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Being Catholic #379: Navigating the Challenges of Being Catholic · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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on Catholic Spirit Radio, 89.5 FM and 92.5 FM in good old McLean County and Bloomington Normal,
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88.3 in Clinton and Champaign covering much of central and northern Illinois
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and growing thanks to you we're going to have a great show for you today.
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I'm here with my wife, Lynn. I hope everyone out there had a great 4th of July.
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The weather held pretty good. It was warm, but I don't think over the 4th weekend,
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we got some of the heavy storms that maybe that we expected at that time when
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we got through the 4th pretty good.
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So we had a good time. I hope everybody else did as well and had time with their
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family and so forth like we did.
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And it was nice being off. It's also nice to be back.
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And remember, again, always, as I said, we are brought to you by you,
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And I'm here with my wife, Lynn, as I said today.
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So before we get started, I'll turn this over to my wife, Lynn,
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and see if she has anything to say.
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Well, what would make you think I would? Well, you never can tell.
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Sometimes at home, I get the idea that you have a lot to say.
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Well, I don't know that you always listen, but, yeah, I do have a lot to say sometimes.
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Sometimes. We had a nice fourth. One of our grandsons from Texas came up,
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and we had a nice visit with him.
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He left this morning to go back.
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He enjoys coming for the fireworks.
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He just loves the fireworks down at the Fairview Park down here in Normal.
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And they are really good. They're good work fireworks.
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I know the kids that come from Albuquerque for the 4th, when they come, they're just amazed.
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Because, you know, out in the drier parts of the country, they don't necessarily
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have fireworks like that.
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But we had a nice time with them and so glad to see them.
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But it's also glad to get back to a routine.
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Seemed like run, run, run, you know, and the vacation for them is over.
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Then, you know, you wonder how to go so fast. But it did.
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And we had a good time. Like I say, glad to be back to a routine again.
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I hope everybody out there is safe and well, keeping cool.
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That's my big thing. The heat doesn't do real well in the heat.
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But it's summertime. It's Illinois. It's humid. The corn looks fantastic.
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I said, I saw it the other day. I said, how tall do you think that is?
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Looks like it's about eight feet tall.
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Some of it surely looks that tall. I think there's some corn that is eight feet tall already.
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Jeez, it's really.
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And then my daughter said, yeah, well, they got a little rain.
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And probably tonight you'll be able to hear it grow.
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That's for sure. You can on a good, humid night.
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And when it gets water, you can hear it creak and grow out there in the field.
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You can really hear it. Yeah.
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No fooling. That's how fast it grows. And it uses a tremendous amount of water.
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And speaking of all that water, I guess we should pray for all of the flood
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victims out there in Texas. That was an awful thing to have happen.
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And it's just... Also in Rio de Janeiro.
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New Mexico, don't hear much about it, but not as big a catastrophe,
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I guess, and our loss of life.
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But they had quite a flood in Rio Doso.
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That's a really pretty village up in the mountains. And you wonder how could they get flooded.
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But they're surrounded on almost four sides by high mountains.
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Yeah, by mountains that are even higher than they are. So, yeah,
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the water comes down from there.
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Because that's when we were out through there, we were up at Lincoln,
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and there was a stream, you know, runs there through Lincoln.
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And when you're at Lincoln there, you're up about around 8,000 feet or so.
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And yet there's a stream up there running along. So, it happens.
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Yeah. And out there, of course, with those heights and the type of soil that
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they have and so forth, it really runs off fast.
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And when you get a huge cloudburst like they did, that much rain in such a short
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time, you can just see the devastation.
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Yeah. Several lives were lost in Rio Doso, too.
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And the houses, it just washed down the side.
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Yeah, we should pray for them. And also, you know, like I say,
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they're not getting the attention that Texas is getting. And maybe it's not
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as big there, but it's still devastating for the people it happens to.
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Yeah. Our daughter lives in Georgetown.
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And two of the grandkids went to camp in Cedar Park this last week.
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They'll be done today or they're done now.
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I really worried about them, but they're a little higher ground.
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But there was damage all the way to Georgetown.
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Sure. Because the water came down the Alano, it was flooded,
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and that would run into the Colorado, you know, the Texas, Colorado,
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which runs into Georgetown.
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And so that would be flooded, too. And so, you know, they got some flooding there as well.
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But at any rate, also pray for our country, and the things that are happening
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here are very, very perilous.
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In fact, I intended to do an article from Touchstone magazine on the genius of Christianity.
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And it was written by a Frenchman who lived through the French Revolution and
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reaction to the French Revolution.
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And he wrote a book, a whole book on the genius of Christianity,
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how it addressed all the problems and built the whole civilization and how,
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you know, the French Revolution was tearing it down.
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And we can make a lot of parallels with that book and, you know,
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with his time, his living through that, with some of the things that we're going through now.
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And I was going to start off the show with that article today,
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but I think there's one more article I want to read from the Catholic Register
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about what's going on in Germany to show how much and that Christianity is needed,
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the genius of Christianity is needed. And so we'll do that next week.
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We'll do that article next week. I don't think I'll be able to get into it today.
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And I want to read from the Catholic Register, and it's the current Catholic
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Register, I think the July 13th issue.
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Yes, it is July 13th, 2025 issue of the National Catholic Register.
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And if you don't subscribe to it, as a Catholic, you really should.
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We don't get the Catholic Post here anymore. and the register covers a lot of
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things in the Catholic Church that people need to be aware of.
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And so some of you out there are probably aware of this, but I will go ahead
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and read from this article anyway.
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It's a German archdiocese imposes anti-Catholic sex ed guidelines.
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But it's just applicable to us too because there's a lot of push for the same
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ideas here in this country. and they need to be resisted because they are bad ideas.
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They're not enlightened or workable ideas as we'll see as we go along.
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It says here, advocates of Catholic marriage and the family are hoping that
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Pope Leo XIV intervenes to help parents protect their children in the face of
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new sex education guidelines being imposed in a major German diocese that promote the LGBT agenda,
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including transvestitism and non-binary identities.
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And non-binary identities would mean probably, and of course,
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transgender and other forms of gender identity and so forth along those lines.
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And that could mean almost anything. They say the new guidelines are further
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proof of the abandonment of Catholic moral teaching in society,
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a fruit of the 2019 to 2023 German synodal way,
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and a part of a complete entrapment of Catholic parents who wish to shield their
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children from such indoctrination.
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And that's, you know, what they call it, and I would agree with it that it is
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indoctrination. It's not Enlightenment, that's for sure.
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The Archdiocese of Hamburg published June 5th a new framework for sex education in Catholic schools,
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which it trumpeted as sending a clear signal for contemporary values-based and
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scientifically grounded sexual pedagogy.
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And as far as I'm concerned, I think all of those adjectives are simply BS,
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scientifically grounded sexual pedagogy.
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It made up word, wasn't it? People refer to science, and that's another article
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that I'm going to do here also.
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This is not science, it's scientism.
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Yeah. You know, the idea that science is somehow or another one huge unified
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pronouncement on various things and that science somehow knows when science
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is constantly and always changing and science does no such thing.
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And even saying science does this or science does that is scientism and it's not science.
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And I've talked about scientism before and we'll have to talk about it again.
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But there's a good article in one of my magazines that will read on scientism
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being substituted for science and how people are taken in by that.
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And don't be taken in by it, this scientifically grounded somehow or another,
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that you can't argue with it.
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You can argue with science all the time. In fact, that's what scientists do.
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Science is always about change and about discovery and about learning new things.
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And there is no such thing as one body of science or settled science or,
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you know, the de-science or any of those kinds of things. And it goes on here.
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And if you want to jump in any time, Lynn, and comment on anything, feel free to do so.
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It goes on, it says, its implementation, that is this new sex ed guidelines,
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its implementation, said the Archdiocese's vicar general,
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is an important step towards development attitudes, achieving justice in our
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schools, and strengthening teachers and all educational staff.
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And that's just all words as well, another word salad, injustice in our schools.
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I haven't seen schools achieve a whole lot of justice, and I don't think that
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there are institutions that are designed to achieve too much justice.
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He claimed it does not introduce a new theology, but rather acceptance of diversity.
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There it is, that word diversity, regarding sexual orientations and gender identity.
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We don't need diversity as much as we need unity in our countries.
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And this is one of the things also that, especially in Germany, that's going on.
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We've had this idea that somehow or another, people like Hitler and so forth
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grow out of a rules-based society or a so-called closed society,
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and we have to have the open society and everybody open to everything and everybody
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tolerant of everything, as if somehow rules and
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dogmas and so forth are bad.
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They are not, as long as they are correct ones. People can't live without rules,
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and people can't live without guidelines,
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and sometimes even strict guidelines, and they are not bad in and of themselves,
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and they do not lead to Hitler in and of themselves.
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Lots of countries and all countries have to have rules and regulations and so forth.
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There's no getting away from that, and even these people themselves are demanding rules.
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They're saying that their particular way of thinking and so forth are the things
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that should be followed and laid down and that other people have to accept them and follow them.
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So it's not the rules that lead to something like Hitler. It's bad rules that
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do. And these rules are bad rules.
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He also said they are advocating a life-affirming and, in this sense,
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positive view of sexuality.
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I don't think so. I think the views of sexuality that they're advocating in
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a lot of cases are not life-affirming at all.
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Look at the transgender views. I was watching on TV the other night.
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I don't know if you were watching it or not, Lynn, where this lady came on when
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she was only 11 years old.
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She was convinced that somehow or another she should be a boy instead of a girl.
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And at 11 years old, she was allowed to make the decision, I guess along with
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her parents must have went along with it too,
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and had her breasts removed and her uterus removed at 11 years old.
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Can you imagine that, Lynn?
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No, no. This is what was done to her.
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And, of course, as she got older, you know, then she realized the mistakes she
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made, but now it's impossible to undo it.
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Right. And she is doing the best that she can with what she's got left and trying
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to keep a positive attitude.
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And she has started an organization to speak out against these horrible atrocities,
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something you would think would come out of some kind of a pagan,
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you know, backward society, you know, torture or something.
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Right. That's just what it sounds like. And that's the same.
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And it is, isn't it? Exactly. Isn't it torture?
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Yes, and it's the same thing here. And it's not life-affirming.
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Yeah, this poor girl suffered a trauma when she was a young girl.
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She was attacked by, she said, a classmate, I guess a boy or something like
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that, and that caused her this trauma, and that caused her would have this desire,
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she thought, to be a boy, probably, you know, as a form of protection against what happened to her.
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And she should have been given a lot of sympathy and helped,
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you know, with that problem, not have her body parts, healthy body parts removed, for crying out loud.
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Well, you know, at that age...
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Kids are so mixed up. I hope I knew when I was about 10 or so,
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wondering how come my brother had all this.
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He could do all kinds of things that I couldn't do, and, you know,
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it wouldn't have been better to be a boy.
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I used to be jealous of my sister, but. Yeah.
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At any rate, we're going to have to stop here and take a break,
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and so we'll come back to this. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking about what's going on in Germany,
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this German archdiocese imposing anti-Catholic sex education guidelines under
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the guise of openness and scientists following the
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science and a positive attitude towards sex and so forth.
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In other words, following bad thinking and bad rules and using positive adjectives
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and so forth to describe what they're doing and what they're really doing is
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going to lead to more disasters,
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just like the transgender situation has led to.
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And the people in Germany, a lot of them are opposing it and they're asking
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for help from the new Pope, and so we'll see what happens here, what he will do.
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It goes on, it says, talking here about this, it says, the Archdiocese issued
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a statement June 5th that said that recognition of different identities and
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sexual orientations is actively promoted.
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And that discrimination and taboos are to be consciously dismantled.
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So, in other words, something is bad simply because it's a taboo,
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or they use the word taboo.
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In other words, because there's a rule, because the church has rules against
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certain types of sexual morality and sexual behavior, and those rules have been good rules.
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In fact, actually, if you look back at the early Christian church,
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they had to live with all kinds of these things already in place in the society that they were in.
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Had already adopted many of these things that we are re-adopting,
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and they had a harder time than we did in opposing these things.
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And that's something else I want to talk about today a little bit.
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In a time when Christianity is under attack, which it is now,
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and we'll go into that in just a little bit here if we get the time,
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is the time actually for the church to toughen up and tighten up and to be more
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strict than it was before?
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Because if you take a look at the New Testament and read the church under the
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New Testament, under Paul and so forth.
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The leaders were very concerned about the people being very strict and following
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all of the rules and regulations and so forth.
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And because they understood that you had to have strong soldiers and a strong
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church to oppose a society that already had fixed in place many of the things
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that are starting to become accepted today.
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But these things were in a pagan society were already fixed in place and part of a powerful society.
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And that society was powerfully against you. And so the church had to be tight
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and strong. It couldn't accept people that were wavering or people who were
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sort of lukewarm Christians.
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It could only accept people who were willing to stand up for all of the principles
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that the church espoused.
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And if you didn't, you couldn't be part of that church.
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And it may be that that's more what we needed today.
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It says, this one man, Christopher Hape.
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Head of the Archdiocese and Department for Schools and University,
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said the Archdiocese wants Catholic schools to be safe places where sexuality
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is not taboo, but is recognized in all its complexity and dignity.
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We've heard that before.
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We've heard about it. Propaganda. Yeah, we've heard abortion was supposed to
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be safe, legal, and rare. Yeah. It's not safe.
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It is legal, but it's certainly not rare.
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And we've seen what's happened with that and with a lot of the other things
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that people have touted as going to be a boon.
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We've seen what's gone on with the drugs and so forth and everything else and
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what it's done to our society, the deaths that it's causing and so forth.
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We've been sold the bill of goods all along the line by people who are supposed to be our leaders.
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Our own government, for example, lied to us and sold us a bill of goods about
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COVID, for example, that we lived through and were given all kinds of propaganda.
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So don't follow these so-called leaders who dress up things differently.
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In such a nice way. You know, the devil doesn't come dressed up like some kind of a monster.
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He always makes things look like they're very, very good. That's right.
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The opposite of what you think.
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It says your perspectives and value systems have changed in recent decades,
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and that's exactly why we have the traditional Catholic Church.
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So the things, the dogmas and the teachings and so forth, the church, do not change.
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Christ didn't hand down a group of teachings and say, here's what I'm handing you.
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Teach this to others, but change everything as time goes along to keep up with the fads of the day.
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He said, go out and teach all nations everything that I have commanded you.
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And the church has faithfully done that. It has handed on what it was given.
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It doesn't have the authority to hand on anything else.
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The church doesn't belong to the pope. It doesn't belong to me.
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It doesn't belong to you. It doesn't belong to my wife. It doesn't belong to the priest.
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It's not our church. It's Christ's church. He founded it, and he established
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the rules and regulations by which it lives and handed them to us,
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and he said, hand them on, teach all nations to others.
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And that's what the church is obligated to do, not to go out and change things
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to suit the fads of the day. Right.
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And as Paul said, even if an angel of light comes to you and tells you something
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different, don't believe it.
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Exactly. I'm glad you reminded me of that.
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He said that and he said that with such, he said, even an angel of light,
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he said, if he tells you something different than what I'm telling you now,
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that's what Paul told his disciples and the apostles.
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If he tells you something different than what I'm telling you now,
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don't listen to him. Right.
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And that's exactly it.
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Summing up the program, the archdiocese listed its different elements,
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which included holistic sex education. Listen to these words,
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holistic sex education.
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What's that? Sounds good, doesn't it? Yeah, what is it?
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Conveyed in a gender-sensitive way. What is a gender-sensitive way,
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as if normal, you know, sex, heterosexual sex is not somehow gender-sensitive?
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Is it gender-sensitive to remove the breasts and the uterus of a little girl,
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11 years old? I mean, it's ridiculous.
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You know, like I was saying earlier, at times I wish I was, you know,
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at a certain age, wish I'd been born a male because of what I saw as very big benefits.
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But you know what my parents told me? Well, it's not the way God made you.
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Exactly. And my sister was, you know, she was the middle kid.
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My brother was the oldest. My sister was the middle. And I was the youngest.
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But my sister was in charge. My dad put her in charge. And I was jealous of her.
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So, I mean, if that, all that crazy, I never was, you know, at that time,
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there was no idea that you could change your sentence or something.
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But, I mean, if, you know, in my opinion, girls got it better than boys. That's what I thought.
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Yeah. Because I just had one, you know, example, her.
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And she could tell me what to do when I had to do it.
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Mm-hmm. I remember. And she loved it. She bossed me around. Oh, yes.
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She bossed me around and everything else. I guess I overlooked that because
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I did the same with my brother.
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Yeah. He probably looked at you and said, I wish I was like my sister. She gets all, you know.
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So everybody goes through those kinds of things. And at any rate.
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He's a liar. A liar from the beginning. Right. You got to remember Satan,
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because he gets it straight.
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He's the father of lies. He was a liar from the beginning. And Christ says that over and over.
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And so you got to watch all of these words.
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Mm-hmm. Training opportunities and external expertise will be provided. By whom?
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The archdiocese said.
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Well, Hepp boasted that the archdiocese is positioning itself as a pioneer of
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forward-looking sex education. It combines Christian values with openness and respect.
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It all sounds good, doesn't it? No.
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Yeah. There it is, this openness.
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Right. We have to have the open society. Otherwise, if you have a rule,
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you'll be Hitler. Of course, their rules don't count.
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But the fact is that you can't get away from rules.
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If you say we shouldn't have any rules, that's a rule. You can't escape. Follow the logic.
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All right. The new guidelines will be implemented beginning with the 2026-2027
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school year at all 15 Catholic schools in Hamburg and regularly evaluated to
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ensure and further develop the impact of the framework. Oh, I bet.
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The Archbishop is, Archdiocese rather, is headed by Archbishop Stephan Hels,
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I'm not sure how it's pronounced,
28:41
who in 2018 called for the Catholic Church to take a more open approach,
28:46
there it is again, to sexuality and for the issue of homosexuality to be reclassified theologically.
28:53
Well, the fact is that we can't reclassify something theologically.
28:57
What he's asking for is to overturn a dogma of the church that has been pronounced.
29:03
And once the dogma of the church has been accepted and pronounced and handed
29:06
on and understood, that's that.
29:09
We have no authority to change it, and he knows it.
29:12
The announcement of the guidelines also comes at a time when the Hamburg Archdiocese
29:17
is close to being dissolved and possibly amalgamated into other dioceses,
29:22
having suffered for years from serious financial problems in a dearth of vocations.
29:28
Last year, it recorded no new priestly ordinations.
29:33
Well, no wonder. Yeah, I was going to say, is it any wonder it hasn't had suffering
29:37
from a dearth of vocations? It hasn't had any new ordinations? You can see why.
29:44
And it's financial. Who wants to donate to stuff like this?
29:48
Leasing pro-family and marriage, leading pro-family and
29:51
marriage Catholics have decried the guidelines which they say are part of a
29:56
so-called comprehensive sexuality education based on the work of an emeritus
30:03
professor of sexual sciences at the Christian University of Kiel.
30:08
That's a contradiction.
30:10
Yeah. The founder of Germany's sex education program,
30:15
Seiler, was a student of the late Professor Helmut Kintler, who,
30:19
according to a pro-family advocacy group, was a notorious proponent of pedophilia,
30:27
a central figure in a pedophile abuse network, and the originator of emancipatory
30:33
sex education that has taken root across Germany.
30:36
So you can see where this is coming from. Oh, God.
30:39
And you would think, well, it would be easy to just ignore all this and it'll
30:43
go away, But it doesn't, and it's been happening, and look at what has happened with transgender,
30:49
and look at the lives that have been ruined with things like that going on.
30:55
Kentler built up a sex education universe with the Institute for Sex Education,
31:01
which he founded in 1988, the link between Kentler's sex education visions and
31:06
political sponsors and enablers,
31:09
before going on and transforming Kentler's agenda, supplementing Kentler's approach
31:14
with the modern neo-emancipatory intention of breaking up the heteronormative
31:18
attitudes and images of children.
31:20
What a bunch of garbage, just in the words themselves, heteronormative.
31:24
In other words, somehow or another heteronormative is bad, meaning that if you're
31:30
a heteronormative, the normal teaching of the church and the normal teaching
31:34
of sane people is somehow bad and has to be changed.
31:40
They make up words, that's true.
31:44
This one lady in charge of this group, some of these names are hard to pronounce for me,
31:51
told the Register June 25th that the Hamburg framework incorporates the highly
31:57
questionable and unscientific idea of Kentler who falsely claimed that children
32:03
are inherently sexual beings,
32:04
a dangerous claim which leads to the idea that adults would have to introduce
32:09
children into sexuality, and that's probably the very intention of this one
32:14
man and the intention of some of these people pushing all of this stuff.
32:18
She said his ideology has found its way into university and school curricula
32:23
and even into the World Health Organization's sex education standards for Europe.
32:28
But you can see here when Christianity begins to break down,
32:34
and we're living not only in a post-Christian world, but in an anti-Christian world now,
32:39
and that's what what I want to get to in the last segment here when we get to it,
32:42
how quickly we start reverting back not only to paganism, but we start reverting
32:51
back to all kinds of actually unscientific and superstitious ideas.
32:57
And we start turning science into scientism, which is not science at all.
33:04
And it goes on here. It says, furthermore, she said,
33:09
the Hamburg framework is ideologically in line with the ideas of the synodal
33:13
way, which seeks to relevitize Catholic sexual teaching and normalize LGBTQ
33:19
ideologies within the church.
33:21
Now, this is a statement about the synodal way. I.
33:27
Leo claims to be in favor of the synod. I hope his definition,
33:31
and I'm not sure, but I pray that it's different than the definition that this lady is using here.
33:39
I think his definition as a synod is something in which people get together
33:45
and voice their questions and so forth about how to apply church teaching and
33:52
so forth in the modern world and address these things.
33:55
And it's a democratic process in that sense, but it's certainly not a democratic
34:01
process in somehow or another changing our tradition, which can't be changed.
34:07
It's just a matter of trying to find out where people are at and what their
34:13
problems and so forth are in the church. And, you know, that can be a good thing.
34:17
But I'm not, as I said before, I'm not big on synods and they can easily go
34:24
wrong. So it's something you've got to be very, very careful of and handle with care.
34:28
German Catholic writer and sociologist Gabriel Tooby also believes the Hamburg
34:33
framework is in accordance with the resolutions of the Sonata Way,
34:37
a four-year consultation with the laity in which the clerical sex abuse scandal
34:41
was used to usher in radical changes to the church in Germany.
34:46
So, in other words, this is using a crisis to make changes.
34:50
And this goes on in politics. It goes on in the church. It goes on in every institution.
34:55
Now, there are always people who will jump all over a crisis and use it actually
35:00
to take things to a further extreme than they were before in the name of somehow
35:05
or another meeting the crisis.
35:08
They love crises for that reason, and actually they will generate crises on
35:13
their own simply as a means of making changes that they couldn't get otherwise.
35:17
So that's something else that needs to be watched. Yeah, that's one of the dangers
35:23
right there is self-promulgated or people, you know, starting a false crisis.
35:31
So we're going to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
35:36
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Honey, what are we going to do for Mass this weekend? We'll be out of town and
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Let's go online to check catholicspiritradio.com and find another Mass time.
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The website lists the regular Mass schedule plus most Holy Days of all the Catholic
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That's a lot in central and northern Illinois.
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Good. We'll easily be able to find another Mass time on catholicspiritradio.com.
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Yes, and they even have a community calendar that lists local Catholic events.
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Let's check that out, too.
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38:00
Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:05
We're back from our break, and we're talking about the changes that are being
38:11
made in this Hamburg Diocese of the German Church, this sort of modernizing of the...
38:20
Changing the attitude, the rules, regulations,
38:24
and so forth toward sexual education in the Catholic schools and in the churches
38:29
themselves, and why a lot of parents are against this and standing against it,
38:36
and the fact that a lot of the reasons that are given for making these changes
38:43
are really not good reasons at all and are actually twisting the truth.
38:50
And are not something that people should be listening to.
38:55
And it is something, hopefully, that people are hoping in Germany the Pope will do something about.
39:02
It says, Catholic parents are checkmated at every turn. It's an utterly evil trap.
39:08
St. John Paul never tired of teaching that the future of the church passes by
39:12
way of the family. And, of course, this kind of stuff is a destroyer of the family.
39:18
Both have been hijacked in Germany, and it's important for us to understand
39:23
this because it could happen here as well.
39:25
And it has happened to a great extent with transgender.
39:29
Cuvie said the church in Germany has long reached the peak of the abandonment
39:33
of teaching Catholic morality in Catholic schools and kindergarten,
39:37
adding that for years, Catholic parents never got any support from their bishops,
39:42
not even from solidly Orthodox church leaders such as the late Cardinal Joachim Meisner.
39:49
Priests avoid the subject since they would most likely suffer severe consequences
39:53
if they did speak out, Kirby said.
39:55
Well, if the priests aren't going to speak out, then the laity sure needs to
40:00
speak out and they are starting to do so. And we need to do the same thing here.
40:04
To combat this ongoing trend, Ward said that parents need to organize,
40:09
as it were, lifeboats to rescue their families from this situation.
40:14
And he urged them to associate with other parents to oppose this usurping of
40:19
their rights by state and hierarchy.
40:21
And that's what's happened here in this country. The rights of parents have
40:24
been usurped in the schools and parents are demanding and finally starting to
40:28
get them back. And it's a battle.
40:30
And that's a lot of it with transgender.
40:33
Parents finding out that their kids have been treated as if they were a different
40:37
sex by people at the school without the parents at all being told.
40:42
And stuff like this has got to stop, and parents have to fight back to do that.
40:47
Parents have a right and an irrevocable duty to provide a Catholic moral education
40:53
for their children, he said.
40:55
And quoting Pope Pius XI, 1937, in Silica, I think that means...
41:04
With a burning heart, written specifically to Catholic families in Hitler's
41:10
Germany, he added that if education profanes the temple of the child's soul,
41:15
then it is everyone's duty to sever his responsibility from the opposite camp
41:19
and free his conscience from guilty cooperation with such corruption.
41:23
And that's exactly what's happening here. In other words, this idea of the open
41:29
society having to move so far away from the rules-based society in order to
41:33
avoid being fascist or avoid being Hitler,
41:36
causes the group of people that promotes that to move so far in one direction,
41:42
they actually move around in a circle and back right up,
41:46
you know, back to back with the very so-called fascism that they oppose.
41:51
And they become the other side of that very same coin.
41:54
They become just as fascist and just as rule-based and just as rigid and just
42:00
as unthinking themselves as Hitler was.
42:03
So the idea that you can get rid of rules is simply not possible.
42:08
And you have to be very careful about which rules to follow.
42:12
And the best rules to follow, of course, are the dogmas and the rules that have
42:16
been handed down by the church and have proved their worth and their value over 2,000 years.
42:22
Because it says, such sex education must be removed from all educational institutions,
42:29
adding that it undermines scientific truth as well as Christian anthropology,
42:34
and it does, and the Church's moral teaching as well.
42:37
In the meantime, she said, parents have some limited options available.
42:42
They can defer to canon law, specifically canon 793, 96, and 803,
42:48
that underpin the rights of Catholic parents with regard to their children's education,
42:53
find like-minded parents, as Ward suggests, address their concerns to school administrators,
42:59
appeal to their bishop, the Vatican, and their constitutional rights,
43:03
and if all that fails, find another school as difficult as that may be.
43:07
I strongly hope and pray that the new Holy Father, Leo XIV,
43:12
will explicitly reaffirm traditional Catholic sexual morality and will call
43:17
upon bishops and priests in Germany and worldwide, to teach and implement it
43:22
faithfully in diocesan schools and intergards, he said.
43:25
A clear and courageous stance from Rome is essential to halt these doctrinal
43:30
deviations and restore the integrity of Catholic education.
43:34
Especially if Rome wants to fight child abuse, it is necessary to stop ideas
43:39
which destroy a child's innocence. And I certainly would agree.
43:43
And in Germany, the parents are not allowed to homeschool. It's against the
43:47
law and you can be arrested for it.
43:49
In the United States, we can still homeschool. So that's an alternative as well.
43:54
And the thing is, is we ought to be aware that we need to fight for homeschooling
43:58
and make sure that there is not a movement against it.
44:02
And be aware that if a movement against homeschooling starts,
44:06
all kinds of reasons except the real reasons will be given.
44:09
So be aware that the real reasons will be the same kinds of reasons that are going on in Germany.
44:15
It will be to disarm and make parents helpless,
44:19
entrap them in a situation where they can't even raise their own children in
44:26
the way, in a traditional way of Catholic morality that they should.
44:30
And so I want to point out here that we are living in an age that is no longer,
44:40
not only no longer pro-Christian, it's not even neutral to Christianity anymore.
44:46
It's actually anti-Christian, and there's a different means of looking at the
44:54
church in such a situation. So that's what I wanted to get at.
45:00
And let me read a little bit from this idea of a negative world for Christianity.
45:07
It says, unlike Europe, America never had a state church, but for most of its
45:12
history, it had a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as
45:18
its default national religion.
45:21
This was still true as recently as the 1950s, though it had shifted towards
45:26
being more of a generic Judeo-Christianity by that point.
45:30
During that decade, about half of all adults attended church every week.
45:34
There were still prayers and Bible reading in public schools.
45:38
The country added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in God we trust to its money.
45:43
And I can remember in public school, I went to a public school,
45:48
We sang Christmas carols and so forth that were religious, and there was religious talk.
45:53
It was nothing for somebody to read from the Bible and so forth.
45:57
You can't do that anymore.
45:59
Then in the 1960s, this began to unravel, and the status of Christianity began to go into decline.
46:07
This period of decline from roughly 1964 to the present can be divided into three phases.
46:14
The positive world from 1964 to 1994, where Christianity is in decline,
46:22
yet it is still basically viewed positively.
46:25
The neutral world, 1994 to 2014, Christianity is no longer seen positively,
46:32
but is not yet seen negatively either, sort of neutral.
46:37
Being a Christian is just one lifestyle choice among many in a pluralistic society.
46:43
Christian morality still has a certain residual hold on society,
46:49
but it's beginning to fade.
46:50
And then finally, the negative world from about 2014 to the present.
46:55
For the first time in the 400-year history of America, official elite culture
47:01
now views Christianity negatively, or at least skeptically.
47:05
And when Christianity is a dissident choice, one that comes with social stigma
47:11
and other penalties, a door is open to the formation of a more robust church
47:16
community with higher expectations of its members.
47:20
Indeed, such is almost required.
47:23
So, what this article is saying here is that if we're living in a time of approval of the church,
47:32
and most people are going to church, and Christianity is taken for granted and
47:36
it's pretty much the moral system of the day and the religious system of the day,
47:43
then people can be a little bit more loose about.
47:49
Being a Christian in a sense of letting almost anybody, the least common denominator,
47:55
call themselves a Christian and be in a church.
47:59
But when Christianity is under attack, it requires a tighter, tougher,
48:05
more militant church than it did before, a church more like what we can experience
48:11
by reading the New Testament and seeing how Paul and some of the apostles behaved
48:17
and enacted in the society in which they lived,
48:21
in which Christianity was under attack and people who were Christians could
48:27
easily be persecuted and even killed by the state.
48:32
And so we're not living in times maybe as stringent as those,
48:37
but we're still living in a time in which Christians are persecuted,
48:41
some more, some less, depending on which country you're living in.
48:45
And the church needs to, and I think our bishops need to recognize this.
48:51
Needs to not be less strict in its rules and regulations, but more strict in
48:57
its rules and regulations, and more careful in handing out its traditions,
49:01
and more careful in responding to movements like the sexual movement in Germany
49:07
than it has before. What do you think, Lynn?
49:09
I think that's very true. I think that we need to foremost,
49:14
above everything else, realize that we're being attacked, the church is being
49:20
attacked, we're at war, and I think our clergy needs to acknowledge that and see it.
49:27
You know, Paul said, put on your armor.
49:32
You're being attacked, more or less, or not more or less, being attacked by
49:39
principalities and so forth that are not of this world.
49:46
Exactly. And we need to be aware of that.
49:49
We need to be more vigilant and less accepting of everything that's thrown at us.
49:55
You know, President Obama's the one that came out and said, we're no longer a Christian nation.
50:02
It shocked me to hear him say that. But, you know, he did have a point.
50:08
Yeah, he was right in that respect. There's no doubt about it.
50:11
And the thing is, is that that is what we do have to understand.
50:15
When we read Paul and so forth, if you read that, say, in the 1950s.
50:22
People, it would have been harder for them to take Paul's militancy as seriously
50:28
as we should take it today.
50:31
Because everything was going along pretty good. I mean, people were going to
50:35
church and nobody really opposed Christianity.
50:38
You know, it was a lot of people maybe only gave lip service to it.
50:42
They may not even have gone to church, but nevertheless, they would approve
50:47
of going to church, and they certainly wouldn't say anything against it,
50:50
and it just was taken for granted.
50:54
And so then Paul's militancy would seem maybe a little bit extreme.
50:58
But if we start to look at Paul's militancy in terms of what's going on today,
51:03
we see that there is more and more animus against Christianity and especially
51:08
against the Catholic Church.
51:11
And Paul's militancy becomes more and more understandable and more and more
51:16
appropriate for ourselves.
51:18
And like I say, we may not be living in a society that's persecuting Christians
51:22
as much as to the extent it was in Paul's time,
51:26
but it's happening a lot more and in a lot greater degree than it ever has in
51:32
most of our lifetimes, that's for sure.
51:33
And it's going to grow. In all of our lifetimes.
51:36
And it's growing. Yeah. And so we do have to understand that their proper reaction
51:41
to it is to actually be more concerned and careful about the dogmas and teachings of the church.
51:49
And that's why I say educate yourselves as much as possible.
51:53
Subscribe to the Catholic Register.
51:55
Start reading, you know, magazines and articles and so forth as much as you
51:59
can on what's happening today. Because it applies not only to religion.
52:06
It applies to the whole general life that you lead today because a lot of this stuff overlaps.
52:12
It applies to politics, and it applies to daily living just in general.
52:17
It can apply to your children.
52:19
I mean, look at the people whose children maybe, and they themselves,
52:23
have been taken in by some of this stuff, and their lives ruined.
52:27
I was thinking of that girl, 11-year-old girl, and there she was on TV.
52:31
I don't know how old she was at the time there in her 20s, I suppose.
52:36
But, I mean, just talking about trying to put the pieces of her life back together
52:40
again after all of this horror, that's just one example. And that's,
52:45
you can multiply that by many. And it's growing worse.
52:48
And if we aren't militant, don't do something about it, it will get even worse than it is now. Yeah.
52:55
That's exactly right. You cannot
52:57
expect it to get anything but worse if we don't do something. Right.
53:03
If nothing else, pray about it.
53:06
As Christianity slides to minority status and is viewed negatively or skeptically
53:11
by secular society, we should be attuned to the new possibilities this opens for the church.
53:18
When citizenship and church membership overlap in a normative sense.
53:23
Even when only a minority regularly attends church, a sort of least common denominator
53:28
of Christianity is almost mandated.
53:31
But when Christianity is a dissident choice, one that comes with social stigma
53:36
and other penalties, and that's starting to happen, a door is open to the formation
53:41
of a more robust church community with higher expectation of its members.
53:46
Indeed, such is almost required. We see this in a New Testament church.
53:51
This is the type of community Rod Dreher calls for in the Benedict Option.
53:56
And whether you agree with Dreher's specific vision or not, nevertheless,
54:02
the idea of a tighter church certainly is applicable.
54:07
And that part of Dreher's vision, I think, is something that all of us can believe
54:11
in and all of us should consider.
54:14
I guess that's very true. instead of considering, where can I turn to?
54:20
You can turn to your own church and don't leave Christ because of all the apostates.
54:28
That's wrong. You've got to stick with the church and do your battle.
54:35
It's your duty. And we'll talk next week then more about the miracle and the
54:40
genius of Christianity. And until then, St.
54:44
Michael the Archangel. defend us in
54:46
battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
54:51
May God rebuke and we humbly pray, and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
54:57
by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander
55:03
through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
55:07
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston On Catholic Spirit
55:11
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