Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday are two of the most important days in the Christian calendar, and they're both holy days of the Christian year. This week, we're joined by Dr. Tom Williams, a colleague of mine from when I ran Breitbart as Executive Chairman, to talk about the importance of Holy Saturday, and why it's lost its place in modernity.
00:00:00.000Okay, we're going to be joined by Dr. Tom Williams. He's a colleague of mine
00:00:07.840from when I ran Breitbart as executive chairman. Dr. Williams is from Rome, lives in Rome,
00:00:15.640and he's going to talk about the importance of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, the entire
00:00:21.480Easter weekend in the Catholic community and the Catholic faith tradition. One of the smartest
00:00:27.120guys I know. Dr. Tom Williams joins us next in the world. Dr. Williams, before I get into it,
00:00:31.880you've written this book, and it's really, I want to spend a better part of the hour going through
00:00:36.720the argument in the book, because I think it is of this weekend, the holiest weekend in the
00:00:42.220Christian calendar for people to contemplate exactly where we are as a faith in the persecution
00:00:48.020directed towards the faith. Walk us through, from a Catholic perspective, the importance of Holy
00:00:55.520Saturday. You know, people know Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ, Holy Thursday
00:01:01.420with the Last Supper and the rest, Gethsemane, and then you've got, but Holy Saturday kind
00:01:07.140of a lot of times gets lost in the mix, and obviously with Easter. But what's the importance
00:01:13.900of Holy Saturday, and particularly this belief of Christ's descent into hell?
00:01:19.640Yeah, there are two things. Thank you, Steve, and it's good to be with you on this very,
00:01:23.660very holy day. There are two traditions that go way back. One that goes back furthest is the one
00:01:30.220you just mentioned, the idea of Christ's descent into hell. It's a hell that's a little different
00:01:36.960than the way we understand hell today, in the sense that he went to lead out the souls of the
00:01:44.360just who had died before his coming. It's a basic Christian belief that up till Christ redeemed the
00:01:51.200world up to the time of his suffering on the cross, all those good and holy prophets, men and
00:01:56.740women of God who had lived since the time of Adam, since the fall of Adam and Eve, they had not been
00:02:03.740able to go to heaven. Heaven had not been opened to them. A savior was needed. And the traditional
00:02:11.420understanding of that was that they were in hell, hell not as in condemned for all time, the way we
00:02:17.900We think of hell as having been judged and found unworthy, but hell more like our understanding of limbo, the old traditional sense of kind of in a waiting place or in a place of the dead, a Gehenna-like place.
00:02:33.760And that Jesus goes, and there's a beautiful homily from the second century, one of the earliest Christian texts we possess outside of biblical texts, where the author describes Jesus talking to Adam and his conversation with him, because he is the new Adam, and inviting him to stand up and to take his rightful place.
00:02:57.340And then all these crowds, the multitude of the just who lived in times before Christ, rejoicing in the salvation that has finally come to them, that they are now able to enter heaven.
00:03:09.820how is this it's something that's been been lost in in modernity it's not really discussed of
00:03:18.040holy saturday and and and christ going into you know going to hell to to bring i guess the pagans
00:03:25.100or the people that were there that hadn't had the uh the living word of christ on earth when they
00:03:30.580existed right the great philosophers and all that why is it like so many other teachings and one of
00:03:36.320powerful things about your book is to go back and really emphasize the early church, what happened
00:03:43.500in the early church, the persecutions of the early church, to make sure we understand it,
00:03:48.720particularly that it was directed at the Christian faith. Why, with modernity, have people kind of
00:03:54.020lost, has Holy Saturday, in the general Christian faith overall, kind of lost its place?
00:04:00.400well unfortunately steve i i think you know that answer better than i do it's it's this kind of
00:04:06.840sunny feel-good form of christianity and catholicism that is so prevalent in our day
00:04:11.760we only want to talk about the nice fuzzy feeling kind of stories and the parables and the sheep and
00:04:17.620you know and the things that make us feel good uh it's not only jesus's descent into hell that
00:04:23.080we don't talk about on holy saturday we don't talk about hell itself we don't talk about the
00:04:27.200possibility of condemnation. We don't talk about judgment. We don't talk about the eternal truths.
00:04:32.040And this is, we're not doing justice to the fullness of the Christian message when we pass
00:04:38.060over these essential, central teachings of the Christian and the Catholic faith. So I think
00:04:44.160that's the kind of the short answer to this. It's also something very tough for people to understand.
00:04:50.020You know, again, we don't talk about hell at all, but look, in the Apostles' Creed,
00:04:54.280what do we say? We say he descended into hell, right? I mean, it's actually there, but nobody
00:04:59.600goes and explains, bothers to look, what does that even mean, right? This idea that there was
00:05:05.440an entire human race of those who had been deemed just, whether they were, as you say,
00:05:10.940the pagan philosophers and those who were just Gentiles, if you will, but also all the Jewish
00:05:17.480patriarchs and prophets, all the Jewish holy people who had not been able to enter heaven
00:05:23.040until Christ opened it for them. This is something absolutely remarkable and wonderful,
00:05:28.580and it is mysterious. It's something that is very hard to understand, but it's something that is
00:05:34.500at the core of what we believe as Christians, and it's so good that you bring this back
00:05:38.640by having us talk about this on Holy Saturday. A second thing, I'll say this just as kind of a
00:05:44.760segue so we can go back to the other as well. Another part of the Christian tradition is
00:05:50.420a great devotion to Mary on Holy Saturday. There's been, for many centuries, a devotion of
00:05:59.300special consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who knows a sorrow and an abandonment
00:06:05.440on Holy Saturday that the rest of humanity does not experience. And the reason that
00:06:12.360Saturday has always been considered Mary's day, the day after her passion, in a way,
00:06:18.860was on Saturday, and Christ's passion was on Friday. That's why we celebrate the Immaculate
00:06:24.520Heart of Mary always on a Saturday, the day after we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
00:06:29.420It's her sharing in the passion, but also in a particular way of having Jesus, her son,
00:06:35.600taken from her. This day of mourning, this day of loss, when she experiences this desolation of soul
00:06:44.300because her beloved son, Jesus, has been taken from her.
00:06:47.780She watched him suffer and die, and now he's laid in a tomb.
00:06:51.100And so there is also that beautiful tradition of consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary,
00:08:10.420I think she was actually in counseling with the pastor, one of the senior people there.
00:08:15.340And it looks to many people in the United States, and nobody wants to talk about it,
00:08:20.720and they certainly won't let it be talked about in the mainstream media,
00:08:23.600that this persecution of Christians is actually—we're actually entering a quite dangerous phase of it,
00:08:29.940particularly when the mainstream media has said, well, you know, it's Tom Williams and Steve Bannon and and these Dr.
00:08:37.080Martin Taylor Marshall and Marshall Taylor, all these all these people are all Christian nationalists.
00:08:43.520Right. And they're the dangers. They're the domestic terrorists.
00:08:47.000Walk me through why your book really, quite frankly, you give people a heads up that the Nashvilles of the world are not going to be the exception.
00:12:22.880Were you shocked about how the coverage of this went down?
00:12:26.660There's no mention at all about it really being a Christian school and an attack upon Christianity, sir.
00:12:32.420Well, no, it's it played out like, you know, this kind of dystopian reality where everything is twisted.
00:12:39.800At the beginning, no one wanted to say that she was transgender.
00:12:43.720No one wanted to say that she identified as a male, as a man.
00:12:47.800This is something that they suppressed for a while, and then it became just common knowledge, and so that was the narrative that was given.
00:12:55.080Weirdly, they did not refer to her as a man.
00:12:58.680In any of these stories, for some reason, they took her biological sex as the reality, perhaps because that's the way the police report initially portrayed it, but at least that was true to the facts.
00:13:11.720But the fact that they completely flipped on its head, they didn't want to talk about, again, the Christian school, that there was a targeted anti-Christian attack, and that the perpetrator was transgender.
00:13:25.460And then later on, as you say, there's still this confusion as to motive.
00:13:29.080I mean, I think the motive's fairly self-evident.
00:13:31.980But the fact that we actually have a document, a text, a manifesto, and that they won't be easy.
00:27:28.920If this is the way society is going, let's just all get on board.
00:27:32.120Let's get on the bus and they'll let us keep our rosaries.
00:27:35.360You know, those are the ones who are going to do just fine.
00:27:40.040Hang on, Tom, we're going to take a break.
00:27:42.920We're going to talk about, by the way, we wouldn't have had Christianity bequeathed to us as it was if the early church had been accommodationist.
00:27:52.720They weren't. They would not accommodate.
00:27:55.060And that led to the rise of the Judeo-Christian West.
00:27:58.920short break. Dr. Tom Williams on the other side. If you're 65 or already on Medicare, listen up,
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00:31:15.900And one of the reasons it's getting more intense is because nobody wants to address it.
00:31:21.400It's not addressed in the pulpits, not addressed in the pulpits of the Catholic Church, certainly
00:31:26.000not addressed in the pulpits of much of the evangelical Protestant community, although
00:31:30.580there are both Catholic missionaries and evangelical ministers and ministries doing an incredible job
00:31:38.120in particularly places like sub-Saharan Africa. Tom Williams has written an incredible book,
00:31:44.480The Coming Christian Persecution. We'll continue with Dr. Tom Williams, as Dr. Tom Williams is
00:31:50.460going to explain. Not simply why this is important, but most importantly, that if we don't
00:31:58.080stop it now. It's only going to get worse. The persecution of Christians throughout the world,
00:32:04.020you're seeing it in the United States. Obviously, it's in China with the Chinese Communist Party,
00:32:09.360but I think you'll be shocked about how widespread it is. Dr. Tom Williams,
00:32:14.220the coming Christian persecution. The drivers of Christian persecution
00:32:17.940are intensifying. And the traditional and historic bastions against Christian persecution,
00:32:25.320Those that uphold religious liberty, those that defend and protect Christians are weakening.
00:32:32.460And these two things going hand in hand set up a situation where things cannot but get worse.
00:32:40.320And there's a problem which, you know, I hope this book will address this problem, will alleviate in some way this problem,
00:32:46.080the widespread ignorance as to the magnitude of the problem.
00:32:49.920People do not realize how many Christians are actively persecuted around the world.
00:32:55.320And how this persecution, which is very bloody in many places, is becoming bloody right before our eyes, even in the post-Christian West, even where persecution used to mean for a Westerner, you know, a little ostracization, a little bit of ridicule in the academy, a little bit of, oh, isn't that sweet, that, you know, devout kind of benighted figure.
00:33:17.540And now it's something that becomes more and more hostile, more and more aggressive.
00:33:22.400And we are going to see more of this kind of violent attack because there are no voices speaking out on behalf of Christians.
00:33:29.760Christians are considered to be a majority.
00:33:32.900They're considered to be wellstanding.
00:33:35.100They're considered to be able to take care of themselves.
00:33:37.860And as soon as Christians start raising their voices and say, this is not a good situation,
00:33:42.140the way that Christianity is being portrayed and the dangerous rhetoric being used,
00:35:27.800You never hear this coming from the Vatican.
00:35:29.520You never hear it preached on virtually any pulpit of a Catholic church on a Sunday.
00:35:35.040You very rarely hear it from any of the evangelical or even the outside of the mainstream Christian preachers, unless somebody is tied to missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa or they're tied to missionary work in the Middle East, like in Iraq.
00:35:52.280I mean, is it one of the reasons we're not hearing it?
00:35:55.120It's not just the mainstream media is in the media's fault.
00:35:59.040There's something about the church is not putting this front and center is that, hey, there's a problem here.
00:36:05.000They're coming after us in a very organized way, whether that is in communist China, in sub-Saharan Africa, in eradication of the Christians in the cradle of Christianity, which is the Near East or the Middle East.
00:36:18.120I mean, isn't one of the central things to hear that either because of they're afraid to talk about it or they just are they they they they like their international organizations and they don't want to be out there actually defending Christianity, that the more official aspects of the Christian and Catholic Church won't address this.
00:36:37.920Well, you're absolutely right, Steve. I think there is a very strong tendency to want to assimilate, to want to just get along, to want to say this brotherhood of man. It's like John Lennon's Imagine.
00:36:52.220Everybody, it's so prevalent in mainstream Christianity, this sense of, you know, we're all the same.
00:37:00.440The religions are all basically, they're all different paths to God.
00:37:08.500Nothing, we shouldn't be arguing about this.
00:37:10.380We shouldn't be, you know, pointing out differences.
00:37:13.720We shouldn't be living out to the full who we are.
00:37:17.540We should be willing to accommodate and to bend and to fit in.
00:37:20.880See, this is what the emperors – this is what the savvy and smart emperors, cunning emperors in the first century and second century offered up was the accommodation.
00:37:33.680All you got to do is burn a little bit of incense.
00:37:35.920You don't even – they didn't even demand that you believe it.
00:37:39.200All you have to do is just give me a little burn there in the dish and go about your merry way.
00:37:43.840Isn't that exactly what's happened here with the institutional church in the 21st century when the church is under – as you make in the book one of the things that's most compelling, you actually make the case that the persecution today in the 21st century is probably worse in any metric you want to look at than in the 1st and 2nd century of the early church, sir.
00:38:07.060Yes, well, that's, I think, verifiably, statistically true. It's just the pervasiveness
00:38:15.400of Christian persecution in the world, the fact that 75% of people who are persecuted for whatever
00:38:20.540faith they belong to happen to be Christians, that there are some 360 million Christians who
00:38:26.140live under severe persecution, in danger of their lives every day. These are facts and figures that
00:38:32.100are that are so startling and so but again so uh unknown uh this is really the untold story
00:38:38.740that so many people are ignorant of but i agree with you and look you know the catholic catholics
00:38:43.420in the in the united states we have a whole history of this there's always been a temptation
00:38:47.480because catholics were very persecuted early on as as you know the irish and the polish and the
00:38:52.940and sometimes germans and they did everything their power to make it look like oh i'm first
00:38:58.720an American and then I'm a Catholic, right? This was a temptation. It was a temptation to fit in,
00:39:03.760to assimilate, to make it show that you're a better citizen, show that you're in this. We
00:39:08.060got John F. Kennedy out of this, you know, the one who said, you know, I'm not, I'm first an
00:39:12.540American. I'm going to be an American. And this is something that there's always been a struggle
00:39:16.980in kind of the Catholic spirit in the U.S. But it's only more recently the evangelicals and the
00:39:21.560Protestants have joined in that same timidness and that same unwillingness to say, you know,
00:39:27.180I am a Christian and I uphold and my allegiance to Jesus Christ is actually superior to any other
00:39:33.900allegiance as I have. And it's what makes me a good citizen. What makes me a loyal patriot is
00:39:39.160because I actually do believe and I believe that I should be loyal to my nation. But this is
00:39:45.180something that we're very afraid of right now. We're so afraid of not fitting in. We're so afraid
00:39:49.880of being considered to be obscurantist, to be considered to be, you know, less cool than the
00:39:57.200academics who say that this is something that's very passe. We all want to fit in. And this is
00:40:02.280the great temptation of our day. And it's why so few people are willing to stand up and be counted
00:40:07.220and just say, hey, yeah, I'm an educated person and I am a Christian and I believe in the creed.
00:40:13.760I recite it on Sunday and I believe it. And I try to, you know, base my life around this because
00:40:18.840these are the truths that actually give firm grounding to my existence and explain reality
00:40:24.720to me. This is what explains human existence and my personal existence in the most cogent,
00:40:30.180coherent way that I've ever seen that I can imagine. But many Christians don't want to do
00:40:35.120that. They want to keep that away in the little catacombs of their house. And when they walk out
00:40:40.320on the street, they want to look like everybody else. They don't want to be seen as somehow
00:40:44.600different, because it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable to be different. But this is
00:40:50.700the world we live in, and we have to stand up, or else we're going to get the situation that
00:40:55.340we're getting right now. Did you see any, because I know you follow this, and we follow it quite
00:41:01.360closely, do you remember any big names in either the institutional Protestant Church or the Catholic
00:41:08.760church, or even come up and condemn what happened against the children at the Covenant School? Was
00:41:15.640there any outrage at all in the Christian community as far as you saw it?
00:41:19.560One person that I saw, and I do follow this as closely as I can, Franklin Graham,
00:41:25.980whom I'm a big fan of, I think he's a worthy scion of his father, did make a couple very
00:41:34.780interesting Facebook post. He's got 10 million followers, and he brought this up and said that
00:41:39.820was, he said, evil walked into that school that day. He actually was very poetic and very stern
00:41:47.420in the way that he described the situation. I mean, he hasn't gone into the whole question of
00:41:54.320this transgender in the way that the mainstream media are addressing it, but he did definitely
00:42:00.100come down very, very hard and brought up the fact that these were Christians who were killed