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Dec. 30, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:28
WarRoom Battleground EP 917: WarRoom's Ben Harnwell One On One With Interview With Bishop Strickland

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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room.
Welcome to this show.
A faith important show today over the Christmas New Year holiday period.
Guest that I've long admired.
I think to my mind, to many people's mind, the most courageous American Catholic bishop, heroic witness to the faith, heroic witness to what a pastor of souls should be, not abandoning the flock to the wolves.
I am, of course, talking about Bishop Joseph Strickland.
Bishop Strickland, welcome on to the show.
Thanks for coming on today over this period.
You were 10, 11 years Bishop of Tyler in Texas.
You're Texas born and raised.
And I think some of the Texan fire is evident in your charism and how you approach being both a priest and a bishop.
I would say that you're so heroic as a bishop because you are well formed as a priest.
And that is the bedrock, I think, of how you approach the speaking truth with charity.
Let me ask you, if I may, start off with this question because I know a lot of people were commenting on it.
You read a letter out at a conference in which you quoted the view that Pope Francis was a usurper, that he had usurped the throne, the chair of St. Peter.
Can I ask you to explain to the audience what you meant by reading that out and whether the reaction to that was what you had expected it to be?
Well, thank you, Ben.
That was, I guess, two years ago, approximately the end of October in 2023, really shortly before I was removed.
Some people pointed to that and said, oh, that's why they removed him.
But, you know, long before that, the decision had been made that I was a disruptor and that, you know, they needed to silence me.
But I've done my best to not be silent, to still joyfully proclaim Christ and his truth.
He is truth.
But using that word usurper that was actually quoting a letter that I received from a dear friend that I deeply respect.
So I believe what this friend meant and the reason I quoted it is not to get in the question of was Pope Francis a valid pope, But really, the deeper question, I believe, was he validly and responsibly acting as, speaking as, living as the vicar of Christ.
We're talking about now a man who is deceased.
So, as Catholics, we pray for the dead.
I pray for Pope Francis.
We should pray for all who have died, whether they're believers or not, whatever they did in life.
We all end in death, and that is the church's mission, the salvation of souls.
So, I pray for Pope Francis, but I use that word because the Pope is the vicar of Christ.
Christ is king.
The church is about Jesus Christ.
It's not about any worldly agenda.
And I saw too much of what Pope Francis was promoting that was not the message of Jesus Christ.
It was either outright contradicting Christ's message or it was making it confusing and muddled and unclear.
If you read the Gospels, Christ is very clear.
Beautiful language at times that is something that you really have to pray over and focus on.
But especially when it comes to calling out evil, calling out sin, and speaking truth, Jesus Christ is very clear, and his church has been clear.
That clarity has been hard won through 20 centuries before Pope Francis became pope and before I was a bishop.
For 20 centuries, the church had been proclaiming the truth that is Jesus Christ.
More and more in my lifetime, I was born in 1958 toward the second half of the 20th century.
And since my birth, really, certainly their issues have started earlier, but things began to truly unravel.
And I think the unraveling is because we haven't been as clear and as strong in proclaiming Christ as the church of the ages through the ages was.
There were difficult times.
There were popes that were on the wrong path, but the church always corrected that path.
And so here we are two years later.
That word usurper is not really what I meant.
And I believe what the friend that first shared that message with me was getting at was usurper in the sense that he's not being faithful to Christ, not getting into whether the proper election happened and all of that.
That is really another issue for history that in many ways was not the most critical issue.
Are we being true to Jesus Christ?
And I've become known for being willing to speak up.
And you talk about being a Texan.
Plain spoken is what we need.
And Texans tend to be fairly plain spoken, not in sophisticated, sort of obscure language, but, you know, call a spade a spade.
Speak the truth clearly.
And that is something I believe we're desperate for in the nation, in the world, and in the church.
Jesus Christ is truth incarnate.
So we need to speak of him clearly.
And the greatest love is to speak Christ clearly.
In charity, the truth in charity.
So Bishop Strickland, let me ask you this because I know it's an issue that has exercised and is exercising Catholics.
Not necessarily traditionalists, but certainly traditionalist.
Because you mentioned it about the validity of Pope Francis's pontificate.
Do you think he was I'm going to ask you shades of question on this?
I'll start off with one of them.
I'll follow it up.
Do you think he was a valid pope?
Yes, from every indication.
Okay.
Do you think that they're how convinced are you in your response to that?
Is that a sort of you tend towards that response, but there's room for doubt?
Or in your mind, in Bishop Strickland's mind, there's no room for doubt whatsoever on that issue?
Well, I think there is room for doubt just because there've been so much confusion.
But every indication is, you know, I would have to say plainly, it's above my pay grade to make that assessment.
The cardinals that were there that elected Pope Francis are the ones that would have to raise a question, and there was no question about that raise.
So as a Catholic bishop and as a Catholic faithful, a disciple of Jesus Christ in his church today, I accept what the church said.
They said this, okay, this is the Pope.
And again, I think the question really goes deeper.
What is the job of the Pope?
To guard the deposit of faith, to promote the message of Jesus Christ, to proclaim the gospel.
And so when a duly elected pope, and there have been popes in the past, not so much being unclear about the dogma and the doctrine of the church, but popes in the past, there were many that were deeply sinful men living lives that were duplicitous and immoral.
And so in that way, they were failing to be what the Pope is.
Certainly, we're all sinners.
And the Pope needs to be the first to acknowledge that we all need repentance.
We all need to grow closer to the sacred heart of Christ.
But we have to proclaim the truth that is Christ.
I think one thing that we need to be very clear on is the Pope is the earthly representative of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is head of the church.
He is king of the universe, head of the church.
It's his church.
It's not ours to mold and shape according to our desires.
It is to be faithful to Christ because it's his church.
So that is what every pope is called to do.
And yet, Bishop Strickland, Pope Francis acted as if the church belonged to him to change according to his private political viewpoints.
And that ontologically is such a great change in the history of the church.
And as you point out, you know, we've had bad popes before, but Pope Francis was bad in a very different, a very different way, a different quality of being bad as a pope.
I just want to pick up one thing that you said here because we have a lot of, you know, our audience is primarily evangelical.
And from the Protestant community, from the evangelicals, there is a misunderstanding as to what the role of the papacy is.
But it's not only a misunderstanding held by Protestants.
99% of the Catholic Church seems to be unaware of this.
The role of the Pope is simply, the charism of Bishop of Rome is very simply to protect the integrity of what has come down to us via Christ and the apostles and say this belongs to the authentic teaching, that does not.
And that's how the Pope exercises infallibility.
He doesn't just make up dogmas according to the whim and then sort of oblige hapless faithful to believe it.
We're not a cult, right?
That's the reason the Catholic Church is a faith, divinely inspired faith, rather than a cult, because we don't believe what a single man imposes.
The substance of what we believe comes down from Christ and the apostles.
And yet, you know, you said you were born in 1958.
That's a rather key year for traditional Catholics, certainly those of a more militant disposition.
Because from 1958 onwards, there's been an increasing tendency in the Popes from John 23 down to the present day to invert that role basically and to use the authority they have as Pope not to defend the integrity of what has come down to us, the deposit of the faith, but to undermine it and replace it with novelties.
Give me one minute, if you wouldn't mind, as your response to that, and then we'll go to the break.
Well, I think you said it very well, Ben: that the work of the Pope is to proclaim Jesus Christ faithfully.
They are not the head of the church in a spiritual sense.
They're the earthly vicar of Christ.
And to proclaim the truth of Christ always, and calling all of us to repentance as Christ did.
Repent and believe the gospel.
That's what we're called to.
Can you just give me 30 seconds and say what would your word be to confused Catholics right now on this question, Mark, that doesn't seem to go away as to whether the Pope is really the Pope?
If you can answer that in 30 seconds.
Well, I would say look to Christ and his teachings, learn those teachings well, and pray for the Pope, whoever the Pope is, to faithfully be the vicar of Christ and proclaim that truth.
But we need to know our faith.
And people aren't well catechized.
We need to be better catechized and know what the truth actually is.
We'll be back on the catechism in just a short moment after this two-minute break with Catholic hero Bishop Joseph Strickland.
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Welcome back.
Look, talking to Bishop Strickland just before the break, we mentioned the catechism.
In the next segment, we're going to be talking about one particular area of the catechism that causes so much discussion in the Catholic Church, and that's the church's teaching on homosexuality.
But before we do that, Bishop Strickland, I'd like to ask you for your account of what actually happened when you were removed after, I think, 11 years, right, from the Diocese of Tyler in Texas.
How did that you say that it followed on from the conference address you gave, where you quoted a friend of yours saying that Pope Francis had usurped the chair of St. Peter, but that that was the desire, the mechanism, momentum to remove you was already long set before that.
Tell us how it happened.
How did you find out about it?
Well, I was called by the Nuncio, the representative of the Pope in Washington, D.C., now a cardinal.
He was Archbishop at the time, Christophe Pierre.
He called me in to come to Washington, which I did on a Thursday.
I flew up there.
We met briefly, about an hour, a little less, I think.
And I really wasn't surprised to get the message from conveyed by the Nuncio that Pope Francis wanted me to resign as Bishop of Tyler.
And I had made it clear because it, like I said, it had been developing for months.
The apostolic visitation happened in June of that year.
And ever since then, there had been sort of this question mark hanging over me.
Are they going to remove Strickland or not?
So all of that had been developing.
So it wasn't a big surprise.
But I had made it clear that I couldn't resign because I saw that as my personal choice to abandon my flock.
And I wasn't going to do that.
But when and immediately the Nuncio said, the Pope has asked you to resign.
I said, as you know, Archbishop, I have said I cannot, I will not resign.
And he said, well, then you are removed.
And so that's basically what was delivered to me, the message that I would be removed as Bishop of Tyler.
I flew back to Texas after that meeting and was in the office there on Friday, received an email with an attachment.
I never actually got a letter in the mail, a hard copy, you could say, of the very brief message that said I was relieved of my position as Bishop of Tyler.
I always thought that word relieved was an interesting word to use, but that's what I got, an attachment to an email signed by the Nuncio, Archbishop at that time, Christophe Pierre.
And then it was announced Rome time, noon the next day, that Saturday, which was 5 a.m., I believe, at that time.
This was, of course, in November, November 11th, when it was announced.
And as I said, Ben, it wasn't a surprise.
I certainly didn't want to leave.
I mean, I'd been, I was born in Texas, and my family moved to what became the Diocese of Tyler when I was four years old.
So it was my home.
It is my home.
Still spend a lot of time there in the Tyler area and also in the Dallas area, but still here in Texas.
And so that's what happened.
I was removed and there was never any um document, any written explanation for that removal, and there's been a lot of speculation.
People said oh, there had to be something that they're just not mentioning.
Really ben, as I understand it, I was removed because I wasn't going with the program that Pope Francis was promoting, whether it be synodality or really loosening up the moral, sexual, moral teachings of the church or whatever the part of the agenda.
If it wasn't according to Jesus Christ, yes, I was opposed to it.
And I feel I will remain opposed to any agenda that isn't clearly faithful to what the Catholic Church teaches about Jesus Christ.
So that's a brief summary in a nutshell of how it all happened.
And since then, I have continued to speak up when I saw something when about a month after Fiducia Suplicans, which gets into the whole question that you raise, the Catholic Church teaches that acting on homosexual desires is disordered and wrong.
That, again, it's acting on not having the inclinations.
Every human being has various inclinations, temptations of sinfulness in various ways.
But when we act on it, when we sin, that is where the problem is.
And the church teaches clearly that acting, living in a homosexual relationship, acting on that homosexual activity, as really any activity, any sexual activity outside marriage.
And I think that that's one thing that we need to focus on more.
It's not just homosexual activity because it's by definition outside marriage.
Any sexual activity outside marriage is immoral and we need to call people away from those sins.
Bishop Strickland, I do want to dig down on this after the break.
But whilst we're on in this part of the show, I really wanted to ask you about your removal as Tyler.
Can you just confirm for me, please, that the actual mechanism was the Vatican, the papal ambassador, papal nuncio to the United States, removed you.
You did not resign.
The reason I want you to confirm that is because, and I have written about this in the past, the Vatican, the Holy See, argued in U.S. court successfully to escape the clutches of a very large claim on behalf of the child sex abuse scandal.
And it argued in court that actually it's all a big misunderstanding.
The Vatican has no power.
The Pope has no power to remove a bishop.
It was an outright lie, but it said they argued the point that the church has no power.
The Pope has no power to remove a bishop.
But they're basically franchise operations.
And it needed to argue that argument to say that bishops aren't employees either, that there's not that hierarchy of authority to step back and say, so what went on there for to do with the moving of priests and what have you?
That is the bishop in the diocese.
The Vatican should not be able to be sued in a US court because of that.
As I say, it was an outright lie.
There is very clear that it's in canon law.
The Vatican does do this.
The Pope does do this in the Pope's name if this is done from time to time.
I think there are consequences for the fact that the Holy See has argued that in US court.
We're talking about legal actions that came to many hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think there are consequences for the Vatican on that.
It can either, as far as I'm concerned, it can either continue to argue that, but it must actually do so in practice, or it should cough up its money to the victims.
It can't, and I think it's actually very, it's very scandalous, I think, for the Vatican to say something which is not true, to eliminate itself from legal responsibility when we're talking about kids who've been abused.
And to say something, that's literally not the case.
And you yourself, sir, are the test, you know, a walking testimony of the fact that what the Vatican has, the Holy See, excuse me, has argued in court is literally not true.
Well, it is a convoluted situation we're in because I think one of the problems we have in the church is that bishops are not acting as successors of apostles.
They are not acting as independent bishops, modern-day apostles, serving the church where they serve.
Certainly, always with respect to the patrine office, the papacy.
But it's interesting there because theologically, what the argument is, trying to not be caught up in financial issues, there's some truth there.
There's more truth in the independence of the bishop than it's presently operating.
The bishops of the world really operate more in the context of Episcopal conferences now.
Individual bishops seem to have forgotten that they're successors of the apostles.
Those 33 counties that I was bishop for, I had responsibility to proclaim Jesus Christ just like the Pope has the responsibility as Bishop of Rome and the Pope overseeing all of the world.
It's all about proclaiming Jesus Christ.
And too many times, the bishops act as if they are branch managers of a huge global organization.
I know, I think you put that perfectly.
But it would also offer the Catholic Church against its will, I think, a corrective mechanism on terms of its overreaching and its authority.
We'll be back, Bishop Strickland, in two minutes after this short break.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Welcome back.
Well, before the break, we were just talking with Bishop Strickland about the difference between being a bishop and the responsibilities proper to a bishop.
And if I might use the word, the usurpation by bishops' conferences to take over that responsibility.
And there's no better illustration of that than what we're going to see now, which is Bishop Strickland's intervention at the bishops' conference a couple of months ago.
I don't know how many of us have seen on the social media priests and others gathered celebrating the confirmation of a man, living with a man openly, and it just needs to be addressed.
Father James Martin, once again, involved.
Great pictures of all of them smiling.
Here we are talking about doctrine.
I just thought I need to raise that issue.
I know it's not part of any agenda, but this body gathered, we need to address it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bishop.
Thank you.
There you go.
And the most surprising thing about that intervention was the fact that it got no response whatsoever.
Bishop Strickland, tell us the background to this because this went absolutely viral.
Yes, it did, Ben.
And I think it is a sad illustration of where things are.
Between 250 and 300 bishops in that room.
And it's like, oh, well, don't bring up something like this.
We've got our agenda to take care of, and this isn't on the agenda.
And what else is the agenda than publicly flaunting a contradiction of the teaching of the Catholic faith?
And really, Ben, one of the things that bothered me about it is the two men, these are two sons of God.
We're all beloved of God.
We believe that.
That is what Christ has told us.
We come from love.
God is love.
And these two men that are living in a disordered relationship according to the Catholic Church's teaching and then going through the motions of celebrating the sacrament of confirmation when there's no sign of repentance, no sign of truly embracing what the church teaches.
When an adult is confirmed that's already been baptized, and I presume this man had been baptized, when an adult is confirmed, they are asked to make a clear profession of faith.
Do you believe what the Catholic Church teaches?
And to stand there living a lifestyle style that contradicts that important teaching of the church, it, as I said, very simply, it needed to be addressed, and it hasn't been.
Even since then, that was mid-November.
There was silence, and that's the only response that I've seen to that whole event, which is scandalous to Catholics around the world.
And the deafening silence is what truly bothered me about that whole situation.
It was deafening silence.
Now, here's my question to you, Bishop Strickland.
We're not living in 1925.
2025 is very different.
And I picked 1925 just for poetic comparison.
Everybody, everybody in the west, everyone i'm here in Italy, everyone in Italy Uk, United States now will be um familiar on direct personal, in terms of friends, family with homosexual practice.
That's very much different from, say, the church just simply 100 years ago.
Bishop Strickland, how can lay Catholics look at people that they love most in the world, friends, family, and tell them that what they're doing is against the gospel?
When, as we saw from that clip, America's bishops didn't even have the courage to...
applaud one of their fellow bishops simply restating Catholic doctrine?
Well, that is, that's where, where the rubber hits the road ben.
It does make it deeply challenging for people to simply share the truth with a son or daughter or other loved one or a member of their community.
And, and again it's we have an agenda going.
I mean, i'm glad that you brought up a hundred years ago, because we are in a very different place.
It's as if the truth has changed, has it?
It hasn't, and just the.
There's so many dimensions of that truth that people pretend have changed, but it hasn't changed.
The same message of the church was there as it is now in 1925, 2025.
It's interesting.
I mean we could go into a lengthy discussion of all of this, but about a thousand years ago, Sain Peter Damien fought the church's the a similar battle where the hierarchy of the church was entering into flagrantly entering into the practice of living a homosexual life.
Saint Peter Damien wrote a book uh titled um, the Book Of Gomorrah, referring to sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, and that is classically pointed to what.
What was that?
A consequence of the disordered living of those communities in tolerating sexual deviancy, in homosexual uh acts.
Again ben, it is so important that we never condemn the individual.
We never hate anyone.
Hopefully, and there has been inappropriate hatred of people of that have had have the inclinations of same-sex attraction and homosexuality.
Hatred is never of Jesus Christ, but it really becomes hatred to allow people to just continue down what the church says is a sinful path and ignore that sin because it's not the popular thing to do in the world of 2025.
That becomes hatred, I believe, in itself.
Love is calling to the truth, willing the good of the other.
If you believe, I mean, and you could take it out of the context of the sexual world, which is so overwhelming in our world today.
But if someone is actively taking poison, do you just say, well, that's your choice and that's okay.
And a little arsenic, if that's what you want to do.
Who am I to judge?
You don't say this is going to kill you.
Well, sadly, even that in the world where assisted suicide is taking the stage more and more.
I mean, just in New York, they just did that.
Said you can assist people in killing themselves.
It comes down to the same basic reality.
It's, well, if you feel like it, then the truth goes away.
Do what you feel and the truth be damned.
That is destructive to the human community.
Let me ask you this, Bishop Strickland.
It would seem from the bishop's silence, to your simple restatement of Catholic teaching, of the catechism 101, right?
It would seem that the bishops now, almost universally, are wholly formed by the values of this world rather than the values of the gospel.
Do you see in four minutes we have before we head to this break?
In four minutes, do you think that there is an eschatological dimension to this falling away, clear falling away from the Catholic faith of its pastors, of its principal pastors, of the successors to the apostles?
Is there an eschatological dimension, do you think, to this?
Well, Ben, I make no claim to know when the world will end, and Christ has made it very clear that only the Father knows.
But as you mentioned, eschatological dimension, what I would point to is the reality that we need to recognize, and we don't tend to focus on that, whether as church or as society, this life is a finite journey.
All of us will end in death.
And that sounds like a dark message.
It's just reality.
And the church, her saints through the ages, were people.
There's a phrase in Latin, memento mori.
Remember death.
We need to remember that this is only a passing journey.
This is not eternity.
This isn't a place where we build heaven on earth.
And collectively, as humanity, we seem to have really forgotten that.
People are always after the thing to keep them young, to keep them looking young, to keep them physically healthy.
And no matter what they do, we will all die.
And the church's mission is to address what happens to us when we die.
We believe if we follow Jesus Christ and repent of our sins, and I'm a sinner, I have to keep repenting and going to confession and working at it.
That's what the church needs to be telling people.
Work out your salvation.
It's by the grace of God that any of us are saved, but we have to work at it in the sense of repenting of sin and living the commandments more fully, more completely, hopefully more joyfully, more recognizing that living the truth that God has commanded us to live is our ultimate happiness, our ultimate fulfillment.
It doesn't make it easy along the way.
Christ said, take up your cross and follow me.
But where are we following him to?
Eternal life in the kingdom of his father.
And we don't hear the church speaking in those terms, really in any dimension today.
That's what we need to return to.
And that I see, Ben, a lot of people are returning to.
Young people, young priests are saying, forget all of this modernist approach in adapting the church to the world.
Let's remember what Christ and his church have taught through the ages.
The church is to be in the world, but not of the world.
And in all of these issues, it comes down to that basic truth.
Are we looking to dwell in eternity with God, the salvation of our souls?
Are we always focusing on that?
Or are we trying to build some sort of brotherhood of man that makes a utopia out of this world?
Many people through the ages have attempted to make this world utopia, and it's always collapsed because it wasn't based on the truth.
The truth is we're called somewhere else.
And real love reminds us that we are called to eternity with God.
Beautiful.
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Back now to Bishop Strickland as we approach the final few minutes of this show.
We only have five minutes, Bishop.
I'd like if you wouldn't mind just to say a few words about Pillars of Faith, which is the project, your apostolate, which you're working on now.
Just if you wouldn't mind to say a few words what that is and how people might get involved.
Thank you, Ben.
Yes, it's pillarsoffaith.net, a website that my team and I established August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption.
So it's just a few months old, but already making progress and proclaiming everything we've talked about.
The beautiful, we need to remember the message of Jesus Christ is joy to the world, the beautiful message of God's Son teaching us the truth.
And that's what Pillars of Faith is all about.
It has podcasts that I put on once a week, writings that I post, a great team that is supporting people that have already joined our fraternity for laity, for priest, for religious, a fraternity that is supportive and offering prayers and letting us all know that we're not alone in seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.
Even when the hierarchy of the church is confused, even when politicians are doing things that are totally detrimental to the truth that is Jesus Christ, we need to strengthen each other and joyfully live the truth.
That's what pillarsoffaith.net is all about.
And I thank you for taking some time to give me a chance to speak about it a bit.
All we're doing is proclaiming Jesus Christ, the ancient and beautiful truth of the Catholic faith, and to strengthen people, the individuals that are listening to this program that are worried about our world, worried about our nation, worried about the church, to know that we are not alone.
And the truth is what gives us strength because the truth is Jesus Christ himself.
No, I was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to give a platform to what you're doing.
I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I think many people think you are a hero of Catholic witness, singular amongst the U.S. Catholic bishops in your courage and your steadfastness.
And there's a great privilege to have this opportunity to give you that platform.
And anyone who's been following the show of the past hour will see that the clarity which you said earlier was lacking from some quarters of the church certainly isn't lacking in your own expositions of what the church believes and why it believes it.
In the final two minutes of this show, can I just ask you, because this is the Christmas New Year season, can I just ask you just to give a quick moment?
You mentioned the joy to the world, that is Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
Would you just say in two minutes, if you can, to share the joy of the Christmas message to the war and posse, and if I may ask you for a Christmas blessing at the end of that.
I'm honored to, Ben.
Really, the Christmas message is the message of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, incarnate in the world, conceived in the womb of a woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and born in Bethlehem.
Our calendar begins.
We talked about 1925, 2025.
That is a measurement since the time of the birth of Jesus Christ.
Yes, there may be some historical questions about was it exactly the beginning of that year, 2025 years ago.
But that is how we operate.
That is the date that we are using as the year that we are living in.
And I think that that's significant.
should remind us of the world transformed when God's Son is incarnate among us.
And we believe as Catholics that he remains with us in his church and especially in the sacraments and most specifically in his Eucharistic face.
He is with us as he promised until the end of this world.
We talked about eschatology a bit.
We don't know when the world ends, but we know Christ is with us.
And he came to us, conceived in the womb of a woman, developing in that womb like we did for nine months before he was born.
God so loved the world that he gave us his son, and his son so loved us that he lowered himself to become a newly conceived child, a child born in a manger in Bethlehem, and a little boy growing up and a man who came to save the world.
Jesus entered into our existence, into our world.
The timeless divine Son of God became one of us.
What a beautiful statement of love.
That's what Christmas is about.
So it's not to keep Christ at the center of Christmas, but to remember there is no Christmas without Christ.
And the blessing?
Almighty God, we ask your blessing for all of those listening that we may trust that you are truth, that you have sent your son, our Savior.
Following him is our salvation, where we all grow closer to his sacred heart through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
And we ask this in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
One hour doesn't do justice for all that you have to say.
Therefore, I will ask you to come back on the show at a future point and share your reflections and analysis with us.
That's all we have time for today.
Thanks very much to Vittorio Franco for putting this show together, for Cameron Wallace, our producer, for Will, his crack team in Denver, and Milamerica's voice.
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