Pints With Aquinas - Love, Loss and the Meaning of Suffering (Dr. Peter Kreeft) | Ep. 587

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

On May 31, 2026, Dr. Peter Kreeft’s beautiful wife of 63 years, Maria Antoinette Kreeft, went home to her Heavenly reward. In his own words, Dr. Kreeft told us before coming, “There is much to say about that: a story of struggle and grace.” The following conversation is just that. Ep. 587 Theotokos Rosaries: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife: https://fs.blog/richard-feynman-love-letter/ The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov https://a.co/d/0cAPqCFS More Books by Dr. Peter Kreeft: https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/pages/peter-kreeft?srsltid=AfmBOoomodTC18sZYXcr3d3oZ9WhWJoIJLYCRSjWevYgh0Nwwfovr9VL  I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine’s Confessions Unpacked: https://a.co/d/07VrV7Id Ha!: A Christian Philosophy of Humor: https://a.co/d/0fWBJM2T Truthy 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Today’s Sponsors:  Hallow: If you’d like to grow deeper in your relationship with God, visit https://hallow.com/mattfradd and get 3 months free. Charity Mobile: Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD and use code MATTFRADD to get a free phone with every new line, plus free activation and free shipping. Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at https://shopify.com/pints .  Seven Weeks Coffee: Go to https://sevenweekscoffee.com/PINTS and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Use code PINTS for an additional 10% off your first order and a free gift. PreBorn: Families are where we first learn how to love and be loved. When we invest in families, we’re not just helping people today, we’re shaping future generations. Dial # 250 and say “BABY” or visit https://preborn.com/PINTS .  Catholic Peoples Foundation: Don't let this once-in-a-century Route 66 celebration pass you by. Visit https://V8sForVocations.org and get your tickets today. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How long were you married? 63 years, I think. In fact, all my children and all their descendants and all that they do for the world would not have existed except for a crick in the neck of my friend Sam. Usually she was right and I was wrong. That tendency to say in marriage,

I'm right and you're wrong. That's terrifying because if I'm right, you're wrong is your fallback position and you say that to God. Are there things in your marriage and in your fatherhood? that you regret having done poorly. Oh, of course.

Nothing to be more tragic than the death of your spouse. That's the other half. We feel like we're becoming the same person. Oh, yes. And I've often thought that if she would die, a big chunk of me wouldn't exist anymore. Of course. You are what you love.

All things work together for good to those who love God. What I felt and what I believe were two different worlds and I had to choose between them. What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be? The last view I had of my wife, about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled suffering body.

It's as beautiful as a crucifix. Do you remember when you were in my studio in Steubenville? I think I said, I think you said, Pints with Aquinas, where's the Pints? and I brought out a beer that according to you was an abomination. It was a peanut butter beer. Do you remember that? I do.

I do. You made that same face. I thought it was a chocolate beer. Yeah, no, peanut butter. Oh. Yeah. So anyway, I have a yingling in there for you. Is that manly enough?

Yingling is fine. Yeah. But we can also do scotch. Or we could mix them. No, I don't think that'll work. Do you like Lagovulin? I never tried it. Oh, come on.

You're a hundred. How have you never tried this? Let me try a little bit. How old, how old are you? Eighty-nine. God bless you. He has. Hey, wait, I've got to cheers you first.

This is an honor to be able to have a drink with you. Slancher. This is why Scotland exists. To produce scotch. Of course. That'll do. Hmm. Now, some people like the peat.

Some people don't, so. I do. I like, I love it. I like the peat. I love single malt with a lot of beet. I heard from a fella in Nova Scotia that they would say they'd be sitting around a fire and they'd bust open a bottle of scotch. They'd take the cork and they'd throw it into the fire as a sort of challenge, you know, like we're going to finish this tonight. Yes.

I like that. Like Cortez burning his ship. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you for making the trip down. Well, I don't want to start on a Debbie Downer note, but I do want to acknowledge the fact that your good wife recently went on to her reward. Yes. I remember asking you, I said, what's the difference between you and your wife?

And you said, well, I'm Dutch and patient and she's Italian and impatient. That was the first thing you said. How long were you married? 63 years, I think. it was a remarkable marriage in its beginning, in its continuation, and in its end. It started with a crick in a neck. In fact, all my children and all their descendants and all that they do for the world would not have existed except for a crick in the neck of my friend Sam, who I went to Calvin College with. He was one year behind me.

I had graduated in 1959 and was in New Jersey. And he phoned me from New York City. He said, Pete, I got a job in New York for the summer. And I met this girl. She has a nice friend. Let's go on a double date. So we did. And Sam's date was Maria, whom I eventually married.

And my date was very nice, but no sparks. but Maria was beautiful and intelligent and very funny. And he went back to Calvin, and I went to Yale. And he wrote me a letter saying, remember that girl, Maria? I'm trying to keep the romance going. But you're a better writer than I am. Why don't you write a note about me?

At that time, I was discerning a vocation. I thought I wanted to become a Dominican. Hang on, hang on. Write a note about me. What does that mean? Well, tell Maria how good a guy Sam is. Oh, from you, though, on your behalf. Okay, I see.

This sounds like Cyrano de Bergerac, but I had no intention of romance at the time. So I wrote a note to Maria. I said, Sam is a smart and sort of weird guy. What do you see in him that you don't see in the other guys in your college? and she wrote back saying, since I go to an Royal Royal Royal College, I think you can answer that question yourself. So she invited me to come down and meet her mother.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would she invite you to come down and meet her mother? Because Sam was still involved in that. And her mother was the one that got Sam a job in a restaurant. When he was waiting for a bus to go back to Calvin College, because he couldn't find a job and the bus was late so he turned his neck to look

in one direction at the employment agency which he had tried for five days in a row without any success and it hurt so he got a crick at his neck and he turned in the other direction he saw a restaurant and said I've got an hour to waste

he goes into the restaurant as he enters the door the bus boy is being kicked out because his hand was in the till so Sam was enterprising and he got the job as a waiter in the restaurant. And he met the, what's it called,

the head waitress there, who was Maria's mother, and made friends with her, and she invited him home, and that's how he met Maria. Okay. And I... But why did she invite you to come meet her mother?

I had other things to do in New York, and it was just a spur of the moment thing. And I think she remembered me, and she said, this is an interesting guy, why not invite him home? Fair enough. Now, I'm absent-minded professor. I'm not good at anything except writing.

I'm the only child. I come from a very quiet Dutch family, sort of like American Gothic. And Maria is a New Yorker, typical New Yorker, happy, loud-mouthed, big family, wild family, crazy family, very good food. We're a square peg in a round hole. So there was no thought of romance at the first.

It was just friendship. But friendship blossomed, and Sam's romance with my ex-girlfriend at Calvin College declined. And eventually I was faced with the question, well, this girl, Maria, whom I was falling in love with, could be a vocation. And to be a Dominican is also a vocation, which vocation do I want? and Maria had already dated two boys in her neighborhood,

both of whom became priests, and she thought I was going to become one too. And then I sent to myself, all right, but God, where do you want me to be? And he said, well, there's two kinds of father, and I want you to be the other kind. Follow your heart. And I did. So I married her.

At that time, she was my godmother, because she was the only Catholic girl I knew. when I got baptized into the Catholic Church. At what age? At age 21, at Yale. So I asked her to be my godmother, and she joked with the priest, what if I fall in love with this guy?

Can you marry your godmother? He said, no, that's spiritual incest. You have to have a special dispensation for the Pope, and it's still on the books, but it's automatic. So a year later, we go to the same priest and say, can you get that dispensation for us? So I married my godmother. That's a riot.

So years ago, a husband and a wife in Lithuania sent me one of their handmade rosaries, and I was so struck by it, the weight, the quality, the care in every detail. It was seriously the most beautiful rosary I'd ever seen. Now, in collaboration with Theotokos Rosaries, I'm making two of their hand-crafted rosaries available to you over at Dailywire.com slash shop, Italian olivewood, gold, plated brass, microbreed cord built for a like lifetime of prayer, each one made by hand in Lithuania. These are not just beautiful rosaries. They can be family heirlooms that you would pass down. Use for personal devotion. You could also give them as a wedding gift, ordination gift, confirmation gift, or for graduation. Now, the first batch

sold out right away. So, pre-order yours now at dailywire.com slash shop before the next batch is gone. That's dailywire.com slash shop. It was, like every marriage, a blend of joys and sorrows. But when she died, I felt that I've written over 100 books. The most important book I ever wrote was my marriage. That was my primary vocation. She has been the best thing in my life, the most important thing in my life. And we finished the book.

And it has been a success. The round peg and the square hole met and they married. and although we had a lot of ups and downs, we ended on a high note. And the book went home to the printer. So I remember writing home in the car from the nursing home where she died, and of course I was weeping.

And suddenly God reminded me that this was a triumph. This was not a defeat. And I said, hey, kiddo, we made it. And the tears turned into wild laughter. And if anybody had heard me in the car, they would have thought I was being either tortured

or having sex. But it's a triumph. Of course, death is a tragedy. And nothing to be more tragic than the death of your spouse. It got three other half. And yet it was a tremendous success, a wonderful success.

Well, I've only been married 20 years, but I would say I'm getting to the point where we feel like we're becoming the same person. Oh, yes, yes. And I've often thought that if she would die, I know that sounds so cliche, but I think we clearly know what I mean.

I feel like a big chunk of me wouldn't exist anymore. Of course, that's you. So I almost like I need her in a selfish way. Like I need her the way I need me because she's becoming me. You know, there's two concepts of the self. There's the common sense one,

which in this case is wrong. And then there's the more sophisticated psychological one. You are what you love. You're not just what's inside your epidermis. You're not just a sum total of attributes. You are what you love. And if the one that you love more than you love yourself dies, then the biggest part of you is dead.

It's like losing a limb, more than losing a limb. So it's the worst thing, but it's also the best thing. It's the best thing you could possibly do. I deeply love and respect priests, but I think they have it easy. Their life is simple. You'll find this funny. Everyone else will be offended by it. I'll tell you this.

My wife and I were going through a difficult time. She was very sick for a long time. And it was just a real strain on our marriage. And I bumped into this Franciscan and I shared something with him. You know, sometimes you say something very honest and the other person doesn't receive it and then you feel alone. Yeah. Yeah. I said to him, I want to go out to the front of every seminary and every monastery and say,

the sex isn't worth it. Yeah. And he didn't laugh. And I just thought, I've shared too much, I'm going to leave. But if you mean by sex, something more than just the physical biological act, it is worth it. That a man and a woman can marry is a bit like a bird and a fish marrying to different species. It's a triumph. Hmm.

Chesterton has an essay about that. He says, it's ridiculous that people get divorced for incompatibility. These two species are incompatible by nature, and God has put them together, and it's a miracle. Every marriage is a miracle. And that is...

That is something I have to talk to you about. Okay. Because that's very significant. This is a phone for those at home. We are 100% keeping this in, and unless Dr. Crave tells me to take it out. That sound of my cell phone. reminds me of a minor miracle that I received a week or two ago during the wake.

The priest was praying over Maria's coffin for a few moments, and my cell phone went off. I was sitting in the front row at the wake, and I was very embarrassed because I'm absent-minded and forget such things as cell phones. So I pulled it out of my pocket, and it's a flip phone, and you can't push any buttons on it until you open it and you see the screen. and I opened it and the screen said, Mom.

Now, we have speed dial on my cell phone, which means that once I press a number and hold it for a second, I get that number, and it's labeled on the screen, who it is. It's Mom or John or Jenny or somebody else in the family, and the number that had called me.

And this was a number that Maria had had on her cell phone 10 years ago and she couldn't master the cell phone so we sent it back, I can't master her cell phone either, and retired the number. This was over 10 years ago. So that number didn't exist for 10 years. That number called me at the wake. How was that? Was from heaven?

Okay. It couldn't possibly be anything else. I called the number and the upper, the, voice said, this number has been retired for like 12 years. Wow. So that's a nice gift. Well, Maria was always a mover and shaker. She did things.

She accomplished things. She helped. There's going to be a long, long line in heaven of people who were helped by her. She got her mother a Section 8 when she was mugged in New York and she couldn't afford it to get a house. And we got a house that day for her across the street. and we let her live there for free until she died. And then we made some money on selling the house, even though we didn't charge my mother-in-law rent.

So that's the kind of person Maria was. She got things done. So even from heaven, she's pushing people around and getting things done. New Yorkers are like that. They're wonderful. I remember reading A Grief Observed, and after the first page, I haven't lost my wife, of course, but after the first page,

just having to excuse myself. That is the best book on grief that I've ever read. I walked out the back and I wept. So have you read that? Oh, I've read it many times. Since Maria has died? Many times.

Well, I haven't read it since Maria has died because the tears would come again. Yeah. There's a line in there, though, where he says, I'm afraid, how does he put this, that his memories of her will somehow alter who she actually was.

Like Snowflay. on a bell. You can't hear the bell. The snow flakes come from you and the bell is her. I mean, I do that with my wife even when I'm away from her for a while. Of course. Of course. I've done that with you. Yeah. Is that Matt? Do I remember him that badly? Yeah. But the point was he was afraid of romanticizing her. Yeah. Canonizing her, as it were. That was hard to do because Joy Davidman was a lot like Maria Craft. a New Yorker who told it like it is and who couldn't stand baloney and Lewis loved it. And I loved it. Yeah.

One of the great things about Marina was that she would always detect baloney in me. That made me a much better writer. Can I ask you, okay, you were married over 60 years, you said. Yeah. What was the most difficult part of your marriage? And I don't mean towards the end. We can speak about that more. But I mean, you know, just through raising children, was there a, was there a point? your marriage where you thought, I regret this or this might end? No, no, I never regretted it. There was a lot of suffering. We had four kids in six years with no help, and there was a lot of exhaustion,

and there was a lot of purely physical, oh, I give up, I can't take it anymore. Yeah. Even though we had good kids and basically healthy kids. Probably the biggest trauma was the other miracle, the bigger miracle that we got. our youngest daughter at the age of five was diagnosed as having a fatal brain tumor. And at the operation, after we had many people praying over her, a miracle happened. And the, well, there it is again. At five years old, she started slipping and stumbling.

And the pediatrician examined her in the eyes, saw the pressure, and said, instantly go to Boston General. Mass General Hospital. And she was operated on, and the CAT scan showed a medulla blastoma, which is a malignant tumor. It's so far into the brain that it's probably impossible to get all of it out, but you can get some of it out,

and you can extend the life from like six months to 12 months. But the prognosis was no more than 12 months of life for her. So after a lot of people praying, and one of them, a priest with the ministry of faith healing in Boston, at the operation, the surgeon who was an atheist, but a darn good surgeon, said, I don't understand this. There must be some mistake. This is a totally different tumor. It's a juvenile astrocytoma. It's quite operable.

We can get it all out, and it's not malignant. and they got it all out and she's fine now. She's in her 50s. We were not allowed to see the medical report so we stole it briefly and then put it back and the surgeon said, have no explanation for this.

We ran three or four tests. This is the right CAT scan. This is the right person. This is what happened. I have no idea. Question our, question mark, question mark. So we got a miracle. All right.

But no major difficulties within your marriage. Well, when we thought that she was going to die within 12 months, that was an enormous difficulty. I mean, it's an enormous difficulty, but did it put strain on your marriage and how? Apart from the old. The strain on our marriage, I think, was a kind of ongoing physical and psychological differences. I mean, I described the two of us, the round hole and the square peg. And we always loved and respected each other, but we argued a lot. I've written over 100 books.

Only one of them, she helped me write, the one on angels, because she deeply devoted to the angels. And she didn't so much write it as unwrite it. You don't have to say this. You're repeating yourself. This is too preachy, et cetera. When I said it to the publisher, Ignatius Press, they said, Father Fesio is the head of it then.

This is your fifth book. How come your style improved so much? It was because I really helped me write it. I never told her that. Or did you? No, I've told her that, of course. So I've got a non-blonie style because my wife had a non-maloney style. It helped my writing.

I find that arguing within marriage can be good so long as we respect the other person, hey? And we argue with love. There's been times in my marriage where I haven't done that. I think the most difficult time in my marriage who were driving to a wedding, and we got into this, that was seemed insurmountable and and ugly actually bitter we weren't shouting you understand but just like I remember this was like 10 years into marriage I remember being in the car and realizing oh shit this marriage is not unbreakable

now thank God that that was that was a real low point and it's not ongoing but was there a time like that for you I mean as Catholics we understand that divorce is impossible and we want And when we were dating one of our favorite movies was divorce Italian style, it was a comedy. Okay. About a man who wanted to divorce his wife, but divorce was not allowed for any reason in Italy at the time. So he had to hire a mafia hitman to murder her. Did you?

So murder, murder equals divorce Italian style. Right. I get it. Well, the movie was funny because... Your wife's Italian. Well, yeah. And the mafia hitman continually found other women that he thought, was the victim and executed almost everybody else in the apartment building, but the one

that he was supposed to execute, survived. But what was so funny about it was that we both agreed, Maria and I, that murder is much more reasonable than divorce. So if we don't have any lethal weapons in the house, we're going to survive. And we've never had lethal weapons. So we have survived. But you, okay, so you never got to a point, though, where you thought this could break. Oh, we had shouting arguments, of course. That's good. That's what I want to get to. I want to get to that real stuff. The family that fights together stays together. One of the reasons I love it's a wonderful life so much is that it really does depict the rawness of what sometimes happens behind closed doors within the family.

Oh, yes. That's why the doors are closed. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, of course. You expect that. That's part of the deal. Yeah. To my point earlier, I feel like it's, I couldn't, I couldn't, there's a comedian who says, if my wife ever leaves me, I'm going with her. Great line. Great line.

Yeah. I feel like that about she wouldn't. But I just love her so much. The last thing Maria said that was totally rational and clear and free before she moved into the hospice nursing home with dementia that was visible to the nurse. I promised her I would never put her in the hospital. nursing home because most nursing homes are terrible places. And she said to her nurse, I think I have to go to a nursing home because Peter is so stressed out that he can't take it anymore. For a year, for over a year, I was her only caregiver and she was incontinent and partly

paralyzed and bedridden. and she was tough and she'd never, well, I won't say she never complained, but she said, this is my fate, I'll do it. That act of charity, in the mouth of a New Yorker who wasn't terribly subtle or sweet or compassionate, that was special to serve this.

For her to say that to the nurse you? Yes, yes. And so we called hospice in, and the last couple of weeks of her life were quite peaceful and quite blessed. Hospice is wonderful. Did she process with you what it was like knowing that she was going to die? Oh, yes, oh yes. She said, I want to die. I'm ready to die.

She was an activist, and to be bedridden as an activist, is a, it's a, it's a. awful. I mean, I was exhausted. I was suffering, but not nearly as much as she would. I'd exchange places for her? No way. Would I like to be in her situation? I'm not even an activist. Would I like to be paralyzed and bedridden and not even able to formulate thought sometimes? Horrible. Parkinson's is a very bad disease. There's no hope. There's no turning it back, no cure. Did you despair at all during that time? Of course. Of course. I complained to God. I screamed into my pillow and I went around the house kicking things. Yes. That's what cats are for. No, you don't get cats. You get dogs.

Cats will get you back while you sleep. Yeah. And then what do the platitudes do at that point, huh? When everything's just a big gaping black hole? Everything's going to be all right. bullshit. Everything's not all right. But God makes wrong things right. The verse in scripture that I find

the hardest to believe, but also the most blessed in believing, is Romans 828. All things work together for good to those who love God. All things, bad things, horrible things. Last year of my life was the most difficult and horrible of my life,

but it's also the most blessed, the most grace-filled. Now, halfway through that year, if you knew that you would one day say this was the best year of my life, would you have slapped you? Like, would you have believed that it would have been at the time? I have a disconnect between my mind and my emotions, and I experienced that disconnect when my daughter was diagnosed as having the fatal brain tumor. I was surprised at the fact that I couldn't disbelieve. I couldn't entertain the notion that maybe God didn't love me. Maybe he didn't even exist.

Yeah. That's so irrational that I couldn't entertain it. But my emotions weren't following me at all. My emotions were a large iron ball in the pit of my stomach dragging me down into nothingness. So it was the same thing here. You know, what I felt and what I believed were two different worlds. And I had to choose between them.

So I chose to believe what I believed. But I certainly didn't feel as if this was a blessing. Yeah. But it was. What's that story of the, the dying man to whom Mother Teresa may have said, these are the kisses of Jesus. Yes.

And he said, could you please ask him to stop kissing me? That's like my favorite Jewish joke. Pious rabbi dies goes to heaven, and God says, I'll answer any one question that you have. And the rabbi says, is it true that we, the Jews, are your chosen people? And God says, yes. May I ask one more question, please?

No. Well, then I would have a re-examination. request. Would you please choose somebody else from now on? All the saints say that suffering is a blessing. St. Faustina says if the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us two things. Holy Communion and suffering. God turns evil into good. Look what he did 2,000 years ago. The worst evil that ever happened, the crucifixion. The worst pain and the worst sin that ever happened. And that's our salvation.

That's our identity. That's written in our lives, too. That's the plot of every human life. Can you understand it without going through it? No, no, no. You might get an A on a theology test, but you don't really understand it. You don't stand under it.

When you stand under a tree, the stuff in the tree falls on you and you become part of the tree. When you just hover over it in a helicopter and make a philosophical or scientific picture of it, that's not understanding it. That's overstanding it. I think a lot of us overcomplicate prayer. We imagine that every prayer time should feel profound,

that we should emerge from it with some deep spiritual insight or mystical experience. Maybe we should levitate. But honestly, most prayer isn't dramatic. It's faithfulness. It's showing up. It's sitting quietly before God, whether you feel anything or not. And that's one reason I really appreciate hello. The app makes prayer simple. If you've never prayed the rosary before, it'll walk you through it. If you've always wanted to try Lexio divina but didn't know where to begin, it'll guide you. If you have five minutes before work, there's a prayer for that. If you're lying awake at night, there are sleep prayers and meditations. It removes the friction that often keeps us from praying in the first place. And sometimes that's exactly what we need. Not a better excuse, but an easier

beginning. I have been using hallow for years now, as has my wife. It's something we keep coming back to because it's so beautiful and so excellently produced and put together. If you'd like to grow deeper in your relationship with God, visit hallow.com slash Matt Frad to get three months free. I can't stress that enough people. That means you could try it for two and a half months, decide to quit and not get charged. That's incredible.

Hello.com slash Matt Frad. Check it out. So here's a challenge. I want you to think about all the things you pay for automatically every month. Streaming services, music apps, cloud storage, phone service. Now ask yourself this question. If I look closely at where all that money was going, would I be happy with the answer? Most of us never stopped to think about it, and that's one reason Charity Mobile caught my attention, because instead of simply paying another phone company, Charity Mobile lets you support organizations that are helping build a culture of life.

You get the same nationwide coverage as the major carriers, no contracts and plans starting under $50 before taxes and fees. and every month a percentage of your bill goes directly to a pro-life or pro-family charity that you choose. It's one of those rare situations where switching providers actually allows you to make a difference. Visit charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad and use code Matt Frad to get a free phone with every new line, plus free activation and free shipping. That's charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad. Can you tell me about one of your favorite dates that you ever went on with your wife? Yeah, we discovered Peter Paul and Mary before the world did.

We spent a summer in Martha's Vineyard, first year of our marriage. And there's this little cafe called The Bitter End. And we saw a tiny little advertisement in the Village Voice, the local newspaper, saying, I just discovered this great singing group that nobody's ever heard of before, and they're going to be famous someday.

So we went there, and there were only about 10 people in the audience was a small place, much bigger than this. And we said, these guys are great, and we've been following them ever since. So before they were famous, we discovered them. Did she come with you to Japan? Oh, yes. Your whole family went, you said your child.

No, well, we had one child at the time. Yes, we went to Japan, and that was a delightful experience and an enlightening experience, too. She was wearing a bright pink dress, beautiful dress and everybody looked at the insider and the concierge at the hotel

said you might want to say to your wife not to wear that dress in public because that advertises her as a prostitute. Oh. Thanks for the tip. Thanks for the tip, yes. And why was that?

Because it was bright pink? Or because it was bright pink? Yes. We carried our one-year-old son on a jury carrier, which is like a backpack on my back. And because I'm bigger and stronger than my wife.

I carried him, and he had blonde hair, and all the Japanese women had two reactions to that. Why, they said to my wife, why do you let him carry your son? You were supposed to carry all the burdens. And look at that hair. It is gold. It is from heaven. Are you missionaries? And then we met some very old women who cast us aspersions, because that was close after the end of the war.

was in the 60s of 1968. And some of these old people still remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we, most of the people in Japan were wonderfully polite and good, but some are still fighting the war. If I ask any questions that are insensitive, tell me to stop being weird. I really don't mean to. But can I ask some more questions about... Absolutely.

Okay. you were you quite you were quite confident were you as to how much time you had left with her now you knew that she was dying yes yes and and frankly i felt confused and and contradicting myself in number one wanting her to live not to die and number two wanting her to die not to live because she wanted to die in the last couple of months anyway. She knew she was dying and she said, I said, what can I do for you? She said, give me a new body. I said, you'll have to wait until you meet God for that. Anything else? Yes. So on the one hand, I wanted her around. On the other hand, I wanted her freed from the cage. What are some boring things that you would do with your wife that you

know that you will now miss? Boring things, yes, walking up and down with babies to try to get them to sleep. Over and over and over again, it's exhausting. I bet you wouldn't have thought at the time. I wouldn't have thought this is a blessing, no. I've told you my time traveler thought thought experiment that helps me appreciate now, haven't I? No, tell me. I think to myself, sometimes I might be laying with a child in bed.

as they're trying to go to sleep, and I don't want to be there, you see. I want to be with my wife. I want to have a drink with her, read her. I don't want to be here right now. And I think, okay, what if in the future someone invents a time machine and you can go back in time?

The only side effect is you don't remember that you've gone back in time. And then I think, well, maybe this is one of those times. And then I can appreciate it more. That's the plot at the end of one of C.S. Lewis's favorite science fiction novels, the worm, Oroboros, by your head. really where these heroes have this wonderful heroic adventure and then it's over in their award

so they go to a witch who has a time machine and they send them back 20 years before the adventure so they can have it over again but they don't know that they don't know that they don't remember it that's sort of like reincarnation yeah and god's got better plans than that but yeah but this helps you know because i think then it helps me basically say what's the beautiful thing here that i know i'll miss one day. But that is, that's a tough thing, isn't it? Because I, I, my, my youngest is now 11. So I know I probably seem like a baby to you, but I already feel like an old man. And I already miss those moments of when they were so young. Well, I'm an old man who feels like a baby. Are you? Yeah. Come on, I interrupted you. That's okay. Maybe as I grow in wisdom, I too will

feel like a baby. Here's another story that will make you laugh and everybody else offended. I came home with my wife and four children from a long trip. We arrived home at about midnight. Around the room, suitcases had exploded. We were exhausted. And at about six in the morning, one of my children started crying. And I rolled over to my wife, both of us, bleary-eyed. And I said, honey?

She said, yeah. I said, do you remember that sign that we saw that said, if I could do it all over again, I would find you sooner so I could love you, longer? She said, yeah. I said, I think I'd be a Dominican. She has a good sense of humor, so she also found that funny. But you know, it is so hard, isn't it, in those moments to see the blessing and the goodness in it. It is. It is. And isn't that great that it's hard to see? Because if we could see everything, it wouldn't be dramatic. It wouldn't be interesting.

It would be like reading a novel the second time. You know exactly what's going to happen. I think reincarnation is a very reasonable mistake because we feel most of us, when we die, that we're not finished. There's a lot we could have done. We certainly could have made a better self and a better life than we did. And something's got to be done about that.

And reincarnation is one answer to that. But purgatory is a better answer because you just don't come back to the same universe and the same kind of body. You go to a different one, and you get heart surgery because that's what you need, a new heart. I never understood why Protestants didn't believe in purgatory because good biblical Protestants certainly believe that we're sinners

and that there's no sin in heaven and that the difference between sin and no sin is enormous. So God has got to do something radical with us to make us fit for heaven. I think a lot of intelligent Protestants are very open, to purgatory as you've explained it. I think they get squeamish when they start hearing about private revelations or other things the church may have said.

See, yes, Louis firmly believed in purgatory. I think of it as heaven's bathroom. Here's the... Or heaven's metamusal or what? Here's the dining room. A great banquet is going to be served. And you show up at the door. And God says, welcome my child, you've made it.

but you stink and there's fleas all over you and you're full of mud wouldn't you like to take a nice hot shower first before you come to the table and wouldn't you say oh Lord please give me the shower well it's going to hurt you know

so what when you said it's like heaven's bathroom the reason I laughed is I thought you were going to say it's where we get all the shit out yes that's right that's what the bathroom is for and that's what we're going to do is for we get all the spiritual shit out of us

and if you don't think you're full of that then you're full of it All right. So here's a question which the correct answer is no, but I hope you'll say yes and then tell me what they are. Do you have regrets? Are there things in your marriage and in your fatherhood that you regret having done poorly that you wish you have done? Oh, of course, of course. Always taking the easy way out, fantasizing, thinking of alternatives, opening the mind to temptations. Yes, of course. We all have that. Of course. That's beautiful. Thanks. remember someone saying to me recently that it's Satan doesn't even need to get us to commit serious sin. He just needs to get us fantasizing. Yeah. Or, um, because when you fantasize, you're not here. Yeah. Well, uh, somewhere else. Thomas Aquinas says that, uh, God, uh, does not let Satan touch two things. Your spiritual intellect and the freedom of your will,

but he lets Satan touch everything else, including your imagination, including your passions and including sometimes bodily things but those are the two castle keeps that he can't get into and it's interesting that we keep falling for it because every time we fall for it we're disappointed

that is the incredible thing we're insane I like to use the image of the godfather versus the father God the father makes you an offer you can refuse the godfather makes you an offer you can't refuse So he gives you only one hand, God gives you two. And every time you make a moral choice, God says, in my right hand is what you know is the secret of all joy, namely, say to me,

your will be done, because I'm perfect and I'm love. And in my left hand is the secret of all misery. Say no to me, because I'm the secret of all joy and all love. And that's the difference between good and evil. Now, what you will choose this time? Your right hand, my right hand, or my left hand. And our reply to him is, well, God, you know, I should choose the right hand, but the left hand is awfully tempting. Let me try it. Maybe it'll work this time. It's never worked before. Yeah. It's always made me miserable at the end. But maybe it'll work this time. Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and thinking it'll work this time. Yeah. As I've heard you say, putting the car back on the road,

expecting it to run. We're nuts. That's original sin. Fortunately, God has great love for his severely brain damaged children. I like how you put that, taking the easy way out. John Paul II said, whatever promises to be a shortcut to happiness leads nowhere. What advice do you have for men and women watching this? Maybe they're married and they know that they do that. Forget about happiness. There are more important things.

Goodness, truth, and beauty. forget about happiness and you'll get it. Worry about happiness and you'll become a spiritual hypochondriac, you'll lose it. You'll worry yourself sick. All the saints say these two apparently very different and apparently even contradictory things. Number one, life is hard and suffering is necessary and suffering is blessed and it's the kisses of God. Number two, don't worry about anything. God loves you. Stop worrying.

Easier said than done. Easier said than done, indeed. Especially because I believe, it must be something Irish about me. I believe in Murphy's Law. If anything can go wrong, it will. Tolkien once described himself as a temperamental pessimist and a convinced optimist.

That's me too. I expect the worst and I hope for the best. And what I believe is too good to be true and what I feel is too bad to be true. How was your wife healing to you? How was your relationship with her? How did that help you? To say growing holiness sounds too cliche, but you know what I mean when I say? It kind of like heals you.

It makes you more of who you should have been but weren't. She was strong. She was strong-willed. She was stubborn. She knew when she was right. and most of the time she was. And so that's basically what C.S. Lewis's wife did to him

in a grief observed. You know, stopped him up short. This is reality. Stop dreaming. My wife's a strong woman. I think your wife, Maria, would have liked my wife. Yeah. She's stubborn.

Yeah. But she's softening as she grows. It's beautiful to see. Yeah. Well, that's, what God does to us. We're meat, and he has to toughen up the meat by softening it. By tenderizing us. Tenderizing. What's your opinion of Pope Leo?

I think he's what the church needs. The Holy Spirit is apparently what the church needs, and he's a peacemaker. He's not an extremist in any way, and he's going to heal the divisions, I hope. What divisions do you see needing healing? Well, the worst of the left and the worst of the right are not just extremists, but stubborn extremists. The conservative always has a temptation to ignore people's happiness and people's feelings and people's vulnerabilities and needs. and the liberal always has a temptation to ignore objective truth, especially inconvenient truths. And truth and love or dogma and compassion are two necessary things in the church. Take what is probably the most divisive of all issues, the one that is the most uncompromising, homosexuality.

The church says two things about homosexuality. Number one, it is the wrong thing. It is not God's plan. It is simply wrong in itself. Number two, we must love all sinners. We are all sinners. We must love homosexuals much more than we do. And we must love homosexuality much less than we do.

And that's a hard combination. But the church is equally adamant about both. Yeah. How does the Catholic Church in her social teaching and moral teaching transcend the left-right divide that we talk about? Always has, always well. from Jesus' time. The Pharisees were the right and the Sadrises were the left

and he said the Sadrises were wrong so were the Pharisees in different ways. Chesterton says somewhere there's only one angle at which you can stand upright but there's always at least two different angles at which you can fall. Aquinas says not something like, well maybe like that

when he talks about beauty. I think he talks about physical appearance and how easily it is to become ugly. You just move the eye up and end sure. the nose over here, where you break this. That's very similar to a kind of scientific argument for the existence of God. The windows of opportunity for a beautiful universe,

a universe that is fit for human habitation are so tiny that it's almost impossible that we exist. It's the anthropic principle is part of it. In order for human life to develop, thousands of almost impossible coincidence has to happen. If the temperature of the primeval fireball, a millionth of a second after the act of creation, where a millionth of a degree hotter or colder, you'd never have carbon, and therefore you wouldn't have life. If the sun were a little farther away or a little closer, we'd either burn up or freeze.

If the cosmic rays hadn't bombarded the slime pools at such and such an angle, the hemoglobin molecule could not have evolved, and we wouldn't have mammals. So we've crept in through an enormous number of tiny windows. And that's beauty. What's your favorite class to teach? If you could teach one more class, and that's it, for the rest of your days. What would it be? The class is where I go deeply into one philosopher,

and I've done that with Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Pascal, I think are the best. Probably the best course I ever taught. It was the first time I taught Augustine's confessions. I add a fairly long reading list, the whole of the confessions and a couple of other books. We never got past book 10 of the confessions. We didn't even do 11, 12, and 13, which were more theoretical because the students were so involved that they asked me a week or two into the course, could we change the assignment?

There's only about 12 people in the course. Could we change the assignment? Instead of having tests and exams, could we write personal journals? And since most of the class wanted to do it, I did it. And every single one of them was as long as the confessions itself, at least 200 pages long. They got deeply into it.

I was an amateur. I had, and still am not a scholar and expert on Augustine, but that book is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Is it true that it's the first biography, autobiography that we have? It's the first spiritual autobiography, yes. We have accounts of Julius Caesar's conquest and so on,

but you don't know what's going on in his soul. Augusta almost invented psychoanalysis. There's nothing like it in pre-modern literature. And you've written a book on this? Yeah. Yeah, called I Burned for Your Peace, which is the same paradox as the one in the most famous sentence ever quoted outside the Bible among Christians anyway. You have made us for yourself and therefore our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.

That juxtaposition of restlessness and rest, that burning and that peace, the combination in Augustine is unique. I don't know anybody else who has both a more burning heart and a brighter head. In the Middle Ages, almost all statues of Augustine had a burning heart in one hand and an open book in another hand. What did your wife like to read?

A lot of stuff about the Holocaust. Fascinated with the problem of evil. And spy stories. Like John LeCarray. Why, the Holocaust? Is there a Jewish connection or just fascinating? She lived in a Jewish neighborhood

and we both have a lot of Jewish friends and a lot of respect for the Jews and their wisdom, wisdom of experience. And also, I think it's just, here is the most spectacular example of evil

and is right in the heart of where we are, our Western civilization. Did you go to Auschwitz with her ever? Plan to, but never got around to it. She was already partly lame about 20 years ago.

We had a lot of good vacations. We went to Italy, we went to England a couple of times, went to Scandinavia, and we were going to go to Eastern Europe, but her legs just wouldn't take it. Okay. Now, I know you said she's ethnically Italian,

but did she speak Italian? Not much. I'm ethnically Dutch, and I only know a couple of Dutch words. Just the swear words? Yeah. What was it like going? on a vacation to Italy with your work?

Well, it was wonderful. We went to three places. We went to Venice, which of course is Venice and unique. And we went to Rome. And... Which is wild, isn't it? Which is wild.

I drove in Rome recently with my children. Did you survive? All those little vespas? I'm not sure my soul did. There was a lot of words that came out of my mouth that I had to actually apologize to my children. children for. It's a frightening experience driving through Rome. It's cutthroat.

Yes, it is. But then we went, we went to her father's birthplace, Cozignano. It's near Asclebocheno. It's in the mountains. And there's this little medieval town on top of a large hill, about a thousand people in it. Almost everybody is related. Her maiden name is Massey. Half the people there were named Massey. And it's a time machine. You think you're in the year 1,200. Boles. Tiny little cobblestone streets only only one way for cars. And you could see

for dozens of miles in every direction. And tiny little shops, nothing modern and no. And the food was just totally fresh, totally delicious. I speak a little German. She speaks a little French. Neither of us speak Italian. And when we went there,

a lot of people in the town square came to see us, and nobody spoke both Italian and English. But we found somebody who spoke Italian and French, and somebody who spoke both Italian and German. So between her French, my German, their Italian and our English, we spent about an hour making conversation which ordinarily would have taken five minutes.

That was a delightful experience. I was just in Lithuania, and we spent last summer in Austria and Croatia. And one of the sad things I think is that I don't know if my children are going to need to learn a language when they go over to Europe, because everyone speaks English in the cities, everyone under 40, you know?

Yeah. Just to throw something depressing. thing in there after your nice little anecdote. Yeah, well. If you could go back with your wife and go on a vacation, let's say you're both 30 years younger. God gives you this little gift. He says you can go anywhere you want. You go one week, wherever you want, 30 years younger. What are you doing? Wales of all places. Different, beautiful, small. Or Norway. Bergen, beautiful,

probably the most beautiful city I've ever seen. It's like living on the side of a mountain. For some reason or other, the more beautiful the place is, the, I won't say just weirder, but the more, I don't know what word I want to use,

I don't want to say evil, I don't want to say just pagan, but the best people, live in the worst places. California. No, that's not true. No, no, California, no, California, no, the flyover countries. The best people live in places like Iowa.

Last time I was in Iowa, they said, you know, Iowa was a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit here. Just the opposite of what you say about New York or California. So you're saying that I see what you mean. So the best, the best people live in the worst place. San Francisco is beautiful. Yeah. New York is beautiful.

You wouldn't want to live. Provincetown is beautiful. Martha's Vineyard's Beautiful. But the best people come from the plains of Texas or Nebraska or North Dakota. What's your... Or Nazareth. Why is that? I don't know.

You've got to have a guess. I guess you've got to have some God. And if you don't have truth and goodness, you settle for beauty. Well, okay. I also think if you're living in remote Texas or Iowa, it's Probably because you have some history and family there, which just makes you a more interesting person, maybe more loyal to your community.

Also, and so it's not the place that you just go to to make a name for yourself. The strangest thing I found about New York City is that there are so few children. You almost never see children in New York. The strangest thing about Norway. We had a hotel in Oslo. You would see during the day women shopping. And then you would see at suppertime men. And then after 8 or 9 o'clock, you'd see the kids come out and all get drunk all night.

By kids, you mean like young? Children, yeah, young adults. Young adults, okay. You never saw families together. They had families. I mean, they didn't do cloning yet. But you never saw them together. Yeah.

I find it amazing that there's this organization. organization, I think it's part of the United Nations, that rates different countries for happiness, and they always rank the Scandinavian countries as the happiest countries in the world, and the sub-Saharan African countries as the unhappiest countries in the world. When I first read that, I thought it was a joke, because Scandinavians are famous for smiling all the time and not being dour, and Africans, of course, never smile. You never see their white teeth. That's right. And the suicide rate in Scandinavia is very high,

and the suicide rate in sub-Saharan Africa is very low. And if there's any indication of happiness that even a child can understand, it's a smile. And if there's any obvious indication of unhappiness, it's suicide. So these idiots have turned everything absolutely upside down. It's almost as bad as Hillary Mantell's version of Thomas Moore. A man for all seasons pictures him as the saint and Cromwell as the villain. She does the opposite.

Really? She's a brilliant writer. She's the writer of Wolf Hall, which is a very successful TV series. But Thomas Moore is the villain, and Cromwell is the hero. She doesn't happen to be an Anglican, does she? No, I think she's a sort of semi-Satonist.

Ah. Well, that'll look to that. At least she went through a phase like that. But sometimes people are so spectacularly wrong that you have to be brilliant to be that spectacularly wrong. What do you do for fun when you have a day off? I write. Writing's fun.

How many books are you writing right now? Finishing up one and starting another one. And I play chess, mainly with computers. Yeah. Not that good at it. No, I hear you're pretty bloody good. You came to my cigar lounge in Ohio, you remember? I do.

And you schooled several people in chess. Yeah. I'm terrible at chess. I remember I once wanted to be good at chess because it seemed like a kind of intellectual thing to do, sophisticated. So I'd like to be those things. Thank you. So I brought my iPad on a plane.

I was terrible. When I say I was terrible, I don't mean, I was okay. I mean, I was, I am terrible. So I pull out my iPad just to kind of practice, you know, because I don't want to humiliate myself by playing with you. And I opened it up and the fella next to me leans in and he starts watching me. So I had to grow in humility that day. Ah, well, this is the good thing about competitive sports.

If you lose, you win humility. And if you win, you win happiness. So it's a win-win. Now, I'm pretty good at chess, but I'm all right brain intuitive. I'll see a position and instinctively say this is unsound or this is sound. I'm very bad at calculation. I can't think more than me. one or two moves ahead.

Interesting, yeah. He ever been to Central Park and played? It's Washington Square Park that has a lot of shares in it. No, never played there, but I played in a simultaneous exhibition once with the American champion,

Sammy Rischowski, and I got a draw. Okay. That's my supreme achievement. It was a very dull game, and I think he was just bored. But after 55 moves, he offered me a draw, and I took it. Did you ever play?

an instrument? Piano a little bit. I used to play competitive chess in high school and it got too much of a pressure. It wasn't fun anymore. So I just play for fun now. What did you and your friends do when you were a teenager for fun? Anything we wanted to do. Life was not structured. We played a lot of baseball, but it was never little league. We never had more than three or four players on a team. And the field was just whatever was around. And we would ride our bikes anywhere we wanted to. We'd follow fire trucks to see fires. Anything we wanted to. We created our own games and thrills.

We did some very dangerous and foolish things, like climbing high rocks and and staring over abysses and daring each other to jump. but we weren't afraid of mass murderers or drug dealers. As Catholics, we spend a lot of time talking about vocation, and rightly so. But sometimes we forget that building things can be part of our vocation too. Maybe that's a business or a side hustle. Maybe it's a product you've wanted to create for years but haven't gotten around to launching. For me, that's been the Pints with Aquinas store.

Well before I joined Daily Wire, I've been using Shopify. and as soon as I did, our sales skyrocketed because it's such a beautiful interface and it's so easy to use. What I love about Shopify is that it removes so much of the friction between having an idea and actually putting it out into the world. The storefront is there, the tools are there, even the moment when a customer is ready to pay is already taken care of. Shopify checkout helps customers complete their purchase smoothly and returning customers can check out even faster. That gave me confidence early on because I could spend less time worrying about the mechanics and more time focusing on serving my audience. And as we've grown, Shopify has grown with us.

With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash pints. That's Shopify.com slash pints. You've probably heard the phrase, do good, feel good. Now, obviously, we don't do good things just because they make us feel good. We do them because they're the right thing to do. But isn't it interesting how often doing the right thing does bring a certain kind of joy?

That's one reason I love seven weeks coffee. First, it's genuinely great coffee. My wife and I have tried a lot of brands over the years, and this is the one we keep coming back to. But every morning, there's something else I appreciate about it. I know that every bag purchase is helping support pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations around the country. Seven Weeks Coffee donates 10% of every sale to organizations helping mothers, fathers and babies choose life.

So yes, the coffee tastes great, but I honestly think it tastes a little better knowing your daily cup is helping build a culture of life. They're called Seven Weeks Coffee because it's seven weeks a baby is about the size of a coffee bean and that's when a heartbeat can clearly be seen on a ultrasound. So go to seven weekscoffee.com

slash pints and save 15% forever when you subscribe. plus use code Pints for an additional 10% off your first order and a free gift. That's up to 25% off your first order at 7weeks coffee.com slash pints. Is it not hard to become to despair when you see how different, say, Boston is today to what you grew up in? Yeah, especially when you read something like Brave New World, which takes it one more step and we're almost there.

How so? life's totally organized totally scientific totally impersonal totally technological abolition of family and motherhood scary book prophetic it is a very scary book do you see anything stopping that and you're not allowed to say god yeah the church how will the church stop it church is you a family of marriage of the meaning of life of a person and the greatest of all adventures becoming a saint nothing can rival that nothing Aristotle says that we're political animals, but as modern technology advances, it seems that we need each other less. And we don't even want community. So we're like fish that don't want water.

We think we don't, but we do. Because when we find it, we love it. But it's almost always small. Plato says somewhere in the Republic that the ideal city can't be larger than the number of people you can know as friends. Was that like 20? He thought it was, I think somebody said it was between 10,000 and 20,000 people. So more than 20,000. So it's a small town.

Yeah. And people in small towns live different lives than people in large cities. Or how, you said that people, when they find it, they love it. How are they finding it today? Either by being born in small towns and staying there or returning to them. Wyoming Catholic College is very small and very rural and people absolutely love it

and one of the things that distinguishes it is that when you go on campus you leave all screens behind no cell phones four years of college education without a cell phone or a computer and many people say I couldn't possibly do that

and freshmen say well I'll try it but I'm not going to like it all the seniors say it was wonderful. You have real contact with real people, real things, real nature. I saw a fella with a sweatshirt and it said on the back, offline is the new luxury. Yep. Yep.

My fear is that our, because modern technology is so ubiquitous and immediately gratifying and because many of us don't know what it's like to experience the joy of community, that none of we won't seek it out and things are only going to get worse forever most won't some will Pope Benedict said that the church is going to become smaller and better the church always has an answer to the new ills of of the society for every heresy there's a creedal correction and for every moral decadence there's an alternative the church is going to survive How big it'll be, how influential it'll be, we don't know. But there is an answer.

There's no reason for despair. Are you seeing what I keep hearing about, namely a resurgence and interest in Catholicism on campus? Do you see? I see it in quality. I don't know about quantity. I'm not a scientist, don't have any measures of it. But the students are more serious, more strong in boldness. both faith and reason and the blend of them.

Yeah, I'm optimistic about that. Whether that will sell well, whether the whole society will follow or not, I guess nobody knows. The saints would all say, well, that depends on you, on how much love and how much sacrifice you're willing to make for the good of the world. Imagine what 10 more Mother Teresa would do. I think I asked you this last time, but about the liturgy wars.

I think it's a little too easy to sort of throw up our hands when we hear that because people don't like conflict. People want people to get along. And so we tend to get upset with these poor traditionalists because they just keep making things sort of annoying for the rest of us. So we're just trying to get along. But I think the traditionalists have a point. Of course they do.

More than a point. So what are we to do? Because I see a lot of young people becoming Catholic. They love the traditional Latin Mass. They love the traditional prayers. And they're being told that, well, maybe they're not being told, but they feel like they're being told that they're wrong to. Well, I go to the Latin Mass almost every Sunday.

And it's the one place. It's the one church that I know that's always full. It's always got families, a lot of kids, a lot of young people, to make that illegal is absurd. Catholic means universal, and the church has always had a variety of options liturgically. You don't have to love the Latin Mass. I love the English Mass, too.

I wouldn't want to go back to everything's got to be Latin. There's no reason for those wars. Well, I mean, I would say, I think it could be argued. that Pope Francis exacerbated those wars with his modiproprio. I think that's my opinion. I can't disagree with that. Okay.

I don't think you have to agree with everything the Pope does. Oh, that's good. I'm glad to. I think Francis did a lot of harm to the church, and I think we're picking up the pieces now. I think just acknowledging that is a great way to stop gaslighting our Protestant friends looking into the church. Yeah. Hey, we've been through worse popes than Francis. I mean, Francis, it was the least, at least thought he was a Catholic.

I mean, imagine. Who is worse? Alexander, the Borges. They were fornicators, so were there. They had orgies. Wouldn't you rather that than confusion on doctrine? I'm being a little hyperbolic, but not really. Confusion on doctrine?

Yeah, we have that. but we've never had outright heresy taught as doctrine. I mean, the stupidest popes, I think Francis was in many ways, stupid, not in all ways. 95% of the things he said were very good. But we've had stupid popes.

We've had wicked popes. Francis wasn't wicked. He had a good heart. Why do you think that? Genuine love for the poor. and for ordinary people. His motives are good. His brains didn't catch up with his motives, I think.

I wouldn't even be scandalized if he were canonized as a saint. Some of the saints were pretty stupid in some things. Yeah, that is a point. I think Catholics need to realize that canonization just means that an individual is in heaven, not that we have to go by everything they said.

They're all doctors of the church either. Right. I find reverence and piety much more important than which liturgy you have or which tradition you follow. I find in some groups that I disagree with a lot, theologically, like the Quakers, and even some Unitarians. I find a genuine sanctity and piety that's lacking in the average Catholic practice. parish. So piety doesn't always go together with theological orthodoxy. It should, but it doesn't. But if they are pious, it's not because of their lack of being Catholic. There's to say, it's clearly a deficiency. Well, they're pious because they follow some of what the Catholic Church has and some of what the Bible says and some of what Jesus is. Sometimes it's better than we do.

I like to think of it as a very well-stocked gymnasium and then a fellow who's got a couple of dumbbells. And if the fella's using the dumbbells over here and the fellow with the gym is just laying on his back, it shouldn't be surprising that this guy's. That's a good point. Yeah. So how many more books you got in you? Have no idea. Ask God.

He doesn't answer me back. The last one I completed, which is in the hands of words on fire, is called When I Die. It's about death and what I expect to find after death. and how to prepare for it. And I'm clogging their pipes with a number of other manuscripts and also Ignatius Press. So I said to them, I wouldn't mind if you waited until I died to publish this.

Yeah. But meanwhile, I'm writing Socratic Dialogues and a book on St. Faustina's journal, Diary is coming out next year. What is this? I mean, I know what Faustina's diary is, but what is your work on it? Well, it's a commentary on it.

Wow. It's trying to do for that what I did for the Ponce's in my Pascal book. Because the diary is already quite large. Are you adding footnotes? It is. Well, I'm writing two books. One is an abbreviation of it, which is only about 100 pages long, and another is a kind of spiritual commentary on it,

which is about 250 pages long. Beautiful. I love the quote where Christ says to Faustina the great. the greater the sinner, the greater right he has to my mercy. She's orthodox and surprising. She doesn't say heretical things, but she says like Jesus, things that surprise you. Do you like what? Oh, the diary is full of them.

Well, I think one thing we often don't know is that she talked about, she had a vision of hell. Yeah. And said that there were many people there and that what she noticed is that most of the people who were there didn't believe in. hell. Yeah. Yeah. Well, CS Lewis said the same thing. He said in the past, the devil got us by over-emphasize his presence. Today, we under-emphasize his presence. These are, these are the two easiest ways to lose a war. Vastly overestimate your enemy, vastly underestimate your enemy. That's good. When's the last time you heard a homily on hell? I don't think I have ever in all my life heard a homily on hell. Is that good or bad?

Nor have I ever in my whole life heard a homily on sexual morality, except in the vaguest of terms. Well, vaguest of terms makes sense, I think, when it comes to homilies because there are often children present. This is true. This is true. But I would think that we need to begin acknowledging the reality of hell from the pulpit. If we don't, what are we saved from? Political incorrectness? I'm fascinated with the fact that Jesus talks more about hell than anybody else and he gives us more reasons for hope than for despair, for instance, the parable of the hundred sheep.

One of them is the black sheep. He spends all his time focusing on the black sheep and he gets him back. So the fact that hell is so important doesn't mean that the majority are going there. Nobody knows, of course. So do you disagree with Aquinas? Augustine then? None of them taught as a certainty

that the majority went to hell. Most of the pre-moderns assumed that. I don't personally believe that's likely true simply because

God's mercy is stronger than our sin and he'll get everybody that he possibly can into heaven. When the disciples said, Lord, are many

going to be saved? They must have thought, Hey, let's find the skinny about this. What's the population statistics? What are our chances? Do we sweat? Do we try harder or do we relax?

You know, his answer? Strive to enter in. Wrong question. Not a fruitful question. The question is, is it real? Yes. Can anybody go there who chooses it? Yes.

Speaking of hell, have you been to Fatima? Not that Fatima's like hell, but the visionary saw hell? I have not. In fact, I just finished reading the classic book on Fatima by Walsh, beautiful. I would love to go. I just read Sister Lucia's account of what took place. As far as I remember, I did too.

And she didn't say the majority. No, no. She said many. Many, yeah. Well, for the Good Shepherd, 1% is too many. Hmm. Even if 99% are saved, that's too few. Yeah.

Well, I don't know. I guess I'm a little more pessimistic than you are. I mean, our Lord does talk about the narrow way and that if you find it, it seems to be a... It is intrinsically narrow. That doesn't necessarily mean less than 50%. He's not a statistician. He's a father. and if a father has 20 kids and one of them is lost,

that's 19 to little saved and one too many lost. I think purgatory takes care of the fact that we're in veteran centers and very, very stupid. Purgatory is much more serious than we think. And all the saints who talk about, especially St. Catherine of General had visions of purgatory, say that not only are the, the pains of purgatory much more serious than any of the pains on earth,

but also the joys are much greater, because you're guaranteed heaven, you're guaranteed that you can't sin again, and you want nothing but God's will, and you get nothing but God's will, and God's will is intense suffering. So you have in purgatory the same attitude towards suffering that the great saints like Faustina

and the little flower have towards suffering. You accept it not reluctantly, but passionately as God's will for you. In that deep sense, you're happy even in your sufferings. Yeah, may all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen. What does your daily prayer life look like if that's not too personal a question? Well, I say the morning offering and expanded it, my own version of it, to have a prayer list.

I say the rosary and the chaplain every day. And I read at least one psalm and one, uh, uh, something else, uh, at night. And then being lazy and stupid and waiting until the night to do this, uh, I usually in a minimal way, uh, talk personally to God.

Yeah. But throughout the day, uh, especially in times of stress, uh, I find that repetition is wonderful. Jesus, I trust in you, the thing on, on Faustina to speak. That's my favorite prayer of all time. That's the

simplest and most complete prayer that I know. Because it's incredibly simple. Here's God's will. Here's your will. Which is better. Which is wiser. Which is more loving. Which is more powerful. Duh. Yeah. So I trust in you

is an act of surrender. Submission. That's faith, hope, and charity together. And I think we see that in little children and in babies. Look at a baby, can't even talk yet, in the arms of his mother, looking up at his mother's face. What's in that look? Total faith, total hope, total charity. Yeah. All has one thing together. I asked you, last time we spoke, I think, if you're afraid of death, you said no, you're afraid of suffering, but there are ways to take care

of that, but has anything changed? Has anything changed? Are you looking forward to death? Are you frightened of it? Are you frightened of judgment? Because I have seen how hard it is to die, and because I realize that that's the normal process, very few people have an instant, easy death, I think I'm more afraid of dying now than I was, but I'm less afraid of death, because I know that death is going to be part of God's will for me. And there are, at least moments when I want nothing but God's will. That's my absolute. And that moment is usually subconscious rather than conscious. It's hard to keep that in the consciousness for long. But that's my absolute. That's got to be. I know you said that Maria was bedridden for quite a while

and it was a slow regression until she was in hospice. But has it, what's it been like sort of having your routine altered. So it's no longer around her or even prior to that, the things that maybe you enjoyed doing together that you could no longer do. Has that been difficult? It hasn't been difficult. It's been freeing and obviously easier,

so much so, that my inveterate pessimism says, all right, when's the next foot going to drop? I constantly underestimate God's love and compassion. He's going to give us better things than we can imagine, not worse. I know that, but I don't feel it. I'm a worrier. Yeah. And I don't think that's in itself a moral fault, but it's certainly a psychological fault.

Who's one of, looking back on your life, who would you say is one of your best friends? did you have many living both either way you don't mean spiritual friends like augustine no no no i mean real annoying friends that pop over without asking you and borrow things and don't return them not that many

surprisingly i don't enjoy parties i don't enjoy just going to bars and talking trash with people i don't like small talk Me neither. I had a few very good friends in college. They're almost all dead now. And some family friends, a few of which are alive. I think my best friends have been my wife and children.

Yeah. And before that, my parents. Do you feel the need to process what you went through with Maria with a friend? That's what I'm doing now with you. Okay. Well, thank you. Yes. I don't feel the need to do it.

It's not a need. it's a it's a way of preaching the gospel you know the saying attributed to St. Francis preach the gospel he was words unnecessary I'm not a great example but I'm a survivor and I'm I guess kind of proud of the fact that I survived that we won that's beautiful think about how much cause for disappointment you would have right now if 30 years ago you called it quits. Oh my goodness. I can't imagine that. That would be worse than death.

And so many people, so many of us do it. Well, that's the point of the joke of the movie. You know, murder is easier to endure than divorce. And psychologists say that children are more harmed by divorce than by the death of a parent, more traumatized. Wow, absolutely. Yeah. we don't love you enough to stay with you goodbye what a terrible thing imagine imagine a country in which half the people committed suicide well half a marriage is ended in divorce we are that

country that's unsustainable yeah it's got to be it's got to be the belief that something is better over there that my wife say or my children are the cause of my misery they're the reason I'm so bloody unhappy. Isn't it? That's obviously the root of divorce. It's that shiny thing over there. Yeah. Then I'll be.

Yeah. Not me. No, I'm fine. I'll be great. If only, these bloody people. If only I could have undone that mistake. If only were for these people.

What a terrible thought. What is that from? Is that from the brothers? Oh yeah, it is from the brothers. Ivan, uh, wants to run off with, uh, Carterina. No.

No. Who's the Sheila? Grushenka. Grushenka. Yeah. Oh, Dimitri runs off with Grushenko. That's right. I got it wrong.

You're correct. Anyway, the author says of Dimitri, you know, that he wanted a take her to the, this is one of my favorite lines. It breaks my heart when I read it, to the ends of Russia to settle down with her incognito. Then a beautiful, pure life would begin. Oh, it must be pure. It must. And then the narrator says, he believed like many men that all of his problems could be fixed with a change of place. Right, right.

This is why people travel. Yeah. It's an escape. But this is, yeah, that's the root of that. That's terrifying because that mistake is one that you're morally responsible for. That's stupidity. That's pride. That's selfishness.

It's your fault, not mine. I'm not a sinner. You are. If that's the deepest thing anyway, you're going to hell. How did you do you do? with arguments with your wife where you were being stubborn or it sounds like she was stubborn was her general state but like how did the two of you how did you overcome your own stupidity when you were convinced you were right by compromising by saying okay by by giving in and usually she was

right and I was wrong feels like death doesn't it sometimes I mean I don't know what death feels like, but I imagine it's going to feel quite like giving it. I mean, I'm a better writer than my wife, but I'm not a better person, and she was usually right about practical things. Yeah. Yeah, how did you run your household if you're the absent-minded philosopher? Well, who's paying the bills and fixing the sprinklers of that? We had to agree on the big decisions, one way or another.

And we didn't have many arguments about the big decisions. We didn't have any philosophical or theological arguments. We didn't have many financial arguments. We had practical arguments. And on the practical level, she was right almost all the time, and I was wrong. Yeah, I'm like that with my wife, too. Don't tell her I said that. So the very thing that bothered me, her stubbornness, was a blessing.

Do you ever thank God that you never married a woman with your temperament? Yes, actually. actually at college, I knew, I dated didn't date that much, but I knew a lot of girls there. And the ones that liked me were boring. And the pretty ones didn't like me that much. And the smart ones were ugly

and the prettians were stupid. my wife was both both pretty and smart okay I think you're going to say pretty and stupid no I wasn't going to correct you but that tendency that you just pointed out to say in marriage

I'm right and you're wrong all the time that assumption that's terrifying because our attitude towards God comes mainly from our experience of our attitude towards other people and if I'm right you're wrong is your fallback position and you say that to God yeah who says in the in the in the epistle you know if if how can we love our brother who we see

if we don't yeah sorry how can we love God if we do not see if we cannot love our brother we we do see and your spouse is the closest person to you and if you can't actually ask forgiveness Yeah, it's probably a good, it's probably a good reflex for both the man and the woman to go, I'm sorry. I, you know, I think it was Jose Mare Escriber who said something, usually in these arguments, you're both wrong, some degree. Yeah. Yeah.

Was there? Well, most marriage counselors say that. Every, or nearly every marriage has faults on both sides. And the fact that they exist on both sides, the fact that both are wrong is much more important than any possible answer to the question, who's the most wrong? Yeah. I mean, if I'm going to go off the road into the ditch on the left and you're going to go off the road and the ditch to the right, does it matter which ditch is worse? Yeah, that's good. Have you written a book on marriage?

No. You've written a book on everything else. I'm not that practical. any practical question even even things like how to run a business or or how to make money or or leadership or stuff like that i i know i'm not good at that stuff but didn't you write a book was it called after i'm gone oh uh what was that you've written so many books you forget yeah that's letters to my kids oh there it is before i go that's right Yeah. No, that's not a theory of how to raise kids.

Okay. It's just advice, practical advice on anything I want. Well, all right. Well, can I ask your advice on how to, how to, how to have a happy marriage? And what that even means or whether that should even be the goal? I wish you would ask an easier question like solve the problem of evil or explain the Trinity. How to have a happy marriage, love. Maybe that's the wrong question.

It depends what we mean by happiness, doesn't it? It does, it does. The word Aristotle uses for happiness, eudaimonia, the old Greek word, is very different than the modern word for happiness in English, because it starts with EU, which means good, so you have to be good to be happy, have to have virtue. And daimone means soul, so happiness is mainly the soul, not in bodily things. and IAA means a lasting state rather than a temporary healing. It's a way of making an adjective into a noun. Okay.

So his notion of happiness is to have a virtuous soul as your stable fallback position and foundation and personality. That doesn't sound like the modern notion of happiness. In fact, the old English word happen, which means chance,

is the source of happiness. So when we see somebody very happy... Like happen, happenstance. Yeah, it just happens, yeah. When we see somebody very happy, the first thing we think of is saying, what happened to you? Just win the lottery?

We think of games of chance. Yeah. The gifts of fortune. How shallow we are. Interesting. The saints are the happiest people in the world. They also suffer more than everybody else in the world. This time of year, people often think about vacations,

plans, and the months ahead. I'm actually really pumped to be going with my family to Canada this summer. But I think it's also a good time to ask a deeper question. What kind of legacy am I building? John probably wasn't thinking about legacy when he learned he was going to be a father. He was simply scared. He wondered if he was capable. He wondered if he was ready. But through pre-born, John found support, received a free ultrasound and gained the confidence to embrace the life in front of him. Today, you can help create that same turning point for another family. A gift of $28 sponsors an ultrasound and helps parents choose life. Dial pound 250 and say baby, that's pound

250 baby, or visit preborn.com slash pints. That's the kind of investment that is an impact far beyond today. Legacy isn't primarily about what we leave behind. It's about helping people become who God created them to be. The greatest investments are often the ones that change lives we may never meet. Dial pound 250 and say baby, that's pound 250 baby, or visit preborn.com slash pints. And if you're a business owner, consider making a larger gift. A contribution of $1,000, $2,000, $10,000 or more can help place ultrasound equipment in pregnancy clinics that will serve families for years to come. All right, let's do a quick thought experiment. You have $25. You could spend it on lunch. You could spend it on another streaming subscription that you don't need,

or you could spend it on a chance to win a 1962 Chevrolet Corvette convertible while helping educate future Catholic priests. That seems like the obvious choice. This year, V8s for Vocations is celebrating the centennial of Route 66 by raffling off a stunning red and white corvette with approximately 65,000 original miles, a numbers matching 327 v8 and a four-speed manual transmission. Now, here's the part I really like. Every ticket helps fund seminary and formation in the diocese of Gallup, one of the poorest diocese in America. Now, let's be honest, a lot of people spend their time complaining about the state of the church.

Well, here's a practical way to do something about it. Help form good priests and maybe win a classic Corvette in the process. I'm so grateful, of course, to all of the priests in my life. There was a bishop in my life when I was young, Bishop Eugene Hurley, who made such a profound impact on me and my faith. Thank God for priests. So this seems like a great and worthwhile raffle. The drawing takes place on July 25, 2026, and you don't need to be present to win, and they

even pay the federal gift tax. Visit v8sforvocations.org and enter today. I think I know the answer to this, but I'd like you to talk about it, was Was the blessed and sorrowful mother at the foot of the cross happier than a man in a drug-fueled orgy right now? Of course. Yeah. And why?

He's blessed. Who? Blessed. Who's blessed? The man in the drug-fueled orgy? No. The other one is. He's blessed.

The sorrowful mother is being blessed. We're being blessed by our sorrows. Sacrifices are God's kisses. I think that example, though. the sorrowing woman, the mother at the foot of the cross and this individual, to say that she's happy. God himself answers that question through his angel, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

No two people ever suffered more than Mary and Jesus. No two people were ever more blessed than Mary and Jesus. So when I say, how do we have a happy marriage? What should I be asking? How do we have a blessed marriage? Or a good, how do we be good? Yeah. A good marriage.

Yeah. All right, how do you have a good marriage? Don't take shortcuts. Repent when you do. You choose to have a good marriage. Happiness is something that you choose, not something that happens to you. You are responsible for your own happiness. If you truly love and practice all the virtues that come from love, you will be happy. You may not be contented.

You may not have a lot of obvious pleasures. You may lack peace, but not the deepest kind of peace. You may have a hard life, but you will have a happy life. You may live in sub-Saharan Africa instead of Scandinavia, but you will be happy. Poor people are happy. Jesus says, blessed are the poor. And poor in spirit doesn't mean spiritually poor.

It doesn't mean spiritually weak. it means literally blessed are those who have very little money. Blessed are the peasants. Blessed are the poor. Why are they blessed? Well, poverty is itself a blessing. Money's a temptation. Power is a temptation.

Too much freedom is a temptation. Who are the suicides? They're rich and powerful. The famous. Fascinating, isn't it? What every teenager wants to be, the world's most famous rapper or singer. And they have a very low life expectancy.

And they commit suicide very often. Why do they do that? Because they're not blessed. They're not blessed by God. They don't have God in their hearts. And the same God who is the supreme source of happiness is the God who wants sacrifice. He wants you to die to self-will.

that's the great paradox the only way you can get your deepest will is to die to all your other wills if your deepest will is to be like God to be Godlike then you have to sacrifice a lot of things and that's part of happiness

but sacrifices hurt so hurts are part of happiness I think if we only took Jesus literally we'd understand them much better bless or the poor What do you mean by poor? Those who have a low income. That can't be what he means.

No, no, you can't possibly. Get some Jesuit theologian here to do a little dance around it. That's not scholarly. Well, then if that is true, and we do take him literally, wouldn't we quit our jobs and sell out? Was St. Francis happier after he gave away all his riches before? Yeah, but if he wasn't called to, he wouldn't have been. That's true. So God has to call us.

God has to intervene. God can't just wait until we figure it out for ourselves. Are you reading any good spiritual books? Do you read spiritual books? I know you, I think you said the presence of God by Brother Lawrence. Yeah, yeah. I like a lot of passages in Degosah's abandonment to divine providence, which is pretty much the same thing.

The first time I read Faustin's diary, I wasn't impressed. I thought it was much too sentimental. It's a fault, but it sounds like a, you know, what a teenage girl might write. And then I discovered that Dorothy Day says the same thing in her writings. First time she read the diary, she thought the same thing, and then second time it blew her a row. Thomas Merton says the same thing about the little flower to receive Liseau.

Yep. And when I read that in the seven-story mountain, I said, well, I'm thinking of becoming a Catholic, and I'm reading some of the saints, and I just read St. John of the Cross, and he's a brilliant, brilliant philosopher, a tomist, and a great poet. And it's just the opposite of St. Teresa, personally. So I'll try the same experiment that Merton does. And I read The Little Flowers' Story of a Soul, autobiography, and I read it. threw very quickly the first time and I got the same impression,

much too sentimental, not my thing. Yeah. Then I read it a second time and I was just as blown away as Merton was. So I think Faustina is in that same tradition. It's like, of all the books that C.S. Lewis wrote, I think his greatest is the one that most people don't like the most when they first read it until we have faces. And the more you read it, the more you think is his masterpiece.

That's what he thought, didn't he? He was right. He was right. Well, that's, I think, true of the simple saints like Teresa of Liseau and Faustina. Do you know I was in Lithuania last week and I was kneeling before the Divine Mercy image? The fact that the art isn't that great. Well, that one is. I find that one.

That was painted by... Sister Faustina herself was disappointed by the picture of Jesus. Well, apparently the fellow who... was commissioned by her spiritual father to paint it, got so fed up with Fostina who would visit with him once or twice a week to kind of give him direction that he threatened to quit. Yeah. And the spiritual director begged him not to. And the artist said, all right, well, I'd like you to pose with a cacic, a white cacacic.

And that's how that happened. Oh. But you know, those two images, right? The one in Vilnius, Vilnius is beautiful. Yeah, I think it's beautiful. But then there's another one. It's terrible. It's just as popular.

All the ones that I've seen are not that good. They're not terrible, but they're not that great. That's got to be, yeah, keep on. But Faustina herself said, no, it'll have to do, but it's not as beautiful as what I saw. Of course. I mean, what do you expect from the man? Well, that's like children at Fatima say. You can't possibly, you can't possibly explain how beautiful Mary is.

Well, especially you see some of these statues. I don't think you can, they're terrible. A lot of statues to the Blessed Mother from Fatima. You have one of my favorite there. This one here? Vladimir. Oh. No, the one with the black.

There it is. Oh, you like that? Yes. Yeah. Icons are beautiful, aren't they? When angels are depicted in icons, eastern icons, they're beautiful. The Western depictions I find often, aren't that? Yes.

Yes. We get on a lot from the East. Yeah. I met the patriarch of Constantinople. was there. Did you? That was an honor. Wow. He was very fatherly and lovely, yeah. You know, both John Paul II and Benedict said that their priority was reunion with the East. And if they didn't do that, they were a failure. We were very high on that. So they were both failures? We're making progress. You think so? Yeah. Well, progress to the East means within a

millennium. Yeah. Right. That's right. Right. Yeah. that'll be interesting, hey? Oh, I think as Western civilization gets more decadent, the church will have to reunite much better. Yeah. We can't afford to fight civil wars when we've got a World War on. I could see us maybe, is it possible

to reconcile with the Greeks, but not the Russians? Because I don't see that happen. It depends on the personality of, you know, the present Russian Orthodox person is questionable. Yeah, well, Carill doesn't seem like his terrible. questionable. with the with the worst he also might be something of a puppet carrel but the pluralism in different forms that exist already in the west and exists already in the east uh can accommodate a pluralism of east

and west together in the same way well it was interesting when i was in ukraine a couple of years ago you'll go into these churches and there's not the same defensive posture over there toward western devotions as they are in Eastern churches in the West. Now, I understand the need to be defensive. I understand the need for Eastern Catholics to be defensive against Western devotions. It's the same reason Quebec has to be defensive about keeping French. They'll be swallowed up with English otherwise. So I understand it, but it was interesting to be in Ukraine and to go into churches that had

icons everywhere and a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Rosaries hanging off the back of pews and this mixture of... I don't think there's any theological reason. The filioque is, well, many, many Eastern Orthodox Christians believe in the filioquette. They just like to put it in their greed. I think it's mainly political. We weren't there when you put it in. That's the main thing.

And we're upset about it. Yeah. What's your favorite drink? Single malt scotch. Do you like this? You can say you hate it if you don't. No, this is very good. Do you like the piteiness?

I love the piteyness. You're drinking Scotland itself. You're drinking the soil. We have to cover this up for illegal reasons. Okay. But it is lug of all on 16 for those who will ask. Unless I'm not allowed to say that, in which case they will blur that out. And it's very difficult to abuse because you can't drink a pint of this and survive.

You should. And you have to drink it very slowly. I remember a priest saying to me, this is the best advice I got. He said, you don't drink scotch. You taste it. Hmm, that's helpful. That's very good. Did you ever get into pipe smoking or cigars or any of these other?

No. No, never tried pipes or cigars. Tried cigarettes, didn't like them. No problem. It's funny how the attitude towards smoking has changed in a generation. Yeah, a generation can change about one of their favorite habits. That's encouraging. Well, no, I think I meant it the other way around.

What I mean is... Well, it is unhealthy. It causes lung cancer. Yeah, but I'm okay with it. Like, my son, I saw someone, showed me, like, he's smoking cigarettes. I'm like, okay. Is he fornicating? No, okay, well, good.

Yeah. But it is interesting, like in the 90s. It's like eating too much butter. It's not a sin, but it's just unhealthy. You're taking a risk. It may be a worthy risk if you really like. But what's interesting is... I really love bacon, okay?

Yes. I'm taking medication for bad cholesterol, okay? So I shouldn't eat as much bacon as I do But I think it's worth it I'm old, I'm going to die anyway So I'll have two slices of bacon Instead of one this morning Thank you very much

And I'm even going to take a photo And send it to my doctor So you can smoke a cigarette if you want It doesn't bother me The first time I met you I was on the phone with you My old studio was in Atlanta And you were on your way up

And I said, Dr. Crave I'll get you some lunch Before we begin, what would you like? And you said, oh, I don't know Something unhealthy. fried. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that, right? Yeah. He's a fella. He's not too concerned.

Health is more important than money, but it's much less important than virtue. Yeah. Are you on a strict diet? No. No. God has blessed me not only with a long life and a skinny body, but with a stomach that can digest almost anything. Have no food restrictions at all. very good do you teach full time at boston college and when you yeah why not why retire well i don't know why not you're old you're old so what well you might not be able to keep up with the i'm doing something i'm doing something important i'm doing it well and i enjoy doing it and i'm glad that you are and i'm sure your students are thrilled that you are i just thought it was a lot of probably a lot of work at some point

wouldn't it be yeah yeah but almost all of it is good work do you have teaching assistants that help with No, I don't trust them. Last one I had many years ago, I had a course on CS Lewis, and there were, I think, 80 people in a very large course. And for the take-home mid-semester, we had read the Chronicles of Rurnia as half of the first semester, I gave them this question. Compare and contrast the figure of Jesus in the Gospels

with the figure of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia. And my teaching assistant was supposed to mark those mid-semesters. And she came to me and said, I can't mark the mid-semesters, you'll have to do it yourself or find somebody else. I said, why? Because I've never read the Gospels. I said, I'm a Marxist.

So I had to write them all, mark them all myself. That's gracious. Now, that's an extreme example of not trusting your assistant. When she's a Marxist. But, you know, my students are sort of like my children. at least in the intellectual sphere. So I don't really trust anybody else's judgment on their essays. So I do them myself.

How do you, what do you do with regards to AI now and the fact that students are used? I make very creative multiple choice tests, which 95% of the students respond well to in that I think they are instruments not. instruments not just of testing, whether they have read and remember the stuff, but whether they understand it. There are 5% who are brilliant writers and write brilliant essays

that I can tell our original and do terribly on the multiple choice test because some people just can't handle multiple choice tests. So I make allowances for them. And I don't require take-home essays. unless I can formulate the question in such a way that it's very difficult for AI to do it

in a way that I can't detect. Can you tell when people write papers with AI? Write, quote, unquote. More than most people can, I think. I'm very good at intuiting that. I'm not by any means an expert on it or even that familiar with it, but when I see that they're following all the rules,

they're either letting AI do it or they're doing it by the book. I see. Yeah. So it's not infallible, but it's workable. How do you think professors are going to have to change to adapt to this? I said to you before we came in here that I would have them stand up and do oral presentations. I don't know. Would that just take too long? Is that the problem with that?

I would think that public shaming would be enough to incentivize somebody to actually study. I don't think it is. People have a little shame nowadays. Oh. I don't know. I'm different. I'm weird. I have a weird brain. When I took the G graduate record exams,

the examiner said, you're the most unbalanced answer I ever saw. You scored a 100 on the verbal part, and you barely passed the math part. That's right brain versus left brain. So I can intuitively sense, I think, when something's AI, better than most people.

can, but although not invalidably. Have you used AI yourself? No. No. No. We probably have professors grading things by AI. Oh yeah. That's both of them.

No one's doing work. Yeah. I once was part of an experiment. Somebody came in to Boston College and sought me out because they knew that I had written on CS Lewis and they were using Lewis as an example of the experiment they were doing. what they're doing is trying to find out whether when a dead writer has discovered to have written apparently written some things that have been unpublished

but it couldn't be proved that the dead writer actually wrote it it could have been a copy or an imitation who had the authority to detect whether this is really from C.S. Lewis or not and they were specializing in C.S. Louis because he had written so much. And the stuff that he had written but never published was a big pile that his brother set fire to one day because he knew that Lewis's brother didn't want them published.

He knew Lewis didn't want it. Lewis didn't want them published. They didn't think they were that good. Walter Hooper came on the fire before it destroyed all the manuscripts and he rescued a lot of them, maybe 10 or 20. And they've since been published. But the others are lost forever.

One was a set of Socratic dialogues. What? which is one of the reasons I started writing Socratic Dialogues. Lewis did it. I can do it too. Anyway, this researcher came here and came to BC and said, would you take, you've read all of C.S. Lewis, you know pretty well. Can you do this for me? I said, sure. What's the test? He said, well, here are 10 paragraphs, each of which claims to be written by C.S. Lewis.

Tell me which one was. Nine of them was not, and the other one was, and I know which ones they are, but you don't. Because you've never read these before. They're all unpublished. And they were on a variety of topics. You couldn't tell from the content, only from the style. So I read them very quickly, right in front of him.

And he said, no, he'd take them home and meditate on it. He said, no, it's very clear. Number seven is C.S. Lewis and the others are not. He said, how'd you know that? I said, I don't know. It's just his style. Yeah. Well, that's the intuition.

tuition clicking in. I'm good at intuiting patterns, but I'm not good at scholarship and putting my nose in a library book all day to get a lot of footnotes and that sort of thing, or even thinking more

than a mover to Ed and Jess. So I've got an advantage in the AI. I think I can detect their style. Did you ever meet Walter Hooper? Oh, yes, yes. Wonderful gentlemen. Absolutely wonderful. He is the godfather of a friend of mine, Jacob Imam, from Steubenville, Ohio, but Jacob studied in Oxford, good his doctorate there.

Did Walter tell you some stories about Lewis that you can share with us? He was Lewis's secretary. Yes, of course, for the last year of his life. I recall that he did, but I forget what they were now. However, I do have some stories about Tolkien from one of his students who taught me English at Calvin College. Tell me everything. Well, first of all, he was a very poor lecturer. Okay.

But people would come and throng to him anyway because if you sat in the front row, you could understand him. But if not, probably not, because he mumbled. He did mumble, yeah. And he taught a required course on Old English, which in his day was required for all literature majors. And the first day of the course, he came in with a very large wagon piled high with books and manuscripts.

And he was rather tall and strong and got that wagon up on the platform. And he said, see this, you don't want to read all these books, which you will. You don't want to be in this course, but you are. You are required to take Old English and you don't see why you should read it because there's nothing other than Beowulf that's any good in it according to you. So I am going to try to make you fall in love with not only these manuscripts, but with my specialty, which is philology, which is the love of words. And my teacher, George Harper, said we were very skeptical, but we were obedient,

so we followed him. And although he was a bad lecturer, he was a very good, tutor because he would spend extra hours of students and he would wander off into what he really loved. And that would seep into his lectures. So those in the front row got a treat because they would get him to go off onto these tangents, which were fascinating. And at the end of the course, instead of giving a last lecture, he gave a lecture of a single sentence. He had the wagon, and all the books were piled in the wagon, and again he put all the books up onto the podium.

And then he threw the wagon down, and all the manuscripts scattered on the floor. He said, you don't need them now. They're in your heart. And then he left. Wow. That's pretty theatrical. Yes.

I want to find this excellent article that, Have you seen what Tolkien wrote about staying married? I know his letter to Christopher about the Blessed Sacrament. Oh, that's beautiful. Isn't that beautiful? Yeah, he wrote this to Christopher. I never called Edith Luthian, but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Ruse in Yorkshire,

where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the high. Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while. In those days, her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing and dance. That's beautiful, huh? You know, that word Luthian is the single word on his wife's gravestone. Really? Tell us more.

Or is that it? That's it. Okay, then. Secrets to a lasting marriage. He said something pretty... Listen to this. Men are not monogamous, no good pretending. Men just ain't.

Not by their animal nature. That's good, huh? Mm-hmm. Let's see if I can find this. There you go. All right, not by the animal nature. Monogamy, although it has been fundamental to our inherited ideas, is for us men a piece of revealed ethic according to faith and not the flesh.

The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment or by what is called self-realization. Usually a nice name for self-indulgence. inymical to the realization of other selves, but by denial, by suffering, faithfulness in Christian marriages entails that great mortification. And here's the last short paragraph, and I'd love your take on it. For a Christian man, there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object, his sexual desires. Its grace may help him in the struggle, but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties

to the purity proper to that state as it provides easements. Did you get that last sentence? It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state as it provides easements. Mm-hmm. Your thoughts. A wise man. A wise man. I love us. Why don't we hear that anymore? That used to be the standard by which we measure other pieces of advice. What do you mean? That's very traditional.

He's saying what all the saints said. But we don't hear it anymore. What part or what do you mean? I mean, many of the saints that we read aren't the fact that marriage is the primary school of sanctity. That marriage is not for happiness. It's for the good.

at least not happiness in the modern sense. I suppose that's perhaps why adultery and divorce are so prevalent. If I believe that marriage exists for my happiness, commonly understood today, then I've got it wrong and should start again. The very last thing Lewis ever wrote shortly before his death was an essay entitled, We Have No Right to Happiness. And he says that when people say they have a right to happiness to justify their affairs or their divorce, they always mean sexual happiness,

not any other kind. And it's absurd to think... Pleasure is really with them, isn't it? I have a right to my pleasure. It's absurd to think we have a right to happiness. It's like saying we have a right to health, or we have a right to riches. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Is that a right? Life is a right, and liberty is a right, and private property is a right. And the original words in the Declaration were life, liberty and property. property. They changed it to the pursuit of happiness. They must have got in a pop psychologist for a rewrite man. What do you think about therapeutic culture? Have you heard of this? I'm sure you know what I mean, but... If you mean by that, a culture that contains therapists when needed, good. If you mean

by that, that the whole of life is seen from the viewpoint of therapy, very bad. Because the point of therapy is simply peace, simply homeostasis, simply overcoming the obvious conflicts and unhappinesses that you have due to psychological reasons. And that's not the end of life. The end of life is God, not your own happiness. And if you don't know that, you won't be happy. And if you do know that, you will. Happiness like life itself can be, can flourish only when it dies to itself. and resurrects. What advice, I know I've asked this, but I want to take another swing at it, give you another opportunity.

What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be? Do you think that when you are very old and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty that you will still find her beautiful? if so marry her. The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home about an hour after she died,

I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled suffering body. It's as beautiful as a crucifix because that body ain't going to last, but the soul is. So if you don't love her soul, but just love her body,

don't get married. Sorry. Yes. Hmm. Some stories have a great beginning and a great ending, but a lousy middle. And many movie trilogies.

Start with a good one, and then they fall down to the second one and maybe come up again in the third one. The Godfather is just the opposite. The second one is the best one. That's the only series like that. Well, life is a three-part drama. Okay.

And the beginning is beautiful, and youth is beautiful. Yeah. And death is also beautiful. Death is beautiful, okay. Yes, it is, because death is the doorway to heaven. I mean, faith sees through that dark side of the door and sees the light. And the light is blinding to ordinary reason. That's what faith means.

something that surpasses reason, something that seems to make no sense. But it does. Because we're upside down. And therefore, most of the mysteries of the faith are paradoxes because they're right side up. And they look upside down to us because we're upside down. Do you remember saying something like, you said, why do holy places always have to be dark places? What did you say there? That's the question that the protagonist, until we have faces,

asks, why must faith be so mysterious? Isn't God capable of giving us adequate, clear, correct answers to the great questions of human life, like the problem of evil? And of course he is. He could have recited to Job chapter one of the book of Job at the end when he showed up. He didn't. He said, basically, what do you know anyway? Yeah. You're not me. Look what I made. Look at nature, which is the other book I wrote, other than the Bible. I'm writing the Bible now, but Bible isn't going to talk about nature a lot.

What's it got in? It's got beasts. It's got monsters. Leviath and behemoth. I'm wild. I'm unpredictable. You just got to trust me. And your life is wild and unpredictable.

And I'm not going to explain it to you because I want you to trust me. Imagine if Romeo came to Juliet with a bunch of philosophers that explained why she was logically impelled to love him or a bunch of lawyers with a pre-nup that wouldn't be romance. No, wouldn't have done as well. It's got to be a leap in the dark.

Well, I thought that, and I wonder what you think about this, it's probably not an original thought. Most great thoughts aren't. So it probably isn't. And I thought, well, okay, I think that's right. You know, you go into a lovely little chap You don't want it bright.

You want it dark. But I think sex is like this. Of course it is. The reason we want a dark room isn't so that we can see less. It's so that we can see more. Well, that is a brilliant thought. Don't you think that's right? I think that's absolutely right.

Because actually, the more you see of the human body, the less you see sometimes. If it was under neon lights. The ugliest thing I ever saw is this x-ray of the human body that has all the body parts. People are flocking to museums to see it. Yeah. It's like you rip the skin off something. somebody. The skin is the profoundest thing in us.

It's the deepest thing in us. What I see in you right now is your beauty. The rest is all mechanism. Here, that machine that the wizard and the wizard of Oz is operating with the leverals, it's not beautiful. But what the machine generates is apparent beauty. Well, your bones and your capillaries

and all that stuff is like the machine. And the profoundest thing about you is your face. We don't fall in love with people's bodies. We fall in love with people's faces. That's right. So the surface is the deepest thing. Let's talk more about sex. You've said three wonderfully insightful and funny things about sex, which I will.

Did I really? Which I will lay out for you now, and then you can comment on them. I remember them. You said, first thing you said, which I've always repeated is the first commandment in the Bible from God to humanity is be fruitful and multiply. And by that, I do not think he meant grow pineapples and invent calculators. Yes. That's number one. Number two, you said, asking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but can we have sex in heaven?

It's like a little child asking her mother upon learning what sex is, okay, mom, but when I have sex, can I eat candy? And the mother says, that's from C.S. Lewis. Oh, is it? Yep. And then mother says, oh, darling, you won't want to. Yes. That's excellent. Yes.

And then thirdly, you said, people think the Catholic Church views sex the way airports view smoking. Namely, all right, if you have to do it, will you at least do it in there? Is that yours? No. It's just the opposite. No, but was that your saying? No, I never said that. No.

I'm pretty, well, I'll take it. I said it. All right. All right. That's a fratism. Fratism. Okay, so there's a way that this could be interpreted that could sound crass. I hope you know I don't mean it that way.

Of course. But what did you learn through the sex as a married man? That it is a kind of knowledge. In fact, the Hebrew word for knowledge is not just a euphism for sex. It means sex. Adam and Eve, Adam knew his wife Eve. The result was not a book but a baby. Yeah.

It's knowledge. The biggest thrill of sex is not simply the physical pleasure, it's the intimacy. This amazing, beautiful, and wonderful person allows me into his or her body in the most intimate possible way, a way which no one else can enter. The thrill of union, of intimacy. And I think that will be preserved in heaven. I don't think our bodies are going to use the sexual organs. in heaven, but we will have a knowledge of each other that gives us that intimacy in a transformed and perfected and more passionate way than physical sex does on earth. Do you think you'll know your wife in heaven? Absolutely.

Will you know her in a particular way? Oh, yes, of course. Not a particular way, but in the... That particularity is a good, and no good is lost in heaven. It's transformed and perfected. I see. Yes. I think the single primary cause of our cultural decline has got to be the sexual revolution because that's the most non-negotiable thing on the part of the revolutionaries.

And I think that whenever the church finds an evil, she invents a vaccine for it. And I think John Paul II's Theology of the Body is that vaccine. I think that is going to be the thing that is going to most powerfully heal society. George Weigel said that's the most important thing since the Summa Theologica. He says a theological time bomb. And people who have discovered that almost always are deeply impressed and find it. It changed their life. My wife was a missionary in Canada with a group of other young adults.

And one day she was sick and so was in this church rectory where they all lived. I guess the priest wasn't there. But anyway, she was sick and had nothing to do. And she found this collection of VHS tapes called Theology of the Body. She didn't know what that was, but she put it in. And she said she was angry. She started listening to this because she thought, why did nobody tell me? Yep.

Yep. Why was the sexual revolution so catastrophic? First of all, because sex is the most powerful passion and most difficult to stop motivator for good or evil. Secondly, because sex is the origin of life, life itself. Third, because the other side most effectively uses a sexual revolution and the destruction of traditional sexual morality, to tear down families.

And without families, no society can survive. Why is it the one, as you put it, non-negotiable? Because your idols need to be attractive. Even money, which is very attractive because it can buy everything that money can buy, and that's a lot of stuff. even money can't rival sex because people pay money for sex they don't pay sex for money

they don't pay sex how would you pay sex for money I get that you're being clever but still if somebody said if you if you promise never have sex for the rest of your life I'll give you a million dollars would you take that no you wouldn't

but only because of inflation if you said 10 million what's that joke people say money can't buy happiness but it can buy a jet ski And I've never seen anybody sad on a jet ski. Yeah. Have you given much thought to why sexual immorality and idolatry are often linked in script?

Well, of course. Everything's idolatry. Augustine makes that very clear. Every sin has a good in it that's twisted. Because evil doesn't have a substantial reality. Evil has a negative reality. Evil is the twist, not the first. not the thing.

That was his great insight that got out of manichyism. Matters not evil. Body's not evil. Sex is not evil. Everything God makes is good. So evil is the twisting of that good.

The deformation of that good. And that is the answer to your original question, which was exactly what? The seeming link between sexual immorality and idolatrate. Think of the Israel

Israelites, they make the golden calf and then they rise up and play. In seeking an evil, what you're really seeking is the good in it, the God created good in it, not the twist in it. And therefore, idolatry is the primary sin. Therefore, the first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me. So every sin is a form of idolatry. Our hearts are made for God and for what God is, so you can't be tempted by something that doesn't have any God stuff in it. It's twisted God's stuff. It's blasphemous stuff, but it's God's stuff.

Was it Chesterton who said the John who enters the whorehouse is really looking for a cathedral? Selfish question. This August, I used to take the August off of the internet. I think I told you that. And I think I'm going to do it again this year. even when I joined this group here, I told him I don't want to work in August, and they went in Luka.

So I'm working harder now to prepare August. Well, you don't have the ultimate reason for doing that. Oh, yes, you do. You live in Florida. You can surf. Uh-huh. You can't surf in Tennessee. Not well.

The waves suck. But the surfing is when it exists in August, it's... August. And I live in St. Augustine. It's brutal. Brutely hot. St. Augustine is the most beautiful city in Florida. Why do you say that?

I've been there. And the surf is good. Yeah. What did you like about it? Just the downtown area? Yeah. I agree. It's beautiful.

It's old. It's different. It's a lot of small shops. It's the opposite of Dallas. In Dallas, everything is too big. Everything in Texas is too big. I remember when I moved to, America being shocked at how big everything was, including the people.

Well, Australia is pretty big, isn't it? Australia is big, but it's not, we don't have big cars, big highways, big refrigerators, obese people, big portion sizes, everything's big, big, big, big. The apples seem genetically modified to be ginormous here. Everything's big in America, you know. The fridges. I mean, I go back to Australia and I'm shocked at how small people's fridges are, you know. Yeah, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the.

boxes. This is ridiculous. All right. My question is, what book should I read in August? Small is beautiful. What's that? By Schumacher. I have no idea about it. Oh, he became a Catholic because he was the economics chief of some sort in Great Britain. And he discovered that the papal encyclicals were the most practical way of restoring a country's economy.

Okay. And he said, well, the church is that smart about economics. It must be smart about other stuff, too. Small is beautiful. Why did you say that so quickly? Schumacher also wrote, I think, a book on Thomas Aquinas or Thomistic philosophy. Hang on, this is this the one, economics, as if people matter? Yes.

Why should I read that? Why would you say that? Because it's one of the few interesting books of economics that I've ever read. It's really bizarre that I asked you for a book for August and you gave me a book in economics. With no precursor. It was the Holy Spirit. Oh, man, don't say that.

Now I'm going to have to read it. I really want to, I think I'm, I'll, sure, I'll give it a shot, all right, but I'll be honest. Oh, I'll read it. But I really just want to read the brothers again. Yeah. This is like my fourth time. Well, then read my book on the brothers. The two greatest novels ever written, the Lord of the Rings and the Brothers Karamazov.

I agree with you. Those are the two greatest novels ever written. And I can't, depending on which one of them I'm reading, depends on which one I think is the greatest. Right. It works that way. What's your book called? Of the two greatest novels ever written. All right.

This novels. Word on Fire publishes it. Can we just do a shout out to Word on Fire? Not that they need it. They're doing excellent work. They are doing excellent work. Bishop Barron is wonderful. My editor, Brandon Vogt is wonderful.

He's terrific. He's terrific. Yep. And I'm not just saying that. Interview him sometimes. Because I have a book coming out with them. He lives in Florida. Yeah, he does.

And I would love to interview Brandon. He's a friend. and a good man. But to his credit, I think he's quite happy to be a husband and a father and to do good work behind the scenes. And I should probably take. It's not for his sake, but for the world's sake that you should interview him. Yeah, I'll tell him that. If I say Peter Crave says, yeah.

And so when he says, I don't want to, I'll say, what does that have to do with anything? Good. Good. You were a wise man, Matt. Do you have photos of your wife and you when you were young? Yes. Do you want me to send you some? I would love to.

Do you have anybody who could scan them or? Yes. In fact, my daughter's coming up and is going to scan a lot of pictures with her cell phone, which I can send. Could you please? Yes. I mean, you can send them to me or send them to Melanie. If it would be okay with you, would it be okay while we were speaking about her? Could we show the photo on public on the video?

We don't have to if that's not. I would be flattered. Yeah, that'd be beautiful, just as we spoke. I don't know how soon we could do this, but we could do it. Yeah. Give me a random memory that you have of your wife. Okay. Huh.

I gave you one. We discovered Peter Paul and Mary. That was good. That was your best date, you said. What about your honeymoon? Where did you go on your honeymoon? We went to Canada. Oh.

To Quebec. I'm sorry. That's a joke. I'm sorry. Sorry, Canadians. We stayed in that big beautiful hotel. What's the name of it? I don't know.

Where were you? Montreal or I don't know. Somewhere. And we went through Maine. Oh, Quebec City. You're in Quebec City? You mean? Quebec City, yes.

Quebec's lovely, actually. That was one of the first, that was, I think that's the first place I ever went to in North America. Isn't that wild? Quebec. I'm pretty sure. Because I went there for World Youth Day in Toronto in 2000. and we either arrived in Montreal, because we said in host terms, anyway,

I'm explaining too much, but I like Quebec. Quebec went from the most Catholic part of Canada to the most un-Catholic, ex-Catholic, and anti-part of Canada. Yeah, we have to take it back. Amazing. Yeah, my friend would even say that they would use the French word for, say, the Blessed Sacrament or Tabernacle as curse words.

That's demonic. Yeah. Well, almost the same thing that can happen in Holland. Yeah. And it's happening now in Ireland. I think the good Irish people are going to take their country back. They've got to. They've got to.

They've got to. If for no other reason, then the Catholic story is a much more beautiful and interesting story than the modern bullshit. Of course. Yeah. They're not boring. No. No, the Irish are great. There's the seed of greatness there.

Even if they're not great now, I remember speaking to an old Irish fella. and he said, well, we used to be able to, would he say, dance or play the fiddle? And if we couldn't do that, we could fight. And now they're just useless. It's what he said about the young Irish. No, Chesteran's famous right about the Irish. When God made the Irish, he must have been mad. All their wars are happy and all their songs are sad.

Oh, that's good. No, but I think we're going to see a revolution of young Irish men taking back the faith. There's a lot of goodness there. Well, God's Irish, as is proved by the fact that whenever we call him, whenever we address him personally, we use his Irish name, oh God. Jude, this is usually what happens when you and I get together. It usually devolves into terrible, terrible jokes. Yeah, I won't say that joke. I think comedian is a very high and holy calling.

I wrote a book about that one. It's a Christian philosophy of humor. Did you? It's titled is simply ha. What publisher in their right mind would allow you to name a book, Ha? St. Augustine's Press. They are no longer in business. Well, they're sort of going out of business.

What makes something funny? Unexpected incongruity. Okay. So the bride slipping on the banana peel. Exactly. Or the millionaire slipping on the banana peel. Yes. Do you remember?

You know what the funniest thing that ever happened? Uh, no. The crucifixion. Oh. God's joke on the devil. Okay. Sure. Supreme Triumph.

Ah, I have killed God. Yes, you've opened hell. Do you know that Mel Gibson is coming out with his resurrection movie? So I hear. So I hear. Wasn't that a beautiful work of art? The resurrection. The passion.

That was a miracle. That was astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. I watched it last year. I mean, this year for Lent. I was shocked at how beautiful it was. It was more than a movie. It was more like a liturgy.

I remember going into the theater to watch it, and people were there with their sodas and popcorns, and they left without touching them. Exactly, exactly. And afterwards, there was silence. You didn't hear people talking about it. Yeah, what a gift Mel Gibson has given to the world with that. Yeah.

Well, creative geniuses usually have a dark side, a problematic side. They're all a little nuts. My dad wants me to interview Mel Gibson because my dad went to high school with his first wife. That's why he wants me. He's like, yeah, make sure you bloody ask him, you know, I went to school. All right, I'll be the first thing I say if I ever get to interview Mel Gibson. How old is Mel now? I don't know.

If I had to, let's guess, and I'll look it up. Mel Gibson. I would guess that Mel Gibson... I would guess 75. Oh, wow. I was going to say 65. But I think you're probably right. Mel Gibson age.

70. Hey. All right. Exactly halfway right. What a good-looking man. Oh, yeah. Did you ever watch the... You've watched The Patriot.

Yeah. There has never been a better looking man than Mel Gibson and the Patriot. No, I think Robert Redford might qualify there. It's a bit too Not smarmy, that's the wrong word But he's a bit too class There was a ruggedness and a Oh gosh

Good looking bloke Until the passion of the Christ came out I thought a man for all season Was the greatest movie ever made But the passion is The passion, it's not one you can watch Frequently I can barely watch it every year

It's too much almost to watch Every second year And you don't have to because it burns itself into your memory. You remember the scenes. You told me of a good movie when my wife and I were driving you back to the airport. I said, I like movies with lots of dialogue.

Oh, I just thought of a show you would love. You don't have access to Netflix, do you? Yeah. Okay. Please watch this. It's a four-part British psychological drama called Adolescence. Please watch it.

All right. It's the best thing I have seen in a long time. And I hate almost everything I watch. I promise you'll love this. Every episode is filmed with one continuous take, no cuts at all. It's not like Alfred Hitchcock's rope. Remember that? No.

Well, that was shot in one continuous take, but there were a couple of cuts. There's zero cuts. It's phenomenal. Okay, that one. And then I just watched a movie on the plane the other day. One of the best movies I've ever seen and one of the worst movies I've ever seen are the only two movies that were simply dialogues, simply words between two people. Right. The critics loved my dinner with Andre.

I hated it. Yeah. I thought the philosophy was really stupid. Yeah. I know which one you're going to say. Cormac McCarthy. Oh. No, I didn't.

The Sunset Limited. Yes. You told me, that's the one you told me to watch. It's excellent. Isn't it? Cornack McCarthy. What a writer. Yeah.

Don't you think? Yeah. His, uh, what was his? Reminds me, the road. Got a dark. The road. That's. I wept up.

Haunting. Haunting. What books have you read? I don't know if this is just a weird thing of mine. I cry, not infrequently when I finish a book. The road, I was in a hotel room. It was the kind of embarrassing cry that you pray, no one will see. You know that kind of cry?

Mm-hmm. That's what I, that way. that one. Dostoevsky's short story, a gentle creature, broke my heart. Oh, I thought you were going to say the vision of an impossible man?

What's that one? Invisible man? No, not impossible. Impossible? I don't know what this is. What is it? There's something of an impossible man. Impossible man.

The dream of ridiculous man? Yeah. A ridiculous man, that's it. I started. I started a dream of a ridiculous man, yeah. This isn't the one about the, no, that's the double, the doppel ganger. That was all right.

I'll have to read that. I love Michael O'Brien. I love all his novels. One of them made me weep, and he confessed that it was his favorite, too. Strangers and Sojourners. Yeah, he's beautiful. He's a beautiful writer.

Yes, he is. But I'll be honest when I read him, and I don't mean any disrespect to him, who's clearly a genius and brilliant. Everyone should read his books. But I do often feel that I'm being preached out a little bit. His later books maybe, yeah. Like, I wish there was more kind of rank

and diversity, even into the sinfulness of the circumstances and the character. So it's like people actually grappling with the broad spectrum of reality. But sometimes I feel like it's a bit too religious. That's probably I'm going to blame myself for that interpretation, not here. I think the earlier ones are probably the best ones. Like what? Father Elijah. Yeah.

That's his first one. Hollywood came to him and offered him big bucks. No. Big bucks. I mean, he's got like nine kids. and not that big in income. Yeah. I mean, he paints icons.

And he said, well, okay, but give me the right of refusal, because if this, I realize you've got to Hollywoodize it a bit and, and. Yeah. But if it's, if it's totally unacceptable and I'd be embarrassed, I've got to say no. The screenplay, he said, was totally wrong. They did that. They got everything wrong. It was almost as bad as could be.

forget it. Forget it. What of a million dollars? God bless him. And they said, well, we like this so much that we're going to fire all those writers and we're going to get a whole new team of writers.

Whoa. And we're going to write another screenplay. And they did. And it came back to Michael. And it was worse than the first one. So he said no, so they never did it. But strangers and sojourners, you said, made you weep.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the best criterion of greatness in a work of art. Does it make you weep? Does it break you? your heart. A masterpiece has to break your heart. Yeah, why is that something something of supreme sorrow

and supreme joy both break your heart. And that's why the Lord of the Rings and the brothers Karamazov are so great. They break your heart in two different directions. I'm tempted to read something that will break your heart and my heart, but I think it might be inappropriate. Richard Feynman's love letter to his dead wife. Have you heard of that? No. Do you want me to send it to you? Or do you want to read it to you? No, send it to me. Who's Richard Feynman? He was, I think he was a physicist.

Yeah, you need to read this alone. Because if I read this, I won't be able to do it. It would be inappropriate. I'll send it to you. Oh, but I beg. Since you recommended a four-part British series to me, I'll recommend one to you. This is, oh, I think there are about 70 episodes. It's not a masterpiece, but it's utterly delightful.

All right. Doc Martin. Dock Martin? Is that a detective thing or what is that? It's a gentle British comedy about a typically weird cornwall village. I think they told me about this guy. And, uh... Dark, yeah.

Can I be honest? I think I started watching that because you told me and there was a sex scene within the first five minutes. And I went, no. There was only one sex scene in the whole of it. Okay, well, good. then maybe I'll watch it again and Martin Cloons who plays Doc Martin says that most

of the stuff on TV is trash because it's all sex and violence maybe I might be wrong okay thank you for telling me about this yeah we we just finished our family we have Frad Family movie night we call it on Fridays

and we just watched that old series monk about the neurotic detective who's a neat freak and Never heard it. Yeah. It's quite good. I wouldn't recommend it because I think it's more for... Another great BBC series is A Tale of Two Cities, the TV version.

I'm so glad you told me about this because I have felt for a couple of years now that our Lord has asked me to read that book. And I keep saying, no. God, have mercy on me a sinner. I think it's because I'm not convinced he's asking me to read it. Well, that's... That'll be... That'll also can break your heart. The book.

Yeah. I'm going to watch the series. Yeah. A tale of two cities. Is there a couple of them or is that the one? No, it's an old one. It goes back to the 20th century. BBC.

Is it, is it, is it, is it that one? Or is that something different? Let me see, I think that's different. That doesn't look familiar. No, no, that is not, that is not the one. Nope. All right. Well, I'll find it again.

If you could do one, you know, bucket lists are silly. I understand that because. the answer is I'll do what the good Lord has in mind for me and that's what's best. If I could make a movie of any book in the world, what would I want to be? That wasn't going to be my question, but that's a good one. So it's better than the question I had, so what would you? The Great Divorce.

Yeah. Mel Gibson's producer, what's his name, Enpower Films? No idea. Sent me two versions of a screenplay for The Great Divorce that he wants to do, and they're both bad. Oh, really? Why are they bad? They're all bells and whistles. they don't get Lewis's point.

I have seen the Great Divorce on stage four times in my life in four different cities by four different acting groups. Some of them using no props at all, some of them having elaborate props. Some of them, the audiences were Catholic, some of them were Protestant, some of them were varied. Every single time I have seen that put on in stage, I have seen the stop-your-breath effect. I'm very sensitive to how interested people are because my students get bored very easily and when they stop shuffling,

I know I'm making a point and when they stop breathing, I can hear that. That happens maybe once every five years. Everybody stopped breathing at a number of points in the Great Divorce when they put it on as a simple stage play because each time they didn't change it. They did word for word the whole version.

Actually, one of them was an abbreviated. version, but they didn't add stuff to it. And that's magnificently dramatic. That's got to be a great... Whereas this one that was sent to you, they changed it a lot. Yeah. There's no need. It's C.S. Lewis.

Yeah. I think movie producers are egotists. However, Martin Scorsese, who's a great movie maker, made a totally faithful version of the one about the Jesuit martyrs in Japan. Oh, yeah. Silence. What did you think of that? that. Wonderful. Movie was totally faithful to the book.

Okay, Sula, I have to ask you then, and just for those at home, maybe sum up the predicament that the priests were in, what decision they made, and whether you thought it was right or not. The good priest had to decide whether or not to publicly repudiate his faith by stomping on the crucifix. And if they did that, if he did that, then dozens of Christians who were being imprisoned and tortured would be released and if not they would be continued to torture until they died. And he did it to save them. And it's, it's to the end ambiguous as to whether this was simply a bad act or simply a good act. He leaves you to decide. And what's your decision? You cannot apostise. That's an absolute. Yeah. Yeah. And yet the temptation to is almost

unovercomable when you see these tortures. Yeah. Yeah, Aquinas in the Sumer talks about coerced acts, right? He talks about human acts and how if you sort of scratch on instinct, it's not a human act. It has to be a deliberate act. And then he talks about coerced acts. So I suppose he would clearly take your decision, your, your, your, uh, coerced, coerced acts still have more responsibility in them, but their more responsibility is, dramatically lessened by the fact that they're coerced. They're not totally coerced. I think Aquinas gives the example of throwing a fortune overboard

when you have to deliver it in order to save the lives of the sailors. Even in a society that has slavery and has put a price on every human head, if the 40 sailors would have given them only 40 million and he was carrying 300 million, should he throw up the 300 million overboard? Yeah. Yes, because human life is more important than money. I think I've asked you this question, and I think I don't like your answer, but you'd be in agreement with Janet Smith, but not other Tomists, namely, the Nazis at the door, do you lie or not?

Of course you do. Of course you do. How would you possibly say, yes, yes, my Nazis, here are the Jews, go ahead and kill them. Here's how you do it. How you justify it is questionable. Is that really a lie? You could say the same thing about the man who maybe he refuses to stomp on the crucifix. How could you justify it?

That's not a lie. That's a public apostasy. I understand it's a different action, but the weight of what is going to result because of your choice is no less intense. Can you kill a man in war? Yes. Why? Because the aggressor does not have the right to life. Can you defend yourself by self-defense, by lethal force if necessary? Yes, because he has given up the right to life by threatening yours or your children's. Which is the argument against pacifism. Yeah, you know way more than me, clearly, but I guess I would say I'm not sure if he's given up the right to life. It's just that you have a right to defend yourself. In the same way, the Nazis have given up their right to truth when they're going to use the truth to execute the Jews.

Of course you lie to them. No. Now, you can be a good philosopher and say, lying is always wrong, and this is not a lie, just as defensive warfare is not murder. Sure, sure, sure. But your point is semantics. Actually, the commandment doesn't say thou shalt not kill. Right.

God himself commands a lot of killing. Murder. That shalt not murder. Okay, well then doesn't that make your case weaker. And he doesn't say thou shalt not lie. He says thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Well, that's, yeah, that's fair.

But, I mean, I think Aquinas would disagree with you, don't you think? I think Aquinas was wrong there. Yeah. I thought Aquinas was infallible. No, that's a joke. No. He was wrong at least three things.

He misunderstood the immaculate conception. and he said lying is always wrong. I'm not sure what he meant by lying. Maybe he is right there. And he thought there were no animals in heaven because there was no need for them. Yeah. He never had a pet, I guess.

Yeah, his view of heaven, there's no plant life in heaven, or animals, I think. I don't think he says anything about plants. But almost every vision of heaven that we know from various sources have plants. It's not like the moon. It'd be weird, wouldn't it?

A resurrected body without life. And without hunting? Or without pets. Do you still have a dog? No, a cat. It's easier to take care of. Yeah. Love them both.

What do you think? Are there cats in heaven? Of course. Why not? Okay, but here's the real question. Should it be illegal for a single woman to own a cat? That's a strange question. Who would answer that question?

Yes. I just think there's a lot of strange young single women that their life would be better. There's a lot of strange single men who have dogs for different reasons. All right, so maybe we apply it equally. I would like to live in a society that's a little bit more like God in Exodus, you know? Like, all right, if your friggin ox impales this fella, you're dead. you know, so let's come up with... You'd rather live in Exodus than in the Gospels?

Well, that's unfair. God himself believes in progressive revelation. All right, okay, let's just... We don't have long together before you have to go. So I want to know, what are some pet peeves that you would like the state to execute people for, and I'm being facetious? For Bill Gates, for inventing Microsoft Word,

which is a chamber of horrors. All right, he should be executed. What about if somebody chooses? ice in front of you. I threw ice myself. I love to chew ice. I'm so sorry. You get one chance than execution. I think if your phone goes off in church more than once,

unfortunately, we have to stone you. What else? I'm a much more angry a man than you are, apparently. I've got a ton of these. If a man wears short shorts on an airplane, execute. If three women in a row give you a finger after cutting you off in traffic. Three women in a row? What does that mean? Oh, I see. Men, you can take that from.

Okay, but if three women, who gets executed, the three women or you? The three women? The third one, maybe. Okay, I was going to say, just the, okay. Women shouldn't give anybody the finger. No, should men? Yes, occasionally. I don't know if this is true or not, but apparently a woman went to confess to Padre Pio about smoking and smoking too much, perhaps.

And I think he said women who smoke are disgusting. Well, of course, I think they, I agree with him. They are disgusting, but it's not a sin. Okay, so I disagree. I think women who smoke cigars are really cool. Well, Dorothy Sayer smoked cigars. Okay. So did that Sheila, who debated C.S. Lewis and won.

What was her name? Oh, yeah. Oh, goodness. Oh, I hate that I've forgotten it. Peter Gitch's wife, Elizabeth Anselm. Yes, Elizabeth Anskone, told God, made a deal with him, that she would give up smoking if X, Y, and. happened and it did, so she took up cigars.

You know the true story about her daughter, don't you? No. When she was something like 14 or 15, she was hauled into court for protesting at an abortion clinic by walking on an illegal sidewalk or something, and the judge lectured her. You're a Catholic, are you not? Yes. And you believe everything that Jesus says, right?

Yes. well then this is a civil matter that you're on trial for and not a religious matter and your supreme authority told you give unto Caesar what belongs unto Caesar and give unto God what belongs unto God and little Miss Anscombe said the bodies of our children do not belong to Caesar very good so Anscombe taught her well yes indeed yeah thank you very much for getting on bloody airplane and flying all the way here to sit with me. What a pain in the ass that was. If I had to ride on the back of a donkey, it would be more of a pain. Yes. The seats in an airplane are quite comfortable and this was quite delightful. Thank you, Matt, for having me. God bless you. Thank you.