How a hermit priest helped save a woman from addiction during COVID lockdown
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Summary
Author Kevin Wells joins the show to talk about his new book, "How The Hermit Came About," and how the Holy Spirit gave him the idea to write a book about his wife's addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Transcript
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It was ugly. I mean, like I said, sometimes it was like Satan was speaking through my wife.
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Your viewer will have to read the book. But I point out some ugly things that seem to me to be
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purely diabolical when I confronted Krista and things that happened in our home.
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Hey, my friends. You know, some writers just have a gift from God.
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They are able to communicate in a way that's so stellar.
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When you read what they write, you want to read it.
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And whatever message they're conveying underneath what they're saying the story about,
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Well, those writers can be truly dangerous if they're evil.
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But if they're good, they can communicate things in such a way that you are really blessed.
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I mean, in a very spiritual sense to have read the writing.
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But he wrote a book that, wow, it's about his wife's addiction.
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My wife would hear that, just the concept and go, you're never doing that.
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But nonetheless, that's really, really down and personal.
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Well, this author, Kevin Wells, is a very holy man.
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And in fact, he's friends with a friend of mine who endorsed his book so strongly that
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In fact, I've known him because he's written for LifeSite News as well.
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My complaint about Kevin Wells is that he hasn't written more for LifeSite News.
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But when Michael O'Brien, whom you probably all know is a great friend of mine, came out
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with such an incredible endorsement for him, I knew right away, this we have to do.
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Not only that, he tells me that this book really was sort of given to him by the Holy Spirit.
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And if you know anything about Michael O'Brien's writings, that's exactly what happens to him.
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Stay tuned for this episode of The John Henry Weston Show with author Kevin Wells.
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For U.S. residents, creating a will has never been easier.
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We would be deeply grateful if you remembered LifeSite News in your will.
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Thank you for your support, and may God bless you.
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Let's begin as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
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It's like, it sounds right off the bat like the thing not to do.
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Why did you do that, and how are you getting away with that?
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Yeah, John Henry, the fact of the matter is, I didn't want to do it.
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Matter of fact, she urged me for several months after telling her no.
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It's funny that you mentioned Michael O'Brien starting this podcast, because it was Michael
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He's really my only writing hero, and I called him in the wilds of Canada, and I said, Michael,
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this is the story of my wife, and she wants me to write this book.
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I want to fictionalize it, because it's a heck of a story, and I think I can do it the
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way, not the way you do, because you're up here, and I'm way down here.
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But I want to fictionalize it, and he said, well, tell me the story, and I did, and after
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speaking for not quite 10 minutes, I heard the voice of God, and John Henry, you hear
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his voice frequently, and he's got that low, slow voice, and he says, write it as it was.
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So in a lot of ways, in concert with the Holy Spirit, Krista's urging, and Michael O'Brien
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Man, well, Michael O'Brien didn't say man, but he said, hey, write it as it was.
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So your book, The Hermit, first of all, where people need to get it from, where can they
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Well, I'm sure Amazon, but where can they pick it up?
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It's Ignatius' book, and so you've got, that's why Michael O'Brien's there.
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And as soon as you start, I'm sure people will know, ooh, that's why it was about, oh,
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These stories are always circuitous, let's say.
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But about 10 or so years ago, I had brain surgery.
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It was actually failed brain surgery and was supposed to die.
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I guess at this point, we were married for about nine years.
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And a priest and his assistant came into my neuro ICU room after the failed surgery where
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they couldn't, I had what's called an arteriovenous malformation.
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The surgeons couldn't get to it and the blood really was drowning my brain.
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And my uncle's best friend, Monsignor Tom Wells is my uncle, my dad's brother.
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And this priest who came into my dark, drab neuro ICU room where this is the floor in Maryland
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He said, I don't know, because I was incapacitated.
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And his assistant said that he knelt on my bedside and said, hey, we've been calling on
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And he said that I whispered, bring my uncle down, you know, bring Tommy down.
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And, you know, he stands up like a V8 moment and goes to the foot of my bed and says, hey,
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He just if you don't do it, he's he's he's a dead man.
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And and and that's when if Father Stack was on this podcast right now, he would tell you
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that lights began to pop and the entire temperature of the room began to change.
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And both of them knew that they were standing in the midst of something supernatural.
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And he said, Kevin, I and this is months later when I recovered.
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He said, Kevin, I knew that things were happening in there, but I knew that you were healed.
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I knew it was a miracle when I saw sort of like a horseshoe interiorly, a horseshoe of
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And your uncle was standing next to me and he was smiling and I knew it was all gone.
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The next day it was the blood, the fluids, the AVM gone.
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And so, John Henry, to tell the story, I'm going to speed it up.
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What happened was it opened up a mother wound in my wife, Krista, a mother wound of shame.
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And she saw me after my close call going closer to God in ways that maybe I wasn't before.
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So daily mass, daily rosaries, more acts of sacrificial love, prison ministry, just, you
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know, the typical thing a guy would do who's this close and maybe he's not set right for
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So Krista interiorly had opened up this wound of shame.
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I didn't know about it, but she began to secretly binge drink red wine for the first
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And just to put a bow on it, what led to the hermit during COVID-19, so it was a long time.
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I know a lot of priests, John Henry, you do too.
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I don't know if I'm ever going to meet anyone like Father Martin Flume, but he sort of took
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I know there's a sacramental moratorium worldwide, but I'm going nowhere, honey.
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I'm not going anywhere for people like you that have ghosts, wounds, addictions, whatever.
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I'm going to intensify my priesthood because I'm not concerned with the disease.
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So Krista, I will be the shepherd of your soul and I will keep things wide open.
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And so when Krista healed during that wonderful year, the worst year in world history was our
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Krista said, write the book about what a strong, muscular, holy priest did for me during COVID.
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So maybe in the future, if another pandemic comes down the pike, they can see what this
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What was it that was so stunning that this priest did?
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I mean, a presumed confession and stuff, but what else does a priest do?
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Father Flume, from the very beginning of his, even seminary days, he set himself right where
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He stopped all alcohol because it knew it could soften sort of the burden of his identity.
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If he was going to mimic the starved man on the cross, he needed to strip himself away.
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So by the time he became a priest, he was set right for taking on the burden of who he was,
00:10:03.880
So for Krista in particular, he knew prior to COVID, where he had been working with her,
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So as I mentioned earlier, he was consumed with trying to get the little demons and snakes
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He allowed holy hour for Krista as many as two, three hours a day.
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He allowed daily mass from the very beginning of COVID.
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All the things that a shepherd would do for a wounded lamb, Father Flume did, not just for
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Krista, but for others or two that were suffering.
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So really, he just said, Krista, I'm not going to let you go.
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The church has responded sort of in a strange way to COVID, but I'm not going to let you go.
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I know, for instance, in Canada, we were at once told that if you continued with celebrations
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of any kind, you would be charged $10,000 for the institution and $10,000 for each participant.
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If you went into his library, you would see books 12 inches thick on the Encyclopedia of
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And so when he read the first release from, it was Cardinal Gregory about sort of how he
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was, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. was going to handle COVID, he read loopholes.
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So his secretary said he came out of the office that day, the very beginning of COVID, and
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And so for your viewer, Father Flume, just to put a face on him, he's got this big Old
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And he came out and he had that smile hiding in his beard.
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And he said, yeah, I think I know how to handle this one.
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So he navigated the loopholes of bureaucracy and he found a way.
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Father Flume in 2021 approached Krista and said, hey, Krista, I'm going to tell you now,
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this is a year and a half after Krista's healing, and said, Mary's calling me to offer the rest
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I want to turn myself over really as a Holocaust for the state of this world.
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We saw what happened during the summer of 2020 when the moratorium of the sacraments,
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we saw BLM, we saw riots, we saw fires in the streets, murders.
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So Father Flume believed, and I do too, and John Henry, I imagine you do as well, that
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whenever you constrain the sacramental graces of the Catholic Church, well, the devil, the
00:12:47.100
devil's like, well, he just whistles to his chorus of demons and says, go in.
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And we saw that in 2020, and Father Flume did too.
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So about a year later, he offered Mary the rest of his life.
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So now, today, to answer your question, John Henry, the remainder of his life will be spent
00:13:05.100
in a cell in a forest, no larger than her childhood bedroom.
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So essentially, his room is the monstrance, and his life is penances, mortifications, and
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I know it's a rare, sort of a rare vocation, but it's real.
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And some priests take it on, and in this area, those that know Father Flume know he's not
00:13:32.960
only taking it on, but imagine that what's happening now, three or four years in, is that
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he's also taking on what all the great desert monks did, and that's the devil, because that's
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He wants to pick fights with the devil to take him out of this woke Western culture.
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So he's fighting the devil for our souls, for our nations, for our church, for the recovery
00:13:58.760
That's what Father Flume's going to do for the remainder of his life.
00:14:01.660
Just so people get a vision of that a little bit more, really, perhaps, you mentioned, even
00:14:07.960
before his priesthood, I believe, that he had already given up all alcohol and also all
00:14:18.540
So if John Vianney converted all of ours after the French Revolution, well, he wanted to know
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John Vianney was 12 to 14 hours in the confessional.
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Oh, he actually worked 18 to 20 hours every day and woke up at the Angelus Bells at three
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Well, that's what I want to do, because I want to help my parishioners.
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So, yeah, anything that he knew could soften his identity or, like, he saw comfort as almost
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Like, if it's comfortable, I'm going to cast it off, because if I embrace any measure of
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comfort, then it could sort of metastasize or expand.
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And by the way, he wasn't like a, you know, a holier-than-thou guy.
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He was tough because he had rejected the world.
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Jesus Christ, I serve you alone, and I consecrate it all to Mary.
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So oftentimes, when I'll be fasting, my mood is not the greatest sometimes.
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When you, you hate to make it simple like this, but when you lift weights and use those
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muscles for so long after a while, you're just like, well, it's a fast.
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Not only, and I'm like you, John Henry, I've become like a jerk too, but not only don't
00:16:03.220
you become angrier, ornery, you actually say, let's extend this fast another day.
00:16:13.480
Because he was always seeing Jesus Christ as a starved man on the cross who poured himself
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You know, Jesus for him was the poor man of Nazareth who had no place to lay his head.
00:16:25.460
So Father Bloom said, well, if I, if I call myself an ambassador of Christ and attuned to
00:16:35.760
Pope Pius XI said, men must look for the peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ.
00:16:42.660
And he urged that the faithful give public honor to Christ the King so that individuals
00:16:47.080
and states would submit once more to the rule of their savior.
00:16:50.700
And that is why LifeSite News is raising up the image of Christ the King across the United
00:17:00.340
Please pledge your support today for these billboards at lifefunder.com slash Christ is
00:17:06.920
One of the things that, that goes on today is such a priest as you're describing is it will
00:17:16.200
rare in the extreme, uh, just the exact stellar opposite approach, uh, vis-a-vis what happened
00:17:24.520
Um, I, I personally believe that the church had an exquisite, unique opportunity during
00:17:32.460
COVID to resurrect herself like few other times in history.
00:17:36.400
The, the, the, imagine had it gone the other way, the government says, shut down.
00:17:41.380
The church says, be gone, Satan, get behind me, Satan.
00:17:45.580
And, and says, no, we're, we're going to, we need, you say we need healing.
00:17:51.540
Um, the mass is the most healing thing there is.
00:17:53.640
And, and they could have, it could have been so different and the world would have flocked
00:17:59.860
I mean, I mean, my imagination anyway, but what do you think is the example for the church,
00:18:09.560
If historians are honest, a hundred years from now, and they look into 2020 and the Catholic
00:18:14.740
church, I think they'll conclude that it was one of the worst moments in the history of
00:18:22.520
I'm not here to pick a fight with how horribly they responded.
00:18:27.620
It, whenever a pandemic comes around, like Aloysius Gonzaga, Charles Borromeo, they understood,
00:18:34.020
they understood, no, you don't, you don't close up shop and lock your doors, your presbytery.
00:18:39.180
You go out into the killing fields and you pray over the ones that are dying.
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And if you happen to catch leprosy, Damon of Molokai, if you happen to catch it, Charles Borromeo,
00:18:48.780
the bubonic plague, well, you saved a lot of souls in the process.
00:18:53.580
So I imagine if this comes down again, I think the church, I mean, let's be honest.
00:18:58.940
I think the church looks back at that time and says, we failed.
00:19:07.980
But that's why I'm so thankful that Chris asked me to write the hermit because father
00:19:12.440
Blume is the, like, he's that plane with like puffing out those, those skywriting words,
00:19:18.040
like be a priest during pandemics, like don't, don't quit the fight.
00:19:22.500
So yeah, I, you, you, you bring up an excellent point.
00:19:26.200
One of the things, um, I'd love you to get into is, um, the, the book, when you told me
00:19:32.440
about it, you, you mentioned about how, when you wrote it, you thought you were writing
00:19:38.800
one book and what turned out was something else.
00:19:42.780
I wouldn't call myself a supernaturalist, maybe in the dimension that Michael O'Brien is.
00:19:46.660
I, I, I'd love to do everything out of my soul and, you know, I'm Irish, so I'm sure
00:19:51.000
there's a lot of that churning and burning in me.
00:19:53.840
But the book that Krista asked me to write was about father Blume and what he did during
00:20:00.020
And once I finally got around to it and began to write, it was tough to get to, I kept wanting
00:20:07.300
to get to COVID-19, like the, the transcendent part, the recovery, the resurrection, Krista's
00:20:15.360
And I didn't know why, but I just kept writing.
00:20:17.580
And I thought by chapter four or five, I could get to father Flume and the recovery, but I
00:20:22.420
kept, you know, chapter five, six, seven, eight, nine.
00:20:26.200
So finally chapter 11, I got to the recovery and Krista's and the fun, kind of the fun part
00:20:32.100
And when I finished, I sent it off to four friends, a theologian, a couple of Catholic
00:20:40.700
And, and I explained to them, Hey, I feel kind of uncomfortable about this book.
00:20:44.100
I read about my wife's addiction and, and what father Flume did it, but I wanted to show
00:20:48.060
and Krista wanted to show what a priest who healed her during COVID, et cetera.
00:20:52.880
And then one by one, they all got back and they really said the same thing.
00:20:57.000
And they said, Kevin, we know what you thought you were doing, but you wrote a book about
00:21:00.920
marriage and I, I thought the first guy had it wrong and I, he lost the plot and second
00:21:07.500
guy, third, you know, they all said this book is about marriage.
00:21:10.340
And, and then since the book came out, it came out just a month or two ago from Ignatius.
00:21:15.460
Krista and I are getting letters from, and emails from throughout the, really the country
00:21:22.680
You know, I don't know how to handle my porn addicted husband.
00:21:27.800
You know, and the, the book really John Henry, and I'll sort of shut it down here.
00:21:32.480
I didn't know that I was mourning as I was, I never mourned.
00:21:42.440
This is what I had to do in the dark night of the soul.
00:21:45.040
I had to nail my unknowingness of Krista's recovery to the cross.
00:21:49.460
I had to nail myself to the cross and say, God, I don't, she hates me.
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I speak a different language, but God, you're faithful and you will make this thing right.
00:22:02.920
And I just got to love her with no consolations, no marital entitlements, no good days.
00:22:11.220
I need to love the way you did from the cross with nothing, naked in front of your mother, friends all run away except for beloved John, tortured Jews mocking you.
00:22:26.940
And Lord, if I'm going to say I'm a follower of you and I love Krista, I'm not going to abandon the ship.
00:22:38.500
And I think that's what resonated is sort of the unveiling of what I did during or what I tried to do as best I could.
00:22:46.320
And there was failing days, John Henry, during those days when I just tried to hang on to God and say, God, you hang on to me.
00:22:53.660
I'm going to keep trying to love her the best I can.
00:22:58.060
And how old are they and how old were they during this process?
00:23:03.200
I was like, as soon as I sensed that the kids understand their mom's addiction is getting worse or she's not maternally loving them the way she should, I'm going to quit my job right away.
00:23:18.260
I ended up moving home, took a sabbatical from work.
00:23:21.840
And I had a pretty good job, but I needed to stand by my wife.
00:23:27.140
But at that time, John Henry, they were young, but they were growing older.
00:23:37.400
When I first 23, Gabby, my 23-year-old daughter, when I first sensed, like I would always kind of look into the nook and crannies of her eyes and ask her questions.
00:23:46.380
And if I sensed any kind of fear or like, Dad, what's going on with your marriage?
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As soon as I sensed that first conversation was bad, then it was time to go home.
00:24:03.580
The whole discernment thing, because that must have been crazy for you.
00:24:08.580
I think how to discern, well, I'm going to deprive my kids of their livelihood.
00:24:25.340
I was at the family business, masonry contract.
00:24:39.580
When I was home with Krista, and she really appreciated that her man came home.
00:24:46.200
She knew I was there to protect her or love her the best I could.
00:24:49.100
She was still sick then, but she appreciated it.
00:24:57.380
I began to write a book that every Catholic publisher rejected.
00:25:08.520
So I wrote a book that every publisher rejected.
00:25:12.080
Until the Washington Post broke a story in June of 2018.
00:25:18.820
And then the publishers came back and said, are you still working on that book?
00:25:22.740
And then a little while later, the priest we need to save the church came out.
00:25:27.700
And it became a Catholic bestseller almost overnight.
00:25:31.140
Not because of the writer, but because I was attuned to things much prior to that going wrong in the church.
00:25:42.920
And so the book now has been read by, it's in seminaries on five continents.
00:25:50.600
It's been read by thousands of clergy members, bishops.
00:25:54.600
So God is so good because, sure, I had the money saved for my job.
00:25:59.100
But he also opened up a new avenue for me to return to a lot more writing.
00:26:12.460
I want to ask you about what some of this was like.
00:26:16.460
Because every guy knows in our relationships with our wives that there are times of real struggle.
00:26:28.920
But if you compound that with an addiction of some kind and then no respite, there are some men who have to deal with that and sometimes lose their wives to that.
00:26:46.300
But then you had the kids at the same time and had to deal with young kids and try and keep them afloat mentally, but mostly spiritually.
00:26:58.920
I had to strip myself away from everything I ever knew.
00:27:03.180
I had to accept that I would never receive the love in the way I had hoped or the honeymoon stage of our marriage.
00:27:12.740
But I understand that Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Moses, when you called them further into the desert, they took their walking stick and went in to find you.
00:27:25.680
And this desert isn't a place, really, to get sand whipped and starve to death and go to sleep with nothing to drink and be lonely.
00:27:35.260
Finally, this is a place that I can encounter you in a deeper way.
00:27:46.680
Because I encountered God in a way I never could have ever imagined without this, I guess, in a way John of the Cross did when he wrote from Spain.
00:27:58.800
I, in the dark night, I experienced God in a very illuminative way where he spoke to my soul.
00:28:05.760
You know, really, it gets to the point, John Henry, where you realize as a man that you can't pray it away with rosaries.
00:28:17.960
What I needed to do and what I ended up doing, which helped, was I followed the way of Teresa of Avalo and John of the Cross.
00:28:25.820
And I just, and beloved John, and I just rested my head against his sacred heart.
00:28:45.860
And you want a healthy mom in the house, a healthy wife.
00:28:50.340
And I'm just going to nail myself to the hardwood the best I can and try and love the way you did.
00:28:55.220
I'm just going to try and love the, I'll fail many, many, many times.
00:28:58.660
But at least I'm going to try to nail myself to your cross and love with no consolations.
00:29:04.120
To get a glimpse of the inside of this, was there, you know, loud disparaging talk, to put it very mildly?
00:29:14.940
Well, you're always walking on a gangplank because even Krista understood, for the most part, she didn't want our children to know.
00:29:22.520
So, so yeah, there was, there was, it was almost, you know what, John, what it was like was this.
00:29:30.980
You understand that you're speaking to someone who's firmly under an oppression.
00:29:39.980
The demon ventriloquist is allowing my wife to say something that it's not her voice.
00:29:47.980
She's, so when you can accept that the ugliness of the fights, it, it, it doesn't really matter because it's, it's not her.
00:29:57.860
You know, the umbilical cord to heaven's cut off.
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I knew Krista could come back where the umbilical cord could go to heaven and be nourished by something healthy.
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I mean, like I said, sometimes it was like Satan was speaking through my wife.
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I mean, you're, you're, you're, um, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're viewer will have to read the book, but I point out some ugly things that seem to me to be purely diabolical when I confronted Krista and things that happened in our home.
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And I'm not one of these guys who embellishes these stories.
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Matter of fact, I grew up in a home that we're very Catholic.
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There's 10 of us, but my dad and mom were like, Hey, your faith is your faith.
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We don't need the supernatural for you to believe more.
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And that's how I sort of, but I saw things and I experienced things that were of the devil.
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And, and, um, um, and I know this because when Krista began to recover and went to unbound and exorcists and, and people began to pray over, she manifested.
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I said this a few minutes ago, the devil is directly involved with alcoholism.
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Um, and also I'll say this, the devil also loves when a little girl is wounded by her mother at a young age.
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And the girl thinks, man, I just, I thought mom's supposed to love me and I'm not pretty enough, or I should be more like my sister.
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And that's, that's what, that's what the devil tried to do to Krista until father flume broke in and said, Kevin, you step aside.
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How did you do some of that shielding of your kids from it?
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I think for a lot of parents, um, who go through this, either of the spouses is addicted or whatever, or, or just in, in, frankly, just in a bad mood in, how did you shield your kids or what did you do for your children?
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A couple of things in a, in a supernatural dimension.
00:32:29.300
I begged God to protect them, um, to give them a good mommy, to bring mommy back.
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And if they were awake, then I would just pray with them in a normal way without mentioning, you know, the problems in a concrete way.
00:32:47.040
I imagine our fathers who are attuned to their identity.
00:32:55.500
So on the car ride across town, 45 minutes away, you have good conversations.
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You, you know, you, you, you talk about their day school, the game they're going to play in, but you always bring in moments of God.
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So, so it was, it was sort of a psychological dad.
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It was a hardworking dad because, you know, you gotta, you gotta make sure your kids are safe.
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And, and, uh, I did not, I did not miss praying over them or with them every single night.
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You know, I hate the fact that there may be people watching right now that are in a troubled marriage that, that, uh, are tired of their spouse who doesn't look them in the eyes anymore or goes to bed without, or, or maybe they have an addiction.
00:33:47.240
What I would encourage is this, um, don't give up, do not give up.
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Obviously, if there's violence, you need to leave them.
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But you will always have a heartbeat's chance if you believe, truly have the faith of the saints, of the martyrs and say, God, it's tough.
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But I believe in you and you hear my prayers, you hear my pleas and you are faithful, God.
00:34:16.240
So I'm going to stick with it and I'm going to, and I know, I know it's, it's not going to get better anytime soon.
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I know it, but God, you will make this thing right.
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So I would encourage your, your viewer to keep that in mind.
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If you're a man, do not be effeminate, do not separate in divorce.
00:34:35.380
Do not be effeminate, be a man, be muscular and stick by your wife's side.
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If, if you're a woman, you know, everyone needs a spiritual director, but I, but, but I encourage you to seek out somebody like Father Martin Flume who healed my wife.
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And you can always see a priest by the light in his eyes if they're really attuned to souls.
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So ask around, you know, if, if you're just in an awful marriage and, and I, and I'm, as I mentioned, I'm in a lot of pretty nasty emails and letters about bad marriages.
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I always encourage, look for a holy priest who will stick with you in this, who will be by your side.
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Stick by your wounded spouse's side and try and get a director to help lead you through.
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Your life story reminds me of a former guest I had who, who basically said the one quality you want to look for in your spouse is a willingness to suffer, to not be afraid of the cross.
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And you had a great example in Father Flume to do that as well.
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The book, ladies and gentlemen, is The Hermit, available from Ignatius Press.
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I'm Deacon Keith Fournier, and I hope you enjoyed this video from LifeSite News.
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