Pints With Aquinas - Modernism, Social Media, and Remaining Catholic w/ Brian Holdsworth

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

https://mattfradd.locals.com/support The first 50 people who become annual supporters on Locals will receive a free PWA rosary from The Catholic Woodworker. We'll email you within a couple of days with instructions. You just have to pay shipping. Advertisers: Strive21 - http://strive21.com/matt Hallow - https://hallow.com/matt  @BrianHoldsworth  http://fishersnetwork.com/ https://www.holdsworthdesign.com/  

Brian holds worth Matt for in studio. Yeah, do you remember I was trying to get you in studio like years ago? Yeah, and you actually flew to Toronto. Mm-hmm got halfway there a little more than halfway And then what happened I think it's like getting it cool This is gonna be the kind of story where the person who made the mistake is gonna be like here's all the excuses and here's Why it's happened and and and everyone's gonna be like, yeah, you just screwed up. Okay. I'm not an experienced flyer. Like I've flown here and there, but I'm not,

I'm not a, well, yeah, I'm not an experienced flyer. And I, so I landed in Toronto in the middle of a pretty crazy snowstorm that was going on. So the airport was a bit chaotic. I found my gate where I was, I went through customs and got to my gate and I was there a bit early. So I was like, okay, I've got a couple hours.

I'm gonna go find a sandwich and just put my legs up. And I'm the kind of person who doesn't board until the end. I'm not one of those people who just like stands in line. I'm like, yes, I'm getting on the plane and then sit on the plane. So I just sat there for the longest time. But what I didn't realize was that when I went to go get my sandwich and came back, the gate had changed flights.

So it was a Delta flight, and this was when you were in Georgia, to Atlanta, had changed to another Delta flight to Atlanta. And the time had changed by 10 minutes. So I was like, oh, it's just delayed or something. And the flight number was almost exactly the same except for one letter. And so I came back and I was like, Oh yeah, we're still good to go. And I just sat there waiting. And then,

so this flight gets called and I go up and they were like, you're not on this flight. I was like, what are you talking about? This is flight such and such. And they're like, no, that flight was over there. It just moved gates and they've left already. And I was like, well, can I get on this one? And they're like, no, because your baggage isn't going be on this flight we've already taken it off and you'll just you can't you can't fly with it your baggage and so I was like okay great and it's like 11 p.m. at this point and a lot of

people had been stranded because a lot of flights had been canceled because of the snowstorm so I found an uber and he took me for a big tour around Toronto and then I thought I think he was just yeah taking me for a ride like you're gonna be obviously stranded I didn't know where I was I was like take me to a hotel he's like oh I'll take you to a hotel yeah exactly so we went for our own drive he even stopped for gas I hope you didn't leave a good review uh well I I'm not in the habit of taking ubers either so this is just what it's like yeah this is I take you didn't leave a good review. Uh, well, I know I'm not in the habit of taking ubers either So this is just what it's like. Yeah, this is I take you on a tour through the city my elements Yeah things you really never wanted to see. Yeah, so then I then I went home

Oh, no that night. So I went to go retrieve my baggage After they told me I couldn't fly and my baggage doesn't come out So it did go to Atlanta after all you're kidding And so I could have probably got on that flight. But they wouldn't have let you. No, they said the only reason was because my baggage wasn't on the plane. But yeah, I see. But you couldn't have said, I don't care.

I don't know. Wow. I would have liked to have, for your insight. Yeah, that morning I was like, oh, bummer. And I had the studio space scheduled because I used to rent a studio in Georgia. So I just was in a scramble. Yeah. I felt terrible. I remember texting you being like, I'm so sorry. No, don't worry. Um,

we ended up getting Paul Thigpen on the show that day. So, yeah. Do you know who that is? The name sounds familiar. Yeah. He's a Catholic author. Okay. PhD. Um, he just wrote a book on aliens. And it was probably way better. I doubt it. Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to crap on Paul Thigben, but it would have been good to have you. You know, that's funny. I always say that, and it's an obvious point, that with the advancement of technology, there's

always a poverty that we don't see right away. Okay. All right. So one of the things that would have been nice is to not have to have a smartphone and to go to the airport. But if you had have had your smartphone and your Delta app, you probably would have got a notification telling you

that they don't feel the need to come up with older ways of communicating. And so you kind of, I don't know, did you have a smartphone? Well, the irony of that too is that I do have a smartphone, but I don't have a data plan or anything. So I'm virtually never connected

unless I'm at home, like on my wifi so I this past trip I took just to get here is my first time using like a digital boarding pass or anything like that I'm always this guy with like pieces of paper and stuff at the airport and I'm fumbling around when it comes time to board. A couple of Augusts ago when I gave up the internet I was traveling and so just had the ticket and it's weird when you're stuck in an airport without the internet you realize just how boring it is right and but I looked at the flight time instead of the boarding time so I missed my flight okay yeah yeah that occurred to me when I was sitting on the plane and there's the

screens and people are plugged into the screens everybody has a phone they all have their their internet access. I didn't have internet access and my plan was to read this trip. Yeah. Yeah. On the plane anyways. And I'm also the kind of person who like I always got a window seat and I, I can't not just stare at the window the whole time. Like you'd like to do that. Oh yeah. Okay. I mean it's an incredible, it's a miraculous view. Like when you climb to a mountain top, if you, if you live somewhere where you have the benefit of mountains that it's an incredible it's a miraculous view like when you climb to a mountaintop if you if you live somewhere

Where you have the benefit of mountains? It's like You want to stand there and soak that in I mean that's like four hours on an airplane of just constant Changing landscape for miles and miles and miles and I can't not just stare. That's an admirable view I wish I held it. Okay, but I just Pull the window down and get work done. Well, fair enough. Maybe that's because of how little you've flown though. Maybe there's still the wonder involved with flying. Yeah. I have a tough time working and being focused in an environment like that though. When there's people around, there's lots going on. The screens aren't helpful. No. Yeah. I often find myself continually looking

and I don't mean to, it's just a great... At screens. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's another thing too. The guy beside me was watching a movie I've never seen before, but I remember at one time, so I'm, I'm the kind of person who reads a page and then puts it down and goes, wow, I have to process that. Right. So at one time I was just sort of staring around and the next thing I see is someone get their head blown off on his screen. And I'm like, they're totally kids who just saw that dude. And then someone else was watching a horror movie when I went to the bathroom.

I'm sitting there thinking like, how? We hate children. Yeah. I don't see any other way around it. If Delta plays porn on their videos, which they do because porn is infiltrated. Most modern entertainment, a lot of modern entertainment. I didn't know that. Well, just like that they do like just explicit sexual scenes, right?

And they do not edit it. Yeah. And so do not edit it. Yeah. And so now that is grooming, that's wicked, that's strapping a child into a seat and letting them see porn. Yeah. I don't see any other way around it, but you hate children. Yeah. I'm saying it aggressively, but I don't think I'm saying it aggressively.

Or out of neglect, we end up treating them contemptuously. Like I think of even just the parents that I saw on planes with their kids Who you know their kids would be they need something and forgive me like again? I'm a bit of a nervous flyer I think it's a crazy thing that we put ourselves in these explosive tin cans and Rocket ourselves through through aerospace And as a kid I mean I would want to be attentive to my kids and be like, are you okay with what's going on right now, right? Cause all these parents are just sort of like, what, what?

And it's like, well, we ourselves are so committed to our distractions that we can't be bothered to show any concern for their actual needs or wellbeing. It seems a lot of the time. Like I don't think most people would say, yeah, it's a good thing my kid has a cell phone. But if I don't give him a cell phone, then I have to get off of mine and pay him some actual attention, sends a quality time with him.

So it's more out of a just a fact. I think that we are too weak to walk away from our own our own distractions and our own vices. Have you done that? Have you tried to do that? And what does that attempt look like? Yeah. So it varies with what what seems to work and then what doesn't. We should point out that you look like? Yeah. So it varies with what seems to work and then what doesn't. We should point out that you're a web developer,

you run a YouTube channel. Yeah. There have been moments where I have thought to myself, I would abandon it all if it wasn't for my job. But I just don't know how to find the boundaries of it as a result of that. But, so at home, we have, like we try to live a pretty scheduled life, like a bit of a result of that. But so at home we have like we try to live a pretty

scheduled life like a bit of a rule of life so we have like a timetable of things that go on and one of those things is like we've got alarm set on our phones to obviously do to pray and when it's chore time and when it's meal time and my wife has like ten more alarms than I do but one of the ones that I have is like go turn the internet off now, right? So it's like 5 PM, finish working if you can, and go turn the internet off, and spend time with your family

doing something more worthwhile. Now there's times when that doesn't work because we have to get online for something, or the kids might need it for school, or Carolyn might need it for something else. But those kinds of things are the goal. We don't have data plans for that reason, just to try and put reasonable limits on our access

to something that is obviously addictive. If you don't have a data plan, how do you make phone calls to people? Oh, well, just through, so maybe it's different in the States, but in Canada, you have data which gives you internet access and access to digitally connected apps. Oh, I see.

But then your phone and your texting is through, yeah, just like a phone connection. Yeah. So we have that, but, and then we also have parental control software on the network at our house, which just filters out the bad stuff. And you can also use it to manually filter out certain things.

So like when I'm at work, I've got it scheduled to like all social media is blocked at that time. And do you work at home or? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to tell people how we met. Okay. Cause people have probably come across me through my YouTube channel and they've come across you from your YouTube channel. Right. But we met, we started to interact, when was that? 2008?

Probably about that, yeah. Because it was shortly after I got married. Yeah, I got married in 2006. Okay. When did you get married? 2007. Beat you. And then I wanted to start an anti-porn website.

Right. And our mutual friend. Jesse. Thank you. Crowley. Yeah. Put us in touch. Right.

Yeah. And you were making these really cool looking websites at the time. Yeah. So this is back in the day of like flash, like everything was animated and, and really not user friendly and I was really good at that. But it was, it was, it was a cool website for its day and you had approached me, I think you had gotten someone who was sponsoring you through that maybe.

Yeah, someone in Ireland, the priest gave me money and I think I went to you and went, here's how much I have, let's start a. And this is back in the time where not everybody had a website or could they get a website if they wanted to and so it was really novel to have a website, let alone like a more professionally designed website. So it really. Yeah, like now if you said, I get a website if they wanted to? And so it was really novel to have a website, let alone a more professionally designed website. So it really-

Yeah, like now if you said, I have a website, no one cares. And now it's like, if I have a podcast, it's like, so does every human, it doesn't matter. Exactly, yeah. But back then, so it really lent credibility, I think, to anybody doing anything professionally for that matter. So went from being like a speaker on kind of a maybe a local circuit in Ireland or just through net ministries? Yeah, I don't know if you were traveling around much at that point

Yeah, and then we built this website and then I think that that became sort of a calling card for you That's right. It was on that topic. Who does it hurt calm right? Remember that yeah, I forgot about that. I thought we saw the porn effect. Then we it hurt.com. Right. Remember that? Yeah. I forgot about that. I thought it was still the porn effect. Then we changed it. That's right. Yeah. Okay.

To the porn effect. Yeah. I was shocked that that website existed, that URL. I was like, there's no way the porn effect sounds so cool. Right, right. So I'm a web developer by trade. I don't know if that's obvious to people that are listening to it,

but that's how Matt got in touch with me. So I built the web and designed the website. And you, so we would have meetings to talk about the website and we just talk about the problems and then we drift off to other topics and stuff, especially because we were both really into apologetics at that time. Like I was a recent convert and you were a recent revert and we were really trying to learn our faith well. And, and this is like, YouTube had only just started at that time and there

was no Catholic content on YouTube. I remember the first time I had reached out to, I think it was like St. Joseph's Communications or something like that. They used to have those CD racks at parishes and I had gotten some of those CDs and I looked in the back and I was like, I'm going to contact these guys. Where can I find more content like this? And they were like, I don't know, you can listen to Catholic radio. And I was like, I'm in Canada. We don't have any Catholic radio. And so they like, I don't know, you can listen to Catholic radio. And I was like, I'm in Canada. We don't have any Catholic radio. And so they turned me on to Cali answers, which you could just start to download. That's right. On iTunes podcasts. Yeah. So I started listening to that.

I was an addict, dude. I listened to Catholic answers every single day. I would even wait till it dropped. I get so excited. It's Pavlovian conditioning, 10 AM in the morning. Here it dropped. I get so excited. It's Pavlovian conditioning. 10 a.m. in the morning. Here it is. And of course, I think part of the reason podcasts weren't so huge is that smartphones or smart devices weren't so huge. So what do you do? Download it onto your computer and listen to it or drag it into your mp3 player and play it? Yes, that is what you did. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so and even if you did have the technology, not many people had shows to listen to. So you it was like in the time where you had to hear from your friends,

like, what do you listen to? Oh, OK, that's that's kind of interesting. You can just go out searching themes or topics. And again, no Catholic content. So Catholic answers was the only somewhat downloadable thing. Media based that that I. You know, around that same time, I don't know about you, but I got really big into Willie Mane Craig debates. There was this website.

Totally. Yeah. It was the same website. All he put together was like. And it was just hyperlinks, hyperlinks. Yes. It was like blue, like pastel blue background. Yeah, totally. And I would just download. I downloaded all of those.

I'd go on three hour walks. Yeah. Cheering, Craig. Yeah, exactly. And he had like old Fulton Sheen lectures and things on this. Right. And yeah, so you and I would just talk about I remember having conversations about who our favorite apologist was and like, hey, who did you say? Maybe that's more of a I think I probably would have said Tim Staples at this time.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the roster of people who were on like Catholic radio. And and I remember Jimmy Akin was, was around at that time. And Isn't it weird? I mean, this is a long time ago. Yeah. But just now talking about, I realized just how long ago. Right.

And then I got, and then I was in Canada and I got that call from Catholic answers and it was like, my ship had come in like this was everything. Cause I envied these folks. So now was this for you to just guest on one of their episodes or was it to go work there? Because you were a guest and you even gave me a shout out. Did I? Yeah, because I designed your website. And I remember like Carol and I were listening to the episode like, yes. Ten dollars off his website. For every mention. I was working,

and so I moved from Ireland to Canada. It was really neat, dude, how this happened. I hope I won't bore you and you can stop me as soon as I do. But I sure sure. I just felt well, it's about you, though. But I felt really convicted to do stuff in the anti-porn realm. And I remember waking up one day and I just had this epiphany. And what I'm about to say is so pathetically simple that you'll swear it's not an epiphany. I was like, I need to

make a pamphlet. Who makes pamphlets? I need to start a website and I want to record my story about how I began to break free of pornography. And I just was set on doing that. So that's kind of how it started. And then you got connected with Kathy Hansen Yeah, I think that's how so like I got to know Jason Everett I actually went to visit him while I was living in Ireland in London Okay, what was he doing there? He was giving talks Okay

I remember I was in, he always would go to adoration with his wife before they would give their next talk Yeah So I was in the adoration chapel waiting and he bare hugged me not knowing me It was honored to meet him because he was a big part of the reason I knew I had to save sexual marriage. Okay. My wife gave me a CD of his before we were even considering dating. Yeah. And I had, I thought the Catholic Church said don't save sex to marriage, but I really didn't understand why I listened to this talk. And I was a, you were a revert at this point, obviously. Yeah. So I mean mean I knew you shouldn't but it's you know Like but I don't know why you shouldn't like if you really love someone if you're if what if you're engaged

You're like all that. Yeah, so this talk really changed my life in a sense So that when my wife dated and courted and you know, we knew we had to save sexual marriage and by God's grace We did and so when I met Jason, it was a real honor to meet him. Yeah, bet. He's such a talented guy and a holy dude. Yeah. But anyway, so then what happened was- So he was working at Catholic cancers at the time?

Yes. But here's the funny bit. When I was living in Ireland, I had two options. I had a job in my hometown of South Australia, offering me aering me a job to work for who the Diocese. Yeah. And then I had net Canada offering me a job. So net Ireland and net Canada are the same organization, aren't they? Not anymore. Oh Ireland came from net Canada for those who are interested.

Net is a missionary team of people who travel the country. Yeah. Youth ministry, yeah. Youth ministry. Yeah. So it was wild because my, you know, if I went home, I would have had a larger salary. And this is when we had no money at all to speak of. So there would have been a car that came with the job, which is like, is it married at this point? Yeah. Like two years, three years. That was a big deal. And then I had net Canada and we looked into it.

And I would have like literally been beneath the poverty line by Canadian standards in living in an expensive city, living in an expensive city. That's neither of our countries. Right. And so we prayed about this. And I had this sentence that I share with my wife. I said, I don't want to wake up when I'm 30 and think, what if I had of just given it a shot?

Diocese. Yeah. That's why I went to Canada. Yeah. Because if I go to Australia, I know that people aren't flying people to give talks. I know it's a lot more limited in what you can do and how you can. And I just felt so committed to be on the missionary trail. Yeah. Speaking about porn writing, and I knew that that could happen in America So that was the reason we ended up moving to Canada Just in case there was a shot that the Lord might want to open doors

And then I thought okay, we'll go there for a year or two and then we'll go back to Australia You were going around speaking Not no, not yet. No in Ireland. I gave like one or two. By the time you're in Canada, were you mud on the speaking circuit at that point? Here's what's cool. Yes, but that wouldn't have begun to have happened. That's probably a wrong sentence. If I had went to Australia, that wouldn't have happened. So making that choice to move was really quite, I think, providential.

I remember, but we were in Canada and it was a rough time as a lot of newlyweds have a rough time where they're making no money. We couldn't afford meat. We couldn't afford beer. I remember we had anyway, it doesn't matter. But I remember sitting there we were bathing our son and I just thought well we'll give it a year and if the Lord wants to open a door, praise God, otherwise, you know, we'll move to Australia. Yeah, and so it was around that time that Catholic answers got offered a donation to bring on more chastity speakers. Okay. So Catholic answers called me, I flew down for what I thought was an interview and it kind of was, but it really was a job offer.

They were talking about vacation time and things like this. And so you had already been, you'd been a guest on their show a couple of times at this point. Yeah. But I just share that cause like, I'm sure you would agree, right? Like, I mean that was like the big leagues when you And I were on the phone. Yeah, we were fanboys Yeah Catholic apologetics back in the day so being in an interview and Jimmy Aiken walked in and started asking me questions I was such a fan

Yeah, you know how Jimmy has nuanced takes on things that you wouldn't heat little little did he know? Imagine the cool little did he know that I had listened to like hundreds of hours of his podcast. So he'd asked me a question, I knew the answer he had. So I would like steer it in that direction. Cause maybe I was convinced by that point of view. Right, yeah. Yeah, well and because of your relationship with them,

I ended up doing some web work for them. That's right. And I flew down there at one point. And I don't, you weren't there at the time. I don't think so. But I remember same thing like meeting those guys for the first time. I was there when Trent Horn came in for the first time. So first he sent a bunch of his stuff.

It was so good. And then I remember him walk around, knock it on the door. Hey there. Yeah. Not how he sounds, but, but yeah, no, thank God for the good work they,. That's not how he sounds. But yeah, no, thank God for the good work they did and are doing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Cool. Cheers. Done. So then- Sorry, could you move in and touch for me, Brian? You're like real far out. Not your find, Matt. To the mic or for the focus both

Okay, is that better? Yeah, oh Man, praise the Lord, but didn't it seem like a simpler time Didn't it feel like we're all on part of the same team Even if we were wrong to think that didn't it feel to be like an orthodox Catholic Yeah, it's like this all those cowies in theics. And that just, my gosh, so simple. Yeah. Yeah. And now people that we've known who have been high profile people and not high profile people. Who we've worked with. Yeah. Yeah. Who, who would have raised their hand like, yes, I'm an Orthodox

Catholic. I'm a faithful practicing Catholic. Have found themselves taking positions that I'm an Orthodox Catholic. I'm a faithful practicing Catholic have found themselves taking positions that I never would have imagined. I'm sure they wouldn't have imagined 10 years ago. And on both sides. Yep. Like I've seen people go down the feminist route, banning Catholicism. I've seen people go down the BLM route. Yeah. And in the beginning they're cloaking it with Catholic language. You know, like, okay, I'm trying to give you a listen here, but it seems like this is more interesting to you than your Catholicism, you know, like, okay, I'm trying to give you a listen here, but it seems like this is more interesting to you than your Catholicism, you know, and then they left.

But then you've got the people we love who would be set of accountants, whether they identify as such. It seems to be the case. Yeah. I mean, the storms and the winds and the currents of the world are such that they are constantly eroding the perimeter of what it means to be a Catholic. And I think if you start to venture out there, you will drift away with it so, so easily. If our starting point isn't our Catholic faith, and I think that intellectual tradition, if we're not really,

really well grounded and it's so easy to adopt, even if it's not the conclusions, like the kind of postmodern or modern intuitions about things where you're just, you're even bringing that to your Catholic faith and reasoning it according to those sort of patterns. And I think it very easily becomes untenable and hard to maintain. I've seen, now that I've been Catholic for almost 20 years, I've seen tragically a lot of people sort of drift off like on the big scale and just, you know, smaller, quieter, um, instances of that. It's, it's a hard thing to watch.

It's interesting how it happens. Like I'm interested in the kind of psychology behind how someone would apostatize because at one point you're telling people you have to be Catholic. And if you reject the Catholic faith, like you won't be saved. We say that kind of thing. And then 10 years later, you're now Eastern Orthodox, or you're now a set of a couple of just nothing. Yeah. I don't know if you experienced this a lot, but I don't know. There's been times where in my circle of friends, I've felt like I'm the kind of Catholic anchor. And maybe that's because, you know, I'm now sort of a high profile Catholic,

but also even just in my local community, I had been pivotal in starting things like, like, like young adult community groups and things like that. And so almost sort of like a pastoral role within my lay community of friends. And so when people start to struggle with their faith, I feel like I at times was a focal point for them to either grasp onto their faith and to hold onto it or, or to be resentful towards if they were,

if it was like a hopeless thing. So in my experience, I've, I've sat down with a lot of, not a lot, but enough people to have those conversations with them. So like, what's going on with you and where are you at with your faith? And, um, I find that the, they almost always provide intellectual objections at that point. It's like, well, it's because this doesn't make sense to me anymore. Or, and, and then you'll have those,

those conversations and you'll work through those issues. And I'm almost always really unimpressed with the objections to the point where it's like, it's not that obviously, right? It's gotta be something else. And I mean, you can't obviously paint with broad strokes across everybody, but I don't think it's typically that they've, they've done their due diligence and they've really studied the intellectual tradition here

and penetrated all the potential options. And then they've thought, and then they drift into agnosticism. It's like, well, was agnosticism so compelling to you that it had all the answers you were looking for. I don't think so. You've just fallen into the default. You've become complacent. And I think before drifting into say agnosticism or some other sect of Christianity or what have you, I think you first become just less combative with those people. And you go, you know what? Things are confusing. And who am I? I don't know.

Like I guess I'm a bit confused too. And we're all, we're all doing our best. Like you kind of, you paint the, let's say agnostic in a favorable light first, right? It seems to me that that's what I would do. And then I would fight, I would allow myself to drift. I wouldn't choose to drift. I would say something nice about the agnostic and then I would probably find myself. Could be. Yeah. And you have to, you can't discount the effects of sin.

I don't want to accuse people of, of, of that's why you left, because you, the shame of sin or something like that. But sin darkens the intellect, right? Like you've got Dostoevsky here, right? And, and, um, for anybody who's interested in reading crime and punishment and doesn't want it spoiled for you, maybe just like take a coffee break. But like in terms of the psychology of what sin can do to a person and how it can have certain effects

that they didn't even expect themselves. So like Raskolnikov, that's what you say, I think, right? So he's the main character and he thinks of himself what you say, I think, right? So he's the main character, and he thinks of himself as being like this great man, right? Like this, almost like Nietzschean, like strong man who can wield power without consequence, right? And he imagines, like he thinks of like

the Napoleonic type characters of history who have done things and haven't suffered negative ill effects of it, right? And so he keeps kind of playing with these ideas and talking himself up into doing something. And he's in isolation while he's doing it. That's the other key factor. Yeah, and poverty for that matter. So there's sort of an economic desperation in all of this. And so he comes up with a solution. And it's, I mean, it's, to most of us, we would consider it a sin or even an illegal act, but it ends up escalating

into something just really, really bad. But even still something that he probably would have imagined, you know, if I'm one of these great men, I should be able to do this. I should be able to wield this kind of power. And he can't cope with it. Like he starts to suffer like psychotic delusions and delirium.

And he passes out for long periods of time and wakes up and doesn't know where he is and just the distress of it all. And he becomes suicidal. And then there's an investigation into the crime that takes place. And he ends up having these little jostling matches with one of the investigators. And he's having an internal dialogue the entire time thinking about, oh, I'm smarter than this guy. And oh, look what he's trying to do here. And then second guessing himself and everything is just so internalized and quite, quite irrational. I can because of the effects of that sin, I think.

So sin makes you stupid and then unable to see the truth for what it is or your stupidity Yeah, yeah, and anyone who's gotten into a heated argument with their spouse knows how quickly your mind can become clouded sure Okay, I've been in arguments with my wife. We don't argue a lot, but the times we argue I'll say things. I'm like, why would I say that or it'll seem like I'm completely right and you're completely wrong and even intellectually I can be like that's probably not true But unwilling so it's almost like those if you've been angry ever with somebody in that way Mm-hmm. That's kind of like a little foretaste of what sin can bring about perhaps Yeah, and and in the context of marriage, I think pretty much every couple will go through that to varying degrees just depending on the The the scale of your passions. Um,

some couples are a little bit more out there than others, but my wife and I are quite reserved people for the most part, but we've had pretty seriously escalated conversations and, and said things that we don't mean. And we're at a certain point, you just start fighting about a position that you don't even know what you're fighting about is you're just defending yourself at a certain point, right? And then I think the, you just start fighting about a position that you don't even know what you're fighting about is you're just defending yourself at a certain point. Right. And then I think the real test of a person's goodwill and,

and the quality of their marriage or the, the endurance of their marriages, what's the aftermath of that look like? What, what did they do in response? Because whoever won the fight at that point becomes really irrelevant because you often don't even know what the spark was that started it. But now it's the point where you come back to the table and say, ah, I'm, I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry. And I love you. And, and that's, that's the thing you weren't willing to do when the fight started. You were holding your ground. You were like, no, she's wrong. Right. Or he's wrong. And, and then you eventually have to come to the point if you're going to get

over this, where you do the thing you should have done in the beginning and just been like, yeah, you're right. I'm, I'm an idiot. I'm wrong. I shouldn't have done that. And I'm sorry. And then if they're a person of goodwill, they should do the same thing. But I think I liked what you said earlier about people often giving intellectual reasons that don't seem that compelling and probably wouldn't have compelled them a few years back. Right? So it might be something else going on, but to me, like,

I like to think of it as like there's a lens through which we look upon the world. Right. And sometimes that lens no longer works. It feels that way. Yeah. I forget the objectivity. You're looking at things and it makes sense. Like, oh yeah, this, this is it. This is, this is the solution to all of these issues. And then I think for these people, at some point it's like, this doesn't make sense of the world anymore. That's their kind of phenomenological experience. Like, this doesn't work for me anymore. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. One of the things I will often say to people is, I get that maybe you're

having an intellectual difficulty here, but, but how can you walk away from grace? Like, has grace not been obvious, the effects of grace in your life? Because it certainly has been in mind, looking at COVID, what it was like to go through COVID. And I don't know, people have had varying degrees of experience with this, but for me, I went months without receiving communion and it was obvious the effects of that. You know, or if I go through periods where I'm not praying as often as I should be,

as what I commit myself to, to a level of prayer that I want to be maintaining, the effects are obvious. And I will point that out to people and they'll be like, no, it doesn't make a difference for me. And I'm just like, how, how is that not obvious? And I think part of the problem for, for some people is that, you know, if we're talking about virtue, whether it's theological or natural, um, there's a lot of nuances in virtue. We tend, I think when it comes to ethics to be kind of big picture people, right?

Where we're thinking of like the big ideal or the big standard that I want to uphold and maybe a list of 10 commandments, but not a million commandments or not a hundred commandments or anything like that. But the problem with virtue is that it's not the big decisions you make. It's not like I'm going to be chased or I'm going to be hardworking or I'm going to be wise. It's like, okay, fine. That's a good, that's a good end to have in mind. But the means to that end is very subtle, very nuanced and very,

very hard to manage. Right? So it's the small iterative decisions that you make in the meantime. Like, look at fitness is the best proof, I think of virtue ethics, um, because it's empirically verifiable. Whereas other things that's sort of like, oh yeah, that person has good character, but you can't really measure that, right? But with fitness, it's like, I wanna be fit. I wanna be healthy.

I wanna have a six pack. I wanna get big arms. Whatever the goal here is, right? It's like, okay, that's the goal. That's the end. You can't decide that tomorrow. It's like, tomorrow I'm gonna have big biceps. No, you're not.

Tomorrow, you're gonna do three sets of bicep curls and nothing is going to change about you. And if you want to maintain that, that goal, you would then have to do it again the next day and then the next day you have to multiply that small decision a million times until it accumulates into the virtue that you want to build until you are fit. All of a sudden you just turn around and you're like, oh how'd that happen? And unfortunately vice happens the same way too, but vice happens by accident and

it's often out of neglect. Like we don't choose to be bad people, we don't choose to be greedy or lustful or wrathful or any of these kinds of things, but they creep up on us because we're neglecting something that we shouldn't be neglecting. And so these subtle things can ensnare us and entrap us. And then the next thing we know, it's like some, some, usually what happens with vices, some big consequence will pronounce itself and we'll be like, how, how did this happen? Right? Like maybe you've been growing in, in your character has been evolving in a certain way

that is unattractive to your spouse or your significant other and they're just sort of like they, they can't be around you anymore or relationships are starting to fall apart or maybe you're addicted to something. Nobody says to themselves as a life goal, five years from now, I'm going to be addicted to porn or I'm going to be addicted to drugs or alcohol or just compulsively watching TV. Real quick, sorry, what happened with my phone? Why'd you take it? I'm not logged in. You logged out of YouTube so I can't get in.

Is everything okay there? I mean the chat's being annoying. I'm just trying to... No, no, but is the stream's working? Yeah, the stream's working. Okay, fine. I just got nervous. I love this point.

Yeah. Because how many of us have said to ourselves, like, I'm going to get in shape. Well exactly. And then failed, right? Because we think of it as being maybe a three step kind of thing, but it's not, it's, it's, it's a, it's thousands of steps. And then you have to keep maintaining that until you get to a point where it just becomes second nature, where instead of like forcing yourself to get up and go to the gym, it's like, you want to go to the gym because you're now, you now have this virtue and this discipline, right?

You not only know you should have seek the good, but you want to go to the gym because you're now that you now have this virtue and this discipline Right, you not only know you should have seen the good but you want to yeah, but all upon on that journey. There's a million side Quests that you could go on that will distract you from that end goal You have to be diligent and you have to be persistent and consistent to actually get there This is why virtue and good morals isn't a consequence of your emotions, because your emotions can never give you the consistency that your intellect and your will can if they're ordered together and if they're governing your emotions simultaneously. Now,

this is stuff that none of us are exposed to in terms of even in our catechesis, even like the church doesn't teach us this thing most of the time. Like it's there in church teaching, you have to go looking for it, but you're not gonna hear this in a homily, typically at least where I live. You have to go read St. Thomas. You have to read, I mean even contemporary, somewhat contemporary writers like CS Lewis. I remember reading CS Lewis for the first time being like, oh this is old stuff, right? Like he was reading before, or he was writing before I was even born, like this is like really old fashioned stuff. Um, and he,

he talks about the Cardinal virtues. That was the first time I'd ever heard of those, like even just conceptually, let alone what they were. And then he talks about the theological virtues. And I was like, how do I learn more? Um, but ultimately for those who do want to learn more and go really deep into this stuff, I mean, this, this comes from, from Aristotle, Aristotle's virtue ethics, which the first time I read that was like, I had been exposed.

It's interesting how you get this a lot in the business world, like the motivational speaker types. Um, there was a guy, um, who was actually a pastor of an evangelical church that I used to go to, but he would talk more about this stuff cause he was just really into like the motivational speaker circuit. And he would talk about that this stuff because he was just really into like the motivational speaker circuit And he would talk about that more in his sermons. I was like, this is brilliant This is really really applicable and really good and it's in a Christian context So I kind of like that and maybe it's related to God

I don't really know but I want to be a good person and I want to be effective I want to be all these things and I remember later on I asked him I was like this is after I had been exposed to Aristotle and I had read the Nicomachean Ethics. And I was like, did you read Aristotle? Is that where you got this from? And he was like, no. And I was like, well, this is what you always used to say and this is basically the virtue ethics.

And he was like, yeah, you're right. I had no idea. So there's figments of it out there, but for the most part we don't get exposed to it, but it's like, it's life changing. You could build a really quality life on the Nika Mekian ethics without, without getting exposed to religion in the process. I mean, grace is the thing that people like me need to even make any success

or any, any inroads in, uh, in achieving virtue. But, but there's, yeah, we could have, if nothing else, if we just built our society on the Nika Mekian ethics, things would be a lot better. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a lot more comprehensible, I think, than people think. Oh yeah. Aristotle, it sounds scary.

It's brilliant. But it's actually more relatable than modern authors. Once you get past some of the jargon, and C.S. Lewis especially, I'm embarrassed to say that when I first picked up C.S. Lewis a few years after my conversion, I found it really hard. So did I. Yeah. But I worked through it. And not his academic Lewis a few years after my conversion, I found it really hard. So did I. Yeah. But I worked through it.

And not his academic stuff, but like mere Christianity, I found hard. Same. And I was like, what does that say about how I was raised and what I've been conditioning myself to? Well, and it's, yeah, how you were raised. Yeah. I mean, it's not so much your fault. Like we went, I had graduated from high school by the time I read mere Christianity and I had no point of reference for how to think like this. I remember, and I read it the same way that I described earlier,

where I'd read a page and I'd have to put it down and be like, Whoa, I have to try and work through that. And then I'd read it again and be like, I think I get this. But the even just the breadcrumbs that I was picking up were enough where I was like, this is life changing and very, very profound. And that was my first exposure to anything philosophical. Um, and by the way, for those of you who are wanting to, to get that kind of exposure,

mere Christianity is a great book to start with because it was written to be lectures that he gave to the CBC or the BBC for radio. So like a mass audience, which just shows the level of sophistication of people back of his 40s, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it's a, it's a great introduction to sort of philosophical thinking. And then you can kind of graduate onto his other books. Um, he's, he's yeah, I would recommend him to anybody who wants to. This is probably an unfair question because it's putting you on the spot, but I really like what you had to say about, we often struggle to choose virtue and if we do have to choose it incrementally, but with vice, we don't often intentionally choose it. Or if we do intentionally choose it, we're choosing it as something that appears to be good, even though it's not.

But that we often get into it. We get distracted and we drift. Yeah. So I'm going to ask you an unfair question. Cause I have, have you, what, where in your life have you maybe experienced that? I mean, what are my vices? Well, I guess what I'm asking is, you know, in you, because I mean, I guess we get all point to obvious things when we were teenagers, where you just drift. Right. And then as you say, something wakes you up, you're like, I don't want to be this kind of person. And it's not until you hit that point. I'll let you think about that. Well, I tell you this, I was talking to my wife last night.

We were talking about how horrific it was that parents thought it was OK to let their children watch Friends. Oh, yeah. A show about stupid men and free whore women. Yes. No, is that not it? Well, so in talking about the things that are also really funny. Right. Sure. So you've got the free whore women and the stupid men. Yeah. Who are really funny. Yeah. And then you find yourself laughing. Exactly. Very attractive.

Living in big apartments. Laughing at sin. Yes. And you can't take sin seriously while you're laughing at it. No. Yeah. Whether it's Friends or Seinfeld was one of my favorite shows at the time. It's hilarious. Yeah. And I love his stand-up comedy still to this day. Is it not wicked? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People get upset when I say things like that

I'm afraid that we we see st. Paul, right? And he says let there not be a hint of impurity among you and we're like just calm down Like I know how to watch Seinfeld. Calm down scripture. Yeah, don't get carried away I know how to watch Seinfeld without being led into this way of thinking like I I'm somehow different, right? So I guess I don't say that to Kinead, anyone but myself, that I feel that in me. It's like, well, I don't want to be like a boorish prude. But you're like, well, then you've never met an interesting person, like who I imagine C.S. Lewis was, right? Or like the many people I know here in Steubenville.

They don't sit around watching sitcoms. They sit around like laughing and drinking beer and reading beautiful things and praying together and shooting and hunting like But as a teenager as a young adult, I guess I didn't realize it was possible to live a full beautiful life No subjecting myself to that. No Yeah, you take what you're used to and you you grasp it at pleasures and happiness and and you don't really try to connect You know those dots like what is true happiness? What is blessedness? Like these are just things that don't occur to you

because nobody's really bothered to introduce those concepts to you, at least the way that I was raised, right? So my parents didn't have any exposure to philosophy or to ethics or dialectic or religion or anything like that. And so they couldn't give that to me. And for the most part, my cultural upbringing was pop culture and TV. We just watched a ton of TV. My parents were...

Do you mind if I ask how old you are? I'm wondering if we were watching the same shows. Forty one. Yeah, I'm 40. So, yeah, we probably were. Because American culture went to Canada and Australia pretty much immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and my parents were split up. And so my mom was working and she didn't get home until like six o'clock

And it's like what what's a 13 year old boy gonna do when he gets home? He's gonna play video games He's gonna watch TV. He's gonna eat junk food And he's not gonna think anything of it at least by the time I started taking Morality and my faith seriously, I was still doing those things But I was kind of putting guardrails around them sort of, like if there was a crude joke or a scene on TV, I'd be like, Oh, maybe I should. How bad is this? These people clearly don't know that. Sure. Sure. I'm watching it.

And then I'd laugh at the next joke, right? Like, Oh, that one's okay though. Yeah. We'll stick around. Right. But at least there's something in your conscience and you're not just giving yourself into it. You're not endorsing it and you're not, um, you're not accepting giving yourself into it. You're not endorsing it and you're not, um, you're not accepting the invitation fully. Well, I think, I mean, when I became a Christian, when I accepted my Christian faith at the age of 17, there was horrendous American pie movies.

And I remember thinking I shouldn't watch this, but not being able, I mean, I was able, but I chose not to not being able to withstand the pressure. All of my friends are watching it like this is, you know, right. And if a priest had had the courage to say, this is completely unacceptable, I don't, I would have hated him for it. Yeah. I mean, you would have resented. You talk about being a Catholic who was raised, you went to mass growing up and then you had your reversion where you were taking yourself more seriously and you still were left with the question. I think sex before marriage isn't quite right.

I remember saying after my conversion to a male friend of mine who was practicing homosexuality, right? And he confided in me that he was struggling with this. That was like, well, if the church told me that homosexuality is a sin, I'd just tell the church like, you're wrong. That was my opinion at the age of. That was your opinion. That was my opinion like a year or two after my conversion. But of course it was. Like you don't want to let yourself off the hook, but you also want to be like, okay, well how would someone ever come to hold that kind of view? Well, how about being propagandized, if that's a word. Right. Like vogue and cause. I don't know that I've read those things, but for women, 17, that's all religious feminist

propaganda. It's as I'm going to shut up, but it's, it's as religious as like a track on certain racism. I mean, you think about gender theory to say I was born in the wrong body. How is that not a spiritual statement? That's not a scientific statement by any stretch. It's not a spiritual statement? That's not a scientific statement by any stretch. It's not a rational statement. It's a mere assertion and you're talking about... so what is... you're talking about your body and you're

making it distinct from whatever you mean by I, your soul, I guess. So there's immediately... you're now a dualist distinguishing these two things. Okay, fine. If you're a dualist, okay, if we live in a liberal democracy and people are allowed to think and believe whatever they want, including about themselves, okay that's fine. But that's the creed that is now being taught in schools and we're not allowed, like if we went all into criticizing that, if we just took that apart viciously on YouTube, your channel would face consequences. My channel would probably face consequences. That's the religion of the world we live in. And it's not rational, it's not scientific, it's not anything else. It is a religion.

Talking about the propaganda though, the nature of propaganda too isn't such that it's like you, there's the Nick and McKean ethics, but we were given the alternative like Nietzsche or something like that. No we weren't. We weren't given anything. We weren't exposed to any sort of like really profound critical thinking. We were just inundated with noise and sensual experiences through rich media to the point where it, you can't help but be transformed by that. If you marinate in barbecue sauce all day long, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you try to wash that off, you're going to smell like barbecue sauce, right?

So it's the same thing with how it affects our minds. And this is something that is just so frustrating about being in the Catholic Church is that we don't seem to appreciate this. This is what culture is. Culture is the manifestation of creed. Culture is how it gets expressed and how it reaffirms that creed and supports it and buttresses it, right? It creates affections for that creed, right? So if I don't know what the creed is and I'm just getting inundated by the culture,

without even knowing it, it's gonna build my affection for that creed. And if I'm just getting inundated by the culture without even knowing it, it's going to build my affection for that creed. And if I'm not trained in philosophy, if I don't know what sophistry is and I don't know what to look out for, then I'm just going to fall prey to it because it's very persuasive, obviously, right? Okay, so that's what the culture is doing. The culture is leading us toward a particular creed that we don't really understand, we don't even know is embedded within there, and it's just having its effect on us. But simultaneously, the church isn't asserting its own culture. We basically, we stripped our sanctuaries. We took our culture, we took our music, our architecture, our art, and our liturgy. And we just like went all out minimalism

in an age of modernism, which is what modernism was all about, was like form follows function. Ornamentation, no, that's silly. We don't need any of that stuff. So what we're left with is basically just the creed and a very minimalist expression of that creed. That's not gonna build affection for anyone.

And that's what you need culture to do. You need culture and creed to be fueling each other and building each other up. And that's how it gets inherited from one generation to the next is that you kids, you're not going to take them through the summa, right? But you are going to just immerse them in culture so that it becomes second nature to them and so that they have this affection for this creed that they don't really necessarily understand. That by the time they're old enough to start to understand it, they'll want to, because they just love it, right? I remember the first, after we started going to Latin Mass,

because it's a fairly barren landscape of liturgy where I live. I hear about these great novus ordo masses down here in the United States where there's lots of, lots of cultural elements, right? It's a great expression of our faith. But where I live, it's like, it's the breaking bread variety and it's not even breaking bread up to like current breaking bread. It's like 1980s breaking bread. Like we haven't even got the new subscription yet. And it's all boomers leading all the way. And God bless the boomers. I love them but their cultural instincts aren't great. So we started going to Latin Mass and shortly after going, so we'd gone for maybe a month, I remember we're driving there and we've got all the kids packed in our big Catholic sized van and I was afraid to

ask them this question because I thought I knew what the answer was gonna be. I was like, hey, so we've been going to this Latin Mass for a little while. Do you guys wanna keep going to this, or do you wanna go back to our old parish? And they like triumphantly, like, cheering fists in the air, Latin Mass, Latin Mass. And I was like, what?

Okay, cool. And then around the same time too, my fifth oldest now, who was just, he was maybe one or two at the time, he was getting really restless at one point. And so I picked him up and there was a cloud of incense just floating over us at this one point and it caught the rays of the stained glass just right.

So it was like really apparent right where we were standing. And he was down in the pew, down in the nether worlds where in the shadows where who knows what goes on down there and I picked him up into the light he's sort of like oh look then he goes prayers I was like yeah buddy that's exactly what that is right at a Nova Sordo like yeah maybe things are in the vernacular maybe they're more accessible in a lot of respects but they're not accessible to a one-year-old let alone a ten--year-old a lot of the time. The language that we use in our prayers is very high ecclesiastical language. The homilies typically, even at the best of times, aren't

relatable to most kids. But that sensory experience is intuitive to their human nature. And even if they don't understand the explicit stuff, they do understand this stuff. And it's something they can interact with and they can respond to and they can identify and they can think about afterwards and they can imagine and it fills their mind's eye. And that's the thing I realized at that point. And I didn't have any perception of this until my kids respond to it. And I was like, they get this. Like I get it because I'm thinking about it rationally, but they just get it. It just speaks to them. And we've lost that as a church. And there's no, like if to whatever degree we're engaged in culture conflict today or the

culture wars, that's a turnoff for a lot of people. But we do need to be influencing the culture if we're going to be evangelizing. But we can't do it without a culture of our own. If we're just trying to piggyback off of the existing culture, people will be like, yeah, you're just posing. You're just not the real thing, you're just trying to hijack this thing that we already have, we don't need to get it from you, and we don't really want your creed either, so, because that's just incompatible anyways. So I think if we want to be serious about evangelization, about interacting with the culture, about having those kinds of conversations, we have to have a culture of our own.

And given how true Catholics who are really serious about their faith are a shrinking group, it feels like people might need to make the decision to move to a community of like-minded Catholics in order to build that culture. Yeah. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle. And that's happening. Like you're in Catholic Mecca here, where even at the hotel... So I was boarding the elevator this morning and right outside the hotel there's a St. Teresa of Calcutta quote and I was like, where am I? This is so bizarre.

But where I live, it's like, yeah, if you want to, if you want to go to a Catholic parish where you're, the people around you are going to encourage you to do something that isn't easy when the culture around you is hostile towards it, you're not going to get it at your average, at your average parish. There's, there's going to be a very sort of lukewarm, complacent attitude. People don't really know their faith. They don't understand it. They're going to be people, people like you at the best times were like, yeah, I think sex before marriage is wrong, but I've never heard a priest say that unless I explicitly confessed it or something like that. And he was like, oh yeah,

okay, well here's something you should work on. But, but unless I understand that myself and I'm bringing that to my faith experience, it's, it's not going to be there. So, so yeah, a lot of us are retreating. I mean, that's part of the reason why I go to the Latin Mass is because there I know that I'm going to be challenged in the homily, in the liturgy. When I go to confession, it's not going to be like, it's just great you're here. Congratulations for coming. You're so, you're so good.

It's like, yeah, but can I get some penance as well here? Can I get some advice about how to correct these things? Cause I don't like just living with it. So at the Latin Mass, I'm not saying it has to be Latin Mass, but at the Latin Mass, where I go, I'm confident I will experience and receive orthodox Catholicism. And that might when my kids are getting sacramental prep, they'll receive it that way too. Usually from a priest, no less. I think serious Catholics need to find a bubble and go and live in that bubble. Yeah. Because it's just a wasteland everywhere else. Yeah. And a lot of Catholics get turned off by this kind of Benedict option type language because I don't know, because they haven't read the book. I'm convinced that's what we're definitely. Yeah. Because that's not really what that criticism of that book. I was like that. He does not read that book. No. But nonetheless, they have this impression of what that means.

It's like, we all want to build Amish communes or something like that. And it's like, no. Yes, but that's not exactly what we mean. No, but even like, look at what the apostles were doing, right? Like, they weren't just like living out in the world. They went out into the world and did missionary activity. And then they came back to their communities where they were living very insulated at the end of the day where they had reference.

And I can only speak from my experience in Stupingville because I don't live in these other wonderful Catholic towns, but that's what it's like here. You have these wonderful professors and people doing all sorts of excellent work and they're going out on mission trips and they are coming back to the place. Yeah, I mean, if I was an American

and there weren't other things anchoring me to where I was. And this is my impression of Americans is that you guys do move around a lot because there's lots of places you can go in Canada. It's like, there's not a lot of options and the options that are there are, or you have to, you have to have $2 million to buy a house or something. Let's try this. I want to ask people who are watching right now to let us know in the comments section of a great Catholic community, let us know the city,

maybe let us know the parish because they really are. It's not just student. There's tons of places popping up where people are banding together and are doing life together. I think what I found so shocking is I had this idea that if Catholics are all going to live together, it'll look weird. And I'm sure it will. It's a weird thing to do. Well, I meant weird in the bad way. And I think there are no doubt we could point to examples where things get weird for different reasons. Charismatic communities, right? Where the head is head of the community is like, apparently he is from God and tells you when you can buy a car or stuff like that happens.

But what I found when I moved here is just a lot of really normal people, messy, funny, different. It's been great. It's been so good. And then I've got my kids hearing the truth from different faces. So when my son or my daughter goes and plays at this person's house or that person's house, they stayed for the rosary. They came back late.

Well, before they played this video game, they're going to pray the Divine Mercy Chapel with these five guys before they do that. And then you have a hot tub and then do whatever the heck they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas in most places, even among again, self-identifying faithful Catholics, if someone was like, I want to organize a rosary night. Everybody be like, really? Can we just play board games or something? Right? Like that, that wouldn't be the kind of thing that a lot of people would be into. But, well, and I wouldn't really be into it either in many respects.

I think like I don't want to overstate that. Obviously, I'd love to pray the rosary as a group. But one of the things I love about Steubenville is a lot of families will pick a particular feast day and then we'll just all go over and party. Yeah. And I think sometimes you can artificially impose upon a feast, a sort of prayer to make it Catholic. But it's like, no, he said grace,

and now all of our children are fighting each other and climbing trees, and the women are encouraging each other, and the men are talking, yeah, it's beautiful. Well, and that's culture, again. It's the kind of thing that does happen organically. It's the embodiment of that creed when it's really actually being lived, as opposed to being contrived.

What's his name? Calkeating. OK, all right. So I've used this line a lot because when I read this line in his book on the current papacy, everything just crystallized for me. I didn't realize he had a book about this. Yeah, I forget. I read it many years ago now. OK, I know. But it's good. Well, I don't know if it's good, but I know this line was excellent.

He said, we used to look to Rome to clarify the confusion of our parishes. Now we look to our parishes to clarify the confusion of Rome. And so like in a day and age where everything is confusing and our creed, isn't that obvious and we certainly don't feel affection for it, as you say, because of the lack of culture, it would be really, really sweet to have clarity. Yes. And that's what we're not getting. Yeah. No, it's true. The Francis feud, why and how conservative Catholics squabble about Pope Francis by Carl Keating. Yeah. Interesting. And it's older. Yeah. It's an older book.

Interesting. 2018. 2018. Yeah. So like midway through that pontificate. Before COVID, it's like BC. So what do you do then? See, this is what's difficult. So like you and I kind of began by saying like when we kind of came back to my faith as I did, when you converted to the faith, it's like, okay, we're all on the same team here.

You know, we had this impression that we got John Paul the second, yes, champion philosopher, King Benedict theologian, doctor of the church one day, you know, love him. And then we have Francis and we desperately tried to defend everything that seemed weird because it had to be good. Like it had to be on the up and up. And this from people like us who would say to our Protestant friends, we're not saying the Pope can't say bad things. We're not saying he's impeccable.

Or even looking at the history of bad papacies. We're like, oh yeah, totally that can happen. But then as soon as we got the hint that maybe people criticized him, we all went to bat for him without taking him. That was that we were always in the habit of doing that. So I wanted to ask you your take on the modu proprio that restricted the Latin mass. Ah, have you given this a lot of thought? Would you rather not talk about it? Well, obviously, I go to the Latin mass.

You with an FSP parish. Yeah, it's not a parish. It's a chaplaincy. I'm so tempted to say things. Oh, you don't have to, I don't want to. Well, I'll give you a lay of the land. So in, in my diocese, there are, there have been parishes closing and the ones that haven't closed yet have been twinned, which means that we have more resources, at least more people and more needs than we have at least human resources in the terms of the clergy to

provide for. And also, just the attendance of these parishes is dwindling. So we can't really justify having two priests at these two different churches where there's only a hundred people coming to Mass at most, right? And they can't financially support these parishes. So we're going to twin these resources and try to pool them. And every time that that's happened, that's led to a closure of at least one of these parishes, if not both. So our Latin Mass community, we are renting one of those kinds of churches,

in which they have a single pastor who manages, who cares for two church communities that can't really sustain themselves by the looks of things at the current rate. We have two priests caring for our community because it's that large, multiple masses, very very high needs. The worst mass time is imaginable. Like most people are like, that's when my kids are napping, or that's literally when we have to have a meal.

And how are we gonna manage that? And people still come anyways. We couldn't receive communion during COVID. People still, we like doubled in size during that time. And we're renting this parish when they feel like it's okay to give us access to it, basically. And they've been very generous, don't get me wrong. But like, that's how kind of backwards we are in terms of our priorities. Here's a flourishing community,

here's a community that's growing, and your priority administratively as a diocese is to just curate the death of these two parishes when you could just give it to this parish that actually has enough people in it that there are two priests that are required for it. Instead, it's managed by this regime where there's like nobody showing up and one priest. So like we're saying to ourselves that what's happening over here is not good for the church. And of course, yeah, there's things wrong in happening over here is not good for the church. And of course, yeah, there's things wrong in currents of traditionalism that are unhealthy and that go to the excess. This is returning back to ethics. Ethics is the mean between the excess and the deficiency, right? So yeah, you can become too

excessive in some of the things that you think about your ecclesiology or even your theology, but that certainly exists on the novus orto side. It just doesn't even need to be said in terms of like, who's more divisive? The culture and the currents of Catholic culture that if you were to survey large portions of the people sampled would say, I don't agree with this, I don't agree with that, I don't practice this, I don't go to mass weekly, I don't even confess it and I don't care. That's a lot of people who show up on the odd Sunday there. On the other side, it's like how many people, there might be some divisive people there, but for the most part, they're right in line with magisterial teaching.

And we're going to say those are the divisive people who need to be marginalized and need to be suppressed because they're causing too much division in the church. It's like, I don't get the argument at all. It's not, it's not valid. So what do you personally do about it? Do you just, what can you do about it? But do you just, Well, I mean, this is another thing is that I never could have imagined as much as I loved

Benedict and John Paul II Based on Keating's formula like Yes, they we could appeal to them. We could be confident that we would always have the sound faith Revealed there and spoken about But they were always so remote from us such that like if I was having a problem in my parish or someone said something goofy in my RCIA class, which happened, I couldn't be like, well, I'm going to the boss man and see what he says. Like that's not gonna happen, right?

That remoteness is maybe a difficulty in that sense, but it should also insulate us and protect us from maybe a bad pope, right? I never could have imagined that I would have direct contact with the decision of the Bishop of Rome. And yet that has happened in this pontificate where he has legislated that my family is doing something wrong by going to the Latin Mass. And that if that legislation was followed through.

Well, to be fair, he hasn't done that. He hasn't legislated your family's doing something wrong. He's given the FSSP the ability to celebrate. Sort of, sort of. So the legislation says that, first of all, you can't host it in a parochial church. You can't be in a parish church. Even for FSSP? Well, my understanding was that they appealed to him and they were given.

Yeah, so they were given a letter and it's been a long time since I've read this letter, but the letter said something like, you're allowed to continue providing pastoral care according to your, your, your charism in keeping with Tradition and its custodians. But those things aren't compatible because a lot of them have parish churches or like in my case, we're renting from a parish church. We have posters on bulletin boards that promote what some of the events that we're doing, that's not allowed. We're not allowed to be renting, we're not allowed to be listed in sort of diocesan

directories and things like that. And of course some of this is open to interpretation, but it's very easy to interpret it that way. And I think a lot of bishops are. So canonically, we're doing something that we're continuing to do because our bishop has really stuck his neck out. I guess. The, at the very least, it would seem that someone with eyes both open would assume that he is at best being tolerated. You and your family are being tolerated. Sure. Certainly not encouraged. Yeah. With a certain measure of hostility as well. You do kind of get the sense that if some of these

people in leadership were told about this family called the Holdsworths and they go to this thing and you wouldn't be looked upon with great favour. Yeah. Supposedly there was a survey that went up prior to the moda proprio in which bishops were surveyed to, how is the Latin Mass working in your dioceses, creating problems? And according to certain reports, the surveys came back very favorable to the Latin Mass. So I don't think on the ground at the local level, it's a lot of bishops saying, oh, it's that Holdsworth family. Like, they're a problem in my diocese.

I mean, maybe that happens here and there, but I don't think that that's really for the most part. I think it's based on, I don't know, internet gossip, that this, or just blanket ideology where some bishops are just hostile towards this thing because of what they think of it, and they want some sort of a weapon or some sort of a hammer to use against it. And I just never thought that, you know, I thought, I thought that like, if my Bishop's good, if my parish priest is good, then I'm good. But apparently, no, like on the other side of the world,

you know, the Pope could decree something and it's actually going to affect my family. And that's what happened to a lot of families. A lot of families who, this was their community, this was their culture. These were the people we got together for potluck dinners. And then we would say a rosary and kids would be climbing trees and people would be just loving each other. And now they can't do that anymore, at least not in the context of a parish. Because in our case too, we're all remote geographically to that building where it's

sort of central and we all came from all over the city. And if that gets broken up, we're not all going to end up at the same place. Like the, unless we, unless there's like a conspiracy of us where we're like, we're taking over this parish now. But if that doesn't happen, like, yeah, he broke up your, your community. The Pope broke up your community, your faithful flourishing Catholic community. That's, I don't know what to, to say about that, that, that, that would honor charity. Like it just, it's, that's a bitter pill to swallow.

And so you just remain silent about it. I think this is what seems to be the general, This is what's difficult, isn't it? Yeah, that seems to be the general, uh, mode of operation for a lot of people. Because our community has grown so big, we're certainly at the point where we should have a building of our own, because again the mass times are exhausting to make those particular mass times. So some people are coming to our pastors and saying like, what do you think about, like we could finance this thing based on our size and if we did some fundraising. And they're like, yes

that would be wonderful, but we don't want to rock the boat. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves. Because if we do, we may put targets on our backs. Like they're not explicitly saying that, but there's just sort of like a, we're talking about this in hushed tones because we just don't know if it's safe. I wanted to share with you just a, just a little bit here from Eric Yabara. He put a post up recently and I really liked it and I just wanted to share the first, let's do a couple of paragraphs. I know reading is death to YouTube videos, but I thought it was so well. Eric's in the chat.

Is he? Yeah. How amazing. I didn't do that because you're in the chat, Eric, but what's up? He says, there seems to be a sense of triumph among Catholics at the site of the church just barely preventing the gates of hell from prevailing. Folks being technically or theoretically squeezable with enough mineral oil into the orange cones of orthodoxy by way of an imagined configuration of how objective contraventions of God's law by particular persons can, in certain complex circumstances, coexist with participations in good is not grounds to claim a pastoral victory.

Imprudence can take souls to hell and take them there very quickly. I'm not sure what goes through the mind of those who are coming to the defence of those inaugurating absurd pastoral initiatives whose inception is the emotional cries of liberals and progressives while villainizing good and faithful cardinals and bishops who simply want the same faith to be unmistakably defended upheld and vigorously clear for the world to see and cherish. The sheep need food at the three inch to two foot level with water accessible at their height."

Anyway, we also need protection too. Yeah, from the wolves. Yeah, from the wolves. Yeah, yeah, that's brilliant. I can definitely relate to that. I don't, yeah, I don't know what more could be said. Maybe he's got some ideas in the chat. Yeah. Maybe he's got some ideas in the chat. Yeah but I

Very often when I do these things when I read through things think through things speak about things I Often think like am I being prudent or am I being a coward? Do you ever have that struggle when you? Try to think like I'll sometimes hear like I know Michael Vores personally, okay And we don't know each other well, but we chat occasionally and I really like him as a person. He's actually very fun and lighthearted and you wouldn't get that sense watching the vortex, but he'll talk so emphatically about things that he seems to think everyone should know, like this bishop and that thing there and this group.

And I don't want to doubt him. I just don't feel I have the same level of certainty on almost anything that people seem to talk about. And I don't know if that's because well, you should bloody well know. And it's because you're choosing not to know because it's inconvenient for you that you feel this way. Or if it's because there's just a cacophony of back and forths that I don't have time or interest in keeping up with that I feel like best to shut my mouth. I do tend to think just to use a kind of a kind of common term in the world, the culture today, just a mental health perspective.

It's kind of nice to concern myself with the things I've actually been given authority over like my wife and family and not to concern myself with things that I can't control. True. Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, this is affecting people like the disputes and the polarization that exists in the church. I mean, it's dividing even people that were knowledgeable in their faith that we have known that we've worked with, that now we can't see eye to eye on things because we're just having to adopt like these coping positions where it's like, this is the only way I can find

something that's coherent within the chaos of what's going on. I think a big part of the problem here too is that for most Catholics and for most people in general, we're conditioned to operate in a way where we're really only getting a superficial appreciation of things, of concepts, of events, of philosophies, of theologies, of church teaching. And part of the reason for that is that we live in a sea of noise. So everywhere you go, I mean, they have statistics about this that seem inflated, but they say that you see like thousands of advertisements a day, for example,

right? Um, we have notifications and, and social media distractions and, and TV and things that we feel like we ought to be doing. And then our actual responsibilities with our job and our kids and our family and all these kinds of things. At what point does the average person say to themselves, I'm going to carve out some time to understand the church's tradition on this side or the other, right? Like it's like when and how, and with no philosophical training,

you're just gonna jump into theology, like priests or people in seminary who are being trained for the priesthood don't start there. They start with philosophy, they start with terminology, they start with concepts, and then they get ready for theology under the best of circumstances. But we're conditioned to just really grasp, or just scratch the surface on everything because it's the only way you can cope with everything that's coming at you. And this is actually a strategy in advertising.

This is what branding is, right? Because they understand that they know that this is all we can do, and yet we still have to make decisions. We still have to operate based on a real lack of understanding. So we're operating usually based on a very sort of superficial view of the landscape.

So for example, there's a product out there that's just been introduced to the marketplace. Some advertisement has reached my attention. I don't know, am I gonna have the time to look at all the variables and compare this to other products that are out there? No, I don't have the time to do that. So what am I gonna make the decision based on? An impulse, like my emotion. And they know that, so what do they do with brands? So a brand is just an impression that's what a brand is basically it's the impression that you have of an organization or even another person. We do this in

like one-on-one interrelationships as well where it's like the first time I meet somebody at a dinner party or something like that it's like the conversation is a bit awkward it's like that's all I need to know about this guy, right? Maybe he's just having a bad night or maybe he's exhausted or maybe, you know, you just, you didn't find that common ground just right away, but that's what we do. And then we, that's my impression of that person

until it gets overcome by a more nuanced appreciation, which I will probably never spend the time to appreciate. So the same thing goes on with products. The same thing goes on with politics. the same thing goes on with politics, the same thing goes on with with ideology. And I would say the same thing goes on in the church where most people are just like, I don't know, I can't, I can't read encyclicals going back to the 1900s to get a sense of what modernism, what does that mean? And how do my friends said that everything that's going on today is modernism and

he called me a modernist and how do I figure this out? So all I'm left with is a pretty superficial impression. And the thing that becomes the guiding principle in that scenario is what's everybody doing? Like what are my friends adopting? And if I say something critical about maybe the synod that's going on or current events or something that they're going to be like, oh, you're an unfaithful Catholic. It's like, well, no, there's a much more nuanced position that a person can have. It is possible to be critical of the pope, of my bishop, of certain things that he's recently said, and still be a faithful Catholic.

And in some cases, it's necessary. But most people like to get to that level of nuance to appreciate that, that they just don't have the stamina, they don't have the interest, they don't have the training for it, and so they just have to go with, oh he's critical of Pope Francis, he's divisive, he's a schismatic. And that's hard to work through, I think, if you're trying to do some good in the church. Because these are the conversations we have to be having. And we're at the point where we can't be complacent anymore, which is maybe the downside of having good popes is that you always knew there was an anchor there, right? It was like, I don't,

I don't have to be the one fighting these fights. He's fighting these fights and he's doing a great job, you know? And, but now without that, that assurance, and I'm not saying like Pope Francis isn't that, maybe he is, but it's ambiguous a lot of the time. He'll say one thing one week and then something else another week, and we're like, are those compatible? I don't know. What is your position here? So now we're at the point where if we want to be Orthodox Catholics, we have to figure out what that is and live it.

I really like that point about branding. That's excellent because we also make the mistake, I would consider ourselves Catholics who are conservative, right? Who hope to live by the church's teachings and believe them and love them. But we make that mistake too, where we'll see someone who's rallying against abortion or about these Democratic candidates in the States, and that's the that's the brand. That's all we need to know. And then we are now on that guy's team. Nevermind all the other crazy stuff. He may have said, or will say he's going to be our guy now.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just tribal currents, especially with social media. I I'm starting to believe that social media is nothing more than identifying yourself. Everything we do is serving that end. Think about like the first, when Facebook first came out, it's like, what's the first thing you do? I'm going to fabricate my profile now, and not necessarily fabricate,

but I'm going to create this persona. I'm gonna create my brand so that everybody who stumbles across it, they get the right kind of impression, right? Everything else we do, sharing a link, mouthing off about something is just reinforcing this identity that we've adopted. And as we do so, there are other people who are identifying somewhere similar, oh, great, now we're a tribe and we're all identity, we're all and, and, oh, you all have Ukrainian flags on your

profile. Okay, I have a Ukrainian flag on my profile. I don't know the first thing about geopolitics or whatever, but I know that Ukraine is the good guy and Russia is the bad guy. Oh, now it's Israel and Hamas and I have to have a take. I don't know the first thing about it, but I have to have a take. And if I don't have a take, that's going to be bad too. And it's just sort of, it's, yeah, it's very, it's very vain and it's very narcissistic and it's unproductive and it just amplifies, I think, some of the worst traits that are going on in society. And I said this to you when we were getting our bagel this morning, that we live in a

day and age where we are forced to care about things. And by forced, I don't mean manipulated, as in you care about this thing, but are wrong to. I mean, you're forced to care about them in the sense that they're put in front of your face and to not care about them. Like with a microphone. What's that? Like with a microphone where it's like, now tell me what you think. Well, yeah, but I'm thinking more of the images, let's say, coming out of Israel, right? Like if you actually don't care about what you're looking at, like you actually are a bad person.

You don't care about children being killed. I don't mean that you'll be perceived as a bad person. I mean, you are, right? And so now I have to care about things that I have no control over. And while I'm caring about these things, and then I like how you put that about social media being how I continually, what, how did you say that? Reinforcing my identity. Yeah, I identify myself. But while I'm doing that, I'm ignoring my son who wants me to see how this caterpillar

is turning into a cocoon or spinning. Haven't you had that experience where you've been on something and your child asks you something and you feel the annoyance? Yes. That's horrible. Yes. But we have to claim that. We have to acknowledge that.

That experience is what taught me to turn the internet off in the evening because I didn't even realize I was doing this, but I would find myself being really irritable with my kids at certain times. And then I would notice that it would correlate to moments where I was doing this. They would be asking me a question, like, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to, and then it's a world divided.

And even when you're not looking at your phone, you've maybe tweeted that thing, and now you are playing with your kids, but now you're thinking about what people have said and what snarky thing you can, who the hell wants that? What we all want it. Yeah. That's why we're all fighting or flight depending on your temperament where it's like, you're always in it to again,

support your tribe or support your identity and about things that are in, if the, if the normal natural limitations were imposed upon us that, that we've kind of broken through through technology, if those were actually imposed upon us, we would admit, I have no idea. I don't care. And it's not that I don't care about wars that are happening, but I can't know anything about them. And to the degree where it would take me away from the thing that really is my focus. Like, subsidiarity is this concept that we have in the church where it's like, focus on the local, make governing decisions at a local level because

it's the people at the local level who are most acquainted with what's going on, right? As a leader in your family, if you're a parent, that's where your governing attention should be. And there's a lot there that you could be focusing your attention on. It's not like, oh yeah, I've got the kids fed and put to bed and there's a movie on and everything's good here. It's like, no, you could be spending a lot more time asking them questions, catechizing them, teaching them, or just spending quality time together and, and building affection within your family. But instead we're, we're debating things that are a world away from us that we don't know anything

about. David Foster Wallace said that the problem with entertainment is that it's so entertaining. And so if I want to convince you that entertainment is robbing you of something, I either have to speak- But I like it. What, you like entertainment? Well, if you want to tell me this thing is bad for me, it's like, but no. I see.

Well, if I want to convince you that it's hurting you, I have to either speak to you in a sort of high level philosophical way that if you're totally brainwashed by entertainment, you may not be open to. Right. Or I have to make what I'm saying about entertainment as entertaining as the entertainment you watch. So it feels I just I'm flirting with this idea that there has to be some kind of revolution and not a sexy large scale activist revolution, but individual families and communities retreating. Yeah. What does that look like though? I got an ideological benders as everybody knows. You throw out the computer for a month. This day I got home the other day. I gave Thursday my computer on my phone. I just had like three days reading books.

And yeah. And I had three days of texts from his wife. Do you know where Matt is? Yeah. I think that is what it looks like. Because we didn't inherit this way of life. So we're, like the oldest child I find in families is always a bit eccentric. Because they're the one who always has to kind of go out and figure things out on their own a lot of the time.

Whereas the younger siblings, they get mentorship from their older siblings. And the parents are a little more relaxed at that point. This is the experimental child who then has to go out and like flee the nest first and they're always a bit eccentric for it. We're that generation who is like, we have no idea what we're doing. I wasn't raised this way. I went to public school and secular values and everything and now I'm trying to live an orthodox Catholic life and culture that I'm reading about in books and trying to

manifest in the life of my children. It's like we have no idea what we're doing. So it's experimental, right? Maybe I do need to throw the internet away. Does that work? Oh, it kind of works and now I'm gonna recalibrate and figure that out. But whatever it is, it's a result of that. And then I look at my kids and I'm jealous for my kids because they are, they're getting it intuitively. It is second nature for them. Some people would look at this and think that this is like, your kids are too sheltered. But the other day we were driving somewhere and,

Nirvana came on the radio and I was like, Oh kids, this is, this is my childhood right here. It was like smells like teen spirit or something. And I was like, and I pointed to one of my kids, I was like, when I was your age, this was my favorite song. And they were like, literally click. Really? One of my kids reached over and she's like, that was, that was offensive. That was bad. I didn't like, I don't know what that was. How old were they who did that? So how old was the one who turned? The one who did it. She, she's 12. Yeah. Yeah. I showed my son master of puppets from Metallica. Yeah. So somebody used to love, he's like, why are they so angry? Yeah. Like, she's 12. Yeah. I showed my son Master of Puppets from Metallica. Yeah. So somebody used to love, he's like, why are they so angry?

Yeah. Because life sucks. That's why. Why aren't you angry? Get with it. We're the resistance. That's right. So they get it.

And I have hope for their generation that they will be able to answer your question better than us. We're just, we're experimenting at this point, trying to figure it out and trying to exercise prudence that we, we wasn't inculcated in us when we were at the age when we needed it. But it's got to be something we wrestle with. I find it hard to believe that we can just use entertainment in the exact same way that the world uses it. And the only difference is we don't watch porn. Like that cannot be it. Nope. And I, I think most people of goodwill have a sense of this because it's like, okay,

we're going to have a family movie night. Let's go through the IMDB top, I don't know, a hundred list. Like anything that was made post 1980, I'm going to say is some is inappropriate for kids. What does that say? Like, and if you refine your search criteria to, post 1980, I'm going to say, is inappropriate for kids. What does that say? And if you refine your search criteria too, let's say top IMDB movies from like the 90s onward, nothing there is going to be appropriate for kids.

What does that say about our culture? Like the contempt we have for children and families? I don't know if I'd say nothing. No? Have you not watched The Incredibles? Well, certainly The Odd Family movie is going to appear there. Yeah. But they're the minority by a long shot. You're exactly right.

And it doesn't take long to exhaust that list. Whereas the family is like, well, are we going to watch the same movie again? Because yeah, there's just nothing else out there. Well, what I noticed on my August fasts was that by the end of the day, I was actually hungering for entertainment. And maybe maybe in a bad way. But I'm saying it was kind of nice because we spend our days looking at screens, retweeting, texting, watching this quick video. Someone says, I got to show you this quick video and they play the quick video and you listen to this podcast.

And so maxed out that I don't know about you, but I can't sit through a movie or watch for 20 minutes. I get bored. Yeah. But when I was off the Internet, can we watch a movie? I was excited. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I get bored. Yeah. But when I was off the Internet, I can we can we watch a movie tonight? I was excited. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I would actually enjoy them. I have some friends who they watch a movie like once a year, and it's usually what's that Christmas movie? It's a wonderful life.

That's like their great movie, their tradition once a year. And they they were actually featured on like some like big family reality show. and so we said, okay Why don't you guys come over here and we'll have a watch party, right? And so they all came over and watching something on a big screen with this family and on all their kids Was like it was so stimulating for them that they were like hysterically laughing They were just this is so stimulating to them that they were like We use an analogy to food.

If I'm eating junk food all the time, then I'm eating junk food all the time. And I'm not satiated. But if I'm just eating apples and then someone gives me a carton of jelly beans. Yeah. Just like, whoa, what is that? So I, have you heard of St. Gregory the Great Academy

and St. Martin's? These are two old boys school, schools, technology free, technology in the sense of modern technology. There's one phone hooked to a wall that the boys share. They memorize poetry, read good books. They raise livestock, slaughter livestock, eat the food. Yeah. So my son went there for a year or for part of a year. Like as a boarding school.

OK. Yeah. So there's like at the time, I think it was like 50 boys in the entire school. Anyway, I was there and so I was like, hey, we're going to go over to dinner to one of the teachers. Sweet. So we went there and it's. No electricity, no running water. They have a sawdust pail they put in the toilet that gets emptied every day. The fellow who dropped me off said if this guy wasn't so grounded in his faith, he'd be Amish. Yeah. And I was like, I love this so much. Yeah. Now I don't know if I'd love it in a week, but I love it now.

And I want to I want to want to love it. You know, yeah. He built it with his sons. That's the Lord. There's a lot of Mennonite converts, it seems, coming into the church. And and we know a few of them, and they're the best kind of Catholics. I find. Because they have this sort of like instinct towards what you're describing. They don't go to that degree obviously, but if there's some sort of new thing that everybody's into, whether it be

social media or mobile phones or even TVs or whatever, like their first instinct is like, I don't need that. Well, why do I need that? But see, here's what's difficult because I used to speak on pornography a lot, way too much. And I would say to parents, um, you should probably just homeschool your kids. And I'd say it as gently as I could, you know, I remember I was actually up in Alberta, I think. And there was this big fight between Catholic schools and public schools. And they had this line, Catholic schools need public schools and public schools need Catholic schools.

I'm like, that's bullshit. Clearly. Why are we saying this? So it was always fun to get up at schools and tell parents to take their kids out of their school if they could. Right. I know it's not possible for everybody, but what am I saying? What I'm saying is if you, I would say, personally talk to parents who were

worried about technology and I said, look, you can send your kid to this school, but he will be a social leper by the time he's 10 or 12. If you don't give him technology. Oh, that's what I'm saying. Absolutely. Cause they say, well, I don't want to give him a smartphone, but that's what I'm saying. Cause there's these men and like people who are coming into the church. Fair enough. Good for them. But if you start sending your kids into a school, you cannot do that. You'll actually, you actually might end up doing irrevocable damage if you impose the

strict- Yeah, they can rebel harder. Yeah. Yeah, it can't be just one of these kinds of measures. It has to be a cohesive life given the options that are available to us. So, so, so yes, we do these things like trying to limit technology, but we also homeschool because you can't do both. I know of faithful Catholic families that have gone to my old parish. I remember when Carolyn and I first started going to the parish as young adults, it was like there were these younger families with young kids at the time who were doing what conventional wisdom told them to do in terms of raising their kids. And we thought of them as like being heroically Catholic families, right? Like these, these are the good families, right? And then we got married and had kids and our kids were little

and their kids were now like, you know, teenagers and not coming to mass anymore. I was like, what is going on? And their kids were in public schools. You can't you can't say this is your culture, go out and embrace it and fit in and do well there, but then always come back to this incompatible culture and creed and expect a teenager to be able to have the fortitude to do that. They're going to identify with their peers, that's where their social needs are,

and they're gonna resist you on anything that you're, any barrier you're putting in place of them fitting in and having those relationships. And without fail, every 10 year old, probably even younger now, has a smartphone in the schools around me. So it's like, people I know that put their kids in public schools, it's like the pressure is on

by the time they're like nine years old, 10 years old. Like, why don't I have a mobile phone? And that's just poison. You just might as well give them poison. It would be way better if they were smoking cigarettes every day. Sure. I would much prefer my kids to all be smoking cigarettes daily. 100%.

On Minecraft. That's the line we use. Cigarettes every day sure would much prefer my kids to all be smoking cigarettes daily 100% On Minecraft That's the line we use I was just banned from I was just thinking of the time I accidentally left a pipe in your room So I was clear. I went up to my son's room He lives on the top floor and Thursday was in between houses So he was staying with us for a bit and I found this tobacco pipe and I thought it was Liam's And I was like, it's kind of cool If he had a shit I was smoking I would have explained to him why that wasn't gonna happen again. Don't get me wrong I'm not encouraging my children to smoke but I think like if my bless my parents

I mean, we're all products of our time to some degree and it's I don't want to hold my parents who were raised in a specific generation to what I think I now know because bloody hell, we're all doing, hopefully, trying to do our best. It was a lot more exciting in their time too. Cigarettes? No, no, no, just the cultural change that was happening. Yes, yes. And it had a lot more promise. We didn't necessarily sense the fallout or it wasn't in our faces all the time.

But I'm just like, man, if my parents had a demonized fornication and porn, the way they demonize cigarettes, I would have had a much healthier childhood. No kidding. It was all about that was like the one thing you can't smoke. Yeah. And everybody was doing it on the slide. Like, yeah, man, I need a breath mint before I go home. Yeah.

Whereas I said to my, my 15 year old, he had a drag the other day. Yeah, sure. If you want, I hate it. Yeah. Of course you'd hate it. It's like crap. Yeah. Would you like this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure. If you want I hate it. Yeah, of course you'd hate it. Yeah, crap Yeah, would you like gross? Yeah Yeah

Yeah, that's crazy. It's weird how we come up with these bogeymen that we have to attack I don't know if that's a sign of virtue signaling either But we come up with this one. Hmm activity that we demonize sure that we aren't engaged in Yeah, and yet all of our parents smoked yeah Yeah. Yeah. My dad smoked all the time. I guess why my mom never wanted me to smoke. Jokes on her. I think I think the cigarettes thing is because I think it's still in a part of hating the poor that's in our

culture because it's the tobacco that the poor engage in. The poor did you? Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it's not sophisticated enough. What's the tobacco that the poor engage in? The poor? Did you say? Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Yeah, it's not sophisticated enough. But it's difficult, man. You don't wanna put burdens on people.

People are struggling. And I feel bad when I extol the beauty of homeschooling because I know someone out there's gonna just feel crushed. Someone who feels like this is not an option for me, dude. And I don't wanna do that to anybody. But so I can only speak from my dude. And I don't want to do that to anybody. But so I can only speak from my experience. And I would say that when we chose to homeschool, our life just got simpler because we weren't packing lunches and driving people places and doing homework

and picking things up. It was just like, what if we just, could we just be home as a family and you can wake up about nine since you like to sleep in and you'll be up a little earlier and you can get your school started and your sister will help you with the math there and mm-hmm. Oh my gosh. It's a beautiful life Easier easier in the sense of if you're lazy, this is a better option and it was just less stressful. Yeah, I love it I mean, let's bless my wife. Obviously she does the I think we do have to concede and recognize that it's, it is difficult though. Like, and I, and I, and I think of my wife, like the amount of responsibility she carries with, uh,

herself, like all day long, every day. It does depends on how you homeschool her. Yeah. We don't care that much. Well, we care. We want our kids to read, we want them to write. We want to listen to beautiful audio books at night. We want to read to them at night. Yeah. write, we want to listen to beautiful audio books at night, we want to read to them at night.

But we also want to inculcate virtue. Like I think last night we were talking about like, my kids range from like 8 to 15, 9 to 15. And what were we talking about? I think we were talking about like sodomy, not the act of sodomy, but sodomitic relationships and gay couples and things like that. You know, with charity, but with truth, like this stuff just comes up randomly.

We were driving home from divine liturgy the other day and we were talking about Protestantism and things like that. And they're all super interested and they keep asking questions and I wish they'd stop cause I don't want to have to go to detail with the nine year old, but here we go. Yeah, it's not always so it's such a formalized structured scenario where it's like, okay kids, we're doing catechism right now, or we're doing math right now. I mean, there is some of that, but like, but like, yeah, the other day the reading was, the gospel reading was Jesus was teaching in a crowd

and his mother and brothers approached the crowd and called out to him. And then the crowd said, oh, your mother and brothers are here. And he said, well, my mother and brothers and sisters are those who do the will of God. And so I, I immediately, and we, we read that as part of our prayer routine as a family in the morning. And so when I put it down, normally I would go on to reciting our prayers, but I was like, what'd you think of that kids? And they're like, that was confusing. I don't know. And I was like, okay, so there's a way to understand this. And you will likely hear if you make Protestant friends, or even if you just read things on the internet,

you will read certain interpretations of this. And those are reasonable interpretations based on this, just this particular passage out of the context of the whole tradition of the church and everything else that scripture tells us. You could say, well, yeah, obviously he had brothers and sisters, but there's also another interpretation. So it's occasions like that where, yeah, you have these really great conversations with your kids. And these questions, just to kind of clarify what I was saying, I wasn't like, all right, kids today, we're going to talk about stodemitic. It wasn't like that. What it was is the culture

pushes this stuff on our children and they ask questions about things. And then we get to talk to them about things. Yeah, that, what it was is the culture pushes this stuff on our children and they ask questions about things and then we get to talk to them about things. Yeah, that's good. How have you grown as a father? Because you tend to have a much more flagmatic temperament, it seems to me, than I do. No, my kids. You don't know. So how have you grown as a father? I would say growing myself, like working on myself

is the thing that parenthood really thrusts on you. In a way that marriage doesn't. No, but marriage does. It does in its own way. Yeah, it definitely does. But then, I mean, the whole vocation of being, being the marriage and the family vocation really is a vocation in that sense. If you cooperate with

that process, it's going to reveal to you what your weaknesses are. So such that if you are, I don't want to say scrupulous, but if you're just the kind of person who's attentive to the things that you need to be working on, it's going to be right there in your face all the time. And you go, okay, I need to work on this. I need to get better on it. And the stakes get raised. The consequences are more severe It's just me as a bachelor living on my own. It's like, oh, I'm just hurting myself and it's just a little bit, right? but if I'm hurting my kids and my wife and As I do so I'm hurting myself because I want to have a good cohesive

warm loving family dynamic Then I'm gonna want to change these things. So I'm a lot more attentive to the subtleties of my vices and my virtues and the things that I'm growing in. And there are things where I've made huge strides. And then there are other things where I just feel like I'm stuck spinning my tires in the mud, and I don't really know how.

And, you know, I think a lot of that, there are those who talk about virtue, like there are, there are, there are saints who talk about this. I'm not sure. I can't recall exactly where I've read this, but they talk about how like this has to be ingrained in them at, as children. And if it's not, it's just not going to happen. And so I'm also getting to the point where I'm started to admit to myself, like this, this occurred to me in confession recently, where I confess some things and I've confessed this a million times.

And he was just like, yeah, that's great. Keep trying. God wreck it. He knows your heart. It's like, yeah, yeah, I need to be more honest with myself and a little more okay, because I, my heart is in the right place. I really am trying to pursue these things. I just don't know how. And I can't seem to govern myself in some of these ways. Maybe I'll get there someday, but I'm not going to hate myself for it anymore. That's good. You know? that working on ourselves can be an insidious mask of self-hatred.

Like I won't be acceptable until I finally. Whereas what he says is, you know, sometimes the answer to when will I ever be free of this is never. Yeah. And once you accept never, you can just breathe and realize that this is the context in which God is going to make you a saint. Yeah, because I've never adopted that. I've always thought, well, virtue works this way and therefore it's possible. And I know how to get there. I understand it intellectually and it's just a matter of doing it. And then for some reason I can't. And then I just hate myself for that. It's like, Oh, you just failed. You should have

been able to do that. It's like, well, maybe you can't. Maybe you just, yeah. It's hard in a day and age where everybody's talking about being gentle with themselves, especially in the laxadaisy culture where everyone's going down the tube. For you to apply that approach to yourself seems like you're joining forces with the enemy. But it's not. No. You read the saints and they always say this.

St. Francis de Sales says, have patience with the whole world, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Never lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but every day begin the task anew. And we're like, yeah, I know better. I'm just going to hate myself and see if that works. Like, you've done that now. Now you're 40. So how's that going? Exactly. And that's maybe what you have to get to is that like, I've been doing this for long enough where I'm starting to admit like, yeah, I'm not making a

lot of progress here and not for lack of effort and not for lack of caring and not for lack of praying either. Like I, I bring this to prayer every day. I, I ask for the grace to help with it. And then at the end of the day, I repent of not being able to have fixed it. So what do I do with that? Yeah, I could, I could just hit myself or I could give myself some room to breathe. One thing I'm getting better at is sitting in the chaos and not leaving and not reacting negatively. That's huge

I'm not dude. You you have no idea how loud it is that my family does right? You say with me I don't believe you I've seen you I've seen your wife. I got a feeling you children So maybe we make up for how many kids you have seven praise God. That's great. Yeah, and little kids I mean the best of little kids. I mean, the best of little kids are still going to be disruptive and noisy and stuff. So, um, yeah, I'm not good at that. It's something about expectations. Whenever I have expectations about how I want this to go,

I end up feeling anxious. If it doesn't go exactly how I, it goes, I feel like upset. The other night we had a family dinner night We'd been away for a while and we really wanted to get everyone around the table like no one's going out tonight there's no extra we're just gonna hang out as a family, you know, and we had dinner that my wife made and and It was not at all idyllic the kids started arguing about something My my son knocked over a glass of wine on my daughter's white sweater. Mmm, and I was given the grace because I didn't think it through to just be like, sweet, like this is it. And this is OK. Like at one point, my son, Peter, had vacuum sealed a straw of milk,

held it up in the air and was licking it and saying, I'm a hamster. And that's beautiful. You know? But I feel like me from 20 years ago would have just lost. I would have told that I would have made this is ending now. I would have yelled I would have missed but to somehow sit in the Chaos and be like this is there's a beauty here. I'm sure yeah, I just keep looking Do you do you listen to comedians much? Mm-hmm. So one of my favorites is a guy named Brian Regan who's pretty well known and he's got this bit. I hate it when people recite comedic bits

when they're not funny, so I'm gonna butcher his bit. But maybe you'll get the substance of it and have some appreciation for it. But it's something like, he told this story of one of his kids was like flinging some spaghetti around and it's this sauce going all over the place. And he recounted how his instinct would always be to yell at them, stop doing that.

And then he realized like, what's more important? Like the joy in your heart or like the paint on the walls or something like that? The curtains are more important than the joy in your heart. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's wrong. Your kids shouldn't do that. Right.

But the sentiment is funny and there's something that's insightful. There's something really insightful about that. Yeah. So it's like, how do I just just drop my expectations? You know, I do think, too, I keep coming back to this idea. I see it in my own life that if I'm not good at something, I shy away from that thing. I think men, maybe in particular, like I don't want to I don't want to be exposed. So I don't like if you say, well, let's go, we're gonna have a game of like touch football.

I wouldn't do it because I wouldn't be good at it. And maybe because of, and maybe I also just wouldn't enjoy it. I don't know. It's probably a few reasons. Ultimate frisbee, whatever it might be. But I think a lot of people shy away from the things they know they're not good at. And so I think when we come to prayer with an expectation, like it's supposed to feel like this.

Like when I pray with my wife, it's supposed to, this is, and then it's not, and it doesn't ever eventuate like that, or it does only rarely. And so you shy away from the thing that you should be doing. I think an insight. So if we're talking about like the vice of sloth, for example, I think. There's a superficial interpretation of what's going on there that I think is really obvious to people in that, okay, there's work that I need to do. Doing that work is unpleasant. Watching Netflix is pleasant. So I do that other thing. I know

I should do this thing, but I do this. And I understand what's happening here, but I think actually what's going on a lot of the time is what you're describing. It's a fear. It's an insecurity. Like the thing that I have to do, I don't know if I can do it well. It dread. Yeah. Yeah. And so I retreat away from it into something that is soothing. I'm like, okay, yeah, this is better. Oh, but that thing still needs to be done.

And now I'm even more afraid of it. And so I retreat again. And it's sort of a fear-based thing. And if you could just admit that it doesn't have to be done at, at the caliber that maybe you're worried about and just get to work doing it and, and doing it with, with love, no matter what, what that thing is. Um, then you'd be probably far better off and recognize the fear, the motivation of fear in that don't be overcome by the fear as opposed to just

like, Oh, I just don't want to do my work. It's like, well, but why? What's what's what are the ingredients that are influencing that decision? But yeah, like personal prayer, like if I think it should feel a certain way and it doesn't, I feel like I've failed as opposed to realizing, no, no, it doesn't have to feel any way I can just do it, praying with my wife or praying with my children. Like if I have the expectation I did at the beginning of our marriage as our kids were young, that my rosary ought to look a certain way with my kids, I would find myself getting angry. Yeah.

But when I realized they're kids and it's kind of cool that Peter's okay doing the rosary if he makes himself a fort and colors while we do it, that's fine. Let's just do that. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. My introduction to Catholicism and even just Christianity, broadly speaking, was very charismatic. So I was going to lots of evangelical churches at the time when I was exploring, well, what church is for me? And then the few Catholics that I knew were charismatic Catholics. And when you would pray together, and this was my first exposure to prayer, it was like emotionally fueled and very dramatic and improvised. And people would get fired up in the process and you'd hear lots of amens and yes and uh-huh.

And so when I started trying to pray on my own, I felt like this burden of responsibility, like that's what my prayer has to look like. And if it isn't dramatic and very emotive, then I'm doing something wrong. If I'm not really connecting with Jesus at that personal level where he's really touching my heart and I'm touching his every single time, then it's not living up to the standard that it should. And if I have these experiences where it's falling short, then I'm going to be more reluctant to want to do it in the future because I'm going to feel like, Oh, I don't have it in me to do that right now.

And so the more I've started to rely on more formal and structured prayer, especially with our family, when we first started praying as a family, as the kids were old enough to be able to participate, it was more that variety. It was me improvising for like a good 15 minutes. It's like, buckle up kids, cause dad's gonna go on a prayer rant with you. And it's like, at a certain point, I was like,

oh, this is exhausting. I can't keep this new and interesting all the time. If only there was a structured prayer, maybe on beads so we could follow along. So the more we started introducing some structure to it, I remember even at one point, we just did Liturgy of the Hours with the kids. And at the end I was like, so kids, what do you like better?

And they were like that, do that more. Because they would have responses and there were things that they could do in the midst of it and we would sing some chants and do some hymns in the midst of it. And that's pretty much what it's become. There are openings for everybody to contribute something. Like, sometimes they'll say, okay, everybody, I want everybody to say something if you want. It can be a prayer of repentance. It can be a gratitude.

It can be a formal prayer if you want. And then everybody will go around and they'll do something. But other than that, it's, yeah, we're following a property. But see, that's good, though, that you include the spontaneous as well. Cause I often will be like, Oh, pray in the rosary, and I'm the father. And we, if we do intentions, it'll derail this thing quickly. Right. But no, that's, that's important to do that as well. Yeah. You asked your kids, you've, you've shared two examples where you've asked your kids,

do you like this or this? And I like that you do that, treat them seriously. And why are you asking them that if they said said they like the praise, would you perhaps? Well, because I don't want to just lead them down a road they don't want to go down without ever checking in and being like, especially something of a cultural nature. Because again, culture is supposed to draw out our affections for this thing. And I want them to have affections for their faith. I don't want their prayer experience to be like, oh, not right now, or where they'll be telling a therapist later that they were. But see, this is why I totally changed how we don't pray the rosary every night, but when we do, it's very chill, dude. Like the other night we prayed the rosary and Liam's

like, I got something to do. All right, well, stay as long as you'd like to stay. But me and your mom are sitting on these big lazy boy recliners and we're about to crack open the rosary and we'd love you to join us. Cause we think you guys are fantastic. You know, that kind of, that kind of gentleness, it's a lot more attractive than. Yeah. I think that's, that's a way to do it. It's a way to do it. Yeah. Well, it's attractive to me to do it that way. And that's,

that's something I'm trying to introduce more into our situation. But I think that there are different contexts within different families. There's different temperaments that might be at play. Pray in the way you can, not in the way you can't. So I know a family, we go to their house, they all kneel on the floor. Good for them. That's wonderful. Yeah, good for them. That's wonderful. What I know is that if I tried that it would be disastrous for me and for them Okay, so don't do that. Don't let the great be the enemy of the good kind of thing I know a family who who sings polyphony which a few times where I've been there I'm just like this is amazing. Yes, but the rest of us are just more observers We're not participating in that right and I'm like I wish I I could do that. And we do a little bit of Gregorian chants when we can. And lots of the common prayer is like, we'll chant the Ave Maria or the Paternoster and

things like that. But it's a pretty limited repertoire that we have. Whereas this other family, it's like you go there and they're singing hymns. They're singing in harmony with some of their young kids and stuff So let me ask you this question because people are going to be hearing you Talking about your lovely little family and the structure that you have and they're gonna feel like really nervous That they're screwing everything up in the same way. You might have felt when you visit a family that Right from appearance was do a pretty superior job. Maybe to what they were doing

Yeah, what advice do you give to that family? He's like I'm just because I think a poisonous question for a parent to ask themselves is am I doing enough? Because the answer that question is no no, so it's not even a helpful question. Mm-hmm In some circumstances, it might be but yes, it's a general question. Yeah, it's crippling It's a paralyze if this is a question of virtue, the virtue of your leadership and the various virtues that you exercise as a parent. So there's some advice that I really like

and this comes back to Aristotle. One is look to good examples of virtue, right? Why are you looking to them? Well, because if you don't know what exactly it looks like and finding the mean is just so fine and it's so hard to actually achieve it. Well, find somebody that you admire and do your best. But in the process, don't say to yourself, like, so let's say you, let's say I'm looking at Matt.

I'm like, Oh, I want to be like Matt. Don't do that because anything short of becoming Matt Fradd is going to, you're just going to beat yourself up for do it in the hopes of recognizing certain virtues that he has and then trying to develop those yourself. But if you're going to compare, compare yourself to yourself and look at the progress that you've achieved. Right. And look at like, this is why I'm so, I'm so convinced by Catholicism because I know the person I was before I started

to insert grace and or to, to grasp at grace in my life. And I know the person that I've become since then. And it's night and day. I do not want to be that old person that I was. But simultaneously, I could be looking at the Matt Frazer, this other friend that I have and being like, why aren't I that? And that's going to be poisonous, right? So compare yourself to yourself.

Look for good examples for the sake of trying to inspire yourself. But if you fall short, that's okay. And maybe you have certain virtues that they don't have that they could admire in you and encourage each other by that, right? That other family, when we got exposed to their prayer life, we're like, that's beautiful.

I want some of that. I don't know how to do a lot of that, but we could learn some chants. So let's do that. We're not great singers. We want some of that. I don't know how to do a lot of that, but we could we could learn some chance So let's do that We're not great singers. We're not great musicians. We're not a musical family per se Although some of our kids are really becoming more that but as parents we can't lead them down In the expressions that we want to attain to So just do your best I think think, and be humble about it.

And be gentle with yourself. Yeah. I like Jordan Peterson's iteration of don't let the great be the enemy of the good, namely what's something you could do that even you flabby, poor excuse of a human being that you are would do. I love it. Yeah. Cause you ask yourself, well, what's something we could do?

It's like, well, there's a whole host of things you could do, right? But have you met you like you're not going to do it. Yeah, so just how about this? What's something you could do that even you would do that would make your life better? Yeah when the Apostles saw Jesus retreating to the mountaintop and praying all night long like this heroic kind of piety and then coming back and they're like, can you teach us how to pray like you? He's like sure here's what you say. And he just gives him the, our father. It's like, but I, that's, that's, you're doing more than that. Right.

But no, you're, you're, you're a novice. Here's what you have. Here's, here's the thing that you can do. So do that. And for those of us that want to be heroes of the faith and, and are struggling to pray the rosary or to sing polyphony and chant and do the liturgy of the hours and all these heroic things you could be doing, maybe that's because you didn't start where Jesus told you to start. Start with the Our Father, start with a Hail Mary, start with a daily offering, an examination of conscience at the end of the day and do what you can and then once you've got that

Once that becomes second nature. Okay now you build upon it slowly and subtly If I don't wake up and pray in any way in the morning, then there's no point telling myself I need to be something much more heroic. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a break. Okay, when we get back we'll take some questions G'day everybody today I'm interviewing my mate Brian Holdsworth, but before we get into that conversation I want to let you know that I'm giving away 50 beautiful rosaries from Catholicwoodworker.com. I worked with them to create a pints with Aquinas rosary. It has a beautiful medallion of Thomas Aquinas in the middle. On one side has Thomas Aquinas, on the back it just says Nonicite Domine nothing if not you Lord and here's how you can get the rosary the first 50

people from now who become a annual local supporter will be given this rosary for free it's worth around $70 you just have to pay for shipping so starting now the first 50 people who become annual supporters will get the rosary if you sign sign up after that, you won't be able to get it obviously, so do it right now. MattFrad.locals.com. Of course we might not even get 50 people today, but you know, hope springs eternal. MattFrad.locals.com and then we will reach out to you by email. We'll just look in the back end and see who the first 50 people were after this announcement and you will get this beautiful rosary from CatholicWoodworker.com and you should really check them out as well, Catholicwoodworker.com.

Amazing Catholic dude who creates beautiful things like rosaries and prayer altars and pouches for your rosary and all sorts of things. He's a good mate and I really recommend his work, Catholicwoodworker.com. All right, here's my interview with Brian. Hello, I want to say thank you to Hello, which is the best, not just the best Catholic app on the App Store, any App Store. Here's my interview with Brian. Hello.com slash Matt, you can get the entire app for free for 90 days. That's ridiculous. After those 90 days, if you don't agree with me that it's worth the money that you're going to get charged after that monthly, which is a relatively small amount, you can just

cancel you won't be charged a cent. They have sleep stories. They have my Catholic lo-fi on there. They've just added the gospels, a dramatized version of the gospels. They have daily exegesis on mass readings which you can listen to. It is fantastic! So if you haven't done it already, hello.com slash matt, sign up over there, try it for free for three months. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called strive21.com slash matt. You go there right now, or if you text STRIVE to 66866,

we'll send you the link. It's 100% free, and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome pornography. Usually men know that porn is wrong, they don't need me or you to convince them that it's wrong. What they need is a battle plan to get out. And so I've distilled all that I've learned over the last 15 or so years as I've been talking and writing on this topic into this one course. Think of it as if you and I could have a coffee over the next 21 days and I

would kind of guide you along this journey. That's basically what this is. It's incredibly well produced. We had a whole camera crew come and film this. And I think it'll be a really a real help to you. And it's also not an isolated course that you go through on your own because literally tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course and as you go through the different videos there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive21. St's Strive21.com slash Matt, or as I say, text Strive to 66866 to get started today.

You won't regret it. Any sinner is capable of being a great sinner. The secret therefore of character development is the realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us, for good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think the people who have worked human kindness. We are back with Brian holds worth. I don't know what that was. I would return the greeting, but I'm not as melodic as you are. I'm doing this little promotion today.

I want to remind people about it. So we're doing these giveaways we have these beautiful pints with Aquinas rosaries and we're giving 50 of them away for the first 50 people who become local supporters today and I now set the beginning and so far there has been seven. So if you look rosary, isn't that cool? We had the hmm. I'm not trying to make you say you like it but that that That middle bit I kind of they we work together to fashion it Oh nice Thomas Aquinas on one side and then they said you want the pints of the finest logo in the back like no Definitely not a nice rosary

I'm returning to this concept of culture, right? It helps to have a nice rosary it didn't it makes you want to pray the rosary. This is a tactical thing Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. It also treats what you're doing with seriousness, doesn't it? Yes. Yeah, it's not trivial You know you and I have similar backgrounds a because like we're the same age close enough We kind of both came to the faith through charismatic experiences or current we were part of charismatic groups Yep charismatic type groups, whatever. Yeah. And then we both had a kind of, you know, a similar trajectory. Wouldn't you say is to what we. Yeah. And you're like, what is that?

Like, is that like, we're just really reasonable people who came to this conclusion that we both wear vests, or what's going on that's carrying us along with it? And it's probably both. It's, it's pretty easy to interpret Providence into the experiences of life. I'm going to eat this bar. Yeah, go for it. You want one? Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Let's eat into the microphone. Gross everybody out. Yeah. It's a weird thing that I met you when I was living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,

where I still live. You were in Ireland, and then you were in Ottawa, and then you were in Georgia or Texas or you've been all over the place. But it's like two very remote people with distinct lives that they can have that much in common and their lives intersect very often in unexpected ways. I never could have, even once you became more high profile with the work that you were doing, like as an apologist for Catholic Answers, I never would have imagined you doing what you're doing now

on the scale that you're doing. And I certainly wouldn't have imagined me doing anything like this because I was so glad when I heard that you started doing it. Really? Oh my gosh, cuz every time we would have phone conversations I'm like this guy's brilliant. Do you think through things really? Well, you have a great way of explaining things Yeah, really insightful. Thanks And so I was pumped when you started your your YouTube channel. Hmm. It's weird tell us about your YouTube channel, or just just having a YouTube channel and having it grow and what's that experience been like for you?

Because you seem like maybe I'm wrong, but you seem like more of a kind of I don't know if a private person, maybe that's the wrong way of putting it. But yeah, I think I am by nature. It's it's it's a blessing. I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for that. And not to mention all the other countless opportunities that it's afforded me. Simultaneously, it's a thing that I'm I've always been a bit apprehensive about and I don't really know what to do with.

So it's been a constant discernment. So the reason I started my YouTube channel was because I it was for professional reasons, because I've always had media and branding business that I've operated and a lot of my clients are Catholic. And I was getting requests from people like, do you do videography? Cause I need like a video for my website, the website that I had made for them. And I was like, well, no, it's not really, it's not really one of my skills. And I could probably learn it if I make a pretty significant investment in some equipment and learn the software, which is very similar to the software I already use.

Yeah, I could probably learn it. And so I did make that investment and spent that time doing that. But I knew that the work's not just gonna come flooding in. I need to maintain a habit of maintaining the skill set or I'm just gonna forget it. And so I was like, well, I could maybe maintain a habit of maintaining the skill set or I'm just going to forget it. And so I was like, well, you know, I could maybe start a YouTube channel just to get in the habit of making videos, right? And well, what would a YouTube channel be of? Like, what could I possibly

make videos of? And simultaneously, I was also in the habit of just writing. So like, I'd go for a run in the morning and I come back and some sort of epiphany will have occurred to me and I'll be like, I'm writing that down because I don't want to forget that because I used to get them and then I wouldn't write them down and then conversation would prompt it I'd be like oh I thought of that recently but what did I think and so I wanted to have some sort of a record of it just for personal private reasons and and so then I had this it was stockpiling as a folder of essays and I was like oh okay yeah maybe I could just monologue these.

Um, and they were about anything and everything, just whatever happened to occur to me on a particular day. And it wasn't necessarily about the faith or even related to the faith. Uh, and so that's what I started with. And then I, I realized, well, this could actually be also a proof of concept as a portfolio piece. Like I'll put as much good production value into it as I can. And then I can approach people that I know.

And there was even somebody that I did know in my diocese who was a priest and like a very good preacher and a theologian. And I was in the habit of having conversations with him, like, you should do what Word on Fire is doing. I bet there's a priest in every diocese that could, that could be their father Robert Barron at the time. Right. And you just put a camera in front of them and think of, think of how we could multiply the good that the organizations like that are doing. Right. And he, he really liked it and we'd get excited and we'd have these conversations,

but then I don't know why he would be apprehensive to actually move forward with it. So I thought, well, maybe this was the kind of thing that would just give him the encouragement to show him what this looks like and then I can also Use this to approach other potential clients and say hey like if you want to do videography I do this too. Here's an example of me just monologuing something right and then all of a sudden it it kind of took off Remember the thing that really convinced me to do this more seriously Was that someone had ripped one of my videos off my youtube channel because that's the only place I was posting them Just sort of a private YouTube channel that I wasn't really promoting Someone had grabbed one of my videos and posted it to their Facebook page. Okay, and it was like a political page

and The only reason I found out about it is because it went viral it got like a million views or something like that And I was like, are you serious? I had no frame of reference for like, why anybody would take me that seriously. And then simultaneously the experience of that many people watching you and commenting, I was like, I was completely unprepared for. But then I realized, well, okay, well, maybe, maybe there is some merit to me doing this more seriously, more intentionally. And so I did. And, and I had a few more of those kinds of like viral on a small scale videos go kind of viral. And then ever since then, I've been treating it as in, okay, God, you've,

you've encouraged me to do this, this thing I didn't really expect to be doing. How do I interpret something like this having the kind of success that it's had? And I don't want to compare myself to great YouTube channels that are out there. But for me, to have 10,000 people staring at you on a weekly basis is like, yeah, that's a big deal. So bizarre, isn't it? Yeah. YouTube is enabled.

Yeah. So, so as long as God is encouraging me in that direction and it's, it's having those kinds of effects that I'm going to continue to do it and whatever opportunities come from that, then I'll continue to do those as well. So here's a question that I often float with wrestle with. Yeah. You often see these actors or movie stars or musicians from the nineties or whatever that you and I were big into and then you see them today and they just look

exhausted and old but they're still wearing their signature hat or their this or that because that's their brand and it's really important they do that and you know you think you know you might want to retire i don't know is that an option or do we just not retire anymore? You know, and I just, I often, I, I, I think that about myself too. You know, like are you, are you tubers just planning on running this thing out as long as it goes, or should we all be like, yeah, maybe we'll wrap this up. This has been good. And it seems to me that you should be thinking that at some point, at least

having the discussion with ourselves and our loved ones, our spiritual fathers. Well, I've tried to be somewhat deliberate in what I do with this opportunity. So I've started another initiative called Fisher's Network, which... Tell me about that, because I heard you bring it up, but I didn't watch the video. So the concept of this, and this has been part of the challenge for me, is that I've had this YouTube channel and then I've also had my day job for the longest time and the two didn't really intersect very much. And so the question for me has been like,

well, okay, so how can I use my professional abilities that is more compatible with where I seem to be called to spend some more time and effort? And so this is something that has evolved as a concept and as an idea. But basically the idea behind it is, and it answers some of the questions that you were talking about earlier, but like, how do we create these bubbles or how do we create these pockets? So what the idea behind it is, is that we build up something like what I'm

calling a Catholic economy or a Catholic Commonwealth,, but at a local level. A lot of minorities do this kind of thing where they're very intentional about making sure that economic interests and economic efforts are concentrated within a community. For good reason, it's not out of greed or something necessarily. The Jews are fantastic at that. The Mormons are fantastic at that, it seems. Yeah. And the reason that they're conscientious about this is because they are a minority and minorities are vulnerable. And we don't seem to get that that's us too, right? Especially faithful practicing Orthodox Catholics, right? We're a minority and we're vulnerable and there's lots of people out there who are hostile towards us. And during recent events and the

various crises that we've been facing, and not just Catholics, but everybody, it was very obvious to me that that vulnerability can be exploited. So I saw people lose jobs, saw people lose homes, and the community at large just kind of helplessly watching by. Because of their faith or not necessarily? Not necessarily. Just COVID or economic factors. People who live a certain way and they live that way because it's informed by their faith

and because they're discerning people, they're not going to just immediately run out and do whatever the authorities tell them. They're going to think about it. They're going to think critically about it and say, well, maybe that doesn't work for my family necessarily. And that's the right thing to do, by the way. Again, following subsidiarity is that just because someone in Washington, D.C. or Ottawa, Canada says, here's what everybody needs to be doing, it's like, well, you know, I hear

what you're saying, but I'm going to apply that and govern the things that are local to me and apply that in a discerning way. So I saw families doing that and facing really severe consequences for it. And even just the things like Catholic businesses, like I saw people who, because of government mandates and things like that during COVID, they had to shutter their businesses. Like this thing that they had been working on their whole life.

Now they have to go work, they have to start their career over, like midway through. And again, as a community, a lot of us just watching by helplessly. And I thought, you know, if we had all the people who were like the economic leaders in a particular community, who were intentionally committed to each other's flourishing, and then to the flourishing of the community, what would that do for a community? Like that would be, that would be, in terms of the some of these challenges that we're just talking about, like it would be a problem solver at the very

least. You know, if you have people who run Catholic businesses and here's other Catholics that are losing their jobs and for reasons related to their Catholic conscience, okay, well now maybe they can go work for a Catholic instead, right? But the problem is we're not organized and we're not mobilized in these ways, right? So you might get the odd Catholic employer who hears about someone in the community and then they get connected, but it's by luck and happenstance a lot of the time, right? But if we can be deliberate about forming these groups where they're networking together, they're working together, they're helping form each other professionally, personally, spiritually, and there's sort of some structure around them that's helping them in their formation to align their professional and their spiritual

lives and their ethical lives as well. And the parish is involved too. What would that do? So what we've done is we've created this program where it's a networking formula where people at a parish level who identify according to this criteria get together in small groups. They meet as a group. We're calling them crews because it's all nautically themed. They meet as crews on something like a monthly basis where they talk about their professional

context, the needs of the parish. Fishes of Men? What's the website? Fishesnetwork.com. Fishesnetwork.com. Yeah. Can you make sure that goes into this, in the underneath Thursday? And there's like a curriculum of formation

that we're curating and creating for them, so that there's certain themes that they're focusing on. We call it the crew journey, where as a crew, they're focusing on certain themes and progressing through them. And then they also meet one-on-one regularly as a sort of a journey, where as a crew, they're focusing on certain themes and progressing through them. And then they also meet one-on-one regularly as a sort of a rotation, where they're really getting to know each other personally and professionally. What's your situation?

What are some of the challenges and what are the successes? So this is something that has to happen locally. Locally, yeah. It's all focused on local. Now is this something that people in different parts of the country can start, or no? Absolutely, yeah. So what we've done is we've created the program and the app. So there's an app that manages the scheduling for you. It helps you stay connected when you're not meeting in person.

It gives you the ability to use tools like referrals, like if you want to send business referrals to each other and that kind of thing. That's fantastic. Yeah. Sounds great. And then, so the hope is again, that you have a flourishing Catholic economy at a local level. The pastor participates in this as well, ideally. So he'd be like a chaplain of a crew because he needs this formation as well, right?

He goes to seminary, he learns philosophy and theology, and then he's expected to run an organization where there's like HR, there's building management, there's fundraising and financial concerns and all of these things that he hasn't dedicated his life to learning. Well now if he has these kinds of challenges, he's got sort of a built in crew of people

that he can turn to and say, ah we've got a construction need, you're a construction company, how should we navigate this, what does this look like, what advice can you give me? And maybe even the parish will hire him to do it, right? Because his interests are aligned with the parish as opposed to just rolling the dice

and going out into Google and finding a renovation person or something like that. I suppose the proof will be in the pudding, right? It sounds great. How is it shaken out? We just started, so we just launched last Friday. It's been this theoretical concept for the longest time for me and my partners where we're like,

it makes sense to us. Um, will it make sense to people when we put it out there and at every phase of where we've kind of been testing it, like first with a pilot group and then, and then doing market research and, and now actually putting it out there publicly so far the response has been really, really positive. Like people are really, I don't know, it could be that they don't understand what it is and they're just Excited about an initiative, but so far. Yeah, it's been really well. I look forward to hearing how it goes

Thanks, because I I don't mean to be cynical it sounds amazing But you know you hear about these like small group ideas and there's a guy that's another thing I got a I gotta go another family. Yeah. Yeah So see that so one of the things we're hoping for is that as people get encouraged by the idea and the concept that give us your feedback and help us shape where this goes, it's in its infancy, right? Like again, it's been theoretical for us.

We've been developing the concept and now it's out there. We're gonna see how it goes, but we're open to adapting and to making this thing what it can be. And then before we get into questions from our local supporters, big shout out for your amazing website building work. open to adapting and to making this thing what it can be. And then before we get into questions from our local supporters, big shout out for your amazing website building work. What is, is it HoltzworthDesign.com?

Yeah, Holtzworth Design. If people wanted to get you to design what, a website, an app, no. Not apps, no. Websites, branding. Branding is the thing that all of my work kind of orbits around. So logo design, brand strategy, graphic design, the kind of stuff that you

and I are doing on YouTube. If there's an apostle out there that wants to be doing evangelistic efforts, I mean, that's obviously something we've had some success in. So we can help consult through that and give you the tools to get there. All right. I want to take questions from our local supporters right now. And there's quite a bit, right? There's like 34. So this is the lightning round. There is no pressure to give a thorough answer Okay, all right. The Catholic dude says how does he manage to have that great head of hair bald inquirer wants to know? genetics Kyle winnington says how have you managed to stay out of most of the online drama with a channel with a hundred thousand plus subscribers?

I've never heard of a Brian Holdsworth situation. Oh, give it time. I just don't have much of an appetite for it. I mean, Matt asked me earlier about being kind of private and I think that's my instinct. I don't I don't go looking for drama. It's not my temperament. I'm a little more withdrawn withdrawn a little more melancholic So yeah, I think that serves me well

Sam Garrett says what advice do you have for a struggling? Anglican like who sees the problems in the church and has a hard time having faith that the church is incapable of falling into error So the church being the Catholic Church. Yeah in this it sounds like he's not yet part of the Catholic church. That's what I take by Anglo-Catholic. Yeah. What would you expect from a church? I guess is my question to that because scripture tells us that it is the pillar of truth and that it does have infallible authority. I mean, I just don't know how you can read Matthew 16 and not come away with this sense that there's a binding authority there. It says to loosen the bind, right?

Like an indisputable authority. Okay, so that obviously exists as a current within the church, but simultaneously, one out of 12 guys is gonna be a Judas at least, right? And then the best of them are still going to be a Peter who has all these kinds of faults on full display. So how does that play out in the actual practice? It's going to be messy, right? There's going to be lots of things that you could look at and say, oh man, that's a problem. How can this possibly

be the bride of Christ, right? And yet scripture describes it in those terms. Well, I mean, something bubbles up in the surface of that messiness that we can cling to. And I would say that that's the deposit, that's the teachings of the faith that, like even people are really critical of Vatican too, for example, right? And they allude to all kinds of sketchy things that were going on politically

and jostling between factions and that kind of thing. It's like, yeah, that goes on. And yet some pretty beautiful texts come out of that. Right? And it's always gone on. It wasn't something new with Vatican too. Exactly. I just got done doing a study of Trent.

So obviously reading the teachings of Trent, but also the history, like whenever I read something like that, I'm like, oh, who is this Pope, right? Who's doing the introduction to this or calling this session? And I'll read about it. And it like he had several mistresses. He had like illegitimate children. And there's all kinds of crazy politics and principalities trying to interfere and prevent this session from taking place. Then they had to move it at one point and then it had to come back. And it's like, and yet, there's beautiful teachings that come out of that council in spite of the brokenness of the individuals who are leading that. Somehow the Holy Spirit prevails in spite of our brokenness.

This isn't where the kingdom takes place just yet. It does in certain aspects and we get glimpses of it and that's wonderful, but we're on a pilgrimage, a very messy pilgrimage of broken people trying to get to our end. And in the midst of that we have this lifeline called the church and it's, it's not easy to, to just see an impeccable bride the entire way. So I don't know. I think, I think that's the best I can do with that.

Also, speaking of the Second Vatican council, I just realized several weeks ago, when's the last time I read a document? So I picked up Gaudi mit Spez. It is glorious. It is so beautiful. I really do think a lot of the online antagonism towards Vatican II and the documents, I just suspect it's from people who haven't read the documents. Yeah. And they always narrow, it's like when atheists narrow in on texts about slavery in the Old Testament and they're just like your Bible endorses

slavery it's like Okay, that verse maybe you could interpret it that way but if you take the whole narrative as a whole it absolutely doesn't it opposes it and Yeah, the things that we get hung up on about Vatican to it's like well There's a lot more to it We have a big episode coming out on Vatican to shortly that I think is going to be very edifying for people. Seth asks, what do you think is the largest enemy against the church and Christianity today? Do you think it's atheism and secularism or maybe maybe Islam?

Maybe Islam is what I would say. Why? Because they've got they've got longevity. Why? Because they've got, they've got longevity. They're reproducing the postmoderns, the Marxists, the atheists, even just the agnostics are not reproducing. They're going to face demographic and societal collapse. Yeah. Although you repeat yourself as they're Marxists. They may drag a lot of people down with them, but they're going,

they're going down just biologically. There's not going to be successive generations to inherit their creed. Muslims are doing pretty well from what I understand in that sense. So yeah. Ralf Raymond says, I know trying to connect Catholic professionals and building Catholic community is a goal he has, you Brian. Can he describe what a desirable Catholic economy within the context of these communities would look like?

Yeah, so I would say people who are economic and professional leaders who are recognized as being such, so everybody knows who they are for the most part, or if they don't, there's a mechanism and a channel to get connected with them them and that they are also connected to the parish. They're very intentional about helping the parish to whatever degree that they can and that when people potentially need service providers, right, so if there's like a Catholic lawyer and a Catholic real estate agent and a Catholic contractor that are part of this crew, it's like, oh I need a realtor and I don't know anybody. Well, turn to the crew now. Right. So it's it's all this.

It's kind of just getting all the pieces that are already there and fitting them together in the right way and having everybody be really intentional about this idea of localized community and helping each other as Catholics, which I think we need. We just needed the encouragement in some respects to do that. And then the right tools. Troy Spring says, are Protestants a whole lot better than Catholics at evangelization? If so, what's the reason for this?

In some respects, I would say they're better at getting people in the door, like getting them saved, so to speak. And then in terms of discipleship and formation, they start to fall flat because for, for it depends from one denomination to the next, but many of these denominations, the end is to get a person saved. And then, then it's just a matter of kind of waiting and hanging out and celebrating. Although I will say though, the Protestants that I've known and the churches, maybe they've told me about, they usually involve some pretty vigorous and intentional small group communities, you know? That's true.

Yeah. But ultimately, if you start to have more difficult questions about Scripture or theology, I find that those groups, in my experience, they tend to shy away from theology because it becomes very divisive, right? Because it's like, well, my interpretation of Scripture is this and yours is this and how do we resolve that? And pastors is this or whatever? So in my experience, they don't tend to get very theological. They tend to keep it sort of very

high level And more about socializing and encouraging each other and yeah, we'll read scripture together and we'll pray together But when when we get confronted with really strong difficulties We don't really have the answers for those. And not that it's night and day on the Catholic side, I mean there's a lot of controversy and difficulty and polarization and Catholicism as well. But for those people who have the intuitions for orthodoxy, they can find their way, I think.

The reason I think Protestants are so good at what they do is because they're all lay people. And the lay vocation just lends itself well to doing the kinds of things that Fisher's Network is doing. I wouldn't expect the clergy to do a Fisher's Network, right? That's the vocation of a lay person to do something like that. But the clergy need to be involved and they need to participate in those kinds of initiatives. And it needs to be sort of a harmonious thing. But in Catholicism, the degrees of harmony between the clergy and the lady varies at the best of times. And I think a lot of the times, most of us in the lady, we're just sort of sitting back waiting for leadership. But in Protestantism, they're like, they're not waiting. They're just doing it. They're doing the things.

They see the needs and they're getting it done because it's all, they don't have a clergy to turn to. I'm trying to formulate a question that's been percolating in my mind since we started speaking. It's got something to do with are things getting better? Because I just mentioned a moment ago that you and I have a similar background, right? We were both probably secular and then we took Christianity seriously and I was 17. You were? When I converted? Yeah. So I was not Catholicism necessarily, but when you became a.

Like 19. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we were then a charismatic experience, right? Yeah. The liturgies I would have thought were perfectly great. Then, um, I don't really want to go to today. And I, so I'm like, okay, but they didn't change. I changed. Right. Like if anything, the typical mass I step into today is actually and I know this differs from person to person, but from my experience, typically is better than what I would have experienced, say, back in 1999 or 2000. Yeah. And then when you look online and you go who are like really popular Catholic youtubers? Mm-hmm

it's not like people being like sodomy or Right death to tradition. Yeah, can you think of one? No, I mean there's loud voices out there, but they don't have much of a following and I don't even know How are they out? They must just have huge financial backing or something like that because they're out there publishing books and they're making high caliber production. But nobody's tuning in, at least on YouTube. So should we take solace in that? It seems like there's a groundswell of interest in tradition and yeah, and yeah, it's a really hard thing to measure, right? Because obviously

there's things that we could complain about, but simultaneously. Yeah, I do think there's a groundswell. And that's something to rejoice in. Have you met a young seminarian or new priest who went the Vatican or the, who said, uh, you know, the Tridentine Mass or the Latin Mass, right? Right. No, I don't know. Like they might have kind of more nuanced reasons for why in this situation, this or

that. Yeah. Yeah. I have to ask for forgiveness from my friends if this embarrasses them. But I, some friends of ours organize, I think they were calling it a nun run or something like that because we don't have sisters or, or anybody other than clergy who are living the religious vocation where I live. So there's not a lot of orders or hoses or anything like that or monasteries. So it was really hard to get exposure to people living the religious vocation.

And so we wanted for all of our girls to have an opportunity to meet with somebody, to hear a presentation from somebody who's living that vocation. And there was one young lady who's applying to join, I think, a Benedictine monastery. And she gave a presentation and she was talking about, you know, the habit and why that's attractive to her and all these sort of very orthodox fixtures of her approach to that vocation. And this other sister that they found was very much like a pantsuit sister who was even

jumping in when this other and she's older. And when this other young lady was giving her presentation Apparently she jumped in a few times. It was like scoffed at things. It was like no, no, no, that's silly Apparently she even she said something critical of the Latin Mass Oh bless her and then one of the parents jumped in was like all the kids here Kathy come on so I, on the one hand, yeah, there's this groundswell of generations that are coming that are going to do great things simultaneously.

There's still a stronghold of an older generation that has a lot of influence and a lot of say. I know I know quite a few, not quite a few, I know a few seminarians who dropped out during COVID because they just couldn't handle what they were seeing. They knew that there was gonna be a vow of obedience in their future and they were like, I can't do it if this is what's gonna be going on.

So, I mean, that's something to decry, that's something to say like, this can't go on, but simultaneously, there's a lot of good going on too. So it's hard to in the balance is it getting better? I don't know. I remember in Canada with a group of mates, we were camping or something. And we met this priest who was shocked to meet other young Catholics. Okay. Well, by an older, yeah, I mean young Catholics, you know, and he celebrated

mass for us and it was just horrific. He, two things. He sat on the floor, cross-legged to give the homily and also spoke about spirit animals. Oh my. And ironically. Oh, that's hard. And I've heard that in Alberta, when I was in Canada, people told me that there

were coke and pizza masses that priests were celebrating. I mean, you hear about that kind of thing at summer camp. I would be shocked to see that in a parish. I don't mean recently. I mean like maybe 70ies, eighties. Oh yeah. The parish that I was received into started in the nineties. So the community that I live in is formerly a

Catholic mission. It's got this rich francophone Catholic heritage and there's the old mission on the hill, very picturesque, old sort of church building that is definitely not an Orthodox parish by any stretch or like hasn't been traditionally. But nonetheless, there was a group of people who were like, this isn't progressive enough. And so they broke away and started their own parish. And at the beginning, they were, they had like a baking ministry, supposedly, where they were baking the hosts and like putting cinnamon on them and things like that. And now, this is what I've only heard, so I mean, I don't take my word for it. But yeah, things like that have gone on.

So horrific and cringy. When I first got there, the pews weren't stationary. They would just move them around for different seasons, and they would move the sanctuary around too, so that sometimes it'd be right in the middle of this sort of square layout. I don't know how to view this any other way than demonically inspired. That sounds like an aggressive way to speak. I'm not trying to be unnecessarily aggressive, but I mean, I was in a Benedictine, no, no, a Trappist monastery in Ireland and they had removed the tabernacle out of the church because they were using it for yoga. Someone came in to teach yoga.

It was in Ireland. I mean, if you're going to do yoga, it's probably a good thing they did remove the tabernacle, but yeah, they just shouldn't be doing yoga. It was stuffed into the corner of the library. Oh yeah. And I was, I saw this tabernacle and I thought, what? I hope this, and I opened it up. A priest in my diocese,

they had previously done this with the tabernacle. So one of the things that he did as a performing measure within his parish was move it back to the sanctuary. And that was just like the final straw for his parishioners and they mutinied against him and got him kicked out of the country. Oh, what?

Out of the country? I don't know if he literally, he left the country. He, what? Yeah. Out of the country? I don't know if he literally, like he left the country. He was like, I'm done with you people. Like, yeah. He went back to Poland. See, that is, as they say in Australia, bad-ass. Bad-ass sounds really cool, but when you're an Australian, just bad-ass. That's a cool way to get kicked out of a country.

Yeah. Bringing the tabernacle back to the center of the sanctuary. Let me tell you a story. Yeah. Wow, man. Mm center of the sanctuary. I'll tell you a story. Yeah. Wow, man. Yeah. So it's, um, the worst thing that can go on and that does go on prominently where I live is just the banality. It's, it's not like really, really bad, uh,

offensive theology. It's just not really any theology. It's sort of cheerleading type homilies with no reference to church fathers or doctors or even the scripture reading that we just read. It's often just the relatable homily. The guy who doesn't know what your life experience is that from having lived it personally, trying to be relatable to it and talk about dinner parties that he's been doing things like. It's kind of like what we said earlier about how homeschooling can actually make your life a lot simpler. One of the ways it makes it simpler, we said is, well, you don't have to give your kids technology and they don't have to feel like a freak because they're the only ones that

are. That's just one way. Another way I would just think, and I'm sure many priests who are listening right now who are like, ah, men, well, like if like, you didn't have to be creative? What if it didn't depend on you to be interesting? To be dynamic. None of us want you to be, you understand? Like, we just want reverence. We want somewhere to kiss the ground.

One of my favorite priests that I've heard preach from time to time, his homilies, like he, he doesn't look up much. He's pretty melancholic personality, very flagmatic, just very quiet and soft spoken. And he's just giving you St. Alphonsus and St. Thomas and just going through it. And people love him. Of course. They love his homies.

They're talking about his homies after mass all the time. And it's not because he told a funny joke at the beginning and grabbed our attention and walked out from behind the, the outside of the, uh, the, uh, the sanctuary and like, you know, did the standup comedy routine. It's like, no, he sits there and he just, you know, goes through his teaching is catechesis and relates it back to the scripture reading and we're all edified for it. And it's brilliant. But see, this is what gives me hope because I don't think anyone who's watching is

strongly disagreeing. No, that's probably because what gives me hope because I don't think anyone who's watching is strongly disagreeing Hmm now that's probably because they follow me and they probably wouldn't be watching this if we were right But I think there's just a lot of young adults who are like and it's it's it seems it seems cultural Hmm this return to tradition because when you and I were in our teens Question authority that kind of stuff true. But today in the secular landscape, there's this massive interest in people like Jordan Peterson and a return to tradition. Well, you had said earlier about how we want clarity enough with the ambiguity. And I don't think that that's just Catholics.

I think everybody who has gone out to live their lives according to conventional wisdom, which is basically no wisdom It's just relativism and and been bit by the world and and and or been burned by the world and and have faced Consequences and they're coming back from there being and they're like Okay, I want to go back out there and I want to live my life But I need to know how not to let that happen again. And can someone give me some direction here? Because everyone's just being just affirming me and whatever I'm doing and saying, yeah, that's your identity. In fact, that's who you are. It's like, but I feel terrible. I'm miserable. I'm on it. Any depressants and

wrong to be miserable. Yeah. You should enjoy seeing your abortion and the fact that you were promiscuous until you were 29 and now can't find a husband. Right. Yeah, you sure. You're missing your abortion and the fact that you're promiscuous until you were 29 and you can't find a husband. Right. Yeah. All right. Nate says, What struggles does Brian experience living in Canada where there seems to be a bias towards left wing authoritarianism, laws and policies directed at odds with the teachings of the church?

Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, we face a lot of economic consequences. Is it as bad as, I mean, do you, on a day to day, cause down here, it may as well be North Korea. When we talk about Canada, I know, I know, like cause I have a lot of American clients and there was one point where one of them called me up and she was like, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, why? She's like, it sounds like catastrophe up there. And I think it was during all the, it was when all the churches were burning too. And it's like,

yeah, there were a lot of church burnings, but Canada is a big place too. And so it's not like my parish burned down, but one 15 minutes away did. It was like an old historical building and there was no investigation, no consequences. Simultaneously, someone had left tire tracks on the Pride sidewalk outside city Hall. They caught those guys and they made an example of them. But the guys who arsoned a 150-year-old beautiful, beautiful old church, what can we do? And we can't find them. Yeah. We'd like to, but... Yeah, yeah, exactly. So is it, I mean, how do you cope with it? I live in a place called Alberta, which is one of the provinces. Provinces are analogous to like a state.

And it's one of the better places to be in terms of the political regime. But yeah, people are definitely suffering. Like the economic consequences of electing someone who has no experience with economics, with governing, with leadership. It's just his name. It's just sort of entitled to it, I guess, through succession. Yeah, we're feeling the effects of that now.

Insane inflation. House prizes through the roof. Nobody can afford them anymore. Punishing climate change policy that is creating energy poverty is an unemployment. And then of course the COVID policy was just completely unhinged. Didn't the premier of Alberta recently issue an apology to people who didn't get vaccinated? Yeah. It wasn't recent. It was like when she was first elected. Yeah, she did.

How did that go? No, I mean, the media really went after her for that. So of the voices... Did you have to get the jab? Did I have to? Did you? No. You didn't mean it. No. It did not

Proud of myself and not getting the chair. I'm gonna say My parents had I could tell we were living in two different countries when they were telling me they were speaking with Tremendous concern about my children not getting the jab and and I was like, what the hell are you talking about? Like I would have spoken to you with as much concern if they had, we're both drinking the Kool-Aid, right? Maybe I guess. And then my parents kept bless their hearts. I mean, I think they've just been this massive propaganda machine. All Australian media seems to be reading from the same sheet of music.

There's not like a competing contingent like the Daily Wire or something like that. It's just all the same thing. And so they quickly write off people who don't go against, don't go with an arrow. But my, my beautiful folks who kept getting COVID, I kept gently being like, Oh, I thought, I thought you got like the boosters and the boosters and the, yeah, yes, but I'd be a lot worse off without him. Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe that's just maybe what we have to say now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I want to say so much about it, but I know YouTube. Let's let's do it on locals. Okay. All right. If we have time. Yeah. We're going to go right now. Yes. Matt, Fred dot locals.com. Matt, Fred dot locals.com. You will. We will stream it up without. Yeah, we'll stream it publicly. so even if you are not a supporter You'll be able to watch this stream Give us a couple of minutes to set it up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, give me a few minutes. Yeah, we're talking about the tranny's we'll talk about

The trans the people of trend we talk about old Brian All the things Brian holds with wanted to say I can you cancel and then we'll go to yeah