Dec. 24, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
48:38
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unidentified
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O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, | |
| until the Son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. | ||
| O come, thou dayspring, come and heal our spirits by thy covenant here. | ||
| Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death's dark shadows put to flight. Rejoice! Rejoice! | ||
| Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. | ||
| Okay, welcome to the War Room. | ||
| It is Friday, the 24th of December, the year of Ruler 2021, and thank you for joining us on our Christmas Eve special. | ||
| We are going to do something a little different today. | ||
| We're going to bring in some people that are Very close to the show throughout the world. | ||
| We're going to have Ben Harn will first join us from the Vatican. | ||
| We got Father Robert McTeague will join us, a Jesuit, will join us later in the show. | ||
| Also, Rayburn Abraham, a Coptic Christian, talks about the Middle East. | ||
| Jason Jones about Christians in the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity. | ||
| So today, talk about the music, talk about the art, Captain Maureen Benn is going to be here, so a lot to get through today, but a little change of pace as we talk about the traditions of one of our most sacred holidays in the Christian calendar. | ||
| I want to bring in first from the Vatican, Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Ben, can you hear me, sir? | ||
| I certainly can, Steve. | ||
| Merry Christmas to you. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| Ben, tell us exactly, tell us where you are. | ||
| Tell us exactly, put us in the location. | ||
| I'm standing right inside the Piazza San Pietro, St Peter's Piazza, which is in front of the Vatican Basilica in the very heart of Rome. | ||
| I want to make sure people, tell us about your journey. | ||
| I consider you're kind of a double convert, right? | ||
| And you've lived in Italy, and we've been working together, I don't know, what, six, seven, eight years? | ||
| Maybe longer, but you've been in Italy, I think, for a dozen years, but you are an Englishman. | ||
| Talk to us about your double conversion, and how do you end up here celebrating Christmas? | ||
| Well, Winston Churchill said that anybody could rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to double rat. | ||
| And I suppose that's what I did. | ||
| First of all, let's see, about the opening years of this millennium, about 20 years ago then, I was received into the Church of England. | ||
| And then over a relatively short period of time, actually, after years in preparation, I'm not going to make any judgement against Anglicans or against the Anglican Church. | ||
| I still have a great deal of affection for both. | ||
| But I had this sentiment that the Church of England didn't have any authentic ontological roots, if you will, that really preceded the English Reformation. | ||
| And at that stage, towards the end of his pontificate, I was quite attracted to the testimony of John Paul II. | ||
| was willing to take a risk on the belief that the Catholic Church was in fact the church founded by Jesus Christ. | ||
| Tell me about your time in Italy, and what is Christmas for our audience, since it's Christmas Eve? | ||
| What is Christmas in Italy like, and what is Christmas in Rome like? | ||
| Well, typically Italian, Christmas is a culinary feast as much as it is anything else. | ||
| Italy is famous for the fact that each one of its regions has specialities especially when it comes to desserts and all of these are on display here. | ||
| There's traditionally on Christmas Eve today a fast so Italians might traditionally have something light of a fast type nature fish-based, and then the main meat courses, courses plural, will come out tomorrow. | ||
| What about the religious part of that, and particularly around the Vatican, as you lead up to the end of Advent and then into Christmas? Walk me through that. Well, perhaps in the UK, if I can put it like this, Christmas starts for a lot of people with the lessons of carols from King's College, Cambridge. | ||
| And that's when most people, well some people, can sit back in their arms and think, yes, okay, here we are, Christmas. | ||
| Or when the Queen makes her Christmas address. | ||
| Here in Italy, it's typically the Pope's homily at his Christmas mass, his Christmas morning mass, which will Which will let Italians feel, so now here we are in Christmas. | ||
| And Italians, strangely perhaps, in the English-speaking world, tend to go to church, they tend to go to Mass, especially around the big feasts. | ||
| Most people do this, literally the majority of people do this, even people who don't believe, which is a curious sensation, but it's an illustration perhaps of the fact that historically Catholicism here in Italy has had such a dominating cultural contribution to Italian's way of life. | ||
| What are the big festivities leading up to Christmas Day? | ||
| Is there a specific calendar in Rome or at the Vatican? | ||
| For those who haven't been in Rome, the churches are so amazing. | ||
| The basilicas are so amazing. | ||
| Every other block, you just have a completely stunning basilica or church and the art. | ||
| You walk in and you've got a Caravaggio above the altar, or one of the altars on the side. | ||
| Is there a set grouping of events that lead up to Christmas Day? | ||
| Well, not surprisingly, I suppose, considering that the nativity scene was created by Saint Francis of Assisi. | ||
| The nativity scene is something that has a massive cultural space in Italians' religious lives, and most churches will try to outdo themselves with, in typical Italian fashion, which is obviously to say, not to downplay anything, will have huge nativity scenes in their churches, typically perhaps even life-sized, and these will cover many, many square meters, and that's something that is | ||
| Has a great popular devotion here. | ||
| What has been with the tourism? | ||
| I know, look, the two the two greatest Christmas cities I've been to are Paris and London. | ||
| But is the tourism this time of year, what is it like? | ||
| And has it been has it been dramatically impacted by Covid? | ||
| Yes, it has, if not by Covid, by the countermeasures that the Italian government has taken. | ||
| To contrast Covid, yes it has. | ||
| There are visibly less people out on the streets. | ||
| Most people are keeping to limited social gatherings, limited to their family, in their homes. | ||
| And this is directly due to the Covid regulations that the government has taken. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| This year is pretty much the same as last Christmas with that regard. | ||
| You know, when I've spent so much time in Rome and Italy with you over the years, one thing that always strikes me, and you see the same thing in London and in Paris, you have these tremendous, these beautiful churches, but for many aspects, a lot of them are empty, even during the religious services. | ||
| Do the churches themselves start to fill up at all? | ||
| Do they start to get more crowded during the holiday season, or is attendance still an issue? | ||
| Well, I have to say, here in Italy, and I spent a number of years before coming to Italy, I spent five years in Belgium, and that is very much, as you say there, huge, magnificent medieval churches and medieval cathedrals, which are basically empty. | ||
| That's not the case here in Italy. | ||
| People do come to church. | ||
| They come to church on Sundays, the churches are normally full, and they certainly come around the big religious festivals. | ||
| And also, perhaps untypically, it's not my experience being a Mass goer in the UK or in, not in the UK, not in Belgium, but there are a lot of young people who come to Mass here in Italy. | ||
| What is driving that, what is that driving that interest back in the Church? | ||
| Because you are seeing it here, and I know you're seeing it in London somewhat. | ||
| What's driving this young people's coming back to the Church? | ||
| I think there are a number of factors. | ||
| Certainly people are still quite influenced and touched by the witness of John Paul II. | ||
| That's definitely a big thing, right? | ||
| And the famous, inverted commas, John Paul generation. | ||
| But there's also a wider thing going on, I think, in the culture that people are starting to question their roots and their identity after a conscious or subconscious feeling that these things have been suppressed. | ||
| Politically, for a number of reasons. | ||
| Some of them, some of those reasons ostensibly one can understand. | ||
| Like the idea that in a culturally dominant post-Christian society, with the presence of other religious minorities, to be heavily visibly Christian in the public sphere might make those minorities feel unwelcome or elitist. | ||
| That's not my experience, by the way. | ||
| It seems to be something more pushed from our elites at the governmental and the civil service level. | ||
| But having grown up now, really, two generations from the 60s onwards, that have had this militant secularism forced on people, people need, on an anthropological level, some sense of continuity within their culture. | ||
| And I think that, more than anything else, It's what is driving the huge representation of people younger than me within the traditionalist movements. | ||
| That is to say, politically traditionalist movements, but also the religious traditionalist movements. | ||
| And there's obviously a link between both of those movements as well. | ||
| I tell you what, Ben, can you hang on? | ||
| Ben Harnwell is in Rome. | ||
| He's our international editor. | ||
| We're doing a Christmas Eve special. | ||
| We're going to be bringing in a number of people throughout the next couple of hours. | ||
| A little change of pace here. | ||
| We're bringing you music from the Robert Shaw singers. | ||
| He was a renowned choral director back in the 1950s, 1960s, post-war period. | ||
| Song of Angels is the album. | ||
| You're going to be hearing a lot of great selections for that. | ||
| We're going to go out with Robert Shaw. | ||
| Be back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have a little. | |
| Oh, Jesus Christ to be your Savior. | ||
| O the rising of the sun and the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir. | ||
| The holly bears are bearing, as bears men is God, and men is Jesus Christ. | ||
| To do more sinning, O Savior, O rising of the sun and the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir. | ||
| of the Lord. | ||
| The holly bears a prickle As sharp as any thorn And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ On Christmas Day in the morn Oh, the rising of the sun And the running of the deer The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir. | ||
| The holly bears a bow, as bitter as any bow, and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ born to redeem us all. | ||
| the rising of the sun. | ||
| Bring a torch and let it serve them. | ||
| Bring a torch and hurry and run. | ||
| It is Jesus the folk of the village. | ||
| Christ is born and Mary's calling. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the child. | ||
| It is wrong when the baby is sleeping. | ||
| It is wrong to sleep so loud. | ||
| Silence now as you come in the cradle. | ||
| As you awaken little Jesus. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the child. | ||
| Skies are glowing, the heavens are cloudless bright, the path to the manger bent. | ||
| Face and follow and see little Jesus shining bright as yonder star. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother. | ||
| Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother. | ||
| It is Christmas Eve, Friday the 24th of December, the year of Lord 2021. | ||
| I want to thank you and welcome you to our Christmas Eve special here in the War Room. | ||
| Now joined by Captain Maureen Bannon. | ||
| She's finally out of hair and makeup. | ||
| The show starts at 10 o'clock. | ||
| Her call sheet wasn't right. | ||
|
unidentified
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You look lovely, but does it take you that long to get to look lovely? | |
| Sometimes. | ||
| Ben Harnwell was getting worried that he was going to have to co-host for the whole two hours. | ||
| Particularly, I said no, Ben. | ||
| You know, Captain Ben is still in hair and makeup. | ||
| Actually, the special is going to be a three-hour special. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's standing out in the cold in the Vatican. | |
| Ben, we're going to get to you right in a second. | ||
| Thank you very much for joining us. | ||
| I know Christmas is a It's always a big deal in the family household. | ||
| You actually, although born in Brooklyn, New York, spent all your, you know, besides coming back to Richmond for Christmas with your mom's hometown and my hometown, you spent a lot in Manhattan Beach. | ||
| What's it like? | ||
| Ben Harnwell's in Rome at the Vatican on Christmas Eve. | ||
| You can't get more Christmassy than that unless you're maybe in Paris or in London. | ||
| But what is it like spending Christmas Eve on Manhattan Beach? | ||
| So, for Christmas, they have Christmas trees lining the pier in Manhattan Beach. | ||
| So, it's definitely a different vibe because you have the ocean and very warm weather. | ||
| Palm and palm trees. | ||
| And palm trees, but then you have Christmas trees. | ||
| And also, in Manhattan Beach, instead of lighting off fireworks at 4th of July, they light off fireworks for Christmas. | ||
| So you have Christmas fireworks and everyone joins in downtown Manhattan Beach to watch the fireworks go off. | ||
| So that's an interesting tradition but a very nice tradition to have. | ||
| How did they end up doing fireworks on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? | ||
| I think that they decided that they didn't want to compete with other cities on 4th of July, so they decided, well, we'll just make it Christmas because no one else will do that, so we'll get everyone to come to Manhattan Beach at that time. | ||
| And it actually works out because you have surrounding towns that don't have fireworks normally on Christmas. | ||
| As many years as I spent in California, I could never quite get into the swing of things. | ||
| I've got to have the cold weather. | ||
| If you don't have the cold weather and the snow, In the crackling fireplace. | ||
| I just can't get into the... I just can't get into the... into the Christmas. | ||
| Although, in the desert in Arizona, it's a little different. | ||
| It gets colder there at night. | ||
| In Manhattan Beach, it's chilly all the... virtually all the time. | ||
| Because you're around the water. | ||
| But... During the day, it just warms up. | ||
| You're right there on the beach. | ||
| It just... it doesn't feel that Christmassy. | ||
| It definitely doesn't and it's nice being back East, like you said, with the cold weather and then most of the time snow on Christmas. | ||
| So that's one of the many reasons why I have stayed on the East Coast since joining, since I left for college and then joining the Army. | ||
| Yeah, since you enjoyed it up at West Point in the cold so much up there in the plains. | ||
| You used to tell me how much you enjoyed marching up there. | ||
| That's where you're always getting out of it. | ||
| Let's go back. | ||
| So Ben, you spent... London is still my favorite Christmas town. | ||
| Although Paris gives you a close run for Christmas. | ||
| Tell us about a Dickens Christmas, sir. | ||
| Yeah, at the end of... just before The break, I was talking about the rise of traditionalist movements in the political sense and the great thirst that there is within people, even younger than me, wishing to connect to the cultural traditions. | ||
| And that sort of got me thinking a little bit about traditions in the other sense of the word, which are things that we do because we do them. | ||
| Perhaps the reason's been lost in time. | ||
| But Europe is a great example of different nations, each celebrating fundamentally the same story with different ways, with different little pious ceremonies. | ||
| In the UK, or perhaps I should say that more widely, in the English-speaking world, our The popular imagination of Christmas is really a Victorian invention. | ||
| Many of the things that we think of, a lot of the hymns come from the 19th century. | ||
| And Dickens, Charles Dickens really did a lot to popularise a certain idea of Christmas and how it should be. | ||
| And Dickens had three main attributes to his writings. | ||
| on Christmas. | ||
| They were based around feasting, and that is to celebrate, in the material sense, the indulgence over want and over hunger, which in Victorian England was a thing. | ||
| There was also the aspect of fellowship, that is to say, the coming together around the table to indulge, to overindulge, with friends and with family, that thing. | ||
| To do with those whom we love. | ||
| And the third aspect of the Dickensian sentimental approach to Christmas is of course the food. | ||
| Mince pies, plum pudding, goose, sage and onion stuffing, Christmas pudding lit with brandy. | ||
| These things were sort of universalised by Dickens. | ||
| And I said goose because in those days it was really goose rather than turkey that English families had at Christmas and there's some interesting stories about that as well. | ||
| For example, most working people couldn't afford a goose at Christmas so they had these little societies called goose clubs and by the time of Queen Victoria there were hundreds of these in London alone where you would go every week and pay a shilling over 10 weeks. | ||
| Traditionally, and save up for your goose that you could then have ready on Christmas Eve. | ||
| And of course, in those days, most people didn't have an oven in their kitchen. | ||
| So the goose would be cooked at the bakery. | ||
| You'd come to an agreement with the baker who would leave his ovens lit on Christmas Day, and you'd send the kids down, or the servants, depending on your station in life. | ||
| The goose would go in to the oven, and then it would be rushed back to the dinner table. | ||
|
unidentified
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What changed? Tell me the... yeah, go ahead. | |
| I want to ask you about the Victorians, because so much when we think of the classic Christmas does come from the Victorian era. | ||
| I think the Victorians had a saying, if you do something three times, it becomes a tradition. | ||
| And so many of the things that we think are ancient just actually happened in the 1880s and 1890s. | ||
| What was it about the Victorians that they had this sensibility? | ||
| I think perhaps they were really civic minded. | ||
| At that time you really had, it was really the era of the national printing press. | ||
| So most families would get a newspaper of one form or another. | ||
| Before television, before radio, that was a great way of letting people really feel as if they're part of a wider society that stretches across the whole of the country. | ||
| And so therefore, coupled with the presence, the more media-present royal family, even back in the mid-19th century, Queen Victoria, what she did, carried through the press, then became the paradigm to follow up and down the country. | ||
| And that's an interesting point that you mentioned. | ||
| I have a perfect example of exactly how this took off, how one traditional aspect of Christmas took off in Victorian England. | ||
| I tell you what, hang on, Ben, why don't you hold that? | ||
| What we're going to do is play some great music going out. | ||
| We're going to bring Ben Harnwell, who's at the Vatican on a Christmas Eve special. | ||
| He's going to join us again. | ||
| We've got Captain Bannon. | ||
| We're going to talk about her favorite, her favorite Christmas stories. | ||
| John Zimmer is going to join us. | ||
| Raven Abraham, Father Robert Batteague, Jason Jones got a packed show today. | ||
| We're going to leave you in this segment, be back in a minute with some great music from Robert Shaw. | ||
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unidentified
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I'm a king on Bethlehem's plain, called I bring to crown him again. | |
| King forever, ceasing never, over us all to reign. | ||
| O star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright, Westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to thy perfect light. | ||
| Blank incense to offer her high. | ||
| Incense owns her dear to fly. | ||
| Prayer and praising, all men raising, Worshipping God most high. | ||
| Oh, star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright, westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to thy perfect light. | ||
| Murr is mine, its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom, sowing, sighing, fleeting, dying, still in the stone-cold doom. | ||
| Oh, star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright, Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, I would my true love didst for chance to see the legend of my play, to call my true love to my dancing. | ||
| Oh, my love, oh, my love, my love, my love, this have I done for my true love. | ||
| Then was I born from a virgin pure, of her I took fleshly substance, thus was I made to man's nature, to call my true love to my dancing. | ||
| Say, oh, my love. | ||
| Oh, my love, my love, my love. | ||
| This have I done for my true love. | ||
| In a manger laid and wrapped I was. | ||
| So very foolish was my chance. | ||
| He twixt the box and the ceiling to us. | ||
| My true love took my dancing, O my love, O my love, my love, my love. | ||
| This have I done for my true love. | ||
| Then afterwards baptized I was. | ||
| the holy ghost a needed glance, my Father's voice heard from above, to call my joy, my love, my dancing, oh my love, oh my love, my love, my love. This have I done. | ||
| Okay, Merry Christmas! | ||
| It is Friday, the 24th of December, the Year of the Lord 2021. | ||
| You're here for our Christmas Eve special. | ||
| Make sure to download the podcast. | ||
| You can get all the great replays, even if you watch it live. | ||
| And by the way, if you're just hearing the podcast or you're on the John Fredericks Radio Network, please make sure you go to Rumble or to Worm.org. | ||
| See the show in its entirety, particularly when we do these specials. | ||
| The guys in Denver do a tremendous job with our staff here, putting up some of the great artwork that go with the music. | ||
| So make sure you get the full experience. | ||
| Captain Ben, a thank you. | ||
| We'll bring John Zimerick in a second. | ||
| Let's go back to the Vatican and to Rome. | ||
| So Ben, you teed us up. | ||
| We're hanging by a thread here. | ||
| Give us your punchline. | ||
| So one example of how the British Royal Family was able to pioneer, as it were, A certain sense of universal Christmas-ness is in 1846 when Queen Victoria had the first Christmas tree in England. | ||
| It was bought in by the Germans, exactly the same in the United States. | ||
| In the UK sense, that was Prince Albert. | ||
| And this was popularized that year in a magazine article with an illustration, and it caught on. | ||
| A great example of exactly how you were saying, in the Victorian era, these ideas became almost self-invented traditions. | ||
| Perhaps even more curious is how Christmas trees emerged in the United States via the German-speaking Americans. | ||
| Because America is, of course, a Puritan country, historically. | ||
| And the Puritans tried to suppress Christmas trees in the United States, as they did in the UK. | ||
| For example, Pennsylvania's second governor, William Bradford, wrote that he tried hard to stamp out the pagan mockery of Christmas trees and penalising any frivolity. | ||
| Oliver Cromwell, back in England, preached against the heathen traditions of Christmas carols, decorated trees, and any joyful expression that diminished that sacred event. | ||
| Well, you could say many things about the Puritans, but you can't say that they overindulged on frivolity. | ||
| In Massachusetts, in 1659, the General Court enacted a law making any observance of December the 25th, beyond going to church, a penal offence. | ||
| And people were actually fined for hanging decorations. | ||
| Now, that was broadly the situation in the United States until the influx of the Germans and the Irish, which sort of changed things. | ||
| I'd like, if I may, Steve, just to go through a couple of these historic, sort of century-old traditions as they are on the continent here in Europe. | ||
| Some of these traditions still exist today. | ||
| And as we are here on the war room in one degree or another, inverted commas, traditionalist, it'd be nice to familiarise ourselves with some of these things and help encourage them. | ||
| So let's go over to Poland, Germany and the Ukraine. | ||
| And they have a tradition there of putting a spider's web in the Christmas tree. | ||
| And this goes back to the legend of the Christmas spider. | ||
| But what was that? | ||
| Well, according to the legend, a poor, hardworking widow who couldn't afford to decorate her Christmas tree, went to bed alone and full on. | ||
| And when she awoke on Christmas morning, she found that a spider Had spun webs all across the tree. | ||
| When the sunlight hit the tree, it turned the webs into gold and silver. | ||
| And that's why, to this day, thanks to this legend, spiders are considered symbols of prosperity in Poland, Germany and Ukraine. | ||
| And you'll find, to this day, stylized versions of a spider's web on the tree. | ||
| Going over to Finland, they have this tradition of the Julusana. | ||
| which is a Christmas sauna. | ||
| And that goes back many, many, many centuries. | ||
| And there, the Finns, on today, on Christmas Eve, would go to the sauna and purify their bodies and calm their minds before the onset of the festivities. | ||
| And they even had the habit of leaving Christmas treats for the sauna tontu, which is the sauna elf. | ||
| Over in Catalonia, in Spain, | ||
| is perhaps the most bizarre Christmas tradition I've ever heard of which is kids would be given smiley-faced wooden logs on December the 8th and they had to put these little logs in a little blanket and put a little hat on them and feed them with bread and orange peel and then on Christmas Day the children would gather round and hit this log with sticks | ||
| And sing songs, encouraging the log to poop presents and nougat. | ||
| And the reason they did that is because in Catalonia, the main present giving was at the Epiphany. | ||
| So to not leave the kids without anything on Christmas Day, they had this to stop whacking the pooping log, which is literally what it is called. | ||
|
unidentified
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Over in Austria, Over in Austria. | |
| No, these are traditions that we need to keep alive. | ||
| There is... I love the Austrians. | ||
| There is the tradition of the Krampus monster, which is a hideous thing. | ||
| Big yellow teeth, little sort of serpentine eyes, horns, the lot, right? | ||
| And this is a scary, terrifying creature, probably more suited to Halloween than to Christmas. | ||
| And it would appear for over a millennia In Austria for centuries. | ||
| And this half-goat, half-demon beast was basically the anti-Saint Nicholas. | ||
| And according to the folklore, this terrifying monster would whip naughty children with his bundle of birch sticks and drag them down to his lair in hell. | ||
| Now, if you're waiting for me to turn this round with a nice happy end, there isn't one. | ||
| This is the Austrians. | ||
| Christmas tradition ends there, with naughty kids being dragged down to hell. | ||
| And here in Italy, finishing here, is the tradition of La Befana, which is probably more of an epiphany thing than a Christmas thing, but it is omnipresent. | ||
| And again, the figure is something that we would think of in the Anglo-speaking world, something more like a witch, basically, with a broomstick and a hunchback, and basically the story of this sad character is that the three wise men paid her a visit and invited her to go down to Bethlehem and adore the Christ child and she said she couldn't because she had too much housework to do. | ||
| Then she had a change of heart and she decided to go so she packed a little basket full of gifts and thought well you know she would help the Virgin Mary with a bit of housekeeping And she took her broom with her. | ||
| And as she ran, she tried to, she couldn't catch up the three wise men. | ||
| She ran so quickly, she got caught up with the wind on her broomstick and went off. | ||
| And this is a figure, La Befana. | ||
| You will see in any, basically, this is something that I've seen so many times here in Italy at Christmas. | ||
| La Befana comes along and gives little kids their presents at Epiphany on the 6th of January. | ||
| But those are just a selection of some of the more quixotic stories that I could find. | ||
| And I had this thought, Steve, that there's, you know, these traditions, right? | ||
| They do help connect us, right? | ||
| With the past, which is always important. | ||
| That sense of rooting in one's culture and one's tradition, one's sense of identity are important, but that's not the fundamental point of these things. | ||
| Certainly not within the Christmas story. | ||
| And I like to think of these stories, as I was preparing them, as perhaps more accessible nuggets, more accessible instruments to help us realise how tradition works, so that we can better concentrate on the fundamental tradition of the Christmas story, which is the Christ Child. | ||
| There's something interesting here that goes back to the Latin of the word tradition, which is traditio, and it comes from the verb Tradere, which means to hand over, to hand on. | ||
| And in fact, it's the same word that we get from Betray. | ||
| It's the handing over. | ||
| And that is what tradition is. | ||
| It is the handing on of something. | ||
| As Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11.23, For I received what I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you. | ||
| And there's the word there. | ||
| And that's fundamentally, as you pointed out, this is the Vatican over my shoulder. | ||
| In fact, the balcony right over my shoulder tomorrow is where the Pope will come out and give his Orby speech to the city and to the world. | ||
| And the point about today, and behind me here, right, the two fountains colloquially known as Scripture and Tradition. | ||
| Shall I give way for the music? | ||
| Yeah, why don't you hang on, Ben? | ||
| We're going to come back to you. | ||
| Ben Harnable, we've got John Zimerick, Captain Bannon. | ||
| Ben's in Rome for our Christmas Eve special. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| return in a moment. | ||
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Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | |
| Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | ||
| Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | ||
| Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | ||
| Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | ||
| Look now for glad and glorious hours come swiftly on the way. | ||
| Beside the weary road, | ||
| and hear the angels sing. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Christian men rejoice with heart and soul and voice. | ||
| Hear ye, hear ye to what we say. | ||
| News, news, Jesus Christ is born today. | ||
| Abs and as before in love, and he is in the manger now. | ||
| Christ is born today. | ||
| Christ is born today. | ||
| In the world. | ||
| ♪ Be my love, my wonder, my thing, present me, O ♪ ♪ My heav'nly sun, divine, my tree, secret me, O ♪ ♪ Alpha, S and O, Alpha, S and O. ♪ ♪ Good Christian men rejoice with heart and soul and voice ♪ ♪ For the Lord is come to save us all. ♪ | ||
| ♪ Good Christian men rejoice with heart and soul and voice. ♪ ♪ Now ye hear of endless bliss, joy, joy. Jesus Christ is born for this. ♪ ♪ He hath brought the heavenly home and man is blessed evermore. Christ is born for this. ♪ Okay, welcome back. | ||
| It is Christmas Eve, our Christmas Eve special, Friday the 24th of December, Year of the Lord 2021. | ||
| I'm joined here by Captain Bennett in studio. | ||
| I'm going to go now to John Zimmerick, one of the great, I guess, observers of American culture. | ||
| So John, where do we stand in The year of our Lord, 2021, during this Advent season, Christmas season, where does America stand as far as traditional Christmas, or where does it stand as far as Christmas? | ||
| I know there's been so much secularization of this one of the most sacred holidays. | ||
| What's your thoughts on this? | ||
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I think we're kind of at a crossroads. | |
| We're also in a very special place, more than our parents' generation. | ||
| We can appreciate a little bit what the first Christmas was like. | ||
| Think of People living in what had been a republic that had degenerated into an empire that was being ruled by a corrupt and senile emperor, Tiberius, where people were unsure about their political future, unsure about their basic rights. | ||
| And here comes this explosion of grace from the Jewish tradition, from the Jewish nation, a minor province in an outlying area of the empire, comes this | ||
| Presence that wise men from the East are drawn to worship that the ordinary working people the shepherds Come to worship and and it's this event more than anything in the history of the West that taught us to believe that the individual life of every human being from the moment of conception to natural death is sacred because they're an image of God become man and that notion of the sacredness of life | ||
| Is really at stake in all our political battles. | ||
| The sacredness of the individual as an image of God. | ||
| Is he protected in the womb? | ||
| Does he have the right to defend himself against violent crime or tyrannical government? | ||
| Does he have the right to make basic conscience decisions about what medicines or vaccines he's willing to take about whether he's willing to take part in medical treatments that involved aborted children? | ||
| And right now we're seeing in state after state battles about that individual conscience and battles before the Supreme Court about the sanctity of life. | ||
| And it all comes back to that morning in December in Bethlehem when God was born a man. | ||
| And let's remember in the liturgical calendar two days, three days from now is the Feast of Holy Innocence. | ||
| On the 28th, we mark Herod's attempt to wipe out the Christ child. | ||
| Herod was a creature of Caesar, a creature of the political secular regime that had no respect for the individual as an image of God. | ||
| And he was trying to wipe it out. | ||
| And so we see from the beginning, Jesus faced opposition. | ||
| He faced persecution. | ||
| We face those things today, but we face them with the same hope that Jesus and Mary had when they fled to Egypt with the Christ child to protect him from the forces of a I think it's a substitute religion. | ||
| How do you think we got a couple of minutes here or a minute or so? | ||
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How has COVID or the CCP virus, you think, affected us in particularly during this, during the Advent season? I think it's a substitute religion. I call the people branch covenants, and they have made the virus the focus of their lives. Staying alive for a few more years has suddenly become just the most desperate, desperate need. | |
| I mean, if you think back, Woodstock happened during a deadly influenza epidemic that killed more people in America than COVID did. | ||
| Those hippies still went to hear Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. | ||
| They were not living under their beds in fear of death. | ||
| We have a generation that is just desperate to cling to the last few years of Netflix and Uber Eats. | ||
| Even at the cost of their consciences and their liberties, we need to wake these people up and say, you know what? | ||
| Death is not the end. | ||
| And if you're going to live in fear of death, you're already dead. | ||
| It's a living death that you're embracing, whereas we embrace a Lord who died and thereby gave us life. | ||
| And that's the source of our liberty and the source of our hope. | ||
| John, how do people follow you on social media? | ||
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I write five columns a week at Stream.org. | |
| Stream.org, please check it out. | ||
| I also often weekly appear on the Eric Mittag Show. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| Merry Christmas, Brothers America. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short break. | ||
| When we return, Captain Bannon is going to do a couple of readings for us. | ||
| We're also going to have Raymond Abraham, the author of The Defense of the West, Christian Heroes in the Middle Ages, next in the War Room. | ||
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And we're going to have a conversation with Raymond Abraham. | |
| And we're going to have a conversation with Raymond Abraham. | ||
| What God I give, or else I have, if I were a shepherd, I would pray for help. | ||
| If I were a wise man, I would do my part. |
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