Pints With Aquinas - The SSPX, Vatican II, and the Liturgy Wars (Jacob Phillips) | Ep. 585

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Catholic theologian Jacob Phillips is here to discuss papal authority, the SSPX's looming schism over unauthorized ordinations, liturgical division between the Novus Ordo and Traditional Latin Mass, and the broader crisis of institutional trust facing the modern Church. Ep. 585 Theotokos Rosaries: https://dwplus.shop/TheotokosRosaries -- -- -- 📚 Resources Mentioned: Jacob Phillips: https://jacobphillips.net Truthy 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Today’s Sponsors: Quo: Try QUO for free + get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://Quo.com/PINTS Exodus 90:  Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-Day free trial or visit https://Exodus90.com/matt to learn more. Charity Mobile:Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Free Phone offer with code MATTFRADD Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. St. Paul Center: Start your 30-day free trial today at https://StPaulCenter.com/pints - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I know that the Orthodox rancism, but it's not been made clear at all that the SSPX rancism. Isn't it the church's responsibility to be really clear about that? I understand Catholic isn't to be universal. If at any point you draw a line and say, this has ceased to be Catholic, that's where you cease to be Catholic. Well then what do you say to those who would draw that line around the SSPX and say, this isn't Catholic? They are planning on ordaining bishops without people approval, not just without people approval, but in direct opposition. It's an inflammatory thing to say that will not go down very well, but to me it's just, it's just Protestantism.

How should we assess, just to sum it up, Pope Francis's pontificate? Can we just say it was a bloody mess and he was a terrible Pope? Or is that inappropriate to say? Imagine if a novice-novus-novis-order was implemented, and the novice-novis-order was as different from the novice-order as the novice order is from the Latin Mass, and in the same direction. People would rightly lose their freaking minds. Yeah, and I'd very uneasy when people talk about leaving.

or joining the Novus Order. And I say, well, so-and-so join the Novice Auto, this kind of thing. That's a Novice Auto church, you know. Why don't you like that? Your accent's just close enough to mine that I might end up sounding like you by the end of this. Yeah, I find the Australian accent a little bit contagious. Do you? You might find me saying gooday and all sorts by the end of it.

Let's see. So who are you, for those watching from home? Well, my name's Jacob Phillips. I am a professor of systematic theology. at a university in southwest London called St. Mary's University, Twickenham. So I'm a Catholic theologian, a dad, a husband. And I comment on bits and pieces to do the church and contemporary culture here and there, sometimes outside the academic sphere, if I feel so called, which I do on occasion.

I first came across you, Catholics unscripted? That's right, yep. It turns out they don't know this, but I guess I poach all my guests from them because I saw Kwasnevsky on there. He's terrific. had to have him on. Same thing with you. So it was good to have you on because I feel like you're touching upon something that I'm half thinking about all of the time as well.

Namely, what does it look like today to be a Catholic and how are we to understand? You know, like it feels like there's a lot of chaos in the church. Yeah. And we talked about this earlier. We're roughly the same age. And when did you come into the church? 2008? 2008, yeah.

Yes. Okay. Yeah, so for me, I converted when I was 17. And just a feeling, at least for me, I know that there were trads who were, look, that's disparaging. There were trads who had concerns that I didn't even know about at the time. Yeah. But for me, it was like, John Bull the second, he's the man. And, you know, so I just started to learn about the beauty of sexuality because the theology of the body and things like that.

And then Benedict came in and just felt like we were chugging along, you know? Yeah. And then he kind of let some of the Anglicans come in through the Ordinariet and then Francis came in. And it just felt, and I don't know if it was a combination between a, to put it charitably, very confusing Pope and social media exploding and everyone having their own platform or what it was. But it just felt like at some point the wheels fell off. Yeah. And the game was different. Yeah.

Did you feel that? Yeah. my experience was very similar. Well, I came in during the papacy of Benedict the 16th, and there was a very real sense that this was the bark of Peter. This was a place of clarity. This was a place of truth. This was not full of ambiguity and warring factions,

although when there were disagreements, you knew what the authoritative voice was. There was clarity, even though some may disagree. And I don't feel that that represents the way the church has been, since the Francis years, or certainly during the Francis years, when that sense of clarity was really, really questioned

in a way that many of us found very difficult to stomach and to deal with, myself included. I still hold firmly to the ineffectibility of the church, and within what would be called in theology the hierarchy of truths, it's very clear that the solemn dogmas were not touched. The ordinary universal magisterium of the church wasn't touched, the infallible bit. But there was a real problem when you get a couple of grades down from that to what's called authoritative doctrine, which is not understood to be infallible, but it should be something of which we can feel certain, if not sure.

That was bened at the 16th phrase. You should always feel certain, if not sure, that this must be true. And that's the level of encyclicals, local bishops conferences, etc., etc. And what we're called to do within the church at that level of doctrine, we don't have to believe in it with faith, It's not infallible. It's not revealed by God. But we are required almost on autopilot to have a hermeneutic of charity towards our leaders in the church, the shepherds of the flock to which we belong. And that hermeneutic of charity, for very understandable reasons,

is something one does not see among believers in the way that one used to see it. Join Benedict XVI, John Paul II. That era seems to have gone. and there's completely the wrong attitude sometimes comes in which is a hermeneutic of suspicion which I understand. I do understand but it's not really the Pope's job to convince you he's right the starting point is the Pope is right

there are exceptional moments in history where there are problems with that level of doctrine but it should never be the beginning of the conversation suspicion should never be the beginning of the conversation it's a very unfortunate end in exceptional circumstances not the norm Yeah. It feels like in all our institutions, something similar is taking place. I don't know what it's like in England. You can tell me, but here in America, like trust levels in mainstream media, the government is at an all-time low is what they tell me and I feel it. And so there is a sort of cynicism and like it would be naive to believe anything that we're being told. And I don't know. I mean, I'm only a Catholic. I don't know what it's like to be a Muslim or a Jew or whatever, but I would suspect in those people, I would, I'd be surprised if there wasn't something like that taking place as well.

Does that make sense? Like this might be a larger thing, not just a Catholic thing, but something that's taken place for a whole host of reasons. Yeah. Part of me wonders if Pope Francis was never Pope and Benedict was still at the helm. Was this inevitable? Does that make sense? Like Francis didn't do himself any favors.

Yeah. It does. And I think the thing about Francis, I mean, I, I, I withheld saying much when he was around. when he was in office. I took a slight vow of silence on it all, really, partly because I teach seminarians. And it's really hard for a young man to come forward and make that sacrifice of entering seminary

and training for the priesthood. In today's culture, it's an immensely difficult thing to do. The last thing they need is their theology lecturer, placing further doubt in the church. So I was very careful. And thanks be to God, none of the issues touched upon my area, so I wasn't really called upon to comment professionally, or only very occasionally. The doctrine of the Trinity wasn't questioned. The doctrine of the

person of Christ wasn't questioned. Thank God. No. But there were occasions when I would be asked, my professional opinion, as a theologian, what do you think about fiducius supplicans, traditiones, custodos, etc. And what was really challenging is that what we weren't given in those years was the theological rationale. These were just given forth by fiat. This is what's happening. This is what needs to be done. And this will be done.

And some people questioned, what's the rationale here? What's the basis in scripture? What's the basis in tradition? From the perspective of a hermeneutic of charity, saying, you know, I'm with you. I want to think with you. Yes. I can't see where you're joining the dots.

So could you explain? And as a theologian, we won't give in those explanations. So there was a certain measure of what I think we can say I say as diplomatically as possible would seem to have been the consequences of a certain obstinacy on the part of the personality at play. Yeah, the Pope.

Yeah, a refusal to have to give a rationale even. Yes. Which meant that we didn't really know what we was saying. As a theologian's, well, okay, why? Well, if you're not getting an answer as to why this needs to happen. And the great difficulty with that in the climate we're in, as you rightly say, is that we know everything a Pope has said.

I mean, in a way, it was to have a personality who's outspoken, forthright, sometimes very funny, some of the things he said made me laugh. But to have that kind of personality at this age where every single utterance of a Pope is worldwide within seconds. Yeah. I mean, you know, God has a sense of humor. I don't know. So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are, without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries I have ever seen in my life. If you're looking for a beautiful rosary that's also like an heirloom, something that you could have for life, check this out. Go to dailywire.com slash shop and pick up one of these.

This is more of the masculine one. This one, they based on St. Peter's Basilica. So it has real stone beads and Italian olive wood. This one is inspired by Notre Dame in Lyon, France. Go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today. And thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. I mean, that wasn't even, it's interesting, when he was elected, I was sitting in the offices of Catholic Answers where I worked at the time. And we were all sitting around a television.

And, you know, whereas today you'd be watching maybe some kind of streaming service. Yeah. And then I remember going into my office and just refreshing Wikipedia or the internet to see if anything had been updated. And it was like a couple of hours. Yeah. I mean, that's really. remarkable because today it's a million people are streaming and talking about it immediately. So even in his pontificate, the acceleration of technology and the immediacy of the news.

Completely. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe some of this would have happened anyway because there were these great big sort of worldly forces at play. And there is, as you mentioned rightly, what I'd call this crisis of authority, which is really deep. And it's happening across Western cultures, very, very deep. and things have happened in the cultures of the West, which have meant that people do not trust what were once seen on autopilot, as it were,

the legitimate authorities. And when I say things have happened, I mean, there were certain things around COVID, which led lots of people to question what the messaging was and whether it was right. I think transgender ideology has done a massive amount of damage to the confidence in our official means of information. Because people have looked at this and said,

I can't square this circle. that everyone in authority is telling me that this circle is square. Yes. And then all hell breaks loose. Yeah, no, totally. If you've got, if the government are telling you that it's okay to cut your son's testicles off and call him Daphne, it's like, well, you can't be trusted for anything. If you don't know that, you can't know anything. And not only is it okay, it's profoundly immoral to suggest it might have negative consequences.

Yeah. It's profoundly immoral to do that. So the whole moral compass goes out the window. And then we're in this position where nobody knows what to believe and things get to be. very, very difficult. And every era of history presents its own problems for the church. In the 19th century it was the labour movement, the late 19th century,

left wing politics, socialism, Marxism, revolutionary activism, which Leo the 13 answered to with Catholic social teaching, and continued into the 20th century. We have this crisis of authority now in Western cultures particularly. But I think it's really important to take a step

back and ask the really deep questions here about authority for us as Catholics, for us as believers in God, in Christ, because we're taught in the modern age that authority corrupts and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, the core contention of the Judeo-Christian worldview is that he who has absolute power is intrinsically incapable of corruption. Absolute power is absolute goodness.

Now, if that's the anchor, that's the starting point for society. And all other forms of authority are somehow acting in a meditative or serving role towards an authority which we can be confident must be good and have a goodness which surpasses the most amazing goodness we could ever think on. Then society would hope, one would hope it would hold together better. And what worries me about the church and the crisis of authority, the way it affects the church, is that people adopt that hermeneutic of suspicion, which is being given towards political leaders, often with good reason, and giving it towards the shepherds of the flock, and making it the starting point. I'm not suggesting people shouldn't criticise the church.

I'm not suggesting people shouldn't be open and honest about their doubts and pray and talk to their friends and all the rest of it. Talk to the parish priest. But when that's the starting point, that your Catholic and the church has to convince you that it's true, something's gone very wrong. The starting point is always this church, this is the church founded by Christ, organized by a divine mandate, anointed by the spirit, in which and by which we live and move and have our being. Isn't willful naivete something of a defect or a sin? In other words, I'm sure a lot of the problem lays on us, like the laity who decided we could, get clicks. I mean, that's to put it cynically. I really don't think that was a majority of it. I think there was just a lot of people trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

And there was an appetite to be helped to be told what's going on. But it seems to me, like, some of the blame definitely lays at the foot of the Pope. And so if he's saying things that prima facie are scandalous, isn't it, isn't it like a defect to choose to be, isn't it naive, just go, well, I can't start from a position of incredulity. Like, what do you do when you've got good reason to be incredulous or skeptical? Yeah, no, I understand that. And I, as a Catholic, you can never ask people to sacrifice their intellect. We believe in reason.

We believe that reason is largely unfallen and we can trust reason. And reason is questioning these sorts of things. I was asked to give a talk to a group of priests who were really struggling after fiducius supplicans. about the different levels of magisterial teaching and how they function. And I found that research immensely helpful. Because the top level of dogma, solemn pronouncement, ordinary and universal magisterium, those things which the church has always held universally,

as revealed, even if they haven't been pronounced solemnly, things like the community of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body. None of that stuff was touched. So that's the starting point. That's the point of faith, the theological virtue of faith that we're given. by God, in the run-up and by virtue of our baptism, that's all untouched. The level of authoritative doctrine was where things got very difficult to maintain a hermeneutic of charity. I did feel that one was still called to, to have that hermeneutic of charity,

even though one felt very confused and upset. So when Pope Francis did his final encyclical on the Sacred Heart, for example, I sat down to read it the most charitable and generous way I possibly could, because I felt that's what's required of us. It was okay, actually. I mean, I have a few minor grumbles, but, you know, it was pretty good. Who's someone who you think did that well,

like in the public sphere? Because that was a long enough pontificate. How long was he pope for 12 years or something? Yeah, I felt like it. Yeah, I felt like a long time. Is there someone you like, they did that well? Because I remember for me, I kept thinking, where's the, am I being a coward

in not just addressing the squarely? Or am I being prudent? what do I know anyway? Yeah. You know, especially, like, it seemed unreasonable to not address what was going on. Yeah. When, because I had people right to me and they would say, just stick to the beauty of the faith.

Don't get involved in this. Yeah. And I get that. Like, I see why they would say that. But when people are leaving the church because of this, or if they're being led down rabbit trails of certain other people online who might be telling them to commit some seismic act, it's like, well, we have to, we have to try. to say something. And so I would often have good people like Dr. Ralph Martin on or others to be like,

oh, pass, pass this out, because we can't just pretend confusion isn't taking place. It'd be nice to pretend, but we can't, you know. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any kind of easy answers here. I think it's about conscience. It's about prayer. And one would hope that those who are speaking out are doing it, you know, well-intentioned and in good faith, not just looking for clicks and engagement. You know, sometimes that one wonders how much that's the case. I think, and there's also, I mean, it's, one doesn't want to seem, um, in any way, sort of deceptive, but there is something about airing your dirty linen in public as well. So you've got to think, what's your forum and what good can you do in this context?

So after you get that level of authoritative doctrine, which then there's a level of prudential disciplinary judgments below that, which are not, which you can deviate from if conscience requires you to do so. One thing I found immensely helpful was thinking Conscience only kicks in when I'm required to actually do something Now I'm not a priest So I'm not going to be asked to bless a same-sex couple After fiducius supplication

But a priest is legit If we consider that a disciplinary measure Not authoritative doctrine Which I think it should be classed as for this reason A priest can by conscience decide not to do it Whereas I'm bound by conscience for other things being married contraceptional kinds of stuff, which a priest isn't. So the question then becomes, if this is really coming from conscience,

how does it affect me in my state of life? I don't have to always feel full clarity and full understanding about everything going on in the church. At every moment, I'm a Catholic believer. That's not required of me to believe. I need to feel entirely sure about the dogmatic level, and I need to have a hermeneutic of charity and good faith when it comes to the authoritative level.

But lots of things actually have very little to do with me, personally. Even something like the death penalty, which is one of the most challenging issues that came up, you know, I don't work on death row. I'm not in the criminal justice system. I'm in a country where no one's been hung since 1962 or something. So it's not going to be an issue of conscience for me. I might find it troubling and I might want clarity, but it's not this sort of crisis of conscience moment. For you personally. Exactly, where I might need to administer a lethal injection and feel that I've been told by the church it's inadmissible. Well, not just that, but maybe be in a position where you had to explicate the church's teaching on the death penalty, that would be...

Yeah, yeah. And it got close to me on some things, and people would have asked me, and I was always happy to speak, you know, but I... The other thing as well, apart from states of life, the other thing to bear in mind in this conversation is that there was a document, this called Donus Veritatis, came out in the early 90s on the mission and calling of a theologian, when Ratzinger was prefect of the CDF, the then-CDF. It's a brilliant document on how to raise concerns.

It offers what I would call a grammar of dissent, a means of how to do it and how to do it appropriately. And Catholic authority isn't totalitarian. Of course, we believe in reasons. So reason needs to ask questions and look for answers and find out what the meaning and the significance of things is. But it does say in that document remarkably for the early 90s, be very careful when it comes to mass media. Which then would have been a weekly journal or, you know, monthly journal. I mean, this was pre-internet, 91, 92. But it said, be careful about mass media

because the momentum can build around mass media and then you're in the danger of forming a counter-magisterium. That's the basis. And I just think that's a really prophetic document. Wow. It says if you have concerns, raise them in an appropriate forum where people can answer to them.

Right. And you can have a proper discussion in the pursuit of truth rather than anything which isn't at that level of good faith. So take the issue then of the death penalty. it seems that according to that document, it would be inappropriate for you and me right now to publicly share what we might find troubling about the new changes to the catechism, but that a theologian in a some kind of meeting with other theologians could then bring it up? I think that's what it's implying. Well, it's certainly at the level of a sort of informal chat, which might be in the, you know, exposed to.

to the media, that's, if it's going to help people in their belief, it's okay. But you just have to ask yourself, you know, what am I really looking for an answer here? Or am I trying to sign people up or conscript people to something which is going to undermine the overall message of the faith? Right. It's a very difficult balancing act to get right. I don't know if I got it right. Yeah.

And I, you know, I didn't speak publicly about the pontificate until it was over. How should we assess, just to sum it up, Pope Francis's pontificate? Can we just say it was a bloody mess and he was a terrible Pope? Because that's my opinion. Or is that inappropriate to say? I would just say God has a sense of humor. Yeah, I don't know if he'm sure he does, but yet so many people lost the faith and left the church. Sure.

And I don't think it's unreasonable to connect some of that loss of faith to some of the things Pope Francis did and said and didn't do. It was a wild mess. And I'm afraid that if we don't just go, yeah, that was terrible. Yeah. But then go, but why think we're supposed to have good popes? Did you, you know, I almost want to say that, but did you think we were supposed to always have good posts? Why would you think that? Has the church ever taught that?

And if she hasn't, then why is it problematic for me to go, yeah, that was a train wreck? Yeah. I mean, one theory I had a friend shared with me was that if we were trying to find God's Providence at work in that pontificate, the faithful were given a very clear message that papal olitry is unsustainable. Yes. An extreme neo-Utramontanism. Yep. And I'm told by a, and he's now an relatively elderly clergyman who worked in the Vatican

for many years during JP2 and Benedict the 16th, he said it was rife among the curia. He said once Benedict the 16th said something he disagreed with and he was told by a more senior member of the curia, the Pope knows all things. Wow. Never question the Pope. He knows everything that will happen. Could you help our listeners understand ultramontanism what you're talking about and and why that's an era?

Yeah, so I'm thinking really of, yeah, what should strictly be speaking, strictly speaking be called neo-altramontanism, which is the view of the, in the late 19th century, the view that the Pope's infallibility extends to almost any utterance he might make. Not things which are said

in his official office on faith and morals, which is ex-cathedra, which is the official teaching. If the Pope speaks in his office and solemnly pronounces something on faith and morals, it's infallible. But there were some who believed at the papal office is such that any utterance or almost any utterance the Pope makes is graced with

infallibility. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's definitely... And that's never going to happen again. But you can see the temptation. And I saw, Carl Keating, you know Carl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers? Yeah. He summed it up well in a book he wrote on Pope Francis.

To me, this just encapsulates everything. He said, we used to go to Rome to seek to clarify the confusion of our parishes. And now under Francis, we go to our parishes to seek clarity due to the confusion coming out of Rome. And that, I just thought that was excellent because, you know, if you had a lot of liberal priests doing all sorts of shenanigans and you had John Paul II of Benedict at the helm, you can see the temptation to elevate them and anything they say and to, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got a strong, strong, good, holy priest at the helm of, yeah.

Yeah. When you don't. And I think Benedict the 16th, whom I love dearly, his theology, his person, someone I feel immensely close to spiritually and emotionally, he did something very, very brave and very courageous actually by stepping down because he showed his fallibility and his weakness and his vulnerability. What do you mean? He showed his fallibility.

By resigning. I think it was actually a really courageous thing to do you. Do you? A lot of people disagree with you. I know. But they wouldn't have disagreed with you if we hadn't got a rock star. I know. I know, but I think for him, what he was saying, you know, people could really believe in him.

And he's as someone I would be tempted to slip into a kind of ultra-montane papillotry attitude towards someone I have the highest imaginable respect for. And he was able to say, I have weaknesses and I have limits and I can't do this due to age and infirmity, etc. And also to say, my faith in God is such, I believe I've been given permission. I am assured in my prayer life enough to know that God has said you can go. I wonder what it was like for him during the tumultuous times of the Francis Pontificate just to suffer in silence. Yeah. Am I right?

He didn't speak out much against Francis or at all, really. No, I mean, no, there was some confusion over on clerical celibacy, a book published by Cardinal Sara, which his name went to, and then it would, official pronouncement came out saying that he didn't consider himself to be co-author and he didn't know why his name had gone to it. It was a bit confusing. I'm not quite sure exactly what happened there. But if you read, there's a book called Last Testament, which was an interview he did after resigning. And in that, he talks about how he'd been an academic for a couple of decades. He was tired in the mid to late 70s and was thinking about retiring. And then he got

made Bishop of Munich. He said no, his spiritual director told him to say yes. He back and said, okay, I'll do it. Oh, wow. JP2 loved him, brought him in as prefect. And he asked, I think, three times he asked JP2 if he could resign. And JP2 said, when I die, you can go. I need you. But JP2 died, and he was like, oh, finally.

Been waiting 15 years to retire. And then, and we know what happened. And then who could he go to? The Pope had said no. His spiritual director said no. His academic superiors had said, no. You go all the way up. And there was only one person left to ask.

And that person said yes. And he talked about it. Yeah. He said he prayed and God told him you can go. And I've never seen any reason to doubt that. I know it's, you know, we'll get loads more clicks and stuff if I come up with some kind of crazy theory about what was really going on. But you read it and think this was a prayerful decision a man of integrity made. That's what I honestly believe.

Jason Everett has said, and I think it's really wise that he said it occurred to him that if he kind of chased down all the rabbit trails about what's really going on in the Vatican and behind the. scenes and who's pulling the levers and where does the corruption go. Suppose he were to discover all of that. Yeah. And it was all made clear to him. Well, then what? Well, then it's like, all right. Well, like, love your wife and your children and, yeah.

Like, unless you're aware of something illegal that you could then report, it's like, your life's pretty much the same. Yeah. And I've been thinking lately about how much energy is wasted in going down these rabbit holes in, I don't know what it is, because I get the temptation to sort of, yeah, when I could just love my, like what's under my authority? Maybe that's a cop out. I want to challenge that because it seems like common sense in a way to say, love your wife,

love your children, be a faithful, I mean, that's enough. It's like, well, is it actually because maybe you, maybe you're underestimating your reach and what you should be doing? I think that's also possible. But certainly if you're going down rabbit holes and being all sardonic on Facebook and wherever people are sarcastic and sorts of things, it's like this is. And if that's getting in the way of your primary responsibility, what you have authority over, clearly that's an evil thing. Yeah. No, I agree.

I mean, maybe we need some kind of teaching on this third sphere that's opened up between the professional theologian who's under vows and, you know, bound by canon law, which is what that document's focused on. and then the lay kind of media personality, which is a more recent phenomenon. Yeah, like how terrifying is it to you as an academic that the average YouTuber may have more influence than you? No offense. Yeah, no, no, it's fine, yeah. Until today, obviously. Until today. Yeah, I mean, I know of a seminary rector who speaks of a counter-magisterium.

No, a counter-formation. He says there's two forms, there's formation, there's what the internet's forming, and is what we're trying to form. and sometimes their intention. I mean, academic theology is different to what you mostly get on YouTube. Normally you can provide academic arguments if there's a particular problem. It's difficult because for years I think some seminary teaching was highly questionable. And good faithful young men going into seminary learnt to keep their heads down, smile and nod, say what needed to be said so they can be ordained and be good faithful priests.

In my experience where I live in the UK, I don't think that's the case anymore. I think the quality is good. And the general disposition of most people within the sort of mainstream of the church is orthodox and faithful in the way it probably wasn't from what you hear, the horror stories you hear about the 70s and 80s. But yeah, you do get, not so much of my seminarians, among students generally, you do get some crazy ideas coming up And you think this must have come from the internet.

Something online. When your team's communication is scattered, people notice, especially your customers. Messages slip through the cracks, responses drag on, and suddenly the whole thing starts to wobble. It's amazing how quickly a bit of disorder can drain the life out of your business momentum. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business communication system built so you never miss a call. Quo makes staying connected with your customers a genuinely effortless experience. Instead of juggling missed calls, scattered texts or par-finished conversations, your whole team can work from one shared number.

Everyone sees the full thread, replies quickly, and customers actually feel cared for. It's not just another phone system. It's the highest rated one on G2, trusted by more than 90,000 businesses of every size. Whether you're solo or growing fast, Quo keeps you reachable and professional. wherever you are on your phone or computer. You can keep your current number, add teammates easily, and let smart call routing handle the rest. The AI even logs calls, summarizes them and highlights next steps so nothing slips through the cracks. Need after our support or lead qualification? It's on that too. And with calls, texts, voicemails,

and contact details all in one tidy view. Your team always knows the customer story, making every conversation smoother and far more personal. So money's on the line. So always say hello to Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first sixth months when you go to Quo.com slash pints. That's QUO.com slash pints. Brothers, we live in a strange time, right? We've never been more connected in some way and yet many men feel deeply alone. It's easy to fill our days with work, noise, even good things and still not be truly known by anyone. And it's in that kind of isolation that we become vulnerable, drifting, discouraged, and more easily pulled away from who God is calling us to be. I have met so many men, I think I've, I have lost count, who have said

Exodus 90 has blessed them tremendously. All right, that's why our sponsor Exodus 90 is inviting you into something better. The Holy Friendship Challenge, beginning July 1st, is an invitation into real brotherhood, small groups of men walking together toward Christ, growing in prayer, learning what true friendship actually looks like. Led by Dr. John Cutterback, this journey is about rediscovering the kind of friendship that strengthens us, grounds us and draws us closer to the Father. If you've been longing for deeper connection, for brothers who know you and walk with you, this is your invitation.

This summer, I want to invite you to break out of the loneliness of our age and growing Christian friendship. Join the Exodus 90 Brotherhood today and sign up for Holy Friendship starting July 1st. Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more. That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt. Download the app today and become the man God created you to be. You know, again, to kind of make an analogy to kind of mainstream American culture and the political conversation, it's like the new right are furious at the middle right because they screwed everything up. They'd made all the concessions.

Yeah. You didn't have anyone manfully speaking out against sodomy or divorce or abortion or whatever. And it's like they, we just, we lost our country. Yeah. You know, immigration and that sort of thing. Yeah. And so now I, you just see this real anger on the part and maybe rightfully so of young men who want their bloody country back, you know? Yeah.

And maybe the way they express it is bad or wrong or, you know, you know, misdirected, but it's, but the, but the very reason they're saying it with that much vigour is precisely because the other thing didn't work. Yeah. So if you, if you, if you think that's basically right, the same thing's happening in the church, right? Yeah. There's all the shenanigans and the bull crap that we were subjected to.

Yeah. Like, I remember being, you know, just to reiterate some of the horror stories, I remember going to a retreat in Ireland and I was in the library. It was like a Benedictine or something. thing, monastery. No one wore the habit, of course. And cynically, he says. And then I went to the library and the tabernacle was on the ground because they had removed it from the chapel because the priests and maybe it wasn't just the priest, maybe they were doing yoga in the chapel. And so they wanted to, so I was like, what's this on the ground? I opened it up and the blessed. So we could

spend years to it. But the point is there are so many horror stories like that. It's like people are like, I'm done. Like I'm done trying to find the middle ground. Yeah. This is benign. and we're not going to pretend it's not bananas anymore. Yeah. Do you think that's kind of right? No, I do. And I think partly what's happened since the Francis years, because Pope Leo's generally been,

we haven't got quite this frenetic mess going on. Yeah. A lot of this energy online and these people that have got big followings and so on is now turning towards, I suppose, what you call conservatives, rather than traditionalists. They've become the kind of target in a way, which is unfortunate for me because I'm in that group.

I'm very much in that group. Explain that to me more. Well, I mean, people that would consider themselves be in the centre of the church debate, definitely not liberal. Yep. Followers of JP2, Benedict 16th. So I guess that's me. Faithful to the council, but

are very fond of traditional liturgy in the broadest sense, which I'm sure we'll get to in more detail, but not an exclusivist towards the Vita Sordo or the TLM. But very happy with Samoan pontifacum that it was opened up again and made available and want the Novos Ordo to be delivered in a much more reverent traditional manner. but maintain that hermeneutic authority towards church leaders and consider themselves to be broadly in the middle, in the centre, if you like. And so you're saying that today under Leo... I think they've noticed a lot more bad feeling towards

the sort of conservative camp coming from some more on the traditionalist side. Okay. Because I think people need something to talk about. Yeah. Because Pope Francis is no longer saying stuff on aeroplanes. There's all this energy and you need a lot of content when you're online, as you know. So what do you, yeah, good. So what do you see the Catholic YouTube is talking about right now?

Well, I've just noticed a lot more negative comments towards conservatives or ratsingarians, which is what I am. I see. And somehow this is where it all went wrong. Let's get them. Yeah, okay. They open the door to France. This is to a point, right, about the middle right, no longer.

Exactly. But it's different from the political sphere. These analogies, they can be helpful and it helps us understand it, but it's very, very different to the political sphere because in the political sphere, people are, they might not want to be, They might say they're post-liberal or whatever, but everyone is bound by a presupposition of a social contract. So you will give the leaders their authority. You mandate them to be an authority to the degree that you agree with them, and you consider it to be in your best interest that they rule over you. Social contract theory came around in the Enlightenment.

Catholicism was around a long time before then. Catholicism has no social contract at all. It doesn't mean to say disagreement isn't difficult, and we don't, you know, we have to make sure we don't sacrifice our intellect and so on. but the starting point within the church is never, hmm, do I like this leader? The starting point is he deserves my love. I might not like him, but I have filial love for his office.

Wow. Even if I intensely dislike him and to live in that difficulty, that's what is required of us as Catholics because private judgment can be a massive problem. Yeah, and so do you think a lot of the problem is maybe in America, maybe in elsewhere as well, where you elect representatives,

prime ministers and things, that we just have that mentality. Yeah. That we, yeah. Everyone's a rebel, you know, and the rebelliousness is great. You know, I find it really fun in the political sphere. I find it really funny that all of a sudden people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not put on these kind of pedestals and you realize that actually there's much to poke fun out, there's much to rebel against, and there's much that was problematic with the consensus before 2016. I'm really into that. I found the whole thing really intellectually invigorating and good fun.

But we do not start from this point of automatic rebellion within the church. That's where you cease to be Catholic. Ooh, really. So what do we do? How do we reorient ourselves? Because to reorient ourselves will feel to some like to be willfully naive or to be a sucker. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I do. Like what did Pope Leo say recently about how he thinks that we should be less afraid of Islam? And I'm like, I don't. I don't think so. I think that's wrong. I think you're wrong there. What should my, what should I say instead of that? Well, I mean, that comment would come down in that lowest level of doctrine I talked about. Right. Kind of disciplinary prudential matters. So it's not binding at all. There's nothing in the solemnly proclaimed documents about Islam that would, that that's a different matter.

We are required to believe that that Muslims worship the one God. We're not. No, we're required to believe that we do worship one God. Yeah. But in terms of solemn pronouncements, it doesn't get much. much further than that or at the level of, you know, an ecumenical council. So the hominutica charity within me would suggest that, um, thinking globally there might, you know, there's more to Islam than perhaps meets the eye and thinking about it from the perspective of the particular challenges of the West and the civilizational crisis of the West and mass immigration and the challenges that's presenting,

certainly to my own country, that the perspective in Islam is rather different. And it needs to be. Leo said. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're speaking in the office he has in Tunisia, I believe, as well. In what? In Tunisia, I think.

He was talking about this, I believe, in a majority Muslim country where he's a guest, and he's functioning in his political office, in a diplomatic role. And I'm willing to believe that that was a prudent truth and a perspective he was in at that point. If he asked me as an Englishman, who's seen the difference between the mid-1990s, the mid-2020s, the answer would be different, but he's not an Englishman of my age. Yeah. Yeah, certainly finding a way to not friggin set your hair on fire and scream at the moon every time the Pope says something would be good for everybody's mental health. That would be nice. Yeah. Definitely, yeah. Not spiral immediately.

Yeah. And I, you know, I try and have the hominical charity. Excuse me. I believe that he's saying less. Yes, thank God. he is considered in what he says some of it's tough we'll get to some of it and you've mentioned something which I know many people I know have found very very tough

and just generally some people thinking the whole priority system of the Roman hierarchy is basically just boomerism and that you know I have lots of people that say that and I get that

but the other thing we have to remember is and this is you know one doesn't want to be yeah one really doesn't want to be in a position where you just feel that you're, sorry, excuse me, you're explaining everything away. Yeah, to the point where, exactly.

But there is a real generational thing here as well. So Pope Francis was the first pope that was ordained after the council. We've now got the second. We are now, in the Francis years, and to a certain extent now, I would believe, under Leo, what we have is the bit that many people were dreading, which was when that generation ordained in the late 60s, early 17th. and mid to late 70s. Are at the helm.

Yeah. Yeah. And we have to get through that period. Now, to turn around and say, the whole thing is going to hell in the handcart is not the right answer. That's what I wish to say. It's a bit like, it's a silly analogy, but I've made it before. If you've ever been as silly as I have been an accidentally put normal gas, petrol,

in a diesel car. I have not. And realized within a few seconds, you have to sort of work it through. and it stunts and chugs and makes funny noises. And you just have to keep driving. And then eventually it will have worked through. Oh, that's interesting analogy. And that's what we're kind of going through.

You know, it's going to be tough because this generation are at the helm. Yeah. And a lot of the cardinals are of exactly that age. And it was just pure discontinuity, spirit of Vatican II. Let's make a whole new age here. Everything's completely different. We know better than anyone else has known since the time of the New Testament. Let's do it.

Right. That thinking has formed some of the minds of the most influence in the church at the moment. And it's down to us to try and keep things steady. I get a lot of solace from St Francis of Assisi on this stuff. Yeah? A lot. Because I think thinking of it in terms of spirituality is very important. And what did St. Francis do?

He focused nearly all of his energy inwardly on his own interiority, his own sanctity, He was called to rebuild the church. What did he do? He never stopped pushing himself to be as Christ-like as he possibly could. To the point to a level which far exceeds anything that any of us could imagine as achievable for ourselves. He went in and kept on pushing to be more and more holy, more and more holy. That was the basis of his calling to rebuild. That's what gave him the mandate to do it.

And it was building up, so it was constructive as well. And what we also see in Francis is someone who, came over 1,200 years after Christ. So Francis, it also gives us hope that the best can be yet to come. If over a millennium after Jesus, someone comes who's the altar Christus, the person that after the Blessed Virgin

is the nearest to Christ that anyone seems to have got. Who, Francis? Yeah. You have a high... Yeah, I mean, he's known as the Altar Christus, the other Christ, which is not... Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't dispute it, I guess. I mean, he was the wild, holy man.

And this, I think that also tells us that the best can be yet to come and that we can approach history with a certain sense of hope. Yeah, that's what we need right now. Yeah. I think it's what we want, but I think we're afraid to have it. It'd be like if you were in a bad marriage. Yeah. And you kept getting disappointed. Yeah.

And the kind of the feeling of hope rises up within you and you get to a point. be like what that hell I can't be bothered being disappointed again this is not my marriage that I'm actually yeah yeah I love my wife yeah but I could see that where you just like you just give up because giving up's easier yeah but it's like if you if there was a really a sign of hope yeah oh we'd like that very much yeah and I mean I mean I think of an analogy of marriage often with those that that would want to say that the hierarchy's been captured and it's all over and everything went wrong at the council because I do think that's the easy option to spare pessimism

I think so. And if you're in a, if you're in a difficult marriage, um, surely the easiest thing in the world would be to think, well, I can, you know, I can trade in my wife with all of her difficulties and all of our struggles for a much younger, fresher, simpler model who's, you know, naive and impressionable. But all the and all of her imperfections will come up and it will be very difficult and that's not the Catholic way and we don't believe marriage can be traded in like that. You know, and I sometimes think... It doesn't work anyway.

Exactly. Like, you could be good. Exactly. It would be a bad idea. Exactly. But I sometimes speak to people who talk about the conciliate church in this kind of way. And they really remind me of the kind of midlife crisis dad of 52, who's traded his wife in for a 25-year-old who's got everything in all the right places.

Really looks the part. Not quite right. Did you ever struggle with this? Did you ever go through a period where you were like really wrestling with Vatican 2 or no? No, not really. No. No. I've always been quite happily convinced by the documents themselves.

Yeah. I like how Ralph Martin puts it. He says, and I wonder what you think of this. He says the problem isn't with the documents. And of course, documents from councils aren't infallible. Oh, sorry, aren't inerrant and could be said better. Right? Is that there? Okay. And so, so he said, documents are good. What needed to be clarified has been clarified. What needs to be exercised from the church is the spirit of Vatican too. Yeah. Anyway, but what do you have to say? I completely agree with that. I mean, I suppose because I was a student of theology when I converted to Catholicism, I went straight to the documents. And in 2008, the digital counter magisterium hadn't quite kicked into gear by then. So the internet wasn't quite as full of information to question that. And because I was studying theology, I actually had to read documents like Lumigensium, Gaudium-Metzpess anyway as part of my degree. So I read them in the run up to my conversion as a young man.

And the documents are not unorthodox, they're fine, they're inspiring. There's a massive problem around the implementation and that period of the quote, unquote, spirit. I completely agree with Ralph Martin there. The documents were all written by people who celebrated the Latin Mass. Of course. Right? Yeah. Like there was no Novice Otto priest writing those documents.

Exactly. So it's, yes, it's about the implementation and the sort of chaos that ensued after the council. But, you know, the... To what do you chalk that up to? Because it was bananas. I really don't know. I really, I mean, it's a, it's a, I don't know. You had a guest on Father Perricone, and I watched that episode in which he talked about the 70s and what it was like in seminary.

And it's very strange. And you kept on asking that these people were also formed in the Latin Mass. The people of the Vanguard, who were insisting that everyone stops wearing cassocks and all this stuff, they were also formed in the traditional Latin Mass. Yeah, what happened? It's very confusing. Well, it could have been a revolutionary time. It was like the culture out of which these people were raised. Everything seemed to be like the 60s may have been the worst time to have a council.

Because there was revolution in the year. The one thing I've tried to understand, to understand my traditional loving brothers and sisters. One way I think about is this. I think suppose like next year there was an implementation that made the Novus Ordo as different as the current Novus. auto is to the Latin Mass. Does that make sense? Like a new... Yeah. But more, but newer. Yeah, like a new novice order. Like, imagine if a novice novice order was implemented. And the novice order was as different from the novice order as the novice order is from the Latin

mass. And in the same direction. It's like, what could you imagine? Maybe we could have lazy boy recliners because we want to rest in the love of God. Like, people would rightly lose their freaking minds. Yeah. And I think, well, fair enough, you know. And suppose you say, Yeah, but you've got no right to be angry because you didn't experience that transition. The Novice order is all you've ever known. It's like, that's kind of like if you were a young kid in a family and you heard about stories about how your parents and children used to gather together every night to read a book by the fireplace. But now the parents are older and have given up and you're just, you barely see your parents. You'd rightly be like, well, why didn't I get that?

Yeah. So I feel like people are right to be frustrated. Well, they are. And I know from, you know, I've got colleagues that teach liturgy and they, they, they, they, the students through sacrosanctum concilium. Yeah. And people just can't believe this is what Vatican 2 says on the liturgy. I know. Because they've got the Novus Ordo spirit of Vatican II in their minds. I still hold firm to the view that I think the Novus Ordo and Vetus Ordo can be complementary in the life of faith. And you can breathe with both lungs. What frustrates me is a lot of criticism of the Novus Ordo are things which are not intrinsic to it in my view.

Okay. So in London, where I've had my entirety of my Catholic life, my adult life, most of the the big parishes in London, the solemn mass, the principal mass on a Sunday morning, will be a Latin novice order, ad orientum, reverent, reverent at the altar, receiving on the tongue. Beautiful. Et cetera, et cetera. Thank God, that's loud. So when people say, well, look, the Latin mass, I think, well, yeah, but I've been going to a Latin mass from most of my adult life.

But it's a novice order, you know, the reverent novice order. So I don't think the problems are intrinsic with a novice ordo. The implementation of it, there are a few, you know, clearly problems, but I don't believe It's people are often taking the worst example of a Nova Sordo and comparing it to the beauty and majesty of the Vita Sordo. And that doesn't really work. Now, I know that's not true in other places and I've spent some time in the States. I was in a town last summer where, you know, my local parish church, Nova Sordo, I just thought, even I was just like, I can't do this. And I found an FSSP parish on the other side of town and went there instead.

So if I was in that kind of situation, I could understand people build this massive animus toward the Nova Sordo. But I don't think the problems are intrinsic to it. And I don't, very, very uneasy when people talk about leaving or joining the Novus Ordo. And I say, well, so-and-so join the Novus Ordo, this kind of thing. Well, he said, that's a Novice Ordo church, you know. Why don't you like that? I don't like that because you're drawing this hard and fast line between two different churches. Now, if you want to do ecclesiology, you want to talk about what it means to be the Catholic church, etc., etc., fine.

But if you're Catholic, you use titles, which are in magisterial documents. which have been used by saints and doctors of the church. No one anywhere has spoken about a Novus Ordo church. No one in authority. No one anointed by the spirit to speak on these matters. It's not a real title. It's a Protestant thing to make up, basically, to say, well, this is a church, this is a priest, etc.

I entirely respect people like FSSP who are exclusive to the Vetus Ordo, and I completely respect that, and I very grateful for them and the richness they bring to the church. And I love the Vitas Ordo. But I can't accept this hard and fast division between them. I think the document Samoan Pontificum that was done under Benedict the 16th was a very wisely done document. Because what he said, what he did in that document is he said he would unconditionally liberate what was called there the extraordinary form. But he didn't

do any kind of intervention or force anything. He accepted that the Novus Ordo is accessible, it's ordinary, it's what most people know. And he had the wisdom to know that we got into the problems we did with the Novus Ordo, when the papacy and the hierarchy felt that they could intervene on the organic development of liturgy, using liturgical experts who could then redraw a whole new template and force it on everyone. And he said, okay, people do the Novus Ordo. That's been in regnant for some decades. It's what people know.

And by the way, it's, you know, fed into the life of sanctity of people like St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the people that founded the Franciscans of the renewal. New, you know, incredibly holy people, wonderful, inspiring people that were formed and nourished by the Novice Ordo. And Benedict 16 didn't just come in and say, well, let's, you know, let's just sort of shut this down and do this, because he didn't believe that that was appropriate for the person and authority, accepted what was happening. Yeah. I'd like to think the two could mutually enrich each other again. I remember talking to a FSSP priest who said to me that he wouldn't want done to the Novus Auto, what was done to the extraordinary form. I think for the reasons you're getting at, namely people.

have been raised in this faith. Yeah. And to have the rug pulled out from them so violently would actually do a lot of damage to people. It's in God's wisdom. And, you know, at the Eschaton, there'll be the marriage feast of the lamb. It's in the book of Revelation.

There'll be one right at the end. Things are going to have to come back together again at some point. Okay, so there was an interview with the superior general of the priestly society of Pope Pius the 10th. First of all, what's just your opinion of Esprit? SPX? I've not... Yeah, it is a big question.

And I don't have much personal experience. I'm always quite uneasy about speaking out about stuff that I don't have much personal experience of. But I've tended to... I mean, I've chosen not to go to any SXPX chapels or anything like that. I... To me, it goes really sort of fundamentally counter to what I understand it is to be Catholic and under the authority of the church. Hmm.

Generally. Yeah. I don't know. But because I don't know, I kind of think it's the church's fault. Yeah. Here's what I mean. I was in Austria and even the Franciscans, right? Because it was with the University of Franciscan, Stubenville.

Yeah. In Austria. And even they who you wouldn't accuse of being trads by any means would say, don't go to the parish church. It's an invalid Eucharist. Wow. I shouldn't be laughing. It was horrendous. I mean, the bad priest.

just making up the words of institution. Wow. So, anyway, we're in Vienna, and I'm like, Latin Mass. And so my wife and I go to this Latin Mass. And it turns out it was an SSPX chapel. And we didn't know that until the homily. Because the homily, of course, was all in German, and then Lafeb's name kept getting mentioned. But it was completely beautiful.

And I went to confession to an SSPX priest. And it was really wise and merciful and good. And so my experience there was good. And I just thought to myself, maybe, what do you think about this? Like, it's easy. to kind of berate people for going when you live in America or England where you have a decent liturgy. Yeah. There's some places in Germany and Austria where you kind of don't.

Yeah. And maybe you think that's an exaggeration, but I'm more sympathetic. And then I think to myself, well, there's so much confusion about whether or not I'm allowed to. I mean, people disagree on this. Maybe you disagree and you can educate me. Yeah. There seems to be enough confusion about this that I feel like, I don't know if I'm morally responsible if it's wrong to go there because I know that the orthodox rancism, that's been

made clear, but it's not been made clear at all with the SSPX rancism. I don't think they are. And so isn't it the church's responsibility to be really clear about that for my sake? And if they're not, can't I just give them the benefit of the doubt, especially when in a country where the Eucharist might be invalid? What do you think? Yeah, and I don't know where conscience would lead me if I was in that sort of situation. I honestly don't know, and I know very good people who, during COVID, um, attended SSPX chapels because the mass was there unrestricted, uh, and it wasn't available. And I respect that decision.

I mean, for me, it's, it's really about the kind of the fundamental theology at play in terms of what you understand Catholicism to be. I understand Catholicism to be universal. Now, most of us think, understandably universal means geographically universal around the world, the world faith, the highest of the world religions, etc. But it's also universal with regard to time, temporality, which means it must always be in step, to some extent, with the present. If at any point you draw a line and say, this has ceased to be Catholic, that's where you cease to be Catholic. Because to be Catholic means to be universal over time.

God is the Lord of History. I really believe that. Well, then what do you say to those who would draw that line around the SSPX and say, this isn't Catholic? Well, those who would say the SSPX aren't Catholic. Yeah. Well, they're right, because I think the SSPX have done that. They've said we can abrogate everything that's happened since the council. And therefore, doctrinal development stopped.

And the church has gone fundamentally wrong. And to think that you can abrogate decades of history and say that the Catholic church has gone completely and utterly wrong. So draw that line in the sand is to say that the church is no longer, has its universality over time. And people have always wanted to do, this is part of the scandal. This is the scandal of the incarnation, the scandal of Catholicism, is that the eternal is present to us in time,

which is extremely difficult for people to understand and stomach and live with. And we flip from one to the other and we find it very difficult. But this is exactly what happened with Jesus and the fundamental heresies of the church, people saying, the eternal cannot be present in time. And that's what we're asked to do with the church itself as the body of Christ, which means there might be elements of Vatican II in their implementation which were imprudent and all kinds of issues which have come up since then

that we have to work through but to think that you can just turn around and draw a line and say this is no longer fully temporal is to get to the very heart of what it is to be Catholic. No longer fully temporal. What does that mean? Well it means it's no longer

developing organically through history. It's preserved in Aspic. In Aspic which means so it's sort of like preserved it's sort of set in stone at a particular point rather than developing with time. Okay. So the challenge of the faith is to believe that

the eternal is made present to us in terms proper to the time in which we live in the present. That's the development of doctrine and that's the development of the church which stays the same whilst moving with time. And I generally, with various wings of traditionalism, There seems to be a refusal to accept change at a particular point and say this is where we draw the line Which coincidentally is exactly what Martin Luther did with the New Testament

Again, Benedict 16th got this right. He said there were two fundamental errors which end up becoming the same thing There's radical progressivism which is saying everything has to change Yeah, move with the times women's ordination same-sex blessings the works and then there's what he called radical Archaeologism which is being an archaeologist and thinking you can find the perfect immaculate level before it went wrong and saying this is it. And then drawing the line there. And they're both examples of the same root error, which is to draw back from the present, to draw back from the reality of the church as it's there before you just as Jesus was before the disciples and say this can't be

eternal and temporal at the same time. So we all pay for phone service. So why not make that money do something good? That's why I'm a fan of our sponsor, Charity Mobile. They're a pro-life company helping build a culture of life right here in America. And here's the thing, you're not sacrificing anything. You still get nationwide coverage, no contracts and solid reliable service. But with charity mobile, a portion of your bill goes to support a pro-life or pro-family charity that you choose. Over the years, that's added up to millions of dollars, going to causes that actually matter. Plan start under 50 bucks a month. You get a free phone with a new line, plus free activation and shipping. And their customer service is based right here in the

the US staffed by people who share your values and truly understand you. So really it comes down to this. Why not have your phone bill reflect what you believe? To get started, visit Charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad. That's Charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad and use promo code Matt Frad at checkout. So one of the things I have been thinking about lately is this. We all want peace, but we don't necessarily all want surrender. But the truth is you don't get one without the other.

That's why I'm really excited about what our sponsor The Hello is doing this tune. They're launching a challenge based on my book, Jesus, Our Refuge, and it's all about going deeper, learning what it actually means to draw close to the heart of Christ, not just in a sentimental way, but in a real transformative way. Because his heart loves us unconditionally, right? But it also calls us higher. It asks us to let go of sin, to loosen our grip on worldly desires, and to be united more fully with him. And look, that's not easy, but it is good. Hello is so excellent. I've used it for over eight years now, and I keep subscribing because it keeps being excellent. So if you've been feeling the pool, like there's

more to your spiritual life than what you're currently living, I'd really encourage you to check out Hello and join the challenge this June. Visit hallow.com slash Matt Fred to get three months free, and let's make this June a month of surrender, connection, and genuine prayer. Again, that's hallo.com slash Matt Frad for three months free. I have a friend who was with the FSSP. They were not whatever enough. So he went to the SSPX. And then he decided the SSPX were too liberal.

And then he went to some other thing. Now they have a priest who comes to their home to celebrate mass for their family. I call this like purity spiraling. Yeah. And I just, I'm interested in the psychological underpinnings of that. Because I get it. That's the thing. Like, maybe that's why this bothers me so much because I'm not, I'm not, you're not

going to win me over to the Father James Martin ideas of the world. There's nothing about that that attracts me. It's like the celery and chocolate or something like that. I'm like, I don't need to resist the celery or something. Yeah. But it's like, I get, I get the desire. And I'm not accusing everyone in the SSPX of doing that. But certainly it seems like this fella in his house with a priest who's more.

trad than the SSPX. It's like, what is that? What do you think that is? I don't know. I mean, I've seen it a lot online. What you're describing is different. It's sort of real. It's embodied. Yeah. It's really happening. I've seen online. And I've experienced it with people I know and for a certain extent myself where you think something which seemed once or slightly untouchable relic from the past. And you actually think about it and you think actually that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. This idea for, you know, something I'm trying to think of an example that I can share publicly. Yeah. So an example of something that's been completely rehabilitated now, but was seen as very outdated 20 years ago, would be what's called typology.

So understanding the Old Testament to be entirely and utterly, properly interpreted through the lens of the new, all leading up to Jesus, the whole thing. Because we were taught. Then, we have to go back into the mindset of the time before Christ and read it like a second temple Jew would have read it. And people no longer do that. Praise God. It's wonderful. But when people first started saying, why can't we just read it like the father's did? It was really kind of edgy and spicy. And like, But isn't that really disrespectful? And aren't we losing our sense of history and not bearing in mind that this is a Hebrew Bible?

And then it was like, well, no, because this is the church tradition and this is how it's been received. And now that's become completely mainstream again. Oh, okay. So then people think, well, maybe if that's spicy, edgy thing is completely vindicated, and maybe this other spicy edgy thing

is completely vindicated. And they find something that, you know, P.O. Nono. Pires the Ninth said about the marital debt or something like that and say, well, actually, you know, this is okay. Yeah. And that seems unconscionable at first, but let's think about it.

maybe it's okay. Yeah. And then you do it and it's often quite playful online as well. You know, it's often like messing around and like, well, what about this one and that one? And then before you know it, you know, everyone's lost it. Yeah. And it's like the most extreme version wins. Like if you can hold the most extreme version on whatever that is. Yeah. The marital dead or no salvation outside the church or liturgy or what have you. You get to be the coolest guy. That's the purity spiraling that I've seen. It's kind of who's the biggest edge lord. Yeah. And that's right. Edge-lawing. Yeah. And again, I'm not a, accusing those who are TLM.

That's not what I'm saying. But certainly within those ranks, you see it. You see it. What's funny is you see people thinking of, as I did, and I guess do in some way, see the east as a safe harbor. You know, it's like, okay, I don't like the Trad parish because maybe people are, I don't know, maybe I don't like them. And maybe that's my fault, but I don't like them.

And maybe I don't like Minervis Auto Parish. And so it's like the east is like a safe haven't. But then what you do is you see purity spiraling there as well. So it's like you join the Ruthinians and then they're not hardcore enough so you find a Melkite church. And then you actually leave and become Orthodox. Yeah. You're only Greek Orthodox. And if you want to be really cool, you want to be Russian Orthodox.

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to say anything that's condemning our separated brethren, but for people that go down that road into it, looking for this thing they can't quite get, this sort of itch they can't quite scratch. I just see the Protestant Reformation Luther. Oh actually no Calvin. Oh no, Zvingli and then complete non-denominational Mennonites, Quakers. You know, once you start that splintering

once you walk away from Rome, it all starts to fragment. That's what happens because you're looking for something which is different to what's right in front of you. I want to read this quotation from the superior general of the society of Pope Pius. 10th. Yeah. He says in an order, this is a verbatim quote, in an ordinary parish, the faithful no longer find the necessary means to ensure their eternal salvation. This is what constitutes the state of necessity. So is it true, Dr. Phillips, that in an ordinary parish, the faithful no longer find the necessary means to ensure their eternal salvation. No. And if it's not true, that sounds like an unconscious, conscionable thing to throw out there. Yeah. I mean, I've seen it defended by some saying that he's saying that you can't guarantee.

That's different. But even then. It's still an incendiary thing to say and deeply damaging. And I think we need to be really, really careful here. The structures of canon law that we have, which dictate to us sacramental validity and so on and so forth, they are all completely solid. They are in place. the personal sanctity of the minister has no effect on the validity of the sacramental celebration.

If you go to a local Catholic parish church, I mean, you named an extreme situation where somebody's actually changing the words and changing the literature. That's different. That's different. But that's not happening. But I'm not talking, you know, I might not want to have to stomach acoustic guitars and a load of peace and justice. during the bidding prayers. I do not. But Christ is there. And maybe God wants me to sit there and stomach that sometimes,

where it doesn't actually vindicate me and make me feel that my understanding of the liturgy is wonderful. You know, maybe God wants me. That's what I try and do. When I find myself in a situation I don't really like liturgically, I think God's put me here, God wants me here. Yeah. There's a reason why I'm here.

And God is a lot bigger than my liturgical preferences. And as I say, there are many saints, people who've lived to the Novus Ordo, it's the ordinary, accessible, available means of salvation for the vast majority of the church, and to turn around and say that Christ is absent in some way, or Christ's victory over sin and death is not strong enough to be the victor over the current weaknesses of the church. It's your faith in Jesus really that week? The guy that can conquer the devil has been beaten by a few boomer priests. No, Jesus is bigger than all of this. Okay.

Christ's love is capacious. And we understand that. We understand that when his arms were stretched out on the cross, they could reach around the whole world and then envelope it in. But the church's capacity for truth is capacious as well. And the church can surmount the problems of history. It always has done. And there have been worse crises than this.

There's another thing I don't understand of some of these people. I do not believe the challenges of the church in the post-concilia era are massively exceptional. and the worst crisis the church has ever been through. Really? All right. Well, I mean, steal me in their argument, though, because I don't know. Like, sometimes when my reaction when I hear people say,

this isn't the worst the church has been through, to me that feels like a defensive coping attitude again. I'm like, well, I don't know, let's pause. Maybe it is. It seems pretty bad. Well, I'd say the Protestant Reformation was pretty awful. The collapse of Christendom, hundreds of thousands of people, bloodshed.

souls lost, entire nations lost to the church? The argument there would be something like, well, during the Protestant Reformation, whereas people were being peeled away from the bark of Peter, the church at least was saying, full-throatedly and reaffirming what the church had always taught. Is that not true? It is true if we take the aerial view of it with Trent and everything, but as it was actually going on and you're in the middle of it. Well, that's a good, I like that, aerial view, yeah.

Before Trent, you've got people like Luther saying, hang on a minute, I know the Greek. None of you cardinals know the Greek. I know the Greek. The word confession isn't there. The word penance isn't there. In fact, the Eucharist is hardly mentioned. We can understand all this very, very differently once you know the real languages. When all that's going on, and the printing press now, it's the digital technology, then it was the printing press. These leaflets are coming along, and we know the Greek, we know the Greek, we know the Hebrew. And everyone's in the middle of it thinking, wow, this isn't it, that's the real thing, that's the real thing.

It's because, you know, there's an explosion of ideas, interpretations and a questioning of authority and all the rest of it. I think it's in many ways it's quite a similar time and I and I Newman, St. John Henry Newman said with a revelation he had or a realization he had is looking at the ancient church. He said Rome was then where she is now. Okay. And that's how I feel, you know, just one of what he would have said today. Because I don't know. Rome was then where she is now. Yeah. Yeah. I do believe he would set up. I'm starting to see a lot of people online just kind of acknowledge that they started to go down the, let's say, SETA. Yeah. And then go, holy crap, what am I doing? You know, that leads to despair

really quickly. Did you have any, obviously, it's interesting, there was a few people who decided to go full on about Pope Francis being an anti-Pope, which always seemed like such an irresponsible at the very least thing to do, right? Because if you're, right, which you're not. But if you're right, you're in no place to make that pronouncement publicly. No. And if you're wrong, which you are, then you risk

leading souls out of the church. Yeah. But what was your take on that? I mean, I must have, I don't want to seem kind of flippant, but I find it all sort of slightly entertaining because it gets slightly silly. Okay. I can't say that I some years into the pontificate, I was genuinely troubled remembering that the day Benedict 16th resigned, lightning struck the Dome of St. Peter's.

Yeah. You know, that did play on my mind a bit. But generally speaking, I agree with you that it's irresponsible. It's also overestimating Francis, really. And what he represented and, you know, Peter Krosnyovsky has said, you know, we had a Jesuit of that generation. I mean, it was almost comic that there could have been nobody worse in some ways. And to have a Jesuit of that generation formed by Pedro Orupé. coming in and, you know, teaching what he did. So I just, you know, I just, I find it difficult. But on the sort of day-to-day, in living the faith day-to-day,

I don't really feel that it has that much bearing in terms of, you know, the individual's relationship to God with their local community, I suppose. I can't explain everything in the church. What? Confounding, frustrating, annoying, maddening. that the Catholic faith never ceases to unlock layer upon layer of wisdom and inspiration and love and joy and peace. What's your take on Leo? Eli, that's how I don't even know if I'll trust your opinion because I'm afraid you're going to be too charitable.

Charitable doesn't mean lying, of course. How about this? The most cynical take I can offer is he's definitely less. bad than Francis. That's what I would say. Yeah. I think he's a very thoughtful man. Yeah. And he seems serious, which I really appreciate. Yeah. And he's clearly very, you know, prayerful. And he's not saying, he's not shooting from the hip and all that kind of stuff. He's not unpredictable. Yeah. He's a safe pair of hands. And you get the sense that he knows that that's what the church needs right now. Yeah. Completely. And he's being very clear that he took the name Leo because of Leo the 13th. But I felt

originally, and he said this wasn't a factor, but when I first heard the name, I thought of Pope St. Leo the Great, who held the bark in unity during all the Christological controversies of the 5th century. And I thought this is the Pope of unity. And in fact, his motto is something around unity and truth, isn't it? Something like that. He said it had nothing to do with Leo the Great, but I still think it's a nice idea. Before we get off this topic, I'm going to circle back to the SSPX one more time. So my understanding is that they are planning on ordaining bishops without people approval, not just without people approval, but in direct opposition. And then that's going to happen in July.

If that goes forward, what do you think will happen? And how should we view the SSPX at that point? Well, I think we have to hold firm with what Rome are saying on it. I trust the judgment of Rome on this. I'm no canonist. I don't know the exact ins and outs of what would qualify schism and so on and that sort of thing. But it's very clear that this is a step too far. It's very clear that it's in open contravention of Rome and the Holy Father.

And it's an inflammatory thing to say that will not go down very well. But to me, it's just Protestantism. Yeah, that won't go down well. Because you don't mean Protestantism in the sense that they've abandoned major aspects of the faith, right? like the Holy Eucharist and... Well, I think abandoning an ecumenical council is quite serious. Yeah.

And what renders the Eucharist valid is the existing structures of canon law. They're involved in sacramental validity. So to simply turn around and say that you can go in contravention of canon law and maintain certain bits as valid, to me sounds like a very slippery slope at best. Yeah. Which is not to say I am not... You know, as I've always said on this, I am profoundly sympathetic.

And I do understand, I really do understand the problems with the church, but this is never the answer. You used to be Anglican. Yeah. I don't know how to pronounce the Sheila's name. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah, is it Malayli? Yeah, Mulali, I think. I don't know. All right.

Go on. What are your thoughts? This is awful, but I mean, it's a Protestant church. So, I mean, that's surprised. And what's your opinion on Pope Leo sort of acknowledging her in some capacity? Look at all these opportunities I'm giving you to be charitable. I know. Oh, God.

So it's part of his office as Pope to be charitable and generous of spirit towards other Christian believers. And I don't think there's anything of that exceptional that's happened there. I think it's more visually, more jarring because Well, she's pro-abortion, isn't she? Let's look it up. I'm pretty sure. She's been called such, yeah. Definitely pros same-sex marriage and so on.

There's a lot wrong, but... Yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think Seroom Raleigh is... A pro-choice Archbishop of Canterbury, yeah. Yeah. No, I think I'm not saying... Nothing I'm saying is in defence of Seroom Rulam Lave. I feel like you're defending her.

I am not defending Seroom Raleigh on any level whatsoever. I think it's a... actually slightly, I say this very cautiously because I think it just makes you look like a horrible kind of person, but there are real issues around the level of intellectual formation. I think with Serum Milali, I'm sure she's a really lovely person in many ways. I'm not. If you're for the slaughtering of unborn children, I'm not sure you can be called a lovely lady.

I think a witch would be closer. witches eat children man okay she's not i don't think she's a witch but i think witches would like her too much in light of that then what do you think pope leo could have done differently well i actually don't i'm not up to date on exactly what he did do yeah yeah fair enough i mean he just opened it he opened the door and was welcoming and tried to find points of commonality and agreement between someone who is nominally the representative

of a vast number of Christians. I mean, actually... Maybe he could have reiterated the invitation to join the Ordinaryate. Maybe there was a way that he didn't directly condemn her, but made a statement about the one true church and inviting all Anglicans to it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think her doing a blessing in a Vatican chapel and a cardinal bowing his head and crossing himself for a formal blessing. Yeah, that's horrible.

It's absurd. Okay, good. No, completely absurd. Yeah. But, you know, diplomatically, I might not particularly like it. I don't particularly like at all where the Church of England's gone, and I don't like Serole Lally at all. But within the diplomatic elements of the office, I think opening the door and exchanging

pleasantries and trying to find common ground for the sake of the greater good, you know, I'm glad I'm not the Pope. I don't have to do it. Yeah. No, it is an interesting question, hey, like to, to, to, kind of pontificate from the sidelines, as it were. It was interesting. I interviewed Russell Brand recently, and he was on P.S. Morgan show, and, you know,

he was kind of going off about the COVID lockdowns and jabs and things. Yeah. I think everyone, like, vaguely agrees. And then Piers said, all right, you're the Prime Minister of England. What would you have done? Yeah. And he didn't really give an answer there. You know, he said I would have listened to everybody.

Yeah. But again, it's really easy in retrospect to say what you would have done. I mean, it's a slightly facile example, but I've been a head of department at an academic institution. And I had to stomach lots of stuff I didn't really like. For the greater good of the institution or the department, I had to have conversations and smile and pose for photos of people I really didn't like. But it wouldn't be helpful for anyone, whether the head of department to make their personal feelings or their disagreements known in those, you know, and I just thought this is what comes with leadership, isn't it? Yeah. Lots of grinning and bearing it. Could you speak more to this? Because I feel like I'm onto something here. Just this idea of wasting energy.

Yeah. I'm sure you can talk about this much more eloquently and helpfully than I can, but I'm just, I'm just reaching at this idea right now where it's like how much time, like how many hours of YouTube videos did we just imbibe about things Pope Francis did and I don't know, maybe getting angry gives you a sense, it makes you feel something. So it feels productive. Yeah. Like you've, you know, so I feel productive because I'm angry and so something's happening and

I'm showing to the rest of the world how serious I am and how this can't. And all that might be good, might not be. But just how much energy is wasted when I'm, I have everything at my disposal to become a saint. And I'm not a saint. And it's my fault. And one of the reasons it's my fault is because I waste my time, pissing around online and choosing to get angry about everything. Yeah. Instead of praying my rosary and growing in virtue and repenting of sin and loving my family well.

Just this, what do you think about this idea of just the energy that is wasted? Well, I completely agree, and I'm as guilty of it as the next person, but I completely agree, and I always think of the book of Exodus. What's the first thing the Israelites did when they got on the other side of the Red Sea? Kicked off of Moses. What's that? Complained about the leadership. Oh, right, that too. You know, built the golden calf, but this is what people do. People get distracted.

What are we called to do? We're called to make the triune God, the person of Jesus, the center of our lives. And what in many ways is the easiest thing for us to forget and get distracted from doing is exactly that. Church politics has become another one of those distractions often. It can and should feed into the life of sanctity. We can and should understand our own pilgrimage towards sanctity as being sharing a journey of pilgrimage with the church as the people of God. But the reality is it's very easy for us in the midst of that to fall to one side and get distracted by something else.

And church politics often becomes that, which is why I made that reference to St. Francis because I think he looked inwardly to rebuild. That's where we rebuild. What's within my jurisdiction? What's within my capability? Where's the Holy Spirit calling me to function and act now? And I think there is this in the last five or ten years the, or the last five years, actually, the awareness of the dangers of smartphones.

As far, you know, the Jonathan Hyde book, The Anxious Generation, and, you know, people have suddenly realized that giving kids smartphones is a really bad idea. I've been telling that for decades. No one listened to me. And it, you know, it does a terrible thing to adolescence. Well, at some point, I think people are going to realize, well, they already are raising questions about, you know, short form video. And that very passive, receptive rabbit hole feature, algorithms and all the rest of it. You know, I'm, I've wasted hours of my life when I should have been pursuing sanctity, looking at all this stuff and getting angry and getting frustrated and all the rest of it. But what are we called to do as Catholics?

And we're called to proclaim the truth. Now, there are things within the church that we need to sort out. there's conversations we need to have and all the rest of it. But, you know, I share your unease, and I think it's just so easy to get distracted from what we're actually meant to be bothered about. I'm a theologian. It's amazing the number of theologians, sometimes myself included, who never talk about God. The word theology is talking about God.

This is a Peter Craves joke about a theologian dies and he's about to go to heaven and he's given the opportunity to go to heaven or a lecture on heaven and he chooses the lecture. Exactly. Exactly. But it's very easy for us to end up talking about something else. Yeah. Liturgy, which is the, you know, that's how God is active in the world. Literatured is extremely important, but church politics, earthly politics, it's always the easiest thing in the world to suddenly find we've forgotten to be talking about God.

Yeah. And that's what we should be talking about. Mm-hmm. You know, just like the Israelites cross the Red Sea, we're given baptism. The storehouses of heaven are opened unto us. The living water of grace pours down upon us. And what did we do? We say, I don't like the person giving it to me.

You know, I don't like his vestments. Mm-hmm. And I get annoyed by vestments as much as the next person. But don't look at the vestments. Look at the grace. Look at the sacrament. I remember I accidentally said this really arrogant thing once, and my wife called me out on it. We were living in Stubanville, Ohio, which is a really run downtown with, you know, you'll see meth addicts.

You might see a prostitute. Like, it's rough. Yeah. And I was just complaining about how exhausted. the town looked, especially in winter. We don't even have a lot of snow up there. So it's just gray and mud and then meth people. And I said to my wife, I'm like, I realized though, remember how I said, remember how St. Francis like kiss the leper? You know, like, these people, like, they're the lepers I can love. And she went, wait, you're St. Francis in this thing?

My point is, I often think that when I'll go to Sunday Mass and I'm sitting there judging everyone. Yeah. You know, not like intentional, not trying to. Yeah. But just angry. I'm just angry. I'm angry that this asshole's talking over here. Yeah.

We're at Mass. This Sheila has got short sort of way too short. And the music sucks. And the homily sounds like Hallmark wrote it. And I just sit there angry. And I just think. I don't know what I think. I mean, it's not that there aren't validityes to those complaints, but I don't know how mature

it is to allow other people to steal my peace. I'm not sure if that's the height of Christian manhood to let other people determine whether I'm going to be upset or not. I don't know. I just think kind of like what maybe you said to me off camera before about being at mass and just being like, all right. How do I maintain my peace and not? Yeah.

Because it's quite immature, isn't it, to just be always put out by everybody or I mean, I'm as guilty of it as the next person. For years, I was an altar server until having our first child, I would be in the sanctuary. And one of the reasons was that I didn't have to deal with the other people around me. Sounds great. So you were right in the middle of it, surrounded by smoke, and it was wonderful, you know. And it was when after we had our first child, I suddenly had to be able to deal with all this stuff, being around other people and their lack of reverence and all the rest of it.

And my own ability to get distracted and all the rest of it. But I could think to it, because I go, I'm in Florida. And so people dress pretty casually in Florida. Sure. You try to make it reverent, but people have got their flip-flops and everyone's talking. Yeah. I could go. I could say, isn't it beautiful that this church is like bursting at the seams right now?

Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? Yeah. Like, there could be 10 people here, but this is packed with people who thought that Holy Mass was worth coming to today. Yeah. I don't do that, but I could. No. And maybe I should occasionally.

And I've got, you know, I know a priest who is really switched on to the discourse. He would understand everything about the desirability of dressing for mass. but I have seen him giving the warmest smiles, handshakes and welcomes to people who are dressed in a way, which is a million miles from that because he knows that this is their first time when they're a visitor or, you know, they're not quite sure what the prose caller. He understands it, but he knows where they are. Yeah.

And where they're at. Yeah, I don't have to be the dad of this parish. I can just be a child. Yeah, it's one of the reasons I'm, you know, one of the many reasons I would have been a terrible priest is because I don't have the generosity of spirit. You know, I'd be annoyed with some of this stuff. We are called to evangelize to share the good news of Jesus Christ.

But that's hard to do if we're not really grounded in scripture ourselves. There's been times in my life where I would say I've been less than optimal at knowing the scriptures and drawing on the scriptures. But the St. Paul Center has actually really helped me with this, especially people like Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. Bergsman. That's why I love them. As a member, you get access to world-class teaching from scholars, like those that I mentioned, with over 50 lessons focused just on Jesus, his life, his parables and the historical reality of the

Gospels. It's not just learning facts, right? It's encountering Christ in scripture in a real way. And when we know Christ, our life changes. No Christ, share Christ, that's the mission. Start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paulcentre.com slash pints or just become an annual member right away. You'll love it. And when you do, they'll even send you a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which is an incredible resource for anyone serious about grolling in the faith. Again, just visit St. Paulcentor.com to start your 30-day free trial. What is the most legitimate, even though you don't fully agree, but what's the most legitimate accusation against the Second Vatican Council documents and why is it wrong? So I guess it's not

legitimate, but do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. What are you most sympathetic to? the argument against one of the documents or maybe what it said, and why do we not need to be upset about it? Well, I think with something like this, you often get to a position where actually something that's a great strength also brings very serious consequences which are challenging. Now, I think one of the great strengths of all the Vatican two documents is that they left the juridical mode of writing,

the paradigm whereby you say this exact fault is wrong, anathema sit. There were no anathemas pronounced. There was a narrative, inspiring, human, scriptural way of writing, which was meant to bring people with it into this change of paradigm. And I think that's important and good. And the fruit we have from that is the latter-day catechism, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful book. The challenge of that is we have the lack of clarity. A challenge of the modern catechism?

of the move to a narrative pastoral way of writing conciliate documents. I see. Yeah. We have lost that clarity and that's a problem. We don't have a very specific anathema of the juridical way of writing that you had at Vatican 1 and, you know, during the Baroque era. So it's legitimate to say that. This is a, you know, it's, you can love it and at the same time understand that there was some seriously challenging consequences have come from that in that various people doing different things can claim to be being obedient to the same document. because it doesn't give you specific anathemas.

And in an age of confusion, the one thing we'd really like, and rightly so, is clarity. Because people feel safe when they know what's going on. Yeah, I agree. But if you're vague about it, you're vague about where the edges are, then no one knows what's going on. And it actually creates a lot of turmoil. Yeah. That's what I see in people today. Like, just give me the straight goods, please.

Yeah. At the same time, though, do you think we, human history is a moment where it can bear that kind of clarity? Or we would just get massive splintering. Yeah. It's the authority in a position where it can actually be received as authoritative. Yeah, but at some point, if souls are being led away from the truth, it's incumbent upon you to say the hard thing, whether or not people will leave. Like, you know, like if Pope Leo, let's just take any example, would it come out tomorrow and condemn IVF full-throatedly, as I'm sure he does. And there's going to be a lot of Catholics

are going to be upset about that and may not be able to hear it and might leave. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't say that, right? I agree, yeah. And this is a consequence of the move towards a pastoral paradigm, which perhaps doesn't work as well when you're in a magisterial position of authority.

Pasturely, it probably would often not be prudent to do a tub-thumping fire and brimstone homily on IVF. Right. Because there'll be people there who are conceived by IVF. There'll be couples that didn't even know church teaching on it, all the rest of it. So pastoral, it's often necessary to be discreet.

Maybe you're right. Maybe there's too much emphasis on the pastoral to the point where it becomes and there's an expense of truth. I recorded it. So anyway, number one, is there a line or a paragraph in one of the documents that you think,

you understand why people think it somehow contradicts prior Catholic teaching in the document? I guess some of the stuff on freedom of religion in Dignitatis Humane. All right. So what would what would those who object to it say and what's your response? Well those who object to it would look back at, I think it's one of the in six schools of Gregory the seventh, where I think he actually says the idea that everybody is entitled to freedom of belief is, I think he uses the word insane. Cool.

And Dignitarist Humane makes the majority of it is vindicating the idea of freedom of religion, freedom of belief as a natural human right. My response to that would be to say an encyclical is at that authoritative level, requiring a human human use of charity, but not necessarily, it's not at the same level as a conciliar document. So there is a tension there. I would also say Gregory the 7th and all those who spoke against freedom of religion believed in natural law and believed in the integrity of conscience and believed in the ability of human reason, even in its fallen state. to comprehend God rightly through natural philosophy, which would suggest there's a legitimacy to other forms of belief, and that legitimacy can be respected. And I would also say within Dignitatis Humane,

it goes on in the second half of the document to talk about the freedom of the church from temporal authority, and it does arrogates a special status to the church as the organ of truth, which I would want to interpret charitably as suggesting that in an ideal society we wouldn't need freedom of religion because if you allow reason to function in genuine freedom it will always find its home in the church

because that's the fullness of truth. About a year ago I guess I recorded this video just like I thought let's just talk about what the good things that are going on. Because whenever you talk about the good things that are going on, you're quickly accused of being what, like a cockyed optimist.

You know, someone who's really not in touch with the reality of things. So I began by saying, all right, look, everything sucks. And it's worse. It's worse than both of us think it is. Yeah. And, you know, whatever you can say, maybe it's worse than that.

And so once you get that out of your system, can we also acknowledge, and I wrote just down a few things here, like, hello is the number one prayer app in the world. And it's Catholic. That's bananas. It's not some evangelical thing, which you might imagine. No, it's Catholic. EWTN is the largest religious network in the world. Bible in a year podcast with Father Mark Schmitz with Ascension Presents is the, I mean, that's the number one religion podcast. You'd think it would be some Protestant reading the Bible for a year.

It's a Catholic priest. Yeah. Can we, you know, truthfully is this excellent AI app. It's like chat GPT, went through OCIA and became the world's greatest evangelist. It's very good. Focus, the Fellowship of Catholic University students. Yeah. They've grown out of cities.

They can no longer hold an event in a city. They have to now disperse it into three cities because it's so ginormous. Not to mention the amount of conversions that are taking place. I just want to say to myself, really. You know what I mean? It's not to anyone else. It's like, all right, Matt. It's like me talking to my inner pessimist.

Like, all right, things suck. Good. Yeah, yeah. And yet, can we just say this is pretty great? And one of the things that sometimes bothers me that often, the main thing I think that bothers me about certain traditionalists is you get the sense that if I were to say to them, can we at least say this is good? They wouldn't want it. Yeah. They'd say, no, it's infected with modernism or something like that. And I'm like, okay, look, dude, I don't just throw me a freaking bone here. I had the sisters of life here recently. Yeah. And all of these gorgeous sisters spend their time helping women heal from abortion. help support women so they don't make the tragic choice of abortion. The fries are the renewal, sleeping on the floor in New York City and feeding the homeless.

Like, is that okay? Well, some things are good, but it's also, you're like, oh, for the love, that's, that's me talking to me. Yeah, yeah. And I need to hear it too, you know, I need to hear that too. And it's very easy for these things to become, the technical word, to be a meta-narrative. Everything makes sense in light of this. So when you're sitting at mass and you're like, oh, that's happened because it's an oversaw. You know, that didn't happen before 60, you know, that becomes the narrative for everything and it takes everything over.

Yeah, like the lens through which you make sense of. And my, my life as a Catholic, if you, I know the global picture and the decline of religious practice and all the rest of it and all the problems we've spoken about, but the reality is, when I started studying theology, the theologians we were studying were people who were asking how anybody could have belief in 20 or 30 years time. The time of religion is over. Huh? It's going to be complete secularization. How's the church possibly going to survive in this? age without religion. I mean, that was, this would be in the late 90s.

Yeah, and then 20 years ago, we had the new atheism. That may have been the death nail. Yeah, yeah, and that was really big in the noughties. Where are they? Exactly. The only ones left are the kind of moderate, sensible ones who aren't blowhards. Exactly. And I was, you know, one of these obscure young people that was quite into it. Now I feel ancient in many parishes.

I've seen churches get more and more popular. I've seen more and more young people come in. I've seen more and more conversions. There's now this whole multimedia engine. You know, I'm actually having a really, really great time being a Catholic. Yeah. In the year of our Lord, 2026. It's almost like you need permission.

Like, you can be joyful. Yeah. You can just drop your shoulders, drop this defensive attitude. Yeah. Get off social media. Yeah. And just love your little shitty parish. Like, you're allowed to do that.

Yeah. You know, with the bad architecture, but the good man who's the holy priest, is doing his best, you're allowed to do that. I wonder if I sometimes have this idea that we've abandoned the world and we all now live online, which is my explanation for why the real world sucks so much and why service is so bad. Wherever you go, it feels like it's terrible. But my joke, but I don't know it's too far from the truth, is we don't live there anymore. Like, we've all abandoned the world.

We all now live here. We live in the internet. We don't live there. Yeah. That's why it sucks. No, it's taken care of it. We don't need to take care of it because we live here. And I sometimes wonder, like, when you live online in the religious sphere, you're getting

the vibes of religion that give you a sense of religiosity and spirituality, like the long beards and the Gregorian chant and the Knights Templar. And like you have these vibes. Yeah. But then you go to like, you know, St. John's up the road and it's like you don't get it there. And so you get angry and you kind of retreat back into the quote unquote real world, which is just the matrix. Yeah, completely. And all Gnostic groups, all heretics, the reformation, all the rest of it were people that said, our little niche, our little group, we're the in crowd, we've got the proper interpretation, we'll tell you where it went wrong.

We know the secret language. We know the truth. Everyone else is wrong. Join our little group. and you'll be the really, really holy ones away from those normies down the road. Yeah. Why is that so appealing?

I've asked this earlier, but I still, why is that so appealing? I don't know. I mean, I think a lot of people are, well, sometimes I think this is a slightly outrageous thought, but I'm going to share it anyway. Sometimes I just think a vast number of these people

should just have become priests or religious. And they didn't. So all of that energy, because the era we're living, fewer people become priests and religious. So they become this sort of clericalized layperson and becomes an expert in kind of online factions and stuff like that. And a lot of them probably should have just taken vows of obedience. It's a slightly outrageous thing to think.

No, I don't know. I mean, a priest said to me once, I mean, he said, you know, just all these people were claiming to know all this kind of stuff. And they'd looked into everything and they were sort of disagreeing with them. And he just said, well, you know, because people don't become priests anymore. You've all become experts and everything. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've got good and holy priest back in Florida. He's his father Keegan parish, his holy family, beautiful parish.

He's such a good man, you know. And it's like, it's so easy to criticize. Like, why are they, you know, doing this or that? And it's, you got no idea what it's like on the ground. Like, suppose you go to a random parish up the road here in Nashville, right? And suppose there's like an altar girl, you know? Yeah. And you go, why are you bloody doing that?

Okay. First of all, you have no idea what's going on. Maybe the priest just inherited this parish. Maybe it would be, it would cause more harm than good to, like, kick her out for whatever reason. And so maybe, maybe you don't know this, but maybe the priest is holding, like, private sessions where people are only privately asked to be altar boys from now on. So he can, you know, like this pastoral thing, it's like, we're not sensitive to that as bystanders, as onlookers who are just demanding that our churches make us feel a certain way or be a certain way. Definitely, yeah. And this is legal, I mean, legalism in its proper sense is to mistake the right practice for being intrinsically salvific in some way.

So it's to say if things are not being done exactly rightly and perfectly and exactly the right way, then that's forfeiting the means of salvation in some way. And, you know, you might have an altar girl wearing bright pink, shiny basketball boots. But what's on the altar? Yeah. You know, of course it annoys me, but what's on the altar? Yeah. Don't look at the basketball boots.

Look at the altar. Yeah, it's funny. I'm not really good at, like, getting annoyed and then correcting myself. I think that's what we've got to do more of. I was sitting down for breakfast yesterday, and this woman was at a hotel, a couple of seats over. You know how people do this? They play stuff on their phones out loud. Yeah, yeah.

I think they should be killed. I think we should actually, not just excommunicate them, but like slaughter them and right there. I think that's a hermenegic of charity. Maybe give it one warning, but then you're dead. We cut you off. Head off. All right. That went sideways real quickly.

I apologize. I don't mean any of that. But it's like how many times do we correct ourselves for feeling irritated instead of correcting, we just correct the world, walk about, judging everybody except ourselves? Yeah. I mean, I'd like, you know, I do. it's that slightly Franciscan thing, isn't it? There's people talking distractedly at mass during the elevation.

Hmm. Do you think of all the times that you've turned your back on the Lord? Exactly. All the times you felt that text is more important than the host in the monstrands on the altar. You know, how disrespectful the crowd's word of our blessed Lord is he hung on the cross. Exactly.

And yet that took nothing away from the sacrifice he was making. Exactly. I don't, you know, I don't manage it. I'm not trying to pretend that I do this, but I do, I occasionally read things and spiritual reading and stuff, where I think that would have been the right response to those people that were annoying me. Yeah. Even if I didn't manage it myself.

Where do we go from here? I mean, as Catholics, like what happens next? Yeah. What should we do? You know, like maybe we could let the hierarchy learn from Pope Francis, and maybe we could learn from the excesses that we committed. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Like, what can we learn? What can you a theologian, me just a knuckleheaded podcaster, and everyone else watching, many of whom have YouTube channels, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and all sorts of like, what can we learn? Maybe we've already said this. I don't know. I just think we need to be better listeners and less good talkers. And, yeah, I think things are moving in the right direction as well. I mean, you must have seen all those statistics showing where the priests are at now.

I mean, I teach seminarians. Well, there's been various surveys out there as showing that the general level of orthodoxy, conservatism, stroke traditionalism among priests, is going up and up and up and up. So I remember when I was 30, which is longer ago than I'd care to remember, but I remember when I was 30,

realizing that there were no liberals my age or younger. They'd all gone. Disappeared. Completely gone. Everyone 30 and under was Orthodox. compared to the generation above them. Yeah. That has continued.

And they're coming through. And the younger bishops we have where I live clearly formed in the JP2, Benedict, the 16th era. You can see that's coming through now. Yeah. So I think things can move in the right direction is why we have to be really careful about those who will take this, this moment of disruption and this generation which are in charge at the moment and turn around and want to just forsake the entire notion of Catholicity completely. That's why it's so dangerous. Because it will change. The times are moving in the right direction.

And actually, I was thinking at mass this morning, actually, a lot of what was going on, I knew this was coming up. A lot of what I saw at the mass was stuff which you didn't see 10 years ago. I've been thinking about this. It's like if you use an analogy and say, after the council, a wound was inflicted to the church. Yeah. And you think of the church as a body. It's like the body feels like it's healing.

Yeah. Just an objective. of how things are today. Yeah. Women want to veil. They're not being told to. They want to. Yeah.

Men and women are kneeling for the Eucharist, even when they're chided for it. They want to do that. You know, even Franciscan University of Stubenville, which I think is an excellent university, all things considered. It's, you know, you can't hold the, even the trads, you can't hold the trads back there. And, you know, I'm using trad in the sense that you and I would be trad. We wouldn't be as trad as people would like us to be. But like they're kneeling. They're praying.

and the holy rosary. Like, the rosary was something I never saw growing up. Yeah. No one prayed the rosary. I was never taught about the rosary. I never saw priests or nuns talk about it. Of course, as I got older, maybe they were doing it, and I just wasn't aware of it, eh? But you just started to see this interest, and, like, you never saw incense.

Yeah. In the night that I didn't, you know? So it's almost like this wound is, uh, is, you're seeing it heal. I completely agree. And that's how I feel, which is why I find it really strange that people are turning around and saying, it's the Novos Ordo. The Novosolto is intrinsically deficient, intrinsically evil,

and it's a problem. Because you see the Novasordo improving massively and becoming reverent, and you think there might come a time when we get proper rubrics and people can do it in that way that I was formed

within it happening reverently. Seems a really strange time now, with all this going on as you've just articulated, now to turn around and say the whole post-conciled church is doomed. Yeah.

It's odd. The timing is very odd. To be fair, is a spectrum, right? And there are some people who are just angry blowhards. And then there are actually like really intelligent church historians who are writing really serious books and why we should return to the traditional Latin Mass. So I wouldn't want to kind of personally, I wouldn't want to put them in the same bucket. Sure. But yeah, I mean, I agree with you. Yeah. And I think we should return. I mean, I think that the traditional Latin Mass should be available without restriction. I think if it were, it would. Slowly. Yeah. It might slowly become the predominant mass in the United States if it was not, if the boot would be lifted off the throat. Maybe I'm wrong.

I could be completely wrong about that. I mean, the two rights will have to come back together at some point. The two what? The two rights will have to come. Well, the two forms of the one right. That's right. We'll have to come back together at some point. We can't carry on with two like this.

That was never. Oh, I see. The intention. And that's what Samoan Pontificum opened the door to. Yeah. That door has been shut temporarily, I hope and pray. Yeah. But the point is that the two should eventually become one somehow.

You know, I wonder if, after the council, if the, if sacrosanctum concilion was actually implemented, like you said earlier, I'm sure there would be academics who would be upset about the changes this far in. But I really think most people wouldn't care. Maybe they should care, right? Maybe the changes were terrible. But as you say, I've been to a Nova Sordo, which was in Latin, at Orientum. And it doesn't say much that I couldn't tell the difference because I'm not versed in these things. I wasn't raised with the Latinas, I don't know. But I just think there wouldn't be this backlash.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, in my parish, they do the old right on a Saturday morning. And I wasn't able to go to one of my kids to sport on a Saturday morning. So I hadn't been able to go for ages. And I went, and I thought it would just be full of, you know, loads of trads that don't normally come to the parish. I'd never seen before, you know, great big families and mantillas everywhere. It was all the usual parishioners. Oh, yeah.

That would go to daily mass anyway. Yeah. And I said to the priest after him, I said, it's all the regulars are here. And he says, yeah, it's the way it should be. Rather than a different thing, a different cult kind of thing, you know, a group coming together for this special thing. It was the same for everyone. I don't think for the average person in the pews really needs to worry too much about what the liturgical experts are trying to do and tinker around with the mass, these things grow organically.

You know, they grow naturally. This is the great travesty we're in when it comes to liturgy is that organic natural development has stalled. So you've got the old right can now, could never change. Imagine if anyone tried to change anything in it now. Everybody would, the whole thing would just splinter and. Yeah, and I think for reason, though, right? Like the reason is it's because of what they did do to it, that we're on, I imagine traditionalists are on guard. Yeah.

hyper-vigilant against any... Yeah. But there is a view, you know, held by people who are, I would say, completely sound and orthodox, that the error actually goes right back to Trent. With the Council of Trent, Pius V intervened over a degree of liturgical diversity, and it was a top-down thing that created this illusion that a Pope can control the liturgy. And as Benedict XVI said, or implied, in some one pontifacum, the liturgy is lord over the Pope, not the Pope Lord over the liturgy.

That's why that document was so important because he left the rights as they are and liberated them so God can do what God needs to do to bring unity back to the church. And there will have to be liturgical unity at some point. It might be at the Eschaton and I'm sure at the marriage feast of the lamb

and our Lord will turn. There'll be someone that doesn't like the chasurable or something, but you know, it will have to come back together. It can't carry on having the Latin right in different usages. Cardinal John Henry Newman is someone you've studied. Why should people be interested in him? I mean, I know there's a lot of reasons, but for those who had just heard the name but aren't too familiar?

Yeah, I mean, St. John Henry Newman is just a massive inspirational figure. I mean, partly to me as an English Catholic. Was he part of the reason you converted from Anglicanism? He wasn't really. I was aware of him, but I only really started to appreciate him after I'd converted. I understood him a lot better. As an Anglican he always had this slight air of suspicion as a sort of traitor because he'd converted. But he helped me understand really how to be English and Catholic insofar as the English national culture is so deeply formed by the Reformation.

And it's so Protestant and quite profoundly anti-Catholic. And at the time... And what sense is it profoundly anti-Catholic? Through sort of deifying private judgment as our capacity. to be, I mean, it's slightly difficult to imagine now with the whole freedom of speech thing, but the idea that you can be a freeborn Englishman, use your own judgment, you can decide what's best for you. A strong suspicion of authority, overweening authority, a strong suspicion in the English national

culture, a certain sense of reserve and discretion, a dislike of intense emotionalism, and you've got all the pathos of Baroque Catholicism and, you know. That's a Protestant thing, you think? It's an English thing. It's English, the Church of England, right? But was it born out of Protestantism? Is that what you're trying to say? Because I do find that interesting with the English being much more reserved.

Yeah, so well, I think the Church of England bears the distinct form of Protestantism that is Anglicanism has a strong sense of reserve and discretion towards overweening emotionism, wearing a heart on your sleeve. It's very much an Anglican thing, I suppose, rather than intrinsically Protestant. Yeah. But it would be associated with being sort of related to authority. Those that were very anti-Catholic in the 19th century would say what Newman and others are doing. They're whipping people up into this emotional frenzy. Oh, okay.

and getting them to fast and to be celibate because then you're weak and you're impressionable and they can have authority over you. So the two... It'd be funny to look... It'd be funny if you compared what an English emotional frenzy would look like compared to certain places in America.

Have you quite reserved? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would like the English emotional frenzy. It looked very much like this. Yeah, you're like, I'm going off right now. I'm undoing it right now, yeah. So, yeah, Newman sort of... When Newman converted, the idea of someone converting from Anglicanism to Rome was almost unheard of.

An incredibly controversial thing to do. I mean, it was Gladstone, became Prime Minister. He said when he found out about it, he staggered around the room like a drunken man and fell over. And after Newman converted, there was a massive wave of converts. The biggest wave ever of Anglicanism to Rome. So bigger than 92 when the Anglican started the ordaining wood. There was a massive wave. Bigger than the ordinary act, those five years after Newman converted, there was an epidemic

and conversion to, so the point that it became part of our culture for people to convert in that way. And we've got Newman to owe for that. But he also did really important work, I think, in doctrinal development. When I was talking about the church being universal over time, not just space, at the bottom of that, I've got Newman's understanding of doctrinal development. So let's talk about doctrinal development, because I think a lot of Protestants hear that phrase and they worry that it's just the Catholic Church's way of instituting whatever it wants

to institute. In other words, I don't know, maybe in the year 3000 will decide that St. Joseph was assumed into heaven and someone will say, we don't have any relics of him or something like that. So isn't it rather dangerous doctrinal development? What is it anyway and why should we be okay with it? Well, I would say to someone in that position as a Protestant, do you believe in the Doctrine of the Trinity. Yep. That was formulated in 325 and 381, Nicaea and Constantinople.

So it's formulated in the 4th century. So it took, you know, 350 years to define the doctrine of the Trinity. Nearly all Protestants believe in it. I had a very good friend, Southern Baptist. He said the slogan of his church was no creed but the Bible. I said, do you believe in the doctrine of the Trinity? He said, yes.

I said, go figure. So between the time of the New Testament being written, and the doctrine of the Trinity being codified in the fourth century is a process of unfolding, greater conceptual clarification, challenging heretical ideas that come up. Maybe Christ isn't fully divine, that kind of thing. So he shares a divine nature, so the father has a divine nature. Well, then what does the spirit do? People experience the spirit, the way the spirit transforms people's lives.

The religious orders are founded, or the religious life, sorry, is founded by St. Basil and his book on the Holy Spirit. This all happens at that time. And people realize this thing, this divine nature must be shared by Father's Son and Holy Spirit. And they realize there are three persons in one nature, and they realize this is the best and indeed the only way to interpret what the New Testament's about. The doctrine isn't in the New Testament. Right. And that's what I was going to say. I bet the Protestant would say, I only believe it because it's in the Bible.

Yeah. It's like you, I don't believe you that you would have come to the acceptance of the Trinity unless it went for the tradition that you were given in your Protestant upbringing. The triune God is in the Bible, but the doctrine, three persons in one nature, that's not there. That's the only way to make sense of the Bible with conceptual consistency. That's what the doctrine is, the proper outworking of it, but it takes centuries to be outworked into full conceptual clarity. That's what doctrinal development is. It's an unfolding of the Christ who is the same yesterday, today, today and tomorrow, unfolding in history through a process of ongoing explication and more detailed understanding of all the different angles of the different things happening in the life of the church and God's revelation in Christ. So the revelation remains unchanged.

It remains definitive. It cannot be surpassed. Okay. But it takes centuries and centuries for people to appreciate that the Virgin Mary must have been conceived without the stain of original sin, which is defined in 1851 or something. Right. And isn't it important to say that prior to 325, the church believed that Christ was divine? Yes. And prior to Pope Pius the 9th, right?

The church believed that Mary was immaculate. Yeah. But it's so that's important to point out otherwise people think that the we didn't know any of these things and exactly exactly and that's often misunderstood about development So it's it's it's it's what's implied in what is known So from very early on people celebrated the birthday of Mary September the 8th traditionally Now According to the tradition of the church you do not celebrate the birthday of a saint because they are not yet redeemed by baptism

You celebrate the birthday on the Baptist because he met Christ in the womb and accepted Christ and danced for joy in the womb. So, was Mary born, was she born a sinner destined for hell? Interesting. So there's this ancient folk tradition of celebrating her birthday. It takes centuries to work out,

well, maybe she was not born in sin. And actually, how does this all work out? And there's lots of disagreement, and we get there in the end. So doctrinal development is an unfolding, an explication of that one truth, which is all there in Nucci. So Newman says in the essay on development

of Catholic doctrine, he compares, it's a nice metaphor, he compares an acorn to an, oak tree. He says, if you'd never seen the oak tree and he'd only seen the acorn, you say to a child, you would describe what an oak tree is like. The child would never believe you that the oak tree could come from the acorn. Yep. That the acorn can only end as the oak tree. The oak tree is the catechism. The acorn is the New Testament. They might not look alike, but when you see how they intertwine with each other, that's the destination of it. So it's a process of unfolding

explication, greater conceptual clarification, and in no way suggestive of change or novelty in the superficial sense. I wanted to point out that unless I'm misunderstanding, I think St. Augustine said, now with the exception of the Holy Virgin Mary in regard to whom, out of respect for the Lord, I do not propose to have a single question raised on the subject of sin. You're familiar with this text? Yeah. The point isn't that the church fathers are infallible, but the point is just to say that again, this isn't, it wasn't simply about, as you said, just the birthday. Like, there's a lot going on. I just say that for those who are, like, skeptical that that's not enough to convince them.

And when I'm trying to convince you right now, it's just to say that I had Dr. Bergsmere here recently. I liked the way he put it. He talked about turning the dial and getting more and more resolution. Yeah. Isn't that good? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So it's like fuzzy. Like, you know what that thing is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over the process. Especially through disagreements, say, like. Yeah. when something's called into question. Yeah.

Like one day if this is the example Bergsma gave, if one day in the future someone proposes whether or not we should baptize robots, they might end up having an infallible statement about something. Yeah. It wasn't because it took the church 3,000 years to know whether or not we should or shouldn't do whatever. I think that's exactly right. And Pope Leo has said he'll be doing stuff on digital technology, his encyclical, probably be related to AI in some way.

This is the road that's going. You know, that's what we need. They're the answers we need. and doctrinal development is really important because it shows the church. Responding, I don't mean dialoguing or accommodating the world. I mean responding to the world and in a lively relationship with the world, able to correct and transmute stuff coming from the world. So with that formal definition of the doctrine of the Trinity,

elements of Greco-Roman philosophy came into the Nicene Creed, consubstantiality, Usiah, so on and so forth. Newman describes this as a process of assimilation through which the church, knowing that there is one dogmatic truth is able to assimilate elements of truth from the world outside the church, transmute them, correct them, and bring them under the rule of what he calls a new sovereign who is Christ himself. Now this must happen with the modern age in some way.

There might be more correction, more transmutation than there was in the ancient world, but don't forget lots of these philosophies that influenced early doctrine were coming from the pagan world. I mean, Augustine says some of these ideas, if we weren't using them in Christianity, they'd only be good for the worship of demons. And this will happen in the modern age too. This connects with what we're talking about.

So doctrinal development is an ongoing organic process. And elements of the contemporary world will have to be corrected, transmuted, and assimilated into the development of doctrine. And we'll end up with something like an infallible teaching on the baptizing of robots, which I hope doesn't happen. As we wrap up, I don't know. Do you write online somewhere? Where can people find you or learn more about the stuff you're doing?

Well, I do a few pieces for a magazine in England called The Critic. I comment on a few things to do with religion in there from time to time. I've got a book coming out next year, God willing, with Emmaus academics, I'll be published over here in the States, called Modern Thought Baptised. And what's the point of the book? It's a study of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger. Oh, wonderful. From his period as an academic. Let me know when it comes out.

I'd love to get it and promote it. Yeah, great. Yeah. That should be coming out next year. Modern Thought baptized, Joseph Ratzinger, and a history of ideas. lots of stuff related to what we talked about today. Yeah. And you teach where? I teach at St Mary's University, Twickenham, Southwest London.

So if you're ever in London, anyone out there, feel free to pop down to Twickenham and argue about the Novice Auto with me. Yes. Well, good luck. Thanks for being on the show. Pleasure. Thank you.