Pints With Aquinas - A Church in Crisis w/ Dr. Ralph Martin!

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

Renewal Ministries! https://www.renewalministries.net 📘 Dr. Martin's Book A CHURCH IN CRISIS: PATHWAYS FORWARD: https://www.renewalministries.net/shop/product/a_church_in_crisis 📕 Fatima in Lucia's Own Words: https://www.renewalministries.net/shop/product/fatima_in_lucias_own_words ▶️ Ralph Martin Responds to Bishop Barron on the Salvation of Non-Christians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNfybpGrxc FREE E-book "You Can Understand Aquinas": https://pintswithaquinas.com/understanding-thomas/ SPONSORS Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd Ethos Logos Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ GIVING Patreon or Directly: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/ This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer co-producer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd 

Hey, Matt Fradd here, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting us directly at pintswithaquinas.com.com. Or at patreon.com. Matt Fradd, when you do that, even for a dollar or $2 or $10 a month, you help this show to continue and to expand. We're flying people out every week to Stupendale, Ohio, putting them up in hotels, paying for debaters, upgrading our equipment, not to mention trying to pay people who work here at Pines with Aquinas. So any dollar amount would be a blessing to us. Thank you so much for considering. Dr. Ralf Martin, hello. Hello, Matt. It's good to be here in your real studio rather than doing this by Zoom. Yeah, there's something that's lost in Skype interviews. It's nice to be sitting across the table from you with your flannel shirt.

That's right, I feel so comfortable being able to wear my flannel shirt. It's what I most prefer to wear every day of the week when I'm at home and I heard it was okay to wear it here. Did you hit an age where you just started being like, this is what I'm gonna do from now on. I'm just gonna wear this one thing they talk about people as they get older.

I've already hit that stage. I wear black shirts and jeans and that's pretty much it. Well, I've always preferred this from a very young age and I've tried to wear it whenever I can, although sometimes I have to wear a coat and tie, you know? I don't know if you remember this, but the first time I met you, I was speaking at a Defend the Faith conference

back in maybe 2013 and I was used to speaking at youth conferences back then and so I show up at this gathering of all y'all wonderful brilliant PhD people and I had ripped jeans on and a superhero t-shirt on, green lantern. Well that's appropriate gear for talking to young people, right? But here in this room I've got Dr. Ralph Martin, Dr. Janet Smith, Dr. Scott Hahn, Pat Madrid, and I remember Scott said, yeah, you've got the youth vibe going on. I looked at the person who drove me from the airport and I said, we need to go and change clothes now.

Find me somewhere to go. But of course it's Steubenville so I'm not sure I forget where we went but anyway. Well I still firmly believe that God loves people no matter what they wear. Really? I do. Interesting. It's a little bit of an outlier kind of position these days. Well it's good to have you on the show. Renewal Ministries is doing phenomenal work. I was telling

you before the show, your YouTube channel has really taken off. People love hearing what you and Pete Herbeck have to say. And I think it's because you're addressing a lot of the crises in the church and the culture, and yet you're proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord through it all. So you have the orthodoxy and the straight talk of, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, when COVID hit, you know, all our international travel was cancelled, all our domestic travel was cancelled. So we said, what are we supposed to do? So we decided to try to speak to people now through our YouTube channel. We had maybe 7,000 subscribers when COVID hit and I never really did YouTube videos. And so Peter and I began to alternate weeks and it's really grown.

We have over 54,000 now and it just seems like people want to have a clear voice. You know, like when the trumpet doesn't give a clear sound, who's going to come for battle? So we feel like the Lord's given us some clarity about what the gospel is, some clarity about who Jesus is, some clarity about, yes, indeed, we've got big problems in the church right now, but it's okay because Jesus is the Lord. That's great, it doesn't feel like we do have a clear trumpet blast.

I mean, it felt like with John Paul at the helm, we had somebody we loved and trusted, and the church may have been a mess, but we felt he was on our side, Benedict the same thing. Pope Francis we had high hopes for, but it doesn't seem like we have a strong, holy leader in Pope Francis.

You tell me if I stated that too strongly and feel free to... Well he may be strong and he may be holy, only God can judge, but he's certainly not clear. We are getting a lot of conflicting signals, we are getting a lot of ambiguity, we are getting a lot of very troubling actions and decisions, so it doesn't, you know, some of these things we don't have to guess at what's going on, we just can say it's objectively bad. Okay, see, this is good.

What you just did there was really good, because you're right, I shouldn't have made that judgment about His Holiness or whatever, because that's an internal thing. But we can point to actual real things that we're seeing with our own eyes, and that's good, okay. Yeah, and a lot of people don't want to admit

that we're seeing those things, but we have to kind of, if we're gonna have solutions that are realistic, we have to be real about what the problem is, and we got some very significant problems in Rome, like when Pope Francis kind of appointed a new person to head up the John Paul II Institute of Marriage and the Family and put Archbishop Poglia in charge of it, who is mostly known for the homoerotic mural he painted in his cathedral

and his bankrupting his diocese. And when he removed the two professors who were really experts in John Paul II's theology of marriage and family life and reappointed two people who were dissenters from Catholic doctrine on contraception, and even wrote articles opening to homosexual relations, we say, what the heck is going on here? But nobody's pursuing that. It's just been done, it's going on, and nobody's asking the tough questions

at Vatican press conferences about how could you have appointed people who are undermining Catholic teaching to John Paul II's Institute on Marriage and the Family. And then of course you have you know the Amazon Synod and you know they say one picture is worth a thousand words and that picture of people prostrating themselves in the Vatican Garden, one Franciscan in his habit, in the presence of Pope Francis, venerating, clearly venerating, little statues of naked pregnant ladies that mysteriously the Vatican press office would never tell us

what they signified or where they came from or who was paying for them, and they were carried in a canoe into St. Peter's Basilica, they were there at the dais, you know, during the synod. And then the first person to identify who it really was was Pope Francis after some German lay people threw them into the river. God bless him. In Tiber, yeah.

And Pope Francis thanked the Italian police for recovering Pachamama. Yeah, so the cat's out of the bag from Pope Francis. And Pachamama, of course, is an earth goddess from Latin America. And so, we're saying like, you know, and then of course in the post-Sinodal Amazon exhortation that he wrote, he replied to criticism

about that saying, well, you can use these symbols without idolatrous intent. So, okay, they weren't intending to worship idols, but it sure looked like something was going on where veneration was being paid to an earth goddess, you know? And so this is confusing for people. I mean, and then of course the bishop who was appointed in charge of, the main person in charge of the content of the Synod on the Amazon, bragged that in 39 years of ministry in the Amazon, he never baptized a single person.

So evangelization, what are we talking about? What kind of conflicting signals are we giving? So I could just go through a dozen things like that, including the most recent thing with the visit with President Biden. Well, let's do that because I was in the airport and I opened up, I think, a copy of the Washington Post and it said that Pope Francis said that Joe Biden was a Catholic in good standing and can keep receiving Holy Communion. Now, to be fair, Biden seems confused about a number of things and so it's possible that he misunderstood. I think most of us don't suspect that's the case.

But the Vatican press, is that right? They didn't clarify what had happened. No, they still won't. So this is... What they say is a private conversation, we don't comment on private conversations. Yeah, you're the theologian, so correct me if I'm wrong. But if someone is in grave sin, public manifest grave sin. Receiving Eucharist is a sacrilege, whether or not it's public, it's a sacrilege.

So what probably happened, I'll say probably, you can back away from that if you want, but is that Pope Francis encouraged and sacrilege, which means that his soul and the soul of Biden aren't, there's a reason to think, aren't in a good place and we should be praying for our brother, Pope Francis, who may have just done something incredibly awful. Yeah. Well I think objectively... Talk me off the ledge if I'm going too far. Well, we don't know what happened. We don't know really what was spoken about. Abortion wasn't on the agenda, the official agenda. Hopefully it was on the private agenda. Hopefully Pope Francis would have talked to him

out of concern for his soul, saying, Joe, you need to repent here. This is really a very serious thing you're doing, advocating, killing babies on even a wider scale. That's really gravely wrong and you really need to repent, you know, and you shouldn't be going to communion. Now, obviously, Pope Francis didn't say that

because it would have been harder for Joe to say what he said. So we don't know what he said. Maybe Joe said, you know, I'm trying to be a good Catholic and the Pope encouraged him, you know, like, yes, I'm glad you're trying to be a good Catholic and the Pope encouraged him, you know, like, yes, I'm glad you're trying to be a good Catholic, that's good, and Joe kinda added something that, you know, obviously that means I should still go

to communion, so we don't know if it was a setup. You know, we don't know if it was a setup by the Biden advisors to kind of a- You are very good at this, charitable. You're very charitable. I think for the rest of us, we're just so tired of making excuses that we're just done. That's kind of where I'm at.

But I think what you're doing is the way to go. Well, we don't know. It could have been a setup where Joe said something big about being a good Catholic, and the Pope said, yeah, you're a good Catholic type of thing. Or maybe he said something like, oh yeah, yeah, just follow the guidance of your bishop, Cardinal Gregory, who was on record for giving Joe communion, you know, that type of thing.

But here's what really troubles me. Vatican diplomacy, Vatican protocol, probably overshadowed the concern for the salvation of Joe's soul because the Vatican never comments on personal conversations hardly, although there's a local pastor in Michigan who was trying to address the confusion in his people about this whole event and said, you know, if Joe came out of there saying the Pope feels like it's not such a big deal about the sexual abuse of children, the Vatican probably would have felt like they had to correct that saying, this was a misunderstanding.

The Pope didn't say that because the world wouldn't have liked that. The world, the culture wouldn't have liked that. He would have lost his credibility, popularity. So why wouldn't they consider abortion, even graver in a certain way, killing people? Why wouldn't they make a clarification? So you could say Vatican diplomacy, Vatican protocol,

they didn't want to embarrass the American president, but Vatican diplomacy and protocol can't trump the concern for the salvation of souls or scandalizing, literally scandalizing, causing people to stumble and fall, to believe that it's no big deal about abortion and we're making too much out of it, strengthening the hands of the American bishops who are in that camp which is a very bad camp to be in. I mean there's really a division opening now on the American bishop between those who really are manifesting that they believe the church teaching

and those that are sort of waffling and worse than waffling, which makes you wonder whether what John Paul II said years ago when he was just Cardinal, you know, Wotila, that we're in a final confrontation between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between the church and the anti-church, between the church and the anti-church, between Christ and the anti-church.

There's really a different gospel going on right now in the Catholic church. There's really a different church, which is a church of accommodation to the culture, cowering before the world. And so I think it's scandalous what Pope Francis did do and didn't do. And the purpose of the Catholic Church is not primarily

to be in good relationship with the nations of the world and not embarrass presidents who are living fornication. The President of Brazil came to the Vatican and received communion with his mistress in St. Peter's Basilica. We're saying, well, we shouldn't embarrass heads of state. Well, guess what? Our primary mission is calling the whole world

to faith and repentance in Jesus Christ and we can't let diplomacy and protocol trump the gospel and that's I think what's happening. Yeah, I think what we all wanna know what to do now is what to do now. Because those who are blowing the trumpet on the stuff that's coming out of the Vatican or whatever, often have a lot of good things to say, but it's almost like they wouldn't exist or continue to

make their funds if they stop saying all the negative things that are happening. It's probably a good thing that they're saying many of the things that they're saying, but it does tend to breed a sort of cynical spirit. Maybe I've even fallen into that, I'm not sure. I don't think so. But surely that's not the answer, just to keep ingesting ecclesial politics. Well, we need to remember people are tending to get discouraged or cynical or frustrated or fed up or whatever, and they tend to fall into reactionary camps of one one kind or another type of thing, like clutching for security onto certain things, falling into mentality of suspicion and fear, connecting our ecclesiastical frustrations with frustrations with the government and mixing things together.

So I just think we need to remember that all this is happening under the providence of God. Now this is really, really important and most people don't understand how radical the providence of God is. There's nothing that's happening that's not being permitted to happen by the Lord and he's got a plan to bring good out of it. So we've got to say, what's the good here? Well one good is that corruption and confusion within the church is being exposed, hopefully giving people a chance to repent. But if not repent, just judgment perhaps is coming because God is going to judge unrepentant wickedness. God is going to judge false shepherds and false teachers. God is going to judge people who are misleading the flock. You know, we have all kinds of prophets in the Old Testament talking

about church leadership at that time who were calling virtue vice and vice virtue and weren't giving a clear sound from the trumpet and were muddying the works and that type of thing. And so maybe the Lord's setting things up for judgment. But certainly what he's trying to do is bring purification to church. I have a chapter in the book I wrote on that, chapter five, it says stop straddling the issue. I think individual Catholics have to now

make a deeper personal choice than ever before and answer the question, who do you think he is? Who do you think Jesus is? If Jesus is answer the question, who do you think he is? Who do you think Jesus is? If Jesus is really the Lord, the only sensible response to make to him is total commitment and total obedience, eagerly wanting to know what he teaches, eagerly wanting to follow what he's asking us to do,

really becoming missionary disciples, which is a very radical thing to become. Not just somebody who believes in Jesus, but somebody who obeys Jesus, follows Jesus, and wants other people to come to Jesus. And a lot of Catholics need to be awakened to that kind of radical commitment to the Lord, because it's the only commitment that Jesus asked for in the Gospel.

Jesus is not asking for lukewarm commitment from anybody. He's saying, unless you love me more than mother and father, you're not worthy to be my disciple. And unless you renounce all and father, you're not worthy to be my disciple. And unless you renounce all you possess, you're not worthy to be my disciple. So if we want to really be called a disciple of Jesus, and that's the new buzzword in the church today, isn't it, Matt?

You know, everybody's talking about discipleship. But disciple is a radical commitment to Jesus, a radical commitment of obedience, of love, of personal loyalty. And I think the Lord's trying to gather together a remnant. I think he's trying to gather a nucleus in the Catholic Church, very much like Pope Benedict years ago when he was just Father Rastintor

where he prophesied that the church is gonna get smaller. It's gonna lose its buildings, it's gonna lose its prestige in society, it's gonna lose its reputation, it's gonna lose its money. But out of that, the Lord's gonna bring together a white hot fire of love for the Lord and love for people. And then he also prophesied, not in the form of prophecy, he's just saying, I think this

is what's going to happen, but I think he was really seeing things. Out of that's going to come people who become unspeakably lonely in a technological society are going to stumble across this little band of disciples and find a home they never knew existed. So I just think something big is going on, Matt. Glory to God. I think something really big is going on and it's totally under the control of the Lord.

So people ask me if I'm discouraged, I'm not. I'm excited. Oh yeah. I'm excited. The Lord's really about something very significant about the judgment of the wicked and the gathering of remnant. Now I think many of these people recognize intellectually

that there's probably been times throughout church history that we've had a great deal of confusion and sin from leaders in the church and even from the pope, but can you maybe shed some light on that? I'm sure you're familiar with this throughout history where there's been tremendous chaos and confusion and how the church is. Yeah, and people say, you know,

is this the worst thing ever? Is this the worst time ever? I don't know, but we do have some unique things right now that weren't present before. We really have confusion in the church happening at the same time as an incredible array of the powers of this world against Christ in the church. It reminds me of Psalm 2 where it says the kings of the world

array themselves against the Lord and his anointed. So all the levers of power now in culture today, all the levers of government, all the levers of entertainment, even sports, how about this, professional sports kind of government, all the levers of entertainment, even sports. How about this, professional sports kind of becoming woke, you know, professional sports kind of persecuting people for not going along with the global elite agenda. Education, I mean, it's incredible how public schools have so quickly become indoctrination centers for gender confusion and homosexuality and disobeying your parents and don't telling your parents,

separating parents from children. You know, so I mean, it's like, wow, I mean, there's a takeover about every kind of, you know, avenue of influence in our society by something really inimical to Christ and the church. And I don't think you can explain how quick our society by something really inimical to Christ and the Church. I don't think you can explain how quick and how thorough it's been without supernatural power.

It really reminds me of something Pope Benedict said after he retired. Could I read that to you? Yeah, because we do often kind of point to secret groups within the Church, but there's also the demonic who are seeking the destruction of souls and Christ's church. Yes, and Paul says our battle is primarily not against flesh and blood, not about political parties, not about Planned Parenthood, not about this, that, or the other thing. Those are instruments of spiritual powers that are just incredibly intelligent and incredibly hate-filled towards the human race

and towards Christ. And so people without even being aware of it can be actually instruments of the satanic. And what's the definition of the antichrist? Somebody who refuses to acknowledge Christ. And these movements, these organizations, these parties are opposed to the truth about Jesus. They don't mind a false Jesus.

They don't mind a Jesus in a church that you can use as a chaplain to their agenda. And I'm a little concerned that that's what the Catholic Church is being lured into. They're being lured into almost being like a chaplain to the UN or a chaplain to the global reset. But anyway, Pope Benedict said, one hundred years ago, everybody would have considered it to be absurd to speak of a homosexual marriage. Today, one is being excommunicated by society if one opposes it. The same applies to abortion and to the creation of human beings in the laboratory. You know, the latest announcement, we just kind of did a blend between a mouse fetus

and mouse cells and human cells. You know, this stuff is really, crazy stuff is really happening. Then he goes on to say, modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-Christian creed, and if one opposes it, one is being punished by society with excommunication.

The fear of the spiritual power of the Antichrist is natural, but it really needs the response of prayers on the part of an entire diocese and of the universal church in order to resist it. So, you know, not too long ago... Wow, that's so well put. You'd think that he was responding today, you know, not however many years ago that was. And not too long ago to have somebody with his respect talk about the Antichrist, you'd label it like,

come on now, this is a little crazy, you're getting into end time speculation, you know. But he's saying, people are beginning to sense that something big is going on that's really, really big and bad, and there's a natural fear about the spiritual power of the antichrist but then he says it needs to be countered by prayer, you know, that type of thing. And so, I mean, there's just so many places we could go with this, Matt, you know, so

many different directions, you know, Ephesians chapter 6, spiritual armor, you know, what the catechism of the Catholic Church says about the Antichrist. I mean, there's just so many ways to... Yeah, it does feel like for too long we haven't recognized the demonic. I remember sitting with a nun and a couple of Catholic women, and they found an old prayer book, this was back in 2003, and they were reading the St. Michael prayer and were astonished at how ridiculous it was. They had never heard of it before, and they were laughing at it and how silly it was.

Yeah. Archbishop Gomez just a couple days ago said something almost identical to what Pope Benedict was saying and that's pretty amazing for the president of the bishops conference, knowing that the bishops are divided, knowing that he's going to take flack for saying something like this. He said something very similar. He said that these movements of kind of global reset, and he mentions Black Lives Matter, he mentions other things, are actually in the process of forming an alternate world view and an alternate religion that has no place for Christ in the church.

Amen, yes. And he says, God bless him. He says we need to really be honest about this. That's what we're dealing with now. We're not dealing with a Christian culture anymore. We're dealing with an alternate religion and an alternate worldview that's coming up that we need to be really realistic about.

I'm gonna make a T-shirt that says reject secular dogma. What do you think? What is wokeism? Define it for me. Well, a lot of it is rooted in something called critical race theory, which basically says the world should be divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, and that the key to understanding history is that there's those who have the power and those who don't have the power and those who have the power and those who don't have the power and those who have the power are oppressed, those who don't have the power. So what we need to do in order to get equity. This is Kyle Mox.

It is. It's class warfare. And Arshar Shigoma specifically says that. He says this is Marxism coming in under all these new labels and we know where that goes. Now believe it or not Putin, the president of Russia about a month ago gave a long talk where he said the West is heading towards destruction because it's embracing this woke-ism and he says we tried this. God bless him. Yeah he says we tried this, we did this, it leads to a totalitarianism, it leads to eliminating people, it leads to disaster.

I mean, it's not human. He says this whole gender stuff is not human. He says it's not good for human beings. So who would have thought that- The ally in Putin. Yeah, that the President of the United States would be leading the charge to a post-Christian anthropology and a post-Christian religion really and he's basically, sometimes it looks to me like he sold his soul to get elected

because he used to have some reservations about abortion. He's a puppet. Yeah, yeah, but I mean like when the radical left put pressure on him to get the nomination he abandoned any resistance he had to any curbs on abortion. So you say, say well what people will do to get power you know it's really it really an awful scary thing that's why I'm so concerned about the salvation of his soul yeah but anyway so Putin so you've got the yeah United States president yeah pushing away from

Christ and the Putin guy saying the Judeo-Christian tradition about marriage and family and sexuality is what human beings need, you know, not that he's an icon of living it necessarily or anything like that, but it's so strange to come out of the Soviet Union a voice saying, we did this and it was wrong and it was a disaster and you're doing the same thing now. It reminds me of the same thing when the Catholic Church tries to accommodate to the culture. I feel like saying, do you see what happened to the mainline Protestant churches

who accommodated to the culture? Yeah. I mean, you can't drive downtown Ann Arbor right now without First Baptist and First Methodist flying their LGBTQ flags. I mean, it's like a different religion. It's directly contradictory to the deposit of faith, directly contradictory to the teaching of Christ to the apostles. And they're trying to win friends and influence

people and get members by changing the message rather than calling people to faith and repentance. So don't you see what's happened to those churches? Don't you see the decline in the Protestant churches? Why are we even thinking about this? Why are the German bishops even thinking of saying this is going gonna actually help us win people? People are gonna say, what's left to believe in? You're just coming around to the culture. The culture's fine for me, I don't need... What's sad though is what you're saying right now

is what faithful Catholics were saying 20, 30 years ago. But it's just escalated. Yeah, it's really escalated. There were many voices raised years ago, many voices raised years ago, warning about what was coming, but now it's here. And persecution is coming, persecution is here. I know lots of people who are trying to hope that their company they work for don't require them to sign on to things that they can't sign on to.

People are getting cancelled every day, people are getting removed from social media every day, people are getting fired from their companies or dismissed from their teams because they're not going along with the new agenda. And I'm just concerned that a lot of Catholics aren't ready to draw the line someplace and that they're gonna be kind of sucked into becoming actually part of the demonic strategy out of fear, out of cowardness, out of weakness and Jesus clearly says and he says this in the context of persecution he says if you deny me before men I'm gonna deny you before my father in

heaven now you say that is so shocking heaven. Now you say, that is so shocking. That is so harsh. That is so radical. How could justly Jesus say that? What does he expect from weak human beings? And I think the only way of understanding that is that the gift of Jesus to us is so immeasurably precious, so immeasurably,

takes our breath away what God the Father was willing to do so that we can be reconciled to him, that we can be forgiven our sins, that we actually could have the gift of eternal life. All these technology billionaires are paying lots of money hoping that they can extend their lives, you know, and, you know, extending natural life is one thing, and natural life is shot through a sorrow, sin, and ultimate destruction, supernatural life.

Like life of the resurrection, life of no more suffering and no more tears, a life of perfect communion of love with each other and with the Lord is what is being offered to us in Jesus. And so to reject Jesus is really a serious thing. Francis Martin, who used to do a lot of teaching here at priest conferences, a student of a very well known scripture scholar, recently died, he said, one of the gravest sins in the New Testament is the sin of unbelief.

Not to believe the testimony that God the Father has given to his Son. Not to believe the testimony of the Son himself, the way he spoke with authority that nobody ever spoke like that before, the signs and wonders he did. Not to believe the testimony of the apostles who said we touched him, we felt him, we saw him. This happened, we're witnesses to the resurrection, the resurrection did happen. And then Paul says, if the resurrection didn't happen,

our faith is in vain. That's because that means that death has the final word, even over Jesus. You know, death doesn't have the final word. You know, there's really hope for eternal life. What would you pay for eternal life, you know? Like, I mean, you know, it's like the golden ticket from Willy Wonka. We got the golden ticket.

I have to think we have to prepare Catholics for persecution. That means helping them to develop a depth of loyalty to Jesus, a depth of relationship to Jesus, a depth of personal to Jesus, a depth of relationship to Jesus, a depth of personal love for Jesus that they would not deny him, whether it's like soft persecution or hard persecution. But every time I talk about this, I feel like I also need to say, don't worry about what might come in the future. Yes, persecution is coming, and you need to kind of make sure

you've got enough to build the tower, you know, so you need to know that you're in that relationship with the Lord that it's not going to be easy for you to deny Him. But Jesus says don't worry when they bring you before kings and judges because at that moment it will be given to you what to say. The Holy Spirit will give you what you will say at that time, what you should do, what stance you should take towards the questioning. You know, sometimes Paul appealed to Rome. He used legal, natural methods to, it wasn't his time to go type of thing. Other times he used argument, he used debate. Other times he was, you know, snuck out of the city

by friends type of thing. But other times he knew that the time had come and so he went to Jerusalem, even though the prophets were telling him, you're gonna be arrested there, you're gonna be bound, you know, that type of thing. And then when he was in Rome, he said, I know that I'm about to be poured out like a libation

and the time comes, but other times you're supposed to avoid persecution. But Catholics need to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit. You know, Jesus says the Holy Spirit will tell you what to do, so that means we need to have a living relationship with the Holy Spirit. We really need to love the Holy Spirit. We need to pray, come Holy Spirit. We need to have as much of the Holy Spirit as possible. Amen, amen, amen. I think one of the things that we have to do at least is to start calling things by their proper name. Yes. You've read 1984.

Yeah. Get do away with language, change how we think. The words of heretic, apostatizing, I pronounced that right, didn't I? Yeah. I always think it's post-a-sizing. Post-a-sizing. Right.

So when we have fellow Catholics who are they fell away? No, they apostatized. They rejected the gift given them. And we have prominent Catholics doing that, like Audrey Assad, who was a beautiful Catholic musician, who was apostatized. Bless her, but pray for her. But she's made it very clear and there are others who are doing it. We have to use words like sodomy instead of gay. Fornication instead of hooking up. sodomy instead of gay. Yeah Fornication right instead of hooking up right adultery instead of cheating cheating. This isn't a game. Yeah This is at least and then we have to apply those ugly words to our own ugly behavior If we are engaging in these things and go to war on our ego as it were in the sacrament of confession We can't keep pussyfooting

around with sin and we can't keep pointing to the sin of others to make our own sins seem more bearable. God is not going to ask me about the sins of Joe Biden when the judgment comes from me. And so I have to want to, I have to hate sin in my own life, and have to be more committed to doing away with my own ugly sin than I would be if I had cancer. What would I be willing to bloody do?

Yeah, yeah. How much would I not be willing to pay? Where wouldn't I be willing to travel if I thought, gee, I might be dead here? And then I apply that to my sin, and I just find myself lazy and yawning and pathetic. No, amen, amen. Jesus said, if your right hand causes you to sin,

cut it off. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better to enter the kingdom missing an arm or missing an eye than to go down to hell with an attacked body. So Jesus isn't asking us to actually literally cut those things out, but he's saying, do whatever it takes to get free of serious sin. And he says don't be afraid of those who can kill the body, rather be afraid of the death of soul and body in hell. So

Catholics got to get their priorities right, you know. The biggest problem in the world is sin, you know, and that rebellion against God, that indifference to God, that refusal to worship Him, that ingratitude towards the Creator, the not valuing the precious gift of Jesus, you know. So yeah, we got a really, just what you said, really. And I think we have to band together, too. One of the things I've so loved about moving to Steubenville, Ohio is I know five or six families on my street who love Jesus Christ and want to be faithful. And if I was to abandon my wife in cowardice or abandon my family, I know I would have

people who would like smack me around in the sense. They would corner me. They would, you know, and that's obviously an extreme example. They would admonish the sinner. They would admonish the sinner. But I lived in Atlanta prior to this, and my closest friend lived a 15-minute driveaway. The church was a 30-minute driveaway. And I know not everybody can move to different places around the country, but I feel like living in this society is difficult enough without good brothers and sisters to

worship with. It's almost like finding a family in the modern world is like finding a child lost in the forest. You think you will not survive unless you have help. The modern family is everything in modern society is aimed at destroying it and sifting us like wheat. We have to do whatever we can, I think, to plug ourselves in with other sinners, yes, but people who want to be holy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I have a very practical example that my wife started a Bible, and her sister who lives near us, which is really a blessing, they started a neighborhood Bible study, and they just reached out to various neighbors, you know, some they knew already as Catholic. They asked the local parish for the names of Catholics that live in the neighborhood that they didn't know and invited them to the Bible study. So out of that maybe about 15 women have gotten connected and they're really supporting each other in a very significant way. You know, they're doing a weekly Bible study and it's sort of like that, you need to find other people

that you can make the journey with, that could strengthen you, encourage you, and they're reaching out. They're kind of challenging me to do something for the husbands. Good, do it, do it. Oh, it's hard. Do it anyway.

Yeah. No, this is not a comedy we've found ourselves in. This is Saving Private Ryan. So those women over a cup of coffee studying the Bible are like going to war. And I think if you try to understand your life in any other way, then you have a target on your back and someone hates you intensely. You won't understand your life. I won't understand my life. It'll just seem like a series of inconveniences and I can never seem to quite be happy as I wish to be. These health issues keep coming up and if only they wouldn't then I could

finally be... It's like no, we're at war. Yeah, yeah. No, they're concerned about the salvation of people in the neighborhood. They're praying for people for conversion, they're inviting people, they're trying to be witness through charity, you know, they bring meals to people that need meals, things like that. So they're living the Catholic life, you know, type of thing. So everybody needs to be connected somehow. Maybe you get connected through a Bible study at your parish. Maybe you can start to get together with people in your neighborhood that you know have Christian

faith, even ecumenically. And it's sort of like, yeah, we need each other. Or sometimes with families. Sometimes families are blessed by having blessed uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews and really kind of praying together when you're together in family gatherings and things like that, strengthening families. I just got together with my daughter and son-in-law

who live here in Steubenville with their five kids. They're a blessed family that's following the Lord. When you're raising kids, there's always challenges. But they're there with the Lord with those challenges. That's good, yeah. I gave them all a little holy card last night. What was it? Well, it was something that the Apostolat

for Family Consecration, which is just down the road. We were there. Printed. And it's the image that the three children of Fatima had during the miracle of the sun. during the miracle of the sun. Like during the miracle of the sun, the three children, Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia, saw things that nobody else saw. Like Mary was showing herself in different tableaus, so to speak, and one of the tableaus

was Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus blessing the people. And so. Tell us about Fatima, because I know that you've been, had maybe a renewed interest in devotion to the Lady of Fatima. Tell us how that happened and what we need to know. Yeah, I think it's incredibly relevant for right now. You know,

1916, three little children, a brother and sister, Jacinta and Francisco and their cousin Lucy, six years old, eight years old and nine years old were tending the sheep. They were ordinary Catholic kids, they weren't particularly noted for holiness, they were part of a Catholic culture so they tried to say the rosary every day, but they said it in a very shorthand way. They say Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary 50 times, you know, so they wanted to get back to their games, you know, whatever they're doing. So they're doing their super short and abbreviated rosary, and this image appears of a shimmering person. They said

it looked like a 15 year old boy radiant in light and he introduced himself as the angel of Fatima and he said I want to teach you a prayer and so the angel I don't know how much the detail do you want? I like this. This is helpful. People are out there watching this. This is real. They've heard of Fatima and they don't know much else about it. This is real and what the angel and Mary ask of them are also being asked of us. It's very important that we pay attention because it relates to what we're going through right now. So anyway, the angel bows down, puts his forehead on the floor and says, I believe in you, I adore you, I hope in you and I love you,

and I ask your pardon for those who don't believe in you and don't adore you and don't hope in you and don't love you." And then the angel said, "'Offer the sufferings that come your way as reparation for sin and for the conversion of sinners and say this prayer." And then he left.

So ever since, for the rest of their life they put their foreheads on the floor and prayed that prayer not in public but when they were by themselves. And then that was in spring and then in summer the angel returned. This time he was a little more direct and he said, what are you doing? Pray! You know, pray for the conversion of sinners, pray for reparation for sin. And then he taught them another prayer about reverence for the Eucharist

and reparation for all the offenses against the Eucharistic Lord and Mary. And then he appeared one other time. And then the next year, another shimmering form came to the mother attending the sheep, and it was a beautiful lady from heaven. She didn't identify herself, she just says, I'm from heaven. And they never identified her as Mary, although they probably had their suspicions until she told them, because they kept saying, tell us who you are, give us a sign so people will stop beating us up and start believing us.

And Mary asked them to do the same thing that the angel asked. She said, offer your sufferings for reparation for sin and for the conversion of sinners. And then the only thing she repeated in all six apparitions, she said, say the rosary every day for peace because the world is in danger. And she says, this war, World War I, is gonna end soon. You know, this was 1917 now, so the war ended in 1918. She says, but unless there's repentance, there's gonna be a worse war that comes.

And then she says, when you see a certain sign in the sky, know that the war's about to come. It was the Aurora Borealis that happened just before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. And we know that 20 million people died in World War I, 50 million people died in World War II, so there wasn't repentance, and it was a very severe punishment,

a very severe judgment on godlessness. Now, I don't think we're in a better situation than the people were in between World War and World War II. In fact, I think it's accelerated in a really negative direction. I mean, Catholic countries like Ireland have crumbled. There used to be a number of European countries that were holding out against the secularizing tendency.

There used to be Ireland, Malta, Poland. Poland's still holding out, but by a thread. Hungary and Slovakia are sort of in the battle too. But Malta legalized divorce, and it was like you pulled a thread out of a cloth, and the whole thing is kind of unraveling right now. I was doing a retreat for priests in Malta a couple years ago. I was talking to the auxiliary bishop and he said, the government no longer even consults us.

All they're doing is consulting us these radical change groups, the LGBTQ pressure groups. They know that the people don't believe us anymore. They know that people, we're 90% Catholic. They think we're an unentity. We don't count. People don't really believe the teaching of the church anymore.

And it's just all crumbling there in Malta. Then in Ireland, 800 years of poverty and persecution only strengthened the Irish people in their commitment, and they sent out missionaries all over the world, way out of proportion to their population. Irish missionaries all over the world. I was talking to an Irish missionary in Rome a couple years ago for a very famous missionary order and he said we don't have any novices anymore and we just changed our mission

statement to include promoting the rights of women. Yeah, they don't deserve any more novices. Taking concern in ecology, yeah. And they were just like sort of aping the world. They were adopting the world. They were adopting the world's agenda, thinking that was somehow going to help them attract vocations. It's such an incredible blindness, darkness, veil. They don't understand the gospel anymore. They don't know Jesus anymore. Yeah, they used to live there for three years. It was godless, I used to live there for three years. It was godless, oppressive. Yeah.

And then Ireland legalizes abortion not too long ago and tens of thousands of people flood into the streets of Dublin celebrating that Ireland can now kill babies like the rest of Europe. Like we're with it, we've joined the modern world, we've thrown off this ancient superstition. How dark is that? It's despicable.

Yeah, how tragic is that? And that is the apostasy you're talking about. That's apostatizing. That's rejecting the treasure that God gave the Irish nation through St. Patrick and all the Irish saints and all the Irish missionaries. For so many years, you know, people would risk their life to go to mass being set in the countryside on mass rocks.

And so, you know so my grandparents came from Ireland as immigrants and they had such a strong faith. They just insisted that my parents and us went to Catholic schools when Catholic schools were really Catholic. So it's just so tragic to see that. So we're in danger right now. Mary says pray the rosary every day for world peace. I try to do that.

If I miss one day, I say to the next day, you know. And then she also said, so many souls are going to hell because so few people are willing to pray and offer sacrifices for them. So besides accepting the suffering that comes to you as a normal part of life, Mary also said make voluntary sacrifices. So what the children began to do is sometimes they would give up their lunch, sometimes they would give it to the sheep, sometimes they would not drink water on a hot day. And I was talking to a Catholic grade school about Mary's appearances at Fatima,

and the teacher in charge asked them to write down what they got out of it. And I've got, like, I don't have them with me here, but 40 or 50 students wrote down, I'm gonna make voluntary sacrifices now. You know, when I have a chance to have candy, I'm gonna say no sometimes, or when my little brother teases me,

I'm not gonna tease him back, or I'm gonna sleep without a pill tonight, or the fifth grade boys basketball team decided to give up water during practice, you know, things like that, you know. So it's just sort of like little children are capable of understanding the mysteries, you know. So I'd like to say anybody working with little children, anybody who has little children, don't underestimate their ability to understand God, don't underestimate their ability to make a commitment to Him, don't underestimate their spiritual sensitivity and how even for an early age they can be called into a journey towards holiness, that type of thing. So anyway, people didn't believe the little kids, Lucia's

own mother probably never believed her to the day she died. She got beaten. So they say, Mary, could you please give us sign that people would believe us. But before that, one other thing happened. She gave them a vision of hell. In July, In July, the third apparition, she gave them a vision of hell and Lucia describes it. And she says it was absolutely terrifying what we saw, the shapes, the agony, the darkness, the ugliness, the foulness of the whole thing. And we just were really shaken up. We looked to Mary, and Mary said, this is where poor souls go because they have nobody to pray and offer sacrifice for them. And so every day, Jacinta after that,

would really ask her cousin and her brother, what have you done today to sacrifice for the salvation of souls? So the whole thing is focused on their own personal holiness, but also evangelization, you might speak. They're concerned about others, they're concerned about salvation of souls,

they're concerned about loving God, loving their neighbor type of thing. So the day of the miracle of the sun comes in October of 2017, and all the newspapers were there. Maybe 70,000 people in the vicinity. It was a very extremely rainy, muddy day. It took some commitment to get there. At noontime, Lucia shouts out, put down your umbrellas.

And all of a sudden the rain stopped and the sun began to spin in the sky. And I hadn't really known this before until I read Lucia's firsthand account. The best thing written on Fatima, I think, is Fatima and Lucia's own words. Nothing beats the first-hand account of how they experience it. What happened is that the bishop said, Lucia, write down everything you can remember about Jacinta and Francisco after they died. Write down. And nobody knew that the angel had appeared

the year before. All they knew was that Mary came out. So all kinds of things came out when she was being asked to write things down. So it's called Fatima and Lucchia's Own Words. Fatima and Lucchia's Own Words. Can we put a link to that, Neil? Sometimes people have a hard time finding it. We do stock it at renewalministries,

renewalministries.net, but sometimes you can get on Amazon too. So the miracle of something happens, the sun starts coming down towards the earth, people thought the world was going to end, so they started out publicly confessing their sins. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. They thought their life was going to end type of thing, they started publicly repenting, that type of thing. And then afterwards, people felt like a new joy came into their heart, it was like a new Pentecost had come,

like there was an infusion of God's grace into the souls of those who are there. Cardinal Maduro's former Archbishop of Boston, whose Portuguese wrote an account of it, he interviewed a lot of people, and many people said it was like a new Pentecost, you know, happening at the end of it. So that's what happened.

Jacinta and Francisco died pretty soon. They went through a lot of suffering. Very moving accounts by Lucia about Francisco's last days. Very moving account of Jacinta being willing to suffer more for the salvation of souls. Mary asked her, are you willing to stay a little longer for the sake of souls, Mary asked her, you know, are you willing to stay a little longer, you know, for the sake of souls, you know, things like that. So I find it very inspiring, I find it very relevant, I feel like it's a warning, a message for us, you know, it's probably the most approved Marian apparition in the church, you know, the Pope has gone to it as a feast day, just like our Lady of Guadalupe. So one of the hopeful things is that every now and then,

the Lord does divine interventions. And he's been doing them through Mary in lots of different ways. Guadalupe, Fatima, lords, they all have a story about why that was a timely time to intervene in a particular way. So we can't pin our hopes on an intervention. We have to do what we have to do right now.

But the Lourdes has an eye on things, and Mary has an eye on things, and when the time is right, they'll do what they're supposed to do, but we need to be doing what we're supposed to do. Beautiful. I want to take a break and then when we come back I want to talk about Marian devotion. I want to talk about religious pluralism and a sort of universalism that seems to be creeping into the church. And then we'll take some questions from our viewers. Alright? Good. Okay. Alright, I want to say thank you to Ethos Logos Investments for supporting this show, elinvestments.net slash pints.

I guess when I was a bit younger I thought that investing was something that only rich people did, or old people did, or rich old people did. I didn't realize it was something that I should be looking into as well. And when I began looking into it I realised I don't want to invest in companies that are doing immoral things. And that's where Ethos Logos Investments comes in. They were founded to work with individuals and institutions within the United States that seek to infuse their morals into their investment portfolio, with portfolios that adhere to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Responsible Investing Guidelines. You can be sure that you aren't profiting from intrinsic evils like abortion, embryonic stem cell research, pornography or human trafficking. Please go check them out

Ethos Logos Investments is what they're called el investments dotnet slash pints there's a link in the description below el investments dotnet slash pints for employers they offer socially responsible and catholic 401k and 403 b options as well so yeah go check them out el investments dotnet slash pintsurities offered through Securities America Inc. Member FINRA SIPIC. Ethos Logos Investments and Securities America are separate entities. Advisory services offered through Securities America Advisors Incorporated. Yes! The second group I want to thank is Hello. Hello. H-A-L-L-O-W dot com slash Matt Fradd. Hello dot com slash Matt Fradd. Hello is a fantastic app that will help you to pray and

meditate. It's not like new age mindfulness apps that lead into wrong ways of thinking. This is a hundred percent Catholic and it's super sophisticated. If you go to hello.com Matt Fradd and sign up there you'll get a few months for free before Deciding if you want to pay a minimal amount every month to have access to their entire app now you can download the app right now And you'll get access to certain things for free So be sure to check that out if you just want to you know play around with it and see what they have to offer But if you want access to everything that they have, like sleep stories and Bible studies and all sorts of beautiful things like that, you have to pay a certain amount every month

to get access to that. If you want access to everything for a few months, just go to hello.com slash Matt Fradd, hello.com slash Matt Fradd and sign up there. Thanks. All right. This book, I read it a year ago, because people probably send you books all the time too. Look at the cover. Notre Dame, is that it?

Yes, it is, and it's burning. I was talking to somebody who works in a bishop's office in Washington, and totally spontaneously he said, we see the statistics, the church is burning. We really, you know, like when you see the, like the- I've never known somebody who speaks so negatively about the state in which we're in and yet be so joyful. That's what you do so well. Well, how can you not be joyful when you know that the Lord's in control? Yeah. Well, anyway, I wanted to say I read that book over a weekend and people,

that's a big book, and people send me books all the time. Yeah. I'm sure they send you books all the time as well. And I try to read them before the show and sometimes I don't and I admit when I don't. Yeah. But I read that over the course of the well. And I try to read them before the show and sometimes I don't and I admit when I don't. But I read that over the course of the weekend. I was so inspired by it that I, if you remember, I contacted the publisher and said,

let's give 100 copies away for free. And they agreed to do free shipping and we broke their websites. That's how many people showed up. But the only reason I share that is I want people to know I am not just saying this because you're sitting across from me. I think this is a vitally important book

and I would encourage everybody watching right now to go and buy this book now, now, now, now, now. Read it and then as St. Josemaria Escriva said, let it collect souls, not dust. That's great. Well, I was shocked when you bought a hundred copies to give out to people watching. I mean that was really Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's an excellent book. It really is. One of the topics you addressed in A Church in Crisis is

this waffling on hell and this universalism and I just want to say that I Think it seems like we all agree the whole pendulum swing phenomena is a legitimate thing, right? Maybe people thought that for too long the church focused too much on hell, probably didn't, but maybe there was that perception and we kind of swung the other way where we had these awful hymns that seemed never to talk about the reality of the war in which we find ourselves. People constantly said they never heard talking about hell. There's a possibility that we're going to see another kind of pendulum swing here, which

is why it's so important that we just stick to what the church teaches. And Ludwig Ott in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma points to, what was it, the sixth session at the Council of Trent and says that the church has never said that we cannot have a sort of certainty of our own, not a certainty, but a sort of assurance of our own salvation, but not in a sort of infallible inerrant sense because we can apostatize and we might be deluding ourselves. So how do we thread this needle? Because the idea of unending torment forever is enough to cripple someone entirely. Especially when they already feel like a failure. They've been living in a society that's pushed porn down their throat. They're engaged in all sorts of things. It was even imposed upon them as it was on me and I'm now supposed to love this God and there's a real possibility that I will

spend eternity in hell. It's terrifying and yet apparently it's part of revelation and we're not free to throw it out. Yeah, well I think the proper balance which you're talking about really, we really find it in John chapter three verse 16, which is a great summary of the gospel. God so loved the world. And it's talking about loving the world in its fallen condition.

You know, loving human beings in our fallen condition, because it's implying that the world has fallen and is alienated from God, and going to be eternally separated from God. But God doesn't want to leave us or the world in that condition. So God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Now, wow, he could have done it some other way, but that's such a personal way of doing it. That's such an expression of profound commitment to humanity.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God forever took upon Himself a human nature. And right now at the right hand of the Father, the man Jesus is there. And we can be there too, and that's the whole point of the incarnation, that God has joined Himself permanently to human nature, and we now can be permanently with God, you know, at the right hand of the Father, with Jesus. In fact, scripture even says our life is even now hidden with Christ in God.

So right now, if we're in Christ, we're with him, with the Father, so it's a mysterious, mystical way, but it's pretty significant to be in Christ. So anyway, God sold the world, that gave his only son, that whoever believes in him. So it isn't like there's an automatic thing going on here.

There's an offer being made here. There's a gift being given. Whoever believes in him may not perish. So there is the possibility of if we don't accept the remedy, we're gonna die of the sickness. If we don't accept the medicine that God is offering, His own Son, and what we talk about in the Eucharist, the medicine and immortality, the body and blood of Jesus,

in the Eucharist, if we don't accept the gift, if we don't accept the cure, if we don't accept the medicine, we're not gonna be cured of the horrible death-dealing disease of sin. So whoever believes in him will not perish, may not perish, but have eternal life. So you say, this is a no-brainer, but it's not a no-brainer to us in our fallen condition.

We're thrown about by disordered desires, the wounds of original sin. We're living in a culture that's brainwashing us away from God. And then we know from the testimony of scripture that the devil is like a roaring lion seeking to devour our souls. So the offer of mercy, the offer of love,

the offer of eternal life is coming not into a neutral environment, but we are swirling about in lostness. We are swirling about in deception and lies and hatred and lust and greed and envy and jealousy. We're swirling about in a totalitarian dictatorship that wants to seal us off permanently from God. So we gotta reach out. We gotta say,

here's my chance, here's the gift, and we gotta take hold of Jesus. We gotta put our faith and trust in him. And belief doesn't just mean intellectual belief, oh yeah, I believe correct doctrine. Orthodoxy is not enough. Orthodoxy is not enough. It's absolutely essential. I spent my whole life fighting for orthodoxy, but orthodoxy's not enough. Relationship, loyalty to Jesus, friendship with Jesus, personal love of Jesus, becoming part of him. The scripture says, how dare you, how would you even think of taking the members of Christ

and making them members of a prostitute? Don't you realize that you're one body, one spirit with the Lord? Don't you realize that you're one body, one spirit with the Lord? Don't you realize that you're a temple of the Holy Spirit? Don't you realize that God's dwelling in you? That's who you are. Live up to who you are. Live up to the holiness that God has placed in you.

So, hell is a terrible possibility for people who aren't willing to humble themselves, aren't willing to humble themselves, aren't willing to swallow their pride, aren't willing to let go of being beyond good and evil and arbiters of their own morality, like Nietzsche talked about, once God is dead, everything is permitted, so what's going on

in our culture right now is God is dead, and it's a power game. The powerful are gonna decide what's right and wrong. And once you separate yourself from the objective reality of God and his structure of reality and the 10 commandments which are just pointing to, this is what human life was created for, once you separate yourself from God, anything goes.

And that's what we're seeing right now, anything goes. Anything goes in fetal experimentation, anything goes in euthanasia, anything goes in abortion, anything goes in eliminatinguthanasia, anything goes in abortion, anything goes in eliminating people from public discourse who disagree with the direction of the culture, so we're in a very terrible situation. But we need to recognize that we need help, we need to recognize that we are sinners that need forgiveness, and if we're not willing to accept the mercy that God is offering us, we're choosing ourselves an eternity apart from God, you know.

That sounds awful. Yeah, it's awful. And it's awful that people would make that decision, but sometimes people would rather be God themselves than humble themselves and swallow their pride and go through the repentance that's necessary and the change of life and the surrender. And it doesn't mean that we're instantly delivered from the devil or from our sins or from the culture, but if we begin to move towards Jesus little by little, he's gonna heal the wounds of sin, he's gonna little by little free us from addictions,

and he's gonna be little by little bring us into the true shape that he created us for, into the true person that we were meant to be. And the only real happiness for a human being is to be in fully in union with God's will for their life. The whole purpose, why God created us is to be one with Him, period. That's it.

That's the purpose of why we exist as a race. We exist as a race to be one with God. And the only tragedy, as people say, is not to be a saint, not to be one with God. Now sometimes people will speak, like they're not committing heresy, but they're speaking in a way that gives people the wrong opinion or the wrong impression. And I think you've done a really good job at charitably responding to Bishop Barron, who I don't think is a heretic, I don't think he's taught heresy, but he sometimes speaks

in a way that gives you the impression that we're all kind of going to heaven and Christians are just sort of like in first class. So it's a much better thing. Like wouldn't you prefer to come to first class as we all go to heaven? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that impression, like he was on Ben Shapiro's show and Ben Shapiro asked him about that and I just thought it'd be rather simple for him to say, Ben, you need to repent and accept the gospel you need to stop you need to embrace the fullness of Judaism or something yeah you could put it in a nice way but yeah just what's what's the yeah well I think this goes back to the pastoral strategy of Vatican II which we're opening up another can of words here. The pastoral strategy of Vatican II is to try to

reset our relationship with the modern world to try to kind of live down our reputation as being anti-science, anti-democracy, anti-labor unions, anti-culture, you know, and to try to affirm as much as possible the positive aspects of modern culture and get over our alignment with right-wing military regimes in South America and bringing back the French monarchy and, you know, all that kind of stuff, you know. So it was, you know, it made a certain amount of sense to try to do that. And then after Vatican II, people were, I wrote another book called Many Be Saved, what

Vatican II actually teaches and its implications for the New Evangelization. And I quote a bishop there saying, now that we've reset our relationship with the modern world, people are just kind of come flooding into the church. They're just going to see how wonderful and positive we are and how much we're for all the good, the beautiful and the true. And of course, right after Vatican II, just the opposite happened. Now, partly we can trace it to the strategy

that was adopted, and I don't wanna say more about that. But partly, unfortunately, the devil had a plan to counter the good that the Holy Spirit was trying to do in Vatican II. In 1968, a couple of years after the Council ended, we had probably the most significant cultural revolution that we've had in a long time, where the whole repudiation of authority, the whole repudiation of tradition, the whole mockery of older people, the whole make love not war, the whole glorification of fornication, the whole glorification of rebellion, the whole glorification of breaking with the

past, breaking with the church just came in there big time. The student rebellion is the anti-war demonstrations, all those things. You know we still have bumper stickers in Ann Arbor to this day, say question authority. You know, we were the epicenter of the student revolt in many ways, and so you had, just at the moment when we were trying to make friends with the culture, the culture was releasing something that was profoundly rebellious against God and the church.

And we've been trying ever since to against God and the church. We've been trying ever since to make friends with the world. We want a seat at the table. If you have to sell your soul to get a seat at the table, it's not a good bargain. It's like a 40-year-old man trying to be hip with the teens. The teen's like, you're kind of gross. Would you go away please? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're still in the mentality of let's affirm

as much as we can in modern culture. I see, this might be where some of this is coming from. Yeah, I think so. The baron I mean. I think he was formed in that, he's still there. That's where a lot of bishops are still, but some bishops are starting to wake up, shall we say, saying this strategy is not working anymore.

The culture that we're dealing with has radically changed, and this approach of being a friend with the world is going to end up making us an enemy of God. You know, like the Epistle of James says, he was a friend of the world, we'll be an enemy of God. So I think unfortunately some bishops and probably the Pope are still in this mentality. And unfortunately it's naive, it's not productive, it's not working, and it's actually feeding into the hands of the enemies of the church. It's making us appear like we're blessing the world, we're a chaplain to the culture, which is terrible. The gospel's not being clearly proclaimed.

People aren't being called to repentance and conversion. The mission of the church is not to improve this world. The mission of the church, the world will get improved because people become Christians, but the mission of the church is called the entire world to faith in Jesus Christ as the only hope of eternal life, to repentance, to membership in the church, to eat his body and drink his blood, to be baptized.

And that's not being heard. The world's not hearing that. What the world's hearing is, let's be friends, let's have interreligious dialogue, let's affirm global warming as the biggest danger facing the world, let's affirm climate change, let's get everybody vaccinated, we're being charitable, we want to help the world. And the gospel is being suffocated, it's being muffled, it's being submerged in the midst of this terrible attempt to appear a friend of the world, you know. So Bishop Barron did do a video not too long ago about salvation of people who don't hear

the gospel, and he did give the impression that, oh yeah, Vatican II says we should be really optimistic about that, and I actually did my doctoral dissertation on this particular issue, and so I just felt like, and he referred people to Lumen Genesium 16, but he didn't identify what Lumen Gentium 16 said, but just kind of gave the impression that this was backing his position. So I don't like to get involved in controversy. I really want to work for unity in the church. I really don't want to cause division, but I just felt like I needed to say a little bit more clearly what the official church teaching actually is on the possibility of people being saved without hearing the gospel. So I did a YouTube video.

I felt like it was very respectful. Would you remind us to link to that below, Neil? Yeah, I felt it was very, very respectful. Yeah, I thought so. You know, I appreciate what Bishop Barron is trying to do. I appreciate all the people he seems to be helping. Indeed, he does. But I really felt like he was giving that impression that you just said that he gives,

you know, that in the interview with Ben Shapiro and with David Rubin and other people where he doesn't quite pull the trigger. He doesn't quite tell the truth about Jesus, you know. Have you had him respond to you? Well I've tried to reach out, I really have. I don't want to get into too much about that, but I've tried to reach out and even he made some comments in the chat box to his original sermon that I responded to that made me feel like, gee, I think there's grounds here for that that were closer on this than maybe people

have the impression, but it didn't, you know. It's a realized thing. Yeah, yeah, that type of thing. So I hope sometime to be able to talk to him about this more, you know, type of thing. And good for you for reaching out. I mean, that is the kind of gospel injunction, isn't it? To approach your brother. But if somebody's publicly saying something and publicly leading

people, same thing with me, please God that people would correct me publicly. Yeah, yeah. And I think we need to do that in the church, I think we need to recognize we're brothers and the Lord, we're not enemies, we're working on the same team, we're trying to accomplish the same goal and you know if we have things to help each other with we should try to help each other with, we should try to help each other with. So anyway, I should probably say very briefly what the church actually teaches about this

because this is important for people to know. So, Lumen Genesis 16 says, it is possible under certain circumstances for people to be saved without hearing the gospel. So people hear that and they say, oh, praise the Lord, I'm really glad to hear that, we don't have to worry about people anymore, and people make this big leap from possibility to probability to virtual certainty.

So this is one of the reasons why there's not a big response to evangelization in the Catholic Church today. People say, why bother, does it really make any difference? You know, like, here we have these meetings with Hindus and Muslims and Jews and everybody's all friends and don't all roads lead to God and isn't that kind of sort of like what the church is saying these days, isn't that what Vatican II

said type of thing? And it's not, but people can get that impression because of how things are being done and what's being said. So then it goes into the three conditions under which it's possible for people who haven't heard the gospel they saved. Condition number one, it's not their own fault that they haven't heard the gospel.

It's an inculpable ignorance of the gospel. Now there can be a culpable ignorance of the gospel. Say a young person says, hey, Matt Fradd's coming to talk in our town today and I'd like you to come and talk to him, he's a fallen away Catholic, you know, or whatever, or he's never heard the gospel, or he's a nun. He grew up in an atheist family, but he has a little idea about what you're gonna say,

and he doesn't wanna hear it. That's culpable ignorance of the gospel, perhaps. Second condition is, even though they're inculpably ignorant of the gospel, they're sincerely seeking God. Now, there's lots of stuff in the scripture that says, if you seek me with all your heart, I'll let myself be found by you. So the Lord expects people to seek him. Why does he expect that? How can he expect that? Because Romans chapter 1 says God has revealed himself to the entire world, to the entire human race.

That everybody can know by looking at the creation that there is a creator, that he's God, that he's powerful, that he's divine. So there is a revelation that God makes to everybody that he expects people respond to by seeking him. Who is this God? What is his will? Why do we exist? How can I know him? And then the third condition is people are living according to the light of conscience assisted by grace. This is like Romans chapter 2. It says people who know the law of God will be judged on the basis of what they know, but people who don't will be judged on the basis of the light that God gives to their conscience.

So everybody has a measure of revelation that God is making to them in creation and their conscience. And so God expects people to respond to that by seeking him, desiring to know him, looking into the truth about God, and two, living according to the natural law. Now, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says nobody should be deemed to be ignorant

of the natural law. That everybody knows in some real way that you shouldn't kill people, that you shouldn't take somebody else's property, that you shouldn't lie, and things like that. That there's some inchoate sense about those things. Assisted by grace. So that's really key because the Catholic Church firmly teaches and a lot of Protestants don't know this,

that the only way we can be saved is by faith through grace. Ephesians chapter two says that, it's a doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church. So that means even people in this situation need the grace of God in order to be saved. So how could the grace of God come to somebody in that situation? There's a footnote, I won't get too technical,

there's a footnote in Lumen Gen 616 that talks about the Father Feeney case. And Father Feeney taught a very strict interpretation, unless people actually became Catholics and died as Catholics they couldn't be saved. So the Holy Office at that time, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith says, well, there can be an unconscious desire that contains within it implicitly a desire to do God's will as they know it, if they knew it, that

they would become part of the Church if they knew that was God's will for them. But it says it can't be just any kind of unconscious desire. It has to actually be a response to a light that God's giving that requires a definite assent, a definite yes, a definite surrender that births supernatural faith and supernatural charity in the soul that enables them to live the natural law in a way that they couldn't unless they hadn't said yes to that grace. Okay, now people never hear about these conditions. And the reason why I felt like I needed to say something is Bishop Barron never talks

about them directly. I just wish people would respond to my reading of Vatican II. I just wish people would respond to, but like, not just Bishop Barron, but other people say, oh, Ralph's really invested in people going to hell. No, I'm really invested in people going to heaven. That's why I want to teach the truth about how people get there. I want to do away with kind of wishful thinking about how people get there. Let's get to the truth about how people get there.

I've had people write critiques of me where they say, Ralph's really invested in most people being damned, and he's really, you know, he's, you know, I remember, terrible things that totally misrepresent, you know, what I'm saying. So anyway, the last three sentences of Lumina Genzio 16, though, I don't know anybody who's ever really commented on them. Even Carl Ronner, when he's doing his high-level theological work on this issue, totally ignores the last three sentences. All he says is that Vatican II adopted my position. Vatican II is very optimistic about the salvation of non-believers.

And you can decide yourself whether this is optimistic or not, but the last three sentences say, very often human beings exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator. Or else they give give into ultimate despair. And boy, we're seeing ultimate despair rise in our culture. There are suicide and drug addiction and just mental illness. I mean, it's just kind of like going crazy.

You know, as people separate themselves from God, it just gets more and more hopeless. You know, more and more hopeless suicide rate amongst people in illicit sexual relationships. I mean, it's just like these things don't work. they're not good for human life, you know, the type of thing. And the isolation of pornography and the isolation of that. So anyway, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. But anyway, it goes on to say, therefore, because we often exchange the truth of God for a lie, because we often worship the creature rather than the creator.

And that's what the culture is asking us to do, is to worship the creature. You know, they're asking us to worship the creature rather than God. We can form heaven on earth. And of course, as Putin warned us, every time you try to make heaven on earth, you turn it into hell on earth,

you turn it into concentration camps that are eliminating your opponents who are standing in the way of equity, that type of thing. So I just love whoever just joined the live stream heard you quote Putin. Listen to the whole interview. Yeah, I know. It says, therefore it's urgent that we carry out our missionary vocation. It's urgent that we evangelize.

Why is it urgent that we evangelize? Because very often people don't avail themselves of the grace of God and the mercy of God. Even us Catholics, with all the help we have of Scripture, of tradition, of the sacraments, of one another, the kind of support we were talking about, sometimes we choose the darkness rather than the light. How much easier is it for people who don't have Christ, don't have the church, don't have the Christian community, don't have the sacraments, don't have the scripture, don't know the explicit Word of God, don't know that Jesus is the perfect image of the Father, and this is who God is really like. People who don't have that, what are they left with? They're left with, I think God exists, but I don't know what his will is, you know?

How can I find out his will, you know? Well, how can I live according to what I know is right in me and I can't, you know, type of thing? And so it's sort of like how much easier it is to be lost, to give in to disordered desires, to love our sin, to reject grace, to go along with the lies of the devil, to go along with brainwashing the culture. I mean, I'd say it's almost impossible

for the average person to resist that without the explicit help of conversion, without the explicit help of repentance and faith. Yeah, amen. So what is your advice to someone watching this who's considering becoming Catholic, but is like, you guys are just as confused as everybody else.

I mean, what would you say to them? Why should they become Catholic? The Catholic Church is the only church really founded by Christ. Christ has established the Catholic Church as His way of carrying forward His revelation in the world, and it really is true. The Catholic Church is the only church that on the books, and this is important in the catechism of the Catholic Church, is preserving the fullness of what's been revealed to us about how human beings can be saved and how they should live and how they can live this way. Every single church that separated themselves from the Catholic Church goes into error and

it endangers the salvation of their members. But we go into error apparently. We have people bowing down before pagan idols. How are we not going to error? We have people who are unfaithful to the teaching of the Church. John Paul II during the year 2000 preparing for the new millennium said, we need to repent for how as sons and daughters of the Church we haven't lived according to the teaching, how we've kind of contributed to the disunity of Christians, how we haven't honored the gifts of women,

how we've sometimes imposed the faith through force. We need to repent for our sins as sons and daughters of the church. But the church doesn't teach those things. The church teaches the right path. And so it's our fault, and it's the fault of leaders sometimes when we don't live it. So, you know, where else can we go? I mean, you know, people were perplexed

by what Jesus was saying about the Eucharist. They said, where else can we go? And the apostle said, only you have words of eternal life. Jesus is the mystery of the Catholic Church. Jesus, his life, his teaching, his sacraments are the mystery of the Catholic Church. And those are there, no matter how worthy or unworthy her leaders are or her members are.

And we have access to the fullness of the means of salvation in the Catholic Church that doesn't exist anywhere else. So I would absolutely encourage anybody who's thinking about the Catholic Church to do what Benedict Richel, the founder of the Friars of the Renewal said, come on in, the water's terrible.

Yes, we've got problems, come on in. Kind of become part of the solution rather than problem. Yeah, not to downplay the confusion and problems we do have in our church, but I also heard somebody say that if you're looking for the perfect church and so you leave the Catholic church, as soon as you find one, which you won't, but if you did, it won't be perfect anymore because look at you. You're a mess. Yeah, I love the testimony of Dion, the singer, I don't know if you know him or not. Yeah, he was a big singer in the 60s, you know, run around Sue, Donna, prima donna, Wanderer, then he did Abraham, Martin, and John, you know, during that time, and now he still does stuff.

He still has stuff, you know, blues and things like that. But he's a fallen away Catholic who became an evangelical Protestant, was looking for the perfect church, and decided, anyway, he came back to the Catholic Church. It's a great story. He has a book out and things like that. It does seem to be a good one, yeah. So. Let me ask you this, Ralph.

A miracle is still taking place today, or is that just something that ended with the sort of death of the apostles? No, there's been miracles throughout the entire history of the Church. What about today? What about in the last month, last year, last five years? And why aren't they happening if they're not? And if they are, tell us about them. Well, they are happening.

I think they happen most frequently in mission contexts and evangelization contexts at Renewal Ministries. We work in about 30, 40 different countries, and I have seen with my own eyes blind people healed, crippled people to walk. I've seen with my own eyes demons cast out of obviously demon-possessed people. I saw that happen in Slovakia. I saw that happen in Slovakia. I saw that happen in Ghana. I saw an old woman led around by our granddaughter who couldn't see, get her sight back and

respond to testing. We got it on tape. We got it on video type of thing. And there's tons of, I would say, minor healings that happen all the time. I know you had Dr. Mary Healy as a recent gift and as a recent guest. And a gift. Yeah, a gift and a guest, yeah. And you know, she's very involved in a renewal of healing ministry and cold encounter ministries and they see like, I'd say, I would call it minor healings, you know, people getting their sore knees taken care of and maybe getting their hearing improved or, you know, getting over this or that type of thing. Now my concern with healing is I think we need more healing, but then Jesus did say that if the miracles done in his hometown had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they

would have repented long ago, but it's going to go worse in the day of judgment for these towns because the healings didn't accomplish their full purpose. The purpose of healing is yes, to show mercy and compassion to people, but it's supposed to be, in John's Gospel, all the miracles and the healings are signs. They're supposed to be signs of who Jesus is.

They're supposed to lead us into relationship with Jesus. It's supposed to lead us into repentance and faith and discipleship. And my concern is sometimes people are so fascinated with healings with Jesus, that will still lead us into repentance and faith and discipleship. And my concern is sometimes people are so fascinated with healings that they get their healing and go home and don't go into a deeper relationship with Jesus. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and what guidance is given, what context it all happens in type of thing.

So yeah, healings definitely happen and they should happen. There are signs that Jesus is alive and acting in the church but I am concerned sometimes that people focus on my healing and don't like out of the ten lepers who got healed, nine of them ran off saying I got healed. One of them came back and said thank you. You know one of them came back and said, thank you. You know, one of them came back. Well, that's a fair point and I agree with it. What I'm concerned of is- Yeah, what's your concern? My concern is the opposite.

My concern is people are no longer praying for healings because they just figure prayer doesn't work. And I'm one of these people. People come up to me, please pray for my daughter, she's got cancer, please. I mean, I'll pray for her, but I don't expect anything's actually going to happen. It doesn't really work. So let's just pray to accept the will of God or something. So speak to

that. Yeah, well, I think we should pray for whatever is going on, but I think sometimes we need discernment whether the Lord is leading us, whether it's gonna be healing here or not, or whether the person needs to prepare for death, and Dr. Mary Healy will say that too. She says the more we pray for healing, the more it's gonna happen, but my biggest problem with healing too isn't what I just said.

My biggest problem with healing is that more of it doesn't happen, just like you said. Friends of Mary Healy and friends of mine die. Friends of us have serious illnesses, and they don't get healed. I mean, friends of Mary Healy and friends of mine die. You know, friends of us have serious illnesses and they don't get healed. Sometimes the healer who has other people getting healed has illnesses that they don't get healed of.

So I say it's a smaller number of people who actually get healed than then we would like. Yeah. One of the things I always love about my charismatically inclined friends is that they talk and act as if Jesus is real. Yeah. And I wanted to talk to you about, imagine that.

And I'm not saying that those who aren't charismatic don't speak like that, but it's just very palpable, as if the Lord's aware of it now and he's going to work now. I want to talk to you just about the Charismatic renewal. Are we going to see another one? It did feel like a sort of Protestantizing, that's not a word, of the Catholic Church in some respects.

Maybe not in your experience, but and maybe it was happening alongside sort of liturgical abuses that made them look sort of Protestant. But what's the role for the Charismatic Renewal? Should we just throw that name out and just talk about Christians living in the Spirit because it has so much baggage? Yeah, well, I don't know. I think the, you know, one of the things that this is going to cause controversy to say this name, one of the things that Cardinal Sunans used to say. Who is this? I don't know who that is. He was one of the four presidents of Vatican II.

And he's become a target of people who are concerned about Vatican II, you know, unjustly, I think. But anyway, so he used to, Pope John Paul VI, Pope John Paul II asked him to guide the Charismatic Renewal into the heart of the church and make sure it's thoroughly Catholic. So what he used to say is that the purpose of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement is not to get everybody into it,

but to be a sign in the church of what belongs to the whole church. Now, it's easy to accept that interpretation but then reduce our understanding about the content of the sign in terms of, you know, when you look at the New Testament, the apostles were very concerned every time a new group of Christians came into the church and asked the apostles, whether it's the Samaritans or the Ephesians or Cornelius and his household, that they come into the same experience he asks the apostles whether it's the Samaritans or the Ephesians or Cornelius and his household that they come into the same experience and this is the exact language they use as the apostles did on the day of Pentecost.

So the apostles expected that what happened to them would be a part of Christian initiation and when it didn't happen they looked into it. So when it happened in Acts chapter 8, the Samaritans had become Christians but the Spirit had not yet fallen upon them, Peter and John went down to kind of see what was wrong and to kind of ask the Spirit to fall on them type of thing. In Acts chapter 10, Quineas said his household was hearing the gospel preached to them and the Spirit falls on them. The language of the spirit falling on them is a fairly strong language type of thing. So Peter gets into trouble because he says, this isn't happening in the right order, but we should baptize

them, you know, type of thing. So he gets into trouble back at headquarters, Acts chapter 11, and people said, you did what, Peter? You baptize Gentiles? And Peter in so many words said, the Holy Spirit made me do it, you know. He said, you know, I saw it happening to them, they spoke in tongues and they prophesied, I saw it happening to them the same thing that happened to us on the day of Pentecost, so how could I refuse to baptize them? And so that settled the argument. And then in Acts chapter 19, Paul comes across some disciples and he asks them a funny question.

He says, you know, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you were baptized? And they said, we haven't even heard about the Holy Spirit. Now this used to be true for Catholics, you know. When Eve Congar was writing his two-volume work on the Holy Spirit, he said people, if you ask Catholics what they believe, they believe in the Father, Son, Pope and Mary, you know, type of thing. So that's no longer the case, partly because of the Charismatic Renewal, partly because of biblical scholarship and things like that. So he finds out that they're just baptized for repentance with the baptism of John the

Baptist, so he says, okay, and this is a good model of evangelization. Find out where people are at. Find out where they're coming from. Find out what they know and what they don't know, what they've experienced, what they haven't experienced. So Paul says, John the Baptist wanted his disciples to follow Jesus, and once Jesus is here, and Jesus has come, and this is what Jesus did,

you need to be now baptized in the name of Jesus. You know, so he baptizes in the name of Jesus, the Holy Spirit falls upon them, and they begin to prophesy. So the Apostles expected each generation, each new group of converts to come into a strong experience of the Holy Spirit just like they did because many Catholics today are living like the disciples did before Pentecost. They had the disciples before Pentecost. They had, the disciples before Pentecost had the best teaching anybody ever had.

They were in a Bible study for three years with the guy who wrote the Bible, and he kept reminding them, even to the last day, this is how you interpret the scripture, and the apostolic preaching we get in the Acts of the Apostles is what Jesus told them how to interpret the scripture. You know, Luke chapter 24, he went through the scriptures again and showed them how the scriptures all pointed to him. Now that's where they got

their material for preaching, from Jesus teaching them. But they had the best spiritual direction anybody had. They got corrected for their faults. They said, we're not going to call down fire. No, the greatest is going to be the least, type of thing. They had the best apostolic supervision. They came back from trying out things in ministry, and Jesus kind of corrected them and said, if they're not against us, they're for us. That type of thing. These things can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. Jesus was, they had the best formation that anybody ever had.

And yet to the very hour where Jesus was ascending to the Father, they say, wait a second Lord, are we going to take over Jerusalem now? What's happening? We've We gotta throw out the Romans? I mean, like, you know, what's going on, you know? And Jesus said, it's not for you to know the day or the hour. Stay in the city until you're baptized in the Holy Spirit. Just pay attention to what I'm asking you to do.

What you need right now is the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit's gonna really bring to life everything I've taught you. Not only that, the Holy Spirit's gonna really bring to life everything I've taught you. Not only that, the Holy Spirit's gonna bring me into a communion with me and the Father and the Spirit that isn't possible unless I return to the Father. I'm gonna actually dwell in you now. I'm gonna be with you to the end of the ages, and you know, and get into John 17 and just everything else, you know. And the Acts of the Apostles is a story of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit moving with the apostles, you know,

really leading them, guiding them, strengthening them, giving them wisdom, giving them a direction. So I think a lot of Catholics today are unfortunately like the apostles before Pentecost. They have correct doctrine, they're living moral lives, they believe what the church teaches, but they're lacking fire. They're lacking personal relationship. No, I won't say they're lacking it entirely. They're lacking the experience of the risen Lord.

They're lacking the experience of the love of God being poured into their hearts. They're lacking the living flame of love that John of the Cross talks about, you know. They're just living the fire. Jesus, I've come to cast fire on the earth, what that would be, you know, unkindled. So I just feel like what the charismatic renewals have witnessed to is to our life as Pentecostal Catholics. Catholics are supposed to be Pentecostal. I mean, they're supposed to be post-Pentecost, not pre-Pentecost, you know? They're supposed to be really full of the Holy Spirit, and that's what confirmation is supposed to be. So the catechism of the Catholic Church says confirmation is the way that Pentecost is perpetuated in the Catholic Church.

So we've kind of put a focus on a sacramental way of receiving the Holy Spirit, stirring the Holy Spirit up in a new way. But one of the greatest elephants in the living room right now in the Catholic Church is that our theology of confirmation is fabulous. If you read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it makes people brave to be witnesses, endure persecution, just what we need, you know, be a public witness to Christ, just what we need, but Catholics are terrified to be a public witness for Christ, Catholics are terrified about the possibility of persecution, Catholics are scared

to death about evangelizing, so what's happening in confirmation? So something's wrong, something's off, something's not working, We put so much stress on ex operi operato, the grace is given anyway, we haven't put enough stress on what has-christendom sacramental crisis and the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas. Hey, Pius with Aquinas! Hey! Okay, we got Aquinas in.

Let's incorporate him in here. Yes, yes. And so in his teaching on the sacraments in part three of the summa, he says people can have a validly conferred sacrament but it not be fruitful in their life because of problems in the recipient. And so he says, and he's talking about of problems in the recipient. So he says, and he's talking about adult baptism as the prototype, he says if a person refuses to repent, he'll receive the sacrament but it won't be fruitful in their life.

If a person doesn't really desire the purpose of the sacrament to live a new life in the spirit, it's not going to be fruitful. It's going to be there in some form but it's not going to be activated, it's not going to be fruitful. It's going to be there in some form, but it's not going to be activated. It's not going to be fruitful. And he says depending on the desire with which people approach the sacrament is going to depend on the measure in which they receive the grace. So lots of things like that. So when people talk about being baptized in the Holy Spirit, was that a sort of fanning

of the coals that were there but weren't in full flame? Yes. The term is scriptural. The term is used by John the Baptist. The term is used by Jesus, the term is used by the Apostles. So it's scriptural. What it's talking about is being plunged in the Holy Spirit, and the Church has come to understand being plunged in the Holy Spirit as something that's connected with Christian initiation. And in the early Church, you know, Achille, MacDonald, and George Montague did this big study on

sacraments of Christian initiation in the early church. They expected the Holy Spirit to fall on people and they expected charisms to be manifest when people were prepared for baptism and confirmation of Eucharist altogether as adults. So we just need to, well it's just so many things we need to do, but we need to prepare people better for confirmation. But that means not everybody who's 14 years old receiving it, not everybody in the eighth grade receiving it, that means discerning individually and making sure people, this is what they want, this is what they're signing up for, they're choosing to follow Jesus.

My children, my babies received it in the Eastern Church. Yeah. Right. It's a little different there. Yeah, but that means now that the validly conferred sacrament needs to be nurtured and those graces need to come alive in an appropriate way as they get older type of thing. So that's where retreats comes in, that's where alpha comes in, that's where the nation exercises come in, that's where life and spirit seminars

come in, they're all trying to provide a mini-catechumenate that would awaken the graces of the sacraments. Yeah. That happened to me when I was 17. I went to World Youth Day in Rome and came back just stunned that this thing was real. I was like a man who discovered he had another sense, like sight, but something that nobody around him seemed to have, and I was confused as to why they didn't have it, and they were just as confused at my joy.

Yeah, yeah. And these things that mysteriously happen in the history of the Church, we generally know about them through saints. But the theology of the Church says this is supposed to happen to everybody, and that's why one of the things that Vatican II did is rediscover the theology of baptism, that every single baptized person is called to the fullness of holiness and also called to mission. And you know, that there's not supposed to be second-class citizens in the Catholic Church. We're all supposed to be on the front lines of pursuing holiness and being witnesses for

Christ type of thing. So that's one of the huge contributions of Vatican II that I'm afraid sometimes we're slipping back into a precinciliar passivity of the lay people and clericalism. We've talked about the persecution that's coming and is here. We've talked about the bishops being divided. What can we say about the end of the world? Obviously the caveat is, you know, the son of man doesn't know the day or the hour. But often that's all that's said. You're like, okay, but can we have any idea? Because this is getting, is this getting bad or is it, or are we too influenced by, say,

our own situation within the United States that just makes it seem like it's bad, you know, remembering that St. Augustine died while Rome was collapsing, and it may have seemed to him and his fellow Christians that this was— And the year 1000, and Y2K. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and there's been innumerable books by fundamentalist Protestants, you know, trying to name the day or hour, counting the weeks of Daniel,

and adding it all up to a date that proved not to be the time. Well, excuse me. There are some specific signs that Scripture teaches us, and the Catechism also teaches us, that need to happen before the Lord returns. So one of them is the time of the Gentiles coming to an end, and the Lord returning his attention

to Israel and a significant number of Jews coming to faith in Christ. And then Jesus, Jesus himself talks about until Jerusalem is no longer trampled down by the Gentiles. So we know that Jerusalem has been trampled by the Gentiles for thousands of years, you know, and for the first time in thousands of years in 1947-48 when the Jewish state came into existence and then the Six Day War in 1967, I guess, Jerusalem was taken back under Jewish control and is under Jewish control today.

So the Jews as a nation have come back into existence in our lifetime. The Jerusalem has been liberated from Gentile trampling down. So something's new on the scene that wasn't there before that could match up with this. The second sign is Jesus saying it directly again in Matthew 24, I think, where he says, the end will not come until the gospel is preached to all nations.

But again, this is a little hard to discern when, if that's the case, or when that would be the case. And I would say that we're in a situation now where whole cultures are no longer so sealed off from the gospel because of the global vigil, the internet, satellites, and there are significant evangelization efforts being directed to people in many languages and many cultures, particularly with Protestants.

Some of the Protestant Bible societies, the Wycliffe Bible translators, they devote their whole lives to putting, first of all, the New Testament into languages that maybe only two or three hundred people speak, trying to give every single ethnic group the ethnos, every single ethnic group a chance to hear the gospel. So tremendous efforts are being made. Some are saying that by 2030 they'll have accomplished that type of thing. I remember Mother Angelica, when she founded EWTN, thought that she was founding it in light of the last days. And the name of the network,

Eternal Word Television Network, comes from the book of Revelation where there's an angel flying in heaven saying, fear God and give him glory, you know, and his eternal word going forth. So whether she's right or not, whether she was hearing the Lord right or not, it's so easy to get a sense of urgency or special time and attribute it to the

final time, we don't know. We do know now she has satellites all over the world, well not her personally anymore, but the network and they're covering the world, you know, with their programming. But the two signs that I think are most interesting right now are from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, where Paul says, don't be upset by supposed prophecies that say that the Lord has already returned, because the Lord will not return until these two things happen. So the first thing is the great apostasy. That's coming up a lot today, isn't it?

And as you know, apostasy isn't something that pagans do, it's something that Christians do. And we're seeing a massive turning away from Christ on the part of traditionally Catholic and Christian cultures, like massive. And there's just a couple left hanging on by their teeth, so to speak. So we're just seeing a tragic turning away from Christ on the part of many, many, many people. The statistics of church decline in all the traditionally Christian and Catholic countries.

It's just going down, down, down, except maybe in Africa. Africa still seems to be a bright spot for the church, but the culture is coming for them. Indeed it is. I was just in Uganda a couple of years ago and saw big billboards for contraception and also being influenced by Protestants and diluting the faith. Yeah. And the culture is coming for them.

This administration and previous administrations have tied foreign aid to accepting the LGBTQ agenda, accepting abortion, pretty wicked, pretty wicked what the United States is doing. Pretty evil what the United States is doing sometimes in its governmental power. So we're seeing a great apostasy. There's no question about it, whether it's the final apostasy or not,

whether it's great enough or not, only time will tell. We'll only know whether the Lord returns or not. But then the next thing is also very significant. Paul says, at a certain point, a restrainer on evil is going to be removed. A restrainer on lawlessness will be removed. And then we're going to see unrestrained lawlessness and evil.

I think clearly we're nearing an end stage where all kinds of restraints on evil have been removed. All kinds of protections of the unborn, of the elderly, of the handicapped, all kinds of protections against the sacredness of male and female identity and openness to life and children. All kinds of protections on children have been removed, you know, and so we're just seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing the world's population becoming very vulnerable to this new totalitarian effort to recreate the human race apart from God, apart from Christ, apart from the natural law, apart from divine revelation. But then it seems just when things seem to couldn't get any worse, the Lord appears.

So this is sobering because it doesn't look like things are gradually going to be getting better as we approach the return of the Lord but it looks like it's going to get worse, much worse. Great apostasy. That's a really great point because I sometimes think you know are we just going to have another swing from this chaos and maybe things will get better but your point seems to be in the biblical point seems to be, well, even if they do, they will then get worse again. Yes, and where to put in, you know, Mary's promise of a time of peace, I don't know where you put that in, you know, but.

When did she talk about that? A time of peace. Well, she says, you know, Russia will be converted and there'll be a time of peace, my Immaculate Heart will triumph type of thing. And we don't know what counts as the triumph for immaculate heart. Is Putin raising the alarm of the apostasy of the West? You know, part of the triumph? That was it. That was the time of peace. We're done now. Yeah, 20 minutes.

You know, we don't know how to interpret some of these things. They're just going to see they fall out. But we know for sure what the Bible says, and the Catechism quotes it exactly. It says the church is gonna have to have to pass through a final trial where the Antichrist is really at work and we're gonna have to pass the test. You know, the church is gonna have to pass the test. Now I'm very concerned that the church, large parts of the church aren't ready to pass the test. You know, large parts of the church don't even idea that there's a test going on. Large parts of the world, large parts of the church

don't even know there's such a thing as spiritual warfare. Large parts of the church think the devil's a joke. You know, large parts of the church is totally. Head of the Jesuit order, and that said, was it last year or the year before? Yeah, yeah, Father Sosa. Bless him and convert to the Lord. Even worse than that, he said,

you know, when the debate on divorce and marriage was going on, he said, how do we know what Jesus really said? Shame on him. Yeah, exactly. Chapter two in the book is- Yeah, I want to point that out one more time. At Church in Crisis, we've got a link

in the description below. I want to beg everybody watching this right now if you can rub a couple of dollars together to buy this book, because one thing you did so well in this book is document everything. So often we hear bits and pieces, but your footnotes are really excellent in there. Yeah, well chapter two is just, is there a solid place to stand? How can we keep our bearings in a time of confusion and division? And the first thing I say is we need to recover our confidence in the inspiration and energy of sacred scripture.

And I quote Father Sosa's remarks, it's really evil to undermine people's confidence in sacred scripture. You know, what Vatican II says about sacred scripture, and this is another one of his contributions, is on the Constitution of Sacred Revelation, section 11, it says, everything asserted by the sacred authors

should be considered to be asserted by the Holy Spirit. That's God, by the way. And to teach, yeah, really, that's God, you know? And to teach faithfully, firmly, and without error those truths that God wished to consign to the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. So, this is, the word of God is precious, you know? The Bible is precious, you know?

Like, I feel so grateful every day. I have an icon of Jesus in my office where I pray. And I don't know, just the last couple years this icon's really becoming really helpful. And it just brings out the person of Jesus. Like, Jesus is a person, you know, and it just helps me relate to him. But then I just feel like so blessed to be living

in a time where the Messiah has come, to living in a time where the words become flesh and we can actually know who God is. We can know what he's like. And not only that, we can know exactly what his mind and heart is about what he wills for human beings. And so, how precious it is that we have the sacred scriptures.

You know, like, you know, every day in the liturgical readings, I mean, there's stuff there that's really useful, that's really helpful, that is reliable, that is without error, it's inspired by God, you know, helping us to accomplish the purpose which we were created, you know, that type of thing. And of course, the authentic interpretation of it we have in the tradition of the church, and most of the church didn't see a need to interpret the scripture very much. You know, right now and then on controversial points it did, but it took it as the saints and the doctors of the church have taken it. And then we have the catechism of the Catholic Church. So a lot of times, you know, I'll read a footnote

and I'll say, gee, I think that this is what scripture is taking, is taking, or saying. And then I look at the footnote and it says, yeah, that's what scripture's saying. You know, type of that. Was it Chesterton who said it's not the confusing parts of scripture that worry me? It's the parts of scripture that I understand for well.

Yeah, I think. That's what's terrifying. Yeah, I think it was Mark Twain, you know. Oh, Mark Twain, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. So basically. Poor Chesterton, he gets all these? So basically, there are hard parts to understand, but so much of it is so clear. We don't treasure it. We don't realize that this is an incredible gift, that we live in a time where God is

revealing himself to us and revealing the path to salvation, revealing the purpose of us being human beings. You mentioned the Antichrist. I know in scripture it's mentioned in different senses. In one sense, the essential sense is that the Antichrist is, are those who deny Christ come in the flesh, but there's going to be a figure, it seems, an actual figure who is the Antichrist, capital A. Yeah, or the power of Satan is concentrated in, yeah.

And then 2 Thessalonians 2 actually says some more helpful things. It says, during this time, this man, this lawless one, the antichrist perhaps. Most interpreters consider it the Antichrist, a few don't. This man of perdition, this man of iniquity, this man of wickedness will use every device available to him, false signs and wonders. That's why we need true signs and wonders that bring people to conversion and repentance. False signs and wonders titillate people, fascinate people, lead people to curiosity, lead people to be infatuated with the healer, that type

of thing, you know, and a lot of times, you know, satanic power can be used or magic power or psychic power. Because you'll hear atheists say things like, well, I mean, YouTube's around, just show us a healing and we'll believe. Or if I could just see a limb kind of grow, then I'd believe. And there might be many who would, but I think there would be just, if not more, who would still be unwilling to repent of their lifestyle or their sexual choices or their heresy. Yeah, we'll look at the teaching of Jesus.

I mean, nobody did a better job preaching, teaching, healing, or delivering to evil spirits. What do they want to do? They want to crucify him. And Jesus said, do this to me, they're going to do that to you. So there's a whole theme of scripture where it goes back to Simeon in the temple who takes the baby Jesus and prophesies over him, this child's gonna be the cause for the rise and the fall of many in Israel, he's gonna reveal the secrets of hearts.

So that's what Jesus is doing all through his earthly ministry, he's revealing the secrets of hearts. One of the secrets he reveals is some people are not men and women of goodwill. Their people have already made a commitment to evil, to falsehood, and they are hard hearted. So he's revealing hard hearts that refuse to repent. We don't know if that ultimately is where they end up, but many, many times

that's what he's revealing. They go away. They don't believe them. From the light. Yeah. Because that needs a wicked. Exactly. Exactly. He says that's why some people love believe him. From the light. Yeah. Because it needs a wicked. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

He says that's why some people love the darkness more than the light. So he's actually revealing pre-existing choices and decisions that people have made and it's very, very wicked. But then also there's men who are in good will, who maybe are those people who are sincerely seeking God or trying to live according to the conscience.

So when they encounter Jesus, they recognize something there because their heart is disposed towards truth or disposed towards God. And Jesus is so, I mean, talk about winning friends and influencing people. That wasn't his overriding concern.

You know, in his encounter with the Pharisees in John chapter eight, he'll say, if you knew God, you'd know me. As a matter of fact, you don't know God. And they say, what are you saying? Our father's Abraham. He says, no, no, your father's the devil. Snap!

Yeah, you know, and they kept trying to figure out how to kill him, how to do away with him, because they had made a God out of their do away with them because they had made a God out of their own interpretation of scripture, they had made a God out of their own position, they had made a God out of their political accommodation with the Romans. They didn't want to disturb their relationship

with the secular culture because it would deprive them of their position. Nothing is new under the sun. Yeah, and that's what I'm most concerned about what's happening in the Catholic Church, is that we fear men more than God. We fear men more than God. Our eyes aren't on the Lord,

our eyes are on how is this politically gonna go, what's gonna happen to me, are we gonna burn bridges, is our tax funding gonna be taken away, are we gonna lose our grants for Catholic charities? To hell with it all. Yeah, accept our Lord and that we'll appreciate with Him. Yeah, so different from refusing to know anything about Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Honestly, what we most need popes and bishops to do, and Archbishop Gomez said this in his recent talk, he said we need to boldly and joyfully proclaim Jesus Christ. That's what we need to do, but as being suff suffocated by protocol, it's being suffocated by political expediencies, being suffocated by fear of revealing division in our midst. There is division, and we can't be afraid of it anymore. I don't know how God's gonna solve this. It's a very serious problem to have division

amongst our leaders. But every bishop now has to have their eye on, they're gonna appear before the judgment seat of Christ, and they're gonna have to give an answer how they took care of their flock. They're gonna have to hopefully say what St. Paul said when he was saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders. He said, your blood is not upon my hands

because I have not held back from telling you the whole counsel of God. Bishops are gonna have to give an account to God. Have I told my flock, the whole counsel of God, have I are going to have to give an account to God. Have I told my flock the whole council of God? Have I told them the truth? Have I told them really what sin is? Have I told them what repentance is? Have I told them who Jesus is? Have I told them the kind of life they live to need to live in order to be saved? Was it Chrysostom who said that the path to hell is paved with the skulls

of bishops? I'd like that to be on a bishop's motto. Yeah, well, I don't want to bash the bishops. Well, you didn't, Chris, I still did, so you're fine. Yeah, I know a lot of them. I think a lot of them are just really good men, really good men who haven't been prepared for this, who don't know how to interpret the signs of the times, who don't really need.

Tell us about some good bishops, then. Yeah, well, I think. Let's celebrate them. Yeah, well. Let's praise them. Let's tweet at them and thank them. Yeah, I've been talking about Archbishop Garcia. Gomez, who's president of the bishops' conference, he's stepping out. Good, thank God. And I might do a YouTube video on his recent speech and that type of thing.

Please, yeah, we need to do that. We need to- I mean, honestly, part of why we need to shed a light on what good bishops are doing is to even appeal to the on what good bishops are doing Yeah Is to even appeal to the pride of other bishops who think well maybe it's safe now to do this like we just want to kind of Encourage them. Well I'm hoping enough emerge that others who are timid and fearful feel like maybe I could do this Maybe I could tackle it. And now would be a good time. Yeah, it sure would be yeah Well now is the hour of salvation and come on up if you hear his voice today. He's hardening hard.

Archbishop Aquila in Denver, he did a remarkable essay. I did a YouTube video on this that he published in American Magazine. You can get it on his website, on the Archbishop of Denver, Archdiocese of Denver website. And he said, you know, for the last number of years, I've been trying to not rock the boat and affirm the culture and everything, I realized that I haven't been preaching the whole truth to people and I need to change. Holy moly. I know, I know, it's really, really significant.

Bless him. Yeah. What humility and courage. Yeah, so I did a YouTube video on that. Strickland's great too. I had Strickland, he was in that chair, I interviewed him, and I would ask him questions about how do you think the Pishaps have failed in this sense or this? And whenever I asked him a question like that, he'd say, well, I can tell you how I failed.

Yeah. Yeah, a real humble man who loves our Lord. Yeah, I think he's really good too. I honestly get a little uncomfortable when he brings in the vaccine and the mask stuff. I think he's, I think this is one of the things I love about him and I'll let you finish your point, I cut you off, but he's a humble guy. Like I drove him here from the place we were at. And I had mentioned a few of those things. And you got the impression that he was really willing to listen, you know?

So when the CDF will say it's not an evil thing to take the vaccine, it seems like he stopped talking about that. Yeah, I don't know. I think I still see stuff, you know? But again, he's brave, he's courageous, I admire him a great deal. I wish sometimes we wouldn't bring in, at least in my opinion, secondary issues that

detract from the center, but you know, that's just, he has to do what he feels like the Lord's asking him to do. No, it's true. I mean, we're looking for saints, and most of us aren't that. We're just people who are trying to love Jesus and who have our own stuff and baggage and things we like to harp on about,

and we need correction as well. But okay, so you've mentioned three. Can we go to that? Yeah, I think Archbishop Court alone is stepping out. Good. He's coming up to very brink of doing what needs to be done, but he hasn't pulled the trigger yet. Cross it.

Well, he's now asking for people to pray and fast and offer sacrifices for Nancy Pelosi's conversion, which is a very charitable thing to do, very powerful thing to do. But I think he needs the excommunicator. Yeah. I think it's ridiculous. This is beyond ridiculous. Yeah, it's beyond ridiculous. You know, I think Biden needs to be excommunicated. I think just saying you shouldn't bring yourself to communion type of thing is like a half step.

You know, I think when somebody is publicly advocating killing babies and like Cardinal Gregory says we need to dialogue with these people, he's been dialogued with till the cows come home and what the dialogue has produced is more and more radical pro-abortion positions. You know, he's obviously made his choice and he's doubled down and he's tripled down. I'm concerned for us all. I think he violated his conscience, what was still left of it regarding abortion in order to get elected, in order to appeal to the radical left. You know, when he gave up any limitations on abortion, any limitations on funding, he just kind of totally surrendered to the radical pro-abortion.

This might be cynical or it might just be the way things are, but I would suspect that if Trump had have been a Catholic that many of our bishops would have been in favor of excommunicating him, but not this Joseph Biden. Yeah, yeah, building a wall is really terrible. So anyway. Man alive. Yeah, so Archbishop of Ch Chappu has been the lone voice for many years, speaking clarity,

speaking truth, speaking reason. And even though he's retired and wants to get out of the fray and he deserves a rest, you know, when Colonel Gregory said he's going to keep giving communion to President Biden, Archbishop Chappu out of retirement, said, can't do that. Can't do that if we believe what we say about the Eucharist, we can't do that. Bishop Proprosky, I don't know how to pronounce his name, from a pure Proproky. Same thing, he says people who are in a holy disposition shouldn't present themselves for communion. thing he says you know he says people who are holy as position shouldn't present themselves for communion so here we have the bishops in a few weeks

about ready to do a document on the Eucharist is this real quick is this the who's the bishop Cordeleon Cordeleon San Francisco is he on Twitter I don't know if he is could everybody start tweeting him to excommunicate Nancy Pelosi that'd be great keep going yeah. Yeah, anyway, so, you know, I think- But Bishop's Conference- Yeah. Well, Bishop's Conference is going to do a document on the Eucharist, and they're embarking on a really good endeavor to try to re-energize Catholics, you know, this Eucharistic endeavor over the next several years. They're going to teach on the Eucharist. They're going

to have Eucharistic conferences and Eucharistic processions and everything, and that's really, really good. But they're probably gonna avoid the issue. Yeah, they will, I think. Yeah, you know, and because they don't have unity, so they can't, as a bishops' conference, say anything. But I think, even if that's the case, which I think it probably will be,

and the scandal of Catholic politicians advocating abortion will continue, individual bishops need to step up and take action in their own dioceses because they have to answer to the Lord. Yeah, that's it, amen. For those who are watching, we'd love to take some questions. So at us, at Pints with Aquinas, so Neil can better see the comments coming through.

Neil, have we got anything yet? Not that I've seen. Great, I was really hoping you'd say yes to that. One thing I've found really helpful lately is praying the Magnificat. We tend to want to over complicate these things I think. How do I pray? I think we're asking that because we don't just want to sit in silence and do what we know we should do. But scripture can be a difficult thing to enjoy and often my prayer is Lord help me to want to want to read your word.

Which is a shame, yeah there I am. Well you know what I suggest to people when I do myself is I use that Magnificat publication. Yeah that's what I use too. Yeah and so I take my time with it yeah and one of the things I started to do is you know when a phrase in a psalm kind of strikes me saying, you know, the Lord, like Psalm 16 the other day, the Lord puts a marvelous love for, you know, your fellow Christians in your heart. I'll just stop there and like thank the Lord for putting a marvelous love in my heart, ask him to put more love in my heart and pray for my brother.

So I kind of like interact in a prayerful way with the scripture. Or when like Paul says, I pray that you know the riches and the heights and the depths of Jesus Christ. I say, Lord, help me to know those riches and heights and depths more, you know, that type of thing. Or, you know, when we talk about loving the Lord, or God with the whole heart, mind, soul and strength, I say, Lord, I want to love you more, but I don't think I can do it. You know, I don't think I've got what it takes, you know, to love you more. Help me to love you more, but I don't think I can do it. I don't think I've got what it takes to love you more,

help me to love you more type of thing. So I'll kind of interact with what's being revealed to us in scripture and asking the Lord to do it more or to do it for the first time or help me understand something better. Sometimes I'll have a question about something like how to understand something. And the last person I think of asking is the Lord, you know?

And then I get reminded that, you know what? I should probably ask the Lord about this, because he probably knows about this. You know, that type of thing, you know? I'll ask the Lord about something I'm wondering about, and very often I'll get an understanding, maybe not right on the spot, but over the course of the next period of time, that type of thing. So I think that people just take their time with Magnificat, and then when it gets to the intercessions, you know, we should be praying regularly for people, you know, and so I have a prayer list.

I don't pray for everybody on the list every day, but periodically I do. And then you have the Saint of the Day, and I find that very inspiring, no matter who the saint is. He could be, from our point of view, a weird sixth century hermit or anybody. It's just very inspiring to me that people in every single century of our history as a people, they've loved God in a radical way. What's common to all the saints is they've totally given their life to God, you know, so I get inspired by even people that I can't relate to their life situation.

You know, I'm married, I've got children and grandchildren, you know, but I can relate to their love of God. I can relate to their desire to give themselves totally to the Lord, you know, so. And then, you know, if the meditation isn't written by a German theologian, a lot of times those are very inspiring too. And then I'll just kind of put it down, I'll just kind of be with the Lord, I might look at the icon and just kind of be grateful for Jesus, or sometimes I'll experience His presence, sometimes I won't, sometimes prayer will be hard. I try to stay there, I have a set time

that I would like to pray each day, and I try to stay there, you know, I have a set time that I would like to pray each day, and I try to stay there even if it's getting harder, that type of thing, to kind of keep facing the Lord, you know. And then I'll try to kind of, like St. Paul says, pray always, you know. You know, I try not to restrict my relationship to the Lord, to my prayer time, but try to remember Him during the day, you know, that type of thing. I might take a walk and say the rosary. I might say it in the car when I'm driving to my office or something like that.

You know, even praying in tongues, like, you know, that's a prayer gift. And so sometimes I find it helpful just to pray in tongues. And a lot of times that kind of releases, like, I feel like just to pray in tongues and a lot of times that kind of releases, like I feel like, I feel like there's joy down there under the surface and it starts coming out. I remember one time I was driving to the airport, I had to give an academic paper to some really high level Catholic academics, which is a little scary,

and so I was a little nervous about it and I just began to pray in tongues and the spirit of joy just came out, like this like, whoa, you know, I got delivered from fear. And I just got, I just had like a peace, like the Lord was going to be there with me. So it's not, praying in tongues isn't a cure-all for everything, you know, it doesn't take away all dryness in prayer. But every now and then it's kind of like another dimension.

Like Paul says, 1 Corinthians 14, I pray in tongues more than any of you. I want you all to pray in tongues. He who prays in tongues prays mysteries to God. So it's definitely biblical. It's definitely something. Well, let's pause there for a moment because I've got to ask you about it. I mean, I think when Thomas talks about tongues, he's probably, I don't think he, I think he, I mean, I might be wrong actually, but I'm pretty sure Thomas says that this is maybe one of those things that's ended except maybe in evangelistic sort of endeavors where you're actually speaking a language, you're not just babbling.

But what do you say? Yeah, well, there's three kinds of speaking in tongues that are revealed in the scripture. The first kind is like what happened on the day of Pentecost where people are speaking out apparently in Aramaic or their own language or Greek, and people are hearing them in their own language. There's people there from all the nations, they're for the feast, all the Jewish people. And so people don't know whether it was a miracle

of the apostles speaking a language they didn't know, it was a miracle of hearing. Yeah, yeah. You know, that type of thing. So that's where speaking in tongues happens and it's recognized as a particular language. And I've been in situations where somebody's there, like for example, an expert in medieval French or something,

they hear somebody praying in medieval French, you know, or somebody praying in Arabic or something like that. You know, people, so every now and then it happens where you'll, there'll be a recognized foreign language. The second kind of praying in tongues is 1 Corinthians 12, where it says, it talks about the gift of tongues and the gift of interpretation, along with the gift of healing, the gift of prophecy,

the gift of miracles, and things like that. And it says, does everybody pray in tongues? Does everybody prophesize? Does everybody do miracles? And it says, so tongues and interpretation is when somebody speaks out a word in like a prayer situation in tongues, not knowing what they're saying in their mind. And then somebody gets inspired by the Holy Spirit to give an interpretation of what was just said.

The third kind of speaking in tongues is speaking in tongues as a dimension of private prayer Where Paul says I pray in tongues more than any of you. I want you all to pray in tongues and And then he would speaks tongues speaks mysteries unto God so it's sort of like taps into another level of our being or consciousness where the Holy Spirit Bypasses our rational restraints on the Lord and. I've heard it described as a sort of babbling, like an infant might babble. Yeah, something like that. But, you know, so it's not a cure-all.

But what you, I mean, someone's watching and they're like, is this a gift that I have to wait to overwhelm me? Is this something I can just implement today in my personal prayer? What is this thing? Yeah, well, this is where that catechumenate renewal comes in where like in a life and a spirit seminars

or an alpha or whatever, they'll like an alpha will have a Holy Spirit weekend and life and a spirit seminars, people will be taken through a period of repentance, renewing faith, commitment to Jesus, renouncing evil spirits, and then opening up for more of the Holy Spirit, and an explanation of the gifts the Spirit may give.

And the only gift that Paul says he wants everybody to have is this gift of private prayer, speaking in tongues. So people are encouraged to, you know what it says, they spoke and the Spirit gave utterance, so people are encouraged to, you know what it says, they spoke and the Spirit gave utterance, so people are encouraged to start speaking out in their prayer time. I remember like, I was quote, baptized in the Holy Spirit way before I ever heard of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. I was a senior at Notre Dame. I was searching for the truth. I was caught up in the Dame. I was searching for the truth.

I was caught up in the confusion of the 60s. Were you a practicing Catholic? Well, sort of, but not really. I was changing my major from political science to English to philosophy, because I did have this thirst for the absolute type of thing. I was reading Plato and Nietzsche and did my senior essay on that.

I probably had been introduced enough to the Lord as a boy that something was missing when I didn't have him. I was looking for absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute love. But I was really getting confused and really caught up in the confusion of the 60s. Wasn't living a good life. I remember one day I was coming home from an off-campus party and it was late, early

in the morning and this tow truck was going by, you know, in that part of Indiana they called them Wreckers. And I really felt like a wrecker was coming for me. You know, I felt like it was like a little sign from the Lord that the wrecker was coming for me. It was like a warning. And I think if I hadn't made that curcio, who knows if I'd still be alive today, who knows, whatever. So a friend insisted I make a curcio, which is a renewal movement from Spain. It's like a You know anyway, so, you know, maybe 70 million Catholics have gone through it's helped a lot of people meet the Lord So I didn't want to do it but

Just because he harassed me so much So I'd like to say to anybody listening or watching don't be afraid to harass people and get them to make retreats and invite them to lectures by Scott Horne or invite them to Life and the Spirit seminars or Alva courses or Bible studies in the parish or Ignatian retreats. Harass people into salvation. So anyway, I'm on the curseio and I think I'm a philosophy major. I don't think I'm going to get anything out of this. There's going to be group dynamics going on and people are going to have warm feelings and human relationships and they're going to call it God, but I'm not going to fall.

Acoustic guitars do that. They give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Yeah, I'm not going to fall for that. But then I heard a beautiful explanation of the faith from a priest and then I heard Catholic lay people talking about relationship with Jesus and quite honestly the thing that was moving for me was when we made a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and they passed around a cross just like this and each person got the cross and they had an opportunity to say something to Jesus. I had never seen that happen before.

I'd never heard people very personally talking to Jesus and I think I passed the cross on. But that really struck me that there's something going on here, either it's real and if it's real there's something the Lord has for me here. And another thing that really moved me was that at a certain point they read letters from people who are actually offering prayer and sacrifice for us who are on that curseal. So I say, wow, you know, there's like Mexican migrants putting pebbles in their shoes as appendants during three days so that we may be open to the grace of God. So, the hangup was repentance and conversion.

I knew that the only sensible response to make to Jesus, if he was Lord, if he was real, and I felt like at a certain point, I think he's here. I think he's here in this retreat house. I think he's been raised from the dead. I think he's here and I think he's expecting something from me. He's inviting me. I didn't hear any voice. I didn't feel anything really personally directed to me, other than that just him being there was an invitation to surrender. And so I knew that the only sensible response to make to him is total surrender. Because if he really is Lord, I mean, you don't bargain with God.

You don't add him to your great books collection, you know. Right. You don't add him to your statuary, you know, type of thing. Yes. So I knew I needed to write him a blank check. And so, but I also knew what he was going to write in on a blank check. I knew he was going to write in everything forever. But I also knew it wasn't because he was selfish, it was because he wanted all of me to be healed,

all of me to be redeemed, all my sins to be forgiven, and to be all his. It was hard. It wasn't until Sunday morning, the last day of the Corsillo, that I swallowed my pride and humbled myself, went to confession, got reconciled with the Lord and the church. I never would have thought about it in these terms then, but since then I think that was a renewal of my baptism. But then at the very end of the Curcio, people came in who had made previous Curcios,

singing and Mexican mariachas type stuff and celebrating. I just felt like the love of God being poured into my heart. I just felt like literally, just like it says in Romans 5, the love of God poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit. And something got born in me, I think it was a renewal of confirmation, to honestly tell you the truth, I didn't think about it that way at the time.

But this tremendous desire got born in it that way at the time. But this tremendous desire got born in me and at the end of the crusade you could say what you got out of it type of thing. And so I remember what I said. I want to spend the rest of my life knowing and loving Jesus and helping other people know and love him.

And that's basically it. I don't have anything more profound to tell people than that, that Jesus is alive, Jesus is real, Jesus is the Lord Totally surrender That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that I got to share this story of a friend of mine who I grew up with Because I think you'll find it fascinating and others will too. She was the mother of my best friend her name is Evie Muldoon and

She was just one of those parents who asked how you were and meant it. You know when you're a kid, most parents will just go out, go somewhere else. She was somebody who looked at you and saw you, and I remember that being a real beautiful thing. But you know, she wasn't perfect. And after my conversion in the year 2000, as I spoke of Jesus Christ, I remember it making her feel very uncomfortable. And she said that we were not in a place to say which religion is better, that sort of thing. So very much had bought into this religious indifference. She was in her mid-50s then. And a lot of these conversions that we hear about tend to take place when people are in their most formative years, like I was 17. Well, she came to our wedding, that's how close she was, she flew to Texas for my wedding

in 2006, and even then wasn't really a Christian, may have been baptized. But a couple of years after though, she went to Holy Mass, and she often wouldn't go, but she went this time. And somebody said, well, look, there's these people who are going to be praying over people if you'd like after Mass, and you're welcome to come up and just share what you'd like prayers for. And if I'm remembering the story correctly, Evie said, well, you know, she had been feeling pretty stressed at work lately, and so she'll ask them to pray. So she does just that and and they laid hands on her and she said she encountered the person of Jesus Christ

and her life radically changed and again mid-50s I'd say, late 50s. So she goes home and she's smashing statues of Buddha that she has around the house and tearing down these New Age symbols which she had everywhere, throwing holy water up the walls, you know. And she went to a Bible study the following week and was sharing this. And somebody at the Bible study said, well, don't you think that's a little rather narrow-minded? And she said, I hope so. It's a narrow path. She had encountered the Lord.

And the last I spoke to her, she said she'll wake up. It's a narrow path. Yeah. And the last I spoke to her, she said she'll wake up in the morning and just spend an hour with the word and glory to Jesus Christ. No matter what you've done or where you've been or how loyal you are, the Lord wants to do, as you said, birth. You say he birthed something in you. I think you say that's how you put it. But that's what he wants to do with all of us. Yeah. So I mean, it doesn't cure all your problems, it doesn't take away suffering, it doesn't take away tests and trials, it doesn't take away disappointments, it doesn't take away sin that you still need to repent from, but I'll tell you what, what I can say is I'm a Christian under construction, and it's so much better to be a Christian under construction

than to be someone under destruction. And if you're not in Christ, you're under destruction. You're heading towards destruction. You're on a Broadway heading towards destruction. You need to get on that narrow way that that lady talked about and get under construction. Allow the Lord to start remaking you and healing you and cleansing you.

And I've never seen this woman so happy. That's the other thing that everybody around her noticed. She lost a ton of weight. She was very, not very overweight, but she was somewhat overweight, and she started eating well, and everything in her life just started clicking into gear. Beautiful.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Jesus says, you know, the unbelievers are worried about what they're gonna eat, what they're gonna wear, what the future's gonna bring, but I say to you, seek first the kingdom of God and His holiness, and these other things will be added as well. So if you put the first things in first place,

the secondary things are gonna really take their rightful place. Yeah. Do we have any questions of the last 20 minutes? All right, do you mind? So we have a super chat from. And you'll put that on. Super chat from Michael Ballmer.

Says, in the spirit of charity, what aspects of Bishop Barron's ministry does Dr. Martin view as laudable? Well, I think he's very much trying to present Catholicism as attractive, Jesus as attractive, the Christian life is attractive, so I really feel like his fundamental effort to evangelize is just laudable. I think one of the things- And he's orthodox.

He doesn't really formally hold to anything, any false teaching. Yeah. I would say too, just to kind of add in there, one of the things, and he's orthodox, he doesn't really formally hold to anything any false teaching. Yeah, I would say too, just to kind of add in there, one of the things he does really well is he helps those who think Christianity is intellectually bankrupt take a second look. And I can't count how many times people have written to me and said, I listen to you, I listen to Bishop Barron, I listen to Father Mike Schmitz, and it's part because of this that I've come into the church. So I'm sure he receives countless emails from people saying he's come into the church because of his good work. So there'll be a few things.

There's another super chat from Kyle Whittington who says, I once heard that our bishops will have the same ratio as the Apostles, one betrayed, one denied the resurrection, one denied knowing Christ, and eight abandoned him, only one stayed loyal to the end. Thoughts." And he also says, thanks for the wise phone, smashing the iPhone has been a game changer. Nice!

I keep getting people to smash their smartphones. Oh yeah. So that they can be smart. Yeah. Right, so. No, I mean, honestly honestly we need to pray for the bishops like I said most of them maybe all of them are really good people trying to do what they think to be the right thing I just think that they need

to increase their fear of the Lord and decrease their fear of men and encounter Christ in even a deeper way and ask for the boldness to preach him and proclaim him and to guard their people from error that the pastoral epistles in the Bible tell shepherds they're supposed to do. You know, one of the things that's most missing is Paul says, admonish the sinner. Where's the admonishing? You know, I mean, really, for any kind of sinner, us, you know, where are we being admonished for? The things that people do, you know

And and just to add to that I would say if you're listening right now and you've done More criticizing than praising of the bishops you might consider This today to reach out publicly to reach out publicly, whether that be through social media, or through a phone call, or even a letter, and thank that good bishop for whatever good decision you think he made so that we can encourage them. Because if we take the spiritual war seriously, then it just stands to reason that our shepherds are going to be being targeted. Yeah, you know, I can't leave out two other shepherds,

not because they're so good on the particular issue we're talking about, but both Bishop Boyer in my diocese of Lansing and Archbishop Vigneron in Detroit where I teach at the seminary, are making a super serious effort to evangelize, making a super serious effort, the way Archbishop Vigneron says, to change the DNA into a

DNA of evangelization same in Lansing and so both those bishops are leading in evangelization in a really strong way, you know I'm thinking of the prayer in you know Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel that this prayer he's come to his people and set them free There's a line in there. He says raised up a prophet Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel that this prayer he's come to his people and set them free But there's a line in there who says raised up a prophet To proclaim if you remember the wording let me know. Yeah, the Benedictus. Yeah. Yeah To proclaim his salvation and he says by the remission of their sins Yeah, and I've often thought that that's great. We can proclaim salvation, but you have to say how yeah

You want to change the DNA of evangelization, sin has to be one of the first things you say. Yeah, and Archbishop of Vigna Ron did this kind of solemn ceremony of repentance where he tried to acknowledge ways in which we've gone off the track, you know, in the diocese, you know, with racism, with not teaching what we should have taught and things like that.

It was a little awkward because he had the previous cardinal there and things like that. But yeah. Yeah, that's good. I mean, and we don't have to wait for a bishop to be perfect to praise him. Right, yeah. A bishop can be wrong on certain things

or ambivalent on certain things, not be right on this or that. Well, praise him for this or that. Yeah, the same thing with our parish priests, right? Yeah, exactly. Encourage them where they should be encouraged and encourage them to be stronger in areas that they're not. Yeah.

Anything else Neil? We have another super chat from Regina Pontes. Super chat is when people pay to ask a question. They bless the channel by their finances to ask a question. Oh really? How much do they have to pay to ask a question? I think they can put in five cents or a dollar. They can do whatever they want. Oh really? Oh yeah. Thank you for that. That's super nice. How much did she put in?

This one was five dollars. She just wanted to say amazing podcast. We better give a good answer for that. Yeah and we'll get lunch after. And we'll thank her. Sorry. She's just saying amazing podcast plus you guys are so needed. So not a question. She doesn't have a question. She's just throwing money at us to thank us. Well encouraging us, yeah. Thank you so much. That's very kind of you. Yeah, are we kind of wrapping up there with the questions? Should we? Yeah, there was a question about, let me find it. It was about ecumenism. Here it is. Rahowens Jason asks, hey Dr. Ralph Martin, how significant do you think ecumenism is

and how do you think it has improved in the last 20 years? Greetings from Belgium, Patrick, Petra and Jason. Could you repeat that? So yeah, the question of ecumenism and its role in the church, has it been a blessing, hasn't it? Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that was confusing after Vatican II is the decree on the unity of Christian people where the church changed its pastoral strategy. We no longer mainly looked at what was wrong with the Protestants and Orthodox calling

them heretics and schismatics, but we said, you know what? We all have a common baptism. We all actually are, theologically, brothers and sisters in Christ. So we should stop only relating to what's wrong in our brothers and start relating also to what's right, and we need to also start taking seriously Jesus' desire that there be mutual love and unity amongst his disciples. So here we have disciples. They're separated brothers, but they're brothers and sisters in the Lord. So after Vatican II, all the bilateral dialogues began, you know, Catholic Lutheran, Catholic Methodist, Catholic Anglican, and so on and so forth, Catholic Orthodox. Real progress was made in so forth, Catholic Orthodox. And real progress was made in taking away stereotypes

and misunderstandings about what each other's churches taught, even to the point of getting a joint statement of justification between the Lutherans that other Protestant denominations then signed onto the Catholics about were saved by grace through faith, which is super significant, you know, really a real advance. So that's helped a lot.

On the other hand, the average Catholic was a little confused by all this saying, gee, maybe people don't need to become Catholics. Maybe it's okay just to be a Protestant, so maybe I don't have to be concerned about Protestant friends becoming Catholics. So that's not at all what Vatican II taught. They taught that the fullness of the means of salvation reside in the Catholic Church. Protestant friends becoming Catholics. So that's not at all what Vatican II taught.

They taught that the fullness of the means of salvation reside in the Catholic Church. They said anybody actually who knew that and refused to enter it could not be saved. So there was a clear affirmation that the fullness of the means of salvation in the Catholic Church and people were called to the fullness of the faith. But it took a while for that to all get sorted out in people's minds, and it's still not completely sorted out in people's minds, just like inter-religious dialogue is not sorted out. So the decree on non-Christian religions kind of, again, emphasized what's positive and

what we have in common, but didn't repeat the serious deficiencies and idolatries and errors and denials of Christ that are in some of the major world religions. So it took a while to sort that all out, and that's still being sorted out, and that's what I'm trying to sort out in my book still. Excellent. Is that pretty much it, Neil? Yeah, there's a few more questions if we want to.

One thing I really want to ask you to do, we had, you know, Sister Miriam James? Yes, yeah. Love her. She's powerful. I interviewed her recently, and she led people in a prayer for inner healing. And I wonder if you might,

if I could put you on the spot and maybe invite you to lead somebody who's watching this right now in a prayer to surrender their lives to Jesus Christ. No, that would be great. Whether they've done it before, I mean, I'll actually allow you to lead me in this prayer. I'd like to surrender my life again to Jesus Christ and to encourage people to.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a phrase in scripture that says, if you hear his voice today, harden not your heart. If you've heard his voice somehow in our voices today, harden not your heart. I believe the Lord has something for anybody who's listening to this. I can't tell you what it is, but if you've gotten something from the Lord today, something's become

clearer. If even you've been convicted of a compromise you made that's not in harmony with the truth, if you've been awakened from a lukewarmness that you didn't even know was there, If you've been awakened from a lukewarmness that you didn't even know was there, if a half-hearted response to Jesus has been characteristic of your life, this would be a good time to let that grace work in your soul and repent. So I'd like to, Jesus, I ask you to pour out your Holy Spirit and everybody listening and watching, I ask you to bring to people's minds and hearts what you have for them today, whether it's a gift of love, a gift of encouragement, a gift of insight, a gift to come up closer, to come closer to you.

And I also ask, Lord, that you bless people with the gift of repentance, to have the humility and honesty to recognize ways in which they're holding back from you and they haven't committed themselves to full obedience to you and to your word, that they haven't loved your word enough, haven't treasured your word enough, haven't paid attention enough to you Lord in prayer, haven't really put you as a priority in their life Lord. I ask you to help inspire them to pick themselves up and try again to have a daily prayer time and when they read the word to interact with it, to talk to you about it, to ask that it come true in their lives Lord, that precious word that you've given us. Lord, I ask you to put into the souls of everybody listening or watching today a tremendous concern

for the salvation of friends, relatives, family members, that there's only one thing necessary, that people make a choice to be a friend of Jesus Christ and accept his mercy and love before they die. The people who die in friendship in Jesus, their lives are a tremendous success no matter what other failures they've had and no matter whatever wounds they bear that will be washed away by the Lord himself. The only tragedy in life is to die with hardness of heart, rejecting the love and mercy of God

and being separated by our own choice from His love forever. Lord, continue to pour out your Holy Spirit, everybody who watches, everybody who listens and help them to choose for you in a deeper way, help them to resolve never to deny you before men, deliver them from the fear of men, and give them a holy and deep and godly fear of you, that they, out of love for you, and of regard for your holiness, and of regard for who you are, that they would never want to freely choose to offend you.

Lord, we thank you for, we love your mercy, we thank you for, we love you, mercy, we thank you for the ability to communicate through podcasts like this with people who have open hearts. We ask all of this in the name of Jesus. Amen. I just felt cool to share too that if there's somebody out there who desires to grow in prayer and doesn't know how and needs some direction, I'd tell you to do this. Again, if you're looking for direction.

And that would be when you wake up, get on your knees, bow your forehead to the floor and say, God, I believe in you, I adore you, I hope in you and I love you, and I ask pardon for those who do not believe in you, do not adore adore you do not hope in you and do not love you We might put that prayer in the description below for people if you're looking for something you want to worship our Lord as soon as You rise and you've been looking for somebody to tell you what to do. Well, here I am I'm telling you what to do do that every day of your life until you die. That's really great. Yeah, I'm doing that too, man Are you really? Yeah, I am. yeah. You do that in the morning? Yeah, I do.

I didn't even know that. I do it at the beginning of prayer time, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Beautiful stuff. Tell us about Renewal Ministries as we wrap up here. Yeah, sure. We'll put some links in the description so people can see the good work you're doing. Yeah, well, you know, people can go to our website, renewalministries.net, and we have the longest running TV program on Ediputian right now,

the choices we face. It's excellent. I really enjoy it. Yeah, you can also access it on our website. It's a podcast too, is that right? It's a podcast too, yeah. Yeah, they can go to our YouTube channel and find it there, just I guess put in Renewal Ministries YouTube channel or Ralph Martin or Peter Hrbeck or something.

Then we have two daily Catholic radio programs, one with Sister Ann Shields, one with Peter. And then we do a lot of mission work around the world. Then we have an outreach to young adults called ID, which stands for intentional discipleship. We have an outreach to high school and middle school girls called Beloved Revolution. We have an outreach to high school boys called Zion.

And we're just trying to do whatever we can to help people know and love Jesus and help other people know and love Him at every age, whatever situation they're in. Excellent. Well, Ralph, I love you. I'm glad you exist. I'm glad that you answered the Lord's call back when you did on that Christio retreat. Thank you so much for all that you've done for the church and continue to do and let people know again to get that book. I'm not just plugging this for the sake of it.

I read the whole thing in a weekend and it was such a blessing to my faith. A Church in Crisis Pathways Forward. We'll put a link in the description below. It's terrific. So thank you. Thanks, Matthew. Thank you for what you're doing. I'm so grateful to God that he got a hold of me, that he got a hold of you, that he

didn't let us go our own ways, but he's got us on the path that leads to eternal life. Amen, and may he hold on tight. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much.