The John-Henry Westen Show - April 30, 2019


Episode 7： Why correcting Pope Francis is a true act of charity

Topics
joy in faith
Hosted by
John-Henry Westen
Mentioned
Cardinal Burke Pope Francis Eric Hess Bishop Burke Saint Athanasius Bishop Schneider Jesus Christ
Episode 5： Pope Francis’ disturbing support of a Cardinal caught covering up sex abuse Episode 8： What’s up with Pope Francis and Protestantism？

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

162.77

Word count

1,610

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, John Henry Weston answers a question about the joy that Catholics are supposed to have in the Catholic Church. He also discusses the life of Cardinal John Paul Cardinal Burke, who served as Bishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, until he was removed from office because of his opposition to homosexuality.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, this is John Henry Weston, co-founder and editor-in-chief of LifeSite News, and welcome
00:00:10.840 to the John Henry Weston Show. This episode is a special episode because I'm on the road,
00:00:16.360 and rather than skipping a week, I wanted to answer some of the questions that some of you
00:00:21.360 have sent in, some of the comments that we've seen on the videos, and so we're going to do
00:00:25.000 that this week, so stick around, and we'll start as we always do with the sign of the cross.
00:00:29.300 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
00:00:34.660 So, we've had many responses. Thank you for watching this show, and thank you for sharing
00:00:39.880 it with many people. But we've had quite a few responses, some of which were concerning,
00:00:44.200 and I want to address those. For one thing, one person wrote in to say, where is, you know,
00:00:50.060 the joy, the love that we're supposed to have in the church? And I want to say, we do have love,
00:00:55.620 we should have love, and I'm sorry if in my former videos, I've not demonstrated, not shown that love,
00:01:01.940 not shown that joy for the faith. We mean to. We mean to show the joy of the faith. We need to show
00:01:07.600 the joy of the faith, because it's in that joy, a lot of the time, that people are attracted to come
00:01:12.740 to the one true Catholic faith. And so, it's hard, given the situation that the church is in,
00:01:20.920 to stay joyful all the time. Yet, we're called to be joyful. It doesn't mean we're la-di-da all
00:01:26.920 every five seconds. No, but generally, we have a character of joy. Sometimes we feel sadness and
00:01:32.900 other things, but we come back to that stable place of joy. It's not a joy in our circumstance.
00:01:38.700 It's a joy in knowing that the Lord is there, that the Lord loves us, that our final destination is
00:01:44.040 heaven, and that's what we're striving for. And yes, we fall. Yes, we're all sinners. And we have
00:01:49.020 the great grace of the sacrament of confession, of Holy Communion offered to us daily, which I beg you
00:01:56.180 to avail yourselves of. And these are the things that bring us great joy. Then there are things like
00:02:03.380 friends and family, your own children. And so, there are lots of things to be joyful about. And yes,
00:02:10.040 even in the situation of the church today, there are a lot of great Catholic heroes out there.
00:02:16.660 I think first and foremost of Cardinal Burke. And I raise him because we've received and we've seen
00:02:24.340 lots of complaints about Cardinal Burke, as if Cardinal Burke were an enemy of the Pope, or,
00:02:29.980 you know, hating the Pope, or jealous of the Pope. And that truly is laughable. If you know anything
00:02:37.720 about Cardinal Burke, it's that he loves the church. He would give his life for the church
00:02:43.560 willingly, happily. He's a joyful warrior. And yes, he's been tried and troubled and had hard times and
00:02:50.780 many, many difficulties, but he's a happy warrior for the truth, for the truth of Jesus Christ.
00:02:57.120 And I'll give you a good example. A good example of the truth of Cardinal Burke is this.
00:03:04.880 You see, many people, even before Pope Francis, disliked Cardinal Burke for all sorts of reasons.
00:03:11.720 One, he sticks close to the church's teaching, not close, right on the line of the church's teaching
00:03:16.720 on life issues, on family issues. And today, that can be very difficult. And of course, especially around
00:03:22.520 the issue of homosexuality, it's always very, you know, hard and difficult. People say you're a hater
00:03:27.840 and a bigot and so on. Well, he's a happier warrior, happy warrior also in that sense. See, there was a
00:03:34.860 parishioner, a member of his church when he was in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and he was a gay activist. His name 0.79
00:03:42.020 was Eric Hess. And Eric Hess got so fed up, you know, with the teaching of the church, living his
00:03:49.680 homosexual lifestyle, that he decided one day to pack up his Bible, rosary candle, and all that stuff 0.77
00:03:55.980 and send it back into the church. And so he did. And lo and behold, he got a letter back from the 0.69
00:04:01.900 current bishop, who then was now Cardinal Burke, Bishop Burke back then. And Bishop Burke wrote to him
00:04:08.460 saying he was saddened, but that he would respect his wishes, asking to be removed, you know, from
00:04:13.320 the list of Catholics. And also told him, though, you know, anytime you want to come in and talk,
00:04:20.440 I'll be here for you. And Eric Hess describes later how, as a homosexual activist, he was very upset.
00:04:27.580 How dare this bishop send me a letter and wrote back to then Bishop Burke saying his letter was
00:04:36.480 harassment and that, you know, he would be in big trouble if he wrote again. And that said, he wanted
00:04:42.480 nothing more to do with the church. Sure enough, not being discouraged, Cardinal Burke, or then Bishop
00:04:47.180 Burke, wrote back to say, yes, he won't be contacting him again. But if any time he chooses to come back,
00:04:53.520 he would accept him back with open arms. Well, it just so happened many years later that Eric Hess did
00:05:00.840 have a turnaround in his life. He found himself in sickness and conversion and really felt a want to
00:05:08.480 apologize to Cardinal Burke. And so he wrote a letter and sent it in. Now, the bishop then asked for him
00:05:19.860 to come in to come in and see him. So he came in. And Bishop Burke then received Eric Hess. And he told
00:05:29.220 him, as he sat there, as he sat there together, I want you to wait here for a second. And he went and
00:05:35.720 got the box of his Bible and candle and rosary and things, and gave it back to him and said, I've been
00:05:43.920 praying for you. And Eric Hess will attest to this day that he regards Cardinal Burke as a great father
00:05:54.120 figure, a father figure that welcomed back, welcomed him back into the arms of Christ with an embrace so
00:06:03.240 very warm. That's Cardinal Burke. No hater, no bigot, no one lacking in joy, just someone who ultimately
00:06:13.120 loves the faith and loves the church and loves the Pope. You know, in his write-up on what happened
00:06:22.180 with Cardinal Burke, Eric Hess compared Cardinal Burke to the great Saint Athanasius. He said he's an
00:06:29.660 Athanasius of our day. And I want to take that up because there's another bishop who has a similar joy,
00:06:36.540 a similar love for the church, who's also accused of attacking the Pope and hating the Pope. And that's 0.53
00:06:42.560 Bishop Athanasius Schneider. And one of the things that he often says that really strikes and really
00:06:50.880 answers this question, this concern about the need to love Pope Francis, is that the real friends,
00:06:59.980 those who truly love the Pope, are those who question what he's doing, who call him to bring
00:07:05.800 clarity. Because as Bishop Schneider says, anything else, showing him adulation and applauding him
00:07:15.160 along and doing these things that we know are harmful for the church and harmful for his soul,
00:07:20.120 aren't doing him any favors nor themselves any favors when it comes to judgment day. You know what?
00:07:27.120 We're all called to judgment day. We're all going to face our Lord. And so I want to challenge you.
00:07:33.360 Do you love Pope Francis enough? Do you love him enough to a pray from every day, which you should
00:07:41.800 be doing? And I've attested to you, I do every day and all the staff at LifeSite, we pray on our
00:07:47.460 morning prayer call for Pope Francis every day. But do you love him enough to be really concerned about
00:07:55.200 what is going on? What's going on is very harmful for the church indeed. And I hope my video series thus
00:08:01.440 far and will continue to show that harm very specifically with the evidence. But are you
00:08:09.600 showing enough love to Pope Francis? Are you concerned about these things? Are you concerned
00:08:16.360 about his soul? A lot of people have said to me, you know, if you had the chance to meet Pope Francis,
00:08:21.520 would you? And what would you say? And I'd say, sure, I'd meet with Pope Francis.
00:08:27.060 I'd tell him, Holy Father, thank you for meeting with me. I want to tell you I'm concerned for your
00:08:33.160 soul. It's true. That's what we're concerned about. We're concerned for his soul. Sure, we're concerned
00:08:40.160 about the confusion among the faithful, confusion even to our own children, as I've already described
00:08:46.080 in previous videos. But we're also concerned for the Pope's soul. And so will you pray with me
00:08:55.480 for a conversion of heart of Pope Francis? This is absolutely necessary to our faith today.
00:09:04.300 It's absolutely necessary for the church today. And it should leave you a happy warrior, not someone
00:09:12.600 with their, you know, any kind of depression or anger or anything, with a joy, a joy knowing that you
00:09:20.860 can serve the church in offering up your own prayers, sacrifices and sufferings and joys in union with the
00:09:28.200 Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world for the intentions of Christ himself, which are to bring
00:09:36.280 the Holy Father to clarity. And we do all this in charity. As you know, our motto at LifeSite News,
00:09:43.140 love in truth, caritas in veritate. And may God bless you from all of us here at LifeSite News.
00:09:49.920 We hope you had a great, happy, joyful Easter.