Pints With Aquinas - 195: Marian Devotion W/ Fr. Gregory Pine

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

In today's episode with Fr. Gregory Pine I discuss Marian devotion. How do we grow in grow in our love and devotion of Mary? What did Thomas Aquinas have to say about Mary? SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day and welcome to Pines with Aquinas. My name's Matt Fradd and today I'm joined around the bar table by, you guessed it, Father Gregory Pine. We're going to discuss Marian consecration, Thomas Aquinas, what he had to say about consecration in general, the Blessed Mother, and we also discuss, obviously, our new book, Marian Consecration, and I forget the subtitle. I think it's a nine-day path for growing closer to the Mother of God. So here's the show. All right, welcome back to Pints with Aquinas,

the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. I have three pieces of really exciting news. First, because of all of you amazing people who are supporting on Patreon, we are currently developing a brand spanking new Pints with Aquinas website. It is going to be outstanding. We have shared a couple of pictures on social media at Matt Fradd, if you're interested in checking it out, but that should be rolling out this month. So I just wanted to say a massive thanks to all of our patrons because y'all help make that possible. And it's just awesome. And yeah, it's gonna be super mobile friendly as well. It'll also just kind of help people stumble across us, all that good stuff.

Here's the second piece of good news. It is now locked in that I will be traveling to Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. I think I mentioned earlier on that that was a possibility, but it's now been solidified. So I'm booking the tickets. I am filling up suitcases of rosaries and catechisms and things like that.

I know that some of you very generously have reached out to me to offer to send me things. You're welcome to do that. If you want to write to my assistant, Melanie, assistant at mattfrad.com, she'll give you an address. You can send that stuff. But here's what I would ask. And please don't take this the wrong way. I don't mean to offend anybody here, but please, if you're going to send stuff, send quality, expensive stuff. Like here's why. When I was in Uganda, we drove to the shrine of the Ugandan martyrs and there was a bookstore there, right? And because the place is so poor, all the things that they have to pray with are cheap. poor, all the things that they have to pray with are cheap. The plastic rosaries and just not well-made books and things like that. Now, someone might say, well, who cares if it's

plastic or not? I get that, right? Obviously, the Blessed Mother is not going to hear you anymore because you have a fancy rosary. I get it, obviously. But here's the thing. You don't like praying on a cheap plastic rosary. So I just don't want to ship over a bunch of crap. I want to buy beautiful, like nice wooden rosaries and good catechisms and things like this. So if you're going to send stuff, you can, but make sure it's good quality. Otherwise, I'll just buy it all. Like this is part of why I love that I have so many patrons, because you guys make this trip possible. I am flying there for free. They're not paying a cent for this. I'm filling up these suitcases, paying for extra suitcases so I can bring them down with me, distributing these with the leaders, Catholic leaders in

these countries. So as I say, I'm happy to buy it all. If you want to help, you can, and you could write to assistant at mattfrad.com and she'll give the address as to, I think it's also on patreon.com slash mattfrad at the, at the, down the bottom. Actually, that is actually where it is. It shows you my, my work address and you can send it there. Anyways, that'll be really, really, really, really awesome. I think I already told you this, that I asked one of the guys there, could I send you some things? And he said, we've had people send us stuff before, but it often doesn't get to us. Like maybe we can tell it arrives at the post office, but then we don't see it again. The implication I think being that it's stolen, you know? So that's why I'm so intent

on bringing down suitcases filled with books and things. So I'll keep you up to date on that. Thanks for your interest in it as well. I'm really honored to do it. And I'm just so pumped. So I'm going to be going there in August, provided that the Uganda, not the Uganda, the coronavirus hasn't, you know, turned us all into zombies or something. Here's the third piece of exciting news. Things are just pumping with Pints with Aquinas and our YouTube channel. I think we've gone up a couple of thousand subscribers in a couple of weeks. So that's really awesome. And let me tell you something that's really cool. Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire was here in Atlanta recently, and I was hoping that we'd get a chance to sit down so I could interview him.

But he didn't realize my house was so far away from his hotel and he had to do his show. It didn't work out. But again, because of you patrons, basically this week, so tomorrow, I am going to, me and Neil, my camera guy, are going to be flying to visit Matt Walsh. We're going to sit down in his house and interview him. So that interview will be coming out this month. And I'm just so pumped about it. I think Matt Walsh has a lot of great things to say. I know a lot of people find him difficult, or they don't find his tone helpful, pleasant. People have different thoughts, I know.

But I'm really looking forward to doing that interview. And again, being able to fly myself, my camera guy, all our camera equipment up, all of that's possible because of you, patrons. This is just me thanking you. Thank you. Thank you for believing in what I'm doing, and I hope that it's been really helpful. I think that's about it. Yeah. Oh, also, Scott Hahn just reached out, or Scott Hahn's people just reached out, and I think he'll be coming on the show too. So you know you've made it big when Scott Hahn comes to town.

No, I'm not really joking. That's how freaking big I am. I'm huge in Turkey. No, it's a joke. Just in case you're not getting my sense of humor, I'm afraid to continue going down that lane. Okay, so today we are going to be sitting around the bar table with Father Gregory Pine to discuss Marian devotion. Why is it okay? Why is it okay to pray to the saints? Why is it okay to honor Mary? How is it not worship or is it worship? And how is it okay to pray to the saints? Why is it okay to honor Mary? How is it not worship, or is it worship? And how is it distinguished from the way we talk about God? These are obviously many, these are questions that many Protestants have, and I think understandably so, given their tradition. So I think you'll find it very interesting. Please, enjoy.

Perfect. All right, everybody, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I am here with the one and only father, Peggery Grine. What's up? Did you ever do that as a kid? Did you replace the first letter of the two names? Yes. You did? So that was a thing. I think it's called spoonerizing, isn't it? Oh, I don't know. That sounds like a dirty word, but yeah, I think it's called spoonerizing. Cool. I'm Fathumrad. Nice. Yeah. Hey, what's going on? Nice to see you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to see you too. Just a sunny day here in Washington, DC, sitting in our nation's capital and just moving and grooving. Tell us about the Thomistic Institute, these videos that are coming out. I think people who listen to this show are familiar with it now. I'd also like to learn from you what's working well. Have you been pleasantly surprised at how people have been taking to the videos you've been pumping out there on YouTube, etc.? Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So here we go. Thomistic Institute,

Hustle & Flow. We're based here. I don't know why I'm laughing. Okay, so here we go. To Missing Institute, Hustle & Flow. We're based here. I don't know why I'm laughing. What? I don't know. I feel silly today.

As one friar once said, I've got the giggles. It's because I put my jacket on? Are you still laughing about that, or is this? Can't rule it out. I don't know. So to Missing Institute, Hustle & Flow. What are we doing? So we have these on-campus chapters, right? So we've got these different students at different universities who organize events. They have lectures from different professors and they

come and we record those lectures. We put them on the podcast. The audio quality should hopefully be improving. Really? We sent them all these sweet microphones. So hopefully those sweet microphones, they, uh, they look like small cactuses, actually like decently sized cactuses. So hopefully the small cactus effect has a, uh, has a great – it's a great boon to our listenership. So yeah, that's the bread and butter of the Thomistic Institute. But in September, we started Aquinas 101, which is a video course for teaching people the basics of Aquinas. And so the first six videos are about who St. Thomas is and why he's important. And then you got like 20-ish videos on the introduction to his philosophy.

So just basic philosophical definitions like form and matter, act and potency, etc. And then the rest is taking you by the hand and walking you through the Summa Theologiae. So we're cruising through the first part and into the first part of the second part. And they come out twice a week. And it's actually really cool. So I don't know. Sometimes when you say things, you're like, maybe these things are interesting to other people or maybe I'm just a weird human being and I find strange things interesting. But you release the videos and then people are like, this is sweet.

I mean granted, it's not like 7 billion people are like, this is sweet, universally true. We all love it. But the viewership has been increasing i don't know how youtube algorithms work but from what i understand you just keep putting stuff on youtube and then eventually people start watching it so in terms of youtube subscribers in the month of december i'm just thinking well sorry i'm just sorry to cut you off i'm just wondering yeah it would be funny if somebody was paying you to teach them how to grow a YouTube channel. And you were like, well, basically, you just keep putting stuff on and eventually people watch it. Like, that's why I'm paying you.

That's the best you got. Yeah, again, I don't know how algorithms work or software or what YouTube wants in life. I'm sure I can research this thing. I think being consistent with what you're putting out and people become accustomed to seeing your videos. I think even if people aren't subscribing and they're watching, YouTube will still show it to you if they think you're interested. But sorry, you were saying? Sorry. Yeah, so in the month of December, there were like 600 people that said, I will subscribe to this channel.

It is at least middling enough to merit my attention. And then in the month of January, there are like 1800 people so based on my rudimentary knowledge of mathematics that is three times as many people in one month as opposed to the former month maybe everyone was doing their christmas shopping in december i don't know yeah december's a bad month for those sorts of things yeah so there's just a bunch of there's a bunch of factors but yeah people are it's picking up picking up steam and um people are watching the. Some of our videos are up around 30,000 views, which I guess is good. It is terrific, especially for your subscriber level, which of course, as you say, is increasing. But that's really terrific.

Yeah. So we're working with a company in Emmitsburg, Maryland named Coronation Media, who's great. They're super great to deal with and they're very professional and they make a quality product. And that is all good news. So I am pleased. The other thing that I love about what you're doing is I feel like a lot of the Catholic content that's being pushed onto YouTube these days either has to do with like the chaos within the papacy and within the American Episcopate, or it's apologetic based that Protestants can't

necessarily also appreciate because they're like, well, I don't agree with you and I don't like you just telling me I need to change. Whereas I feel like the stuff you're putting out is something that both Catholics and evangelicals and even Orthodox could really appreciate. And I think it's really great when our evangelical brothers and sisters can learn from Catholics without feeling like you're asking them to change beliefs right away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's kind of how we pitch it is St. Thomas Aquinas gives you a great entree to the Christian intellectual tradition, because he's a great inheritor of what's gone before. And he's a great way to understand what

comes after. And so I think a lot of people find him attractive for that reason, just because he's a really good teacher. And so we just kind of set it up as a teaching course, you know, so like the speaker's looking at you in a kind of didactic way of saying, like, these are the things, you know, that St. Thomas says, and you can believe him you cannot believe him it's all gravy yeah so yeah it's really good well today we want to um basically this episode is going to be a shameless plug for our book on marion consecration yes i'm pumped oh wait wait shameless plug let it begin hold it up marion consecration with iguanas uh nine day path now keep it up. Marrying consecration with Aquinas. Nine-day path. Now, keep it up because I don't know the title. A nine-day path for growing closer to the mother of God.

Nailed it. Yeah, very good. It's funny. Is this the first book you've had published? Yes. Yeah, this is your fifth book, sixth? Something like that. A couple of them are editorials, but yes.

But I remember being so thrilled when it came out oh i gotta show you one thing wait there i'm not sure if i've showed you this or not but this is my favorite thing that's ever happened this is my book the porn myth in korean yes did i show you that's exactly you did show me that that's awesome i'm pumped about that they gave me taekwondo i give them this. You gave them that. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, no, it's a real blessing.

I think the nice thing about a book as opposed to a video is people are really investing in a book in a way that they might not invest in a video. So you might see how many downloads you've had. That might mean that they watched it for like 20, 30 seconds and didn't really pay attention. Whereas if someone's investing with their money and then they're investing like sitting somewhere and having to mentally engage with a product,

it's probably going to have a more of an impact. Yeah. And I think too, like, I'm not, I'm not thinking that the internet's going to get hacked and shut down, but you know, when we post a podcast to the old interwebs, when we send it through the tubes and wires, we always save a copy on the, on the hard drive. Yeah. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen. Because you just put stuff out there and maybe it gets buggy or maybe you lose it. I don't know how things work. But with a book, it's here. It's just in my hand. And it's not going to disappear from my hand until such time as someone lights it on fire or takes it from me. So yeah, there's something about that that's substantial. You feel like you're contributing to Western civilization in a way that the internet doesn't quite have the feel of yet.

Yeah, and just to kind of ruin everybody's view of best-selling authors, I shared this with you over a text message because I was wondering what that meant. Like, what's a best-selling author? And it turns out it's just like if you're a best-seller within the publishing house that you release that book with, you're a best-selling author. Wow. So you could go with a really little publishing house and be the best seller out of all of their merchandise and be a... So it's not terribly interesting.

But we're best sellers on TAN right now. Yes. First pump. Hey, TAN's great. Oh, they are. TAN is the second biggest publishing house and the second biggest Catholic publishing house in the US after Ignatius Press.

That wouldn't surprise me, yeah. They do a lot of great work, and I was really pleased with that front cover. Yeah, it's very attractive. And I love the Fra Angelico painting here was actually the image from the holy card that we made for our simple profession. So I was like, yeah, the Lord, he's just looking out. Well, this idea kind of started percolating in my brain, I guess, I think maybe first when I stumbled across, well, a couple of things, really. That beautiful prayer of consecration or of entrustment that Aquinas makes,

I think is a prayer that not a lot of people have heard about. And I think when you read that prayer, it sounds very De Montfortian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which surprised me. And then secondly, as much as I can appreciate De Montfort, I find that when I read him, I'm trying to like him more than I think I should be. this would be cool if we could take Aquinas' text on the Blessed Mother for people who don't necessarily click with the Montfort right away so that they can have a different avenue to entrusting themselves to the Mother of God. So yeah, we drew from his commentary on the Hail Mary

and one of his texts from the Summa Theologiae on praying to saints and then that beautiful academic sermon, Lux Orta, correct? Lux Orta? Yes, that's right. In which he says, Mary is like light in seven ways. So I think people are going to really like it, not to mention the fact that it's a nine-day sprint, which I'm good at. I'm good at nine-day things, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's in the Colby tradition, you know? So 33-day marathons are a good thing. Nine-day sprints are also a nice thing.

And yeah, I don't think that one is necessarily better than the other because the principle of merit is not length of consecration, but the devotion with which one consecrates. So yeah, it's cool. I think it's a sweet thing. Now you taught me, and we make this clear in the introduction, what Aquinas has to say about consecration and the religious life as a whole burnt offering. Talk about that a little. Sure, yeah. So I think St. Thomas doesn't have like a treatise on Marian consecration, so he doesn't give you his explicit thoughts about the matter, but you can kind of cobble it together from different places in his writings where he talks about consecration. And the most basic sense of consecration is just baptism, right? So at baptism, we are consecrated. We are made holy. And we talk about how baptism gives a character

because it makes you a worshiper of the Lord Jesus Christ because you have a share in his priesthood. So you're able to offer spiritual sacrifice as a Christian, as a child of God, as one who has grace and virtue and gifts of the Holy Spirit. And then another sense of consecration that he describes at some length is religious consecration. And religious consecration just builds upon baptismal consecration. It kind of intensifies it. So like at baptism, for instance, you die to sin. So like St. Paul in his letters, he talks about how you go into the waters, and then you're buried, and then you rise, you know, a new man, as it were. And so at religious consecration, not only do you die to sin, but the idea is that you die to the world as

well. You die to everything else. That's the hope. And what it does is it intensifies, you know, those baptismal graces, or it kind of like helps you to live more intensely out of those baptismal graces. And St. Thomas has this awesome way of describing why poverty, chastity, and obedience make of you a sacrifice. And here is like what you're talking about, the whole burnt offering. In the Jewish temple system, you've got all kinds of different sacrifices that you can offer. So you've got like the cereal offering and the wave offering, and then you've got like tithes and firstfruits and oblations and all these different things. And in all these sacrifices, you're giving part of it to God, specifically the blood and the fat,

and then you're giving part of it to the priest. So the priest gets like the stomach and the jowls and the shoulder, and then you give part of it to the offerer himself. So you take some home with you to feed your family. But there's one kind of offering, the Holocaust offering, where you give the whole entire animal to God. So you just, you take out the blood, you know, you sprinkle blood on the altar, and then you just burn the whole animal on the altar. And St. Thomas says that this is a good image for religious life, because with poverty, you give all of your possessions. With chastity, you give all of your body. And then with obedience, you give all of your soul to God. And St. Gregor the Great says in one of his commentaries on Ezekiel, he says,

if a man gives all that he is, all that he knows, and all that he loves to God, it is a holocaust, right? So that the religious makes of himself a kind of whole burnt offering. And so what we do in the book is we use that kind of logic to describe Marian consecration, where we are consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ at baptism, and then in a Marian consecration, you're given to the Blessed Mother in a way that's appropriate to her, right? So you would give her your thoughts, words, and deeds, and the merits specifically of your thoughts, words, and deeds, so that she can apportion them as she sees best and most lovingly as a heavenly mother, something like that. So yeah, it's beautiful logic. Yeah. And you point out that

on the natural plane, there are three goods, three types of goods in relation to myself. And you have what's external to me, and then you have what is me, which is both body and soul. And as you point out in the book, external has to do with poverty. Chastity has to do with what? My body. The greatest kind of bodily pleasure I can have. And then obedience is submitting my will to somebody else. So you're literally kind of giving all of you naturally speaking, which is really, really cool. Okay. But then we have some evangelical listeners who are like, okay, and we point this out in the introduction. Like, is this supposed to begin a conversation to take like a fringe element of Catholic piety and make it the be all and end all?

Doesn't this just sort of, doesn't this just stop the conversation? Why would you do this? How is this possibly ecumenical? And we probably have some evangelical listeners who are like, what are you talking about? Like, I was tracking with you. evangelical listeners who were like, what are you talking about? Like, I was tracking with you, you were talking about God and your love for Jesus, and now you're consecrating yourself to Mary. How would you explain that briefly to an evangelical as best as you could to kind of make it as palatable as possible? Sure, yeah. What would I say? I think I would begin by saying

that, yeah, it's not something that one has to—it's not a sacrament, right? So you've got to be baptized. You need to be fed by the body and blood of the Lord. You need to have your sins forgiven. You hopefully go to God having entered a state of life, and you've got to be equipped for that journey. There are sacraments that equip you with the necessary things or the essentials for the journey. And then there are other things that are sacramentals, right? So they're helpful, but they're not strictly necessary in the same way.

So like holy water, you bless yourself with holy water. That's great. You might pray the rosary. You might do a variety of other things, right? But they don't have the same kind of efficacy assigned to them in the church's tradition. So this is one of those things. So I wouldn't say like Catholics aren't making it the be all and end all. We're not thinking of replacing the mass with Marian consecration.

You know, we're not thinking about giving up on priesthood, religious life and marriage and just making everyone just kind of Marianites, right? There's no more states of life. You should just like wear a veil and hold your hands together like Our Lady and just kind of make the best of it. No, we're not saying that. So on the one hand, we want to situate it within the analogy of faith and assign to it or recognize its proper importance. But then on the other hand, we can appreciate that it is good, right? And that there are many reasons for which it's good, and maybe just to talk about one of those. So why would it be fitting or suitable to consecrate yourself or to entrust yourself to the Blessed Virgin Mary? And I think the short

answer is because Jesus did so, right? So you think about the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ could have come into the world in any way he saw fit. And, you know, you have some wild stories described in these Greek and Roman myths where, like, gods are just kind of coming full-grown forth from the thigh of their dad or like popping out of his head and stuff like that. Like Jesus could have done any number of wild things. He could have come like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Terminator in a lightning bolt and then just stood up and made that kind of dastardly insouciant Schwarzenegger look. You know, he could have done a number of things. He didn't. He took flesh in the womb of

the Blessed Virgin Mary. So when you think about what's the done a number of things. He didn't. He took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So when you think about what's the purpose of spiritual life, it's to become more intensely and perfectly an adopted son or daughter of God. Okay, well, how does one become a son or daughter of God? Let's look at the Son of God. How did the only begotten Son of God by nature do it? Well, he took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Okay, so when he took to hand or when he chose an instrument for coming into the world, he chose her. And so when we choose an instrument for, you know, being fashioned after the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ, it seems that we would do well to appeal to her. So that's just kind of

like a basic setup argument, and that doesn't necessarily go into the particulars. But I think that gives you some of de Montfort's logic, certainly, talking about Mary as the mold of Christ. And it's, yeah, it's super helpful to think about it in those terms. Yeah, and if I were to give a less adequate, perhaps, but perhaps for some people more palatable kind of reason for it, I personally like the language of entrustment more than consecration, and that might just be because I have hang-ups, or it might just be because I think I understand entrustment more. So I think you could kind of begin by arguing that we have no good reason to think that Christians in heaven aren't concerned about us. We have no good reason for that. And I think we have a lot of good reasons to think that they

still are, not the least of which is the fact that the earliest Christians believe that they still are. It's interesting that when you read what the church fathers had to say, they are, in different instances, beseeching the prayers of Christians in heaven. And no one's sort of kicking up a fuss about this. This has been part of the Christian tradition for 2,000 years, that those who are in heaven are more alive than we are. They're perfected in love and in charity and surround us like a great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on, as it were. Okay. So, and if it's also the case that the prayers of a righteous man

availeth much, then I can ask those in heaven to pray for me, right? And I can, in a sense, to pray for me, right? And I can, in a sense, entrust myself to their prayers. And if it's true that there's something of a hierarchy within the saints in heaven, and if the Blessed Mother is the apex of that, for reasons we could go into, then it would seem to entrust myself to her maternal care in the way that Christ submitted himself, or in the way in which he told John, you know, that Mary would now be his mother, then I can entrust myself to her prayer and ask her to lead me to her son and pray for me that I could overcome temptation and strive with the grace of God to be holy. I think that's another way kind of I just kind of get down to it. Yeah. And I like in what you described, the image that kind of comes I just kind of get down to it. Yeah. And I like, in what you described,

the image that kind of comes forth is like maternal friendship. So saints are like, you know, our devotion to saints is kind of patterned after friendship. It's about cultivating communion, right? It's about having bonds of fellowship with those who have gone before us in the Christian life. And in one sense, you know, it's kind of silly to talk about it in these terms, but it's like kind of a mentorship. And as much as they've lived the Christian life. And in one sense, you know, it's kind of silly to talk about it in these terms, but it's like kind of a mentorship in as much as they've lived the Christian life well and beautifully, and they can give you great instruction and encouragement in living the Christian life well and beautifully. And also they have insights into the Christian life, which are only available to them and not to people on earth, that they can impart, you know, through their prayers and

through lights and insights. And so when you kind of cast your lot with the Blessed Virgin Mary, you're making in her a great maternal friend because she has your best interest in mind and she's advancing it insofar as God gives her to advance it. And that by appealing to her, you have another insight into what it means to be a Christian, specifically a perfect Christian, and that that's an efficacious friendship. It's the type of friendship that makes life possible for you in a way that it wasn't previously.

It's the type of friendship that gives you greater insight into your own thoughts, words, and deeds because you see in her a kind of mirror of Christian perfection. And it's also one that just like, it cultivates in you a deeper desire for a union with God that she enjoys. Because when you see your friends and they have great talents and they're not like vaunting the fact that they are flaunting the fact that they have these great talents, it inspires in you a kind of holy jealousy. Like when you meet people, you know, maybe you have some friends who are less self-possessed

and maybe you have some friends who are more self-possessed. But when you meet somebody who's really self-possessed and they know that they, you know, they're loved by the Lord, they know that they're loved by their parents, it's really, really attractive. You're like, man, I wish I were less insecure and I wish I knew the Lord and knew the love of other persons the way that you did. And I wish that I were just kind of more stable and firm in my own identity. And that's what we have in the saints, you know, like their fixity in the Lord gives us, it gives us courage, but it also gives us the moral imagination to see what the Lord might be calling us to. I mean, these are

all kind of like friendship-based and a little fuzzy, I suppose, but I think it's all true, just in the terms that you describe. Yeah. And there's that great line in the Summa, which we should point out to people, that when Aquinas sets himself the question, can God do better than he already has? Do you want to dive into that? Let's go. So it's in the Prima Pars and a question dedicated to the power of God. And St. Thomas asked specifically whether, yeah, God can do better than he has done. And he says, yeah, of course he could, because you can just picture stuff and then think like that stuff could be better. So like, you can picture... Use the analogy you used, because that made me laugh out loud.

Yeah, I said like, picture your best friend. Okay, now picture him with wings. Bingo. So God could have done something different, but he did this. But St. Thomas adds in a reply to an objection that there are a few things that he could not have done better. So he says the Lord Jesus Christ, right? So Christ's human nature is perfect, right? United to the hypostasis of the second of the Trinity, and it's flooded with grace. So the grace of union, a kind of habitual grace, the grace of headship. So it can't be surpassed. Also, he says created beatitude, which is just to say like happiness.

So when you have the beatific vision of God in heaven, it cannot be surpassed because God weds himself directly to your mind. And there's nothing in between, nor is there any way in which it could grow or intensify. It just is given whole and entire. Why is it called created beatitude for those of us? Oh, yeah, sure, because God is uncreated beatitude. So God is just, God is happiness in the sense that he is the object of our happiness. He's what makes us happy in a full or ultimate sense. But that happiness registers in us in a particular way.

So he kind of gives himself to us in such a way that we recognize it. And that recognition is what we mean by created beatitude. And then third and finally, he says the blessed mother, which is awesome. It's really amazing he says that. Yeah. Yeah. Because like the logic of our Lord is pretty clear. And the logic of created beatitude, you know, it's like pretty clear. You can't really imagine a way in which it could be surpassed. But with respect to the blessed mother, I guess sometimes our thoughts on the matter are a little bit confused or a little bit ill-defined, maybe even vague. And then he goes and says that, and you're like, wow. I mean, it makes more sense of what Fulton Sheen says, that she's the world's

first love, and that God pours his love into her in an especially intense and especially perfect fashion. What does Fulton Sheen mean by that? Maybe you just said it, but maybe try and say it in a different way that I can grasp. Because I haven't read that book. Everyone says that I should. What does he mean that Mary is the world's first love? So I've read that book and I've forgotten most of it, but I can tell you what I think it means. So specifically as concerns the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady participates in the redemption in peculiar fashion, because whereas everyone else in the world is liberated from sin, right, so we contract original sin at our

conception, and then we have to be cleansed of it at baptism by the merits of Jesus's passion, death, and resurrection. In the case of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she was preserved miraculously from it. So the redemption applies to her in strange, almost time-travel-ish fashion, where she gets the fruits, the merits of Christ's passion, even before it was actually consummated in time. And so it's as if to say that God loved her first, or God loved her in such a way as to prepare her to be a fitting dwelling place for his son. So we see her as the kind of, yeah, she's the object of the Lord's love in a way that's different from other people. Yeah, I think it was Protestant poet William Wordsworth who called her our tainted nature's solitary boast.

Yeah, no, I've heard that too, and that's beautiful. And then like Dante says, I think it's at the end of the Divine Comedy, he says, she has the face that most resembles that of her son. Yeah. You think about that, like, I mean, like the Lord took his human nature from her, so he would look like her, but also in the order of grace, she most perfectly resembles the Lord Jesus. Yeah. But that is pretty powerful for those listening, that of the Blessed Mother, he said,

she could not have been better than she is. Like, what does that mean? Because I look at my life. Can I be better than I am? Yeah. Ask my wife. You know, we can all be better than we are, but Mary, you can't even conceive of Mary being better than she is. It's pretty great. And it's not like, so like in the case of our Lord Jesus, he did not grow in grace in the way that we would often think about it because he had a kind of quasi-infinite grace, whereas Our Lady did grow in grace. Okay, well, there you go.

Let me just kind of respond to that then. So how could she not be better than she is if she's growing in grace? And I think, okay, well, direct answer and then sweet spiritual application side note. Because Our Lady is always growing in a way that's proportionate to who she is. So she's not – there's no imperfections. There's no remiss acts. There's no light faults or anything like that. She's always cruising towards the Lord at higher and higher velocities. So original Gary LaGrange says that she's like a meteor. That's just, um, what do you say? She's just like cruising towards earth and picking up speed. Like she has no terminal velocity. She's just for the same reason.

We wouldn't say that Mary was better when she was a full grown adult than when she was five, even though she had a greater intellect. It's sort of similar. Like she grew in proportion in an appropriate way, spiritually as she did physically. Exactly. Yeah. And we see, I mean, God gives her more graces than he gives other people just, you know, at the outset. So it's not like she's just consenting to and cooperating with these common graces that everyone's offered and she makes them more fruitful. It's like God is giving her more because he loves her more. And it's not because she merits to be loved more. It's because God wants to love her more for his own mysterious reasons, but that she does respond to those graces most perfectly. We see in her like a kind of icon of Christian discipleship, an icon of,

you know, what it means to be receptive to God's initiation and things like that. So, yeah. What's something from the meditations that we included? So, for those listening who don't yet have the book, every day we give a kind of meditation on an excerpt from Thomas Aquinas that we then share with you. So, every single day you'll be reading a chunk of Thomas Aquinas, and then we kind of go into that. But for me, I forget where it was. Maybe it's day six. It's during Thomas Aquinas' commentary on the Hail Mary,

where he says the sinner seeks fulfillment but can't find it, but that is saved for the just or something to that effect. And it made me think of after the resurrection of our Lord, where the angel says, why do you seek the living among the dead? And how that's what we do when we sin. We are seeking fulfillment and satisfaction in something that's dead and cannot actually satisfy. But that was really cool.

I forget in what respect he said that or what part of the Hail Mary, because I don't have the book in front of me, but that was something that I found really beautiful. What about you? I guess I hadn't thought at length or especially well about the whole idea of praying to saints and why it makes sense to do that. idea of praying to saints and why it makes sense to do that. And I think that, so in the first day, we have that passage there from the Summa Theologiae about why we should ask the saints to pray for us. And can the saints hear our prayers in heaven? And we already talked a little bit about friendship with saints and how devotion is a matter of establishing communion with the heavenly church. But this idea that God likes to work

through intermediaries, that was really brought home for me because, you know, God could do everything that he wants to do directly. He doesn't really need anyone else to carry it out. Like you think about creation, God created the heavens and the earth in six days. You know, that's to be interpreted as it's interpreted. And God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and he didn't deploy any ministers. He wasn't like, ooh, I'm all tuckered out with the firmament. Could you adorn the firmament for me? No, he just does it all directly. And so, too, in the order of grace, that God gives graces, and he could choose to give graces without any third party or without any middleman, but that he chooses to use the saints.

third party or without any middleman, but that he chooses to use the saints. And that it's good that he does choose to use the saints because it makes the saints more like him who is giver of grace. So not only can we be passive recipients of grace, but we can also be agents and causes in the giving of grace. And I think about this especially like in the context of the church, how wise that dispensation is, because like we could all just be on Barca loungers or on chaise lounge, you know, around a pool, and we can just kind of tank up on grace at the beginning of each day and then exhausted as we sipped Mai Tais and, you know, strawberry daiquiris. Or we could be involved in a common life that has us, you know, deeply enmeshed in these relationships and connections and associations. We're just kind of thrown in

with each other in such a way that we can actually be to each other a source of grace, a source of encouragement, a source of life, a source of love, and that the Lord loves us precisely through that. It's not like I'm getting some stuff from my friends and I'm getting other stuff through the Lord, but the Lord is actually maturing me, growing me, loving me, encouraging me through my friends and in my friends, and I see the Lord in them, and they are able to reflect in some way God's love for me. And that our prayer for the saints is just part of that really, really cool choice on the part of God to make things available. I'm thinking of St. Paul who says, like, I have become your father in the faith. So he uses, and we've all had that experience perhaps of people who are further along in the Christian walk

who the Lord has used to benefit us, and He doesn't use them like tools who have, you know, no freedom, but He works in and through them. This actually reminds me of Aquinas' fifth way, in that you have, even in nature, you have non-sentient, non-mental things acting towards an end that is good with regularity, even down to, you know, if electrons weren't attracted to protons, then atoms wouldn't form and evolution would have been impossible, right? And even there, God's not manipulating these things like a puppet master, but rather bakes in a sort of intention into those things. That brings about a good end. Yeah. So things are at work in the world and they're acting for ends. And God is kind of like

the master artisan or the master orchestrator. If you were to think about the world as a kind of stage play, it's not only the case that he's written the play itself, but he's also the producer, he's the director, he's the stage manager. He is one of the actors, but in a way that kind of transcends the other actors. But he's also at work in the actors themselves. They have interiorized the script, They have interiorized his stage directions, and he's actually giving them the very wherewithal to play their roles perfectly. And it's not like he's kind of domineering and saying, like,

do it exactly as I say to do it or otherwise don't do it at all. But he's actually showing them how best to act as they were made to act. He's saying, like, you're really whimsical. You should incorporate more whimsy or you're kind of hilarious and stodgy. you should play that up and be a kind of hilarious and stodgy type. So he's giving us grace to actually be ourselves and to mature into our identity, but in a way that remains definitely, you know, like properly ours, but it's given by him. Not infringing on our free will somehow. I mean, another analogy or another example would be the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I mean, the analogy or another example would be the gospel writers,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I mean, the church has made it clear that it's not as if Mark had the gospel of Mark dictated to him by the Holy Spirit, but rather the Holy Spirit used Mark's memory and experience and learning to produce the inerrant Word of God and so on. Yeah, pretty great. Yeah. I was just going to say, too, like, when you read the different Gospels, you get a sense for the different relationships that these men had with the Lord. And, you know, like Matthew and John, I mean, some of these questions are debated as to who wrote them, and we don't need to entertain that at any length. But you think about Matthew, and you think about John, especially John, who is an intimate of the Lord, you know, who reclined on his breast, who is referred to as the beloved disciple, it seems. And then he has these really beautiful, soaring insights into the Lord's divinity.

And, you know, some scripture scholars will tell you, you know, that's only because, you know, it was written super late, like 90, 95 A.D. And the church had had time to reflect on this. And this is actually the kind of communal meditation of some Johannine group, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I think that we can say simply, without being naive, that John has insights into the Lord that only he has insights into. When you think about the fact that the Lord went to a couple of places and only brought a few of his intimates with him, you know, Peter, James, and John, you know, you think about the healing of Jairus' daughter, or the transfigurationuration or the healing of Peter's mother-in-law or the Garden of Gethsemane, things like that. Like, he's inviting them into his interior life in a peculiar way,

and we see that reflected in the Gospel of John. So, like, yeah, like you said, that these different instruments, they retain something of their, you know, they retain their own proper identity, and God, in giving them grace to be who they are, makes them to be more so who they are. It's not as if God's imposing His will and kind of running roughshod over our will, but rather He's making us to be more free. And as concerns the intercession of the saints, you see how that's on offer, how that's on display, because He's making the saints more glorious, and He's making us more glorious in receiving the ministrations of their friendship. And it's not as if he's trivialized by it. It's not as if he's stepping aside because he's so intimately involved in it that he's glorified in the very warp and woof of the fabric that he's woven. It's just, it's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. And I think one objection I've heard offered to the fact that the saints in heaven can pray for us is, well, in order for Mary to hear all of the prayers, you know, of Christians throughout the world, wouldn't she have to be omniscient? And we would say, well, she's not omniscient, and maybe we don't know how, like the mechanism by which she comes to know of our prayers, but we can both know that she does and also not know how she does. And I think the general answer the church has given is that God makes it known to them somehow. And that might seem like a bit of a cop-out if I can say, well, she just does and we don't know how. But I mean, that's true of this Skype call. I know that I'm talking to Father Gregory Pine,

but I could not begin to explain to you how this happens. Something to do with like, what? Like electricity? It's not the phone lines anymore, is it? It's something different? Like, I got no freaking clue. And that's kind of one of the sad things. One of the beautiful things about modern technology is it's given us a lot, but that we're so kind of detached from the things we're engaged in day to day. But the fact is, I don't know how to explain how I'm talking to Father Gregory Pine.

I have no idea how it happens. You have no idea. You cannot explain to me, podcast listener. I don't mean you, Father Gregory. You probably do know. But our podcast listeners, they don't know how they're listening to me. They could try and explain it, and maybe some of them would do better than others. And maybe they could potentially explain it.

But I think the vast majority would have no idea. And yet they know that they are. And I think similarly we can say, well, we're not really sure how the saints hear our prayers, but we can trust that they do. And I think, too, when we get too involved in explanations of this sort, sometimes the faith starts to sound a little bit science fiction-y. And people will make fun of some medieval authors for entertaining these wild questions that have no practical application, the classic of which is how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And so I think that we're probably, you know, you can think about it and you can entertain different possibilities. And that might be a fun exercise for meditation. But I think we can also trust that it gets worked out and that if it's the case that Our Lady sees the Lord and if it's the case that grace perfects nature, right, if it elevates it, if it heightens it, and if she's most grace,

then there's some way by which to account for it. And I don't think we need to get into nitty-gritty details, but the Lord gives her to know what she needs to know, and that just as a mother has a kind of solicitous desire to know everything about her kids, and is always trying to kind of tease those details out so that she can love her kids more and better. So too of the Blessed Mother. And she's going to use every means at her disposal to get into the details of her life, not to nag or manipulate, but to help, to heal, to love, to encourage. Yeah. Now on day eight, we read a section from one of his academic sermons. Can you explain to people listening what Aquinas' role was at the University of Paris? What academic sermons were, how they were different to his other

sermons? Sure, yeah, gladly. So St. Thomas was, he finished his initial studies or his doctoral studies in 1256, and then he lived until 1274. So he had about 18 years functioning as a university professor. And for most of that time, he was in universities. So he was in Paris from like 1256 to 1259. And then he went from there, I want to say to like Naples from 59 to 61, and then Orvieto from 61 to 65, and then Rome from 65 to 68, and then back to Paris from 68 to 72. And then maybe like Naples again at the end, or maybe just whatever, it doesn't matter. But for most of that time, he's functioning in universities, or he's working in the different studia of the Dominican convents where he would

have lived. So these young men would come to study, and he would be the one who would teach them, or he's working in the papal curious. He's got a lot of different jobs, blah, blah, blah. But in the university setting, you had three principal responsibilities. So it was to read, specifically to read scripture and to comment scripture, because that was what most of the courses were for the students there, because scripture is the soul of sacred theology, and because theology is about knowing God, and because scripture is this really privileged element of the tradition, and it's not like, you know, it's not like you just kind of get it out of the way so you can do speculative theology. It's the very substance of speculative theology.

So that's first. You read Scripture. Second, you dispute. So St. Thomas would be involved in these different disputed questions, sometimes in the classroom setting where they'd be kind of having it out among themselves, and then sometimes publicly at these, quote, libital questions where people could come in these open-air scenes and ask him whatever they wanted, and then they'd be recorded later. St. Thomas really liked doing these things. He does more than your average bear. And then the third and final one is to preach. So at one of the churches that would be part of the university,

you would give a sermon, an academic sermon, at different times throughout the year. So St. Thomas also did popular sermons. You know, he would have preached like a normal Sunday mass from time to time, and we have some of those texts. Specifically, the commentary on the Hail Mary is a popular sermon. And St. Thomas is said to have been such an excellent preacher that he moved himself and his listeners to tears, preaching in his own Neapolitan dialect. But the academic sermon was more kind of curated, and it was something to, not to show off, but it was something that was addressed to an academic audience. So you might use like a little bit more elevated language, and you might be a little more

theological and technical in your exposition. And then it was recorded, and then we have a good 20 of his academic sermons, I think, right now that were edited by people, but that doesn't matter for our purposes. So yeah, that's it. And what was one of the, I don't know if you remember, but I mean, seven ways Our Lady is like light. Was there one that you want to comment on? One that maybe stuck out to you, or would you have to kind of go back and read it to refresh? I have it in front of me, so I'm just going to pick one. I don't remember offhand if there were one that caused me a special joy. But like, so St.

Thomas has this understanding of light, which we don't have to go into, but basically light makes other things visible. So he doesn't really think that light is something unto itself. You know, that we have this theory, lights are waves or, you know, lights are particles or what are, you know, it's hard to say. But Mary is like light in that she makes other things visible and she's transparent. So she kind of gets out of the way. So I think for our purposes, when thinking about Mary in consecration or Mary in entrustment, sometimes you get nervous that if you place too much emphasis on the Blessed Mother, then you kind of distract from your devotion and love of the Lord. But the point here with light is that Mary lights up the Lord. Mary makes the Lord visible because she makes him visible in a humanity that's accommodated to our weak state.

Because even though the Lord took human flesh, it can still seem like something kind of distant or far off from our experience because a human person is united to, or excuse me, a human nature is united to a divine person. It's like, what does that even mean? Like, how do I sympathize with that guy? And it's not to say that we should ever feel distant from or alienated from the Lord, because we always can and do appeal to Him directly. But Our Lady's humanity, her womb specifically, are kind of transparent to the workings of God's grace in our lives, and specifically in the Incarnation. And so we see in her how God takes human flesh. And we also see in her how grace takes root in a human heart, because there's no, there's nothing in the way. Because sometimes like in our own lives, we're thinking like,

am I actually getting holy or am I just getting better at deceiving myself? I don't really know. And you can look at the Blessed Virgin Mary and you know that here I'm not observing any imperfection. I'm not observing any light faults. I'm observing what it means to receive the grace of God well. And that is a kind of mirror in which I can see the working of grace of God, you know, like the working of the grace of God in my own life. So yeah, she's, she's transparent and self-effacing and she, she gets out of the way. So she's not overly concerned with, um, you know, she doesn't agonize or anguish over like, oh, was this the right intention over like, oh, was this the right intention? Or, oh, was this the right motivation? Blah, blah, blah. You just see

how grace works in her. So that's one thing that comes to mind. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I would offer this challenge to Catholics who perhaps are still doubtful that if they give the Blessed Mother any attention, that this will somehow detract from their devotion to Christ. And that's this. Name one person in your life who has a strong Marian devotion, who does not also have a strong Eucharistic devotion. I don't think you're going to find many or anyone, or if you find somebody who is devoted to the Blessed Mother, say through the Holy Rosary or something, but isn't interested in the Eucharist, it's because they have a very clear perverted view of the Blessed Mother. But I think it is interesting that if I know someone who is deeply Eucharistic, they're also deeply

Marian. So to your point, what do you think about that? I think, yeah, I sometimes, I don't know that I thought about this in a clear way before right now, but specifically my experience of men who have Marian devotions is that they tend to be solid, right? I remember at Steubenville, there was a guy who was a residence director named maybe Louis, I want to say. I've forgotten, but I remember him being a good man. And I remember overhearing a conversation between two persons who served as RAs underneath him. And they were talking about a meeting that they were going to with him. And they said, you know, like, do you know what the agenda for the meeting is? And the other person said, no. And they said, do you think we'll pray a rosary?

And the other person said, it's Louis. Of course we'll pray a rosary. So it was known that this guy had a deep Marian devotion. And whenever I was with him, I just got a sense of his solidity, right? He wasn't, he wasn't like, you know, you'd talk to him and you'd say like, how are things going? He wouldn't be like, oh man, crazy busy, just totally storm tossed, losing my mind. Can't, can't like put one foot, barely put one foot in front of the other. You just always had a sense that he was, he was doing well, right? And he might say like, you know, you can please pray for this for me, or, you know, I have this thing on

my plate that's causing me anxiety. But you had the sense that he was rooted and grounded in love. And I think part of that is because the Blessed Mother is a mother, and the Blessed Mother loves us like a mother. So she loves us unconditionally, and she loves us as a kind of like safe haven. So you might feel that life is difficult, or you might feel that life is trying or lonely, but you can always return to her and you can always receive the kind of consolation of her tender maternal care. And I think, you know, like I think about this, like you can basically always rely on your mother to love you. Regardless of what you do, you can basically always rely on your mother to love you. And you have that in the Blessed Mother. That's not to say that you don't have that in the Lord Jesus Christ or in the Triune God,

but you have it in the Blessed Mother in a way that's especially maternal. So it comes to you in a way that's, yeah, it just corresponds to your experience of life. I don't know. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I love my mom a lot. And it's good to know that I have a mom in the spiritual order who loves me in a way that resembles the way that my mom loves me, but to an infinitely more perfect degree. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that's it. I mean, just to have a mother in the spiritual order, there's, yeah, there's nothing quite like that. And so you see people who have a Marian devotion and they're, they're recollected in that, you know, they know that they have a safe haven. They know they have someone on whom they can rely wholly and entirely. And that, that comes through in their personality. It's just, it's substantial. And they're not just going to be

thrown about here and there. Sorry, that's kind of a wending answer, but I'm just... No, I mean, it's difficult to describe what we mean by maternal. It's difficult to describe our experience of the maternal. I think that's maybe what you were running into. It's something that you deeply know, but it's difficult to kind of put words to. To your point about Mary shedding light on things, I think this is also true with her dogmas, right? I mean, we call Mary the Theotokos to safeguard the divinity of Christ, for example. Maybe talk a little bit about that. And that's usually the example I hear. She's mother of God. What about the other dogmas? Is there another one that you can point to and say, this safeguards this about Christ? Yeah. So I think that each of the four

Marian dogmas point to something about the Lord Jesus. And I think, yeah. So the mother of God one is clear, that the grace is given to her. They're given to her because God loves her, but they're also given to her because they are for the incarnation. Right. So she is mother of God because. So this is defined at the Council of Ephesus against Nestorius, who held for a kind of two person Christology, which did not adequately affirm the unity of Christ. So it's like you got, you know, you got the divine person and you got like a kind of human person that's assumed by the divine person. But the council fathers there, and especially Cyril, Saint Cyril, wanted to insist that no, it's one thing, it's one person, because otherwise our human nature cannot hope to be redeemed. Because if it's not assumed in a unified way, then it's not redeemed in a unified way, and our hopes of redemption are

further off than we first imagined and then you think about like okay the next would be her perpetual virginity it highlights the fact that something new is going on here right so it's not just like there's a dude who was born who made claims to be the son of god and we're all just kind of caught up in a mania that you know leads to this false resurrection account and people sacrifice their lives in this huge fiction that's been perpetrated through like 2000 centuries. It's like, no, like something, something very different has happened here. And the fact that it's very different is signaled by the fact that his birth comes about by extraordinary means, means that we

have never really seen before or since. Um, so the fact that she has a version before, during, and after is a way of highlighting the fact that what has happened is holy and unique, and that it makes holy and unique those whom it touches. And then speaking about, we talked a little bit about the Immaculate Conception, right, which is defined by Pius IX in the 19th century, and it gets its big kind of like shout out at, let's see, Our Lady of Lords, right, identifies herself as the Immaculate Conception, a little Bernadette Subaru. Couldn't have known that, you know, because she wasn't educated, and then she goes and tells the priest that this is how the Virgin identified herself, and that's a kind of confirming sign that what

she is saying is true. But the Immaculate Conception shows in, again, in extraordinary fashion what the redemption does for each. So I think a lot of people think that the redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ is good and it kind of applies to me, but I don't really feel it so much because I still have to struggle under the weight of sin and life is really hard. It's kind of a slog. I'm holding out hope that heaven will get better. But to be liberated from sin doesn't feel, you know, it doesn't always feel great. Whereas in the case of the Blessed Mother, she's preserved from sin. And so you see the heavenly logic already at work. So it kind of animates your hopes and it raises your spirit to believe that it's actually possible to seek and to strive and not to yield because we see the term of our Lord's love already in manifest fashion in

the Blessed Virgin Mary, and we can consent to and cooperate with the graces that He gives because we are not defined by our present difficulties, but rather we are made for something infinitely better, which we already see at work in her. And then when we talk about the assumption, I love this line in the Psalms that He does not suffer His beloved to no corruption. So when we talk about the Lord's resurrection, we really mean it. So 1 Corinthians 15, if you want an awesome passage to meditate on for days and days in Lent, 1 Corinthians 15 talks about the logic of the resurrection, and it gives an order for the resurrection.

So Christ the firstfruits and then all those who belong to him. So the resurrection is a matter of something that, you know, God cannot be killed, God cannot remain dead, and he suffuses with life all that he touches. And he has touched the Blessed Virgin Mary in an extraordinary fashion. And so, you know, there's kind of a debate in the East and the West as to whether or not she died or whether she fell asleep. But what we do know is that she has taken body and soul into heaven because he does not permit, he does not abide, he does not suffer his beloved to no corruption. And if that's the case, then we can really hope for a bodily resurrection for each of us, that Christ's body reigns gloriously, you know, like that Christ reigns gloriously in the body in heaven with his blessed mother who is seated, you know, also I imagine on a throne of great dignity and splendor, and that we are meant to share in that. So the body matters, and it's not just a kind of appendage to the soul,

but it's something through which our spiritual life is perfected. And we see that in the Lord, we see that in the Blessed Virgin Mary. And so we should conduct ourselves as children of light, we should conduct ourselves as those destined to the inheritance of the saints in light, as one who was made for a bodily resurrection. And that, again, it animates our hopes because our Lord ascends to the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. He pleads for us. He shows our humanity before the Godhead so that we can kind of come after him. It's the cause of our own ascension and glory. And the Blessed Virgin Mary is a kind of link piece or bridge. So we see how that resurrection works in his first

love, in the greatest among us, in our singular boast, and it animates our hopes that we can attain to a similar height. The analogy of Mary being the moon and reflecting the light of the sun has been something I've found helpful. And I would just kind of want to reiterate that to our evangelical listeners or cautious Catholic listeners who perhaps have been influenced by sort of Protestant thought when it comes to devotion to the Blessed Mother. Well, let me back up a step. I suppose I'd say if you have any caution about that, go look at what Martin Luther had to say about the Blessed Mother. Holy smokes. He praises her in a way that I think would make De Montfort blush, actually. But yeah, you think

about the light of the moon. The moon has no light in and of itself. It merely reflects that of the sun. And the moon's brightness doesn't make the sun any more beautiful. It's precisely because the sun is so luminous that the moon can be as luminous as it is. And same thing is true with our Blessed Mother. You know, any perfection and beauty that we speak about, that we point to, is only because of the goodness of God. As de Montfort says, next to God, who alone is He who is, she is next to nothing or nothing at all. And so,

I think those two things are important to kind of keep in balance as we talk about the glories of Mary. Yeah, I think St. Catherine has that beautiful line in the dialogue where she talks about how God is He who is, and I am She who is not, right? And the Blessed Mother would say the same of herself, that there is an infinite distance between God and the greatest of creatures, that we're like almost, you know, we're closer to animals than we are to the Lord. And that's not to say like we're animals and we're like the Lord's slaves or bondservants or anything like that. We don't want to make it a kind of crass comparison so that we can languish in our own self-pity. But that is to say that when we say these things of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our language is imperfect. Our language kind of limps along

before these concepts which we want to give expression to, and we simply just don't have adequate words for explaining how great God is. I think a helpful distinction here, too, is the distinction between the worship of sacrifice or adoration, or sometimes called latria, and then the worship of veneration or dulia. So what we're assigning to God is a specifically distinct thing. So when you pray litanies, for instance, you only ask God to have mercy on you. You don't ask that of Blessed Mother. When you offer sacrifice, like the sacrifice of the Mass, for instance, you would only offer that to God. You would never offer it to the Blessed Mother. When you offer sacrifice, like the sacrifice of the Mass, for instance, you would only offer that to God. You would never offer it to the Blessed Mother.

There are certain things that are due only to God because God is our creator and end, and to him we owe everything, or he has claimed to everything by right. Whereas with the Blessed Virgin Mary, what we're saying is it's veneration. So we're saying that God is glorious in his saints, that he has done a wonderful work in her. We're also asking her for her intercession. So to pray for us, to apply the merits of her life in our own by God's dispensation, you know, because he has willed it to be so. But we're not holding her up as we would esteem God or as we would reverence God or worship God or sacrifice or adore God, sacrifice to or adore God. So we also want to have that in mind. And I think that when we lose the sense that there is this peculiar form of worship due to God, then we can kind of get muddled a little bit.

So, yeah, we want to insist on that fact so as to keep the lines clear. Yeah. Excellent. Well, look, we just want to kind of humbly ask if our book is something you'd be interested in, you could go get it from Amazon or you can get it from Tan Books. You could go get it from Amazon or you can get it from 10 books. Actually, there's a way you can get 10% off. If you type in my name, Fradd, all capitals, F-R-A-D-D, 10, you get 10% off. And if you like the book, just help us by promoting it.

We live in a world where there's a lot going on. And unless we start kind of gaining some traction, the book might fall into obscurity. And if it does, glory to Jesus Christ, obviously, we're going to submit this to the will of the Father. But if you read the book and you want to review it on Amazon or wherever else, give us an honest review. We would really appreciate any feedback you can give us, because I genuinely believe that this would be a way to introduce people to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and it'll help people to grow closer to the Mother of God, and then ultimately closer to Jesus Christ, which of course is the goal of all this. Amen. Hallelujah. Good. All right. Father Gregory, any final words? Final words. Let's see. Lance, Lance, God's planning. We've got our Back to Basic series, Hustle and Flow. So check it out. When you say Hustle and Flow,

is that just a side thing you're saying or is that what you're calling it? Oh, no. Hustle and Flow is the title of a movie with Terrence Howard in it. You keep saying it, Hustle and Flow, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure he's just saying that, but maybe that's what you're calling the series. No, no, no. That's not what I'm calling the series. I just say those words as a space filler, like many say. I wish I were more deliberate, but alas, I'm not. So, yeah, we have a series for Lent called Back to Basics where we're just focusing on simple stuff like prayer, sacrament, you know, confession, going to mass, friendships, penance, study, stuff like that. Things that you want to use to intensify your current Christian practices without necessarily adding a lot of burdensome things. So doing Lent well, that's the hope.

So, yeah, check that out on God's Planting. That's all I got. Beautiful. Why don't we close in a Hail Mary? It seems appropriate. Perhaps you could lead us in the first's all I got. Beautiful. Why don't we close in a Hail Mary? It seems appropriate. Perhaps you could lead us in the first half and I could close this. Dig. Hail Mary, full of grace,

the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. All right, guys.

Thank you very much for tuning in to this week's episode of Pints with Aquinas. Just so you know that these episodes are also on YouTube. If you want to watch me and Father Pine chat back and forth, if you want to look at my head for some reason, I can't fathom, but if you do, just go to youtube.com, look up Matt Fradd and be sure to subscribe over there. Also, please give this podcast a review. It helps people know about the show. So if you like it, it'll just take a couple of clicks for you to give us a five-star review or a one, you know, you choose, and that'll help get the word out. And then finally, of course, if you're not yet a patron, please consider becoming one at patreon.com slash mattfradd, patreon.com slash mattfradd. When you're there,

you can check out all of the free things that I send to you, and then you can make a decision whether or not you want to support us. All right. Cheers. Bye. To carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you.