Pints With Aquinas - How to be Holy w/ Dr. Scott Hahn

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Dr. Hahn spills the beans on Holiness, and how only God is truly holy, but through Him, by grace, we can also share in His holiness. Dr. Hahn's New Book (Use Code "HOLYPINTS" for a discount or as an exclamation): https://stpaulcenter.com/product/holy-is-his-name-the-transforming-power-of-gods-holiness-in-scripture/ Word of The Lord: https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-word-of-the-lord/ Sponsors: Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt-home/ Hallow (FREE TRIAL): https://hallow.com/matt Parler: https://parler.com/mattfradd

G'day and welcome to Pines with Aquinas. Today I'll be interviewing Dr. Hahn about how to be holy. So if you're not as holy as you should be, you're going to want to listen to this episode. But before we get into that, I want to say thank you to HALLOW, H-A-L-L-O-W. This is the best prayer and meditation app on the planet, especially if you're Catholic. So go check them out, hallow.com slash Matt. When you subscribe over there on that website, you'll get three months for free. So you can try out the number one downloaded Catholic app on the planet for three months

to see if you think it's worth paying to use. It's really fantastic. I use it, my wife uses it. It's got great sleep stories and meditations and audio books. Highly recommend it. Hello.com slash Matt. H-A-L-L-O-W dot com slash Matt. Again, click the link in the description below if you want to try it out. It's really great at helping you grow in prayer. Second thing I want to say is thank you to Exodus 90. Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men that will help you take your spiritual life to the next level.

It's starting up again on January 9th for tens of thousands of men all over the world. So is this the year you break old habits and curb the distractions keeping you from being a better man? The answer is probably yes. So exodus90.com slash Matt, go click over there and sign up. Find a group of men, do it with them. It's fantastic. Exodus90.com slash Matt. And again, they're starting January 9th. So you've got plenty of time to get ready.

Independent research shows that Exodus men report significant changes in their quality of life. Dramatic decrease in time spent on their phones. Stronger satisfaction rates for their marriages. Improved relationships with their kids. It's amazing. Exodus90.com slash Matt. Again, click the link in the description below so that they know that we sent you. Here is my episode with Dr. Han. Dr. Han, lovely to have you. Great to be with you, Matt. Just got back from Rome. It was fantastic. I did the Scavi Tour. Oh, first time?

The first time. Oh. Unbelievable. Yeah. The first time for me was like in 92. And all of the Petrine images and keys and that sort of thing, it's really breathtaking. I remember lecturing to about 120 seminarians

for two and a half hours. Yeah, for about two and a half hours after the scabby tour. And that particular day of the week, I was going through Matthew 16, the keys of the kingdom and, you know, all of the things that pertain to the Old Testament typology of the Davidic kingdom. And at one point I almost got choked up. It was like, I just saw, you know, I just touched. Yeah, I was kind ofoked up. It was like I just saw, you know, I just touched. Yeah, I was I was I was I was kind of tearing up throughout the whole ordeal. And something that struck me, too, was, OK, you think this was one of Nero's circuses.

The leader of the small Christian sect was crucified and the whole place was a graveyard. Right. Right. And you think if anyone had reason to lose hope in Christianity as a movement, it would be those Christians. But now look at St. Peter's, that overlays the whole thing. Right. And even the faith after they were both martyred, Peter and Paul, I mean, the first or second generation of believers after the chief apostles were martyred, you know, they compared them to Romulus and Remus.

And so the two spiritual brothers who were the new founders of the new Rome, I mean, before it became, you know, the papacy and all of that, they just recognized that the ground had been consecrated by the blood of the martyrs. I just have a lot more hope. Yeah. I have this feeling, and I think it's based in fact,

that things are about to get way worse, way quicker than any of us even expect now. We're gonna look back on 2022 as the good old days and about 30 years from now, but that old as well. I have a tremendous amount of hope right now. I almost feel like you've been wiretapping my phone. That's exactly what I've been thinking and saying to friends. Yeah, I believe that is gonna get much worse, much faster.

And then we're going to see who is really in charge and what he does when we really muck it up. Hey, this book, can we put a link to this? This is Scott's book, Holy is His Name, the Transforming Power of God's Holiness in Scripture. So we'll put a link to that. That's to the St. Paul Center. And if people click that and use the promo code, which is holy pints, one word, one word, no exclamation mark, just holy pints, holy pints. Yes. They'll get 20% off Dr. Hahn's new book until Christmas.

Yeah. So listen, uh, how can I be holy? Dr. Hahn? You know, holiness is one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And saints, we talk about, you know, the saints all the time, especially in this month, you know, where we remember the dead, but we celebrate these saints and then the souls and all of that. I think of this book as sort of being the culmination of a lifetime of study, a kind of narrative arc. I mentioned at the beginning of the book that holiness captured my attention literally 50

years ago when I was 14 and a half. I experienced the grace of conversion. I found Jesus. I started reading the Bible. He found me. But I went to church and it was like the early 70s when it was peace, love and you know, we were all getting over a kind of hippie hangover of all you need is love, as the Beatles put it, you know, and you spelled it L-U-V and it was just like saccharine. It was like a sticky run.

I'm thinking of Brother, Son, Sister Moon. Not to fully throw that under the bus. I'm sure there are good elements to it, but it had that kind of vibe, didn't it? That Francis was just a hippie like Jesus probably was. Yeah. And I mean, at the time, I was just really turned off by this sort of thing. This easy believism or what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. And it just struck me as being superficial, if not counterfeit.

And so, less than an hour from my home, this young Protestant theologian by the name of R.C. Sproul was teaching every week in this, actually what was his living room down in Ligonier. He was just starting the Ligonier Valley Study Center and he was starting a series of lectures on Scripture that later became I think his greatest book, The Holiness of God. And he basically introduced us to holiness, you know, that God is not just love, love, love, mercy, mercy, mercy, but holy, holy, holy in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4. And he would refer to a book entitled The Idea of the Holy by a German professor who

wrote back in 1917, if I recall, Rudolf Otto published Das Heilige, which is translated on the idea of the Holy. Oxford University Press published the book and he was talking all about the experience That people have of God's holiness and it's never oh cool It is always like Moses turning away from the burning bush or Isaiah. Whoa is me. I am doomed You know, I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell on a land full of people who are unclean and My eyes have seen the Lord thinking to have Peter in the boat man of unclean lips and I dwell on a land full of people who are unclean. And my eyes have seen the Lord.

Thinking too of Peter in the boat. Get away from me, Lord. Right. After the nets were full to the breaking point, you know, he should have dropped to his knees and said, can you sign a contract? We'll enter into a partnership. I'll pay you for your public ministry. But this is also true for the beloved disciple. You know, in John 13, he's reclining on our Lord's breast in the Last Supper. In Revelation 1, he turns to see the one who was speaking to him, and upon seeing the Son of Man standing in the midst of the seven gold lampstands, the menorah in heaven, he fell at his feet as though dead. You know, and you'd expect our Lord to say, oh, come on, John, get over yourself. I mean, or John to say, hey, long time, no see, you are looking really good, you know.

But instead, he's so filled with awe and dread. And this is what Sproul introduced to us. I would go, you know, my youth pastor would drive me down to Ligonier, Stalstown, in fact. And I would come back just enthralled. And he would quote from Otto's classic work on the idea of the Holy about how holiness is the Mysterium Tremendum at Faschanons. So first and foremost it's a mystery, and then Mysterium Tremendum, it causes us to tremble.

It isn't just something that we're enthralled with, and yet on the other hand, Faschanons, we do find it more than a little intriguing. It's fascinating, and yet like the seraphim who were covering their faces before the Lord God, who is holy, holy, holy, we are cowering, we're trembling in awe and reverence, and yet at the same time, we're drawn intractably to that which we dread. And for the next two or three years, that was my experience as a new believer in high school trying to find my way out of excess and addiction and that kind of thing. And it really helped a lot. And then later on in college when I did more intensive biblical study or whatever, I realized

that as true as that notion of holiness was, it was really a description of how we respond to holiness, rather than a definition of what God's holiness really is in itself. And it isn't like either or, but the primary meaning of holiness is what is proper to God. You alone are holy, so you alone hallow us, but becoming holy, you discover, is not about becoming a good citizen, or just making ourselves bigger and better and smarter and stronger. There are some things that we can do in keeping the commandments, but there are other things we can't do in becoming holy if you alone are holy. And so, I went back over this, and the next step in my own research in college was to realize that we confuse not only our experience of God's holiness

with whatever that mystery is in itself, we also confuse the terms that are used to describe righteousness and holiness. We basically act as though it's synonymous. And I don't mean to get all lofty and academic, but righteousness, justice, mishpat, zedek, is the province of the King. In Psalm 72, the Solomonic Psalm, give the King the justice and judgment. And whereas holiness is the province of the high priest, it's in the temple, not the palace. And so you discover it pertains to the vertical axis that unites us in relationship to God, who alone is holy. And it really pertains to the first three of the Ten Commandments, have no other gods before me, don't take my name in vain and remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, the only time Kodesh occurs

in the Decalogue. And then the last seven of the Ten Commandments are the second table of the law that have to do with love of neighbor. So love of God more than self and then love of neighbor as ourselves, you know, this is righteousness, this is justice, this is being a good citizen, you know, and keeping the civil law of Israel, whereas you go from the palace to the temple, you go from the king to the high priest, and this then supplied me with this surprising insight into the background of Isaiah's vision. In Isaiah 6, we have the locust classicus, where everybody goes to understand holiness, and it begins in a way that seems like sort of you know a tangent you know in the year that King

Uzziah died well okay that's the time marker at the beginning of Isaiah's ministry and it lasted over 50 years and King Uzziah was the tenth king in the line of David and his reign lasted nearly 50 years so in in the year that King Uzziah died, you know, Isaiah says, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple, and above him stood the seraphim. And he describes them and how they called to one another, saying, holy, holy, holy, Kadoosh, Kadoosh, Kadoosh,

is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory, and the foundations shake. The temple in heaven is filled with smoke. And Isaiah replies, he cries out, what was me for I am lost? I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts. And so one of the seraphim takes this burning coal from the altar of incense and touches Isaiah's mouth, his lips. I mean, just imagine that, third degree burn.

But then he says, �Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven.� And the early Church Fathers loved to use that as an image of the Holy Eucharist, which touches our lips and purifies us if we receive it with faith. But what you discover here about holiness is the year that King Uzziah died. King Uzziah was one of the most successful kings in the history of the Davidic monarchy, the tenth in the series. And in Second Chronicles, you read about how he caused economic prosperity, military victory. He basically made Israel great again. And like politicians who succeed, he grew very proud.

And swelling with pride, one day we read in 2 Chronicles 26, he decided to stroll out of the palace and on into the temple. Well, and there's a court for the laity, but he kept going until he entered the holy place. And he kept going. And the priests are following him. And Azariah, the high priest, they're like, don't do this, you're the king. Go to the palace. You know, this is the temple, the holiness of God. Were the priests, but he wouldn't let them stop him.

And so as he proceeded on into, you know, nearer and nearer to the Holy of Holies, suddenly they see something. On his forehead there's leprosy. He's defiled, he's unclean. Whereas the high priest has on his forehead emblazoned holy is the Lord and holy to the Lord is he. And so he's leprous and it starts to spread. And dozens of priests drag him out of the temple, but not just back to the palace. They ended up obviously having to kind of have a makeshift royal leper colony, you know, where he could basically spend the last remaining days dying of leprosy. So in the year that King Uzziah died,

I am a man of uncleanness. I dwell in the midst of a land full of people who are unclean. My eyes have seen the Lord who is the King, but he is holy. And it's in the heavenly temple, not earthly. It's not made by human hands. It is where the glory of the Lord dwells, you know?

And so you want to distinguish righteousness and justice from holiness and sanctity, not to separate them, not to oppose them, but you don't want to confuse them. That's what Uzziah did, and it costs us. So fulfilling the statutes that make us good citizens is necessary. But even more is loving the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength. That vertical axis, you know, you can think of the cross and the horizontal bar is in effect our human relationships that really depend upon our relationship with God. We're related to God before we even know that he exists. He creates the soul, me as a person, out of nothing.

And so even more than I'm related to my parents, we are related to God as our creator, who is all holy. And well, what are we made for? What is his purpose and plan for us? Well, one thing, and only one thing, and that is become saints, to become holy, to allow him to take what is proper to Him alone and if we really become freely and fully His property, then He who is alone holy, He

is the one who can hallow us. He can sanctify us. Since the first of the seven petitions in the Our Father, hallowed be thy name, is not us asking God for help and making his name holier than it is, but we bear the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so, like my children bear my name,

we bear God's name. He is our Father through the waters of baptism. And so when you study this in Scripture, you begin to realize, you know, like 1 Thessalonians 4 verse 3, this is the will of God for you, namely your holiness, your sanctification. When you hear Paul say, this is the will of God for you, everybody's ears perk up, you know, like, okay, who am I supposed to marry?

What is my major? What is my career? You know, where do I park my car? And the will of God is like trying to decode something hidden in God as though he is a puppeteer and we have strings and we've got to figure out what does he want to do with us. When Paul just simplifies it, no, this is God's will for you, your sanctification. You become holy.

And then he adds, and that you avoid sexual immorality. And the Greek word is pornea. So we can kind of draw our own conclusions from that It's interesting that at the beginning of this Interview I said to you how do we be holy? Notice I made we the first point yeah And then you rightly were like no no it's about God and maybe I was messing that up thing because you've got that as you Say the vertical axis which might lead if I'm understanding you correctly to the horizontal axis

Maybe too quickly we as Catholics, how do I be righteous? What's the seven day or the nine day or the 90 day plan on how to be righteous to my neighbors? But we've got to first turn to God and sit before Him and receive His grace. Pete Well, the human realm, the social order is where justice, righteousness, that's where we perform these, we keep the commandments. But I would also hasten to add that we're related to God first and foremost, and then these other relationships will flourish in as much as we allow God to do for us what we can't do for ourselves. That is sanctification.

And you know, just as I grew in my understanding of holiness, it was when I was in grad school that I began to study this more closely in terms of scripture and salvation history, because I never noticed something that turns out to have been hiding in plain view. And that is, in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, it's 50 chapters long, but the word kadosh only occurs once with regard to holiness. It's in Genesis 2, after God has made all of the world in six days, it's the seventh day that He consecrates, He sanctifies, He calls it holy. And so, the seventh day is the Sabbath, the sign of the covenant, which reveals not how

much clock time it took for God to make the world, but what is His plan? What is His purpose for those who bear His image and likeness? It's not just to work for six days. It is to enter into His presence and rest on the seventh day. And so in that same chapter, just four verses later, God breathes into our first Father's nostrils the breath of life, which is not just air or oxygen, it's the Holy Spirit. And so he has what theologians call sanctifying grace. He's no longer just a creature with a soul and a body, with an intellect and a will.

He's a child. He has the breath of God, he has the Holy Spirit, he has the Spirit of sonship. And what's so important about that is ten verses later when God says, you can eat from all of the trees, enjoy all of the fruit, but one. The day you eat of that, you will surely die. That really stands out because you turn the page and in the next chapter, both our first parents partake of the forbidden fruit, and what happens next, they drop dead. Well, no they didn't. Well, wait a minute, how is that? You know, the day you eat of it, you'll surely die. God could have said, you'll deserve to die, you know, you'll be sentenced to die, you even begin to die. But no, the day you eat

of it, you will surely die, moat to moot. It's really emphatic. And so, when you realize, wait a minute, they had sanctified grace and they didn't just transgress the law, they desecrate the garden as a sanctuary. So when Adam is driven out and God posts the two cherubim, every Israelite reading this book will recognize, well, where are two cherubim? In the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest can go, but only for a short time on the Yom Kippur, the day of atonement to atone for his own sins and the sins of the people. Like, what's happening here? Well, whatever happened involves spiritual death, or what the

Catechism calls the death of the soul. You know, cancer, COVID, a snake bite, you know, those things can snuff out natural life. But the only way you can die a spiritual death is by giving consent to what 1 John 5.16 calls mortal sin. It's the same Greek term thanatos as what you find in Genesis 2 17. You'll die the death. And so our first parents committed spiritual suicide. And for us as Catholics, original sin is not us being born depraved,

the way Calvin and the Calvinists would say, it's us being born deprived of the divine life that our first parents had and forfeit it. So we have human nature, but it's utterly dev born deprived of the divine life that our first parents had, then forfeit it. So we have human nature, but it's utterly devoid of divine nature. So holiness never occurs again in the rest of Genesis to show that it's not just a fall, it's a catastrophe. And then when you move from Genesis to Exodus, I discovered that in the 40 chapters of Exodus, it's 10 chapters shorter than Genesis, you have this explosion of holiness. Kaddosh and the various Hebrew terms that are derived from it occurs 98 times. Beginning with take off your shoes, the ground is holy, and then the vestments are holy,

the sacrifices are holy. You have the holy days, you have the Ark of the Covenant, the Veils, all of these things are described as holy, and Israel is called to be a holy nation in Genesis, in Exodus 19, 5, and 6. But what I didn't know until this rabbi points this out, Rabbi Berman is a friend now, he points out that in the Old Testament, even though they have the explosion of holiness in Exodus, nobody is ever called holy. Nobody's ever called to be a saint.

They're called to be holy, if you hear my voice and keep my covenant. Then you'll be a holy nation, but they hear thunder. They don't hear God's voice. They don't keep the covenant. They worship the calf. So they're desecrated as a nation. And so it's like, okay, keep looking for holiness. In Leviticus, the holiness code, be holy as the Lord your God is holy, be holy as opposed to defiled, the way you've been since the golden calf. And so, Rabbi Berman points out that in the Hebrew Bible, nobody's ever referred to as a saint. So, just as there was a holiness explosion as you move from Genesis to Exodus, I discovered

there's a holiness explosion as you move from the Old Testament to the New. The incarnation, you know, again, hiding in plain view makes something that was humanly impossible historically actual. I just want to back up a bit. What do you mean in the Old Testament no one was referred to as a saint or no one was called holy? Yeah, people- Just that or-

Noah, Abraham, they're called righteous, they're called upright, but if you fail to distinguish righteous and holy- Ah, I see, I see. Then you're like, well, yes, they are called upright. But if you fail to distinguish righteous and holy, then you're like, well, yes, they are. And translators often collapse the notion of holiness into righteousness or pious. And so in the English translation of the Psalms, for example, I have a section in the back of the book on this where you don't have people who are identified as saints. People are called to it, but it's always something they fall short of until the Holy Spirit comes upon her and the

power of the Most High will overshadow her, so the child that shall be born to her will be called holy. Like Peter says at the climax of John 6, we have come to know that you're the holy one of God. And it's like, ah, big deal. It's a huge deal. It just went completely unnoticed by me for 10 or 15 years. And then when you begin to kind of factor it in, it was actually the catechism that came out in 92. I read this and I'm like, holy, you know, no, I didn't, I didn't. I found the definition that I've been looking for over 25 years. In 2809, we read the holiness of God is the inaccessible center of his own eternal mystery. What is inaccessible?

Well, it's the Holy of Holies. It's not even the high priest for 364 and a half days out of the year couldn't go in. So let me ask you this then, how does this change how we understand the words Holy Mary? Because I think up until now a lot of people would have said, yeah, it just means like she was a really good person. But you're saying no, it means something radically more than that. That's right. So what does it mean to say someone is holy then?

I always back up too far like the pole vaulter, you know, but I would say just as the catastrophe of the fall in Genesis, you have this divine counteroffensive and exodus, but it falls short for apart from me, you can do nothing. You can have the tabernacle, the high priest, the animal sacrifices, the feast, and all of these things that are called holy, but Israel is not yet holy. And in fact, what I found that I thought disproved what Rabbi Berman said is, ah, in Daniel 7, I found the exception. There you have a group of people referred to as the saints of the Most High.

But when you look more closely, you're like, well, actually, that's the exception that proves the rule, because in Daniel 7, the saints of the Most High are only going to be given the kingdom after the Son of Man goes back to heaven riding on the clouds of glory and is presented to the Ancient of Days. So only when the Son returns to the Father is this universal everlasting kingdom conferred upon Him, which He already had as the Son of God, but He turns around and gives the kingdom to the saints of the Most High, but only after they endure much persecution and suffering.

And so the exception in Daniel 7, where you actually find a group of people called saints, is what kind of proves the rule. And that is, only when the Father sends the Son to pour out the Holy Spirit, and when the Son of Man rides on the glorious cloud of the Holy Spirit back to the Father, suddenly there's this explosion of holiness that goes so far beyond Exodus. It's the New Exodus. And in Matthew 27, verses 50 to 52, you know, Matthew is the only evangelist to record the fact that after Jesus' resurrection and up until the time of His ascension, tombs all around Jerusalem are opened and these saints

are witnessed by all of the inhabitants of the holy city. And what happens next? We don't know. They're gone. Well, what we know is that when he descended into Hades, he basically liberated the souls of the faithful departed of the Old Testament. And so when he ascends on high, it's not some solo flight. Ephesians 4 and other passages describe how he led captivity captive. And what I discovered in the process of my own research is his ascension brought about nothing less than the repopulation of heaven. In all of the Old Testament, all of

the visions of God and the angels revealed heaven to be populated exclusively by the angels, the Seraphim, the cherubim, and all the way down. Only after Jesus ascends into heaven, as the Son of Man returning to the ancient of days, are the souls of the faithful departed, suddenly ushered into a state of glory that had been promised but never fulfilled. Just might be getting hung up on a technicality, but so people witness these resurrections apparently that took place around the time of Christ. Are you saying then that they were bodily assumptions of these saints? Yeah, I mean, these were miraculous resuscitations that were meant to be signs bearing witness

to the hinge of all salvation history. That now that the Son of Man has suffered, descended into Hades, and now he's risen from the dead and ascending into heaven, it's like the fulfillment of promises that exceed the highest hope to the Hebrew people. So that is then what you're saying, these people were assumed bodily into heaven? So the only other time you find- What does that look like? That just, it sounds crazy to me. It sounds like a comedy.

You've got all these people just being sucked up into the sky. Yeah. I don't think suck is the right word, but I think that the- Even the sky, right? Because it's the kind of cloud that our Lord descends into, not the sky. Yeah. And so when we use coordinates of space and we speak of from above or from below, we're not talking about, you know, wow, right, he went right past that plane.

There goes Fred. Okay. But the only other vision that we have of the Holy, Holy, Holy, the Sanctus occurs in Revelation 4 verse 8. Only in this case, it's not just the angels before the throne of God singing it, it is the 24 elders, it is the martyrs, it is the mother of God, it is the vast throng from all 12 tribes of Israel as well as from every other nation. So these people have their bodies back? Is that what you're saying?

Well, you know, in a certain sense, we would speak of this particular, this intermediate state as disembodied glory. So the resurrected bodies that they got back were probably something like the miracle of Lazarus getting his body back, you know. So it's a kind of resuscitation. But getting back to the pole vaulter's leap. Yes, I wanna get back to Holy Mary. Yeah, Holy Mary. Yes, the season was holy.

There is a sense in which she fulfills what the Ark of the Covenant represented. She fulfills what the Tabernacle was. So the ark contained the Word of God in a stone, she contains the Word made flesh. So if that ark was so untouchably holy that it cost Uzzah his life, you know, in 2 Samuel 6, that makes her not like the ark, that makes her the ark of the New Covenant that Revelation 12 verses 1 and 2 describe. Do you think then though if you put the saints, say the apostles, right, in the New Testament who've received the Holy Spirit, if you put them alongside the Old Testament saints who hadn't yet received the Holy Spirit, put them in a time machine and send them back to the

Old Testament, do you think that just watching their behaviour there would be a substantial difference between the two? Yeah, see, if it is something that we do for ourselves, Lord, I'm going to try to be righteous and just and keep the commandments, but I'm also gonna take it upon myself to make myself holy, even though you alone are holy. At that point, the tail is wagging the dog. And so, Jesus is not just like indulging in pious exaggeration when he says that John the Baptist is the single greatest born of woman, whereas the least in the kingdom is

greater than John. It's like, okay, that's pious hyperbole. But what if it's not? What if it is not what we make ourselves, but what Christ makes us through the Holy Spirit so that Paul can say to these Corinthian mutts who live in the most immoral city in 1 Corinthians 6-11, you've been washed, you've been sanctified, you've been justified. It's not you've been washed and so you will be eventually made holy, sanctified, and you will eventually be declared justified. No. Baptism is not different from circumcision in degree but in kind. The Eucharist is different from the Passover, not just by being holier, but it's a difference in kind. It's an entirely different kind of holiness. We don't have an irrational lamb, you know, with the throat slashed, the body burned,

and then we eat that lamb to celebrate the Passover. No. The Lamb of God lays His life down out of a love for us that is not originally human but divine. I guess the downloading of the divine into the human nature, you know, this is what he's talking about with John the Baptist. He assumes what is ours, human nature, to make us partakers of the divine nature, 2 Peter 1, 4. This is why the central chapter in Holy is His name is holiness as divinization.

Now, you can't work your way into the Hahn family. I can't work my way into the Fradd family. I might get paid for doing some yard work or whatever, but the only way you can get a family inheritance is by being born into the family. We are reborn through the Holy Spirit, through holy baptism, into the holy family. And so it's like, okay, the analogy of the Old Covenant is an earthly family traceable

back to Adam, Noah, and Abraham, whereas the family we call the Church is the family of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit extending out. You're like, okay, that sounds nice, but that's too good to be true, unless of course it's the truth, and it's the whole truth, and it's the truth of the Catholic Gospel. So then- Divinization. So are you then saying that holiness is more about whose we are than what we do? Is that what kind of- because I began by asking if you-

Absolutely. I mean, Our Lady did- it's not like a self-made woman, you know. Justice, righteousness, scholarship, you know, efficiency, these are things that we can and should do for six days. We work for six days. But what the seventh day requires us is to stop working. Why? So that we'll get right things right, we'll get first things first. That is, we can do things that are secular, that are temporal, that are human, social, political, and economic, but the only thing for which we were made, just like we didn't make ourselves, we can't

sanctify ourselves. But once we were made as creatures, we've got to observe the commandments. But the commandment that makes us holy is to not work. So it's remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy by getting all of the musicians and the choir and the vestments and the furniture in place. No! The way you fulfill the Sabbath is you don't work. Your sons and daughters, your manservants, your maidservants, why?

Because you're saved by grace if we're talking holiness, not apart from works, but not on account of works. And so what we see in the notion of holiness is like, whoa, you know, this is divinization. We can't divinize ourselves. You know, so holiness is not about becoming bigger and better, smarter and stronger. It's really about becoming smaller and closer to our Lord. So would a child newly baptized be holier than Abraham at his peak or David at his peak? Yeah, I mean, I would say that you have in the sacraments of the New Covenant,

things that the kings long to see but didn't see, the prophets long to hear but didn't hear. Because I'm trying to get to that again, so it's whose we are more than what we do. So would that be a true statement then to say the newly baptized child is holy in a way that David never was? Yeah, what I'm trying to do is coordinate two sets of things on the one hand the sacred is not opposed to the secular The sacred is opposed to the sinful period the sacred basically sanctifies the secular in this sense That we work for six days so that we'll have labor the fruit of our labor to offer On the seventh day. But what we do is we continually fall into sin, and so what we didn't do, what we couldn't

do is precisely what the Son of God does by becoming the Son of man. And so the incarnation is not only what repopulates heaven, but what gives the lowest child of God something that John the Baptist was predicting, promising, prophesying about, but not yet possessing. And so the sacraments are what make this kind of holiness possible in a way that the sacraments of the old law only prefigured. They were prophetic signs, circumcision, the Passover, the Sabbath, but now we have ex operi operato and the sacraments don't make, they don't make us saints automatically. We're not robots. So the sacraments make holiness possible. Wouldn't baptism do that

automatically? Automatically. I mean, I mean Francis of Assisi, you know, was observed by his friars, genuflecting before a newly baptized infant. So that would be the one exception to the sacraments. I mean, that's the temple of the Holy Trinity. Yeah. I think the reason I'm trying to ask these questions is it's difficult when you don't have an experience of people being holy and righteous in this life. Like, you've got an atheist friend who's far more moral than you, perhaps, or you know people who are Christians but they're scoundrels.

So when we talk about the thing that holiness does or what God does when he bestows his life and grace upon somebody, it's like, I don't really, sometimes it's hard to see unless you're in a good Christian community. That's why I'm trying to figure out this distinction when you're trying to make between, or that you are making between the holiness that God bestows bringing you up into his family versus how it may display itself in righteousness, but it may not display itself in righteousness, but you could be just as holy. Yeah, and so when I said that the sacred isn't opposed to the secular, it's only opposed

to the sinful, if Christ, becoming incarnate, takes a walk, he has made walking a source of holiness. If he went to work with St. Joseph in the shop and worked hard, he has transformed work into something that is sanctified. Okay, it might be obvious, forgive me, but why? I don't understand why that's the case. That whatever Jesus does, it makes that thing holy. He assumes our nature to give us His, He alone is holy, as divine. And so it is not something that will show up on your radar.

It won't be like an aura. It is going to be something utterly hidden, like the blessed Virgin, like the beloved disciple who is the youngest and the one who's closest to our Lord. And so what holiness is, it's sort of counterintuitive. It's almost the opposite of what we associated with, you know, oh, so and so is a saint. Well, first of all, we're all saints. We're all called to be saints. You know, Paul tells the Ephesians they're saints, the Corinthians, the Thessalonians. All of these people are saints in a way that even the prophets in the Old Testament weren't

called saints. So what God is doing invisibly through these visible signs called sacraments, the sacraments are the visible signs that we call the sacred mysteries. And so what is the sacred mystery? We have been reborn through the water of baptism. So I'm a child of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit more than I'm a child of Fred and Molly Lujan. It's like, that's nice, but that's rhetorical overkill.

Theoretical. Yeah, it's theoretical, it's abstract, it's scholastic theology, but what if it's not? What if God does more with less? What if his strength is made perfect in weakness? What if through a lowly virgin he accomplishes what the Seraphim and the Cherubim, all teaming up, could never do? And that's exactly what happens. How do we personally, very practical question, how do we trust that God has done and is doing that when we find ourselves continually slipping back into sin or just choosing grievous sin, serious sin?

Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge of becoming a saint. The fact is, you know, if it's proper to God alone, only to the extent that we become His property. So you think of demonic possession and how unclean spirits defile people by kind of driving them crazy through addictions and that sort of thing. Well, the Holy Spirit possesses the Blessed Virgin from the moment of her immaculate conception to her virginal conception of Jesus, to the virginal birth of Jesus. And it's like, well, bring out the fireworks, you know, bring out the orchestra, let's, let's, no. You know, as God reveals holiness progressively, it's a lot like, I compare it to Elijah in the cave

at Horeb, you know, in 1 Kings 17, I think it is, where, you know, he hears this mighty wind that splits the rocks, but the Lord isn't in it. Then he hears, you know, he hears this mighty wind that splits the rocks, but the Lord isn't in it. Then he hears, you know, he sees the fire, but the Lord wasn't in the fire. And then this earthquake, but the Lord wasn't in the earthquake. And then, okay, what's next? Well, you know, you can trace the wind back to Moses in the Red Sea, the mighty wind that enabled Israel to pass into, out of Egypt. And likewise, the fire on the top of Mount Sinai, the consuming fire there, and the earthquake that basically shook all of the ground around the mountain.

But then Elijah hears a still small voice, and he covers his face because he realizes that the revelation of God's holiness has progressed so that his strength is made perfect in my weakness, more through less. And it's almost like the still small voice, you know, I dedicated this book to my son, Father Jeremiah, because the day after his ordination I heard him say in a still small voice, this is my body. And it's like, wait a minute, son, up until yesterday, I was your breadwinner, I was your father, you know, just who do you think you are now that you're ordained? You think you're my father in the supernatural order of divine grace?

Well, okay, yeah. Well, I was the breadwinner. You know, I could take bread, I could say those same words, and you know what would happen? It would nothing. It would still be bread. And so, to realize that through through holy orders the Holy Eucharist comes to those who have received Holy Baptism. God is not flexing his muscles. He's not shouting through the mighty wind or sending down fire.

What it is, it's through the still small voice that pronounces the words that were pronounced when the word was made flesh as an infant. You're serious? You think that's the creator of the universe? Then he's hanging on a cross. You think that is Almighty God? And he's buried in the tomb? You know, like, we recite these mysteries of faith. We profess them not too often, but we ponder them too seldom. And I think when we ponder the mysteries that we profess, we're like, there's no way we could have come up with this on our own. There's no way that we can fulfill this on our own. So, okay, we won't be sanctified apart from our work, but we're not going to be made holy simply by what we do.

Okay, and so then, yeah, so how does the Christian view differ from, say, the Pelagian view? Well, first of all, it's a sacramental worldview. Pelagius said the sacraments are only necessary for the weak and the wayward. You know, and this is why Augustine went after him, you know, because the Pelagians say, you know, if you're really sincere and you put out your best effort, you can become holy. And Augustine is like, no, original sin means being deprived of divine life, sanctifying grace, being baptized is more than washing out a stain through this sacramental detergent. Paul describes baptism as a resurrection in Romans 6. After describing original sin in Romans 5, we're resurrected to new life more

than Lazarus was after the fourth day. He gets his natural life back, we get this infusion that is invisible but substantive of divine life. I mean, this is why when I hear non-Catholics or even ex-Catholics just say, you know, I once professed all of those things but it just didn't make any sense, I'm like, I get it. You know, I want to hug these unbelievers and say, truly, flesh and blood can't reveal this to us. And so if the Holy Spirit does this to us, then only the power of the Holy Spirit can make us recognize mysteries, you know, what eye hasn't seen, what ear hasn't heard, what has never entered the heart or the mind of man.

This is the only thing for which we were made. You know, and so strive for holiness for without it, no one will see God. But just don't ever mistake your striving for the job itself. So that's a difficult thing to find that separation, isn't it? Because if you if you say, how do I be holy or if you say, I want to grow in holiness, it's like, well, what are you doing? You know, you're like, well, I'm going out a ration or I'm praying daily or I'm trying to do this and that. And as you say, all of that's necessary. And yet it's not about what you do first and foremost.

And, and Pelagius was telling his brother monks, look, you know, the lay people out in the middle of the world, they're the ones who need sacraments, you know, but Augustine was saying, no, the world is in us. who need sacraments, you know, but Augustine was saying, no, the world is in us. And so the sacraments are possible because of the incarnation, they're necessary because of our first Father's fall, and they're also intrinsically powerful in a way that the sacraments of the old covenant were not. And so this is why he's called the Doctor of Grace. The sacraments are possible because of the incarnation, they're necessary because of original sin, and they're intrinsically powerful.

So, against the Pelagians, against the Donatists, against the Manichaeans, he becomes the Doctor of Grace, but he's the Doctor of sacramental grace. And so, you know, as far as I'm concerned, what holiness consists of is recognizing that I belong to God and that, you know, my prayers, my works, my joys, my sufferings, but especially the prayer. And not just praying and then going to work, but the prayer will transform the work into prayer. And so if you're working for six days in the Old Testament and you're gathering the fruit of your labor to offer in the liturgy, then it's not just the seventh day that's holy, it's the seventh day that's making everything holy and you're gathering the fruit of your labor to offer in the liturgy, then it's not just the seventh day that's holy, it's the seventh day that's making everything

holy that you're doing. And so when Vatican II identifies the universal call to holiness, people in the middle of the world are just like Jesus. People who are working, He worked with St. Joseph. People who have to get dinner ready, have to clean up the table after the meals. All of these things can be holy because, and only because, of what Christ has done. I just think that there is a kind of universal tendency toward Pelagianism. Individual Pelagianism, I can make myself holy if I work hard enough.

And then the Lord will allow you to fall flat on your face and show you that through holy confession, holy life, divine life is restored to you. Well, let me ask you this, try to put some flesh and blood on this kind of concept that might feel a little too theoretical or sound that way. Who's the holiest person you know if you had to take a stab at it? Or one of the holiest people you know if you don't feel... Well, I mean, for a long time I thought of it as John Paul, who I met on several occasions when I was in Pope John Paul, Pope John Paul.

Yeah. He's not alive anymore. What about someone you know who's someone you know, who you would say that person seems to me to be a holy person. You know, it's a kind of Tevyev and Filler on the roof. Cause I have a full up question. Everybody's baptized in the state of grace. Yeah. But you're talking about canonizably holy. I guess so. It's just like,

I guess in the sense that people say that person's a holy person. Or should we not even be saying things, saying it like that? I don't think we should. Okay. You know, and especially if- Interesting. You know, you are holy if you're in a state of grace. So can I throw something out there and have you pick it apart? I think if you ask me,

like, who's one of the holiest people you know, and I'm not just saying this, I really think my wife is one of the holiest people I know. And I think that because of the way that she endures suffering with tremendous patience and joy, like she's just mysterious to me in the way that she lives her life. And meanwhile, I'm fretting about the place and yelling at the kids and but there's something like the Lord's I see her and the Lord seems to be transforming her in front of me. And I haven't, she's a mystery to me. I have no idea what's going on, but it's very impressive. I'd say something similar about you and Kimberley. Like seeing the way you guys pray at Mass, I'm just like, God, you guys are the real deal.

You're beautiful. You're holy. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what holiness is. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that eye has not seen, ear has not heard. You know, on the one hand, all of us are holy for an estate of grace. But you know, the idea that holiness consists of getting smaller and closer to our Lord and it's hidden, you know, makes me think that the people who appear to be holy probably are but might not be. Okay. The people who just appear to be whatever they are.

So God knows the heart. So is it a wrong question then to be asking? Well, when you say about Kimberly, I mean, I, I could have said, yeah, I think that Kimberly is holy because I really do. The holiest person I've ever met, you know, the fact is she's much holier than me, you know, but when people say that Scott is holy, I say, if I didn't know me, I might be impressed, but I do. And so I'm not. Okay. Let me drill down on this then. You say Kimberley is holy than you, let's just run

with that. What does that mean? What does it mean? Well, you know, in terms of the way that she wants what God wants, it just comes more easily to her, whereas I want God to want what I want, you know? And so I try not to pray to change God's mind. I pray for God to change my mind. That I might be conformable. So there's a submissiveness or like a, as you say, a littleness. Yeah, you know, six days you shall work on the seventh year.

And so if we worship the works of our own hands, we can end up like the Pharisees say, I thank you God that I am what I am, that I'm not like the tax collector. I mean, here he is expressing gratitude to God for what he has accomplished, you know? I could never have done it without you, but I did it, you know? And you're like, ooh, incoming missile, duck. Missed it so quick. Yeah. It's so subtle, but the idea that the seventh day requires cessation from labor so that God can do a work that you can't do.

I see. You know, in John 5, when he heals the man who had been by the poolside for 38 years on the Sabbath and the officials confront him, he didn't say, look, I had to do it today because I'm out of town tomorrow and I couldn't get here earlier. He says, why did I do it on the Sabbath? Because my father worketh still. So, wait a minute, then they sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath, but called God his Father, thus making himself equal to God. But that's what holiness is,

that God is making us capable of what we could never render ourselves capable of. So is it true to say then that if someone's holy, it's because of what God has done, not because of what they have done? That's right. Okay. I mean if you have a guy who's on his death bed and he gets baptized. My grandpa. Yeah. What do we believe? Baptism does what? Yeah. He can't go to purgatory. Yeah. He hasn't purged him of all of his sins. Wasn't that Constantine? Yeah. I mean it is the single most underrated of the seven sacraments. You know, if baptism can come- I know they say we really shouldn't wait till our deathbed to do that, but I kind of wish

I had. I'm sorely tempted. It's too late now. But I mean, this is why the sacraments, not just baptism, but all the seven sacraments are just like, well, there are rituals that we perform to kind of get God to do what we want. But what if there's the things that God does primarily to get us to want what he wants, to do what he does and to make us what only he can make us to

do. And so the sacraments are not like dessert, you know, it's not like the icing on the cake. The sacraments are the sine qua non for becoming saints. They don't make it easy, but they do make it possible. What does that mean? What's that language? Is that French? What is that? Sinical is Latin. Without that, you can't have this. Okay.

Yeah. So without, so say it again and translate for me. The sacraments make holiness possible. Not automatic, not easy, but without the sacraments, you know, the incarnation is what endows the sacraments with the power of the Holy Spirit they would never have on their own. So we're not just doing these rituals to impress God or to kind of enter into this contract. You know, it's a quid pro quo. Oh, there's another line. But you get a punch. Yeah. So what does that mean in French? Not sure. Okay. But so what about the person who's never been baptized? Like, you know, take a classic example of like Anne Frank. Like, was she holy?

I guess, would you have to say no or that you don't know? I don't know. Yeah. You know, I would suspect that, you know, that God's spirit is capable of moving people apart from the sacraments, such as we find in the Old Testament. But what we have received, we dare not presume, you know, on the one hand, because we received the sacraments, we don't necessarily have infused charity, especially if we're just kind of performing theater for God and for others to be impressed. You know, on the other hand,

provenient grace is the work of the Holy Spirit in a soul, bringing them closer and closer to God. So God can still be at work in people prior to baptism and we could call that the beginnings of holiness. That's definitely the case. You know, the Ethiopian eunuch, for example, in the book of Acts, he has been moved by the power of holiness or- That's definitely the case, you know. The Ethiopian eunuch, for example, in the book of Acts, he has been moved by the power of the Holy Spirit, but what is he moving toward? Or the house-

There's water, let's get back with- Where was it in Acts, is it Sylvanus or those who received the Holy Spirit prior to baptism as well? Yeah. Well, in different places, in Acts 8 and also Cornelius as well. Cornelius, yeah, that's what I meant, sorry. But when baptism comes, that's when the visible side of the Holy Spirit comes upon them. Okay, okay. So the realm, you know, God created the heavens and the earth, so the invisible, that's the

heavens and the earth is the visible. But there's also the old covenant, which is the sky and the earth, you know, the invisible realm of the angels. But what the New Covenant is, and I'm always kind of diving more deeply into this, you know, the New Covenant, well, Covenant is sacred kinship bonds. So the Old Covenant is the earthly family of Adam and then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David and all the rest. What is the New Covenant? Well, the New Covenant is the kinship

that comes from the Father to the Son, to us through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship. And the prophets saw this, but, you know, they longed to see it, but they didn't. The Holy Spirit would possess them, say, would be delivering truths of the New Covenant in the time that we call the Old. But the Old Covenant is not reducible to BC, the New is AD. It isn't like the Old Covenant is everything up to Malachi, and then the New is from Matthew on to Revelation. The New Covenant is when the Holy Spirit possesses you. And so this is why Augustine, echoing Paul, would say that Abraham was a man of faith,

but he was a New Testament man of faith living in the Old Testament times. So for him, circumcision accomplishes this growth in holiness. And you're like, well, wait a minute, how does that work? Well, it's mysterious for sure, but it isn't as though the Holy Spirit is just kind of waiting in the wings, when do I get to go on? Where can I take the stage? On the other hand, in John 7, verses 37 and 39, Jesus said this about the Holy Spirit, which had not yet been given because He had not yet been glorified.

So the glorification of Jesus in John's Gospel is when He's lifted up on the cross, and that's when the water and the blood flow from His side, that's when he gives the Spirit. And so, that event, you know, we are just looking all the time for numbers, for glitter, you know, and so often it's the still small voice. It's in dying that we live. It's in renouncing this life that we gain eternal life. And this is why I just, you know, I don't think we recognize how precious is the gift of faith, the mysteries of faith, how hidden and how counterintuitive. And I just think we would say on the one hand, I want to find unbelievers and just communicate my respect for their unbelief.

I get it. I mean, I can see why you don't get it. You know, this is not logic. This is not science. It's not illogical. It's not contrary to science. But at times it sure feels that way. So becoming a saint, you know, is belonging to God and becoming his property through consecration, you know, consecrated life and all of these things. You know, these are the things that are in this world, but are really more out of this world. All right. So if somebody says to you, how do I be holy? What do you say to them? Yeah. You know, these are the things that are in this world, but are really more out of this world.

All right. So if somebody says to you, how do I be holy? What do you say to them? Well, you know, the last chapters basically develop a plan of life where you live out this idea that just as unclean spirits can possess people, I want the Holy Spirit to possess me. So the first moment of the day, I want to serve you. I want to belong to you.

And then morning prayer, morning mass. When I finished this book and I reread it, I started going to 8 a.m. mass more than noon mass. Why? Because I want to lay the foundation of my life. I want to lay the foundation of every day so that I am looking at the things that matter more than everything else that I'm going to do for the rest of the day. And when I come home, it isn't like Kimberly says, oh wow, you're glowing.

But she can sense the difference. When I start the day in prayer and by going to Mass and by getting a rosary or two in, you're just realizing that, you know, I can row my boat and I can get far. But when I hoist the sail and the wind of God's Holy Spirit can blow me much faster and farther than I can ever take but when I hoist the sail and the in the wind of God's Holy Spirit can Blow me much faster and farther than I can ever take credit for myself There's difficult in it because we're trying to distinguish between what God does and what we do and then we say well How do I become holy and the first thing we do is say well, here's what you do Yeah, we distinguish but you know, the famous line of Aquinas is we distinguish to unite We don't distinguish to separate and then oppose or divide.

So we distinguish the secular and the sacred. We distinguish justice and holiness precisely to show how Jesus is a royal high priest. Which is he, a king or a priest? Yeah, he's both. Ah, gotcha. Okay, so is he in heaven or on earth? Yep, he's both. In the Eucharist, he's in heaven and on earth.

Okay, is he divine or is he human? Yep The incarnation, you know apart from me you can do nothing Jesus said and it's not just because well You know you fell and you keep falling and goes back to your first father Adam fell. It's no Creatures cannot divinize themselves. Even the highest angels cannot make themselves holy with the holiness of God except by allowing God to do for them what they can't do for themselves. And this is so un-American. This is so anti-democratic. This is so anti-capitalist, but it's also anti-socialist because, well, the government

can do it. No, they can't. Well, individuals, rugged individuals can make themselves saints. But what if all of that is a lie? What if it really is the Blessed Virgin Mary, you know, when she says what she says, fiat mihi secundum verum tuum, be it done unto me according to your word. Why? Because I'm a creature, I'm a handmaid, I'm a female slave, I'm your property.

You know, nothing I have is my own. And so she is possessed by the Holy Spirit at the moment of her conception in a way that unclean spirits could never possess broken people. How has your view of holiness changed from when you first became a Christian to now? Because a lot of new Christians have a lot of fervor and they're kind of white-knuckling what they might call holiness. But then when I meet people further on in the journey, if they're still on the journey, there is this sort of peace to them. And there is a sort of wanting the right thing in the right way, as opposed to wanting the

right thing in the wrong way, the kind of frantic white knuckling. How has that changed? Well, I mean, it goes in stages. So it's a lot like the natural life that Aquinas uses as an analogy, that you're infant, then you're a child, then you're a pre-adolescent, then you're an adolescent, then you're an adult. I can say that when I was first converted as a Reformed Evangelical Calvinist, I was devoted to Luther in high school. I wrote a long paper for my senior class on Luther's rediscovery of the Gospel of Solafide, that we're saved by faith alone.

And he uses the image that we're a dung hill covered by white snow, which is Christ, and it's an alien righteousness, it's extrinsic, it's not ours, you know. And Calvin, in a certain sense, intensified that view by the first- I'm wondering how you would intensify that view. What analogy would you use?

Well, you know, the five points of Calvin summarized by Tulip, the first letter T stands for total depravity. Total depravity, yeah. You know, and so it was the sense that I am so depraved that the best God can do is just to cover this dung hill with snow. Yeah. But then you begin to realize, wait a second, if God is all-powerful and if he is sovereign, if he is God the Father Almighty, then however depraved I am, is my power to sin greater than his power to sanctify?

That's not even, that's bad theology. I am powerfully sinful as a teenager, but at the same time I know that I belong to Christ, but it was this breakthrough that came to me in my early 20s where you are God the Father Almighty. You've got to be more powerful to make me holy than I am. I'm still very powerful to separate myself from you through sin. But it's basically, he who began a good work and you will be faithful to complete it. And so for me, in the beginning, it was probably more like a sprint, you know, a race to the finish line, heaven, you know, and we're not going to have

to be holy because we're only going to be always sinful in the end. But what if we are called to holiness, but again, it's not bigger and better, it's smaller and closer, like Our Lady. John the Baptist, he must increase, I must decrease. And I would say, and this is something that is true in the testimony of the saints, that the closer they get to holiness, the more unholy they feel. And so, I would say now after 50 years of becoming Christian, after 36 years of becoming a Catholic, it is like objects in the mirrors are further in the look, you know.

I feel as though I need the Holy Spirit, I need the medicine of mercy, now more than any point in my life. But then I take great comfort in the fact that that's exactly what Saint Augustine said about himself, too. But I think I would get a higher test score in terms of my neediness. But I think he'd give me a run for the money because, you know, what you end up feeling is that, you know, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. It's God's work, not yours, but it's God working in us, enabling us to do things. But I would say, look, if Christ reigns from the wood of the cross, then as we approach the hour of death, or as we suffer, especially, I mean, we can obey the commandments, we can achieve justice, we can strive for holiness, but at the end of the day, we have to recognize that though

a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, and thus being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Hebrews 5, 7, he was the Son of God, then he becomes the son of man, and he learns obedience through suffering. Well, he also learned obedience through attending school and memorizing the alphabet, learning how to read and all of that. But I mean, to me, the end of the day is this idea of saints end up being discovered in heaven as simply those who graduated from the school of suffering. And so, God doesn't allow us to suffer in spite of His love, but because of it.

God sends us suffering because He knows that we need it. We don't want it. I think of suffering, Christ wants to heal us of illness, but even more, I think He wants to heal us of our fear of suffering, our dread of illness, and that abhorrence of death that he only overcame in the garden. You know, loud cries and groans, though his son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And so the Gethsemanes of our life sanctify us much more than all of the good things that

we're doing while we're talking on puns with Aquinas. And so the father is like a divine sculptor, the chisel is suffering, we're like the marble that is hard and cold, and then he chooses a way through suffering in the hour of death. Nobody is canonizable until they've passed through. And that's why, you know, for the souls that are in hell, they might be smarter, stronger, more virtuous as citizens, but the soul in hell is the dropout. He dropped out of the school of suffering, he stopped trusting God, he started resenting God and never stopped. A little bit of contrition at the end would, you know, empty.

So that would be a good sign of holiness, wouldn't it? If someone can, how are you suffering? How well do you suffer? Yeah. And you know, you look at a saint like Jerome and you realize he didn't suffer very well. He would cause his opponents to suffer much more with his rhetoric. Yes, he would. But this is why holiness is not like one size fits all. Okay.

It is so important and yet it is so elusive. It's not unlike the Holy Spirit, you know, the Holy Wind. You don't even know where it comes from or where it's going, you know. So trying to be holy doesn't necessarily mean looking like a particular saint, obviously. Yeah, that's right. For sure. The Therese of Lejeune, Joan of Arc, who she portrayed, but yeah, Saint Jerome, Maximilian Colbe, there's a great difference in how they look and act. Yeah. And I mean, I'm not an expert on holiness, but what I am is passionate about becoming

holy. And as a professor, as a writer, as a teacher, I want to understand it better. But in the process, as I get older and I get weaker, I realize, you know, that doesn't lessen or diminish my chance of becoming holy. If anything, it increases it. Excellent, yeah. We have a Super Chat that's related. Robert Grant says, so would righteousness be something we practice while holiness is something we receive?

Holiness seems to be inherited with the state of grace. Yeah, again, I distinguish to unite. You know, Jesus is a royal high priest, and so he gives to us his own justice. But it just as we distinguish the procession of the Son from the Father and the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, these are distinct and yet inseparable. And I would say we have to keep the commandments, which includes the first three. So, worship God and no other false gods. Take the name of, don't take His name in vain, which means that we should call upon His name. Hallowed be thy name, the first

of the seven petitions. We're basically saying we can't make your name any holier than it is, but because we bear your name, we're going to do everything in the name of Jesus so that your name won't be holier, but we will because we call upon your name. And then the third of the Ten Commandments is that we're going to cease from our labors in order to celebrate your work, and especially in the holy sacrifice of the Mass, and not just one hour of the Lord's Day, but really setting apart the Lord's Day. So we're keeping the commandments. You know, I just thought of something, and I don't remember whether or not we ever talked about

the book that I co-authored with Brendan McGinley, it is right and just. Yeah, we did. Why the future of civilization depends upon true religion. You know, I draw from Joseph Pieper and Aquinas that justice has the level of transactional justice, which is commutative, and then distributive justice, which is like social justice. But the highest form of justice, and even Cicero, which is communicative, and then distributive justice, which is like social justice.

But the highest form of justice, and even Cicero, Seneca saw this, is the virtue of religio. It's the virtue of virtues, Aquinas says, the highest form of justice. And so what does religion call for? Sacrifice. Where does that start? In the heart, the altar of the heart. And this is the highest form of justice.

It is right and just to give him thanks and praise always and everywhere, which implies that it's horribly wrong and profoundly unjust for creatures who have souls that can express gratitude. This is why if somebody's upright with the seven commandments, but they have forsaken God who is knowable by reason, and they don't call upon his name to make up for what they lack And they don't set up, you know, they don't set aside time to give him thanks and praise always and everywhere There's a cosmic injustice. It's not a misdemeanor. It's a felony. It's really a profound injustice. And so You know when we forget God or when we relegate God to just a kind of external actions That don't really begin in the heart of a broken-hearted man who's like, you know, I'm a creature, but I'm a sinner.

I owe you everything. You owe me nothing. I've given you practically nothing. You give me everything. It's like, what is the only reasonable, logical response to that? Thank you. Yeah! What is the only reasonable logical response to that? Thank you. Yeah. Thanks and praise always and everywhere, so that everything I do, especially the small things, I mean, taking a shower, brushing my hair, tying my shoes, all of those things, it isn't like I have to deliberately and consciously say, I'm tying this shoe for you, God. But on the other hand, you begin the day, you end the day,

and you punctuate the day throughout the day with the prayer, with the rosary. But also, the next hour of work after lunch when I have a difficult time staying alert, I'm going to give it to you. And I think the one thing I, in prayer, the thing I find that the Lord appreciates the most is when I give Him the gift of my anxiety, my worry, my weakness, my waywardness. I'm like, you know, I'm going to be on Matt Fradd's show. I've got nothing, Lord. You know, nothing. And yet, I sense that He's like, yeah, but they don't want what you have. They want... And you mean that. That's not hyperbole. That's not you trying to sound humble. You actually

mean that that's not hyperbole. That's not you trying to sound humble. That's you actually mean that humility and honesty I think are interchangeable terms. I'm being totally honest Yeah, you know, I I have a great sense of I mean people like you get nervous before you give talks I get nervous before I walk into a class with five students. I am so inadequate I am so not sufficient for these things not just because I'm echoing my my patron Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians, we are not capable on our own of achieving the only thing for which we were made. And so, to be God intoxicated is to be utterly reasonable, totally logical. It doesn't mean that people don't matter.

They matter even more because you don't just love your neighbor as yourself, as Augustine said, you love your neighbor as yourself for the love of God. And so you don't just treat people the way you want them to treat you, you treat people the way that you want them to treat you for the love of God. And so Jesus, you know, knows there are 613 commandments in the law of Moses. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God, love your heart, mind, soul, and strength. The second is like it, but it's second to love your neighbor as yourself. This is holiness. This is righteousness. One of the most terrifying scripture verses is from Matthew five or somewhere

where our Lord says, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. Thomas makes the distinction in his commentary between being perfect as God is perfect like God which we can't be since we're not God But it's still terrifying like I'm not perfect as a man How do we how do we understand that verse without falling into a desperate depression? Yeah, I mean on the one hand be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. The word �teleosis� is mature, perfect, in the sense that a father is not being a reasonable dad if he expects his five-year-old to have calculus. So a father is patient in fathering a child, and so we strive to please the Father and allow Him to basically fill us.

So Matthew 5, at the end of the chapter, verse I think 43, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Every one of us prefers Luke 6, which says be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful. But it's not like, well, is it A or B? There's also Leviticus 19, too, and that is be holy for the Lord your God as holy. Well, once we understand Aquinas' notion of mercy, we'll see that for Aquinas, mercy is not divine pity. For Aquinas, mercy is God's power. It's the omnipotent power of His love in action.

And so, if God loves us more than we love ourselves, as a father loves a child more than the child can even realize Then he's going to perfect us how through mercy and that's how we become holy So it's D all of the above. It's Matthew 5. It's Luke 6 and it's Leviticus 19 Because the father is perfecting us through his mercy through the medicine of his mercy through his all-powerful us through His mercy, through the medicine of His mercy, through His all-powerful love and action, but it's God the Father Almighty. So all of His might and power is exercised in terms of fatherly love. He'll stoop however low He has to go. Like when my little infant child is in the crib, you know, stuffed up, cold, cough, you

know, you scoop him up, not to catch what he's got, but just to comfort him, you know, and then you will stoop however low you have to go when he's misbehaving. You have to display a kind of righteous anger, but not because you love him less or because you stop because you can't stop. It's funny you say that my daughter was throwing up last night and I stooped down to the ground and I'm cleaning up. Forgive me for those watching, who might be eating, but her vomit and I'm holding her. And it's a nice analogy because that's often how I feel before God, just on the ground sitting in my own vomit.

Yeah. Mercy, perfection, holiness. Kimberly traces my conversion back, my conversion to the Catholic faith, back to me becoming a father. Even before I was, I was still a pastor, I still considered myself somewhat anti-Catholic, but it was the first night home from the hospital after she had gone into 30 hours of labor, a cesarean section, she was recovering from serious surgery. At three in the morning, she's done nursing. I say, I'll burp him, I'll lay him down.

I walk down the hall, I burp him, and he throws up. And I feel it going down my back. And I'm thinking. It's a great feeling. A year ago, if you had asked me, has anybody ever vomited before, I would know. How will you feel the first time it happens? Frustration, anger, maybe rage.

And I'm looking into the eyes of the only person on planet Earth who's ever vomited on me before, and I'm feeling a love welling up within me. I don't wanna lay him down. I sit in the rocker next to his crib, and I'm rocking him, feeling the warmth becoming clammy cold on my back up my pajama shirt. But I'm like, I don't care. I love you. And I'm like, I've never known this kind of love before. It's a first time father. And then something happened, and I'll never know exactly what it was

But it was like God became present to me It was dark if you'd flipped on the switch and I'd seen the face of God I don't think it would made it any more real and I'm like, okay. Thank you. Oh, by the way, thank you Thank you, you know, and I just felt like he was trying to get through to me I wasn't sure what what do you and then I was just like you see how much you love your child. I'm like Words don't begin. I mean, words utterly fail. I mean, thank you again. But then I was like, no, I'm trying to get something

through to you and you're not getting it. I'm like, what? And it was just like, you think you love your child more than I love my children? Like, I mean, theologically, that's absurd. I'm a first time dad, you know, but words can't just. Then I realized it wasn't like a pop quiz at 3 a.m. He was like, you know, I don't love you because of how good you make yourself. You know, you exist because of my love. You

grow in virtue because of my love. And I'm like, you mean you love me like I love him only more? And all I could think of was the countless times I had kind of vomited on God metaphorically by my own selfishness Always thinking well, he's gonna love me less and less until maybe he'd stopped loving me gives up I didn't realize that if I can look into the pearly whites of this little baby boy Just threw up on me. Yeah and feel a love that I've ever known before That was a grace moment and it was just like okay be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfecting you. Be merciful as your Father in Heaven shows mercy on you, not just pity, but a patience

and a power that will raise an infant to a child, to an adult, and never expect more from a child than is reasonable. And then that is what holiness is. It's God the Father reproducing his Son in us through the spirit of sonship that causes us to cry out Abba Father. There's a great book, I Believe in Love, which is a commentary, you know, I'd recommend everyone go get it, especially if you're struggling with scrupulosity. But there's this one line there where he says, I'm not telling you you believe too much in

your own wretchedness. We are far more wretched than we could ever imagine. I'm telling you, you don't believe enough in merciful love. And maybe that's the ticket, because I think that a lot of people feel crippled in their own sin and their own sense of their own unworthiness. And so when somebody comes to them and tells them about the love of God, they're like, yeah, you don't understand. And I like that response. It's like, no, no, I get it. You're way worse than you think you are. Like, way worse. Yeah. But what I'm telling you is God's love is deeper than your wretchedness. And more powerful. Yeah, you know, I think this is especially true for professional Catholics like us, you

know, and even more for professional Catholic intellectuals and academics. Because trying to figure out what holiness is for a lecture or for a book or for a radio interview, you know, I end up, and I was telling Mike Aquiline this recently, you know, I hear about the Eucharist, but I hear it in terms of my own voice, my own formulation. It's just like, oh, you've got to be kidding. You know, it's so much more than what I, and people, oh, you expressed it so well. Maybe I did, thanks be to God, but not to us, oh Lord, not to us. You know, and so I think it's important for us to defamiliarize ourselves with all of the things that we teach to talk about, and then like little children, refamiliarize ourselves until it's like, wait

a minute, these are true, but they're real. They're powerful, but they're beautiful. And it's like, it's amazing how unamazed we are. I sang Amazing Grace before I became a Catholic, but the grace of the Incarnation, the Blessed Virgin, the Communion of Saints, you know, it's like, you know, only if you could become a child, not childish, but a child-likeness where you're like, you know, this is truly fantastic, almost bordering on fantasy. And yet this is what we profess to be true.

God the Father Almighty, through the Son, by the Spirit, a communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins. And so besides the Eucharist, which I try to go to Mass every day, I go to confession at least once a week. And neither my wife or my confessor suggests that I go too often. And so often I could have just photocopied the list from last week. Yeah.

But my confessor- I remember you said this once in a talk. I don't know if you were about to say that, but- Yeah, it's the same. I mean, what do you want? New sins? No? Yeah, that's right. I feel like I'm confessing the same sins. Would you like to confess different ones more? No. Yeah. And then he said, if you stop going to confession, you'll have a lot of new ones. I want to get to some questions, but I have a question before we get to that. Catholics are often accused of thinking we need to work for our salvation. So let me just kind of

ask you this question, more of an apologetics question to get your summary. Are we saved by faith or works? Well, we're saved by faith. We're justified by faith. And you could even say with the Calvinists, we're justified by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone. So the only time faith alone occurs is not in Paul, but in James 2.24, where James says we're justified by faith and works. So we're not justified by faith alone the way Luther said, you know, a dunghill covered

with snow. No, we have faith, but even that's not what we conjure up ourselves. It is a gift from God. And so to receive the sacrament of faith, baptism, gives to us not only the fidesque quae, what we believe that we could never prove on our own, but also the power of faith, the means by which we believe. It's a supernatural power that basically embraces supernatural mysteries. If we knew how precious divine life is, divine grace, we would not say, well, I'm just exercising my human rights

to commit mortal sin, just as we would do anything to stop people from committing suicide, to commit spiritual suicide and stuff out the life of the eternal trinity in our souls. I mean, just extraordinarily stupid, you know, and yet so common. And, you know, But this view that we just have to do enough good works before our time runs out or else we go to hell is a false view, correct? This is not what Catholics think. And yet so many, they think of the two scales. You have to have more good works and bad works by the time your time runs out. If we were employees, if we were slaves, if we are earning a wage, then all of that follows.

My kids are not going to receive the inheritance because they worked harder than the kids in the backyard, your kids sometimes in our backyard. No, they're my children. And so this is what faith is. It's that filial instinct where I say, not just God the creator, not just the Lord and lawgiver, but Abba Father.

And it's like, non-Christians, Jews and Muslims would say the idea of divinization is absurd. The idea that God is your Father through Christ, and that you receive divine sonship, you are regenerated. This is only and always metaphorical. But for us as Catholics, especially as Thomas, this is metaphysical. This is more real than the table we're sitting at.

OK, one more time. There's a link in the description below. Click it and go over to Emmaus Road. If you type holy pints into the what's it called? Promo code. You get 20 percent off to get this book. You y'all are doing a beautiful job with your front covers. I'm sorry. I always judge a book by its cover. And this is a beautiful, beautiful cover. So we do work hard and long at that. You know,

that book on the paper sees brilliant. I'm already at a hundred pages into it. Or something. My gosh. We're proud of that baby boy. Yeah. You know, one thing I want to say to kind of get back to a question or two that I left unanswered or only partially answered, and that is prayer is obviously the breath of the soul. Prayer is the best way we live out our faith. And prayer before the blessed sacrament, where we say, look, I could work all day long and I'll still feel like I'm behind.

And so when we're in the presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, he does more with our less in that kind of purpose. But if we can't get there, we just say, an act of spiritual communion, I wish I could be with you. I wanna unite myself to you, but I don't want it that much. And so take my desire, but along with that, take my lack of desire, take my

distractions, you know, take all of my waywardness. I remember being in a holy mass about seven in the morning and just before consecration was looking forward to the coffee I was about to have after holy mass. And I was the Eucharist I was about to receive. Lord Jesus helped me to want you more than I want coffee. Yeah. And I mean, he's not up there saying you want coffee more than me. I'm gonna blot you out. You know, he just shows us how he would do this. I would do that if I were God, but thank God I'm not God.

Yeah, but I think the things that weigh us down the most are the things that he appreciates the most. I went through a hard time a few years ago. I mean, unbelievably, just didn't see it coming. And I would spend time before the Blessed Sacrament. And then I walked to the top of the hill on a campus where we have the big steel cross. And I'm just like, my cross is too big. And I try to embrace this huge steel cross and I couldn't get my arms around it. And I'm like, you know, I want to give to you my utter sense of failure, my inadequacy. I really mean it. But I feel like I would crush the altar.

It's just, it's, and then he just whispered, I'm the altar. Don't worry. Go ahead and crush me. You know, your sins have already done that, but I've borne those. Now give to me your fear, your weakness, your brokenness. I want that more than all of your good lectures and books. Yeah. All right, we'll get some questions. Yeah. Is that okay with you? For sure. So these aren't, I don't know, I haven't read through these questions, so they might be all over the show. You can think of this as the lightning round since we've got a lot of questions.

So feel free to answer as little or as much as you'd like. Alan says, can we ever achieve a life without mortal sin, as in an extended period of time till death? If this is so, what about venial sin? Can we ever achieve a life without mortal sin, as in an extended period of time till death? If this is so, what about venial sin? Can we ever achieve a life without that? Well, Trent says that only- Not Trent Horn. Yeah, the Council of Trent speaks of how, you know, sons of Adam, daughters of Eve, can avoid mortal sin and can be free of mortal sin, but only by an

exceptional grace. So again, we're not meeting God halfway, God, you're my co-pilot, you know, no, He's the pilot, we're more like the cargo. But it is important to recognize that apart from Christ, apart from the power of the Holy Spirit, you know, it's like Saint Frank, no, it was, it was, oh, just drawing a brain drain here. It's me most of the time. Philip, Philip Neary. Okay.

You know, who said, watch out for Philip today lest he betray you. And that was a prayer that he prayed fairly frequently because he knew Philip, he knew himself. And so I try to make that my prayer, you know, and like, watch out for Scott lest he betray you because you withdraw your spirit and I withdraw from you. But it isn't like a neurotic sort of thing. It's just, it's sanctified common sense. And so to realize that he is more committed to sanctifying me than I'm committed to letting him do it. You know,

the idea that he is all powerful to make me holy is such a comfort. Now I think you could probably answer this next question in about 20 hours if you wanted to, but try not to go that long because you'll see what I mean. This person asks, how can we understand sanctification and personal growth and holiness in terms of covenant, covenantal theology? In other words, how can covenantal theology help us in becoming holy? By picturing ourselves as children living in the home of the Father. You know, and when my kids would play

as long as they weren't fighting at each other's throats, you know, it isn't like why are you wasting your time playing? No. Or when they're struggling with math. And so to live in the presence of God as our Father and to cultivate what St. Josemaria would say, divine filiation. Do I reflect upon my own divine sonship that he sees me not as I see me, he sees me as he sees Christ and he's trying to reproduce Christ in me more and more. Amen. What Advent traditions do you keep or suggest? Well, we have the Advent candles, the wreath, we have the evening devotions as well. We also try to pray, you know,

morning prayer and evening prayer. We also sing Advent hymns, whereas we used to sing Christmas carols during the season of Advent before we became Catholic. And yeah, we also have Christmas parties. Okay, I confess we're going to have a St. Paul Christmas party during Advent, mea culpa. Yeah, but I mean, Advent is to me, another one of those underrated graces. Advent is to Christmas what led his to Easter.

It's a penitential season of cultivating hope and all of that. Yeah, and so we should also look for small mortifications that we might add. You know, I want to go back an hour. It's just, I hesitate to say this because I know he'll hear about this, you know, but the, um, the person who I consider to be holier than anyone else I know, he's going to never forgive me.

Is Mike Aquilino. He's gonna have to if he wants to continue being holier. Exactly, yeah, he's stuck. Mike has this gift of friendship. And we're both in Opus Dei, we've got norms of piety, and I try to do every norm every day, but I never, never get that done. He gets it done, I think, much more than almost anybody else

I know in the work. But he has this gift of friendship that he shares with so many people. And I dare say, I think, you know, he's like my best friend and I'm his best friend, but then you run into all these other people who are his best friends. And I would say that he accomplishes more with less. And he's younger than me, but spiritually he's older than me. And he's written that book, Friendship and the Fathers, to talk about how the church evangelized apart from social media, technology, any of that, it was through friendship. And it goes back to Jesus saying, I no longer call you servant because the servant doesn't know what the master's up to.

I call you friends. And that's what, my oldest son, Michael, he also lives the norms, and he's only a cooperator. But I tell you, he's my best friend. And he teaches me, I think, more than I teach him. He's now 40, or he will be in 10 days, and doctrine, all of that. But all of my kids have taught me about God the Father. And now they all have shown me a life of virtue that exceeds their dad.

And I just look at them and I'm like, you know, I handed them off to you, Father, and you've picked up where I left off, but you've always made up for what they lack, and you're doing the same for me. And so it's like further up and further in. I'll race you to the top of Zion. What would your advice be to parents out there whose children seem to have left the faith? How should they trust in God and not fret and become anxious about their children's salvation? Yeah, I mean, you're going to fret. There's no way to avoid that. Just fret in his presence, you know,

with, I mean, the rosary is my favorite prayer. I mean, that's a cliche, but I mean, I'd pass the polygraph. You know, I would, I would embarrass my spiritual director if he knew how much the rosary, I just try to pray it two or three or four times a day, because I'm like a little child in her arms. And when my kids have gone through hard times and all six of them did many times. And you know, I would, I would feel completely bereft. I don't know how to get them back on track and I just would feel like our Lord and our lady would say, you got that right. You know?

And so bring that anguish. And it's like, our lady would say, that's what the tear ducts are for. That's what tears are for. When you mingle your tears with those beads, you will discover I love your children more than you love them as a mother, even more than Kimberly. And you just kind of complete the circuitry, you know,

when you say, Lord, I have a broken heart over these kids. You know, and it might be Monica waiting until whenever a conversion comes to Augustine. But you just have to believe that through prayers, through tears, through friendship, you want to forgive them as much as God the Father has forgiven you. You want to apologize to them for all of the ways

that you might have failed them or let them down, a little humility goes a long way. In the Hail Holy Queen, B. Martin asks, it refers to the mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. He's asking if this refers to Mary or Jesus in this specific prayer, it's referring to Mary. Yeah. I mean, So the next question I suppose would be, how is this not blasphemous? Maybe that's kind of what he's driving at or maybe what he's heard, how to refer to Mary as our life, our sweetness and our hope.

Yeah. I mean, if, if, um, I said at the Kimberly, you know, you are my life, you are my sweetness, you're my hope. She would say, you're blaspheming. I'm not blaspheming. It's all by way of participation. And so, I was just looking for the blurb because one of the bishops pointed this out. I can't remember which was it. I want to say the long one from Cardinal Burke. I got some of the most generous. You used Cardinal Pell in here. Yeah. What a man. But I mean, these Cardinals and bishops are like theologians who get this right. Archbishop Nauman, but this idea, this is Burke's line,

Holy is the name offered to the profound and thorough reflection upon the mark of holiness, which belongs properly only to God, but which belongs by participation to every Christian in virtue of the innumerable and ceasing love of God for man. So the son honors his father, but he honors his mother by bestowing upon the blessed Virgin Mary a fuller participation in divine grace, in divine life, in divine love than any other creature, then all of the other creatures put together

So is our life our sweetness our hope pertaining to him or her it's clearly C both A and B Because he holds nothing back by bestowing the fullness of grace upon her She holds nothing back by wanting the Lord to possess her as a handmaid nothing back by wanting the Lord to possess her as a handmaid. And so this idea that it's a kind of zero-sum game, it's a tug of war, if we attribute it to a human, then we take it from, you know, the Blessed Virgin Mary, as Lumen Gentium says, adds nothing to the work of Christ and subtracts nothing from his work. She is his work, his most perfect work. He is the artist of our redemption and she is his masterpiece. So whatever we attribute to her, we ascribe to him. Back to the question of the rosary. I've encountered people who've worried that they're not giving the mysteries as much

attention as they possibly could be. And I suppose that's true of all of us whenever we pray the rosary. How do we overcome that scriptulosity, especially if we're going to try to pray two or three rosaries throughout the day while we're doing different things? Maybe we dedicate time for one, five-decade kind of, but yeah, what's your suggestion? Yeah, I'm embarrassed and I'm ashamed, but on the other hand, I'm proud of God, the Father, and you know and Jesus, Mother Mary, because in the beginning of the day, especially when I'm just kind of still mostly awake,

but not entirely, I will go through a decade and realize by the eighth or ninth beat that I'm actually, I am addressing you, God, but also the Blessed Mother, although I'm, it's like Pauli want a cracker. I could have been a parakeet in the cage just saying these things. And so I want to give to you my embarrassment,

my distraction. I want to pray to you. And then like two decades later, it's like, there you go again. And we have this vision, we have this image of the father and of the mother that's perfectionistic, and it's completely wrong. It's totally distorted.

I wasn't that way with my children, and I was a flawed dad, and I failed them as a father so often. But Abba Father never fails us. And so if we say, you know, I just prayed a second rosary today, and maybe two out of the 50 were actually addressed to her and then the glory be. And so I just feel like a little honesty, a little humility, plus the power of God, the Father working through the Son by the Spirit and the Blessed Virgin.

It isn't like, well, it's been like three minutes since you really were meditating on those mysteries. It's the liberation, you know, when Paul speaks of the freedom that belongs to the children of God, again, it's not rationalizing childishness or willfulness, but it really is celebrating, I am a child and I keep growing smaller and weaker as I get older and I'm like, you know, you're going to have to take it from here. And he's like, I was dying to do that.

Yeah. I mean, this, we haven't talked about Teresa of Lusia yet, but I mean, her whole spirituality is the elevator. Your arms, Jesus, are the elevator that will raise me. Yeah. And God gives me whatever I want because I really want whatever he gives. I trust him more than I trust me. And I don't trust him nearly enough, but I love to cultivate more and more distrust in Scott Hahn. And being a celebrity, a Catholic celebrity, is such hogwash. We are Catholics. We want to be saints, not celebrities. And so,

you know, I'd like to say, oh, I detest the celebrity status. And I do, more than people realize, but not for all the right reasons. And it's often because it's inconvenient or whatever. But I mean, this idea that, Lord, they want so much from me. He just whispers no they don't they only want me and so open up your heart let me to fill it because then you're inadequacy will make room for my super adequate I've heard you once say the never forget that the Lord wants you more than he wants to use you. you. And this is the line that, I mean, 10,000 times is probably fewer than, I want to sanctify you and make you holy more than I want to use you to make other people holy. And so being a disciple following Jesus, being an apostle leading other people to Jesus, one is inhaling, the other is exhaling.

But you can't exhale what you haven't inhaled. And so I just feel like prayer is the breath of the soul where you are sharing with others, but not if you're dried up. Slow Up 212 says, any advice for men in particular to lead their families in holiness, especially when it seems our wives are more spiritually adept? Yeah. I mean, I would go to our Lord on a regular basis and just tell Him that. You know, my wife is just so much more spiritual and more virtuous and more generous. Make

me more like you, Lord. Make me more like her. But I would also say that if we do the Catholic faith like we do our job, a checklist of dos and don'ts or whatever, it's like Bass-Ackwards, as my mom would say. You've got to understand that friendship with our Lord means friendship with your kids. Not buddy old chummy old pal, but I mean, let them see the fact that you're enjoying being a Catholic, and then the joy of the Lord will spill over. I mean, that's our six kids, you know, there, but for the, I mean, I, to God be all the glory, they're all practicing their faith, they're all enjoying it, mostly because of their mother. But one thing, they know that whatever I was doing at 13 with drugs and alcohol, I don't need to do because

this is what I was looking for. This is really what I was needing then. And so it brings you a joy and a high that goes away all the time, you know, but you know there's more where that came from. And so going back to prayer and admitting I'm distracted, I'm not praying very well for the umpteenth time today, you know, I've got to be honest because that's what a child is. And those kids of ours, you know, know that, you know, dad's a Catholic celebrity, so what? You know, it's like that is just, you know, if I didn't know me, I might be impressed. It's like the national anthem in our home. Yeah, they know I am, for good reason, I am profoundly unimpressed with me, but I'm impressed with God and what he can do in my life and my kids.

Okay. Jacob says, Scott, so I have siblings who are getting married soon and we're baptized Catholic, but I'm, I'll say, well, they were baptized Catholic, but are not having a Catholic wedding. I'm confused on if it's okay for me to go to these said weddings. I have asked many people what I should do, but it's still very iffy for me. What would you say is the best thing for me to do? If baptized Catholics are getting married outside of the church, they are fundamentally

bearing false witness. And so by attending, you would also be bearing false witness. That is a very hard saying, you know, but it's one of those things where Lord, if I obey will you make up for what I lack? I'm going to be absent. They're going to be hurt. They're going to be angry and all of that. We had to do this with someone very close to it, like, like a family member where they wanted and it wasn't just showing up at the wedding. It was like you'd be the bet, you know, my bridesmaid and you'd be singing at the wedding and your son would be this and and just upon reflection was a very difficult decision to make because we love these people and we didn't want to break relations with them but we had to say we can't we can't go.

That was brutal. I mean, we didn't go at all, but there's certainly a difference between taking an official part in the wedding and then showing up at all, or would you say no, never? Well, no. I mean, the people who are at a wedding are witnesses. In Canada law, in the tradition, and according to scripture, you're bearing witness to something that is sacred and solemn. And so if you're bearing witness to something that you know to be fraudulent, inadvertently, unconsciously, you're bearing false witness. And so this is, I mean, the old line I hate is tough love. But in a certain sense, you could say, I know this upsets you. It breaks my

heart to pieces. I would love to be there. But more more than loving you I have to love the Lord my God and believe that he's gonna make up and give you what you need in order to get back on Track, there's just no way to do that. That's easy. Yeah, you know Well, there's a straight answer for you Jacob. Anyway Ian says dr. Hahn, what's your favorite cigar at Chesterton's? Please say magic toast magic toast. Magic toast. Okay. Then I should get one because I've never had a magic toast. Quite good. Joe Ward says, I'm a new convert from Calvinism and I'm struggling to really grasp the Catholic

view on atonement. I grew up with penal substitution. I want to be able to articulate this well as I talk to my Protestant friends and family. Any thoughts?" Oh, wow. I mean, this in some ways is the biggest thing for me. Penal substitution versus vicarious satisfaction, Luther versus Aquinas. You know, we would say in vicarious satisfaction that yes, Christ paid a debt he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay. Because Christ paid a debt he didn't owe, because we owed a debt we couldn't pay. And that works when it comes to indebtedness and the riches of Christ. But it doesn't work in terms of penal law or punitive justice. So we're in a courtroom, there's God, the judge, we're found guilty of enormous crimes,

and then a door opens and in walks the son and says, look, they're guilty, but I'm innocent. And so you have to execute them, execute me instead, because I'm not only innocent, I am willing. And so if the judge says, okay, beloved son, I'm going to pour out my wrath on you because you're willing and because you're innocent and righteous, I want to give them your righteousness, give you their guilt and unrighteousness. And then when I'm done venting my wrath, I'm going to remember who you are and I'm going to resurrect you and bring you back. You know, that is Trinitarian schizophrenia.

When the Father is looking down from heaven upon His Son and He only can see our sin, that kind of, I mean, that is so profoundly, profoundly wrong theology. You know, he always loves his son in his sacred humanity for 33 years, but never was that sacred humanity so lovable as when he was hanging on the cross fulfilling this debt of satisfaction, giving back to God out of love more than our sins ever detracted from God. And so this is why Aquinas' notion of vicarious satisfaction is so vastly superior to a counterfeit of penal substitution. To say, okay, this is divine justice, I'm going to punish the innocent because he's

willing, and I'm going to liberate those who are guilty. You know, it's like that is not only theologically problematic in the relationship between the Father and the Son. The idea that the cross is concealing God's Son from the Father. No, the Son is revealing a love that is life-giving on the cross. He's not losing his life at Calvary. He's pouring it out. He's doing in time what he does in eternity and that is imaging the Father's life-giving love. It's a mystery. The Council of Trends says it's the hardest mystery to explain, but it's also an easy mystery to counterfeit and falsify. Bottom line is this, I would recommend you get a book that I just brought back into print through the St. Paul Center, through Emmaus Road,

called What Is Redemption? How Christ's Suffering Saves Us, by Philippe de la Trinité, who was a Carmelite, and he builds on scripture of the fathers, but especially Aquinas, to show that, you know, the idea that Christ is not bearing the brunt of divine wrath and rage, but manifesting, giving to the Father this perfect satisfaction. He is satisfying justice, which that might sound like legal abstraction, oh, the West,

it's just so juridical. But the fact is, if the highest form of justice is sacrifice, religion, and the inner logic of the law of religion is love, then it is not how much Jesus is suffering on the cross that saves us, it's how much he's loving the Father and loving us as his neighbor, as himself. And so, that love that is the logic of divine law is the thing that is so elusive to us because law for us for centuries now seems to be nothing more than the superior will imposing His law upon the inferior subjects, whereas God's law is meant to perfect us. And you know, it's the love that turns the suffering into sacrifice. It's the love that turns the pain into passion.

And not just back then and there at Calvary, but here and now as we are made members of his mystical body, you know, as Paul says in Colossians 1.24, I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, not because Jesus died a few hours too soon, but because what Christ wants to do is to reproduce His love in us, and then through pain, turn it into passion. So, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, Paul says. And this is really not understandable in terms of, well, we'll slay cattle, sheep, and goats until the sun appears, then we'll slaughter Him instead and appease divine justice. That is beneath even the pagan

deities. And yet it was the thing I preached, it was what I studied, it's what I defended, until I realized in becoming a father, that doesn't work. 1.5 How do you find that staunch Calvinists respond to that very sensible in my mind response to their view? Well, they say that justice in God is different than justice among humans, that it's analogous, that it's not univocal. And I would say no, that's a misuse of analogy.

What you're saying is that when the Father sees His Son, but only really sees our sin and bashes and punishes and pours out His wrath and rage upon that Son of his. That isn't analogous, that's equivocation. Then what you're saying then is that injustice is justice, that in God, for the Father to punish his son and to acquit the criminals. Again, it works when it comes to torts in financial law. He paid a debt he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay.

Yeah. What is the debt? To love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. That alone is what satisfies divine justice. He wants us to love him as we have been loved. We love because he first loved us. We think, well, it's love or it's law. You can't legislate love. But what if Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God, all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength. That is beyond counterintuitive, but that is the only thing that makes sense out of divine justice and the logic of the cross. It is not penal substitution, it is vicarious satisfaction

that Christ is satisfying divine justice as the beloved son of God, but also as the Son of Man. That He's empowering us by uniting us to Him that when we offer the holy sacrifice of the Mass, we are basically loving the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, satisfying the highest demand of justice in a way that we never could apart from the Incarnation. This is the greatest need in the Catholic Church today, is to crack the code or to expose the falsehood of penal substitution and rediscover that it's the love of God the Father perfected

in the Son, and then the Holy Spirit is poured out upon us to achieve this law of love by loving God as he has loved us. I mean, I just wish that we could find, you know, it's like the 99 and the one stray. Well, in this case, there's like one or two theologians who are doing this and 99 who just go around singing and parroting this logic of the penal substitution. There are passages like Isaiah 53, the suffering servant, that left alone might seem to lean towards that view. And so you've got to do what the fathers

do. There are passages like 2 Corinthians 5 where Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us to become the righteousness of God. But the word that Paul uses, he who knew no sin became the ha-martia, that is, he became the sin offering. So in each and every case you have verses that seem to lean toward this really scary view. And you should interview John Bergdahl because this idea of penal substitution, he backed into a dark depression because if that's how a father loves his only beloved son, where is there any light or consolation?

Are Calvinists explicating penal substitution faithfully to to Calvin or are they misrepresenting Calvin? Well, I mean, it's really in Luther in a way that is like larger than life. But Calvin, because he was an attorney, he was trained in law, refines the logic of penal substitution and does the best job. And you can't, Chemnitz does, Butcher does also. You have Turriton and a lot of others who are trying to make it fit. But at the end of the day, I remember when I was at Gordon-Conwell, I was studying under Roger Nicole,

who was the world expert on atonement theories. And I got to be the chauffeur for Dr. J.I. Packer, two different semesters. And I wrote a paper called Packer's Dissatisfaction with Satisfaction, where he's defending penal substitution. And I remember reading Gerhardus Vos, the great Princeton Calvinist, on the eternal love of God.

And I'm like, you can't square the circle. You can't show us that it is all the love of God. I mean, he loved us when he sent Christ to die for us. Then it's a legal fiction to say, well, you know, He sees us as sinners, but He puts all of the sin on Christ, then He acts as though we're righteous like He is. It's a legal fiction. It's a divine injustice. It's a kind of theological schizophrenia. It's so profoundly flawed, but it's in the water and the air we breathe and you know in that book What is redemption by Philippe de la trinité?

Which I brought back into print after like 50 or 60 years of being out of print. It was when I read that I'm like It's like being under the dark clouds and then in a plane you suddenly shoot through the clouds and you see blue sky and sunshine Yeah, and you know and and then Philippe de la trinité also walks through all of the six or seven And, you know, and then Philippe de la Trinité also walks through all of the six or seven passages that are apparent problems for kind of decoding or unmasking penal substitution. But I dare say that, you know, you back into a kind of master-slave relationship the more you embrace this view of God's law, God's justice, and how we can basically punish the innocent and then pardon the guilty. of God's law, God's justice, and how we can basically punish the innocent and then pardon the guilty.

Thank you. Yeah, I'll have to have Bergsmith back on. Oh yeah. What a guy. Okay, a couple questions as we wrap up here. Some of these are a little more fun. What's Dr. Hahn's best Catholic pick-up line? Honey, I'm home.

All right. I remember hearing of these back in the day. I forget like you have lovely brown scapula colored eyes or can I use your fingers to pray a rosary on? I don't know. I've got to renew my pretty good humor. I think we actually that was the next question. Also ask if he knows any cringy dad jokes. Look at my Facebook page. They feel with you.

It's funny as you get older. Dad jokes like actually are funny for me now. Peter Crave was sitting where you are a couple of weeks ago, and here's a joke he told me. He said this man walks into a bar with a banana sticking out of his ear and the bartender says, excuse me, you've got a banana sticking out of your ear. And the man says, sorry, what's that? I can't hear you. I have a banana sticking out of my ear. And I thought that was great. It is. All right. Emma asks, do you have a favorite joke? You know, I probably do, but I've just got done talking about penal substitution. It's difficult. I mean, I was also, and I told you this before we started recording, before we started the show, and that is I was lecturing to graduate students in my master's seminar on the Gospel

of John, and we were dealing with all of this Trinitarian soteriology and trying my hardest to get it across clearly, and then finally feeling as though I was making a connection. And by the time I walked out to the parking lot into the car I'm like, God I really do have nothing. I'm just drained to the max, you know. And so the humor and you know all of these things it's like... All right here's a question. What do you love about living in Steubenville? And maybe you can incorporate into this answer what we're about to do down on the main street. Yeah, I mean light up night we're gonna have the Christmas tree light, we're gonna have fireworks, you know, first Friday on 4th Avenue. What

I love about Steubenville is, this is a lesson that's teaching me, that you don't need to have economic progress to have cultural renewal. Yes, that's it. You have, yeah, you have this Catholic family subculture that the university is feeding, and in turn, the Catholic families are also blessing the university. And it's not the dominant thing, but it is, and it's probably good that it's not, but I think that this prevalent Catholic family subculture, in some homeschool, others go to Catholic Central or to a Christian school or to public school. So it's a big tent, not one size fits all.

Yeah, that's right. And you've got the Charismatics, you've got the Traditionals, you've got the Tradismatics, the Trinity Councils like me and you. And I just find that raising our six kids here made the Catholic faith as plausible as raising Mormon kids in Salt Lake City. A burger would call it plausibility structures.

You just have ways to make this stuff believable and desirable and attractive and sometimes irresistible. And it's like, you've got to find good soil to put the, you know, to plant the the flower. I love that Yeah, you don't need economic prosperity for cultural renewal. I mean we have Shakespeare in the park. We have these Yeah, we have great homes Yeah, you've got the coffee house for those at home. Yeah, but and the the advent market with all, you know, Therese Nelson, uh, what's her married name? I don't know her married name. Federica. Okay. You know,

and she has devised all of these, um, uh, what do you call those? Uh, on the streets, what the Christmas trees or the nutcrackers, the nutcrackers, nutcracker village. I think she has some new ones. It's unreal. That's a lot that she's in. The St Paul center has the St Paul nutcracker and mother Teresa. We're going to get a chest at an outside the cigar. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. But I mean, I, I grew up in a part of Pittsburgh where it was economically flourishing, but morally stagnant. I mean, it was decrepit and sometimes, sometimes the effect of economic prosperity is people are

isolated. They isolate from each other. Whereas we kind of depend on each other here. Yeah, I'm pumped. If I had known how great this would have been, I would have, I would have moved much sooner, like you told me to seven years before I actually did move. 2013. Yeah. Yeah. I remember finding that text. You know, there was a fella, I just met him. Maybe you've heard of them.

They just moved from Hawaii. Ah, they live like, they live half a block from us. Isn't that crazy? I got a text message from him. Yeah. A couple from Hawaii moved here. That's amazing. They're going through culture shock. I bet.

I'll buckle up. It's not February yet. It's about to get much worse. Before we're done, I want to just say thank you for extending the gift of friendship to Cameron. Oh, Batusi? Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, actually, yeah, he had a question. You recall a year ago when Swan came out as well as Cameron, you know, gosh, was that a year ago? Yeah. But wasn't it fun? Are we allowed to have that much fun? I don't know. I don't think so. I had to go to, I went to confession and he said, why even here? When I don't know. No, yeah. He actually had a question here somewhere. He's, he asked what's your advice for new converts? Cause he's getting slayed online. There's a lot of people who are angry and they're making videos about him

They're trying to impugn his motives saying he's only doing this for the money or he's only doing this for that He's definitely not doing In spite of the money lost, but I mean the fact is I mean I converted in 86 but I gave the first talks that were recorded in 89, and I look back on a three-year honeymoon. And God has blessed us so wonderfully by using us in ways I never, ever imagined. But I would just, you know, I've told this to Cameron, too, I mean, dates, not debates, and just show her and others that the grace of the sacraments

They're not just real and true. They're powerful and transformative and they'll make you a better husband a better father a better friend a better neighbor And if they're not You bug the Lord and just say hey How come and I told the Lord you show me your bride and you drive it like a wedge between me and mine you gotta do something about the division in my home. And you know, the Lord is never outdone in generosity. And Cameron is going to have a tough path because he's got that premature celebrity status that he wasn't seeking.

You know, and I don't think in any way he should have avoided it. But you know, you're going to have to ride the rapids. Yeah. I mean, I think it's But you know, you're going to have to ride the rapids. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just you don't respond to the haters. You know, when someone does a whole hit piece video on you that says you're an idiot who just converted for reasons that they can't possibly intuit because they're not psychic, you don't respond. I think to respond is to just throw logs on a fire that you just let die out. And what's been interesting actually is that the first responses from some Protestants have been very critical of is to just throw logs on a fire that you just let die out. And what's been interesting actually

is that the first responses from some Protestants have been very critical of him. But then there's actually been some subsequent responses from other Protestants who have been much more charitable and who are correcting these other fellows saying, so you don't know his heart, how about, you know? Yeah, you know, I think about, you know, you say don't take it too seriously.

I mean, I take my critics way too seriously and I can't really, I don't know how to receive the affirmation and praise because it's like, you know, you say don't take it too seriously. I take my critics way too seriously and I can't really, I don't know how to receive the affirmation and praise. In my mind, anyone who says anything nice about Pines of the Coinas at any point is clearly an idiot. But anyone who says something terribly critical of me is infallible. Yeah. I mean, grow up to marks I would never join a club that would have me as one of its members, you know. I have trouble respecting people, praise who praise me. But I mean, people who criticize, I think Benedict Rochelle taught me years ago,

Father Benedict would say, you're wrong, I'm much worse than you think, but just for other reasons than what you're saying. And that's not just a disarming rhetoric, that is the truth of the matter. And I think for Cameron, for me, for you, for anybody who's, you know, like a sage up on stage, we've got to really not take ourselves too serious,

but we've got to take confession. Yeah. Seriously. And regularly. He's looking forward to that. How cool would that be? Wow. Yeah. And he's got a really good mentor. Yeah. Michael Gormley down there in Houston. Well, this has been a pleasure, Dr. Han. Thank you kindly for coming on the show again and people can check out your new book, Holy Is His Name,

The Transforming Power of God's Holiness and Scripture. There is a link in the description below. Type in Holy Pints, one word. I don't think they were trying to be clever. They were probably just trying to put together the book name and my podcast name. Put in Holy Pints into the promo code at that link and you'll get 20% off.

Good. Good. Up until Christmas day. Up until Christmas day. There you go. Get it. And check out the St. Paul Center website because Dr. Bergman and so many others are doing amazing things.

I remember being so shocked at how great Bergman was. I think, let me back up. He just seemed like a computer, you know? And so I was like, I hope this is, I hope he's able to sit down and like have a conversation. He's amazing. I know. And the thing is he wears his nerdiness so well, you know, and it's not pretentious that he really is the way he is, but he's as deep as the ocean. He's extraordinarily intelligent, articulate as well.

We do a show on the St. Paul Center website for subscriptions called Word of the Lord, where I host it and I basically just launch him like a rocket where he summarizes all of the Old and New Testament readings. In like nine minutes, he connects all of the dots and then we reflect practically what to do, you know? Do you do this every Sunday? Every Sunday. Where is it so we can put a link?

The St. Paul Center, you can go to the website and see Word of the Lord. It's a weekly half hour that I host with John, but I try to... There it is, yeah. You see it? StPaulCenter.com. If you scroll down, the Word of the Lord, you can sign up, yeah. Yeah, we have over a thousand subscribers now. But I mean, everywhere I go, people, especially priests are saying, oh, I can't wait to listen to this, you know? Yeah. And then also, y'all are building a new building.

That's right. That's exciting. Right across from the entrance of the university. Wow. You know, they sold that land to us for a song to kind of strengthen or reinforce that sense of partnership that we've had for 21 years as an official affiliate of the university. But it's going to be, it's two acres, 25,000 square feet. We have over 40 full-time coworkers.

But I mean, it is a kind of zealous apostle. I was just in a meeting for an hour and a half this morning with all of the events planning and that kind of thing. And oh man, to do things with Bergsmut, to do, we now, we had priest retreats starting back in 2005 with over 200 priests coming for like almost a week. And then there was a waiting list. So we did twice a year.

Now, this year for the first time, we did three priest retreats, 635 priests, and they all end the week by saying, how come I didn't get this in seminary? Now this is what we signed up for. One priest I'll never forget, you know, he came over to me and said, this is my 37th year being a priest, this is my 37th retreat, this is better than all the other 36 put together. And at breakfast he said, all of my brother priests were saying the same thing.

Why did we never learn to read scripture in a way that you and Bergman others do? And it's like, it's the flagship of what we're doing at the St. Paul Center. It's biblical literacy for lay people, but biblical fluency for the clergy and the educators. Emmaus Road, Emmaus Academic is now publishing all of these textbooks that seminarians have all around the country. And my own son, Dr. Michael Hahn, is now the director of Emmaus Academic. We were together with thousands of scripture scholars in Denver this past weekend, and he was engaging them. You know, I just, as I turned 65 last month, I'm like, okay, the decline is empirically unfalsifiable. But to see him turning 40 in

the next week or two and to realize that he's- Where does he live? Is he here? He lives in Emmitsburg. He's a professor of scripture and theology. I was going to say, would you believe I'm turning 40 next year? So again, he's my age. Yeah. Wow. And he's got these seven kids and his wife Anna grew up in town and her family is like the tribe of Hummel. I mean, they have so many grandkids, I think it's closing in on

50. Wow. And we only have a paltry 21. Please. That's amazing. Now, Bergsmüller is a convert. He is. He was also a Protestant pastor. That's right. We did talk about it, but I forgot for a second there. But what I was going to say is it's interesting because I think for a long time, Catholics have benefited from our Protestant, you know,

pastors and academics, but do you find that there are Protestants today who are benefiting from what the St. Paul's center is doing? They're not necessarily on the verge of conversion. It's funny, nobody's ever asked me that before, but I mean, I marvel at how many notes or emails or Facebook messages I get from Protestants and not just the Anglicans that you might expect, but the Baptists. I ran into a number of scholars and professors this weekend, two members, two pastors and professors of the Church of Christ, which is like, you don't get much further, you know? But they're, and the thing is, we share so much more in common than where we diverge.

And the more we focus on that common ground, the more, not only can we come together, but the more they can sense that maybe there is a greater fullness of the faith there than we ever imagined. Yeah. So maybe in 20 years, Protestants years Protestants will say well, I don't know the Bible like the Catholics do but I do know basic stories I don't know. Yeah, hopefully they'll notice Kimberly and I co-founded the st. Paul Center She said in 40 years what I want to see that whenever people move into a new town and they ask their neighbors Where can I go to find the best Bible study? The reply will be, oh, you've got to go to the Catholic parish for that. Oh, what a beautiful, yeah, goal.

That's wonderful. All right, Dr. Hahn, thank you very much for being on the show. Thanks, Neil. Professor Fradd, thank you so much. Cheers.