Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E48: Demons and Angels - A Conversation with an Exorcist

Transcript

E48: Demons and Angels - A Conversation with an Exorcist · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  I at that moment on that Good Friday evening, was for the
• 0:03
  first time in my life, speaking with a demon who was speaking
• 0:06
  out of the body of this young man whom I knew.
• 0:09
  And from then on, that summer, I had a crash course and what it's
• 0:12
  like to be an exorcist. There is a war happening all
• 0:15
  around us all the time. It's the war for our souls and
• 0:18
  for our eternal life. Father Ambrose, thank you, Sir,
• 0:24
  for sitting down with me. Thank you Lila for the
• 0:26
  invitation. It's wonderful to talk with you.
• 0:29
  I got to speak with you yesterday at Saint Michael's
• 0:30
  Abbey, which was a wonderful experience.
• 0:33
  We're going to talk about exorcism today and the spiritual
• 0:36
  warfare. Satan, God, angels, demons.
• 0:40
  All the best things, all the all the wildest things.
• 0:42
  All the wildest things. This is an episode not just for
• 0:45
  Catholics or Christians, but anyone who's interested in these
• 0:47
  topics, and I know there's a lot of interest.
• 0:50
  A lot of interest right now, right?
• 0:51
  So thank you for coming. You're welcome to sit down and
• 0:53
  talk about this. One of our sponsors today is 7
• 0:56
  weeks coffee. Seven weeks Coffee, as you may
• 0:58
  have heard before in the podcast, I've talked about it
• 1:00
  before, is my favorite coffee brand.
• 1:02
  So this is what I drink every single morning when I wake up.
• 1:04
  My husband makes me a cup. My favorite roast right now is
• 1:07
  Ethiopia Medium. It is smooth and balanced and
• 1:09
  delicious. This is gourmet coffee that is
• 1:12
  pesticide free, organic, low acid and it's just amazing.
• 1:16
  It's amazing coffee. The best part about 7 Weeks
• 1:18
  coffee, the reason that I am a proud supporter of this coffee
• 1:21
  company is that they give 10% of all of their revenue, not just
• 1:26
  profits to the pro-life movement.
• 1:28
  They're supporting Pregnancy Resource Center.
• 1:30
  So every time you drink a cup of coffee, you are part of building
• 1:33
  the pro-life movement. It's called seven Weeks coffee
• 1:35
  because at seven weeks is when the baby's heart is beating and
• 1:39
  it's about the size of a coffee bean.
• 1:41
  If you want to order seven Weeks coffee, join the coffee club
• 1:44
  with me. You can use the code Lila at
• 1:46
  check out for 10% off your order.
• 1:48
  Check it out. You're going to love Seven Weeks
• 1:49
  Coffee. Coffee.
• 1:50
  Let's start with and you are. Let's also make sure folks know
• 1:53
  you are an exorcist. I have worked as an exorcist.
• 1:56
  That's right, every in a every priest has that possibility.
• 2:01
  And so part of my priestly ministry has involved
• 2:04
  deliverance ministry and exorcism.
• 2:06
  So that's yes, it's a part of my priesthood and has been for for
• 2:09
  the entirety of my priesthood. OK, I can't wait to get into
• 2:12
  what that looks like, what that means.
• 2:14
  But let's start with you, who you are today.
• 2:16
  So your father, Ambrose? Ambrose Christ the right my my
• 2:19
  name is Father Ambrose Christ. I'm a Norbertine Canon regular
• 2:22
  from Saint Michael's Abbey here in Orange County, California,
• 2:26
  and recently also from Corpus Christi Priory and Springfield,
• 2:32
  IL. So I'm dividing my time between
• 2:34
  two houses of our order, one in Illinois and here.
• 2:37
  My my home community is Saint Michael's Abbey, so I'm a
• 2:41
  Norbertine priest. Wonderful.
• 2:43
  What is that? What is a?
• 2:44
  Norbertine explain. That for people listening.
• 2:46
  Good. So in in the Catholic
• 2:49
  priesthood, there are different ways of being a Catholic priest.
• 2:54
  And my style of the Catholic priesthood follows a religious
• 2:59
  order founded 900 years ago, though more than 900 years ago,
• 3:03
  which is a we are canons regular.
• 3:05
  That means we're priests who live together in monasteries
• 3:07
  like monks. We pray together, we work
• 3:09
  together. It's a common life.
• 3:12
  And we take the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and
• 3:14
  obedience. So we're following one of the
• 3:17
  many traditions in Roman Catholicism of following the
• 3:21
  spirituality of a particular St. or particular lifestyle.
• 3:25
  And mine is one that follows that order founded by Saint
• 3:28
  Norbert of Zanton. And 11:21.
• 3:31
  So that's a, that's kind of probably too much information,
• 3:33
  but it's a little corner of religious life in the Catholic
• 3:37
  Church that also involves the priesthood.
• 3:39
  And I come from a thriving monastery here in Orange County,
• 3:42
  a large and thriving and growing community.
• 3:45
  Just thriving. I go there and there's tons of
• 3:47
  people, not just priests and religious, but lay people
• 3:50
  walking around, hanging out. It's a hotspot.
• 3:53
  People love it there. Monasteries are supposed to be
• 3:55
  kind of like lights on the Hilltop direct, you know,
• 3:58
  drawing people to Jesus Christ, so.
• 4:02
  And it's rare to see that in the modern world.
• 4:04
  I think most people have never encountered a monastery unless
• 4:07
  they went to like, Italy, you know, or something like that.
• 4:09
  And. In fact, no, I think if you know
• 4:11
  where to look, even in our country and certainly in this
• 4:13
  region, you can find these lights shining on the hills.
• 4:17
  And I hope people come in and visit us there in Saint Michaels
• 4:20
  Abbey and Silverado Canyon, so. Wonderful.
• 4:22
  Well, let's get into exorcism in a minute, but first I want to
• 4:25
  hear how you knew you were called to be a priest.
• 4:28
  Great. OK, Well, that's a yeah, we
• 4:30
  often, we priests often get that question because it's so unusual
• 4:34
  for someone, for a man to forego life in the world and forego
• 4:38
  family, a wife of my own and a family of my own, and to follow
• 4:42
  Jesus Christ more closely like this, which is what we
• 4:44
  understand ourselves to be doing.
• 4:45
  So I grew up in Colorado, my family, my family are all still
• 4:49
  there. And a very kind of ordinary
• 4:53
  parochial Catholic upbringing, went to the Parish School, you
• 4:57
  know, live my life with my family, attending Mass
• 5:00
  regularly, receiving the sacraments.
• 5:02
  I went to a Jesuit boys school for high school and then off to
• 5:06
  college, university, college and university.
• 5:08
  And I was pursuing kind of an academic career path, studying
• 5:12
  history and political science and the classical languages,
• 5:15
  ancient languages. And so I was definitely on that
• 5:18
  route. I always had this inkling in the
• 5:20
  back of my mind that maybe God was asking me to be a priest.
• 5:24
  I wasn't. I didn't take that very
• 5:26
  seriously, Lila, until I started running more quickly away from
• 5:30
  the Lord in college, like many young people do.
• 5:33
  So I got to know the Norbertine Order through a very
• 5:38
  providential set of circumstances, and I visited an
• 5:41
  Abbey of our order in Pennsylvania.
• 5:44
  I would I really fell in love with the idea of the priesthood
• 5:47
  joined with the monastic life and at this ancient tradition of
• 5:52
  how to live the Christian life in this very focused and intense
• 5:55
  way. So I was in Graduate School in
• 5:57
  England at Oxford University, and I was then realizing that I
• 6:02
  had to stop running from the Lord.
• 6:04
  So maybe some of your viewers and listeners have heard the
• 6:07
  story of San Agustin of Hippo, who was kind of a wayward youth
• 6:11
  and he definitely was running away from the Lord and he
• 6:14
  stopped running. And he, he said something that
• 6:17
  I, I got to know San Agustin through his writings and in my
• 6:20
  studies very intimately. And so he, he was a friend of
• 6:24
  mine, as it were. And I was, I was saw in his
• 6:27
  life, very much of my own life as a young man.
• 6:30
  He said, our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.
• 6:34
  And I was living this amazing life in Graduate School on a
• 6:37
  very prestigious scholarship at Oxford University, had
• 6:41
  everything. I had the world at my fingertips
• 6:44
  and I was so restless. My heart was so restless.
• 6:47
  So I finally stopped running and I looked around to different
• 6:50
  monasteries of our order in England and in Belgium and in
• 6:54
  Philadelphia, and finally found my way to Saint Michael's Abbey
• 6:56
  in Southern California. And when you said you were
• 6:59
  running from the Lord, it used that language.
• 7:01
  What does that mean? It meant that I knew.
• 7:03
  I knew what God's I knew very clearly what God's holy will
• 7:08
  would be for my life, not necessarily whether I would be a
• 7:10
  married man or a priest or a consecrated religious, but I
• 7:13
  knew that he wanted me to do to to obey his law and to follow
• 7:18
  the 10 commandments and to live a thoroughly Christian life.
• 7:22
  And I was wrestling with that. I didn't want to do that always.
• 7:25
  I wanted to be a wayward youth, you know, drinking too much and
• 7:28
  womanizing and, and all of the things that that young people
• 7:33
  can fall prey to, right, if the Lord is not the center of their
• 7:36
  life. I intuited, I knew that the Lord
• 7:39
  wanted to be the center of my life and I was running away from
• 7:42
  that. Now, there's such a
• 7:43
  contradiction, I think, for the modern sensibility of a
• 7:47
  religious who's some of it, because it's enough for people
• 7:50
  to think, oh, I'm going to get married and be monogamous.
• 7:53
  I mean, that in and of itself is a debate for some people today
• 7:55
  say monogamy is not natural or possible for especially men.
• 8:01
  And so there's this conversation happening about that, but then
• 8:04
  to have someone say, well, not only am I, you know, I'm not
• 8:08
  monogamous, I'm even more so I'm celibate.
• 8:10
  So there's, you know, that's the life choice for me.
• 8:13
  And it's a dedication and obedience now to God.
• 8:17
  How does that work for a priest? What if there's people listening
• 8:20
  right now who are wondering, that's weird.
• 8:22
  Something's weird with this. There's something unnatural.
• 8:24
  I would say, well, what about the life of our Savior Jesus
• 8:27
  Christ? He was a celibate.
• 8:29
  What about the apostles who were called, you know, many of whom
• 8:32
  were married when they started following the Lord, But we
• 8:35
  understand from the Acts of the Apostles, we understand that
• 8:38
  they put away their wives and their families for the sake of
• 8:40
  the gospel to follow Christ more closely.
• 8:42
  That's what that's what we learn from the early Christian Church.
• 8:46
  So there what we learn from the Holy Scriptures and especially
• 8:49
  from the Acts of the Apostles, we learned that celibacy is a
• 8:52
  gift. It's a vocation, It's a call and
• 8:55
  a gift, not for everybody, but for those to those who are
• 9:00
  called to that God gives the grace to live it.
• 9:03
  And it's just so free and beautiful and challenging and
• 9:06
  difficult, but it's a really, it's a beautiful life.
• 9:11
  There is that beautiful story from the gospel of the rich
• 9:14
  young man who comes to the Lord and says, Lord, what must I do
• 9:16
  to inherit eternal life? And, and the Lord says, we'll go
• 9:20
  and sell everything and give what you have to the poor and
• 9:22
  come and follow me. And that man, the gospel says,
• 9:25
  goes away sad because he can't do it.
• 9:27
  He didn't have that call. So not everybody has that call.
• 9:31
  Everybody, every believer, every man and woman are, is called by
• 9:35
  their biology to live as a married person.
• 9:38
  That's what the that's how the Lord built us.
• 9:40
  That's how God built us. And he calls some people out of
• 9:43
  that natural state of marriage into what we call a supernatural
• 9:47
  vocation of celibacy. And for those men who are called
• 9:51
  to ordain a ministry as a priest.
• 9:53
  So, so that's that. I mean, that's in a nutshell.
• 9:56
  And it's a beautiful, liberating, there's a freedom
• 10:02
  that comes through the religious profession of the vows, poverty
• 10:05
  and chastity, celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom and
• 10:08
  obedience. We, we minister to the church.
• 10:12
  We are meant to be at the, at the disposal of the whole
• 10:15
  church, the whole people of God. And so that freedom comes from
• 10:19
  from these vows which free us to be completely the Lords.
• 10:25
  It's beautiful. Well, so many have spiritually
• 10:27
  benefited, myself included. So thank you for your guests to
• 10:30
  your vocation. My audience knows I'm very
• 10:32
  Catholic. So I, I love the I love the gift
• 10:35
  of our religious and our priests.
• 10:36
  Where would we be without our priests?
• 10:38
  We wouldn't have our church. We wouldn't have our Catholic.
• 10:40
  Church, I have one more thing to say about that.
• 10:41
  Just one more little thing, because especially for folks who
• 10:44
  are watching and listening who might not understand Catholicism
• 10:47
  so much, which is perfectly understandable, we are meant to
• 10:50
  be visible signs on earth. We celibates are meant to be
• 10:54
  visible signs on earth of the state that everybody will live
• 10:57
  in heaven. We won't.
• 11:00
  We are supposed to be like, like the heavenly state where, you
• 11:03
  know, marriage lasts until death parts the couple.
• 11:07
  And of course that relationship, because of the intimacy that
• 11:10
  they share, carries on into heavenly glory, but not as
• 11:14
  marriage. Marriage ends and there is no
• 11:19
  marriage in heaven. And so we celibates are supposed
• 11:23
  to be, we consecrated people are supposed to be a sign of the the
• 11:25
  heavenly life that we will all live one day on the other side
• 11:29
  of the veil. So it's just a little bit of
• 11:30
  yeah. So it's would be like an icon, a
• 11:32
  living icon. And that's because communion in
• 11:34
  heaven is going to be even more perfect and intimate than a
• 11:37
  marriage, which is crazy to think about and beautiful.
• 11:40
  To think about because the Church is the bride of Christ,
• 11:42
  we are the members of the Church, which is the bride of
• 11:45
  Christ. So that spousal relationship
• 11:48
  with our Lord, the bridegroom, the divine bridegroom, the
• 11:52
  Savior will be every bit as intimate for every person in
• 11:57
  heavenly glory. That's that's the union that
• 12:00
  will be the most perfect. Beautiful.
• 12:04
  So when you became a priest, did you think that you would end up
• 12:07
  being, at least for a period of time, an exorcist?
• 12:09
  In no way. In no way.
• 12:10
  You're like, that's not what I was signing up for.
• 12:13
  I didn't ever imagine that that would be a part of my priestly
• 12:15
  ministry. And in fact, those priests who
• 12:17
  are doing the work of exorcism and deliverance ministry usually
• 12:20
  say that if there's some priest out there who strives or in some
• 12:25
  way wants to be an exorcist or functioning as an exercise,
• 12:27
  that's usually not a very good sign because it's not a it's not
• 12:31
  the sort of thing that we should aspire to exactly.
• 12:33
  So what? How did you become an exorcist?
• 12:36
  That's a great question. The monasteries are often places
• 12:39
  where people who are struggling with all kinds of things,
• 12:41
  psychological issues, spiritual wounds or issues, or in this
• 12:46
  case, very serious spiritual wounds or issues like demonic
• 12:51
  obsession or infestation or possession.
• 12:54
  They, they come to the monasteries to seek help because
• 12:58
  a lot of people know that's a place where I might find help
• 13:01
  and I can't find it anywhere else.
• 13:03
  So it's not unusual for an Abbey like mine to have people coming
• 13:07
  and asking for this sort of spiritual help of deliverance
• 13:10
  from demonic influences in their lives.
• 13:14
  So a few years into my priest, I've been a priest for 15 years
• 13:17
  now and a few years after my ordination, there was a young
• 13:21
  man with whom I had a, a kind of a paternal relationship.
• 13:25
  I knew his family well. He was receiving some spiritual
• 13:29
  counsel and and his family were very closely associated with our
• 13:33
  Abby. And it turned out that as he was
• 13:39
  wrestling with some very serious psychological issues and seeking
• 13:43
  psychiatric care and even some kind of psychiatric collapse in
• 13:47
  his life, it became obvious to those who are trying to help him
• 13:51
  that there was something more going on than merely the
• 13:55
  psychological or the psychiatric.
• 13:57
  And it was on Good Friday that year that I had retired.
• 14:03
  I had gone to bed a little bit early.
• 14:04
  Not not super early. Monastic life has short nights
• 14:07
  and long days, but especially in the end of Holy Week, the sacred
• 14:10
  true to him, we're very, very busy and a lot of time in
• 14:12
  church. And so I was, I, I had retired
• 14:16
  and someone came and awoke me in my room in my monastic cell and
• 14:20
  said, this person is here. He needs your help right now.
• 14:25
  So I at that moment on that Good Friday evening was for the first
• 14:31
  time in my life speaking with a demon who was speaking out of
• 14:34
  the void, out of the body of this young man whom I knew in
• 14:37
  our Abbey parlor. Couple people were holding him
• 14:40
  down and a priest confer, an older priest who had been doing
• 14:44
  some of this work was there with me.
• 14:47
  But I was the right priest for the job because of the, the
• 14:50
  relationship that I already had with this young man in his in
• 14:53
  his life. So I was thrown into a very
• 14:57
  serious crisis of diabolical manifestation in this man's
• 15:03
  life. And from then on, that summer, I
• 15:06
  had a crash course and what it's like to be an exorcist.
• 15:09
  As it turned out, in that particular man's life, he needed
• 15:14
  the major right of exorcism. So that's very unusual.
• 15:17
  Most people who wrestle with the demonic in their lives, while
• 15:22
  all of us wrestle with the demonic in our lives.
• 15:23
  We call it temptation. Temptation is a place where
• 15:28
  demons are involved, even as every moment of our life there
• 15:33
  are angels involved in our lives.
• 15:35
  We don't think about that very often and we don't usually see
• 15:38
  it, although sometimes people do.
• 15:40
  But the angels and the demons are at war for our souls
• 15:44
  constantly. So whenever we feel ourselves
• 15:47
  tempted to sin, there are demons involved with that.
• 15:51
  So it's a very low grade kind of diabolical influence in our
• 15:55
  lives. There's also obsession.
• 15:59
  There's also oppression. Oppression is less serious than
• 16:02
  obsession. And then there's possession.
• 16:05
  There are some statistics that exorcists share, people who do a
• 16:08
  lot of this work. It's a tiny percentage of people
• 16:11
  who ask for the ministry of deliverance from priests in the
• 16:14
  church. A tiny percent, less than 1%
• 16:16
  need the major right of exorcism because they're actually
• 16:19
  possessed. That's extraordinarily unusual.
• 16:22
  Explain the difference for folks listening.
• 16:24
  What is obsession versus oppression versus possession in
• 16:27
  terms of the manifestation? How that feels or what that
• 16:30
  seems like? So oppression.
• 16:31
  So these are basically working from the outside end of our
• 16:34
  interior life. Temptation is a very exterior
• 16:37
  kind of thing. Now, demons as angels.
• 16:41
  Demons are angels. They're fallen angels.
• 16:43
  So they're the same category of created spirit that the Lord
• 16:47
  created. You know, they're created by
• 16:48
  God. And a third of the angels fell.
• 16:52
  We learned that from the Holy Scriptures.
• 16:53
  So there are twice as many good angels as there are fallen
• 16:58
  angels. And they're the, the, the fallen
• 17:01
  angels hate God and his will. They hate his plan.
• 17:04
  They try to UN overturn it. They try to convince people to
• 17:09
  follow them in their rebellion. And there's a lot we could say
• 17:13
  about that, Lila, to put your, your, to put all of our hearts
• 17:17
  at ease about that. You know, all of that is under
• 17:19
  the huge overarching umbrella of God's will.
• 17:22
  Even what's happening, even what the demons are doing.
• 17:25
  God permits that because he knows that the victory is won.
• 17:29
  He knows that Jesus Christ our Savior wins in the end and wins
• 17:33
  already. So when people are struggling
• 17:35
  with temptation or something more serious is because God
• 17:38
  permits it, which is a great mystery.
• 17:40
  But so it's not like there's an evil God and a good God and
• 17:43
  they're somehow at war. Not at all.
• 17:47
  Everything that happens, Saint Paul says in the in the letter
• 17:49
  to the Romans, everything works for the good.
• 17:52
  For those who love God, everything works for the good.
• 17:54
  I've heard, I've heard it said that the Lord permits it for
• 17:59
  like you're saying, bringing out greater good and the
• 18:01
  sanctification of those people, even if they're being afflicted
• 18:04
  and it wasn't their fault in any way that God is going to do
• 18:07
  amazing things with that person. They're he's creating this.
• 18:11
  It's like a master soul that he's helping develop in that
• 18:14
  person. So in a way it's a crown of
• 18:16
  glory even though it's a huge cross, but you need the cross
• 18:19
  before the crown of. Glory, that's exactly right.
• 18:20
  And, and the people, the people I've encountered who wrestle in
• 18:24
  these, there's more serious ways with the, with the demonic.
• 18:27
  They are people on a fast road to holiness very often,
• 18:32
  especially when they start to embrace the means at their
• 18:34
  disposal through the church, the sacraments and, and these rites
• 18:37
  of exorcism and so forth. It's beautiful.
• 18:40
  Their purification is intense. Our next sponsor is Public
• 18:44
  Square. Public Square is the Yelp for
• 18:46
  conservatives. This is a group of 50,000
• 18:48
  businesses, 50,000 businesses that share your pro-life, pro
• 18:52
  family, pro liberty values. So instead of shopping at
• 18:56
  companies that oppose your values, you can support
• 18:59
  companies that love and support your values.
• 19:02
  These are companies like Every Life, the diaper company that
• 19:05
  I've talked about that is amazing, diapers that are
• 19:07
  pro-life, supporting the pro-life movement, and so many
• 19:10
  other companies that you can find in most industries.
• 19:13
  You can check them out at publicsquare.com.
• 19:16
  That's publicsq.com or download the app at the link in the bio
• 19:21
  and be part of the growing movement to change how we do
• 19:24
  business in America to shore up the American family.
• 19:28
  Check out Public Square, publicsq.com or download the app
• 19:32
  at the link of the bio. So you asked about about.
• 19:34
  OK, so that's temptation. We're all we're we'll all know
• 19:37
  what that feels like. Angels and demons can touch our
• 19:42
  imagination and our memory. So angels can manipulate
• 19:45
  material things. They helped create the material
• 19:47
  world. God created the material world
• 19:49
  through the ministry of the angels.
• 19:51
  We learned from the early church fathers.
• 19:55
  And so usually the way that we experience temptation is that
• 19:58
  they stir up some memory, or they stir up some passion, some
• 20:01
  emotion. They amplify some emotion, or
• 20:03
  they put into our mind an image that's already there in our
• 20:07
  memory that they can select and make present to our imagination.
• 20:12
  So they're they're involved in our imagination, in our memory.
• 20:15
  So do they have access to our memories?
• 20:17
  They do, and they know our memories.
• 20:19
  They can see them as it were. They can see because those are
• 20:22
  material things, the way that our, the, the way that our mind
• 20:26
  works and the way that we know that that involves our
• 20:29
  corporeality, It involves our body and our brain.
• 20:32
  So, so they can, they can manipulate those things.
• 20:34
  It's why it's one of the reasons why it's really important that
• 20:38
  we are careful about what we put into our minds, what we see,
• 20:42
  what we read. So what pornography is such a, a
• 20:45
  huge, a huge epidemic of bad because those images stay there
• 20:51
  even if you don't remember them. And a demon can take one of
• 20:54
  those and present it to your imagination.
• 20:57
  So I know you're going to explain the oppression,
• 20:58
  possession and obsession, but on that point, an important
• 21:01
  question I think, and people may have is every time that someone
• 21:05
  has a bad thought or they recall a bad memory or they have a bad
• 21:09
  feeling about someone, maybe they feel resentment or
• 21:12
  bitterness or lust or anger or greed or one of the sins, right?
• 21:16
  Is that from a demon or OK? Sometimes though, it's from a
• 21:20
  demon. It could be amplified by demons,
• 21:21
  so. So The thing is, all of those
• 21:23
  passions you just enumerated greed and anger and resentment
• 21:29
  and lust. Now some of those words you use
• 21:31
  are actual sinful feelings, but feelings themselves are not
• 21:34
  sinful and they're also not virtuous.
• 21:36
  The emotions are pre moral. They are they're movements of
• 21:42
  our body and our and our interiority towards some
• 21:45
  stimulus. And that's, that can be good or
• 21:47
  can be bad, depends on what we do with it.
• 21:50
  So what the demons can't do is they don't touch our will.
• 21:53
  They don't, they don't touch how we choose things or what we
• 21:55
  affix our will to. We say what I'm owning as mine.
• 22:00
  So I might feel angry. Sometimes we should feel angry.
• 22:02
  Sometimes you should be attracted sexually and
• 22:06
  physically to another person, right?
• 22:07
  I mean, that's not bad. But if, if, if we give in to the
• 22:13
  demonic part of that, and that's amplified or exaggerated or
• 22:18
  misdirected or misplaced, and we own that, then we have succumbed
• 22:23
  to the temptation, as it were. So is that obsession?
• 22:26
  No, that would, that's still temptation.
• 22:27
  That's just temptation. So I would say then the next,
• 22:30
  the next sort of degree of severity would be oppression,
• 22:33
  oppression. And that would be, you know,
• 22:36
  that can be external or it could be internal.
• 22:38
  And that's, you know, let's say I'm going to try to think of
• 22:42
  think of an example. Let's say somebody has really
• 22:48
  intrusive thoughts of resentment.
• 22:52
  You know, that there's some there, there's some really or
• 22:55
  understandable wound, maybe some abuse in their family or
• 22:57
  something. And and they they hate their
• 23:02
  father and they have a hard time forgiving their father, which is
• 23:05
  a totally understandable, right? But let's say that they have at
• 23:09
  some point in their life invited a kind of, I don't ever want to
• 23:13
  give this up. I'm going to nurse this
• 23:16
  resentment. I'm going to live with this
• 23:17
  resentment. I'm going to love this
• 23:18
  resentment. That's very easy then for a
• 23:20
  demon to affix itself to that and say, I'm never going to let
• 23:23
  you forget this. And so like an obsessive
• 23:26
  thinking about that resentment that could be, that's a kind of
• 23:29
  a, that would be sort of a symptom of oppression.
• 23:33
  If let's say that something like that becomes so ingrained in the
• 23:40
  person where even though they're, let's say they have
• 23:44
  forgiven their father and they've made it, made peace with
• 23:47
  this difficult past. And they've, they're following
• 23:50
  the Lord closely and they're trying to live in love and they
• 23:53
  choose, they say, I'm not going to, I don't want to resent him.
• 23:56
  But it's like there's a almost like a mind worm, like somebody
• 24:01
  else almost inside of them speaking to them.
• 24:05
  You know, that would be an example of something that's
• 24:07
  probably more like obsession. So it's a tighter hold on the
• 24:11
  person's interiority by some kind of a demonic force where
• 24:14
  the person is having a hard time distinguishing their own
• 24:17
  personality from this other personality that's inside of
• 24:20
  them. And when that becomes so extreme
• 24:22
  that the person's own personality can recede or
• 24:25
  disappear, and this other person, the demonic person, can
• 24:29
  take over their body completely and manifest itself through
• 24:33
  them. We would call that possession.
• 24:36
  In other words, the demon has taken possession of the person's
• 24:38
  body, and they're still in there, and they're still free to
• 24:41
  choose. But they might not be able to
• 24:43
  choose what they're doing with their body, or they might not be
• 24:45
  able to choose where they're going or what they're saying.
• 24:48
  So in the case of the young man, that friend of yours who came in
• 24:51
  the middle of the night, and that was the first major.
• 24:55
  I didn't perform the rite of exorcism that night.
• 24:57
  Not that night. Interesting.
• 24:58
  I can't do that. I need permission from the
• 24:59
  Bishop to do that. So what did you do?
• 25:02
  So I started commanding the demon in the name of the Lord
• 25:04
  Jesus Christ to be quiet. I I I commanded the demon in the
• 25:09
  name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to, to sit down, to, to keep the
• 25:14
  man at peace, to keep him in his chair.
• 25:17
  Why was he manifesting a lot of anxiety and and also how did he
• 25:21
  show up at the at the Abbey at the time?
• 25:24
  So this is a young man and he was so distraught he got in his
• 25:27
  car and drove over. And in this Case, No, he was, he
• 25:30
  was, he was already there with his family for another reason.
• 25:34
  And and his his struggles had been amplifying in the previous
• 25:38
  weeks. His family was becoming quite
• 25:39
  alarmed. So he was there anyway.
• 25:41
  He didn't drive himself there. I've never seen someone in the
• 25:47
  act of diabolical possession, the act of what we say, a
• 25:50
  manifestation of a demon, able to drive themselves to a a
• 25:53
  monastery for for deliverance. Because they're so out of
• 25:56
  control. They're so out of control.
• 25:57
  And are they out of control? I mean, the scripture, there's
• 26:00
  these cases of, you know, men attacking themselves with rocks
• 26:04
  and breaking chains, you know, superhuman strength and all of
• 26:07
  these manifestations. Have you seen manifestations?
• 26:09
  Like that in your ministry? Yeah.
• 26:10
  So the, the you're talking about the Gerasene demoniac who is the
• 26:14
  one amongst the Gerasenes, that non Jewish village where Jesus
• 26:19
  was there and this man was living out among the tombs and
• 26:23
  he would strike himself with rocks.
• 26:25
  And that's the one where when Jesus delivered him, the the
• 26:27
  demons went into this herd of swine and cast himself off the
• 26:30
  Cliff into the sea. This is there.
• 26:32
  There's a very interesting diabolical psychology in that
• 26:34
  story. We exorcist love to talk about
• 26:37
  think about that. We see there because it's
• 26:39
  scriptural. So that's not only true as in a
• 26:43
  scene from history, which happened, but it also shows us
• 26:46
  an archetype, how demons work and how possession looks and how
• 26:51
  deliverance happened. So we get that the gospel
• 26:53
  teaches us these wonderful things, amazing things.
• 26:56
  So yes, that particular man exhibited superhuman strength
• 27:01
  and speaking in languages that he had never studied and
• 27:03
  understanding languages that he'd never studied.
• 27:05
  So there there are the the church, the Catholic Church
• 27:07
  gives us the the a list of indications that we should look
• 27:12
  for to see to to know if the person is possessed or not.
• 27:16
  Both of those are some of those demonstrations.
• 27:18
  Superhuman strength and the knowledge of things that they
• 27:20
  can't possibly know otherwise. So can a possessed individual
• 27:23
  physically harm themselves or. Others.
• 27:26
  And they often do. To the degree of killing
• 27:28
  someone. Else that the end game for
• 27:30
  demons is always suicide in despair.
• 27:36
  Because what the what a demon wants, a demon wants you or me
• 27:41
  or any of us. They want us to, first of all,
• 27:44
  to rebel against God's will. They want us then to persist in
• 27:50
  that rebellion to the point of despair and hopefully to take
• 27:54
  our own life in despair so that we're certain to go to hell.
• 27:57
  That's what they want. But that would require the
• 28:00
  person chooses it to some degree.
• 28:01
  There's some. Level of at some, Absolutely.
• 28:04
  At. Some point in that long, sad
• 28:07
  story of that trajectory to despair and then eventually
• 28:10
  suicide. And it didn't have to be
• 28:11
  suicide, but they they want the kind of angry despair that is an
• 28:18
  act of rebellion against God. And at some point along the way,
• 28:20
  of course, the person would have to choose.
• 28:21
  We don't you, you, we can't be caught unawares in hell, just
• 28:26
  like we can't make, we can't commit a sin without choosing
• 28:29
  it, right? We have the free choice of our
• 28:32
  will. That's the beautiful gift of the
• 28:33
  of the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.
• 28:35
  We are free agents. Is, is there, is it possible for
• 28:38
  there to be a case where someone is possessed and they do
• 28:40
  something wrong while they're possessed?
• 28:43
  I mean, it could be as simple as they break an object that
• 28:45
  doesn't belong to them, but it could be as harmful as they harm
• 28:48
  somebody else, but they are not in any way culpable.
• 28:52
  For that, that could be yes. Do you have you?
• 28:54
  Ever seen that? I I would say where I've seen
• 28:57
  that, let's say the foul language of the blasphemy that
• 29:00
  they're said they're come, that's coming out of their
• 29:02
  mouth. It's not them and it's and
• 29:05
  they're not responsible for it. So because of course, again to
• 29:08
  commit a sin, it has to be grave, a grave matter has to be
• 29:11
  a serious, you know, something that's contrary to God's will.
• 29:14
  We have to know that it's contrary to God's will and we
• 29:16
  have to choose to do it anyway. So in the case of possession,
• 29:19
  where the the demon or demons are the ones who have, who are
• 29:24
  with whom I'm speaking or who are manifesting themselves and
• 29:28
  that the person who is possessed is still in there but not
• 29:32
  acting. Very often the person is not,
• 29:37
  does not remember what happened while the manifestations are
• 29:40
  happening. Sometimes they do, but that more
• 29:42
  often than not the person has a kind of a blackout of its of a
• 29:45
  sort. And when they come back, they
• 29:49
  may or may not remember what was happening during that demonic
• 29:52
  manifestation. It depends on the on the how the
• 29:54
  person is possessed. What happened to the young man?
• 29:57
  Thanks be to God. I mean, God works.
• 29:59
  Like I said, it's true that God works all things to the good for
• 30:02
  those who love him. This young man, I, we at my
• 30:07
  Abbey was a priest giving us our community retreat that very
• 30:10
  month, who was a very accomplished exorcist and a kind
• 30:14
  of a puppet master almost of the exorcist in the country at that
• 30:18
  time. And so he was there and I knew
• 30:21
  that he did that work. And so I was able to have a kind
• 30:24
  of a crash course with him in person and how to help this
• 30:27
  young man through the summer over, you know, week, first of
• 30:31
  all, every day for a while and then weekly and then every two
• 30:33
  weeks we were praying with this man, with the diocesan
• 30:37
  deliverance ministry team, you know, a number of priests and
• 30:39
  lay folks. And it was a beautiful,
• 30:41
  beautiful experience. This man was liberated.
• 30:43
  Thanks be to God. He is alive today, married, you
• 30:48
  know, putting together a family recovery.
• 30:50
  He's recovering. He'll be recovering probably for
• 30:52
  the rest of his life. But that was a when Christ is
• 30:56
  always victorious. How does it happen that someone
• 30:59
  becomes possessed? Yeah.
• 31:00
  That's a good question there. There are a lot of ways there
• 31:02
  can be everything from dappling in the occult.
• 31:09
  Ouija boards are extraordinarily dangerous ways of opening
• 31:13
  oneself up to demonic forces that are already out there
• 31:17
  waiting and giving them an opportunity to enter into one's
• 31:20
  life. That can be through curses or
• 31:24
  things cast upon you from the outside.
• 31:25
  It can be with dappling with the occult from of your own choice.
• 31:28
  Hypnosis is extraordinarily dangerous in this any kind, I
• 31:33
  think any kind. I think it's very dangerous any
• 31:36
  place where we relinquish the own our own control of our
• 31:43
  interior life and allow other things outside of us to
• 31:49
  manipulate that like a hypnotist or astral projection.
• 31:54
  All of these things where people are thinking I'm going to try to
• 31:57
  surrender myself to something outside of me that is who is not
• 32:00
  Jesus Christ. There are plenty of forces out
• 32:03
  there who I say I'll come and be your friend.
• 32:07
  So, so dappling in the occult, psychics, tarot card readings,
• 32:15
  all of these things are very, very dangerous.
• 32:18
  And they're, so they're more and more prevalent all the time.
• 32:20
  And I, I, I drive just driving around on the streets, you know,
• 32:22
  you see the, the psychic on the corner.
• 32:24
  I think, gosh, that person's probably a charlatan.
• 32:27
  But whoever's paying the money to have those cards read or
• 32:30
  whatever else they're doing, there are plenty of demons who
• 32:33
  are happy to get involved. So surrendering oneself when
• 32:40
  they're, you know, to serious addictions, expect sometimes
• 32:43
  addictive behaviors, hedonic lifestyles.
• 32:51
  What does that mean? You know, like, like hyper,
• 32:53
  hyper, yeah, hedonism, hypersexuality, or, you know,
• 32:56
  giving over to just the the free for all of you know, sex, drugs
• 33:01
  and rock'n'roll proverbially, you know, that kind of that that
• 33:04
  surrender of 1's life to just one's lower pleasures in a very
• 33:08
  consistent, deliberate way that can open up one's life to to
• 33:11
  demonic influences. There was a story from a
• 33:15
  documentary last year made by Netflix.
• 33:18
  It was Harry, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
• 33:22
  And it was, I think, talking about their love story and in it
• 33:25
  they had this scene. I think it was from that or it
• 33:27
  was their Oprah interview. It was one of recent public
• 33:30
  comments that they made. I think it was the documentary.
• 33:32
  Anyways, they talked about how they went to a site.
• 33:35
  I think Harry went to a psychic and she somehow knew about an
• 33:39
  ornament that had been broken on their tree and she had this
• 33:44
  insight that seemed otherworldly to Harry that, but it was it for
• 33:48
  him. It was a positive experience
• 33:49
  because it confirmed that his grandmother was looking out for
• 33:52
  them who had passed. What's going on in a case like?
• 33:56
  That so in in the second letter to the Corinthians, the 11th
• 34:02
  chapter, Saint Paul says even Satan disguises himself as an
• 34:06
  Angel of light. That I don't know what happened
• 34:10
  there, Lila, but I would guess it was something like this.
• 34:13
  That psychic is maybe maybe not even aware that he or she is
• 34:20
  consulting demonic influences. But you know that a whole
• 34:23
  practice of basically saying, give me some knowledge that that
• 34:26
  person otherwise doesn't have. And there's a demon that says,
• 34:28
  OK, I'll do that for you, you know, and tells them something
• 34:31
  that's interesting, curiosity peaking and consoling, you know,
• 34:38
  they they walk away from that consoled, Oh, isn't that
• 34:41
  wonderful? Grandma loves me.
• 34:42
  But actually what's going on there is the demons like I'm
• 34:46
  happy to be your friend. You want to do this again?
• 34:48
  Why don't you come back and consult the psychic again?
• 34:51
  Or you know how else can I help you?
• 34:54
  Because it's taking them away from Jesus Christ as the
• 34:56
  authority and. The Lord so the.
• 34:58
  Demons happy to kind of look gentle for a time, but does he
• 35:02
  get vicious eventually, eventually, eventually he knows
• 35:05
  the long term plan for this man seeking the psychic for advice
• 35:09
  is that I'm going to wreck that man's marriage or I'm going to
• 35:11
  destroy that man's life in some other way because there's I'm
• 35:13
  further separating him from the one true God.
• 35:16
  They play the long game. They don't care how they get to
• 35:19
  the end of the story, if that means, you know, consoling that
• 35:22
  person for a while, you know, showering them with riches and
• 35:25
  success. And as you said, you know, this
• 35:28
  relationship is so wonderful, but I'm going to have to divorce
• 35:30
  my wife for it or whatever, right?
• 35:33
  Yeah, absolutely they can. They will disguise.
• 35:35
  They're they're liars, deceivers, and they're way
• 35:38
  smarter and more powerful than we are.
• 35:40
  You know, there's probably people listening here, like, OK,
• 35:42
  this is scary. Maybe maybe they have been to a
• 35:45
  psychic once or maybe back when they were younger, they, you
• 35:48
  know, play with tarot cards or, you know, they're listening and
• 35:51
  or maybe they, you know, we're living a hookup lifestyle and
• 35:53
  they're like, OK, shoot, am I? Am I trapped?
• 35:55
  Am I trapped? I've opened myself up for
• 35:57
  demons. What would you say to anyone
• 35:59
  listening who is concerned about their spiritual welfare, but
• 36:02
  they're not sure what to do right?
• 36:04
  What's the answer? OK.
• 36:05
  I think that, well, the answer is always drawing closer to our
• 36:09
  Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and to his Church and to the
• 36:12
  sacraments. So there is nothing more
• 36:14
  powerful on the face of the earth than the sacraments of the
• 36:17
  Catholic Church. So if someone has had a rough
• 36:20
  past hedonic lifestyle, you know, all of the sins of 1's
• 36:25
  youth and they're worried because of what we've just been
• 36:27
  talking about that wow, I might, I might have really opened
• 36:30
  myself up to some bad things in my life.
• 36:33
  Go to confession. That's what it's there for.
• 36:36
  If we're sorry for our sins and we have recourse to the mercy of
• 36:38
  our Savior Jesus and let Him wash us in His precious blood.
• 36:42
  What if they're not Catholic? OK, if they're not Catholic then
• 36:44
  I would say explore Roman Catholicism first, right?
• 36:46
  But but also also ask the Lord to forgive your sins, you know,
• 36:51
  love, the love of God heals all of our wounds, right?
• 36:57
  That we always have access to salvation if we choose it, if we
• 37:01
  ask for it. The Lord wants all men to be
• 37:04
  saved. That's what.
• 37:05
  That's what the Gospel says. I was given a piece of advice by
• 37:08
  a spiritual director once when I was on my spiritual journey.
• 37:10
  And I was, I think, going through the process of becoming
• 37:12
  Catholic. And he's told me the devil's
• 37:14
  like a barking jog that can bite you.
• 37:17
  I mean, he can be very vicious, but he's tied to a fence.
• 37:20
  And so if you get close and put your hand out, yeah, he'll bite,
• 37:23
  He can bite you. But overall, don't worry about
• 37:26
  the yapping because the the devil loves attention.
• 37:29
  The devil loves. He wants, he's jealous of God
• 37:31
  and all his power. And you know, that being said,
• 37:34
  it's good to still know the the realities of the.
• 37:37
  That's right, because that's, that you're, you're absolutely
• 37:39
  right, Lila, that if we, if we approach the chained barking
• 37:44
  dog, we might get bit. That's absolutely true.
• 37:47
  And it's also true that the whole demonic world wants to
• 37:50
  remain unknown and unrecognized. And the devil loves it when we
• 37:54
  don't believe he exists. So there's a kind of quest for
• 37:58
  hiddenness in that. If we can explain everything in
• 38:02
  purely natural terms, No, it's just whatever then that they
• 38:07
  have a, they have a leg up because we're not aware of the
• 38:10
  war that's being waged against us.
• 38:11
  You see what I'm saying? So it might be that you don't
• 38:14
  even know that there's that dog change of the fence.
• 38:18
  So you got to at least acknowledge the dog.
• 38:19
  Which is why this conversation that you're having is a good
• 38:21
  one, I think, for people watching and listening.
• 38:23
  So yeah, we there is a war happening all around us all the
• 38:26
  time. And it's the it's the war for
• 38:28
  our souls and for our eternal life.
• 38:31
  So when you were after this first encounter with this young
• 38:34
  man, you got thrown into the boot camp for how to be an
• 38:36
  exorcist. You had this, you know, exorcist
• 38:38
  in chief that that providentially was there and was
• 38:41
  training you. What did What was the toughest
• 38:44
  case you dealt with? Well, that was a pretty tough
• 38:46
  case. I mean that that was a very
• 38:48
  difficult situation. The one that followed it about a
• 38:52
  year later, I guess, was a very different kind of case of
• 38:56
  beautiful suffering woman from another state whom the
• 39:00
  deliverance ministry team flew in.
• 39:03
  That chief exorcist man thought that it would be the right
• 39:05
  match. There's a, it's a, it's a
• 39:06
  strange world with all kinds of twists and turns.
• 39:09
  But it's often the case that the Lord in his Providence raises up
• 39:13
  certain priests who are particularly skilled at dealing
• 39:17
  with certain kinds of demons or certain sort of cases of
• 39:20
  exorcism. And so this particular priest
• 39:23
  who was at my Abbey in the kind of boot camp, as you said, was
• 39:27
  good at pairing up cases that needed the right sort of
• 39:30
  priestly ministry. And so he sent this other woman
• 39:34
  our way. And that case was not so easy to
• 39:38
  I, I, it wasn't so happily resolved.
• 39:42
  She was someone that it seemed that the Lord was asking to
• 39:44
  suffer at greater length. So every it was a case.
• 39:48
  It was a case of possession. What were the things that you
• 39:50
  were dealing with? Well, her physical ailments were
• 39:55
  practically incapacitating that the she had been struggling with
• 39:59
  this, with this problem in her life for such a long time that
• 40:03
  she was almost immobile. She was, she was frequenting the
• 40:07
  sacraments as best she could. She wanted to be a good woman.
• 40:09
  She was a very good woman, but she was just kind of crippled in
• 40:13
  her body by long years of this spiritual war.
• 40:17
  It was. Tragic to watch and beautiful
• 40:20
  beautiful to watch because she was really thirsting for
• 40:23
  holiness and achieving it. I think you know, it's not
• 40:25
  unusual for someone who's possessed to be a St.
• 40:29
  Wow and and again, this is all God's Providence that somehow he
• 40:33
  knows that that this is going to be for the good of the building
• 40:37
  up of the Kingdom of God. This is again, I sort of lots of
• 40:42
  thoughts just sort of flow and conversations like this Lila.
• 40:45
  But you know, suffering is not a bad thing.
• 40:50
  We know that because we look at the crucifix, right?
• 40:52
  The Lord shows us the example of suffering, the perfect example
• 40:55
  of suffering. There aren't that many.
• 40:59
  I'm trying to, I'm trying to be gentle toward the people who are
• 41:01
  listening who are not Catholic. But there aren't that many
• 41:04
  denominations of Christianity who understand the, the role of
• 41:06
  suffering in the Christian life. And so here's a very extreme
• 41:10
  example of what suffering might look like in the Christian life.
• 41:13
  And that woman is a good case of that.
• 41:15
  So one couple things I want to say just while it's on my mind.
• 41:20
  The rite of exorcist, the major right of exorcism, the way that
• 41:22
  unfolds is that a Bishop in his diocese is the high priest.
• 41:27
  He's the he, he, he has the fullness of the priesthood and
• 41:31
  he shares that with the priests who are in his, under him and
• 41:34
  under his authority. The diocesan priest, the Bishop
• 41:37
  is the chief exorcist in the diocese.
• 41:39
  Usually in this day and age, he delegates to a priest or to the
• 41:44
  possibility of using the right of exorcism.
• 41:48
  And so that's why it requires the permission of the Bishop.
• 41:52
  Demons are legalists. They know all of the truth of
• 41:55
  the faith. They know every theological
• 41:58
  truth perfectly. They know that Jesus is the
• 42:00
  Savior. They know they know everything.
• 42:02
  And they also know that that Jesus Christ instituted A
• 42:06
  hierarchical church governed by the apostles and their
• 42:09
  successors. So they know that the Bishop is
• 42:11
  the one who has the authority in the name of Jesus to cast them
• 42:14
  out. And if the Bishop doesn't give
• 42:16
  another priest that authority, then the the demon will.
• 42:19
  They'll they'll tell you this. You don't have authority to cast
• 42:21
  me out. Wow, have you been told?
• 42:22
  That by a demon. Well, no, because I have the
• 42:24
  authority but but they but. Like got you.
• 42:27
  Yeah, they're, they're legalists.
• 42:28
  They're they're perfect intellects.
• 42:31
  So you have to cross all the TS and dot all cross all the TS and
• 42:35
  dot all the IS. So that said, exorcism is what
• 42:41
  we call a Sacramento. It's like wearing a scapular or
• 42:43
  carrying a rosary or having blessed holy images or blessing
• 42:46
  yourself with holy water. It's not a sacrament.
• 42:50
  Going to confession is way more powerful.
• 42:52
  Receiving the Holy Eucharist is way more powerful than the rite
• 42:55
  of exorcism. Sometimes we need that ritual to
• 42:58
  actually break the ties that the demon has on people's lives, to
• 43:03
  break them officially in the name of the church, the name of
• 43:05
  Jesus through the church to to set that person free.
• 43:10
  In the case of the woman you mentioned, who God is
• 43:14
  permitting, it sounds like was continuing to permit despite
• 43:17
  major rite of exorcism continued possession and she was suffering
• 43:22
  greatly. But it sounds like heroically
• 43:24
  she was suffering with love, offering that up.
• 43:28
  What ended up happening to her? I don't know.
• 43:30
  I don't know. It's often the case.
• 43:33
  It's often the case that these people who find them themselves
• 43:36
  in these very dire situations also have very scattered,
• 43:40
  chaotic lives because very often that's also coupled with some
• 43:44
  serious psychological wound woundedness.
• 43:47
  So that's part of the part of the real art, I would say of, of
• 43:51
  deliverance ministry is sorting out what is psychological, what
• 43:53
  is natural, what it, what can be helped by natural means and
• 43:56
  scientific and medical means and what is actually spiritual.
• 43:59
  That's very difficult. But those two things often go
• 44:02
  together. The, the serious psychological
• 44:04
  woundedness is a, is a fertile ground for demons to be involved
• 44:08
  in people's lives sometimes. And so in this particular
• 44:10
  woman's case, I don't know what happened to her because she sort
• 44:13
  of fell off our radar, you know, not reachable by phone or by
• 44:17
  e-mail or one of those beautiful strugglers that whose life was
• 44:23
  just difficult in every way. So in any sort of population, so
• 44:27
  I think about like San Francisco.
• 44:28
  So I'm from the Bay Area and walking through the streets of
• 44:30
  San Francisco, there's a lot of suffering, homeless on the
• 44:32
  streets, drug addiction, traumas, you know, folks acting
• 44:35
  out, you know, half naked. I mean, really tragic, tragic
• 44:38
  scenes and, you know, humanitarian crisis.
• 44:40
  I believe in the in the city. That's how we're handling it.
• 44:43
  But in those cases, you're, you're clearly seeing a lot of
• 44:45
  mental illness on the streets. How often is that obvious mental
• 44:51
  illness? Also, would you say a case of
• 44:54
  demonic activity? I would say again, I'm, I'm not
• 44:57
  an expert exactly in this and I don't want to, I don't want to
• 45:00
  people to think that I'm, you know, sort of authoritative in
• 45:02
  this opinion that I'm going to give you right now.
• 45:06
  Demons love to capitalize on the weakness of individuals wherever
• 45:09
  they might find them, whether that's through some addictive
• 45:11
  personality or family woundedness or moral weakness.
• 45:16
  In the case of mental illness. Demons love to capitalize on
• 45:19
  that. So they will certainly, I think,
• 45:20
  almost always make that person's struggle worse because they can,
• 45:26
  because they're punks and they hate us.
• 45:29
  So there's a weak suffering person who's psychologically
• 45:33
  wounded. They'll make their life worse.
• 45:35
  And I see that. I see that often as a priest.
• 45:39
  Just a story about that. I was walking onto a psychiatric
• 45:42
  ward to minister to a Catholic who was in who was actually
• 45:48
  locked into the psychiatric ward for a few days.
• 45:52
  And I was taking that person Holy Communion and going to hear
• 45:55
  that person's confession and and sort of minister to them in that
• 45:59
  very serious situation they found themselves.
• 46:01
  So I walked in the psychiatric ward in my habit with a Holy
• 46:03
  Eucharist in a pics, you know, and the response of the other
• 46:09
  people, the other psychiatric patients on the ward was very,
• 46:13
  very interesting. Some I could see immediately
• 46:16
  manifesting demonic activity because a priest walks in with
• 46:20
  the Holy Eucharist. They probably weren't aware that
• 46:23
  that was what was happening to them.
• 46:24
  There's another. How did you tell that it was
• 46:26
  mnemonic activity? Well, sometimes they'll shout at
• 46:27
  me, you know, blasphemies. Get out of my sight, you wicked
• 46:32
  priest. You know, with, with really
• 46:33
  serious language. I mean that kind of thing.
• 46:35
  Abuse, verbal abuse, just on seeing me because this war is
• 46:40
  very, very real and present all the time.
• 46:42
  There was 11 young man on that ward, actually as I was
• 46:44
  ministering to this young man. Of course, on a psychiatric
• 46:46
  ward, nothing is private. We had to sort of put ourselves
• 46:49
  in the corner. But there are people watching it
• 46:50
  because it's a psychiatric ward. So it wasn't like we were the
• 46:54
  two of us, you know, in a private situation.
• 46:56
  This one young man, he was a teenager.
• 46:59
  He kept walking around the room looking and looking and looking.
• 47:03
  I could tell he was hoping for some kind of word of peace from
• 47:08
  the priest who's in there on the ward with the Holy Eucharist.
• 47:10
  He probably didn't know that. And I can see that there's a man
• 47:14
  who probably has some kind of demonic activity in conjunction
• 47:16
  with his psychiatric issues, and he's looking for help, you know,
• 47:21
  So it's. So that's a long way of
• 47:23
  answering your question. I think often there is demonic
• 47:29
  exacerbation of these crises that we see all around us.
• 47:33
  I'm certain of it. It has to be the case.
• 47:35
  What's your advice to someone listening who is wondering, OK,
• 47:40
  I have this in my family or I myself am facing it, you know,
• 47:43
  some mental health issue or some like deep wound or resentment
• 47:47
  that they carry on forgiveness. What's the proper lens to see
• 47:51
  this through? Maybe they think they're
• 47:52
  listening like, OK, I need deliverance ministry.
• 47:55
  I need deliverance ministry. Do all people need some kind of
• 47:58
  deliverance ministry? Would you say?
• 48:00
  What would what would be your general advice?
• 48:02
  That's a good, that's a really good question.
• 48:03
  I think that we all need the sort of deliverance that comes
• 48:07
  from the goth, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.
• 48:09
  We need to be saved from our sins.
• 48:11
  That's deliverance, you know. The ultimate.
• 48:14
  It's the ultimate deliverance we need.
• 48:15
  Salvation is what we need. And I would say that in all of
• 48:20
  those places that you enumerated that kind of clinging to a
• 48:22
  resentment or family woundedness or problems with addiction in
• 48:25
  one's past or one's family history or whatever, yes, that's
• 48:28
  all place that needs deliverance.
• 48:29
  But it probably doesn't need specific deliverance ministry
• 48:32
  from a priest or the, or the deliverance ministry team of a
• 48:36
  diocese. It probably doesn't need that.
• 48:37
  It probably needs a good confession.
• 48:39
  Very often in confession, we priests will also say
• 48:42
  deliverance prayers is let's say someone is confessing regularly
• 48:46
  some addictive behavior that they're trying to shake and
• 48:49
  they're going through all the properties they're, you know, in
• 48:51
  the 12 step program and it is. And they just, they're stuck or
• 48:55
  they're struggling with, I don't know, with adultery and they
• 49:00
  want to, they want to get over this struggle and they have a
• 49:03
  hard time, you know, that sins of the flesh and, or whatever.
• 49:07
  Sometimes we'll pray a deliverance prayer there in the
• 49:09
  confessional to say, if there's a demon associated with this
• 49:11
  particular struggle in your life, we're going to try to,
• 49:14
  we'll ask the Lord to free you from that.
• 49:17
  So there's that kind of, we call that minor exorcism or
• 49:20
  deliverance, which is very common in the Sacramento life of
• 49:23
  the church. But no, I don't think people
• 49:25
  need to be alarmed that I need to call the Bishop or Paul, call
• 49:28
  the the Dawson headquarters, you know, and say you need to say an
• 49:31
  exorcism over me. Meaning you would know.
• 49:34
  If you if it was really possession, you would know.
• 49:37
  That's right. It's not like you're wondering,
• 49:39
  am I possessed? You would know.
• 49:40
  You would know. It would be so bad, you would
• 49:41
  know. That's right.
• 49:42
  You would be desperate. You'd show up at the monaster at
• 49:44
  Saint Abby's. Your life, your life will have
• 49:47
  already come apart completely and your, you know, life is
• 49:49
  basically not functional for you, you.
• 49:52
  Know so so if someone's listening who has Protestant or
• 49:54
  evangelical, we've got a lot of listeners who are and they're
• 49:57
  saying well, they've had experience over in the name of
• 49:59
  Jesus Christ. I bind this evil thought and I
• 50:01
  think Catholics do that can do this too because there's certain
• 50:04
  prayers that you can pray exorcism prayers you can pray as
• 50:07
  a just you know, not as a religious person and people
• 50:11
  listening who are evangelical would say, well, I can the Lord
• 50:15
  I feel has given me maybe they have this own experience in
• 50:17
  their life. I know friends of mine who they
• 50:19
  felt that they were in experiences where there was,
• 50:22
  they thought demonic oppression perhaps, or activity of some
• 50:27
  kind. And by saying the words of, you
• 50:30
  know, Scripture and by calling on the Lord, they felt they were
• 50:33
  able to free themselves from that.
• 50:35
  And there may be even in prayer ministries where they help other
• 50:37
  people and they pray prayers over other people.
• 50:40
  Is that all? How do you see that as a
• 50:42
  Catholic priest? I see that that's the Lord's
• 50:44
  work through His, through his believers.
• 50:47
  Christians are Christians. You know what?
• 50:49
  So even if someone in, in, in from the perspective of a
• 50:52
  Catholic priest, they don't have the fullness of the Sacramento
• 50:55
  order, you know, but they're Christians and they call upon
• 50:59
  the name of the Lord Jesus and he hears their prayers.
• 51:01
  You know, we, we have a lot in common.
• 51:04
  We have a lot in common in a certain respect, a lot more in
• 51:07
  common than we don't have in common.
• 51:08
  That's a great, that's a great consolation, isn't it?
• 51:12
  So yes, of course the prayers of the faithful, the prayers of
• 51:15
  Christian believers are powerful.
• 51:18
  We know that we have that great confidence as believers.
• 51:20
  That's a beautiful thing. And so if we call upon the name
• 51:22
  of the Lord Jesus, if one of your evangelical or Protestant,
• 51:26
  you know, followers is doing that and it's effective in their
• 51:28
  life, that's because Jesus wants it to be effective in their
• 51:30
  life, thanks be to God. Thanks be to God, it's very
• 51:33
  consoling to know that He's available for all of us to call
• 51:36
  on Him. Even if you're not even a
• 51:37
  believer yet and you're saying help me believe, you know the
• 51:40
  Lord, the Lord wants to. Come at the name of Jesus.
• 51:42
  Every knee shall bend under heaven, right?
• 51:48
  Every knee shall bend at the name of Jesus.
• 51:50
  That name is powerful. Words are so powerful.
• 51:54
  So powerful. Names are so powerful.
• 51:57
  It's why we only have a certain small number of the names of the
• 51:59
  angels from scriptures. You know, they're big creatures.
• 52:02
  We don't, we don't deserve to know their names.
• 52:04
  That's an interesting. Michael Rayfield, Gabriel.
• 52:07
  That's an interesting point. So you, you said earlier there's
• 52:09
  2/3 angels, 1/3 demons. Yes.
• 52:12
  And you said that's in Scripture.
• 52:13
  Yeah, that's the Book of Revelation.
• 52:14
  So 1/3 of the angels fell from heaven?
• 52:16
  Yes. So talk to us more about that.
• 52:19
  These angels, what are they doing?
• 52:21
  What are they doing? What are the good angels or the
• 52:24
  fallen angels? Good angels, we'll talk about
• 52:26
  them for a minute. Let's talk about the bad ones
• 52:28
  for a little while. The good angels.
• 52:30
  So when I became Catholic, I discovered that you, the
• 52:33
  Catholic Church taught teaches that you have a guardian Angel,
• 52:36
  that God gives you at least one. And that was really exciting
• 52:39
  thought to learn about this guardian Angel.
• 52:41
  And in Scripture, there's that talk of angels who are
• 52:43
  accompanying, you know, and, and lifting you up and helping you.
• 52:46
  Yes, in the Psalms and yes. Exactly.
• 52:49
  I think in the evangelical and the Protestant world there's
• 52:51
  still a belief in angels to some degree, but there's sort of a
• 52:53
  hesitancy about over developing the belief 'cause they would
• 52:57
  say, oh, it's not scriptural. Our Lord Jesus says in the
• 52:59
  Gospel of Saint Matthew talking about the little children, do
• 53:02
  not scandalize the least of these little ones, for their
• 53:04
  Angel is always looking on the face of the Heavenly Father.
• 53:08
  It's from the words of our Savior.
• 53:09
  So. What does that mean?
• 53:10
  What does it mean? OK.
• 53:12
  What does it mean? So yeah, that's a beautiful
• 53:14
  question. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th
• 53:19
  century developed the theology of angelology, the theology of
• 53:22
  the angels, very extensively. But of course, it's all
• 53:24
  scriptural. And the ancient, the ancient
• 53:26
  Christian commentaries, you know, the ancient fathers of the
• 53:29
  church origin and also Saint John Chrysostom and the Greek
• 53:32
  Fathers and the Latin Fathers, they talked a lot about angels.
• 53:37
  We know that they exist from the Holy Scriptures.
• 53:39
  Obviously, they're all over the Old Testament, all over the Old
• 53:42
  Testament and in the New Testament, right?
• 53:43
  Gabriel the Archangel Gabriel comes and announces the
• 53:46
  Incarnation to our Blessed Mother, right?
• 53:48
  And by the way, love that there is an undercover Angel, yes, and
• 53:52
  in in in the story of Raphael that he's an undercover Angel
• 53:55
  who pretends to be a like kinsman or whatever to basically
• 53:58
  set two people up and. And it's so wonderful.
• 54:00
  Which I, I, I when there was a, you know, the Tobit, Yeah, the
• 54:03
  Tobit, Yeah. I did undercover work, you know,
• 54:05
  in the past to expose abortion clinics and things like that.
• 54:07
  Action still does it. And there was a debate in the in
• 54:09
  the church among some, you know, Catholic theologians about is it
• 54:11
  ethical to do undercover work and represent yourself as
• 54:14
  something you're not for a time to accomplish a certain goal.
• 54:17
  And I would just say, well, what about the Angel?
• 54:19
  Right. Well, I would say, and they're
• 54:20
  angels that can do what they want.
• 54:21
  So I mean. That's that's fair meaning.
• 54:23
  It's meaning Angel. The morality that binds angels
• 54:25
  is different. From the morality or it's often
• 54:28
  the case, sometimes in Scripture, especially in the Old
• 54:30
  Testament, we have examples of things where it seems, it seems
• 54:33
  like, well, that's not an example to follow.
• 54:36
  You know, Abrahams deception of the people in the land he took
• 54:39
  his wife to and said, no, she's my sister.
• 54:41
  There are things that we see that are scriptural, that we
• 54:43
  said, of course, that are not to be.
• 54:44
  But can angels do evil things? Absolutely not.
• 54:47
  Good angels, Yeah. So in that.
• 54:48
  Case they always do God's will perfectly.
• 54:51
  They cannot stray from doing God's will so.
• 54:53
  The, the, the, the debate at that time was is it possible to
• 54:57
  do undercover work representing yourself as something that
• 54:59
  you're not for a period of time, which by the way, is all acting,
• 55:02
  but is that possible to do that morally?
• 55:06
  And I would argue yes. And there were many that argued
• 55:08
  yes. And I thought one example of
• 55:10
  that could be that was that the, was that the Angel did that and
• 55:13
  you know, he wasn't committing evil by doing it.
• 55:15
  It was part of the will of God, certainly the for different
• 55:17
  ends, but it was still a good end.
• 55:19
  The angels certainly can never do anything but God's holy will.
• 55:22
  And it's just to wrap that we don't have to dive into that
• 55:24
  right now, Lila, because that would that would take a little
• 55:26
  bit far astray as far as the morality.
• 55:28
  That would be a moral conversation, which is a very
• 55:29
  interesting one, an important one.
• 55:31
  We it's always true that the ends don't justify the means.
• 55:34
  So the examination there has to be, are those means legitimate
• 55:38
  or are they sinful? And that's the whole question.
• 55:41
  And we can say certainly with the angelic world, there's never
• 55:43
  the possibility of an Angel using a sinful means to achieve
• 55:48
  God's will. We might not understand exactly
• 55:51
  how it works, but we can be certain that they're the the
• 55:55
  means that they choose will always be good means never
• 55:59
  wicked means that if that makes sense, The so the guardian Angel
• 56:03
  question. You know, there there are so
• 56:05
  many of these creatures. There are billions and billions
• 56:07
  of that scriptural language. You know, myriads upon myriad
• 56:10
  serve him. There are billions and billions
• 56:14
  of angels. Saint Padre Pio said that if we
• 56:17
  could see the demons, it would darken the light of the sun.
• 56:20
  If we could see them, it would cloud the sky so completely that
• 56:23
  we would not. The sun would not shine on the
• 56:24
  earth if they were visible and material.
• 56:27
  That's the demons, I mean, so we have this, some amazing kind of
• 56:30
  revelations of the Mystics about this.
• 56:32
  Each of us is assigned an Angel when we're born.
• 56:36
  Every human being, man and woman, of every race at birth.
• 56:39
  Or conception. At at birth, Saint Thomas says
• 56:41
  it's at birth. Yeah, he says that Saint Thomas
• 56:44
  talks about that in the summa. He asked that question.
• 56:46
  And of course, this is not defined by the Church.
• 56:48
  This is just theological reflection.
• 56:50
  But as long as the child is in his mother's womb, it's
• 56:53
  protected by the mother's guardian Angel, which is a
• 56:55
  beautiful thing. And that when the child is born,
• 56:58
  that's when it's guardian Angel is assigned to it.
• 57:00
  And, and then, and what's that angel's job?
• 57:03
  The angel's job is first of all to protect it physically, to
• 57:07
  protect that that child, and to bring it to the saving waters of
• 57:09
  baptism. Every person born after the fall
• 57:12
  of Adam and Eve is born into a state of sin and we need
• 57:16
  salvation. So the angel's job is to try
• 57:20
  with all its might to have the gospel preached to that person
• 57:23
  so they can be saved. Because then then the angel's
• 57:28
  job to protect it and to help it to grow in virtue, and to help
• 57:31
  it to achieve the end for which God created it, that is, heaven,
• 57:34
  will be much easier. So.
• 57:36
  So what did you ask your Angel for help with in the day-to-day?
• 57:39
  Everything, absolutely everything.
• 57:41
  Your Angel never sleeps. They're looking upon the face of
• 57:43
  God. It's sole task is to get you to
• 57:46
  heaven, to help you, to get to heaven, to protect you.
• 57:49
  You can ask your Angel to inspire you with holy thoughts.
• 57:52
  You can ask your Angel to go ahead of you, to prepare that
• 57:55
  conversation, that difficult conversation you have to have
• 57:57
  with your husband or with your children or a business meeting.
• 58:00
  You can send your Angel to console someone who's suffering.
• 58:05
  You can. They want to be involved in our
• 58:07
  lives. They already are.
• 58:09
  And someone listening who again, is maybe not Catholic and
• 58:11
  they're thinking, OK, it sounds, it sounds crazy.
• 58:14
  Freeze. No, of course not.
• 58:15
  But it sounds nice. But you know, I would just ask
• 58:17
  the Lord for that directly. I would just ask the Holy Spirit
• 58:20
  directly to help me with those holy thoughts or to help me in
• 58:22
  the conversation. And this is, you know, the
• 58:24
  conversation I've had with my, you know, Protestant brothers
• 58:27
  and sisters about, well, what's the point of Mary to with her
• 58:30
  intercession when you have the the intercessor of Jesus Christ
• 58:33
  Christ? What's your response to that?
• 58:35
  The role of the Angel versus the Holy Spirit or our Lord?
• 58:38
  Yes, we the Lord loves to use what we call instrumental
• 58:42
  causality. That's a philosophical
• 58:43
  expression. But how is it that you got to
• 58:46
  know about Jesus Christ? Some person probably preach the
• 58:49
  gospel to you, right? Who teaches you who the Lord
• 58:52
  Jesus is? Your mother, your father, a good
• 58:54
  friend, He didn't come and appear to you directly.
• 58:57
  He used that instrument. That person, the Lord loves to
• 59:01
  use instruments to affect his holy will.
• 59:03
  Why? Because he wants to share his
• 59:06
  goodness. The the our Heavenly Father
• 59:09
  created the whole universe. He wants us to be able to share
• 59:12
  in what it feels like to pour out goodness upon one another.
• 59:16
  So he loves to use instruments, the Saints in heaven, the Saints
• 59:19
  on earth, the angels. He shares his creative goodness
• 59:25
  through these instrumental, these instruments, these
• 59:27
  instrumental causes, so that way we can all become his hands and
• 59:33
  his feet and his face and his voice.
• 59:35
  Does that make sense? Of course, beautiful.
• 59:37
  We should talk to the the God the Father and we should talk to
• 59:40
  Jesus his Son, of course. And we should also ask those
• 59:43
  instruments that He's put in our life, who are already in heaven
• 59:46
  and who are here on earth to be our intercessors, because we're
• 59:50
  all collaborating together in this beautiful work.
• 59:52
  Right, so beautiful. And it's the question of why did
• 59:55
  God bother creating humanity right out of generosity and
• 59:58
  love, right? He loves love.
• 59:59
  He doesn't need us. He doesn't need us for his own
• 1:00:02
  happiness or contentment. No, he's perfect.
• 1:00:04
  Perfect within himself. He didn't need anything outside
• 1:00:07
  of himself. So I've heard some people say I
• 1:00:09
  have multiple guardian angels, that they would say that about
• 1:00:11
  themselves. One person, a few people have
• 1:00:13
  said that to me. You have multiple.
• 1:00:15
  I don't know how they would know this.
• 1:00:16
  You have multiple guardian angels.
• 1:00:17
  Is it possible for someone to have multiple guardian angels?
• 1:00:20
  So the common opinion amongst the theologians of our church is
• 1:00:23
  that each human being gets 11 is more than sufficient.
• 1:00:28
  It really is, you know, and. Don't be greedy now.
• 1:00:32
  It's more than. Sufficient.
• 1:00:32
  It's funny, we don't properly utilize the one, right?
• 1:00:35
  So can you. Possibly utilize more than one.
• 1:00:38
  Also some common opinion that if there's some office that a
• 1:00:41
  person has that requires a greater protection or a greater,
• 1:00:47
  yeah, protection, then they'll have another priest assigned.
• 1:00:50
  So it's common opinion that a priest at his ordination is
• 1:00:51
  given another, another Angel or a Bishop in his diocese.
• 1:00:55
  Or we might imagine. Well, certainly it's true that
• 1:00:59
  each country has a guardian Angel.
• 1:01:01
  We even get that from the scriptures.
• 1:01:02
  That's I was going to the. Angel of the Churches and.
• 1:01:04
  About countries and cities. Yes, countries and cities have
• 1:01:07
  guardian guardian angels because these are these are arrangements
• 1:01:12
  of of humanity that need a special kind of protection,
• 1:01:16
  unique from just the protection of each individual.
• 1:01:18
  How big does a city need to be to get an Angel?
• 1:01:20
  I don't think it needs to be big at all.
• 1:01:21
  Can it be like a settlement of five families?
• 1:01:24
  Perhaps these are these are mysteries that we don't really
• 1:01:26
  penetrate. You know, it's not like God has
• 1:01:28
  not revealed these answers to us.
• 1:01:30
  We'll see that one day. We do know that the children in
• 1:01:33
  Fatima, the children who received the apparitions of Our
• 1:01:35
  Lady in Fatima a little over 100 years ago before Our Lady
• 1:01:38
  appeared to them, the Angel of Portugal appeared to them a year
• 1:01:43
  before to prepare them to receive these beautiful
• 1:01:45
  apparitions of the message of the Blessed Mother and Fatima.
• 1:01:47
  So the Angel of Portugal showed up there for those kids to, to
• 1:01:50
  teach them how to pray and to show them what was about to
• 1:01:54
  happen. So we do see even in in modern
• 1:01:57
  again, these are not scriptural revelations.
• 1:01:59
  This is these are these are church approved, you know, extra
• 1:02:04
  revelation outside of the ordinary, the ordinary kind of
• 1:02:07
  course of revelation. So.
• 1:02:09
  So back to demons for a minute. I wanted to ask you about some
• 1:02:14
  of the craziness we see in the culture today, because a lot of
• 1:02:17
  people who listen to the podcast care deeply about that or
• 1:02:20
  they're concerned about it. And you know, we talked about
• 1:02:22
  the sexual revolution in the last few decades and just the
• 1:02:26
  manifestation of their the proliferation of pornography,
• 1:02:30
  abortion, 2500 abortions every day in this country, the divorce
• 1:02:34
  rate. You know, more people are born
• 1:02:37
  to a single parent now today, non intact families what and
• 1:02:42
  sexual abuse rates have risen mental health and mental illness
• 1:02:45
  has risen all of these things. What does that mean when it
• 1:02:49
  comes to demonic? They're all over it, Lila,
• 1:02:51
  they're all over it. So I have AI have a couple
• 1:02:52
  things to say about that. One, just about abortion.
• 1:02:55
  You know, abortion is the sacrament of the diabolical
• 1:02:58
  underworld. What does that mean?
• 1:03:01
  It's like the the demon, the demonic world loves abortion
• 1:03:05
  because this is like such an offense to God.
• 1:03:08
  And it's an innocent life sacrificed on the altar of human
• 1:03:13
  hedonic pleasure. And it's just, it's such an it's
• 1:03:17
  such an offense, isn't it? And and you see that in the
• 1:03:21
  really wicked corners of our political climate, how people
• 1:03:25
  cling to that cause like a religion.
• 1:03:29
  It's the sacrament of their false religion.
• 1:03:32
  Isn't that sick? And the way they speak about it
• 1:03:35
  is with that same kind of religious devotion, diabolical
• 1:03:38
  religious devotion. It's just the sacrament of the
• 1:03:41
  demonic underworld. It's their only sacrament.
• 1:03:44
  They have to have it. So when it comes to a girl
• 1:03:47
  facing an unplanned pregnancy, she sometimes just felt with,
• 1:03:51
  she faces this wave of fear, insecurity, anxiety, all of
• 1:03:58
  these things that and temptation to have an abortion.
• 1:04:01
  You think the demonic is at play there in the temptation?
• 1:04:04
  Absolutely in the temptation because because that that is
• 1:04:08
  feeding the demonic religion all around us.
• 1:04:12
  So I, that's, I want to say that first, but then I want to back
• 1:04:14
  up a minute because I've learned from the other exorcist in the
• 1:04:17
  church, especially in this day and age.
• 1:04:20
  As I said, you know, I, for those, those early years of my
• 1:04:23
  priesthood, I was doing more of that.
• 1:04:24
  It takes a lot of time. It's, it's a, it's a arduous and
• 1:04:28
  beautiful ministry, but people's lives are chaotic and, and, and
• 1:04:32
  the priest's life becomes very chaotic and the, the demonic
• 1:04:36
  pushback is real. So depending on what our other
• 1:04:40
  assignments and what other ministries the Lord is asking us
• 1:04:42
  to do, sometimes we can do more of that, sometimes less.
• 1:04:44
  So that's happened to me periodically that I've dipped
• 1:04:48
  back into this world. But at the moment I'm not doing
• 1:04:50
  this ministry other than minor exorcisms and kind of, you know,
• 1:04:53
  deliverance ministry with some of my confreres in a more
• 1:04:57
  confined sort of a way. But I've learned from the other
• 1:05:00
  exorcist in the church about when they're, what they learn
• 1:05:05
  from the demons who speak back to them in the, in this
• 1:05:07
  ministry, because you're talking to real personalities who are
• 1:05:10
  talking through these people and, and they're liars and
• 1:05:13
  they're deceivers. But there's a, there's a, a kind
• 1:05:15
  of a dance that happens where the person who is possessed,
• 1:05:21
  their personality has to be separated from the demonic
• 1:05:23
  personality. And then that demonic
• 1:05:25
  personality is cast out of them through the ministry of the
• 1:05:27
  church and through the the power of Jesus Christ.
• 1:05:31
  And while that's happening, it's a whole conversation and a real
• 1:05:36
  wrestling match. In that conversation, that
• 1:05:39
  wrestling match, we learn a lot about some of the strategies of
• 1:05:41
  the demonic in this day and age. So there there are.
• 1:05:47
  And again, your product, your Protestant evangelical listeners
• 1:05:50
  and and followers might find this a little bit strange.
• 1:05:53
  It's certainly much of what I'm about to say is not a scriptural
• 1:05:57
  kind of a revelation. So they don't have to see it as
• 1:05:59
  that. And we don't think of it as such
• 1:06:01
  either. We do know the names of some
• 1:06:05
  demonic forces. Leviathan or Legion, those are
• 1:06:10
  those are biblical names that we hear that's that have demonic
• 1:06:14
  Satan, you know, which is the the stumbling block.
• 1:06:17
  That's what that word means, a stumbling block.
• 1:06:20
  So we have some names, but we don't have a lot of demonic
• 1:06:22
  names. And one of the things the
• 1:06:23
  exorcist has to do is get the name of the demon because of
• 1:06:26
  that authority question. You name your children, you and
• 1:06:29
  your husband name your children because you have authority over
• 1:06:32
  them as their parents. Adam named all of the creatures
• 1:06:35
  in the garden because he and and Eve had authority over them.
• 1:06:39
  God gave them that authority. When the exorcist demands the
• 1:06:43
  name of the demon, it's so that he can exercise his priest the
• 1:06:45
  authority, authority of Jesus Christ over the demons.
• 1:06:47
  So we have these names of what we've understood to be kind of
• 1:06:50
  the five generals of the underworld, sort of those who
• 1:06:53
  are most, those demons that are most closely associated with
• 1:06:56
  Lucifer and are just like the angels are arranged in a
• 1:07:01
  hierarchy. The demons are arranged in a
• 1:07:03
  hierarchy as well, subservient to one another and so forth.
• 1:07:05
  They ape everything that's good. They mimic and ape everything
• 1:07:09
  that's good, like the sacraments, like the fact that
• 1:07:12
  abortion is the sacrament of this world.
• 1:07:16
  So with the sexual revolution, the demon Baile, that's one of
• 1:07:19
  the demons we know about the that ancient awful God from the
• 1:07:23
  Old Testament, that was the work of Bail, which was about sexual
• 1:07:28
  promiscuity, fornication, the severing of all of these
• 1:07:32
  important family ties like marriage.
• 1:07:35
  So that sexual promiscuity and the whole sexual revolution that
• 1:07:39
  we saw in this country in the 60s was the work of Bail and his
• 1:07:42
  minions, very successful in that, you know, with with all of
• 1:07:46
  the divorcing of human intimacy from the act of procreation.
• 1:07:52
  So that's artificial contraception, the no fault
• 1:07:56
  divorce, all of these things. And and that was to pave the way
• 1:08:02
  for then the next demons in this of these generals who could come
• 1:08:04
  and do their work as MO Deus. That's a biblical name who is
• 1:08:10
  the demon of male homosexuality. And so that's.
• 1:08:15
  Not that's not politically correct to talk about.
• 1:08:18
  No, of course it's not. But it's true.
• 1:08:20
  Because if we do what is, what is human intimacy for?
• 1:08:24
  It's for the procreation of children between one man and one
• 1:08:27
  woman. God has blessed that with a,
• 1:08:29
  with a covenant that we call holy matrimony, right?
• 1:08:32
  That's what human sexuality is for and for the intimacy of the
• 1:08:36
  spouses, but especially for procreation.
• 1:08:40
  So it has to at least be open to the procreation of children,
• 1:08:43
  even if that's not what's going to happen because of infertility
• 1:08:46
  or all kinds of things. So male homosexuality was the
• 1:08:50
  work of Asmodeus run rampant in our culture and follows upon as
• 1:08:53
  you can see if if human sexuality and promiscuity
• 1:08:58
  degenerates, then you can open the world to male homosexuality.
• 1:09:03
  Following surely upon that is Leviathan, the demon Leviathan,
• 1:09:06
  who is the the demon of female homosexuality of that kind of
• 1:09:10
  masculine slant, followed quickly by Lilith the the the
• 1:09:16
  demon of female female homosexuality of the more kind
• 1:09:19
  of seductive femme fatale sort followed quickly as we've seen
• 1:09:25
  so much by Bohemet the demon of abortion.
• 1:09:34
  Because once all of that human sexuality has completely
• 1:09:36
  generated, what's the end in view?
• 1:09:39
  The abortion of God's that the killing of God's most innocent
• 1:09:44
  and weakest and most Beautiful Creatures.
• 1:09:48
  And we know these names because. We know these.
• 1:09:50
  Have actually heard the devil the demons admit.
• 1:09:53
  Yes, that. They are that they are, or
• 1:09:56
  they're commanded by that general demon.
• 1:09:58
  One or the other? Wow, one or the other?
• 1:10:02
  So what is the solution to this? I mean, the sexual revolution
• 1:10:06
  has created so much havoc. I I work in education primarily
• 1:10:10
  and trying to inspire the good through, you know, podcasts.
• 1:10:13
  It's one of those projects and help people learn how to heal
• 1:10:16
  from wounds and learn what the truth is about relationships and
• 1:10:18
  all this stuff. But I mean, it's a spiritual.
• 1:10:21
  Warfare. It's spiritual warfare,
• 1:10:22
  absolutely. Not just intellectual or
• 1:10:24
  emotional, but this spiritual. Yes, that's absolutely true.
• 1:10:28
  It's absolutely true. It's spiritual warfare.
• 1:10:31
  And, and the more we can, I think the more we can
• 1:10:34
  incorporate into our political activism and our work on the
• 1:10:40
  natural level of just building up family life and community and
• 1:10:42
  relationships, healthy relationships, all of these
• 1:10:44
  things that you're you and your podcast are striving for, right?
• 1:10:48
  Building up the Kingdom of God in all of these ways.
• 1:10:51
  If we couple that with first of all, knowledge about the
• 1:10:54
  spiritual warfare and then prayer against it, and a real
• 1:10:56
  kind of engaging in that war to the degree that our Lord asks us
• 1:11:01
  to you, we can when Christ is already victorious.
• 1:11:05
  I mean, that's the good news of the gospel, isn't it?
• 1:11:08
  So looking at the sexual revolution over the last few
• 1:11:10
  decades, a lot of people I've talked to are just feeling kind
• 1:11:13
  of hopeless about the state of things.
• 1:11:15
  You know, we're in California. It's especially dark here.
• 1:11:18
  Or do you think they're, by the way, more demons in California
• 1:11:21
  than in other states? I think so only because there
• 1:11:24
  any any place where you see that degeneration and all the ways
• 1:11:27
  that we see the culture degenerate politically and
• 1:11:29
  otherwise. Of course there's going to be
• 1:11:31
  more demons involved. It's hard to miss them if you
• 1:11:34
  walk on the streets of any downtown area with the zombies
• 1:11:38
  of the drug addiction homeless problem, right?
• 1:11:41
  And you see, OK, these, these poor people, it's not their
• 1:11:43
  fault in a way. Maybe it was at some point, I
• 1:11:45
  don't know. But you think, gosh, it feels
• 1:11:48
  like this place is crawling with demons.
• 1:11:50
  So what I'm hopeful about is that, yes, demons I think helped
• 1:11:55
  initiate and tempt and create some of this destruction and
• 1:11:58
  free will, human beings choosing to go down the path because the
• 1:12:01
  demon can't force you to do anything.
• 1:12:02
  You got to choose it in the end. So, and the good thing is like
• 1:12:05
  the girl who's experiencing abortion temptation, like there
• 1:12:07
  can be her Angel encouraging her or God sending her angels, you
• 1:12:12
  know, human beings like an Angel to encourage her.
• 1:12:14
  And they can always choose life like that.
• 1:12:16
  That's always the option. What do you think is going to
• 1:12:19
  happen though in the next decade or two culturally if the people
• 1:12:24
  of God get get activated spiritually and in every other
• 1:12:28
  way? Well, I think that, you know, we
• 1:12:31
  see, I don't know how well I live in a monastery, Lila.
• 1:12:34
  So my perspective on it is something of an outsider's
• 1:12:36
  perspective into the culture. Well, that's a good perspective.
• 1:12:39
  I hope so. I hope so.
• 1:12:41
  It seems like the battle lines are being drawn more clearly.
• 1:12:44
  Maybe in the 1960s or in the 1970s, maybe it wasn't so
• 1:12:47
  obvious who was, who was at work, because it's such such a
• 1:12:52
  gradual degeneration of the culture in those decades, right?
• 1:12:55
  It's like a little by little, it's the demons play the long
• 1:12:58
  game, just as the the kind of wicked people in the political
• 1:13:02
  order play the long game. As we see more clearly what's
• 1:13:06
  dark and what's light, I think that helps us in a way to have
• 1:13:10
  the confidence to lean into where we can be victorious.
• 1:13:13
  Like the overturning of Roe V Wade, that was that was a
• 1:13:16
  triumph that most people were not expecting, don't you think?
• 1:13:20
  Yeah, of course. It was.
• 1:13:21
  It was. So surprised.
• 1:13:22
  So surprised, it was such a happy surprise, it happened.
• 1:13:25
  And so I think to see that as well, maybe it took a kind of
• 1:13:29
  division of the camps so that that victory could be won.
• 1:13:34
  And it seems like the more your followers and, and our followers
• 1:13:40
  at the Abbey too, you know, people who are surrounding those
• 1:13:43
  Points of Light, the, you know, great Catholic or Christian or
• 1:13:47
  just positive broadcasting, you know, and, and the digital
• 1:13:51
  platforms like us or monasteries or churches, so forth.
• 1:13:55
  The more people rally around those and find the strength they
• 1:13:58
  need and then take action in their life.
• 1:14:00
  You know, I'm going to raise my family in the faith or I'm going
• 1:14:03
  to really be mindful about my, how I raise my children, right?
• 1:14:08
  And that might involve public schools, it might not whatever.
• 1:14:09
  But we're still going to be, we're going to be conscious,
• 1:14:13
  very conscientious about how we fight the battle so that we can
• 1:14:17
  keep pushing at least my family or my parish or my church
• 1:14:21
  community toward that victory line, even if we watch the dark
• 1:14:25
  side falling further and further away.
• 1:14:28
  I don't know. I think that there's who was I
• 1:14:32
  had a friend once who said, you know, it's going to get worse
• 1:14:35
  before it gets worse, you know, so so but isn't.
• 1:14:39
  It already bad. It's already bad.
• 1:14:41
  I hear that a lot of people say it's going to get worse before
• 1:14:44
  it gets better. Or, you know, Rome, the Roman
• 1:14:46
  civilization fell. Civilizations have fallen.
• 1:14:48
  Yes, You know, we're a couple few 100 years into the American
• 1:14:50
  Express. It's been a great run.
• 1:14:52
  It's. Been a great one.
• 1:14:52
  It's going to fall, but the good news is some of us might survive
• 1:14:55
  and we can build something on the rubble.
• 1:14:56
  Yes, and I hear that and yes, of course that's possible.
• 1:14:59
  Anything's possible. But I think first of all, we're
• 1:15:03
  not fated to that. There's no fate to the
• 1:15:05
  civilization falling. Except in the big.
• 1:15:07
  In the big big. Picture in the big big picture.
• 1:15:09
  Which is what we read about. We know that we know that there
• 1:15:12
  will be the the final persecution.
• 1:15:13
  We know that the you know the and and we also know that Christ
• 1:15:16
  will be victorious in the end. Now people often ask us priest,
• 1:15:19
  you know, are we living in that? I don't think so.
• 1:15:21
  It doesn't sure doesn't look like like it to me yet.
• 1:15:23
  I don't think these are these are the end times that we read
• 1:15:25
  about in Revelation. So you think those end times
• 1:15:28
  will very practically speaking, be tremendously difficult?
• 1:15:32
  It's. More than it is today?
• 1:15:34
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 1:15:35
  What would that look like? I mean, that would look like
• 1:15:37
  everything that the scriptures say, you know, the rocks falling
• 1:15:40
  fair, the rocks falling down upon our heads and you know, you
• 1:15:42
  know. Is that an asteroid hitting the
• 1:15:44
  No? Maybe it is, Possibly we're not
• 1:15:46
  fully. Sure.
• 1:15:47
  But I I that all that said, and what's?
• 1:15:50
  The period of time, by the way, end times cause a lot of people,
• 1:15:52
  do they think we're in the end times or they think we're about
• 1:15:54
  to be in the end times. The signs are here.
• 1:15:55
  We've been in the end times since Christ ascended into
• 1:15:58
  heaven. We're in the last age.
• 1:16:00
  We're living out. We're living out his final
• 1:16:02
  victory. We have been for almost, well,
• 1:16:05
  almost 2000 years now. These are the end times.
• 1:16:08
  They're always the end times. But when are they the end end
• 1:16:11
  times and how long is that end end time period?
• 1:16:15
  Yeah. So that's again, that's that's
• 1:16:16
  something that's given to us to know and that's what even the
• 1:16:20
  scriptures. Say and so it could be a day, it
• 1:16:22
  could be a day, a day of just total havoc.
• 1:16:24
  I don't think so. That's not really what the
• 1:16:26
  that's not what the Fathers of the Church say about it.
• 1:16:28
  But we don't know with that. That's the point is that we are
• 1:16:31
  not given to know that. And the Scriptures make that
• 1:16:34
  clear to you that we are. We don't know when the Son of
• 1:16:36
  Man will come. That's what the Scriptures say.
• 1:16:39
  So we don't, we don't, we can't predict that and we shouldn't
• 1:16:42
  presume to try. But I do think it's helpful for
• 1:16:45
  all of us believers of all the denominations to realize that
• 1:16:49
  that we are working out Christ's final victory from the time he
• 1:16:53
  ascended into heaven until he comes again in glory, whenever
• 1:16:56
  that's going to be later today or tomorrow or another 1000
• 1:17:00
  years from now. That's, I find that tremendously
• 1:17:03
  hopeful, to be honest, because what that tells me is that
• 1:17:07
  however we feel like we're struggling or however we worry
• 1:17:10
  that we might be struggling more, it's always been like that
• 1:17:14
  for the church since the time of the apostles.
• 1:17:18
  Well. I think about the apostles and
• 1:17:20
  what they suffered. I mean the martyrdoms.
• 1:17:23
  And every single one. Like having to hide the like
• 1:17:26
  secretly, you know, the catacombs and you know,
• 1:17:29
  Eucharist and the Church of the, you know, hiding it from the
• 1:17:31
  Romans and just what they endured compared to most
• 1:17:35
  Christians in the West today. Clearly there's tremendous
• 1:17:38
  Christian persecution outside of the West.
• 1:17:40
  But most of the audience here is Western, and we're doing we're
• 1:17:42
  so unpersecuted. Yes, I mean, we definitely,
• 1:17:46
  we're, we're, we're seeing more persecution now than we ever
• 1:17:48
  have before in the West and certainly in our country, you
• 1:17:51
  know, politically and otherwise, that's true.
• 1:17:54
  But compared to my goodness, the Coptic Church in Egypt's from
• 1:17:58
  the time of Saint Mark until today, we've got it pretty good.
• 1:18:02
  We can go to church, we can access the sacraments, we can
• 1:18:05
  worship God freely for the most part.
• 1:18:08
  We're very, very fortunate, aren't we?
• 1:18:09
  It's that perspective is everything, isn't it?
• 1:18:11
  My mother used to tell me when we were little children and, you
• 1:18:15
  know, I mean, like our little children, Catholic children or
• 1:18:17
  Protestant children, we all resist going to church on Sunday
• 1:18:19
  sometimes, right? And one of one of my mother's
• 1:18:23
  ploys to get us to come into compliance and to be grateful,
• 1:18:27
  she'd say, well, you know, there are parts of the world right now
• 1:18:29
  where there are Catholics who can't go to Mass even if they
• 1:18:31
  want to. She always said China, but
• 1:18:33
  because, you know, under Communist China there, she knew
• 1:18:35
  that there were Catholics there who didn't have priests and they
• 1:18:37
  couldn't go to Mass. So I think that perspective that
• 1:18:41
  you just brought up, which is look at how good we have it and
• 1:18:44
  be grateful to God for that. It's awesome.
• 1:18:47
  So father, this is so fascinating.
• 1:18:49
  I'm sure people listening, there's lots more questions
• 1:18:51
  coming in, so encourage folks to put them in the comments.
• 1:18:53
  And I don't know, can St. Michael's Abbey YouTube page
• 1:18:56
  come and talk to people or check out your YouTube page to learn
• 1:18:59
  more about everything. But a few more practical
• 1:19:01
  questions before we wrap up here for people listening.
• 1:19:03
  So in the spiritual life and facing vices and trying to grow
• 1:19:09
  in virtue, how does some, how does one navigate what is or
• 1:19:14
  what is sort of some guidelines for people to know?
• 1:19:16
  OK, this is where I'm being tempted by an external force.
• 1:19:20
  You know, the, the, I, I hear people say, oh, I'm getting
• 1:19:23
  really spiritual attacks. You know, I'm getting all these
• 1:19:25
  spiritual attacks. You know, my spouse is more
• 1:19:28
  angry at me today or things are rougher today.
• 1:19:30
  And it's because I'm doing this good work over here.
• 1:19:32
  I hear this a lot from some faithful Catholics or faithful
• 1:19:34
  people. Is there some rules of the road
• 1:19:38
  for how to discern what 1 is dealing with in one's life and
• 1:19:41
  to understand what is that? What are the forces at play?
• 1:19:43
  Because a lot of the times I think it could just be your own
• 1:19:46
  weakness, could just be your spouse had a bad day.
• 1:19:49
  You know, don't just go right to this is a spiritual attack.
• 1:19:52
  Yes, spiritual warfare is real. But you know, I I think there
• 1:19:56
  can be some harm sometimes in over spiritualizing.
• 1:19:59
  I couldn't agree with you more Lila.
• 1:20:01
  I think that there is harm in over spiritualizing everything.
• 1:20:05
  It's true that the demons and the angels are involved in all
• 1:20:09
  of those things that you just said in God's almighty
• 1:20:12
  Providence. So it might be that there is a
• 1:20:14
  correlation providentially between your your spouse picking
• 1:20:16
  at you or being more irritable because of the good work you're
• 1:20:19
  doing over here, whatever that might be true.
• 1:20:22
  Our response to that as Christians is always going to be
• 1:20:25
  the same and that is that I need to love my spouse and I need to
• 1:20:29
  do what's right and good according to God, God's will as
• 1:20:32
  he manifested to me. I'm going to respond as a
• 1:20:35
  believing as a believer. Anyway, sometimes if we over
• 1:20:40
  interpret our life in merely spiritual terms, then things
• 1:20:45
  start to feel and get kind of weird.
• 1:20:48
  You know, our life as Christians is not supposed to be weird.
• 1:20:52
  It's supposed to be like 11 in the dew, right?
• 1:20:55
  Or like the light on the hill, Or like the seed that grows into
• 1:20:59
  the huge, the huge plant right where we're meant to be, where
• 1:21:04
  we're meant to live a life that is transformed by God's grace,
• 1:21:08
  not not taken out of the natural world and made something like a
• 1:21:13
  bobble on a shelf. And if we over spiritualize
• 1:21:17
  everything that happens to us, sometimes life can feel like
• 1:21:19
  it's a bobble on a shelf and not a real life that we have to
• 1:21:22
  live, don't you think? Yeah.
• 1:21:24
  And but then also I think how do you avoid under spiritual?
• 1:21:27
  Yes, right. So that's.
• 1:21:28
  Because there's some people who say like, oh, I've never been
• 1:21:30
  tempted by the devil. It's just my, my own free will
• 1:21:33
  and my own weaknesses. So yeah, I'm sure some people
• 1:21:36
  face it, but that's not mine. And also, even if it was
• 1:21:39
  happening, why does it matter whether or not I know it was the
• 1:21:41
  devil? The temptation feels the same
• 1:21:43
  and I have to have the same response, which is to reject the
• 1:21:45
  temptation. Right.
• 1:21:46
  I think that sometimes then in that case, that excess on the
• 1:21:49
  other direction could make it so that people really stop praying
• 1:21:53
  because they're they're interpreting all of their life
• 1:21:55
  in such natural and such a natural way that they don't,
• 1:21:59
  they don't remember to bring in the supernatural and have
• 1:22:01
  recourse to prayer or to or to interpret something in a
• 1:22:05
  positive way that says, OK, well, even if I'm struggling
• 1:22:08
  right now for whatever reason, or, you know, it seems like this
• 1:22:11
  week's been really, really bad or met with a lot of hardship or
• 1:22:14
  a lot of even internal family strife.
• 1:22:18
  Having the right spiritual lens on that says that, OK, I can
• 1:22:21
  persevere through that because I know that this is part of the
• 1:22:25
  world that my Savior has given to me to endure this week.
• 1:22:28
  So so I would say, like in all things, the virtue is in the
• 1:22:32
  mean. And if we're excessive in one
• 1:22:34
  way or the other, then we're probably going to miss the boat.
• 1:22:36
  But if we can have that moderate middle Rd. of of not over
• 1:22:41
  spiritualizing and also not over naturalizing the Christian life,
• 1:22:45
  then we're probably going to be on the right path and be
• 1:22:48
  peaceful. That's the whole point, right?
• 1:22:49
  And you said, how do I discern? So much of discernment in the
• 1:22:53
  Christian life is about restoring, looking for and
• 1:22:57
  restoring, if we've lost it, an interior sense of peace.
• 1:23:00
  And I think that that's a good way to discern what's happening.
• 1:23:03
  Am I at peace with that thought or with that interpretation?
• 1:23:07
  Or how can I pray or look at my life in such a way that I can
• 1:23:12
  restore that peace if I've lost it?
• 1:23:14
  And that's a that'll help us keep it.
• 1:23:15
  Keep on that middle, that middle path, which is that narrow Rd.
• 1:23:18
  that our Lord talks about. Any tools or tips for how to
• 1:23:21
  restore interior peace or maintain searching for and
• 1:23:26
  maintaining interior peace? Jacques Philippe.
• 1:23:28
  Great book, read that one. You've meant, you mentioned
• 1:23:31
  earlier in this conversation, Lila, the name of Jesus and your
• 1:23:35
  Protestant evangelical friends calling upon the name of Jesus.
• 1:23:38
  That's such a powerful way to maintain and or restore peace is
• 1:23:42
  having recourse to holy thoughts and holy things and holy words
• 1:23:46
  for us also for the Catholic, for us Catholics, you know,
• 1:23:49
  calling upon the name of Mary, calling upon our Lord's name.
• 1:23:52
  So those brief prayers that bring us back into focus.
• 1:23:57
  Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a Sinner or Jesus,
• 1:24:01
  Mary and Joseph, we love you save souls.
• 1:24:03
  You know that that kind of that those brief prayers are such a
• 1:24:07
  great way. It keeps us as people of prayer,
• 1:24:10
  continuous prayer, which is what the Lord says pray always right.
• 1:24:13
  I I have one of the other suggestions.
• 1:24:15
  This is what also by way of just a little bit advertisement.
• 1:24:17
  So please do advertisement for your work and for our work at
• 1:24:21
  the Abbey and filling yourself with good content, listening to
• 1:24:27
  great podcasts, watching great video production.
• 1:24:30
  You know, you're, you're doing a, a hero's job of building out
• 1:24:34
  your platform, The Abbott Circle at the Abbey, the Abbott Circle
• 1:24:38
  and the the soon to be launched Evermote Institute.
• 1:24:40
  You know we're trying to reclaim the digital space for Christ,
• 1:24:43
  right? I love that.
• 1:24:44
  And, and we all need to do that, lay folks like you and the great
• 1:24:48
  ways that you're doing it, religious and consecrated people
• 1:24:51
  and priests like us. We're reclaiming areas of our
• 1:24:55
  life, areas of the culture for of Jesus Christ.
• 1:24:57
  And I think your friends and followers and listeners can do
• 1:25:00
  that too. At work, at home, You know, not
• 1:25:03
  everybody has to be a podcaster or a digital content producer
• 1:25:06
  like you are in like I am now, right?
• 1:25:08
  But we can recapture some of the ground that the demons have
• 1:25:13
  stolen from us. Amen.
• 1:25:15
  OK, So to wrap us up, how do you fill your cup, especially when
• 1:25:19
  you've worked as an exorcist and in your ministry?
• 1:25:21
  You just have a lot of demands on your time, but what are some
• 1:25:24
  ways that you restore yourself? In the.
• 1:25:27
  Middle of the spiritual. Battle the Liturgy of the Hours
• 1:25:29
  so that the Divine Office of the Church.
• 1:25:31
  My job as a priest canons regular, the kind of priest that
• 1:25:33
  I am with my confreres. Our job is to pray 7 times a day
• 1:25:38
  the Psalms of David. We go to the Church, we sing
• 1:25:40
  Gregory Enchant and we pray the scriptures.
• 1:25:43
  That is how I fill my cup. I I celebrate the sacraments.
• 1:25:48
  I celebrate the holy sacrifice of the Mass every day.
• 1:25:50
  I lift up the Lord saving chalice and call upon the name
• 1:25:53
  of the Lord. You know that these this life
• 1:25:57
  that our Savior has given us in the church that he instituted is
• 1:26:02
  filled with everything we need. So that's how I fill up I I love
• 1:26:08
  praying the divine Office with my community.
• 1:26:10
  I would, I would not be able to, I would not live with.
• 1:26:13
  I could not live without it. So so praying the scriptures
• 1:26:16
  essentially. Beautiful well my brother Paul
• 1:26:19
  Rose has singed the hours, which is allowing the lay people to
• 1:26:23
  join in some of the prayers of the daily prayers, the vespers
• 1:26:28
  and lots morning prayers and evening prayer.
• 1:26:32
  So I I'll, I'll link that for people later as well, but.
• 1:26:34
  Good. And of course.
• 1:26:35
  And then, and then just because I'm such a devotee of the
• 1:26:39
  Blessed Virgin Mary. And that's part of our life as
• 1:26:41
  Norbertines, the Holy, the Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin
• 1:26:43
  Mary are some of the centerpieces of our
• 1:26:44
  spirituality. The Holy Rosary is it's, it's
• 1:26:49
  like a lifeline. The Holy Rosary is like a
• 1:26:51
  lifeline of continuous prayer. So that's, that's another I, I,
• 1:26:55
  I, I would be a miss. Not to mention the role of
• 1:27:00
  Blessed Virgin Mary in the life of the Christian believer.
• 1:27:03
  So. Well, and we look, we were
• 1:27:05
  talking about the sexual revolution and these demonic
• 1:27:07
  presences and forces, Lilith and these evil, you know, the
• 1:27:11
  destruction of the child, destruction of marriage, the
• 1:27:14
  destruction of human sexuality. And what better model as a
• 1:27:18
  response than the Blessed Mother who said yes to life, who is
• 1:27:22
  generously given to us as a Mother who's perfectly pure and
• 1:27:26
  good? And such a spouse.
• 1:27:28
  What a what? A what?
• 1:27:29
  What a marriage that was, huh? Wow, that's another podcast,
• 1:27:32
  father, we've got to do a podcast on the marriage of Mary
• 1:27:35
  and Joseph. It's a it's a fascinating 1.
• 1:27:37
  Thank you so much. Father Ambrose what?
• 1:27:39
  A gift this has been to me and I'm sure the people listening.
• 1:27:42
  Praise the Lord, it's been a real joy and I hope we can do it
• 1:27:44
  again, Lila. Where can people find your work?
• 1:27:46
  OK, so look at the Abbot Circle. Well, a couple places.
• 1:27:49
  St. Michael's, abbey.com,
• 1:27:51
  theabbotcircle.com, and soon the Evermode institute.com.
• 1:27:56
  Awesome. Thank you so much, Father.
• 1:27:58
  Ambrose, Lila, God bless you.