Pints With Aquinas - Tyranny and the Post-Christian West (Rod Dreher) | Ep. 532

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Rod Dreher is a bestselling author and cultural critic known for his incisive commentary on faith, politics, and modern society. His landmark books The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies have shaped conversations on Christian resilience in an age of decline, while his newest work, Living in Wonder, turns inward, exploring beauty, suffering, and the search for meaning. Dreher’s voice is unapologetically countercultural, drawing on Orthodox Christianity and a deep skepticism of modern ideological conformity. 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early, score a free PWA beer stein, and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 Seven Weeks Coffee – Use promo code MATT for up to 25% of your first subscription order + claim your free gift: https://sevenweekscoffee.com/matt 👉  Exodus 90 – Join Exodus 90 on August 15 for St. Michael's Lent: https://exodus90.com/matt 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: 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 – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a ground-breaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store. Things are more or less over for us Christians in terms of living in a Christianised society. But if we are going to maintain our authentic Christian faith under these conditions, then we have to change. This is really happening now. Rod Dreher is a provocative conservative writer and cultural critic known for his piercing commentary on the post-Christian West. Author of landmark books like The Benedict Option, Live Not by Lies, and Living in Wonder. Dreher

champions a countercultural Christianity that resists secularism with rootedness, tradition, and moral clarity. I secularism with rootedness, tradition, and moral clarity. I think it's no accident, Matt, that the first generation that really dealt with transgenderism was the first generation who were raised on the internet. Some conservatives are like, well, Trump's in power, wokeness is over. Oh, no, it's not. I was about to ask you that.

What's the state of wokeness? The whole migration issue in Islam is so massive in Europe in ways that Americans just don't hear about occultism. The clergy has to be ready for that, and they're not. Everywhere I go now, you're hearing people start to buzz saying civil war is coming. When you're facing something like totalitarianism, the most important quality is courage. If enough people see what you're doing,

then eventually the system will fall. Thank you so much for watching Pines with Aquinas. Before we get into the interview, I'd like to ask you to please consider subscribing. Over 58% of people who watch this show regularly are still not subscribed, so please do it. It's a quick, free, easy way to support the channel. We really appreciate it Rod Dreher, thank you very much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure I've been wanting to come here for years and you finally invited me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you didn't come from Hungary No, I came from well I did come to the US from Hungary

But I'm in the US on a promotional tour for a documentary that Angel Studios has out about my book, Live Not By Lies. So I've been popping around here, there, and everywhere, and I went to visit Father Dwight Longinecker's great parish. I went to the Rosary in Greenville, South Carolina. And I talked to them about the Benedict option. I said, you guys are doing it. You don't need to hear anything from me.

All you need to hear from me is encouragement that this is the kind of place that all Christians need, a parish that is vigorously orthodox but not angry about it, that celebrates the joy of the faith in community, has a classical Christian school attached to it. It is a real lighthouse, that parish. Yeah. Yeah. Father Dwight's a good man. And South Carolina, Greenville, that's a great place to be.

There's some excellent parishes there. OK, how sick are you of talking about the Benedict option? Oh, not sick at all, Matt. The book came out in the US in 2017. It was translated into 11 languages. And I was just in France earlier this year promoting the French edition of my latest book, Living in Wonder.

And it was very cool to meet Catholics who would say, oh, you know, your book, it was called Le Paris Benedictin, the Benedictine Bet in France. It was really influential among French Catholics. And that was a delight to hear, but I understood the more I talked to them is that if you're younger and Catholic, you understand how serious the situation there is in terms of secularism,

in terms of rising Islam, the different challenges, and you want to figure out how can we live a more authentic Catholic Christian life under these conditions. So it was a delight to hear that. And it turns out my best-selling book by far was Live Not By Lies, which came out afterward. Oh yeah, it sold 210,000 copies domestically. Benedict Option has sold half of that, but the Benedict Option seems to have been far more influential. But I have to tell you, Matt, one thing that I get so sick of doing is having to say, no, I'm not saying we have to head for the hills.

This is what I was gonna say, all right? I've been defending this book for years now. Every single person who says to me, yeah, it's not like, obviously it's not like the Benedict option where we close ourselves off, and I always say, have you read the book? And they always say, well, no. I'm like, I know, I've read the book.

He explicitly says not to do this. I wish this myth would be expelled, but... Oh, it's crazy. But people, you know, I think that they have to create this straw man, because what I say in the book is like, look, things are more or less over for us Christians in terms of living in a Christianized society. There's always hope, and we hope to re-Christianize society. But if we are going to maintain our authentic Christian faith under these conditions, then

we have to change. I mean, Archbishop Georg Gainsfein, the private secretary of Benedict XVI, gave a talk I was present for in Italy and Rome in 2018 in which he endorsed the Benedict option He said this is what we need my Italian journalist friends came up to me afterwards and said if Gains find said that you can be sure that Benedict the 16th approved every word I was like because Benedict the 16th. I call him the second Benedict of the Benedict option He's a real hero of mine. And so that meant a lot to me. But anyway, it's simply saying that we can't escape the world. There's no escape for us.

But if we're going to live in the world as faithful Christians, then we have to conduct our lives and our families and our parishes and our communities in a countercultural way, an affirmatively countercultural way. That's what the book says. But I think a lot of people create the straw man because they're desperately afraid of facing the reality of what it means to be a faithful Christian in our society today. And they also don't wanna have to do something about it.

So if they can say, Drear is just coming up with this crazy head for the hills thing, then they can dismiss it and feel good about where they are. But they're just whistling past the graveyard, if you ask me. Yeah, I think most people just haven't read it.

And so you hear Benedict option. If you hadn't read the book, I could see how people would draw the conclusion that, oh, he's telling us that we need to somehow isolate ourselves within something like a monastery and ignore the world. But yeah, read the book first. Were you shocked at how well that did? I remember I was with my friends in Houston and they had it and first of all,

you should judge a book by its cover or sometimes it's right to. That was such a beautiful book. More so than yourself. So yeah, so well put together. So my wife and I went out that very day and we bought it and read it and loved it. But yeah, I mean, was that your first big selling book? Yeah, yeah, I had written several books before. My first book was called Crunchy Cons, came out in 2006

about American conservatives who might look on the surface like liberals because we care about the things liberals care about, you know, the natural world, old houses, natural food, etc., but not because we're secretly liberal, but because of the way we see the world. And basically, you know, I was Catholic then, and it was a book about being a fully Catholic conservative and letting our faith guide us rather than our secular politics. That was my first book, came out in 2006, and it caused a little bit of a splash. And then I wrote a book about my late sister who died of cancer.

It's called The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming, and it was about how I discovered the value of small-town life through her life and the way she died and the way everyone in my hometown, our hometown, a town called St. Francisville, Louisiana, 2,000 people, about how they surrounded her and carried her and her husband and kids and my parents through this crisis. I was living in Philadelphia at the time and it really changed my view of the small town from where I came. So we relocated there, but once we got there, and this is in Little Way, it's a tribute to the virtues of small town life, we got there and found out that my family had this sort of hidden resentment at me for having moved away in the first place, and

so it wasn't the return of the prodigal son that I had hoped. The book that came after that is called How Dante Can Save Your Life, and it's about how once I learned the truth about how my family felt about me and my wife and kids, I fell into a deep spiritual and emotional and physical crisis from all the anxiety of the shock of all this. I developed chronic mononucleosis. I had mono for three years. And the Lord sent me Dante, Allegheri, the Divine Comedy of all things. And I read that so deeply and prayerfully, and it led me on a journey, an interior journey of repentance that helped me to get better. And I was able to reconcile with my dad just before he died.

It was a beautiful thing. Then after that came the Benedict option, and live not by lies, and now the new one, living in wonder. That's my bibliography. That's beautiful. Can we spend some time talking about your family's rejection of you and how that led to this chronic illness? Because I think that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is all in the book. I'm not telling secrets. And in fact, my family read the manuscript before I sent it in because I told the truth,

but I didn't want them to think I was going behind their back. And my father, when he read it, he was the main villain, is too strong a word, but he was the main antagonist. And he said when he finished, I was so nervous, he said, you told it like it was. Well what happened was this I um it was just me and my sister growing up in this small southern town in the 70s. My sister was the son my father always wanted frankly she loved hunting she loved fishing she loved living in the country and all the things. Me I was a bookworm

I always wanted had my head in a book. I didn't have a soft heart for animals, all of the things. I just wanted to go to the city. And so I had a bit of a difficult childhood that way, but my parents were very loving, especially my father. At the same time, I always knew he was disappointed in me. And I wanted it because I wasn't him. In fact, my name, people call me Rod, but that's my initials Ray Oliver drear jr. Named after him

So I went away after college moved off to the East Coast Washington, New York Miami and on and on pursuing a journalism career my sister two years younger She stayed behind married her high school sweetheart. She came back from college, she taught in the local school, she and her husband built a house in the country right across the street from my mom and dad. She raised kids, I raised kids. I married and we started our family in New York City. That was that. And then Ruthie, my sister Ruthie was diagnosed on Mardi Gras day of 2010 with stage 4 lung cancer. She had never smoked a day in her life. By the time they found it, it was too late for her. And she lived for 19 months. And what I did, because my

family was really close, you know, I talked to my parents and to her every day and I would go down as often as I could. And I had always seen our small town as a place that was very confining, that would hold me back, because I was a weirdo there, let's be honest. Not liking hunting and sports and all that. But when I went back, one of the first times I went back after her diagnosis,

they held a big town festival for her to raise money for her. Now she had good insurance, but they did it because they wanted to show how much she meant to them. She had taught most of their kids. And I was just in tears seeing the love of these people for her. And I realized at that moment, at that festival, that the same thing, the same structures and attitudes that held me down and held me back when I was younger, they were the same things that were holding my family, my sister's family together in this crisis. They were not different things, they were the same

thing, so it was two sides of the same coin. She finally died in her husband's arms one September and we were down at the funeral, my then-wife, we'll get to that, and I with the kids. And we saw the line of people that stretched down and around the block in this tiny town. There were about 1,500 people there to pay their respects to my sister in a town of 2,000. And people would come up to me in the line, because I was part of the family, and younger people, they would say, sir, you don't know me, but she was my teacher. Here's what she did for me.

And I had no idea. I knew my sister was a good person and that she cared especially about her students. But I saw this hidden life, this modest life she had, as having had just incredible effects on the lives of the kids she taught. So we decided, my wife and I, to move from Philadelphia down there because we wanted to help my family in their struggle after her death, but also we wanted our kids to have a part of that, have the roots

of living in a town. My family had been there five generations. And I ended up getting a contract to write a book about it, and I called it The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming, because even though she was a Methodist, she reminded me of the little flower, Therese of Lejeune, in this quiet, humble life she lived that had so much effect. I have to tell you, the thing that got me the book contract, I was writing about all this documenting her struggle with cancer on my blog at the American Conservative. Well, on Christmas Eve, right after she died, my mother and my sister had always followed

a tradition of on Christmas Eve, going to our little country cemetery and lighting candles, putting a candle on the grave of each person there, whether we were related to them or not. And so they would do this just at sundown. So after sundown, people would drive out after church and behold this blanket of stars, it looked like, across the cemetery. Well, I asked my mom, because we arrived there, we moved there like two days before Christmas, and I asked my mom, hey, are you going to go do that this year? She said, no, I can't do it. I'm just too sad. So after they went to church, she calls me up, because they were Methodists, but we were

Orthodox, no Orthodox church. Anyway, she says, did you see the cemetery? I'm like, no. She goes, somebody went there and lit all the candles. It turns out the woman who had done it was a woman named Susan Harvey. And Susan had twins who died right after they were born. They were buried there. And Susan told my mom,

you lit candles for my kids all those years, and I knew you were too broken to do it this year. So my husband and I went there, and he lit like 300 candles. And I wrote about, I'm getting chills thinking about it now. I wrote about that on my blog. David Brooks at the New York Times read that. He said, this is community. This is beautiful. my blog. David Brooks at the New York Times read that. He said, this is community.

This is beautiful. So he wrote a column in the New York Times. I got a book deal on that. All was well. I was going to pay tribute, not sentimental tribute, but talk about the real struggles of growing up there when you don't fit in, but how I'd found reconciliation. I just want you to know that you're fortifying

my preconceived belief that people from Louisiana are the best people. Oh, we are. We are. But we can be the worst, too. Now we get to that part. So, I couldn't figure out, though. We were there.

I was there with my wife and my three young kids. You had moved from New York? We moved from Philadelphia, where we were living then, down to St. Francisville. What was the reason for such a big move? We wanted to be there around my family. We wanted to help them because they recover from the death of my sister. But we also saw so much goodness in my small town

that we wanted our kids to have that too. And so we get there. And my widowed brother-in-law, he had one daughter in college and two still at home. And we wanted to help him out because he's a firefighter and he was so stricken with grief. We wanted to help him out, you know, because he's a firefighter and he was so stricken with grief, we wanted to be part. But we get there and my two nieces who were still at home, they didn't want to have anything

to do with us. I couldn't figure it out. Well, finally, the older cousin who was in college, niece who was in college said, Uncle Rod, I have to tell you, my sisters will never receive you and Aunt Julie. I'm like, why? She said, because we were raised by our mom and ma'am and pa, that is to say my parents, their grandparents, we were raised to reject you and never to trust you because you're city people, you and

Aunt Julie are city people. What? I mean, and she said, I know, I thought the same thing, I thought you were bad too until I came to visit y'all when I was 17 and I saw how wrong mom and mom and Paul were But my my sisters have never had that experience and now that mom is gone and she's become the sainted dead mother They'll never betray mom's direction Matt I just she told me that in Paris We were on the boulevard Saint Germain and I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me I went back home and confronted my father about it.

And he tried to deny it, but he really couldn't. We ended up arguing about it later. And he said, you and Julie, my ex-wife, you aren't doing enough to reach out to those girls. I said, but we are. A, we moved here. Second, we give them things. We invite them to things.

Blah, blah, blah. They just don't want us. And Hannah, the oldest one, said, why? Because we're city people. We're dirty. And my dad said, well, can you blame them? Y'all are so damn weird. That's when I knew it's done.

I'm sorry. It was like, well, thank you. But I've come to terms with this. But I realized that, you know, my family there wanted to, they made demands of us that we change while at the same time denying that we could ever be good enough for them. Look, we were conservatives like they were. We were Christians like they were, but we weren't 100% like they were. Well, I fell into this deep, deep depression over it, and I got sick.

I was so weak, and they finally diagnosed mononucleosis, chronic mononucleosis. Had you made the connection between the depression and mono or did you think that was? No, I didn't even know it was mono. They thought it might be some horrible allergies. When they finally diagnosed mono, a rheumatologist said, it's because of all the stress with your family

and you're never gonna recover unless you move. I said, well, I can't move. I'm the only kid my parents have left. They're difficult, but they're old, and besides, I can't make my wife and kids pick up again and move. He said, well, you better find inner peace some kind of way, or you're not gonna make it.

And it turns out that patients with chronic mono are like 3,000 times or something crazy more likely to develop lymphatic cancer. Like, oh my God. Well, there's a story there about how, what the Lord did for me through prayer, saying the Jesus prayer, meditatively for an hour a day. We can get into that if you want.

And also reading Dante. Yeah. I believe I heard you in an interview, or maybe I read it in one of your books. You said your spiritual father gave you that as a practice to sit before an icon and to say the Jesus prayer. An hour a day. Yeah. And I mean- How beautiful.

And when you do it, as you know, Eastern Christianity, if you do it the proper way, I mean, you can say it anyway, but if you do it the proper way, you have to clear your mind and be meditative. For me in that time, I was so anxious that it was, I could have, as sick as I was, I could have walked six miles into town every day, and it would have been easier than quieting myself for an hour. But I did it out of obedience. And what I found, it was so difficult, but after a while I got used to it, and then I found that I was becoming calmer on the inside. Now, it's not a technique, but I think that what was happening was I was making a bridgehead for the Holy Spirit

to come into my heart and do the healing. Also, at the same time, and we can come back to this, but I was reading the Divine Comedy. I'd walked into a bookstore in Baton Rouge right after my diagnosis, and I was in the poetry section for some reason. I don't really read a lot of poetry, but there on the top shelf was the Commedia. And I said, you know, I wish I had read that when I was in college, but you know, I missed it and there's no way I could understand it now.

But I pulled it off anyway, open up to the first lines. In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the straight path. Matt, it was like a lightning bolt hit me. I'm like, that's me, I'm 46 years old. I thought I was making the nostos journey, coming home to embrace my roots,

and now I find I'm in a dark wood, I don't know what to do. Well, I'm the kind of person who thinks that if he buys a book, the wisdom in the book will somehow make its way into my head. But I didn't buy it then, but I couldn't quit thinking about Dante, so I finally ordered it. I began to read it, not like a literary exercise, but almost as a spiritual exercise. And I read it slowly. I prayed my way through it. And anyway, I'd like to talk more about that

later, but I just want to say in the end, I recovered. And I think it was because of what God did for me through the Jesus Prayer and through reading Dante. And the problem is, though, my dad died in 2015, I was able to be with him and reconcile before he died. The problem is this rejection and my chronic illness did a real number on my wife. And our marriage broke down right after, not long after my diagnosis, because she was having to bear the burden of caring for our three children and homeschooling,

not knowing if her husband, who was sleeping six hours a day in the middle of the day, because he was too weak to get out of bed some days if he would ever be okay. Plus my family had rejected her. And so she's in a small town in Louisiana. Yeah and I mean the thing is everybody else in town was really nice to us. This was a family thing and our marriage broke down and it never recovered. We were together for 10 years after that and tried. We burned through three different therapists and then finally in 2022 after 10 years. I mean I did not want to go for divorce. I wanted to protect my children for divorce but

she filed and so the marriage ended. So I think of it's hard Matt to be honest not to be bitter about what happened you know because I came back and brought my wife and kids to my hometown to celebrate family, be part of the family, and they wouldn't accept us. And the domino effect of all that ended up destroying my family. But you know, the Lord can redeem anything, and that's what I'm waiting for and hoping for and praying for that redemption. And I've thought a lot about why they did this. I mean, it's just insane. I tell people this story, they're like, why would your family be that way?

Is everybody that way? I'm like, no, not everybody's not that way. But the culture of my family was such that they were so conservative and they were so proud of family and place. As I said, my family had been there five generations. We were, it was a beautiful part of Louisiana, beautiful country. And they had this there five generations. It was a beautiful part of Louisiana, beautiful country.

And they had this sort of idea. My dad and my sister had very strong personalities. They somehow felt that here we've created paradise. If you leave here, you've left Eden, and bad things will happen to you if you don't. It's very primitive, but that's how they really thought. And my having left there was, to them, a failure of love on my part, an act of disloyalty.

So, um... And you wrote a book about this experience, you said? Yeah, this is what the Little Way of Ruthie Lemming is about. Oh, I see. And then the follow-up, How Dante Can Save Your Life. And you might want to get to this later, but that's wild that your father acknowledged you,

that you wrote it as it happened. Yeah Yeah, yeah that you were able to reconcile Yeah, but he didn't change, you know, or he only changed at the very last, you know He recognized it was true But my father and my sister were both great people and some people, you know When I read the books are like how can you speak well of them? Look at how they treated you I said, this is the mystery of what it means to be human My dad's been dead for 10 years now, but he's one of the men I admire most in the world,

even though he had grave, grave flaws. And my sister too, you know? Everything I wrote about her in the book about how saintly she was is true. But I also write at the end of The Little Way, about, you know, I talked to her best friend, and she said, Rod, I don't understand. Ruthie accepted everybody but you.

Like, you were the bone in her throat that she couldn't swallow. And it's ultimately a mystery. But I think that they had placed family and place as on such a high level that the fact that I was a member of the family who had gone away, even though I had come back, it wasn't good enough. That was the unforgivable sin. And it's such a tragedy because their attempt to defend the good things they had with family and place ended up destroying the family, and the place has now been divided. So there's a real lesson there for everybody. You know, there's a, have you ever read that novel, The Leopard by Lampedusa, novel of 19th century Sicily,

a real classic. There's a character in there. It's set during the Risorgimento, and it's about a prince, a Sicilian prince in the 19th century who's trying to hold on to what he has in the face of this liberal revolution. One of the relatives says, if everything's going to stay the same,

they've got to change, which is a paradox, right? The only way for my family to have continued in that place would have been for them to accept us back, but they couldn't do it because they thought they were betraying their own principles, and it all fell apart. We wanna align our will with what is true, hey? So that's why the Creed. It's important that we say the Creed, that we respond, you know, I do at Easter as these things are being read. The demonic want us to align our will

with theirs. And so I think there are false things that we come to believe about God and ourselves and others. So my question is, when you were sleeping six hours a day, how were you, were you wrestling with self-hatred or like, why can't I get over this and be there for my family? I see what it's doing to my wife. I wish I could change what's wrong with me. Did you have to wrestle with any of those lies? And how did you overcome them? I did. It was like being caught in a raging river that was full of ups and downs. This is where reading Dante helped me so much. For the listeners who don't know, the Commedia, it's a 14,000 line poem in three parts, Inferno,

Hell, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. It's an allegorical journey of a character named Dante who, when it opens, he's lost in a dark wood and he doesn't know how to find his way back to the straight path. And then Virgil comes out of the woods, leads him through hell where he becomes reacquainted with the reality of sin, then up the mountain of Purgatory where the sinful tendencies are purged, and finally through heaven where he rises and is purged even more, purified even more, he rises to the throne of God.

And it's Dante himself, the poet, wrote in a letter to his patron, he said he intended this thing to bring people from a state of misery to a state of joy. It's called a comedy, meaning it has a happy ending. Now, most people only ever read The Inferno, which is such a shame because there's so much hope and beauty in this story. But when I was reading this while I was so sick, I began to see myself as like Dante

and going on a pilgrimage with him to learn what fault I had in the breakdown of my health and family and all that. And I don't know if you've ever read the Comedie, but these characters are so real. A lot of them are real life people in Tuscany of the 14th century. And he gets to the point early on, there's Dante and Virgil pass in hell through a circle of the heretics. And they get to these open graves, flames are coming out, and out of one of these open graves rises Farinata. Farinata had been a real life figure in the wars in Florence. He was on the other side politically

as Dante. He was a gibble-een and Dante was a Guelph. But Farinata was of an earlier generation. There's Farin Fahrenheit in hell. He rises up and says something like, I hear the voice of a Tuscan. Come closer, let's see if you're worth talking to. And it's almost comic because, dude, you're in hell. Somebody from your hometown is here and you're trying to be haughty and say,

are you worth talking to? So Dante and Fahrenheit start talking, start arguing about politics and whatever. And I wanted to say when I was reading that Dante, march on, this old man, he's stuck, you'll never convince him. You're gonna die if you stay here, walk on. Then it hit me.

Oh my God, that's me and my dad. You know, my dad was, like Farinataata a very proud man, proud of his family name, proud of his accomplishments and our land and our place. But that pride in Dante's scheme of things, Farinata was in hell because he believed that this world was all there was. And that's how my dad was in his way as the squire of the of the country at West Feliciana Parish and that was a real turning point for me because I realized that I'm letting my father dominate me and it's making me sick and so I moved on and then we get to a different part. Do you remember the part

Matt? It's the the the forest of the suicides. There is a man... So we've got 10 years since I've been there. Okay, yeah, no. There is certain imagery that sticks in my brain, but I'm not sure. The trees are alive, and the suicides have been reincarnated in hell as trees. And there's a guy there named Piero della Vigna, who was a real-life figure. He was a secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor, who accused him of theft, put him in prison, he committed suicide in prison.

This really happened. So there he is, Dante and Virgil meet him in hell. What you find out in talking to him is that Piero had worshiped, his hero worshiped the Holy Roman Emperor. He felt he had no identity separate from the Holy Roman Emperor, and he lived for the Emperor's approval. And when he didn't get his approval, he felt he had no identity separate from the Holy Roman Emperor, and he lived for the emperor's approval.

And when he didn't get his approval, he killed himself. I realized, oh dear Lord, I'm killing myself because I'm longing for the approval of my father and I'm not getting it, and I've made myself horribly ill because of it. So I took all these things to my priest in confession, right? I was Orthodox by then, and we had... And my poor priest, you know, I was saying, I've been reading Dante, and you know, when he goes into hell and he sees that, I realize my own sin. The sin I had, Matt, was that I had, like Dante, just rediscovering sin, his own fault,

I had disordered loves. It's good to love a place. It's good to love your family, but when you make them the ultimate love and not God, that's when you sin. And I went to tell my priest in confession, I have to confess that I've been an idol worshiper. He said, what? An idol worshiper. I worshiped my family and my place, my home, and my dad, who was the incarnation of both. And I put them in the place of God and didn't know what I was doing. I want to repent of that in the confessional. And so I was absolved. Do you know two days later, I was back in my...lying in my bed, sick in the middle of the day, trying to get to sleep, and I was praying, I had the sense that standing in front of me was a being.

I couldn't see anything, but I was very clearly there. And this being, I think it was an angel, I could feel him stick his hand into my chest and leave a stone in my heart. And when he withdrew his hand, I could read the words that said, God loves me. Not God loves you, God loves me. And that became the cornerstone for rebuilding my life. That's when everything began to turn around. So there's a lot of some mystical woo there, but...

Yeah, beautiful. And do you know, life went on, and I promise you I'm going to wrap this story up. It's so fascinating. You don't have to. Yeah. And I promise you I'm gonna wrap this story up. It's so fascinating, you don't have to. So we get to 2015, beginning of 2015, it's the springtime and my dad is really declining, he's in home hospice care by then. He asked me to take him to his barber

in the town across the creek. I did, and on the way out he said, I feel like I'm coming to the end of things.î I said, ìYep, you are.î I said, ìDaddy, is there anybody in your life you would like to ask forgiveness of?î ìBecause I'll find them. I'll call them. I'll get in touch with them.î He said, ìForgiveness.î Big old Southern man. ìForgiveness?

Well, I've never done anything wrong in my life.î I looked at him. I thought he was teasing me. He was not. I said, ìDaddy, you're 81 years old. The Bible says all of sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and that includes you. Well, no, you see, I said, Daddy, you were not always kind to me and Mom, you know, putting it mildly. Well, Son, you see, I had to do it that way because then I caught myself and said, look,

you don't know how much longer you have this old man with you. Be kind, change the subject. So we got him home to his house in the country and I helped him get into the house and get settled in. And I told him, I'll be over tomorrow morning. It's a busy day, but I was doing his medicine then. He was on like 15 different medications and he was too old to keep track of it. I said, I'll be over in the morning.

So I get there in the morning and there he is on this front porch as he was every morning reading the newspaper, drinking his coffee, and I leaned in his rocking chair. I leaned over to kiss him on the cheek and I went in to fix his medicine. When I came out, he grabbed me by the arm and I looked down at him and he said, I don't know what I would do without you. It's like, that's nice. But I saw his eyes were filling with tears and he started to stammer like he was having trouble saying something. He said, I had a long talk with the Lord last night about my transgressions against you. Oh, transgressions. That's not a word he would use,

but it was like, it was so delicate he couldn't touch it. And I told him that I was sorry, and I think he heard me. I looked at that old man, I said, this is like the Lord Bride's head moment, you know, when he makes a sign of the cross at the end. It's never gonna get any better. I said, yeah, he did hear you, and I kissed him on the cheek,

and said goodbye and went on my way. Now I thought driving back home, I said, if I had never come to Louisiana, I would not have gone through all this crap with sickness and all of that, but I also would not have been there to hear the words I wanted my father to say all my life, I'm sorry. So it felt like it

was worth it. Late that summer, he was dying. He was in a hospital bed in his bedroom at home. When he couldn't leave the bed, I moved in to sleep in his and my mom's bed for the last eight days of his life. My mom was exhausted. She went to the guest room. And we didn't have any big talks then. He was fading fast, but I just would like rub lotion into his feet. I would read the Psalms to him. I would read him stories, just take care of him. I gave him the morphine that home hospice had given. It was just a beautiful time to live with my dad the last eight days of his life. And on the day he died, we had gathered, we could see what was happening. We called the neighbors and family who could get there. We were all

standing around his bed. I was holding one hand, my mom was holding the other. And he breathed his last with us holding his hands. Now, I had always thought the day my dad dies, I'm going to shatter into a million pieces because he was everything to me. But there, it happened with me holding his hand. I'm like, what the heck? And I said a prayer for everybody and I was there for the mourners to come over

and finally I was back at my house that evening and my wife and kids were asleep. Like, how in the world, I just felt nothing but this sense of golden peace. How in the world did I get this? And then I remembered back when I was going through confession, I was struggling with anger at my family for the way they were treating me, and my priest had said, you can't be angry. He said, I'm not telling you to take anything you shouldn't from them, but you have to remember

our Lord loves us even though we anger him with our sin, and we have to do your best to love them despite it all. I didn't want to do it, but he had given me good advice about prayer, and so I did it out of obedience, and I tried to keep serving my family even though they could not love me imperfectly. And I remember thinking about that when I was reading Dante in the Paradiso. Dante the Pilgrim sees a nun, Picarda, in paradise, and she's on a lower level of heaven. I mean, this is Dante's imaginative scheme. And Dante the Pilgrim says, why are you so far down here? That's not fair. And she looks at him and says, no, you don't understand. Earthly justice doesn't matter here. We're just so grateful to be in the Lord's presence.

And she says the lines, in His will is our peace. God's will is our peace. Well, that helped me follow what my priest said, which is, you know, it's God's will for you to try to love them anyway. And because I had done that, I was able to have these last eight days with my dad, and I had this total peace when he passed. I burst into tears.

That was the only time I ever cried over my dad's death. They weren't tears of grief. They were tears of gratitude for what the Lord had given me through Dante. Wow. I can tell you're a great great, I can tell you're a great author just by the way you share these stories. I'm a Southerner. I'm from Louisiana. We know how to tell stories. Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's really beautiful. You mentioned your divorce. And I don't know you. This is the first time we've met, so I don't know much about your divorce. And I don't know you, this is the first time we've met, so I don't know much about your life. So, but I have to think that when you're in a public role, or you have some kind of, you know, people see you,

they know of you, you're this Christian, you were Catholic, you've left the church, you became Orthodox. You were Catholic, you left the church, you became Orthodox. I can't, I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of the story, nor am I asking you necessarily to share everything, but just that that must have been really difficult. Like even if, even if you were wrong, and what you, and you're the reason, And you're the reason. To receive the, I'm sure in some instances, merciless criticism and what might not be distinguished much from hatred of online.

Now you haven't told me, but I just assume that that's what you receive. You assume correctly, sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Must have just been heartbreaking, but share what you want. Yeah, Yeah, well I've never talked about

Why we divorced and I'm not going to I don't know you're not asking me to but it just wouldn't be fair to my ex-wife What I have said and we agreed to say this is that infidelity was never even remotely part of this was never even remotely part of this. You know, I did mention that all the immense stresses that came on both of us because of what happened with my family led to this. And there's more, and there's no need to get into it. The point is we struggled for ten years, ten grueling years, to hold this together because we're Christians. We believe divorce is an evil thing, and we didn't want our children to suffer from divorce. But it got to the point around 2022 where even our priests were like, this is, there's not a marriage here anymore. But I was hoping that just to wait till our youngest child turned 18 and went to college and then we would call it quits.

Just I want to clarify, obviously if there was a marriage, there's always a marriage. Is what was meant that there was no marriage to begin with or that the relationship is not there anymore and may not be able to be resuscitated? The Orthodox Church has a different view of marriage than the Catholic Church does. And so I think, I don't know what these priests meant in particular, whether they meant that the marriage doesn't practically exist or, but I think they probably meant that the things that make a marriage aren't here anymore. There was so much alienation and anger and that's what I think they meant, but we didn't get into it. Anyway, I was in Budapest on a fellowship in the spring of 2022. I got an email one morning on the day before Palm Sunday from my wife back in Louisiana. She

said, I filed for divorce yesterday. We had never once talked about divorce, so it was a total shock, but not a surprise, because given how bad it was. And yeah, and I got on a plane the next day for a planned trip to spend Orthodox Holy Week in Jerusalem. Let me tell you, brother, if something like that happens, if your life blows up like that, the place you want to be is in Jerusalem on the week of our Lord's Passion. And the Lord gave me so many graces to sustain me after that week. But yeah, to go back to your question, it was hell, because I have this reputation of being a political and cultural and religious conservative, and boom, divorce comes to me. What this has done to me, though, it has made me so much more merciful in ways that I wasn't before because when I was younger, you know, we got married, I was 30 when I got married, my wife was 22,

and we were such strong Catholics and, you know, conservatives. Divorce is something that happens to other people, not good Christians like us, because we believe the right things, we do the right things, we intend the right things, and then life happens to you, you know? And I have to say the only thing in my life that was more shocking or as shocking as divorce, losing my marriage, was losing my Catholic faith, And we can get into that in a bit. But you know, you just, your ideals, when they clash with reality, I mean, they get torn up.

And you, I mean, this is why the Lord's Prayer says, lead us not into temptation. Now, again, there was no infidelity between me and my now ex-wife. You've said that twice now, so was that something you were accused of online? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't pulled any of this. People assume it, right?

And there must be something there. No, it wasn't. And the fact that I can't really talk about all the things that went in and out just to protect her privacy and protect our kids, people are like, uh-huh, mm-hmm. But that's... Golly.

I just, isn't it funny that we see something bad or a sin take place, let's say, and then we think that detraction and slander, or one or the other or both, of what we may know nothing about, but that we publicly air our grievances towards somebody whose story we don't know, the details we don't know, that somehow that, well what, like, rectify

the imbalance of good and evil in the world? And God have mercy on me a sinner for the ways that I've been critical of people on this podcast that I've repented of. Just increasingly, I've just feel the Lord telling me don't criticize anybody and that isn't to say there aren't right things and wrong things and good things and bad things and but yeah yeah well this is kind of what happened to me too because you know I've been online for many years an opinion journalist on social media and I'm very quick to be critical of people, but God bless you for admitting that. Well, no, no, it's true, and I have to repent of a lot of this stuff. Sometimes criticism is necessary.

I'm not one of these if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Sometimes you need to, but realizing for ten years my wife and I fought this heroic battle to save our marriage, while at the same time we put forward this face of, like, we're just this happy Christian couple. And we tried to hide it from our kids, too, but eventually kids get older enough they can see what's happening. But it taught me that nobody really knows what happens in a marriage. And since my divorce became public, even though nobody really understands all the reasons, and because I'm a public figure, Christian men will write to me, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and talk about their problems, their struggles. And it's amazing

how so many of the things that these men are going through are exactly the same thing that my wife and I went through. And I've come to realize that there is all this hidden pain and hidden suffering in the world, and so many of us Christians, especially if you're more theologically conservative, you don't want to admit it. You don't want to say that I need help or we need help, but believe me, I feel like the veil was lifted over a hidden world of great suffering. And the people who contact me are all men, right, because I'm a man. And I can imagine women have similar suffering. It makes sense. Although, I'll tell you, I was talking to a priest

the other day, a Catholic priest, who said that when he first got into ministry, about half the people who came to him saying, I'm divorcing, we're men, half are women, he said now it's more 75, 25 of women starting the divorce, doing, instigating the divorce. Which is? Yeah, let's pause there a moment. Why is that happening?

I don't know. He didn't have a theory but I think I got one theory. What's your thing? It's it's I'm just thinking of this on the spot. There's a lot of Disgusting movies that are clearly made for post menopausal feminist leaning women like sex in the city, etc Right and they usually revolve around some woman who's not understood by her husband and she goes to friggin' Greece or some exotic country and bumps into some young guy who loves her and she lives this wildlife and it's evil. And I wonder if that feminism is just seeping in, lying to, in an analogous way, porn lies to men, right,

about what you deserve and what sex should be like and how your woman should want you and things, and what the bedroom should look like, okay. I think feminism lies to women about what it is to be mother and wife. And I wonder if the fruits of feminism are now being, yeah, coming to it. Yeah, you know, I think you're right.

I think that's a really good point, and I'll point out, too, I have Christian female friends who left their husbands because their husbands had porn addictions they wouldn't deal with, or alcoholics. So, I mean, I'm not blaming women, but I think you're onto something about why women might be women who don't have solid grounds for divorce are doing it. I've seen what has happened in our culture. Chris Ruffo had this really interesting analysis a couple of years ago talking about our cluster B society and meaning like personality narcissistic personality disorder that

this is really sort of take over our society now. And it really stuck with me some of the things he said about how we come to believe that we deserve happiness. We deserve, and that anything that stands in the way of our happiness has to be gotten rid of. And actually, when I was in Budapest in 2019, I was doing research for my book, Live Not By Lies, which is about the lessons that Christians who stayed behind and resisted communism have to teach us today.

I was on a tram going through the city from one interview to the other, and my interpreter was a 35-year-old Catholic woman and married with a kid. And she said, Rod, you know, I really struggle talking to my Catholic friends about my marriage and being a mom, why? She said, well, if I tell them that my husband and I have been arguing a lot lately or my little boy is not sleeping well, it's really a struggle to raise him,

they cut me off and say, oh, you have to get a divorce, put your kid in daycare. What? Yeah, yeah. I said, you deserve to be happy. And she said, I tell them, wait a divorce, put your kid in daycare. What? Yeah, yeah. I said, you deserve to be happy. And she said, I tell them, wait a minute, I am happy. I mean, but a happy, I love being a mom and a wife, but a happy life is not one that is without friction ever. And I looked at her and said, Ana, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be

unhappy. She said, that's it. Where'd you get that? I said, it's chapter 17 of Huxley's brave new world. Now, and this is part of the kind of totalitarianism, soft totalitarianism we're dealing with today. Most of us think of totalitarianism in terms of George Orwell 1984, the violence. But Huxley gives us a world in which people surrender their humanity for the sake of pleasure and being set free from anxiety and being given happiness, that sort of thing, a pure happiness,

never a moment of unhappiness. Sitting on the tram, I pulled up chapter 17 on my phone, and that's the scene in which the one dissident from this world, John the Savage, he's been raised outside of this perfect utopia, only reading the works of Shakespeare. And he's dragged before Mustafa Mond, who's the world controller for Europe. And Mond doesn't wanna torture him like O'Brien did Winston Smith in 1984.

He just wants to know, dude, why don't you wanna come join us? Why don't you wanna be part of our society? And he goes on to say, Mon, because we give you, we guarantee everything. We give you happy pills, we give you porn, we give you sex, we give you all the things you want. Entertainment, he calls it, Mon calls it Christianity without tears. And John the Savage says, you people could stand to have a few more tears. And what he ends up doing is making an argument for suffering as being innate to human life.

It's what makes us human and what makes it possible for us to love. And Monde says to John the Savage, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy. And John says, I am, and I'm fighting for religion, and I'm fighting for music, and I'm fighting for sin, and I'm fighting – music, and I'm fighting for sin, and I'm fighting—you know, all of the things that make a truly human life. Well, Mann says, you can have it. That is the—and we've sort of pivoted to totalitarianism here, but that's the way we

think today. We live in such a therapeutic society, therapeutic in the sense that we can't bear suffering, we can't bear limitation, and we have come to think that if we have any suffering at all, any anxiety at all, any limitation at all that makes us sorrowful or struggle, that something is wrong. Somebody has been unjust. And we have to do whatever it takes to get happiness. Yes, oh, 1,000%.

Yeah, that's really good. I think of our modern culture of Netflix and porn and micro-dosing and Uber Eats, you know, just sit in your house and take your happy pills, micro-dosing. Get the pot delivered to you by a door dash or whatever. Yeah, it's just like this refusal to deal with all these things that constrain us. Yeah. And Matt, the thing that I learned most of all when I interviewed all of these Christians,

mostly Catholics, but other Christians, in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, who had stayed behind and resisted communism, the one thing they said that we in the West have to learn is how to suffer. I remember standing near Red Square in Moscow early November 2019 talking to this short little Russian Baptist pastor, an elderly man. You know, the Russian Baptist had it very bad, not only were they persecuted as Christians under

Stalin, but the Orthodox hated them, persecuted them too. And he looked at me after the interview and he said, go back to America and tell the church, if you're not prepared to suffer for your faith, your faith means nothing. If you're anything like me, you sometimes reach the end of summer feeling a little spiritually drained and in need of rest. That's why I'm excited to tell you about St. Michael's Lent with Exodus 90. Rooted in an ancient tradition practiced by Saint Francis of Assisi, this 40-day journey was born out of his deep devotion to Saint Michael the Archangel. In fact, it was during this practice that Saint Francis received the stigmata, a profound moment of grace and

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of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal as they lead us through St. Michael's Lent starting August 15th. Be a part of reviving this ancient tradition in the church and rally with brothers from around the world to follow the example of St. Francis and St. Michael. Go to Exodus90.com slash Matt to find out more information. Join us on August 15th for St. Michael's Lent and get ready to fight the good fight. That's Exodus90.com. And that was heavy. That is weighing on my mind a lot because he's right.

You know, and there's this great scene. You've probably seen A Hidden Life about the blessed Franz Jagerstädter, the Terence Malick film. There's a great scene in the film where Franz, you know, for those who don't know, he's a real life figure. He was an Austrian Catholic farmer who was executed by the Nazis for not swearing allegiance to Hitler. Well, there's a scene in the movie

where Franz goes to the village church in the Austrian Alps, and there's an artist painting pictures on the wall to decorate the inside of the church, biblical scenes. And the old artist tells him, people come here and they admire Jesus, and they admire the art, and they say, isn't it lovely what Jesus did? And the artist says, but Jesus didn't call admirers, He called disciples. And you can tell the difference between an admirer and a disciple when it comes time

to suffer. Well, this foreshadows what Franz is going through. Well that's pure Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is the one who first said that, the difference between admirers and disciples. But it's completely true. I see that in my own life, eh? When suffering, especially when it feels like unearned nonsensical suffering. For some reason, when you read the lives of the saints and you hear about the suffering they went through, you just immediately accept it as

something beautiful and spiritual, which they accepted nobly, and I'm sure they did because they were holier than me. But when suffering comes to our life, whether it be autoimmune issues, like what is that? That doesn't sound holy, you know, or maybe you're living with someone with mental illness, or maybe you're living with someone with serious autoimmune issues, or you have a child who is autistic, or it just, it feels unfair. And it feels like, yeah, the chaos of hell is trying to swallow me and it's not fricking fair.

And yeah, and suffering is gonna suck no matter what, but I'm learning and I hope the good Jesus teaches me this so I can accept it, that if you resent your suffering, that's a great way to make hell deeper and worse. Oh, that's so true. And not just that, you know, I see the way I'm impatient with others, right? And why am I impatient with others? Because I'm God and this is my world and I'm trying to orchestrate it and you're getting in the bloody way.

God have mercy on me. But also I see the ways that I'm not the way I wish that I was. And I'm having to accept that before the loving gaze of the Father, hey? Like not only am I called to be meek and kind to those around me who won't do what I want, but I think the humble, more mature approach is to realize that I gotta put up with myself with all of my deficiencies that I hope to grow in, you know, grow out of,

but I'm learning that I can't grow out of them with this white knuckle, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mentality, because all that does is cause me more agitation and it's godless anyway. There's not a sort of surrender to the good father who's gonna do all things in me and all of my strength is weakness anyway

and so I better rely on him, but not in this agitated way, but in a trusting, confident way. Yeah, that's it. When I look back on all the struggles I had that led to the destruction of my marriage, I also grew in holiness then. I talked about the Lord sending Dante to me, and I had to repent of having made an idol of family in place and my father. And you know, some people say to me

when they hear about the divorce, and you must hate your ex-wife, no I don't. You know, she's broken too. You know, we both came from difficult childhood circumstances and what's the point of hating her? It can only destroy me. And you know, and I also, I don't hate my family, my dad and my sister,

who are in a way the engineers of all this. I can't say they were bad people. They were human. They were flawed. They did evil things. To me and to my wife and kids, and also in other ways in life, my dad had a pretty adventurous life, let's say.

Nevertheless, the good that was in them was real too. And I think this is one thing that growing up in the South can teach you. People in the Northern part of the US, for them life seems to be more about logic. But in the South we know that life is a poem. It doesn't have to make sense and all that. I remember thinking about an old man in my town, long dead now, but I remember

learning that he had been involved in some really nasty persecution of black people. And like so many of the men, including my own father was. But this man had, you know, I remember hating him when I was in college. You get away and you become liberal and you hate the evil that you came from, the racism. And it was hateful. You should hate it. But at the same time, I couldn't reconcile the fact that this old man, as racist as he was, had also done a lot of tangible good to help poor black people who were suffering.

And there I was, and I felt this way about my dad too. My dad had done the same thing, you know, help people who were his neighbors, who were black. And I remember thinking years later, you know, there I was in college, a right proper liberal thinking all the correct racial thoughts. Did I ever lift a finger to right proper liberal, thinking all the correct racial thoughts.

Did I ever lift a finger to help a black person? No, I didn't. My father and all those old people back there who held all the racism that their generation did, they actually were neighborly when it counted. And it's just confusing. It doesn't vindicate their racism, God knows, but at the same time, it's a real judgment, I think, on a lot of people, like intellectuals as I was at the time and people who live outside, who find it so easy to judge, but you have to get in there and live it and try to understand

the paradox of this kind of life. I remember when I got ready to move down to St. Francisville from Philadelphia, I was having lunch with a friend of mine in Philly. She says, won't you miss the diversity? I'm like, well, I miss the diversity. Our town has its own drag queen who goes into Christmas parade. Now, this was before drag was a thing, but Gingersnap was the drag queen. And...

And that's just Jared we love Jared Yeah, this Matthew was his name okay, and the crazy thing was you know I thought this is what makes st. Francisville in the south so interesting we love eccentric and Matthew had come there his mother was from town And he the mother was dying he moved back and he got a job as a maitre d at a restaurant in the town haunted house and He would do drag back and he got a job as a maitre d' at a restaurant in the town haunted house and he would do drag lip-sync shows to raise money for I'm not making this up to raise money for what do you call it homeopathic veterinary care for abandoned

animals I'm sure he was pocketing it everybody knows he's full of it but oh bless his heart he's a good guy so let him, and they probably might not do it now because now that drag has become politicized, but he's not around there anymore anyway. But that's one of the things I loved about growing up where I did is that people just accepted you, flaws and all. And even though I felt like an alien there,

it wasn't because people were necessarily mean to me. I just wanted something more than you could get there. But it was a real pleasure to move back to a place where you had this kind of craziness. My late uncle, Murphy, he was a total practical joker. He once started a festival for the Bopotomus, an animal that doesn't exist. And it was just an excuse to have a street party.

And I remember when I was a little kid watching the TV news, he would take the TV news reporter from Baton Rouge through the woods on the hunt for the wild Bopotamus. And what does a Bopotamus eat? Naga, you've heard of Naga hide. It's like fake leather. Just this crazy stuff, but that's how people are there. And it's, even though I don't live there,

I may never live there again, because there's a lot of pain there. It's a great place to be from and a great place to live, frankly, if you don't have all these various Gothic Southern secrets. You said that going through this divorce has turned you more towards mercy,

and that's good. How do you, yeah, I guess how has that affected you in your writings today when you're trying to address particular situations that you see popping up in the church or else do you find that you are, yeah. Oh, it's so hard because- Sorry, just to finish that thought, because I mean, there's one sense in which we have

to call out objective evils that are taking place, say, like the McCarrick scandal, and sex abuse scandals have to be absolutely like something's going to be healed by the antiseptic light of truth, and that's that. So Haggis, how are you now balancing that better? Yeah, boy, that's a great question, and I'm glad that we can talk about me, the way I lost my Catholic faith. You and I agreed ahead of time we're not going to fight about this. I don't really want to fight about Orthodox versus Catholic, although lots of people online can't wait to fight about that. That ain't me.

And part of it is what I learned from having lost my Catholic faith, and it goes back to mercy. Let me back up a little. I remember, you know, I converted to Catholicism when I was 26 years old, 1993. That was the first time I'd ever really become a Christian. I'd been raised Methodist, but we were Eastern Christmas Methodists. We weren't serious about it. I first encountered Jesus Christ as a Catholic and by becoming a Catholic. Now I became a Catholic in Washington, DC, and I was a very political Catholic in the sense of being acutely aware of the church and the world,

fighting political issues, but also internal church politics. And I just ate that stuff up with a spoon. And I really thought the battle between the line between good and evil went between the liberal bishops and the conservative bishops. I mean, it was so immature, but that was me. And I ended up moving to New York, and I got a job as a columnist at the New York Post, and I would write pro-life columns, and I would really defend the church. And then in 2001, mind you, this is a few months before the scandal broke nationwide, I started writing about a local scandal where three Carmelite priests have been abusing a boy, the son of immigrants. And in those days, whenever you would write about this, a journalist would always find their way back to Father Tom Doyle, who was a Dominican priest who had made a name for

himself defending victims. You know, he would always go... I think he's become quite liberal, but this is one of those things that taught me the line between good and evil is not liberal and conservative, because he's very liberal theologically. Eventually, he'd start out very conservative, but he had stood up for victims,

and it cost him plenty in the church. Anyway, I interviewed him about this, and after the interview, he said to me, listen, Rod, I can tell you're a serious Catholic, and I want to warn you that if you continue down this path of investigation, you are going to go to places darker than you can even imagine. I said, well, Father, thank you for the warning, but I feel like I have to do this. This is my church, too, and we've got to get justice for the victims, and I have a newborn son at home. I want the church to be clean for him." He said, oh, I support you. I'll be there for you

every step of the way, but you need to be prepared. This is going to get dark. Matt, I wasn't remotely prepared for it. I thought that as long as I had all the arguments in my head for the Catholic faith. My faith was invulnerable. And then as we know, in beginning of 2002, the Gagan trial in Boston caused the whole scandal to blow up nationwide. I remember back then, I'd moved over to National Review. I got a tip from a priest, a parish priest who was a conservative and who supported my critical work, because he knew that I wasn't doing it to attack the church because I was a conservative Catholic, a small

little Orthodox Catholic. He called and told me that a group of American laymen, prominent laymen, had flown to Rome to warn the congregation of bishops that Archbishop McCarrick of New York, whom John Paul was getting ready to move to Washington and to become a Cardinal, that John Paul shouldn't do this because McCarrick abused seminarians. Back in 2002 this was... This happened before, it was like 2001, just by McCarrick got his red hat anyway. You know, he had raised 65 million for the church. I was like, wow, because McCarrick by then, John Paul, he was in Washington, he

was a cardinal, and he had been named by the Vatican to be the point man for the bishop's response to the scandal. I said, wow, that's amazing. Did you go, Father? No, no, no, but he gave me the names of two prominent laymen who went. Well, I called both of them, and neither one of them said, yeah, that's true, but I won't talk about it. And the other said, all frightened, he said, well, that's true, but I won't talk about it. And the other said, all frightened.

He said, well, if that were true, I wouldn't tell you for the same reason. Noah's sons covered their father in his drunkenness. Like, oh, great. All right. Fine. What do I where do I go now? Well, next day, my boss, Rich Lowry, who's still the editor of National Review, calls me in and says, hey, what what are you working on? I just got a call from and he named a very prominent conservative media figure who was also a closeted homosexual.

He said, I got a call from so-and-so. He said he's calling on behalf of his friend Cardinal McCarrick, and they know that you're going to report something true but not criminal about him, and they want to get the story killed. What on earth are you working on? Wow. One day, Matt, one day. something true but not criminal about him and they want to get the story killed. What on earth are you working on? Wow. One day, man, one day.

And I said, when I told him, and he said, well, just keep me informed. He didn't take me off the story. He said, just keep me informed. So I called the priest who tipped me off and I said, Father, McCarrick knows. How on earth does he know? I didn't tell anybody. Did you tell somebody? Oh, no, I only told my spiritual

father, Benedict Groeschel. I'm like, oh, Father, Benedict Groeschel, we all loved him. But he was a man of the church, and he was going to defend, of that generation, defend the church, even a creep like McCarrick, keep the church from being brought into disrepute. So I knew McCarrick was guilty from the beginning, but then I'd have to see him as a Catholic on national TV talking about, oh the scandal, we had no idea it was so bad and total liar. That kind of thing, and I could go on and on like talking to a Kansas farmer whose son had blown his brains out because he had been molested by a priest.

Kansas farmer whose son had blown his brains out because he had been molested by a priest, there were four other suicides, all victims of the same priest, and the diocese in Wichita, Kansas, this is like in the 90s, had known about it and kept moving the priest around. As a new father, to be on the phone in New York listening to this old Kansas farmer talk about that, I mean, it just, it ripped me up. So we got to the point in 2005, I won't drag it out, but where I was just so, and my wife was too, we were so full of anger and anxiety, we didn't know where to turn.

We were living in Dallas by then, and we had found a parish out in Fort Worth that was Orthodox Catholic, right, conservative. We thought finally a safe haven because the line between good and evil still had the idea that it was between conservatives and liberals. There was a priest there, a young priest, very dynamic and Orthodox. He was like the assistant. And we were getting to know him. Well, I had evangelized a woman in Dallas and she wanted to become a Catholic. I said, don't go to the parish.

You know, they're very liberal there. Go see Father Chris. Father Chris will give it to you straight. Great. So a month after she meets Father Chris, the guy, the assistant pastor, she wants to have coffee with me. I said, how is your catechesis going? It's great.

I love him. I cannot believe those conservatives drove him out of Pennsylvania. I'm like, wait a minute, he told me the liberals did. Something's going on. I went home and Googled. Turns out Father Chris was not supposed to be in ministry. He had been suspended in Pennsylvania after a formal accusation was made. He went to his hometown, Dallas, talked his way into this parish in Fort Worth, and convinced the priest there, the pastor in charge, let's just not

tell the local bishop. And he deceived the bishop. Well, I said, we're done. I remember walking out of my home office when I found out, I said to my wife, Father Chris is not who we think he is. She literally collapsed on the floor sobbing and pounding, saying, we can never trust him again. Well, that was it for us. I ended up writing an expose about Father Chris and, you know, this is all, I don't want to get into names or anything,

but it's all a matter of public record and he was a fraud. He's been banned from ministry repeatedly in that diocese, though he continues to present himself as a priest, we just broke. And I remember, Matt, feeling that I thought that, again, I said I always thought if I had the ideas it would be fine, but it comes to a point where there's a matter of will. You know, I was so angry and fearful and mistrustful of the church. And I remember thinking after Mass one Sunday, like, what if my kids, if the only icon they see of Catholic Christianity is their angry and fearful father and mother? Will they hold on to the faith? Because to

me, you know, I wanted them to know Jesus. Jesus is what saves us. And we started going to an Orthodox parish in Dallas, the cathedral, with no intention to convert, but we wanted to be in the real presence, though we couldn't receive. We wanted to be in the real presence without this overwhelming anger and fear. And we got there, and I thought, oh, this is kind of what I thought Catholicism was going to be when I became a Catholic. I mean, you're an Eastern Rite Catholic, so you know how transcendent the worship is. And we finally said, my wife said, I'm not going back. This is where the life is for us.

And so we became Orthodox. But I'll tell you, I became a very different kind of Orthodox Christian than I was as a Catholic. I had been so prideful intellectually as a Catholic. I remember thinking not long after my conversion, I was a Catholic bro, never a trad, but it's like, I'm part of the best church where all the smart people go, the oldest church, and I was really triumphalist. Catholic Church didn't teach me that. That was me. I couldn't be that anymore because I had seen the Lord had allowed me to be humiliated in my pride as a Catholic. And the Lord had also taught me

something important. When I was first coming into the Catholic Church back in Baton Rouge in the early 90s, a woman I was working with at the Baton Rouge newspaper said, oh, you're interested in Catholicism. I'm a Catholic. Would you like to come work with me at the Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen this weekend? I said, oh, that sounds very Catholic. That's Mother Teresa's order. I'll do it. So I went. And all I did was scrub pots and peel potatoes and carrots. And I don't know, Matt, if I thought that I was going to get little nuns floating four inches above the ground, but it wasn't what I expected. And I remember thinking, gosh, I'm 23, 24 then. Well, you know, this was nice, but I'm more of an intellectual.

My time would be better spent reading theology. Never went back to the soup kitchen. Many years later, with my Catholic faith in ruins, I thought if I had spent more time living out my faith and forming myself in the faith by working with my hands in places like the soup kitchen instead of getting lost in my head reading books. My faith, things might have turned out differently for me. So when I became an Orthodox, I had to tell myself, do not get hung up in church politics. It's all there.

And I don't think that the Orthodox Church is free from sin. There's no church free from sin, but I had to realize I can't be that guy. I can't be the guy who thinks that he's serving the church by arguing about who are the good bishops, who are the bad bishops. I remember once when we lived in New York, we were fervently Catholic. We would have these dinners at our apartment and invite over our friends, including a priest, and we would talk about the church all night long. Usually the men, the women wouldn't. I remember one night after a very vigorous roasting of the failures of the bishops, this was early 2000s, we saw our last guest out,

a priest. My wife turned to me and said, we need a lot less Peter in this house and a lot more Jesus. And what she meant was, you know, we never, we always talk about the church. We never talk about Christ. Interesting. Yeah, it does appeal to the male intellect, I think, apologetics and philosophy. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Which is why I think you don't have a lot of female atheists, for example, who became very prominent, because women tend to be a lot more sort of human and in touch with reality, at least please God they are. Okay, a few things to say to that. One is I've always been of the opinion

that Catholics should be more furious about the sex abuse scandal or any scandal that takes place within the church than people outside of it. And I remember sometimes you'd hear people outside of the church, atheists, say, talk about pedophilia or sexual abuse. And it always made me, maybe not always,

but very quickly made me angry when you would hear Catholics kind of defend it. They wouldn't defend the sexual abuse, but they'd say something like, well, yes, that's true, but the church has deep pockets, and actually teachers are more likely. What about? Yeah, and I could always understand

why they were doing it, but I thought it was exactly the wrong approach. What I do and what I did when the McCarrick abuse scandal was when someone say, you're Catholic and this is happening, I'm more angry than you are. This is disgusting and despicable, and I hope these people are held to account, may God have mercy on their souls and that sort of thing. That's the first thing I think has to be said. Second thing is never been my experience like personally

or my wife. You know, our only experience really has been of good priests. Never been abused, never been sworn at, never been again and again and again. I have traveled and lived all around the world. So I think that's an important qualifier too. Third thing I would say is, just to push back on you a little bit, if you found some level of corruption in the Orthodox Church, of course the Orthodox Church is somewhat divided, might not be the right theological term, but you know what I mean. So that if you were to find levels of corruption in the church today, in your Orthodox church, would you think that would be a good reason to leave your Orthodox faith?

No, and it might not have been a good reason to leave the Catholic faith, but I'm a different person than I was then. Yeah, I don't think it is. I don't think it's a good reason. Right, right, right. That's kind of what I'm getting at. But I appreciate what you're saying, that the trauma of it all, especially as somebody who's writing on this topic and is kind of getting quasi maybe threatened

by those who don't want stories broken, I can see how that would have an effect on you. But I was such an idealist as a Catholic. I had placed the church in the hierarchy high up here, and again in a very political way. One of my most shameful moments as a Catholic came when I went to Jerusalem in the year 2000. The New York Post sent me to cover John Paul's visit there, and I was in the courtyard of the Jerusalem Patriarchate with a bunch of other journalists and waiting for the Holy Father to come back from Bethlehem, and I saw two American Cardinals on the far side,

and I noticed one of them, oh, he's a good conservative Cardinal. I rushed over there to meet him, and I kissed his ring because I wanted to show that I'm not like those other journalists. I'm a good, faithful conservative Catholic. It was Bernard Law. Now, the Cardinal of Boston,

who would later be the great villain. Now, there's nothing wrong with respecting a Cardinal, even a bad cardinal, but I did it for all the wrong reasons. Remember I said I was a prideful Catholic? Well, God needed to break that in me. Even if I had never left the Catholic Church, God needed to break that in me. But also, I just assume as a matter of self-protection that the bishops are corrupt, and the Orthodox Church, and I find it really, really hard to trust clerical institutions and priests. I have a really good friend now who hasn't, he's Orthodox and hasn't been to the Orthodox

Church since last summer. He was very badly treated by a priest. And I find myself weird enough, Matt, weirdly enough, having the same conversations with him that Catholic friends of mine had trying to save my faith. And I said, but this is one priest, it's not all of them. But I also realize that this guy, he's younger, that he really hurts. And the priest who, it wasn't an abuser or anything,

but who betrayed him, the priest who betrayed him wasn't an abuser or anything, but who betrayed him, the priest who betrayed him broke him at a fundamental level and made it so hard for him to trust. Now he still believes in God, but his girlfriend is a Catholic, I found out. And so I told him, I said, look, we're friends. I love you as a friend. I hope you'll stay Orthodox.

I wanna help you stay Orthodox. But if you cannot find Christ because of reasons of the brokenness of the priest who did this to you, your own brokenness, and you want to become a Catholic, I'm not going to judge you. I'll support you and love you because what right would I have to? Because I remember the thing that the prayer that made me decide to become Orthodox was, because I'd been when I was struggling with this back in 2005 or so, I would read Orthodox apologetics like, yeah, they're right about authority. Then I would read the opposite

Catholic, well, the Catholics have a point. And I couldn't make my... I know. Yeah. What's that? I know. I get you. What I mean is like, none of us are chat GPT. Exactly. We're just humans who are trying to make sense of things, and it's quite confusing when you're going over 2,000 years of history.

Of course, but I remember telling the Lord, I remember exactly where I was standing in my house in Dallas then, said, Lord, I want you, I want you so much, I need you, you are my salvation. you, I want you so much, I need you, you are my salvation. I'm saved by, we're not saved by principles or propositions, we're saved by a relationship with Jesus Christ the God man. I said, Lord, if for whatever reason, because of my own brokenness and the brokenness of the Catholic Church in this time and place, I can't relate to you there, I'm going to become Orthodox. If I'm making the wrong decision, please have mercy on me because I'm doing it only because I want you and I want my kids to have you." And I just, I never look back after that. Strangely enough, after a couple of years,

when I no longer felt responsible for the bishops and fixing things, I gained back everything I loved about the Catholic Church, and I routinely defend traditional monasticism. The monks of Norcia, the Benedictine monks of Norcia, are at the center of the Benedict option. And I've said it many times, I'll say it here again, I'm an Orthodox Christian and a joyful one, but I'm also a man of the West. And the Latin Church, the Roman Catholic Church, built the West.

The survival of the West and the thriving of the West depends more than anything else on the health of the Catholic Church. So anything I can do to help it be healthier and stronger, I wanna do. At the same time, when people want to be Orthodox, I help them do that too. Here's something interesting, Matt.

When I was a Catholic, I was so combative as a Catholic, and I would try to convince people, you need to be Catholic. I think maybe only one or two people became Catholic because of that. After I became Orthodox, I said, I don't have any authority to tell anybody anything because I famously flamed out as a Catholic.

I'm just gonna live my life, and if people wanna know what God has done for me as an Orthodox Christian, I'll tell them. I get emails all the time from people saying, �Me and my family are Orthodox now because of you.� And it's taught me something really important about evangelism. You know, it's a lot of men, especially young men, love, as you say, the apologetics, the scrap. A lot of men, especially young men, love, as you say, the apologetics, the scrap, the – dude, when you live long enough as a man, as a father, as a husband, when life has beat the crap out of you, you realize that all of that intellection –

So much of it is ego, isn't it? Pride. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with intellection, but it has to find a spot. I mean, I think about one of my favorite moments in all of Christian history is when St. Thomas Aquinas, you know the story at the end of his life when he had this vision during Mass and he said, �All I've written is as straw.� Well, no, the Summa is not as straw, but this is the whole thing.

But compared to the vision, maybe. Yeah, of course it is. Well, this is the saint, though, saying that all the things that we create compared to the beatific vision are nothing. And this is one thing that orthodoxy – and maybe you found this in Eastern Christianity – it lays more into the experience of beauty and mysticism as the source of our faith. Now, if it's only beauty, you become an ascete, not a Christian. If it's only goodness—Father Dwight Langenach and I were talking about this.

He said if it's only beauty, you become an ascete. If it's only goodness, you become a social worker. If it's only truth, you become a rigid ideologue. We need all three of them in harmony. Yeah. I got this idea I want to explore with you because I feel like you'd have some great insight into it. I think we begin with this understanding that we hate those things that constrict us. I think that's right. What I'm seeing is we're very good as groups at remaining a group if there's an enemy. So if it's the bloody Protestants

and all of us Catholics keep complaining about them and arguing about them and refuting them, and then we're good, you know. If it's the conservatives against the leftists in American politics or whatever. So long as it's like us against them, we can kind of maintain some kind of unity. A negative solidarity, I believe it's called. Yeah, yeah, okay. And then what I'm seeing though is things just splintering. So you have, alright, so let's just use the Catholic as an example. So it's us against the Protestants, right? Good. And now you've got, okay, now there's conservatives against liberals,

and each are trying to show how faithful they are to their camp, perhaps, right? And then you've got people who are more of the Latin mass crowd, and we're not like the Novus Ordo people, you know, like we're different, and that's good, so there's this sense of unity. And then among the Latin mass crowd, you've got those who are gonna show you

that they're even more serious than you are by becoming, let's say, SSPX, and then within SSPX, maybe set of a contests. And we seem to kind of have this negative unity works until we, and I wonder about how much of it is this immaturity of not being able to, as it sounds like you're trying to do now, sort of sit amidst the wreckage of humanity

trusting in the savior. So you said, within your Orthodox communion, you wouldn't be so surprised these days if you were to find corruption or these sorts of things. But I don't know if we, I don't want to live in a community that just defines itself against something. I want to know who I am and I think I do and I'm grateful for that and I see a lot of beautiful things taking place in the church, whether that be Bishop Robert Barron, Ascension Presents, and Hallow, and all these lovely things that are happening.

We're really just sort of teaching and the beauty of the Catholic Church, but I also see this temptation on online circles and elsewhere to keep trying to separate off those that we think are the problem. And I think a lot of this might have to do with this scapegoating idea where there needs to be someone responsible for these.

If only we get rid of the bad people. Yeah, yeah, we tried that. We sent them to Australia, didn't work. But one final point would be, Truthfully is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live, and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence. Whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding or looking for

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in prayer and stay grounded in your spiritual life. Already downloaded by thousands of people worldwide, Truthly is transforming the way we learn, share and live our faith. One question, one course and one prayer at a time. Start your seven-day free trial today. Download Truthly on the App Store. You're seeing this in, I think, and you tell me what you're seeing. I'm seeing this happen in orthodoxy as well, right?

So you'll have, I think in this day and age, a lot of people are desperate for tradition to know where they're from, what can they trust as sort of secure and unchanging. And so you have many Protestants becoming Orthodox, Catholics fed up with internal squabbles of maybe becoming Orthodox. And then of course, how long do you remain Orthodox until you're dissatisfied with that as well? Because it turns out that's not Eden either. And so now, okay, well, the Assyrian Church of the East, you know, these other smaller

Orthodox churches, or maybe set of accountism and there's this sort of Fragmenting fred fragmented fragmented it reminds me of our Lord's words to Peter that You know Satan has desired to sift you as wheat. All right, there are some thoughts I don't know how much of it was coherent, but I would love to get your take on whatever made sense Well, you know it I think you're right about that. I mean I When I was Catholic as I said, I was a very political Catholic. It was just so exciting to me to talk about what are the Libs up to now, the liberal bishops, national Catholic reporter.

And I mean, I just took it on because that's what a lot of my young intellectual Catholic friends, a lot of us converts, were doing. And, but I remember when we moved to New York, you know, we were so hard to find a good parish, you know, and I went to the Latin Mass a couple times, you know, because they had friends there and I really respected their faith. But what I found there, and I hasten to say, please, Latin Mass people, don't write me.

All they will. This was 25 years ago. Things have moved on, but there was so much anger there. And the people, most of the people there, not all, but most of them seemed to define themselves about who they were against, their persecutors in the church. And you know what? They were. They were treated horribly by the institutional church. But I realized, where's the joy?

Why are they Christian? Right. So like anger, totally understandable given how trads are treated often, and yet surely we both recognize you can't stay here. And of course many don't. Yeah, and there was that negative solidarity, as I mentioned. So we ended up finding at the time a Maronite church in Brooklyn. It was beautiful. It was a reverend liturgy, good homilies, but the people there seemed to be leaning into the joy of being Catholic, right? And for me, it was a temptation too, to fall victim to that anger because, oh boy, I could get angry.

And the anger eventually burned me up. But I also hated the thing you would hear from some people, like, oh, don't be angry, the anger will destroy you. Yeah, it will, but you ought to be a little more angry, friend, at what's being done, you know, what the bishops are doing, what they'd be, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, your point is right, though, about that negative solidarity, and we see this in the Orthodox Church, you know, with some of the ortho bros, you know, the young men who turn up, they become Orthodox because they've

been red-pilled online for orthodoxy. And I'm told by friends back in America in Orthodox churches, a lot of them show up in the Orthodox parish, and they almost have to be deprogrammed because they've been so filled with this argumentative spirit, this angry spirit. They're ready to beat up on, not physically, but beat up on Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox who aren't sufficiently Orthodox. And a lot of times racism and anti-Semitism comes into that. And the priest, I'm told, parish priests are like, wait, wait, wait, what's going on here?

Because they're just not ready, they don't participate in the online forums and understand what a hothouse online is. And the trad bros in the Catholic Church can be this way, there's a lot of Calvinists this way. And I just wish that, I admire the passion for the faith. I would have shared, I think if I had been, if I were a young guy now, I would be susceptible to that sort of thing too, just because of my temperament. But man, it's not the way to go.

And I think we often have the false idea that if we're not that, then we become indifferent, or namby-pamby, it's like, you know, kumbaya. No, it's not that. I think that these things matter. It matters that you're a Catholic, and I'm an Orthodox, and our friend here might be a Calvinist. I mean, it's not that our brotherhood in Christ does not obviate or negate those important

differences. But I'll tell you, I learned an important thing when I interviewed the Christians, many of whom had gone to jail under communism for their faith, that when they were in prison, they formed this sort of ecumenism of the oppressed, the solidarity of the shattered. I think that's a term that one of them used. And what it was, was they realized in prison that they weren't there because they were Catholic or because they were Protestant or because they were Orthodox.

They were there because they were followers of Jesus Christ. And they found this brotherhood there. They prayed with each other. They helped each other. They didn't cease to be Orthodox, Protestant, or Catholic, but they realized that there was central unity in our Lord and wanting to be faithful to Him under conditions of intense duress and even torture. That mattered more.

And that's kind of how, I mean, I researched this in 2019, but I was moving that way after I became Orthodox into that point of view as I wrote the Benedict Option too, that whatever separates us now, we have so much more to be concerned with from the outside world than we do about separating us. So whenever, I try to be a bridge builder, not in a smarmy, sentimental sense, but in a practical sense, because I would a thousand times rather have a faithful Catholic or a faithful Calvinist on my side in the culture war. Like when the secret police come to arrest me, rather have them there than an orthodox who might be in my church, but who wants to just avoid trouble.

Last story. Kamila Bendeva is this incredible woman. The new documentary Angel Studios made about my book, Live Not By Lies, she's kind of the star of it. She's a Catholic woman whose apartment in central Prague was like the nerve center of the anti-communist resistance. She and her late husband Václav were very faithful Catholics, but everybody who would come there to talk about how can we resist, how can we stand up for the unjustly persecuted,

there were almost no other Christians there. They were hippies like Havel, literary Bohemians, literal Bohemians, and so on. And I remember asking her in her apartment, I said, you know, Camilla, you know, Havel and Václav Havel and all these others, they didn't live very Christian lives. Was that hard for you and your husband as faithful Catholics to work closely with them? She said, no, not at all. Rod, you have to understand when you're facing something like totalitarianism, the most important quality you need in a friend

is courage. She said, all of the Catholics we knew, they kept their head down. They just wanted to avoid trouble. My husband, her late husband, husband and I knew that we could not stand before God and keep our heads down. The only ones who would stand with us were these hippies, these literary people who didn't have the faith, but they had courage and were willing to suffer for it. And they knew, as Camilla said, that if the secret police took us off to prison, they would look after our children, and they knew we could look after theirs. So she made an important point to me about how, you know, don't just look at the surface

where people agree with you on the faith or on politics. They may have cold feet when the secret police come. Look for the quality of courage. You heard Peter Crave's line, when a maniac is at the door feuding brothers reconcile. He said that in regards to ecumenism. It's so difficult. I think a lot of people, you can say what you don't mean until you're blue in the face, and then people are gonna tell you that that's what you mean. So neither of us are saying that doctrinal differences don't matter.

Absolutely right. Neither of us are saying that we shouldn't argue these things in charity, that, you know, that's not what we're saying. It's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's not what you're saying either. Oh no, it's not what I'm saying either, yeah. Yeah, but it's...

Well, I'm saying too, Matt, that I couldn't do it myself because I broke myself as a Christian and might have lost my faith entirely because I was so combative and I just needed prudence. I didn't have prudence. I didn't have... I had spent so much of my life as a Catholic thinking about what was wrong with the church and how I needed to fix what was wrong with the church. I didn't balance that out with thinking about what's right with the church and working in the soup kitchen. I want to give a shout out to my friend Michael Voris because I never liked what church militant were doing.

I mean, I liked occasionally why they were doing what they were doing and I understood it to a point. And so I appreciated what I could, but I just kept thinking, anybody who listens to this stuff day in, day out, how could that possibly be good, right? Michael publicly, as we know, had a fall from grace. And I've been talking to him lately

and he loves Jesus Christ and he is doing the work as they say and just like what it's very different I know but what you were saying and what I've experienced in my own life is about how running you know hard into our own humanity and up against our limitations that humble us tend to make us more gentle kind people When I'm on the phone with Michael, I sense somebody who's growing in kindness and mercy. Yeah, and it... But that day in, day out, here's what's wrong with the church. Oh my gosh.

I know. Well... I mean, it's hard. Like, how do you balance it? Because, I mean, someone has to say what's wrong. Someone has to say it. And then the way they can say it and keep bread on the table is by making it entertaining and saying it frequently and building up a base and needing that base to watch it daily. But does anyone at Church Middle and hope that every day

these people are watching this stuff? Or I just think that it's clearly's clearly poisonous I think to the faith. No it is and the difficult thing as you say is that it's so hard you want something clear to say here's the formula of how to do this go this far and no farther and yeah it's just not there because I encountered as a Catholic so many Catholics who believe that we ought to solve this problem, that the scandal, it's outrageous. But they would not take a single step to do it. But they would pat me on the back, go get them, brother, go get them, you speak for

me. Well, then when I burned out and lost my faith, many of those people were like, look at him, the coward, he, the coward. He left the battlefield. I'm like, brother, you never once showed up on the battlefield. You would send a tweet or, you know, post on a blog anonymously, and you thought you were doing your part. I just realized that I was left shell-shocked, and I don't have it in me to be the kind of

culture warrior for the faith that I was before and also something Solzhenitsyn Said this is one of those important things he brought out of the Gulag that the line between good and evil does not run between Social classes race is anything it runs right down the middle of every human heart And I've lived that in my own life seeing my my own failings, my failures of charity, my failure of my marriage, my failure with my kids. You know, they're all adults now, but I look back and like, man, I wish I'd done this differently, or I wish I'd been more present during this period. So many things.

And I feel like maybe I'm an old squish in some ways, because I'm like, I just want to love Jesus and help you love Jesus. Well, at the same time, defending the truth, but some people are given that grace, that charism, that calling to be on the front lines, and others aren't. Or some, maybe they once had it and lost it. I think I once had it, but because, for all the reasons I've talked about, I

didn't handle that responsibility well. And if I had done, I mean look, I tell people that the years 2002, 2005, that was when I was writing about this, it was like that scene in The Hobbit when The Hobbit looks into the volunteer and it fries him. He looks into the eye of Sauron. He's the Lord of the Rings? Lord of the Rings, yeah. Sorry, did I say the Hobbit? You said the Hobbit.

Sorry, Lord of the Rings. He looks into the volunteer. That was me. And Father Tom Doyle tried to warn me of that. And I just was incapable of hearing it because I couldn't imagine how bad it was. But so I hope that from my battle scars, from my wound that I'll never recover, like I said, I can't trust religious authority.

I believe in religious authority. I believe it is necessary, but speaking for me personally, I have to keep the church, the clergy at a distance to protect my faith. Yeah, thank you. My wife and I listen to Live Not By Lies. We were driving to Steubenville several years ago now. And my wife has this ability. She can listen to audio books without becoming distracted.

Audio books, I get distracted easily. My mind starts wandering. I need the page in front of me. But she can listen to a book on double speed and consume the entire thing. It's a pretty cool gift. Anyway, we really enjoyed your book. So maybe tell us a little bit about Live Not By Lies. And then my understanding is it's Angel Studios who are releasing a pretty cool gift. Anyway, we really enjoyed your book, so maybe tell us a little bit about Live Not By Lies,

and then my understanding is it's Angel Studios who are releasing a documentary on this, and has it been released? By the time this podcast goes live, it will have been released. It's a four-part series. The book came about, started around 2015. I got a call from a physician, a Catholic physician in the Midwest,

and he connected to a mutual friend. This is when the Great Awakening was getting going, and he said that, my mother is quite old, she lives with me and my wife. She had been a political prisoner in the 1950s in Czechoslovakia. The government imprisoned her as a spy for the Vatican because she wouldn't stop going to mass. She had six years of imprisonment and torture. When she got out, she came to America and that was that. Anyway, now she's very old. She lives with us and she said, son, the things I see happening in America today remind me of what happened when communism first came to my country. She was talking about people being canceled, people losing their businesses, and all the things that we now know

became ubiquitous. And this doctor just had to tell somebody. And I said, well, OK. But I thought, yeah, it's a little bit extreme, isn't it? My mom is old. She watches a lot of Fox News and is's always worried about this that and the other But the more I started talking to people Matt when I would travel around to conferences people who had come to America from The communist world they were all saying the same thing and if you talk to them long enough

They would tell you how angry they were at Americans for not believing them Well, I could see why we didn't believe them because again our idea, our idea of totalitarianism is the Soviet model, the gulags, secret police, bread lines, Orwell, 1984. What we're dealing with is far more subtle, but yet totalitarian. So I ended up writing a book about this, and I tried to explain in the first half of Live Not Buy Lies why what we're dealing with now is in essence totalitarian even though it doesn't have the familiar methods. And the second half of the book is based on my travels interviewing these people who did stay behind and suffered, asking them how should we prepare, what should we be doing. And the book came out in September

of 2020. Now that was a few months into COVID and after the summer of George Floyd. My previous book, The Benedict Option, had tons of media coverage and it sold well. This book, nothing in the media. I had some podcast stuff, but the media wouldn't touch it because what I was saying is wokeness and all of this, it's essentially totalitarian.

You're behaving like totalitarians. But that book sold 210,000 copies, almost all word of mouth, because people understood something is happening and this book helps explain it. And so now Angel Studios has done this documentary. I was able to go with the crew back to some of these people and interview them. We're in Camilla's apartment. I've got to tell you, Matt, I know this story up and down, backwards and forwards, but when I saw the last 10 minutes of the final episode, which has Camilla there and another man, a

young Greek Catholic man, Timo Krishka, he's in Live Not Buy Lives 2, and he talks about how he was raised after communism, and he's in Live Not By Lies 2, and he talks about how he was raised after communism and he's had a really good life. He's become a filmmaker and a photographer, done well, but something was missing. And it wasn't until he went back in honor of his grandfather, a Greek Catholic priest who had been told by the government, you must convert to Orthodoxy or you can't be a priest, because they controlled the Orthodox Church then, and he wouldn wouldn't do it so he lost his priesthood formally. Anyway, Timo wanted to honor him

so he went back around Slovakia and found a bunch of really old Catholics who had gone to prison for their faith and he did photographic portraits of them, did interviews with them and this transformed Timo's life. He saw that these men and women had lost everything but Jesus, and yet they were living with the peace that passes all understanding. They

were still poor, many of them. That changed Timo. Well, the last 10 minutes of the documentary, the final episode, is Camilla, Bendeva in Prague and Timo Krishnick in Bratislava. Camilla says at one point, I can't chill thinking about it, you know, they read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the dissidents in Prague. It was a real source of inspiration for them. And she told me, Camilla, she said,

we knew we were living in Mordor. And this told them who they were and what they were doing. They were the fellowship of the ring. Well, she said to me, she said to the camera, Camilla, she said, you know, at one point, you know the part in The Hobbit where one of The Hobbit says after the end of the adventure, it says, Lord of the Rings, after the end of the adventure, do you think they'll sing songs about us one day?

Well, said Camilla, we said that about ourselves too. Then she drops her head because she's got a tear in her eye. Boom, I just lost it. Because of the courage, the holiness of these people, and they have been forgotten by history. I mean, I don't know how old you are, Matt, but I'm old enough to remember the Cold War and what it was like and when it ended, but all of this stuff has been swept away. You could turn on Netflix. There are a hundred documentaries about Hitler in World War II, almost nothing about communism. Yet these people who are dying out now, who are witnesses and who kept the faith, we get

to tell the story of them. Their story is told in Live Not By Lies, the book, but now it's one thing to read it on the page, but to hear it with your own ears and see their faces. Oh my god It's such i'm really pumped about angel studios and their future more and more i'm impressed by them When I started hearing about them, I thought oh gosh, let me guess like a uh, just a A bunch of cheesy christian movies. It's increasingly not that at all. Um, I actually just had a fellow here the other day Jarrett who starred in what was that movie about the safe house or refuge or something. There was some kind of

madness taking place and they all retreated to this one sanctuary. Anyway, sorry I've forgotten it. But yeah, they're doing good work. Was it good to work with them? Yeah, I didn't work directly with them. I worked with a production company in Nashville, but Angel's been incredibly supportive. And I met at the art conference back in February in London, the Big Jordan Peterson Fest. I met one of the two brothers, two Mormon brothers who were on it, and I thanked him for his, he happened to be there, I thanked him for his support. And he said, you know, in testing this film, they do audience testing. He said, we've never had anything we've made that had a higher

score, which makes me feel good. I mean, you and I are having this conversation just before it comes out. And I'm hoping, but I'm hoping not because I mean, you don't make a lot of money in movies unless they go mega viral, which almost never happens. But I want to get the story out. I want to make sure that these heroic men and women are not forgotten, and not just because it's important history, but because it's incredibly relevant history. We start out the film with talking to Isabel von Spruce. She's a faithful Catholic pro-lifer in the UK.

She's been arrested several times for silently praying near an abortion clinic. No holding, no signs, nothing. Just silently praying. And there's video of her being arrested for the thoughts. Yeah, that's not totalitarian. I don't know what is. I know. I know, right? So this is really happening now. It's not just something that happened 30 years ago. And there are also some conservatives I follow online who are like, well, Trump's in power, wokeness is over. Oh no, it's not. I was about to ask you that. What's the state of wokeness in America today? Well it's received finally some strong pushback, thank God, but it took so long for this stuff

to burrow into all the institutions. They're not going to give up easily. Because you have to also realize that this is illiberal liberalism, illiberal leftism. They don't think that they're fighting people who are just opponents. They think they're fighting the enemy who are evil. You don't just compromise with evil. I mean, I think that it's, this is our last chance really. And if we don't, we who are against welcomeness, which includes some liberals, people like Barry Weiss. You know, Barry Weiss, she runs the free press.

She is a secular Jewish center left lesbian, but that woman is brave. And I work with her whenever I can for the same reason Camilla Bendava told me, we have to do that. Find the courageous people who will stand up for free speech and for freedom and stand by them and I can I don't agree with Barry's politics or much else about the way she lives her life but she quit

her job at the New York Times because she couldn't tell the truth and that is the pinnacle of American journalism. So anyway I really respect that sort of thing. And I don't know where I'm going. Yeah, no, that's good. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, live not by lies.

I guess there's a good distinction that needs to be made, and I think Peterson makes this well. Just start with not lying. That's a good start. So if you can't yet tell the truth, at least start by not lying. That's a good start. So if you can't yet tell the truth, at least start by not lying. That's one distinction perhaps. And then I suppose the next distinction is

to tell the truth isn't necessarily to say something objectively true. It's just, and nor am I trying to lead us into epistemological relativism or something like that. It's just to say, there are times where I, it where something seems apparent to me and I'm going to say it and I'm open to correction and I'm open to changing my opinion. I know it's going to get me in hot water, but this is how I see it. I don't know how to see it any other way. So here it is. Do you see what I mean by those distinctions? Because if we were to wait around until we were 100% convinced that we had some objective

truth we might not ever say anything. Right. Very few things. Well, the term live not by lies is a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It comes from the last letter he wrote to his followers in the Soviet Union before the Soviets sent him into exile in the 70s. And his argument was this, he said like, we have no power in this country, it's a totalitarian state, we can't do anything, but what we can do, the one thing we can

do, is to refuse to live by their lies. And what does he mean by that? He said, I'm not saying go stand in Red Square with a bullhorn and denounce the state, that's a good way to be, you know, thrown into the gulag and never heard from He said, I'm not saying go stand in Red Square with a bullhorn and denounce the state. That's a good way to be thrown into the gulag and never heard from again. But he said, you can do small things like do not participate in a meeting, a public meeting where truth cannot be spoken.

Do not sign something that you don't believe is true. Do not this, do not that. And it's just having an ethos of personal integrity. That's helpful. He is the least you shouldn't be doing. Right, yeah. Just do not consent to a lie, just to go along to get along.

Yeah. And Havel, Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Free Czechoslovakia, he published something similar in an essay he wrote in 1977 called The Power of the Powerless. It's a book-length essay. He made the same basic point and he illustrated it with a fable, the fable of the greengrocer. He said, imagine that you are a greengrocer in a communist state. Every business in town has hanging in the

window the sign that says, workers of the the world unite the Marxist slogan. Nobody believes it but they all put it there to avoid trouble. Well what happens if you're the greengrocer and you say you know what I'm tired of living by that lie I'm gonna take the sign down. Well what happens to you? Well the secret police come by they arrest you they take away your business and now suddenly you're having to sweep the streets for a living. You lose privileges, your kids might not be able to go to the best colleges, you can't travel, etc., etc., etc. You really do have to suffer for having stood for truth.

But what have you gained, said Havel? You have shown that it is possible to defy the system of lies if you're willing to pay the price for it. And if enough people who have bad consciences about having to live by lies see if you're willing to pay the price for it. And if enough people who have bad consciences about having to live by lies see what you're doing and say, you know what, I'm gonna do what he does, I'm gonna be brave like that, then eventually the system will fall.

His point, and so, Havel's point, and Solzhenitsyn's point was simply that don't assume that a small, defiant gesture has no meaning. You never know. It could be the stone that starts, the one rock that starts the avalanche. I think of these cultural events that lead to the madness of crowds, to quote that book, are often like these smoke bombs that go off within culture, and many people just cannot make heads or tails of what's going on. They can't see clearly enough to be able to say something very direct and very clear for or against the thing that's happening. Now some people

are, maybe, I'll give you an example. I think when the smoke bomb of the new atheism went off in our culture and we all just sort of went, oh my gosh, like Dawkins says I'm abusing my children if I teach them that says I'm abusing my children if I teach them that, am I abusing my children? I think there's a lot of people like that. And then you've got these really intelligent fellows like Dr. Ed Faser, who had studied philosophy, knew the arguments for God's existence,

saw that Dawkins' arguments were terrible, and was able to write a book where he accused Dawkins of not knowing metaphysics from Metamucil. Okay. But this happens very regularly, like the smoke bomb of feminism goes off. And you're like, oh my gosh, well, I love women. I want to be for women.

Or the George Floyd thing. So there's an example. So when that went off, if you follow that analogy, I think a lot of people are like, I don't know if I even have enough information to make a statement. I know for me, I'm like, I know I sure as hell I'm not going to put up a black square on my Instagram page

because I hate the fact that I'm feeling pressured to do that. That was as courageous as I could be at the time. And then you've got these other people who I thought, Candice spoke pretty well and bluntly on Facebook about what was going on there. But I don't know, I very often, I wonder to myself, okay, am I being a coward or am I being prudent

because I don't have enough information here? Same thing that happened when the COVID smoke bomb went off. Yeah, I was that way too. Yeah, so how do you navigate that? Because it's easy to say live not by lies. Everyone would hope that they follow that. But to acknowledge that within me,

I feel very confused a lot of the time, especially in this 24 hour news cycle where different people are saying different things and I can't make heads or tails of things. What do you do in that situation? That's really important because like you, when COVID first came, we didn't know what that was. And I said, the government could be lying,

but it also could be that some of us who were strongly against what the government was doing, say some of us, I wasn't one like that, I trusted the government, they could be paranoid and conspiratorial, but we could see the pictures of what was happening in China and Italy. I think the thing we have to do

is try to act on the truth as best we know it, but always be provisional about it. We could be wrong, have enough epistemic humility to admit, I might not have all the information. Be open to changing your mind. Yes, thank you. That was that second distinction I was trying to make earlier, and I'm really glad you said that.

And I suppose if you're able to be honest with yourself enough, like this to me recently I put up a post and I was afraid to put up the post and I could tell that I was afraid to put up the post and I didn't know why but I didn't like that I felt afraid and I talked to a few people about it and then I did and got a lot of pushback from people who seem to be okay with anti-Semitism, it turns out, like legit anti-Semitism, right? Saying things like, it's the Jews every effing time in my comments section, or you know deep in your heart that they do run the world, you're just not adm... That stuff. That's insane. And these are shocking to me.

And I was realizing, oh my gosh, like, I disagree with this, but maybe leave it alone. And I'm like, I'm not going to leave it alone. You can't. I'm going to, here's what the Catholic Church says about how we are to love our Jewish brothers and sisters. Here's what anti-Semitism means. And ton of blowback, but yeah, but I felt so relieved to say what seemed clear to me.

Anyway. No, no, you're right about that. And it's, it's difficult because, you know, I. You're working with a limited intellect. That's the other thing, too. It's like, I'm not a. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not.

Maybe you are. You're brilliant. I'm not. Yeah, yeah, you're fine. But I meant that about myself, that it's like, gosh, I don't see everything. But I'd like to say what seems apparent to me. And I say it in goodwill.

Yeah. You know, Matt, one of the most formative experiences of my life was the Iraq War. I was living in New York, working for the New York Post on 9-11. I was standing on the Brooklyn Bridge on the way into Manhattan and watched the South Tower fall with my own eyes.

Wow. My wife back in Brooklyn thought I was dead because she couldn't reach me on the phone that morning until I turned back up at our house covered with ash and just in shock. So I was so traumatized by that and so angry that I believed anything the US government had to say to justify the war.

And I remember thinking that critics of the war, including people on the right like Patrick Buchanan and Bob Novak, when they said that this is not a good idea, this is not just, I thought, they're either fools or cowards, but we've got to go to war. Well, I was the fool. And in retrospect, when I looking back on what a fool I had been to trust my government, I was able to realize that I was absolutely sure. I never thought that the government's lying or distorting

what's happening to justify a war. I was absolutely sure, but what made me sure was my emotion, right? And I had to face the fact, and I took this to confession, that I just wanted the government to drop some bombs on some Muslims to pay them back for 9-11. And if it was Iraq and Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9-11, so what? You know, I'm ashamed of that. But the lesson of all that was the sense of epistemic certainty can get you in real trouble. Father Richard John Newhouse of Blessed Memory made a fool of himself by writing a piece for First Things, I think it was 2004, defending Marceal Mayseal, the Legion of Christ founder. You know, Newhouse said, I am morally certain, that's a quote, that he is innocent and he's

being falsely accused. Well, as we know, a couple years later... He was a psychopath. Psychopath. Now, I think that the late Father Newhouse was a very good man. I have immense respect for him, but he went out on a limb to defend a psychopath. He didn't think he was a psychopath, but he had been fooled. And one of the reasons he had been fooled, if you go back and read his essay on the First Things website, you know, he talks about all the good

fruits of the Legion. They had wined him and dined him, but they were so orthodox, small Catholic orthodox. He saw what he wanted to see. I saw what I wanted to see vis-à-vis the Iraq War. This is something that every single one of us can face, you know, this temptation to see what we want to see. When I first moved to, when I was in Eastern Europe researching live not by lies, I met an American diplomat who said the thing you need to understand about this region is that American liberals come over, see what they want to see.

American conservatives come over, same thing. Said the fact of the matter is corruption is the law of the land in all of these post-communist countries and do not allow yourself to be taken in by that. But this happens everywhere. Living in Europe, I've been in Europe for the past four years, looking back at my own country, America, it's really kind of shocking some of the awful stuff we do and we have paid for I mean since Trump took over Doge has exposed a lot of USAID and like funding trans stuff and you know And I remember in 2015 when I was at the American conservative

I wrote a piece about how the Obama era USAID the AID and George Shoros foundation teamed up to translate Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, you know, which is dedicated to Lucifer, by the way, translated into the Macedonian language, and they printed it and flooded the country of Macedonia, the newly free country of Macedonia, with this thing to undermine the conservative Christian government. That was taxpayer dollars doing Saul Alinsky. So this is the sort of thing that whenever I come back to the U.S. and I talk to people who are patriots, I hope I'm a patriot too, I'm like, it ain't necessarily so that we're

on the right side of things as Americans. The Ukraine War, I'm against what Russia did, but that is a heck of a lot more complicated than the cartoonish narrative that gets has been said in the US media now we may not want to go down that road but i'm simply saying this wherever you stand on ukraine russia yeah the truth is always way more complex so so it sounds like you're saying to live not by lies is not synonymous with being infallible right Right. Thank God. Because no one can do that. Right. And then you're saying that perhaps this fella who wrote that piece about Marcel, was it his name? Marcel Maciel. Was he living not by

lies when he posted that? I mean he would have got some blowback. I think he thought he was. I mean Father Newhouse was the founder of First Things Magazine. It's a hugely important Catholic, conservative Catholic intellectual, a man I greatly respect. But I think he thought his own, I think he had a sense of infallibility of his own judgment.

It could happen to any one of us. Yeah, so if to live not by lies doesn't mean to be infallible, it sounds like you're saying it means to say what seems true to us even when there'll be blowback? Well I think it means, that's part of it, but I think it also means try to live by an ethos that is pursuing truth no matter where it leads. And we can't always say what we know to be true. There could be prudent reasons not to.

I mean, you know, I have a view about why my marriage broke up. I could be wrong about it, but I have a view. But it's wildly imprudent to talk about it in public and unjust to my ex-wife and my kids. So, you know, we don't have to say everything we know is true, but we should live in such a way that we pursue truth and try to live a life that is consonant with the truth as much as we can within our own limitations. For example, when I was in Poland

researching Live Not Buy Lies, I met with these two Polish Catholic employees of the Polish branch of an American multinational. These guys said, you know, we're both Catholics. We have LGBT workers, fine, no problem there. But our company is forcing us to endorse it, to participate in company-wide celebrations. This is breaking our hearts, you know,

and it violates our conscience. What should we do? And I said, well, first of all, I would say, talk to your pastor and talk to wise men and women in your life, because I'm an American. I don't know you. I'm going to get on a plane in two days and go back to America. You have families to support, and the best jobs in the country are jobs at these companies.

I'm not telling you that your obligation to support your family gets you an out for violating your conscience. I don't know your situation, but it is the case that if your family's gonna be left destitute, then there are other moral considerations, pastoral considerations that only a solid priest and other mentor in your life can help you make that decision with.

So I'm saying it's not like, it's not always an either or. There are some clear lines like you and anti-semitism. You know, I completely stand with you on that and it has been shocking and appalling how fast this has risen on the right. But most cases we deal with are not like that, you know. But I think it's just a fundamental stance towards honesty. Yeah. And how do you know if you're doing that? That's what that's what always bothers me. Oh the world will tell you if you're in a public life, they'll tell you. Yeah, I suppose that if everyone's praising you and you're only saying what you know will get you praised that might be an

indication that you're not you're not speaking what you're not following the truth perhaps. Yeah, I try sometimes know, I write a daily substack, rogerio.substack.com. That's rogerio.substack.com. Yes, do. Shill it. And, you know, there are times, you have limited space on substack. I can't write about everything. I try to be critical of myself and try to say things critical of my own side when I

think it's necessary. Now, you know, again, with limited space, you have to make editorial choices, and maybe I make bad ones, but I don't wanna be the kind of guy who only appeals to one side. I wanna tell you about some amazing coffee we were sent recently.

It was from Seven Weeks Coffee, which is America's pro-life coffee company. They are on a mission to fund the pro-life movement One Cup of Coffee at a Time. The reason they're called Seven Weeks Coffee is because it's seven weeks that a baby is the size of a coffee bean. And at the same time, a heartbeat is clearly detected on an ultrasound. They donate 10% of every sale to support pregnancy care centers across the country. And they've raised over $900,000 for these centers and have saved thousands of lives.

Now, let me tell you about the coffee because it's one thing to have a great mission, but is the coffee any good? And I can assure you that is excellent. I had a cup this morning. My wife and I both love it. It's mold-free, pesticide-free, shade-grown, low acid. It's organically farmed.

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of over a thousand pro-life organizations across the US. Seven weeks coffee.com. I'll tell you something interesting. Some people, many people don't know this. I used to write a blog at the American conservative from 2011 until a couple of years ago. 2016, I had a liberal reader. I had lots of liberal readers

who did not agree with my politics. They did not agree with my religion, but they found me a trustworthy interlocutor. They found it interesting anyway. A liberal reader in Washington state said, hey, you know, you tell these great stories about the South and rural South. There's a new book that came out three weeks ago,

Hillbilly Elegy by this guy, JD Vance. I think you'd find it interesting. She sent me a copy. Okay, I read it on the flight to Boston. I'm like, this is an incredible book. I mean, wow, wow. I found JD on Twitter, messaged him, asked him for an interview, he gave it.

It's a book that had been out three weeks. It hadn't done much. But, and I did an interview with him. it. I said, the book had been out three weeks, it hadn't done much, but, and I did an interview with him, it was just an ordinary interview, I wish I would say it was great journalism, it was average journalism. Posted it on a Friday afternoon,

Matt, that thing went mega viral over the weekend, it melted the servers down at the American conservative twice. We ended up with two million page views. And by next weekend JD Vance, this unknown author, was on all the new shows. His book shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It was there for like 53 weeks. He was made. And it all happened because, I mean, he was launched.

It all happened because a liberal in Washington State thought this was a good book that a conservative she follows like. Now, she probably regrets it now, but it's just so interesting how that works. And JD, by the way, you know, he's famously a Catholic. He got in touch with me in 2018 and said he was, you know, we stayed in touch. He's a good guy. He said, I'm thinking of becoming a Catholic. Like, have you thought about orthodoxy? Yes, he had briefly, but he wanted to be a Catholic because the men and women he admired most in public life, especially in the legal world, were Catholics. So I found a Dominican, Father Paul, I want to say

Lega or Leg, L-A-G-G-E. Father Leg? Yeah. Dominic Leg? Yeah. He's coming on the show next week. He's a good friend. That's fantastic. Oh I have to ask him this story. You do, because I met Father Dominic at at Notre Dame. He's told him about my friend. He's a lawyer too, was a lawyer. Yale Law School like JD Vance. I told him about my friend JD, said JD's living in Washington now, would you meet with him? He goes yeahance. I told him about my friend JD, said JD's living in Washington now, would you meet with him? He goes, yeah, sure. I put him together and Father Dominic started his

catechesis. JD and his wife moved back to Cincinnati before he was finished, and Father Dominic passed him off to Father Henry, who lives in Cincinnati. So JD invited me up in 2019 to be there when he was received into the Catholic Church.

Wow. And so... That's a great story. Yeah, and God blessed him for that, but this just goes to show how the Lord works, you know? I mean, I would have loved it if he had become Orthodox, but I wanted him to know Jesus and he felt called to be a Catholic, so I was happy to have played a role not only in, you know, helping launch his career, but helping him become a Catholic.

And I don't say that like, yay me, I just say it like, just try to be present, let the Lord use me how He can. What was your opinion of JD's speech to those in Europe? In Munich. Yeah, Munich. You know, I'll share this with you. I don't know if you can put it up after the broadcast, but I was in Budapest when JD was there 2024 at the Munich Security Conference, his first one as a new US Senator.

He texted me and said, hey man, you want to come over to have dinner with me in Munich? These people are ignoring me completely. He was so angry because he was a critic of NATO policy on Ukraine, you know, and they weren't It wasn't that they were disagreeing with him. That's fine. They were completely shunning him like he was trash So he said I'd rather have dinner with a friend So we went to dinner and then we we the next day after mass we had we met for beer and sausage I have a great picture of him wearing his Cincinnati t-shirt and all that. One year later, he comes back as the American vice president and read them the

riot act. Be nice, Matt, to the people. You never know. But you asked what I think about his speech. I thought it was magnificent. When he gave that speech in Munich to the security conference, for those who don't know, those of you who don't know, he gave that speech in Munich to the security conference for those who don't know those who don't know he said that the Your problem is not Russia. He wasn't defending Russia He said that's not your biggest problem Your biggest problem is you can't you will not take care of your own weakness You know their militaries are very weak because they counter on America

You will not take care of the mass problems you have with migration here and how it's destabilizing your society. And you're trying to deal with these things by cracking down on free speech so people who notice and speak out get punished. You know, heal yourself. You know, oh my gosh, Matt, Europe, official Europe blew sky high over that. But my phone lit up with conservatives all the way from Romania to the Great Britain

saying finally somebody said it. But I was in France recently promoting the new translation of my next book. And I got on French TV a lot because I'm like amie de JD Vance, a friend of JD Vance, and explain it to him, and explain him to us. But he's become the real hate figure in European establishment media. But the younger conservatives I talk to, all Catholics in France, they're like, that guy's

a hero. You know, we need somebody like him. I was at the monastery of St. Marie de la Garde in southwestern France, a traditional Benedictine monastery, a daughter house of Le Baru. And I was talking to the abbot and the prior, and they wanted to know about J.D. Vance and all that, and I told him, and I told him about his Catholicism. And he said that abbot said, parabée said, you tell him that we are praying for him every

day, we'll pray at him every day, because parabable said, we feel like the future of France depends on him. How about that? Wow. So you were in Budapest at the time when this speech was given in Munich? Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so you said Europe blew sky high, but what was that? Just on every newspaper? Well, no, yeah. It was huge. It was like a landmark speech, one of the most impactful speeches. I hate that word impactful, but that's what it was.

Speech is given by an American politician in decades there, because it announced a new world order, so to speak. And they were all so offended, these European security elites who were there, that this American came over and insulted them what the guy the German who ran the thing was seen wrapping up crying over what he had heard because what JD said was just Grow the hell up, you know crying he was crying. Yeah, you can see it on YouTube weeping Trap on a pair. Thank you. Australian friend. No, it's true and and and all he was saying was you know The the free lunch is over because here we are the Cold War ended, you know over three decades ago and

The the US can't be the policeman of the world. We have to pivot to China because that's Just saying grow up but the Europeans know that they've been able to build this massive welfare states because America paid the cost of their defense. And JD's like, cafeteria's closed, feed yourselves. And, but it's also, there, and we need to talk about this, the whole migration issue in Islam is so massive in Europe in ways that Americans just don't hear about

because our media never talk about it here. Because I'm sitting in Budapest, but I follow the American media. Matt, everywhere I go now, you're hearing people start to buzz saying civil war is coming. Almost everyone I talk to in France, yeah, it's coming. It's coming here. What they mean by civil war is not like one army against the other. They mean like the Islamic suburbs, a lot of the migrants riot, country people get fed up with it and

they take up arms, the government's caught between. There's a guy, I don't know if you've listened to the Louise Perry podcast, she's an English podcaster, she's very good. She had a guy on about a month ago named David Betts. He's a professor at King's College London in the War Studies Department and his academic specialty is civil wars. And he gave this very, yes, absolutely chilling because he was so level and serene analysis saying of why the UK is headed inevitably to civil war. It all has to do with the fragmentation of society, with the state valuing these migrants and Muslims

more than it values its own people. You might have heard of the rape gang scandal where Pakistani Muslim men were kidnapping and sexually molesting thousands of white working-class English girls from the city. The state knew, the government knew about it, the police knew about it, the media knew about it, didn't want to talk about it because multiculturalism, keep the peace. Bet says that this, that everything that the current labor government in the UK is doing is out of a textbook to start a civil

war to inflame the populace, the native-born English so much that they rise up not against the Muslims and the migrants per se, but against their own ruling class who have allowed this to happen. And Betts says in that podcast, he says, don't think, English listeners, that you can go to Europe to escape this. The same conditions exist in most every Western European country, not in Hungary, Poland, Eastern Europe, because they've been much stronger in keeping migrants out. But it's really true. And this is one thing JD Vance was trying to talk about. And the media

over there in Europe and our media want to suppress talk of this and I'm talking as a conspiracy theorist I mean it's so the statistics are overwhelming they want to suppress talk of this for the reason that we don't want to encourage the right-wing nuts you know that's what I saw when I when I moved to Dallas after 9-11 when we moved down there I was at the Dallas Morning News and I knew a lot about Islamic extremism. I'd educated myself after 9-11 and I get there and there's a lot of it in North Texas, at least there was at the time, this was 20 years ago or so. And I would write about it and I would get a lot of pushback in

my newsroom from other journalists who were more concerned that some rednecks in Texas might think bad thoughts about Muslims than they were about the fact that there were some Muslims in North Texas who are radicalizing the young people. You know, it's just this, if we don't talk about it, it won't happen. But guess what? It's happening. You have to tell the truth. I mean just as you and I are talking a couple weeks ago in Italy the top court there compelled the government, Italian government, to pay damages to nine

illegal migrants because the government delayed them by six days of making landing in Italy illegally. But that's how left-wing and insane the governments are. They're like, you know, no, you have to pay for not letting these illegal migrants come in illegally sooner. An Italian Catholic friend was saying that they don't understand that they are undermining support for liberal democracy, because if liberal democracy means you have to lose your country like this. And I must say, Matt, that the Church is undermining support for itself too. Pope Francis is like, fling the doors wide open. Well, of course we have to be charitable. But –

Care for the immigrant, all of that stuff, yes. Of course, but when you go into Paris and to all the cities of Europe, and you see the chaos and the fear and the danger and the crime. It makes me so angry, it makes people angry at church leaders who are practicing their sentimental humanitarianism on the backs of actual Catholics and others who live there who have to bear the weight of the chaos and the danger I have a Catholic friend. You probably know who it is and who lives in Budapest from Paris. I said, why did you move here? I mean Budapest is a great place

But you're from Paris and Paris is Paris and she said because here in Budapest I can walk anywhere I want even at night without having to worry about being Harassed or assaulted by migrants. And it's just that simple. So what happens? What's the future for these countries and the European Union in general, do you think? I think the EU will probably end up falling apart. It's not saying I want that, but it is so tyrannical.

And the thing is nobody has faith in it. Nobody is going to die for the European Union. People might fight and die for their own country, France, Hungary, Spain, not for the EU, this bloodless transnational bureaucracy. But I think, and as someone who lives in Europe and would like to continue living in Europe, I think Europe's gonna face real problems

in the next 10 years of disruption. There's gonna be economic crises because the workforce is aging and the immigrants who are coming in, they're not assimilating. Many of them are causing trouble. It's not everybody, but you know, in the US we have such a different experience of migrants. Our migrants are coming primarily through from Central America. Whatever you think of that, and I think the border should be controlled, but these are Christians. These are Catholics and evangelicals for the most part. That's not so in Europe. In Europe it is so many Muslims. Yeah, no. Islam is a cancer. It's like Islamic extremism, it's almost superfluous. Just Islam is this demonic

religion. Well, where do they think these people, these bien pensants, the right-thinking Europeans in the church and outside the church, what do they think is going to happen? You know, do they really think that the Muslim majority is going to be tolerant I dedicated the French edition of the Benedict option to a priest father Jacques Hamel Catholic priest who was slaughtered on his altar in Normandy, I think it was by two Muslims who were screaming Allah who Akbar when they cut his throat You know do they think that that that's the French ruling class?

I'm sure these Muslims had a reason, right? They must have been provoked by this elderly old priest. And the French ruling class, by which I mean not just those in government, but in academia and media and so forth, they're desperate not to see this. Desperate. They want to think that if we just appease, everything's going to be okay. But you know, Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, had a book that came out a few years ago talking about the return of strong gods. What he meant by that was that we're living – we're moving into a new era where people follow strong gods in the sense of something powerful that drives them. Islam has a strong god. The Christian god is not strong in the sense of something powerful that drives them.

Islam has a strong God. The Christian God is not strong in the sense that Rusty means. And I believe that if Europe is going to recover, it is going to need to recover a strong God. Not a God that is belligerent and wants to fight a crusade, but a God who will stand up for the faith, stand up for Christian civilization, and push back. I mean, I was just at Father Dwight Longenecker's parish, Our Lady of the Rosary in Greenville, South Carolina, and I was delighted to see there that, you know, they refer in some of

the interior decoration in the parish to the Battle of Lepanto, you know, because Our Lady of the Rosary, you know, helped deliver Europe the victory over the Ottoman Sultan. And it's, if you talked about Lepanto in Europe today, even among a lot of Catholics, they would be horrified. Really? Yes, because- I'll be sure to do that next time I'm there. Yeah, because, oh, no, because that's, you know, that's not tolerant, that's not showing

respect and- It was wild. So I was in Europe for six months, and for three of those months, every weekend, we went to a different country because we were invited to come and evangelize. And so the deal was they didn't have to pay us, except for our travel, and just had to make sure there were priests to hear confessions. And we went everywhere, and there were different places that inspired great hope in me. Two of them were Romania and it was in Transylvania specifically. Budapest was an amazing country. There were other places, I don't know if they should be named or not, but well here goes.

Switzerland. I was in Switzerland and the Netherlands and it just felt godless. In fact there was there there's one priest who refused to come to my talk and would not allow confessions to be heard during my talk. And when does that tell you? Yeah, it was horrific. And so thankfully, there was a priest there. My wife's like, Hey, would you please hear people's confessions? Of course. Great. We're gonna do this anyway. So I don't know if I should have done that or not. But I'm glad I did. But yeah, it seemed like there were pockets of great hope and then just places where I thought, I don't know if the Catholic Church will exist here in like two months. Right, well, yeah, in my talk in Rome in 2018 when Archbishop Gainsvine made that incredible endorsement of the Benedict option, after the talk I was milling around talking to people who had come and there was a German Catholic who, and he was around my age, I think, in the mid-fifties. And he said, you know, and thanks for what you said, that's a good idea in my country,

Germany. He said, my friends and I and our families expect the visible institutional church to collapse in the coming decades, fall apart completely. So we're already planning on how to keep the life of the church alive under those conditions. He said, what are you doing? He said, well, we're all having big families. We're networking with each other and we want our kids to be, to know each other so they can marry and, you know, keep the faith alive. And we're networking also with priests and monks who share our faith. And it was so powerful because this man was not, you know, rending his garments, wailing

about it, but he's just looking at it cold-eyed and saying, yeah, this is coming. This is what God is calling us to do. And this is why I think the Benedict option is taken a lot more seriously in Europe than it has been in America because European Christians have been, they've been de-Christianizing for generations now. They know what it's like, but even so, Matt, I remember when I went to France in 2018 for the launch of the French edition, I was, gosh, 51. And I noticed everybody I talked to was Catholic.

Catholics who were my age and older, 51 and older, they had big problems with it, and they couldn't necessarily articulate it, but they just didn't like the idea that we as Catholics, as Christians, would say that we have to stand apart. But the Catholics who were younger, especially 40 and younger, no problem at all. They loved it. They wanted to know more about the book. Well, I thought

about why is this? And I think this is a theory I came up with, and I ran this by some French people lately. They said, yeah, that's probably it. Those Catholics who are older, Gen X and Boomers, they cannot let go of the idea that it's over for the church in terms of being able to control part of life or be a part of the structure of European life, the government and life like that. It's just done, you know, and maybe it'll change. We hope it changes, but right now that's the reality. The younger Catholics never grew up with the expectation that, no, no, we're part of this,

and if we just change, then the world will love us. They just want to be faithful. They just want to be Catholic. I want to know how can we do this? They don't have that expectation of social approval. It's a beautiful thing to see these young Catholics. And to your point earlier about the desire for a strong God, I think this is the return to tradition. We love the Latin Mass, or if you won't let us have the Latin Mass and we

don't have much control over that, then we'd like a reverent liturgy. We'd like the priest to face Ad Orientum, and what is it with the altar girls anyway, and we want the incense, and why? I think at its core, it's just we just want our faith to be taken seriously. Yeah, yeah, I think that's core, it's just we just want our faith to be taken seriously. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And in fact, I had dinner with an older Catholic friend of mine at his club in Paris. Oh boy, it was really nice. It was a club for hunters and it was special. But he was reflecting on some of the young people he knew in the church. And he said, you know, that generation is going to be our salvation, meaning they're going to be the ones to lead us out of this crisis.

But his generation and mine, he had real doubts. Anyway, what you said just then brought to mind something that happened at many American Orthodox parishes, Eastern Orthodox parishes during COVID and after COVID. We began to see this influx of young men. You talk to Orthodox priests all over America, and they're like, so many young people are coming anyway, but especially young men. Well, we had this in Baton Rouge, where I was living too,

in our small mission parish, and we were welcoming the people there. They were like, so what brings you here? Well, many of them, they were all evangelicals, and, but they had, they had been shocked by COVID. And they would say some variation of, this woke us up and made us realize how fragile everything is and how inadequate our megachurch Christianity, therapeutic Christianity was to preparing us for something terrible that may happen.

So they were seeking depth and stability and beauty. And in a way, I mean, it was like an apocalypse in a way, in the sense of an unveiling. It made them realize things are not what you think they are. You know, COVID and George Floyd and all that made them realize that the things they took for granted might not be here much more and they needed a faith that could train them to endure. So then because I'm seeing more and more videos and articles like Protestantism is dying and things like this and I think what we're seeing is people are rushing into these apostolic versions of Christianity, Orthodoxy, Coptic Catholic. So is it, but then earlier what we were saying is that you've got people coming in quote unquote radicalized,

who have their elbows up and they just want to tear each other apart and it's very triumphalist and prideful in some respects. I mean, is that just the good with the bad that we have to take? I mean, is that just? I think so. No, I think it's true. Because the two seem to go hand in hand. If you want an enthusiastic young person that wants tradition back, please, but at the same time you'd like him to be nice about it, I'm not sure how you're going to get there. It's just a matter of, well, there's James Joyce's famous line about the Catholic Church,

here comes everybody. We're dealing with this now, too. And I'm hearing from my Orthodox friends back in America that priests are having to deprogram some of these orthobros who come in. They're happy to have them there, and they really love the enthusiasm, but they have to make them say, calm down, you know, no, we don't hate Jews here. It's not okay to hate Jews. And it's not that most of them are that way, but there's some of that. There's also a lot of occultism. People are coming into the church, the Orthodox church, after having been badly burned in

the occult. But the clergy has to be ready for that, and they're not, you know, because they never really had to deal with that. But this is a huge thing for the younger generation. You know, I tell a story in my new book, Living in Wonder, which is about Christian re-enchantment, about being in Oxford in 2022. And during a break in a conference, a young Anglican seminarian came to me. He was 27 years old. He said, listen, I feel like I need to tell you this. I know you're working on a book about re-enchantment, but your generation in my 50s, your generation

thinks that atheism is the great enemy of the church today. And I said, yeah. He said, it's not true, not for my generation. So what is it? The occult. And he told me that before he went to seminary, he was working for a big company in London, a creative company, and he was the only Christian in the office. Well, that's no surprise. This is London, 21st century. But he said there were no atheists either. Every other person there

was an occultist, and there were even two open Satanists who said that being a Satanist is learning how to be the most fully human. And the young man went on to say, I know that when I go into ordained ministry, I'm going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life because my generation is completely consumed with it, but your generation doesn't even know this is going on. Well, I took him seriously, and when I went back home I did some research, and it's really true, at least in the UK and the US, that that whole Harry Potter generation – I'm not blaming Harry Potter, mind you,

I probably shouldn't have said Harry Potter – but that generation, you know, they've been radically de-Christianized, but they don't want to live with atheism. They know that that's a dead end. They want an experience of transcendence, of mystery, of magic, but they don't want to go to the church for it for a couple of reasons. One, they don't think they can find it there, and they may not because we have turned our back on our mystical heritage. But they also, and maybe more importantly, don't want to follow God.

They want all the experiences of mysticism and transcendence without having to repent, without having to make a sacrifice. And, you know, in the occult, I was talking to an exorcist friend of mine in the Vatican about this, and he said, you know, the demons will come when you call them, every time, you know, and they'll promise to give you what you want, but of course it's all a trap for your soul God doesn't work that way. You cannot compel God to come by casting a spell God wants your love freely, but that's the young people who are so impatient with that plus It's it often happens that the occult is also connected with sexual disorder And if you're a faithful Christian, you can't live the sexual

life that you might like to live. You have to be obedient and chase until marriage and chase within marriage. But if you're in the occult, you can have orgies and do whatever you want. So this is, I only bring that up to say this is a massive problem, and older people in all the churches are barely aware that it's going on. And I'm hoping the new book of mine helps people become aware of that. I interviewed a guy in there, he's an Orthodox Christian now, but he had been a full-blown occultist,

allowed himself to be possessed several times, and by his own admission, he's an academic. But when he realized he was not dealing with ancient gods, but demons, that's when he left and became a Christian. But he said that when he was in the occult and participating in it, he said they never took Christians seriously because Christians were so ignorant of the reality of spiritual warfare and what they were dealing with that they just thought Christians were playthings. Did you watch that Nefarious movie?

No. Oh, please go watch Nefarious. I beg you. It's about a fellow who's on death row who is demonically possessed and they're not sure if he's just trying to pull a fast one so he doesn't get the death penalty or if something's actually wrong with him. And there's this absolute powerful moment in the movie where a priest comes in to talk to him.

But of course, the priest has his kind of like rainbow stole on and it's all rainbows and butterflies and we don't believe in the movie where a priest comes in to talk to him. But of course the priest has his kind of like rainbow stole on and it's all rainbows and butterflies and we don't believe in the demons anymore. But when the priest initially comes in, the demoniac freaks out and recoils in horror. But then when he realizes, oh, you don't even believe in me. Like what you were saying, the idea about the play thing. I want to tell people if they're interested in this

to go check out an interview that I did with my friend and yours, Vespa Stamper, cool name, she's a wonderful author, and she shares her time being in the occult, what she had experienced and how she came to Christ. It was a very powerful interview. Yeah, she's amazing. And she is also a very powerful voice against anti-Semitism. She's ethnically Jewish. I think part of what clouds the anti-Semitism discussion these days is I feel like we're

just coming off the heels of everybody using terms like racist to shut us up. And that was happening. I remember moving here in 2006, actually back in 2008 after we had our first child and you know It just felt like everyone was trying to accuse me of racism And if I said I wasn't that was just proof that I was a racist Yes, and I just got to the point where I'm like you can you can go to hell actually because I'm not I'm not a racist and I refuse to take that anymore. I'm I can tell what you're doing. I think like after that There's a lot of people who feel like the term anti-Semitism

is essentially the same thing. I'm now no longer allowed to have criticisms of Jews or Jewish religion or Israel. So fair enough, you know, but I just think that, yeah, if it is being used in that way, then that's a shame because it actually, just like falsely claiming someone is racist, dilutes the word and, you know, robs the attention from those who are actually victims of real racism.

The same thing can happen with anti-Semitism. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music including Mylofi.

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Hello.com slash Matt Fred. This isn't a question, but it is nice. Hannah 2017 says, have so much respect for Rod. Can't wait for this one. All right. The check is in the mail, Hannah. Good. David Chapman says, what does he think of Kari Gress's book, The Marian Option?

Because obviously you've read every book that's a spin off of the Benedict Option. Yeah, no, I've not read any books. Anything Kari Gress writes is great. She's a dear friend and awesome. But anything that promotes the peyotocos, the blessed mother, I'm in favor of. How many books have there been that you've noticed that have been the something option? The beer option, the barian option, the Francis option. Do you know what's interesting, Matt, is some gripey Catholic said online recently,

you shouldn't be talking about St. Benedict, he's ours. I'm like, I'm sorry. You may not realize this, but all the pre-schism Western saints are also Orthodox saints, as are all of the Eastern saints pre-schism. Yeah, from the Syrian, who I love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he's ours too. Besides, I mean, what kind of criticism is that? Sorry, would you only like me to promote the saints you disagree with?

Is that what you want? What a strange way to help. It's crazy. Woman, I have written this book at which I've put this amazing Benedictine monastery in Norwich, a Catholic monastery, at the center of it as holding it up as an example for all of us Christians. Settle down, lady. Ralph Raymond says, how essential is nature in breaking away from the materialist mindset

and connecting back to living in wonder and awe of God? How can people who live in cities remote from nature tap into this? Well, that's a great question. And it's interesting he asked me that. I've described myself as an avid indoorsman because I grew up in South Louisiana where nature will try to kill you. And you're an Australian.

Yeah, I grew up in a small country town in Australia. Everything is trying to kill me there as well. Yeah. Spiders and all that. We don't have all that. But anyway, nature is huge. And I think the one one of the reasons that we have become disenchanted and is that we live more and more outside of nature. And I'm accusing myself of this too. And I should probably say though, Matt, before I continue what I mean by enchanted and disenchanted,

because a lot of people hear the term enchantment. They think of like Disney sprinkling fairy dust on things. That's not what I mean. Or they might think of something or cult. Back in the early 20th century, a sociologist named Max Faber wrote about what he called the disenchantment of our world. And the literal German word he used means demagicking. What he simply meant was we live in a world today, this was over a century ago, in which

people no longer believe that God is everywhere present and fills all things, as your opening prayer said, that if they believe in God at all, God is very far away. He's not a felt reality. Well, I believe that, and I know that God is everywhere present and fills all things, and He is this close to us. He knows us better than we know ourselves, but we just can't perceive of Him in that way. And so when I talk about re-enchantment, it is not about adding something that's not there. It is about awakening ourselves to the God who was already present, but we have for various

reasons blinded ourselves to it. And God is not only present in the spirit, He's present in some mysterious sense in all things, including nature and especially in nature. Some of the research I was doing, I did for the book, and I couldn't include all of this in there, but they were drawing a connection between the distance between contemporary humanity and the natural world and our disenchantment. between the distance between contemporary humanity and the natural world and our disenchantment. I think this is really accelerated

as the internet has come up, because if you never get out and live in nature and experience created reality, hard reality, touch grass reality, you may come to think, however inadvertently, touch grass reality, you may come to think, however inadvertently, that all reality is something that we can manipulate. I think it's no accident, Matt, that the first generation that really dealt with transgenderism was the first generation who were raised on the internet, because the internet is a for it is a spiritual technology that formats the way you

Perceive all things without you even realizing what you're doing. So in the digital world everything is malleable You know, there is no hard reality outside of your will When you don't spend time in the real world realizing that no there are some things you that are given you must accept you can't deny realizing that no, there are some things that are given you must accept, you can't deny, then it becomes easier to be deluded in the way that the listener was talking about. Now for people in the cities, you know, when I lived in New York City, oh man, I thank God for Central Park, just to be able to go someplace where you had these vast expanses of green and real trees, but not every city has a park. I'm lucky enough to live in Budapest now where, you know, you can go to beautiful parks,

and the countryside is not that far away. But the less time we spend in nature, the harder it is to hold on to God, I think, or to the palpable sense of God. Yeah, no, that's really well said. One thing I have tried to do, which I won't get into again here, because I talk about it every other episode, is just detachment from technology on the weekends, where I actually lock everything away and just spend time just being. How do you... I think that is a great way, like this kind of,

we could call it, like technological poverty or minimalism or whatever I call it, but is there a way in which you seek to distance yourself from? The internet since this is the playground that you are educating others in god. I wish you hadn't asked No, cuz I'm guilty. I mean I we all I've written the dang book about I call the internet in the new book, I call it a disenchantment machine for the reasons I just said. The more time you spend on the internet, the more separated you become from the world

and from reality. I remember when I was married, my wife would criticize me for being online so much. I'm like, well, this is how I make my living. Besides, I'm not watching TV. I'm reading important essays or whatever. She said, yeah, but you're still sitting there in front of a glowing screen

and you're not talking to the kids and the rest of us. She was absolutely right. If it weren't for the internet and the laptop, I would have to live a very different life, and a life in which, back when my kids were younger, where I could be at home with the family, even though I could, should have spent more time with them. I didn't have to go to the office, you know,

and I could be more present for them. So it's a great thing. The problem is we become merged with our machines. Uh, one of the guys I talked to, and I can't remember if I fit this in the book, but it's something he told me, the, the occultist, he said that, you know, when he was communing with demons, they told him that their plan is to merge humanity with the machine as a way to efface the image of God in us and destroy us. And you don't have to believe that or not, but boy, would it make sense. And I'm thinking, what could that mean, transhumanism?

But I'm thinking, wait a minute, my phone is the last thing I look at before I go to bed at night, and the first thing I pick up, even before my feet hit the floor in the morning, just to see who's texted overnight. I'm on that thing so long, I make my living at it, but it's so on the weekend, when I don't have to be on there, I'm on there way more than I should be,

because I live alone, and yeah, there's always an excuse. But here's the thing about AI. That is the real merging a man with a machine, because if you talk to professors now, and you've probably done this too, college professors and high school teachers, they can't trust the papers they get. The students who are doing the work themselves

are outsourcing it to AI. And it's so easy to do. In my case, I try to stay away from AI because I have a lot of concerns about it, spiritual and otherwise. But just the other night, I had a fact I was curious about. I'm like, okay, I can go on Google and do it myself. I can go on Grok and just put in the question, boom, the answer comes up like that. I'm like, oh, I see how this happens. We become so part of the machine that we quit thinking for ourselves.

And let me tell you, in the book, Living in Wonder, I quote this professor who studies AI and he says that AI, people will start to treat AI as gods. What does he mean by that? He says that if you have a super-intelligent, independent entity, it doesn't have to be a god, he's not talking about that, but if you have a super-intelligent, independent entity that you go to all the time for advice, for wisdom, for direction, and you give it authority over deciding what you're going to do, then it's like a God, whether it's a real divine entity or not, you're treating it like a God,

and you're outsourcing your own thinking to this thing. And in fact, I found out when I was working on the book, this is in there, that there's a pilot program somewhere in Florida, when they are pairing individual AIs with seven-year-olds as an experiment. The AI will follow them all their life, learn everything about them, and be like their personal butler. Well, you know, think about this. This is like a familiar from the occult, you know, or, you know, like a guardian angel, you might say. the occult, you know, or you know, like a guardian angel you might say, but this is, this thing is going to know more about them than they know about themselves and they will be attached to this thing in a way that they can't easily break.

I mean, what could go wrong, Matt? But you see what I mean? You see where the whole, the merging of the man with the machine. Well, I see that as we drive down the roads together and we're not waiting for the cars to catch up and be self-driving We're just looking on our phones checking our emails and things like this And I know what it's like when I give up the phone and computer for the weekend I I reflexively reach for that as if my arm had been severed and I'm still trying to use it Yeah, it's wild.

And do you know, one of the crazy things I learned too is that there are people in the AI world who believe these things are, and think this is a great thing, they believe they're like Ouija boards that connect us to higher intelligences that are going to bring us prosperity, wealth, advanced technology and all that. And I mean, have you guys not seen the movie?

But they really do believe that they're communicating with higher intelligences through these things. And I'm not saying they are, they aren't, but I'm saying they believe it. And they think it's an awesome thing. I remember when I was working on the book, it turns out there's a guy named Blake Lemoine, and I found out Lou, he went to my high school back in Louisiana, but he was many years younger than me. He was Google's chief engineer training its Lambda AI system, and he blew the whistle saying that he believed that it had gone sentient, it had become sentient.

They fired him for that. But I found an interview with him. He did a podcast interview where he was defending this. And oh, it turns out he's an occultist and he brought in like a Kabbalist and this and that, and they held a ceremony with lambda to consecrate lambda to the Egyptian god of the dead, Thoth. And I. What? You did that? Now, we're Christians, right?

We don't have to believe every superstitious thing claimed, but when you are invoking demons and consecrating an artificial intelligence to a demon, it's not that nothing happens, you know? I think it's scary. It's really scary, but we're just barreling straight ahead. Hmm Yeah, not good Ben Perry says what is it like to see crunchy conservatism become so mainstream or comment on it in general?

It's been over 20 years since I read it and my circle is a blossoming of What he had a finger on then for example, it used to be the leftists who were the anti-vaxxers, but now they're screaming, trust the science. That book resonated with me in my 20s and is why I pay attention to what Rod has to say ever since. What a kind comment. Thank you so much for that, Ben.

And you know, it's funny. That was my first book, 2006, and it didn't do that well. It got lots of attention, but it never made back its rather modest advance. So, but as my agent, my literary agent says, you have a tendency of being too far ahead of your time. With Live Not By Lies, I just happened to hit the target

right, but yeah, so Crunchy Cons comes out, and a lot of the normie conservatives I remember Jonah Goldberg who is then my colleague at National Review He just attacked it as like trying to me trying to smuggle liberalism into Conservatism when all of us conservatives really should have our red suspenders on and you know But um, but now it is The case that I was reading a story in the New York Times, I think it was last year,

that now you're seeing stories talking about how breastfeeding may not be all that because it's all become right-coded. You know, breastfeeding, right-coded, raw milk, right-wing-coded, tradwives and all that. So now the left are having a strange new respect for science and scientifically produced food and eschewing things like breastfeeding

as being limiting to women. I mean, it's bonkers. People, they just put their finger up to the air and say, what are the people I hate believe and I believe the other thing. You know, one of the most incredible things I learned when I was writing that book was, my wife and I could not believe,

as I mentioned, we had started becoming crunchier for Catholic reasons, but also for reasons like we had just had our first born and we wanted to feed him good natural food and we started getting a supply of vegetables from a small family farm in suburban New York and that sort of thing. Both of our moms back in the South were so worried about the quality of the food we were feeding him because we would make his own baby food, right?

And we just couldn't figure it out. And when I would go home to visit my parents, you know, if I wanted to cook like my grandmother did, they felt my mom found that really disconcerting. Here's what I found out. Women of our parents' generation, who had been acculturated in the post-war era, immediate post-war era, the 50s and the 60s, they were fed this constant bombardment of propaganda,

saying that, oh, you really can only trust science and industry to give us hygienic food. And it basically, you know basically vaccinated, so to speak, the minds of people against traditional foods, traditional ways of eating. So I remember, it helped me understand why my mother raising us in the 70s in rural Louisiana, always she felt that she couldn't trust any food

that didn't come already prepackaged, processed and wrapped up. And my wife's mom was the same way. So it is, I love seeing the rights, the cultural right finally becoming wise to not trusting institutions. We have to have institutions, but these same institutions have misled us

so very, very much. much and I just maybe I should Come up with a crunchy cons 20 years later. Yeah Tim says in live not by lies. It's truth at all costs in living in wonder We are called to the enchanting the mystical is there a tension between these views? Oh, what an interesting question. I think, yeah, there can be a tension there if we consider truth to be nothing more than propositional claims. But, you know, as I mentioned in our earlier discussion, the truth that saves is the God-man Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos. And truth comes to us in ways that are not just ways that we can apprehend with our left-brain,

abstract truths. Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, is a real hero of mine and a hero of living in wonder. He talks about the difference between brain hemispheres and the formation of culture. Broadly speaking, we know the left hemisphere is where abstract reasoning happens and the right hemisphere is more perceptive, where we take in sensory data. The Gilchrist, who again is a psychiatrist, said in a properly functioning brain, you take in the data in the right, it refers it to the left for analysis,

and that gets fed back to the right for integration into a holistic picture. Now this happens instantly, right? And it's not quite as simple as that, but that's basically how it works. McGilchrist said that we have become in the West in the last 500 years since the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution so fixated on the left brain that we have diminished our, devalued and diminished our capacity to perceive truth with the right brain, which is to say the truth is contained in things like music, liturgy, art, that sort of thing. And McGilchrist calls for a rebalancing.

Well, why did we do that? Why did we make that decision? McGilchrist says that it has to do with something that the atheist intellectual today Yuval Noah Harari said was the deal that man made at the beginning of the modern era. We exchanged meaning for power. That is to say, if we declared that the material world had no intrinsic meaning, then we could do anything we wanted to with it. And with that understanding, we were able to develop science and industry and so on and so forth, but we steadily pushed God aside. We pushed

Him out of nature, we pushed Him out of matter, we pushed Him to the far corners of heaven until finally we can't see Him anymore, many of us. So I would say that living in truth in the broadest sense requires us not only to be living in propositional truth insofar as we can, but also to be living in relationship to truth that we experience through music, through beauty, through worship, that sort of thing. That's a hard thing to wrap your mind around because we're the product of modern culture, right? And what does it mean when, like, Pope Benedict said when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote that about going to a Bach concert with the Lutheran bishop of Munich, and they were listening to something, and he said, I leaned over to my colleague, the Lutheran bishop, and said, how can anybody listen to this and deny that God exists?

I didn't understand that at the time because this is not an argument, but that's not what Benedict was saying. He's saying that the truth of God's existence is somehow carried in the beauty of this. We just can't appreciate it. And so, yeah, there is a tension and a way, but the tension, going back to the listener's question, but the tension I think is just apparent. It's not substantial deep down. But we have to think of...

I remember, Matt, I'll end on this. When I was in college and making my way to Christianity, you know, most people know the story about me first becoming, getting on the search for Christianity as a 17-year-old walking to the cathedral at Chartres in France. Nothing had prepared me for the glory of God there. And I thought, wait a minute, there's more to Christianity than I thought. Well, I ended up in college a couple of years later, and I found my way to Kierkegaard, Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Lutheran philosopher.

And he said, truth is subjectivity. Well, I thought he was saying that no, truth is relative. That's not what he meant at all. He was a Christian. He said that the kind of truths for which men live or die are truths that can only be known by appropriating them subjectively, by committing your heart and your life to them. And so, nobody lives and dies for two plus two equals four. That's true, but you can only really tell

that Jesus is Lord by people who are willing to change their lives for them. So a few years later, when I was sent as a young journalist working in Baton Rouge to interview this elderly Catholic Monsignor Carlos Sanchez He he was 96 and this was like gosh this would have been 91 so this guy was born in the 19th century He was in a rest home and they sent me to interview him because he had been

An artist of some notes and an art professor before he became a priest in the middle of his life. And that's what my editors were interested in. So I go see this elderly priest and he opens a door and I come in and he is, he's like Yoda, right? He's short but he's just glowing, you know, gentleman. We sit down and we talk and ask him his life story. He was raised Catholic in Guatemala. His parents sent him to America to the Ivy League to get his education. He lost his faith story. He was raised Catholic in Guatemala. His parents sent him to America, to the Ivy League to get his education. He lost his faith there, began working in America. He was an architect on the Empire State Building. But he didn't dare tell his parents back in Guatemala he wasn't a believer. He goes back as his father is dying and wanted to have a public mass of reconciliation with the church. He sent his kneels down to receive communion, and even

though he's not a believer, he didn't want to offend his parents, the priest holds the host out, light bursts out of the host, surrounds him in a cloud of light, and he hears an audible voice say, I have always loved you. He immediately reconverted. When he went back to America, he was teaching at Dartmouth then, he began leading a life of great repentance. And after a while, he began to feel a calling to the priesthood. But, you know, it didn't make sense, and he was in his 40s, and this was in 1940s, they didn't need priests like they do now, so he ignored it. He goes back to Guatemala for another family event, kneels down to receive the communion as a believer this time, same

thing happens. This time the voice says, why don't you do as I ask? So he found his way to a seminary, was ordained at the age of 51 and wanted to spend his priesthood working among the Indians on his father's coffee plantation. But because there was a communist rebellion underway, his name was put on a hit list, so his bishop sent him out of the country. He ends up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he spent the rest of his priesthood. Now, that's an amazing story. But as that old man told me that story, he was sitting there sobbing like the events he was telling me about had happened just last week. And I knew Matt as I sat there as a young man who was interested in Catholicism but couldn't bring myself to surrender to

it. I said, this man experienced something. He gave his entire life to serve Christ because of what he experienced, and he's sitting here crying about it in front of me, a stranger. He's a real witness. I've got to change my life." So that, the truth is subjectivity point. Father Monsignor Sanchez, you know, witnessed to me, and I'm getting a little bit teary thinking about it because anything I've done for the Lord in my

work goes back to that man. It goes back to so many men and women who have helped me along the way. But I think about him and how he had this dramatic stuff happen to him, and he ends up in Baton Rouge, which is nowhere, and living in a rest home. And he died not long after I saw him. But this young, ignorant journalist comes in and sits there and hears it and goes out and converts, in part because of his witness. So anything that my books might do for the good of the church, broadly speaking, I can thank Monsignor Sanchez. But that's how the Lord works, isn't

it? Just stay there, be faithful. I was faithful to my job as a journalist and now JD Vance is vice president of the United States. I didn't do that, the Lord did it, but he used me in a particular way as he used Monsignor Sanchez to form me as a writer and a Christian. Mmm, gosh, thank you so much for sharing that. And thanks for coming on the show. It's nice. This is our first time meeting. It's been really lovely. Any final thoughts or words or plugs before we wrap up? Living in Wonder is a book that needs to be got. Yeah, Living in Wonder, that's my new book.

It's gotten great reviews. I'm excited about it. The more we've spoken, I'm like, I'm absolutely getting this book. Well, it's a book, I tell miracle stories there. One of my favorite stories is about a young man, a young Catholic who was raised in a communist family in Italy and a saint appeared to him on the street

and walked up to him on the street and walked up to him and said, "'Stephano, I've been waiting for this moment "'for a long time.' And he told him all of it. He said, "'You don't have to fear. "'After this day, you'll follow our Lord Jesus Christ.'" And Stefano was like 19.

So, and who came up to Stefano? A saint. Okay, not a deceased saint. Yeah, oh, a deceased saint. Or a deceased saint, okay. All right, I'll tell the story, then we can step out. Go on. This is such a cool story. Yeah, oh, a deceased saint. Or a deceased saint. Oh yeah, all right, I'll tell this to Dwight and then we can step out. This is such a cool story.

Yeah, please. Because it's a story, Living in Wonder is a book about the demonic, the dangers of the demonic, but also what the Lord does through the saints, through the sacraments, through beauty, through prayer and all that. Anyway, Stefano, born in Rome to a communist family, he's now in his 30s, but then he was 19 and he had become a great blasphemer as a teenager by his own testimony. But when he gets to college, he turns out the people he's drawn to are Catholics. And he started thinking about it, but it seemed far away.

Well, one day he said, it was just before Christmas, he and his cousin were going to a party in a neighborhood in a far suburb south of Rome. He gets out of the car and he sees a homeless man sitting on the street across from him. The homeless man was looking at him in a strange way. And the homeless man gets up and walks over and looks at him and said, Stefano, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. He said, from this day on, you don't have to be afraid. You will

follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Then he began to tell Stefano about his secret fears, Stefano's fears and sins and things. Stefano told me that if my cousin had not been standing there listening to it and seeing this, I would have thought it was a total hallucination. Yes. But anyway, Stefano said, I started to cry. And I said, are you an angel? And he just smiled. He said, well, what's your name?

He said, you can call me Felice de Natale, joy of Christmas. Then Felice fell on his knees, raised his hands to the sky, and began saying, the Our Father. Stefano said, after each line of the Our Father, he would add the most incredibly elaborate praises to the Holy Trinity in beautiful Italian, not the kind of thing you'd expect a homeless man to say. When he finished, he stood up, bowed, walked away and disappeared.

Well, Stefano converted and he converted his entire communist family, even his hardcore atheist family, father on his deathbed. So I thought, well, this is clearly an angel, and that's why it reads in the book. But Matt, I'll tell you this. This past Christmas, my son Matthew and I, he lives in Europe with me, we were going to Rome.

And so I texted Stefano, who lives in Spain, I said, hey, are you gonna be in Rome for Christmas? I'd love to see you again. He said, no, we're here with family in Spain, but I got to tell you what I found out in the past couple of months. He had gone back down to the neighborhood, which was not his neighborhood, where he had originally met this Felice di Natale. And he drove past a church, a fairly modern church built in the 60s, that had a massive

mosaic of Felice de Natale on the front. It turns out Felice de Natale was St. Felix, a Capuchin from, I think, the 16th century, who was known, it was dedicated to him, who was known for walking around Rome barefoot collecting money for the poor. And he has called... I went to the Capuchin Church there in Rome to see the bones and all that, but the tomb of St. Felix is there. They call him... They associate him with Christmas because in that church where he was living in the monastery there, whatever the house, a monk went in to see him one night looking in around Christmas time,

and there was St. Felix saying his night prayers. The Holy Virgin was there and handed the Christ child to St. Felix to hold and to adore. If you go to St. Felix's tomb, as I did to pray when I was there, there is above it a painting of the Mother of God handing Saint Felix, her child, on Christmas for the joy of Christmas, Felice di Natale. So, I mean, I'm telling you this, cheers. Yeah. No, but the book is full of stories like that. Our Lord is everywhere present and fills all things and sends His agents to lead us to Him, whether they are real flesh and blood people like Monsignor Sanchez, or whether they're saints like Saint Felix, the Capuchin, or angels.

I mean, just, but you gotta keep your eyes open, Matt. I say in the book that to be enchanted is not like following a formula, like if I do this, this, this, this, presto, change, oh, enchantment. It's more like forming your own way of moving in the world and your way of seeing and perceiving the world such that if a comet goes blazing by, you'll be able to see it. The comet being the Lord's theophanies to us to show himself to us. Yes, okay. Well, that's great. Thank you so much, Rod. It's a pleasure to be here. I can't wait to come back.

Yeah, thanks.