The John-Henry Westen Show - Converting To Catholicism In The Time Of Pope Francis ｜ Timothy Flanders

00:00:00.000 The monuments of our forefathers were literally destroyed with hammers.

00:00:04.860 They built churches that were ugly because they were not being inspired by what came before.

00:00:11.640 We don't know which bishops we can trust, but I feel like you can trust Bishop Strickland.

00:00:23.940 There is a thing going on in the church right now about Eastern Orthodoxy. 0.91

00:00:27.600 People are thinking, wow, Pope Francis is so crazy.

00:00:30.800 Maybe we can escape to Eastern Orthodoxy as something that would be better for us. 1.00

00:00:36.640 Is that what we should do?

00:00:37.640 That's a confusing question for a lot of people.

00:00:40.140 I've got someone with us who was there.

00:00:43.180 He was in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

00:00:45.080 He actually converted and became a Catholic only in the time of Pope Francis, and he's

00:00:49.580 very glad he did.

00:00:50.900 You're going to want to stay tuned to hear this episode of the John Henry Weston Show

00:00:54.100 with none other than Timothy Flanders, who heads up 1 Peter 5.

00:00:58.340 Stay tuned.

00:01:00.820 Hey friends, this July, we at LifeSite are celebrating 25 years of service to life, faith, family,

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00:02:38.100 God bless you.

00:02:40.460 Tim Lee Flanders, welcome to the program.

00:02:42.640 Thanks so much, John Henry.

00:02:43.920 It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you.

00:02:46.120 Praise God.

00:02:46.660 Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.

00:02:48.780 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

00:02:53.460 Amen.

00:02:53.680 Everybody will know you as the One Peter Five guy, and from your podcast, you've got a book

00:03:01.460 as well now.

00:03:03.180 Tell us about that, but first give us a little bit of a history of Timothy Flanders.

00:03:08.020 Who are you?

00:03:08.820 I'm celebrating 10 years as a Catholic, actually, this year.

00:03:12.960 This month, in fact.

00:03:14.380 It was shortly after Pope Francis was elected that I came into communion with Rome.

00:03:20.720 In fact, I've never been a Catholic except under Pope Francis.

00:03:24.840 And my first article, actually, at One Peter Five was in 2019.

00:03:28.880 And the title of the article was,

00:03:30.680 I left Eastern Orthodoxy for the church under Pope Francis, and I don't regret it.

00:03:36.400 And the reason I wrote that article is because I came from Eastern Orthodoxy.

00:03:39.700 I was Eastern Orthodoxy for three years before that.

00:03:42.460 Before that, I was a Protestant and various sects within that.

00:03:45.660 But Eastern Orthodoxy really presents itself as the next best thing. 1.00

00:03:49.940 And some Catholics are tempted to leave the bark of Peter, leave the Roman dogmas,

00:03:57.780 and find solace somewhere in one of the Greek schisms.

00:04:01.640 And so I was noticing that in 2019, after six years of Papa Bergoglio

00:04:08.920 and all of the crisis that has resulted.

00:04:11.940 And so I wrote this article explaining a little bit about that.

00:04:15.640 So that gives a little bit of my own biography.

00:04:18.680 But yeah, I was raised Protestant.

00:04:20.680 I had very pious Protestant parents,

00:04:23.200 but I just sort of went on a search for truth, as many Protestants do.

00:04:28.140 And I landed first with Eastern Orthodoxy,

00:04:31.400 and then with Rome's sweet home, as the Hans call it.

00:04:36.120 If you wouldn't mind unpacking that for us a little bit,

00:04:39.380 because that trend is still there.

00:04:42.920 There are Catholics who have converted and left, I know personally of some,

00:04:48.680 and very good Catholics.

00:04:51.260 These aren't, you know, wavering Catholics who are slightly, you know, on the edge.

00:04:58.220 No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:04:59.240 Very sincere Catholics.

00:05:01.240 So if you wouldn't mind unpacking your reasoning for seeing,

00:05:06.980 even under Pope Francis, the Catholic Church as being the true church versus Orthodoxy,

00:05:12.380 and that's where the hard argument is.

00:05:14.080 I mean, to boil it all down, I have all my sources in this article,

00:05:16.860 and we have a whole series of articles over at 1 Peter 5 on this very question.

00:05:20.460 But essentially, even with Roman Catholicism in a state of crisis,

00:05:27.540 it still surpasses Eastern Orthodoxy on a number of very significant points,

00:05:35.180 chiefly of the chief of them being the ability to definitively resolve dogmatic controversy.

00:05:43.040 This is, in other words, a universal magisterial authority.

00:05:49.340 Now, the Eastern Orthodox churches used to have such an authority when they,

00:05:55.760 in the first millennium, when they were in union with Rome,

00:05:57.700 and they could call an ecumenical council.

00:06:00.060 And that's how universal controversies are resolved.

00:06:04.320 But since breaking from Rome, the various Eastern Orthodox churches

00:06:08.220 cannot resolve universal doctrinal controversy.

00:06:13.140 And so they have not had an ecumenical council since 787.

00:06:17.540 And so they have, they have, you know,

00:06:20.340 we have controversies in the Roman Catholic Church, obviously.

00:06:23.240 But I would hazard to say that 95% of the controversies today,

00:06:29.080 they've already been definitively resolved by our own magisterium.

00:06:33.420 There's just renegade heretical clerics out there pushing heresy.

00:06:38.220 There is that 5% that there are theological questions out there that really haven't been resolved.

00:06:43.320 The theologians are debating those, and magisterium may rule on those in the future.

00:06:47.780 But whereas with Eastern Orthodoxy, for example,

00:06:51.080 like something that's very acute for Catholics is the question of contraception.

00:06:56.460 I documented in my article how the different Eastern Orthodox churches

00:07:01.320 really waffled on that question in the 20th century.

00:07:05.120 They actually started to allow that more,

00:07:07.900 and they don't really have a doctrinal authority to judge that.

00:07:11.880 In reality, what it comes down to is that in Eastern Orthodoxy,

00:07:16.640 there are as many popes as there are priests,

00:07:20.300 because every single priest that you go to in the Eastern Orthodox Church

00:07:23.440 is your spiritual father.

00:07:24.720 And there should be a spiritual fatherhood relationship with any Roman Catholic priest as well.

00:07:28.000 But their spiritual fathers are so powerful that their faithful rely on them individually

00:07:35.260 to resolve a question like contraception.

00:07:37.640 Is contraception evil or not?

00:07:40.160 My spiritual father told me this.

00:07:42.200 But then if you go down the road to you go Greek Orthodox over here, 0.64

00:07:46.000 and you go anti-Orthodox over here, you might get an entirely different question.

00:07:50.460 You know that and that's a serious moral question.

00:07:53.100 It's not some arcane thing.

00:07:55.500 Ultimately, the Eastern Orthodox churches, they do not have the ability to resolve that.

00:08:00.540 We have a problem in our own Roman Catholic Church, 1.00

00:08:02.580 but all we need is a pope to do his job,

00:08:05.660 and then the crisis will be over.

00:08:08.700 Or an ecumenical council to do his job.

00:08:11.180 Or even a single bishop in his own diocese to do his job.

00:08:14.280 And the crisis will start to be resolved.

00:08:16.860 We have the ability to do that.

00:08:18.420 But your history is fascinating because it exists totally in the time of Pope Francis,

00:08:24.440 and you don't regret it.

00:08:26.280 There's a lot of people who, those of us who lived before that time as Catholics,

00:08:34.700 for us it was a very rude awakening to go from John Paul II and Benedict into Pope Francis.

00:08:42.160 But there are converts, though.

00:08:43.540 I know of converts, great converts to the faith, who also came in during this time.

00:08:48.920 And I think that's really momentous.

00:08:50.740 One of my big things was, hey, we can actually use this for the good,

00:08:55.080 because telling our evangelicals, especially for evangelicals who are really strong in the faith,

00:08:59.280 we need you right now in this fight.

00:09:01.500 It's a huge fight.

00:09:02.460 And I know you've been thinking about becoming Catholic, and it's crazy right now,

00:09:05.960 but that's all the more reason we need you in here.

00:09:07.660 What would you say to evangelicals like that who might be thinking about becoming Catholic 0.88

00:09:15.240 but are intimidated or turned off by Pope Francis?

00:09:19.520 I've been told that that is the question with catechizing the converts, you know,

00:09:24.960 do I have to follow Pope Francis and everything?

00:09:27.140 I mean, to me, the best thing that I usually would say here would be to look at the Holy Scripture

00:09:33.520 and to take them through the various papal Petrine passages.

00:09:40.600 Peter, I have prayed for you that thy faith may not fail.

00:09:44.840 Jesus' prayers are always answered.

00:09:47.580 So Peter's faith does not fail.

00:09:49.280 And yet, in the most famous passage, of course,

00:09:52.400 you are Peter upon this rock, I will build my church, the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

00:09:56.300 Just a few verses later, so Peter gets two names.

00:10:00.580 He says, you are Peter.

00:10:01.800 So Simon is being named Peter the Rock because he confesses Christ.

00:10:07.080 But then just a few verses later, he says, you are Satan. 0.85

00:10:10.920 Get behind me, Satan.

00:10:12.140 This is this dichotomy.

00:10:13.520 And Cardinal Ratzker gives a commentary where he says this is sort of a commentary on the entire history of the popes.

00:10:18.880 And this is, I think, how I would present this to a Protestant is to say, 0.68

00:10:22.620 one, as Catholics, we truly believe in the power of the Scripture

00:10:28.400 and that these dogmas are firmly embedded in the Holy Scripture.

00:10:34.800 But there's also, the Scripture also gives us these paradoxes that are mysterious and uncomfortable.

00:10:40.360 And yet, with the eyes of faith, we can see that even though Peter is called Satan,

00:10:48.640 in his human capacity, when he acts on his own power, he becomes Satan just on his own power.

00:10:55.880 But when God acts through him and he acts according to, as Jesus says to him,

00:11:01.660 my Heavenly Father has revealed this to you,

00:11:03.760 then he is Peter upon this rock, I will build my church.

00:11:07.760 And God is in control of the church and he rules it through Peter.

00:11:12.980 But even when Peter becomes Satan, Jesus still rules through him.

00:11:19.240 And so we see through this history, the Scripture, we can even go into Peter and Paul and their debate there.

00:11:25.520 So I would use the Scripture to bring out that even in the Scripture,

00:11:30.260 there are these sort of apparent contradictions, apparent mysteries.

00:11:34.540 And that's the mystery of what we're living right now, is that we do have a pope, Pope Francis.

00:11:40.440 He is the successor of Peter.

00:11:43.140 And yet, he is doing things in his own human capacity.

00:11:47.780 And when we have faith, though, and we look at the whole history of the popes,

00:11:52.180 and we see, well, the church has been through bad popes before, here's what happened this time.

00:11:56.840 This is one of the things I go in in my book, is various bad popes.

00:12:00.780 So we don't need to lose our faith.

00:12:02.420 We don't need to lose our faith and think that the pope is the Antichrist, as the Protestant Reformers did. 0.96

00:12:08.300 But we can look at the Scripture and we can hold faith, have faith in the words of Jesus.

00:12:14.680 City of God versus City of Man, what's that all about?

00:12:17.780 City of God versus City of Man is an attempt to provide the faithful with a one-volume survey history of the cosmic history of the church.

00:12:32.400 And when I say cosmic history, I'm talking about not only men, the history of men and the church,

00:12:38.120 but also the history of the angels and the angelic powers, both good and bad,

00:12:42.100 and their machinations using the greatest work of St. Augustine, which is City of God,

00:12:49.720 through the lens of his greatest 20th century disciple, Christopher Dawson.

00:12:54.180 And one of his great insights is to take this spiritual vision of history that St. Augustine gives us

00:13:01.780 and to illustrate the power of religion as really religion is the pivot of history,

00:13:08.560 because we see that what really makes history flow is culture.

00:13:13.540 And what it really boils down to is it is the cultus.

00:13:18.260 The cultus is the liturgy.

00:13:20.840 In every single culture known to man, it has a liturgy.

00:13:24.860 And that liturgy is a visual and audible representation of divine mysteries.

00:13:32.900 And it is how we make contact with the divine.

00:13:35.240 Now, obviously, there are every other liturgy besides the Roman Catholic liturgy is corrupted in some fashion.

00:13:42.560 But even in pre-Christian societies, we have this same essence of culture, which is the liturgy.

00:13:48.480 There's four elements of culture.

00:13:49.880 There's the cultus, the liturgy.

00:13:51.780 And then there's the tradition, which explains what that cultus is all about.

00:13:56.720 All of the morals and the doctrines and everything, even all the way going into lesser matters like dance routines and cuisine.

00:14:06.520 These things are brings us to the third element of culture, which is elders.

00:14:11.160 The elders, their job is to explain the tradition to the next generation.

00:14:16.960 And then the fourth element is piety, which is the hinge upon which the next generation receive that culture.

00:14:22.900 So my book is a is a framework to understand the history of Christian culture.

00:14:30.980 What I call it, I call it a spiritual history of culture.

00:14:34.440 And it's it's meant to provide this framework to show how important the liturgy is, because this is obviously one of the flashpoints of our Roman Catholic crisis now with the liturgy.

00:14:48.420 And we can get into that. But also, it is going back to your first comment about people leaving the faith.

00:14:55.200 It's giving them an apologia.

00:14:58.840 It's it's really indirectly.

00:15:00.460 It's it's a it's my own explanation as to why I'm not Protestant and whatnot.

00:15:05.340 Eastern Orthodox. It's 500 pages of explaining why that is.

00:15:08.640 But it's giving Roman Catholics their history, their identity, solid foundation to stand on so that they don't have to they they don't have to fear what we're dealing with now, because they can look at our forefathers and their zeal and what they dealt with, which in some ways was worse, some ways better.

00:15:27.280 But they we can learn from the example of our forefathers and all these different examples.

00:15:32.240 So that that's the gist and the purpose of my book.

00:15:35.360 Let's look for a second at some of the pre-Christian liturgies, as you might describe them.

00:15:41.980 We're seeing a resurgence of some of that with with Pachamama and kind of weird elements creeping actually into the mass.

00:15:49.540 But nonetheless, they were there at that time.

00:15:53.540 Explain, if you can, if you if you looked at that historically, what some of those were and how they related to the culture of the day.

00:15:59.100 What we have today is what I assert in my book is that what we have is actually not a culture at all.

00:16:05.100 It's actually an anti-culture.

00:16:07.840 It's it is completely inverted as to what a culture even is, because even in these Roman ancient pagan Roman or Greek Roman,

00:16:18.200 even the Muslims or, you know, in Hinduism and all these different traditional cultures, they all have these four elements that I just mentioned.

00:16:26.060 But since the advent of liberalism, we have an entirely new situation where it's really because even even the Protestants, 0.96

00:16:34.760 even the Protestants had those four elements in their own civilizations.

00:16:38.940 But with liberalism, with the American Revolution, the French Revolution, all these different liberal revolutions,

00:16:45.440 what we have is first, the cultist is removed from public society.

00:16:50.800 And what is valued is a revolt against tradition and elders without piety.

00:16:57.580 So it's a completely, completely, complete repudiation of the very essence of what a basic culture is.

00:17:04.320 So even in the pre-Christian societies, when our forefathers came to the worship of the mother goddess that they encountered in various societies,

00:17:15.520 Pachamama included, they were they what they did was they baptized that society because that society was pagan and it was corrupted by demons. 0.89

00:17:24.260 But it still had these four elements of culture.

00:17:27.300 And so what our forefathers did was they baptized that culture, which cleansed it of all its demonic content. 0.98

00:17:32.760 In particular, they would destroy they what they would do is, for example, they would destroy a demonic altar.

00:17:38.760 They would destroy that. But then they'd build a church on top.

00:17:41.360 So they wouldn't actually destroy the fact that this is a holy site.

00:17:44.660 This whole hill right here, you know, like a lady of Guadalupe, for example, they have there's a holy hill that that culture reveres.

00:17:53.380 But there's a pagan idol on it. So we're going to destroy the pagan idol. 0.58

00:17:56.620 We're going to keep the fact that that's a sacred hill, but we're going to put the blessed sacrament on it.

00:18:00.800 And that's going to be the throne, the new throne of God in this society.

00:18:05.100 And we're going to cleanse that goddess worship because that is just a corruption of demons. 0.98

00:18:11.640 And we're going to bring that to the veneration of our lady.

00:18:16.800 So we're going to transform that from this pagan worship to venerating our lady, which is the proper veneration of the matron, the mother of God.

00:18:28.480 But these new things are not even not they're not trying to restore even a even a pagan version of that.

00:18:34.720 But Dietrich von Hildebrand, he observes that what we have now is not even it's not even as good as paganism.

00:18:42.280 It's a lot worse than paganism, because even the pagans had a sense of wonder.

00:18:47.220 They had a sense of veneration to the divine.

00:18:50.780 And what we have now is is just anti-culture.

00:18:53.760 How do you see this figuring into the liturgy debate inside the Catholic Church?

00:19:01.140 Because surely there is still there are still elements of culture.

00:19:08.020 And while the the the outside culture is is definitely loving to bash all tradition.

00:19:14.980 There are some elements of that in the church as well, particularly since Second Vatican Council.

00:19:20.400 But I'd love to hear your take.

00:19:21.420 The liturgy has always developed the Roman liturgy and other liturgies as well.

00:19:27.120 There's always been a development over time.

00:19:29.480 But even the Second Vatican Council stipulated that the the liturgy called for the reform called for should be an organic development, which is a metaphor which illustrates this cultural development.

00:19:41.760 And in particular, we can note that what makes a an organic development is that it does not break this cultural transmission between the generations.

00:19:53.480 So there is a small change that happens that the father passes down to the son and the son takes it up and passes it on to his son.

00:20:03.780 And in other words, it catches on.

00:20:06.600 It's something that just organically and freely develops.

00:20:09.620 So the proper way to do this, an example is when Pius XII introduced his his new psalter, what he did was he gave and he presented an option.

00:20:21.080 He said, this is an optional psalter, but it never caught on.

00:20:25.020 What's a psalter just so that people know.

00:20:26.440 So this is a new version of the psalter that was translated directly from the Hebrew.

00:20:31.020 This was promulgated as an option by Pius XII and it never caught on.

00:20:35.820 So it was optional, but nobody really was interested in it.

00:20:38.780 And a psalter for people who don't know, it's just it's basically it's a prayer.

00:20:42.160 Yeah. So it's all the psalms.

00:20:43.980 So it would be your priest is required to pray all the psalms in their divine office.

00:20:49.080 So Pius XII said you could pray this version of the psalms instead of the older version of the Latin psalms.

00:20:54.760 So what we have in the imposition of the Novus Ordo is that Cardinal Rassiger said this is a breach in the history of the liturgy because instead of creating, for example, an option where this could organically develop like in the cathedral, we're going to have this new liturgy and anyone can freely go to that liturgy.

00:21:19.780 And perhaps some will will like that.

00:21:23.560 Some some will have some, you know, help in their faith and they'll start attending this new liturgy.

00:21:28.480 But others, they won't like that and they'll keep to the old ways.

00:21:32.400 And that this is organic development in a culture.

00:21:36.160 But what we had was everything was swept away and something new was imposed on the faithful.

00:21:42.760 Not only that, but the monuments of our forefathers were literally destroyed with hammers.

00:21:49.180 Rosaries were ripped out of little old ladies hands. 0.99

00:21:51.860 It was it was it was it was a moment where a generation isolated itself from all the prior generations and they built churches that were ugly because they were not being inspired by what came before.

00:22:07.460 In an organic development passing down this this this cultural transmission.

00:22:11.500 This was this entire thing was a movement of anti-culture because it was a breaking with the tradition before.

00:22:18.820 And like I said, again, it was it would be one thing if if if the Holy See were to promulgate an optional reformed liturgy.

00:22:26.640 That would be one thing.

00:22:27.900 And that and that could work for some some cases that wouldn't that would not destroy this cultural transmission.

00:22:36.920 That's why one can say there is a certain wisdom to Pope Benedict in some more on pontificum attempting to recreate a an organic cultural transmission with with his solution.

00:22:50.640 And we can debate whether or not that was the proper way to do it.

00:22:53.460 But it seems that that was what he was trying to get at.

00:22:56.180 So those are some of the aspects of that.

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00:23:43.060 May God bless you.

00:23:43.560 Tim was not using hyperbole when he was talking about destroying the altars and whatnot.

00:23:52.680 For those of you who might be younger, if you go and look at what happened after the reform of the liturgy, so-called reform of the liturgy, and basically the ridding of the traditional Latin mass.

00:24:05.760 This is in the 60s still, maybe a little bit later into the 70s, but they were literally destroying all these beautiful historical, even I would say if we had the historical preservation societies, none of that would have happened.

00:24:20.840 But because they were marble altars, and they were literally being wrecked with sledgehammers, because it was hard to reform what was there in stone, literally in stone.

00:24:33.460 And statues were smashed and thrown into sea.

00:24:37.080 I mean, quite literally, this is what happened, which is why sometimes you can find old treasures of ancient statues at the bottom of lakes and so on.

00:24:48.820 But because this went on, it was a forceful rejection of the past, of tradition.

00:24:57.000 And so your point is very well made, that actual break rather than some kind of organic growth.

00:25:04.120 It was really evident.

00:25:05.380 But so many people actually don't know that history.

00:25:08.840 This is the situation that we're in now is that we're debating these things.

00:25:11.540 But and we think about debating Archbishop Lefebvre and what he did was what he did was right or not, the various actions of the faithful.

00:25:21.340 And we don't really know a lot of what was really going on in the 70s and 80s until we read about these horror stories that I mean, we talk about liturgical abuses today, which are bad.

00:25:35.200 But back then they were quite horrendous.

00:25:38.640 So we have this movement of the of the generation rejecting and rebelling against what came before.

00:25:46.200 But then we have the office really.

00:25:47.760 I mean, if there's anyone to blame here.

00:25:50.720 I think most of all, the bishops will have to answer at Judgment Day because they're the elders.

00:25:58.080 Their job in this in a cultural transmission is to watch over that transmission of the culture.

00:26:03.240 But they had a generation of young clerics.

00:26:07.300 Unfortunately, many priests were involved in this, but also lay people who were rebelling against their forefathers and destroying what came before.

00:26:14.220 And the bishops just let it happen to a large degree, unfortunately.

00:26:17.680 Part of this is because there was the fad was that patriarchy and fatherhood, spiritual fatherhood, should not include discipline.

00:26:30.780 We shouldn't discipline these clerics.

00:26:33.320 We shouldn't issue an anathema.

00:26:36.180 We shouldn't excommunicate these people.

00:26:38.760 We should just dialogue with these wolves.

00:26:42.920 But dialoguing with the wolves, unfortunately, has resulted in this destruction.

00:26:47.680 It's very true.

00:26:48.960 That's one of the underlying hallmarks of the destruction since the Second Vatican Council. 0.80

00:26:57.660 And that spirit still exists.

00:27:01.020 You can go and talk to some of the bishops who still believe the faith, who are still Catholic by any sensible sense of the word.

00:27:10.220 But they have an appreciation for the Latin mass still.

00:27:14.140 They have a, you know, they're still pro-life.

00:27:17.600 They still believe in the teachings of the church on the whole, all the LGBT alphabet language issues.

00:27:23.940 And yet, they have that same kind of, well, you know, we just, we can't be condemning and we have to, those things are really deadly.

00:27:36.660 Particularly when you are dealing with wolves.

00:27:39.540 They have brother bishops who are patently against the faith.

00:27:44.080 And then what do you do?

00:27:45.100 You're in a very strange, strange situation, particularly publicly, because you maybe think you don't want to condemn your brother bishops or whatever.

00:27:53.800 But that's, that's where we're in.

00:27:55.260 We're actually dealing with wolves that aren't hiding so much anymore.

00:27:59.020 Christ says, I am the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.

00:28:04.640 And we need to have bishops who are fearless and they're willing to be hated for, hated by the world for the sake of their sheep.

00:28:14.160 And attacked by the wolves for the sake of their sheep.

00:28:17.200 Destroyed by the wolves for the sake of their sheep.

00:28:19.360 That's what we need.

00:28:20.400 But in the absence of that, we have fathers like yourself who are standing up and doing what we can, doing what we can to defend the faith for the sake of our children.

00:28:33.080 Because we, that's our job.

00:28:36.360 Our job is to protect our children and protect our children's faith.

00:28:40.360 And unfortunately, we do have many clerics and bishops who are undermining that faith and the other bishops are doing nothing.

00:28:46.620 So we have to do something.

00:28:48.120 We just had a stunning thing happen not too long ago.

00:28:52.900 A bishop whom we appreciate so much at LifeSite, Bishop Strickland, he does a show at LifeSite once a week.

00:29:00.460 And we're in partnership with Virgin Most Powerful Radio, Terry Barber and his crew.

00:29:04.460 And he hosts that beautiful show with Bishop Strickland.

00:29:07.120 But Bishop Strickland did something amazing.

00:29:10.620 He called out the Pope for going against the deposit of the faith.

00:29:15.240 At the same time, he put out a tweet condemning as schismatic the SSPX.

00:29:20.260 And then within, I think, an hour or two, he corrected himself, noting that Bishop Schneider, his take on it, and retracting his take on the SSPX, saying they're not in schism.

00:29:36.420 To me, that was stunning because it was something you never see or hardly ever see.

00:29:43.680 It was a simplicity and humility that was truly touching, to me, truly remarkable.

00:29:49.600 The fathers in the role of bishops were, for the most part, fishermen.

00:29:59.160 Simple men who didn't pretend to take on errors of some kind of something else that they weren't.

00:30:06.680 But they were totally faithful.

00:30:08.680 And when they made mistakes, they corrected themselves publicly.

00:30:13.100 And that example was so stunning.

00:30:19.040 I would love to hear your take on it.

00:30:21.180 Yeah, like you said, there are many bishops, I think, out there who are Orthodox, who believe, you know, they were raised under John Paul II and Benedict.

00:30:30.380 And they believe everything that the Catechism, at least the older version of the New Catechism.

00:30:35.840 He just showed us that he has even more than courage and Orthodoxy.

00:30:40.120 He also has humility.

00:30:41.180 That, to me, you know, it's hard to tell who you can trust nowadays, unfortunately.

00:30:49.180 We don't know which bishops we can trust.

00:30:52.240 We don't know which priests we can trust sometimes or even lay people, lay commentators out there, myself included.

00:30:58.880 You don't know if you can trust me.

00:31:00.180 But I feel like you can trust Bishop Strickland.

00:31:03.960 I mean, even if, I mean, even if you, even if you are, happen to be like a critic of the SSPX or something like that, and you disagree or whatever, you have to admit that it took a great act of humility to say, oh, I was wrong.

00:31:18.780 And that, I feel like we can trust.

00:31:22.620 I mean, we already could trust him because we admired him.

00:31:25.220 He was doing a good job.

00:31:26.620 We were so thankful that we had a father figure, a shepherd who could shepherd us in Bishop Strickland.

00:31:33.080 But now he just showed us an even greater example, a Christ-like example of emptying himself and not caring about his reputation, but the truth, the truth above all else.

00:31:45.120 And St. Thomas says that humility is conformity with the truth.

00:31:48.340 And he cares more about the truth than his own self.

00:31:52.600 Something you so rarely see.

00:31:55.440 And you just had him also do something else, a great favor to the whole wide world, in that we have very few prelates who are totally embracing the way of Christ and his truth, despite everything around us.

00:32:07.820 And he points himself to Bishop Schneider, who is named Athanasius, not by his own choosing, for very good reason.

00:32:15.680 There's no more apropos thing than that.

00:32:18.340 He gets, in religion, you know, his born birth name or given name at birth or baptism was not Athanasius.

00:32:26.260 He was named then in religion.

00:32:28.220 And it is stunning that that's his name.

00:32:31.920 And here he is, almost literally one of the only bishops in the world, and pointed to by the sort of Athanasius of America, Bishop Strickland, as a moral authority.

00:32:43.980 And it was so beautiful.

00:32:44.640 You know, you've got a beautiful image of Our Lady beside you there.

00:32:49.700 What is that?

00:32:50.440 Yeah.

00:32:50.660 So this is the Russian Catholic icon of the Theotokos of Fatima.

00:32:57.160 The Theotokos is the term most commonly used in Eastern Catholicism, means the birth giver of God.

00:33:03.760 And the title of the icon is In The Unity, Through the Mother of God, Unity.

00:33:09.220 And it is actually written by a Russian Orthodox Christian in collaboration with Father Burgos, who is a Russian Rite Catholic priest in St. Petersburg, Russia.

00:33:24.860 And they are working to build a shrine to Our Lady of Fatima in St. Petersburg, Russia.

00:33:32.000 And so this is one of the projects that we are promoting.

00:33:36.800 We've been working to get this icon available for purchase in the West.

00:33:42.820 And so we will have that available very soon.

00:33:45.200 So you can go to 1peter5.com, subscribe to our mailing list to get the news on that.

00:33:50.380 This is something that we promote, first of all, for the intentions of Fatima, for all of the intentions, as we know, about Our Lady of Fatima, consecrating Russia and against the heirs of Russia on the first Saturdays and everything like that. 0.77

00:34:03.500 But really, it is a unique image for obvious reasons, because in a unique way, it incarnates the whole message of Fatima because it is the Russian icon of Fatima.

00:34:16.540 And so this is something that we promote for the sake of Fatima, but also for the sake of our brethren in our Ukrainian Catholic brethren, as well as our Russian Catholic brethren at a time of this awful war.

00:34:32.860 And so this is also an effort of peace, promoting peace against this awful conflict that our brethren are facing and promoting the gospel to unite non-Catholics, especially the Russian Orthodox, with the Holy See.

00:34:51.400 I think that's a special thing for you as a convert from Orthodoxy.

00:34:56.160 It must be a unique perspective you have, because the schism will one day come to an end, in whichever way the Lord has that planned.

00:35:08.100 And it sounds to me like it will sort of come with the conversion of Russia, which Our Lady promised would happen as well, after the consecration of Russia.

00:35:18.360 What does that mean for you?

00:35:20.920 It's an interesting question for someone who was coming from Orthodoxy.

00:35:24.460 I didn't actually even know about Fatima until later I became, after I became Catholic.

00:35:29.520 But it's quite amazing because it really shows that in the same way that after the split in the kingdom of Israel between the northern and the southern kingdoms, we know that the southern kingdom obviously was faithful to God.

00:35:45.700 But God still sent prophets to the northern kingdom because God still loved the northern kingdom.

00:35:51.520 And what Fatima shows us is that God loves Russia, even at a time when Russia was descended into the greatest evil perhaps the world has ever known in terms of totalitarian evil spreading and persecuting the church. 0.74

00:36:05.720 I read a Russian author whose name is Vladimir Solovyev.

00:36:10.260 He was a Russian Orthodox turned Catholic.

00:36:15.580 And he wrote a book called Russia and the Universal Church.

00:36:19.020 And he was able to really, this is somebody who died in the early 1900s.

00:36:22.780 But he helped to create the modern Russian Byzantine Rite Catholic Church of today through his influence.

00:36:33.780 And so I've always had a great love for Russia.

00:36:37.320 And so, yes, it's very significant.

00:36:40.680 I definitely feel God's providential hand in this work here at One Peter Five.

00:36:45.440 And I'm very thankful that I can be one of the workers to help this icon get promoted in the West.

00:36:53.240 What would you say for Catholics today?

00:36:55.380 You have a great work there at One Peter Five.

00:36:57.380 Tell us as well, where can people get a hold of you if they want to?

00:37:01.220 You can email me at editor at OnePeterFive.com.

00:37:04.200 I encourage everyone to join our lay sedentary.

00:37:07.520 We have two lay sedentaries.

00:37:08.440 One is about fasting, recovering, doing penances and recovering traditional rules of fasting.

00:37:15.980 And the other one is about Eucharistic reparation.

00:37:18.760 And this is one of the aspects that we offer at One Peter Five that is offered to the traditional movement.

00:37:23.720 And it's an aspect of the Fatima message that is not as emphasized.

00:37:28.420 But it is actually something that it was a part of the Fatima message even before Our Lady showed up in 1916 with the Angel of Portugal.

00:37:37.780 That taught the seers the reparation prayer. 0.95

00:37:41.740 And that prayer is part of the prayer that was composed by His Excellency Bishop Schneider.

00:37:48.140 That is the prayer that we pray as a part of our lay sedentary, which the one I'm talking about is,

00:37:54.860 My God, I believe, I adore, I trust, and I love you.

00:37:57.580 I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not trust, do not love you.

00:38:00.820 And what we hope to offer to the faithful is a spiritual means to channel all of the zeal and the anger that we feel against all the injustices perpetrated by bad clerics,

00:38:15.080 the Eucharistic abuses, where we can do something about that and we can offer reparation to Almighty God.

00:38:22.220 And in these United States, we, our bishops, are trying to create a Eucharistic revival in the faith and the real presence.

00:38:31.400 And we all want that as well as trads.

00:38:34.000 But we do believe strongly that there should be more sackcloth and ashes in that process.

00:38:41.240 And we need to do that first.

00:38:43.080 We need to make reparation to Almighty God for all of the wickedness that has been perpetrated against the Eucharistic heart of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

00:38:53.860 So that is, that's something that we'll be promoting a lot next month in June for the octave of Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart and everything,

00:39:03.140 which also allows us to make reparation for all of the evil that is promoted during June and even gets infected into various liturgies out there, even Catholic liturgies so-called.

00:39:16.280 We hope that this is a positive thing that we, the faithful, we can, we can put our hearts into this and we can truly make reparation to Almighty God and ask pardon for sinners and ask the conversion of sinners and evil men that their hearts may,

00:39:32.540 their hardened hearts may be softened by Our Lady of Fatima.

00:39:35.680 Truly beautiful works.

00:39:37.500 Go check that out.

00:39:38.280 St. Michael the Archangel to the three children before Our Lady appeared, taught them, a host elevated in the air by itself, and then went and knelt down,

00:39:49.520 the angel went and knelt down with the three little children, taught them that prayer.

00:39:53.120 My God, I believe, I adore, I trust, and I love thee.

00:39:56.160 I pray thee for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not trust, and do not love thee.

00:40:00.480 Absolutely beautiful.

00:40:02.640 Timothy Flanders, thank you so much for joining us and sharing with us your incredible ministry,

00:40:07.340 your incredible apostolate, I should say, and look forward to seeing that icon around.

00:40:14.500 Thank you, John Henry.

00:40:15.360 It's been a pleasure and a joy.

00:40:17.160 God bless you and God bless all of you.

00:40:19.220 And we'll see you next time.

00:40:27.720 Hi, everyone.

00:40:28.700 This is John Henry Weston.

00:40:29.860 We hope you enjoyed this program.

00:40:31.420 To see more like it, be sure to hit the subscribe button below to get all the latest content from LifeSite News.

00:40:36.700 Check the links in the description to read more and connect with us on social media

00:40:40.540 so that you can stay up to date with all the latest life, family, faith, and freedom news.

00:40:45.360 Thanks for watching, and may God bless you.

The John-Henry Westen Show - June 13, 2023

Converting To Catholicism In The Time Of Pope Francis ｜ Timothy Flanders

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