said about it because I don't want to appear to be piling on.
28:30
But, you know, there was a hung jury, there was a mistrial,
28:34
and some of the jurors are speaking out now,
28:38
and, you know, for a criminal trial, you have to have a unanimous
28:42
jury, and the government has to convict, you know, beyond a reasonable
28:45
doubt, or the person has to walk.
28:49
One juror said, oh, we were lobbying for acquittal
28:53
on day one, and then one
28:57
woman complaining about the one man who was a holdout— this
29:01
is an exact quote, this is from her own lips— so
29:04
everyone else voted to acquit. This one guy said, no, she's guilty. She definitely
29:08
strangled her kids. She said this: He had
29:12
the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously
29:15
killed her children. End quote. So yeah,
29:18
that's another reason why I'm cranky today, but oh wait,
29:22
there is more. In the Diocese of
29:26
Erfurt in Germany, of course, the Catholic
29:31
church called St. Severi, they had an
29:34
ecumenical rainbow service inside the church.
29:38
Pride flags, rainbows, drag queens
29:42
stood in the sanctuary in the presence of the Blessed
29:46
Sacrament, and then they all marched out to join
29:50
a pride festival and parade. And then the
29:55
next day they had Mass. Didn't, you know,
29:58
do anything to, I don't know, exorcise the church
30:01
or reconsecrate it or make a reparation They
30:05
had turned a church where the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is
30:09
offered, wherein the Blessed Sacrament resides, and had
30:13
what I think is an abomination. You know,
30:17
what does one say to that? Where do
30:20
we go from here?
30:24
Lindsay Clancy's supporters are threatening the father
30:27
of the children she murdered, what with him, you know, being a
30:31
man, and all that. That's pretty much the level of discourse. Speaking of murder,
30:35
as you listen to this, it'll be the first anniversary of the murder of Charlie
30:39
Kirk. Now, I didn't listen to Charlie Kirk a lot. I'm just
30:43
busy. I thought he was pretty moderate
30:48
in what he had to say. He said obviously true things like men are men
30:51
and women are women and, you know, don't kill your kids.
30:55
Well, Georgetown University is, at least it
31:00
was the case as of yesterday, is planning a Charlie Kirk lookalike
31:05
contest on campus.
31:08
Now, I noticed they're not trying to recreate what Charlie
31:12
Kirk did. They're not reading his speeches. They're not having a
31:16
marathon of his YouTube videos. They're having a
31:20
Charlie Kirk lookalike contest. Is that to honor the fact
31:24
that a young man who spoke on behalf of the unborn,
31:27
among other things, who was married and dad to a couple of
31:31
young children, was murdered publicly in the presence of his family?
31:35
I don't know. I don't know how that works.
31:39
And my goodness, I could go on and on. You know, we're getting ready for
31:44
the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
31:47
You know, if you're old enough, you remember remember where you were.
31:52
I was at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit school in Northeast Pennsylvania.
31:56
I'd slept in late that morning because I wasn't teaching, and I know that later
31:59
in the day we were supposed to have an outdoor barbecue, and it was canceled.
32:02
They said, in light of recent events. What are those
32:06
recent events? Ran to the newspaper, wasn't there yet. Turned on the television,
32:10
and then I saw the horror of it all.
32:14
I know that A lot of the kids in the area are from the New
32:18
York area. A lot of them had— your kids were from New Jersey and Philadelphia
32:21
whose family commuted into New York City for work. A lot of them worked
32:25
in the Twin Towers. They were distraught. They wanted to go home.
32:29
They couldn't leave. It was, it was a lot of drama. And,
32:32
you know, some of the Jesuits stayed up with the kids for 24, 36 hours
32:36
trying to hold them, hold it all together. It was, it was horrifying.
32:40
It was traumatic. I never want to go through something like that again. You know,
32:43
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and when I was 12,
32:46
thereabouts, we moved to Belleville, a little town next to New Jersey.
32:50
And my parents' house was on a hill, and if you walked to the corner
32:54
and you turned to the left, you would go down the hill to high
32:58
school, which I finally called— which I fondly called Pagan Prep.
33:01
But if you turned to the right, you'd see the Twin Towers. I mean,
33:04
I was that close to Manhattan. And the first time I went to
33:09
see my parents after the collapse of the towers, and I looked
33:13
to the skyline and, and there was nothing there. It was
33:16
just empty sky. It was
33:20
like looking up to the sky and not seeing the sun, looking up
33:24
to the night sky on a full moon and not seeing the moon.
33:28
It's like looking out the window and seeing that the mountain is gone. It was
33:31
just there, larger than life, and then one day it
33:35
wasn't. And I read a lot of
33:38
things, a lot of things about what happened
33:43
and who may have been responsible and the aftermath and the War on
33:47
Terror and all that. And I will simply say that
33:50
at the time, I believed a lot of what I
33:54
was told. And with 25 years of
33:57
hindsight and reading other things and listening and viewing other
34:02
things, I don't hold with the same conviction
34:06
what I held 25 years ago. What I
34:10
do know is that life is very uncertain.
34:15
We live in a world of tragedy, a world of
34:19
violence, a world where there's
34:23
not just conspiracy theories, but there are real conspiracies.
34:27
There are real conspiracies. People plot to
34:31
do horrible things to one another. That is beyond dispute.
34:35
And here I want to take a deep breath and think back to something
34:38
that C.S. Lewis had written. I think it was in The Screwtape
34:42
Letters, which, as you know, was published in World War II. And he said,
34:45
people keep bandying about the phrase real life, and, you know,
34:48
and real life is German bombers in
34:52
the sky and houses being destroyed
34:56
and blood being splattered on the wall.
35:00
And he said, no, no, real life is also birthday
35:05
parties and birth and
35:09
marriage and love. And a good friend of mine,
35:13
faithful man, really solid Christian, great friend
35:17
in the Lord to me for many years, he sent me something the other day,
35:19
and it was a quote from C.S. Lewis from an essay he wrote in 1948.
35:24
And I think he gets it right. So what's happening in 1948? Well,
35:28
we've gone from being allies with the Soviet Union and Joseph
35:33
Stalin, the totalitarian mass murderer whom President
35:37
Roosevelt fondly referred to as Uncle Joe.
35:40
And so now the Soviet Union is the bad guy. The Cold War is perking
35:44
up. Somehow the Soviet Union
35:47
got plans for the atomic bomb, and now we're talking about what will
35:52
nuclear war look like, etc., etc. And people were getting themselves in a tizzy.
35:55
So in 1948, C.S. Lewis wrote this. He said, the first
36:00
action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we're all going
36:03
to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes,
36:08
find us doing sensible and human things: praying,
36:13
working, teaching, reading, listening to music,
36:16
bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends
36:20
over a pint and a game of darts. Not huddled
36:24
together like frightened sheep and thinking about
36:28
bombs. So says C.S. Lewis. So the world has gone mad.
36:33
You know, the American— what,
36:36
military action, war, something something with
36:41
Iran since February is on again, off again, on again, off again.
36:45
Uh, the Straits of Hormuz are open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
36:49
Young Ukrainians and Russians are still killing each other,
36:53
apparently with no end in sight.
36:56
People who we hated in Syria are now our besties.
37:02
And it's kind of like 1984, but the 21st century version.
37:07
You know, you've got how many thousands of flock cameras following
37:11
our every move out of doors? Yes, it is It is
37:15
absolutely insane and dystopian. And yet,
37:18
you know, my younger sister, my most favorite person in the whole
37:22
world, visited me for the Labor Day weekend. And we had
37:25
Mass on Sunday with a very beautiful community.
37:30
And my sister said, if this is what your Sundays are like,
37:34
you are the most blessed man on the planet. So for all the madness,
37:39
for all the mayhem, for the murder, for all the stupidity
37:44
the pig-headed ignorant stupidity of the people
37:48
who should really know better club, and especially the senior Catholic cadres of
37:53
the people who should know better club. In the face of all that,
37:56
I say Christ is King. He has
38:00
not yielded his sovereignty to anything or
38:04
anyone. I proclaim before God and man that
38:09
Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God and Son of Mary, the Word
38:13
made flesh, Our crucified and risen
38:16
King is reigning now.
38:20
He is merciful and he is just, and he will return
38:25
to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.
38:28
And I want my eternity to begin well. Indeed, I want everyone's
38:32
eternity to begin well. So I, raging introvert that I
38:36
am, I just want to be with my books and my fountain pens and the
38:39
Blessed Sacrament and just to scribble and publish and be left alone.
38:43
I show up to a microphone every day, and sometimes, God save
38:47
us, even a camera, because I want to proclaim Christ
38:52
crucified, risen, reigning, and returning.
38:56
And I'll have more to say about that in the next segment. I'm Jesuit Father
38:59
Robert McTeague, your host every day of The Catholic Current. Be part of the conversation.
39:02
Follow what we're following by following us on Gab. That's gab.com.
39:07
The channel is The Catholic Current. You can influence the conversation. You can
39:11
find us at thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
39:15
Comments, questions, suggestions, recommendations, objections— we
39:20
want to hear from you. In particular, this format where it's not like Friday where
39:24
it's just me and a topic, but just me thinking out loud— yes,
39:28
no, thumbs up, thumbs down. Let us know thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
39:35
What you think matters a lot. Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with
39:59
Have a question or feedback
40:03
about today's episode? Want to suggest a guest or a future topic?
40:08
Go to thestationofthecross.com/askfather and
40:13
help influence the conversation.
40:21
Be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTaggart of the Society of Jesus, your daily
40:25
host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and the world
40:28
to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios, your local
40:31
radio station, and the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the fullness
40:35
of truth with clarity and charity. Here we are, the last segment
40:39
of, uh, Thursday, and it's just me. What happened?
40:42
Well, our regularly scheduled guest had to cancel.
40:45
The people we go to usually for emergency guest services they
40:49
couldn't make it because life happens sometimes. So it's just been me sounding
40:54
off. So last 10 minutes, what do we want to talk about? Well,
40:57
as I said, uh, as I get older, I see that I'm starting to
41:01
piece things together. I, you know,
41:05
I've had a to-be-read list that is mountains
41:08
and mountains and miles and miles tall for, for decades and
41:11
decades. The growing list now is the things I want to reread. The things
41:16
I want to look at again with older and mature eyes.
41:20
Things that I read in a hurry once for school, I want to
41:23
read again at leisure and with a lifetime
41:27
experience in tow. You know, a couple weeks ago I turned
41:30
65. That's kind of sobering.
41:34
I want to give some advice about that. I was visiting with my family
41:37
in June when my sister's oldest girl graduated from high
41:41
school, and I was sitting outside at the fire bowl with my brother-in-law. He's a
41:44
great man, a real St. Joseph superstar as a husband and father.
41:48
And we're talking about getting older and he's, you know, in his early 50s.
41:52
And he said to me, well, I, I know what 50-year-old me
41:56
thinks of 45-year-old me.
41:59
What will 60-year-old me think of 50-year-old
42:04
me? And I said, well, I don't want to spoil the surprise,
42:07
but you're probably not gonna like it.
42:11
Um, I spent a lot of my 60s— I'm halfway
42:14
through my 60s— I spent a lot of it saying,
42:18
what was I thinking? So I found
42:22
an article that I published, you know, way, way back when I turned 60,
42:27
and this is before I qualified for senior citizens discounts,
42:32
and I just had little comments on the decades,
42:36
and I want to share some of that with you. I wrote that when I
42:39
was turning 10, I decided that I wasn't a child,
42:43
uh, anymore. And to prove that
42:47
I wasn't a child, I bequeathed my entire Matchbox
42:51
car collection to a younger cousin. And that was my first experience
42:55
of Stoicism. And I try not to think about how much they would have
42:59
been worth if I kept on to them all those years. And turning
43:03
20 I felt cheated. I said,
43:07
you know, just when I thought I figured out this teenager thing, it goes away.
43:12
And my enthusiasm for the adult world,
43:15
such as it is, along with my confidence in being able to live as an
43:19
adult, were, were incomplete. There was a lot of adult stuff
43:23
that just didn't do it for me.
43:27
And then I turned 30, and I accepted that my membership
43:31
in the adult world was undeniable. Uh, the responsibilities of
43:35
adult life were obvious to me, the benefits slightly less so,
43:39
and possibilities still seemed plentiful. I was seeking
43:43
definition in my life, and I saw definition in
43:46
terms of freedom rather than restriction. I wanted
43:51
freedom for good things, and the
43:56
price of freedom is discipline. And then
44:01
the tempo of aging began to increase out of nowhere.
44:05
I turned 40, and I realized that being an adult,
44:08
barring some unforeseen incident, would probably take a long
44:12
time. Now, even by 40, I'd been around long enough
44:16
to acquire some really profound regrets
44:20
and failures, and I was haunted
44:24
by ghosts of missed opportunities. And I said, well, there's still time,
44:28
told myself then. To do better.
44:32
And then I turned 50.
44:35
50 arrived with a thud. I said, you know,
44:39
if I'm really going to be middle— if this is really my midlife, I gotta
44:43
live to be at least 100. Uh, my mentor Paul
44:47
Weiss, God rest his soul, lived to be 101, taught until he
44:52
was 90s and well into his 90s, writing books to the day he
44:56
died. So if I match his cycle, then, you know,
44:59
50 was midlife for me.
45:03
But time seemed to be more behind me
45:07
rather than ahead of me. And I said, have it— you know,
45:11
I mean, I don't think people were talking about bucket lists back then,
45:14
but achievements, accomplishments,
45:17
aspirations, things that I could point to You
45:22
know, I think back, so 19— so 2011,
45:26
I turned 50. I think of my best friend Mark
45:30
Maciag, who died violently while I stood on in horror and looked
45:35
in 1983. And I've had all those years that he didn't have.
45:39
What did I do with them? I'm not impressed.
45:43
And my spiritual director urged me to count
45:47
my blessings and and surrender to God who
45:50
was with me in all of my highs, which were very high,
45:53
and all of my lows, some of which were very low.
45:57
And I think that's good advice regardless of one's age. And then 5
46:01
years ago, I turned 60,
46:05
and I said, you know, my, my health is, is pretty good.
46:09
Um, never had major surgery, not on any medications,
46:13
don't have hearing aids or prescription glasses or a walker or
46:17
anything like that. And I think of Psalm 116:12,
46:23
what shall I return to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
46:27
Now, I can't reciprocate with God. God's God
46:31
and I'm just me. But I do want to be grateful,
46:36
and I want to prove to God that I'm grateful. So when
46:41
I turned 60, I published 10 bits of advice which I think
46:45
are still true today. I'll just say be less tolerant
46:49
of, of your excuses. That's what I've learned in the past 5 years.
46:53
So number 1, count your blessings daily, uh, because gratitude
46:57
is the virtue that's most pleasing to God. Saint Ignatius made that clear.
47:02
Surrender immediately, if not sooner, the illusion
47:06
that you can sin safely. Sin is an untamable
47:10
wild animal, cunning and impossible to
47:14
satisfy. And friends, now that I'm older, I'll say this:
47:18
sin's just so boring.
47:21
It promises so much, and it show— always
47:25
shows up a day late and a dollar short. Pray daily and
47:30
pray always. Get to Mass when you must and get
47:34
to Mass at every other opportunity. Pray the
47:37
rosary daily. Take Fatima seriously.
47:42
Number 4, go to confession frequently. Learn to live as a loved
47:46
sinner. Go at least twice
47:50
a month just for basic spiritual hygiene.
47:53
Number 5, do all you can to please our Blessed Mother. Daily rosary,
47:57
her scapular, Miraculous Medal, 5 First Saturdays.
48:01
Uh, number 6, learn the rules of discernment from Saint Ignatius Loyola,
48:05
commit them to memory. Number 7, be quick to forgive
48:09
and ask for forgiveness. Number 8, allow no room,
48:13
none, for resentment in your life.
48:16
Number 9, the greatest enemy of love is selfishness.
48:20
And number 10, don't waste time. And by
48:24
that I don't mean have every minute filled and scheduled, but I
48:28
mean don't dither. Don't act as if life owes
48:32
you anything or another moment. Life is
48:36
uncertain, so strive even
48:39
in your leisure to cultivate all your
48:43
gifts and to make the most of your opportunities and resources.
48:48
Friends, I'm grateful for the life I lived. My only regret was that I didn't
48:52
live it better. Please pray for me so that in God's providence I might die
48:56
a saint. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host every day here at The Catholic
49:00
Current. You want to join us tomorrow? It's Friday, which means let's talk about this.
49:03
We're going to be up to part 9 of novel prophecies.
49:08
I'm going to be talking about a novel that deserves to be known better
49:11
called Darkness at Noon, written by Arthur
49:15
Koestler. It became part of the inspiration
49:19
for George Orwell's 1984. And it deals with the question
49:23
of what happens if you learn to live within
49:27
a culture of lies, because that's where I think we are right now.
49:31
Thanks for putting up with me today in this unusual episode where it's just
49:34
you and me doing some freestyle speaking. Through the intercession of
49:38
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
49:41
Go in peace, and please do pray for me, for I am a sinner.