Pints With Aquinas - Responding to Archbishop Viganò & What's Going on in Ukraine w/ Fr Jason Charron

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Vigano's letter: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/abp-vigano-globalists-have-fomented-war-in-ukraine-to-establish-the-tyranny-of-the-new-world-order/ Donate to the UUARC: https://www.uuarc.org Eye Witness account from Ukraine: https://youtu.be/SyevWlwiV7k Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt/ 

And we're live. Welcome to Pines with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. Today I'll be interviewing Father Jason Charon about what's going on in Ukraine. We'll also be responding to Vigano's recent letter, some of the things maybe that Taylor Marshall has said. So if this is an interest to you, if you think this is important, hint it is, share it on social media, give us a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe. Before we get into the chat though, I want to mention Halo, which is a fantastic prayer and meditation app that you should consider downloading a week or so, two weeks into Lent? Two weeks into Lent? If you've screwed up royally the first two weeks of Lent, it's not too late to get back on track. Go to halo, h-.com.au and download the number one Catholic app that's

out there today. It'll help you pray and meditate. It has daily meditations throughout Lent. I've been using it. I've been using my smartphone since I was in Poland. I swapped from my dumb phone to a smartphone. I plan on swapping it back very shortly, but I've been using hallo.com.au. It's really terrific. hallo.com.au. Check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd link is in the description below. Father Jason, good day. Good day, mate. Nice to have you here. Thanks, man. How are you doing after being in Ukraine and Poland? Yeah, I'm doing well. There's a lot of hate over in that part of the world right now, as well know, but at the same time, there's a lot of love going around people wanting to help people who yesterday may not have been able to locate Ukraine on a map and now they all know where it is.

And they're constantly asking, how can I help? How can I help? So as deep as the pit of misery is among the Ukrainian people at this time in their history, on the other hand is as high as the mountain of love and concern throughout the world for them. So it's a bittersweet moment in world history. That's been my experience as well. I mean, we did like three videos on this YouTube channel

and just so everyone knows, we raised over 500,000 right now for the work you and others are doing for Ukrainian refugees and things. So that's it's just been beautiful to see that outpouring of love. And then I was in Michigan and I got a woman come up to me and said, I'll take these orphans in if you need a place. Everyone is saying that it's been really beautiful to see. Yeah, just just we've had I've been overwhelmed.

My secretary has been overwhelmed with people wanting to know about the orphans. So my person, Alan, had a little. So my parishioner, Alan had, uh, um, a little girl that they were looking at, uh, potentially adopting and, uh, she came over for Christmas and, um, you know, he made a promise that if anything bad ever happened to her, he'd rescue her and fast forward two months, Russia invades Ukraine and he and I are on an airplane with the

next day, uh, to, uh, to rescue her and the other 21 orphans in the orphanage outside of Kiev. Uh, a bomb was dropped four kilometers from their, you know, from their orphanage. It was kind of a harrowing experience, but we met up with them at a pre-determined location and we got them to safety out of the country and they're in safety now in Lithuania. They're not here in the States, but we got them to safety and that was our main objective. In one sense, you can overcome the Red Army,

but you can't always overcome government red tape. And so the main thing is that they're safe and whether or not they'll ever come here is far beyond anything I could answer, but glory to God that those kids are safe and they're with their guardian and his family in Lithuania. So people have been praying and asking about this, and I thought I'd just kind of put that out there.

Yeah, thank you for giving us an update. Yeah. You know, I've been seeing over the last several days different videos from people on the, what would you say, Catholic right? Kind of calling into question the narrative that's being laid out by mainstream media. And so I'm looking forward to kind of getting your perspective on this. I think we live in a day and age where

any kind of conservative person is very skeptical and cynical of mainstream media, such that if CNN came out tomorrow and assured us the sky was blue, we'd be like, it mustn't be. It blue, we'd be like, it mustn't be. There's no way, because you've lied to us too often. And so I think people feel deeply for those in Ukraine,

but at the same time are questioning whatever, if you wanna use the word narrative, is out there. So what's going on and what did Vigano have to say? Well, first of all, I think that we as Christians must never lose our biblical, Christ-centered interpretation of world events. And it's very easy for us to fall into cynicism, skepticism, and just a worldly approach to looking at these events.

And we become little more than secularists with a religious flavoring on the side. And just because the secular media is our enemy, it doesn't mean that their enemy is ipso facto our friend. You look at ancient Israel, and Israel had Egypt and it had Assyria who were opposed to her. And simply because Egypt was opposed to Israel, it would be fallacious for Israel to think, oh, therefore Assyria loves us. Let's align with Assyria.

And so I'm not going to listen to the news anchor from Egypt who's telling us to come back and feed our sheep in Goshen's fields. So therefore, I'm going to listen to what the Chaldeans and the Assyrians tell us about what to do with our children. Israel has to keep her eyes on the Lord her God and place no trust in the princes of men, as we read in Psalm 146. That same temptation of ancient Israel of old to long for the bread of Egypt or to long for the courts of Babylon is still the temptation here with the new Israel. And it doesn't matter if it's an archbishop like Vigano or people we trust who've been

there in the past two years with the COVID crisis like with Taylor Marshall or others, we cannot put our trust in the princes of men. We put our trust in the Lord Himself. And the only kingship that He offers us is that kingship from the cross, Him crucified. And so we have to really be on our guard to avoid that temptation that Satan placed before our Lord in Luke chapter 4 when he came out of the desert fasting you know that those three temptations correspond to the three levels of the soul and the basic one is is you know the repetitive aspect of the soul food sex the second one is refers to the will and that that is to have an earthly kingdom to have will over others.

That's what power is, triumph of the will. Think of the Nazi propaganda film. That's the the the thimikon aspect of the soul. And the final aspect of that temptation is is vainglory and pride, is to confront God directly. And so this same dynamic hasn't changed. Technology's changed in the past thousands of years that we've been on the face of the earth, but man's heart has not changed. We conservatives, I'm politically conservative, we conservatives are not exempt from the attack

of the demons. It's not as though the demons are saying, oh, you know what? They're conservatives. We're not going to lambast them. We're not going to lure them into the lugubrious lake of sloth and sin. Let's leave them alone. Oh no, no, no. They're coming after you and me. Those of us who support life, who support family, who have been clinging to our prayer ropes these past two years as worldwide powers have been trying to undermine legitimate authority, the rights of the family, the rights of God, they're

coming for us. And they will use all kinds of manipulations like the demons do. And so we have to interpret these things as Evagrius, and Pontus did in the Greek fathers, that we interpret these things typologically and symbolically. And the demons, like the press, maybe it's why I'm repeating myself, but the demons do this, is that the demons know that they cannot take from us the thirst for truth. So they have three tactics. They will distort it, they will deprive it in some aspect,

like you know, have 50% truth instead of 100% truth, or they'll misdirect it, you know. And that's what we're seeing now. And we cannot allow ourselves to fall into that. You know, these events that are unfolding cannot be interpreted through the lens of the culture war and left-right dynamic here in America. It doesn't work that way. That's like, you know, you grew up in, you know, Cork, Ireland, let's say, and you have, you know, competing mafia bosses there.

And then you go to London and you try to interpret the things that are happening in London according to, you know, which mob boss back in Cork, Ireland is pulling the strings. Well, I'm sure some of them have tentacles in London, but there's a whole other dynamic there. And that's what's happened in Ukraine. I live there. This has been my daily bread

for the past almost 25 years now, 24 years. And the West cannot interpret these things according to its categories. This is a millennium long conflict between Russia and Ukraine back and forth. They've been friends, they've been enemies. They share a lot, but they don't overlap completely. And even importing our terminology

of like liberal conservative, it doesn't apply in Ukraine. If you have positions in Ukraine that are so-called conservative, people think you're taking a Soviet position, which is a Marxist-Leninist position. For them, that's a conservative position. If you start reading to them, you know, Rerum Novarum, or if you start reading to them Leborum Exaritsyn's, John Paul II's encyclical on the dignity of work, well, that's kind of a liberal thing. You know, it's completely reversed for us.

So it's futile. It's absolutely futile for us to interpret those events through the lens of the World Economic Forum or the New World Order and all of these things. Don't get me wrong. I'm not naive and the Ukrainians are not naive that the EU seeks to suck everything out of them that's religious and Christ-centered and to replace it with everything that's abhorrent. They know that. George Soros has been on the ground there since before the Soviet Union collapsed. He came in 1990. And his open society, Renaissance Foundation, has different names for it.

It's been funding all kinds of things in Ukraine. So they're aware of that. But their fight right now is an existential fight. And they're not fighting for George Soros or the New World Order or the economic forum. They're fighting for freedom because they know what it's like to live under the Russian boot and people need to see the experience of what it's like living under the Russian boot. You talk about the 8 million Ukrainians who were starved in a year and a half between

1932 and 1933. It's not just the Ukrainians who suffered this and that whole pale of settlement that's from Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics and Ukraine. More people died there in the Second World War than anywhere else combined. It wasn't on the Western front, it was in the bloodlands as Timothy Snyder, the historian from Yale speaks of it. And so what's Vigano doing in this letter that's as long as the Lord of the Rings manuscript? Holy crow, yes.

Well, here's before I answer that, you know, there are a lot of fallacies here and simple factual errors. I don't, I'm not entirely convinced that Archbishop Vigano wrote this. The problem is that we have to look at, before I discuss that about Vigano, we have to realize that Eurasia is the chess piece, the chessboard of the world. And that's where empires go to die. If you control Eurasia, you control access into Asia, you control access into Europe, and you control access through the Black Sea

down into the Middle East. If you don't control Eurasia, you cannot be an empire. And it's for that reason that Napoleon, where did he go? Mm-hmm, into Russia. Into Russia and met his fate ultimately. Where did Hitler go? Mm-hmm. He went over just a little north of Iran.

He went into the Caucasus, right to the border of Georgia. He had to go into Eurasia, he knew it. You have to control Eurasia. And so this is the history of Russia. Russia and the Turkic Mongols, they had to control that for their empire. And if Russia doesn't control that, it cannot be an empire. Russia is either an empire or it's a client state. That is, Moscow owes its greatness to the Khans, because it was the Khans that divided all these cities in Russia and Ukraine. And the one city that was able to unite the clans, as Michael Matt speaks about, you know, uniting the clans before uniting the clans was famous was Moscow. They consolidated all these powers, they repudiated all this

pomynike, the tribute they had to pay to the khans, and it was through that that they were able to consolidate a power and control Eurasia. If they didn't do that, they would still be under the boot of the Mongol Tartars. So the problem with Archbishop Vigano's letter is that, first of all, Jesus' name is only mentioned once. If you're a man of the Church, then interpret these events Christologically. There's no excuse for that. And he interprets this in a worldly way. And that's why I'm not convinced that he wrote this I've written to him before and I think he's a godly man I know people who knew him and what he did in the Vatican was was absolutely beautiful he spoke up about the financial mismanagement and he was eliminated by promotion and that's why he went to Washington DC so he's a man

of integrity and and I wasn't surprised when he spoke up regarding the McCarrick scandal. And shame on the bishops for hiding McCarrick and continuing to hide him and his disciples under their cassocks. Shame on them. They need to be purged from the face of the earth. And it was Vigano who had the integrity and the courage to speak up. So I respect him. But that same integrity does not translate to infallible interpretation of geopolitical events. My wife was born there, two of my seven kids were born there, I lived there, I know the language, I understand Russian as well, and I can read primary sources. I know what's going on better than Archbishop Vigano, wherever

he is in hiding. If he's offended by this, then let him come out. Let him go to Ukraine. Let him go to Poland. Let him see these people. Let them speak to them firsthand. I'll send them a translator. Same with Taylor Marshall. Same with Michael Matt. Same with any of them. Go and you hold those refugees. You hold the orphans. I did it last week two weeks ago. It's heartbreaking. So some of the problems here, can you give us a bird's-eye view of this document for those who have heard about it? Maybe they watched Taylor Marshall's video, but they have they don't actually fully understand it. How would you sum it up before maybe getting into it? Yeah, so

this is what we call, again, I'm not disparaging his person, but this rambling 10,000 word essay needed an editor. And there are all kinds of logical fallacies in here. So if you have students here watching who are studying logic, they have to read this because this is full of shotgun argumentation. You know, shotgun argumentation, you put a whole bunch of stuff out there and more than you can possibly respond to. Yeah, you just, it's, and you try to overwhelm your opponents. Yes, yes. You know, it's like death by 10,000 popcorn kernels there to thrown at you.

You have, you know, kettle logic using multiple inconsistent arguments. The fallacy of the single cause that all this is because of the world economic form or the new world order It's not true. You know, this is this is this pre predates the world economic form It predates the new world order and I believe there are actors on our world stage who want those things That's not a conspiracy theory. You just go on the UN website in the 2030 project. Of course, they don't hide it Klaus Schwab doesn't hide it. But it's the fallacy of the single cause that he subscribes to in this letter that's problematic. And again, this is also the Texas sharpshooter fallacy,

improperly assuming the cause to explain a cluster of other data. The argument of verboseum, all of this stuff. And then cherry pickingpicking certain arguments and then the association fallacy guilt by association so let's look at this just kind of paragraph by paragraph and you know that the media narrative now he starts off here by saying if we look at what's happening in Ukraine without being misled by the gross falsifications of the mainstream media well which, which falsifications? Yeah. Give me a specific example.

And I don't doubt that the media is utilizing this barbaric tragedy, this war crime, this sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance on the part of Vladimir Putin, you know, creating orphans, creating widows. I don't doubt that the Western media is utilizing that for its secular one world agenda. I don't doubt that. But at the same time, this is simply disingenuous of whoever wrote this, because it leaves off the table all the gross falsifications of the Russian media narrative. Okay, so he's taking a stick to one side of it, and it's an argument that completely omits and ignores the very real falsifications that's happening on the Russian side.

And there's this begging of the question, uh, assuming the truth of the conclusion that the global elite are trying to carry out a plan to, to, uh, uh, whatever that plan is, you know, to, to level the ground in Eastern Europe so that they can come in and pick up the leftovers. Well, that's begging the question. I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe it's, maybe it's China. And in this whole document, the big winner in this immediately is China China

So well because China has already extended its credit system to Russia China is already offering to sell its military hardware to Russia, you know So so the one world government these the World Economic Forum folks, you know, they've cut themselves off from that market Which isn't a huge market, you know, their gross GDP is like 1.3 trillion in Russia. You know, it's a little more than Pennsylvania's, you know, but MasterCard, Visa, they've all pulled out. Well, who's moved in? China. Okay, so China is benefiting. It's not the Klaus Schwab's of the world here.

And he leaves that out of the calculus here. So if you're going to make these arguments arguments you cannot assume in your conclusion what you're positing at the beginning. Later on here, second paragraph under this media narrative, he speaks about it should not surprise us that pluralism and freedom of speech so praise in countries that claim to be democratic are daily disavowed by censorship And intolerance towards opinions not aligned with the official narrative and that's true You know you see this you you you speak out against the draconian things that happened

Under covid to people who just wanted their kids to live normal lives They don't have to breathe through a face diaper for eight hours a day at school You know the archbishop is, or whoever wrote this is right. But, you know, what about the censorship and intolerance of opinions in Russia? You know, does the Archbishop or his ghostwriter know that just speaking out against the war, which is, I think, a Christian thing, no one wants a war, but speaking out against it in Russia now, as of today, gets you 15 years in prison. Hmm. You know? I didn't know that. That's wild. Yeah, it's absolutely absurd. So, hey, where's his cry against censorship? You know?

So, this is inconsistent. If the world media have so far been able to lie shamelessly on a matter of strict scientific relevance, COVID, we should ask ourselves why in the present situation they should suddenly rediscover that intellectual honesty and respect for the code of ethics widely denied with COVID. So all of a sudden, they're discovering respectable reporting and respectable journalism.

Well this is what we call the prosecutor's fallacy is a low probability of false matches does not mean a low probability of some false matches. So yeah, they've missed the mark on this, but it doesn't mean that they're completely always going to miss the mark. And on this I can say that yeah, they're reporting always going to miss the mark. And on this, I can say that, yeah, they're reporting the facts. So, you hear some people saying that what's happening over there, these scenes of the maternity ward being bombed

or the residential areas being bombed with cluster bombs and all that, that's just, that's the Ukrainians doing it, but it is our media that's distorting it and saying that the Russians did it. Well, no, the media has it right on this issue. Why is it that all the foot traffic is away from Russia? You know, if it's that the Ukrainians doing it, then they're not going to...

The refugees from eastern Ukraine are not going to flood in to central and western Ukraine and then to Poland. They're going to flood into Russia. But out of the 2.5 million refugees, only 100,000 have gone into Russia. You know, the supposed protector of the Russian speaking minority. It just doesn't make sense. That's the same number of people who've gone into Moldova, you know. So the other 2.4 million have fled from Russia.

And then you finally the whole article here is unfortunately just riddled with the fallacy of guilt by association. You know I read this and I thought is this the same guy who wrote and courageously stood up against McCarrick's misdeeds, his sins, his perversity? I can't believe it. So the logical rigor just isn't here. And I think someone, maybe metropolitan Hilarion Al-Fayev is probably his source on this, who copy and pasted this talking points from the FSB, successor of the KGB, and gave it to the good metropolitan, good archbishop, who just thought he was doing a good deed to get it out to the world. But, you know, all of the stuff he speaks here about the association of Europe, of the Ukraine story, with the tentacles of the UN and NATO and the World

Economic Forum and the EU and the George Soros Open Society and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all of that's true. All their tentacles are there, but their tentacles are also in the Vatican. Their tentacles are here in the United States, but they're not almighty. God alone is almighty and these guys can be defeated. But just, you know, this is the fallacy of guilt by association. Social security is a state funded pension. The Nazis supported social security. Therefore social security is bad.

Well, well, no, Hitler like dogs. Yeah, exactly. It like dogs. Yeah, exactly. Hitler was evil. Yeah. So Ukraine has an association with these nefarious actors. They're in Ukraine. These nefarious actors are planning to do bad. Therefore Ukraine is planning to do bad.

It's fallacious reasoning. It's not true. It's fallacious reasoning. It's not true. It's not consistent. And then he uses these scare quotes throughout the text. The warmonger Putin, or he talks about poor Zelensky, or Zelensky is the defender of the people. This just isn't calm, collected argumentation. Yeah. Mocking something is not an argument. No. No. So there's a lot of this, but the big one is this appeal to NATO, you know, that NATO is the boogeyman here.

Now, I agree with one of his premises here, that, you know, NATO did agree in 91, and it's just demonstrated that they wouldn't expand eastward. And Putin kind of tolerated this expansion into the Baltics and into Poland, but going beyond that is a provocation. And I think that there's something to be said about that. You know, you don't get a kid into a marching band and then march them through the woods right near the the the the bear's den and then knowing that it's gonna wake up the the

slumbering bear and he's gonna attack and then when he attacks you know you the West, NATO, the US run for cover and leave him there by himself when all along you knew that there was a probability he was gonna strike and and that's what the the West and the NATO have done with Ukraine is they've promised them all of these great things They promised them if you took if you get rid of your nuclear weapons like they did in the bed Budapest Budapest Memorandum in 1994 if you denuclearized Ukraine had more nuclear warheads than China France and Britain combined and Having come out of the horror of Chernobyl. They didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear fallout so out of the horror of Chernobyl, they didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear fallout. So out of pure altruism,

out of pure altruism, Ukraine divested itself of its warheads, of a lot of its military hardware, and the agreement, although not legally binding as we now learn, the agreement from the signers, the signatories on that, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the United States, was that in exchange these three countries would guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity. So Ukraine negotiates this in good faith.

They march Ukraine in front of Russia with this. And if I were Russia, I wouldn't be very happy about that. I get that. I wouldn't be very happy if China set up a military alliance with Canada right now. And then the West runs away. They may be right because Ukraine is a sovereign nation nation sovereign nations have a right to elect their destiny and their alliances freely. But it was not prudent, you know, but nevertheless, if they choose to do that, I'm sorry Russia, but this is the world we live in in which growing boys pull their pants up and make decisions

on their own and Ukraine is a sovereign nation and if it chooses to make an alliance with the West, well that's just the world we live in. You lost the Cold War. You never had to do war reparations like Germany had to do after the Second World War. And you know what Russia? The fallout, the human fallout, the carnage from your godless communism and your ethnocentrism was far worse than what Hitler did in his seven-year war. Far worse. Just the Ukrainian nation alone lost over 10 million people.

I'm not talking about all the other countries and what they did to their own people through a false political messianism you know of of Ruski Mir they never had to pay for that so if the if what they have to do is just kind of shut up and allow free nations to make free choices about their alliances hey that's not heck of a that's not a bad price to pay. Yeah. I give credit to Germany. You know, to this day, they have, they put their big boy pants on. They're still paying war reparations. You know, I know when I came out of Ukraine, I got a call to rescue 125 orphans from a

certain city in Ukraine. And many of them Jewish. And I wasn't able to do it. I had to for a number of reasons. But I found out these kids, their situation was, you know, the documentation wasn't perfect, it's wartime, but the one country that stood up to help those 125 orphans was Germany. You know, kudos to Germany. Wasn't the United States, wasn't anyone else because we have red tape. We got to observe that. War or no war, too bad. We have our red tape. We got to follow. Germany came through. So they've been responsible in recognizing the evil that fell upon the earth because of their misdeeds in the 1940s.

Russia still hasn't done that. And my thing is that if they have to put up with this imprudent incursion of a free nation choosing alliance with NATO, then that's a fair reparation that Russia should have to put up with. Here in the argument here, Archbishop Vigano says that practically speaking, the Russian Federation is under military threat from weapons and missile bases, just a few kilometers from its borders. Well, why is it that countries around Russia aren't comfortable with Russia? Is that NATO's fault?

You know, is it NATO's fault that Russia has been deploying cyber attacks on these people, has been inciting division in these nations, in Georgia, in Moldova, playing Armenia off against Azerbaijan, having an enclave in the Baltics in Kaliningrad? You know, is that anyone else's fault? No, that's Russia. Russia's done that. And it uses divide and conquer. So in all of these neighboring states, you know, it divides these people.

And so it did that in Ukraine with Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea. It did that in Georgia with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It did it in Moldova with Transnistria, Pranistrovia. It did it in the Baltova with Transnistria, Pranistrovia. It did it in the Baltics with Kaliningrad. All of these are artificial constructs that are used as a point that they can manipulate those countries and weaken them. So the other thing is that Archbishop says that while Russia has no military base in similar proximity to the United States, and that's patently false.

In June of 2021, the Minister of Defense for Russia expressed his open support for the use of military force in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela. They're virtual Russian client states. So this isn't true. It's patently, it's materially false. Russia has used these countries going back decades, especially in the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, as points of threat to the United States. So the fact that Cuba has been there all this time, what is it? 90 kilometers from the American border.

It's not such a thing, such a bad thing that maybe we give Russia finally a little bit of its own medicine and have, have free nations choosing their own free destiny. All of this isn't to absolve the United States. The United States has been leading countries on for far too long, promising them freedom, democracy, and then when the bear bites, the US is nowhere to be found and doesn't bother to pick up and bury the corpses. This happened in Hungary in 1956.

You know, they're hoping and they led people on that if you just fight long enough, you know, you're going to be like us and you'll be free. They offered no help. In 1945, you know, with Poland, Roosevelt handed Poland over to Stalin. You know, people begging not to be handed over to Stalin, you know, people begging not to be handed over to the Red Guards. And American troops would take these people because they were of Ukrainian background and, and, and, and Stalin wanted all of these ethnic groups. He wanted to arrest them. These people would beg the American guards, don't take us over that hill. And they said, there's orders, you know, they took them over the hill, gunshots.

They just killed them right away. Poland was betrayed. And the same with Czech Republic in the uprising of 68. They just let it unfold. And here it is again with Ukraine now. They promised the West has promised all these things. And when the moment of need comes, we won't even send them Kevlar vests. It's so hard to.

Helmets. You have to go through all the red tape first, boys. Sorry. But God bless America. We've got MIG fighters sitting there. We won't even give them the old MIG fighters in Poland that Poland wants to do. This is just equal force to defend the innocent. Ukraine doesn't want any of this stuff to go in and bomb

the people of Russia. They just want to defend their own land. And our actions do not match the loftiness of our words. What else has he said that you want to respond to? Wow. You know, what does he get right? Does he get anything right? Let me go through here first what he gets wrong on this thing about the economic blockade of Russia.

Okay. And same with, I think, Michael Matt is, you know, they've turned off the faucet, so to speak, on Russia, which isn't entirely true. They've cut off some banks from SWIFT, but the US is lagging behind on this. They're not being serious. Russia still has access to financial markets, so it's not as though they've been cut off. That's not true.

But even if the US and the West were to entirely be serious about cutting Russia off from all the financial markets, all swift transfers, which they're not, it's partial, but if they were, then it's still consistent with Catholic social teaching on just war. You have to exhaust all non-military means before you resort to force, lethal force. And last time I checked, diplomatic channels and economic sanctions are on the table. So these people who are offended by the US and the West cutting off some swift access and pulling McDonald's out of Moscow, well you know what, I'm offended by kids being murdered and having a maternity ward being bombed. And then when I speak about it, people say that's just Western propaganda. Hmm, funny thing about that, because when I was at the train station in Krakow and the train station in Warsaw, these women crying unconsolably, you know, they were from Kharkiv.

You know, the neighboring buildings were bombed. I only got to speak to those who lived, obviously. So how about speaking about that instead of crying about the economic injustices against Russia? We're not even responding like by like here. You know, we're responding unlike to like. They're using bombs. They're using cluster bombs.

They're using bombs. They're using cluster bombs. They're using bombs that are illegal, missiles that are illegal, phosphorus. We're just responding economically. So the fact that they speak about that puzzles me. What he does get correct here, oh, one more thing about China, in the letter here Archbishop Vigano speaks about an indirect threat to China's expansionist ambitions in Taiwan. Well again, he's all over the place. Just stick to the topic, but when he does bring up the topic of China, it's really two sentences,

and it's to dovetail with his point that he wants to make about palladium and neon resources in Ukraine and how these are gonna be used by the Western powers to develop their microchips. Well, he uses nothing about the most obvious argument here is that China's watching this because if the West allows the bear to Dominate its its inferior militarily inferior neighbor with no consequence Then you can bet China's going to be doing the same thing with Taiwan. He doesn't even mention that hmm

He mentions palladium, but he doesn't mention prayer that this is this is but he doesn't mention prayer. This is, this is, and the thing behind this is really religious freedom is under threat here in Ukraine. This is a war as much about religious freedom. How so? Because in Russia, there is no religious freedom for non-registered organizations. My church, the Ukrainian Catholic Church,

the largest Catholic Church in the world after the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the largest Catholic church in the world after the Roman Catholic Church, is a banned religion in Russia. We're not allowed to exist. We're banned from existing. A shaman, a shaman from Siberia who follows Siberian tribal traditions, some of them mixed with Buddhism, has more legal recognition in the Russian Federation than I do. I'm a non-entity. And in fact, if I were to try and open a church, I'd be expelled, but not the shaman. So this is...

That's interesting because that seems to be what people are saying. There's this sort of appeal of Russia as this Orthodox Christian state who opposes the LGBTQ craziness of the West, which I think is partly why you're seeing people on the right wanting to align with them in some capacity. Yes, this is taken out of the Stalinist playbook. You know, Russia projects one thing and does another and this is taken out of the Stalinist playbook. Russia projects one thing and does another. And this is part of the Russian history.

You look at the Potompskian villages. Catherine the Great wanted to go down and see what the Black Sea was like. So her minister of the interior, Potomkin, as the train went through Ukraine, he had these cutouts of- That's right, same in Cuba. Yeah, that's taking place there now I was told that if I was to go into Cuba to evangelize which I was considering and working on I'm from Australia

And they said that they'd show me the nice parts, but I wouldn't actually see the real Cuba right right And so this is the thing with Russia is that from the time of Catherine the great is there's the Russia of appearances of Making the sign of the cross you know with Putin on Easter morning, Pascha kisses the Icona, the Svichka, the candles and then this is a projection but then there's the the animus side of Russia you know which has a connection to it's a morph type of religion that holds to kind of these old, mythical, earth-centered, tribal superstitions, and it mixes it with, with sociology, the study of Christ as the divine wisdom of God incarnate. And so these fringe Orthodox beliefs of of this world

spirit and logos merging as a fourth person as the divine wisdom you know interesting and it's esoteric so this is in the background but I'm getting off topic here is that the main thing though is that this is very real the churches are flourishing in Taiwan, they're not flourishing in China. Churches are flourishing in Ukraine, Catholic churches, they're not flourishing in Russia. They're restricted. If a priest tries to set up a kindergarten, a Roman Catholic priest tries to set up a kindergarten or a playground on the front lawn of his church, he'll be expelled from Russia. They're not allowed to build churches

with big edifices. What's the state of Roman Catholicism in Russia? They are not allowed to, it's akin to Omar Khalifa's stipulations on Christians in the Middle East from the seventh century is that they're guaranteed a minimal existence, okay? They can have their buildings and they can swing incense around inside those buildings, but they cannot go out

into the street and evangelize. Like having what you and I do here in Russia on the street, you'd be banned, you'd be fined, possibly imprisoned. You can minister within the walls of your church and that's religion for them. Now the Orthodox on the other hand are granted its official status, you know, so that's a big difference. You cannot, and if a Catholic, a Roman Catholic, because we don't exist in Russia, you know, officially, if a Roman Catholic tries to do this, he's attacked and said to be violating the 1997 law,

and he's called, this is the sin, the great sin of proselytism. So it's very restricted, and they're permitted a base bare-bones existence. But that's not our gospel. Our gospel is as much the faith of the mind and heart as it is the faith of the hands. So I was disappointed that the archbishop or whoever wrote this doesn't talk about, you know, the religious freedom issue of Catholics in Russia. What he does get right is the, to get to your question about what he does get right, is Biden's interests here. You know, Biden and Hunter Biden, you know, they are financially invested in Ukraine not being under Mr. Putin's control. Okay. And he's absolutely right about that.

I give him full credit for that. You know, I can't argue with that, you know. Yeah, nothing to argue with about that, but- Just like guilt of association is a fallacy, so would be like inerrancy by association. Like just because you're saying some true things It doesn't mean all the many things that you're alluding to are true correct in this document. Yeah Yeah, yeah

So like like not not to compare the good arts bishop to Satan But you know you look in the Garden of Eden and and you know Satan says, you know, if you eat this fruit You're not gonna die. Well, it's partly true, you know immediately they didn't die, you know, but spiritually they died You know death came into them at that point. So the big omission here though, the whopper of omission in this letter, which is 385% wrong, is that when he starts speaking about the Budapest Memorandum, you know, on February 19th, 2022, at a conference in Munich, Zalensky announced his intention to end the Budapest Memorandum, you know, on February 19th, 2022, at a conference in Munich, Zalensky announced his intention to end the Budapest Memorandum. Well, the Archbishop doesn't mention in here that eight years ago, Russia violated the

Budapest Memorandum by invading Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea and killed people. And he doesn't even mention it. Doesn't even say sorry for it. It's like it doesn't exist. It's kind of like a Soviet era Stalinist Photoshop, where you all of a sudden one day, Grigori is in the picture, next day there is no Grigori in the picture.

He's gone missing. Where did he go? We don't know. You know, this is the thing. That whole reality of Russia violating its own agreement is not even mentioned in the letter here. That is very dishonest or very ignorant. And so they, I think, you know, if Zelensky decides to move out of this

Budapest memorandum, well, hey, all the other signatories have moved out of it. The UK and the United States are not honoring their obligation. Russia's not honoring its obligation. So Ukraine is left as the only one honoring the memorandum. Why am I in a party in a tent by myself? You know, just close up a tent and walk away. And so that's a whopper of an omission. And then he paints Russia as threatened when it's Russia that has all the cards and is

kicking Ukraine in the gut. It's not Ukraine that's invaded Russia. It's not Ukraine that has shelled its hospitals and residential areas. There hasn't been one missile go into Russian territory. This is entirely defensive on Ukraine's part. Last time I checked, there's nothing wrong with defending the innocent. And Russia's actions here are entirely offensive. They're coming into Ukrainian territory.

My brother-in-law is stuck there. My brother-in-law, my in-laws, my mother-in-law, she's with us, my nephew, my niece, my sister-in-law, they're refugees. And last time I checked, there are no Russian refugees. There is no incursion of Ukraine into Russia. So if Ukraine expresses desire to have defensive weapons, that's not... to have defensive weapons, that's not, that's just absurd on the part of the Archbishop here to say that this is a threat to Russia. You know, you come into my house, you start kicking my daughter in the teeth, and you pick up my two-year-old

son, you fling him around, and I hold your arm back. And also someone comes and says everyone has to be peaceful here. Well, no, I can use just force to push back the unjust aggressor. You'd be wrong not to. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The final thing, and a lot of people get this wrong, this is really the crux of the matter here, is all of the set, the coup of 2014, they speak about this. And when they speak about this, in this they expose their ignorance. In this they expose their ignorance. I don't know if you have a picture of President Victor Yushchenko.

You gotta pull that up, Neil, and throw it on. Good luck, spell on it. Is that what you sent to us, that? Yeah, the face? Yeah, those images there. All right, so for those who are unaware, and I I'm one of them talk about this coup and give us some background okay so Russia has long sought dominance over Ukraine and and not just Russia the Ottomans the Poles mm-hmm post Lithuania the Germans here

it's the most fertile place in Europe, maybe the world. Yes. Black soil. When the Germans came in in the 40s, they took trains and the empty trains they brought into Ukraine and they filled up these train carts with soil from central Ukraine to take back to Germany. So this is the bread basket. Let us know when it's up. This is the picture. This is the bread basket. When you talk about it, he'll throw it up.

Okay. And so, lost my train of thought there for a second. The coup. Oh yeah, so this is the bread basket. From 1901 to 1944, you know, the western part of Ukraine, if you're a guy named Boris living in a village, and you have the same church, same neighbors, you're a guy named Boris living in a village and you have the same church, same neighbors, you've never left your village in those 43 years, you had nine

different passports. You know, nine different passports, sorry, eight different passports of all these different countries that took over your village. So this is one of the most contested areas in the world in the past century. And so when you have the Russians who exile millions of people to Siberia simply for wanting to go to a Catholic Church, simply for wanting to speak freely, simply for wanting to have public gatherings, simply for wanting to have a free press, and you're tortured, you're raped, you're sent to Siberia, or in the better case you're just killed and you're eliminated from having to live that misery. You don't want to have your children under their thumb. And so in 2004, really there was this first politician in Ukraine, who his name was Viktor Yushchenko, and he decided that this was time for us to come to terms with our history.

The whole world knew about the Holocaust. Even Ukrainians. 70 years after the Holodomor, in which almost 10 million perished by starvation in 18 months, they even didn't know about their history. It was so suppressed. And so he comes to power. One of his things is I want us to mourn these 10 million, almost 10 million people. I want us to have free association, to be able to speak freely. And he was campaigning against a puppet candidate from Moscow,

called Yanukovych. And funny thing is, is that just before the election, something happened to him. Maybe your viewers can take a look. Yeah, you can see it. Now that's dioxin poisoning and that's only made in certain types of laboratories. And this is horrible. If you can look at what that is the same man. Do you have the sidebar shot there? You may have difficulty believing that's the same man just a few months apart but that's the same guy. That was, that picture was taken in late 2004, early 2005. Wow.

He dared to stand up against Russian hegemony over his people. Wow. Yeah. And that's what a little bit of dioxin in his tea by a Russian agent did to that man. So when that happened in 2004-2005, the election was declared invalid because it was so obvious of all the corruption that Yanukovych was not really the winner. They redid the election. He won.

was not really the winner. They redid the election. He won. His family was threatened and he wrote out the rest of his presidency until 2010 in an anticlimactic manner, maybe. Not a whole lot was accomplished. And you can see, we can understand why. I can't imagine all the threats that he had to endure. He had young children.

I think his youngest daughter was about four or five years old when that happened. And so this really woke the world up to the threat that this nation was facing. And so fast forward to 2010, his opponent gets in and he immediately begins this process of Russification. He makes some promises as well to align, He's trying to benefit both East and West. So he wants to have economic alignment with Europe and he promises to sign this economic agreement with

Europe and he also promises to sign an economic cooperation agreement with Russia and Belarus. And then in 2013, under pressure from Moscow, he says, no way. We're moving away from these European agreements. We're going to align ourselves with Moscow. Well, he broke his promise. People come out. My students that I taught back when I lived there in 2000, they went out. The teachers from the colleges, people of all strata of society

went out. And this went on for months, peaceful protests, and then they became very vocal and they became not so peaceful. They didn't have guns, but they had sticks, they began to throw rocks at the police, there were tents out there, priests, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestants, Jews, they were all praying together, Muslims, the Crimean Tartars were there. So this was a pan-Ukrainian thing and people who say that this is a Nazi operation as the Archbishop says here is absolutely out of their mind. There was a CIA operation. Now the CIA and then other NGOs were trying to ride the wave of it to their benefit.

That's for sure. Like we have Victoria Nuland and they're saying we're gonna choose winners of this once it's all done and over with. But this was an organic movement in 2014 of people standing up against a would-be tyrant because they saw a tyrant in Lukashenko in Belarus, a tyrant in Russia, and they were not about to go back after 75 years of being under the communist heel of tyranny. They were not about to go quietly into that dark night. So they stood up and they came out in the tens of thousands, in the hundreds of thousands. At the peak, there were 800,000 people in the Maidan.

These were old ladies, these were young men, these were, it was a prayerful experience. You watch that stuff on there. It is, that is one of the great movements in human civilization where people freely came out, not through, you know, constructed astroturf political management. in human civilization where people freely came out, not through, you know, constructed astroturf political management. No, this was grassroots from the heart, people praying

with their whole heart and singing. Yannikovitch had his thugs fire live rounds on these people. He had his agents in there causing violence and the people who were supporting this revolution of dignity as it was called arrested them and they found out that they were being paid by this thug of a president Yanukovych $25 a day to cause trouble. So they tried to isolate these guys, you know, false flag operations. Yanukovych fires on these people, 100 of them, the Sultan in the Besine, the heavenly 100, they die. And all pandemonium breaks loose all across the country. People, they demand his resignation. He resigns and he flees to Poland, to Russia.

And he's been there ever since so so That's just the reality but people who don't know this situation can't read Ukrainian. Mm-hmm You can't read the the Russian aspect was vegan. I was saying about that vegan Oh is he's repeating the talking points of Russia of Russia, which is shameful You know, this is the irritating thing. You know, I say, I speak in Russian to these people. I say, Do you think they understand Ukrainian and Russian language, language, history, culture? No, never.

They don't understand the Russian and Ukrainian complexities of here, but he's using his legitimate title as an archbishop to weigh in and speak on things that he doesn't understand. And he's crossed a line and he needs to say sorry. As you say, our blessed Lord's name is mentioned once in this 10,000 word essay. Yeah. Yeah. Which leads me to think it may not have been him who wrote this. I think it was probably no his source.

I'm convinced his source is that duplicitous evil man named Metropolitan Hilarion Al-Fayev. Talk about him and what's going on with him right now. Well, you know, in Lord of the Rings, you know, in Lord of the Rings, you have who's that King of Rohan? It's escaping me. And he's under the control of this worm-tongued. Yes. And Gandalf comes and liberates him.

What's his name? Do you look that up? Yeah. Just look in the live chat. Everyone's telling you. We've got 1,500 people watching. So you could probably... This is Metropolitan Hilarion Al-Fayev.

He is a highly intelligent, sophisticated, slick operative. Theoden. Theoden. Theoden. Thanks. slick operative. Theoden. Theoden. Theoden. Thanks. And what happens here is that he's telling lies, and he's repeated these lies. He said, for example, in 1946, when our church was liquidated, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic

Church in 1946 in Lviv, and our people, my landlady's father, when I lived in Ukraine, was forced to renounce his Catholic faith and become a priest under Joseph Stalin, which was at that time just a front church for the atheistic regime. This same Metropolitan Alfeyev says, well, no such thing happened. It was just a free, organic development. These people spontaneously united themselves to the great Soviet motherland.

This sounds like a KGB brainwashed agent from 1952 in some kind of spy movie, but he said those things to George Weigel just about 10 years ago. He says, there's nothing wrong with this. This is a perfectly legitimate church council. So the things that he has said for the past 15 years, since he became the Archbishop in Vienna, that was in 2003 actually, are the same things that are in this letter,

which leads me to think that the good Archbishop Vigano must have some kind of connection with Hilarion Alfaev and he trusts him and the Metropolitan of the Russian Church exploits this and sends him talking points. So that's the very unfortunate thing about all of this. Does he criticize Putin at all? Because I want to be clear, you know, in Taylor Marshall's show where he seems to back up a lot of this, him and others, no one's praising Putin that I heard. I heard Marshall say he's a thug war criminal. It seems like they're willing to say that is maybe I'm wrong, but is vegan also criticizing

Putin or is there none of that? Nothing. So this sounds like just Russian talking points. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I'm willing to give Putin his credit. You know, it's very difficult as a Ukrainian Catholic priest. My wife, every day, she's going through hell right now, seeing what's happening to her homeland. But I'm willing to give him some points. I'm willing to say, good for Vladimir Putin for restricting homosexual propaganda to children. I'm willing to say good for Vladimir Putin for restricting homosexual propaganda to children. I'm saying good to him for trying to promote pro-natalist policies. I'm not going to

say they're pro-life, but they're pro-natalist policies to boost Russia's birth rate. And so women want to have abortions, they have to go meet with a psychologist and wait a week. They have a reflection period for a week. That's good. But we have to point out like this Russian tradition of the official Russia and the Russia behind the scenes. And he doesn't do that. He doesn't do that. Does he does he at all condemn Putin for invading a sovereign country? I think at the beginning he speaks about, you know,

the great tragedy of this. Okay, so by implication he's saying this is, yeah, this isn't, he's not endorsing what happened, but in one sense he's saying this is an inevitability. What else could he do? You know, it's a form of determinism in a way. And he cherry picks throughout all this. So he'll cherry pick the, you know, there's a minority in the Ukrainian movement which are fanatical. I admit it, but I mean, Trump had his minority who were fanatical. January 6th, most of those people on January 6th were just patriots. I know people who went there, they weren't violent, but you have just two or three who were a little too enthusiastic.

And then the media is, is slapping the whole Trump movement as a bunch of knuckle dragging goons. Well, that, that same tactic is what Vigano is doing to the Ukrainians who are trying to live in freedom so they can have free worship of churches. Why is it that our, my patriarch, uh,leszczyński, his Beatitude, Sietoslaw Siewczuk, has to go into hiding? Because the Russians get him, we're not going to see him again, you know. And so the Archbishop here doesn't speak about this. He speaks, he cherry picks, and he talks about what some extremists did in Odessa, but he doesn't speak about this. He speaks, he cherry picks, and he talks about what some extremists did in Odessa,

but he doesn't speak about what the Russians do in those areas where they capture people. And it's funny that most people don't want to live in Luhansk. The Russian speakers, they don't want to live in Donetsk. They have fled, and they fled to the Ukrainian speaking parts. So if those Ukrainians are so anti-Russian, as he alleges in this letter here, then why is it that the Russian speakers are going to the Ukrainian speaking areas? Why is it that the atrocities that he's referring to here, why is it that they happen in areas, suppose, that are controlled by Russia? I'll tell you why. suppose that are controlled by Russia. I'll tell you why. In 2014, my parishioner has, Pittsburgh is a sister city with Donetsk, two industrial cities, and we have exchanges. He was there in 2000 with some other parishioners of mine. They set up, they developed a good friendship

with a lady in Donetsk who's a Russian speaker. Well, 14 years later, you know, they've always been staying in touch. She sends him emails and we still have them of her, a Russian speaker saying, look what they're doing to our Donetsk, is they would capture it and the Russian soldiers, they would say that they're from this new republic, which is fictional, which the Archbishop says they're a sovereign nation, which isn't true. It's just like saying North Dakota is all of a sudden its own country. But these Russian soldiers and Russian operatives would put on Ukrainian uniforms and commit atrocities and they would film it. And so she's seeing this and she sends him an email, you know, of this. So these are false flag operations that are still circulating on

the internet that people in Donetsk even tell us are not Ukrainians, they're Russians, but then in the Archbishop's letter he refers to these things. He doesn't know people in Donetsk, I do, well they fled now, my parishioner knows them, they're still there. And they testify as eyewitness, first-hand eyewitness accounts that these are false flag operations. So it's just disappointing that that's put in this letter. There's, yeah, so there's a lot of this going on and it's just disappointing to see all of that. going on and it's just disappointing to see all of that.

Father, if people want to look up information about the presidential campaign with the poisoning and about the protests with the Heavenly Hundred, what are like keywords that they could search to learn more about those? Oh, the Revolution of Dignity, the Euromaidan. If they want to look at information, what happened in 2004, 2005, that set the stage for 2014, they look up Orange Revolution. And these were not CIA engineered. I'm quite confident that Western NGOs and the CIA were trying to manipulate these events to, you know, let's utilize this tide to get to where we want to go. But these were organic movements. A teacher, historian, professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University,

he was a professor to one of my parishioners when she was there. And he was shot and killed. And he wasn't going there because he was a CIA operative. He was going there because he didn't want to go back into that orbit where his own church was banned. So that's the other thing. And finally, the Archbishop here speaks about President Zelensky. This is one of the most perplexing arguments I've ever heard.

So throughout this article, he keeps making all kinds of reference to neo-fascists and how Ukraine is being led by these neo-fascist movements and Russia goes in there saying that their initial movement was to denazify Ukraine. the meaning of terms have lost their significance. Nazi, what does that mean anymore? When the head of this country is a Jew and everyone knows he's a Jew and he's not ashamed of being a Jew. So Russia, which Putin has bragged about having a formal alliance with Nazi Germany, he's not ashamed of it. He said there's nothing to apologize for. He said that in 2008 or 2009 about the Molotov-Rubintrov Pact. It was Russia that aligned with Nazi Germany and that only reason that alliance was broke wasn't because Russia broke it off. It was because the Nazis invaded. So they, the inheritors of this

political union with Nazism are now saying that they're going to denazify Ukraine, whose president is a Jew, which is perplexing. In this article, the good archbishop somehow repeats these points. And then the further intellectual dishonesty of it all is to say that it's to protect the Russian-speaking minority. Well, 60% from what I'm told of the Ukrainian army are Russian-speaking. You know, most of the refugees I spoke to in Krakow at the train station were Russian-speaking, and the president of Ukraine is Russian-speaking. So, this is absurd.

This is absurd. They're not a persecuted minority. They can speak. No one No one stops them from speaking Russian The you know the the woman I met going into Ukraine Two and a half weeks ago. You know she dropped off her baby She left Kiev because the building beside her was bombed. She goes all the way makes a treacherous Journey to Poland drops off her baby in her in the father's arms, who's a Pole, kisses him, she turns around, comes back into Ukraine. And I recorded the video. It's heartbreaking.

Our Lord speaks about the love that a mother has for her child and he uses that as an example to understand his love for us. Well, that same love that that mother had for her son, she leaves it for the love of her homeland. And she's a Russian speaker. She's not a Ukrainian speaker. So the Archbishop of Vigano and others who are using this, I tell you, the people on the ground tell you, don't believe these talking points. Russia needs a pretext to control the chessboard of Eurasia.

And they're using every trick in the book. They're using the pretext of NATO. They're using the pretext of language. And none of it's true. If there were no Russian speaking minorities there, if there was no NATO expansion, Russia would find another way to get access to a fresh, a warm water port. And that's what all this is about. What would you say to Vigano? Why don't you look in the, if you're open to this, look in that camera and tell him what you'd like him to know about this.

Archbishop Vigano, I would tell you, you wrote a letter on June 7th of 2020 in which you said that you and President Trump are on the same side of the battle. That same President Trump who spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2020, that same President Trump in January of 2020 spoke at the World Economic, who said that Klaus Schwab and him were good friends. That same President Trump, who also promoted the LGBTQ agenda. That same President Trump, who in 2019, launched a global campaign

to decriminalize homosexuality. That same President Trump, who wasn't afraid to appoint openly LGBTQ judges on the federal bench That's the same President Trump that you said that you're on the same side with That's the same Type of people that Zelensky is aligned with he allows The gay pride parades in Kiev to his shame and to the great shame I'll tell you,

of all my Ukrainian friends. They are traditional Christians. They don't support this. They're not killing these people. They're not throwing rocks at them, but it's not consistent with their beliefs. And so as Zelensky aligns himself with these interests, as he aligns himself with the World Economic Forum, just like President Trump did in January 2020. Why can you not extend the same standard to President Zelensky that you have

extended to President Trump? That's all I ask. Is the same standard be extended? Let's take a break and then we'll come back and dive deeper into this and take some questions from supporters. All right. We're back with Father Jason Charon talking about Ukraine, veganos, all that's going on here. Before we go any further, I want to say thank you to Exodus 90 for being a sponsor of this show. Exodus 90 is a wonderful

ascetical program for men who want to start taking the spiritual life seriously. You've heard about Exodus 90 probably, I've been talking about this a lot on the program. They also have Exodus lent So I mentioned this earlier in the show today if you've kind of not done a great job these past two weeks And you're afraid that maybe you've ruined your land You haven't been faithful to the resolutions you made you could check out what Exodus 90 is doing for lent And so for the rest for the remainder of lent live it in a kind of manly way That you've heard things like you got to give up hot showers You're gonna give up alcohol and things like that

This is a modified version for lent that Exodus 90 is doing so you actually get to have warm showers You get to have an occasional drink and things like that. So it's a little easier, but it's still tough So click the link in the description below to go check out Exodus 90. What is the exact URL? Do you have it? description below to go check out Exodus 90. What is the exact URL? Do you have it there? Okay. Go to Exodus nine zero.com slash Matt Exodus nine zero.com slash Matt. Again, link in the description below for you to learn more about it. Um, father Jason, I want to ask you a question. I think it's, it's obvious I think that human beings just really like simple narratives.

We like there to be a good guy. We like there to be a bad guy. You know, the French are this, the Canadians are this. Yes. Like we all have these narratives and, and these, these sort of simple narratives. Um, what do you say to those who say, okay, fine, there's propaganda coming out of Russia, but we'd be idiots to think that there's no Ukrainian, um, propaganda. So like,

how do we discern that and what's your response to people who say things like that? Yeah, I really, in the fog of war, I'm trying to, although I I'm not going to pretend I'm completely objective, like I have family there, a bomb was just the military installation, just a number of kilometers from my brother-in-law where he lives right now was just bombed 36 people died died. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I'm completely lucid and objective. And so, and I'm not gonna say that the same is true

of the Ukrainian press, which hasn't been destroyed yet, that they're looking at this clear-eyed, but how could you when your son's being, and your daughters are being killed, you know? But I think that their reporting on this is simply, is fact-based in that the number of jets that have been shot down, the number of tanks that have been shot down,

the streets that have been lost or gained, the number of casualties reported. So a lot of the Ukrainian reporting has actual numbers in it. And a lot of what comes out of Russia, if it comes out of Russia, because they didn't call it a war, is not as specific.

So I'm naturally inclined and predisposed to believe people who are giving specific numbers. That are potentially refutable, if you're giving specifics. Yes, and so if someone is speaking in generalities, I tend to be skeptical. And so I'm aware that in the fog of war, when your land is being attacked,

you're gonna wanna, you're inclined to believe everything bad about the Russians and everything good about your own people. But the tenor of the reports that I read in Ukrainian, from Russian speaking as well as Ukrainian speaking, you know, independent journalists who are walking around with their phones often, is that it's number-based. And that is corroborated by the Russian troops who are surrendering and who speak about what's

going on and their reports reflect what we're hearing in Ukrainian media. Ukrainian media are saying the Russian people don't want this. They're not going off against Russian people. And so when the Russian soldiers are captured, you can watch, I can send your viewers some of the videos, they said, we were lied to, they told us it was a training exercise. We didn't know we'd be shooting guns at women and children, shooting up buildings. We didn't know that. And so the fact that you have captured Russian soldiers

whose narrative reflects what you hear in the Ukrainian media, tends to say to me that there's truth here. Yeah. Okay, yeah. What's interesting, what's sad here though is that, you know, as that, the Russian Revolution hit Russia in 1917, at the time of Our Lady's apparition in Fatima, is that Russia was considered the most religious place on earth. And here we are a century later, and Ukraine is the most religious country in Europe, bar none.

Far more than any other country. Ukraine is a profoundly religious country. It has lots of problems, has lots of pressure from the secularists trying to de-Christianize it. But it is still a religious country and it's for that reason that this war is taking place. And it's not Australia or Peru that's attacking it, you know, Russia attacked it and with the threat of nuclear weapons. So people who want to say that this guy is the catechon of second Thessalonians. Okay, what's that? I'm sorry. So Archbishop Vigano says here in his letter

about Moscow being the third Rome. And this is the most egregious and offensive sentence in the whole letter. He says here, The Rome of the Caesars and Popes is now deserted and silent, just as for centuries the second Rome of Constantinople has been silent. He says here, chapter 2, verse 6 and 7, of eschatological obstacle to the antichrist. Well, Monsignor Vigano, if you believe that Moscow has now taken on the role of the catechon, that great obstacle to the antichrist, then you need to be in communion

with him, which puts you out of communion with everyone watching this. How is it that that can be the catechon, speaking of by Paul, if that same body killed the Tsar, whom you put in the alignment of the third realm. So if the Tsar and his family were the inheritors, let's say that we take this at face value, that the Tsar is the inheritor and is the Third Rome and that Soviet Empire murdered him and his family, how is it that you now

call the man who says that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the same man who's trying to rehabilitate Stalin in 2009 about all the great things that Stalin did, that same man you impute as being the catacomb that's contradictory. It's more twisted than a Pittsburgh pretzel. It just, you can't, how does that stand? Examination. You can't have it both ways. You know, either the Tsar was the legitimate heir of the title of Rome,

the inheritor of the Tsars, and you know, others made that. The Sultan of the czars, and others made that. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire, they still call themselves the Caesars of Rome. They always refer to themselves as Roman Caesars. The Holy Roman Emperor, who's the one that's being beatified? Nicholas? No, of Austria, Karl.

Oh yes, Karl of Austria, yeah. So there's a claim to the Roman title there. So one of them may have had that illegitimate title. I don't know. And I think that there is a role of the Roman Empire as the Kathekon. But it contradicts reason to ascribe that to Moscow and the person who's there now, who longs and says openly that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, that same empire which killed supposedly the third Rome, but now they are the third Rome, they are the Catholic one, it doesn't make sense. It's just completely irrational.

The other thing that is concerning here is the he says that NATO provokes this he provokes Russia so that Russia and Ukraine would kind of battle it out and then NATO can walk in well that just isn't true. Like Ukraine is pleading. They're pleading for, for, for weapons, basic weapons. And if, if NATO, if this is the whole goal of NATO to have a pretext to come in, well, now would be that moment. But NATO is, is sitting on the sidelines. They're not doing anything. They said a bomb dropped 10 miles from their border with Poland.

They're not coming in. They've said that we're not sending soldiers in. We're not declaring a no-fly zone. We're not sending in jets. That's going to be a provocation. Well, then that undermines Vigano's argument here that this is a provocation for NATO to get in. So that simply doesn't hold up to the facts. to the facts. I would strongly request on behalf of my friends back in Ukraine and there are priests at the front lines here, priests who are ministering to these people,

that you stop being the armchair analysts and do something. You know, in 1 Corinthians, we hear this from Paul, that knowledge puffs up, but charity edifies. And so people on the sidelines are, through their knowledge, their gnosis, you know, are analyzing the situation from all these currents and streams that are pulling into Ukraine. But what have you done to help the widow and the orphan? You know, what have you done? St. James tells us in the first chapter of St. James that you want a religion that's pleasing to God.

You got to have the right Roman missile? No. Oh, I know what religion that's pleasing to God. You got to have the right lace surplus. Yeah, the right beretta at the right angle. That's what's pleasing to God. Camel crap. You know what's pleasing to God? According to Scripture, first chapter of James, to take care of the widow and the orphan orphan so all of you experts on Ukraine To me children of Rosamie. You don't understand a thing about these long-suffering people Get off your moral high horse and your prognostications and your Gnostic religion and do something to help these people

You know who's doing something to get involved in this war? Are the Islamic militants. Whose side do you think they're taking Matt? Russia's? Yeah. So 6,000 just came in to fight for Mr. Putin. How is that? How isn't that interesting? Because in John's letter, John tells us what's the Antichrist? The Antichrist is he who denies that God has come in the flesh. That's the antichrist. And that's the fundamental core precept of Islam, that God did not come incarnate in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

That's the fundamental precept of Islam. And it's these hardcore militants of Islam whose side do they take on this? Putin's. Putin that is aligned with North Korea, with China, with Iran, whose Chechen soldiers are coming in, the militant Chechen Islamists from Dagestan to shoot up the people in Ukraine. These are the same people that some of our own conservative God-fearing Christians are aligning with. So you're in alignment with that same spirit of Antichrist. It's perplexing.

My enemy's enemy is not my friend. We are Israel, we are the people of God, and we cannot put our trust in the princes of men. There is a vein in this whole church of ours that longs for an imperial Christianity, a Christianity that's courtly and powerful, the Christianity that we once had when Christendom was tall and strong with broad shoulders.

But that Christianity is stripped away from us, and we're on the Via della Rosa like our Lord. If He was not exempt from crucifixion and humiliation and being stripped naked, then neither will the church. And when our Lord was on the way to crucifixion, He faced the temptation, oh just come down from the cross and then we'll believe you. You Christians, you conservative God-fearing Christians who love your family, who love being pro-life, you are susceptible to that same temptation as the institutional aspect

of Christianity is stripped away from us. And we live in shame like losers in our culture. This evil one is, he wants you and he's whispering into your ear, oh, but you can have an imperial Christianity of a man who's gonna give you some promises on these moral teachings. Don't fall for the promises of Babylon or the promises of Egypt. You follow the God of Israel.

And the God of Israel is only gonna be found naked with his arms stretched out, with holes in his hands, his feet in his side. Know your faith. Amen. Thank you. I'd like to take some of these questions from our supporters, if that's okay. Yep. Some of them you might feel like you've responded to it, but we'll see. Kathleen says, nobody seems like a good guy in this conflict, but nearly all of the verifiable propaganda I've seen is from Ukraine.

All of the people banging the drum for what would be World War Three are all doing it on Ukraine's behalf. I have deep sympathy for Ukrainians wanting to maintain their independence, but also don't see Russia's demands as being altogether unreasonable. I'm left thinking the only reasonable position is to most offer humanitarian aid, but to militarily stay out of it. I'd love to hear your take on such a position. Let's look at what Russia is offering and what Russia has done.

We have to look at the facts. The facts are that the religious freedom that we enjoy in our countries is not offered in Russia. There are restrictions on the church, and for example my church is not even allowed to exist. There's a track, there's a man who has There's a track, there's a man who has threatened nuclear response. This is incredibly irresponsible. We are looking at people who have lived under the Russian boot and the people most nervous are not only the Ukrainians but the Poles and everyone else in Eastern Europe. And their estimation of this needs to be taken into account.

If he is allowed to continue here, I would ask her, do you think that he will stop and be completely appeased? I don't think he will. He'll be emboldened. There's no way back for him. He cannot win Ukraine. You cannot subjugate 40 million people. People who were sympathetic to him in Ukraine two months ago are now his biggest enemies. And at this point, if he regresses, he loses everything.

And I see the only way is simply for these people to defend their families, their livelihoods. And the only other option is that they completely capitulate, in which case there'll be no mercy for them. I don't know if I answered the question very well. What do you say to those who say America should really just stay out of this? This isn't our war. There's no point sending American soldiers over to get killed, get involved in... Yeah, well first of all it's a fallacy because nobody in Ukraine is asking for American soldiers

to go over. Ukrainians can fight this on their own. They've said that. All they want is for America to fulfill its promises. And that promise came in 94, that if they tried to be a democracy, and we all tend to be living in a democracy, we enjoy having free exchanges of ideas like this, which you can't have in Iran or in Russia, then those countries like Ukraine that did that were guaranteed by our country to protect them and their territorial integrity. So the problem is this, is that if we don't honor our word, then we have lost our moral authority. And in the future, any country that wants to denuclearize and walk back from the precipice of tyranny will never trust us. So this is the problem.

If we don't act, we will never have any moral authority whatever is left for people to trust us again. And if we do act now then this is for the future and for now that we will establish our credibility that our word are yes means yes or no means no. No means no. Patron Rob asks, can Father Jason comment on the bizarreness of some of the most evil people in the world like Clinton, Obama, Soros, Rothschild, Pelosi, Kerry, repeating, stand with Ukraine? I mean, people are understandably skeptical when they see these people who are their ideological opponents saying stand with Ukraine. He says, what's the bigger picture here?

Yeah. You know, the Second World war was a highly confusing time. You had, the United States was an ally with communist Russia, with the communist Soviet Union, you know, highly confusing time. And so alliances were shifting. So one day we are the enemy of Russia, and then the next day we're supplying them with military aid, we're buying wheat from them, and then a few years later we're enemies with Russia again.

And so here what you have is Vladimir Putin, he is his own man, he doesn't march to the beat of the George Soros's of the world. And what we're seeing is a turf war between rival gangs and they're fighting over a shop. And Ukraine is in that center of the chessboard. If you want to win at chess, you have to control the center of the chessboard. You don't control the center of the chessboard, you don't win the game. And so Ukraine geopolitically is located

at the center of the chessboard. Ukraine, Poland, Belarus is all the center of the chessboard, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus is all at the center of the chessboard. It's the bloodline. And so when, um, if, if the Hillary Clinton's of the world and the George Soros's of the world can't completely dominate it because of the opposite, you know, warlord coming in, then they're going to

cheer when Ukraine is pushing back against their rival. And their rival is Russia. He does not conform to their marching orders. And they don't conform to his marching orders. And Ukraine is that little teddy bear in between that the two are fighting over. And when Ukraine pushes back against Russia, the George Soros of the world are going to scream, yay, hooray. pushes back against Russia, the George Soros of the world are going to scream, yay, hooray. And when the opposite happens, when if Ukraine, let's say this ends today and Ukraine turns against the secular godless West, then Russia is going to cheer for them. I hope that answers the question. Supporter Zach says, what a Father Jason's view on Vladimir Putin's faith and

relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. It seems as though he goes to great lengths to publicize his faith just like Biden in order to justify his mission. Yeah, I can't speak to his faith. I don't know it, but I do know that the Russian tradition is to have a strong leader who is the embodiment of church

and state. That's the way they do governance in Russia. And we Americans and Canadians, we don't understand that, because we have no official religion. Maybe secularism is now, but we have no state-sponsored religion in the United States, right? Russia does. Russia does.

So if you're going to be the head of the Russian Federation, you are de facto, not in law because they changed the law in 97, but you are de facto, not de jure, but de facto, you embody both the head of state and the head of religion. That's why Stalin, you know, appointed and created the restored the Moscow Patriarchate. And so Mr. Putin has to continue with that. That's the expectation that the head of the Russian Federation is also going to have a leadership role in the Orthodox Church.

Whether he personally believes that or not, I don't know. It's just like looking at Biden. Biden on one hand, like people say he does pray his rosary. I've heard that. Austin Lloyd says that when he was being sworn in as the defense secretary. He saw Biden praying the rosary and he does go to mass and receives communion to our shame. I wish the bishops would have some more balls on this. He kills babies. He kills babies. He cooperates in this publicly.

It's disgusting. And they allow him to receive communion. Shameful. But it's a good analogy. Just like Biden's praying the rosary and attending Holy Mass, you could take some pictures and say, look, he's a Catholic.

That doesn't prove he's a faithful Catholic in the same way that Putin's show of being an Orthodox Christian. As you say, you're not denying his faith. You can't read his heart. Yeah. What we're seeing here is, I think, look at the Kennedy Christianity, cafeteria Catholicism.

You know, I think their faith is serious to them. I don't think it's like number one in their faith, because you just look at their policies. But it's definitely on their top five list, you know, and that strain within American Catholicism, you know, those sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance, depriving workers of their just wages, you know, they're not for that. Depriving, you know, well the sin of Cain, you know. Well, maybe that.

You know, harming widows and orphans. No, they're not for that. Sin of sodomy. These liberal cafeteria Catholics, yeah, they're all for that. Okay. So, two of the four they support. Well, Putin is just the opposite. You know, his cafeteria, his cafeteria Christianity, well, he's good on some of them.

He's not promoting, youy, but he's certainly not very good in the area that has to do with orphans and widows and the sin of Cain. Just look at Litvinenko. Look what happened to the plutonium that he put into Litvinenko in England. Look what he did to Anna Politkovskaya. You know, you people want to have independent journalism

to report the truth on COVID, if you did that in Russia, well, Russia's COVID regime was far stricter than anything in Pennsylvania, for example. How so? Well, you take your kid and your kid has the vaccination cards for that to go to school. Well, in Russia. Yeah, in Russia.

In Russia, COVID vaccine's on there, to go to school. Well, in Russia, COVID vaccines on there, you know, and the medical workers were required, all medical workers, no exemptions were required. And other people were required to have the COVID vaccine. Here, at least you could get some exemptions and whatnot. And, but not in Russia. Oh no, no, no, no. Masking, all the stuff, it's just, it's far worse

than what was in some of the more liberal states in the United States, but people don't talk about that. And I've gotten off topic there, but. I was in Poland and they were expressing concern about the million plus refugees piling into Poland. On one hand, there's this tremendous outpouring of love and support from the Poles. It's beautiful to see. But they also are concerned that they don't have the resources and infrastructure to maintain this level of people if they don't leave again.

And I know there's a lot of concern there that Russia could even turn on Poland. How do you see that happening, especially if the country is destabilized with this influx of refugees? Yeah. Russia is a zero-sum player. You look at Germany, the Western axis, they're compromisers, whether it's on morality or other things that they'll compromise on things. Russia is a zero-sum player and they have to either

win completely or lose completely. It's part of their national psychology going back to the you know the Mongol Tartars is that they either had to be an empire that consolidated everything or they completely collapsed and so I've forgotten your question again. Well about Poland being destabilized. Oh yes, so here we have this thing is that Russia looks at things not in terms of independent sovereign states, but in terms of spheres of influence. We don't look at things so much like that.

Like Spain looks at things like this is my country and there's where the French live, there's where the Italians live. Russians don't look at that that way. They look at their sphere of influence and they look at the high water mark. So the high water mark of Russian influence encompassed Poland, all the Baltic regions down to Romania.

That was their sphere of influence and that has to be recouped. Now it's not gonna be recouped in terms of having, tanks on the ground necessarily, but if I were Poland, if I were Hungary, if I were Slovakia, if I were Czech Republic, if I were Latvia, Lithuania, I'd be very nervous because it's going to be a soft transfer through a staged red flag

operations or coup attempts so that you will have all of a sudden someone running for president of Russia, who will be very president of Poland, who will be sympathetic to Russia and will Move itself away from the Western sphere of influence So so that's what I think my opinion I might be wrong But the chessboard of Russian geopolitics would would indicate that that's their goal is to recoup What was once lost and how do you see this ending?

Like what are your predictions for this war? Suppose America gets involved, what's your prediction? And suppose they don't. How does this end? Does this just continue for the next 20 years? You know, Matt, I think this is only going to end when we repent. I don't think the genesis of this is spiritual.

And so the solution of this is spiritual. We see in the book of Revelation that there are four horsemen, you know, and this is continuous from throughout the scriptures that when men fall into idolatry and grave sin, that God, in His mercy, these are manifestations of His mercy, He allows things to happen to wake us up and to come back to His heart, to be repentant and to love Him, to unite ourselves to Him. That first wave is a pestilence, you know, this is the effect of Pachamama. That is a fact, a biblical fact.

We have to look at this scripturally through the lens of faith. If, and we had something about a pestilence these past two years, didn't we? And then after that it's war. And that's what we have. Right from COVID, the narrative goes into war. And if we still don't repent,

the next two are not good. It's famine and death. So Kamala Harris is not going to save us from the wrath of Vladimir Putin. Joe Biden is not going to save us from the wrath of Vladimir Putin. The only thing is for us to implore God to send Michael the Archangel to protect Kiev. That's the patron saint of the city. No one talks about that. That's the only solution. The stopgap measures, yeah, if we were to send in some planes to help them,

Putin can't be more provoked than what he already is. I mean, us sending in Patriot missiles, Javelin missiles, do you think he's okay with that? In fact, they're more deadly than the MiG fighters in some stages of the war. It's just, it contradicts reason to think that he's already not provoked. And one on a separate subject, one other thing in this is that Putin's exposed, he's humiliated. This is supposed to be a 72-hour operation and it's now into day 15. That's why he's imprisoned, had arrested two leading intelligence officers with the FSB. And it's also part of the problem here is that the whole world has

seen the incompetence of his soldiers. If you look at the columns of their tanks, I mean, if my two year old son is driving a tank, he wouldn't do that, you know, because all the Ukrainians have to do is pick off the front guy, pick off the back tank and then pick off the rest and that's what these Russian tank drivers are doing. I feel embarrassed for the Russians. You know, this is the mighty Russian army. They don't even know how to, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So this has all been exposed. Their, their, their soldiers are eating rations from 2015 it's underfunded. There, there are kids who are 18, 17, 18, 19, you know, young kids. So, uh, he has to get out of this because, uh, his wart covered nether regions are being shown to the whole world. And when someone's that arrogant and is put to shame, usually retreat and surrender

aren't what they do. No, they'll lash out. Yeah. Because if he's kind of like, you know, Saddam Hussein, if I'm going down, I'm going to bring everything with me. And I think that that's Vladimir Putin. But at the same time, we know with the passion of pride, it can't be satiated. The more you give, the more it wants. The quick thing about the passions, like we have to understand this, what we see here, we cannot just interpret this politically and visually. These are signs and symbols for the bigger battle which is the spiritual combat. And what we're seeing, one of the lessons that people have to get here is that, I get it, I'm angry, I think it's a righteous anger,

like our Lord had at the temple. I have a righteous anger for what the neo-Marxists, the cultural Marxists have done to the institutions in my country, in Canada and here in the US. And what they do to our children in the schools here, and what they do to children in the abortuaries of this land is Moloch worship. It's evil, it's horrible, it breaks me apart. I hate it. I hate it with all my being. But we have to be careful because that passion of righteous anger, it distorts and it very quickly becomes sinful anger. Do not let your anger, the sun go down on your anger. And then it distorts and attacks charity and justice as St. Thomas says. And what we see is that I'm so angry with these people, these leftists, the sources of the world, the Clintons of the world who support all these things, that when they are even remotely aligned to people like some of the people in Ukraine, that when Ukraine is suffering an injustice, my anger responds not with charity and justice, but to put my heel on their throat so that they have injustice, just like I've suffered. And there, that's where the spiritual war makes us participants in it.

And we have to have gospel eyes to ensure that our righteous anger does not become unjust and deprive our brothers and sisters of charity and justice that's their due. You know, that's the first time that passage really struck me, don't let the sun go down on your anger, because the sun enables us to see. And unrighteous anger is an anger that is no longer engaging the intellect. It's blind. It's blind.

And that's what's happening, is that the higher faculties of the soul have been blinded by this anger. And that's why, you know, Joseph Stalin, this is really important to know. You know, if I gave you a president, let's say we're speaking to my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and I give you a president who's going to reinstitute marriage and defend it, who's going to, you know, ban abortions, who's going to open up the churches and bring back, you bring back priests and nuns who were exiled. Would you support someone like that?

Sure I would. Well, you've just supported Joe Stalin. This is all the things that Joe Stalin did in the 1930s. You know, is that Lenin had implemented the Marxist view of marriage. Our view of marriage in the United States now is very Marxist. That marriage is a form of slavery for women, so we have to liberate them from it.

So they did that in 1980. The 1918 code in the Soviet Union was a complete liberation. The stuff we have about open marriages and swingers here, and we think that's new and modern, no, the Soviets were all into that. They had so many orphans from these loose unions with people sleeping with other people in common buildings with homosexuality that the number of orphans running around by 1930

was a humanitarian crisis in Russia. And Stalin comes in and says, no more of this, we're going to have strict laws instituting strict traditional marriage, we're going to ban abortions, we're going to bring back, and literally a few years later when the war broke out in order to revitalize the nation he says okay we're going back to old-time religion we're going to have the churches open. Well man that's great.

He didn't believe any of these things. This is merely pragmatic. This is all pragmatic, utilitarian. It's like Napoleon, who utilized the church for his own ends. And it's the same thing here, is that, yes, Mr. Putin shares some things with us, just like Stalin did, but don't be deceived by that false bread. I'm not eating that. I'm eating the bread that's giving eternal life. Gosh, that's such a great point. You know, I've noticed that even in our kind of American Catholicism, that we feel so shell-shocked

by the destabilization of the morals in shell-shocked by the destabilization of the morals in our culture and then the destabilization of the morals in our church. And we're just looking for a strong man. We're just looking for someone to lead us, to guide us, to father us. And we've found these, there's been several figures who have stood out and we cling to them, but with an unholy clinging, you know? Because these people aren't God and they're not inerrant and they end up saying sometimes crazy and sinful things, but then you see them on YouTube defending these people. I place a lot of this on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which has failed, failed,

failed since the 1960s to give us solid ground and solid food. And so when that bridge collapses, you know, the church is like a bridge between heaven and earth, when that bridge becomes unstable and people begin falling off, you can't blame those people for reaching out and grabbing the limbs that are hanging out. And men like Putin, they seem like a little, a little bit of help is better than a free fall.

Yeah. So I'm going to grab onto that, or maybe some of the people who are more left in their view, oh, at least the liberal social program is going to, you know, political party's gonna save me from falling So I'm gonna grab on to it. You know the liberal them same things happening with vegan Oh, it's I'm gonna cling to this man and everything He's saying Because at least it's something I'm not free falling But if someone then criticizes vegan are you gonna see tremendous anger from these people?

Yeah, and I think it's out of a fear that if I let go of this What do I have to cling to? Yes? And what you're saying is Jesus Christ. We have the cross. Do not fear the cross. That is our only hope. Of the 12 disciples, only one was there. And they were from all different perspectives. There were zealots, there were people all across the spectrum in Jesus' inner core, there were tax collectors, all of them. Fishermen, all across the spectrum in Jesus' inner core. There were tax collectors, all of them. Fishermen, all across the political spectrum. People who were politically divided.

They were in his inner core. Yet only one stayed true. So if we think that because we have a good liturgy, we have a good chant, we say our prayers, that we're immune to falling away, not the case. The shepherd is beaten, the sheep will be scattered. That's what is happening and we cannot have a false hope in an imperial Christianity. We have to go to the cross and that means a free fall but trusting that the Father's hand is guiding all things."

A lot of people are asking how they can help. They did this for me when I headed over there and my answer was just, just come. What do you need me for? Just show up. There's no lack of need on the borders there. What do you say to people when they say, how do we help? Oh boy, honestly, I don't know anymore. You know, prayer, I don't know anymore. You know, prayer, but you know, some of the, there's just so overrun with humanitarian aid. I don't want to say don't give, but there's been so much,

but there is, they need wound vac machines at the military hospital in Lviv. They need helmets, they need Kevlar vests. These are basic things like doctors are going out in the field without any protective gear. You have that one Ukrainian soldier yesterday who died because he took his vest off to evacuate children out of Kiev through a humanitarian corridor that the Russians opened up and they shot him. But he took his vest off and put it on the little kid. That's not propaganda, that's true. So Kevlar vests, helmets, you know just

basic defensive things that you know Kevlar vest isn't gonna kill any money anybody but it's gonna save somebody. Things like that, medical equipment. Where are we sending them to? UUARC.org. Say it again. Let's put that at the top link there. Yeah, W-W-W-U-U-A-R-C dot O-R-G. The United Ukrainian American Relief Committee. They've been around since the Second World War, since the 1940s. They're one of the highest rated charities in the entire country.

They're very trustworthy, very efficient. We have a fund that, the Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh, Ukrainian Orphans Fund, and that's helping with some of the financial things. But you know, it's just prayers and, you know, go to your senators, go to your congressmen and say, we've given these people our hope. And if we, they've been betrayed by their neighbor and all they have is our promise. And if we're not there for them, when the bear comes out of the den, um, then it's a, it's a violation of the natural principle of justice. A lot of questions about adoption. So I don't know what you can say to this,

but this, let me just ask the question and you can kind of give a response. Cause there's a ton of people, my wife and I have been, this is David Augustini. Thank you for being a supporter. He says, we've been looking at adoption, but it's become a commercialized nightmare in the U S we had shield away or shied away from looking overseas under the thought of great difficulty and a hesitancy due to a major language gap that we felt would be just one more stressor trauma for a child to face. With what's going on, we are wondering if this is our path instead. The unknown is how with everything going on.

So there's a lot of people who are willing to adopt. Yeah. Unfortunately, the I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, I think, but our government is not doing nearly enough. I know people, Ukrainians, who've been turned away. They pay their fees to get into the embassy, their visa fees, and then their denied visas. And our government is using technicalities and red tape. So these people, the orphans, widows, refugees, you may escape from the Red Army, but you will not escape the red tape of the American government and the red tape of the UN. So it's going to be a very,

very arduous task. And the short answer to all these wonderful people who are opening up their hearts and homes is I don't think they're going to be able to get orphans into this country and anytime soon, they're going to have to go through all kinds of international red tape and the Ukrainian government, we don't know if it's going to be an exile. We don't know where it's going to be. Maybe they'll be victorious and all these

kids will be able to go home. I don't know, but any adoption process is going to have to go through the Ukrainian government and the American government, and both right now are in complete shambles on the question of Ukraine. So it's not a question that can be answered succinctly. So I don't think that they're going to get any clarity anytime soon, unfortunately. But I do want to say that Poland, which has historically been an enemy, Ukraine and Poland have been enemies of each other. Poland has stepped up to the plate.

Catholic Poland, you're a light shining on a hill. The United States usually is a light shining on a hill. Not right now in terms of the refugees. It's Poland. It's her neighbors, Hungary, Slovakia. Slovakia received us, Archbishop Siro Vasil in, in Slovakia, he's a hero. He got, you know, the 43 of us into the country

through father Valerian Michlik and gave us a place to stay with the orphans. When we came through, you know, we had to drive eight hours through the country to get to a hotel. They gave us a four star hotel and these kids had never been in something like that before. But that kind of open hearted hospitality, the Romanians who gave food, clothing, and, and,

um, and money to these kids from Romania, uh, the businessmen who opened up their hearts at the hotel where we stayed. You know, these people are heroes, people in Eastern Europe, um, uh, especially Poland. They're going above and beyond, but our country we're lagging behind in the corporal works of mercy when it comes to these refugees and it's shameful.

And it's not for lack of the Americans. The American people have been swapping my life, my secretary's life with calls and it's an onslaught of God's love through these people. And it's too bad that the red tape doesn't allow that love to filter through tangibly to these people over in the refugee centers in Poland Is there anything else you want to touch upon or say before we wrap up as we wrap up? I'd love to invite you to lead us in some prayers But before then what do you want to touch on? You know? People who are concerned about propaganda, I know it's I know people it's the fog of war and it's hard to know what's true and what isn't true.

Two days ago, Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, said this openly. He said, Russia didn't attack Ukraine. Well, who did? Iceland? Those damn Icelanders attacking Ukraine. This is gaslighting at its worst, you know, bald faced lie, Russia's never attacked Ukraine. Um, this should be an indication that we're

dealing with people who are not telling the truth. And if they, um, are really concerned about the truth, take five days out of your life, go to Poland, and see it for yourself. You did that, it's real. People are not fleeing because of a lice infection. People are not fleeing because of a herpes infection, as it erupted randomly over the whole country. People are fleeing because because of a herpes infection as erupted randomly over the whole country people are fleeing because there's a war

Yeah, I just say I interviewed a girl at that convent we were at She had just fled Ukraine leaving her new husband behind to fight. She's 23 and Neil it's it's one of the recent videos I put up. It's her and her brother I was interviewing maybe put a link in the description so people could check that out because she showed me on her phone, this massive explosion that erupted just by her house. Yeah. So if people want to hear from those in Ukraine, that's, that's one place you could go to.

You know, I would like to close with a few facts, please. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union, the evil empire. Do you believe that? I believe Soviet Union the evil empire do you believe that I believe it was an evil empire Vladimir Putin says the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of that empire do you believe that they both can't be true we have to choose between the two. And I don't believe the reasons that Vladimir Putin is giving regarding this situation. I do believe my friend who's been a priest in Russia for almost 30 years, when he tells me two summers ago, I asked him about these questions about Russia as the defender of traditional Christian values. He said, it's the official Russia. I've lived there for 30 years and it's a lie.

Abortion is still the preferred method of contraception and in 2017 when good politicians in Russia wanted to ban abortion because Putin has a firm grip on the country, it was Putin who interfered. He himself and said, it's a woman's choice. That's the Bill Clinton line. Okay. This stuff about Russia being pro-life, it's pro-Natalist because in 2006, Mark Stein predicted what's happening now.

It's Mark Stein, read America alone. In 2006, he predicted all this. He said, it's a mathematical necessity that this will happen because there's a demographic winter hitting Russia through its abortion, the highest HIV rates outside of Africa, through its alcoholism, men have the average life expectancy of 68. And Russia will have no choice in the next 10 years, he said, then to invade its neighbors

and recoup its lost populations. of 68 and Russia will have no choice in the next 10 years, he said, than to invade its neighbors and recoup its lost populations. So if there were no NATO, if there were no other, Russia would still be doing this because it is a mathematical necessity. What we're seeing here in Russia and Ukraine right now is a foretaste of what's happening in the rest of the world 20 years from now. Russia's been on the path of abortion since the 1930s

and 20s. And those unpaid bills are coming due now. It's in a demographic collapse. It needs to recoup populations or it will cease to exist. All of you people who are having fun with contraception, who are living the life and not worrying about tomorrow, your unpaid bills will come due. And there will be a demographic collapse.

Russia sees its future, and that's why it's engaging in this war, because it needs bodies. That's what we're facing. And what we see in Russia is not a Christian nation so much. There are good Christians there. But from this priest friend of mine is the rate of practice, according to his experience, is 1.5% of the population. That's like what you get in Quebec or Ireland. So if that's a converted Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with 1.5% of the population attending church every Sunday with sky-high abortions, threatening its neighbors with

nuclear weapons, then I don't want a converted nation like that. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here and for going through that. I really appreciate it. Would you mind us closing in prayer you could lead us? Oh, I'd like everyone to join me in praying for those God-fearing people in Russia Who love their neighbors in Ukraine and are powerless to Do anything about it? For the conversion of Vladimir Putin who got whom God loves with all of his heart

Vladimir Putin whom God loves with all of his heart, to pray that the wounds of his childhood may be melted by the motherly care of Immaculate Mary, that he may be washed white in the blood of the Lamb, that he may see the love that the Father has for him, and that the gap in his life between the love he should have had and the love that God wishes him to have will be filled in by people who will be willing to forgive him should he repent. And we pray also for the healing and the courage of the Ukrainian nation to defend all that is good and true in just proportion and for the moral conviction of the West to stand for the persecuted and to feed the widows and the orphans.

For all this, together join me now as we pray. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored Thy help, or sought Thy intercession, was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, we fly unto Thee, O Virgin of virgins, O Mother. To Thee do we come, before Thee we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, but in Thy mercy, hear and answer us.

Amen. Vladimir Putin, if you thy mercy hear and answer us. Amen. Vladimir Putin, if you're watching, I love you. The Ukrainian people, despite the pain you've given them, they too, who've suffered so much, are a people of love. And if you repent, I'm convinced that they too will forgive you. And I urge you, brother in Christ, to turn back and to come back to the household of God. Amen. Amen.

Thanks so much.