Pints With Aquinas - BONUS | Conversion, Crisis, & Spiritual Warfare | Matt Fradd Show Ep 2.

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

Matt Fradd sits down with Dr. Paul Thigpen to discuss a whole host of interesting things: how he became an atheist at the age of 12; why he gave his life to Christ; his encounters with the Devil, and the current crisis in the Catholic Church. 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

What's up Pints with Aquinas peeps? This is the second episode of The Matt Fradd Show. So let me say a couple of words about it. Number one, we've just started a new podcast called The Matt Fradd Show. So I'm not going to be putting these Matt Fradd Show interviews on Pints with Aquinas for much longer. So be sure to download The Matt Fradd Show podcast and subscribe there so you'll be able to listen to the full length episodes as they come out. Secondly, you can watch clips of this show on YouTube. So go and subscribe to my YouTube channel, Matt Fradd. Finally, only patrons get to watch the full-length video. So if you want to be a supporter of Pints with Aquinas and me, go to patreon.com slash Mattfradd and in addition to all the other free stuff that I give you, you will get to watch the entirety of this show there. Sound good? Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the Matt Fradd Show. Today I'll be interviewing Dr. Paul Thigpen, who's a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and convert to the Catholic faith. We discuss everything from his conversion to Christianity, from him being an atheist when he was 12 years old. We talk about demonic possession. We talk about guarding ourselves against Satan. We talk about the current corruption and tumultuous time we're going through in the Catholic Church. You're going to absolutely love the show. Before we jump into it, however, I want to talk about two amazing companies that are making this show possible. First is Exodus 90. You can check them out at exodus90.com. That's exodus90.com. Exodus 90 is essentially a Catholic spiritual

boot camp for men. I'm currently undertaking it. I'm on like day 11. You basically go through 90 days where you give up things you would rather not give up and take on things like cold showers that you would rather not take on. You know, this is a hectic time in the church and we need men who love Jesus Christ and are willing to pray and who are willing to fast and who are willing to suffer for Holy Mother Church. So please check them out, exodus90.com. Right now, you can join a waiting list at exodus90.com. Join the waiting list there if you want, and you'll get some kind of exclusive videos from me to encourage you how to do it. But I really recommend checking it out. This is an amazing thing. And it's not just something you do in isolation. You do it with

a group of men. So it really is a fraternal thing. And it'll free you from those things that perhaps you've become enslaved to in order that you may love. So check it out, Exodus90.com. The second group I need to tell you about who are sponsoring the show is Covenant Eyes. Now I used to work for Covenant Eyes. So sometimes when I tell people about Covenant Eyes, they think I'm biased and maybe I am, but frankly, if there were better filtering and accountability software out there, I would not be talking about Covenant Eyes. The only reason I'm kind of allowing them to be a sponsor is because they are the best thing out there. The only reason I'm kind of allowing them to be a sponsor is because they are the best thing out there. You've been online. You see all the crazy stuff that's on there.

You feel a draw and a temptation to perhaps look at things you know are evil and that you shouldn't be looking at. This is why you need Covenant Eyes. It's the best filter on the web, which means it blocks the bad stuff. If you've got kids, this is a necessity if you love your children, which, of course, you do. The other thing that's fantastic about Carbonize is their accountability software. And this is what really sets them apart from anything else. Okay, so you go online, you maybe try and look at some things, maybe you get blocked, but also your accountability partner gets a report daily, weekly, whatever they choose, telling them the places you've tried to go online, maybe the places you did go online that you shouldn't have gone. And then your accountability

partner isn't there to shame you. They're there to call you to be a better human being. It's about time you have covenant eyes. I've said this in the past. If you're somebody who struggles with pornography and you don't have covenant eyes and you keep falling back into this thing and you make excuses for why you don't have covenant eyes and you keep falling back into this thing and you make excuses for why you don't have covenant eyes, maybe consider not going to confession anymore because maybe you're not that contrite. I get that that's tough language, but I also mean it. All right, covenant eyes is just something I have

on all my devices and it's something you should have on your devices too. If you use the promo code Matt Fradd, M-A-T-T, you can see it right there, F-R-A-T-T, you can see it right there, F-R-A-D-D, one word, you'll get 30 days for free. You can try it. And I promise you, you're not going to want to not try it after that. You're going to want to continue with it. So go to covenanteyes.com, that's covenanteyes.com and use the promo code Matt Fradd to get a month free and make your house and your life a much safer and more beautiful place. Paul Thigpen, thanks for being on the Matt Fradd Show. Thanks for having

me, Matt. Great to be here, buddy. Now, were you just on the journey home with Mark Estrada? A few weeks ago, that's right. We were just talking about what a great interviewer he is. He is. He's a fine man. What you see is what you get. Whatever he is on camera, he's like that in real life. Yeah, I did the journey home up in Canada. They set up stage in a religious house up there and I really enjoyed it. I was going to say, I've known him for many years, almost as long as I've been Catholic. I was a charter member of the Coming Home Network. Yeah, how were you? I can't wait to get into that. Yeah, because you're a convert, you've been in a Christian rock band, you have your PhD,

you've written 752 books, right? More or less. Yeah, I'm really excited. Do you remember the first time we met? Because it's kind of embarrassing for me. Yes, I do. Did I come across as... On the back row in the church. You can be honest here. Did I come off as arrogant?

Not arrogant. I guess I was a little puzzled because you said, do I know you? And I greeted you and you had requested a friendship on Facebook maybe a year before or something. So I thought, well, he probably just doesn't remember. So this is why it was kind of, I'm so embarrassed every time I think about that. Because we're up the back. It was adoration. And you just sort of very lovingly and gently said, hello, Matt.

And I just thought, oh, this is some guy from a church who may have seen me on EWTN. Right? And I'm like, okay, well, just why don't we come outside the church and I'll say hi. I didn't know it was Dr. Paul Figg. Anyway. It was a pleasure. I apologize. It was a pleasure Paul Figg. Anyway, I apologize. It was a pleasure to see you. Yeah, but it's really great. It's been great to get to know you a little bit,

and I'm actually really excited about doing this show. Like I said to you on the phone this morning, I feel like the Matt Fradd Show is just an excuse for me to get people to sit down with me for a few hours and chat about stuff I want to chat about. It's very selfish, actually. It's great stuff, though. So tell us a bit about yourself, how you grew up. Wow. I grew up in Savannah, Savannah, Georgia, and I became an

atheist at 12. We were an honorably Presbyterian. Became an atheist at 12. I had been reading, doing some additional reading in my seventh grade history class, I guess it was and teacher gave me some stuff from some of the Enlightenment skeptic philosophers Voltaire yeah and probably just hit me at the right time where I was feeling my adolescent rebellion but wasn't going to do it as most people in the 60s were through drugs and alcohol didn't want to lose control of my mind 12 is is a really young age to adopt. You said you were an atheist at twelve. And to read Voltaire at twelve, you're obviously an intelligent guy.

Well, I don't know. But anyway, I read it. It became, without my realizing it, my weapon of choice for adolescent rebellion, I think. I became a philosophically materialist. There's only matter and energy. There's no life after death. There's no spirit. There's no God, no devil, none of that. Were your parents Christian? Yes, yes, they were Presbyterian.

And I continued to go to church with them because they... Did they know you were... No, it would have been awful if I'd told them at that time. So what I did kind of in my own way of making my point was, though they didn't realize, I mean, we had a bunch of kids. There were five kids, and I was down the line somewhere. And when we got to the Apostles' Creed, which we would say, you know, recite in the Presbyterian Church, I would go silent.

Me too. I did the exact same thing, but I was about 16 years old. I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Yeah, same here. So that went on for six years. During that time, still had a hunger for transcendent things. I want to dwell on this before we get to whatever the Lord clearly did in your life. Atheism probably wasn't as popular a thing as it is

today. I don't think I knew an atheist that I realized was an atheist. When I was a teenager, I was agnostic. I think partly because atheism hadn't been a shorthand way of saying, I'm more intelligent than you, as it apparently does now. Or maybe it did. Maybe it's kind of run out of steam, I think, at this point. Well, agnostic is a humbler position to take, and I was much too arrogant to take that. It's one thing to say, I don't know, I don't think we can know. It's another thing to say, I absolutely know it's not true. Did you follow through the consequences of that?

I did. Intellectually, did that lead you to a sort of nihilism? And to despair, really. Really? It was, you know, I got to the place within a year or two where I was just saying that, getting up in the morning and saying, what's the purpose of life? Why am I even here?

There's no meaning. I come, I go, nothing will be, the whole universal ceased to exist someday. What difference will it make? 13, 14 years old you were thinking these things. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I let the despair, I'll just say I probably had, I'm sure I had thoughts of just ending it all, but I was too much of a coward.

I didn't follow through that way. Did you talk with your high school teacher who gave you Voltaire and some of these Enlightenment thinkers? No, she was like a seventh grade junior high teacher. It's amazing that a seventh grade teacher would give you some of these Enlightenment philosophers to read. What I did was this. I still had this hunger for the transcendent, something outside of you know every day yeah and began to to study what we would now call paranormal phenomena yeah but parapsychology they called it yeah back then there was a Institute of parapsychological studies

associated with Duke University and so for my seventh grade science project, I wrote off to them and got their literature, their testing materials, and then began testing my roommates and having myself tested for any kind of evidence of either extrasensory perception. Oh my gosh, that would be so cool. Or psychokinesis, mind over matter. See if you're going to join the X-Men kind of thing, right?

If you have these sort of super abilities. And I began to attest that there were things that were beyond what should have been. You know, the way they have to couch it is, okay, according to kind of averages, this is attributable. This many times I'm getting the target is attributable to chance. But well beyond that, it has to look like something else. to look tell us about what did they send you? What were these two first just a big text kind of you know summarizing the research But you had these little cards, you know size of playing cards and they had four symbols on them a square

Let's see if I remember circle a plus sign weighty lines and I think the other one was a diamond and so you when you're testing someone you'd have like a screen between you and you would hold up one and they're randomly mixed you hold up one of the deck and you look at it and then the person across from you says what he thinks it is so someone was doing this test with you it wasn't just something I came yeah right I say yeah oh I mean I had to do it with someone else it was not that was my seventh grade science process so you could either if you just wanted

to see kind of whether they could read it remotely um then you would just take the cards and do them without looking at them yourself yeah if you wanted to see if they could read your mind so to speak you would look at them and then the person would concentrate on and then of course like i said i had somebody else do it with me as well then the other test had to do with how did you know this wasn't just a fluke every time that you got it right what I'm saying is that they had they had had figured out their little algorithms that I guess that this this number of times would be attributable to chance okay just random but if you had considerably beyond that that seemed to suggest that something beyond chance was of times would be attributable to chance. Okay. Just random. But if you had considerably

beyond that, that seemed to suggest that something beyond chance was at work. And do you agree with that assessment? Probably so. I mean, what it is, whether it's the mind or something else, as I came to see, it could also be something else besides your own mind. So that was the beginning.

And then psychokinesis, mind matter you had you throw dice but before you know before you started say okay I want to I want to do threes yeah yeah and he would just keep throwing intending a concentrated on making it three and see how many times you got it yeah so that was my science project I got blue ribbon yeah and it seemed to suggest that something other than chance was operating, especially when I was testing myself or having someone test me. And that began to at least, I wouldn't say satisfy my desire for something transcendent, but to point me in that direction, that here I am.

Maybe there's no God and maybe there's no life after death and demons and angels and all the rest, but maybe our minds are capable of more than we realize. Maybe our minds are much bigger things than we realize. And what we consider parapsychological phenomena are simply natural powers of the human brain that we haven't discovered yet. It would be interesting to look into that further and try to help find out what they are. So that way I could convince myself that what I was doing was still very scientific but still fit with my materialist worldview. Okay, so that's what I was going to ask.

So you say you were into this paranormal stuff but you were saying, well, this is still a materialistic world. There's just more to the mind, perhaps, that we right now understand. Right. Okay. So from that, eventually, I began to think, well, what about some other stuff? Not just things that haven't necessarily been looked at scientifically, but what about seances? Yeah. What about Ouija boards?

Palm readers. All kinds of things. Maybe it's the same kind of thing going on. I never practiced that stuff. I did have a Ouija board. So I never practiced it as a habit. Certainly never set myself up as a mind reader or a palm reader or anything. But I began to get involved in it and only later realized that at that point

I was opening the door to dark powers that I didn't believe existed. So how did you go from a 12-year-old atheist to becoming, I don't know, becoming a Christian? Well, six years. I went through, again, kind of leading those things, leading to despair, but still at least having a sense of, well, there's maybe something else out there. It's just that we haven't

understood it yet. And it's all part of our universe and of the human brain, getting involved in these other kinds of things. My senior of high school, two things happened. We had, in Savannah at that time, we were still living in a situation where the public schools, I was in public school, were segregated racially. And so they had just a couple years before, maybe about the time I started high school, were allowing, or maybe a little before, allowing people who wanted to go to a different school. They had what was called freedom of choice. So you began to have African-American students finally coming into schools that had been all white before. But there was a ruling by the Supreme Court that originally had actually taken place the day before I was born. If you look at the newspapers on the day I was born, this was what the headlines was.

The Supreme Court struck down this Brown v. Board of Education saying that we can't have, some states couldn't have separate but equal schools. It seems like I'm off track, but this is really important. No, no, this is fascinating. So finally then, in my senior year of high school, it was like they finally said, okay, you have got to dismantle this system you've got. they finally said okay you have got to dismantle this system you've got and in fact the system was forced to reassign students across the board no matter where they lived so that every school's proportion of white and black students

reflected the county proportion which was 60 white 40 black so it meant just moving people all around and doing kinds of. I got to stay at the same high school, which by the way, it was a high school that was all black until I went there and my friends. So that was an incredible experience to be immersed in black African American culture. So how many white people were in the school with you? When I finally came, for a little while they put a bunch in and then it kind of went back and forth over several years. So it's not like I was a tiny minority, but I got immersed since I'd grown up in this system where almost all the students, one or two, were white.

It's a wonderful eye-opening experience for me. But what happened was during this time I was active in student government, so I was like the sophomore class president and that kind of thing. I saw it as my little laboratory that, like the Enlightenment skeptics that I've been reading, I was convinced that mankind is perfectible, that if we just work at it hard enough, educate ourselves, form ourselves correctly, we can actually bring an end to all this other stuff, the hatred and the conflict and that kind of thing. So great little, I was a perfect little

18th century rationalist, you know, optimist. And wow. So I saw it as my laboratory and things were going great there, more than all the other schools in this city by my... What were you doing to try to perfect humanity, but as a microcosm, the school you were in? Well, being involved in student government by having initiatives that got black and white students together so they could become friends doing things together. And what happened over the summer before my senior year, they finally did that

rearrangement to all the schools which meant we had to get rearranged again. And they ended up putting in students at our school from some really racist parts of town, racist white, racist black. And I was student body president that year. So I reached out to the students from the African American schools and said, if you're in student government there and you're being sent over to our school, I want you to be part of what we're doing. We'll make a cabinet, we'll do something, but we'll work together.

And it was looking really good. But then other high schools started having rioting because they had all had the same kind of adjustment which was really wrenching to them. And so schools were being closed down because of the rioting. Federal marshals were assigned to the halls to try to keep peace. And we were lasting longer than anybody else. And again, it was all evidence that we had done what I thought we could do.

But then homecoming came. All the other schools had said, okay, for homecoming to avoid trouble, we're going to have a white homecoming came. All the other schools had said, okay, for homecoming to avoid trouble, we're going to have a white homecoming queen and a black homecoming queen. And I thought, oh, you can't do that. No, the council agreed with me. So I said, no, we're just going to have one homecoming queen. We can handle that, right? And so on the day of homecoming, I remember being in the gym for the assembly.

And what I didn't know at that point was that the nearest high school, maybe a mile or two away, had closed down with rioting that morning and the kind of instigators of the trouble, both black and white, had come over to our campus and infiltrated the assembly. Wow.

Is this when the queen was being elected? This is all weird to me, by the way, because homecoming, I don't even really know what it is. I guess it's a dance or something? You have a homecoming dance, right, but you elect a queen who then is kind of announced and you have voting and she's announced at the halftime of the football game. Yeah, that's right. It's somehow intertwined with football.

We all saw this in American television growing up, of course. I just don't really know what it is. Okay, so the announcement was being made and you've got not yet actually we haven't even voted yet so for the assembly what you're doing is presenting each of the candidates and she maybe answers a question almost like a beauty contest yeah you know and and for everybody applaud and then she goes on to the next one well they infiltrated the assembly and so the first af-american candidate comes up Somebody starts booming Go attention's right first white candidate comes up somebody starts booing these instigators Yeah, because the people our school weren't really like that. Oh, yeah. Could you tell they were from a different school?

Well, I saw some of them different Okay, so it wasn't obvious that I knew we were a rather small school And I'm a student body president have been there for three years. I knew him all right I knew these people were not when I saw that they were not from our school. Yeah So the tension starts rising you can feel it the Assemblies over we're walking out of the gym You know to go back to our classes and right in front of me. I saw it happen one guy pushed another guy in front of them into the guy in front of them they were of

different races I say so that it would start a fight and he wasn't there and while I watched the whole thing just fell apart just exploded knives I mean you know oh yeah don't we didn't metal detectors back then yeah and the schools and I watched as you know my friends got involved in it. I would never thought would have fought. Some of them felt like they were, and I mean both black and white, like they were fighting for their lives. And I would go around literally trying to pull people off of each other

and say, you know me, you don't need to do this. My watch, I remember, got knocked off and crushed from my wrist. I was not hurt, but there were some really bad things that day. And it was finally over. I remember some of the teachers called me in to talk about what had happened, and I just began to weep because I realized not only was I sad that I saw my good friends trying to kill each other, but I realized at some level that my whole project. That Hegel was wrong.

Yeah. Or that Voltaire or the others, that they were wrong. My whole project had fallen apart that day. Everything I'd worked for for two and a half years was dust and ashes at my feet. And right on the edge of just terrible bitterness. But I know now God was was knocking down the idol and crushing it because I had made you know humanity an idol not long after that I had a amazing experience where and this

one I think is a miracle I guess somebody could think of it as a coincidence but I was walking some weeks later, walking with a Christian friend. The way the school was laid out was in wings, all one story with big grassy areas between. So we come around one wing. It's a big grassy area. And I look, and as we come around the corner, we see that there's a mob forming. On one side black, on one side white, facing each other. Furious, cursing, knives, stuff out, fists, just rage.

And I thought, I've seen this before. Oh, no. At this point, how do you stop it? If I run out there in the middle, it's not going to stop it. What do we do? And my friend, like I said, who was a Christian, said, I don't know about you, but I'm going to pray. And she dropped her knees. And we were so far away, they didn't even know what we were doing. They couldn't see us. But she dropped her knees and began

to pray. And Matt had a dilemma. I love my friends. I didn't want to see them hurt each other. I wanted to do anything I could to stop this, but I didn't believe in God. So what do I do? And I finally just humbled myself, dropped on my knees. Really? And I said, God... If you exist, God... If there is a God, this cannot be your will. Do something.

And I stood back up, and I don't think it was even a full minute later when the most amazing thing happened. You know, if a SWAT team had come in in a helicopter between them and stopped, later on I could have said, eh, just coincidence. Somebody already called them and they were coming and blah, blah, blah. But that's not what happened. What happened was on one side of the mob, all of a sudden somebody starts to laugh. And I don't just mean a chuckle. They start guffawing, this belly laughing, belly laughing. And it was so contagious that the guys around him started laughing. And before

you knew it, it jumped over the gap to the other side. The gift of laughter was being said. I know. And as I watched them laugh, all the anger drained out of their faces and their hands. After a few minutes of it, they just kind of went, and they turned around and walked off. And they were ready to go at it. Oh yeah, they were seconds away from it. Wow.

And I remember thinking, okay, you know, if it had been a helicopter or a SWAT team, I could write this off as a coincidence, but how do you explain that? Yeah. I mean, I've written a novel before. If I were to write a scene like that into a novel, people would say it's not believable. If I had asked you as a 14-year-old, give me a good reason to think atheism is true. Now, I know some people are going to take issue with that because they define atheism differently. But give me a good reason that God doesn't exist. Would you have good reasons, or did you just think that arguments for theism and Christianity weren't good?

At the time, what was I thinking? Yeah, because you said you're an atheist at 12. Is that just because you thought Christianity is intellectually bankrupt? Or is it because, no, I have compelling arguments for atheism. I hadn't got to the point of compelling arguments. Again, I was still pretty good but it was more that i saw that people like the skeptics you know different skeptics brought me to the place of questioning everything and saying being intellectually honest was a right right but i didn't have anybody else so

it's not like a read that would bring me yeah beyond that to the answers so at that moment when you dropped to your knees it wasn't like you had positive reasons to think god didn't exist like say you would have for santa claus you know go on to think God didn't exist. Like, say, you would have for Santa Claus. Go on Google Earth. You couldn't have at the time. But if you go on Google Earth, there is no North Pole. So you didn't have positive reasons to think God didn't exist. But you're an atheist because of reading these different philosophers.

And so you were open to the possibility of God existing. Well, I guess what I'm saying is I was pressed to be open that day. My circumstances, I love my friends so much. I thought if there's any possibility. So were you all both kneeling when that happened or you were praying? We both stood up. You got up and this happened. Yeah.

And then what happened? How did your friend, what did she say? How did you respond? Well, she said, praise God. Glory. Off she went. Yeah. And I can tell you some other stories later oh i want to hear that but um so that that's going to shake me but then what really shook me was that the dark

powers that i had been trafficking with without realizing it in the occult um turned on me how did they how did that happen it's uh one one night in particular i was with a a friend of mine uh he lived in savannah he moved off to chicago was come had come back and was visiting and i brought a friend with him that i didn't really even know it but we were hanging out one evening and um wow we sav Savannah's right on the ocean there islands and I lived on one of those islands actually so we driven out of the beach tonight we were walking I remember at one point this man out missing with Steve but anyway he even told me I didn't know him just getting it on that night and we're talking he looks at me, and he gets this terrified look on his face.

And he pulls back his fist. He's a big guy. Both of them were football players. And he's about to punch me out. What? And my other friend jumped in between. What's going on? What are you doing?

He said, I saw Satan in his face. And I just thought, that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. And for no apparent reason. We hadn't been talking about nothing. It was just, he saw it. So we keep walking. Interesting thing happens. We happen to look up at the sky,

and there are these three bright circular lights, red and green. So you would call them UFOs in that they were unidentified. I don't know if they had anything to do with it or not, but when we saw it, we jumped in the car and drove back to my home and they basically followed us and then disappeared over my home wow so we're you sold this with the other guys yeah yeah yeah there were three of us so the other uh where my home was i lived on the water not the beach but where the salt water of the ocean flows between the islands. They're called barrier islands. Yeah, so we had a dock and it was well over my head, you know deep

and We're sitting out in the car back in the days when you have big cars and bench seats in the front so all three of us had kind of squeezing the front we're talking and all of a sudden this I Mean I know now what it was but this this darkness Descends on me and begins to like it's coming to the top of my head and begins to press down. So it's palpable. It's tangible.

And press and press and press. And I was pushed down, so my knees hit the dashboard. But when they couldn't go any further, it's as if then it came on in. Wow. And all of a sudden I felt as if the darkness had filled my whole body and that there was maybe a little part of it that was still me. Do you want to interrupt? Now, for our listeners, you weren't doing drugs? You weren't drinking?

Oh, no, no. Like I said, or I may have said before, I think my reason probably for becoming an atheist at some level was that I was rebelling against my parents, but I refused to do alcohol and drugs at all. But what were you and the friends doing in this front seat as this began to happen? Were you just chatting? We were just talking. Yeah, not about that, not about anything like that.

And all of a sudden, this... So it comes on me, presses down, my knees sit there, and it feels like it's just filling me. And all of a sudden, the just I would say superhuman strength Come sorry. I'm not a big guy. I'm not strong and You know only five six, but these guys were much bigger stronger guys And all of a sudden I just felt this search to and I was in the middle To and a voice in my head that said I'm throwing you in the water and a voice in my head that said,

I'm throwing you in the water. Now, what that meant to me that might not have meant to everybody else is I'm going to kill you because I can't swim. To this day, I can't swim. You can't swim. I can't swim. But it's going to throw me in the water. That's what I heard inside. And all of a sudden, my arms,

and I'm basically pushing them aside and about to crawl over. They can't even hold me down. Wow. But just at the time I think, I'm going to die, another voice comes into my head and it says, focus on the cross. Which would have been weird advice for you since you weren't a Christian. Of course, of course. I wasn't thinking of any of that. I mean, I had known enough as a kid. I had been a religious little kid actually. I memorized scriptures, people

in my tradition did, and knew a lot of scripture, but that had been six years that I hadn't focused on the cross. That little part of me inside said, what does that mean? What cross? What cross? Then I remembered that my girlfriend, who was Catholic at the time, had given me a silver cross that was on a necklace around my neck and I wore it. I wore it just as a piece of jewelry because of her. Not because of any faith but the last little bit of me was able to kind of like slip my hand away like that and I grabbed the thing on my shirt and I just put it right here.

I didn't know what else to do except follow it literally. Now, they're holding you back. You're in the car trying to bust out of the car. They know something weird's happening. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so I pull it out, and I just do this and look at it. I don't know what else to do. Focus on the cross.

And as I did, slowly the thing began to subside, subside, until finally it was gone, or at least it stopped doing what it was doing. And when they were convinced that I was okay for the moment, they kind of let go. What the heck happened to you just now? Because you weren't, like, that wasn't part of your personality to do strange things like that. So they were like, here goes Paul again.

Right, right. No, it's nothing like that. I know me you know so i began to tell them what i just told you and then the guy that i didn't know well from chicago who was visiting said that's really odd he said why this is the guy who thought he saw satan on face. He said, my girlfriend had exactly the same experience. I said, really? Maybe this is you, Chicago. So let it go at that. Went out to bed that night.

I could hardly sleep. Wrestled with it all night. And next morning, my closest adult friend was my senior english teacher wonderful excuse me how old were you i would have been 17. okay turned 18 at the end of my senior year okay so she says i mean i go to talk to her about everything she's wonderfully and i told her the next day what had happened so what do you think? And she said, she was a wonderful Pentecostal Christian, very devout, very solid, and said, you just had a run-in with the devil. And I literally said, don't be so medieval.

That's ridiculous. And she said, you have had a run-in with the devil. I know you've been fooling around with that occult stuff. Leave it alone. And that began to shake me because I respected her so much. She was my dearest adult friend. So I go through the day, can hardly think about my studies, get home, and I know that my friend who was visiting from Chicago

and his friend from Chicago were still over at somebody's house. So I called him, and I said, let me talk to your buddy okay so he gets up there Steven said Steve he said your girlfriend had an experience like this right like I had last night he said yeah yeah and I said well she religious does she go to church or anything yeah he said yeah she goes to church and I said well what church he said the Church of Satan she's a witch okay so my teachers is the devil his 20th century which is still the 20th century at this point I said the world's crazy okay thanks Steve I love that he

says it so nonchalantly I know some people would say Satan doesn't what's your difference but in his book anyway she or her book she was both the Satanist and a wicked you know which so that begins to get me a lot to think about and that evening I could do is think about that of course and I finally thought okay yeah where have I heard about this kind of stuff before and I remember when I was a kid and reading the Gospels memorized scripture Jesus would cast out unclean spirits demons and it seemed like this kind of stuff and in fact I remember a story where Jesus had an

encounter with a boy that was possessed, and his father said that the demon often throws him into the water or into the fire. And I thought, oh my goodness. Up until this point, had you tried to kind of explain those stories as sort of fits of epilepsy and other mental illnesses, or were you not even really thinking of the Gospels during that time?

When I thought of them, I just thought either that or they're not historical accounts in the first place, which is what most people today would typically say if they don't think it's a real thing. So you just went back to a Bible, started flipping through and finding those passages? Yeah, and finding that. And so I began searching. I had several close adult friends who had

a little prayer meeting in their home. They invited me to go and I said, okay, I'll go. I don't think I can pray, but I'll go. I thought a lot about what had happened that day at the school. Other things began to fall together. I try other little, what I would call experiments in prayer, and God would respond. He would respond. Yeah, okay. Like the day with the mob. And began reading the Scripture again.

And in a certain way, just kind of fell in love with Jesus and the Scripture. Your parents, even though you said you never said to them you were an atheist, they must have known that there was something going on and that there was now a change occurring in you maybe so i don't really i don't know i don't know i'm gonna ask love my parents and dear folks um they had a family business that just kept them so busy sure that i i would get to see them some of the evenings and but i was keeping it to myself and did you have friends who were atheists or at least people who sort of thought religion was a whole medieval thing at the time i can remember i do remember a year after my conversion i met a guy who had kind of taken that position but yeah okay so you were falling in love with jesus you're going

to these prayer meetings what are the prayer meetings look like well i would just kind of sit in the corner while they would talk about scripture and then they would pray and they pray for each other they pray for me and i didn't say anything, but I was grateful. They loved me and I knew they loved me. And did you share some of your opinions with them about God? No. But at the end of my senior year, so I had just graduated the next week, the Campus Crusade for Christ, you've probably heard of them, had a big, at that time the biggest rally of its kind, a youth rally in Dallas, Texas, where something like 70,000 people

were going to the Cotton Bowl every day for meetings and preaching and stuff. And then the last meeting was 100,000 at a Christian rock concert. And so a friend, another, my other close adult friend who was a solid Christian, asked me if I wanted to go. And I said, that might be fun, but I don't have any money. He said, I'll pay for it. Oh, wow. So he did, and I went. Did you fly or road trip?

No, road trip with a big bus. I mean, because we had a bunch of 30, 40 probably students coming from where we were. And things had been falling into place and at that that rally at some point it's hard to even put my finger exactly on but i heard billy graham preaching it was very amazing um some point during that round what impact did billy graham make on you what was it like to hear him just i know just uh he seemed so sincere and so convinced that's what everyone says about him and the sincere yeah and so convinced. That's what everyone says about him. They're sincere. Yeah, and so convinced.

I mean, I've actually studied in grad school revivalism as a tradition, and a lot of past revivalists, and a lot of them were just showmen. But he was not. He's really different from a lot of the others. Very sincere, very dedicated. Were you resisting this? Like for me, when I went to Rome when I was 17 and encountered Christ and converted there was a part of me that thought I want to get sucked into this like I know what you're gonna do you're gonna play guitars we're all gonna sing and we're all gonna feel emotional

and you're gonna call that God and so I was very kind of reluctant was that your experience I think by that point I was already very close to conversion so So I wasn't so much saying, it was kind of like, I don't care how they approach me. If God's real, I've got to give myself to him. Nothing else can be more important. And so I think that was kind of, so when I say conversion, it was the culmination of the process that had been going on for months.

Came back home. Was there a particular moment during that rally where you gave your life to Christ or was it just a gradual? It was a gradual. So that by the time we're getting on the bus going home and I realized, you know, I believe I'm a Christian. Yeah. Yeah. And so actually, my first name is Thomas. Paul's my middle name. And I grew up as Tom or Tommy and got back home and began thinking, you know, I feel like a really different person. Wow. Just so totally different.

And I knew enough to know that Thomas was the doubter and Paul was the man of faith. And of course, at that point, not being Catholic, I didn't know about Thomas Aquinas and all the other wonderful Thomases. And even the one in the scripture, of course, he gave his life for his Lord. But that's kind of all I knew and I thought well I also know in scripture that you get people get new names when they've got new lives so Jacob becomes Israel I mean yeah Jacob becomes Israel Abram becomes Abraham Sarah becomes Sarah Simon at some point yes Simon becomes Peter at some point Paul starts going about Paul instead of Saul. Who knows how that happened. So I just announced to my parents I'm going to start going by Paul.

What did they say? I was like, well, why? Well, I just, it's important to me. Again, I couldn't tell them too much because at that point, it would have just broken their heart to know what I've been through the last few years. So you started introducing yourself to new people as Paul? Well, I was getting ready to go off to college. And to a college where I knew nobody. So college was 18 hours away. It's not like you had an online presence. Yeah, right.

The internet didn't exist. So, in fact, my girlfriend was accepted. I went to Yale and my girlfriend was accepted there, but wasn't able to go in the end. So, I didn't know anybody when I went. I was 18 miles away and, I mean, 18 hours away drive. And so, that made it really easy just to introduce myself as Paul. I've been Paul ever since. Why did you go to Yale and what did you go for? That's interesting, that's interesting. This is gonna be so funny you know you always, a Yaley always has to make comments about Harvard. When I was in junior high I had a, they had a what do you call it like a college night at the local civic auditorium where all these colleges would come and set up booths and students would come and take literature and get to know the students who were there. So I had known for a while I wanted to at least try for Ivy League.

So I went to the Harvard booth. I have to say it was awful. They were the most stuck up guys I'd ever seen. I'm not saying everybody at Harvard is like that. But they just were so full of themselves guys I'd ever seen. I'm not saying everybody at Harvard's like that. Yeah, but these guys were. But they just were so full of themselves. I was really just like this. I went to Yale and it was totally different.

The Yale guys were just funny and engaging. They wanted to know about me. So I got it in my mind. That's where I wanted to go. And so my senior year, I even just decided I'm not going to apply anywhere else until my counselor finally said, you've got to apply at least one other place or I'm not

gonna help you yeah because you thought it could be disappointed so I thought alright where can I apply that my parents will never let me go so I applied to Stanford because it was California so they will never that's the right of the height of the kind of hippie movement they will never, because this is right at the height of the kind of hippie movement, they will never let me go there. So applied there, but I did get into Yale. So what happened was that I had planned to go into pre-law and then law school, I wanted to get into politics. Had all kinds of ambition.

But when this happened, it just knocked all that ambition out of me. I woke up one day and said, I don't want to do politics. I don't want to do pretty well. I don't want to give a rip about any of that anymore. What do I do? So I ended up majoring in religious studies. You know, I finally thought, okay, if I've got four years.

What was religious studies like in Yale back in when, the 60s? Well, yeah, well, this is early 70s now. So, you know, they had gone from calling it theology to religious studies as it became secularized. It's very interesting. I had a couple of professors who were Christians and just delightful people. Hans Frey was kind of New Testament and modern Christian thought. He had actually been a German Jew and survived the Holocaust.

Wow. He was a teenager or something. And afterward became Christian, became a Catholic Christian. Wow. So incredible man, wonderful teacher, brilliant scholar. My Hebrew professor was a very devout Episcopalian. Delightful man. His family, even his nephew became a good friend of mine.

He was also a student. So I had a few folks like that. I had some others. All I can say is that I was wondering, why are you giving your life to study religion if you don't believe religion? Actually, I won't say his name, but I actually had a tutorial with one of them one time.

Brilliant man, he's written a lot of books. He ended up at Harvard, so I thought, okay, that's good. But I'm having this one-on-one with him tutorial and I say, can I ask you a question? He said, sure. So some of the comments you made made me think that you're probably not a Christian, right? He said, no, I'm not.

And I said, so why would you give your life to studying and teaching religion, researching and studying and writing if you don't believe? And he looked at me with a straight face. And he said, Paul, I went to seminary. And when most young men go to seminary, they go off and see the light. I went off to seminary, and I saw the darkness. And I've been teaching it ever since.

And I wanted to go you know it's scary to say that but at least he was honest yeah and there were others some it was an interesting phenomena that I saw I called it the Bible Belt phenomenon that at a place like Yale where you wouldn't expect there to be that many southerners teaching you it's an old New England institution world class institution and they did have plenty of professors for all over the world and all over the states. But in the religious studies department, there was this plethora of southerners teaching. Who had lost their faith?

Most of whom had been raised in fundamentalist situations and lost their faith. When I watch these atheists online, many of them come from fundamentalist backgrounds. And you can tell that by their characterization of Christianity. You think, I don't know any serious Christian who believes the things you say Christians believe. And then you realize, okay, they were brought up in this fundamentalist sort of... And that was true probably out of a dozen professors I'd see. Probably nine. Did you have a southern accent back then? You don't really have one now.

I can turn it back on any time, brother. That's beautiful. It was great. I never lived anywhere else. Of course I did, and people would make fun of it. That was fine. They also looked at southerners as dumb. If you hear a southern accent, the typical New England reaction was that they're idiots.

They've been raised on either the Beverly Hillbillies or Andy of Mayberry, the Andy Griffith Show, and that kind of thing. But it's okay. I used it to my advantage because they would think, yeah, he's dumb. He's not going to do 12 classes. Slip on by him.

But it was fun. What was your opinion of the Catholic Church at this point? So you're going to Yale, you are a card-carrying Christian as it were, I suppose you were attending a local church, getting involved in Christian communities? Trying to find one, yeah, that I could. Okay.

What was your opinion of Catholicism? Well, it's interesting. Especially because my specialization was church history, historical theology, I began having a much greater appreciation for the Catholic tradition than I had before. I knew some Catholics that I really respected. So I didn't have the kind of hostility that other folks did, but I had not been exposed to the kind of apologetics that might have convinced me otherwise.

Was Catholicism a big thing when you were growing up in the South? Well, you know, the interesting thing is I knew a lot of people that were anti-Catholic. My family never was. They had some close Catholic friends. And occasionally my dad would make a comment, like, close friend of the family, yeah, you know how Catholics are. They go out and they act like the devil all Saturday night and then they go to confession and they're fine the next morning. And some of his friends probably gave him a good reason to see that. But they were never hostile to the Catholic Church.

But I did know, I still remember, I was probably in the fifth grade when my girlfriend, that's when we actually started going together, in the fifth grade, we were talking, and some girl found out she was Catholic, and she said, my mother says Catholics worship idols. And it just broke my girlfriend's heart. It was terrible. And I remember thinking, gosh, I hadn't heard that before. What are you talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was just kind of, you know, I was convinced. For instance, I didn't think there should be a priesthood and other things. And I still recall getting into some Catholic friends there that I really respect. In fact, they were actually attending the, I went to the Yale Christian Fellowship, which was an intervarsity group. I don't know if you've ever heard of intervarsity ministries, but it's kind of an academic ministry for students. A little bit like Campus Crusade, but a little more academically oriented.

And they would come, and their faith was incredible. Cool. So you were studying, did you do your master's at yale as well or no i did my bachelor's there and then my master's and phd were at emory at emory okay right all right so you studied church history and you said that kind of gave you a greater respect for well you start reading the church fathers and they sound kind of catholic yeah yeah so anyway yeah uh so i had respect i still remember sitting at a table. It was me and my Catholic friend and my Jewish friend who was his roommate.

And we're somehow getting to religion. It says something like, and something about priest or something. And I mean, I didn't make a negative comment, but just kind of, oh, like that. And he said, well, what do you think about priests? And I said, well, I don't think they're biblical. And then the Jewish guy says, oh, this is interesting. These Christians disagree on something of the things I'm basically saying. But there was no hostility or anything like that. But I did start seeing things that

were planting seeds. How did you become Catholic, cross the Tiber as it were? Oh, wow. That was some time later. So I graduated from Yale in 77. By the way, I dropped out of Yale to go be a... Well, at the time, I didn't know that's what I was going to, but to go to Europe to the mission field. I ended up being the lead singer in a Christian rock band. Tell us about that. What was the name of the rock band?

Do you really want... We got time? We've got so much time. That's the beauty of these. All we have is time. I can't wait to tell you. I'd love to tell this story. Okay.

So end of my first semester at Yale. And I'm loving it, and things are going great. But one night, I was at the Yale Christian Fellowship meeting, and they have a guest speaker and singer. He's composed his own music. He's playing guitar. And I'm sitting there listening, just kind of innocently. Back in those days, at least at Yale,

you didn't finish the semester before you went home for Christmas break. It was a horrible setup. You went home for Christmas break, and when you got back immediately, you had exams at the end of the semester. So it ruined your Christmas break, studying and writing papers. But anyhow, so it's right before that. And there's this little line where he's singing the song he'd written, and he said, Is there anything worth having that isn't worth giving up? To the Lord. And of course, now, right now, it doesn't

resonate so much. But in that moment, it was like God was shouting at me. What is it that you have that you wouldn't give up? And I realized I've wanted to come to Yale since I was in junior high. This is really important to me. And I heard I've wanted to come to Yale since I was in junior high. This is really important to me. And I heard him say, I want you to drop out of Yale and go where I sent you. So I just sat back and said, oh, no, I can't. So I had the Christmas break to think about it, begin to pray about it. And I'm asking people in general ways, well, you know,

because I'm a brand-new Christian, just only a few months, and how do you know God's will? If you think he's speaking to you, what are some indicators? And they told me lots of different things. But one thing that really stuck with me, somebody said, in my experience, if it's some kind of drastic major thing,

and I hadn't told them what, you should go to each of your closest Christian friends who know you the best and that you trust, know the Lord really well, and run it by and see what they say. That's at least one thing you can do. So I thought, okay. Objective counsel from people who care about you. Yeah, right, and who themselves know the Lord really well.

So I said, okay, I've got this close adult friend, the English teacher. She's the closest female adult friend. I've got this closest male adult friend, the English teacher. She's the closest female adult friend. I've got this closest male adult friend, the one who paid for me to go to Dallas. And then at college, I've got this one girl that's close. We weren't a boyfriend or girlfriend. She was dating somebody else, but close friends. And the guy who's the closest friend. So I come back.

Oh, and I remember one of my other close friends just talked about how he kind of lost his faith. And he said, but you know, I don't know how we were talking about it. I wasn't talking about dropping off. He said, I don't know how much Yale means to you, but you know, if you ever decide to drop out of Yale, I think that would be pretty good evidence for me that God must be real for you to do that. Now, it didn't make any sense logically, but he just said that. Yeah, while you were thinking all this stuff. So I go back. I the getting prepared for exams um and i called the girl and say we've got to talk and she says yes we do okay so go out for a call we said and say i've got

something to say she says so do i well you were first no you go first okay you start and she says paul i've been praying for you over the Christmas break and the Lord told me you're going to drop out of school why why and so I told her she says why to you no no then I oh yeah yeah she says why why are you going to drop out without you even admitting I hadn't said anything about it she goes first and says, why are you going to do that? I said, oh my gosh, well, here's why. So I tell her and she was very supportive. Then I go get with the closest male friend who's a classmate. Okay. I'm sorry. I have to stop here. There's a, this woman says the Lord told her you're dropping out. And she says, why? She's convinced that,

so she doesn't say I get the sense, but maybe I'm wrong. No, she says, you're going to drop out, so tell me why. I love evangelicals. Can I just say that? So I go to the guy. His name's Mark. We're talking. And then at one point he just looks at me.

I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to say this. And he says, Paul, are you thinking about leaving school? So who's Martin? Mark is his name. He's mark is his name he's my closest friend here okay yeah he's my closest female up here yeah yeah yeah so mark says and he says the same you also an evangelical christian says are you leaving school and i said why would you say that because i wanted you know he says i was praying for you over the Christmas break, and I was telling the Lord how much I appreciate our friendship and how grateful I am, and the Lord said,

what if I moved him away from you? Paul, are you leaving school? And you're like, apparently. But that wasn't the time. It was just the beginning. So I go, I call up the female friend and the adult, and I just say, hello, this is Paula. She says, don't say anything on the phone.

Don't say anything. I said, okay. And she said, the Lord told me you're dropping out of college. I don't know why, but he told me you're going to. So how can I support you? And she has no other reason to think this except that. I came home and was telling everybody at home how much I loved it and how much good stuff was going on. No reason.

So that's three of them, you know. That'll do. So I do that. Well, there's more. I do that. So I'm finally at a place where I have to make the decision. I'm taking exams, and I'm going to have to go and tell the dean I'm dropping out. So I say, okay, Lord, if I'm really going to do this, then my parents are going to hate it.

They're not going to want to even pay for me to come home. Got all this I'm facing back home. They're going to think I'm crazy. Because at that point, even though they were Christians, they weren't at the place where they would think that God would talk to anybody, that kind of thing, at least not my dad. So I said, I'm going to need some finances to get home. And not only that, I've got this Greek exam tomorrow, Lord,

that I haven't been studying for because I've been spending all my time praying and thinking about this. I don't know if I can pass that thing. So put it to your hands. So the next day, have the Greek exam. And it was classical Greek rather than Koine, biblical Greek, New Testament. And we had not talked about Scripture all semester or any of that. It was just classical Greek.

So I go into the exam, and I'm really struggling to get through it. And I made the worst grade on that course of any there. But anyway, I get to the last part, which is a translation section. I thought, oh, gosh, I'm just not going to be able to do this. I opened it up, and in the Greek it says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And I thought, it's the first chapter of John,

which, of course, I had memorized and was able to do it. And I passed it. And I remember the next day, whatever, the professor called me in. He said, okay, you're kind of struggling through here, but you did really well here, and that's what caused you to pass. It reads a lot like the King James Version. And then he said, I'm going to ask you a question. It doesn't matter with regard to your grade.

I just want to know, did you know that passage by heart? I said, yes, I did. He said, it's okay. It doesn't affect your grade. I just wanted to know. Yeah. So maybe the next year you weren't gonna do that. So that happens on the way home from that exam.

I'm gonna have to go tell the dean, but I stopped by my PO box on campus, opened up the PO box and there's an envelope from the fourth person, the adult male Christian friend, and I opened it and there's a check for a hundred dollars and he says the lord told me you're going to need this i don't know why but let me know why and went and told the dean got all you know all that done and then i set out to and back in those days of course this is the this is 1972, well, it would have been January of 73 by then. So things were a lot cheaper,

but I was able to get a youth fair airplane ticket home. I had to put all my stuff in. I sent some of it by UPS, some of it by Greyhound in a trunk, some of it by the post office. And back then, 100 bucks could get you to Georgia, apparently. Well, not only that, when I added up the cost of the ticket and the limo,

I had to get a limo from New Haven to New York to the airport. The limo, the plane, and it was a youth fair. Back then, you had a special fair for young people. And all the three different ways of packaging stuff and sending it home. It was $100.14. That's amazing. So I said, okay, Lord, I can handle the 14 cents. And then I called my friend to tell him why I needed it. And of course, he was a little less likely to be supportive just because he was

thinking about my parents and that kind of thing. Yeah. But before we get to how your parents reacted and what happened next, you've said on several different occasions that you've heard voices. You talked about it being in the car. You've talked about it as you were praying and your friends heard these voices. I've never heard an audible voice. Is this what you're referring to? Is it an audible voice? Not audible through my ears.

So it's an interior locution, I guess, would be the Catholic term for it. Because I've had moments where I've felt a strong sense of something in which I might say I felt or I believe the Lord was saying to me. But it sounds like, at least in this first experience when you were in the car, that it was more than that, though. Yeah, it was very specific. It was very specific, yeah. Okay. You want an example? Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. After I'm in Europe, at the end of my time there, my girlfriend who was Catholic had actually become agnostic for a while. She, back in those days, we'd have email, phone, making phone conversations was really expensive across the ocean if you didn't have much money, and I had none as a missionary. And one day I get a letter from her,

so that's how we communicated, saying, Paul, I'm gonna be in Europe for like six weeks he's at University of Georgia we've got something going on a classical program she's a classics major and this and this weekend I will be in Rome can you meet me there okay I'll make sure and I had already planned by then a six-week backpacking tour around the Mediterranean where I was just backpacking tour around the Mediterranean where it's just backpacking, which, by the way, the Lord provided for while I was in this mission organization.

He tells me, or at least, you know, yeah, I heard him say, you know, I want you to do this, and you're going to go to the Holy Land, all this stuff. So, Lord, how am I going to pay for it? I'll take care of it. The next day, close friend in the mission organization says, Paul, I had a dream last night.

I saw you with a backpack getting off a bus somewhere in the Middle East. And I don't know where it is, but my husband and I were wanting to tithe some income we got. And the Lord said, give it to you. So here's the check. It's for that trip, whatever it is. Where are you going? So, I mean, it's amazing. Oh, my gosh, that's beautiful.

So anyway. Yeah, this audible voice you heard. Did she have it? Oh, she had going? So, I mean, it's amazing. Oh, my gosh, that's beautiful. So anyway. Yeah, this audible voice you heard, did you say? Did she have it? Oh, she had it. Yeah, on that. But then I knew I was supposed to be on that trip. So I arranged that I could be in Rome that weekend, but then I wrote her and said, okay, I'm leaving pretty soon.

You've got to let me know where you're going to be and how to get a hold of you. Sent the letter off. I don't know if it got lost in the mail or, you know, delayed. But the time came where I had to leave and start backpacking because I had, you know, the six weeks, that was the end of the six weeks for me. And I hadn't heard from her. Her number was different.

I didn't know how to contact her. So it was just killing me. I was enjoying myself as I'm backpacking through Greece and Holy Land and, you know, other places. But I'm thinking, okay, I finally get to that weekend in Rome. And I'm in a little pensione. And I get up in the morning to pray. And I'm praying. Oh, I forgot one little detail. When my girlfriend wrote the letter telling me that she was no longer agnostic, she'd come back to faith. She said, I've come to see

what the scripture says, taste and see that the Lord is good from the psalmist. So that was in my mind. So this morning in Rome, I get up. Millions and millions of people. I'd never been there. I didn't have a map. I didn't have anything. Just a little pension that I found near where I came in.

And I get this little psalm number in my mind. I can't even remember what it is now. So I looked it up, and it said, taste and see that the Lord is good. And I had been asking the Lord, please find some way for me to meet up with her. I haven't seen her in all this time. And now she's Christian again. And we have so much to talk about. And so I said, Lord, does this mean that I'm going to see her? And this doesn't happen to me all the time, but he said very clearly, yes. Do you want it to be an adventure?

And I said, No, not particularly. I said, well, you know me, I love adventures. So, yeah. He said, get up and start walking. So, this is crazy. So, got on my backpack, I remember going out of the pension,

nice little Italian lady asked me, so where are you going? And you know, goodbye, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to see my girlfriend. Oh, where are you going to meet her? And I said, I don't know of the pension, nice little Italian lady asked me, so where are you going? Goodbye, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to see my girlfriend. Oh, where are you gonna meet her? And I said, I don't know where she is, but I'm gonna find her. She just kind of shakes her head like a crazy American.

I get out and I start walking. If I have an impression to turn left, I turn left. I mean, this is downtown. Impression to turn right, I turn right, go straight. I try getting more and more lost all the time. I don't have a map, I have no idea go straight. I try getting more and more lost all the time. I don't have a map. I have no idea where I am. Feeling really silly at that point.

You know, if God didn't speak to me, I'm just really going to get myself really lost here. And you didn't have GPS or anything like that. Google Maps, yeah. But after a while, I just kind of, I don't know, I just had this kind of, my heart lightened up and said, just keep going. What do you have to lose? Just do what you hear. So I'm making all these turns going, and all of a sudden I come out to an intersection,

and the street in front of me had banks lined on either side. So it was like the Wall Street of Rome, I guess. So I said, okay, Lord, if you're really leading me, I've got a traveler's check, which is, you know, you didn't have credit cards for somebody my age back then. I've got a traveler's check here I need to cash. Is there a particular bank you'd like me to go to? And I hear very clearly Banco di Napoli, Bank of Naples. So I look around. There's the Banco di Napoli. So I go into the Banco di Napoli, big place with like 10 teller lines or something.

Okay, Lord, if you're really leading me, is there a particular line you want me to get into? And I heard a third from the end. So I go over and get in the line. I pull out my traveler's checks and I start to fill it out and I look up. And not three people ahead of me, not two people ahead of me, but the person immediately in front of me was my girlfriend. No way, Paul. Yes. I was just. So without thinking, I put my arms around her,

and she thought it was some fresh Italian, and she's. Sprays you with mace. Just turned around to slap me. And then she really screamed because it was like seeing a ghost. She had no idea I would be there. We don't get how crazy that is in today's day and age. I used to love backpacking too. I mean, believe it or not, I remember a time before the Internet

and I went to Rome really as the Internet was a new thing. You didn't have smartphones. Email was really difficult to find. It was a real adventure. If you got lost, you were kind of screwed. Yeah. All right, that's amazing. So we spent the rest of the day together that's beautiful it was interesting we we realized by the end of the day

that that god did not intend us for each other but that was okay yeah we're still friends and um but anyway that was just an example of that speaking and how he and how is that when i talk to an atheist and they say all right give me an example of something i say okay all right tell me if this you know tell me if this tell me if you really think this can be a coincidence. And I'll tell them that story. And then they either have to think I'm lying or exaggerating or they have to think. Or they have to dig their heels in and be like, well, you know, it is implausible, but it is a coincidence. It has to be.

Right. When did you become a Catholic? How old were you? Oh, let's see. That was 25, almost 26 years ago. So around 40. Okay. How did that happen?

And was it an earthquake kind of moment? Was it dramatic, traumatic? I had the experience in Europe. As I told you, I dropped out, was a lead singer in a Christian rock band for almost two years. What was the name of the band? Cornerstone. that is a great name so it's better than little jesus the cornerstone i was in a couple of bands a little choppy stitchwork ninjas that was my favorite stitchwork ninjas that was the best band yeah that's great all right so came back and then went to yale finished oh so you did your undergrad. You finished your undergrad there?

Yeah, yeah. So you dropped out, came back, okay, undergrad. Yeah, and finished. Parents must have been happy about that. Oh, they were very happy about that, yeah. That's great. If you could be done backpacking, please. Was it a lot of money, like it is today, to go to university and to Yale of all places?

You know, the thing is, the great thing about Yale, at least then, I guess it is still now, is that they didn't give any merit scholarships because kind of everybody there, you know, on the same playing field. So they did it purely need-based. And my family didn't have a lot of money. Oh, I see. When you say same, you mean academically speaking they're at the same level. Well, that and extracurricular and all kinds of stuff. I mean, so it's not like you could ... Oh, so your parents were thrilled. You go back to Yale. And they paid less for that than they would have for me to go to the local college in Savannah.

That's amazing. Just because Yale had so much money. All right. So you graduate. Yep. You go to Emory. Well, not yet. Come home, meet the woman who's now my wife.

Yeah. In Savannah. Terrific. And after eight years, decide to go back to grad school. Had wanted to all along, but once you get married, you start having a family. You know, how hard it can be to go to grad school. Indeed. I actually didn't start my undergrad until I was married with kids.

Not even harder, yeah. You know, in Australia, it's very different. You know, like, I remember being really embarrassed to tell my father-in-law, like, I've never been to university. But in Australia, it's not like a mark of shame. It's like, I was working at a lab technician technician making pretty good money and trained to be a lab tech you know it's uh whereas here it's a it's kind of a big deal you know yeah but all right so yeah so went back uh it's so funny one another one of those things where uh I'd applied to Yale again, to Duke, to Harvard, and to Emory. And Yale was probably my first choice.

And I finally said, okay, Lord, I need your help. You need to arrange things so I know which place to go to. So Yale finally writes back and says, we want you to come, but we don't think that you'd have. And at this point, I was going to be doing a master's and PhD combined. Didn't really have the time or the money to do several degrees. So they went back and said, well, we want you to come, but we think you ought to have at least one of your degrees from some other institution. Go get a master's somewhere else and come back for a PhD.

I can't do that. Harvard said, yes, but we can't really give you any money. It seems, that's Harvard. What do you mean you don't have any money to give? You're Harvard. Exactly. Duke said, yes, we've got money for you, but it wasn't as much as they'd let me to believe it would be.

And I was asking, okay, Lord, just show me some way, show me through financial provision how you're supposed to. And then Emory offers me this huge fellowship, the Woodruff Fellowship, worth about $60,000, which at that time went a long way. It paid for all the tuition and fees and gave me a $15,000 stipend a year, tax-free and all that. So, okay, that's where I'm supposed to go. So we moved there from Savannah.

Did a combined master's and PhD there. What did you do your PhD in? Historical theology slash church history. What was your dissertation? What was the topic? I was specializing. By that time, I was Catholic when I actually wrote my dissertation because there was a big gap between the classwork and then my fellowship ran out.

I had to support a family. Had a new kid all the way. God bless your wife. So I had to do, yeah, all that. And then finally, they told me, well, we've just changed the rules and you only have a certain amount of time to finish it or it's too bad. So I had to do, yeah, all that. And then finally they told me, well, we've just changed the rules and you only have a certain amount of time to finish it or it's too bad. So I had to go back. But the Lord, I can tell you, he's just provided.

So I went back and my specialization within historical theology, church history was American religion. Okay. And primarily because Dr. Brooks Holifield was the guy in that field at Emory, and he was remarkable. He was just the top guy in the country in my book and loved him dearly.

So anyway, yeah, that's what I did. I did a dissertation on the Catholic community, but the lay part of the community in Savannah from 1820 to 1870, a very critical time in Southern history and Catholic history. I was going to ask you about, oh, what's her name, the author from Savannah? Flannery O'Connor. Yeah, I was going to ask you about her.

Were you introduced to her works prior to becoming Catholic? I think I was. And when was she writing? I don't even remember. Well, she died in the early 60s, as I recall. Mid-60s, maybe. So her writing was out. So by the 40s, she was already writing. But she died very young. I read some of her works to my children.

Well, she's remarkable. My kids are like, read that one where the old woman gets shot in the chest. I'm not a good parent. I'm not a good parent. She's Southern Gothic, as they say. Oh, she's beautiful. Well, I knew some of her family members from Savannah. Turns out, I found out my mom went to college with her.

That's amazing. I had my mom's old college yearbook, one of them. And she's in there. And they're both in there. Did she know her? Well, by the time I found that out, my mom had Alzheimer's and couldn't remember anything. You know the story of her being accused of being a hillbilly nihilist, and she said, no, I'm a hillbilly Thomist.

Yes, right. I think there's a book about her by that name, actually. And a band now, a group of Dominicans. That's right, Dominicans. That's great. So, yes, she was amazing. In my dissertation, the people I was studying, it was the lay Catholic leadership in Savannah from 1820 to 1870.

So that would have included her grandfather and parents and aunts and uncles, but there were still people who were my friends that I found out were actually related to her. They were cousins. And then of course we have what I call the alternative tradition about Flannery. I love her dearly.

But she can be a little eccentric. And apparently her mother could be a little eccentric. Well even the you know the fact that she taught a bunch of chicken or chicken she taught to no she had peacocks later but when she's still living in savannah a town home that had stairs she she taught a chicken to walk backwards down the stairs or go upwards down the stairs or backwards you know but weird but cool but anyway so apparently uh a little lady that i knew that would have had anyway oh yeah really and she um apparently her mother um wanted to interview children before she would let them be playmates with flannery and that really upset a lady i

knew who had been young and had played with her and And so when she found out I was going to, I established a Catholic reading room in Savannah. I was at the cathedral, which would have been her home parish, and her childhood home was right across the square. So I was going to do a reading room and call it the Flannery O'Connor Reading Room. And my little old lady friend came to me, you can't do that. I said, why not? She said, she's just a kook.

She's just a kook. have you ever read anything she wrote of course she didn't understand yeah what they were written yeah um but it was so funny that there are at least a few people that just thought she's a kook and that's all she is a kook yeah but uh she's oh yeah what amazing stuff and um and her family the the people a couple of generations back were really central to the life, Catholic life in Savannah. Now I've been trying my hand at fiction lately. I'm terrible, but I want to keep trying. I've just fallen in love with Dostoevsky.

Read The Brothers in August. I'm reading Crime and Punishment again to my wife. I'm doing this Exodus 90 program right now where you have to have cold showers and no television and things I'm like come on honey let's read more but I just have such respect for fiction and Flannery is incredible

and it's not until I began trying my hand at it that I began to respect it but you've written fiction just one what was that book called? it's called what do you know I've got a copy right here. The Dumbest Name Ever. I'm sorry, my publisher isn't going to like that. Show it to the camera. Which one are we doing, Pritchard? Middle?

Two. Yeah, show it to the camera. My Visit to Hell, which was not my original name. Was this your Visit to Hell? Well, what I did is I borrowed the basic storyline from Dante's Inferno, which of course is quite Thomist. Yeah, it's quite Thomist. It is indeed. What is it? Thomist in verse. Yes, that's right.

In verse. So part of the basic storyline put it in, at the time, it was the late 20th century, and then I've updated it since the turn of the century, so I can say now 21st century, and had him start out in downtown Atlanta, which some people think is right next door to hell. I think that's Houston. He gets lost, the new character. He gets lost and ends up in hell. So I had to kind of adapt everything.

Of course, I had my own set of characters, but they kind of were like the other characters. All the imagery had to change. So, for instance, in Dante. Yeah, I've read the Inferno. Yeah, I've read the Inferno. Okay, you've read the Inferno. I've read all of it, actually. Okay, all right, good. I remember the Inferno most because it was the most fun to read.

Of course, and it's the one that everybody loves to read. In the Inferno, he has the scary place, the place that he tells himself is like the wilderness, right? He has to go through the wilderness. Yes. Because in his day, the wilderness was the scary place. I mean, there's an old tradition going back to Bible times that the demons lived out in the wilderness. Now it's the city.

Exactly, I mean, so the wilderness was the place of the demons, of witches, of robbers, it's a scary place, and beasts and animals that might devour you, and the city was the place of refuge in his time. But I thought, okay, when I started this project, if I use that same imagery it's not gonna work because today wilderness is the place of vacation and that's the rest that's the rest right and the city is the place that feels dark and scary it's crime

ridden it's polluted it's crumbling so that's what I'll do. Instead of having hell like a big wilderness, hell is going to be a huge, crumbling, crime-ridden city with levels that go down. Amazing. This is really great. I always love now, as I say, as I'm getting more and more into fiction, I love picking up a book and just opening up to the first page. All right, so I've got to read this because this is really cool. It was June and it was Georgia. The sweltering dog days had come early, all at once in a pack, sweating and snarling and showing their teeth. Hours had passed since the sun had finally given up the ghost bleeding down around the

dark roof lines of old grimy tenements and new mirrored towers. That's beautiful. I love it. How many books have you written? Number 50 just came out. This is number 50. This one here. And so when did you write fiction for the first time?

This would have been back in 90. As far as in your lineup of books, where was the? Oh, I see. Gosh, I'd have to sit down and count how many before and how many after. I don't know. Lost track. But it was in the 90s, and then I did an update.

Because I had to change things. So, for instance, in the... Well, I don't want to give away too much, but in one of the scenes, you've got the souls just sitting in front of TVs with a test pattern on. And they're not doing anything. just sitting in front of a TVs with a test pattern on and there they're not you know they're not doing anything, they're just all absorbed in it. And by the time I

the book, the second I did the update nobody, we didn't have test patterns anymore so I had to change that uh... I had a few characters from Hollywood and that kind of thing who would show up in here not because I think they're damned but it's just I did the same thing Dante did where he would take famous characters and put them in there. And I realized a lot of those folks,

or even TV programs I mentioned, sighted weren't, nobody knew them anymore, at least the next generation. So I had to update references like that too. Did you have a guide like Dante had the guide? I did. Who was the poet? Who was his guide? I forget now, but anyway. Virgil. Virgil, yeah.

Did you have? I did. So again, yeah. And then I did it. So again, I had to adjust this to Savannah. The main character was a lot like me. His name was Thomas, which is actually my first name. Travis, which is my father's name. And Thomas Travis, Thomas is the doubter. Travis means from the crossroads or at the crossroads. So he was the doubter at the crossroads.

And that tells you everything you need to know to start the book was your guard was his man so anyway he ends up meeting an African woman who had been enslaved in Africa and brought to the coast of Georgia the early probably late 17 hundreds early 1800s never said exactly the date and she was kind of a noble pagan see no Virgil what characterizes him and Dante is he's the noble pagan. He's pagan, but he has enough light that, you know. So that's how it is for her. She's a noble pagan, convinced, though, that she's going to be damned. But she ends up being his guide.

She's not real happy in the beginning that she's got a white man coming to her. And also, she always wants a woman, and she always gets a man assigned to her but um but anyway copopia and i wish i could say this it's really interesting this relationship that develops between them not romantic of course she's much older um toward the end you find out something about that connection I can't wait to read it. And how life imitates art. I found out a few months ago through a DNA test that if Thomas is my character, that there's something very similar to that going on in real life. Oh, wow. So it's a lot of fun.

It's not great literature, but I've had a lot of people, especially counties, come to me and say, okay, I read the book and it sent me to the confessional right away. And I said, perfect. That's what I wanted. Give us some advice for authors. In fiction? I mean, I don't know fiction to say.

Well, is the advice you would give to someone writing fiction different, a lot different to what you would, I mean, I know it's a much different art, but to someone writing nonfiction. You know, the biggest advice I would say is just read good fiction. And tell me, what are some of the best books you've read? Some of the best fiction books? So for me, I'm just obsessed now with Dostoevsky. I mean, I read The Brothers K, I read Crime and Punishment, I read a bit of Notes from Underground. And now when I try and read other authors,

they feel flat and two-dimensional. Yeah, because Dostoevsky is so great at explaining the psychology within the protagonist and what's happening and what he's feeling and that slight he felt and it's oh powerful yeah but I haven't read a great deal as far as fiction it's you know it depends on part two on what you want to read you know what you what you want to write what kind of fiction was genre yeah so in addition to classics like that I would say things like Dean Kuntz, who a lot of people don't realize is Catholic. He's a fantasy

writer. Of course, Tolkien. I've read Tolkien. Well, of course, yeah. Of course, you didn't even mention him. But as far as writing in general, I've heard somebody say, get up half hour early and write 500 words a day. Just try and tackle it bit by bit. Is that something you'd recommend or is that not how you write? It's just not how it works for me. I have a friend, Bergezi, who's written like that for years. He's written a bunch of books and gets up really early. I mean, 3.30 or 4 or something. And I guess he still does and writes and writes every day. That's not how it works for me. Most of my books I've had to do, like just take my day off

or most of my weekend and write. Or this novel, in fact, I wrote in six weeks because I was able to arrange it so that I could just get away and do nothing. I immersed myself in writing it day and night until I finally got to where I was dreaming the next chapter. So that's just for me. But for others, yeah, it's a matter of discipline. Once I get bitten by the bug, I don't have to worry about discipline. I never had writer's block. I never have never had writer's block. It's just, let me at the page, you know, to write. The best advice I was given, because the closest I've come to fiction is a book I wrote called Does God Exist? I've got to give it to you. It's a credit

dialogue on the five ways of, and it's about an atheist and a Christian meeting a coffee shop, and they go at it, you know, and so it's a fictitious sort of dialogue, and it's about an atheist and a Christian who meet in a coffee shop and they go at it, you know. And so it's a fictitious sort of dialogue, but it has, you know, a real apologetic element in it that's, I guess, non-fictional. But I heard somebody say you've got to write drunk and edit sober. In other words, you can't worry too much about how it sounds. You just have to dump it out.

And to me, at least, that really helped. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I write with passion. Sometimes I come back and it's a little too colorful or it's a little too, it's almost purple. I have to come back and rein it in. But I still have something to work with at that point. If I start out just trying to construct it like a Lego set, it doesn't work. Yeah.

How did you become Catholic? I know we keep kind of dancing around this, but I want to know. Well, yeah. Because I know for some converts, it was this traumatic event where my friends abandoned me and I really didn't want to do it. And I came in begrudgingly. For me, I guess the enlightenment that came to me came through my doctoral program, master's in doctoral program. When I started reading seriously and having to look at seriously, write papers about the apostolic fathers and then the fathers after that, it was impossible to deny that these guys were Catholic.

I mean, for starters, Ignatius actually calls them, speaks of the church as Catholic, but they believed that the Eucharist was the body and blood and that those who thought it was a symbol had left because it's not the faith. They had bishops. They had priests. They had all these things that early on in my Christian life,

after my conversion, I'd been kind of led to believe, not in a hostile way, but led to believe that those were all later. Medieval inventions. Yeah, yeah. Or at least late ancient. And I began to say oh my gosh and then and realized if if these guys got it wrong who received it from the apostles themselves what and the next generation then you know jesus was he had the wrong strategy because he had

entrusted the hands of people who couldn't even survive the generation yeah i gotta say like you know you always want to try and be as intellectually honest as possible. It's difficult when you have a platform of sorts to look objectively at your position. Right now, I have a lot at stake in remaining Catholic. I'm just trying to be as intellectually honest as possible. What would it take for me to leave the church, become a Protestant, join Orthodoxy or something? I like to think about that sometimes. But I think one of

the things one of the reasons i could never become a protestant is just like you say how would i how would i try and explain the church and i heard peter crave say this you know he said well you know that the uh the bark of peter as it were was sailing across the oceans of time and as it did it collected all these pagan non biblical barnacles and thank God for Martin Luther's wing Lee and the rest who were able to sort of shave those barnacles off restore the church to biblical purity you know but then the problem is as you say when you start reading these these early church fathers you know the 100s, 300s, and they're talking about prayers to saints.

Prayer for the dead. Prayer for the dead. That doesn't make sense unless something like purgatory exists. It gets awkward quickly, and baptismal regeneration was a big thing for me. I found out that the first Orthodox Christian to reject baptismal regeneration was Ulrich Zwingli. The first Orthodox Christian to reject baptismal regeneration was Ulrich Zwingli. In his work, De Baptismo, he said, I'm paraphrasing but it's almost verbatim, I can only conclude that all of the doctors and fathers since the time of the apostles have been in error. And as arrogant as that sounds, you have to say that.

You have to say it because they all taught it all the fathers universally read john 3 5 as meaning baptism and so it's like okay i guess i guess i just have to somehow accept that until the 16th century then everyone was kind of wrong and now we know it and And I can't buy that. Now that said though, let's talk about the church today because we are in a tumultuous time today. Over the next, I'd say decade or more, this is just, I want to know what you think, but it seems to me that we're going to get grand jury report after grand jury report.

And we're going to get some very disturbing, have already received and will receive very disturbing information that's coming out and i wonder how many catholics are going to survive this and i think that there is going to be and as we're already beginning to see i don't want you to tell me if you think i'm being too dramatic a mass exodus from the church to orthodoxy, to agnosticism, to things like SSPX, who I don't believe are a schismatic group, but we're going to see some schismatic groups. You know, that's what we're going to see. And now would be a good time to write some fiction

on what the church will look like in 20 years in America. You tell me, am I being dramatic? What do you see happening right now? I'm happy to say that in my particular parish, which is a wonderful, strong parish with great leadership, I don't see a lot of that. But I do believe, yeah, it's happening. And, you know, when I used to teach religious studies at Missouri State University some years ago,

I forgot my PhD. It was my first job there. Springfield, Missouri, where we were, didn't have a lot of Catholics. It was kind of part of the Bible Belt. But we got a lot of students from St. Louis who came down. And St. Louis is a very Catholic town. So I would usually do a survey. About a third of my students were St. Louis who came down, and St. Louis is a very Catholic town. So I would usually do a survey, about a third of my students were Catholic. And when I did a course in American religion, the first week I would focus on Native American religion. The second

week, since it was the first religious tradition to come from Europe, I did the Catholic tradition, I would focus on the most basic things, the Trinity, sacraments, the Incarnation. Every doggone semester at the end, I would have a delegation of Catholic students come up saying, Dr. T, that's what they called me, Dr. T, I went to Catholic schools all my life. I've been in church all my life. I've never heard any of this. And part of me would say, were you listening? Because I know how many students, I can say things

and then they go right past them. But on the other hand, it was just too consistent that they just had not been catechized. If you haven't been catechized, there's a good chance you could lose your faith now. Because you've got to understand that. I mean, if you don't understand. Like, unless you really believe it,

why on earth would you want to continue to associate? Yeah. Or if you don't believe how the catholic church sees herself and the claim she makes for herself if you think it's just a you know another good place to be yeah then you say i'll find another place what do you think about this um we we i mean john paul the second generation. We used to look to Rome to clarify the craziness of our parishes. Today, we look to our parishes to clarify the craziness of Rome. What do you think of that? Depending on which parish we're in. Well, that's true. I can't imagine. And for me, because of my training, I'm in a good place.

I am too. Yeah. And I'm in a good place. And you say, well, I know that doesn't agree with what the Father's taught. Here's what St. Thomas would have to say about that So I've got that but most people don't but a state what I just said there's gonna upset some people I'm gonna get some really angry comments in the comment section people who are telling me that I clearly hate Pope Francis that I'm you know, not true at all but Generally speaking. What do you think of that kind of statement? Is there a lot of confusion coming out of Rome?

There's plenty of confusion coming out of Rome. There is. I don't think that's debatable at all. And why do people feel the need to continue denying that, do you think? Once again, it depends on kind of where your faith is. If your faith is such that you think that it rises or falls on that particular man, then it would be a very frightening thing to allow that something could be going on in this particular people's brain that's quite difficult and getting worse. What would your advice be to us Catholics right now?

Oh, man. It's interesting. This little book. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say there is a civil war within the church. Yeah, I think we're very close to civil. I tend to speak, well, there you go. Thank you. Thank you for being more, I was about to say, I tend to speak hyperbolically, but I actually do mean it. There has been a virtual, again, you know more than me, so I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. There has been a virtual uh schism within the

church for decades now and now it's coming to light uh you know when a family of say six kids goes and sits in a parish and people look at them with like that's weird okay we're not believing the same faith when you're in the same church as people who it's not that they know what the church teaches or it's not that they that they know what the church teaches, or it's not that they don't know what the church teaches. It's that they know and reject it. Contraception, homosexual acts, what have you. We're close to schism, you think?

And what does that look like? I think it could be. I mean, this time, in some ways, I'm a church historian. I think we're in a place maybe where we've never quite been before. In the beginning of this going on, I would say to people, you know, we've been in tough times before. Look at St. Catherine's in his time. Right, Aryan controversy. And Aryan controversy before that.

The majority of bishops being on the wrong side. Majority of bishops were heretics. St. Catherine's time, you had the Pope had gone to Avignon, France and was, you had a split. In the College of Cardinals, France, and was, you know, had a split. In the College of Cardinals, we've had citizens, formal citizens before with two popes, two people claiming to be popes. And we've had men, excuse me, in the early medieval centuries, the real dark ages, not the whole medieval time, which wasn't, just those first few centuries, who were just terrible men, you know. But in most of those times, especially with the really bad men, they weren't messing around with doctrines. They weren't bringing confusion in doctrine, they were just behaving immorally. In the way, though, you think Pope Francis is making confusion about doctrine? There's no way around that. Why don't we just stop

doing that? Because I kind of studied ambiguity about the way he speaks. He'll give these words, but then he'll ally himself with these people and these causes. So people may hate me too for saying it, but I tried after he became pope to kind of give him a chance. Absolutely. I don't know how you can get away from that now. What happens as a thought experiment if the Pope is on the wrong side of the schism? What happens then? What does that look like? I'm not saying he will be. It's just a thought experiment.

And if that's too close to home for people, we can say, all right, 100 years from now, this is a theoretical experiment. What happens when the Pope is on the wrong side of this? Isn't it true that every Protestant group saw themselves as holding true to the faith? And so if a section of Catholicism breaks away from the bark of Peter and the Pope's not with them, how are they any different to Protestants? It's tricky. I don't think we know for sure what that would look like, because we haven't actually seen that in the sense that where the people breaking away really did

relate to the tradition. I mean, the Protestant case, you could look at it and say, okay, here, here, here, and here is where it rejects the tradition. Central parts of the tradition, we have to stand with the tradition, and Rome is standing with the tradition. Isn't that what SSPX and other groups have done? Again, I'm not calling them schismatics, but there are groups who have said, look at where the church is. I mean, you go to the majority of parishes I go to with the felt banners and the stupid music and you think, this isn't beautiful, this isn't manly, this isn't challenging me to love Christ and to die for him. I think there's a lot of people who are coming out right now and saying,

I'm really sorry for all the ways I made fun of rad trads. Do you know? It's not that rad trads, if you want to use that kind of, it's a bit derogatory, don't have their issues. But it's, okay, sorry. I'm just thinking out loud. I used to go at the extraordinary mass in Savannah at the Cathedral so deep deep love for the

Latin mass so where but where we are now that you know or where we would be if there were that kind of schism is that it's back then if you stood with tradition you were not in the other camp that's right the people who would go into some kind of separation now the ones at least would see themselves and I would think they are standing with the tradition and so you had people like you know st. Robert Bellarmine in the Catholic Reformation tell us a little bit about him for those who are totally on he was just he was one of the bright stars of the Catholic Reformation. Tell us a little bit about him for those who are totally unaware. He was one of the bright stars of the Catholic Reformation.

A lot of people don't realize that when they say Reformation, they think it's only a Protestant Reformation. But even before the Protestant revolt began, there was a Catholic Reformation going on. Catholic leaders who saw the church needed purification and reform were already working toward that end. And then it went through the time of the Reformation, culmination in many ways, or at least a high point with the Council of Trent. And others, you have people like St. Teresa of Avila. There's just remarkable things that they did.

But St. Robert Bellarmine was in many ways the theologian of that and of Trent and all those things afterward. And instrumental with the Catechism of Trent that was produced after. Brilliant man, very devout man. He speculated and others would speculate what happens if the Pope goes astray in teaching? So, you know, one of the speculations was, when you have to go back and see if he was validly elected in the first place. That's one option. It's an option, yeah.

Another is, and I'm thinking, Bill, I mean, don't hold me to it, because it's been a while since I've read all this, but may have been one of the others, that at the point when he would try to formally define a dogma that's contrary to what the church has always taught that he would thereby be abdicating. He would no longer be pope. But again, if something like that were the case, okay, let's say 100 years from now, take it out of the current situation, all right?

100 years from now, who's going to make that call? You're going to have a conclave of cardinals who come together and say, you know, we look at this and we judge it. A set of a contest. Yeah. And then what you get is, you know, you get, so they elected a pope. The other one says no matter what it may, then you get the same kind of thing you had in the Middle Ages. You've got two claims to the throne. I suppose being a church historian, though,

even though this is sad and tragic and tumultuous, you know enough that the church has been in dire times in the past. So I think for a lot of us, we grew up during the JP2 papacy, and then we loved him. And then we had, you know, we loved him. And then we had Benedict. We love him. So it was almost like, talk about Hegelian sort of flow towards it. It just keeps getting better and better and better. You know, and before that, at least Pope Paul VI, humana vitae.

And it's just, yeah. And then we're like, I want to keep, I want to cheer on the Pope, but he's making it really difficult for me to do that. Yeah. How do we, how do, you know, because people have different opinions. Like, okay, so let's say, how do you criticize the Holy Father? Should you criticize the Holy Father? Is that the, is it legitimate for a lay person to publicly criticize the Holy Father?

Some people say yes, some people say no. What's your take on that? How do we do this? Some people say yes, some people say no. What's your take on that? How do we do this? I definitely say yes. I say that especially to criticize things that have been written. See, I'm not sure if you, I just learned this yesterday. Pope Thomas Aquinas says that we have the right to publicly criticize prelates when they're causing scandal. That's actually one of the objections in the Summa Theologiae is, okay, but you shouldn't publicly criticize them.

And he responds, yes, you should, and here's why. We have an obligation to charity and justice both. We have an obligation to the truth. To be public if it gets to a certain point where people are, numbers of people are being misled or at least confused. The classic definition of justice is given to each his due. What is it that we owe to people? We owe them, among other things, the truth when they have a right to it. To continue to speak only in secret, only in private about

things that people are— As people are fleeing the church. Yeah, and being confused about things, that seems to me that's both a matter of justice to speak about it and a matter of charity. If you love them, you don't want that to happen. Do you know evangelicals who are looking at Catholicism but are being either kind of turned off or have a lot of questions? You do.

Yeah. And what are you going to do? And especially, I mean, I teach RCIA. Do you know how difficult this period is for people teaching RCIA? I know apologists are making a lot more money these days because every time the Pope takes a plane flight, they're going to write articles. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we do have at some point a responsibility, not to nitpick and all this kind of stuff, but especially to say in a written statement or a published spoken statement, if it seems really clear to us to be able to say, well, this is what was said, but this is what the tradition says.

This is what previous popes have said. This is what scripture says. And in the end, I feel like what I have to, I know this could be dangerous. I'm sure the Protestants said the same thing with Luther, but we have to remember what the apostles said, we must obey God rather than men. If we should get to the place where we have prelates insisting that something the church has always taught

is deeply immoral, it says it's fine. Rebuke them. We've got to obey God rather than men. Yeah, we actually have a Pritchett, our video guy, is actually evangelical. And I think it's funny, we as Catholics, I think kind of got cocky during the heyday of our apologetics era with our Carl Keatings and our Patrick Madrids and our Scott Hans. For years it felt like the evangelicals were saying, where's that in the Bible?

And we were like, well, here it is. Look how united we all are. And then all of a sudden we're like, sorry, maybe we're not as united as we wanted to think. God bless them. And I appreciate it. I know evangelicals who are praying for our church and the Catholic church who are praying because they realize that what's happening

in the Catholic church ends up spilling over. I mean, there are people in Protestant churches standing up and blurting all the stuff and making accusations. We're not even Catholic. I know I heard of a man in a Roman collar who was a Protestant pastor who had someone in an airport, not physically accost him, but verbally accost him and all this stuff. And he's like, I'm not even a priest. Well, it doesn't matter. All you religious guy.

So there's this generalizing of the attitude. So they're recognizing this is a tragic, difficult situation for every Christian. How do we keep our eyes on Jesus through this? Because it's really difficult to be patient, because patience often feels like concession of sorts. And I think this is why we're going to see a lot of people abandoning the church because we want to take control.

We feel the need to be faithful. So we want something to happen now. We look at the conference of bishops going on who apparently aren't even going to address this issue of sexual abuse. And we just think, well, okay, I've got to take matters into my own hands. And you can understand why somebody might be tempted to do that and just abandon the church. What's your thoughts on that? What's your advice to that? I think we have to get a clear sense of for whom are we responsible. If we're a father,

parent, mother, we're responsible for our kids and maybe for some of our extended family members who are looking to us. You've got an audience here in my parish. I've got an audience and some beyond to go to speak and write. To look to the place where we actually have some kind of responsibility and to do what we can to focus on the truth. But we're not cardinals, so we can't, certain decisions we can't. We're not with the USCCB. I used to be on the National Advisory Council for USCCB, but even then, one out of 60 people or something, you can only do so much to even get words to them of what you hope will speak to their hearts.

And you fell in love with our blessed Lord before you fell in love with the church. And so you realize that our allegiance is to Christ. And so when you see scandalous and abominable actions of the clergy, even bishops, you're able to say, okay, well, I don't worship the church Christ established. I worship Christ. And you're able to differentiate that. For many people, Catholicism has just been a cultural thing. I'm Irish, and so I'm Catholic. Yeah. They come, I'm Irish, and so I'm Catholic, and yeah.

Well, the other thing is I come from a tradition that had plenty of its own share of things. I was Pentecostal for a while. There's nowhere to go to find a perfect group of people who perfectly love Jesus, isn't there? And God bless them, the Orthodox, I love them dearly. I looked very seriously at the Orthodox Church before I became Catholic, and right now you're seeing the situation with the split between Russia and Constantinople because of Ukraine, where you begin to see the limits of the Orthodox system of how they view synodality. You feel like Peter's saying, Lord, where would we go? Yeah. I often say, you know, suppose you were to leave the church to find a better church or something like that.

You know, once you found a perfect church, which wouldn't exist, but once you found it, once you entered it, it wouldn't be. Don't join it. It wouldn't be because you're a mess, you know. But yeah, these are turbulent times. I think we have to not just say we're fasting, but actually fast. Not just say prayer is important, which is something we people who try to be Orthodox Catholics can fall into. We tell everybody else about the importance of fasting, but are we fasting?

This is why, have you heard of Exodus 90? Yes. I'm doing it right now, as I said, and I'm so glad I am, and I'm learning a lot from it. I'm seeing more and more men wanting to step up and do this. I feel like we need a new crop of men, and there's a big push to get people to start Exodus 90 towards the end of January to end on Easter Sunday. If people go to Exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd, there's a waiting page they can join. But yeah, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal when you say what you're giving up and what you're taking on. But when we've become so addicted, to use that term loosely, to entertainment and things, it's actually kind of difficult.

So cold showers, no television, no sweets, only three meals a day, no snacking, which is much more difficult than I realized. No alcohol. There's much more besides. But it's been really great to see men say, okay, I got to really take this thing seriously. I can't keep. And you know, there's a, not to try to get back to some of my books, but I've written three books about spiritual warfare. I want to talk about this. Show us this book. This book is, by the way, incredible. I've got to tell people a joke about this. My wife, so I don't know what this is called.

This is probably called Alpha Hyde because I'm coming out with a book with Ascension right now. They're using it. But my wife bought a handbag recently, and she was very proud of the handbag. It was a lovely handbag. And somebody said, oh, it's a lovely bag. She looked at the tag and went, yeah, it's vegan leather. And someone said, oh, it's a lovely bag. You know, she looked at the tag and went, yeah, it's vegan leather. And someone said, isn't that pleather? Isn't that the same thing as pleather?

What's vegan? She was like, I got a pleather bag, you know. But no, this is beautifully done. Benedict Press are really coming out with beautiful books. I feel like we are in the land of mass-produced things. We don't want it. We want something that feels sacred. If we're going to engage in sacred activity, I don't want an app. I don't want a cheaply produced Amazon mass-printed book. I want something beautiful, and this is really beautiful. And they've got a whole series. Everywhere I go, I'm seeing this book.

I'm glad. Tell us about it. Well, it's, you know, given the experience I'd had that I've talked about earlier in spiritual warfare when I was still an atheist, and since that time I've had a number of experiences with, not because I've been in the occult again, but because people will come to me and say, I understand you've had experiences. Let me talk to you about something. My students have done it. I had one case in a particular small college where I taught where there was actually a dorm room infested.

I slept in it myself just to make sure. What does that mean? Infested means that demonic spirits have kind of associated or connected themselves to it. It can be an object or it can be a place. Okay. And you said you slept in this room. Yeah.

They reported things like several of them would be around awake, so it's not like we're sleeping. And all of a sudden, the temperature would drop 10 or 15 degrees. Suddenly, a cold wind would start blowing through the apartment, even though the windows were closed and the AC wasn't on. Then things would start happening like appliances would start turning on and off randomly, separately. You saw this. Well, they saw that than what I saw. And in another room, the faucets would start turning on and off by themselves and some other things. And I finally, at one point, they continued to talk about it.

I said, okay, I'm going to go sleep in it myself and see what happens. And I did. And sure enough, I had just turned off the light, was in bed, but I was not asleep. So this is, just to be clear, this is a university dorm room. Yeah, a small college, yeah.

Right, so obviously there's no one else in there. Nope, yeah. And they had come to you for advice, all right. So they had left, so you were sleeping in this room, okay. Yeah, and so I'm wide awake, lie back, the next thing you know, temperature drops, you know, at least 10 degrees, I'm sure, maybe 15. Cold wind starts blowing through. AC's not on. The windows are all closed. And the next thing is the bed that I'm in levitates.

I'm sorry. Forgive me for sounding critical or But I think I think it's important that I take that role for those watching Mm-hmm you're saying that you laid on a bed which began levitating Yeah, didn't come high But it came up high enough half an inch and then began to oscillate to turn back and forth like that while I was in it There's no way you could have dreamt this imagine this no because I was I was sitting up and talking at that point Of course to the thing and you're looking down you can see that this thing yeah well I can see that it's that it's I mean it's oscillating it didn't have any wheels on or anything the whole thing is actually moving back and forth like that

and the other stuff had just happened so I said yep yeah this reason festered alright you do at that point well I remember that but also yes and I remembered from my Pentecostal days there had been a pentecostal teacher way back who had had a lot of experience with these things and he said don't show fear to the enemy he they they eat they eat it they live off of it it energizes them and you don't have to be afraid so So at that moment, I thought of that. Wow. Because you must have naturally been terrified, no? Well, I'd seen other things, you know, before. When I was in Europe during that time, when I was

like, I would witness some Pentecostal exorcisms and other things. So anyway, so, you know, it's obvious what's happening. So this isn't your first rodeo? No, no. So I said, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the son of the living God, leave me alone. I'm going to sleep. And put my head down on the pillow and then went, sat back down. Didn't have any more trouble that night. We eventually had to have a priest with a bishop's permission go through the whole building and pray and do cleansing of all the rooms.

And we had blessed St. Benedict medals, which are very powerful in that regard. He was a great spiritual warrior. They have their own special blessing. Put one of those over each door. Didn't have any more problems there. What did these students think were they particularly religious this is yeah this is a Catholic school oh okay and they were yeah they were so they knew something was going on yeah so

I found out later I was gonna mention you know about infestation how that kind of thing happens we found out later that the building had been bought by the school because it was already existing. And we had kind of old buildings in the town where we were. It was a new college, really new, only a few years around. They bought the building because it existed right next to campus and would make a great dorm. It was an apartment building. Come to find out that some of the students actually knew some people in the apartment building before the college bought it.

And there was a young woman in there who was practicing white magic you know nothing dangerous or I'm just you know I do spells on my girlfriend's boyfriends to make them fall in love with her and that kind of stuff so this is no joke then no so there's people watching right now who probably have a Ouija board in the cupboard or maybe played with it as a kid what do you say to these people how do they how do they kind of repent of this and turn from this? You have to get rid of the thing. Burn it. Don't throw it away. Somebody else may find

it. If you're Catholic, get to a priest. Confess it that you've been fooling around with these things. Usually when people do, it's because it's a desire to exercise some kind of power. We may think it's just a game. But with Ouija board, for instance, or tarot cards or fortune telling, any of that, at some level, you're trying to get power over the future and to have that kind of knowledge. If you're trying to do spells, even if you think they're just white magic, you're basically saying, I want power over these other people's free wills. That's wrong. And you have to confess it and say, I admit that that was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. And I renounce it. I don't want anything else to do with it.

Do you think, I mean, you probably speak to exorcists. Yeah. Are the amount of exorcisms that are taking place increasing or decreasing? Oh, increasing. Yeah. Tell us about that. Right now, you actually have groups in America, Catholic groups, that are training exorcists, Americans, clergy to be exorcists. You have to have a special training.

You have to have been designated by your bishop or you don't have the authority. Whereas they used to go to Rome, but the backlog in Rome is so great now they're having to be trained over here. You talk to exorcists, why are there so many more? And what I hear again and again is there's kind of a double whammy that on the one hand, you've got more and more people who are engaging in practices that, like in my little book that I call making an Invitation to the Enemy to Come into Your Camp. People playing with occult stuff, maybe going to channelers, trying to, seances, trying to contact the dead when actually they're contacting demons.

Other kinds of occult stuff, but at the same, and at the same time, certain very serious sins, exorcists will tell you, can open the door to demonic power. So at the very time when people are playing with fire, you have more than ever greater number of people who are not religious at all, who are not Christian, who've never had even baptism,

let alone any of the other sacraments. And as I talk about in the book, the sacraments are some of the weapons that God has given us. And baptism is the initial deliverance from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, as Paul puts it. It's as if the spiritual SWAT team goes in to the kingdom of darkness, rescues you, pulls you out, and puts you back home where you're supposed to be. That's what baptism does for us. And if you haven't even had that, there's no protection. So at the same time you've got people exposing themselves to this stuff, their defenses are down, are

nonexistent. Even if they've had baptism, if they are practicing faith, if they don't have sacraments, if they don't know the Scripture, which is another weapon, learning the Scripture like Jesus did in the wilderness, man, you're wide open. And so more and more people. In Italy, gosh, it's almost epidemic more and more people and Italy it's gosh it's almost epidemic but in the United States it's growing too. Now people will obviously say isn't this just like a sort of what do you say kind of demon of the gaps to kind of quote it's like God of the gaps it's like well we just don't know enough about sort of psychology and the complexity of people's minds and as

we grow in our understanding of how people become mentally ill, we'll realize this really isn't a satanic sort of attack like you Catholics want to say. So what do you say to that? And how do you know that this is actually a legit possession or infestation? Well, the church is very aware of that, of course, after 2,000 years. It's not like the church is like, never thought of that. So the church will start out, when someone comes to them and says, I think I'm possessed or I've got this going on,

the church always starts by saying, you know, they go to the proper authorities in the diocese and they will say, okay, we have to make sure first this is not a medical condition, since they're psychological or even physical. And so they insist that you have to go get cleared by doctors who will say, yeah, I don't see any medical cause for this.

If you get to the place where everybody seems to be saying, okay, oh, that's all right, you still got these serious problems, there are actually certain tests that an exorcist can do that will kind of give evidence. And so I'm gonna give you exorcist can do that will give evidence. I'm going to give you an example. Give me an example. Yeah, a couple of examples. One is that the victim is seated at a table and the exorcist

or someone on the deliverance team brings in three identical boxes with contents that are totally unknown to the victim, the person speaking. And one of them is a blessed holy card, and one of them is a saint relic, and one of them is a consecrated host. They have no idea what's in it, and then the exorcist will say. Is this something you've seen or just something you've heard about? I have an exorcist telling. It's not like the third person. I know it from people who have done this.

And say, what do you think of those? And the person speaking, the enemy speaking through them, will point at the one without opening them, will just point at the one with the holy card and say, that's just silly. Point at the one with the relic and say, that one makes me uncomfortable.

And then point at the one with the consecrated host and say, get it away from me, that terrifies me. So that's a pretty good indicator. Another one is to take a group of holy metals, they're identical, and have just one of them blessed, and then put them down in the same situation and say, what do you think of those? And if there's something spiritual going on, and this to me is a testimony that sacramentals are real. If one's been blessed, the person will kind of say,

that's a piece of metal, that's nothing, that doesn't bother me, that's silly, like that to all the others. And then the one, of course they have no idea which one, or even that one is supposed to be different from the others will point to that one and say that one burns me get it away so those things begin to be well it is you know i think about how in the gospel um there were several times when when jesus is in the middle of a deliverance session he's got these you know scribes and pharisees are his enemies who are saying he's not the middle of a deliverance session, he's got these scribes and Pharisees or his enemies who are saying, he's not the son of God, he's a fake, he's a fraud, he cast out demons by the prince of demons,

all this stuff. And you can imagine the people around kind of saying, well, Jesus, these guys, and they're testifying against him. Who is it in these situations that testifies to the reality of Jesus' power? The demons themselves. They will say, we know who you are, the Son of God. Have you come to torment us before the time?

And they will speak in such a way that the people listening, they're testifying to the reality of who Jesus is. You get a similar thing in some of these cases where something that the Catholic Church claims, like that when a piece of metal is blessed, it actually becomes sacramental. It's different from what it was before. Or even what the Eucharist is, the body, blood, and soul, not just a piece of bread. You have the demons basically through these people testifying to the reality of those things, to something

that the church's enemies or others just say can't be. Do you have any other examples? I mean, those are great. There's three boxes, the medals. I hear there's a natural kind of repulsion to religious imagery. Yes, but especially if something's blessed because it's sacramental. Revulsion, I should have said. So I know a case of a, I'm trying not to use names in all these, but a case of a priest who did a lot of counseling with people with demonic influence.

And he tells the story. I hope I'm getting all the details right. It's been some time. But about how he's in his office. His chair's here. He has a chair facing him. A person comes in for counsel, sits there. He leaves the door open to the office, and his secretary is outside, kind of waiting room outside the office.

And both he and she have been through this kind of situation many times and that the patient if you want to call him that at some point starts doing the kind of things that sound like an episode of demonic possession on the roof is growling or speaking another language what and she the secretary can hear this and she right away says okay we're gonna do this and she reaches in her desk and now he's got his back to the door and to her out there and pulls out holy water and is going to bring it into him but before she can the thing speaking through him and this demonic voice says no not the holy water without even seeing so yeah um and it's terrified by it. The voice changes, does it? Well, that's why.

I mean, it can speak through the person's own voice, but often will speak with a totally different voice. So you have a petite little lady who's speaking in this deep, masculine, gravelly voice. Sometimes the voice isn't even using their vocal cords. It just comes out of their body, and their vocal cords are being used. How do you know that? Well, if you're a person there, I mean, you can tell where the voice is coming from. It's a different voice.

And it's not coming from here. Oh, I see. And speaking in languages they've never studied. I have a friend who, going through some of these things, in one of her sessions, she started speaking Aramaic. She never studied that, but that was the language, Semitic language related to Hebrew

that the Jewish people spoke in the time of Jesus in Palestine. A lot of times they'll speak in Latin, they'll speak in other things. They will identify in a deliverance session, they'll say, because that's another sign that they have knowledge of things that naturally they couldn't.

You have to make sure the deliverance team has got the direct cleaned up personally because if not, they'll start calling out secret sins to the people in the room. That's a little taste of judgment day. So anyway, it's... How does one protect themselves against this? Because Jason Everett, who you're aware of, good and holy man, one of the most faithful men I know. I've known him for years now. One of the godfathers of one of our children. He says that in his experience, at least for him, that the devil will make himself manifest

to his wife to intimidate her. But if you've ever met Kristalina, she's not easily intimidated. But whereas he said he often sees it for men, Satan might kind of hide his presence to make them careless, as it were. At least that's his own personal experience. But I think this is so crucial that we realize, as our first pope says, 1 Peter 5, 8, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. And yet, you know what, Paul, until I joined this parish where I have a holy priest, I don't remember hearing a homily on Satan and on the demonic. I don't know if it's because the priests themselves didn't believe in the demonic or if they had, you know,

psychologized the demonic or if they just thought they'd get a bad reaction or what. But most Catholics, I would say it's fair to say, walking around either don't think about it or think it's a joke. Or think that if it's real, it won't apply to them. So I'm going to talk about this in the first part. This is something that happens in movies. I wrote the book that people were, you know, so I once had this, I was praying and I kind of had this image,

I won't call it a visionary thing, but praying about all the people who are in the middle of this battle. I mean, I start off saying, you're at war, whether you like it or not. There are no demilitarized zones. You're in the middle of a battle. Gunpowder. And if you don't recognize that battle, you're in trouble. And the image that I had, not in the book, but in my mind, I had seen once a documentary on some Civil War stuff. but in my mind, I had seen once a documentary on some Civil War stuff.

And as sometimes happened, you had this big field and the Yanks and the Rebs, you know, digging in on either side and kind of firing against the meadow at each other. Great analogy. And it might be on a beautiful day where the blue sky and the butterflies and birds singing and flowers. And I saw like a little two or three year old who wanders out into the meadow and say, oh, look at the butterfly. Oh, oh, the flower. Oh, the sunset. And the bullets are whizzing by on both sides. And I said, that's, that's what we're like. That's what most of us are like. We're not even in the battle. Instead, we are totally vulnerable, oblivious. And all it takes is just, yep. Living life as if, what is this?

Like this thing that we're in is a comedy instead of a battle, you know? And, you know, a lot of people will say, well, you know, I've never been on a bed that levitated or those kind of things, so it's not going to bother me. Well, they don't realize, and that's part of what I talk about in the book, is the church traditionally speaks of the ordinary activity of the devil and the extraordinary activity. The extraordinary activity is the kind of stuff that Hollywood likes to make so much of.

So the levitation, the possession, all kinds of things like that. Superhuman strength, the different voices. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes screens coming out of a building and all kinds of things. People being like spiders and climbing up the back of a wall and then coming up and levitating down. I have an exorcist who told me about that one time in his church office while the secretaries were there. And so they think if that's not the case, if I haven't seen any of that, and that's rare, it's never going to happen. But this church says, no, the ordinary activity of the devil, if you want to sum it up in one word, it's temptation. And because the enemy is non-corporeal, which means he doesn't have a body,

he has a stealth strategy that we typically, if we have a thought come to our mind that comes from outside of us, how do we know? Through our senses. We realize we've read it, we saw it. It comes through the intellect. But what if you've got an enemy who doesn't have a body and therefore can communicate directly into your mind? Put thoughts in your mind that you think are your own

or maybe even you think they're God's, thoughts from God. So he has this strategy of, especially if he can get you to own that thought, which often happens, it's really dangerous. And so every one of us has a bullseye on us and that's the main strategy that he takes. So for those who are listening and they think to themselves, well, how do I kind of protect myself from temptation, as we've talked about, and just the enemy in general? What would be some practical sacramentals or prayers that we can begin incorporating into our spiritual life?

Well, I think sacramentals and prayers are certainly part of our arsenal and our armor, but there's a whole lot more. I talk about it in that book. But some of the major things we have to remember is, first of all, that we have the saints and the angels to help us. So we should be asking for their help, not just praying to our Lord, but praying for their help, especially Our Lady, who is the one that the enemy seems to be most frightened by. But also the Lord has given us the sacraments and each one of

the sacraments has a special role in spiritual warfare I'll talk about it in there but especially the Eucharist and reconciliation those two really important to keep regular with those knowing the scripture is really important when Jesus went out into the wilderness he was tempted how does he respond to the scripture that's how he engaged the enemies, with Scripture. So we should too. And he prepared for it with prayer and with fasting, which is another important thing. I don't understand fully how it works, but I know that it does.

Fasting gives power to our prayers. Jesus even said one time about a demonic case, this kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting. It reminds me of what Louis de Montfort said in True Devotion to Mary. He says that Satan fears Mary, in a sense even more than God himself. And as soon as you hear that, you think, blasphemy. But he says, no, no, not because the power and hatred, if you want, of God are not infinitely greater than Mary, who is next to nothing,

or nothing itself next to he who is but because of Satan's great pride he fears being beaten by a little handmaid much more than having to go up against the omnipotent God precisely I think it was Augustine who said you the one virtue that the enemy cannot counterfeit his humility and he was bested by her humility, and he smarts under that. Are there specific sacramentals that you've seen have greater power than others or not necessarily? Well, certainly folks like St. Teresa of Avila and others have testified to the power of holy water. I mentioned an earlier case where that was true.

Blessed salt is also good for putting into a home, house, a room. The crucifix is very important. Once it's been blessed, then it's a sacramental and it's a reminder to the enemy of the moment in history when he was decisively defeated. I can tell you another story, we don't have time, but I can tell you another story of a demonic infestation of a room that might have happened differently if the crucifix in the room had been blessed. Is that right? So it was just a piece of wood and metal as far as the enemy was concerned. So those sacramentals, but also all the ones we think about. Exorcism itself, the rite of exorcism, people don't

realize is a sacramental. The sign of the cross, the rite of exorcism, people don't realize is the sacramental, the sign of the cross, the blessings that we get. In my experience too, it can be, one can begin to view sacramentals as a novelty. We kind of get bored of the scapula, we try on this, we try this, we like the Divine Mercy, now the Rosary, now the Chokki. I believe it was Jose Maria Escriva who said there are many devotions within the church's Treasury choose only a few and be faithful to them what do you what do you think about that in yes when I became Catholic and

we began to discover the devotional tradition of the church we became overwhelmed my wife and I say how could we do all this yeah this is a holy infinite product and all these things we can't do it all we can't do it all and so I gave us the same advice just which ones whichever ones resonate with you go for them yeah they recommended the rosary some others but um st. Benedict medal is another good one st. Benedict was a great spiritual warrior and his his medal in fact is so special that it has a different blessing specifically for it from other sacramentals.

And once it's been blessed, it's been known to do great things in spiritual warfare. Wow, wonderful. Well, Paul, you've written, as I say, 15,202 books, roughly. I don't know if it's exactly right. But who's counting? Yeah, who's counting? You've brought some books with us today. Tell me a little bit about them.

I mean, this is your latest book. I want people to get this. And you have a spiritual warfare Bible, glory to God, and this fiction book, which I'm going to steal from you, whether you want me to or not, and then go to confession later. Tell us about this book, The Biblical Names of Jesus, as we wrap up here today, maybe, or whatever you want. It just came out this week, published by TAN Books.

The Biblical Names of Jesus, Jesus, beautiful, powerful portraits of Christ. What I did is I looked at 18 of the names and titles of Jesus in Scripture, and then with each of them kind of a cluster of related names, and then look at them all through Scripture and what do they tell us about Christ. The whole idea is that St. Richard of Chichester

in England centuries ago had a prayer that's been kind of adapted, but it was a song even in the 60s from Godspell, the musical, which was, Lord, I pray to see you more clearly, love you more dearly, follow you more nearly. And so that's kind of the reason for this book. If I can help people to see Jesus in a whole new light with one of these names, then they'll fall in love with him all the more and have the desire to follow him.

And so some of them are very common names we all know, Son of God, Son of Man, Christ the Messiah, that kind of thing. But some of them may be a little unusual. So, Alpha and Omega, the dawn from on high, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. And many of us say these without really knowing what they mean.

Yes, every one of them, if you look at it, even like the good shepherd, you start looking at all the references to shepherd in Scripture from the Old Testament into the New, and you find out all these things about what a shepherd did and what it means for, I mean, like what people say, you anoint my head with oil. Why would a shepherd anoint his sheep with oil? There's actually a very good reason for it.

Tell us, tell us quickly. Well, it's just that they get these little biting mites in their wool and they get sores from it. And so the oil they would pour on would kill that stuff and help promote healing for them. So they would pour oil on the head. But so those kinds of things, just beautiful, the things that you learn. The Alpha and the Omega was my favorite probably, the beginning and the end. It changed my life to write the book.

So I'm hoping people will read it. This might be an unfair question. How many books have you written roughly? 57? This is 50. Although I've actually written my doctoral dissertation. I got so busy once I got my first job and just finished it. I never had time to actually have it published.

So that's my longest book. It was 700 pages or something. So this is a difficult question to answer, but I'm going to make you answer it. Suppose you could have only written one of these books. Which one would you have written? Wow. And it's okay if 10 minutes later you're like, ah, I didn't mean that one.

But I want you to try to think of it. Maybe this one. Really? Maybe this one. Yeah, and why is that? Because it's just purely focused on Jesus. It's about Jesus. It can't get better than Jesus.

And after every chapter I just hope people sit back and say, wow, that's what it means to be the true vine. That's what it means to be Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Powerful stuff. It's been amazing. Thank you so much for being on the Matt Fradd Show.

Thank you. I have had such a great time chatting with you. My pleasure. Other than getting your books, is there a place online people can learn more about you? I have a website, but it's terribly out of date. Someone promised me they would help me with it a long time ago, and circumstances haven't worked out. Well, at least a Google pull fig pen and see the videos you've done.

Also, I have an author page on Amazon. This is probably not quite up to date, but most of my books you can get there if they're still in print, and even a few that are out of print now. Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show. God bless you, Matt. Thanks for having me.