Phil Lawler, founder and editor of Catholic World News and author of Courageous Faith, joins us to discuss his new book, "Courageous Faith," and to discuss the health-first heresy, which he calls the "Health-First Hypothesis."
00:00:00.280Welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, where I'm very pleased to have a guest with me, who many of you know as the founder and editor of Catholic World News.
00:00:11.440Phil Lawler has written a book called Courageous Faith, in which he discusses many things that we're going to talk about on the show.
00:00:18.380But one of the things he talks about is the health-first heresy, which of course pertains to what we've been going through on COVID.
00:00:26.740You're going to want to stick around for this one.
00:00:48.140Thank you for having me. It's good to see you after having corresponded online a bit.
00:00:54.560Absolutely. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.
00:00:57.360In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:01:03.840Phil Lawler, I have known you for many, many years.
00:01:08.520In fact, years longer than we've been in communication, because Catholic World News was really one of the things that inspired LifeSite to found as well.
00:01:19.520Way back in 1995, I was looking, because you guys just started, and I said, gee, you know, we could do that for the pro-life movement too.
00:01:31.000And so we actually started an email kind of news thing that went on for a couple of years there before LifeSite News proper founded.
00:01:40.020It was an amazing thing. I'd always been impressed by your rigorous pursuit of truth and the fact that Catholic news was necessary because the bias against the truth and the faith were just so extreme.
00:01:54.560Tell us, tell us, for our listeners who don't know you as well, tell us a little about yourself.
00:02:00.460Well, let me just jump off from that. I was editing Catholic World Report, the monthly magazine at the time, in the mid-90s.
00:02:08.560And I have for years been concerned that Catholics are not getting the news that they need.
00:02:19.040And part of the problem is the bias that you see in the mainstream media.
00:02:23.920But bias, you can discount for bias if you know what the facts are.
00:02:29.400You know the New York Times has its own editorial slant, so any story that's in the New York Times, you can sort of adjust for parallax and get reality.
00:02:39.980But if the story isn't in the Times, if you never hear it at all, there's no way to adjust.
00:02:46.100And that's the case with all too many issues, particularly the pro-life issues.
00:02:50.920You just don't hear about them in the mainstream media because mainstream media, the editors don't consider them important.
00:02:57.260And so you really need your own source of news, a source that will view the world as you see it and see things as important that you think are important.
00:03:08.860And so that's why I wanted to be in the news business.
00:03:14.940As I said, I was working in Catholic World Report, and it's a monthly magazine, and I was developing contacts all over the world.
00:03:22.320And I thought, I have a problem, because if I find a useful contact in, say, Croatia, we're only going to do a story about Croatia, maybe once every year or less than that, and I'll lose touch with them.
00:03:39.000Whereas if I could ask him to do just a little bit of a report much more frequently, I'd have him online.
00:03:47.100And with the development of the World Wide Web, I could do that.
00:03:51.060And so I also started out as an email news service, and when the web blossomed, then I put it online and have been going ever since.
00:04:02.060So in your new book, you address many things about the faith.
00:04:07.880But if we could just start with this thing you called the health-first heresy.
00:04:13.960I think most people will be very, very interested in that.
00:04:16.040We are all living through an unbelievable insanity.
00:04:20.800There's so much, I think, from a newshound or a reporter's perspective, particularly the discrepancies.
00:04:28.520Even if everything is accepted as gospel truth about COVID, the reality of it, it's all innocently come from somewhere, and we're doing the best we can to treat it with the governments, or all with everyone's best interests and heart, including vaccines.
00:04:43.540Even if that were all true, the discrepancy, the absolute inequality between how we are allowed to go to church and yet how you're allowed to fly in a plane or how you're allowed to go to the beer or liquor store.
00:04:58.800So there's an absolute injustice going on there.
00:05:03.000Tell us from, you know, what's in your book about the health-first heresy?
00:05:07.740Well, I can approach that by telling you how I decided to write the book, which was really the genesis was very soon after the lockdown here when we could not go to mass, or at least we couldn't go to mass publicly and officially.
00:05:25.560A lot of us found ways, but it was wrong.
00:05:29.120It was terribly wrong, and I couldn't believe it was happening in my lifetime.
00:05:34.620I mean, I've grown up in the faith, and I've heard, of course, about places and times where the faith, it's been illegal to practice the Catholic faith, and brave Catholics have practiced the faith anyway.
00:05:47.580Sometimes going to jail, sometimes it's cost them their lives, but here we had a disease, which by the worst accounts was a very minor threat, and we were closing down churches.
00:06:01.220I found it really hard to fathom how we could accept this, how bishops could do this.
00:06:07.740I mean, the first obligation of a bishop is to make sure that his people have access to the sacraments, and we didn't.
00:06:20.220When you speak of the health first heresy, the heresy that I'm referring to there is the idea that your physical health is more important than your spiritual health.
00:06:35.460You take a risk every time you get in a car.
00:06:37.560You take a risk every time you go down a flight of stairs.
00:06:39.920If you're a sane person, you calculate the risks and rewards, and you take intelligent risks, but you do take risks.
00:06:50.640Now, are you willing to take a little bit of a risk to participate in the sacrifice of the mass, which is the source and summit of our faith?
00:07:00.140And what is this risk that you're undertaking?
00:07:02.880It's a very small risk of contracting a disease which probably will not be terribly serious for you unless you are already seriously ill.
00:07:15.400So it seemed to me such a horrendously disproportionate reaction, and not just disproportionate, but betrayed a lack of faith.
00:07:27.080Because if you really believed that this is the most important thing you do all day, all week, is get to mass, you would get to mass.
00:07:37.320I mean, as you say, you could go out and buy a six-pack of beer.
00:08:02.540There again, it's an attitude born of a lack of faith.
00:08:06.340If you believe that participation in the mass is essential, not watching, not watching online, not being an observer, not being a consumer, but actually participating.
00:08:16.760You know, we'd just come through the synod for the Amazon region, where many bishops were saying it's absolutely essential we have to get married men as priests, because it's absolutely essential that these people have access to the mass.
00:08:33.040And then just a few months later, some of the same people saying, well, you don't have access to the mass, but you can watch on TV, or you can watch it live streaming.
00:08:41.140And it's just not the same experience.
00:08:44.540If what you think about the mass is that you can watch it on TV, and that's just as good, then there's something missing in your faith.
00:08:53.960It's a sort of magical, or I'm not sure how to characterize that line of thought, because it's so foreign to me, but it's not the Catholic faith.
00:09:04.080Yeah, yeah, one of the ways of characterizing it has been, that I've heard has been to say, well, that you believe then maybe in virtual marriage as well in relations with your spouse.
00:09:20.200One of the things that you have experienced that is really unique, and I know your former book was about this, it's to see the dark underbelly of the church, the dark side of things, the real Judas priests who have just done unspeakable things in terms of the sexual abuse crisis.
00:09:43.340But you've dealt not only in the sexual abuse crisis, but the crisis in terms of the infidelity of pastors, even bishops, to very high-ranking people in the church, really undermining the faith.
00:09:56.540And yet, your faith has remained strong, and you continue to fight in this arena, despite all the darkness around it.
00:10:29.540And we should be prepared to fight for it.
00:10:31.280And fighting intellectually for it doesn't require nearly the amount of courage, as so many of the martyrs have already shown.
00:10:39.400But I also have to tell you that this lockdown this past year shook my faith much more than the sex abuse scandal, even though I was up to my eyeballs in reporting on that very early on.
00:10:56.460And I was appalled by it, and I mean, there were days when I was virtually weeping at the end of a day of reporting because I read so much that was so horrific, and it was so scandalous to see that bishops were condoning this or enabling this sort of just terrible exploitative behavior of children.
00:11:24.720But I could always tell myself it was a minority of priests who did these horrible things.
00:11:30.980Wait, one was too many, but it was a small minority of priests.
00:11:54.720I always thought that whatever else went wrong, our bishops would make sure that we got the sacraments.
00:12:01.580That was the bedrock on which I built my everyday life.
00:12:06.400And then along came the day when I was told, you can't go to Mass.
00:12:10.540And that was, to me, more of a betrayal, because really, for most of the people, unless you knew somebody, you just couldn't get to Mass for weeks at a time.
00:12:23.760And how can you have a Catholic Church that allows that to happen?
00:12:33.920We had the scenario where some pastors were fighting.
00:12:40.940Some non-Catholic pastors, some Jewish Orthodox leaders were fighting.
00:12:48.940Actually, I know of a Catholic lawyer, Chris Ferrara, who was fighting on their behalf, along with some pastors who are usually considered ostracized from the Catholic Church, in that they were SSPX priests.
00:13:03.880But they were the ones fighting, not, you know, for the most part, not the mainstream Catholic leaders.
00:13:09.960So that's an unbelievable thing, and so strange to see where these people of different religions are fighting for their right to their worship, when the many, so many of the Catholic leaders were not fighting for it.
00:13:30.400I was embarrassed to see in Massachusetts, where I live, there was an evangelical pastor who was fighting for the right to worship.
00:13:39.960And I thought, well, God bless him, but where are our bishops?
00:13:44.480And as far as I know, there was the one bishop, Bishop DiMarzio in Brooklyn, who launched a lawsuit.
00:13:51.980It seems to me there should have been about 300 Catholic diocese that launched lawsuits, because the Catholic Church is the biggest institution.
00:14:08.060And it should have been up there fighting all the time.
00:14:11.780What, in your experience, and you have a vast experience in knowing the church, what have you seen that most points to the reason behind what's going, or the lack of what's gone on in terms of fighting for the faith, and the reason for the willing acceptance of the shutdown?
00:14:31.100I'd say there are two different things.
00:14:32.880On the one hand, I think our bishops are scarred by their experience with the sex abuse scandal, and they're afraid of getting on the wrong side of the media on any issue at all.
00:14:44.380And the media has been going hammering, fear-mongering, the panic porn, as I call it, every day a new headline about how likely it is that you'll die of COVID.
00:14:58.160And our bishops didn't want to be the bad guys and say, we're going to take risks that you are not willing to take.
00:15:08.700The other issue is a deeper issue and a more long-lasting issue, and I think one that I've addressed one way or another in all of my work on the scandals.
00:15:19.620Are church leaders trying to act as community leaders rather than spiritual fathers, trying to be in sync with the political will of, well, I suppose political correctness is one shorthand way to say it,
00:15:40.940but believing that their role as bishops or as pastors is to build a community to make our lives better.
00:15:52.360It's really a form of the health-first heresy, another form to make our lives on this earth better.
00:15:59.320And that's not what the church is about.
00:16:02.800What do you propose, or if you propose, a solution to all this?
00:16:07.700Where are you at with what might be the best way forward for us?
00:16:11.520Catholics are struggling all over the world with the same thing, most of them, again, being locked out of their churches.
00:16:19.740Some haven't been to Mass in a year and a half, and they're just, you know, what are they supposed to do?
00:16:27.200Well, you can be a Catholic under dire circumstances, even if you don't have pastoral help.
00:16:33.300When the church somehow survived in Japan, the Catholic faith oddly survived, despite complete absence of priests for generations, it's obviously not what we want.
00:16:45.680What most of us should be doing, I think, is taking a bolder stand for the faith and insisting that our pastors and our bishops do the same.
00:16:55.100Because this is the message that I try to get across.
00:16:58.220And the reason that I entitled the book Contagious Faith is that I believe that sort of faith is contagious.
00:17:05.320I believe that if we are bold enough and firm enough in our faith, clear enough in our faith, to say that this is our top priority, we're going to get to Mass no matter what, that other people start noticing it.
00:17:18.960And other people start saying, oh, that's really important to them.
00:17:24.960Well, once they ask the question why, they're listening.
00:17:28.360And once they listen, you give them the faith.
00:17:30.860And the faith, when it's properly explained, always sells.
00:17:34.940Because it answers fundamental human needs.
00:17:38.020But first, you have to get people listening.
00:17:40.260And the way you get people listening is through witness, through showing what's important to you,
00:17:45.280through sounding different, through not being afraid to sound different, and to show that your priorities are not the same priorities that you're going to see on CNN every night.
00:17:55.840And I think, you know, your admonition to go out to the bishops to demand, for the faithful to demand their rights, which are the sacraments.
00:18:04.520This is the principal reason for the church is to bring us Christ, to bring us the sacraments.
00:18:08.960And so I think in doing that, you might also convert, if you will, the bishops themselves, because they are in dire need of conversion on this issue,
00:18:19.560because they've actually shut things down, they shut us out of the sacraments, for the most part.
00:18:27.080One of the really difficult things with regard to doing that, as people often feel, oh, you know, I can't even write properly,
00:18:35.140and they're going to think I'm nuts, and I can't do it successfully.
00:18:39.800What do you say to people who are concerned about doing it for a whole host of reasons?
00:18:44.100They don't feel that they're the right ones to speak up.
00:19:33.300Well, I think it means that you are implicitly encouraging priests to do what they have to do as pastors to bring the sacraments to us.
00:19:44.100If that means doing it underground, let's do it.
00:19:48.200And, you know, a fair number of priests did that in the past year.
00:19:52.140There were priests who were pushing the envelope, who were doing things that were either not encouraged
00:19:58.480or in some cases even explicitly forbidden by their bishops because they felt in conscience they were obligated to give the faithful the sacraments.
00:21:08.180I think that your audience is disproportionately made up of people who have already made the commitment that I'm encouraging people to make.
00:21:18.480And I think that that's I think it's contagious.
00:21:52.320We'll see you next time on The John Henry Weston Show.
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