Dennis Prager Show - Ultimate Issues: Do You Ever Have a Crisis of Faith?
Aired: 2020-12-09
Duration: 08:09


=== The Difference Between Fame and Honor (02:15) ===

[00:00:00]  You're grappling with the great issues.
[00:00:02]  It's the perfect example of an ultimate issues book, writing about philosophy for today.
[00:00:08]  Do you live in the Bay Area?
[00:00:11]  Yes, I do.
[00:00:12]  You know, Jesuits move around a great deal, and at the time, I find myself in the Bay Area these days, for the time being.
[00:00:19]  You would have a more positive response in Zimbabwe.
[00:00:27]  You know, Dennis, I have never been invited to the Cool Kids table in my life, and I don't think I'm going to be invited to the Cool Kids table anytime soon.
[00:00:36]  But, you know, this is the difference between fame and honor.
[00:00:39]  Fame is the approval of the mob, and honor is recognition by honorable people.
[00:00:44]  And that's how I understand my presence on your show today.
[00:00:47]  An honorable man who wants to know, wants to have a conversation with me.
[00:00:50]  In this life, it's hard to improve on that.
[00:00:57]  Deep and wonderful insight, the difference between...
[00:01:01]  I'm laughing because my engineer said, okay, let's go home now.
[00:01:07]  This is what I have to deal with in my headphones.
[00:01:09]  People have no idea.
[00:01:11]  It's like having a Greek chorus behind you at all times.
[00:01:14]  But anyway, that is a brilliant distinction, honor and fame.
[00:01:21]  That's right.
[00:01:22]  Honor is how you are received by honorable people.
[00:01:26]  Fame has nothing to do with that.
[00:01:29]  That's exactly right.
[00:01:31]  By analogy, G.K. Chesterton said that a crass and vulgar woman seeks attention from crass and vulgar people and dresses accordingly, and a wise and prudent woman seeks attention from wise and prudent people and dresses accordingly also.
[00:01:48]  What I want in the book is for honest people who know they're being lied to, say, can you help me turn the lie down?
[00:01:56]  Can you help me figure out what's going on?
[00:01:58]  So the elevator pitch for my book is this.

=== A Priest's Vocation (06:08) ===

[00:02:00]  This book will help you to be a lie detector, a truth detector, a lie refuter, and a truth promoter.
[00:02:07]  All in one volume.
[00:02:09]  How long did it take you to write?
[00:02:12]  Well, you know, people ask me the same thing about my sermons.
[00:02:15]  How long do your sermons take to prepare?
[00:02:16]  And I said, always the same amount of time, always my whole life.
[00:02:20]  I started reading philosophy when I was 18 in 1979. The book took me too long, as my good friend Ignatius Press, Fr.
[00:02:29]  Fessier, reminded me.
[00:02:30]  I started writing it in 2011. I finished writing it in about 2018, which is probably about six years too long.
[00:02:38]  But I've been teaching it in the classroom since the late 90s.
[00:02:42]  So this is something that has been battle-tested in the classroom for very many years.
[00:02:46]  Do you walk around the Bay Area with a priest's collar?
[00:02:50]  Sometimes, yeah, when I'm on my way to mission.
[00:02:54]  And, you know, if I'm going to Walmart to buy a pair of jeans, no.
[00:02:58]  But otherwise, yeah, I do.
[00:03:01]  How do people respond to you?
[00:03:04]  Or are you just another person who happens to have it?
[00:03:07]  You know, for the most part, it's been just another person in the crowd.
[00:03:11]  What I find that I attract the most attention when I'm wearing my, you know, a friend of mine called my Sin Fighter suit, is at airports.
[00:03:19]  I've had people come up and thank me and say, oh, Father, I'm so glad, you know, would you hear my confession?
[00:03:25]  Would you give me a blessing?
[00:03:27]  Sometimes there'll be a fellow priest who's in a wheelchair and needs a little bit of help.
[00:03:32]  I have a very close friend who's quite young.
[00:03:46]  He's in his late 20s.
[00:03:47]  He converted to Catholicism from Protestantism a couple of years ago.
[00:03:51]  He's an extremely serious thinker.
[00:03:53]  He's written two books of his own.
[00:03:55]  And he's thinking of being a priest.
[00:03:57]  And he's very torn.
[00:04:01]  What would you say to him?
[00:04:05]  Well, God gives us gifts and desires for a reason, and we would do well not to ignore them.
[00:04:15]  Be very clear about what a priest is.
[00:04:18]  Spend some time with the ordination ritual, where you're told repeatedly by the bishop, imitate the mysteries you celebrate, and model your life on the cross of Christ.
[00:04:30]  The great clarity I had for my own vocation was the night before my mother had heart surgery, and the parish priest, a friend of the family, brought Holy Communion to the family, and he put his thumb in the aisle and then reached out with his thumb to anoint my mother.
[00:04:44]  And I had this clarity.
[00:04:46]  I said, oh, here's this man who gave himself to Christ so that Christ could be given to others.
[00:04:51]  What could be more important than that?
[00:04:54]  And that really propelled me down that road towards priesthood.
[00:04:57]  So if your burning desire...
[00:04:59]  Is to love the people of God as Christ loves them, which is to say, as poor, chaste, obedient, and sacrificially, then priesthood may be something that you're called to.
[00:05:11]  What if you're also burning to make a family?
[00:05:16]  Well, you know, and that's a very fine thing.
[00:05:20]  Here's the key thing.
[00:05:21]  The Church, historically, has ordained celibate men and has ordained married men, has never ordained bachelors.
[00:05:30]  Why not?
[00:05:31]  Because you have to prove that you're willing to make an undivided commitment to what you decide is the greatest good.
[00:05:42]  You know, when I told my parents I was planning to become a Jesuit, my mother said, I knew something like this would happen to you.
[00:05:48]  And I said, Mom, you make it sound like it's a James Dean movie and the law cut up with me.
[00:05:52]  And she said, well, you were never satisfied.
[00:05:54]  You never wanted what everybody else wanted.
[00:05:57]  I said, Mom, I think that's a good thing.
[00:05:58]  Was it Emerson or Thoreau who said most men lead lives with quiet desperation?
[00:06:02]  And my father said, you know, you'd be a good husband and father, but you'd always have one eye on the horizon.
[00:06:09]  And I said, I could hear your wife say, I know Bob loves me, but I don't have all of him, and you wouldn't do that to a woman.
[00:06:16]  So eventually, you have to make a choice.
[00:06:19]  Where do you think you can most fruitfully, faithfully, and fully serve God?
[00:06:25]  And for some folks, it's that sacrificial way of being a husband and father.
[00:06:30]  Who are the unsung heroes of the day?
[00:06:33]  And then there is the very sacrificial, also paternal way of serving God, and that's in the person of Christ.
[00:06:41]  And you make that celibate commitment so that you're announcing to the world, I want to live with an undivided heart.
[00:06:48]  A priest has to stand before his people and say, because of who God is and because of who you are to God, I choose to love and serve you without reservation.
[00:06:58]  And it's harder to do that if you've got another family.
[00:07:03]  I've asked this of religious Jews, Catholics, Protestants, all of my adult life, and I have no agenda because I'm so pro-religion and the good people and all those three faiths.
[00:07:20]  But I think that it's helpful for people to hear.
[00:07:23]  I'm not rooting for any answer, but I am curious.
[00:07:27]  Do you ever have a crisis of faith?
[00:07:32]  Well, you know, I have spent a lot of time wrestling with the problem of evil.
[00:07:38]  A few weeks before I got my undergraduate degree, I watched the violent death of my best friend, and I realized I had a choice to make.
[00:07:48]  Either everything the Church proclaims about the cross and resurrection of Christ is absolutely true, Or, life is a bad joke that probably shouldn't have happened.
[00:08:00]  So it's either Thomas Aquinas or it's Nietzsche.
[00:08:03]  And everything else is just whistling past the cemetery.
[00:08:06]  We'll be back in a moment, Father Robert McTeague.