The Eric Metaxas Show - Joseph Pearce

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Biographer Joseph Pearce explores the life of Pope Benedict XVI, "defender of the faith," whom Pearce regards as one of the greatest popes in Church history. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Taxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. I'm really excited right now. I get to talk to somebody who is a decidedly literary person. and a man of great faith. His name is Joseph Pierce. He's been on the program before talking about many books. His books on Chesterton and Solzhenitsyn and so many others. He has a new book out about someone you may have heard of, Benedict the 16th. I think you can tell from the name that he was Pope. Remember, Benedict the 16th, a biography titled Defender of the Faith by our friend Joseph Pierce. Joseph Pierce, welcome back. Great to see you.
Starting point is 00:01:11 It's great to see you again, Eric. It's been some time. Good to see you again. It has. And I just have to say congratulations on the book. It's a beautiful book. I may not be a Catholic, but I am a Christian and I have been a huge admirer of so many Catholic Christians
Starting point is 00:01:30 through the years, obviously Chesterton at the top of the list. But Benedict the 16th always. in awe of him, his leadership, his intellectual abilities, his fierceness as a defender of the faith. So it seems appropriate to me that you titled the book, Defender of the Faith. What was it that led you, Joseph, to write this biography? Well, like you, Eric, I've been an admirer of Benedict 16th for many years since the time when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. prior to that. You know, we need to remember that as well as the relatively few years he was Pope, he was St. John Paul II's right-hand man for a quarter of a century prior to that.
Starting point is 00:02:19 So this man was basically the most powerful man in the church, apart from St. John Paul the 2nd, for a period of a third of the century. And it's a time, I think, of restoration for the church after what we might call the madness and miasma of the modernism of the 1970s where the world, where the church was, well, at least certain members of the church were, were seduced into trying to become like the world to sort of follow the world. And you and I both admire Chesterton. And, you know, Chesterton said, we don't want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world. And I think the St. John Paul II and and Benedict XVI moved the world rather than moving with it. And there's a crucial difference.
Starting point is 00:03:05 I think you're quite right. And I think, there are a lot of people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, are a little bit baffled by the leadership of Pope Francis. And also, don't really understand how it can be that someone like Benedict the 16th would have chosen to step aside. I mean, that's virtually unprecedented in 2000 years of the church. Any thoughts on that? Because I think so many people are just baffled. don't understand what happened because I personally was so excited to have that kind of a Pope leading the Catholic Church. And so I was dismayed at that news, of course. Yeah, I was too saddened, dismayed.
Starting point is 00:03:53 They're both appropriate words for how many of us felt when we got the shocking news that Benedict 16th had chosen to retire. I think one of two things I would say, and a lot of this is conjecture. So I think that we do need to specify when we're dealing with conjecture. But he clearly was hoping to retire when after St. John Paul II died, he wasn't looking to be Pope. So he took that burden upon his shoulders as an act of duty and responsibility. And I think that by the time he got to his late 70s, you know, he was beginning to feel that he wasn't up to the job. But there's also a lot of corruption around him in the curia.
Starting point is 00:04:43 And he felt and hoped that perhaps a younger man would have the vigor, the vibrancy of relative youthfulness, to be able to tackle this corruption. And I think that he resigned in the hope that we would have a decisive figure like his predecessor and like himself as one to lead the church. And that's my reading of it. Again, as I say, it's speculative and it's conjecture. Well, I want to talk to you about the life of Benedict the 16th.
Starting point is 00:05:17 By the way, how old is he today now? Well, last week he celebrates 95th birthday. So he's had a long, long, arduous life. That's hard for me to believe that he could be 95. My goodness. Now, so let's talk about his life. Obviously, German, his last name, Ratzinger. Talk us, I assume in your book, you go through his life from the beginning. Yeah, basically, the book is a biography and an overview of the legacy.
Starting point is 00:05:55 So it's not a conventional biography, or better than the 16th, but it does. tell the story from the beginning, from his childhood, where, of course, he grew up as a child under the tyranny of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. So he knows what totalitarian secularism is because he experienced it firsthand, as did, of course, St. John Paul II, with his experience of communism and the Nazis of both. So these men know the dangers of the absence of God in human affairs because they experienced it firsthand as young men. And I think that, you know, that St. John Paul II saw in Cardinal Ratzinger, someone who had the same understanding, not just of authentic Christianity and orthodoxy,
Starting point is 00:06:49 but also of the dangers of secularism. And that's why the two men, I mean, look at the two terms coined by them. It was St. John Paul II who coined the term. the culture of death. And it was Benedict the 16th, actually on the eve of his election, that spoke about the dictatorship of relativism. So I think the early lives of both these men enabled them to see the horrors and terrors of a godless politics, which unfortunately in modern 21st century America, many of the
Starting point is 00:07:20 younger generation appear oblivious of. Well, I think that's the heart of it. And it's why I admired John Paul. the Great, and I admire Benedict, because they understood what is at stake. They had lived through it themselves. Obviously, if Benedict the 16th is now 95 years old, he was fully aware in the midst of the Nazis in Germany. He was fully aware of what was happening at the time he saw it. And I think because John Paul, the second and similarly saw it, first the Nazis, then the communists, the Soviets.
Starting point is 00:08:04 They understood the levels of wickedness that can come about. I think that there are many people today, Joseph, younger people who they simply can't comprehend it, or if they grew up in America, as you didn't, but if they grew up in America the way I did and didn't have parents like mine who had lived through this hell, they simply cannot conceive of how evil things can be when you pull God out. But the men were talking about, they saw it with their own eyes and they spoke about it. Yes, basically the vacuum as caused by the absence of God is filled with viciousness. It's as simple as that.
Starting point is 00:08:43 But we have the naivete based upon two things, I think. First of all, the dictatorship of relativism, to use Pope Benedict's own words, where we basically don't believe there's a coherent and coherent. reason governing things. Both St. John Paul II and Benedict of the 16th, following in the tradition of the church, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, insisted upon the indissoluble union, the indissoluble marriage between faith and reason. So in a world which has abandoned that for emotion and feeling and relativism and self-empowerment,
Starting point is 00:09:19 you know, that we end up with the anarchy, which is the consequence of their absence. And the other thing is, of course, the absence of history, that we are so ignorant of history, particularly the younger generation, that they've been deliberately not taught it, because the history teaches lessons that the radical relativists don't want us to learn. So we now have a generation of people that don't know nothing about the Nazis, nothing about the communists, nothing about secularism. And the consequence, of course, is we're in danger of making exactly the same mistakes. And we're making the same mistakes.
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Starting point is 00:11:57 Now I'm able to clean out the junk and invest in companies actually doing good things. inspire insight.com today and register for free. That's inspireinsight.com. Go there. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Joseph Pierce, P-E-A-R-C-E, the author of many wonderful books. The new one is called Benedict the 16th, Defender of the Faith. Joseph, we're talking about, you know, the evils in history. And I think that it's important for us to say that, At the heart of everything, you know it and I know it, it is a spiritual battle. So just because the Soviet Union crumbled didn't mean that wickedness had left the world. There's just as much evil in the world that just takes on different forms.
Starting point is 00:12:57 And what we have seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, of course, is that Marxism, apart from China, which is its own story. But Marxism becomes cultural Marxism. and it affects us everywhere we look in the United States of America. It is at its heart a spiritual battle. It's an ideological battle. But it seems to me that Benedict XVIth, he understood this. He understood what he was at war with. Yeah, I mean, to me, John Paul II, Benedict the 16th,
Starting point is 00:13:32 and that other great figure, who wasn't a Pope, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. These three men experience, their almost exact contemporaries, and they experienced the same reality, that grim reality of secular fundamentalism. And what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, which really plays into what you just said, Eric, is that the battle between good and evil takes place in each individual human heart. So it's a spiritual battle, basically, between the Homo Viator, the pilgrim man, the man on the journey who's called to get to heaven, and Homo superbus, proud man, who refuses the journey, who wants to do his own thing.
Starting point is 00:14:08 That battle takes place in each individual human heart, and the trouble with Marxism, it actually plays to the proud man. It actually not just sanctions pride. It glorifies pride. Yes, you be your own God. You do your own thing. You don't have to serve anybody else. So non-Servian, right, this is the spirit of Marxism. So it is a battle literally being good and evil, ultimately between God and the devil that we're seeing played out before us.
Starting point is 00:14:36 Well, look, we have to be quite blunt about it. Marxism is a satanic project. There's nothing neutral about it. The kind of atheism that we're talking about, when we talk about real atheism, it's satanic. It is not some neutral anodyne thing. And you saw this played out. Solzhenitsyn saw it with his own eyes in the labor camps, in the gulag. He wrote about it.
Starting point is 00:15:03 The tremendous cruelty and inhumanity is it. It's really, I think, Joseph, incomprehensible to most people in the West. And it's why we've allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked so badly for so long so that now, in a sense, by seeing the horrible fruit, by seeing some of the things happening that we can never imagine, we're finally understanding, aha, maybe we've missed something, maybe, you know, these prophetic voices, whether it's Ratzinger, Solzhenius, or Wojtelia, how do you pronounce it, they saw this, they tried to tell the world about it. Yeah, exactly. These men are giants who straddled the 20th and early 20th century. They're prophets. And your prophets are often stoned rather than listen to.
Starting point is 00:15:55 And that's the problem that we really need to learn the lessons that they were teaching and preaching. Because if we don't, we're going to repeat the horrors of the 20th century. And we do need to remember the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history in terms of the body count. And if we don't learn those lessons, we will repeat that carnage. That's the bottom line here. And that's why we do need the coherence and cohesiveness of the teaching of people such as Benedict the 16th to guide us through the darkness into which we are wandering. I have to ask you about your own story. You've been on the program before, but we have many new listeners who, first of all,
Starting point is 00:16:35 they're wondering, what is that lovely accent? Where do you live now? What is your story? How did you come to be who you are today, which is to say a writer of many books and a man of deep Christian faith? Well, I mean, I told the story, Eric, in a book called Race with the Devil,
Starting point is 00:16:56 my journey from racial hatred to rational love. But in a nutshell, I, as a very young man, as a 15-year-old, to be precise, got involved with white supremacist politics. I was very anti-Christian, very anti-Catholic, and very secular, and I sort of worshipped that secular fundamentalism of Adolf Hitler. So it was through the reading, first of all, of writers such as G.K. Chesterton, who, as you can see behind me there, still looks after me like a guardian angel.
Starting point is 00:17:26 You know, it was the reading of Chesterton and Bellark and C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien and some of these great Christian figures that led me away from the dark, darkness, and that coupled with a spiritual healing, which I didn't even understand until I could look back in retrospect, this miraculous healing coupled with the reason that I was receiving from these great Christian writers that led me away from the abyss. And really my life since my conversion has been one of gratitude for that conversion and a desire, if you like, to make up for all the bad things I did prior to my conversion by trying to live a good and faithful life. and bring other people to the truth of Christ.
Starting point is 00:18:07 And where did you grow up, Joseph? Oh, I grew up in the east end of London in England. So the accent you see here is a London accent somewhat mutilated by 20 years in the United States. That's so interesting. Well, so, yeah, so it's hard for many people to believe. One of the reasons I ask you is because people need to understand there's redemption, there's forgiveness. And to think that you were not just, you know, flirting,
Starting point is 00:18:34 with genuine white supremacy. Today, these terms are thrown around there. They've become utterly meaningless, but you were in the thick of it. You were, you know, hated God. We're pro-Hitler. We forget that that does exist, and we've cheapened it, you know, beyond our understanding of it. But you were filled with that kind of a hate, and God reached you. It's an amazing. story. You tell it in your book, Race with the Devil. Is that the title? Race of the Devil and the subtype is my journey from racial hatred to rational love. To rational love. Well, there's a term, rational love. It sounds very Catholic in a good way. I just think it immediately brings to mind great theologians, but the idea of rational love.
Starting point is 00:19:27 Say a little bit about that term. Yeah, well, the key thing, of course, one of the problems in the modern world is a misunderstanding about what love is. So for the relativist, love is a feeling, it's an emotion, it's intrinsically irrational, right? There's nothing you can do about it. It comes, hits you and it goes away. Whereas for the, for the Christian, to love is to freely, and rationally choose to lay down your life for the beloved. It's encapsulated in the paradox of Christ that the first shall be lost, that basically love is putting yourself last and put in the other first. And the paradoxes, of course, that in doing that, we actually grow ourselves, not just spiritually,
Starting point is 00:20:11 but in happiness. That the more we give ourselves to others, the actual happier we become. It's a paradox. It's counterintuitive. But the key thing is the rational choice to freely and rationally choose to lay down our lives for our brothers. That is what Christian love is. And that's what I discovered through the faith and reason of these people that I read
Starting point is 00:20:33 and through the healing grace of Jesus Christ. And how did you, as an angry, very young man, stumble on any of these authors? Was it Chesterton the first one? How does a young man in the east part of London stumble on Chesterton? My goodness. Well, there's actually a parallel, which I tell in my book,
Starting point is 00:20:52 between my discovery of Chesterton and C.S. Lewis's. When C.S. Lewis first read Chesterton during World War I, he was an atheist, but he couldn't help liking Chesterton, nonetheless. When I first read Chesterton, I was a white supremacist, and I couldn't help liking Chesterton nonetheless. And both of us, what C.S. Lewis said, that Cheston had more common sense and all the moderns put together, except, of course, is Christianity. And that was my, that was my, that was my, exact my belief. So when I first read Lewis, in surprise by joy speaking like this, then I said, I've got to find out who C.S. Lewis is because his understanding of Chesterton
Starting point is 00:21:28 is the same as mine. And then, of course, I start buying everything by Lewis. So, you know, these two men, especially G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, you know, I held my hand, led me on. And again, through baptizing my head as well as my heart, you know, again, this connection between faith and reason led me out of the darkness of the secularism and the hatred that basically in which I'd lived since I was 15 years old into the light and truth of Jesus Christ. Did you have any inklings, no pun intended, when you were a younger person before you were 15, that you had a literary bent? Because, you know, not every white supremacist is stumbling into Chesterton and Lewis. Well, I've always been a writer. So I made a national poetry competition final when I was nine. And in the white supremacist movement, I was editing my first youth newspaper.
Starting point is 00:22:29 when I was 16. So it's part of what I am. I just thanks. And that's what I was saying. I'm now hoping that the gifts I was given that I used so diabolically when I was a young man can now be used for the heavenly cause and undo perhaps some of the damage I did through my hatefielding prose. I think it's safe to say that that's happening. We're going to be right back talking to Joseph Pierce, the new book Benedict the 16th. We'll be right back.
Starting point is 00:22:59 Well, he ruled up Interstate 44 like a rocket sled on rails. We tore up all of our swindle sheets and left and sent in on. Folks, I'm talking to Joseph Pierce, who has a new book out called Benedict the 16th, Defender of the Faith. He's the director of book publishing for the Augustine Institute. He's a biographer, many books. His own book is Race with the Devil, My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love. You do have a love of Shakespeare and of literature in general. And I know that you have edited a series of books.
Starting point is 00:23:51 Is that for Ignatius? Who did you do that for? Yeah, that's the Ignatius Critical Additions. And actually the story behind that, Eric, is I was teaching literature for Arvary University in Florida. And I was horrified by the radical feminism, anti-Christianity, Marxism, queer theory, and the rest of it that was in the textbooks that I was given to my students. And I thought, why am I, first of all, putting this into the hands of my students, and why am I patronizing these books?
Starting point is 00:24:23 Because if you're a professor and you're setting a text, you're not buying one copy of a book, you're buying dozens. So I suggested to Ignatius Press, we should bring it out our own critical editions of classic works of literature, which would have tradition-oriented criticism of the works and not this postmodernist. So what, first of all, God bless Father Fesio for saying yes to that. God bless you for thinking of it.
Starting point is 00:24:52 Every time, if somebody says, I want to read a work of classic literature, almost always. If you stumble into a Barnes & Noble and you grab one of them, it will have a preface and two introductions by people who are radically opposed to a biblical sensibility. or even to a Western sensibility. So what are some of the books in that series that you have edited? What works of literature? Yeah, so the key thing is, as you completely say, the modern academy poisons the reading of literature through these theories.
Starting point is 00:25:29 So we have 27 books in the series now. There are seven Shakespeare plays amongst them, so Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and others. But we also have American literature, so the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and others. We have Victorian literature, Wuthering Heights, Pichodorian Gray, so Frankenstein. So I say 27 titles in the series.
Starting point is 00:25:53 And certainly people want to be able to pick up a critical edition of these great works and not be poisoned or affronted by the nonsense that the modern academy is poisoning this literature with, and that's the series to go to. Well, again, God bless Father Fesio and Ignatius Press. I want to say to everybody, folks, if you're interested in great literature, go to Ignatius Press. I don't know how many books I bought over the years from Ignatius, but just most of Chesterton and so many other great authors there. But the idea that you came up with this idea, is the series continuing?
Starting point is 00:26:32 Yeah, it's ongoing. The series is ongoing, so we hope to continue to add titles to it as time goes on. So how does somebody, you know, coming from a post-modernist or critical theory point of view, screw up Moby Dick, for example? I mean, it's just amazing to me that some of these books doesn't seem possible to mess with them. But obviously, they've tried. Well, you know, I'm always reminded of the words of G.K. Chesterton. He said it doesn't matter how much he made the point of the story stick out like a spike.
Starting point is 00:27:06 The critics would go in carefully empower themselves and something else. and that's exactly what these, because they don't want to see what's really there. You know, Jane Austen, and again, three of her books are in the series. Now, she's being a great philosopher where she juxtaposes pride and prejudice, because if you are motivated by pride and not humility, you will approach reality, including literary texts, with a perspective which is prejudiced. So these people bring their pride and prejudice to the text,
Starting point is 00:27:36 and they don't see what's there, they see what they want to be, is there, want to see this there, or they just condemn what is there. Well, I mean, it needs to be said that a lot of the authors you've mentioned, particularly Jane Austen, was a profound Christian. There's no way around it, is there? No, there isn't, but it's amazing how, I mean, particularly the introduction of both of Wuthering Heights, for instance, that Emily Bronte was a Parsons daughter and a lifelong practicing believing Christian. And I spend the first half of the introduction to that text exposing the critical nonsense where they tried to turn her into just about everything except the Christian that she was. And based upon ignoring the facts, inventing the facts, and misreading certain things she wrote.
Starting point is 00:28:23 So I went through and just meticulously destroyed that nonsense in order to get back to the real author who was a profound lifelong practicing Christian, which is evident in the work. It's really amazing. What is the title of your Oscar Wilde book? My book's The Unmasking of Oscar Wild. And again, that was, you know, pull the mask of Oscar Wild, you actually find deep down a life, somebody had a lifelong love affair with the church. He was an unfaithful lover. He was a messed up human being. But when he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, it was the, it was the consummation of a lifelong love affair. So what I wanted to do was to rest of, rescue Oscar Wilde from those who had made him a gay icon and a figure of the so-called sexual liberation movement, because he said, he said that my homosexuality was my pathology, my sickness. Now, in some countries in Europe now, you can go to prison for saying that. They should send everyone to reading jail who says that.
Starting point is 00:29:27 I got to tell you, your book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, I've recommended it very, very often. It's a spectacular book, and it really is a very, very important correction. I mean, all you're doing in the book really is telling the truth, but it becomes a correction to the ridiculous lies that, as you say, Wild himself. would have protested against the portrayal of him as some proud libertine. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Joseph Pierce. The book is Benedict the 16th. Hey, folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell.
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Starting point is 00:30:59 including some overstock products, such as individual towels, blankets, comforters, and much more. Or call 800-9-78-378-3057. And use the promo code, Eric. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Joseph Pierce, P-E-A-R-C-E, who has a new book, Benedict the 16th Defender of the Faith. We were just talking, Joseph, about your book on Oscar Wilde. And I thought it's an extraordinary thing, really, that all through the 20th century, we've had this battle, really. It's between atheist Marxism and really the Christian worldview, between truth and then what really is anti-truth. And it's interesting to me how it's everywhere. I mean, you see it in literary studies, you see it in the academy, you see it in politics, you see it, in politics,
Starting point is 00:32:05 you see it just about everywhere. And it seems to me that we're living in a clarifying moment where it has become, it is clearer that I think that a lot of people that were asleep or that could ignore it are less able to ignore it today. Yeah, certainly is my hope that this will be a wake-up call to the silent and somnambulant, the sleepwalking majority, that we are fighting a battle here with the culture of death. the dictatorship of relativism. So I am hopeful that, but we do need to remember, of course,
Starting point is 00:32:41 that there's never going to be a heaven on earth and nor will evil triumph over the church on earth. But really, the end of the world for each of us is when we die. And all we need to do is to be good and faithful servants in the relatively short period of time we want active service in the battle against evil here on earth. Because if we are good and faithful servants on active service, in this life, then we will gain the eternal victory, which is beyond the reach of all of this
Starting point is 00:33:10 nonsense. Well, and it's interesting, too, because I think if you don't see it as a spiritual battle, then either you become some kind of utopianist. You're trying to win here, whether it's a win for Marxism and the devil or a win for Christian values, but you forget that in the end, we're in a perpetual battle and that we're supposed to have hope in the midst of the battle. I think that those who aren't kind of naive utopianists are often defeated and grumpy. They just think that, well, it's all going to go to hell.
Starting point is 00:33:43 Who cares? And because of that, they don't fight. They don't understand that we're called to be happy warriors in the midst of this, to speak the truth, knowing that there is someone hungry for it. And we may not know who it is. But I think it's important for us to have hope. And I think by reading these stories, it does give us hope. Solzhenitsyn, I guess I have to say, is another one of those figures that you've written about who, I mean, if anybody knew that he was in a battle, even when he came to the West, you know, after leaving the Soviet Union, and then really not to be received here.
Starting point is 00:34:23 I mean, when he gave his speech in 1978, the famous Harvard commencement speech in the rain, here you have this Old Testament prophet. in a sense, now being rejected by the West. He had been rejected by the Soviet atheist communist. Now he's being rejected by the materialists in the West. I don't remember if you write about that in your book on him about that period. Do my books above, if you have a image, which takes it. Well, the first edition was published when he was still alive, but there was a revised edition that published after he died the whole life.
Starting point is 00:35:00 But yeah, there's a lot on the Harvard. It was a defining moment, basically, for me, even to this day, for those that are old enough to remember it, it's the way that I test whether someone's reliable. You know, if they agree with socialist as Harvard address, they really understand the heart rule of the problem. If they take some sort of progressive response that, well, you know, communism is evil, but the West is good, you know, by which I mean the sort of the modern secular West, not Western civilization. Socianism, by the way, said specifically to me, he said, I want you to make it clear that I'm not anti-Western. He said, if the iron curtain had come down and the cream of Western culture had coming over the top of Western civilized culture, I would have rejoiced. He said, but what happened was the Iron Curtain came up and all the dregs of Western decadence came in, Western materialism came in. And it was that Western decadence and that Western materialism that he was critiquing and criticizing in the Harvard address, basically saying that we have two types of materialism here.
Starting point is 00:36:10 Both share the absence of God, both basically share materialistic understanding of the cosmos, both communism and this Western hedonism have their roots, he said, in the Enlightenment. There's no question about that. And it's interesting to me that we're seeing those two strains come together to some extent. when you think about big tech and the cancel culture in America today, it's fascinating because there's a lot of Chinese communism mixed in with it. It's about power. It's about all those things. And it's also materialistic.
Starting point is 00:36:45 It is fascinating that we're seeing, in a way, the coming together of those two strains at this point, which I guess makes it a little bit clearer for some people. Yeah, I think it's good to not not have. have a schizophrenic approach to the fight against evil. And many people did in the past that we sort of fought against one half of the evil, not the other half. I think we now see them as the same evil. And if it's the same evil, we can actually be defending ourselves from it without looking
Starting point is 00:37:14 behind us. Well, the new book is Benedict the 16th. We just got about a minute left. What is Benedict the 16th doing with themselves these days? It's amazing to me that he's just turned. Well, he's clearly what is our eyes set firmly on the finishing line. He's clearly now living a largely monastic prayer-filled and prayer-full last years of his life in order to please God attain the reward that all of us hope for, which is the eternal presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in heaven. And, you know, that I think is something which we should be grateful for what he's done for us in the past. But we should, I think, should be should understand that he's got his eyes very firmly fixed on his own future at the moment, and who can blame him for that?
Starting point is 00:38:03 Do you know whether he's been writing in the last years? I think he's largely retired from such things. You think he's largely retired from such things? Because we always wonder. Well, just wonderful Joseph Pierce to have you back again. I want to recommend all of your books to my audience, and they can find most of them at Ignatius. They can get a copy of Chance of the Dance by my dear departed friend, Tom Howard.
Starting point is 00:38:33 So many wonderful books there. But Joseph Pierce, where can people find you? Is there a website? Yeah, if people want to check me out, it's very simple. Jay Pierce, J-P-E-R-C-E dot co, not dot com, but dot co. That's my website and keep up to date what I'm up to, what I'm doing, if they go to that site. Say it again, Joe. J-P-E-P-R-C-O.C-O.
Starting point is 00:38:57 Well, Jay Pierce, a joy to have you. God bless you, my friend. My pleasure always, Eric. Thanks for having me. God bless. Alvin, we have an important announcement to make. Oh, we do? Yes, it is. I mean, actually, it is important. Yes. One of our sponsors is nutrometics.com. This month only, the month is almost done, folks.
Starting point is 00:39:34 This month only, they decided a special introductory offer. If you use the code, Eric, you get 30% off of everything. on the website. That is huge, okay? It was a big deal when they said, we're going to do 25% for one week or something like that. They said, we're going to do it for the whole month as an introductory thing. So if you're not familiar with their products and you want to try them at a ridiculously low price,
Starting point is 00:39:57 use the code Eric, but it has to be in April 2022. That's right. That's right now. Right now. But it's going to be gone soon. Pretty soon it'll be May 2022. And then when you put in the code Eric, you get the 20%, not the 30%. So I want to encourage you.
Starting point is 00:40:11 If you need melatonin or you need magnesium or you need zinc or vitamin C, all this stuff. You might need vitamin D or C. I take this stuff every single day. So does Ann and I. And the reason we do that is because we are now aware that you want your immune system to be very healthy. Right? You don't have to get weird injection. We're staying healthy over here.
Starting point is 00:40:35 So that's the goal. So if you go to nutrimetics.com, but this is only this month, folks. only this month, 30% off. We should also mention a couple of other things while we're on the subject. If you use the code Eric at my store.com, the Bonhoeffer posters will blow your mind. If you don't have one of those, I don't know what to tell you. They're absolutely gorgeous. They're just good, like the paper stock, the print of everything is gorgeous.
Starting point is 00:41:03 It's a Bonhofer poster. It says silence in the face of evil is itself evil, not to speak, is to speak, not to act. And if you don't have that poster, look in the mirror and say, what kind of a mayor? can, am I? Yes, and if you don't have that poster, you're being silent in the faces of evil itself. Do you understand? Do you understand what I'm saying? So you go to my store.com or mypillow.com, use the code, Eric. All right, now we get to the films. There's two films out. One is whose children are they? That talks about, I mean, again, it's amazing where we are in America, but the good news is that people are waking up and people are making films to help us understand.
Starting point is 00:41:41 understand what's going on. So the film whose children are they deals with this kind of communist takeover of our kids. That, you know, the very idea that there are people in leadership in America who think, I get to teach your kids what I want. I don't care what you think, Mr. Parent. Like, you have no voice and you're thinking, wait a minute, I could have lived in East Germany, you know, 50 years ago and where they had that kind of attitude toward children and toward parents.
Starting point is 00:42:11 But in America, so if you want to see that, well, go to SalemNow.com anyway because there's a ton of good stuff there. SalemNow.com. Whose children are they? SalemNow.com,
Starting point is 00:42:25 I believe eventually, will carry 2,000 mules. I don't think that they do now. Yeah, they only carry 1,000 of them. Yeah, it's only a thousand. The full boat is coming up. If you want to see 2,000 mules and who doesn't, seriously,
Starting point is 00:42:37 you want to go to 2,000. Mules.com, I've got to tell you, folks, it's hard for me not to get emotional because this is, you know, I always say if this is true, well, now I know it's true. I mean, I've known it's true, but the more you see, the more clear it becomes. And so then the question is, at what point, what's the tipping point? At what point did people have to say, oh, yeah, Galileo was right? At what point did it finally get to where they could no longer say, shut up, don't ever talk about that. At what point does the truth come out? The truth is coming out, but it's vital for us to do our part in getting the truth out. So I want to ask you to go to 2000 mules.com. I am in the film,
Starting point is 00:43:28 but that's not why I'm telling you to go see it. I also want to tell you, finally, folks, there's all kinds of stuff we cannot share on this program, sometimes for legal reasons. So please sign up at my website for the newsletter, ericmetaxis.com. It'll tell you where I am, where you can come see me. And we hope you'll sign up for the newsletter at ericmetaxis.com. Please do that. God bless you.

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