The John-Henry Westen Show - July 22, 2022


FLASHBACK： John-Henry Westen warns about Francis' remarks on life and family in 2015


Summary

Learn English with Pope Francis. Pope Francis addresses the Rome Life and Family Forum in Rome, Italy on the subject of homosexuality and the Church's response to it in the wake of the 2013 Synod on Homosexuality and the Apostolic Exhortation


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Embrances, reverend fathers, honored members of the Rome Life Forum, and guests, it is
00:00:26.660 a great joy for me to be here. You are, in the words that John Paul II gave me when I spoke
00:00:35.720 with him in 1993, good people. Speaking to the members of the Rome Life Forum, with whom
00:00:46.020 I have spent two days, two wonderful days, more than a hundred of you from most, many,
00:00:51.760 many, many countries, dozens of different countries, it has been an honor and a pleasure and unworthy
00:00:59.680 though I am to serve with you in this movement for Christ and for his gift of the family.
00:01:08.680 You are such good people. I'm willing to hand you my life. And because I'm willing to do
00:01:15.760 that, I'm so happy that my daughter was here, my eldest daughter was here, to experience
00:01:21.760 the goodness that you are. That goodness for you leaders of life and family has been sorely
00:01:31.760 tested. These last, this last year, these last couple of years. Around the world, we have
00:01:43.760 often been confronted, even in the church, in our various nations, sometimes with a lack
00:01:50.760 of support from those who we thought would naturally be not only our closest allies, but the leaders
00:01:58.760 whom we could follow. We had in the words of the beloved words of John Paul II in the Gospel
00:02:09.760 of Life that the right to life should be courageously and constantly promoted. We had the words of Pope
00:02:19.760 Benedict that taught us that the primary goal of the Catholic laity is to speak in the public square the truths
00:02:31.760 on the non-negotiable issues of life, of family, and that parents are the primary educators of children.
00:02:44.760 When in our own countries, the hierarchy sometimes did not agree, did not support, we felt unsupported by, we had Rome at our backs.
00:02:59.760 But since the confusion that came with the Synod, that support seems to have left.
00:03:09.760 And it's not just the Synod. There is a lack of clarity in communications, even from the offices here that require that clarification so we can understand what is happening.
00:03:23.760 And I'll give you a very powerful example. The Holy Father made a beautiful gesture, which was, in all likelihood, a call to repentance.
00:03:38.760 But, when asked for clarification, we were not told it was a call to repentance.
00:03:46.760 What happened was a year ago, almost a year ago today, there was a mass celebrated in Casa Santa Marta with a priest,
00:03:57.760 Michel de Paolo, here in Italy, who is quite well known. He's well known because he started a pro-gay organization.
00:04:08.760 He's well known because he's a huge dissenter on the matters of life and family, and particularly on the subject of homosexuality,
00:04:18.760 where he has not only gone contrary to the Church in minor ways, but very specifically stated the wrongness of the Church's teaching
00:04:29.760 on the fact that the sexual actions between two men and two women are impermissible.
00:04:36.760 He's even gone on to say that the Church's teaching will change, and we must be patient.
00:04:42.760 Now, in the Mass, there was a concelebrated Mass, and after the Mass, the Holy Father kissed Father de Paulus' hand.
00:04:54.760 And it was a gesture that we could see that saints have done with sinners and those who need repentance.
00:05:03.760 And our Lord was Himself criticized by the Pharisees for eating with sinners and tax collectors.
00:05:15.760 And yet, what did He respond? In Luke chapter 5, we have His own account.
00:05:21.760 He said, I did not come for the just, but for sinners, but He added, to call them to repentance.
00:05:36.760 And I have heard so many times, aren't you being like the Pharisees because you are pointing this out?
00:05:45.760 The problem with the communication, the miscommunication, the failure to communicate that this was about repentance.
00:05:52.760 And I say, no, because had that communication happened, had that clarification been made publicly,
00:06:01.760 all of us in this room would have heard about this incident and rejoiced with tears of joy.
00:06:11.760 Because the truth is, we all love sinners because, especially in my case, I was in grave sin.
00:06:22.760 I was destined and bound for hell.
00:06:26.760 But I was called to repent of this.
00:06:31.760 We have to fix the communications error, the need to show the beauty.
00:06:38.760 Pope Francis, when he came in as Pope, came in with a big media splash of being the Pope who kissed the feet of AIDS patients.
00:06:51.760 What an amazing image that should have been and was, if it was used properly to communicate the truth.
00:07:01.760 What's the truth?
00:07:02.760 The truth is, we see in those men and women who are suffering with a disease that is so linked to a behavior,
00:07:12.760 which is condemned by the church, not out of any kind of hatred, but out of mercy.
00:07:20.760 The church and Christ in his love for men and women with same-sex attraction,
00:07:27.760 the church will accept the pejorative label, the false label of hater and bigot in order to have mercy and love.
00:07:39.760 Because it communicates to those who are in a lifestyle that is so harmful to them.
00:07:46.760 We care about you enough to tell you that this harms your bodies and harms your souls.
00:07:58.760 And even if they don't agree with us, at least those on the other side, as it were, can see we're coming at this from an altruistic perspective.
00:08:10.760 And what better thing to kiss the feet of AIDS patients and say, I love you.
00:08:20.760 And yet at the same time, the witness of Pope Francis in Buenos Aires was about opposing same-sex marriage with vehement language.
00:08:28.760 Yet against the backdrop of his kissing the feet of eight patients, there is an opportunity to show love.
00:08:38.760 We need to be able to make those kinds of clear communications that will show, that will demonstrate to the world the clarity of the love and mercy that we are coming from.
00:08:53.760 But the synod has not done that clarification.
00:09:01.760 In fact, there is massive confusion.
00:09:05.760 And thanks be to God and the interventions of at least two of our guests and their African brothers.
00:09:16.760 There was at least some resurgence of sanity.
00:09:31.760 Because it was insane what was going on from the midterm or Lazio on.
00:09:36.760 It was mayhem.
00:09:38.760 It was like an atom bomb had gone on.
00:09:46.760 And there is still the need for clarity.
00:09:50.760 Things have been misinterpreted by the media everywhere.
00:09:54.760 Pope Francis' comment, who am I to judge misinterpreted in the first place to be about one thing when it was about another, has been used all over the world.
00:10:04.760 Most demonstrations in favor of gay marriage have the poster.
00:10:09.760 It's on T-shirts.
00:10:12.760 It needs to be clarified.
00:10:14.760 The media doesn't help at all because the media is on the other side and uses the Pope's words to bash Catholic activists in America and all over the West.
00:10:26.760 The clarity we need is so important and still needs to be done.
00:10:32.760 We have sometimes been shocked by things that we have heard.
00:10:43.760 The pro-life movement has been told that we can't talk about the issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception all the time.
00:10:54.760 But many then wonder, where is this happening?
00:10:59.760 Because in most of our countries in the West, we've had a virtual silence from the pulpits on these issues.
00:11:08.760 And we've had that virtual silence be a torture for most of us.
00:11:13.760 And that virtual silence is accompanied by a shouting from every secular pulpit, magazine, book, and screen of the gospel, I should say, of the anti-gospel of hedonism and sexual aberration called liberation.
00:11:35.760 That gospel, that anti-gospel, is promoted all throughout the world.
00:11:42.760 It is promoted as a new religion that does not allow for dissent.
00:11:48.760 And it is becoming increasingly, as John Paul II and his successor predicted it would be, a tyranny.
00:11:59.760 In my own country of Canada, where we passed same-sex marriage in 2005, many of the people assumed what same-sex marriage was in, there could finally be cultural peace.
00:12:13.760 The LGBT movement would have achieved what they wanted and we could have peace.
00:12:20.760 But there was no peace.
00:12:22.760 There was an increased attack on parental rights and on religious freedom.
00:12:30.760 Because that movement is tyrannical and it does not allow for dissent.
00:12:39.760 It is a new orthodoxy that demands absolute and total submission.
00:12:45.760 Because they believe it akin to racism, they are willing to stop it out in one generation.
00:12:53.760 Already in Canada and throughout many parts of the United States, parents are forbidden from exempting their children from classes which teach the equality of all families.
00:13:06.760 In the province of Quebec, one province over from where I live in Ontario, the law was passed to have such equality education be taught not only in the public schools, but also in the Catholic schools.
00:13:21.760 And not only in the Catholic publicly funded schools, but also in the private schools.
00:13:26.760 So much so that we have a refugee family in my province of Ontario who fled from Quebec because they didn't want to educate their seven children in that type of education.
00:13:45.760 We are dealing with an encroaching hampering of religious freedom through this very means of the religion, if you will, and this push on gender ideology.
00:14:06.760 We have today, and I was telling you, I was born in 1970, so I wasn't there for what I'm going to describe, but I've heard from many of you and the beautiful historians who we read of the confusion in the church around the promulgation of the money and the years leading up to it.
00:14:29.760 That confusion engendered because there was ambiguity at the time, there was wondering.
00:14:36.760 You had cardinals in the church submitting reports that we should change the teaching.
00:14:41.760 And of course, a couple of years later, we finally had clarity in the beautiful encyclical Romani Vitae.
00:14:48.760 But yet that very delay, that very ambiguity, that very wondering what is going on, resulted in what we see still today.
00:15:01.760 The majority of Catholic couples, Catholic women, practicing artificial birth control.
00:15:11.760 And so that same confusion plays out today in the attitude of Catholics towards same-sex marriage.
00:15:22.760 I have been blessed to travel much of the world and go and speak to Catholic youth.
00:15:29.760 I had a great opportunity a couple of years ago to go to New Zealand and speak in Catholic schools, Catholic high schools, grade 12 students.
00:15:37.760 And I was told by many, many teachers there, on average, it's 50 to 1 of Catholic students in the final year of schooling against the teaching of the church on same-sex marriage.
00:15:54.760 There is a confusion in the church very much akin to that which happened with Humana Vitae.
00:16:04.760 What has come of this failure?
00:16:08.760 Failure to teach about contraception, against contraception for openness in life.
00:16:14.760 Failure to teach about the problems of in vitro fertilization and the solution of natural family planning.
00:16:22.760 Failure to teach about homosexual acts and the need for chastity.
00:16:28.760 Failure to teach about immodesty and the need for custody of the eyes.
00:16:35.760 Has that failure, based on maybe a want to be pastoral or perhaps just convenience or to be politically incorrect, has that failure resulted in a cultural peace?
00:16:49.760 It hasn't.
00:16:50.760 The failure to preach against contraception has resulted in the abortion holocaust.
00:16:59.760 The failure to teach about immodesty and custody of AIs has led to a near universal addiction to pornography.
00:17:06.760 The failure to teach about the harms and wrongness of in vitro fertilization has given us embryonic stem cell research and cloning.
00:17:19.760 And the failure to teach the errors of homosexual sex has led to same-sex marriage and one of the greatest repressions of religious freedom that we have seen to date.
00:17:34.760 As we heard in today's reading in the extraordinary form, there was a beautiful quote which startled me this morning at Mass.
00:17:46.760 The very first reading today was already in my notes, was St. Paul talking to Bishop Timothy.
00:17:56.760 Talking about a time that would come when people would have itching ears and not want to hear the truth.
00:18:06.760 And wanting to heap to themselves teachers of what they want to hear.
00:18:12.760 And St. Paul's words to Timothy are so charged with emotion.
00:18:18.760 I charge thee before Jesus Christ, he said, to preach the truth in season and out of season.
00:18:31.760 We had this admonition in the church from 1986 in the CDF letter by Cardinal Ratzinger, of course, who was to become Pope Benedict.
00:18:45.760 You had the letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church about homosexual persons.
00:18:51.760 And in there the church in her wisdom forbade silence on the immorality of homosexual acts.
00:19:02.760 And why did it forbid silence?
00:19:06.760 Remember, this was a pastoral document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons that forbade silence.
00:19:14.760 Of course, forbade going against the teaching, obviously, but forbade silence.
00:19:18.760 Because it forbade silence in the interest of pastoral care.
00:19:22.760 Because it said, silence is neither caring nor pastoral.
00:19:26.760 Because it denies homosexual men and women the care they need and deserve.
00:19:37.760 You have this not only from St. Paul's Timothy, not only from the Vatican's document.
00:19:43.760 You have this also from atheists themselves and from those who are even in the LGBT community, as it were.
00:19:56.760 Canada, as I said, passed same-sex marriage in 2005.
00:20:00.760 There was a homosexual activist, a LGBT leader who's the head of the Rainbow Coalition in Canada.
00:20:08.760 And he went to the government a few years after the passage of our same-sex marriage legislation
00:20:12.760 to demand extra health care dollars for the LGBT community.
00:20:17.760 And he said, in fact, the health of the queer community in Canada was extremely bad.
00:20:34.760 He talked about how anal cancer was rampant in the gay male community.
00:20:39.760 How breast cancer was rampant in the lesbian community.
00:20:43.760 And then he said, many of the deaths that occur in our community are hidden.
00:20:50.760 We don't see them.
00:20:51.760 But those of us who are on the front lines see them.
00:20:54.760 And I'm tired of watching my community die.
00:21:00.760 We have this admonition to speak the truth clearly on these issues,
00:21:04.760 from the scriptures themselves, from the Vatican itself,
00:21:08.760 and even from the LGBT community,
00:21:11.760 proving to us and hopefully to themselves,
00:21:14.760 his behavior harms the body.
00:21:17.760 And we know as Catholics and Christians that it harms the soul.
00:21:21.760 What does all this mean?
00:21:23.760 In Proverbs 13, 24, we're told,
00:21:28.760 and especially people like myself, a father of eight children,
00:21:32.760 are told,
00:21:34.760 he who spares the rod of discipline hates his child.
00:21:42.760 But when you discipline them, you love them.
00:21:46.760 We're told in Hosea,
00:21:51.760 my people perish for lack of knowledge.
00:21:55.760 And he was speaking to the religious hierarchy at the time.
00:21:59.760 Our Lord condemning them for not giving the truth to the people of God.
00:22:05.760 And also we had this warning from Our Lady of Fatima,
00:22:15.760 who said,
00:22:17.760 more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.
00:22:25.760 But once again, the warnings on this being a matter of hate and true love,
00:22:30.760 being to express the truth, especially of the spiritual realities,
00:22:33.760 come not only from the scriptures,
00:22:35.760 not only from a private revelation with Our Lady,
00:22:39.760 they come from the atheists as well.
00:22:42.760 One of the most famous atheists in the United States,
00:22:45.760 Penn Jillette,
00:22:47.760 had a television show
00:22:48.760 where he did more bashing of the Catholic Church than anything else.
00:22:52.760 And Penn Jillette said in 2008,
00:22:57.760 a quote that I carry on my phone with me,
00:23:00.760 and is so very powerful.
00:23:02.760 He spoke of,
00:23:06.760 just one second, I've got to find it.
00:23:14.760 There we go.
00:23:15.760 So, Penn Jillette said,
00:23:20.760 if you believe that there's a heaven and a hell,
00:23:24.760 and that people could be going to hell
00:23:26.760 or not getting eternal life or whatever,
00:23:29.760 and you think that it's not really worth telling them that
00:23:33.760 because it would make it socially awkward.
00:23:35.760 How much do you have to hate somebody
00:23:39.760 not to proselytize?
00:23:41.760 How much do you have to hate somebody
00:23:43.760 to believe that everlasting life is possible
00:23:47.760 and not tell them that?
00:23:49.760 these words from this atheist,
00:23:55.760 from this real hater of the church, it seems,
00:24:00.760 should convict all of us,
00:24:02.760 but more importantly,
00:24:03.760 our spiritual fathers in the faith,
00:24:05.760 to preach in mercy the truth,
00:24:10.760 this beautiful truth.
00:24:14.760 Why is the church withholding in her treasure house
00:24:20.760 the treasures of the church?
00:24:22.760 And I don't mean the gold and the art
00:24:24.760 that's in the museum over here.
00:24:26.760 The true treasures are the teachings
00:24:31.760 that bring us eternal salvation.
00:24:36.760 We need to look out for poverty.
00:24:38.760 We agree.
00:24:40.760 But it was Mother Teresa herself who said,
00:24:44.760 it was the greatest one who cared for the poor,
00:24:48.760 who said, at least in recent times.
00:24:52.760 When she was asked in an interview,
00:24:54.760 why are you sending nuns to the United States?
00:24:57.760 You have poverty there and not over here.
00:25:00.760 And she said,
00:25:02.760 your poverty there is much greater there
00:25:08.760 because there you have a spiritual poverty
00:25:11.760 as opposed to our physical poverty.
00:25:18.760 In conclusion,
00:25:20.760 I would like to beg
00:25:24.760 on behalf of my own children,
00:25:28.760 my own eight children,
00:25:30.760 on behalf of the thousands of children
00:25:35.760 that are represented here in this room,
00:25:38.760 where I'd say the average number of children we have
00:25:40.760 is probably over five,
00:25:42.760 and then grandchildren over 50.
00:25:45.760 But on behalf of our children,
00:25:47.760 I would beg the fathers of the church
00:25:53.760 to speak these truths,
00:25:55.760 to speak them in love and charity.
00:25:59.760 Caritas in veritate.
00:26:01.760 Because these truths are needed now more than ever before.
00:26:05.760 The future of the church depends on this.
00:26:11.760 And that's not really my estimation,
00:26:13.760 because 18 days before he was made pope,
00:26:17.760 one day prior to John Paul II's death,
00:26:20.760 Cardinal Ratzinger said,
00:26:23.760 very soon it will not be possible to state publicly
00:26:27.760 that the homosexuality is a disorder.
00:26:31.760 That's an approximation,
00:26:33.760 something exactly like that.
00:26:35.760 And so today we are restricted.
00:26:40.760 We have this lack of speaking about these issues.
00:26:43.760 And yet all we face today
00:26:46.760 is the label of hated,
00:26:50.760 the label of politically incorrect,
00:26:52.760 the disdain of the world,
00:26:54.760 and sometimes the loss of prestige.
00:26:58.760 We have it excused under pastoral considerations,
00:27:02.760 prudential considerations.
00:27:04.760 And so we often don't hear these truths.
00:27:07.760 The treasures,
00:27:08.760 the real treasure of the church,
00:27:10.760 remains locked up.
00:27:12.760 Yet if we're unwilling to speak these truths today,
00:27:17.760 what about tomorrow,
00:27:20.760 when those penalties will increase
00:27:23.760 to loss of job,
00:27:26.760 to loss of freedom in prison,
00:27:29.760 and perhaps even to martyrdom?
00:27:32.760 Please, O fathers of the church,
00:27:35.760 speak the truths in love and in charity
00:27:40.760 for the sake of our children.
00:27:42.760 Thank you.
00:27:44.760 Thank you.
00:27:45.760 Thank you.
00:27:47.760 Thank you.
00:27:49.760 Thank you.
00:27:51.760 Thank you.
00:27:52.760 Thank you.