The John-Henry Westen Show - September 26, 2023


Communism will never destroy the Catholic Church. Here's why


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Length

44 minutes

Words per minute

161.25304

Word count

7,253

Sentence count

347

Harmful content

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When the Sickle Falls is a book that tells the story of Catholics who survived communist oppression. Author Kristian Van Uden explains what communism really is and why it was so devastating to the Catholic Church and the world at large.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Not only does communism overtly just treat life as disposable, but also it creates the
00:00:07.780 conditions where even those who had been faithful to a certain point were finding themselves
00:00:12.140 doing things they thought they would have never done before.
00:00:14.600 So it's this both overt and covert attack on life.
00:00:24.680 A lot of people today will tell you that communism is alive and well, except that
00:00:29.980 people wonder, where is it?
00:00:32.980 People say, well, it's in China.
00:00:36.200 Yeah, but then people say, but America seems communist.
00:00:39.420 Except what does that really mean?
00:00:41.440 A lot of people who are here in America from former communist countries are telling us,
00:00:48.140 don't you see it's becoming communist?
00:00:51.300 And most of us are left scratching our heads going, really?
00:00:55.420 We're not China.
00:00:56.540 And what is that anyway?
00:00:57.380 Are we not, we're not doing like some kind of shared economic system?
00:01:05.160 What are we doing?
00:01:06.380 What's it all about?
00:01:07.620 Well, we're going to find out today.
00:01:09.180 We've got an author with us who wrote a book on communism.
00:01:13.580 It's called When the Sickle Falls.
00:01:15.940 And it's stories of Catholics who survived communist oppression.
00:01:21.160 Now, it's being released this November by Sophia Press.
00:01:24.860 So we're going to go check that out for sure.
00:01:26.460 But stay tuned to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show with Kristen Van Uden.
00:01:31.920 Listen, dear friends, long gone are the days where you and I could just simply trust what the nightly news broadcasted or consider what we read in the local newspaper as the truth.
00:01:43.980 The mainstream media deceives the world, telling them bold-faced lies and often using fear to scare and control the masses.
00:01:52.080 Now, how many of you are already seeing your friends and family back to grabbing their masks or scheduling another vaccine due to the uptake the media is covering about COVID or something else?
00:02:03.320 Well, we've had enough.
00:02:05.440 We can't let the mainstream media shape our culture and influence our family and friends.
00:02:09.300 We must make sure that the truth is available to all to remind and warn the world of the lies that are continuing to be spread.
00:02:19.400 So today at LifeSite, we kick off our fall campaign.
00:02:22.720 And I need your help to strengthen LifeSite's voice for truth.
00:02:26.400 To keep LifeSite news fully operational in the United States, Canada, and around the world.
00:02:31.040 We must raise $500,000 by October the 1st.
00:02:35.000 So please pause this video now.
00:02:37.940 Pray right now about making a contribution.
00:02:40.940 And then do as you are called to do by the Lord.
00:02:44.480 Thank you for your attention.
00:02:45.860 And now, back to the program.
00:02:49.140 Kristen, welcome to the program.
00:02:50.880 Hi, John Henry. Thanks so much for having me.
00:02:53.060 Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.
00:02:55.460 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
00:03:00.020 Amen.
00:03:01.820 So, Kristen, you've done kind of a deep dive here into communism.
00:03:06.640 Tell us, first off, what is communism?
00:03:09.000 Because there's a lot of confusion.
00:03:10.320 A lot of people are wondering, what is this?
00:03:12.840 This was, you know, a system, an economic system.
00:03:16.000 It sounds pretty good.
00:03:17.100 It sounds like, you know, we'd all be sharing.
00:03:18.980 Instead of having this super wealthy class, it would just be, you know, people having sort of equality.
00:03:24.760 What is communism?
00:03:25.640 Communism is a political and economic system that really is a full ideology when you look into it.
00:03:32.040 It has the principles of a religion, which I discuss in the book.
00:03:35.340 It has these totalizing principles of positing that it helps to build the entire person.
00:03:41.840 So, Stalin famously said that he was the engineer of souls, and they were trying to form the new Soviet man.
00:03:47.940 And they're forming man in the image of a fallen world, essentially.
00:03:52.700 Communism always claims to be an almost salvific ideology.
00:03:58.660 It forwards a worldly utopia, which, of course, as Catholics, we know is impossible. 0.86
00:04:03.780 And that is really where the crux of its main error lies, in that we are in a fallen world.
00:04:08.800 Of course, we have been redeemed through Christ's blood, but we will never achieve perfection here on this earth.
00:04:14.400 We store up our treasure in heaven for the next life.
00:04:16.880 Communism inverts that entire cosmology, denies the existence of God, and says, instead, you can have perfection and utopia here on earth.
00:04:25.620 Ironically, it never achieves this, because we've seen that the death count of communism in the tens and hundreds of millions over the past century alone is evidence enough that this is not the worldly utopia that they claim to achieve.
00:04:38.020 And it's because they have these foundational principles wrong.
00:04:43.540 Communism, people make the mistake, as you alluded to, that it's primarily just economic.
00:04:48.600 And as I hope to illustrate through this book, it really has this almost demonic undertone to it.
00:04:55.180 Religion was heavily targeted by communist regimes the world over.
00:04:58.440 So, astonishingly, the playbook against the Catholic Church is pretty uniform, despite geographic and temporal disparities between these countries and these individuals that I spoke to.
00:05:09.520 And it's this playbook that really reveals the true nature of communism.
00:05:12.740 It's interesting, because you know how, with the LGBT movement, for instance, there was always this talk about how members would be harming themselves, and they were doing all these bad things and getting these psychological problems.
00:05:30.640 But they always blamed it on those who would say, no, the behavior is against nature, and you're harming yourself, and it's causing the problem.
00:05:39.160 But the homosexual activists rather would say, no, no, no, it's not.
00:05:42.920 It's only you. 0.88
00:05:44.040 The whole reason why we're experiencing guilt and shame and killing ourselves is all because you're condemning us.
00:05:51.320 We have to stomp out that condemnation.
00:05:54.260 Therefore, we'll be finding good.
00:05:55.560 We know that didn't work, because if you go to Switzerland and other countries where homosexuality is celebrated and has been for decades, they've still got the same suicide rate.
00:06:03.580 But the question is, is there some similarity there with communist countries? 0.98
00:06:09.160 The reason why this is not working is because we have those darn Catholics or people who believe in God, some God in the sky, that are stopping us from achieving our utopia. 1.00
00:06:20.340 Yes, that's a great parallel that you make. 0.99
00:06:22.240 And of course, that's the argument that the communists use.
00:06:24.780 Catholics were often accused of being wreckers, which is a term that basically accuses them of sabotaging the communist project economically.
00:06:33.080 Also, a very major charge often leveled against Catholics was counter-revolutionary.
00:06:39.080 And this is because not only we believe things that are antithetical to the communist project, but also because of the existence of the Vatican as a sovereign state, they would try to claim that Catholics were foreign agents.
00:06:50.100 So they always find a way to make it the fault of the supposed fifth column that their own ideology is failing at its own purported ends.
00:06:58.760 But what you said at the beginning really resonated, and it reminds me of another Sophia title, Guilt, by Carol Hauslander, which was originally published in the 50s.
00:07:07.620 And her thesis in that book is that suppressed guilt, when it is not taken care of through the proper channel of confession, redemption, absolution, and true penance, will fester in the soul and produce all sorts of pathologies,
00:07:21.520 both psychosomatic to purely psychological, and actually she argues that totalitarianism and the willingness of an individual to collaborate with a totalitarian regime, such as the Nazis or the communists, is a manifestation of this repressed guilt.
00:07:37.820 And it's very interesting because, as you mentioned, with the transgender movement, for example, these people are feeling a certain guilt, their conscience is speaking up, but it's being stifled.
00:07:48.380 And it's because we've basically absolved, or we have abolished absolution.
00:07:53.740 So what they really want is absolution.
00:07:55.940 What they get instead is false affirmation, and it completely thwarts that natural instinct that they have towards the good.
00:08:01.980 Absolutely. So you found, in your research, a kind of a universal element in communism, a persecution of the church.
00:08:13.900 And so tell us some of this.
00:08:17.320 Like, you've got a bunch of stories in your book here of folks who've experienced this.
00:08:23.300 What's one of them that touched you the most and sort of really settled this for you?
00:08:27.840 Oh, there's so many.
00:08:30.560 And I think, to start with, I will talk about a gentleman named Arturo from Cuba, who I interviewed.
00:08:37.020 He spent 17 years in prison as a political prisoner.
00:08:40.800 He was known as one of the plantados, which means planted or firm.
00:08:45.280 And this referred to the prisoners who were so firm in their beliefs that they would not budge, they would not submit to re-education.
00:08:52.440 And the temptation was always there.
00:08:54.540 In prison, there would constantly be the opportunity to go to a re-education class, to apostatize from the faith, to renounce, even just in a small way.
00:09:06.440 So the challenge faced by martyrs from the centuries, right from the beginning, the pinch of incense to the gods in Rome, or stepping on the icon for the martyrs in Japan, they always present it to Christians in this way where it's minimized and the apostasy is made to seem like not a big deal.
00:09:24.160 One story sticks out from his testimony, and that I heard from a few others, of what would happen in the prisons in Cuba, which also happened during the Spanish Civil War, perpetrated by the communists there.
00:09:37.520 And the guards would take Catholic prisoners and tell them, just renounce God, just apostatize briefly, and we'll let you free, and then you'll be able to go home to your family, and it's not a big deal.
00:09:49.720 You just say the word once, and you're done, and then you can go to confession, right?
00:09:53.340 And the sin of presumption on their part.
00:09:58.200 And so some of the prisoners, unfortunately, who were just beaten down by starvation, malnutrition, torture, would take this deal, and they would say, okay, I don't mean this in my heart, but I will go to confession after, God knows. 0.94
00:10:12.120 And then they would renounce the faith, and the guards would just laugh at them sickly and say, just kidding, you're going to hell now, and shoot them anyway.
00:10:20.360 And for a purportedly atheistic regime that does not believe in the eternal soul, for them to gloat about sending a soul to hell is really revelatory as to what communism believes.
00:10:32.700 And, of course, we entrust those souls to God and God's mercy, because they were in this impossible situation.
00:10:39.280 Arturo was able to survive these 17 years.
00:10:42.860 He was actually serving a 30-year sentence, which was the longest sentence one could serve, short of death and execution.
00:10:49.040 And he recalls witnessing martyrdoms in the prison.
00:10:53.820 There were many men who went to their deaths shouting, Viva Cristo Rey.
00:10:57.700 In a separate prison, one that he was not at at this time, there were these heroes of this counter-revolutionary movement known as the MRR,
00:11:06.280 which these men were extremely devoted to their Catholic faith and wrote letters home encouraging that their deaths would encourage their family to attend Mass and to stay close to the sacraments.
00:11:18.840 And they all said Viva Cristo Rey right before their deaths, just like the Cristeros in Mexico. 0.98
00:11:25.180 And so, in addition to these martyrdoms, Arturo recounts the secret Masses in the prison.
00:11:32.300 So, there were several priests imprisoned on the various circulars, and when possible, they would say Mass.
00:11:39.080 If it was not possible, then either they didn't have the proper matter and form for the sacrament, or there were no priests on that block.
00:11:46.600 The prisoners would actually all get together and pray the prayers of the Mass, short of actually performing the consecration, obviously, to keep their Sunday obligation and to just highlight the importance of the sacraments, even in these impossible situations.
00:12:00.940 So, one thing that really shines through in all of these testimonies is the great lengths that these Catholics went to to get to the sacraments.
00:12:09.060 And maybe a little later, we can talk about the underground church in Czechoslovakia and how that puts things into perspective for us who take the sacraments for granted.
00:12:19.380 Hey, my friends, now is the time to stand up and fight.
00:12:21.860 We are just about to have the Synod on Synodality, and everything that you've seen indicates that it's going to be an absolute disaster.
00:12:32.020 We have Fr. James Martin as a personal appointee of the Pope speaking at it.
00:12:37.600 We've got Cardinal Cupich, Cardinal Tobin.
00:12:40.860 These picks of the Pope to engage in this Synod are indicative of where we're going.
00:12:47.720 We're going into heresy.
00:12:49.280 And at these times of great crisis, the church, especially those called in the laity to work for the glory of Christ and his church, are called to gather and strategize.
00:13:03.680 Back in 2014, LifeSite launched something called Rome Life Forum.
00:13:07.560 It was a gathering at that point of some 75 life and family leaders from all around the world to strategize as to what we could do.
00:13:15.920 And when we gathered, the majority of people were most concerned about what?
00:13:20.440 About Pope Francis, about what was going on in Rome.
00:13:24.340 But this was 2014.
00:13:26.280 But the life and family leaders saw it first.
00:13:29.400 Now, a decade on, we are confronted with some of the most severe challenges the church has ever faced.
00:13:38.020 And so, our tradition at LifeSite is to continue with Rome Life Forum, which has continued every year until we had to take a break over COVID because we weren't permitted.
00:13:47.380 But we're starting it up again.
00:13:48.700 Please come, if you feel so called, to Rome, October 31st and November 1st, the very end of the Synod on Synodality.
00:13:59.540 And we'll be there to strategize with his eminence, with his excellency, and with many life and family leaders from around the world.
00:14:08.840 For LifeSite News, this is John Henry Weston.
00:14:11.060 And may God bless you.
00:14:11.780 How did you come to write this book?
00:14:15.840 Like, why communism?
00:14:17.540 It doesn't seem like something that, you know, where did this come from?
00:14:22.320 It's really, honestly, a gift from God.
00:14:24.600 I can't explain it short of it's just been an obsession my whole life.
00:14:27.760 I started this project when I was in college conducting interviews.
00:14:31.420 I majored in history and Russian studies.
00:14:33.420 So I studied communism more broadly.
00:14:36.400 But I was really interested in these unknown stories because you often hear of survivors of the Holocaust, for example, or survivors of other disasters.
00:14:44.780 But these Catholic survivors of communism and survivors of communism more generally seems to be quite neglected.
00:14:51.400 There's the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., which is doing some great work on this front.
00:14:57.220 But in countries where communism actually was implemented, these stories are often stifled, even by the government.
00:15:04.840 So Putin last year shut down the Memorial Society, which in Russia was collecting stories of Gulag survivors and testimonies from eyewitnesses.
00:15:15.220 And there is this broad swath of memorialization efforts where often it's as if we want to forget these things rather than memorialize them and take lessons from them.
00:15:26.280 So I've always been very interested in martyrdom.
00:15:29.080 Many of my favorite saints are martyrs.
00:15:31.300 St. Catherine of Alexandria is one of my new favorite patron saints.
00:15:35.340 And when you think of how martyrdom is possible in our modern day, it was mostly under these regimes.
00:15:42.280 So under, I just read a book about Christ in Dachau.
00:15:45.920 So under the Nazi and Soviet and broader communist regimes, there were actual physical martyrs, red martyrs, who died for the faith in these extremely heroic ways.
00:15:55.520 But also there were many white martyrs.
00:15:57.580 And the stories in this book really highlight the spectrum of martyrdom that is available to us.
00:16:04.220 And I think this white martyrdom is something that is more relevant to our lives in the West, that we will probably not be shot for the faith, although who knows with the way the country is going. 0.73
00:16:14.640 But we will have to face this temptation towards a gradual piecemeal apostasy.
00:16:20.180 And many of the stories that I highlight showed how to thread that needle and how to avoid giving in in the small things so that if the request to perform the ultimate sacrifice ever does come, we will have been prepared.
00:16:34.160 One of the things about communism deals very specifically with Catholicism, Catholic oppression. 0.59
00:16:41.600 And you just mentioned Putin.
00:16:43.480 I think that's very interesting because a lot of people, the Ukraine war and stuff has been very, very complex because it's a very confusing situation.
00:16:53.660 On the one hand, you have Putin saying pro-life, pro-family values, and Zelensky being insane on the other side, as woke as woke gets.
00:17:08.040 And so the whole situation is confusing.
00:17:12.020 But I know because I was in Moscow years ago now, but I noticed there's no Catholic churches.
00:17:17.320 I had to travel 45 minutes in a cab every day to get to one. 0.74
00:17:21.160 It was ridiculous. 0.86
00:17:22.700 There is a very anti-Catholic stance there. 0.74
00:17:25.560 And what you just mentioned there is very interesting.
00:17:27.320 Putin shut down the Memorial Society that was collecting the stories of those oppressed.
00:17:32.400 He's made shows about condemning communism's excesses.
00:17:38.000 What's going on for real?
00:17:40.540 That's a great question.
00:17:41.660 I think this is definitely a false dichotomy that's been set up between Russia and Ukraine, and it's something we may never get to the bottom of until after it's over.
00:17:50.860 But to your point about the lack of Catholic churches, it's interesting because obviously in Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church was the primary target of the communists.
00:17:59.280 But that provides an example for us of what could have gone wrong, where luckily, and through the grace of God in Czechoslovakia, at least, the underground church maintained strict fidelity to the Vatican and a strict implementation of Catholic principles and didn't really allow the infiltration that the secret police was attempting to subvert doctrine.
00:18:22.920 However, that did occur to a much larger degree in the Russian Orthodox Church.
00:18:26.720 So Patriarch Kirill, who I believe is still the main Patriarch at Putin's side there, is actually a former KGB, and that's pretty common knowledge.
00:18:36.660 And this extreme seeding of the church hierarchy with party loyal men was much more dramatic in Russia and in the Soviet Union than it was in the West, although they did try.
00:18:49.500 And of course, we know even in the United States from the testimony of Beledad that they have done that the world over.
00:18:54.520 But one of the inspiring parts of the story was learning about this divide in the church in Czechoslovakia.
00:19:01.320 So I can explain this if we have a few minutes.
00:19:04.200 That basically, in 1949, Pius XII issued what are known as the secret mandates.
00:19:10.700 So he basically gave carte blanche to all bishops under the Iron Curtain to consecrate bishops and to ordain priests without specific, you know, permission from Rome.
00:19:21.860 So they could go around that usual ordinary jurisdiction because of the emergency situation.
00:19:27.660 So in Czechoslovakia, this was a great grace because the communists had basically shut down communication to the Vatican and were murdering the bishops and priests. 0.96
00:19:37.200 So in order to continue apostolic succession, this was necessary.
00:19:41.880 A gentleman I interviewed from Slovakia, who is actually a politician who's run for president there several times, Frontishek Miklosko, worked closely with the underground bishop, Jan Chrysostom Koretz, who later became a cardinal under JP II.
00:19:54.900 And their side of the underground church maintained, as I mentioned before, this strict fidelity to Catholic principles to the Vatican.
00:20:03.420 They never tried to set up their own pope or to act outside of their state in life and what would be permissible to them through jurisdiction.
00:20:11.000 So they were also instrumental in actually the candle demonstration and following year's Velvet Revolution, this public, peaceful and prayerful protest that helped to bring down communism.
00:20:22.380 But on the other side of this, you had sort of these rogue elements who were taking liberties with these secret mandates.
00:20:29.220 So another character I examine is a man named Felix Maria Davidek, who actually started ordaining women with these permissions, which obviously violates Catholic principles.
00:20:41.500 And all of those ordinations, obviously, were declared null and void by John Paul II after they came to light.
00:20:49.220 So this highlighted for me the great temptation that there is to, during these times of extraordinary jurisdiction, kind of cut corners with the faith and, you know, with this assumption that in an emergency situation, you can do this sort of thing or that anything goes, is something that I hadn't really considered before.
00:21:09.400 And that Catholics, either in the West, in traditional communities or anywhere else where we believe we're facing persecution, have to keep that in mind, that if you're fighting for the Catholic faith, it's whole and inviolate.
00:21:20.820 It's the whole thing.
00:21:21.840 And you can't sacrifice aspects of it in order just to survive.
00:21:25.280 Looking around yourself in the United States now, with many of those who have survived communist times, telling us, hey, guys, wake up.
00:21:36.340 This is what I experienced in my own country.
00:21:37.940 We're becoming communist.
00:21:40.080 Do you see that?
00:21:41.480 And what in the society that you're seeing right now and in the church are you seeing that indicates that?
00:21:47.560 It's a good question.
00:21:48.520 Of course, in the West, it's a much softer and more vague implementation of these principles.
00:21:54.100 They know that we've caught on.
00:21:56.660 There's a great scholar, Diana West, who's written a book, American Betrayal, that discusses actually the presence of communists in the FDR administration, even that early on, and how they've been subverting culturally the human mindset and our psyche to be primed to accept more totalitarian measures, which obviously we saw happen with the COVID totalitarianism is one recent example.
00:22:21.920 And then, as you mentioned before, what you cannot say, you always have to look at what you're not allowed to say and how today the transgender epidemic really fills that spot.
00:22:32.760 I think it's going to be a very different way of resistance.
00:22:39.100 I was able to identify sort of these main points of action that communist regimes typically took against the church, and we don't really see any of these just yet, except for the propaganda and infiltration.
00:22:50.860 So, when alarm bells really start going off, these are what you know to look for.
00:22:56.540 Number one is to outlaw the public worship of the church, which I guess we did see during COVID to a certain extent.
00:23:02.060 And, in the very least, make mass attendance discouraged.
00:23:06.660 A woman named Olga, who I interviewed from the Czech city of Brno, discusses that in the early years of communism, she would be instructed by her parents to go to mass with her eyes cast down, so that she wouldn't be able to identify either the priest or any of the other parishioners.
00:23:21.900 Because if you were hauled before the secret police, you could then, with a clear conscience, say, I didn't know who the celebrant was, I don't know who else was there.
00:23:30.580 And this use of this weaponization of neighbor versus neighbor, which, of course, was a hallmark of communism, I think is something to look for that we might have seen, at least during COVID, with people turning each other in and this soft pressure to not attend mass.
00:23:49.700 The rounding up of the clergy and religious, I suppose that could be happening to a degree now, with the persecution of what we see with Bishop Strickland, for example, and faithful Catholic prelates who are speaking the truth and not bending on matters of doctrine.
00:24:05.600 The seizure and repurpose of church property, not sure there's a parallel to this just yet, but that's another one of these red flags and warning signs that happen under totalitarianism.
00:24:16.180 And this is why, as an aside, it's interesting that oftentimes there is a blurry line between political and religious persecution when it comes to Catholics under communism.
00:24:26.060 Because, as we've seen, a lot of these charges, such as wrecking or counter-revolutionary activities, are really political charges, but they're leveled at people who acted the way they did because of religious convictions.
00:24:38.660 So the seizure of the church properties and the Catholic schools in Eastern Europe, for example, was one of these watershed moments where the clergy and faithful laity had to stand up against this, even though it was technically just a political measure.
00:24:54.220 So that might be where we see the greatest parallels in this.
00:24:58.840 We know as Catholics, we can't vote certain ways because of the culture of death and the pro-life policies that certain candidates might or might not hold.
00:25:09.500 And that is something that is political, but really it would be a sin even to act a certain way in the political realm because of religious convictions.
00:25:18.020 And so that's probably the closest parallel we have.
00:25:21.040 You called your book, When the Sickle Swings, what is that?
00:25:25.660 Why that title?
00:25:27.120 Yes, so that comes from scripture, The Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe.
00:25:31.740 And I really loved this imagery of, all throughout scripture, of the swinging of the sickle and the harvest as this moment of testing the faithful and separating the wheat from the chaff and the final moment where we must remain faithful until the test is over.
00:25:49.080 And it's very interesting that the hammer and the hammer and the sickle are these perennial symbols of communism because we know what they symbolize for them, of course, is work, both industry of the hammer and agriculture uniting those two proletarian groups.
00:26:05.580 But when you think a little deeper about it and think of some of the more spiritual imagery that you can take from these, the hammer, to me, I thought of the hammer of justice and how communism clearly subverts all justice.
00:26:20.680 And that the justice of God is ultimately the justice that these individuals I interviewed and all those who stayed faithful throughout these persecutions were keeping in mind that this false authority here on earth had usurped power and was using it against truth and goodness.
00:26:37.680 And to just keep in mind the eternal judge and to just keep in mind the eternal judge and that he ultimately is the only one you have to impress.
00:26:43.920 And then the sickle, of course, I'm sure others have thought of this, but the grim reaper wielding the sickle and the great death toll of communism is just this ironic, poetic sort of comparison to make.
00:26:56.400 But also that these moments, as we know, the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.
00:27:01.520 And so when communists cut down Catholics, either through actual martyrdom or persecution in small ways, forbidding them to go to church, making it harder for them to get into schools and employment opportunities.
00:27:16.780 And as, as Olga put it, death by a thousand cuts, when this sickle is swung, this is actually the means of our salvation, because we know we have to carry a cross.
00:27:26.860 And so these many people that I interviewed would reference that they sometimes even became grateful for these trials because their faith was purified in this much more intense way.
00:27:38.420 And they emerged from these trials with a much stronger faith.
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00:28:25.080 May God bless you.
00:28:25.580 We have talked a little bit about what you see in terms of what's around us already that seems to be going in that direction.
00:28:37.920 What are we to do in times of persecution?
00:28:41.640 What did you learn from those whom you interviewed about best steps for us as we see these things approaching and happening around us?
00:28:49.380 So there are many tactics that can be applied to organization of resistance, which I found interesting to compare the various countries and resistance that was possible, because oftentimes it just wasn't.
00:29:02.580 The implementation of communism was either gradual or so totalizing that there were really no recourse to take.
00:29:10.260 In Cuba, this is interesting because there were a much more militant set of resistance freedom fighters, and that was available, of course, because American intelligence was involved to a certain degree.
00:29:24.520 But everywhere else, it was really this internal battle, first and foremost.
00:29:29.120 So the main takeaway that I took from all of this advice was that your first priority is to save your own soul and to save the souls of those around you to preach the faith as much as possible.
00:29:40.600 Because we can often get caught up, as we saw with the Davidek case, in fighting this political battle and in defeating communism as a whole, winning these more temporal victories.
00:29:52.420 But if you lose your soul in the process, then all of that was for naught anyway.
00:29:56.940 And so, as we've seen with the example from the prison guard, and when you think of that as a microcosm of communism and how these tactics were used to get Catholics to apostatize just in daily life, that is the major battle.
00:30:12.920 And you need to be guarding internally your mind and your soul against this onslaught of propaganda.
00:30:17.620 And one story kind of illustrates this from Cuba, and this is an example of propaganda that was leveraged at schoolchildren.
00:30:27.020 So, of course, we know from the American context, propaganda is always brought before people as young as possible in order to form the next generation.
00:30:37.060 What teachers would do is they would line up all the elementary school kids, tell them to place their hands out and close their eyes, and then said, ask God for a piece of candy.
00:30:46.340 And, of course, nothing would materialize, nothing would happen, the minutes would tick by.
00:30:52.220 Then they would say, okay, now ask Fidel for a piece of candy, referring, of course, to Fidel Castro.
00:30:58.640 And then the teachers would go around and place a piece of candy in all of the kids' hands.
00:31:03.540 Which, of course, is this brainwashing from an early age that the communist government is the one you can trust, that will provide for you, and God is nothing more than a myth.
00:31:12.220 And that sort of thing can really get to you when it starts early enough.
00:31:17.540 A woman I interviewed from Romania remembers that her family would either turn off the TV or turn the volume really low when Nikolai Ceausescu, the communist dictator there, would have his four-hour daily rants on TV.
00:31:31.140 And they would pray the rosary instead during this time.
00:31:35.160 And so when you think about it in the grand scheme of things, no, this was not toppling the Berlin Wall, but it was protecting and preserving the seed of faith in these children who were met at every turn with this onslaught of propaganda.
00:31:48.820 And ultimately, that is what God asks of us first and foremost.
00:31:53.720 So tell us a little bit about propaganda and that whole war, because that's obviously a huge element of what goes on here, the control of the media.
00:32:01.880 But also that which you just said about Romania was also very true of China still is.
00:32:08.200 In fact, in China, with their special app that gives them social credit scores, if they watch, I think it's for an hour a day, Xi Jinping on whatever else, they get bonus points and stuff like this.
00:32:21.820 And if they don't, then they lose them and they could do really badly for themselves.
00:32:26.140 So what is it with the propaganda deal that they need to expound their people and be heard and also very much control of media?
00:32:34.840 Yes. Well, propaganda's main purpose is that a successful communist state requires a certain degree of buy-in from its citizens and from the individuals, because otherwise you would revolt.
00:32:46.700 So you have to deny your senses to a certain extent where you're told that this is a great utopia where birds just fly onto your plate to eat and you don't have to really worry about any of your temporal needs.
00:33:00.020 And then you look outside and see the poverty and the absolute violence and just terrible conditions.
00:33:06.040 And so they had to create really a pseudo religion.
00:33:10.120 Father Vincent Michelli has written on this in his book, The Gods of Atheism, where he basically argues that atheism is not the lack of worship, but the worship of idols and that that human impulse to worship something is always there.
00:33:23.520 And communism took that place. They would have the picture of the dictator up where either a crucifix or a picture of a saint would be in our homes.
00:33:34.160 They had these ritualized experiences, including a new liturgical calendar with feasts such as Victory Day, where the Soviet Union celebrates the winning of World War II, and an entire body of literature too.
00:33:49.960 So Socialist Realism, one book that I remember is called When the Steel is Tempered, or How the Steel is Tempered, which actually ironically sounds kind of like my book title, but it's glorifying this working world.
00:34:04.880 And it's just, it's a completely materialistic book, obviously, where you're, again, engineering souls and creating a new Soviet man, because in order to be sustainable for many generations, that is necessary. 0.86
00:34:18.200 A great part of this was the incentivization of collaboration. So party members, joining the party was almost a prerequisite for any sort of life.
00:34:30.380 Olga, for example, refused to join the party her whole life and was persecuted at various teaching jobs.
00:34:35.760 She also would wear a cross to work and was told, you have to take that off. And so they break you down in these small ways and encourage, of course, as we've mentioned, the spying on neighbors and the buy-in to the system.
00:34:51.300 There's a really interesting book called Keeping Faith with the Party that talks about returnees from the Gulag who actually had internalized the communist ideology and message so much that they believed that they had sinned against the party and were seeking reparation, even though the party had just thrown them into the Gulag for many years.
00:35:13.160 And so it's the Stockholm syndrome almost. It's a very interesting psychological phenomenon, but it shows what happens when anything else takes the place of God.
00:35:22.680 And when we don't have objective eternal principles, these other false ideologies can take the place of religion.
00:35:29.660 Another thing that was an interesting sort of subtle propaganda tactic that I noticed, especially in the Czechoslovak context, was the weaponization of the sin of scandal.
00:35:39.160 So they would spread these rumors about the church and would often say about specific priests, oh, Father so-and-so has left the priesthood or he's committing X, Y, Z sin to disillusion the faithful about their own priests.
00:35:56.980 And that has, as we've seen with even the scandals in the U.S., that has a tremendous effect on people's actual supernatural faith.
00:36:03.480 So, one example of this was, there was a Eucharistic miracle in a Slovak town of Cihost in the late 40s, and it was the crucifix behind the altar swung to the right and to the left in a way that it wouldn't have naturally, and then came to rest in the middle, right as the host was being consecrated.
00:36:25.280 And this sort of spurred a local cultist, a movement of people who would make small pilgrimages to this site, and the priest was a young priest by the name of Father Joseph Tufar.
00:36:39.340 The communist authorities got wind of what had happened and, of course, found this unacceptable.
00:36:43.700 So, they tried, they hauled him before state security, and they actually tried to make him apostatize and tried to get him to participate in a propaganda video that was going to disprove the miracle and show how it had all been fake, and he was really standing there with a rope to the side and making this happen.
00:37:01.960 And, of course, he said no, even if this had not been a genuine miracle, because, of course, it didn't have the chance to be investigated by the bishops, so we'll never really know for sure, but he wouldn't lie, he wouldn't admit to doing something he hadn't done, and thereby scandalize the faithful and probably make some of them lose their faith.
00:37:22.220 So, he was beaten, tortured, and eventually killed after a show trial for his refusal to participate in this propaganda.
00:37:30.020 The film still exists, it's about 12 minutes, it's available on YouTube, and again, it shows in a more obvious way than any of us could ever what the communist project was really about, that this Eucharistic miracle is such a threat.
00:37:45.620 If God doesn't exist, why is this a threat? If sacramentality is not real, why do you care so much about this?
00:37:52.220 Amazing. Last question for you, Kristen. Totally fascinating, but there's a tie-in with communism and abortion. Can you explain that to us?
00:38:06.060 Yes, well, it's really quite sad to see that in many former communist countries, abortion is still so prevalent.
00:38:12.860 And it's interesting because sometimes, depending on what the population goals in the next five-year plan was at the time, abortion would either be illegal sometimes, as it was even under Nazi Germany, or discouraged because, not because of the known dignity of the human person, but instead because they needed to grow the population for temporal worldly means.
00:38:36.620 Nevertheless, but nevertheless, it still remains a plague, especially in Eastern Europe.
00:38:41.800 One woman that I interviewed did discuss this in the context of her own family, how not only was life and the dignity of life completely rejected by the communists and made out to be something that, as Stalin said, the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
00:39:02.780 It was really just this cavalier attitude towards life.
00:39:32.760 So, not only the internal conditions of communism.
00:39:34.760 So, not only the brainwashing and the propaganda, but also on this more human level, the weakness and the decisions that were made under duress, and how much stronger you had to be to stick to the truth and to defend life in that situation.
00:39:50.320 And so, not only does communism overtly just treat life as disposable, but also it creates the conditions where even those who had been faithful to a certain point were finding themselves doing things they thought they would have never done before.
00:40:05.900 So, it's this both overt and covert attack on life.
00:40:09.380 So, one more thing for you then, you know, in the church today, it certainly seems like there are what many would have called communism at play.
00:40:23.120 I know that there were books written about, you know, communist infiltration into the church, but what's going on now, even from Rome, starts to make that all seem very believable if you didn't believe it before.
00:40:38.520 I'd love to hear you take on it.
00:41:08.500 So, in Czechoslovakia, as I mentioned before, this was known as the National Church.
00:41:19.240 So, it was about 11% of priests collaborated fully.
00:41:23.620 They pledged their allegiance to the Czechoslovak National Church and to the state rather than to the Vatican, and they were known to collaborate, to turn people in.
00:41:33.600 And, unfortunately, they would even break the seal of confession if you went to them to confession in order to inform on penitents.
00:41:40.080 This was sort of, it was more of an obvious distinction between the National Church.
00:41:46.660 It was, it even had a name.
00:41:47.840 It was called Pacem and Terras in the 70s, and the church that remained loyal to the Vatican was underground, and we've talked about the problems with that.
00:41:56.800 But it was a pretty clear distinction.
00:41:58.940 In other countries, it was less clear, and that, I think, is more what we are experiencing.
00:42:06.140 Because in Latin America, for example, this took the form of liberation theology, where you get to the point where Castro himself is claiming that he can be a good Catholic, and he wants to be both a Christian and a communist.
00:42:18.440 And it's much more doctrinal warfare through means of propaganda without that clear distinction between national church as a body, as a separate entity, and secret church.
00:42:31.740 They didn't really have that in Latin America, as far as I understand.
00:42:35.300 It was just this milieu where many of the clergy were starting to spout heresy and things that didn't make sense and were contrary to Catholic doctrine, but they remained part of the same body and same entity.
00:42:47.760 So, in my opinion, that one is harder to deal with.
00:42:51.280 It's harder to navigate, because, on the other hand, you know if someone is a collaborator, of course, they can always repent, but you knew which priests to avoid in Czechoslovakia.
00:43:01.440 But in Cuba, it was much more difficult to determine that distinction.
00:43:06.140 So, that is what I think we are seeing today in Rome and in the West, is that these men all belong, obviously, to the same organization, and there is no clear distinction, but they will say things that are clearly anti-Catholic, and yet, at the same time, maybe a day later, they will uphold the faith.
00:43:28.420 And so, we're in this position where the laity have a lot more pressure on them to have to discern and to filter things that are coming from the clergy in this way, and that's really unfortunate.
00:43:38.200 But it's a subtle victory for the communists that, as Beledad has noted, this was their goal, to be able to not distinguish between truth and lies.
00:43:49.740 But if you pray for discernment, and the Holy Spirit will guide you, this is something that we can distinguish between.
00:43:59.500 Our consciences are not broken.
00:44:01.320 So, of course, with the proper respect for authority that always must be there, we do have that built-in Aboriginal law, as I think John Henry Newman said.
00:44:13.240 Kristen Van Uden, truly, truly remarkable.
00:44:16.440 Look forward to your book, out in November, by Sophia Press, When the Sickle Swings.
00:44:22.780 Thank you so very much, and God bless you.
00:44:24.940 Thank you so much. God bless.
00:44:26.340 And God bless all of you.
00:44:28.160 And we'll see you next time.
00:44:39.640 Hi, everyone. This is John Henry Weston.
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