Pints With Aquinas - The Society-Shaking Power of Christian Friendship w/ Mike Aquilina

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Mike Aquilina is an author and expert on the Church Fathers. Mike's Books: https://bit.ly/3g0PFVn Mike's Website: https://fathersofthechurch.com The Octavius: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0410.htm OUR COMMUNITY Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas Locals: https://mattfradd.locals.com/support Special thanks to all our supporters for your continued support! You don't have to give anything, yet you do. THANK YOU! SPONSORS Parler: http://parler.com MY Parler: https://parler.com/mattfradd Hallow: https://hallow.com/matt MERCH PWA Swag: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com SOCIAL Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/312eXMI31liKUHSx6U5p1H Parler: https://parler.com/mattfradd Website: https://www.pintswithaquinas.com

Bob Lesniewski made this table. We had to bring it up in chunks. We're in a little... Very nice. Yeah. But thank you for being on the show with me. Well, thank you for having me. I am honored. Is it right that you've written 800 books? No, I have not written 800 books. 70, 70 plus books? Yeah, I'm right around there.

How do you keep up? I'm highly motivated. I have six children. Now I have six grandchildren, you know, so there are a lot of things that you want to do and and things take money, you know, so you have to write books. Well, fair enough. And it's the only thing I know how to do. What's the first book you wrote? The first book I wrote that was solid book. Yeah, is The Fathers of the Church. Oh, interesting. And this remains a love of yours because you've written a recent book on that, haven't you? Oh, I've written most of my books on the Fathers of the Church. And that was the big surprise, you know, because what happened was I was doing a lot of incidental journalism. I was editing the Diocesan newspaper in Pittsburgh and I was writing for our Sunday Visitor newspaper

in a number of publications, periodicals. And so the publisher of our Sunday Visitor books, you know, saw my voice and he said, I want you to write a book on the Fathers of the Church because there's no popular introduction to them out there. And I thought that book will sell about four copies, right? But let's do it. Right. Well, I mean, he was willing to pay me in advance, so that's a good thing. And when you're a freelancer, as I was at the time, that's a very good thing. It's money all up front. So I wrote the book and it surprised all of us. What was it called? The Fathers of the Church, an Introduction to the First Christian Teachers. And it ended up being a textbook,

used as a textbook at the university level. So it took on a life that we did not predict because I wrote the book to be on the level of my son, who at the time I believe was in sixth or seventh grade. He's a smart kid. I was going to say, maybe you've got really bright kids. He's a smart kid, but I put it out there and so one day my phone rings and it's a professor of Patristics and he says, I want you to do a new edition of your book. And I'm like, my publisher has to make that decision.

He said, it needs to have superscript footnotes and all that kind of thing. And I said, my publisher did not want that because they wanted it to be a popular book and they didn't want to push people out of the page. But he said, you know, this is what I'm using for, as a textbook for my classes. And I said, well, you shouldn't be using it as a textbook for your classes.

It's not my fault. Right? I wrote it for, I wrote it for at the junior high level. And there was a long pause on the other end of the line and he said, buddy, you don't know what we're dealing with out here. Amazing. So he talked to my publisher into doing a new edition with the footnotes and everything. The book is now in its third edition.

It's still used as a textbook, which blows my mind and it's been my best seller, even though I've written 60 some books since then. Amazing. Yeah, you've sold me. I'm going to get it. Yeah. So how did you develop this love for the fathers or this understanding that we need to be more and we need to be emphasizing them more? You know, when I was a little boy, we had a bunch of boys books in the back of the classroom at school. Nice. And, you know, they had a lot of Westerns, Kit Carson, that kind of thing, and war books. It's still, World War II was kind of a living memory,

a lot of books about D-Day and that sort of thing. And another thing was archeology. So there was a book on Heinrich Schliemann back there and his discovery of Troy, and it was a boy's book. And so I read this thing and I wanted to be that guy who went over there put a spade into the earth Found whatever it was a city Troy the Iliad the Odyssey suddenly come to life By what he found underground. That's what I wanted. Yeah, so at that this was before the

he found underground. That's what I wanted. So this was before the Indiana Jones movie. So I couldn't satisfy it by going to the theater. But I dreamed of being an archaeologist and going and discovering these things. And then as I got older, I learned that what archaeologists do is they poke around with a toothpick for a long time, and they scrub things gently with a toothbrush. And I thought, I don't want to do that. But you know what? As I got older, reading the Fathers was like being an archeologist. It's going to this very foreign land from a very long time ago. And you have an imaginative entry through the books. And that's what I found in Schliemann, but that's what I was finding in the Fathers, this imaginative entry into the early church where it suddenly became vivid for me, and these people were real! You know, Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, they were friends to me.

That's how I got into it, and I got excited, and I'm still excited. I've been doing this a long time. Have you always been Catholic? And I got excited and I'm still excited. I've been doing this a long time. I love it. Have you always been Catholic? Well, I'm baptized Catholic. I'd say during high school and college, I was not practicing the faith and I came back in the years after college. I had the fortune or misfortune to grow up in the years after the Second Vatican Council. There was a lot of confusion in the church and a lot of it hit the schools, you know, and I went to Catholic schools all the way through because my parents were saints, they're canonizable.

And they raised us well, but you know, they also raised us to listen to what Sister says and what Sister said during those years was not always reliable. And to us kids, it wasn't like it kind of seduced us into bad Catholicism. It's like it just made Catholicism seem silly. It was a lot of handholding, love, love, love stuff. And nothing's more off putting for a 15-year-old boy, I think. So a lot of us just stop practicing the faith. And I kind of hovered in that area.

If you asked me during the time, I would have described myself probably as agnostic. But a funny thing happened when I went to college. I went to Penn State, big state school, enormous. You have no identity, you're a number kind of thing. But I studied the humanities there and I had some really good teachers. Most of my teachers, I think, were agnostic.

There were some exceptions. But what surprised me was the great appreciation they had for the Catholic faith and its effect on culture, on literature, on art, on music, all of these things. I took art history courses and we talked about almost nothing but the Catholic faith. And I don't think you'd find that today, do you think? Maybe not. I don't know, because I'm not in that world. I'm not an academic. But back then, this was something that kind of startled me, because it wasn't the kind of silly Catholicism of our time, but it was this solid thing, you know?

This silly Catholicism that you're referring to seems to be evaporating a little bit. I mean, I know you've got pockets of absolute madness in Germany and places in the United States, of course, but even those who are dedicated to the novice ordo and maybe unfriendly towards more traditional Catholics, even those people don't seem to want the same insanity that we were seeing 20, 30, 40 years ago. Or is that not true? I think that's true. You know, I don't... What is it that's changed then? Is it that we had our... Was it just an unbiblical, un-Christian, we were trying to maybe merge a lot of psycho, Babel, new age crap with Christianity? There was that going on. You know, we read a lot of... I can remember in religion class in high

school, we read like these little thin books on psychology, essentially. This was in religion class, and they were kind of pop psychology books about feeling good about yourself, that sort of thing, and feeling good about others. So was it just a bad time to have like a revision of the Holy Mass? Was that what it was? Like maybe if the new Mass had been implemented in a less crazy time, things would be less crazy or? Well, I certainly think it wasn't implemented well. that the new mass had been implemented in a less crazy time. Things would be less crazy.

Well, I certainly think it wasn't implemented well. You know, it's it's it's gosh, I have I have terrible memories and you're you're probably, you know, triggering me right now because these things are coming back. It definitely was not a good time to. And many of us like myself, I'm 39, like I was just raised in that. Like I didn't know anything else. Oh my. So I just knew people would, during offertory, it was like, well, let's have the kids bring up a symbol of their world. It's like soccer balls

and field hockey sticks and... Plush toys. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that was Christianity to me. Yeah. So I mean, that was my experience during, I'd say during junior high and high school. What's funny is how sudden the change came because I can remember my confirmation year, fifth grade, and we had to memorize the Baltimore Catechism in that year and it had to be memorized. And I can remember memorizing it because- I can't remember it, but I can remember memorizing it.... I can't remember it, but I can remember memorizing it. Well, can you remember it? I can remember some of the questions. Why did God make me? I remember that. I can remember

who is God and what is man. Because what's interesting is the Baltimore Catechism, the Baltimore Catechism gave people a language for dealing with reality, for big things, not just whatever the pop culture wants us to think about things. My parents had no education beyond high school, but my parents could think metaphysically because of the Baltimore Catechism.

You know? Whenever issues came up in politics, medical ethics, whatever, well, they knew what is man. Man is a creature composed of body and soul made to the image and likeness of God. That drives everything in the conversation. When you have those categories, when you have those definitions in your head You can move in a good direction. You can feel pretty confident about where you're moving. I love the Baltimore Catechism I really do And anyway, we had to memorize it and I wanted to memorize it because the first student to memorize the Baltimore Catechism got a ship in a bottle

It was cool. I wanted that thing, you know, and I wanted to be the first so I could get that, but I lost. Another guy in the class got the bottle. I actually had it memorized at the same time as this guy, but she called on him. Sister called on him. Anyway, we do all that. Fifth grade, we get confirmed. Sixth grade, we came back and it was like we entered a different world. It's very strange. How do you account for that? I can't, you know, I can't, you know, unless everybody went to the same seminar that summer, you know.

Yeah, like how do you account for that? Because, I mean, prior to the changes, we may have this kind of unfair view of the way Catholics were, like very faithful Baltimore catechism people love the tritons in mass, were holy, were sound, orthodox. And then the bottom falls out in some sense. Was it that it wasn't as romantic as maybe we're envisioning? I think that's true. I think that's true. I have a friend who describes the church in the 40s and 50s as a September fly. Ever see a September fly in September around here?

You know, it's fall season, it's cold, but these flies that survive, they combine, they're big and they look intimidating, menacing because they're so huge and they've survived so much. And if you go like this, they're easy to catch. And if you go like this and you open your hand, you have a handful of dust. That's what it is. Ben Wattenberg Oh, how interesting. Jared Sussman Yeah, so that's my friend's metaphor for describing the church of that period. And there may be something to that, especially as we got into the investigations over so many of the scandals that took place. And we found out that the roots were in the thirties and forties, you know, and it's kind of a.

Where if you were to see photos of Catholicism in the thirties and forties, you'd say that's Catholicism. That's my world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there were great things going on then. Yes, but sure. But yeah, that's, that's my world. So I heard stories in Kansas. I was giving a men's talk and an older man came up to me and said after the second Vatican Council

They were taking the statues into the car park and smashing them with hammers with the teachers and I just couldn't believe that I thought he must be exaggerating. Maybe he's insane and he Called his friend over he said yeah. No, that's what we did. Wow. No, I never saw anything like that I never saw it really feel it. I don't know how you look at that and don't think that's inspired by the demonic. I think there would have been a violent uprising in my town if that had happened just because my town was a coal mining town, lots of immigrant population with a kind of peasant piety. I went to an ethnic parish, micro-ethnic. If you were from three villages in Sicily, you could go

You know, you're from another village. I think you better go across town, you know So I think the the people there would have had an uprising, you know against that kind of thing. Mm-hmm Yeah Yes, yes Yes, it's all what do you I mean, I don't know how much you think about these things, but like, what's the way forward now? Do you think because it feels like we're a stalemate between those who want the traditional liturgy and those who don't care for it.

And maybe it's just because I spend too much time online and not in the real world amongst these real conversations that take place between real people. But I'm not sure, especially with the modo proprio, how do you see things shaking out? R. What is the way forward? It was your first question. I think the way forward is that we've got to refocus on the interior life. We do feed it through the liturgy, but we've got to begin here. We have the sacraments, and we can go forward. We've got to cultivate a sustained and disciplined life of prayer, and we've got to do that personally. We've got to seek spiritual direction so that we can get some kind of transcendence, you know, some kind of transcendent view of our own lives. I find

that too often people are engaged on the exterior right now. Social media forced that really because you know, my pocket's buzzing. I've got to see what's new. Maybe somebody said something wrong on the internet, you know, I've got to correct it right now. I've got to see what's new. Maybe somebody said something wrong on the internet, you know, I've got to correct it right now. I got to be engaged that way because that's the way I'm faithful. That's the way I'm an apologist. That's the way I defend our Lord. But we have to defend Him here first and we've got to be living in charity. So, I think that we've got to return to these basics, I think that we've got to return to these basics, the cultivation of an interior life, time for prayer, and again, something that's sustained. Doing mental prayer every day, doing the rosary every day, all of these contemplative things where we're not responding to the buzz in our pocket.

What do you mean by cultivating the interior life? Well, we've got to have that sustained and disciplined life of prayer. We've got to be spending time with our Lord and we've got to be doing it in the ways of the tradition. Okay, there are certain time tested ways of going forward and that's why I mentioned the Rosary, that's why I mentioned the Mass. You know, if we do these things we're going to move forward in life. We're going to find a piece that we're not going to find if we're constantly using social

media as our primary referent in life. Yeah, it's like the social media sucks the interior life out of us before it has a chance to mature and develop. Exactly. To set the bar even lower, maybe the interior life just means trying to be reflective, but we're not even reflective. Yes. Because as you say, you've got that buzz in your pocket that must be responded to now.

Right. Right. So that my real life is out there in the calm boxes. You know, that's where I'm living my real life. That's how I process whatever thoughts I might make. Those are the things I talk to my wife about. You know, what I said to so-and-so today in the comments. Do you have to battle that or did you sort of find that you became disciplined enough

before the craze of social media took off that it didn't suck you in in the way? I think I have to battle it, probably not to the degree of my children say, because I didn't grow up with this. You know, I have other neural pathways. The other thing is that I have an allergy to things like video and audio because I've never owned a television in my adult life. That happened by accident, but I've never owned a television in my adult life. So I've just not drawn to face the screen all the time. I love books and I love being able to spend time with books, the real paper kind of books,

and that's where I find my joy. I suspect that some people, you know, they get that kind of rush that I do when they put comments on a webpage, you know, that kind of thing, or on social media. But I really do get a rush when I open a book. And I think it's a delight that we're able to read them, that we're able to own them. My dad was born in 1916 and my dad was born, well he was in a poor family, there were coal miners. His dad died when he was 10 years old.

They had no money. He was one of seven kids, right? They had no money at all. But he and nine of his friends would chip in a penny a month to buy a dime novel every month. And they would have to read it. They had like three days to read it every month, and then they had to get it and give it to the next guy. And my father pre-did books like something sacred. So this is the way I was raised. He would always use this line, our books are our friends, and he wasn't reading great literature. He was reading Alexandre Dumas, you know, all of these boys adventure books.

But he saw books as a way to enrichment, and I think he inculcated that in his son because that's the way I am. I still get joy out of picking up a book. And I think it's such a privilege to own them. Yeah, I'm trying to think as we're reflecting here that, you know, you might say kind of like social media is to books. What? What do you say? Like ban now conversation is to a deep one. And I find every year I take August off the Internet. And during that month, I can read a ton. Wow.

But I find it very hard to focus on deep thinking and deep reading when I'm in the Internet world. And I'm sure I just have to be. Obviously, the answer is you have to be more disciplined. And I am trying to do that. But I think about these things a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have to we have to be, obviously the answer is you have to be more disciplined. And I am trying to do that, but I think about these things a lot. Yeah. Well, we have to, we have to figure out how to engage that world and evangelize it without, without having to take us over. Yeah. You know, we've got to watch what kind of compromises we make, I think. But again, if we're sustained, if we have

that sustained and disciplined life of prayer, as we're going forward, if we're sustained, if we have that sustained and disciplined life of prayer as we're going forward, if we're able to put our phone down, you know, and stay away from it in the times that we spend with our Lord and have serious conversation with him, and in marriage, you know this. That's right. If you don't cultivate conversation. If I'm just chatting with my wife on the way out the door or not looking at her over dinner and yeah. Yeah, I can. What happens to your marriage? just chatting with my wife on the way out the door or not looking at her over dinner. Yeah.

What happens to your marriage? I can remember when I met the woman who would become my wife. I wanted it to go so well that I used to think in advance about the things I would bring up in conversation because I didn't want the conversation to lag. I wanted to be sterling. I wanted to be sparkling. And you planned for that. And I mean, we should be doing this with our prayer, you know, thinking about that time when we're going to be with

our Lord and we should want to make that time sterling. Make it a delight for Him. I want to read this to you because this is a conversation I had with Father Jason Charon, who you know today, right? Oh, what a great man. So he's sort of like helping me form my daily prayers. I've been praying the hours and and so a bit of a bit of an admission here. I said to him today, you know how Protestants talk of finding liturgy

and structured prayer inhibiting? I said, that's kind of how I feel praying these hours, because it's these the Eastern hours that are like 800 hours long somehow. But Father Jason is the king at writing just amazing things back in text message. I'll read it to you and see what you think. He said, structured prayers is the bridle and bit which God uses to turn a roaming Mustang into a disciplined stallion fit for battle. I freaking love who texts like that.

But I like that, he says. I also know that to be a disciple means being one who is disciplined. But speak to that, because I think I'm the least disciplined person on the planet, and I tend to pick up different ways of praying only to get to sort of get bored with them after a month. And then I change and I don't like that about myself, but I've never been able to fix it. and I'm wondering if it's something I should fix or if I just need to sort of accept that maybe this is how I am and so long as I'm praying every day. Are you one of these,

are you a part of Opus Dei? I am, I'm a super new member of Opusnova stay. So I do tend to be disciplined about it. I have a plan of life and I try to be faithful to it. What I have found helpful is the spiritual direction I get. When you think, you know what? I want to change something in my prayer life that's been part of my prayer life for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. You know, if you get an idea like that, you know, there's somebody on the other end who says, well, let's, let's, let's talk about that. Yep. Yep. Having someone to bounce it off of. Yeah. You know, as I said, that kind of transcendence you get over your own life because you're in the middle of it. You know, you really can't get perspective. You can't think about what are the possible

consequences of this or at least not clearly. It's difficult to discern whether or not this you really can't get perspective, you can't think about what are the possible consequences of this, or at least not clearly. And it's difficult to discern whether or not this is an act of laziness, like I just don't, I don't want to do this anymore, I'm bored of it. Yeah. Or if you're actually being led somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's where I get a lot of help in spiritual direction.

I've been blessed to have, you know, good interlocutors for those conversations down the years of my adult life. So that's the way I've developed. I've tried to stay with the plan, and the plan has changed a lot over, and well, I've been in the work for 30 years now. The plan has changed a lot over those 30 years, but it's probably changed more slowly than I would have had it, because I have these impulsive things, and I'm a male.

I've got this attention span that goes like this. Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely like that. I definitely have that attention span thing. Yeah. But, But good. RG Yeah, we see the squirrel. CB So when you started getting into the Fathers, were you back into your Catholic faith at that point?

RG Yeah, yeah. And what was interesting at that time is that there were real discoveries going on. Remember I talked about Sleemann discovering Troy? Well, there were recent discoveries like people finding a stash of Augustine's letters in one place and a stash of Augustine's sermons in another place. It's like when they found that lost work of Aquinas. Yes. Yes. Wow, this is great. So you're in the middle of this happening and suddenly new words, you know, from this friend you hadn't heard from in a long time, right? So it was an exciting time and I was kind of following those news stories and the publisher of Our Sunday Visitor approached

me for that reason. He knew that those were the stories that excited me, the stories about these found works from so long ago and that I liked reading about that period. And then after my book came out, there came another book by Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, and it was a sociological study of Christian growth during the first three centuries. And that book shook me. Okay, that book really shook me because he's studying, you know, Stark as a sociologist and an agnostic is just looking at this from outside and he was the most respected sociologist of religion in the world. So he's looking at this phenomenon, he says, to get the numbers we know it had, Christianity had to grow at a steady rate of 40% per decade for about

250 years. Wow. 40% per decade. So he shows what that means. And then he tries to figure out how did that happen? And he goes to the documentary sources to figure out how it happened. And then at the end of the book, he's saying this again as an outsider. He's saying, I don't have faith, but we got to worry about what we're losing if we lose Christianity. Now that was very much a concern to him because he saw an erosion

of some fundamental values of Western civilization. Why did you say it shook you though? That book? Yeah. because I was seeing in real time like some kind of instant replay of the Roman Empire, that so many of the issues that the early Christians had to deal with, we're dealing with today. So many of the attitudes that they had to deal with, we're dealing with today. So it just became very clear to me, especially after I had spent a lot of time with the Fathers in writing my book, that we've got to immerse ourselves in them, to learn from them, and

see what they did that enabled them to succeed at such a crazy rate of growth. So that really did motivate me to go out and start speaking about the fathers. Now that was something I never wanted to do. I'm extremely shy, painfully shy. I'm an extreme introvert. So I never had any desire to go out and speak to people. After that book, I wanted to go out and tell this good news, tell what I had found. And it's motivated a lot of the books I've written since then that I want us to get an imaginative entry into that world. That's what my books, that's what I want my books to be. An imaginative entry into that world that is very foreign, very ancient, very different from ours. And I want us to learn from these ancestors and

the faith. And I want us to cultivate a friendship with them. I want us to feel comfortable going to them for intercession and instruction. You know, make St. John Chrysostom my companion for the next four years. You know, that kind of thing. Mason Hickman Usually, I think when Catholics go back to the fathers today, it's for apologetics. You know, like, what did they believe? And that's fair enough. But it sounds like you're saying that there's other reasons we should be reading the fathers. What can we learn from the fathers other than doctrine?

It is useful. The fathers are useful that way. And we should, you know, Marcus Grotei, when he welcomed his 1000th pastor into the Catholic Church, 1000 Protestant pastors into the Catholic Church. And this is quite a while ago. This is at least 10 years ago, if not more. At that time, I said to Marcus, I said, Marcus, out of that thousand, how many came in by way of the fathers? And he said, huh, out of a thousand, a thousand. So, the fathers are apologetically useful. When you read what Ignatius of Antioch was writing in 107 AD,

you look at his seven letters, you're looking at your parish. You're looking at a church that has a certain structure to it of bishop, priest, and deacon. You're looking at a church Ignatius calls Catholic. You're looking at a church that's centered on the celebration of the Eucharist and believes the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus. His flesh, sarx, his blood, he calls it the blood of God, you know, this, the realistic language. What you're looking at in those seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch is your parish church. That's a, that's some experience when you, when you undergo it, when you engage Ignatius in this way, when you come to know him as a friend.

The other thing that you come to know is that Ignatius is somebody who feels this nearness, this immediacy of Jesus. Jesus is right here and I love him. I love being with him and I love being this close to him, but I'm gonna get even closer when I become a martyr. So he feels propelled to Rome to become a martyr. It's such an experience reading him and getting to know him and knowing his friendship.

So all of those things, the fathers are useful for all of those reasons, but the fathers are beautiful. Even those who were known as apologists, they were writing beautiful things and they were trying to stun their world with its beauty. And individual Christians were trying to stun the world with the beauty of their lives, their moral lives. And what they talk about most is the moral beauty of the Christian life. Really? There's a great work of the late second century. The moral beauty, that's interesting.

Not just the moral rightness of it, but the moral beauty of it. Right, the moral beauty of it. There's a great work of the late second century, early third century, and it's by Marcus Menutius Felix and it's a little, almost autobiographical novel. It's a memory of an episode in his life. Now Menutius Felix was not a theologian. He was a judge in Rome. He was a magistrate in Rome. He had been a pagan and he had persecuted Christians. He had persecuted them to the death and he converted to Christianity. He had a good friend, he had two good friends, two of his colleagues, and they decided that since there was a holiday weekend coming up, they were going to go to the resort town of

Ostia near Rome and they were going to enjoy the weekend there, just have a nice vacation. And once they get there, they do what lawyers do. Now two of them are Christian, and one of them is a pagan. And they get- What do lawyers do? Lawyers argue. So as they're entering the city, there's a statue of one of the gods there and the pagan blows a kiss to the statue. And this other Christian who's there tells him, friends don't let friends worship idols,

I got to tell you what you're doing and why it's not going to get you anywhere. And then he's offended, right? The pagan is offended and he tells him, I'm hurt by that. And he says, let's do this. Let's have a court case here and I'll argue this side, you argue that side and Marcus will judge us. So it's a beautiful thing because what they have is a- Is this conversation documented?

Yes, it's all in there. In this little work by Marcus. In the Octavius by Marcus Manutius Felix. And it's a beautiful little known work of the fathers, right? And it's in there just buried because it's the only work we know by him and he wasn't a bishop, so it doesn't get a lot of publicity. He never quotes the scriptures. No one in the book ever quotes the scriptures.

Jesus is hardly mentioned. But what they do is they meet him where he is, you know, their pagan friend, they meet Cecil where he is and they consider his objections. And most of them are the same objections that the new atheists have today. They're objections in natural theology. And they respond to him in a way that he can understand. And by the end of the weekend, he says, you don't have to make a judgment, Marcus. I've made a judgment. I want to become a Christian.

I need to read this book. Oh, you must. You must. Marcus Manutius Felix. There's no way I'm going to be able to. And you can get it for free. Oops, sorry. You can get it for free. What's it called? The Octavius.

All right. And it's, um, by Marcus minutius Felix. And you can find a free at newadvent.org in their library of the fathers, or tertullian.org and found it in the library of the fathers. And, and it's there. It's very, it's not too long. And it's, it's set up kind of like a platonic dialogue, but it's,'s a novel. I can't wait to read it. They're little touches. You know, I keep coming back to this phrase because it's so important to me, that we

need an imaginative entry into that world. Yeah, what does that mean? Well, we need to be able to picture ourselves in that world. And it's hard for us to do that because we're so dependent on technology that did not exist then and was not even imagined or dreamt about them.

But to try to get into that world where they live to see their heroism, to see their piety, to see their devotion, and to see their courage, this is something. We have a man who's working as a magistrate in ancient Rome with all that entails, having to enforce laws, some of which he considers unjust. And what does he do? But anyway, this is a guy who managed to navigate those waters and live a faithful Christian life and write this text that has lasted all these years. Why has it lasted? Not only because good question. Not only because of its arguments, the arguments are good and they're sound, but you can read those in other places,

in the other works of the apologists, but because he gives us this novelistic vision, okay? So for example, when Octavius offends the pagan Cecil by correcting him, because he had blown a kiss to the statue, we know that a silence, an awkward silence, fell on the three friends. Now, how do we know this?

Because he shows us that in a way a novelist would. He starts describing the landscape. He sees little boys skipping stones on the water and he describes that. And you know that there's this awkward silence that they're all like noticing everything because they're trying not to look at each other. How are we gonna get out of this?

And finally, Cecil breaks the silence. But it's very good for that reason that it gives us that very rich imaginative entry into that world. Remember, this is a world where there was no printing press, right? There were no media. The only medium out there was the forum. If you could stand in the forum or some public place and raise your hand and speak, that's

your only public medium. And Christians had no access to that. And yet it spread. Yes. Yeah. So how did it spread? That's the question. Yeah. They show us.

It spread through friendship and trust. They trusted each other. They trusted each other enough to have a vacation together over three days and have a frank conversation. They could have that frank conversation. And that's what we need to cultivate today. and have a frank conversation. They could have that frank conversation. And that's what we need to cultivate today. We need to have that bond of trust with other human beings. We live in a weird situation where we live in suburbs and when we, you know, we go to work in the morning, the garage door goes up and we drive to a job somewhere else. We come back,

we raise the garage door and we go behind it and we don't come out until the garage door goes up and we drive to a job somewhere else. We come back, we raise the garage door and we go behind it, and we don't come out until the garage door raises again the next morning. We don't know our neighbors to this side or that side or the people behind us. Riechel Right. You know, we don't really know the people in the market stall next to us. But that's the way the Christians change the world by affecting those people who are closest to them. And that's the way the Christians changed the world, by affecting those people who were closest to them. And that's what you see in this book more than in any other

of the works of the Fathers. I haven't seen it anywhere else, the mechanism by which the Christians took the world. Mason Felsenfeld So friendship, moral beauty, would those be two of the main things that converted the pagan world? Dr. Mark Sulewski world. Because friendship really opens you up to showing a beautiful life. Okay. And you don't have to say, you know, I'm better than you. I am so much better than you.

It's never helped when someone said that to me. It's never made me want to adopt their position. Yeah. I mean, uh, what happened though was that, you know, you, you got into the life and what Rodney Stark, again, an agnostic, what he points out is that pagan marriage was awful. That what usually happens is some guy was married off in an arranged marriage to a girl who was 11 years old. And so she was already in this relationship

that was mismatched, really. Psychologically, it just wasn't healthy. One of the first things that the Christians came after was child marriage. They said it's psychologically unhealthy and it violates the vocational freedom of the girl. Okay? Yes, go Christians because the girls should be able to flourish in their own way as boys can.

They should be able to choose their vocational path in life, even if that path means not marrying, choosing virginity, consecrating virginity. This is the reason the Romans hated the Christians. Really? Yeah, because they were a threat to the social order, to the way of Roman family life. This is how you start a family. What are you talking about? Yeah, give us more. How else was the Christians a threat to the social order? So that's one way. That's one way. Well, you know, what Stark points out and what Robert Wilkin points out in The Christians as the Romans saw them, two books that enable us to see persecution from the

perspective of the persecutors, what they show is that we were threatening a way of life, really. That abortion and infanticide were normal in the marital relationship, because you didn't want a lot of children. You didn't want them. Especially girls, females, because they're a drain on the family economy. They're never going to make money. They're never going to be a source of income for you. You just don't want wanna have them around. So we have evidence of this. Like in the last 30 years,

there've been these baby dumps found in Scotland, in Athens, and in Palestine. So we're talking far flung, just dumps of babies. And most of them are female, right? Because what are you gonna do with the girl, okay? So what they would often do is just drown the baby in a bucket of water at birth. God have mercy. Or bring the baby out

to the edge of town and leave it by the ash heaps. Because it could be rescued by a she-wolf out there, or it could be rescued by the pimps of the city, or it could just become carrion for dogs and vultures. So this is the kind of world they were living in. This was a normal part of married life and family life, and it was very unhappy. Divorce was common, just as abortion was common, and women often died from the effects of abortion at that time. How common was homosexuality? It was practiced recreationally. I don't know that they would have called it homosexuality the way we think of it today.

It is common enough that Paul condemns it. BD That's right, that's right. And all of the Roman emperors practiced it. All of the Roman emperors had- MG Was it part of what you had to agree to become a Roman emperor? I'm not okay with that one. BD No, and it was part of just the aristocratic life. You had boys who were sex slaves. This was part of the aristocratic life. There's praise for Domitian in one of the historians because he was a moderate pedophile and he didn't harm the boys, whereas Nero was a sicko and had the boys surgically altered. So you had this spectrum

of behavior, but all of it, in my opinion, in your opinion, in our opinion, our societal opinion now, was awful. It was. So this is. Yeah, so it's not as if like we're just ascending or descending into depravity and a depravity that's never existed before. It's that like the sunshine of Christianity that got rid of the depravity, as it were, is now being clouded over again. The depravity is rearing its head again. That's right. That's right. So we've been here before. So you talked about, you know, moral beauty. got rid of the depravity as it were, is now being clouded over again, the depravity is rearing its head again. R. That's right.

That's right. So we've been here before. R. So you talked about moral beauty. Now when you compare that to the happiness in a good Christian marriage with children and children close to the breast, and with a love for the children, they'll have vocational freedom even if they're girls. Imagine that, right? So that there's freedom to give your whole life and even a desire to give your whole life in virginity. This was so countercultural and it was really in a front, okay? So if there's a shortage

of girls in the Roman world, as there was, so many of them were being killed at birth, there's a shortage of girls and the pagan men can't find women to marry, and yet you're allowing your daughters to pledge themselves to lifelong virginity? Well, that seemed downright unpatriotic. It seemed crazy to the Romans. Why would you do that? Okay, maybe we'll have our three vestal virgins who do their job for the empire and they may not be defiled at all, but to have this be common, and we know that there were many consecrated virgins in the second century. And it also doesn't seem to make sense from a human standpoint that, okay, we want to

propagate Christianity, let's have our daughters be virgins, or our sons be virgins, you see? And yet it did. It did did and Christians were actually having babies What that's what's interesting is that as early as Caesar Augustus 9 ad we have we have the speech by Augustus That he gives to the nobles where he's saying the big problem with the Roman Empire right now is that we're not having babies We're not making babies you people aren't even marrying. I don't know what to call you, he says. I can't call you men because you don't do what men do. You're not propagating the Roman way. You're not having children. This is an amazing speech that he gave. It's in Cassius Dio, and it's preserved for our good. What he's saying is that this isn't

good for the homeland security. It's our good. What he's saying is that this isn't good for the homeland security. It's not good. Mason- We're hearing these conversations taking place today. Riegel For economics in 20 years. This is demographic winter we're heading toward. And we're told by the historians, Tacitus tells us, Pliny tells us, that everyone ignored the laws of Augustus. Everyone ignored the pleas of Augustus. And they continued not having children in the empire, continued to decline, continued to be dependent on foreign workers to do all of their important jobs. And so the culture itself just started to erode.

Ruling from the inside out. Right. Right. So that's the decline of the empire there. It's something that we can watch happen through the ancient documents. So, okay, what do we learn from that today? Oh, we have a lot to learn from that. It's interesting. When the Severan emperors come around in the 190s and the 200s, it's very interesting what they do. They enact laws that mimic Christian morality. They outlaw abortion. They penalize bachelorhood and spinsterhood. They do all of these things to try to make the Roman family look like a Christian family.

And they're pagans. But what they're just trying desperately to imitate the Christian success in propagating themselves. And of course it failed because the aristocratic Romans, who were the ones that mattered, ignored it because they could afford the fines. You know, they could just keep on living the way they were living and the emperors really weren't going to bother them. All right.

So we find ourselves in a similar situation, would you say? Yes. Okay. How then does Christianity propagate now? I know the answer because you've just told me, friendship and moral beauty. Friendship and moral beauty, but it all begins with the cultivation of interior life. See, what's interesting is up until this point, you haven't talked about the kind of intellectual defenses of Christian dogma. I know you find those good and obviously important, and maybe you would put it under the heading of moral beauty that we should be interested in these sort

of metaphysical truths and truths of Christian faith. But it sounds like you're putting an emphasis on something different, friendship and moral beauty. I think it's friendship that gives us the opening to talk about those other things because your neighbor never comes over and knocks on your door and says, give me account for the hope that you haven't, but they might, but they don't say why do you call Mary the mother of God or something. They usually begin by, by asking for a cup of milk or a cup of flour or whatever it is that they need to round out the recipe or to say, you know, could you come over and

hold the flashlight while I look at the engine, You know, that kind of thing. So it begins there, you know, eventually we get to metaphysics, but we got to begin with the cup of flour. We got to begin with offering the ride to the doctor's office or whatever it takes. You know, we got to be there when they need us and they have to know who we are. They have to know our names. And I suppose moral beauty is all the more convincing once we are friends, because it's difficult in friendship to hide your moral choices from me. You might be pretending to act moral so that you impress me, but once we're friends and I see your life as it were, that's when I'm really impressed that you are actually the way you appear to be.

What they see is our lawn. They want, they want us to, you know, live up to our lawn or be better than our lawn in my case. So, so, so yeah, I know that not everybody is open to it. You talked about that before, you know, we really don't want to know our neighbors. Well, our neighbors kind of feel the same way about us, right? And especially if they know that we're religious, you know, they might be put off by that too. But you know, it's important that we make the overture, you know, show up with cookies once and say, I made a batch, thought of you, you know, here you go, kind of thing. So that we're at least there, we're on the radar, you know, here you go, uh, kind of thing so that we're at least there. We're on the radar, you know, where they know that we're there as neighbors and, uh, and

where the, w we seem to be helpful. You know, we seem to be approachable. You mentioned earlier before the show that, uh, these first Fridays here at Stubendale street parties, we have once a month with thousands of people come to our main street. I said to you, I was walking out of our cigar lounge and the band is playing and you've got, you know, all these Catholic moms and dads and children dancing. And you also have like some of the homeless folks dancing. Yeah. And some of the people who are clearly poorer than, but all together. And I just thought that's a beautiful way in which

the Catholics evangelize this town by inviting them to party with us. Imagine life before screens. This is it. You know, my father used to talk about my little town where I grew up, and he said that on Friday and Saturday night, the sidewalks were so thronged with people that you had to walk in the street. People were mixing that way naturally, you know, because they didn't have screens. Probably had something to do with the before uh, before the air conditioner too.

Yes. I would think. Yeah. Before the air conditioner. You got to go sit out in your porch to get some breeze and, and there's no entertainment at home. They didn't even have radios. My father couldn't, couldn't own a radio, even though some of people had them by then. Sometimes they, they would, uh, a store would have a radio in the window and kind of, you know, put the speakers toward the street to attract people.

Right? So you go and stand on the sidewalk with your friends and listen to the radio there. Even consumption of media was a social thing. Well, even my dad, when he was in the Navy, said that there was this gigantic tattered copy of the Lord of the Rings that everyone was on list on line up to read. I can't imagine them doing that today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, reading, for one thing, everything's instantly accessible, right? It's out there. If you want it, you hit the button and it's in your device.

There's no social interaction involved, not even browsing in a bookstore. That's something I miss because the number of bookstores has been declining. You know, we have browsing in a bookstore. That's something I miss because the number of bookstores has been declining. Mason- You know, we have one on fourth street. Steele- I do, I do, I do. I've spent money there. Mason- Well then, what should we as Christians do in the face of this technology that isolates us and sort of draws us into these antagonistic back and forths on social media? Could it be the case that there's no salv on social media. Could it be the case

that there's no salvaging social media and that we ought to do something a little more manly and dramatic, like quit it? No, I don't think it has to be dramatic. And I don't think it has to be a black or white. I think that we do need to engage it, but we have to make sure it doesn't become our life, define our life. But I do think that social media is created in such a way that it's actually better than you are. And in the sense of demanding your attention in a way that you don't have the defenses against. You may be right. I would imagine the vast majority of people are not yet aware of that fact, but it's true in their own lives.

Wow, you may be right. And at what point does it best us and you can keep talking about moderation, but it's actually something that you cannot use moderately. Maybe not, but. Yeah. Well. Talk to your spouse. See what they think. Yeah.

Honestly, talk to your husband. See if he thinks you use Instagram too much. Yeah. Marco Polo. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, you may be right, but right now I'm glad you're there, you know, and I'm glad you're out there and I'm glad your voice is heard in that wilderness. I'm pleased about that. I think that we do need to be there where people are and we need to meet them where they are. But we need to have flesh and blood friendships. We need to have flesh and blood community. We need to know the people next door so that, you know, we're not letting our city

go to pot because our real city is the people we hang out with online, you know, either the people we fight with all the time or the people who are who agree with everything I say and are always going to give me a super-sized thumbs up, you know? So, I mean, that's it. And it is a struggle for people, not only because of the societal circumstance where people are resistant to friendship or even contact with others, but also because people are shy, I'm shy, you know? So how do you do it then? And the best advice I have ever had was to cultivate devotion to the guardian angels, you know? That knowing that you, the guy across the table for me, has a guardian angel. And to ask the guardian angels help in this conversation that we're having now.

And that's helped me a lot in life as a very shy person. So if there's anybody out there listening saying, I can't make friends, maybe that's your way forward because it sure helped me. It started out with my confessor telling me to have an intense devotion to the guardian angel of my son who was a contrarian three-year-old. Yeah, I had one of those. So, I mean, you know, I needed it. And it was great advice for me to have a relationship with my sons of Guardian Angel. But eventually it expanded from there to to all my relationships. And I'm grateful for that advice to this day.

I know Jason Everett gave me the advice when I would speak to teenagers to invite your Guardian Angel to lead a rosary with all the Guardian Angels throughout his talk. Hey, that's great advice. Good for you. Yeah, when St. Francis de Sales, whenever he entered the pulpit, he used to just pause and look around. And someone asked him, what are you doing when you pause?

And he said, I'm greeting the Guardian Angels of all the people there. What a man. Yeah. Someone might be listening to this and they think, yeah, sure, I'd love to get into the Church Fathers, but it really does seem beyond me. Is there one particular letter or book that you would recommend that they read to maybe convince them that actually this isn't beyond you, you can read it? Bregman. Well, the two I'd recommend are the two that we've already talked about. And that's why they come readily to mind. Ignatius of Antioch's seven letters, which are beautiful. And you can get them free online at newadvent.org, slash fathers, you go there and you'll find

Ignatius of Antioch and his seven letters. They're written in 107 AD. Ignatius is someone who knew the apostles and was discipled by them. And you will be infinitely richer for having read those letters. The other one is the Octavius, Marcus Manutius Felix. Find it at the same website. It's free. It's a good read.

Who's publishing these things today though? Oh, today? Because I don't want to sit down and open up my laptop with a ton of hyperlinks and try to stay try to concentrate through that. I'd much rather hold a- I've written at least 50 books that are about the church fathers. Like this, like the Mino by Plato. We need someone publishing them like this. Do you know who's doing it? I'd much rather hold a I've written at least 50 books that are about the church fathers at this like the meano by Plato, like we need someone publishing them like this. Do you know who's doing it? Well, St. Vladimir seminary press. They publish little, little works of

the fathers. Um, th there's are the most affordable additions that you can get with just, just a little ones. They don't have Ignatius of Antioch. They don't have minutious Felix, but uh, but they do have a number of other writers and you'll benefit from any of those and they're good translations too. My friend Matthew Thomas is working on Clement of Rome right now for St. Vladimir's and it should be out shortly and that will be a great day in human history. Really? Yeah.

So, I mean, that's what I do in my books. What's this book? This is How the fathers read the Bible. All right. It's one I put out a couple years ago and I tried to show how the fathers did a lot of things, how they made friends. I have a book called Friendship and the Fathers. I tried to talk about how the fathers did these things, how the choir converted the world. I talked about how they used music and evangelism and catechetics and the healing imperative about how the fathers invented the hospital, how they invented healthcare as we know it, and what were their ideals,

what were their principles that they operated on. I want to give people these accessible ways to see the fathers and to read the fathers and to see them in context that they can't otherwise imagine. How did the fathers read the Bible? How did the fathers read the Bible? They didn't pull off the bookshelf. No, most people could not read.

And even if you could read, you couldn't afford a Bible. That would take a year or more of some scribe's work, maybe two years of some scribe's work, and it would cost two years' wages of a skilled professional. You're not going to have a Bible to own. So how did they read the Bible? They went to the liturgy, they went to mass, and there they heard the Bible proclaimed in the readings and then interpreted in the homily. And then they were immersed in the Bible throughout the liturgy because as we know,

our liturgy is made up largely of lines that are called from the Bible. So, um, so yeah, that's how they read the Bible. That's the bottom line. But I show, I show that, you know, through texts of the Fathers. As you read the Fathers, has that helped you interpret the Bible maybe in a way that As you've read, the Fathers, has that helped you interpret the Bible maybe in a way that others don't see? I mean, sometimes I'll read the scriptures and I think I have no idea what they're referring to and I think it probably has to do with the fact that I'm 2,000 years removed. Yes, that's a short answer. There's a beautiful series of books that's put out by InterVarsity Press, a Protestant

press, and it's called The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, right? And what it does is it goes through the Bible, verse by verse, every single verse of the Bible, and it gives you what the fathers said about that particular verse. So all the time, if I'm puzzled by a verse, I go there, I get like a dozen of the fathers

telling me- How big is this book? It's a multi-volume series. I could go to that. It takes up three shelves. Crikey. But that is the set I use more than any others. Not because it gives me the last word, but because it gives me the first word in my exploration.

Yes. I go and I see what the Fathers are saying and I say, I need to find that in context. And then I turn to my other shelves and I find the books. Would that be similar to Thomas Aquinas's What's it called the Golden Chain the yes? Yes. What is it in Latin? Yeah Yeah, so similar to that only this tends to give you smaller segments So then you go and you look them up in context to get the fuller richer interpretation

and you look them up in context to get the fuller, richer interpretation, but it's a beginning. Will Barron Have you, in your study of the Church Fathers, ever been led towards the Orthodox position? Because obviously Catholics are as enthused, or sometimes not as enthused, as our Orthodox brothers and sisters are. R.S. Thatcher Because I don't have a television and because my online interactions are fairly minimal for someone who has to maintain a presence

for his work. I live in the first millennium. I really do. And I really don't, I haven't had as much real time, real interaction with Orthodox Christians as I have with Protestants. It's just the way the neighborhood shakes out. So I don't have a lot of experience interacting with the Orthodox. You mentioned Father Jason, and he's one of the Eastern Fathers in my opinion. And he embodies it very well. I, by nature, am very culturally Western. I am at home when I read Cyprian, Tertullian, Minutius Felix, Augustine, Ambrose. I read them and I feel very much at home. Yeah, these are my people.

Yeah. They think the way I do, they talk the way I do. This is my world. I have a great appreciation for Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom. They're beautiful, but they are a little foreign to me. And I think in that sense, I'm living the way maybe Ambrose would be when he encountered their writings and he could see that they were foreign and he had to adapt them to his Western audience. Jerome accused Ambrose of plagiarism because he did this. He would take these Eastern works and adapt them to his Western audience. But you know, that's kind of the way I feel, you know, that this is all part of the same church. Yeah. You know, East and West. We should all be thinking along the same lines, even though we're thinking in different idioms.

Has there been a recent revival of interest in the patristics from our Protestant brothers and sisters over the last 20 years? Or has this always been something they've been interested in? It doesn't seem that way. At least back in the day when I would sort of evangelize or try to speak to Protestants about the truth of the Catholic faith, and I would refer to the Fathers, they were oblivious to that there. But now it seems like more and more they're referring to the Fathers too. R. No, I think it goes in waves, because if you think of Newman, you know, Newman identified as an evangelical, and yet he became a great patristic scholar, and it's that wave that made him, you know, it's that trajectory that made him become an Anglo-Catholic and then a Roman Catholic, you know, and it's a beautiful thing that you can witness happening in his

essay on the development of Christian doctrine. If you think of someone like Robert Louis Wilkin, you know, one of the scholars I most admire in our time, he spent most of his life as a Lutheran pastor and Lutheran scholar. So Robert Louis Wilkin, I think that yeah, it's happening in the Protestant world. The series I mentioned, the ancient Christian commentary on Scripture, that's put out by InterVarsity Press. And Matthew Thomas, the guy I mentioned, his own book on the early fathers and their reception of St. Paul came out from Erdmans, which is a traditionally reformed press. So yeah, I think there is increased interest in the Protestant world because even to Protestants, the Fathers are apologetically useful when you're talking to atheists and agnostics, because they witness to the growth

of Christianity, they witness to the early authoritative stature of the Scriptures in the Church. I have some questions that have come in from our local supporters, so if you're watching live right now, go over to matphred.locals.com and put in your question because I want to get to that. Okay. But before I do, I need to do two adverts. Okay. One is for Hello.

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I really, really just think it's a horrible, horrible thing. I've never beenlling Twitter. I really really just think it's a horrible horrible thing. I've never been on Twitter It truncates your comments to such a degree that It's very difficult to have productive anything and They seem to shadow ban and flat-out ban conservatives where the the leftist sort of nonsense runs a mark and gets a megaphone So if you're sick of that go go over and check out Parler. All right, I got a couple of questions here. Mitchell Godfrey says,

what do you say to Protestants who say the fathers are fallible, so we should go to the Bible instead of the fathers? Soloscriptura seems to prevent Christian curiosity about how early worship was done and how the faith was put into practice. Well, I mean, what I'd say to that is, well, how do you interpret the Bible? And, and, and why is it that there is so much difference about essential matters in the interpretation? The Bible just doesn't make itself clear to everyone. We all wish it would make itself, you know, as, as clear as the phone book, if anybody remembers what a phone book looks like. It's very clear what it's telling you and how you use it. Well, the Bible doesn't

do that. It's important for us to know how the Bible was interpreted by the people who received it, the people who perpetuated it in time, the people who preserved it through the centuries when there was no printing press, and they did this at the risk of their lives. So if you want to understand the Bible in its own context, it's good to read the Fathers. Yeah, if you've ever sent a text message to somebody who has then misinterpreted that text message, you should realize that text is tone deaf. That's one of the reasons sometimes you're like, this will take take a phone call because there's a lot more that you can put into your speech. Yeah, inflection pacing, etc.

Yeah, that's going to communicate something differently than if you have written the thing down and sent to them. I remember Pat Madrid and I think it was a debate with James White. Perhaps I'm not sure if you remember this where he used that sentence. I never said you stole my wallet. Have you heard of this? And then he emphasized each word showing that that word can be interpreted in. You know, I never said you stole my wallet. Or I never said you saw my wallet.

Or I never said you saw my wallet. Yeah. Or I never said you stole my wallet. I never said you stole my wallet. But, you know, that's I think that's a really good example. Yes, it is. Like, for example, John three talking about water and spirit. I have not gone to the father's nearly deeply as you have, but my little investigation of it, and I wonder if you concur, has shown that every single father that comments on that.

Where is that? John 3 15. Mm hmm. comments on that. Where is that? John 3 15? Thinks of it as baptism, right? Unless you're born of water and spirit, you won't have life within you. That means baptism. So, you've got every single church father saying this is what to be born again means. They seem to think it's obvious, right? Yeah. And it is really kind of disheartening that after 2000 years, we still haven't nailed down this baptism thing, which is the means by which we're saved. Or maybe it isn't. Like, we're not sure.

Some Protestants think yes, some think no, some think yes for specific people. That just seems so unlikely that the Spirit who's meant to lead the Church into all truth about essential things. These aren't like peripheral things, essential things. What's another example? Well, the real presence of our Lord in the Eucharist. Yeah. The idea that the church is the pillar and foundation of truth.

You know, all of these things. Or, you know, the idea that the power of the keys was given to Peter. You know, all of these things that are stumbling blocks today just were not so in the first millennium. I would say to anybody who's sort of like questioning their Catholic faith, and maybe they're looking towards Protestantism, as lovely as our Protestant friends are, and as much we have to learn from them, it can be very edifying to take a particular topic and to chase it down until you feel very satisfied as to what it means. I did that with baptism for way too long. My wife was like, it's a running joke in

our family where it's the thing I talk about. She's like, please God talk about something else. But I just did such a deep dive into that. And recently in a debate I did with a fellow called Cameron Batuzzi, I did a deep dive into the scriptures and the fathers on the Eucharist. And I just, after that, just thought, oh my gosh, this, this, the, the sort of the Baptist view of the Eucharist where it's merely a symbol and nothing more is just so not what the earliest Christians believed. Right. That's absent from, from the record of the first millennium.

One saved always saved would be another example of that. Absolutely. Absolutely. All of these things. And it's not like, it's not as if it showed up a few hundred years after. I think Calvin was really the first one to sort of perpetuate that. I've often thought this, that in order to believe that the Protestant Reformation was legit, you have to believe that it was an event on the

order of our Lord's incarnation. Because it cancels 15 centuries of Christian practice and Christian thought. It just cancels it. And it says, no, not that. All those centuries, all those prayers, not that, it's this. Something very different. So you have to believe that Luther's nailing of the theses was an event on the order of our Lord's incarnation. Mason I'm trying to think what someone might say in response to that who disagrees with you. Maybe they would say, well, look, we know that the scriptures are infallible, and inasmuch as the

fathers concur with the scriptures, they're right, but many times, you know, even Paul talks about people abandoning the faith in his letters. And so we shouldn't be that surprised that a hundred or two hundred years after the death of the last apostle, the people would be leaving the true faith. And so, no, we're not at all saying not that, but this. We're saying some of that inasmuch as it goes along with the scripture and this. I have a while back, about 20 years ago, I collected texts of where Protestant patristic scholars said everything went wrong. Oh, everything went wrong. Usually it's Constantine. Yes. Okay. At that point, we went commercial. Okay.

It's just ridiculous. You ever read that book, Roman Catholicism? I forget who wrote that book. It's that classic anti-Catholic book. Bepner maybe or something. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And that's his point. Okay. A lot of them make that point. Constantine, all right? Some of them will say, well, you know what, if you're looking at 290 AD, the church kind of looks the same as it did in 313. So they have to push it back further. And they say it's 180, because that's where we first see Christians having participation in the Roman military, that kind of thing.

So they're already compromising in that way. But the most honest ones will say, well, by 180, the Eucharist, the liturgy, all of this stuff, the evidence of the papacy, exercise of authority, it all looks Catholic by then. So that I can remember, I can't remember the guy's name, but it's a major scholar says that the faith was compromised by the very copyists who took down the words of the apostles. The very copyists who took down the dictation of the apostles were the ones who compromised the faith. And after that, it just kind of went silent

until Martin Luther. So you really do have to give Luther this exalted position in human history that I don't think he merits. Yeah, no, no, no, no, not at all. Okay, let's see here. Conservative Anglican here says Jonah, why would the Catholic church claim infallibility as opposed to inerrancy? It would seem that infallibility declares that the church cannot

whereas inerrancy claims that the church will not. Does it not make more sense to claim that the church will not err while leaving the cannot err category to the scriptures? I was under the understanding that it has to do with the way in which something's being communicated. So we could talk about a script being inerrant, without error, but infallible means something different. And you wouldn't call the scriptures infallible, I don't think, or maybe you would, but you would mean inerrant and likewise.

Well, I didn't understand the question, but I understand what you said just now. So I'll go with that. That sounds great. But when we say that the pope is and the church is infallible when it makes this sort of universal declaration, let's say, we're not necessarily saying that everything about that statement is inerrant or said as well as it could have been said. Is that right? That's my understanding. I'm not a theologian, but I love that somebody who's written 70 plus books isn't sure if

he's an academic. But I suppose you just mean by that you don't teach in universities and have any real desire to do you? I have no desire. Why not? Oh, because I'm so shy. I do like being in my house with my wife, with my children. You're not in any way socially awkward. Like you're very charming and it's funny when I think shy, I guess I mean, I think people

who are, don't like being around other people, but you seem to. This I enjoy. But, but, but I think, I think I think that that level of social involvement day after day would be difficult for me. I find this very enjoyable, but if there was three other people around here, it's almost like I don't understand the dynamics of how a conversation should work at that point,

and it exhausts me quickly, and then I leave. Maybe I'm that way too. Yeah, it's called the Irish goodbye. The other day I was at a dinner party, and I went, all right, I got to go. And everyone went, well done. We're so proud of you. You told us you were leaving.

You stayed a good amount of time. All right. Matt says one thing Protestants do well is weekly home groups where families meet to share a meal, study scripture and pray for each other. Would Catholics benefit from something similar? What are Mike's thoughts on this? Oh, of course. You know, anything that we do to interact with our neighbors that way. You know, as I said, I find this difficult. You find it difficult, Matt. You know, but anything that we

do in order to cultivate friendship with others is a good thing. We don't even have to make it about scripture. We could have it be a book discussion group so that we're reading something that's less threatening. A lot of people find scripture threatening, but they won't find a novel threatening. So some people might like that kind of thing. My son-in-law is very much involved in great books groups, and he's a tugboat captain, but he likes reading the classics and talking about the classics and he finds that to be a fruitful ground for the Apostle It's awesome Joey says after showing up with cookies. How do you do more than just be there? How to say more without being pushed away? I think

I'm always alert. I think most people if not all people are allergic to people having an ulterior motive Yes, like when a Mormon shows up at your door, you know they're just not there to chat. Right. They want to fix something about you that they think is in need of fixing and nobody likes that. So I, I, I just, I don't want to be that for someone else. I don't want to become your friend so that I can convert you. I would feel way too gross to do that. And that's not what you're saying.

When I was in college, there were people in the dorm who were involved with Campus Crusade and other organizations. And they would befriend you. And I felt like I was their project. And every now and then they let something slip about how we were talking about you last week. You know, and you think, well, you're like, I didn't know it was that interesting. Yeah, right. And it just made me feel icky. It made me feel like I was their project.

And I've even heard, one guy told me that there were women involved in the group who practiced what they called missionary dating. Now that would make me feel so used. I feel so bad. Finally, would make me feel so used. Finally these women like me. They just want to get me to church. Right. No, that's, that's pretty awful. Uh, you know, and I don't think anybody likes, likes being treated that way. Um,

so I, um, I, yeah, I, I think, um, so where's the line? Where's the line then? What line between? Well, if you're telling, OK, the line between getting to know somebody so that you can make them a Christian, if we agree that that's. I don't think we have to think about it that way. Friendship is a good in itself. It's a natural good that God has created us. He said it's not good for us to be alone.

Right. He made us to be social beings. Yes. He made us to have friendships. And we're not quite fully human if we don't. And what's alarming is that there's been this trend. There was a great longitudinal study done on social isolation, and it showed that the practice

of friendship has declined in the United States to practically non-existence over the last 30 years. It's amazing. Arizona State University, I think, and Duke University, they did this together. And it's alarming that people have kind of lost the ability to form friendships. On average, in the 1980s, we said we had three friends, three close friends, people with whom we could confide our problems, our deepest fears, whatever. And it's a large number of people now who say they don't have one. Not one. How sad. It's an awful way to live. It's almost, I don't know if the internet

It's an awful way to live. It's almost, I don't know if the internet, things are so transactional and so automatic that friendships aren't like that. Human interactions aren't like that. You have to have conversations with people. You have to care about more than what you're getting. You have to, hmm, wonder if we're being conditioned away from friendship. I hope not. You know, I do think that that is kind of fueling the the epidemic of suicide, you know, that suicide is a very complicated thing.

I know. But but there is a certain loneliness that I think is common to these people, you know. Bree says, How can I best explain to my father, who is a Baptist pastor, the need for the church fathers to better understand true biblical context and doctrine. He said if it was meant to be understood from my Catholic perspective, it should be plainly, it should plainly say it. All right. So I guess what she's saying here is I understand that you think that you need the church fathers

to interpret the scripture. Maybe this has to do with the perspicuity of scripture, this idea that if it's meant to be clear, it will be clear. Yeah. R. And everybody reads scripture from within a tradition. I mean, that's something that we have to show people. It's not like there's one way of reading scripture. We're all reading it from within a tradition, and the tradition tells us to emphasize these verses even though they seem to be, you know, to say something in conflict with these verses, right? So we privilege certain verses over others.

So when Jesus says, why do you call me good? No one is good but the Father. And then we see something else that says, I am the father of one, which do you privilege and then harmonize the other one with? That's right. That's right. So what the fathers do is they give us the, and really, I mean, we talk about the fathers, we're talking about writers from about 60 AD until 750 AD. So we're talking about a big stretch of time. And if you find a consistency from place to place and time to time within that period, you're finding something that's solid. You're finding a good foundation to build on. Her dad is very likely reading the

scriptures within a tradition. It's a tradition that says that the scriptures have to be clear. That's right. Who said that? Right, right. Why tradition that says that the scriptures have to be clear. That's right. Who said that? Right. Why think that to be the case? Right. So he's reading it within a tradition of reading the scriptures, and we can show him that we're doing that too. Only ours goes back 2,000 years rather than 500

years, and ours is shown to be consistent over the first millennium. Jonah says, has Mike read an apology of the Church of England by John Jewell? Nope. In it, he makes the case that the English Reformation is in continuity with the whole of patristic Christianity. This is why I think it's during the kind of Anglican revolt that Roman Catholic was a sort of almost a slur. Oh, sure.

Right. So it's funny that that, my understanding is it originated from the Anglicans to differentiate us from the other Catholics, which is why I'm not a, I mean, unless you're distinguishing between the different churches within the Catholic Church, like the Ukrainian church, say, or the Latin Roman church. I'm not sure when that when that work was written, but I'm sure that Newman engages it because Newman seems very much aware of that sort of thing. He was part of it. He was defending the Anglo Catholic position for so long. And he said, what he came to

realize was that he, he had to, he couldn't just stop at the fathers of the church. He had to go on to the church of the fathers, right? Because you could cherry at the fathers of the church. He had to go on to the church of the fathers, because you could cherry pick the fathers the way you cherry pick scripture to say a lot of different things. And he said, okay, so what happens when your church body seems to be doing something that's contrary to the faith? I believe that the incident that provoked the crisis for him believe that the incident that provoked the crisis for him was when the Church of England named a bishop for Jerusalem. Okay? And wait, well, why are we doing that? Why are we doing that?

Are we allowed to do that? And he started to ask these questions about authority. So Newman knew that he had to move. He had to move from the fathers of the church to the church of the fathers. There had to be a church that was authoritative in that way, and he did not believe that the Church of England had that kind of authority. William Palmer, I think, was the man who came up with the branch theory that the Anglican church was yet another branch of Christianity.

So that's how Palmer tried to deal with it. But Palmer ended up rejecting the branch theory and becoming a Roman Catholic. Do you think that we've lost a lot from this Protestant revolution in that maybe the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today is more Roman and French than it otherwise would have been should have England remained with us? That's a good question. That's probably the case.

I know a lot of folks who start attending the Anglican Ordinary and feel right at home in there because it's kind of part of their heritage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all part of our heritage, but you know what I mean. I do think that the Protestant Reformation, the revolt, forced a kind of martial law on Europe. Certain liturgical rights were suppressed because at the time there was liturgical anarchy going on in the wake of the Reformation. So we had to deal with that. We had to deal with it. And then the way they did it was by suppressing a lot of the rights and, and kind of, uh, unifying the Roman right.

And for the first time in history, liturgical books were possible. You could do this. And so everything became uniform and we're still living under martial law to some extent. We are very Roman at the moment. And I would say certainly more Roman than than we need to be mmm in what ways It's weird to me the cult of celebrity that we've invested in the papacy it's's weird to me that since the 1960s, we've made the popes into mass media icons and this kind of built in a crescendo through the pontificate

of Pope John Paul II. And I understand why a lot of Catholics were willing to exploit that and promote it and make it more, right? But it just seems weird to me that we would be so invested in every tweet that comes from the Holy Father, you know, that we need to take a stand on it. We need to be alert to it as if we're taking our marching orders from it or something. Or if you don't like the current pope, for whatever reason, I've got to react against it so that this tale is wagging the whole dog. It's very strange. How do we get away from that then?

Because this is the ultramontanism idea, right? That we're giving far too much authority to the- And I've long thought that that was true. Well, that's interesting. I'm glad to hear that because it feels like it's only today that conservatives have decided that we probably shouldn't be doing that. No, no, no. I've long thought that to be true. That it's this form of clericalism, clericalism on steroids. And maybe it is because that, you

know, the online world is so driven by celebrity that this is unavoidable. You know, you keep on forcing me into these corners where I have to look at it and be horrified by these media that I'm really not that plugged into. Mason Hickman Carl Keating said, we used to look to Rome, and this is, I think this is a great line, we used to look to Rome and this is I think this is a great line. We used to look to Rome to clarify the confusion of our parishes. Now we look to our parishes to clarify the confusion coming out of Rome. I think there's some truth in that.

Well, I I love Catholicism as a as a local phenomenon that is universal, you know, and and and when I read the works of the early Christians and when you get into the material culture, you realize that all of these Christians, these Christians who were growing the church at a rate of 40% per decade, probably were not entirely sure they knew the name of the current pope. And it would seem that our current Holy Father, who wishes to be seen as the Bishop of Rome, may be in favor of us giving him less attention in the proper sense. But, yeah, that may be the case. Yeah.

All right. Well, as we wrap up, what is the website? I think we've got the website to your web. Yeah, we do. We have the website to, we have the link to your website below, which is? Fathersofthechurch.com. And if there were a couple of books that you would recommend us reading of yours, given our conversation? Given our conversation, I'd say the one to go to is Friendship and the Fathers.

And you can find all my books that are still in print at CatholicBooksDirect.com, CatholicBooksDirect.com. It's so cool that you've been writing books for so long that you can actually use that sentence. Those of mine which are still in print, that's terrific. And what was the first book you wrote again? The Fathers of the Church was the first book I wrote on my own, and it is substantial. I wrote a couple others before that with others. Yeah. Good. Well, thanks for your time today. I appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here

And on such a platform and and and it's been a joy to spend the time in conversation. Yeah indeed. All right. Thank you