Pints With Aquinas - On Music, Art, and the Recovery of the Sacred (Dr. Peter Kwasniewski) | Ep. 552

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

In this interview, Matt is joined again by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski—scholar, author, composer, and book publisher. In this conversation, they discuss the purpose of technology, what makes music beautiful, making time for prayer, the history of liturgical vestments, and good literature, among other topics. --- 📖 Jesus Our Refuge book: https://a.co/d/9gKN4eb  --- Explore more from Dr. Kwasniewski through the links below: 🔹 Website https://www.peterkwasniewski.com/ 🔹 Tradition & Sanity Substack https://www.traditionsanity.com/ 🔹 Composer Page https://cantabodomino.com/ 🔹 Publishing (Os Justi Press) https://osjustipress.com —- 📚 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Our-Refu... 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 College of St. Joseph the Worker:  https://www.collegeofstjoseph.com/mat... 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook:   / mattfradd   📸 Instagram:   / mattfradd   𝕏 Twitter/X:   / pints_w_aquinas   🎵 TikTok:   / pintswithaquinas   👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - - -  Timestamps: 00:00:00 – Intro and Matt's new book 00:02:19 – Technology 00:16:53 – Is LARPing merely pretending? 00:32:56 – Why are people rebelling against modernity? 00:40:14 – Smartphones versus "dumb" phones 00:49:12 – We need to unplug and simply reflect 01:03:38 – The pollution of music 01:36:35 – How to do a distraction detox 01:44:47 – Book recommendations 01:49:51 – Giving up the internet and silent retreats 02:01:31 – Progressing in small steps 02:09:00 – Changes to the breviary 02:22:38 – Cuss words and swearing  02:39:15 – How should priests dress?  02:50:40 – A Church healing from liturgists

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the app store. It seems to me that those who often accuse others of LARPing, it's quite a cynical take, it seems to me, sometimes. How exactly is it that anybody becomes something except by slowly working towards it through a kind of imitative process? Pascal on the Ponce says something to the effect of all of man's ills can be traced back to this, that he does not know how to sit alone in a dark room silent. Modern people, if they're not Catholics, if they don't have a spiritual life or an intellectual life, for that matter, they don't want to be left alone in silence with their thoughts.

People who are watching this now who don't have a prayer rule, okay, what's something you could do that you actually would do? Yes. And it might just be you have a crucifix by your bed and when you wake up, you pick up that crucifix, kiss it, pray in our father. We need to follow the advice of St. Paul

who says, whatever is good, true, noble, honorable, beautiful, think on these things, i.e., don't think about the opposites. Hey, everybody. Before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brain. new book. It's called Jesus Our Refuge. If you, like many people, and like all of us, to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously

when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out, Jesus, our refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. Great to have you back on the show. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for coming. Yeah, absolutely. That's all. I don't know. This is the kind, this will be a bit more laid back than the last interview. We said in this interview what we wanted to tackle were the topics of technology, beautiful music, which I know you've written a lot about and written music yourself. Good literature, the fear that people don't read books anymore. Where do you want to start? Gosh. You're like, that's your job. You're the

interviewer. Why don't we start with technology? What is technology? Well, I mean, technology from the Greek technet is just any, any art that man invents with his reason to improve his way of life, to improve some process that we do naturally as human beings. So naturally, we speak, we communicate, but writing is a certain simple form of technology. It had to be invented. Alphabets had to be invented. You know, manuscripts, papyrus, you know,

figuring out how to write things had to be. That's all technology. And then, of course, it's developed from there in terms of communication. You know, we need to get around. We walk around. We might run. But then people invented chariots

or they rode on horseback or, you know, then later on they invented carriages and then eventually bicycles and cars and airplanes and everything else. So at least in theory, the purpose of technology is to make our life better, is to make our life easier in a way that should allow us to be more fulfilled as human beings, maybe to spend less time scraping the clothing against the washboard and more time doing something that is distinctively human, like singing and making music and reading and thinking and, you know, and having good conversations and worshiping God, celebrating the feasts of the saints, you know, that in a certain way we want to be freed to do higher and better things.

And so, of course, implicit in saying that is already a critical. that if technology develops in a certain direction that in fact demeans or diminishes or distracts or dilutes what it is to be human, then you can seriously question whether that technology is in fact useful for us. It might even be dangerous, right? And even those technologies that do save us time,

is it the sin of sloth that leads us to waste our time when it does, we do find that in fact that it is saved? Yes. I mean, let's just put it. this way, right? You know, I was at an exhibit recently at a children's museum because I was visiting with some children of friends. And there was this whole exhibit about pioneer life in America and, you know, how hard it was. And they had all these heavy iron pans. And there was an interesting sign there. You know, the sign said, because of the way these people lived, they were naturally

strong. They developed muscles and they were, they could lift a lot. And, you know, they, in other words, they were not lazy and passive and overweight and so on. And it seems like when, you know, when people invented, let's say, washing machines and dryers and things of that sort, it's not as if suddenly everybody was now reading literature and, you know, doing wonderful things that they couldn't have done before. They were just sitting and watching the television on the couch, you know, while the machines were doing the work for them. So I think that, you know, technology is a two-edged sword and it always is. You know, I want to be clear about this. I see Marshall McLuhan talks about this a lot.

You know, Neil Postman talks about this too. That every technological advance causes a loss of something. And sometimes we're willing to, actually most of the time, we're willing to put up with that loss or we think that the gain compensates for the loss. But the fact is there is a loss. And let me just give a concrete example that isn't so highly charged as the technological example

as what we call nowadays technology, by which we usually mean computers and machines and so on. But, you know, Plato talks about the invention of writing, the damage that the invention of writing does. You would think, what could possibly be wrong with writing? You know, we want to encourage people to read and write and so on. And that seems very traditional and old-fashioned nowadays, and it is. But Plato makes the point that when you start writing things down in books,

then you have less incentive for remembering them. And so what he's commenting on is the transition from an oral, culture to a text-based culture. And if you read about cultures that are predominantly oral, such as the Native Americans or, you know, many, many native cultures don't have writing. They don't have libraries. What that means is they remember a huge amount. They carry the wealth of their culture within them.

They can tell stories endlessly. They have this huge internal library that they're drawing from. and that gets passed down from generation to generation in a way that means each member of that culture has a more abundant interior life as regards their cultural wealth, their cultural heritage, then we have, even though we have gigantic libraries or we have archive.org or whatever immense search engines we have,

all of that stuff is external to us. We don't remember it. We don't memorize it. It's not part of us. And so, you know, it's kind of silly when people say things like, well, now with Google, you know, Google books, we have millions of books at your fingertips, you know, nobody's ever had this before. And I want to say to that, if you don't have any of those books inside of you, then first of all, you don't even know what you're looking for, right? I mean, this is a So, this is a Socratic paradox. If you don't know what you're looking for, how are you ever going to find it? So you have to have knowledge within you in order to even gain further knowledge outside of you.

And secondly, that library, you know, if I'm surrounded by a thousand books on my shelves, but I haven't read a single one of them, that's just decorative. That's just a kind of, you know, makes me feel good about myself. But I don't have that content within me. So again, every form of technology

is a sacrifice of some precious good that was there before. And so what I want to ask about, a lot of modern technology is are we sufficiently aware of what we have sacrificed in order to adopt this or that? Mark Barnes, who you may have heard of from Steubenville, has a great article, I think, on the automobile, and he has this great line, he says,

a man with a car in a world made for feet is a god. A man in a car in a world made for cars is in traffic. That's fantastic, oh goodness. goodness talk about a but that's one of the things we've lost i mean i was just living in europe and we were in a little small town and we'd go to a a big city in europe and it's very walk friendly it's made for human beings exactly i come back here to florida i got to drive 20 minutes through you know ugly really because it's just concrete roads stores that all look identical uh how do you live in close-knit community when the closest person is 25-minute drive-away or something you know so we've lost something

No, and this is a point in which I think Wendell Berry is really the most eloquent critic of how America has developed in this regard. You know, he talks about how the interstate system, in a sense, destroyed locality. It made it possible for everybody to travel anywhere in such a way that it increasingly dissolved the attachment of people to particular places, towns, states, regions. And, you know, I mean, I think most, not most, I don't know what the statistics are, but it seems to me that very many Americans, if you ask them, where are you from, they would say, well, I was born in this place, I grew up in this place, I moved here after college, I moved over there, and I don't really belong anywhere. I mean, you know, I've met great people everywhere I've been.

I have friends, you know, life is good, but I really don't belong anywhere. I don't see myself as, you know, as a Carolina. Indian or a Texan or a Californian. And when you meet people, I love meeting people who say, I am a Texan. We've been here for four generations. Yes, I love that too. And I think that is so beautiful. And you get that in Europe, too, a lot.

I lived in Europe for seven and a half years in Austria. And I was astonished in a good way by how many Europeans I met who would say, my family's been here for 500 years or 1,000 years, or we don't even know how long we've been here. The records just go back so far. And they wouldn't even think of moving. Or if they moved, it was like 15 minutes away, or some kind of bold move, like a half an hour away. But it was we belong to this region. We speak this dialect among ourselves. You know, we, on special occasions, you know, we might even dress in a certain way that is particular to this region. I think that's so beautiful. And my friends in Europe, too, they always, they can't believe Americans who say things

like, oh, yeah, I just, I just went to visit my parents. They only live eight hours away. I mean, they're pretty close to us. And like, what, are you kidding? Like, you can drive across half of Europe and that, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's and it's amazing how quickly this transition took place. I think Australia obviously moved slower than America technologically. And, you know, my parents grew up in the same town as each other.

And everyone they knew grew up in the same town as each other. But now here I am living in America. My sister lives in America. And she's in Ohio. I'm in Florida. so even that's a gigantic distance. So, yeah, it's, it is, but it's crazy, just the kind of tectonic plate shift

that's taken place in culture that's probably destroyed culture. Depends what we mean by culture. No, it's true. And this is a huge problem. That culture, I mean, we all know this, but culture comes from the word cultus, which is connected to the verb for cultivating the land.

So you cultivate the land. that's the most basic thing that that human beings do as soon as they settle down as soon as they stop being hunters and gatherers who are wandering around nomatically looking for their food looking for good weather whatever the case might be as soon as they settle down they start farming from that agriculture that that culture of the field that cultivation of the field um you know comes in a certain sense comes now a cultivation of of arts practical arts initially like iron working and, you know, leather working and whatever tools are needed

to build up a village life. And then you get to fine arts. Once that culture has risen to a certain level and there's time for leisure and there's a certain stratification where some people are doing the farming but other people are in the village teaching or you've got clergy now and, you know,

and they're more literate. So then you have the fine arts after the practical arts, after the farming, you know, begins. And at the top of that, that whole sort of hierarchy of culture is the divine cultist, the cultivating, as it were, of God, which of course means something very different from cultivating potatoes. It means to now God is the one before whom we come. We approach him in humility, and we are his clients. We are asking him,

fundamentally, we're asking him as needy creatures to bless us and our efforts. And so this whole kind of structure of culture, which I would say is embodied perfectly in the European village centered on a church, right? You go into a little European village and what do you see? On the most prominent place, or in the most prominent place in town, in the center is this beautiful little church. Everything is built around that church, almost like radiating concentric circles. And you hear the bells peeling from the bell tower, calling people to prayer. And it's this coherent, centered life that, you know, and

you come to America and where is the center of our cities? Do our cities have centers? They don't, they're just sort of miscellaneous, eclectic assemblages of buildings and people and traffic, as you said. So I think it's very hard to be centered

in a world that has chosen a kind of de-centered, denatured, always mobile, always changing paradigm, you know. How do we not just fall into a deep depression? Because it doesn't seem like we can go back. Yes.

Actually, right? Yeah, it's, I mean, this is a huge challenge. I think that my sense is that people nowadays, thoughtful people are intensely aware of these problems and are trying in a piecemeal way to figure out how to mitigate, some of the worst aspects of our placelessness and our homelessness, our lack of connection

to the natural world, to the fields and the forests. I mean, obviously, you see this in oddball forms, you know, the people who sort of almost make a religion out of nature, you know, and who worship on the mountains and not the ocean and whatever, and that's their religion. Okay, but I think, you know, really even the hippie phenomenon of the 60s was a kind of reaction against that, enlightenment rationalism, that that sort of baconian Cartesian mastery of nature, that we're going

to conquer and enslave nature and make it serve our hedonistic, materialistic ends. There was a rebellion against that. The rebellion was ill-formed, ill-informed. It often took self-destructive paths. Obviously, sexual liberation is the quickest way to a new form of slavery. And so I think, you know, obviously that was, but I'm just pointing out that people sense that we need to do something and that it's better to do something

than to do nothing. And that's, I think, the cure for despair is not to sit back. Despair is fundamentally a form of passivity. It's saying, I can do nothing. There's nothing I can do. It's hopeless. And if you can do even one thing,

if you can move your finger one inch towards a better answer or a better way of living, then you've cured despair for that day. You've met it and you've fought it down. That's great. but so just to give some concrete examples please yeah how you've done it in your life I'd love to hear

well we'll get to that a moment but I did want to give the example of something that I'm not doing I feel like I sort of missed the boat on this one and maybe as an academic and a professor it was never going to be the boat that I should have gotten on to to begin with but you know there's a whole Catholic land movement right now that's taking off like wildfire in this country I've certainly heard of it the Catholic land movement it's fascinating this was a fairly big deal before World War II

it existed under that name, Catholic Land Movement. You can read about this on the internet, ironically. So you can find out about the Catholic Land Movement. But then it fell apart in the 60s and 70s like so many other things. Why? Mainly because of that, I think, that sort of post-war, optimistic, humanistic, we're building a better world. We have so much great technology, progress, progress, progress.

you know, we're going to chase, we're going to, we're going to end hunger and poverty and war and all this kind of, there was a huge naivetee that you can see. And Vatican II fits right into that period, you know, about like, we're going to win modern man over. And, you know, he's like, ripe for conversion. And modern man's like, I'm good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Please leave me alone.

Exactly. And so I think that the Catholic land movement died because everybody was just racing to get into the suburbs. They were, they were racing to move to the cities. I mean, this is still a problem, right? Unfortunately, in this country, a lot of rural communities are drying up because the young kids, they're bored out in the fields, the corn fields. They want to get into the cities where it's exciting.

Okay, well, we understand how that process works. Cities have always been magnets for people, especially since the Industrial Revolution. Tons and tons of people moving to cities looking for a better life, often finding a much worse life. But, you know, once you've committed to it, maybe you're stuck. you're not going to go back necessarily to the country. So I think there were

a lot of reasons why the Catholic Land Movement petered out and I'm not the best expert to ask that question too but in the past 10 years or so it's exploded into life again. It's been revived under the same

name. They now have thousands of families who have banded together under this label, Catholic Land Movement, to, you know, these are all families that are basically working small family farms. Everything from from sizable organic farms that are actually the main business of the family to hobby farms of a couple of acres with a few goats, some chickens, maybe some ducks, a pig, whatever that might be, you know,

even a dairy cow. And, and, you know, everything in between, right? And these families, these are Catholic families, often large families, that just want to get back to the land. They want to get back to a healthy, natural way of life. I don't think this is a fantasy. There are people who say, oh, that sounds like larping and, you know, this is so romanticized. And it's, well, it's hard work. Everybody knows who's tried to do this, that it's very, very hard work. But the people who are doing it, it seems to me, if they stick with it, they know it's hard work. They want the hard work. They think it's healthy and natural and normal. It's especially good for their children. And it's a way to give your children,

especially obviously I'm talking about older children who are capable of doing chores and stuff, gives them meaningful work, work that contributes to the common good of the family, work that is economically profitable, work that teaches virtues, hard work, endurance. They learn how to care for livestock. They learn how to plant and grow vegetables.

You know, probably the father or the mother or both are going to have to do something. some work outside, you know, they're going to have to do something to make, it's not like it's very easy to make a living simply on growing potatoes and dairy farming. But it just seems to me that the fact that there are so many people thinking about this and doing it as well shows me that despair is not the answer. People have to think outside the box, they have to get creative, they have to get busy, and try to push back against the hegemony of big tech, the hegemony of, you know, the suburban, boxed-in car-based virtual reality that, you know, that traps us.

It's interesting you bring up LARPing. It seems to me that those who often accuse others of LARPing, it's quite a cynical take, it seems to me, sometimes. Because you could look at it in two ways. You could say, you're pretending to be what you're not. But maybe you're trying to be who you're not. Yes. And that could be good imitation, imitating something beautiful so that your life can be more beautiful.

I mean, how exactly is it that anybody becomes something except by slowly working towards it through a kind of imitative process, a memetic process, much you put that so well, yeah. And this comes up, by the way, I know that we're not going to talk about this much, but it comes up also in discussions of liturgy where people say, oh, the traditionalists,

you know, they're just 1950s larpers. You know, no, frankly, we don't care about the 1950s that much. I mean, I have a historical interest in the 1950s. I'm interested in what was going on, the good, the bad, the ugly. Sure. But we are doing what we're doing right now for reasons right now that are completely meaningful and relevant and intelligible to us right now

without any reference to any past decade. And that's just simply, you know, living today from the wisdom of the past. Have you heard of Nietzsche's idea of resent him or where you demonize what you believe yourself impotent to attain. Yes. I think the accusation towards the trads as LARPAs comes from a place like that, right?

Because you've got these young men and women who dress in a way that shows that they respect themselves and take themselves seriously and take the act of worship seriously. And so I think to kind of sit back and point a finger at them and sort of mock them, really, is what you're doing when you call them a LARPA. Maybe it's just because you're jealous

because here they are taking their lives seriously and maybe you're not. Yes. Yeah, I do think that's true. I mean, oftentimes people will say, including people who are now very much committed to going to the traditional Latin mask, that when they first attended it, they felt judged.

Yeah. They felt judged because they were the only ones, let's say, wearing jeans and T-shirts and everybody else was in nice dresses and suits and whatever. And maybe they had just a small family and they saw this family of 12 kids come in, you know, like from the parking lot full of giant vans. And, you know, and people, they feel initially judged by that.

But I think that the mature response is to say, what is that feeling telling me about myself? Maybe have I made mistakes in my life than I need to repent of? Can I improve? Can I up my game? Maybe I need to dust off that suit or that dress, you know? And just, and I think that ultimately

that, you know, a lot of people do have that kind of change of heart, that metanoia where they say, you know what? I do need to get more serious about my faith. I do need to, and I know about families, this is beautiful. There are families, I mean, I've read about this. You can find it on the internet too. And families who, because of their encounter with the Latin Mass, decided to stop contracepting and have more children, you know.

It's such a powerful witness, right? A witness of life, supernatural life, natural life. That's what we're talking about. I would imagine the desire to live off the land, as we're talking about, and the desire to return to a traditional form of worship kind of goes hand in hand. It would surprise me

if less than 50% of these people weren't attending a traditional energy. No, actually, it's more like 90%. That's what I would think. So what is that? I think that, well, you could say it on a generic level

as a general skepticism towards modernity. Which is what? What does modernity mean? That's a million dollar question if ever there was one. Right. It's hard to define modernity

in a simple way. The synthesis of all heresies? That's modernism. Oh, okay, thank you. Okay, well, help me understand what modernity is. I think that you could go out this in different ways, but one of the most salient aspects of modernity, and most people would date this to,

this itself is a debated question. I mean, the roots of modernity are in late medieval nominalism, William of Occam. They are certainly more approximately in the philosophy of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The Protestant Reformation period is generally when people talk about the birth of the modern age. And you can find that in, you know,

what's the name of that one book? The Theological Origins of Modernity by Gillisbee is a really good book on this topic. I don't know if I said his last name properly, pronounced it properly. But I think that one, One salient feature of the modern age is a skepticism of and even a rejection of tradition as normative.

And so whether it's the tradition of scripture, as was rejected by the Sachinians, whether it was the normativity of sacred tradition as understood by Catholics, which the Protestants in general rejected, whether it was the normativity of scholasticism as a method in philosophy and theology, which all of the modern philosophers rejected to one degree or another, whether it's the normativity of high medieval, the high medieval synthesis of church and state of liturgy and agrarian life, you know, which is fragmented and fractured in all the modern revolutions. You know, something like the French Revolution is deeply and bitterly anti-Catholic, anti-clerical, anti-medieval, anything to do with the Ancien regime.

anything to do with the world that existed prior to that time had to be destroyed. As Voltaire said, you know, eccise le infam, destroyed the infamous thing, meaning the church, you know. So there's just this general anti-tradition, anti-wisdom, anti-sapiential, anti-Christianity, Christendom, anti-Christendom in particular, right?

Christendom as the sort of incarnational synthesis of life. And so it seems to me that what we see with modernity is wave after wave of more radical rejection. So it starts with, say, Luther rejecting aspects of Catholicism, but still preserving a liturgy, still preserving some Marian devotion, you know, still preserving the reverence for the scriptures, right? So he was a partial revolutionary, you know, but then you have the next, you know, then you'll have somebody coming along later who's more revolutionary. You know, you have, I mean, I'm kind of jumping around here historically, but, you know, a Kant or a Hegel who rejects even more of the preceding tradition and tries to replace it with a new ideology or a new system that is the system to end all systems. You know, and then you have that devolving into, let's say, Forbock and Marx. And then once you have Marxism, then that goes into Leninism and Bolshevism.

Just to think of the quick slip from Descartes' cogito to Hume's, well, I've never experienced the self, so the self has to be replaced with a bundle theory. Exactly. Who would have thought that the cogito is up for debate? And then Hume says it is, so does Nietzsche. Exactly. It quickly unravels. Yes, that's right.

And so my point here in general is just that every century, of the modern age can be understood as a more and more radical departure, not only from the wisdom of the past, from tradition, but also from the natural law, from human nature, from what makes us to be human, so that the breakdown of confidence in reason, the power of reason, right, which you see in Hume, Hume is a skeptic as compared with Descartes, who's a rationalist. by the time you get to the 20th century

and you have somebody like Jacques Derrida, he's calling into question the meaningfulness of language in general, which of course is a performative contradiction. He has to write about it. But, you know, it's... And then, you know, you have initially, the early modern philosophers,

they would not even have thought of calling into question the division of mankind into the male and female sexes. That would have been perfectly obvious to them because they were still in harmony with the natural law to that extent,

to that which cannot but be known, which is what the natural law means, by those who are not clouded by passion or corrupted by ideology, sort of like what everybody will know if you don't mess with them, if you don't brainwash them in a kind of Orwellian way. And then as you go,

you start to have in the 19th century, maybe even the 18th century, you have the beginnings of feminism and the calling into question of the family as a basic unit of society, as the most basic unit of society, where it's not just questioning abuses of patriarchy, which there were,

but now questioning whether the family is a good thing and whether it wouldn't be better for men and women not to have families, right? And this, of course, in Karl Marx, this leads to the idea of communal families and there's not going to be marriage anymore, and that never worked, even in Soviet Russia. That didn't work.

And so now, of course, we're into homosexual marriage and transgenderism. You see what I mean? It's like, century by century, it's like, it's like reading the autobiography of a person going progressively insane. That's what modernity is. Wow. I've been talking a lot lately about my friends at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, you know, Jacob Imam, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Jones, and company, the guys who started the college that combines the Catholic intellectual tradition with skilled trades training. Well, listen to this. They're growing their program and are looking to connect with experienced Catholic tradesmen to hire as instructors.

So if you are an experienced carpenter, plumber, HVAC technician or electrician, and want to help mentor and teach future Catholic tradesmen, go right now to College of St.Joseph.com slash careers to connect with the college and see how you can become part of something truly special. And if you're watching or listening and know a tradesman who needs to hear this message, please invite them to reach out to the college. Again, that's College of St.Joseph.com slash careers. College of St.Joseph.com slash careers.

Thanks. How that's so well put. You know, it's like the first segment of this autobiography is written like Dostoevsky. Oh, my goodness. Yes. And then the last part of it is written like James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, or, you know, just completely unintelligible stream of consciousness. you know, often...

This is interesting you say this. Fulgar and in the gutter. The way you're putting, it's much better than I have. But I have thought the same thing. I remember once being at a pub and I stepped outside for a moment. There was a fellow there and we got to talking.

And over the course of about five to ten minutes, it gradually dawned on me that he was blind drunk. And it seems to me that my... I think a lot of people have this experience as they interact with modernity or modern people or people who have... of imbibe these modern thoughts.

They begin by saying things that seem kind of reasonable. Are you, oh, okay, I see why you think contraception could help marriage or something. And then they start saying, you know, men can have wounds. You're like, oh my gosh, you are, I can't, why was I even listening to you? Yes. How much have I been lied to up into this point?

I think that's where a lot of people are today. How much do I have to go back and unlearn? I didn't realize that this person was drunk. And so to get back to your question, you asked me multiple questions, and I want to get eventually to what I'm trying to do personally to respond to the madness of modernity. But, you know, you asked why are people rebelling

against modern liturgy, liturgy made for modern man by modern man? Why are they rebelling against modern, suburban, and urban ways of life? Why are they even starting to rebel in a quasi-ludite manner against the invasion of technology into every nook and cranny of our lives. Why are they doing that?

I think the answer is that there is some awareness that people didn't used to be enslaved to the machines that they built, that people used to be more free to be themselves, not in a goofy way, but just to be human and to do human things, to enjoy life to the extent that fallen life can be enjoyed. You know, they have a sense that the Middle Ages, for example, had the key to a transcendent beauty that we've lost. And you can see that just by visiting a cathedral in Europe, visiting Notre Dame or Chart or Amiens or Rem or any of the great cathedrals.

Just this past summer, I was in Spain and I got to visit the cathedrals of Seville and Segovia and Leone and Salamanca, incredible places that we couldn't even dream of building nowadays. What was the secret? How did they do this? Right? Well, it was because they had a whole different mentality, a whole different worldview. And we can't easily recapture that. We shouldn't try in a simplistic way to, you know, to, we can't do time travel. That's not the point.

The point is, rather, what can we learn from our predecessors that we have forgotten, that modern people have forgotten? And that's why I think in so many different ways, there's an attempt to, not to go back in time, but to ask what can we do here and now that was better for our forefathers that will take us out of the cul-de-sac into which we've landed, right? What might be the way forward? And there are lots of ideas, lots of possibilities. I don't think that anybody is claiming to have the one and only answer. You know, we all have to become organic farmers

and we all have to go to the Latin Mass. You know, there are different ways of doing this. But I do think everybody needs to fight back against the octopus-like tentacles of the spirit of modernity, right? Which is in a kind of hyper-accelerated mode right now. that's excellent i think everyone will watching this will resonate at catholic non-catholic so the question we could ask ourselves that might accuse us is what am i doing yes yes and once you ask yourself that question it can be embarrassing to realize how little you're doing exactly and yet at the

same time you're complaining about feeling anxious and tired and exhausted and not wanting to live like this so we don't want to despair as you say that's passive we want to be active so people doing big things like, you know, as you say, the Catholic Land Movement. But, yeah, what are some ways you've pushed back against it? I think, you know, I think in general the problem that we're dealing with is that technology, as I said earlier, makes life easier in many ways. It makes it more convenient, even though it also makes it harder in other ways, more subtle ways. You know, harder to be at peace, harder to have clear thoughts, harder to pray, harder to read.

Right. This is what almost everybody experiences now. But the convenience is very seductive. It's, I mean, once you become, so I'm going to just talk about smartphones for a second. The smartphone is the ultimate Swiss Army knife. It does everything. I mean, what is it that it can't do these days? It can pay for your groceries. It can keep a list of all of your contacts.

It can, you know, you can do video calls with it. You can learn another language. You can learn languages. You can, I mean, I don't know. Rent it, get an Uber. Yeah, exactly. Look at maps. I mean, it's, you know, as a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon put it, you know, it slices, it dices, it conjugates verbs, you know.

I mean, it's, you know, so it seems to me that this, and of course it has the internet on it, which means having social media. So it has Facebook, it has X, it has Instagram, it has TikTok or whatever people are looking at. And we know this. This is all obvious now. These things were created as addictive technologies. They create the dopamine hits. We know that. There's tons of research about this.

And so, you know, social media is designed to be sticky. Right? It's designed to make you want to go back to it again and again and again to get your fix. And it's all, the amazing thing is almost everything we look at on the internet is a form. of advertisement. Even if, you know, even in the best case scenarios, right, I have a YouTube channel, you have a big, you, much bigger YouTube channel. We'll promote things, we'll promote things on this show. We are, exactly. I mean, there's, there's a good use for advertising, but, but I, but what makes, what makes me, what gives me pause is that we are freely consuming hours worth of essentially

advertising every day. I mean, who would ever have thought that? You know, when advertising was first invented. I mean, there was a time in the 20th century when we didn't have billboards, when we didn't have ads plastered all over the place. And when they first came out, there were naysayers. There were people who were saying, why are we polluting the space with signs for everything, right? I mean, initially, people experienced that as a kind of violation of the peace and order of their surroundings. So anyway, we've sort of surrendered ourselves to a world of advertising. a world of distraction, of noise, of constant inundation of largely irrelevant, superficial,

sometimes inaccurate, generally, you know, just say distracting information. T.S. Eliot has this great phrase, distracted by distraction from distraction. And he wrote that 100 years ago. I mean, what would he say now, right? So I think that the smartphone, it's not only the ultimate Swiss Army knife,

it is also the ultimate addictive technology. there's never been a form of technology more addictive. And a lot of people recognize this. I mean, it's very easy to, you know, if I bring this topic up with people, if I bring this topic up with people, you know, what do you think about smartphones? Almost everybody has this kind of self-deprecating mark.

Like, yeah, I know I use it too much. And, you know, I kind of wish that I didn't have to use it all the time, but, you know, I need it for work. You know, they make excuses. And really, there is beginning to be a pushback about that. I was going to say this. And one of the ways we can tell that there is a pushback is that there are companies making bank on dumb phones. Yes.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've got one. Yeah, yeah. So I'm just going to, you know, full disclosure here. I've never owned a smartphone. I've, you know, I've been working. I worked at a small Catholic college in a small town. I didn't actually need one.

I saw everybody needed to see every day, you know, face to face. It was wonderful. That's the way life should be. So I never needed a smartphone when I was teaching at Wyoming Catholic College and then I left WCC seven years ago and started working for myself and I don't need to keep in touch with myself by a smartphone

so there was no compulsion from my employer to have one. My wife, you know, she lives at home with me and she's a painter and a translator and she doesn't need a smartphone either. You know, if we need to talk to each other, I just call up the stairs, you know. I mean, I call Viva Voce, not with a phone.

So it's been, it's been, admittedly easy for me not to have a smartphone but but still when people hear about that they're actually they're they're pretty darn amazed that i don't have a smartphone they just ask how can you not have one you know and i've i but it's fascinating when i tell people i've never had a smartphone um i i would say honestly half the time people say gosh i wish that i could i wish i could do that too and then they make the excuse one excuse for another that they can't do it so um i did an interview with Edward, not Edward Penton, but Rob Marco, but it was published on Edward Penton's substack

called Life Beyond the Smartphone. And I wanted to mention that because we won't necessarily get into every detail that I got into in that long interview, but we can link it with this episode for people who want to read more about why I think it's so important for us to get away from smartphones.

I think, before I talk about this, I think people should push back against the smartphone hegemony. I think that they should start saying, I don't need this. I'm going to de, I'm going to downgrade, downsize. I'm going to choose voluntarily a certain amount of inconvenience in order to win back peace of mind,

a more distraction-free environment, more silence, more room for my interior life. I think people should push back like this. I think that's the question. What level of inconvenience am I willing to embrace to live a more peaceful life? Yes. Yeah.

So here's the phone that I use. It's called a Light Phone 3. it's a fairly new product it just came out a few months ago some people have heard of the light phone two which had a kind of paper white screen do you prefer this to that well i have never used a light phone too i know people who have it i've seen it um this one is in fact more versatile it does more things so for people who who want to have a serious downgrade but but not something that is going to cut them off completely from their contacts um and from a lot of the usual functions then this is a good options. So what does this do? Well, it's, it's a phone. It's a phone. That's, it's a phone and it

texts. So is that, you know, I've got, does it have things like voice to text? Yeah, so it's got, it's got voice to text. That's easy enough. It has, it has a camera on it that's decent. It's not an, it's not an Apple iPhone camera, but it's a decent camera. And you can receive photos over text. Yeah, you can, you can receive photos over text. You can send photos by text as well. It has, let me see what else does it have here. It has the usual things, alarm, timer, notes, calculator. It can do directions. So this functions as a GPS for walking or for driving. It has a nice feature called directory where you can type in, you tell it where you are, or let it determine where you are, and then you can type in restaurant, and it will pull up

restaurants and show you their hours and you can call them and things like that it has you can do music and podcasts on this you have to you have to connect it via internet to your account and then you can basically download things on the computer yeah so in other words i have a i have a log in with light phone on my desktop that connects to my phone and i can download podcasts that way um so the main point i want to make is this doesn't connect to the internet so no apps no social media, it's just a very bare bones phone. And you know what? I have to say, I like it a lot because it does the things that I need for all of my traveling when I go around to give lectures and so forth, like on this trip. But it's not the kind of phone that you ever really want to

spend a lot of time on because it just doesn't do that much. You know, it's more like instead of the ultimate Swiss Army knife, it's like a wrench or a hammer. You only pull out a hammer when there's a nail. You only pull out a wrench when there's when there's a bolt. So this is like the wrench and the hammer. Not this was army knife. Yeah. So, you know, there are other products like this too. It's not the only one. But it's, I think it's, it's a way

for people to push back and reclaim territory for themselves. You know, Cardinal Sarah wrote a very beautiful book called The Power of Silence against the dictatorship of noise. And he goes into all of these things, you know, much more profoundly

than I could do. He says, he says basically, we need to guard the integrity of our interior castle. To use St. Teresa of Jesus's metaphor. You know, we, the interior life of man is, it's like a vast chamber. And that chamber, that temple, to use a better term, is meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

It's meant to be filled with the triune God. It's meant to be filled with good and pious and holy thoughts. It's meant to be filled with beautiful things. You know, St. Paul says in Philippians, whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is honorable. Think on these things, right? Fill yourself with these things.

Let those be what occupies your interior temple. And I think that what's happened is, in the modern world we've chosen to fill ourselves with noise with with floods of information with the constant drip feed of the social media feed and you know we are what's what we're doing

there is chasing out the still small voice of God making it difficult to hear the voice of conscience I think the deadening of conscience that we see in something like the Charlie Kirk assassination but many many other examples school shootings and so on That deadening of conscience is made much easier by this constant flood of noise where you're basically shouting down the voice of your conscience.

You know, you're cutting off yourself from yourself. Yes, exactly. And making self-knowledge more difficult, right? What was it that Socrates, well, Greek philosophy, the oracle, the Delphic Oracle said, know thyself, right? And then Socrates took that up as a kind of mantra. um it's difficult to know yourself it's it's much more difficult to know yourself than to know any kind of scientific information or anything from the encyclopedia anything from wikipedia all of those things are

are a piece of cake low hanging fruit compared to knowledge of oneself and a fortiori compared to knowledge of god right so this is why the the desert fathers you know we have these incredible men and women the desert fathers and mothers who after Christianity was legalized in the early 4th century and suddenly there were floods of people converting to Christianity sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes for questionable, let's say more social reasons, you know, for political influence or what have you. Suddenly there was this movement away from the cities into the desert. It's as soon as it's like as soon as martyrdom ended, as soon as it was, as soon as it stopped being hard to be Christian, the most serious Christian said, we now need to find a new kind

of martyrdom. We need to retreat into the desert, flee from the cities, and find God and find ourselves. The first Catholic land movement. Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying people need to flee into the desert of Utah or Wyoming or Montana or something. I mean, frankly, as we can see, Utah is not the safest place. Anyway, I'm not saying that people need to imitate the desert fathers and mothers, literally. What I am saying is these were men and women who were willing to give up their whole lives to acquire knowledge of God and knowledge of self. What are we doing? What little things can we do to acquire knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves? Pascal and the Ponce says, there's something to the effect of all of man's ills can be traced back to this, that he does not know

to sit alone in a in a in a dark room silently yes something like yes and i often think that too i mean i know it's ironic saying this on a podcast but you know how certain are we that um walking around all day long with somebody else's opinions being forced fed into our mind through podcasts how are we so sure that's a good thing even if what we're listening to is edifying you know what about just doing the dishes and not listening to something i mean surely there's some benefit to your mind just reflect peacefully on things as opposed to having to always receive somebody else's thoughts. I think what I would say about that is, look, podcasting has done an immense amount of good because we, you and I, many other podcasters, are talking about really important issues that

people are wondering about. They're looking for guidance. They're looking for fresh insights. They might be confused. They might be demoralized, scandalized. You know, I mean, there are so many reasons why people are looking for knowledge and hopefully wisdom, if we can share any of that, give any of that to them from the Catholic tradition. But there's a question here of proportion, of quantity, of being selective, of opening up spaces in everyday life for either doing simple chores, being with one's family, doing nothing. reading poetry, reading novels, reading any kind of book, for that matter, time to pray without distraction. And in order to get to the point where we can read books again. And by the way, I just want to be really clear about this. I do not think it's possible to be an educated person without reading books. I don't care how many podcasts you listen to. I don't care. I mean,

audiobooks count as well. I just want to be clear about that. So if people want to listen to, you know, the brothers Karamazov on audiobook, that's fantastic. I have no problem with that. I actually think that it's neat how oral culture has been revived through audiobooks. And so I don't have, but I mean, you're not ever going to be a thoughtful, or you're not ever going to be a cultivated, educated person. That is, you won't achieve or realize the full potential of the image of God implanted in your rational soul unless you study, unless you use to the full the rational gifts

God has given you. Almost every modern person is literate. But we waste our literacy often on things that are not worth reading, you know? And if we just think if we took a tithe, just a tithe, just a tenth

of the time that we spend reading social media and put that towards reading really serious books. Like, It doesn't even have to be St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa, although that's a great thing to read. But it could be, you know, St. Alphonse's Legory. It could be St. Theresee. It could be St. John of the Cross.

It could be the Bible for, I mean, of course, absolutely. The divine office, the Psalms, you know. Just think about what a radical transformation there would be in people's lives. If they could shift their attention towards things that are more substantial, more permanent, more ancient, more timeless. more and more full of wisdom really so that's so that's what i'm saying about podcast is just it's a question of a healthy balanced diet you know we have a limited amount of time so we shouldn't give it all to just one kind of thing we need to diversify and we need to refocus and recenter and make sure that that what we're doing is securely anchored in um substance in really deep and

rich substance. That's what we need. And that's what you and I, I think, I mean, talking to you outside the show as well as on the show, you and I are both people who, before we talk about things, we read a lot and we think a lot about them, and we talk to other people about them informally. And we try to keep educating ourselves, right? That's what we all have to do. We all have to do that. We're all perpetually in need of more education, I would say. So you've never had a smartphone, but have you struggled to break yourself free from that which distracts you from, you know, more wholesome activities? Yes. And how has that battle been for you and how have you tried to gain mastery over it?

Yes, for sure. So I would say, you know, the problem that I have, which is not unusual, I think it's a problem that millions of people have is that my work is computer-based. There's nothing wrong with that, per se. But what that means is that I'm at my desk, you know, for hours a day, every day. You know, not so much on Sundays, of course, because on Sundays there's been a lot of time singing in the choir at the church and hang out with friends and talk to friends on the phone, talk to family. So Sunday has always had a different character. And I think I try to make it have as different to characters as possible from every other day of the week. And I encourage people strongly to do that as well.

I know people, for example, who turn off all their technology on Sundays. I'm not at that level of self-mastery. But I think that it's actually a grand idea. Some people talk about the Sunday, the Sabbath rest, where they just turn off everything. And I mean, I'm not saying that they have a Jewish mentality about it. Like they can't do any chores or whatever. But just that they're just not going to be online, on the computer,

watching TV, whatever. They're just going to have Sundays as a day of rest, a day of fellowship, a day of in-person activities and so on. So I try to do that on Sundays. But on the other days of the week, I'm just at my desk. So one problem that I find for me is that

the way our technology has developed, even just the computer format of many different windows and different applications and information coming in from all sides, it's very distracting. It makes it very difficult to focus on one line of work. And so I think it actually makes us less efficient. When I look at the

50 folio volumes that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the 13th century, when they had, you know, they had no machines, it was difficult to write. You know, life was much harder than it is nowadays. You know, and I look at what Augustine could do, you know, in his time. I look at what Aquinas did in his time. I look at what an author like Jack London could do, you know, the, the countless volumes that people wrote before computers, before even typewriters. To be fair, they were anomalies. It wasn't like everybody back then. No, no, not everybody was doing that.

But my point is that the people who lived by writing, it seems to me they had fewer distractions, and therefore they wrote better, and they often even wrote more, at least more of substance than we can do. People will often say if Thomas Aquinas had the internet imagine how much more he could have done, and perhaps he could have, but perhaps not.

No, I mean, I agree with the cynic who said, if Mozart had been born in the 20th century, he would have ended up writing movie scores. Now, granted, they might have been ingenious movie scores, you know, John Williams Plus, but I would rather have Mozart's symphonies and string quartets and operas, you know. I mean, that is, the art forms of his period were better than our art forms in many ways. I mean, we still have those art forms. I mean, there are still composers writing symphonies and string quartets and sonatas and so forth.

But I just mean to say, yeah, we can't think in those terms. but but you know it okay so what's what's my struggle my struggle i think is is a struggle against tunnel vision a struggle against distraction and a struggle against a sedentary lifestyle right um i need to exercise more you know um the intermittent fasting has been has been great but i just i need to get out on my bicycle more you know and and be and whenever i go out for a long hike in in the fields or the woods which i love to do and i was and i had to do that a lot this spring because i was preparing for a 60 mile pilgrimage i did in spain in july which was very hard but very fulfilling um you know so i was training for that every time i got out into into nature

it was so restorative it was so refreshing you know it just it resets you know it's uh um i i there's this wonderful cartoon where there's a man sitting on his back on the grass. Maybe you've seen this and he's looking up the sky. And somebody says, somebody says something like, I got a new app today. Do you want to see it? And he said, no, I'm, I'm using my app, you know, which is the sky or whatever. You know, I don't need to recharge my app. My app recharges me, you know. So it's something like that. But I do think that these are the challenges anybody in modern life is going to have when we're driving

ourselves everywhere and we're always on our computers and whatever the case might be. We need to get off the machines more frequently. We need to have more time in the natural world. In God's first book, the first book is creation. His second book is scripture. You can't

understand the second book without the first book. The first book, the first book gives you the language that is presupposed by the second book, right? So to take a simple example, when people stop experiencing the stars because there's so much light pollution in cities and they can hardly even see Venus, let alone the constellations, how are they supposed to understand the symbolic use of stars all over Scripture? And then in the liturgy, borrowing it from Scripture, right? And I mean, that's just a simple example, but there are hundreds of examples like that where when we cut ourselves off from the natural world we're cutting ourselves off from

scripture and from liturgy right and so i think a lot of the problem with modern catholic life is that people have been uprooted from the sources that sustain us to such an extent that that the language spoken by tradition becomes unintelligible um and then you get to and then that leads to insane situations like ugly modern churches that look like walmarts or cost coes or jet propulsion laboratories or whatever with screens on which the words of hymns or liturgical texts are are projected i mean what a depressing what an absolute um contradiction of the spirit of the liturgy is a situation like that I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world.

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Hello.com slash Matt Fred. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Halo.com slash Mattfrad. where the church should be like a foretaste of the heavenly Jerusalem.

It should be glorious and magnificent. It should take us out of this world into the good things to come, you know, helping us to pierce through the veil with our great high priest. You know, and instead, you know, it's just like a lame version of what you get in the secular world. You know, so yeah, anyway. Yeah. And maybe what's more depressing is that no one in that church, had considered that it was depressing.

I was in Vienna recently, and we went to a beautiful church. We walked down there from our hotel, and it was locked, and so we couldn't get in. But you could pay to buy tickets for an upcoming light show inside of the church. If that's not enough to make you want to start hurting people, I don't know what is. Yes, but I do think people are waking up on so many levels. I mean, at this point, I mean, on the interest,

One of the fascinating things about the internet is that because it's such an uncontrolled, well, at least in the United States, maybe not in the United Kingdom or Germany, but because it's such an uncontrolled free market of ideas, people share everything there, a lot of common sense takes of ordinary people have gained attraction that they never would have if the academic institutions and the government and other gatekeepers were in charge. And so an example of that is online people just routinely mock ugly modern churches and routinely praise and celebrate beautiful churches, both old and new ones, to such an extent that if you want to get a pulse on what Catholics think in general about church architecture, the internet will show you

they are thinking in a traditional direction. They want churches that look beautiful, that look like churches that remind them of God and heaven and the saints and that lift their hearts and souls to the divine. That's what they want. That's the vibe, as it were. And that's true in so many different ways. You know, so anyway. You talked about the pollution of advertisements. Could we talk about the pollution of music? Yes. At my cigar lounge up in Studentville, Ohio, we intentionally, and from the beginning, have no electronic music and no televisions, and I think we're flirting with getting rid of Wi-Fi.

And consequently, these good men, sometimes women, will come into our lounge and sit down, and they'll read a book, and they'll talk to each other, and they'll do what human beings do and get revived by. It's funny, I think the only negative reviews we have are people who are like, where's all the TVs? Yes. We meant to do that.

We actually have a live jazz band that will come in on Thursday nights, but I'm so tired of going to a restaurant. My wife and I the other day were in Nashville. We went to a lovely steak restaurant. The music was so offensive. Yes. Not because of the lyrics,

but because of how annoying and bad it was. Exactly. And to say, could you please turn this down or off? You're met like you've just asked a very offensive question. Yes, yes. No, it's, I hate that. It goes back to Cardo Serra's book about the dictatorship of noise.

you know, people, modern people, if they're not Catholics, if they don't have a spiritual life or an intellectual life, for that matter, they don't want to be left alone in silence with their thoughts. They don't, they're terrified of that. That's a terrifying proposition for a non-believer, I think. I think life without faith in God is a terrifying prospect. I can't even, I mean, I can hardly even imagine it. I think that if you don't believe in God, if God is not the center of your life, giving it a meaning, a purpose, a goal,

giving your sufferings and your hardships and your limitations a meaning and a purpose and a goal, then I think one of two scenarios has to play out. Either you become a pessimistic nihilist, like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Derrida. Larry David. Yeah.

Either you become a nihilist, in which case you ought to either kill yourself or kill other people or both, if you're being fully consistent, or you have to distract yourself constantly so that you can live a superficial life and never think about the pain, the woe of being alive in a fallen world. I was joking with my Larry David reference. I don't even know if you know who that is, but he has this funny, insightful joke. He says, wherever I am, I just want to get the hell out of there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't actually know who he is, but that's... I love that. I love that you don't know who he is.

You're so cool. But so I think a lot of people, in a sense, they medicate and stupefy themselves with constant sensible stimulation, visual, audible, tactile, whatever it might be, in order to live perpetually on the surface and never be reminded of the depths. never be, never be forced to be alone with themselves where they have to ask painful questions, difficult questions. Yeah, so I do think that this situation that we now see where there is almost not a single public place left

in the Western world that is not thumping with music of usually a very degraded character. I think that just fits right in with my explanation. You know, that's why it's happened. And that's why people can't imagine not how. having it. I'll tell you this, 30 years ago, if I was at a restaurant and I asked them to turn the music down, they almost always did without any fuss. Ten years ago, maybe they did with a grimace or with a surly attitude. Now they refuse to. They will not touch the music. And I've even

tried, okay, I'll admit, I'm really radical about this. I love silence or beautiful music, classical music, sacred music, and I really hate most forms of modern music. I make an exception for folk music, real folk music. But I've even tried bribing people at restaurants or cafes because I know I have to be here for two hours because I'm supposed to meet somebody and I'm here early. How much is it going to cost?

I'll give you 20 bucks if you just turn this off. They won't take it. I'm serious. You can't even bribe people to get rid of it. That's the extent to which this has happened. And even if you're the only. only one in the place. It is, anyway.

Yeah. But yeah, so there's a lot of sonic pollution. A lot of sonic clutter. So what's going on with modern popular music? Well, very simply, modern popular music, it began in a fairly mild way with jazz. It intensified as you went through the decades from the 50s to the 60s to the 70s to the 80s. But modern rock and pop and rap and techno and all of these genres, they have one premise in common,

which is to excite the passions as much as possible. That's their goal. Music in general speaks to the passions. It speaks to the emotions. I mean, this is something you find in Plato and Aristotle. It's been known since the ancient times, that music is a language of emotion, of feeling. So it always is appealing to emotions and feelings.

But the point that Plato and Aristotle made is that, that it should do so in an orderly way. That is, good music should put order into your passions. It should, in a sense, it should direct them in harmonious ways so that your feelings are, become part of a virtuous character. They become the substrate of a virtuous character. But the point of modern forms of music

seems to be simply to excite the raw, irascible and concupiscible appetites. Explain what that means to people. I will, in a sec. But to excite the appetites that have to do with anger and lust. I see. Essentially.

So that people can be made less rational to live by their emotions, to be more like animals, to be more animalistic, to be angry, which is what you see often with heavy metal, to feel a kind of rage or a kind of of intense

feeling of, well, it can be anger, it can be despair as you get with this sort of fusion metal, this kind of slow, I forget what they call it doom metal or something like that. But, you know, it targets these irascible appetites and then, or to stimulate your passions in the direction of lust so that at the nightclub, it's sort of like fornication in musical form is how I would put it with with some types of music so how so how does it do that with lust because the rage thing makes sense to me I mean heavy metal is done in a sort of aggressive way which is why I like listening to it when I work out yes yes so I'd be interested in your your thoughts on that but the lust thing yes seems less obvious yeah I think that that that generically speaking

what you could say is that when music um when it when it acts powerfully on your sense appetite for pleasure when it makes you want to experience sense pleasure and the music itself is one such pleasure and it it sort of turns off the reasoning part of the soul it tries to overcome the rational part of the soul with a sort of cloudy mist of feeling of emotion such that you are more prone to want to let yourself go. So it seems to me that it's not surprising that, you know, we talk about, well, for example, we talk about music, seductive music.

You know, like in the movies, if a man is trying to put moves on somebody, he doesn't put on like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or something. I mean, he puts on like the mood music to kind of soften the resistance and to break down the resistance to make a person feel sort of gooey and sentimental and, and, you know, and to surrender right um but i think it also takes the form in let's say like a nightclub with with pulsing and pumping sort of music where it it makes you live in your animal physical nature it without of course canceling out reason it can't do that metaphysically but it can acclude or cloud over reason the way that a thick layer of clouds can block the sun so the sun is still there

but the clouds are blocking it and i think that this nubilation this clouding of reason is what any form of music does that excessively stirs up the passions. And I just want to be clear about this. You know, I think some romantic period music does this too and aims to do this. So I'm not just against rock music or other forms of current popular music. I think that Wagner, for example, as much of a genius as he was, I mean, there was more musical ability in Wagner's little finger than there isn't any pop musician that has lived in the past 100 years, 50 years.

So Wagner was a genius, he was a musical genius and his operas are incredibly rich musically, but they are designed to seduce. They are a subtle form of pseudomysticism that is meant to entrance and lure and propagate a sort of Germanic mythology,

it's a weird combination. If you look into what Wagner is doing in his music, it's a weird combination of elements of Christianity, of Buddhism, of Nietzsche, of Germanic, Aryan dominance. I mean, it's, you know, anti-Semitism is in there. It's this very complex philosophical system that his music is designed to induce you into in a way so that your feelings resonate with it.

Yeah. And, you know, you don't even know that you're being seduced. I've been to a bunch of Wagner operas live. I know his music very well. And honestly, I mean, I was, a lot of 20 and 30-year-olds have this experience. If they get into classical music, they find the romantics very appealing. I guess I would say in general, when people start to listen to classical music, the first thing that is an easy listen for them is romantic music.

What do I mean by that? Chikovsky, Rachmaninoff, V. Wagner. Well, maybe Wagner's not such an easy listen. You know, most movie scores are written in a romantic vein in that genre. So it's kind of familiar to us. It's the form of classical music that we find easiest to relate to. Beethoven would be a kind of early romantic. When we say romantic, what do we mean? I'm talking about music written from circa the 18, 20s, 30s, all the way down to the present. I mean, there have been romantic. composers writing all the age of the present. What is the essence of romantic? Oh, this is a, yeah. These are very nitty-gritty questions because, so the period right before the Romantics

was the classical period. So people talk about classical music is kind of a misnomer because the word classical really should be limited to a phase from about, it didn't last terribly long, but maybe the 1760s to about the 1820s is the kind of heyday of the classical period. The three great classical composers are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,

the Viennese trio that people always talk about. And already with Beethoven, as I said, he's beginning to shift, but Hayden and Mozart are wonderful examples. Their music is, of course, richly emotional, but it's characterized above all by orderliness, by a kind of, by a classical sense of proportion and balance

and elegance and a certain simplicity of form, everything is very logical, it's very rational, it's music of the Enlightenment period. It's Enlightenment music par excellence. It's the kind of music that the Enlightenment philosophers were drinking their tea to as they listened, you know, to a string quartet play Haydn, you know.

And I'm not saying that as a put-down, although I think that there are issues there that are interesting for another conversation about the Enlightenment aspects of, classical music, that period of music. But the point is that it's music that is very much designed to stimulate the emotions in an orderly way, in a way that's gentle and moderate. It's, you know, Mozart and Haydn are not looking to stir people up to break and burn things down. You know, like, Mazurksky would not be like that. No, no, no. Would he be in the romantic

period? Yeah, he's a romantic, absolutely. And so the music that develops in the romantic period is characterized in reaction to classicism. And this is true of romanticism in general, in all the arts, characterized by a reaction against orderliness, against moderation, against proportionality. You see more use of asymmetry, more use of free forms, more intensely emotional music. Would, forgive me, because I know nothing about this stuff, but would sort of the Baroque style within a church, would that fit within that romantic? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. So, Baroque is even before classical.

Okay, well, what am I thinking of when I think of, I go to some of these churches and they look overly kind of floral? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Baroque. That's Baroque. Yeah, so what lined up with the romantic period as far as architecture? Architecture.

Well, okay, here's what I'm going to say, just to make it as confusing as possible. The arts don't always follow lockstep with each other. Okay. So what's happening in literature, what's happening in music, what's happening in architecture or in painting, they have some elements of analogy,

but there are also great differences. And what I mean by that is that the development of music took place over a slower period than the development of architecture. So architecture went through massive stylistic changes faster than music did. And music's stylistic changes happened in an accelerating period. That is, let's put this way, the medieval period of music,

of which Gregorian chant would be the highest example, that lasted for a thousand years of relative stasis, relatively little change. Then there was the Renaissance period that followed the medieval period, and that is a period of a couple of hundred years of quite a bit of change, where you start getting multi-part polyphonic music

written by composers like Guillaume de Moshe, Jocin de Prey, eventually, you know giovanni pierre luigi de palestrina um william bird thomas louis de victoria all these great renaissance composers that's considered the classic the golden age of catholic sacred music that lasts a couple of hundred years then you get into the baroque period that's maybe circa end of the end of the 17th century to traditionally the death of bach 1750 that's the baroque period that was maybe a hundred years i mean again this is

all very very rough yeah and then you get to the the classical phase, which is only about 60 years or something, maybe. And then you get to the romantic phase, as I say, that that's longer. But the point is that even the romantic phase pretty quickly morphs into late romanticism, which tends to be more dissonant, more chaotic. Gustav Mahler is a great example, a turn of the 20th century composer whose music is very tempestuous, very anguished, sometimes stretching tonality to the breaking point where it almost sounds like it's going to become atonal music. And then you get Arnold Schoenberg, Albin Berg, Anton Weber, and the second Viennese school who are writing atonal music. So music that no longer has a key. I'm sure you've heard

atonal music. If you've ever watched a movie like The Exorcist, you know, that's where a total music finally found its home is in like horror movies. Because it sounds like, you know, it just sounds horrible. It sounds like you're about to be stabbed by an axe murderer. And so, you know, music, I guess what I'm saying is that the phases in music accelerate as time goes on, it seems to me, in a certain way. Whereas, you know, with periods of architecture, I mean, they lasted longer. And then in the romantic period itself, when you have romantic poetry and romantic music,

there was a gothic revival, you know, led by Pugin. And so the same people who are listening to romantic composers are building Gothic cathedrals again. So the arts don't always work lockstep as the only point I want to make there. But I suppose the larger lesson to take away is that I would make the argument, and I make it in my book, Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence in quite a bit of detail. I would make the argument that music in the Middle Ages is characterized by serenity, by orderliness, by interiority, by sacrality. It's music that stills you,

that puts stillness into you. That's a good way to put it. It's music that actually, it does affect the emotions because music inherently, as I said. But it's music that calms the emotions in order to open up a space, space for the exercise of the higher faculties of man.

So it's music that's actually sublimating the emotions in service of the intellect in which the image of God is located. And therefore, it's music in service of prayer. That's the predominant character of at least much of medieval music. You do have the troubadours and the Truvairs and their music is kind of rowdy, but that's secular music, and that's fine. It's rowdy in a nice way, actually. In the Renaissance, the same thing is true.

If you pick any Renaissance composer, such as the ones I mentioned, Palestrina, Bird, Victoria, you listen to their music, again, it's music that it's stimulating, it's interesting, it's intricate, but it's still fundamentally peaceful and orderly. It's not music that's tearing you apart

and trying to make you, like cry or cry out or or you know feel anguished or feel depressed or feel angry or or feel um you know like like you know where are the wenches you know it's it's not it's not like that yeah and if you do cry or feel angry it's not because it's sort of imposing itself upon you in a violent way is that right because certainly i've sometimes i was saying the i don't know which creed it is credo in unum That is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard in my life. Oh, sure.

And there's certainly been times I felt I've teared up at that. Unum, sanctum, catholicum. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, and I guess I should revise my statement by saying, Renaissance music certainly can be intensely emotional if you listen to, let's say,

the passion music of Victoria, his setting of the Tenebrae Psalms or responsories, his requiem mass, you know, if you listen to William Byrd's motets, in which he's expressing the anguish of recusant Catholics in England under persecution from Queen Elizabeth I. So it's just that it's a different kind of, it's an intense emotion that is somehow a pure emotion that is of a contemplative nature that is not artificially induced. It's bringing you into yourself, into that interior castle. that I was talking about.

And therefore, it still is fundamentally in service of a religious sentiment and a conversion of the mind to God is how I would put it. Even when it's highly emotional, it seems to me that in the romantic period, you're often dealing with composers who are either not Christian believers or who are conflicted believers. They don't really know what they believe. Beethoven was a mishmash of that. that sort. He was Catholic, but he wasn't an Orthodox Catholic, you might say. Farns Schubert,

even more so. What you hear in the music is an expression of their own interior confusion and an expression of a kind of quest for transcendence that is going to take another route than religion. It's a kind of humanistic, naturalistic, psychological route to whether it's elevation or ecstasy or nirvana or oblivion or whatever it might be. They're trying to find almost a substitute religion

is the sense you get with a lot of romantic composers. And I think by the time you get to the 20th century and a lot of the forms of pop music you're finally listening to a music that has been completely cut off from religion, completely cut off from Christian roots, cut off also from natural roots in the sense that it doesn't anymore observe the natural principles of order and proportion and harmony that the ancient philosophers discovered like Pythagoras,

especially the Pythagorean tradition. And that's kind of baked into these modern musical styles so that even when you get like Christian rock, unfortunately there's a contradiction between the form of the music and the message the message they want the message to be good but the form of the music is a form of cultural rebellion against Christianity and Christendom

and even against nature I would say in a way that makes that music a contradiction can you explain how you said it kind of began with jazz when I listen to jazz, good jazz if that's such a thing my mind feels right I feel it settles me But I know people hate it, and I see the point that it kind of became more ad-lib. What's the problem with jazz in your mind?

Yeah, well, just to give my bona fides at the beginning, I love Keith Jarrett. Keith Jarrett is one of my favorite artists out there. I love his classical recordings, of course, Bach and Handel and so on. But also, I love his jazz improvisations. I don't listen to them frequently, but of jazz musicians, he's the one, he's my go-to. And I don't know if you're familiar with Keith Jarrett. Just a little. But he's quite amazing.

He's one of the most phenomenal musicians of the 20th century, and down to the present, he's still alive. So I am familiar with jazz. When I was growing up, my parents loved jazz. They used to take me to live jazz festivals in New Jersey, where I grew up. And, you know, I enjoyed them. I mean, the musicians are very talented.

They're very good at what they do. You know, if they have a good riff, you know, it's very impressive. Everybody claps. You know, there's an energy in the air. And live jazz is better than no experience of live music. I mean, I think the experience of live music is very precious and very valuable, and people need to seek it out.

So that being said, my basic problem with jazz is twofold. First, it's musical fooling around. I think that there's a kind of fundamental unsuriness to a lot of jazz. where it's, it's, I think music is a serious affair. That doesn't mean it's joyless. It doesn't mean it's, you know, stern, that you, there's a lot of fun music in the classical realm, fun by which I mean, like, frolicsome and delightful

and clever and playful. All of that you can find, especially, let's say, in Haydn's, you know, string quartets or Haydn's symphonies. He even plays musical jokes. I mean, he's such a, such a frolicsome composer. So I'm not saying, but I think it's serious in the sense that it's a craft. And the craft requires discipline and mastery of material and intellectual structure. And what I see in the great composers of all periods, from the Middle Ages down to the romantic and even modern composers like Arvopert, what I see is music of a high intellectual caliber and dignity and serious.

like a great work of architecture, like a great painting, like a great novel. And what I see with jazz is something more like finger painting or more like Jackson Pollock splashes or... That's interesting. I mean, I know you just said that art doesn't always kind of fall in lockstep, but did Pollock and jazz?

Actually, I don't know. That's an interesting question. I have no idea of Jackson Pollard. There's a similarity to it. There's a playfulness to it, a clear task. Yeah. Yeah. So again, I'm not saying there's not talent there, only that it seems to me that jazz is fooling around musically. And maybe that's okay. But it doesn't seem to me that it's certainly not the highest form that the art of music can take. Okay. That's one thing. The other aspect is it seems to me that it's, there's a sensuousness to a lot of jazz. I'm not talking about the experimental stuff, which can just be weird. But mainstream jazz, what people think of as jazz, has a kind of nightclub sensuality to it.

Definitely. Setting the mood. Which it's supposed to have. That's part of its genre. And, you know, again, I mean, at the expense of people thinking that I'm some kind of Gnostic dualist or something, I just think that according to a to mystic anthropology, you know, our fallen human nature is fractured and fragmented, and our emotions, our feelings are generally disorderly or often disorderly.

They need to have order put into them. We need to help our emotional life to be integrated into our spiritual and intellectual life. We need to seek integration, integrity. We need to be people of integrity. And what I think this means is, you know, there's a great saying that passions make good servants, but terrible masters. Truthly is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence. Whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding, or looking for daily spiritual guidance, Truthly is your companion on the journey.

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We're supposed to harness our passions for higher purposes. You know, Plato has this, Plato has this wonderful image of a charioteers, you know, who think this is in the phaedrus, you know, who has the two horses which represent basically the irascible and concupiscible appetites. You know, eros and thumos, if I remember correctly. And the charioteer is Logos, is reason. And he's supposed to, yes, he needs those horses

to carry him along. You know, we need anger. We need righteous anger when it's time to fight. If we don't have that anger, St. Thomas says, we're not virtuous. Similarly, we should have, you know, married couples should feel desire for each other, right? it's not good to lack that.

There would be something wanting in us if we lacked that kind of desire, that eros. But we need to hold a tight rain on them and we need to direct them in a direction that is where Logos should be going and wants to be going. Instead of letting the horses break free and just go wherever,

and pulling you off a cliff, right? Which is... Right, so your point is that many of us, if not most of us in today's world are being driven around by wild horses going in all different directions and that modern music just exacerbate, that fracturing, that chaos.

Modern music is the wild horses running as free as they can go. Right. And we are just letting ourselves be passively carried around in whatever direction those manipulators of emotion want to take us. You know, we should not allow ourselves to be emotionally manipulated. Okay. Now, anytime we listen to music, frankly, anytime we listen to human discourse, anything. I mean, we are always being affected. We're being informed. We're being moved.

But there are good ways and bad ways of being moved and affected. And we should not allow ourselves to become manipulated instruments of a commercial, musical, industrial complex. That is what we're dealing with, with a lot of modern groups. It's not like your local neighborhood band anymore. It's you know, the music that people listen to is slickly produced by multi-billion-dollar companies in order to hook you and get your money. I mean, it's just like so many things on the internet, right? So I think that we should, we should ask ourselves, you know, what music is going to support my life as a Catholic seeking virtue, seeking moral virtue, seeking intellectual virtue, what is going to minister to the building up and ornamentation and

cleansing of my interior temple, right? Yes, right. I think we need to have a religious, basically what I'm saying is this. We should have a fundamentally religious view of ourselves, where we think of ourselves, according to St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, I believe it's the first letter, that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, you know, and this is his argument. You remember, this is his argument against fornication.

He says, you are a temple of the Holy Spirit. Why would you defile or profane that temple by using your body, which is the temple of the Spirit, in an immoral way? I think people don't realize the extent to which, since music is a physical phenomenon and it affects us physically, it's like food and drink.

It's like sex. I mean, it really is a physical phenomenon that moves us, changes us, affects us, molds us. It's like when your grandparents, my grandparents, my parents give my children a ton of sugar because they just want to be the fun grandparents and then they're surprised when my kids go absolutely crazy. Of course.

The music's like that, isn't it? It's precisely like that, yeah. Wow. So this is why I wrote my book, Good Music, Sacred Music and Silence. Where can people get that? It's published by Tan Books so they can find it And they can find it at Amazon. They can find it at also at Aususey Press

where I keep my own stuff too. Wow. Let's think of how can we, and I'm asking you to help me, let's be honest, but I'm the stand in for everybody else watching. How can we have a distraction detox, right? Because it sounds like we've kind of gone

through a few different things here in this interview. The first is the realization that, okay, thing to do is to actually remove something. In other words, there's not an app for that. There's only a deletion of apps that will, right? It's sort of like a detox from the phone. We've talked about that with dumb phones and things like that. Then you've said, okay, just try to direct 10% of your reading into something more worthwhile. And then another thing that we could do is start to listen to beautiful music. Could you maybe flesh this out? Like if someone's like,

okay, tell me what to do. Yes. Don't, don't make it vague. Tell me exactly what I can do. What would you say to them if they're, like most of us, just hooked into the machine? Yeah, I think I want to return to this point that the Christian, ascetical, mystical tradition has immense resources for us in its promotion of fasting and abstinence. And, of course, I mean literal fasting and abstinence, but I also mean all the other ways that we can fast and abstain. We should, so this is one practice that I've recommended. that other people have recommended it too. A 40-day lent and fast from music.

Now, this is actually, now what I mean by that is no music at all. Just spend your lent in silence, relatively speaking, give up, this might be an awkward thing to say at this moment, but maybe even give up podcasts. Of course. Give up music and adopt some form of prayer, whether it's the rosary or if you already do the rosary,

perhaps I'm part of the divine office, which I want to get, I want to come back to that in a second. But take on a certain discipline so that you fill your life with more silence. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be very strange. I heard a great lecture once by a fellow named William Brownsburger, he who wrote just the absolute best article on silence that I've ever read. It was publishing Camunio magazine. I think, I hope you can find it online somewhere. William Brownsburger. but I heard him give a lecture once at Wyoming Catholic College in which he said when you get into your car,

resist the temptation to punch on the radio and listen to NPR, you know, national propaganda radio or, you know, resist the temptation to put on the radio station. Just be still, be quiet. Just look at things. Just be with your thoughts. Pray a bit, you know. And so I think it's very hard to do this kind of fasting

and abstinence, But what I've discovered, what other people have discovered and have said so to me, is if they do that during Lent and then Easter comes around and they put on the rock music they were listening to before, they actually don't like it as much. It's kind of aggressive. It's like, why was I listening to this? It's agitating, right?

Because you've actually given yourself a chance to heal. You've given yourself a chance to calm down, to taste what it's like to be free interiorly or to be freer. And when you put that back on the aggressiveness or the abrasiveness or the worldliness of it, the profanity of it, strikes you much more powerfully.

So that's one thing I definitely recommend is a musical fast. Another thing I would recommend is, in my book I have a chapter where I give practical advice for people about how to start loving classical music. Please tell us. It's not, no, but you have to, I mean, to get the full version,

you have to get that chapter. And actually, there's a version of it online at 1 Peter 5 that people can find. I'll give you the link to it later. But it's, there are many, many, many, many, many pieces of classical music that people will almost instantly enjoy. I mean, it's not, it's not that cerebral and rarefied. You know, sometimes people think, ooh, classical music, you know, that's for the high fluton, you know, sorts of people.

And I'm not that kind of person. and I'm just a, I'm just a country bumpkin, or I'm, you know, I'm just an ordinary working boy or whatever. No, no, no. Classical music is classical music speaking broadly. Everything before pop music is, a lot of it is just delightful and compelling and interesting. And you know what? You're already partially used to it because many great movie scores

are done in a fundamentally classical idiom. Most of John Williams is like popular classical music. They call it pops, you know, popular classical. classical music. You can handle this, right? Everybody can handle this. Why should we do it? Because these are great achievements of the human spirit. These are part of our Western inheritance. Suggest one symphony for people, or one piece of music. People can listen to after this. Of all these four seasons. Okay. I mean, in fact, that work, well, sometimes the problem with a certain piece of music is that it's so often used that it reminds people of commercials

or something. But I think that of all these four seasons is a great example. It's very enjoyable. I would say, you know, if you can get every year in December, in almost every urban area of any size, there will be a performance of Handel's Messiah. Go to that. It's so, it's so wonderful. It's such a great musical, you know, depiction of the life of Christ. You know, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is very exciting music. There's a reason why it's been, you know, there's a reason why Beethoven is a perennial favorite of everybody. What's the first piece of classical music I listened to that I fell in love with was Bach's, you can tell me, Yazoo, uh, soul. Yes, uh, yes. Oh, yeah, Bach is, I mean, Bach is my

desert island composer, you know, in the sense that if I had to take any composer along with me and give up everybody else, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. And that's a feeling that I think is shared by quite a few music lovers. But yeah, Bach, oh my goodness, he, you know, it's, okay, in a way music streaming services have made discovering classical music way easier than it ever was before, because all you have to do is start with one piece, find one piece that you like, and then just let the algorithm pick the rest of them. Now, it's not, the algorithms are not always right, and sometimes they throw a curveball and there's some weird thing that comes on that you have to skip. But the point is that you can actually familiarize yourself, you know,

while you're exercising the gym, while you're taking your long walk, while you're driving to work or whatever, you can use a streaming service to get you quick access to a lot of popular classical music, even to enter something like Bach's greatest hits. You know, it'll take all the pieces that people love by Bach. You know, sometimes the performances may not be the greatest on those kinds of compilations, but, you know, it's worth a risk. You know, it's worth the role of the dice. But I will say that streaming services are not so good in another respect, which is that they do very much enhance the consumerist approach to music. They make us think of it more as a commodity and less as an art form. And people will seldom be able to remember what it was that they listened to because the pieces are just kind of going on in a random order in the background.

And it's like, oh, I heard something the other day that I liked, but I have no idea what it was. I'll probably never be able to find it again. So I do also encourage people to listen intentionally, to find a composer or a piece they like, and then to keep listening to that composer or that piece so that they get to be familiar with it. You know, just the way that we become familiar with a favorite movie or something like that.

You know, we want to do that. My recommendation for people, if they would like to start to read, maybe not the great authors, but the good to great authors, is to choose a novella, you know, start with something that seems manageable, like Tolstoy's the death of Ivan Iliuch. Yes, what a fantastic book.

Dostoevsky's a gentle creature or these sorts of things. Like, that way you don't have to feel defeated immediately. I love the Brothers Kay. I've read it about three or four times, but I know that the first time I picked it up, I felt very overwhelmed by it. I felt overwhelmed definitely by war and peace. I've put that down two or three times now. I haven't succeeded. And that can be quite defeating. You think, oh, I guess it's not for me. I was right to not even bother with that. So So picking up a short story in a novella can show you, no, no, you really can understand and love this. Right. Well, I agree with you on that.

I would throw out as another example, Solchitzen's A Day in the Life of Yvonne Denisovich. Oh, yes. Yes, very sad and beautiful. Yeah, I mean, there are so many great short stories that people can read. I would also recommend, excuse me, Willa Cather's death comes for the Archbishop. I haven't read it. Beautiful novel set in the American Southwest. Yeah, gosh, I mean, I wasn't necessarily prepared

to put out literary recommendations. Yeah, I've enjoyed the Catholic novels of Robert Hugh Benson. I think Lord of the World is a fascinating read. Flannery O'Connor. Flannery O'Connor. Her short stories are really zany, but that might appeal to. They appeal to me.

I think they appeal to a type of person and not to everybody. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I think. But again, the point is, don't let the great be the enemy of the good. Yes. I mean, if all we're doing is scrolling through TikTok, then all right, just pick up a short story and, you know, prove to yourself that you can concentrate, that you can get this done and then go from there.

Yes, and I think it's a question of, you know, we have to actually rebuild our intellectual muscles that we've allowed to atrophy. Very much. You know, everybody knows this from experience, but studies have also shown that the more people got used to using their phones, the shorter their attention span became, and the harder it has become for them to pick up a book and read it without being distracted. And now that if you pick up a modern fiction book,

it'll have like 80 chapters. Yes. Because it needs to keep you gripped, and the chapters are two pages long. Yes. Well, and, you know, it's funny. I mean, Charles Dickens, I mean, his novels are on the long side, most of them.

A tale of two cities is, is rather short and that's and so is hard times and those are what ones that i would recommend if people want to get into charles dickens but he was the master of the cliffhanger ending you know i mean that that goes back away each chapter yeah the chapters the chapters he because he serialized he was same with dostevsky right right was written for a russian newspaper so they're quite short and each sort of ends on yes it makes you want to go on to the next one so yeah they definitely it was uh it was a sort of harmless version of clickbait i suppose but um yeah Yeah.

But yeah, but I think... This is helpful. This is really helpful. I think what you said earlier is really, really true. That it's important to create for ourselves a less cluttered, an uncluttered, and as much as possible, distraction-free environment if we're going to read. What I mean by that is, you know, this, this amazed me when I first read about this. But there have been, actually, by now there have been a lot of studies done about every aspect of, of, of, of, technology use, internet use, smartphone use, AI use.

And it's what's been discovered is that even if a phone is in the same room as you, and it's shut off, it affects the quality and length and level of conversations. It affects, you know, your ability to read because you have a subliminal sense that at any moment, you could either be disturbed or you could just go over there and turn it on and see what people are saying on. X, you know. And so I think this is why, I mean, writers for centuries, I suppose, at least for a couple of centuries, have found it necessary. And composers, too, to go off to a cottage or a cabin somewhere and write their novel

or write their symphony. Because even before we had all of this technology, people needed to get away from their ordinary life with all of its burdens and all of its demands. to get to a freer zone. And so at least another thing that people should think about doing is they should think about maybe low tech or less tech vacations, right? So going somewhere where most of the time

they're going to be out, you know, hiking or swimming or just reading. Like take a bunch of books and I don't know, it's hard, it's hard, but we have to try. I don't know if you know this about me, but for three years in a row recently, every August, I would give up the internet. Yes.

And I was, it was always the exact same experience. I remember the last time I did this, and I need to do it next year. Please God, I will. I'll have the courage to. I was chatting with Dr. Peter Craft in one of these interviews, and it was the last day in July.

And I knew that after this interview was done, I actually gave my phone and my computer to my producer at the time and demanded that he not give them back to me until August, oh, so September 1st. And the first thing, that happens is your mind feels like one of these rotating fans. It's just, it's just, my brain's going all over the place. And only after several days does it start to slow down. But a couple of

interesting experiences that I had. The first was, after that interview with Dr. Craft, I went to Franciscan University to do something or other. And as you drive up to Franciscan, there's this beautiful place with a roundabout, I suppose, with a lot of flowers. And I thought to myself, I'm going to go over and smell the flowers. And then I thought, well, I better not do that. That's kind of weird. And then I thought, well, why else are they there, if not to admire?

They're not there for any utilitarian reason. They're there to enjoy. So how strange is it that I'm embarrassed to do what these flowers are meant to have me do? Exactly. So I did that. And then a couple of other things that took place. It was just so easy after, like maybe a four or five days,

so much is sit and read a bunch of books. I actually even had a record player. if I wanted to listen to music, I would use that. And I also memorized poetry very easily. Yes. But could, like now I'd find it very difficult. So I like to call these two spaces, internet land and creatively non-internet land.

When I'm in internet land or internet world, it's very hard for me to read deeply, to think deeply. When I detach from that, I wonder why I don't do it more often, honestly. Yes, well, I mean, this is the paradox of your work in mind, is that we depend on the internet. We depend on this technology for what we're doing even while we recognize the limitations

and the challenges it presents. So we're talking about things that people can do. Another thing that I think people can do and should do is they should go on a silent retreat from time to time. Spend a week at a traditional Benedictine monastery. I mean, it's not easy to get to do, it's not easy to arrange more than a week

even though that would be ideal. Some people might not even find that ever possible because of family and work circumstances. But if you can get free to spend a week at Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma, for example, and you get there, and the same process will happen, right? You're not going to have your computer.

You're not going to have your phone. You're going to go possibly seven or eight times a day to the monastery church to hear the monks chanting the divine office that is very um tranquilizing in the best sense of the word uh it's very um it's going to calm you down and slow you down it's not going to be easy because of the reasons you said but it's by the end of the week you are going to feel completely revitalized by that experience um so yeah and that's what i do every year for the Easter trituum, I go on retreat. I leave on, I try to leave on Wednesday evening to catch Tenebrae. I go to the Benedictins of Mary in Gower, Missouri. I stay there and I just

participate in all of their liturgies for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday morning, and then I come home. And that whole period, no, no technology, just as, as, you know, and I love it. It's so, it's so good. I have discovered, I've done this now for three years in a row, and I'm going to do it the fourth year this coming Easter. I've discovered that it's actually the only way that I can really fully absorb, well, at least absorb to the maximum of my capacity,

the immense riches of the traditional triduum. I mean, in fact, it's so rich. It's already like drinking from a fire hose. But if you give up everything else and you just are attending these liturgies, which actually take up many hours a day, it puts you in this zone. Like, it really takes you out of this day-to-day,

conflictual, tempestuous, distracting world. And it very much brings you into the mystery of Christ in a way that I think we need to do periodically. Like, we have to have these periodic moments where we are deeply, reconnecting with the Lord of our lives so that it can sustain us in all of the rest of the time. And I think that if people don't do that ever, there's a very serious risk that they will just drift over time away from the Lord. And that's, I think, when you have the

danger of religion becoming rote practice, becoming a box that's checked off, becoming what some people call a kind of insurance policy against hell. You know, it's, I think, yeah, our religion should be the deepest source of what we do and what we think and what we feel and how we live. And we're not going to be able to do that if we don't have these periods of separating ourselves from the world. And by the way, that, I think, is one of the tremendous advantages of the traditional Latin Mass,

because in a miniature form, it's like a miniature retreat. You know, when you step into a low mass, you're leaving the hustle and bustle and noise and confusion of the world behind, and you're entering into this sacred precinct, which is like the half an hour of silence mentioned in the Book of Revelation,

where everyone in heaven is silent for a half an hour, right? This is what the low mass is like, when you enter into a church for a solemn high mass, you're there for an hour and a half of symbolic pageantry that puts you right into the court of heaven with the elders falling on their faces with the angels and the saints. It's a little, it's a mini retreat is how I would put it. You mentioned earlier wanting to speak about the liturgy of the hours. Oh, yes, yes.

So I think that one of the things that's one of the immense, nuggets of wisdom that we have, if that's not a contradiction in terms, immense nugget. One of the most valuable nuggets of wisdom we have from the monastic tradition is the practice of an aurarium, some kind of order to the day that is dictated not by the pressures and demands of the external world, which leaves us like flotsam and jetsam or, you know, just something. But where we have, have a kind of plan of life. Yes.

And, you know, Opus Day makes a big, you know, emphasis on this too. You know, have a time when you get up in the morning, have a prayer routine, do a morning offering, you know, pause at this time of day to pray, whatever. You know, so, but this is just monastic wisdom. I'm a Benedictine Oblate of the Monastery of Norcia in Italy. And a Benedictine Oblate is somebody who promises, he makes a solemn promise, it's not a vow,

to follow the rule of St. Benedict in a way that is adapted to the life of a lay person. Basically, conversion of life, conversion of morals or manners according to the rule of St. Benedict. So that's what I try to do. And part of the requirement

that I promised to follow, again, it doesn't bind under pain of sin, but it's something that I take very seriously, any oblate takes it very seriously, is to pray a part of the divine office every day. The divine office is the churches, offering of prayers and praises to God, primarily through the Psalms of David. And this is, you know, traditionally divided into eight sections, matins at night and seven offices during the day.

I don't do all of that. I mean, that's what monks do. Monks spend five hours a day or more doing all of that and singing all of it. But what an oblate does could vary depending upon his circumstances. In my case, I begin every morning before I take, turn on any technology, no computers, no phones, nothing. I get up, I make coffee. That's an absolute day rigour, you know, presupposition. But I get up, I make coffee, and then I light a bunch of candles around my icons. I have a sort of icon stand in my room above my dresser. I light all these candles, and then I have a kneeler. And I just do, I recite the Office of Prime, which is the, basically what I'd call the Office of Workers and Fighters.

It's a short office. It's three Psalms. I prayed in Latin. I've been doing it for many, many years now, so it's quite familiar to me. And I find that very consoling. It's a strong anchor because it's familiar, because it's regular,

because it's there all the time. So three Psalms, you know, each day, three different Psalms. Little reading from scripture, a hymn, you know, and a closing prayer, our father, Kirier Leason, just various things that are connected

with the Office of Prime. And then right after reading Prime, I read the Roman martyrology. So I read about all the saints, the martyrs, the virgins and confessors and so on that are being celebrated in the liturgy that day. What a lot of Catholics don't realize is, you know, the saints who show up in our liturgical calendar that we celebrate at Mass, that's just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of the number of saints that the church remembers every day. And the Roman martyrology, which is this book right here, this is a liturgical book. And it contains every day, you know, 20 or 30 saints that are listed. May I have a look? Yeah, yeah.

And so that's connected with the Office of Prime is to read the Roman martyrology. And it talk about, you know, being inspired by a cloud of witnesses. Yeah, this is like a page each. It's not long. Right, it's a page. But it's, you know what? It's like reading about all of the glorious soldiers

who fought for the Lord, you know, who fell in the line of duty, you know, or who gave their lives to Christ in all sorts of ways. And it's just a great reminder each day of however bad my life is, it could be a lot worse. And however bad it is, God's grace will be there for me. My grace is sufficient for your weakness. That's what this reminds me of.

And then right after that, I read a little segment from the rule of St. Benedict, which is what Oblates do as well. And that gives me a chance to, you know, to ponder, you know, what lesson from this great ancient, wise man of the church, can I apply to my life today? And so in this practice,

the only reason I'm describing all of this is that when you have a practice like this and you do it before technology, it has a way of putting things in perspective. It has a way of framing the day and consecrating it to the Lord. It has a way of... Even from a naturalistic point of view,

you're the hammer, not the anvil to sort of cite, Dominic there, you're beginning the day and you're acting upon the day. You don't let the emails and the phone calls of impact you. Yeah, and it seems to me that that's such a problem with people who pick up their phone first thing in the day and they're just flooded with all of the angry messages on Twitter or whatever it might be. Why should that be the first thing that invades our consciousness? Why not take advantage of even 15 minutes? I mean, what I just described. Yeah, how long does that take you? So prime martyrology and reading the rule

is 15 minutes. It's not more than that. Which is really nice. You know, don't let the grave be the enemy, the good. I like the way Jordan Peterson puts a similar thing. He says, what's something I could do that I actually would do

that would make my life better? Yes, yes, yes. That's nice. It's kind of what you said earlier about. Just move the finger. Like, what can you do? And so people who are watching this now who don't have a prayer roll,

okay, what's something you could do that you actually would do? Yes. And it might just be, you have a crucifix by your bed, and when you wake up, you pick up that crucifix, kiss it, pray in our father. Maybe that's what you can do. Oh, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Do that. And I'm definitely not saying that, you know, my number one recommendation for every human being on the planet is to do prime arterology and rule of St. Benedict. But this is what you've chosen. This is what I've been doing for many, many years now. Wow. And I find that if I don't do it, like, let's say I oversleep because I forgot to set my alarm,

or somebody calls with an emergency or something. And I get thrown off. I feel really, I feel like I'm on the wrong foot all day, all the rest of the day, you know, that I've lost my, my anchor is now just drifting, right? And so I think this is the wisdom of the aurarium. We shouldn't think of it in terms of, you know, some people I think overcommitted, like, I'm going to do this at 8 a.m.,

this at 9 a.m., this at 10 a.m., no, that's too much. Don't underestimate how weak you are. You're a layman. Well, it's more also about just what's the structure of our life. You know, if you're in a busy family, lots of kids, lots of chaos. You know, there's a limited amount you can do. But what I would say

every human being on the face of the earth should do is take the morning hours, especially the early morning hours, are very special. There's a special character to them. Our mind, even if we're tired, even if we're a bit sleepy and we need the coffee,

there's a kind of clarity to the mind in the morning that evaporates as the day goes on as we get sort of burdened by the cares of the day and as we get more tired. that early morning clarity, that kind of simplicity, that kind of emptiness of the head before the world rushes in,

that should be given to God. That must be given to God. I don't know much about this, but I know that there was an update to the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office or whatever you call it. I know that you prefer pre-Vatican 2.1.

Why? Yes. Why is it better in your estimation and how different is prime in what you're praying versus what the modern bravery does? How many hours have you got? No, I'll keep this very simple. So the liturgy of the hours is the new language for what we're talking about here, which is this cycle of Psalms and other prayers outside of the Mass,

traditionally recited by priests and religious, but also to some extent by lay people. Paul the 6th called the Liturgy of the Hours when he released a new version of it in 1971. Unfortunately, the new version, just like the new mass, as compared with the old mass, is radically different from the old one that existed prior to 1971. The history of the divine office is complicated, but I'm just going to put it in a nutshell this way. Very early on in the ancient church, I mean, we know from the very beginning. We know this about the life of Christ and the apostles.

they recited the Psalms. They prayed with the Psalms. The Psalms of David were always the bread and butter prayer for Christians. First of all, because they were for the Jews and the early Christians just carried it over, but also because, as St. Basil the Great says, and many other fathers, the Psalms, the Psalter of David, is a miniature version of the whole of Scripture. In fact, Basil the Great, if I remember correctly, he makes this astonishing claim. He says, if we lost all of the Old Testament but the Psalms, that would still contain the essential teaching of the entire Old Testament. So the Psalms are really important. Why is that? Because all of them talk about Christ. They're all, well, they're messianic to varying degrees. Some of them are very obviously messianic, you know, thou art my son, this day have I begotten you, you know, you know, thou art a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. I mean, there are some that are really, are really obviously messianic and prophetically referring to Christ. But all of them can be read in a Christian key, right? They have their literal meaning,

which is what they were about in their historical context, according to the mind of the original author. And then there's the spiritual senses of the Psalms, the allegorical sense, which refers to Christ, the analogical sense, which refers to heavenly glory,

and the moral or tropological sense, which refers to our moral life. So these spiritual senses of the Psalms, the Psalms are unbelievable, rich, just unbelievably rich. I find that as I get older and older that I can't get enough of them. They're just amazing. And so the church very wisely always made the recitation, the singing or speaking of the Psalms, the backbone of the daily public worship of Christians. Outside of the mass, it was the divine office. That's what it was called. And divine office, why? Because officium

means it means duty or or you know that which you are obliged to do and so it's like a divine act of worship to which people are committed that's what divine, that's why it's called the divine office and

you know what was the main change well I'll get to that yeah I'll get to that and so prior to Paul the 6th it was a fundamental norm no exceptions always, always everywhere

to recite the whole salter of David in one week. So the one week salter is just normative. In fact, the only alternative to that that you get in the desert fathers and St. Benedict refers to this in his rule is the ascetics who would pray the whole sultan in one day.

So they would just start in the morning and they just crank through all 150 Psalms, sometimes standing in cold water. I mean, these men were just heroes of asceticism. perhaps in some cases more to be admired than imitated. As one person said once. But yeah, 150 Psalms a week. And St. Benedict, interestingly, he says,

we lazy monks should be willing to do in one week what our fathers did in a day. This is how Benedict puts it in his rule. Okay, so he's tough love all the way through. There's no waffling and no, you know, there's no sentimentality. And in St. Benedict, he's very, he's tough. He's a tough one, but also gentle and prudent as well.

So 150 Psalms in a week. And in the early 20th century, there was a considerable revision of the breviary done by Pope Pius X. That's a controversial subject within the traditional world. I'm not gonna go into that. It'd have to be a separate podcast. But suffice it to say that Pius the 10th did

something fairly radical in his own way, which is he kept the one week solace, He wasn't going to touch that. He kept it in Latin. He kept the Vulgate. None of that was going to be moved. But he reorganized all the Psalms in terms of which days particular Psalms were prayed on,

how they were grouped together in order to minimize repetition of Psalms because in the traditional way of praying the Roman Psalter, the Roman rites way of praying the Salter, you repeated certain Psalms many times during the week. It wasn't just once for each Psalm. psalms. Some psalms got prayed every day, you know. And so you were actually praying quite a few more than 150 in terms of, you know, the actual number that you were saying. So Pius the 10th wanted to reduce that repetition. He did reduce it to decrease the burden on parochial clergy. That sounds

reasonable. Yeah, and I'm not saying it's unreasonable. It's controversial only because some people feel that it was too radical a move for him to upset so many essential. of tradition and that there would have been other ways to keep that traditional order of the Psalms while also addressing the burden of the Salter. And that's why I said I didn't want to go too much into the weeds there because then that gets into technical matters that might cause people to fall asleep out there. But anyway, so Pius X, he reorganized the brief area, but it was still 150 Psalms in one week in Latin with the Vulgate and with all of the other elements of the office remaining as they were. Paul the 6th really overthrew.

everything. It ceased to be in Latin normatively. I mean, it's in Latin officially. The base text is in Latin, but almost nobody uses that Latin text, and sometimes it hasn't even been available to use. The Psalms were spread out over four weeks, over a month, rather than over one week. That's a huge difference because what it means is that you are praying a lot less every day, and you're praying these psalms less frequently, which means they become less familiar, less formative on the soul. Is this why my friend Father Dominic Legg calls it the liturgy of the minutes? Yes, yes. And by the way, some people are super offended when they hear that, but it's actually true. Well, he said it on my podcast. It's actually true. I mean,

unfortunately, it's true. But that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that Paul the 6th, this was very much his decision against the advice of some of the theologians who or the liturgists who were on the committee that was working on the divine office, he insisted on removing verses from the Psalms, removing verses from the liturgy of the hours in the Psalms that he considered to be difficult or potentially offensive to modern man. Like what? He, so he removed every, okay, he removed 122 verses total, including three full psalms that just don't show up anywhere in the liturgy of the hours.

And these are what are called the cursing Psalms primarily. So Psalms in which the one speaking the Psalm is basically hurling imprecations at the enemies of God or asking him to crush people's heads or asking, you know, for vengeance on the enemies of God, that kind, those kinds of Psalms. Paul the 6th said, no, in a sort of pacifistic mood, he just got rid of all of those verses. And to me, I mean, this is, okay, there is, just like I would say, almost nobody is happy with the Novosorto.

Everybody wants to tweak it and change it and make it more traditional or more progressive or more inculturated or more Latinate or more Gregorian or whatever it might be. I think that at this point, every serious person who writes about the literature of the hours, and I have a folder on my computer with dozens of articles written by people saying this was a mistake. It was a mistake to break from 20 centuries of Christian spiritual exegesis of these Psalms.

It's not like people in the past didn't ask themselves, how can we pray these Psalms? What does it mean to ask God to take vengeance on our enemies? What does it mean to express our wrath at sinners? How can we say in the Psalms, I am sinless, oh, Lord, judge me and my innocent hands? I mean, there are many things that we pray in the Psalms, actually, that you have to stop and say, how can I pray this? What does this mean? I mean, that happens in verses that Paul the 6th left in, such as the one I just mentioned,

the many verses of the Psalms where the speaker claims to be sinless, innocent, holy, upright, and you know, and you're praying this and saying, am I lying? Like how, you know, how can I say this? And so then you get a great church father like Augustine who comes along and says, you know what? You're not the only one praying these Psalms. Guess who's really praying them? Jesus Christ is the main one who's praying these Psalms.

He is the I, the ego in these Psalms. I am innocent. Oh, Lord, defend me, protect me, take vengeance against my enemies. This is Christ speaking. And when we participate, when we pray the Psalms, we are praying them as members of Christ's body, as members of his mystical body with Christ as our head. That's why we can say certain things.

That's why we can say them. And also it goes in the other way. It goes in the other direction. There are Psalms that talk about, I am a sinner. I have sinned against God in so many ways. How could Christ pray those Psalms? Was he lying?

No, because he's praying them on our behalf. He's taking our sins on himself, right? Just as St. Paul says, right? He took the burden of our sins on himself. So St. Augustine's doctrine of the mystical Christ, head and members, gives us a golden key to understanding the Psalms. And this is the sort of key that Paul the 6th, you know, why didn't he use this key? Why didn't he think that Catholics were intelligent enough to keep using the key that everybody had been using for 20 centuries, you know? Not that Augustine was around for 20

centuries. But I mean, this sense of we have a key to the Psalms was always there. And the struggle with how do we pray these Psalms was always there. Right. And so what modern commentators will say is it's beneficial for us to be uncomfortable sometimes as scripture. We need to squirm when we read certain passages. When we're reading the book of, I don't know if it's numbers or judges that I'm thinking of. But when we read about the Israelites just wailing on the Canaanites, you know, killing their men, women, and children, right? There are things in scripture that make us very uncomfortable. And we need to squirm. We need to say, Lord, I believe this is your word. I believe that you revealed this for my benefit. Please show me what that is. And you know what? We're not going to

just stand there like this and wait for him to drop something down from heaven. We're going to go to the church fathers, right, to this repository of wisdom. And we're going to say, what did St. Augustine think about that. What did St. John Christosum think about that? What did, you know, what did Saint Gregory Nazianzan think about that? What did St. Ironius of Leon think about that? I mean, these men were brilliant, brilliant, brilliant men who wrestled with scripture, who knew it intimately, inside out. Thomas Aquinas talks about all of these things, right? So I just think that, yeah, nobody, nobody defends the liturgy of the hours. as such.

Do you know traditional priests, not monks, but traditional priests who do pray the traditional bravery? Oh, yeah. Almost, I mean, so if you're talking about, so you're not talking about like fraternity of St. Peter is to Christ the cake because they only do the traditional abbreviary. Wow. How much time does that take? Oh, that would be a better question to ask to a priest.

I think that, I don't think you can do. I see the wisdom. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just don't expect enough from our priests or from myself. but I would think that, okay, you're busy, you're a priest. No, no, no, no. So here's something that's very interesting is that at the Second Vatican Council, there were bishops, I've written about this too, on a new liturgical movement.

There were bishops, many bishops who warned against the idea of always lightning and simplifying burdens. Because they said what this is giving into is activism, pragmatism, utilitarianism. What this is giving into is the mentality that priests are mainly social workers, mainly people persons. and that they're not first and foremost ordered to divine worship and order to sanctifying their souls, right, so that they can be the good shepherds that they need to be. I think that here's the truth. Here's the naked, unvarnished truth.

People have as much time for prayer as they make. And I'm saying this about myself as much as anybody else. I think all of us could pray more. All of us probably should pray more. And if we, any time that we open up, that we don't give to prayer, will simply be invaded by other things, invaded by all kinds of things that probably at the end of our lives in the light of eternity will say,

why didn't we do, and not just prayer, but why didn't we spend more time with our spouses, our kids, our friends, you know, as opposed to this or that activity that we thought was so important. And so a priest who's not praying, I would say you could do the breviary, the Roman preconcilier breviary in about two hours a day. Oh, the entire, all the seven hours?

Yeah, people who are praying that are not saying it super slow. I mean, they're kind of cranking through. I mean, this is the way Latin, like Italian, like Spanish, you can definitely get a good random go. Yeah, all right, two hours, that's, that's doable. But, you know, somebody who's not spending that time praying and immersed in the language of the Psalms. And you can do it in front of the Blessed's Sacrament.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is he doing? He might be giving that two hours to watching a movie. Wow. He might be giving that two hours to... Well, it's, I think, to me, I've heard someone say, it's not that you don't have time to pray, it's that you don't have love.

And we, like our Blessed Mother and John, too, who said they have no wine, should go to him and say, I have not love. Well, I mean, I mean, there's a great saying in Jose Maria Escriva's furrow. I think it's the furrow. I don't know if it's the furrow or the forge or the whore or the way.

the way. Yeah, one of them. But he says, you say the mass is too long. I say your love is too short. Amen. I love what he says about the rosary. Blessed be the monotony of the Hail Mary's that purify you of the monotony of your sins. Wow, that's great. I love that. I find in my own life, yes, I find in my own life that once I've decided to do something, that that's more than half of the battle. Yes. So lately, by God's grace and just a decision I made, I'm praying the three, the three mysteries of the Rosary Day. It's not hard at all. It's not hard at all. The three sets of mysteries. Yes. And it's not hard. That's right. The three sets of mysteries. And the reason it's not hard is once you've decided to do, and you decide to do something. And then I also say it's okay.

I give my self permission to not pray imperfectly. Now, I don't mean I'm going to intentionally distract myself. That would be a sin. But I understand that I am fragile and that my mind will wander and I'm okay with that and then I'll do so I'll wake up in the morning I'll pray the joyful mysteries with my coffee I'll drive to the office and I'll pray the sorrowful mysteries then and I'm only doing the introductory prayers in the morning not for the sorrowful right and I'll pray the salvee with the kids and the family rosary at night that's really easy and then I don't bog I don't know what you think about this but I don't bog my rosary down with a million prayers in the middle of every oh I just don't do that yeah no no you can I just do the

glory be exactly and uh but does that mean then that that surely doesn't mean that you do the glorious mysteries every night with the family no that's a good question no what i sometimes i will pray let's say it's the joy let's say it's a monday i'll wake up in the morning i'll pray the joyful i'll pray the sorrowful and then i'll pray the joyful with the kids again so i'll i'll pray 150 right to get that that's what i don't love about the luminous mysteries yes i'm okay with people praying them i'm fine saying it's part of the rosary whatever um but i also think Hey, John Paul II said it was a suggestion. Yes.

So I'm not doing anything wrong in saying, no, no, it's not a beautiful suggestion. I'm personally going to do this to stick with the 150 Psalms counterpart. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the rosary was called the Salter of the Poor. Yeah. For that reason, 150 Helmeries,

the poor in the Middle Ages wanted somehow to do what the monks and nuns were doing. They wanted to imitate from a distance what they were doing. They knew they were praying 150 Psalms. So they thought, why do we pray 150 Hell Marys? So beautiful. Yeah. So beautiful.

And like Louis de Montfort says, like those words, those power, that angelic sultan, the battering ram against the gates of hell, huh? Ave Maria, gracia, plena, dominos tecom, these words that sent hell trembling. Yes. So very beautiful stuff.

I got a question for you, which I know you'll have a great answer to. What is the problem with cursing? This is something we're seeing becoming more and more common as our society tends to sort of vulgarize, harden. And even in Christian circles, you'll watch people on YouTube, including myself, I'll occasionally swear, but I don't want to. Yes.

And I don't think it's nearly as cool as people seem to think it is. So the way I think about swearing is, obviously, we're not talking now about swearing in the sense of using the Lord's name in vain. Everybody understands what's wrong with that, at least I hope. It's a form of blasphemy, dishonor to the name of God. but if we're just talking about using curse words cuss words then i think the problem is more one of vulgarity one of willful um diminishment of our um of the use of the gift of speech so speech is meant speech is ordered to the truth uh to conveying the truth it's also ordered to beauty in the sense that what we say should be comely, should be worthy, should be

dignified. St. Paul says this. And so we should use the speech faculty with self-control, with care, with respect for the feelings of others. I'm not saying we have to be wishy-washy and not speak the truth, of course. And that's going to offend people. I just mean there's no reason to be to be rough or or irritable or or vulgar or nasty or whatever when we're speaking because all that's doing is making us sound uneducated uncouth crass and whatever and the problem is some people think that that's cool they have this sort of image where they want to be the rough guy the tough guy you know they no nonsense I want to just tell it like it is but I'm sorry to say it It just seems to me that it shows that you just don't have much of a vocabulary.

It's like you just haven't bothered to develop and refine and expand the way you can talk about the world. And because the way we talk about the world influences how we see the world or put differently, the range of our speech is the range of our thought. then if we can't talk well about a particular subject, it means we haven't thought well about it. It means that what we're actually seeing is very narrow. Anyway, this is my thought is that language, we need to strive to elevate and refine and improve our language instead of letting ourselves be dumbed down

by the prevailing culture of dumbness. I mean, our culture is a culture of people shouting slogans and grunting at each other and just being angry all the time or being dismissive, trampling on our opponents. I mean, this is really counterproductive to any kind of intelligent conversation whatsoever, right?

My friend, his name's Michael Verland, had an argument against swearing that really convicted me. He said that when we, first of all, most of foul language tends to be around the bathroom, or the bedroom, or religion, perhaps. But often it's bedroom and the bathroom. And he says that when we use foul language, we tear down orally those barriers that humans have sought or thought necessary to implement

to safeguard those activities which distilled, us from the beasts. So, whereas dumb beasts may copulate in public, humans typically don't. They set up rituals to safeguard this activity. The same thing with, if you came to my house and I let a, say, a little child, let's say, defecate in the woods next to you or something, you'd think, what is wrong with this man, you know? No, we understand that this needs to be separate, again.

But then when we use language of a sexual nature or language concerning the bathroom, yeah, then it sounds like what we do is we're kind of weakening those boundaries that everyone for millennia has sought to set up in polite society. I thought that was really... That's a fantastic argument.

It reminds me of a book by Christopher Derek called Sex and Sacredness, which I don't even know if that's still in print. It was originally published by Ignatius Press, but he talks extensively about this building up of a sacred reserve or precinct around human sexuality, treating it as something sacred, instead of treating it as something primarily or even exclusively animalistic or biological. And we do that because it is, of course, something human, something properly human.

it's it's but um well it is something animal and it is something biological but we are not just animals and we are not just uh biological um apparatuses uh we are we are created in the image and likeness of god and so what we do should befit our dignity as rational animals and as sons and daughters of god well that's how i would you know how you could put it um so yeah that that actually makes perfect sense to me um in a way what he's saying your friend is that there's a there's an element there of iconoclasm almost like a you're trying to to destroy it's it's like the people who are smashing down statues or who are tearing down you know an iconostasis in a church that's separating the holy from the profane or or the

the nave from the sanctuary or whatever it might be you know yeah yeah um i said i wanted you to Now's a good time as any to tell us about this book that you all have just released and your publishing house. I know you're putting out a lot of great books and I'd love to give you a softball to throw at you there. Oh, sure. There's the camera.

Yeah, sure. So this is the most recent book that Os Justi Press has brought out the Cristero Counter-Revolution and the Battle for the Soul of Mexico by Father Javier Olivera Ravasi. This is a book that was already a classic in Spanish.

and here finally is the English translation. It is absolutely the single best book on the Cristero War. If people are interested in this, I certainly have long been fascinated by it. I didn't really know that much about it. I just knew, oh, in the middle of the 1920s, you know, the, yes, in the middle of the 1920s,

the government of Mexico was anti-clerical and anti-Catholic, and they imposed a bunch of unjust laws on the Mexican people who said, enough is enough, we're rising up in arms and there were many battles fought, and the Cristeros were actually winning, and then there was a kind of compromise reached,

and it kind of crumbled. It had a disappointing end. And that's basically all I knew about it for a long time. But then I read this book. The author approached me and asked me if I would consider publishing English translation with my publishing house. And I, you know, and I,

I read it, and I said, this is an incredible story. Everybody needs to know about this. It's incredible for so many reasons. First, because the history of Mexico is so sad. Their government was taken over by free Masonic, anti-Catholic, anti-clerical, I mean, monsters. I mean, that's not too strong a word. in the beginning of the 20th century and it went for many decades

you know it reached its height in the 1920s and this photograph sorry to interrupt you the execution of Father Francisco Vera is iconic oh yes yes but so I mean the Mexican government was fighting against the religion of the people

against their faith against their families against their communities against their whole way of life trying to break them down they forbade worship, they forbade clergy. I mean, it was, it's a persecution. It's unimaginable, the level of persecution. When you read this book, you're just, your eyes are popping out on every page about what the government was doing to the people.

And then when you read about their heroism in organizing themselves into troops, tens of thousands of troops being led by, I mean, they had no money, they had no possessions. They had to raid federal depositories to get bullets. You know, they had to, I mean, it was such a heroic. Talk about the ultimate example of the underdog rising up and winning. It's harrowing and it's inspiring. And then all the martyrs, all the martyrs, so many martyrs, hundreds of martyrs, you know, all different kinds, men, women, children, priests, religious. It is, if you want to be, if you want to be challenged and inspired as a Catholic to give your life to Jesus Christ, the king of kings and his mother are,

Lady of Guadalupe. I mean, this book is going, it's a transformative experience to read this book. But the other thing, the other aspect of it that fascinates me in particular, given my interests, is that there's a long discussion of how, how, you know, the movement, although it was a lot of peasants carrying around rifles and trying to defeat the federal troops, its leaders were quite intellectual and quite thoughtful about what they were doing. And they thought very carefully before engaging in battle about, is this a just war? Are we allowed to do this? What do the theologians say?

And so there's a whole chapter in here about how they went through the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Francesco Suarez, you know, Vittoria and Bartolome de las Casas, and, you know, down to more recent theologians. And they made a theological case for fighting against the government in this civil war. And I just find that remarkable because how often do you see that kind of the kind of scruple or the conscientiousness of saying we want to be sure that what we're doing is morally legitimate, you know, especially in view of the teaching of the New Testament and repeated often by the magistrate of the church that we are to be obedient to our civil authorities, even when they're imperfect, right?

So where do you draw the line? How bad does a civil authority have to, does a civil ruler have to become before you can throw off the shackles and go to war against him or his men? These are serious questions, difficult questions. I mean, vexing ones. And the book just does a wonderful job, not only showing you how the Cristeros themselves worked through these issues, but then summarizing the teaching of the church fathers and St. Thomas and some other Thomists on this question. So that, you know, it comes up. When I used to teach Catholic social teaching, students would ask me this question, is armed rebellion against an unjust government ever legitimate, ever? What are the circumstances? It was the Christero's conflict that crystallized a Catholic response to that question for the first time. I mean, it was a real development of doctrine.

There were elements present in earlier writers, but it was actually in the cauldron or the crucible, rather, of the Christero's conflict, that a fully formed doctrine of armed resistance against a tyrannical government was first formulated, so much so that when Pius XIUS the 11th addressed the question in his 1937 encyclical Nosis Mi Conocida,

he actually summarized the arguments of the Cristeros. And that was the Magisterium learned from the Cristero conflicts, when was it that you could actually revolt against your government? So I think this has massive implications way beyond 1920s, Mexico, right? Just to think about that. The other reason that this book is fascinating to me

is that it talks about the failures of most of the bishops in Mexico and of the Pope, unfortunately, their failure to support the Cristeros. So there were a few bishops who helped them in the sense of went into hiding with the Cristeros soldiers and kept giving them sacraments and so on but none of the bishops of Mexico there were

a few dozen bishops at the time approved of what they were doing some of them disapproved of it publicly even though they had such good arguments about why we need to do this and even though they were suffering so badly from the from the freemasonic anti-clerical laws and and troops the troops were doing savage forms of torture it was it was horrible and the book goes into all that it's it this is definitely not a book for kids in that sense um but um the bishops were very cowardly in this, for the most part. And, you know, they kind of hid, they went into exile. They sort of left the people to kind of work it out for themselves.

And then when the government finally realized, we're losing this battle, we're actually our butts getting kicked. I mean, we're going to lose this. Then they called back some of the bishops and they said, okay, we're going to make a peace with you. We're going to make a compromise. Well, they never intended to keep the terms of the compromise. And so what the bishops ended up doing is at the very moment,

when the Cristeros were at the peak of their success if they had fought a few more months they would have cracked and crushed the government and probably in some way taken over I don't know what that would have looked like nobody knows what it would have looked like but at that peak moment the bishops intervened

and forbade them to fight any further and basically cut off arbitrarily the conflict and then the suffering continued and all of the evils continued in Mexico so it's not that their war was in vain because the war certainly broke the worst of the persecution, but it was a kind of, it was, it was a, it was, it was, it was an, an avoidable

failure. It was kind of own goal, if I could put it that way. And that was the fault of the bishops, but also Pius I, the 11th, Pius I had a kind of pacifist line where he hated, of course, what the government was doing, but he thought that peace should be obtained at any cost. As long as, as long as the government would just leave the priests alone to say mass, basically what he wanted was like a minimum settlement. If the government would lay off of the priests and let the churches be open, then the government could do whatever else it wanted to. And the Cristeros, they were trying to fight for, they were trying to regain Mexico as a Catholic nation. They wanted to make it a Catholic nation from the government down, you know, or from the people up to the government. And so in a way,

it also goes into this whole question of papal policy is papal can papal prudential policy be wrong can it be ill-informed can it be harmful and this I mean the author here with he's not an axe grinder

but he very soberly comes to the conclusion that Pope Pisth was wrong in the way that he handled this situation and that a lot of people lost their lives because of the policies of the Pope at that time So again, you know, for me, this is just another example of how as Catholics, we need to be very careful that our respect for the Pope's prudential decisions doesn't prevent us from using our reason and using our analysis of historical events and our analysis of the situation at hand to reach possibly different conclusions and to argue those different conclusions, right?

So these are some reasons why the book is really fascinating, in addition to just being a ripping story about the war. Is it true that priests can't wear clerics in public in Mexico still? I'd heard that, but I'm not sure. I don't think that that's true because, I mean, at least the time that I visited Mexico a few summers ago, it was actually time really flies, so it was in fact four summers ago. I visited Mexico for the first and only time.

and I actually got a tour of Cristeros places in Guadalajara. It was very inspiring. And I wish I had read this book back then because all that I know now makes me want to go back and see all of the same places again and have an even deeper experience. But all the priests we were with were wearing cacics. And, you know, what the traditional priests did say to me

is that people in Mexico are not accustomed to seeing priests in cacics. And I remember being so struck that we walked into this small village, you know, a village of maybe a few thousand people. So not that small, but certainly not a big city. And I was with two fraternity priests. They were dressed in their cassocks.

And all the people started running around them and gathered around them and were like touching them and they were asking them to bless things. And it was like, it was like the holy man had finally arrived. Like, you know, I don't know, I'm sure they've seen a priest before,

but he probably didn't look like the priest, you know, that this one did, you know. So anyways, it was really. I don't know why if you had the option to wear a cacic, why you wouldn't. Yeah. It's so serious looking and elegant. The cacic or the sutan is the clerical garb in the Roman church. The clergyman, the so-called clergyman, the suit, looks ridiculous.

It looks like a Protestant minister. I mean, that was its origin. It started as a way for Roman Catholic priests to fit in with their Anglican and Presbyterian and whatever, you know, peers. And not to stand out, not to look different. I think in the United States, there might even have been, I don't know, I forget if it was just the bishops telling priests not to dress in the cassock or what the exact circumstances were. But basically the clerical suit is certainly a secularization of clerical dress.

I mean, granted, it's better than clergy just going around in jeans and t-shirts or like the suit and ties that the Jesuits at Georgetown wore when I was there. But, but yeah, it's not like the cassock. The cassock has, what it looks like is religious garb. It looks like a monastic habit. It sets this man apart as he is indeed sacramentally, ontologically set apart by his ordination. And, yeah, I mean, it definitely shows that he is,

he has stepped out of the secular mainstream. He's not dressed like a workman or like a businessman or like a, or like anybody else, but he's dressed for a particular function within the church. And of course, it works better. I mean, if you just think about it, you know, when the priest says mass, what does he put on? He puts on an alb, which is a robe. And then he puts on an amos and a stole and a chasible, a maniple. So he's putting on all these layers, which are all fundamentally this ancient tunic

or flowing garment type of garment. And the cassock suits that as the under garment, right? As the low, you know, if you're putting it on, but like think about how absurd it is, and I've seen this, and it's like, a priest has got a pair of slacks on, and then he puts the rest of the vestments on over it, and you kind of see his slacks underneath.

And it's like, it just doesn't fit. Even it, it's just of a piece, the cassock with all of the rest of the clerical vestments. Yeah, I'd never thought of that. Why, the cassock that we have, have, you know, post-Fatican 2, was that around prior? And if not, why do we change it? Because the fiddleback is clearly a more elegant. Oh, you're talking about the chasibles. What did I think you said? I think you said cacics. Oh, I did. I meant chasdoll. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, well. This is what I'm confused about. It feels like there was an orchestrated, worldwide orchestrated directive to make everything fall in lockstep. I don't know how else to understand those changes it's actually really astonishing i mean the the historian henry sear in his book phoenix from the ashes which i highly recommend it's a it's an excellent excellent book i don't agree with him about everything but it's it's still a superb book um henry seer says that the the historian wishes that he could have a more believable tale to tell when he writes about the modern church because when you write about what happened it's the kind of thing that anybody who didn't know that it actually happened would read it and say that's baloney or that's fantasy like it would that could

never have happened. But it did happen, right? But in terms of the chasible, actually, so I'll push back a little bit and say the Gothic chasible, that is the more flowing and fuller cut chasible, is a perfectly honorable and respectable vestment. I mean, it was what was worn for many, many, many centuries. And, you know, if you look at historic examples or if you look at newly made, beautifully made gothic chasibles it's a very dignified very worthy vestment it doesn't look like a polyester drape okay that's not that's that's that's a gothic vestment equivocally so called um and and so i you know basically you know the vestment st thomas aquinus would have seen or st bonaventure um would have been gothic in that sense more like a bell shaped you know that flows flows more fully down to the the

the floor, or towards the ankles. The Roman fiddleback vestment was the result of a sartorial evolution that took place mainly in the Renaissance. And when basically, if you look at the history of vestments, either in east or west, there's been a tendency towards simplification, towards making them less heavy. The older vestments tend to be a lot more fabric. And so it's heavier for the priest to lift up his arms. And during the mass, he has to lift up his arms at various times to move, to lift up the host

or to move things around or whatever it might be. And so the heavy fabric and the full cut over the centuries would be cut a little bit more in and more in and more in until you get to the point where all that's left is just sort of the centerpiece, almost like what some people a little bit disrespectfully call a, what do you call that poster board is that what i what i you know where where people wear like uh in the front and back some kind of poster oh yeah yeah what you mean so really all that's left in the in the roman fiddleback chasible oh interesting i didn't realize that without the without the stuff that connected it and flow further being present um and so it's it's cooler to wear it's easier to move around

in um you know and but we'll put it this way then maybe another way putting it why don't you see that today. Yes, yes. So I think that's easy to say. That form of vestment, which had dominated almost everywhere for several centuries prior to the Second Vatican Council, was one of those symbols that became fixed in people's minds as a sign of the Tridentine Right. You know, this is part of the old 1950s church that we're trying to get away from as fast as we can, light speed, warp speed, you know. And so anything to do with that old church, whether it's the Roman fiddleback vestment, the barretta on the head, the casic, you know, lots of use of holy water, you know, whatever it might be. If it, you know, lots of statues of saints, women wearing veils, anything that was associated with the post-Tridentine or the Tridentine post or Counter-Reformation Church, you know, all of that we have to reject.

so women should stop wearing veils, priests should wear suits or lay clothes, and at mass they should wear so-called gothic chasibles. Unfortunately, what that often meant was just, as I said before, like a big polyester dress, you know, with some kind of ugly cross on it that looks like it was made by, you know, six-year-olds or something. And I mean, this is, this was very deliberate, and what we have to understand is how, you know, how did changes like this spread so rapidly? How did communion in the hand standing spread so rapidly when it was never mandated? The Vatican never, ever said,

all of you folks need to stand and receive in the hand. What the Vatican said was the norm is receiving communion on the tongue, but permission can be given to receive communion in the hand. So there was a permission given, but there was never a mandate to do it that way. And yet within a couple of years, it seemed maybe more than a couple of years, within half a decade,

everybody, it seemed, was doing that, right? Or similarly, as you said, with the vestments, another example would be Mass versus Populam. Vatican II never mentioned turning the priest around to face the people. There's no subsequent liturgical document that mandates that, that says you must celebrate mass this way. In fact, all you can find is indications

in different places that say the altar should be built freestanding so that it can be incensed from all sides and so that mass can be celebrated facing things. facing the people. Again, can be. But this is all just a sort of creation of a space. But once more, within just a few years, there was practically not a single Catholic Church on the face of the planet where the priest was not facing the people. How did this all happen? Was it a conspiracy? Well, kind of. I mean, in a very simple way, the liturgists, the liturgists who were lockstep behind these changes because of their false antiquarianism,

because of their Pistoian rationalism, because of their emulation of the Protestants, you know, for various reasons, they were in lockstep with each other and these liturgists met annually for liturgy conferences that were very well attended. So if you look in the 40s, 50s, 60s, there were these massive liturgy conferences

where every single liturgist from all over the world would show up and they'd all talk to each other about how we need to go back to this and we have to do this and imitate made this and get rid of that and whatever and ecumenical this. And they were comparing notes constantly. And so there was this network, this dense, well-connected network of liturgists. And naturally, although I think unfortunately and unnecessarily, the bishops in most dioceses

were not trained liturgists. And they thought, we're not the experts. These guys are the experts. Every year they're going to these conferences. They're the avant-garde. They've read the latest and greatest. We're just going to let them come up with the diocese and Paul. and so that's why it seemed like just in a matter of years everybody was doing the same thing

that's exactly why it happened wow so a lack of oversight and well definite lack of oversight and then a and then a and then a very concerted effort on the part of the well-connected network of liturgists yeah amazing okay so putting aside the fact i know i know that you've said the new the new mask can't be fixed but but just leave that to one side for a second it's really interesting, wouldn't you say, that it feels like the church is trying to heal itself from the wound that was inflicted upon it by these litigists? Isn't that weird? Because, I mean, I grew up, you never saw incense. No one ever prayed the rosary. No one veiled. No one knelt for communion. If you did any of those things, you would have been looked at very strangely. And yet, it's almost

like despite the efforts of those who would wish to suppress it, like weeds, these things keep, calm enough, but I almost get the impression from people that, well, it seems to me that when people say it's a beautiful novice order, what they mean is, it approximates the Latin. Yes, yes. That is indeed the case. So this is, where does this end? I mean, this is really, it's really fascinating that without any top-down implementation, sort of almost like the reverse of the litigious thing. Well, I think we have, I mean, we have to take into account a few factors. One is that although I have spoken of the church's autoimmune condition. I'm talking about the church on earth,

not the heavenly bride of Christ in her immaculate celestial glory and perfection. But the church on earth made up of the wheat and the tears, made up of saints and sinners and people with good ideas and people with really bad ideas. That church on earth has an autoimmune condition right now, by which I mean that things that the body ought to be promoting or ought to be welcoming are being rejected. You know, the body's attacking itself, right?

So, you know, you have bishops who are literally attacking, vibrant, flourishing communities of faithful Catholics bursting at the seams in every way with young people, with men, with vocations, with marriages, with families, just because these bishops are adamantly opposed to Latin, enchant, and veiling, and, you know, the return of tradition in all of its dimensions, right? So that's an autoimmune condition.

I'm sorry, there's no other way to look at it, but the church's immune system is still there and it's still working. And what that means is some of the evils, the evils of heresy, of compromise with vice of, well, basically compromise with the world of flesh and the devil, of the evils of dumb ideas from liturgists in the 1950s, like the promotion of Eucharistic Prayer No. 2, the pseudo-Hipolitan, pseudo-Roman, pseudo-anaphra. you know that these the immune system of the church so to speak is pushing these things out is trying to is trying to expel these toxins from the body and and you know and meanwhile there's a kind of influx now of vitamins you might say and of nourishing food in the form of you know priests religious and laity who are educating themselves from traditional sources you know it all you have to do is look at at the books that are, the books that are out there right now. There's so much access now to traditional sources of literature.

I don't just mean the church fathers, of course, they are definitively traditional. But I mean like old missiles, old books of chant, old books commenting on the mass and the symbolism of it, new books like Father Claude Bart's book, A Forest of Symbols. What a beautiful book. Father Stefan Hyde's book, Altar and Church, where he demonstrates exhaustively that in the early church, there was a dedicated altar at which the minister stood at Orientem, that this is the norm from the very beginning. All this stuff is coming out right now and is strengthening the movement to recover tradition in the teeth of, you know, bad bishops and wayward popes who are

trying to stop this from happening. And that's just a sign of the Holy Spirit at work. I mean, the Holy Spirit never abandons the church. He will never abandon the church. He's not going to make it easy for the church. You know, sometimes, sometimes I have the impression that Catholics expect the church to be like this glowing golden galleon just skimming across the surface of the ocean of history, you know, just every arrow and cannonball bounces off of it. And everybody on board is just a, you know, some kind of perfect specimen of Christian humanity. And, you know, like this triumphalistic picture of the church is nonsense. It's never been that way, ever. really helpful because as you continue to speak, I would love you to give advice to those who are

watching who, because of the corruption in the church, because of the scandal they've experienced, I'm maybe being tempted to leave it. So I'm glad you're bringing this up. Well, look, I mean, the way I look at it is this way. This is a very realistic way of looking at things, I believe. And that is, your alternatives are not this golden galleon of perfection or any number of other motley ships that happen to be sailing the ocean of life to the port of eternity. Your options are the storm-tossed, tempest battered ship, bark of St. Peter on which the rigging is ripped off and the masts are hanging loose and people are trying to fix it as it's going and they're bailing out water and they're swash buckling and the enemies on board, you know, and that's the bark of

Peter. That's the way it is. It's still floating. It's still sailing. It's never going to sink. It's always going to make its port, but it's not going to be easy. And your alternative is drowning in the ocean or being eaten by the sharks, right? You don't have other options. So if that's the way you look at it, then it's like, okay, I can deal with the corruption. I can put up with that because my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is still the captain of the ship. He is still the one who put me on the ship for my safe passage to eternal life. He'll never let me fall off the ship unless I jump off the ship.

I have to jump off the ship. I mean, I have to either, metaphorically, I have to either kill myself with mortal sin and stay that way, or I have to jump ship and become a schismatic or a heretic or something like that. So this ship is reliable and faithful and true just as its captain is.

And I can deal with the fact that there's skirmishing and, you know, that some of the sailors are drunk and swearing and, you know, and some people haven't washed in, who knows how many months and, you know, okay, this is life. This is life in a fallen world. And I think that we, I mean, this is very much a problem of enlightenment rationalism.

You know, Ernst Kasserer wrote a book called The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in which he has this sentence that I've never forgotten. He said, for all of their disagreements on every other topic, the philosophers of the Enlightenment came together as one in rejecting the doctrine of original sin. So this view of progress, of endless progress through humanistic self-improvement and technological discovery and science and whatever, you know, is that we're all familiar with, although it's certainly been battered and I'm not sure how many people really believe it anymore, but this view is antithetical to the Christian view of fallen human nature, you know, marred and burdened. by the effects of original sin. So I think if we had a truly realistic perception of the human condition, we would be amazed that there's any way to salvation at all, right?

And I think the problem is that with the Enlightenment humanistic optimism and scientific positivism and so on, it's induced in people, even if they don't want it, or even if they're not voluntarily choosing it, it's induced in them a kind of sense of like, we're all going to be saved. like God is so good and so merciful and you know we're just sort of pathetic little morons and he's just going to save everybody because he's merciful and uh and you know and kind of in a sense radically downplaying the evils that are endemic to our fallen condition and radically downplaying the magnitude and the might of the resources that God has given to us and the and the suffering he endured to bring us these resources right the

What Christ suffered from the beginning of his incarnation all the way through his bloody passion and death is, I mean, Newman has some incredible sermons about the sufferings of Christ that will just bring you to your knees. But it's like no other suffering, you know, Ovos omnes, oh, all you that pass by the way, see if there be any sorrow, liken to my sorrow, right? What Christ had to suffer in order to bring baptism to us, in order to rescue our souls from how. hell all of this is cheapened if you have this cheap mercy view and you you know what i'm saying a hundred percent it's like saying if the sickness isn't bad then you won't desire the cure or even respect the cure exactly and if we don't think we're sick then and and this is right i knew i knew a priest once who said um i loved this i i'll never forget he was preaching this homily and he said he said the problem with you know people ask why is it so hard to preach the good news to modern people or modern

Western people. And his answer was, it's hard to preach in the good news because they don't know what the bad news is, you know? Right. First, they need to grasp the bad news. And then the good news comes to them as this overwhelming source of liberation, which is the way it was in the pagan world. It would be like if I woke up one morning at five in the morning because a fireman had kicked down my door and was stomping across my carpet with his muddy boots. If there was no fire, this is very annoying. And I'm outraged, actually. And this is how people respond

because there's no threat. Yes. But if my house is burning down, then how glad I am to see the fireman no matter what he does to the carpet. Exactly. Yeah, well, I've also heard it said the good news without bad news

is often perceived as no news. It's so true. Yes, yes, I'm sure that that saying has been around for a while. Yeah. You know, scripture says, I think this is in the book of Proverbs, well it's in the wisdom literature

it says sin makes the nations miserable St. Thomas likes to quote that but you know what sin also makes people stupid right and I think part of what's going on now in the modern world is if you look at the world with Christian eyes you can see the depth of the wickedness you can see the depth of the the self-harm the torture

the torment the the lostness the of people without God, right? But they don't see it because the, you know, the further down you go into the cave, the darker it gets, and the less you remember,

or maybe you never knew that there was a sun outside the cave, you know? And that is, I mean, that's just another aspect of this, that without the support of a Christian culture, without the support of a culture that kind of surrounds people from birth with signs and symbols of the true faith

and that teaches them from an early age you know about beauty and goodness and truth you know with I've lost my train of thought I was thinking and maybe we can begin to wrap up here because everything you're saying is fantastic and so people can go check out your substack because you say it there very well

but a lot of what we're talking about today it seems to me could fit in with Aquinas understanding of curiosity versus studiousness yes right the idea that so you might say

that curiosity is to knowledge what I don't know binge eating is to the natural appetite or something like that and he talks about how we get this kind of

intellective curiosity and the sensitive curiosity I'm not sure if those are the exact words he uses but but even in the intellectual realm We can fall into the sin of curiosity by concerning ourselves with things that either get in the way of our vocation

or which are harmful, such as divination and these sorts of things. And then a sort of sensitive curiosity, which I suppose we could think of as like TikTok and, you know, that kind of... It's like just feeding us, our intellect in the way an obese person continues to shovel food into their mouth.

Whereas the studiousness is to truth is good And, but it has to be rightly ordered, I guess, is what we're saying. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, you know, the evidence is certainly in right now, you know, what we're doing is not working in terms of securing the human good. You know, there's this amazing substack called After Babel by a man named Jonathan Haite.

I think I've seen you share. H-A-D-T is the way his last name is spelled after Babel. And it's a website, or it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, a substack dedicated to helping people understand the harm that is being caused by smartphone usage, especially for teenagers, children, teenagers, adolescents. And it's, I mean, the research is overwhelming. It's all there. We are making massive societal mistakes, and we need to undo them as rapidly as possible.

This is not about free speech. This is about human sanity. This is about human health. This is about basic needs. So, I mean, that I definitely recommend to people. I would also recommend a substack called the School of the Unconformed by Ruth and Pico Gavronsky is what it's called. And, I mean, there are a number of really good substacks. I mentioned them in my interview with Rob Marco on smartphones over at Ed Patton's substack.

You know, and there's a, these resources are there because, I think we all need to convince ourselves that there is a problem. I mean, we're so much like fish and water. We take so much for granted. And especially older people, you know, I grew up in a world without internet, without smartphones, even without computers to speak of. I mean, the first personal computers, like the clunky, really clunky, 48K, floppy disk sort of things were coming out when I was in at the end of high school.

So my childhood was spent in the woods. I lived, I grew up in a house behind my house was a big, beautiful forest. so big that you couldn't even see the houses on the other side. I mean, this was in the middle of a generally suburban town, but for whatever reason, this large tract of many acres had never been developed, and it was just a wild space. And I spent countless hours out there in the woods, climbing trees, cutting down plants.

I did random things like, so when you were in the middle of these woods, you couldn't see any habitations anywhere. You were just completely surrounded by vegetation. And so, first of all, I think that that was a really neat place to be as a kid where you felt like you were away from everybody. And my parents didn't worry about me.

They're just like, oh, yeah, go play in the woods. It's fine, you know, it's no big deal. That's what parents should be. You know, parents shouldn't be like helicopter parents that have to watch every kid, every moment. So, but, you know, I would do things like, okay, I'm looking at these plants and these plants have, like, really thick stems

because they have like a juice inside the stem. So I'd cut a bunch of these plants and I'd squeeze out the juice into a glass jar. And I'd pretend there was like a potion. He was like, here's this potion, you know, and I'm going to hide it somewhere. I don't know, just all these silly things that kids come up with. Oh, that's my son, Peter.

My son, he's called Peter. Yes. To a tea. Yes. And so, you know, this is what kids need to be healthy. So I grew up in a world like that. And in a way for me, every form of computer technology has always come as an afterthought

as something that I was able to integrate into a life that had been lived prior to that moment. What I really worry about are people who grow up with these things. Inside the cave. Yeah, in a way where they don't know what it's like not to have a smartphone. Or they don't know what it's like not to be on the internet all the time. And those are the people who I say, I think they need to read people like Jonathan Haidt.

They need to read Ruth and Pico Gavronsky. they need to read, you know, other, other folk, Byeongchul-Han. I love that, that Korean-born German philosopher, his book, The Burnout Society, his book, Non-Things. If they read things like this, it's actually going to, it could have the effect of awakening them to the magnitude of the dangers presented by these forms of technology

where they're not even aware of, right? This is where we need to be, I think, really vigilant in terms of, you know, it used to be that people emphasize vigilance about media consumption. Like, don't watch movies that have gratuitous sex and violence. You know, that's unworthy of a Christian. Do you remember when they used to say, don't sit so close to the TV, you'll get square eyes? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't remember that. Maybe that was an Australian thing. But don't sit so close to the TV, it's dangerous, so it's bad for you. That's what everyone used to say to me, and now we're all doing this. Actually, it's funny. I do remember

my mother's saying that if I was watching cartoons on Saturday, like Bugs Bunny or whatever, that I shouldn't sit too close to the TV. I do remember that. But, you know, I don't, I mean, I've written about this before. I, I'm shocked at the kind of stuff that a lot of our fellow Catholics and Christians watch. I mean, I don't, there is no excuse for people to watch, say, R-rated movies with gratuitous sex scenes in them. Why are you putting that into your mind? I mean, it's pornography. I mean, granted, it's not hardcore. I mean, it's not.

Of course it is. You're right. It's putting images into your mind, into your imagination and your memory that are going to be there for the rest of your life. Our brain capacity is such that even things that we think we have forgotten are there somewhere. How do we know that?

Because we dream about it sometimes. I've had dreams where things I haven't thought of or heard of for 20 years suddenly pop back in. Where was that? It was somewhere in my brain, right? Yeah. So we are, look, we are what we eat. We are what we consume.

We are what we watch and listen to. So before we consume any content, whether physical or intellectual or or cinematographic, artistic, whatever kind of content it is, we have to just, we have to stop and say, do I want myself to be like this content? Because that's what's going to happen. I'm going to be like this content in some small way. Granted, it would take a long time to make yourself like it in a big way, if you have a good moral compass. But do I even want to have that in me a little bit? Do I want a little bit of poison? It's like, okay, like I could take a little bit of poison and feel a bit sick, but I'd still be okay tomorrow.

Do I want that? Is that a rational, virtuous way of behaving? I sort of feel as if a lot of people have the attitude that if you don't live dangerously and on the edge, like always skating on thin ice, somehow you're a wimp. somehow you're not like living life to the full. That is a satanic lie, right? We need to follow the advice of St. Paul who says, whatever is good, true, noble, honorable, beautiful,

think on these things, i.e., don't think about the opposites, right? Don't make those your diet. Yeah, very well put. It reminds me of Aquinas. He has this whole section on memory, and he talks about how strange things are more easily kind of implanted in the brain. And so people can use this, you know, like you put down your keys

and let's say you usually forget where they are, well, you might throw down your keys and imagine them exploding. If you did something like that, then the next day you'll probably know where it is. But what's so dangerous and demonic with pornography is just how strange and grotesque it has become. And so to your point, you put that in your head,

it's not even like things you saw when you were young that weren't particularly strange. These are things that just, yeah, God have mercy. Just for those at home, when that happens, I offer a prayer of intercession for this individual. Yeah, because even as you said that, I'm like, I think I can still remember the first pornographic image I encountered, Lord Jesus Christ, I give you this woman, you know.

And then I humanize them, right? I say, I don't know what you think about this, but this, because I think what pornography does is it dehumanizes, like it removes body and soul in a way, it's like death. And so I say, even I say to myself, I wonder what she's doing now. and I wonder if her parents are alive.

I wonder if she has children. I say that. And then I ask Mary to lead her to Jesus. And I also ask, yeah, yeah, that can be helpful, I think, especially if these sorts of temptations and images that come up are demonic temptations, then it's like, well, use that as a springboard for intercessory prayer. Can't be a bad idea.

Yes, yes. Final thoughts? No, I think we've covered a lot of ground. and it's just delightful to talk to a fellow Thomist and a fellow lover. Well, I'm definitely on the bottom of the ladder, but I appreciate that. I'd like to learn more. Yeah, well, I'm excited. Actually, I want to take the commentary on the gospel of John home.

I don't know if you saw this. I have it up there. The St. Paul Center, they put together the Aquinas' commentary on Romans. Yes, of course. But rather than it being side-by-side, you know, Latin and English, it's all in English, and it's just much more compact. Yes, so I'd like them to do something like that with John's Gospel because it's really beautiful.

Okay, I do have one final question, then I'll let you go. And we're kind of bouncing around here, so apologies to those at home. But what am I supposed to listen to in the gym? Like when I go to the gym, I'm trying to beat records with weights. You know, it's not a lot of cardio that I do, so it helps me to be aggressive

towards that bar that I'm lifting, you know? And I really like listening, to heavy metal. And maybe you wouldn't tell me not to do that. Maybe you would. But what am I supposed to do? Surely there's got to be a place for aggressive music. If we're going into battle, folk music's not going to cut it. Well, I mean, I would actually. Okay. Counsel, you not to listen to heavy metal music for a lot of the reasons that we discussed earlier in this conversation. But I, you know, I think that there are quite a few very exciting pieces of music in the, in the in the repertoire of pre, you know, pre-20th century, well, let's just say pre-rock, the pre-rock

era, you know, there's, there's something like Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, which is pretty exciting, a lot of it. You're going to have to email me all of these, because if you're going to take heavy metal away from me in the gym, you're going to need to, like, help me out by giving me some of these. Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, I think there's, there's a lot of Beethoven actually that's very, very vigorous and very, you know, propulsive and very strong. makes you want to go out and crack skulls, perhaps, at least metaphorically speaking, you know.

Yeah, no, I mean, I'd have to think about this more carefully, but I certainly know this could just be that I'm, you know, I'm, I'm habituated to this music more so it has a, paradoxically, it has more of an effect on me than it might have on some other people unless they got habituated to it. But, you know, some of Johan's Boschon Bach's piano concertos or keyboard concertos are very, very energetic, very propulsive. And I've got this one CD, the performer is David Frey, love him, love his performances. So it's a chamber orchestra, David Frey at the piano.

And they are such, these pieces are so, the fast outer movements are so propulsive and so energetic that I speed like nothing. When I'm in the car listening to these, my wife has to warm me. She's like, stop. You're going like 90 miles an hour. I was like, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't even realize this. Like the music just does that. Okay, that's good.

I mean, there's definitely stuff. F-R-A-Y? F-R-A-Y. F-R-A-Y, yeah, David Frey. Okay. All right, God bless you. Thanks so much for being on the show.