Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#604 Claymore: "The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive": Rediscovering Truth in an Age of Lies
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Friday Claymore!
There's an awakening happening among young men today - a rediscovery of the sacred against seemingly impossible odds. Having grown up in perhaps the most toxic, propaganda-filled culture in history, many are now rejecting moral relativism and asking the fundamental questions that have driven men throughout all ages: What is the truth of things? How should I live?
Here are 4-5 discussion questions based on the episode:
1. Rediscovering the Sacred – Young men today are rediscovering the Sacred despite a culture that opposes it. What do you think is driving this spiritual revival among young men?
2. Crisis of Objective Truth – The episode critiques moral relativism and argues that rejecting objective truth has led to cultural decline. Do you agree that the loss of objective truth is a primary cause of societal issues today? Why or why not?
3. Spiritual Warfare and Society – Jack presents modern cultural struggles as part of a larger spiritual battle between good and evil. How do you interpret this perspective? Do you see current societal trends as part of a deeper spiritual struggle?
4. The Role of Culture in Faith – How can individuals and communities work to build a culture of life that promotes what is true, good and beautiful?
5. Hope and the Future – The episode ends on a hopeful note, quoting Pope John Paul II’s call to “Be not afraid.” What role does faith play in overcoming fear and despair in today’s world? How can people actively live out this call to courage?
Download the Claymore battle plan at the John Paul II Renewal Center website. Email info@jp2renew.org with questions or to invite Jack to speak at your church or community.
Jacks Article Referenced: “Love Written Into Our Bodies”- What Gender Ideologies Miss
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Welcome men of Claymore to Friday Update. I'm glad you're joining me. I hope you're doing well. I didn't get many emails or texts from you, so I suppose that you guys are doing okay. If you have any questions, don't forget the battle plan. Download the battle plan, walk in it with somebody and email me questions. So I must be answering them. Okay, you know I'm getting add. I think in my, in my old age. I don't think I had it as a kid, but I think you know all the distractions and stuff today my mind can go all over the place, but anyways, hey, it's great to be with you.
Speaker 1:Somebody asked me why I I put up a Trump hat in the back. Trump wasn't Catholic Jack, and a lot of people don't like Trump and if you put that back there, you're going to push some people away. I said, man, if you don't understand that God has used all through history, just read the Old Testament. God has used different people for different reasons to help us, to help all his people, and some of them understood it and some of them didn't. But God will use all kinds of people. Somebody said to me the other day but he's corrupt because he got divorced multiple times. I tell you what if you're looking for a person without sin to come into the world, what do you think Biden was? Donald Trump might've had some things in his past, but all you young men that stood up to vote for him this time, you know that he has something about him and he's not a corrupt person. He's not a perfect person. He's not Jesus Christ. Nobody ever said he is. So he said well, why is he back there? Because he is being used by God. That's my belief, and he's fighting corruption all over, and I'm not going to take the time to go into that right now. But just listen to Tom Hampson and I. We put out a show. We try to get out a show once a week. We miss sometimes because we're traveling or whatever, but we unpack the secular evil that's going on from the trans stuff I think we just put up this last week to those movements, to what they're pushing on you guys in schools and the pornography in the schools, to steal your innocence, obliterate your moral imaginations, have you look at a woman in a way as body parts and to use her right, and so all of these things. This is what you're waking up to. You're waking up to ah, ah, ah, there's got to be more, got to be more. That's where Claymore comes in, because Claymore's taking you where you're at and just saying, hey, dude, we all went through the same thing.
Speaker 1:And a man's waking up and he says what is the truth of things? How should I live? Right? So when I speak to men of all ages, this is one of the biggest things always how should I live? How should I live my life?
Speaker 1:So go back and watch Tom Hampson if you're looking for some of that. You know there's three core things about a man. He comes to the point he says life's got to be an adventure. I got to go out and say where is the truth? I want to live this adventure.
Speaker 1:We find out it's going to be a battle. And that's where the battle plan comes from, because this is going to be a battle and it always starts with your heart, your own heart. You know you can't give what you don't have. Too many of us try to get in relationships, try to find the right person, but we haven't become the right person. So when the right person sees you, you're not the right person. So she goes on to the next guy. Right, but it's a battle. It's a battle to overcome lust and selfishness and all the things that the deep state that Trump is fighting. Those guys and those girls did not fight those battles, they just gave over to evil.
Speaker 1:In today's reading, in fact, I might read you a little bit with scripture and stuff just from today, from today's reading, and I also talked about you think okay, well, this is complex. No, it's not. I knew it all in second grade. I must have been a little prodigy, right? I talked about my second grade experience with this and I'm going to link in the show notes, hopefully. I remember I just published an article in the Catholic Exchange talking about some of these issues and then linked my second grade story. So, hopefully, go there, go to the show notes, hit that button and link it and you're going to find it.
Speaker 1:When you start to look at the Claymore Battle Plan, it starts with your heart and I just want to start with this again just to remind you how important this is. This is an anxious time, right. We see a lot of things around us. Don't forget. Before you look at that phone in the morning, drop down to your knees. I do this every day. I love it, and the longer I do it, the more powerful it becomes.
Speaker 1:I kneel there. I have a sense of our Blessed Mother behind me here, kneeling next to me, at the Annunciation which we just had this week. That's when the angel Gabriel comes over and tells our Blessed Mother that she's going to be impregnated with God himself. What a wild, crazy talk about an adventure, huh, but this is the adventure that we're invited into. And so what does she do? Finally, she says be it done to me according to your word. I trust you. Then be done to me. I don't understand it all. That's what our Blessed Mother said. Go read Luke, chapter one, like somewhere around verse 25 or so, and then read all the way through 38, where she says let it be done to me according to your word. And so we don't understand everything, we don't see everything, but as we go through life, we understand what works, what doesn't work. It's practical stuff. So that's what we say. We're kneeling with our blessed mother. Be it done to me according to your word. In other words, I'm opening myself up.
Speaker 1:Second thing we know it's going to be a battle now. Well, that battle starts in the heart. It's temptation. When you get hit by a temptation. Remember, temptation is not a sin. Jesus himself was tempted. So what do we do? We don't push it down, we don't indulge it.
Speaker 1:Right, this is the pornography addictions and all this different things, food addictions, drink addictions. You know, god gives us the beauty of our sexuality, the beauty of a glass of wine, the beauty of food, whatever it is. But that's not our end. All you know, it's called temperance. Use and enjoy the things of the world, but do it, you know, improper, the way they are. So every time you're tempted, it's awesome because it's an invitation to prayer. See, that's the battle going on in your heart.
Speaker 1:You get tempted, boom, you're at the battle, you got the sword. You got the Claymore sword in your hand and you say I open myself up to God. I give you Jesus, I give you this temptation. Carry it with you on your cross and I'll carry my cross along with you. See, we're a body and a soul. We were always supposed to be filled with grace, but we live in a fallen world. We had rejected God, rejected that grace that comes into us from God, this connection, the branch on the vine. Jesus would often say right, and so we're a body and a soul. The default position. Just reality is sin and then death. There's a six-foot hole waiting for everybody, a whitewashed tomb, chiseled poise, right Ready to put your name and the last date on it. The only person that's ever overcome sin and death is Jesus Christ, and he gives this power to us, so that's why we open it to him.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful thing you can be praying all day with that Very, very important to do and the last thing become a person of love. You cannot give what you don't have. I get up off my knees and you look for that next person to love. Now, sometimes you know part of this spiritual formation that I'm talking about now. It goes on to daily mass readings. You know scripture readings every day. So this morning I decided I had a little extra time. I decided, instead of getting right up off my knees, I decided to read the scripture for the day. Sometimes I have time to do that in the morning. Sometimes I go later on, but this is from Jeremiah. This is from this morning.
Speaker 1:It's very, very cool because think about, as our country, what was happening to our country people walking away and God's trying to be there for us and see, this is what Donald Trump brought in, and this is what all of us did when we said no more to this deep state. We got to break this thing apart. The government was never supposed to be like this full of evil and corruption and just taking, taking, taking, taking until you have no more to give right, pushing this stuff down in our school system. The Biden administration takes a man that was married with three kids, puts him in charge. A guy that dresses up as a woman, really thinks he's a woman, puts him in charge of our mental health, for our country. I mean, this is how insane these people have become.
Speaker 1:When you reject God, you become very irrational, your reason becomes unreasonable and then the violence starts. It's always violence because, at the end of the day, it's Satan and he wants to destroy human beings. We're creating the image and likeness of God. If you can't kill God, you're going to kill the image and likeness of God in the earth. Right, take him to hell with you, and so this is what the battle's all about, you know, and so that's why we step into the plan.
Speaker 1:But anyways, I want to read you this passage from Jeremiah. This is from. I'm recording it the day before so you'll hear this tomorrow, but this is on Thursday and again, think about the United States here. But this command I gave them obey my voice and I will be your God and you shall be my people and walk in the way that I command you. That it may be well with you, but they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts and went backward and not forward.
Speaker 1:I'm going to stop here for a second. We think we're so progressive, these guys are so smart. These world economic leaders, all these crazy people that are in power, these little people, little tiny dots on the planet, so full of pride, right? Rachel Levine, who I just mentioned, that Biden put in charge of the HHS, the Human Health Services, said we're going to have Pride Month, in fact. Well, let's have Pride all summer. I mean, these people are just so lost.
Speaker 1:Pray for them. That's the good thing about being a Catholic and a Christian. We don't have to hate anybody. In fact, we're called not to hate them. Pray for them. Jesus came for all of us and that's a good thing, you know. But you got to point out the insanity, because they hurt all of us, right? But anyways, they think they're going forward and they're going backwards and it's so obvious but it's irrational, so they don't see it and it becomes violent. What is violence? Violence now comes from even somebody like Rachel Levine, pushing, affirming care, these puberty blockers and mutilation of little kids' bodies down into the culture. I mean you can't make this stuff up, but they don't see it. But we see it.
Speaker 1:So let me finish from Jeremiah here. So he says stubbornness of the evil hearts. And they went backwards instead of forward From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day now think about this God takes them out of Egypt, out of slavery, leads them into the promised land. This was the United States. Of the four grandparents I have, they all came from different countries to the United States, all basically coming out of Egypt right and coming to this promised land of the United States. That's why they all came. So this could have been written yesterday about us. I have persistently sent all my prophets to them, day after day. The Lord says I keep sending people to you telling you what the story is, telling you to change your ways, telling you what's gonna happen to the United States of America if we don't get it together. Yet they did not listen to me. They didn't incline their ear, but they stiffened their neck. They did worse than their fathers. They did worse than their fathers.
Speaker 1:So those people that were enslaved, people like Western Europe now. Most of my grandparents came from Europe, either Eastern or Western Europe, and now what happens? We've given up. Western Europe is coming down. I think it's probably past help. I mean, of course God can always step in, but it's in decline. It's to the point where, unless those people really rise up and ask for a miracle, they're in big trouble.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about a little bit more today. I can go a little long, because the good thing about a podcast you can come back to it, right, you can come back to it a little bit later, but for now, young men, against all odds I call this session have rediscovered the sacred in their own hearts. The glory of God is man fully alive? That's St Irenaeus. He was an early church father and he became a bishop. This is like second century. The glory of God is man fully alive? See, we bring God into the world, we proclaim his name in the world, we bring his glory into the world. This is our adventure, our battle and the beauty of the sacred. We want to bring it into the world. Well, this is what young men, against all odds what I mean by that is this toxic culture you guys grew up with. You're rediscovering the sacred and you're finding out it's here in my own heart. This is why we pray huh, to connect ourselves to the sacred. By the time I was nearing.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell you my own story, because this is the story People ask me. Well, why did young men start to wake up? They grew up in probably the worst, the most toxic propaganda culture, full of evil, full of pornography, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All kinds of things vaccines and this COVID and blah, blah. You guys have been hammered, yet something happened in your heart. You say, uh-uh, no more, there's gotta be something more. That's what we do. We're seeking the truth. See, our reason says what is the truth of things. So I'm gonna tell you my story a little bit, but this could be your story.
Speaker 1:I don't just tell stories for stories, because I wanna show you that this transcends our time, that this transcends our time. It goes back all the way to Jeremiah's time, where God's trying to wake people up. Right Now he's waking us up. He woke me up one day, he woke you up one day. We're on this journey at different places, different times. We're not going to be the same, right. We're all unique, unrepeatable persons. God's got your own adventure, your own battle to fight, yet we do it together. Right, we're taking on a common enemy, which is evil itself. Right. Which is lies, which is the profanity of beauty, right? So here's my story.
Speaker 1:By the time I was nearing graduation from high school in the 1970s I graduated in 1975, go do the math my friend, jimmy Patrick, was a young Marine. He was fighting in Vietnam. He had already come back a couple of years before that, missing both of his legs. The sexual revolution from the 60s was in full steam, so I was getting this garbage too, already Not as bad as you guys, because we didn't have those phones and stuff. Right, our country had passed a law giving us the right to take the life of our own children. In 1973, two years before I graduated from high school, we were already allowed to take the life of our, to murder our own children. I mean, this is how insane. It had already got right. And the church itself? The church was going through all kinds of changes and seemed to be as confused as I was.
Speaker 1:Simultaneously, I became conscious of a dark force in the world that opposed another force, that of my conscience. I said something's wrong. So I rebelled against what I didn't understand, causing more than a little strife in my house. I caused trouble. They didn't know what was going on, I didn't know how to articulate this thing, and so when it got really bad in my house my senior year, I decided I better get out of there. So the day I graduated, I threw my backpack in my car, I threw my bicycle on top I'm still riding a bicycle yet today and I drove off.
Speaker 1:I proceeded to spend the rest of my life, the remainder of my life up to today, trying to make more and more and more sense of those two opposing forces and to discover the truth, if it existed, and a path in which way to live. Isn't that what you're doing? These two opposing forces, this evil that we see in the world and a battle in our own hearts and forces of good and evil, and you want to be able to understand that so you can fight it off? And what's the best way to live? What is the truth of things.
Speaker 1:So today's young people are faced with a culture and a nation that's even deeper crisis and decline than the one I face as a young man. It's an age that it's a forgotten God, an age where 90% of young people ascribe to moral relativism, which means there's no objective truth. There is no truth. There is no right way to live. Are you happy with that? I don't think so. That's what you're waking up to. It's an age that has rejected the mystery of man fully alive and so has succumbed to a culture of death, turning man against man, in cooperation with evil to destroy himself. We'll destroy the baby in the womb. We'll render kids infertility right. We'll render them infertile. We'll destroy each other. And you see the war, one war after another. We don't care Pharma right, injecting you with as much garbage as they can, some of it good, some of it bad.
Speaker 1:Look at what Trump did to replace Richard Levine and put in a guy like Bobby Kennedy who actually cares about us. He's already changing things within a month or two, right? Trump's changing things. He's got Doge in there, getting rid of corruption and all this waste. This is our money, this is your future right. So no longer satisfied with murdering his own children. Man goes further in this Biden administration especially, but it was going on before him. I said this is in the 70s already.
Speaker 1:So man pursues a false and dangerous gender ideology that seeks to render again fertile, mutilate the very bodies of our society's most innocent and defenseless. I bring it up again because when you look at children, you think what kind of society does this to children? Worse, these horrors are codified into law. It's the law of the land, putting a mark on our whole nation. So it's one thing for us to do evil things, it's another thing for us to put a stain on our nation, and that's what we did through abortion, these gender affirming laws that we put in. See, this is what I was reading about, jeremiah, that our whole nation was coming under this evil. You're always going to have evil people. But now our nation says, yeah, this is our law, this is how we're going to live. And that's what the beauty of Donald Trump in his first administration pushing abortion back to the states and taking it and saying no, no, no. This isn't a blight on our whole country. If you want it, it's yours to take, it'll be on your conscience, but it's not on the nation's conscience. That's a big thing and that's one of the reasons they hate Donald Trump for that. When you're evil, you're going to hate that point that we just can't randomly just outgo and kill every little kid that's in its mother's womb anytime we want right.
Speaker 1:In rejecting objective truth in God's plan for human flourishing, including his plan for human sexuality, the evil one is leading many to participate in a revolutionary attack, not only against children, but against marriage and the family as an institution. This is their real goal right To take out marriage and the family, the fallout and damage from rendering marriage meaningless. Don't forget we had that Oberfell and Hodges in 2015 that said, you know marriage is meaningless. That two men could get married, two women could get married. You could probably marry a tree outside if you wanted to. It's just crazy. Well, that idea was being pushed down into our whole culture and being forced on us. See again, it's one thing for you to believe that I'm not going to condemn people, whatever, but don't push this on my kids and don't tell me that I have to look at marriage that came down to us from the very beginning and say, yeah, now, all of a sudden, we're so progressive again. You get back to that progressive. We are full of pride. I can tell you what's good and evil. I'll be like God I'll make the rules right.
Speaker 1:So, as the base building cell of civilization, when marriage and the family is threatened and as society itself ever becomes more atheistic, it becomes increasingly what Irrational and more violent. You see this again. Consider the irrational attack on Elon Musk and the violent bombing of Tesla stroll rooms, no different than the BLM and the Antifa riots. The burned down cities destroyed many minority-owned businesses. Right, these are minorities protesting against and burning down their own people's businesses.
Speaker 1:You can't make this stuff up. You know. It is the primacy, as Bishop Fulton Sheen pointed out, of action over reason. That's what happens with these Marxist ideologies. Right, you just act. They get you all riled up because it's just about emotion, and then you act. First you act burn down a Tesla facility or a showroom, and then you think about it later on. Okay, what did I do? You see these people keying Teslas right now. These are older people. They should know better than that. What are you doing out there? Getting caught? They're going to be thrown in jail now, some of them maybe for five, 10 years. I mean, did you think about that before you did this. No, because it's an irrational attack.
Speaker 1:And I bring these things up over and over again because you guys are waking up and you say what is the truth of things? Well, truth is always seeking what it's. Reason and truth work together. So my reason that's in my heart and my soul within me is seeking what it's, seeking the truth. What is the truth of things? Well, the truth of things is you don't go out and destroy people's property. Elon Musk isn't hurting us. Isn't it amazing that we're attacking Elon Musk? Who's the messenger? They attack the messenger, not the corrupt politicians that are stealing our money, wasting money by the billions. But who do we attack? We attack the messenger. It's the irrational insanity, and pervasive evil has become impossible to ignore. Just when it seemed to reach some sort of climax, like it can't get any worse. I was telling people, I said I don't know what's going to happen if kamala harris gets in. This country's going down. I guess you know.
Speaker 1:And then something amazing began to stir in the hearts of young men, especially the world that so desperately sought to obliterate your moral imaginations, deprive you of all that's true, good and beautiful, instead has woken you up, against all odds, to a rediscovery of the sacred. And guess where you found God? Huh, residing in your own hearts. So there's a little bit of a disconnection right now, and so what happens is we want to get you into prayer and the sacraments, because if you don't feel God yet in your own heart, you just feel like something's wrong. We're going to get you into prayer so that you can understand that, that God is within us, that we're a body and a soul, but we were never supposed to be disconnected. Our souls, our spirit, our souls are supposed to be connected to the Holy Spirit, to God himself, and this is the powerful story that we live. Right, it's amazing, amazing, amazing thing. So what are you discovering? That it's foundation.
Speaker 1:There have always been two worldviews, from the very beginning. Read Genesis, chapter one, two, three, two systems that humanity is free to choose from the city of man, which is a rejection of God, where man makes himself God. This is what I was saying about the culture today. Right, when you can kill babies, render children infertile, pride month, pride, summer, what is he saying? Really, we can be like God. This is from Genesis, chapter three, deciding what is good and what is evil. The city of God is the alternative. We say, nope, I'm going to reject that. I'm going to get down on my knees and I'm going to open myself up and I acknowledge God and I go out to seek what, the truth, and asking how shall I live? See, a nation doesn't exist without people.
Speaker 1:A nation is made up of these people, in a sense, right, in a sense it has a soul. John Paul would say so, I have a soul and the country has a soul. Well, how does this country have a soul? Well, it's, the foundation of a nation is ultimately the united body or force of individual human hearts coming together to create either a culture of life, love and truth. Right, that's what we're called to do and that's what you're waking up. This is why we go on our knees. We want to become this divine life within us and then we want to take that goodness, that truth, that beauty out into the world. You cannot give what you don't have. So the soul of the nation is made up of soul of all our people. That's what creates the culture, right? So we come together and this is the beauty of our nation and our founding on Judeo-Christian principles, right, the dignity of a person, the inalienable rights of a person, that we're all equal.
Speaker 1:Now, we didn't create a perfect country. You know why they didn't create a perfect country? Because it's made up of us, of people, of fallen people. But the documents are incredible documents, just like the gospel, just like the church itself. She's perfect. What's the problem with the church? Same thing she's made up of people, fallen people, sinful people, sometimes people that want to take down that church. So don't forget that it's not the nation that's systemically racist, it's all the people that are evil in the world.
Speaker 1:And I meet all kinds of people all the time. Most people, I would say, are good people, at least they try to be good. But at the end of the day, we got to stand up for all that's true, good and beautiful, or we lose it. So that's the other side, right. So you either create this culture of death that you saw all around you or you reject that. And so the nation, in fact, is a great community of men and women who are united by various ties, but above all, precisely, by the culture it creates.
Speaker 1:My grandparents came from four different countries. They didn't even speak the same language. They all learned how to speak English, but that wasn't enough. The great community of men and women who, in turn, form the culture. Right, we all lived within a block and a half of each other in the city at one time, maybe within two blocks Aunts, uncles, grandparents, on both sides. Well, what brought that together? Some were Polish, some were Italian, some were Swiss, some were Danish, I mean all these different people around us, you know, and why did we? We're such a great community? Well, the great community of men and women who, in turn, formed today's culture and extended through time and then through human history, were first educated and formed by their culture.
Speaker 1:So what was their culture? They learned the United States. They came to the United States, they read the Constitution, they understood the Constitution, they were church-going people, they were Christians. They were different denominations. Some of my grandparents were. My one grandmother was Catholic, the other ones weren't, they were Protestants.
Speaker 1:But anyways, they come together under these Judeo-Christian principles. You could be Muslim, but you say no, we're not going to kill, we're not going to lie, we're not going to steal. Here's what this country is made out of, right, and at the end of the day, you take our Judeo-Christian principles out, everything starts to come down. So this is what the Biden administration and some of these neocons that want wars all over the place, these people that want to suppress the deep state. They want to take God out. The problem. When you take God out, you take human beings out with them and everything starts to come down right. So that's the foundation for our nation. Our foundation, our culture, is made on these Judeo-Christian principles, right. So let me figure out a way to wind this down for you guys.
Speaker 1:Today, we're faced with a culture and a nation in crisis and decline. Ultimately, this is a crisis of individual human hearts, men and women who have rejected objective truth and instead have embraced subjective constructs of individual thoughts and feelings. That's why the danger when 90% of young people say they're moral relativists, 70% said they're socialists. In other words, they've given up on the truth. They're just getting blown around by the spirit of AIDS. You will never be a hero. You'll never be able to understand what the adventure is about. You'll never understand what the battle is about between good and evil if you're a moral relativist, because there is no good, there is no evil, it's just my opinion, or your opinion. The baby in the womb eh, I'm against abortion, but if you think you should kill a child, then that's up to you. No, you got to stand up for objective truth. That's the only way that this lasts right. It can't just be individual thoughts and feelings. You see this already in Europe. If you want to see just a little bit ahead, western civilization in Europe as a whole, for all practical purposes, is not only declined, it's dead. Now you see sparks of people rising up again, right, so we pray for them, huh?
Speaker 1:So let me start to wind down with this Bishop Fulton Sheen, one of my favorites. He had the number one rated show on television when I was a kid. So Bishop Fulton Sheen, one of my favorites, he had the number one rated show on television when I was a kid. So Bishop Fulton Sheen, saintly long-ranging spiritual vision he had. He saw the roots of this decline in today's crisis already growing in 1974, before I got out of high school, warning of a crisis in Christendom. He called it. First of all, we're at the end of Christendom, he said. He said solemnly during a television show Not Christianity, he said, not the church, but Christendom. That is, economic, political and social life inspired by these Christian principles we're talking about here. He said that is ending. We've seen it die.
Speaker 1:Look at the symptoms, he said the breakdown of family, divorce, immorality, general dishonesty. We see all of that right. People don't care about lying, stealing, going into stores, robbing stores right now. That was in 1974. Today we know it's much worse. Almost every institution has been compromised by corruption, including the church.
Speaker 1:And again it's not the beauty of the church itself. She's holy church. And again it's not the beauty of the church itself. She's holy. It's those bishops and cardinals and priests and all of us that go to church that have not given themselves over to jesus christ, that don't know what the truth, what goodness is, and live that out, live out the beauty of god himself, to take god deeply within us. This is why it's not enough just to talk about Jesus. I have faith. Well, faith in what and what do you believe? Satan has faith. Satan believes in God. He's seen God. It's not enough to have faith, dude. What do you have faith in? That's what I ask people all the time. The murder of the innocents now is a right. Marriage and the family have become redefined to mean anything and so nothing. Gender ideologies are pushed on children and parents. They're forced to comply by a weaponized justice system.
Speaker 1:Bishop Sheen reminded us that of the 22, two, two major civilizations that have decayed since the beginning of human history, 19 of those 22 rotted and perished from within. It wasn't an exterior enemy, it was rotting, moral rot. And this is what we're facing here in the United States. But we live in a day-to-day and most people don't see the decline until finally. Now, you say, they start to wake up. But the people that are waking up, see, oh, I'm in a battle because the other half of the country and we're almost 50-50, the other half of the country has given over to evil. It's really something. Again, you know, it's our job to pray for them.
Speaker 1:But Christ says it very clearly. You know, in the gospel, many, many times, you are of your father the evil one, so he says, hey, you know you are of your father the evil one, so he says, hey, you've given yourself over to evil. So it's true, today many people have a sense that something's terribly wrong. But because they live like that frog in a proverbial pot, consciousness is dulled by moral relativism. They become apathetic to the evils of the day. So, consciousness, their conscience, close to death.
Speaker 1:They're easily manipulated by anyone who appeals to their emotions and feelings with words such as kindness, compassion. We see this in school. Be kind, be compassionate, don't judge anybody, don't judge anything. Well, we don't judge the person, but we judge the action right and we see the damage that can be done when you have dysfunction for little kids that are being sexually abused or brought into a home without a mom and dad, you know, ripped away from their mom and given to two men or whatever you know. We're not looking at that baby, we're not looking at what's true, what's good and beautiful for a child not to have a mother and not to know their mother, or to know that they were just taken the very first day they were born from their mother's womb and taken away. Situations like that happen. But when you do it purposely, purposely Now, I know women that were teens that had babies and gave those babies away for adoption.
Speaker 1:That's a different story than a surrogate. That two people come together, say two men, to buy a baby and then take that baby from its mother's womb and raise it without a mother purposely, for money, for profit, and you just go wow, dude, this is like a business and industry now. So these are the things that we're fighting against, right? These are big battles right now. So this confrontation, as I wind down here, and it is really in the human heart, it's about human liberty, it's about your hearts, and so we step into a story and we're trying to make sense of this. You make sense on your knees, reading scripture, praying, inviting God back into your heart, realizing what's going on.
Speaker 1:So there's these two confrontations, right, they have two dimensions. I should say an interior dimension of the heart and the exterior dimensions. See, man's not a pure spirit, so the human person's not solely interior, like a spirit, but we're exterior, we're of the earth and we're spirit. So we live in this world right now, in this temporal plane. So we're embodied souls, so we're filled with God and we either bring the goodness into the world or we twist, we allow Satan to twist and distort who we are and we bring evil into the world, right, so we're expressed in the culture. It's called the culture how all these different human beings come together, what they believe.
Speaker 1:Law is very important. We have to push back against laws that are not just right. The culture, then, is this mode of living which is specifically human. Animals don't have this culture, they run in packs and stuff, but we can form a whole nation under a good, solid foundation. We saw that we did that already with the United States, the most homogenous nation in the world. Don't let people tell you that it's an evil nation or whatever. Every single race, every single nationality is here in the United States and it worked. It worked because we had these foundational documents in place by our founding fathers. What's true, good and beautiful. Not that the country was not perfect, but the documents are the most incredible documents. We became the most powerful nation on earth. Why is that? Why do we accept everybody into here and let them build up a life of freedom? And you hear all these people saying, no, it's an evil country and stuff. Go around the world. People are very, very naive, but we were almost there.
Speaker 1:We were into that decline that Bishop Sheen was talking about, and this is a tremendous battle. Support the politicians that are talking about freedom, building a culture of life and taking away from this culture of death. Right, that's the culture of life and truth or the culture of death and lies. Finally, there's a voice that the faithful hear that the tyrants of this present age who are seeking to build the city of man have rejected. This is from Revelation, the book of Revelation.
Speaker 1:And he, god, jesus Christ, god the Father, the Holy Spirit, and he who sat upon the throne said behold, I make all things new. And he said write this, for these words of mine are trustworthy and true. And he said to me this is John who's writing this down? And it is done. I'm the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
Speaker 1:To the thirsty, to all Ooh, we're thirsty, huh, we're looking for something more. I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life that flows from God himself. He who conquers shall have this heritage and I will be his God and he will be my son. But for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, the liars and their lot, they shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. So you're going to die. And now boom, we get taken to heaven or we have the second death, we go to hell. I mean, how sad is that? Listen in your prayers and you will hear the voice of John Paul II calling out, encouraging us be not afraid. Huh, be not afraid. Hey, God bless you. Don't forget my info's in the show notes. If you have a question, if you need help with something, email me. We're always glad to talk to you.