The John-Henry Westen Show - Catholic bishops showed ‘a lack of faith’ during COVID lockdowns： author

00:00:00.280 Welcome 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.

00:00:11.440 Phil Lawler has written a book called Courageous Faith, in which he discusses many things that we're going to talk about on the show.

00:00:18.380 But 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.

00:00:26.740 You're going to want to stick around for this one.

00:00:30.000 Phil Lawler, welcome to the program.

00:00:48.140 Thank you for having me. It's good to see you after having corresponded online a bit.

00:00:54.560 Absolutely. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross. 0.62

00:00:57.360 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

00:01:03.840 Phil Lawler, I have known you for many, many years.

00:01:08.520 In 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.

00:01:19.520 Way 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.

00:01:31.000 And so we actually started an email kind of news thing that went on for a couple of years there before LifeSite News proper founded.

00:01:40.020 It 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.

00:01:54.560 Tell us, tell us, for our listeners who don't know you as well, tell us a little about yourself.

00:02:00.460 Well, let me just jump off from that. I was editing Catholic World Report, the monthly magazine at the time, in the mid-90s.

00:02:08.560 And I have for years been concerned that Catholics are not getting the news that they need.

00:02:19.040 And part of the problem is the bias that you see in the mainstream media.

00:02:23.920 But bias, you can discount for bias if you know what the facts are.

00:02:29.400 You 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.

00:02:39.980 But if the story isn't in the Times, if you never hear it at all, there's no way to adjust.

00:02:46.100 And that's the case with all too many issues, particularly the pro-life issues.

00:02:50.920 You just don't hear about them in the mainstream media because mainstream media, the editors don't consider them important.

00:02:57.260 And 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.

00:03:08.860 And so that's why I wanted to be in the news business.

00:03:14.940 As I said, I was working in Catholic World Report, and it's a monthly magazine, and I was developing contacts all over the world.

00:03:22.320 And 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.

00:03:39.000 Whereas if I could ask him to do just a little bit of a report much more frequently, I'd have him online.

00:03:47.100 And with the development of the World Wide Web, I could do that.

00:03:51.060 And 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.

00:04:01.500 Amazing.

00:04:02.060 So in your new book, you address many things about the faith.

00:04:07.880 But if we could just start with this thing you called the health-first heresy.

00:04:13.960 I think most people will be very, very interested in that.

00:04:16.040 We are all living through an unbelievable insanity.

00:04:20.800 There's so much, I think, from a newshound or a reporter's perspective, particularly the discrepancies.

00:04:28.520 Even 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.

00:04:43.540 Even 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.

00:04:58.800 So there's an absolute injustice going on there.

00:05:03.000 Tell us from, you know, what's in your book about the health-first heresy?

00:05:07.740 Well, 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.

00:05:25.560 A lot of us found ways, but it was wrong.

00:05:29.120 It was terribly wrong, and I couldn't believe it was happening in my lifetime.

00:05:34.620 I 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.

00:05:47.580 Sometimes 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.

00:06:01.220 I found it really hard to fathom how we could accept this, how bishops could do this.

00:06:07.740 I mean, the first obligation of a bishop is to make sure that his people have access to the sacraments, and we didn't.

00:06:16.660 And it was voluntary.

00:06:18.280 It was a self-inflicted wound.

00:06:20.220 When 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.

00:06:30.880 It isn't.

00:06:32.140 I mean, you take risks all the time.

00:06:35.460 You take a risk every time you get in a car.

00:06:37.560 You take a risk every time you go down a flight of stairs.

00:06:39.920 If you're a sane person, you calculate the risks and rewards, and you take intelligent risks, but you do take risks.

00:06:50.640 Now, 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?

00:07:00.140 And what is this risk that you're undertaking?

00:07:02.880 It's a very small risk of contracting a disease which probably will not be terribly serious for you unless you are already seriously ill.

00:07:15.400 So it seemed to me such a horrendously disproportionate reaction, and not just disproportionate, but betrayed a lack of faith.

00:07:27.080 Because 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.

00:07:37.320 I mean, as you say, you could go out and buy a six-pack of beer.

00:07:41.880 Why was that essential?

00:07:44.200 And the mass was not.

00:07:45.300 How did we tolerate this?

00:07:46.740 So that's what got me pounding my keyboard this year.

00:07:50.560 One of the responses, though, to that right away is that, but you have access.

00:07:54.900 You have access to the medium you've chosen for your whole profession, online access to the mass.

00:08:00.500 What's wrong with that?

00:08:01.640 How do you respond?

00:08:02.540 There again, it's an attitude born of a lack of faith.

00:08:06.340 If 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.

00:08:16.760 You 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.

00:08:33.040 And 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.

00:08:41.140 And it's just not the same experience.

00:08:44.540 If 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.

00:08:53.960 It'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.

00:09:04.080 Yeah, 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.

00:09:15.560 So it's not all that fruitful.

00:09:19.720 Amazing.

00:09:20.200 One 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.

00:09:43.340 But 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.

00:09:56.540 And yet, your faith has remained strong, and you continue to fight in this arena, despite all the darkness around it.

00:10:04.340 Tell me a little bit about that.

00:10:05.740 Well, two things.

00:10:06.420 First, I'm Irish, so, you know, I like a fight.

00:10:10.940 And I'm such an ornery creature.

00:10:16.000 I'm just not going to let people get away with it.

00:10:18.480 I mean, to put it more seriously, it's my faith.

00:10:22.480 It's our faith.

00:10:23.900 I'm not going to allow people to take it away from me.

00:10:28.440 And we shouldn't.

00:10:29.540 And we should be prepared to fight for it.

00:10:31.280 And fighting intellectually for it doesn't require nearly the amount of courage, as so many of the martyrs have already shown.

00:10:39.400 But 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.

00:10:56.460 And 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.

00:11:24.720 But I could always tell myself it was a minority of priests who did these horrible things.

00:11:30.980 Wait, one was too many, but it was a small minority of priests.

00:11:35.440 And I understood evil.

00:11:37.620 I understand, you know, sexual predators, that sort of evil is in the world.

00:11:44.100 That wasn't a revelation to me.

00:11:46.560 It was more appalling to me to see that it wasn't curbed as soon as it was found.

00:11:52.360 But I knew there was evil.

00:11:54.720 I always thought that whatever else went wrong, our bishops would make sure that we got the sacraments.

00:12:01.580 That was the bedrock on which I built my everyday life.

00:12:06.400 And then along came the day when I was told, you can't go to Mass.

00:12:10.540 And 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.

00:12:23.760 And how can you have a Catholic Church that allows that to happen?

00:12:31.620 It boggles my mind.

00:12:33.140 Truly unbelievable.

00:12:33.920 We had the scenario where some pastors were fighting.

00:12:40.940 Some non-Catholic pastors, some Jewish Orthodox leaders were fighting.

00:12:48.940 Actually, 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.

00:13:03.880 But they were the ones fighting, not, you know, for the most part, not the mainstream Catholic leaders.

00:13:09.960 So 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.

00:13:28.060 It was incredible.

00:13:28.800 It was, and it was really a shame.

00:13:30.400 I was embarrassed to see in Massachusetts, where I live, there was an evangelical pastor who was fighting for the right to worship.

00:13:39.960 And I thought, well, God bless him, but where are our bishops?

00:13:44.480 And as far as I know, there was the one bishop, Bishop DiMarzio in Brooklyn, who launched a lawsuit.

00:13:51.980 It seems to me there should have been about 300 Catholic diocese that launched lawsuits, because the Catholic Church is the biggest institution.

00:14:02.220 It's the one that everybody looks to.

00:14:04.940 It's the most organized.

00:14:06.800 It has the most clout.

00:14:08.060 And it should have been up there fighting all the time.

00:14:11.780 What, 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?

00:14:31.100 I'd say there are two different things.

00:14:32.880 On 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.

00:14:44.380 And 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.

00:14:58.160 And 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.

00:15:07.440 That's one issue.

00:15:08.700 The 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.

00:15:19.620 Are 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,

00:15:40.940 but believing that their role as bishops or as pastors is to build a community to make our lives better.

00:15:52.360 It's really a form of the health-first heresy, another form to make our lives on this earth better.

00:15:59.320 And that's not what the church is about.

00:16:01.940 Absolutely.

00:16:02.800 What do you propose, or if you propose, a solution to all this?

00:16:07.700 Where are you at with what might be the best way forward for us?

00:16:11.520 Catholics are struggling all over the world with the same thing, most of them, again, being locked out of their churches.

00:16:19.740 Some haven't been to Mass in a year and a half, and they're just, you know, what are they supposed to do?

00:16:27.200 Well, you can be a Catholic under dire circumstances, even if you don't have pastoral help.

00:16:33.300 When 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. 0.62

00:16:45.680 What 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.

00:16:55.100 Because this is the message that I try to get across.

00:16:58.220 And the reason that I entitled the book Contagious Faith is that I believe that sort of faith is contagious.

00:17:05.320 I 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.

00:17:18.960 And other people start saying, oh, that's really important to them.

00:17:23.680 Why?

00:17:24.960 Well, once they ask the question why, they're listening.

00:17:28.360 And once they listen, you give them the faith.

00:17:30.860 And the faith, when it's properly explained, always sells.

00:17:34.940 Because it answers fundamental human needs.

00:17:38.020 But first, you have to get people listening.

00:17:40.260 And the way you get people listening is through witness, through showing what's important to you,

00:17:45.280 through 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.

00:17:55.540 Yes.

00:17:55.840 And 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.

00:18:04.520 This is the principal reason for the church is to bring us Christ, to bring us the sacraments.

00:18:08.960 And 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,

00:18:19.560 because they've actually shut things down, they shut us out of the sacraments, for the most part.

00:18:27.080 One of the really difficult things with regard to doing that, as people often feel, oh, you know, I can't even write properly,

00:18:35.140 and they're going to think I'm nuts, and I can't do it successfully.

00:18:39.800 What do you say to people who are concerned about doing it for a whole host of reasons?

00:18:44.100 They don't feel that they're the right ones to speak up.

00:18:46.820 Find strength in numbers.

00:18:49.000 If you don't think you're the right one to speak out, find a few other people who think the same way,

00:18:54.960 and join with them and find someone who is more comfortable doing the talking or doing the writing.

00:19:01.260 And get yourself an appointment with the bishop.

00:19:04.440 I'm aware of now several dioceses in the U.S. where groups of men have spoken to the bishop in this way and just said,

00:19:13.680 we cannot tolerate another shutdown.

00:19:16.280 You must not shut things down again.

00:19:19.340 And a message with a little bit of force in it to say, if there is another shutdown,

00:19:25.360 we'll do whatever we have to do, whatever is necessary to get the sacraments.

00:19:31.260 What that means practically?

00:19:33.300 Well, 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.

00:19:44.100 If that means doing it underground, let's do it.

00:19:48.200 And, you know, a fair number of priests did that in the past year.

00:19:52.140 There were priests who were pushing the envelope, who were doing things that were either not encouraged

00:19:58.480 or in some cases even explicitly forbidden by their bishops because they felt in conscience they were obligated to give the faithful the sacraments.

00:20:08.500 That's what you're ordained for.

00:20:10.720 And those priests, I think, should be recognized for their zeal.

00:20:16.240 They shouldn't be perceived as the problem priests.

00:20:21.200 Bishops should recognize them as those are the priests you want to have, the ones who are out there with a zeal, showing a zeal for souls.

00:20:29.440 Showing a contagious faith.

00:20:31.040 Absolutely.

00:20:32.800 Phil, where can people get your book and how can they get in touch with you?

00:20:35.920 Well, they can get in touch with me by looking at the Catholic Culture website.

00:20:39.660 And I'm on there pretty much every weekday.

00:20:43.740 And they can find the book.

00:20:45.200 It's published by Sophia Institute Press.

00:20:47.340 And you look on the Sophia Institute website.

00:20:50.900 And, of course, you can get it in bookstores.

00:20:52.960 You can get it into Amazon.

00:20:54.280 But it's the same price direct from the publisher if you don't want to enrich Amazon.

00:20:59.260 Excellent.

00:20:59.700 We'll have the links to that in my blog post on this and below this video as well.

00:21:04.520 Phil Lawler, any parting thoughts before we let you go?

00:21:07.140 Keep up the good work.

00:21:08.180 I think that your audience is disproportionately made up of people who have already made the commitment that I'm encouraging people to make.

00:21:18.480 And I think that that's I think it's contagious.

00:21:20.700 I think you make the commitment.

00:21:23.660 You refuse to compromise your faith and you'll find that other people are drawn to you.

00:21:29.080 And we know how this ends up.

00:21:31.400 We don't know what we'll go through in the short term, but we do know how this ends in the last analysis.

00:21:37.000 So have faith and confidence.

00:21:39.760 Amen.

00:21:40.240 Phil Lawler, thank you for all that you do.

00:21:42.700 You've been a great inspiration to me for decades and decades now.

00:21:46.300 Thank you for saying that.

00:21:47.700 And thank you for having me on.

00:21:49.200 God bless you.

00:21:50.700 And God bless all of you.

00:21:52.320 We'll see you next time on The John Henry Weston Show.

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The John-Henry Westen Show - May 25, 2021

Catholic bishops showed ‘a lack of faith’ during COVID lockdowns： author

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