Pints With Aquinas - Fatherhood, Devotion to Mary, and Catholic Pet Peeves w/ Sam Guzman

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

From holding hands during the “Our Father” to lovey-dovey couples at Mass, there’s plenty of stuff to grind a Catholic’s gears. In this episode, Sam Guzman joins me as we share our biggest Catholic pet peeves. We also discuss:  - The importance of sacrifice in marriage, including small acts of self-denial.  - How to handle today’s liturgy wars between attendees of the Latin and New Order Masses.  - Why devotion to Mary and St. Joseph is so important.  - And more! The Catholic Gentleman website: https://catholicgentleman.com   Sign up for my free course on St. Augustine's "Confessions"!   SPONSORS Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ Ethos Logos: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints   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 Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas   MY BOOKS Get my NEW book "How To Be Happy: Saint Thomas' Secret To A Good Life," out now! Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx   CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Sam Guzman, thank you for being on Pints with Aquinas. Thanks for having me. You are the founder of Catholic Gentleman. That's true. Which is a fantastic blog. You work at Covenant Eyes. That's right. And you're almost a licensed therapist.

Yeah. Well, that's still like a year and a half away licensure, but I'm in the process. Is there a difference between a licensed therapist and a licensed clinical therapist or is that the same no they're the same thing same thing yeah but it's a long process i mean they you got an internship phase and then you have like a what they call like a candidacy where that you got to get like 3 000 hours of clinical experience before you can get your apply for your license and there's exams you got to take and stuff like that so it's pretty involved honestly honestly. But yeah, I've been in that process for a few years. So as somebody who's about to be a licensed clinical therapist,

what is your opinion on coaching? Well, it depends. I mean, coaching is one of those things that's very ambiguous at this point. It's not well-defined like counseling is. And so pretty much anyone can be a coach. So sometimes that can be a great thing. Some people are awesome coaches. And there's coaches for your diet. There's coaches for your mental health. There's coaches for your business goals. I mean, there's coaches for

pretty much anything you can think of. There's people out there who will coach you on it. So I think in some ways it can be great. It just depends on who the coach is and what their experience is. It feels like a relatively new phenomenon though like when i was a kid no one was talking about coaches unless they were talking about sports so like what happened do you think it's like technology made people who are good at encouraging others more accessible or yeah yeah i mean i think in one sense it's it's kind of mentorship has kind of fallen by the wayside. We don't have role models in the business world or a lot of times even familial relationships

where you used to ask grandma or grandpa a question. Interesting. Now that family unit is kind of broken down. And so I think people are looking for wisdom that they can apply to their lives. And well, where do I turn for that? And maybe they start a google search or something like that they come across this thing called a coach and hey that that would be awesome to have

somebody who's had life experience or who at least understands how things work help guide me in an objective sense and help point me in the right direction so that i can save myself from some pain and mistakes um so i think i think that's kind of where it's it's come from but definitely picking up a lot of momentum in the culture right now so you had no idea i had no idea we're going to be talking about coaching within the first three minutes of this episode this is terrific but um no one thing you and i said we were going to begin this interview with he's talking about catholic pet peeves yeah um so i'll i'll start and we'll see how many you can come up with this would be impressive i just have so many man i mean this is gonna be a lot do you have more the older

you get i'm just kidding though no i really don't have a lot but i i just there are some things that definitely you know that are pet peeves i got i got many and i'm bound to offend everybody who's watching because everybody offends me um one of the things I don't like is when people have an over-animated voice when they read the readings, and they feel the need to look up at the congregation after every line. Well, do they do hand gestures while they read? No. No.

But that thing, when they look up after every line, just look at your page and read it like a normal person. I don't need it to be super animated. That's really annoying to me. Last night, well, we won't say when. There was a time in the last seven years since I have known each other, we went to mass and someone was coughing. What the heck's that about?

Get out of the church. They didn't even have a mask, man. I mean, come on. Yeah, I mean, maybe I've been just... I'm just kidding. I've been kind of affected by COVID restrictions and stuff. But if someone's coughing, like, I need you to leave. It was more of a hack.

Like, it was pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. All right, your turn. Okay. Well, okay, so one of mine is confession line. Someone, you know, the person goes in there and you just know, you can just tell by their whole demeanor, this is going to be a long one.

And they're in there for 20 to 30 minutes, even though there's 30 people behind them in line. It drives me nuts. Like, come on, if you want a counseling session, make an appointment. Okay. But like Saturday afternoon when there's like, you know, 30 minutes of confession time, please don't use the whole 30 minutes to talk about your whole life history. Okay, but isn't, that seems to me that would be a problem with the priest.

The priest is the one. Well, yeah, he should definitely say that, you know, can we, if we want to continue the conversation, let's make an appointment or something. So I'd be more frustrated with the priest than the person is what I'm saying. Like that person just might be emotionally troubled. Yeah. And here's someone willing to listen to them. That's very true.

Let's blame the priest. But it's a pet peeve. It's a pet peeve. All right. Another one of mine is when you go to adoration and someone is praying the rosary, but not silently and not even out loud, but they're whispering it. Hey, I'm Mary, fellow Christ. I'm like, don't, don't.

We can all hear this. It's very distracting. I don't like this at all. Do you disagree? I mean. No, no, no. Absolutely. That's what, that's that's

really annoying also sideburns sideburns if any cleric has sideburns they should be excommunicated well defrocked they should shave this side but like i'm talking lamb chops okay well that's that's true sideburns are fine but lamb chops aren't good i also and one of mine is is internet twitter warriors who you know think that the the great the great Sixth Crusade is on Twitter. And they have to comment on everything, find fault with everything. So now we're moving outside of a church, and you're talking about Catholics on Twitter. It's a Catholic pet peeve. Yeah, fair enough.

And these are people who usually have a crusader as their image. Yes, yeah. They have a knight holding a bloody sword or something, even though they're probably in their mother's basement or something like that. Why do we always say mother's basement? We never say father's basement. It's America. Everybody's got a broken home.

I mean, what can I say? And they're not at their father's house? No. Just at their mother's house? No. In the basement. I don't want to go down that path. All right.

But yeah, okay. So what does that look like then, these Twitter wars that people get involved in that annoy you? Well, I mean, it's kind of the modern incarnation of fairytaleism, really, of just that spirit that we can also come to. I don't want to say this in a, I'm above it, but we can also come to kind of that critical spirit where we can learn to focus on what's wrong.

But that's what we're doing right now. I know. I know. Mea culpa, mea culpa. Yeah. But let's keep going, can we? Because we've only come up with like five. Right.

No, but I was at Mass the other day. Everything was annoying me. Okay, here's another pet peeve. If you go to mass as a couple please don't massage your girlfriend's neck and shoulders in front of me yeah that's it's too much yeah don't rub her neck and back that back pat is okay yeah but no no kisses no caresses maybe a kiss on the cheek if you have to but nothing more than that you know that's gotta stop um okay so one of mine is is is catholics don't

sing by and large like i always feel so bad when you go to like this big basilica and they've got this choir that's belting it out and like no one in the congregation is singing. That's kind of sad to me. Part of it, in fairness, is because I grew up as a Protestant, but I have a terrible voice, but I like to sing. I have no musical ability whatsoever, but I still like to sing. But it's really awkward when you're in this big church, and I'm singing way off key, and I'm the only one singing. It can be really awkward.

When the priest comes, reads the readings, and then for his homily comes down in front of the altar. Yay or nay? And wanders around. You're not a fan of that? Please, no. I mean, I don't know if he's trying to connect with the people or what, but it's just... No. Why not, though? I mean, there's going to be

more than just he might be trying to connect with them. Well, I don't know. I'm kind of over it. I don't know i'm kind of i i'm kind of over it i don't care as much maybe because i'm at franciscan now i get a franciscan for daily mass all the time so yeah no i and honestly it doesn't it doesn't bother me that much but it is kind of it's just odd to me i think it's just the way they were trained like you know you've got a kind of have this freedom to move about i don't know why now you go to a latin mass so presumably you don't exchange the sign of peace no so if you go to a novus order you and i went last night

how many people is it acceptable to say peace be with you two five fifteen two one i mean i want to i want to connect with everybody there you know i'm waving uh to people on the other side. Yeah, you're doing this, the thing where you kind of flick the peace sign at people. You know, people do that. Or stand on the pew. Then people catch it and they put it against their heart. No, it is an awkward thing.

It's like, when is enough enough? I just kind of look at the floor. I do like two people. To the left, to the right. And then I can feel the person in front of me turning towards me but they get nothing they don't even get eye contact they get nothing it's their fault for turning around yeah right i know i i kind of do this anti-social thing i just stare at the floor cross my hands and just leave me alone um and it works it works pretty well so our father holding hands yeah

your name no no no no no this what about about the little squeezy poo at the end? You know where they... You finish it off and you're holding hands and they give you an affectionate squeeze before they let go. Don't touch me. Don't touch you. I'm going to wear a shirt. Next time I go to an observatory that says,

don't touch me. What else? Because once we get through all of these, we can talk about how we need to stop being little whiny people and you know grow up and yeah stop complaining about everything i mean we're so annoying like you who is watching youtube right now you're super annoying you have no idea yeah right no i mean you think everyone else you think you're j and Pam from The Office and everybody else is like Toby and Michael Scott. But you're not Jim.

You're annoying. Yeah. As I am. I'm very annoying. I don't have to get that annoying. No, that kind of sums up a lot of mine. I mean, I can't think of too many more. You can.

One thing I will say is extraordinary ministers when there's like five people in the church. Really annoys you. Yeah, because it's so unnecessary. What's the right amount of people for an extraordinary minister, would you say? To the point where the priest is overwhelmed and can't do it himself. Like, I mean, it's... Technically, all priests can do it. So what is, I mean, overwhelm, that's kind of a relative...

Extraordinary ministers are way overused. They're supposed to be extraordinary, which means out of the ordinary. They're supposed to be kind of a stopgap for, you know, when the priest just there isn't enough, you know, he can't distribute to everyone. But they've just become a default thing. So even when there's five people, there has to be an army of extraordinary ministers, you know,

doing their their purell yeah cleansing ritual and then yeah and you hear it there's nothing worse than hearing that the wet clammy thing yeah um and then different eucharistic ministers have different ways of administering the eucharist yeah some of them do a real intense eye contact yeah that's fine you know they're trying to take this seriously and that's good yeah um what else was i thinking that annoyed me what about you catholic jamie anything annoy you if uh you're in a situation where you're either waiting in the pew or going up with the crossed arms and then you have to be going to the extraordinary

minister i mean usually in that situation you'll just wait in the pew but then they put their arm on you like there's some kind of mentor oh yeah that is annoying yeah i'm a fan of that okay so i haven't done this super often but there's been times when i've kneeled to receive it yeah let's talk about that should i be kneeling to receive the Eucharist at a Novus Ordo? I've kind of, for various reasons, I don't anymore. Then again, I haven't been to the Novus Ordo that often recently. But one of the awkward things is when the priest is really tall. And you're kneeling down and they have to really bend over.

It's just kind of awkward. Especially if he's on a step. Yes, right. Or a platform, you know. Yeah, I think obviously everybody has the right to kneel and receive our Lord. And anybody who says otherwise can go away. But I think that I don't do that anymore. It's too awkward when it's not set up to kneel and receive,

and you're in line, I personally, I'm okay if other people do it. I think it's beautiful. I just find it awkward. Yeah, that's... It kind of interrupts the flow. You're not sure if someone's going to trip over you. Right, yeah.

And occasionally you'll get a priest who won't give you communion. Shame on them. Right, yeah. And I think you should say shame on you to the priest if he does that. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. Oh, wow. I'm not kidding no um well i mean shame on them maybe aftermath okay yeah but yeah tambourines no just no that's nothing more needs to be said

gotta be more gotta be more but really, in all fairness. Oh, gluten-free hosts. Oh, yeah. Fan or no? Should people just have allergic reactions and suck it up? Yes, yes. No, I have nothing to say there. But really, I mean, if you think about it,

that's part of being the family of the body of christ is tolerating one another's annoyances right like it's an act of charity to put up with your neighbor's faults yeah because we have our own right this is and this is what i did want to get to because it is fun kind of lamenting these things and i was at mass the other day and everything was annoying me it even got to the point where i thought is anybody in this church not annoying me? Pick one. Right. I think I found one guy.

But that says a lot about me. And that's what I need to look at. Because Matt Fradd doesn't deserve a beautiful liturgy, though it would be good to have. And I have a right to as a Catholic. But Matt Fradd deserves hell. Yeah. And so, and Matt Fradd's's annoying i didn't want to be the

one to say it yeah but no um it was interesting uh jr tolkien and one of his letters i've got a book of his collected letters he you know he wrote this prior to vatican ii so this was you know uh when the whole church had the latin myth And he actually recommends going to Masses as a spiritual exercise where everything annoys you, where the priest is mumbling, there's people over here yawning and shuffling around the pews, and there's just obnoxious things happening. He actually recommends going to Masses like that, where you're intentionally irritated.

It's kind of a spiritual exercise in order to kind of purify your view of what's actually happening at the mass is not dependent on you know of course we should strive for beauty and holiness and in the mass but it can also be kind of a like you're saying like a spiritual exercise in the sense that what am I here for? And also learning to love your neighbor in the pew next to you with all of their faults and failings, and you have your own. So learn to love them. And that's one of the fundamental commandments, a new commandment I give you that that you love one another. That's the fundamental basis of the whole Christian life. So if it has to come through annoyances and pet peeves, then so be it.

But we all need to learn that kind of loving toleration of our neighbor and their faults. In the Screwtape letters, Screwtape tells Wormwood to put this thought in the mind of the person he's trying to win and that is to have them think that everyone around them ought to be dressed in togas or something

and to be terribly annoyed with everybody else now we might change that and say everybody ought to look like they're from the 1950s or something but it is an interesting point and I think I've got to get better at this. If something's annoying me, I don't need to tell my wife who's next to me right now. It's kind of a relief to be like, what is this guy doing? I don't think I'm this bad.

I'm just focusing. I'm not always annoyed at this stuff. But yeah, I think it's, as you say, a good spiritual practice. Meekness. Meekness. Meekness is a forgotten virtue. What is meekness and why should we cultivate it? Well, it's a misunderstood virtue. I mean, I really think it's being easily led.

Being someone who is not pig-headed or stubborn to the point where they have to have their own way at all times, which is kind of what we're talking about, where when you get really annoyed with people at Mass, you just want to banish them from, you know. The other one, too, would be people whose kids are screaming at the top of their lungs and they won't take them out of Mass. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or when the phone goes off.

I'm sorry, it's been at least 10 years since everyone's had phones or 15 20 so it's like uh you should have known by now right and even though i feel kind of bad for you because you're embarrassed you're right to be embarrassed yeah that your phone went off at mass yeah you should be embarrassed but yeah yeah i mean i think they uh automatic excommunication for anyone whose phone goes no no no just embarrassment deep deep shame i was going to call back the inquisition are you sure you don't want to do that i'm open to the discussion okay kids at mass but two sides of the spectrum right those who clearly aren't willing to endure any sort of annoyance from a human being who

hasn't developed self-control or rational faculties yeah those people are annoying like you have to be more meek and gentle and loving and patient yeah and if you can't be at least don't show it yeah repent repent because this mother and father are doing the best they bloody can and they're there and they're there especially if they're bringing them to holy mass good for them they should be celebrated i always try to do my best to kind of look at them and smile but yes yeah but there is a threshold was that deep shame no but they should be deeply ashamed no but there is a point where it's like you to know that you have to take your child out of this point. Your child is screaming.

It's time to go. Yeah. But I mean, we're talking about meekness, right? So that's insisting on your own way is kind of the opposite of that. So like, I have a right to a noise-free mass, an annoyance-free mass. That is my right. And insisting on your own way, insisting on your own rights is kind of the opposite of meekness. Meekness would be, on the other hand, saying...

Gentleness towards others. Yes, gentleness, patience with them, long-suffering. That's kind of a word that it's in Scripture, but we don't use it very often. But it's very literal. Suffering for a long time. Long suffering is like, can be a form of charity. And, you know, 1 Corinthians 13 talks about, you know, all of the beautiful forms of love. And one of them is really just that basic virtue of tolerance.

Like just putting up with annoyances. Other people have to put up with us we should tolerate one another in in a spirit of of love and in mutual uh affection and as the body of christ i think it was therese of legere who talked about this that she would find that her the sister behind her in chapel yeah with the rattling of the beads or something she it would frustrate her yeah and she would thank jesus for it as a blessing. And it turned out to be a sweet thing. So I do think that is probably the first thing that you and I and others should do is not

to think, what does this say about them? Because we have all sorts of things to say about them. But what does this say about me? Yeah. That's the, I think that is the first thing I got to do. Well, we talk, you know, a lot of the saints talk about things like mortification. We think of that as like hair shirts or, know pebbles in the shoe yeah right but but honestly it can just be those interior annoyances that can be almost painful sometimes because they really

irritate us like nails on the chalkboard you know and yet those can be the ground for growing in virtue it doesn't have to be anything extraordinary. Learning to love your neighbor, G.K. Chesterton, he's got a quote for everything, of course. And even if he doesn't, we'll give it to him. He says the gospel tells us to love our neighbor and to love our enemies because they're often the same people. And I think that's so true where it's the people closest to us is what the gospels mean by our neighbor.

They can often be the people that we have to learn to love. Because if we don't, then what good is the Christianity that we espouse? Amen. And most of us are complaining about the culture going to hell. We're very frustrated with transgender ideology and all this sort of nonsense. And then we go to church with people who believe the things you want them to believe, and you're angry with them. Yes, right. Like, stop it. Repent. Actually, we're getting dangerously close to that line, or that scene in The Brothers Karamazov. Have you read it? It's when Father Zosima is speaking

to the old woman who says, sometimes I think to myself, I could die for humanity. I could be burnt for humanity. But as soon as I'm forced to be in the same proximity with another person, I can't stand them. They impose upon my free will and they take too long to eat or this person speaks too quietly. And I just, the more I love humanity, the more I hate my neighbor. Yes. Speak about that. Yeah, well, I mean, that is the point. Because you cannot love humanity unless you love the person directly in front of you. And that's often a greater martyrdom than dying for all of humanity, as she's saying.

Because it is something that requires kenosis. You know, God is self-emptying God. He is a God who lays down his life for his creatures. And laying down your life for your friends doesn't have to mean being burned at the stake or, you know, beheaded in some far country or anything like that. It can often mean laying down your own will, your own way, your own wishes for the person directly in front of you. Where, you know, I want to talk about this idea of empathy, right? Like it's kind of a therapeutic word where people like, you know, talk about the importance of it and things like that. But what is empathy really?

It's saying that your inner world is as real as mine. It's imaginatively projecting your feelings, your kind of inner complexity on someone else, where oftentimes the opposite happens. I look at you and I think, well, he's less real than I am. Yes. He doesn't have the same inner life that I do. Therefore, I can treat him in a less sensitive way than I want to be treated. Because I have feelings and they need to be respected and my rights need to be respected.

But what empathy does is it teaches you to kind of imaginatively enter into the world kind of imaginatively enter into the world of someone else and encounter their inner life and respect their inner life and realize that they have feelings and motivations and complex inner life that we have to learn to respect. And that's really what the process of learning to love your neighbor is all about, is saying they're as real as I am. They're as deserving as respect and dignity as I am. And that's what Christ means when he says, love your neighbor as yourself, because they are as real as you are. And that's really the process

of empathy. But that, it takes time. It takes, it's an exercise. We don't, we're not really born with that ability to see others as we see ourselves, as real as ourselves. So we have to learn to kind of purify our vision in a sense. And it's what scripture talks about when talking to the renewing of your mind, you have to see the world with new eyes. That's a really great point. I think sometimes even just envisioning how you, Sam Guzman, are seeing me. Yeah. Like that's strange to me, obviously, because I've only ever looked through this set of eyeballs. Right. But there's another person who's looking at me and isn't me.

Right. And doesn't know what I'm experiencing. And that's a strange thing. I thought I was the center of the universe, you know, as you said, like that's how you grow up, like you're a baby, you grow up and... Right. Yeah. Yeah. Your needs are primary, but that maturation is growing out of that. And the other thing it's, I remember I used to work at a checkout, as a checkout operator at Woolworths in Port Pirie, South Australia. And one of the things my mum always said to me is like, be kind to everybody because you have no idea what they're going

through. And I know that that sounds cliche and maybe sentimental, but it's 100% true as well. And they may have just been given a diagnosis. They may have not slept well last night. Their child may have just said they don't love them. There's a billion things. And you don't take them into consideration. You think my bad behavior is justifiable. I had a bad night's sleep. This is happening with my marriage. This is what my son just did.

This sickness has befallen my grandparents or parents. But you should be perfect. Yes. and my grandparents or parents, but you should be perfect. Like, you know. Yes. And there's nothing that could justify you massaging your wife's neck or girlfriend's neck. It's like, well, maybe she's pregnant and sick. Right. How about don't be a jerk, Matt Fradd?

Yeah, right. I mean, the minute you can start making the excuses for your neighbor that you make for yourself, you've grown in an important way. That is beautiful. Yeah, let's an important way. That is beautiful. Yeah, let's focus on that. That is deep wisdom right there. The moment you can start making excuses for your neighbor as you make them for yourself, that's a sign of real growth.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, it takes work. You know, I think about my marriage. Oh, man, when we first got married, I was such an insensitive jerk. And I still can be. Don't talk to my wife about that. But really, though, it's a constant ascetical exercise to encounter my wife's needs and perspective. And the things that I often don't think about are completely insensitive and hurtful to her and I have no idea I'm just kind of

wrapped up in my own world in my own mind oh my gosh yeah so if you can use the either that that marriage relationship or any relationship really to learn to come out of yourself and to encounter another in all their fullness and complexity that is is is spiritual growth in a significant way. And that's why Christ, whenever he was on earth, he always moved towards brokenness. He didn't move away from it. That's beautiful, yeah. I was sharing on a video the other day, and this seemed to strike a lot of people.

I was just sort of admitting how I've been a jerk to my wife lately because she's been sick and i've been upset at her for being sick which is irrational but where i'm at and it occurred to me that many men will say something like i would die for my family i would die for my wife yeah right all right but how about like just be kind to her today? Yeah. And don't be impatient with her. Yeah. And anticipate her needs.

Well, no, I wouldn't do that. But I'd die at a stake for her. I'd take a bullet for them, but yeah. Yeah. So even though taking a bullet is much scarier perhaps than that individual instance of self-sacrifice, that's the thing that we ought to be doing because, first of all, if I can't be kind when I'm tired, if I can't anticipate my wife's needs,

what makes me think that I'm actually in a place to lay down my life for her physically? Right. Like if I'm not being faithful in the small things, why is it I think I'll be faithful in the large things? But this is where it's at, isn't it? Just anticipating my wife's needs. Yeah.

Not when she's asked me three times, but being like, hey, you look tired. Why don't you do this? Or could I do this for you? And again, that's all like getting out of your head. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, big sacrifices are often the culmination of many, many small sacrifices repeated regularly. And if you can't make those small sacrifices, you may not make that spontaneous big sacrifice in the way that you hope you would.

But it really is, you know, St. Paul said, I die daily, right? It's got to be a process of continual... I forget who it was who said, the problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar. That's very true. And that's what I do in my marriage. It's what I do with my kids. It's what I do in my relationship with my friends. Just the desire to throw down the cross. And what's so funny is when you see other people throwing down their cross, again, you see it for what it is oftentimes. It's abominable. It's selfish. It's despicable.

But when you throw down your cross or when you're tempted to, you have every reason in the world to do it. It feels right. It seems like this is the way to life. Yes. You know, how many people have you known or who I have known who have left their families, who have just gone, got married again or something, as if this is the way to life.

Yeah. But it doesn't bloody work. No, it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't. So this wisdom of pick up your cross and follow me, if you want to have life and life to the full, that's got to be part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

We can't flee. We can't flee from the cross. And that's one thing that I think isn't talked about enough with the marriage vocation is that there, as with all sacraments, but, you know, marriage too, there's a cross involved with marriage. It's a particular form of experiencing the cross, but it is a cross. It is a laying down of your life for the good of others and raising them up through your own self-emptying sacrifice, which can be a painful reality at times, and people want to flee from it.

I mean, men don't like learning intimacy. We don't like learning sensitivity. We'd much rather flee from it, bury our heads in work. Porn. Yeah, porn, yep. it's so much easier and simpler yeah uh but the cross is there it's waiting for us to pick it up and carry it if we will yeah i had an experience when i was a child um well i was about a teenager and one of my good friend's dad left his family and he moved to Bali. And that would be like your whatever, Mexico or I don't know. Like it's close to us, you know what I'm saying?

And it became known that he was seeing prostitutes, I believe, and things like this. And he was a big guy and he had black hair but he dyed it blonde and he's got this shell necklace and he comes back and bless him i mean the man's in pain yeah and you know he's probably a better man than me i don't know but it just but seeing that you see the ugliness of throwing down the cross yeah and you see that he doesn't seen it. He doesn't seem to see it. Maybe he did. I don't know.

And I felt that temptation too. I said to my wife a couple of years ago, in a particularly stressful moment of our marriage, I said, I get why men go out for cigarettes and don't come back. I fully get it. And I wouldn't trust a man who's been married for more than five years who doesn't get it yeah yeah because I don't believe you if you say that you don't understand that I think you're lying yeah because you don't want to face that

part of yourself it's very true but I think facing it and then embracing the cross and asking your friends to hold you accountable to the to the commitment you've made like a man. That's much more honest. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no virtue without temptation. You know, fidelity means nothing if you're not tempted to be unfaithful in a sense.

I mean, we all face that at different periods of our marriage, I think. And it's, you know, women value safety, men value freedom. And every man is going to, at some point in his marriage, feel that temptation to break free from what feels like constraint, limitations on his autonomy and his freedom and his ability to be a man or whatever that form that takes. But it's that conscious fidelity that has to be renewed. Those vows are not a one-time thing.

They're a continual choice of fidelity to your spouse. And until you can do that, until you can make that conscious choice, you can flee from it in all kinds of ways, even if you stay married. Yeah. Yeah, when I got married, you know, my wife, I'm not just saying this to sound cute, she's my best friend. Like, I really enjoy spending time with her. And when I got married to her, we wanted to do the same things.

You know, we wanted to be together intimately, say. We wanted to go to see the movies whenever the other one did. We wanted to go to a bookstore and drink coffee. There was no imposition, really. I mean, maybe there was some, and maybe I didn't see it and embrace it as I should have. But it seemed to me that we were both kind of wanting to do the same thing. And when I started having children, that's for me what was really difficult for me personally.

I realized that there was now these demands upon not just my autonomy, but upon my wife. Yes. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, we're friends. We do these things together. Now there's this other person or these other people that have demands upon us. I found that very difficult. And I remember thinking I much preferred when we didn't have children,

we could sort of potter about a bookstore and find a book from some saint and nod sagely as we read about self-sacrifice. I like that. Sipping my latte. I like that stuff. But the kid who's crying at 3 in the morning and you haven't slept well in a week and you can't be intimate with your wife for different reasons. I don't want this. But that's exactly where we have to do it.

Yeah. How has it been for you as far as growing? Because you said in the beginning you were an insensitive jerk, I think you said. Yeah, I was. But how have you found that you've grown and what caused that growth? Yeah, well, I mean, it's definitely something that's still a process. Like I said, I still fail at that. So I don't want to make it sound like I've moved beyond that. But I will say that, yeah, it's turning those obstacles, those temptations in marriage into

opportunities to grow. Every time, there will be trials in your marriage. There will be arguments, there will be misunderstandings, there will be hurt feelings. The question is not whether or not it will happen. It will happen. The question is what will you do with it? Will you turn them into excuses for selfishness and withdrawal and from lashing back and hurting your wife back or vice versa, hardening your heart?

Or will you turn them into kind of rungs on the ladder towards holiness, towards learning to love your wife the way Christ loves the church, which is despite the church's infidelity to Christ, he is always faithful to his church. And there have been times in church history where the church has been gravely unfaithful. You even go back to the old covenant, Hosea. It's kind of a bizarre story, but basically as a picture to the Jewish people who are constantly unfaithful to God. You know, Hosea is asked to like marry a prostitute who is constantly unfaithful to him. And God's like saying, this is like an analogy between me and my people who are constantly unfaithful to him. And God's like saying, this is like an analogy between me and my people

who are constantly unfaithful to me, and yet no matter what they do, I will always take them back. And likewise for us, we have to learn to love in that way that, again, is self-emptying for the good of others and learning to serve our families. And so what will you do with those opportunities? For me, there's been times when I've taken those obstacles, those frictions in marriage, and I have grown through it. I've learned to be more sensitive to my wife,

and I've learned to listen to her needs and understand her in a deeper way. But there has been times when I've fleed from that, and I've kind of escaped, I've fleed from that. And I've kind of escaped into, you know, selfishness and withdrawal. And, you know, of course, that's never worked. But one thing I've learned is to really apologize quickly. Don't let hurts fester. Forgiveness is the condition of all relationships. If you can't forgive, you won't be in a relationship very long. So ask forgiveness, learn to forgive unconditionally,

and your marriage will grow and profit as a result. So that's something that's been hard for me. It takes a lot for a man to swallow his pride and say, I was wrong. It really does. It feels like a death. Yes, yes.

And it feels like a concession. Yes. Well, if I ask, because in my marriage what happens is my wife does something perhaps wrong or insensitive, I get angry and say something stupid, and then it becomes all about me getting angry and saying something stupid. Yes, right. And then I'm angry that it's become about that rather than the first thing, but the first thing has like paled in comparison to me now.

And so I don't apologize. If I apologize, then I'm, you know. But I agree. It's really, really important. And one of the things we've implemented immediately in our marriage was please forgive me. And having them say, I forgive you if they want to or not. As opposed to just, sorry, it's okay. I think that's helped us too.

you if they want to or not yeah as opposed to just sorry it's okay i think that's helped us too well we talk about like the sacrament of of of confession or penance or whatever you want to call it uh what is that about in one sense like why does god require that because conceivably he could forgive us without this yes but it's about ruptured relationship when you sin you are sinning against god yes but you're also sinning against the body of Christ. There's a severed communion there between the body of Christ and your relationship with God. It's like almost every mortal sin is almost like an excommunication, self-imposed, in the sense that you've cut off communion. You've broken those ties of relationship with the community and with God. And so confession is a self-accusation.

It was saying, I was wrong. And forgive me. Yes, God forgive me. But also the body of Christ forgive me for wounding you in this way. for wounding you in this way. And in marriage, it can be kind of a similar experience when we learn to confess our sins. Scripture says, confess your sins one to another. Okay, yes, again, that's the sacrament of confession, but that also can be a restoration of relationship, is taking responsibility for the sins that you commit and owning it and saying, through my own fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, I have sinned against you.

I have broken this communion that we share, and I want to restore that by taking responsibility for what I've done. If you hold back in confession, it really doesn't do you any good. All the saints and sages of the church say that. If you're holding back something, you're not fully restoring it. It's an invalid confession. Yeah. You're not taking responsibility for the wounds that you've inflicted on the body of Christ. And likewise in marriage, unless you take responsibility for those actions that are

hurtful and insensitive and selfish, you can't restore communion. It's severed. And what you see in a lot of relationships where they've never learned to forgive and to ask forgiveness, those hurts just fester, and they grow, and they taxify, and that wound in the relationship just grows larger and larger and larger, until one day you wake up and all the love is gone. What happened? Well, it was often those very small things that were never healed and repaired in the right way what's the most difficult thing you've found about marriage and what's the most beautiful thing maybe that was either a surprise

to you or maybe not but what's been the most difficult thing in your marriage if i can ask that and well i just did and then what's the most beautiful thing in your marriage, if I can ask that? Well, I just did. And then what's the most beautiful thing? Yeah, I think the hardest thing for me has been to sacrifice my time. You know, as I said, men kind of value their independence. And I'm kind of, unsurprisingly, a bookish sort. You know, I'll just give you an example. From earlier in our marriage, it shows that shows like what an idiot I was but like we'd been we'd been married probably like like literally like three or four weeks like very

early in our marriage and I I had my first like office job and you know I was doing kind of computer work all day long and talking to co-workers and I came home and I just kind of wanted to kick back with a book kind of like this 50s dad thing like i'm gonna kick back on my newspaper my book honey you know bring me a beer and and i so i came home and i i i said hi to my wife of course but she had just quit her job like she was planning to be kind of a stay-at-home mom she had been all like by herself all day long she was like really lonely she just wanted to talk talk. She needed to talk to another, you know, adult human being. And I just kind of picked up my book, kicked back. And I was like, every time she tried to talk to me, I was like, okay, just leave me alone.

Yeah. Just, okay, you know what, honey? I need like an hour when I get home to unwind and recharge. She's like, are you kidding me? Like, are you kidding me like are you kidding me we've been married for like three weeks and you're kicking back telling me to leave you alone for an hour while you've been away all day yes yeah right and uh it did not go well it was kind of like the first big argument in our marriage but but really like like sacrificing my time i mean if it were up to me i would just read for like hours every day. Like that's just kind of my personality. I just absorb, um, things and I've got a, you know,

a stack of books taller than I am that I would love to, you know, tackle. And yet, um, oftentimes it's, it's, it's the needs of the family that take priority. It's the children, getting them ready for bed and listening to them and helping them with their homework. And my wife, my wife needs attention too. A lot of, you too. She's got a hard job. Women have one of the hardest jobs in the world. I heard some study that said the average stay-at-home mom is like the equivalent of working three full-time jobs, the kind of time that you put in.

I wanted to say something snarky. As soon as you said women have the hardest jobs in the world, I'm like, yeah, please. What about these men who are on high rises and but but actually i agree with you like being with children all of whom are demanding things upon you is very difficult people underestimate how costly attention is to be able to give your attention to someone else all day long is a huge sacrifice. And that's all moms do. They're not attending to their own needs a lot of times.

It's constant attention and demands on their time. And so as husbands to participate in that ascetical exercise of giving your attention to these needy little creatures called children is very difficult. And to not forget to nurture your marriage relationship as well can be very difficult in kind of the chaos and milieu of family life. But that's just important. If mother and father don't love one another, the whole family is going to suffer.

So you have to, attention is costly though. And for men, to be present physically and absent attention is costly though. And as for men, like to be present physically and absent mentally is very easy. But to be physically present and mentally attentive to the needs of your children as they develop and grow and to your wife and her needs is a costly thing. But that's what marriage is. That's excellent. Thanks for that.

What's been the most beautiful thing or the most surprisingly pleasant thing about marriage for you? Yeah, I mean, to me it's kids. People talk about kids, I'm not saying in the Catholic world, but in the secular world it's just like it's a burden. Oh, they're so expensive. You've got to shuttle them here and there. How could you

ever have more than like two children but the most beautiful joyful moments in my family life have been a result of my children's presence in my life and i just love i love being a dad and they're constantly surprising me with their joy and their spontaneity and their affection and just the funny things they say the surprising things they say the difficult questions they ask but just watching them learn and grow and um you know coming home to um you know uh poorly drawn pictures that say i love you dad and you know i missed you or things like that like to me that's just there's no there's no substitute for that or a baby smile like i often joke with my wife like like all the uh you know one smile from our five month old is worth a thousand sorrows like it really is like just the joy on his face uh just it melts your heart there's no experience like it i was uh this this conversation's uh

making me realize that i need to apologize to my seven-year-old when i get home today i was impatient with him this morning but here's a kind of cute story that happened that at the time didn't seem cute now that i have distance from it i'm like that was amazing so last night i'm like make sure you have your lunches packed before we head off. We're going to leave early because I've got this interview today I've got to set up for kind of thing. And my wife's sick, so she's been sleeping, needs some rest. So, yeah, I woke up and I said to my son, Peter, like, do you have your lunch packed? Yes, Dad.

Okay, good. Woke up in the morning and he doesn't have his lunch packed. And I'm ready to go out the door. And I'm frustrated. And I was short with him. But I look in the kitchen. And here's what he was doing. He had two rice crackers out.

You know those large rice crackers? And he had cut a lime in half and was squeezing lime juice on each side. That's beautiful. That's so cool. You know, like this was his way of like making something for his lunch. And I was impatient. So I have to apologize. I also think it's important for me to remember that when I apologize to my children, I'm teaching them that it's okay to apologize to other people.

And it's okay to be wrong. And it's okay to admit that you were wrong as opposed to thinking I just i just can't concede because i'm the authority yeah yeah it's it's uh it's it's a setting example of that humility but i mean you look at christ i mean what the the apostles when they were with him on earth like the one thing they didn't understand is they thought he was the lord he was the, therefore their whole job was to serve him. But what he showed them at the Last Supper, by removing his garments, essentially symbolically laying aside his authority. That's what Aquinas says in his commentary, actually. And washing the disciples' feet, what he was saying was, in the Christian way, in my kingdom,

the higher serves the lower, not the lower serves the higher. And power is for service in the Christian paradigm. We're to raise others up rather than beat them down and get them to serve our needs. We are there. Any authority, any power, any privilege that we've been given as christians is to be laid down in service for others in order to raise them up and for our children that's the ultimate example of that it's it's an inverted hierarchy where the pinnacle of the pyramid is is at the bottom serving the rest of the body and in the family, that means, yes, I am often insensitive with my children. I try to apologize to them and make it known to them what true Christian humility and service

looks like in a family context. And if a father is there to lord it over his family and to get his family to serve him and his needs, it's going to be an entirely different outcome than if a father is there to lay down his life in service of his family's needs and raise them up. I forget which epistle it is. Maybe you can tell me where it said, don't tempt your children to anger or don't lead your children to anger. Be patient with your wife. And I think how I've interpreted that is sometimes when you're so kind of strict

and rigid with them or you impose things upon them that they cannot yet fulfill because of their age or development, that's a frustrating experience for them as it would be for you or anybody. So don't do those things. Don't put impositions or regulations or demands upon people who cannot actually fulfill them. Or if they can, it would be only if they're on their total A game and they were banging on all cylinders. But for the most part, they wouldn't be able to. Yeah.

That's Ephesians 6. Thank you. Good job. Ephesians 6. Isn't that the armor of God, Ephesians 6? Did you look that up? Good job, Catholic Jamie. What verse?

The one about fathers do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Fathers do not exasperate your children. Yeah, yeah. Ephesians 6.4 4 thank you so much i mean i remember when i was a kid how many times i got in trouble where i was just totally shocked yes i had no idea yeah i was doing anything wrong which is so dispiriting yeah yeah and it's like as adults we think that they're just mini adults walking around with the same ability to reflect and to, it's like the same adult consciousness that we have,

but they don't. They see the world. And you said something interesting before we got on the air about your son who had ordered a T-shirt online and when it came, it was the wrong size. And he was very frustrated with that. Yes. And what did he say to you?

Because I thought that was a very interesting insight. Like, how would you feel? Yeah, he said, how would you feel if I ordered you a phone online and it came and it was the wrong size and i had to you had to send it back you'd be really upset it's a great point in a way you know because we we we often yeah we just think that our kids desires are just trivial and we forget that they want this thing maybe more than you want sleep that night. Who knows? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, for me, the most difficult thing about marriage was realizing that my wife had needs. I didn't expect that. No one prepared me. I'm joking. But I'm not really. You know, like it's realizing that you're in a relationship with somebody who isn't just there to give to you. And it's been said so often that perhaps we've now were maybe unable to hear it. And that's that we often go to a spouse seeking God, the fulfillment of all my desires.

Christopher West put it well. He said, don't hang your coat on a hook that was never meant to hold the weight. on a hook that was never meant to hold the weight. Don't bring your desires and needs to a human being that cannot actually fill up the God-shaped hole in your heart because you will crush her. You hear that, every person, you know, who's perhaps a Christian, would nod, yes, of course. But then what happens in marriage is you begin to understand

that analogy at different levels. Yes. To the point where you realize you didn't even understand it when you said you understood it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so much of that is about communication. So we were talking earlier about empathy and how your wife maybe has an inner world that's as real as yours.

has an inner world that's as real as yours. But she has to, the way we are in kind of this fallen state, her inner world is kind of opaque to me. I can't see it. I can't know it directly. She has to communicate it to me. And that is a struggle. And likewise, I have to communicate my motivations and my desires and my feelings to her, which is also a struggle.

Like we have to work through this medium called language. It's like a symbol for our inner life. And a successful communication bridges that gap between human beings and brings them like successful communication brings you into communion with someone else's inner world. So communication and communion have the same root word of communio. Like it's a union based on a successful communication of my inner life to you. And when you understand that, we are brought into union with each other. We understand each other at a soul level.

But again, it has to happen through this medium of language, at least for now. Yes. And, you know, what is a term? Like a term, it's the intellectual abstraction of the essence of a thing and it's the thing you're trying to convey with the term it's the concept right right or is the concept the intellectual abstraction yeah but the term is like the packaging right it's like here's a box and there's something in it um and it's the meaning and we often don't even hear each other because we're using terms and meaning something else by them.

That's another thing I'm starting to find frustrating with my children, and I wish that I wouldn't fall into this, and that's that so often I find that my children aren't trying to understand each other. So here's a very simple example. My daughter and son and I were watching a Bob Ross painting the other day. And my son said, it looks ugly right now. And his point was, it's going to look beautiful later.

But isn't that interesting? That's what he was trying to convey. My daughter jumped on him. It's not ugly. You shouldn't say that it's ugly. I'm like, oh, for the love. Like, try to understand what it is he was trying to say and this happens a lot with children it's it's almost like why don't you just refit this why don't you Thomas Aquinas like why don't you reformulate did you mean this you know

and we should be doing that with our wives because I don't know about you you get into an argument with your wife are you even listening and then you recount word for word what she just said yeah but that doesn't prove that you were listening right actually yeah you know what do you think she meant by that yeah well and that is an exercise that you can do with couples and like couples therapy is like you take like an object like this and you pass it back and forth so that each person has a clear turn to talk but when the person says like when you did this i felt this and the other person before when they respond they can't fire back with well you know you you misunderstood or you know they have to articulate exactly what they heard the other person saying before they respond so um when you did this i felt this okay and then the husband has to say, what I heard you saying is this.

And then that gives the wife an opportunity to say, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. That wasn't the meaning I was trying to convey. This is the disputed questions. This is what Thomas Aquinas does in the Summa Theologiae. He's a therapist. He's a therapist. He's a universal therapist. Yeah, that's fascinating.

Like, think about how much more progress we would see in presidential debates if they had to do what the scholastics had to do. Namely, reiterate your position to your satisfaction before I then respond to it. Those debates would be way more boring, but way more helpful. exactly exactly yeah yeah community communication is a struggle in in a and i don't think it was always that way prior to the fall i think we knew each other intimately immediately as the angels can intuit things directly they don't have to struggle through the medium of discursive logic or things like that it It's an intuitive direct knowing. And I think in paradise, it will be a restoration of that where we can know each other's inner life immediately and intuitively. We won't have to struggle with this barrier of symbolic communication that we call language. But until then, it's a spiritual exercise to strive to understand someone else but it can be

an incredibly holy and helpful thing so um yeah i was not listening towards the end of your sentence speaking of communication because i was thinking about something to ask you i'm sorry you're writing a book called Learning to Love. Did you get into this kind of stuff in that? Yeah, it's about all of these things that we've just been talking about, about marriage. I mean, it's really the fruit of a couple of years of meditation just on the meaning of marriage as a sacrament. Cardinal Burke has this incredible quote

that he just tossed off in an interview several years ago, but it really struck me as incredibly profound. Cardinal Burke has this incredible quote that he just tossed off in an interview several years ago, but it really struck me as incredibly profound. He said, one of the greatest forces against evil in the world, second only to the Eucharist, is the love of a man and woman in marriage. One of the greatest force against evil in the world. Amen. Second only to the Eucharist is the love of a man and woman in marriage. And I thought, how many Catholics just dismiss their marriage as something secondary? Well, my real vocation is my job or

my apostolate or whatever, whatever your thing is. And marriage is just kind of the background, you know, it's just there. And sure, yeah, it's a sacrament in some sense, but it's not really helping me grow in the spiritual life. I mean, it's not really giving me any graces or anything. It doesn't feel like it anyway. It's kind of chaotic. And, and, you know, kids have all these needs, and they people are screaming and crying. And like, you know, my wife's upset with me, like, it doesn't feel very holy, it feels very mundane, actually. And so we lose the kind of spiritual depth of the marriage relationship. And so I kind of wanted to write a spiritual meditation on

marriage that really encapsulates a lot of the themes that we've been talking about here but really um walks through step-by-step human relationships and how we can grow through them especially the most intimate the most potentially provocative, but potentially sanctifying relationship of marriage, where you're living in close contact with someone every day of your life. That's either going to make you bitter or better, but it's not going to leave you the same. And so just really meditate on that as a, let's take our marriages seriously. Let's strive for holy marriages, holy Catholic homes, because it really is the foundation of really everything. And it is a profound, where do priests come from? You know, priests come from holy Catholic families.

Where do nuns come from? You know, where do all the other holy orders and roles and vocations in the church? They all come from families. They all originate in a family. Holy families lead a holy church in a holy world. Broken families lead a broken church in a broken world. So it all goes back to the family. It's a profound sacrament. St. Paul calls it, you know, in the Vulgate, the magnum sacramentum, you know, the great sacrament.

It's the mystery, the great mystery of Christ in the church, which there's few things more profound than that. And if we can kind of plumb the depth of that and understand just how significant our marriages can be, not only in the temporal economy, but also in the spiritual economy, it can really change everything for our Catholic families. Yeah, Christopher West pointed out that, you know, what are societies? Well, it's the kind of collection of families. What's at the heart of the family or, you know, where do they come from? Well, families should come from the interaction of men and women in marriage. All right, but go one step further. Like what's at the interaction of men and women in marriage all right but go one step further like

what's what's at the heart of marriage what is that action that married people engage in that they don't engage in or shouldn't engage in with others that's the sexual act okay so i thought to myself like here would be a cool idea for a marvel super villain since most of their super villains are underwhelming you could have somebody attack the sexual act because as sex goes, marriage goes, and family goes, and then so goes society, you know? Oh, there's my phone. That's my dumb phone, which we'll talk about soon.

But yeah, it's fascinating. You want to destroy the world, destroy sex. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think we're not really doing a good enough job addressing as catholics today uh as far in regards to the family like i here's one suggestion but you don't have to go with this maybe in our zeal to demonize contraception, which we should be doing, perhaps we've made NFP seem far easier and whatever. Yeah.

Good, whatever, than it is. I don't know. But maybe there's something else. Like, we're not really addressing this. Yeah. Because it often takes courage for someone to step out and be like, hey, I don't mean to be weird, but I'm really struggling with this thing. Yeah.

And it's usually at that point you hear this gigantic sigh of relief from everybody else who's also going through the same thing. Yes. But it takes the humility of someone to kind of acknowledge that thing and then it becomes more acceptable to talk about, books to be written about it, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. Yeah, no, to me, I think it is the cross of like NFP

in the sense that there's some people that have this prevalent providentialist mindset towards children in the sense that well we're just going to have sex whenever we want which usually benefits the man more than the woman by the way but we're just gonna have sex whenever we want regardless of the consequences and if god wants us to have another baby um we'll have another baby and if he doesn't we won't which sounds nice But it totally disregards the law of cause and effect in the temporal world in which we live It's like saying we have a train tracks in our backyard And we're just gonna let our kids play back there with with no rules whatsoever And if they get hit by a train, you know, it's God's will and if they don't then it's not God's will

Yeah, I'm just saying like it. There's a law of cause and effect here and sometimes You know the church is very clear. There are times when for your wife's mental health, your wife's physical health, for your, the economic good of your family, that is, you're on the brink of absolute disaster financially. You just need to wait. You need to, you need to space children. And in Paul VI in Humanae Vitae spells this out very clearly. There are legitimate reasons for spacing children or preventing them for a certain reason or whatever. However, NFP is hard. It's especially hard for men because how we receive our affirmation, how we receive our, fulfill our need for intimacy.

For women, again, it's very emotional. It's very, she wants you to listen, things like that. And it's not to say women don't like sex. Of course they do. But it's just different for them than it is for men. Where men, it's, while oftentimes the caricature is that men don't have feelings and that sex is just like this lustful, like, base thing. It's absolutely not the case. For men, it can be a very emotional fulfilling experience it can be how they receive their affirmation and how they

and to deny that is very difficult it can be very hard for men yeah for i think for that's a great point that you're bringing up i think for a lot of men saying we need to abstain for three months and you should be okay with that to some, it feels like them saying to their wives, we're not allowed to have conversations for the next three months and you should be okay with that. Yes, exactly. Whether they should feel that is a different question. All I'm saying is that is how it's experienced, can be experienced.

Exactly, yeah. I think for a man like his wife's affirmation in this actual act is incredibly important. I mean, they're not Catholic books, but for men only and for women only, these two books written by kind of these social researchers, they talk about how men and women view these things is a really fascinating read. Because when you start to read the book, you know, about like men, there's a man for men there's a book called for men only and it's about how women think um and it and women likewise like they had no idea that this is how men saw sex as like an affirmation of their manhood and to like deny that feels like your manhood's gutted in a sense but again it's it's a maturation. We can all start with a very immature view of sex.

And I'm not saying that all need for it or desire for it is inherently immature. But there's a spectrum. And growing maturation means learning to sacrifice that need for the good of your spouse. And to learn intimacy in other ways, which is a struggle for men. We don't want to just sit on the couch and hold hands and talk or something like that. That's not thrilling for us, the way that sex is. But that may be what your wife needs. And so for men, it's really learning to express affection in more ways than just the sexual act,

which can be a painful thing for guys um and likewise for women it can be a growth in understanding how important sex can be for a man like they may not realize that they may just think it's like it's not a big deal like what's the big deal you know um but for guys it can be it can be a lot more important than than we realize and the other thing i want to emphasize too is well nfp can be an important part of marriage i don't want to underestimate the importance of the sexual act like the church actually says that if you can't perform the sexual act you can't get married it's that important like like if you're if you're just you have some physical condition or something

and you can't consummate your marriage you can't get married according to church canons and and the church also teaches along of course with saint paul so that's who our authority is also thomas aquinas that to deny your spouse sex without a serious reason is a grave sin yeah so it's important to point that out it's that important to the marriage relationship. It is the symbol of the union between Christ and the church, which, again, can be like,

really? Like, woo, you know. But that's how all the great commentators on Scripture interpreted the Song of Songs was like the sexual book of the Bible

is really about the relationship between Christ and the church. Like, that can be, sex is a lot more profound. So I don't want to, in affirming the necessity at times of NFP, I don't want to dismiss also the important and the holiness of sex in marriage. Well, as St. Paul says, you know, be apart for a while

in order to devote yourselves to prayer, but to come back together. Yes. prayer but to come back together yes um sex marriage we've done a lot about sex and marriage yeah what about um you and i spoke about this a couple of weeks ago i wonder how real we'll get here let's see well let me let me lead into it this way. Another pet peeve I have, of which I am a culprit, is the endless capitalist machine within the church cranking out new books and things. Again, guilty, 100% guilty, right? It just feels like there's always these, we got to keep, you know, oh, you're St. Joseph, like time to make bank. Let's write a ton of books on saint joseph and that isn't to say that people don't have the best of intentions in writing them it's just it feels kind of icky sometimes to me and maybe i'm wrong to feel that way but what do you think not just i'm not talking about saint joseph devotions necessarily i'm just talking about the machine of the church and not even the church,

but like the publishing houses and the YouTubers and all this, just cranking out these new things. Yeah. I mean, I think we all underestimate the degree to which we are secular in our mindset. It's infected all of us where there's got to be a constant stream of content to consume like we're creating right now, and products to buy.

Like the sum and bottom of the modern secular is consuming, shopping, purchasing. Like there is no greater good in the modern secular world than that. That is what life is for. Consuming. Yeah, and that's how the suburbs are laid out so you can shop easily. It's how Amazon, they want to reduce that friction of purchasing things to the bare minimum so that you can just have a constant stream of Amazon packages arriving at your door, one-click purchasing.

It's infected all of us. We all have this consuming mindset where we've kind of lost the ability to be creative. It's a struggle. But on the other hand, like, it is something that we just have to face in the church, and we need to be very careful about putting the faith up for sale. Like, I've written books. You've written books. I do a podcast. You do a podcast. And the great good can come from that. But I think there is, too, like, a sense in which we need to be on guard. Like, we don't need to take things for granted. I think as people striving for holiness and sanctity in a world that's constantly trying to erode that and

tempt us away from that it's not that we shouldn't do things but we shouldn't do them mindlessly or thoughtlessly we should weigh everything and and like it's kind of like test the spirits is this what is this doing to my spiritual life is being on twitter all day harming me or is it strengthening my spiritual life is being on twitter at all yes something you should be doing right like i mean you got the dumb phone you know you know how harmful social media can be to your spiritual life your ability to concentrate um you know uh and so i guess that's the question we all need to ask. Don't just put a TV in your living room because everyone else is doing it. I'm also not saying don't, but I'm just saying don't do it mindlessly. Think about it. Think about the impact it's going to have on your family.

Think about the influence it's going to have on your spiritual life. Think about the influence it's going to have on the relationships in your life? Is it going to be strengthening all of these things, or is it going to be eroding them? So as content creators, as content producers, we have a responsibility. You know, St. James says, you know, not many of you should desire to be teachers. God have mercy on me.

Because you'll face the stricter judgment. And I think for each of us who have an influence in the world, whether that's in person or online, we need to weigh everything very carefully. Are we doing this just to keep the machine going, or is there a purpose behind this, this a greater purpose and that can be a scary question sometimes but um i do think that that a lot of this is approached a little too casually sometimes and we should always be kind of engaged in a perpetual examination of conscience

about the choices that we're making in life in every domain and again the the impact that it's having on us in in our moral and spiritual and relational development yeah um yeah icky pills gross and it's so hard to know your own intentions it's so easy to justify your own intentions. It's so easy to justify your own intentions because, again, the standards don't apply to you, that kind of hypocrisy. Yes, right. Yeah. So how do we fight against that?

I mean, you said, you know, like, we're all more secular than we realize. Here's the part in the show where I'm going to try to convince you to get rid of your smartphone. And if you agree to it, I'll buy you a dumb phone right now. I have Neil do it. Is that cool, Neil? Yeah.

All right. And here's the thing. I don't think everybody should get rid of their smartphone. There's some sacrifices that are too great, Matt. Yes. Like getting rid of Google Maps, for example. Yeah. I agree.

So can we try that? Is that okay? Yeah, convince me. All right. Change my mind. Have you ever desired to have, say, a Wyze phone or a Lite phone? Yeah, absolutely. Why?

Just get sick of the constant stimulation and the drain on your attention. I think, as I said before, attention is like a precious gift and what you give it to is going to limit the attention that you give to other things. And there's times when the constant inundation of messages and just kind of the nervous,

I'm bored, boredom is intolerable, therefore I'm just going to grab my phone, mindlessly check my email, mindlessly seek some stimulation on social media, some intellectual pleasure. It can be a temptation that leaves you resentful of the time that it can take away from you. I think these phones are designed to be addictive. But they can also be incredibly useful or we wouldn't rely on them.

Okay, but see, your insights into your own technology use and the negative impact it can and has had on your life is something I'd say 90% of the people out there aren't seriously considering, which is super cool of you. So why not then make the switch to a dumb phone is it because there's just too many conveniences and this is how we live life right now and it would be like asking me to stop using a computer and now use a typewriter yes yeah it's it's it's kind of that cost benefit analysis of you know yes there are costs to using a smartphone but there are also benefits you know i've got my my banking app in there where I can, you know, deposit checks remotely. You know, there is email that I have for work that I need to check. There's, you know, when I'm getting on a plane, there are, you can, you know, keep track of your tickets, which I used to lose all the time.

And things like that where there there are gps is huge like i i actually have a great memory for like if i go someplace once i can remember how to get there but that first time you rely on gps very frequently even if you know your way around your city excuse me pretty well um so it is just kind of that cost-benefit analysis. And to this point, the benefit has, to me at least, outweighed the cost. That's fair, yeah. What apps would you be okay destroying forever on your iPhone? So it sounds like, yeah, I agree, right? There are certain things I'm not willing to sacrifice.

So for me, it was Maps. And so the Wyze phone that I have has Google Maps, but unlike Google Maps on your smartphone, you cannot see images of the places you're looking up, nor can you click through to any sort of website. That was something I really wasn't willing to sacrifice. And I didn't want to go to Walmart and get a GPS system and have to plug it in and update it every year or some such. Yeah. Okay.

So that's something I'm not willing to give up. What are other things for you that you're like, I'm just not willing to give this up? Like, is that email? Is that one? Like, you wouldn't be willing to give up email? You don't think the benefit would outweigh the consequence there? Yeah. That one would be a hard one for me.

I do check my email a little too much sometimes but i have out like three email accounts on my phone and there's always something new which okay so we're talking about a kind of consumeristic society we can come to crave something new all the time and there's almost a sense of like disappointment when you check that email or check that app and there's nothing new yes um but it is amazing how this like hijacks the kind of the psychology or the the wiring of our brains in the sense that it keeps you coming back for more even when there's a part of you that's like why am i doing this like why but so email for me would be kind of hard to give up because it is really useful um to check on the go. The other one would probably be,

well, I mean, I think email would probably be one of the biggest. GPS and email are kind of the two biggest. Calendar is really useful. It's very useful, yeah. I have this thing right now, right? This is my calendar. Yeah, no, when I gave up the internet in August,

and that's when I got the Wyze phone, I went to Savannah, when I gave up the internet in August, and that's when I got the wise phone, I went to Savannah. And I missed my flight because my app didn't alert me that we were boarding. And I looked at my paper ticket and thought that the travel time was the boarding time. So my daughter and I were in the Atlanta airport for seven hours waiting for the next available flight to Savannah. And I, you know, you know, that saying it's great to be in the Atlanta airport without any technology for seven hours. That's false. Whoever said that, that's not true at all.

Yeah. So it was, it was tough, man. It was really tough. And so that was, that was hard. So the inconvenience there. And then I had to get a taxi back to the airport because i couldn't get an uber yeah you ever called a taxi place that's weird and then i just figured taxi people would be just around my hotel like we'll be there in 20 minutes yeah 20 minutes and then you gotta get into the

taxi and then when you get out you have to put your credit card into a machine oh i know can you imagine what is that about? It's so primitive. So for me, fully aware that there are a ton of annoying things that come about. A ton. Things that you haven't even thought of yet. But for me, it's definitely worth the risk. You're not doing a good job of selling it to me.

But tell me why. Why is it worth it to you? Well, it's for all the reasons you already know it's like having a phone with the 100 ways people can get in touch with you is like having a hundred people in your brain whispering that they might have something to say and it just fragments your internal life and your interior life you're playing with your kids and you're wondering how that youtube video did and so you refresh it and want to see yeah you put something out in the twitterverse and you're wondering how that YouTube video did and so you refresh it and want to see. You put something out in the Twitterverse and want to know how well it's doing.

Very true. And the thing I find is that most of us, if we were to say, hey, why are you on your phone right now? We would actually have a legitimate sounding reason. Right. Like my brother's texting me about like car photos or you know, or I just need to pay this. I need to do this check thing. It's all legitimate, but you still shouldn't be doing it now because I'm with you, you know, or like it's nighttime and the kids are in bed and we need to just be bored together. And the phone almost, I think, makes it impossible to have that yeah um and i kind of think that

smartphones are in this in i'm using the word smart equivocally or at least analogically but they're smarter than you and you don't i think most people don't have the self-control to outsmart their smartphone yeah it's true i think many people maybe i'll just be modest and say i think there are many people who think they're smarter than their smartphone that they can put it in a phone area, a phone cage or whatever and they just when people are making bank on

selling little safes that you can put a timer on to lock your phone away, bloody hell I mean something bad has happened when iPhone who does not benefit from you using their product less, tells you how much you've been using your phone this week so you can have a healthy phone life,

and they've got no reason to do that, something seriously bad has happened. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, and again, I want to emphasize how important attention is and what we give our attention to matters. And it even matters, even doing something as mundane as your math homework, can prepare you for the kind of attention that you need to bring to prayer to truly encounter God in a deep way. All right, so you can argue for this

better than I can argue for it. So, and this sounds like a, it sounds like I want you to answer this question in a certain way. I don't. It could just be, right, that you have more self-control than I do. No. No, but it could be.

No, no, no. Well, if you don't, then I think you should get rid of your smartphone. Because the only reason I can see is because obviously people have different levels of self-control and the ability to put their phone in its place and not have it overtake their brain. So that could be the case, actually. Yeah, it is very tempting to me. And I've gotten on these minimalist phone websites so many times and been so close to hitting buy. Yeah, dude. I'll do it right now.

I will buy it for you right now. All right. Buy me one, Matt. No, no, but you've got to commit to getting rid of your phone. I'm not just going to buy you a phone that you can put in your top drawer. I can't keep it in a drawer? What? My phone. My smartphone. Okay, not just going to buy you a phone that you can put in your top drawer. I can't keep it in a drawer? What? My phone.

My smartphone. Okay, so just so everybody knows, this is my smartphone, but we've disconnected the service, so the phone stuff. Here's why I have it, and I'm about to get rid of it. But here's something I didn't realize that would be really annoying. I try to log in to a computer, and it sends this phone phone a text or it says, open up your Gmail app. How am I going to get around this? It's like I'm locked in.

So I basically use this phone as a computer now. Yeah. But here's another thing I did. I actually switched my phone number as well. Not only did I get rid of my smartphone and take a dumb phone, I actually have a new number. And here's why. And Father pine put this really well he said your phone it's this strange device through which you can make demands upon

other people and through which they can make depends demands upon you and we're all good about the first part but we're not good about the second part well i have a confession yeah i've gotten annoyed with you for not answering my texts and calls immediately okay interesting i was like what is what is this matt like is he like stonewalling me or something or like what's going on here like exactly and like i feel this need for you to be always on too and this this fear that i have that other people think i'm doing that to them almost prevented me from doing this yeah uh so so over the last i've had this phone number right for about about eight ten years yeah i've just given my phone out to every tom dick and harry yeah and so now it's this thing that is it blows up a lot and i was just like

you know what i don't want to i don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to get a new number. And then I went on my smartphone and I texted like people in Steubenville who I want to do life with and my sister and my mom and you and Neil and people I work with and close friends. And I know, and it bothers me that there are people right now who do not know I've made this switch in number who are texting me who think I'm ignoring them. That bothers me that there are people right now who do not know i've made this switch in number who are texting me who think i'm ignoring them that bothers me yeah but i think it's i'd rather be bothered by it than continue this bloody charade yeah that's very fair point very fair

point and the reason the fact that i've been on these minimalist phone websites and searched for them on google and things like tells me that there is a desire in me to be free of the hamster wheel that these devices get us on of it's the attention economy they call it where they're actually selling your attention to advertisers you are the product the phone is not the product it's just a very shiny and enticing way for advertisers to access you but really what it's about is getting your data so they can sell it to corporations or advertisers or whatever what have you um to sell you stuff there's been times when i've searched for something online and all of a sudden i get a catalog in the mail just based on my google search because google has my data i no longer use

google for that reason but they also have all my emails and everything that i email people about through gmail so the attention economy is they are buying your attention through the medium of these devices advertisers are um so it is there is something in me that does want to be free of that is your concern that you've done this in the past and failed? Or you've done something similar in the past and then thought I was being too idealistic. So it's better to be realistic. Yeah, that's kind of the tension is like, there is an anxiety there that like, okay, I'm going to do this.

And like you said, there's gonna be all these things in my life that all of a sudden don't work. Yeah. And that is a little bit alarming it's like have we reached this point of no return socially where you have to have a smartphone to like participate in society which if so that's a very scary reality but we're kind of at that tipping point where it's like uh yes and no though my you know my brother for example has a dumb phone and he's able to function perfectly fine in society.

Yeah. But they want to get us to that place, I think, where you really have to have a smartphone to be able to interact with the world. So then for you, is it only a matter of time before you make that jump, given the trajectory, the way things are going? Because things are only going to get worse.

You're only going to become more dependent on this thing presumably so for you is it well in a couple of years i might do it and maybe should do it or are you like no no i just have to be better at regulating this forever i'm going to be a freaking 80 year old in a nursing home texting people and checking my instagram account yeah right well which by way, I have seen dozens of grandparents and things like that who grew up with no technology who are completely addicted to their smartphone now.

They're just as bad, I should say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It really hijacks you. So I'm asking you the question, though. Is it just a matter of time? Because if it's a matter of time, jump off now and learn to... You're so persuasive, Matt.

This whole conversation reminds me of the Sumo, though, where it's like, I answer that. Yeah, said contra. Well, I'll so persuasive, man. This whole conversation reminds me of the Sumo though, where it's like, I answer that. Yeah, said contra. Well, I'll tell you this, and this is just, I've shared this with you. I think I've been doing these August free internets and two, I think it was two years ago,

I bought the Light Phone. And I had this grand plan of being somebody with a dumb phone and it looked cool and I lasted a few weeks was it the light phone one or two one okay so that one but i'll be honest like the okay here's what i like about this dumb phone is it also has in addition to its google maps by the way for those who are interested this isn't like they're not paying me to tell you this but it's a wise phone by techless i think it's techless.com so check it

out if you want to check it out but what's good about this phone is it has maps can access the internet you can take photos which is good because i take photos of my work receipts to send to my accountant um and you can do voice to text and you can do group text the thing i found infuriating about the light phone even though it looks cooler objectively yeah is my thumbs are too fat it gives you the keyboard when you hold the phone sideways but people text expecting a paragraph response today they don't expect a that's true a ty meaning thank you you know that's weird now so that we've kind of changed the way we've communicated which is but even that like i i'd like to get to a point where maybe i don't have a phone at all i actually would like to get there actually on my august off i was seriously contemplating getting rid of email

wow yeah that would be that's that's when i get radical that's what i get that would be radical but i yeah you go i mean i think you've persuaded me i mean i think there's there is an intertension though that i can't deny because i'll be honest, you were on the phone way too much when we hung out yesterday. Every time I looked at you, you were on your phone texting somebody. Well, that is not true. A lot of the time you were. There was a time when we sat down and had a cigar. You had your phone up on the thing, and that was wonderful.

But when we were on the phone, I'd look at you, and you were just doing this. Don't it? Does your wife think that about you? I think most people are like that. Yeah, no. I think we're just kind of used to each other. That comes out of a place of love, by the way. I love you, and you call me on stuff.

You're hurting my feelings. No, I think that's fair assessment. I mean, I think it is true that we're just kind of used to everyone doing that, so we don't really notice it anymore. And it's like any lull. There's a lull in the conversation. Well, there's this thing. It's like, I would like you to be an active participant in this conversation,

not just reacting to the stimuli of my words. All right. All right, man. Consider it. Yeah, no, I will. By the way, I have no vested interest in you doing this, obviously. It's not like I'm making money from this, but yeah, whatever. I just, and I didn't think I'd manage.

That was the kind of point I was making. So like two years ago, got the light phone, but I didn't last. And I felt like an idiot for not lasting. Like this is a typical Matt Fradd thing to do. I get excited and passionate about something and it doesn't last. So I did this at the start of August and I was very reluctant to commit to it.

It's a couple of months now. It's been a couple of months and I actually don't feel any desire to use this. It's not even like it's a struggle. We went to Mother Natalia's life profession over the weekend and i just had and i had and i even just left it in my suitcase a lot of the time because what's the point of it it's dumb anyway yeah and i didn't even i had no desire to check anything which is nice yeah i mean i will say too that attention like a fully present person

is a dangerous thing like i've seen in my own life when i'm focused and i'm in that state of like flow almost where you're just so zeroed in on something that you lose track of time you can get an incredible amount done like you you can do you can be dangerous in the sense that you can get you can you can create you can bring things into being that no longer, or that didn't exist before. And so attention can be a beautiful gift to either those around you or to kind of the creative process. So it is, the fragmentation is exhausting. And I do think that there is a very valid argument to be made

for taking the plunge. Neil, we need to get you a microphone so you can be part of this conversation so maybe speak loud but uh is would you ever consider getting a dumb phone or you're like dude no and what do you have different reasons to what we've already expressed yeah i mean i think that i would consider it i feel feel like, you know, maybe I'm just overproud, but I feel like I'm pretty good at controlling when I'm using social media apps and how long I do that. And there is a lot, I feel like, that I just honestly don't want to give up.

Like there's, you know, kind of group messages on these apps to that people are sending each other stuff and sharing things and talking about things and making plans around certain things that are all kind of originating from the virtual. So it would kind of be because I've deleted Instagram before and I've had friends like who were frustrated with me because they use those apps to communicate. And they're like, we made these plans, you deleted Instagram before and I've had friends like who were frustrated with me because they use those apps to communicate and they're like we made these plans you didn't say anything so it's kind of extra work for them yeah yeah yeah yeah that's the element that kind of keeps me on there

and also I like memes I think they're good sure yeah I agree thank you someone's saying Neil get a microphone so that's the reason I cut you off. I think most people could probably hear you. But yeah, no, I think the question is, what level of inconvenience am I willing to accept in order to live a more balanced life? And for some of us, it might be, I'm willing to delete. Well, for some of us, it might just be, I'm willing to turn off. I'm yelling because you're talking loud. I'm willing to turn off all notifications on my phone. I'm yelling because you're talking loud.

I'm willing to turn off all notifications on my phone. That's the level of inconvenience they're willing to adopt in order to live a more balanced life. For others, it'll be I'm going to delete social media off my phone entirely and I'll tweet and Facebook from my desktop. That's the question, I think. That's the question, I think. I don't think there's anyone who has two bloody neurons to rub together, two brain cells to rub together, who would think this isn't affecting me at all and I need to make no changes. So I think that's the question. And maybe that's an interesting question for those of you in the comments section. Let me know what is.

And don't be embarrassed if it's as simple as just turning off notifications from my social media. That's the inconvenience I'm willing to accept. Well, and that's the thing is too, as I was saying earlier, we need to be doing kind of a perpetual examination of conscience on these things. Like, how is this affecting me? How is this affecting my relationships? Because it is kind of disturbing for me to hear

that you thought I was on my phone too much yesterday, whereas I thought I was actually doing a really good job of not checking it very often. Did you get any passive aggressive vibes from me? No. Okay. Because I was definitely sending them out. That's interesting.

You didn't pick up on them. Yeah. Your inner world isn't very real to me. That's right. It's very opaque. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to ask the listeners, like, what should I do? Should I get rid of my smartphone?

Should I get the wise phone? I want to ask the listeners, like, what should I do? Should I get rid of my smartphone? Should I get the wise phone? The nice thing about having a dumb phone is when you do tell people, oh, I have a dumb phone. For the most part, people are pretty respectful of that. Like, today, my mate Mike Welker sent me a link to a video. And I can't watch links. I can't click links on my phone.

So I texted back, dumb phone, remember? Oh, so sorry. Like, I actually think most people, they kind of think it's cool yeah um and i would imagine that's true of like work for you because you were saying checking emails on airplanes and things like that a hundred percent agree that's a that's a huge convenience but um i don't know you get to come back from the weekend on monday morning and open up your desktop and check your emails it's kind of nice it's true i i thought of a riddle, and the answer is your phone. But the riddle is, what grows hungrier the more you feed it?

Yeah. Because I took the month off the internet and expected my phone to explode when I turned it on. Because it's done that before. This time around, i didn't get nearly as many text messages as i thought which was a little insulting but i realized that a lot of the activity is me feeding it that's true you feed it you get responses you hit it it hits back that's a very good point yeah yeah yeah it's a cyclical cyclical thing thing that feeds on itself. Yeah. What should we talk about?

Well, we could wade into dangerous waters and talk about the liturgy. Because we were talking about this yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. Let's talk about the liturgy. But before we do that, you have to know that we're going to make pretty much everybody upset. They're okay with that. No one's going to be happy.

They're on YouTube. They're here to be upset. Okay, yes. That's the whole point. Flame us in the comments. Tear us apart on Twitter. We'll be okay. Or we won't. We'll go weep after this and contact our therapists and we'll be okay. So how should we start this? Do you want to just begin?

Well, I don't know. I mean, what do you think? Okay, so let's start here because we were talking yesterday about how there can be so much anger and vitriol around kind of the liturgy wars where it's the Latin mass needs to die or, you know, the traditional Latin mass people are saying, well, the Novus Ordo needs to die. It needs to be a resurrection of the Latin mass. And there's this tension in the church.

It's really, I think wounding the body of Christ in a significant way. And I do think that it's something worth discussing. Like what, what is the proper response to kind of this liturgical tension that we're experiencing right now? Is it misguided nostalgia, or is there something else going on there? But I do think it's a significant question. I mean, I go, just truth be told, I go to an FSSP parish.

I've been a convert now for nine years, and for all but six months of that, I've primarily gone to the traditional Latin Mass. So for me, it's really nurtured and sustained my faith. somewhat threatening or somehow kind of eroding the faith in the pope or kind of leading to isolationism or things like that and i think it's just a conversation worth having so i love how you put that because i think what you just did then is sort of exemplify what we spoke of earlier and that is trying to understand because i think when you well, there are people who love tradition and Jesus Christ, and then there are like gay hippie people with ponytails. You haven't even tried to understand why there may have been the desire for a reform. Or even the fact that you said that this tension, we can at least admit that it's wounding the body of Christ. And what's the proper response to this?

I just love the thoughtful way that you put that. I think it's crucial. Yeah. So, I mean, do you go to La Sota? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we have the Latin Mass here. We have a high Latin Mass once a month at St. Peter's.

Okay. I think we're going to get to the point where it's weekly. Okay. Once it's weekly, I'll probably go there every week. But it's just a strange experience for me and for my children, honestly, to go to a low Latin mass on Sunday. I find it strange. I don't mean to be rude. I'm just explaining kind of how I feel about it. It almost feels like an awkward adoration yeah like you show up you're in the church you're kneeling and it's silent and there are things happening but you're not participating

yeah and coming from a byzantine yes last three or four years where it's incredibly interactive and your whole body and throat and you know it's a strange thing for me. So I don't, I'm not someone who would say, well, Latin Mass or bust. So we do go to a very beautiful Novus Ordo here where you have the altar rail and you have Latin and you have, yeah. So I've been to the Latin Mass for like eight and a half years now and I have my reasons for that.

But I'm just curious, like what do you like about the Novus Ordo? I like the participation. Yeah, okay. I like understanding the words that I'm saying. I like not having to follow along with a missile. Okay. Yeah, those are some things that I like. Is there anything you dislike?

About the Novus Ordo? Yeah. Is there anything you dislike? About the nervous order? Yeah. Generally speaking, it's banal and shallow and not fitting for the thing that's taking place right now. It feels sloppy. The sloppiness of it seems to influence everything else, such as those who attend.

We dress sloppily we we shuffle about the place like it's a 7-eleven the the sacred has disappeared um those are some things it feels commercialized even the statues feel commercialized like the new statues that we're cranking out that look like they've been carved but haven't. Yeah. The language isn't as beautiful or as profound. The music often isn't either. Yeah. It's like, would you rather celebrate Holy Mass on a marble altar or a card table?

And if you say marble altar, why? And whatever reason you give is why I would prefer to prefer the Latin Mass in every other respect. It just feels like it's more fitting. Yeah. Well, and also, too, I don't know if anyone's ever noticed this, but a lot of those traditional marble altars, those high altars, there was rubrics governing everything about them so for one piece they had to look like a tomb

like a catafalque or something like a tomb and the reason being because it goes all the way back to the catacombs when they would literally offer mass on the tombs of the martyrs and in the traditional rubrics there has to be a martyr

or a relic of a saint in the altar so that you're literally like representing the mass of the catacombs in a modern context so you have a relic there and then the mass they say we you know we're asking the intercession of the saints whose relics are here which harkens back all the way to the catacombs when they were hiding in secret and offering mass on the tombs of the martyrs who had just been killed a few days ago by lions in the Colosseum

and things like that so there's a huge continuity another thing is like the altar has to be in contact with the earth and there's like profound reasons for that but like so even if the church had like a church hall underneath they would have like a big pillar coming all the way down to put it in contact with the earth because the sacrifice of christ you know the blood of christ fell into the earth from the cross and there's there's like a sanctification of creation

that happens through that continued sacrifice. So everything has a meaning. What else? What else don't I know? This is profound. Keep going. I'd love to learn from you. Something you said last night was the number of times the priest blesses.

Yes. Tell us more. Yeah, so liturgical scholars may correct me on the numbers, but the point is everything is significant in the Latin Mass. So, for example, when the priest is incensing in a high Mass, he's incensing the gifts before the presentation or the offertory and the consecration, he'll do three circles around them and then three crosses over them with the censer. And each one of these things, you know, the cross kind of being a manifestation of God in time

and circles representing eternity. So this sacrifice is both in time and it's an eternal sacrifice. You know, as St. John talks about in Revelation, how the Lamb is slain before the foundation of the world. So this mass is something that is a revelation of the character of God. And we're kind of calling that forth in these symbols. The other one being like the numbers, like the priest makes the sign of the cross, I believe it's 52 times, which is kind of harkens back to, I believe it's like the 52 books of the Septuagint, or at least the people who worked,

there's 52 scribes that worked on the Septuagint. Like everything is a density, there's a density of meaning, layer upon layer of meaning in the traditional mass like the priest turns and faces the people i think it's seven times to typify the seven days of creation in the mass and and um so everything is is it's like i was trying to explain last night like and this is something that is hard for modern people to understand and of course you go to a medieval peasant and explain this, they're not going to understand it either. But reality is symbolic. There's a world of immaterial essences and realities that we can't encounter directly in the material world. But symbols are a way of manifesting these metaphysical realities in time and space. So your body is a symbol of your soul. It's

manifesting to me the reality, the underlying essence that is Matt Fradd. It's how I encounter you in time. Well, likewise, the mass is a symbol of the sacrifice of Calvary in time. It's making present, drawing it down into time and making it present to us. So the symbol has to be fitting to the reality that it represents. And so, again, everything in the traditional Mass, it's like a forest of symbols that is just thick with symbolism. Everything means something. Now, you may not understand that,

but you feel it at an intuitive level. You walk in and you just feel this sense of, like time stops. Like one of my favorite things was in Milwaukee. We went to this church called St. Stanislaus, which was a Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Peace Parish. And busy city streets, kind of downtown,

like just cars rushing by honking you know ambulance sirens things like that then you walk into this church it's dead silent it's just silent and there's this beautiful gold high altar marble and gold and and you it's you walk into another dimension it takes you out of time out of this horizontal plane of time, cause and effect, and raises you up into the vertical axis of eternity. It draws you up and out of the ordinary, which is what the sacred is. It's a separation from the ordinary. And in all traditional cultures that had any sense of sacrifice and

they all did the holy was what was not ordinary and you've heard people talk about things like well he does that religiously well that means that he guards that practice or whatever he's doing it's set apart from ordinary activities and he he's faithful to that. And he guards that with intensity. That's what the holy is. It's the numinous. It's something that draws us up and out of ourselves, like the experience of the Grand Canyon does. No one goes to the Grand Canyon to contemplate themselves.

They go to be in awe of a reality that is greater than themselves and to kind of venerate that. Well, the same is with the mass where you walk into a sacred space that's set apart. We talk about the mass being full of symbolism. Talk about medieval cathedrals. They too are just forests of symbols. Like everything from the pillars to how, you know, they would have 12 pillars to represent the 12 apostles. They would would the shape

of the church is cruciform they would even measure like 40 yards or 40 feet or whatever and to represent the purification in the wilderness or the 40 days of christ in the desert and and like everything was meaningful and like we need that as human beings meaning is not superfluous uh meaning provides structure to facts it draws them up into a narrative and what we've kind of lost in our modern way of seeing the world is we we have no narrative there's no meaning to anything anymore it's just raw random facts and well how can we put this dead matter that is reality to use whereas in kind of the pre-modern consciousness we can still recover today by the way um everything was meaningful everything was a symbol of an underlying reality so trees were not just trees they were symbols of their

manifestations of god they were theophanies of of god and they told us something about him so like a medieval saint like saint francis just saw the world or saint bonaventure just saw the world as a john the cosmos as a symbol a sacrament of it was revealing god the underlying essence of who god is um and the the lat Latin Mass preserves that in a way that I think the, and I don't say this to wound anybody, but I do think the Nos Ordo has succumbed to kind of that horizontal axis where we've kind of lost that vertical dimension of being taken up and out of ourselves into something,

you know, as Rudolf Otto calls like the numinous, there's something that's both mysterious, fearful, awe-inspiring, but it also inspires love. Whereas if we bring everything down to our level, we drag God down to our level, the imminence, yes, God is imminent imminent but he's also transcendent but if you eliminate that transcendent dimension everything collapses into us and our needs and our feelings and our desire to express ourselves and our our desire to um you know assert our rights and things like that um whereas whereas the traditional mass has both It allows you to encounter something mysterious and transcendent while also bringing it down to us into the imminent and horizontal domain. Christ is coming to us. But Christ is a mystery that we cannot begin to even fathom.

And the Mass reminds us, through its density of symbolism, what's actually taking place. That is, yeah, really profound. I heard Taylor Marshall say, and whatever you think of Taylor Marshall, I thought this was a great point. You know, repeating that the Novus order is valid isn't terribly encouraging. It would be like if I said to you, tell me about your marriage, and you said, well, it's valid. But how is your marriage? And then you brought up this analogy between the wedding at a courthouse versus a beautiful church ceremony. Talk about that. Yeah, well, I mean, one thing that we've learned from human experience, and marketers know this, by the way, but context gives meaning. So something may, like a product, like let's say,

I wrote about this in my book, but like Marlboro cigarettes. They originally marketed to women, and they flopped. Every time they introduced them to the market, no one wanted a part of them because they had filters, and filters were considered kind of like a concession to health, which was just kind of weak. And nobody was interested. So the product stayed exactly the same,

but they changed the context around it to a rugged cowboy, you know, out in his field dragging bales of hay and wrestling cattle and stuff, and made it a men's product the product was exactly the same it still had filters it was still barbro cigarettes but they changed the context and the meaning was completely different and again there's no such thing as a raw fact all facts are part of a greater narrative that's how we make sense of them and even the most hardened atheist who says well reality, reality is just facts.

Just trust the science. It's just facts. It's just chemicals in our brain and things like that. That in itself is a narrative. It's a story about reality. We can't escape stories and narratives. The question is, which narrative are we presenting? Is the mass just a utilitarian function?

I mean, if it's really just about validity, why not just say the words of consecration and leave it at that? Why have readings? Why have a canon? Why have intercessions? Why have any of that if it's literally just about being valid and just the minimalist expression of the words of consecration and just repeating those and that's what makes it valid? No. The context surrounding the words of consecration is what provides the greater meaning. And I think what happens a lot of times is

Socrates talks about like the three transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty. In the modern world, we think beauty is superfluous. It's not necessary. Just give me the facts, give me the raw, the truth of the matter, severed from beauty and goodness. And I think if the Novus Ordo has a flaw, it's that it celebrates truth and goodness

and says beauty doesn't matter. Beauty is superfluous. Beauty is a nice add-on, but it really doesn't do anything essential. No, what beauty does is inspires love. You can't love something that's not beautiful in some way to you. And that's what's missing. If you look at the, and again, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings here,

but if you look at the traditional mass, it produces love wherever it goes. Composers, artists, you know, stonemasons, like sculptors, like it produced a massive outpouring of beauty, the traditional mass did. Every composer worth his salt prior to like 1900 composed a mass because it just, it was beautiful. It was profound and inspired love. Why not take a more cynical view of that though

and say that there was money involved? People were willing to patronize these composers. There was big and inspired love. Why not take a more cynical view of that, though, and say that there was money involved? People were willing to patronize these composers. There was big bucks in it. I mean, you could take that cynical view, but I do think many of them, it was just an act of love. They were inspired by it. It did something to them that provoked a response. Whereas if people don't love the Novus Ordo,

it's not because it's not valid it's because it's not beautiful it can be but in its most frequent manifestations it's not because we don't think beauty matters but beauty is really is intimately it's a trinity connected to goodness and truth and without that manifestation of beauty there is no love there's there's no love provoked that manifestation of beauty, there is no love. There's no love provoked. And while at some level we may like the idea of a kind of a cozy and intimate Jesus, at the same time we lose the grandeur of who he is, and it's harder to love someone who we don't understand the fullness of their dignity and their worth.

the fullness of their dignity and their worth. Yeah. What do you like about the Novus Ordo that isn't in the Latin Mass? Yeah, well, one thing. Okay, so if you want to make an argument for the vernacular, I would say the Anglican ordinariate that often gets forgotten to me is a beautiful synthesis of kind of the best elements of the Novus Ordo in the sense of vernacular yeah I was going to point that out because many people will often praise the Byzantine liturgy but most Byzantine liturgies have there is the English

language it's being translated if I if I had to go to a Ruthenian Byzantine church and it was in a different language I wouldn't be attracted to it in the way that I am now. So, okay. All right. So yeah, vernacular. I mean, I think it is something that does help some people to encounter the mystery of what's taking place more directly. Again, we're kind of going back to this symbolic communication where it's helping people

internalize the mystery that's taking place. So I do think there is a benefit to that, especially there are some artifacts like reading the readings in Latin. Well, the priest always reads them in English afterwards. So you could say, why not just incorporate that into the liturgy or something like that, where instead of reading them in Latin, which is kind of incomprehensible to people now, read them in English or something like that. I think there's a case to be made for that. I can see that.

And I have to be honest, if someone said, what does the future of the Catholic Church look like? Is it the Latin Mass only? I would have to be honest and say it probably isn't. I don't think there's some pope in the future who's going to say. You mean in the Roman rite or across the board? Is that kind of, because of course, I hope it wouldn't be. I mean, we have these different traditions within the Catholic church. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know. It's a very difficult issue. I do think Pope Benedict handled it in probably the wisest possible way by allowing both to coexist and kind of have a gravitational pull on each other um i think the rigidity that people complain about regards latin mass folks which certainly isn't sort of uh illustrative or isn't kind of indicative of all of them right um is a result of reclaiming a tradition that was taken from you or your ancestors that you now wish to reclaim.

I mean, it's natural. If Quebec in Canada becomes completely anglicized and then in the future there are these French who want to reclaim their heritage, of course they have to do it with a defensive posture. That's the only way they're going to get it off the bloody ground. So in that sense, I understand why there might be this rigidity it's because everything else is flopped we want some rigidity would be nice maybe in the proper sense of that word or in the um yeah okay uh i forget the point i was trying to make so well we were talking last night about about um kind of the trauma that was experienced to make. Well, we were talking last night about kind of the trauma

that was experienced after Vatican II, where millions of Catholics had grown up with the traditional Mass and loved it. It shaped their whole understanding of what the faith was. And then they show up for Mass one Sunday, and I've heard stories that this actually happened, but like the pipe organ is in pieces in the parking lot. The stained glass windows were just smashed out.

That's right. The statues were jackhammered out. God have mercy. You know, I heard one tragic story of a Protestant who was hired. He was like a stone worker to jackhammer out a high marble altar that had this. It was like all hand carved in Germany and everything. And he was like weeping as he was doing it. Like, this is wrong.

It's hard not to think of that as anything other than demonic. Yeah, it's traumatic. Like people, like they were deeply wounded by this. And I think as people, you know, young people today who didn't grow up in that time discover the traditional mass, they're kind of like what are all what is this generation so cranky about well something they deeply loved and treasured and it shaped their faith was stolen from them overnight i mean it happened so fast there was such a zeal for

innovation that um you know thankfully is kind of being counteracted. It's kind of faded over time, but it was hard for people. Grandma's weeping and praying the rosary at our church in St. Stanislaus. They smashed out the stained glass windows and poured in this crazy glass concrete thing. Oh, I want to go and hurt them really bad. Let's get into a time machine and go hurt people. New comic book idea for any catholic comic book writers um yeah cool yeah you're like a vigilante for for tradition

god have mercy yeah it's like why are you angry talk about the height of gaslighting yeah let's destroy what you love and then complain that you're angry about it yeah yeah exactly what's the way forward then? Because I spoke to a dear friend of mine, an FSSP priest who said that he would not want the Latin mass imposed upon the church. Good thing because it doesn't look like it's going to happen. In the way that the Novus Ordo was imposed upon the church because it damages, it fosters bitterness and damages people's relationship with God, really. He says it needs to be a grassroots thing.

And that's what was happening. I mean, I tweeted out last year that I think there's an argument to be made that within 50 years from now that the Latin Mass would be the ordinary means of the liturgy in the United States. That's not going to happen anymore. What was your thoughts about Pope Francis' motu proprio? Yeah, I mean, with all respect to the Holy Father, I do think it was mistaken or misguided in the sense that it undid a process

that was organically happening. No one was imposing it top-down. It was a very bottom-up organic development. And you see in France, the trajectory was in France that in probably 10 to 15 years, there would have been more traditional priests than regular diocesan priests just because no one's signing up to be a priest anymore.

No one's going to seminary. Like a huge diocese like Paris only had like one seminary in every five years or something like that. You know, so the traditional mass was growing in France. And what we see is like violence or imposition, like authority is almost like this iron-fisted, like we're going to put the brakes on this. It damages trust because the people are saying we're doing our best to worship God here in times that are really godless. They have no sense of the sacred or God's presence in time and no sense of divine prerogatives. And we want to worship God in the best way possible. And they're suddenly demonized and told that this is wrong, this is harming the church, etc.

And that's not to say that there aren't elements of tradition, just as there are elements of kind of the more innovative liberal side of the church that can be very vitriolic and even hateful towards those who are not like themselves. But that is not the norm. This was a movement of love. I mean, have you ever seen the Chartres pilgrimage in France? Like 10,000 young people from all over the world marching miles and miles through the French countryside, you know know as an act of love

and devotion at their own cost at their own expense you can't reproduce that like that that is an organic movement of love and devotion and it was blossoming so to be just to have that kind of curtail cut short it really sucks the life out of a lot of elements in the church that were just starting to organically develop which which is we should desire. And I think the other thing that was happening is due to COVID, people weren't going to Mass. And their first experience of the Latin Mass was online. And they couldn't believe how beautiful it was. And there's many stories like this.

And now it's either being denied them or it's become much more difficult how do we square that what do we do what do we do now yeah i mean i it is a difficult question i think the the biggest thing is fidelity to what you love um i mean i'm going to go to the traditional mass and i'm gonna i mean i i love it it is something that is produces love in my soul for both the Eucharist and for the church and for all the mysteries of our faith it inspires love in me love is persuasive it radiates outward it draws people in um and kind of the same accident colby who lived during the ugliness and uh hate and tension and destruction of world war ii he was very careful with his you know he had a newspaper that reached you know over a million people he was like he was very careful to his

newspaper writers and editors who wanted to get into polemics and stuff sometimes and wanted to attack people and tear people down. He's like, don't do that. He's like, we must put good in relief. You know, essentially, we must make goodness attractive. And so I think just living your faith with joy and with winsomeness, sharing what you love about the traditional mass is far more persuasive than, you know pope francis did this i can't believe this and attacking you know this priest and this bishop and um you know just playing church politics essentially is really kind of the way to the death of a movement but to live with love and with winsomeness and with joy and to let that be infectious and to do its own work,

I not only think that that's the call for all those who love tradition, it's the call for all of us Catholics in kind of a secular age who has entirely different values, values of this world, where again it's consumerism, it's maximum pleasure, minimum effort, just a whole different paradigm, a different way of seeing the world, to live in a different dimension informed by entirely different values eternal values eternal truth eternal beauty that's inspiring the life that you live today that's that is winsome that is attractive people may not understand but they're going to want to know what you have like why why why are you living so differently and why are you happy about it um so um i think the best argument for the light mass

is just to love it to embrace it to live the rhythms of the uh mass as it is presented throughout the liturgical year um live differently and people will kind of be like, well, what's so special about this thing that is bringing so much joy and peace to your life in an otherwise chaotic world? Because when I read the newspaper headlines or I get on Twitter, and it's all like hellish, you know, just conflicts and deaths and arguments and people tearing each other apart.

And then I go to Mass, and all of that ceases. It's like Christ saying peace be still calming the waters of my soul and making his life present to me in an intimate way to sustain my own life um that that is a beautiful thing everything is right with the world when i'm at mass um and and that piece is something that you can't trade for anything it's what's one of the greatest gifts of god is his peace of soul we're going to take a two minute break and when we get back we're going to discuss masculinity true devotion to mary and

then we're going to take questions from those in the live streaming on on Patreon. Sound good? Sounds great. All right. 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, 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 realized 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 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Responsible Investing Guidelines.

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separate entities advisory services offered through securities america advisors incorporated America Advisors Incorporated. Yes. The second group I want to thank is Halo. Halo, H-A-L-L-O-W dot com slash Matt Fradd. Halo dot com slash Matt Fradd. Halo 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 100% Catholic and it's super sophisticated. If you go to hallow.com slash 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

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How was that? It was terrible. It's my Aussie cred. G'day. Have you been following up or following at all what's going on in Australia? It's crazy. Unbelievable. What have you heard?

Well, I mean, I've seen these videos on social media, but I've seen these videos on social media where people are getting tackled for being 50 feet from their house without a mask. SWAT teams. It's pretty unbelievable. I want to talk about true devotion to Mary because I expressed something to you that I was embarrassed to express and you agreed with me.

Oh, really? Yeah. I said, like, I don't know how I feel about this, like, devotion to Joseph stuff. Like, do we need to keep consecrating ourselves to everybody? Like, who's next, you know? Like, Anne, the grandmother. the grandmother and again this is not me accusing people who are publishing books on this i'm sure they're very wholly good people and i'm

sure i i need to grow and learn you know you know this area but i just kind of it annoys me i just i wonder sometimes if it's just oh you're saint joseph let's let's i don't know publish stuff on that yeah i i have done the consecration of St. Joseph, by the way. Who wrote that? I did Devin Schatz. Devin Schatz. Oh, was that a consecration? Yeah, yeah.

Devin's amazing. Yeah, he is. You know who else is amazing is Father, he wrote a book on St. Joseph. It was a consecration of St.oseph calloway yes he's terrific yeah yeah he does a great job but i do agree though that was my initial reaction when i first heard about this consecration of saint joseph i was like really like who's next like really that same exact thing that you had described was like we've barely gotten the marion devotion the marion

consecration off the ground in the church it's really just gained steam kind of since john paul the second really uh emphasized it and of course it was always around it's been around since saint louis de montfort but not in the way that you know it was just starting to spread uh fervently and and um and then this consecration of of St. Joseph comes along and kind of derails that and now that's what everyone's talking about so not that it's wrong but it's just it was just kind of frustrating well just like Protestants think stop putting Mary on the level of Jesus

I'm like stop putting Joseph on the level of Mary yeah but yeah I mean there's no I mean there's like five Marian or four Marian dogmas where there's a push for a fifth yeah but but I mean Mary has a unique role in salvation, the economy of salvation, that St. Joseph, while he may be one of the greatest saints in heaven, he's just not on the same level.

And I don't mean to disparage St. Joseph. He is a tremendously great saint who can be a huge intercessor for us. saint joseph he is a tremendously great saint who can be a huge intercessor for us but the virgin mary is uh very unique in the economy of salvation and i think we need to not lose sight of that in our zeal to kind of consecrate ourselves to to all the saints or whatever we whatever the next movement is so but to be fair to devin shard he wrote that book prior to the year of saint joseph anyway yeah he did he's an excellent author yeah uh call it callaway is excellent too i'd love to have him on the show he wrote an excellent book on the holy rosary yes fantastic what do you think of that so many hidden gems in there like history and and um characters that were fascinating that

that really adds a dimension of depth and richness to the devotion of the Rosary, which is probably the most popular Catholic devotion. But really, it just enhances it. I mean, I would encourage everybody to get his book on the Rosary. I mean, he's got several, actually, but his primary one, do you remember the title? I'm blanking on the title all of a sudden. But yeah, but it's, look it up. Father Donald Calloway and the Rosary, and you'll find everything you need so again just

kind of reiterate like my critique isn't of individual authors it's just this like capitalist machine within the church and it's like the pope declares it's the year of something you're like oh well let's wait 10 seconds before ignatius and ascension everybody else and maybe me too starts cranking out content on this thing because and you hope that it comes from a good place but i think it also comes from like a yeah mixed bag you know sure yeah it's kind of like when yeah when john paul ii did his encyclical on the rosary there was just like a flood of new rosary books and that's good that's a good thing just like these books on saint joseph are a good thing and i but i just i get just nervous yeah and when it feels like we're just i don't know cranking out stuff to make money

and i want to emphasize too that no one has a an obligation to follow any devotion you know you come across these people it's like well it's divine, and if you don't do the divine mercy devotion, you know, you're practically damned for crying out loud. I mean, and other people, like, you know, I have, have you heard of the 32 promises of Jesus given to a Brigantine nun in the 1300s? And if you venerate, like, his left kneecap or something, like, you'll get special graces that no one else will get.

And, like, all this stuff, it's just like. And that has to be the devotion that everybody embraces. And I'm just like... You're using easy ones so as not to be criticized. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Right, because the trads are critical of Faustina and the other ones so obscure. Use the rosary if you're going to... Okay.

Well, you don't have an obligation to play the rosary. It's just that one. It doesn't resonate for everyone. However, there have been enough people in the church, saints, you know, doctors of the church, popes, right, that pronounced its significance enough that we should at least pay very serious attention to it. If there were as many popes and saints promoting the whatever this Brigantine nun thing was, then you ought to take, you ought to take heed to that too.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm beginning to pray the rosary more daily, and I'm really enjoying it. Yeah, and like we were asking about technology, the thing has to be what is the effect on your soul? So is this devotion provoking an anxiety, a scrupulosity in you? Well, I have to check the list of all the devotional requirements in order to access said graces,

where it becomes like a vending machine, where God says I have to do these 15 devotional steps in the right sequence to access the graces that I need. That's entirely missing the point of what these devotions are for. They're really to inspire love and relationship with Christ and with the Virgin Mary and with God the Father and with the Holy Spirit and all of these beautiful aspects of our faith. If they're not producing love in your soul and peace, then they're not serving their purpose. And let them go.

And it's true that just like we like new things, we refresh our email, something new, something exciting. The dumb phone, that's exciting for three minutes. The idea that that couldn't possibly be the case with devotions is foolish. We get excited about new devotions. You hear about something, it feels new, feels special. And then you translate that into, I feel holier or something. Right, yeah. I think it was John of the Cross who talked about this, about how unhelpful it is to jump from devotion to devotion

or prefer this particular crucifix until you get bored of it and you get this one. One Our Father faithfully said over a long period of time can be way more impactful than praying 15 decades of the rosary haphazardly yeah haphazardly and and inconsistently and whatever but like saint but like saint and canonized him like lewis has said we often talk about the negative extremes but there's a middle thing so it's like yeah praying the our father uh could could be far better than praying 15 rosaries haphazardly. But here's a better option. Pray the rosary well.

Yeah. Well, I've often thought about the rosary, the reason why there are so many Hail Marys and so many decades. Because maybe you'll get one, right? Yes, exactly. Like if you say one with a feeling that you need to, you might revolutionize your spiritual life. But I often thought like the Hail Mary has developed, obviously, the Holy Mary, Mother of God, wasn't what Louis de Montfort prayed, that half of the rosary.

So when you hear that he would kneel down and pray the 15 decades, you're like, well, yeah, that's a lot easier. It's half the time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I love, though, the devotion to Mary, I think, is something that the church needs to continue to promote. I think it is the message of our time. And it's interesting because it was hidden for most of church history.

It wasn't something that was—the apostles didn't publicly proclaim devotion to Mary. It was something that, you know, Christ, the dogmas around Christ and around his divine human person had to be solidified and established. That's right. And it was really the central message of the preaching. But St. Louis de Montfort and later St. Maximilian Kolbe talk about, like, in these last times, Mary is the instrument that God will use to crush the head of the serpent and it's not an either mary or god or mary or christ they work in complete concert with one i think it's louis de montfort who says if you want to understand the mother understand the son yeah and that's

that's really a great way to begin if jesus was a nice guy then i don't really much care who his mother was except that maybe she contributed to him being nice, and that's nice, I suppose. If Jesus was a prophet, wow, okay, that's impressive. So this is the mother of that prophet. She deserves some respect. You see where I'm going. I don't mean to belabor the point. Yeah, well, people respect Buddha's mother.

But if he's God. But yeah, but like exactly like the the dignity of the person corresponds the other thing too that i think is is essential is mary is and by the way we should point out for those who don't know you were a protestant yes yeah so i think that's you know you maybe your most of your followers are familiar with that but that's important because i'm sure you perhaps had the same caution and hang-ups that perhaps many other policies absolutely yeah yeah and i but i my my my zeal was if i'm going to become catholic i don't want to just tolerate marion dogmas i want to understand them through and through um and so i i read all the sources I could find on Mary.

But really, true devotion to Mary just blew me away. Like, the same amount for it was just a fiery soul, you know, just burning with zeal for Jesus and Mary. And the way he talks about Mary and her role in the church and in the economy of salvation and incarnation of Christ is just really mind really mind-blowing and when i read that book there was no going back like mary and devotion came kind of became the the central you know devotion in my life um and it's interesting because people say well isn't that a distraction from christ but paradoxically the more i've loved mary the more i've loved christ like it just one've loved Christ. Like it just, one follows the other. There's no tension. There's no opposition whatsoever. The more I love Mary, the more, the more I love Jesus. And St. Maximilian Kolbe has this very interesting, provocative

statement that I think might shock a lot of people. But he was kind of that way. Like he was always saying things that bewildered people. But one of these things was, like, we talk about, like, being like Christ. We want to be, like, Christ-like and the imitation of Christ and things like that. But what he said was, like, we actually need to become Mary in the sense that we're Christ-bearers. Like, our soul is receptive to the life of Christ. We all need to be kind of Christ-bearers in the way that Mary was

in saying, be undone unto me according to your word. It's like, we need to become kind of christ bearers in the way that mary was in saying be undone unto me according to your word yeah it's like we need to become her he said you know and radiate her love to the world and again this concept of radiation love is infectious like love is a fire that spreads um and i wrote a post about this a couple summers ago i was grilling and the thought struck me that love is kind of like starting a like a charcoal grill and then it's the fire starts in the middle and spreads outward to the charcoal kind of on the peripheries but it's concentrated at first and like that's what mary can do for us is she can inflame us with that love and then it radiates outward to the world. And people are drawn to that warmth and that love that we radiate. Well, you've shared a shocking quote from De Montfort, so let me do it.

He says, the demons of hell fear Mary and the name of Mary and her intercession for a soul even more than they fear God. Yeah. And then he says, not because the justice and anger is not infinitely greater in God than in Mary, but that the demons being proud fear being tormented by her, the humble little handmaid, more than God. They'd much rather go up against God than this little virgin from Nazareth. And when you speak to exorcists, as I have, I've had them on my show, and they'll say

the intercession of Mary is incredibly powerful in the driving out of demons. Well, the thing that is important there is Lucifer, Satan, was originally the highest and greatest and most beautiful creature that God ever made. He was the supreme creation, the pinnacle of creation, if you will. But it went to his head and he fell. As a result, he rebelled against God and wanted to be God and was cast down as a result. But what we see in the Magnificat is that Mary is the replacement for Lucifer. She is the new greatest creature that God has ever made. For every ounce of pride that the devil has, Mary has twice as much humility.

For all the blasphemies that Satan utters, Mary offers twice as much praise. What is it in the Magnificat specifically that shows this? He has put the mighty down from their seat and exalted the lowly. Wow. I had never made that connection before. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I did write a post on this,

why the devil hates the Virgin Mary so much and why you should love her. And I would encourage everyone to look it up because I think it's one of the deepest mysteries of Mary. But many prayers in Eastern Christianity and even in Western Christianity talk about how Mary is actually higher than all the hierarchies of the angels. There's nine hierarchies of angels, but Mary's higher than them all. She's like the furthest point between creation and God. She is the return, the first fruits of the return of all of creation to union with God.

So her role goes far beyond simply just being, you know, it's all founded on the motherhood of Christ. But it's so much more than just, it's the return of all creation to its origin, which is in God. And it's love that impels that. Her love, her sacrificial love for her son is what draws all of creation ultimately back to union with god um so she is she's a replacement for lucifer and she is the one who will crush his head because he hates women he hates the weaker vessel if you will he hates um that feminine reality if you will too yeah and and that makes his humiliation being crushed under her feet that much greater because

in some sense woman is a better icon for humanity than man is in relation to god right yeah since we are the ones who ought to be receptive to god yeah yeah and and and he deceived eve it was through eve's weakness that he was able to drag humanity down through the fall. Misery loves company. He wanted company in hell. But it's through Mary's strength that all of creation will be restored. Beautiful stuff, man. I love this line.

I think it's from Colby, but it might be from someone else, and he's quoting. I'll say the first half, you say the second half. Allow me to praise thee, O holy virgin. Yes. You know the second part? Give me strength against your enemies. Yeah, that's something I was giving some talks in Pittsburgh recently and that was sort of the thing I just kept

breathing in and out. I love the Jesus prayer. I love the East. But I was just consecrating that time to her because I had to go give a talk just kept breathing in and out i love the jesus prayer i love the east i love you know but i was just consecrating that time to her because i had to give a talk like three to five hundred students yeah on things like different things so give me yeah allow me to praise your holy virgin give me strength against their enemies yeah absolutely yeah well let's take some questions um if you are a patron feel free to go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd and throw your comments in there. Yeah.

And we'll also take super chats. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's begin with a patron, Becca Davis. She says, I'm a new convert right now, and I'm struggling with loneliness. I still have my Protestant friends, but there's a distance there that is new and strange. My parish, deep in the southern U.S., is small and not very well populated with young people. Where can I look for good Catholic friends my age?

She said she turns 23 soon. So did you experience that kind of loneliness? And what maybe advice might you have for Becca? Yeah, well, the first thing I would say, and I know this sounds difficult, but accept that cross for now. That doesn't mean that will be forever. But I will say definitely when I converted, there was a sense of alienation. My family didn't understand. You know, there were co-workers I was working at for a Protestant ministry at a time who didn't understand. There was just a lot of misunderstandings and a sense of alienation. Jesus does say, you know, that you does not hate his mother and father

to follow me, is not worthy of of me and i do think that there is sometimes sacrifices that are made what i will say though is that what at least in my experience anything that we sacrifice to follow christ is eventually uh given back pressed down you know running over much more than you could ask or think. There is a God meets those needs for community and for belonging eventually. But carry the cross for now, but God will provide in His time and in His way. Pray for that. Do your part to seek that out. That may mean, and I know this sounds radical, but it may mean eventually moving.

That's what I was about to tell her. Yeah. And I know this sounds radical, but it may mean eventually moving. That's what I was about to tell her. Yeah. That's only something that she can decide when that's right and when that's appropriate or if it's appropriate. But I think for now it's a cross. But trust.

Trust that God will meet the deepest desires for your heart, for belonging, and for community in his time and in his way. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's good. I do think, though, that people should seriously consider moving and in his way. Yeah, thank you. I think that's good. I do think, though, that people should seriously consider moving to a Catholic community, especially in such a godless pagan age in which we live. We've got to do it. We've got to.

Yeah, I don't care where you go, but I wish that when I got married, I had no hindsight 2020, and I should accept the providence of God as to what happened in our family in the last 15 years of our marriage. But if I had my way, I would have moved straight to Steubenville or some other Catholic community and just planted roots. There's something so powerful. It's just about having these good, faithful people who love Jesus Christ. And it's not this insular community. No, it's this, like you said, it's this fire that then goes out. Many people who live in Steubenville have different apostolates through which they're trying to reach souls for Christ.

So I would also recommend that this person, Becca, consider that. All right, we've got a question here. It's a super chat from Chris Wilkes. Thank you, Chris. He says, do you think we as Catholics can make certain devotions seem mandatory to be a good Catholic versus discipline they've embraced? And that's the point we made earlier. Yeah, exactly. No, it's not necessary. The one thing needful is Christ.

Christ present to us. Christ in the Eucharist. That's the center. Yeah, I asked my spiritual father, Father Boniface, what his favorite devotions were, and he said the Holy Mass and Liturgy of the Hours. Yeah. That'll do. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've said this way too many times,

but I do think we can get just excited about a devotion that we see bearing fruit in our lives, and it comes from a good place. We then want to share that with other people. But sometimes that language becomes, you know, it reaches this level of intensity where it now becomes a demand. You're essentially telling people that if you really wanted to be a good Catholic, you would pray three rosaries a day.

And the only reason you're not is because you're not a good Catholic. And it's difficult to criticize that because it then seems like you're being the impious one. But in fact, the person demanding that in order to be a faithful Catholic, you must pray three rosaries a day is demanding what the church doesn't. And we don't want to do that. It's one thing to strongly encourage something, but it's another to... Alright, let's see what else we got here. Anyone else in the chat?

Did I miss any superchats? Yeah, we had some earlier when we were talking about technology from Austin Decker. Austin Decker, okay. I can read them out or... Yeah, let me see. I'm trying to see them, but I can't actually see them.

So maybe you could just read it out to me and all. So the first one is, don't many people come to the church via YouTube from videos by you or Trent Horn, et cetera? The world is online more and more. Should Catholics not be trying to reach the web if it doesn't hurt?orn, et cetera. The world is online more and more. Should Catholics not be trying to reach the web if it doesn't hurt? Right, fair enough.

This is great. Thank you for the question. To the point, just to reiterate, is we've been kind of poo-pooing the internet a little bit. I tend to do that. But isn't this reaching souls for Christ? Shouldn't we be here? This is the new kind of market square

or the public square, as it were. So this is where we ought to be, right? And I'll answer then, feel free to share. I was chatting with Dave Rubin in an interview prior to me going offline and him going offline. And he said he knows he's doing a lot of good for people. And I don't doubt that. But I tend to have more of a pessimistic view of my own reach here. I do think that God will use bull crap as manure for the growth of other people, and that includes me and what I've got to say. But I actually think this is a necessary evil, maybe.

Like, I think your life would be better if you got off the internet entirely and read good books and had more meaningful conversations with other humans. But since you won't since you and i don't do that it's nice to provide this i'm i'm probably wrong even as i say that i i think that's not right because what am i going to do then just uh there are many secular people who are online who we would want to reach with the gospel yeah so anyway what's what's the what's the balance and what do you think yeah well well for me the mentality has always been you know anyone who follows the catholic gentleman has known that i've i put out a lot of these like black and white images with

saint quotes and things like that my mentality is if one person can be reached one soul can be helped the logic of god's economy is dramatically different than man's economy to me it's not about reach it's not about hundreds of thousands of subscribers it's not about one soul uh in god's economy is worth far more than all the stats in the world so my mission is yes to use technology to disseminate truth, goodness, and beauty. And to inject that into someone's day so that maybe they're on infinite scroll, and then they come across something beautiful, provocative, true, that stops them in their flow of endless content consumption.

And for even a brief moment, reminds them of an eternal or transcended truth if that happens to one person to me that is worth all the hours and years that i've put in the catholic gentleman um it's a it's in god's economy the littlest and the least, the smallest outweighs the greater, or at least equals it. And so technology is here. As far as we can tell, it's here to stay. Let's spiritualize it. Let's draw it up into the realm of the transcendent. Let's disseminate truth through it. And leave the results to God.

Just detach from the results just just kind of leave that in god's hands but if one person person is helped then it's all worth it to me did you run another one yeah uh right after he sent um and i think he'll agree with this matt maybe but uh would catholics help the world more if we all got offline and started inviting our neighbors friends family to coffee or over would so the question is would catholics help world more if we all just kind of got offline and were more interested in our neighbors yeah that reminds me of that line from the office where dwight says like you get something about the big paper companies are going to be screwed when this whole internet fad is over this is just funny because the idea that it's a fad yeah i don't know man i i i'm

probably wrong i i i you know people already know what i'm going to say so i'm not even going to say it but what are you going to say i don't know what chance it's just i don't know it's just i would say why not both yeah why not invite your neighbors over and use the internet for good yeah if we don't use it the devil's gonna use it he's gonna disseminate pornography he's gonna disseminate you know propaganda he's gonna disseminate uh mutual hatred of one another polarization and fragmentation of our culture but why not both why not invite your neighbors over um why not get to know them? Why not to get to know, you know, have in-person interactions? I think you're right.

I think you're spot on. I think, did I mess up the mic by moving that? Just so everybody knows who's watching right now, we're about to buy brand new mic stands and cords and stuff. So we've had a couple of issues with the... Excellent. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I just feel like the internet is a drug and I don't think the world is better off because of it, actually. Maybe I'm wrong in that, but that my immediate sense is, yeah, TV's made the world worse, cars made the world worse've pulled away from Internet community and have engaged in personal people in my neighborhood community, you know.

Yeah. That's what I'm seeing. And so that's what I'm saying. Yeah. And, you know, I might just be wrong and old and cynical. I think there's a spectrum of ideal good, like on the, on the,

on the road to the ideal good. In the sense that a internet community where people are talking about things that they might not otherwise talk about is better than no communication at all. However, it's not the greatest good. Keep moving, keep moving towards that ideal of in-person relationship and community and don't stop striving for that

even if you realize you're not quite there yet you know maybe an internet community can be a sort of stop gap but don't let it be the end of the road don't stop there keep striving for in-person relationships and interactions how weird that we're saying that like just that one line keep striving for personal relationships and personal interactions like imagine hearing that 100 years ago what do you mean but what's amazing is you read like some of these people who did live 100 years ago and they were complaining about the speed of communication and the distractions and things like that i think they were right yeah yeah i think they were right i think we'd be better off without television

without cars. Gosh, I should stop. Because I don't even know if I'm just full of it. I'm just, I don't know. It's probably an idealization of the past that I'm thinking of as well. But I do think cars are a community killer. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm going to just state that. And I think if I was cooler, I'd get rid of my car. And maybe I will one day. That might be the goal. After email. Wow. I admire your zeal, Mattal man yeah i got a lot of that perseverance we'll see ryan casey says just stopping by to say hello god bless you both also shameless plea for a prayer for my spouse and i as always uh expect our firstborn child in February. Wow, congratulations.

Thanks, Ryan. Chuck says, as fathers, it often feels like there is a tension between making time. By the way, Chuck is a patron and a beautiful, handsome human being. All my patrons retract me. I don't know if you know that. Speaking of money.

As fathers, it often feels like there is a tension between making time for our legitimate personal duties, mental prayer, spiritual direction, exercise, etc., and our familial duties to our wives and children. Making time for one often feels like it comes at the expense of the other. What are some thoughts about how to manage this balance? Great question. Yeah.

I heard a metaphor once that I think kind of addresses this i talk about taking like taking a jar filling it with sand yes i love this yes and then trying to put big rocks in it it's not going to work you can't put the big rocks in a jar that's filled with sand filled with many little tiny grains of sand but you'd reverse that process and you put the large things in first and then pour the sand in on top of those large rocks. They'll fit. And I think the important thing is, the lesson there is that the big rocks are prayer and personal devotion. Now, that doesn't have to mean you have to pray for an hour every morning.

That can be something as simple as a morning offering, five, ten minutes with scripture or some other devotional. It doesn't have to be lengthy. We're not going for quantity here. It's quality. So focus on developing quality in your interior life rather than quantity. But make that something that you do. If you have to get up a little few minutes earlier, wake before your family or something like that,

then do what you need to do. But get those big rocks of prayer and interior formation in place first. And then you'll find, miraculously, you'll have time for all the other demands in life. God kind of makes a way. But it doesn't have to be, again, like an hour. It doesn't have to be 45 minutes. It can be five minutes of your day.

Yeah. Oh, someone just pointed out, Father Calloway also wrote his consecration to St. Joseph way before there was even a possibility of a year of St. Joseph. So that's, yeah, that's awesome. Good for him. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, right, because there are so many things that are important. Eating healthy is important.

You need money to do that, it turns out. Exercise is important because most of us are sitting down all day, or some of us are sitting down all day. For me, I've been trying to find different ways to exercise, and I started doing jujitsu, but it's at like 5 and 6 p.m. I'm like, well, in order to make this work, I should go two or three times a week, but that's right when dinner is. I can't do that.

So it is hard. It is very hard, yeah. You've got to be creative. But I think it would be better if I just took a stroll every day and had to give up, you know, maybe say CrossFit or some sort of intense exercise and be with my family. Like sometimes you've just got to choose a lesser good in one area to choose a greater good in another area.

Better that my kids and my wife see me and that dinner time isn't stressful and I have a bit of a flabby gut than to be super intense about working out, which is also a good at the expense of a greater good. What is sacred to you? What's at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of needs? You know, there's this whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs of, you know, food and shelter and then, you know, like emotional and all the way up to like kind of the spiritual dimension. But what's your hierarchy?

You don't have to go with Maslow's. Like what's most important to you? And if it is that family time, then don't let anything come in the way of that. Yeah. So just, I mean, if you have to just sit down with a piece of paper and say, what is most important to me?

What do I value most? And then work your way down from there to those other things. A few Catholic men on YouTube. That's their name. That's the name their mother gave them. Matt and Sam, what is the best way to tolerate immature behavior? on YouTube. That's their name. That's the name their mother gave them. Matt and Sam, what is the best way to tolerate immature behavior? I've been having a hard time with my friend who plays video games all day.

His fiance left him because he doesn't want to get a job. What say you? Well, I mean, I would have that conversation with him like i mean maybe he has if he's not receptive to it that's kind of a bigger problem but as a loving friend it doesn't have to be harsh or uh angry or mean but just kind of question like why is why is this so important in your life to the extent that you're willing to lose goods like a fiancé to do this? What is so compelling about this? And then have that kind of that open conversation about what's going on there. If he's not receptive to that, though, you have to, like, the people we surround ourselves with can have an influence on us. We can have an influence on them, but they can also have an influence on us we can have an influence on them but they can also have an influence on us it may just you may just need to assess like how much time do i need to spend

with this person like you don't need to cut people off per se but you may just want to assess like is this someone i need to be spending a great deal of my time with um and i know it sounds harsh but but also realize that friendships matter. And if someone's not building you up, they're probably tearing you down at some level. But I would just have that loving conversation. I think it's an act of charity to kind of lovingly confront someone about harmful or destructive behaviors. About harmful or destructive behaviors. Trevor Sanders says, practical question.

How does a broke 21-year-old with a high school diploma move to Steubenville? LOL. In all seriousness, I'm terrified of not being able to repay debt. Well, first of all, like, not everyone's cool to move to Steubenville, obviously. Secondly, Steubenville's really cheap. We had a five-bedroom house that was in good condition that I almost considered buying because it was a five-bedroom house for $85,000. And I was thinking about buying it to rent it out or to have somebody else buy it from me so we could have another good Catholic family.

Like, it's a cheap place to live. Neil, what have you found? Like, when you were renting, what's like a decent place that you, because you just moved here, what's a decent place and what's the kind of price that you were seeing? I mean, it's really surprising how cheap monthly rent can be versus in other states and other things. Yeah, monthly rent can be versus in other states yeah what's it like yeah monthly rent one guy i'm not asking for your rent specifically but what did you see i mean it's

around the the cheaper ones are around like 500 a month yeah five 500 bucks a month to to rent you know so if you're a single dude it could be that that cheap and then of course you want to get a job and so you want to maybe come here and visit and yeah i don't know it's yeah well i mean i'm not sure about this bloke specifically because i don't know his details but the other option is to just make it a goal and work towards it i mean get a job in the where you live now say i do want to live eventually in a place where i have a catholic community uh wherever that happens to be but i'm just going to work towards that i'm going to get a job i'm going to save i'm going to do the hard work of laying the groundwork for that and then i'm going to move but

it doesn't have to happen tomorrow you don't have to go get a personal loan or get a credit card to make that move yeah you can work towards it and debt is such a awful awful thing yeah um so i'm sorry to hear that this this fellow's got a bunch of debt. Yeah, that is terrible. Oh, hallelujah, wants me to remind people that we started a little apostolate, and it's called crossthetaiba.org. And I started it with Noah and a mate called Benjamin and Noah and Benjamin are converts and they wanted to create a space where Protestants could ask questions

and Orthodox or atheists could ask questions or Jews or Muslim, whoever, could ask questions as they discern the Catholic church. So crossthetiber.org is a place that you can go and join a small video chat community. Like you can actually join a small group and chat with other people who are considering converting so if you're watching today and you're a jew and you want to come in to become a catholic then you would join a little jewish small group of others

or if you're a mormon there's like a little mormon group and the goal that we're trying to reach is that if you're a mormon convert you would head up this small group sure so i just want to throw it's free too i just want to let people know that 100% free so cross the tiber.org cross the tiber the tiber of course being the river between rome and the vatican.org so go go check that out yeah oh thanks neil for putting it in the live chat sweet sweet sweet sweet oh my goodness someone said this 2,600 a month for a four-bedroom townhouse in canada where i live five beds yeah but that's canadian so that's about 15 dollars american i think yeah yeah and the people's republic of california i've heard one-bedroom apartments going for 5,000 a month uh yeah why would you want to live there why do

you want to live there when you could live in a town with potholes, meth busts, the occasional prostitute, and Scott Hahn? And we have four masses. I said that to you. We went to mass last night. Four. There's four daily masses just at Franciscan. Yeah.

And the students fill it up. That's incredible. It's beautiful. There's confession all the time let me let me put a plug for tulsa to amazing diocese we have clear creek abbey so close uh tulsa is a fantastic city and very affordable too uh and not quite as many meth busts um okay although that i know that is a desirable aspect in a city so yeah i think that's the ticket is, I mean, especially now that many of us can work remotely, not many, I understand there's a lot of people that still

can't, but given, if you can work remotely, I think you should consider moving to a Catholic community. One of the best things about it, and you'll, you'd agree, I'm sure is your kids have good peer pressure. Yeah. You know, like the kids across the road, they go to daily mass at noon and my kids want to hang out with them. They don't want to go to daily mass at noon, but they want to hang out with them, which means they go to daily mass at noon. That's cool.

Yeah. It's so life giving to have a community. I think of, of the things that nurture your faith community can be one of the most powerful. And I know for me, it has just been tremendously incredible to have, you know, a weekly men's breakfast meeting that I go to and to have a circle of friends that you can rely on and need and who care about you and you care about them and you're there for them when they need things. And so I would encourage everyone to at least think about the possibility of moving towards kind of an intentional community.

That doesn't have to be out in the country. It doesn't mean you have to be on a commune or anything, but just an area where there are devout Catholics who care about their faith and who are living their life together in shared relationship with each other. It's tremendously enriching your spiritual life. Now, for those who aren't aware, you started catholicgentleman.com. You can get there through.net or whatever. Yeah, sometimes.

So first of all, it's a wonderful website. It really is good. You have a very good gift at writing. Like, I know I keep affirming you in that area, but you honestly, when I read you, I'm like legitimately impressed. i keep affirming you in that area but you honestly when i read you i'm like legitimately impressed uh so keep doing what you're doing neil just put catholic gentleman in the live stream so click it also neil we should put that in the in the descriptions oh good man it's in the description already thank you um how's that going what's what's going on

what are you pumping out that people could get access to? Because, you know, we need to be consuming continuously. Yeah. If you're sleeping and not listening to a podcast, you're doing it wrong. Yes. How would you do the dishes with that? You need to listen to more podcasts. Especially the Catholic Gentleman Podcast. Yes, especially.

There is a Catholic Gentleman Podcast. Yeah. It's on YouTube. It's on all the major podcast platforms. Pretty much any podcast platform you want to listen to it on youtube it's on all the major podcast platforms pretty much any podcast platform you want to listen to it on it's there um me and my co-host john kind of talk about a lot of things but i would say the most important thing is we want to start interviewing more ordinary catholics who are doing interesting things like for example we have an interview coming up with uh someone who makes guitars that's just kind of their craft their trade

and we're going to interview them. And so it's a lot of people who have interesting careers and things like that that we're trying to interview more frequently. So there's the Catholic Gentleman podcast, of course, around most of the major social media platforms except for TikTok. I haven't taken that plunge yet. I don't think I'm going to. But, you know, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

But also then there's the blog, CatholicGentleman.com, where kind of there's years worth of writing on all different topics. It's not just about men specifically. It's about just the spiritual life or just reflections that have come to mind, things I've meditated on just in relation to the Catholic faith. Yeah. Yeah, if you're watching right now and you're on TikTok, I have no respect for you.

I don't think you should be able to vote. Also, we have a new TikTok page, Pines with Aquinas, so you should totally subscribe to that. You know, your life's already hopeless. Why not subscribe to our TikTok channel? It can't make it any worse. You already suck. That was really awkward. But anyway anyway i want to thank catholic jamie also known as neil

for starting our catholic i'm just i'm only partly joking what i mean is it just sucks your soul out of your face yeah and then crushes it poops on it that's all i meant jeez yeah all right um okay here's a brandon says matt how do you discern between leaving your city for a great Catholic community or helping to be the change in your current city? Your city's probably on fire, so just leave. There's no hope of saving it. That is too big of a project right there.

It's kind of like Catholic schools. Like, I think 98% just need to close. Yeah. Maybe less, but it can't be less than 90. I just think they're God awful institutions with a religion class. And even that's pumping error into the minds of people. Wow. With an atheistic narrative and a few photos of a priest and kids at chapel to keep their Catholic donors happy.

Yeah. So it's like, should I keep my kids in there? Like probably not. Just take them out and homeschool them or find a good Catholic school. So I just think at some point you've got to. I do think all the people who say, like, I want to reform my parish or I want to do this or that, that's a huge project. It's a huge project.

And if you've got kids, it might not be worth your time doing that. It might be. Maybe the Lord's calling you to that. But maybe not. And I think the most important thing to do in a day and age where we're being bombarded by such poisonous false ideology is to find a place where children can be children and your family can flourish. If you can't flourish, then you're not going to save your city either. No. That's what I reckon.

Was that too intense? it felt too intense well no i i think we kind of need to just say these things well here's what we do we say these things and then people can find the truth i mean maybe i maybe i overstated it but it is different for everyone but i do think there's general principles that that apply and i think trying to reform your city is probably a little bit too big of a task everybody is really interested in whether i will grow my beard back it did grieve my heart when i when i showed up here and you didn't have it man have you not seen my face since then don't you watch points of the quietness every week no cool yeah i'm just gonna i'm gonna shave for a while when i get old Don't you watch Pints with Aquinas every week? No. Cool. Yeah, I'm just going to shave for a while.

When I get old, or if my wife dies one day, then I'll just become like a hermit with a giant beard. That would be pretty great. Have you seen the pictures of Blair Malick in his final years? No. It's so great. But I would like to. He looks like a weathered fisherman or something like that

uh beautiful final question what are you reading right now um wow that's that's an interesting question yeah so one of the books i'm tackling right now it's it's actually a eastern orthodox book but it's fascinating it's called the ethics of beauty it's like 800 pages of just brilliance on the role of beauty uh in the life of the soul um and how we can make ethical decisions kind of informed by a beauty first narrative um it's a ton to it but but it's a book that's really kind of uh provoking me um the other one too uh is i'd like to have books in different categories so i am reading uh crime and punishment right now it's kind of my my fiction uh consumption um and it's a it's a difficult book it's not like a page turner like some of the more contemporary

novels are um but it is something you disagree and don't care if that sounds pretentious yeah didn't find it difficult at all found an absolute page turner rips and order loved it but yeah i mean some of these russian novels are just i also think you're going to get to get into it it's like a different culture and once you get kind of acclimated then it becomes easy absolutely but if you're kind of reading some maybe dense philosophical theological work or some something else maybe it's a hard transition. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, now that I've crapped on your intelligence, what else? Yeah. I'm rereading Lord of the Rings.

I just read it in June, July, and August. I read it very recently too, yeah. But I'm rereading it just for pleasure, not in the sense of I need to finish this. No, no, no. I just have it by my bed expecting I won't finish it, but if I wake up in the middle of the night and i can't sleep i'll open it up and i'll read several pages and just it's incredible gently

and slowly read it it just really gives you a different perspective on the trials the world is going through right now and yeah help sustain you so yeah um do you find that you start a lot of books only not to complete them i'm sorry do you find that you start a lot of books only to not finish them very rarely i really try to even if it takes me months to get through a book i i don't give up very easily i think it's just good to plod along and make a little bit of progress every day i give up very easily it depends i mean if i really feel like there's no benefit to it to finishing it i won't't do it. I agree. Yeah.

I've read some modern books that were good, but I'm like, I'm just going to go read Crime and Punishment again. Yeah. This is fine, but yeah. You know what I was just thinking, you know, because you mentioned the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo, and then you made that distinction between going to a courthouse to be married is just as valid a marriage perhaps i mean obviously if you're catholic you know what i'm saying but if it is valid it's just as valid

there as it is at a beautiful wedding ceremony but that reminds me of like um there's these websites now that basically dumb down books for you they do those for kids too they adapt a book i saw this the other day hg wells the time traveler was adapted for children and it's just kind of well it's just it's the main point. I mean, here's the main, you don't need all that fancy, beautiful language. Right. So here's the point. Better yet, why don't we just break this down into bullet points?

Here's the eight things you need to know. And now you don't need to read the book. And they have those, those summary books on Amazon. Like here's a summary of 12 rules for life or whatever. And it's like 10 pages, like condensed. Forget the beauty. Forget the rhetoric. Forget the arguments. Right. Who needs that yeah right right a utilitarian minimalism is can be a dangerous harmful thing i think so all right yeah god bless you brother thank you for coming

thank you for flying from oklahoma being on the show it's been a pleasure all right god bless god bless you thanks