Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E225: How Christian Marriage Can Save the World w/Fr Josiah Trenham | Lila Rose Show

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E225: How Christian Marriage Can Save the World w/Fr Josiah Trenham | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  Marriage is the image our excellence that the prophets use
• 0:03
  for the relationship of God and his people.
• 0:05
  But if you look at the Old Testament, even amongst the
• 0:07
  greats, marriage got completely mangled.
• 0:09
  It's a brutal set of books. It is but going to the wedding
• 0:12
  feast of Kenneth. By taking the common stuff of
• 0:14
  water and turning it into the finest wine, he showed that his
• 0:17
  presence in a couple's life radically transforms.
• 0:20
  It why all of this focus on love and marriage?
• 0:23
  Everything that Pope Paul the 6th said in his human Ivitai
• 0:26
  came true even worse than he said.
• 0:28
  All traditional cultures have supported marriage as a
• 0:31
  keystone. We have this short term
• 0:33
  experiment. It has gone very poorly.
• 0:35
  It's time for us to stop. We need to honor marriage again.
• 0:40
  Hello everyone, welcome back to the Lila Roche show.
• 0:42
  I'm delighted to sit down again today with Father Josiah
• 0:45
  Trenham, who is the founder of Patristic Nectar.
• 0:48
  We talk all things marriage in today's episode.
• 0:50
  How did we get to the state of decline that marriage is in and
• 0:54
  really the sexual anarchy and chaos that we're in?
• 0:56
  What are the solutions? How do we get out of it?
• 0:58
  How can we come together as people of faith to re establish
• 1:01
  God's beautiful design for marriage?
• 1:03
  I hope you enjoy. If you're married, this episode,
• 1:05
  I think will be especially encouraging for you.
• 1:07
  But if you're not married, I think it's also very helpful.
• 1:10
  And if you're listening to it and you're wondering, what is my
• 1:12
  vocation? What am I called to?
• 1:14
  I hope this episode is also illuminating.
• 1:17
  And after this episode, we're going to have another segment
• 1:20
  over at rosereport.supercast.com with Father Josiah Trenham.
• 1:23
  You can go check it out there. We'll have our question reel.
• 1:25
  He talks about good habits for prayer as well as beard care
• 1:29
  advice and some other fun tips. Go check it out over at
• 1:32
  rosereport.supercast.com. Father Josiah Trenham, thank you
• 1:36
  so much for coming back on the podcast.
• 1:38
  Wonderful to be with you again, Lila.
• 1:39
  Honored to have you here and to discuss this part of your work
• 1:43
  that we didn't even get to last time.
• 1:45
  We had a great conversation, but there's so much that you do that
• 1:49
  I admire with regard to marriage and family formation.
• 1:53
  So first of all, for those who are meeting you for the first
• 1:55
  time, give us a little bit of background on Father Josiah.
• 1:59
  I'm an Orthodox priest and have been for 30 something years.
• 2:03
  I'm married to my wonderful wife Catherine for 37 going on 38
• 2:07
  years. We have 10.
• 2:08
  Lovely. She's here, She's very lovely.
• 2:10
  Yes, she is lovely and here. It's wonderful to have her here.
• 2:13
  Hey Sweets, we have 10 kids together and seven
• 2:17
  grandchildren. Hoping for at least 50 please.
• 2:19
  At least 50. And I have been a passer since I
• 2:23
  was ordained. For the last 27 plus years I've
• 2:26
  been pastoring a parish called Saint Andrew which is in
• 2:29
  Riverside, CA. I also have a ministry called
• 2:32
  Patristic Nectar. It focuses on high quality
• 2:37
  patristic material teachings of the Church Fathers designed to
• 2:40
  nourish the spiritual, the spiritually thirsty with with
• 2:45
  the sweet teachings of the church fathers.
• 2:46
  That's really what we're trying to do both in books and in
• 2:48
  lecture series. We have an app with hundreds of
• 2:52
  incredible lecture series. And when I said I mean lectures,
• 2:56
  but series of lectures between 5:00 and 10:00 lectures each
• 2:59
  hundreds of them from the top teachers who know the scriptures
• 3:05
  and the Church fathers in the English language, all for free.
• 3:08
  You can get it on the App Store. We'll link it.
• 3:11
  Thank you, Father. So you have done so much of your
• 3:15
  work on you're, you're obviously shepherding a church, but you're
• 3:20
  also writing. I mean, we have your thesis
• 3:23
  here, right, on marriage and virginity.
• 3:25
  According to Saint John Chrysostom.
• 3:27
  We have enduring love, which you were kind enough to send me,
• 3:30
  which is a phenomenal manual here for people preparing for
• 3:34
  marriage. You've got the Particip Nectar
• 3:36
  app. You obviously speak about this
• 3:38
  frequently. I guess the first question would
• 3:41
  be why all of this focus on love and marriage?
• 3:46
  Well, there's many reasons for that.
• 3:48
  I would say initially I I wanted to be married since I was 15
• 3:51
  years old and my I'm not exactly sure why except my parents.
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  I was happy to live in the family that I was in and I
• 4:02
  wanted to get on with my life and I felt like marriage was so
• 4:06
  noble. I it was still in the culture
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  that way. When I was born, 75% of houses
• 4:10
  in America had a husband, a wife and children.
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  Wow. Of course today it's like 41%.
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  It's not even normative. It's tragic.
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  And you're not even that old. Thanks a lot.
• 4:19
  But maybe I was born in the mid 60s.
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  I was born in the mid 60s and and it was just normal.
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  I remember playing in my neighborhood.
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  I know all the neighbors. I walked to school.
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  It was a mile to school. I walked on the sidewalks.
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  It was no, this is LA and all my.
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  You walked yourself to school on the sidewalks of LA.
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  How many miles was that? One, it was one mile each way.
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  Yeah. And there was a liquor store on
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  the way that sells great bubble gum and, and baseball cards and,
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  you know, and I would save my money so I could get my bubble
• 4:44
  gum and get baseball cards. And we just wasn't a worry.
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  Our schools, I went to public school and elementary school.
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  They were always unlocked. We played there on the weekends.
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  No, no prisons. No big gates around them.
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  It was just normal. That was normal.
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  Nothing went on on Sundays. I played sports my whole life.
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  Never would any sport team have dreamed to have a practice or a
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  game on a Sunday morning. They're both and it would never
• 5:06
  have happened and it didn't happen.
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  So marriage was marriage was normal.
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  I remember going in and out of my friends families.
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  I, I didn't have friends whose parents were divorced and we
• 5:17
  just, we were normal people. But that was normal.
• 5:19
  Today, that's not normal at all. When I moved into my house in
• 5:23
  downtown Riverside many, many years ago in 1998, I went on to
• 5:29
  the computer to find out how many sex offenders were nearby.
• 5:32
  You know, they have that. I don't know Macon's Law website
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  or whatever it's called. 80 within a 2 mile radius, 80
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  within a 2 mile radius. Yeah, it's really, my kids
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  obviously don't play outside like I did.
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  And many, many homes are, the majority of homes don't have
• 5:50
  married couples in them anymore. But I knew marriage was from
• 5:55
  God. And when I was, when I went off
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  to college, I asked my dad, can I get married?
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  And he said no. I said why?
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  I said I'm ready. I'm 15, you know, I was 6 foot
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  one at the time. I felt like, hey, I was ready to
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  go. He didn't discourage me.
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  He just said, look, you got to you got to get your stuff
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  together. So when I went to college, I was
• 6:15
  very blessed. The first day of my second year
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  in college, the first day of my wife's first year, I made myself
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  available to be a servant to help all the young ladies who
• 6:27
  were coming. And all the freshman girls were
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  moving into the freshman dorm and there was no elevator and
• 6:33
  they were on the 3rd floor. So I went to be of service.
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  So it I helped, I spent the whole day moving luggage up.
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  It also gave me the opportunity, of course, to meet all these
• 6:41
  young ladies. And in our school, I went to a
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  school called Westmont up in Santa Barbara.
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  In the school, it is a beautiful school.
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  Freshmen are not allowed to have cars.
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  So I was a sophomore. I had a car, remember, I had a
• 6:53
  pickup truck which could contain many human beings.
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  And so I came back at the end of that day and I asked the girls.
• 7:00
  I just went up and down their hall and I said, look, you're
• 7:03
  new to town. If you'd like to go downtown and
• 7:07
  see downtown Santa Barbara, I'm very happy to buy frozen yogurt
• 7:10
  for any of you. I I knew the soft spot.
• 7:13
  Yeah, Yeah, I knew the soft spot.
• 7:16
  What do you know? Sounds like an indiscriminate
• 7:18
  approach. It's like ask them all at once
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  and see. What happens?
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  It was effective, though. It was effective. 13 girls took
• 7:25
  me up on it and I very happily drove them down to downtown
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  Riverside, bought all of their frozen yogurt.
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  One of them so stubborn she refused to let me pay and when
• 7:39
  she went back and I dropped all the girls off, she put her money
• 7:41
  in my glove compartment and that was it.
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  That's the first time I noticed my wife.
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  Fast forward to March the 17th, the feast day of Saint Patrick
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  of Ireland. She went out with me finally on
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  a date. My parents were coming to town,
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  we went out to dinner together which was wonderful.
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  One year later, on March 17th of the next year, I asked her to
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  marry me and she consented and we got married May 22nd, 2
• 8:06
  months later and we've been married for 37 plus years.
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  And marriage has been such a path for the development of my
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  heart and the overcoming of my weaknesses and passions.
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  To see it in the scriptures and in the writings of the Church
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  fathers. Marriage presented as something
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  holy, as what the fathers call a path of salvation.
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  It has I grabbed my heart. The interest in it has grabbed
• 8:36
  my heart and I began studying it very seriously when I was young
• 8:40
  in seminary. And then I decided to go and do
• 8:44
  a doctorate in theology under an orthodox patrologist in the
• 8:48
  northern part of England at a university called the the
• 8:52
  University of Durham. It's one of the three old
• 8:54
  universities, Oxford, Cambridge and Durham in England.
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  And I did, I did a doctorate on Saint John Chrysostom, and
• 9:01
  that's the volume I gave you. Marriage in virginity.
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  According to Saint John Chrysostom, his vision for
• 9:07
  marriage as a mystery and as a holy sacrament and as a means of
• 9:11
  saving mankind and making a person God like and fit for
• 9:17
  God's presence forever, his vision is what's really inspired
• 9:19
  me. Well, I'd love to hear you share
• 9:22
  more about that vision. What is John Chrysostom's vision
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  of marriage? And this also sounds like you
• 9:29
  adopted it, or you at least discovered it after you had met
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  your wife. So this was how many years into?
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  Yes. We were married in 1988 and I
• 9:39
  didn't start my doctoral studies until 1997.
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  So you're about about a decade? About a decade.
• 9:45
  So I also, I'm going to want to ask and you maybe can speak to
• 9:48
  it when you answer about Chris Austin, how your marriage
• 9:51
  changed, if it changed when you fell in love with Chrysostom and
• 9:56
  and also discovered your Orthodox faith.
• 9:59
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  How your marriage changed if it changed when you fell in love
• 10:46
  with Chrysostom and also discovered your Orthodox faith?
• 10:51
  Marriage is a path of Christian discipleship, and Christian
• 10:57
  discipleship is about change every day until the 2nd coming
• 11:02
  and even after the second coming, once the Lord comes and
• 11:06
  the great judgement takes place. And if we're privileged to hear
• 11:09
  those beautiful words, come. You who are blessed of my
• 11:11
  Father, inherit the Kingdom which is prepared for you from
• 11:14
  the foundation of the world will continue to change in the sense
• 11:17
  of perpetual growth. There is no end to the growth of
• 11:23
  the heart of a Christian. St.
• 11:25
  Gregory the Theologian, one of the three what what we Orthodox
• 11:29
  call the three Holy Hierarchs, St.
• 11:31
  Gregory the Theologian, St. Basil the Great in Saint John
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  Chrysostom. These are what we call
• 11:35
  ecumenical teachers. They possess a teaching
• 11:38
  authority that in the West is only comparable to what you
• 11:41
  might ascribe to Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas in the East,
• 11:46
  these three which are also doctors of the Church.
• 11:48
  I was going to say, we love them in the Catholic tradition, 100%.
• 11:51
  They're wonderful. They're unspeakably glorious and
• 11:56
  illumined. They loved God so much.
• 11:58
  They gave their lives to God so much.
• 12:01
  They spoke their theology from experience.
• 12:03
  They spoke of what they knew, what they saw.
• 12:06
  They were true theologians, not academic theologians.
• 12:09
  There are people with pH DS in theology all over the West.
• 12:11
  They don't know anything about God.
• 12:13
  They went, they did a program, they got a degree.
• 12:16
  That's not what the church means by theology.
• 12:18
  The ancient father said that the one who prays is a theology, is
• 12:22
  a theologian, and a theologian is the one who prays.
• 12:25
  Theology is about experience. It's being able to speak from
• 12:29
  what you know about God. And these men were that they
• 12:33
  were all dedicated monks. So it's amazing that they spoke
• 12:36
  about marriage. And Saint John Chrysostom
• 12:38
  himself spoke volumes about marriage.
• 12:42
  He had incredible parents. His father, Secundus died when
• 12:45
  he was relatively young. But his mother, Anthusa, is a
• 12:47
  Saint of the church and raised him after she was only 20, when
• 12:52
  she lost her husband, and she dedicated her widowhood to his
• 12:56
  formation and his sisters. How?
• 12:58
  What year are we in right now? He was born in 347.
• 13:01
  Yeah, and he fell asleep in the Lord in Four O 7.
• 13:04
  In exile, he was exiled by the emperor.
• 13:06
  Power almost universally hates holiness, and he was.
• 13:12
  He was exiled in four O 3 and spent four years in exile in the
• 13:15
  very corner of the Roman Empire, where he died in as much as
• 13:21
  Saints died. He fell asleep, he reposed in
• 13:25
  the Lord, and his soul was taken to paradise.
• 13:30
  He knew a lot about marriage from watching his mom and seeing
• 13:34
  all by. By the way, all three of those
• 13:36
  men, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom,
• 13:39
  all their moms are Saints. Wow.
• 13:41
  And come wow. How wonderful.
• 13:43
  Incredible what what a true mother is.
• 13:46
  Saint Basil the Great's most famous and she raised 10 kids
• 13:49
  and I think six were Saints, six were Saints and his grandparents
• 13:54
  were also Saints. It's parents were Saints.
• 13:56
  Incredible. Saint Gregory the Theologians,
• 13:58
  mom's the Saint. Anyway, Saint John Chrysostom
• 14:02
  wanted to be a monk since he was since he was young, but he had
• 14:06
  this rich family experience also.
• 14:09
  But you. Said his his father died at.
• 14:12
  Father was a high-ranking civil servant, so he was he was in the
• 14:15
  government. So he probably had very limited
• 14:17
  exposure to marriage, he or no. Did she remarry his?
• 14:21
  Mother No, she did not remarry. She remained a widow.
• 14:24
  Remarriage, especially in the early church, very much not
• 14:28
  respected. As a matter of fact, that wasn't
• 14:30
  just a Christian thing. That was a a Pagan thing.
• 14:33
  In the Roman Empire, monogamy meant monogamy.
• 14:35
  Today, when you talk to a Westerner and you ask them to
• 14:39
  define monogamy, most people think Americans are monogamous.
• 14:43
  We are as far from monogamy as possible.
• 14:46
  Monogamy means you're married to one woman.
• 14:48
  If you're a man, you're married to one woman ever, not at a
• 14:52
  time. Americans think if you're
• 14:54
  married to one at a time, you're monogamous.
• 14:56
  You can get married, get divorced, get remarried, get
• 14:58
  divorced, get remarried, get you have 5 wives, but you're
• 15:01
  monogamous as long as you're only quote married to one at the
• 15:03
  same time. That that is not what monogamy
• 15:05
  means. She was monogamous and she spent
• 15:11
  her and she invested her whole life in forming him, teaching
• 15:14
  him how to love God and surrounding him with incredible
• 15:20
  mentors and teachers. He also became a a spiritual son
• 15:24
  of a small monastic community there that were studying the
• 15:28
  Scriptures was the catechetical school in ancient Antioch.
• 15:31
  This is modern Antakya in southeast Turkey today.
• 15:34
  Antioch was the powerhouse city of the eastern part of the Roman
• 15:38
  Empire. There was a palace there.
• 15:39
  It's where the emperor was when he was staging his wars against
• 15:42
  the Persians. He disappeared when he thought
• 15:47
  he was going to get ordained. He disappeared literally.
• 15:50
  He convinced his best buddy to get ordained and then tricked
• 15:52
  his buddy by suggesting he was going to get ordained too.
• 15:55
  And then he, he just escaped, went to the mountains.
• 15:58
  There's a mountain only a couple miles outside of the city of
• 16:01
  Antioch called Silpios. It's only about 1800 feet tall,
• 16:04
  but 300 monks lived in caves on this.
• 16:08
  Can you imagine going out with your friends, you know, in high
• 16:10
  school and you're going to just go say hello to some monks?
• 16:13
  It's only 2 miles. He just walked.
• 16:14
  That's how he lived. And he ended up spending six
• 16:17
  years in a cave. Why?
• 16:19
  Why did he flee to the mountains and disappear?
• 16:22
  In the 1st 300 years of the church, the appetite for the
• 16:26
  next life, Remember, they lived. The early Christians are
• 16:31
  forebears, lived through the unthinkable.
• 16:35
  They saw their savior murdered and they thought it was the end.
• 16:41
  And then he went into hell. He decimated the place, he
• 16:45
  turned the devil and the and the demons into screeching
• 16:49
  terrorized girls, took everyone out leading captivity captive,
• 16:55
  and then rose from the dead. On the third day, for the first
• 16:58
  time, a man. More than a man, but not less
• 17:04
  than a man. A man got into the ring with
• 17:06
  Satan and wasn't Kayode. Every other person up until that
• 17:12
  time, even the great patriarch Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses,
• 17:17
  everyone who got into the ring with Satan and death lost.
• 17:21
  Doesn't matter how pious you were.
• 17:23
  Jesus got into the ring and destroyed his opponent.
• 17:28
  First person who's ever done that and then came out the other
• 17:30
  side and announced that everyone who believes in him though he
• 17:35
  die yet will he live. I am the resurrection and the
• 17:39
  life. Whoever believes in me will live
• 17:41
  even though he dies. This completely blew the mind of
• 17:47
  everyone who heard him say this. He spent 40 days after his
• 17:51
  resurrection affirming his disciples that this was the new
• 17:55
  reality. And not only was it the new
• 17:56
  reality, but they needed to take this news that death no longer
• 18:00
  was the great terror of mankind. Remember Saint Paul says that in
• 18:04
  the 2nd chapter of his Epistle to Hebrews that death was like a
• 18:07
  great weapon that Satan used to keep people in constant fear and
• 18:10
  terror. People had no solution for it.
• 18:12
  They were going to the unknowable dark place.
• 18:15
  No longer, no longer. Jesus said, look, you go and you
• 18:19
  tell everyone, announce my resurrection to the whole world,
• 18:22
  proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.
• 18:24
  Baptize everyone in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
• 18:27
  Spirit. Teach them my ways.
• 18:30
  And lol I'll be with you until the end of the age and I'll come
• 18:32
  back and I'll raise everyone and it will be all glory and all
• 18:36
  Kingdom and will drop Satan and darkness and death into the lake
• 18:39
  of fire and they won't bother us anymore.
• 18:41
  This is the future, this is our life.
• 18:43
  This is how we Christians live. And so in the early centuries,
• 18:46
  the question was, is marriage and family life legit?
• 18:51
  And you actually get married and have a family and that be
• 18:55
  consonant with the imminence of the Kingdom of God, with the
• 18:57
  fact that that we're so close. Like why bother when we're this
• 19:02
  is heaven and earth at at its moment and souls are being lost.
• 19:05
  Let's go. Jesus is going to come back
• 19:07
  anytime. Yeah, many people.
• 19:09
  Asking it felt so worldly. Many people were asking that.
• 19:12
  Jesus, however, affirmed to us that marriage continues.
• 19:17
  One of the ways he did that was preparing us for this by going
• 19:20
  to a wedding feast himself and performing his first miracle.
• 19:23
  There he radically changed the common stuff of marriage.
• 19:27
  You know, marriage is something God made for the whole human
• 19:29
  race, not just for Christians. It's human.
• 19:33
  And Jesus, when he went and performed his first public
• 19:37
  miracle, offset the temptation to think that marriage was passe
• 19:41
  and no longer relevant to Christians.
• 19:43
  Of course, people, we can understand why they might think
• 19:46
  that because Jesus didn't marry. Jesus and his mother lived in
• 19:51
  consecration and John the Baptist lived in consecration.
• 19:54
  So many people thought maybe marriage is done by going to the
• 19:57
  wedding feast of kin and gali, by taking the common stuff of
• 20:00
  water and turning it into wine, and not just little wine, the
• 20:02
  finest wine. He showed that his presence in a
• 20:06
  couple's life doesn't end marriage, but it radically
• 20:09
  transforms it. Christian marriage is not Old
• 20:11
  Testament marriage. Marriage, the way that God
• 20:14
  fashioned marriage when God first made Adam and Eve, it's
• 20:17
  very unlike our life now. Adam and Eve were not torn by
• 20:21
  passions. They weren't looking for a
• 20:23
  spouse because they had lust burning inside of them.
• 20:26
  They were made whole and one flesh, not by sexual union, by
• 20:31
  the fact that God made Adam. And then in his great love he
• 20:34
  put Adam to sleep, and he took his rib out, and he fashioned
• 20:39
  Eve his wife, from his own flesh.
• 20:43
  And when Adam looked at her, he said, This is now flesh of my
• 20:46
  flesh and bone of my bones. She shall be called Eve, woman.
• 20:53
  That oneness was to be a glory for them, an absolute glory for
• 21:00
  them. That was the very good of
• 21:04
  creation. You remember when God made all
• 21:05
  the animals and fashioned the whole world and he made Adam.
• 21:09
  But on the days after God made things, he said it was really
• 21:12
  good. He looked and it was good, The
• 21:14
  creation was good. What he had made on this day was
• 21:15
  good, and that day was good. And then he made Adam, but no
• 21:18
  Eve, and he said was not good. And then when he made Eve, he
• 21:22
  said very good. She is the very good of Adam's
• 21:26
  life. After the fall, when our first
• 21:29
  parents gave up their union with God and their union with one
• 21:33
  another, their marriage was catastrophically altered.
• 21:37
  Marriage fell in the collapse of mankind, in the great sin, in
• 21:41
  the original sin or the ancestral sin.
• 21:44
  Marriage collapsed with them and they went from being each
• 21:46
  other's partner in living in the uncreated light before God's
• 21:49
  face, dancing as His representatives, representing
• 21:53
  Him as His image on the earth. They went from that to
• 21:56
  accusation, the woman you gave me and excuses the serpent,
• 22:03
  right? We fell into sin.
• 22:04
  They hid from God, they hid from each other.
• 22:07
  Marriage got completely mangled. It didn't end marriage.
• 22:10
  But if you look at the Old Testament, even amongst the
• 22:12
  greats, it's far, far, far below Christian marriage.
• 22:17
  Polygamy was tolerated. Even the great, I mean, David
• 22:20
  had multiple wives. Abraham had multiple wives.
• 22:24
  If you read the book of Genesis from chapter 1 to 50, every type
• 22:28
  of marital problem, sexual deviance, family violence, it
• 22:33
  all, it's all there. It's all the contraceptions
• 22:35
  there. Homosexuality is there.
• 22:38
  Rape is there. Domestic violence is there.
• 22:41
  Polygamy is. Infidelity.
• 22:43
  Yeah. All in the 1st chapter it's.
• 22:45
  Brutal. I mean, the first it's it's a
• 22:47
  brutal, brutal set of books. It is.
• 22:49
  Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the
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  times. I love Hallow because they have
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  sleep stories, they have the daily readings, they have
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  scriptural commentary. You can listen to Holy
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  Scripture. I also love that Hallow has kids
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  content for your little ones. You can listen to stories.
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  children. An amazing way to help you pray
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  together as a family. A lot is at stake.
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  We have only one life to live and we've been given each day to
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  make something beautiful for God.
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  And that's why prayer is an essential part.
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  It should be an essential part of all of our days.
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  your relationship with God. So I, I like to point out that
• 23:42
  to people, especially in our context today in America where
• 23:47
  theology is at such kind of a low level, we do not hold, we
• 23:51
  Christians do not hold what we call a judeo-christian ethic.
• 23:55
  There is no such thing as a judeo-christian ethic.
• 23:58
  That's a language that was invented in the 1920s by
• 24:01
  politicians to justify collaborations and alliances.
• 24:07
  We have a Christian ethic. There is a Judeo ethic.
• 24:10
  There's a Judeo ethic about marriage, but it's far, far
• 24:12
  below the Christian ethic. Read the Old Testament and
• 24:15
  you'll see the Christian ethic shocked the disciples.
• 24:20
  Completely shocked them. When Jesus was Incarnate and
• 24:25
  began teaching, He taught his disciples that marriage would
• 24:28
  continue. He honored marriage by his
• 24:30
  presence at the wedding feast and King of Galilee.
• 24:32
  But then he taught them something that they just
• 24:34
  couldn't understand. He taught that marriage was
• 24:37
  indissoluble. He taught them that marriage is
• 24:41
  holy and that it can't be measured by Old Testament
• 24:45
  standards, but that he was going to recover what was at the
• 24:51
  beginning and establish true monogamy.
• 24:54
  So he forbade divorce. And this completely scandalized
• 24:58
  the disciples. He told them, if you if a man
• 25:03
  and woman divorce and remarry, they commit adultery.
• 25:05
  And they said, excuse me, but Moses said all you had to do for
• 25:08
  divorce was write her a certificate and hand it to her,
• 25:11
  which is true. Deuteronomy 24.
• 25:13
  That is the Old Testament ethic for divorce.
• 25:16
  God didn't like it then and he doesn't like it now.
• 25:19
  Malachi in inspiration, quotes God as a prophet and says, I
• 25:27
  hate divorce, says the Lord God, I hate it.
• 25:31
  That's God's attitude. Anybody wonders what God's
• 25:32
  attitude about divorces and he hated it then.
• 25:35
  But because humanity hadn't been redeemed by Christ yet, the
• 25:37
  standard that he asked of his people was very low compared to
• 25:40
  Christian times. Now that he's come and he's, he
• 25:45
  destroyed our enemies, He's atone for our sins, He's joined
• 25:49
  humanity and divinity in himself, He's given us Holy
• 25:51
  Baptism, He's poured the Holy Spirit out on us on the day of
• 25:54
  Pentecost. Now the Christian standard is
• 25:56
  here, and that's called fidelity.
• 25:59
  It's called love. Matter of fact, to be saved as a
• 26:01
  Christian, you have to learn to love your enemies.
• 26:04
  If you can't learn to love your wife and your husband, how in
• 26:07
  the world are you going to be saved?
• 26:09
  A lot of Christians thought perhaps marriage was just done.
• 26:13
  We all should be just devoted monks and nuns.
• 26:18
  That was common. As a matter of fact, there were.
• 26:20
  Saint Paul even warned in his epistle to Timothy, his
• 26:23
  spiritual son, that the time was coming when men would forbid
• 26:25
  marriage. Paul for criticized that as a
• 26:29
  heresy. Christ hasn't abolished
• 26:32
  marriage. He's abolished Old Testament
• 26:34
  Jewish marriage. He has established Christian
• 26:37
  marriage and the Christian standard is very, very high.
• 26:41
  And this is what Saint John Chrysostom lays out in great
• 26:43
  detail. He has this vision for how
• 26:46
  running the Christian Rd. being on the race to serve Christ,
• 26:50
  seeking first the Kingdom of God.
• 26:51
  That's universal Christian practice.
• 26:53
  You can do it in two ways. You can do it as a consecrated
• 26:56
  celibate, what we know as monks and nuns.
• 26:58
  This is the highest way. This is Saint Paul's way.
• 27:01
  Saint Paul describes this in his first epistle to the
• 27:03
  Corinthians. In Chapter 7.
• 27:04
  He says, I wish everyone was even as I myself am.
• 27:09
  That's the cry of everyone who loves God.
• 27:12
  He says, nevertheless, everyone has his own calling from God,
• 27:16
  one in this way and another in that.
• 27:18
  And then he describes marriage and monasticism.
• 27:21
  It's a matter of calling, right? You have a calling from God.
• 27:24
  So the important thing is to discern that calling.
• 27:26
  He wants everyone to run the race.
• 27:29
  He wants everyone to fix their eyes on Jesus and run to win.
• 27:32
  He says that in his epistle to the Hebrews.
• 27:34
  And there's two ways to do it. You can do it as a monk and a
• 27:37
  none. That's the most aggressive way,
• 27:39
  the goal. There is no attachment to the
• 27:42
  earth at all. Instead, you're attached to your
• 27:46
  prayers. You're attached to the Kingdom
• 27:48
  of God. I have a beautiful nun.
• 27:51
  We have a beautiful nun in our life.
• 27:53
  It's the first nun we really got to know.
• 27:55
  She lived near us when we were converting to Holy Orthodoxy in
• 27:58
  1992. And we met her and we started
• 28:01
  talking to her and I asked her. I said, why did you become a
• 28:03
  nun? Without hesitance, she looked at
• 28:05
  me and she goes eschatology, the doctrine of the eschaton, the
• 28:10
  Kingdom, it's here. The imminence of the Kingdom,
• 28:13
  it's here. The veil is so thin between this
• 28:16
  life and the next. It was a just a perfect,
• 28:19
  theologically perfect answer. And it is why our monks and nuns
• 28:24
  are doing what they what they do.
• 28:25
  But there's a beautiful synergy between true Christian families
• 28:28
  and monks, monks and nuns. We look at them like the
• 28:32
  marines. That's how we look at them.
• 28:35
  We're all in the army. We're all in the army, but monks
• 28:38
  and nuns are really the ones out there on the front lines and we
• 28:41
  mutually support one another, right?
• 28:43
  So our monasteries wouldn't exist without the support of our
• 28:47
  married people. Our married people come to the
• 28:48
  monasteries, they visit, they pray, they venerate relics,
• 28:53
  because our usually our monasteries are just full of the
• 28:55
  sacred relics. They're the keepers of the
• 28:56
  sacred bones of Christians, full of grace.
• 28:59
  And Christians come there to pray and to have their
• 29:02
  confessions heard, and then they leave their offerings and they
• 29:05
  support the the plans of the monasteries.
• 29:08
  They help them to accomplish what whatever is necessary.
• 29:11
  There's this beautiful mutual support.
• 29:13
  As a matter of fact, the candidates of the Church forbid
• 29:14
  if any monk monk judges a married person, as though
• 29:18
  somehow there's anything inherently sinful about
• 29:21
  marriage. Not only is he not a good monk,
• 29:24
  he's a heretic and he has just decimated any value of
• 29:28
  monasticism because monasticism is not a command.
• 29:31
  The monasticism isn't. Is it an evangelical offering?
• 29:35
  It's a love gift that the monk or nuns give.
• 29:38
  They don't have to. They could have families and
• 29:40
  they can find the path to salvation in their families, but
• 29:43
  they choose to give up the beautiful for something even
• 29:46
  more beautiful, which is spiritual marriage.
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  and a father of the church. He's both was the climate very
• 31:02
  like you said, there was this question that everyday
• 31:04
  Christians were asking themselves, should I even what
• 31:07
  marriage is it? Should we even be getting
• 31:09
  married? How prevalent was that question
• 31:11
  at the time? The atmosphere was very
• 31:13
  different than today, because today the presence of
• 31:16
  monasticism in the West is very small.
• 31:18
  This is the case both in in my Orthodox world and in your
• 31:21
  Catholic world. In your Catholic world, if we go
• 31:23
  back 60 years, it was very different because you had about
• 31:28
  15 to 20 times as many books. Yes, you did none.
• 31:33
  So yeah. They built the whole Catholic
• 31:35
  infrastructure of America. Dipped.
• 31:36
  It's kind of coming back a little bit now there's a return
• 31:38
  to vocation. But yeah, the kind of sexual
• 31:41
  revolutions didn't really crippled everything.
• 31:44
  Yes, like 95% crippled. Did you see Did Orthodoxy take a
• 31:48
  similar hit? In the West did not have the
• 31:51
  Western presence OK, So from 1890, especially because the
• 31:54
  Irish immigration in America from 1890 to 1955, you guys were
• 31:58
  just on a trajectory like this. I mean, you honestly, you were
• 32:01
  on a. Ascendant.
• 32:02
  You are on ascendant to to take the country over and many people
• 32:05
  were worried about this right? Especially when JFK was running
• 32:07
  for president. He had to literally say I will
• 32:10
  not allow my Catholicism to influence my policy.
• 32:13
  What an insane thing. What would you allow?
• 32:17
  Vehemently anti Christian I mean they really the sexual
• 32:20
  revolutionaries they hated guess God, but they hated you know,
• 32:24
  Christian strictures and moral codes.
• 32:27
  I know we're going off on tangents here.
• 32:29
  I apologize, but it's so it's so fascinating.
• 32:31
  Do you what do you think the the sexual revolutions impact right
• 32:37
  on the culture on Roman Catholicism.
• 32:39
  We talked about this on the show a fair amount, but I'm curious
• 32:42
  your take on this question. What was it?
• 32:44
  What would you say the why was it so compelling?
• 32:47
  Because they've always been hedonists.
• 32:49
  They've always been materialists.
• 32:51
  They've always been libertines, sexual libertines.
• 32:53
  The Roman Empire was full of them, and Western civilization
• 32:55
  has had its share. Why was it such a ripe time?
• 32:59
  And I know, why was it so effective, the sexual revolution
• 33:02
  and upending, like you said, now 70% of married couples were
• 33:06
  innate, you know, intact families when you were growing
• 33:08
  up. Now it's, you know, less than
• 33:09
  half. Things have changed dramatically
• 33:11
  everywhere. Yes they have.
• 33:13
  It's been a massive Satanic assault, catechetical assault.
• 33:19
  I've always tried to convince my people that Satan is an
• 33:24
  extremely talented catechist. Oh gosh.
• 33:27
  Oh, he's unbelievable. Lord of.
• 33:29
  Mercy, he's a very, very talented catechist and he came
• 33:31
  from multiple angles. He got he won the entertainment
• 33:35
  industry and then gradually ramped up exposure to
• 33:38
  impropriety. So this that we didn't even know
• 33:41
  was like the frog and the kettle.
• 33:42
  You'd even know that what you're watching is completely
• 33:44
  inappropriate to be watching. Little by little by little by
• 33:46
  little. You know, Before 19/19/63 every
• 33:50
  script was sent to Cartel Spellman in New York.
• 33:53
  Right there was a leading the moral standards.
• 33:56
  Right, Christians were actually evaluating content and if he
• 34:01
  said no, it was no, it was no. Those days are are long gone and
• 34:08
  Satan has been educating our children.
• 34:12
  I was just, this never stops, actually has never stopped in my
• 34:15
  ministry. There's there's so many of our
• 34:18
  young people that go off to secular universities and the
• 34:21
  catechism begins immediately. Absolutely, it's thorough going.
• 34:25
  It's as though it's the number one thing that the secular
• 34:28
  universities are committed to, and that is establishing our
• 34:30
  children in an apostasy from moral norms.
• 34:33
  So I, I, my, you know, we just have Naomi Best on the show.
• 34:37
  I don't know if you've seen her story yet.
• 34:39
  She's phenomenal, but she's just a very brave, gentle spirit.
• 34:43
  Speaking out against the insanity in their therapy
• 34:46
  courses, sexualizing, you know, pushing ridiculous stuff on the
• 34:49
  kids. But I remember being in freshman
• 34:50
  orientation at UCLA, and I was just baffled because it's
• 34:55
  literally within hours and probably within the second hour
• 34:58
  of orientation, we're all there in the auditoriums, and they're
• 35:01
  talking about how to put on a condom.
• 35:02
  And I was just like, what am I? Where did I enter in?
• 35:05
  Like, why? And then there was a joke made.
• 35:07
  Oh, some of you might think you're not going to have sex,
• 35:10
  but ha, ha, ha. This is for when you change your
• 35:12
  mind. And I thought how like how
• 35:15
  offensive and totally inappropriate.
• 35:16
  I'm here to get an education and, you know, liberal arts and
• 35:19
  you're, you're what is this charade that's happening here?
• 35:22
  So. But that's everywhere.
• 35:24
  Yes. When I was in college, which was
• 35:27
  a long time before she was, I took some summer classes at
• 35:31
  University of California, Santa Barbara.
• 35:33
  We were married, we were brand. We were a brand new married
• 35:35
  couple and I took two classes from a psychologist.
• 35:38
  His name was Plummer from Britain, from London, and one
• 35:43
  was called Feminism and Sexism, in which in the class he showed
• 35:47
  pornography numerous times. I just had to excuse myself.
• 35:51
  I'm sorry. I guess I'm leasing.
• 35:54
  I guess I'm leasing. I actually went to see him,
• 35:56
  though. I went to see him and I asked
• 35:59
  him. I said, why are you doing this?
• 36:02
  I said, aren't you from England? I said, weren't you Anglican?
• 36:04
  He goes, yeah, actually I was. I said, how did you just
• 36:08
  jettison Jesus? How did you do that?
• 36:12
  And he said, well, you know, I'm gay.
• 36:14
  And he told me kind of his his little bit of his story.
• 36:17
  And I had a book with me. Actually, I brought a book by a
• 36:19
  Christian apologist that I thought might help him.
• 36:23
  And at the end of our conversation, I said, look, I
• 36:25
  said, I'm not trying to impose on you, but you kind of imposed
• 36:27
  on me, right? You didn't ask me if you can
• 36:30
  show something that I find completely morally repugnant.
• 36:33
  You just showed it. And I had to walk out.
• 36:35
  This is kind of embarrassing. I said, so maybe you could also
• 36:39
  do something for me and read this book.
• 36:41
  And it was basically a, an, an apologetical book using CS
• 36:45
  Lewis's Lord liar, lunatic argument.
• 36:48
  Yeah, it's a very beautiful, reasonable evaluation.
• 36:51
  And he said, I'll read it. I said, well, I really
• 36:52
  appreciate that. And I came back and saw him like
• 36:54
  2 weeks later and he gave me the book back.
• 36:56
  I said, So what do you think? What do you think?
• 36:58
  He goes, it scared me to death. That was his answer, yeah.
• 37:04
  I didn't win him. I didn't win him.
• 37:06
  I had another that same summer I was taking.
• 37:08
  If it's true, it's true and I'm. I think he was saying, I think
• 37:11
  he said more than that. I think he was saying, I think
• 37:13
  it is true and I'm very. Scared.
• 37:16
  I'm very, I didn't sense any repentance.
• 37:19
  I think he was just terrified of the fact that he was so out of
• 37:22
  accord with Jesus's standard, and he knew that that spelled
• 37:26
  very bad things for his future, which it most certainly did.
• 37:28
  I hope he repented. I really gave it to him out of
• 37:31
  love and with a desire to help him.
• 37:33
  But I mean, that was a wild summer for me.
• 37:34
  I also took a class on geology that same summer from a Berkeley
• 37:37
  professor who was down teaching it.
• 37:39
  And his whole goal, his whole goal in the class was to mock
• 37:42
  the Bible, to mock Noah, to mock this, to mock that.
• 37:45
  And I just went to his class and I just confronted him.
• 37:47
  So I just said what is wrong with you?
• 37:48
  So this was what, 30 years ago? This.
• 37:50
  Was in 1920 years 80. OK, so.
• 37:53
  We were married in 88, so maybe 88 that summer.
• 37:57
  So that was your experience in university in California?
• 38:00
  And my experience was the same and maybe worse because
• 38:03
  everything in class was political.
• 38:05
  There was a class that was shown porn.
• 38:06
  And I had a class that I had a whole thing with, a meeting with
• 38:09
  the professor. And he was kind of a sex addict,
• 38:11
  you know, professor effectively. And he was obsessed with porn.
• 38:13
  He would do these pornographic experiments.
• 38:15
  But it's just these are not unique stories, but it it just
• 38:19
  then you ask the question, well, how did we get to the point
• 38:21
  where there's divorce is rampant and addiction is porn addiction
• 38:24
  is rampant. Well, there you.
• 38:25
  There you go. The bigger question, though, is
• 38:27
  how did Christians tolerate Yes, how could our love be so cold
• 38:33
  that we would actually allow ourselves to be catechized by
• 38:36
  the devil and not by Christ? Our view of commit Christian
• 38:40
  commitment obviously was completely inadequate for the
• 38:42
  times and and since we're in a much more serious position today
• 38:47
  in which the culture has gone even farther and now we're
• 38:49
  reaping the terrible benefits of depression and death and
• 38:53
  addictions that are just literally leaving people in
• 38:56
  debtors. Now it's time I think for us to
• 38:58
  wake up to wake up. It's way past that time and
• 39:01
  especially in this area, area of marriage and family life that
• 39:04
  you're so interested in and I am as well.
• 39:07
  It's time for us to really articulate very clearly what the
• 39:11
  value of Christian marriage is, how it in fact saves man, how if
• 39:16
  you embrace it, it becomes a foundation upon what you can
• 39:20
  build your whole life. You know, it's not just a little
• 39:22
  aspect of your life. It's not just like something
• 39:25
  that you add to have a fun life. You have a good job, you know,
• 39:27
  you go to the gym and you have your wife or your husband.
• 39:29
  That's not it at all. For us, it's a fundamental
• 39:32
  orientation to life, and there's only two If you want to serve
• 39:36
  God, you either serve him in consecrated celibacy or you
• 39:40
  serve him as a married person. And in both, the goal is not to
• 39:45
  do your own will, but to have a path of repentance in the
• 39:49
  monastic life. It's to obey your superior and
• 39:52
  you learn the virtues of obedience, stability, chastity,
• 39:56
  etcetera. In marriage.
• 39:57
  Marriage has its own form of obedience.
• 39:59
  It has its own form of chastity, right?
• 40:01
  There are spiritual disciplines that are built into married life
• 40:05
  that if you use them, if you embrace them.
• 40:08
  You will be changed, your heart will grow, your love will grow,
• 40:12
  your virtue will glow your your intimacy with God will grow if
• 40:16
  you learn to establish family prayer.
• 40:18
  For instance, one of the great things Saint John Chrysostom
• 40:20
  does is he teaches his people how to be devoted spiritually as
• 40:25
  a family. He talks about establishing a
• 40:30
  domestic typicon in your house, meaning that a a way that your
• 40:33
  house runs with regards to holy things.
• 40:36
  For instance, he asks that you set up a place to pray that's
• 40:39
  consecrated to prayer in your house.
• 40:41
  In the Orthodox tuition, we call it having a prayer corner and we
• 40:44
  usually have it facing east. We put icons there and incense
• 40:49
  and a candle and our prayer books and our prayer ropes,
• 40:52
  etcetera. And then we.
• 40:53
  Have that in so many Catholic homes.
• 40:54
  It's so normal. It's so normal and.
• 40:56
  Even in the Protestants, they, they have their little prayer
• 40:59
  room or I mean it's innate that we would do this in our homes,
• 41:02
  have a sacred space at our homes.
• 41:03
  At least to be with God. Yeah.
• 41:05
  A place to be with God. And you see it, right?
• 41:08
  It calls you just like your church does, right.
• 41:10
  You, you drive by your church and you love it.
• 41:12
  You make your cross. You can't wait till you to to
• 41:15
  the next service you're going to attend.
• 41:16
  It's the same in the home. It orients the home towards
• 41:19
  holiness. And then you do prayers
• 41:20
  together. You have prayers that you just
• 41:23
  do. I mean, all of my kids when they
• 41:25
  were growing up, they did the prayers.
• 41:27
  I would make the cross, I'd say in the name of the Father, Son
• 41:29
  and Holy Spirit, but that was pretty much it.
• 41:31
  They took this one did that prayer, this one did.
• 41:33
  Even the little ones could say Lord have mercy.
• 41:36
  And I'd say, do the 12? Lord have mercies, Lord have
• 41:39
  mercy, Lord have mercy. They had their spots right and
• 41:42
  they learned you don't live without God.
• 41:44
  You begin your day with God. You end your day with God.
• 41:47
  There's certain important things that you say they said decreed
• 41:49
  every day. They said to our Father every
• 41:50
  day. They make their cross every day.
• 41:52
  This is normal. This is just a Christian way of
• 41:55
  life and it's part of the path of a sanctified family.
• 42:00
  He he gives lots and if in this text that you have there, he
• 42:05
  gives like 20 practical guidelines on how you can
• 42:09
  actually in marriage grow in your knowledge of God and become
• 42:14
  holy, become loving. There's two things I want to ask
• 42:17
  you before going down the track of Chrysostom's prescriptions
• 42:21
  advice and also and it's impact in your life as well.
• 42:24
  But what you were saying earlier, so fascinating on a
• 42:27
  couple fronts. First of all, you were talking
• 42:29
  about the two vocations to celibacy or to married life.
• 42:33
  And of course you have to ask, well, what about those that are
• 42:36
  single, that have not married yet?
• 42:38
  They have not been consecrated. They're not sure what their path
• 42:42
  will be. They have maybe a desire for
• 42:44
  marriage. I'm speaking about many people I
• 42:46
  just know personally. And I think about two the two
• 42:49
  Saints that our church is about to the Catholic Church is about
• 42:52
  to canonize and we have Carlo Akutis and Blessed Pierre
• 42:57
  Giorgio Farsadi who are will be now Saints.
• 43:00
  Both of them pre vocation. They died young, so they didn't
• 43:04
  have a chance to be married or to be religious, you know, have
• 43:09
  a religious vocation. And so, you know, I'm curious
• 43:11
  your thoughts on the Lords of of a sales Providence over all
• 43:15
  these things. But what is the and?
• 43:17
  And also just using speaking to people listening who might be
• 43:19
  single and don't have one of the other vocation figured out yet
• 43:23
  what this means for them? This is a hard time to be in a
• 43:27
  condition like that because we don't live in a marriage culture
• 43:30
  anymore and we don't live in a culture that honors monasticism
• 43:33
  any lower. So both of those vocations are
• 43:36
  hard to discern. I love to use an example.
• 43:40
  We, we have this incredible St. who was sent here to America in
• 43:44
  the early 1960s. He ended up going to San
• 43:47
  Francisco. He was an Archbishop.
• 43:48
  His name's John. It's incredible.
• 43:50
  And he died in 1966 on July the second.
• 43:56
  As a side note, he's an incredible, he's been glorified
• 43:58
  as a St. His body is incorrupt.
• 44:00
  He was buried. He was buried with no embalming,
• 44:03
  in a crypt underneath the cathedral between 26 and 27th
• 44:07
  St. on Geary St. in downtown San Francisco, of all places, in the
• 44:10
  60s. Can you imagine?
• 44:11
  And he's still incorrupt. Yeah, when 1994 we opened this
• 44:15
  coffin and it fell apart. It was all oxidized.
• 44:18
  It fell apart. I have a little piece of the
• 44:21
  coffin in an icon of him in a little reliquary in the icon and
• 44:26
  some hair, because there's that's all we could get.
• 44:28
  We lifted his head and shaved the back of his neck, the nape
• 44:30
  of his neck, and then the hair was distributed.
• 44:33
  John, John John of San Francisco.
• 44:35
  John of San Francisco, beautiful.
• 44:36
  He he also was in Shanghai, China.
• 44:38
  He was Russian and he fled the Communists and he took 5000
• 44:42
  people to America from China, first to China, then to the
• 44:46
  Philippines. And then he came actually and
• 44:48
  petitioned the United States president for permission and
• 44:50
  brought them here and then spent hit the last years of his life
• 44:54
  serving people. He spent his nights, he he only
• 44:56
  slept an hour a night at midnight.
• 44:58
  He ate once a day and he would visit the hospitals at night,
• 45:02
  praying for everyone. Doesn't matter who you were.
• 45:04
  He healed. He's called the Wonder Worker,
• 45:06
  the Thav Mathura Ghost, which means a worker of great wonders
• 45:09
  because he did so many miracles and he still is, still is all
• 45:11
  over, all over the place anyway, that that.
• 45:17
  We've got to heal the schism, so.
• 45:19
  We can write. We've got to heal the schism so
• 45:21
  we can recognize him as our, as a, as a St. too.
• 45:24
  We'll, we'll get there. We'll, we'll, we'll sidebar that
• 45:27
  later, but there she goes. You know.
• 45:30
  The what a wonderful guy. Here he is in the middle of this
• 45:33
  chaos, right in the middle of this chaos, and he comes he he
• 45:37
  became a monk because he grew up as a young boy, literally next
• 45:42
  door to a monastery with 600 monks he played.
• 45:45
  Soccer. It has to be in the.
• 45:46
  Water. It has to be in the water.
• 45:48
  I think that's that's the thing with the tragedy.
• 45:51
  It's like, why fight the culture battle as Christians just preach
• 45:54
  the name of Jesus and that's it. And it's like, yes, of course
• 45:57
  we're preaching the name of Jesus, but you can't create the
• 46:00
  foundation for fostering the, the, the appetite, the aptitude
• 46:06
  for the, for the greater things and for, for marriage, quite
• 46:09
  frankly, if it's not in the water and.
• 46:10
  Well, you can make it in the water of your house.
• 46:12
  Yes. I'm sorry.
• 46:13
  I had my goal. I, I would love to save
• 46:15
  everyone. I really would.
• 46:17
  I actually pray for that all the time.
• 46:18
  I always ask up, Lord, please send me more people, help me to
• 46:21
  catechize and baptize more people more than I can possibly
• 46:24
  manage so that it's clear to me and to everyone has nothing to
• 46:27
  do with me. This is completely you.
• 46:29
  This is completely you. But I told myself and my wife
• 46:31
  and I have reminded ourselves we have our kids.
• 46:34
  We're the water for our kids. I want our kids to and I this is
• 46:41
  I'm I'll leave to my wife to say if it has happened, but I wanted
• 46:46
  them to love marriage by watching us just to love it and
• 46:51
  to love family life and to have the and to never want to be away
• 46:55
  from it. I've always wanted them to be
• 46:56
  close to us and close to each other and want to do the same
• 46:59
  thing to find spouses with whom they can run the race towards
• 47:02
  Christ and his Kingdom together. And we can do that.
• 47:06
  We can do that in our families. Each person who has this vision,
• 47:10
  if we catch the vision right, 12 apostles change the whole world.
• 47:13
  There. Was nothing in the water except
• 47:16
  the grace of God is more powerful than that.
• 47:18
  That's it. The blood of Christ and the Holy
• 47:20
  Spirit on their life. They made huge changes and we
• 47:23
  can do this especially it should be easier for us now because now
• 47:27
  we've tasted 1/2 century of this sexual revolution garbage
• 47:32
  garbage. Let's make an evaluation of it.
• 47:35
  Let's take it back to its roots, let's chop it down, and let's
• 47:39
  not tolerate this nonsense anymore.
• 47:41
  I have to ask one more question in your take on this, which is
• 47:44
  we are, you're discussing very beautifully how you see the
• 47:47
  sexual revolution. It's a horrible impact and how
• 47:50
  we can start to renew the culture basically.
• 47:54
  But we've got to ask. So we did, like you said,
• 47:57
  Christianity in many ways was ascendant in the United States
• 48:01
  in the first half of the 20th century.
• 48:03
  You, you do have a lot of postmodern thought and you know
• 48:06
  the all of the bad fruit of that.
• 48:08
  So I'm not saying that the ideologies were, there weren't
• 48:11
  horrible ideologies, because there were.
• 48:13
  But what were Christian families not doing in the mid 20th
• 48:19
  century that maybe caught them off guard or caught them flat
• 48:23
  footed? I have to just insert one thing
• 48:25
  that I can see very clearly, which is the advent of
• 48:29
  contraception, hormonal contraception, the birth control
• 48:32
  pill, early 20th century and Christian families just adopted
• 48:36
  it because it's a new technology.
• 48:37
  Of course, the doctors are telling me it's good for me.
• 48:40
  And the Catholics kind of did a scramble and they're like, OK,
• 48:43
  we got to have a teaching on this.
• 48:44
  So we have humane vitae and it says, I mean, it was always like
• 48:47
  the Christendom was always against contraception.
• 48:49
  But specifically to note this is bad, like remind people because
• 48:54
  there was confusion, because the new technologies, technologies
• 48:57
  are so exciting. The doctors are, you know,
• 48:58
  science is telling us whatever, whatever they think they're just
• 49:01
  telling them. And but I think it's getting
• 49:04
  caught flat footed at the crisis of the moment, not being in a
• 49:09
  posture of readiness. And it's like the the thief
• 49:13
  comes to steal, kill and destroy and you're not ready for it.
• 49:16
  And so they literally take over the entire home.
• 49:19
  And I would you say that that would you agree that that was
• 49:23
  part of it or what would you say is the source of the?
• 49:25
  Race of contraception as normative cannot be overly
• 49:32
  emphasized as wreaking the destruction of the family.
• 49:35
  Everything that Pope Paul the 6th in his human ivit I said,
• 49:40
  everything he said came true, even worse than he said.
• 49:45
  So if there's an argument for that being a prophetic document,
• 49:47
  forgive me, just read it. What he said was going to
• 49:50
  happen. It all happened in the my world.
• 49:53
  In the Orthodox world, contraception and its forbidden
• 49:57
  is as ancient as the Church. In fact, I in that volume I have
• 50:00
  a whole chapter dedicated to Chrysostom's teaching on
• 50:02
  contraception. Even the the first Protestants
• 50:05
  were anti contraception. Absolutely everybody was.
• 50:07
  We all were and. Hundreds of years until 1931.
• 50:10
  Everything changed, Yeah, and. Yeah, and it it, it was a lack
• 50:14
  of adherence, a lack of proper instruction and adherence to the
• 50:18
  teaching of the Church. No one suggested that the Church
• 50:21
  taught otherwise. Chrysostom is very clear.
• 50:24
  Although all of the major forms of contraception today,
• 50:27
  spermicidal things, barrier methods, chemical treatments,
• 50:32
  they all have ancient precedents.
• 50:34
  Chrysostom was very familiar with ancient gynecologies.
• 50:38
  I mean, we the whole books which we still have in Greek and in
• 50:42
  Latin that describe in great detail this.
• 50:45
  And it was strictly forbidden by Christians.
• 50:47
  Strictly forbidden. The embrace of contraception has
• 50:50
  absolutely decimated us because it's taken the miracle of
• 50:54
  marriage which unites all of these things together so
• 50:57
  mystically in God's wisdom, and it has brought broken them in
• 51:01
  pieces. Marriage does incredible things.
• 51:04
  It takes desire and it unifies it with sex.
• 51:11
  This is a huge problem in our culture today because desire and
• 51:14
  sex have been disconnected. There is a a catastrophic
• 51:18
  increase of autoeroticism of of masturbation, which is a plague
• 51:24
  in our time. Right.
• 51:25
  So it's like sex is not only not prerogative, it's not unitive.
• 51:28
  It's not unitive. It has nothing to do even with
• 51:29
  driving you to another another human being.
• 51:31
  It's turned in on yourself. So marriage addresses that
• 51:35
  initially, right? You have desire and you have
• 51:38
  sexual union. You have sexual union just
• 51:42
  combined in marriage with love. You have love designed also and
• 51:47
  impacted with commitment. You have commitment defined by
• 51:52
  God, by lifelong fidelity. It's an indissoluble union that
• 51:58
  also includes children and parents and family life.
• 52:03
  All of those things together are bound up in marriage.
• 52:06
  So if you mess with marriage, any aspect of marriage, you are
• 52:09
  literally wreaking havoc on an entire society, on something
• 52:12
  that that binds the society together.
• 52:15
  You can't just take bits and pieces.
• 52:17
  And what we've done is we've just completely shattered all of
• 52:20
  those things. Do you think no fault?
• 52:21
  Does a lot of people, especially in those sort of more right wing
• 52:24
  conservative side say, well, no fault divorce, That was the end
• 52:26
  of the end of the road that destroyed everything because
• 52:30
  everyone just got divorced, Willy.
• 52:32
  Nilly compromises that have led to the destruction of normal
• 52:36
  human behavior in life and family life.
• 52:38
  Absolutely. And it's a great grief that the
• 52:42
  first state to embrace no fault divorce was our state in 1969,
• 52:46
  and that under Governor Reagan And Reagan, forgive me, I like.
• 52:51
  Reagan legalized abortion in California.
• 52:53
  He also was the first divorced president we ever had in the
• 52:55
  United States. And forgive me, President Trump
• 52:57
  is the first twice divorced president we've ever had in this
• 53:00
  country. So if we're looking to our
• 53:02
  Republican leadership to be champions of family life, I'm
• 53:06
  sorry, you need to look someplace else.
• 53:08
  You need to look to Christ. You need to look to the church
• 53:11
  because in society we are in a terrible way, in these ways.
• 53:15
  100% contraception, no fault divorce, the legalization of
• 53:19
  sodomy. That's a controversial one.
• 53:24
  Share Share more of your thoughts on that.
• 53:26
  The idea? In some ways, that's the most
• 53:27
  controversial thing today is to criticize.
• 53:30
  Yeah, no priest of the Church of Christ is free not to censure
• 53:35
  sodomy, especially when those who are promoting it are
• 53:40
  attacking the Christian Church like crazy and suggesting that
• 53:43
  we're bigots simply because we're holding to Jesus's
• 53:46
  teaching. The idea that Jesus somehow
• 53:49
  endorsed or tolerated sodomy is ridiculous.
• 53:52
  Absolutely. Ridiculous.
• 53:53
  Even calling the same sex sexual activity between men's sodomy I
• 53:57
  think is offensive is seen as offensive to most modern years
• 54:02
  today. Of course, because we're
• 54:04
  evaluating it morally and we are supposed to.
• 54:07
  And you're naming the ACT. I think the other thing is that
• 54:09
  it names the act, and people are very squeamish about doing that.
• 54:12
  Strangely, we're so overtly sexual in today's culture, you
• 54:15
  know, and we're pushing sex, you know, it's everywhere.
• 54:17
  But then we're also squeamish about calling things by their.
• 54:20
  Yes, we are. And I mean no judgement.
• 54:22
  The church means no judgement the people.
• 54:24
  The church is not interested in judging people.
• 54:26
  We're interested in saving people.
• 54:29
  Even Jesus, who is the judge, didn't come to judge.
• 54:32
  He said I didn't come to judge the world, but that the world
• 54:34
  might be saved through me, right?
• 54:36
  The judgement's coming, but we don't want anyone to be poorly
• 54:40
  judged. We want everybody to be saved
• 54:41
  and forgiven. We're 100% for every person,
• 54:45
  regardless of their spiritual problem or their sexual
• 54:47
  deviance. We're for them 100%.
• 54:50
  I have plenty of former homosexual former homosexuals in
• 54:54
  my parish. What parish doesn't have any
• 54:57
  size? We don't.
• 54:58
  They're treated no differently than anyone else.
• 54:59
  Matter of fact, most people don't even know.
• 55:00
  Only their confessors know. So this is not about love.
• 55:03
  We absolutely love those. And we love them even if they
• 55:06
  hate us. And we love them, even if they
• 55:07
  say terrible things against us. There is a push, by the way,
• 55:10
  sidebar on that. This is such an important aspect
• 55:12
  of what you're what we're talking about with the sexual
• 55:14
  revolution and the, you know, the the defraying of everything,
• 55:17
  the fraying of everything. But I've noticed there's this
• 55:20
  approach in pastoral, you could say this is in the Protestant
• 55:24
  world it's in, it's in some parts of Catholicism.
• 55:27
  Obviously the Magisterium is the Magisterium that's unchanging.
• 55:30
  But you see this tendency to want to be particularly pastoral
• 55:34
  with people who struggle with same sex attraction or any
• 55:37
  number of sexual deviances or disorders.
• 55:40
  And so they kind of fall back on the LGBTQ moniker, this title to
• 55:47
  kind of be a safe place to sort of without direct and, you know,
• 55:50
  trying to shame anyone, just sort of categorize people.
• 55:52
  It's also the name that the activists choose that are
• 55:54
  promoting this stuff. So they say, well, will you want
• 55:56
  to be LGBT friendly here? That doesn't mean we condone
• 56:00
  same sex behavior or we condone sexual activities outside of
• 56:03
  marriage or we're not, you know, we're not trying to change the
• 56:05
  marital teaching, the teaching on marriage, but we want to be
• 56:08
  LGBT friendly here. So there's this kind of, I think
• 56:11
  struggle session that's playing out with some of the pastoral
• 56:15
  elements of just larger Christianity and and different
• 56:18
  facts, you know, factions of it about how to deal with this
• 56:23
  moment. What is your take on that?
• 56:26
  That's called poor pastoring. Without question, there's no
• 56:30
  precedent in the history of the Church for such things these
• 56:32
  problems. Mean for the LGBT label as a
• 56:34
  proper label to use. It's worse than that.
• 56:37
  All the Catholic churches in the Diocese of Riverside in San
• 56:39
  Bernardino fly the pride flag. No, 100 percent, 100%.
• 56:44
  I live right next to them. I have to endure this all the
• 56:47
  time. Not here, not in our diocese.
• 56:49
  Who's the Bishop? Someone needs to call that.
• 56:51
  Bishop. Worse, though, you're that
• 56:53
  Bishop. Needs a talking to.
• 56:55
  Yeah, I'm not the one to do that.
• 56:56
  That's your area, Yeah. Well, I don't know if that's
• 56:59
  even. I have a good friend who's a
• 57:01
  priest in the Pope. Leo are.
• 57:02
  You listening I. Think orange is straight?
• 57:04
  I'll write a letter. I'll write a letter to Pope Leo
• 57:06
  too. Catholic diocese that I grew up
• 57:07
  in, which is. There are bad bishops, as you
• 57:09
  know, as you know, so. Well, I'm I'm just pointing out
• 57:13
  how much this has permeated our Christian reality here.
• 57:19
  It when I was just becoming a priest, I had a friend who was a
• 57:22
  young Catholic priest in Santa Barbara.
• 57:25
  This is the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which is the largest
• 57:28
  Catholic archdiocese in America. 4.4 million people and Cardinal
• 57:34
  Mahoney. Not.
• 57:35
  Not good. Yeah, not good.
• 57:38
  Cardinal Mahoney opened a office for gay and lesbian ministry and
• 57:42
  my friend went to see him and said what are you doing?
• 57:46
  We don't do that. And he said I'm the cardinal,
• 57:48
  what are you talking about? He said, well, when are you
• 57:50
  going to open the office for liar Ministry and when are you
• 57:53
  going to open the office for adulterer Ministry?
• 57:55
  You know what happened to him. He had his faculties taken away.
• 57:57
  He. Had to just for that one
• 57:59
  conversation. For that opposition, yeah,
• 58:01
  because he. Wouldn't that's insane.
• 58:03
  Yeah, that is something we haven't touched on yet is the
• 58:05
  fact that the you know, especially in the Catholic
• 58:08
  Church, the pre sex abuse scandals lockstep with the
• 58:12
  sexual revolution and this new like liberated ideology that
• 58:17
  infected seminaries. Absolutely.
• 58:19
  And that's a real crisis that hit.
• 58:23
  The church. And it doesn't just go away.
• 58:24
  The light needs to be shown on it.
• 58:25
  It needs to be publicly renounced, yes.
• 58:27
  And Cardinal Mahoney was involved in cover up as I
• 58:30
  understand it. Yeah, I feel very bad about it
• 58:34
  and you have my sympathies about that, but in general?
• 58:39
  But I will also just say one other thing.
• 58:40
  Sorry, any every institution has been infected.
• 58:43
  It's not a Catholic problem. It's not a uniquely, certainly
• 58:46
  Christian problem, obviously. And to your point with
• 58:49
  Orthodoxy, it sounds like you've been generally spared, but
• 58:51
  that's because you've been generally not here, largely now
• 58:54
  you're here, but you're doing a different tact, thanks be to
• 58:56
  God. But I think no one, yeah.
• 58:59
  Yeah, I this is a universally traumatic moment for us.
• 59:04
  We need to recover our integrity.
• 59:06
  This markins back to what we were just speaking about
• 59:09
  earlier, about the need for a theological reaffirmation of
• 59:12
  what we believe. Marriage is something from God.
• 59:15
  You know, earthly marriage is based upon a divine prototype.
• 59:19
  Marriage is the image par excellence that the prophets use
• 59:23
  for the relationship of God and his people.
• 59:25
  It's used by the prophet Isaiah. It's used by the prophet
• 59:28
  Jeremiah, by the prophet Hosea, over and over and over again.
• 59:31
  It's the number one image through which Israel was to
• 59:34
  interpret its relationship to God by covenant.
• 59:37
  God is the husband and the people are the wife.
• 59:42
  That paradigm of the divine relationship influencing the
• 59:45
  human relationship is exactly what Saint Paul takes in his
• 59:49
  beautiful teaching that we use in our wedding service from
• 59:51
  Ephesians chapter 5 where he describes the role of the wife
• 59:54
  and the role of the husband in relationship to these divine
• 59:57
  relationships. Right.
• 59:58
  The wife if to respect and obey her husband as the church
• 1:00:02
  respects and obeys Christ, and the husband who gets.
• 1:00:06
  Far more difficult challenges. The wife pretty much just has to
• 1:00:09
  obey 3 verses. The husband gets 9 verses, and
• 1:00:14
  in those nine verses he's told that he has to love his wife as
• 1:00:17
  his own flesh. He have to lay down his life for
• 1:00:20
  her as Christ laid down his life for the church.
• 1:00:23
  He have to wash her with the water of the Word of God and
• 1:00:26
  present her on the day of judgement, pure and without
• 1:00:30
  blemish. Wow, you hear that And I think
• 1:00:35
  husbands would rather have the wife's command that.
• 1:00:40
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 1:00:41
  And that even that comment that when you really think about what
• 1:00:44
  the commands, how the commands are different, yes, there's more
• 1:00:49
  difficulty here. So you're saying you think the
• 1:00:50
  husband has a more difficult job?
• 1:00:52
  Objectively, he has three times the amount of commands and
• 1:00:55
  material than the wife. The wife has a singular
• 1:00:57
  direction. It's hard for women, especially
• 1:00:59
  for husbands. Trouble.
• 1:01:00
  I mean, I've given my wife a lot of trouble.
• 1:01:02
  She's worked hard at respecting me, even sometimes when I'm not
• 1:01:05
  respectable. And that's when it really
• 1:01:06
  counts, right? It's easy to love someone who's
• 1:01:08
  loving you, but when someone is maybe not doing so great or
• 1:01:11
  isn't so lovely to respect them or love them, then that's very,
• 1:01:14
  very honorable and very Christ like.
• 1:01:17
  But the husbands have a massive, massive task.
• 1:01:21
  But you see how Paul's using the divine human comparison, right?
• 1:01:26
  He's saying, look, Christ has shown us how to do this.
• 1:01:30
  Husbands look to him to know how to fulfill their earthly
• 1:01:32
  marriage responsibilities and wives look to the church to know
• 1:01:36
  how they should respond to their husbands.
• 1:01:38
  This is shows how fundamental marriage is.
• 1:01:40
  Marriage is not a social Contra. We didn't we didn't invect.
• 1:01:43
  It's not a construct made by men.
• 1:01:46
  The idea that you can alter something that God made as a
• 1:01:48
  foundational reality. I mean, this is Genesis 1 and 2.
• 1:01:52
  This is not something that was done, you know, in some
• 1:01:54
  political party. The idea that you can have
• 1:01:57
  politicians and judges redefine a foundational creation like
• 1:02:03
  this that is pre political. There's nothing about marriage
• 1:02:06
  that is made by politicians. You either accept it or you
• 1:02:11
  don't. Well, I'm noticing that people
• 1:02:13
  are no longer even concerned with marriage.
• 1:02:16
  They're now concerned with any number of arrangements that they
• 1:02:19
  just want to have revered and honored, even if not the legal
• 1:02:22
  benefits. I think about the polyamory is
• 1:02:24
  now the thing. Open marriage is not the thing.
• 1:02:27
  So marriage what is an what is an open marriage between 2 of
• 1:02:31
  people of the same that. Doesn't surprise us, my love for
• 1:02:34
  people who don't have a heavenly ambition, right?
• 1:02:36
  For people who don't fear God. But if you fear God, that that
• 1:02:41
  should concern you greatly, right?
• 1:02:42
  If you actually believe in God, and forgive me, the vast, vast
• 1:02:46
  majority of the world do believe in God.
• 1:02:50
  They may not believe in the true God, but the idea that it's only
• 1:02:53
  us, this is a distinctively corrupt, secular post sexual
• 1:02:57
  revolution reality in the West. This idea that we don't have to
• 1:03:00
  worry about the divine realm. It's just about the here and
• 1:03:03
  now. It's just about my pleasures.
• 1:03:05
  And whenever I think about that, I'm just going to suppress it.
• 1:03:07
  This is this is novel. This is absolutely novel and it
• 1:03:11
  has never produced anything. There is no historical
• 1:03:13
  precedence for this. Forgive me I I often tell people
• 1:03:17
  these days because it gets it's a shock value, but it drives
• 1:03:20
  home a truth. We should not call the secular
• 1:03:25
  way of life as we see it today in the West Pagan.
• 1:03:29
  It's not nice to the pagans. It's an insult to the pagans,
• 1:03:32
  the pagans, even the Greeks who the pre Christian Greeks.
• 1:03:36
  That's the closest corrupt culture that those who are in
• 1:03:42
  the LGBT movement might be able to appeal to.
• 1:03:45
  There is no parallel. There is no.
• 1:03:47
  Parallel. Why?
• 1:03:47
  Because they had a sense of reverence.
• 1:03:49
  Even the pagans had reverence for.
• 1:03:51
  The men who were practicing pederasty with boys had wives
• 1:03:57
  and they would be the first to tell you that you need a wife
• 1:03:59
  because if you don't support marriage your state will fall.
• 1:04:03
  The empire depends on strong families.
• 1:04:05
  They might have their boyfriend on the side but they would never
• 1:04:08
  do that to replace their wife and their family.
• 1:04:11
  No, there were all sorts of laws in Greco Roman civilization that
• 1:04:14
  you followed or else the state is done.
• 1:04:17
  Which is why it also factored into their legal code and the
• 1:04:22
  vast majority of the Pederas. Pederasty was not.
• 1:04:26
  I'm sorry to be so explicit, but it was not in penetration.
• 1:04:29
  They knew. That's nuts.
• 1:04:31
  That will ruin your health and destroy your body.
• 1:04:35
  It was so-called between the legs.
• 1:04:37
  This is how it was done amongst the homosexual men in ancient
• 1:04:43
  Greece. What parallel is that to the
• 1:04:45
  LGBT movement today? There is no parallel at all.
• 1:04:48
  There's no respect for marriage. There's no respect for family
• 1:04:51
  life, and the consequences of their way of life are
• 1:04:55
  objectively destructive to their own health and happiness.
• 1:04:59
  The statistics for men who are in this movement are horrifying.
• 1:05:05
  Their health outcomes are just horrifying.
• 1:05:07
  No one wants to talk about it. No one talks about.
• 1:05:09
  That, but they're irrefutable. Well, I think a lot of them if
• 1:05:14
  you're talking about like suicidality, they would say,
• 1:05:16
  well we're. Not just that.
• 1:05:17
  We're we're suicidal because society doesn't accept us or
• 1:05:20
  because of bigotry. So that's kind of the sleight of
• 1:05:22
  hand that's often used as. Accept society not only has
• 1:05:26
  accepted them, they've given them everything they've wanted,
• 1:05:28
  including dominance over religious people.
• 1:05:31
  And this is where there's this conflict where there's some
• 1:05:33
  pushback going on right today. So the people who have been
• 1:05:36
  terrorized are no longer they, they, they asked for tolerance.
• 1:05:39
  They got tolerance. They asked for legalization.
• 1:05:41
  They got legalization. They asked for honor.
• 1:05:43
  They got honor. For goodness sake, we're in
• 1:05:44
  June. We're doing this in June.
• 1:05:46
  This is the first year in the last 10 years we all haven't
• 1:05:49
  been made to bow down and to kiss the flag.
• 1:05:52
  Are you kidding me? Lord of Mercy.
• 1:05:54
  Year after year after year. So what do they?
• 1:05:57
  What is left? I think they're, they're
• 1:05:58
  searching for identity because they're not at rest, because
• 1:06:02
  they don't have their true identity of sons and daughters
• 1:06:04
  of God. And so they're going to
• 1:06:05
  constantly point the finger. Look what you're doing to me.
• 1:06:08
  You don't accept me, you, you, you because they are not at
• 1:06:10
  peace with themselves. And it's, so that's a, it's a,
• 1:06:13
  it's a, it's a dramatic deflect, constant deflection on to other
• 1:06:16
  people, projection, I should say, and other people.
• 1:06:18
  Yes, it. Is of the of the insecurity that
• 1:06:22
  is deep within and and again, I don't say this with judgment
• 1:06:25
  because we all have our insecurities.
• 1:06:27
  We all have our challenges and some people do have a special
• 1:06:30
  cross to bear with and and the culture because everyone does.
• 1:06:34
  Everyone does, everyone does. Of course.
• 1:06:35
  Thank you for correcting me. And in this culture, how many of
• 1:06:38
  us, because of the way we were raised, both nature and nurture,
• 1:06:42
  there are things that we the the opportunities, I think, for
• 1:06:46
  sexual deviancy and disorder are abundant today.
• 1:06:49
  If. Marriage if.
• 1:06:50
  Marriage is disrespected and it dissolved in the majority of
• 1:06:55
  homes, which it has been. Where is anyone going to have
• 1:06:58
  the health and the joy of seeing what true family life is like, a
• 1:07:03
  divinely arranged order of living?
• 1:07:06
  How are they going to have that benefit?
• 1:07:08
  They're not. So many have no dads and then
• 1:07:12
  their mom have to work because she's supporting herself.
• 1:07:15
  And they're literally being raised at schools.
• 1:07:17
  And, you know, we've mentioned a little bit about what's going on
• 1:07:20
  in a lot of those schools. It's tragic.
• 1:07:23
  There must be a cultural re evaluation about marriage.
• 1:07:27
  Marriage has to be once again embraced, honored and lifted up
• 1:07:32
  for gods and humanities Universal support.
• 1:07:37
  God made marriage. All traditional cultures have
• 1:07:40
  supported marriage as a keystone.
• 1:07:42
  We have this short term experiment.
• 1:07:45
  It has gone very poorly. It's time for us to stop.
• 1:07:49
  We need to honor marriage again. What about honoring children in
• 1:07:53
  that? How would you speak to that?
• 1:07:54
  Because I've noticed there's a theme or trend of, yeah, I'm
• 1:07:57
  going to honor marriage, but I don't know about the kids.
• 1:07:59
  Yes, maybe I'll not have children, be married or what are
• 1:08:02
  the. Best ways to honor your children
• 1:08:04
  is to love your spouse. You know, people talk about what
• 1:08:08
  divorce today is one of the greatest acts of hatred you
• 1:08:11
  could possibly do to a child. First of all, it destroys their
• 1:08:14
  whole theology. If the husband represents Christ
• 1:08:18
  and the wife represents the church and their Christian kids,
• 1:08:21
  then, and they see their father or their mother put each other
• 1:08:24
  away, what are they going to think about God's fidelity to
• 1:08:27
  them? They're going to say, you know,
• 1:08:30
  I hear that God loves me, but my dad represented God in the
• 1:08:33
  household and he dumped my mom. Is God going to dump me?
• 1:08:37
  I think the answer is yes. If you destroy marriage, you're
• 1:08:41
  destroying the most tangible expression in their life of the
• 1:08:45
  love of God and how it works itself out.
• 1:08:47
  And it works the opposite way. If the wife does that, this is a
• 1:08:51
  great gift to kids. They need parents.
• 1:08:54
  And are you happy? Well, forgive me.
• 1:08:57
  Marriage is not just about being happy.
• 1:08:58
  There's a lot of times that I'm sure my wife hasn't been happy.
• 1:09:02
  I'm not saying me, but there's a lot of times I'm sure.
• 1:09:05
  But she loved me. And that's when love really is
• 1:09:09
  important. You know, sometimes when we
• 1:09:11
  think of love, when we're talking about marriage, we think
• 1:09:13
  about emotion and we think about Eros.
• 1:09:15
  Eros is great. Eros is great, especially when
• 1:09:18
  you're young. It is, you know, CS Lewis has a
• 1:09:22
  beautiful description. He says, look, Eros is like that
• 1:09:26
  love that gets the train moving down the track.
• 1:09:29
  It's the explosion that actually gets this very heavy,
• 1:09:33
  complicated train moving. And without arrows, that train's
• 1:09:37
  never going to move. So you need arrows.
• 1:09:39
  But arrows is not the love that is going to keep the train
• 1:09:42
  moving to the destination over the course of a whole lifetime.
• 1:09:46
  That takes Storgy, which is a deep affection.
• 1:09:49
  It takes filia especially, which is cultivated friendship.
• 1:09:53
  And for Christians, if you want to have a glorious marriage that
• 1:09:55
  God respects, it takes agape, which is the uniquely
• 1:09:59
  unconditional Christian love which is so important in
• 1:10:02
  marriage. And that's where the face of
• 1:10:04
  Christ appears, is when husbands and wives love each other and
• 1:10:07
  forgive each other because they love God.
• 1:10:10
  Why should Christian couples not just have children, but be
• 1:10:14
  generous in saying yes to children, especially in a world
• 1:10:18
  that has its chaos? You know, I know you're asking
• 1:10:21
  me to develop that ethic and I will because I've done it 1000
• 1:10:24
  times. But I always want to say up
• 1:10:26
  front, that's just such a crazy question.
• 1:10:29
  It is such a crazy question because.
• 1:10:30
  I was literally just on a show with a friend recently.
• 1:10:32
  I'm talking about it. Well, we have two or three and
• 1:10:36
  it's tough. And you know, no, I mean, not to
• 1:10:38
  put her talk about her specifically, her case was a
• 1:10:40
  little different. She had health issues, but or
• 1:10:43
  very difficult pregnancies. But this is the I was literally
• 1:10:46
  talking with a couple at an event last weekend.
• 1:10:49
  We had the three kids and we looked around and we were all
• 1:10:52
  busy on Saturdays with soccer games, a very devout Christian
• 1:10:55
  couple, Christian, evangelical Protestant.
• 1:10:57
  And and then we accidentally and, and I said, and then we
• 1:11:01
  had, and then we had a fourth accidentally, right.
• 1:11:03
  OK, on the accident, whatever, God with God, there's no
• 1:11:06
  accidents. And then we were at the the
• 1:11:08
  soccer game. They're also soccer at the same
• 1:11:10
  time. And I said to them, and then we
• 1:11:13
  looked, what are we doing? I said, it sounds like you
• 1:11:14
  signed up for too many soccer games.
• 1:11:16
  And they're like, they were like we never thought about.
• 1:11:21
  And I was like, is the is the problem the child or is the
• 1:11:25
  problem something else? You know the answer to that.
• 1:11:28
  I want to hear you pine on it, though.
• 1:11:30
  You do so eloquently. Person who's making the
• 1:11:36
  decision, I'm sure, is very happy to be alive.
• 1:11:40
  And do we all think that our parents had us because it was
• 1:11:45
  just the perfect time in the right way and all the money was
• 1:11:47
  set and everything was correct? That's such nuts.
• 1:11:50
  Now I think we're happy to be alive, and whatever sacrifice
• 1:11:54
  our parents made, May God bless them, we're thankful for it.
• 1:11:58
  We better be. We should be.
• 1:12:01
  We should be. And if you're thankful to be
• 1:12:03
  alive, give the same gift. Give the same gift to the
• 1:12:07
  children that God wants you to have.
• 1:12:09
  And remember who's in charge of your life, who's God.
• 1:12:12
  You know, the Lord doesn't just have treat us like rabbits.
• 1:12:15
  It's not like, oh, if you're going to just live a beautiful
• 1:12:18
  life together and not use contraception, you're going to
• 1:12:20
  have 32 children. That's not the case.
• 1:12:23
  You're certainly going to have more than 1.6, and that's the
• 1:12:25
  real elephant in the room. The real elephant in the room is
• 1:12:28
  that we are dying. As a culture, we are dying,
• 1:12:30
  dying, dying. We're corrupt and.
• 1:12:32
  Europe is, yeah, we're corrupt and we're rotten and we're
• 1:12:35
  disappearing. And to have to be schooled by
• 1:12:39
  Elon Musk about this, I'm thankful.
• 1:12:42
  I'm thankful he's schooling us. But because people listen to him
• 1:12:45
  and when he comes out and says look.
• 1:12:48
  But then the endless baby Mama approached and he doesn't know
• 1:12:52
  his own kids. Let's give him credit where
• 1:12:53
  credit's due first, which is thank you, Elon, for pointing
• 1:12:57
  out the demographic, demographic collapse. 100% thank you.
• 1:13:02
  Because you speak with authority in many people's minds.
• 1:13:06
  And no one's talking about this. No one is talking about the fact
• 1:13:09
  that children are despised. And I was at the conference.
• 1:13:13
  I don't know if I've ever told you this before.
• 1:13:15
  I was at a conference once and the president, the woman who
• 1:13:18
  would be president of Hungary, was at that time the Ministry of
• 1:13:22
  Family Life and Culture. And she did it.
• 1:13:25
  She set up a beautiful on the screen, a beautiful map of all
• 1:13:28
  of Europe. And it had all the countries,
• 1:13:30
  Western, Central and Eastern European countries, and had a
• 1:13:33
  picture of the head of state, the Prime Minister for every
• 1:13:36
  country, and then a number next to it.
• 1:13:38
  And then it had right down the middle a line.
• 1:13:41
  And then she asked us, so she said the number up here and she
• 1:13:46
  actually was just a hole is going to be filled with the
• 1:13:48
  number when she pushed the button, she said the number I'm
• 1:13:50
  going to show you is the number of children that the head of
• 1:13:52
  state has on average you can average them so that she pushed
• 1:13:56
  the button. Guess what?
• 1:13:57
  The number of average number of children for all Western
• 1:14:00
  European heads of state. That's so fascinating.
• 1:14:03
  Guess what it was? 1.720.
• 1:14:09
  Not a single Prime Minister of a single Western European country
• 1:14:13
  had a single child. You want to be governed by
• 1:14:16
  people who have no kids? Do you want them to make
• 1:14:18
  decisions about who goes to war? They don't have a single child
• 1:14:21
  in the game. That's nuts.
• 1:14:23
  You know what the average was? For Central and East not to do
• 1:14:26
  totally sidewalk, but you know the kind of war hawkish.
• 1:14:30
  He has no kids. That's such a good point.
• 1:14:32
  He has no children. The wars that he may help start
• 1:14:35
  now. There's no child of his that
• 1:14:38
  will die for them. No.
• 1:14:40
  You know, we can talk about other things we were talking
• 1:14:42
  about earlier about Lindsay as well, but let's not.
• 1:14:44
  Thank you for being pro-life, Andrew, but the prayers of the
• 1:14:47
  war, the war stuff that we got to avoid at all best cost we
• 1:14:51
  can. Yeah.
• 1:14:52
  Warmongers kill people, the Central and Eastern European
• 1:14:55
  countries. 3.5 So you have a major world view conflict which
• 1:15:00
  we see playing out in Western Europe and Central Europe
• 1:15:03
  conflicts right now. Elon did this incredible gift
• 1:15:08
  for us by by calling this out and showing that we're not,
• 1:15:13
  we're not having kids. If parents get in, if they're
• 1:15:17
  Christians and in the case you're presenting to me, they
• 1:15:20
  are Christians, then you have to accept marriage for what it is.
• 1:15:23
  God made marriage. We're not free to take this part
• 1:15:26
  and leave that part. It is a package deal.
• 1:15:29
  There's fundamentally 3 reasons that God fashioned marriage for
• 1:15:32
  men. One is to provide a way for him
• 1:15:35
  to overcome his own. What the great Tertullian in 3rd
• 1:15:40
  century called the virus of lust.
• 1:15:43
  St. Paul says this in First
• 1:15:44
  Corinthians 7 because of fornication.
• 1:15:46
  Let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own
• 1:15:48
  husband, right? This is a solution.
• 1:15:50
  This is a solution for our sexual desire.
• 1:15:53
  Can I pause you before you go to two and three?
• 1:15:55
  Of course, I think this is a common misunderstanding in the
• 1:15:58
  church and among Christians and maybe conservatives, this idea
• 1:16:02
  that well, the man and the woman need to channel their loss.
• 1:16:04
  And usually it's focused around the man, which is a little funny
• 1:16:06
  to me because it's like women, we have this sort of attitude or
• 1:16:10
  posture that women are less sexual than men.
• 1:16:12
  And that's I don't think true. But that's another issue it.
• 1:16:15
  Is, but it's an important one, so you can.
• 1:16:17
  Bring it. OK, so we'll get there too.
• 1:16:19
  But there's this posture about marriage that, you know, and
• 1:16:23
  it's the criticism of the of the Catholic Church sometimes.
• 1:16:25
  Well, if the priest could just get married, then we wouldn't
• 1:16:27
  have had the sex abuse scandals of the pedestrian and the
• 1:16:30
  pedophilia against the young boys.
• 1:16:31
  And it's like, wait a minute, you don't want to marry a man
• 1:16:34
  who has sexual inclinations that he's acting upon about boys.
• 1:16:39
  You know that he goes, he should go to jail, right?
• 1:16:42
  If he's acting upon them. And if he has the strong
• 1:16:44
  impulses, he needs therapy and and exorcism, you know, he needs
• 1:16:47
  support. He shouldn't be channelling it
• 1:16:49
  in a marriage, right? So can you help explain in your
• 1:16:53
  view what this actually means, this idea of burn, you know,
• 1:16:56
  Saint Paul saying if you're going to burn with passion, then
• 1:16:59
  you should marry. It's not saying, oh, you can
• 1:17:01
  lust now within your marriage. No, it's not saying that at all.
• 1:17:04
  But I think that needs to be clarified because I think it's a
• 1:17:07
  common misunderstanding today. Men and women were created with
• 1:17:12
  desire from one another, and the Church Fathers say that they
• 1:17:15
  were. Men and women were created as
• 1:17:17
  one flesh. They weren't created and as one
• 1:17:19
  flesh by sexual union in paradise.
• 1:17:23
  As I mentioned earlier, Eve was taken from the rib cage of Adam
• 1:17:30
  by God's own hands. The incredible 3rd century
• 1:17:33
  church Father St. Methodius of Olympus, in his
• 1:17:37
  incredible treatise on the marriage banquet, describes how
• 1:17:42
  lovingly God put Adam to sleep. He gave him, you know, this
• 1:17:46
  sedative so that he wouldn't feel anything when God did this
• 1:17:50
  surgery to take his rib out because God didn't want him to
• 1:17:53
  associate any pain with the creation of his wife.
• 1:17:56
  And then he chose to take her from his rib.
• 1:18:00
  He didn't take her. I always remind men from the
• 1:18:02
  man's foot, He took her from his rib.
• 1:18:06
  What does the rib do? It guards the heart on the side
• 1:18:09
  as his companion. It's a symbol of what role the
• 1:18:12
  wife plays in marriage. She is the guardian of her
• 1:18:14
  husband's heart. I would also argue she's the
• 1:18:16
  heart of the family. He's the head, but she's the
• 1:18:18
  heart and she's his companion in life.
• 1:18:22
  And he was saying, Methodius says that when God was doing
• 1:18:27
  this, he put him also into a, a sleep.
• 1:18:31
  It wasn't just knocking him out, but he was in this beautiful
• 1:18:34
  sleep so that she could in this sense of great arrows of love in
• 1:18:40
  his life. The woman comes forth and then
• 1:18:42
  he sees her in front of him. They lived one flesh union and
• 1:18:47
  that one flesh union was also a union of their minds, right?
• 1:18:51
  The good marriage is of marriage that the husband and wife work
• 1:18:55
  towards Concorde. They work towards a common
• 1:18:58
  vision in life. This is one of the most repeated
• 1:19:00
  things in the marriage service in the back of my book.
• 1:19:04
  It's a good time, I think to hold it up.
• 1:19:06
  I wrote this pre marriage manual, Enduring Love, laying
• 1:19:08
  Christian foundations for marriage in the back of the
• 1:19:11
  book. I have actually the liturgical
• 1:19:13
  text for the Eastern Orthodox Wedding Service and I use, I
• 1:19:17
  reference it constantly because there you see the emphasis of
• 1:19:21
  the Church and it's the same in traditional Western marriage
• 1:19:24
  rights, Catholic marriage rights, the emphasis on praying
• 1:19:29
  for their Omonia. It's the word, it means harmony
• 1:19:32
  or Concorde, and it's repeated over and over and over.
• 1:19:35
  And it's something that is a gift from God, but also is
• 1:19:37
  cultivated by the couple. Well, that's the source of all
• 1:19:39
  divorces. A lack of Concorde, a lack of
• 1:19:41
  harmony, and. Embracing, embracing the the
• 1:19:45
  task. You know, when you're learning
• 1:19:47
  something as a married person, you'd learn it as a married
• 1:19:49
  person. I always tell husbands and
• 1:19:51
  wives, look, if you learn something new and it's
• 1:19:52
  important, digest it, understand it, but don't go on until you've
• 1:19:56
  sat down with your spouse and talked about it.
• 1:19:58
  You learn together, you move together.
• 1:19:59
  Or you might find that in a year, if you have been selfish
• 1:20:03
  or functioning as a single person, when you're not a
• 1:20:05
  single, ontologically you're done.
• 1:20:07
  You're not a single person anymore.
• 1:20:08
  You are a married person. The same thing can be paralleled
• 1:20:11
  with a priest. When a priest becomes a priest,
• 1:20:13
  it's not a functional reality. His ontology has changed.
• 1:20:15
  He is a spirit bearer who performs the mysteries and
• 1:20:19
  communicates God's blessing. He may be in the shower, you
• 1:20:22
  know, in his birthday suit, so to speak.
• 1:20:25
  He is a priest. Cassocks don't make priests.
• 1:20:29
  Ordination and the grace of God make priests.
• 1:20:32
  And it's the same with the married life.
• 1:20:33
  When you're married, you're married.
• 1:20:34
  You carried yourself as a married man and as a married
• 1:20:36
  woman, even if you're not together.
• 1:20:38
  And cultivating this harmony, working together to learn, to
• 1:20:42
  grow, to develop, to acquire the new ambitions, you have to do
• 1:20:47
  this slowly and carefully with your spouse.
• 1:20:50
  You can't just run ahead like you're some single person.
• 1:20:52
  No way, 100%. Which means, of course, that you
• 1:20:55
  have to, you have to moderate yourself, you have to be able to
• 1:20:59
  and you have. To be patient.
• 1:21:01
  And that's such a lost art today.
• 1:21:03
  And listen and talk and make progress together.
• 1:21:08
  But if you do that, then you're taking steps together, right?
• 1:21:10
  You're actually strengthening yourself that that kind of
• 1:21:15
  cultivated friendship is also one of the reasons that got
• 1:21:18
  fashion marriage. Fashion marriage to overcome our
• 1:21:21
  sexual deviancy, our our mess, which is something that happens
• 1:21:26
  over time. So you asked me the question
• 1:21:30
  about marital relations when you're young, it is a solution
• 1:21:34
  for your passion, right? You confine it and you demand
• 1:21:38
  that it be associated with love. And that's how it's tamed.
• 1:21:43
  That's how it goes from something that's wild, that's
• 1:21:46
  bestial and degrading and self-centered.
• 1:21:52
  That's how you switch it from that to something that actually
• 1:21:54
  communicates love and builds unity.
• 1:21:57
  Saint Gregory the Theologian says that kind of cultivated
• 1:22:01
  marital sexuality functions like a super glue and the knowing
• 1:22:06
  each other as one flesh. And then from that, also being
• 1:22:09
  able to have children and multiply the image of God, which
• 1:22:11
  was, by the way, the first commandment that went into the
• 1:22:13
  human ear. Be fruitful and multiply is 1.6.
• 1:22:17
  Being fruitful and multiplying. I'm sorry, that's not even
• 1:22:18
  reproducing yourself. That's killing the human race.
• 1:22:22
  It's not even multiplying it at all. 2.1 is necessary just to
• 1:22:25
  reproduce yourself. That's not multiplying either.
• 1:22:29
  Oh, interesting. Multiplying is at least what, 4?
• 1:22:32
  Yes, yeah, exactly. And.
• 1:22:35
  And again, not everyone caveats here.
• 1:22:37
  If you're not, you know you have infertility.
• 1:22:39
  You can't. This doesn't make you less than,
• 1:22:41
  and if there's some severe health crisis, it's not.
• 1:22:44
  The Scriptures, the Lord is the one who opens the womb and
• 1:22:46
  closes the room. We're thinking just
• 1:22:48
  biologically, we think that these laws just run.
• 1:22:51
  That's not what natural law is. Natural law is just God doing
• 1:22:54
  things the same way regularly so we can count on Him if we woke
• 1:22:58
  up every day and the so-called law of gravity, He changed every
• 1:23:01
  day and when I dropped this cup it went up to the ceiling and
• 1:23:04
  stuck. That's a very confusing life.
• 1:23:06
  I'm expecting the cup to go down.
• 1:23:08
  That's not because of law. It's because God made the world
• 1:23:13
  such a he's. He permeates everything.
• 1:23:15
  His spirit permeates everything. Everything moves by the Spirit
• 1:23:17
  of God in the world and he is consistent.
• 1:23:20
  Sometimes if you're the prophet Elias and your disciple is
• 1:23:24
  chopping a tree down and the axe head falls off and it goes into
• 1:23:28
  the water and it sinks because that's normally what happens.
• 1:23:31
  But if you're in big trouble because you borrowed it and you
• 1:23:33
  go to your spiritual father, the prophet Elias, and you say or
• 1:23:36
  Elijah actually, and he says, Oh, father Elijah, I drop my my
• 1:23:40
  axe head and then he comes over and he goes, please, Lord, give
• 1:23:42
  me the axe head. He comes to the top.
• 1:23:44
  OK, That's the intervention of grace.
• 1:23:47
  That is God performing a miracle, but he also performed a
• 1:23:51
  miracle by making it go down. He was just involved, as
• 1:23:53
  involved as making it go down as he was making it come up.
• 1:23:56
  God's involved with this kind of thing and he's involved in
• 1:24:00
  opening wounds and shutting wounds, right?
• 1:24:02
  For very many reasons. Just look at the the life of
• 1:24:04
  Abraham the patriarch when he went into Egypt and the Pharaoh
• 1:24:09
  took Sarah got closed all the wounds in Egypt.
• 1:24:13
  Not a single person could conceive.
• 1:24:16
  They could try as they want biology.
• 1:24:17
  So would you say that obviously artificial closing of the womb
• 1:24:20
  is always wrong, but then there is a conversation about, well,
• 1:24:24
  fertility awareness, natural family planning and, you know,
• 1:24:27
  spacing children and delaying children and doing, you know,
• 1:24:31
  because of, you know, financial or material reasons or health
• 1:24:35
  reasons. What would be your approach that
• 1:24:39
  you think would be the good guiding star for that?
• 1:24:42
  And I know the Orthodox and the Catholics are very close on
• 1:24:44
  this. Not fully identical, but very
• 1:24:46
  close. The teaching of the church is
• 1:24:50
  that God is the Lord of birth giving and that we do not have a
• 1:24:56
  right to play with the purposes of marriage.
• 1:25:00
  When a couple sits down to me on their first pre marriage meeting
• 1:25:03
  and they say Father we're going to get married and we want you
• 1:25:06
  to do it and we want you to form us, I always stop.
• 1:25:09
  I say, wait just a second before I get involved.
• 1:25:12
  Let's find out if you're really supposed to get married.
• 1:25:14
  And then I asked the couple. I say, look, when you get
• 1:25:17
  married, you have to confine yourself sexually to your wife.
• 1:25:22
  You have to make her your chief friend and you have to cultivate
• 1:25:27
  that friendship for for the rest of your life and you have to
• 1:25:31
  procreate because these are the three reasons that God has
• 1:25:34
  created marriage. So I asked the the husband.
• 1:25:38
  I said, look, what would you want me to say if a couple came
• 1:25:41
  to me and said, you know, Father, I really want to get
• 1:25:44
  married. I'm ready for kids and she is my
• 1:25:49
  chief friend. But I need my girlfriends on the
• 1:25:51
  side. I'm going to sleep with my wife.
• 1:25:53
  I'll give her her due, her due, but I'm going to have to have a
• 1:25:56
  few girlfriends on the side. What would you want me to say?
• 1:25:58
  Oh, yeah, sure, I'll marry you. No, If I you're a good priest,
• 1:26:01
  you're going to want me to say as a good priest, if you're
• 1:26:04
  going to have girlfriends, you can't get married because that's
• 1:26:08
  not what marriage is. Marriage is an exclusive
• 1:26:11
  commitment to one other sexually.
• 1:26:14
  And what happens if the next couple comes in and I say to
• 1:26:17
  him, look, Are you ready to be sexually exclusive to have
• 1:26:20
  children but and have your wife as your chief friend, your chief
• 1:26:24
  companion. And he says, you know what, I
• 1:26:26
  like everything, but I have a really tight group of male
• 1:26:29
  friends, really tight. And nobody can come between me
• 1:26:32
  and my male friends. I have, you know, we go to we go
• 1:26:35
  to the bar on Tuesday and Thursday night.
• 1:26:36
  We play basketball on Friday. You know, we have a rugby
• 1:26:39
  practice on Saturday. My wife's just going to have to
• 1:26:41
  deal with it. What would you want me to say?
• 1:26:43
  You want me to say if I'm a good priest, you know, that's all
• 1:26:45
  nice. But if you're going to be
• 1:26:46
  married, your number one neighbor through whom you're
• 1:26:50
  going to enter into the Kingdom of God by loving her is your
• 1:26:53
  wife. She is your chief friend.
• 1:26:55
  Nobody can be in comparison with her.
• 1:26:58
  They understand those two. But when I come to the third and
• 1:27:01
  I asked, look, are you going to be sexually exclusive with your
• 1:27:03
  wife? Are you going to be committed to
• 1:27:05
  her as your chief friend and the the neighbor that you're going
• 1:27:07
  to love? And are you going to have
• 1:27:09
  children? So many will say, well, you
• 1:27:12
  know, eventually, Oh, fascinating.
• 1:27:15
  So you can just pick and choose like a wax nose.
• 1:27:17
  Marriage is a wax nose. You make it what you want.
• 1:27:19
  You can take this. You can you have to be sexually
• 1:27:22
  faithful. You she has to be your chief
• 1:27:23
  friend in your mind. Those are non negotiables.
• 1:27:25
  But whether or not you have kids, where do you get this
• 1:27:27
  idea? Well, they would say, well,
• 1:27:29
  we're just going to delay a little bit to set things up
• 1:27:31
  better or. Can you delay sexual fidelity to
• 1:27:33
  your wife? Can you delay being friends?
• 1:27:36
  Can you? Can you have keep girlfriends
• 1:27:38
  for a year, 2 years, three years?
• 1:27:40
  You know you can't. I remember that a very wise
• 1:27:43
  priest in premarital prep for with my husband and I, we were
• 1:27:47
  discussing this question of when, you know, children and
• 1:27:49
  being open to life. And he was saying, you know, his
• 1:27:52
  principle, which is a beautiful one, is why are you getting
• 1:27:54
  married if you're not ready to get pregnant right away?
• 1:27:58
  That's what marriage is. That's what marriage is.
• 1:28:00
  That's what marriage is. And that doesn't mean you're
• 1:28:02
  going to get pregnant because. Right, you might not.
• 1:28:04
  Children are a gift from the Lord.
• 1:28:06
  The fruit of the womb is a reward.
• 1:28:10
  Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of
• 1:28:14
  1's youth. How blessed is the man whose
• 1:28:16
  quiver is full of them. Psalm 127.
• 1:28:19
  That is the Christian understanding of kids.
• 1:28:23
  How presumptuous on our part to think we're going to get married
• 1:28:25
  and God's going to give us 32 rewards.
• 1:28:28
  Rewards for what? No, maybe he will.
• 1:28:32
  Maybe he will, and you should be thankful if he's going to give
• 1:28:34
  you a lot of kids. OK, but not everybody has a lot
• 1:28:35
  of kids, and not all the kids you have live.
• 1:28:38
  This is one of the great tragedies pastorally is people
• 1:28:40
  who have one and two kids. If they lose one of them, it's a
• 1:28:43
  tragedy. Oh, it's horrible.
• 1:28:44
  So what in your view would be an appropriate, if any, is there
• 1:28:50
  any situation where you would intentionally avoid intimacy
• 1:28:54
  during fertility windows in order to space or delay
• 1:28:57
  children? And examples could be you just,
• 1:29:00
  you know, someone just found out they have cancer, the youngest
• 1:29:04
  child has some life threatening disease or, you know, there's an
• 1:29:08
  economic challenge you're having, struggle to put food on
• 1:29:10
  the table. I don't know.
• 1:29:11
  I'm just, you know, inventing things as, as examples.
• 1:29:15
  I would say first that it's very important for couples to learn
• 1:29:21
  to practice sexual fasting. This is traditional Christian
• 1:29:25
  practice. Fasting is something that we do
• 1:29:30
  traditionally. We Orthodox still do it twice a
• 1:29:34
  week, on Wednesdays and Fridays. We don't eat flesh meats, we
• 1:29:38
  don't eat fish. We don't have dairy products.
• 1:29:42
  We try to reduce our intake by half, and we tried to give money
• 1:29:47
  and time to people who are in need.
• 1:29:49
  This is the traditional fasting rules, and for the vast majority
• 1:29:51
  of Catholic history too, it's the same.
• 1:29:53
  Yeah, I know Catholics who try to observe that as well.
• 1:29:56
  It's very doable. It's actually very doable.
• 1:29:58
  You don't have to be a great Christian to do it.
• 1:30:01
  Actually. Now, Americans, you know, we eat
• 1:30:03
  what we want when we want, so it's hard for us.
• 1:30:05
  To we have the lobster feast on Fridays.
• 1:30:07
  That's our fast note. Part of the I'm not fully
• 1:30:11
  judging us, but we are. We are in need of a of a of a
• 1:30:14
  big wake up call. Part of that fast in in the
• 1:30:18
  tradition of the Church, and this is in the canons East and
• 1:30:20
  West, is sexual fasting, which forgive me, for most men is far
• 1:30:25
  more important than delaying having a hamburger for a day.
• 1:30:28
  They want their wives more than they want a hamburger, most men.
• 1:30:31
  So this is very, very important. And it's very, very important
• 1:30:35
  for their own love. If you're always indulging
• 1:30:37
  yourself, the, the preciousness goes down, not up.
• 1:30:43
  Learning to be disciplined, learning to say no to your
• 1:30:46
  desires also spills into everything else, right?
• 1:30:49
  If you can learn this area, if you can fast.
• 1:30:51
  And so when your, your stomach says, feed me, feed me.
• 1:30:55
  And you look at it and you're like, could you be quiet?
• 1:30:58
  You're going to get fed in six hours, but you're not going to
• 1:31:01
  get fit. Now that movement very, very
• 1:31:04
  important. There is no Christianity without
• 1:31:07
  fasting. This is why the Lord put it
• 1:31:09
  right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Fasting,
• 1:31:12
  prayer and almsgiving, the three fundamental disciplines.
• 1:31:15
  When you fast, you learn not to react to your impulses.
• 1:31:19
  You get mad and you want to say something.
• 1:31:21
  If you're fasting, you go no. If you're fasting and you're,
• 1:31:25
  you're learning how to say no to your impulses.
• 1:31:28
  If you want to be violent, you can say no.
• 1:31:31
  If you want your wife, you can say no.
• 1:31:34
  This is extremely important in the development of virtues.
• 1:31:38
  Long-suffering comes this way. So I would say before we even
• 1:31:42
  ask the question about kids learning not to take fast not to
• 1:31:48
  take your sexual life as something common and to respect
• 1:31:52
  days when it's it's inappropriate to come together
• 1:31:55
  like when you're preparing for Holy Communion.
• 1:31:59
  This is not something in our tradition on Saturday night.
• 1:32:01
  If you're going to receive Holy Communion the next morning, this
• 1:32:04
  is you're going to be 1 flesh in your divine relationship, right?
• 1:32:08
  Christ is your bridegroom. He's offering you his body to
• 1:32:11
  become one flesh with you, and he's going to permeate you.
• 1:32:14
  And this is the desire of all believers when they receive Holy
• 1:32:17
  Communion. That union, that one flesh union
• 1:32:21
  should trump the earthly union and actually give it inspiration
• 1:32:24
  later, right? The union that you have with
• 1:32:26
  Christ, with him in you, and you in him, is marvelous.
• 1:32:31
  It's the greatest gift any Christian can have.
• 1:32:34
  And to live from that in your marriage makes marriage sweet.
• 1:32:39
  So learning to be disciplined makes it a lot easier to ask the
• 1:32:44
  question about moderating sexuality.
• 1:32:47
  If there is some pressing reason, and you meant you
• 1:32:53
  mentioned some, I don't see that that's a big deal.
• 1:32:56
  I really don't. Especially if you can embrace
• 1:33:00
  the benefit of that sexual fasting, because it's
• 1:33:02
  essentially a form of sexual fasting.
• 1:33:04
  You're fasting during fertility periods when normally you
• 1:33:07
  wouldn't have to. But I would only do that with
• 1:33:09
  the blessing of my spiritual father.
• 1:33:11
  I would ask my confessor, get it, get his opinion, make sure
• 1:33:14
  that it's blessed. Don't just do it yourself.
• 1:33:16
  And I would also make sure that you Paul's very serious about
• 1:33:19
  sexual fasting. When he talks about in First
• 1:33:21
  Corinthians 7, he says it should only be done by mutual agreement
• 1:33:25
  and for a time, lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of
• 1:33:28
  self-control. So this is an area because your
• 1:33:31
  fasting practice is unlike giving up meat for instance.
• 1:33:34
  That doesn't. I haven't had meat in 32 years
• 1:33:37
  and neither has my wife. But let's say she was still
• 1:33:40
  eating meat. My not eating meat would not
• 1:33:43
  impose on her. That wouldn't hurt her anyway
• 1:33:45
  because she had meat. But in sexual matters, if you're
• 1:33:48
  going to fast, of course it impacts both members of the
• 1:33:52
  couple and therefore should only be done by mutual consent and
• 1:33:55
  carefully. I think that's well said and I
• 1:33:58
  think that's obviously a, a core shared approach between both
• 1:34:03
  Catholics and Orthodox. It goes back thousands of, you
• 1:34:05
  know, 2000 years practically, which is so such a gift to be
• 1:34:09
  able to have that sort of a foundation in the wildness of
• 1:34:13
  today. So you went through the three, I
• 1:34:15
  think we did the three elements of marriage.
• 1:34:18
  Yeah, we did the procreation, a cure to your passions.
• 1:34:24
  It tames you in every way, actually.
• 1:34:25
  And you you'll actually learn to be a servant.
• 1:34:27
  And it also, yeah, forms a a collaboration that's divine.
• 1:34:34
  Beautiful. Yeah, that really also proclaims
• 1:34:38
  to the whole world, God is good, he wants to marry you.
• 1:34:44
  So many people have asked me over the years of my priesthood,
• 1:34:46
  why? Why do so many people come to
• 1:34:47
  your church and convert? And I can honestly say to them,
• 1:34:51
  I think there's a lot of reasons.
• 1:34:52
  The Spirit of God mostly is the reason.
• 1:34:54
  And people praying for that. I think the liturgy, I think the
• 1:34:58
  choir people who are invested, but without fail, they say
• 1:35:01
  people come in and they walk in and they see husbands and wives
• 1:35:05
  and kids and they, their heart erupts on fire.
• 1:35:09
  They go, Oh my gosh, this is so gorgeous.
• 1:35:12
  Families worshipping in before God and they see the fathers
• 1:35:18
  holding kids and they see the mom, you know, holding their
• 1:35:21
  child and they're helping each other.
• 1:35:23
  They're patting each other's head and they're trying to offer
• 1:35:25
  worship to God. It's so magnificent.
• 1:35:28
  I think it's the ultimate apologetic for the faith.
• 1:35:31
  Beautiful. John 13 Jesus says by this all
• 1:35:36
  men will know that you are my disciples if you have a love one
• 1:35:40
  for another, if you love each other the way I love you.
• 1:35:42
  And when they see families working on that and doing that,
• 1:35:46
  it's irresistible. They want to be part of it.
• 1:35:49
  It's the greatest missionary project today, I would say, is
• 1:35:52
  forming beautiful, thriving families.
• 1:35:57
  Thank you, Father Josiah. This has been so lovely.
• 1:36:00
  Thank you. Where can people find your work?
• 1:36:03
  I'm sure I was supposed to say this much earlier, but this
• 1:36:06
  wonderful subject which we just touched the surface of.
• 1:36:09
  I know we only got to the. Darn.
• 1:36:11
  The cover of Chris Austin. We'll do more later.
• 1:36:15
  There is something I do want to share with your viewers, which
• 1:36:19
  is an upcoming conference that we're hosting.
• 1:36:22
  It's called the Marriage Conference.
• 1:36:24
  If you just go to themarriageconference.com.
• 1:36:27
  At themarriageconference.com. It's going to be hosted at the
• 1:36:30
  historic Fox Theater in downtown Riverside, October 10th and
• 1:36:34
  11th. We're bringing in champions,
• 1:36:37
  champions from across the country.
• 1:36:40
  Doctor Brad Wilcox, who is the leading sociologist of the
• 1:36:43
  benefits of marriage and the great exposure of the myths
• 1:36:48
  against marriage that are so common in our culture.
• 1:36:50
  He's going to come and speak the very fine Roman Catholic
• 1:36:54
  Archbishop of San Francisco, Archbishop Salvador Cordelioni,
• 1:36:58
  who is a Californian, a San Diego just and an old friend of
• 1:37:01
  mine, and just a champion of marriage.
• 1:37:04
  He led the effort to pass Proposition 8 in the state to
• 1:37:08
  defend marriage, which we actually did.
• 1:37:10
  Many people forget this. It was not very long ago.
• 1:37:12
  It was not a decade of. A man and a woman.
• 1:37:15
  It was only overthrown by some tyrannical states.
• 1:37:18
  Of Gavin Newsom. Well, in Gavin Newsom.
• 1:37:20
  He tried, yeah. He, he was the mayor of, of, of
• 1:37:23
  San Francisco and practicing his or shall I say sanctuary cities
• 1:37:28
  policies back then by ordering the recorder to give marriage
• 1:37:31
  licenses illegally. And he wants us to think he
• 1:37:34
  respects law. Forgive me, I don't think so,
• 1:37:38
  but Archbishop Cordelione was a fighter for marriage.
• 1:37:41
  He also was the chair of the Defense of Marriage Committee of
• 1:37:44
  the USCCB for years. For years.
• 1:37:47
  This man is an articulate defender of the value of
• 1:37:50
  marriage in society as a whole. I'm going to speak mostly about
• 1:37:54
  marriage as a school of virtue, of all the virtues, especially
• 1:37:58
  the virtues that are necessary for Christian society.
• 1:38:01
  This whole conference is focused on the place of marriage in
• 1:38:04
  culture, making an argument that we must as a nation, lift up
• 1:38:09
  marriage to become normative again, to be praised and
• 1:38:12
  honored, because from that commitment comes all sorts of
• 1:38:15
  civilization, Christian civilization.
• 1:38:18
  We're also going to have a very fine Protestant theologian and
• 1:38:22
  pastor, Doctor Gavin Ortland, is going to come.
• 1:38:25
  Yeah, I'm very happy to have his contribution.
• 1:38:27
  We're also going to have the great symbologist, a dear friend
• 1:38:30
  of mine, Jonathan Paggio, is going to come and speak about
• 1:38:33
  the symbology of marriage from Genesis to Revelation in the
• 1:38:36
  Scriptures. And then we're going to have
• 1:38:38
  some great live music around the theme of marriage and its value
• 1:38:43
  by a group called the Dirt Poor Robbins.
• 1:38:47
  This is Basil Neil Degrade and his wonderful life wife
• 1:38:49
  Catherine. They performed recently at the
• 1:38:51
  art conference in London and are just incredible.
• 1:38:55
  All of us are going to come together for a couple days of
• 1:38:59
  discussions about the great value of marriage, and it's at
• 1:39:01
  the marriageconference.com and I hope that those who are watching
• 1:39:04
  you will come. Wonderful.
• 1:39:06
  I I'm sure folks. I want you to come.
• 1:39:08
  I'd love to as. Avip, we would love you to come
• 1:39:10
  as AVIP and and hobnob with the the other speakers.
• 1:39:14
  It'd be great to have you. Thank you.
• 1:39:15
  Thank you for everything you do to uphold marriage as God
• 1:39:19
  designed it. Thank you for the encouragement.
• 1:39:22
  Thank you all for listening to this episode of the Lila Roe
• 1:39:24
  Show. I hope you enjoyed it.
• 1:39:25
  Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your
• 1:39:28
  podcast and make sure you're subscribed here on YouTube.
• 1:39:30
  And check out Father Josiah Trenham's wonderful marriage
• 1:39:33
  conference coming up as well. We are going to do a couple of
• 1:39:36
  minutes here of the wheel, the questionnaire with Father Josiah
• 1:39:40
  Trenham. Let's see what we've got.
• 1:39:42
  Harris, what do you got for us today?
• 1:39:45
  And a huge thank you to EWTN Eternal Word Television Network,
• 1:39:48
  which is the largest religious broadcaster in the world.
• 1:39:51
  You can get access to Lila Rose Show episodes 24 hours in
• 1:39:55
  advance at ewtn.com. Slash on demand.
• 1:39:59
  And a big thank you to EWTN and their incredible mission to
• 1:40:02
  bring souls to Jesus.