Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #388: When Sanctuaries Aren’t Safe: Violence, Faith, and the Modern Crisis

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Being Catholic #388: When Sanctuaries Aren’t Safe: Violence, Faith, and the Modern Crisis · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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That's right, 94.5 in the greater Rockford area.
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Illinois and growing thanks to you.
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We're going to have a great show for you today. And also in Charlton,
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I forgot that. And that's 90.5 in Charlton, Illinois.
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And I'm here with my wife, Lynn. Remember always that we're brought to you by you.
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Again, that's 309-807-2427.
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And as I said, I'm here with my wife Lynn today.
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And before we start, I'll turn it over to her and see what she has to say.
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Well, it's a beautiful day out today and the farmers have been really harvesting a lot.
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A lot of, I guess it's corn dust in the air in places, but it's just beautiful, beautiful fall day.
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And some people have a three-day weekend because it's Columbus Day.
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Thank you, Mr. President, for going back to Columbus Day instead of indigenous.
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I don't know. Indigenous. I can't even pronounce it.
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So I'm just really thrilled that it's gone back to Columbus Day.
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I guess when you get old, you get that way. You just don't want anything to change.
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But, you know, the people from Bishop or Bishop Tilka, and I think there's about
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150 people on that pilgrimage,
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that have gone over to Italy, and they're touring right now.
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It's quite a big thing. I see it's on Facebook every day. They post what they're doing.
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But what are we going to talk about today, Bob?
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Well, we're going to talk about some of the demonic forces that are going on in our society.
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I did want to make a comment, though, on that Indigenous Peoples Day.
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Is there really anybody indigenous to our area? I mean,
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it seems to me that people arose and developed in the old country and,
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you know, Asia and Africa, and they migrated here, one group after another.
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So there really isn't anyone who can claim to be indigenous to the North American
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continent, I don't think, or even the South American continent for that matter.
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Probably the people that settled the South American continent were the Polynesians
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maybe that came across the ocean. We don't know for sure in a lot of these cases.
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But people came to this new country from a long, long time ago,
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so I don't know that there were really ever any indigenous people,
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so I don't think anyone was displaced by naming it Columbus Day again.
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Well, I guess you're right.
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Yeah. Because even the American Indians, well, I don't know.
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That's right. Well, when Columbus
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landed in a new world on some of the islands off the coast of Florida,
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and landed in those islands, the peoples there had just been displaced by Indians
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that came from the, you know, the regular North American continent,
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you know, from what is now the United States proper and displaced them.
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And so, you know, this was going on for a long time. And a lot of these Indians were taken as slaves.
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A lot of them were killed and others were forced to flee. And they fled from
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some of the islands back onto the mainland and so forth.
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Other Indians were pushed to the West by Indians from the Northeast coming in and so forth.
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And this was, you know, these kind of things were going on all the time.
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It certainly wasn't the Europeans were the only ones that started this kind of thing.
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This happened. And then I think sometime it would be great if our country developed
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a study, a true study on slavery.
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I mean, slavery was something that has existed for thousands of years in the
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world, and it existed certainly in Africa long, long before any white men ever got over there.
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And it existed, of course, in Europe, Asia, it existed everywhere in various
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forms and so forth. And it would be a good thing for people to know the true
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history of slavery and how it operated and so forth.
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Not trying to justify it in any way, but we need to understand it better.
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It's not something that was native only to the Americas and done only by the
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Europeans to other peoples.
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Europeans were enslaved by other Europeans. They were also enslaved by Middle
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Eastern peoples and so forth and vice versa.
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People enslaved each other all over the world. It took place,
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and it really didn't end until actually the rise of Christianity and,
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you know, with the rise of the West.
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So it still hasn't really ended today. There's still slavery going on in all
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places in the world, even in the United States. And we should know more about it.
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Yeah. How about Abraham, the time of Abraham?
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Of course. It's been, what, 6,000 years ago, something like that? Yes. I mean.
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I'm sure it goes back much longer than that even.
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Well, sure, but I'm saying, if you have a Bible, pick it up and read it.
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You can see there even, so he was in existence.
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Probably goes back 50,000 years. His first child was his wife's.
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Handmaiden or whatever. She was a slave.
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Exactly. And it existed in various types, too. So it would be something that
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we should know more about.
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At any rate, we're going to talk about some of the evils going on in our society.
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I'm going to read a couple of articles from the New Oxford Review.
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And one of them is entitled by the editor of the New Oxford Review by Peter.
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Vree, and it's entitled Mirror of Society.
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And I'll start with that unless there's anything more that you have to say. No. Okay.
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It says here, the unthinkable has happened.
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And now we know that we are not safe, even the most sacred spaces in the United States.
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I'm referring, of course, to the terror attack at Church of the Annunciation
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in Minneapolis this August, when Robert Westman, a transgender former student of the parish school,
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unleashed a barrage of gunfire through a stained-glass window on the nearly
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full nave during a school mass.
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He shot 21 people, 18 of them children, before turning his gun on himself.
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Two young innocents died in
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the attack. eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel and ten-year-old Harper Moiske.
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May God grant them eternal rest. As was to be expected, in the days that followed,
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the monstrous incident was presented as yet another example of why we need greater gun control.
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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wasted no time in calling a special legislative
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session to vote for more restrictions.
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Yes, there are too many guns getting into the hands of the wrong people.
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According to the Gun Violence Archive, that is GunViolenceArchive.org,
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there were 503 mass shootings in the United States in 2024, with mass shootings
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defined as those in which four or more people are injured or killed.
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Such shootings have escalated since the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at 689 in 2021.
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Gun violence is a pandemic of its own sort, and there's no sanctuary from it.
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A mass shooting could happen to any one of us, anywhere, at any time.
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We're not safe even in the sanctuaries of our churches.
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Yet, there is a legitimate debate about the effectiveness of gun control.
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Some states with restrictive gun laws, such as Illinois, our own state here,
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and Maryland, have high rates of gun homicides.
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The city with one of the highest rates of gun violence, Chicago,
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has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.
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Meanwhile, Westman, 23, had no prior criminal record, and all the weapons he
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used were legally purchased.
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There is no simple correlation of gun control severity and violence rates,
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said Gary Kleck, an emeritus professor of criminology at Florida State University.
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The U.S. Congress passed the Gun Control Act in 1968. 1868, ask yourself,
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are we safer in this country since then?
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And I certainly don't think so. And I can remember, you know,
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back in the 1950s, when we were in high school, then, a lot of us kids took our guns to school.
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I mean, we didn't bring them into the school building. We didn't carry them openly on our persons.
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But we took our shotguns in our cars, usually locked in the trunks.
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And the reason we brought them, you know, in our cars to school is because after
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school, we went out hunting.
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And everybody, I shouldn't say everybody, but lots of us did.
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School got out. We went out pheasant hunting or duck hunting or whatever happened
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to be in season. There was still time after school.
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We lived in a small town. It wasn't hard to get out into the country very quickly.
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And you'd have an hour, an hour and a half or so to hunt before it got dark,
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before the season ended for the day.
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And so we would go out hunting. We never heard. Did you hear of any school shootings
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or anything like that going on?
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Oh, good grief, no. And yet everybody owned guns. I mean, we walked through town with our guns.
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You know, you'd throw it over your shoulder, walk through town.
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A lot of times, you know, when I was younger, before I could drive and before,
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you know, a lot of us could drive, we would simply throw our gun over our shoulder
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and walk through town to the edge of town, out into the country, and go hunting.
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Or walk down to the Rock Island Railroad Tracks and do some target shooting
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and so forth down there or down along the river or whatever and so forth.
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And we took our .22 rifle sometimes if we were going to target shoot or we would
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take our shotguns and so forth.
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But we never heard of anybody shooting up a school or killing anybody.
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I mean, it was unheard of. You'd be horrified.
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Maybe a couple of so happened and we didn't hear it in the news or something.
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Maybe in the larger cities, I don't know.
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I don't think so. But I never heard of it.
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And so, and yet there was guns everywhere. So it's not just the guns. No.
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It says pushing for greater restrictions, though important, is us tinkering
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around the edges of the problem.
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And so, you know, what is the problem? And that's what we're going to get to.
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It's certainly not just guns because there was guns in the country before,
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lots of them, and lots of people carrying them, and we didn't have this problem.
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Waltz, by the way, is the same governor who, in the wake of the 2023 mass shooting
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at Covenant Christian School in Nashville,
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ignored pleas by the Minnesota Catholic Conference to include Catholic and other
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non-public schools in a state's school safety programs.
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Instead, that year he signed a law declaring Minnesota a trans-refuge state,
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and the students at Annunciation reaped the whirlwind.
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Waltz, a Democrat and political opportunist bar none, is a party-line loyalist.
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He adheres to all the liberal dogmas of the day.
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He likely would not have known or would not have even believed had he been told
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that transgender persons are overrepresented in mass shootings,
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according to a report by the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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That's crimeresearch.org.
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They're typically portrayed as victims of violence.
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Yet the trans share of mass public shootings over the 2018 to 2024 period is
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6.8 times their share of the population, the report states.
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That's almost seven times their share of the population.
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So that tells you something.
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Probably a lot of it could be attributed, I would guess. So what do you think,
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Lynn, to a lot of these people are on various drugs and so forth and hormones that they're taking.
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And I would guess a lot of these hormones disrupt a person's, you know, thinking.
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Oh, right. Mentally and emotionally.
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And your whole body just goes crazy. Yeah. It doesn't know what it's supposed to react to.
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So, you know, that could be a huge factor. And maybe it's a factor also just
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that some of these people could have, you know, a mental problem in the first place.
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I mean, you know, you have to consider that that could well be a problem.
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And we don't think of that. And
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then pouring all these hormones in and drugs and so forth on top of it.
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And all the negative assumptions on the part of people like Governor Walz even,
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that the transgender people are somehow being discriminated against and attacked,
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and then the people hearing that or believing that and having all of this other
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stuff going on in their personalities at the same time,
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it certainly could drive them to do some of the things that they're doing.
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Maybe that is why the rate is so high. All of this needs to be looked into.
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And yet it seems as if, you know, these things are untouchable,
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that if you do this or talk about it or anything, somehow or another you're
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aggressing or doing something wrong against the transgender people.
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And that certainly isn't doing them or anybody else any favors.
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And it certainly isn't being compassionate at all.
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If there is a problem and you're not, you know, we are not addressing it and
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not doing something about it, talking about it, handling it,
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it certainly isn't compassion.
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No, it's not. In fact, it's causing causation.
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Exactly, and I think a lot of it is being used politically. So stuff like this
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in our society is being used, and it's being used politically,
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but it even goes deeper than that, as we'll get to in the article here.
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At any rate, we're going to have to stop here and take a break,
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so stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
19:25
We're back from our break, and we're talking about the violence that is going
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on in our society, especially the mass shootings that we are having throughout our nation,
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and again, especially those mass shootings that take place in public schools,
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but, you know, as well as other places.
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And some of the reasons for them and the motives that we're trying to look at.
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But it goes deeper than that. It goes, as this article will get to that we're
19:54
reading from, into the demonic, and we'll get to that in a bit.
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But there are a lot of public shootings that are going on, mass public shootings,
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a lot of them taking place in our school system, shootings of small children
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and young people and so forth.
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And the reason for it could be, it shows here that some of the transgender people
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that are doing these shootings,
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that this takes place almost seven times more than on the regular population,
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a greater amount than the regular population of the country.
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And we should be looking into the reasons for it.
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But especially in the transgender, these people are being treated with some
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very, very powerful drugs and hormones.
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And so forth, that it could easily cause emotional problems and cloudy thinking
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and maybe contributing to it.
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And yet it seems as if there's almost a hands-off attitude toward this problem
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that we can't research it or do something without being accused of...
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Prejudice against these people or being non-compassionate, and that has to change.
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It says here in the article going on here, it says, talking about the transgender, it says, indeed,
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the Covenant shooter, and that's that shooting that was down in Tennessee,
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down in Nashville, the Covenant shooter was a transgender woman who identified
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as a man, Audrey Hale, 28,
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like Westman, was a former student of the school she terrorized,
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a Presbyterian-affiliated institution where she murdered three nine-year-olds and three adults.
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Other recent trans shooters are Kim Brady Carriker, a male cross-dresser who
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shot five people to death in Philadelphia in 2023,
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Anderson Lee Aldrich, a non-binary male who shot five people to death in Colorado Springs in 2022.
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Alec McKinney, a teen girl who identified as a male and shot one person to death
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while injuring eight others at a school in Highland Ranch, Colorado, in 2019.
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Snuckia Mosley, a woman who identified as a man and shot three people to death
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while injuring three others in Aberdeen, Maryland in 2018 William Whitworth,
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a teenage boy who was in the process of transitioning to female and admitted
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to plotting to shoot up three schools and at least one church,
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also in Colorado Springs, in 2023,
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He was sentenced to six years in prison.
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What I termed unthinkable at the outset might more accurately be called inevitable.
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Given the popularity of targeting schools.
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Four of the eight trans-terrorists mentioned above attacked or planned to attack
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schools, combined with the increase since 2020 in attacks on Catholic cathedrals,
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parishes, and missions, it was only a matter of time before an attack on Catholic
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schoolchildren like the one at Annunciation took place, and by someone like Robert Westman.
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You see, there's a pronounced yet largely unexamined violence streak in the
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trans community. As we've said, they commit six point times as many crimes of
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this sort as the regular community does.
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An outfit called Trans Resistant Network had been planning a trans day of vengeance
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in 2023 to promote, quote,
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fighting back with vehemence against the eradication of our existence right
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before the covenant shooting took place.
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And I'd like to know what they mean by the eradication of our existence.
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Well, if you just take it on face value, think about it. You're going to eradicate.
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And who among us has the most vocal about doing away with the transgender movement?
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Who is that? I would imagine it seems to be the transgender itself seems to think this.
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No, no, no. I mean, that's maybe what they think. But what they think is...
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Religion is doing this to them. Well, true. They think this,
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but I don't think that, you know, that is the case.
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It seems to be that you're right, that that's what they think,
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and they think it because it's being said, and it's being said a lot,
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I think, also, you know, politically as well,
24:50
that somehow or another that the right, that the so-called fascists or the white
24:55
Christian nationalists are out to get them, and yet there doesn't seem to be
24:59
any evidence that that's the case.
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It goes on here, it says, So we'll see.
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After Hale's massacre, the group issued a press release saying she had no other
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effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others.
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Hey, she just wanted to be seen.
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I mean, just imagine this, saying something like that,
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that she was just acting this out like it was justified, like somehow or another
25:30
people weren't paying enough attention to her or enough attention to the transgender
25:35
problem or something along those lines.
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And therefore, these people have a right in order to be recognized or to be treated or something.
25:45
It's okay for them to go out and lash out against people and kill them.
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That's what this seems to be saying, that it's justified for them to commit
25:53
murder on innocent people who have never done them any harm.
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And so that's what we're going to examine here and see if indeed that is the
26:01
case. It goes here, it says.
26:05
Vowing that trans people, she was vowing that trans people will not be eradicated
26:11
or erased. That's what was in her head.
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Hale is something of a hero to this community, a martyr for the trans movement.
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I mean, you know, which is, this is ridiculous.
26:23
I mean, the idea that she goes out and shoots down innocent people,
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kids, and that this other guy goes out and shoots down innocent people,
26:31
kids, And that's somehow okay because they're getting the recognition that they
26:35
otherwise, you know, wouldn't get.
26:37
As freelance writer Eliza Mondegreen put it, the subculture that has grown up
26:43
around trans identities too often excuses, legitimizes, and even glorifies violence.
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That includes violence directed at the self.
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The warning signs are everywhere.
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Grimacing skulls that promise death before detransitions.
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And I'm not even sure exactly what this means.
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Then I guess it means some of these people keep, you know, skulls or replicas
27:12
of skulls on their, you know, in their possession somewhere,
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their deaths or somewhere that say death before detransition.
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I don't get death before transition.
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Detransition. Oh, before detransition. I see.
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As if they're being forced to detransition. That makes sense.
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To, you know, and I don't know that this is ever the case.
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It could be in a few instances, but that still doesn't give anybody an excuse
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to go out and kill other people, especially innocent people who have had nothing
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to do with the so-called detransition or any of their transition or detransition problems.
27:52
I mean, this is not the way you do things. Again, it points to the fact that
27:56
they could be victims of a lot of these hormonal treatments,
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or they could be victims of something even deeper, and that's what we're going to get at.
28:04
It says some of these people have knives, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire,
28:11
assault rifles painted in the pastel tones of the trance flag.
28:15
I didn't even know that there was such a thing as the trance flag.
28:18
I guess it's something like the pride flag, and somehow or another,
28:22
this gives them some kind of identity against everybody else.
28:27
Torrents of rape and death threats. So this is what's going on.
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The grim vow that every day is trance day of vengeance.
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And this was, all of these things have been identified in, I guess,
28:42
a magazine called UnHerd.
28:44
And it's spelled U-N-H-E-R-D, March 29th, 2023.
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It says, in fact, at Walls' press conference announcing Minnesota as a trans
28:56
refuge state, his lieutenant governor,
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Peggy Flanagan, wore a t-shirt emblazoned with an image of a hunting knife and
29:06
the phrase, protect trans kids,
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suggesting a willingness to shed blood for this ideology.
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Can you imagine, say, Catholic kids or Presbyterian kids wearing a t-shirt with
29:21
a honey knife and a slogan on the shirt saying,
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protect Presbyterian kids or protect Catholic kids? What do you think the press would do with that?
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You don't have to think too hard on that one. No.
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It says, but again, the article here says, but we must be cautious here because
29:41
not all or even nearly all trans individuals or their advocates are violent.
29:46
So we have to do it. We have to remember that.
29:49
And, you know, this is usually the case on behalf of more ordinary people.
29:54
They recognize that everybody that's trans is not some kind of a monstrous killer.
30:01
And, you know, is it the other way around, though?
30:04
I mean, do other people recognize the fact that just because you have a problem,
30:09
you don't have some kind of license to unload your problem on everybody else
30:14
up to the point, especially a murder?
30:17
Vilifying an entire class of people at a time like this is facile,
30:21
a form of scapegoating, as is blaming guns for mass shootings.
30:27
They're the instruments of flotter, not the reason for it.
30:30
Doing either is to overlook the core problem, and the core problem is that there
30:35
is a sickness at the heart of American society.
30:39
Gun violence and transgenderism are merely symptoms of that sickness.
30:44
Take the case of the Annunciation shooter.
30:48
Westman identified as a woman, but appeared to be ambivalent about his identity.
30:54
Quote, I regret being trans, he wrote in a notebook he displayed on a YouTube
30:59
video before his channel was scrubbed from the internet.
31:04
He also wrote that gender and weed effed up my head. I wish I never tried experimenting with either.
31:12
And he would discourage others from letting their kids change gender.
31:16
So this is not all about gender and not all about any hormones and so forth he was taking.
31:23
In his deliberations over what he termed his final act, he was clear that he
31:29
wasn't trying, in his words, to spread a message.
31:33
He didn't see himself as a crusader advancing an agenda by any means necessary.
31:40
His final act wasn't a blow for trans rights, and it would be wrong to categorize it as such.
31:47
Instead, I do it to please myself, he wrote. I do it because I am sick.
31:54
He mused about various targets, such as President Trump,
31:59
Elon Musk, and filthy Zionist Jews, before ultimately deciding that killing
32:06
children of innocent civilians would bring him, quote, the most joy.
32:13
The scrubbing of Westman's YouTube channel conveniently allows opinion shapers
32:18
and policymakers to continue to defer asking uncomfortable questions and to
32:24
ignore the core problem.
32:26
Instead, they busy themselves casting about for Westman's motive.
32:33
But we needn't wonder about a motive.
32:38
Westman, no less than all mass murderers, was motivated by hatred.
32:43
The only thing unclear is what measure was self-hatred and what was hatred of innocence.
32:50
Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Joseph Thompson, characterized Westman as
32:57
obsessed with killing children, as many as he could.
33:02
Westman chose Annunciation because he was familiar with the layout,
33:06
and he knew there was a school mass on the schedule.
33:10
His glee at the prospect of slaughtering innocent children was palpable.
33:15
I really want to shoot down the rows of pews at all kids thinking they can hide. Lots of luck.
33:23
They're going to be trapped in those pews. Easy targets. Waiting ducks, he wrote in his journal.
33:31
In the physical sense, Westman's attempted mass murder was an attack by a nihilist
33:38
on Catholic schoolchildren.
33:41
In the metaphysical sense, it was an attack by evil on innocence.
33:46
Innocence is what evil always seeks to destroy.
33:50
The most typical victim of evil is a child, writes psychiatrist M.
33:56
Scott Peck in his book people of the lie, the hope for healing human evil.
34:03
That's because children are the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.
34:09
Westman's despicable deed, however, shouldn't be isolated from its larger context.
34:17
We can see similar predations on the innocent in such everyday evils as abortion,
34:25
child sex abuse in the Catholic Church,
34:28
drag queen story hours in public libraries, LGBT plus curricula in elementary schools.
34:37
Child trafficking, and any form of child neglect, abandonment,
34:43
sexualization, or exploitation.
34:45
And just remember, you know, when the 300,000 or 350,000 kids were lost in the
34:55
invasion of our country by all of these illegals coming in from other countries
35:00
and crossing our borders without any checkups whatsoever.
35:04
True. We don't even know, you know, if their parents came with them,
35:07
who was in charge of them, or anything else. The cartel?
35:12
Right. What's that? The cartel, probably.
35:15
Yeah. A lot of them were brought in to be trafficked, you know,
35:18
for sexual abuse and so forth.
35:23
And we don't know where a lot of these kids are now. So, you know,
35:25
ICE is finding some of them. And what's happening in the big cities where ICE
35:30
is trying to operate, they're being opposed, you know, by politicians.
35:36
So what is all this going on? Drag queen story hours.
35:40
I mean, who would have heard of such a thing just a short period of time ago
35:44
that kids would be exposed to such stuff?
35:46
In LGBT curriculum, in elementary schools, in the neglected children,
35:53
even in the Catholic Church itself, and abortion, all of the stuff that's going
35:59
on like this is having an effect.
36:01
And if people don't think that it's having an effect, they should think again.
36:05
At any rate, we're going to have to stop here and take a break.
36:08
So stay with us. We'll be right back.
36:10
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:51
We're back from our break, and we're talking about the violence that is going on in our country,
38:57
especially the shootings that are going on, and especially those shootings that
39:03
take place against public schools and communities.
39:07
Churches in our society and the shootings that are taking place against children and young children.
39:14
And we're talking about the violence that is being spread,
39:21
the evil that is being spread in our country and some of the sources for it,
39:25
such as abortion and the LGBT curriculum in schools and the drag queen story hours and so forth,
39:34
child trafficking and what's going on and how this builds up and leads to what's happening.
39:40
And we're getting down actually to the people are always talking about motives
39:45
and what are the motives of these shooters?
39:47
What are the motives of these people doing the killing of young, innocent children?
39:52
And the motive goes deeper than just transgender and deeper than some of the
39:59
political and so forth surface motives.
40:01
The article is getting to what the real motive is. It's evil against innocence.
40:08
And of course, in our society or any society, one of the most innocents,
40:13
of course, are young children.
40:15
And it says evil, of course, finds its genesis in him whom we call the evil
40:21
one, Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning.
40:25
And we've talked about that a lot, haven't we, in the fact that he was a liar
40:29
from the beginning. That's right. He was a murderer from the beginning.
40:32
He is a creature dominated by hatred. And what are these people dominated by
40:38
when they go after the innocents and go after these young kids?
40:43
Oh, the evil, the...
40:46
They want to destroy all that is good. That's right.
40:51
Hatred of the good. Hatred of the innocent.
40:55
And it goes on here. It says, he is a creature dominated by hatred,
41:00
hatred for God and for man.
41:02
One more thing at risk of being shoved down the memory hole is a since-deleted
41:08
video of Westman's showing what appears to be a self-portrait in his notebook,
41:13
a hand-drawn sketch of himself with a machine gun slung over his shoulder looking into a mirror.
41:22
And his mirrored reflection is a horned demonic figure.
41:28
Westman must have known at some level that he was in the grip of Satan.
41:34
And now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty.
41:36
That's right. A lot of this is satanic. It's demonic.
41:41
Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. And why would it be satanic and
41:45
demonic? Because a lot of the things our society has been doing,
41:49
starting especially with abortion, has been leading up to the satanic and demonic.
41:54
When you start doing these things and allowing these things and even calling
42:01
these things good, you're doing exactly what it said in the Bible and Scripture.
42:07
And what does it say there, Lynn? Doesn't it say that because of Satan,
42:10
we will call evil good and good evil? That's right.
42:16
You won't know right from wrong.
42:18
And we don't seem to. That seems to be a lost thing.
42:25
I guess it, Westman's horrific attack at Church of the Annunciation is clear
42:31
evidence that Satan is still hard at work in this world.
42:35
He is still the reigning prince of this world. He works through human instruments
42:40
who take part in the inextinguishable hatred that consumes him and who often
42:46
work with their own legally purchased instruments of destruction when committing their atrocities.
42:54
Satan's proposals are cunning and seductive, but in reality,
42:59
all he can give us is his desolation, unhappiness, hatred, and desperation,
43:06
writes Father Livio Fanzaga in The Deceiver, Our Daily Struggle with Satan.
43:12
Westman is proof positive of this. Satan, however, attacks not only personally, but corporately.
43:21
His influence penetrates culture, institutions, and social structures,
43:27
infiltrating many different environments.
43:29
It conditions the way people think and damages consciousness.
43:35
Father Fanzaga writes, the corruption of society is a mirror of the corruption of the soul.
43:43
Satan, Father Fanzaga writes, deftly hides himself behind people, things, and events.
43:51
Yet the world knows so little about him that it has denied his existence or
43:58
has reduced him to an innocuous character.
44:00
And that's exactly why Satan can be so effective because most people,
44:05
what? They don't believe in Satan, do they? No.
44:10
And this allows him to move freely among us and our institutions,
44:15
influencing policy and popular opinion.
44:20
Satan loves to dominate individuals and society, hold them fastened between his claws.
44:26
And he does so these days without ever even being noticed.
44:31
Right. Well, we have to keep in mind, I mean, the idea that Satan hates mankind,
44:38
and he wants to destroy mankind because he's jealous of mankind.
44:45
Because when God made man, Satan was not going to serve him.
44:51
That's why he served man.
44:53
That was just revolting to Satan.
44:57
So what's his way of getting back? Like Satan's way of being attacked the human
45:04
and showing God that, hey, you made them and they are not perfect.
45:09
Exactly. He can't get back at God himself. And he knows that.
45:13
And he knows he's going to lose.
45:15
But he can destroy a lot before he loses.
45:18
Oh, and take down with him the multitude.
45:22
Exactly. He can have his own kingdom, the kingdom of pandemonium,
45:27
you know, the all-demon world. Make people miserable.
45:31
Right. And show God. Well, you know, the Divine Comedy, if anybody has read that.
45:40
You know, just... Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost. It should be read.
45:47
We shouldn't marvel, then, that NBC News would issue a formal apology for misgendering
45:54
Westman in its reporting of his massacre by referring to him using male pronouns.
46:00
So concerned they were about offending trans sensibilities at a time like this. Imagine that.
46:06
I mean, here's a man that goes and kills a couple of kids and wounds and hurts
46:10
others, and they're more concerned, it seems to me, about worrying that they
46:16
misgendered him than they are about what happened to the kids.
46:20
Talk about conditioning the way people think. Okay.
46:24
Not only radical fringe groups like Trans-Resistant Network,
46:27
but mainstream media outlets, too, at times act as Satan's emissaries.
46:34
And this goes on also in the Fox News channel that I watch often.
46:40
It really irritates me that these people use, you know, talk about misgendering.
46:48
I mean, males are males and females are females. You cannot change your DNA.
46:54
Your DNA is your DNA. You can't transition from one thing to another.
46:59
And yet they will use the wrong pronouns. A male who proclaims,
47:05
a lot of times with no change at all, someone who just says, I identify as a female,
47:10
they will use her instead of he, which is, you know, to me,
47:16
ridiculous. Yeah.
47:18
Because some of these people, they don't use anything.
47:21
They just decide that they're going to be a male and then they get to go in
47:25
girls' locker rooms and everything else and stuff without any kind of change whatsoever.
47:31
You know, any operations or any hormones, drugs or anything.
47:36
And somebody is calling them she instead of he and talk about using the wrong pronouns.
47:42
I mean, the pronouns in the English language do not belong to any particular
47:49
person. They belong to the proper identity of things.
47:52
That's what they're there for, so you'll know what somebody is talking about
47:55
when you refer to he, she, or it.
47:58
If you refer to it, you know you're not talking about a human being.
48:02
If you're to he or she, you know about what sex you're talking about.
48:06
And sex is sex. You can't change it. It goes, when the presence of Satan is
48:11
not recognized, Father Fanzaga continues, the salvific action of God becomes incomprehensible.
48:20
So it should come as no surprise that Westman would scrawl the phrase,
48:25
where is your God, on one of his animal magazines.
48:28
Such is the cry of the desolate.
48:31
And in effect, he's asking, you know, where is God?
48:34
Yet even in moments of darkness and depravity, of corruption and chaos,
48:40
such as the Church of the Annunciation this August, God in His goodness grants
48:45
us a glimpse of the light.
48:47
As those who have sent kids to Catholic schools or attended one themselves know,
48:52
eighth graders typically are paired with kindergartners in a buddy system.
48:57
In this system, the older students are responsible for sitting with their younger
49:01
charges during Mass and setting an example of proper comportment during the Holy Sacrifice.
49:09
Annunciation was no exception. As Westman rained down hell upon the young worshippers that sunny morning,
49:16
some of the eighth graders shielded their kindergarten buddies from Westman's
49:21
bullets, positioning their own bodies in the line of fire.
49:25
Other schoolchildren reported that their friends did the same.
49:29
Shielding them and taking bullets in their stead.
49:33
Some of the wounded will suffer lifelong maladies.
49:36
Others might not survive. We can see in their spontaneous heroism an imitation
49:42
of the ultimate sacrifice they were at Mass to commemorate.
49:47
Here indeed is our God. The age of the martyrs has not completely come to an
49:53
end, Father Fonzaga writes, because the beast that has come up from the abyss
49:58
is now more active than ever.
50:01
And I think that beast was loosed, especially when we made abortion,
50:09
first not only just legal, supposedly safe, legal, and rare.
50:14
After a while, we made it legal, and somehow we made it shout the abortion from your rooftops.
50:21
Exactly right. It was the golden opportunity for Satan to take a more active role.
50:30
And at the end of this program, and out there also, there's a Rachel's Vineyard going on this weekend.
50:37
And I hope everybody out there says prayers for the people at Rachel's Vineyard.
50:43
Satan's war on the God and man on holiness and innocence has just intensified.
50:50
Each one of us, whether we like it or not, know it or not, believe it or not,
50:55
is conscripted in a spiritual battle.
50:58
We all serve under a master, and we serve only one of two, God,
51:04
the deliverer from evil, or as an adversary, the deceiver.
51:09
And that puts the choice pretty starkly. If you don't serve one, you serve the other.
51:15
Robert Westman isn't an anomaly. He's a mirror of contemporary American society.
51:22
Even as he saw in his own mirror a reflection of Satan, Westman served his master to the end.
51:30
Let us in turn serve ours.
51:33
And that's the end of the article. And one thing we should remember before we
51:39
take everything as negative, wasn't it St.
51:42
Paul that said where sin is rampant, grace abounds.
51:47
Yes. So that's what the Catholic Church teaches, is that the sacraments,
51:53
especially the sacrament of communion, gives us tremendous amounts of grace.
52:00
And I think it says here, let me look at this.
52:06
It says here.
52:09
At his ascension, Christ told his apostles, Lo, I am with you always,
52:14
even to the end of the world.
52:17
By this, he means not only as a spiritual presence, which we can see in the
52:22
goodness of others, the wonders of nature, and the powerful love of a mother
52:27
for her child, but as a physical presence as well.
52:31
He is with us physically in the Eucharist. We consume at Mass,
52:36
and in the small box, the tabernacle,
52:39
the centerpiece of every Catholic church in the world, accompanied by a tiny
52:44
red flame, a reminder of His real presence, available day and night for our comfort and adoration.
52:51
One Protestant is said to have remarked, If I believed that Jesus was really
52:57
present in that box, I would never leave.
53:00
Such should be the attitude of each one of us who believes, to desire never
53:04
to leave Christ's presence through sin and to adore him constantly in our hearts.
53:09
And the fact is, is that through the sacraments in the Catholic Church.
53:16
Tremendous amounts of grace is rained down upon us.
53:19
And we have the opportunity to reach out and grab that grace at any time.
53:24
It's ours for the taking.
53:25
So an article like this should not be just taken as a negative.
53:30
It is possible for the society and for each of us to redeem ourselves through that grace.
53:37
And the Catholic Church offers it in huge quantities in every way available
53:43
to all the people that want to participate.
53:46
And so we should become better and more understanding Catholics,
53:51
learn your Catholicism, learn how much grace is offered to you,
53:55
and learn what the antidote to what is going on here is.
54:00
And with that, we'll end.
54:03
Right. And—,
54:05
Our closing prayer, we're calling upon the Archangel Michael to help us in this battle.
54:14
We can't do it alone. We have to depend on God, on Jesus Christ,
54:20
His Son, and we've got a helper.
54:23
He's given us a helper, too.
54:26
Don't hesitate. And read your scripture. Read the Bible.
54:30
You can get so much out of what's going on by seeing. it's been foretold.
54:36
It's right there for you. Do it.
54:40
And it is a battle. It is a genuine, true battle.
54:46
So, St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle.
54:50
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
54:54
May God rebuke him and humbly pray.
54:57
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
55:02
thrust into hell, Satan, and all the evil spirits who wander through the world,
55:08
through the ruin of souls. Amen.
55:11
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit
55:15
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55:21
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