Pints With Aquinas - Eastern Christianity, St Thomas Aquinas & The Immaculate Conception w/ Fr. Christiaan Kappes

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

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Thanks for coming down. Where you live in Chicago? I heard or no, I live in Pittsburgh. Okay. Yeah, I misheard. Yeah. So I was living in Italy actually, and I think it was around 2006 2007 serving my archdiocese in Indiana, which is a Latin archdiocese,

and I was living with Bishop Curt Burnett, who is now the bishop of Ruthenian or Byzantine Hosea. I've met him. Ah, great. And we started concelebrating together at the Casa Santa Maria, and he suggested that with my love of Eastern patristics as well as Aquinas, who was translated into Greek

after 1354, successively there was a series of translations of Aquinas into what we might something like classical Greek, and that I should start getting to know the Byzantine rite better since all my sort of student interests and study interests were in there. And eventually he just said, why don't you become an Eastern priest, so to speak? Oh, I see. So were you a Roman priest? Yeah, I was. You were a Roman? Yeah, I was a Roman priest. Yeah. Yeah. And I was invited to, um, by, uh, then Father Kurt to, uh, serve the Byzantine church. Wow. And I received the permission from my archbishop and, um,

was, uh, welcomed by, uh, Archbishop William eventually to, to serve the Byzantine church at first in Rome. And then, um, which there was just a little convent there and then little chapels in Rome, and then came back over and began serving churches here in the United States. So I've been doing that now, I guess, since 2009,

if not 2008 maybe. So you were a Roman Catholic priest in which diocese? In Indianapolis. And did you grow up Roman? Obviously. I did. Yeah. But you were practicing Catholics throughout your... Yeah. What was it like making that transition to Eastern culture as it were? The toughest thing is, is it's very... for me it was very scary even though I had an interest in liturgy of how long and how complex the rituals were. And at least initially, that it seemed like it was very confusing, the music.

And then you begin to realize that there are, just like Gregorian chant, there are different modes, there are different tones, and there's actually some predictability to that music. But yeah, I think that was the most daunting thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if for most people, the most daunting part of it is the complex, the visible complexity of the ritual and then the adaptation to the music.

So you're a Ruthenian priest then. Yeah, I'm serving the Pasiak. Is that the, uh, right now the arch, the archeparchy of Pittsburgh. Okay. Yeah. I, uh, my wife and I, uh, went to a Ruthenian church in Atlanta for three years. And it was, so it was an interesting transition kind of becoming enculturated into the East for a while. I think there's a lot of people like that right now who feel homeless actually.

Maybe they feel like the Western tradition has evaporated on them and they don't necessarily vibe with the more traditionalists in their diocese for whatever reason. And so give the Eastern church a chance. So it sounds though, before you were asked vibe with the more traditionalists in their diocese for whatever reason and so give the Eastern Church a chance. So it sounds though before you were asked to be a priest in the Eastern Church that you were gravitating in that direction for a while. Yeah I had actually explored that when I was in my teens but it

really never came to much just because of choosing to apply as a seminarian. I sort of lost touch with the local Ruthenian church in Indianapolis, which I eventually went back and served around 2013 or 14 for several months as the interim priest there. So, it did come full circle that I was able to serve St. Athanasius Church for a little while, even though I kind of abandoned that route.

It just looked too complicated to get to know the ritual and then all the niceties that go into trying to enculturate yourself in a different church. What do you see now in Westerners kind of becoming Eastern or wanting to become Eastern? Do you see an influx like I do? And what are some pitfalls you see? I would say that because the eastern churches in the United States tend to be very small by Roman Catholic standards, you may see in one church in any given, let's say small town or city, only about one or two families, which is a percentage of the local church's population.

They tend to be families that either are large, they have children, or they tend to be individuals who have some sort of intellectual or sort of studied awakening. You will find the occasional person that's drawn by the iconographic tradition, but I sort of studying, studied awakening. You really like a feeling of connection of the present to the past. They can enjoy the Byzantine tradition without, I think, a lot of the tensions that you're going to have in the Latin tradition when you try to reconnect with a liturgy which is, at least as far as its revised version, is much older.

And they don't have to worry about a lot of the liturgy wars that have become so famous in the Latin church. By and large, a liturgy war in the Eastern church in the United States tends to look something like whether or not we're going to continue to do First Communion or our church is gonna go back to communing infants. And those would be big liturgy wars

that took place in the 1990s. And there were some holdouts for the old practices, even though the church had officially moved forward, is that some of the priests were sort of, well, I wasn't ordained to do that, and I don't plan on learning anything new. And so they had their kind of little fiefdom, and they held out.

And so you'll still find a couple places that are like that that might use Latin liturgical instruments instead of the classical instruments that had actually been restored as early as Pope Pius XII. Pope Pius XII in the 1940s made an official concerted effort to have all the Eastern, at least the Slav churches, return to their roots and was rather successful. And of course that led to Vatican II really doubling down on that but it still took Till the 1990s for that to happen. So it just looks a little

It looks like it's a little bit of a transition from more authentic practices to less authentic practices Whereas there's this giant visible change if you were to look at the pre Vatican II liturgy So to speak in the post Vatican II liturgy, so to speak, in the post Vatican II liturgy. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think for my wife and I, we were just desiring mystery and beauty and reverence. And many of the churches around us, it just felt like we acted no, well, people, we tried to, but the kind of the culture was you don't act much differently in here than you would a 7-11 or Walmart or something.

And maybe there was a desire to change that, but it just felt like I want my children to be raised in a place where mystery is palpable. There's so much, I mean, when you kind of make the transition or start to kind of put your toe in the water of Eastern Christianity, I think it's difficult for some people they have, and I don't know what's the right thing here, but either an old or nothing kind of mindset in regards to private devotions.

So maybe they had a devotion to the Holy Rosary and they come in and they learn that that's not necessarily practice in the East, but something similar might be. And what was that like for you? Did you feel the need to disavow yourself of Western Catholic devotions and sacramentals? Yeah. And I would say in my personal life, I feel comfortable with both traditions. The only difference is, is that there is a concerted effort by the hierarchy as once again,

the beginning of that mandate came from Pope Pius XII to try to be as authentic as possible with those traditions of the East that originated in the East when they're still in the books, they're still practiced by Eastern Orthodox as a living testament to that tradition. So when I'm in a Ruthenian church or when I'm in a Ukrainian church, if I get to choose, let's say, what am I going to do for Lent? I'm going to want to choose things like liturgy of the pre-sanctified, which is like the Good Friday liturgy, the communion liturgy that Catholics are used to over, let's say, Stations of the Cross. I've actually inherited a church that wanted stations of the cross, and I said to them, look, I really wasn't sent here as your priest to do stations of the cross. I understand that you

want it and I'd be happy to go with you to the Latin church and celebrate with you the stations of the cross. But our church, I think we need to be doing pre-sanctified because that's what our bishops are asking. That's the area that we're going in. I've also had churches where I've covered where we had the Rosary before Divine Liturgy, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that because that even in the history of Orthodoxy, there was a version of the Rosary that was adopted even by saints of the Orthodox Church. So those things don't bother me per se. It's really a question of first trying to recover the full liturgical life.

And we could call it the paraliturgical life in Latin terms. Some of the ceremonies that aren't strictly speaking in the abbreviary or the divine office, like they call them malevins, which we might think of like litanies of Laredo or the litany to the precious blood of Jesus. Trying to recover those first and you can always do other things. So my own view on that is I'm entirely tolerant

of both and I practice in my life both, but when I'm in a context in which I understand the mission of that church is Eastern spirituality is we emphasize that without denigrating the other. It makes sense. I used to live in the north of the Republic of Ireland in what's called the Gaeltacht, one of the two main Gaelic speaking areas of Ireland, and all the masses were set in Gaelic, and sometimes the Polish mass readings were laid out in the vestibule but not the English ones you would never do that. And I think it makes sense if you are a small culture within something much larger you have to in order to maintain your culture defend against the encroaching culture sort of like Quebec is to Canada you might think so that makes sense. like Quebec is to Canada, you might think. So that makes sense.

If you weren't to sort of enforce these sort of, as it were, Eastern practices, then especially since you have so many Westerners coming in, it would end up just being like a Western. And I've been to places like that, where they kneel for Holy Communion and pray the Holy Rosary and beautiful things like this, and they're all beautiful,

but it's trying to recover your own tradition and the beauty of it. Yeah. And to be appreciative of both churches because there can also be a kind of a porcupine mentality on the part of Eastern clergy if they're constantly getting these demands by people that want to come and visit and be part of the church to change their traditions to be more like the reverence in the Roman rite. Well, reverence is not some sort

of objective standard, whether kneeling or standing. For example, in the Ethiopian church, the way that you would reverence a book is you would touch your forehead to it, you wouldn't kiss it. And so it would be inappropriate for a Byzantine, for example, to demand kissing of an object when that doesn't have that significance in among Ethiopians. So I think there is some pressure on priests in the Eastern tradition to conform to the larger Catholic culture because why do we want to make people feel uncomfortable and not come back? Maybe we should offer the erosory, maybe we should offer this, maybe we should offer that. But once again, the mission since Pope Pius XII renewed the Eastern churches and Vatican II put a seal on that has been

prioritize your own traditions, which is to say nothing of not having the options of people practicing all kinds of spirituality within the greater 1.3 billion church. So why shouldn't the church say to those who are concerning converting to an Eastern Catholic church, respect your own tradition? I mean, were you Eastern? Are your parents or ancestors?

No, I don't really have any historical familial connection. The nice thing about the way that the Code of Canon Law, which governs all churches now. We have one for the Eastern churches and one for the Western churches, but taken together, they both have the same canons when it comes to changing ritual churches is the church is very neutral on it. So there's nothing that the official church has,

which tells you that you were born into this group. Therefore your spirituality is pigeonholed there. There were tendencies to do that probably from the 15th century, especially into the 19th century. It was Leo the 13th that really started turning that around by publishing an encyclical on the intrinsic value of the Eastern tradition.

And that eventually led to the codes of canon law Placing a lot of respect on the Eastern traditions and talking about the value of anyone seeking for the right reasons To practice those Eastern traditions And so now it's really been taken from being a request to the Pope himself all the way down to just two bishops agreeing taken from being a request to the Pope himself all the way down to just two bishops agreeing that You have the spirituality and the mentality that would make you a good parishioner in any Eastern Church and therefore they can Have you switch rights that way? But even though the church doesn't teach it officially white

Why isn't it good advice to say to somebody listen you were raised in a Western Church your grandma prayed the rosary You've been praying the rosary don don't be switching, bloom where you planted. Yeah, I think it, to me, the reason why that's not good advice is because it's not, it's not directing the individual soul, so it's using a sort of a blanket spiritual program that the church itself doesn't endorse on a magisterial, if you consider the Code of Canon Law

is officially promulgated by the church, on a magisterial level, it's simply not endorsed. Furthermore, with John Paul II granting things like indulgences for the acathist, those indulgences aren't granted to Eastern Catholics, those are granted to anyone that says the acathist. We're starting to see that the Western churches absorbing, we see with divine mercy, a greater use of the Trisagion,

the holy God, holy, mighty, holy, mortal have mercy on us. That does technically exist in the Good Friday liturgy, sadly rarely sung in the Latin church. But nonetheless, even in the Good Friday liturgy, it was still adopted from the East, which it was in the official Latin liturgy before the council, it was sung in Greek and Latin, Greek and Latin, because that's where it was adopted from,

a Greek culture. So what we're seeing is, is that the Western Church itself is more open to Eastern influences, the solemn blessing of holy water. I believe Leo XIII adopted that, Western Church itself is more open to Eastern influences. The Solemn Blessing of Holy Water, I believe Leo XIII adopted that, and it was based off of an Oriental model, the Eastern Church's model. So we're seeing that the Roman Catholic Church,

the 1.3 billion today, of which almost all of them are Latin Catholics, is a church which has really paved the way for openness to adopting the spiritual riches of the East, which is, I think, a good challenge to anyone from Eastern Orthodoxy to Eastern Catholics to also be mutually tolerant of spiritual practices within their own church, not denigrating their public mission, but showing that spirituality, you're not pigeonholed by it. We can emphasize it in a liturgical and a public context, because this church belongs to this right.

When it comes to individuals' private practices, the church is quite open to that. And sometimes when a person's entire liturgical life, an entire devotional life within that encouragement of the church means that they would best fit in a Eastern church, then they, all the mechanisms on a local level are there to just make that happen. I've seen examples of members of SSPX chapels be very vocal against people joining Eastern churches. I don't know if they speak on behalf of SSPX chapels be very vocal against people joining Eastern churches. I don't know if they speak on behalf of SSPX.

I'm not making that claim, but I certainly see it. And when we lived in Atlanta, my wife encountered this lovely SSPX priest, full Cossack, terrific. And he too said, you really shouldn't be going to an Eastern Catholic church. Maybe what's the strongest example you've encountered of that sort of prejudice and why is it wrong? Yeah, the classic document that's referred to is a document that has now been superseded, which is by, I believe, Benedict XIV, which talks about the peristansia ritus latini,

the outstanding or preeminence of the Latin right. And there's this idea that in Benedict the 14th that there's one ritual which is intrinsically of greater value than all these other apostolic churches rituals. And it certainly was an official opinion that he put out in an official document. What we look for in the Magisterium when it comes to questions of discipline or questions of opinions on history is we need for it to even approach something like dogma, we would look for consistency over time. We would look at regular authorities, not just one statement that's made in passing in a document.

A higher level statement at Vatican II was made in which over 2,000 bishops voted on, and that was the equality of the rights. So what we probably see here is a resistance to the 2,000 bishops gathered in an ecumenical council, in which of course Bishop Lefebvre participated. I'm not a Lefebvre expert, I don't know at what point he decided that the council was no longer ecumenical, though it had the largest participation of any council in the history of the church since Chalcedon, which was only about 480 bishops. So this 2,000 plus

bishop council, which represents the Catholic Church, made the highest level decision that it could on these rights that they're all of equal value. So I think what we're dealing with is a mentality which Leo XIII tried to start getting rid of because in the 19th century the 13th to try to start getting rid of because in the 19th century the Oriental patriarchs, the Eastern Church of Patriarchs, were complaining to the Pope who was happy to hear more of the Latin missionaries that had this attitude that cultural expressions of the one true faith being different or inferior and it was Leo the 13th whose encyclicals and whose disciplining of this idea that there was

such an inequality that one was better than the other that led to the renewal of the Eastern the dignity of the Eastern liturgies which culminates in Vatican II. Vatican II is really the product of Leo XIII's leadership and then subsequent popes, Pius XI, Pius XII that we've already talked about. This culminates in Vatican II. So really if we're going to call into question the statements on the eastern churches in the document of Vatican II thereupon, we really are calling into question the entire trajectory from the other 13th up until Vatican II. For those who aren't aware, how did the Eastern Churches come back into union with Rome?

There's many different churches. We could maybe number them somewhere around 20, 22. It depends on how you want to talk about a church from a canon law point of view, which is a ritual point of view. But with each one of them, they have their own unique story. Some of them, like the Maronites, have a really good claim to have never separated from the Roman church by any sort of legal separation, documented separation, and that it was simply a rediscovery of one another as being

always in spiritual communion with one another since the 12th century and then more official documentation we see after that that acknowledges those truths. Whereas more recent groups, for example the local Bulgarian church or the church of the actual Greek peoples that were living in Turkey or Constantinople would be only a little bit over a century ago, where because of local needs for communion with the Holy Father or the Pope of Rome, there was a petition on the part of that church. There are also some others that are less ideal. If I have less rights, for example, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, because rights

are based upon your status as a citizen, the Catholics have certain rights. Maybe the Protestant Hungarians have certain rights within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The people that are kind of left out without an explicit mention of all these civil rights that they have are the Orthodox. So one of the ways to get your full civil status as these other groups is to have an official recognition by the Emperor of Austria.

And one of the ways that you do that is you negotiate how to do that and one of those is that the local Orthodox churches petitioned to be under the local Latin bishop in communion with the Holy Father which is the Ruthenian Church in 1646 and it was basically just a work switching bishop, our own bishop is willing to place himself under the one local bishop and that was pretty much it. So each story is, is very, very unique. Um, but you have about 20 different stories about different groups as early as the very beginning of the, of the second millennium and as recent as the 1900s

that have found their way into the, into the community of the, of the Fuller church, where do you see these liturgical wars in the West ending up leading to if you were to speculate? Um, wow. Uh, well, I, I, I, I do have the ability to speculate, I suppose, since I am trained as a liturgist. Yeah. Oh, good.

Yeah. And perhaps I'd like to ask you your opinion on them because there does seem to be this desire to unite ourselves to what is ancient. We're tired of just being floating modernists who have no connection with the past. And I was of the opinion, and perhaps it was incorrect, that if Pope Francis hadn't have issued his mutu proprio, that we had some reason to think, or at least it wasn't insane to think, that within 50 years you might see the Latin mass being the predominant mass being celebrated, perhaps because of a shrinking of the Catholic Church within America, but there seems to be this tremendous enthusiasm towards it. And I don't see the two getting along really.

You know, I would make a distinction first and foremost, which is often neglected, a distinction first and foremost, which is often neglected, of those who come from a Western European inheritance and those who are outside of that cultural sphere, because it's quite clear that there were some real negative impacts of such a radical change in 1965. There's been some statistics that they don't show the mechanism but they do show it coincides with those radical changes in the Western Church. On the contrary, we look at Africa, we think of the Namingen conference which happened among other things on liturgy, it was all the missionaries in Africa and then I think it was 1962 in the Netherlands, you're making me go back to my memory now from my doctoral dissertation which was was 2012, I guess.

And it was the missionaries there who were having no success with the Tridentine Mass in conversions, let's say, in comparison to Muslims. And there was a real frustration that the cultural and linguistic divide in that mass ritual was really making very little impact and there was even proposals that The entire missionary efforts Should just change to the Ethiopian right and that Africa should be the Ethiopian right country

They were all willing to drop the Roman right and just go to the Ethiopian right So there were some really innovative ideas going on and well then Vatican II came along and then we see this explosion of success in Those countries so I think we have to take a country by country But let's talk about what most of our listeners are coming from which is the United States And so yeah, I think that there when you have music and art which is meant to surround one kind of liturgy And all of a sudden that liturgy has changed How do you make that adjustment? I think there was a lot of problems with taking an entire cultural

tradition of Of anything from art to music and plugging it into the new liturgy You'll see attempts at this. So for example in Germany you'll see like a Mozart mass for the Novus Ordo and it is kind of just sitting around and waiting for it to get done more than you would expect with let's say the the Tridentine form of the liturgy and because you're so used to it being in the vernacular to have it all being sung in Latin due to its original composition. It really doesn't work for what the novus ordo is made for, which is to engage in the language of the people, to be more

accessible in that sense. But as far as how I speculate on the liturgy. Everything that I've seen leads me to believe that we'll continue to see a decline in the United States and Western Europe, but I don't know that I can find the mechanism being the liturgy taken in isolation. I'm open to the fact that there are certain liturgical changes that could could happen from a sociological point of view Which would in fact increase attendance But I think it's very difficult to find a mechanism from a studied point of view what I would say is That we do notice is that those who have an appreciation in the Western Church for

is that what we do notice is that those who have an appreciation in the Western Church for, I'll say, the Church in the United States, since I have some pastoral experience there, they tend to have larger families. They tend to make religion more of a focus in their lives. They tend to have better attendance. All those things clearly show that, at least on the local level, whether in the United States or in this town, that particular parish is going to

be doing very well in 20 or 30 years. How that impacts the demographic, I don't have enough studies done. Certainly in France the claim has been for some time that the demographic is quite profound. I don't have expertise to know how many are attending a traditional mass in France on a Sunday versus the other. But I'm certainly open to those arguments. I think that one of the difficulties is that a lot of the arguments remain anecdotally. And from my point of view, I'd like to see a mechanism

that explains why there's going to be an increase here. And that kind of thing. So I'm open to it, but I'm not convinced that the novus ordo is somehow intrinsically destined to do poor, particularly with its success in African countries. And we might ask, what is the common denominator in African countries? I would say that sociologically, you could argue that one of the common denominators is there's a lot of male leadership in the sanctuary going on.

And that there is a sociological argument to be made there that when you have a lot of good male spiritual leadership going on in the sanctuary and in the administration of the church is that you have a lot more male involvement and we probably you've probably had a show on the importance of the father of the household practicing his faith and kind of Sociological evidence that we have how that translates into the rest of the family practicing the faith

So those sorts of things I think maybe have some real purchase, and we see in the United States there's oftentimes a de-emphasis of male leadership in the spiritual realm, and that even includes the sanctuary. What do you think the Eastern churches have to offer the West during this tumultuous time? Um, I think a certain constancy consistency in their liturgical tradition, they do have to offer that male spiritual leadership. Um, and, uh, they, they also can balance a certain being in touch with real traditions that go back in many cases before we know how to document them, with the ability to adapt to modernity.

Perhaps one of the things that could be lamentable about the Tridentine Mass, not as a rite, but its current state has frozen in reaction to seeing the reforms, right? Whereas the Byzantine rite doesn't have that kind of prickliness about changing readings into English, a prickliness about maybe having the antiphon for the entrance sung in English, because what they found is the vernacular liturgy is also on the same path as returning to the ancient

tradition. So it's not that the vernacular is somehow ebbing away at traditions, it's actually one of accompanying the road of returning to tradition. So there's not an antithesis seen between those two. Or if we cut a small part of that liturgy down for pastoral reasons, we still leave it in the liturgy as always an option technically, instead of just cutting it out and you're not allowed to use it anymore. So there's certain ways I think in which liturgical reform has been done in the Eastern churches which is allowing the liturgy to still technically be everything that it was, the three hour

long liturgy that it had always been, but it can be pastorally adapted for an hour and a half. Whereas with the Western liturgy there's often times this idea, well the Tridentine Mass, there were no options, so you couldn't, let's say, omit the last gospel for pastoral reasons, or in the office, a priest would be exempted from the little hours if he were to pray vespers publicly. These kinds of options, these were in their initial stages of being thought out in the 1960s, so the 62 missile does have a little bit of this, but instead of thinking in those pastoral terms of just curtailing some of the things, making them always still part of the liturgy as options for certain circumstances, they kind of just all goting some of the things, making them always still part of the liturgy as options

for certain circumstances, they kind of just all got thrown out. Whereas the Eastern reform was sort of like, now they're always part of the tradition, but we don't always have to use them. We can use them for our big, festal masses, or if a particular congregation, with the bishop's permission, finds that they're useful.

So those kinds of reform ideas, I think, keep tradition, but they don't lead to stagnation. Yeah. Please talk more about that, about this stagnation. Maybe that's not the word you would use in the sort of Latin mass. And how do liturgies develop naturally and this kind of reaction against the abuses since Vatican II that may have caused this sort of unhealthy, people often can use the word rigidity, that might result in Latin Mass communities. And I don't know, maybe steel man their argument. What might their response to that be?

Yeah, because I did my doctoral dissertation on the reform of the Trinitine Mass into a transitional form in 1967, which I won't belabor in this talk, I looked at each one of the Tridentine Mass into a transitional form in 1967, which I won't belabor in this talk. I looked at each one of the individual rights that was reformed in the Mass, the why I had to come up with the history of the right up to that time, so I do feel like I'm in a good position to talk about that. In general terms that might cover all the rights, I would say there are some times where accidents of history, as Second Vatican Council calls some of these rituals, actually do affect the

Mass. So for example, the prayer, my peace I leave you, my peace I give you, which we say at the Novus Ordo and at the Tridentine Mass. That prayer had a very peculiar context. Here's an easier example, since that's said privately, not everyone pays attention to it. They behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world, and then we all strike our breasts once,

formally, three times. Beautiful ceremony, not part of the Missal of Pius V and 1570. You can't find it in the Missal. Why does everybody do it? The reason why everybody does it is really because in French there was a devotion that was so popular around 1585 that when the ritual for communion outside of Mass, not inside of Mass,

the ritual for communion outside of Mass was published by the Holy See in the year 1614. The Tridentine Mass is 1570. In 1614, the communion outside of Mass, behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world, we strike our breath three times, that was published in Latin, though it was being used in French in France. Why is it in the Mass? The Holy See must have had a cardinal on that particular commission that was partial to this. He brings it into the ritual for communion outside of Mass. When's everybody receiving communion? Not in Mass. The priest either gives communion before Mass or after Mass. So when St. Pius X restores communion inside of Mass, nobody knows how

to do it. So the question is brought to the Holy See. How do you give communion inside of Mass, this strange thing? Well, you use the communion prayers for outside of Mass, inside of Mass. That makes a lot of sense, obviously. So what do you do? Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world, you strike your breast three times. That's what everyone is so used to now. Those kinds of confusing liturgical things need to be dealt with. We're seeing that a ritual that was used for communion outside of Mass has become an essential part in the average parishioner's mind of inside of Mass. They don't see that that's a case in which the

liturgy changed since Pope St. Pius V. They may not realize that there were revisions of the actual Latin, from the old Latin to the Vulgate, that were done. Rubrics have changed since 1570. So the first thing is there's a lack of appreciation. Just give you an example to so that you might know is Formally when the the the priest said as often as you shall do these things So he consecrates the chalices as often as you shall do these things you shall do them in my memory one the 1570 missile I Believe has you holding up the chalice while you're saying that and it may be that the new missile has you Genuflecting while you're saying that and it may be that the new missile has you genuflecting while you're saying that. You and I might say is that really

worth talking about? But it is because that kind of rigidity would tell you that the 1570 missile has never changed. We're seeing all kinds of changes. These are on an official level but some of them are brought out by the people's devotion which translate into legislation. So the question is if there's been these incremental changes in the Tridentine Mass why is there such opposition now let's say to having the readings in English or these sorts of things and it all has to do I think with reaction to what has been seen as extreme reforms that have happened now. But in fact we've never seen the Tridentine Mass as it was published in

1570 remain exactly as it was. It was always in these incremental changes. So this would be something like organic growth if you want to consider legislation, organic growth. The example of the faithful getting the, behold the lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world to come back, to come into the liturgy and the communion rites, is a little bit more like organic growth.

But there were actually some examples of organic growth where people began to use the English readings in the 1960s and the Holy See was resistant at first, but then eventually gave permissions to do it in creative ways. For example, you could have somebody reading it aloud in English as the priest was reading it in Latin. There were some of these pushes to do these sorts of things which would have been gradual and would have led to these sorts of reforms. But I think that as soon as I start talking about these kinds of reforms, the first thing that they're as I start talking about these kinds of reforms,

the first thing that they're gonna point to is the Novus Ordo, the antagonists, and they're gonna say, well, you'll never be able to stop sort of the unraveling of this thing. And I'm sympathetic to it, you know, and I think that rigidity, again, to use a word that I know many people wouldn't adopt, and I know many people, Latin Mascoco is who I wouldn't consider rigid.

I just want to get that out. But it seems to me like an entirely appropriate response. If you feel like your spiritual heritage has been gutted, if the statues have been smashed, the rosaries have been put away, the incense is no longer used. I know that people sometimes point to extreme examples, but extreme examples do occur. When I was in high school, I was in charge of the liturgical music

and chose to play Metallica from a CD player. Shame on me, but I'd say more so shame on the priest and the teachers who allowed such nonsense. So in my mind, it seems entirely reasonable to sort of have your defenses up. Maybe what concerns me though is if it is natural and good for a liturgy to develop naturally, are you saying that it is? Yeah, I think so. Okay, then yeah, what's the future for the Tridentine mass if it won't allow this natural development? Yeah, I think it's too difficult to say, because for example, the Malabar Church in India

has come up with its own mass rights, which it's not technically empowered to do, but it is coming from the ranks. Okay. The Holy See has been very resistant of that homegrown organic development based off of what the clergy want, the people want, and they're using it even though it's technically not allowed.

The same issue happened in Germany under Pope Pius XII with a sung mass in German where it was the Latin mass celebrated but with kind of German singing over German song over the entire mass in place of the Latin song. It was never like, there was no crusade against it from a discipline, suspend priests or this sort of thing point of view, but it was technically not allowed, but that's organic development. So when does it become good organic development? Is it when you get a, finally a document that says it is we're not these things are are very

In the history of the church's liturgy Saying the canon in a silent voice was initially resisted By the rubrics and we even have legislation in the Eastern Church that condemned it and then but it eventually took over So at a certain point it was illicit. And now if you try to say the canon aloud, you're suspicious in certain liturgical context because you're a modernist. So, you know, these things, to determine what's organic development, what's not,

it does require a working definition. It requires whether it be local, whether we're going to say that there's something that's organic development that has to be more than local. These things, I think, require a lot of study, both historically and then philosophically. And we had a chance to do that in the 1960s. My own dissertation came up with the idea

that I don't think a lot of philosophy was part of that discussion. There was more a lot of historians who were all arguing in small groups and that certain dominant personalities in that small group won the argument, which led to a certain ritual being reformed. Not carte blanche the entire ritual,

but each part of the mass ritual being reformed, not carte blanche the entire ritual, but each part of the mass that was reformed depended on an individual. Almost none of them were philosophers, which I'm not saying that I'm not Plato here, that if you have the philosopher king, it's going to turn out really well. That worked well in Sicily with Dionysius, right? But what I am saying is that part of the church's thinking is from first principles, and I don't think that there was a lot of the first

principles that were being applied systematically in the reform. A lot of the issues were simply arguing about whether or not something in past history was good or bad because of some sort of situation now. It is a very difficult topic topic and I don't know that I'm going to have an answer on this show for it. You suppose you get made Pope tomorrow and you're sort of in charge of the

Western churches. What would you like to see happen or what would you implement or not implement or? You'd have to have, I think, a study commission that's composed of individuals who represent the interests of those who are attached to the Tridentine liturgical tradition, and I would even say the other lesser-known traditions. So there are some who have the Carthusian ritual, which is very much like the Tridentine Mass, and they've actually adapted it in the Carthusian order where they have things like concelebration, but they've still to my knowledge

I've never been to a Carthusian liturgy I've only seen documentation on it where they've managed to somehow make that work And bring them to together the people that are actually living it as well as the the the individuals who are the individuals who are trained liturgists and to try to get them to reach across the table and come up with universal principles that aren't going to look like they have any problem with the magisterium thus far, including Vatican II.

And then secondly, that look like they could actually meet the pastoral needs of people. We're gonna have fringes. I mean, the Orthodox Church, when it tries not to use spoons during the COVID era, they've got risk of schism. So we have these sorts of fringes as well. I think there are certain people that are absolutely closed to any sort of reform of the Tridentine liturgy, not realizing how

many reforms have happened since 1570. Even if they're overall incremental or small, I mean the destruction of the Breviary by St. Pius X was monumental. He basically, to pastorally meet the needs of priests who had just stopped saying the abbreviary. He basically threw out the 6th, 7th century version of the abbreviary and replaced it with something that had never existed before. So what we don't see a lot of is a lot of anger and animus directed towards Pope St. Pius X, because he's supposed to be the charismatic figure that we all want every pope to be if we are anti-reform, and yet he was the most

iconoclastic when it came to the liturgy. Why wasn't that really a problem? He actually didn't have any good liturgical principles there. What actually had happened was that he ordered a commission to reform the Breviary and they sat on their hind ends and didn't do anything. And then you have all these petitions coming in from bishops saying, if you don't do something soon, none of our priests are going to say the Breviary. They don't want to sit around and whisper this thing for three or four hours a day.

So the commission just lickety split, came up within a year or so, a new breviary compilation, and just imposed it on the church. The reason why we don't have such a reaction is the liturgy wasn't being celebrated publicly. People didn't see it. You might have seen Vespers on Saturday nights in a German church that was, you get people to go because you get them to go to

Eucharistic Adoration that would be given at the end of the Vespers or something. But with this liturgy, everybody sees it, right, the Mass. And so it is a more challenging pastoral question, but if it's about these unbreakable principles, how do we deal with St. Pius X? How do we deal with Leo XIII, who added all these extra masses that overcame the Feral Days, which the Council of Trent had reformed the Mass

to make the Feral Days come back and get rid of all these devotive masses? So we're seeing that all sorts of things are not addressed, which are what are the principles of liturgical reform, having them meet with individuals who are living the Tridentine life as well as the Novus Ordo life, the old reformer, the reform people

with people like the Adoramos movement, and actually making them have to discuss this. It's not, so Pope for a day, how do I make that happen? I'd probably have to sit there and try to work through a lot of arguing across the table. Determining a common mission and getting everyone to buy in, that's going to take a long time. Yeah, it's very difficult. I find too that we can get rather dogmatic about things that aren't dogmatic or rather like private devotions. Like my understanding is the second half of the Hail Mary wasn't sort of part of the Hail Mary until after the Black Plague.

I've not studied that, but I have seen that. Yeah, certainly. I mean, do you think it's fair to say that the original context in which they say Saint Dominic was praying the Hail Mary was that first half? From what, from what very little I know, I'm perfectly uncomfortable with that. Yeah. So that's, that's what I know. I might be wrong, but suppose I'm right. And I think I am.

Why isn't there a strong movement to like go back and reclaim the original Hail Mary? And I thought to myself, I wonder if it was originally twice the size or took twice the amount of time to say the Hail Mary back then as it does today. And we cut it out and we found out it was because people were being a bit lazy. I think there would be a real desire to recover the way we should be praying the Rosary. Humans are weird is what I'm saying. It's like whenever we feel under attack, we just like freak out.

I see this in the Protestant movements, you know, with the King James version only thing is like we want to be safe and we want to be safe from people changing things that will make us and our world and our faith seem like it's it's up for grabs or multiple choice or something like that. But it would be a lot. This is anecdotal from knowing priests of Lincoln, Nebraska, but Lincoln, Nebraska, from what I understand from their priests and some of the faithful that I've met,

had a long tradition of discipline in their liturgy after Vatican II and had a long tradition of doing what the actual liturgical books say. For example, having only instituted readers and instituted acolytes. At that time would have been male, older leadership in spiritual leadership in their local churches. The Tridentine Mass, as I understand it,

from the priest and the faithful there never really took off. You had a St. Pius the 10th Chapel, you had a fraternity of St. Peter, which was welcomed in by the bishop at the time, I think it was Bruskewitz. But his predecessor, Gavin, why did they have an abundance of vocations?

As I understand it, they had no real issues in parochial life with the diminishing of the size of parishes or closing of schools of a lot of other places. It could be for very local reasons, but I'd like to think, and even though it's based off anecdotal evidence, that liturgical discipline there provided a spiritual continuity from the Second Vatican Council of what was intended.

And you're not going to have that rigid reactionaryism in the Lincoln Diocese because you're not seeing crazy stuff happening. What you're seeing is reverently celebrated English masses with the kind of leadership spiritually that you would have expected before the council and there's a connection I think those radical Psychological breaks that we saw or my grandmother when she was growing up told me about her parish priest. God rest him Who one of her parish priests who in front of the rosary society got so frustrated that he took a rosary and broke it in front of them because they wanted to pray it towards at the beginning of mass in the 1970s.

Apparently that was the local parish, not the thing to do anymore. She was horrified by that. She continued to be a daily mass goer, still preferred the mass in English, but that's the kind of extreme challenges she was dealing with. Now, if I have to deal with those extreme challenges, I can see why I'm going to have a reactionary mentality in many places in which I feel it felt spiritually abused. This happens I think in the Eastern churches too, is if you have someone that would come in and try to impose the

bishops collectively thought-out mission that they were given by the Holy See to restore the tradition, but you have someone that is attacking the rosary. The saints have endorsed the rosary, saints have appreciated the rosary, the Universal Church appreciates the rosary. Why are you attacking something instead of giving people a new option, let's say, which would be the some sort of acathist or some sort of morning prayer service, and asking them if they would consider having that, attending that as well, and seeing if we can gradually

have the rosary to not, let's say, be right before divine liturgy and replace that with the divine Office, which is the universal prayer of the Church. So I can see where there was going to be this digging in because you're trying to change our tradition. We've had that in the Eastern churches. So I think that it's going to happen no matter where we find ourselves because these extremes are so well known and many of the people that are being ministered to on the diocesan level, they go to a Tridentine church, are refugees from very, very unfortunate experiences.

That's how I explain, it's funny you say that, that's how I spoke of myself and my wife. We said we are refugees from a sea of banal liturgies. But yeah, what else is weird is like, Pines for the Quietness is one of the most popular Catholic shows on YouTube. It's weird that people would sit down and listen to this kind of conversation. Like when were Catholics listening into these sorts of conversations back in the

sixties or? Yeah, it's a good point. I, I, I. What does that do? Yeah. Yeah. So I think in conclusion, when it comes to liturgical reform You have to rely on the human institutions in the church, which are not guaranteed any sort of infallibility And even if they were very very traditional and tried to bring the church back

100% in the Latin right to the Tridentine Mass of 1570 They're not guaranteed pastoral prudence from the Holy Spirit. The Church's own claims and its own magisterial documents are, we should presume that the Holy Spirit is working in the day-to-day magisterium of the Church, but we must be cognizant of the fact that the lowest level of the magisterium, this is in Ratzinger's published document on the vocation of the theologian, that the church has changed its day-to-day teachings, which would be matters of prudence, matters which do not affect defined ecclesiastical dogmas or the faith as we would experience it in

the scripture. And it's these day-to-day best guesses that the church gives that it does believe that over the course of the ages the Holy Spirit is aiding those, which is perhaps the reason why the church has had such visible success in winning hearts in its best of times without violence and even being persecuted. But the reality is that the church can make any number of mistakes on either direction when it comes to what is most pastorally effective when it comes to liturgical reform and what we have to do is we have to be thinking think tanks to try to include is as broad of a spectrum as we can to make sure that the people in Asia aren't neglected Africa neglected but you also the United States neglected and Europeans neglected and so if we were to

bring all these individuals together, it would be a very long and arduous process. And I think if everybody was equally unhappy a little bit, but overall okay, then we probably had arrived at a good liturgical reform. And I don't think we can argue right now that in the Western countries that the liturgical reform has been successful pastorally if it's considered to be the main mechanism for connecting people with God, and therefore our churches should be fuller.

I don't think you can make that argument against the African missions. I think you can make the argument that they're quite full and quite alive and doing quite well. So I think what we're really talking about is our situation. We're really talking about is our situation. We're not talking about the 1.3 billion. We're talking about the 65 million in the United States.

Difficult to have a universal church, universal being the word. I don't believe and I think it's a fact that the SSPX aren't in schism. You said schism. I've heard schism, schism and now schism. Which is the word? I don't know.

I don't know. We're all just doing no, but I'm gonna say schism. Okay, so I don't believe the SSPX are in schism, schism, and now schism. Which is the word? I don't know. I don't know. We're all just doing no, but I'm gonna say schism. Okay, so I don't believe the SSPX are in schism. But I do think that people who attend these chapels may have schismatic tendencies. Do you think that that's also true with those who attend Eastern Catholic churches or do you not agree that the orthodox are in schism? Wow. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, with St. Pius the 10th, um, you do have a range of individuals. There is a certain intra chapel and humanism going on there. You have many people that are in doubt and not even in doubt that we don't have a

Pope, but they are parishioners. And, um, as long as they don't have a pope, but they are parishioners. And as long as they don't make a fuss, they need to be treated pastorally, which is probably a good thing. When you have people that are on the fence about whether there's a pope or not, and they're a member of an organization, which is telling you if you want to receive sacraments here,

you need to believe that there's a pope, probably good, even though they're not pushing them out by going after them. There's not a witch hunt, as far as I understand it, from SSPX personers whom I've known over the years, and even on occasion got to know a priest or two. When it comes to the Eastern churches, there is. There's a, when we come back

to the historical look at the Eastern churches, and we see how in many cases, for example, the Ruthenian Church, its agreement with the Holy See to enter back into communion with the Holy See officially was simply to place itself under the local bishop and by extension to accept obedience to the pope, and there is no other call for any other traditions to be changed or modified. Even Pope Pius the 12th in 1943 when the Russian Rite was officially published as a magisterial document, meaning a liturgical document by the Congregation for Eastern Churches of which he was the head, He left in the post-schismatic Russian saints in the offertory ritual, in

the bread and wine preparation ritual. So we're naming off Orthodox saints. Some of whom may have been quite critical of Catholicism? Excellent distinction. There were a couple that were omitted, but the criterion for omitting a saint from the Russian rite was only if they had published formally schismatic materials. If they had never published a formally schismatic materials against the Holy See, they were considered worthy of commemoration. There was this sense in which all the means of salvation are present in the Orthodox Churches, not just as sacraments, but they also have not only a valid hierarchy, which of course is the sacrament of order, but they have all the same sources that you and I do, same canons that were used by the Eastern Western churches in the first four, five, six, seven centuries. They have the same saints. They have the same tradition of

interpretation of sources that we have. What is the major issue that we disagree on now is how to interpret these sources in the church's lived life right now. So what you'll get then is we get a enthusiastic transfer from the Latin Rite or someone rediscovering his or her inheritance of their Eastern tradition is they're so into the Orthodox aspect of their liturgical and their ecclesiological tradition, they feel like they need to create that dichotomy of opposition between the persecuting Latin Church and authentic Eastern Christianity. It is true that you can find tons of examples where mainly local bishops were mean to Eastern churches, but you do have some real examples of popes who were imprudent in their legislation, some of which has been admitted in so

many ways by the Holy See in their way of treating Eastern churches. For example, just so we can have some sense of what that would mean, the Eastern churches in southern Italy that use the Greek ritual, the Greek Orthodox we'll call it ritual, were always in communion with the Holy See in the 1300s, 1400s, let's say. But eventually from their 1300s and 1400s communion with the Holy See, it came to the attention of a Roman Pope that they were confirming or chrismating their infants, as they had done as early as the documents that we have from the fourth century if not before. Because of the state of liturgical studies of the time

the popes thought that's very different from what we're doing so they just forbade it, just immediately forbade it. Now that would be looked at as pastoral imprudent just as we might, let's say, forbid now all of a sudden Tridentine Catholics from having access to the sacraments that they've had access to since Benedict the 15th. Is that right? 15th, yeah. Pope Benedict.

I'm not sure. Meaning our last Benedict. 16th. But Benedict the 16th, yeah. Benedict the 15th was in there early 1900s. Anyway, so since Benedict XVI until now, they've had access to all these sacraments, is it pastoral and prudent to just deny them,

let's say, that they can have something blessed by the Book of Blessings of the Tridentine Rite? I'm using kind of basic language, I don't need to say Rituale Romanum 1614 as updated by Pope Pius XII in whatever year with some little addenda by John XXIII. So when I do these things, it's intentionally meant to be simplified.

But anyway, yeah, I think that one can argue that there is pastoral imprudence just as there has been a lot of pastoral imprudence in the handling of the Eastern churches now. Are the Orthodox churches in schism? The classical distinction has always been a formal schism versus a material schism. And we also have to understand that every church

in the Orthodox Church has a bishop as its ultimate head. It is part of a larger group, which is a synod. Most of these synods go all the way to the top to kind of a bishop among bishops, which is, let's call them a patriarch to make things simple. Well, can that patriarch be in formal schism? Of course, you could say that I don't accept, I understand fully the Roman Catholic Church's position on the papacy, and I fully reject it. The Holy See has taken a different prudential judgment over the years about how to deal with this.

Perhaps through continued ecumenism which happened from the really the 11th century all the way through until the Council of Florence. Then it's document, documented negotiations with Eastern churches after Florence until present. Perhaps it understands what we understand pastorally in our own parishes. Most people couldn't tell you how papal infallibility works. How can you reject something that you don't understand?

The caricatures of papal infallibility that exist in the Eastern churches are oftentimes very peculiar. Not that the Holy See itself hasn't had some overzealous missionaries that didn't do us any service. For example, I think his name was Antonio de Masa who showed up at the Byzantine court once and said, and called the Pope a god on earth.

That didn't do a really excellent job of introducing the Pope into his historical rights. Now, there's a longer story to that which is, in so many words, we have a Latin historian, Rufinus, who had said that all the bishops are gods among men, and that's the reason why Constantine would not intervene in the bishops'ations at Nicaea because they're all gods Well the Pope like being a I think a slightly better God than all the other gods and eventually he just was the only God But what we see here is that Antonio de masa perhaps knowing this literature Trying to translate it into Byzantium. It didn't go over. Well, God on earth. We don't say that

We only have that source in the Latin sources. We don't have that in the Greek sources So they had no idea that all the bishops are gods on earth we don't say that we only have that source in the latin sources we don't have that in the greek sources so they had no idea that All the bishops are gods on earth, uh according to constantine. So at any rate, um The the issue then is um How do we look at them as being schismatic not in their sacraments not in their sources not in their canons Not in anything that counts in order to think about the faith to to puzzle about the faith, to come to conclusions about the faith, but do some of them in their conclusions, if not most of them,

differ from where the Holy See is now? Yes, but it's not because they understand our premises as well. This is the reason why the Catholic and Orthodox dialogue is happening, so that we can both start with the same premises and try to come to the same conclusions. What does the Holy See look at that juridically as? Being in good faith. Being in good faith means that you're not formally schismatic. Being in good faith in these dialogues means that you're open to the truth and that you both want to see it. The Church is convinced that she has it. She's convinced that these goodwill orthodox who are that she has it, she's convinced that these good-willed Orthodox who are asking for these conversations and trying to come to a way to make the

appropriate historical patristic distinctions in order to accept the same common faith, that this means that they are not formally schismatic. And that's the reason why in the Eastern Code of Canon Law and the Western Code of Canon Law that we can give, for example, communion without a lot of administrative hoops jump through to an Orthodox who asked for it under certain conditions. And so I think... What are those conditions? In the Code of Canon Law, the conditions are simply that the Orthodox alerts the priests that they are of their own accord asking for

the sacrament, not out of pressure from anyone else, and that the Orthodox in conscience believes he or she is within his or her own canonical tradition when they're asking for it. In other words, they're not going to be excommunicated by their church for seeking the sacrament from us, because their own church discipline may technically be able to punish them. So for example, in the Assyrian Church of the East, which is orthodox, meaning anti-Aryan, there's a formal agreement that they just, we have a sacrament sharing,

because they're on the road to unity, realizing that it's probably more for historical reasons, that, or there's a divide, and of course you know very well the tragic story recently of the Syrian Church of the East, both Catholic version and the not yet in communion version because of the ISIS horrors that were happening and how many of those Christians are now

in the diaspora in the West. Well, those Christians can seamlessly go to one another's churches because that lack of formal schismatic intention is there. If you had a parishioner come to you and say, I'm going to stop coming here and I'm going to go to the Greek or Russian or whatever Orthodox Church up the road, would you try to persuade them from doing so? I would certainly want to know why and I would want to let them know that I would certainly want to know why and I would want to let them know that that is not within the purview of how the church sees unity.

However, if they had a really good reason, I'm married to a Greek Orthodox man, I'm a Ruthenian woman, we don't want to go to two churches anymore, we refuse to do just every other weekend or whatever and we're not gonna stop. It's worthwhile since the Code of Canon Law provides for it that I seek permission from the bishop, my bishop, for this pastoral circumstance and then go to the Greek Orthodox bishop and ask that bishop to agree with it.

And on occasion, you get agreements. These are not widely publicized because the larger 250 million orthodoxy, each church is more or less rigorous on how it thinks of Catholics going to communion under whatever circumstances. Less so with the non-Caledonian Orthodox. What's interesting is though we share more items of faith in common with Eastern Orthodox than Eastern Orthodox do with, let's say, Egyptian Coptic Orthodox, or that Eastern Orthodox share with Ethiopian

Orthodox, that there are communion sharing agreements which are official and on a local level and quite common, where spouses are receiving communion in churches which are not their Orthodox church. So we're starting to see that some of that realization on the Eastern Orthodox churches is happening. It has to be kind of low-key because how do you get the, with the famous Articles of Confederation in the United States, where you have each state that gets a yes or no vote and you can't get anything done unless you get all the new states, old colonies, voting on something, right? Well in the Eastern Orthodox Constitution right now, you have all these individual churches which, if for example, the

perhaps the most open churches, let's say the the Antioch Patriarchate is very open to Melkites or to Maronites receiving communion and even kind of celebrating at their liturgies, the priests. Why can't that be something that they just push? Because they have to deal with the fact that they're part of a worldwide orthodoxy, which is one in faith, and that they don't want to innovate in something without bringing along their other 15 churches with whom they're in communion. So there is a certain pastoral prudence,

let's say, in the Antioch Church who might, I'm not saying it is open, but let's say that it, just hypothetically, it were the most open to this kind of idea, is that it does need to get the cooperation of other churches to say, nothing is blocking it. We're not gonna do it, but we're not gonna excommunicate you for doing it

or call you bad names because you're doing it. And I think that that's the reality on the ground right now in the Eastern churches. Now, my understanding is the Code of Canon Law may allow Catholics to give Eucharist to Orthodox and vice versa. Well, I know the first one to be the case, but I don't believe the code of canon law says that a Catholic can fulfill their Sunday obligation by attending an Orthodox church. I think that's something I hear a lot, but when I've looked it up, I haven't found that. I don't see it in the code and I haven't checked a commentary recently. You would end up finding that from a response. I think it's the, for legislative texts,

the council or, I think it's the council for legislative texts, I'd have to remember how the congregation is called. I'm sure that they've had a dubium that has been sent to them and it's been asked. Probably the situation would be, always the circumstances for these kinds of things are, if it's morally or physically impossible to get to a legitimate meaning a canonically erected church with a priest who's in good standing so

If I'm morally prevented my mom and dad won't let me won't let me go to church and they're in charge of me My boss won't let me Practice on the hours I want on a Sunday, so the only option I have is the Orthodox Church. These things were provided for even in pre-Vatican II legislation. St. Alphonsus Liguori talks about this, so that we have, I mean, now we're going back

to the 18th century, so that if your employer would fire you and the work is essential for your family's survival, is that the confessor can tolerate that individual being under moral duress to work on that Sunday. So in that occasion, we would wonder if the Holy See would give permission to go to the Orthodox liturgy,

which does happen at a time that I can go to. So those are the kinds of things that on an individual level they would be answered country by country, situation by situation. The overarching code of canon law doesn't seem to my knowledge to provide for that. And I did teach canon law several years ago, but I forget everything after about a few months or years after I do. There's a lot to remember. Yeah. Why is Thomas Aquinas wrong when he says that babies shouldn't receive Eucharist?

Does he appeal to reason? I haven't. He says that if one has their reason and then loses it so that they can no longer affirm what the Eucharist is, they may still receive. But he flat out says that babies and infants shouldn't be given Eucharist. I can pull it up and read it if you want. You're welcome to. While you begin to answer all of it up.

One of the interesting things is I do have this come up sometimes. I was in Hungary and a Serbian Roman priest came up to me and Roman priest came up to me and he said to me, Oh, I serve in Serbia, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, why do you guys give communion to infants? Um, and, uh, and he said it kind of disparagingly. Like I was kind of like the foreign guy that he could say this to, cause he was surrounded by an

Eastern majority. Uh, and, um, and I said to him, well, I said, because the church sees that as long as there's nothing in the individual's disposition against receiving a certain sacrament, is that there's a benefit for them to receive it. So the child doesn't have any will to resist the efficaciousness of the sacrament

in whatever way it operates in the child. Just like baptism, there's no positive will of the child until the child reaches reason to create any form of moral opposition to the sacrament. They may be screaming no as you dip them into the water, but then it's not a rational no. Yep. And so he wasn't really satisfied with that,

and so he continued to go on about how dumb the practice was. And I said, do you give communion to Down syndrome, severely Down syndrome adults? He said, well yes. And I was like, well shouldn't you be denying it since your code of canon law says that you have to have the use of region? And I think he immediately saw the pastoral insanity

of how the actual code of canon law is applied in real pastoral situations throughout the world now. A person that has severe Down syndrome is not a rational being. They have to have someone take care of them their entire life. They are not autonomous. They should be denied communion.

And yet, pastorally, who does that anymore? The reason why is because they believe that there's some good benefit to that person receiving communion. They may not be able to name it and they may not be able to give you a theological reason, but they do know. That's a really great response. That's the one that I always come to because I know Pastor Lee and the Roman Catholic Church. Yeah, because here we're not talking about somebody who had reason, knew what the Eucharist was, accepted it and then lost it. We're talking about someone from birth who has never had the faculty of reason operating.

They're essentially an infant. They may be a 30 year old infant, but they're still an infant. Eucharist was accepted it and then lost it. We're talking about someone from birth who has never had the faculty of reason operating. They may be a 30 year old infant, but they're still an infant. And yet every single pastor would cringe at the idea of upsetting a family and the Roman Catholic communion of churches, at least in the Western countries that I'm aware of. Because they know that they were gonna lose a family.

If you deny their suite, I used to babysit a severely down syndrome boy named Timmy who was like, I don't know, six to 280 pounds and he was all muscle, but he was like sweeter than anything, used to go play basketball. So when I say this, I say this and I'm starting to tear up a little bit.

But yeah, so a person like Timmy is this adult and he's going to regular communion. What priest in his right mind is going to deny them in front of the family, in front of everyone else? They don't because they know that they're gonna lose a family and that they're gonna alienate people. If that is a sufficient theological reason for them to give communion to a Down syndrome child,

why do we need to justify what we're doing to infants? We don't. It's the discipline of the church. Now the historical story for this is, in the Tridentine baptism, this is what I teach actually at one of the Latin seminary that I adjunct at, is we read the Tridentine ritual for baptism.

At the doors of the church, there's a blessing over the child before you walk in in Which it asks that what's happening in this baptismal ceremony? Lead them very quickly to receive the bread of eternal life Why is that in the Tridentine baptism because it's an ancient ceremony how ancient? Most of those prayers the majority of those prayers go back as early as the 7th century. Those prayers we read in my Latin, my Roman Catholic seminary where I

I'm a guest teacher and when we read those we see that that's because the Latin Church was communing infants up until That's because the Latin Church was communing infants up until the second millennium. What we see is the Tridentine prayers continue to request that immediately the child after baptism is going to receive communion, but to no avail. Why do we have a reformed right for baptism? Because maybe we shouldn't be asking for the child to receive communion at the doors of the church when he ain't going to get any. So there are reasons for reforming the rites. Now if you were to ask a priest that were trained in the Tridentine tradition why that priority exists, I'd be very interested to see what their very very convoluted explanations are. I'm sure

we'll get some below. Yeah. The real reason why is because it's based off of a first millennial prayer in which all children were receiving communion. In fact, St. Augustine in the day Trinitate talks about distributing communion to children. Yes. I didn't realize that. Yeah, it's in the first books. So all the evidence we have suggests that the earliest Christians were giving Eucharist to children. Yes. Okay. And in the 11th century, we start seeing it taper off for not pastoral reasons,

but for historical reasons where the bishop can't be at every baptism, so you have to wait. You have to wait for the bishop to show up to give you confirmation before you can receive communion. Are we still doing that? So then these explanations are sort of ad hoc then from Aquinas here. Yeah, there's nothing, we should not condemn the practices of the Roman churches somehow being, you know, evil or condemnable, but at the same time, you need to understand that there was a common tradition between both churches until the last liturgical books in the Roman church probably in the early 12th,

still being copied into the 13th century, show the last rubrics for infant communion, and after that we don't see any more copied rubrics of infant communion. So we can say that probably infant communion disappeared in the ten hundreds Even though it's still being copied in conservative liturgical books till the 11th and the 12th century That makes sense. Well, here's what Aquinas says

Men are said to be devoid of reason in two ways first when they are feeble minded as a man who seems dimly sees dimly sorry is said not to see and since such persons can conceive some dimly sorry is said not to see and since such persons can conceive some devotion toward the sacrament is not to be denied them in another way men are said to possess fully the use of reason either then they never had the use of reason and have remained so from birth and this is your example of the severe Down syndrome and in that case the sacrament is not to be given them because in no way has there been any preceding devotion towards the sacrament or else they were not always devoid of reason. And then if when they formally had their wits, they showed devotion towards this sacrament,

it ought to be given to them in the hour of death, unless danger be feared of vomiting or spitting it out. Hence we read in the Acts of the Fourth Council of Carthage. spitting it out. Hence we read in the Acts of the fourth council of Carthage period and the same is to be found in the Decretal's Decretal. What is that? Yeah, the decretal's the let's call them papal official letters. If a sick man asked to receive the sacrament of penance and if when the priest who has been sent for comes to him, he be so weak

as to what you're unable to speak or become delirious. Let them who heard him ask bear witness and then he can receive penance and Eucharist. But fair enough. I mean Aquinas was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. He's trying to justify. So what's going on here?

He's received a tradition. He knows that the church has the power, the keys, to have this tradition. The tradition is not contrary to nature. We're not even sure, in the early church, what is the benefit that a child gets when they receive Eucharist. We don't know, because they don't have the use of reason,

they don't have the use of their will. Grace is something that affects intellects and wills. This precision psychologically is actually one of Aquinas' contributions to history, is to really come up with a very robust explanation in psychological terms of the human will. That is a real contribution of Aquinas. Not that there wasn't a sense of the human will before, but as documented in recent medieval studies is that to boil down the soul's two operations as intellect and will as two separate faculties and not sort of mixed, let's say, with one another or just the intellect willing, but rather the will and the intellect being separate

faculties, that's really something that the framework is a contribution of Aquinas. So why is Aquinas able to make the arguments that he's making? Because he has probably one of the most robust psychologies that has ever existed in the history of the Church. And so we can see why Holy Communion doesn't benefit a child when it comes to grace infusing the intellect or grace infusing the will because the child doesn't have use of the will yet to really benefit from it. The question is are there still benefits like receiving confirmation with a child at death which I believe

even in the old code you could do, the old Latin code in 1917 you could do, and I may be wrong on that, and if I am it's just because I haven't read it in years. So what is the benefit of confirmation? Well the benefit is is the church has a mandate from Christ. Now the reason why also Aquinas in medieval distinctions would not be terribly wrong, let's say, or wrong absolutely speaking, but rather he's giving a possible justification for why it's not mandated to get baptism. So it's one thing to say we shouldn't give communion to infants. I think it's another thing to say we're not mandated

to give in community to infants. One is we we have to and the other one is should we or shouldn't we? Maybe there's a pastoral argument to be made So I'm gonna take him as making a pastoral argument based off of psychology is I He can't find any sort of spiritual benefit in the intellect on the will therefore. There's no necessity for it. However confirmation of a of-rational little person before death, if they're, God forbid, sick. Baptism, what is it that the distinction is made that makes baptism an exception? Well, baptism is considered in the medieval language a necessity of means. So even though Jesus says, you don't have life within you,

unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, the church has not received that as an absolute, whereas baptism, as the current catechism says, the church knows of no other means by which someone is to be saved. If God supervenes or overcomes the sacramental system, that is because he's operated in his omnipotence outside of that system, we cannot comment on that. All we have is revelation. Revelation tells us that the church is always

obligated to use the sacramental system for salvation. Hence, Aquinas can see the necessity of baptism even though the same things apply because it's a necessity of means. God does not transition one from a child of wrath to a child of God, except by the sacrament. Can you say that for the Eucharist? You can't say that for the Eucharist. So his distinctions are rational, they make sense as to why you're not mandated to give communion. Why you're obliged not to give communion?

I would say that I'm not convinced any more than I would be convinced about confirmation on a child's deathbed that they can't rationally benefit from it therefore they shouldn't receive it. And the other thing is is Aquinas would not be aware from, we've actually had a wonderful Dominican brother, father Innocent Smith who's doing all his work on Aquinas in the liturgy so I'll look forward to maybe one day him being able to tell us, did Aquinas ever have access to this earlier liturgical material

that would have told him about these earlier practices? Did he ever read the entire De Trinitate of Augustine to see where Augustine is talking about giving communion to infants? These are interesting questions that maybe Father Innocent Smith, OP, will be able to answer for us because I think he's one of the only Dominicans I know other than there's a West Coast Dominican. I don't want to forget. I think I can't remember his name though

Who is doing some stuff on liturgy, but maybe we'll have more insights into Aquinas because of his work fascinating. I Remember the first time I heard that Aquinas denied the Immaculate Conception It was in a debate format between a Protestant and a Catholic. And when the Protestant stood up and said that, I was shocked and many Catholics are shocked. Help us understand why Aquinas denied the immaculate conception. Then you'll have a lot of other people actually say, well, actually, no, he changed his mind on that.

Help us flesh that out. Yeah, let's do that first. Well, I don't know if it's translated or not, but the major document that I'm used to is, that out. Yeah, let's do that first. Well, I don't know if it's translated or not, but the major document that I'm used to is, I believe it's his discussion of the angelic salutation. I think it is maybe translated. It is. Angelic salutation commentary. Yeah, I believe so. I've only read it in the Latin. So I know it is translated. I used it in my book. I wrote a me and father Gregory pine wrote a book It's a nine-day preparation for total and consecration based on his writings. We use that so if I remember that well now You also have to remember sometimes the translators are cognizant of where the church is And so I don't know how that translation in English would look

But as I remember the Latin which can be found on the corpus to mysticum calm which is in The the best editions of Thomas Aquinas available in Latin online, which is a real great service that's provided by several Thomistic universities. Navarre, I think, I should call them Thomistic University, but it's shorthand for saying that they really love Thomas Aquinas a lot, and therefore they're willing to invest money in him. So in that document, I think what you'll find is he makes a distinction between the conception of Christ and the conception of distinction between the conception of Christ and the conception of Mary and the birth of Christ and the birth of Mary, whereas Jesus

was both conceived and born in original sin, Mary was conceived in original sin, but born without original sin, which is an interesting distinction. So that would be the first place. Yeah, I just want to point that out because I remember when I first heard that Thomas, and of course, and this is something I think Catholics need to realize is just because a saint is fantastic and brilliant and has a lot to offer doesn't mean he's infallible. That's why we have the church. Um, but I, when that, when that Protestant said that, that Thomas Aquinas denied

the Immaculate Conception, what he didn't say is Aquinas said that she was purified in the womb. It's like, okay, that's, that's very close to what we think. Yeah. The second reason would be is there is, until the microscope was perfected to the point, I mean the microscope is 18th century, but until the microscope was perfected to the point where we could actually look at what's happening in things like semenation of anything from animals to people. All this work on when conception happens is all philosophical, it's best guesswork.

And we're using ancient traditions of ancient doctors who claim to know something. And the reason why this medical literature survives is because nobody can get any better than this medical literature. So there's competing ideas of conception at this time. Aquinas took an idea, an Aristotelian idea, which was the least favorable to our modern scientific approaches to the conception, which could talk about the conception, meaning the coming together of a

male and a female contribution, but not necessarily that it was formed to the extent where it was ready for a soul, a human soul to be plugged into it so to speak. So that is a, this is even a theory that Augustine was familiar with. Whereas let's say the Franciscan tradition which is famous in Denskotis for adopting what we call the Imakwa Conception nowadays, took a more medically Galenic, Galen, first century BC approach, which thought that when the male and the female contribution for Thomas's accepted medical theory would have been disproportionately, let's say, formative and the female portion would have been disproportionately passive in the whole thing. So it's

whatever the male brings. Whereas the Galenic or the Galen idea would be kind of a 50-50 with a slightly maybe 50.1% extra contribution of the mail, but it also led in a lot of the literature that was adopted by Christians in the fifth century after that to the notion that along with what was attributed to being Galen's idea, I haven't read Galen's actual position on this, so I'd have to punt and say that the Byzantines got him right, which is, insolment happens at that time. So the person comes about at that moment. So you can already see that if you have physical conception

but it's not a person yet, there's no problem with that being dirty or infected, and Mary is still not yet immaculate. There as it were. She's only there when her soul is there. Right. And if Aquinas in his angelic salutation is saying, well, at the moment of insolment, which would have been 80 days after the physical act of two elements coming together. So after 80 days of growth,

the soul is infused, therefore it's possible to think because Aquinas doesn't tell us with more precision, and I don't believe that he tells us anywhere else with more precision, but I am not an expert on this topic in Thomism, so I'll wait for a Dominican to quote me chapter and verse from the many, many volumes of Aquinas' writings. But in this case then, we could imagine that Aquinas is open to the moment of insolent being the moment of immaculateness. Now, why is Aquinas even being innovative here?

Well, Aquinas himself is going beyond the textbook that he himself got at university. So we talk about bad Catholic catechetics and these terrible textbooks that we're using in school. Well, they also had a textbook that wasn't perfect in the university system in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. It was called Lombard Sentences.

Lombard was praised some, I think the ecumenical council in 1215, I believe, but he was also disagreed with vehemently on some other ideas. And one of the things that he actually introduced into the Western Church, which had not existed before, this is kind of the contribution of the work that I'm doing a lot now, which has been published in academic journals and is, I would say, new. Peter Lombard got a hold of a Latin translation that deals with Mary in John Damascene's language. And John Damascene seems to say that Mary was purified of something at the moment of the Annunciation. She's 12 years old, best case scenario, 14 years old,

and she's purified? What does it mean? This is outside of its cultural context. This is- What century is John Damascene writing for? He's writing in the 700s, and he's writing in Greek, and he's only been translated at exactly the time that Peter Lombard is writing. Nobody's ever had access to this literature before. This is like the cutting-edge theology of the East that has finally been translated in 1045 AD.

It translated a little bit before that, but we'll just say 1050 to be. Nice number. So it's 1050 AD. This new stuff comes to Peter Lombard, and he sees Mary purified at the Annunciation. She must have had some kind of sin, because that's what you get purified from. Augustine talks about purification of flesh, and that means sin. So translating the concepts through Augustine, which is applying and saying, and they must come from the same culture Maybe this even the same language and Augustine a little bit of Greek trying to plug Augustine in as the context for here for

Interpreting what purification means in this Damascene passage leads Peter Lombard to go on a rather long dissertation saying well Mary was purified of something like the relics or the leftovers of original sin when she was 12 or 14 years old. So does Aquinas actually hold Lombard's position? No, in his angelic salutation, if we consider that a more mature work, and I don't know the dating on that work, if that's his more mature work.

If we consider that his more mature work, that would mean that he's actually gone against the university bad catechetical textbook grain. Interesting. Which is that Mary was purified at 14. Now she's purified in utero. What's some other things that are happening about this time? This university textbook is so popular and the interpretation of well read, the very popularly read Paschisius Redbertus. Paschisius Redbertus, not a household name, I know, local saint, but Paschisius Redbertus in the Latin Church in the same place really, France, the 9th century, argues explicitly that Mary was conceived without original sin. He's a very popular author, he's a

local saint. I would argue that Bede the Venerable has authentically the same doctrine. How is it that this catechetical textbook changes what is a shared idea of Mary between the East and the West? Well, the historical narrative is that this textbook has such influence, it becomes the standard textbook in all the universities, nobody has common access to Pascasius and nobody has common access to Bede as they do to this textbook. It spreads everywhere and the interpretation of it, it spreads everywhere. No one has a counter proposition based off of a father that is either Damascene himself, that guy writing in the 700s, or anybody that's just as famous or as holy as Damascene. So it's basically become a textbook truth that Mary was

purified at 12 to 14 years old until what happens? Basically a Franciscan comes along, and this is not Duns Scotus. Duns Scotus argues philosophically why this whole Macclet conception thing is the best solution to the question of sin and Mary. But the patristic argument is Francis Maron, who's a disciple of Duns Scotus, comes across an old translation. Thomas Aquinas loves Dionysius the Areopagite, loves him. of Dunsgotis comes across an old translation.

Thomas Aquinas loves Dionysius the Areopagite, loves him. He's the second most quoted author after Augustine is Dionysius the Areopagite by Thomas. One of the things that Dionysius handed on to Thomas that he actually uses, I believe in book three, question 27 on the Immaculate Conception, in one of his responses to objections to the Immaculate Conception, he mentions the fact that what purification means, might mean, does mean something that

Dionysius says it means. One angel gives knowledge to another angel, it purifies that angel, but the angel has no sin. It's in heaven. It's totally meritorious. It's totally in the beatific vision, but it's getting new knowledge. So what does purification mean in this Greek Syrian tradition? Now he's not thinking in Greek Syrian terms. He's just thinking this Greek guy, Dionysius. Purification means a imparting of grace slash knowledge in a spiritual way to a means a imparting of grace slash knowledge in a spiritual way to a spiritual being. So Francis of Maron says Thomas Aquinas's question already

actually has potentially the answer to defend the Imaculacanception. He just rearranges this objection and the response to the objection to say using Thomas Aquinas's own format, he writes that because purification for Dionysius means giving grace, that when Mary's purified at the Annunciation, it just means that she got grace, just like an angel. And that is actually the Greek answer. Among the meanings for purification in the Greek East, it is getting grace or knowledge even though you're already all holy. And so we actually see is a 14th century rediscovery

of an Eastern father who turns the table on this objection. This objection I would argue, I can't say that it's 100% now but all my studies are leading me into the area of, we have a common Mariology of a sinless and totally pure Mary, well into the ninth century in both the Eastern and the Western churches. And we have, in the last several years, a team of fellows that I work with, we've got many patristic quotes,

which I've shared some with you, so if they make it on your page or whatever, that's fine. Much more than we thought. So if you were reading Francis Dvortnik, who had a very famous article on the Immaculate Conception in the East in the 1950s, you were reading a very popular book, I think it's put out maybe by Ignatius,

by Gambero on Mariology in the Middle Ages and Byzantine. All this stuff is the most recent stuff done. We've discovered a lot since then. We found that Ephraim the Syrian also affirmed the Imachal conception in quotes that are being used by a fellow you've had on William Albrecht. Those quotes were authenticated by Sebastian Brock, who is the outstanding Syriac scholar on religious literature,

particularly Mariology, in the entire history, understanding Syriac scholar on religious literature, particularly Mariology, in the entire history, probably, of Syriac literature. Certainly, I don't throw that out there lightly. I think he really is a god among men, to use a statement, when it comes to Syriac stuff, particularly Mariology. We have now, the 5th century a recently resurrected quote by a homily that was read out in Ephesus in which Mary is claimed to be different from everybody else by Theodos of Ankara because she

was made from the same virgin earth that Eve was at her conception, essentially is what it's talking about, instead of like everyone else. So this is Ephesus, the very same council which discusses original sin by condemning Pelagianism. I'm looking at these quotes you just sent me. Which one here? Pre-feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God? Do you see one there that is has the word Ankara on there and I think it's the oddities. How do I spell that? the th e o D and you should get it the oddities. Yeah. Okay. That's quite quite a long quote Yeah, it's probably a little bit too long for our purposes. But do you do you welcome to is there anything in particular? Why don't we use the the virgin earth one if I can yeah here it is

I hope so indeed it is I hope so indeed it is useful for the support of pious and Unalloyed beings that they make some small exercise of inquiry towards the counterfeit and badly written things that have been said Which is why Ephesus has taken place to combat Nestorius among other things that appears his bad Mariology Which we don't know a lot about For in this way is the divine law to publish the sentence with respect to the blasphemers tell us then appears his bad Mariology, which we don't is composed and formed by the immaculate hands of the Creator. So that's the immaculate hands making an immaculate, so to speak, conception of Adam. And if on one hand you say no, then aren't you clearly persisting as no welcome guest of our people and our alien to Holy

Rit? But on the other hand, if yes, you agree, but with what do you disagree illogically with respect to the truth as you are rebelling and renounce the good pleasure of God, that is the law of economy towards the common salvation and the all-holy Virgin." So his whole point is as immaculately as Adam was made out of earth so immaculately is made Mary. Now this is read at the Council of Ephesus. What is really fantastic now this is not unknown literature now you'll see 19th as far as early as the 17th and the 18th centuries, that is being cited by Catholic apologists. I don't know why it fell out of fashion to use that citation, maybe because Theodotus was never sainted, but it was still read out at the Council of Ephesus as part of their deliberations.

When was this rediscovered or has this never been? It's not been popular recently and I'm not sure why. It was William Albrecht that brought it back to my attention. Now subsequent to him, I've actually had an orthodox priest that emailed me recently, wanted to focus me on the feast of the entry of the Theotokos into the temple at three years old. We have that feast, the feast of the entrance of Mary into the temple in the Latin rite. There is a hymn there, and feel free to read that one. Pre-feast of the Nativity?

Yeah. From a barren woman doth the all pure and most immaculate mistress, issue forth barren of sin, whom the law prefigured and the proclamations of the divine heralds of God announced." And what we see here is this feast of the entrance is concentrating on the earliest life of Mary, first century or early second century life, and it's going beyond the actual text and saying that an immaculate one was issued forth from a sterile wound. So we have actually the Byzantine liturgy, the Greek liturgy. This is probably, I'd have to go back and check the doctoral dissertation that's been

written on the entrance of the Theotokos, but if this is the original written document, this would be the ninth century. Yeah, it says here 850. So what we have then is, then we have another famous individual, many of our listeners were probably heard of the very famous spiritual classic called the Philokalia, or Philokalia, which was published recently in the 1970s until in several volumes. One of the authors there is Th agnostic the priest the agnostic the priest also wrote a commentary okay so this isn't in the philokalia this is something this is a different document

but it's the same one who's being reference and feel free to read a beautiful explanation is held in reverence as it holds for today's festival explanation when it the aphos, competes to make public the law of nature, childbearing, well, that's what they mean, nature, along with things accomplished in a paradoxical manner. For then it bursts forth by recognition thereof unto sweet hearing and make manifest the supposition of truth rather exactly. For it was ought really ought that from the beginning,

Mary through a holy prayer underwent in a holy manner. What is embryo Genesis? She came a little embryo. Okay. Fair enough. In the uterus of her holy mother. And after her birth, she was turned over to the holy of holies. She who then herself conceived by an angel, Gabriel, and then herself bore the holy blastula. The the.

First little embryonic being. Wow. And likewise, then slept the holy sleep whose beginning is holy. The same's midlife is holy and holy is her end and her every habit of life. That's a commentary on that same hymn, more or less, that we were seeing. We're seeing here. These are things that have never been really gathered in print. We also have others. We don't have to read them all off. I've sent you a couple others, but another one is- I'll put a link to them in the description. So if people are like,

how do I get my hands on this? As soon as this episode is done, I'll put a link in the description, you can click through and read them. Basically, what I provided you with is a stringurgical text, which is still sung in the Orthodox churches, all of which explicitly acknowledge that Mary's first moment of existence was immaculate. So what this brings us to is that the tradition which Francis of Maron is plugging into... When did he live? He died in 1328. I think there's some debate about his exact year of birth, but died in 1328. And he rediscovers for the universities, not for the Latin West,

for the universities, the Semachalic conception notion. Now people will say, well, what about this whole controversy that existed before the universities in England and Northern France with the Normans? Well, the Normans were fighting against a feast of the Conception of Mary, which was oftentimes linked to the Immaculate Conception as early as the 11th century. So now we have at the end of the 9th century Pascesius Robertus throughout France, his famous works including his homily endorsing Mary being conceived without original sin and we are already seeing

in England probably from Eastern influence the Feast of the Conception of Mary which is oftentimes linked to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, that gives us about a century in the Latin West that we can't account for what people are thinking as if they what do they do they flipped for a hundred years and all of a sudden and who is it that has a problem with this conception of Mary being immaculate it's the Normans what are the reasons why children of Vikings have a problem with the conception of Mary that's an interesting point I'd be interesting to know why they particularly have a problem with the conception of Mary? That's an interesting point. It'd be interesting to know why they particularly have a problem. My sense is, is the same reasons why Lombard, who is in that tradition, I think, does, and that is taking Augustine as the context for

reading the feast. And the idea is that anything that has to do with flesh that is conceived in a natural way will be simple trying to give. An application of the general rule in this particular instance instead of seeing this as an exception to the instant. Yeah so what about those Protestants who might be listening right now and say okay but the earliest you've given me is something from what the fourth century. How come this doesn't go all the way back when is the earliest instances we have of people talking and maybe even agreeing that Mary was immaculate? Well, of course, the Pro Evangelium of James, which is published by 150 AD, but arguably could be first century, spent some time talking. It implies more about a miraculous, if not imm macula conception of Mary, and it's generally rejected in apologetic Protestant literature,

not merely because it is quite clearly hyperbolic as any sort of encomium, like you give somebody a birthday toast, you're not gonna say something like, at this level, you're gonna say it at the best of all possible levels, right? So yeah, there is some of that going on, but that is one implication. But actually the best argument comes up by someone who has strangely become a champion amongst evangelicals who have a history of, we can say maybe bashing Mary, is

Father Raymond Brown. Father Raymond Brown in his immortal book, Birth of the Messiah, 1992-1994, talks about a puzzle if you go to your Bible and you look in Luke chapter 1 at the Magnificat. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. We're all used to saying that if we pray our breviary, our divine office, every day, whether the Byzantine divine office or the Roman divine office. The problem is that translation is wrong. And Raymond Brown as well as the Latin version of this both confirm this. It is actually not, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior But rather my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit a long time ago

Rejoiced and God my Savior now What is Raymond Brown who's working with a team of Protestant specialists on scripture and publishing his findings? What is their communal problem with this? It's clear that that's what Luke wrote, but she's a 12 year old girl. What is the great thing that God did for her a long, long time ago? Real briefly, why do we suspect 12? Prode Evangelium custom? That's right. The Prode Evangelium has some manuscript variants. The probable way of reading it is at 12 years old,

but there's also a variant reading which could be true and that is 14 years old. But that's the oldest testament that we have. Of course, we also know from rabbinic literature, which dates within 200 years of Jesus's time, that the marriageable age for girls makes this very light. That's really interesting because I've heard people say things like that. You know, Mary was 14 when she conceived, and you hear that a lot.

You're like, okay, is this even true? Because there's also some debate as to Joseph's age, depending on which tradition you look at or whatever. So that's good to know. So the earliest evidence we have suggests that she was 12 or 14 when she was pregnant. And even if we wanna say, oh, this is just a novel, well, it's a first century novel

that has been now authenticated as most likely a work written in Palestine. So you have a Palestinian Jew writing about when a girl is getting married. Is he gonna say that she was married at 30? He's probably not writing a cultural fiction, he's trying to convince people. He's gonna name the period of her life which it would be normal to marry off a young girl.

Gotcha, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so whether or not you accept it or not as a biography, you do need to understand that it is culturally irrelevant document. For the same reasons we should think that there were instances of first century virgins dedicating themselves to God, right? So if the proto-evangelium was mere fiction, it's still talking about something. That's an excellent point. I've actually not heard that argument, but it's a great inference because usually what we go to

is Philo the Jew who testifies independently in his works that there are women living as virgins. But actually I had not thought about the cultural argument that comes from the Prodigy of Angelium. I said, it's an excellent point. I'll just add it to my list. Of course, I'll give you attribution. Please don't.

But yeah, no, it's an excellent point. But the most convincing argument is the scriptural argument that Ray Brown and his team of evangelicals who are doing meritorious work together have a problem with. What is the problem that they have? Mary is 12 or 14 years old, whether we look at rabbinic literature or we look at first century Christian literature, and she's 12 or 14 years old, and she says, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoiced a very, very long time ago. It's a completed action in the past. Fascinating.

In what God had done for me. He's done these megalah, these fantastic things like crossing the Red Sea. What's the thing he did for her? Well, the part of Evangelium of James, of course, saying, well, she was conceived, of course, and born. Well, what is Mary referring to? She can't be referring to having the baby Christ, and this this is driving father Raymond Brown nuts because he's thinking in his, with his evangelical hat on, and he's saying Mary got it wrong. Somehow Luke actually got it wrong, because Luke is writing the story. Luke got it wrong.

He shouldn't be speaking in the past tense. He should have changed Mary to say God will be doing great things for me when I have my baby after the angel announces it. So they actually come up with a very complicated theoretical justification why Saint Luke can still be right. Okay, and their theoretical justification why Saint Luke doesn't have to be wrong is And their theoretical justification why St. Luke doesn't have to be wrong is well see what he's using here is he's using a hymn and he didn't adapt the song to his story. He left in the past tense and he should have put in a future tense. Fair enough.

And not only that, but the song's at the wrong time. This is a post-resurrection song after Jesus has saved everyone. So it must have been a post-resurrection song that has been displaced to Mary at 12 years old and got the tense wrong. And I'm just like, wow, it's getting really complicated. Like they know all this is happening, even though we don't have any source documents for Luke. We don't know where he got this stuff. It's still argued whether or not he had access

to Semitic literature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We don't, some of them disbelieve the fact that he interviewed any witnesses, even though he says he interviewed witnesses, et cetera, et cetera. So with all the stuff that we disbelieve, you know, or we debate about with the Luke and gospel, the one thing that we have to hold

is that this is somehow a post resurrection hymn, though the, because that's the only time that it makes sense that Mary could talk about great things that God has done for her right and secondly that it had it should have been changed to the future sense future sense tense in order to make sense for the narrative and the Catholic Church surprisingly could answer father a Brown and say no she was accurate when she said God did a long time ago great things for me this father you said so he's a priest and he's critical of the

immaculate conception things like this was he no he's he's not attacking the immaculate conception he's got a kind of a laser focus on scripture interpretation with the techniques that he was learning I said which were mainly techniques that aren't sensitive to if there there can be, a widening of your view from doctrinal contributions and not a narrowing of your view. So one way of looking at tradition would be tradition almost never has any basis in the actual text, so it is something that distracts us from understanding the text. Versus tradition may get things wrong and it may get things right, we need to be open to that,

but we do need to check and see if it has an insight, because it is, let's say, a first century Greek or a second century Greek that is writing about a first century Greek document. Maybe they do know something that we can't see. Now, Father Ray Brown, I don don't think would object to that contextualization I think this is just one of those areas where he didn't apply it. I mean we all make mistakes I think this is father right ray brown making someone correct him

As a contemporary or is this something only discover that particular topic? No, but Christendom press actually put out a book a series of books written by Father William Most now made available free on the internet William Most in which William Most actually went by an itemized correction of many of the claims that Father Brown made and I actually compared the pre William Most Father Brown to the post William Most Father Brown and it was rather entertaining. He never acknowledged that he read Father William Most's book critiquing him. But if you actually look at all of his later publications, it's almost as if line by line, he made slight adjustments to his claims.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure that Father William Most was just happy that he was more nuanced amazing and less rigid about His opinions that he had made in the first editions of his ideas because he oftentimes repeated the same ideas and later Texts because he's dealing with the same materials. Mm-hmm But you you definitely see an evolution father Raymond Brown's thoughts So you can see that father William most published again by Christendom Press and available on the internet, has made a contribution to biblical studies, though he is not a ghost writer, but a ghost editor, so to speak, of Raymond Brown's opinions.

So let's read from Quinas's Angelic Salutation. Again, this is in the English, so maybe it's not the best translation, but he says the Blessed Virgin Mary in this. Let's see Christ excelled the Blessed Virgin Mary in this that he was conceived and born without original sin while the Blessed Virgin was conceived in original sin, but was not born in it. So, let's see, she exercised the works of all the virtues, whereas the saints are conspicuous for the exercise of certain special virtues. Thus, one excelled in humility, another in chastity, another in mercy to the extent that

they are special exemplars of these virtues, as for example, St. Nicholas is exemplar of the virtue of mercy. The Blessed Virgin is exemplar of all the virtues. I just share that because even if Aquinas got this wrong, which he did, and he said, is that he's too harsh to say, and he did like that. I don't mean to be too hard. I think it's OK to emphasize the point for our audience that any saint doesn't have a charism of infallibility, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that.

I think I would have a nuance to not wrong him. Yeah, it's a it's a nuance to got it wrong. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. But the reason I bring that up is when this Protestant in this debate said that, it's like what he didn't say is Mary never committed a sin and how close so that is to the Catholic position. I think a good thing for our Catholic hearers and even our inquirers to hear is when it comes to infused knowledge, you're not infused like the entire contents of the internet

in every single experience. You're infused one idea, two ideas, 10 ideas, according to what God gives you, just because he gives you a really good knowledge of how many, to use Aquinas' example, how many grains of sand are at the bottom of the sea doesn't mean that you know what's going on in space. And so if Aquinas has infused knowledge about A, namely what to write about A, that doesn't

mean that he has infused knowledge about everything else in dogma. So we have to realize that infused knowledge is not like to have the entire content of the internet at your disposal. It is a very selective knowledge that is given by God. He could infuse quite a bit of knowledge, but we have no sort of meter by which we can detect how much infused knowledge about how many things that he acquired by divine private revelation. So in that sense every saint is ignorant to the extent in which he is not infused by knowledge and that probably varies according to

God's purposes as well as the holiness of the saint. Yeah fair enough. So why did Scotus get it right when Aquinas got it wrong? Was it merely because of his different understanding of biology and gestation? I think it had to do with something that we were actually discussing before the show and it has to do with that absolute primacy of Christ that you're talking about. Please explain that because that's fascinating for people to hear about I think. We tend to we naturally tend to think of history as as linear where you know Adam's the first guy Eve's the first girl and they have babies then we get to Jesus but

scholastics had an alternative way of thinking about history and that is what was God's first thought? So if I wanna make a pancake, I'm gonna be God right now. I'm making a divine pancake. It's gonna be great. Yeah, it's gonna be the best pancake of all possible pancakes. Well, actually that sounds a little Spinozian.

So it is a perfectly wonderful pancake though, nonetheless. And in this wonderful pancake, I have to have means to get to the pancake, which might be some batter, some milk, some eggs, and various other things. The final end is pancake. That's what I want. That's what's going to make, that's going to satisfy my taste buds. Well, that's how God looks at human history. He doesn't look at it as, I'm gonna make Adam, and then I'm gonna make Eve, and then I have like a bunch of babies, and then I'm gonna throw in Jesus. He's gonna say, I want to unite myself to my creation

as the standing miracle that will demonstrate my love for my own art, my own beauty that I've created. Why do I choose to do that? Because I can, I'm an artist. That's a sufficient reason in the Franciscan tradition. That freedom of being able to do a good thing because it's possible to do and be good and to love it. So God in His divine freedom chooses that He wants to unite Himself to His creation in this way. So what does He do? Well, if I'm going to get to a

pancake, if I want to get to Christ, I've imagined my pancake as So I'm starting to create a series of products and a series of plants and a universe surrounding the pancake the pancake so I can get to it the end in mine. Yeah the the first in The mind is the last in execution is the first in intention is the last in execution the first idea that Spurs me on to write my book is the last thing. I actually complete the book I have to use all this stuff to get to my book being complete So with God it's it's very similar is that the first thing in his mind is the incarnation

not a remedy for sin and that everything is designed around that. Now that tradition is actually the major tradition in the Greek East. One of our professors at St. Cyril Methodius Seminary, Byzantine Catholic Seminary, by the name of Father Bogdan Booker wrote an article published in a Harvard journal, Dumbart Notes, in which he goes over all the early fathers up until, I believe, the sixth century, who held for this idea of the absolute primacy of Christ. So we're seeing an East-West convergence here. Now, seeing an east-west convergence here. Now, Scotus's insight came from reading John Damascene, who was an Easterner, and perhaps some ways in which Bonaventure was thinking, who was inspired, among others, by reading Maximus the Confessor

in Latin translation. So we can see that through indirect roots the Franciscan tradition is taking up this very ancient eastern idea, whereas Thomas is not absolutely rejecting this. You'll see that there are very good scholarly articles on this. His whole point is if we simply isolate scripture and we say what does scripture deal with, it's almost always dealing with the incarnation from the perspective of a remedy for sin. So if we were to reason from scripture What we would end up finding is is that the best we can come up with is that it's 100% surely a remedy for sin the incarnation But is it necessarily diametrically opposed to the possibility of there being an absolute primacy of Christ?

The read the articles I've seen that study this question because I have not researched it myself come to the conclusion It is thinkable in some of Aquinas's statements But he simply doesn't embrace it in its totality because he's his thought experiment is purely Based off of scripture not based off of fathers and remember What are the fathers that the Franciscan tradition is using? Only indirect access. So there's not access in, let's say, Augustine or anything obvious in Dionysius. And the third most quoted by Aquinas, I believe, is St. John Damascene. It's not necessarily the case that Aquinas had either read the entire work of John Damascene. I'll leave that to a

Thomas scholar to tell me if he had access to that or only to portions that are mentioned in that that kind of bad catacled good mostly good but a little bit bad catacled catacled textbook that we call Lombard sentences so with with Aquinas his sources he he didn't have a lot to tell him that he should speculate maybe more in the Franciscan tradition. That was just the genius of Bonaventure that was taken up by Scotus. So both positions are entirely allowable by the church. Can I just simplify this for those at home? And it is a simplification so you can

nuance it more, but the Thomistic position is no sin, no Christ, because the point of Christ is to redeem us from sin. Got it. Whereas the Franciscan tradition is no sin, still Christ. Yeah. Still the incarnation. Still got it. Yeah. Because what's and I'm much more friendly towards the Franciscan tradition because it would seem that and maybe you were about to go into this

much more eloquently than I'm about to. But, you know, there are other benefits that came about through the incarnation that don't directly deal with sin. Right. Like theosis and becoming adopted children of God in a special sense. Again, feel free to correct me. Also having, you know, this person called Mary.

Yeah, like I've seen people actually say that if if there were no sin, like Mary, the mother of God actually wouldn't have existed. And you think, oh, that sounds like a impoverished world. Yeah, you've taken us full circle and you've gotten us back to, well, if Jesus is how do you get to a Jesus? Well, he has a belly button. So I guess he's going to need a mom. We're going to have to design that around him. Do you design a maculite mom or do you design an immaculate mom? Well, an immaculate one.

Well, does God take into account human free will in this universe that he's created around Christ. Yes Would there be in this plan any need to? In fact we use a metaphor though not quite accurate to deprive Mary of the same Justice the same grace in her soul as Christ would have because of the sin of Adam and Eve. There is no necessity. Why would it make sense for Mary to still be sinless, at least one person in the world to be sinless, and obviously the mother of the God man would make the most sense. Why does it make sense for her to be chosen?

Because if Jesus's grace is supremely powerful and it can be operative and effect, whatever it's designed to effect, would not the most impressive or the most powerful way in which grace would operate is to mediate so perfectly grace that not only does it cure original sin but even in at least one case it prevents it. And the idea is is that if there is a hot all forms of redemption are good but shouldn't a redeemer who has all-powerful and perfect grace be able to redeem at the highest and the best way? And what is the best way to redeem?

To prevent the contraction of original sin. And hence, in the primacy of Christ, to be a perfect mediator, to show that he can mediate perfectly, all grace, is to show that the same grace predestined at the beginning of the book of Ephesians of the saints before time is the same grace that Mary has, that that grace was never lost, but that God could preserve it through time, that he chose not to preserve it for most people. But Mary counts as an exception. We can argue theologically, if John Baptist is an exception, we can argue what the status of Enoch and Elijah are as individuals who did not undergo mortal death,

because Augustine himself is puzzled by this in his sermons. So we can see that if in the biblical conceptions, there are individuals who seem to be exceptions to the effects of original sin, death, Enoch and Elijah, to not having the Holy Spirit, if the Holy Spirit is something like original justice or sanctifying grace, that John the Baptist might be an exception, that there's no problem with exceptions. The question is, where do you find the most appropriate example of perfect mediation of grace and that would seem to

Be most obvious in the mother of the Redeemer himself So that's the way that the argument goes and then he simply comes up with answering objections to why? Scripture might get in the way of that and so he spends some time skodas. Yeah talking about that Right. So for example when she says Christ my Savior Mmm, sorry God my savior, that's not a problem because... Salvation from danger versus redemption from sin. So redemption, if we look at the Old Testament use of redemption for example, is your enslavery, right? Oftentimes physical, like Jacob to his father-in-law, I think right

Is that right? so Here we have somebody that is redeemed by an angel Lord from real physical slavery indentured servitude seven years. Yeah, so The Jethro no, yeah, you got it. Thank you. Yeah. So here we have an example of what redemption means. By analogy, this is applied to sin, is that we're under the slavery or the domination of the devil.

To be redeemed then is taken up by St. Paul in New Testament language as meaning devil. But if you actually look for the use of savior, savior is the most generic way in which you can be saved. You can be saved from external dangers, not falling off a cliff. You can be saved from an army. That doesn't mean that you have an intrinsic problem with being morally bad or an intrinsic problem with being morally weak. So saviors are used throughout scripture in a way which does not imply any sort of moral

debility, any weakness. Whereas redemption, when applied in the New Testament, is oftentimes redemption from something like slavery to the devil or internal conscientious sin. And so, okay, fair enough. So, Scodus has this idea that she was saved sort of not medicinally, but preemptively. Yeah, exactly. Excellent, yeah. Excellent. Yeah.

Can you help us understand why perhaps Catholics should be a little more interested in SCOTUS and why we're not? SCOTUS is major contributions tend to be in a Mariology. Of course, we've discussed that major one. course we've discussed that major one. Other advantages or contributions of SCOTUS aren't so much in any individual doctrine but that you have alternatives within Catholic Orthodoxy for thinking about both the world and puzzling about problems and I would include Bonaventure in that. And we've seen that the Magisterium has endorsed all three of them.

Paul VI endorsed SCOTUS most recently in the 1960s. Before that we have Pius X who on a local Franciscan level endorsed SCOTUS and Bonaventure. We see that the endorsements of course, Aquinas is primary. The Church's Magisterium of course, Aquinas is primary. The Church's Magisterium has really celebrated Aquinas for many, many understandable reasons, and then for some preferential reasons. So the understandable reasons are,

you actually have a collection of works that is compiled in the 16th century that prove more or less to be almost incontestable. There's a few of them that turned out to be not really Thomas's works. We have the solid body of literature that is a reliable reference point that makes sense that Aquinas is a good guy to pick if you're going to pick someone to endorse amongst the many saintly writers of the church. Secondly, we already had in the 19th century a grass roots movement to

Re-encounter Aquinas as a primary text his own writings not summaries of him textbooks about him to read Thomas as he wrote and to try to dialogue with modernity Answer modern-day problems by using the principles that he set down. That grassroots movement was eventually embraced by Leo XIII and it became really part of the congregation for education, became their kind of standard bearer and that's why like every school is named Thomas Aquinas. And so we get into the official magisterial promotion. Even for a time there was an attempt to

see if we could make everybody wear the same style hat, that maybe everybody would look better if they all wore the same hat, the Aquinas hat. The Jesuits, who are good guys in this tale, were resistant to that because they had their venerable Father Suarez. He was never sainted, but he was a ven a venerable the church and he had a love of Aquinas But he had nuances to Aquinas which he disagreed with That was really what kept that movement from going forward But there was also the Franciscan tradition which had had magisterial endorsement By many different popes on a on a very specific level for their educational institutions not for the church necessarily at large

but still admiring Bonaventure and SCOTUS, the orthodoxy of their thought, and the permissibility of teaching their system, even where you couldn't see eye to eye in the Dominican tradition. And so what you, I think the major advantage of looking at SCOTUS and Bonaventure is that you have a different perspective on looking at real world problems as well as abstract problems where a lot of people don't like this style of hat. We all come to the same conclusions when it comes to the essential dogmas. But it's really a question of does this style speak more to my we talked about spirituality to my intellectual way of puzzling and coming to solutions.

That's what I would say. That makes a lot of sense. So do you think then the Magisterium was imprudent in pressing Aquinas as much as they've, they have? To the exclusion of others? It's hard to judge what the church, I mean, I would really love to talk to maybe a church historian of the 19th century because what you have to take into account there is all the pressures of a church, which is losing any influence it has in the secular society. It's being thrown out of state constitutions.

The church is suffering closure after closure, property seizure after property seizure. They feel the impetus to have some sort of intellectual response to all this modern science stuff. And we have this stuff out there. Were they rather rigid and they even tried to impose in the Congregation of Education one hat for everybody? Yeah, could those have been imprudent? Sure.

We can all get exaggerated about our favorite team. We can all, you know, get a little hazing on others that don't think that our team is the best Whatever sport we do that with devotions again humans are weird if I were Christ I wouldn't have saved us But I'm not so I'm glad he did. Yeah. No, I mean it is it's with devotions, right? So if you're not praying this you don't have this green scapula. Yeah So so I think there is some of that historically going on but that has to do with all the non-saints that are embracing the system versus hopefully all the saints that are embracing whatever system.

We hope that the saints are the high-minded ones who are seeing the 1.3 billion to be saved and not just the initiated into this group. So yeah, I think that there was a tendency to be too stringent and the problem that you get with that is even if I'm giving you the best diet, you know, I've got, you know, all these veggies for you, all these fruits, and I'm telling you that things with trans fats are just evil and I'm really punching

every single button on you and just indoctrinating you and how evil they are, that doesn't work for everybody. Some people are, they wanna eat those trans fats now and when they taste them and they actually see that they actually are pretty good and you've been telling me how evil they are, you're not so believable anymore. Even if the trans fats really are inferior to any other kind of fat that you can consume

for your body health. So I think with the Thomas Aquinas project that the church engaged with in the early 20th century was giving everybody a great diet. But diets can be great objectively. That doesn't mean that every individual likes to, that's not a sustainable diet for me. Yeah, I like what you said about the different ways

of puzzling through to things. That made a lot sustainable diet for me. Yeah, I like what you said about the different ways of puzzling through to things. That made a lot of sense to me because I found myself sometimes gravitating towards more Franciscan thinkers and being like, this just rings true with me. I just like even when I look at say, I know, you know, both Aquinas, well, Aquinas is critical both of Anselm's ontological argument, as well as, you know, the sort of what's now been come to know as the Kalam argument. And yet those two just speak to me in a way that Aquinas's Five Ways don't, even if they're inferior.

Well, it's funny to say that I was teaching a philosophy of science course to a group of nuns and I had them read Aquinas's Five Ways and then I had them read Bonaventure's like 20 arguments or so and a lot of them felt kind of gushy and you know More like feeling and beautiful arguments and I said sisters These are nuns who by constitution are dedicated to Aquinas Aha and by constituting and are suspicious of SCOTUS. I said sisters tell me which ones you like best I was you know, we're they all love the the Bonaventure arguments from from beauty and various other things. Yes. So surprised. Yes. So surprised.

But that's me. I just find myself. It's sort of like going to a museum and somebody pointing at a legitimately beautiful piece of art and explaining it to you. Don't do you see it now? Do you see now why? And you're like, yeah, and you kind of feel like you should say yeah, but it's difficult. And then you see something else and you just gravitate towards it

for some subjective reason. And that is what I think. So did Bonaventure have a list of arguments for God's existence? You said 20 arguments. Yeah, this is my bad memory again. I don't know exactly how many arguments he provides. I wanna say that they are provided in his book

for those that are interested in it, that is on the Trinity. It's actually got quite a long title. But if you just look it up on his questions on the Trinity, he provides quite a few there, some that he adapts from Augustine, some of the traditional arguments that you find in Damascene that have been developed into Thomas's Five Ways

and whatnot. But yeah, he's got quite a few. Had Joseph Trabek, Dr. Joseph Trabek on the show several months back, and he's got like, he's writing something now where he's got at least 35 arguments for God's existence from Aquinas's writings alone. Wow. Yeah. And I know that Peter Kreeft, many years ago when I was in high school, put out the Summa the summa Yeah, he called it and just in a very abbreviated form in a footnote that took up like two pages He listed like 30 different arguments in summary. Yeah, the existence of God. So yeah

Yeah, so one of them was that there is the music of your hand Sebastian, but therefore God exists Do you have a favorite argument for God's existence? Uh, I found that SCOTUS is contingency argument is is the best for me which is we can reduce it to if essentially none of the products in the universe or By products, I mean things that can't account for their own existence. They had to have something that brought them about they had to have something that brought them about. If we all agree that there are products in the universe, then something had to produce them, which means that they're not eternal in and of themselves,

they're not something that was always and therefore could still always be. We have to admit that they can come into existence and go out of existence, and in fact, by nature they weren't in existence, but now they are, and that everything that I can possibly know about them with certainty means that they should be able not to exist. How do I account for there still being existent things since everything can potentially not exist and

by its own constitution is the kind of thing which tends not to exist. Is this given an infinite universe? Even, yeah, even if we were to say that the universe is somehow infinite in time, meaning there's matter moving, the question is... How do things which can go out after an infinite amount of time, whatever that means, go out of existence? How do they not go out of existence? If we can't actually argue that the matter itself demonstrates that it's indestructible, which we can't from modern physics or I would say from a philosophical physics point of view Then it looks like we're stuck with possible possibly and therefore after certain conditions are met

Certain destruction of this matter something has to account for keeping it going. And that has to be something that's not subject to the same conditions that the material universe is. That's what we call God, essentially. Now, Skodas' arguments are tortured and... What does that mean, just like... Premise after premise. We actually have quite a few experts

who have made very good contributions by uncovering the full premises behind every argument because sometimes he skips logical premises which are known within their university context that everybody knows but are unspoken. And so we actually have to figure out which assumption is being made in this premise because his argument which is 20 pages, his condensed would have been you know 40 pages if he had told us every single premise which wasn't already presumed by the university environment which was in yeah so I find his contingency argument the most convincing and I have no way of

overcoming it let's say yeah Yeah, oh, terrific. Back to Eastern Orthodoxy. So do you find that there is perhaps the Holy Spirit might be leading our Orthodox brothers and sisters into perhaps being more open to the church's teaching on the Immaculate Conception? Yeah, I think the word or the phrase sadly is the lightning rod.

If we were to use other language, is the Orthodox Church open to the all holiness of Mary during the entirety of her existence? Sure. Yeah, funny, isn't it? Yeah. Now, when it comes to the Maccabees Conception, what are they arguing against with the Roman Catholic Church?

Historically, in 1848, I'm sorry, after the 1854 proclamation, what the Eastern Patriarchs were arguing against was the usurpation of imposing a dogma without basically the entire church. I see, yeah. So that's a bit different perspective, and there's something to be said for getting everybody on board first.

Do you think that if the church defined Mary as co-mediatrix that would further divide Orthodox? I think so. And so that might be a good way. Benedict. In fact, one of the most popular names in the liturgical rights of the Eastern Orthodox, i.e. Eastern Catholic Church, is mesitis, which is mediatrics. There's a couple other terms that are used as well, but if it were defined, I would expect a walking back

of any sort of embrace of that. It's sort of like saying, can you reject basically every other Marian hymn, calling Mary a mediatrix, and still be Orthodox? I would think the answer would be no since the liturgy is, as Father Schmeman called it, the locus theologicus par excellence. So it's a, as you and I might go to the Constitution

to argue out what is right and wrong legally in our country, that's a locus, that's a place we go to for authoritative arguments, the Constitution for American law In a very similar way a place that we go to as Orthodox to argue what's good and bad in religion is the liturgy So she's there as mediatrics, but I tend to think if there was a unilateral declaration of Mediatrics we would see some as Father Schmemen the Orthodox theologian of St. Vladimir's called it, an anti-Roman reflex.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sometimes, I mean, I've got four kids and I've learned that it's not helpful to tell your child to do something which you know he either can't do or won't do. You would rather give him something he can and will do so that he can be faithful to you. But if I exceed his ability, given his tiredness or what have you, then I'm sort of putting him in a position where I know he will be disobedient.

And so perhaps is the pastoral and more prudent thing to just sort of wait. Yeah, yeah, I think that that's, it's a perfectly fine comparison because I think that what we get into is if we actually look at the history of the debate, what we find is before the well-known 1854 definition, when the universities were still arguing the question with less freedom after the 1400s, you find that all the Palomites or the Orthodox who are now celebrated as saints saints or reverential writers in Byzantium from let's say 1348 to 1453,

all of them, without exception, embrace some form of what we call immaculatism. They refused to accept what was then the Dominican line, which is there's some sense in which Mary is not holy at her first moment of her existence. And then what we see as Martin Gigi, a French scholar, an assumptionist, meticulously documented in a book that sadly has not been translated into English, a beautiful French book.

He was a very opinionated man, but on Mariology he was like a softie. So he's actually very nice to the Orthodox Church on Mariology. And there he cataloged all the Orthodox opinions that he could come across in print, and even in manuscripts, meaning non-printed handwritten stuff,

up until modern times. And you basically see that Orthodox were in the same position. Some of them were pro-theologians, some of them against. There were some local authorities that defended it, and there were some that did not. They were very much in the same debate world as the Latin church was. as the Latin church was. But then you see after the 1854 proclamation that the official sort of correcting of Pope Pius IX for being haughty in doing something that pretends to speak for Christianity

instead of having all the Orthodox churches first unified and then coming together, let's say conciliarily in doing it from their perspective, is that we see an increasing interest in the doctrine, and then an ever increasing reaction against the doctrine. And basically, there was no unified response as to what the particular problem was, so you would see like Bogatkov,

who might say that Mary's not human if she's not sinful in some way, but you don't see that argument used anymore. You see more the original sin brings death argument and because Mary died she therefore was an original sin. But the question about that argument is although Orthodox theologians are completely free to talk about original sin in more speculative ways, they don't have a Council of Trent, which very specifically tells us that original sin is about the privation of a spiritual reality, which is called original justice from the soul at the soul's first moment of its existence or creation by God. Adam and Eve were created with a spiritual reality called original justice. It was in their soul.

It was communication with the Holy Spirit and that that communication is no longer the case after the fall from all the in all the progeny of Adam and Eve as God himself decreed not because human beings like a cracker have the ability to like do stuff with grace but rather decree of God of the supernatural reality, what would happen to it. So with that precision, we do see that in the Orthodox world, something like that happened in 1672

at the Council of Jerusalem, where they were reacting against Protestant theories of justification. And by and large, any Catholic would be comfortable with their idea of justification. The reason why that council's being neglected when it's a place where Catholicism and orthodoxy could see eye to eye on the macro conception probably has more to do with Schmiemann's observation of the anti-Roman

reflex. And my final thought on that is the Great and Holy Council of Crete, which recently was convoked with all the participating Orthodox churches, most of the jurisdictions were present, not necessarily representing a majority of the Orthodox population. It was 2014 maybe, and in that Holy and Great Council of Crete, that 1672 Jerusalem Council, which has a justification theory very much like the Council of Trents, was reaffirmed. So at least we see that modern orthodoxy is reaffirming its embrace in many places of where we are similar, which means that we could be working officially towards restoring the Council of Jerusalem to its proper

place in orthodoxy as orthodox determined for themselves and thus being able to speak once again the same original sin language and to stop saying that original sin is defined only as death if in fact the Council of Jerusalem wants to talk about it being a lack of justification. And that would place us on track to say a maculacanception with the same meaning. That is fascinating. Yeah. Ah, thank you so much. We're going to take a break and then when we come back, I've got some powerful questions here from our

supporters on orthodoxy, Catholicism stuff. Okay. Sure. Sound good. Yeah. All right. And we're back before I look at these comments and questions for father. I want to say thank you to Hello, who is a sponsor of this show.

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All right. We got some questions here. Feel free to think of this as a lightning round. It's going to be difficult to give a full, encompassing answers to some of these, I'm sure. Sophie Carpenter says, Can you explain the reasoning why Eastern priests can be married? I can only assume it's hard to live out both vocations. Well, are you married? No, okay, so the Eastern practice and the Western practice are basically from the same origins You you won't find

To my knowledge you won't find Western scholarship that denies that Western priests were married that denies that Western priests were married and that Western popes even had children, the question is always not about marriage, but whether or not when a priest is married, does he, after he is married, does he live his brother and sister with his wife? That's the classical scholarly question. What we're not used to in the Western church is,

it's kind of hard to keep tabs on whether or not a married priest is living as brother and sister unless something rather obvious happens like a swollen belly and a sister, right? So regardless of where you fall in the historical debate, which I'm not going to settle today, one position says they did live universally as brothers and sisters. The other side of the historical debate says if you actually look at the historical literature you'll find that it was a creeping idea that happened let's say in North Africa around the fourth century and then it and then it's celibacy yeah the idea of celibacy meaning living as

brother and sister with your wife and in fact eventually just getting rid of the whole ability to marry. So from our perspective today we know it's very unusual to find a Western right priest, a Latin priest that has been married or is married. They do exist, married Roman Catholic priests. Father Dwight Longinecker would be an example who's quite a popular priest, I think, from South Carolina. So they're exceptional. They're, the apostolic see has to be involved,

it's for very peculiar circumstances, oftentimes because someone is coming over from a different Christian religion, religious confession. But we actually frame the debate wrong nowadays. The debate is not whether or not priests can be married or not. The question is, do permanent deacons, which exist in the Western Church, do they have the ability to have marital relations with their wives? Do... it's the same problem right now. The code of canon law in the Western Church has married major clerics.

The debate should be, does that deacon to apply the Latin Church's own historical questions, does that married deacon have the ability to have marital relations with his wife or not? The current code of canon law has married deacons. You have married major clergy in the Western Church. That was the question. It's not the question of whether or not

you have married priests. It's all individuals in major orders. So for example, if you were go to the Fraternity of St. Peter, they were very proud of the fact that they had subdeaconate and in their subdeaconate they had to take the promise of celibacy and in the Pre-Vatican II Church the subdeaconate was called a major order. Hence, can you have married subdeacons? That would be a question that would have been debated in the Western Church. So it does sound like the question is relevant today but it's

actually not. The question is what's the historical truth? Did priests only live as brothers and sisters with their wives or did they not? And if we go to Benedict the 14th who issued a statement to the Latin clergy who were rumbling about this in the 18th century, Benedict XIV said, look, it's a matter of mere discipline, stop arguing about it. That was his response in the 18th century. Now, does that settle the debate? Well, clearly not, because we're here debating it, right? So, but that's the official Roman response. It's a pure matter of discipline of discipline now if you look for something that wants to claim that it's More than a matter of discipline. I'm open to that. Maybe I haven't found something but that's the only official Documental that's the only position I saw why is it a meritorious?

discipline There are many practical reasons, but there's also because the Eastern Church and the Western Church value celibacy for the kingdom of God Many priests that serve in the Eastern Church Elect not to be married even though they can be why because they see it as Dedicating their virginity or their celibacy as a meritorious act of God. The monastic tradition, which is almost the only religious orders that are represented historically in the Eastern churches, monastics, tons of monasteries, perhaps many more monks

than exist in the 1.3 billion strong Catholic church, even nowadays and just in the Orthodox church. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more monks than we do. They're all celibate. So there's not an issue between the Eastern and Western churches of the value of celibacy, the spiritual benefits of celibacy, the preferential option of celibacy. There's only a question of the historical issue of whether or not priests must live as brothers and

sisters and deacons and subdeacons must live as brothers and sisters as an apostolic practice, and the church has refused to give a magisterial statement on it. I see. And my understanding is that those deacons today in the United States Western Church have to get a dispensation from Rome in order to live as married men and wife. There is a documentation they go to to live as husband and wife. What's interesting is, I don't want to get into this can of worms too much, they do live as husband and wife, but there have been some that have tried to push the code to say there's no explicit allowance for marital relations,

and therefore technically they want to push that they shouldn't have marital relations. I think that they should have thought about that kind of before they started doing it. That would have been a good idea. Yeah, I think that they should have thought about that kind of before they started This point yeah, I think that would have been a really good discussion to have before Okay so the Practice is is that they're not asked to do that and I know that people may feel very strongly about this and you're allowed to Feel in our church very strongly about this and you're allowed to argue for it

And you're allowed to say that this is the way it should be and All you have to do is produce the evidence that nobody will Controvert you on very good Ajay Kala says as a Protestant convert to Catholicism a question I would love input on is what the church teaches about ecumenism It seems from the orthodox writers I've read that ecumenism can lead to relativism modernism and a disregard for Christ's teaching. Could you both comment on how can we better navigate acknowledging the truth and also God's mercy to those outside his visible church, thanks and God bless? There is the, a rather famous document in traditional

circles known as Mortalia Manimus of Pius XI, and his exact arguments are just what was mentioned by your inquirer. And in fact, I think it's in Redemptor Hominis that Pope John Paul II, when he is dealing with the churches, what he calls it's in contra... I want to say it's an exact quote, is in our incontrovertible commitment to ecumenism. He acknowledges that there are certain groups within the church that are critical of it because it could lead to pluralism and Relativism and he allows those voices to continue. So what is John Paul the second being a magisterial opinion on this? What does he claim? You're allowed to

question moments of pluralism moments of weakening the faith because ultimately ecumenism isn't a defined thing like we might define a triangle. We can have a mathematical precision with a triangle. Ecumenism, like many things in sociology and psychology and farming and the hard sciences, has an approximated definition that is based off of

more or less what can we do with someone else and still be good Catholics. Those situations can admit of such variations. When you're in a concentration camp, is it as important to worry about whether or not the individual that's asking to receive communion is asking under all the conditions of canon law. Historically the answer has been no. And I don't think that they're wrong for welcoming that person, in my sense would be, is that they're trying to be Christians together.

Those conditions are not the ordinary conditions that Kahnon-Lahl perceives. And in many other examples that we could give then, it would be something like this. What in the American context is conducive to the faith spreading versus watering down the faith? We have to make our best guess. black and white would work wonderful if we were a little geometric figures maybe in the metaverse But look about that. Yeah, did you yeah, I've read it. What's a good? No, this is Facebook and I saw some articles on it that Yes flatland, yeah, so if we live in a geometrical universe We can give perfect definitions of things everything else is left to the church's prudence That is so helpful to say.

And the church might be totally wrong in the United States or on the universal level about what is going to win the most souls in 2020. But you know what? It might hit the spot in 2022. And we have to be tolerant of the fact that you can't have a business model that doesn't adjust in the real world on non-dogmatic issues, as if we're geometric figures that are always going to have the same products by just plugging in the meat, we're going to get sausages come out.

We don't live in that kind of geometric universe. That is so helpful. Thank you. Matthew says, what are some things I can pray for or do specifically that would help build unity between Catholic and Orthodox? I know the issues of separation differences and I sometimes I just don't get it. I think the East and West could be unified, humility and love. The thing to do right now would be to look at your local Orthodox churches and probably

especially your Ukrainian churches, which are having joint services like they've never had before. To go to some of those joint services, which they're not violating the codes of canons for the Eastern churches by and large. What's happening is they show up to one or the other church, and the proper celebrant of that church, whether Orthodox or Catholic,

celebrates evening prayer together, or some other service. And everyone else is there praying that entirely Catholic service to the same God, and the Church has acknowledged the means of grace that exist in that Orthodox Church. And there is no communicatio, as they say in sacri, in the sense in which it's taken in in the 1983 Code of Canon Law which means we're not receiving communion at one another's churches without seeking the proper permissions and dispositions but we are contributing to the unity of the churches I think that sadly it's the war that's bringing some Orthodox and Catholics together to realize that the main, you have to say the pars sanior, the wiser

part of the Orthodox Church is seeing the scandal of certain ideologies and is seeing that one of the driving things of these extreme ideologies that has affected the Orthodox Church has been anti-uniate rhetoric. Very much a hatred against uniates. There's a lot of that on YouTube. Yeah. And that a lot of the liquidation of the so-called uniate churches, the Eastern

churches, that we can anticipate, let's say, in a successful conquering of Ukraine is also something that many other Orthodox churches could anticipate having now to suffer because of their situation vis-a-vis the Moscow Patriarchate. So I think that those things cause further reflections and help us identify no longer with the aggressor, but with the victim.

This came out from Catholic News Agency yesterday, I don't know if you saw it, Ukrainian Orthodox Church declares its full independence. Do you see this? Yeah. What does this mean? Whereas the, we'll call it Moscow Patriarchate, the patriarchate that is faithful to its ties juridically to the Moscow Church, was diocese by diocese and priest by priest they had stopped naming Patriarch Kirill in the canon of their mass like we named the Pope. Well now it's gone more formal before that was just we're emitting his name

Some of the scholars in Ukrainian Orthodox he had mentioned this is not really a big deal This is actually happened historically in Ukraine prior because it's very politically divisive depending on where you are in the country to commemorate the patriarchal or not. But now it's moved into a formal step of cutting ties legally. Now that may lead to a greater possibility of that ex-Moscow Patriarchate Church falling voluntarily under the Patriarch of Constantinople, which is the newly

unified Ukrainian, exclusively Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which of course sees the Uniate or the Ukrainian Catholic Church not as an enemy, at least from my experiences of Ukrainian clergy, they don't report to me that that church sees them as an enemy. And so what we could probably expect is a Ukrainian Orthodox independent church under the constant Neapolitan or Istanbul Patriarchate, which is going to be ever stronger, provided that of of course,

Ukraine defends its sovereignty successfully. And perhaps a lot better relations between Slav Christians numerically than they've had in the last probably 10 or 20 years. Thanks. Tony says, why are Orthodox churches defined by ethnicity? This has been a problem that the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate has actually addressed, which it has condemned as ethno-filetism. The Patriarch of Constantinople has worked very, very hard to try to get churches of whatever place and whatever

position geographically to see the church as one holy and Catholic and therefore to welcome anyone regardless of of race or Linguistic background there they quite frankly admit that in some countries that's only been of moderate success One of the reasons why is in many cases the actual outlines of a country that has set that by and large shares the same culture also shares the same religion. So it's very easy for nationalism to get tangled up when your cultural borders and your political borders are the same and then all the people in that cultural political border over the same religion

The Catholic Church in different places and at different times has had this problem Perhaps the best way for us to sympathize with this problem Would be in our boroughs in New York and you can't get the Portuguese to go to the Brazilian mass because they're Brazilians same language to go to the Brazilian mass because they're Brazilians. Same language, arguably the same blood, I mean I'm sure that they wouldn't like me to say that, but the same blood lines are contributing to the Brazilian population. The same political history for many years, but you can't get them to go to each other's church. You can't get, let's say, a certain Hispanic clergyman who is of this nation to be over this nation because they don't accept people from that country. You

can't get these particular Hispanics to go to that particular Hispanic church. I'm not saying that this is peculiar to the to the ethnicities I've just mentioned. Polish and Irish were famous for not getting along. So in those cases, would we say that that wasn't a case of ethno-national issues? I think we would have to admit that the United States Church struggled with this, that we were successful as a melting pot. That's a really...

That's so helpful that we be sympathetic to our Orthodox brothers and sisters by coming up with an analogy like that that rings true to us. Yeah, and in some places they still feel this very much to our Orthodox brothers and sisters by coming up with an analogy like that that Rinks true to us. Yeah, and in some places they still feel this very much If you go to the right places in New York and you go to the right places in New Jersey Yeah, they feel the with these combined parishes because the lack of clergy It's the problem is more that they don't want to spend time with those same linguistic people who aren't the same nation Yeah, yeah, so we we may not have the degree of challenge that they have,

but we have historically known this challenge in greater or lesser degrees. And then if we go back historically to kings who identify a church as being their own and opposing the Holy See, we see that we've had our own issues. Yeah. Yeah. Drew asks, how do Eastern Orthodox interpret Matthew 16, 18 through 19? I think that when we talk about Eastern Orthodox, we want to say, do we, are we talking about 16 autocephalous churches coming together and giving us an official reading? I don't think we're going to find that if we want to talk about lesser level, do we have individual autocephalous churches,

of which I'm aware, making a declaration on Matthew 16 and 18 in a sort of what we would call a magisterial way? And I would say I'm not aware of that. If we talk about whether or not there are experts on the Catholic Orthodox Theological Commission who are in fact bishops or leaders of their church, they do have some opinions on that and they try to be by and large faithful to their tradition and I'm actually getting ready to publish a book on this if I ever finish the last chapter and basically that tradition comes to what did the Greek fathers by and large say about Matthew in 1618 and one of the problems I actually ran into in the book, so this is maybe trying to, you know,

prepare you to purchase for me my next Ford sedan. I'll never get a Lamborghini out of this book. So maybe, what we find is, is that the Greek version of the text is actually less tied is actually less tied to the Old Testament in Greek, because the Old Testament Greek text that Jesus is quoting is a Hebrew text. So when Jesus is saying, I give you these keys, Peter, he's quoting Isaiah 22,

but Jesus is quoting a Hebrew text which very much matches up with this. That's no surprise, Jesus is quoting a Hebrew text. The problem is that instead of quoting the same Hebrew text that Jesus used, the Greek church was like, hey, we got this nice Reader's Digest version of Isaiah. And the Reader's Digest version of Isaiah doesn't have all the nuances that the Hebrew text has. Who got the Hebrew text has. Who got the Hebrew text almost literally right? The Latin Church. So you see a lot more Latin fathers who are really keyed in to all the implications of

Matthew 16, 18, but that's not to say that there weren't these other translations that were floating around in Greek, which I actually document, that people like Theodoret of Cyrus and some others had access to. So there's a minor in Greek, which I have to nuance that a little bit because we don't read Old Testament and Byzantine liturgical services, but for the, for Vespers, let's say, the Isaiah that's read at Vespers, I should have said Divine Liturgy, for the Isaiah that's read at Vespers, that is a reader's digest version of Isaiah. It's not a literal word-for-word translation like we're used to with, let's say, the Pentateuch, which was translated into Greek, the first five books of the Bible, of Moses.

So what we get is, is that we have two different traditions of thinking about Peter as the rock. We have one which is less emphatic about Peter and the Pope of Rome, and that's because of the Greek text that the fathers have access to, whereas the Latin text and all of the traditions, the Jewish traditions that go behind that, I think there's more access in the West. My prejudice is usually to believe that the Orthodox East has the best access to what the early church's teachings are because it's the closest In its writing and heritage to the Greek New Testament

This is actually one of those cases where I was led in the research to understand that the Greek Church had less access than the Latin Church did to the tradition. Hmm Thank you final question and then we'll definitely plug some books so you can get another Ford. What? Ah, yeah. What was your Ford? You said you get enough money. Oh, my Ford sedan. So we're going to at least at least get you like an oil change from this.

From these book promotions. And the final question is, what could Latin Catholics learn from Eastern Catholics? And what can Eastern Catholics learn from Eastern Catholics and what can Eastern Catholics learn from Latin Catholics? The biggest thing that Western Catholics could learn from Eastern Catholics is an appreciation for the entire liturgical expression of their church. How many churches would benefit from public recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours? Beautiful, beautiful custom. Imagine going on a Wednesday night, not for mass and your fish fry, because the mass has been offered in the morning, but rather instead of having to have a second mass

and place that burden on the priest, the priest has to pay his liturgy the hours anyway, is he sings in Gregorian melody, fine in English, fine in Latin, the entire Vespers, and you're all singing the hymns along with him and you know it, and then you go for your fish fry. That is, I think, and you'll see the occasional parish, the Anglicans, the Anglican, the Anglo-Catholics have done a good job of bringing in some places their Vespers in. That's something that we could really resurrect in the West from the Eastern example is that if a Byzantine priest has to choose in some parishes between Mass and Vespers, depending on the pastoral benefit, he'll choose Vespers.

That's unthinkable for us. But there could actually be occasions in which Liturgy of the Hours brings more people together or has more benefit from the disposition of the individuals, not from the objective value of the sacrament itself, in being celebrated preferentially. And that's not to say we have to put them together, you could have both. How many priests were trained in seminary to have Liturgy of the Hours combined with their morning Mass? Liturgy of the Hours combined with their evening Mass? To actually find a way to be pastorally effective where people aren't looking at their watches for the extra 15 minutes that

that would do, so that your 20 minute daily liturgy, I hope it's that long, becomes 35 minutes. Is that really worth it? And I would say the answer is yes. And the Eastern Church, what can it learn from the Western Church? Nothing. All right. To be quite honest, the question has already been answered because the Eastern Church, by and large, absorbed wholesale anything from doctrine to culture to even sadly against the Holy See's own wishes many times, liturgy over the last 500 years especially. There's a lot that the Eastern churches have already gathered. I don't think that the Eastern churches need to learn from the Western church because they have learned from the Western

church. And even somebody as pugnacious as a very famous guy by the name of Father Robert Taft can talk about the virtues of approaching liturgy from a Western perspective and he can talk about two benefits of comparing Eastern and Western liturgies and that the Eastern liturgies in many ways are innovative and the Western liturgies are actually very conservative. So I think that the answer is that the Eastern churches have been learning for the last 500 years.

It's John Paul II who's really put his pulse on it that Leo XIII's call for us to learn from the Christianese needs to have the rubber meet the road and that his encyclical on breathing famously from the two lungs has yet to be instantiated in a more visible way by the Western churches really appreciating things like the acathist. Yeah. And those sorts of things. What a glorious prayer. I'd recommend everyone go check out Acathist to the Most Holy Theotokos.

Print it out. Read it before you know how to chant it. It is absolutely one of the most beautiful poems to our lady. You have a book called The Immaculate Conception, which is how I first heard of you. Father Jason put me onto it. I've put a link already, I think, Neil, in the description to it. So why should people check that out and where can they learn more about you? That book is worthwhile checking out because it is an ironic or peaceful dialogue between

both traditions. Many of the topics that we touched on Thomas Aquinas, where Thomas Aquinas is gently shown why he came to the conclusions he did, but without needing to inculpate him, make him feel guilty about his situation. But also showing how the Eastern and the Western traditions still culminated in that university environment and managed to get past the Eastern- Eastern Western rhetoric that is 19th century, 20th century, 21st century and get back to a common language that was spoken by the Fathers where we essentially agree on Mary's all holiness. And do you have any way you post online or a blog or anything like that?

I have an academia.edu page and you can find the first, because the book is out of print sadly, you can find the first half of the book that I've offered for free. I hope Academy of the Immaculate won't hurt me as a result of putting only half of the book on there because it is out of print. A more accessible book, which I really think people would enjoy more, would be an entire discussion of

Mary in the New Testament and showing how all the Catholic Church's positions on Mary can be elucidated by Scripture, including perpetual virginity. Is this your book? Yeah. What's it called? Mary Among the Evangelists. Do you mind, Neil? Yeah. Mary Among the Evangelists. Is that from the Immaculate no, it's actually William and I published it privately And I'm actually most proud of that book I mean I've I've been very fortunate that my education the support that I have from the church has led to me Having a lot of scholarly opportunities to publish books And articles that are certainly get up there exactly a hundred but maybe in to publish books and articles that are

starting to get up there, not exactly a hundred, but maybe in the 50s and that kind of thing. And of course I feel really good that legitimate presses, Oxford University Press, and these sorts of things have published things I've done, but the proudest book I have is not those, it's the Mary Book. It's wonderful. Yeah, it was a labor of love. And it's been so successful. Well, we have you mentioned, William, we have William. He'll be doing a debate on this channel coming up soon on The Assumption of Mary. So I'd like to invite everybody who's watching right now to please click

subscribe and that bell button, even though we've got like 230,000 subscribers. I think the majority of people who watch this show aren't subscribed. So that would help if you would click subscribe, smash the bell button. And then I always do this when we ever do these long ones. Whenever we do these long form discussions, I always want to see who actually watched to the end. And so the way I will know that because at this point, for goodness sake, three hours, if you're still with me and you haven't subscribed, seriously, I want you to write,

Duns Scotus rocks my socks in the comments section below. And that will tell me that you've watched these three hours. Had to think of it on the spot. It could have been much better, but that's as best. Well, God bless you, father. And thank you for taking the time to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah.