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April 23, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:05
TURNING TO TRADITION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1068
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Hi, everyone.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill, and I am hosting Dinesh's podcast this week while he is away in Israel.
If you're a regular Dinesh D'Souza listener, you might have heard me on here before.
I've been on here the last couple days.
I am frequently busy being a mom to my daughter, Marigold, having a second baby very soon, and also supporting my husband's role in U.S. Congress.
We live in North Texas, so hope to see you guys sometime soon.
And I always love coming on to guest host, and I've really enjoyed it so far.
The best way you can find out more about me is to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, True Social, X, all the places.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill.
And, oh, I guess Rumble and YouTube also.
But beware if you follow me on Facebook.
I do post often, so it's all good stuff, though.
Information you need ASAP about everything going on in the admin and the news.
So we have a lot of content to get to today.
Today we're going to be talking about the death of Pope Francis.
We will be discussing the implications of his death, what this might mean for who the next pope will be.
We will be speaking with Raymond Arroyo, a Catholic expert on these topics.
He's been reporting on this for years.
He is a best-selling author, a Fox News contributor.
You may have seen him recently hosting the Ingram Angle, and you can also find him on EWTN, a Catholic news channel.
We're also going to talk a little bit about the recent attacks from the Atlantic on our very own Secretary Pete Hegseth.
All right, well, let's get started.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Far above us now, light years beyond even where Katy Perry fears to tread in space, the bodies of the universe are all in constant motion.
They're moving in relation to each other and in relation to us.
Distant celestial bodies like stars are also moving despite their massive size.
We know this because as they move, their light waves are distorted.
If they're moving towards us, the light waves become shorter and skew more towards the blue range.
If they're moving away from us, the light waves become longer and thus move more towards the red range, a visible light.
The phenomenon is known as blue shift and red shift, respectively.
But there's another kind of redshift that happens here on our planet.
It can be summed up in the pithy yet unattributed saying, if you are not a liberal when you were young, you have no heart.
And if you are not a conservative when you're old, you have no brain.
You may have heard something along these lines, which traditionally says, oh, you know, young people, they're going to be liberal.
That's just the way it is.
And we just accept it.
And older people are just going to become more conservative magically.
Well, research by both Pew and Chicago Booth show that this adage is, or has been, more or less true for the American voter, so it makes sense that older people might think this.
But leftist policies are fueled by appeals to emotion and prey on one's feelings of guilt, fear, inadequacy, which sometimes younger people are easily persuaded by.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are more rational.
They look to the practical effects of things like taxes or immigration.
Anecdotally, you may see that it is true that people have tended to become conservative with age in the last 50 years.
How many people do you know went from voting for conservatives when they were young to voting for liberals when they were older?
Now compare that to the number of people who walked away from the Democrat Party.
Unless you're surrounded by that rare group of NGO employees laundering our tax dollars, or the useless bureaucrat who facilitated that global money laundering operation, chances are very good you don't know many people who stopped voting red and then started to vote blue.
Now, if you're a Democrat, you might be concerned by this natural progression.
But for the past decade or so, the Democrats haven't been bothered by it.
Because in their minds, they'll just try to get more young people to turn out and vote, and they don't really want to deal with old people anyways.
They don't care about them.
Why? Because data was showing that generation after generation, younger voters were increasingly left-wing.
According to Pew Research, in 1999, the generation born in the 1970s leaned Democrat 52% to 46%.
In 2009, the next generation, born in the 1980s, favored Democrats 60% to 38%.
And in 2023, voters born in the 90s favored Democrats by the margin of 27%.
With each successive generation becoming more and more blue, the redshift phenomenon became less of a concern.
Add to that the fact that baby boomers have been aging, Democrats were confident that the problem of the redshift itself had a natural remedy in the grim reaper.
They thought that they were inevitable to win.
That to be young meant to be Democrat and to be Democrat meant to be young.
But fate has a sense of humor, especially when it comes to such thoughtless hubris.
Fast forward to the 2024 election and Democrats were stunned to discover That not only were they losing greater numbers of the minority vote, but they were losing a shocking number of younger voters as well.
Just last week, we saw the results of the Yale Youth Poll.
It shows that the cohort born in the 90s still clings to the Democrat identity, but only barely.
For the under-30 voter aged 22 to 29, a group which is half-compromised of Pew's deep blue cohort, Democrats are now only favored by 6.4%.
And for the youngest voters, 18 to 21, the preference isn't blue at all.
That group favors Republicans by 11.7 percentage points.
So the youth vote went from favoring the Democrats by almost 30 points to outright favoring Republicans by close to 12 points.
And if you think about the red shift where voters become more conservative as they age, if that still holds true, then Democrats may have to write off an entire generation of voters before too long because, well, inevitably the only thing that would happen is more of them would keep getting more and more conservative.
Not that we want to rely on that, but this is a very good sign.
Now, unless the Democrats become some next-generation version of the Republicans, those voters are...
Lost to them forever.
This has certainly spooked Democrats.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, you had outlets like Vox trying to analyze the problem.
These are kind of middle-aged, older writers who are trying to analyze these young people.
A lot of liberal writers think that they're young and cool, but actually they're just getting older, and so they're a little bit out of touch with these people.
They blamed TikTok.
They blamed young men, toxic masculinity.
The Atlantic blamed COVID hysteria, calling the new generation of voters the COVID youth.
Now, there is some truth to this in the sense that, yes, a lot of young people realized during COVID that I don't want to live like this.
I don't want to live under some Democrat-controlled country where I don't have any freedom to do anything.
They don't want to live in a culture that's, you know, just idolizing girl boss culture.
They want to live amongst...
Other men that they can be friends with who are masculine, not toxic, but masculine, and they're interested in women who are feminine.
So I think this younger culture realized, hey, we don't want to keep going down this path of destruction, which the Democrats are trying to sell us, because it's horrible.
And more recently, these liberal reporters, they've been blaming Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, the manosphere.
People who have been following the youth culture, however, have not been surprised at all by the shift in voting preference.
And I don't think it goes back to any specific person like a Joe Rogan or someone, you know, just one person.
I mean, I think this is a larger movement that's actually taking place amongst millions of people.
There was a major event that triggered a tectonic cultural transformation among youths in 2014.
That event was called Gamergate.
Gamergate was the first time the heavy-handed efforts by institutions infiltrated by leftists directly impacted the lives of people who were too young to be politically affiliated.
To this day, the mainstream media gaslights over the nature of the event, calling it a harassment campaign.
But at its core, it was about a bunch of video gaming enthusiasts pushing back on woke culture.
The controversy centered around a completely worthless game that was given.
Rave reviews by gaming journalists.
The reason?
It was programmed by a woman.
And there may also have been some other strange things going on in the mix.
Gamers felt betrayed, lashed out.
Oddly, instead of apologizing for rating a game not on its qualities as a game, but the gender of the person who made it, the journalists engaged in a concerted effort to destroy the reputations of ordinary gamers who dared to complain online.
Those gamers were smeared as misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes.
One of those maligned by journalists was UK YouTuber Carl Benjamin.
Thanks to his experience at the hands of lying journalists trying to destroy his life, he went on to become one of the most vocal British advocates against woke culture and a leading thinker.
The story of his transformation is emblematic in what happened to that generation of otherwise apolitical young people.
There's that saying about fearing the wrath of the righteous man who just wanted to be left alone.
What Yale discovered last week is that today's wrathful men, who just wanted to be left alone with their hobbies, actually are voting red.
In the current year, American pop culture is in shambles, thanks to wokeism.
People are warning that Hollywood is about to become the next Detroit.
A place full of ruins that was once great, but is on the decline.
The Science Fiction Literature Award for the Hugo now gets 30% fewer votes than just a decade ago.
The comic industry is hollowed out, and the video game industry is also collapsing.
The woke mind virus has operated as intended.
It has brought everything it touches to absolute ruin.
This means that GamerGate was essentially a boot camp for future conservatives.
It taught them that leftism is suicidal and self-destructive by design, and that those who believe in it will willingly sacrifice every less shred of integrity in its defense.
It showed that the media lies openly to its own detriment, so long as the liars can get the opportunity to make public jabs at people whose politics they hate.
So after all of this, Democrats still can't figure out why no one believes them or the media.
They're confused why their stunts, like phony filibusters, trips to El Salvador, impress no one, especially not any young people.
An entire generation of people have been aggressively abused, lied to, lied about for decades, with the Democrats attempting to control them.
The same people who were castigated for protesting a major scandal in the gaming industry have grown into voters who see right through ploys, like lawfare and concerted media campaigns.
They aren't the type that can be fooled by the antics of rogue judges.
And Democrats are surprised at this change in voting preference.
If they were smart, they would have left those gamers alone to just enjoy life.
They kind of represent a larger group of younger people.
But let them be young people.
But they took those pleasures away in condescension, took away their freedom through COVID.
A lot of these young people decided to pick up a new hobby, which was ripping on leftists.
Democrats took them for granted, thinking they'd have to vote blue because that's what young people do, and thinking young people idolize these celebrities.
But actually, a lot of young people are involved in meme culture and these kind of undercurrents online, many of which are actually conservative.
And now they see that a lot of the lies, like during COVID, are not all true.
So, Democrats are trying to reinvigorate the youth vote.
They've pinned their hopes to 25-year-old David Hogg, a finger-wagging adult male with shoulders so small he can wear a banana peel like a cape.
Well, good luck with that choice, Democrats.
Good luck doubling down on gender confusion, putting the rights of illegals over those of your own citizens, raiding our taxes so you can buy mansions as politicians.
Encouraging violent extremists to commit acts of vandalism, arson, and even further violence at Teslas.
This is apparently your go-to strategy.
And you clearly haven't gotten the message of losing in 2024 yet.
So let me offer a few words of advice and give Democrats some of the best political consulting they've had in years, which is that people don't like you or your branding or what you're doing.
That might be upsetting for them.
It might have something to do with the fact that they are lunatics, imperiously trying to force everyone to go along with their reality and to cling to the way that they talk about feelings, cling to the way that they want to create this alternate universe.
And a lot of young people just aren't interested in the delusion, in the societal collapse and widespread moral degeneracy that the left has been pushing.
And are interested in a more traditional way of life.
So until the left starts fixing this mental brokenness, I think transgenderism is a good example of that.
They still won't let that issue go.
They're going to have a hard time reaching young people because young people see through this.
So remember our lesson in astronomy.
That which shifts red is moving away.
Away from you.
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Call 800-876- The root word for organization is organ.
That's a word heavy with biological meaning, and its connotation is a living entity.
Does that seem weird?
We don't tend to think of organizations as living bodies, despite the fact that they are composed of, well, living bodies.
People. People who belong to that organization.
They may be mere members, another word with biological implications.
They may be administrators, or they may be leaders.
But what's become clear over these past few years is that organizations, despite being comprised of various living human beings, very much have a life of their own.
We see that one of the most vexing features of organizations is that they seem to possess a will.
That is at once a part of yet also separate from the collective will of its members.
A will to live, a will to thrive, and generally that is a good thing.
One of the reasons we form organizations is to create human legacy, something that will endure, perhaps something that will serve man in some capacity for generations.
But that's not always the case.
Just like human bodily organs, organizations can become unwell.
At which point, they end up working towards some purpose that they were not intended to do.
Kind of like a bodily organ that ceases to function normally in order to produce cancer cells.
But even in the case of a sick or malformed organization, it seeks to live.
Organizations have an uncanny ability to resist what they perceive as threats.
Threats from the outside, threats from within.
What's very clear now is that they never give up without a fight.
Take, for example, the case of the U.S. military.
Recently, the military had to relieve Colonel Shayla Baez Ramirez from duty as garrison commander at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin.
Why was that?
Because the good colonel refused to complete the chain of command board at Fort McCoy.
The board lacked pictures of the updated personnel at the top of the chain.
Namely, President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Secretary Hegseth.
The chain of command board is something you see in every command.
It includes pictures of those who serve as the operational and administrative heads, tracing the hierarchy of the military all the way up to the White House.
Now, it's important to show soldiers who they work for, who is at the head, who is in charge of this organization.
And all are ultimately responsible not to uniformed officers or plainclothes civilians, but it ends up being a hierarchy where ultimately it goes back to who is in charge of this military.
To refuse to update this is an act of insubordination.
But that's not the only form of insubordination in our nation's military.
The commander in Pituffic Space Force Base in Greenland was also made to step down after she brazenly rebuffed Vice President Vance's public statements regarding the future of America in Greenland.
In addition to that, a group of officials at the Pentagon were also dismissed in the aftermath of investigations into the signal leak involving Secretary Pete Hegseth.
And so it comes as no surprise that following the dismissal of these high-level DOD officials, the signal leak story somehow once again was laundered as a separate story by The Atlantic this past week.
Liberal outlets are obsessed, once again, with getting rid of Hegseth.
It seems like he has become their main target, and clearly they see something about him that is a huge threat.
But for the most of the conservative media, this hasn't really been much of a story.
We support Pete Hegseth, we stand with Pete Hegseth, and we're not going to just buckle down because of some silly Atlantic story.
We've reached the point of saturation on the right where the press releases don't even put a dent in our news cycle.
It's predictable.
Of course, this news story is little more than hearsay.
And like most media stories, the facts are wrong, they're being misreported, or the situation is being grossly misrepresented.
Why? Because we all now understand that the organism called the Department of Defense is fighting back from the threat of reform.
Now this is an organism, an organization, and someone new like Pete Hexeth coming in, changing things, shaking things up there.
I bet there are going to be bureaucrats who are not going to like that.
So rather than see the story as evidence of Hegseth's ineffectiveness or some kind of big news story, we see it as an endorsement of his ability as a reformer and as an outsider to come in and make the changes necessary to this organization.
And President Trump would not have nominated him and made him the secretary if he wasn't going to do this.
And this is really what we voted for and what we expect.
We want to see a change in a lot of these kind of bureaucratic roles because we don't want things to keep continuing the way that they always have been.
And we see that when there's rot in these organizations, in the military, for example, it's not good for anyone.
Some of these young men who come in and they have these high hopes and they have very idyllic views of America, we want those things to be preserved because America is a great country.
And when their hopes and dreams are stomped on because of some bureaucratic silliness forcing them to, you know, Go and compete against people who are not as qualified to pass certain standards or to follow some kind of DEI or some kind of race,
gender, strangeness.
That's not what the military is about.
So I really support what Pete Hegseth has been doing to get rid of those things.
And I think we all do, and it will create for a much better atmosphere amongst the men and women in the military who compete on an equal playing field there.
Across the world, another Reformer was also dismissed of his duty as leader on Monday when God called Pope Francis to his final rest.
He passed away.
You may have seen he celebrated Easter.
He also met with Vice President J.D. Vance and passed away.
So say what you will about Pope Francis.
He was a Reformer.
He definitely was different from his predecessors as Pope.
As in someone who takes the form of something and makes it look different.
His critics would claim that he was malforming the church that he ran.
And to be honest, a lot of his papacy did raise some eyebrows regarding his progressive views and attempting to atomize the church by instituting a completely novel meta-hierarchy.
Pushing topics that aren't considered theological, like climate change, open borders, Global integration.
The Pope's role is really to focus on theology, focus on issues within Christianity, and spreading the faith, not necessarily to be commenting on every political issue.
So don't agree with him there, but definitely our hearts go out to all of the Catholics who are mourning the loss of him.
We will see changing as they're electing a new pope.
We will see whether the cardinals choose to go in a direction of A more traditional pope, we've actually seen a lot of revivals, especially amongst young people who are converting to Catholicism, who are craving this traditionalism,
and actually returning to the Latin Mass, which I personally love.
And so this is very exciting.
I think that a lot of people thought, oh, you know, maybe by Pope Francis being more liberal, he's going to pull in more people.
And that might have been some of his But actually, I think the opposite has been happening, which is that the traditional mass, the traditional way of life, is something that is a revival, which is why we've seen that there are all kinds of baptisms taking place,
and it's very exciting.
And speaking of traditionalists, where was Francis when it was discovered that the FBI was conducting surveillance on traditional Catholics?
He did not issue a statement about that.
And so I think it'll be interesting to see if we get a Pope who wants to defend Catholicism, defend Catholic people, and defend the tradition of the Church.
So in the case of the Department of Defense and the Catholic Church with a new Pope on the rise, these are examples of movements to realign their respective organizations towards a more traditional role, hopefully.
Military recruitment has never been better since the election of President Trump and the appointment of Pete Hegseth.
It's clear that the average warfighter is behind our nation's duly elected leader.
That's significant because it's the average warfighter who will ultimately be asked to risk his life in the next conflict.
Those recruiting numbers are a clear endorsement of the Trump strategy of peace through strength, as well as the common sense approach of moving away from irrelevant DEI and climate change goals.
In all the examples of insubordination above, the problem isn't with the grunts, but with the entitled knife and fork types among the upper crust of the officer class.
The people who got their commissions through Congress, their assignments through appointments from leftist functionaries.
There are Wokies, DEI hires.
There are trans officers who turn the military into a playground for personal hangups.
They sacrifice our safety for their feelings.
They have an inverse understanding of what's trivial and what's essential.
So let's hope that whoever the next pope is...
Ends up being an inspirational figure who is very much focused on the actual doctrine.
Let's hope that Pete Hegseth is able to continue to do all the great work he's doing.
After all, all of the 135 Cardinals who will participate in the Conclave to choose the Pope's successor, fully 110 of them were appointed by Francis.
Francis was focused on elevating to cardinal bishops from the periphery, those nations such as Africa, South America, Asia, which are not historically as well represented in the Vatican.
So why is this a cause for hope?
Well... Look at the voting habits of Hispanics here in the U.S. The Democrats have spent half a century trying to flood the country with Hispanics under the delusional belief that they were importing a permanent class of Democrat voters who would only vote based on their skin color,
but their reality has offered a harsh rebuke of that hubris.
As it turns out, many of these Hispanics love to Actually follow their Catholic faith.
They love to keep the money that they're earning to feed their families and are horrified by wokeness.
They have very strict perceptions concerning abortion.
In other words, Democrats only discovered too late that they were importing a class of Republican voters along with those who may vote Democrat.
And according to the last election, it's the GOP that's been able to capitalize best on that net gain.
We also have seen that there have been amazing revivals of Christianity in Africa and many other countries around the world.
Unfortunately, the West is in a place of severe destruction where we have seen Christianity declining.
We have seen a lot of Western nations taken over by foreigners who do not share Western values.
We've actually seen Christianity growing in many African countries.
So it's not guaranteed that this conclave will necessarily vote in a way to bring about another pope who has the similar ideology flavor as Pope Francis.
So we may see a more traditional pope.
Like American Hispanics, many from these other countries, they likely won't.
Just vote based on how the Democrats think people should vote based on their skin color.
If they pick an African traditionalist like Cardinal Seurat, then the true meaningful reform can begin.
He's an example of the type of cardinal that could undermine the woke takeover that could potentially happen within the Catholic Church.
Furthermore, thanks to President Trump and Doge, there's less graft in the picture.
What self-respecting leftists would want to get involved in running an organization that's bereft of government funds?
Maybe some of the more radical cardinals will opt out of the running because they probably would not get elected considering the makeup of the group and considering the USAID funding has certainly been cut.
Wouldn't it be great if our organizations were Revived in a way where we could say, wow, you know, this is so inspiring.
This is so amazing.
And so that is what my hope is for the military, for the Catholic Church, because I think our country and the world will be better off if we see these organizations really thriving.
And this is the type of reform that can only be accomplished through excellent leadership and through a change in the way that the stream has been flowing.
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Again, it's dinesh.locals.com I am delighted to welcome our guest today, Raymond Arroyo.
He is a New York Times bestselling author.
He is a chart-topping vocalist.
He is the managing editor at EWTN.
He is a Fox News contributor.
You have probably seen him on Ingram Angle before, and he is an expert on all kinds of things, but especially what's been going on in the Catholic Church.
So, Raymond, thanks so much for joining us.
Oh, I'm delighted to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, I thought we could start.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how your Easter weekend was.
Well, Easter weekend was tumultuous because I was here in New York.
I thought I was just going to stay for a few days.
You know, I had some hits.
I filled in for Laura Ingraham on Friday, did some weekend shows.
I thought I was going to coast back to New Orleans.
And then the Pope died, who, you know, I've been covering.
This is going to be my third conclave.
So it kind of throws my days and nights into a tailspin.
We were up last night.
I had to be up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do the live conveyance of his body out of the chapel where it was into St. Peter's.
So we were on air for a few hours this morning.
So all your days and your nights get inverted because of this crazy schedule.
But we are pressing on.
Yeah. Will you be traveling to be there kind of?
Speaking about it on site or nearby?
Yeah. No, no.
I'll be traveling to Rome early next week to go cover, you know, the conclave.
The lead up to the conclave and the conclave.
It really happens during those, they call them general congregations.
Those are the meetings that precede the conclave.
And that's a chance for these cardinals, you know, 138 men who really don't know each other.
I mean, that's the, I think what a lot of people are missing.
They think, well...
Pope Francis appointed 78 to 80 percent of these cardinals.
Clearly, you're going to get somebody like him coming out of this.
But that's not necessarily true.
One, he didn't really vet those cardinals in the way that his predecessors did.
So they're not all ideological clones of Pope Francis.
They're not all progressives, that's for sure.
On the other side, they don't know each other at all.
So there's going to be a very fast, you know, this is going to be like speed dating.
They're all going to get to know each other really fast.
Then they go into conclave and they have to pick a pope.
My guess is it's going to go longer than the two days that, you know, we've seen in recent years.
Wow. What has been, because I know you mentioned you've already seen other ones occur.
What has been your experience in the past?
Is this kind of a similar situation where it's always this case where they don't all know each other and goes longer?
Or is this, do you feel like a little bit of an unusual situation?
No, no, no.
This is a unique situation under John Paul II and Benedict, the two previous popes.
The cardinals, all these cardinals would meet regularly.
So they had regular meetings.
They would regularly consult with the Pope.
They regularly came to Rome.
So every two years or so, there'd be a synod where all the cardinals would come.
Pope Francis threw that out and created his own synod.
A synod is just a meeting of bishops.
His version was inviting laypeople in a handful of selected cardinals and bishops, only the ones he liked selected.
And he even brought in...
You know, atheists and people who weren't Catholic at all and allowed them to be consultors.
So it was, you know, Pope Francis's pontificate was improvisatory and at times blunt.
And that reflected the man himself.
He was improvisatory in the way he ran his life, in the way he executed the papacy.
And even in these big decisions.
And, you know, he often called himself the Pope.
He used to talk about the God of surprises.
Let us embrace the God of surprises.
I think we're seeing the Pope of surprises.
And the biggest surprise may be that his predecessor is someone very unlike he would have imagined.
Wow, that is incredible.
What do you think the other cardinals felt who maybe weren't, I guess, invited anymore to the special meetings?
Because if they were all going before and then, you know, it's only some, plus these other people, is it people he- Well, the cardinal, remember, a cardinal, yeah, a cardinal is nothing more than a bishop or an archbishop who's been elevated by the Pope to be a special consultant and very close to him,
to collaborate closely.
With Rome.
You know, Cardinal Timothy Dolan here in New York is a cardinal.
These are men who are elevated, and therefore, because of that status, you know, they wear the red.
You can always tell a cardinal because they're wearing red, and people are,"Why are they wearing red?
They're just being fancy, and what is that?" No, the red is a sign that they're willing to shed their blood for Christ.
That's what the red symbolizes and has always symbolized.
Pope Benedict, the previous pope.
Gotten some hot water because he wore those red Gucci shoes they made for him.
And that, too, was a sign of, you know, you're willing to bleed and die for your beliefs and for Christ.
So what should have happened is all of the cardinals should have been included in all of those meetings because they are his closest collaborators.
They're also the people who run the largest dioceses in the world.
So they simply...
Are in charge of and are in touch with more people than anybody else.
But for whatever reason, he decided that he wanted to go out to what he called the peripheries.
And he brought nuns in and, you know, atheists and people around the corner and asked their opinion.
And they'd have small group discussions.
And then he'd come up with a document.
So it was a kind of herky-jerky, again, improv way of handling a synod.
It did offend and upset a lot of cardinals.
But here's where the worm always turns.
You know, when a pope dies, everything freezes.
All the people that were in charge are no longer in charge.
No decisions can be made.
Nothing can move.
All that happens now is you bury the pope.
Then you have a conclave.
All those cardinals, including the ones who were offended by this diss, they're going to get to go and vote for Pope Francis's successor.
And we'll see how this turns out.
Yeah. When you look at the makeup of cardinals, do you have any kind of predictions on what direction it may go?
Even if there's not a specific person, do you think it's going to be a bit more of a traditional leaning or more of a progressive leaning pope?
What do you think?
Well, the bet gamblers would tell you and the bet makers that it's probably going to be a progressive pope.
I'd be careful of that.
But because of the dynamics I just discussed, the Cardinals don't know each other and Pope Francis didn't really know these Cardinals that well.
They weren't...
Chosen with the specificity that he chose bishops, for instance.
With bishops, they would vet them.
There was a whole department to vet them.
With cardinals, he just kind of picked guys he liked.
He met some missionary from Morocco one afternoon, 53-year-old guy.
Oh, he's a nice guy.
He seems smart.
A few weeks later, he's made a cardinal.
Well, the man has about 1,000 Catholics total in his entire diocese.
That's about the size of a very small parish in the United States.
And it turns out that guy also was a fierce combatant of Islam, living in Morocco and being a Catholic there.
So I don't know if Pope Francis quite got the cardinals that he imagined he was getting.
And we'll see.
Like I said, I think surprises are in store.
I think this could take a while.
But yeah, maybe there's a surprise in the offing.
Yeah. What do you think about possibilities of the new pope being from Africa or somewhere that's more of a...
A peripheral place.
Well, look, the church is so vibrant in Africa.
I mean, that's where converts are.
They're very zealous about the faith.
They believe.
And, you know, look, anytime a faith is challenged, I would argue it gets stronger and better.
Because when you confront something like, you know, look at the people in Sudan.
You know, I knew the former bishop of Sudan, a wonderful man named Bishop Makram Ghassiz.
He would fly in.
He had a death sentence on him because the Jaweed, who were the sort of horsemen, Muslim horsemen who would go burn villages and destroy.
I won't tell you what they did to the women and children, but it's horrible.
Scar them off, kill them, butcher them, hit them with machetes.
And they put a death sentence on this bishop because they didn't want him flying in.
He would fly in.
Do baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and then he'd fly out.
And he kept coming back and bringing aid and digging wells to keep the community going.
So, you know, when you go through that, when you've encountered that kind of human and spiritual obstacle for your faith, I think it deepens it.
I think it strengthens it.
It gives it a medal, frankly, that somebody living in Philadelphia or...
Baltimore or New Orleans or L.A. Just don't have to contend with.
We have it very easy, particularly in the West.
Very easy.
That's not the case in Africa.
Yeah. And particularly in the Far East and China.
You know, these are people who suffer and die for their faith, and they're willing to do that.
So the men who come out of that region, perforce, I think, are going to be more zealous.
And look, I heard you talking about this in a monologue.
Young people are wise to this stuff.
We are seeing a 30 to 70% increase just this Easter in Catholic converts.
Yeah. And it's mostly young people who are, you know, the alarms are going off.
They realize, wait a minute, I'm floating in this chaos.
I need something to tether my life to.
I need something to make sense of this chaos and to move forward.
So they're looking, again, to ancient Christianity, Catholicism.
And I think the African church is well poised to offer up a refined version of that zealous, deeply held, serious, eternal faith that I think is drawing young people.
And most of those converts are millennials, which is an amazing thing.
And men, millennial men, which is another good sign.
It is.
It's a great sign.
Nothing away from beautiful ladies.
Well, it would be great if this traditional Catholic revival continues.
Do you think that with the next Pope, we might see more acceptance of Latin Mass?
What about kind of this very traditional revival?
Do you think there might be a different perspective towards maybe more conservative bishops?
Do you think that there will be more...
Maybe more being done to protect persecuted Christians in China or other countries.
I mean, I guess there are so many issues that the Catholic Church can focus on.
I mean, look, the Latin Mass thing has not gone well.
And what I mean by that is Pope Francis tried to stamp out and forbid a Latin Mass.
And he's done it in major dioceses in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.
And I mean, there are major dioceses where they simply stamp it out.
You can find it in one little chapel at a hospital or something, but it can't be in a parish setting.
It can't be regularly scheduled.
You can't say a Latin Mass on High Holy Days, Easter and Christmas.
I mean, this is absurd.
We've never seen anything like this in the history of Catholicism, where you simply stamp out a traditional practice that Saints used and celebrated with.
I mean, this is the mass of the saints.
It goes right back to the first century.
I mean, bits of this go right back to the first century.
Why you would want to placate that or destroy it?
Particularly when young people are leaning in and going, wait a minute, this is feeding me.
There's something otherworldly here, mysterious and supernatural, that's happening in this church when we worship in this way.
I feel closer to God.
Well, let them have that experience.
It doesn't mean everybody has to.
You can still go to the vernacular mass, the English mass, the Spanish mass in your community, but if people are drawn to it and it's growing the faith, why stamp it out?
That I could never understand that decision.
My guess is, my hope is, the next pope will reverse that.
And he can't.
It's easily.
Yeah. Yeah, I've been to a Latin Mass, and it's so amazing to be in the midst of the chanting and the smells.
Just everything about it makes you feel like you're really in centuries ago.
Like, you really have that kind of, this is like the tradition of what we're connected to.
And of course, it's about, you know, the meaning.
I believe in Christ, but I think the traditional element of it is really special and different.
It's supernatural.
It's mysterious because it's so ancient.
You mentioned the smells.
When you see the incense, that's the symbol, the symbology of the entire mass.
The vestments worn, the gestures throughout, the incense.
I was covering, they moved.
The Pope's body from a private chapel into St. Peter's last night or this morning.
And they were incensing the body.
So I said, you know, a lot of people, maybe Protestant folks or people who've never been to a high mass might not even know what incense is.
So I explained it.
This goes right back to the Jewish temple.
And it was a sign of...
The prayers wafting up, floating up to heaven.
That's what all that smoke symbolizes.
So when they go around and they incense the whole altar, they'll circle a couple of times.
All of that has deep meaning.
And whether you understand all the meaning or not, it's a little like opera.
I always say, you know, you don't have to know the narrative.
When you hear the aria, it will cut through your heart and you're riveted by it.
That's kind of what the Latin Mass is.
It's opera.
And we're so used to, you know, folk music.
We can't imagine there's anything different, but there is.
And it may be grander and more beautiful and more powerful.
And I think the young people may save us on this.
Let us pray.
Oh, well, that's very exciting.
What do you think about in the Western kind of Europe?
It seems like there's a lot of issues with Christianity, Catholicism.
We've seen Charles talking about Ramadan and all these things.
We've seen there just really be a big cultural shift.
So I'm really hoping young Americans save us.
But what do you see going on in Europe?
Because I think a lot of us here, we're having these traditional revivals, yet we see that there are these riots in Europe.
Well, but even Europe, and this is fascinating, even in Europe, this Easter, there were 17,000 converts in France, of all places.
In England, there was a story I just read before Easter.
I did this last weekend.
In England, Catholics, because of the young people, Catholics are outnumbering Anglicans for church attendance in England.
So all of that, this is why we always focus on...
So it's going on.
Yeah, well, you do it every day.
I do it every day.
We focus on the, you know, the bad stuff that's bubbling up.
You know, King Charles is saluting Ramadan.
People are listening to that and they're going, wait a minute, that's not our culture.
That's not Western culture.
That's not the belief I was raised in.
That's not why we have these beautiful buildings and Big Ben.
You know, Westminster Cathedral wasn't built.
On Ramadan.
And I think there's an awareness and an awakening of that.
And you see the pendulum, because of that pressure coming from those secular forces, you see the pendulum now swinging.
And it's not just an American phenomenon.
It's happening across Europe, where we thought, we all thought, Christianity was dead as a doornail in Europe.
That's it.
It's going to be museums and close the door.
It seems even there.
There's bounce back and a revival, and I think that's a really hopeful and wonderful sign.
That's the roots of Europe.
The roots of Europe are Christian.
Pope Benedict wrote movingly about this.
If you don't reconnect with those roots, you lose a part of yourself, and the thing becomes very brittle.
Yeah. Do you think that because of this, we'll see kind of a revival of family values?
Maybe we'll see fertility rates rising.
Maybe we'll see more of that going on.
I'm actually having a baby in two weeks, so I'm very much in the baby mode.
Oh, congratulations.
You're already doing your part.
I love it.
Well, then you should answer the question, not me.
I haven't had kids in 20 years.
I hope that more young people get married.
They convert to Christianity, have families, but do you feel like that's something that you're seeing amongst these revivals?
I do.
If you go to the Latin Mass, go to any Latin Mass, you will see women in Montias.
Holding multiple babies and the husbands behind them holding even more.
I mean, that's what's happening.
You know, the Latin Mass is not as quiet as it used to be because the children are crying the whole time.
I mean, and that's a beautiful sign.
It's a sign of life.
You know, when priests and people complain about all those kids, you want to hear that.
What you don't want to hear are the snoring old people dying in the back pew.
That you don't want to hear.
So, look, I'm delighted.
I think there is, yes, you're going to see a bounce back of, I think, the birth rate.
Starting with this show.
And then I think you're going to see a restoration of marriages, which will inevitably...
You know, everybody's focused on the bro culture that brought Trump into office.
That was a byproduct of everything I'm talking about right now.
There was already this religious undercurrent moving, which is inherently traditional.
And then the politics bubble up on top of that, and the culture comes from that.
What you believe, what you think, how you spend your time situating yourself in the world, that will dictate how you live, who you marry, where you live, and how you vote.
But we, stupidly in the media, too often focus on the last bit, how they vote.
That doesn't tell you anything.
That's a byproduct of how you live.
And how you live comes from how you pray and think and feel.
So that's where we need to start.
That's where I start.
That's where I always start.
I always look to the culture.
I always look to the culture.
And cult, belief, religion is the heart and the foundation of any thriving culture.
It comes from cult, a belief in God.
Right. Or its absence.
There are other cults, which we have to cover from time to time too, which can lead you to an abyss.
Yeah, and it's interesting because I feel like there has been that family revival.
J.D. Vance has brought his kids a lot to his work.
He's Catholic.
It is funny because in a Protestant church, you have to be really quiet.
So if you have a bunch of kids inside, it's like, wait, how come they're not in Sunday school?
And I've been to Latin Mass.
It's like, oh, I can bring my daughter.
She's kind of going crazy during service.
But it's like, oh, that's kind of like what everyone's situation is.
So it's fine.
If I can give you one tiny bit of advice, and I don't offer a lot of parenting advice because Rebecca did most of that in our house, but my wife, 30 years.
Take them to church with you.
Sit them in the pew next to you.
I know it's hard and you've got to feed them Cheerios and give them toys and flip books and let them chew on things.
But to give them the experience of hearing and moving and singing in the way that you sing and move and pray every week, they will pick it up pretty fast.
And then they quickly learn once they're of reason.
Right, definitely.
But I think it's good to have them with you.
And I love that J.D. Vance and the Duffies take their kids everywhere they go.
You know, Sean and Rachel Duffy are dear friends.
And, you know, everywhere we went, we would take the kids on vacation or we'd go to, you know, an opening of something.
You take the kids.
It's hard.
You know, as a parent, it's hard.
You know, those strollers and pumpkin seats and diaper bags.
It's worth it.
Yeah, but you know, it's like going up the Himalayas, but it's worth it.
It's absolutely worth it because you're sharing life with them, and that's why we're here.
Yes. How many kids do you have?
Three. I have three children.
Okay. Two in college and one who's married and off making his fortune.
He went to Notre Dame and married his girlfriend that he met there, and they married at Notre Dame in the beautiful basilica there.
So, yeah, it was a year ago.
Just a year ago.
So they're starting.
So it's nice to see that sometimes it works.
Well, congratulations.
That's amazing.
And maybe final thoughts on maybe what you think Pope Francis's legacy will be.
What do you think about kind of how this is going to unpack in this next week or so?
And, you know, people focus on the political side, but kind of what do you think is going to be?
Look, it's a mixed bag.
On the one hand, to those who haven't been paying very close attention, to those outside the church, Pope Francis appeared, and this is a wonderful thing, he appeared to be a humble man who went out to those who were forgotten, to the poor, to the migrants, to prisoners,
and, you know, people who felt ignored and far away from the church.
That's fantastic.
For those who are really paying attention internally, the Pope's record is a bit more checkered.
He had a kind of hostility to formal...
Ritual and tradition, he didn't like that.
I mean, starting with, you know, what he wore, you look at his funeral rite, it's very bare bones.
I mean, he's practically, the coffin is practically on the floor, okay?
The last two popes, John Paul II's funeral, Benedict's funeral, there was a buyer, which is kind of a platform that, off the ground, so that they're eye level.
So when you go kneel before them and pay your final respects, you can see them.
He's on the floor.
I mean, he's on a little platform on the floor now of St. Peter's Basilica because he wanted simplicity.
But the simplicity also, true simplicity is found in subjugating your personality to the office you hold.
Pope Benedict, whom I knew very well, was a shy, humble, sweet, holy man.
But he was not an outgoing.
Public show dog.
That wasn't in his personality at all.
But when he became Pope, he put on the costume that he was to wear, put on the cassock, and he wore the red shoes, and he went out and he found within himself the uncomfortable having to go out to people and shake hands and wave.
That was not part of his personality.
But he did it to rise to the office.
That's humility.
That's humility.
The other is bending the office to accommodate you.
And I think at times Pope Francis did that.
He didn't live in the Apostolic Palace.
Our friends at CBS and ABC News say, oh, he's so holy, not like those other horrible people who lived in the palace.
Well, I went to that palace.
I went and visited those popes in their private apartments.
They literally had John Paul II and Benedict, a single bed, a couple of bookshelves.
A desk.
That was their private room.
And it was a drafty 15th century or 16th century building that didn't have working air conditioning and heating.
It was hot in the summer.
It was cold in the winter.
Pope Benedict, one time I went in, he had a blanket over his shoulders.
He's writing at the desk.
What are you doing?
And so if I were given the chance, if I were given the choice, live in the Apostolic Palace.
Or live in a hotel that was built in 1993, I'd take 1993 suite with a double bed and a marble bathtub, too.
Oh, wow.
So just so people put that in perspective.
Yeah, those are like the actual details of it.
Yeah, the media gets a lot wrong.
They get a lot wrong.
They don't know.
They're drive-by, they drop in once every 10 years, and they're suddenly Vatican experts and conclave, you know, mavens.
They're not.
Yeah. Wow.
Well, thank you so much, Raymond, for sharing your thoughts with us.
And, you know, I hope you have a great trip out there.
You're going to be, like, front and center seeing everything going on.
A great trip.
Sleep. That's all I want.
I just want a few hours of sleep.
That's it.
Because your schedule just turns upside down with the shooting.
Oh, my goodness.
Because, you know, you're shooting overnights because it's...
It's nighttime here.
It's 7 o'clock here, but it's 2 o'clock in Rome.
So you're doing mornings and you're doing nights.
It's crazy.
Maybe you need to go now and acclimate.
That's right.
I'm going to go and stay after at the bar.
Okay. Well, thank you, Raymond.
It was great to talk to you.
Wonderful talking to you.
Thank you for having me.
Well, that wraps up today's show.
If you enjoyed the show, make sure to find me on social media.
You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, X, True Social, Rumble, YouTube.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill.
And beware, I do post often on Facebook and X and Instagram.
So make sure to find my videos, thoughts, all things there.
I will see you guys tomorrow.
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