The John-Henry Westen Show - January 14, 2022


John-Henry Westen explains how Catholics should act when Pope Francis contradicts Church teaching


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

156.8511

Word count

3,346

Sentence count

190

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Sustainer Segment of the John Henry Weston Show, host John Henry Westendorf answers a question from a listener about abuse in the Eucharist and the role of lay Catholics in reporting it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, welcome back everyone to this week's episode of the Sustainer segment of the John
00:00:04.700 Henry Weston Show. I'm Danielle Zuccaro, the Sustaining Donor Coordinator with LifeSite News.
00:00:10.180 We are glad to be back in this new year and we have many wonderful questions to share with you
00:00:16.300 today. John Henry is excited to answer them for you. Just as a reminder, the Sustainer segment
00:00:21.760 is our bi-weekly exclusive where John Henry gets to answer questions from our Sustainer community,
00:00:29.380 our Sustainers are our LifeSite monthly donors who submit questions to be answered on the show.
00:00:36.240 So if you'd like to become a Sustainer, please feel free to sign up below. We welcome your questions
00:00:41.820 once you have joined our community. There's also many other perks to becoming a Sustainer,
00:00:47.120 including behind the scenes, some exclusive previews of some news, and definitely some
00:00:54.380 contact with our staff. So feel free to sign up below and we welcome your questions on a future
00:01:00.640 Sustainer segment. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father,
00:01:10.900 and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, welcome John Henry to the Sustainer segment.
00:01:16.920 Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Danielle. Good to be here and also a very happy
00:01:22.060 and holy Christmas to everybody. I hope it was really great for you and best wishes and prayers
00:01:26.580 for the new year. Well, we have a multitude of very interesting questions today. So we will begin
00:01:32.660 with our first, which comes to us from Janet in Ohio. Janet asks, what do you suggest we do as
00:01:40.980 faithful Catholics when we see sacrilegious abuses up on the altar or a lack of reverence toward the Holy
00:01:48.180 Eucharist? Thank you for the question, Janet. Yeah, it's a struggle because it actually is not
00:01:53.720 too unfrequent, unfortunately. There is a document of the Church out, I believe it was called Sacro
00:02:01.140 Sanctum Concilium or something like that, that actually told Catholics, lay Catholics, that they're
00:02:06.420 actually responsible to report Eucharistic abuses to the proper authority, which is in most cases your
00:02:13.580 bishop, you know, when you see a priest doing it. I think if we follow the advice of the Holy
00:02:19.940 Scriptures on how to deal with conflict, it's easy enough to do. First, you go to the individual,
00:02:26.260 then you go to the Church, and then—or you bring witnesses, and then you go to the Church.
00:02:32.620 And so really, it's if you feel that the pastor is someone that you can mention this to, I would
00:02:38.460 perhaps gather a document from the Church that spells out the teaching of what they should be
00:02:44.380 doing, for instance, and bring it to the pastor, if you think he's open to it. There's some who
00:02:49.780 won't, you know, won't be, but—and show it to him, and then pray. If that doesn't work, and there's
00:02:56.840 still the abuses going on, then it's your responsibility to go to the bishop. After that, of course, that's not
00:03:02.940 on you anymore. So, you know, for instance, one of the practices condemned by the Church is the
00:03:10.820 pouring of the precious blood into other vessels. Sometimes, horrifically, you will see the
00:03:18.160 consecration of the precious blood of our Lord Jesus in Mass into a kind of a pitcher, and then
00:03:24.080 it's poured out into different chalices, or even cups, and nonsense like that. That's a total abuse
00:03:29.760 of the Blessed Sacrament in Mass, and it should never happen. When it does, it's incumbent upon us
00:03:35.560 Catholics to report it in that method. So, one of the things, though, privately that we should be
00:03:42.940 doing when we see such things is to pray in reparation, just there at the Mass. Another thing,
00:03:48.840 though, is when we are exposed to that kind of abuse, or even worse, you know, we do have to think
00:03:56.240 seriously about moving parishes, particularly if you have young children who could be negatively
00:04:02.360 influenced by abuses of the Eucharist, of the Mass in general, both by externals, but also, you know,
00:04:12.080 by homilies that are off-kilter. So, sometimes we just need to get to a different parish.
00:04:19.240 Thank you, John Henry. Our next question comes to us from Diego in Montreal. Diego writes,
00:04:26.860 are the newly approved Pfizer and Merck's pills against COVID-19 tainted by abortion? Are they
00:04:33.300 morally acceptable? Diego, thanks for the question. We have in both the Pfizer and Merck pills is
00:04:41.120 something interesting. A, they're brand new. So, we haven't assessed or been able to get to yet
00:04:48.320 that particular determination. But with regard to the pills themselves, something's very fishy
00:04:55.660 because Pfizer and Merck come out with these pills, A, in record time. So, they're relatively
00:05:02.280 untested. One of the things we know for sure, and here's one of the things that should alarm you very
00:05:08.460 much, is that the treatment protocols that were established by various doctors and have been shown
00:05:16.240 to work. Particularly, I should mention Dr. Peter McCullough, who with Dr. Elizabeth Villit put out
00:05:21.700 the first of the, not authorized, but the treatment protocols, published them in medical journals so
00:05:29.660 that these are published in medical journals, peer-reviewed medical journals, so that you know
00:05:34.840 they work. Dr. Zelenko's protocol he published. These are all protocols that have worked, have been
00:05:41.160 very, very effective. The various medications they suggest other than the zinc, D, C, and so on,
00:05:48.660 vitamin protocols, including quercetin, but they also include ivermectin. And ivermectin, for instance,
00:05:56.320 compared to the Pfizer drug, Paxilivin or something like that that it's called, but it acts in the same
00:06:02.580 way. It's an antiviral. And interestingly, both the Merck pill and the Pfizer pill that have just been
00:06:11.120 given this authorization, emergency youth authorization, are both about over $530 per treatment course.
00:06:20.460 That's ridiculous. If you look at India's price for the ivermectin treatment that they were basically 0.96
00:06:26.160 giving out, it was like $2.30. Compared to $530, something is really wrong there. So whatever's
00:06:38.040 going on, it is really nefarious. We know that the ivermectin was effective and worked. We know that
00:06:44.960 the treatment protocols were there. For them to now voice something on it to basically enrich the
00:06:51.740 pharmaceutical companies again, it smells of something really, really bad. So whatever is
00:06:59.700 going on here, it seems ridiculous. And I know that there will be many people who will wonder at this 0.57
00:07:06.240 because now that this protocol is open to us, approved, therefore it will likely be allowed for
00:07:16.360 in hospital treatments rather than basically denying them everything until they just go on a vent or
00:07:23.780 whatever. So there is that. There's one other concern because this is so new. We just learned the other
00:07:29.660 day that in 2017, the CDC gave approval to pills with trackers on them so that they could tell if you
00:07:41.300 ingested the pill and it dissolved in your stomach, it would send some kind of notification. So there's
00:07:47.580 all sorts of weird stuff. I don't put anything past the pharmaceuticals anymore because we have learned
00:07:52.740 such horrific truths about what they've done and what they're doing that unfortunately, the system of
00:08:01.260 trust there is really broken. And when you follow that financial motive, something smells and I would
00:08:08.440 avoid it. Our next question today comes from Jacqueline in Illinois. Jacqueline asks, how can we
00:08:15.940 understand Pope Francis, who on the one hand dedicated a year to divine mercy and another to St.
00:08:22.780 Joseph, yet wants to ostracize traditional Catholics who want to receive the Eucharist properly and attend
00:08:28.940 the Latin Mass? He challenges doctrine regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as other longstanding
00:08:35.100 proclamations made by previous popes. Jacqueline, thanks for the question. Very difficult one. It's
00:08:40.500 obviously something that we've been struggling with at LifeSite for the last seven years now. And it is a
00:08:47.540 very difficult thing to discern because you're right, this is very confusing. He seems to do some
00:08:56.480 really good things, right? You know, every once in a while. You have to remember, we at LifeSite, we pray for
00:09:01.640 Pope Francis every single day. As, you know, as staff, we pray for him, pray for his conversion,
00:09:09.500 actually, because that's truly what's needed. Very much like Saul was persecuting the Church.
00:09:19.420 Pope Francis right now is persecuting the Church. But one interesting thing about Saul, of course, 0.58
00:09:23.040 is that he became Paul, the great apostle. He went from harming the Church gravely to one of the
00:09:29.600 greatest heroes in the Church. And that's our real hope for Pope Francis. We, as Bishop Schneider
00:09:34.960 himself, actually advocated publicly, pray for the conversion of Pope Francis. And that's what we've
00:09:40.300 been doing. And it would be glorious if he did. Because imagine if that same attitude turned around,
00:09:47.180 the same attitude that would basically get rid of Cardinal Burke, just like that, that would get rid of
00:09:52.600 some of the best prelates in the Church would dare to go up against, meaning politically incorrect
00:09:58.720 things that he's done, like bring out Cardinal Daniels when he's known to be not only, you know,
00:10:04.280 rainbow stole type of a Catholic priest and bishop and cardinal, but also one who has even been
00:10:11.560 heterodox on abortion of all things. But even in terms of the world, he was so bad that he was caught
00:10:18.300 on tape, telling a fellow who was abused by a bishop friend of his, who happened to be the guy's
00:10:23.160 uncle, you know, not to go public with the abuse, not to go to the police with the abuse. Horrific stuff.
00:10:29.940 And yet Francis has the gall, has the chutzpah, to go forward with him on the stage during his
00:10:35.540 election, on the stage, I mean on the balcony for the papal election, and bring in Daniels over and
00:10:42.180 over again into the first, you know, synod on the families and things like this. So there's a real
00:10:47.560 chutzpah there, and if that chutzpah got turned around into a converted Francis, it'd be quite
00:10:52.320 something. But to get back to your question specifically, what are we to make of this?
00:10:56.920 Well, I'm going to be very honest with you. I have found a pattern in Pope Francis. When he does
00:11:03.080 something good, it usually is a prelude to something really alarming. So I'll give you a couple of
00:11:10.060 examples. Pope Francis actually contravened the Church's teaching on contraception, and that's huge.
00:11:17.340 You have to understand, we went through, you know, the whole debate in the 60s. And when we finally
00:11:23.200 came to Humanae Vitae, remember, that was a sort of compromise. Because at first, it seemed in the
00:11:30.980 debate during the, which led up to Humanae Vitae, it really did seem like the Church's teaching was
00:11:37.640 going to change. In fact, the majority of those cardinals that looked into the question for Paul VI
00:11:43.160 actually were on the other side. And then we know that it was the intervention of Carol Baitiwa,
00:11:49.080 who later became Pope John Paul II, that actually brought Humanae Vitae back to its senses, if you
00:11:56.760 will, brought the Church teaching, made it solid again. And people were already being told in
00:12:03.220 confession, yeah, you can go ahead, the Church is now approved for contraception, it's no problem,
00:12:07.820 and so on and so forth. So when it finally came out, Humanae Vitae came out, and the Church was 0.85
00:12:13.900 solid in her teaching and affirmed the teaching against contraception for 2,000 years, it was a
00:12:20.080 massive blow. In fact, there was a ton of consternation in the Church. Whole countries,
00:12:26.060 bishops from the whole, you know, the whole of the country, the United States, Canada, other countries,
00:12:33.580 rejected Humanae Vitae originally. So just horrific stuff happened. And yet Francis, in a plain interview,
00:12:41.680 said that it was okay to use contraception. He was talking about Zika virus, when there's a possibility
00:12:45.920 of, you know, transmission of Zika, could you use contraception? He said, yes. Well, that was really
00:12:51.040 weird. And so we thought, oh, that can't be. So we went for clarification to the Vatican Press
00:12:56.620 Secretary at the time, and he told us, yes. Pope Francis said that, you know, in grave circumstances,
00:13:02.460 he made even more broad, you can use the pill and the condom. So that's totally outside of Catholic 0.92
00:13:09.820 Church teaching. In fact, it's the opposite. And so how can this ever be? But here's how the statement
00:13:17.140 started from Pope Francis. In fact, if you look at pro-life reporting the next day after he made the
00:13:26.320 comments, the pro-life reporting was all about one thing. It was all about how Francis said that
00:13:33.520 abortion is not only wrong, it's a crime. And so like, it was a really good, really strong statement 0.98
00:13:44.260 and tons of Catholic news services, including the Catholic news service and many others. Go look,
00:13:50.440 ran with the story. Pope Francis says abortion is a crime. And yet that was just the prelude
00:13:57.980 to going against the Church's teaching on contraception. Actually, over the years, I've noticed
00:14:02.940 that very frequently there is a really good, strong statement, and then comes something really,
00:14:11.020 really weird. You know what? I'll go really, really recent. So very recently, in the past week
00:14:17.760 or so, there was the statement from Pope Francis about why are people just adopting pets? They
00:14:24.520 should be having children. Very Catholic sounding concept. And yet what happened in the same week?
00:14:30.400 So in the same week, we just saw Pope Francis double down massively on the obligation for COVID
00:14:38.980 injections for these abortion tainted jabs that we're all supposed to get them morally obliged to 1.00
00:14:43.740 somehow. He also, in the same week, gives a letter of appreciation for Sister Gramic, who really was
00:14:51.880 basically kicked out of all public appearance for the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict and JP too,
00:14:59.720 because of her basically being pro-LGBT in a way that contravenes Church teaching. And yet Pope Francis
00:15:07.620 not only praised her, we heard about a month and a half ago that he praised New Ways Ministries,
00:15:12.580 which was the ministries that, you know, she founded with Father Nugent. And they were both ostracized
00:15:20.160 by the Popes because of their infidelity, because of their leading to harm those people who are same-sex 0.96
00:15:27.060 attracted. So you have all...and same week, by the way, Francis tells traditional Catholics again,
00:15:34.300 you know, really maligns them, puts them to the back of the bus by saying that they are seeking
00:15:40.040 a dead language. And so, you know, these kind of pejorative things that come out, these kind of
00:15:45.740 hugely alarming things, they come very often after some kind of positive statement. So as sad as that
00:15:55.640 sounds, when I hear a statement of Pope Francis that's very positive, I'm like, I'm cowering already
00:16:01.800 thinking, uh-oh, what's coming now? So we really do need to pray. We need to pray for the conversion
00:16:07.800 of Pope Francis. And just imagine if he does. It would be a glorious thing. And God knows if I were
00:16:14.400 a liberal bishop and saw him convert, I would be quaking in my boots because from what we've seen
00:16:20.100 him do on the other side, it's unreal. So we'll see what comes.
00:16:23.260 And our final question comes to us from Kirby today. He begins with a little anecdote by writing,
00:16:31.500 yesterday I was called by my pastor and asked not to come to mass because I don't wear a mask
00:16:37.380 due to my discernment of my conscience. I don't have any real experience in theology and didn't
00:16:43.800 see any resources about assistance in this regard. I was wondering if you might know of any person or
00:16:50.160 resource that could help me appropriately defend my ability to follow my own discernment?
00:16:55.780 Kirby, thank you for the question. It is a very, very difficult one. And this is one that
00:17:00.800 people have been struggling with, well, obviously over the past couple of years. We've been
00:17:05.300 trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here. And the answer on the part of Orthodox 0.94
00:17:12.480 Catholics really does vary. In a way, it's so sad. It's endemic of our time that we don't have clear 1.00
00:17:21.240 teaching in the church, almost period. Because, you know, the Pope, there's something up with the
00:17:29.100 Pope. And in the scriptures we read, you know, they will strike, the shepherd and the sheep will
00:17:34.280 scatter. It's so true. Finding clear teaching today on the specific issues that are most pertinent to
00:17:42.420 us is very difficult. With regard to masking, it is a massive challenge to know what to do. But you're
00:17:50.000 well within not only your rights as a Catholic, but your own personal conscience to discern. So it's
00:17:58.640 your conscientious decision. And they can't deny you the sacraments for that. So that's something
00:18:06.200 that's very clear. So they might say, oh, it's a health issue, and so on and so forth. Well, let's
00:18:11.960 take it up as a health issue. During SARS-CoV-1, there was this same, not same, but similar question
00:18:19.880 that went to the, I think it was the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline and Sacraments.
00:18:26.400 It might have been the CDF. And the question was asked by an English bishop, I believe it was,
00:18:32.120 should, do I have to give Holy Communion on the tongue to the faithful who want it, even though
00:18:38.840 it's a health concern right now? And that's, by the way, a health concern that could be argued is
00:18:44.040 much more concerning than a mask, because there you're actually touching someone's tongue or close
00:18:49.620 to someone's tongue. And that's much more dangerous, you could say, than being like six foot apart from
00:18:54.960 someone and still needing a mask on. Nonetheless, but interestingly, the congregation came back,
00:19:02.920 and by the way, you can find this letter right on lifesitenews.com. My blog post on the issue of
00:19:08.780 reception of Holy Communion on the tongue has this letter within it. So please do avail yourself of
00:19:15.020 that, and you can have the original letter. The congregation comes back and tells the bishop that
00:19:20.120 he is not able to deny the faithful, who are in a state of grace, obviously, from receiving sacraments
00:19:27.640 because of this desire to want to only give communion on the hand. So there's a health concern that seems
00:19:35.220 above that of the mask, and yet the congregation rules, nope, you can't deny the faithful the sacraments.
00:19:43.900 And so everything that I can understand on the question is that we cannot be denied for reasons
00:19:52.380 of following our conscience on masking. And many people have decided different ways. A lot of people
00:19:59.420 have decided to go along with it so that we can have the church open, because there's those concerns
00:20:05.420 too. Sometimes the health authority says, well, if you mask and follow the regular protocol for
00:20:10.720 everybody else, then you can have your churches open. If you don't, you can't. People make all sorts
00:20:16.100 of decisions within that. And we don't want to condemn people for wearing a mask in church or not
00:20:24.820 wearing a mask in church. We should be able to defend the conscientious decisions of our brothers and
00:20:30.700 sisters. But definitely, we're not allowed to be denied the sacraments for following our conscience
00:20:37.700 in that way. But Kirby, thanks for the question. And really something that we all need to pray about
00:20:44.820 and discern with the best resources we can. Very good. Well, thank you so much, John Henry,
00:20:50.180 for your time. And thank you all for staying tuned to this week's Sustainer segment. We look forward to
00:20:57.420 getting your questions. And again, if you would like to become a monthly donor or a Sustainer,
00:21:03.220 please sign up below or go to lifesitenews.com and you can sign up in the right-hand corner of our
00:21:09.460 webpage. We look forward to receiving your questions and look forward to seeing you next time
00:21:14.660 on the Sustainer segment of the John Henry Weston Show. Thank you so much and God bless you.