April 16, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
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unidentified
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♪♪ | |
| Okay, welcome. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| It is Good Friday, the 15th of April. | ||
| Year of Our Lord 2022 as we start an entire weekend of specials and having special personalities on here and folks that can talk about the Passover, Holy Week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter, all of it, the holiest week in the year in the Judeo-Christian calendar, and very honored to have for this hour Dr. Taylor Marshall, someone we've tried to get on before and spend some time with. | ||
| We've got him for the entire show today. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, thank you so much, and particularly thank you for carving so much time out so that we can drill down on some of these topics in depth. | ||
| It's great to be here, Steve. | ||
| So, Dr. Marshall, first off, particularly for our audience, we have a combination of evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics, a substantial Jewish following, and obviously a big international following, and diaspora, the Chinese people, all of it. | ||
| We're in, you know, we're in Mandarin, simulcast in Mandarin and Japanese, and now I think also Korean. | ||
| I want to make sure we walk through your journey. | ||
| Right of how you got to be the Dr. Taylor Marshall. | ||
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unidentified
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That's one of the most influential Voices I think among the traditional Catholics of the world and particularly those that are very concerned about the direction of the of the church Tell us about yourself Well, you know I didn't grow up in a Christian home I guess you know I'm of a generation sort of after the baby boomers where you know a lot of us grew up in With no religion at all. | |
| My parents were, I guess, nominal Protestants. | ||
| So we had Christmas. | ||
| We had an Easter egg hunt on Easter, but there was no religiosity. | ||
| There was no Bible reading, no prayer, no faith. | ||
| Anything like that. | ||
| And I kind of grew up with friends who went to church, but I knew literally nothing about it. | ||
| And I had a friend of mine who told me that I was going to hell because I wasn't baptized. | ||
| I didn't have Jesus. | ||
| I was probably around seven or eight. | ||
| And at the time, I just thought, well, that's a bummer. | ||
| I don't know what baptism is. | ||
| I don't know who Jesus is. | ||
| I don't know any of these things. | ||
| And it was a little bit later, as I got closer to adolescence, my dad gave me the autographs of the Texas Rangers, the baseball team. | ||
| And one of them, Daryl Porter, wrote under his name, Romans 10 9, which reads, If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved. | ||
| And I thought, Wow, this is—I can finally know who Jesus is. | ||
| There's this promise of salvation. | ||
| There was this, you know, affirmation that he rose from the dead, which is what we're going to talk about today. | ||
| And I believed. | ||
| It was sort of like a random miracle. | ||
| There was no preacher. | ||
| There was no church. | ||
| I was just, you know, in my bedroom with an old King James Bible, I think, reading this message that a Major League Baseball player wrote for me. | ||
| Just over time got more and more interested and started reading the Bible a few times through Genesis, Revelation, and In college, I was an Evangelical. | ||
| I'm a Catholic now, but I started off as an Evangelical, going to Bible churches and megachurches and all kinds of Lutheran and tried out all kinds of things. | ||
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unidentified
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Hold on a second. | |
| With no religious background or nothing, no religious in the family, it was your point of initiation was an autograph signed by a baseball player in the Texas Rangers that Got you really to get into it and start reading the Bible. | ||
| And what was it when he first started reading the Bible? | ||
| Tell me about that, because so much of our audience, even people have drifted away. | ||
| Still, most of them came from a family that had some sort of religious service. | ||
| When you first started reading the New Testament, what was that like? | ||
| You know, we had a King James Bible in our bookshelf in our house. | ||
| This was before Wikipedia and Internet. | ||
| I mean, I couldn't go on to, you know, just Google search who is Jesus. | ||
| So we had this Bible and I just started reading it. | ||
| I literally had no church, no preacher, no mentor. | ||
| And I just started reading the King James Bible as a young man, probably, I'm guessing I was around 11 or 12 years old. | ||
| And then kind of through adolescence, and you know, I had my ups and downs through adolescence, but I always sort of had this interest of who is Christ, and then I also kind of, I knew there's all these denominations and churches, and there was Catholic and Baptist and Methodist, and which is the right one? | ||
| Like, they can't all be true, because I would go to different ones. | ||
| And they would contradict one another. | ||
| So, I was on this journey, well, what is the true version of Christianity? | ||
| What's the oldest version? | ||
| What's the authentic version? | ||
| You know, the Baptist and the Methodist can't both be right. | ||
| So, over time, that led me, I became a Catholic, a traditional Catholic, which is what I spend, you know, my time, you know, writing. | ||
| I've written 10 books, and I, on YouTube, and podcasting, and traveling, and speaking. | ||
| So, it's kind of just, it is a strange journey that I began with a Bible verse about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. | ||
| And from there, it's kind of just a miraculous journey, I think, of the Holy Spirit leading me and kind of mirandering around and, you know, studying and reading lots of books. | ||
| Before we get to your issues with the church today, and then we're going to get into, obviously, Good Friday and the descent in hell and all this, is that I don't know if it's ironic, but when you first started reading the King James Version of the Bible, and then you said you started going or attending or associating with evangelicals in college, eventually to convert to Catholicism, even a lot of Catholics, and I think a lot of Catholics, particularly in my generation, will say that Catholicism back then maybe was not as grounded | ||
| In the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, right, as some even Protestant religions. | ||
| How do you balance that? | ||
| In that Catholicism, particularly mid-century and then later 20th century Catholicism, was not maybe as grounded in daily contact with or familiarity with the Holy Word of God. | ||
| Yeah, you know, there's sort of this I don't know. | ||
| It's sort of a parody that Catholics have sacraments and beautiful liturgy and music and the cathedrals of Europe and the Protestants have the Bible. | ||
| And that's sort of the standoff, I think, especially in America, the way people think about it. | ||
| But I started reading the Bible. | ||
| At a certain point, I just said, I'm just going to start at page one, Genesis, and go all the way to Apocalypse. | ||
| And I did that. | ||
| You know, as you read through Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus, you realize that God is very much concerned, not so much about reading. | ||
| He's mainly concerned about, if you read Leviticus, sacrifice, liturgy, priesthood, vestments, the tabernacle, and all of that is towards blood atonement. | ||
| And the Passover lamb, which is something we could talk about today, too, because that ties into Holy Week. | ||
| You know that the people escape from Pharaoh and from Egypt because of the miracle of the Passover lamb. | ||
| And the Passover lamb, you had to kill the lamb, spread the blood of the lamb, and eat the lamb. | ||
| So this is a liturgical sacramental reality, and, you know, Steve, you're a Catholic, I'm a Catholic, we believe that Christ is the Lamb, He died, He spread His blood on the cross, and then we eat Him, literally, in the Eucharist, which is commemorated being instituted on Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday, the night before Good Friday. | ||
| So, you know, I didn't have a lot of evangelical influence on me early, but reading the Old Testament, I realized this is the God of Israel, is very much concerned with blood atonement. | ||
| And I think evangelicals kind of speak about that. | ||
| But when you look at the history of Christianity and you go back to the very early church, this is what I found. | ||
| I said, I want to read the earliest Christians, the people who are right after the apostles, first, second, third, fourth generation of Christians. | ||
| They're talking about coming together to eat a sacrifice, the Lamb of God, who's Jesus Christ. | ||
| They're talking about the Eucharist, what we call the Mass. | ||
| They're talking about baptism, and there's priestly action and liturgy and altars, and eventually we have incense. | ||
| And all of this develops into this just beautiful synthesis. | ||
| And so it's not really sacraments versus the Bible. | ||
| It's the Bible points us to a sacramental, mystical reality, which is the kingdom of God, which we call, you and I call, the Catholic Church. | ||
| So I honestly believe that the Bible does sort of, if you take it seriously and you look at who God is and what He desires, I think it actually does point to this sacramental reality or Eucharistic reality that we Catholics enjoy. | ||
| So as a Catholic, I can have both the Bible and I can have the sacraments. | ||
| I don't have to choose one. | ||
| I notice today there's a lot more, I think, focus on the Church Fathers and particularly that generation right after the founding generation of Christianity. | ||
| When did you start reading those? | ||
| Is that before you converted? | ||
| Is that when you were an Evangelical or after you converted to Catholicism? | ||
| And what was your big takeaway from the early Christian writers and the Church Fathers? | ||
| Yeah, you know, as a young man in college is when I discovered that there were all these writings, you know, they call them the Apostolic Fathers. | ||
| And I think that's how people would go about studying any form of history. | ||
| You know, if you wanted to learn about Socrates, you're going to have to study Plato and Aristotle. | ||
| They're the philosophers that come in succession after Socrates. | ||
| So you can't just study Socrates in isolation. | ||
| You have to look at him as the way Plato discusses and Aristotle and from there. | ||
| I was a philosophy major. | ||
| I think that same principle, I applied it to Christianity. | ||
| I said, okay, well, there's the 12 apostles and there's St. | ||
| Paul. | ||
| They were martyrs. | ||
| They died. | ||
| They clearly didn't just do nothing. | ||
| They had to set up a succession plan, an inheritance plan for this theology and this doctrine, this church to continue. | ||
| Who were those people? | ||
| And I found out that those men who trained under, you could say, went to seminary with the apostles, They wrote books, you know, you have St. | ||
| Clement, he was in Rome, you have St. | ||
| Ignatius, he was in Antioch, and you have the Didache and all these, and you read them and you realize that this was a very tight community that was persecuted, that was suffering, and they united in underground ways to support each other and to commemorate those who had been martyred. | ||
| And it's a liturgical So, for example, both Clement and Ignatius of Antioch are comparing the early Christian leaders to the Old Testament high priest and the priest you see that in Clement's epistle. | ||
| But this is a form of worship and it's a form of consolation in a persecuted time. | ||
| And as I read those things, I realized that You know, praise and worship. | ||
| Like, you turn on TV, you look at Joel Osteen, or you go to these big mega churches, and there's a band, and there's a drum set, and guitars, and there's really good visual effects, and they have flat screens with lyrics and imagery, and the sermons are very polished, and the pastors are generally good-looking and likable. | ||
| I realized that kind of thing that I was experiencing as a college man. | ||
| Was not going on in the first generation of Christianity, that it was very much liturgical, sacramental, ceremonial, suffering, and that the concerns of the church were really, you know, it's kind of appropriate to talk on Good Friday, kind of penitential. | ||
| Discussing fasting and prayers and night vigils, and these were people who were, to use the language of Christ, carrying the cross. | ||
| It wasn't just a party. | ||
| It wasn't just drinking coffee and having beautiful, you know, exciting music. | ||
| These are people who are living a cruciform life, doing penance, praying, and in a way, when you read these early Christians, they have this sort of expectation that they might be next. | ||
| You know, they might be ascertained and they might go to prison. | ||
| They might even be killed. | ||
| You know, they may be fed to the lions in Rome. | ||
| And that's attractive, you know? | ||
| I found that that was attractive. | ||
| I'm like, that's the Christianity that I want. | ||
| That seems real. | ||
| I tell you what, we're going to take a commercial break and we're going to be back. | ||
| I want to ask you when we come back about persecuted times and about are we in persecuted times today. | ||
| Is that why it seems that certain of the more austere versions of the church, not just Catholicism, Christianity, are becoming more and more prevalent or people are drawn to that. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| Dr. Marshall Taylor will join us on the other side. | ||
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unidentified
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♪♪♪ Okay, welcome back. | |
| ♪♪♪ Welcome back. | ||
| We're in the War Room. | ||
| It's Good Friday, our Good Friday special. | ||
| It's one of the, if not the, most solemn day of the year in Christianity. | ||
| Of course, it's also Passover. | ||
| We've had specials all week during Holy Week and Passover Week. | ||
| I want to thank Dr. Taylor Marshall, one of the, I think it's safe to say, one of the more controversial thinkers, thought leaders, and writers in what I would refer to as the traditional Catholic Church. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, do you think this is a time of understanding that it's always spiritual warfare against Satan, but do you think particularly today in world events that it's actually so much of what we're facing in our country and now what we're facing throughout the world, this is a time of spiritual warfare? | ||
| Most certainly. | ||
| I mean, you have in the 1900s more martyrs worldwide Than all the centuries before that. | ||
| So take from John the Baptist in the first century all the way to the 1800s. | ||
| There's more martyrs in the 1900s. | ||
| And I think that's been accelerating now in the world. | ||
| Now, we see it's in Africa. | ||
| You see this with, you know, Muslims coming in through towns, kidnapping, but also murdering many of the people because they're Christian. | ||
| You've seen this in China and in many parts of the world, Egypt, North Africa, these places, Lebanon, More and more Syria, Christians being persecuted. | ||
| You know, I was last, a year ago, I was with some of the, the Chalcedonian Christians from Iraq and every single one of them, we had dinner at a big table, it was a political event, but every single one of them, as I was having conversations, had a relative who was a martyr in the Chalcedonian Church, Catholic Church in Iraq. | ||
| You know, they would talk about their uncle who was hung from the rafters and all, I mean, these horrible stories and how much reverence they had for their people and for their immediate family because each of them had a martyr in their family. | ||
| And I mean, in America, it's so hard for us to even understand that when you get baptized, when you make the sign of the cross, when you say, I serve Jesus Christ, Christ is my king, in certain cultures, like the culture they came from, that puts a target on you. | ||
| When you do that, you know, this could be the end for me. | ||
| I could be murdered for loving Christ. | ||
| So most certainly, and then there's also what we call soft persecution. | ||
| Stephen, this is the pressure that's put on | ||
| Christians by the government to compromise their conscience, compromise their beliefs, compromise their families, the way they raise their children, and of course, you know, I don't have to name all these things, but whether you're in Canada, or you're in Germany, or in certain states in the United States of America, there is this soft persecution on Christians, and particularly families, as they're trying to navigate our culture wars. | ||
| So help us out here. | ||
| If you go on any Sunday and on, I'm not going to say most, but I think a majority of pulpits in a Catholic church, you're hearing social justice warrior. | ||
| And if you go to a lot of the evangelical churches, you're hearing prosperity gospel. | ||
| Why are Christians and Catholics not preaching the persecuted church every day? | ||
| Because our taproot of this religion is the Desert Fathers. | ||
| It's in, you know, it's from Damascus to Antioch, North Africa, St. | ||
| Augustine's from North Africa. | ||
| The very basis in taproots, even outside the Holy Land, Has not just been persecuted, it's been taken over. | ||
| And, as you said, the persecution of Christians and Catholics in those areas have been monumental. | ||
| As bad as it is with the Chinese Communist Party, as bad as it is in Sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| Here, the basis and foundational elements, those great monasteries, those great churches, where the great Desert Fathers came from, is absolutely under full-on assault And yet it is virtual crickets from the pulpits of Catholic churches and from the pulpits of evangelical churches, with some exceptions. | ||
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unidentified
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Dr. Taylor Marshall. | |
| The reason that you don't hear it is, I think, two reasons. | ||
| First off, no one wants to hear it. | ||
| You know, people want to come on Sundays and they want to feel uplifted. | ||
| They want to strengthen their family. | ||
| See their friends, talk about their golf game, you know, in a mainstream, whether it's Protestant or mainstream, Novus Ordo Catholic, there's just this sort of idea, I'm religious, I believe in God, I'm going to check these boxes, I'm going to put in my due, I'm going to see my fellow Christians, but don't bother me with the hard teachings of Jesus Christ. | ||
| Like, take up my cross and follow, take up your cross and follow me. | ||
| I mean, that's, I mean, you and I don't want to do that. | ||
| We don't want to go the hard way. | ||
| So hearing about it is not a popular sermon topic. | ||
| I think the second reason why we don't hear about it is because other than China, most of the persecution that happens against Christians happens at the hands of those professing the religion of Islam. | ||
| It is politically incorrect to discuss These things like Boko Haram and these things in Africa, where some of the most horrendous things are happening at the hands of Muslims on Christian villages. | ||
| These don't get a lot of traction in our news, so people don't even know about it. | ||
| Beheadings and rapes and kidnappings and all kinds of just horrible things. | ||
| I don't think they get the traction in our Western media because of this delicate situation with Islam. | ||
| So I think those are the two reasons. | ||
| Is it possible to have a vibrant Christianity, whether that Christianity is Reformed Protestant or Evangelical Christianity or Traditional Catholic, unless that church has a more direct connection? | ||
| With its desert roots, with where the church came out of, which is the Middle East, which is Damascus and Antioch and North Africa and Egypt. | ||
| Can it be vibrant and robust and real, unless it has that connection? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And I'm glad you brought the Desert Fathers up, because the Desert Fathers were a movement that happened in Egypt, out in the desert, After Constantine began to turn the Roman Empire into a Christian form of what becomes Christendom. | ||
| And what happened is, you know, before Constantine, almost all the bishops were being martyred. | ||
| The popes were being martyred. | ||
| Christians were meeting underground. | ||
| It was a persecuted movement. | ||
| It was hard to be a Christian. | ||
| When Constantine legalized it, Suddenly there were so many more converts, the church grew, they built beautiful cathedrals and basilicas, they had golden crosses and beautiful vestments, and a lot of the Christians who were on that transition there, the threshold there between the old way, which was hard, and the new way, which was comfortable, said, you know what, we're losing our edge as Christians. | ||
| We're losing what it means to suffer for Jesus Christ, to be the servant of a king who wears a crown of thorns. | ||
| And so what happened is you see just this explosion of monastic movements, especially in Egypt with the Desert Fathers, and they say, we want to restore the grittiness The suffering, the hunger that Christians had felt for coming up on 300 years at that time. | ||
| And they went into the wilderness and they fasted, they prayed together, they prayed the entire Psalms every single day, all 150. | ||
| They didn't eat meat. | ||
| They basically were becoming like John the Baptist. | ||
| That was the model. | ||
| And then there was also women's communities. | ||
| I think, you know, I was an evangelical That connection to that reality was not so strong. | ||
| I didn't encounter it until I became a Catholic. | ||
| You meet monks, you meet nuns who are living that, but I think what we have in the Catholic tradition, and the Eastern Orthodox actually do it better than us right now, and that is there are periods of suffering, periods of penance worked into the year. | ||
| So the most obvious one is Lent. | ||
| The 46 days of Lent before Easter, we impose on ourselves suffering. | ||
| Now it may not be living in the desert. | ||
| It may be not eating meat and not drinking alcohol and not turning off all of our screens and not watching TV and not watching Netflix. | ||
| But we have to deprive ourselves We have to live a good Friday in order to get to an Easter Sunday. | ||
| There has to be a crucifixion, there has to be a scourging, a crowning of thorns before you get to the joy and the glory and the beauty of a resurrection. | ||
| And I think that's just built into human nature, that if we're always in luxury, if we're always eating the best food, always drinking the best wine, we can never really level up in our devotion to God. | ||
| Is this what Pope Benedict actually said when he took the name Benedict, is that along the lines of the monastic communities, he'd rather have, or at least the implication was, a smaller Catholicism, but a more lived Christianity. | ||
| Is that what the Desert Fathers teach us? | ||
| Is that the link to what at least certain members like Pope Benedict and others were trying to get out about modern Catholicism? | ||
| I mean, we have a tension here, and I think Pope Benedict is right, but the tension is we want to cast the net wide, we want to get as many people in relationship with Jesus Christ, as many people baptized, as many people coming to church, right? | ||
| But then once we do that, there needs to be a system, a program that says, now here's how you live as a Christian. | ||
| You know, one of the great things that before Vatican II is all Catholics didn't eat meat on Friday. | ||
| It made every single Friday of the year into a good Friday. | ||
| Christ gave up his flesh on Friday. | ||
| We give up eating flesh on Friday. | ||
| And it was this sort of weekly reminder that was communal amongst all Catholics. | ||
| Hey, we kind of have to suffer on Friday. | ||
| We don't get the best food. | ||
| We don't get to have hot dogs and burgers or ribeyes once a week. | ||
| And that's just sort of Reminding us again that every Friday is a good Friday. | ||
| Every Sunday is an Easter Sunday, year-round. | ||
| And we constantly have to tell ourselves, be humble. | ||
| You're not that important. | ||
| You're going to return to dust. | ||
| One day you're going to be a skeleton. | ||
| You have to deprive yourself so that you can ascend to something greater. | ||
| And that's, of course, heaven with our Lord. | ||
| Dr. Taylor Marshall, short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return in our Good Friday special here in the ballroom in just a moment. | ||
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unidentified
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God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America. | |
| God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America. | ||
| God bless America, God bless America, God bless America. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| We're in the War Room, and this is our Good Friday special. | ||
| We're very honored to have Dr. Taylor Marshall, one of the more, I guess, controversial thinkers, thought leaders, writers in the traditional Catholic movement. | ||
| Tomorrow, we're going to do, we're having a special. | ||
| I have Jack Posobiec will be in studio, and also Joe Allen will be with us, who heads up and does all of our work in transhumanism. | ||
| He's also a, has a Master's Degree from Boston University in Theology, where Dr. Martin Luther King went. | ||
| We're going to be talking about Anne Catherine Emmerich and going through some of her visions and about the Descent into Hell and much more and how this series of books inspired and was the basis for the screenplay for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and for his new movie that's going to come out in a year or two on the Resurrection. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, you've done a lot of work in this area about the Descent into Hell and going about Thomas Aquinas and I know in modern Particularly in prosperity gospel evangelical Christians, I'm not picking on them, but the prosperity gospel evangelical Christians and the social justice warrior, you know, Christ as a social worker, Catholicism, they don't really talk about the penitential side of this. | ||
| They don't really talk about heaven and hell. | ||
| And in fact, When you're with some of these people, it's almost like an embarrassment. | ||
| You're such a troglodyte even bringing it up. | ||
| Walk us through your thoughts about this and the reality of hell and how central that is to the message of Christianity. | ||
| Yes, so the message of Christianity going back to the earliest days, so you'll see this very strongly in Catholicism and also in Eastern Orthodoxy, maybe even | ||
| More in Eastern Orthodoxy is that in the Old Testament, from Adam and Eve all the way up to Jesus on the cross, when the righteous died, the faithful died, so we're talking about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esther, Sarah, Rebecca, all these Old Testament people, where did they go? | ||
| It was the universal teaching, and still is, that they didn't go to heaven. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the gates of heaven were closed. | ||
| Just like when Adam and Eve sinned, they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. | ||
| It was closed off. | ||
| The teaching is when Christ died on the cross, he opened back up the gates of heaven. | ||
| And so the idea is, just as Christ is fully God and fully man, he also has a body and a soul. | ||
| His soul descended into hell. | ||
| We say this in the Apostles' Creed. | ||
| A lot of people are like, what's going on? | ||
| Did Christ burn in hell? | ||
| No, Christ did not burn in hell. | ||
| He went to the lower world in order to proclaim and preach That death had been conquered, Satan had been defeated, and then to transfer the Old Testament faithful from what's called limbo, have you ever heard of waiting in limbo? | ||
| This is the idea, waiting in limbo, also called Abraham's bosom, and bring them to heaven. | ||
| And this is recorded several times in the New Testament. | ||
| For example, at 1 Peter 3.19, St. | ||
| Peter, the apostle, says, Christ coming in spirit preached to those spirits that were in prison So Peter's talking about the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and right in the middle of this he throws in this idea that Christ, in his soul, in his spirit, descended to the underworld and preached the gospel, presumably, and saved them. | ||
| Also, Peter in Acts says the same thing, that Christ went and loosed the sorrows of hell. | ||
| He went down in there. | ||
| So, it's not the idea that Christ has to suffer in hell. | ||
| He doesn't go into the fires of hell. | ||
| There are sections of hell in Jewish theology and in Catholic and Orthodox theology. | ||
| There's a purgative area, which we call purgatory, where you actually can get out of. | ||
| People pray for you and you suffer. | ||
| There's Gehenna, or Gehenna, which in Jewish theology, also in Catholicism, is the hell of the dam. | ||
| You never get out. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| That's where Satan is. | ||
| So the idea is these people are waiting in limbo, Christ descends into hell as a victor, triumphant. | ||
| All the Eastern icons, the Western images of this is Christ trampling down the gates of hell. | ||
| He's standing on the gates. | ||
| And he's reaching out to Adam and Eve and all the people in there and pulling them out. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because on Good Friday, he died on the cross and the veil in the temple tore from top to bottom. | ||
| You see this in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. | ||
| It's beautifully done. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It means the gates of heaven The entry to the Holy of Holies, which was separated by veil, is ripped by whom? | ||
| God. | ||
| God rips it from top to bottom. | ||
| And now humans, through Jesus Christ, because He died for our sins, can again enter into communion with God in the Holy of Holies, in Heaven. | ||
| So, this mystery is called the Harrowing of Hell, is the proper theological term. | ||
| The Harrowing of Hell is celebrated on Holy Saturday. | ||
| It's this mystery that in quietness, Christ ascended as a victor and rescued the Old Testament faithful, Abraham, all of them, and brings them to heaven. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's part of our theology going back to the earliest days of the church. | ||
| Sadly, it's something that most people don't talk about. | ||
| They do Good Friday, Jesus died. | ||
| They do Easter, He rose again. | ||
| But that mystery of what goes on in the parenthesis deserves our attention because it's in the New Testament. | ||
| Well, let me go, because this obviously would be one of the foundational and most important parts of a religion. | ||
| But it is controversial in two things. | ||
| Number one, there was a huge fight of whether even to keep it into the creed. | ||
| So this has been a fight of just the phrase, to send it into hell. | ||
| The other was, did he go to hell to suffer, as you just talked about, or did he go in victory? | ||
| So take both of them. | ||
| Why was it so controversial that it was going to be part What was the controversy that even the early Christians, it seemed like the theologians were divided about this very concept, and then I want to go to the concept of did he go to suffer and bear the suffering of the damned, or did he go in victory to free the damned? | ||
| Yeah, so in the former you have early manuscripts of the Apostles Creed that have into hell, he descended into hell, and don't have it, and as you say to the Nicene Creed, does not have this mystery if he descended into hell. | ||
| The reason for this is, when you look at Greek and when you look at Latin, we have the word hell in English. | ||
| When you go into the ancient languages, in Hebrew you have Sheol, which just means basically underworld or grave area. | ||
| In Greek you have Hades, you have Gehenna, you have Tartarus, you have all these different words for it. | ||
| And so The popular mind hears that and they're thinking, like, if I say to you, go to hell, that's bad. | ||
| I'm telling you to go suffer, to go burn on fire in a lake of fire forever. | ||
| So that phraseology can be scandalous to people. | ||
| However, as it was worked out and it was explained, Christ did not descend into hell to suffer. | ||
| He descended as a victor, triumphant, destroying the gates of hell, destroying the works of Satan, the palms of Satan. | ||
| So once that theology is clear, it's mainstream. | ||
| Now unfortunately, Steve, the Jesuit theologians in the 40s and 50s and 60s, primarily with a Jesuit theologian, Father Balthazar, he worked out a theology that is considered by many to be heretical. | ||
| He says that Christ descended into hell. | ||
| Hang on, I just want to say, he's also one of the more prominent Jesuit theologians overall, but particularly Jesuits, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I mean, yeah, of the last hundred years, he's in the top three. | ||
| So he's very influential. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he's very liberal. | ||
| I mean, extremely liberal. | ||
| He's the one who says we should hope that all men be saved. | ||
| And part of that theology is related to the fact that he teaches, this is not Catholic, there's been dissertations written on it, that Christ descended into hell and had solidarity with the damned. | ||
| It's his phrase work. | ||
| There is no church father, there is no one in the Catholic or Eastern tradition who will ever say that. | ||
| This was something new in the 1900s, that Christ ascended into hell and had solidarity with the damned. | ||
| He had solidarity with Judas. | ||
| He had solidarity with Pharaoh. | ||
| He had solidarity with everybody. | ||
| And this gives you the hope, the Jesuits teach, that all will be saved. | ||
| And I've spent a lot of time podcasting, writing, you know, Writing articles trying to show that there is nothing in the early church that has this idea because it basically borders on Christ suffering in hell. | ||
| That he's entering into the realm of the devil. | ||
| Was the connection they were trying to make is that he was in solidarity with the suffering of fallen man? | ||
| Was, I mean, that the concept that they were trying to push? | ||
| Yeah, but particularly with the damned. | ||
| So, traditionally Christ comes to Hades to the underworld and he says, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, you looked forward, you didn't fully understand who I was going to be or what I was going to do, but you believed and you looked into the future and you placed your hope into a Messiah. | ||
| That is me. | ||
| You are believing in me. | ||
| You are saved. | ||
| That was the traditional teaching. | ||
| In the 1900s, no one wants to believe in hell. | ||
| No one wants to believe in damnation. | ||
| This is all embarrassing to social justice warriors. | ||
| This is the part of Christianity they don't like. | ||
| So in order to sort of scrub it away, they say, well, Christ, when he descended to hell, he actually descended and he was with all the damned people. | ||
| And they kind of just had this solidarity or like this group hug of Jesus and all the damned. | ||
| And so we can kind of insinuate from that, that he also saved all the damned as well. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| Give us this concept again of the harrowing of hell. | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| Harrowing, I believe, refers to, it's an agricultural term, so you're sort of Bringing up or you know, like as you prepare earth and bring things up. | ||
| I believe that's the original context. | ||
| I should be wrong. | ||
| And so, you know in ancient culture that's sort of how they understood, you know, Christ kind of goes down into the earth and brings up from the earth, you know, these ancient saints from the Old Testament. | ||
| So that's the harrowing of hell. | ||
| One of the things that you've kind of dedicated your life to as a convert, first really as a convert to Christianity and then as a convert from more of the evangelical or Protestant to Catholic and then to the Catholic to the most traditional side, is how the church itself has gotten away from its root teachings and it needs to get back to more of a traditional side. | ||
| We've got about a minute here before we go to break. | ||
| Walk us through that. | ||
| Why are you so focused? | ||
| You talk about the infiltration of the You're very much going back to source teachings and source documents in a Catholic Church that used to be this way. | ||
| And you're saying that the Catholic Church, more than any other religious institution, has lost its way. | ||
| I'll tell you what, let's wait and we'll come through the break, because I want to make sure you get a lot of runway on this. | ||
| The Infiltration, and having spent a lot of time in Rome and the Vatican, this book will chill you to the bones. | ||
| There's been other books that have led up to this, but this book is quite harrowing and very scary, and it just came out a year or two ago. | ||
| So, Dr. Taylor Marshall, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return in just a moment. | ||
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| you I'm not sure what I'm doing here. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to our Good Friday special. | ||
| We're honored to have Dr. Taylor Marshall with us for the entire show. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, it is Good Friday, and I would be remiss if, particularly for our audience, which I know you have many, many fans, and particularly among the traditional Catholics. | ||
| We're not believers in conspiracy theories, but we also believe they're no coincidences. | ||
| What inspired you to write the book Infiltration, and what is your task and purpose today? | ||
| I mean, what are you trying to accomplish? | ||
| In the Catholic Church, Dr. Taylor Marshall. | ||
| You know, as we said at the beginning, I started off not religious at all, became an evangelical, sort of ran in Protestant circles, eventually became a Catholic, and have in many ways given my life to teaching Catholicism, promoting Catholicism, but it's no secret that since especially 2002, and actually before that, there have been sexual scandals, there have been financial scandals, There has been so much swept under the rug. | ||
| I wanted to get to the bottom of how can it be that a church, an institution that claims to be the kingdom of God on earth, it claims to have the seven sacraments, it claims to have given us the holy canon of sacred scripture, to have continuity through the past 2,000 years all the way to Jesus Christ, how could it be that there would be so much corruption in | ||
| What should be such a beautiful institution, a beautiful body. | ||
| How did we get here? | ||
| And so I, when I started writing the book, I thought, okay, this book is going to go back to maybe the 1960s, 50s and 40s. | ||
| And we're going to kind of see sort of the post-World War II liberalism, optimism after the war coming into Catholic theology and seminaries and monasteries. | ||
| I'm just going to kind of see this corruption, but And then Vatican II and so forth. | ||
| But as I started studying and I realized that this principle of what I call infiltration, that's the name of the book, is something that goes back to the beginning of time with Satan, who was a good angel, who betrayed God, all the way up until what we're celebrating this week with Judas Iscariot. | ||
| One of the Twelve Apostles was an infiltrator. | ||
| He was part of the Twelve Apostles and he betrayed Christ for 30 pieces of silver and the instrument of that betrayal was a kiss. | ||
| So this is a recurring theme over time, and I think our current crisis in the Catholic Church really goes back to the mid to early 1800s, where we see a plot to attack the Church not from outside, like Napoleon did, or the early Roman emperors, but to attack the Church on the inside. | ||
| And that is to infiltrate the seminaries, the priesthood, the bishops, the cardinals, and their goal, as stated in the Permit and Instruction of Alta Vendita, which is documented, ultimately their goal was to take a hundred years and infiltrate the papacy itself. And so I'm exploring this trajectory that begins really rolling out in the mid-1800s, becoming open to the public in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council, | ||
| all the modernist and updatings that happened to the Seven Sacraments, to the liturgy, to the teaching, to the parochial schools, to the convents, and we just see the demographic numbers crashing on every single one of those levels. | ||
| Marriage, everything, and trying to give an account of how it was planned, how it was executed, where we are now in this arc, and then how do we Fix it. | ||
| How do we ascend? | ||
| How do we become great again as Catholics? | ||
| How do we become devoted disciples of Jesus Christ and transform not just the church but the whole world? | ||
| You know, a true culture war under the banner of Jesus Christ. | ||
| And so, that's the idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the people you highlight in this that I think a lot of folks have forgotten is Fulton J. Sheen. | ||
| Give us a minute or two on his importance. | ||
| Fulton J. Sheen was, it's amazing, he was a Catholic bishop. | ||
| who had his own primetime TV show back in the days of black and white television and eventually into the time of color television. | ||
| And he represents sort of this climax of American Catholicism. | ||
| You know, in the 1700s and the 1800s, it was a little bit shameful and dangerous to be a Catholic in America. | ||
| In places like Philadelphia and other northeastern cities, there were riots attacking Catholics. | ||
| And a lot of people don't know the Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| They were against Jews. | ||
| Blacks and Catholics. | ||
| Those were their three targets. | ||
| By the 1900s, you sort of have Catholics getting their place at the table. | ||
| This is symbolized, I think, by Bishop Fulton Sheen having his own TV show. | ||
| It's also, I think, symbolized by JFK being elected. | ||
| You know, this is the time period of Catholics finally feeling like we're normal. | ||
| And we're okay. | ||
| So Fulton Sheen has this major platform, but he also discusses about how eventually there will be an ape of the church. | ||
| Ape like a monkey. | ||
| There'll be a mockery. | ||
| He also talks about how eventually the bishops and the clergy are going to fail, and it's going to take the laity To restore and to revive Catholic orthodoxy and devotion. | ||
| So, in a way, Bishop Fulton Sheen was prophetic. | ||
| He was seeing the times that we're living in now, and with his amazing platform, was spreading this message that we're going to get into hard times, and it's going to take the laity, it's going to take families to rebuild what we're in. | ||
| And I think in the 2020s, I think we can agree that that's where we're at. | ||
| Dr. Taylor Marshall, it's been fascinating. | ||
| How can people find out more about you, your books, your writings, your ministry? | ||
| You can go to taylormarshall.com, that's my site, or you can go on YouTube, I have a big YouTube platform, Dr. Taylor Marshall Podcast, and the podcast is wherever you can listen to podcasts. | ||
| The books are at amazon.com. | ||
| So thanks for having me today, and a happy Good Friday everyone, and a happy Resurrection Holy Easter as well. | ||
| Dr. Taylor Marshall, thank you very much, the author of Infiltration. | ||
| I cannot recommend this book enough, particularly if you're Catholic. | ||
| It is absolutely something I must read. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return. | ||
| We're going to have Rabbi Spiro is on. | ||
| He's going to talk to us about Passover. | ||
| We'll take a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll be back in the War Room in just a moment. | ||
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