Here’s How the Jesuits Cancelled One of Their Most Faithful Sons
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Summary
In this episode of The John Henry Weston Show, we are at the Coalition for Canceled Priests Conference and wanted to show you a glimpse of some of the canceled priests. And we have with us an author who was a close personal friend of one of those canceled priests, Father Paul Minkowski.
Transcript
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I went to Hollywood cocktail parties and told everyone I was working on a novel about the
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nature of evil and I thought that was very sophisticated. And then I got to be on page
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250 and realized that I couldn't look at the nature of evil without looking at the nature of good.
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Hello my friends and welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show.
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So we are at the Coalition for Canceled Priests conference and wanted to show you a glimpse of
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some of the canceled priests. And we have with us an author who was a close personal friend of
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one of the canceled priests. In fact, one of the canceled priests canceled back when it wasn't
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cool to be a canceled priest. But you might know him because if you've been around in the Catholic
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world, you would remember that over at Catholic World News, they had a writer who was unnamed
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under the pen name Diogenes. And this writer was so keen, so on the mark, so plugged in,
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everyone thought, ooh, he must be like in the hierarchy or he must be, he's someone who really
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knows, but he's really, really good. And there was all these rumors about who it could be.
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Well, that priest was Father Paul Minkowski, a Jesuit, and therefore silenced, if you will,
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canceled by the Jesuits. We're going to get into this picture of a canceled priest with the author
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of the book. Here's the book, The Sound of Silence, Karen Hall. Stay tuned.
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Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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So, The Sound of Silence, the publication is by, it's a crisis publication. You were close to Father Paul
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Monkowski. He was, we were very good friends for a long time. And it made no sense because only God
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could have put that together because I had been a television writer for 35 or 40 years when I met
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him. And he lived to be 66 and he never owned a television. His family didn't have one when he was
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growing up. So, you know, that was God keeping me humble because I had all these accolades that meant
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absolutely nothing to him. What shows did you write for? I started on MASH. Oh, really? I went from
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there to Hill Street Blues. And then I did Moonlighting. I did a lot of movies and miniseries.
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I did five years of a show called Judging Amy that my sister was the executive producer of. And I did a
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couple of episodes of Good Wife and a lot of other stuff. Wow, the later iterations, I don't know, but
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MASH and even Moonlighting, Bruce Willis and I forget who else. Yes, yes, yes. So yeah, no, I probably
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watched your work. Very good. So that was pretty secular though. It was very secular. And I tell this
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story in the book. I converted myself in the process of writing a novel. I grew up Methodist. I moved to
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Hollywood and declared myself an agnostic. And so, you know, Hollywood was thrilled to have me as an
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agnostic if I didn't have the guts to be a full atheist. So I got a lot of support. And I started
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writing a novel in 19, around 1990, 91. The story of the novel was a friend of mine had a mother who
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thought there was a demonic curse on their family. And I knew the story of the family. And I thought
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that her case would hold up in court. So I thought, I want to see if I can write that as a novel and make
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an intelligent case for that being true. So that's what I did. I went to Hollywood cocktail parties and told
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everyone I was working on a novel about the nature of evil. And I thought that was very sophisticated.
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And then I got to be on page 250 and realized that I couldn't look at the nature of evil without
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looking at the nature of good, which is something that I hadn't given any thought to in a long time.
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So I decided I had to go back to church and I had last left me at a Catholic church. I had a Catholic
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boyfriend and started to go into mass with him and loved it. So I went back to church so I could remember
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why anybody could possibly believe this, you know, what at the time to me was nonsense. And it took
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me about a month before I realized that I was where I was supposed to be. So I joined the church. But,
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you know, so there's two halves of my Hollywood career. And the first half was, you know, I was an
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agnostic and a bleeding heart liberal and, you know, no one, no one was unhappy with me. And then after
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conversion, they were less happy with me. But when I first converted, it was during the period of time
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when spirituality was considered cool. I don't know if you remember, but there were shows on like
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Touched by an Angel and things like that. So Christianity fell into the umbrella of spirituality
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is cool. And that lasted for about five years. And then the world changed and all other spirituality was
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cool. But Christianity was not. And as the world changed and Christianity became less popular,
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I didn't get as many jobs as I used to. So which is fine, because I really think I was born to do this.
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Interesting. How did you meet? How did you meet Father Minkowski?
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After I converted, I converted in Los Angeles, which means that, you know, I thought I had converted to
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Catholicism. I had really converted to Mahoneyism because Colonel Mahoney, you know, all the priests
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had gotten to the point that they agreed. He was like the Pope of Los Angeles. Yes, very much like,
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if anybody's wondering, the reference very much like Theodore McCarrick, with all the same proclivities.
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Yeah. And so my mother-in-law was a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. And so she knew
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Father Minkowski. And she wanted me to be a real Catholic. There was a meeting of the Fellowship of
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Catholic Scholars that he was going to be a speaker at. And so she sent me in her place. And she told me,
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do not get on the plane to come home if you haven't introduced yourself to Father Minkowski.
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And she was a scary lady. She was a third order Dominican. She was holier than, I mean, more Catholic
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than the Pope back when that meant something. And so I was not going to get home and tell her I didn't do it.
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So I went up and introduced myself and I gave him my email address. And he sent me an email a couple
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of days after I got back home and was talking about things I had said to him at the conference.
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In fact, the email is in the book. When I went back, when I went to write the book,
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I kind of wanted to look back and see how did this friendship build. And I realized that it never did.
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We met as foxhole buddies. It's like we knew, we knew we were in the same business. And we were just like
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best friends. It's nice to meet you. So beautiful, beautiful. So what happened to Father? I mean,
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such a brilliant man. Yes, a Jesuit. But no, no, that sounds weird. But very brilliant mind.
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Very great writer. I mean, gosh, he could write. Yes, he was.
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But what happens to bring him to cancellation and why? I wrote about it in the book in detail. So I can just
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tell you that the short version is that he came out against Robert Drinan, who was a Jesuit who ran for
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Congress, ran several terms. And he's basically the godfather of abortion in the Democratic Party.
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He ran as a Democrat from Massachusetts. And he went up to Hyannisport and explained to the Kennedy
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brothers why it would be okay for them to say that they were personally not in favor of abortion, but they
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shouldn't tell anyone else what to do. So he really is. He has so much blood on his hands. It's
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unfathomable. Father Paul wrote, he was going to write an article. He ended up deciding not to write
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the article. And he gave all the research for the article to a man named James Hitchcock, who's a
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church historian. The research showed that the Jesuits' father general, a man named Pedro Arrupe,
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had tacitly given permission to Grinan to run. Because, you know, St. Ignatius didn't want Jesuits
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running for public office. And so he ignored that. And that's what he did. Well, when the Jesuits found
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out that Father Paul had given the research to James Hitchcock, and then James Hitchcock wrote an article
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about it. So basically, you know, all their dirty laundry was aired. And so that's what got him
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canceled. At the time they told him not to, he couldn't write anymore under his byline. And so
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that's why for a few years after that, he took the pseudonym of Diogenes and he wrote under Diogenes.
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Yeah. But like you said, it didn't take people long to figure out who was writing Diogenes. And so the
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Jesuits told him that he couldn't write under any byline. And so that's when he stopped writing.
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He got canceled again. So he's canceled once and then canceled again. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we have that.
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They would dig him up and cancel him again if they could get away with it.
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Now, what did you, you say he was a holy man. You say he was good. What, what was it about him that
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struck you so, so profoundly? He lived radically. He, his foul poverty was such that
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he never owned more than you could put into a medium sized box because, you know, in case of
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sudden relocation or being kicked out. And, um, I went to his room with a couple of
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judgment friends of his after he died and, uh, and he had told the truth. There was really no more
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there than you could put in a medium sized box. He had, uh, I think four shirt, black shirts.
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He wore clerics all the time, four black shirts, two black pants, one pair of black shoes. That's his
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clothing. And, um, they, most of them came from dead Jesuits who he would go and raid their closets.
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So, um, he just, he took his vow of poverty really seriously. You know, he just had an air of holiness.
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If you were around him, you just knew. But the thing that was so surprising and why people treasured
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him so much is that he was one of the funniest people we'd ever met. We would argue over who
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was going to get to sit with next to him at the table. Um, so he wasn't somber and holy,
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you know, he was hysterically funny. Give us, if you have an example of that, we'd love it.
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I was going to, uh, give one this morning my speech, but I was afraid I'd get excommunicated.
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So, uh, I'll, I'll just let them read that in the book.
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Oh, okay. His, his wit, at least as Diogenes, was, was quite biting. It was very, very good,
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very insightful. I think for that reason, the character of Diogenes over at Catholic World News
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There seemed to be sometimes a different writer and then sometimes, uh, it was Father Paul.
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I didn't know it was Father Paul at the time, uh, but reading it, you'd recognize, oh,
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oh, that doesn't seem like him, but oh, well, whatever. Maybe he's having a bad day. But we
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learned later, uh, from Phil, Phil Lawler, uh, that indeed sometimes, at least in the beginning,
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as you said, uh, there's, there was another writer or two, uh, using the pseudonym.
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But then he was clearly so much better that he just became Diogenes. Yeah.
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And, um, he referred to, uh, himself as Uncle Di when he was going to tell you something that Diogenes
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would say. So I would write him an email about some problem I was having and he would write back
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and say, well, your Uncle Di would tell you, whatever it was. What happened to him? He passed
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away? He passed away. He had an aneurysm, September 3rd, 2020. And, you know, we, we had no notice.
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It wasn't like he had had an illness. I just got the phone call and, and he was gone. Wow. So it was
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really devastating to the ones of us who were close friends. And you were still able, unlike the rest of
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people, to hear him, to hear his take on things that were going on. It's a very interesting period
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of time because we're dealing with the start of COVID already. You're dealing with lockdowns already.
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What was his take on, on that? He actually got grounded by the Jesuits
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for leaving the house to go, uh, say, mass for the nuns down the street. Another of his friends
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and I were planning to fly to Chicago to take him out to dinner. And, uh, he said, don't bother
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because they wouldn't let him leave the house. This is 66 year old man. I know. I know. Held under
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house arrest. Yeah. That's incredible. Was he allowed to receive guests at all? I don't know.
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Cause you know, we couldn't take him out to dinner. We weren't going up. You know, what really got me
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because the Jesuits who, uh, you know, it wasn't just the superiors, the people who were his contemporaries
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were really awful to him. Um, you know, he, he never had a friend and a Jesuit residence.
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He was always the odd man out. You know, when he died, uh, Father James Martin, there was no love
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lost between the two of them. And Father James Martin put up a thing on Facebook saying that he
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had lost a brother Jesuit. And I saw it and I thought, really? And so there was a long strain of
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people, uh, giving him condolences for losing his good friend, Father Minkowski.
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So, and that might've been the moment when I decided to write the book. I don't know.
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Do you have some understanding of what, uh, Father Paul thought of Father James Martin and were
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there exchanges? No, I mean, not that I know of. I, there was a time when I was friends with both of
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them. This was, yeah. And so that was a little bit of whiplash because I had met, uh, Father Martin
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before I met, um, Father Minkowski. And so when I, when I, when one knew I was going to see the other
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one, they would say, you know, tell him that I said hi. And then Father Minkowski would usually say,
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and more than that, I dare not say, he, he got a chance to review Father, uh, Father Martin's book.
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So he got a chance to say some things. Oh, interesting. That's, that's one of the things
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that's really, really strange is that this with Father James Martin, it's, he is, he plays a careful
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game, but most people by now have caught him at doing things that are completely off the mark.
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And yet it's accepted by the powers that be. What was Father Paul's take? Do you know his take on the
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powers that be in Rome on the change in the church from like 2013 on? It was pretty radical, I think,
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for everybody. It was. And by the time we met, I mean, we already knew that we were in that trouble.
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We didn't know how bad it was going to be. The arc of our friendship kind of started at,
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it has to get better. And as time went on and it didn't get better. And it really ended with
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the last two or three emails I got from him, he signed them waiting for the asteroid.
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And so he had really like, and he would say to me, I just don't know what to tell you anymore,
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you know, because he had words of wisdom for a long time. And he really changed in the last year.
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And I spoke to one of his sisters who said she felt the same way. He really had kind of lost hope
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of anything getting better. There was no loss of hope in our Lord or in the faith or anything else?
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No, no, no. Not at all. He had such an underlying joy in the calamity. Yes.
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Did that retain? Did he retain that as well? Oh, absolutely. And I kind of have that a little bit,
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too. So, you know, you know how things get so bad that you just laugh because it's just too bad.
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Yeah. And we were like that. There was a lot of gallows humor that went back and forth.
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If you could tell people one thing to take away from your relationship, your knowledge of your
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reading of Father Minkowski, what would that be? I think I would tell them because he's hard to
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describe. He was a very complicated person. He was a philologist. He spoke something like 13 languages,
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and half of them were dead. And I thought, you know, it's because he's brilliant. And he told me it
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was because language was an easy A. So that's why. That's why. I would tell them that had the Jesuits
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not silenced him, I think he would be as much of a household word as Fulton Sheen or Father Mike Smith.
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You would know him. That's who he was. He would have been huge. And the Jesuits knew that,
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you know, because he was so faithful and so orthodox that, you know, would not have been good
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for their team if he had had a voice. Or you could say it would have been good for their team.
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Well, it would have been good for our team. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I see what you mean. The team of that kind.
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Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well, Karen, thank you so much for joining us. This is the book, The Sound of Silence,
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The Life and Cancelling of a Heroic Jesuit Priest by Karen Hall, put out by Crisis Publications.
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Go grab yourself a copy. Karen, thank you so very much. Thank you. God bless you.
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You too. And God bless you. And we'll see you next time.