The John-Henry Westen Show - How to prevent your kids from abandoning the faith

00:00:00.000 And right before we get into it with Jason Jones, here is a clip from his new film,

00:00:05.700 Divided Hearts of America. Very powerful.

00:00:08.800 When does a person get rights? When a person is a person.

00:00:12.400 When is a person a person?

00:00:13.420 And that's the thing. When a child is born, then the child is a child.

00:00:19.320 If we look at the history of abortion laws, it's always been predicated on when a human's life begins.

00:00:25.400 There is no personhood under law for fetuses.

00:00:29.740 We don't have that in this country.

00:00:33.120 The state legislature has passed the Reproductive Health Act.

00:00:36.300 They say that this law has made Illinois the abortion capital of the Midwest.

00:00:40.960 This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman in her family has to make. 1.00

00:00:47.500 The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable.

00:00:51.780 There's nothing more common sense than giving a child born the right to continue.

00:00:57.620 People are saying, wait a minute, do they really kill babies?

00:01:01.460 I said, hey, it's called infanticide.

00:01:04.280 It's important that as African Americans, that we truly understand the history of abortion.

00:01:13.560 In New York City, the home of Planned Parenthood, for decades more black babies have been aborted than born alive.

00:01:19.280 For decades. 0.65

00:01:20.200 Abortion is targeting black America. 0.61

00:01:22.800 That's not an accident. 0.94

00:01:24.820 That's genocide.

00:01:25.680 That's genocide.

00:01:55.660 Welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, where I'm very pleased to introduce you to, well, someone who probably doesn't need an introduction.

00:02:02.860 He's a great friend, and he's been a stalwart pro-life warrior for decades and decades.

00:02:08.240 It is Jason Jones.

00:02:09.780 Jason, welcome to the program.

00:02:11.900 It's great to be on with you, John.

00:02:13.080 John Henry.

00:02:13.940 I always call you John Henry Newman, so forgive me for that.

00:02:16.820 No problem.

00:02:19.280 Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.

00:02:21.760 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

00:02:25.360 Amen.

00:02:27.280 So, Jason, I've been really wanting to have you on the show for a long time, and you had to move from Hawaii.

00:02:33.680 First of all, how's it going in your new digs?

00:02:36.140 You know, I am sorrowful.

00:02:38.600 I miss Hawaii, but we love Texas.

00:02:41.400 It's a beautiful state.

00:02:43.040 I feel like I emigrated to another country, but we love it.

00:02:46.340 Awesome.

00:02:46.960 Awesome.

00:02:47.280 So, we want to bring some hope for the faith today, because there's lots of consternation going on.

00:02:55.940 And a lot of people actually questioning their faith because, well, the church is in great consternation, as you know, with Pope Francis himself.

00:03:05.800 But also, we have a new development in Joe Biden.

00:03:10.040 Joe Biden masquerading as a faithful Catholic.

00:03:13.340 Nancy Pelosi did it for some time. 0.83

00:03:14.700 We saw John Kerry before that.

00:03:15.860 But with the actual President of the United States receiving Holy Communion, going to Mass, it's a very trying time for Catholics, for faithful Catholics.

00:03:27.480 And it's leading people to question the faith.

00:03:30.660 And I was praying my rosary the other day, and I think an inspiration occurred to me to contact you about this very thing.

00:03:40.740 So, if you wouldn't mind, there's a lot of people who know your story, but I know some don't.

00:03:44.620 But I really want you to focus on your conversion story, first of all, from a Catholic perspective.

00:03:50.420 What can you tell us on that?

00:03:52.420 Yeah, well, it's interesting because my pro-life commitment was birthed at the very same moment that my anti-Catholic prejudice was born.

00:04:01.280 And also, at the same time, sort of my curiosity at the source of human dignity.

00:04:07.500 And it took about 15 years for those all to merge in that I became a Catholic.

00:04:11.620 But when I was a young boy, really, a few days before my 17th birthday, my high school girlfriend rode her bicycle over to my house to share with me that she was pregnant.

00:04:22.200 And so, we had conspired that after my birthday, I would join the Army.

00:04:27.580 She would hide that she was pregnant. 0.76

00:04:29.220 She went to a Catholic high school, wear baggy sweaters.

00:04:32.000 I'd go to basic training and come home, and then we would tell our families.

00:04:36.200 I had a friend that just joined the military through this special program for, quote-unquote, troubled youth.

00:04:41.620 So, I figured I could get into the program, and I did.

00:04:46.000 So, while I was in basic training, I would get these letters from my high school girlfriend.

00:04:51.660 We were both sort of from broken homes in different ways.

00:04:54.620 She was from a prominent family with a lot of abuse.

00:04:57.540 Her parents were married, but there was a lot of abuse in the home. 0.99

00:05:01.060 And my parents had me as teenagers, and I never knew them as a married couple, never really had a family.

00:05:07.280 You know, we were ahead of the time, I guess.

00:05:08.980 What is the normal American family?

00:05:10.800 I was born to a 16-year-old is today maybe, unfortunately, quite common.

00:05:16.580 But so, we were both sort of the idea of creating a family and caring for a child.

00:05:23.460 We were excited by this, even though we probably didn't have the formation to live up to our aspirations.

00:05:32.040 So, while I was in basic training, a few weeks before I came home, I get a call from her,

00:05:36.940 and her father had found out she was pregnant, beat her up, and took her to Chicago Masonic Hospital,

00:05:42.960 where she had a forced third trimester abortion. 1.00

00:05:46.900 And what makes us all very startling is, not only was her father Catholic, 0.54

00:05:51.780 he was a very prominent Catholic, and he was really best friends with Cardinal Bernadine.

00:05:57.160 And so, for me, and I knew this, and in many ways, I looked up to him because he was wealthy and established friends with these important people.

00:06:09.200 I always thought he was a strange guy, but I admired him, and I associated Catholicism with him.

00:06:14.260 And so, after this happened, I would say I became really angry.

00:06:20.640 I became sort of almost an anti-Catholic bigot.

00:06:23.540 And it was grounded in, at the same time, I didn't know abortion was even a thing, as strange as this may sound,

00:06:31.260 until I just, let alone something that was legal, until I discovered that my child had been destroyed through a forced third trimester abortion. 0.52

00:06:38.260 And my captain, I was begging my, I was crying, just asking my captain to call the police.

00:06:44.480 And he looked at me and explained, you know, confused, why would I call the police?

00:06:48.180 Don't you know this is all perfectly legal?

00:06:50.060 So, it was startling.

00:06:51.740 So, you know, and I'm a filmmaker in the film business, that would be the call to adventure.

00:06:57.580 And what was interesting about this sort of grave injustice that I experienced,

00:07:01.680 my high school girlfriend experienced, and our child experienced, is that how closely connected abortion and the Catholic Church were in human anthropology.

00:07:16.340 For me, in a real, I was very conscious of this.

00:07:19.480 Why was this so wrong?

00:07:21.360 How could a prominent Catholic do such a thing? 0.98

00:07:23.400 And it wouldn't be until years later that I began to see how just tragic and disgusting it was that this all took place at a Masonic hospital as well.

00:07:34.280 It's an incredible thing that, you know, you were so anti-Catholic at this point.

00:07:40.220 Understandably so.

00:07:41.020 It seems to be linked to the most traumatic, most hurtful, harmful thing in your life at this point.

00:07:47.260 And yet, you came to the very faith that you thought so despicable.

00:07:53.400 Give us the rest of that journey.

00:07:56.240 Yeah, well, and I did.

00:07:57.720 And sadly enough, my high school girlfriend is today even a very aggressive anti, you know, she's really anti-Catholic today.

00:08:05.780 Because of all the experiences that she had to suffer in a way that was much more devastating and intimate than how I suffered.

00:08:14.380 So for me, it really, I became, I had read the novella by Ayn Rand, Anthem in Junior High and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

00:08:24.320 And as strange as this sounds, after the abortion, I thought of those two short stories or the novella and that short story.

00:08:30.100 And then I started reading all of Ayn Rand's non-fiction and her fiction.

00:08:34.460 And I became like an aggressive, objectivist, Randian pro-lifer.

00:08:40.400 As strange as that all sounds, who is very anti-Catholic.

00:08:42.980 And, but I, when I graduated college, I wrote, sort of my goals were to end abortion and to develop Ayn Rand's metaphysics, epistemology, and anthropology. 0.60

00:08:54.680 I was searching for an atheist foundation for the self-evident dignity of the human person that became really evident to me through the abortion, right?

00:09:06.060 But I, it was, I joked that it was Sartre and Nietzsche and Freud that played a bigger role in me becoming Catholic than any Catholic I had ever met.

00:09:15.680 Because especially Sartre really erased any hope for a human dignity that to me was self-evident, but that I came to understand was really the fruit of the gospel.

00:09:27.880 It was the fruit of Christianity. 0.65

00:09:30.560 It was the fruit of the Christian vision of the human person that the church taught the West and the world.

00:09:37.960 First, you know, Jewish scriptures were made in the image of God.

00:09:40.760 And then what does the, what does it mean for God to become man in the Trinity to have three persons?

00:09:45.800 And it was through the church thinking about this for centuries that we came to accept what our founding fathers called the self-evident truth.

00:09:54.740 If it's in our declaration of independence, the declaration principle really is not self-evident.

00:09:59.640 It was taught to the world through the church.

00:10:03.120 And I had to accept, I really, I remember that there was a point in time where I, and I didn't want to accept the church's sexual ethics either, because by this time I'm in my late twenties, had a lifetime of living one way.

00:10:14.720 Didn't really want to accept the church's sexual ethics.

00:10:17.900 I remember I was just kind of forced, I was really forced into a corner.

00:10:23.120 And I say really by Sartre.

00:10:25.580 But then at the same time, somehow I discovered Chesterton and Bellic who were very attractive to me, especially in their triumphalism.

00:10:31.920 I found so much of the pessimism in the church that we see, especially in the English speaking world, was really just depressing to me.

00:10:41.280 And so discovering Chesterton and Bellic, around the same time I was at this crisis, that the only hope for the human person is, is the Catholic church.

00:10:51.040 This church I hated.

00:10:52.620 Actually, when I graduated college, I put that my goals were to end abortion and develop Ayn Rand's anthropology, metaphysics, and epistemology, and, and destroy the Catholic church.

00:11:04.420 That was, I literally, I could show you my journal where I wrote that.

00:11:06.980 So that's how anti-Catholic I was.

00:11:10.200 I saw the church as an obstacle to my commitment to defending the child from violence.

00:11:14.960 Now, here I am, wait, the only support for human dignity was, I really came to accept genealogically, is the Catholic vision of the human person.

00:11:26.720 But it was Sartre that sort of, and Nietzsche, that deconstructed any hope for human dignity away from the Catholic church. 0.54

00:11:33.880 And I remember thinking, I have to choose how I'm living my life and abandon any hope for human dignity.

00:11:44.400 And if the human person doesn't have this sort of dignity that we see as self-evident, because it is self-evident, but that's not an answer to its source.

00:11:52.600 I had to either abandon this, what appears to be self-evident dignity to the human person.

00:11:58.440 I had to say that all the great crimes in history and all the great crimes that happen around us personally are not really crimes at all.

00:12:07.300 And it was really, it seems like an easy choice, you know, but it wasn't.

00:12:11.960 And I really wrestled with it.

00:12:14.160 And I wrestled with God.

00:12:15.160 I'd studied the schism for years.

00:12:18.580 This is how long a process it was for me, hoping to become Orthodox.

00:12:22.120 I thought, and I think a lot of people in the English-speaking world that have sort of an inherited anti-Catholic prejudice, the Orthodox church becomes an acceptable place to go.

00:12:30.520 And I sort of followed that route.

00:12:31.860 But I wanted to be sure.

00:12:35.020 And so I studied the great schism and saw that there were many schisms in the great return in 1688.

00:12:41.540 And I realized if I was going to be honest, and I've tried to make deals with God, like, well, I'll go to this nice Protestant church where they have a bookstore and they all vote the same and look similar to me.

00:12:52.440 Or can I just do that, God?

00:12:54.740 I know it's not really the church, but, and I've really tried to make these kinds of deals.

00:12:57.620 And I realized, no, I have to go to this place that is, is, looks as diverse as the world down the street.

00:13:05.140 And they, they have all sorts of inconsistencies in, in the community, but that's the church.

00:13:12.760 And that's where I have to go.

00:13:14.460 And I knew that I was broken and, and needed formation.

00:13:18.200 And I wish that I could go to some place that was a utopia where everyone was perfect and, and could help for me.

00:13:25.160 But no, I had to go to that hospital of sinners that the church is.

00:13:29.820 And the, the violent winds of the age had ripped the doors off the hinges and were, you know, battering down on us, even as we know it's in the, in the pews.

00:13:41.480 But the church is the church.

00:13:43.320 And so that was what for me was a really hard decision.

00:13:46.480 But then as soon as I made the decision, as soon as I became Catholic, I remember something Chesterton said that made real sense to me.

00:13:55.640 The Catholic church is the only thing that is bigger on the inside than from the outside. 0.66

00:14:01.700 And, you know, I am so grateful for the grace and the privilege to be a part of the Catholic church.

00:14:11.660 And the spirit of the age tempts Christians in every age and people fall in every age.

00:14:19.460 We feel betrayed and lost and lonely in every age.

00:14:22.600 And I think when you, when you look at the 2000 year history of the church, I'm, I'm honest, I don't mean to be disrespectful to people who are wanting to abandon the church because of their quote unquote great sufferings.

00:14:37.400 But I have to ask them, how would you have felt Nazi Germany when an SS officer kicked down your door and you knew him from your church?

00:14:45.200 Or how would you have felt during the French Revolution when you were surrounded by Catholics that were trying to chop your head off? 1.00

00:14:51.900 Or if you were in the Nineveh Plains just five years ago and the Catholics were being slaughtered and enslaved by ISIS?

00:15:01.780 Or you were a Christian in the Nuba Mountains today and you were being barrel bombed by Khartoum?

00:15:07.400 You know, I've traveled to these places and I've met these folks and I never hear them suggest that they would abandon Jesus Christ or leave the church because of the great sufferings that they are facing.

00:15:19.340 And so I wonder how really we have to acknowledge, and I'm the worst in this, John Henry.

00:15:24.220 I am a very decadent, soft person.

00:15:27.920 And I wish that things could always be as easy as they seem to me as a teenage boy in this country in the 80s.

00:15:35.540 But that's not the way of the world.

00:15:38.860 And I know that if you ever get an organic yogurt that has that like inch of cream on top, that is the whole history of the Christian church or the Catholic church.

00:15:47.820 I've been born in the cream.

00:15:49.960 And so whatever hardships we face, it's strange that people are so despairing.

00:15:57.340 And I think it's just because maybe they haven't been paying attention to what's happening around the world today and what Christians have suffered throughout the history of the church.

00:16:03.820 Absolutely.

00:16:05.980 You've been very blessed in your life, very much like I was.

00:16:11.100 I was worse than you, though.

00:16:13.060 I was a fallen away Catholic and raised by like a saint.

00:16:15.360 But nonetheless, we've both been blessed with faithful wives and a multitude of children.

00:16:22.380 But something came to me the other day in prayer and specifically why I thought of you.

00:16:29.960 It's that there is something going on in the world today that's very scary that really hasn't gone on in the world before.

00:16:38.400 Yes, we are in a physical la-la land compared to much of the history of the church, much of the history of the people of God, in fact.

00:16:47.040 It is very comfortable to be Catholic.

00:16:51.560 However, there is a challenge today that there wasn't before.

00:16:55.300 The lure of the world, the lure of pornography, the lure of all sorts of worldly pursuits is much more powerful today than it ever, ever was before, much more easily accessible.

00:17:07.560 But not only that, the pull of false doctrine in the church coming today from the highest echelons of the church has caused a kind of a confusion that really the church hasn't experienced before, especially when it comes from Rome.

00:17:29.560 And one of the things that I really thought about was, what do we do for our own children?

00:17:37.200 There are very many people, your age, my age, around the same age, who have children now approaching their teens or in their teens or in their early 20s.

00:17:45.560 And they're questioning the faith, the true faith, for another type of faith that maybe isn't so rigid or so fundamentalist that they say, you know, can there be exceptions?

00:18:01.880 You know, no one really means to have an abortion.

00:18:05.920 Nobody wants to.

00:18:06.760 But isn't it just, if there's really hard circumstances, you know, what happens then?

00:18:13.060 Or the question of LGBT, you know, can't we go to our friend's marriage?

00:18:19.300 They love each other, but isn't the church stance being too hard?

00:18:22.580 Can't we maybe provide some exceptions in exceptional cases where it's real true love and so on and so forth?

00:18:29.600 When your children are questioning the faith, even perhaps wanting to leave the faith, how would you respond to them?

00:18:35.620 What would you say to them or what would you do?

00:18:39.920 Well, you know, I think that there are two big obstacles that our children are going to face.

00:18:46.660 And I think all children face.

00:18:48.160 First of all, all of us, the first, if our children are drifting from the faith, especially as they get older, as you mentioned, there's the spirit of the age.

00:18:56.740 And the French Catholic anthropologist, René Girard, said the only thing stronger than the spirit of the age is the Holy Spirit.

00:19:03.640 And so that's why I think it's so important that we impress upon our children the importance of remaining in a state of grace, frequenting the sacraments, especially confession, sacramentals, filling our house with the music of our faith.

00:19:17.420 And our house looks like a Greek monastery.

00:19:19.900 You know, we have so many icons everywhere.

00:19:21.360 And so there's that spirit of the age.

00:19:24.860 And the spirit of the age is becoming quite vicious and cruel and terrifying.

00:19:29.320 And so young people are going to not so much be seduced maybe by the spirit of the age as they have been maybe when we were young.

00:19:37.060 The spirit of the age was quite seductive.

00:19:38.980 Today, the spirit of the age is terrorizing.

00:19:41.860 It's terrorizing young people.

00:19:43.120 If you don't conform, we will destroy you, dox you, take away your YouTube channel, for example, whatever. 0.88

00:19:49.060 So there's that.

00:19:50.920 But also, I think the biggest reason young people leave the faith, and it's my great fear with my own children, is scandal.

00:19:58.240 And especially, the greatest scandal to my children could be me.

00:20:05.240 And so my wife and I talk a lot about this.

00:20:08.460 We're both adult converts that, you know, come from broken homes.

00:20:14.660 And we didn't receive, like, what we would call, without being disrespectful to our parents.

00:20:19.360 My parents had me as children or as teenagers.

00:20:22.140 You know, we didn't have sort of a proper formation.

00:20:25.180 And so we're trying to live up to the, we want to be the types of parents that our children deserve.

00:20:31.760 And I would never want to be a scandal to our children.

00:20:35.200 So in this age of there's so much division and hatred and this shunning culture, this cancel culture, how are we to behave?

00:20:45.500 I think that the drift to, quote, unquote, progressive Christianity is exactly the wrong way to go.

00:20:51.740 And in fact, it is a scandal.

00:20:53.120 And here's why.

00:20:53.800 We're in a world without banisters, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, the great Jewish political philosopher.

00:21:00.420 The only banisters that I really see that I can cling to are serving the vulnerable, serving those who are shunned, serving those left outside of legal protection.

00:21:10.560 A great new book by our mutual friend Carter Sneed talks about how law not grounded in the body is not grounded in the vulnerable.

00:21:16.960 So a law not grounded in the body leaves the vulnerable unprotected.

00:21:22.700 I think the first thing we want our children to see is that we serve and love and honor the vulnerable.

00:21:29.760 And in doing so, that we show that we will not conform to the spirit of the age.

00:21:34.900 And we recognize it comes with all sorts of costs.

00:21:37.720 But at the same time, and if you see that beautiful film by Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life, which I would wish everyone watch, about Franz Jägerstader, the Austrian farmer, blessed, who refused to say the loyalty oath to Hitler.

00:21:52.940 Even though the Nazis had annexed Austria, even though his own bishop was encouraging him to say this loyalty oath to the regime, this loyalty oath to the spirit of the age, say it, even if you don't, you know, say it, don't believe it, of course, but say it and think of something else.

00:22:10.960 Say it and don't mean it so you can go home to your family.

00:22:13.120 Then a Nazi officer who was Catholic begged him to say it and said to him, do you think you have the right not to say this oath?

00:22:21.360 And Franz says, do you think I have the right to say it?

00:22:25.240 So powerful.

00:22:26.760 But even in the midst of this violent, cruel, vicious ideology that captured his country and was piercing it on his home, their home was filled with beautiful art, beautiful music, flowers.

00:22:38.780 So we should not allow the world to puncture the moral imagination of our children, that our children's moral imagination should not be invaded at every minute with discussion about politics and the tragedy of the, you know, of bishops openly dissenting from the teachings of the faith.

00:23:01.280 Not that we don't have those conversations, not that there's not a time and a place, but I had recently said to my wife, my job is dealing with genocide, democide and war.

00:23:11.560 And I'm a filmmaker and I'm making these projects and working with the Uyghur, working with groups in Yemen on the drone war. 0.81

00:23:18.280 And I realized maybe sometimes I'm too careless.

00:23:20.460 I'm walking through the living room and I'm talking about genocide.

00:23:24.240 I said to my wife, that's over.

00:23:26.180 In my office, these conversations take place.

00:23:28.420 The door shut and only during work hours.

00:23:32.040 And we were never a big family.

00:23:33.900 I stopped watching cable news in 2010 and I stopped listening to talk radio in the 90s.

00:23:39.240 I read my news.

00:23:40.900 That way is to protect myself from constantly being manipulated and emotionally unsettled.

00:23:47.760 So you got to keep that in a box.

00:23:50.320 So I think we owe it to our children to protect their moral imagination, to fill their life with beauty and joy.

00:23:58.040 I fill my house with flowers.

00:23:59.900 My wife doesn't like flowers. 1.00

00:24:01.280 Okay.

00:24:01.880 I do.

00:24:03.760 Always fresh cut flowers.

00:24:05.340 Always in and around the house.

00:24:07.060 Icons everywhere.

00:24:07.960 I'm looking at icons right here.

00:24:09.540 Icons everywhere.

00:24:11.700 And so I think that's something that's very important.

00:24:14.720 Also, we have to be the same person inside our house as we are outside our house.

00:24:18.600 Our children see dads one way in the house and one way outside of the house.

00:24:23.900 That's a grave scandal.

00:24:26.420 So I think our real challenge right now, and then we have to address the inconsistency in some of the church leadership.

00:24:32.560 You know, what does it mean?

00:24:33.620 My kids, I don't know where they get it.

00:24:35.200 They're much tougher on Joe Biden than I am.

00:24:37.560 The things they say, I had to, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know.

00:24:41.420 Because they're scandalized.

00:24:42.920 It makes them angry.

00:24:44.060 My seven-year-old, I will see him walking around the house.

00:24:47.600 And my wife and I actually do not talk like that.

00:24:50.000 He will say things about Joe Biden.

00:24:52.280 I have to call him.

00:24:52.880 Where did you get that?

00:24:53.660 Where did you say that?

00:24:54.620 You know?

00:24:56.060 And he's like, well, isn't he this?

00:24:57.520 Isn't he that?

00:24:58.080 And I said, well, yes, he is Catholic.

00:24:59.620 And yes, he is pro-abortion.

00:25:00.740 Or he claims to be Catholic.

00:25:01.600 He's pro-abortion. 0.57

00:25:02.740 And so those are great opportunities to have conversations.

00:25:05.740 But we have, my wife, the day you emailed me to say you wanted to have this conversation,

00:25:10.480 it was striking to me.

00:25:11.920 You've done that once before.

00:25:13.620 I woke up, said to my wife, I have to get a coffee.

00:25:17.700 Call John Henry.

00:25:18.980 Because in a dream, I was told I have to call this cardinal.

00:25:23.280 Before I got back with my coffee, you had called me to say this cardinal wanted to talk to me.

00:25:27.800 I don't know if you remember that.

00:25:28.720 And then you emailed me if you wanted to have this conversation.

00:25:34.320 And the whole night before, my wife and I were talking about recalibrating, being more disciplined,

00:25:40.180 that we cannot let the hatred and the division and the calumny and the gaslighting and the insanity

00:25:47.140 that we're all having to deal with as adults, let's shelter our children from that,

00:25:54.060 ground them in transcendent truths, fill our life with the sacramentals, the beauty of the faith,

00:26:02.440 bring them to the sacraments, be the same person inside the house,

00:26:07.160 who's outside of the house, to the best of our ability.

00:26:09.800 And when there's a chasm between what we say we believe and how we act,

00:26:14.720 we need to be very open with our children about our struggles and why I struggle with this

00:26:19.460 or why I struggle with that.

00:26:21.600 And I think if we do that, by God's grace, our children will remain in the faith.

00:26:27.640 Amen.

00:26:29.560 Amen.

00:26:30.840 What a thing.

00:26:32.320 What a world we live in.

00:26:33.220 And it struck me as you were talking about Cardinal Bernardin and that horrific chapter in your life.

00:26:43.060 You're one of the people who have actually unmade his scandal,

00:26:49.480 which was the scandal of, you know, the seamless garment, which is complete falsehood.

00:26:54.660 And basically for him and for all progressive, the progressive movement so-called in the church

00:27:02.280 is about equating all things with abortion, really subsuming abortion so that we could make

00:27:07.960 the environment and the climate and the death penalty and all this ahead of the concern for life.

00:27:13.880 But you've taken that and really not twisted it, given a straight road to it.

00:27:20.640 If you could explain that just a little bit, that'd be great.

00:27:22.600 Yeah, it's strange by God's grace because my commitment to sort of a consistent ethic of life

00:27:29.600 began with the very beginnings of my work in the pro-life movement because I had come as an atheist,

00:27:37.880 never went to church a day in his life, knew nothing really about politics.

00:27:40.880 To me, abortion was the intentional direct killing of an innocent human person, 0.89

00:27:44.700 of a vulnerable child, the most vulnerable member of the human family.

00:27:47.940 So for me, it birthed in me a radical commitment.

00:27:52.700 If you'd have talked to me when I was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old, not to just ending abortion,

00:27:57.660 but to really, I would have said, I wanted to stand between the violent and the vulnerable,

00:28:01.420 the violence in children.

00:28:02.660 And it didn't, I didn't see really that line that our culture had painted in the Roe v.

00:28:07.940 Wade, the lines that they had drawn.

00:28:09.680 It was just protecting the vulnerable from violence.

00:28:11.960 As I went, got out of the military and went to college, I discovered this quote unquote

00:28:17.280 seamless garment or consistent ethic.

00:28:19.500 And it was, it was really gross to me from the very beginning.

00:28:23.020 It was a scandal.

00:28:23.940 The seamless garment to me was really a great scandal to me entering the church.

00:28:28.360 And what might be strange is if you go back and look to my earliest writings in the nineties,

00:28:31.940 I was writing about war and immigration and other things before pro-life.

00:28:36.820 Um, even though I was speaking about pro-life, I felt as a writer, I don't have much new

00:28:43.120 to say.

00:28:43.540 I'm learning from all these great pro-life writers.

00:28:46.220 Um, but on war and other things I felt I could speak as a, as a former soldier.

00:28:50.520 But, um, but to me, well, yeah, what the consistent ethic or the seamless garment does, I think

00:28:56.300 by design is it drowns the child in the womb and a sea of prudential issues.

00:29:02.120 And in doing so, it not only abandons the child in the womb from those who would protect

00:29:08.120 the child, but it also creates divisions on those issues where there is harmony.

00:29:14.920 For example, like on immigration, I support border security and I support a mandatory 0.98

00:29:19.980 verification system.

00:29:21.240 I also support a big supporter of the DREAM Act.

00:29:24.680 Um, I've been, I've been, and I've been writing on this for 20 years, but I come from

00:29:28.800 this position that, that we need a secure border because we want to protect the vulnerable

00:29:33.540 from economic exploitation, vulnerable migrants.

00:29:37.180 We want to protect vulnerable Americans from having their wages undercut by the exploitation

00:29:42.560 of vulnerable migrants.

00:29:44.040 We want an e-verification system because we want everyone working in this country to have

00:29:49.660 the same architecture of legal protection as the next person.

00:29:52.920 Da-da-da.

00:29:53.700 Now, you may disagree with me on this.

00:29:55.660 You may say, Jason, you know, I think that, that, um, a mandatory verification system isn't

00:30:01.280 the best way to go.

00:30:02.260 And I may say, I support the DREAM Act because I think the children of parents who were, were

00:30:08.140 lured into an underground economy, who were raised around American children, are American

00:30:12.280 children.

00:30:13.200 They should be recognized as such by the law.

00:30:15.540 You may say, well, but Jason, to do that is going to lead to more exploitation of migrants

00:30:20.000 and more children trapped.

00:30:20.960 And we can have this argument.

00:30:23.280 These are prudential issues, but we should, we would both be grounded in a concern for

00:30:27.360 the vulnerable.

00:30:28.220 What the seamless garment does is it creates divisions where there are none and it leaves

00:30:34.180 the most vulnerable abandoned.

00:30:36.360 And what I notice about the quote unquote seamless garment folks, which have sort of evaporated,

00:30:41.780 I don't know where they are.

00:30:42.740 Um, but the issues I work on, this offends some people, there are issues like in commensurate

00:30:49.400 to abortion in the world today.

00:30:51.100 There are issues like in commensurate to abortion in the world today.

00:30:54.400 For example, 3 million Uyghurs are in concentration camps where they're murdered, their organs are

00:31:02.420 being harvested, where there's forced abortions, contraception.

00:31:06.180 I'm not saying nothing is like in commensurate to abortion.

00:31:08.920 If tomorrow China nuked Taiwan and Hong Kong, that would say is a liking commensurate issue.

00:31:14.760 It's mass murder of intentional, the intentional mass murder of innocent life.

00:31:20.580 Um, but I wonder why I never see these groups speaking up for the Uyghur, which we all profit 0.99

00:31:27.500 from John Henry, because we wear Nike shoes and we use Apple computers and we shop at Costco.

00:31:32.560 So all three of those companies have used, participated with, uh, partners that have used slave labor.

00:31:41.540 So I don't see them talk about that.

00:31:43.780 I don't even hear them today talking about limiting strategic nuclear weapons, which are

00:31:48.240 designed to target civilians.

00:31:49.980 It's always prudential issues on how best to spend the government dole.

00:31:55.440 So I call it actually, we should call it a seamless garment, what it actually is preferential

00:32:00.780 option for me, preferential option for myself.

00:32:05.320 Catholic social teaching exists as an instrument to gratify my ego and as a tool that I can use 0.51

00:32:11.920 to argue for benefits that go to me.

00:32:15.040 And then I see most of these people are white college educated middle-class folks using Catholic

00:32:22.120 social teaching to advance what is obviously directly in their interests.

00:32:26.720 When it's the opposite, Catholic social teaching, all of us, look, if you're watching this, what

00:32:35.160 it tells me is by God's grace, you have good formation.

00:32:38.200 You're strong in your faith.

00:32:40.100 We're the privileged ones.

00:32:42.020 We're to serve.

00:32:43.220 We're, you know, we're the ones that recognize that our neighbors are made in the image of

00:32:50.500 God, that we are surrounded by these, the most beautiful creatures in the created cosmos

00:32:54.900 that angels kneel to.

00:32:58.460 Why would I want to look at Catholic social teaching as an instrument to serve me?

00:33:03.660 And, um, and I really believe, so to me, I recognize that what I want is an authentic,

00:33:09.880 consistent ethic grounded in the truth.

00:33:13.420 And this new book by Carter Sneed is, is really Wall Street Journal called it one of the top

00:33:18.160 books of 2020.

00:33:20.980 Um, he talks about how we need a legal framework grounded in the vulnerability, the, how frail

00:33:27.620 the human body is, the human person.

00:33:29.560 And that's what Catholic social teaching is about, uh, is, is, is ordering us to think

00:33:36.460 about the vulnerable.

00:33:37.380 John Henry, I don't know if you remember when, uh, there was a false nuclear alarm that went

00:33:41.760 off in Hawaii, a false nuclear alert.

00:33:44.140 Oh yes.

00:33:44.980 Yeah.

00:33:45.660 And I wrote that article.

00:33:47.580 Um, I think I might've published it with you guys.

00:33:49.500 I forget, but you did absolutely my family.

00:33:53.480 I had a plan I've known since the nineties, we were, you know, in the hot seat and I had

00:33:58.680 a plan for my family's safety.

00:34:01.140 So when this happened, we had a timetable, we had go bags, we had a cave to get to, and

00:34:06.580 we got to our cave within the time that we needed to get there from a missile to go from

00:34:11.680 North Korea to Hawaii.

00:34:12.960 And we published that article.

00:34:15.600 What was strange to me was, was startling to me when it was all clear.

00:34:20.760 It was called and we drove back home and I put funny cartoons on for my children to distract

00:34:25.640 them from the trauma of what they just experienced.

00:34:27.820 My whole state experienced my phone, my, my email and phone and my WhatsApp and my friends

00:34:35.040 from Iraq and Syria filled up my phone.

00:34:40.460 Concerned for me.

00:34:42.960 You know, other friends were sending funny taxer jokes, but these people who were, were,

00:34:51.880 were literally just beginning to heal from ISIS and ISIS was still in large parts of their

00:34:58.340 country.

00:34:59.340 We're the first to be concerned for me, not to worry about themselves as a victim, but

00:35:04.120 they were thoughtful to me.

00:35:05.400 And that's what it's about.

00:35:06.620 That we have to be, no matter what we're going through for most of us.

00:35:11.020 Um, and I'm not diminishing what any of us and all of us might go through.

00:35:16.300 We are blessed.

00:35:17.340 We are privileged.

00:35:18.020 And with the gospel and the church teach me as I am called to serve the vulnerable, not

00:35:23.500 to use Catholic social teaching is a rhetorical tool to advance my interests at the ballot

00:35:29.280 box.

00:35:30.140 That might've been too long winded.

00:35:31.540 That's great, Jason.

00:35:34.840 You know what?

00:35:35.680 It's, uh, it's great to have you.

00:35:37.260 You're an answer to so many of the, the folks who would say, oh, all those guys care about

00:35:42.340 is, uh, is a baby in the woman.

00:35:44.580 Once it's born, they don't give a damn.

00:35:46.440 Well, uh, you're an, you're an answer to that in a big way.

00:35:49.460 I want to thank you for being with us on this episode of the John Henry Weston show.

00:35:53.320 God bless you.

00:35:54.340 And God bless your family.

00:35:56.000 Thank you, John Henry.

00:35:57.800 And God bless all of you.

00:35:59.320 We'll see you next time.

00:36:01.540 Hi, this is John Henry Weston, the co-founder and editor in chief of LifeSite News.

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The John-Henry Westen Show - February 12, 2021

How to prevent your kids from abandoning the faith

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