In this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, host John Henry Westendorf is joined by Jason Jones, a stalwart pro-life advocate who was born in Hawaii, raised in Texas, and served in the U.S. Army. Jason shares his story of how he became a Catholic and how he converted to the faith.
00:01:55.660Welcome 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.
00:02:02.860He's a great friend, and he's been a stalwart pro-life warrior for decades and decades.
00:02:47.280So, we want to bring some hope for the faith today, because there's lots of consternation going on.
00:02:55.940And a lot of people actually questioning their faith because, well, the church is in great consternation, as you know, with Pope Francis himself.
00:03:05.800But also, we have a new development in Joe Biden.
00:03:10.040Joe Biden masquerading as a faithful Catholic.
00:03:15.860But 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.
00:03:27.480And it's leading people to question the faith.
00:03:30.660And I was praying my rosary the other day, and I think an inspiration occurred to me to contact you about this very thing.
00:03:40.740So, if you wouldn't mind, there's a lot of people who know your story, but I know some don't.
00:03:44.620But I really want you to focus on your conversion story, first of all, from a Catholic perspective.
00:03:52.420Yeah, well, it's interesting because my pro-life commitment was birthed at the very same moment that my anti-Catholic prejudice was born.
00:04:01.280And also, at the same time, sort of my curiosity at the source of human dignity.
00:04:07.500And it took about 15 years for those all to merge in that I became a Catholic.
00:04:11.620But 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.
00:04:22.200And so, we had conspired that after my birthday, I would join the Army.
00:05:10.800I was born to a 16-year-old is today maybe, unfortunately, quite common.
00:05:16.580But so, we were both sort of the idea of creating a family and caring for a child.
00:05:23.460We were excited by this, even though we probably didn't have the formation to live up to our aspirations.
00:05:32.040So, while I was in basic training, a few weeks before I came home, I get a call from her,
00:05:36.940and her father had found out she was pregnant, beat her up, and took her to Chicago Masonic Hospital,
00:05:42.960where she had a forced third trimester abortion.
00:05:46.900And what makes us all very startling is, not only was her father Catholic,
00:05:51.780he was a very prominent Catholic, and he was really best friends with Cardinal Bernadine.
00:05:57.160And 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.
00:06:09.200I always thought he was a strange guy, but I admired him, and I associated Catholicism with him.
00:06:14.260And so, after this happened, I would say I became really angry.
00:06:20.640I became sort of almost an anti-Catholic bigot.
00:06:23.540And it was grounded in, at the same time, I didn't know abortion was even a thing, as strange as this may sound,
00:06:31.260until I just, let alone something that was legal, until I discovered that my child had been destroyed through a forced third trimester abortion.
00:06:38.260And my captain, I was begging my, I was crying, just asking my captain to call the police.
00:06:44.480And he looked at me and explained, you know, confused, why would I call the police?
00:06:48.180Don't you know this is all perfectly legal?
00:06:51.740So, you know, and I'm a filmmaker in the film business, that would be the call to adventure.
00:06:57.580And what was interesting about this sort of grave injustice that I experienced,
00:07:01.680my high school girlfriend experienced, and our child experienced, is that how closely connected abortion and the Catholic Church were in human anthropology.
00:07:16.340For me, in a real, I was very conscious of this.
00:07:21.360How could a prominent Catholic do such a thing?
00:07:23.400And 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.
00:07:34.280It's an incredible thing that, you know, you were so anti-Catholic at this point.
00:07:57.720And sadly enough, my high school girlfriend is today even a very aggressive anti, you know, she's really anti-Catholic today.
00:08:05.780Because of all the experiences that she had to suffer in a way that was much more devastating and intimate than how I suffered.
00:08:14.380So for me, it really, I became, I had read the novella by Ayn Rand, Anthem in Junior High and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
00:08:24.320And as strange as this sounds, after the abortion, I thought of those two short stories or the novella and that short story.
00:08:30.100And then I started reading all of Ayn Rand's non-fiction and her fiction.
00:08:34.460And I became like an aggressive, objectivist, Randian pro-lifer.
00:08:40.400As strange as that all sounds, who is very anti-Catholic.
00:08:42.980And, 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.
00:08:54.680I 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?
00:09:06.060But 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.
00:09:15.680Because 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.
00:09:30.560It was the fruit of the Christian vision of the human person that the church taught the West and the world.
00:09:37.960First, you know, Jewish scriptures were made in the image of God.
00:09:40.760And then what does the, what does it mean for God to become man in the Trinity to have three persons?
00:09:45.800And it was through the church thinking about this for centuries that we came to accept what our founding fathers called the self-evident truth.
00:09:54.740If it's in our declaration of independence, the declaration principle really is not self-evident.
00:09:59.640It was taught to the world through the church.
00:10:03.120And 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.
00:10:14.720Didn't really want to accept the church's sexual ethics.
00:10:17.900I remember I was just kind of forced, I was really forced into a corner.
00:10:25.580But then at the same time, somehow I discovered Chesterton and Bellic who were very attractive to me, especially in their triumphalism.
00:10:31.920I found so much of the pessimism in the church that we see, especially in the English speaking world, was really just depressing to me.
00:10:41.280And 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.
00:10:52.620Actually, 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.
00:11:04.420That was, I literally, I could show you my journal where I wrote that.
00:11:10.200I saw the church as an obstacle to my commitment to defending the child from violence.
00:11:14.960Now, 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.
00:11:26.720But it was Sartre that sort of, and Nietzsche, that deconstructed any hope for human dignity away from the Catholic church.
00:11:33.880And I remember thinking, I have to choose how I'm living my life and abandon any hope for human dignity.
00:11:44.400And 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.
00:11:52.600I had to either abandon this, what appears to be self-evident dignity to the human person.
00:11:58.440I 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.
00:12:07.300And it was really, it seems like an easy choice, you know, but it wasn't.
00:12:18.580This is how long a process it was for me, hoping to become Orthodox.
00:12:22.120I 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.
00:12:35.020And so I studied the great schism and saw that there were many schisms in the great return in 1688.
00:12:41.540And 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.
00:13:14.460And I knew that I was broken and, and needed formation.
00:13:18.200And I wish that I could go to some place that was a utopia where everyone was perfect and, and could help for me.
00:13:25.160But no, I had to go to that hospital of sinners that the church is.
00:13:29.820And 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.
00:13:43.320And so that was what for me was a really hard decision.
00:13:46.480But 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.
00:13:55.640The Catholic church is the only thing that is bigger on the inside than from the outside.
00:14:01.700And, you know, I am so grateful for the grace and the privilege to be a part of the Catholic church.
00:14:11.660And the spirit of the age tempts Christians in every age and people fall in every age.
00:14:19.460We feel betrayed and lost and lonely in every age.
00:14:22.600And 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.
00:14:37.400But 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?
00:14:45.200Or how would you have felt during the French Revolution when you were surrounded by Catholics that were trying to chop your head off?
00:14:51.900Or if you were in the Nineveh Plains just five years ago and the Catholics were being slaughtered and enslaved by ISIS?
00:15:01.780Or you were a Christian in the Nuba Mountains today and you were being barrel bombed by Khartoum?
00:15:07.400You 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.
00:15:19.340And so I wonder how really we have to acknowledge, and I'm the worst in this, John Henry.
00:15:38.860And 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.
00:15:49.960And so whatever hardships we face, it's strange that people are so despairing.
00:15:57.340And 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.
00:16:13.060I was a fallen away Catholic and raised by like a saint.
00:16:15.360But nonetheless, we've both been blessed with faithful wives and a multitude of children.
00:16:22.380But something came to me the other day in prayer and specifically why I thought of you.
00:16:29.960It'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.
00:16:38.400Yes, 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.
00:16:47.040It is very comfortable to be Catholic.
00:16:51.560However, there is a challenge today that there wasn't before.
00:16:55.300The 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.
00:17:07.560But 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.
00:17:29.560And one of the things that I really thought about was, what do we do for our own children?
00:17:37.200There 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.
00:17:45.560And 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?
00:18:01.880You know, no one really means to have an abortion.
00:18:48.160First 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.
00:19:03.640And 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.
00:19:17.420And our house looks like a Greek monastery.
00:19:19.900You know, we have so many icons everywhere.
00:19:21.360And so there's that spirit of the age.
00:19:24.860And the spirit of the age is becoming quite vicious and cruel and terrifying.
00:19:29.320And 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.
00:19:37.060The spirit of the age was quite seductive.
00:19:38.980Today, the spirit of the age is terrorizing.
00:20:53.800We're in a world without banisters, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, the great Jewish political philosopher.
00:21:00.420The 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.
00:21:10.560A great new book by our mutual friend Carter Sneed talks about how law not grounded in the body is not grounded in the vulnerable.
00:21:16.960So a law not grounded in the body leaves the vulnerable unprotected.
00:21:22.700I think the first thing we want our children to see is that we serve and love and honor the vulnerable.
00:21:29.760And in doing so, that we show that we will not conform to the spirit of the age.
00:21:34.900And we recognize it comes with all sorts of costs.
00:21:37.720But 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.
00:21:52.940Even 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.
00:22:10.960Say it and don't mean it so you can go home to your family.
00:22:13.120Then 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?
00:22:21.360And Franz says, do you think I have the right to say it?
00:22:26.760But 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.
00:22:38.780So 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.
00:23:01.280Not 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.
00:23:11.560And I'm a filmmaker and I'm making these projects and working with the Uyghur, working with groups in Yemen on the drone war.
00:23:18.280And I realized maybe sometimes I'm too careless.
00:23:20.460I'm walking through the living room and I'm talking about genocide.