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March 19, 2025 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:51:11

Psalm 114/115: Father James Mawdsley

Father James Mawdsley, a traditionalist Catholic priest and former prisoner of conscience in Burma, is known for his activism and writings on democracy and human rights. He served as a priest from 2016 to 2022 and actively engaged in political and religious debates, particularly on the traditional Mass.↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

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	In today's Welcome to the Psalms, you get, arguably, two psalms for the price of one.
	That's because it depends on which church you belong to as to how you number them.
	In my Psalter, today's Psalms are listed as Psalm 114 and Psalm 115.
	This is the Miles Coverdale Psalter used by the Church of England in the Book of Common Prayer.
	But the Catholics...
	For example, number their Psalms differently.
	So they call this Psalm 114 and 115.
	They call it Psalm 113.
	So as far as they're concerned, it's one Psalm.
	Anyway, I shall go with my Psalter.
	And first of all I'm going to read you, recite Psalm
	When Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.
	The sea saw that and fled.
	Jordan was driven back.
	The mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like young sheep.
	What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest?
	And thou, Jordan, that thou wast driven back, ye mountains that ye skipped like rams, and ye little hills like young sheep?
	Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the hard rock into a standing water, and the flintstone into a springing
	well. more.
	Now for what in my psalter Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give the praise, for thy loving mercy and for thy truth's sake.
	Wherefore shall the heathen say, Where is now their God?
	As for our God, he is in heaven, he hath done whatsoever pleased him.
	Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
	They have mouths and speak not, eyes have they and see not, they have ears and hear not, noses have they and smell not, they have hands and handle not, feet have they and walk not,
	neither speak they through their throat.
	They that make them are like unto them.
	And so are all such as put their trust in them.
	But thou, house of Israel, trust thou in the Lord.
	He is their succor and defense.
	Ye house of Aaron, put your trust in the Lord.
	He is their helper and defender.
	Ye that fear the Lord, put your trust in the Lord.
	He is their helper and defender.
	The Lord hath been mindful of us, and he shall bless us.
	Even he shall bless the house of Israel.
	He shall bless the house of Aaron.
	He shall bless them that fear the Lord, both small and great.
	The Lord shall increase you more and more, you and your children.
	Ye are the blessed of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
	All the whole heavens are the Lord's.
	The earth hath he given to the children of men.
	The dead praise not Thee, O Lord, neither all they that go down into silence, but we will praise the Lord from this time forth for evermore.
	Praise the Lord.
	Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole, and my special guest, long-awaited, much-requested, Father James Maudsley.
	First, I've got to congratulate you.
	On having such an excellent Christian name?
	Oh, well, yeah.
	I mean, James, he's one of the better disciples, isn't he?
	He's got...
	There's nothing wrong with him.
	He doesn't do anything weird.
	Well, he was the first to be martyred, so he...
	Of the apostles.
	Right.
	How was he martyred?
	Wasn't it...
	I think he was beheaded, and Herod saw that it pleased the Jews.
	And so he went after Peter.
	But it wasn't Peter's time, so God preserved Peter.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I mean, beheading is not as bad as it could be.
	I might be wrong, which is embarrassing.
	But I thought he was put to death at the sword, at least.
	I almost feel like looking it up now.
	Well, you can feel free to look it up.
	I mean, we have time for digressions.
	We have, if you've got any animals that want to come in at any point, if you want to go for a pee, that's allowed in these podcasts.
	But, I mean, being beheaded is not as bad as being chopped in half with a wooden saw.
	No, maybe beheaded, I'm going too far.
	And maybe it was just that he was put to death with the sword, I think that Acts tells us.
	I'm trying to look it up now and...
	Well, maybe it's something for later to...
	Yeah, we can go back there.
	Is your way of understanding things that being martyred is a good thing?
	Absolutely.
	It's the best.
	I do not live up to my name patron at all, so...
	Being martyred just covers all your sins if you've died for the faith.
	But it has to come to you.
	You can't go looking for it or provoking it.
	Interesting.
	Total gift of God.
	If you go looking for it, you probably stuff up.
	Because who can face death with that courage and love?
	It has to be a special grace.
	And therefore, if you're trying to do it on your own strength, you're not going to make it.
	But to think how...
	How it can cover so many failings.
	It was an Irish writer who said they didn't think she could be a martyr or they didn't think she'd get to heaven unless they martyred her and she wasn't looking or something at the time.
	I don't know.
	No, that doesn't make sense.
	I think we get the idea.
	Flannery O 'Connor.
	That it's a good shortcut.
	Seems so, seems so.
	But God in his justice has probably worked out the whole lifetime beforehand.
	And well, he takes every soul with his perfect timing, either for their maximal sanctity or the good of the wider church, or even to diminish their punishment in hell.
	He can take some people before they make things even worse for themselves.
	Before we go on and go into these wonderful digressions, before we go any further, tell me a bit about yourself.
	Were you always religious?
	Always a believer?
	I was brought up Catholic in a very, very happy environment, but fell away drastically, squandered it all like the prodigal son.
	I grew up in a little village in Lancashire where our church...
	It was built in 1830, so it was one of the first after Catholic emancipation.
	So it had to be a mile outside the village centre.
	It had to be back from the road.
	It wasn't allowed to look like a church.
	It looks like a large barn.
	So it was very secluded and right opposite our little primary school.
	And my family and I, we lived a few hundred yards down the road.
	There's a grotto of Our Lady of Lords there in the graveyard.
	So it's just a beautiful, very happy first 10 years of my life.
	I had the most loving mother in the world.
	My father is like a hero.
	He's flying helicopters in Oman, which later I realized, okay, he's a mercenary for the globalists.
	God bless his soul.
	But as a child, a very happy upbringing.
	And then I squandered it all, went way off the tracks, and God in his mercy, step by step, I hear this story so many times from my Catholic guests that they fall away after having had this sort of the Catholic upbringing and then they sort of they become prodigal as you say and then quite a lot of them come back to the church.
	Do you think it's because Catholicism is sort of slightly more rigorous than a lot of Christian churches.
	I'm not sure if that's the reason why people come back, although that's certainly a reason to believe that the truth is very definite and it requires a consummate life.
	But it's, I mean, rigorous in doctrine.
	Well, I suppose what I mean is what you often hear people say is that I couldn't handle the guilt.
	All this guilt was dumped upon me, and I couldn't be dealing with it.
	That's what I'm saying, really.
	It's the truth of the doctrine, the Blessed Sacrament.
	There's nothing like it on Earth.
	There's no teaching like that on Earth.
	And although I was born in the 70s and grew up with the Novus Ordo, But the parish priest was old enough that he kept certain habits of the old Mass, so that when I started coming back to Mass, and when you hear the Creed sung in Latin,
	it's like taking you back to your childhood, something you would hear and you know this is home.
	Or, when I first came back and I started serving the Mass again, it's just completely random in the Novus Ordo what you do with the cruets, for example, the water and wine.
	But in the traditional Mass, there's an order to it.
	Holding them or passing them to the priest with your right hand or kissing the cruets before and after.
	There's a reverence.
	And when I saw that done in the traditional mass, when I eventually found that, it reminded me of the parish priest who had this old formation.
	And again, it's that feeling of being home.
	This is what the synagogue of Satan wants to rob us of.
	The true worship of God.
	Maybe we'll come back to this, but ultimately it's the pre-1955 Holy Week.
	There's nothing like it on earth.
	And that is the target of 2,000 years of the devil's machinations.
	And he's going to lose.
	I think everyone, every true Christian, and there are lots that listen to this poem, everyone is nodding furiously at this point.
	I hope so.
	It's certainly been my experience and my understanding since my Christian faith was properly kindled, having been a kind of cultural Christian or whatever,
	kind of into the idea of church as a thing but not really taking it seriously, is that you become aware that the forces of darkness have...
	They've done their damnedest, and they're pretty good at this stuff, to strip out all the numinous, everything that really matters about our traditions and our understanding that this stuff is real.
	It's not just social work.
	It's not just about turning up and throwing the occasional vegetable-growing competition for the vicar to judge.
	Right.
	It's more than that.
	God is infinitely real and we have to grow to be able to receive him so that an embryo in the womb is growing physically before it has any organs to sense, before it can see or hear.
	And then it's only after it started sensing things that it can begin to think and have its rational life.
	Even though from the first moment of conception it is a human being, it is rational.
	With all that in potential, which is real.
	But then the spiritual life builds on later, after the emotional equilibrium and the rational life, you can grow more and more into the spiritual life.
	I mean, you can receive God in baptism as an infant, but then to know God better and better and love Him more and more, it's like, that's why God gives you a lifetime.
	And you hopefully never stop growing into it.
	And at some stage start realizing how evil is evil.
	To set itself against this goodness and truth.
	It's a mind-boggling mystery why Satan rages, though he knows he's lost.
	And he's increasing his own punishment with every soul he drags to hell.
	Because in justice he'll be punished for each one of them.
	He knows that and he still does it.
	And it's very much active through history.
	But God has foreseen all and overcome all.
	I was thinking, as you were saying that, of a psalm we're not doing today.
	Now, I know it as Psalm 139.
	You might know it as a different psalm.
	And in thy book were all my members written, which day by day were fashioned when as yet there was none of them.
	is the...
	Today we're going to talk about what you would call, in the Roman Catholic Church, Psalm 113.
	And I checked, and this rather took me by surprise, because it's two psalms.
	So I'd gone and learned Psalm 114.
	I thought, this is easy.
	It's a nice, short psalm.
	I thought you did it very quickly.
	I read your book last night, and I thought, well, I better bone up on what this is.
	This is Father James's book, by the way.
	We'll talk about that in a moment.
	I realise that you chaps have gone and amalgamated.
	No, no, no, no.
	My chaps have gone and split it up, yes.
	I followed the Jews, the synagogue of Satan.
	It's that bad.
	Not only...
	What the C of E has?
	Yes.
	Oh, really?
	Martin Luther and the C of E followed the Jewish psalm numbering, which has no...
	It doesn't go back before Christ.
	The Jews before Christ, who translated the Septuagint, have this as Psalm 113.
	Ah, that's interesting.
	And so do the Orthodox churches, which is a testimony.
	And all the St. Augustine and Cassiodorus say, this is one single psalm, and it's a peculiar thing that rabbis have split it into two.
	Oh, okay.
	And even the Dauai Reims in 1610 has an annotation on that.
	It's one psalm.
	And tragically, the Catholic Church, after 1948 is the key disastrous date, after that and after Vatican II, she also, most of her Bibles now, she splits it up and calls it Psalm 114 and 115.
	And yet the psalm is a unity.
	The first half is about the power of God's presence.
	And the second half is the degradation that man goes through when he worships something less than God or less than himself.
	Can I just say, James, that they are both absolute crackers.
	I mean, sorry.
	It.
	It.
	Sorry.
	No, I'm interested in that, actually.
	You've already got me down a side tunnel of the rabbit hole.
	This is really interesting.
	You say that the Jews have...
	The C of E took it from the Jews, and the Jews is a corrupt version because their version post-dates...
	Yeah, exactly.
	This is a thing that loads of people do not know.
	If you were to say to everyone, well, not everyone, but a lot of people think that the Jews are the descendants of...
	The children of Israel, and that they were around way before Christ, etc., etc.
	But as I understand it, my research has been quite sketchy, but I've started dipping my toe into this.
	Talmudic Judaism seems to be a kind of a first millennium AD phenomenon.
	It's not...
	It's got nothing to do with the children of Israel and the traditions of the Septuagint, which you mentioned.
	Is that right?
	Yes, it's a new religion after the destruction of the temple, when they can no longer offer sacrifices.
	So they have this religion of the rabbis arguing back and forth.
	It does have roots before Christ, which St. Paul tells us clearly that they murdered the prophets.
	They crucified Christ.
	And they're enemies of mankind.
	So going back to Moses, you have this rebellion from Abiram and Dathan.
	And we see this conflict within the assembly of God, within the people of Israel, of those who will be meek like Moses and follow God, and those who reject him and are vying for power and control.
	So that by the second century before Christ, the high priesthood was disgustingly corrupt.
	Absolute imbeciles taking the high priesthood, perverts and cruel men.
	And then after Christ, although again the Talmud draws on certain dark spirituality from Babylon and even from Egypt, it is a new religion of those who reject Jesus Christ.
	And the Jews who are faithful to him are the 11 apostles minus Judas.
	And then with Matthias and St. Paul.
	St. Paul's conversion is basically the greatest sign of hope that those who persecute the church now, the synagogue of Satan, in God's time, they will convert at the end, basically.
	And that's why I said in the beginning, we need the pre-55 Holy Week, because only that has the proper powerful prayer for the conversion of the Jews.
	Their hearts are blind.
	They have a veil over their hearts.
	And if you think how Jesus Christ has changed you to...
	Teach you and guide you and illumine you and sanctify you, make you a better man than you would otherwise be, and comfort and rescue and strengthen you.
	And then he's done that for Christendom, for civilization.
	We have so little idea how good Jesus has been to us and to the world.
	What is it then if you reject him, actively reject him?
	This perfidy of the Jews is not just...
	Infidelity, like the heathen or the pagans, are without the faith.
	But it's perfidious, like perjury is against your oath.
	So perfidy is against the faith.
	And this is a darkness we can't really look into the depths of it.
	It would kill us.
	But that's what's been going on for 2,000 years.
	The most disastrous extent of it, almost, is that you now have Catholics, including Catholic bishops, celebrating rituals of Judaism and saying that the Old Covenant is still alive, which is absolute heresy.
	And it's coming close to the line.
	I imagine that your views get you into trouble with the Catholic hierarchy.
	I've already distanced myself a lot from...
	Because if you say these things, it's going to be a disaster, first for you and then everybody around you.
	So I've removed myself quite far from the system.
	I wouldn't say from the church or the faith.
	Because I don't want basically anyone to get caught in the crossfire.
	If I'm wrong...
	I want to be the only one that suffers for it.
	So, technically, where are you in terms of the church?
	I'm a suspended priest, so I left my order without permission.
	I informed my superiors beforehand I would do this, knowing that it would get me suspended, which, just following due process and canon law, I was...
	Suspended after a couple of weeks, and then after a year's absence, expelled from the Institute or Society, which is fair enough as far as I'm concerned.
	I took all this on board before it happened.
	But now I can say things that if I were a member of any order, Rome would punish that order.
	But you haven't been excommunicated or anything like that?
	No.
	Basically, I can't hear confessions because I don't have faculties to hear confessions.
	I can't preach because I don't have delegation from a bishop to preach.
	I don't have canonical mission.
	But I'm a baptized Christian.
	I'm confirmed, so I should witness to the faith, which I'm trying to do.
	And as a priest, I offer holy mass every day.
	I pray the office every day, which is the essence of the priesthood.
	And of course, I would like to have that ministry for the faithful, but that was taken away during COVID because I wouldn't cooperate with the COVID circus, such an insult to God.
	And then when Francis issued, I don't know if you've heard of Traditiones Custodas, he's trying to eradicate the traditional mass.
	Yes, I've heard of this.
	And yet it's the very job and
	preserve and treasure and defend the traditions and the true worship.
	He says that all religions lead to God.
	He honors Martin Luther on Vatican stamps and with statues.
	He brings pagan idols into the Vatican gardens.
	And yet he has an animus and a hatred of Catholic tradition.
	How can it be tolerance to be open to everything apart from your own heritage?
	That's not tolerance.
	That's a self-hatred learnt from the Jews.
	But to be fair, he's doing his job, which is to be...
	I mean, he's a Jesuit, so his job is to destroy...
	I think that the Jesuits, who are absolutely awesome for the first 300 years, was it Benedict XIV, I can't remember, who suppressed them?
	If, in obedience, they'd taken that suppression, it would have been like a martyr's death for a religious order.
	Who died for obedience.
	But they wangled away through Russia to stay in existence and then resurrect themselves.
	And because they were so excellent in so many ways, that's why they were targeted by the synagogue of Satan and corrupted and have become such a disaster.
	One of the charisms of them, I believe, was, I might be wrong, but they wouldn't seek office or preference in the church.
	And how is it that we have a Jesuit who now dresses in white in Rome, supposedly Pope?
	Basically, I think the Jesuits, had they accepted their suppression in holy obedience, they would have had the most glorious history and that's it.
	And they wouldn't have had the disastrous effect they've had on the church since they came back.
	I think I know the answer to this question, but it surprised me.
	Have you seen Conclave?
	No.
	You know what it's about, don't you?
	Somebody just messaged me about their impressions, and they just told me it's sort of cliches about liberals, conservatives, trans or whatever.
	It's got some nice costumes.
	I bet.
	Very nice.
	Very nice costumes.
	All the kind of the...
	The ceremonial stuff is fantastic.
	When is it set?
	It's now, or more or less in the present.
	But you're right.
	The politics are completely like the goody faction.
	The candidates that one is encouraged to root for are very much into ecumenicism.
	They hate the Latin mass.
	It's a terrible period where priests spoke to one another in Latin, and thank goodness we're over all that, and they're kind of leaning towards gay marriage and this.
	And the baddie, the Cardinal Tedeschi, he wants everyone to speak Latin, and he's a traditionalist, and he's clearly awful, just appalling, appalling man.
	And then there's a very, very stupid twist at the end.
	I suspect that most of the Catholic listeners, and I do like my Catholic viewers and listeners, they're very sound.
	I suspect most of them don't think much of Francis and tend to go to Latin masses rather than the kind of gay version that's been instituted since Vatican II.
	It must be a testimony to the good things that you say.
	That you draw the sound.
	I've listened to about three or four of your psalm episodes and very, very impressed, despite my theological differences with some of your guests.
	Oh, sure.
	I saw Bishop Williamson as well.
	Wonderful.
	It was good to get him before he died.
	Because he was much requested, as you have been.
	And I think people...
	People respect men of faith who are prepared to sacrifice their place in the hierarchy or whatever for their beliefs.
	Because I think people recognize that, as you say, the world has been given over to the forces of darkness.
	And we've got to fight back whatever way we can.
	Now, I learned some things reading your book, Divine Depths.
	One of which is...
	When Vespers is and when...
	Is it pronounced Compline or Compline?
	Compline, I think.
	Compline, yeah.
	I'm deformed in my pronunciation because I was in a seminary in Germany surrounded by Frenchmen with classes in Latin or a lot of the common parlour.
	So I don't know if I'm pronouncing things in German, French, Latin or English or American.
	So, but Compline.
	I think Compline.
	In my head, that was the right version.
	So were you actually a monk?
	No.
	Secular priest, so not a religious order.
	So what I'm asking is, because I get the impression that you would be quite happy in the environment where...
	You could say the Holy Office, go through the different hours.
	There are eight hours?
	Yeah.
	Some of which people know.
	I think the one most familiar to people will be Matins.
	Yeah.
	But Matins, I think a lot of people think just means morning.
	But it doesn't, does it?
	It's not the first...
	You've got...
	Tell us about the order that we go in through the day.
	In your 24-hour...
	Matins would be the first, or it could be three or four o 'clock in the morning in many monasteries.
	I thought you started with Vespers.
	I think you said it started in evening.
	Indeed.
	The liturgical day begins with Vespers.
	So you have Vespers one evening and then Vespers the next evening, and depending on the ranks of the feast.
	So, for example, today is the feast of Saint Perpetra and Felicity, two awesome Roman martyrs.
	On the 6th of March.
	Their first Vespers was yesterday on the 5th of March.
	And Vespers tonight will be of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast is tomorrow, with a commemoration of St. Philistia and Perpetua.
	So the days actually interlink with Vespers.
	You can even have the Psalms of the passing day, along with the Capitulum and Hymn and Magnificat Antifant of the coming feast day.
	The sun going down, like in Genesis, it says there was evening and day, the first day, or the second day, the third day.
	Each time it says evening and morning, one day.
	It begins with evening.
	It's like we have to go through the darkness before we come to the light, or this veil of tears before we come to that promised land.
	So, yeah, the liturgical day begins in Vespers.
	That was changed as well a lot after Vatican II.
	It's a real shame tearing up these traditions that we barely understand.
	We'd better keep hold of them even if we don't understand them because it will become clearer down the line.
	The Jews, for example, are very clear that the liturgical day begins in the evening before.
	And I think this is one of Satan's tricks so that they won't recognize that the...
	Catholic faith is the fulfilment of everything in the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings.
	Everything of old is fulfilled in the Catholic Church.
	And if we would keep our traditions, it would be easier for the Jews to recognise that.
	So they will see it in the end, but we're making it harder for them by adopting the ways of the world.
	And people who are watching this thinking, well, what are they talking about?
	Vespers and stuff.
	It'll become clear in a moment, won't it?
	When you, for example, go through every day, do you celebrate all eight hours of the Divine Office every day?
	I recite them, pray them.
	To say celebrate, it sounds like you're more doing it in common.
	So in a community, for example, in our seminaries, we would do four a day.
	So together, like Lords, Sext, Vespers and Compline.
	In a religious house, you're really obliged to do all eight together.
	And matins and lords would be joined together at like four or five o 'clock in the morning.
	And then at particular times of the day, you all come to the chapel together to pray them.
	And that's proper for religious.
	For a secular priest, in formation that we did four hours a day together.
	I don't mean it doesn't take four hours, but they're called hours.
	But then...
	If you're living in community with other priests, it's good to do two or three together every single day.
	It's what keeps you stable and keeps you out of trouble.
	The office, it's a bit of a burden, you know.
	It takes quite some time.
	You're praying 34 psalms a day minimum and in Lent slightly more every single day.
	And you're going through 150 psalms every single week, give or take some depending on the feast days, which will be changed for other psalms.
	So, and all your life, and you keep discovering new things in them.
	This is amazing.
	You're praying it for decades, and you keep finding new things.
	How can that be?
	Can I tell you something?
	I'm not boasting here, James, but I do actually do about 30 psalms, 35 psalms a day in my head, mainly because I've discovered that as one gets older, it's the same with poetry.
	I mean, I've learned A poem by pretty much every major poet.
	But you've got to keep practicing them.
	Otherwise, you lose them quite quickly.
	Apart from because it's a nice thing to do, I go through the Psalms I know.
	And as my list grows longer, so the amount of time...
	It's got to the point where I can't listen to podcasts anymore on car journeys because the journey is taken up.
	Running through the Psalms.
	I think it's phenomenal when lay people pray the Psalms.
	It's awesome.
	For a priest, we're under an obligation under mortal sin.
	If I were to skip one hour, that's a mortal sin.
	I have to go to confession before I can say Mass again.
	That's strict.
	It is.
	Really?
	But if it weren't, then you would just find reasons like pastoral...
	Pressures that you couldn't do it.
	And that's why I say it keeps you out of trouble.
	And when I hear laypeople who want to pray the office, and it's good if they might pray Prime or Compline or perhaps Vespers, but it's quite complicated to getting the rubrics right.
	And a layperson is not meant to neglect their duties of state as a father or mother or whatever for the sake of the office.
	However, there are like the Knights of Malta.
	Some of their members pray the whole office under an obligation.
	And they manage to lead fairly productive lives in the world as well.
	And so if you're praying Psalms every day and 30 Psalms a day, like I'm flabbergasted because I couldn't...
	I wouldn't have done that as a layman, and I think that's why God called me to be a priest, because he knows I need hard medicine.
	Well, I mean, it's nice, but I'm not trying to claim that I've got a special status.
	It's just the thing that I do.
	The Vespers, the ones that...
	There's a group of Psalms, isn't there, that are specific to Vespers, is that right?
	Yes, and especially for Sunday Vespers.
	So it's five Psalms for each Vespers, and Sunday is Psalm 109 to 113.
	And they are, in certain ways, the most important of the, if we can say, most important of the Psalms.
	But they've always been, the Roman office, even before St. Benedict, had Psalm 109 as the opening Psalm of Sunday Vespers, and then St. Benedict kept that as well.
	And that's never, never changed.
	Psalm 109, Dixit Dominus, it has everything in it.
	And then Psalm 113, which I hope we discuss, is the close of Vespers on most Sundays.
	For everyone who's not familiar with it, it's the one that goes, Psalm 109, or 110 as I would call it, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
	Yeah.
	It's a great, it's a cracker.
	Yeah.
	It's got drama.
	It's got, it's got, thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
	Who brought out the bread and wine and offered bread and wine with Abraham after the successful battle.
	And that's where I think we get the first hint of the Holy Eucharist in Sunday Vespers, that each of these Psalms has a hidden praise of the Holy Eucharist.
	Including Psalm 113.
	Which is really kind of important, isn't it?
	I think that when one's trying to persuade non-Christians that this isn't just some kind of religion that we made up in order to deal with the fact that we're going to die and we don't like it.
	So we invented this elaborate belief system to feel better about ourselves.
	And it could just be interchangeable with all the other religions.
	I mean, this is stuff we're up against.
	But it seems to me that one of the most persuasive cases intellectually for Christianity is this intimate connection between the Old Testament
	prophecies and their fulfilment.
	And there are too many of these things for it to be a coincidence.
	You read the Psalms and again and again you get prefigurings of the life of Christ.
	And we're talking Psalms that were written, what, a thousand years before?
	A thousand years before.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and every single page of the Old Testament is about Jesus Christ.
	Every single page.
	And it's just beyond all human capability.
	And it took about...
	1,300 years to write the Old Testament from Moses writing the Torah through to the books of the Maccabees.
	You know, it's a book that took more than 1,000 years to write.
	So how you're going to collaborate on how this all comes together in Christ is beyond human cooperation.
	Incidentally, the Roman Missal as well took about 1,300 years to develop.
	To its fullness.
	So in these two books, the Bible and the Missal, you have more than a thousand years before and after Christ.
	The two greatest books in the world.
	We're going to talk about, mainly about Psalm 130.
	Is that your dog?
	I'm dog-sitting.
	You're dog-sitting.
	That's good.
	I have...
	I have these to keep them quiet.
	Very good.
	That's quite a yappy dog you've got there.
	It's quite a sharp bark.
	He's a Tibetan terrier.
	Oh yeah?
	He has featured once online.
	So he'll be a Buddhist then?
	I think he's Catholic.
	Is he?
	Yeah.
	How can you tell?
	He's from a Catholic family.
	Okay.
	So, and...
	He's not an angel.
	Right.
	But it comes good in the end.
	Okay.
	Well, so I...
	Okay, we're going to do...
	It's a psalm of two halves, isn't it?
	And I, as you know, use the Coverdale version.
	So, which actually is not dissimilar to the versions I've read that you quote.
	The language is pretty similar, and there are only minor differences in translation.
	I think this psalm has got some of the best lines in the Psalter.
	And I remember skipping through it once, and...
	Well, actually, skipping through it, there's the word.
	Well, that's quite...
	That's one of the most beautiful parts of it, the skipping, huh?
	Isn't it?
	Isn't it?
	I mean, okay, so we're just...
	When Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among the strange people.
	I love that phrase, among the strange people.
	Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.
	So what are we learning here?
	Well, that exit from Egypt is the Exodus.
	It's the Israel makes that exit from Egypt.
	And then it says the house of Jacob.
	We know Jacob's name changed to Israel when he wrestled with the angel, which is a prefiguration of the incarnation.
	You have the divine and human natures intertwined.
	And the new identity in Christ is like the name change from Jacob to Israel.
	You know, Israel is a person, Jacob.
	It's a people, the people of Israel, and it's a place, the Holy Land.
	And all that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the person, in the Christian people who take on his name, as Israelis take on the name of Israel, and in the land, which is heaven, which is life in Jesus Christ, is heaven for eternity.
	And it's from, you can say, a strange people or a barbarous people.
	The Hebrew means people of a strange tongue, an unintelligible tongue.
	They don't make sense.
	And I'd say this is looking forward to Jesus Christ as the Logos who makes sense of everything.
	And St. Thomas, whose feast is tomorrow, quotes Augustine on this, that it's the baptism symbolized by the Red Sea and passing through the Red Sea.
	Which St. Paul in Corinthians 10 writes about as well.
	We know this is what it means.
	It's the stopping of sin and death at our baptism in Christ.
	So basically this whole psalm that you get in the first line there, that historical event is to teach us about what happens through the sacrament of baptism.
	When God enters you and you enter God.
	And then we'll see the rest unfold from there.
	So it's got some standard Old Testament Bible history simultaneously with a deeper hidden meaning.
	But by the way, when it says Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion, is there a hierarchy in terms of Judea versus Israel?
	Judea, if you like, is a truer part or the more chosen part of Israel.
	But that's possibly not so much the point here.
	I think it's not talking about the land so much as the people are made God's sanctuary.
	Truly, but not Judea, the geographical territory, not Israel, the geographical territory, because that's gone.
	But the church, the souls of the baptized become God's sanctuary.
	He dwells in you through baptism.
	And so when it says Israel is God's dominion, it means Israel is the church and he is the Lord there in the church.
	He's the Lord of everything.
	He's the Lord of all creation.
	But in the church, he's the Lord as one who governs through love.
	Whereas in all creation, he governs.
	Through power, you know, over those who rebel against him, for example.
	But it's talking about this exodus where the people are born or baptism where the people are born.
	So God dwells in them as his sanctuary, as his place of dominion.
	So then we've got some of the best lines in the entire Psalter.
	Okay.
	The sea saw that and fled.
	Jordan was driven back.
	The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like young sheep.
	What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest?
	And thou, Jordan, that thou wast driven back, ye mountains that ye skipped like rams, and ye little hills like young sheep.
	So what's going on here?
	Is sort of nature cowering before...
	The waters are cowering and the land is exalting.
	So the sea parts and the Jordan River is halted, whereas the mountains and the hills are skipping like rams and lambs.
	And the waters can mean life or death, but here they mean really death and sin.
	So they cower.
	But even you could say the mountains tremble on Sinai when God came onto Sinai.
	They tremble.
	So it's a reverent fear, but an exaltation.
	And this is the effect we will see of God's presence on creation.
	He elevates it.
	And that David is interrogating them.
	He doesn't just say the sea fled and the mountains skipped, which makes you think, I mean, to flee is something more than the sea can do.
	And to skip is something you think is more than a hill can do.
	He's giving them almost a sensitive soul that can act like that.
	But then he asks them a question.
	He said, why did you flee?
	Why did you skip?
	And I love it.
	And it's not any kind of pantheism or animism.
	But all creation is intelligible because it's made through the Logos.
	It has a meaning.
	And therefore, he's interrogating nature to find the meaning of its reaction to God.
	You know the Jordan River, when the ark was carried through it, part of the waters ran down to the Dead Sea.
	They were just gone.
	And the fathers say this symbolizes those souls on the left, the goats.
	Who gallop on down to this death and the salty sea.
	But those waters on the right of the ark piled up and up and up and up till they could be seen from afar off.
	This mentions a town, Ara, or something a long way away.
	And these waters are those on the right side of God, the sheep, who pile up into a mighty mountain that can't be hid, like the city on the hill, as a witness to the whole world.
	So, in the waters, you have as life and death, the right side and the left side.
	With the hills and the mountains, you have little hills.
	I love that.
	I won't often praise the Protestant translation, but he said the little hills, right?
	Yeah.
	In the Dao Irems, I think it just says hills.
	But that contrasts it with the great mountains, who Cassiore says the mountains are like the apostles and the evangelists and the preachers who bring the word of God and the teaching to the world.
	And the hills are like faithful Christians.
	They're not as great as these great saints, but they're still part of the land, that which is stable and eternal.
	And the river and the sea, you also have this little and great.
	The river is something little compared to the massive sea.
	And the lambs and the rams, you have these little lambs who represent, if you like, the flock, the faithful and the rams that these figures of authority are bishops should be.
	I think this psalm has a special attraction for me because I live in a house surrounded by sheep.
	And as we record this, in the field outside are 17 rams and they're recovering.
	After a season's tupping.
	And it's really exhausting.
	They have to cover something like 50 ewes a day during tupping season.
	And they get absolutely knackered.
	And their legs, often their rear legs are stiff.
	And you see them hobbling around like old men.
	And they spend the whole time in the field.
	They don't skip.
	I've never seen a ram skip.
	They look so exhausted.
	They're almost dead.
	In fact, I saw one this morning and only by seeing that it was breathing could I detect that it was alive.
	They kind of, they sprawl in the way that ewes don't, because I think ewes have to be, they've got a job to do.
	I'm being tough here.
	Give him a biscuit.
	Yeah.
	Ruin him.
	Ruin him with another biscuit.
	Yeah.
	Not very disappointed.
	Today, The first lambs have been put out into the field.
	And lambs do skip.
	Not normally in the first couple of weeks, but there comes a point where they form gangs with all their fellow lambs.
	And they run around in circles and they pronk.
	And they do skip.
	I'm surrounded as well by lambs.
	In most of these fields, but in the village, around the village.
	And they're amazing.
	You can't help bring a smile to your face when you see them.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It is.
	It's a privilege to be able to...
	Most people haven't seen this stuff.
	Okay, whatever.
	well
	They teach us it's good to be alive.
	They do.
	They really do.
	You cannot look at a field of lambs without having your heart uplifted.
	Right.
	And I'm sure that Jesus was so keen on this, on being the shepherd.
	Well, he made them.
	He made lambs with a reason and a purpose.
	Yes, of course.
	As the sign of innocence, the whiteness, the simplicity.
	The harmlessness of the lamb.
	And then going silently to the slaughter.
	So all the animals carry meaning.
	And the landscape carries meaning.
	The climate carries meaning.
	Like a storm and the thunder on Sinai to show the power of God.
	Every sky carries meaning.
	The blue for Mary and the sun for Christ.
	or the stars for the saints and the moon for Mary, or the storm for God's anger, or the clouds for the Holy Spirit raining grace down with rain,
	You make a good point there.
	I haven't really thought about that, about lambs.
	There is this puzzling thing that this...
	I mean, actually use...
	After a certain point, sheep generally, they look a bit manky.
	They've got sort of, often they've got sort of poo hanging out their bottom and their wool gets matted and they look very, towards the end of the year, they start looking really bedraggled and sometimes their wool comes off in clumps and they've been,
	they're just sick of these lambs, which are almost as big as they are, just continually sucking on their sore teats and so on.
	But when lambs are born, and for the first few weeks, they look so sweeter than any other animal, I think.
	I mean, they look really cute, don't they?
	Cute by divine design.
	It can only be.
	Yeah.
	Nothing could be that cute accidentally.
	Correct.
	And is the dog making too much noise?
	No, it's fine.
	Also, nothing could be that delicious.
	Accidentally.
	I mean, the fatty lamb meat is just about as good as it gets, isn't it?
	It is connected, I think.
	I believe a chicken or a pig or a cow is a proof of God, just on its own.
	You have to make a machine that pecks around the dirt and produces eggs.
	And how many ways can you cook an egg?
	Or a cow.
	I ask catechism classes, what's the best thing to come out of a cow?
	And they think milk.
	Or steak or beef burgers.
	No, it's a baby cow.
	It actually produces another one of itself so that man can have, through all the generations, this sustenance of milk and steaks.
	And they're so docile cows, usually.
	Yeah, except when they've got calves and they attack you walking your dog.
	And the pig is the ultimate proof of God and the true religion.
	Because you can eat every part of a pig.
	You know, bacon, pork chops, truffles or crackling, gammon steak, sausages.
	But for the Jews and Muslims, no.
	It's interesting you say that because I have heard some dumb Christians take the extreme, the hardcore, I would call it, view that one shouldn't even, despite what we learn in the rules changing in the New Testament, They still maintain that we really shouldn't eat pig,
	that the old dietary laws still stand.
	That's insane.
	It's what goes out of a man's mouth that defiles him, not what goes in.
	And God said to Peter three times, St. Peter, don't call unclean what I've called clean.
	And this is really crucial to understanding how everything in the Old Testament, Jesus changed it in his resurrection.
	From what is local and geographical to what is universal.
	From what is temporal to what is eternal.
	From what is carnal to what is spiritual.
	So that those dietary laws and the authorities of the priests, to look into it, are a symbol or prefiguration, the whole system of then sin and confession and the moral theologians,
	which is far more important.
	What your diet is to your health, so those things that you allow to enter your soul or come from your heart are to your spiritual life.
	And if we don't see that transition in the resurrection, then we're vulnerable to Judaizing the church and sticking with the local and carnal, which is where Zionism comes from, which is the biggest threat to world peace.
	A failure to understand how the covenant is translated.
	St. Paul says it's translated in Christ.
	The old and the new.
	Joshua told the Hebrews before they entered the land that if you obey God's covenant, you'll be blessed and blessed and blessed.
	And if you disobey, he said God will take you out of this excellent land.
	And Moses reinforced that with blessings and curses, or Moses obviously before.
	Blessings if you obey the covenant, curses if you do not, until losing the land.
	Now, they lost the land in the temple in 70 AD and the land around 135 expelled from there.
	And it's just the fact that there are Christians who think that the Jews or Israelis have any claim to that land is obscene religiously.
	That's a complete contradiction of the new and old covenants.
	Of what God laid down.
	Maybe I could get into a very long digression there, but...
	Yeah, I'd love to...
	It's you versus 20...
	Something like 20 million evangelical Christians in America are Zionists.
	They're led by demons.
	Who's this woman that Trump has appointed as some kind of pastoral...
	Advisor in the White House, Paula something.
	If you see her in her, whatever they call their worship, it's demonic.
	I've seen her on a chat with some Jewish lady talking about how it's the time for destruction.
	That at the end of Deuteronomy, Moses promised God would come and destroy.
	And they're saying, great, now's the time for destruction.
	Let's do this thing.
	Their religion is from the synagogue of Satan.
	They would rather destroy and tear everything down at the moment than convert.
	But God will lift the veil in his time, they will convert, and the devil will get the shock of his life.
	Yeah, out of interest, you were talking about sort of demonic.
	Where is the Catholic Church now on demons?
	I mean, if I went to the average, presumably the hierarchy, We've got a good bit next.
	Tremble thou earth.
	Sorry.
	Tremble thou earth.
	At the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob.
	I love these lines.
	Who turned the hard rock into a standing water and the flintstone into a springing well.
	Isn't that great?
	So Fred and Wilma make an appearance.
	Officially, each diocese the bishop should appoint.
	At least one priest as an exorcist for the diocese.
	And so where there are cases brought forward that need attention, a lot of them are nothing spiritual.
	It's just psychological problems or something.
	But the exorcist will discern that.
	Or there might be a few of them.
	And they can deal with it.
	But in the old rite, for example, of baptism, you have exorcisms.
	Very powerful.
	They were removed under Paul VI.
	For a very weakened rite of baptism.
	So no wonder demons have more entry into souls.
	But do demons...
	Can they get into children at that age?
	No, but if the child has these exorcisms in the baptism...
	Yes, theoretically they can.
	Then it's protected against them.
	And it's a lifelong protection.
	So that only by your giving consent or permission to the demons...
	Implicit or explicit, can they enter your soul?
	No demon, not even the devil himself, is stronger than your guardian angel when it comes to getting into your soul, unless by your actions or thoughts you open the door.
	So the church has weakened her rights.
	To protect us from demons and weakened her beliefs and her teachings on them.
	When I say the church, I obviously mean certain members of the church, members of the hierarchy.
	And it's a disaster.
	If you don't take God seriously, you're not going to take demons seriously.
	Yeah, I do wonder.
	I think some people think I'm a nutcase for believing in demons, whereas I'm like, duh.
	They're real, but I mostly ignore them and would advise people just ignore them.
	Don't give them attention.
	Most of them are pathetic.
	A lot of them are very weak.
	You know, there's a hierarchy of demons.
	Some of them are strong.
	Most of them are pathetic, giggling, little freaks.
	And they're to be ignored.
	You don't show any interest in them.
	Don't show you're bothered by them.
	And it's only if you're doing very dark stuff that they're really going to have much power over you.
	And a possession is very, very, very rare.
	Yeah.
	So...
	One doesn't want to big them up too much, but who are the big ones?
	I wouldn't name them.
	They love hearing their names.
	Never say their name.
	Go away, demons.
	Horrible, stupid, pathetic.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yes.
	I'm glad for the exorcists who do their job.
	But if a priest is not appointed to be an exorcist, he shouldn't go dabbling in that either.
	Leave it very much to those who are appointed.
	Yeah.
	But how do you...
	So, generally, in the course of one's life, unless you do something really stupid like what?
	Dabble with the occult.
	You're safe from these creatures.
	In terms of possession, yes, you're safe.
	I mean, they still, obviously, they have an effect on the world around you and they like to put temptations before you.
	But, you know, if you're praying the St. Michael prayer every day, Like, what's the problem?
	I do the Sanctum Michael Archangelaire defending us in Perulia, that one.
	Yeah, that's great.
	And what about, what's the deal with guardian angels?
	We each have a special one.
	An individual one, yes, personally assigned to you for the entirety of your life and to whom you will be grateful forever in heaven or else he will not lament you if you go to hell.
	He knows exactly why.
	And they're there all the time for you to ask for help and express gratitude.
	And we don't...
	You know, you have an idea or you see the truth after some time, a certain truth.
	And you might think, where did that idea come from?
	Or how is it I saw that truth after so long?
	The angels speak to us, but it's not with a physical voice.
	And especially around the altar in Mass, the angels are there.
	They communicate with each other by a cascade of truth from the highest choirs of angels down to the lowest, communicating what they can see of God and be of God.
	And that's their form.
	And the lower choirs can't receive as much as the higher choirs, but receive as much as their level of being allows.
	They're singing the praises of God all the time.
	And if we will humble ourselves and cut ourselves off from distractions of this world, especially for example during Lent or on retreat or in some minutes of silence at the beginning or the end of the day, that's when you're spiritually alert.
	And so you will have, if you make a half hour meditation each day in silence, you will have insights that don't...
	It doesn't necessarily come to you during the busy hours.
	Although I think St. Therese of Lisieux said you can make a very dry half-hour meditation when nothing, it's all dark, and later in the day when you're doing the washing up, you get this insight.
	But that's like your reward for the meditation.
	And where does this come from, this idea?
	It's not necessarily every time God planting it in you, or if it's from yourself, what's the worth of it?
	It's the angels, the obedient ministers and spirits of God communicating about him to you.
	How do we know their names?
	We don't.
	We don't need to.
	I mean, we know the names of certain archangels, Gabriel and Raphael and Michael.
	We wouldn't get one of those, though.
	No, no, they have their...
	Their jobs.
	Yes.
	But, so we just get allocated an angel.
	And they go to their job.
	I mean, presumably, there isn't kind of quality control.
	They're perfect.
	They're perfect.
	Right.
	That's good.
	Because, you know, you wouldn't want to get a duff one, would you?
	It was a bit careless.
	There are no duff ones, but they're different.
	Every angel is a different species.
	I think according to St. Thomas.
	Right.
	So they're very much tailored to your vocation in life, what God wants of you, what God expects you to become.
	Right.
	Your God and angel is perfectly suited to aid you in bringing that about if you cooperate.
	And the beginning of that cooperation is to pray to your God and angel to believe in God's goodness.
	In the Creed, we say God created everything visible and invisible.
	We should believe in that invisible.
	There's a higher level of being than the visible.
	Should we, talking of which, return to the psalm?
	I was going to say, after that glorious digression, when you were putting the dog away, I recited the next lines.
	Tremble thou earth at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the hard rock into a standing water.
	And the flintstone into a springing well.
	Isn't that nice?
	And so here we have the answer to what it is, why the sea fled, why the mountains skipped, what made them move as if they were sentient, and what David is asking them.
	And the answer is at the presence of the Lord.
	Did you read those?
	Yes, at the presence of the Lord, the earth was moved.
	So what is this?
	There's the presence of God on Sinai, but there's also the carrying of the Ark of the Covenant through the Jordan River.
	And when the priest's feet entered the water, the water stopped.
	In the Ark of the Covenant, we have three things.
	The tablets with the commandments, the staff of Aaron, the high priest, and the urn with the manna, the bread from heaven in it.
	And these three are all about Jesus Christ.
	So the two tablets with the commandments is a symbol of the Old Testament, which, you know, they were broken and remade.
	It's a prefiguration of the covenant itself being broken and made again new by the finger of God.
	So therefore, we have the new covenant, which is in Christ's blood.
	The staff of Aaron, which a dead stick, which then budded and was fruitful.
	And symbolizes the high priesthood of Christ, which even after death comes to life, has life, like this stuff.
	And the manna in the urn is the Holy Eucharist, the bread of heaven, preserved as a memorial for all generations, except that's lost.
	You know, in the Babylonian exile, it was lost.
	But Holy Mass is the new covenant in Christ's blood.
	It is the act of the High Priesthood of Christ, his sacrifice on Calvary.
	It is the bread of heaven, the Holy Eucharist, all of them, the presence of God, which is why the Jordan River stopped, and it's why the mountains exalted at his presence, which you know the Catholic teaching is God is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament,
	body, blood, soul, and divinity.
	He's present, and it's that which elevates nature.
	As he can elevate water, Minerals to act as if they have some life above their natural measure.
	So that's what the Holy Eucharist does to us, because we have a natural biological life, but by receiving the highest of all the sacraments, we're made like to God with his divine life above our station, made a supernatural life,
	is given to us.
	So it's actually more astonishing to see a saint act.
	With charity, for example, forgiving their enemies, Saint Stephen forgiving those who stoned him to death, is a greater leap and exaltation than the mountain skipping like lambs or the sea turning and fleeing.
	Because it's not in our nature to forgive people who are stoning to death, stoning us to death.
	But only by grace, by God's love, can that be done.
	And this is what I think the psalm is telling us.
	A thousand years before it happened, that at the presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, our hearts should be skipping like mountains, skipping like rams.
	And sin and death turn and bleed.
	They're terrified of the sacraments.
	They have no power over the sacraments.
	And then we move to the second part of the psalm.
	And we can sort of...
	We can move through this quite, well, some of the verses quite quickly because essentially they are variations on a theme.
	I like the beginning of the section.
	It seems very familiar somehow.
	Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give the praise for thy loving mercy and for thy truth's sake.
	Why is that familiar?
	Is it in the today?
	Oh.
	It might not be.
	I'm embarrassed if I don't know that I'm saying I pray it most every day.
	No, it's not.
	It's not in the today, no.
	Okay.
	No, no.
	We praise the O God in order to be the Lord.
	I'm getting confused with a certain...
	It might be another section of some liturgy somewhere, or maybe it was quoted by T.S. Eliot or something.
	And then we have this, Wherefore shall the heathen say, Where is now?
	Their God.
	That again sort of prefigures what I would call Psalm 22. You'd probably call it a different...
	21, probably for...
	Yeah.
	The bit where...
	How does it go?
	Um. Thank you.
	Where they sort of mock the speaker of the psalm for trusted on the Lord.
	He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him.
	Yeah, which is what was said to Jesus on the cross.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	If you be the son of God, come on, come down from the cross and where is God?
	That's why that line matters, doesn't it?
	Where is now their God?
	Which, forgive me as...
	I'm brutal in my lack of ecumenism.
	But this is exactly what people say about the Blessed Sacrament.
	They point and laugh at what they say is a wafer or a piece of bread and say, where is your God?
	He's there.
	He's there.
	And we come now to the part where they said they have eyes and see not.
	They have ears but do not hear.
	So Jesus has said, this is my body.
	Can you hear him or not?
	We look and he said on the night before he died, You believe because you've seen.
	Blessed are those who believe who have not seen.
	So seeing the accidents of the sacred species, what looks like bread, but we've heard from God and hearing comes from faith.
	This is my body.
	We have to believe him who's infinitely true and infinitely real.
	The Holy Eucharist is his presence.
	And so now the second part of this psalm is talking about the...
	Opposite of that elevation of nature, it's the degradation of nature that follows from those who say, where is your God?
	The scoffers and the mockers who will become idolaters.
	They worship the work of their own hands.
	And I'm skipping ahead here a bit, but as we think idolatry maybe is something from 3,000 years ago, people got a piece of wood or stone and painted it and put a face on it and gold or silver.
	Coating, whatever, and bowed down and worshipped it.
	And we think that's fully retarded.
	It is.
	But this psalm is looking ahead to what's coming now with artificial intelligence and androids.
	You know these life-like androids where you see a figure that seems to breathe and blink and have muscles under a fake skin and is hooked up to artificial intelligence to have a conversation with you.
	People will be worshipping this junk soon.
	They're already attached to their iPhone, and you have people like Noah Harari saying, we're going to have AI write us a new Bible, a new religion.
	Good luck with that.
	For those who already love the Word of God, you are inoculated against that nonsense.
	Yeah.
	But for people who don't now love the Word of God, they are so vulnerable.
	They have no idea what's coming.
	What a deception.
	One of the fathers said that when the Antichrist comes, he'll be such an expert in the Old Testament that even the saints will be put to silence or the church doctors.
	Your great, most learned exegetes are going to be flummoxed by the lies coming out about how to interpret the Old Testament.
	So we better stand fast, not just in the Word of God, but in the sacraments, in the seven sacraments.
	And that's how we can stand against what's coming.
	But people will be worshipping some figure that is the work of men's hands.
	You know, Jesus Christ is not the work of men's hands.
	His divinity is uncreated.
	His soul comes directly from God.
	His flesh and blood come from Our Lady, but not by her hands, but by that mystery of generation.
	In her.
	Jesus Christ is the temple.
	He is our worship.
	He is who we entered for heaven.
	But to worship something that we've made, whether it's a sculpture of an animal or a person, or whether it's an android with AI, is insane.
	It's a degradation of ourselves, a lowering of ourselves.
	Because nothing you make is ever as good as you.
	Like saying the best thing that comes out of a cow is a baby cow.
	The best thing that comes out of a human being is another human being.
	So no matter what empire any king or emperor had, it's never as big as the empire of a soul that a mother has over by bringing up a child with love.
	No matter what product your company is, like an iPhone or Tesla car, whatever they're called, that machine is not as impressive as a baby, as an embryo.
	It's nowhere near the complexity and the potential.
	So that the best thing to come out of a human is another human being on the natural level.
	And then God can be born in them by grace on the supernatural level.
	And this is what should be amazing us.
	And we can then use our laptops, iPhones, whatever, as a way to communicate the gospel or find out when Holy Mass is.
	But to be enslaved by them, to let them use us instead of us using them, it's a strong temptation, right?
	I was thinking, you're absolutely right, of course, about the transhumanism and stuff.
	But before that, don't forget, we've had this era where the word idol appeared in TV series like Pop Idol.
	And we were actually expected to think, these people are supposed to be our idols.
	These people like Dua Lipa and Madonna!
	Madonna!
	We were supposed to...
	She was supposed to...
	I mean, how brazen!
	Yes.
	How brazen was that?
	To get this sort of slutty...
	It is shocking, isn't it, how in your face it all is?
	This is...
	A lot of people say they're waking up since the COVID nightmare and everything, and now the Ukraine insanity that we should try and pick a fight with Russia, which is just mental.
	Evil hasn't had that much power through history, but because the church has part of her task is to protect...
	Can I call you back?
	I'm doing a podcast at the moment.
	Okay, bye.
	Bye.
	You still there?
	Yep, maybe a good time to everything in order.
	Oh, is that your microphone?
	Yeah, that's better.
	The point of the iPhones or the transhumanism or the Androids is that people look at them and think they have eyes and ears because they've got a camera and a microphone.
	They think they speak because they've got a speaker.
	It's not our body which sees and hears.
	It's the soul which sees and hears, the person.
	The body is a very wonderfully knit apparatus for doing that through.
	But the iPhone or the computer can never see or hear.
	It's just a mechanical reaction.
	And artificial intelligence can never actually think.
	It's not intelligent.
	It can't choose.
	It's not sentient.
	It can't apprehend.
	So this is why I think this Psalm 113 is so apt about the modern idols.
	Because we seem to think if they have what appear to be eyes and ears, and that they can shuffle about, that they are somehow alive.
	Oh, people think, materialists think they've understood life, the mystery of life, because they can create something which appears to be alive.
	But that's not life.
	We're not lords of life.
	We can never create life.
	And to be amazed at that and not to be amazed at real life is what separates us from the Creator and degrades us.
	To become like them, the psalm says they will become like that that they worship.
	If you worship something that's dead without a soul, you will become dead and your soul will die for eternity in hell.
	Yes.
	And by the way, you are totally...
	Absolutely absolved from the sin of lack of ecumenism.
	I expect this from all the Roman Catholic priests I have on the podcast are absolutely rock solid on that.
	I would expect nothing else.
	I don't want any kind of namby, pamby surrendering to everyone else.
	You stick to your guns, mate.
	Thank you.
	Just tell me, do the...
	Do the Orthodox believe in the real presence?
	Yes, certainly.
	So why did the Anglicans give up on it?
	It is demonic and it's from the Jews.
	What kicked off the Reformation in England?
	Yeah.
	Henry VIII was infatuated with a witch called Anne Boleyn and violated his marriage vows to Catherine of Aragon after a consummated wedding.
	How did he bring it about?
	He sent Thomas Cranmer around the universities in Europe to get theological opinions to justify his divorce.
	And he comes up with a verse from Leviticus.
	He's going to that Torah to justify divorce when Jesus had said, Moses allowed it because of the hardness of your heart, but I tell you it was not so in the beginning.
	What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
	They were Jewish theological opinions.
	That you can justify divorce using the Torah.
	And that's what, obviously in Germany with Luther, it had come before Henry.
	And he learned Hebrew from the rabbis.
	And he was infatuated with the Jews in his early years.
	But because they refused to follow him, Luther turned against them later in life.
	But the rejection of the papacy of the Mother of God, of the real presence, And Luther, he slid on the real presence until Lutherans believe all sorts of strange ideas about it.
	This is the hatred of Catholic, our highest Catholic realities.
	And then the loss of the sacraments.
	And then Luther as well, throwing books out the Bible, having only 66 books in the Bible instead of 73. Dumping 1,500 years of...
	Some 1200 years of fixed tradition to follow the rabbis.
	So that's what Henry was doing.
	And we see it with Elizabeth, with Cecil and Walsingham, who have their spy network across Europe.
	Who is this spy network?
	It's Jewish merchants.
	And then Oliver Cromwell lets the Jews back into England.
	They take over the Bank of England and the East India Company.
	And that's the beginning of the British Empire.
	Which is one of the most satanic organisations on earth.
	And we all think British Empire has done all these glorious things.
	I used to think that.
	But that's an entire separate podcast to deal with the British Empire.
	But you're right.
	The monsters.
	Irishmen fighting in 1915 for the British.
	And they could never have imagined that.
	Some of these men who died that day, receiving last absolution, they'd literally just got off the ship the day before.
	And you have all these men from all over the world and the Commonwealth who are so brave and so good to their brother soldiers dying for the bankers.
	I think we agree.
	It was a blood sacrifice coordinated by the Milner Group and financed by central bankers and planned, pre-planned.
	It was a cull, wasn't it?
	It was a cull and a satanic sacrifice.
	Yeah.
	And shuffling pieces around the chessboard and trying to prevent Germany from rising.
	Yes, of course they hate Germany as well.
	Yes, I'm just whizzing through.
	As for our God he is in heaven, he hath done whatsoever pleased him.
	Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
	They have mouths and speak not.
	Eyes have they and see not.
	They have ears and hear not.
	Noses have they and smell not.
	I love the different senses.
	They have hands.
	This is great.
	They have hands and handle not.
	Feet have they and walk not.
	Neither speak they through their throat.
	They that make them alike unto them, and so are all such as to put their trust in them.
	But throughout the Old Testament, St. Paul said everything happened in the Old Testament as for our instruction.
	And so we Christians have to admit that We do the same.
	God has revealed himself to us, given his life for us, and we go on sinning, and even some apostatizing, and even churchmen, bishops, or those popes, or men who call themselves pope, rebelling against God and running after the world,
	making our religion into something about climate change or transgender.
	Or making deals with Rothschild bankers?
	Usually it's a sin.
	How can the Vatican be making deals with these Rothschilds?
	So the incredible infidelity of the Jews that makes us think, oh my, how can they be so stupid in the Old Testament?
	They get the time of the judges again and again and again.
	God rescues them.
	And within a few years, they've fallen away again.
	I think it's a lesson for our...
	Daily spiritual life.
	And we might say, okay, I was impatient and snapped at someone.
	I was lazy and got up late.
	That's not the same as putting my son or my daughter into the fire.
	Your son, if you like, is actually the Christ in your soul.
	The measure of your eternal life living in you.
	And so you either attend to this What begins as the baby, Christ, in your soul.
	And you're in charge.
	And you need to nourish him and feed him by you reading the word of God.
	You praying.
	You spending time with him.
	And he grows and grows into you until he then leads you and leads you where you didn't want or think you would go.
	And life becomes suddenly, you can't see more than one step ahead.
	And when we sacrifice the life in Christ in us, For the sake of something worldly, which is basically any sin.
	There's the venial and the mortal sin, but why do we keep doing it?
	It is even more retarded that we should risk the life of grace in us than that the Jews of the Old Testament would turn away from those judges and redeemers that God sent to them and the word he spoke through Moses or the prophets.
	If, for example, You look at the church hierarchy now.
	If we didn't have the example of the Jews murdering the prophets, we might think that somehow it's all gone wrong now.
	If we didn't have the example of Judas betraying our Lord and the apostles fleeing from Gethsemane, honestly, we Catholics would look at the Vatican with all the paedophiles there and Francis protecting them and promoting them.
	There's too many to name.
	You would think everything had gone off the rails.
	But we can see God's people who gave them that land, Canaan, and let them wipe out the people in that land, not to justify genocide in Gaza today, which is one of the biggest crimes happening on the planet.
	It's because they were practicing child sacrifice in every kind of abomination.
	And for the salvation of the world, God needed a people who would give no place to such things.
	You know the importance of Abraham and Isaac, with Abraham being ready to offer Isaac on Mount Moriah.
	And Orthodox Jews will read Genesis 22 every single day, like we Catholics go to Mass every day, because it's the sacrifice of the Father and the Son on the very same mountain.
	Mount Moriah is Mount Calvary.
	Offering of Isaac and then a ram coming in his place is a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ when his humanity died, but his divinity lived and united with the father as Isaac was still with Abraham.
	That's like foundational to Judaism.
	And if you misinterpret the father's willingness to offer the son and misinterpret what God was asking for and pleased by, God did not want Isaac's blood spilled.
	He wanted Abraham's total obedience, who loved God more than his own life.
	And it's harder to sacrifice your son than to commit suicide.
	So it's an even bigger sacrifice to be willing to offer your son.
	Today, again, the feast of Saints Perpetua and Felicity.
	Perpetua had a baby boy with her at the breast when she was martyred.
	And Saint Felicity was pregnant, eight months pregnant.
	And under the Roman law, they wouldn't put a pregnant woman to death.
	They were going to say, right, you have to wait a month till you're given birth, and then we'll put you to death.
	But she wanted to die with her companions.
	And they all prayed, and she gave birth early, and then they all were martyred together.
	Not necessarily the two babies.
	The babies would have been taken away.
	But Saints Perpetual Felicity loved God, Jesus, more than their own children.
	And this is not because they didn't love their children.
	Of course they loved their children.
	But they love God more.
	If we don't understand that Abraham and Isaac are teaching us about Jesus, the Son of God, as the pleasing sacrifice, then there's that insane temptation to follow what the other cultures were doing, sacrificing their children to Moloch.
	And even Jewish, Israeli and Judean kings, even King Solomon started doing this, sacrificing children.
	He did?
	Yes.
	After that...
	Very promising start.
	It's just mind-boggling.
	He went off the rails completely.
	Yes.
	And God knows if he didn't maybe rescue himself on his deathbed, perhaps, through contrition.
	But he married all these concubines and false religion, which is what Francis is doing, mixing with all this false religion.
	And they could be so much clearer about abortion and IVF.
	This is evil.
	This is giving children's lives to molochs.
	Souls which God has created which don't belong to us.
	Every soul is created by God.
	If you mess with that soul, if you abort it, or if you have IVF, you've earned hell.
	And your only way out is repentance.
	This is what the church should be preaching.
	How did we get here?
	So basically, Israel's falling away is for our instruction.
	To realize our infidelity, that a priest or a bishop who's not preaching against IVF and abortion, as hard as the prophets preached against offering the children the fire, like Jeremiah saying, such a thought never entered God's head.
	How is it you can think this is something pleasing to him?
	Then we're making the same sins that Israel made then, except we're sinning after God's revelation of himself, full revelation.
	So it is mind-boggling.
	Their infidelity is mind-boggling, but then it's meant to be for our examination of conscience, our own infidelities.
	It's quite demanding, though, isn't it?
	I mean, back then, to be a good person, in the Old Testament, to be a good person, all you had to do was not sacrifice your children to Moloch, and not...
	and not make golden calves and stuff.
	Whereas now, what you're saying is that, I mean, we've really got to...
	I mean...
	I don't know.
	We're all confronted with the choice of life or death, with truth or falsity, always, you know, in every moment.
	And God knows our measure, that we are...
	We're children, we're infants, we're lambs.
	And so he goes gently with us.
	The saintly life, sanctity is possible.
	And eminently possible with the sacraments, which are such a help to it.
	And if you grow up in a Catholic community, you have all this support.
	And hopefully under a Catholic monarch, this is how society is best ordered.
	There can be a parliament, there can be an element of democracy, but the sovereign should be truly...
	Sovereign.
	And it's not that it's then easy, but then much would be expected of people who've received much.
	Except when you read in the bit in the Old Testament about the creation of kings, all the people are wanting kings.
	Look at the other nations.
	They've got kings.
	And God tells whoever the prophet is at the time.
	Samuel.
	You're really not going to like this.
	Your king is going to be absolute rubbish and you're going to regret this decision.
	And I'm kind of with God on this one.
	I don't think that kings are good.
	I think that's very much for Israel.
	To have a king was a thing of nature for all the nations round about.
	But for Israel itself, God's saying, no, I'm your king.
	You have me through Samuel and the prophets.
	And the people said, yeah, yeah, but no, we want one anyway.
	And God can overcome that, still bring Christ the King, who is the King of Kings.
	He's the King of the Jews.
	He's the King of Israel.
	The true King.
	God is their King.
	So the ideal would be not to have any King until Jesus comes, the Messiah.
	Yeah.
	And then they realize, aha, the fact that they opted...
	For what they thought was an easy, better route, but against the advice of the prophets speaking for God, it got a lot of them caught up in worldly concerns, and then they didn't recognize their king when he came.
	But they did crown him with thorns, and they did have a purple cloak put on him, and he was enthroned on the cross.
	And there was written above his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
	So everything was actually fulfilled and done.
	The crowning and the enthronement and the royal robes and the soldiers bowing down, the Roman soldiers bowing down saying, Ave, Rex.
	But it was a mockery.
	How many prisoners do you think the Roman soldiers crowned with thorns and bowed down to saying, Hail King!
	Not many.
	Zero, apart from Jesus.
	What is that?
	That came from the Jews.
	They realized that his claim is the king.
	And yet, when God said, it's not time for king, they said, give us a king.
	And when it was time to recognize the king, they refused.
	Except, of course, all those who repented, as they went away from Calvary, beating their breasts in contrition, and then on Pentecost, at the coming of the Holy Spirit and the preaching of the apostles, thousands converting.
	And then every day...
	You know, there's more than 2 billion baptized souls on earth right now.
	In 2,000 years.
	That's quite a lot.
	That's a million growth every year.
	Every year.
	That's 3,000 every single day since Pentecost.
	We read in Acts that 3,000 people converted on Pentecost.
	That's happened every single day since, on average.
	The growth, not just the number of conversions, but the growth in the number of baptized.
	Isn't that amazing?
	For 2,000 years.
	Can you answer this one?
	Sorry, this is a complete digression, but souls.
	How many are there and where do they come from?
	I mean, does God just make them?
	He does.
	So, to St. Thomas' Feast again, I'll say tomorrow.
	So, he'll tell you that a carrot...
	Or a dog has a soul, but the carrot has a sensitive soul, a vegetative soul, meaning it can grow and nourish itself and reproduce.
	The dog has a sensitive soul, so it can also see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and it has locomotion.
	But the human being has a rational soul.
	Therefore, the animals and the plants, they perish.
	When their body is gone and corrupted, the soul doesn't exist ever.
	Again, but the human soul, because it's rational, it has a spiritual, and it is spiritual, then it must be immortal, because it's perfectly simple.
	Even Plato and Aristotle realized this is about the soul.
	If something's perfectly simple, it cannot decompose.
	And so our human soul, for every time a human being is conceived by the...
	Mothers and fathers, zygotes.
	God infuses a soul.
	So it's a cooperation between mother, father and God.
	And God does the heavy lifting, the hard part, which we can never do, is to create the soul.
	And that's united with the material from mother and father.
	And that soul is capex of God.
	It's capable of receiving God's life because it's spiritual, which happens in baptism and then increases.
	With every act of charity or sacrifice, every new sanctifying grace infused into that soul.
	If you like, you could say the soul as our principle of life is what you get when you're looking up at this being from nature, from the vegetables, animals, humans.
	And the spirit is what we get looking down from God and the angels.
	Because God and angels are spirits.
	They don't have a soul.
	The human beings have a soul which is also identical with their spirit.
	Jesus Christ received a created soul at his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the anima Christi, which is the fullness of truth.
	Aristotle worked out so much of this with the anima.
	The anima means life.
	It's your life principle.
	Anything that's living has to have a soul.
	But it's just logical by definition.
	Because that's what life is.
	The phenomenal effect of life has to have a cause.
	What is the cause of life?
	What is the principle of it?
	It is the soul.
	That's what we call it.
	And when in death, the soul is separated from the body, but the soul cannot be destroyed.
	So the soul goes on for eternity, either in heaven or hell.
	Maybe in purgatory on its way to heaven.
	And at the general resurrection, everyone's body will be reunited with their soul, whether they're in heaven or hell.
	A greater joy for the saved, a greater pain for the damned.
	And this is my last question, because unfortunately, I could...
	I could chat to you for hours and ask you all sorts of questions and we could go in all sorts of different directions.
	But unfortunately, I've got to prepare supper and I get told off by the wife.
	But when we get our bodies back, what age will we be?
	What will we look like?
	I mean, like me, but sort of a bit better looking with better teeth and more hair.
	No, no.
	Some people say in a simplistic way that...
	Jesus died at age 33, the perfect age.
	But there are four qualities of the resurrected body we get from, I think it's 1 Corinthians 15 or 2 Corinthians 15, that you'll have this agility, impassibility.
	So impassibility, you can't suffer anymore.
	Agility means you can be in any location just by thinking about it.
	Although what location means at that stage, I can hardly think.
	It'll be glorified and clarified.
	So it'll be shining with God's glory.
	Almost like light.
	Matter will be different.
	There has to be a way for all the saints to communicate with each other and share the same space.
	You know you can do that with light, without the light losing its identity of the individual.
	If you send light waves through each other, they come out the other side intact.
	It will be the same body.
	It will be your body.
	Even if someone died in the most unfortunate way and you think their body was obliterated, God knows how he will give you back your body.
	It will be a real physical body, but it will be elevated in the way that Jesus was in the resurrection, which is a mystery.
	It's a mystery.
	It sounds pretty cool, though.
	Sorry?
	It sounds pretty cool.
	I like that, you know.
	Very cool.
	I think we're not going to be disappointed.
	No.
	We're just going to be amazed, please God, if we get there, not given, how good everything he offered and how he told us so plainly and how slow we were to hear what he was saying.
	Again, with this psalm about they have eyes and see not, ears and hear not.
	It's a journey.
	It's a real journey, right?
	That you keep growing, keep growing and realizing the words of Jesus.
	These are more true than you ever understood before.
	If I may finish then with two words of Jesus, that we have to go deeper and deeper into the truth of these every single day.
	One of them is, this is my body, this is my blood.
	That's more true than we can ever exhaust, although we can understand exactly what he's saying.
	It is his body and blood.
	The other is Apocalypse 2.9 and 3.9, when he says, This is those who say they are Jews and are not, but do lie, but who are the synagogue of Satan.
	We need to really meditate on what that means.
	Those who say they are Jews, there's two kinds.
	The religious, who Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog said in 1959, you're a religious Jew if you're born to a Jewish mother.
	Or a convert if you go through the immersion and for men circumcision.
	That's the only way you can be a Jew.
	Born to a Jewish mother or by the ritual conversion.
	And David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, I think, said, no, a Jew is one who declares himself a Jew, who has a Jewish lifestyle, cares for Jewish things, which is a circular definition, makes no sense in logic.
	But interestingly, he said, who declares himself a Jew.
	And Jesus is telling us that they say they are Jews and are not.
	So anyone who says they are a Jew is going to fall in this definition.
	Whether religious or secular.
	Whether Talmudic or Zionist or both or neither.
	Except he says they are not.
	And that doesn't mean they're not Jews by ethnic descent or genes.
	As a lot of people seem to think now, oh there are no Jews or they're all Ashkenazi.
	That is such a red herring.
	The point of saying they're not Jews means spiritually they don't have circumcised hearts.
	Because the New Testament tells us again and again and again.
	Yes, you can be the children of Israel by the flesh, by blood, but you're not true children of Abraham if you don't do what he did with faith.
	Yes, you can be Israelites by descent, but you're not true Israelites.
	Or yes, Jews, but not true Jews if the heart isn't circumcised, open to the Holy Spirit, basically.
	So they say they are Jews.
	Don't get caught in the trap.
	Does this mean Zionists or secular Jews or religious Jews?
	All of them that say they're Jews.
	But they're not circumcised at the heart.
	It means they're not Catholic.
	They've not converted.
	So a Jew who enters the church is not falling in this definition that are the synagogue of Satan.
	The assembly of Satan.
	In the assembly of Moses, the ecclesia, the church of Moses, the assembly, it's also the infants.
	Like the eight-year-olds that are circumcised, they become members of the assembly.
	They don't carry the same responsibility as the high priests or the priests.
	Or the princes of the different tribes.
	So in the synagogue of Satan, you have very few at the top who are fully conscious of the evil they're doing, the opposition to Jesus Christ, of the darkness and chaos and pain and suffering they want to bring in this world, and the child sacrifice.
	Very few of them.
	But there's layers in a society until you get down to newborn children who are incapable of personal sin, though they inherit original sin.
	They're all the synagogue of Satan.
	That doesn't mean we make ourselves the judge and say who is good and bad, which is also irrelevant.
	Who's a good Jew?
	Who's a bad Jew?
	It's irrelevant.
	People platform Jeffrey Sachs because he speaks sense about Russia, Ukraine.
	Or they'll platform normal Finkelstein because he speaks a lot of sense about Gaza.
	But you will never hear them give you the solution, which is Jesus Christ.
	So why do we platform them?
	We don't need Jews to tell us it's insane to go to war with Russia over nothing or insane to commit genocide in Gaza.
	We know that's wrong.
	But the only way out of it is Jesus Christ.
	So why are we platforming these people as if we're the judge?
	Oh, this is a good Jew.
	This is a bad Jew.
	It's irrelevant.
	God's the judge.
	They're part of the signal of Satan because they oppose Jesus Christ, whom they're called to accept when they say, I'm a Jew.
	If you say, I'm a Jew, well, your job is to welcome the Messiah in the world and the flesh and proclaim him to the world.
	And that you identify with this descendants of Abraham.
	So, I believe you have to cook supper to keep your family up.
	It's been great talking to you.
	Tell us where we can find you and your book.
	Yep.
	So, Amazon for six of these books, which try and show how the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New.
	Every page of it is about Jesus Christ.
	I'm on a YouTube, Scripture and Tradition.
	And X, I think, Father Jay Mordsley on X. And Rombol's Twitter.
	We traditionalists still call it, because X is kind of Osiris.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I think if someone were to look up Divine Depths, my name will come up and then they can spell it right and Google it.
	Well, thank you very much, Father James Maudsley, for appearing on the Welcome to the Psalms podcast.
	And thank you for the light you've cast on Psalm 113, or depending on whether you follow that.
	My version or not, 114 and 115.
	But I go with your theory.
	113 sounds like it's more proper.
	Thank you for being such a gracious host and coping with my prickliness without any sign of discomfort, which is a true gentleman.
	And I'm not surprised at all, having seen some of your work.
	Oh, well, I didn't notice any prickliness at all, but thank you again.
	And if you've enjoyed this podcast, well, just share it.
	Tell your friends, because I quite like the Welcome to the Souls podcast.

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