Pints With Aquinas - 5 Hours Investigating the Strongest Miracle Evidence for Catholicism (Ethan Muse) | Ep. 581

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Ethan Muse is here to make watertight arguments for how the Marian apparitions of Fatima, the stigmata of Padre Pio, and the Lanciano Eucharistic miracle, each naturalistically inexplicable, collectively vindicate the core doctrines of Catholicism, such that rejecting all of them as fraud, coincidence, or demonic deception becomes increasingly implausible. Ep. 581 Theotokos Rosaries are available here: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: Ethan Muse on Substack: https://substack.com/@ethanmuse Ethan Muse Padre Pio Substack: https://substack.com/@ethanmuse/p-174400229 St. Beluga: https://www.saintbeluga.org/our-lady-of-fatima-queen-of-the-heavens - - - Today’s Sponsors: Shopify - Sign up for your $1-per-month trial and start selling today at https://Shopify.com/pints Hallow - Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. Catholic Match - Download the app or head to https://CatholicMatch.com and find your forever. St. Paul Center - Share your faith with others this Easter Season by joining the Easter Accompaniment Challenge. Sign up and become a member today at https://stpaulcenter.com/pints Charity Mobile - Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Free Phone offer with code MATTFRADD PreBorn! - Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. So in this kind of like clickbait age, I don't know, people I think are maybe justifiably really skeptical before somebody talks about miracles.

The vast majority of claims about miracles are false, which is not unexpected. There's a lot of incentive to invent miracle stories. I want to get on to whether or not miracles could be demonic deceptions. In addition to proving that something is naturalistically inexplicable, we also need to use spiritual discernment to preclude a demonic explanation. It's entirely reasonable to think that maybe demons are involved. I want you to address those people who are impressed somewhat by what you've laid out today, but because they have issues with Catholic doctrine, they can't bring themselves to accept it.

Tell me how that's possible and make it sound plausible. You're going to have to say it five more times for the rest of my Eucharistic miracles. Then you're going to have to say it for all the Padre Pio stuff we just talked about. Then you're going to have to say it for Lucia. Then you're going to have to say it about Guadalupe. And I'm going to continue going all day long. And how many of these are you willing to pause it? The entire virtue of faith is God saying,

I've proven to you that it is me, so it's reasonable for you to believe that I am speaking. These are the miracles that prove it. So we have to talk about why the two of us are dressed up. Yes. Well, both of our friend Cameron Bertuzi decided to have a fundraiser for me because, I mean, I was getting a lot of comments about my presentation in my previous videos, and so he wanted to help.

That's what happens when you're as good a debater as you are. People can't attack the substance, so they have to attack your presentation. Now they can attack neither. Why my dad's happy. Okay, good. Well, it's really good to be with you. It's good to hang out with you this morning. And I know before we get into this ginormous episode, we plan on doing on miracles, which I'm really excited about.

Just wanted to ask you maybe briefly how you became Catholic and when you became Catholic for those at home. Because when we were talking this morning, I was surprised to realize you're a convert. Yeah, yeah. So I was raised Protestant. My family was Baptist, but really it was more like a sort of non-denominational Christianity. And I wasn't really taught much about theology and certainly not like the reasons why we believed what we believed. But when I was younger, I was really zealous about it. And I'm a Sunday school graduate.

Like I wanted to be a pastor. But I really, you know, went through that new atheist phase when I was a teenager and I sort of fell away. And I just couldn't see a rational justification for believing that, you know, Christianity was true. and then for even believing that God existed. And so I became an atheist for a long time. Now, I still had like a religiosity while I was an atheist. So there's sort of a zealous atheist where you sort of prophylatize for atheism. And I really did, yeah, and I like spending time in religious debates and talking with people from a whole bunch of different religious backgrounds.

It wasn't really until I was in college that I started to actually take theism seriously again. And that was partially due to like a religious experience that I had. But I mean, it's sort of hard to describe even. But it came more as an insight than like this like hallucination or anything like that. And then a time passed and I started taking theism seriously and then I started identifying as a theist. And then I sort of started forwarding with Christianity. And my motivation for that wasn't any rational argument for Christianity, but it was just the character of Jesus. and that I had always found him very compelling.

And there's just an authority that Jesus speaks with, where even as a new atheist type person, I always thought it was kind of cringe when people would, you know, try to make fun of Jesus or even dispute with Jesus. You know, if you could find it in the red letters, that sort of carried a weight for me. And there's something about him where it's just, he's very mysterious and he's compelling,

and he speaks with this assurance, you know, and he offers, like, he's just evocative and compelling. And so I wanted Christianity to be true, even if I couldn't really justify it. So I sort of came up with a liberal Christianity where it's a Christianity on my own terms, where I don't have to submit to any authority outside of myself, but I sort of am the arbiter of truth. And so if it makes sense in the New Testament, then I can accept it as something that's authentic, but I'm not really committed to inerrancy. I'm not committed to anything like that. And I sort of started to realize that that was untenable, that that wasn't really an intellectually defensible position. So I went back to being more of this like religious, poroist, generic theist.

But then, basically last year, like almost a year ago, exactly, right before Easter, I really started taking a second look at apostolic Christianity. And I started finding, I mean, I found some evidence relating to the Shrout of Turin that I found compelling. I heard about Our Lady of Zytoon. I even started seriously inquiring into Coptic orthodoxy. But then for reasons that are sort of beyond me, and that I certainly can't rationally articulate, God drew me to the Catholic Church.

And so I attended a Catholic Mass. And then I attended another one. And then I attended another one. And then I started OCIA. And I was just baptized. Last year, this year? This year, this Easter vigil. Praise God.

I got a feeling you would have been a formidable atheist. So I'm glad I never crossed swords with you in a comment section. Although maybe I did. But if someone had to approach you during the height of your new atheism days, and had us said, God exists, why are you an atheist? What would you have said? Yeah, I mean, well, first, I thought the problem of evil succeeded. Second, I thought the problem of divine hiddenness was, you know, indissoluble. Third, I basically didn't think there was any compelling evidence that God existed.

I thought there were basically like stalking horse explanations that you could give, where whatever work God was going to do, you could strip away a lot of God's attributes, and then you could still accomplish that same work. And so I thought that theism was kind of all these superfluous commitments that there wasn't really motivation for. And then it made a lot of predictions that just didn't make sense to me, like, you know, how God would sit idly by and permit the Holocaust to happen and permit, you know, terrible things to be done to young children. And, you know, how if he wanted people to enter into a loving relationship to him, why didn't he just make it apparent to me that he was there and that he was seeking a relationship? Yeah. And so, I mean, I was virtually certain.

that atheism was true. Who were you reading or watching at the time that helped you kind of become an intellectually satisfied atheist? I mean, I consumed a lot of religious content, so I was listening to just about everybody. Okay. And so, I mean, you, you know, I had heard philosophers, like Graham Opby, and I'd heard people talking about that.

And so I'd seen, like, sort of like, analytic philosophy, I've seen their atheists, you know, and Alex Malpass and people like that. But I mean, they weren't really what persuaded me. Like, for me, I just thought it was like there were very straightforward arguments. And, like, there was a lot of ad hocery that we could do where, like, people could twist themselves and not trying to explain it away. But really, the problem was that we just lived in a reality that just didn't look like the reality I would expect if theism was true. It looked like it was like this, you know, purposeless, sort of nihilistic, indifferent universe where I was this just like excretion that had popped into being for no reason. And did you watch any William Lang Craig debates?

Yeah, I had seen those. And yeah, I wasn't. What was your assessment of his arguments at the time, even if they're different now? Yeah, I mean, I wasn't at all impressed at the time, I will say. Yeah. And now? I mean. Now, is it big, do you believe in God now because you think you have an argument or two up your sleeve?

Or is it something different? Oh, well, right now. At the moment we're having this conversation right now, I think I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists. and that, like, atheism is, like, an insane, implausible, ridiculous theory that no serious person should take seriously. And, like, I also think there's tons of theistic philosophical arguments that succeed. But really, I'm not convinced by those nearly as much as what we're going to talk about today. All right. Well, let's do that. We want to talk about miracles.

Now, I had a conversation with somebody before I walked into the studio. And I said, you know, we're going to discuss miracles. And they said, oh, I remember I read a book on, like, coincidences, you know, and how, and I got the sense. that what they were referring to was, you know, one of these books where people too easily attribute the word miracle to something that makes them feel warm and fuzzy. And I think a lot of people are skeptical. I'm skeptical of that, especially in this day and age on YouTube where everybody's titles are hyperbole, right? Miracle or whatever, atheist destroyed or something like that. And then you watch it, you go, okay, none of that happened. They're just getting me to

click. So in this kind of like clickbait age, I don't know, people I think are maybe just justifiably really skeptical before somebody talks about miracles. So I'm sure you can relate to that, especially in your atheist days, maybe now. What am I getting at? What is that sense in which people are, why are people not wrong to be skeptical at first when they just hear some miracle claim? Well, the reason that, I mean, I think people have that impression. I mean, some of it is just the secular culture that we live in and that that has suffused

basically all of our academic institutions and all of the people that are sort of seen as like respectable intellectuals, that there's a sort of snobbery and snide condescension and like a priori judgment that miracles are totally bunk and that all of them are ridiculous and that there's no credible evidence for them. And I mean, I hope at the end of our conversation

we'll see that it's an indictment of all of those intellectuals and not at all of miracles when we actually look at what the evidence is. But there's also, there is truth in what you're saying which is, first, that the vast majority of claims about miracles are false, right? Which is not unexpected. There's a lot of incentive to invent miracle stories, and they're also the sorts of things that can very naturally develop as legends

and sort of collective memory, or things can become exaggerated where they're really sort of, maybe you could see the hand of providence in it, but then the story starts becoming a little bit more exaggerated and exaggerated and exaggerated as it's told in the telling. And so I think there is a lot of that where because there's so much of it that's based off of reminiscences and hearsay and legendary embellishment, and there's so many cases where when you start scrutinizing it or looking into it, it seems like the supposed credibility vanishes, then I think there is a sort of justifiable skepticism when there's a rare and frequent event that people have an incentive to make up. You know, you're going to have a higher standard of evidence for proving that than just for a mundane claim. Okay, good. You put that way better than I could. I appreciate that. that. So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are,

without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries I have ever seen in my life. Theotokos Rosary sent me one maybe about a year ago or so. And I remember being absolutely blown away. You probably heard me talking about it. I've sent one to my mom and dad and uncle. I give them to some of the guests that we have. And everyone who receives one is blown away. These are just a total different caliber. And when you think about the kind of money we're willing to spend on a phone, it's like, you know, sure, you can pray a rosary on your fingers or on a string rosary and it would work just the same, obviously. But if you're looking for a beautiful rosary that's more of an also like an heirloom, something that you could have for life, check this out. Go to dailywire.com slash shop and pick up one of these. This is more of the masculine one. This one, they based on St. Peter's Basilica. So it has real stone beads and Italian olive wood.

This one is inspired by Notre Dame in Lyon, France. So you might want to, again, pick this up. It'd be a beautiful ordination gift, a gift for those who are getting married, maybe Father's Day, Mother's Day. Like, honestly, a beautiful gift. I remember what moved me so much is when I sent this to my, I won't say who because I don't want to call them out, but a family member who doesn't actually pray the rosary,

they started praying the rosary. And I think it's honestly because it's so beautiful and so sacred looking. So again, go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today. And thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. What is a vindictory miracle? Yeah. So, well, if we start with just miracle, and there are many senses of that word that can be used and that are perfectly legitimate.

And so I don't care actually about being territorial about how people use the word miracle. Because you could technically view, there's things I would call providential coincidences where maybe God answers prayers and there's sequences of events that definitely could be, could happen as a mundane coincidence by chance. But maybe if you have a worldview where God really has an active hand of providence where he's involved in the world, it's also reasonable to interpret those same facts, which could have a mundane explanation as also reflecting some kind of intelligent, you know, plan. And so I wouldn't call those miracles in mind. sense, in my sense, it's going to be something that exceeds the power of nature or that is basically

just outside of the ordinary course of human experience that is a sign that is performed by God, a divine deed that's performed by God, a sign performed by God, that exceeds the powers of nature that's naturalistically inexplicable in some way. So start there as a baseline understanding of what we're talking about when we're talking about miracles. Now, God can do those for a bunch of different reasons. And sometimes the reason won't even be clear why he did some but didn't do others. And so sometimes it can just be that there's a pious person who maybe has lots of mistaken religious beliefs, but God as an act of compassion, or maybe even because he foresees a bunch of downstream consequences that are going to be good, grants them a healing, you know, or sends them a sign that

points them in a direction that's going to send them down the right path. And so it's very private and it's very personal, and the intent behind it is either hard to discern or is just so generic that you couldn't really get much, you know, specific doctrinal content out of it. Then there's another type of miracle that God performs and which are recorded extensively in the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, which are vindicatory miracles. So basically miracles that God performs as public extraordinary signs with the intention of promulgating a revelation. So basically God's speech that he's given, he's entrusted to what we would call a divine legate, so someone who claims to speak on behalf of God. God performs.

forms an extraordinary sign to put his signature on the claims that are being made by the divine legate about what God said. And so when it's public revelation, this is the most extreme because it's when someone is demanding faith. So that means they're binding the conscience to accept the revelations as being from God. And they're saying it's going to be sinful if you reject it, given that God is accrediting this person to you as a divine legate. So on Pentecost, when St. Peter begins preaching to the Jews, he begins with an accusation against the Jews, where he says, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God, by miracle signs and wonders, which he performed amongst you in your midst, as you yourselves know,

you have given over to lawless men and crucified. And so he begins with that accusation. And he says, he had the signs. It was your obligation to know, to recognize that God was vindicating this man's claims, and that nonetheless you rejected it. And so, therefore, that's imputable to you as sin. And so, and our ward even explicitly says this, you know, If I hadn't done among them the works that no one else did, they would be without sin.

But now that I have, they have the greater sin. So he's explicitly saying that basically, if he hadn't performed all of these extraordinary signs that made it so clear that he was who he said he was, they would be without sin for not believing. But now that the signs are there, faith is required. They have to give faith to his claims, or its contempt for known truth, blasphemy of the spirit. And so that's the most extraordinary. There's also private revelations where God performs a public. sign to confirm people in the deposit of faith that he's already entrusted to the church within the Catholic paradigm, right? So these and themselves, no one's required to accept them,

except insofar as we're just required to accept credible human testimony, right? So for instance, if a doctor comes to me and says, hey, your wife really needs this medical treatment, you know, you really need to encourage her to get this medical treatment. If I refuse that, I could be committing a sin by being unreasonable or obstinate in accepting the facts. that I have an obligation to accept. But it's not a sin against faith. There's not divine faith that's being compelled. So we only owe the same credence

that we would give to human testimony to these. But God still performs them with a vindicatory intent. He performs them to point people to the deposit of faith. So it's a way of lending credibility to the things where he does demand faith by performing revelations that confirm that and point to that and refer people back towards it. And so vindicatory is really about the intent that God has to reveal truths and then to elicit assent to those revealed truths from the people that he performs the miracles, you know, in the context of or as the audience.

And do those who experience the miracle firsthand have a greater obligation to respond with faith than those 50, 100 years post? Yes. I mean, basically, well, everyone in our view has an obligation to basically love the truth that is. proposed to them, right? And we believe that God will make the sufficient means to be saved available to everyone. And so therefore, basically, whatever the person needs to be saved, whatever measure of truth that they need to be saved, the grace will be made available to them where they will basically either accept it or reject it. And if they accept it, God will work with them and basically draw them to all the truth that they need in order to basically make the right decision at the final moment of their wife.

So, so every, everyone is going to get enough. But yes, the, basically, the sin for rejecting revelation will be greater, the more clearly the revelation is basically accredited to you. That makes sense.

I know you touched upon this, but just one more time, the distinction between public revelation, which we are bound to accept and private revelation, which may be true, but what Catholics aren't, obliged to accept. Right? So Catholics aren't actually obliged to accept miracles such as the ones

that we're going to talk about. Well, so there's a prerogative that God has given to the church to bind the conscience of the faithful. So this is divine sanction, right? So it's the same thing that St. Paul is claiming for himself when he's claiming apostolic authority and he's saying he has all the marks of a true apostle, including miracle signs and wonders, right? When he's saying he has divine sanction. So you have to listen to me where you're committing a sin against faith. You're basically, our Lord makes this explicit when he says to the apostles, you know, whoever listens to you, listens to me, whoever despises you despises me. He's conferring divine sanction to them. And so we believe that the church has that. But the church only has it.

There's a limit to the jurisdiction that the church has, which is just the deposit of faith. Right. And so we can, the church can bind people to accept its interpretations and clarifications, and applications of the deposit of faith. And certain things that are proximate to it or correlative of it, we don't need to get into all the details of that. But the church is not going to be able to bind people to any, basically all public revelation has ended with the death of the last apostle. And basically, with Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God's word,

he's said everything he has to say, at least as far as public revelation is concerned from a Catholic perspective. Now, private revelation, you are not bound in faith. And the church certainly, insofar as it has to say, divine sanction, when it authorizes or approves one of these miracles, it is not binding you to give faith, divine faith, to the contents of these miracles. However, that doesn't mean that you can't be bound in conscience to accept a miracle, because there are certain context, as I said earlier, in which we're bound to accept or to lend credence to human testimony. So, for instance, if I come in to the

room and say, hey, there's a ton of smoke in the house and I think it may be on fire, you need to get your daughter out of the house. And then you say, yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't I'm deciding not to believe that. And it's completely unreasonable for you to decide not to believe that. You're not committing a sin against faith. The church isn't binding you to believe that this fire is about to kill your daughter, but you may still be doing something wrong. And so in the same way, if there is credible testimony from people that are claiming private revelations,

you're not bound in faith to accept them. And in fact, we should be very careful about spiritual discernment and testing all things, and especially being deferential to the church's judgment about the authenticity of revelations in deferring to it. There's what's called the moral safety in deferring to the church. But that doesn't mean that, for instance, if we know that our lady of Fatima, who we're about to talk about, has come and has encouraged us to do penance, and has encouraged us to recite the rosary every day, and who wants us to say the Jesus prayer at the end of every decade of the rosary, and who wants us to do, you know, the first Saturday's devotion, if our lady's

asking, you know, and you believe that there's credible testimony that our lady is asking for that, a faithful Catholic is going to say, okay, you know, Mary says jump, how high? Yeah. Yeah, that's good. All right. So the three miracles, we're going to talk about more than just three miracles today, but we're going to talk about specifically three in depth.

What are those three and why have you chosen them? Yeah. So there are lots and lots of very credible Catholic miracles that we could have discussed. And some of them, the selection of miracles that I've made is in no way meant to prejudice us against the other Catholic miracles that I'm not discussing. So, for instance, one of the greatest Catholic miracles that I'm not discussing. miracles of all time is Our Lady of Lords, which is not one of the miracles that I'm planning on discussing today. You know, St. Charbel has worked so many healing miracles. You know, there are five

Eucharistic miracles where we have scientific analyses supporting them across a whole bunch of different continents. And I'm only going to talk about one Eucharistic miracle today. So I'm not actually intending to convey that I don't have confidence in any of these other miracles or that even that these three are the best. But these three happen to be the ones that, one, I have done the the most research about personally. Two, they give you a representative sample of a whole bunch of very well-evidened Catholic miracles. So we have a Marian apparition. We have a saint who's a miracle worker and a stigmatist, and we have a Eucharistic miracle. So that's a good representative sample of the range of phenomena that we're talking about. There's also the issue of the vindicatory

implications that all of these have, so the range of doctrines that they confirm. So I'm going to argue that the life of Padre Pio confirms purgatory. It confirms the papacy. It confirms the papacy. It confirms intercessory prayer to saints. It confirms the efficacy of relics. It confirms, you know, the existence of hell. It confirms. So we will talk about all that. Then the Marian apparitions at Fatima, confirm the papacy, confirm the immaculate conception, confirm the, you know, rosary and God's love of the rosary and encouraging us to recite it, you know, much more that we could say there. The Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, you know, the summit of our faith, the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation, which seems to be perceptibly enacted by it.

So basically, it's a range of phenomena where if you can see these, the essence of Catholicism has been demonstrated. All right. Fantastic. Well, I'm pumped. Let's begin. Okay, great. Yeah, so let's start with Fatima. Okay.

And so I'm going to start with, let's just get like a narrative description of the events. For those who have no idea what it is. And then we're going to go through and we're going to talk about what might skeptics say. And specifically, we're going to start with naturopists. There are other people who may want to start talking about demonic deceptions, and I'm hoping on planning on getting to that actually a little bit later. So we'll go through each of these and we'll talk about why we should think that they're naturalistically inexplicable, and then maybe later in the interview we can talk about

why we shouldn't think that all three of them are demonic, rather than sort of being a little bit repetitious with the discussion of demons for each. I think that's excellent, and that was my plan. Now, before we talk about Fatima, although maybe you would like to discuss it during our discussion on Fatima, would it help to say a word to the skeptic or the atheist? currently watching, who says, it doesn't matter what you show me, I know God does not exist. So whatever the answer is, even if the answer to these instances is going to be highly improbable, it's got to be that.

Is there anything you want to say to the atheist before we begin? Who's kind of dismissing these out of hand, as it were? Well, so we can begin by just, I want to begin with asking them a hypothetical. Okay. So if you were there for all the events that are described in the New Testament, and they happened exactly as they were described in the New Testament. Would you therefore conclude that it couldn't be a miracle? It would just have to be a series of extraordinary coincidences and that on the basis of your confidence and your own ability to do philosophical reasoning about the existence of

God, going against the consensus of the masses, against some of the smartest and greatest philosophers of all time, against the inherently abstract and highly speculative nature of philosophy, as opposed to something as simple as this guy walked on water. He changed water into wine. He multiplied loaves. He restored sight to the blind. He healed the paralytic. He resurrected other people from the dead.

He raised himself from the dead in a glorified body and hung out with a bunch of people for 40 days, right? And then he gave superpowers to all of his apostles who went throughout the world and then performed miracles routinely and habitually causing mass conversions of pagans. If you watched all of that, are you really going to sit there and tell me that, oh, I guess a super intelligent, being couldn't have reasons for doing stuff that seems counterintuitive to me. No, you're not going to say that. And so therefore, we know that if you have an a priori objection to miracles, if there's at least one case where the evidence could be good enough, we know that the a priori objection can't work.

So therefore, you're going to have to articulate some principle for how good the evidence can be before the opriory objection is going to be undermined or is going to be defeated. And I claim that based on the evidence that I'm going to present here today, I don't think your a priori objections are good. I think you're also neglecting a lot of good a priori arguments for the plausibility and tons of independent arguments besides miracles that get us to the same conclusion. So I think your premise is wrong. But I'll concede you your sort of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I'm saying, I'm the guy. I've got the extraordinary evidence.

Are you ready to listen? Let's go. Okay, cool. So we're talking about Our Lady of Fatima. So on the screen, we have three children here, three shepherd children who were illiterate at the time that these events began. Lucia, she in the middle there, she was 10 at the time the events started taking place. We have Jacinta Marto. So that's Lucia dos Santos.

That's Jacinta Marto. She was basically seven years old at the time these events began. And that's Francisco Marto, who's the brother of Jacinta. And he was probably about nine. He was nine at the time these events took place. Okay, these are three shepherd children. They were tending sheep on May 13th of 1917 when they claim that something extraordinary happened, which is basically they saw a flash of lightning.

So they thought, oh, maybe there's some kind of May shower situation that's about to happen. So they start gathering their sheep to leave. And then they see another flash of lightning. And then an extremely beautiful, radiant, as bright as the sun, woman appears. okay, and the woman has a conversation with them. And in essence, I'm not going to go through everything that happened, you know, but all these interactions are going to be about 10 minutes. But what happens is the lady says, okay, hi, I'm from heaven, you know, nice to meet you guys. I'd like to set a schedule where we're going to meet here on the 13th of each month for the next six consecutive months, same time, same place.

I want you to come, and I'm going to tell you what I want. And so you're going to have to wait. and then she also promises that eventually she's going to take all of them to heaven. So anyways, starting out already, there's an interesting perceptual asymmetry in what all of these children are reporting. So Francisco doesn't see the lady, doesn't hear the lady until the end when the lady's leaving, and then he sees her leave. Jacinta doesn't talk. It's only Lucia who talks back and forth, but she can hear and she can see throughout. Okay, and the perceptual asymmetry is going to continue in the subsequent act. apparitions. So then we go and basically June 13th happens. They come. And then July 13th happens.

They come. And on July 13th, I mean, by this time, word has already gotten out. And so very large crowds of people are coming and gathering to watch these children talk with the lady. And it's been announced that, you know, we have a pre-announced schedule for when these supposed Marian apparitions are going to occur. So people are interested and they want to show up. Now, what's interesting is, is, so none of them can see the apparitions. These are private. These are supernatural experiences that just the children are having. But the crowds are able to verify two things for us. So the first thing they're able to verify for us is the behavior of the children during the apparitions. And so both the children are occasionally acting as if they're being blinded by the brilliant

light of this woman. And so they're having to divert their eyes and close their eyes because they're being blinded by this brightness. And they're all gazing at this fixed location. And Lucia is enacting the side of the dialogue that she's then later reporting in interrogations, where we have the transcripts of all the interrogations right after the event. So she's giving her half of the dialogue and then at a conversational cadence waiting for the lady to respond. You know, starting something new can be terrifying. I remember when I launched this show. I had really no clue.

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And the truth is you don't get one without the other. That's why I'm really excited about what our sponsor has. Hallow is doing this June. They're launching a challenge based on my book, Jesus, Our Refuge, and it's all about going deeper, learning what it actually means to draw closer to the heart of Christ, not just in a sentimental way, but in a real transformative way, because Christ's heart loves us unconditionally, but it also calls us higher. It asks us to let go of sin, to loosen our grip on worldly desires, and to be united more fully with him. Hello is doing such amazing work with these book studies and these meditations. So many people I meet

say that their lives are being changed by by Hello. So, I mean, if you've been feeling the pull, like there's more to your spiritual life than what you're currently living, I'd really encourage you to check out Hello and join the challenge this June. Visit hallo.com slash Matt Fred to get three months free. Let's make this June a month of surrender, connection and genuine prayer. Again, that's hello.com slash Matt Fred for three months. months free. And so we can see here, my second chart, we can see a record from these are, so DCF there is talking about the critical documentation of Fatima. And so there's an amazing, amazing priest named Father Alonzo, who is basically a historian for the Fatima apparitions and who put together an extremely extensive compilation of basically tens of thousands of primary source documents,

including all the contemporaneous documentation of the newspaper reports, the transcripts of the interrogation by the priest, the transcripts of the interrogation by the canon lawyers, you know, the photographs, everything. So he goes through, and so in document three, in those critical documents of Fatima, we have what Lucia says to Father Ferreira, the local parish priest, immediately after the apparition, like on July 14th. Could we read through some of it? Yeah. So, and this is going to give us the structure of what she says. So opening question, I note down and asked, what do you want of me? Okay, petitions. I have your request.

for you to convert a woman from this location, another from Fatima, another from another location, and then she said those would be converted and improved within a year. Also, already this is going to be important in thinking later when we think about the implications of Fatima. She's asking the lady to convert people to Catholicism, so to heal and convert. And another thing that's important to keep in mind about these apparitions is our lady actually refuses some requests to heal, says our Lord doesn't have confidence in them. And so that's already sort of theologically interest edifying for us to think about once we accept the authenticity. But okay, then we get to the core. This is the most important part, and we can verify based on contemporaneous documents. This 100% definitely happen.

The miracle request. Work a miracle so that everyone may believe after she gives all of these petitions for conversions. And then the reply, which Lucia reports, in three months, I will make everyone believe. So at the final apparition she had scheduled on the first visit, in three months, I'm going to make everyone believe. I'm going to perform a sign that will make everyone believe. So on October 13th, around midday, which is when the schedule is for all of these apparitions, at this location, which is the cova. So a little pot of land that's owned by Lucia's family. So then we get rosary directives, pray the rosary to our lady of the rosary to bring peace to the world and to end the war. Recall this is happening during World War I.

Forgive me. So this took place after which apparition? This is the July 13th. So this is the third. This is right in the middle. So immediately after the apparition happened, they were questioned by the priest. So what the priest did have gotten them to agree to do Because what the priest was really worried about

Is allegations of impropriety Where it was the priest who was basically Organizing or orchestrating this conspiracy So he was basically exploiting the children And so he would be the one that was facilitating it So he made it a policy that he wasn't going to go to the apparitions And he wasn't going to meet with the children before the apparitions Right

He told Lucia's mother to bring her to him The day after each apparition So not even immediately after the apparitions so that they basically had time to already tell other people so that what he said could be checked. And why was the priest afraid of being associated with this? Well, because first is, when these miracle claims started getting made, there was lots of skepticism from everybody.

So, like, Lucia's own mother is convinced that Lucia is lying and basically threatens her, beats her, tells her to stop going to the cova, drags her in front of people and demands that she recant. You know, Lucia's, you know, bawling. She's inconsolable. She's extremely upset about this. but she's just maintaining her story.

And so then basically, and so that's her own mother. There are lots of people who are locals who are threatening. There's like anti-clerical people who want to basically say that this is a conspiracy by the church to basically replicate what had happened in lords because they wanted the same sort of thing to happen here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Governmental officials? Right. And so these are illiterate children who are, you know, they're described by others as rude and ignorant, right?

And so it's a little bit harder to imagine, given the impression of sincerity that they give off to people, given the consistency between all of their accounts, you know, given the commitment that they have, given the details, the vivacity, and also just how there's not many fantastical elements to their narrative. It was hard to imagine them as the masterminds, all three of them. And there's additional things that I could bring to bear. So obviously you want basically the church to be the mastermind. So he's putting himself at a distance, which is why this interrogation has happened. on the 14th and not the 13th. And is it happening in isolation? He's talking to each child individually?

Well, so actually, the record is very complicated. There's sometimes where they're questioned together. There are some times where they're questioned apart. Now, he questions each of these children in turn. Now, the children have already had time to talk to each other between now and when this particular interrogation is happening. But that's not always true. Sometimes they're questioned by people who are there at the apparitions,

like immediately after questions separately by people. there we're about to get to something that happened in August that will be really extraordinary for the children's credibility. Okay, when it says here under Teresa of Jesus, you know, I'm reading, she asked that a lame man be healed. What is, is that mean the Blessed Virgin was asking the children to pray? No, no, no, no, no. So, well, I'm about to explain these other two columns. So this is what Lucia says the day after. This is her recollection of the exchange that she had, where she's giving us both her end.

of the exchange and our ladies end of the exchange. Then one thing that I'd really, is really, really important to establish is that Lucia's memory of what she said and did during these events was accurate and that she enacted all of this in real time and in front of this crowd of, you know, huge numbers of people, right? And so what these two testimonies here, one is basically a sister, which is the Teresa de Jesus testimony. And another is Jacinto Lopez, who's just a local guy who is close enough to where he could hear the conversation. These people have statements that are taken down. And these are independent

statements where they're saying here was Lucia's half of the dialogue that we heard from her. Oh, okay. And so I have here a table showing her side of the dialogue, its exact matches with these two independent witnesses and their independent recollections of what she said. So we know that she said what she said she said the next day in front of this crowd of people. So we know they were behaving in the way with the basically, they were perceptually enacting what they said they were seeing in real time. It was happening simultaneously. There wasn't collusion after the fact.

She was having this conversation extemporaneously back and forth at a conversational cadence. And she's saying exactly this. So another thing that's important to note about these other members of this crowd who are going to be questioned at various points is that in the buildup to this extraordinary sign that's going to happen on October 13th, there's a lot. of other prodigious phenomena that happen in these crowds during these apparitions. So one example, which there's an astronomer who attended October 13th event, who basically goes back and he becomes fascinated with this, because he thinks it's a way to prove that the apparitions were objective rather than psychological, is there's a lot of testimony concerning white smoke that would appear right as the apparition began and right as it ended.

So these columns of smoke that would come up, this fog or this mist. And so we have lots of testimony from people attesting to that. But there's no censor. Like people looked around, they investigated it. There's no plausible source for where it could come. And lots of people are going here, deering after these events. And they're not seeing it at any other times besides the times when these apparitions are supposedly occurring. There's other things where it's like more subjective.

And so therefore less convincing to a skeptic supernatural phenomena that convert some skeptics where they seem to be seeing solar anomalies and stuff like that that are happening. in connection with these apparitions. But I'm not really appealing to those, but it's just interesting that it's not just the people are there watching the children. There's also basically a lot of reports of basically prodigious sort of paranormal phenomena

that are happening. Okay, and we have lots and lots of testimony from people. So we can just prove beyond reasonable doubt that all this happened with historical certainty. So anyways, after the July apparition, well, another important piece of context is that our lady gave this year's a secret, during this July operation.

And the secret will not be disclosed until the first time it will be written down, put down in writing, is 1927. And there are more nuances and complicities there that we can get back to. But the secret, these children are not going to tell anybody about it. They're going to be super tight-lipped, and there's going to be a lot of people that really, really want to know. And so that's something important to know when we get to August 13th. So the next date after these July 13th apparitions. So before the August 13th date, there's a local administrator who's anti-clerical. So he really doesn't like the church.

And he's really skeptical about these apparitions. And he believes that they're a fraud or a hoax or at least, you know, embellished by these children. So he basically abducts them. He takes them, he basically takes them to a local priest's house. He questions them. He tries to get them to recant in front of the priest. The priest won't do it. He takes them to a jail.

He puts them in the jail. He says they're going to have to stay there until they recant or until they tell him the secret that they said, Our Lady, told them. Wow. He puts them separately. He asks someone to go prepare boiling water, and he says he's going to throw the boiling water on them or dump them in the boiling water if they don't tell him the secret. The children are crying. They're terrified to the point of tears. They refuse to do so.

For several of the children, he tells them that he's already killed the other children. And so now this is their chance. So basically, and he also is. He's questioning them. He tries to bribe them with money. He tries to try the phrase that's used in the statement by a priest in a local newspaper when he's defending himself from being involved in these antics, is that he tried all sorts of police tricks to try to trip up the children and get them to contradict themselves. And then the reports are that at the end of this, though he's the administrators later going to try to dispute some of the facts about what occurred here. But the reports are that at the time he was impressed by the children. and basically decided to stop interfering and let them go at the end of this, basically, August 13th encounter with the children. That was going to be my question. How do we know that this interrogation took place the way that you say it did?

Well, so the first thing is we have it from the children. And we're going to see that we have very good reason to believe that the children are not basically huge, compulsive liars, that they're actually very high in integrity. So we can independently corroborate that that was true, that basically the children's testimony is worth taking seriously. But second is we actually have, obviously we don't have a fly on the wall besides the children and the administrator on all of the events that took place while the administrator was questioning and threatening the children. And the administrator is not cooperative. He's not confessing that he did all of this.

But we have elements that are sort of incidental to their story. So, for instance, the parts that took place in front of a local parish priest. And we can compare the administrator's later statements that are plainly contradicted by contemporaneous statements by this priest about what happened, where he's left. lying about what happened with the priest, we can compare those, and they match perfectly with what the children say, and not at all with what the administrator says, which would once again seem to lend credibility to the children, who we have independent reason to believe, are basically credible. But so another thing that's important to keep in mind that's happening during these August

apparitions of Our Lady are the, basically, the crowd has gathered in expectation at the Kovah, but the children haven't showed up. but our lady is going to make it clear that she's keeping her side of the appointment. And so what she does, first is we have reports of the cloud at the time when the apparition would have taken place or should have taken place.

We have reports of lightning, but what's most important that we have very credible evidence took place was that just about the time the apparition was supposed to happen. Huge explosion. Boom! People hear that,

and then the crowd goes into a frenzy and a panic and disperses. How many people are there? It's thousands. And are people taking photographs? Well, no. So this is 19-7. So we will have photographs.

Obviously, we just saw that we have photographs of the children. And we will have photographs on October 13th, because all of the major Portuguese newspapers send their photojournalists. Yeah. It's not like everyone had an iPhone. But however, yeah, if you look at it, it's basically like a, oh, sorry. It's like a tripod camera. Yeah.

That's basically where you're going to have like a 30-second exposure to take the photo and you're going to have a guy who has a bunch of training. So it's not like we have, yeah, it's not iPhone camera photos of what's happening. But we have testimony from the people who were there. Yeah, we have enough contemporaneous documents that it's inconceivable that it didn't happen roughly as described. So then, anyways, and again, there's lots and lots of details that I could be adding that I'm skipping over. So I just want everyone to know. I'm just trying to give you a basic narrative frameworks.

You can get a feel for the events that are taking place. And then I'm going to get a little more forensic when we start considering skeptical explanations. Okay. But okay, so then we keep going, and basically we have what happens in September, and now this is when we're starting to deal with crowds in the tens of thousands have already gathered. And so the apparitions play out as they had before, and we have prodigies that are widely reported by people in the crowds, and there are some conversions, and so there's interesting stuff happening, but what's really interesting, and this is really when this guy who's going to become a very important historian of Fatima,

named, you know, Father Dr. Formigal, Manuel Formigal. He starts to become involved and he starts questioning the children. And in addition to him questioning the children, he's also watching their behavior during the apparitions. And so he's one of the best testimonies that we have for basically the periodic dazzling, which will be important later when we start considering the explanation for what's happening to these kids. But so he's one of the people who's witnessed to that. And now, fast forward. And so we're all super excited.

It's about to be October 13th. Tens of thousands of people are expecting something. There's going to be an extraordinary sign. Newspapers have already reported that this prediction is going to happen. Huge number of people are planning on going on a pilgrimage to go see this happen. The children have received lots of death threats, which is basically, you know, if something doesn't happen, like, we're going to hurt you. Real bad. And the, you know, Lucia's mother has become persuaded of authenticity by this point in time.

And she is going to Lucia. And it's kind of heroic by her parents, where they say, well, we're going to accompany her to this. And if they're going to kill Lucia, they're going to kill us. And so, and they say, like, Lucy, I think we should just go to confession because I think we're going to die tomorrow. And basically, Lucia says, you know, like, I don't think, we're definitely not going to die. Like, our lady's going to follow through, but fine, I'll go to confession with you.

But basically, two days before this happens, and we have, we have the letter. We have, we have, we have it in writing by Formigau's pen. We have it in writing, which is he's going and questioning Lucia. And he says, you know, okay, if these, you know, aren't you worried, aren't you scared that people are going to hurt you if nothing happens on October 13th? And Lucia replies, I'm not afraid at all. And that's supernatural faith. That's extraordinary, given the circumstances.

I'm not afraid at all. In two days, we're about to go out there and there's going to be an extraordinary sign that's going to happen. So Formigal writes and he says, look, the impression of sincerity, the consistency, between the children, the genuineness that I get from them, it's so unaffected, it's so unadorned, you know, Jacinta seems extremely shy. There's discrepancies between them that are easily explained by differences and differences, but not by basically a highly scripted narrative between them. So it does really seem like their shared content that they're all recalling and describing independently. He's like, I don't know what to say. Like, I guess it's too early to say whether this is authentic.

But in two days, you know, we're going to get. either this whole thing is going to dissolve as if by magic, or we're going to get entirely new evidence that's going to prove the supernatural nature of this phenomena. And I think the audience can already anticipate which of the two options happened. So then we come to October 13th. So it's raining heavily all day

and throughout all of Portugal, actually. And so there's lots and lots of rain, and there are people who are getting drenched and soaked in water. You know, their clothes are getting super many, muddy, there's descriptions from witnesses that basically the whole Kovah had been turned into like basically like a puddle. And so, but nonetheless, extraordinarily, somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people have

come to the Kovah basically to witness this miracle. And we can, it turns out for authenticity, it's actually kind of better for us if the number is lower. There's actually diminishing marginal returns to having more witnesses. to having more witnesses past a certain point. Like the difference between whether 30,000 people are having mass hysteria and 60,000 is sort of insignificant. But what actually is really helpful is, and this is how the crowd estimates are actually formulated in the first place, is the COVA. We can look and we can say this has a capacity where it can fit about 300,000 people in it.

And so these people are actually, it's not just one giant crowd that are all in direct contact in close proximity with each other. This is actually really a better way of thinking about it is dozens and dozens of isolated crowds. And so actually, the fewer people it is, the more dispersed these isolated crowds are from each other. So we have people that are really far back in the coval who are looking at it through binoculars. You know, people on a hill, people in these little cars up here. We have people that are way down there, right up where the children are meeting, so we have them dispersed. And so there's some people, like a really important witness we're going to get to later, is Dr. Jose Garrett, who's a lawyer, and who provides one of the most detailed and meticulous testimonies about what happened,

his estimate is about 100,000 people, because he's basically just saying, like, it's about a third full, is his eyeball. The secular newspapers, they have their own crowd estimates, maybe 40,000, 50,000. So estimates vary for how many people it was. Now, we also know that approximately when these events were taking place, which is within 10, I mean, within 15 minutes of basically noon, solar time. So when the sun is at its zenith. That's a universally attested fact that's sort of beyond doubt, which is the sun is at its zenith when these events take place. And that's going to be important for reasons that may not be apparent now,

but will be apparent later. So then, basically, and here we go, just if you want to see, this is the type of crowd we're talking about. So we have a press photographer. There's one photographer there named Judah Ruah. And he is the one who's going to take all these photographs during the event before the event. after the event that are going to document basically, well, the number one thing that they're documenting right now

is there really were a huge number of people here attesting that this event happened and who were claiming to perceive a miracle while this event occurs. So, anyways, moving forward, we, the noon comes, the clouds of smoke appear, Garrett sees them, he sees three clouds of smoke through his binoculars, looking forward, he's not hearing the children at the time. The people close their umbrellas,

They kneel down into the mud at the command of the children. The children are sitting there and they're asking, and maybe basically the Our Lady comes. And then at one point, there's a whole interaction that happens. We can talk more about later. But the Lucia says, hey, everybody go look at the sun. So the sun's opposite direction. So crowd turns around and faces.

Everyone go look at the sun. Hey, look over there. All right. And so now, important context for everybody. If you've ever tried to go out when the sun is at its zenis, It's not sunset. The sun is at it's zenith. It's high in the sky.

And if it's not covered by clouds and you stare at the solar disk, it will be blindingly bright. It will be painful. It will cause retinal damage. It will not be safe for you to do that for 10 minutes. Let's all be clear about that. That's sort of an indisputable fact that's just common sense from ordinary human experience. And you certainly can't have that happen for 30 to 100,000 people at the same time.

That they would all be able to stare at the sun without being dazzled. But nonetheless, right when all these events start, the rain abruptly stops and what the witnesses all attest, I have, you know, maybe a dozen testimonies that I've reviewed personally attesting from the credible people. I'm setting even aside, all this stuff from peasants, like from educated witnesses, hostile witnesses. This is who I'm talking about. The clouds part, the rain stops, the clouds part, and then everybody turns around and what I can find may be one possible exception. But even people who say they didn't see a miracle agree on this detail. The sun is a pale moon-like disc that's painless to gaze and that occasionally appeared in clear patches of sky where you shouldn't be able to see the very sun. Cloudless and Edith Zenith is in one of the newspaper reports written by a skeptic who had basically published an article mocking the miracle in the days before.

So he's publishing an article saying, you know, cloudless, added zenith, pale moonlight disc, painless to gaze and to fixate upon for an extended derivative. And we have photographs of people, many people whose pupils don't seem to be dilated staring up at the sun. Okay. And so they don't seem like they're squinching. They don't seem, so they, so basically this is already an extraordinary fact before we even describe any of the other events that took place here. Just optimologically speaking, let's all keep this in mind for people to be staring at the midday sun if the witnesses are right that it's cloudless. There are no recognizable clouds. And it's so high in the sky that the thin, basically ice crystal clouds that can sometimes attenuate the sun and create a sort of similar optical effect.

Those are going to happen when the sun's at a low angular elevation. But what the astronomer, one of the, so the, basically the dad of Jose Garrett is an astronomer, and he's like, one of the most important facts is that meteorological effects are weakest when the sun is at its zenith. So this is something that he points out. And so that's already an extraordinary fact that's basically universally attested by witnesses. You'll hear, but claims about diversity of witnesses in the crowd. This is not a fact about which there is any diversity.

And it's also corroborated by the photographs in many ways. One is just by the gaze of the people in the crowd in the photographs. Another way is the length of the exposure that he used, seem to be compensating for low ambient brightness, the darkness of certain shadows that are being cast, the fact that there's a secondary light source that seems to be a cloud, and the primary light source is about as bright as the secondary light source, but you can't really get diffuse clouds that will be as bright

as secondary illumination as the midday sun. it's zenith. So this is, it's about the brightness of the moon in the, is what the sun has been reduced to, and there's no perceptible, visible clouds. So already extraordinary fact, you know, and recall, predicted time, date location three months in advance. Now, what else we get from the crowd? And this is where we have more diversity, but even as my skept, as my critics, like Scott Alexander wrote this very extensive article, you know, Our Lady of Fatima, like, more than you wanted to know, where he's sort of criticizing me and Father Dr. DeLore, who I'm drawing on heavily our interpretation of the Fatima events and trying to offer a skeptical

explanation. Even he concedes that amidst all the diversity and amidst all of the some anomalous testimonies that we're going to get, there is a consensus narrative that's widely reported by the crowd. And there's a high degree of convergence between them on this consensus narrative. So this consensus narrative has these elements. So first, perfectly painless, comfortable to fixate at. Second, it appeared to do rapid rotational motion. And one of the rotational motions, the description that was most often used by witnesses was firework wheels.

So basically imagine the reason it seems like it's spinning is like imagine you're like emitting sparks in a circle, you know. So that's why it feels like it's spinning. The colors of the sun change. So it goes through a sequence of transitions. And I have a new article coming out where I'm going through and showing the actual both convergence as to the sequence of color transitions and that the variability is actually what would be. expected based on a physical interpretation of the event. So, but anyways, they describe this sequence. So Jose Garrett says, I look out and it seems like everything has become, you know, purple. Everything around me has become this, like, violet color. Okay. And so that means it's reflecting

off of people where people seem like they're tinted violet. The landscape seems like it's tinted violet. Everything seems like it's violet. And he's like, okay, what is going on? You know, am I suffering a retinal defect is the question that he asks himself. And so this is one of the most important details in any testimony is he closes his eyes. He doesn't have after images. He turns around to face the other direction, opens his eyes, everything's purple. Okay, this is a highly educated lawyer writing this saying he, and he says at the end of his statement he attests, I was completely calm and serene throughout all of these events. Okay, and so this is what he sees. And this is the fact that there's this narrow band spectral mission. So basically normally, light is bright.

broadband enough that things reflect back their own color based on their own absorptive properties. So it means that you had a very narrow band where you're only getting the violet so things are reflecting back the violet. And so we get that for the two best ones where I have testimony for are violet and for golden or yellow. Okay, yellow, orange, golden. So violet to yellow, golden transition. There's also reports of people seeing green, people seeing red, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But those are definitely the most secure is that there was a violet, to yellow transition that occurred with the light, and that it reflected off the environment.

Other important details from witnesses are people who said, I never looked at the sun because I didn't want to have sun-gazing effects. I was facing the opposite direction of the sun, and I saw the colors reflecting off of people. Wow. And so then, in addition to this, we have the sun appears to fall from the sky

on three occasions, to approach the crowd as if it was going to crush them. Some people say it seems like it's two separate disks, where basically the sun detaching itself, like disdetaching itself and then seeming to crush them and then to recede backwards. But basically, other witnesses just describe it as the sun appearing to fall from the sky.

Now, people are thinking these events that they're witnessing are apocalyptic. And so one thing that's important to keep in mind when evaluating witness testimony is that people, in heightened emotion, when you have 100,000 people, there's going to be a lot of videocyncrasy and variability in how people remember it, what people pay attention to, what people see during the event, etc.

And so, especially when it's something very highly surprising and unexpected. So we have reports of people who just passed out, right? And so they just passed out from the excitement. Other people who just agreed that they were so shocked that they were basically like attentionally blind, they were oblivious to everything that was happening around them and they didn't see anything. So we have reports like that. We have other reports of people where they claim, I could stare at the sun painlessly,

I don't see some of these other, basically the phenomenology that the other witnesses are reporting and a lot of the extraordinary signs that these other witnesses are reporting. And a lot of them interpret it actually as like, I didn't deserve to see it so God didn't let me see it. That's the spontaneous explanation that a lot of these people arrive at for why. Now, honestly, I've gone through a lot, a lot, a lot of testimony about the miracle of the sun. And I can say, and I've gone through skeptics, and they look, they love testimony of anybody who will say they didn't see something. There are maybe two examples of testimonies they can find. Two or three examples of testimonies they can find. And it was adversarial. They were looking specifically for these

testimonies sampling from crowds of hundreds of thousands of people where you have lots of people saying everyone around me saw it, right? And lots of people who had skeptical predispositions, right? And so three people, crowd of 100,000 people. Didn't you say 30 to 60? Hmm? Didn't you say this was 30 to 60,000? No. So I think the crowd is between 30 and 100,000. Okay. If you go by Jose Garrett's estimate, he has a, he has a good vantage to be able to say it's a third full. So I think his estimate of 100,000 is very credible.

There are other reasons to prefer it. Now, I personally like if it's 30,000. So I'm almost conceding arguendo that it's 100,000, even though it sounds, it sounds cooler to say 100,000 than to say 30,000. So it sounds like it's good for me. But no, what's good for me for crowd psychology is the further space to part all the people are. That's what's really, that's what I want. I want everybody not to be close.

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Again, just visit St. Paulsenter.com slash pints to start your 30-day free trial. Is this the event? Is this where the event happened or is this a prior? Yeah, yeah, this is the event. They don't look spread out to me. Huh? They don't look spread out.

Those people are very close together. The problem is we have people who are like a kilometer away in the other direction who are looking at the event through binocular. So these people are packed together. And because they're so packed together and there's so many people, especially up front close where the news reporter is, where everybody gathers. So if you have a huge field, everybody's going to gather towards the front where the children are. So the people pack themselves together.

Yeah. But John Haffert has put together a list where he tried to triangulate where a bunch of different witnesses were during the event. So I think he has locations for 60 witnesses. And we know we have testimonies spread across the entire field. Okay. But we also know that the whole field cannot look like this image on the screen. So this is where the density in the field is the highest. Okay.

And the best testimonies are actually going to be the ones that are the furthest back looking with binoculars who are not part of this giant field. Well, actually, there's even better ones that we'll get to in a second. But, so here's a photo of what the people look like during the event. So now notice one of the things that skeptics are really going to want to say is that this is all subjective and psychological. Yeah. And that there's nothing physical about this event. And all this is showing is the capacity of basically expectation and suggestion. to lead to like convergent like quasi group hallucinations by a bunch of people.

Yeah. Now we've already discussed some problems with that. And I think also people will realize that this is like a super ad hoc implausible thing. And for like a one in a billion crowd psychology event to happen at the date, time, location, predicted in the context of the credible apparitions, already doesn't sound great. And then like optimologically, like you can't psychologically suspend the fact that you're going to get dazzle glare and like photophobia after images, you know, retinopathy, if a bunch of people are taking the dose that you would have to take, staring at the sun at Zenith for 10 minutes. So we've already discussed that.

But thankfully, there's a brilliant man, a very, very brilliant man named Father Dr. Felipe DeLure, who was really one of the main inspirations for me to write my Fatima post in the first place was amazing work that he did, which is Fatima, you know, photographs and testimonials and in-depth analysis published in this peer-reviewed journal, Science, and Faith. And so he had a bunch of really clever ideas about how to use his skills in applied science by looking at these photographs to corroborate the witness testimony about details that they reported. So first thing we're going to look at here is he realizes that even though they didn't have the equipment to take a photo of the sun and Rua didn't even attempt to take a photo of the sun and there are various explanations for why he didn't attempt to. But obviously it's not a conspiracy on his part because he was a Jewish newspaper photographer who was not he didn't convert.

So we look here and basically what we're seeing is he found shadows, shadow cues throughout this entire photograph. And one thing that you can do, there are techniques that have been used for over a century that have been extensively validated that you can use to within a degree of angular precision reconstruct based off of these photogrametric cues, what the position of the primary light source is

in the sky on the celestial sphere. So what he does is he goes and he finds them, and the first thing he has to do is see that there's a vanishing point that they all converge to. And then he just has to defer a few other things, like the center of view and some other camera parameters. Those other things besides the vanishing point, like don't matter much.

They, like he could be, like, within the realm of plausible error, none of them are going to affect the ultimate conclusion that he has. So really the only thing that matters is that he's correct in estimating this vanishing point. and I believe he's very credible as far as doing that goes. And he's published it in the peer-reviewed publication. He's got a lot of great stuff, and he's very confident about it. So anyways, he infers based off of these shadow cues, that the sun, I mean, well,

we know from astronomical data that from the vantage of the COVA at the time of this event, the sun would have been at an angular elevation of approximately 42 degrees. This photograph, the shadow, points to an angular elevation. of no greater than 32 degrees, probably 28 degrees, 27 degrees. So, what does that mean? It means that whatever the primary light source in this photograph was, this point source that's a luminous directional emitter, that's casting all the shadows on this scene,

whatever that is, it is not the sun. It couldn't possibly be the sun. So the witnesses who said the sun appeared to fall from the sky and descend really low down on the horizon, Whoa. There's photographs, this is D-115 from the Rua series, where we have a peer-reviewed analysis proving that there was a primary light source that was not the sun that was at a lower angular elevation than 42 degrees.

And just to show you, these are four photographs where Father DeLurr used exactly the same techniques that he used on this photograph, diverse lighting conditions, diverse clouds, one of them is a computer simulation where we know what the true sun position was. And he gets it to within a degree of it. on all of them. Wow. So this excludes, absolutely excludes a solar elevation for the primary light source. If this was an objective atmospheric event, it's both unprecedented, and there's a lot of reasons to think it should be physically impossible. But in addition to that, it was predicted the date, time, and location three months in advance by illiterate shepherd children. So there's no

way that's a coincidence. We can talk more about that. But in addition, to that, he does further analysis on these photographs. So, first thing we want to prove is that all these reports about rain, which are corroborated by basically local meteorological data from the time period, and lots and lots of witness testimony that's unimpeachable, but have been questioned by some skeptics like Benjamin Radford, just, I think out of pure desperation. But basically, we can see here photographs from right before the event, puddles on the ground, reflections of dampness from these umbrellas. We can see people look wet. You know, we have reports that everybody kneeled down and closed the umbrellas. It's still raining. This whole place is super muddy. So we know the reports

from dozens of witnesses that they were soaked. Yeah. Are credible. Okay. Then we noticed something about the testimony that I haven't told you yet. So everybody reports that during this event, they feel a strong sensation of warmth. So they feel warmth. And so like they entered into a greenhouse. Tons of people are saying that. Wow. A ton of other people are saying, not everyone is completely dry. Some people are just reporting that they weren't dried off after this event. But there's at least some people in this crowd who report that even though they were completely soaked before, they were completely dry after. And so the interpretation that might suggest itself to the mind is that whatever this non-solar emitter was that had formed south of the cova and that was casting these shadows that a non-solar elevation was also an infrared emitter.

that was basically doing radiant directional drawing of the crowd. Now, how could we possibly prove that from a photograph? I don't know. So, let's look here at this photograph on the screen. I got a feeling you have an answer. Let's look at this photograph here on the screen. Now, we see there are two dark patches on this boy's pants that otherwise seem perfectly dry.

The one dark patch there, that region labeled S, is completely saturated with water. the region labeled W is partially wet, partially dry. So it seems like there's like incomplete drying that's occurred there. Yeah. Now, this drying pattern, this wet, wetness pattern, how in the world does that happen? How in the world does it happen? I have an answer, but just if you're a skeptic, if you don't believe this miracle, what is that wetness right there?

What is that? How does that get there? If you got wet from the rain... You stand on the top of a sauna and you slowly lower your legs into it and stop at the at the crutch. I mean, how do we know that's just not a color? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, so we can talk about photographic defects because there have been people who've tried to claim that. All right. It's not remotely plausible. That's a photographic defect, as Father DeLore and I have argued.

Okay. But that, so those two things, and it's corroborated by other photographs too, but so this is the best one. Okay. I will admit this is by far the best one we have because it's basically, basically what we see is it looks like

it's an accouter-shaped drawing pattern. What does that mean? So what that means is, A cooter is something that blocks light or some kind of radiation from reaching a surface, right? And so if a guy had had his jacket buttoned, right, right before this photograph was taken, if there had been a pulse of radiation that had been drying everything off, there could be that some wet regions on the guy's pants that were roughly shaped like that underneath his jacket were covered. Gotcha.

Yeah. But that then when he unbuttoned it and this photograph is taken, we see there's the parts that are saturated with water, and we see the parts that are completely dry underneath it. Yep. Now, notice, this isn't in a vacuum. This isn't me coming out with this theory out of nowhere. This is me saying there's a huge number of witnesses who say they felt warmth, who say that their clothes dried off really rapidly during this event when it couldn't have,

because relative humidity is extremely high, looking at a photograph that appears to depict exactly what we would expect to see if that had occurred. Yeah. And that this is the interpretation of our PhD in Applied Science's father, Dr. DLure. Okay. And meanwhile, if we look at this, there's no way that that's a shadow from the illumination in the scene. Let's go back to D-115, which is what this image is taken from. Oh, okay.

So this is the same image. It's just look down here at the boy's pant leg right there. I see. Yeah. So this is exactly the same image. I see. There's no plausible way based on this scene that that is actually a shat, that's a luminous shadow. Right.

Right. So it's way more plausible to interpret it as a wet, wet, dry contrast pattern. Yeah. The tonal qualities of it are way more consistent with a wet dry contrast pattern. We look at it and it appears to actually track not, so a development artifact doesn't care about the subject geometry in the actual scene from our perceptual reconstruction of it. It's something that's like chemicals are happening on top of it.

So it's going to be completely indifferent. So it's not going to appear to track the weft and the weave of a garment or to match the geometry of the actual 3D scene. It's something over that that's going to be. Basically, if it was like a chemical fog or anything like that from this old photograph. Okay. So it doesn't make sense as anything other than the photographic corroboration of the claim that already it's hard to see how people could be wrong. How could lots of people be wrong that they were soaking wet and then completely dry in a miraculous way?

Like we have, for instance, a testimony that I review in one of my articles on my substack, Motiva Credibilitatis. One of the articles I review on that substack, I mean, in one of my articles in the substack, I go through testimony. of a guy who says, look, I have pneumonia, and so I was really worried about getting wet. So I tried my best not to get wet when I was on my journey to the COVA. But unfortunately, it was just impossible for me not to, and I was soaking wet. But then after the event, I looked at myself and I was suddenly completely drawn. So these are the types of testimonies that we're dealing with concerning it. And I have, now, this is not the uniform report of the entire crowd that they were completely wet before or that they were completely dry after.

But it's corroborated by enough people and by the photographic evidence where it's not, it's hard to see how it could be wrong. And it also coheres with the rest of the story so well. Like, for instance, feeling this extreme heat. So anyways, this gets us through the photographs. But there's another piece of evidence, the last one that I'll mention concerning the events that happened here at the Miracle of the Sun before maybe zooming out a bit. that is even harder to refute than the photographic evidence that we just reviewed and the

ophthalmological evidence that we just reviewed. And just the simple fact that lots of skeptical and highly educated witnesses were here and reported highly convergent perceptions at the predicted date. Besides all that, this event was witnessed over a 40-kilometer radius. So, for instance, we have a city, Al-Buritel, that is 15 kilometers away from the cova. And it's basically an oblique line would be the direction where you would look at the cova from Alberatel. We have two different groups of people. One at the town center of Oberotel and another at like a ridge that's basically a kilometer away from the town center.

All of them looking towards Fatima in expectation of this event. Okay. They report exact. We have it from two brothers. We have written testimony. We've also have people ask about the brother's testimony to other people that were there in Alberatel. So we have it. And so we have the letters, we have everything.

So then these two guys report exactly the same phenomenology as the crowd at the cova 15 kilometers away. Including the wet and drying? Well, so the wet dry, no, on the Albertel. But it's a little bit more complicated on that. But the thing that they actually report is, so sun appears to fall from the sky three times, just like the witnesses of the cova three times. The colors, the sequences of colors reflecting off of the environment, the spinning, zigzag motion, translational motion. So basically, it maps on extremely well, as even skeptics have conceded, the Alberatel testimony that's multiply attested, you know, 15 kilometers away.

But those aren't the only guys we've got. So we've got due south of the cova. There's a city called Minde. And there was a boy named Barrow was his last name. I forget his first name. I think it was Alberto. But regardless, he's looking north. So if you wanted to look at the sun, you'd look south.

He's looking north. And he recalls, he told John Haffert that he saw the sun falling from the sky and that he basically was so panicked that he basically can't remember anything else that happened. And that everyone else in the area also saw it too within that radius. Wow. We have people, here's another key piece of testimony. This one is from a city

Basically, this could have been 30 to 45 kilometers away I'm forgetting my Portuguese geography right now But so basically in a city called Learia We have a woman and two construction workers Who were basically looking towards these mountains That are interposed between where the cova was Not where the solar azimuth was where the cova was And where they were at during the event

And they say that about noon, they saw like a weird red flash above the mountains. So if you had multicolored light that was scattered over long distance, like when you see the sun low on its horizon, what's actually happening is when you're at a low angular elevation, the amount of air mass between the sun and you is a lot bigger. So there's way more scattering or attenuation of the light that occurs. And in typical atmospheric conditions, that's going to create a preference for actually the longer, wavelengths like red. And so that's why the sun appears to red when it is low on the horizon. So if you had long-distance scattering of multicolored white from a local emitter at the Kovah, what would you exactly expect to see coming over as diffuse illumination over the

mountains, but a red flash? Meanwhile, if you were under the influence of suggestion or you were embellishing, would you invent something as boring as a red flash, which doesn't even match with anything at the Kovah that people made up? Oh, yeah, we saw a red flash. No. So we have multiply attested testimony of that correlated with the time when this event at the Kovah occurred. That's really interesting.

And we also know, unfortunately, a lot of the best testimony from distant witnesses is currently not available. That was, for instance, that was collected by the canonical investigation and that was reviewed by the bishop. We have selections of all of this testimony and all the stuff I'm talking about we actually have. But for instance, we have references published in newspapers that are just like, and lots of people saw it, from here in the area. And so we only have those three things. So we really can't say we don't know for sure. There's other stuff that we could talk about

that's even further away. But I'm good for now. Here's the thing you need to know is that you, so whatever your crowd psychology theory is, it probably can't cause convergent perception at the same time by people spread out over 50 kilometers, expect to people who aren't expecting to see it, and who are reporting details that are not copying details

of other people, but would make sense under a physical interpretation that we wouldn't expect from any of them. So we can see there was something objective that occurred. There was some kind of event that occurred, probably involving some kind of localized emitter that was due south of the cova at the time of this event. Now, there are many theories that have been suggested. Some of them are credible regarding basically exactly what the physical implementation of that looks like.

For instance, there's an astrophysicist named Dr. Ignacio Farron who believes that the this was basically an unprecedented comet entry. Hmm. That was, and so it was the disintegration of a comet, and the bollied was what the people were seeing, and there was a cometary cloud that attenuated the sun. And so, so regardless, he calculates what the odds of it happening would be, and it's like 1 in 60 quadrillion. So I think it's not a coincidence if that theory happens to be correct. Wow.

All right. So anyways, so we look at this, and already skeptics, you're done. You're out of options. There's no naturalistic explanation for the prediction of this event. Right. And we know the crowd psychological explanation, which was already desperate and ad hoc to begin with, and there's no plausible naturalistic mechanism that can cause a whole bunch of people to have convergent hallucinations in a large and diverse crowd, where the rule is the convergence

rather than the exception is the convergence between the witnesses. It's not plausible. But we have physical evidence from photographs in multiple ways. We have distant witnesses spread out over 50 kilometer radius. We have the ophthalmological evidence. So it's done. There's no way that this was natural. There's no way that this was merely a coincidence that this event occurred.

But recall, this is not just, my case is not just the miracle of the sun. That's the core element of my case. That's the foundation. But I actually have a whole bunch of other pillars that I can build on top of that. So one of them is that not only is there the prediction, but there's the context in which the prediction occurred. which are these scheduled, okay, apparitions. So there's a pre-announced schedule by these children that I can prove are honest, right, that do not have the psychological profile that would lead them to have convergent, synchronized,

perfectly reliable, multimodal hallucinations on demand, and then get all the details right afterwards and memorize the script and then never embellish, like, fantastical elements, but keep it all, like, austere and have it to where there's even undesigned coincidences between the reports. That's not going to happen. We know that they were doing the things they said they were doing. They were perceptually enacting it, right?

There's no way it's confusion of imagination and perception for a million reasons that I can also get into. So it's already, you already had nothing to say to explain what was happening with these children. You had nothing to say. Not to mention the prodigies on top of that, like the smoke. You had nothing.

And then in the context of that, these people who clearly aren't lying. So, for instance, if you're a wire, you don't say, at this date, time, and location, an extraordinary verifiable sign that I have no control over is going to occur or I die. You probably don't say that. So then you look at that.

And so there's no natural explanation for the kids, and then they predict it, and then it happens. And there was mountains of evidence that it happened. And so there's no way that there's a natural explanation of this that is true. But that's just the beginning. This goes on for decades after where there's events very similar to actually what happens at Lords. They just never established the Medical Bureau, which is why the Fatima healings don't have the same notoriety as the Lord's healings.

But the publication, The Voice of Fatima, publishes over the next few decades, testimonies from tons and tons of people to healing miracles associated directly with the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, going to the site of Our Lady of Fatima, getting water that was sort of prodigiously discovered at the sites in a similar fashion as what happened. at Lords, and, you know, people are, like, applying it to their eyes and people who've been blind for extended periods of time who doctors are saying they have prognoses where they're never going to get their sight restored. They do a novena to Our Lady of Fatima. They apply the drops every day. Exactly on the final day, he can see again. Deaf people who've been deaf for years, total treatment resistance, applying Fatima water, no more deafness, you know, cancer's going away, you know, lesions going away, you know. And so we have, for many of these, we have medical testimony, though nothing as good as Lords, which is

sort of the crown jewel as far as healing miracles are concerned. We have a woman whose leg is like actually growing in size where she had a stunted leg and she was like debilitated. So, you know, healings of paralytic. You know, we have things that are pretty close to like with the term that's used in the documentation is near resurrection. So, and this, they're basically over the period just up until this book, Our Lady of Light was written by Canon Barthus, just up into that period, the number of registered cures at a Bureau for Authentication was 15,000. About Fatima exclusively? That were connected to Fatima.

The voice of Fatima had recorded maybe up to, I think, 850, if I recall correctly, cures, you know, of these extraordinary varieties where it's just... And this is shortly after the... Well, this is... Well, this is... Basically, there's a shrine that gets built at Our Lady of Fatima to commemorate these events and to honor our lady. And so beginning right after the miracle and continuing for decades.

So we have them in the 20s, in the 30s, in the 40s, these events are continuing to occur through going to Fatima water. So it's not 15,000 on the day of the event. It's spread out over a considerable period of time. But it's extraordinary. The sheer number of them, many of them are very credible. There's an amazing website people should go to called St. Beluga, where they should just read their article on Our Lady of Fatima and their documentation for the medical cures. You know, Cannon Barthus' book, Our Lady of Light, is a good reference also if people are interested. The Voice of Fatima publications are all available online if people are interested in that.

So lots and lots of healings, these aren't even the most impressive healings. We'll get to those with Padre Pio. But they're just the cherry on top for all the rest of everything that we've just described. There's also the 15,000 miraculous healings, all of which I'm sure are coincidental. I'm not sure how much more evidence you want to give for Al-Aidav-Fatima, but I do have a question. Yeah. At least before we move on, I want to ask what was the primary message of Al-A-Fatima? But we don't have to go there right now if there's more you'd like to show.

No, no, no. I mean, I'm good as far as the presentation of the evidence goes. And people who want to know more, we've got a lot more. Yeah, we'll put all links below. So anyone who's interested in checking out your substack or that website we just brought up, it'll all be below. Yeah. And so there's a lot more where this came from for people who are interested. We're just giving you a taste for what the evidence looks like and how uncontrovertible it really is. This happened. It happened. We have newspaper articles. We have interrogation transcripts. We have interviews with hundreds of witnesses. You know, we have letters. We have everything. We have photographs. We've seen some of these photographs. So, and then maybe I guess one last cherry on top coincidence that I will mention is just the incorruption of Jacinta Marto's body. So within basically three years of these events, both Francisco and Jacinta,

who are now canonized saints within the Catholic Church, basically pass away. And they accept their deaths with resignation. They knew that they were going to die young, because it was prophesied by our lady, that they would die young. They accepted them with resignation. They were constantly doing penances throughout all these events,

and basically prayer and penance intensifies after, no publicity tour, no media junket. That's what I was gonna say, yeah. What did they get from this? because if you use the Lord liar lunatic or seer liar lunatic, is there any good evidence to think that they profited from these? I understand that you've just provided enough evidence to show that whether or not they did, something still happened.

I get that. But how did they live out the rest of their lives? No, there are people who wanted to give them money and their parents made them refuse it, and they were pretty voluntarily not seeking out money. The way they live the rest of their lives is basically by praying the rosary all the time, by praying a prayer that an angel taught them as a prelude to these events by doing sacrifices, lots of penances,

fasting, giving away their lunches to poor children, you know, so, and then basically accepting excruciating pain basically with this peace and resignation and then they pass away. So the siblings. And they reassert on their deathbeds the truth of everything that happened at the Kovah and they're Catholics.

They've been Catholics our whole lives, they're thoroughly indoctrinated into Catholicism. They're Catholics. They're reasserting on their deathbeds right before they die that Everything they said happened happened exactly as they described. All right. And so, oh, yeah. The two siblings die. And so how long after did they die after the apparitions?

So they're both dead by 1920. How old were they? Well, so at the start of the apparitions, Jacinto would be 17. I mean, seven. So that means it was 1917. So die in 1920 means she's 10. Okay. All right.

And then the, the, the, Lucia becomes a Carmelite nun, yeah? Yeah. So she spends the rest of her life in seclusion and isolation from the world as a Carmelite nun, where basically the number of public interactions and interviews that she did, you know, I can count it on like one hand. Really? Throughout her entire life. Yeah.

She spent decades in seclusion. Now, she reported follow-up apparitions actually afterwards. Really? So there were further apparitions that occurred at Toy and Pontevendra in 1925 and 1927. We all have mobile phone service. Maybe it's time to support. a phone company that supports us. Switch to our sponsor, Charity Mobile. They are different. They're proudly pro-life and impacting the culture of life in America. With Charity Mobile, there's no compromise

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I'd love to talk about the alleged incorruption of this body. Well, it's not alleged. It's on, there's a photo. That's her face. That's a dead person being exhumed in 1930 after dying in 19. Did they're naturalistic explanations for why a body doesn't deteriorate? Oh, well, sure. There's natural explanations for why you can get partial preservation of a body.

I mean, it's extremely unlikely under the conditions under which he was buried, and given what happened to all the other corpses buried in the same conditions. Is that right? Do we know that? Yeah, like, for instance, Francisco's completely decomposed. So the, and he was exhumed. But so. So.

But were the bodies around the same area that died around the same time that were? decomposed? Well, so just, but again, I'm not pointing to this. So notice, this isn't actually part of my core case for naturalistic and explicability. Okay. Because, and we really don't use in corruption that way in the Catholic Church anymore. We've always been cautious about it. There are certain conditions under which, so for instance, at Lords, St. Bernadette's

in corruption is a very interesting case. This, I would just say, for those of us who just know what happens to human faces, the faces of human children when you bury them in the ground in coffins that were made with the intention of causing the body to decompose. Basically, you don't get face preservation that looks like that, where there's recognizable facial features and it looks soft. How many years is that after? So, I mean, I'm going off of memory, but I think it's 1935 and 195.

So I'm not wrong on that. Okay, who was exhumed twice, 1935 and 1951. Yeah. So I was off by one on the second one, but yeah. We'll forgive you. Yeah, wow, okay. Yeah, and the other thing I guess that's impressive about this is not just that we have an undecomposed body by the look of it. It's that this is the woman who saw the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It's the context of that that makes it impressive. Right. So remember, there was the miracle predicted in advance. There were the 15,000 healings. There were the six apparitions on a pre-announced schedule, you know, shared by three people, you know, vivid perceptual detail enacted in real time with accompanying objecting. signs, that was the woman who had this very rare, oh, yeah, prodigious. I guess prodigious will be the right word. Yes.

But, okay, no, so there are a couple objections to Fatima I want to address before we move on, but then I'm happy to move. That's fine. At some point, I really want to get the evangelical part in here. That is to say, what did our lady say? Yeah. Oh, well, actually, I should have already brought that up. I was negligent.

No, that's okay. The point of this is to help people believe in that. But it's important to say, what did our lady teach the children or want us to know? Yeah, well, no, and that's very important because it helps us understand what the vindicatory implications are. So we notice it's actually not part of God's normal MO to routinely do obvious colossal miracles like this that we've just gone through in detail. So that makes us say, well, there must be some kind of special importance.

to this message where God seems to be going out of his way to vindicate it in a public, extraordinary way, to draw so much attention to it, to lend so much credence to it, to continue pointing and referring people to it, and to make a say, yes, there's veracity here. This really is from God.

This really is the Blessed Virgin speaking on behalf of God to these children. So then we need to be concerned about what the message was. So the first thing that's important in understanding the vindicatory implications that Fatima has, first is on July 13th, Remember, the lady is granting petitions to convert people to the Catholic faith, which is already affirming that Catholicism is the proper object of conversion.

And it is within this context that Lucia asks, perform a miracle so that everyone may believe, right? And so it's already being framed as a vindication of Catholicism in particular the miracle when it is promised and announced initially in July 13th. The second thing is, and this is something that I've repeatedly told people, I don't need to convince you that Catholicism is true, if I just convince you to say the rosary every day, regardless of what else you believe, like you will become Catholic eventually. So if you piously recite the rosary every day, so that's already winning for me. In fact, it's better for you to do

that than even for me to just intellectually convert you straight away. And R.O.80, so for instance, at the sixth and final of these apparitions, she identified herself as R.O.80 of the rosary. Okay, all of these apparitions occur after the children have recited the rosary. The lady exhorts the children to recite the rosary. She admonishes them for basically cutting off their prayers too short when they're saying their Hail Mary, so for basically being a little bit too hasty and how they're going about reciting the rosary. So, our lady is repeatedly in every possible way commending the rosary, identifying herself in terms of the rosary. The evaparitions happening in context of the rosary. She's giving the children advice on how to say the rosary. She's commanding the children to do

it. And perhaps if you've been, you know, if you are a daily rosary reciter, you know you say the Fatima prayer at the end of every decade of the rosary now, which is something that our lady gave to the seers. So, oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us in the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those and most need of thy mercy. Amen. So that's a Christo-centric prayer that's introduced to the rosary by our lady of Fatima and is now recited by pious Catholics at the end of every decade of the rosary. So that is, I would say, at the time, before these secrets were disclosed, that was the core of the a message was everybody needs to say the rosary and do penance for the conversion of sinners

and in reparation, basically to God for all the blasphemies that are being uttered against him, and especially in our world right now, where we've entered into, like, mass apostasy of the West. So then, in addition to that, the secrets were disclosed, but obviously the contemporaneous documentation for the secrets isn't there because they kept them secret. They didn't say them. though basically the first time that Lucia ever writes the secret down, and then she shows it to five people, but then she's forced to destroy it by ecclesiastical authorities. But we have five names of individuals that could have been questioned after the secrets were published, that they had seen the text of the secret that was published by Ucia in 1942. They can see the text of that secret in writing in 1927.

Okay, the secret, which it's really one secret in three parts, though we tend to speak of the first secret, the second secret, and the third secret. to refer to each of the parts as separate secrets, but it's one secret in three parts. The first part of the secret is a vision of hell. The vision of hell, so the children are taken to hell and they see basically demons and damned souls. And the demons are like basically horrifying, terrible beasts, you know,

which have the likeness of like unknown animals. And you see the sinners are basically like charred, black souls burning in flames. And they basically said, unless our lady had promised to take us to heaven at the first apparition, I felt like I would have died because the terror was so extreme. And so, basically, our lady then gives the second part of the secret, where she basically says, these are the souls of poor sinners, you know, but our God wishes to save them by establishing devotion in the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. So Immaculate Conception is Catholic dogma.

It's not anybody else's dogma. But Immaculate Heart of Mary is what God wants to establish devotion in the Lord. the world too. And then has a request for how people are to go about doing that. So part of that includes everyone just doing prayer and penance and falling through on all these directives for saying the rosary. Another part is there's going to be all these chastisements that are going to occur unless her requests are heated. So some of the chastisements are, there's going to be a worse war is going to break out under the pontificate of Pope Pius the 11th. And it's going to be signaled by an unknown light, you know, that in addition to that, in addition to that Russia is going

to spread its heirs to the whole world and persecute the church and the Holy Father. By which it meant communism? Yeah. I mean, it seems pretty clear that Russia was about to apostatize and then go and basically spread its heirs to the whole world as the Soviet Union. And then if you read this book called The Anti-Humans about what Russia, what the people in the Soviet bloc did to Our Lady and did to nuns and just is the most despicable evil probably ever in the history of the world that took place. And so our Lady forewarned us that this was going to

occur. And I think it makes sense before, if you think about the context, right before World War II, right before the Soviet Union was about to spread state atheism across and start persecuting the church and religion as intensely as it did and at such global scale as it did, I think it made sense that our Lord decided to do such a dramatic intervention at this. time and to warn us before. And so basically the request in order to avoid these chastisements was that the Holy Father would consecrate Russia in communion with the bishops of the world to the immaculate heart of Mary. So consecrate Russia.

And then basically Russia would be converted. And there's debate about what it means because converted could mean convert to Catholicism, but it could also just mean convert back from atheist, I mean from state atheism and communism, you know. So there's debate about exactly what that means. and the world will have a period of peace if these conditions are met. And so basically, establishing devotion

to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and receiving the consecration of Russia and directing everyone's attention towards Russia is going to be the locus of the major problems and the conversion of Russia is heaven's agenda for the world. So that's part of the core of the Fatima message. Okay. I wanted to tell people to check out the book by Father Andrew Apostoli.

it's a great introduction to the teachings of Alalia Fatima and what took place. It's called Fatima for today, the urgent Marian message of hope. And then we'll also put links to your substack articles below. Cool. And I would also recommend everyone check out this book called The Whole Truth About Fatima in three volumes. But I think it's Father Michelle of the Trinity. But basically, if you check out volume two and volume three, it deals with the critical, and even volume one in the end, deals with the critical history of the secrets and

the Fatima message and how it evolved over time. And basically, I think people should look into that if they're interested in understanding the message and the implications that Fatima has. All right. So before we move on to Padre Pio, let's talk about what are the best objections you have heard against the miracle of Fatima? Well, I guess I'll start with maybe what are the most common objections, even though I think some of these can be disproven just definitively. So the most common objection that you're going to hear is that the children made a fail prophecy on October 13th. So basically, the children shouted that our troops would be home soon and that the war will end today, is what the lady had told them. This is what, so there are witnesses

that can attest to that. And then in addition to that, basically, we have Lucia's own testimony on October 19th, where she's asked by Dr. Formigal, hey, you know, you said, didn't you guys say like the war was going to end today? You know, what happened? Like, the war's still going on. Like, here's the newspaper. Yeah. And then Lucia's like, well, I don't, I don't know. Like, all I know is what our lady said.

And then Formigal follows up. And he says, well, you know, some people said maybe you said soon rather than today. And then Lucia's like, no, I said exactly as our lady said. So what's now, I'm going to resolve this puzzle for us in a second. But what's appreciate implications that this has that often are not appreciated? So first, if you. were a liar, and basically you had just been massively bailed out of your giant lie by this extraordinary event, whatever it happened on October 13th, there's obviously, or if you even

didn't have any, if you had any lack of integrity at all, where you weren't going to be perfectly honest, then either you might fib or you might try to come up with excuses or rationalizations to try to get yourself out of this situation where it seems like you made a failed prophecy, and this single thing is going to be the thing that's going to delay the approval of this miracle for a very long period of time. So you may try to explain it or to add additional details that you hadn't previously mentioned

that sort of reframe it or you might try to do that. But Lucia just flatly admits, like, I don't know. I just said what our lady said, right? And then he goes and he gives her a leading question. So if she's highly suggestible or she doesn't actually have a distinct recollection

of what it occurred or all of this is just fuzzy, reconstructive memory. And then he's saying, she said, today, are you sure? Some people said they heard you say soon, right? And then so he's trying to bail her out, and he's throwing her a bone. And she says, no, I have a distinct recollection of today.

Hmm. Now, okay, now it's how do we resolve it? How do we make sense of what happened here? Well, first, it's important to say that in this same interrogation, Lucia clarifies, I remembered better what she said on October 13th. And she was asked about the surrounding context. So she definitely remembers this statement, the war will end today. She remembers that statement.

And when she's asked whether soon rather than today, she says, I definitely remember that she said today. But she actually clarifies that she's uncertain about a lot of the surrounding context of this statement. Now, meanwhile, during the same interrogation, Jacinta gives this prophecy in a different form. So Jacinta remembers it as a conditional prophecy. And so basically, if the people say the rosary, if people do penance, then the war will end. otherwise the world will end. It'll be the end of the world. Okay?

And also that fits with a bunch of prior statements, even that Lucia had made in all the previous apparitions, where a lot of conditional language was used in context similar to this one. But we actually go back, and what my friends at a blog called Veritatis Splendor, and they recently published this article, and they went through all the documentary evidence relating to this, discovered is that not in the critical documents

that I've largely been relying upon, we actually have Formigau's interrogation notes from Lucia on October the 13th. So not on the 19th. On the 13th, when she, on the 19th, tells us that she remembered it better. And what do we have there? She says the prophecy in conditional form. We emailed the professor of Portuguese at Harvard. We send them the language.

We said, can you be 100% this is conditional? Yes. So we got a ton of Portuguese speakers to verify for us. It was a conditional prophecy explicitly on the 13th. Jacinta said it. Lucia admitted that she was fuzzy on the 19th, and she said it in conditional form on the 13th. So it's clearly conditional.

It's also proven by a bunch of people in the crowd who remembered conditional exhortations. You know, do penance so the war will end. Do penance for the war will end are things that should. So Carlos Mendez, a lawyer, is holding Lucia in his arms after this event. And he recalls her, we have testimony from him in the 20s and then in the 40s,

where he's explaining that that's what their behavior was. There was clearly a causal connection between whether these conditions were met and whether or not this war was going to end, which makes perfect sense. And so then the conditions were failed to be met, and obviously we don't know explicitly what the threshold was or all of them.

We can only speculate as to that. That's the sort of hidden mystery of God's will and his providence. But we know that there is no falsification of a conditional prophecy based on one of the conditions not being met. And then in addition to that, there's that other statement by Jacinta

that, well, the world will end? Well, the world hasn't ended, right? So what does that mean? And this, Catholics can take a variety of different approaches, and none of the actual contextually permissible readings of that statement could be falsified. Now, I'm not citing this prophecy as evidence or proof. I have a ton of other proof.

what I'm pointing to. But none of the readings here could be falsified. So one of the readings is just clearly it doesn't say the world will end today, right? And that wouldn't even make sense in the context of all the prophesied chastisements. And, you know, it wouldn't make sense in the context of Catholic theology of how the world ends, for it to end suddenly and abruptly on that very day, right? So what it has to mean in context is that a sequence of events that culminates with the end of the world will be initiated. Okay, so basically apocalyptic events are going to occur. So that's one possible reading, in which case we definitely couldn't falsify it.

And in fact, Lucia seems to reaffirm it in a Father Fuentes interview that she gives in the 50s, where she said, our lady didn't explicitly tell me that we were in the last times of the world, but I inferred that for all these reasons. And then she gave reasons why she felt like we had entered into the last times of the world. And then, I mean, I guess with events that have occurred, in the subsequent period, you could see how maybe we could be in apocalyptic times. Now, who knows how long it will be. It's an indefinite period of time, but that there's a historical epoch or moment that has begun.

A second possible interpretation is there's no reason to think that it was binary either or when the two things are happening on different timescales. So the war will end today versus the world will end. It could be that the requisite conditions of penance and prayer are met to avert the end of the world, or that God just has mercy and relents, which he tends to when he threatens chastisements. even if we didn't get the merit, the benefit of the war ending, right? So it just doesn't follow logically that even if you didn't think we were in the last times of the world, that it would be falsified. Then finally, and obviously, those skeptics are never willing to concede stuff like this suddenly when making positive arguments against us. The world will end can be an idiomatic expression that means catastrophically bad things are going to occur.

And they did. The 20th century is probably one of the saddest and most tragic centuries in human. in history. Are there any objections to the miracles that have to do with the phenomena of the sun at all? What's the best you've heard there? Yeah. Well, so the best strategy from naturalist does not involve actually looking at the data, at the miracle of the sun, and then saying, here are natural mechanisms that could account for all of this data. I've not seen any naturalist attempt anything that's even remotely plausible when you actually look at what the data is and compare the theory against the data, and you aren't just willing to accept loose approximations that

fit a very small subset of data points and or and you're also not willing to tolerate huge coincidences given the prediction in advance. So instead what naturalists have resorted to and what Scott Alexander does throughout his article is basically trying to draw parallels between Fatima and other events and then say Catholics shouldn't think that these other events are miraculous and these other events are similar to Fatima. So even if we don't know what explains Fatima, we know there must be an explanation for these events, and whatever that explanation is is probably what the explanation for Fatima is. Yeah. So that's his strategy.

Now, already, this is a pretty dubious strategy, which is based off of just like drawing analogies with other events where we have way worse data and where I haven't dug into it in exactly the same detail, where we seem to be positively excluding every possible mechanism when we look directly at the data for this case. Yep. And then meanwhile, we're just looking for superficial similarities with other events to just show that vaguely some stuff similar to this can happen or has been reported. Especially, but this is especially bad strategy when you realize that the overwhelming

majority of examples that he gave occurred in Catholic contexts after these events had occurred, and in many cases are credible miracles. So he's piling up more miracles to refute miracles, and then just raising a bunch of positive objections to those miracles. So basically, oh, if my failed prophecy objection to Fatima isn't going to work. How about I just change the subject, go to another similar thing, and then start objecting to that instead, so we don't have to talk about Fatima, even though it's a credible miracle, right? So that's already bad. Like, for instance, there's ones called Our Lady of Gaye, which is not approved by the church, happened in the 40s.

And basically, it was a series of apparitions to this very young and pious girl. But basically, and there were, where there were basically giant solar miracles that were reported by distant witnesses and by people. people that were present during the apparitions. Yeah. Like over 300,000 witnesses. So it's even, it's an even bigger mass spectacle, and it was repetitious. And there were over 400 documented healings in connection with it. And so, gay is actually a very credible apparition.

And the main reason it got held up for approval is just because, unlike the Fatima children, went under coercion, under extreme coercion, the gay seer did recant. Okay. But, and then unrecanted afterwards. Oh. And so basically, and there are many people who believe, and I, personally believe in the authenticity. So your point is this objector is like, look at this one.

This was false. And you're going, not necessarily. Well, I'm going, I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm pretty sure this is a bigger problem for you that all of these are happening in Catholic contexts and that there's tons of credible evidence and there's no mechanism you have that can explain it. Now, so the best they're going to do is they can find stuff where we really are going to want to debunk it.

I don't think many of the examples he goes through are like that. So, for instance, another example he goes through is Ben and's, city, basically a bunch of people are gathered. They're going to consecrate Nigeria to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And basically, a bunch of people report, and it's the 100th anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima. So it's 2017 in Benin City. We know that it's not an objective event, because we have like videos and stuff of what was happening, and there aren't distant witnesses. But people, there's a lot of testimony subjectively that people saw recapitulation of the miracle of the sun subjectively. Now, that would have to be.

be implemented differently than Fatima, but there's no reason to think it's not authentic. There's not a positive reason to think it's not authentic apart from a presupposition. So therefore, it really shouldn't be used as a basis to infer that there must be an explanation for Fatima, where we do have physical evidence for Fatima, where we do have, you know, basically distant witnesses for Fatima, where we, you know, we do have 10 minutes people staring at the sun without any after image, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's also a very flimsy basis. And he does this for Harold Spock, Germany, and so, but there are examples where,

I mean, first, when you gather a large crowd of people together in expectation, and especially if you get people to gaze at the sun, which can cause perceptual distortions, there's, and then you have people under the influence of suggestion that are all talking to each other after an event, and all of them have the Fatima narrative in the background in their minds. Yeah. There are sometimes where it is going to be possible to get events like this that you're going to be able to debunk. But when we look at those cases, like, for instance, in this Lubbock, Texas example,

there were skeptics present that didn't see it, right? And skeptics looking through their telescope didn't see it. The phenomenology actually isn't that close to Fatima in many of the most striking elements. You know, you don't have the photographic evidence. There was no prediction of it in advance. It's missing all the key aspects. They're not credible apparition. So you're missing key elements of Fatima.

So again, this is what I call a horizontal strategy, this like draw analogies and then infer non-constructively that there must be an explanation for Fatima. Now, another reason why this is very dubious is because on a Catholic, worldview, we believe in non-miraculous paranormal events that are caused by demons who have a motive to create confusion and to bring the motives of credibility into disrepute. So the naturalists have a higher burden than just there are anomalous events that happen in other contexts that seem non-natural for the same reasons, because we can concede that those are non-natural, and you have an independent burden to prove that it's plausible there's a natural explanation, despite the fact

that a natural explanation seems to be positively excluded. And so already this seems to be fallacious. But the best example they can come up with that came in a non-natural context so far is a Buddhist sun miracle or series of sun miracles that are supposed to have occurred in 1997. Now, let's recall no prediction in advance for this. It's not occurring in the context of credible apparitions. There's not photographic evidence to corroborate. There's no rapid drying. There's no warmth. You know, a lot of the testimony is much more discordant than the Fatima.

testimony. A lot of it sounds like the Marfa lights, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. But there are large crowds, and there is convergence between the crowds as to some very weird anomalous details. Now, I don't think there's any reason to suppose that if it's not, if the elements that are convergent are not explained by atmospheric optics and like peridolia and suggestion and all this stuff, if they're not explained by that, I don't think it's at all plausible that it's like a group hallucination or mass hysteria or that. But okay, and then we think about the context in which the Buddhist stuff occurs Sun's really low on the horizon.

Why is that important? Well, because for reasons we already mentioned, you can get a lot more attenuation from thin ice crystal clouds. The sun goes through a lot more air mass. It goes through a lot more aerosols. It's in every atmospheric optics textbook, distortions of the low sun will get a chapter because it's so common that you get weird stuff that happens when the sun is low.

Which is why the scientist present were so impressed that Fatima was high. It was near at zenith at 42 degrees, that angular elevation. Now it also turns out there's an El Niño happening in that basically throughout this period that's unusually strong. And it's caused unprecedented levels of aerosol pollution and haze in this region. And so then you have a really interesting aerosol environment and a low sun. Everyone's standing around this really weird reflective dome and then people are reporting these weird. So, and none of this is predicted in advance. There's no apparitions, whatever.

And so the superficial parallels between that and Fatima then become the basis for assuming this couldn't possibly be demonic even if it were real. This couldn't possibly be basically explained by factors that clearly aren't relevant to Fatima's case. And so therefore Fatima must be debunked. And that's the strongest argument that skeptics have to explain like parts, tiny parts or modicums of the data. Yeah. And so it's not good. Okay. Now I've seen you debate, was it on Fatima you did on capturing Catholicism?

Batuzi's new channel, didn't you debate? Yes, I did. I debated an Anglican, but he argued it was demonic. Yeah. So I don't want to get into that here because we got a long, we got a lot of more ground to cover. So is there anything else you want to cover before we move on to Padreepio? No, that's good. Okay, terrific.

Al-A-Fatima, pray for us. Pray for us. All right. Who's this Padre Pio chap? What happened to him? So here's Padre Pio. Here's a photograph. We have lots more photographs where this came from, but this is the first ever photograph of Padre Pio

once he has the stigmata. So we'll talk about what that means. So Padre Pio's Capuchin Friar, okay, and I'm just going to begin. Obviously, it's his whole life story. I'm not going to tell his whole life. I'm going to focus specifically on the supernatural carisms that Pio had and the evidence concerning it. Now, the wife of Padre Pio is very edifying and very interesting, and I would encourage

everyone to check it out, and we have a lot of great biographies that are written about it. So Padre Pio, the true story by a Lutheran historian named Rufin. You know, Renzo Allegory, Padre Pio, Man of Hope, those are great biographies that I would recommend to people who want that, but I'm not going to tell the story of his whole life. I'm just going to focus on the supernatural prodigies. And so the biggest one is basically in 1917, basically right after the Friday after,

well, first I'll say he's basically in prayer in the chapel after Mass on Friday. in 1917, in September, and he goes, and he basically is praying, and he enters into this religious ecstasy. And once he enters into this ecstasy, he has a vision of our Lord, who appears to him in the posture of a crucified man. And basically, he's bleeding, our ward. And they have a conversation, and our Lord tells him that he's very upset about basically the infidelity of religious clerics and those who are consecrated to him. Wow. And so Padre Pio is like, what can I do?

And our Lord responds to Padre Pio, you know, I unite you to my passion. And so then Padre Pio comes out of this ecstasy and he notices that he's bleeding from his hands. And he has wounds now on his side, on his hands. So on the front and back of his hands and on his feet. Okay. Now, just for those at home, when did this take place? What?

When did the initial stigmata take place? That was what I was just saying on September of 1917 while he was. praying after mass. Yeah. And so then, basically, and so now he's bloodied and he's, so he's bleeding, the blood is dripping and these lesions have formed. And we have testimony confirming they were not present like the day before, you know, like a couple of days before nothing there, everything's perfectly normal.

Yep. Then within the next day, word is getting out that people have seen now that he has lesions on his hands, even though he's going out of his way to conceal it. And he views it as like an embarrassment and a humiliation that he's received the stigmata. That's his attitude towards it. Yeah. So pretty soon there's a guy named Father Benedetto who basically is like a spiritual father for Padre Pio, and he's also like a provincial superior for the Capuchins. Yep.

And he basically writes and he demands that Padre Pio within a month provide a written account of his stigmatization. So Padre Pio writes that written account of his stigmatization and provides that to Father Benedetto. Then it's after this that, and notice, these are all local. to the site of the five holy wounds of Christ. So it's clearly, basically, he's being turned into a living icon of our Lord's passion, a living representation of it. And what some people will point out is that the locations don't correspond to the likely sites for the historical wounds of Jesus.

For at least, like, for instance, they probably wouldn't be on the palm. It would probably transfix the wrist to nail him to the cross. So there's examples like that. But that's not the point. They're not meant to be a reduplication of Christ's actual anatomical wounds, like the sort of thing you would see on the shroud. What they're meant to be is an iconic representation where they're turning him into a living representation

of our world's passion. And obviously, therefore, it makes way more sense for the wounds to match basically religious art and icons and for them also to be visible. Like, he tries really hard to conceal him, but during mass he has no choice but to expose basically the lesions on, the Palmer lesions on his hands. But anyways, so within a few months of all this happening,

and again, there's so much documentation and there's so much to go through, And people really should check out my blog. And I probably will mix updates and stuff like that. But everything's on my blog and everybody can double check everything. You can fact check you on your blog. Right. Good.

But within basically the very first examination really that I have documentation for is done by Father Benedetto who visits the convent. And what's really important. And he clarifies what he means later when he's talking to Dr. Festa, one of the physicians who will come and examine Padre Pio. But what's really important is that the claim he makes about the depth. that the lesions had at the time that he examined them. Okay. Which is what he's saying is, so these are true perforations that exist on the hands and on the feet, and then he also has this laceration on his side.

And by perforation, he means transfixing, like going through the entire hand. So what he clarifies to Dr. Festa is if you had had like a piece of writing and you had put it on this side, he could have read the writing clearly and distinctly staring through it. Okay. So that's the claim that basically Father Benetian. Medetto is making about the depth that the lesions had at this point in time. And that's true of the feet as well? Yes.

Well, so then we go, and basically the first ever medical examination happens later in this year, where basically we have Father Romanoly come. And what Father Romanoly determines is now there have been basically thin membranes that have formed that are covering these lesions to where basically you can't actually see through them. They're not transparent. to light in the same way that they were. But what Romanelli reports, and this is some of the most important evidence,

and it's medical testimony, there are other people there while he's doing his examination, and he writes it down, and he's making these statements at a time when, like, anyone can just go verify for themselves whether this is true or whether this is false, and he's expecting other people to critically examine these claims, and so there really won't be much benefit.

So he says he palpates the lesions, and it is as if, basically, if you press the two thin membranes, they will meet as if there's a palpable void in between the two where they will meet. And he does that for both of these lesions and the lesions on the feet. Okay. So. I know this isn't the point, but that must have hurt.

Oh, well, we're going to get to that. But yes, Padre Pio probably had some of the most extraordinary, immense, unprecedented suffering, physical suffering of any person in history. And so, and he was definitely, and we know this from many of conversations that he had with our Lord where he's offering himself up as a victim soul for the conversion of sinners. And so all these extraordinary graces and conversions that we're going to talk about, these were obtained through offering himself up as an oblation, as a living sacrifice that's united to our Lord's passion.

And so, yeah, it's even worse than it seems on the outside. I think what's so powerful about this is that the, one of the one of the first, maybe the first documented evidence in my understanding is St. Francis of Assisi. Right. And that was actually something I was going to say when I got tripped up. which is that Padre Pio had a huge devotion to St. Francis of Assisi. And all of this, the memorial, the feast day for St. Francis's stigmatization was like the Wednesday before St. Pio's stigmatization occurred on that Friday.

The reason I bring it up is it's easy to dismiss something that took place in when was that the 13th century. But didn't he live in the 60s? Didn't he make it up through the... Yeah, so he's living during the time of the Beatles and anyone can come and examine... We have color video of Padre Cicester. saying his final mass. Remarkable. So this isn't like, the stigmatization didn't take place on a Wednesday and leave the next Wednesday.

Even if it did, you still have all that evidence. But the fact that it lasted for those many decades. Yeah. And that's something we're going to get to. That's going to be a key piece of my case here relating to the stigmata. Okay. But the important thing to remember with this, well, so first is, yes, these are going to last for 50 years, okay, for 50 years.

And they're not going to develop in the way that wounds should develop. They're going to develop in a million ways. a million ways. They're going to change in a million ways, but none of them are the ways that a natural wound should develop or an artificial simulated wound could or would develop. Okay. But the, they last for exactly 50 years. And if you think about it, it literally the day he dies, okay, is the soonest possible date he could have died on exactly the 50th anniversary of his stigmatization where he got to say one last Sunday mass and then died. So, and it's three days after, just like it was three days after St. Francis, three days after St. Francis, three days

after the 50th anniversary of his stigmatization, basically he passes away. So it's like almost exactly 50 years on the dot is how long these last and then he dies. So anyways, returning to the story that we're telling, the next thing that happens is basically we get an atheist physician from Rome named Dr. Bignami, who comes. And he does his own examination of the lesions. And he does his examination, and for him, now it seems like they're not deep. He thinks that they're just superficial lesions, but he does recognize that they're true anatomical lesions that exist. And he does recognize that they couldn't be a natural pathology. So he wants to posit, since he's trying to maintain his atheism, he's trying to posit, because he also is so impressed by P.O.'s

character and his sincerity and his demeanor that he's unwilling to posit conscious fraud, Dr. Bignami. So what he starts positing is like, unconscious under the influence of suggestion after these like multiple necrotic lesions formed, he completed them in their symmetry through basically the use of iodine or carbolic acid in an attempt to actually treat them or cure them. And so it was an unconscious, involuntary process of suggestion. Now, everybody who reads this report is like, wait, that doesn't make sense for a million reasons. Like, we basically should just conclude he's a fraudster.

If these are in fact through just, he's, he's, if these lesions are in fact created, by the application of chemicals, if they're chemical burns, then we should just conclude that Padre P.O. is a fraudster. But also, it would also require overturning the multiply attested multimodal testimony of the earlier people as to the depth of the lesions

for this theory to be true. But Bignami does confirm, yes, there are real anatomical lesions here, and he confirms other observations about them. Like, for instance, there's not paralegional inflammation. Now, if you were trying to keep superficial wounds that will heal quickly open, through creating chemical burns, well, so first, the action of a chemical agent is going to be effusive and it's going to be diffuse, and it's also going to cause like redness and edema and inflammation. And also, if you ever repeatedly apply, like, there's no one in the world who's actually going to be able to keep these like perfectly symmetrical, circular lesions in that, with that exact morphology, with no surrounding inflammation, by repeatedly applying chemical burns to the same spot in their hand over and over and over and over again for a year, which at the time this is all happening. But then, in addition to the

that, he actually wasn't super rigorous about verifying the depth of the lesions. So a lot of this was more presuppositional. But he does recommend one experiment, which will prove very helpful later on. And eventually we have evidence and Rufin documents this, that eventually Bignami came to concede the naturalistic inexplicability of the lesions later on in his life, and even that he was very pleased to learn around the time he was dying that Padre Pio had sent his regards and said he was praying for him. But so, so even our skeptic may have eventually come around. But he's, he proposes an experiment to be done basically on Padre Pio's lesions. And so he says, here's what I want you guys to do. I want you to take away all the chemicals for his room and I want you to search his

room. I want you to wrap up his hands and bandages. And I want you guys, this committee of three people who are doing sworn testimony, I want you guys to just keep going for the next, like, couple of weeks and come back and keep making sure that his hands are constantly sealed, and then I'm sure the lesions will heal up and clear up. And what we have is, the lesions retained exactly the same characteristics at the end of this experiment as they had at its beginning, by the sworn testimony of this committee, but also that they had never bled as much as they bled during those days, effusions of hemorrhaging blood from the lesions. And if they're superficial lesions, that's already interesting that you would get massive hemorrhages of, you know, hundreds of milliliters

of blood from the lesions. So then, and so those are removed. So then we get another guy who's sent. Because now everybody, like, for instance, the Holy Office is just like, what is going on? We're hearing everything. We're getting very conflicting reports about what's happening with Padre Pio. So we'd send in yet another guy that we trust. So we send in Dr. Giorgio Festa.

And so, and he's going to be one of the main people who's going to provide all the medical evidence for the inexplicability and collect all of it. and basically be someone who's going to be a vigorous proponent of the authenticity over the next few years after he sees what he sees. So he comes to visit Padre Pio after Big Nami's visit. And he comes and he verifies basically, yes, these lesions do exist. His psychological impressions are that he can't imagine that it is fraud. And he also can't really imagine that it's like unconscious involuntary suggestion or that he's really psychotic in the way that he would have to be. And he's basically, well, the really crucial thing actually happens when he comes back for a follow-up visit where it's both him and Romanoi.

So the Holy Office sends both him and Romanoi. They're like, you guys couldn't agree before. So why don't you guys go do it at the same time? So both of them realize that if they remove the escar and if they also treat to clear up chemicals and they look at the lesions on the feet, they can see that it's a like basically true and proper anatomical lesion that's extended in depth. and they dispute Bignami's characterization of the superficial depth, though clearly it also doesn't have the same depth that it did, the profound depth that it did at the beginning. And so there is variability in the depth that's happening over time.

That's very anomalous for how, because, like, for instance, like, father, I mean, Dr. Rominelli had pointed out that, like, the lesion didn't heal the right way for a lesion to have healed, given the way he was palpating it. And also, like, it wouldn't really have been possible for him to inflict transfixing lesions in the way that he would have to. And it would have been like completely debilitating and potentially fatal. And like the, you know, mechanically, you'd probably need someone else to help you.

Because after you had already done one, you wouldn't really be able to do the rest. So, so I mean, there's a lot of problems if you actually concede that early testimony. Interesting. But, but in addition to that, they come back and they're confirming these are not, these are definitely subcutaneous. And like, for instance, he can't clench a fist. And so like the articulation of his. of his hand wouldn't have actually been impaired in the way that it was unless these were subcutaneous lesions. So they are deep. And that also means that when they heal, they have to leave a lasting

scar. So we'll get back to that later. But okay. And so he's also testing, and they had ordered him after, Dr. Bignami had ordered him to stop using, applying chemicals. And so Festa did test for chemicals and he could determine at least that chemicals hadn't been used recently and yet the lesions were still preserved with the same morphological characteristics that they had earlier. Now, natural lesions have two options, which Dr. Festa points out. All the doctors actually pointed out, I collect all the testimony.

So there's two options. Either it's going to become gangrenous and get worse and deteriorate, or it's going to heal. But wounds don't stay suspended like that for extended periods of time throughout somebody's entire life. They don't do that.

So basically, it's already an extraordinary fact. In addition to the fact that, like, they were not being treated. Like the treatment of them was very suboptimal from a medical standpoint and they should have become infected to have open bleeding lesions this long to be treating them with dirty water

as they were to have them. It's totally impossible that they wouldn't get there wouldn't be a bacterial infestation of these lesions. Like anyone else in the world try to do this and it's not going to have the same outcome that it did in this case. I'll promise you that. Not to mention that Festa and Rominelli are

also like, hey, what's going on? it clearly couldn't be chemicals just based on the morphology and based on the depth. It seems like it has to be as if you basically were cutting or the impression that he had was like maybe burning, but also you would still expect this like perilesional inflammation that you don't observe. So anyways, you proceed forward in time and the depth of the lesions continues to fluctuate. So for instance, you have a guy who comes who's a Monsignor, roast. A bishop Rosi is sent as an apostolic visitor who starts out very skeptical of Padre Pio, but leaves totally convinced of his, based on the rumors that he had heard, but leaves totally convinced of his authenticity.

He comes and he says that there doesn't even seem to be any breaking up or interruption of the skin at the time he finally examines them after days of interrogating Pio. There's no breaking up or interruption of skin. He can see that clearly there's bleeding that's happening from those locations and they're creating basically like incrustations. And so he says the lesions are a real fact. They're a true fact. He says the stigmata are, but he doesn't describe them as anatomical lesions. That's not how they present to him when he's examining them later. Now, there's an interesting fact about that, which is, if you were Padre Pio and you were a hoaxer,

and you knew that the apostolic visitor was coming and that this was going to be the most important decisive examination of your life to determine the authenticity of your supernatural phenomena. And you had already successfully duped all these medical doctors and had been able to maintain for arbitrary periods of time very impressive lesions.

Is that day going to be the day that you really want to have no lesions at all and let them all heal? Only to then, and this is the kicker, later in 1924, Dr. Festa comes back to do a hernia repair surgery on Pio.

Pio's hiding his lesions and Festa doesn't have authorization to look at the lesions. He doesn't want him to see. Pio refuses anesthesia so that he can prevent Festa from taking a peek at his legion. Oh, that's why. And so then he basically, Festa conducts the surgery. It's so excruciatingly painful that Pio passes out unconscious.

So after refusing the anesthesia. And then Festa looks at the wounds. While this other atheist is present, Angelo-Murwa, doctor is with him during this hernia repair surgery. He looks and he says, oh, the lesions had exactly the same characteristics they did during my last visit. And so notice, he let them heal completely, despite knowing the apostolic visitor was coming and having kept them concealed until the guy finally asked him after several days of depositions of everyone there, including several depositions of people. When the apostolic visitor came to visit, you're saying they were completely healed?

There was no breaking up of skin. So there was bleeding happening through intact skin, which is very, that doesn't happen, right? You don't have effusions of blood when you don't have a wound. That's even more extraordinary than when you do. And bleeding will stop after a few days anyways. So what was the, what did you call him? the apostolic visitor? Yeah.

What was his account after his initial viewing of them? Well, yeah. So what he had said was that there was no breaking up of skin but that the lesions were a true fact that he could see clearly that there were like escars

and incrustations that were in the shape where it was bleeding in the shape of the lesions that was coming out. So when he got the hernia surgery does he have his hands covered up and he's unwilling to let him? Yeah, yeah. He's uncovered and he's

uncovered and he's unwilling to let Festa examine him. But then he passes out and then Festa examines him and he says it's exactly. Exactly the same. Yeah. So the time when he has the most incentive to simulate them, they're the least impressive. Yes.

The time when he's trying is best to prevent them from being seen, they're the most impressive. Which is the exact opposite behavior of what I expect from a fraudster or someone who's hoaxing and simulating. And you're saying two people viewed at that time, including... Yeah, well, there were two people present for the surgery. So that was Murwa and Festa. And so this, I mean, basically the record, I mean, again, this is 50 years, so I'm not going to go through everything that ever happened in connection.

But notice, so again, no inflammation, they're not becoming gangrenous, they're not becoming infected, they're not deteriorating. The morphological characteristics of the lesions are fairly stable over time. I go through all the nuances in that post that people can refer to about Padre Pio. And they've also, throughout this entire period, been continuing to bleed, abundant effusions of blood, red, physiological blood is how it's described by Festa, by Dr. Sala later in his life, by Dr. Romanette. We have, you know, bandages are being soaked.

That's what I was going to say. He would have to be going through a ton of bandages. Bandages are being soaked in blood, and they're storing all the bandages. Garments are being soaked in blood. You know, people are witnessing during mass, the outflowing of blood being even more abundant than it normally is during the consecration at mass. And so, so basically, the continue. Now, wounds like this don't continue to bleed indefinitely. Okay.

There's no way actually for that to happen. What would have to happen is, I mean, the closest you could possibly get is for to allow the wounds to repeatedly continue to heal and then re-inflict them and then re-caused bleeding. Okay. Right. And then rupture new blood vessels and, you know, you don't have. And notice, he doesn't have like a bleeding disorder because we actually have hematological tests done on him and all his blood's perfectly normal and all of his circulation is perfectly normal and like other wounds of his heel like normal wounds. And so everything else is normal besides these, the stigmata, right? And the bleeding is abundant and effusive from those wounds, basically throughout his life, with a very limited exception where there was a period of time where there was relatively little bleeding in the 50s.

So basically, that's not possible to begin with, but also notice something. Can a person lose arbitrary amounts of blood and survive? No. What a person's going to develop when you lose enough blood is they're going to inevitably develop iron deficiency anemia which Pio, who's repeatedly medically examined never did, and when his blood is tested

it's actually normal. It's within the normal range. He's saying he didn't become anemic. He never became anemic despite losing these vast quantities of blood during these abundant hemorrhages. And I go through in my article and actually document I say, okay, based on all the testimonial evidence we have, the minimum certain facts

we can establish about how much blood Pio would have been losing. we basically are looking at a situation where at a bare minimum really we're probably talking about like 250 milliliters of blood a day but I say bare minimum I think we're dealing with

at least 50 to 100 so it turns out that even if he was eating a completely normal diet or very iron rich diet and was supplementing iron in huge quantities that were going to cause lots of gastrointestinal basically problems for him if he did it

and so he was somehow procuring and then secretly administering all of these iron supplements, it's actually far, far greater than the amount, even through oral supplementation. So he would need IV transfusions. Yes.

And even if he had the IV transfusions, he obviously couldn't, without lab work, actually know how to avoid going over versus under and actually targeting the exact right amount of iron to be injecting into himself. And it would have caused a whole bunch

of other problems, too, if you tried to do. So it's impossible for him to have lost as much blood as he did and not die, not completely die. Like, within a few months, he should have been dead, and it went on for 50 years, you know.

So the replacement rate for the amount of iron that he was losing, he was exceeding that by, like, an order of magnitude or two every day, you know. So he's going to become anemic, and then he's going to pass away and die. And that never, ever occurred, despite the fact that we can verify huge amounts of bleeding from these otherwise extraordinary and inexplicably morphologically stable wounds. that doesn't even seem plausible that he could have self-inflicted. Yep. And so that's already, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

And then you add on top of that one of the most extraordinary documented facts. So by the end of his life, tons and tons of people are incidentally coming across and giving us testimony about the depth of the lesions. So for instance,

there's one guy who's cleaning them out almost right before he dies, like a few months before he dies, and it seems like they basically were about a centimeter deep, the ones on the top of his hands, that if you went and cleaned it out, it seemed like it was about a centimeter deep.

So that's pretty deep as far as lesions go, given the total thickness of your hand, if you think about how far that's going in. So that's actually a very deep and profound wound. There are other people saying, like, we could see light through it. Like, it was somewhat transparent. Like, light would pass through it

if he had put his hand in front of a window and the sun was up. And so we have lots of testimony concerning that towards the end of his life, we know they were also deep. And we can corroborate that just like at the beginning they had been deep, there was lots of reports of extraordinary depth towards the end of his life. And then when he dies... 1968, I think.

1967. Okay. Or maybe actually be in 1968. I may have gotten everything off by a year. So I kept saying, because it's actually the year after... So it's 1918 is when the stigmatization occurs, and it's 1968 when he passes away. And yeah. So it's 19...

And then it's basically at that time that he passes away. The lesions have already started to disappear. The final, basically, escar falls off. And then the people who go look, say there's no trace of scarring. It's perfectly normal skin, exactly like the rest of the skin, and all the sites of the lesions. So on his chest, you know, on his hands, on the front and back sides of his hands, on his feet. And we have photographs to show you basically,

right after he died, like taken, I think, within five minutes of dying. These are basically, look at the bottoms of his feet where there had been lesions, look at the palm of his hands, where there had been lesions, look at the tops of his feet. So there's no trace at all that he had ever had lesions there, even though there should have been, I mean, first, they shouldn't have healed at all. And then second is, there should have been profound scars. Because you don't actually have, like, regeneration of skin when you have deep subcutaneous lesions. What you'd have is basically a far less complex structure than the normal structure of skin

that will cause visible scarring that looks different when you actually replace it. And so everybody agrees that it's like physiologically impossible for this to happen. And for this to happen in the context of all the rest of Padre Pio's life and the inexplicable origins of the stigmata and all the reasons to trust St. Pio's character where he has like extraordinary heroic virtue. So all that is remarkable and doesn't seem like it's exceptional. bookable in any other way. Now, in addition to that, probably the most extraordinary fact that's attested in connection with the lesions is actually what's called the odor of sanctity. And so the odor of sanctity is basically an intense sweet floral perfume smell that would

emanate from the lesions. And that would also, we have abundant testimony to this effect, the blood itself would be scented with the floral perfume. Now, if you understand, these actually lesions should be very malodorous. The blood should also be malodorous. Even if you dumped pretty expensive perfume onto blood, you shouldn't have an especially intense and pleasant floral perfume, especially not one that's long lasting in its duration. But that's exactly what you have in Padre Pio's case,

as is supported by unbelievable amounts of eyewitness testimony over very, very extended periods of time. So allow me to actually, this is one case where I actually want to read some of the testimony, just so people can understand. So, here we go. Bernard Rufin wrote,

quote, without exception, those I interviewed who spent any time at all with Padre Pio experienced the aroma at some time or other, end quote. And so he's one of the historians, the biographers, who's interviewing like all of the contemporaneous witnesses, including people that are like friars

and people that are going on visits and pilgrimages. And he's saying, without exception, that every single person that he spoke to in preparation had personally experienced the stig- I mean, had the odor of sanctity from the stigmata at some point in time. And then Bishop Rosi, who's the apostolic visitor... Without exception.

And this is actually what convinced Bishop Rosi of the authenticity of Padre Pio, more so even than the stigmata themselves, was that he was a personal witness to the odor of sanctity. So here's what he said. This very intense and pleasant fragrance, similar to the scent of violet,

as it was well described by the bishop of Melfi, is attested by everyone. Most eminent fathers let me attest to it too. Father Alberto de Apollito wrote, The reality is that hundreds of thousands of individuals, even unbelievers, have testified and continue to testify that they suddenly and inexplicably perceive the perfume of Padre Pio. And so notice this.

There's lots of properties that this perfume has that are totally inconsistent with artificial perfume that's being applied by St. Pio. And here are some of them, just so I can actually reference testimony. So the first thing is, there were periods of time where the lesions were not malodorous, but there was no perfume. Okay.

Now notice, if his strategy for avoiding people noticing that his basically super old lesions and the blood that was pouring out of them, like smelled unpleasant, if his strategy for avoiding that was concealing it with perfume, then there's no way he could do it when the perfume was not detectable. But then there are, quote, innumerable testimonies for one of the main critical histories of Padre Pio's stigmata describes it that way, that confirm it. a fine and delicate scent that frequently emanated from the lesions and especially the blood that exuded from them. It was likened to a mixture of violets, roses, and lilies. Dr. Rominelli,

quote, consulted several scientists inquiring as to whether blood could, under any circumstances, have a sweet odor. They told him this was impossible. So then, strength. The fragrance was basically an exceptionally strong, showed an exceptionally strong power of penetration of smells and spaces. Witnesses reported entire rooms were inundated with a strong perfume. It was sometimes perceived at a great distance from Padre Pio. Father Modestino reported it was so intense I was about to faint. Father Comente reported so intense I was almost overcome. Father Romalo reported so intense it was impossible to be in his room. Intermittency. This is another thing that's totally incompatible with artificial perfume. The fragrance was sometimes sent, sometimes not, and came as if in waves.

This was not only true of his person, but also of his blood, bandages, garments, and other items that came into contact with him. It was sometimes perceived when St. P.O. was mentioned, but not present. For example, Dr. Amanzio Dudo, so this is a doctor, reported, he was talking with friends, one of whom was describing a visit to San Giovanni, when suddenly and unexpectedly an intense perfume of violets enveloped us all. It lasted about half an hour. Whoa. Dr. Eduardo Bianco was also present and corroborated Duado's account of that event. Okay, persistence.

This is another one that is inexplicable. Items that came into contact with St. P.O. retained his characteristics scent for extremely long periods of time. Father Ladovico reported, St. Pio's handkerchief was for 20 days in my suitcase. After such a long time, it still had the scent in all its intensity. In the small drawer of the nightstand in my cell, there was a bandage from St. Pio's side. This small drawer has been in myself for a year, and now every time I open it, I notice P. P.O.'s scent. Bishop Rosi reported that, quote, the bandages with the blood that flowed out of Padre Pio's wounds, his zucetto, his gloves, his hair that was cut two years ago, keep this scent.

Selectivity. So there were often, there were several, there were many occasions where it was perceived by everyone in a large room simultaneously. But there were other occasions where multiple people were present and some of them could sense it and some of them couldn't sense it. Okay. And there were some places where it was persistent, like for instance in his room, like Father Wadovico is testifying. But meanwhile, there are some people who aren't going to able to sense it. Where like, for instance, Father Pietro, I didn't smell it in his room, but in the vegetable garden. and yes. And meanwhile, Father Pio,

his, I mean, well, St. Pio throughout his entire life, claimed that he never smelled at once. Whoa. And so we're going to see reasons to trust his integrity. But, and this is the case where I actually really think it will be good to go through just a litany.

This will be my litany for our interview of testimonies, just because it's so impressive and it's so obviously inexplicable. And for it to occur in connection with the wounds, the deep wounds, disappeared without scars, without leaving a trace, where there's multimodal testimony that there were transfixing lesions that then inexplicably healed, where the, basically, the lack of infection, the lack of paralysional inflammation, it's all totally impossible, also happened to be exuding

amounts of blood that should have killed them, that's scented with this perfume that has all these characteristics that we just described. And so let's see whether this could really be mass suggestion over hundreds of thousands of people over decades, having repeated encounters with Padre Purs. Let's see if that's really truly a possible explanation for this data. So Dr. Rominelli, he basically couldn't possibly be explained by suggestion if he's being honest. So when he examined him for the first time, he smelled it, but he assumed that it was perfume. And he actually remarked to someone else that he thought it was unsuitable for a friar to be using perfume.

But then in a letter, he wrote to Father Pietro, he pointed out, this was not suggestion on my part, first because no one had ever spoken to me about such a phenomenon. and then because if I had been influenced by suggestion, I would have noticed the odor constantly, but he only perceived it intermittently. Then here's what Dr. Festa says. His testimony is especially valuable because Dr. Festa was completely devoid of the sense of smell and never smelled it.

So he literally just could not smell anything, so he didn't smell the odor of sanctity. But here's what he says. During my first visit, I removed a blood-soaked cloth from his side, which I took with me for microscopic examination. Personally, for the reason mentioned, I did not detect any special emanation from it.

However, a distinguished officer and other people who were in my car on the way back from San Giovanni, although unaware that I was carrying the cloth in a case, despite the intense wind caused by the movement of the vehicle, clearly detected its fragrance and assured me that it corresponded precisely to the perfume emanating from Padre Pio. Once in Rome, in the following days and for a long period of time, the same diaper kept in a piece of furniture in my study,

perfumed the room so well that many of the people who came to consult me spontaneously asked where it came from. So notice he's keeping wrappings from Padre Pio that he took home to study in his arms, office and people who have no idea that Padre Pio's wrappings are there are continually bringing up, hey, where's that smell

coming from that he can't smell? So then I already read to you some of the testimony from Rosi, and then we should just, here's the last one that I will read from the litany, which this one is coming after Padre Pio's death. Okay. So this is a Lutheran seminarian who never met St. Pio. And here's the account,

which will be worth reading at length. Even after Padre Pio's death, the aroma has continued to manifest itself. Robert Hopk of North Plainfield, New Jersey is a Lutheran seminarian who has never met Padre Pio. Hopk was in Philadelphia in mid-September 1978, visiting his friend, Vincent Mondado, prior to leaving for a year's study in Florence. Mondado was devoted to Padre Pio. On Sunday morning, the two young men went to Mass at a Catholic church near the University

of Pennsylvania campus. In a letter to me dated June 30th, 1980, Hopper counts, at Mass, just before the homily, I remember smelling very distinctly the odor of roses. I didn't think much of it, and it seemed to go away only to come back again just as sweet and just as strong during the creed. At that time, I recall looking around to see who the woman was nearby who had doused herself with so much scent, but there was no woman near us. I tried to locate a flower arrangement in the church that could be giving off such a perfume, but again there was no arrangement nearby and no roses in the church at all. I thought perhaps

it could be the scented candles, but the strength of odor was such that the faraway candles would have had to fill the church with their scent, and surely I would have smelled such a powerful fragrance immediately upon entering the church and not halfway through the mass. The odor seemed to fade again and came back for the third and final time during the consecration of the host. It faded again. I thought the experience a little odd, but promptly put it out of my mind. That is, until my friend Vince asked me after Mass, did you smell something strange in church today? I said that I had, and he told me to ask his father when I returned home, what the fragrance could have been. Intrigued by the whole affair, I hurried over to the Mondado's house as soon as I arrived home.

The senior Mondado had been very close to Padre Pio in his native Italy when he was young. Hopk said nothing more than, you know today while Vince and I were in the church this morning, we both smelled something very strange in the air. He finished the description for me. It was very sweet and very strong like the scent of roses, a garden of roses in decline. It came and went a number of times, three or four times. Why, yes, I answered, surprised at the accuracy. And it came right before the homily during the creed, during the consecration of the host. Miss Mondado jumped off her chair and kissed me. The spirit of Padre Pio was with you and Vincent today in church. His spirit is often accompanied by just that scent of roses. Surely Vincent was invoking his protection for you for the coming

year in Italy, and the scent of roses was his assurance that he will be with you. Now, here's finally his conclusion. All right. Not having known Padre Pio personally as the Mondadoes, and having, I like to think, a very rational, logical mind, I neither totally believe nor disbelieve the stories of Padre Pio. The sheer volume of them tends to make me believe that something indeed miraculous took place in the presence of this obviously holy devout capuchin. However, the far-fetched character of many of these tales

reactivates the skeptic within me. Nevertheless, I cannot deny what I smelled in church that day. And I cannot deny that even before I spoke of what I had smelled, Mr. Mondado had described it perfectly. What a sober recounting. And so we're looking at that, and notice, these are all just representative samples of, again, the unanimous testimony

where we have a position that was prepared for Padre Pio's canonization, which is a 108 volumes of testimony. All right. So there's no way. And if you actually stop to think about it for 10 seconds, what would be required for him to be doing artificial perfume, it's totally inconceivable and inexplicable

that it would be that way. So anyways, we look at the stigmata, and we look at the full set of facts, and we realize that even, prior to looking into the heroic virtue of Padre Pio, which we will discuss and which is impressive and is very hard to deny. Even before looking into that, the physical circumstances here are completely inconsistent with any natural fraud that was being perpetrated by Padre Pio, no matter how mentally deranged, no matter how evil he happened to have been, no matter how ingenious

he happened to be in pulling off the conspiracy, not to mention that he would have to do the conspiracy while he was under strict surveillance. There were large periods of time where the church was hostile to P.O. And suspected him of being a fraud. And there were lots of people that were spreading lies and calumnies about Pio. And were literally,

his confessional was bugged. His room was bugged. Whoa. His letters were intercepted. Who's bugging the confessional? There were lots, his enemies at the Vatican, basically, and there were tons and tons of people

that were enemies of Padre Pio. Now, we go, and so letters are being intercepted, letters are being seized and confiscated from him. Every single person in the entire convent on multiple occasions is deposed in lengthy interrogation. So we're dealing with the situation where whatever this conspiracy is that he's constantly doing to create the intermittent perfume that's being satisfied all, whatever that conspiracy is is being done under those adversarial hostile conditions of strict scrutiny and examination by the seemingly extremely holy priest, as we will return to in a moment. And so that's the stigmata of Padre Pio.

Now, if that was all there was, it would already be one of the most extraordinary and obvious miracles of all of human history. But actually, we are barely even scratching the surface. And we will not even attempt or endeavor to survey a small fraction of the supernatural phenomena for which there is great evidence for Padre Pio, who is the greatest miracle worker in the history of the church, at least since the apostolic age. Oh, my God. And so here's one. There are basically two sets that I will want us to talk about.

I'm going to say something that some people might find impressive, right? Because a lot of the time when you hear miracle claims or, you know, terrific claims like this, you can chalk it up to, okay, that was back in before we had modern science or that was done before we had photographs. Look what I just learned. Padre Pio died the same year that Hey Jude was written by Paul McCartney. Isn't that wild to think that while the Beatles were at their peak, Padre Pio is there for the whole world to examine. Yeah, he was there for like when Humane Vite came out. He wrote a letter to the Pope to Pope St. Paul the 6th. So, yeah, I mean, he was there for, like,

there are lots of people alive today where they could have met Padre Pio. Now, okay, so moving on, there's two other supernatural prodigies, and there's lots of stuff I'm not going to tell you about. So I'll just list off what I'm not going to tell you. Yep. Just so you can get a sense for how much there is. So, for instance, Padre Pio spent almost all day, every day, in the confessional hearing people's confessions.

So there were often periods of time where he was spending 12 to 15 hours a day in the confessional hearing confessions. Wow. And so this fraudster who's simulating sanctity all he seems to want to do for 50 years is sit and listen to people air out all their dirty laundry

and all of the filth and slime of the fallen human condition that we're in to sit there and listen to that and absolve people for 15 hours a day day after day after day after day after day. And so that's the main thing that he does is he's a confessor. And you go, and basically we have tons and tons of testimony, including stuff collected in the positionio, tons of stuff available in biographies, and tons of stuff available, where people are saying, Padre Pio knew my unconfessed sins and told me about them before I confessed them in specific detail.

Right. So you're dealing with situations like a woman having a secret abortion, confessing all of her sins, and then Padre Pio basically being like, is there anything else you want to confess? And she's like, no. And he's like, we'll come back tomorrow. Is there anything else you want to confess? No, come back tomorrow. Is there anything else you want to confess? No. What about the abortion that you had at this date? And so, and he's doing this over and over and over again where we have lots of testimony for the scrutiny of hearts. You know, other things, levitation, biolocation.

Jimmy Aiken has an excellent episode on Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world about this. It's not as silly as you might think prima facie. You hear biolocation, you hear the sorts of things that took place. It seems legit. It's really extraordinary, the evidence to support all of this. And so, you know, there's radiance that's happening. So basically light, it's extraordinary manifestations of light that seem to emanate from Padre P.O. You know, so it's throughout his entire life.

Tons of providential coincidences, predictive prophecies, like, you know, tons and tons of mystical experiences that he's happened. So we can't even begin to scratch the surface of all of the supernatural phenomena associated with him. But there are just two that classes of phenomena that I really want to talk about and that I've looked into the most and that where I think it's just like knocked down, drag out, it definitely happened,

it's definitely inexplicable, there's nothing you can say, there's nothing you can do to get out of it. Let's do it. So the first one is hypothermia. So fevers. So what's the highest recorded fever that you think any human being

has ever survived? I don't even want to venture a guess. You tell me. Yeah, the highest is 52 degrees centigrade, 125.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That highest number is Padre Pio. Oh. The second highest in history, what is that?

50 degrees centigrade, 122 degrees Fahrenheit. That also belongs to Padre Pio. On several occasions, his temperature reached 48 degrees, so that's 118.4 degrees. That's the third highest ever recorded. Whoa. Then on many other occasions, it's 47, 46, 45, and it's reported by witnesses that during those fevers,

he could get up, move around, and do everything, and that they always subsided within a few days without any aggressive medical treatment. So notice, let's compare that, okay? Just if that fact is true, and we can review some of the evidence that it really did happen, let's review what is the closest analog

that we can find in all of the clinical literature where I looked to try to find the closest analog to the extraordinary fevers that Padre Pio had. Okay. So this is the Guinness World Record for the highest body temperature. This is credited to a heat stroke, that survived a 46.5 degree fever.

So that's 115. So notice Padre Pioz is 10 degrees higher than this, okay, where he's getting up, walking about, doing everything, recovering within a few days with no treatment. So let's hear what happened to our Guinness World Record survivor, the highest fever anyone has ever survived. Okay. So EMTs found Willie Jones in a deep coma.

When he arrived at the hospital, he was wrapped in wet sheeting, which was kept cool by continually replacing bags of ice, and an ice water lavage was begun to supplement cooling. It took approximately two hours of therapy, for his temperature to return to a safe level. In subsequent weeks, he received aggressive care for a sequo like multiple organ system failure, generalized seizures, profound ataxia.

His doctors were astonished that even he eventually recovered. So let's contrast that with what's claimed for St. P.O. So first is, in what is causing Padre P.O.'s temperature to reach these extraordinary values? Because it's actually very hard to get a temperature up to 52 degrees centigrade in a human body, right? Thermal regulation has to have completely failed. And also, I actually am providing in this article basically medical evidence that once you exceeded 45 degrees centigrade, there are just negative feedbacks where unless you were in like a super hot room or you were in a condition like what Willie Jones was in when he entered into his fever, it shouldn't happen.

So it can't be happening on cool days during the winter in this convent where he's sitting there and he's basically getting up through his own natural body is for some reason, you know, generating enough heat to move him to move him. to 52 degrees centigrade and sustain those temperatures and then just dissipate. And then there's no other pathology that anybody can identify that's causing this to occur. And this is just occurring repeatedly. And he's claiming he's having like mystical experiences during these fevers, you know, a representation as of the Lord while these fevers are happening. So he's, and he's offering up this suffering for the conversion of sinners. So already, if you had a metabolic storm that was intense enough to bring you up to the temperatures you would need to in the conditions that he was in, there's no way to avoid cardiopulmonary collapse.

So that would definitely happen. And he would need to be resuscitated, which never ever happened. He was just given like ordinary treatment. You would give somebody for the flu on some of these occasions. And it was medical doctors who took his temperature. Oh, we're about, so I want to go through that too. I'm not going to read testimony, but I'm just going to, I'm going to scroll us through so you can see what the testimony looks like.

And then I'm going to show us some photographs of some broken thermometers. Oh, God. So anyways, let's think about the duration versus the heat dose. So we look at it, and basically, if we think about it, the amount of damage that someone's going to accumulate is basically while you're above this safe threshold of 43 degrees centigrade, it's the total amount of time that you spent above there integrating over that is going to be how much damage was done to your body. So, like, let's try to compare how much worse were the individual fevers P.O. was having compared to the worst ever if we just had to try to quantify. it, right? And so I, based on my own speculative reconstruction of the Willie Jones case, I think, based on the units that we use to measure the severity of the heat dose, it's 10 to the three. So, like, of these units, which nobody knows these units, so who cares, right? But just so you know.

So then Padre Pio, meanwhile, the minimum it could be for him is 10 to the 5. So that means that's a hundred times greater than Willie Jones, even though Willie Jones is in a deep coma and multiple organ system failure. And that's one of these fevers, and these are happening repeatedly over decades for PO, as a result of an ill-defined condition. And then we think about the lucidity. So basically, one of the first thing that's going to go away

when you're really, really high fevers, like extraordinary fevers, is consciousness, because that's very thermal lab aisle. So it's something that's very, it depends on a lot of stuff going right in your brain for you to be conscious and to be awake and to be alert

and to be coherent. A lot of stuff has to go right that's going to start breaking down when you enter into these really dysregulated extreme internal temperature regimes. And so there's literally no way. Like even above 42 degrees, you should almost have no electrical activity in the brain. And so for him to be wide awake, alert, conscious, completely coherent at 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, it's impossible. There's no way that that's true. And then finally, just the most obvious, incredible fact, is that he's getting almost no medical care compared to Willie Jones, the Guinness World Records guy. His heat exposures, we just saw 100 times greater on individual incidents. And yet he's recovering quickly without any complications.

And notice, we just can go and look at the biophysics. And there's literally no way that the cells will retain their integrity. Like, you'll have almost like an oblation of his internal organs. Like, you know, you would literally, like, basically have a melting down of his lungs and his heart and his brain if he had had the heat exposures that he had unless something supernatural had occurred. So just if we can see the fact that these fevers occurred, if these fevers did in fact occur, there's no way it's natural. There's no way. And we can go through hoax scenarios, but it's not really worth it. But basically we have here.

Here is just a list of the friars and medical doctors who are reporting taking his temperature repeatedly with multiple different thermometers in sequence. So first we have Father Polino here. He's giving us the highest number of 52 degrees centigrade. Then we have interviews with the Belgian newspaper of three different medical doctors, including the atheist doctor, Angelo Merla. And all of them are corroborating core temperatures, 50 degrees, 48 degrees, 4 degrees, 4. 48 degrees from all of these in interviews with the Belgian newspaper, contemporaneous, basically, with these events occurring. And so all of these doctors separately with different instruments are, they're all corroborating these extreme, extraordinary temperatures. Okay.

Then we have here, basically, sworn depositions from when Rossi visited, and those are giving us core temperatures 48 degrees and 45 degrees there. We have other people, like Father Ignacio saying, a 48 degree C fever was observed, but he's not knocked down. He gets up, moves about, do everything. That statement comes from him. they're naming in these statements too. Other people who are still alive and can be questioned, like Dr. Angelo Murwa was there, Antonio Gino was there,

you know, Dr. D. Frank was there. Okay, Padre Pio himself confirmed that he had these 48 degrees fevers. So this one is worth reading. Yeah, read it. Yeah. So, question, what does Father Pio have to say

about his temperature sometimes rising to 48 degrees C? Answer, it's true. It happens sometimes when I am ill. Question, what kind of illness does he mean? Answer, I believe it's a moral rather than a physical illness. Question, what affects does he experience? What does he feel?

Answer, internal feelings, the contemplation or some representation of the Lord. Like in a furnace, still always conscious. Then this is a follow-up investigation, I mean, a deposition the next day. Question, when did the raising of the temperature up to 48 degrees see you start? Answer, it's been several years.

Question, what did the doctors have to say? What did they say while you were enlisted? So while he was in the military? Answer, they were amazed, that's all. When I was enlisted, I also had very high temperatures, but I always tried to hide it. One time, luckily, the nurse attributed it to a faulty thermometer. Now, let's go back to Dr. Festa, who we met before.

We're not going to read it. But here's his statement where he's going and interviewing all the people. He's giving them a thermometer of what he calls, a thermometer of absolute precision. He gets from the hospital, a bath thermometer, and gives it to Polino and gives him instructions on how to administer it while he's gone. And he's going and he's confirming with a physician in Fogia and talking with him that he definitely measured this, etc. So his conclusion is he verified with complete certainty, and quote, that there had been numerous measurements of core temperatures as high as 45.5 degrees seat.

Okay, so that's Festa. This is Father de Apolito. He's saying just repeatedly while he's working with Padre Pio at a boarding school, core temperature is 47, 46 degrees. Okay, then last one, Father Ezekia and Dr. Avenia, both of them are reporting that when they attempted to measure St. Pio's core temperature, even though he didn't make any movements or movements, and they're watching him carefully the entire time,

they put it to him and the thermometer explodes. And so we have in the archives, basically the busted thermometer from that. Wow. We also, Father Polino, in his recollections of him doing the thermometer, he also provides us and here. Here, all the thermometers. Oh, my goodness gracious. With the certificates that they recorded these temperatures. So it definitely happened.

And all of these broke, you're saying? Or these were just the ones that we used? So there are two thermometers in these pictures that were broken thermometers. Okay. So they cracked because of the excessive temperature where it was above the maximum. temperature that they could record. Then one of them is just a bath thermometer that Father Polino had preserved that he had used.

And basically a note from Father Polino about the temperature he'd recorded when he recorded the highest one, which is like the 125 fever. So, yeah. And basically for a million reasons, there's no way he could have faked it or that it would have made any sense for him to fake it on this scale.

This repeatedly under this much scrutiny, it would be extremely difficult to try to do that with you would cause like severe burns if you tried to turn your body into a heat reservoir to through local heating simulate those temperatures. So it's just a provable, demonstrable historical fact. Would, would happen? Did, did people talk about him being hot or sweating a great deal during these? Well, so, and this all varies.

It's all over the place for when, basically, because these happen so many different occasions on so many different episodes that he has these. And we see so many different things. So there's sometimes where he's just. like completely out of it. Like he's like basically like, um, he's in bed and he's super sick.

And like he's still like lucid and he's still conscious and like he can have a back and forth conversation with you. But he's also like like totally like kind of like, I mean, how any of us would be like, you try talking to me with a much milder fever. But anyways, there's other times where he's walking around and acting completely normal while he

has it. There's sometimes where he's, you're recording these high temperatures, and then you're putting his hand on his head, and it doesn't feel hot. Wow. And so then you're saying, wow, so it just seems like maybe even there's a miracle

in the instrument in that case, right? And then you're going, and so it's a whole range of different things. There's sometimes where he's sweating profusely, other times where he's not sweating. So we get the full range from the full range of different, you know, doctors and physicians over decades. Out of all of the miracles, you could have chosen to elucidate to show the veracity of these,

of Padre Pia's sanctity and these super, supernatural events. Why choose this one? Well, there's several reasons. The first is it's just so undeniable that this occurred. So we know how thermometers work. All of us do. It's just like a basic fact of our experience about how a mercury thermometer or bath thermometer is actually going to work when you apply it. It was used by so many different physicians, so many different ones. We have physical artifacts. We have lots of multiply tested recordings over several days. It's something where the medical evidence for it being naturalistically inexplicable if it occurred is so overwhelming. But it's also one from an implication standpoint that corroborates this broader picture of Padre Pio as a victim soul and that makes no sense outside of that context.

Yeah. So if Padre Pio is being united to Christ's passion in a singular and extraordinary way to offer up his sufferings to the Lord in reparation for the sins of the world and to bring about the conversion of sinners, then it makes sense that God would, imposed this miraculous suffering. Yeah. But outside of the Christian context, as an accommodation of Padre Pio's false religious beliefs, so God condescending, is the way he's going to do that by torturing this guy? No. It's also not the sort of thing that you would fake to prove how saintly you are.

No, it's clearly not what you would fit. And if you did fake it to prove how saintly you are, which would be impossible for a number of reasons for him to even do it physically. But if you did fake it, why would you go to such extremes where these schemes, these schemes, would have to be pretty complicated and there would be a lot of risk of getting exposed that would blow up your whole spot with this otherwise very successful hoax that you're pulling off in all the other ways and so it's going to blow up your whole spot so why would you do it dozens of times wouldn't the fact that it occurred like even a couple times be enough

why are we taking another bite at the apple repeatedly yeah all right that's amazing but so then basically the last thing with regard to his actual carisms and then we can talk a bit about the implications because I think Padre Pio can prove Catholicism. Okay. And specifically, and not just Christianity. Right. So you said in addition to the stigmata, there were two things you wanted to point out. Right.

This was one. This was one, which is the hypothermia. Then the second is the healings. And they're just some of the most incredible healings, are Padre Pio healing, some of the most incredible and well documented. So there are thousands that are attributed to him, and they're very, very credible, lots and lots of them. There are also lots of spurious ones, which is sort of inevitable.

You know, this is the nature of miracles, as we discussed earlier. But basically, I've selected three. And these are not explicable as one in a million coincidences. But if you want to explain them as one in a million coincidences, I just want you to know when you multiply one in a million by one in a million, buy one in a million, by the rest of it, it's not going to work. And then also the thousands of others and everything else we've said. Yeah.

And so, but okay, fine. So let's go through and let's look at the most incredible one. And I'm going to go super fast through the other two, which are basically the three I picked are the best one from when he was alive. Yep. Then I picked the canonization miracle and the beatification miracle and the beatification miracle and the canonization miracle. Okay, good, good.

So those are the ones I picked. All right. So, and so two of them are happening after he's dead. So he can't even be involved in these other two if they're fake or, you know. Yes, yes. And they're also proving intercession of saints and that he's in heaven and all this stuff. But okay, fine. So this guy is the number one miracle in Padre Pio's life, Giovanni Savino, whose right eye is regenerated through the intercession of St. Pio after it was blown out.

So I'll just read at length because I think it's helpful. So on February 15th, 1949, Giovanni Savino, a construction worker, was involved in a workplace accident at the convent. He placed a charge of dynamite that failed to go off for several minutes, so he went over to examine it. It detonated. Father Raphaelie, Dr. Sanguinetti, I can't say Italian names. And Father Meyer were at his side within minutes. All three noted that Savino's face was horribly disfigured and that his right eye was gone entirely. He was rushed to a nearby hospital.

The doctors confirmed that his, quote, right eye had been completely annihilated and the left one was so damaged that there was little likelihood of his ever seeing out of it again. So cure. On February 25th, Savino's face was unbandaged for the first time since he was admitted to the hospital. Doctors were shocked to discover his shattered face was completely healed and covered new skin, they were even more shocked to discover that, quote, Savino had a right eye as well as a left eye, unquote. For the rest of his life, quote, Savino was blind in his left eye, the one

had been damaged but not lost. He maintained good vision, however, in the right eye, which had apparently materialized after its predecessor had been emulsified. All of the doctors acquainted with the facts of the case, agreed it was inexplicable. Now, context. What connects this to Pio? On the morning of February 12, St. Pio predicted that Savino was going to be the victim of a near fatal accident by exclaiming, courage. I'll pray to the Lord that it does not cause your death. On February 18th, while Savino was recovering in the hospital, he mentally spoke to St. Pio and then smelled his characteristic scent. He told the surgeon that St. Pio had just paid him a visit. On February 25th, he felt someone slap him on the right side of his face and then smelled St. P.O.'s

later that day, when an atheist ophthalmologist realized Savino's eye had regenerated, he converted on the spot. Okay. So the basic facts there are, it's undeniable that if an eye blows up, it does not immediately regenerate, it instantaneously regenerate, in fact, it doesn't regenerate at all ever under any conditions, ever in history. Also, in addition to that,

the fact is, you know, Padre Pio shouldn't be able to predict horrific workplace accidents before they happen, right before they happen. There shouldn't be multimodal hallucinations of Padre Pio, the famous miracle worker, that accompany the unexpected regeneration

of the completely emulsified eye. So really, there's one desperate hope. left for skeptics, which is basically there's some kind of mistake that's being made in the reportage of the facts, because it can't concede the facts. So the facts can't be right. So you have to contest the facts. So let's look at could this be fake? Let's look at the documentary evidence that we have. So here, the first person is the historian that we're going to rely on a lot for collecting all the facts and putting everything together for us is a guy named Father Joseph Pius Martin. And it's really good that it's him because we know he's not credulous. about miracles attributed to St. P.O. So one of the most famous examples of a miracle, way more famous even than Giovanni Savino. Is this basically restoring of sight to Gemma Golgani. So basically, and the claim is that she's a woman

that can see without pupils because of the Padre Pio miracle. But Father Joseph Martin is not convinced that that is a miracle. So he says, basically, and he's being asked by Rufin, Yeah. He's being asked about the Gemigalgani case. He's saying that he believes that there's nothing. Basically, her whole eye actually is one giant pupil is the nature of the condition.

And he does believe that it's naturalistically explicable. So notice, this guy isn't super credulous and he's not trying to exaggerate Padre Pio. He's looking into one of the most notorious cases that's favoring Pio, and he's basically, his personal conclusion is that he can debunk it. So then Rufin is reaching out to Father Joseph Pius and saying, which miracle attributed to Padre Pio is the most striking? And he's told that he researched the question extensively in 1981, determined it has to be that pertaining to John Savino. And basically, he concludes it's historically certain that his eye was completely amultified and then reconstituted.

So here's what had happened. So first, we have an account taken down by Father John Shug from Savino himself. So we have Savino's account of the miracle and all the context surrounding it. We have statements from his widow, various members of his family, a number of people that were present who examined him after the accident. We have all of those statements. We have contemporaneous documents like the medical records from the hospital that confirm the hospital medical records confirm the eye was totally macerated when he was admitted. And here's the quote, every doctor connected with the case was positive.

There was no way, according to even the most liberal interpretation of the laws of nature, that an eye so completely destroyed could regenerate itself. So then we also have a circular letter from Father Dominic Meyer within a month of this event having taken place. So perfectly contemporaneous, where he was an eyewitness. to the maceration of Savino's eye. Whoa. And Father Raphaelie, he quotes, Father Raphaelie, the doctor with the unpronounceable name, all those people. He quotes them and their statements from this event right after it happened. And basically, the doctor went home and told the wife, your husband's eyes are both destroyed.

Yeah. And so the word in the medical records that's used is blown out. Yeah, okay. And it's a known, no one can dispute that he could see for the rest of his life after this. So if it was blown out, it's game over. That is remarkable. Yeah. And so that's the sort of miracles that we're dealing with in the life of Padre Pio.

So that's our like premier example. You know, also it's reminiscent of people who say, well, why are amputated limbs never regenerated? Now, it turns out sometimes they are, as we can demonstrate. For instance, I have an example where this one is a miracle of Colanda, so it's not in connection with Pio. But I have an extremely good documentation to support that a guy's leg was amputated and then it was regenerated through the intercession of our lady. But so there is, in fact, does happen that amputees do have miracles that restore them. So if you've ever heard that atheist line, that's like, why is it never amputees?

The easiest reply is not to do philosophy, it's just to say, yes, there are amputees whose legs have been restored. You just are unwilling to accept the overwhelming evidence based on a philosophical presupposition. But okay, so then let's look at these other two cases, and we'll go through them in a little bit more of a cursory fashion than the, previous one that we just did. But so Consiglia Martino is the beatification miracle. Yeah. So she basically has a situation where she discovered in 1995

a giant lump had formed on her left clavicle. So basically like a grapefruit sized lump. And she goes to the hospital and they do a CT scan, right? And they do a couple CT scans. And they basically are like, oh, the thoracic duct in your neck has ruptured and there's basically a lump that's containing half a gallon

of fluid, lymphatic fluid, that's And then she's told that she basically needs a difficult and complicated surgery as soon as she can possibly get it. So then we look at the cure and right before the checkup. So she was told she needed the surgery on November 2nd. November 3rd, she's getting the checkup before the surgery. And the doctors are, quote, amazed that there was no more lump. The lymphatic fluid had all been absorbed, end quote. Soon a chest x-ray and total body CT scan were performed and everything was normal.

DeMartino was released from the hospital on November 6th without ever having surgery. or medication. And so we basically have a diocesan investigation. And the beatification and canonization documents are always the best. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And so they in 1997, after collecting all the medical documentation, all the witness statements and everything, we see that consiglia, basically, it's declared inexplicable by a panel of medical experts. It's extraordinary and scientifically inexplicable is what the panel of expert sets. And so then why does this tied to Pio? Well, so from the beginning of her hospitalization, until her cure, She was incessantly praying for the intercession of Pio.

They called Father Modestino and asked him to pray to Pio. Then on November 2nd, when she learned that surgery was necessary, she asked and prayed to St. Pio, please be my surgeon. And Father Modestino told her husband, tell Wina not to have the food syringed because there's no need. Padre Pio is close. So he's predicting so confidently that Padre Pio will come through that he's advising against surgery on the grounds of a miracle.

That's the prediction that this will occur from Father Montesino. So later that day, she felt the presence of someone who made a cut at the level of the clavicle, then stitched it up with sutures. She reported this was accompanied by a clear sensation of sweetness, filling my soul while the swelling began to disappear. So noticing that, basically, she asked Padre Pio to be her surgeon, and then he was her surgeon. You know, the ruptured thoracic duct was restored, the fluid was drained, the difficult and complicated necessary surgery wasn't required. This is occurring, again, I guess, in the context of hallucinations and in the sense of hallucinations. otherwise not at all hallucination-prone individual and a confident prediction by Padre P.O.'s close associates that such a miracle would be performed. And so basically, the only thing we need

to ask about this case is, is that naturally even possible for what to occur to have occurred? And so there's an amazing doctor who's written about these Padre P.O. cases named Dr. Violy. And so here's what he says. Quote, the treatment practice and reported in the literature is surgical. In fact, resolution always occurs after ligation of the duct. In this case, not only was there no increase in the effusion in the cavities where there was lymph, but on the contrary, such a rapid disappearance. Various experts agreed with Dr. Violi's assessment that, quote, the almost immediate, complete, and spontaneous disappearance disappearance of a large quantity of liquid estimated around two liters, which due to its composition and high substance

content is certainly not susceptible to spontaneous reabsorption is inexplicable. And then also, for even if there were this unprecedented recovery that were within the bounds of naturalistic possibility, there's no way that it would occur in a context that closely tied to Padre Pio with that good, both experience and prediction and there's no way it would be, that would be the only case in history of that occurring. All right, let's take a pause and we'll come. Do you mind if we have a break? Yes. This is phenomenal.

Thank you. Yes. I'll take a quick break here. Oh, man. Oh, there's so many questions. All right, we got this. All right, bye-bye. Thanks, guys.

So then let's get to the final. guy, canonization miracle. Okay. And perhaps the best, um, the best of the three. I mean, Savino's pretty good. You can't top that, but, but it's really good in terms of like the amount of medical documentation. Yeah.

Is extraordinary. So you can't really doubt the physical facts that happened here. There's literally no way to doubt it with the Mateo case. And so this one's also worth reading. Um, so here we go. On January 20th, 2000, Mateo P.O. Coelela was admitted into the home. for the relief of suffering with fulminant meningitis. Within hours of admission, his condition deteriorated in deceptic shock with disseminated

intravascular coagulation and rapidly progressive multi-organ failure. He was transferred to intensive care, intubated, placed on mechanical ventilation. The infection progressed to the point that nine organs were affected, and it's important, becoming insufficient. Mateo's doctors did not believe a positive resolution was possible, suggested continuing the resuscitation attempts was a bad thing. Cure. Wait in the evening of January 21st, suddenly something extraordinary happened,

and with everyone's disbelief, Mateo's condition stabilized and then began to improve. All of his symptoms followed a rapid resolution trend. However, it was not possible to assess Mateo for brain damage since he was in a pharmacological coma.

After 10 days, the coma was suspended, the child woke up as if he had nothing and in fact asked to enjoy a Coca-Cola popsicle and to have a PlayStation, which was brought to him and with which he started playing. The doctors involved in the case,

as well as more than 10 experts that were consulted about it, unanimously agreed that Koiola's recovery was, quote, inexplicable. End quote. Now, context. The home for the relief of suffering was founded by St. Pio, which is the hospital where this is taking place. Coyola's mother, Maria Lucia, had a devotion to St. Pio, incessantly prayed for his intercession throughout the entire course of her son's condition.

While praying, laying flat, face down on St. P.O.'s tomb, she had a vision of St. P.O. lifting up her son's lifeless body and placing him on his feet. When Mateo woke up, he reported that he had an out-of-body experience. During the experience, he saw an old man with a white beard and long brown dress who gave him his right hand and said, Mateo, don't worry, you'll get better soon. When Maria Lucia showed him an image of St. Pio, he exclaimed, it's him, mom, it's him. Oh, my goodness. All right. Now, is that naturally possible what we just described? And this one, I'll go even more in depth than we did

for consiglia. So, first, there's, I mean, it's still extraordinary unlikely that this was a natural coincidence, especially with the ties being as strong to Pio again, as we just talked about. But the prognosis was so bleak that this is what Dr. Viole says. The survival

of any patient has never been described as mortality is 100%. He endured the simultaneous insufficiency of nine organs, including respiratory failure so profound that oxygen saturation fell to 18%. Oh my. Cardiovascular failure so profound that arterial pressure was not measurable, despite vasho pressures. He doesn't have measurable blood pressure. Coagopathy so profound that his entire body was covered with basically the necrosis

that you'd expect. So then Professor Francesco Ramondo, one of the medical experts that reviewed the case, concluded Mateo's condition was so severe the phenomena indicative of death had already been detected. So basically he's dead. Now, he's not technically clinically dead, but he's actually worse than dead. So, like, people who are clinically dead come back to life, actually naturally sometimes, who are clinically dead. But what you never come back from is when for very extended periods of time, your body is in this state where it's basically like you're a living person whose organs are decomposing and who all the structure of the organs is being destroyed. So you're basically, your vitality is being preserved for long enough, but yet nonetheless, the destruction is.

is proceeding to become so complete. And so for it to be nine organs that are all simultaneously, profoundly insufficient, there's no way to come back from it. There's no, as Dr. Vio always said, there's no case ever recorded where someone came back from that. So there are cases where maybe your, you know, electrical activity, your brain stopped and your heart stopped, you know, and you were dead and people pronounce you dead. But then you come back to life and it's like a Lazarus effect sort of resurrection. But this is even more extraordinary than that in many ways.

this is almost more extraordinary than those types of resurrection cases. Yes. So then we look, basically, generalized sinosis, bilaterally fixed madriasis, and extreme bradycardia persisted for at least 30 minutes or more, which should have at least caused pervasive and permanent neurological damage. Right. Instead, Mateo's recovery was complete and long-lasting without after effects. In fact, the recovery was so complete,

the only residual effects were tiny scars, which were far smaller than they should have been given the extent of the damage to Mateo's skin during his illness. Dr. Violi characterized the attitudes of medical experts towards this outcome as follows, quote, we remain more and more perplexed, surprise, dare I say, incredulous at this extraordinary healing, end quote. And then third, finally, survivors of multiple organ failure syndrome with involvement of as few as three organs, always, quote, have a very, very slow recovery. Within days of Mateo's coma being suspended, he was alert and conscious, had no motor deficits, urinated spontaneously without a bladder catheter, even started making fun of hospital staff,

and challenging them to play video games with them. So not only did Mateo completely recover from a condition that was far more severe than the most severe that any other patient has ever recovered from, he did so almost instantaneously, whereas patients with far less severe conditions require months of convalescence to achieve far less dramatic improvements. Yeah. And so whatever you have to say, maybe there was something you could say to explain that. Maybe there was something you could say to explain Kinsiglia. Maybe there was something you could say to explain Giovanni Savino, to explain the conjunction of all three, then to explain the perfume, then to explain the disappearance without scars, then to explain the lack of inflammation, then to explain the bleeding and no iron deficiency

anemia. There's no way it happened. It's all certain. It's 20th century photographs, videos, thousands of testimonies, 100 volumes of documentation. It happened. It's a fact. God exists. And people just need to accommodate their worldview to that. Yeah. I think what happens is skeptics hear this or they hear about it and they dismiss it for the same reason that you or I might dismiss what we think is an absurd claim about the moon landing or about some other conspiracy, say. You see what I mean? Like I've said this before, but I have a relative who was really big into the 9-11 conspiracy theory that it was inside job. or choose whatever conspiracy theory you want, okay, that you think there's nothing to that.

There's someone who's read a million books on that and you just go, I just couldn't be bothered dealing with it. Does that make sense? Or if I'm chatting with somebody who's convinced that the earth is flat, I might take a couple of swipes at it, but because I haven't really thought a great deal about it, I accept it, because Aristotle talked about it, the church has already talked about it. We have satellites and things like that. You just, you don't even engage it, is my point. It's not that, I don't think it's that skeptics are engaging this at a deep level and a remaining unconvinced. I think it's that they're unwilling to engage it because they think it's crap. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a bunch of different.

Well, I would also distinguish between the pretext that is given and then the deeper reasons, the deeper psychological explanations for why people behave the way that they do. And I do think, like if you heard, I mean. In the vast majority of cases, the reason why people are rejecting Catholicism is not actually a head issue. it's a heart issue. And if a person has a hard heart, basically they're not going to be responsive to evidence in the way that they will be if they basically have a softened heart.

And so I think people like me, I'm a prime example of this, where I know for a fact that I should have inquired into this evidence. I should have been receptive to it. My excuses for dismissing it were very thin and flimsy pretexts. And it was because my heart was hard.

It was because I didn't love the truth. It's because I didn't even want. to love the truth. That's why I didn't inquire into it. And the moment my heart was soft, the moment this sort of like existential need that you have and the longing that you have to be friends with God, when you just embrace that, then all of a sudden your eyes are opened and you can see what's laid out plainly before your eyes. Yes. But you cannot treat as reasonable. It's not reasonable. I don't give you an excuse atheist. I don't think what you're doing is reasonable. There's no excuse. When we're looking at a situation where this is the world's

largest religious denomination, Catholicism, the vast majority of the world's people believe in theism, the vast majority believe in miracles, even a majority of medical doctors in the United States believe they've seen a miracle. Okay, didn't know that. But so we go and we take surveys, there are hundreds of millions of people

all around the world claiming to be firsthand participants in miracles. And so if your basis for dismissing miracles is that there's no evidence for them, and this exists, and it's readily available online for any person to get, It's a hard issue. I think it would be something like if we heard of an incredible miracle that took place in the context of Hinduism, say, a lot of Catholics would go, yeah, maybe, but I'm probably not and I'm not going to look into it anyway. Does that make sense? Yeah, well, everybody.

And now you would because you're a nerd in the best possible way. I mean, that is a compliment, right? But most people would just dismiss it. Yeah. And I think that's kind of okay. Like you dismiss things that you're not compelled morally to investigate. when they conflict with what you think is true? Well, I think there's a, I mean, I think there's all a difference where when a person

is given reason to believe that something is credible, and it has very significant moral implications if it is true. Yeah. And if the only basis upon which you could dismiss it is actually your own basically like intellectual pride, where you just think you're so much smarter than St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Alphonseus Leger and so much smarter than Father Dr. DeLour and so much smarter. I'm not talking about that. No, no, no, but that's what I'm saying.

That's the situation that everyone in the world finds themselves in right now, which is, we have the records from all the canonization trials throughout history, we have these, we have the photographs, we have the videos, we have the expert analyses, the evidence is there, and it's publicized. You've heard of the Catholic Church, we're the McDonald's of religion. Okay, so you've heard, you can't plead ignorance now. There's some people in the world who can, like maybe the Sentinelese Island tribe, You know, maybe people like in the remote reaches of the Amazon.

If you're watching this video, you have no excuse. No, no, I don't know if I agree. And here's why. I would agree with you that somebody who has a platform and they're attacking miracle claims and they're trying to build up evidence that it's not true. I would agree that they have a moral obligation to investigate, at least an intellectually moral obligation, to investigate what they're seeking to tear down. But the average Joe who hears about this peripheral,

I don't think is any obligation to look into it. And if prima facie, it doesn't seem likely, I don't blame them for not looking into it. Well, it depends on how it's proposed to the person. Now, I disagree, and I think there's way too much complacency in the world about if God exists and if God has communicated with humanity, that imposes strict obligations on us. I agree with that.

And we all, to sit here, knowing how sinful we are, and knowing how desperately in need of absolution from God that we are, if we hear that God is extending, he's telling us what we need to do to receive his mercy and what we need to do to be reconciled and restored to him, if anything credible is proposed, we deserve to give it more attention. So I agree with that.

I agree with that. But what I'm saying is most people aren't investigating it to the point that they can know that it's credible. No, I know. But I think people have an obligation to investigate when a matter is so serious, and when it's not a fringe position, right? So if it's Catholicism, right,

now obviously there's limits to what that's going to look like for all the different people, right? So if it's in the 20th century, there was a miracle predicted in advance and it was witnessed by over 100,000 people and every Catholic in the world and there's 1.4 billion of us have heard about it

and we're constantly talking about it and all the evidence is available online and you have a smartphone and you have a computer and God has spoken to the world and he wants you to come to learn the religious truth about him, you have more than an obligation, you don't have the obligation to go and read as much as I have, but I think you have an obligation to seriously and critically examine the claim. Catholicism, compared to all the world's religions, I think, at least deserves a hearing.

And if you haven't heard, if you haven't given us enough of a hearing to have heard this, then I think you've paid insufficient attention. And I think there's, I think the language of our Lord in scripture doesn't support the way he addresses the world when he says the light came into the world and this is the condemnation that men prefer darkness to light. Yes, it's normal. In fact, the vast majority of people, the normal complacent attitude of the vast majority of people is to prefer darkness to light. And that's the condemnation. That's why only a few are going to go to heaven. That's why the way is narrow. That's why many are called fewer chosen. Yeah. What do you say to those who say, well, there are other

miracle claims within different Christian denominations that seem legitimate, doesn't that disprove Catholicism? Or doesn't that at least mean that Catholicism isn't the only way or something? In fact, I don't know how, if we want to skip to that right now, because I was, I want to plan, I was planning on addressing that. Sure, we can do that later. Oh, cool. Because I did, there is a couple more things I want to say about Pio before I continue to,

you know, like, reproach everyone. Uh-huh. Which I love doing. And we'll get back to it. Okay, what else you're going to say? Yeah, no, so just the thing that makes. maybe will be most impressive to people if you don't even have like a super rationalistic mind, or if you're not a person where it's like you care that much about the physical circumstances

and the science or you're just generally skeptical of my characterization of it or of experts or anything like that. Yeah. Something that may convert you. And so I would really recommend you to do is just get to know Padre Pio the man. Because there's something, there's truth is persuasive. There's like a natural aptitude that the human mind has to discover truth and to cling to it once it's found it. And so just seeing truth manifested before you so clearly will be persuasive.

But there's also to see goodness or to see beauty is also persuasive. And there's a different sensitivity that different minds have to those different aspects, which are really inseparable from each other in reality. And so when you look at Padre Pio, what you see is an eminent, unparalleled goodness, where it's just like the character of Christ that I found so compelling and seductive and irresistible when I wanted to convert to Christianity, he's, he, He's someone who's exemplifying that and recapitulating it in just such a perfect and exalted way that it points back to Christ and it makes you, like it makes you fall in love with Christ through coming to know who Padre Pio was and the effect that he had on people.

And so that's something I would encourage people to do is to, and I go through some of it here, but you're never going to get a sense for it unless you basically read a biography and you just feel like you get to know the person. Is there one you'd recommend? Yeah. So the two that I recommended earlier, so the best one for the facts will be the Bernard Rufin, the sort of Lutheran historian, his Padre Pio biography. And you'll get a sense of who he is by reading that.

But probably the best one for his character is the Renzo Olegre Pio, Man of Hope. And if you read that one, I mean, we can read it here. Here's what, so Renzo Olegre, one of St. Pio's biographers, and he justifies this very thoroughly through just, he shows, not tells for the most part. But here's him telling. Quote, an extraordinary moral strength emanated from his whole being, end quote. and we listened to the effect he had on like, for instance,

these bishops who came to visit him who started off skeptical. So Bishop Ansemao Canelli, who is a severe, rather distrustful man, was overcome with admiration for the great superiority of his spirit after conversing with him for a few hours. Bishop Angelo Polly wrote,

I came, I saw, I am conquered. His demeanor, always the same and composed, inspires complete confidence. So let's look at some aspects of St. P.O.'s life that are having that effect on people other than just his demeanor, just the general way that he's carrying himself and the way that he's talking and presenting himself to them.

So one is, let's think about just his vocation in life, what he decided to do with his entire life. So he entered the cappachins and decided to become a religious monk who's taking a vow of poverty and of chastity and to be in relative seclusion from the rest of the world. He's deciding to do that as a teenager, and he remained that way until his death. The capuchins have very strict ascetic practices to which he adhered rigorously. And he went above and beyond. He would set his alarm for like 2.30 a.m. in the morning, every morning and wake up then. He would eat almost nothing, right?

Some people thought it was even a miracle in itself. He did eat. But some people were even like, is this a miracle in itself? Like, it seems like he's barely eating anything. How is he surviving? He's incessantly praying. So, like, literally every time you'd see him, he'd have a rosary in his hands. And, like, the stories are that he would be saying, like, he would have a commitment to say 33 rosaries a day.

Wow. So 33, five decades of the rosary a day. And then you go through, and I told you earlier, every day he's spending 10 to 15 hours in the confessional, which is probably one of the most brutal and non-glorious ways to spend your time. And he's listening to them even when he's ill, even when he's exhausted. Okay. And remember, this is supposed to be our like pathological liar master fraudster. This is also, this is how committed he is to the bit, I guess. So then let's think about how he dealt with suffering.

Okay. Because basically he's our modern Job. Yeah. So what, and I just love this expression by Allegory, he endured, quote, incredibly enormous suffering, but bore it without complaining. So think about that. So he's chronically ill. He's, we just saw it. I never want to know in my life what it's like to have 125 degree fever.

I never want to know. I never want to know what it's like to have transfixing lesions on all of my appendages. and for them to be constantly bleeding. But it's even worse are the moral crises in his life, even beyond the physical crises. So this is a person who accepted, here's what he had to deal with. Quote, more persecution, humiliation,

accusations, slanders, trials, and condemnations than one can imagine. So the amount of people who are lying about him, defaming him, saying it's simulated sanctity, who are making up stories about misconduct between him and women and saying that he has, like this sexual misconduct towards women, you know, the number of people who are coming out and claiming to have evidence that doesn't exist, that proves that he's faking and forging it,

the amount, it's incredible. The fact that the Vatican humiliated him before rehabilitating him later on by basically saying they didn't think there was anything supernatural going on, implying he was a fraudster, banning him from celebrating mass, banning him from doing confessions. How long was that for? It was years. I would have to go back and check the exact periods of time. And there were two separate periods where the Holy Office took this very negative stance towards Padre Pio.

And basically, and the impression that people had of him, even despite all these situations, was, quote, in the midst of the most difficult trials, he always looked to the future with the spirit of optimism, faith, and love. So that's what he's able to radiate. He's having this effect on people while he's separately dealing with extraordinary, unimaginable immense suffering, and while he's being persecuted and lied about and defamed. and in many cases, just like our Lord giving no answer before his accusers. And then we sit here, let's think about his humility. So think about the lengths he went to to conceal the stigmata. So we already talked earlier about refusing anesthesia during a hernia repair surgery just to prevent Festa from verifying their presence rather than their absence.

And so, and Bishop Rosi wrote, I was able to observe his deeply felt and profound humility so that, as is universally attested, He lives in the utmost simplicity and indifference as if nothing had ever occurred around his person, and he still wasn't the object of so much attention. Okay, let's think about his obedience. So, during these periods where he is being persecuted by the Holy Office, what's his reaction to the Holy Office? Because, so think about this.

When they, he basically could publicly protest. And there were literally, like, groups of people that were, like, threatening to riot based on some of the measures that were being instituted against Padre Pio. So he can, there's definitely work for him to do to go incite. a crowd or incite his supporters. Yeah. He had this guy who was kind of unscrupulous, who was like a big fan of his that he was a close associate with, who's also like a hilarious guy who like has all these like, like, he's like

this kind of shrewd businessman and kind of mobster guy. And so he's, and he comes in and he basically has a religious conversion because of Pio and he's trying to go back to his old ways basically. Yeah. So he's going and he's like, Padre Pio has to beg him not to go to the United Nations and plead Padre Pio's case that he's being religiously persecuted in front of the United Nations. The guy goes and he literally finds the Vatican officials that are persecuting P.O. And he starts extorting them in writing.

And Padre Pio has to be like, dude, you got to stop. You have to stop. You're out of control. And so that's the kind of guy we're dealing with the attitude he's having towards persecution. So rather than rehabilitating his reputation, rather than using his sanctity to rise up and rebel, he's encouraging quiet obedience and submission. Even when his silence is being interpreted as like almost this tacit admission. What a witness for us today, huh?

Yeah. And so then, let's think about the mercy that he had. So this case is really good. Dr. Francesco Ricardy defamed and ridiculed St. Pio for years. St. Pio, for his part, quote, never uttered a word of blame against the cruel man. When Dr. Ricardy came down with a serious illness, he had a pang of conscience and declared, only Padre Pio, whom I have so offended, can hear my confession today. Upon warning of this, St. Pio traveled to him, embraced him, and then heard his confession.

This was perhaps the only time St. Pio ever left the convent. Wow. Wow. And you look at that, and you also just look at the wisdom that he exhibited, where you're looking at it. And so here, just, I'll read this one quote. People would go to him not only for confession, but with every kind of question you could imagine, he never said, let me think about it.

He had his answer, Bing, Bing, Bing. And yet his advice was remarkably effective. Dr. Festa was struck by the, quote, gentle, serene, and persuasive eloquence of his words. Father Nello Kestello recalled Padre Pio knew my problems better than I did. And so we're dealing with just, an insane, incredible, almost unsummerizable, like ineffable Christ-likeness to where when we start, I'm perfectly willing to go play the nerd game where we go through and prove all the physical circumstances preclude it.

But the moral circumstances preclude fraud. I don't believe it. I'm unwilling to bet my soul that this guy was a liar and a fraudster. And he has to be if this wasn't supernatural. Right. Yeah. It's like if you want to deny this, you have a heavier burden of proof that you then have to follow through on.

Correct. And so that's already, I think, incredible. So then that gets me to the last part of the PO case that I want to discuss. I mean, we can talk about objections if you want. Like, there were some people who have told lies about PO where we can go through and debunk some of the lies. There's one objection that I really do want us to talk about. There's just one where everyone, lots of people have heard about it. Let's go through this, then look at that one objection before moving on.

Cool. Yep. So basically, there's, let's think about what it means if we just take the bare facts at face value. So the first thing is, it's clearly a vindication of Christianity. So it's hard to see how it makes sense if Christianity is not true. Which is to say, first is, the whole guy is turned into a living icon of our Lord's passion. If this is like accommodation of his religious beliefs, it makes no sense that he's being told he's a victim soul who's being asked to give up all these extraordinary miraculous sufferings. that basically God is going out of his way on his own initiative

to torture the guy against his wishes. Like, for instance, Padre Pio repeatedly prays for the stigmata to be taken away and those requests are not granted. So it makes no sense. It's like this religious poroist accommodation of his views that you're going out of your way to create a misleading impression

by torturing a guy who doesn't want the stigmata, right? And so basically the stigmata make almost no sense apart from the theology of the redemptive atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross the vicarious satisfaction for sin that Christ makes for us, the idea of co-redemptive suffering and that we can sort of unite ourselves penitentially, you know, as part of this universal priesthood of believers to Christ and offer up sacrifices through Christ. None of it, none of his suffering, none of his being a victim soul, makes any sense,

especially since, given that he is being vindicated by God in all these extraordinary ways and receiving all these supernatural charisms, I think we should probably take the private revelations that he claims where Jesus and Mary are speaking to him pretty serious. So we should listen to those. Jesus, Mary, and my guardian angel keep encouraging me and repeating to me that the victim to be such needs to shed all of its blood. He characterized his fevers as a moral illness

that occurred whenever he contemplated the Lord. When Giovanni Savino, who we spoke about, thanked him for the regeneration of his eye, he said, if only you knew what this cost me. Then, basically, the holy sacrifice of the mass is perhaps the completion of Padre Pio. I think almost everything that happens with him

is meant to make the mass when Padre Pio says it even more powerful. And the masses that he would do, he doesn't give homilies. Yeah. He wasn't a homoist. He doesn't talk.

But the mass lasts three hours. Wow. And so we're sitting there and the supernatural charisms that he had reached their apex during the holy sacrifice of the mass. So that's when the lesions were bleeding the most. The odor of sanctity

was perceived the most intensely and by the most people. He suffered, quote, in his own words, as far as it is possible for a human body, end quote. He reported, I quote, suffer the scourging from the beginning to the end of mass more intensely after the

consecration. Communion is the culminating point of my suffering, end quote. Peritioners recalled they were, quote, transfixed by the Eucharist made real to them by this extraordinary man, end quote. So already, it's impossible for all of that to make sense if Christianity is not true. If apostolic Christianity is not true even. Okay, and it doesn't sit well with a lot of Protestant theology already based on what we've said. But let's see if we can go even further to getting it to being specifically about Catholicism. Okay. So first point I want to make is that the basically within the Catholic paradigm, it's totally

consistent. And you brought this up earlier, and I want to talk about it more extensively later, but just I want to say, Catholicism totally predicts that the gifts of the Holy Spirit will be distributed to Christian believers, even ones that are not in the visible confines of the church, even people who are not visibly united to the church. Okay. We expect that there are supernatural charisms that will be. be given to them. And part of the reason we expect that is because it's plainly taught by our

Lord in Scripture. So, for instance, in the sort of like Matthew 25 discourse, the Lord Lord discourse, he says, Lord, did we not work miracles in your name? So we know not only is it that we can't exclude the possibility of saints outside the visible unity of the church. Not only we can we not exclude that based on Catholic principles, but we know that even there will be people who will work miracles who are nonetheless damned, who are reprobate according to our Lord in Matthew 25. So we expect, that you just merely working a miracle through the invocation of Christ doesn't mean that you're right about all of your theology, right? So we need the theology, we need something more specific than just this guy is a miracle worker and he believed this. And so that's never going to be our argument for

Padre Pio. All of our arguments are going to be about it being more proximate to the miracle performed and the active cooperation of God. So God himself would basically be either explicitly or implicitly affirming a lie and misleading people and causing spiritual harm. it by doing what he was doing if the doctrine wasn't true. And so that's how my argument will proceed with the Padre Piocharisms. It's not going to proceed just

he believes this and he's a miracle worker so therefore he's right about everything. Yep. That wouldn't really make sense. But there is something we can say and something that I think is worth noting, which is what Father Shug wrote. Quote, I know of no other person in history

who has had such a range of gifts encapsulated within himself or herself. There's never been anyone like him. And I do agree, based on my own personal research, that qualitatively and quantitatively, as for an individual miracle worker, there's no one who approaches or comes close.

And so if it is true, as scripture repeatedly affirms, that God uses miracles to confirm his word with the signs that accompany it, then it actually makes perfect sense that it would be a Catholic priest if Catholicism were true that would receive qualitatively and quantitatively

the most extraordinary and verifiable and clearly intended to be verified miracles of all time. And so if we were looking at the overall distribution, it's very consistent with the Catholic claim that we have the fullness of the truth, even though other people can imperfectly participate in it, and all these other miracles can militate

towards greater Christian unity. And so I will say that even if we just went sheerly based off of the number of miracles worked by the guy, given how holy he was, given how constantly he was receiving private revelations and supernatural insights, I'm going to defer to his opinion about religious matters,

basically more than anybody else's. And so if he's telling me I need to be Catholic, and he is, he's telling me, he harshly rebuked an Eastern Orthodox woman who wasn't converting to Catholicism and said, orthodoxy is dying. And he said, you need to convert and become Catholic. And she was talking about her family

and what they would say, and she says, he said, you're not going to be able to plead that as an answer on Judgment Day. So he's not an ecumenist. He really believes that you need to be Catholic. And he's constantly, through, his miracles, for instance, biolocation miracles to a bunch of Protestant

airmen, causing Protestant airmen to convert to Catholicism. So God is actively cooperated in P.O. bringing about huge numbers of conversions from these other sects, from Protestantism, from orthodoxy. Right. So even just the sheer volume would be enough. But we don't need that. We don't. Because we have all the key elements of Catholicism directly in St. P.O.'s private revelations and in the charisms themselves. And so we already explained that for above what we did with basically him being a victim soul, co-redemptive suffering, the mass, all that stuff, right? But here, let's get more. And I'm just going to go through in a really cursory fashion just to show you what we can get. So first, in his diary, St. Pio wrote, I received various

inner insights about several people. I saw his vicar on earth, Pope Pius the 11th, filled with bitterness because of the wickedness of men. Many times I was asked to pray and to encourage others to pray for him and the repentance of these wicked souls. So he's receiving spiritual insights about the state of people's souls and where God is inciting him to pray. And he's being told, what's especially important for you to pray for is Pope Pius the 11th, his vicar on earth, and the outrages that men are committing against him, who on all these other views, you're going to say some bad things about the Pope. You're going to say some bad things about him on almost any other Christian view that's

remotely plausible. Now let's think about confession, sacramental confession, it's power to absolve people of their sins. So remember, that's where he spends almost all of his time. It's estimated he heard almost five million confessions throughout his life. Wow. And he said that God told him what to say during the confessional to people, right? And many penitents told them that he confronted them about unconfessed mortal sins. And his whole charism of the discernment of hearts presupposes the mortal venial sin distinction

and that confession is efficacious in remitting mortal sin and all of it. And when a penitent confessed that, quote, he considered confession a good institution but did not believe in the divinity of the sacrament, St. P.O. replied, these are all heresies and all your communions have been sacrilegious. You must make a general confession. That penitent reported that St. P.O. knew about sins that, quote, humanly speaking, it was impossible for the Father to know. So he's receiving spiritual insights

about what is sinful and what people's sins are. And he's received the insight that a person who denigrated communion as something that's spiritually good but not divinely instituted. That was such an outrageous heresy that all his communions were sacrilegious

and he needed to do a general confession of his entire life. So he's receiving supernatural insights from God about what is and isn't sin. Saints. Okay. There's a million things you could say, but I'll just say intercession to saints.

If that were not allowed, none of the healing miracles as we talked about even make sense to begin with, right? But he also claimed to have supernatural knowledge about whether people were in heaven that he was receiving from God directly. And so, for example, when a religious sister asked St. Pio about the recently deceased Pope Pius the 12th,

he replied, I've seen him in paradise. Father Augustino wrote in his diary, Padre Pio was very sad for the death of Pope Pio, the 12th, but our Lord let him see the Pope in the glory of paradise. Now, Purgatory. Padre Pio, said, when he was asked, Padre Pio, have you ever seen a soul in purgatory? He replied, I have seen so many,

they don't scare me anymore. Okay. On one occasion, he told Friars, I was talking to some souls in their way from Purgatory to Paradise. They came to thank me that I remembered them today in Mass. That presuppose not only that purgatory

exists, but also that mass is a propitiatory sacrifice that could be efficacious and getting people out of purgatory. And then, when asked how the flames of purgatory compared to the fire on a hearth, St. Pio replied, they compare like fresh water and boiling water. So also, you don't want to go to purgatory.

Like, let's all try to get to heaven. Hell, this is bet big and bat. I've been down to hell with those miserable, and God made me experience the sufferings of the damned. So that's another set of private revelations that he's claiming to have been to hell and to see the sufferings of the damned. Then, Mary, this is, his devotion to Mary is some of the most incredible, extraordinary devotion to Mary you were ever going to see to Our Lady. St. Peter reported during a period when he was required to celebrate Mass by himself, quote, I was never alone. Our Lady always kept me company during Mass. He claimed,

Our Lady comes to me whenever I need her. He marveled, quote, there are people. was so foolish they think they can go through life without the help of the Madonna. What could I ever do without her? He referred to our lady as the Immaculate Mother. He prayed the rosary dozens of times every day and called it his weapon. He claimed, quote, the Madonna never refuses me anything I asked to the prayer of the rosary, end quote. Wow. Now, another thing that's important to know is that he had a very special devotion to Fatima to tie everything together. So St. Pio was actually the spiritual father of the world apostleate of Fatima. And he received, personally, St. Pio, received a miraculous, healing from Arwady of Fatima. Okay. So, this one I'll read just because it's worth it. In April 15, in April 1959, St. Pio was seriously ill with porzis,

bronchial pneumonia, as well as had a cancerous tumor that required chemotherapy. He was bedridden for nine months. There were rumors he was deathly ill. The Fatima Pilgrim Virgin statue arrived by a helicopter at San Giovanni Rotondo on August 5th, and although he was very weak and needed to be helped there and back, he had the opportunity to venerate the statue and the

next afternoon. When the helicopter departed, it circled the monastery three times, and St. Pio cried out, Madonna, since you have come to Italy, I have been laid low with sickness. Now that you're leaving, are you going to leave me this way? The helicopter headed back to the monastery. The pilot later recounted he felt compelled to do so. St. P.O. cried out to Mary for help and felt a mysterious force surged throughout his body and declared, I am healed. This cure was so real and complete that he resumed his full schedule of duty shortly thereafter. After his healing, St. P.O. sent a message and crucifix to the then-Bishop of Fatima, Bishop Vanansio.

The bishop in return had a statue of Our Lady of Fatima made and sent to him, and it was kept in the sacristy over the vesting table. It was greeted by St. Pio prior to every Mass, and it was there that he would devoutly offer his prayers and Thanksgiving every day after the Holy Mass. Praise God. So if P.O. is right. I think Fatima's right, too. And so we can get all the implications we had from Fatima for Pio. And that's also true for Wards, which this is much shorter. St. Pio was devoted to Wards. He had an icon of Our Lady of Wards on the wall of his cell. When he was asked if he would like to make a pilgrimage to Wards, he replied, I did not have to go to Lords. I go there every night. I see Our Lady of Lords every night. Cool. And recall, Our Lady of Lords is where St. Bernadette is told by our lady, I am the immaculate conception. Right.

So, if Padre Pio is the most extraordinary, publicly vindicated, verifiable miracle worker in history of eminent supreme holiness. Okay. And all of these private revelations that he's reporting are true and all these charisms are true. It's impossible for me to even conceive of how Catholicism could not be true. Right. Yeah, good Now, so then that just brings me To the one final thing

We said we were gonna talk about on this Yeah, unless you have something No, no, please So just the one final thing we said Was just the most common objection That you're going to hear to Padre Pio Which is the carbolic acid Okay

So there's a woman who, and this was all discovered By this historian, Sergio Wuzato And he has a book about it And a woman told her local bishop That she had in strict secrecy requested carbolic acid from a pharmacy on behalf of St. P.O. in 19-19. Italian historian, Sergio Luzato, unearthed a note that St. P.O. wrote to her, which reads, I'm in need of 200 grams or 300 grams of carbolic acid for sterilizing.

Whoa. I pray for you to send it to me on Sunday. So this has been used by a lot of people as just definitive proof that St. P.O.'s lesions were artificial. Now, let's already begin by just pointing out that St. P.O. having access to carbolic acid would not even remotely begin to explain... like, even a tiny fraction of all of the things that we've just described. Like, it doesn't explain why the lesions didn't deteriorate and become gangrenous if he was repeatedly using carbolic acid to inflict them.

It doesn't explain why there wasn't paralegional inflammation. It's totally inconsistent with all the testimony about the depth of the lesion at various points. It doesn't explain why, since they were subcutaneous, why they healed without a scar. It doesn't explain why he was able to effuse so much blood and not die. It doesn't explain the odor of sanctity and all the abundant testimony that we've just reviewed in detail. It doesn't explain any of the healings.

So it doesn't explain anything. Yep. So even if we were to concede, he has access to it, which is, it's over-the-counter medicament. You didn't even need a prescription from a doctor. Like, yes, you could get access to carbolic acid. And there are a million reasons you might want to use carbolic acid. We're about to hear the real reason in a second. But notice, this is always presented as like, this is proof he's a fraudster.

It's like, you have not even begun to scratch the surface of proving he's a fraudster. You've just, this is the first step, which is he has, you've proven he had the opportunity to use carbolic acid. Which in itself, it's not even clear how it could possibly explain the data that it's supposedly being invoked to explain. So that's not fraud. That doesn't prove fraud. But, okay, let's go further than that. So we have the interrogation of Bishop Rosi, of St. P.O., at the time Father P.O., asking him basically about the carbolic acid, because he had heard about the carbolic acid, even though it was only unearthed by this historian later on, at the time the apostolic visitor was well aware, and nonetheless concluded that St. P.O. was credible. And so he asked him whether he has ever requested pure carbolic acid from people outside the convent.

St. Pio replied, I recall requests for some for the use of the community, actually of the minor seminary of which I was director in case it wasn't available in the convent. Bishop Rosi followed up by asking whether the request was made in such a way as to remain unknown to the brothers themselves. He said, no, especially considering that in the past, I was almost alone with the Father Guardian, if anything, the only purpose was to prevent the people that had to carry it from knowing it was a medicament requested without a doctor's prescription. Now, Bishop Rosey believed that this was credible, and it's a completely innocuous explanation. There's lots of reasons why I, guy who's at a boarding school who has syringes, who's having to use syringes, would want that, you know, would want carbolic acid. So there's a million possible uses that carbolic acid could have besides this one. Then second, even if we went and looked and conceded that he had access to carbolic acid

at the time in 1919, there are very extended periods of time where it's not at all clear how he would have gotten access to carbolic acid. And recall, remember, like, for instance, Dr. Festa cleaned the lesions with a cloth soaked in ethel alcohol and glycerinated starch, and there was no trace of reaction, which means that carbolic acid at least hadn't been used recently before Dr. Festa's visit then, which is already happening in like 1920, I think, is the date of that visit. And also, Dr. Festa made a very astute observation that if he had applied carbolic acid, that would actually destroy any perfume it came into contact with. Right. Choose one. But then next is actually if we think about it a little deeper, we realize how this episode totally refutes fraud rather than proves it. Yeah.

Which is, if St. Pio was the mastermind who was able under strict surveillance to secretly procure all the stuff that he needed to do the perfume and to do the carbolic acid and to do all this stuff in perfect secrecy, doesn't make sense that about a year after that he had acquired the stigmata. that his procurement strategy was to write to a random woman, a note asking her to do him a favor to go get the super secret acid, where this woman and her pharmacist cousin immediately run to the bishop and snitch on him. Yeah. So is that the operational security that you would need to pull off the conspiracy that he's going to pull off for the next 50 years? No. And it shows that by the time this was happening, he didn't actually have the ingenious super deceiver skills that he would need to have to do all the rest of the stuff that you're saying he did.

Yes, yes. So actually, even though superficially, it looks like an embarrassment for the authenticity, when you think about it for 10 seconds, you realize it doesn't help us explain any of the stuff that we thought was hard to explain in the first place. And if anything, it's like totally not the M.O. of a fraudster. Excellent. Here's another objection before we move on. And I know you've heard this. A deeply religious mystic, intensely focused on the crucifixion, unconsciously manifested bodily wounds through the power of the mind over the body. You've heard this?

Well, yes. And actually, St. Pio himself addressed this. Okay. And I think his remark is funny. Okay. At least in... I didn't know. I didn't know he had addressed this, all right?

Which basically his response was, okay, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go and imagine really hard that you're going to sprout horns and then see if it happens. Very good. Which is just that there's no evidence that that ever has happened in history, ever before, and there's lots of corroboration, it's not physiologically possible for it to happen. Like, what we're talking about would be, like, sort of similar to, like, when an embryo is in development, like, the morphogenic sculpting that that does, you're basically talking about, like, an unconscious voluntary process by which you're able to, like, sculpt skin to match

that works instantaneously and produces it and then sustains it. There's no such mechanism that exists to even be invoked, not to mention, like, there are million other predictive expectations we would make if it really were a psychological phenomena. But notice, that can't explain anything that happens after he dies, even if we go as far as deposit basically magic, because there's no scientific evidence that any of that is remotely possible. There's also a bunch of physical reasons why it's like biophysically impossible, the fevers. You know, it's biophysically impossible, for instance, the perfume, the qualities, the perfume

hats, the intermittency and the persistence and the strength that it had, even when it was intrinsic to blood that was separated from PO. So you're already positing something ad hoc for which there's no evidence at all whatsoever, totally contrary to all of our ordinary experience, and that is a partial explanation for one data point amidst dozens. Yep. Very good. All right.

Thank you. Do you want to move on to the next one? Yeah. And last one. And I think we can go through this one faster, especially since I know you've had conversations about Eucharistic miracles in the recent past. But basically, a lot of people know that there have been reports that basically there will be bleeding hosts or hosts will transform perceptibly into flesh. And then the Catholic Church will conduct scientific examinations.

And on several occasions, these scientific examinations have come back and confirmed that basically the host, rather than being fungus or rather than being bacteria that had developed on these hosts, Instead, the consecrated host really was myocardium, so heart muscle, right? And that there was real human blood. And they've even noticed this striking anomaly where the blood in the credible examples of Eucharistic miracles continues, despite being a bunch of different continents and a bunch of different occasions being A, B. blood. But there's one Eucharistic miracle that I've looked into the most, and that I'm taking to be a representative example that dates back all the way to basically the 8th century. All right, so this one Eucharistic miracle, why choose this one over the many Eucharistic miracles that have been purported to have happened?

Well, yeah, so there's a couple reasons to choose this one. The first is that there's an aspect to this one that there isn't for the others, which is basically extraordinary, miraculous, inexplicable preservation of this Eucharistic relic. So for this to last, basically, for as long as it has, which we will get into, is completely extraordinary inexplicable. There are further results that are related to that. And I've yet to encounter any skeptic that's even like attempted a plausible explanation for how these relics are still here. Okay. This is one where they seem to be just at kind of a loss, like dumbfounded at how to explain it.

And so that that's one of the things that impressed me the most about it. But the second thing that impressed me the most about it is that because the time that the relics would have to be forged, if they were forged, was so long ago, basically the feasibility of fraud is so much less than even in the modern period. So if we're just taking one case, rather than making like a cumulative case where we had to go through each miracle and then look at them conjointly,

this is the one where it seems to me that fraud is just kind of practically impossible, that it's just ruled out by all the circumstances, both because of the preservation and because of the time period during which the fraud would have to have taken place. Okay. So anyways, the basic story is

that we have a story of a doubting priest back in the 8th century who witnessed the elements perceptibly transformed during mass after the consecration in his hands. And then they were basically stored and have been perpetually venerated in Lanchiano, Italy, since then,

so since the 8th century down until today. Now, what skeptics will point out is, and they're right to point this out, that there is a gap in the provenance where we don't have contemporaneous documents from the 8th century describing the miracle. And there's a period, there are periods of time where we don't have like a chain of custody where we could go and prove 100%. Now, we have lots of circumstantial evidence

that the relics existed and that it's the same relics, but really the last time we can prove, for fact, 100%, there's no doubt at all that the relics were there and were being venerated as ancient, is an Episcopal inspection that took place in the 16th century. So we have further evidence, like for instance, we have people saying at the time, There were Greek Latin manuscripts that recounted the history of the miracle that would be entirely appropriate for like eighth to 10 century Episcopal records that wouldn't really make sense as a forgery for a bunch of reasons. And then basically that those were stolen and those records are now lost. So we have sources that are noting the existence of this, you know, or like for instance, there are ancient paintings depicting the relic that are being described back in the 17th century and the 16th century.

Those paintings are no longer extant. But like we know that, so we know that there is credible evidence that. that they were ancient and that they go back. I mean, I think it's actually even very, very secure that they go back to at least the 13th century, but it probably goes back much further than that just based on the historical evidence alone. Like we have a basically 11th century reference

that seems to be describing exactly these relics. Wow. In Italy, basically both species perceptibly transformed and then they're stored in the altar, you know, the wine put in the chalice, etc. And so we see on the screen what the artifacts of that miracle look like. So on the left side, we see the flesh, the miraculous flesh,

and on the right side, we see the miraculous blood, which kind of, it looks, it's like coagulated blood clots, basically. Yeah. But it's very, I mean, it's a very weird aspect macroscopically because you're never going to see anything in real life that looks like that. So we'll talk about that in a second, what exactly that is. But what's really awesome about this one is, is that we had this like completely amazing, super qualified scientist named Dr. Odardo Linoli,

who basically was commissioned in the 1970s to do a scientific investigation of the relics, where he's allowed to extract a fragment from the flesh and to extract samples from these blood clots and to basically do the full battery of the best available scientific forensic investigation of these relics that he could do at the time. And so before that, we actually couldn't really. make much of a persuasive case from these relics, because it would be so plausible that they were relic forgeries. So therefore, it's only really with this scientific investigation that's conducted, that we then get evidence where we could say, wait a second, if we actually start thinking about this, not based on testimony, this is not a case based on testimony,

this is a case based on inference where we say, we can exclude all the alternative explanations besides the traditional account of this miracle for how relics like this could have originated and then lasted for as long as they have. It seems like this has to have been a miracle. And so, when always investigation, basically there are six aspects to what he's able to prove about the identity of these relics. So the first part is just what we can learn about them

by just looking at them. And so that's most important for the basically flesh that we're looking at right here. So we see a circular, we see that it's basically a circle with a hollow cavity towards the center. So there's a concentric void, and the whole, the flesh is a circle. And it's about 55 to 60 millimeters in diameter is the size of this relic.

And so notice, and I'm already going to give away what we're going to say that this is, that's actually very consistent with the size of the left ventricle of an adult male's human heart. So basically what we can imagine is think about taking a transverse section, cutting transversely. Think about taking a hollow, basically if you had a hollow, hollow organ that's like a sphere. Yep. And then you took this circular thing and then we laid it out flatly what it would look like.

Yeah. And so we can actually see exactly what that would look like, setting them side by side. So this is, this would be a human, this is a human heart. This is a transverse section of a human heart. And we can set it, and so that's the left ventricle right there. And we can set it beside the Lanchiano flesh. And we can actually see, now obviously, despite going through maybe more than a millennia of aging, at least centuries of aging, obviously there's going to be changes.

And especially since we don't actually know the initial conditions that the relic found itself in, or exactly the method on either theory by which it would have been procured, we should never expect to be able to establish a perfect correspondence just by looking at something with the heart. But if we look at it, it's already very interesting that you would have a circle with a hollow cavity with this central, basically discrete protrusion in the middle that seems to match that sort of like, intraluminar muscular projection that we're seeing

on the right side of the image. And so already just looking at it macroscopically, it kind of actually plausibly looks like a transverse section of a heart. And so that's something we importantly need to keep in mind when we start thinking about the rest of the data. And part of that is that if we thought about a fraudster,

there's no tradition associated with Lanciano of venerating the relic as anything other than flesh. They're not even claiming it's a heart. And obviously, I, not being a medical doctor did not notice or at all occur to me looking at that at first that that would have anything to do with the heart. Me neither. Right.

If anything, I would have thought that it started out as a host and it kind of freight. That's what I thought. Right. Exactly. And so you would think they would make a circular, fleshy disc, right? Yep. And so then it would have to be a coincidence if it started out as that circular fleshy disc that it would actually basically disintegrate over time in such a way as to become a plausible

match for a heart macroscopically. Yep. But meanwhile, there's not any reason since the fraudster's not passing. it off as a heart, for them to try to make it seem like this like transverse section of a hall organ. And if you tried to prepare it this way, it would actually be very hard for many reasons. But so anyways, then we go further. And what we look at is that Dr. Linoulli then puts this under a microscope.

And so we can see here the photomicrographs basically, and I'm not going to talk us through this. I'm not even the right person to have do that since I'm not an expert in, you know, histology. But we rest assured that we have two experts in histology that actually personally looked at it under a microscope. Basically, Dr. Winole himself, who is eminently qualified because he's basically like the director of a laboratory at, you know, this regional hospital in Tuscany who has tons of hands-on experience. And he's a professor. And so he's, you know, he's certified to basically train young doctors in chemistry to train them in, basically, gross anatomy to train them in, like histopathy. All the stuff that's right everything that's exactly relevant to all the stuff he did is all the stuff that he's certified as a professor to teach and which he routinely does like weeding quality control for this hospital Wow so he's the best guy in the world to do this and he calls his friend

Okay Ruggiero Bertelli who's an atheist who is a doctor who's a professor at the University of Siena which is one of Italy's top secular universities and he sends him the histological preparations and so Bertelli looks at it under a microscope too. And both of them concur that these photomicrographs, and specifically there's a lot of stuff that we also don't see in the photomicrographs, this is just what they're making available for us in their publication afterwards, that what these depict is basically most consistent with striated muscle, specifically myocardial muscle from the left, well, I mean, not from the left ventral, you couldn't tell that from the histology, but basically from the heart. And then subsequently, Winoli does another follow-up investigation in the 80s, 10 years later, where he looks at leftover fragments, he didn't look at the last time, and he finds additional features that confirm the

previous diagnosis in the leftover fragments. So already, we just looked at it, and it kind of looked like a heart in a weird way that didn't make much sense, given the provenance of the relics. Then we look at it under a microscope, and we've got two guys, including an atheist, who, basically, Dr. Serafini, who everyone should go read his book, a cardiologist examines Jesus, if you want to learn everything about the Eucharistic miracles. And Dr. Serafini, not only is confirming their interpretation that this is clearly evidently cardiac muscle. But he also went and talked to Rigero Bertelli's grandson, who said that even though he remained an atheist, Bertelli was kind of profoundly affected by this for the rest of his life. So then that already is

telling us this is a heart. And we can start thinking further about the implications of that, but let's just continue with the other data. So there's four more things that Lunali does. So the next thing that he does is let's confirm, is this a human heart? And so there was a test where we can have very high confidence in the reliability, the specificity of the test and the certainty of the test, because it was accepted as proof beyond reasonable doubt in like every court in the world, and it's been extensively validated by dozens and dozens of control tests. Okay, so you'll see people try to cast doubt on this, but notice, in the forensic literature, people weren't doubting it. In courts, people weren't doubting it. There was so, there's extensive validation of these

tests. And so in the only context in which people are suddenly developing all these qualms and worries is now when we're talking about a Eucharistic miracle. And he does, so he does the test, this precipitin test for species. And he does it alongside controls. So he does it. He has a bovine control. He has a rabbit control. He has a saline control. And so no reaction at all with the rabbit, no reaction at all with the bovine. Very quick, clear precipitin bands with the human. No reaction with saline. And so he demonstrates that, which basically what Dr. Serafini says, looking at this result, is it is, quote, qualitatively unquestionable, and quote, that that was true human, I mean, that that was true human, basically, tissue. So both the heart and those blood clots. Okay. So

species identity, very secure. And it's also corroborated by other things, but that test by itself should already, it's already enough. Okay. Then we continue. So then we go and we ask, okay, What about the blood clots? We haven't talked much about those. How can we really know that those are blood? And it's not going to be by looking at them. The main way that we're going to do it is by figuring out whether there's hemoglobin there.

So whether there's degraded hemoglobin, whether there's denatured hemoglobin. Because they try some initial tests, these basically crystal tests, which in a degraded sample, it's kind of expected that you would get negative results. Or it's not at all surprising that you would get negative results

as even skeptics of the miracle concede. And so he tries those at first, and he gets negative results. But then he tries a technique called thin layer chromatography. And what he does there, and in triplicate runs, he shows. So if I put through this alkaline treatment, basically all of the, basically, fluid that I've taken from the blood clots, and I put that alongside, basically, hematin standards, the behavior that they have is exactly the same in triplicate runs in this, like, chromatography test.

And I won't explain all the medical and scientific principles behind the test works. But basically, what Linoli said, and he cited scientific literature to prove this, and I believe he's correct in his characterization, is that this was fully satisfactory to just prove blood. So it was fully sufficient for the recognition of blood by itself. Then he goes on, and after proving its blood, he then wants to determine the blood type of, and so he does blood type for basically you do something called the absorption allusion reactions. and so you see whether you get these agglutination reactions

with the anti-A and the anti-B serum. And so he does that with the samples from both the flesh and from the blood clots, and he gets concordant AB results in both. So it's AB blood in both cases with the AB. And so that further corroborates that it is blood, way more expected if it's blood than if it's not blood, that you get those results after we already prove blood

chromatographically. And it shows, it's suggestive of a common origin because AB is a very rare blood type. You know, like in today's modern Italy, I think it's like 4%, right? So picking it random. And you have a convergent result between these two that happens to match all the other Eucharistic miracles too. And so if you multiplied the improbabilities, it starts to get truly astonishing. But there's lots of criticisms of the A, B, that have been, this is the main line of attack

that skeptics have against Eucharistic miracles, specifically Dr. Curse and Dr. Trisankos. But I don't think those criticisms hold water because they rest on conflating what is theoretically possible to occur. with any estimation of the statistical likelihood of something occurring. And when you actually start to think about the likelihood and the scenarios that would be involved, rather than just saying there is a theoretically feasible scenario where something could occur, you then start to realize that this is strong evidence. Because it's just help, even if the AB results were fully invalid, it wouldn't disprove any of our miracle claim.

This is a convergent, concordant, corroborating result. And so if you're having to posit like a huge fluke just to explain that away, That's bad news because that's very secondary evidence that you're already having to go to great lengths of desperation to refute. But so we continue further, and we basically get to one of the most striking results, which is the protein electrophoresis, or the cellulose acetate electrophoresis that Dr. Winoli does. And what he does there is basically shows you that we can see a distribution of serum proteins in the blood that perfectly corpus. corresponds to basically fresh human blood serum, the fractions of each type of protein. So like the albumin and the alpha globulins, the beta globulins, the gamma globulins, he's showing you that the fractions of them all match up with each other,

just like they wouldn't fresh human serum. And Father Nizudi pointed out that this is a very remarkable result, because normally, if you had stored this chilled in a laboratory refrigerator, blood for more than basically a week at more than four degrees centigrade, you wouldn't have been able to do the test. And so, and you look at it, and if you're looking at ancient blood, where you're getting protein fractions, you can recover proteins from ancient blood. And there are very modern techniques that have been developed that allow you to basically detect like these like nanogram, you know, per liter concentrations of proteins. But for the test he performed to work, you would have to have like orders of magnitude, more globulants that I think you've ever found in any ancient sample.

and for them to be preserved in the same relative proportions, the gamma band of this test gets inflated in a very consistent way to where forensic scientists have proposed using it as a dating method, like as a way to determine how old it is, how it becomes gamma inflated. And you didn't observe it in the way that you would have expected where you just had the denaturation and then basically a shifting towards this left side

of his little electrophoretic tracing. So already it's very anomalous biomolecular, preservation for ancient remains, both in the abundances and in the proportions. So it's completely extraordinary and unfathomable that you're getting that result. But anyway, so Dr. Winoli has proved all of that. And so what we can walk away concluding is this is real human blood, this is real human cardiac tissue, it's likely, basically of transverse cross-section of the left ventricle of an adult human male. And that was these ancient relics.

We just had the relic forgery, whatever our credence was in that, how likely we were going to think it was that we were going to get these results, just assuming forgery, already very astonishingly unlikely. But we can go through and even see why it's impossible. So another datum that Linoli gets for us is there's no hint of preservatives or fixatives that have been applied to these relics. Now, let's already think about this logically for like 10 seconds. So one is, if I go and I cut a slab of meat off of a pig and I lay it on a table and I don't treat it,

is it going to be here two weeks from now? Is it going to be here a month from now? Is it going to be here a year from now? It's uncured meat is not going to be preserved. No matter what method you use to try to desiccate it, even if you had very optimal conditions, You're not going to preserve it for centuries. That's not actually going to happen. Because the problem is, I mean, first is, you're probably never even going to avoid the immediate

putrefaction of the flesh. And that's especially true for myocardium because it's highly cellular. There's a lot of moisture content in it. So, like, heart tissues, it's not like the normal meat that we would eat and that we're used to, like, doing normal food preparation with. It's very hard to preserve myocardium. And so to put it out there in... non-airtight reliquary, where we can literally see there's fungal colonies on the surface

to put that out there. And so it's, it's, you clear we haven't suppressed bacterial activity. You clear we haven't suppressed these cycles of the thing getting dehydrated and rehydrated over and over again, which causes its eventual destruction. You haven't been able to do, you haven't, it's exposed in many cases to the open air, and so you're going to have like oxidization. So based on everything we know from the field of taffinomy, so about the preservation of soft tissue.

This shouldn't be possible. There's no example. Even skeptics who are like these like paranormal investigator miracle debunkers who's like a chemistry professor, he was forced to concede. He's like, look, the proteins can be preserved. But I must admit it's a little bit different to have a small slice of myocardium exposed to the open air lasting hundreds. I can admit that's a little different.

Because if you're looking at like mummies, that's like you're embalmed, you're completely sealed away from air and humidity. They're treated with these extremely sophisticated chemical agents. that we're, you know, we, in some ways, we can't even mirror the full quality of a lot of this stuff today. You know, you look at things like these like Chilean mummies and it's like, you know, there's like natural preservatives that have inseminated the soil and they're like in like the driest nonpolar desert on earth. And meanwhile, these are in a porous reliquary like in this area with lots of fluctuating humidity and temperature in Italy and this heart tissue is being preserved for centuries. Right. And it's not even clear how you could have preserved it without the application of the initial preservatives in the first place, without a weird extreme environment, which the for, but think about it from the perspective of a forger, if this really is a forgery.

If you went to all the work to go, say, dig up a dead human corpse and then perform a complex dissection in order to take a transverse section of the left ventricle in this pre-modern fraud and then tell nobody that you were taking heart tissue, if you went to all that work, are you just going to be like praying for a rare preservation anomaly? to happen so you can pass up the, what are you do? What is the, what is the scenario that you're imagining? And so then, but then, can I, can I offer an objection that I know is not new to you? So you said what, sixth or eighth century? Eighth. All right. So eighth century, there's this whole conspiracy, maybe the parish priest is in on it. They get a chunk of meat, they get some blood, voila. And then they just keep up that conspiracy over the years by replacing, the meat and the blood. And right before the 70s, when they knew there was going to be scientific testing on it,

that's when someone got, you know, got a part of the heart and put it in. Yeah. Could that be the case? Well, so, I mean, I think it's extremely unlikely. So. Because it's not like we have photographic evidence. The skeptics are definitely probably not going to concede it goes back to the 8th century. I think they're probably just going to bite the bullet on like all that circumstantial evidence

for earlier date doesn't work. And so then they're probably going to say, like, this is probably like a high medieval, you know, maybe very early modern forgery. And so then what they're going to probably say. What's the earliest evidence that we have of this that skeptics would agree? There's a 1570 Episcopal inspection that we just know happen. And where we can know, it's like relics of similar aspect to these, you know, are recorded then. Okay. And so we can be very confident.

So they write about what it looked like? Yeah, yeah. From there, starting in the 16th century until now, we have a very, we have a good chain of custody. Okay. And we have good descriptions of like, we're constantly publicly venerating and displaying the relics. And so everybody knows what they look like. Okay. We have descriptions of what they look like.

And like, you know, like in the 19th century, we know exactly what they looked like to the letter. You know, basically it's like exactly the same, like even to the weights. Do you have drawings of it prior to? Well, so there's, I mean, definitely not as early as 1570, but the, um, basically we have an epigraphy inscription so we know that you don't create an epigraphic inscription like out of nowhere for this relic the dish of but anyways So I'm fine with just the the thing I always reason arguendo with people is just I'll let you assume it's a it's a modern like an early modern Even though I don't think we can get that. Okay, so it's probably a high medieval like maybe I'll give you early modern just to be super duper charitable to yeah So then there's something you're talking about there which is like the constant

swapping hypothesis, which really doesn't make any sense. So as an explanation. So the first problem for why constant swapping doesn't make sense is just because there was no reason why this, you couldn't have just replaced it with like inorganic substitutes and then not needed to continue swapping it. Then second is, it requires like a series over centuries of a bunch of independent religious friars all deciding to become conspirators in pious frauds. independently of each other in sequence, in unbroken chain.

So that's already a very incredulous theory. And then for them to do that, to replicate the actual appearance of desiccated, basically soft tissue and blood clots over and over and over again. Well, presumably they were, but maybe they weren't. Well, no, but that's the problem is they're replicating the appearance. So, like, if we're replicating the appearance, if it looks qualitatively similar, then you're creating something that is plausibly soft. tissue for, but regardless, let's just, let's concede. So you found a bunch of friars

that separated by centuries are all willing to do. This brings a lot of money into our town and to our church. So we need to keep this going. So I'm going to die, but it's your job to replace that. Right. It helps the people's faith. So then that helps the economy. That brings us, so it seems really implausible to me for a lot of reasons and that you would keep replicating the qualitatively similar things and that nobody would notice the difference between the two things. because they were all constantly decomposing. And so I think that's probably not true. But okay, fine.

The Catholic Church actually has interesting and effective means of preventing relics substitution. And so one of the coolest ones that we have, and this at least puts these relics back until 1880, at least, is what's called Episcopal seals. And so what we do is we have the reliquary, and we have basically a seal that we're going to stamp on it using a bishop's unique matrix,

to where if you break the open the reliquary to tamper with the relics, the seal has to be destroyed. And we intentionally design the seals to where they're kind of hard to replicate, and they're also going to be signs of aging, so you'd have to make it look like an old seal. So basically,

the fraud that would have to occur would actually involve, like, a very convoluted replacement of the Episcopal seals, and then without leaving a trace that you had destroyed the previous seals in order to swap out and then substitute the replica relics

of the things that are constantly being publicly venerated. So that's already, okay, that's pretty bad. But okay, so then let's say somehow that did occur right before Winole's investigation. Well, how in the world are these friars going and getting basically transfer sections of hearts that they're desiccating and making to where they can be relatively stable

to where they've lasted since the 70s until now without using preservatives? that show up in the laboratory analysis. And then also that are stored in conditions where they shouldn't be able to produce the electrophoretic tracing they did in a week. And so it doesn't really make sense. So I think there's a lot of problems with substitution theories. I mean, we're barely scratched the surface. Like, for instance, when we discovered what seemed to be basically tiny little incisions that look like holes

that were basically used to like stabilize the relics early on. So basically indications of an ancient merleks. Crovenants for the sample that people weren't drawing attention to and that seemed way too meticulous and attention to detail for the fraud hypothesis. But anyway, once you're willing to posit, like, a massive epic conspiracy involving, like, wildly implausible and risky actions by a bunch of religious people acting independently of each other in order to go, like, for seemingly no other reason than, like, the advantage of the church that teaches that they're going to go to hell if they do all these things that they're

doing and never repent of it. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't believe that. Yeah, okay. But also, even if that were true, actually, it's hard for me to imagine how you'd produce those. So those blood clots right there. So here's, if you've ever seen blood stains, you'll notice they're like kind of like a trace, like a residue, basically, like a thin residue. You don't generally see a coagulated mass that's preserved of like a blood clot like that. Right, right.

And if you think about what desiccation is, so basically what we're trying to do, when I say desiccation, what I'm talking about is removing moisture, drying something out, right? Moisture is a real problem because the moisture is, there's going to be enough water activity that you're going to have basically like a proliferation of bacteria, and then it's going to putrify, and then it's going to completely decompose and there's going to be this exponential growth, and then it's going to decompose. And there also is like atolysis, so the natural way that cells destroy themselves is going to advance. So to preserve things, you tend to want to draw water out of them really fast. But the problem is with blood clots, they're like this fibrin network that's almost entirely constituted by the moisture. Like with soft tissue, it has like a scaffolding, like a cellular matrix that can still be there when you take the water out. But with the blood, it's like, how do you take the liquid out of the blood while preserving the structure of the coagula? So like these discrete coagula that are freestanding masses like that are depicted there in that chalice.

It's very strange how you would even possibly forge that and achieve the preservation that you did with that. These are some of the most fragile biological materials on Earth. I'm not aware of any example in history of a preservation of anything like this. Yeah. Just real quick, I want to get on to whether or not miracles could be demonic deceptions. I want to conclude by asking what is someone to do who has objections to the Catholic faith as they assess miracles. Could we just spend maybe 15 to 20 more minutes on this one and then move on to that before we have to wrap up? Yeah.

And I mean, we can even be faster on this one if you want. It's up to you, yeah. But I'd say like 15 more minutes on this one. But yeah, but basically just the question I would pose to the skeptic who doesn't believe that this is naturalistically inexplicable is just to answer these two questions. Okay. Tell me a story that's a plausible sounding story where you have the double coincidence of the fraudster deciding. deciding to procure a fresh human corpse rather than animal tissue,

which is indistinguishable from human tissue at the time, readily available. If you wanted a heart, you could even do a pig heart. It would be perfect. Wow. But you didn't decide to do that. You decided to go for the heart rather than superficial muscle,

even though you're not going to advertise it as a heart. Right. Then you decide to do this complex dissection without fixatives that when Oli is saying, like, no, you'd have to have a very expert hand in anatomical dissection, and even then this would be very difficult, and I don't even understand how you would do it.

And I give a bunch of arguments on my blog for why it actually would be physically impossible to do it, given the constraints they were working in. But okay, fine. And then you decide not to use preservatives on any of it. You figure out some way to make those blood clots. I don't know how to do it. And then you have the double coincidence of that with extraordinary unprecedented preservation anomaly that the fraudster can't even be involved in personally. Yeah. Just tell me how that's possible and make it sound plausible.

And then whatever that theory is that you told me that you just made sound plausible, remember that you're saying, whatever you is, to say Lanchiano. You're going to have to say it five more times for the rest of my Eucharistic miracles. Then you're going to have to say it for all the Padre Pio stuff we just talked about. Then you're going to have to say it for Lucia. Then you're going to have to say it about Lourdes.

Then you're going to say it about Guadalupe. And I'm going to continue going all day long. And how many of these are you willing to pause it? Yeah. Yeah. Is there more you wanted to show us on this particular miracle? That's really amazing. A book you would recommend for people who want to dive deeper

into this. Obviously, they can check out your substack article. Link below, but what else? The number one is Dr. Franco Seraphini, who's just done the most amazing spectacular work on Eucharistic miracles. And he has a book called A Cardiologist Examines Jesus. And I think it's the definitive book. Okay.

Now, I know we touched upon this earlier, but how are we to think, if you have more to say on this, of non-Catholic miracle claims? And then I also want to ask, because you debated that fellow recently, who suggested that the apparitions at Fatima were perhaps demonic. So how are we to know it's not demonic? So those two things first. Yeah. And so those are basically,

let's start with basically framework for thinking about non-Catholic miracle claims. Okay. And so basically my response is going to be, I totally concede that miracles happen across all religions, all sorts of people get their prayers answered. Sometimes the prayers are answered in ways

that are miraculous, okay? And sometimes they're even verifiable that basically a miracle has occurred. And they were done in such a way that it seems like God wanted people to be able to verify that a miracle had occurred. I concede that doesn't only happen in Catholic context.

However... What's the most convincing non-Catholic miracle claim in your estimation? Well, it depends on our... Even a miracle claim that took place in a non-Christian context. Well, yeah, there aren't many of those that are even all that convincing, but there are a few. But the miracles that are the most convincing from a non-Catholic context, I mean, first, there's a really good case called Barbara Schneider, which is basically a healing, that took place where there's just very extensive medical documentation.

It's totally inexplicable. It'll be reminiscent of some of these Padre Pio healings that we've talked about. But really, the most impressive, I think, that everyone's going to hear about is Our Lady of Zaytun. Absolutely. Which everyone is repeatedly hearing about that's happening basically in the context of Coptic Orthodox Church, where Our Lady is appearing over this Coptic Orthodox Church over a period of three years, seen by somewhere between 250,000, and a million people, including Muslims, including atheists. you know, government does an investigation, they can't figure out how it would be a fraud or a conspiracy, you know. And so there's lots of conversions. There's lots of miraculous healings associated with Our Lady of Zaytune. And this was actually one of the first miracles, as I mentioned at the beginning, that I personally had learned about. And so, and it was the one I was familiar with even before converting to Catholicism. Now, there's things to think about for Zaytune, which is, it's almost in many ways the exception that proves the rule. So there's absolutely nothing in Zaytune.

That's at all antithetical to Catholic doctrine. Let's think about that. So first, our lady publicly manifesting her presence during a time of turmoil and war, you know, to unite Christians and Muslims and, you know, the cops who have been so consistently persecuted throughout history and who are engaged in ecumenical dialogue with the Catholic Church around the time these things are, you know. So basically, there's nothing at all unfriendly or antithetical to a Catholic worldview about conceding the veracity of that phenomena. Now, on the other hand, if we pose the question, can a Copt concede Fatima? Can you concede all the revelations to the seers and say that all those were substantially true,

and nonetheless, that Coptic orthodoxy is the one true church and not the Roman Catholic Church? Can you concede all the private revelations to Padre Pio? Can you concede all those statements that he made and still remain Coptic Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox? Can you concede a distribution of Eucharistic miracles where we are all believing that God uses miracles to confirm his word, as this is taught in Mark 16, we all believe that that's true, but nonetheless, why would all the best scientifically verified Eucharistic miracles be occurring in Catholic context if you had the one true church? Why wouldn't you have comparable evidence for yours that was as good? And you can't say it's a selection bias because God is providentially in control of the universe. So if he's trying to get a message

out there, he can't be thwarted by selection bias. He can get, he can make the evidence appear. He can make it happen. He's a smart guy. So he's not limited by those sorts of human constraints if he's trying to show to the world what the true religion is. So then I would say that asymmetry in itself for how difficult ours are for you versus how innocuous yours is for us is illustrative of the principle, which is, yes, miracles, even vindicatory miracles can happen in non-Catholic context. But when they occur, they will not be an authentic miracle as opposed to a demonic deception and vindicate something inconsistent with Catholic doctrine. That will never occur.

I'm committed to that never occurring. So if you think you have an example, me and you can have a discussion about it. You know, I can come and try to debunk it and I'll be your interlocutor. You heard of one in a Christian context? Well, yeah. I mean, there's lots and lots of claims, which is why there's something I want to get to, which is actually my schema for dealing with claims. Because everybody's going to come out of the woodwork with a million claims.

But there's a difference between having a claim. So having hearsay testimony, having reminiscences, having, you know, all this stuff, and giving a presentation like the one I just gave. And the presentation, so I want you to find in your religion, don't just nebulously gesture for me towards there are lots of claims or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me your closest parallel to Fatima, and then we can look at what your closest is, and we can look at Fatima, and then I can start scrutinizing your thing. But before we do, even taking your thing at face value, we could ask, which one of these religions does it seem like God is more excited about? And I want to make sure you can pass that test And there's nobody in the world that can and I think that's already telling Nobody can nobody can give the presentation for one of their miracles that I can give for these

Except for the cops in our lady of Cydoon basically And so then we can but we continue Into three categories of miracle claims in other in non-Catholic contexts and three responses that we're going to give So one example of a response that we'll give is just to say that it's a spurious claim Yeah And the vast majority of miracle claims are false. So therefore, the mere fact of a claim, without the additional substantiation and corroboration, like we're talking about here, the fact that you have a claim is not good. Even sometimes testimony.

Lots of multiply attested testimony, even from people who were firsthand, you would not believe in researching the number of examples of that quality of testimony that I've found that I can then show was spurious. It just turns out retrospective memory is unreliable, especially when people are giving testimony a lot later. There's a certain fraction of people that will tell lies that will seem implausible or surprising to us. There's a natural tendency for legendary embellishments to occur and for exaggerations to occur. There are misinterpretations that happen all the time. Sometimes there are coincidences. So all these things do happen, and they happen with great frequency, which is why you need to be as forensic and analytical about verifying each case as we've been here, and not just super credulous and be like, well, everybody has claims.

therefore everybody's on a par. No, claim is not the same as what we just did. That's not a claim. So we want very concrete, solid evidence and corroboration. And then we can start talking seriously about the implications and how to harmonize it with the Fatima and the lords and the Lanchiano and the Padre Pio and all this stuff. So then the second category is going to be actually one last point on that, which is even for someone like Padre Pio where he's a true miracle worker. Yeah. There's tons of miracles I can debunk that get claimed in connection with Padre Pio, more than I can confirm.

And so, and Padre Pio himself acknowledges this throughout his life, that many people are claiming miracles from him that he just thinks couldn't have happened and claiming he said things that he didn't say, et cetera. So also, you could have people that did true miracles, but then the vindicatory implications of that get distorted over time because basically additional stuff gets added to the war. And so that's another thing that you have to be very careful about when you're basically examining these.

carefully, which is even if there's true miracles, that doesn't mean that whatever the tradition or devotional narrative is about the event is true in its substance. It could be just, there's a core that's real, and then there's a narrative on top of that that's been like a superstructure imposed on it. So then second is, okay, we can concede that it's a genuine miracle, as I just did with Zaytune, but then point out that the vindicatory implications of it are consonant with or consistent with Catholicism. And so if you maybe, if you just looked at that one miracle in a vacuum, maybe you would conclude that religion. But then if you looked at the overall distribution of miracles, you'd see they're all clearly favoring both qualitatively and quantitatively

the Catholic Church. And we're by far the best, and we can prove all of our distinctive core doctrines that way. And so it just establishes it beyond reasonable doubt. Then the third category is basically demonic deceptions. And we all have to believe that demonic deceptions occur if we're Christian. So if we, for instance, if we're believing in Matthew 24 when our ward is prophesying for us that there will be many false prophets that will come and will perform false signs and wonders that would deceive even the elect if that were possible. When he's saying that, it would be astonishing if we believe Christ and he's prophesying that if it weren't true. So then we can't have these Christians that are so reluctant and reticent to ever say that anything was demonic.

They're so ashamed to claim that some of these things that happen in these contexts. are demonic. But no, there are demonic deceptions. They do occur. Sometimes they're not even deception. Sometimes our Lord is just making it plain that demons exist. And he's giving that to us almost as an extraordinary grace that he's forcing the demons to manifest themselves clearly and conspicuously. And so, for example, Dr. Richard Gallagher has a book where he goes through and he's a psychiatrist and he's a personal witness to many exorcisms. And like he has one example of this Julia case that is... Tell me about it.

It's completely incredible. I have quotes that we maybe can read concerning Julia. Yeah. You're going to sum it up for us first? Yeah, well, I almost think it's helpful to hear it in Gallagher's words. He's better at summarizing it. So here's who he is. He's a medical doctor.

He's a board-certified psychiatrist. He's in private practice. He's also an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. we have a bunch of attestations from secular doctors that are like, this guy's like a real deal. He's a real psychiatrist. Like, we respect him. Like, he's smart guy. So if we're about to call this guy like a massive liar, because there's no way he's about to be honestly mistaken about what he's about to say.

And I can present lots of cases that are very multiply corroborated. But just Gallagher's book is a great one for people to look into if they are really skeptical that demons are real and that they are active in the world today. Yeah. So here, and here's what he says concerning the case. So all the facts presented here are true and verifiable. by the multiple and highly credible individuals involved in her care, Julia revealed a long, disturbing history of involvement with explicitly satanic groups, an obvious historical antecedent to her then-present condition

and to her accompanying psychic abilities, as they might be characterized. Julia was not the typical type of individual who frequently importunes the church for help, but who really is in need of psychiatric or other medical intervention. She was in no way psychotic. In fact, she was consistently logical, highly intelligent, and even quite engaging at times, despite her obvious turmoil. Because of the complexity of this case, we assembled a team to assist.

At varying points, this group comprised several qualified mental health personnel, at least four Catholic priests, a deacon and his wife, two nuns, both nurses, one psychiatric, and several way volunteers. We made a number of phone calls to arrange gathering together to help Julia. Julia herself was not in on these phone discussions. She was far away from the area at the time. Astonishingly, Julia's other voice, again sometimes deep, sometimes high-pitched, would actually interrupt the telephone conversations and somehow come in over the phone line.

The voices would espouse the same messages. Leave her alone. Leave you idiots. She's ours. Get away from her. Julia again said later that she was unaware of any such conversation. And yet this speech was heard distinctly by several of the team on a number of occasions. As mentioned, even outside her trances, Julia unmistakably displayed psychic abilities. Put another way, her presence was clearly associated with paranormal events.

Sometimes objects around her would fly off shelves, the rare phenomenon of psychokinesis known to parapsychologists. Julia was also in possession of knowledge of facts and occurrences beyond any possibility of their natural acquisition. She commonly reported information about the relatives, household composition, family, deaths and illnesses, etc., of members of our team, without ever having observed or been informed about them. As an example, she knew the personality and precise manner of death, the exact type of cancer of a relative of a team member that no one conceivably could have guessed. She once spoke about the strange behavior of some inexplicably frenzied animals beyond her direct observation. Though residing in another city, she commented, so those cats really went berserk last night, didn't they? The morning after two cats in a team member's house uncharacteristically had violently attacked each other at 2 a.m. as another example Julia once described

not only the actual surroundings including the decor of his room but also the exact state of his mind skeptical and dismissive of a priest peripherally involved whom she had never met the facts were subsequently precisely confirmed Julia could also consistently depict from afar with amazing detail

the activity of one of the principal priests involved she would repeatedly report from her distant vantage whether and when he was in pain he suffered from recurring illness often where he was for example walking on a beach and remarkably even what he was wearing for example windbreaker rounding out the picture of this case

finally where the happening during the lengthy exorcism rituals that Julia herself requested. There were two series of sessions separated by a period of time. The exorcism began on a warm day in June. Despite the weather, the room where the right was being conducted grew distinctly cold.

Waiter, however, as the entity and Julia began to spout vitriol and make strange noises, members of the team felt themselves profusely sweating due to a stifling emanation of heat. The participants all said they found the heat unbearable. Julia at first had gone into a quiet, trance-like state, after the prayers and invocations of the Roman ritual had been going on for a while,

however, multiple voices and sounds came out of her. One set consisted of loud growls and animal-like noises, and which seemed to the group impossible for any human to mimic. At one point, the voices spoke in foreign languages, including recognizable Latin and Spanish. Julia herself only speaks English as she later verified. Julia also exhibited enormous strength. Despite the religious sisters and three others holding her down with all their might, they struggled to restrain her. Remarkably for about 30 minutes, she actually levitated about half a foot in the air. The presumptive target of the exorcism, the entity or entities that were possessing Julia, could also distinguish between holy water and regular water.

She would scream in pain when the blessed water was sprinkled upon her, but gave no reaction to clandestine use of unblessed water. During the ceremony, she also, as previously, revealed hidden her past events in the lives of various attendees, including information about deceased relatives, completely unknown to her. The case of Julia illustrates a number of the classic signs of possession, the venerable Roman ritual, lists a strongly suggestive signs prominent among others, hidden knowledge, the ability to speak in unknown language, abnormal physical strength, other elements traditionally associated with possession were evident, invariably expressions of hatred of the sacred, blasphemous, and retuppertive language,

the ability to discern blessed objects, the phenomenon of levitation, and most importantly, a translike state interrupted by the presence of what appears as an independent intelligent entity and the expressed desire of this intelligence not to be afflicted. Whoa.

Who wrote that? That was by Dr. Richard Gallagher, the board-certified psychiatrist. Hmm. And there's no way you could be honestly mistaken about that. So either he's a pathological liar who did not. treat any further patience.

Like, if you were a person who doesn't believe that testimony, like, you need to try as hard as you can to get him, like, you know, unable. When was that written? This is the, so this is the, and actually, I have a friend who actually knows Gallagher actually quite closely, but I may, I may have to get actually the information on the exact dates for all the Julia Diaries. He's a contemporary. Yeah, yeah, this is recent.

That's recent. All right, yeah. So, mhm. Demonic deceptions. So basically, the claim is. just based on the cases where God forces demons to reveal themselves. We already knew it as a revealed truth that demons existed, and that's amply confirmed by the miracles that our religion is true,

so we already knew demons were real. But it also helps, I think, emotionally for us to see that there's direct evidence that demons are real and that sometimes there are extraordinary manifestations of demonic power where they, for instance, possess people, and there are all these paranormal prodigies that accompany that. And so this leads us to, as the church consistently advises us when it investigates miracles,

that in addition to proving that something is naturalistically inexplicable, we also need to use spiritual discernment to preclude a demonic explanation, or otherwise, basically, it's entirely reasonable to think that maybe demons are involved. And so there are a few, basically, criteria for spiritual discernment that we can use, and which criteria will be persuasive to you will largely depend on how much you share in common with us to start out with. And so talking to different interlocutors, I have to argue in different ways. when they want to explain, when I want to talk about demons, right? Because if you're a Muslim or you're a Mormon,

you have a different set of shared commitments than the Anglican that I was speaking with, right? Right, right. Where when I'm speaking with the Anglican, when I'm trying to prove how you can tell whether something is demons or not, I'm just basically going through the New Testament and basically doing a litany of proof text

to try to show distinguishing marks of when it's demons versus when it's not demons within our paradigm. Yeah. But then there's sometimes when, if I'm just talking to an atheist who's like, why isn't it more plausible it's demons than God? there's a separate set of answers that I have to give to them

than I can give to people who share authorities in common with us. But just to mention, there are basically three criteria that we're going to use that are always going to be consonant with each other and that which can all independently be sufficient. So notice, sufficient meaning, if you were to verify one of these were present, you could verify it wouldn't be a miracle.

It would have to be a demonic deception. It would have to be a miracle. Okay. Meanwhile, there are certain necessary criteria where we would go and say, if this is missing or this is lacking, then it couldn't be a miracle. It must be a demonic deception or be naturalistically explicable. But so sufficient criteria, basically three categories. So first, theological, second, moral, third, physical. So those are three categories we can look at.

Theological, the most basic and foundational one that doesn't presuppose any revelation is just that things have to be consistent with the preambles of faith. So basically what we can know about God through natural reason alone. And so if something contradicts that, then basically it couldn't be authentic. However, you shouldn't have supreme confidence in your ability to do philosophy, right? So a lot of times, even if you perceive a contradiction, if there's clear evidence that one of the other criteria is met, then you should go with that rather than just assuming that your ability to apply basically theological consistency is good. And we know that God will make available things that don't presuppose any revealed truths, though he probably will, he can require us, though he tends not to, to only use natural reason to discern. So, for instance, if a person is not even claiming to invoke God the creator, so the simple, infinite, ultimate,

ground of all being, if they're not claiming to speak on his behalf and to perform a sign on his behalf, God is going to give us less protections for making that distinguishable, because he just expects us by natural reason to know, hey, you can't just go around trusting every super powerful spirit that's saying stuff and doing magic tricks, right? So because that's an unreasonable expectation to begin with, you're given more free reign, if you're a demon, to basically do crazy stuff in these pagan contexts where they're just not even pretending to be God. But a thing that God's really worried about is he wants it to be possible to speak with humanity. He wants it to be possible for him to sign his name to a revelation. And if demons were allowed to do perfect forgeries that were invincible deceptions where there was no possible way you could tell without pre-supporting. that you already knew the religious truth, that would completely defeat the possibility of God

ever communicating to us through objective signs, which is something that at least all Christians will be committed to God. It's definitely possible for him to be able to do that. He's not going to let us be invincibly deceived, where there's nothing reasonable that we could have done to get out of a deception. But that first part of theological is just consistency with preambles. Who are you claiming to speak on behalf of? If you're not claiming to speak on behalf of God, then God doesn't need to make sure there's practicable ways to detect deception, because you're not even really impersonating God, then in addition to that, everything is going to have to all revealed truths are going to have to be consistent amongst themselves, otherwise God is a deceiver. And if God is a deceiver,

then we're all in a skeptical scenario. Why not think that God is just systematically deceiving us about everything for some profitable end? Like, he's the one who designed all of our faculties. Why even think they're truth tracking rather than whatever this thing is that is a non-truth end? You know, and if he's coming and he's lying to us and he's trying to deceive us, basically our entire project of trying to figure out the truth about God through studying the world is already defeated. So we do need to assume that God is truthful and therefore that all revelations will be consistent amongst themselves. And so therefore, if we have really strong miracles and then really weak miracles, and we can't

see why this one is wrong, but we know it conflicts with way stronger and queer ones that are also more plausible given all these other commitments we have, that could be a reason to reject it. Yeah. Though, in fact, even if just like how the Bible will always be consistent amongst itself, but will not always be clear to us how to reconcile the contradiction. The same sorts of possibilities can occur, and we always need to keep that in mind. So that's the first category, which is all these theological criteria. The second category are the moral criteria, which is basically just if someone is

claiming to be a divine legate, one way they're going to be accredited to us as a divine legate is through their sanctity. And especially if their revelations and them being chosen and anointed by God, as a prophet is something that seems to bear moral fruit in their lives. This is what our Lord told us to do. He says, beware of false prophets, you know, because, you know, bad tree can't produce good fruit, good tree can't produce bad fruit. By their fruits, you will know them, even though they appear, you know, their wolves and sheep's clothing. And so we look for the moral fruits. And is this person a good person? Is this person a bad person? Does it seem like this person is bearing the fruits worthy of repentance in connection with basically divine revelation to them?

And then, in addition to that, what moral effects are they having on others? And is there even a plausible demonic explanation for why the demons would want to perform a deception of this kind? And our word sort of presupposes that when he's accused of doing exorcisms by the power of Satan. He says, how can Satan drive out Satan? You know, how then can his kingdom stand? And so what he's saying there is, you don't need to use this logic that's like they're playing 13D chess because they're super smart and you'll never be able to tell because they're going to do something that seems good. by all accounts, but actually is bad.

He's saying, no, don't worry about that. We're going to make sure that you can always tell where there may be deceiving superficial appearances, so it has to be a careful, in-depth investigation. But you're never going to have to posit these extremely contrived, like, where there's no at all detectable indication at all that there's anything nefarious going on. There's going to be evident signs of moral rot in connection with this,

either as to the character of the seers themselves or as to the effects that they're having on people that are, believing in the revelations. And so, part of that is the end, which is being served by the revelations, part of that is the honesty and integrity of the legate. God is not going to generally give a public mission to be a prophet to someone who is habitually and serially dishonest. So, for instance, Joseph Smith, you know, we look at him and his character is atrocious and abominable. You know, like for instance, in 1844, a month before he dies, he gets up before a large congregation in Navajo, Illinois, and he tells them,

that, hey, these Navu dissenters are coming out with these allegations that, like, I'm a polygamist. What a thing it is for a man to be accused of adultery. You know, they say I have seven wives. I can only find one. I'm as innocent now as I was 14 years ago. And then he says, I can prove them all perjurers. And then what does it turn out to be the case? Even conservative LDS historians now concede that he had at least 33 wives at the time that

statement was made, that he had been sleeping with at least some of these wives behind Emma Smith's back, that Emma Smith had been very reluctant about all of this. Emma Hale Smith had not was, had reneged her consent after she had given it in a brief period. There was probably even like an adulterous affair with Fannie Alger that had occurred earlier. The guy is involved in the occult. He was a treasure seeker. He was scamming people for money. He was involved in all these nefarious financial schemes. So those are the kinds of evidence signs of moral depravity. When someone's a divine legate who's performing false signs, God's going to make sure that stuff like that that comes out and that people can tell this guy is a bad apple and you should not bet your

salvation on this being a good spirit rather than an evil spirit that he's speaking on behalf of. I mean, we don't even need to begin with Muhammad. And so when you see these false sex emerge, you see that there are evident signs of moral rot that God will make available so that we can tell by the moral circumstances. Meanwhile, contrasts that with Fatima, right? So with the Fatima children, no sex scandals, no lies, no financial fraud, no sear stones, you know, no, no money digging. What do they do? Penance, prayer, accepting deaths with resignation, willing to basically suffer martyrdom to

avoid lying or even embellishing a secret because there was no reason they couldn't have just made one up if they didn't have a strong commitment to not lying and to not deceiving. You know, you're looking at them. They're just having, their sanctity is radiating from them. I mean, we already talked about it with P.O. So, yeah, we were looking at the moral fruits, and we're just recognizing, like, there's a clear contrast between two types of cases. There's the cases that are happening in the Joseph Smith context. And then there's the cases that are happening in this context.

So even if I can't tell by the physical circumstances, and even if you're not confident in your ability to do the theology to realize that, you know, God was not a man and there's not this infinite regress of demiurge gods creating all each other. And, you know, there's not like a prophet named Brigham, you know, Brigham Young who's coming and, like, in Dornham. Slavery in a racial priesthood and then that none even if you can't figure that out There's going to be evident signs of moral depravity Then finally physical circumstances which is and this is presupposed throughout scripture That there are certain things that demons could only do in appearance, but they couldn't do in reality They exceed the power of demons in reality So therefore if you actually were able to get moral certainty about the physical circumstances

So let's say the Catholic Church did extremely thorough investigations of all the physical circumstances God, now obviously a demon who's clever enough could simulate any physical circumstances they wanted if they were given just completely free reign. Sure. But the Bible presupposes that God wants these criteria of physical circumstances to be practicable, because otherwise he wouldn't expect people to use it. So for instance, when he says, so that you may know that the son of man has authority to forgive sins, get up and walk to the paralytic, if when they're accusing him of basically blaspheming

by derogating the authority to forgive sins to a man, if, their direct personal experience of watching him do that verifiably for this paralytic, if that were not sufficient, then his claim would be unreasonable, right? You wouldn't be proving it because it could just as easily be demons. In fact, if you're saying 15,000 Fatima healing miracles are demonic, just like my Sean Luke did in our debate, if you're saying that, if you're saying, so restoring sight to the blind, restoring sight to the death,

basically making the lame walk. So going through the entire New Testament ministry of Jesus with all the signs, like the man born blind, when he heals the congenitally blind man, they say there's a debate amongst the Pharisees with themselves. And some of the Pharisees are like, what? How can he do work on the Sabbath? And the others are like, okay, how can a sinner perform such signs?

And Sean Luke is literally siding with the guys on the other side. And then the man born blind comes in, and he says, nobody has ever heard of someone restoring sight to a man born blind. You know, God doesn't listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man and does as well. If he were not from God, he could do nothing. So that's a confession of faith by the man born blind.

mind in it weighing in in this debate. And their response to this is like, oh, well, the sense of the faithful doesn't really matter. It actually was kind of a specious argument. Like, actually, what he needed to do was go and consult all the scriptures to make sure there was exact doctrinal conformity. Right. Right. That's a little ridiculous. Yes. So we basically can go. And there's a great book by Father Gary Goulogne, the great Thomist of the 20th century. If you go check out his book called On Divine Revelation Volume 2. He has a very in-depth treatment for people that are curious. about the, basically, criteria for how to tell physical circumstances if it exceeds demonic power, if it doesn't. So, like, one of the examples is Isaiah 48, basically God makes it clear, you know, so you know that your metal gods didn't ordain it, I told you before that what was to come, which implies that determinate foreknowage of future events is a criteria by which people are expected to recognize that something is a true divine oracle and couldn't be from demons.

So therefore demons must be able to make speculative inferences, but they must not have that kind of determinate for knowledge of the future. In Deuteronomy 13 versus Deuteronomy 18, we see in Deuteronomy 13, the preambles of faith distinction that I made before is explicit, where it says, if a false prophet comes and he announces a sign or wonder and it comes to pass, if he then says, let us go follow other gods, you basically ignore him. You don't follow them under any circumstances. Yeah.

But in Deuteronomy 18, when basically we're getting a prophecy that there's going to be a greater prophet than Moses that's going to come and teach us everything, that prophecy in Deuteronomy 18, they say, well, and how are we supposed to know when it's like a false prophet, when we have to fear the prophet or when if prophet is spoken presumptuously? And then in this context where they're drawing the distinction between those claiming to speak in the name of God versus those claiming to speak in the name of God's, the ones who claim to speak in the name of God, the criteria that's given in Deuteronomy 18 is if it doesn't come to pass, then you don't have to fear them, with a contrastive implicature. Well, no, if they're claiming God's name.

And this is what Father Gary Gula Grange says. He says, God will not allow for there to be a pre-announced sign through the invocation of the name of God, the Creator, that comes to pass, that leads men invincibly into air. Because that would be so unreasonable to be able to forge his signature in that way. Yeah. And so exactly the type of circumstances we're dealing with in Fatima, that's exactly the sort of thing that you're not going to let God, that God's not going to allow to occur. Even though demons can predict what they're going to do in the future, and there's no problem with that. But specifically, God is very defensive about forging his signature. He's not going to try, there's restrictions.

And so, like, for instance, when basically Pharaoh's magicians also turn their staffs into snakes. Well, first, they, what our exegetes point out is they never invoke the name of God, the creator, to perform the black magic signs. So already, they're not trying to forge God's signature. And second, in the immediate context of that act, God then demonstrates this a piece of, efficacy of his power by having Aaron's rod swallow up the snakes of the demons. So in the immediate context of their false signs, God makes it clear who actually has the superior efficacy. Yeah.

And so then, basically, if we generalize that to the overall distribution of miracles, is it really true that, which is more true, the Anglican claimed miracles are like the equivalent of Aaron's rod swallowing up the serpent of the Catholic miracles, or is it the opposite? Is that God demonstrating the superior efficacy of his power in Catholic context? so that someone who astutely and with an open mind studied the miracle record, they would clearly see that there was one top dog that was above the rest. And so they would use miracles to figure out what the religious truth was. That's really helpful.

All right. As we begin to wrap up here, I want you to address those people who are impressed somewhat by what you've laid out today and maybe about other miracle claims that they've heard of or have seen. But because they have, you know, issues with Catholic doctrine, they can't bring themselves to a lot of. accept it. And so maybe they're in the position that your Anglican friend was in where he's like, I can't see how this isn't demonic because it contradicts with what I see scripture to teach or something like this. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I would encourage everybody to do is to first have very little confidence in your ability to do abstract philosophical reasoning that lots and lots of very smart people throughout history have all disagreed about and clearly

most of which have gotten wrong, as opposed to very direct and simple, just like demonstrations, where it seems like you're almost seeing something is true. So we know miracles have to be good arguments, because just go back to the hypothetical I said at the beginning, which is you're there for all the events in the New Testament. You're there for Jesus walking on water, turning, you know, water into wine. You're there for him healing the paralytic, restoring sight to the blind, raising Lazarus from the dead, raising himself from the dead in a glorified body, doing all the predictive prophecy, you know, giving the divine ministry to all the apostles and the apostles go out and do all their miracles and have superpowers. If you're there for all of that,

the problem of evil is not remotely going to be a good excuse or reason to disbelieve in the existence of God as the explanation. And there are just certain things where there's lots and lots of ways that a mysterious infinite being that far surpasses your intelligence and your imagination could behave that will seem counterintuitive and perplexing, where you're not going to fully understand it. And that's actually what the entire virtue of faith is. The entire virtue of faith is God saying, I've proven to you that it is me. So it's reasonable for you to believe that I am speaking. These are the miracles that prove it. So you can trust this and it's not unreasonable. It's not credulity. You can trust this and it's rational to trust this. I have reasons of which you know not.

My ways far surpass your ways. I need you to trust me and I need you to do as I say. Because if you try to plan, you're a worse planner than me. You've got way less context than me. So stick with the plan. plan. You have very limited understanding. You're very feeble and weak-minded. So listen to me and try to be simple and docile to submit to instruction, to listen to an authority that I've instituted above you rather than to make yourself this sort of like metapope or arbiter of truth into your own God. And in fact, this is part of the reason God loves using miracles to authenticate revelation. He doesn't come. He could have sent our Lord if he wanted to. Our Lord could have come into the world and just like carnivoned everyone in like philosophy debates. And he could have come and

he could have done like the amazing theological arguments. But that's not our Lord's actual rhetorical strategy. The rhetorical strategy of our Lord is get up and walk. You're blind, now you see. So you know who I say I am. You know I am who I say I am. Yes. And so it's precisely that, which allows us to be docile, which allows us to say, my faith is not rooted in human wisdom, as St. Paul says, but in God's power. My faith rests on God's power, not on human wisdom. And human wisdom is so fallible. And so don't bet your salvation on human wisdom

over arguments like, there was no leg, there was a leg again. So leg, no leg, leg, that argument is very simple, very direct. It shows your atheist road view is false. You've got to abandon it. And we keep going further and further and further. for whatever religious tradition that you're a part of. Yeah. If you don't, if you drop the presupposition that your religion is true,

because if you're a part of a religious tradition, you know there's all sorts of special difficulties with your tradition that you're not know how to work, you don't know how to work through and you don't know how to explain. And that's fine. Making negative arguments is a very bad way to figure out what's true. There's a million ways to explain away any difficulty or any possible objection.

What we're looking for are really good, what do we have the best positive reasons to believe? And these are the positive reasons. These are the foundation that then give us the license to say it's okay that I don't know how to answer this. It's okay I can't debate every top Exodus historian in the world on the historicity of the Exodus. It's okay that maybe Bart Ehrman could stump me about some Bible contradiction. I don't care because, you know, he was blind and now he sees.

Praise God. Yeah, that's really helpful. Any advice to someone who's trying to believe, wants to believe? I've met a lot of people. I was in Ireland a couple of years ago and a fella came up to me on the street. I said I've been watching my shows for a long time now, really wants to believe in Christ. It just doesn't know how to make that jump.

Well, the first thing I would ask anyone who says that is what is it that you want to believe? And I think if we actually look down and we ask ourselves and we confront that within ourselves what it is that we want to believe, oftentimes there's a lot in Catholicism that we don't want to believe. to believe and that we can't bring ourselves to accept.

And that a lot about what this process is is making peace with that. And the first stage of that is actually going to be clearly articulating what our grievances are, what our problems are, what we can't bring ourselves to accept. And so what is it about the Catholicism that we don't want to be true? I see. And then once we- Not what we can't justify as true through philosophical reasoning, but what we don't want to be true.

Right. And once we name it, and then once we lay out the evidence in faith- We lay out the reasons we have for not wanting it. That's good. When we weigh those side by side and we name it, I think a lot of times people will realize that even though they're claiming they want to believe, they don't really want to believe, and that it is a heart issue, not a head issue. The head issue is that, we can solve that.

It's a heart issue. And so there's only one thing I would say to a person who has a heart issue besides just naming for themselves and confronting what their problem is. Excellent. Which is, just say the rosary and ask our lady to soften your heart. in your heart. And that's all, the only advice is the more you will say the rosary, just and make a commitment to say it once a day, five decades of the rosary, once a day, and actually do it. And if you do it, I don't despair of your salvation at all. Have you tried this with friends? Yes, and it works.

I've often thought the same thing. I've given a, I've given a rosary out to different guests on the, on the show who haven't been Catholic and they'll sometimes reach out to me and say they're still praying it. I'm like, just a matter of time. It's like God's lasso or something. This has been really marvelous and I'm so glad how old are you? I'm 24. 24 so you were four years old when I got married. I'm so glad that our good Lord is raising up good intelligent souls like yourself who can articulate these things for us. That's not meant to be flattery. I'm just very grateful that yeah. Well, thank you so much. I'm very grateful for all the things that you've done. I mean you played a huge role even in my conversion. Oh, okay. Well,

praise the Lord and we'll put links to your substack below and people are going to hear more about you and I would love if you would love if you would let me to maybe pray because I believe I I sometimes do interviews where I know people's lives are going to be changed to you know like it's just it's just like a deep piercing intuition I interviewed a fellow on the shroud of Turin I think I saw that one that and that did have a big effect on me did that glory of God and I just knew as we were like I mean, people are converting. I'm never going to meet them. Would it be okay if we just maybe offer to Hail Mary together?

Yeah, that would be great. And you can conclude. And we just, yeah, okay, in the name of the Father, son and Holy Spirit, blessed Mother, we entrust everyone who will come across this interview, who will watch all of the interview, who will watch part of the interview, more likely.

And we pray that they would be led into a relationship with the good Jesus and Holy Mother Church. 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. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. Whenever I do long interviews like this, I always tell people who are still watching to leave a comment below,

to prove that they watched it all the way through. And it's usually something weird that they have to write that makes every other comment are curious as to why everybody's writing it. Give me like a weird phrase or a weird word that they can put in the comment section to prove that they have watched all five hours. Antelope. Cantaloupe?

No, antelope. Antelope. Let's get very clear. Antelope. All right. I love it. God bless you, brother. Thank you so much.