Pints With Aquinas - BONUS | From scandal to hope, with Raymond Arroyo

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

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G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. This is the third episode in a row that we've been doing on the scandals in the church. And honestly, I think today is the most hopeful and uplifting one. I was so honored that Raymond Arroyo from EWTN agreed to be on Pints with Aquinas. And, you know, we talk about everything. And it's a fascinating interview. And he has some very surprising and well thought out answers that I think are going to bless you and certainly blessed me and please please stick around to the end of this episode because I asked him what mother Angelica who he worked with for years at EWTN would say to us and I was honestly in tears as he was saying what he said, and I know it's going to bless you too.

So this will be the last episode that we're doing. The next episode will be, as per usual, next Tuesday, I'll interview Kalu Brassad about Aquinas' fourth way. But it's been wonderful to get all of the feedback, whether positive or negative, that's been coming through these. But I truly believe that overall, it's been a blessing people. So, enjoy the show. Here we go. Raymond Arroyo, how's it going? Great to be with you, Matt. I'm fine. You must be really busy right now. I am.

I am running in 12 directions, just trying to keep up with this story. And Matt, to my eye, this is the biggest story since Pope Benedict resigned the papacy. It's one of those moments where you can feel its import, and everybody's trying to process it in real time. And it's one of those big seismic moments where you can feel the plates shifting. And we're in uncharted territory, and that's why I equate it to Benedict's resignation. We hadn't seen anything like it in 600 years. None of us were around then. And the circumstances were vastly different, And I feel the same way now. You have, for the first time, a Vatican official charging the Pope with malfeasance, possibly part of a cover-up related to sexual abuse,

and he names the names of many, many papal collaborators, including the Pope himself, and then has the temerity at the end of the thing to suggest that the Pope and all those responsible should instantly resign for the good of the Church. Here's an easy question. Do you believe him? Do you believe Vigano's letter? Do I believe Vigano's letter? Well, I know Vigano. I've met him before. I knew his predecessor, Archbishop Sambi, who was the nuncio here for many years, in fact, who was quoted in the long 11-page letter as yelling at Cardinal McCarrick and informing him that he no longer can execute public ministry and should go live a life of prayer and penance. Sombi was the guy who did that, and they say his voice was thundering down the hall, which I could probably attest to because he had one of those big, booming voices. So when I look at these allegations, I take them extremely seriously.

Vigano is a serious, very deliberate, well-trained Vatican diplomat with a long record. This is not just some apparatchik that they brought in overnight. This is a man who for years oversaw, like for a decade, oversaw all of the embassies in the world for the Vatican. And then he was at the Vatican city-state, charged with overseeing that entire operation, and Benedict charged him with cleaning out the corruption there. That was his job. And people won't remember, but back in, I think it was 2010,

when the Batty Leak scandal started, when those letters, private letters of Pope Benedict were being made public, it was Viganò's 2011 letters to Benedict that was being leaked out, because in it he would chronicle the corruption he was seeing in the Vatican City State. The people he named there marked him as an enemy and drove him out of the Holy See, and he was sent to America as the American ambassador for the Vatican. Were his claims then validated? That is to say, was he found to be trustworthy then? Yes, I think many of those claims, similar to what we see happening now, the release of the letter became bigger than the charges he was making. But the truth of the matter is, I've substantiated some of the charges he made in those letters,

and they're easily substantiated. But look, Matt, we don't do the letter in verse. You can look at the cascade of horrible stories coming out of the Vatican over the last few years, of orgies in cardinals' apartments. By the way, the same down the hall from where Cardinal Ratzinger once lived, same apartment building. We have former diplomats who were caught in elevators with male prostitutes, who then get elevated to oversee the Vatican Bank, and now are running the Dona Santa Marta, the papal house there where the Pope lives.

So there are a lot of very strange doings in the Vatican. And I've said this on air before, I'll say it now, I said it before the Vigano letter, I have never in my 23-year career covering the Vatican, never have I seen the sexual and financial corruption that we are seeing now. The Vigano letter, just for the general public, puts a fine point on it. Now, these are allegations. They're allegations. And with any allegation, they have be proven uh... but the fact that you have a credible integral source like this that both the bishop many bishops of the united states around the world and now the bishop's conference seem to be giving credibility to his account and

saying it demands urgent investigation that's what you have the bishop's conference of the united states and the president of that conference urging the pope and uh the Pope and the Vatican to investigate these charges, something is up. And though the New York Times and others want us to dismiss this, I think that's the road to folly. Is that Donato? He's the president, right, of the season? Yeah. So is this just recent now, that he's demanding an investigation? When did that come out? Yesterday. It came out yesterday, and he, in the name of the bishops, issued a statement where he said there's an urgent need now to investigate this. Wait, I might have the quote

in front of me. Oh, I know I do somewhere. You were happy with it, huh? What he had to say, you were happy with it. Oh, here it is. Here it is. He says, the questions raised deserve answers that are conclusive evidence. Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusations, and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past. That's the end of the statement. So, there are urgent answers needed now. And I think the people of God, the people in the pews, are demanding those answers. And convening another commission at the level of the USCCB is not going to satiate the men and women in the pew today.

I can tell you that. Yeah. What does an investigation on the Holy Father and these cardinals even look like, practically? Well, this is the question. Let me give you a little history. I was here in 2002 when the last dam broke on this, and the bishops appointed something called the National Review Board, which was constituted of mostly lay people, okay? All lay people. And there were prosecutors and captains of industry, in some cases former prosecutors or heads of the CIA, Leon Panetta, Bob Bennett, you had Supreme Court justices from Illinois, incredible great people, Frank Keating of Oklahoma. And what you ended up with was a frustrated group of laymen who,

though they could ask questions of bishops, had no discovery or investigatory power or enforcement powers. So they all came away kind of burned from that experience, and the bishops are now kind of calling for another National Review Board. Well, they already have one, and that doesn't seem to have done the deed here. And my argument would be the reason it's not effective is in 2002, the crisis was protecting children. Protocols were put into place, and by and large today, children, little kids, are protected in schools and in public settings, in the church public settings. public settings, in the church public settings. The danger today, the danger that Vigano points to, the dangers we're seeing in the McCarrick situation are young men and young boys in the seminaries being targeted and abused. This is where, it's an internal church matter, it's not with the laity, it's with those entrusted to the clergy and the clergy themselves.

So it's a slightly different emphasis. How you investigate it, I don't know, but I'll tell you what it needs. You're going to have to have an independent investigator appointed and an investigative team like a special counsel. I personally don't think the Vatican will ever authorize such a thing. That's my personal feeling. And there is no protocol in place to investigate a pope or that high-ranking Vatican officials.

The pope would have to have his own team, but that would be clergy investigating clergy. And I don't think the laity are going to look on that with any credibility. So, that's the situation you have. As we go on, I'll tell you what I think we'll end up with. Right. I was going to ask, do you think, you know, we just had John Paul II, then we had Pope Benedict, like two rock star popes. Do you think that's made Catholics less likely to want to criticize the Holy Father?

It seems that there's this real reluctance among many Catholics. That's true. What do you think about that? Well, he's the Holy Father. Look, he's Peter's successor, he is our Father in faith, he's someone that Catholics look up to, and they look to him for clarity and truth. And in these days, when he's vowed to bring justice to this situation in Ireland just days ago, now we have a situation, and I'm sure the timed release of the Vigano letter was timed just because it came on the heels of those pronouncements. Now the Pope really has to put meat on the bones of his words, which is bring justice, have full accountability, and be transparent,

and bring these malefactors, whether they wear collars or not, to justice. That's where we are. Are people around the world, like other news outlets in different countries, addressing this the way America is? Because I tend to think as an Australian, sometimes America can be pretty myopic. At the last election, there was all this talk about the likelihood of a U.S. cardinal being elected to the chair of PETA. It was a real possibility, and maybe it was, you know. But are

we blowing this out of proportion, or is this something that other countries are talking about? No, this is a global... Look, I cover the church around the world, and I can tell you, Matt, we are dealing with an international sexual crisis of abuse. And again, that abuse is not little kids. That abuse are teenage boys and men in seminaries. It's kind of the Catholic Me Too thing, in that you have people abusing their power, using their power to abuse others. It's not that some of these people aren't of consenting age, but the power is still being used to entrap them, corner them, keep their silence. And you have the other issue of hierarchs using their power to promote or protect their friends and enablers. That's what's being charged in the Vigano letter.

That's what we're seeing play out in Honduras, in Chile, in Ireland, in England, in Rome itself, and here in the United States. This is a global problem. Now, some of the reportage a little overheated or missing the mark all the time, all the time. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a crisis on our hands. We do. So it would be unreasonable to say that there is not a homosexual problem in the hierarchy. Would that be unreasonable to make that claim? Well, that's the claim that Vigano is making in these letters. That is, you know, the John Jay criminal report showed that 82 to 85 percent of the abuse, and I was back looking at everything from, I think it was 1964 or 5 to 2000, and they concluded that 82 to 85 percent of the victims were male, and they were post-tubescent males. That's who the victims were. So, yeah, I think

that, you know, you have Richard Seif and others who said this is a problem. I can't imagine that the secular media would be that excited about covering this, then. I mean, according to secular wisdom, we should have praised McCarrick for exploring his sexuality. Well, this is the tension that I think the Church is going through now, because I read a piece today in La Stampa, and in it, the reporter attempts to make the case that, well, McCarrick, although he was sleeping with seminarians, it wasn't that big a deal. So, they could understand how Benedict could issue a private sanction of him rather than a big public one. Well, abuse is abuse is abuse, and the breaking of vows is critical here. And when you have a major churchman like a cardinal and kingmaker, as McCarrick was,

who's appointing other cardinals and suggesting them, globetrotting and raising millions of dollars, the evil is magnified. And his double life infects pools of the Church and ripples far beyond him. So, yeah, this is a major event, and it's a network. We'll see. I can see why an investigation is needed. see. This is why an investigation is needed. Right. I can see that many conservative Catholics might be willing to sort of criticize Pope Francis and demand an investigation, but is it fair to say that from Vigano's letter that Pope Benedict doesn't come out looking great either? Like,

does it seem that he should have been doing a lot more as well, or no? Well, he did. Here, look, I'll give you a fair reading on that. Members of the National Review Board, when no one would talk to them, they had evidence of wrongdoing, sexual misdeeds. They couldn't get the American bishops to listen to them. They went to Rome. No one there would accept them. Cardinal Ratzinger was the only one who invited them in. Ratzinger laicized himself through the Holy See when he was at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. He laicized thousands of men globally based on those reports and others he conducted on

his own. Okay? So he was very aware of the problem. He did, I think, everything that could have been done at the time. However, I will fault him in the McCarrick case, because I think he was convinced. McCarrick had retired by the time these settlements were paid to his victims. They were males. They weren't children.

They were grown men, 18, 19, 20. And therefore, they said, look, we're going to give you a private penalty, and that penalty is you will live out your days in prayer and pen penance and you're not to be seen in the public anymore, no more masses. So Benedict, I think, was probably overly merciful to McCarrick. It should have been a public criticism, you think? You bet. He should have been stripped of the office

entirely, like Laodicea. But again, the thinking was, well, it was guys, he was breaking his vows with guys, and it was consensual, and, well, no, no, no, no, no. Breaking of one vow always leads to breaking of others, and you're living a double life, and anyone who enables that. And now, in the light of the Me Too thing, we see the abuse of power used by these predators, and that's what we're dealing with. So whether it's heterosexual or homosexual, if you're using

your power to gratify yourself and demean another sexually, that's got to end. That can't be accepted on any level by laity, priests, anyone, Pope, no one can accept that.

And I fear that we're still trying to sort of cut the baby here, have, you know, cut the baby in half and think it's going to survive. It won't. It won't. All abuse is bad, and these victims should be in the forefront of our mind. And unlike others, I've actually talked to them, sat with them, watched them recount their broken lives. And the deep wounds that reach clear into old age with these people, where they quake and shiver telling the stories of something they endured when they were 8, 9, 12, 14, 15. It's unconscionable. And when you see that, it cries out for justice.

Amen, yeah. It cries out for justice. Has, yeah. It cries out for justice. Has Pope Benedict responded to all this? Hmm. Well, it was Ed Pendon at the National Catholic Register reported in his first piece when he released the Vigano letter that he had confirmation that Benedict had indeed placed sanctions on McCarrick. And Ed Pendon got that from sources close to Pope Benedict. Today, Pope Benedict and Pope Francis, the secretary they Vigano letter and the accusations made therein.

Well, the New York Times and others ran to say, look, it's Penton and everything, they reported lies, you see, it's not true. Well, it turns out, Penton got this from a source in July, before the Vigano letter even existed, that sanctions were placed on McCarrick. And additional to that, the denial from Gonsolin does nothing to undermine that bit of reportage. All he said is, the Pope colleague at Penn about the sanctions placed on McCarrick. That's the heart of the thing. Not whether the Pope Benedict agrees with the Vigano critique. Of course, he's not going to say he wholeheartedly agrees with it. But did he or did he not place sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick? It appears he did. In Vigano's charges, Pope Francis ignored those sanctions and rehabilitated McCarrick once he became Pope. That's a big part of his charge.

When Pope Francis became Pope, how many cardinals in the world had sanctions on them? Do you know that number? Is it a small number? Who knows? No, nobody knows. I mean, you know, usually this stuff is made public, but there are private punishments and restrictions on public duties that are made on individuals to keep scandal down. That's what it's done. And my guess is Benedict said, look, here's a retired bishop. He's an old perv. He did these horrible things, but he did them with consulting adults.

I'm just going to take him off the scene and tell him, lay low and go away and pray somewhere. That's what they were thinking. Whereas if it was a big splash and he was still an active bishop, they would have removed him. There might have been other penalties, but it was, I think he was trying to be overly merciful, and frankly, I think the mercy outweighed the logic there. He should

have cleaned up. So did he remove his cardinalational fee and the whole thing? Was Carrick obedient to Pope Benedict's sanctions? Until Pope Francis? Was he obedient to Carrick? Yeah. Was he obedient? Carrick was never obedient to anything. This is the other thing people need to know. Cardinal McCarrick was a great fundraiser. He raised millions of dollars, tens of millions around the world. That was his cachet in Rome that gave him enormous power. At the same time,

let's look at the record. Back in 2005, I think it was, maybe it was earlier than that, there was a controversy among the bishops about whether to give communion to pro-choice politicians. Cardinal Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and the Church's chief theologian, writes a letter to the U.S. bishops. He entrusts it to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was part of a committee dealing with this issue for the bishops. McCarrick takes the letter and never delivers it to the bishops. It was leaked later out of Rome, because the bishops never saw it at their meeting. What did it say?

Well, it said that you can't give communion to poor abort politicians. Right, that's what I thought you'd say, but yeah. Yes, and McCarrick wanted that spiked, so he simply withheld the letter. Now, if that's not being disobedient to authority, I don't know what is. There are other instances like this. I think he played fast and loose with the rules, and if he was indeed sanctioned by Benedict, he appeared at all these public functions, he continued to speak, he continued to say Mass.

Clearly, there's another issue here, and I'll just tell you real quick. In 2008, Archbishop Zombie goes to him and says, you've got to move out of that seminary you're in. You can't be staying in that seminary. Okay? Now, why do you move a former cardinal out of a seminary? Hmm. Because he's abused seminarians. That's why. So he moves him to a local parish of St. Thomas in Washington, D.C. Cardinal Wuerl is now the head and archbishop of the Washington

Archdiocese. It strains credibility that Cardinal Wuerl would not have known that the former Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, McCarrick, was now ensconced in a parish house. That makes no sense. that Wuerl canceled an event with McCarrick and seminarians that was to take place, because Vigano, the man who wrote these accusations, warned Cardinal Wuerl and said, you can't let this go on, and had a brochure with McCarrick's picture on it, surrounded by handsome seminarians. So Wuerl canceled that meeting. Why would he cancel the meeting if he didn't know about McCarrick's history? So, again, we're learning more every day, but increasingly, bits of Vigano's accusations are checking out and being confirmed, whether people want to acknowledge that or not.

What do you think of Pope Francis's response on the airplane, where he, just to recap for people, essentially said he won't say one word about this, and that maybe later he'll say something, but you know, you as a journalist, you come to your own conclusion. Right. Well, I mean, you know, when he says, I think you all should read the document carefully and judge for yourselves. I will not say one word on this. I think the statement speaks for itself. Well, it does speak for itself, but it's devastating. And, you know, it struck me as kind of a lawyerly response, and I think at a time when people want clarity.

Right. No, you don't want no clarity. Look, if somebody's telling me, if I come to you and say, Matt, you've been enabling sexual predators, and you knew all about it, and I told you about it. Yeah. I know what you're going to say. No comment. I won't say that. Yeah, of course. Absolutely

not. If you say no comment, the public instantly leans in and goes, hmm, what's up there? And that's where we are right now. I think you have very faithful Catholics looking in and going, why won't the Pope answer this? Why won't he answer this? How much evidence is enough evidence before people like yourself and maybe others say, you need to resign now?

Because people are already saying this, of course. Let me say this. Let me just say this. I'm a reporter. I host a TV show. It is not my role, I really don't see it as my role, to call for the resignation of the Pope or anybody else. All I can do is provide information. It's up to the public and the man in the pew to make that determination. And frankly, the cardinals who elected the pope, they need to make that call. And it's really not even about resignation. I will tell you my personal view, I'm going to say this, this is going to seem very controversial by some, I don't like the idea of a pope resigning. I don't like it.

I didn't like it when Benedict did it, I think it was a mistake. I don't like it. I didn't like it when Benedict did it. I think it was a mistake. I don't like it now. I think what happens, here's what's at stake. Forget the resignation for the moment. What's at stake is the credibility and the moral credibility of the Holy Father. That's what's at stake right now. His moral reputation and voice, and did he enable individuals or a culture of predators to exist in the Church? There are examples that some have pointed out where you can make the case that he did. There are other things, like Furman Swift, uh, stripping of McCarrick's powers and titles where you say he clearly didn't. Okay. So that's a call others are going to have to make, but I would be very careful about

the resignation of Popes. Um, because it, first of all, there's no mechanism for it at all. You can't impeach a pope. There's no way to do that. All you could do is have an uprising of Catholics, I guess, and they just storm the Vatican City like the villagers in Frankenstein and kind of take it by force, I guess. I don't know.

But there's no mechanism to remove the pope. He is the supreme pontiff. He is the lawgiver and lawmaker. So that's the predicament that the Church is in today. So if all that Vigano said is true, and you wouldn't have him resign, would you just have him kind of clean up the Church and repent, and what would you have him do if not resign? and repent, and what would you have him do if not resign? Well, my advice would be, you remove all the malefactors, and you prove yourself to be the instrument of reform that you were elected to be,

and restore the credibility of both the papacy as well as the Church. If he doesn't do that, and these allegations don't go away, I think it's going to be very difficult for his papacy to be looked on with any respect by the laypeople. Well, look, I'm reading my peers in the press. I'm getting calls all the time. I just got off the phone with a reporter from a major paper. When I look at this coverage, it's clear that they have moved into a different position. See, I really don't. I'm very clear about this. I'm very clear about the corruption we're dealing with, and Francis himself. But it's not my job to be a lobbyist against or for the Pope.

I have to report what's going on and be seen as the fair, honest broker, because that's what we need now. And I worried, and I hated the statement. I'm going to tell you why I didn't like the Pope's statement. It was very disappointing. You don't tell the media, you read it and you make your own judgments. You're mature enough. Go out there and you go and figure this out. Because what happens is that's the dog whistle for everybody to attack each other and basically have a grudge match in the street. That's what's happening now on social media. That's what's happening in parishes. People are taking sides and attacking each other.

I refuse to get into that. I refuse. People have been baiting me all day and night for days on social media about this stuff. I report the facts. You figure it out. Some of it you're going to like. Some of it you won't like. There it is.

What advice do you give to the rest of us who are, you know, you said the faithful and the pews. What would your advice be to us? How should we handle ourselves on social media? My first advice is this. My first advice is this.

I have to, I've been immersed in this stuff for now two decades. It's an ugly business. It's horrible. It's distressing. It's depressing. And it's a trial to your personal faith, if you believe it is.

You have to remember, and this is why I live in New Orleans. I work in D.C., but I live in New Orleans. And because it has its own Catholic culture, I have my parish, I love my priests, I love the Mass, I go to the sacraments. It is life-sustaining to me. We have to focus on the reasons that the Church exists, and it was left for us, and who left it to us, and not on the current occupants that occupy seats of power that will be blown away like chaff in the wind in due course. That will happen.

But at the end of the day, we're going to face judgment for our actions and words. And I think, look, I've been criticized for reporting cleanly and honestly on the Pope. I have been criticized for reporting cleanly and honestly on the Pope. I have been. But I can't do anything but be honest and freely report what I'm told and what I learn. And if I don't do that, I'm not standing up, I think, for my audience or to my vocation. But we have to remember what we're really here for, and it's not to fight about sex abuse or call for resignations. Because then your faith becomes that acrimony, like a grudge match. It's a bloody blood test.

That's not what we're here for. So we have to take this into prayer, consider it soberly, and demand answers. Demand answers because our children's lives are at stake, our sons, more importantly, are in danger, and they need protection. And we must valiantly struggle to demand and insist that they are safe everywhere where the Church is concerned. That's great advice. And accountability. Accountability is important right now. So, that's where I am. Well, thank you so much for saying that. Here's an honest question. Do letters

to bishops make one lick of difference? Sure they do. And more importantly, conversations with them. Engage them. Go talk to the bishop. Tell them what you're really feeling. Particularly you moneyed Catholics listening, and I tell this to all my moneyed friends as I have in recent days, before you scratch that check, take a pause and have a conversation with the people you're handing it to, and make some demands upon them. They have a bigger voice than we do, because it is the money. Peter's Pence, these organizations, all these knights and dames running around like it's a feudal court, they have lots of power and money. They now need to use that for answers, transparency, accountability, and fidelity.

Those are the three things we must insist upon as laity, I think. and fidelity. Those are the three things we must insist upon as laity, I think. And do it in charity, do it in love, and try to keep the shouting down. I know that's hard, because this is nasty stuff. It's nasty stuff. And when you've been lied to, as I have by the same men who are now being called out, it's really upsetting. But look, I'll tell you what a bishop told me many years ago. Boy, is he right. He said, Raymond, at the end, the 12 men that Jesus handpicked, only one of them was standing with his mama at the cross. That's what you're going to get. One in 12 are going to be worth a damn.

That's what he told me. Wow. And, you know, as kind of depressing as it is, it's kind of comforting, too. Yeah, I've heard you don't leave Jesus because of Judas. Right. You don't. You don't. You don't. Because then we'll be gone all day. There's many reasons to leave over Judas. And we've got plenty of Judases and cooperators. Right. We just don't want to become Judas ourselves.

We don't want to point the finger at others while we're engaging in, you know, nefarious behavior. Holiness. Look, what this all should do, for me, what it does, I step back and I marvel, and I do marvel at the endless creativity of the devil. He is endlessly creative. He bends and twists souls, creative. He bends and twists souls, and they add a lie here, and an indiscretion there, and they, you know, steal here, and they twist there. It's amazing. It's like a chain of events. It's like a chain. One begets another, begets another, and pretty soon they're all trapped, and then they trap others. This is the wonderful inventiveness of the devil. And somehow you have to counter that with a holy inventiveness. And that's the challenge, isn't it? Yeah, amen. Just one final question. Your biography on Mother Angelica,

I listened to the audiobook. I think it's the most fun, interesting, powerful audiobook I've ever listened to. You did such a great job narrating that. What would she be doing? Like if she could give, because I know you work with her at EWZN, what would her advice be to us? Well, I'll tell you two quick things. First of all, if you love that, in October, at the end of October,

the sequel to that biography, which contains the last 15 years of Mother's life I've written, and that audiobook I'm also very fond of, and it is, and I'm going to use it to kind of answer your question. Mother Angelica amazingly, and this is what the book recounts. She had a major stroke in 2001, the year the sex abuse scandal crashed into the church. And she was rendered silent because of that stroke. She couldn't speak at length anymore. She could still talk a little bit,

but not the monologues were no longer in her life. She couldn't do TV any longer. And to most people, they said, well, she's done. That's it. Mother Angelica lived the rest of her life in obscurity in her monastery, and they shut the doors, and the story was over. Well, that's not—the story actually wasn't over. The story was beginning. Because what happened is, using her pain, offering her pain up to God, suffering through that, and imagine the biggest voice in Catholicism taken away,

and you just have to sit there, and you're confined in a room with people you don't always like, and they're now doing things for you that you didn't want them to do. What's that line in Scripture in old age? They take you where you don't want to go? Right. And that's her story. But the beauty of it is, EWTN grows more in that period, while she's in the corner room of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, unable to speak. She reaches more people. Her voice is magnified more. All the books I edited for her go out in the day.

They've all become New York Times bestsellers. Millions and millions of people encounter her on television, in the written word, on radio, than at any point in the 20 years when she was active, okay? And souls are changed, lives are touched. All the mysterious economy of God. So I think what she would say is, be faithful, be faithful, be faithful in your circle, and tell the truth, and defend the truth. She says, we live in a poverty of the truth today.

And she used to always say that. And it's up to us to be the truth and to discover it. And for me personally, you know, she charged me when I started here. She said, I know you can work other places. I know you can go to other places. But only here will you be truly free to report everything you see. And, um, I struggle with that. I will tell you, I struggle with that. Um, because that's, uh, that was, that's, it is, it is a great gift and, um, and an obligation. So I, but I don't, you know, I'm happy to tell you what Mother said.

I never, I never say, if Mother were here, she would say this. She was full of surprises? She was full of surprises. And you know what? I know if I said it, I'm going to end up in purgatory with a torn rock down my head. So I don't want to do that. So no, I would never say what she'd say now. But I know it would,

my sense is it would be we have to stay true. You have to be true to the present moment. And her big, the center piece of her spirituality was always this. If she taught me one thing spiritually, it was this. She said, she would see me running around the network, running here, running there, going to the deadline, I got to finish this, got to do that show, and she'd say, come here, sit down.

And she said, you have to be- Please, oh, that is so great. Please do her voice. It's unbelievably good. She said, sit down. She said, you have to be true to what the Lord's calling you to in this present moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now. It's in the duties and the responsibilities of this present moment where you will discover what the Lord has for you. And only by being in that present moment will you discover in the duties and the responsibilities the Lord has given you what he intends for you. That's what I would share with everybody else, because that has been the light in my life, particularly in these dark moments. So powerful.

You can't worry about tomorrow. You can't worry about yesterday. You've got to stay in the present moment. And it's not always great, let me tell you. But it's true, and it's good. And God is in it, even in the darkness. Especially in the darkness. Raymond Arroyo, thank you so much for your time.

Well, delighted to be here, Matt. Thank you for your fine work. Great, important work. Particularly now as we see a culture in massive and rapid decline. So it's important to have lay voices out there. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this final episode that we're going to be, you know, devoting just to this issue. I hope these three episodes have blessed you. And I want to say, if you're not yet supporting Pints with Aquinas on Patreon, but you believe in the work that I'm

doing, and that you actually are like benefiting from these podcasts, please consider doing that. It really helps the work continue and grow. That's another cool thing about it. Go to pintswithaquinas.com, click donate. There you can give a dollar a month if you want or 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month. You see all the thank you gifts that I give you in return. Big thanks to everybody who has been doing that and we'll do that after today's show. God bless. My whole life to carry you, to carry you.