Pints With Aquinas - Getting Arrested for White Supremacy, Hilaire Belloc, Special Needs Children w/ Joseph Pearce

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Joseph Pearce is a renowned Catholic author, editor, and speaker. Once a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement in the UK, Pearce experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism while in Prison, which transformed his life and work. He is now dedicated to exploring Christian themes in literature and promoting faith and culture. Pearce serves as the Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College and is a sought-after speaker at international events. Show Sponsors: Strive21: https://strive21.com/matt Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  

Hey guys, it takes a lot of money to keep this podcast going. Please consider supporting us at matfrad.locals.com. When you become an annual supporter, we will send you a free Pints with Aquinas Beerstein. Just pay shipping. You also get to interact with me on my exclusive stream for my supporters over at matfrad.locals.com. Thanks. It's funny, these conversations. What I love about Pints is it's just a casual conversation.

Yeah. which is like I've floated with the idea of like not allowing you to talk to me before we click record because all these little things are like You know, I would never do that. No, sorry can't speak wait Look to schkuman anina Lutuska mananina. Didn't make that noise, but okay. No. Say when. New 50-kilo never last.

All right, Joseph, g'day. G'day. Great to have you back on. It's good to be back on. Thanks for having me. Christopher Chek said no one will understand this conversation. Exactly. The Aussie and the Cockney together.

God help us all, right? Yeah. The Cockney's closer to the Aussie, isn't it? Well, actually, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if I was Australian, I would actually be a rich man. I'd have fifteen dollars. I think to American ears, the London accent, the Cockney accent sounds similar to the Australian accent. I can see phonetics. Because it's sort of like a rough blue color. Like when they want a blue collar person to play in a BBC series it's the Cockney accent. Yeah, or even worse it's the accent that the Orcs use in Lord of the Rings.

Wow. Yeah, I don't know. Do I sound Australian anymore? I don't know. You sound Australian, thanks be to God. I love your accent. When I go back I sound very Australian. You give me two hours. Oh, you pick it up. Or if I have a few beers, yeah go back, I sound very Australian. You give me two hours of an Aussie. Oh, you pick it up? Or if I have a few beers, yeah. Yeah, really. What about you?

Well, my theory is that if you can't mimic, and I can't, you just keep your accent. So if you ask me to do an American accent, I couldn't do it. So I've been here for 23 years, and I haven't lost my English accent because I can't do other accents. If I could, I'd lose it.

So I'm guessing you can, because if you pick your Aussie, back up straight away. I'm guessing you can mimic other accents fairly easily. Oh, I see. That's interesting. Yeah, that's my theory, because I can't. I don't have that gift, I don't have that ability, and so that's why I've still got the same accent. I mean, it's not exactly the same. It probably sounds a little bit weird when I go back to England, because I came here to teach, you know, and I need to be understood. So I spoke more slowly than I would do normally. I made a point of trying to pronounce my T's and my H's

because cockneys don't, you say ouce, not house, water, not water. So I try to smooth off the rough edges, not because I was ashamed of my accent, because I needed to be understood. You're teaching and trying to communicate, right? So I'm a writer, you're writing, it doesn't matter, but when you're actually speaking, it's important.

So I've got a softer accent than I had when I arrived. Now you're a literary man, you've published books on lofty kind of topics. Were you ever tempted to change the accent to make it a bit more refined because of your pride and arrogance? Emphatically not. And with my background, two prison sentences, I think it'd be rather preposterous to try to pretend to be, tend to be something I'm not. So it is something people, including myself, especially in the past, I remember I started pints with Aquinas. I remember just that fear, like, I actually don't know what the hell I'm talking about. The deeper I get into this, you know, I'm not a termist. I'm have a master's in philosophy. I know a few things. I'm not an idiot, but I'm not brilliant. And I think in the

beginning, it was tough for me, but then I got to a point where it was just so much easier to be honest. Yeah, and I also think, you know, that first of all that if you're willing to read and willing to learn, you don't have to go have jumped through all the academic hoops to know what you're talking about. In actual fact, there's a certain type of academic. They always say there are two things necessary for teaching

to know what you're talking about and to be able to communicate what you know. And there's many lots of academics out there that know what they're talking about, but they can't communicate it. And if you can't communicate it, you might be able to write a book, but you can't teach. Tim Staples said that when he was hiring me

at Catholic Answers. He said, like, I because I had I had not one day in university when I was hired by them. And I think they were like, OK, we need to fix this, maybe just for appearances. I don't know. But he said we'd much rather have someone who can communicate now and learn as opposed to someone who's very learned, but can't communicate. Exactly. That's that spot on. I would pursue that as well. Jimmy Akin's like this.

So Jimmy, he shared openly that in order to be taken more seriously, he kind of communicate. Exactly that's that spot on I would pursue that as well. Jimmy Akin's like this so Jimmy he shared openly that in order to be taken more seriously he kind of kind of dropped the southern accent a little bit and even changed his name to James Akin and then he realized really quickly none of that matters. Yeah yeah an actual fact but be honest with you my favorite American accent is the southern accent. I love it. It reminds me of the rural rust rustic English accent. You know, the countryside accents, they're not rushed. And they're not melting pot ugly, you know, where you got all the different inputs of different slang from different cultures.

You know, there's this sort of sing song of purity about it, which I love. So I love the Southern accent. I mean, if people would try to lose it, I don't really understand why, you know. I like it. That's funny. I wonder if that's a foreign thing, because it has a bit of a stigma in America, unfortunately, and I

always get quite offended on their behalf when they try to make the southerner seem like the dunce when we all know it's the kind of, yeah, it's the aristocratic people on the edges of the country. And it's ironic, of course, because I said the same thing in England, you know, the cockney accent over here, people think my accent is cute and quaint. Over there there they think you're cockney from the east end of London right it doesn't there's very the English is very sort of hierarchical in its class consciousness so you know it over there my accents are a handicap over here people like it yeah the southern accent is my favorite my friend

John Henry says he loves it when people sound like they're from somewhere Yeah, exactly precisely. You know what generic American whatever that is You know I was disappointed a little bit when I was in Europe for the last six months because every big city I went to all over Europe and I traveled every weekend to a different country to preach I realized that I can get away with English in the big cities Yeah, and that was helpful, but it was disappointing. I know. And it made me wonder in 50 years from now,

maybe when my grandkids are going to Europe, will they even need to bother learning German or Italian, even in the smaller places? And and then the thing I'm driving at, the thing I want to get you to talk about is, you know, how tied up a people's culture is with their dress, with their speech, with their songs. And now it feels like just like England once kind of colonialised a lot of the world, now America is doing that through their lack of culture, perhaps. So that everyone dressed like Americans, we listen to the American music, we speak English. Yeah, I think that it is the danger of globalization, globalism.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the individual nations of Europe are like beautiful flowers in the gardens of God, and we're replacing that beautiful garden, all those beautiful different flowers, all unique and have their own beauty, with a monoculture. You know, a single wheat field speaking the same language badly, wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, mostly bad. So we've replaced this authentic multiculturalism of all these different nations and cultures with a dumbed down, lowest common denominator monoculture, globalism. And really really I'm in favor of people resisting that, and that must include, by the way, the preservation of local languages. For instance, in my, I'm now the United Kingdom, I love the efforts to keep the Welsh language alive and the Scots

Gaelic and the Irish Gaelic languages alive, because it's very important for the authenticity of that nation as a unique entity, rather than something just to be subsumed within Great Britain and in the world, you know. Yeah, I wonder all these things I just mentioned, right, so like a country's literature including their poetry, their dress, their language, how much of all of that is sort of like a seamless thread or seamless garment? Like once you attack one of them, a seamless thread or seamless garment, like once you attack one of them, do the rest fall? Or is it possible to maintain one's language while giving up one's dress and, you know, entertainment things like that? Or is it kind of once you adopt one of these things, the rest will fall? I think there's an integrity and an entirety and a wholism about the whole. So when you start tampering with it, you're weakening

not just that part, but the whole. So you do have to try to preserve all that which is authentic. I mean, Tolkien, I mean, the whole idea of the Shia, right, the local culture being very intent on preserving itself against encroachments from outside. And you know, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have them. I believe in the great books. I thank God. I can't speak Italian. I wish I could. But I thank God people translated Dante into English. So I don't believe in isolationism from Christendom and the wider culture of civilization. But I do think we don't want a monoculture,

because you know, none of these things would be able to exist. We'd all be speaking the same mundane, lowbrow, badly articulated nonsense. I'd rather have to either learn other languages to access this literature, or thank God for good translators that make those things accessible to me, rather than a having, forgetting all those different languages and just being mundane and lowbrow. It seems to me though that you can have pockets of people resisting all you want. I used to live in the Gael Turk in Ireland, where they're keeping the Irish language alive. I used to live by Quebec, where they're kind of violently defending their language and good for them.

But it seems to me like there's no hope. This is a tsunami and it's just going to happen. There's no way there's no way with I mean, like in England, what I found interesting or Ireland is you drive an hour and you've got different accents. Yes. So that says to me that when people live long enough in an area, those things will evolve in In Australia, you don't see that as much, right? Because we haven't been there as long. In Africa, I remember being in Uganda and my fellow friend and evangelist Dennis was driving me around. He's saying

he can tell where women and men are from based on their physiognomy. So I just, I would like to believe that we can kind of resist, we can maintain our cultures. I think with the internet and with the speed of entertainment, it just won't happen. I think, I think that yes and no, I mean, certainly you can't resist things that are much too powerful to resist. But you know, we're living in an accelerated time. Acceleration is unstable, so either things have to slow down or they crash. So what will emerge from that will be something which is healthier than globalism. It won't be the same pure thing that hasn't experienced globalism.

Right? A whole different history. So I'll give you an example. I have a nostalgia for Anglo-Saxon England, right? The pure England before those darn Normans conquered the country almost a thousand years ago. But the Norman conquest happened and it made, you know, indelible changes to English culture, the infusion of the French language into English for starters. And I might wish in a pure world that the Norman Conquest never happened, but it did. So the key thing is that we have to preserve that which is good, true, and beautiful from where we are, not where we want to be or where we should be, but from where we are. And the key thing about Christianity is whatever the culture, we can evangelize it. And insofar as we evangelize in accordance with the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christ,

we are going to be making something good, true, and beautiful. And it will be something impacted by the culture that surrounds it, but it will still be good, true, and beautiful. That's the purity of Christ. The unchanging aspect of culture is insofar as it's Christo-centric, it's going to be good, true, and beautiful.

You know, something just occurred to me, and that's that what we're talking about with this globalization and people losing their languages and how this is a bad thing, but it seems like in the church the opposite has happened. You know, for a long time in the Western church, we've had one language, different liturgies, but they look quite similar. If you look at the Dominican or the Carmelite Rite to the Tridentine Rite, which sort of synthesized them somewhat. I think a lot of Catholics would say it's kind of unfortunate, you know, that you go to a church in Africa or Germany and now there's

different languages. Do you see what I mean? It's like we're saying the opposite is the case. Or do you not agree with that? Do you think it's good that people can... BF I think the difference between Caesar and Christ is absolutely essential. The Catholic Church is the mystical body of Jesus Christ. It should have one language that speaks to all Christians across the world. It should have an official language. And that's not to say that we can't have diversity in other respects, but we have to have that one language.

And it's ironic, at exactly the time where people are traveling globally more than ever, right, we used to, you used to go to the mass in Italy or France or Africa or anywhere in the world and it would be the same mass. You'd feel exactly at home, you'd be part of the same mystical body and you wouldn't have to try to work out what's going on because it would be clear. And exactly the time when everyone's traveling all over the world, we dissolve that unity and end up with this sort of fragmentation. So I think we do have to see the difference between Christ and Caesar, that we don't want Caesar to have world dominion. We don't want globalism because that's the global power, the global dominion of Caesar. But we do want

Christ to have dominion. Ah, wow. That came full circle in a beautiful way. Do you go to the Latin Mass? We do. I mean, we go to a Darshan parish that offers both forms of the Mass. We have a strong preference for the traditional Mass, but I'm very happy to go to the Novus order Mass. I'm not one of these people that says it's illicit or anything like that. I think the important thing, I'll tell you what I am, if you want to encapsulate me, read the Spirit of Liturgy by Joseph Ratzinger. That's exactly where I am liturgically. I'm completely at one with Benedict XVI. So if we have the nervous order mass, it should be ad orientum, has to be done with reverence.

There certainly should be an admixture of Latin in the liturgy along with the vernacular. So if it's done with reverence, preferably people kneeling for communion, preferably receiving on the tongue. I'm a Benedict XVI liturgical Catholic, that's why I am, if you want to bracket me. Mason You know, it's funny here at Franciscan, there really has been this pendulum swing. I don't mean that in a negative sense, like it's gone to an unhealthy place. But I would say most people on campus would prefer to kneel to receive. They would prefer the priest to be at orientum. And I'm wondering why that's the case. Even like I kind of came into the church amidst a kind of charismatic culture. And I love charismatic Catholics like

Ralph Martin and others who, you know, love the church and appreciate that form of prayer. But it's interesting to me that a lot of the people I was hanging out with in the early 2000s who were more kind of charismatic in temperament are now all traditional in temperament. And they'd be on the spectrum as it pertains to how much they want the Latin Mass to be the Beol Nendol and how much criticism they would aim at the charismatics. But I'm wondering if you've got a thought as to why that happened. We could point and maybe say the Holy Spirit is guiding them into the more of a full expression of the church or is it just like a cultural back and forth where you kind of get bored of one thing and you go to the next and will the

Charismatics be... Do you know what I'm saying? I'm not expressing myself. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen it amongst many people as well, the same thing. I'm thinking when you were speaking then of words from CS Lewis's book, The Last Battle, when they get to heaven at the end, Aslan invites them to go further in and further up. And I think that people that are devout Catholics who want to get deeper and deeper into their faith. The liturgy is very important. Reverence in the liturgy is important. You know, if there's a very reverential Novus Ordo mass said ad orientum with people being encouraged to receive on the knees, you know, people could be quite comfortable with that, and I am.

I still prefer the beauty of the traditional mass. To me, the traditional mass, to me, is God's work of art. I know of nothing, I don't think, it's like the Bible, I don't think it's a human creation. I think it's where, over the years, the church has cooperated with the Holy Spirit, and we now have this liturgical dance. There is a liturgical dance, it's called the traditional mass, you know, where every

movement, every gesture by priests and servers is beautiful and symbolic and leads us further in and further up. And I find I'm much more engaged with liturgy when I'm at the traditional mass. And we have in our parish the Latin and the English side by side, and I'm much more engaged with, because I can't, if you go to the Novus Vortem in the vernacular, it depends on how well you're listening. If you can switch off and you've missed the gospel, right? Whereas if you've got it there in Latin, he's saying in Latin, you want to follow that, normally read it in English first, before he says it, and then I follow the Latin, but with the English beside, and my Latin's improving, I'm much more engaged with the Word of God. So for me, absolutely, as regards

participation in the Mass, I find I'm much more participating when I go to traditional Mass than the Novus Ordo. That's one percent of parishes though, right, where you've got Adoriantum, Novus Ordos. That's the absolute. We're very blessed. Where we live, three of parishes though, right? Where you've got ad orientum, novus ordos. That's the absolute. We're very blessed. Where we live, three local parishes do ad orientum, novus ordo. So we are very blessed. It's a bit of a hotspot, should we say. So what do we, I don't mean to be contentious too quick off the bat. We could give it another half hour if you like. But what are we to do with the mode appropriate from Pope Francis? How are we supposed to receive that when we don't want to? Yeah, well again, do we have to pretend that we want to and that he's right? The most important thing we need to do, and this applies particularly, I would say, particularly to trads, is if we allow ourselves to get too angry, very

quickly we lose charity. The only person I trust to turn over the tables in the temple is Jesus Christ. If any of us start doing it, our anger very quickly leads to a lack of charity. And as soon as we lose charity, we're on the wrong side, even if we're saying the right things. So the first thing we have to do is prayerfully ensure that we are animated by Caritas. And if we're not animated by Caritas, we need to get the hell out of wherever we are to by Caritas and if we're not animated by Caritas we need to get the hell out of wherever we are to a better place. So we must not allow Pope Francis' vote to make us angry. We have to resist prayerfully and charitably and that will depend upon where we are, who we are and our

position in the church. But again, we must not succumb to anger because anger leads to a lack of charity. Yeah, I see a lot of Catholics today justifying their anger by pointing to Christ or pointing to St. Thomas, right, who says that anger is that passion that seeks to rectify a wrong. And they're correct in saying that. it's just that when we get angry, because of our passions, we very usually slip into sinful anger. And analogously to that,

I'm seeing a lot of Catholics, I don't, I'm not, I include myself in all this, saying things like, you know, we're going to be loving, but loving doesn't mean just saying nice things. And I want to be like, yeah, but when you start criticizing people very quickly, you're not loving anymore. Does that make sense? How do we make sure we're actually being loving, given that loving

doesn't just mean agreeing with or saying nice things, it can mean disagreeing strongly, it can mean being critical. How do we know that we have that spirit of love? To love, from a Christian Christian perspective is not an emotion, first of all. Anger is an emotion, and therefore it is in itself not rational. And fetus at ratio, faith and reason must be united. Love for a Christian is to freely choose to lay down our lives with the beloved. It's a rational choice. Freely choose to lay down love for the beloved, even if the beloved is our enemy. So how do we know we're loving the other person if he's disagreeing with us? Are we laying ourselves down self-sacrificially for them? Are we willing the good of the other? Or do we just basically say

you're wrong and it's for your good that I'm telling you you're wrong? I mean, that might make us feel good, but is there actually authentically self-sacrificial love? Will Barron Yeah, I've often thought to myself, trying to kind of probe whether or not I'm being loving or appropriately critical. I think there's been times where I would rather see, let's say, Joe Biden, like, humiliated, like, at Holy Mass by being denied and like there being a big spectacle. like there's part of me that would much rather that than some movement in the direction of Christian living. And I say that to my shame, but I also think I'm not unique in that. And I think that's kind of one way to be like, oh yeah, okay, that's not love. Like I should want his good and not want him to be embarrassed. We should be praying for his conversion,

in fact, what we should be doing. But I think, see, let's look at this one a pretty pragmatic, practical level. Those lovers of tradition who have allowed themselves to become angry and have allowed that anger to spill over into words and actions that are not charitable are doing far more harm to the traditionalist movement than any liberal. So the point is that they're shooting themselves and other trads in the foot. If we can't love, that's exactly what allows the liberals in the church to point their fingers and say, look, told you so, there were a bunch of fascist nutcases. And of course, they're going to point the finger at the five percent

that that might apply to. And the other ninety-five percent they'd be tarnished with that brush but I want people to realize if you really want the traditional mass to flourish we have to become saints. Our job is to become saints. That's our only job. The only purpose of life is the quest for heaven and are we getting closer to heaven right and if we're not growing in holiness, we're not helping the traditional cause. On the contrary, we're actually giving weapons to the enemies. I think what I agree with everything you just said, I think what makes it so infuriating for people is you've heard this term of gaslighting, where you try to make someone else seem like

they're insane, you know, so it's like it's your problem. Even though you know it's not their problem, you're trying to get them to react. And I think a lot of people like myself who kind of came to the church in the late 90s or the early noughts, we didn't have much experience of the traditional Latin Mass and traditional prayer. And those traditional people were just written off as kind of crazy, kooky people. And while you're seeing this kind of mass apostasy, is that too strong a word? This apostasy within the church and the changing of the teachings of the church, people wishing to change them. So I don't fault on a natural level people kind of getting angry.

I understand why they're getting angry. When you keep being told you're the problem, while the church is falling, the church you love is falling apart, people are fleeing the church in droves. Which is exactly what Benedict XVI treated, those people have been forced into the ghetto, right? The traditionists were forced into the ghetto in the 60s and 70s, and the trouble with being forced into the ghetto is very easy to adopt and embrace a ghetto mentality, right? Everybody that's not in the ghetto is an enemy, and the ghetto is the only place that's authentic, right? So what Benedict XVI, authentically loving

all the flock, he says, we've got to bring these people out of the ghetto, right? We need to include them within the flock of the church. Right? We need to include them within the flock of the church and not ostracize them. And that was the purpose of the first much more on Pontificum, right, is to bring the traditionists back into the fold in the understanding that they are good Catholics for the most part, every bit as much as no other sort of Catholics for the most part, every bit as much as nobleroads or nobleroads or catholics for the most part, right? And as you say, you talk about vocations to the priesthood, you talk about attendance of Mass, and really if you want to make a spectrum of it, the nearer you get to the traditional end of the spectrum, the higher the rate of vocations, the higher the Mass

attendance, the higher the frequency of the sacraments. And if further you get to the liberal end, there are no vocations. The children drift away from the faith. There's an aging congregation, a shrinking, shriveling congregation. I mean, this is why it's taking care of itself. I mean, I heard, I haven't checked these facts, but someone told me that the FSSP will date more priests in Germany than the entire darshan church in Germany. I'd be willing to put money on that. Yeah, so this is the Holy Spirit speaking. What other tangible and empirical proof do you need than this data, you know? Yeah. I've been thinking lately, and I'd love your insight on this,

what happens to a people when they radically change their central ritual overnight? So if a family's central ritual, let's say, is evening dinner, and it's something we've done every single day of our lives, it's where we come home, it's where we love each other, hear each other out, suppose we were to alter that in the way that the traditional Latin Mass was altered, okay? So you might say, okay, well now we kind of like, we stand around the stove and we kind of just eat hot dogs while we're standing and, or something like that.

You know, what does that do to a family? And so like, what is it doing to the church in the West when the central ritual has been so radically altered? Like, can a community survive something like that? Now I know the answer is well yes, because you're a Catholic and you believe the gates of hell won't prevail against the church, but I mean just maybe thinking about it more abstractly or theoretically, it seems to me to be a way... well, what do you think? Well again, Benedict XVI, God bless him, right? He talked about the hermeneutic of rupture

and the hermeneutic of continuity. Hermeneutic continuity is tradition, right? As Chastain says about tradition, it's the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn, right? It's the continuum through time. The Second Vatican Council did not sanction the hermeneutic of rupture, as Benedict XVI kept saying. If the letter of the Second Vatican Council had been kept to, we would not have had the rupture. What happened is a so-called spirit enabled all sorts of violations of the authentic spirit of Vatican II to happen. And that's that anarchy, which is not from God, that caused the rupture, which followed in the 70s. Yeah, I agree with that. I think a lot of people who criticize

the Second Vatican Council haven't read the documents. Some have, of course, and have legitimate criticisms, perhaps. But they're very beautiful documents that clearly place Christ as King, and right there in the center. I have not read them in a systematic way. I'm not a

theologian. But insofar as I have read the documents, I've passed the documents, there's nothing I can think of at the moment that I've read in the documents of Vatican II that I actually have a big problem with. What the big problem is what people did in its so-called name, which is not in the council. In other words, these people are violating the teaching of the church. Right. I do see the tide turning. I really do. Oh, absolutely. I don't, I mean, do you, have you met a young priest, let's say, who wanted there to be altar girls or wanted there to be an allowance for contraception in certain circumstances

or thought the church should change their teaching on so-called female deacons or gay marriage, quote unquote? I don't, I haven't met one. Now I know I'm more of a conservative Catholic if you want to put a label on it, but I can't think of one successful YouTube channel that's pushing that, and I can't think of one young priest that wants that. Well we talked earlier about the spectrum, from liberalism to tradition, and the nearer you get to traditional the more the spectrum, the more vocations, etc. But you can also do a different spectrum, young to old. And again, the younger the priest,

they're far more likely to be more traditional oriented than the older priests. Holy Spirit speaking, I really do think that these latest attacks on tradition are the last hurrah of the hippie generation. We ride this- The death throes. Yeah, the death throes. We ride this particular storm, which is why we don't have to panic. We don't have to panic. We don't have to overreact. You know, we have to respond with charity and we have to overreact because time and the Holy Spirit will sort this problem out and we're not God and we won't sort the problem

out. We just have to respond in charity to whatever challenges us but others. I was, so I've mentioned this before I want to see how long does it take? For star light to reach us someone made this analogy to me recently Time for the light to reach us. So as the nearest star system is Alpha Centauri that takes 4.3 years to reach us His point was when we look around at the church today and we see the effects, so we feel the effects, those effects aren't what's happening right now. Those effects is what happened like 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

Yeah. And I do feel great confidence when I see the caliber of young men in the seminary. Say I was just at the North American College and spent some time with the seminarians. They're just normal, manly, well-rounded, articulate people who love Christ and have a living faith, have a prayer life, love tradition. You know, or you go to this Eucharistic Congress, which I heard was so beautifully done, I wasn't there. My understanding was that around 50,000 people show up worshipping the Eucharist. I mean, this is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, and you're completely correct. So there's two things I would say. My most recent book, The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful, History in Three Dimensions, was deliberately designed to give people hope and encouragement. A lot of so-called traditionists are actually

progressives. Let me explain. Please do that. Slow it down. This is a good point. I want to hear it. Well, basically, the progressives believe that everything is progressing in an inexorable direction. That humanity is in an ascent towards a golden age in the future, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. A certain type of trad believes that. They just believe it's bad and not good.

Whereas what I want to show is if you actually look at history, you see in every century the good, the bad and the beautiful. You see the saints and other good things, but mostly the saints, you see Caesar and Judas. So in every century you've got the enemies outside the church, the political power usually, and the enemies inside the church that can just be corrupt morally or can be heretics theologically and every generation you get that and every generation also you have the beautiful great works of art literature music architecture and and this was this book was inspired by Benedict XVI's words that the ultimately the only defense for the Catholic Church are the saints she's inspired and the great works of art that she's inspired in other words the goodness and beauty. And so I want to show the good and the beauty and

also the bad in the midst of it and show that if you look at human history you're not seeing an ascent to either a golden age or a doomsday. What you're seeing is a tapestry of three threads, goodness, beauty and wickedness. The absence of goodness and beauty. And if you understand that and you can look back in the past and really another game I'd of goodness and beauty. And if you understand that, and you can look back in the past, and another game I'd love people to play, if you set up a wall, it's an imaginary game, but it would be good fun if you actually did it. You set up a wall and there's a card on the wall for every decade since, let's say, the crucifixion, right? And you put a blindfold on, you turn around, you face the wall, you just throw a dart.

And you look, imagine a particular decade, and then you look at that decade, right? And you can be sure there's some saints in the church. They're outnumbered by the sinners. There's trouble that Caesar is trying to crush the church, that Judas is trying to undermine the church, and it's the saints and the great works of art that keep the church moving forward. And above all that, you have the promise of Christ, right, that He's with us, because the church is not a human institution, it's the mystical body of Jesus Christ. And the other thing we have to remember about the church, the smallest parts here in time, right, the mystical body of Jesus Christ, most of it's the church tromping in heaven.

Victory's already won, it's in eternity, there's far more souls up there, certainly if you take into account the angels, right, than there are down here. This is just active service, right? We are here as Mille's Christie soldiers of Christ, we're going to do our active service three score years and ten or thereabouts, less for some, more for others, and then we get to get off, and if we've been good and faithful servants and good and faithful soldiers, we get to join Church Tramphan. There's no reason for any Catholic ever to despair. Yeah, I felt that way when I was on the scovitura under the Vatican. You know, there was a time during Nero's Circus where Peter was crucified upside down and any objective onlooker must have thought the church is over. And then you quickly fast forward to today and you see St. Peters and go,

what happened? Well, the same thing can be true today. Like you can focus on the corruption in the church, the poor leadership in the church, your own wretched heart, and the way you live out your Catholic faith and how bad you are. But God is good and it's God's grace. He's going to make you a saint. And it's going to keep the church afloat. We just have to keep our heads while it's happening. Keep our heads, keep our hearts, trust in the Lord's Word and have the courage of our convictions.

Were you an atheist as a teenager? No, I was an agnostic. I always thought atheism was a stupid position because you can't prove the non-existence of God. Anymore you can prove the existence of God on a purely rational level. Of course, I came to realize later that you can prove the existence of God beyond reason. I also think you can prove the non-existence of God if God didn't exist. There are ways, right?

Let me show you. I mean, all you'd have to do is to show that there is a contradiction in the concept of God. If you could do that, I'm not saying it exists. I'm just saying that what's been interesting over the last 20 years is, I think a lot of atheists are redefining atheism to mean agnosticism,

and now it's kind of indistinguishable. But there was a time that people had arguments against the existence of God. That didn't mean they were certain God didn't exist, but they at least had reasons for it. And they might be things like the problem of evil. Like, like, here's an argument against God's existence, right? If God is all good and all powerful and all knowing, then he, if he's, since he's all good, he wouldn't want there to be evil in the world. Since he's all powerful, he could do away with the evil. Since he's all knowing, he would be aware of all the evil.

So it's not like he can say, well, I would have done something I didn't know about that. But evil exists. Therefore, God is either impotent, ignorant or wicked, you know? So that's an argument. It just doesn't work. I get that it doesn't work. My point is, I think you can, if God didn't exist, I think, you know, that's the atheists used to try to give arguments. They'd say, can God lift, create a heavy rock so heavy he can't lift it? You know,

so those sorts of arguments, I think, could show God doesn't exist. I just don't think they do. Right. I mean, I think that those arguments are ultimately superficial. They are, it's sophistry rather than rhetoric. You know, rhetoric to me is the use of words and the use of reason in pursuit of truth. Sophistry is the use of words, use of reason in order to pursue an agenda. And I think the vast majority, I wrote something once about good and noble, on noble and ignoble atheism. And I said, there is such thing as a noble atheist. I mean, Chesterton wrote a book called The Bull and the Cross, a novel. And the two main characters in that novel are McKeon, who's a Catholic, and Turnbull, who's an atheist. And they both take truth so seriously, they want to fight a duel over it, right? But the rest of the world, because their relativists are various descriptions,

right? Nietzscheans and other types of philosophies are playing with some background, they don't think truth is important or they exist. And in the end, Turnbull and McKeon sort of come to realize they have more in common with each other because they're authentically pursuing the truth than they have with all the relativists out there. I think the problem is, and I don't know whether it was less true in the past, you might have a valid point there, but I think that there are far fewer noble atheists than we actually realise. Most of them are motivated by desire that God doesn't exist and trying to find arguments for

his non-existence, which is not the same as trying to pursue the truth. But I think you could say the same about Christians, that most are ignoble, that they just like the idea of there to be some comforting sugar daddy up in the clouds who's going to make them feel good about themselves and they want to see their dead relatives when they die. I couldn't agree with you more. I'll give you an example by the way, actually. I had a conversation with someone who shall remain nameless, who says that, you know, I know that God doesn't exist. And he was angry, he was clear, and he didn't want God to exist.

And then I mentioned about some deceased, his deceased grandparents. And I said, you know, he said, well, I know they're in heaven. I said, no, you don't. He said, if God doesn't exist, they're rotting in the ground. You can't have it both ways. So he wanted the comfort of religion,

but he also didn't like the idea of God. But you know, then he realized, well, I've got to have one or the other, I can't have both, right? But you're correct, some people, they like the idea of God because it makes things easy, they're all going to die and be happy, we're going to live happily ever after, you know. That was my thing when I was like 15, 16, I liked the idea of God, I didn't like the idea of being told what to do right so I'll have a God if I can have my Fornication and my pornography and my drinking and my everything else. I wanted that That's why Eastern religions like Buddhism where there was a lot of flex and the joints as it pertained to morality were very attractive Right. I could have this sort of transcendent more spiritual view of the world

Well, basically being a schmuck, morally speaking. So you were agnostic. Did you care about God's existence as a young man? No, that basically he was not important to me. He was irrelevant. You know, for me, the problems of the world were political, and they had political solutions, and you had to fight the political battle and win the political victory, and that was what made the better world is politics. Of course, I realize now that's nonsense, but that was where I was at.

I couldn't get beyond ideology to get to higher places, such as philosophy and theology. Were you a neo-Nazi? Yes. What does that mean? What did that mean for you? Yeah, belief that white race is genetically superior to all other races. The belief that other races pollute the gene pool and therefore you have to have an entirely white society because anything that comes in that's not white is polluting this pure gene pool like a toxin. So it's an obsession with race

as a physical anthropological reality. Have you heard of the term steel manning? It's the opposite of straw manning, yeah? I haven't heard it. But you get it, right? The opposite of straw manning when you don't take someone's argument seriously in order to more easily refute it So could you steal man that position that you held at one point that the right white race is superior?

Like what what was the kind of arguments that you would put forward or listen to that you found intellectually satisfying? You know, it's a bit like what you said about atheism. There were some scientists out there that had done some IQ testing and what have you, and you can be selective about your choice of statistics and data to prove your point, right? And yet the other thing I'd like to say as well, though, for me, this whole idea, we have a son who has Down syndrome and autism, right? The whole idea that someone's superior than someone else because they're more intelligent. You know, again, in, so even if it were true, right, so what's your point?

So in The Hobbit, we're keeping in the illusions here, in The Hobbit, you know, the narrator says that the goblins make no beautiful things, but many clever ones. And it's not unlike that they're responsible for inventing ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once. In other words, being clever doesn't make you good. You know, clever can make you just very, very powerful in inventing weapons of mass destruction and being an absolute menace to the rest of humanity. So the whole idea that you look down your super-silly nose at someone else because they're not as smart as you are

And of course, these are the same people that would and do advocate the extermination of Children or people with Down syndrome, right? Because they because because they they don't have the same intelligence therefore their own dimension, you know subhumans And we can make the make the race purer by eugenically exterminating those people from the gene pool. I mean, did you hold ideas as extreme as that? Or were you just sort of playing in the waters of neo-Nazis? Yeah, I mean, I was never as rabid as some, and I certainly would never, I don't think I would ever have advocated the extermination of the unfit or the extermination of non-white races for that matter, although I did advocate the compulsory

repatriation, in other words the forcible removal of all non-whites from England, which would require a great deal of violence and a great deal of suffering. So you know, I was absolutely a fellow traveler. So I wonder though, like I'm playing devil's advocate here and I'm trying to like bolster your pre your position back then which you don't hold anymore. I wonder how much of that was a response to the gaslighting of multiculturalism as if this is great for society and if you have any qualms with it you're a racist. I think that I think that's rubbish and so I think that leads people to these positions because they're not allowed to talk. You know, you're not even allowed to go.

I don't know if it's good that we've got all these mosques appearing in London all of a sudden racist. And so if you're not given a platform to actually hash out these ideas, you kind of go underground and the ideas may fester. That's exactly what we were talking earlier about this the situation of traditional Catholicism that the one who's angry and has succumbed to hatred is the one that's going to be focused upon. So we were actually, you know, the neo-Nazis, the National Front members were actually serving the purposes of the multiculturalists because they could point their finger at us and say look these people are post-immigration, if immigration if you are post immigration you're like these people right which is

a logical non-secret or so of course what immediately made me feel angry was the neighborhood in which I grew up in the East End of London was because there was a Sikh temple first and then there were Muslim mosques going up place whole streets were changing in the space of about two or three years from being white English people to being Pakistanis. And you see your own local culture, and I'm a localist, but you see your own local culture being changed,

irreparable, in fact becoming a different person's culture. Right, and you're basically being marginalized. And you're being told to shut different person's culture, right, and you're basically being marginalized. And you're being told to shut up and not complain. Exactly, and you're marginalized within your own culture and you're the perpetrator, not the victim of this. Of course, and that fans the flames that neo-Nazi groups play upon. So of course, do I think that mass immigration to England after World War II is a mistake? Yes. Do I think that the violence we're now seeing is a natural consequence of that? Yes.

Should it have been allowed? No. But as a Christian, you cannot respond to injustice with hatred. The two great commandments of our Lord is to love the Lord thy God and to love thy neighbor. If you stop doing that, you're on the wrong side, irrespective of whatever logical and arguments you can come up for for the position you hold. If you no longer love your neighbor, you're on the wrong side. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called Strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right now or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link.

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You won't regret it. So I know I already asked you this, but I want maybe more clarity on this. Like how do we know we love our neighbor? Because there's a lot of this going on today in comment sections. It's a, we feel like the white Christian male today in America is tired of being looked down upon. We're tired of being told we're toxic. The Christian is tired of being

called stupid, of not having his faith taken seriously or treated with respect such as was the case at the Olympic Games with the mockery of Christ in the Last Supper. And so I think how then does the person listening to this who is outraged at what's taking place not fall into hatred? Like how do I know? Because it's so easy to point to other people and say they're hateful. It's so difficult for us to look at ourselves and say, am I being that way? I know you already said earlier, it's about will I lay down my life for this person? Is there more to say there

so that one can sort of self assess? Am I loving my neighbor? Am I loving Kamala Harris? Am I loving the Muslim, the Jew? Well, we have to, I mean, the point is that we have to distinguish between an individual person and evil in practice. All right. So woke isism is evil in practice. We have every right to resist wokeism, and not just every right, we have every responsibility, and I try to do that, and again, I have to test myself. I'm a writer. I'm attacking wokeism, manifestations of wokeism pride, and that's the way we should do it. I mean these people are proud of their pride right and what is pride? Pride is laying down the lives of others for the self right it's all about me and what I want and if you get in my way I'm gonna kick you right so the way to

respond to these people is to say look it's a choice between humility and love because those two things are inseparable and pride and hatred Jane Austen, when she wrote the book, Pride and Prejudice, those two things are inseparable. If we have pride, we judge everything in accordance with the way that we want to see it, not the way that it is. And we don't believe in objective truth, so the first thing that the pride agenda is,

well, it's your truth, my truth, there's no such thing as truth. And then you can say, I can do what I like, because there's no such thing as truth, And then you can say, I can do what I like, because there's no such thing as truth which I should be subjecting myself to. So this is a war between love and humility on one side and pride and prejudice on the other. And if you actually can frame the argument in that way, talk about it in that way, you don't have to attack individuals who are misled. If people believe that stuff, at worst they're malicious and diabolical, that they really do hate Christ because they want to live their dysfunctional lifestyle. At worst, they're

just dupes. If they're diabolical, they need our prayers, and if they're dupes, they need our prayers. So as individuals, we should be praying for them. But as regards to what they stand for, we should be fighting it. How do we do that in a two-party system in the America, in America right now with Kamala Harris? Because I hear what you're saying, we have to fight her ideas perhaps, and I know we're not all on board with Trump's ideas either, but it seems to me there's an obviously bigger threat here. How do you do that without dragging someone's name through the mud? Well, I mean, I think what Kamala Harris stands for is what we should be attacking. We have to attack her as a person. I see. Right? I mean, if she'sala Harris stands for is what we should be attacking. We have to attack her as a person, right? I mean if she's got a heap of policies, if we're quite clearly destructive

in practical terms and in terms of goodness, truth and beauty, we should be attacking what that platform is and those ideas that she's advocating, showing that they're wrong, harmful, dangerous, and given examples of how decadence leads to destruction, self-destruction. That's what we should be doing, not just attacking ad hominem. That's the problem. It's just become attacking each other as individuals and persons, and that's not healthy, quite frankly. Are you familiar with these race riots that have broken out in London this week? Oh, I heard about up north in Rotherham and I just looked this up on CNN. This came out today.

Riots have swept Britain over recent them in CNN. So who knows what we're going to read here. Have swept Britain over recent days and more outbreaks of far right anti-immigrant. You see how they paint them far right. So that's bad. Anti-immigrant or that's bad. It can't be like pro-culture. It can't be that. And our fear this week, leaving the new UK government scrambling to control the worst disorder in more than a decade. Police officers were injured, yada,

yada. But this gets back to what we were saying earlier, where we paint our enemy as the insane one, as opposed to yeah. And this is a reaction by the way, they probably not going to mention there, there was an immigrant who obviously basically killed three or four young children in a knife attack in Southport in the north of England and that's triggered this reaction.. Now, I'm not, in one of the, in one of the, in Rotherham in Yorkshire, they tried to burn down a migrant hostel which could end in the deaths of the migrants.

That's absolutely outrageous and should be condemned. But if you think you can continue to just allow immigration, and they say anti-immigrant, no, anti-immigration, right? You can be opposed to immigration without being anti-immimmigration, right? You can be opposed to immigration without being anti-immigrant, right? You can be opposed to immigration without being a racist. But again, this is all, again, it's personalizing all, right? If you have any objections to the harm that's being done

to your indigenous culture, to the way that the English people, I mean, the way I put it, we fought two world wars in the 20th century. The second world war was to stop invasion from the Nazis, from the Germans. We expected people to go to war and lay down their lives to preserve the British way of life, right? That's how they signed people up. And now if people want to preserve the British way of life, they're racist. So for exactly the same reason they were sent out to die in World War II, they're now condemned for being racist. And this is obviously hypocrisy. But we have to distinguish between thinking immigration is harmful, certainly on the levels that is happening,

and most of which is illegal, or much of which is illegal, and nothing's being done to stop that illegal immigration. This is obviously harmful to the indigenous culture, right? And that doesn't make you an anti-immigrant. Doesn't mean you want to kill, you know, the person next door who's an immigrant. Right, but it's not just the illegal immigration, it's the legal immigration that's being allowed. So what are the people supposed to do when their government is against them? Well, let me say one thing here. The British Nationality Act was passed in 1948, right, so a long while ago. No British government, Labour or Conservative, has ever said vote for us and we will increase immigration. In

other words, there's never been an electoral mandate. No one has ever stood on the platform of immigration. This is something that's happened without anybody ever voting for it at any time. An actual fact, if there had been a platform, that party would have lost, which is why they did not talk about it. So in other words, in so-called democracy, we've had some which has changed the very fabric and culture of the country, that there's no electoral mandate forever, no democratic mandate forever. The people didn't want it. It's been forced upon them. So obviously you're going to get a reaction.

Now, I mean, we can't advocate violence. What are people supposed to do? Not violence against the person, you know? Yeah, I guess I'm confused as to what people are supposed to be doing other than violence. If the people who are meant to represent them don't and are happy to see their country destabilized, I mean, what are you supposed to do? Just lay back and let your whole culture die?

Isn't that what's happening? I did correct myself somewhat, violence against the person. You know, I do think that the resistance is necessary, but I think resistance has to be within the parameters of loving the Lord thy God and loving thy neighbor. And if it's not within those parameters, you're on the wrong side, even if you're fighting for the right side. So that has to be always... And this is the trouble, that you're going to get the extremists to be the ones fanning the flames, and they could point the finger at the 2% who are Nazis,

you know, and say that the other 98 percent are the same. Well, that's a lie. Well, I mean, I'm already seen as a, what would you say, as a radical by my government? I mean, the fact that I am a practicing Catholic, I'm seen as a threat, I presume. Yeah, fair enough. But it doesn't mean I have to hate my neighbor. Yeah, you must not. You must not. You must not.

Yeah, it's actually a command wasn't a suggestion. Yes. All right. So how did that get you in prison? And okay, prior question to that, since we were talking about Nazism, what was your view of Hitler? Well, at first, when I joined it, when I joined the organization in when I was 15, I was naive and was probably anti Hitler.

But by the time I was 16, I was pro Hitler. By the time I was 17, 18, I was anti-Hitler. So, uh- How did that happen? Well, basically, you know, you enter the party, the 15 year old naive, you just sort of, you know, anti-immigration, patriotic, or whatever. And then you realize that the cognoscenti,

the leaders of the party, the, you know, the inner part of the party, almost said inner sanctum, but it's not inner sanctum. The inner sanctum. You realize that the cognoscenti, the inner part of the party. Almost said inner sanctum, but it's not inner sanctum. You realize that the Cogdecenti, the inner core, are all basically Hitler worshipers, and you all want to be part of it, so you learn, you read the books, and you take it on board.

But then actually, I became a follower of, and so did other young radicals, the youth movement. I was chairman of the young national front, so the youth movement, of a follower of someone called Otto Strasser. And Otto Strasser founded a secret society called the Schwarzwald Front, the Black Front, within the Nazi party opposed to Hitler. And basically he said, you know, A, he's totalitarian, B, he's anti-Semitic to the point of view, to the extent of being a madness. And so we started calling ourselves Strasserites against the Hitlerites and the party. This was actually part of the beginning of my conversion just before I first came across Chesterton because, you know, Strasser had, he was Catholic, one of his

brothers became a Benedictine monk, the other was was murdered by, on the orders of Joseph Goebbels, not long knives. So it was a Catholic dimension, which didn't mean much at the time, but I was aware of it. That is sort of a Catholic response to Hitler, which I actually thought was I agreed with, you know. Yeah. I mean, this sort of all or nothing thing, this either you're you're in the ghetto or you're you know and then things fester like we talked about do you think that's part of what's happening maybe in today's culture where I mean obviously Hitler was an evil man who did evil things and should be condemned for those

things and I understand people not willing to have any kind of nuance about an evil person I understand why we can't something we've that we're afraid to sort of allow any nuance because as soon as you do that it feels like you're opening the debate to was Hitler maybe a good guy and just misunderstood or an evil guy. But at the same time, like clearly Nazi Germany came from somewhere. There was probably there were obviously legitimate things that the German people were concerned about, that Hitler was concerned about. Do you see that, do you think that's a problem when people, I don't know, for fear of saying Hitler

may have had some good reasons, right? Well, the first thing I'd say, first of all, I'll say two things on that, I think. First of all, the World War II, the seeds of World War II were sown by the unjust peace at the end of World War I. Treaty of Versailles was a so-called peace treaty which was a treaty of vengeance. So it treated the Germans so abysmally at the end of World War I. That led to the festering in the 1920s, that led to the rise of the Nazis and hit the kind of

power in 1933. So the seeds of World War II were planted by the lack of charity with the Treaty of Versailles, so lack of Christianity. And you had, by this time, this time you had, Blessed Kyle of Austria was preaching reconciliation, you had Pope Benedict XV preaching reconciliation. The allied powers at the Treaty of Versailles excluded the pope from the proceedings because they didn't want to hear what he wanted, a conciliatory, a genuine peace, not rub their nose in it so that they're going to be very resentful and come back and sting you 20 years later. So the Catholic Church wasn't listened to and World War II was a consequence. So that's something I want to bear in mind. And as regards Hitler, yeah, he's an absolutely evil man, I'm not interested in defending him. But the Catholic

Church, by the way, canonizes saints. It doesn't ever say anybody is in hell, because the point is what the Church says, we don't know, you know, the very last moment of someone's life, you know, what's in their heart and what's in their mind, and therefore we can judge not lest you be judged. So the Catholic Church has not sent Hitler to hell. The Catholic Church doesn't send anybody to hell. They're judged. I wouldn't personally want to be in his shoes. But, you know, the Catholic Church has not for anybody ever in hell, not even Judas. I think that you've articulated what I'm trying to get at here. So my point is when you make it seem like a particular individual, be it Hitler or Stalin

or any other person we'd consider evil, just sort of rose out of the ground with horns and started doing a lot of evil things. And when people read a little bit of history, like you just explained, you go, okay, wow, wait a minute, there was some, you know, legitimate concerns here. And that kind of like when you blacklist somebody, you sometimes do more harm than good, because then people see that there were legitimate concerns, and then maybe go over on their side. So anyway, so you were 15, you were against Hitler. So that was probably what was happening for you. You were being educated, and then that led you to have more of a favorable view of Hitler.

Yeah, and then educated beyond that to having an unfavorable view of him. So in other words, again, it's the path of reason. Insofar as we are gonna be open to reason, we'll be led from error towards something which is more authentically true. And that's basically the path I took. So 15 year old, I descended for a year or so

when I started reading with the wrong stuff and then started discovering other stuff and eventually Catholic stuff and it led me away from that darkness towards the light. Good. What led you to prison? What happened? So there was an Act of Parliament passed in 1976 in England called the Race Relations Act, which made it illegal to publish material deemed likely to incite racial hatred. So obviously I was opposed to that. I thought it was something which was against free speech and democracy and political liberty. So I deliberately, as editor of a magazine called Bulldog, started deliberately defying

the Race Relations Act and deliberately saying things that were provocative and very racist. And I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm an advocate or support of what I wrote, but they did provoke them to charge me and in the hope that this act was so unpopular they would not be able to get a jury to actually convict. So they they did charge me and the first trial was it was a 6-6 split verdict and you have to have at least a 10-2 for majority verdict. Usually, they would then drop the case, but they ordered that the government, and it is the government, this is the highest,

the home office, the government ordered the retrial. And in the second trial, I was convicted by majority verdict, so I saw the 10-2 or 11-1. I'm sentenced to six months in prison. I came out, continued to edit the magazine, and was sentenced a second time for the same same offense, and spent, I was convicted since to 12 months in prison. So I spent my 21st and 25th birthdays in prison. Were you a muscular skinhead type of neo-Nazi or what?

I was never a skinhead. I did actually have a skinhead haircut on occasions, but a skinhead is a skinhead. I mean, you've got to wear the clothes and get the tattoos and I was never interested in that. Although I ran with them and I was probably the biggest skinhead gang leader without being a skinhead, but I actually started to become muscular through prison. Yeah, what was prison like? Were you afraid to go into prison? Well, the first sentence is rather weird because the prison population was probably 50% black, and the other 50%, 25 to 30% were skinheads.

So the prison authorities worried that my presence would be a catalyst for basically hell breaking loose amongst the prisoners. So they actually put me in the top security wing in solitary confinement, which actually, then my comrades had a march outside saying I was being treated unfairly, being put in solitary confinement. I was actually enjoying it, it's not exaggerate, but I began to realise I'm comfortable with solitude.

I had books to read, I had notebooks to write and I was comfortable. Much better than being banged up in a cell, right, very confined space with someone you have absolutely nothing in common with, right, for 23 hours a day. I mean, that's miserable because you can't talk to them. You have nothing in common. I mean, it's much more awkward. How big was your cell and did you have time each day to exercise or to engage with anyone else or was there nobody? There was only the first three weeks of sentence before they took me out of solitary, but I was in my cell they slopping out If you work out what that is, well, yeah, you have a you have a chamber pot inside yourself

Yeah, there's no there's no plumbing So you have to empty that out in the morning and then you go down for breakfast lunch and dinner to be just go down And pick your food up and go back to your cell, but you're on your own You're not yeah on my own conversing with people Yeah Well now you go down with it They all let you all out at the same time you get drawn the cube you go back to your cell afterwards and then one hour of exercise i think it was one hour of exercise a day but the other 23 you're locked up

but i started using my cell as a gym you know using the the uh the bed as a bench press so i actually started getting into weight training which i've been doing ever since uh during that first prison sentence so i have at least prison to thank for that. Yeah. What sort of things were you reading in solitary confinement? Well, in that first sentence, I mean, I remember reading a book about Rastafarianism on the basis of know thine enemy. I read a very interesting book called The Man Who Gave His Company Away, which was turning me on to what would be Catholic social teaching. You know, what we now call ESOPs, so the Employee Stock Holdingship Plans. Covenantized does that.

Yeah, right. Not sure if you're familiar with them. Yeah. So, why were you reading that? I was really interested in politics and economics. Okay, yeah. And of course, he was a Christian. I mean, the only spade of this chapter is Caves Company and Way. He was a Quaker. so again, it's just planting seeds.

There's a connection between economic justice and Christianity, right? So bit by bit. But it wasn't until the second prison sentence. No, that's not true. I'd started reading Chesterton by this point, that was key. I can't remember if it was the first or second prison sentence. I started reading Thomas Aquinas.

So I think it's probably the second Thomas Aquinas. But the difference between the two sentences, when I went to prison the first time, I was an absolute radical militant. I screamed at the judge, you know, you'll face your own judgment, and they dragged me off, screaming to the cell, considering myself to be a political prisoner.

Second prison sentence, I thought, what on earth am I doing here? I don't believe this stuff anymore. I've been living a lie for a couple of years. What you have to understand is that within the movement I'm a hero. I've been to prison, I'm a martyr, I'm a hero. Outside the movement I'm a pariah, probably unemployable. It's much easier to stay in the comfort zone even if you know you're living a lie and I was doing that. So during that second prison sentence, on the second day of that second prison sentence, I found myself holding some rosary beads and I have no idea how I got them. I just don't remember how I got them. Not saying they fell like manna from heaven,

but somehow or other I had these rosary beads and I had this great desire to pray the rosary. I'd never prayed in my life, you know, I'm 20. Were you a Catholic? Oh no, no, no, no, no. I was up, I'd been reading Chastain, I was sort of on my way, but I wanted to pray the Rosary. I never prayed at all, and I didn't know the Hail Mary, I didn't know the Glory Bee, I didn't know the Apostles Creed. I had learned the Our Father and I was a kid, but I'd forgotten it. So I couldn't pray the Rosary, but what I started to do was just just fumble the bees and mumble inarticulate prayers and just began this conversation. And from that moment onward, I mean, a great desire to become a Catholic, I started to go to Mass during that second prison sentence.

I started having discussions with the Catholic chaplain and the Anglican chaplain. And when I got out, I knew I had to make a clean break. So I had to leave London, leave all my friends and just start completely afresh. And a couple years after that, I was receiving them through the church. So as your opinions are starting to change between your first and second prison sentence, are you trying to engage, you know, your comrades and what's developing within you and how did they take your opinions changing?

I think between the two prison sentences, one or two, particularly the more militant, anti-Christian atheist types were alarmed at, you know, my quoting of Chesterton and Belloc and the sort of Papist direction in which my mind was moving. But they just sort of thought, well, you know, just put that down as an idiosyncrasy. Mason- Right, because you're still the hero, right? Steele- Yeah, right. But then when I walked away, because I realised that my beliefs were completely incompatible with my position, and ultimately a divorce was absolutely essential

and I just left, you know. Mason- In addition to the priest and the Anglican chaplain and the books you were reading, did you have another person that you were journeying with or conversing with about the faith? Jason- No. So that's why I was convinced at the time it was a completely rational path, the reading books. In hindsight, I now know that healing was happening, that grace was pouring into me, that I was being healed, because a lot of my beliefs had nothing to do with reason, they were just knee-jerk, emotional gut reactions to things, and that required not, you can't reason you out years later, that at the time I thought it's a purely rational process, and I've seen the Catholic Church has the answers on the theological, philosophical, political, economic, you name it. You know, the Catholic Church has the answers and, you know, and by the grace of God, eventually had the great desire to be received.

Were you close with your parents during these, this time, prison sentences? I mean, before the conversion, and how did they handle that? Well, my parents were both pleased when I became a Catholic, not because they were Catholic. They weren't. But I think they thought it would keep me out of trouble. Yeah. I mean, I've been to trouble, been to prison twice. I've been involved in violence. How did they view you? Like your violent time getting sentenced to? Well, they supported the politics. Oh, so they weren't opposed to the politics.

They were worried about me as a as a as a person being hurt being hurt. So I think they were pleased that I got out for my personal safety and pleased that I became a Christian because I thought that would keep me out of trouble, which for the most part it has. Yeah, very good. So what was the liturgies? And we were talking about liturgies earlier. What was the liturgy like that you you received into and started going to Mass? Well, the priest who received me was absolutely Novus Ordo, and it was versus popular, but this priest was trad oriental, I mean he preferred ad orientum, and he would say the Novus Ordo in Latin, and then that would be ad orientum, and that was probably once a week, and I would try to go to that. But for the most part, it was,

say reverent, but we received standing up on our hands. Actually, no, that's not true with me. I know I've only received on my hands once. So I know right from the beginning, I was receiving on the tongue. Once I was at Mass in England in Norwich and I went up and put my tongue out and the priest clearly wasn't gonna give me communion unless I put put my hand out and I wish I'd just walked away actually

but I did what he wanted. I fantasized about looking at the priest and saying shame on you. Yeah. I don't know if you'd agree with that. Yeah I mean I should have said something and just walked away but I complied. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's awkward. I remember I went up in for a blessing in Canada.

So I had my hands across my chest and he essentially just pressed the Eucharist into my mouth. Well, I guess we're doing that. Wow. But but he may not have known. I mean, maybe it was a different considered a different gesture in this part of Canada back then. I don't know. Well, if you haven't got your mouth open, I mean, you think you think. Yeah, right. I guess this is happening.

Yeah. Wild. So then, I mean, how did your Yeah. So then did you flip flop? I mean, did you did the pendulum swing back or were you able as you were kind of changing your opinion on things to realize the problem with mass immigration while not hating the immigrant? Is that the change that took place?

Yeah, I mean, I still think that mass immigration to the UK was a disaster. Yeah, but you thought that then after you converted. What I'm saying is, so did your opinion from then to now change as you view? Not as we, not with respect to immigration or the European Union. You know, these things are evil and you know, I was on those things, I was right for the wrong reasons. But you know, that those things that people should be opposing, they should be opposing as Christians in charity, and not allowing themselves to get angry or allowing hatred to enter their hearts. So what is your poisons us? Yeah, amen. What is your opinion then of the European Union and Brexit? And what's happening right now in England regarding that?

Well, I was and am completely in favor of Brexit. I'm completely opposed to European Union I support those small nations within the European Union or defying the globalist agenda of the EU rulers Brexit you know, it's only been half-heartedly carried out Yeah, so a lot of the laws that were the European laws in place are still in place Brexit, you know, it's only been half-heartedly carried out. So a lot of the laws that were the European laws in place are still in place. No one's bothered to actually extricate UK from them, the legal constraints.

So it's a half-handed, half-hearted affair, but I still, to be halfway out is better than being wholly in. So I still rejoice at Brexit, albeit that it's messy. Were you shocked that the people voted for that? Absolutely shocked. I mean, I got cynical and jaded, jaundiced. Basically, the media can just manipulate public opinion every time and you get the illusion of a democratic vote, but everyone's sort of... That's how we feel now in America, right? Exactly.

Hoodwinked and sort of shepherded into the right side. And people do not have the ability to see through the lies and the manipulation. And I spent too much time watching the media and the Gulliborne. And so that was my belief. So when Brexit happened, I was astonished and very happy. Will Barron So you're against the European Union. Why? Because it's part of the globalist agenda that has too much authority and control or what? David Hulme Well, yeah, I believe in localism. I believe that true democracy has to start with a

family and be devolved upwards, not start with a huge central government and imposed downwards. So obviously if governments get bigger and bigger then we're becoming less and less free. We need the revitalization first of all of the family as a political and economic cultural unit but we also need the revitalization of local government, local culture, local economy. We need to, from grassroots up, start to re-democratize the world, basically. And we can't expect the globalists to do it. We have to do it in spite of them and instead of them.

Mm-hmm, okay. You have a kid with Down syndrome. We do, yes. I've been thinking lately about how, what a blessing. I'm not sure what the politically correct terminology is. So forgive me if I get it wrong, but like disabled people physically or mentally. I know they say differently abled, but I don't love that word. It seems like no, they're disabled. We don't need to pretend right that anyway, but just how what a blessing they are. I was at a homeschool co-op

recently with my family. There was this beautiful little boy in a wheelchair who can't speak and you know, his arms are all kind of bent in and just this, it kind of brought about this softness to my own heart as I was with him. I just, there's something beautiful when people are vulnerable. That's a beautiful thing and not vulnerable for a malicious end, you know, so that you like them more or congratulate them, but are just honest, right? There's something beautiful about honesty and it's it's almost like people who are physically disabled are incapable of putting on a front and it does something to me. It softens me and I think it does that to a lot of people who aren't afraid or allergic to it.

That's also an interesting reaction to to the mentally or physically disabled. Yeah, when I was young I felt threatened by children with downs. You know, people with downs, they're just weird, keep them away from me, you know, the hardness of my heart and the ignorance of the reality of who they are as human persons. So our son Leo, it's been a great blessing in our lives. He is the happiest member of our family. We have, I say that the traditional mass we go to is the only mass where we have liturgical dance to polyphony, because our son gets up and he starts swaying, you know, to the gory chant and Palestrina.

And I tell you what, by the way, the stereotyping of people who like the traditional mass, we've been going to that mass for 15 years and Leo is loved, no one has ever said anything, he must be a bit distracting, you know, doesn't make noise, if he starts making a noise we take him out, like with a kid, right? But if he's just moving, we can't stop him fidgeting, you know, if he stands up, let him stand up and sway for a while and then return, ask him to sit down, he does, you know. But no one, I mean, it's just full of love for him and I love our parish for that reason. But let me give you an example. Very rarely, and not for a long time, thanks be to God, I've lost patience with him, right? And I say something angry to him. Maybe it's the middle of the night and he's got me up in the middle of the night, I'm tired, I just want to go to bed,

you know, and he won't go to sleep. And you say something angry to him, he looks at you with those innocent eyes, and says, why, I don't understand, you know, you understand the relationship I have with him, and this is something different, and it's just complete perplexity on his part. You know, it's,

all I can say is that he is a path to sanctity for me and my wife and our daughter, that he helps us to be patient, he helps us in love, and yeah, he's an absolute great there's a cross as well, but it helps us to understand that the cross is itself a blessing, right? Trying to avoid the cross is not the way to get closer to Christ. What was it like when you had him and realized he had Down syndrome? This is one of the most miraculous moments in my life, because I was there at the birth, and they handed Leo to me at birth, so I saw him before Susanna did, and I saw it immediately

because his facial features he had down. So I knew straight away. And I just said, you know, I think it was out loud, but it was certainly very clear in my head, just three words, so be it. But that was not me, right? I know me. There's been certain moments in my life, rarely, but when there's been an infusion of supernatural assistance. And this moment of absolute acceptance was a gift of grace at that moment. The selfishness in me was sort of purged for that moment. And as Susanna said, the fact that I was so accepting from the first moment made it much easier for her. Yeah, wow. Do you have you experienced people looking at him funny or treating you differently in a negative way because of him at

Restaurants or something like that and how do you handle that? It's mostly children, you know, and they just they just all they're doing God bless them their innocence that he's different He's obviously a grown-up and he's not behaving as grown-ups do and they just keep looking and yeah And they're a bit disturbed by him and you understand that and when you He's our normal Right. He's our normal., he's our normal, right? He's our normal. So that's our normal life.

So there's nothing unusual for us. We just take all of that in our stride, you know? Yeah. What advice do you have to young parents who have a disabled child or someone with down syndrome? That's a great one. I try to, you know, all I can say is that they first will pray because we all need help, but with prayer, you know, they will transform, transfigure, you know, their lives and they should be seen as a great blessing.

I always try to give literary examples. There's a wonderful novel by Flannery O'Connor called The Violent Bearer Away, and this is Flannery O'Connor's brilliance because Bearer of the Way, and this is Flannery O'Connor's brilliance, because there's a character in that called Bishop, and he quite clearly has Down syndrome, and all the rest of the characters are all selfish and nasty, right, and they don't see the point of Bishop. And what's the point of it? He has no point, you know, he's in an economic function, he's got no purpose, you can't talk to him, and in the event, in the end, you know, he's like no purpose, you can't talk to him and in the event, in the end, you know, he's killed by one of them. Symbolically he's drowned, he's for the baptism, he hadn't been baptized, so there's this going on, but only Flannery O'Connor can make a child with Down syndrome

the Christ figure, because throughout the whole of that he is the innocent, he is the only person not full of hatred and narcissism and antagonism towards the neighbor. He's just completely open to everybody, even when they treat him badly. He's typical Downs loving openness. And then, you know, he's killed. He's the innocent victim. Only Flannery O'Connor could turn a child

with Down syndrome into a Christ figure, and I love her for that. Well, that's beautiful. Has it been a, I remember the first time I met you we were at an airport, I forget where Kansas maybe is. Kansas City airport. But I remember I had something on my face and you're like, hang on, and you were like you were rubbing something away off of my face. Okay. And I just thought this is a very different thing for a person I've just met to do

and it was so gentle and I just thought I... you seem like a gentle person. I bet you your relationship with your son has I was honored by it, by the way, I actually thought it was a beautiful thing. You know, there was kind of like this immediate sort of vulnerability that I wonder if your beautiful boy Leo has helped you grow in. Absolutely. I'm not the most patient of people. And patience is one of the things you have to have when you have a child with Down's. And he's helped me grow in patience. I mean, he's helped me try growing in the trust of God. I mean, I am a much better person

than I would have been because of Leo. And we all are as a family because of Leo. I mean, I don't know what else to say. There were concerns. We've had to take all sorts of measures, trusts, funds, and everything else, because he's probably gonna outlive us. So you've got all those measures, trusts, funds and everything else, because, you know, he's probably going to outlive us. So you've got all those practical, pragmatic, you know,

not very interesting aspects of things to make sure that when we die, you know, whoever's looking after him won't have to worry about money at least, right? But you have to trust God with that as well. I mean, you have to trust the Lord. I mean, we all going to, we don't know what's happening next in our lives. We just move forward in trust and hope that everything's going to be good. How did you view people with disabilities back in your neo-Nazi days? How would you have viewed someone with Down syndrome if you were 16 or 17 and they had approached you? Yeah, I think there was enough of a soft heart in me that I wouldn't have gone along with that with the hardcore, you know, exterminate the unfit. Um, so, but I was uncomfortable and wouldn't know what to do with the situation. Um,

but, uh, keep it out of sight and it was okay, but I wouldn't want to, wouldn't want to kill them. I was never that, I knew people that would, but I wasn't, thanks to God, one of those, even in my worst years. Yeah. Uh, tell us about your online community called Inner Sanctum. Yeah, so people don't know what I'm doing. I'm the one stop place for everything is, is JPS.co.com, JPS.co. And then the Inner Sanctum is basically what I post every week, three new podcasts, one video, two audio, and I write an essay.

So that's every week. So whatever that is 200 original. And now we've been doing five years, so there's hundreds of a piece of original content there for people to explore once they join. So that's a good way of supporting me, my family, my work, so I hope that- Yeah, I hope people do that.

Josiah, could you make a note that we make sure we put that link below so that people can sign up and kind of get access to that? Yeah, that's really helpful. I know you write a lot about the Lord of the Rings. You were at our cigar lounge last night talking about the Lord of the Rings. When's the first time you read it or heard about it? One of my favorite questions, Matt. Yeah. The first time I read the Lord of the Rings was during my second prison sentence. Yeah, really? Yeah, I mean, I'd always meant to read it, you know. I had

friends that read it, but it's that thick, right? It's over a thousand pages long and I'm busy, right? And sooner or later, one of these days, and then you find yourself in prison, right, with lots of time on your hands, it's the perfect time to pick the Lord of the Rings up when I read it. And I was blown away by it. I wasn't a Catholic. It was second prison sentence, so I was on my way.

I was reading it alongside Thomas Aquinas and Chesterton and everything else, but I didn't get all the Catholic dimension, that sort of grew on me with further readings and what have you, but I realized this was a healthy world, you know, where goodness was something objectively real, where fighting for the good against evil required great self-sacrifice, and if you didn't sacrifice yourself fighting evil,

evil would triumph, you know, so it's just on this pure level, even before you start getting the Catholic theology which permeates the whole thing, even without that it's just a good healthy world where the good are willing to die for the good against the powers of evil. The powers of darkness are very powerful, so you know it's a real world, not a fairy story, you know, that the forces of darkness are more powerful politically than the forces of light. Well that's also true of the whole of history, right?

Look again, look at any century, any decade, the forces of darkness, politically speaking, obviously not ultimately speaking, but politically speaking, the force of darkness are more powerful than the forces of light. So the Lord of the Rings very much reflects the reality in that, and how do you respond to a darkness which seems so powerful, it doesn't seem much point, because it's bound to win. You do it by heroically being willing to die.

That's what you do. Yeah, not using it. But yeah, not succumbing to it, not running away from it, not hiding from it. Not trying to harness its power against your enemies. Exactly. Wow, what a, such a brilliant story. One of the things you were saying last night, which I'd like you to talk about is how you didn't say this, so let me say it. I like C.S. Lewis. I like his nonfiction a lot more than I like his fiction. And I don't mean to be overly critical, but sometimes it feels a little too two-dimensional.

You know, like the lion is Jesus and this person is this person. And even when I read the first of his trilogy, it seemed to me like the aliens were meant to be the angels, or that there were those angel figures rather. And I don't like that. But I love the Lord of the Rings. And one thing you said last night, which I'd love you to talk about, is how you can't do that with Tolkien's characters. You can see how Frodo was Christ-like,

etc. But if you're going to try to then go, okay, so he's the Christ figure, so now everything he's done in the story, I have to somehow shoehorn into a Christ figure, it won't work. So talk more about that. Yeah, so Tolkien is much more subtle than C.S. Lewis, you're completely correct. Lewis could not normally avoid the temptation to teach and preach. No, that's fine to work in non-fiction if that's what you're doing, but in a work of fiction, if the reader feels that you're being preached at, you turn away. That's not why you read a story, is to be preached at, right? But Tolkien, again, there's certain figures, so Frodo as the ring bearers, as like a cross bearer, but it's only in that aspect of his character

that he can be seen as a Christ figure. Everything else is a mere hobbit of the Shire, and he has his weaknesses and everything else. Insofar as Aragorn is the true king who has great powers of healing and can take the path of the dead, descend into the path of the dead and release the dead themselves from their curse, he's a Christ figure, but only in that dimension, not in anything else, the death, resurrection, and transfiguration of Gandalf, again, but only in that dimension of the story. If you try, as you say, if you try to shoehorn, say Gandalf is the Christ figure, or Frodo is the Christ figure, or Aragorn is the Christ figure, it won't work, and Tolkien doesn't want it to work because that's not what he's doing.

What is the ring? The ring, I've said the ring is the nearest thing you actually get to something that signifies something synonymously because Tolkien has the ring destroyed on March the 25th. March the 25th is of course, as Catholics know the Feast of Annunciation, which is possibly the most important Christian feast. It's the moment of the incarnation of when God becomes man, the Word becomes flesh. But it's also historically, according to tradition, the historical date of the crucifixion. So you've now got the date on which God becomes man, the date on which Christ dies for our sins.

Taken together with the resurrection, that's our redemption. What's destroyed by our redemption is the power of sin. What is the one ring? The one ring is the one ring to rule them all in the darkness, bind them. What is original sin? The one sin to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. And the one ring and the one sin are both destroyed in the same allegorically significant date, March the 25th. And once you realize that, to wear the ring is the act of sin, and if we wear the ring habitually, we golemize ourselves, we become shriveled wrecks, addicts, you know. People talk about the freedom, right, to become addicted. I mean, how absurd.

It's the freedom to become a slave, right? And then you've got the ring bearer, the one who carries the weight of sin without sinning, right? That's the ring bearer, the one who carries the weight of sin without sinning, right? That's the cross bearer. So the ring is the key to unlocking all the deep theological and philosophical dimensions of the Lord of the Rings. Will Barron Well, I love what you said about how the ring, or how sin, golemizes us.

Can you spend some time talking about that? Jason Vale Yeah, I mean, so Paul talks about slavery to sin, and we live in an age now of pride, the pride movement, you know, St Paul talks about slavery to sin and we live in an age now pride, the pride movement, you know, that basically you do what you want, right, and no one has the right to stop you doing what you want. These people are advocating basically addiction to sexual or other physical pleasures that turns them into addicts, they're miserable wrecks, becoming more miserable wrecks for every year they succumb to the power of the sin or the ring, the vice, the pride, because what is the first and worst sin is pride, right? The first and the worst of sins, that's what leads to the one sin to lead them all into darkness,

by them is pride, so we have the pride. And I love, by the way, that's the name they give to themselves, because at least it's an inaccurate name. In our day and age there's so much misuse of words, but pride is exactly what they are, and we have to pin them to it. We have to of course define what we mean by what is meant by pride, and define what is meant by love, which is inseparable from sacrificing yourself for the beloved. You don't do your own thing. You don't sacrifice others for the self. You sacrifice yourself for others. It's the difference between love and humility and pride.

So again, that's the power. You see, when you look at a pride parade, you're looking at a parade of golems, which is why really we should be praying for them. Maybe you have to resist them, right? And Golem had to be resisted, right? But in the end, they didn't kill Gollum, right? They could have killed him, but if they had killed him, things wouldn't

have worked out as well. So we're meant to be praying for the conversion of these people, for the heeding of these people, not merely wishing to shoot them. Yeah, that is a part of the story that surprises a lot of people. I feel like if I was to write the story, then you'd just have Frodo go to the edge of Mount Doom and throw it in. But that isn't what happened. What happened? Yeah. So I mean, if you've read The Lord of the Rings, you know, you get, I was very annoyed and frustrated when you get to that point because talking doesn't allow us to rush, right? This is a pre-technological age. We go, when we're traveling from A to B, we're

doing it on foot, right? It's slow. It takes 900 pages to get to Mount Doom, right, at walking pace. And then we climb the mountain slowly, we trudge up the mountain slowly, and then he's there. He's on the precipice. The fires of Mount Doom are down below. He just has to cast the ring into the fire and victory is won. And you're waiting, right? You want to cheer him on. This is the great climactic moment and he refuses. He claims the ring for himself, making him a loser, making him a traitor, and so our hero becomes the miserable loser. You get angry with him. And then of course you go a bit deeper and you think it's not Frodo's fault, it's Tolkien's fault, because Tolkien

made Frodo do it, right? And he made me read it. And made me read it, exactly, you dragged me 900 pages for this, how dare you? And then you think a bit more deeply, right? And you think, there's something really profound going on here, because Gollum is, who arrives at that moment and struggles and bites Frodo's ring finger off, gets the ring and then falls with

the ring into the fire. Therefore, the victory is won by accident, not by the will of Frodo. Of course, the key thing about Christian theology is we cannot triumph over the power of evil, the power of sin through the power of sin, through the triumph of our own will. That's the sin of Pelagianism. You just listen to what Jesus says and you do it, you get to heaven. You don't need grace, you don't need sacraments, you don't need church. It's just the triumph of your will. It's a heresy. So if Frodo had thrown it in, it would be Frodo's triumph over the ring, Frodo's triumph over sin. But Gollum emerges. Now why is he there? At the beginning of the story, Frodo says,

I wish Uncle Bilbo had destroyed that miserable creature when he had the chance. Gandalf says, sorry, I wish Uncle Bilbo had destroyed that miserable creature when he had the chance. It's a pity that he didn't and Garnoff says pity. It was pity that stayed his hand Then later in the story Frodo has the chance to destroy Gollum to have Gollum killed He says now I do see him I do pity him and he spares him and later on Sam also pities him so three separate occasions the three hobbits have have triumphed in the most important

way of doing the will of God and the most difficult commandment that Christ gives us to love our enemy and they all succeed in loving their enemy and because of that their enemy is there at the end, if they killed him he wouldn't have been, to deliver everyone from the enemy, right? So again, acts of love, acts of obedience to the commandments of God, laying down our lives for not just our neighbors, but our enemies, is the way to defeat the power of evil. Love is the only way to defeat evil,

not hatred, not violence, love. Yeah, wow, that's great. I remember in the initial pages, it talking about Gollum and how, it reminded me of a porn addict, the way they talking about Gollum and how it reminded me of a porn addict the way they were describing Gollum because I've been there back in the day something about how like there was nothing that could satisfy him like and there were no more secrets something like that yeah just empty earth or

something like that like he had thought that there was going to be nourishment and that which would satisfy but there was nothing there and sin is like that, like he had thought that there was going to be nourishment and that which would satisfy it, but there was nothing there. And sin is like that, you know, you go because it promises you adventure, promises you mystery, promises you power, and then once you've bitten into it, you realise, damn it, like it's crippled me and there's nothing there. It's not that there's nothing there, it's that there's nothing there and now I'm less of who I was. Right, you're shriven, you're golemizing yourself. I mean, again, the word satisfy, satisfaction comes from the Latin word satis, which means enough. Think about an addict, by definition, an addict never has enough, an addict always, not just wants more, an addict needs more. That's slavery, right, And you're never ever satisfied because you never ever have

enough. Yeah, I don't know if this is scientifically accurate or not. I'll let other people let me know in the comments section. But St. Anthony of Padua in one of his homilies is talking about leprosy. And he said that one of the effects of leprosy is this insatiable desire for thirst, which is what ends up killing you or something like that, or at least making you sick. I forget exactly. But it's something like that or at least making you sick I forget exactly But it's something like that right where it's like you find yourself in need of the thing that's hurting you and then the thing that's hurting You causes you to then want that thing more

So it'd be like I mean if you think of a mundane example it would be like just fried food or sugar, right? You know, I want this thing it tastes good and then I just get this desire for it more and more. We've all had the experience of eating a nice steak, and by the time you're done, you don't want to look at another steak, thank you very much. But you can eat two bags of Skittles and not feel satiated. You just want more and more and more, and you feel sicker and sicker. Men, have you checked out Exodus 90 lately? If you've heard of Exodus 90 before, you're probably thinking cold showers and Lent, but the Exodus 90 app offers so you've heard of Exodus 90 before, you're probably thinking cold showers and Lent, but the Exodus 90 app offers so much more. It's the number one freedom app to help you become

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around us. Go to Exodus90.com slash Matt to join us for St. Michael's Lent. That's Exodus90.com slash Matt to join us for St. Michael's Lent happening now on the Exodus 90 app. It's not too late to join us for St. Michael's Lent happening now on the Exodus 90 app. It's not too late to join. We've all had the experience of eating a nice steak, and by the time you're done, you don't want to look at another steak, thank you very much. But you can eat two bags of Skittles and not feel satiated. You just want more and more and more. And you feel sicker and sicker. If you don't mind me asking, have you ever had the experience of feeling addicted to anything? Sure. You don't have to be personal if you don't wish

to. No, no, I've struggled with pornography in the past like many, many other people have. It's far, far too easy in our day and age. I'd say I've obviously struggled with hatred and that sort of festers and it feeds off on itself, you know, how do you get out of it once you're into it, if you look at whole groups of people in society as your enemy, and you just have to see them. They're strangers, complete strangers, see them on a tube, right? And you don't know who they are, but the skin's in one color, and you hate them. How do you break those habits? As I said, I thought I was being reasoning my way to Christ and that was part of it. But I also needed healing and an addict needs healing.

Right? You have to, you will has to be involved. You have to want to be healed. If you don't want to be healed, you're done. Right? I also remember I was worried about booze. I remember the first time I gave up alcohol for Lent. I knew it wasn't physically,

I knew it wasn't physically addictive because I had no DTs or no physical, because obviously you go to prison, you're not going to drink until you get out again, right? So no physical stuff. But my concern was, am I socially addicted? Can I actually physically go through the whole of Lent without drinking? Because if I can't, I've got a problem. without drinking because if I can't, I've got a problem. And the first time, first lent was tough. It was really tough. Cause I met all my friends in the pubs. That's where people meet, right?

I mean, if you could just lock yourself away for six weeks, not see anybody, it might be easy, but that's not your life. But you know, it got easier. It got easier. And so yeah, I think we all do. I mean, we're all human, we're all broken. That's one reason, by the way, we shouldn't be so

full of hatred and animosity towards those who are wrong, right? Because in some sense we've always been, we've also been wrong. Yeah. Right, and we have to love the one who's further from Christ than we are. Amen. I mean again, think of the words at the end of each decade of the Rosary, right? Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of your mercy.

There's a beautiful prayer I pray at the end of every day. It was written by St Ephraim the Syrian, who is a doctor of the church, and in it, it says, Lord, oh Lord and master of my life Forgive me all the sins that I committed today Not only humanly but even worse than a beast my voluntary sins known and unknown from my youth from my brazenness and from boredom If I blasphemed your name So in or sworn by it and thought blamed or reproached anyone or in my anger have detracted anyone or slammed at anyone because this whole litany There's one line. I've said a million times in this podcast already that always chokes me up

It says if I have made fun of my brother's sin when my own faults are countless Wow, yeah Absolutely crushes me every single time and in the morning I pray a prayer of sin afram again that says Lord give me the grace to see my own sin and not to judge my brethren. Because there's something about judging our brethren that makes us God. Like we're the ones who separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats. We decide, we are the ones who will impose our order upon reality because right now it seems disordered and we can't live in disorder. We will not live in disorder. We will make things right. And this is, this kind of goes back to a lot of the things that we're talking

about. Absolutely. So that's, that's why we need to love every individual person, even if they are doing a great deal of damage because of their sinfulness and their wrongheaded ideas. Doesn't mean we have to let them do things without resisting them. No, we have to resist them and that's part of loving them. In fact. You don't let someone do exactly what they want if it's going to be harmful to them and others right. I mean the way I look at about Catholic Just War theory, you know I can turn the other cheek hopefully, I hope I can, I'm not sure if I hit the cheek I don't know what I do, but I hope I could turn the other cheek. But if my daughter is being attacked, right,

and I, as a pacifist, allow that assailant to do what he wants with my daughter, and I do nothing to intervene, right, then I have facilitated that abuse. So yes, we have to physically intervene even, but we don't do it because of hatred. We do it because of hatred. We do it because of love of the person. And that's the challenge. As I said, we went just to mention about Gollum.

It's a challenge to not just get rid of your enemy when you get the opportunity, right? The way to heaven is not paved, it's not the path of least resistance, right? It's the via dolorosa. It reminds me of Chesterton's line that the soldier doesn't fight because he hates what's in front of him, but because he loves what's behind him. Or at least that's what ought to be the case. Yeah, it made me think earlier when you were talking about, you know, when you're on the tube and there's people who look differently than you. Like, it is actually, I think easier than most of us are willing to admit to hate the person because we hate the sin. It's so easy to do that actually. Like actually, you know, you sometimes you hear these things, love the love the sinner, hate the sin.

And you think, oh, that's maybe that's a little too cliche to be correct. Aquinas essentially says that exact thing. I don't know if it comes from him or not, but it's in his response to why we should love the sinner. But my point is, I know, you know, because when you're being, when an ideology is being shoved down your throat, like it was for you with the immigration is good, and if you're against it in any way, you must hate people, right? I mean, this just changes different forms. Like if you're against the debauchery in the streets, because you're homophobic, transphobic, there are always these new slur terms by our elites to keep us shut up. And one of them

today, of course, is you're transphobic. Which it's like, I'm okay actually being transphobic, if by that you mean I'm afraid of people who clearly seem to have some sort of mental disorder that they're willing to then perpetuate upon the rest of society in an in an anti-social way. Yeah, I'm afraid of that. I think it should be resisted. But to my shame, I know what it's like to have someone in front of me, maybe the barista with the blue hair and you can't tell if they're male or female, to feel a sort of repulsion. I don't think it's wrong to feel repulsion at people. No, right. But there's been a kind of hatred in me like you friggin' and I'm like, oh, it's so...

And then I had someone in your seat recently whose name was Chloe Cole, who is a detransitioner. She had her chest mutilated, she presented as a male, and then she realized the insanity of it and she's so beautiful, but it made me think, gosh, I need to love these people while hating the ideology and resisting it. And you're completely correct. I mean, it's much easier said than done of course. First I want to say about is the whole idea of reducing every position which the elites don't like to a phobia, in other words a sickness, right? Basically if you think about the Nazis, the communists,

the extremists, the real extremists that basically if you disagree with me it's because you're mad, right? There's no rational response to what I believe in. If you disagree with me I'm going to reduce you to some sort of madman that I can then marginalize for your madness. I mean this is exactly what the Nazis do. You're not interested in engaging the other person as a person and having a discussion with them, right? You say, you disagree with this agenda, you're phobic, right? You're insane. This is exactly what the Nazis do. There is no difference, right? These people are extremists. And that's the irony, of course, because everybody who disagrees with them are extremists, and that's,

again, what the Nazis did, and they know the ad the communists and enemy of the people so As regards, yeah, I'll be flying home this afternoon from here Right and I'll be I will be affronted by people with their pride agenda blazoned upon their chests And my visceral reaction will be one of hostility I think you're correct if the hostility is for what they're presenting to me, right, which is an insult to me, then, and I know that it's evil, then that visual reaction is healthy and understandable. But what do I do with that visual reaction, right, the next moment? So the moment, so we say the pre-rational moment, that's a different thing.

But then I'm presented with this person in front of me. Do I then allow my animosity to fester so I don't like her or him, right? Or do I say, okay, that person's clearly messed up for whatever reason. I mean, they could have been sexually abused as kids. I mean, who knows why they're as messed up as they are. And I've got to love that person in spite of the fact they are fronting me with an agenda which is destroying them as well as destroying the culture of which they're a part. Yeah, that's beautiful. And you actually just, you may not have meant to, but you corrected me there and I appreciate the correction. I said I am transphobic. I'm okay with that

label. I guess the problem with that is it means an irrational fear. That's the correction. I said I am transphobic. I'm okay with that label. I guess the problem with that is it means an irrational fear. That's the sense. So okay, no, I don't have an irrational fear. I think the fear is rational if somebody is mentally ill and then is like twerking in front of children in libraries or something like that. So yeah, that's helpful. Yeah, it's funny. It's good that you said that. Like my wife, she's one of the best people I've ever met. Full on. Like not just saying that to sound cute. Like I really think she's one of the best people I've ever met full on like not just saying that to sound cute like I really think she's one of the best people I've ever met and she's you know we're currently looking after this child that's not ours and the mother was not in a good place and my wife really helped her become a better mother it's really

beautiful to see and this I'm not going to say too much because I don't want to give it away But this woman is now working, you know, because she has to because her boyfriend has Abandoned her or something to that effect. So my point is she's working at one of these, you know big stores You know that we go to and we don't expect good service and we usually don't get it But I actually was at one of those big stores today where I don't get good service and I should stop expecting it. And I wasn't terribly polite to the person, you know, and it's, you said it earlier and it sounds like a cliche and we're sick and maybe it doesn't strike us because our mothers said it to us when we were 10, but like you'd never know. You never know what they've been through. Like, that's actually true.

That's a fact. Like, I barely know what I've been through. I barely know why I act the way I act when I do act poorly. So I don't know what people have been through. And so, you know, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas talks about the virtue of affability, friendliness. That it's not actually putting on a mask or being fake when you're friendly

to people when you don't want to be. That's just what you must do so that civilization can continue. Mason- Right. And Christ himself said, even the publicans are friendly towards their friends. I mean, what virtue is there in that? The rule of virtue is being friendly towards people you're uncomfortable with. That's the test. Yes. Yeah. God give me the grace to do that more. Yeah. To be friendly to people who, yeah, because it's like, yeah, if I bump into someone and they've got a scapula popping out and they've got 10 children around them, I'm going to be really friendly to them because like, you're one of mine. Like, I know how difficult it is to live in this culture. But,

yeah, but to be friendly to like, you know, the people who wear their Democrat pins down the end here or to be... It's hard to love people who stink, you know, like There's meth heads here in Steubenville, right? Like there are prostitutes here in Steubenville. It's out in the open too. It's not like... I know there's that stuff everywhere, but it's hard to be kind. That prayer I mentioned earlier, there's another one. And that prayer I mentioned earlier, there's another one. If a beggar has approached me and I despised or neglected him, you know, like it's really hard to like people who are... It's hard to like people who are just trying to scam you, you know?

Like... That's the other thing is they come, they ask for some money for food, they're hungry, and they're just going to spend it on the next drug. I mean, you know, I mean, we're not obligated to give every time someone asks, you know, especially if there's every possibility, you're going to be facilitating some of your self-destructive. Right, but the very least I can do is not despise the person. Right, and be polite, be polite. If you're going to refuse, be polite in the refusal. Just say, I'm sorry, I can't at the moment, God bless you, you know, and leave it at that, you know. And yeah, you don't have to, you're not obligated to, to, to, to surrender to every time a beggar asks you for money because you might not be doing them any favors. Yeah. What are things that you do for relaxation

and fun that are not impressive? So don't tell me that you are currently studying Russian or Latin or that you read The Lord of the Rings in Braille. What do you, what do you, what is something? Although I skydive every Tuesday morning. Basically I, I, I try to be a, a, a techno minimalist. So when I'm not working, I try not to be plugged in. So I'm happy to sit out on the deck, watch the sunset

during the colder months, light a bonfire. My favorite pyrotechnic display, my favorite firework display is watching the embers of a fire go out. There's sparks going up the edge of the wood and then it's just beautiful. So the simple things, we love looking, we've got a bird feeder, I love watching the birds.

You know, so I just want to basically find silence, We love looking, we've got a bird feeder, I love watching the birds. So I just want to basically find silence, space. And again, and it can be prayer time without prayer, just in the presence of God's beauty, looking at the trees in the breeze. You don't have to be, your heart's edified, lifting up, it's grateful, without having to say, thank you to him, I'm not saying I don't, but even if I didn't, I'm communing in the presence of his beauty.

Help me and help others watching right now, become techno-minimalists, because we all want it, just like we all want to eat better and exercise, but we don't because we suck. So talk to someone who sucks like me on how to be a techno minimalist. Well, you know, we were talking earlier about addiction and the real question is, is it addiction? I mean, are you just plugged in because you need to be plugged in? And if you're not plugged in, you're wondering, you know, where's the nearest plug? Of course, that's what everyone's doing. That's 100%. Right.

Especially the people who don't realize that about them. That's them too. Yeah. So that's the point. For instance, I mean, I'm a bit wary now because it sounds like I'm holding them now, right? About what? You know, I've only got one app on my phone, a GPS,

because it's very useful. I've used it while I've been here. But I refuse to put other apps on my phone. Now, I went to a conference really recently and everyone was supposed to upload the Hoover app so that they could find out what's going on at the conference. I'm gonna find out what's going on at the conference when I get there, right?

I mean, I don't need that app. So it's about, you have to really convince me that I need it, I not need it in an addicted sense, in an actual, this is gonna be good for me, right? If it's not gonna be good for me, I don't want it. So, and then it's just a question of practice. And I find, of course I got favorite websites I look at sometimes, I'm not, you know,

but if I find that I'm, my downtime, because I'm probably at the computer most of the day, most of the time, you know, writing or editing or replying to emails or whatever. Then when I'm not working, why on earth would I want to spend my downtime staring at a screen? Do I not want any life beyond the artificial, virtual reality instead of real reality? You know, that's the primal thing to me is I want to go out there, I want to see God's creatures, God's creation, or be in a pub with real people and have a drink with

friends that I can see across the table and a hug, right, rather than have Zoom meetings. I mean, I've got friends in England, we have Zoom meetings. We actually have a pub we call the Flying Inn. We get together in a Zoom meeting and we drink and we talk. They're 3,000 miles away. I get it, right? There's a time and a place, but it has to be under control. Mason Harkness No, you don't in any way come across as holy in there, just heads up. And we don't need you to worry about that. Because I think we all just want to be taught. We all want to be kind of helped here. Because we use, you change the drug and you see, you know, like you just said, oh, I've been staring at a screen all day. Do I want to

keep doing that? That would be like saying somebody who says, do I want to eat artificial food? No, I want to eat good food. To most people, they're like, well, yeah, okay, I want to, but there's a big part of me that doesn't want to. And I've had this idea that the phone and the screen are both the cure and the cause of a sort of anxiety that we feel. You're in line to get a coffee, you don't really much want to talk to the people around you, you're in the elevator with one other person, you pull it out. Now I'm doing something, now I'm okay to not have to engage around me. But it also causes the anxiety because now I'm wondering if I've got more notifications or did I get an email or

did I miss a call? And so it's causing anxiety, but then I go onto it and I watch my stupid little videos and there's a sense of relief that it gives me this. This will, I guess I apparently this is going to be a battle for me until the day that I die. And maybe that's the point. It kind of has to be. Um, but, uh, but yeah. Yeah.

Cause and a cure. You can block the app store, that helps. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I know how to use the app store. Seriously, I mean, the one app I had, the GPS, a friend uploaded it for me. That's amazing. Can I have a look at your phone? Sure. It is a smartphone.

Yeah, yeah. No shame. No shame. My wife still has a flip phone though. What a woman, huh? Yeah, yeah, good. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. How do we learn to love what we should love and hate what we should hate? That's the question, isn't it? Whether it pertains to friendship or actions or technology use or exercise? Yeah, I think, I think that I wrote something once in distracting ourselves to death. Yeah. Right. If we need to be distracted all the time, we're addicted. It means we're not comfortable with silence, which is the presence of God. Right. I mean, it means we're not spending time with him because we'd be too busy

just stopping spending time with him, but doing something else. Right? So, I think distracting ourselves, that's the big danger there, is distraction. It's so easy. There's so many distractions out there. It's almost impossible to go. I mean, you go to a restaurant, they deliberately position the TVs, there's no way you can sit. You don't have one to look at.

You know? I mean, it's impossible to find some of this TV free if you want to go out for a meal, you know Yeah, I'm sure you're happy with this but our cigar lounge here in Steubenville Chester Tons Refuses to have electronic music or televisions and me and the owners a couple of the other There's me three of us who own it. We're talking about getting rid of Wi-Fi actually Which is quite radical to most people We'll have Wi-Fi for our manager and the people who work there

because we need that for transactions. But we're thinking of getting rid of Wi-Fi so that when people come, they can't just sit on their computer and work. The whole point of Chesterton's is to come together, have a smoke and talk like human beings. Like wasn't last night beautiful? It was absolutely beautiful.

Just like a bunch of people in a room talking. And that's, I mean, for me the most beautiful sound if you're at a restaurant or a pub is hubbub. It's the background noise of human voices. No technology involved, no music. Unless you've got a band playing fiddles and traditional folk music, that's great. Nothing against that. But just that sound of hubbub. You've got your own conversation in the background. You've got eight or nine other conversations that you can't hear, but it's just that sort of

background noise of human voices, human laughter. I mean, there aren't many more beautiful sounds in the world. And Hilleb Alok said, there's nothing worth the wear of winning than laughter and the love of friends. Say that again, there's nothing? There's nothing worth the wear of winning.

The wear, what does that mean? The wear, as in the effort. Nothing worth the wear of winning than laughter and the love of friends. And I used to think, hang on for a second, that's a bit flippant, heaven. Heaven's worth winning. But you think about it, what is heaven but laughter and the love of friends? It's a perfect depiction of heaven. So in so far as we have laughter and the love of friends this side of the grave, we are getting

that little inkling of what heaven is going to be. Tell me about Helia Billock, because he's one of these people that a lot of Catholics may not know about, even if they know a little bit about Chesterton and Lewis. to be. Tell me about Heléa Belloc, because he's one of these people that a lot of Catholics may not know about, even if they know a little bit about Chesterton and Lewis. Yeah, so I, you know, one of my crusades, if you like, is to bring Belloc out from Chesterton's shadow, because, you know, most people, they know Belloc, they know him because he's a friend of Chesterton's, and that's unjust, because actually, you know, his own literary achievement is equal. He's a great writer, a great thinker, in some aspects, such as political philosophy, Chesterton called himself Belloc's disciple. So this man's

a major figure, so a sort of two-minute version, cradle Catholic, unlike most of the other leading literary Catholics, most of whom are converts, he was a cradle Catholic. He wrote a book with the path to Rome, which is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It's a metaphor for life. Tell me about the book. I've been told to read the book, never have. Yeah, well, yeah, so basically it happens in reality. This is the beauty of it. He's in northern France, in Toul, in northern France, where he served in the French military. He's Anglo-French, so his mother's English, his father's French.

Serves in the French military, goes back after years later, sees the local British church renovated and beautiful and new. As an act of thanksgiving for the renovation of the church, he makes a vow that he's going to walk to Rome from there, Toul, and he's not going to sleep in a bed. He's going to go to Mass every day. He's not going to sleep in a bed, he's going to go to mass every day, he's not going to make use of any wheeled thing. Any what thing? Anything with wheels. I see wheels, yeah.

And will arrive in Rome in time for the feast of St Peter and Paul, June 29th, right? So he sets off and of course, one by one, he breaks all the valves. Okay. Makes me feel better about myself and the valves I've made. Yeah, I mean, he actually breaks all the valves and then, you know, this wonderful sin to the top of the Alps, he's not going to go round the bottom of the Alps like the Taurus. He's going to go straight line to Rome. That's his promise.

He's going to go right over the top of the Alps, right? And of course, there's a blizzard up there and he bribes someone recklessly because it's putting both their lives at risk to get him over the hill, over the top of the mountain. They get within about 60 feet or something of the peak and the guy says, look, if we don't go back down now, we're going to die. And he just refuses to go on. So Bellot goes back down again and his pride is defeated. That's the whole point, his pride is defeated. And then eventually he's so tired in Italy, he jumps on a train and with the last of his money to get as far as he can. He does arrive in Rome in time for mass on June the 29th. And it's a metaphor for our lives, right?

Is that we have the best of intentions and in so far as our vows or rash vows, we are going to break them. We shouldn't have made them in the first place. I've got one right now that I've made Joseph that I should not have made and I'm right now trying to think away around it It reminds me of Elizabeth and scum who promised God for something and she would not smoke cigarettes anymore And after she got what she wanted, she just started smoking cigars every day. I don't know if you know about this I didn't know that I didn't know that Yeah, yeah, and it goes, pride is humbled, his vows are broken, but he perseveres by the grace

of God. And there are certain moments where, and for instance, there's a wonderful thing. This is a perfect example of it. He's French, he doesn't like the Germans, right? And he was born of the year the Franco-Prussian war when the Germans invaded France. There's all sorts of reasons he doesn't like the Germans. He's a Francophile. So he's going to cross the year the Franco-Prussian war when the Germans invaded France. There's all sorts of reasons he doesn't like the Germans. He's a Francophile. So he's going to cross the border into German-speaking Switzerland. So he buys this huge jug of red wine because he's convinced that when he crosses the border to the barbarian countries of the German speakers, he won't get any decent wine, right?

Yes. So he fills up. So he's got this with him and then he says i'm he's really tired right he's trying to struggle to go on and he sits down and all of a sudden he feels his burden miraculously light and a split split second later he hears the crashing of his glass he loses all of his wine oh funny that was the lightning the lightning miraculous lighting of his his load is losing one of his wine. He could be dejected and he crosses the border, because this is our metaphor for death, right? Crosses the border and the wine he gets at his first din is amongst the finest he's ever tasted. In one sense he sort of criticises himself for being so anti-German, right? For not trusting his fellow Catholics on the other side of the border. But the other thing is, you know, we cling on to the comforts of this life

And it's what keeps us going. But when we cross the border, these comforts will be as nothing to what we offer when we die. Wow. Was he French? He was born in France and he had to evacuate to England when he was a baby. In fact, it's very interesting. So he's born just as the Franco-Prussian war was starting in 1870 and the Germans, the Prussians invade France. So they have to evacuate the family home, which is wrecked by the Germans, and they go to Paris and they get the last train out to England from Paris. If they hadn't

caught that train out, Bellot almost certainly would have died because there's a siege of Paris which follows. And basically every infant under about 12 months old dies in the famine and disease that's the consequence. So he gets out as a child and then he spends the rest of his life in England except when he volunteers for the French military to do his national service. Other than that, he spends the rest of his life in England. So he would call himself, typically he would call himself, another thing I love about Belloc, he's a localist. He would call himself French, right, that's his nation, but he would also call himself from Sussex, his shire. One particular shire in England, he did another walk, I won't go

into details on this one, called the Four Men, which just walks from the eastern border of Sussex to the western border of Sussex, about 75 miles, in the company of four men, myself, the sailor, the poet, and Grizzle Beard. And these are all facets of his own character. You ever been on a long hike by yourself? Yeah. You know, when you talk, you're having dialogues with yourself about all sorts of things. So he is a sailor, he is a poet. Grizzleby is the historian, he's a historian, and myself is myself, right? So it's just, you know, it's just a beautiful book. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you for encouraging me to maybe read it. I heard he was a prickly character, which is why I can relate to him a little. Is that right?

Yeah, I sometimes say that I talk about the difference between Chesterton and Belloc, is that the difference between Chestertonian charity and Bellocchian bellicosity. So Bellocch's very happy to get in a fight. And sometimes does not have charity. So that's a real weakness. When Chesterton died, Bellocch wrote a book called On the Place of Gilbert Keith Chesterton the English Letters

and he said that Chesterton did not always go for the kill. If he's in a discussion or something in a debate where as Bellocque would go for the jugular, you know, this is a fight to the death and I'm going to win. Chesterton would not, deliberately not because he's more interested in the soul of his adversary and Bellocque says it doesn't matter that he didn't win because he's in heaven. of his adversary and Belloc says it doesn't matter if he didn't win because he's in heaven. In other words that Belloc knew that Chesterton's way of doing things was better than his own and it was a weakness on his part. I like that. I also though like that people are different, obviously. Yeah. Not different in a sinful way, but there's something nice about, you have a bunch of different friends, some of them just happen to be more jovial and the glass

is half full and others are a little bit more prickly and a little bit more kind of irascible. I know, I agree. And the thing with Belloc, I mean, he often when he's being his most bellicose, his most argument is that he's got his tongue in his cheek. So there's one of, there's one thing called the sailors cowls was Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, may all my enemies go to hell, Noel, Noel, you know? I mean, we know he doesn't mean that. It's just meant to be funny.

If he never says if humor, then it's our problem, right? He sort of, you know, the other thing he said, I mean, when I die, may it be said, his sins were scarlet, but his books were red. Again, he doesn't mean that. it's meant to be funny, right? One thing I love about belloc has a great sense of humor So I want to hear more about that But I'm trying to understand like what are these little phrases that he uses called like wherever the Catholic Sun doth shine There's always laughter and good red wine. At least I've always found it. So

Something Benedict Thomas Domino. Yeah. Yeah. What is that kind of way of? There's always laughter and good red wine. At least I've always found it so something. Benedict Amos Domino, yeah. What is that kind of way of... Well, it's epigrammatic, with epigrams. So, you know, saying things that succinct, memorable, that epithy, just a few lines. Yeah, that's an epigrammatic, an epigram. Chesterton was king of that. Oh, he's wonderful too, yeah. What does he say that an inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered?

Rightly considered. An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. I was saying it the other way around though. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Which is exactly true. I mean, an adventure is not meant to be convenient,

right, if it's convenient, it's not an adventure. Yeah, so okay, you said he's got a great sense of humor. Yeah, I mean, one of my favorites, at the Chesterton Conference last week, I gave a talk with Chesterton Belloc, and I read, I've had it at the hand, I've recited, it takes too long. But he wrote a wonderful book called Lines to a Dawn.

And it's Lines to a Dawn that dared attack my Chesterton. And it's, 60 lines are basically invective. Every single term of abusing you can think of against this Dawn that dared attack his Chesterton. But it's spiced with humor and it's meant to be funny. He doesn't name the dawn. We mentioned earlier about, you know, don't aim at a particular person. He doesn't give his name, right? But, you know, it's just, it's hilarious. It's meant to be funny. Here's some more quotes of his. The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity

might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such naivish, cave-ish, naivish probably, naivish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed and by whom one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived it all. That's good. He's got a ton of these, does he? Yeah, I mean, he's a great historian. He wrote a wonderful book called Europe and the Faith. He says, one thing in this world is different from all others. It has personality and force. It is recognized and when recognized, most violently hated or loved. It is the Catholic

Church. Within that household, the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it is the night." Yeah. Mason- Yep. Good man, huh? Mason- You know, we have, you saw his painting in our lounge? We have Belloc among those paintings. Mason- Oh, no I didn't. He's one of them. I didn't notice him closely enough. Mason- Yeah. Craif, Belloc, Lewis, Chesterton and Tolkien. Yeah, yeah. We plan on doing more. That's a great place by the way. Yeah, it is isn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's very special.

Yeah, it is. It's been so lovely to create, to be able to be part of creating a space where people can come and be human beings. Do you like board games? I do. Don't play them as often as I used to, but I do. One of the things I like about Scrabble is no, the other people I? I do don't play them as often as I used to but I do one of the things I like about Scrabble is no other people I'm playing against don't know that I'm an idiot Do you know because they can't see all the words I could have made but didn't because I'm an idiot Like if I if we play chess, you know that I'm an idiot like you keep seeing the moves that I should have made but didn't whereas in

Scrabble you you might think well, he probably just has bad titles. I like that philosophy. Actually, my family won't play me at Scrabble because I keep winning. All right, I really enjoy playing Scrabble, I must admit. You've written books on poetry. I have. What is poetry and what do you like it? Well, poetry at its best is the distillation of language in pursuit of beauty. What a beautiful phrase. There's no superfluous

distillation of language in search of beauty. Did you just spit that out or is that a… I just spat that out. It's very good. Well, I thank the giver of the gift. But there should be no superfluous word. If there's a word out of place or an extra word that didn't need to be there, it's bad poetry. You know, every word is exactly where it should be, and then you've got on top of where the words are, you've got the meter, the rhyme, you know, the onomatopoeia, the alliteration. It's music. It's the best that language can be. The only poem I've memorized is by The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God.

Yeah, Hopkins, wonderful. Yeah, it is a wonderful poem. I want to tell you about Halo, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Halo.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it,

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The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. What do you think about modern poetry?

Like have you ever tried to enjoy modern poetry written by kind of secular modernist type people? Have you ever tried? Because I know, you know, the knee-jerk reaction is it must all be crap, but have you tried reading? Well again, I mean, obviously I'm a literary historian, the modernist movement really begins in poetry, begins with people like T.S. Eliot, who I love. So T.S. Eliot broke rules, right, and those that formalist, those that think the form of the poetry is crucial,

didn't like what Eliot was doing because he was breaking, he's a bit like jazz music. Yeah. Right, so jazz music. I love jazz music. Well, that's the whole point. Do you hate it? No, I don't, I don't hate jazz music. No, I like jazz music.

But you know, you have to sort of play with the form in order to get the jazz. So basically that's what Eddie is doing, and the poem like The Wasteland, it's one of my favorite poems, but it was hated at the time. People like Chesterton didn't like it because I thought it was iconoclastic. But it's absolutely what the Wasteland does.

He uses the form of disintegration as a way of reflecting the wasteland of modernity. Now he, we don't, there's no form that the whole thing's collapsing. So he uses a collapsed formlessness, inverted commas, as there is form to it. But he uses a formlessness as a way of reflecting what he's talking about, which is the wasteland of the modern world. And basically, at the end of the poem, there's a conversion. The only salvation from modernity is faith and baptism and acceptance of the Lord and the peace that comes therefrom. So it's a wonderful poem, but yeah, he's the first modern.

No, when I say modern, I'm talking about the last 20 years. Yeah, no, we get, I edit a magazine called The Austin Review, I get sent far more contemporary poems by good, solid Catholic poets that I can possibly publish in the magazine. Most of them, most Catholic poets are formalists, so they keep to traditional form, but there are some that don't, some that sort of are using sort of modern poetic techniques, and if what they're saying is beautiful, in other words, the word choice is important and what the words are actually meaning is deep, because a poem has to be deep, has to be inviting you to something contemplative. If it's not, it's a waste of time, right? This is a limerick,

it's meant to be funny. But I mean, so if you're not going to use form, what you're saying has to be very profound, and the word choice has to be very good. And then I'll publish it. But generally speaking, my sympathies are with tradition as regards poetic form. So when I talked about modern poetry, this one came to mind and this one is probably not at all deep and doesn't have any form. And yet I just can't help but like it. You ready? You're going to hate it so much. Here we go. This is by William Carlos Williams. Here it is. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. That's it. How much do you hate that? I find it cute. I get why so much depends upon that. It's a beautiful sight. It's it's it's they are words that lead us to

contemplation. I would question whether it's a poem. Yeah. Because there's no, I mean, you could, just because you break up sentences into stanzas. If you can make it as a grammatical sentence in a single line, it's not a poem. Yeah. So it's not a poem, but it is a thought that leads us to contemplation. And it's a beautiful thought, leads us to a beautiful understanding of the beauty and simple things And how much depends upon that the beautiful simplicity of simple things Yeah, now that's how I like where it leads my mind. Uh-huh, but I don't think it's a poem. No good. All right Yeah, yeah, it's been pretty I don't know. I'm sure who's the fella

Bob Dylan, you know when people start talking about Bob, like he's one of the world's greatest poets, I'm like, you don't have to say that. Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example of that. This is where hyperbole leads you. This is what this is the this is the opposite of what we were saying earlier. When you say that a bad person in history, like was the devil, you've overplayed your hand. And and now you're forcing me to see nuance and goodness in him. Same thing is true. When you say Bob Dylan is up there with the greatest, I was perfectly willing to appreciate his work until you said he was one of the greatest. Now he's crap. In fact, in some ways I feel sorry for Bob Dylan because what it really does is a judgment upon the Nobel Prize selection people. It just shows that in our woke culture, where beauty is despised, where form is despised, where goodness is despised, where truth is despised, that basically that poetry can be

reduced to someone who writes quite good rock songs and several of which probably qualifies poems. But no, writing half a dozen good poems does not make you a Nobel Prize for Literature winner. What's your favourite poem? Would you recite it if you knew it? Yeah, I'm not very good at reciting from memory, which is a weakness. But my favorite poem, I love the Wreck of the Deutschland by Jeremy Manny Hopkins which is a very deep mystical poem on the mystery of suffering which I want to write a whole book on one of these days. It's 35 stanzas, it's quite long so I know I can't recite it. And I love a poem by Hille Bellot called Tarantella and it's just Tarantella. Yeah.

Please spell that. and it's just yeah um uh tar a n t e l l a and if it's in readable form i'll happily recite that if you want or you can read it i'd love you to because that's not too long that'll take about a minute thank you my glasses work okay tarantella by helle belloque Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn, And the tedding and the spreading of the straw for a bedding, And the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees, And the wine that tasted of tar? And the cheers and the jeers of the young milliteers,

Under the vine of the dark veranda? Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn? And the cheers and the jeers of the young militias who hadn't got a penny and who weren't paying any and the hammer at the doors and the din and the hip hop hop of the clap of the hands and to the twirl and the swirl of the girl gone

chancing, glancing, dancing, backing and advancing snapping of a clapper to the spin, out and in, and the ting tong tang of the guitar. Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn? Look it down here. Nevermore Miranda, nevermore, only the high peaks hoar, and aragon a torrent at the door. No sound in the walls of the halls where falls the tread of the feet of the dead to the ground.

No sound but the boom of the far waterfall like doom. So what happened to this pub or this inn? Well I think the two things there is that he's remembering a particular night with obviously dancing and guitars. So beautiful. Yeah and just a good time up in the high mountains between France and Spain and that moment can never be brought back again. It's just you know so the point is that these moments are there, you can remember them, be joyful about them, but it's all mutable, changeable. It passes away. Like good things, this side of the grave, this side of heaven, they pass away. Yeah. What, what is it about? That's that feeling I have is similar to nostalgia. It's like the pain of something not being anymore. That was beautiful.

Yeah. I melancholy. I mean, what I love about it is it shows both, right? I mean, the first part of the whole meter is, is don't you can dancing to it. It's actually, it's moving to the beat of the Tarantella dance, right? You dance along this, you're having the good time, right? And then there's that break in the verse and it's gone, right? I mean, it's both. It's the joy of laughter and the love of friends, which we talked about earlier, but then the fact that all these things must pass away.

Mason- Yeah. And I love the use of the non-word words. Steele- Yeah. Mason- That you're using And I love the use of the non-word words. Yeah. That you're using it more for the sound than... Exactly. Ting tang tong of the guitar. Yeah. Hip hop hop. Yeah.

Who's the fella who converted him and his wife because of C.S. Lewis? A Beautiful Mercy, he wrote that. Oh, Sheldon Van Oaken. Yeah. I love that line he has about his conversion But between the probable and proved their yawns a gap afraid to jump we stand absurd Then see behind us sink the ground and worse our very standpoint crumbling desperate dawns our only hope To leap into the word that opens up the shuttered universe Wow Lord. That's powerful. That's beautiful You've heard that before? No. Isn't that

glorious? This is the second half of the, I don't like the first stanza very much, but that one is that feeling of like we can't stand here. There's no, there's no choice to, it's the Pascalian wager idea, right? Like I can't, a game is being played and I must pick a side. And we're not, St. Augustine, no abiding city, right? The city of man is no abiding city. We have to somehow transcend that in the direction of the city of God. Otherwise everything's meaningless, mutable, decays, disintegrates. Yeah, I wonder if that's, I mean, there's a good sense in which we should keep to our culture and hold onto our culture and to hand down our culture, but maybe some of the anger for our culture disappearing is this desire to

hold on to an abiding city. And this frustration that the town I grew up in is not the town that exists there now. Yeah, there's a danger, particularly if those of us who put too much faith in politics, that we're investing too much in the world. Now, in St Matthew's Gospel, you can't worship both God and mammon. But if we get too invested in the political process, I'm not saying we shouldn't vote, I'm not saying we shouldn't be political, I'm not saying we shouldn't be active politically, but if we're investing too much of ourselves and our souls in that process, we're basically

belonging too much to this world and not to the world we're destined to. And Nunn once said to me that for every hour of, I think she stood by this, for every hour of political media we consumed, we should have two hours of adoration. You think if that was actually what you took seriously, you wouldn't listen to a lot of political news, but it does aggravate us.

It does stir up the passions. Yeah, I mean, I find that, for instance, we don't have TV reception, where you have a TV, old fashioned TV, for putting DVDs in, mostly for our son. You still watch children. One good thing, one thing doesn't change, but when you have a child who's down to 22, we still put videos in for three year olds about 20 years on. So yeah, we know all the Wiggles videos and all the Barney videos and all that, back to

front. But when I'm in hotels, for instance, you know, and because I don't have a TV, curiositas, which is obviously Thomas Aquinas warns us against, right, there's a difference between ciencia, knowledge, and curiositas, curiosity, that I get the remote out. Because you know, what is on TV these days? Quite frankly, I don't know why I do it, because the last 20 years it's the same stuff, right? The only thing that's got worse is there's more bad language and more sex than there used to be on TV. But years it's the same stuff. Right? It's, it's the only thing that's got worse is more, but it's more bad language and more sex than it used to be on TV. But, but basically it's the same banal, meaningless stuff.

And you go through 50 channels three times before you realise there's nothing worth watching. Unless you get happy, you get lucky, and if you get a soccer game or something on, you can watch. Yeah. Peace. But you know, unless you get lucky, you go through the 50 channels three times. And at the end of it, two things you feel, agitated and probably slimed.

What is slimed? You've covered in some sort of slime, you've been watching stuff and you can only see something for five seconds, you know, before you hit the remote again, but it's already in there. You've seen the image, it's done its damage to you, it's slimed you, it's covered you in slime and there's nothing you can do about it now. You can't take that moment back, you know. And of course you've left yourself open to it by playing with the remote, right? So, but I do it because I'm stuck. Sometimes I give a talk in the evening, get back, I'm not ready to go to bed, right? I'm still hyped up and you know, and so what am I going to do? I mean, I'm too tired to read because I'm getting towards bedtime, right? You want the path of least resistance. You turn on the TV and yeah. I, uh, I've had this relationship with swearing over the last,

how old am I? 41 years. I, I'm quite convinced it's, uh, wrong. And, uh, I think I've got good arguments for it. Um, but it is, it is interesting that more and more we're tolerating swearing. Oh, yeah. I saw last week, I think it was last week, sometime I was in a hotel, and there's a film that was being shown,

and I'm not joking, I'm not even exaggerating, honestly, every second or third word was an expletive. So this person was not being able to say much because every second or third word was an expletive. Yeah this person was not being able to say much because every second or third word was an expletive. So what's your problem with that? I get, I know what it is, but I want you to tell us. Well first of all, first of all it's ugly, it's offensive. It's offensive in the sense that what I want is beauty, goodness and truth. Language which is peppered with expletives

is full of none of that. And the best it's getting in the way, worst it's violating and destroying it. So, and it's habit forming, sort of people that watch those sorts of films will talk that sort of way. So it's contagious. So, yeah, and as you would expect that, it's all violence, narcissistic, self-centeredness.

If that sort of language is, if you like, an outpouring of that which is inside. Right. Frustration often is what it communicates frustration. Like when you stub your toe, you don't say, oh golly dear, you might, but you might just, it's like a sound, it's like an ape beating its chest. It's no longer articulate. It's yeah. I lately I've got a really bad neck at the moment, a damaged neck, which I'm having a chiropractic on, but I'm managing most of the time just to say ouch. Yeah. Yeah. When it hurts. Nothing worse. You know, well, I mean, there's lots of, I think, clever arguments for swearing, but here's a not so clever, but I think very convincing one. If you and

I and a few fellas were sitting around together, you know, let's say we were at the pub and everyone around us was swearing. And we were there for three or four hours and I had a lot to say, let's say, but I didn't swear once. Nor did I make people feel bad about the fact that they were. There are times where that may be appropriate. A child or a woman walks in the room. Come on. But it's just us. So I'm not making anyone feel bad about it.

But you notice at some point, this fella's not, he hasn't sworn once. You have more respect for me. Yeah, absolutely. That's the point. In fact, you've evangelized. That's the, yeah. You know, but you clearly are able to enjoy their company, to be articulate without having to descend to the profane.

Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah. So impressive. But you've never walked away. I mean, because I've had these experiences. I know people like that who I realized at some point they don't swear, you know, nor do they make me feel bad for the times I've accidentally sworn. Because that's just what is that?

I mean, I mean, sometimes you should feel bad about things. But and you should even lead people to feel bad about things, but not in a sort of like look down your nose at them kind of thing. Right. But that's interesting. But I've never been in a group of people where everyone's hasn't been swearing and one person has. And I came away with a better view of them. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's a modesty thing too. It's like guarding the speech, guarding my speech. Yeah, which I still struggle with. I don't want to make any bones. I do swear occasionally. I like it. You know, and I like when people swear in front of me, but it's more for the frankness that I believe them to be, you know, it's not the swearing. It's also, I mean, I think it's better not to use swear words, period. But if you are

going to use them, at least use them. Be clever. Well, or to be emphatic. Like for instance, if you're very rarely angry, people know you're very, very angry and you use an expletive, my word, we've taken him one step further and we've seen him for a while. So he's had at least that, had that impact.

It'd still be better if you could convey that without having to use the expletive. But the point is, at least then you're using it, I say appropriately, but it's emphasizing something and you're using it in a way that he's used that bad word, because we've really offended him, we've really upset him, you know, he doesn't speak like that. Usually, wow, we better back off. So it's at least it's, it's having an impact, right? I desire one, but when you, when you just use habitually, right, it's like, it's like word inflation. It doesn't mean anything to you. It just offends people around you in so far as they're not as desensitized as you are.

You know, I know people in England, you've got East End of London, I come up every other words and F word or worse words than the F word and they're using without thinking about it. Yeah. You know, that's the same. My wife said she had more cursing from my mother than she had heard in her whole life. Okay. But see, what's, why did you laugh? That wasn't just to make me feel better for throwing my mom onto the bus. There's something charming about,

there's something about swearing that's appealing. Well, I know I don't think that, I don't know. I mean, it's a good question because I have to think about it. I think because it's the absurdity of the situation of a mother-in-law, daughter-in-law scenario where the mother-in-law scandalized the daughter-in-law. You know, it's more the domestic, you know,

a lot of things are funny that the domestic side of things where things are not working the way they should within the family, we think that's funny. Because you know, you know, But then but yeah, maybe well maybe that is it. Yeah, it's kind of like the the the woman on a wedding day slipping on a banana peel. It's the what do you call that? It's where it's your expectation is thwarted. Yeah, it's basically when decorum is disappears, right? That is decorous. That which is fitting is just disappears, right? It's just decorum, that which is fitting is just disappears, right?

It's just to write an essay on running after one's hat. And you're saying, basically, there's something, you said something noble about running after one's hat. In fact, we should have a sport where people run after hats. And he said, it would be no more absurd than 22 men running after a piece of leather, right? So the funny is that, but the thing about

what makes running after one's hat funny is you lose your dignity, your dignitas, right? You're wearing your hat because it makes you look suave or good or handsome or whatever. It's blown off and then you have to chase it, right? You've lost all respectability, all decorum, all dignity and that makes that's funny. It's like the bride filling on the banana skin. It's funny because everything is as it should be. And then something preposterous happens to us, everything upside down. And that is funny. I mean, yeah.

I think, I don't know why I feel like there might be more to it than that. Because if you said to me, if your grandma was still alive, you'd be like, oh, my grandma swears like a sailor. Something about that makes me like her, even though I don't know anything else about her. Now, what is that? Again, I think it's something about frankness. She speaks her mind, she doesn't much care what you think, which I

understand is probably a vice. And you know what's interesting is if you said your granddad did, I wouldn't find that as interesting or charming. Yeah, I don't know. You are asking some, I think, deep and challenging psychological questions here. Not about the nature of humor or the nature of swearing, but also the nature of family and family relations, men and women, parents and children. You know, there's so much we've invested psychologically in those things, as we should be, that I think that we, yeah, it's very easy for us to be, and I wonder to what extent we laugh because we're uncomfortable. It's a response, right? Well, how do I respond to that?

He just said his mother swears a lot, I guess. Ah ha ha, that's really terrific. Well, I hope that my laughter is more impulsive and not forced, but you know, I think there is a degree of that, like, you know, you I just do I just respond in a prim and proper manner but but the point is I think it's so habitual or spontaneous the laughter is genuine yeah now that you've just said something which is there's only two ways of taking this right I just want to primish right prim and prudent way that was I don't think much of your mother. Right. Or you laugh. Yeah, there's no third way. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Well, what do you have coming up? What's on the docket? Well, I'm teaching two courses in the fall, one for Rosary College, it's a new Catholic college in South Carolina,

we founded one for Memorial College. Is this an online? They're both online classes, yeah. But the Rosary College, what's this? I haven't heard of this. It's brand new, it's the first ever Catholic college in South Carolina. So we started this fall, we'll be starting this fall in a couple of weeks, and just a few students, dozens of students, but that's the way these things start.

You know, you have a pioneering type who's willing to take risks, and they've re-offered some board once it's been going a couple of years. So, so yeah, I have high hopes for that. So I'm teaching online, I'm on the lecture circuit. So I can't think where I'm going offhand, Aiken, South Carolina, I can actually drive there. That's good. Houston, Texas, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Michigan. How do people book you? And is there a place they can see where you're speaking? My wife keeps wanting me to put a place to speak on the website and my attitude is I'm traveling too much already.

I'm trying to sort of not advertise the fact that I want to travel a lot. I put my prices up deliberately because I want to be at home with my family and I was hoping it would deter people but some people seem happy to pay so at some point you know it doesn't make sense for the family budget to say no. So yeah. Okay. Yeah. That sounds mercenary but I can only say one thing it's important. I feel very blessed that God allows me to make a living for my family by evangelizing and serving the Lord but my primary vocation is as a pater familias, father of a family But my primary vocation is as a paterfamilias, father of a family, my primary vocation under God obviously to get me to heaven

and help my wife and children get to heaven. And a large part of that is making sure that we pay the bills and there's food on the table. So I don't feel the least bit bashful about the fact that yes I'm evangelizing, but yes you know that I have to support my family and yes, please, you know, if you're going to support me in my work, then understand that I'm a paterfamilias before I'm anything else under God. Yeah. And your JPS.co is your website again. Correct.

Where do you, are you pretty tech incompetent like Peter Crave? Not as bad as him. I'm not as bad as Peter Crave. I tech incompetent like Peter Crave? Not as bad as him. I'm not as bad as Peter Crave, not as good as Peter Crave. Until fairly recently, he insisted on handwriting his manuscripts. He does at least type them up now, but, I'm admiring greatly. Now I, I, I learn what I need to learn. So I know how to record on audacity, audio podcast, but the video podcast I get a techie chap come in and film me and he does that stuff and then I know how to

upload it onto WordPress. You know, I know the basics because I know what I need to know. You know, I know how to edit a Word document because I edit magazine, you know, I mean I know how to write a Word document because I'm a writer but I learn what I need to learn but I'm not interested in learning what I don't need to learn basically. I have no desire to I learn what I need to learn but I'm not interested in learning what I don't need to learn basically I have no have no desire to know more than I need to. Who books your talks though? How do you? Well people find, my website you can find out, joseph at JPS.co, the email address is on there. I get everything, so the Bishop of Bridgeport,

Connecticut invited me and Chesterton Academy's invited me, I'm doing some work with Catholic Parish in Houston, Texas, so yeah, all sorts. And what book are you reading right now, or books? Well, I hate to put me on the spot, I've just finished reading because I've picked up Pinocchio, so that's the children's classic, I haven't started that yet, but I just finished reading The Mass of Brother Michelle. I'm glad you mentioned it by the way, this is a wonderful classic novel, I thought it was a new novel because I've never heard of it before. A contemporary novel. It's actually about set in France at the time of the Reformation, the rise of the Huguenots, and it's about this man who, you know, he has called him for the priesthood, but he's been maimed in a boar hunt.

And so he only has one hand and one mangled hand so he can't raise the host and so he can't be a priest so he becomes a brother and it's just how he grows in the holiness and the back against the backdrop of the history and the love for this woman before he becomes that he leaves his father tells him to get out because he's maimed he can't be the heir so he goes off as a beggar and he ends up being rescued by this Benedictine monk. And anyway, it's a very beautiful story, but the point about it, the Mass, the sacrament of the Mass is the whole backdrop to the whole thing, and it ends with just a beautiful depiction of the Mass. So those are the liturgies. What's that book called? The Mass of Brother Michel. The foreword is written by Peter Krasniewski, so people that know him will know that.

And it's recently published by, I think, Angelico Press, one of the exciting new Catholic publishers that are doing new things. So that one I would recommend. Just finished reading that. Yeah, good. Well, that's it. Thank you for being on my show, for hanging out with me, and for coming to the cigar lounge last night, and for telling me a bit more about hilaire belloc and uh things my pleasure it's always a joy to talk to you you go places that i love to follow what does that mean that means you talk about all sorts of things that i like being with you good god bless you thank you very much my pleasure that means he needs us you need us to get out of the way to get them? Yeah.

Alright. I'm good because I need the loot. I'd have been dancing in my shit chair if I'd have gone much longer.