Dec. 9, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
06:29
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Look, real philosophy for real people. | |
| The last issue was the crisis of the church, which you were acknowledging, which, of course, well precedes the pandemic. | |
| What are its roots? | |
| Well, you know, a lot depends on how far back you want to go. | |
| If you want to go all the way back, you go back to Adam and Eve. | |
| More recently, let's go back to Pope Pius X at the beginning of the 20th century, sounding the alarm about modernism, which he called the mother of all heresies, the heresy of all heresies. | |
| The idea that the Church really doesn't have anything truly distinctive to offer, and that if we're going to have any credibility or persuasiveness or authority, That we have to be in harmony with whatever the heirs of the so-called Enlightenment are willing to accept. | |
| Once you begin to go down that path, it's really hard to recover. | |
| And so when people ask me, Father, do you think COVID is God's chastisement? | |
| And I said, that's above my prayer grade. | |
| I'm inclined to say no, because I don't think God will let me off that easily. | |
| But it is a time for illumination, for the thoughts of many to be revealed, as Scripture says. | |
| And this is where we find out who really believes and who doesn't, whose heart has been won over to worthy worship and whose heart has not. | |
| And so for just speaking as a Catholic priest, it's time for the Catholic Church to say, we've got to win people all over again. | |
| For Christ and for worthy worship. | |
| This is a time to teach and to reteach people, and we have to do it soon, or otherwise even more souls are going to drift away. | |
| Well, this is the outsider, and I am a totally sympathetic outsider, because there is nothing good. | |
| In the collapse of Christianity generally, or Catholicism specifically, I always remind my fellow Jews that with all the anti-Semitism that existed in Christian Europe, the Holocaust was not produced by Christianity. | |
| It was produced by anti-Christianity, and it became fascism, Nazism, and Communism arose when Christianity died. | |
| Why would anyone, Jew or non-Jew, welcome, even if you're an atheist, you've got to be pretty optimistic about human nature to welcome the collapse of Christianity in the West. | |
| No, no, that's certainly true. | |
| And I think a lot of the intelligentsia and the political managerial class have been infected with a kind of Vichy syndrome, and they see God in general as a buzzkill. | |
| And the Catholic Church in particular, because we're the final bulwark against the madness of relativism. | |
| And so we're the team to beat. | |
| And you say, boy, you will not like what the world will look like if the Catholic Church is not there to proclaim the Gospel and to offer the sacraments. | |
| Right. | |
| So tell me then this. | |
| If I had to summarize the difference between Benedict and Francis, I think that's a reasonable characterization. | |
| You know, Benedict and then John Paul were academics. | |
| I spent most of my life in academia. | |
| Their way of governing the church is more accessible to me than the present occupant of the chair of Peter. | |
| I think that Benedict had a sense of continuity, that to be faithful to Christ is to be in line with all of what the Church has taught. | |
| I think Francis' approach is with more a sense of immediacy. | |
| What is the clamor right now? | |
| And I think that can... | |
| The way that's being done has led to confusion among many of the faithful. | |
| Well, I have harsher words, but I don't expect the priest to have harsher words, and I mean that quite sympathetically, because it's not an easy time. | |
| Do you have a theory as to why Benedict resigned? | |
| You know, I've gone back and forth on that, and I think somewhere out there is a doctoral dissertation waiting. | |
| I know people who studied under Benedict back when he was Father Ratzinger, and their claim is, and they say that Benedict hinted at it in many interviews, and it's along these lines. | |
| The Church, you know, had John Paul who tried to govern from his sickbed for a very long time, and Benedict didn't want the Church to go through that again. | |
| And that's why he thought it was better to leave while he could still do it under his own power. | |
| Some people find that persuasive. | |
| Other people make interesting cases that there may be more kind of Dan Brown novel powers and principalities at work. | |
| I'm not so sure. | |
| I will say that I'm sorry that he did, because he was a scholar, and I think what he had to say... | |
| About worship and about the distinctive role of the West for the sake of the Church in the world, as articulated in the Regensburg lectures, that needs to be promoted to this day, and I wish he had taken the opportunity to do so. | |
| It is, to me, a tragedy that he resigned. | |
| I don't remember any other voice condemning him the day he announced it. | |
| I did. | |
| For the sake of humanity... | |
| And here I am, you know, a non-Catholic. | |
| But I was a big fan. | |
| I mean, because the man told the truth. | |
| Your book is about the truth. | |
| And he told the truth. | |
| Those Regensburg lectures were awesome. |
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