Become Who You Are

#687 The Decline of Western Civilization: Young Men Take Heart, You Were Born For This Battle!!

• Jack • Episode 687

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Jack discusses the decline of Western civilization, emphasizing the importance of faith, family, and cultural identity. He highlights the spiritual battle against ideologies that threaten individual identity and moral values. 

He then calls for action through the Claymore Battle Plan, urging individuals to take responsibility and engage in the fight for truth, goodness and beauty! There is no plan B! 

 The Claymore battle plan is a practical map for spiritual formation and cultural rebuilding. The goal isn’t outrage; it’s forming men who can love well, raise families, start businesses with integrity, and anchor parishes that become bright centers of mercy and truth. 

If you’re tired of false choices and hungry for a life that unites faith, work, and citizenship, this is your invitation to begin. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review with one habit you’ll start this week to live the third way.

Read Why Young Americans Are Turning to Socialism—and Why They Deserve Better 

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SPEAKER_00:

Good to see everybody. I hope you're doing okay. I got my warm weather gear on today. It's cold around Chicago. I think it was uh eight degrees or something like that this morning. So I hope you're in someplace warm. I want to talk to you about what's happening, this decline of Western civilization that we see around us. We work with young men, of course, with Claymore here. Claymore's a big sword behind me, as everybody knows, made famous by William Wallace. And these young men are waking up and they're looking around and saying, you know, will it a country even be here if we get married, if we raise kids, etc.? And that's a good question. Whether the country's here itself is a uh geographic location is one thing. But we've seen the the decline of Western civilization right before our eyes, it's been happening for some time in Europe. The only thing separating us really uh from Europe right now, we have a we have more people actually are practicing Christi Christians, patriots, and uh and and while much of our population and the baby boomers on down have fallen asleep at the wheel, have allowed evil to come into their own hearts and into the marriages and the families, and then that's the culture and that's the nation. Well, the difference is uh Donald Trump actually, if he would have lost that election, those of you who have been paying attention under the Biden administration, and I think it was uh God's uh will Trump would lose and then be able to come back in again because you saw the devastation and you saw that the what happens when evil comes in and the push abortion and these LBGTQ issues that go after kids. Uh it's amazing what's going on. And so John Paul II saw this a long time ago, and so did Bishop Sheen and some of the others that we talk about. And he always said as a prophet for our time, he said, look at yourself, the power of the person. What can I do? So many people will say, Well, what can I do? I'm only one person. Ah, that's exactly right. If you do your part and we come together, and that's what why Claymore exists, to get our own hearts back, to understand what marriage and the family are, which are the building block of every civilization. It has to be united with Christ. And we go out and change the culture and the country. God is behind that. In Matthew 20.4 or verse 4, Jesus says, You too go out into my vineyard. He knows this battle is taking place. You know, when Jesus came into the world, he didn't come into a perfect world, did he? He he came into a world at war. We're still a world at war. And uh and uh I'm gonna read you what we mean by this, and I'm gonna get into the culture a little bit, play you a couple clips of what's going on in uh in Europe right now. I want to especially I want to play a clip of a teacher there that's been arrested a number of times, and now he's been put into prison because he won't use pronouns in school where he teaches. It's it's insanity, is what it is. From Matthew chapter seven itself, uh, is just such a rich chapter. If if you're looking for something to read, read chapter seven of Matthew. It's got ask, seek, and knock, where we're we're asking, seeking, and knocking. And Jesus is coming into the story. This is where he talks about the broad gate, the broad highway, basically, that everybody's living on that goes to nowhere, and you should come in through the narrow gate. He talks about false prophets there, concerning self-deception there, where we deceive ourselves, thinking that we're doing good and and we're not. Then he's gonna say he doesn't know us. But the one I want to tell you about is hearers and doers. This is what we're talking about. You two go into my vineyard. Well, what do we do then? Jesus says this everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock. And when the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand, and when the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority and not as their scribes did. This is what happens in the civilization when we take God out. I mean, the the essence is we took God out of Western civilization. We ignored him, we rejected him. How many people don't go to mass anymore? And that's why Claymore again exists. Make sure you have the Claymore battle plan, download it. There'll be a link in the show notes if you haven't done that already. If just download that, start to follow it, start the journey with other people, tune into this podcast, and don't forget uh the handbook has been written. I'm working with some publishers now. Hopefully, we can get that to you sometime early next year. It's going to be a very important thing. And we're going to be looking for just to start out early next year, uh, 100 leaders in 100 different parishes around the Chicagoland area. We're looking for some because that's where many of us are from. But we can go across the nation. We want to work with 100 young leaders. You'll have the handbook. It'll be very easy to do. We'll be in communication with you and tell you how to plant those seeds. John Paul explained that culture, and in turn, a nation exists because of people, of course, because without people, there is no culture or nation. So the foundation of culture is ultimately the united body of all these individual hearts coming together to create either a culture of life, love, and truth, or a culture of death, division, and falsehood. That's why our founding fathers, like John Adams, said, you know, this country will only exist, this republic will only exist if we have a moral and religious people. He knows this battle between good and evil. And this is what we're seeing. This is very much a spiritual battle. So a nation, John Paul said, is a great community of men and women who are united by many ties, but by above all by culture. This community possesses a shared history that transcends the life of any one person or family. It's the shared history and culture that form the true foundation of a nation. What happens is, you know, we're getting this passed down from generation to generation to generation. This is why you're seeing the Biden open up the borders here, just like they did in Europe. And you have this invasion of immigrants. Now, we are a country of immigrants, and people get confused about that sometimes, but you can't just let them flood in the door. They have to come in legally, and they can't just come in all at once. You know, you have to be able to absorb that because you have to, you, you have to have a shared history and a culture, and the people that are coming in, when they came in, uh, my grandparents and uh came from four different uh different countries. When they did the one thing that united us, one from Denmark, one from Poland, one from Switzerland, one is uh she thinks she's French, Canadian, and Irish. Three of them were orphans, actually, my grandparents that when they came over here. So it was not an easy time. But what they did do is they came in with a Christian background and a Christian belief. Some were Protestants. Of course, my grandmother from Poland was Catholic, brought the Catholic faith into our family. But anyways, they had a set of moral, and they were moral and religious people. They didn't all you know exactly believe the same thing, but it was Jesus Christ, and that was the unifying factor, and that was what united us in this country. We were based on Judeo-Christian uh principles, our laws, et cetera, et cetera. And so we we took that for granted, and this is how we assimilated, you know, uh, people. If you let them in too fast, or people with just Muslim backgrounds that don't uh uh believe, of course, they believe in that Jesus is a prophet, existed, but don't believe that he's God, have a whole different set of values, et cetera, then they're not gonna come in. Then you have all these different cultures that will never come together. Nothing can unify them. So today's young people are faced with a culture in crisis and a nation in decline. At its core, this is a crisis of individual human hearts, men and women who have grown up in a culture that rejects God. And when you reject God, you reject love. God is love, and you see this vitraw and violence and objective truth, right? There is no truth. Because if you take God out, then who comes up with the truth? Well, it's it's just subjective constructs based on individual thoughts and feelings. There's no truth, only my truth or your truth. And how do you settle that? You don't. It just becomes violence when there's no objective truth. Something has to be to transcend us to be truth. To see where this path leads, one can look to Europe. Western civilization was built on a foundation of Christianity, but it's always it's already decayed so deeply that for all practical purposes, it's dead. And as far back as when I was in high school in the 70s, Bishop Sheen saw this coming, and the saintly uh prophet warned us already. So I want to show you two clips here. One is a clip of this teacher explaining that he's thrown in jail because he won't go along with these insane pronouns. And don't forget that these uh pronouns that people say, you know, call me him, uh they, them, you know, I mean, just insanity. They're an attack on human dignity. Because what do we do when, especially with children in schools, to, you know, they're told to take on pronouns. Well, these kids don't make this up, right? Somebody's telling them this. Well, if you take away a child's name, tell him he's not created, but he's an accident of history, that he's no longer unique and unrepeatable, one-of-a-kind person, but he's an interchangeable pronoun. We'll take your name away, your identity away, you know, your culture, your language, your music, whatever that is. You are you're just here by accident, just emotions and feelings. There is no truth. So make no mistake, Satan and the henchmen who uh cooperate with him, look for what? Power, money, control, prestige. But at the end of the day, they want to attack the individual human heart. They want to make you so weak, so confused about who you are that you just go along with anything. And this is exactly what they're doing, right? So let me play this clip for you.

SPEAKER_03:

This is Enoch Burke, the teacher who has refused to deny his Christian belief and vow to transgender ideology. We're here at the Four Courts again in Dublin, where Enoch's case was again before Mr. Justice Brian Cregan. And he has a number of matters to deal with today in relation to the case. But at the beginning, he says, he said if any member of the Burke family so much as speaks, they will be removed by Guardi. So this is the situation we are in. Lies are being told from the bench. Uh, Enoch Burke his name blackened, the uh constitution set at naught, the law disregarded, and if a person so much as speaks a word, they will be removed by a battalion of Guardi.

SPEAKER_05:

Judge Cregan today has given us a new version of the constitution regarding uh religious freedom. He said if Enoch Burke had practiced his Christian belief outside the gate, this would never have happened. He said it three times today. So he is telling us you can have your religious belief outside the gate. But you know that's not what the Constitution tells us.

SPEAKER_00:

It's uh it's amazing, isn't it? And so they're just taking that they're taking that power of they want to take their religion away. Well, Bishop Sheen talked about this a long time ago, that we're end of Christendom, he said, and this is on a television show he had. Not Christianity, not the church, he said, but Christendom. That's the economic, political, and social life is inspired by Christian principles. That's ending. We've seen it die, he said. Look at the symptoms, the breakup of the family, divorce, immorality, general dishonesty. And now we see control even by people in the governments, right?

SPEAKER_04:

We have rights and liberties, like freedom of press, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, which do not come from the government, which do not come from the will of a majority, which do not come from a state. These rights and liberties come to us from God. Therefore, the state cannot take them away. That is our principle. Now they have to deny God, because that would be another source of rights than the state or the party. In order to build up this structure of theirs in which the party is supreme, they must hold that any right or liberty which the individual possesses comes to him from the party. Therefore, the party can take the rights and liberties away. But if there was a God, then they were right, there would be rights not dependent on the party. So they have to deny God.

SPEAKER_00:

We're at the end of Christian Christian uh Christianom, like he said. We've we've we did this ourselves. That was in 1974. Today the situation is much worse, right? Now almost every institution, including parts of the church, have been captured by secular or these Marxists, we call them Marxists, just atheist ideologies, including wokeism, which threatens to destroy both people and their identity. Karl Marx made this big, of course, with uh these Marxist ideologies that we continue to bring into our culture. And uh he's an atheist, of course, and he said this we're not persons with an immortal soul, capable through grace of living in personal relationship with God, our creator. Rather, human beings are seen as dependent on a political party or an idea ideological group to uh determine the nature of man, an elite few deciding what humanity is, and the masses are expected to obey and conform to everything they dictate. This is completely destructive. Wokeism is part of an ideological wave that opposes personal identity, the body, male and female, stable family relationships, distinct cultures and languages, history, and the normal stable relationships that are part of being human. We live in a time when the murder of the innocent unborn is declared a right. Marriage and the family have been redefined into meaninglessness, and gender ideologies are aggressively being pushed upon children. Parents are forced to comply by a weaponized justice system. The only thing, and I've come up against all of that, getting thrown out of, say, of school board meetings, uh banned from libraries, just speaking about these kind of issues. It's amazing what's happening. And so that's why I said all of this, you know, we we've codified into law the right to kill our own children. We've codified into law that marriage is meaningless now, it doesn't mean anything. So we've seen the unraveling. You know, these are all sacred. The human person is sacred, marriage is sacred, points right to the Trinity itself, created right from the very beginning to what? To be united with divine life and love and that make that visible in this world. We forget about that. So we all went along with it. And so the only difference between, again, between what you just saw in Europe there, where they're just taking down the individual person, just they have to be quiet. They can speak about their religion quietly in their own home, but they can't do it publicly. And and we were right there. In fact, we're we're there. I'm from this the state of Illinois, you know, uh the attack on uh the unborn is amazing. And if they escape the womb, right, we're gonna use pronouns, we're gonna push these LBGTQ issues on them. The anxiety, the depression, the suicide among children is is uh skyrocketing. So this is even coming from pastors now. I want to play a clip of a pastor just to show you Satan even has his minions pushing mass murder of children from the pulpit now in some of these Protestant uh churches. You you can't make this stuff up. Let's play this clip.

SPEAKER_01:

Make them stop. Talking about abortion makes many people profoundly uncomfortable at dinner parties in light conversation with friends and family and too often in church, despite many people's profound discomfort with abortion, images, messaging, and moralizing about abortion are ubiquitous in our culture. Talking thesis, aggressive bumper stickers, and saccharine billboards, quoting scripture and invoking God's wrath to pave our streets and plaster our highways. Politicians stump on the issue, and state legislatures spent the last 50 years working to control, regulate, and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade. Their success was our failure. In the abortion imaginary, all people of faith are against abortion. This imaginary has colonized our minds, traumatizing many people with its toxic theology, and shaping a culture of stigma and shame that has silenced millions of women and people who have had abortions, erasing their voices, their stories, and their witness from the public sphere. As a child of God, I can certainly appreciate the lyrical beauty of this text as well as the descriptions in Jeremiah and Job of their certain knowledge that God was with them in the womb. I too feel that I am known by God in these ways. As a woman who has borne two children, I can affirm that I felt something sacred happening in my gestating body during those pregnancies. I can also attest that I felt God's presence with me as I made the decision to end two pregnancies. And I felt no guilt, no shame, no sin. While the liminal space of my womb and all fertile wombs represents the possibility of creating new life if pregnancy and gestation are to remain holy mysteries, they require cooperation. A forced pregnancy or birth is not holy. I cannot fathom a god who would imagine otherwise.

SPEAKER_00:

That's amazing, isn't it? You can't make this stuff up. You almost have to play that over again, you know. She is just promoting at the pulpit, a Christian woman promoting murder. This is just one of the commandments. It's amazing, right? When how far we can have fallen right now. And so I bring these up because we have to be very, very careful. When you say, you know, what can I do? Well, you have to speak up against this stuff. You have to do exactly what that pastor was saying. You have to be in that court that says, no, murder is murder. You know, Bishop Sheen reminded us that of the 22 major civilizations that have decayed since the beginning of history, 19 of those 22 rotted and perished from within. Not from an exterior force coming in, but from within. And we live in a day to day and we don't see this decline. Today, people have a sense that something's terribly wrong, but because they live day to day like the frog in a proverbial pot, conscience is Are dulled by moral relativism, there is no truth, they become apathetic to the evils of this present age. Conscience is close to death, they're easily manipulated by anyone who appeals to their emotions and feelings with words such as nice, kind, compassionate, accepting of others. You hear this this this uh this pastor. Regardless of what's objectively true, good or beautiful, they've forgotten that being kind is not the same as love. That to love someone is to will their good. What is good for them, allowing children to be murdered in the womb, rendered sterile, and have their sex organs cut off is not kind or loving. It's cruelty, disguised as compassion. This is the culture that you young people have grown up with. Because this was all kind of heavy. I want to play one clip, even though she's talking about some heavy stuff. Katie uh Hopkins, she has a she's from England and she does this great comedy piece. She's been in trouble in England. She'll probably be in a prison one of these days. But she's brave. She kind of moves around a little bit so she doesn't get arrested, I think. But anyway, she's talking about this totalitarian system again in England, canceling elections now. They're grasping for power in real time. They're throwing people in prison in real time. Tommy Robinson and those people that are standing up. This is a real battle going on. These people, like I said, they fell asleep, they turned away from God, they don't realize the evil that comes in. We're really fighting a spiritual battle here. We have to be connected to God. When you bring in all of these immigrants all at once, who do not share the culture, the literature, the language, the music, Satan and his minions go right to work and they bring them in to lute the population. You know, they keep us um addicted to to porn and abortions and all these ideologies, and and we just go to sleep. It's amazing what happens. So I I wanna I wanna play something from Katie. Give you just a little background on her, but she's she's funny as heck, but but uh she's speaking uh she's speaking the truth here.

SPEAKER_02:

I've had a lot of people moaning today about the Labour government. But really, are they really that bad? I mean, all they've done is just cancel a few local elections so there's no democracy at a local level, and now they're gonna cancel the mayoral elections, so there's no democracy at a more national level either, because they know Nigel and Reform would get in. And then they've also cancelled jury service so there won't be a fair trial anymore. The government can just lock you up without needing to go through any of the kind of pretense of having justice in this country. And they're also gonna install facial recognition software up and down the country so that decent British people just trying to go about their lives, do a job, earn their money so they can pay more tax for other people, can be locked up and stopped from doing anything more easily. But obviously, you can't target illegals because they don't exist, so you're not gonna recognise them on facial recognition software now, are you? And also, if you're wearing a burqa, you're probably fine as well. And also implement digital ID so that if they choose to, they can just close you down, stop you moving, stop you accessing your money, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, of course, they're gonna increase the benefits for people like Mohammed, who wants to bring his fourth wife over from Karachi. We're gonna increase the amount that we pay to those good souls for not working and producing babies that we're also going to pay for. We also do have one of the highest tax penalties in the whole of Western Europe, if not the Western Hemisphere, and we're paying the most for energy compared to anybody else in Western Europe. But apart from that, let me tell you, labour are not that bad. I mean, it could be worse. We could be living in Venezuela we could be living in North Korea we could be living in we could be living in R No, it could be worse, it could, because we could be, you know, dead.

SPEAKER_00:

It's amazing, right? They're throwing out juries. So, like this teacher goes in, he just sits before some woke judge and he gets can gets thrown to prison. I think they've given uh uh uh a couple years or uh a sentence just now, and it could go longer depending on his attitude, I guess, then you know. So why is this allowed? Because citizens have forgotten God, period. So I I just want you to wake up. I want you to see out there, I want you to pay attention. When God gets thrown out, this is what happens, and you can feel this in your own heart. So pick up the Claymore battle plan. This is why Claymore exists, right? There's two opposing forces out there right now fighting, and you have to be able to see those forces. One is built upon truth, goodness, beauty on the rock of Jesus Christ Himself, especially the beauty then of authentic love. If you want to know what that is, just look at Jesus hanging on the cross, the culture of life. This is my body given for you. The other is built upon lies, evil, ugliness. Look at that pastor. Especially the hatred of authentic love, the promotion of this culture of death will even kill our own children and will make a mockery of the people that are standing up. Well, John Paul II saw clearly these ideologies like socialism and communism. They sought to do what? To pulverize the individual human person first, reducing each individual to nothing more than a cock clog in the political machine. And if if you stand out against it, you'll be taken out. See, this is what happens. So this teacher, Katie, others will be just taken out. Now, if you stand up and promote this like this pastor, then the government will be behind you. You know, he insisted, John Paul did, that the extraordinary brutality of the 20th century, don't forget we had World War I, World War II. Millions and millions and millions of people were brutalized then. You know, this world needs a redeemer. Young people aren't even told about this in schools anymore. My father is a World War II veteran. He's still alive. I mean, and we're and it's going to get worse now. John Paul warned us about it. He said, what's happening as time goes on, this is all going somewhere. And this will end. You know, this temporal space will end. We have to build our house on the rock. And that's also, it's a win-win situation when you do that. You come into union in communion with Christ now. You go out and build the culture. If the end comes, the end comes. We're all going to die, and we're setting ourselves up for eternal life at the same time. Plus, it gives you an identity, meaning and purpose, understanding what marriage and the family is all about, how you find love here on this earth, and love that satisfies too forever, because it's connected to eternal love, right? John Paul said this in 1976. He was here for it was the bicentennial of our country, 200 years. He was here for the Eucharistic conference, and he and he said this. He said in a speech, I do not think that wide circles of American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this. We're now facing the final confrontation between the church and the anti-church. He saw what was going on in the church too. So he was aware of that when he became Pope. Then he went out. People criticized him because he made some bad appointments. He got some bad advice. Look at he's a human being. At first, you know, even he's prophetic. He doesn't have everything, all the knowledge, right? He was depending on people within the church to bring, you know, good bishops and different people to him, and he got some bad advice. You know, there's worse evil already in the in the in the Vatican. So he just he went out and he decided he saw there's a lot of evil people holding him back in the Vatican. He went out and he said, I have to go out to evangelize. And so what happens is, you know, we have to stand up for the truth. You know, we're facing the final confrontation between the church and the anti-church, he said, the gospel and the anti-gospel. You see that preacher, that's the anti-gospel. And this confrontation, he said, lies within the plans of divine providence, you know, God's plan. You know, it's a trial that the whole church must take up. He truly told the crowd in the speech to prepare for great trials, even martyrdom, if necessary. The renewal of the church, he said, which needs to be done, has always been brought about through suffering, and it would be no different in our time. He warned us it's going to be uh blood is going to be shed. And you go, wow. You go, how could that be? Here in the United States, well, don't forget, we just had the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. It's a vivid reminder of the truth of John Paul's prophecy and the demonstration that his words are even more urgent today. The battle we face is not primarily between left or right or any political factions. It's a spiritual battle between Christ and Satan. The forces of evil seek nothing less than the destruction of humanity itself. That's why Claymore exists. It's your call to arms, guys. The world is tearing children from the arms of God. It's sterilizing young bodies, it mutilates their innocence, it catechizes them into despair instead of the slight of Christ. But I know you're busy trying to decide how you're going to raise families or what you're going to do for a living at the same time. You have to follow that Claymore battle plan. Get down on your knees in the morning, et cetera, et cetera. Just follow that and inform apostles, right? Rebuild men and rebuild each other, marriage and the family, and go out and restore the culture. You'll do this as you go out into the world. You're going to bring your this Christian foundation into the world. So you got to recover that purity, that prayer, that discipline, that brotherhood, so you're not alone. And then we know what that mission is, to build on the rock, not the shifting sands of ideology. Claymore, then, Claymore battle plan, this three-step battle plan. It's not a program. It's a spiritual battle plan, a way of life, a call to sainthood, really, a response to Christ Himself. If we do not act now, souls will be lost. They are being lost. If we do not resist now, error will become law, as it is already. Look again with the things that I mentioned and brought up already today. These are being codified into our actual law. If we don't rebuild now our children, your children will inherit ruins. The solution to the evil of a day, we are, right? I am, you are. Everyone who hears these words of mine, Jesus said, and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The storm is not coming, guys. It's here. If Donald Trump had lost that last election, this madness, this evil that was unleashed during the Biden administration would have consumed us. The John Paul uh tube renewal center here. We felt that pressure, heavy pressure coming down, even getting canceled from social media. We're still on the edge. Uh Trump said that. He said, I'm in office right now, I'm in power now, but he could sense. He said, We're on edge. We could go either way, he said. So he's a he's a realist. You know, he's fighting his battles. We have a window there while he's in power. He brought a beautiful cabinet in. So many Christians, so many people of faith there, and you just feel like they're doing good things. But Satan is trying to twist and destroy and and even change his message. And he's again, he's he's not perfect. He's a he's a man, but he's doing some really good things. But now we have to do our part. What's the solution? I am. You are. Well, that's G.K. Chesterton, you know, when asked, what's wrong with Christianity? What's wrong with the culture? What's wrong with the country? He didn't try to blame somebody else. This isn't wokeism. I have to take responsibility. We have to remember our life is not an accident. You were born for this hour, and Christ is calling you into his vineyard. And he does not call the qualified, my friends. He qualifies the called. He qualifies each one of us. Now's the time. Pick up your cross, join the battle, enter the vineyard, huh? Hey, God bless you. Become who you are, Saint Catherine of Sienna said, and you will light the world on fire, huh? And gain eternal life at the same time. Hey, God bless you. Thanks, guys. Talk to you again soon. Bye bye.