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E274: The One Thing Jesus Asked That We Ignore | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  You have something to teach everyone who's listening because
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  of the 10,000 doors you've knocked. 10s of thousands. 10s
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  of thousands of doors. We had Nisa powers.
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  On the show recently, he shared that he had never heard the
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  gospel. And I was so moved because I
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  know for a fact that's the case for way more people than we
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  realized. The only people I run into today
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  who have never heard the gospel before are the younger
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  generations. Those are the people that I get
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  to actually give the entire gospel to.
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  Most other people know who Jesus Christ is.
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  They're just a fallen away, some kind of religion.
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  If we had this in every town city in America.
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  The country would. Be transformed.
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  Have you ever had your door knocked by someone sharing the
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  gospel? I'm sad to say that most of the
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  people I know haven't had that experience.
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  What would the church? Look like in America and across
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  the world, if every Christian took responsibility for their
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  neighborhoods and shared the gospel personally with everyone
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  in their community. Welcome back to the Lila Rose
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  show. Today I'm speaking with Austin
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  Habish, the founder of Scent evangelization.
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  Austin has knocked on 10s of thousands of doors personally to
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  pray and share the faith with strangers.
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  And it's actually a lot simpler than you may think.
• 1:13
  This episode will include Austin's guide for how to do
• 1:16
  just that. And I think this is a must
• 1:18
  listen for everyone. The community here at the Lila
• 1:20
  Rose Show is interested not just in flourishing lives for
• 1:23
  ourselves, but sharing it with those who are lost in the lies
• 1:27
  and confusion of our culture. I hope this message inspires you
• 1:30
  and if it does, please hit that like button and ensure that
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  Please also join us over at patreon.com/lila Rose Show.
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  get exclusive 30% discounts for our brand new merch line.
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  I'm very excited about this merch line.
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  I hope you all enjoy it. Our recent episode with
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  Billboard. Chris was actually demonetized
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  last week by YouTube because he made the simple claim that
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  over to patreonthatspatreon.com/lila
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  Rose Show Austin Havish. Welcome to the podcast.
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  Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here.
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  So glad you're here. Last time I saw you, we were in
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  Rome. Yeah, that was fun.
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  It's good hanging out with you all, the Catholic family.
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  I have such a heart for Catholics coming together and I
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  got to see that there at Rome. As in, like a million other
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  pilgrims. Yeah, exactly.
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  It's like a sea of people, kind of easy to get lost.
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  Difficult for someone who's a Carthusian monk to spend all
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  this time with that many people, but it was wonderful.
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  What do you think of it? I loved it.
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  I felt so happy to get to go. I brought Gigi.
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  I don't know if you saw my daughter, the little one.
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  Yeah. So that was really fun to be
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  there, like on this girls trip. And yeah, just getting to go to
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  our spiritual home was so special.
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  You got to shake hopefully, his hand up at the front.
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  Blessed he touched, he blessed Genevieve and we got to, we
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  talked very, very briefly, but it was very special.
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  Although I'm back in the bleeds there in Saint Peter's Basilica,
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  That's OK. I'm standing on a chair.
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  You didn't. Know where he was going to come
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  in. So you might have, you could
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  have gotten the baby blessing. You know, he could have given
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  you that. But he came.
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  I I was, I happened to be in the right spot at the right time.
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  So yeah, I wasn't strategic. I got in late.
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  I got to chant walking in though the procession going in.
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  I got to chant the song with Father Simon, the called Dean.
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  Do you remember his last of? Course, he was on the show a
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  year, year or so ago. He's here in Southern
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  California. Amazing guy.
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  Nice, really nice guy and so I got to chat with him but in
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  doing that I gave up a front row spot so.
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  That was, you know, the first. She'll be last.
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  Thank you. She'll inherit the.
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  That's what I was. Going for so I was trying to do.
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  So you're a fascinating guy because of your dedication to
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  our Lord and what that's looked like.
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  You have something to teach everyone who's listening because
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  of the 10,000 doors you've knocked for the.
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  Gospel 10s. Of thousands of doors you've
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  knocked to do what? Door to door evangelization.
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  So for a decade I've been knocking doors, evangelizing
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  somewhere between every day and at least every week.
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  So I'll, I'll tell people, I may not do it the best, but it's
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  possible as a Catholic in America that I've done it the
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  most. That's wild and beautiful.
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  A lot of fun. And you're not a Jehovah's
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  Witness. Nope, not a Mormon.
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  You're not a Mormon. You are a Catholic.
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  And you, you were. You are discerning religious
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  life as well. Absolutely.
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  OK, so I want to, I want to get to the training because I think
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  this is a lost art among American Christians in general.
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  This is, I mean, yes, Catholics, but also just, I would say
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  generally Christians in America don't do door knocking.
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  It really is a Mormon Jehovah Witness thing.
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  And some Mormons listener like we're Christians too.
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  So I'm not trying to disparage Mormons, but the reality is it's
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  it's a lost art. I think we're comfortable
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  because everybody, there's a church on every corner in
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  America. There's literally 10s of
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  thousands of churches, maybe more than that in this country,
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  but there is a tremendous spiritual poverty.
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  So you're going to give us the tools today, But I'm really
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  interested first in just learning more about your
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  background. So I was raised in a Catholic
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  home. I would lose my faith in college
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  through a philosophy class, so I went to the University of
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  Kansas. I know a classic story.
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  So sad I. Didn't have any philosophical
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  background. We really have to prepare kids
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  before they get to college. So I'm in a class, I hear the
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  philosophy TA ask us what our final paper will be on.
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  And we have to defend either materialism, so there is no
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  soul, or something in between called.
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  So that would be determinism based on materialism,
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  compatibilism, which was like a middle ground of free will.
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  And he was intuitive enough or he was intelligent enough to
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  know that if you're going to defend free will, you have to
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  defend the existence of the soul.
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  Most people don't know that. So I remember listening to to
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  him talk and it seemed like he didn't believe there was a soul.
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  So neither did I. So I stopped going to church.
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  I became an agnostic. I honestly don't know if someone
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  can be a sincere atheist, but I was confused.
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  So in my heart of hearts I remember Catholic school.
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  I remember growing up Catholic I had a foggy notion of God, but I
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  was just confused from that class.
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  So I step out of religion. I'll get picked up by an
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  evangelical Christian that I know.
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  I'll start going to the Nandanam church.
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  Probably would have stayed there except for John 6A Catholic
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  homily Justin Martyr from 1:50 AD which I actually mentioned.
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  I went door to door yesterday so I have some letters from door to
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  door that I hope you can mail to the people I met.
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  I was explaining that to a evangelical yesterday.
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  Meaning you got the the sorry, this is so you have letters here
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  of the homes you knocked yesterday.
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  You write the people you talk to a letter that you mail them
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  later. Yes, a handwritten letter.
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  Incredibly thoughtful. Part of the method, so there's a
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  script and then I put a Starbucks gift card in there.
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  So I would love to talk about some of those encounters
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  yesterday. Wow, that's so beautiful.
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  That's so beautiful. Praise God, I like to think if a
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  Hindu knocked my door and I wasn't interested in Hinduism,
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  but then he sent me a handwritten letter and Starbucks
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  gift card, I would always respect Hinduism.
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  And so I'm trying to soften people's hearts anyways.
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  So I become non denominational. The Eucharist brings me back to
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  Catholicism. I read the the catechism front
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  to back, set it down. Go to seminary that fall.
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  So I read it in the spring, go to seminary that fall.
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  I'm a seminarian for 3 1/2 years.
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  I start door to door evangelization in seminary
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  because of this call. We had a priest come to the
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  seminary and he drew a square on the the whiteboard and he said
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  this square is the parish territory.
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  All the souls within it the parish is responsible for.
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  And that's true for Catholics. We have Canon law behind that.
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  Canon Law 771 states that the pastors of souls must ensure
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  that the gospel reaches non believers living in the
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  territory, since the care of souls must go to them to know
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  less than the faithful, no less than the faithful.
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  Could you imagine a pastor considering caring for his
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  neighbors to no less extent than the people coming to mass on
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  Sunday? So that's Canon law.
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  That's the law of the Catholic Church.
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  Vatican 2 creases Dominus paragraph 30 says that to.
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  Moreover, the care of souls must be infused with the missionary
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  spirits of their reaches, as it should to everyone living in the
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  territory. If the pastor cannot contact
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  people, he must enlist the help of others, even layman, to help
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  him in the apostolate. So he mentions this to us.
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  We have to go reach these people in some way.
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  How is it to be done? A uniquely Catholic way.
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  And I knew the Jehovah Witnesses or out there, the Mormons are
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  out there. And so I thought to myself, what
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  would a Catholic method look like at the door?
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  The first thing I thought is it would have to be priestly.
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  Our Lord says that apart from him we can do nothing.
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  Faith is a gift. So we'd have to be prayerful.
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  Secondly, it would have to provide dialogue surrounding our
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  Lord. Faith comes through what is
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  heard. That's Roman 10/17.
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  And then I thought that it would have to be charitable because of
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  a story my grandfather told me living in South Sudan.
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  So my grandfather said in South Sudan, the Catholics,
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  Protestants, Jews and Muslims will all preach on the street
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  corner. But today, South Sudan is a
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  majority Christian country with a Catholic president.
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  Because according to my grandfather, when the Catholics
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  came, they didn't just preach, they built homes.
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  So I looked at those 3 and we started knocking doors.
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  That became the sent method for door to door evangelization.
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  So in a story, one of the first doors I knocked, a lady comes
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  outside. I said I'm a sent.
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  It's a Catholic group. I'd like to know.
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  I can pray for you. That's it.
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  Now, do you know about Jesus? Do you want to accept Him into
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  your heart? No, just beginning with prayer.
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  And the reason to do that, first of all, is it's an act of
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  charity. How can I pray for you?
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  People receive it that way. It's an act of charity.
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  Secondly, again, Ephesians 28, by grace you were saved through
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  faith. So faith is a gift.
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  God has to give it. We can say all of these things,
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  but at the end of the day, the Lord has to move their heart.
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  And then it's going to bring the conversation to a depth that
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  otherwise may have been impossible.
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  So she says back to me, you can pray for my son.
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  His name is Michael. Actually, you can pray for my
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  son. He took his own life a couple
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  months ago and he was about my age.
• 10:05
  There's that priestly part of the method and I'm just starting
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  out so I just move into the prophetic trying to talk about
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  the faith at that time, which I wouldn't recommend.
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  I was saying do you have any questions?
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  Are you Catholic yourself? She said Nope, but Bob is that's
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  her husband hiding behind the door watching didn't know what
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  to do next. Moved on to that last that
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  charitable component. I said while I'm here can help
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  in any way. She stepped outside.
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  She pointed at her gutter line were Christmas lights.
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  We're still up in we're in March and she said my son put those up
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  there, but he's no longer with us and I don't trust myself or
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  my husband on a ladder. So do you think you can help us?
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  I pluck Christmas lights from the roof.
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  She reeled them in from the ground.
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  Send her a handwritten letter. Came back at Easter with an
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  Easter basket and until I left the seminar she was going to
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  Mass. No way.
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  So the charity, so that was the beginning of door to door
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  evangelization as a seminary. And so you're asking about my
• 10:59
  story. So we knock doors.
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  I'm a seminarian for 3 1/2 years.
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  I step out to be a religious because I began to learn where
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  the religious state comes from. So what sent me to seminary was
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  Matthew 1921. Jesus says if you would be
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  perfect, go do these things. So all that you have your
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  treasure in heaven, come follow me.
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  Those two plus what Jesus says about celibacy in 1912, let him
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  who can receive it, receive it. What Saint Paul says in First
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  Corinthians 7, Those three things give us the vows of the
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  religious state. So poverty chase, celibacy and
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  obedience. So I wanted to live this perfect
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  consecration, our Lord, and that's what sent me to the
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  seminary. Then I realized in seminary that
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  those vows are actually the vows of the religious state.
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  So now my question is, should I go active life or contemplative
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  life? And I'd already been knocking
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  doors, so that was a natural move to be a Dominican or a
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  Jesuit, one of those religious orders.
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  But in my heart of hearts, I'm kind of a solitary figure.
• 12:02
  I love solitude. I love silence.
• 12:04
  Sometimes people ask, are you an introvert or an extrovert?
• 12:07
  I don't know what those words mean.
• 12:08
  I don't know if you know what those words mean, but I would
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  consider myself probably an introvert.
• 12:13
  I do derive a joy and peace in silence, even though I love
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  going door to door. So I read a document on the
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  Carthusian life by Pius the 11th.
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  It's titled Umbrat to them. And he says in there that it's
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  clear that those who practice prayer and penance do more for
• 12:30
  the salvation of souls and the welfare of mankind than those
• 12:33
  who labor tilling in the Master's vineyard.
• 12:36
  So I heard that, and I see the Church giving priority to
• 12:38
  prayer, which makes sense because again, faith is a gift.
• 12:41
  And I got on a plane. I was a Carthusian for two years
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  in England, would have stayed there, but the prior told me at
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  the end of those two years to consider the life I would give
• 12:50
  of myself more. And I think the brothers noticed
• 12:53
  that I enjoyed teaching because we have this weekly walk.
• 12:57
  And I would talk to the brothers when I exited, having talked to
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  the prior about where I should be, should I remain here?
• 13:04
  Should I go to an act of apostle?
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  And we kind of settled on an act of religious life would be best
• 13:08
  for me. After I leave, the brother who
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  took me to the airport pointed at me and he said you're not a
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  Carthusian, you're an evangelist.
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  So I stepped out, and ever since then I've continued knocking
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  doors, helping parishes knock doors, and trying to find my way
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  back into that act of religious life.
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  So you're seeking the religious vocation?
• 13:30
  Yes, ma'am. And are you planning to return
• 13:33
  to a seminary or what's your next step?
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  I'm hoping, looking at my heart, for door to door evangelization.
• 13:41
  I'm hoping that I'll find a good fit with the Dominicans.
• 13:44
  Beautiful. I'm discerning for the West
• 13:46
  Coast Dominicans. Keep them in your prayers.
• 13:48
  Keep me in your prayers. The Saint Albert's Priory, Yes,
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  very old. Yes.
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  My, my husband and I lived there when we first got married near
• 13:57
  Saint Albert's. So we'd go there occasionally
• 13:58
  for Mass. We loved it.
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  I, my husband's mother would joke that if he hadn't gotten
• 14:04
  married, if we hadn't gotten married, she always said you, I,
• 14:06
  I would have wanted you to be a Dominican or something like
• 14:09
  something like this. But we have such great love and
• 14:11
  fondness for the Dominicans. Yeah, great guys.
• 14:13
  Keeping your prayers. They're growing really quickly,
• 14:16
  apparently. Beautiful.
• 14:17
  Every class they say is full, so every new incoming class is full
• 14:21
  so. We had Father Gregory Pine back
• 14:23
  on the show. East Coast.
• 14:24
  I know East Coast, right? Who?
• 14:26
  Who are the great guys here on the West Coast?
• 14:29
  I don't know if they're as well known.
• 14:31
  They're not as Father Gregory, they're not.
• 14:33
  Doing. Godsplaining, but.
• 14:35
  You have a show. That you can.
• 14:37
  Yeah, think Catholic. Yeah.
• 14:38
  So, so when you join Saint Albert's, you can do your.
• 14:41
  That's a great place. To call him a letter, send him
• 14:42
  an e-mail. Would love to.
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  That's one of the the graces and the difficulties of being a
• 16:32
  religious is that vow of obedience.
• 16:34
  And so you you submit everything or your desires, like door to
• 16:37
  door evangelization. You submit that to the will of
• 16:40
  the superior, the so many year podcast to think Catholic
• 16:43
  Instagram, submit it to the will of the superior and then see if
• 16:45
  the Lord gives it back. So yeah, we'll see what God has
• 16:49
  in store. As the bride of Christ.
• 16:52
  It is interesting because as women, a married mother, a
• 16:55
  married woman, not even a mother, just a married woman,
• 16:58
  you're ultimately under the headship of your husband.
• 17:01
  And so my husband is, you know, he's very generous and extremely
• 17:05
  supportive. But at the end of the day, if
• 17:07
  there's a shot that has to be called, he calls it.
• 17:10
  And so it's similar in that sense.
• 17:12
  And I freely choose, chose him. Of course, you'll freely choose
• 17:16
  the Dominicans if that's where you go, but then they have to
• 17:19
  choose you back. So in that sense, it's similar
• 17:21
  to a marriage. Now tell me what you think of
• 17:23
  that as a married woman. So the parallel that you've
• 17:25
  drawn between, I don't know, if you call it obedience,
• 17:28
  submission to your husband and the religious life, I see that
• 17:33
  parallel, I guess. I mean scripture tells us that
• 17:36
  parallel. Ephesians 5 Do you feel a
• 17:40
  freedom and a peace with that? Because there's a religious I
• 17:42
  absolutely love that. I think of all the vows, that's
• 17:44
  that's the best 1 I don't have to wonder what is God's will for
• 17:48
  me as a religious. Romans 13 One, there is no
• 17:52
  authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have
• 17:55
  been instituted by God. And so our Lord has given me
• 17:58
  this authority in this religious order.
• 18:00
  And So what the superior tells, tells me, if it's not against
• 18:03
  conscience, of course, is, is God's will.
• 18:05
  I loved that, absolutely loved that.
• 18:07
  I mean, do you, do you see it like that in your marriage or
• 18:09
  what do you think? I do love it.
• 18:11
  I think the difference is that there's much more perhaps
• 18:15
  interplay in a marriage where it's not a, there's not sort of
• 18:21
  a process the way that there has been developed over 2000 years
• 18:25
  for the institution of the church and all the different
• 18:27
  orders and the priesthood for how decisions are made.
• 18:30
  And so in a marriage, you do develop your own processes, but
• 18:34
  each man has his own approach and each woman will have her own
• 18:38
  requests or desires, right? And so there's going to be this
• 18:41
  tremendous personalism around discernment.
• 18:46
  And not to say there's not personalism that is practice
• 18:49
  when decisions are being made about the priest, you know,
• 18:52
  where to assign priests or whether or not someone should be
• 18:54
  accepted into the priesthood or whatever.
• 18:57
  But there's less process. And so how does that maybe
• 19:00
  impact a marriage? I don't know.
• 19:03
  There's, there's tremendous freedom in it.
• 19:05
  I, I don't, I, I, I, I understand some women feel the
• 19:08
  burden of it because they might be in a marriage that they feel
• 19:12
  is domineering or they go in there with expectations that
• 19:15
  we're not of our faith. You know, the wrong expectations
• 19:20
  of what a marriage is and what it means to be a wife.
• 19:23
  But if you go into it with the right understanding and then you
• 19:25
  go into it with a man that is also ordered towards love of God
• 19:29
  and love of you, then it's just, there's a lot of beautiful
• 19:32
  freedom and peace there. And if there's a disagreement
• 19:35
  about a decision that needs to be made, you get to have, you
• 19:40
  know, a ton of communication and an opportunity to grow closer to
• 19:44
  understand what's the root of the disagreement.
• 19:46
  I've always thought CS Lewis's take on this, I think it's a
• 19:49
  mere Christianity, is that hierarchies for the sake of
• 19:52
  unity. So nowadays you see a lot of
• 19:55
  marriages split apart. He says if you have two people
• 20:00
  that are to stay together and you get to a fork in the road,
• 20:04
  we can't vote, there's only two of you.
• 20:06
  So you if you say left and he says we're going to go right.
• 20:10
  There's no majority. So what do you do?
• 20:12
  And I think a lot of married couples will just go their own
• 20:14
  way. Literally, one will go and make
• 20:17
  their decision. They'll split from their spouse.
• 20:19
  What protects that is that one person between the two has a
• 20:23
  vote that's a casting vote or counts for more that you've
• 20:27
  decided before you get to these forks in the road that when we
• 20:30
  get here, we're just going to go with what you say or with what
• 20:34
  you say because we have to go together.
• 20:35
  So I think it protects unity, but this coming from the male
• 20:38
  perspective. So I've always been curious of
• 20:40
  the the female perspective, what wives think about that.
• 20:44
  I think I'm really blessed because I'm in a situation with
• 20:47
  a husband who is tremendously loving and respectful and
• 20:50
  desirous of my good and eternal good and our family's eternal
• 20:54
  good. This is one of the reasons, of
• 20:55
  course, I married him. And so I don't have an anxiety
• 21:00
  or a distrust that doesn't exist in the marriage.
• 21:04
  There's disagreements that happen and we have to sort
• 21:06
  through those. But at the end of the day,
• 21:07
  there's a tremendous peace because I know if he decides
• 21:09
  something, he's doing it for love of God and love of me,
• 21:12
  praise God, and he puts us first.
• 21:14
  And so that's just AI again. I sometimes even feel guilty
• 21:17
  talking about my marriage on the show because I know that I'm so
• 21:20
  blessed and privileged to have it and to have our marriage.
• 21:24
  So but it you know the Lord, the Lord at the end of the day in a
• 21:29
  Christian marriage gives the graces for the woman and the man
• 21:32
  to to together live out the role that God has called them to
• 21:35
  live. I think we have to trust God,
• 21:38
  trust his design, Our Lord, He knows what he's doing.
• 21:41
  Ephesian 5 S hierarchy, unity. And if it's based on selfless
• 21:46
  love, as you were saying, the two precepts of charity, it
• 21:49
  ought to work and it ought to be peaceful and joyful.
• 21:51
  Yes, Amen. There's so much that you just
• 21:54
  shared. That I had questions about, but
• 21:56
  I didn't want to interrupt you because you were sharing it so
• 21:58
  beautifully. And so I want to go back to a
• 22:00
  few moments in your story before we get to your approach to
• 22:04
  evangelization, which you have fine-tuned.
• 22:07
  You've honed very intentionally over a decade, which is amazing.
• 22:12
  So you shared when you were raised Catholic, you fell away
• 22:16
  in this kind of history of modern thought class, which is
• 22:19
  so funny because the philosophy they teach at universities
• 22:21
  today, it's not philosophy like Western civilization philosophy.
• 22:24
  It's like usually postmodern philosophy, which is just sort
• 22:28
  of like a complete deconstruction of what is true
• 22:30
  and good and beautiful. I tell people there's three
• 22:32
  different paradigms when it comes to philosophy.
• 22:34
  We have three ancient teachers that pretty much everyone falls
• 22:37
  under. If you're walking down the
• 22:38
  street and you pull someone aside and you ask them some
• 22:40
  questions, there's Democritus. So he was the first atomist.
• 22:43
  So everything is just atoms and it's just a exchange, a movement
• 22:47
  of atoms, different combinations of atoms.
• 22:50
  And he has problems. There's problems with that view
• 22:52
  that he runs into. It's the same problems they run
• 22:53
  into today. So Democritus the materialist,
• 22:56
  you have a middle ground, which is Plato.
• 22:58
  So that would be something like you have a material body, it's
• 23:01
  totally material. And then you have a soul which
• 23:03
  is entirely distinct. It's like a glowing ore about
• 23:05
  there wherever. I think sadly a lot of
• 23:08
  Christians, that's their notion of the soul doesn't work.
• 23:11
  How does the body interact with an entirely immaterial soul?
• 23:14
  That's out where? Where is that with?
• 23:16
  The gods. Yeah.
• 23:17
  And then how does the soul then input into this system,
• 23:20
  especially if you're looking at physics and the conservation
• 23:22
  laws? That's the middle ground soul.
• 23:25
  What's a Descartes calls it the ghost and the machine.
• 23:28
  And then there's us. So we pick up Aristotle, refined
• 23:33
  through Aquinas, which is your one thing.
• 23:35
  So your body, soul through your composite.
• 23:38
  So those three world views, I would say everyone out there has
• 23:42
  one of those three world views. The one I was taught in school
• 23:44
  is the first one. It's the materialist.
• 23:46
  So there's no spiritual nature at all to matter.
• 23:48
  And I don't fault the TA. I'm sure he was just trying to
• 23:51
  convey what he felt was true and what he had been taught.
• 23:54
  But there's a lot of damage in those world views that are not
• 23:58
  true. I remember being at UCLA and the
• 24:00
  History of Modern Thought course first semester freshman when
• 24:05
  which everyone was required to take this interestingly.
• 24:08
  And there were these young men and women and we were talking in
• 24:11
  like a subgroup or a study group or something.
• 24:13
  And this one guy was like, I was crazed Christian.
• 24:15
  But this is so interesting. What am I going to believe?
• 24:18
  I love Descartes, just like I remember thinking in the back of
• 24:21
  my head, like in one hand, this is so stupid.
• 24:24
  Like this is because I, I had been blessed to be taught
• 24:27
  Western civilization by my dad. It was homeschooled.
• 24:30
  We were reading the Church Fathers and Doctors.
• 24:32
  So my education was so much bigger than what UCLA was
• 24:36
  presenting as philosophy, right? And the guy wasn't stupid, but
• 24:40
  what we were being taught was so incomplete.
• 24:43
  And it was this materialist view, like you're saying, of the
• 24:45
  human person. And it was presenting it like
• 24:48
  this was enlightenment, right? Like this is what we figured out
• 24:51
  because of evolution. And like, this is actually,
• 24:54
  there's actually less evidence for this view, this strictly
• 24:58
  material view, than there is for the view of a human.
• 25:02
  You know the human person has body, both body and soul.
• 25:05
  Yeah, the materialist runs into a lot of problems.
• 25:07
  Honestly, if you're just matter, then there's no such thing as
• 25:10
  free will or entire society is based on free will.
• 25:13
  So there goes voluntariness. Truth disappears.
• 25:16
  So Democritus knew that. He said in reality we know
• 25:20
  nothing about anything because each person's opinion is just a
• 25:22
  reshaping of atoms. So you believe you hold certain
• 25:26
  things because they are true, because your mind is related to
• 25:29
  the world in a very real way. But if you're just atoms, then
• 25:33
  that's not the case. What's going on in your head is
• 25:34
  just the laws of biology and chemistry and physics.
• 25:37
  So you drop truth. Truth doesn't exist.
• 25:40
  Voluntariness, truth is gone. You also run into some really
• 25:44
  specific problems. Problem today is called the hard
• 25:48
  problem of consciousness, which I actually ran into as I was
• 25:52
  trying to come back into the faith.
• 25:54
  It's it's a yeah, it's a relatively easy way of
• 25:58
  understanding that there's a new material aspect to you.
• 26:01
  You can take color, for example. So Doctor Richard Feynman, he's
• 26:05
  a physicist, He has a Nobel Prize and quantum
• 26:08
  electrodynamics. So that's photons, electrons.
• 26:11
  He takes color to be a sensation.
• 26:14
  So most people would say the color is waves, bounces off the
• 26:18
  thing, hits your eye. Physicists don't say that today,
• 26:21
  though, because atoms are colorless.
• 26:24
  Light is colorless. You're having this experience of
• 26:28
  tan and blue and black. How are you able to do that if
• 26:32
  you're just atoms? And so the physicists will say
• 26:34
  it's a sensation, It immediately creates this soul body split.
• 26:41
  If atoms are colorless, light waves are not color, and you're
• 26:43
  experiencing color, there must be something about you that's
• 26:46
  more than the material. So there's a lot of good proofs
• 26:49
  for soul. I wouldn't recommend that one.
• 26:50
  It's an interesting one to think about.
• 26:52
  I haven't heard that. That's fascinating.
• 26:53
  A lot of Catholic philosophers really press into that.
• 26:56
  Your experience of pain, your experience of color, warm, cold,
• 27:00
  sweet, bitter. Which Democritus ran into at the
• 27:03
  very beginning. So he says, and I think he's 370
• 27:07
  BCS when he lives, he says buy custom sweet, buy custom bitter,
• 27:13
  buy custom warm, buy custom cold, buy custom colour.
• 27:15
  But in reality, Adam's in void. So the atom is pictures
• 27:19
  Democritus depicted. It cannot explain what's called
• 27:22
  the qualities of the world. So you're left with a couple
• 27:25
  options. You either go Plato, you're a
• 27:27
  soul in a machine, or you go with Aristotle.
• 27:30
  There's more to you in the matter than Democritus would
• 27:33
  have considered. It's interesting because the
• 27:35
  Plato worldview of the soul and the machine or this, you know,
• 27:40
  separate soul out there, and you're just in the sort of like
• 27:43
  the organization of the spiritual.
• 27:45
  Yeah, or that like what is the organization of the spiritual
• 27:47
  realm? And there was so much that was
• 27:49
  seen as unknown and arbitrary. And then there was sort of
• 27:51
  religious reference, reverence that was developed for the, you
• 27:55
  know, a system of gods and how to kind of understand and
• 27:57
  interpret the moral order. And it always very arbitrary.
• 28:01
  It lacked cohesion. The the gods themselves were
• 28:05
  arbitrary and lacked cohesion. And so if you just look up the
• 28:09
  what I remember when I was kind of discerning or discerning is
• 28:12
  too much of a fancy word for this because I was a 15 year old
• 28:15
  girl, confused. But I was trying to explore
• 28:17
  religion and decide if I what religion I believed in, if I
• 28:21
  believed in one, even though I had been raised as an
• 28:24
  evangelical. Yeah, yeah.
• 28:27
  But it wasn't a long process because I quickly came to
• 28:30
  Christianity as it making the most sense.
• 28:33
  It just makes the most sense was in the end what made me so
• 28:38
  attracted to it and to the story of Jesus Christ as this
• 28:40
  historical figure who is so much more than that.
• 28:42
  Of course he's God. Yeah, that these different
• 28:47
  philosophies you do you run into problems if you're not a soul in
• 28:53
  a body, then you get really. So the Platonic view that
• 28:57
  there's a ghost trapped in the machine then allows you to say a
• 29:00
  lot of things the culture does say.
• 29:02
  So I'm. I'm actually a woman who's
• 29:04
  trapped in a man's body because you've split the spiritual from
• 29:07
  the material. Or I can use my body however I
• 29:11
  want any kind of perverted sexual way because I'm the real
• 29:16
  me is not, does not have to do with the body.
• 29:18
  It's just operating the body. So it kind of opens up the can
• 29:21
  of worms of the ethical issues that we run into today, that
• 29:26
  Platonic worldview. So when you were in college and
• 29:29
  you said you fell away from your faith that you were raised with,
• 29:33
  sounds like you would never really deeply understood it or
• 29:35
  identified with it. It was sort of a cultural faith
• 29:38
  that you were growing up in. Not to say it didn't matter, but
• 29:41
  it was around you, but not it's really deeply held within you.
• 29:44
  And then you became evangelical for a brief stint.
• 29:47
  Tell me about that. Did you have a born again
• 29:49
  experience? So leaving Catholicism, going
• 29:53
  into agnosticism, for a couple of years, I just lived as all
• 29:56
  other college students do, and I couldn't find happiness in that
• 30:02
  kind of the sensual life. And so I reached out to a buddy
• 30:06
  of mine who is today a Protestant pastor, I believe,
• 30:10
  and he brought me to the Bible study.
• 30:12
  And I was trying to do better. And I remember a couple points,
• 30:16
  though my Catholic identity stuck with me.
• 30:19
  And I see that in the neighborhood that people who
• 30:21
  raised Catholic, they fall away. They still have an affinity for
• 30:23
  Catholicism. I remember I was in this Bible
• 30:26
  study and at one point they turn to me and they say, OK, Austin,
• 30:30
  Are you ready to be baptized? And I thought to myself, why?
• 30:33
  I think I've been already baptized.
• 30:35
  I think I've been baptized. And they said, no, no, no, no.
• 30:37
  Now that you've looked at the scriptures, Are you ready to
• 30:38
  actually be baptized? And so I called a priest, not
• 30:41
  going to a Catholic Church, but I always thought in my head that
• 30:44
  was the authority of religious matters.
• 30:47
  I call a priest and he says, well, you've already been
• 30:49
  baptized. You don't need to be baptized
• 30:52
  again. So I told the the men's group,
• 30:54
  you know, I'm, I'm good. So I was in the non
• 30:57
  denominational world but I still held on to my Catholic identity.
• 31:02
  There was another point with the non denom that I started to
• 31:05
  question what I was learning there.
• 31:08
  I remember there was a homily on Matthew 1917, Young retriever
• 31:13
  comes up to Jesus and says, Jesus, what good thing must I do
• 31:17
  to inherit eternal life? Jesus says back to him, if you
• 31:20
  would enter into life, keep the commandments.
• 31:23
  And the pastor that day said, well, this doesn't mean you have
• 31:26
  to keep the commandments to go to heaven.
• 31:27
  That's, that's not what Jesus is talking about.
• 31:29
  What Jesus talking about is like, if you want to have that
• 31:31
  best, most fullest life, then it's a good idea to keep the
• 31:34
  commandments. And I said, there's no way.
• 31:36
  There's no way. That's what Jesus is saying.
• 31:39
  It does really look like Jesus is saying I have to keep the
• 31:42
  commandments to go to heaven. So I went back to the guy who
• 31:46
  was running the men's group and I voiced my concern and he was
• 31:50
  completely silent. I didn't respond at all.
• 31:53
  And then he said to me, I don't want to contradict the pastor.
• 31:57
  And from that point on I was just kind of curious, like how
• 32:01
  do we know the right interpretation of Scripture here
• 32:04
  at the non denominational church?
• 32:06
  And then I was back home visiting my parents and I went
• 32:08
  to Catholic Mass because the non denominator taught me that you
• 32:11
  could go to really any church you wanted to if you like the
• 32:14
  sermon and you like the music. So I'm back home going to
• 32:17
  Catholic Mass and I hear the homily on John 6 and.
• 32:23
  That Sunday. That Sunday, praise God.
• 32:26
  Praise God. I'm there, save me.
• 32:28
  And the Nandanam did a lot for me, taught me to read the Bible,
• 32:32
  taught me to be evangelical in the sense of sharing the Gospel.
• 32:37
  I hear this homily on John 6 and the priest says, ask Catholics.
• 32:40
  We believe that the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul and
• 32:42
  divinity of Jesus Christ, and a lot of our other Christian
• 32:45
  brothers don't necessarily believe that.
• 32:47
  I had never heard that before Lala.
• 32:49
  Ever. I knew he was a Catholic.
• 32:50
  Would. Have been raised Catholic 1818
• 32:52
  year. Did you go to Catholic?
• 32:53
  School, Catholic elementary school.
• 32:54
  We didn't have a Catholic middle school, high school, but I was
• 32:57
  still Catholic through. Mass every Sunday growing up.
• 33:00
  Yeah, with my family. And you never heard.
• 33:03
  The. Catholics, we believe that Jesus
• 33:04
  Christ is the Eucharist, is the Eucharist, is Jesus Christ,
• 33:07
  Body, blood, soul and divinity. I heard that as a Catholic.
• 33:09
  No, I had heard that. I had never heard.
• 33:12
  There was a distinction I had. I had thought I knew what I
• 33:15
  believed. I knew what the Catholics
• 33:16
  believed. I didn't know that everyone else
• 33:20
  didn't believe that. It was interesting in my town,
• 33:23
  and I've heard other people say this, I didn't know I thought
• 33:25
  everyone was Catholic when I was in elementary school.
• 33:28
  Wasn't until I got in middle school and public school that
• 33:30
  that I figured out there were other Christian groups out
• 33:32
  there. So I've never heard this
• 33:34
  distinction before. And so he drew a line in the
• 33:37
  sand and I needed to decide which side of that line I was
• 33:40
  on. Did I believe this was
• 33:41
  substantially Jesus Christ? Well, then I need to be
• 33:43
  Catholic. Didn't know about the Orthodox
• 33:45
  that time. Or did I believe it was symbolic
• 33:47
  or something like that. Then I could go to an
• 33:50
  evangelical church, read John 6, called the priest.
• 33:54
  He said read just a martyr in 150 AD who describes the Mass.
• 33:59
  He describes the liturgy. I was explaining to a lady
• 34:01
  yesterday going door to door, She's an evangelical.
• 34:04
  I said just read that document, read John 6, read the early
• 34:08
  Christians. I told her you want to follow
• 34:09
  Jesus Christ. The easiest way to figure out
• 34:11
  how to follow Jesus Christ is to follow the followers of Jesus
• 34:14
  Christ. So look at the church Fathers.
• 34:16
  What have they said? Just a martyr writing to
• 34:19
  Antonius Pius. I'm sure you're aware of this
• 34:21
  already. He describes the Mass and he
• 34:23
  says, and the man who presides prays over the bread and the
• 34:26
  wine. And we don't believe it's just
• 34:28
  bread and wine, but it becomes the flesh of Christ Jesus who
• 34:31
  took on flesh. And I said, if anyone knows,
• 34:34
  this guy knows. 150 AD reading John 6.
• 34:38
  And so I went back, so went back to the Catholic faith and went
• 34:43
  back to confession, started going to daily mass, praying the
• 34:46
  rosary every day. And that changed me.
• 34:49
  I was working in marketing at the time for a company out of
• 34:53
  Boston, but I was in Kansas working for that company.
• 34:55
  So I had my job, I graduated college, I was dating, going,
• 35:00
  going on dates. So I had kind of my life coming
• 35:03
  together. And then I found truth, Like
• 35:05
  rock solid truth that I I realized I could set my whole
• 35:08
  life on and not regret that this was reality and I could bank
• 35:12
  everything on it and it would have been worth it.
• 35:15
  So I went to seminary that fall. Wow.
• 35:17
  And did you tell, did the folks that were in your Bible study at
• 35:21
  that church, did they know that you were going back to your
• 35:25
  Catholic faith? Did you have any conversations
• 35:28
  with them? They began to find out and one
• 35:32
  of the leaders of that Bible study had a conversation with
• 35:36
  me, but he didn't attack me. And honestly, in God's
• 35:39
  Providence, he was sympathetic to Catholicism.
• 35:41
  He had a catechism in his bookshelf.
• 35:44
  So he kind of said, go, if the Lord is lead leading you here,
• 35:48
  go. And I went, but I did lose all
• 35:49
  of my friends. I lost all of my Protestant
• 35:51
  friends. They they just didn't go with
• 35:55
  me. And it's really sad.
• 35:57
  There's two guys I know specifically that I really
• 35:59
  loved. I mean, we were great friends
• 36:02
  and we just couldn't talk about it because I wanted them to be
• 36:06
  Catholic. Not like I want someone to join
• 36:09
  a club or a group, but for their sake, for their, for the peace
• 36:13
  and the joy that I had received. And I believed it was true.
• 36:16
  And I, I couldn't just not have the conversation with them.
• 36:19
  If I could not have the conversation, we could just try
• 36:21
  and live as we were before, hang out as we did before.
• 36:24
  It would have been OK. But I, I couldn't do it.
• 36:27
  And then they were trying to bring me back into the non
• 36:29
  denominational. And so overtime, those
• 36:33
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  checkout. You had said earlier that when
• 38:13
  you went to the first door that you knocked, you had this
• 38:17
  incredible encounter with this couple, older couple grieving
• 38:20
  the loss of their son by suicide.
• 38:22
  And it sounds like they had never been to mass before.
• 38:28
  Or were they? Her husband was a fallen way
• 38:30
  Catholic. She maybe had been in the past,
• 38:33
  but not practicing any faith. We had Nisa Powers on the show
• 38:37
  recently who's having his own transformation.
• 38:40
  He's sharing it online kind of 180 days he's.
• 38:43
  An OCIAI see his videos. He's an OCIA.
• 38:46
  He shared that he had never heard the gospel, at least in a
• 38:51
  way that was very personal and direct from soul to soul, until
• 38:54
  he met two guys on a tennis court or pickleball court.
• 38:57
  Sorry, and I was so moved by him sharing that because I know for
• 39:02
  a fact I think that's the case for way more people than we
• 39:05
  realized. When you've been going door to
• 39:07
  door, what has been Have you heard people's express to you
• 39:10
  that this was the first time they really heard about the the
• 39:12
  Christian faith? One of the stories I'll never
• 39:15
  forget. I knocked the door of a Jewish
• 39:17
  lady. She came outside.
• 39:19
  I went through the process. I don't know how I could pray
• 39:21
  for you. I almost sent.
• 39:22
  I know how I can pray for you. She asked me to pray for a
• 39:24
  relationship in her life, left, sent her a letter, came back
• 39:29
  with an Easter basket, came back Christmas caroling, brought a
• 39:32
  group of guys. We caroled.
• 39:33
  She invited us in our home three years past then no, it's about
• 39:37
  two years past. And then she walked to the
• 39:40
  seminary because I was still at the seminary and she asked for
• 39:43
  me and then I called her. She wanted something that
• 39:46
  actually didn't have to do with the gospel.
• 39:47
  She had a question for me that was actually unrelated.
• 39:50
  And I told her on the phone. I I said, I think God is calling
• 39:53
  you to become a Christian, to follow him, to follow Jesus
• 39:57
  Christ. She entered OCIA and she became
• 40:01
  Catholic. She became Catholic the next
• 40:03
  year. This notebook I have here, I'll
• 40:07
  show you Lila. I knocked a door of a Lutheran
• 40:11
  and she had a friend who was Catholic.
• 40:14
  Her father had just passed and so she was kind of thinking
• 40:17
  about end of life God, Catholicism.
• 40:20
  We spoke, I prayed for send her a letter.
• 40:22
  She joined OCIA, she became Catholic.
• 40:24
  She gave me that notebook. When she became Catholic.
• 40:28
  God opens doors no man can shut. Yeah, so.
• 40:33
  When you're talking with these people, do any of them express
• 40:36
  to you, I've never heard this before or do they just say I
• 40:41
  feel like God is just speaking through you?
• 40:43
  How did they interpret what's happening back to you if they do
• 40:47
  it all? Maybe they don't share the why
• 40:49
  behind their conversion as much. The younger generations have not
• 40:52
  heard the gospel. Those are the people I'm running
• 40:54
  into. So you're I run into all kinds
• 40:56
  of people. But let's say 25 down, 25 years
• 41:00
  old down, those are the only people.
• 41:03
  And I'm knocking doors in America, so I'm not knocking
• 41:05
  doors in China or something like that.
• 41:07
  So the only people I run into today who have never heard the
• 41:09
  gospel before knocking doors are the younger generation.
• 41:12
  So their grandfather was a faithful Lutheran, let's say dad
• 41:16
  falling away. And then so the kiddos don't
• 41:18
  know who Jesus is. Those are the people that I get
• 41:20
  to actually give the entire gospel to.
• 41:21
  I'll start at God's existence, go all the way down to the
• 41:23
  necessity of the church and lifelong endurance.
• 41:26
  Most other people, they know who Jesus Christ is.
• 41:28
  They're just a falling away some kind of religion.
• 41:31
  They're falling away Catholic or they're falling away Lutheran.
• 41:34
  And so that conversation is, is different.
• 41:37
  It's calling those people home. Yeah.
• 41:40
  So a lot of people are nominally Christian in some way.
• 41:44
  They've had some experience of Christianity.
• 41:46
  Those are the people that I'm spending most of my time
• 41:49
  speaking to, although there are some of the young, younger
• 41:51
  kiddos, Niza I guess, who have never heard the Gospel before.
• 41:54
  So how many doors again total it's you said the 10s of
• 41:57
  thousands at this point? Yeah, so I went out yesterday
• 42:00
  knocking doors around here in two hours.
• 42:02
  That was about 75 doors. You did 75.
• 42:04
  Doors in two. Hours.
• 42:05
  How many did you make contact? About 30% opened their doors and
• 42:09
  I can go through. I mean, I got a couple stories
• 42:11
  here. I've been feeling really
• 42:13
  convicted. I feel like the Lord is using it
• 42:14
  right now to invite my neighbors to church.
• 42:19
  You can do it of. Course you.
• 42:20
  Can totally do it and. I'm ashamed that I haven't yet.
• 42:22
  And it's easy. Some of them already go to
• 42:24
  church by the way, I know that. But to invite especially the
• 42:27
  ones that are, I know don't. And I think it's it's very easy
• 42:30
  the method that we teach parishioners or diocese parishes
• 42:34
  that based on baptismal identity focus on charity.
• 42:36
  So priest, prophet, king. So just beginning with the
• 42:38
  discussion of prayer, then are you of a particular faith
• 42:41
  background yourself? And then ending with some kind
• 42:43
  of charitable requested. Do you need anything from the
• 42:46
  church? Is there anything we can do for
• 42:47
  you here? A couple of people from
• 42:49
  yesterday knocking doors around here.
• 42:52
  The first door I knocked was Rick.
• 42:54
  So he was Catholic, comes outside and was sent, It's a
• 42:57
  Catholic group. I don't know how I can pray for
• 42:58
  you. And he said I pray every day.
• 42:59
  So we prayed outside. Chris was about 10 doors later,
• 43:07
  comes outside, I was sent. It's a Catholic group.
• 43:10
  I know I can pray for you. Are you familiar with prayer?
• 43:12
  And he says, yes, he was raised Presbyterian.
• 43:15
  So I asked him, do you go to a particular church here?
• 43:18
  And he said, no, I just kind of drifted away.
• 43:22
  I asked him when he thought about Jesus Christ, do you
• 43:25
  believe he's God or he was a messenger or a prophet?
• 43:28
  And he said, well, I think he was a good teacher and he
• 43:30
  brought people together in community.
• 43:33
  And that was the point that I felt I could build on community.
• 43:36
  So I said, do you do you think that you would benefit from a
• 43:40
  community like a Christian community?
• 43:42
  They said, yeah, I think I would.
• 43:43
  And I said, what do you think about Jesus claims John 858
• 43:47
  before Abraham was I am John 14-6.
• 43:49
  I'm the way the truth and life. No one comes to the father by
• 43:51
  me. And he didn't speak to that
• 43:54
  directly. We went back to this discussion
• 43:56
  about the community. And so I invited him to the
• 43:58
  local Catholic Church here. And as I was leaving, he said to
• 44:02
  me, we prayed and he he shook my hand and he said this was
• 44:07
  impeccable timing. Keep up the great work.
• 44:10
  So I also ran into a lady. Please keep in your prayers is
• 44:13
  about 10 doors later. She comes outside her face.
• 44:18
  I can't get a read on her face. Something's not right.
• 44:21
  She's like wearing her pyjamas about my mom's age.
• 44:23
  This is the middle of the day, maybe noon.
• 44:26
  And I say, I don't know, I can pray for you.
• 44:28
  Are you familiar with prayer? She just kind of nods her head
• 44:32
  and still something's not right. I say, are you of a particular
• 44:35
  faith yourself? She says yes, but she's still
• 44:39
  not speaking to me. And then she tells me that her
• 44:41
  daughter just died and her daughter looking at her age
• 44:44
  would probably around be around my age.
• 44:47
  So we prayed together, I'll send her this letter.
• 44:51
  And if I was here, if we had a scent team, if you had blue
• 44:54
  shirt evangelist going out, you had red shirt intercessors
• 44:57
  remaining at the church praying. If you had grey shirt support
• 45:00
  team writing letters, putting together gift baskets, and we'd
• 45:03
  send a gift basket out to her. Yeah, So a couple others.
• 45:08
  I would say about 5 in two hours, about 5, I would say
• 45:11
  extended conversations, 30% of the doors opened and a lot of
• 45:16
  fun. It's very simple.
• 45:18
  If we had this in every town city in America, the country
• 45:22
  would be transferred. I mean.
• 45:26
  I like, yeah, it's so it is so very simple, the Gospels.
• 45:31
  Give me a shirt. Which color should I wear?
• 45:33
  Red. The grey is the support team so
• 45:36
  I wear the blue shirt yesterday. So within the team you have 3
• 45:39
  sub teams. Who founded scent?
• 45:41
  So I started it, started the method just praying about.
• 45:44
  Very. You're very humble about it,
• 45:46
  Austin. I just trying to serve the blue
• 45:49
  shirt evangelist. Go knock doors.
• 45:51
  Your grey shirt intercessors remain behind and pray for them.
• 45:54
  So a regular sentence Saturday. So if you call up Saint Charles
• 45:56
  Borneo in Omaha, they have a scent team.
• 45:59
  So I flew in, trained their scent team on a Saturday.
• 46:02
  The blue shirts are going out two by two for an hour, knocking
• 46:05
  doors on using the scent method. The red shirts stay behind.
• 46:08
  They pray. The grey shirts are the ones
• 46:10
  writing that handwritten letter. Or if someone lost a loved one,
• 46:13
  they're creating the basket, putting a blanket in it, some
• 46:16
  tea, a gift card, and they're thinking about what are we doing
• 46:20
  for Easter? And then one of the best kept
• 46:21
  secrets in evangelization for Catholics, and it's sad, it
• 46:25
  really is a secret, is direct mail.
• 46:27
  I know, I know a parish. I mean, it sounds crazy.
• 46:30
  I know a parish that sent 5000 Christmas invitations into the
• 46:35
  neighborhood and with USPS you don't need to know people's
• 46:39
  addresses. You just give a zip code.
• 46:41
  You go to USPS with a stack of cards and you say I want every
• 46:45
  house in this zip code to get one of these Christmas
• 46:48
  invitations. They sent 5000 cards into the
• 46:51
  neighborhood for Christmas. The pastor told me every mass,
• 46:55
  every one of his Christmas masses were full.
• 46:57
  Two were over full. The best mass attendance he sent
• 46:59
  in seen in 10 years. If every parish in the country
• 47:03
  sent to direct mail, Christmas and Easter invitation knocked
• 47:07
  every door every year with the sent method following Canon law,
• 47:12
  we would be looking at a totally different country in my opinion.
• 47:15
  OK, I've I've gotten chills multiple times in this
• 47:18
  conversation already and I'm very excited to see what God is
• 47:22
  doing through your yes to him and then also all the yeses of
• 47:26
  the people listening that are going to already are happening
• 47:29
  or will happen. A few things just to breakdown
• 47:32
  sent method. You just you've mentioned it a
• 47:34
  few times. You've touched on it a few
• 47:36
  times. Walk us through the sent method.
• 47:37
  OK, so in short and brief, I'll knock the door, I'll stand back
• 47:41
  from the door. You want to go 2 by two, one
• 47:43
  person on the door, one person at the sidewalk.
• 47:45
  I think you want to have two people just for safety, but you
• 47:47
  don't really want two people at the door.
• 47:49
  It kind of frightens people, I think.
• 47:51
  So you want some distance there. The first thing I say, you're
• 47:53
  focusing on that priestly component.
• 47:56
  So are. You on the hearth, Foley, like
• 47:58
  the doorstep. Or I'm I'm back.
• 48:00
  You're one step. Down.
• 48:01
  OK, you're not like at the. Doors.
• 48:02
  It's too intimidating. Yeah, and I'll turn my body to
• 48:05
  the side a little bit, too. I'm trying to make people as
• 48:07
  comfortable as possible. So you're like a few steps.
• 48:09
  Down I'm maybe 6 feet away from the door, 6 to 10 feet away from
• 48:12
  and. They're like, what are you
• 48:13
  trying to sell me? They'll open the door.
• 48:15
  They won't say anything. They'll let you start.
• 48:17
  I was sent. It's a Catholic group.
• 48:20
  We pray for people. I'd like to know.
• 48:22
  I can pray for you. Are you familiar with prayer?
• 48:25
  Something like that. The ask is you say your.
• 48:28
  Name. I don't at the beginning and I
• 48:30
  do that because I want to keep it till later.
• 48:31
  So towards the end, I'll say, oh, by the way, my name is
• 48:34
  Austin. What's your name?
• 48:34
  And I'll shake their hand. And then that allows me to write
• 48:36
  them a letter with their name on the letter.
• 48:39
  So the reason that I ask, I close that question with are you
• 48:43
  familiar with prayer is because a lot of people say, yes, that's
• 48:48
  a yes. We can build on, so then one can
• 48:50
  go into a conversation on prayer.
• 48:53
  What can we pray for? So that Lady said, well, we can
• 48:55
  pray for my daughter who just died.
• 48:58
  We can pray the our Father right there.
• 49:00
  Or you can move into that second component.
• 49:02
  So let's talk about Jesus Christ.
• 49:03
  Let's talk about the Gospel. Let's talk about your particular
• 49:06
  situation. So my prompt for that transition
• 49:09
  is I'll say, are you of a particular faith background?
• 49:12
  Just about everybody I run into is of of a particular faith
• 49:16
  background from there. So let's say you say I'm a
• 49:20
  Lutheran, I'm a Hindu, I'm a Buddhist.
• 49:23
  Oh, they just say I'm a Christian.
• 49:24
  I'm a Christian. I'll ask them what they mean by
• 49:26
  that. I'll say, would actually think I
• 49:27
  said that yesterday talking to one of the ladies.
• 49:31
  Then I'll ask, would you so that someone says they're a Buddhist.
• 49:35
  I'm a Buddhist. Would you recommend it?
• 49:37
  Now I like that question. The reason I like that question
• 49:40
  is because I want to know how you feel about your particular
• 49:44
  religion. So if you say you're a Buddhist
• 49:47
  and I ask you, would you recommend it?
• 49:49
  And you say no, OK, it's. A good one.
• 49:52
  Then we'll just say, well, have you considered Christianity?
• 49:54
  What do you think about Jesus Christ?
• 49:55
  But if you say yes, why? Why would you recommend being a
• 50:00
  Buddhist? Because we have contemplative
• 50:02
  prayer and peace. That's fantastic.
• 50:04
  I was a Carthusian. I I can speak about
• 50:06
  contemplation as well in Catholic.
• 50:07
  So you build. You build on what are they?
• 50:09
  Whatever. Yeah.
• 50:10
  Whatever is good and true in their religion already exists in
• 50:13
  its fullness in the Catholic faith.
• 50:14
  So we don't need to be concerned there.
• 50:16
  So you build with them. If I ask her you have a
• 50:19
  particular faith background, you say no because then I'll then
• 50:21
  I'll begin the gospel. I'll ask, do you believe God
• 50:25
  exists? And then we'll go through that
• 50:27
  acronym that we teach evangelists.
• 50:30
  So our particular formulation of the Gospel, God, it's an acronym
• 50:34
  God exists, our creation, sin, payment, ecclesia, the necessity
• 50:39
  of the Church and the lifelong endurance.
• 50:41
  So is that gospel Gospel? OK.
• 50:43
  And that's our presentation you got.
• 50:45
  It I got. It our.
• 50:46
  Presentation the Brain the. Brain's working.
• 50:48
  It's turning. So walk us through it one more
• 50:51
  time. What does Gospel stand for?
• 50:53
  And this is an acronym that you use for evangelization and
• 50:55
  sharing the gospel. Yes, to present the krigma.
• 50:57
  So G stands for God exists. So giving just a real easy proof
• 51:02
  for God if you need to, if they're there, they might not be
• 51:04
  there. So the thing about this gospel
• 51:07
  framework is it allows you to see the picture of the whole,
• 51:09
  but then you can start in the middle, you can start in the
• 51:11
  end. So God exists our creation, sin
• 51:16
  payment, ecclesia, that's the church.
• 51:18
  And then L the necessity of lifelong endurance.
• 51:21
  So yesterday when I'm talking to fallen away Protestants, I'm
• 51:24
  talking about the church and lifelong endurance.
• 51:26
  So we need to keep the commandments.
• 51:28
  We have the sacrament of confession.
• 51:29
  That's John 2023. There's deadly sin first John
• 51:31
  516. And so we just kind of go
• 51:33
  through the verse. The payment is.
• 51:34
  Jesus Christ, death on the cross, satisfaction.
• 51:37
  The wages of sin are death. Yeah, and then ecclesia.
• 51:40
  You can't do this without the Church.
• 51:42
  So it would be the necessity of baptism.
• 51:44
  So John 35. Unless one is born of water and
• 51:47
  spirit, he can't enter the Kingdom of God.
• 51:49
  Titus 3/5. He saved us not by deeds done by
• 51:51
  us in righteousness, but by the washing of regeneration,
• 51:54
  renewal, and the Holy Spirit. Mark 1616 He saved.
• 51:57
  He who believes and is baptized will be saved first.
• 52:00
  Peter 321 Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves
• 52:04
  you. So that's what we're talking
• 52:05
  about. What is baptism?
• 52:06
  Why is it necessary? And it comes right after
• 52:09
  atonement to satisfaction our Lord. 1 So that's gospel.
• 52:15
  That's if someone says, I'm not familiar with any particular
• 52:19
  religion, then you can begin at the beginning and then work your
• 52:22
  way through. So that's that middle part, a
• 52:24
  discussion about our Lord, the faith and then lastly leaving
• 52:27
  with some kind of charitable component.
• 52:29
  Is there anything you need from the church?
• 52:30
  Is there anything I can help with today?
• 52:32
  That second one, you kind of have to be careful how you want
• 52:34
  to ask that question. You want to freak people out.
• 52:36
  So I've kind of leaned towards lately asking is there any, can
• 52:39
  the church do anything from you? Is there anything you need for
• 52:41
  the church? Almost no one takes you up on
• 52:44
  it. I which I mean, you're a
• 52:47
  stranger. That makes sense.
• 52:49
  The taking down the lights was an act of charity.
• 52:53
  I've once I helped someone build a fence.
• 52:56
  How long did that take? No, we didn't do all of it.
• 52:59
  We did a part of it. So we put in a couple beams and
• 53:02
  then we left. So.
• 53:03
  You don't ask how can I help you today regularly or because it's
• 53:09
  a dangerous one, because they may be like.
• 53:11
  It's you just want to play it by ear.
• 53:12
  OK, get a sense for it. Yeah.
• 53:14
  And the way I like to ask it really is, is there anything
• 53:17
  that you need from the church so that they understand what you're
• 53:20
  you're trying to do? I ran into a lady in Denver and
• 53:23
  she told us in the prayer request that she struggled
• 53:26
  paying her rent. Well, we have Saint Vincent de
• 53:28
  Paul's Society at her church. So what can the church do for
• 53:30
  you? The church can help with those
• 53:32
  kinds of things. So you offer that if you hear
• 53:33
  about a financial need that's a. Beautiful.
• 53:35
  Yeah. Call the parish, I told her.
• 53:36
  Call the parish. And then we wrote the letter to
• 53:38
  her. I mentioned it as well, Then the
• 53:41
  letter. So that's the method at the
• 53:43
  door. So priestly, prophetic, kingly.
• 53:46
  Then when I leave, we have a script for the follow up letter.
• 53:51
  It's a dear Lila, thank you for the gift of your time and
• 53:54
  kindness during my visit on Monday.
• 53:56
  You were truly in my prayers. It was also a pleasure to meet
• 53:58
  you. It's true that before the world
• 53:59
  was made, God look forward to the day you would walk to earth.
• 54:02
  As he says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
• 54:05
  Before you were born. I set you apart.
• 54:07
  So I thank God for the gift of you.
• 54:09
  May God bless you. You will be in my prayers.
• 54:11
  Please send me an e-mail if there's anything I can speak to
• 54:13
  or come visit the church. Or here's this business card and
• 54:15
  I'll put a Starbucks gift card in each one of those letters.
• 54:18
  So there's a Starbucks gift card.
• 54:20
  And it's handwritten. Handwritten.
• 54:21
  Written. Yeah, all of them are
• 54:23
  handwritten. And I'll send a letter to
• 54:24
  everyone that I think would find it edifying.
• 54:28
  So if I knock the door and someone doesn't like me, I won't
• 54:31
  send them a letter. But if we have a nice encounter,
• 54:33
  I'll send them a handwritten letter.
• 54:35
  So who knows what that? How many handwritten letters
• 54:38
  have? You seen thousands.
• 54:38
  That's the real question. I'd love to know the answer to
• 54:40
  that question. It's in God's hands.
• 54:44
  Wow, you're not even keeping track at this point.
• 54:47
  So when you are walking, let's do a little.
• 54:52
  I'm going to be. I'm going to be somebody.
• 54:53
  I'm not going to tell you who I'm going to be.
• 54:54
  I'll knock, come knock on the door.
• 54:56
  And I'm going to see you to say, OK, I'm going to.
• 54:58
  Yeah. So knock on the door.
• 55:00
  OK. Hello.
• 55:00
  OK, you just knocked. All right, guys.
• 55:03
  Hey. I start right.
• 55:04
  Oh yeah? Well, I'm just like, who are
• 55:06
  you? Why are you on my doorstep?
• 55:08
  I'm going to say it's a Catholic group.
• 55:09
  We pray for people. Are you familiar with prayer?
• 55:11
  Yes. OK.
• 55:12
  Are you of a particular faith yourself?
• 55:15
  I was raised kind of Christian. Okay, and now what would you
• 55:20
  say? Have you found a church for
• 55:21
  yourself? No, I'm spiritual, though.
• 55:24
  I don't really. Sometimes I'll go to church a
• 55:27
  few times, but I'm I'm more of a spiritual person.
• 55:29
  Okay, you were raised Christian. What would you say about Jesus
• 55:32
  Christ? Would you say he's God?
• 55:34
  He's awesome. Okay what would you say if his
• 55:37
  claims he says before Abraham was I am so he's claiming that
• 55:40
  he pre exists. Abraham seems like he's
• 55:42
  indicating he's God before the high priest he says I am and you
• 55:46
  will see the son of man coming at the right hand of power in
• 55:48
  the clouds of heaven and the high priest tears his shirt and
• 55:51
  blasphemies claiming to be God. Do you think Jesus was lying to
• 55:55
  us, or he was crazy or he is God?
• 55:58
  Sure. I think he's God, Yeah.
• 55:59
  OK, so Jesus is God, we want to spend eternity with God.
• 56:06
  Well, he gives us a very clear way to do that.
• 56:09
  He says unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot
• 56:11
  enter the Kingdom of heaven. So that's, that's baptism.
• 56:14
  So are you interested at all in Jesus Christ and walking with
• 56:18
  him, maybe coming back into the church?
• 56:21
  What are your thoughts on Christianity?
• 56:23
  I was baptized and I feel close to God.
• 56:26
  I feel like I'm connected to him and I'm pretty spiritual.
• 56:32
  OK, well I would agree God is close to you and continue to
• 56:36
  pray and God has sent. This is not a coincidence that
• 56:39
  we're talking to another here. I am at the door.
• 56:42
  That is a sign that is a sign of God's love for you.
• 56:45
  I would say if we want to love God in return, if you want to
• 56:48
  love Jesus Christ in return, Jesus says if you love me, you
• 56:53
  will keep my commandments. His commandments are not
• 56:56
  burdensome. And so He's asked us to do those
• 56:58
  things that we would want to do anyways, to pray to him, to
• 57:01
  worship him. That's the third commandment, to
• 57:04
  honor and love those around us, not to injure our neighbor,
• 57:08
  steal, lying, not taking the Lord's name in vain.
• 57:12
  If you've broken any of those commandments since your baptism,
• 57:16
  our Lord gives us a way back into relationship with them.
• 57:19
  So in John 2023, he breathes on his apostles and he says whoever
• 57:23
  sends you forgive are forgiven, whose ever sins you retain are
• 57:26
  retained. Now those men were going to die.
• 57:28
  And so they gave that ministry of reconciliation to other men,
• 57:31
  to other men all the way down to us today, to our priests and
• 57:34
  bishops today. So you can you can come to a
• 57:37
  Catholic Church through a process we call OCIA.
• 57:41
  You can receive forgiveness through the hands of the
• 57:43
  apostles and. But I feel like God's already
• 57:45
  forgiven me. I, I, if I mess up and I, I try
• 57:48
  to be a good person. I don't usually do crazy stuff.
• 57:51
  I don't drink. I don't, you know, I don't do
• 57:54
  drugs. I'm pretty, try to be pretty
• 57:57
  honest and hardworking and I don't feel like I need to.
• 58:00
  I wouldn't want to go to like a priest or something.
• 58:02
  I can just tell God I'm sorry if I do something wrong.
• 58:05
  Are you a a mother yourself? Do you have children?
• 58:08
  I'm a 21 year old guy. Oh, you're a 21 year old guy?
• 58:11
  OK. Are you a father?
• 58:13
  Do you have children? No, I'm fine.
• 58:15
  That is my parents house and I live in your parents house.
• 58:17
  I live in the back bedroom. Well, God bless you.
• 58:20
  That's OK. You're still figuring out what
• 58:22
  you want for your life. That's all right.
• 58:25
  Most parents understand with their children that for children
• 58:29
  to love their parents, that means not only saying it with
• 58:32
  their lips, but but listening to them.
• 58:35
  And so you're right, you can pray for God's forgiveness and
• 58:38
  please continue to do that. There is a distinction among
• 58:42
  different kinds of faults or sins.
• 58:44
  So in first John 516, it's written, if anyone sees his
• 58:48
  brother committing a sin that is not deadly, let him pray to God.
• 58:50
  So that's what you're talking about.
• 58:51
  You're praying to God. But there is such a thing as
• 58:54
  deadly sin, which we're not to, we're not supposed to pray for.
• 58:57
  So God is telling us that there are some sins that we should
• 59:00
  pray to God for forgiveness. And you're doing that.
• 59:02
  Please continue to do that. But there's other sins which cut
• 59:05
  us off, deadly sins from the body of Christ, which we're not
• 59:08
  supposed to receive forgiveness just through prayer.
• 59:11
  That's why we have John 2023. We're supposed to come to his
• 59:15
  particular ministers to receive forgiveness from Christ through
• 59:18
  these people. And it's a really good idea.
• 59:20
  It humbles us, allows us to speak to this person about our
• 59:23
  particular faults, to get guidance as well, and to be part
• 59:26
  of the community. So that's something I'd want for
• 59:28
  you, but you're on your journey, so I would like to invite you
• 59:32
  just to the community to come see what it's like to get
• 59:34
  reintroduced into the church. So we have Wednesday night
• 59:37
  Alpha, we watch a video, the community comes together.
• 59:40
  Is that something you'd be interested in as a first easy
• 59:43
  step? I mean, sure.
• 59:49
  Praise God. Well, I'd love to say a prayer
• 59:50
  for us here. Here's my information.
• 59:52
  I'll send you a letter. My information would love to be
• 59:55
  in touch and I just praise God for you are.
• 59:57
  You going to be there? I'm going to be there.
• 59:59
  I will definitely. Goes out there, anybody my age,
• 1:00:01
  there's. Some cool people there.
• 1:00:02
  OK yeah, not everyone's cool. It's a church, so different ages
• 1:00:05
  but. And and do I have to confess to
• 1:00:07
  the priest or is? That happening, that's down the
• 1:00:08
  road, all right. Just keep that in the back of
• 1:00:10
  your head. All right, you got it.
• 1:00:12
  All right. So that was I should have I, I,
• 1:00:14
  I should have told you at the beginning, I was a 20 year old
• 1:00:16
  man. So that I know threw you off.
• 1:00:18
  But you never know these days when you're knocking a door in
• 1:00:21
  our in our culture, who you're going to get.
• 1:00:23
  But do you get my heart? A lot of my heart is for younger
• 1:00:29
  people who do not understand what Christianity actually is.
• 1:00:34
  They think they know what it is and they've they've written it
• 1:00:37
  off or they think they're living a event on form of it.
• 1:00:41
  Have you had a lot of conversations with people like
• 1:00:42
  that? With people like who I just sort
• 1:00:44
  of pretended to be or are they not answering the door me?
• 1:00:48
  They're not going to tell me at the door so much of their
• 1:00:51
  history. The conversation we just had is
• 1:00:53
  actually very accurate to to many conversations.
• 1:00:55
  So falling away, you did great. So falling away Christian, I
• 1:00:59
  think I'm a good person. I don't need the sacraments.
• 1:01:01
  I don't need church. I'm going to have my own
• 1:01:03
  relationship here with God. And so those verses that I that
• 1:01:06
  I mentioned are verses that I mentioned yesterday.
• 1:01:08
  That's normally who I'm running into.
• 1:01:09
  So falling away Lutheran quick. Question Are you usually
• 1:01:14
  successful in making the case that they're not?
• 1:01:17
  Like kind of you're basically pricking their conscience.
• 1:01:19
  You're trying to wake them up out of their slumber.
• 1:01:21
  That's what you're doing. And you're throwing Bible verses
• 1:01:23
  at them, basically. It's our Lord's first words.
• 1:01:27
  Repent, Repent and believe in the gospel.
• 1:01:31
  Take it for certain that the worse a person becomes, the more
• 1:01:35
  likely they are to take themselves to be a good person.
• 1:01:38
  So Jesus says in John 320, everyone who does evil hates the
• 1:01:43
  light. It does not come to the light
• 1:01:45
  unless his deeds should be exposed.
• 1:01:49
  So if I live far away from God and I continue to do these
• 1:01:54
  actions against conscience, who is God to me?
• 1:01:57
  He's the just judge. What do I have in a relationship
• 1:02:00
  with God? Punishment, Damnation.
• 1:02:05
  And so people are already afraid.
• 1:02:07
  I believe in their conscience. What we're doing for them is not
• 1:02:11
  adding to their condemnation. We're just saying these are
• 1:02:13
  things you already know. So we're going through the
• 1:02:16
  commandments just a little bit. So you already know this, that
• 1:02:18
  you ought to be worshipping God, that you shouldn't lie, steal,
• 1:02:21
  or any of the adultery is one of the 10 commandments underneath
• 1:02:26
  that. You could have all sexual sin
• 1:02:28
  underneath that. So we're just letting people
• 1:02:29
  know that we understand that there is a way to forgiveness.
• 1:02:33
  So there is Jesus Christ, there is the sacrament of baptism,
• 1:02:36
  there is the sacrament of reconciliation.
• 1:02:38
  So I think people are initially against religion because they
• 1:02:45
  think that all that's there is punishment and damnation.
• 1:02:48
  Then you allow them to understand that we get what
• 1:02:51
  they're going through and that there is a solution, which is
• 1:02:54
  forgiveness. My sense is that a lot of
• 1:02:56
  people, especially again, younger folks, and by younger I
• 1:03:00
  mean like 40 and under. It's not, I mean, when you're 40
• 1:03:03
  or you're young, you're middle-aged basically.
• 1:03:04
  But that sort of part, that was sort of generations, millennials
• 1:03:07
  and Gen. Z, they've lost sense of what
• 1:03:09
  sin is. So their idea of what is right
• 1:03:12
  and what is wrong is complicated.
• 1:03:14
  They've, they've sort of think some things are wrong that
• 1:03:18
  actually aren't wrong. They think things that are right
• 1:03:20
  are not right. And so especially like sexual
• 1:03:22
  sense as an example, usually they're not convicted about most
• 1:03:25
  sexual sins. Do you find yourself having
• 1:03:28
  conversations about those sorts of things?
• 1:03:31
  Because you can have like this, you know, younger person who's
• 1:03:34
  living with their boyfriend or who's, you know, regularly
• 1:03:37
  viewing pornography or sleeping around, and they're in sin.
• 1:03:40
  And overall, besides that, they're trying to live a good
• 1:03:43
  life. They're honest, they're working
• 1:03:45
  hard, they try to be in good relationship with friends and
• 1:03:48
  family. And so in their view, they're
• 1:03:51
  doing OK. They even believe that they
• 1:03:52
  pray. They kind of have, maybe they go
• 1:03:54
  to church occasionally. My sense of it is there's a lot
• 1:03:57
  of people like that out there. And so if you come to the door,
• 1:04:01
  they're like, oh, that's a nice guy.
• 1:04:02
  He's so passionate for the, he's really so passionate for
• 1:04:04
  Christianity. But I'm not feeling convicted of
• 1:04:07
  sin. Romans 7, Saint Paul says if it
• 1:04:11
  had not been for the law, I would not know sin.
• 1:04:15
  So you're right, we have to educate people's conscience.
• 1:04:17
  The Decalogue helps, the 10 commandments helps a lot.
• 1:04:20
  I do think though, just looking at my own personal experience, I
• 1:04:24
  don't know if you had a stint in your life where you were just
• 1:04:26
  away from God. I think your conscience it
• 1:04:31
  darkens. So you won't see like gossip
• 1:04:37
  maybe as sinful, but at least for me, when I was away from the
• 1:04:40
  church, I, I didn't think I was living rightly, entirely
• 1:04:44
  correctly. I wouldn't have said I was an
• 1:04:47
  evil person. But if someone came to my door
• 1:04:50
  and said this is who Jesus Christ is, and this is how he's
• 1:04:53
  asked you to follow him and went through a couple of those 10
• 1:04:56
  commandments and what they mean, obedience to the Church through
• 1:05:00
  the sacraments, then I would have become aware.
• 1:05:03
  So we are educating people's consciences out there through
• 1:05:06
  the Decalogue and then through the precepts of the Church which
• 1:05:08
  Jesus has given us. Have you ever offended somebody?
• 1:05:12
  I remember one man who had had a priest that had abused him and
• 1:05:22
  he he blew up on me, but I understood I didn't.
• 1:05:28
  I wasn't upset at him. I apologized for his experience
• 1:05:32
  with the church. And yesterday actually, a lady
• 1:05:36
  was saying to me, we're talking about this, the pre scandal.
• 1:05:38
  And we talked about, well, it's not like child abuse is not in
• 1:05:41
  the public schools or just out in in the world.
• 1:05:43
  So it's not something unique to our clergy.
• 1:05:46
  We're right to expect a lot from our clergy, but I'm convinced
• 1:05:49
  that everywhere you have the bell curve.
• 1:05:52
  So in your family, in your workplace, in the church, you've
• 1:05:55
  got the majority, which is as you would expect, most priests.
• 1:05:59
  They celebrate the Mass, they're praying, they're liturgy, the
• 1:06:02
  hours, they're showing up. Then you have the Saints, Saint
• 1:06:04
  John Vianney, who's eating A2 potatoes a day and a glass of
• 1:06:07
  milk. He's spending the whole day in
• 1:06:08
  the confessional. And then you have the Judases.
• 1:06:11
  And we will always have that bell curve.
• 1:06:12
  And that's, that's just the way the Lord has willed for the
• 1:06:15
  world to work. So this man blew up on me.
• 1:06:18
  I didn't blame him. He went inside.
• 1:06:20
  That was it. I've never been attacked.
• 1:06:23
  I've never been accosted at any length whatsoever.
• 1:06:27
  I try and remind Door to door evangelist when I launch one of
• 1:06:30
  these sent teams at a parish that you're scarier than they,
• 1:06:34
  they're more scared of you than you should be of them.
• 1:06:37
  If I knock your door, you know nothing about me.
• 1:06:40
  I know a lot about you. I know you here, I've seen you.
• 1:06:43
  I know where you live. So I think people are scared
• 1:06:47
  when they open the door. Here's the stranger.
• 1:06:49
  What does he want? So they're more, way more afraid
• 1:06:52
  of you than you ought to be of them.
• 1:06:54
  So they're, they're nice to you. They don't want to upset you
• 1:06:56
  because you could always come back.
• 1:06:58
  You always come back to the house.
• 1:06:59
  I think it's remarkable that you've knocked thousands, 10s of
• 1:07:02
  thousands of doors in America and you've got of only one guy
• 1:07:06
  get upset at you and it was somebody who'd been abused by a
• 1:07:09
  priest. Lord have mercy.
• 1:07:11
  And you were representing that memory for him.
• 1:07:13
  And, you know, he was upset and, and deeply hurt.
• 1:07:18
  And I mean that those numbers are incredible.
• 1:07:20
  And I, I think we're so polarized today and divided.
• 1:07:23
  And the rhetoric of the left versus the right has become so
• 1:07:26
  intense that I think it's hard for people to imagine what
• 1:07:29
  you're saying, that you can have as many interactions as if you,
• 1:07:34
  you have had thousands at this point of the 10s of thousands of
• 1:07:36
  doors. You've had thousands of
• 1:07:37
  conversations at people's doors that were amicable.
• 1:07:41
  Hundreds of them have led to, it sounds like, conversions.
• 1:07:44
  Is that fair to say? I've seen personally see, I've
• 1:07:49
  seen that first parish I was at, I saw seven people step inside
• 1:07:52
  the church. Those scent evangelization teams
• 1:07:56
  that I've launched, we launched 4 in Denver immediately last
• 1:08:00
  year. We had a couple launches and
• 1:08:01
  then now that scent evangelization is on
• 1:08:03
  formedformed.org. There's a video series on there
• 1:08:06
  and a book. I have no idea how many
• 1:08:09
  conversions we're seeing. Every Paris I've launched sent
• 1:08:11
  out, I've seen people sitting in the pews from door to door.
• 1:08:14
  So it's you were reaching people on the edges.
• 1:08:18
  So we're planting the seed. It's going to take a little bit
• 1:08:21
  more time from the conversation, the door to get them into the
• 1:08:24
  parish normally, but I do see genuine conversions in the
• 1:08:27
  parishes that launch. Sent I mean, I would say
• 1:08:29
  definitely based on what you're describing hundreds and
• 1:08:31
  regardless, you're planting the thousands of seeds.
• 1:08:34
  But I, I, I just want to go back to this idea of the of, of the
• 1:08:37
  piece, the amicability of these interactions, because I think we
• 1:08:44
  are so quick as Christians or even conservatives to wield
• 1:08:50
  truth and faith like a weapon and we are basically superior
• 1:08:55
  somehow, or we're going to win the debate or we're going to be
• 1:09:00
  more, you know, the holier than that.
• 1:09:02
  Ultimately. Now, many of these people don't
• 1:09:03
  wouldn't say that that's what their disposition is, but
• 1:09:06
  effectively that's what the disposition is.
• 1:09:08
  And so when the other person reacts poorly, it's the other
• 1:09:11
  person's fault. I think that's, I think that's
• 1:09:14
  where I'm trying to get here in a long winded way, is that we
• 1:09:17
  assign other people's poor response as their fault
• 1:09:20
  entirely. And we never really examine
• 1:09:22
  could, could be our posture, could it be our tone, could it
• 1:09:24
  be our words? And I'm first in line to need to
• 1:09:28
  evaluate this because I'm out there constantly trying to
• 1:09:31
  educate people. And sometimes I do try to be
• 1:09:32
  more aggressive in my language when I'm speaking more broadly
• 1:09:37
  publicly. It's not one-on-one.
• 1:09:38
  It's more of a broad public statement because I'm trying to
• 1:09:40
  get engagement to get people to understand this is a serious
• 1:09:42
  matter. You should pay attention to it,
• 1:09:43
  right? Abortion as an example.
• 1:09:46
  But in a one-on-one conversation, I mean, do you, do
• 1:09:51
  you, do you find that? So do you feel surprised by the
• 1:09:53
  fact that you've had so few negative responses to you?
• 1:09:57
  I would say immediately or first of all that it's these are
• 1:10:01
  different environments. So door to door evangelization
• 1:10:04
  is different than tabling on a sidewalk, which is different
• 1:10:07
  than St. ministry. When I knock on your door, there
• 1:10:11
  is, I believe, this feeling of vulnerability from the
• 1:10:14
  homeowner. So they do.
• 1:10:16
  They are a little afraid of you, which I think keeps them from
• 1:10:20
  blowing up on you. If you have a table, you're
• 1:10:22
  probably going to have more elevated experiences.
• 1:10:24
  I've experienced that tabling, if you're doing St. ministry,
• 1:10:28
  because that fear is not there. People are more likely to attack
• 1:10:31
  you or assault you, but because they're a little nervous, you're
• 1:10:33
  a stranger, you're there at their door.
• 1:10:35
  I think that causes people to be a little bit more chill and
• 1:10:39
  composed. And open it.
• 1:10:41
  So it's like, would you say open or?
• 1:10:44
  I would say the people you meet at the door, you meet all kinds
• 1:10:47
  of people, which would be a little bit different than the
• 1:10:50
  people who come up to your table, than the people that
• 1:10:52
  maybe come up to you if you're holding a billboard or
• 1:10:54
  something. So the variety of the people
• 1:10:57
  that you run into I think leads to an openness.
• 1:11:00
  I would also say in conversation in general, I tell evangelist
• 1:11:03
  you want to diagnose as soon as you possibly can whether the
• 1:11:06
  person in front of you has a heart problem or a head problem.
• 1:11:10
  As an example, when I run into atheists, the first question
• 1:11:12
  I'll ask. So when I get to that second
• 1:11:14
  part, the prophetic, are you a particular faith background?
• 1:11:17
  I'm an atheist. Would you want God to exist?
• 1:11:20
  That's my first question. Good question.
• 1:11:21
  That's what they say. And then they'll pause.
• 1:11:25
  I had a guy pause for three seconds two weeks ago.
• 1:11:27
  He just paused for three seconds.
• 1:11:29
  And then they'll say yes or no. Most of them say no, I would.
• 1:11:33
  I would not want God to exist. Then I ask why we go down that
• 1:11:37
  road. Asking questions allows you to
• 1:11:41
  understand whether so this particular question, would you
• 1:11:45
  want God to exist to say no, they're not missing information.
• 1:11:48
  It's a willful thing. So they have set their heart
• 1:11:51
  against God. So giving them a proof for God
• 1:11:55
  is not necessarily going to be helpful.
• 1:11:56
  So we need to take a different route.
• 1:11:58
  We need to talk about their experience of God.
• 1:11:59
  What do they think God is? The problem of evil?
• 1:12:02
  What is their experience of evil that has LED them to hope that
• 1:12:05
  there is no God? Is it a heart problem?
• 1:12:08
  Ask questions, allow them to go on their own journey, walk with
• 1:12:10
  them. Is it a head problem?
• 1:12:13
  So with the atheist, would you want God to exist?
• 1:12:15
  Yes. I would give information.
• 1:12:18
  So I think it's important to diagnose.
• 1:12:20
  Yeah, give the proof right there.
• 1:12:21
  How? Often do you see head versus
• 1:12:22
  heart with atheists? 80% say I would not want God to
• 1:12:25
  exist. It's a heart.
• 1:12:26
  It's totally a heart. They've set their will against
• 1:12:28
  God. I don't.
• 1:12:29
  I don't think you can be a sincere atheist.
• 1:12:32
  We're human beings. We pull truth from the world.
• 1:12:36
  There's two truths that every human being knows that they
• 1:12:38
  can't prove. The 1st is called the principle
• 1:12:39
  of non contradiction. That just means that you're
• 1:12:41
  looking at me. You know that either Austin is
• 1:12:44
  sitting in front of you or not Austin, but not both at the same
• 1:12:46
  time. That's at the bottom of all
• 1:12:48
  science. It's a fundamental principle.
• 1:12:50
  You can't prove it. You just pull it from the world
• 1:12:51
  because you're a human being. Same with the principle of
• 1:12:54
  sufficient reason. So if something blew up in the
• 1:12:56
  room and you asked how did that happen and I said there's no
• 1:12:59
  explanation, you wouldn't accept that.
• 1:13:01
  There has to be an explanation. Those two truths, which all
• 1:13:04
  science is based on, cannot be proved.
• 1:13:06
  We just intuit it. We just pull it from the world.
• 1:13:09
  Romans 120 Ever since the creation of the world, His
• 1:13:12
  eternal power and deity has been made manifest through the things
• 1:13:15
  that are created. So they are without excuse.
• 1:13:17
  All of us, in some kind of foggy way, pull from the world a
• 1:13:21
  notion of a creator, a maker, a first, 'cause when I was
• 1:13:25
  agnostic, I could not shake the notion that there was a God.
• 1:13:29
  So if someone is an atheist, it's a willful thing they've
• 1:13:32
  chosen against God. Why?
• 1:13:35
  I don't know, but I need to know.
• 1:13:37
  Is it a heart problem or a head problem?
• 1:13:39
  If someone has a heart problem, we lead with questions.
• 1:13:43
  We just ask questions. We allow them to take inventory
• 1:13:46
  of their own heart and to lead their own journey.
• 1:13:49
  So it's not preaching. So the method at the door,
• 1:13:53
  leading with questions most often providing information when
• 1:13:56
  it's important, I think that keeps people from getting angry
• 1:13:59
  with you. What is the toughest
• 1:14:01
  conversation that you've had knocking on doors and sharing
• 1:14:04
  the gospel? That is a great question.
• 1:14:07
  The toughest conversation that I've had at the door.
• 1:14:12
  Toughest intellectually, probably arguing about the
• 1:14:16
  problem of evil with the atheists.
• 1:14:18
  Toughest emotionally would be this guy.
• 1:14:20
  People. Which one?
• 1:14:22
  This guy who blew up because of his experience with the priest
• 1:14:24
  in the church. I had an atheist tell me once he
• 1:14:28
  said, I said keep praying, you know, God will lead you to
• 1:14:32
  himself. And he said to me, I hope, I
• 1:14:34
  hope to God that's not God. So whatever that is out there, I
• 1:14:38
  hope to God that's not God, which is kind of a
• 1:14:41
  contradiction. Most people just, if they don't
• 1:14:45
  like you, they close the door. You go on with your life.
• 1:14:48
  So yesterday, people that didn't like me, they just said no
• 1:14:50
  thanks, they closed the door. I people just don't take the
• 1:14:53
  time. How?
• 1:14:53
  Often does that happen where you say I'm a Catholic and they're
• 1:14:56
  like slam the door? 30% of the doors that opened
• 1:14:59
  yesterday, so 75 doors, 25 doors opened, had about 7 extended
• 1:15:04
  conversations, 5 to 7 extended conversations.
• 1:15:06
  So we're talking about 20 doors. Because most people say I'm
• 1:15:09
  busy. I'm so sorry I got to close the
• 1:15:11
  door. Yeah, I'm good.
• 1:15:13
  Thanks. No, thanks.
• 1:15:15
  Keep up what you're doing. Door closes here in California.
• 1:15:18
  I've never had really bad experiences.
• 1:15:20
  Southern California specifically if you're knocking doors in
• 1:15:23
  Kansas, most doors open. Most people are Christian.
• 1:15:26
  One of my best experiences was at this parish, Saint Charles,
• 1:15:29
  Borneo and Omaha. Just about everyone stepped
• 1:15:32
  outside to pray to your father with you.
• 1:15:34
  There's some places in America that if you went door to door,
• 1:15:37
  you could literally build the church just by inviting people
• 1:15:40
  to your Catholic Church. Or if you were a Protestant, you
• 1:15:43
  could build to the new church and invite people to it.
• 1:15:45
  What's been the toughest place to knock?
• 1:15:47
  Doors where you've had the least.
• 1:15:49
  Oh, really? Denver shot and I don't know
• 1:15:50
  it's. Pretty secular, huh?
• 1:15:51
  That's. True.
• 1:15:52
  And the Paris territory I'm knocking doors in right now and
• 1:15:56
  I'm knocked doors in in many of them in Denver is dangerous.
• 1:16:00
  It's a dangerous area. So I was knocking doors.
• 1:16:03
  Dangerous meaning it. Is like gunshots, people dying.
• 1:16:07
  Are you are you afraid you might get shot by knocking on the
• 1:16:09
  door? I don't feel like I'm a target.
• 1:16:11
  Sadly, nowadays your churches are more likely a target, your
• 1:16:14
  schools are more likely a target than a random guy with a scent
• 1:16:17
  T-shirt on on the sidewalk. I was knocking doors for this
• 1:16:20
  parish about a month ago and we came up on an intersection where
• 1:16:24
  there are some shops there and it just looked a little bit
• 1:16:26
  rough. So I told the Prokyo vicar,
• 1:16:29
  let's just turn around so we'd let's do the other side of the
• 1:16:31
  street. And we did.
• 1:16:32
  And the whole day I was kicking myself like what's going on with
• 1:16:34
  me? Why?
• 1:16:36
  Why don't I have the courage just to continue doing what I'm
• 1:16:38
  doing? That same day, five hours later,
• 1:16:40
  a guy was gunned down on on that intersection.
• 1:16:44
  So I think in Denver. God gave you a sense of
• 1:16:48
  foreboding to not go there, and you listen to it, which is good.
• 1:16:51
  I think in Denver, there's, there's a lot of wealth and
• 1:16:57
  there is something to be said about, as our Lord says, it's
• 1:17:00
  easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich
• 1:17:03
  man entered into heaven. There's something about that.
• 1:17:05
  I don't know what it is exactly. Can't put my finger on it.
• 1:17:08
  So it's, it's a wealthy area, very secular and people are
• 1:17:11
  afraid. They're afraid for their own
• 1:17:13
  lives. So people are not likely to open
• 1:17:16
  the door. And then if they do open the
• 1:17:18
  door, you're scary. So they're not really going to
• 1:17:20
  open up to you as much as if you're in a small village in
• 1:17:23
  Kansas or you're in Nebraska. What's the longest conversation
• 1:17:27
  that you've had when you've gone door knocking?
• 1:17:30
  Recently, a recent memory of speaking to a man in Denver.
• 1:17:33
  He was born in America and he wanted to be a Buddhist.
• 1:17:36
  And so we talked about who God is.
• 1:17:38
  He thought God was this nebulous spirit.
• 1:17:41
  And I said, well, you're intellectual, you can think.
• 1:17:45
  And so if this creator of all things, if there is a creator of
• 1:17:48
  all things, it mustn't be at least intellectual because
• 1:17:50
  you're, it's a fact. There can't be more in the
• 1:17:52
  effect than in the cause. So God, the spirit must be able
• 1:17:56
  to think and will. So we're talking about God.
• 1:17:58
  And it can't be multiple gods, because if there were two gods,
• 1:18:01
  one would have to be more perfect than they would have to
• 1:18:03
  be distinct, which means one would have a perfection which
• 1:18:06
  the other wouldn't, which means the other would not be God.
• 1:18:08
  So there can only be in principle one God.
• 1:18:10
  That God must be endowed with intellect and will.
• 1:18:12
  And we just kind of went round and round about the nature of
• 1:18:15
  God. Was that an hour?
• 1:18:18
  How long does that go? Yeah, yeah, maybe half an hour
• 1:18:20
  to an hour. The parochial vicar was
• 1:18:22
  watching, I would say yesterday, conversations were about with
• 1:18:27
  those people, open the doors about 20 minutes or so, which
• 1:18:30
  feels like a lot. I mean, I was exhausted after
• 1:18:32
  the day was over. That is a lot and you don't know
• 1:18:34
  who you're going to get or how long the next conversation will
• 1:18:36
  be. So this is not something that
• 1:18:38
  you can do like, oh, I have only an hour, I'm going to go door
• 1:18:40
  knocking. That's what I do normally, so
• 1:18:42
  Monday to Thursday, Monday to Thursday, I'll go out over the
• 1:18:44
  noon hour. You do recommend just going for
• 1:18:47
  an hour? Your parishes, I tell them do a
• 1:18:51
  scent Saturday. So you get together from 9:00 to
• 1:18:53
  11:00, an hour of that you're scent.
• 1:18:56
  So blue shirts go knock doors, red shirts are praying, Gray
• 1:18:59
  shirt is support team. And then you got a little bit of
• 1:19:01
  time on both sides to drink coffee and Donuts and then
• 1:19:04
  afterwards to debrief. So 2 hour total thing.
• 1:19:06
  But for me personally, I just take the noon hour.
• 1:19:08
  So I'll go noon to one, I'll go 11 to 12.
• 1:19:10
  There's a parish here at my parish.
• 1:19:11
  We'll go knock doors. I'm hoping that most of these
• 1:19:14
  scent parishes are doing The Saturdays once a month or every
• 1:19:18
  other week. It's definitely up to the
• 1:19:19
  capacity of your parish. There's a parish in Michigan,
• 1:19:22
  Charlotte, MI, they call it Charlotte, MI.
• 1:19:25
  There's two guys that are going out every single Saturday and
• 1:19:27
  they've knocked. It looks like every door in
• 1:19:30
  their parish territory. Why do you recommend wearing
• 1:19:32
  shirts colored different colored shirts that identify you with an
• 1:19:36
  organization when you're doing door knocking to share the
• 1:19:38
  gospel? I think it helps people trust
• 1:19:39
  you. So if I knocked your door and I
• 1:19:41
  was wearing the shirt and I said I was with a Catholic
• 1:19:44
  organization, I think you'd be more likely to trust me if I was
• 1:19:47
  just in a regular T-shirt. And I said, Oh, I'm with the
• 1:19:49
  Catholics and I'm doing, you might still trust me.
• 1:19:52
  But I, I do think having some kind of official things, I think
• 1:19:55
  the Jehovah Witnesses, the Mormons go with the badge.
• 1:19:57
  I think they have a badge on them.
• 1:19:58
  So that's, that's what I have in mind, helping people trust you.
• 1:20:01
  This is not just a a random. Yeah, when a Workman shows up
• 1:20:04
  and there's nothing to identify him as a Workman, you're like,
• 1:20:06
  there's this person at my door. Yeah, yeah, he's trying to rob
• 1:20:08
  me. Yeah, or something.
• 1:20:11
  So the combination of the method, the scent method, the
• 1:20:15
  T-shirt, the team practice. Do you do practice with team
• 1:20:21
  members before you go out into the wild or you just.
• 1:20:25
  Say go do it, role play. You do role play.
• 1:20:27
  So if a parish calls me to come in on a Saturday, I will train
• 1:20:30
  their team. It's a full day thing.
• 1:20:31
  And then over the noon hour we will go knock doors.
• 1:20:35
  So teaching them in the morning, teaching them in the afternoon,
• 1:20:38
  we'll do a little bit of role play.
• 1:20:40
  It's simple enough though that like the first word you're
• 1:20:43
  saying is I'm a sent one, I compare for you.
• 1:20:45
  That's very simple. So really the training is on the
• 1:20:47
  ground, practical training. So I'll give them the script,
• 1:20:50
  we'll run through it, we'll send them out.
• 1:20:52
  Apologetics, I think might be intimidating for some people
• 1:20:55
  because you're going out there and you're presenting the gospel
• 1:20:57
  and they might throw any kind of problem at you, argument at you,
• 1:21:02
  or they might just be rude and or, you know, frustrated with
• 1:21:05
  you and you have to be kind of handle that.
• 1:21:07
  So I think some people might find that a little bit
• 1:21:09
  intimidating. Again, looking at the different
• 1:21:11
  environments, so apologetics, if you're tabling and someone's
• 1:21:14
  going to walk by and stand and talk to you for a long amount of
• 1:21:17
  time, you probably need to know a lot more.
• 1:21:20
  If you're doing what other kind of ministry, street ministry,
• 1:21:24
  tabling, I think in those environments, you do need to
• 1:21:27
  know more apologetics. Door to door is not the case.
• 1:21:30
  You're just encountering people and you're just having a nice
• 1:21:33
  conversation like this. But to equip the parishioners,
• 1:21:36
  your the scent team, I teach the Gospel.
• 1:21:38
  So the Gospel framework. And then if that's challenged
• 1:21:41
  underneath that. So if someone says, yeah, I'm
• 1:21:43
  just not sure about Jesus Christ, OK, then you'll peel
• 1:21:46
  back into what's called the fundamental 5.
• 1:21:48
  So those are the five steps, taking someone from nothing to
• 1:21:50
  the demonstrable proof of the Catholic faith.
• 1:21:53
  A Does God exist? Is scripture reliable?
• 1:21:56
  Did Jesus be claimed to be God? Did he prove it?
• 1:21:58
  Did he found an infallible church?
• 1:21:59
  Is that the present day Catholic Church?
• 1:22:01
  So if you're going through the gospel of somebody and they say,
• 1:22:04
  oh, that's all well and good, but Scripture, I can't trust it.
• 1:22:06
  The copies aren't legitimate. OK, well then you'll peel back.
• 1:22:08
  You'll peel back into the one of those components of the
• 1:22:10
  fundamental 5. How often do you get into that
• 1:22:13
  depth of conversation with? Them almost never.
• 1:22:16
  So we're we're just showing up as a human being.
• 1:22:19
  We're letting them know that God has not forgotten them.
• 1:22:22
  We're praying with them, we're sending them a letter.
• 1:22:23
  We're inviting them into the church.
• 1:22:25
  The whole process of sent evangelization is we're trying
• 1:22:28
  to take people through the three conversions of Saint Peter.
• 1:22:32
  So when we're seeing Saint Peter's three calls in John, in
• 1:22:39
  Mark, no John, Matthew, Luke, a lot of times we look at that and
• 1:22:44
  we say, well, those are just three different additions or
• 1:22:48
  viewpoints of the one call. Saint Thomas Aquinas, St.
• 1:22:51
  Augustine, Saint John Chrysostom actually believe Peter was
• 1:22:53
  called 3 distinct times. So the first time was in John.
• 1:22:57
  So Andrew brings Peter, Jesus says you are Peter, you are
• 1:23:01
  Simon, son of John, you will be called Peter.
• 1:23:02
  That was it. Peter went back to his life.
• 1:23:05
  Second call in Luke. So Jesus gets on Peter's boat.
• 1:23:08
  Now we have shared community. Now Jesus is preaching, Peter
• 1:23:11
  gets to hear Jesus is preaching. And then Peter confesses, Lord,
• 1:23:16
  I depart from me, I'm a sinful man.
• 1:23:18
  And then the last calls Matthew, where Jesus says come follow me,
• 1:23:20
  and it leaves everything. So wait, what?
• 1:23:22
  What? Which one was the call where he
• 1:23:24
  says you are going to be fishers of men?
• 1:23:26
  Is that the first or the second? Matthew, I think it said in
• 1:23:28
  Matthew, probably Matthew and OK, yeah, that's a good
• 1:23:33
  question. One of those three, maybe two of
• 1:23:35
  those three, actually. Hold on now, I.
• 1:23:37
  Don't think it's in, Mark. Yeah, go ahead.
• 1:23:38
  I want. So wait, they're the three, the
• 1:23:40
  three calls of Peter. Yes, John is the first, Luke is
• 1:23:43
  the second, Matthew's the third. The first call was at Peter's
• 1:23:46
  conversion of this is from Spurgeon Center, Charles
• 1:23:50
  Spurgeon, the great Protestant John, like you said, the two
• 1:23:55
  disciples heard him speak and they followed Jesus.
• 1:23:58
  So the fishers of men was in Matthew.
• 1:24:00
  So that was the second call. I'm dwelling on it because I'm
• 1:24:03
  want to identify what was going on in each call that was
• 1:24:05
  different. The first is a call to
• 1:24:07
  conversation, the second is a call to community, The 3rd is a
• 1:24:10
  call to conversion. So the fishers of men, what was
• 1:24:12
  that? You will now be a Fisher of men.
• 1:24:15
  Come follow me and I will make you fishers of.
• 1:24:17
  Yes. What?
• 1:24:17
  When was that? What call was that?
• 1:24:19
  I think it's mentioned in two of them.
• 1:24:21
  Matthew is the last and that's the Commission, the
• 1:24:23
  commissioning. So first you must convert.
• 1:24:25
  John, John is just a a conversation with him.
• 1:24:28
  You're Simon, son of John. You will be called Peter goes
• 1:24:31
  back. To his he gave him an identity
• 1:24:33
  as a son of God. And then the second one was.
• 1:24:36
  Luke share community in the bow. He's hearing Jesus teach.
• 1:24:40
  What is the? Do you know the burst for that?
• 1:24:42
  You're looking at Luke 5. Luke 5 S 1st identity then
• 1:24:48
  become part of follow me as a disciple and then I'm going to
• 1:24:52
  send you out. Call it a conversation, call it
• 1:24:55
  a community, call it a conversion Commission.
• 1:24:58
  Yeah, you could do that. When you've trained other people
• 1:25:01
  to do door to door knocking, what has been the biggest
• 1:25:05
  concerns that other people have had or fears that other people
• 1:25:07
  have had? I think safety, safety is
• 1:25:09
  probably the big one. And then in people's hearts,
• 1:25:11
  they're afraid of apologetics when they say this, What will I
• 1:25:14
  say? Rarely comes up.
• 1:25:15
  And I give people the freedom just to say say, I don't know.
• 1:25:19
  I don't know. That's a great question.
• 1:25:20
  We'll see you Wednesday night. Be a great question to ask.
• 1:25:22
  Father Saint Agustin says that fear is nothing else but the
• 1:25:27
  possibility of losing that which we love.
• 1:25:29
  So the more things that one loves, the more afraid they're
• 1:25:34
  going to be. So I don't know what people love
• 1:25:37
  that they have the possibility of losing at the door.
• 1:25:40
  Is it losing face? But this, this person you don't
• 1:25:44
  know. I mean, why would that be
• 1:25:45
  concerning to you losing your life?
• 1:25:48
  That's like impossible, I would say.
• 1:25:50
  I mean, it's possible, but not practically.
• 1:25:52
  Speaking. Incredibly unlikely.
• 1:25:55
  So that would be the question. What do I love that I have the
• 1:25:59
  possibility of losing in door to door evangelization that's
• 1:26:02
  causing me to be afraid? Purity of heart.
• 1:26:04
  Purity of heart is what we need to be evangelists, to not be
• 1:26:07
  afraid. I think you're right.
• 1:26:09
  I think it's purity of heart. I think it's also magnanimity
• 1:26:12
  and generosity because people are just not making time for
• 1:26:16
  that and it feels a little bit weird anyways.
• 1:26:18
  So they're not willing to take the sort of cultural risk you
• 1:26:21
  could say or social risk and that the the risk of their time.
• 1:26:25
  There's also a principle. It's a philosophical principle.
• 1:26:29
  The good is self diffusive and it's a law binding from the
• 1:26:32
  inanimate all the way to God, who is the law.
• 1:26:35
  So inanimate things, the greater they are, the more they pull on
• 1:26:38
  gravity, so they diffuse themselves into their
• 1:26:40
  environment. Heat's the same way.
• 1:26:41
  If I light a match in this room, room's not going to change.
• 1:26:44
  If you light a bonfire in the room, the room will become like
• 1:26:47
  the bonfire. Same with living things.
• 1:26:49
  We judge maturity of the tree by its ability to create another
• 1:26:54
  tree, maturity of a rabbit, its ability to create other rabbits.
• 1:26:57
  Physical maturity for human beings is when they're able to
• 1:27:00
  create another life themselves. In the same way, spiritual
• 1:27:03
  maturity leads to a desire to create other Christians and the
• 1:27:08
  capacity at least in prayer, maybe someone doesn't feel like
• 1:27:11
  they're very eloquent, But again, faith is a gift.
• 1:27:15
  So when when someone reaches maturity in sanctifying grace in
• 1:27:20
  soul, since the good is self diffusive, it should
• 1:27:23
  automatically lead to a desire to create other Christians and
• 1:27:27
  in the capacity, at least in prayer, to do so.
• 1:27:29
  So I think we're missing sadly mature disciples.
• 1:27:33
  Maybe, Lord forbid, sanctifying grace among our Catholics, which
• 1:27:38
  then compels them. As Saint Paul says, the love of
• 1:27:41
  Christ compels us. We were talking earlier about
• 1:27:44
  the religious vocations and the we're discussing with a friend
• 1:27:49
  here about talking about another person who didn't want to pursue
• 1:27:53
  motherhood or being a wife who is happy being single, but still
• 1:27:59
  felt very connected to faith and God and was trying to practice
• 1:28:02
  faith. And we were discussing whether
• 1:28:05
  whether it's a man or a woman, the lack of desire for a child,
• 1:28:10
  if that was natural. I was on a podcast recently
• 1:28:14
  debating a DINK, dual income, no kids, a woman who not religious
• 1:28:18
  or spiritual, but she was somebody who wanted to have no
• 1:28:20
  children. And that is an issue today in
• 1:28:23
  our culture at large. Now, the reasons why someone
• 1:28:26
  might not want to have a child may vary.
• 1:28:28
  I do think that God, you know, allows some people to have a
• 1:28:31
  greater desire than others. But do you think back to your
• 1:28:34
  point about this law of? The good is self diffusive.
• 1:28:37
  The good is self diffusive if somebody doesn't have a thirst
• 1:28:40
  or a hunger or a desire for offspring.
• 1:28:44
  If not biological then spiritual.
• 1:28:47
  Do you think that there's something lacking with?
• 1:28:49
  That person, yeah, if the good is there's.
• 1:28:52
  A deficiency. Yeah, if the good is necessarily
• 1:28:55
  self diffusive, heat fire creates heat in the room, mature
• 1:29:01
  things create other like themselves.
• 1:29:02
  Then we ask if this is the tree we're missing.
• 1:29:05
  We're missing fruit on the tree. What is the tree?
• 1:29:08
  So there's a missing goodness. I, I can't speak to a woman or a
• 1:29:11
  man who doesn't want to have physical children.
• 1:29:14
  I mean, it does seem odd. That's the purpose of marriage,
• 1:29:18
  the primary purpose of marriage. There's other goods or ends of
• 1:29:22
  marriage as well, but in the supernatural life, it's
• 1:29:25
  definitely the case. If one is not a Christian, they
• 1:29:28
  don't have sanctifying grace in their soul.
• 1:29:29
  They will not desire to share Christ with others.
• 1:29:32
  They will not have the capacity to do so.
• 1:29:34
  So why does one not want to be an evangelist, not share Jesus
• 1:29:39
  Christ with others? It may be because they don't
• 1:29:42
  have charity, so they've broke one of the 10 commandments,
• 1:29:44
  mortal sin. They don't have hope through
• 1:29:46
  presumption or despair. They don't have faith through
• 1:29:49
  heresy, apostasy, or voluntary doubt.
• 1:29:52
  So, so you're right on the on the natural sphere, our natures
• 1:29:56
  call us, call us to marriage and they call us to create others
• 1:29:59
  like like ourselves. What if someone hears what
• 1:30:02
  you're saying? They say, well, I'm just busy.
• 1:30:05
  I've got my hands full. So it's not that I wouldn't want
• 1:30:08
  to want or I wouldn't want someone else to have faith or,
• 1:30:13
  you know, be evangelized. But I just don't have the
• 1:30:16
  capacity because I'm really, you know, at capacity with my
• 1:30:20
  current obligations. That would be a disorder of
• 1:30:23
  priorities absolutely busy with what it's you should be busy
• 1:30:27
  with love of God and neighbor. Both of those entail spreading
• 1:30:31
  the gospel. First Timothy 24 he desires all
• 1:30:33
  men to be saved come to the knowledge of the truth.
• 1:30:36
  If my will is united to God's via charity, I will what he
• 1:30:39
  wills. I want what God wants.
• 1:30:41
  What does God want from me? He wants perfect conformity to
• 1:30:43
  Christ and he wants other Christ like that.
• 1:30:45
  So my life becomes very simple. Christ's life was very simple.
• 1:30:49
  Poverty, obedience to the Father and purple perfect.
• 1:30:54
  Excuse me, self sacrifice for the other.
• 1:30:59
  Busy. Busy with what?
• 1:31:00
  Busy. Well, let's say this person has
• 1:31:02
  children, grandchildren, ton of work responsibilities, family
• 1:31:06
  obligations. I mean, what I'm getting at here
• 1:31:10
  is, and I'm going to guess this is true for a lot of people
• 1:31:12
  listening, including myself, that for most, and I'm newer to
• 1:31:15
  my neighborhood, but I think about, you know, people that
• 1:31:18
  I've known. I think about where I grow
• 1:31:20
  growing up and lived there for 15 years.
• 1:31:23
  Do Christians have a responsibility, regardless of
• 1:31:25
  how busy they are, to invite their neighbors to church to
• 1:31:32
  share the gospel with their neighbors?
• 1:31:35
  Do you have any sort of? Words for them.
• 1:31:38
  Standards that you think we should be holding ourselves to
• 1:31:41
  regardless of our unique situations.
• 1:31:44
  I think it's I think it's OK to say that maybe not everyone is
• 1:31:49
  called to door to door evangelization as such.
• 1:31:52
  Now your neighbors you're friends with, you have a
• 1:31:56
  relationship with them, you should, you should will their
• 1:31:58
  good. I think it would definitely be
• 1:31:59
  OK to send a letter to them inviting them to Christmas Mass
• 1:32:02
  when you see them knocking their doors.
• 1:32:07
  If you feel called to do it, that's that's definitely OK.
• 1:32:10
  I think your parish absolutely needs to visit these people and
• 1:32:14
  it needs to have a team that's going to visit these people and
• 1:32:16
  it needs to have direct mail that goes out to these people.
• 1:32:20
  Your personal part in your own personal street is going to be
• 1:32:23
  up to your own discernment. I honestly think sometimes I
• 1:32:27
  knock the doors on my street. Sometimes it's a lot easier to
• 1:32:30
  knock streets that we don't know the people.
• 1:32:34
  There's nothing to lose. There's totally nothing to lose.
• 1:32:36
  And I think one of the reasons we don't evangelize our friends
• 1:32:40
  and our family members is because we were afraid of the
• 1:32:42
  fallout. So maybe Lila Rose going to the
• 1:32:45
  street next the next street and knocking doors.
• 1:32:48
  If you feel called to do that using the set method.
• 1:32:51
  When it comes to evangelization in general, we absolutely have
• 1:32:56
  to do it. St.
• 1:32:57
  Pope Paul the 6th and Evangeli Nunciandi following Vatican 2
• 1:33:02
  and there's some confusion in Vatican 2 on is everyone saved?
• 1:33:05
  Do you need to know the Gospel? Lumingencium threw some people
• 1:33:08
  off. So to kind of remedy that, he
• 1:33:11
  says, and Evangeli Nunciandi he says, OK, it's true that a man
• 1:33:16
  may be saved, although we don't preach to him.
• 1:33:18
  But will we be saved if through fear, negligence or shame we
• 1:33:23
  fail to preach the Gospel? That would be to betray the call
• 1:33:26
  of God. I don't know if you noticed in
• 1:33:29
  Matthew 25, one of the most explicit chapters in the Gospels
• 1:33:34
  on judgement. So you have two parables, the
• 1:33:37
  parable of the virgins, the parable of the talents, and then
• 1:33:39
  you have Jesus just saying I will come and I'll separate the
• 1:33:41
  right from the left. Not a single person, that whole
• 1:33:43
  chapter, not a single person goes to hell for something they
• 1:33:47
  did. That whole chapter is filled
• 1:33:49
  with people who didn't do something.
• 1:33:50
  They were supposed to do something.
• 1:33:51
  So the man buried the talent. The Matthew 25, you were
• 1:33:55
  supposed to give food to the hungry, you drink to the
• 1:33:58
  thirsty. You didn't do so.
• 1:33:59
  So it's the sins of omission, which at the end of the day may
• 1:34:02
  cause the most souls to be damned according to Matthew 25.
• 1:34:06
  So it's it's those sins which should most concern us.
• 1:34:08
  And evangelization. There's no greater work of mercy
• 1:34:12
  that you could do for someone than to give them eternal life
• 1:34:15
  through preaching the Gospel to them.
• 1:34:17
  But for the Catholic, for the Christian, we can have assurance
• 1:34:22
  of our salvation if we confess our sins and if we receive, you
• 1:34:28
  know, Jesus in the Eucharist, you have a confidence.
• 1:34:33
  Not saying that you'll not have to have a purgation because of
• 1:34:36
  those sins, and maybe many of them are sins of omission, but
• 1:34:39
  there's a confidence that you will be saved.
• 1:34:42
  It's a great question. So the question is, can I be
• 1:34:45
  certain to my salvation based on on anything?
• 1:34:49
  We can have certain a moral certainty in the efficacy of the
• 1:34:53
  sacraments. If someone is validly baptized,
• 1:34:55
  they are justified at that moment.
• 1:34:57
  You go to confession, you confess your sins to the power
• 1:34:59
  of the keys given to the Church through Peter the Holy Spirit
• 1:35:03
  given to the apostles. You're forgiven of your sins.
• 1:35:06
  At the same time we have Saint Paul who says in Philippians
• 1:35:13
  311, if possible, I may attain resurrection from the dead.
• 1:35:17
  He says in First Corinthians 4/4, although I'm not aware of
• 1:35:20
  anything against myself, I'm not therefore the quit acquitted.
• 1:35:23
  It is the Lord who judges me. So even Saint Paul looking at
• 1:35:26
  his own condition has to say, I'm not positive how I'm doing
• 1:35:31
  right now, how I'm going to do at the end of the day, but I
• 1:35:34
  have confidence in Jesus Christ. And so our hope is in Jesus
• 1:35:38
  Christ through the sacraments and through prayer.
• 1:35:42
  So there is such a thing as the elect, There is such a thing as
• 1:35:44
  the predestined. That's all over the New
• 1:35:46
  Testament. And Luke 18, Jesus gives us a
• 1:35:49
  clue into who the elect are. So 18, verse seven and eight, he
• 1:35:55
  says, and will he be long delayed?
• 1:35:59
  He will vindicate them speedily, the his elect who cry out to him
• 1:36:03
  night and day. So it's prayer that's our
• 1:36:05
  confidence. St.
• 1:36:06
  Alphonsus Liguori says those who pray are certainly saved.
• 1:36:10
  Those who do not pray are certainly damned.
• 1:36:12
  So when Father Gregory was here, he can't actually mention this.
• 1:36:15
  Saint Thomas Aquinas says that if someone prays perseveringly,
• 1:36:18
  humbly, for their own salvation, they will be saved.
• 1:36:24
  So it's that constant prayer because God is moving you to say
• 1:36:26
  that prayer, which can give you confidence that God intends to
• 1:36:28
  save you. And I think that's where they, I
• 1:36:31
  mean, a lot of wonderful Protestants say if you say the
• 1:36:34
  sinner's prayer, you will be saved.
• 1:36:35
  And there's some truth to that in the sense of obviously Jesus
• 1:36:39
  is the one who saved. That is 100% true.
• 1:36:42
  There's no contest there. And we can put our trust in
• 1:36:45
  Jesus and have confidence in him and his mercy.
• 1:36:50
  Now we don't want to presume on that to the point of sin, right?
• 1:36:55
  And and just saying, well, I'm going to do what I want to do
• 1:36:57
  because I'm saved, because then you could be damned.
• 1:37:01
  So it is a it is an interesting. I mean it like you said, the
• 1:37:05
  last the L in Gospel. Lifelong endurance.
• 1:37:09
  It's really important. I had that conversation with a
• 1:37:11
  lady yesterday. Jesus is very clear that we can
• 1:37:15
  throw away our salvation. So John 15 five says I'm the
• 1:37:19
  vine, you are the branches, abide in me.
• 1:37:20
  If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch.
• 1:37:24
  The branches are gathered and burned.
• 1:37:26
  Saint Paul says in Romans 11/22 note the kindness and severity
• 1:37:30
  of God, Severity towards those who are perishing, but kindness
• 1:37:33
  towards you, provided you abide in his kindness.
• 1:37:36
  Otherwise you will be cut off. Calculations 521 envy,
• 1:37:40
  drunkenness, carousing, and the like.
• 1:37:42
  Those who do such things shall not enter the Kingdom of God.
• 1:37:45
  First Corinthians 69 gives a similar list.
• 1:37:47
  So scripture is very clear, but we can throw away our salvation.
• 1:37:51
  Even I would say First Timothy 119.
• 1:37:54
  Saint Paul says such persons by rejecting conscience have made
• 1:37:59
  shipwreck of their faith. But that's why we have the
• 1:38:02
  sacraments. John 2023 forgiveness of the
• 1:38:05
  sins through the apostles. We believe is Catholics, that an
• 1:38:07
  act of perfect contrition, love of God above all things can be
• 1:38:11
  unto the forgiveness of sins. The woman in Luke 747, Jesus
• 1:38:17
  says there her sins, which are many are forgiven, for she loved
• 1:38:21
  much. So our confidence really is in
• 1:38:24
  God, who has asked us to pray, to pray perseveringly and
• 1:38:28
  humbly, and he will lead us to Himself in ways known only to
• 1:38:31
  him. What do you think are the
• 1:38:33
  biggest stumbling blocks today to people realizing their need
• 1:38:37
  for Jesus Christ and his salvation?
• 1:38:40
  Jesus is our savior. We call him Savior.
• 1:38:43
  One who doesn't think they need to be saved is not interested in
• 1:38:46
  a savior. So I do think it is, as Saint
• 1:38:52
  John of the Cross says, as you draw closer to the light, you're
• 1:38:57
  going to see imperfections. So if we turned off the lights
• 1:39:00
  in this room, we wouldn't see, I don't know, dust on the ground.
• 1:39:04
  The rug kind of wrinkled there in that corner.
• 1:39:06
  If we, no offense, if we opened up a window and a beam of light
• 1:39:11
  came in the room, we would see dust in the air.
• 1:39:13
  So the bride of the room gets the worse it's going to look.
• 1:39:16
  Ironically, the one common theme of all of our Saints was that
• 1:39:21
  they saw themselves to be great sinners.
• 1:39:23
  So the more one tries to be a good person, Matthew 6, when you
• 1:39:27
  pray, when you fast, when you give alms, someone who's
• 1:39:30
  actually trying to do those things in greater and greater
• 1:39:33
  degrees for the love of God and neighbor are going to see how
• 1:39:36
  much they fall short. They're going to see how much
• 1:39:38
  they're in need of a Savior. So the worse a person becomes,
• 1:39:41
  the more likely they are to take themselves to be a good person.
• 1:39:44
  The better a person becomes, the more they're going to see
• 1:39:46
  themselves in need of a Savior. What are the sins that you think
• 1:39:50
  people that you've encountered now doing 10s of thousands of
• 1:39:53
  doors are the most people have the most difficulty
• 1:39:57
  acknowledging because they don't see them as sins?
• 1:40:00
  I would say, and this is not from door to door necessarily,
• 1:40:03
  because people aren't confessing their sins to me, I would say
• 1:40:06
  Aquinas in his treatment of the seven deadly sins, he gives what
• 1:40:11
  are called the daughter sins under each one of those seven
• 1:40:12
  deadly sins. So those are kind of like your
• 1:40:14
  symptoms that come from the deadly sins.
• 1:40:16
  So lust begets these other sins, avarice begets these other sins.
• 1:40:22
  If you look at those daughter sins, the ones under lust are
• 1:40:24
  the worst. So hatred of God, abhorrence of
• 1:40:28
  the future world, that list under there is the most
• 1:40:33
  terrifying of of all of the seven deadly sins of my opinion.
• 1:40:36
  Abhorrence of heaven. Yeah, abhorrence of the next
• 1:40:38
  life. Like not even wanting to have.
• 1:40:40
  Another life, despair of the next.
• 1:40:42
  Life. Yeah, so I think sadly, what
• 1:40:47
  might be unique for our day and age might be the sexual
• 1:40:50
  perversions. At least it's incredibly
• 1:40:52
  visible. And nothing takes a person away
• 1:40:55
  from God more vehemently, according to Saint Thomas, than
• 1:41:00
  those particular sins. They engrossed the mind in the
• 1:41:05
  world. And as James says in 44-O,
• 1:41:10
  adulterous people do not know the love of the world is enmity
• 1:41:13
  with God. So there is something about the
• 1:41:16
  more I become inclined to what's low and earthly, the less
• 1:41:20
  interested I am in those things which are particularly human,
• 1:41:24
  which is to be able to contemplate and know God.
• 1:41:26
  So those three tasks of Matthew 6, fasting, prayer and
• 1:41:31
  almsgiving, that is our rule of life.
• 1:41:33
  That's your rule of life. That's my rule of life.
• 1:41:35
  Every single day we need to be looking at our prayer, which is
• 1:41:38
  against the lust, the pride of life, fasting which is against
• 1:41:42
  the lust of the flesh, and then almsgiving, which is the lust of
• 1:41:47
  the eyes. And so removing our heart from
• 1:41:49
  the world, so that I can cleave to our Lord.
• 1:41:51
  I mean, I've heard Saint Thomas Aquinas I believe.
• 1:41:54
  I don't know how to where to reference him saying this, but
• 1:41:57
  pride is the greatest of all the sins.
• 1:42:01
  Pride is a disordered, A disordered desire for any
• 1:42:03
  excellence. That's what pride is.
• 1:42:05
  So what was Satan trying to do? He was trying to possess God,
• 1:42:08
  but on his own terms. We're we are all supposed to be
• 1:42:10
  like God. That's what he was accused of,
• 1:42:12
  trying to be like God. Second Peter 1/4 as you're
• 1:42:15
  called, to be a divine, a partaker of the divine nature
• 1:42:17
  that is our end. We're supposed to be like God.
• 1:42:19
  But he wanted to be like God in his own way.
• 1:42:22
  He wanted to be happy in his own way.
• 1:42:24
  Whenever anyone sins ever, that's what they're trying to
• 1:42:28
  do. They're trying to be happy, but
• 1:42:30
  in their own way, not in the way provided for them.
• 1:42:33
  So pride is a disorder, desire for some excellence that would
• 1:42:38
  fit any of the seven deadly sins.
• 1:42:40
  So what is lust? A disorder, desire for X, some
• 1:42:44
  temporal good. Same with avarice, same with
• 1:42:47
  sloth. So all of those seven deadly
• 1:42:48
  sins are kind of like white light hitting a prism.
• 1:42:51
  So in that way, pride is the greatest of the sins.
• 1:42:54
  It is the cause and. The root of all of.
• 1:42:56
  Them. There you go.
• 1:42:56
  Yeah. Have you heard of the idea
• 1:42:57
  though, of the three root sins? What?
• 1:43:00
  What are the three? It's sensuality, it's vanity,
• 1:43:04
  and it's pride. Have you heard of that?
• 1:43:07
  I have not heard that that. That that set up as as everybody
• 1:43:11
  sort of has a roots in and it's one of these three, but you tend
• 1:43:14
  to one more than the other. I would definitely see a a
• 1:43:16
  tendency towards particular things.
• 1:43:18
  I tell. I tell men that since they're
• 1:43:23
  more earthly in the sense that God has made them in such a way
• 1:43:27
  that they're supposed to be providers and protectors.
• 1:43:29
  Like those are very physical, tangible things.
• 1:43:32
  Because of that, we struggle with those bottom 2 vices.
• 1:43:35
  That's lusting gluttony. So if I'm talking to a young
• 1:43:38
  man, we're talking about fasting, we're talking about
• 1:43:41
  cold showers. You don't even get to day one if
• 1:43:43
  you're not doing those things. How many people struggle with
• 1:43:45
  pornography, the sexual sins, who are praying the rosary
• 1:43:49
  hoping for a miracle, who will not take up fasting?
• 1:43:54
  Saint Jerome says, and it's in his 22nd letter, he says it's
• 1:43:58
  not that the Lord and Creator of all things enjoys A growling
• 1:44:01
  stomach, stomach, but this is an indispensable means to chastity.
• 1:44:06
  So you have to check the flesh to be able to train the flesh.
• 1:44:10
  So you have to watch what you're eating, take the cold showers.
• 1:44:13
  So grow in temperance so that you can fight less.
• 1:44:15
  So men, I would say, have a proclivity to the two bottom
• 1:44:20
  vices, lest and gluttony. Women, it's they're more
• 1:44:22
  spiritual. They want more spiritual things.
• 1:44:24
  They want beauty. That's a transcendental.
• 1:44:25
  The dog doesn't know what beauty is.
• 1:44:27
  They want a lovely family. So their vices are more
• 1:44:30
  spiritual. So the two right above that, do
• 1:44:32
  you want to guess at what those would be?
• 1:44:34
  I mean, I would definitely say envy would be one of them.
• 1:44:37
  Jealousy. Throw that all.
• 1:44:40
  In but I think sensuality is 1. I mean the the the desire to
• 1:44:44
  possess. You got it.
• 1:44:45
  No, you got those are the 2. So you've got avarice.
• 1:44:48
  Well, OK. Is that avarice the desire to
• 1:44:51
  possess covetousness? Covetousness.
• 1:44:53
  Yeah. Both of those works.
• 1:44:54
  Yeah. So avarice or covetousness and
• 1:44:56
  then envy, Those are the two. Yeah.
• 1:44:59
  So men Las colatas, Graham. Is the perfect tool for like
• 1:45:03
  both on steroids when used irresponsibly, just like the
• 1:45:06
  Internet can be the perfect tool for lust on steroids.
• 1:45:10
  So what's the solution for ladies?
• 1:45:12
  It's almsgiving. It's simplicity.
• 1:45:16
  Service. OK.
• 1:45:18
  Yeah, that's good. I mean, my message to I again,
• 1:45:22
  I'm, I'm still developing this as I go, you know?
• 1:45:24
  Spirituality. Yeah, but I feel like the
• 1:45:27
  service of others. And you mean corporally?
• 1:45:30
  You mean like feeding the hungry I?
• 1:45:31
  Mean in any which any way you can, you can do it through the
• 1:45:35
  lens of the love languages. You can do it through the lens
• 1:45:37
  of what nonprofits do I want to get involved with?
• 1:45:40
  You can do it through the and it should be all of the above,
• 1:45:42
  actually, your family of origins, serving your parents,
• 1:45:45
  your siblings, your friends, but having a posture of how can I
• 1:45:49
  serve you? Not for the sake of ingratiating
• 1:45:53
  myself or appearing better, but really, how do I serve you?
• 1:45:55
  And like putting in the time so that it's less of a self
• 1:45:58
  absorption. Because I think that would be,
• 1:46:00
  if I had to put a one word on what ails modern women.
• 1:46:04
  Again, very generally speaking, because I think there's a lot of
• 1:46:06
  crossover with women and men today.
• 1:46:07
  A lot of men's vices are becoming women's vices and
• 1:46:10
  women's vices are becoming men's vices.
• 1:46:11
  Women are looking at porn. So it's like it's a, it's a,
• 1:46:14
  it's a free, free, free fall. But I would say self absorption.
• 1:46:18
  That's actually really good. So I would, I would say the same
• 1:46:20
  thing. I would say biblically.
• 1:46:23
  So avarish lust of the eyes, covetousness is solved by
• 1:46:27
  almsgiving. That's exactly what you're
• 1:46:29
  saying. So if a woman deals with
• 1:46:32
  greediness, she wants particular possessions.
• 1:46:34
  What's the solution to that? To give away of herself, give
• 1:46:37
  away her time, but also give away her things to be envious.
• 1:46:41
  So almsgiving also helps that other one.
• 1:46:43
  To be envious, you have to first love the things that she has.
• 1:46:48
  You have to first have a disordered love for temporal
• 1:46:50
  things. So for a woman to hate another
• 1:46:52
  woman because her hair is nice or her car is nice or her house
• 1:46:55
  is nice, she has to first of all disorderly love nice hair and a
• 1:47:01
  nice car and a nice house. So detach your heart from these
• 1:47:05
  temporal, material things, and you'll be less likely to dislike
• 1:47:08
  the other person who has them. There's a woman, I remember
• 1:47:11
  talking to it over a decade ago, very wise, lovely older woman
• 1:47:15
  who was very intentional about the development of the female
• 1:47:18
  person, about how to develop a woman's heart and soul and
• 1:47:21
  character. And one of the things that she
• 1:47:24
  user it on was envy and how crippling it can be and how
• 1:47:28
  damaging it can be and stunting. And she would say instead of
• 1:47:32
  envying another woman in terms of, you know, desire being
• 1:47:35
  desirous of what she had to the point of not wanting her to
• 1:47:39
  continue to have the things she has, which is like wanting her
• 1:47:41
  I'll. Which is it's.
• 1:47:43
  Malice, right? She said.
• 1:47:45
  It's OK to admire and you can make your admiration instructive
• 1:47:50
  by celebrating the other person's good and thanking God
• 1:47:54
  actually for their good and surrendering whatever God would
• 1:47:58
  have for you back to God. And so getting in the habit of
• 1:48:02
  not like, don't look, don't look at the beautiful hair like as
• 1:48:04
  your example, or don't look at this woman who has this
• 1:48:07
  beautiful marriage that maybe the, you know, the woman is
• 1:48:09
  envying or she has the children the woman wants or she has the
• 1:48:12
  job or whatever it is be saying these are objectively good
• 1:48:15
  things, you know, making the active will of I thank God for
• 1:48:19
  these good things for that woman.
• 1:48:20
  And I surrender myself and my life to God, whatever He would
• 1:48:23
  have me to have. I think that I think that works.
• 1:48:25
  I would take, I would look forward to the next step though.
• 1:48:28
  So the step you're giving is I still see hair is nice, I still
• 1:48:32
  see the car is nice. I still see the house is nice,
• 1:48:35
  but I praise God that she has those nice things.
• 1:48:37
  I think that works. One step farther would be just
• 1:48:40
  saying, wow, these are temporal goods.
• 1:48:44
  I love God, I love charity, I love spiritual goods like these.
• 1:48:48
  These are OK. I would just value.
• 1:48:50
  I see what you're saying. Value them in light of eternal
• 1:48:53
  goods. That that I would say is the
• 1:48:55
  cure. Well, I think for women it's
• 1:48:57
  often much more than I like her hair.
• 1:49:00
  It's I want her marriage, I want her, I want to have children I
• 1:49:04
  can't have. I want the relationship that I
• 1:49:06
  can't have. So I think women, yes, are
• 1:49:08
  certainly envious of material things and physical beauty and
• 1:49:12
  things like that, but I think the ones that kind of hit the
• 1:49:14
  hardest are the things that are more of the spiritual goods,
• 1:49:17
  like this relationship. So it's how much do I how much?
• 1:49:21
  Or even I I admire her piety, like if she seems to really have
• 1:49:24
  a relationship with God or a confidence about our life's
• 1:49:27
  purpose. And I I'm, I'm envious of that.
• 1:49:31
  Yeah, Where's my heart? Where your heart is there.
• 1:49:33
  Where your treasure is there. So your heart be also.
• 1:49:35
  It's as a man, I don't it's difficult for me to put myself
• 1:49:38
  in those shoes. I I get the last gluttony
• 1:49:40
  totally get that 100%, but it is kind of neat that we have
• 1:49:45
  Matthew 6 speaks to our predominant vices.
• 1:49:48
  So the female vices of covetousness and envy.
• 1:49:52
  You have almsgiving. So a woman's spirituality needs
• 1:49:55
  to lean heavily into simplicity and generosity service.
• 1:49:59
  As you said, A man's spirituality has to lean heavily
• 1:50:04
  into physical penance of many different kinds, or he will be a
• 1:50:09
  slave his whole life. Just like I would imagine a
• 1:50:12
  woman will be a slave to envy or covetousness if she doesn't very
• 1:50:17
  seriously give her heart to almsgiving of different ways.
• 1:50:20
  Spiritual almsgiving Teaching. That's why I highly recommend
• 1:50:23
  pro-life work to women. It's like, go volunteer at the
• 1:50:25
  pregnancy center, pray outside the abortion clinic, help the
• 1:50:28
  mom with the young baby. Get out of yourself.
• 1:50:32
  Get out there in the world. Forget yourself.
• 1:50:33
  And, and it's so rewarding. I mean, let's be real, like when
• 1:50:36
  you have the opportunity to go, you know, volunteer at a
• 1:50:39
  homeless shelter. I mean, the the spiritual reward
• 1:50:41
  that you receive as the alms giver is such a blessing.
• 1:50:46
  If you're willing to open your heart, have that, you know, have
• 1:50:48
  that a heart that's not enclosed in like stone and open your
• 1:50:50
  heart. And it's like that, the wealth
• 1:50:52
  of grace that you receive by being able to give in that way,
• 1:50:56
  it's so beautiful. More than not, door to door
• 1:50:59
  evangelists will tell me that they think scent evangelization
• 1:51:05
  is more for their good than it is for the people they knock the
• 1:51:08
  doors of. And I think that's totally true.
• 1:51:10
  I have no control over what happens to this person that I
• 1:51:14
  knock the door. In a way, I'm not responsible
• 1:51:16
  for their soul. I am responsible for my own
• 1:51:18
  soul, and I know how much good it is done for me.
• 1:51:22
  You're right. He who gives receives Aquinas
• 1:51:25
  would say every creature loves. Its like that's your act 1315.
• 1:51:30
  So if you are virtuous, if you're in a state of grace, if
• 1:51:33
  Jesus Christ is alive in you, you will like those things which
• 1:51:37
  are like him. So when you do things like Jesus
• 1:51:39
  Christ, you will enjoy them because they're similar to you.
• 1:51:43
  Bringing home that Matthew 6. So if I'm working on fasting,
• 1:51:46
  the female is working on homes giving.
• 1:51:49
  All of us have to be working on prayer.
• 1:51:51
  The man who does not pray has those top vices.
• 1:51:54
  He has Vainglory, He has sloth, he has wrath.
• 1:51:58
  Prayer is the antidote for those.
• 1:51:59
  And I tell people when I'm having these conversations with
• 1:52:02
  friends that which one of those three, you don't do know for
• 1:52:05
  sure. You have the vice which it was
• 1:52:07
  supposed to treat. If you don't pray, guarantee
• 1:52:10
  that you're boastful. You love novelties because
• 1:52:13
  you're trying to show your excellence.
• 1:52:15
  So Vainglory, you're lazy and spiritual things.
• 1:52:18
  You're not praying, right. You don't want to go to Mass.
• 1:52:21
  You don't want to read scripture and you're quick tempered.
• 1:52:24
  You're likely because you haven't humbled yourself in
• 1:52:26
  prayer. You're likely to look down on
• 1:52:28
  others. You're likely to feel like
• 1:52:30
  people treat you unjustly, which causes wrath.
• 1:52:34
  So every one of us need to be praying.
• 1:52:36
  We need to be fasting. We need to do an almsgiving.
• 1:52:39
  That's so beautiful and a perfect message for for Advent.
• 1:52:42
  Were you going to say something else?
• 1:52:44
  I was just going to say and to help understand the religious
• 1:52:47
  life, the religious takes those three and he takes it to the
• 1:52:50
  maximal degree. So to almsgiving, he takes the
• 1:52:54
  vow of poverty, to fasting, he takes the vow of chase celibacy
• 1:52:59
  and then to prayer, he takes perfect obedience.
• 1:53:01
  So he becomes a slave. So that in that in in one way,
• 1:53:06
  that's why it's called the perfect life.
• 1:53:08
  As Jesus says, if you would be perfect, go do these two things.
• 1:53:12
  And then we have chase continents, chase celibacy, or
• 1:53:15
  continents in the rest of Matthew 19.
• 1:53:18
  Go do these three things because it's the surest antidote to the
• 1:53:20
  three of us of the world. That would be the first way that
• 1:53:23
  we see it as the perfect life. The second would be it's just
• 1:53:25
  the life of Christ. Those 3 vows allow you to live
• 1:53:27
  as Jesus Christ did. This is all so beautiful.
• 1:53:30
  I hope everyone listening is inspired and can join Scent.
• 1:53:35
  How do you people find Scent? How can they join?
• 1:53:38
  I want to see these shirts at every door in America.
• 1:53:42
  In the world they go to form.org, they have 7 videos
• 1:53:46
  from me and they can watch the method how they started at their
• 1:53:49
  parish. They can start on their own.
• 1:53:50
  They can order T-shirts from. You have to log in by the way
• 1:53:53
  to. Form.org, yeah.
• 1:53:54
  So they would have to have a form.org subscription and.
• 1:53:57
  You have to get that from your parish.
• 1:53:58
  Yes, a lot of parishes have it, thank God.
• 1:54:00
  And an individual subscription is not much, maybe $10 a month,
• 1:54:03
  something like that. Yeah, I get the they can get the
• 1:54:05
  book. There's an audio tape on
• 1:54:06
  form.org. They get permission from the
• 1:54:08
  pastor and they start knocking doors with their pastor's
• 1:54:11
  permission as soon as they would like.
• 1:54:13
  Another way they can do it is they can send me an e-mail.
• 1:54:15
  So my e-mail is there on that form.org page sent.
• 1:54:20
  So they Austin at thinkcatholic.org and that's.
• 1:54:23
  THINK yeah. Thinkthinkcatholic.org,
• 1:54:26
  austin@sendevangelization.org or they can contact me through the
• 1:54:30
  Augusta Institute. I'll fly in on a Saturday.
• 1:54:32
  I will train their team. They will have a team ongoing
• 1:54:34
  so. Amazing.
• 1:54:35
  So you would come out to if someone listening wants to have
• 1:54:38
  you out to their parish to train a scent team, you will come out.
• 1:54:41
  Absolutely, I would love to. How amazing.
• 1:54:43
  I'll bring Lila Rose to knock doors as.
• 1:54:45
  Well, I'm I'm inspired. If your own parish, you can
• 1:54:48
  launch your own scent Team I. Know we should.
• 1:54:49
  I'm feeling very convicted and it's and it's Austin.
• 1:54:52
  I know Harris. Harris, you're going to go right
• 1:54:55
  now after this interview and it's Austin at
• 1:54:58
  thinkcatholic.org. Yes.
• 1:55:00
  Ma'am. Thank you, Austin.
• 1:55:01
  And you also have a podcast. Too many year podcast.
• 1:55:04
  So there's Bible, one of you, there's Catechism in the year.
• 1:55:07
  Summa is our third ranking document, arguably in the
• 1:55:10
  Catholic Church. And so we're about done.
• 1:55:12
  And if someone wants to start it in January, the beginning of the
• 1:55:16
  year, then they can follow us, read the entire Summa along with
• 1:55:19
  me in one year. And I'm summarizing it so they
• 1:55:22
  don't have to worry about the text.
• 1:55:23
  I just summarized what Aquinas is saying over.
• 1:55:27
  It looks like it's going to end at maybe 310 days, so almost
• 1:55:31
  done. So this is Thomas Aquinas's
• 1:55:32
  Summat Theologica and it's the basically there.
• 1:55:35
  It's it's, it's more than I would say it's the Catechism is
• 1:55:38
  heavily borrowed from Saint Thomas, of course, in Holy
• 1:55:41
  Scripture, but you've got the philosophical foundations of the
• 1:55:46
  faith and then you've got the theological.
• 1:55:48
  He goes through everything from does God exist?
• 1:55:51
  Does the soul exist? What are the human emotions?
• 1:55:54
  What is virtue, Christ, resurrection, ascension, all of
• 1:55:58
  those major theological topics. And what I'm trying to do is
• 1:56:00
  summarize them in such a way that everyone, whether you know
• 1:56:03
  anything about philosophy or theology, can follow along.
• 1:56:06
  And I think most people are really interested.
• 1:56:08
  They've heard about the sumo of Saint Thomas, but they didn't go
• 1:56:11
  to school in philosophy. It's actually a difficult text
• 1:56:13
  to read. It's not written like a book.
• 1:56:15
  You have objections, the said Contra his response and then his
• 1:56:19
  answers to the objection. So it's, it's not an easy read,
• 1:56:21
  but I'm open with the Suman Year podcast.
• 1:56:24
  People can dive in to Saint Thomas, learn something, and
• 1:56:27
  then if they want to go back to the text, they can do that.
• 1:56:29
  Amazing. Thank you, Austin.
• 1:56:31
  How can we pray for you? People listening, how can they
• 1:56:33
  pray for you? Pray for my discernment.
• 1:56:35
  I would love to be, by God's grace, a Dominican of the of a
• 1:56:40
  province. I'm looking at the Western
• 1:56:41
  Province right now and for the perfection of charity in me and
• 1:56:46
  for all the people I promised to pray for that I've knocked doors
• 1:56:48
  over the last decade. Wow, Beautiful.
• 1:56:52
  Thank you so much, Austin. Thank.
• 1:56:53
  You thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:56:55
  this episode with Austin Havish. I hope it was as inspiring for
• 1:56:58
  you as it was for me and made me want to get up and start
• 1:57:00
  knocking doors. Make sure to go check out his
• 1:57:03
  work. You can contact him at
• 1:57:04
  austin@thinkcatholic.org. Also make sure that you have hit
• 1:57:07
  that subscribe button and leave this video a like.
• 1:57:10
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• 1:57:11
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• 1:57:20
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• 1:57:23
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