Pints With Aquinas - 194: Byzantine Catholics, Eastern Orthodoxy, and The Schism! W/ Fr. Michael O'Loughlin

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

I talk with Byzantine priest and co-host of Catholic Stuff You Should Know, Fr. Michael O'Loughlin about the Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Filioque, and much, much more (it's a 3 hour chat, gang). --- SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today I am joined with my father Michael O'Loughlin who is a Byzantine Catholic priest of the Eparchy of Phoenix. We are going to discuss a whole host of issues surrounding Eastern Christianity. We'll be talking about Orthodoxy, the Filioque, the Fourth Crusade, what happened at Constantinople. We're talking about the jesus prayer a whole lot of things it was a really i have to say i was we just did the uh interview and now this is me giving you the introduction so i was i was just hooked and fascinated the whole time father and my father michael o'loughlin is a fantastic communicator and he's just really vulnerable

in an awesome way and so i think you're going to really get a lot out of today's show. I want to say thanks to two of our sponsors. The first is Catholic Woodworker. Catholic Woodworker, the guy who runs it was a patron of mine over on Patreon. And he sent me one of his rosaries. This is it here. I don't know how well you can see that or not, but it is so beautifully made. I've said this before, you can get two types of rosaries or three, right? But on either end, you've got the flimsy ones that break, you know, after a few uses. You've got the huge, big, masculine, bulky ones. The thing I love about Catholic woodworker rosaries is that they are, I think, masculine, right? But without being bulky. They're very sacred looking and feeling.

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It's not like a B-grade version of those apps, but we'll use it just because it's Catholic. It's actually just, if not better, than those apps. It's not like a B-grade version of those apps, but we'll use it just because it's Catholic. It's actually just, if not better than those apps. I'm really impressed with it, but it's 100% Catholic. Halo, H-A-L-L-O-W, again, there's a link in the description, offers a permanently free version of their app, which includes content that's updated every day, as well as a paid subscription option with premium content. By using the promo code Matt Fradd, you can try out all of these sessions in the app for a full month, totally for free. So to take advantage of this special offer, visit hallo.app slash Matt Fradd, hallo.app slash Matt Fradd and create your account online before downloading the app. It really is a

fantastic app. So check it out. All right. Here is my discussion with Father Michael O'Loughlin. Father Michael O'Loughlin. How are you? Thank you for pronouncing my name correctly. How do people... O'Loughlin. O'Loughlin.

Yeah. I get that all the time, which I understand. My wife's middle name is McLaughlin. Ah. And she grew up pronouncing it mclaughlin okay and then we went and lived in ireland and she introduced herself from the pulpit and this old irish lady came up and went do not pronounce it like that that's really funny yeah sometimes you need to hear from them to to correct those things but we've it's always been a lock

then my sister dated a an o apostrophe capital l a u g h l i n and they did pronounce it o'loughlin but since the the letter was different we just said okay we'll let you do that but if i was like if you marry her if you marry him theresa like he's either taking your name or you're hyphenating it because you are not becoming o'loughlin but oh but her last name was o'glocklin so so her name was o'loughlin so wouldn't it be if it was hyphenated wouldn't it be o'loughlin O'Glocklin? So her name was O'Locklin. O'Locklin. So wouldn't it be, if it was hyphenated, wouldn't it be O'Locklin O'Lofflin? It would have been. It would have been hilarious. You can't have that.

That was kind of a joke. Yeah. Well, it's so good to have you on the show. Thank you. Let me see if I can set this up. You go to a church where there's no people praying the rosary, generally speaking. There's no statues. You're jumping right in.

Yeah. Tell me why you're not a schismatic. No. What are you? I am a Byzantine Catholic priest, one of the 23 different Eastern Catholic churches that all belong to the Universal Catholic Church, but we are not Roman Catholic. I can tell you've said that before. I have said that before. I have memorably done.

Now, what do you mean, Father? Isn't there just one church? What do you mean 23 churches? Yes. In one sense, there is one church, the one Catholic church. But in another sense, there is a diversity of leadership. In other words, when Christ sent the apostles out, each of the apostles, the bishops and the successors of the apostles, each have, in a sense, carry with them the church. Every diocese being led by a bishop is its own church, if you will.

But even in a more general way than that, you have these smaller churches. So when the apostles spread out Jesus, right, Matthew 28, they spread out to the four corners of the world. There wasn't much communication within the apostles because there was no mass media. There was no Twitter at the time. So they went out and they landed in a city and the apostles appointed bishops in cities. And then the traditions that developed, because of course the Bible doesn't say, here's how to do the mass, begin in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So they took the cultures that they landed in. they took their understanding of the scriptures of what Jesus Christ did. And then they took the Eucharistic celebration that Jesus initiated. And then they said, here's how we're going to celebrate the

Eucharist. There's always the word of God, there's always a consecration, but different traditions developed. And then as time went on, organization happened within the church, those different bishops in different ways were then allowed to say, we're going to keep these traditions, these cultural traditions, these language traditions, these geographic traditions, and those became over time solidified into various churches. And by church, we mean led by a certain hierarchy within the church of bishops. And then they have their own saints, their own lectionary, things like that, that can change depending on these geographic churches. So for instance, mine, I belong to the Ruthenian Catholic Church, which would have been based in the Karpatho-Rusyn mountains that kind of run along modern day

Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland. And those mountains were kind of the hillbillies of the Byzantine world, the hillbillies of the Catholic world, I like to say. So they were quite isolated up there. And so they developed their own language. They developed their own melodies for the singing style for the liturgy. And all these things kind of developed alone. So they said that's a unique church that has developed very authentic traditions within the Catholic world or Orthodox for a while until we came into the Catholic Church in 1646.

But that area, those traditions developed so much so that we were very different from the Ukrainian church, which was based in Lviv, and very different than the Polish church, say, that was based in Poland. And so it was unique enough that we have our own allowances to develop it a bit separately in the smaller aspects of church tradition. So you say that these liturgies kind of developed kind of organically and brought into themselves part of the culture around them. So wouldn't, because people tend to think of West and East. They think of the Western liturgy. They might think of the Tridentine Mass. They think of the Eastern liturgy.

They think of the Divine Liturgy. But might think of the Tridentine Mass. They think of the Eastern liturgy. They think of the Divine liturgy. But it would seem that there would be much more variance than just those two different. So is that the case? Or have they sort of begun to unify around? Many have unified, but also many have not. So that's the distinguishing between the term rite, R-I-T-E, rite and church. It's a good distinction that not a lot of people know. It is.

And it's very important too. So rite is the word-t-e right it's a good distinction that not a lot of people know it is and it's very important too so so right it is the word that we use for a ritual so there's actually within the catholic church into in 2020 there is eight different rites okay um so one two so two of those really that are used commonly are are in the. Generally, we say the Latin rite is the mass. So you have the ordinary form and the extraordinary form of the Latin rite, R-I-T-E rite. Within the Eastern churches, you actually have five other different rites. So those rites are completely different. If you went to a Byzantine rite divine liturgy, it would look 75% different than a Roman Rite Mass. Some parts are the same, but it is mostly different. If you went to a Maronite Rite

liturgy, it'd be different. Armenian, it'd be different. Some things that are similar, but these are the way that the Eucharistic celebration developed different in these different cultures. So they absolutely did kind of come together within broader categories, but they're still even within those. So you have the eight different rites, and then underneath those, you have the 24 different churches. So like the Ukrainian church, the Ruthenian church, the Russian church, the Melkite church

all celebrate the Byzantine rite. So if you went to any of those parishes, you would see that the book could be the same. The structure of the mass, if you will, we call the divine see that the book could be the same. The structure of the mass, if you will, we call the divine liturgy, would be the same. But if you went to the Melkite and the Ruthenian, the language would be different, the melodies that we sing everything in, because usually in the business you write, everything is chanted. So it's all about melodies and harmonies. So you're going to go to the Melkite and the Ruthenian, you're going to have different melodies that we sing, but we're singing the same words, but maybe in a different language.

Okay. So one more time for those in the back, the difference between a church and a rite. So rite is the ritual. So this refers specifically to how the liturgy is celebrated when you say the rite? Among other things, but the most obvious thing is the way that the Eucharistic celebration. I mean, you have liturgy of the hours is going to be different traditions. Vespers and matins and how that looks. And there are some saints that every church within a certain rite celebrates. And then there are some saints that each church celebrates on their own or commemorates or has on their calendar.

Oh, okay, good. So that's what we mean by rite. And that's really important because I've been going to a Byzantine church for the last four years. And people often say, are you Byzantine rite? But what they probably should say is, do you belong to the Byzantine church? Exactly. So you can say yes, both. But Byzantine right means I could be Ruthenian or Melkite or Russian or Ukrainian, et cetera, or as Byzantine church. So this is the history aspect of this. If you go to a Ukrainian Catholic church, it's usually

going to say Ukrainian Catholic church on the sign in the front. If you go to a Ukrainian Catholic church, it's usually going to say Ukrainian Catholic church on the side, in the front. If you go to a Ruthenian Catholic church, it's usually just going to say Byzantine. We don't usually use the word Ruthenian. The reason for that is because our forefathers 60 years ago who started deciding these things did not want the Ruthenian church to be known as an ethnic church. So Ruthenian sounds very ethnic, whereas Byzantine doesn't. So we took the name of the rite to use for our church. And I wonder if that has influenced the way your churches are operated, because I've gone to some Eastern churches in the past, maybe Melchiah to Amaranite, and they felt very ethnic. But when I go to a Byzantine church, it doesn't feel that way.

And you will find that in some Byzantine churches, but it's probably about 50-50 in the United States, at least, where you're going to get a very just ethnically diverse church. But we've been working on that for 50 years, trying. I mean, I'm an Irish kid, you know, so I don't fit into the Slav at all. So we've been working on making sure that we take our ancient and beautiful Byzantine traditions, but also are not afraid to be Americans. We're not afraid to be living in this culture and to say, you're going to come to a Byzantine divine liturgy and you're going to get these ancient, beautiful hymns, but they're going to be in English. You know, so that everybody can understand that a typical American who can walk in the door and say, oh, those are beautiful prayers. You know that you're praying. You said earlier that the different Eastern churches came back into union with Rome.

How did that happen? And since there wasn't sort of mass media back then, was it the case that there were these different churches that didn't know they were out of union with Rome? Most of them knew generally, although you certainly get this situation. Like, for instance, back in, I think, 2001, 2002, I went to Ukraine as a

seminarian. And because of the persecutions in Ukraine under Soviet communism, many of the, you know, the priests that were there were just kind of wandering pilgrims. They had to be, of course, ordained secretly. So they'd come to divine liturgy in people's basements and things like that. And you look at, and the priest I stayed with was a historian. So he decided that every church in his area, he was going to study the history of who shepherded the souls of those people, who were the pastors. And so he wrote it down. And then he put a little O or a C if the pastor was Orthodox or Catholic. In other words, during that time of persecution, the people didn't really care.

The Orthodox have—we're getting into kind of a field here, but the Orthodox have valid sacraments. They have apostolic succession, validly ordained bishops. So in other words, an Orthodox priest could come through and the Byzantine Catholics could say, Father, please say divine liturgy for us.

Please hear my confession. And a situation like that, where kind of the canon law gets loosened because of the persecution, the people were being served. So why am I telling this story? I'm trying to figure out how these churches came back into union with Rome. Yes.

Because I don't think there was necessarily a clear break among these local churches. They didn't realize tomorrow we're going to be Orthodox or whatever that means, since that word was used along with Catholic for those first 11 centuries or whatever. So I want to say the main reason was the Holy Spirit moving us towards union, because I believe that, I mean, many people disagree with me on this, but I believe that the Byzantine Catholic, the Eastern Catholic churches are a way and the main way of hope for the reunification of the Catholics and the Orthodox.

We are trying to show within our church that there can be union, and this is what it looks like. We don't always do it perfectly. I have a lot of criticisms of the way we do it, but that's the goal here. So what happened was, is I believe the Holy Spirit was leading us in that way. Now, there was also politics. There was also all the human dimensions of these things. One of the general things I say was that these things happened shortly after the Protestant

Reformation. So if we can get into it, if you want. Yeah, let's do it, please. But the Eastern and the Western churches had very different kind of mindsets, the way of developing theology. So Thomas Aquinas came out of the scholastic tradition. The Western tradition is very much about catathatic theology. In other words, let's figure out who God is,

because if we know more about him, we can love him more. And so the scholastic tradition, of course, utilized philosophy and said, using philosophy and theology together, let's find out more about God. The more we know about God, the more we will love him. And this would include St. Augustine, who's also a Latin father, right? Absolutely, yes. So when you're talking about, yeah, okay. So St. Augustine kind of started this.

Not a scholastic, but Western, yeah. Right. He started this tradition exactly before scholasticism proper. But you have this analysis of God to know more about him. So what happens is when the Protestants in the 16th century start to break off, they also come from a Western scholastic tradition. And the systematic theology has developed teachings about God and about Christ and the Father and the Holy Spirit in such a way that there's a language that is common among Western theologians. Well, the Protestant reformers started going East. And as they started doing evangelization, the Eastern church, which did not have this scholastic tradition, didn't have the systematic theology. They had their own equally good and valid way of more apophatic theology, which is-

Explain the difference between those two things. What was the first word you used? Cata- Cataphatic theology. And- And apophatic theology. What are those two words mean cata cataphatic theology and and apophatic theology what are those two words so cataphatic is is what god is okay so he i am going to find out what god is and by knowing more about him in that way i can love him of course it's something i mean just to be i know you know this but aquinas denies we

can know what god is right at least to know like about god through his effects so that we can love him and of course god has revealed himself to us. So it's knowing the things he's revealed, which every church acknowledges. But there's a, within scholasticism, right? There's a certain, we're dissecting the things that we know of God through reason, through revelation to come to know him more. Apophatic theology is to say, we're going to discover what God is not. So instead of what God is.

Right. It is in there as well. And both very, I mean, that's Aquinas. Right. It is in there as well. And both churches have both. But one is emphasized more, I think, in the East. Fair enough. The apophatic theology is like, if you listen to the divine liturgy, there's a passage during the very beginning of the anaphora, the beginning of the consecration, that says God is invisible, incomprehensible. And it's all these things he's not. that says God is invisible, incomprehensible.

And it's all these things he's not. And what the idea here is that if I can strip away the things that God is not, I can, it's not that I know him more. This sounds very Franciscan maybe, but it's not that I know him before I love him, but I have an experience of him through the liturgy, and I'm kind of stripping away all the human things. Stripping away the errors, and that allows me to have union with God. So, for instance, so when the Protestant reformers started moving east and had this scholastic mindset, this Western mindset, the Orthodox that were in the east didn't have the answers. And I can see these, you know, coming from scholasticism, they would have been like pumped up, jacked, ripped in the sense of apologetic debaters.

Right. Then you kind of encounter these Eastern Christians who are talking about mystery and stuff. Right. The mysticism. And that can be, I mean, that can be disarming to say the reformers who went out there because they can say, we're trying to under, that's very Pauline, right? Evangelization. You need to kind of know the world of the person you're talking to before you can share

Christ with them. So it was disarming to the Protestants that went that way, but it was also disarming for the Orthodox who didn't have the same language to explain these things. So in some way, many of the Orthodox needed the military protection, the political protection that came from the West, which is so much stronger. In some ways, they needed the Western patrimony. The intellectual clout too, perhaps? Exactly. The intellectual clout and the patrimony of that way of speaking about God to answer the Protestants. And then, I believe, the Holy Spirit as well. So there are a bunch of different reasons.

That's fascinating. But for all these churches that, shortly after the Protestant Reformation, started going to Rome and saying, we want to have the union we had during the first thousand years of the church. What does that mean, they went to Rome? What did that look like? So usually there was like a delegate from Rome. What did that look like? So usually there was like a delegate from Rome.

For instance, some of the more negative aspects that we can get into if you want about imposed clerical celibacy in the U.S. Yes, I can't wait to get to that. We'll get to that. Amen. Good. And some of them were done by kind of a cardinal or a representation from Rome. But sometimes you'd have a bishop just go to Rome and say. We want union. Holy Father, we want union.

We want it. But we also, the reason for this great schism in 1054 or around that time were these things, married priesthood, Eucharist for infants, the filioque, things like that. And we actually, after 500 years of fighting over these things, we think there's a way of looking at them that we can debate these things within union. So we want to keep our right. We want to keep our ability to elect bishops. We want to keep our, our ecclesiastical protections. We want these things, but we also want to be in union with you. And some of the pride had slipped away after those 500 years so that the Pope could say, yes. And so a union was signed saying you, we are now, this formerly Orthodox church is now in union with Rome.

Now, it never was pure. You never had like an entire Orthodox church. It was a split. It was a schism, if you will, that happened where some of those in that church, some bishops, some priests came in union with the Catholic church, some bishops and some priests did not in the same region. Were many of the laity in these Eastern churches familiar with the split between East and West? I don't know on the ground level.

I don't know among the lay people, but certainly. So why would some wish to come back into union with Rome other than the fact that you've got these Protestants? Yeah. Was there other reasons? I think it was a desire for a real union. I mean, after the split in 1054, you had many little attempts. You had the Council of Florence and things like that.

Little attempts to have that union, and they all fell apart. None of them really, really worked out. And so I think they finally said, let's be, I hope so. I mean, this is maybe pietizing it a bit, but they said, let's be a light. Let's be a light in the darkness of how this union might look. So we're getting really close to this. So I just want to go there. Tell us about the split in the 11th century. How did this split between East and West take place? Yeah. So if you look at almost anything in the world, the human trumps the spiritual, unfortunately. So you have these human situations and our human nature comes into it. So pretty much

for the first thousand years of the church, there really wasn't that much exposure to each other. So their church in Constantinople. Is that the word? Exactly. Yeah. So I don't know if that's it, but there's certainly an east-west line. So when you have the Matthew 28, Christ sends the apostles to the four corners of the world.

Now, what you obviously have is he sent them from Jerusalem. So those that went north settled in Antioch. They went south, they settled in Alexandria. These became kind of the hubs of Christendom. And then you had, of course, Peter and Paul, the blood of the apostles, got sent way over here to Rome. So you have this already an east-west divide. You have Rome, where Peter and Paul died, and it's quite geographically separate from Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. They're over here in modern-day Syria, modern-day, you know, Israel, Palestine, modern-day Egypt. And then when Constantine in the early 4th century moved the head of the Holy Roman Empire to Byzantium, which is where we get our name from, to Byzantium, that became, in his humility, he named it Constantinople after himself.

And then it became, of course, in the 15th century, the Muslims took over the Turks and called it Istanbul. Which I found out, Istanbul is just, I used to kind of be offended by that word, but Istanbul is just a pretty much language. It means Jesus reigns. That's a joke. Yeah. I wish.

It pretty much means it's just their way of saying Constantinople. You can kind of hear it in there. Istanbul, Constantinople, even the song, right? They sound similar enough. They weren't trying to like change anything. It was just the way they said Constantinople. Well, that's funny. Obviously, I'm generalizing here.

So then you had four of the main hubs that became the four patriarchates over here in the east and one way over here in the west. gates over here in the east and one way over here in the west. And so it became kind of understood that these four are going to be having better conversations and more frequent conversations than one way over here. But what happened was, is in that time, these traditions developed similarly, these four patriarch gates, if you will, separately from Rome, the one over here. And so when you have this split, the tradition develops separately. So the church over here, we have the Carolingians, we have Charlemagne, and we have Augustine, who in the very early church developed a thing like explaining.

So Augustine had this view of the Godhead. And it's almost funny. You can see the devil in the details. The way that when you have theology and spirituality developed, if you have two different options for seeing Christ or the Trinity or God, you could almost say between the East and the West, one is going to choose one and one is going to choose the other. So the way that Augustine, he focused on when he was looking at, what are we talking about the Trinity? In the first 500 years of the church, 600 years of the church, the dogmas of the Trinity, who is Christ? Is he eternally God? Who is the Holy Christ? Is he eternally God?

Who is the Holy Spirit? Is he eternally God? You know, all these debates were happening in the early church. And so when Augustine was looking at the Trinity, and he wrote this in his document on the Trinity, he said, okay, I'm going to focus on the unity within the Godhead. Within the unity of God the Father, when he generates the Son in eternity, right? The Son is begotten of the Father. If there's a unity in the essence of God within the Godhead, so then God the Father,

if he cannot, when you have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you have the Trinity. So in his unity, he's going to generate the Son and begotten. But because of his unity, he can't generate two different persons in the same way, or they would be the same person. So the way that he came up with it is he said, the Father generates the Son, and then the love of the Father and the Son, together they generate the Holy Spirit. And to be clear, this isn't sequentially. We're not talking about time in God. Exactly. There is no time. God's outside of space and time. So this was Augustine's concept was you have the father. He generates his son.

The son is begotten of him. And then the two of them, the Holy Spirit proceeds from is the love between the father and the son. And so this was Augustine's way of saying within the unity of the Godhead, here's how you can have the unity did not generate two different persons, but one person and the other person that came out of the other two. Now, Augustine didn't speak Greek. So when you have the Greek fathers reading this, the Greek fathers focused on the plurality, the three persons and one God God started there. So in the East, they said, okay, the Father, because of the plurality, the Father can beget the Son, and then the Holy Spirit can proceed from the Father as well, separately from the Son in eternity. And this is where the big Gileokwe debate came. But when you have that, there's two Greek words that can both be translated proceed. One of the Greek words very much focuses on the origin.

So if you proceed, one of the Greek words talks about if you proceed, you have to proceed from somewhere. And that word implies a beginning and defines that beginning. The other Greek word just means you're proceeding along. You're on a pilgrimage. You're moving forward without the sense of origin. In Latin that Augustine was speaking, there's only one word. And that word does not imply origin. So when you say the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, those in the Greek word are saying, do you mean generated by? Do you mean originated there? Or do you just mean when Jesus

Christ says that when I go to heaven, I will send the Holy Spirit? That word send can mean coming from. So when we say the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus, do we mean as an origin or do we just mean in time? Jesus in time ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. So this big debate over the Holy Spirit, that was one of those things. And that came to a head in actually the 8th century. I mean, it's from Augustine, so the 4th century. But it kind of came to a head in the 8th century where the Roman Catholic Church in Spain with the Carolingians. And then it ended up extending to the entire universal Roman Catholic Church.

They put in the creed the phrase, and the Son. Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the son. Holy Syrup proceeds from the father and the son. So the split between the Greek and the Latin words started in the 8th century generally because of that tension. Excellent. And so when it started going into more and more creeds in the West, and then in the year 1054 is when they said, we have two different creeds. Right. And yeah, I can see how that would be upsetting.

Why would the Western church add something into something already agreed upon? Exactly. So you have these four patriarchates over here, these four cities, these four bishops, if you will. And the one over here, they have two different creeds. We're not the same church. Right. Exactly.

We're two different creeds. We are two different churches. And then, unfortunately, in time before it happened, then because of that split, when the Fourth Crusade came through Constantinople, they sapped it. Oh, gosh. Let's get to that in one second, because that is a huge, that's huge. that split when the the fourth crusade came through constantinople they sapped it oh gosh let's get to that in one second because that is a huge that's huge um so are you saying that uh the the differences they aren't irreconcilable between how augustine was explaining it and how the greeks were explaining it correct i believe that we can have this debate which is a true

debate and needs to be debated but i believe we can have this debate within union. In other words, we have it among friends. So we can say, you know, okay, what are the issues of the filioque? There's political issues, there's pastoral issues, theological issues, historical issues, and there's semantic issues. And so all of these issues that do make the filioque really a debate that we cannot gloss over. It does involve God himself. So we need to fight this out, but we can do that within one church because I believe, and I think Pope Benedict would have agreed with me, we eventually need the filioque taken out of the Roman Creed. Hey, I want to take a pause amidst this fantastic conversation to say a big thanks to our third sponsor, which is Covenant Eyes. Covenant Eyes is simply the best filtering and accountability software on the web. And if you don't have it, you probably need to. Filtering blocks the bad stuff. And it's

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locked down with Covenant Eyes and we don't let our kids play at other kids' houses unless they have Covenant Eyes or something like it. It really is the right thing to do. CovenantEyes.com and use Matt Fraddad one word in the promo code section uh to get a month for free all right back to my discussion with father michael o'loughlin explain that so because everything you just said that was brilliant i want you brilliant in the sense that i'm like i'm barely holding on so i'd love you just maybe slow this down a little bit i tend to do these monologues oh it's actually no don't be it was excellent okay i'm gonna go re-listen to this a couple of times. But for those at home who are like,

okay, I really want to understand this. I know the filioque is this big deal. Maybe explain what does filioque mean? Maybe what the Orthodox would say. I mean, you think the two are ultimately reconcilable, but they don't. A lot of them don't. So maybe steel man their position. What do they think? And then respond to that. So filioque is one Latin word that just means and the sun. And so into the Latin creed was added universally around the 19th century, maybe even the 11th century when it actually was made universal in Rome. But different popes, some popes were for the filioque, some popes were against it. But that one word, which is three words in English, and the sun, was added to the Latin Creed around 1,000 years after Christ and 700 years after the creed was first formulated. And it was added, why?

Was it to ward off a particular heresy? Exactly. So the very first heresies, you know, St. Nicholas smacked Arius, right? The Arian heresy that denied the eternal divinity of Jesus Christ. So it put Jesus Christ on a lower level than God the Father. Which is why, I mean, this is what Thomas Aquinas does in his commentary on the creed. He explains not only the kind of biblical foundations for each line in the creed, but how they responded to particular heresies of those days. So in the creed, you have God from God, light from light, true God from true God to deny

Arius. So in a sense, the creed was written in a sense to reject these particular heresies. And so I suppose this is just kind of continuing the tradition. So what was the heresy that we're responding to? It was, it was what, four or 500 years later, it was still the Arian heresy. It was still the Arian heresy. Kind of rearing its ugly head. It was under different names, but it was still the heresy that Jesus Christ is not equal to the Father. Jesus Christ is somehow below him. I see.

So that's why you say the Holy Spirit proceeds from both. Exactly. So they went back to Augustine, and the Roman church in the Latin Creed said to fight the heresy that Jesus Christ is not equal to the Father in his eternity and his divinity. We're going to put in the creed what we believe is that he is so equal with the Father that the person of the Holy Spirit proceeds from the both of them, which is Augustinian, which comes from Augustine. But they wanted that to fight that heresy. So they actually put it into the creed. But do you deny that it's true that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both in the way Augustine was trying to explain it? I do. Now, I don't want to be heretical here, of course. I'm Catholic, but I believe there's a way of the subtleties within that debate. And this is where

the semantics comes in. You know, we have to say, if you're going to put, for instance, if you go to Greece and you go to a Roman Catholic church in Greece and hear the Roman Catholic mass in Greek, the philoque is not in the creed. Why was that? Because it's Greek. It's the original creed. Okay, so as they were developing, was the rope the same mass as was being celebrated in the west even though they grew independently no there was different ones but the creed was always used ever since nicaea okay so the creed became part of the so that never changed whereas universally in the western church that filioque clause bit was added but not correct not in greece and i i honestly don't know because obviously greece even in greece if they were

celebrating roman mass, they would have used Latin up until Vatican II. So I'm guessing the filioque was, correct me if I'm wrong listeners, but I'm guessing that the filioque was in the Latin creed when the Catholics in Greece celebrated. But now at the Novus Ordo, they went back to the original Greek creed, so they do not have the filioque in the creed. Now, when I go to the Byzantine church, that is omitted from the creed. When was permission given to the Eastern churches to not include that bit? So Vatican II very explicitly asked us to return to our traditions. There was, because of especially Soviet communism, there was an insecurity that came and fighting with the Orthodox. Because, of course, in the beginning of the Soviet movement in the USSR, the government, the atheistic government, wanted to control the church because they saw how pervasive the church was.

So in the beginning, they said the Orthodoxy is the national church because they thought they could control it. So then you had these Byzantine Catholics that were the first ones persecuted because their head was in Rome, you know. And so they started doing this persecution. So at first, only the Byzantine Catholics were persecuted. And then later on, they realized the Orthodox, we can't control them. So then they started persecuting the Orthodox as well.

So you certainly have this attempt. But because of that, the Catholics and the Orthodox started butting heads. And so the Byzantine Catholics, feeling insecure about this, started looking more and more Western. They started adapting Western traditions to distinguish themselves from the Orthodox, exactly. So Vatican II later said, you Byzantines have become too Latinized.

You've been doing things that are too Latin. You need to go back to your original traditions. And unfortunately, it took the Western Council telling us this to get us to do that. So we started looking more and more Eastern when that happened. And so that was when some bishops started putting the and the son in parentheses. Like, in other words, this is not original to us. But it wasn't until, it wasn't until, goodness, 2007, when we retranslated our Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic books, that it was just completely left out, which was John Paul's encouragement, Pope John Paul.

Okay. So you're of the same mind as the Orthodox who say that this addition is not just sort of superfluous, but actually incorrect. And yet you think the two can be reconciled in a way that Orthodox don't. So how does that happen? So I think that all apostolic churches, Catholic and Orthodox, in order to promote and to establish union, need to have the same creed. And why not just go with the original? We understand the history that the Romans put in there for a very specific reason, and even a good reason to fight that heresy. We understand Augustine's point of view about, about the Holy Spirit coming from the, being the love between the father and the son, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

But I believe that there are subtleties with the language with Augustine. I do believe that, that Augustine, um, it does in a sense depersonalize the Holy Spirit, calling him the love between you. It, it, you know, I, I do believe that there's issues there within, as the Orthodox would say, so like using the Orthodox mindset, it seems to them that you have a hierarchy within the Trinity. You have the Father first, he generates the Son, and then the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and the Son.

So it seems to be almost like a ranking, Father, then Son, then Holy Spirit, which is, of course, heresy. The Catholic Church would never say that's the son. So it seems to be almost like a ranking father, then son, then Holy Spirit, which is of course heresy. The Catholic church would never say that's the case, but within the Orthodox mindset, because of that, then you can have, well, if that's the case, then couldn't you have the Holy Spirit then generate a person of the Trinity along with the son. And then you have another member of the Trinity, which, you know, and then you have this. And so the Orthodox would say the way that that's worked out pastorally is that if there's a hierarchy within the Trinity itself and the church, which is the body of Christ, mirrors the Trinity, then you have this major, very strong hierarchy within the church.

And that's the biggest issue that the Orthodox have with Catholics is that the Pope's primacy and supremacy is lived out in a way that is too authoritative. But the Orthodox say it comes from the Catholic understanding of the Trinity. Now, is that the case? Or is that just an interesting, you know, insight that may not actually line up with reality? It seems to me that they're just looking for trouble. If you're finding an excuse, and I do believe that, and John Paul agrees with me, Pope John Paul agrees with me on this, and so does Pope Francis, that we need more synodality within the Catholic Church. The way that the Pope lives out his administrative authority, faith and morals, God bless you, we need the Pope to be authoritative on faith and morals and say that from the chair of Peter, what he says is truth. We need that.

But when it comes to administering the parishes themselves, electing of bishops and things like that, I believe that at this point in history and the Council of Ushadad, the Union of Ushadad, where our church came back into the Catholic Church, that union specifically says we have the right as Ruthenian and Byzantine Catholics to elect our own bishops with the approval of Rome. Right now, Rome elects our bishops. Still. Yep. We have gotten away from that. Now, within the hierarchy,

so like a church that has a patriarch, like the Melkite Byzantine Catholic Church, they do elect their own bishops with the approval of Rome. We only have a Metropolitan Archbishop in Pittsburgh. But I do think that we should be given more autonomy than we have. Why haven't you been if the Melkites have? So the Melkites are our universal church. They're based in Lebanon, Syria, in the Middle East, and they have Melkites all over the world. We Ruthenians, because of the tumult between the

wars and after World War II, so the national boundaries do not include us. So we are the mountains between like five different countries. So each of those countries have their own national churches. Ruthenians only exist technically in the United States. Interesting. So it was just a historical reality. So we're not big enough really to have a patriarchate. I don't think we should. major archbishop for the Ukrainian church, and then our metropolitan archbishop in the

U.S., we should be able to say, we within our Ruthenian business at the church are going to choose our own bishops, and then we send it to Rome for approval. Instead of Rome choosing, Rome approves, which I think is a sign of we're administrating our own church. And so, like, I understand that tension. The law of subsidiarity that we don't want to get to. Exactly. Right. And so, but what you have that when you have the Orthodox who are standing outside the Catholic church and they're looking in and saying, this is why we're not Catholic.

We're criticizing it. They're obviously much stronger on these issues that I'm saying, I don't like the way that that Roman ministers are church. I think there should be subtle changes, but I'm going to work on those changes from within union rather than without. And honestly, we kind of need both. I don't criticize the Orthodox. We need them throwing rocks from the outside and they need me throwing rocks from the inside, just kind of testing these things and saying, we need to grow. We need to become more authentic in these ways. So I understand the Orthodox understanding of saying the Augustine's misunderstanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit, that does lead to very pastoral and really lived issues within the pastoral administration of the Catholic

Church. I believe so as well. I do not think that should mean we're separate churches. Okay, that's really interesting. So I certainly haven't studied the filioque at all, to be honest. So I can't speak with any sort of authority on it. But I would want to kind of ask our Catholic listeners to put the shoe on the other foot, because it's very difficult to see our own biases.

Like, suppose we were trying to come back into union with the Orthodox, and we found out that several hundred years after the creed was written, they added something to it. Right. I think we would all be like, you should be the one to take out what we didn't agree on in the beginning. Right. And also, and you can say now, because that heresy has pretty much been obliterated. It doesn't exist anymore. I mean, there are Aryans, but they're so, they're cultish now.

I mean, it's not a major faction within the apostolic church. So I think that you can say, since that was added for a very specific reason, you know, therefore we can say since that reason is now gone for a very specific reason, you know, therefore we can say, since that reason is now gone for the sake of union, we are going to take it out of the creed. And most people actually thought that Pope Benedict was going to do that. Now, yeah, you said Pope Benedict would agree with you. Why? I think he, Pope Benedict was, he was desiring union in a less obvious way than Pope John

Paul II and Pope Francis are. John Paul and Francis are much more vocal about the desire for union with the East. Benedict was just very desirous of union within the West. I mean, he wanted to bring in the Latin schismatics, if you will, you know, Pius X, etc. So that's where his focus was. But he also, being a great academic and a great theologian, I think he understood that we can still debate the theology of the filioque without and still take it out of the creed. Just clarify. I don't think SSPX were in schism.

I mean, yeah. I mean, it's— I think the term is an irregular relationship. Yeah, just for everyone to comment on. And I mean, when an SSPX person comes to my church, I can't give them the Eucharist. I understand that. So thank you. I was them the Eucharist. I understand that. So thank you. I'm using the wrong terminology here.

Yeah. Wow. This is so fantastic. Talk to us about the Crusades. Certainly the Crusades kind of get demonized in Hollywood and in other places from people who don't really understand what they were. There were good things that happened in the Crusade. There were certain absolutely abominable things that happened, especially in the fourth crusade. Right. Help us understand that. So, so Deus Vult, God wills it, right? This is the cry of the crusaders. There was a desire to reclaim the Holy Land, where Jesus came from. That's why the Pope

sent these crusaders and they were... And you might be saying this, so I'm sorry to cut you off, but it's not just a reclaim, right? It was almost like a uh it was it was to defend the christians who were being attacked in the holy land by the muslims yeah and it's and it was certainly a i mean i i personally think there's this balance the the islam and judaism are going to be fighting over the temple mount for all time right and so there's this there's this physical piece of land that people are being killed and fighting over it, and they'll be that way probably forever. I think I love the fact that Christianity should be able to kind of take a step back from that and say, we're focusing on a heavenly genealogy and a heavenly Jerusalem.

So our goal is heaven. So we are all the chosen people of God. Now that Jesus Christ died and rose, we are welcomed into his body. And the body of Christ is a heavenly body of Christ that involves human people. Still, my understanding is it was a responsive attack. So it wasn't like the Muslims were set up there and the Christians were like, let's go take it. It was that the Christians were set up there and they were being invaded by Muslims and the crusades were a response to that. Yeah. When exactly that invasion happened, I don't know. So you might know more than that than I do. But I do know the Crusades, as much as it's demonized,

did have a good purpose. I mean, I believe that the Holy Spirit was working through the church in a general way when it came to the Crusades. But the problem that the Orthodox have is that during the Fourth Crusade that went through Constantinople, there was an obvious knowledge by the Crusaders that the Orthodox who were there were not Catholic. Yeah. Now explain this to us in all of its gory detail, because I want Catholics to be absolutely, I don't want anyone defending this Crusade. At least some of the things that happened here. And This is one of the subtleties within the crusades we need to understand. So the Orthodox who saw themselves, and I don't mean to build them up either, but in a way I shouldn't.

But the Orthodox saw themselves as Christians united with the Catholics against the Muslim invasion. But then you had the Catholic crusaders come in who saw themselves as separate from the Orthodox, even though they were Christians. And they just, you know, raped and pillaged and killed. And it was one of the, in a human way, you know, pretty much destroyed all the churches and left Constantinople sad. Explain what they did in the churches. My understanding is they were like raping of Eastern nuns, even in the church. Yeah. I mean, it was.

It was horrifying. And it was because there was this sense of us and them. Right. And to be clear, it's not like the Pope went, go and rape. Absolutely not. So we're not saying that. You can sort of criticize the Fourth Crusade without having to say the church's authority is under threat.

And without saying this is the Pope's fault or this is the Roman Catholic Church's fault. But that's just what happened. Now, within that, I mean, there is many times where Catholics have killed Orthodox and Orthodox have killed Catholics. It's a horrible storied history of martyrdoms on both sides. When union happens, God willing, it's going to be very interesting to say, for instance, like Alexis Toth, we can get into this if you want, but in the American Byzantine Catholic Church, Alexis Toth.

I don't know what that is. So he was a Byzantine Catholic priest who was a widower, and before we had our own eparchies, before we had our own dioceses here in the United States, to get another priest for a parish, he had to go to the local Roman Catholic bishop and say, can you please write to Rome and have them, have Rome, since we don't have our dioceses, send us priests from Ukraine, from Slovakia, and send them here to the U.S.? Well, he showed up at the office of Bishop John Ireland in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is where he was, and Bishop Ireland just said, aren't you one of those Byzantine Catholic priests?

And he goes, yes, I'm a widow. I was married. And for now about 30, 40 years, there had been this tension where the Roman Catholics thought that the Byzantine Catholic was causing scandal because of their married priesthood. So they wrote to Rome and said, we need an authoritative document from the Eastern congregation that says Byzantine priests in the United States cannot be married. So when that documentation came from Rome, it had already happened in the 1890s. It happened again in 1929.

Many, many, many of the married Byzantine Catholic priests switched to Orthodoxy. So, I'm sorry, how do we get from the Fourth Crusade to this? So, well, that's the differences in between the Latins and the Romans. Oh, I see. So that happened in the Fourth Crusade. in between the Latins and the Romans. Oh, I see. So that happened in the Fourth Crusade.

And the reason why these crusaders themselves felt that they could sack was because of these real, they saw it as heresy. Your liturgy looks different. You're married. You celebrate with leavened bread. Exactly. All these different issues that led to the Great Schism in 1054. And now just a couple hundred years later, is enabling this us and them tension.

And so when union does happen, here's all the human things we're gonna have to deal with. So, I mean, you still talk to some Greek Orthodox today and you will say, why aren't you in union with the Catholics? They'll say the Crusades. That'll be on the top of their list. It's a very emotional thing.

How dare they came in and destroyed our homeland. I mean, Constantinople was where our church from. That's where we get the name Byzantium, Byzantine Church. I mean, and the Byzantine Orthodox, too. They saw that as an immense attack. So there's this human dimension. And the reason these attackers did this is because of the differences they thought were illegitimate. Exactly.

You know, like married priests, leavened bread. This is not the true church. These are not apostolic Christians. And this is- I mean, with the Orthodox, I mean, I'm sure there's been Orthodox fighting Catholics. Did they just show up to a bunch of peaceful Orthodox and destroy their church? No, I think it was just the crusaders were so much more militarily powerful. And also, you know, there was a bit of, Constantinople was kind of under constant attack, you know, there was a bit of Constantinople was kind of under constant attack, you know, from barbarians, from the Slav areas, you know, but from the Muslims, of course.

And so I think they just felt, again, if we're looking for good, they were seeing, oh, here's someone that's going to be on our side, and they weren't. And so it's very emotional, just like the Alexis Toth story I was telling you about. Like with him, he left, he is a saint in the orthodox church for leaving the catholic church and so it's like he you know the the imposition of rome this evil rome on us telling we cannot have our authentic tradition of married priesthood so he left and joined the orthodox so they now have him as a saint for kind of sticking with the ancient traditions now when we have union, is Alexis Toth going to be a saint in the universal church? And what are we going to do about the Crusades? I mean, there's things like that.

These are the emotional aspects of the separation of the churches that we're going to have to somehow deal with when this come back together again. But the Crusades is one of the big ones, one of the big emotional reasons for separation that we're going to have to somehow deal with. Emotional reasons for separation that we're going to have to somehow deal with. And so there are certain things that Catholics ought to defend as they speak with Orthodox and try to bring them into the church. I'm not sure if you would see it that way. But this isn't one of them. You know what I'm saying? Like defending the Fourth Crusade is not one of them.

As we interact with our Orthodox brothers, we might feel the need to defend absolutely everything. Right, correct. There needs to be subtleties there. And John Paul, thank God, Paul II, he actually apologized. He made a public apology for the sacking of Constantinople. And we need that. And so much in our faith is subtlety. I mean, I've been a priest now 15 years.

Like so much of it is saying we want to be black and white. Exactly. And now in the social media world, it's like everything is black and white. I'm going to be hardcore because we also need that. We also need some black and white in the church nowadays. Especially when we feel like we're not getting much direction. Right. Right. And we just, yeah.

We're flailing. Yeah, we're flailing. And I think the temptation is to forsake nuance for the sake of clarity. And sometimes that goes too far. So we need to pray for wisdom. I've realized wisdom and maturity, those two things to what is what does a wise mature person do they see the subtlety and they're black out when they need to be black and white and they're gray when they need to be gray and that they have the wisdom and the maturity to say this is how it is so i think we can we as

catholics can say um the crusades were done for a very specific reason and god was there in many aspects of it. Sacking of Constantinople was not one of them. And we can say, look, I mean, every Christian church knows that we are kind of by nature hypocrites, right? We are called to something that we will never attain. We're called to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, and yet we will always be sinners. So within that, we should understand human weakness better than we do even among other christians and so i hope the orthodox one day can say they've apologized for that aspect of the fourth crusade and so we are going to offer forgiveness and once we've offered forgiveness kind of corporate

forgiveness for the for the corporate sin now we can move forward with the other issues that are still causing this what was the response from the orthodox churches in to john paul the second's apology um because sometimes when i think of the orthodox i just think of like a pissed off group of people that aren't interested in union yeah and don't want anything to do with this yeah i have this like theory and i think it's accurate that it's always the underdog that's upset with the bigger guy yeah canada doesn't want to be america but america thinks canada's cute new zealanders hate australians. We think New Zealanders are fine. The Orthodox are always upset at Catholics.

We're like, well, basically we believe a lot of the same stuff. Right. And that's the squeaky wheel gets the oil. You know, so there's the people that are the loudest and kind of the most, you know, there's a great story where you have the, especially the Russian monks on Mount Athos and Patriarch Bartholomew, who's currently the ecumenical patriarch. He knew John Paul. They worked together very well. And he's very solid in his orthodoxy, of course, thank God. But he is also desirous of union if it's done well. And I like the way he phrases these things. It was very similar to what John Paul was saying. John Paul actually, if you remember, said, I am open to reanalyzing the way that I live out my primacy and supremacy in the church.

I want theologians to debate this. And unfortunately, the devil was there. And only two or three theologians really threw themselves into the work of saying, here's how we can, without giving any of our traditions, be authentic to canon law and to the reality of the Catholic Church. Here's how we can phrase differently the administrative authority of the Catholic Church that came from Trent, that came from Vatican I. Here's how we can reanalyze those statements in a way that will hopefully be okay, understandable, and the way that the Orthodox can embrace it. You know, I feel like, you know, after the confusion of the Second Vatican Council having a faithful, saintly Pope, I feel like, you know, after the confusion of the Second Vatican Council

having a faithful, saintly Pope, I feel like we Catholics were like, all the authority. You have it all because these guys, we're all crazy. We need you to lead us.

Yes. Sort of leaning into this ultramontanism thing. Now we've got Pope Francis. I feel like a lot of faithful Catholics are like, no, no, divide the authority. We don't want you doing that.

And it's making us be mature and wise. It's making us say, what is the proper way to see the Pope? Like, what is the proper way of listening to his Wednesday audiences, interviews on airplanes, and then documents, and similar documents, tweets. Like, it's making us reanalyze the fact that he's human, but also, you know, a Pope. Another issue the Orthodox have is because of this hierarchy, they say, when he asked the title of the vicar of Christ, if Christ, if the Holy Spirit proceeded from Christ as well, then they think that the Catholics say that Christ has a certain authority over the Holy

Spirit because of that hierarchy. So therefore, if we call the Pope the vicar of Christ, therefore, he decides where the Holy Spirit goes and where the Holy Spirit doesn't. Oh, that's interesting. And he's giving himself that order. So all of these are, I don't, I see these as a bit of a stretch. Many Orthodox might argue with me on that, but to me, it's, again, kind of looking for trouble. But that's where someone like John Paul, who seemed just like a dad, you know, he seemed like grandpa.

And I'm from the John Paul generation. So it was like, I will give you all the power like i i i would follow archbishop charles chapu to anything i mean i i probably put him on a pedestal because i i knew him in denver for a while and i i love everything he does and i think but when i get to know him better there's things that every human being has that say okay i i need to there are certain disagreements that we have, and there's a subtlety there that I just can't listen to everything he says and say, yes, you know, everything you say, speak more. And so I think that maturity and wisdom needs to come about in this understanding and the Orthodox need to see that in us and we need to see that in them.

So we've offered some criticisms of the Catholic Church that we think are legitimate. As I say, I haven't really studied the filioque a great deal, but you offered a criticism there. Let's offer some criticisms of the Orthodox. As they've grown and developed, are they explicating the faith in a way that's contrary to certain Catholic teachings? I know they have a weak stance on contraception, for example. But other than those sort of moral issues, are there irreconcilable differences between how the Orthodox view Mary's translation? Is that the word?

Into heaven? Is that the word? No. I think you can use that word, yeah. And assumption in the Western church, like the immaculate conception. Yeah. So could a Catholic, could you in good conscience, well, obviously you can't join the Orthodox church because you would be joining a church in schism.

But if there was this reunion, what would the Orthodox have to accept that they don't yet accept that's in conflict with Catholic teaching? I think the only thing that they would have to accept is the role of the Pope. That's really the only thing that actually keeps us divided brethren. What does the Orthodox, I want to get to that, but how does the Orthodox view the Blessed Mother of God, her assumption, her Immaculate Conception? What language do they use? Is it two different? You hit the nail on the head. It's a language. Again, those issues I believe are semantic issues. They're issues with language. So for instance, when you have original sin, so Romans 5.12. And when you have Romans 5.12, again, when you have the Greek... Do you have a Bible on you? Do I? I do. Do you mind getting it?

It's by my lamp over there on the couch by one of those side tables. So I can point out where the language differences refer. And this also goes back to Augustine, who, again, was reading the Latin Bible and then the Greek Bible. And inherent in those languages is different issues. So when you say in Romansans 5 12 that that one man sinned yep and death came into the world because of his sin thanks um there there it's the way you you translate the words to say what original sin is and the way that the roman catholic church defines original sin in the way that the orthodox and byzantine catholic churches um define um what Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches define what they would call ancestral sin.

Yeah. And there's a subtlety there. Is that subtlety? Because I suppose, I mean, you explained this to me because you'd know it better. Isn't the difference between doctrine and theology? Doctrine's been what's revealed. Theology is how we express it. Is that an appropriate way to say it?

There's also a different definition of theology between the East and the Western churches. Is that an appropriate way to say it? There's also a different definition of theology between the East and the Western churches. So a theologian in the East, we actually give title, the title theologian to like John the theologian, Gregory the theologian. These were men who in a sense had such an intimate relationship with Christ that came through prayer. I see. That they were able to change things rather than like a systematic type of theology like you'd say in the west exactly um so romans 5 12 therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to all men because all men sinned so this translation um because all men sinned is actually the greek version of that so in other words when adam sinned is actually the Greek version of that. So in other words, when Adam sinned, how does that sin affect us?

This is what we call original sin or ancestral sin. So the way that Augustine looked at it was that he said, not because of Adam all sinned, but in Adam, in whom he translated because of in whom. And he didn't, again, Greek was not his first language. So he translated the Greek into in whom. of in whom. And he didn't, again, Greek was not his first language. So he translated the Greek into in whom. So according to Augustine, all of us sinned in Adam and his guilt, the guilt of that sin passes on biologically through the sexual act to all generations. And so now the Roman Catholic church has kind of gotten away from that recently. They don't use the word, we are guilty in Adam.

But the way that the Orthodox, again it's a greek thing in greek you can translate that phrase um f ho two different ways and you can say that it either refers to adam or refers to death is is it because of adam or in adam that we sinned or is it because of death that we sin so in other words what what sin? So in other words, what has been passed on because of this sin? Is it guilt or is it mortality? Is it guilt or is it death? The Orthodox Church in the East has always said the result of Adam's sin was mortality, and it's certainly a lessening of our human nature. There's certainly a fallen nature there, but it's not the guilt. So the way that this lives out with the Immaculate Conception

is that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception says that Mary was freed from the results of original sin. Now, the results of original sin in the West are guilt, right? So Mary was freed by the cross outside of time of the guilt of Adam. That makes sense to me. If you say she was freed from mortality. Yeah, she wasn't. She wasn't. So that's a semantic thing. So that's when the Greeks say, when they hear original sin,

they would say ancestral sin instead. They're going to say, are the Latins saying that Marie was free from death because the Eastern Church is specific about that Mary actually died. And the Pope, when he defined the dogma of the assumption, said at the end of her earthly life. Right. I think some Catholics don't realize this.

So the church did not teach that Mary did not die. Right. So Scott Hahn, when I was in his class, said this very specifically. Raise your hand if you believe Mary died. Raise your hand if you believe she didn't die. Within the Roman Catholic Church, you can believe either one. There's an openness there, which is very un-Latin, actually. Usually we Greeks, we in the East are kind of like, it's one or the other.

It's fine. It's a mystery, you know. But he said that. But there is the proto-Evangelical, I'm sorry, early, early documents, early iconography explicitly shows Mary's body laying in the tomb. And Jesus, who ascended to heaven, came back and is holding her soul. So the separation of soul from body means she actually died. The problem is there's been private revelation in the West, private revelation, not authoritative, private revelation that says she did not die, that she fell asleep, and that did not mean death, and

then she assumed that heaven without without dying and it adds a certain purity to her if she was immaculately conceived and then death always involves corruption whereas which of course she didn't corrupt the east would say she died but didn't corrupt um but the west would say even if she didn't die even if she but again if she didn't die that's a better sign of her not corrupting at all. Her body, which is the temple of God, was kept pure from the moment of her conception all the way up until she died. And it never involved corruption because that is the temple. That is the tabernacle.

That is God's house. Of course, it wouldn't undergo corruption. Again, to be clear, the church, I think it would be fair to say that the bulk of the tradition is that she did die. That's certainly the more ancient way absolutely and i would say i mean since there's a choice in the west you the whole east believe she died and the west you can believe one or the other right and it's kind of one of those things again the orthodox are very good at saying these seem like esoteric like who really cares if she

died or not how does that affect my holiness how does that affect my holiness? How does that affect my life? The filioque, you know, so the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or the Father and the Son. How does that affect my life of faith, raising my family, growing in holiness? The Orthodox are good at kind of pointing out, here's how it actually affects the structure of the Church, the ecclesiology. But what does the Catholic Church teach about original sin. So whether or not Augustine interpreted Romans 5 in a particular way, the Catholic Church does have an authoritative teaching on original sin,

which we have to submit to, yes. Right. And where the specifics of that authoritative teaching, I'm not eloquent enough to say it's these exact things. I'm just not educated on that enough. But you can see this lived out

in a way. So for instance, one of the ways that this is pretty obvious is when you have, what does the Roman Church call it? Like if you go on a pilgrimage and you pray in our Father, Hail Mary. Oh, indulgences. Indulgences, thank you.

So in the Roman Church, there are indulgences. And what that is is you're saying that there is temporal punishment due to sin. And that God can say, if you do this, I will take away that temporal punishment due to sin. And what that implies is that in the Orthodox mind, they look at that and they say, what that means is God is holding something against us as a judge. He's seeking justice. But at some point, God can just say, I take away that judgment. God can just say, I take away that judgment. And unless, and I spoke about this with Father Gregory Pine recently,

unless you don't necessarily see judgment and healing at odds with each other, like if they're more interrelated than we think, then God's remitting through the church, the temporal punishment due to sin, can also be in a sense a supernatural act in which he heals. Exactly. And so what you're doing right now is you're doing an act of union. You're showing how we don't need to be separated, brethren.

We don't need to have this because the way that there's, if we're looking for polarization, we're going to find it. And so the Eastern church, you're right, is all about healing. Pope Francis said this. He got it from the East.

The church is a hospital for sinners. We've come here to be healed. And the West, though, has this tradition that annulments—indulgences—thank you—indulgences came from this, you have this many days indulgence, you get this many days out of purgatory. That did come from the more Augustinian mindset. Now, it can be reconciled, I fully believe, with the Eastern mindset, but that's where one of those disparities is. So that's where you're going to see something like the understanding of original sin, that it's guilt that can be alleviated by God's judgment or mercy, rather than saying, like the Eastern view would be, when I die, purgatory is like detox.

purgatory is like detox. Purgatory isn't some place of punishment where I'm, right, where I am, I kind of, I need to satisfy God's justice because of my sin. Now, some Western theologians

have said that, some have not. It's not an explicit dogma. But where the Eastern Church has been very, and honestly, the Eastern Church in many ways,

I hate to put it this way, but they're responding to the West. The West is the bigger, the bigger brother. So, And it's so much bigger that I think there's always a response to that. So the Eastern Church tends to err on the side of, okay, no, it's only about healing. It's only about healing, but no, God is perfectly just and God is perfectly merciful. And the West can contribute that part of the discussion to what this is. But when you have those signs, you're saying, I do understand how the Orthodox,

how the Eastern Church can look at the West and say, it's too juridical. It's too much about, say what sins in confession you are and tell me how many times you did this. The old Irish manuals where literally the confessor would sit there with a book and it said, okay, I gossiped 10 times. And they say, okay, gossiped,

for every time you gossiped, you need to walk a mile. You know, and they would say, your penance is to walk 10 miles since you gossiped 10 times. And they say, okay, gossiped. For every time you gossiped, you need to walk a mile. You know, and they would say your penance is to walk 10 miles since you gossiped 10 times. That can be seen as a very juridical, you know, you offended God and therefore in order for him to forgive you, you need to make up for what you did by walking those or praying these things, by going on a crusade, by going on a pilgrimage. You need to do these things. So did by walking those or praying these things, by going on a crusade, by going on a pilgrimage.

You need to do these things. So there has been a history in the Roman Church that was probably too juridical in my mindset. But I don't believe that that has to be a separate issue from the healing aspect of God's mercy offered in his justice and mercy that the Eastern Church is so eloquent about. It's interesting to me I asked you to criticize the Orthodox Church and you you criticize the Catholic church again. What's going on? So is it that you can't, that you don't wish to, that you're really Orthodox at heart, or you see them as the same? Or is it you're so sympathetic to the Orthodox church that anything that seems to be a contradiction can't be? I am Orthodox at heart. I will fully admit that. I mean, that is where my heart is. So how are they in a state of schism? Obviously obviously because of the act of being not in union with the Pope, but what is it Orthodox

need to change? Not just to be in union with the Pope, but to be in union with what Christ wants. So the Orthodox need to change and able to allow a obvious unifying head of the entire Christian church, which is the which is the the Pope of Rome, the Bishop of Rome, is the the unifying head and has certain authority over the other churches when it comes to faith and morals. And can I believe through it should be through great bureaucracy. It should be through synod, but can when it comes down to it, correct other patriarchs. He is given a gift by the Holy Spirit to be the eldest among brothers, to be the greatest among equals in that way. And he should have some way, even if it's worked out and we need to be more eloquent about what that is, the Orthodox. And it's shown itself, right? The patriarch of Moscow has now excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople and is probably going to do that with the patriarch of Antioch.

Yeah, Antioch. So, I mean, there's these, of Alexandria, excuse me. So there's this, like, they don't have any visible head. Moscow, which is not one of the first five patriarchates, now they're excommunicating the one who is the second after Rome. So at the early councils, they said there's a hierarchy within the patriarchates. And Rome has that hierarchy. And Rome comes first and Constantinople comes second. Again, there's not much reason to have this hierarchy, but that's there. So when the schism happened, now you have

Constantinople, we call the ecumenical patriarch. And now you have who makes decisions, who is a sign of unity and brings the Orthodox churcheses to unity? There is nobody. They're all completely separate. The Church of Moscow is completely separate from the Church of Constantinople, from Antioch, from Alexandria. So, and that's a problem. There's no way of enforcing on a human level union. And that's my biggest criticism of the Orthodox. How has the Orthodox Church viewed the papacy? And how has that maybe developed since the time of the schism how do they view peter's role as it were yeah so one of the problems is that since peter also went to antioch they claim they have peter there so so but but but it's so it's more the city of rome

that that was given primacy in the first councils it the city of rome has primacy because peter went there but also that seat that that bishop or that that c has that primacy over the other ones so they agree with this they did in the early church in the first century now are orthodox apologists denying that they acknowledge that in the early church they're not denying that they did but because of the schism they call constantinople the new rome which wouldn't that mean that there's a primacy in Constantinople? Yes. And would that refer to a specific patriarch? It would. It would refer to the patriarch in Constantinople who's, that's Bartholomew. We call him the ecumenical patriarch. He's the patriarch of the Greek church, but the patriarch of Constantinople. Right. But I presume that there's

not a majority of Orthodox who would look to him. So. No, the majority, that's one of the issues. The majority of the Orthodox are probably under the patriarch of Moscow, that that's one of the issues the majority of the orthodox are probably under the patriarch of moscow which is not one of the first five but moscow likes to call itself the third rome so so because of because of the power they have so that that's why there can be this offense and a disagreement everything was over ukraine between moscow and constantinople because moscow has more power secular power it has more people than constantinople, because Moscow has more power, secular power. It has more people than Constantinople does, since Constantinople is now in Turkey, which of course is not a Christian nation. And most of the Christians underneath the ecumenical patriarch are in Greece. And so you have this kind of Greek-Russian fight going on, and they're fighting over Ukraine, and who actually

has authority over Ukraine. I think it's important. I just want to point this out. Side note, we are living in a very confusing time in the church. And I think that there are particular Catholics who are so fed up with what looks like endless debates and fractions that they think that the grass is greener in orthodoxy. But you only have to spend five minutes on an orthodox Facebook forum to realize heaven is not here, right? Right. And you're going to get the noisiest people there too. But one of the things that is funny is people will even say to me as a Byzantine Catholic

priest, they will say, oh my gosh, I'm so sick of all the infighting in the Roman Catholic church, all the mass wars. We're going to go Byzantine because all of you are completely Orthodox, completely reverend. I'm like, no. We have our own issues as well. Of course you do. And so do the Orthodox. And you go to an Orthodox parish, you're going to see the same human issues.

And then people get really disgruntled, you know, and then they leave altogether or something like that. So, no, you're going to find the human issues everywhere. And Catholics and Orthodox both need to understand that the human issues are there. We're doing it imperfectly there. But I believe that union is more important than getting it perfectly correct. That's why I will remain within union with the Catholic Church, even though I believe there are issues that need to be dealt with. So how does the Orthodox view Pope Francis right now?

Is he like, do they see him as a schismatic bishop? Yeah. Is that it? Do they see him as the head among many who's gone astray? I think some would. Not the head among many, sorry, the head of the other bishops. Yeah, the elders among brothers. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

The greatest among equals. But there is a, like, the Orthodox generally love the fact that Pope Francis desires synodality. Like, he's not just making authoritative statements. He's actually calling bishops together. And synodality is a very Eastern thing. And by the way, the word schism is actually not even used among. And synodality is a very Eastern thing. And by the way, the word schism is actually not even used among, I mean, there is a separation.

We are separated brethren, but John Paul and Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew actually discussed that when the great schism happened in 1054, the delegate from Rome who only had power to excommunicate the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, his power came from the Pope who had died during the journey.

So it's a weird historical thing that the Holy Spirit is there. So actually, the Great Schism wasn't a true- This is a book by David Bentley Hart. Are you familiar with him? Yes. He's a brilliant philosopher. And he actually, I think, has a book by that name, The Myth of Schism. Do you agree with that?

Are the Orthodox in schism with the Catholic Church? I think— I'm pressing you here. I am. I wouldn't use the word schism. I would use the word separated. We are obviously separated. I mean, the Orthodox will not allow Catholics to receive the Eucharist in their churches.

And most Catholics will be— Oh, yes. —understanding that enough will say, if most Catholics will be understanding of that enough, will say, if an Orthodox person comes to me and says, can I receive the Eucharist? I will say, the Catholic Church teaches that you can receive the Eucharist in a Catholic Church, even though you are Orthodox, because you believe the same thing about what it is. It's interesting to me that the big church, Catholic Church, Orthodox Church, if you want to put it that way, is bending over backwards, it seems. Didn't Pope Paul VI kiss the feet of one of the patriarchs?

I'm not sure, but I mean, I wouldn't doubt it. Doesn't it seem like the Catholic Church is doing in many ways all that it can? Are there swaths of orthodoxy that are similarly kind of responding? Not swaths, but there certainly are some that are. I mean, I've known there are few and far between, but I've known bishops and orthodox bishops and priests that will commune me if I go to their church. Yeah. And it's this, it's this little.

Well, why are you going to a separated church? It's only if I'm there for, for to pray or there for union, you know, it's a, you know, that, that is, that is the rule in, in among the Catholic church. You know, you can, you know, if you, for some reason, which I don't know why this would happen, but if you're up in Siberia somewhere and you're a Catholic and you are allowed and you cannot make it to a Sunday mass somewhere within the Catholic communion, you can go to an Orthodox church. Now, they won't commune you, but it will fulfill your Sunday obligation. I disagree with that. And it's only if you have no access.

Yeah, I think that's wrong. And I can't even tell you why it's wrong, which is a really annoying thing to do, to challenge someone and not know how to back it up. That's very orthodox of you, actually. They're the ones that say, unless you're in communion, you shouldn't go. Because I looked into this, because I've been going to a Byzantine church now for four years,

and I was up in the backwoods of Georgia for a year, and the Holy Mass was so sloppily, sloppily? Sloppy celebration. It was gross. Just ponytails and guitars and who cares anyway. It was effeminate preaching and it was nothing. There was an Orthodox church nearby.

I really, really wanted to go there to fulfill my Sunday obligation. I spoke to one Byzantine priest and he said, well, you can technically do that. You're saying something different. You're saying there's no other option. If there's a Novus Ordo, go. Yeah. You can go pray at the Orthodox but receive Eucharist at the Catholic. I'm willing to be wrong.

So let's have people look this up and tell us in the comments section. My understanding is you cannot fulfill your Sunday obligation by going to a schismatic church. You wouldn't call it that. But you can go, I suppose. It's not forbidden to go. But you're no more fulfilling your Sunday obligation than if you didn't go. You just wouldn't be culpable for not attending Sunday Mass when you couldn't. Right. And you're right. I mean, if you're looking at it in that way,

you can either stay home because you don't have access to a Catholic church or go to an Orthodox one. My understanding is the reason why that is kind of put that way is because the Sunday celebration, as you know, is more than just receiving the Eucharist. I mean, there's the Sunday, the Sabbath, the Day the Lord Rose from the Dead. There's God is present in the divine liturgy or the mass in a way that along with the Eucharist that finds its climax. And the Eucharist, of course, is the whole is the we're receiving the body and blood of Christ. But we experience God more in a divine liturgy, an orthodox divine liturgy than we do sitting at home, pretty, pretty objectively. So you'd want to go to that. And again, I would, I definitely would. And so, so there's, there's that I'm engaging with the reality of the, of the Lord's day of

Sunday, even though it's at a, at an orthodox church. And if they don't, if I, honestly, I think, at an Orthodox church. And if they don't, if I, honestly, I think a wise thing to say would be, if you say there's a Roman Catholic church on the street and it is just, it is hard to pray, it is hard to endure, I'm gonna go endure it because I get to receive the Eucharist

and I get to hear the word of God. I'm gonna go and do that. I still think that you should do that and go to the Orthodox. You know, the Orthodox, you would go to, again, I'm saying this is a celibate without a family and things like that. So I say, yeah, go to both. Why not?

But you go and you're saying, I'm experiencing God in a human way. I mean, I get it. And my desire would be to do just that. But how is a person not putting themselves at jeopardy by attending an Orthodox church? I mean, I could see someone just sort of, I mean, you might not want to use this word and tell me why you might not. How is it that someone won't just apostatize, leave the Catholic church? If you're only, let's think of a hypothetical set of a cantus church that denies that the Pope is on the Chiripita. And maybe you've gone to an FSSP church, which is

obviously completely in union with Roman, absolutely beautiful. And you move to this place and the only church you can go to is a Sedevacantus church or this hokey kind of Novus Ordo. I could see there being an argument for why you shouldn't be, you definitely shouldn't go to the Sedevacantus church. And if you began to do that, you would likely end up just leaving the Catholic church. So how is that also do that, you would likely end up just leaving the Catholic church. So how is that also not an argument for why you shouldn't attend an Orthodox church? I think that's an argument from a purely human perspective. I know how vulnerable I am. And I think there is that. That's why, and there's even many Byzantine Catholics who disagree with

me on this, that they would say, if you're in that situation, go Orthodox. I mean, they have valid sacraments, you know. And I say, I don't—to me, that's watering the differences down enough where why even move towards union? Why put in the effort if we're already saying they're the same thing? So I believe that we are so close, but we need to deal with it. We need those same Byzantine Catholics. Many of them would actually say, would probably agree with disagreeing with our bishops on Latinizations. Like for instance, in the Orthodox church, there is no concept the same way we have in the Catholic church of Sunday obligation. There isn't.

So I actually find this beautiful and there's subtleties here, but in the Western mindset, there's this sense of, and I think this is a cultural and a church thing, there's this sense of we are going to say here is the least you can do, and if you do less than that, you're in sin. And that's Sunday obligation, that's fasting on Fridays. In the Eastern mindset, in the Orthodox Church, they say monasticism is the ideal. Talk to your spiritual father about where you fall within that. But there's no bottom level where if you go below that, you're sinning. You're just saying you should be in discussion with your spiritual father, your community, being accountable to always doing more and more and more.

And that means praying the full liturgy of the hours. That means going to every single feast day, doing vigils on all feast day nights. That means that's monastic, which not everybody can do, but that's the ideal. So in that sense, many Byzantine Catholics will say we are, they'll call themselves Orthodox in union with Rome, which I actually like that term, Orthodox in union with Rome. So if we are, then they will say we don't, we're Orthodox. We don't have that concept of Sunday obligation. And I will say, correct. Within our deeper Eastern roots, we don't have that concept of sunday obligation and i will say correct within our

deeper eastern roots we don't but our bishops even if they're wrong say that there is a sunday obligation and i believe that that the bishops are given that duty and we need to be obedient to our bishops so there are the usually a lot of the same byzantine catholics that would say if you're in that situation just go orthodox would would also say, even in a Byzantine Catholic church, you're not in sin if you don't go to church on Sunday for a non-authentic reason. But your bishops do say that. Our bishops do say that. Your Eastern bishops do say that.

And I say we need to be obedient to them. I think there's a virtue there. So this is the debate within Byzantine Catholicism. You can just see from the little conversation we've had how complex this gets really quickly and what that looks like. Again, pray for wisdom and maturity. We need it for these issues. I think what I'm hearing is we don't want to overemphasize our differences when we don't

have to, but we also don't want to pretend we're in union. Exactly. Because that doesn't kind of... That's a great way of saying it. Man, this is fun. And it's also a whole other part of the world. I have a lot of, I mean, I converted to a business in Catholicism from where I was when I was 17. Why?

I was from a Catholic. Why did you do that? I went to one liturgy, and as a 17-year-old kid, it just blew my mind. I said, this language in the divine liturgy, it melts my heart, and it engages my brain in a way that the language used in the West never did. And it did it in one liturgy. And the way I described it back when I was 17 was it's like God took a two by four and just smacked me across the face with it. Or like later on, I often have the image in prayer where I am such a child of my mother, that I will always begin my prayer with her. And I'll always just meditate upon the presence of the mother of God, the Theotokos.

There's been times, and I've been in prayer, especially during the Divine Liturgy, where you know how kids will sometimes grab your chin and move your face to look at them? That's happened oftentimes with the mother of God. Well, she'll grab my chin and move it to her son. It's a beautiful image, but I think that's what that was. It was like this two by four was Jesus saying, like, look here. Like you and I could not. I had a hard time.

My mind didn't wander. I have ADD really bad. My mind didn't wander that bad. Keep saying that. I've done so many episodes where like Peter Craig's like, I think I have ADD. I think I do. I'm going to get this checked. But I'm obviously all over the place with this.

So like where the divine liturgy kept me engaged minute by minute. Yeah, me too. More than the Western traditions did. No, absolutely. I go to the Tridentine Mass, which I would find preferable over the Nova Soto, just personally speaking. But there's so much quiet, which I think there's a lot to be said about that. Like you ought to be contemplating. quiet, which I think is, there's a lot to be said about that.

Like you ought to be contemplating. But then when I go to the Eastern church, it's almost like you get put on a roller coaster. Here we go. And where the metanies and the chanting nonstop. Yeah. But what do you say? Because I would consider myself, people say, why do you go to Byzantine church? I say, I'm a refugee from a sea of banal liturgies.

I think there's many people in the church who, they don't want to go to a Byzantine church, I say I'm a refugee from a sea of banal liturgies. I think there's many people in the church who, they don't want to go to the Novus. I think the Novus order can be celebrated beautifully, of course, but I think there are those cases which we've all seen

where it's just, there's nothing to reverence. Obviously, objectively, there is the Holy Eucharist, but it's like people are shuffling about like it's a 7-Eleven. I want to

go somewhere and kiss the earth, metaphorically speaking, or maybe not. I want to bow down before the mystery of God. And I want that desire that I have for him to be taken seriously. And when the priest stands up and says, let's greet everybody, it's not. It's just, it's what are we doing? I'm not interested. I think there's like nothing so exclusive as when the priest tries to make the Holy Mass more inclusive, if you want. So that's kind of why I, and I suspect that's why a lot of people are going to the Byzantine church. They want beauty and mystery. And unfortunately, it's a stereotype, but I think sometimes it's true. You'll go to one of these Tridentine churches and you just encounter all of angry people. And you're like, well, I don't want that. I want the beauty.

I want the tradition, but I'd rather people not be pissed off. Right. So I think that's why people are going to the Byzantine church. But do you think, in a sense, that people shouldn't be doing that? Like, maybe they should stand and fight and seek to revitalize the parishes that they're in. I'm not saying you shouldn't leave a parish that doesn't look like it's going anywhere quickly, especially if you've got kids.

I don't want to stay in a terribly celebrated parish, expose my kids to it just so I can heroically change from the inside, which probably won't change. So I think, yeah, you should go to a beautiful church. But do you think there's something to be said about, no, stick in the West? If you're an Eastern Catholic, don, I guess, if you're an Eastern Catholic, don't abandon ship and go to a Western church. Stay there and do what you can and vice versa. Obviously you wouldn't though, because you've converted. Yeah. So absolutely. And I,

when I converted, when I was a teenager, I did not have that same understanding. I did not have the same understanding where you need to, because I actually did not, I did not leave the Roman church. I just was drawn to, exactly. I was drawn to the Byzantine church, but I, by ritual, I celebrate the Roman mass. I love celebrating the Roman mass and I do the Novus Ordo and I love it. So my personality is going to be, I'm an adapter. They say kind of, you know, if you walk into a friend's house and it's too cold, what do you do? There's two types of people. I'm the controller.

Right. So you say, please, can you change it? Right. Or I just do it myself. Okay. That would be screw it up. And I'm an adapter. I'll go out to my car, get a sweater.

I'll do whatever I can to not impose myself upon this person. Now, that can be a weakness, too, of course. can to not impose myself upon this person. Now that can be a weakness too, of course. So I will, I will sit there in a horribly done Novus Ordo mass and I will seek the little seeds of goodness. I wish I could do that more. Yeah. And it's just, it's just my temperament. So that's not why I left the Roman Catholic church. Cause I, I mean, I didn't so, but I was more attracted to something else. But I do think that you're correct. We should feel a vocation, a call from God that is direct. If we're going to leave one church and go to another one, it should be a drawing by God.

And this ties in, excuse me if this is a bad analogy, but it ties into actually priests becoming laicized. And I've thought about this. Because when a priest becomes laicized and he says, I want to leave the priesthood, I want to go get married. Something in me goes, you are breaking a commitment. You are scandalizing the church. Now, whatever's going on in their mind, they might just be a horrible priest. They might be leading people astray. Maybe this is what they're supposed to be doing. But when a priest gets laicized, I think I need to hear, I had the ability to be a good celibate and I did not take it.

In other words, when I was ordained a deacon, God, even if I was not called to celibacy, when I was ordained a deacon, God infused the grace in me to be a good celibate at that moment. And I have rejected that grace out of sin. Now, it's because I'm weak, but I'm leaving because I'm weak. And it is a sin. So I think the same thing. And so I have to say, fine.

If you feel, and the church has laicized you, you now are laicized. Go get married. But I do think there needs to be an acknowledgment of weakness in that. I think the same thing happens when we switch churches. It's kind of a mature thing, isn't it? You're not blaming everybody else. You're acknowledging your own. And you need to say, I'm leaving one church and going to the other one because me and my family, who I don't have control over, but we are not able to find Christ.

And in this wreck of a mass, a wreck of a liturgy, we are not able to find those little seeds in a way. So it is out of, in a sense, weakness in humility. We're going to go somewhere where it is more obvious, where the reverence is more obvious. The theology is more obvious. And that's what I did without thinking of it that way. I found something and I left the church without, I just didn't even think that was that big of a deal. I don't know.

I just don't want people to hear the soundbite and think you've left the church. So you don't mean, you know, I church, but yeah, yeah, of course. I just, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. It must be hard. I mean, you must be misunderstood so often by Roman Catholics, by Protestants. There's a lot of pushback there. There's criticism there. Not that often, but it does come because it is hard to say when people experience my liturgy. I mean, I still have people I know back in Denver where I served before Los Angeles that cannot engage me without saying, no, you're still other. You left what is true.

It's like in a time of chaos, we seek stability. We've already spoken about this, right? In a time of confusion, we speak clarity. We end up demanding uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or custom. But in a day and age where it seems like everything's changing, then an openness to different opinions or customs is threatening. Yes. Yeah. And that's why, again, maturity and wisdom. There's that understanding where, I mean, at Steubenville, I went to University of Steubenville and I loved it.

And Steubenville, we were educated to kind of debate Protestants, right? It was the big schism was between Catholics and Protestants. And you atheism hadn't hit yet. So they weren't even addressing theistic apologetics at that point. So this was the main focus. So Protestants come in and there were many Protestants who would put on their church signs Catholic, right? Not many, but a few.

And it confuses Catholics. They go there and they just mean, oh, we're universal too, right? Or we're the a few. And it confuses Catholics. They go there and they just mean, oh, we're universal too, right? Or we're the authentic Catholics. We put Catholic up there. So there was this defense, you call yourselves Catholic, but you're really not. And many of us, as students there, had that mindset. So when we as Byzantine Catholics came in, and the seminary was 45 minutes away. So the seminary one time came to Steubenville, and we took over a normal mass spot and had a divine liturgy at that spot with 300 students that were just going to mass.

We had a divine liturgy. And so then we said afterwards, I was still a student, but the priest says, this is probably very different for most of you. I'm going to have a Q&A in this classroom. And this one guy came in just heated. He walked into the back of the Q&A, screamed that we were other, we're different, how dare we call ourselves Catholic, then left. Just so mad. And I saw in him, as frustrated as it was, I saw in him this defensiveness that was looking for that uniformity.

But his big issue was actually with the way we, one of the big issues was with the way we chanted. He says, there's no heart and soul in the way you chant, because he was very, very charismatic. Right, right. And he just says, there's nothing there. There's no passion there. And he left. And it was funny, because one of the priests who was there said, I actually converted to Byzantine Catholicism from evangelicalism.

Like, I converted from charismatic worship, and I find as much and more heart because of my personality in the byzantine chant the way of music than there was there so but it was just this one kid who was just causing trouble but but yeah there is a reaction i mean if you want to kind of acknowledge what good we can in that young man you know what was he desiring he was desired he didn't want the truth to be watered down um you know i mean we're all very passionate when we're young and yeah. And I'm even of the case not to get to something else, but I quit with the Pachamama. Like I, I believe that there are, here we go Pachamama write that down, Neil. Here we go.

Talk about the Pachamama father. So I believe that there, that there, again, I'm always looking for the good, my disposition. So I believe that there were subtleties in what happened during that synod. I believe there were subtleties we need to understand. I would not have been the guy to go grab the pachamama and throw it in the Tiber. But you probably wouldn't have been the guy who bowed down. No, I would have been an observer to say, we need to give it more time and I need the truth to reveal itself. But I am so glad somebody did. I'm so glad someone grabbed it and threw it in

because I'm saying, I'm glad that passion is still there. We as a church need to say we can't do this and not expect a strong reaction. I would have been the type, let me give this a few days. Let me really find the answers here before I react. But I'm so glad the church needs to know that Catholics are going to

react to something that looks like an idol even if it's not exactly. If it looks like it, you're going to get passionate Catholics who are going to go throw that, burn it. There's a venerable tradition. So I loved the fact that it happened, even though it wouldn't have been me. And I think that's one of those things with the subtleties we need to understand is that I like the passion. I like the Orthodox screaming and yelling at us because it is holding us accountable. It's making us answer

their questions. And I think it's important for us to say to the Orthodox, look, you guys are a mess. The Patriarch of Moscow and Constantinople are in schism. What is the solution to this? You don't have someone up top. I mean, you think of any organization, it can't flourish with five heads. We are human and divine. The buck has to stop somewhere, as it did in the early church. So what's their explanation? How is this all going to be resolved? For those who do not want to reunite with Rome, what do they see the end goal being? The way I understand it is that they say, we don't need that union.

Our bishop is the head of our church. That's all we need. And we have the fathers of the church. So we have our, you know, we have our theology expressed in our divine liturgy. Yeah. And they will say that it doesn't matter that the Russians and Constantinople are in schism,

that they excommunicate each other. It's that Moscow excommunicated Constantinople. It doesn't matter because I have my bishop. He happens to be in our Moscow or he happens to be in our Constantinople and I will just follow him. I mean, if you go on the Orthodox Facebook pages, which I'm on a lot of them, a lot of times people will say like what you brought up earlier, artificial contraception. And the answer is, the Orthodox

answer to can me and my wife use artificial contraception, the answer is ask your priest. And you disagree with this because you're a good Catholic and tell us why. Why are the Orthodox mainly wrong on this issue? Do you like how I phrased that? Yeah, because they don't have any unity to come up with a unified answer to that. Because I imagine the Orthodox response to Catholic teaching against contraception could be that it's too sort of legalistic. You've got all this scholastic language of teleology. But you would say the Catholic Church is right and that contraception is a grave sin.ion is an obedient son of the catholic church and and i are you obedient reluctantly or do you agree that contraception

is a grave sin i so the way i see it i believe that contraception is a grave sin okay absolutely um what i believe is that that and this sounds gray i know but as a celibate i just have i have some trouble um my job is to speak the truth to my people, and I will absolutely speak the truth to people, and I will be obedient to the church. So artificial contraception is absolutely a grave sin. The way that I see the Orthodox seeing it is they're saying the church within the hierarchy needs to be black and white, right? The church needs to say this is the way it is. Now, when you get into the subtleties of life, that's where the ask your priest comes in.

Give me one subtlety. Because you're not saying that the subtleties of life legitimize contraception. I will say, I'm going to be careful here. And I'm going to say, a Roman priest giving Eucharist to a Byzantine Catholic baby. What does that have to do with contraception? Right, it does. But I would say, I don't know any situation, I cannot speak to a single situation where a family should use artificial contraception. Not a single one. I think that there is really no gray in there because every sexual act needs to be open

to life. But you're going to say that contraception might be permissible in certain circumstances? No, I would not say that. It sounded like you were getting there. I'm speaking like the orthodox point of view is that there is, most orthodox would fall in the majority report when it come to the document on life. So most orthodox would say, as long as you're not using artificial contraception in a general way throughout your marriage you can use it in in in specific circumstances as long as the majority of the time it's not you sound sympathetic to that i i understand the human dimension of that but i think it's wrong okay yeah i i want to keep pressing on this but i don't want to lose your friendship

it sounds like you're i when i sat down with you, I thought my perception is changing a little bit, and not in a bad way, but it felt like I'm sitting down with a Catholic priest to talk about the orthodoxy. But I feel like, as you say, you're an orthodox. I feel like I'm sitting down with an orthodox priest who is in union with Rome and accepts the authority of Rome. Yes. And I would say- Is that how you view yourself? My orthodox heart comes from our patrimony, not from the moral issues of the past two, three hundred years. See, because my concern is when you start talking about the subtleties within human life,

it sounds like you're doing what the Anglican Church did back in the 1930s, where they opened up in extreme circumstances where contraception could be used. And where did that lead? But is that what you're doing? No. If we weren't on the microphone, would you say that? No. I would say I have heard some Orthodox who will say the Catholic Church would ask my husband and I to live in a Josephite marriage because of our specific biological medical situations, we just cannot have sex. Oh, gotcha. In the ordinary way without using artificial contraception for whatever reason. And they will say, so they will say the sexual act between my husband and I is so unifying. If she gets pregnant, you could be, is this what? Exactly.

Like the doctors have said pretty much you will die. If you get pregnant, there's a good chance you will die. Yeah, you will die. So yeah, the Catholic Church would say. So the Catholic Church would say then you need to live in a Josephite marriage. Now, I think exactly, that's my stance, is that you will have the grace of God. God has given you the grace by the authority of the Church to live in a Josephite marriage. I understand, though, when they can say, this is going to break our marriage apart. And I think that's, in a sense,

where the devil is. The devil is saying, if there is subtleties within this specific teaching, and then you can say, you can say, well, maybe God isn't giving me the grace to live a Josephite marriage. And because the Orthodox church and my priest does allow us to use artificial contraception because of this situation. I think that's another one of the negative aspects of the Orthodox church is that they don't have a unified teaching on artificial contraception. They don't, because it's a new thing. And the Orthodox church is that they don't have a unified teaching on artificial contraception. They don't because it's a new thing in the Orthodox Church since there are so many churches. I should say Orthodox Church is

because that they might have different teachings within each church. The problem with that is then it goes, if I, I mean, I have had probably five or six families

leave my Byzantine Catholic Church for the Orthodox Church because of its teaching on artificial contraception. The Orthodox Church will allow my family to use artificial contraception. So, but that happens with the orthodoxy.

If I don't like what my priest says, I just go to the priest down the street who I know is going to say something else. That is one of the negative aspects of orthodoxy is that you can pick and choose your teachings. And I believe that every married couple and Josephite marriages, in other words, not sleeping together,

God can give the grace in that unique, exceptional circumstance to live that out. And we should say that is the way it is. Right. Because it sounded like you were saying that God could give the grace for a couple to live a Josephite marriage, but that it sounded... No. Yeah. But you're not saying he will always give that grace. If the other option is to engage in grave sin... God will always give that grace. Absolutely. Yeah.

But I suppose like that you've got the objective element and then you've got the pastoral element. And so my heart would break, you know, for a couple if they came to me and this was going on. And what would I do if I were in your situation? And I can't imagine what you're going through and all of that. It is really hard to speak into other people's lives in that way, especially when it comes to things like sexual ethics. But this is where I think, like, for instance, I have many friends who have 13 and 14 kids, and they are dirt poor because of it. And their whole life is surrounding poverty and because of the children. And they exalt their children. They say, totally worth it.

I'd much rather have children and have this major sacrifice in my life and be always open to life. But some aren't, right? Some aren't. And part of me can't blame them. I feel like we've been sold this myth that if we use NFP, our sex life will be great

and our family will be terrific. And then what I know from my own experience is that I'm encountering these people who they feel like they've been sold a bill of goods. And they're like, my mom's brutal. I can't have sex with my wife. I've got too many kids. We're exhausted.

Now, that's not a justification to then go ahead and use contraception. But it's almost like, and I spoke with Jason Everett about this a few months ago, that we have sometimes fallen into the trap of proclaiming a sort of sexual version of the health and wealth gospel. If you just save sex to a marriage the health and wealth gospel right if you just save sex to marriage it'll be perfect if you just use contraception sex will be great and it's like no yeah there's why i think that yeah maybe and maybe there's maybe there's some statistics are there to back that up but that's not going to be the case we are we are called to heroism and martyrdom every single christian is so easy to talk about that in the abstract right it is and i and i think that that's where the ask your priest comes in.

That's where the subtleties of this. So like what I was saying is like, I know these families that have given everything to be open to life and they are heroes and they are martyrs for life. And then you get a misunderstanding like the Pope on the airplane speaking about a specific situation in the Philippines

and saying, God doesn't want you to have as many kids as you can. Now that is interpreted different ways. And people have said like, Holy father, I have given everything. I have given my life to be open to life. And now the Pope himself is making it sound like through a bad translation is making it sound like I, I did something wrong by like, like I, I did something wrong by having this many kids.

And there are ways I should have tried to prevent having this many kids like, like that can yank the rug right from underneath somebody who needs the Pope to be on their side on this needs to be saying the Pope sees you as a hero, the Pope sees you as a martyr. And this is where where those subtleties need to come in where I need to say, No, beautiful, you are a martyr, and you are a hero and you're doing the right thing. And even if there's a misunderstanding here, like keep up the good work, you're going to get a crown in heaven and all of your children are. You have created children for the kingdom of God that will have eternal consequences because of your openness to life. And you might be giving everything for this, but that is good and God approves of it. And I think we need that black and white within the subtleties of the world.

So again, wisdom and maturity. So thank you for pushing me on this because it is one of those situations where the human parts of us want to say, as a celibate man, I don't understand. I have zero first-hand experience of those struggles. And so I even get a bit insecure saying, how do I speak into this? How do I, with humility and a lack of knowledge, how do I speak into your need and proclaim the black and white serious sin nature that the church says while still saying, as a human, I understand what you're going through, and I'm going to try to carry your burden with you as much as a celibate pastor can.

Okay, so you had the option of being married. Yes. But you're not. Yes. Why? All the married people are like, I can see why. So a quick thing just for the US, because some people might hear that and say, but you didn't have permit. You weren't able to do that.

So in 1890 and then 1929, Rome issued documents that forbade the married priesthood in the United States. I'm generalizing here. Forbade the married priesthood in the United States only because it caused a scandal to the majority of Roman Catholic population here. America was a melting pot unlike really anywhere else in history. So you all of a sudden had Roman Catholics and Byzantine Catholics that were usually separated by national boundaries. Now they're both interacting in the United States because of the immigration. And so many of the Latin hierarchs said, having married priests is scandalous to the Catholic

population in the U.S. So they wrote to Rome, and Rome outlawed the married priesthood only in the U.S. and Canada. Ooh. Yes. And are they married priests at the time? Yes. So they almost always

became Orthodox, almost every single one of them. What was their option? The option proposed by Rome was to go home, to go back, yeah. That's got to be a slap in the face.

Or even send your wife home and you stay here. I mean, it pretty much was if you want to serve in the U.S., your wife needs to go. Yeah. I mean, it pretty much was, if you want to serve in the U.S., your wife needs to go. Yeah. I mean, it was so brutal.

Oh, it was brutal. And so, and it was an absolute severing of our authentic ancient tradition. So, I mean, it was, it was, it was not only like a human thing. It was, you are attacking. Yeah. One of the greatest foundations of our church that we've had for, for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years. So, so many became Orthodox. Some went home.

Some just disobeyed. Golly. So what happened was is we spent over 100 years technically, if we're being obedient, only ordaining celibate priests, our Byzantine Catholic bishops. Interesting. So that changed under Pope Francis. Interesting.

That's very recent. Very recent. So when you were ordained, it was still kind of outlawed to get married and then be a priest. But I knew well enough that the church was moving in that direction. It was coming down the pipe. It was John Paul. He certainly wanted to change it. It was just figuring out how to do that.

So it was coming down the pipeline. And my worst fear would have been I get ordained celibate, kind of like, oh, poor me, I need to be celibate because the church asked for it. And then within a generation, all the guys are married. And I would have become so bitter if that had been the case. I like, I just, if I had been born five years later, I could have been a married priest. And how, I mean, marriage is, is essential. I mean, marriage is such at the heart of a man's life. I didn't want to have to say it was just bad timing. So I discerned that if God wills it, if I discern married priest, I'll be a married priest.

So I had full confidence. And then I actually approached my bishop. I won't say who it was. But I approached my bishop and I said, Bishop, if I—I was in seminary. I said, if I discern married priesthood, will you ordain me a married man? He says, I will not ordain you, but a bishop in Ukraine will. He says, I'll celebrate your wedding here. But how would that look? So if it wasn't allowed in the Roman church and you were saying, correct?

It's not allowed in the Roman church. So Rome didn't allow Byzantines to be married in America. Correct. And you're saying you were going to discern whether you could be a married priest. Right. How does that work? A Ukrainian ordains you. So I'm allowed to be ordained a married man in Ukraine.

And then I would come back here as a missionary priest to the U.S., which was outlawed in the early church. But by then, there were many married priests serving in the U.S. that were just from Ukraine. When you say early church, you mean in America. Correct. I'm sorry. You say it was outlawed in the early church. I'm sorry.S. that were just from Ukraine. When you say early church, you mean in America? Correct. I'm sorry. You say it was outlawed in the early church. Yeah, it was outlawed.

Yeah, so married priests were only outlawed in North America. And so I would have gone to Ukraine where 99% of the priests were married priests. And I would have been ordained there and come here because there were already missionary priests who were married from Ukraine and Slovakia that were serving here. And the Roman church was allowing them to. And almost every Roman bishop who a

hundred years ago thought it was a scandal. Almost every Roman bishop was supportive of a, of a married priesthood for Eastern Catholics, for Byzantine Catholics. So we could see the tide changing. So I knew this. So I, I fell in love my third year of college. Okay. And that was actually a push. So even though I had converted to the Byzantine Catholic Church when I was a teenager, when I went to Steubenville, most of my friends were Roman Catholic. I was part of the Roman Catholic pre-theology program. And so we talked about celibacy daily.

Like this was the big issue. We all wanted to be priests, but celibacy was the big issue. So it was like we were like 12-year-old girls talking about our weddings. You know, we're sitting in our dorm rooms. Yeah. And we're saying, wanted to be priests, but celibacy was the big issue. So it was like, we were like 12 year old girls talking about our weddings. You know, we're sitting in our dorm rooms and we're saying, oh, the glories of celibacy. And you know, well, and there was the priest. And I needed that conversation to help me discern, to see the beauty of it. But when I fell in love, I said, I now am moving towards being a married priest. So that's when I started asking these questions.

And not of my bishop yet, but just asking the questions of, so that's one of the reasons why I switched from even considering being a Roman Catholic priest along with my friends just for their fraternity to saying, if I want to be married, I need to be Byzantine. But you were a Byzantine Catholic at the time. I was not canonically Byzantine. I had been attending Byzantine parishes for years. So you could have become a Roman priest, yeah, because you'd never left. But I had been practicing Byzantine Catholicism long enough where I knew I could switch rights pretty easily and that it would be accepted. So that was the subtleties of my personal life. So what happened?

You fall in love with this woman. You're dating her. Fall in love with a woman. Well, it was the weirdest thing because I was a pre-theologian, so I actually was not allowed to date. So it's one of those little rebellious things. Pre-theologian, what does that mean? So there was a pre-theology program at University of Steubenville that meant, but if you were part of the program, you could not date seriously. Why? Was this because it was leading to priesthood?

Exactly. So it was a formation program for a seminary. So yeah, totally understandable. So my coordinator kind of looked the other way with my hanging out with this girl all the time because he knew I was Byzantine. And they didn't want to change the rules of the pre-theology program. They didn't want to put something official saying since he's Byzantine or most likely going to become canonically Byzantine, therefore we'll let him date. So instead of that, they just kind of kept a blind eye to my two-hour long phone conversations in the room and, you know, being— You hang up.

Yeah, exactly. So this happened and I fell in love and it was, and it was in this context where then I, I went to, I took it to prayer as you should. And I said, and because I had insecurity, my first couple of years, last few years of high school, first few years of college, I had a great insecurity. And if someone had asked me, in all honesty, Michael, would a good Catholic woman fall in love with you? I think I would have said, I don't think so. Father, I'm with you. That was me too. And so I think many men have that insecurity. So I said, I don't think so. So I dated secular girls who were just all about the fun. It wasn't anything about we're leading to Christ, leading to a sacrament. So, but having this amazing Catholic girl spend time with me, I, all of a sudden, I see what God said is he says, I am teaching you that you now have the freedom to understand that you'd be happy as a married man.

And also you'd be happy as a celibate. And that's an immense moment of freedom to say, please. Can I share with you, yeah, sort of my own experience, because it lines up with yours. And I think we could bring out something good from this. I became seriously Catholic when I was 17 at a reversion to the faith. And from that point on, I was discerning the priesthood, just because it felt like the most kind of Catholic thing. Yeah, that was a radical thing I could do, like to convince all my friends and family

I was serious about this. yeah that was a radical thing i could do like to convince all my friends and family i was serious about this but i didn't realize that my desire for the priesthood came out of a fear that i would be a bad husband a lousy father a bad lover a bad provider like i had this deep insecurity that i'm not really acceptable that no woman would want me and i started you know liking cameron and i had this thought like gosh if i if i just become like a franciscan friar of the renewal she can observe me from a distance and respect how holy and pious i am yeah but bloody hell yeah when we're dating you know she knows when i'm grumpy selfish horny angry she sees all that yeah and that's grumpy, selfish, horny, angry.

She sees all that. And that's terrifying. Yeah. And so it was through spiritual direction that I realized that my desire for the priesthood came out of this terrifying fear that just didn't have what it took. And obviously, you don't want to join, become a priest or become a merry man because you think you don't have what it takes for any other one. But that sounds like there was something similar there, right? It was.

And I think that's just a point of maturity that every man needs to go through to say. And that's why I use the word freedom. It's an immense freedom to say, I have the freedom to listen now because I have the freedom to be open to whatever God's calling me to. Because I just didn't, I would not have listened to his call to marriage because I would have said, no, you're wrong. Like I could not have a good marriage. And it was mostly I wanted to be married. I certainly did. I wanted to be a biological father.

I did. But I didn't think that was an option to me because of my insecurities. Now, was this subtle to you? Like for me, it was in the background. I wouldn't have acknowledged it. I would have been, no, I think it would be a good. Was that like? It was subtle.

I wouldn't have said that to anybody. And I think even looking back now, and I had an experience a seminary where I was chatting with two other seminarians, and I said something about the similarities between celibate fatherhood and a parish and biological fatherhood. And they said, do you really think you'd make a good father? Like biological father? And I was like, yeah, I think I would actually. And to them, I said, would you? And they're like, you know, that's why we're here. No, they didn't say that. They, one, had major commitment issues, you know.

And they just knew themselves, and they knew they had these deeper issues. And I thought, you guys need to leave. You know acknowledging that isn't a good thing, right? I wanted to say you need to leave seminary. You need to go get some counseling and therapy. You need to find the freedom. Once you'd be a good father and a husband, then you come back. Exactly, because that's what's going to'd be a good father and a husband, then you come back. Exactly.

Because that's what's going to make you a good priest and pastor as well. You know, it's really the same virtues, the same disposition, the same way of functioning and sacrificing and loving and giving of yourself, I think, in both worlds. So I had that insecurity. And then so these amazing women taught me that I was lovable by a good Catholic woman. Again, it was subtle, but I understood that. So then I had that freedom. So kind of the big moment came where I wanted to actually ask this.

I mean, we knew each other so well, but I wanted to say, you know what? Let's go on a date and call it a date. Let's say to the world, look, that we're not just this pre-theologian and this girl who were scandously hanging out together. I said, let's kind of show it to the world. So I, without going into the whole story, but I pretty much told Jesus in prayer, I was like, Lord, tell me to do this, like support me. And I got nothing. And I was like, Lord, like, just give me one little hint. I want to do it. I think she'll say yes. I wasn't even anxious about it because I figured she'd say yes. I had the place planned. I was like, my whole life's going to change. This is going to be amazing. And so, and I said, there was getting nothing from him. So then I said,

okay, Lord, then you're going to have to stop me because our Lord works that way too. Throw up a door, Lord. Exactly. I'm going to do it, but you're going to have to stop me. And so I'm walking to go ask her and I'm completely expecting something big. I'm expecting our Lord to open up a chasm or a linebacker to hit me or something just extreme. And I got, I got all the way to her door and I just could not knock. There was, I wanted to with everything in me, but I said, there, there's something I am. I now have this anxiety that is not a human anxiety. There was no human anxiety. It I said, there's something, I now have this anxiety that is not a human anxiety. There was no human anxiety. It was a divine anxiety that came from saying,

this is the chasm, but without being a chasm. Our Lord has said, I'm giving you the eyes of faith to see something subtle. And it is a little faith anxiety that I'm giving you that I'm directing you in a different direction. So I went, I didn't knock. I went right back to the chapel and I said, Lord, like that was so odd. That was what I did not expect. I did not expect to be the one to not do it, even though there wasn't anything obvious. I could have made the excuse. I'm like that, that little anxiety there, whatever.

I want to do this, but I didn't. Thank God I listened. So I went back to the chapel and I said, I am going to pray until I feel more peaceful about this. So what our Lord kind of directed me in was this sense of imagination, which the Eastern Church kind of pooh-poohs. But I used it. It was beautiful. And I said, okay, I'm going to imagine being married. And I just imagined sitting in a nice room with a fireplace, six little kids running around, my beautiful wife sitting there in the chair, us having this deep discussion.

And I thought, this is heaven. This is heaven. And then I saw I had this very surface piece, but there was something down deep, inexplicable that I said, what is that? So I said, okay, now let me consider celibacy. So I switched that I thought of this dark, cold house with gray walls, and nobody else living there. I imagined walking in after a hard day. And there's nothing no lights on no lights on no human beings. I want to talk to someone I need a little bit of love. I need a little consolation. There's nobody there. There's nobody there. Here I am alone in the world. And I

this is the imagination I went in there. and then I had this complete surface anxiety, but then I was like, what, what do you do? And I says, well, I'm going to go find my icon corner and I'm going to stand and I'm going to, I'm going to start crying. And I was like, and I'm going to stand before Christ. And I stood there and I just, I was like, Lord, you have to give me something. Like you cannot call me to this life without giving me peace. Like you, you cannot take away my wife and without giving me peace. Like, you cannot take away my wife and my kids. You cannot do that without fulfilling me somehow. That would be unjust, and I know you're not an unjust God. And I stood there praying, and like, all of a sudden,

this deep, deep peace, like even in the midst of the surface anxiety, this deep, deep peace came in there, and Jesus just said, I am everything. Like, I will be your everything. Like, unmediated love. And all of a sudden, I had this rebellious kind of attitude of, you know what? I don't want to be normal. I don't want to have the consolation from a wife and kids. I want to actually say, I am living a radical life. And this came over time to a radical life where if I don't depend upon Christ, I'm going to fall. I'm going to leave the priesthood. I'm going to turn to drugs. I'm going to become homeless. I'm going to die on the street if I don't cling to Christ for everything. And that became so attractive to me. No safety net. Christ is the only safety net.

And having that and saying that is such a contradiction to the evils of this world. And I want to live those contradictions. I want to be a sign of the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of the world in the most obvious way possible. And I began to learn that that was celibacy. It was a way of saying, you are not normal. You are not natural. What you're doing is not normal or

natural. It is supernatural. And I desired that little sign, if you will, that little eunuch for the kingdom, if you will, of something more. And that was an ideal, pious thought. And I have absolutely found now in my life why God, why my celibacy serves the world. Because I love going out into the world and talking to people. And one of the ways that that works is that somebody will say, they will say, like, for instance, you know, how can I be same-sex attracted and not act on it? Like, isn't it, if I'm attracted to another man or to another woman, like, it's natural to act on that. And I go, look at me. I can speak from firsthand experience.

I'm attracted to women. I desire marriage. I desire children. I desire to have sex with a woman. And I don't do it. I don't. And so it is entirely possible. And look at me.

You know me. I'm happy. I'm a happy, joy-filled guy. And I do not have to know me. I'm happy. I'm a happy, joy-filled guy. And I do not have to act on all my impulses. And so it's this conviction for them to say, just because he's doing it, maybe I can be attracted to those of the same sex and actually not act on it, not have a sexual relationship, you know, have a disinterested friendship, as the catechism says. Maybe that is possible. And I've seen those little witnesses of my celibacy, and I've also seen that I actually went through it the right way. I discerned it properly so that I can say, for instance, I knew

that my insecurity, if I had not, if God had not healed me of that insecurity, I would have been ordained a priest having no good Catholic woman attracted to me, but when I was ordained, here they come. Then all of a sudden I get a good Catholic woman showing me an attraction in a way that I never experienced, and I think I would have been powerless. This happened to you? No, it didn't. I mean, it happened to me.

It could have, theoretically. Yeah, I mean, I think every celibate man has priests, has women flirting with them. I mean, it's a... Well, you also have women coming to you in vulnerable situations, sharing their sins with you. You having to comfort them in some respect. And I call it flirtation and it's not.

They're just being human, you know? But there's that attraction that maybe if I had never felt it, I would have seen what was not flirtation as flirtation. I would have seen what was not attraction as attraction. And that could have pulled me out of my celibacy because I had never had to tell myselfacy because I had never, I had never had to tell myself, no, I had never. I, so when I, when I broke up with this girl or we just stopped hanging out and when I had to then tell in other situations, had to tell myself I'm

attracted to her, do not do anything about it. And I had that repeated experience of saying, I'm attracted to her. Don't do anything about it. Whereas now as a priest for 15 years, I can say, if I'm attracted to a woman or I fall in love with a woman, which happens, I can say, yeah, I'm in love with her. Don't do anything about it. You know, keep it where it is. Love on her through prayer and through sacrifice, but don't follow those urges because it's going to lead you and her and the church and the kingdom of God astray. And so this is where fasting comes in. You know, we need small examples of sacrifice. We need small examples of saying no to myself. But if we have enough of that experience, then we'll be able

to better say no to the bigger things when they happen. I am just so honored by your honesty and humility and sharing all of that. I think one of the things Catholics wish of chastity speakers, just be more real. You know what I mean? You have this, people want to present a front of, they don't share with what they're really struggling with or marriages. They don't talk about how bloody difficult it is. And so I'm just so honored that you would share that. Thank you. Had there been situations in your priesthood where you were like, yeah, screw it. I just, I want to have sex and I'm kind of done with this. And I was wrong.

That thing that I thought I felt in prayer by my icon corner, that was whatever. That was just me being a teenager and I'm just... Yeah. I've wanted to say screw it, but I've never done that. Thank God. And I've, it's never been, it's never, I've never been really strongly tempted. Thank God. I think if I was, I'd probably fall just in true humility and knowing my weakness. I probably would. So every time I have had some, like I've fallen in love again or been really, really attracted or said, you know, this could work out and I'm still young ish enough where I could have a normal life as a married man. When those thoughts have come through the power of God, I've been able to push them out and just say, if I spend too much time

thinking about this, it's just not going to be good. Because a similar thing happens in marriage. It's not like you wave yourself to somebody and everybody else stops becoming attracted. You don't start feeling things for people. And I think that's a really good thing to tell seminarians. Seminarians feel, as priests, feel so sorry for themselves as if, I don't get what married men have. It's like, look, buddy, we're in the same boat. Like married men, as you know, no offense, you know, that there is those, we're human

and there's those attractions there. We just need to be mature enough to say that this, I don't function out of a hedonistic mindset. I don't function out of a desire this song and to go fulfill it. And the light can be, gosh, if I wasn't like a priest or a seminarian, I could have any of these women. When in reality, the choice is between celibacy and one relationship with one woman. Right, exactly.

And finding your fulfillment in that one relationship and all the temptations are the same. Yeah, I don't think we're vocal about that enough. I think the church, and I'm a vocations director, so I think there's enough. The church for a long time has tried to grapple with that and and kind of separated celibates and the priests away from from lay people almost too much where where there's this they they think the other again the graces are different given to us but that there's a we we consider ourselves of two very different our minds work differently our actions work if you're a different type of human. Right. Exactly.

In reality, I mean, what would it mean if you became a priest and stopped having sexual attraction, stopped being attracted to women? I don't want a priest like that. That doesn't sound like a human man. Right. Exactly. We need human men. And that's why if you're impotent, you can't be ordained. You know, it's, you know. Explain that to us. So, so you, I mean, you have to be, although you're real, you can't get married either, actually. I've heard this is true.

Christopher West, I think he said it was, I don't know, it was in the old canon law, or maybe it wasn't there, but somewhere else. But I've never actually verified it. So is it actually the case that if you're impotent? You would, if a bishop ordained an impotent man, he'd be validly ordained. Validly. He'd be validly ordained. Validly. Validly ordained. But the rules of the church have said, just like, I mean, with same-sex, if you have whatever deep-seated homosexual tendencies, the American bishops say you should not be ordained a priest.

Now, what does that mean? That's, of course, the big debate. What is a deep-seated homosexual tendency? Now, if you ordained a man who has deep-seated homosexual tendencies, he's still validly a priest. But there's something about the need to be free of those tendencies and that disorder in order to be a...

Because you're actually sacrificing your marriage for the priesthood. Is that part of it? I think it is. My understanding, this is the way I function as a vocations director, is that I believe... It's hard for me to say to get another topic.

This is such a weird topic. I'm like, what does it even mean if you're impotent? You can't become a priest. First of all, you're not using your genitals for that reason. Secondly, how would they know? And I don't want to know how they would know. Exactly. But the idea here is that, and this is like, why can't women be ordained priests?

And Jesus had no female apostles where he, I'm sure he would have, and he would have ordained Mary a priest, et cetera. This is kind of the church's argument. It was something that Jesus would have done it if it was true, right? But even in my human mind, that doesn't hold enough water. That's not enough reason to say women... I mean, priesthood is such a beautiful thing. I just want to share it with everybody, right? Why can't everybody do it? So I needed a deeper reason. I've spent a lot of time thinking and praying with this.

I need a deeper reason why women, because I believe women can't be priests. But why is that? And I think one of the reasons is, is because the church within its structure needs the complementarity of femininity and masculinity. And the role of a priest within the sacramental, especially within the sacramental where you're administering sacraments, even the leadership in the church, there's something very masculine about that. There's something very fatherly about that.

Now, in the Byzantine church, one thing I love is that when a woman who's becoming a nun takes her final vows, you call her mother. You call all of them mother. I'm happy to be there, the sister Natalia. Amen. Good. You and I will both be there then. So in other words, she will go from being sister Natalia to mother Natalia.

So there is very explicitly a role of fathers in the church and a role of mothers in the church. And those roles are complementary and beautiful and equal, of course, but they're different. And so we need as a church to put more thought into what does it mean that a priest is a father to the church, to the father, not only in his parish, but in a general way. And therefore, in what way, where are the mothers? The priests are everywhere, right? We call them all father. We don't see enough mothers. We don't, we're not eloquent enough about women's role in the church and that it's equal and good and should share in all these ways, but it's complementary and therefore different. So how does that happen? So I think part of the reason why only men can be priests

is because the role of the priest is very masculine, and it should be. And we need to be more eloquent about what that looks like in his fatherly leadership of the church. And therefore, we need also to say, here's what the feminine aspect, the feminine leadership, the church. And therefore, we need also to say, here's what the feminine aspect, the feminine leadership, the feminine guidance of the church looks like, and here's how it is lived out by women in the church. How is the priestly role masculine? What do you mean by that? Certainly, administration of sacraments. I think that the way that a priest speaks to his flock is a way that the father speaks to the kids. What's interesting is as we lose the idea of what a true masculine man or a true feminine

woman look like, it's harder to understand what that would mean in the way you're referring to it. And I want to qualify this by saying there's always exceptions. I mean, I cringe when somebody says women should always be at home raising the kids. I'm like, yes, I think that's true generally and ideally, but there's always exceptions to that that need to be embraced by the church. Absolutely. So there's always exceptions to this, but I do think, and I would want to develop this further, and I'm an extrovert, so I process by talking. I'm agreeing with everything you're saying. But there's something about the role of administering the sacraments that only priests can do. So that right there is saying, that right there is teaching us something about the masculine role of a father within the church.

Part of that role is administering sacraments that only a priest can do. But I also think in a more subtle way, anybody who is growing in holiness, anybody who's living a life in the church, they need exposure to a spiritual father and a spiritual mother, just like a child. Again, there's exceptions, but ideally has exposure to both a biological father and a biological mother. So how does that work out? Taking the family as an example, principle of subsidiarity, right? Taking the family as an example, the ideal of the church as a family, how does that grow into a larger system within the church of the role of those we call father and the role of those we call mother. I actually, if we had more women in the church that we called mother,

namely usually nuns, if we had more of them, I don't think the Protestants would have such an issue of us saying father, because we're not comparing ourselves to God, which is what Matthew says we shouldn't. We're comparing ourselves to mothers, and that's what we do within the biological family. There just wouldn't be as much of a cringing when they hear the, you know, we are being called father. Yeah. Do you know who Sister Miriam James is? I went on a retreat with her earlier, well, last year, and I had such a profound experience with her in prayer that I told her, I don't care what you say, but from now on, your name is Mother Miriam. So I, and I said, I'm going miriam so i exactly and i said i'm going

to just keep saying it and just we're going to press through the awkward you know just like when you know what's funny is that she and this is an honor to me is that um we haven't solidified yet but she's probably gonna be the godmother to one of my and i'm a godfather to a new child that's just been born and so it would be so wonderful if we could say like in that role again, and we need, we need more nuns and we need, and we need, we need more nuns to, to, to kind of show that because like, if I walk onto, and I, again, some people would disagree with this. If I walk onto Christ of Bridegroom Monastery in Burton, Ohio, I put out my hands and I ask mother for a blessing and she makes the final cross over my hands and I kiss her hand just like I would to a priest or a bishop. And I do that because I have now walked

onto the area that she has authority over. And have you been to Christ the Bridegroom? I haven't yet. Oh my gosh. It is the most feminine atmosphere. Like in the evenings, they sit down and give each other back rubs. I'm like, oh, that's beautiful.

You'll never see a monastery of men should be doing that. But here's that they sit down and they're rubbing each other's feet. They're giving each other the back rubs and they're drinking and laughing. And I'm just like, this is the most feminine little beautiful world of monastic nuns. Yeah. So anyway, so that in my mind, that's kind of the ideal.

We need more of that to showcase why only, why priests can only be men because we, we see the role of women in our faces. And we see women in the church as much as we see mothers in our lives. That's the way it should be. That's really beautiful. How has your brotherhood with other priests played a role in your priesthood? How helpful has that been? I believe that celibates living in a house alone is a necessary evil, but it's an evil. I mean, I think the vocations crisis has created this. If you look at the way Eastern monasticism is set up,

you don't just become a hermit. Now, in the early, early church, they did because monasticism was new. But Basil the Great is very explicit. When he's kind of the father of Chittabiddic monasticism. He's the father. I know what you're going to quote. Whose feet will we? Exactly. If you live alone, whose feet will you wash? In other words, washing feet is essential to the Christian. That sacrifice and that lived sacrifice of taking care of another person is part of being a Christian, a part of being a human. If you do not have that, you're living one of those exceptions I just talked about that is necessary, but it is an evil. Priests, no human being should live completely alone.

Now, if you look at the model of Byzantine monasticism, Eastern monasticism, at some point you become what's called a hieromonk or a grand schema monk. When that happens, you can give permission to leave the monastery and leave as a hermit, but it's only after living a level of community life where you're saying the only community I need is Jesus Christ. But that doesn't happen in the beginning. Exactly. That comes after years and years of living in community with other men. So we are honed and formed. One of the biggest issues I see with clericalism is that you get ordained, you're the awkward kid in school. I hate to put

this away. I'm judging my own brother priest, but you're the awkward kid in school. You go through four years of seminary, having good community in seminary, and then you're king. You get made a pastor somewhere, or you do your time as a vicar, then you're king. And what you say goes, and your parish is your kingdom. And if you don't have anybody watching what you do and holding you accountable, you can go so off the rails because you've been given the reins if you don't have anybody watching what you do and holding you accountable, you can go so off the rails because you've been given the reins when you don't deserve them and you have nobody calling you out because the bishop's far away or whatever it is. So it's a huge issue. So when you live in community and you're washing the feet and you're having these

discussions, you're holding each other accountable. When I was in Denver, I belonged to the Companions of Christ, this fraternity of priests who desire to live together. We meet for fraternal groups every other week. We have purges every year where we literally walk through the other man's living quarters and say, why do you need that? Is that really— Is there a temptation to hide it before they come for us sometimes? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Put that over my Xbox or whatever. Right. And so what you do is every year on the purge during lunch, you put a pile of stuff in the middle of your room, your living quarters, and you say, I'm getting rid of this stuff. And then they walk around the rest of your room and say, why aren't you getting rid of that? Or they look at the pile and say, you're getting rid of your high school yearbook. That's probably a little bit too zealous. You might want to keep that. And so you have somebody else speaking into your poverty, speaking into your life. And so, and even just saying there was, there was a situation that happened when I was in

Denver. Um, and I was living in community, thank God at this point. And I went out and I had this experience. I won't share it here, but I had this experience that, that, that, that rocked my world. And, and I, as an extrovert, I need to process. And I came home too late. I came home like 11, 11 PM. I'll share the story with you afterwards, but I came home at late. I came home like 11 p.m. I'll share the story with you afterwards. I came home at like 11 p.m. and just was reeling and just didn't know what to do. And my brothers were asleep. And I knocked on the door. And I hear Father Brady Wagner.

Yeah. I was like, dude, Brady, I'm sorry, bud. Just got home. Need to talk. He gets up. We pour a scotch. And I was able to process this. And I went to bed just feeling loved, feeling having beloved and processing this experience. It was very demonic in a way.

And, and so I came back and I went to sleep and I said, if I had gone home alone, I would have, of course, God would have given those extraordinary graces to give me peace. But at that moment, God gave me my brother. He gave me my priest brother. And that is the natural and the normal way that priests should be. They should be living in community like monastics. So they have that community. priesthood, but had them to call and to talk to at any time because we belong to this fraternity that was explicit. And you're in the community and others are not. If they want to come in, they can.

But having those kind of boundaries on a community to say, we are required to give in the grace of God to love each other. We are very explicit. Like, we are brothers. Within the brotherhood, we might have friends. We don't all need to be friends, but we are definitely brothers. And so there can be, like like non-jealous exclusive relationships, exclusive-ish within the community,

just because as human beings, we like to be friends. But there will never be a man excluded from the brotherhood. If you join. How many were in the? When I left, there were 11. You know, it's interesting. Teresa of Avila set up her convents, I think, in such a way that it would be no bigger than 12.

And I like that. That's the way the Christ of Bridegroom is. If they go past 10, they'll probably open up a second monastery somewhere. that it would be no bigger than 12. And I like that. That's the way that Christ the Bridegroom is. If they go past 10, they'll probably open up a second monastery somewhere. And for us, it was, we can actually have, so within the general community, within the Archdiocese of Denver,

we might have 25, but the living households will probably always be three or four. And the fraternal groups will be only slightly bigger than that. Now, in my talking with men who are struggling with purity and pornography, I'll often talk to them about the necessity of accountability. And what I find is excuses, and it makes me want to hit them. You know, well, there's no one in my area. And I'm like,

okay, well, that doesn't matter. Well, and I just... I bring that up because are there priests who are basically acting like that? You say to a priest, like, you need to be in brotherhood. basically acting like that. You say to a priest, like you need to be in brotherhood. Yeah. And you just want to hit him. Yeah.

And, and there, there are priests that, that are, their human temperament and personality thrives at living alone in, in just a very human way. Now, and they, there is going to be more subtle.

One of the biggest frustrations, and I'll, I'll say this on the air, but one of the biggest frustrations is when I got moved, I got moved from Denver to Los Angeles and I got moved and I, and I told the this on the air, but one of the biggest frustrations was when I got moved, I got moved from Denver to Los Angeles, and I got moved, and I told the board that makes these decisions and advises the bishop, I told the board, I want to stay in Denver because I have priesthood community there. And so I wanted to say that. So if I got moved, I saw it as I have informed them as much as I can. And my spiritual father let me do this.

I ran it by him first. I said, can I say I want to stay in Denver? And he says, and I, why? And I shared the reasons why he says, yes, it is healthy for you. You like community. You have community. So it's healthy for you. So when I did get moved, I was confident enough to say the bishop and the council knows that I want to stay in the community.

to say the bishop and the the the council knows that i want to stay in need community so therefore god's going to give me exceptional graces in this move until i can build community in los angeles have you been eager to do that has that been difficult i i've i've actually been i've been making too many excuses to go back to that i have said because of the the popularity of the catholic stuff podcast that i was on and because of the popularity of the companions of Christ that I was in, I, at this point, I expected some priests to come to me. Right.

I would have thought that too. And I, so that hasn't happened in four months, not a single one. So now I'm saying, okay, then I'll go out. Like I'm going to go out and just say,

are there any Roman Catholic priests? And my, um, our administrator, Bishop Olmsted in Phoenix, who I love immensely, he, I said,

would you be open to me having other priests living in my house and having that community? He goes, bring it up when that's a possibility. But yes, in general, I would be open to that. Olmsted's not in LA, though. So he's in Phoenix. So we have this dramatic situation in our hierarchy right now where we have a bishop, but the administrative authority was handed over to the Roman bishop in Phoenix, which is Olmsted. So it's kind of, it'll be reconciled soon. But it's this kind of weird situation.

What do you call it? Companions? Companions of Christ. Did you start that? It started in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And so there's like 25 Companions of Christ. The idea is to have different types of priests who aren't already in religious orders, I presume. Exactly.

And we don't want to be a religious order. The idea is that this is the norm for diocesan priests. Too many people think the norm for diocesan priests is living alone. That's not the case. That only came about because of the vocation crisis. The only time that there have been diocesan priests living alone is if they're missionary priests, if they're out somewhere alone. And that's, again, an exception. The norm for diocesan priests should be lived community. So is this continuing has this, is this continuing to spread? Are you helping kind of develop this? It sounds like this is just a crucial need.

One of my fears about becoming a priest, in addition to what I already shared with you, was just what you say, that idea of being alone. It is spreading and it's spreading. Obviously we got it from Minneapolis, St. Paul. And the way that we found out was because the Denver priests sent their philosophers to Minneapolis, St. Paul, to study there. So they discovered these companions and said, this is amazing.

So they brought it to Denver. Now, because of the podcast and because of the priest that the Archbishop of Denver has sent to Rome, now they're in Rome at the Casa and meeting with other priests and seminarians. And then we have seminarian companions who are at the NAC, and they're interacting with all these priests from other dioceses. And these other seminarians and priests are saying, that's beautiful. So there's four or five dioceses now, and these priests investigating bringing it there. Is this a formal kind of organization that comes in and helps you? Oh, kind of. It's a canonical reality approved by Rome.

So it's very established and very good and beautiful. So, like, if I had a couple times a priest through other friends say, let me find out more about the Companions. So I would talk to them and I would say, the next step is to go talk to Father Brady Wagner, our moderator. He'll share our rule with you. He'll share all the official things. You bring it back, pray about it, present it to your bishop.

Because the other big issue is that you have to have in this model, the bishops have to assign priests close enough to each other and parish that are close enough to actually live together. Like my bishop, thank God, in Denver gave me permission to live 45 minutes from my parish. That's very unusual. But I said, I need community so much that I'm willing to spend the gas and the time, get up earlier, to drive 45 minutes each way to my parish. So you're not saying to your bishop, please assign me in the parish next to these other priests. You're saying, let me live off.

Well, right. And most bishops would not say that. But the fact that Byzantine parish is that, like, my people drove from 45 minutes away anyway. So it wasn't like my people lived close. Whereas in a Roman Catholic situation, your parishioners live close. Sometimes. We're all starting to spread out now, I think.

Because you go to different places, exactly. But so most dioceses actually have rules that say a priest cannot live more than like 10 minutes. So then they do need to be assigned. What do you say to a priest watching this right now who's like, yeah, how do I do that? What do I do? Yeah, call Father Brady Wagner.

Call Minneapolis St. Paul ask for the companions call the Archdiocese of Denver ask for the companions. We have a I think Companions of Christ Denver.com

It's just look up the Companions of Christ Google it but in Denver we actually post our rule and our other documents on the website. But make it happen.

Don't wait for another priest to do it. Absolutely. Make it happen and God will bless what you're doing to start building this community. Because it's not just about fun hanging out together. We're not a fraternity, a college fraternity. There's rules.

Give us some of the weirder rules or some of the most hardcore rules. So like the purge. Yep, that was one. That's great. And then so then you also have like, I cannot spend over $250 on anything without asking permission from my fraternal group. If I'm buying a car, I need to bring another brother with me so that he speaks into that purchase. I cannot purchase a car that's more than $16,000, which is a lot.

But there's purchasing. Then there is like the fraternal group checklists. So we go through the checklist. Are you praying? Are you praying at the right time of day? How is your relationship with men? How is your relationship with women? How is your relationship with women? And then you would say spending.

How's your spending? And you go through this checklist and you're being held accountable to your brothers and you're really speaking in their life. Do you have a spiritual director? Are you listening to your spiritual director? When are you asking these questions? So it's in fraternal groups every other week.

Every other week you're asking these questions. That's excellent. And we go through the check. So pretty much what I would begin by saying, here's been the theme of this past two weeks. And here's, I just need to share this with you're asking these questions. That's excellent. And we go through the check. So pretty much what I would begin by saying, here's been the theme of this past two weeks. And here's, I just need to share this with you guys, my brothers. And then I would say, okay, checklists, prayer,

good, not so good, whatever. And we go through that checklist then. And then we share those things and then you go to the next guy. So each guy gets about 20 minutes and then of him kind of sharing his life and then the other guys speak into it. And then the next guy goes and you go

and you do that every other week. That's really beautiful. And I would do things like, you know, um, uh, you know, hopefully I'm not being too vulnerable here.

Like, okay, there's this, there's this, this woman who, who, you know, who I met out and,

and, you know, I'm a priest and I, I, but I, I have this attraction to her. It is the attraction of spending time with her. If I don't mention the name,

let's say Molly, next time, the next fraternal group, ask about Molly. Like, you know, in other words, I want your accountability. So good.

Because if I don't bring her up, I might be hiding something. One of the things I love and I'm to this point of vulnerability, one of the things I love about your, are you still with the podcast,

Catholic Stuff You Should Know? No, we decided, I know. Father, I'm sorry. It must have been so difficult. It was. And especially because I process by talking. Yeah, me too.

So what we decided was that the beauty of that podcast is the lived community. And when I got moved, I got moved away from that lived community. So I'm no longer a fruit to that podcast. But for those who aren't aware, most of them are, I think Catholic Stuff You Should Know is probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Catholic podcast. It was for a while quite the biggest. And now we bounce back and forth.

So I'm not off that. But again, if you're listening to this, keep an eye because I did have, I will be starting something in LA too that's more Byzantine. Byzantine Catholic Stuff You Should Know. Some sort of media something. I'm excited for that. And I'm sure it'll be promoted on Catholic stuff once it comes out. But one of the things I was going to get at is I love about Catholic stuff.

You should know is you priests just speak like men who aren't trying to hide something. Right. And I imagine you must get quite criticized for that. I've said this many times in the past. If I became a priest, I'd be like, Oh,

how am I supposed to act now? How am I supposed to speak and hold myself as if to say me isn't enough so i can't be me because that's too weird and extroverted and add or whatever it is introverted i'm introverted yeah um but i process you're talking there's a lot of vulnerability in the podcast and and 99 of the feedback is positive and i think that's why we continue doing it people love you guys so much and i'm sure it helps as people discern vocation they're like okay cool i don't have to become some weird automaton we get amazing feedback and another beautiful thing is that one of our listeners is archbishop aquila he i don't know if he listens to everyone but he listens to it and he's their boss and he came that's right i heard the recent one yeah we had we had our 10th anniversary but he was there

he came to watch us and so he's so recent one. Yeah, we had our 10th anniversary. But he was there. He came to watch us. And so he's so supportive of the companions. He's so supportive of the podcast. And he, again, there have been a couple of things that he asked us. There was especially photos that we posted on our Instagram feed that I thought was hilarious. And we got a letter from the bishop saying like, I'm not making you take this down but we've gotten some complaints it was just like you know photos such like father nathan one time he just he cut his hair into a mullet then cave they cut what he called um kentucky rumble strips in the side and then dressed just in this like 70s outfit and then like laid down on the floor for this for this

photo we put it and people are like that doesn't look like a priest at all and so it was like and i thought it was hilarious i would but we got a letter enough letters saying like and we put it and people are like, that doesn't look like a priest at all. And so it was like, and I thought it was hilarious. I would, but we got a letter, enough letters saying like, and we're like, okay, so we took it down. But I love that you err on that side.

Yeah. And, and have you found, as I think many of us have found as we put out content online, that the negative contents tend to feel amplified. So you might get five negative comments in a hundred, but those are the ones that kind of stick out. And how have you dealt with that?

And how has Catholic stuff you should know dealt with that? Because it can be tempting to be reactive to the first several negative comments you get. Maybe we're not doing this right. So what I, the philosophy I use in this is to say, okay, there was a criticism, usually within the subtleties. Part of it is totally valid, and part of it is just making a mountain out of a molehill. So there's a subtlety there. So what I've said is God takes evil.

He does all the time. He takes evil things, and he brings good out of it. We don't deny that it's evil, but he brings good things out of it. So I almost always say, how do I hear this, especially if it's a public criticism on social media, how do I hear this and say, let me work with our Lord and try to discern what he's doing to actually take this and make it more beautiful as if it was better that it happened than if it had not happened. So for instance, this happened, probably my first criticism was that I was a social media guy for Catholic stuff.

And this woman just posts. I've shared this story before, but I think it's hilarious. This woman posts on there. And I did a book review. My topic was doing a book review. So she posts on the Facebook page. Didn't even finish it. Father Michael is horrible at book reviews.

Please never let Father Michael O'Loughlin ever do a book review again. And that's all her post said. So I responded. And I was a social media guy, so I respond on the Catholic stuff page, and I go, I actually find Father Michael to be a fantastic. I did the opposite. I said, just listen to it. You're right.

It was pretty rough. I do encourage you to listen to the whole thing because he might redeem himself in your eyes, but it was pretty rough. And then I jump on in my personal account and go, what? It wasn't that bad. So I create this whole fake debate between the podcast and me. But I'm doing both sides of it.

And then so then she jumps on there and is like, I didn't think your eyes would actually answer me. She kind of thought she was just throwing this criticism to the wind and nobody would ever hear it. It was just kind of this moment of frustration. So then I shared on the podcast that I was doing both of them. That's very humble of you. And then she friended me on Facebook and was like, that was hilarious and awesome.

So I thought, you know, like there probably was a criticism. I was probably boring at some points. I was probably just reading out of the book or something like that. And so part of her criticism was probably completely valid. But I do think I redeemed myself at the end. And so she did end up listening and saying, okay, and that podcast, many, many people have read it and loved it and read the book because of it.

So she was definitely in the exception by not being inspired by the podcast. But I thought, why not engage with her? Because if she's just an angry, angry person, then she'll probably never respond or then we'll just block her or whatever. But if there's some way to redeem her frustration by bringing some humor into it by bringing humility that should have been there and by just being vulnerable saying yeah you're right i'm not

perfect at these things then i think it turned out being much better than it had to be but i am not also against blocking bullies you know at all i mean sometimes you got to do this because it's not helping them or us to let them vent this way. What I love to do, I'm no longer, I haven't been using social media for about two and a half years now. Kiernan Doyle, my boy, runs it for me. And I initially, I said, change the passwords because I don't have any self-control files. So I haven't logged on at all. So it's nice to have people just shouting into the wind.

Meanwhile, I'm over here. I don't know what they said. But muting is fun too. Because if you mute somebody, then you don't see it. And you have the pleasure of them banging angrily away on their keyboard. You can't hear them. That's fine.

I wanted to touch upon, before we begin to wrap up, the beauty of the Jesus prayer, which has seen a resurgence lately, maybe because of that beautiful, anonymously written Russian book, Way of the Pilgrim. Talk to us about this. What is the Jesus Prayer? So the Jesus Prayer is a way of obeying

and engaging the scriptural command in Philippians to pray constantly. So St. Paul tells us to pray constantly. Now that has been a mandate from Paul that has been engaged in many different beautiful ways in the church, even the Liturgy of the Hours and even the Mass. When the Mass is on the Roman church daily, somewhere in the world, the Mass is always going on. So the consecration is happening 24-7 somewhere in the world. And since we're all one body in Christ, there's prayer happening constantly. Liturgy of the Hours, in monasteries, in, you know, convents, there's always somebody

praying. There's usually the hour. So the prayer, as far as the body of Christ goes, is praying constantly. But there are some, like in that book, that refuse to see it only in a general way. And they'll say, I hear in that, I need to pray constantly. And then, so there's this, this anxiety. If, if God wants me praying constantly, like I can pray 75% of the time, but when I'm eating, when I'm sleeping, how am I praying constantly? So the book, The Way of a Pilgrim, explains very well this process of this one pilgrim says he comes to, he talks to all these wise men. He's traveling all over Russia looking for the answer.

And pretty much he's able to come to grips with various wise men speaking into this that what do we do constantly? If we're not praying, what do we do? We're breathing. We're breathing while we're sleeping. You can't stop your breathing. So he said, what if I tie prayer into my breath? And then one of these holy men taught him the Jesus prayer, which is just a combination of two different scriptural stories. So the Jesus prayer is, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It's a combination of Bartimaeus, the blind man, crying out, Jesus, Son of David, or Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me. And the publican coming into the church along with the Pharisee and saying, have mercy on me, a sinner.

So we're quoting these two men. The most important words are the name of Jesus, so Jesus, and then mercy. It's the most simple prayer, Jesus, mercy. Simple, simple prayer. The power of the name of Jesus and what we need is his mercy. So that has been extended a bit to Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. So what he would do is then breathe in Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, as he's breathing in, breathing out sin.

Have mercy on me, a sinner. Breathe in Jesus, out sin. In Jesus, out sin. Jesus, mercy. Jesus, mercy. And then what happened was is he said, I want to do that constantly. So how do you work? Human virtue.

Human virtue comes from habit. So he would then start tying knots in beads so that he would actually, so they would say, spiritual father said, pray 600 a day. And then we'll do the thousand a day, then 10,000 a day. And pretty soon, because you're holding yourselves accountable to the number of beads by counting, pretty soon it just becomes natural to you and you don't need to count anymore. You are literally just praying constantly. And if you're praying along with your breathing, where every time you breathe in, you're saying Jesus.

And every single time you breathe out, you're saying mercy. This becomes throughout the night, I'm still breathing in and breathing out. And then breathing becomes associated with the prayer because of the habit I've gotten into to do that. So the Jesus prayer, the chotki, the Jesus prayer beads are that. It's a way of actually counting if you want to. But the deeper level is, and the Byzantine church is very eloquent about this, prayer is not only in our head. We need to use our entire body for prayer. So when you're actually moving beads,

like we do with the rosary, right? You're moving beads through your fingers. You're utilizing your, even if you have it in your pocket because you're going about your day, you're still somehow utilizing the body in your prayer. And then if like you're in a monastery in prayer, you would, on these beads that are not the tied ones,

you would either say a Marian prayer on those beads, some people say, or the monks would do a prostration. So you get to this point, if you're praying in church or praying in your cell, you get to this one and then you do a prostration. And it's, again, using your physical body in prayer. Prayer should not be just an intellectual endeavor. Prayer involves our entire bodies. That's why we generally stand in prayer, because standing is a bit hard to do

for long periods of time, but it's a posture of dignity. And so we're saying we're receiving dignity from God. It's the normal posture for prayer, and we're utilizing our body. That's why you do bow, genuflections, kneeling, things like that, are saying, I'm not just going to talk to Jesus in my head. I'm going to use my entire self, my entire being to respond to his grace. And how is this, how have you used this in your own life? And have you gotten to the point where you're doing this more often than not? No, I wish I had. I wish I had. So I will remind myself, and these are little promptings from our Lord, but I will remind myself just when

I say, you need to pray, I'll just try to pray the Jesus prayer. And you do it, and then, you know, I kind of forget, and I stop doing it, and I'm reminded by something, you know, to do it again. I wear mine, I don't have mine on me right now because I gave it away, but like, I'm, Sister Natalia's making me a new one, but I wear it around my wrist, and most Byzantines do, to be that, to have easy access. Exactly. There you go. So easy access to the Jesus prayer, easy access to the chokhi and that physical prayer along with the mental. And the two things work together.

It's like, why do we sing? Well, why do we teach kids their ABCs by singing? When you sing it, you retain it better. You memorize it better when you sing it than if you just memorize A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So it's the same thing. When you are utilizing the movement of your hand and moving the beads, there's something more human about that, and we retain the information and the experience even better than that is.

You know, in the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas addresses the question, can we pray at all times? And his answer is nuanced. He begins by saying, well, in some sense, no, because you've got stuff to do. Right. But then he says, in another sense, yes. And he quotes Augustine by saying, we can continually pray by continually desiring God, which I think is very in line with the Jesus prayer. I think of it that way as turning my inner disposition towards our Lord. And it's parents taking care of kids in church.

Yeah. The celibate priest up there is having a very different prayer experience than the mother who's trying to control of kids in church. Yeah. The celibate priest up there is having a very different prayer experience than the mother who's trying to control her two-year-old, but they're both prayer and they're both called by God in that moment to be engaged in prayer in that way. So prayer can look different, you know, to quote Thomas, it can look different, whether it's the desire to be praying that in itself could be a prayer, right? You're kind of saying, Lord, I desire to pray. Well, there's a prayer right there. You didn't just tell yourself that you actually told Jesus and okay, Lord, I desire to pray. Well, there's a prayer right there. You didn't just tell yourself that. You actually told Jesus, and okay, now you're praying.

So there's that. But that's where this comes from, is the beginning of that desire to fulfill the scriptures. Sometimes I'll pray this on the airplane or somewhere, right? And I'll get halfway through it. And I'll think to myself, I'm kind of bored. I'm done. And I think, well, am I done breathing? Well, why don't you just do it together? And so it has been a really powerful thing for me. I've said this to my wife, especially the times that we've both been very much immersed in this. I'll wake up in the morning and find myself accidentally, as it were,

praying, which is a beautiful thing. We have this tradition, my wife and I now, where I wake up in the morning and the first thing I say is, glory to Jesus Christ. And she usually says, because she's not a morning person, but that's all right. I love it. That's beautiful. Tell us, here's like a kind of devil's advocate question. We get that there's different traditions and both traditions are equally valid.

But why not pray the Holy Rosary? If you want to say, well, this is just as good as the rosary and the rosary is not necessary but um what about what our lady of fatima has said about the importance of the rosary and it seems to me if you want to say you don't need to pray the rosary i don't necessarily think this i think this is i'm just trying to think of someone's objection it seems to me if you say well the rosary i don't need to pray the rosary because i'm doing this then that's kind of like saying either fatima wasn't a legitimate uh revelation or not revelation but but uh apparition um or that she she didn't really say that do you see what i mean yeah so um the way i understand it is that

we so fatima obviously came long after the rosary was invented by Dominic. Even well before that. So the reason the rosary developed—and forgive me if I'm condescending you. I don't mean to tell you what you already know. Teach me about this. My understanding is that the monks would pray 150 psalms per day, and then the laity would, not being able to do that, would pray 150 aves. Exactly. And prior to the Black Plague, the Hail able to do that, would pray 150 aves. Exactly. And prior to the Black Plague, the Hail Mary was only half of what it is now, before the

Holy Mary, Mother of God. And so they would do that. And this was kind of, it was more of a gradual kind of buildup than a, you know. Yeah. Thank you. So understanding that that's where the rosary came from, it fulfills a very specific purpose. It allows lay people who couldn't read to pray the structure of the Liturgy of the Hours. So the rosary was the Liturgy of the Hours for

lay people. The Liturgy of the Hours was the Psalms, right? And there's 150 Psalms, so you pray 150 Hail Marys or Abbes instead of the Psalms. So it's a way of lay people engaging in the life of the monk or the nun. And then the meditation upon the scriptures was also most lay people couldn't read. So you teach them these mysteries these mysteries. So, you know, the basic outline of scripture. So it's a, it's a praying of the Psalms while also meditating upon the new Testament upon the scripture. So it's a very monastic and scriptural experience now because they were Aves, obviously after the rosary became a popular thing, it makes total sense that Mary would say, pray the rosary, because what is the rosary? The rosary is also the best known and most authentic

in many ways prayer to the mother of God. So we're asking for her protection. It's not only Liturgy of the Hours and Meditation of the Precious Scripture, it's also very Marian. And so the rosary in itself, in a simple, easy-to-do format, you now have everybody able to engage in the intercession of the mother of God and the Bible. And so in such a simple way, you have kind of the Christian life fulfilled. So I completely understand that because of that, the mother of God would say, pray the rosary. The rosary has almost everything you need to be a good Christian. Of course, sacraments and love your neighbor and things like that. But it has all these different aspects of prayer to it.

Now, understanding that that's the case, the Byzantine church, which has its own traditions, also has ways of praying the Liturgy of the Hours and ways of meditating upon the New Testament and immensely beautiful Marian devotions. So I don't think what—pardon me, Mother of God, if I'm wrong. I could be wrong. But I don't think it's something about saying, Mary literally meant take a rosary that has five decades, and these are fathers, and Satan is order.

I don't think she was saying, here's what I mean by every Christian must do this. And so we say, I think she's totally open to the same way that the Byzantine church fulfills those same desires, same prayers. Now, with that being said, I have no issue with the rosary at all because many of the things that we've done is like, when I said there were Latinizations in the Byzantine churches, most of that is saying, we're going to replace part of the Byzantine liturgy or replace part of the ancient Byzantine traditions of art and architecture with something Roman. So we're going to take out the iconostas and we're going to put in statues, right? That'd be a Latinization. That's taking a valid tradition and replacing it with something else. The rosary isn't really

replacing anything in the East. So you can be praying the Jesus prayer while praying the rosary. That's the whole point of the Jesus prayer, right? You're breathing while you're praying the rosary. So the two are not mutually exclusive. You can pray the two at the same time. Now you only have the rosary in your fingers, but the breathing is going to continue. And so why not do both at the same time? So I have no issue with the praying of the rosary at all. I think it's absolutely, absolutely gorgeous and beautiful. But I would not like say there's going to be women praying or, sorry, it's just typically women, praying the rosary before the liturgy in my parish. Because we have other things that prepare you for the liturgy, namely the preparatory prayers, namely matins, third hour. These are things that we use to prepare for the liturgy, whereas in most Roman Catholic parishes, you have people praying the rosary before Mass,

because that prepares us for the Mass. We have other things to prepare, so I would not want the rosary replacing, but in private devotion, the rosary isn't really replacing anything, even though you could say there's other Marian devotions, there's other engagements with the Psalms, and so you can do those things, but the rosary does not get in the way, in my mind, of any Byzantine tradition, so I do not mind at all when Byzantine Catholics pray the Psalms. And so you can do those things, but the rosary does not get in the way in my mind of any Byzantine tradition. So I do not mind at all when Byzantine Catholics pray the rosary. Yeah. Do you think that there's a tendency on the part of Eastern Catholics to sort of have a reactionary response to the Western church? I was at a beautiful Byzantine church recently, and there was a chotki, but it had 10 and then, you know,

separate. I said, oh, that's good. I could use it as a rosary. He said, well, we don't pray the rosary in the Eastern church. And I just thought, that's annoying. Like, even if what you just said was right and valid, it's annoying to me when people define themselves by what they're not. So when somebody says, well, that's not part of our tradition, I could see someone saying,

well, make it part of your tradition. I mean, if the mother of God has said it, rather than relativize what she said and said, well, maybe she just meant this or that. Well, if what she actually said was pray the rosary, then bloody well do it. If Eucharistic adoration is a beautiful thing incorporated into your tradition, rather than just saying it's not out of fear that you're blending the two. What do you say to that objection? Right. So there are, so for, I think it's important though, to be fair, to say there have been revelations spoken in the East that the West would never say, oh, she was speaking to the universal church. They would say, well, no, that's a Byzantine. So if there is an attitude by the big brother to say, that's just kind of a fascinating side thing.

We're the real church. The Byzantine churches, they're so small. They're kind of cool. And we like it. But they're not. There's an attitude that they're not equal with us. We're the real church. And then there's this kind of the arm of the body of Christ that is cool sometimes that I want to experience.

It's cool, you know, funny liturgy. That's a good comeback. I likegy. That's a good comeback. I like that. That's a good balancing. Did Our Lady of Fatima, did she mean this for the universal church, or did she mean for those who have the rosary as a devotion? Use this devotion that is yours. So I could dig up apparitions in the East, and I would say, I'm not imposing that on

the West. So I think that's where the subtlety of saying, I want to listen to the mother of God, but she was speaking to Western Catholics, you know, rather than- This is a good point. You know, even in the Western church, you pick, let's say we laid out every physical devotion on this table. There would be a lot of them. And then let's say you were to trace back to how it was given.

Suppose it was said to have been given in a supernatural way. to how it was given, suppose it was said to have been given in a supernatural way. None of them seem to suggest that that particular devotion is something you could or could not do. They're all pretty like, this is what will happen. I will, you know, these graces will be given. And so, yeah, you run the risk of, yeah, yeah. And it would seem like an unhealthy spirituality if you felt the need to pray every single devotion, wear every medal and scapula. Right.

It's like they're our father. We say, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I don't mean that. I don't mean only forgive me as much as I forgive others. And I don't mean I'm always good at doing it. But I'm saying it as that's the ideal. Like we, I want to forgive each other. But the, but the language we use is, is very black and white and that, but it's, it's there. We need to, again, go back to subtlety. We need to

understand the subtleties in that. So, you know, that's in a sense, the, the, the devotion, the mandate. What's the other thing you said? Oh, Eucharistic adoration. So this is one of those things that, that the Orthodox oftentimes criticize Roman Catholics, because there is a different theology here. So in the Roman Catholic world, remember that Protestants questioned two big things. They questioned Mary and the Eucharist. Now, the Protestants never really made it east. So in Trent and following in the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church said, if you're going to question the Eucharist, we're going to emphasize it. And if you're going to question mother of God, we're going to emphasize her. So, so, you know, having

Eucharistic adoration and exposition, a lot of that came and especially in the popular mind, only after the reformation, after it was questioned, now we're going to use it in the East. What happened? The Muslims came in and the iconoclasm came in and they said, you cannot have icons or images. So what do we do? We put them everywhere. We cover our churches and our walls with them. So again, it came like the councils, like the creed. It came from something being questioned. So in the East, we have this, we've always been very proud of saying, when we pray, it's

just like moving these beads. When we pray, we engage all five senses and our entire person in prayer. So when you go to a divine liturgy, your sight is engaged. Your hearing is engaged. The sense of smell we use in a sense for everything is engaged. Taste, touch, every one of the five senses is engaged. So what happens is when you have a, and again, this is maybe making a mountain out of a molehill, but in the Eastern mindset, if we were going to say, let's adopt exposition, in other words, looking at the whole Eucharist,

the problem with that in the Eastern mindset, being a purist, is saying, if I hold up the Eucharist, it is the body and blood of Christ. But what does it look like to my physical eyes? It looks like bread. Why does it look like bread? Because it's supposed to look like bread. Because the Eucharist sustains us. If bread sustains our physical life, the Eucharist sustains our spiritual life. But as somebody said, I think it was brilliant.

If you hold up the Eucharist in front of me and say, look, Jesus came in the form of sustenance. He came in the form of bread. And now I'm going to put him back in the tabernacle. It's torture because you're saying, let me receive it. And of course, receiving the Eucharist is much more important than just looking at it. Looking at it is second in importance, but there's something about the physical. If I'm using my sense of sight, and you show him to me and then put him away without letting me receive him, it's almost torture. So that's why it's never really grown

because we're so sensory. So what do we use as a visual? Icons. Because icons, you say Jesus has a high forehead because he's wise. He has a small mouth because he's humble. He's wearing red because he's divine, blue on top because he became human. Long nose. Long nose because he's good at hearing our prayers because incense symbolizes prayer. So then a very pronounced nose symbolizes receptivity to prayer that is symbolized by the incense. So when I'm looking at an icon, I'm looking, I'm using the sense of sight to learn something about Christ and engage in a window into heaven to see Christ in that way. So we don't really need Eucharistic adoration in the same sense because the Eucharist is always on the

altar. Every Byzantine Catholic church you go to, the Eucharist is, oh, you know where it's going to be. He's going to be on the altar. And so I walk into a church, I say, Jesus is here. He's here in the Eucharist and there he is. But what am I looking at? I'm looking at an icon. What am I hearing, chanting bells, et cetera. What am I smelling? Incense. So our humanity is engaged in a more, even maybe a childlike way where everything looks like it is. But when I look at bread, I'm looking at it because I'm going to eat it because it sustains me. Gotcha.

So that's the bit of the aversion of exposition, not benediction, because being blessed by the Eucharist, we do that in the liturgy. We're blessed by the Eucharist. But just exposition itself, where you're looking at the Eucharist and not being able to receive it is, again, you may be making a mountain out of a molehill because I love adoration. I love exposition. I grew up doing it. So I love looking at our Lord, but I also get the, I'm separating my Byzantine insistence upon the five senses when I do this.

Yeah. Now, I think what we have to do is distinguish between what the church mandates, forbids, encourages, but I think what we sometimes do is, as I said earlier, demand uniformity where the church has allowed diversity. So not recognizing that if I was to actually say, if you're not praying the rosary every day, you're sinning, I'm telling you something that the church isn't. I'm actually in conflict with the church in doing that.

And I think I'm seeing increasingly more, and again, it might have to do with the sort of turbulence of our church. People want something to just impose upon others. So we're all kind of walking step. If you tell me don't pray the rosary, you tell me you don't pray the rosary, and you're proud you don't pray the rosary, that's obviously evil. I mean, there's this, and I think it comes from a scrupulosity really, but that's a scrupulosity that is rooted in a reaction to the attack of the world and the attack of unorthodox Catholics and things like that. So we need things to cling to, but we need in the church, we need to hear you can cling to these things and you shouldn't

cling to these things. We need things to cling to, but, we need to hear you can cling to these things and you shouldn't cling to these things. We need things to cling to. But sometimes we cling to the wrong things and we need to be gently informed that be careful with that. Like right now, what is it? Priestly celibacy. There's a subtlety here. Byzantine priests have always been and will always be married. Roman Catholic priests have not always been celibate, but are called to be celibate for the past hundreds and hundreds of years.

So there's something like don't exalt celibacy as a sign of orthodoxy, not that it's not the case. But there are things to cling to. Celibacy is just not one of them. Now, if you're Roman, cling to celibacy because your church says it's tradition. But in the Eastern churches, we don't. But in the East, you see the value of it. I mean, your bishops are chosen from the monks, which are celibates. Exactly.

And monks are always celibate. And then we need to remember that. And in the Byzantine tradition, you would not go to your married pastor for confession or spiritual direction. You'd go to a celibate for that. And you'd go to the monks. So if I want confession or spiritual direction, I go down the street to the monastery where I find a celibate.

If I want the public sacraments, like marriage, Eucharist, I go to my pastor. If I want the private sacraments or spiritual direction, I go to the celibate, because there's an understanding that he is kind of, I hate to put it this way, this goes against, you know, John Paul a little bit, but like he is objectively closer to Christ because he needs to be there. There's a unique relationship that the celibate has with Christ that the married man does not in that way, and the married man in his own way that the celibate does not. It's his pole, right? The celibate. Exactly. Yeah, I wish you would have been, be like me. So you would go to those celibates

to receive that, here's what I think Jesus is saying to me, or can you help me discern what this is? If you're really close to Jesus because you're, you have to be because you're a celibate, you don't have a wife to bounce these things off of, you always go to Jesus, then maybe you can speak into this better. But with the, with the vocations crisis among monasticism and things like that, all of this has kind of become mixed together. I enjoy talking about this tension as we discuss the different ways we express things. There really is a tension here because there are certain circumstances where we're saying both are valid options.

Don't exalt it, as you say, as a sign of orthodoxy when both can be seen. So, for example, I love that my baby Peter, when he was a baby, received Eucharist. I love that my children were confirmed. And so here's that tension again, right? So someone will say, and rightly so, that once you have passed the age of reason, you're at a stage where you can understand what it is you're receiving. Great. But then from the Eastern side, you could say, I don't wait until my child can explain nutrition before I feed him. I just feed him. So there's a tension there, right?

Because you are saying you're trying to make the case for both while seeing the beauty in both. And it's really, really hard because, again, I feel like I discern celibacy very well. I don't think a lot of Roman Catholic priests have. And they'll tell me that because they just want to be priests so bad. Celibacy was a requirement of it. So I understand the scandal that seeing some men are married.

So how do I say I treasure my celibacy? I treasure it in the West because in the West, it has a different reason. There's a different reason to be celibate priest in the West. And I'm hearing now with all these debates, people are starting to rag on the Eastern Church. Push that a bit forward so we can speak more closely. Okay. To rag on the Eastern Church because they're trying to compare where there really is no comparison. And I get it because it would be really hard if I had not discerned celibacy well, it'd be really hard to

watch another priest enjoy marriage. And I could not, and I'm saying, why don't I have that? And we need to explain why, why can a Roman, why should a Roman priest say, I need to cling to the celibacy that the church has asked me to have because it actually affects my ministry and affects my relationship with Christ, whereas in the Byzantine church, those who discerned married priesthood, there's a difference there. We don't need to say, you should be this way, you should be that way. There's actually, and I'm not eloquent about the difference, but there is a difference there about those two ministries.

Excellent. As we wrap up here, this is going to be my final question. I want to ask about the feeling many Eastern Catholics have of being, as it were, a child of divorced parents and hope for reunion. And are there any signs of that? And then you can just sum up however you'd like. I love looking at the differences between John Paul, Benedict, and Francis, because as some people have said among the popes, you each see their specialty, and you can kind of see how each one has contributed from a Byzantine Catholic perspective to that unity. And I can see what the Holy Spirit's doing. philosophical, and even in himself, since he had Byzantine Catholicism in his blood, being from Poland, like he brought this physical sign of unity, and people would have followed him to the end of the world. And he had such a good, friendly relationship with the Orthodox,

that it gave us hope. There was a little bit before that, but it gave us hope in a new way. Benedict comes along, and he's kind of dealing with the philosophical, theological in a deep, deep way because he was such an immense, is such an immense intellect that he can speak to those things. And then Pope Francis comes along and brings in this synodality of like really desiring that the bishops get together and hash these things out before the Pope just makes a statement on it. So I see God working in that. I see God working in the Popes. I'm just not as aware of the Orthodox side. But I do know that the Orthodox faithful and priests and bishops that I do talk to, there is generally, I think, a desire that is growing for that unity.

And not because of some inferiority complexes, truly because we want what Jesus wants. And Jesus wants us to be one. And so I'm seeing that change. So I think the Holy Spirit's at work, sometimes subtle ways, sometimes more explicit ways. But so for instance, real quick, going back to the filioque you mentioned, if you want to read it, just Google filioque USCCB. There's a 40 page document that was composed by both the Orthodox and the Catholics, the

commissions, and they put together a 40-page document explaining the differences and the similarities when it comes to the filioque. Why I bring this up now is because it's things like that that are giving me hope. Like here we are hashing these things out in a very real way because we desire what Jesus desires. And that's where I see the hope, even more than saying, you know,

is Patriarch Bartholomew about to go ahead and form a union with pope francis in the west i don't know some people some people see it i i don't i'm not seeing it explicitly and but i'm seeing real work happening that is good glory to jesus christ glory forever thank you so much for being here of course here's what we're going to do we're going to take a pause here on youtube and we're going to wrap up the rest of this conversation over on patreon