The John-Henry Westen Show - May 29, 2023


PART 1: Freemasonry, the Black Hand, and ‘War with the Antichrist’ | Joshua Charles


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44 minutes

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184.55598

Word count

8,126

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491

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Misogyny

4

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4

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Hate speech

26

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Summary

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

In this episode of The John Henry Weston Show, host J.H.W. discusses a new book that takes a deep dive into Freemasonry and its impact on the Catholic Church. Author Joshua Charles explains why the church should be worried about Freemasonry.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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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 When you look in a lot of Masonic sources, they really do think of themselves,
00:00:03.740 they say the difference between a beast and a man is the same as a man and a mason.
00:00:08.240 But that's why I think the Catholic Church is their number one target. 0.99
00:00:11.620 Yeah, they want to go after Christians in general,
00:00:13.760 but they're very, very clear in many of their writings that the big kahuna is the Catholic Church.
00:00:25.380 Do you know that right before he became Pope,
00:00:27.960 Joseph Ratzinger was asked a question.
00:00:30.920 He was asked, who is the greatest of all enemies threatening the Catholic Church?
00:00:35.720 And after a pause, he responded, Freemasonry.
00:00:42.020 Really? I think most people think Freemasonry.
00:00:44.900 Isn't that like people with tinfoil hats believe in that stuff, none of us?
00:00:48.280 Well, there's a new book out by TAN Publishers,
00:00:51.740 and it takes a deep dive into Freemasonry in a very interesting way.
00:00:56.080 I'm going to introduce you to the author.
00:00:58.680 His name is Joshua Charles.
00:01:00.200 He is a number one New York Times bestselling author.
00:01:04.540 He is a historian, a classical pianist, and a former White House speechwriter for the Republicans.
00:01:10.840 He has degrees in music, government, and law.
00:01:13.320 He came into the Catholic Church from Protestantism in 2019.
00:01:17.700 And you know, this is going to be super fascinating.
00:01:21.660 We're going to divide this up into two parts because it's a really deep dive,
00:01:27.320 and it is going to be worth it.
00:01:29.420 You'll see on this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.
00:01:32.680 Stay tuned.
00:01:33.160 Hello, LifeSite friends.
00:01:36.680 As you know, the times we are witnessing in the world,
00:01:38.920 and specifically the Church, are both perilous and shocking.
00:01:42.280 We are seeing bishops against bishops,
00:01:44.800 Catholic clergy defying the Church's 2,000-year-old teaching with impunity,
00:01:48.940 and good priests suffering calumny and marginalization,
00:01:52.360 even a point of being cancelled by their own bishops.
00:01:55.460 That's why LifeSite News is proud to sponsor and support the upcoming second annual
00:02:01.060 Coalition for Cancelled Priests conference at the Rosemont Hilton near Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
00:02:08.060 I will be speaking there at this event, which takes place on June 23rd and 24th,
00:02:13.300 and reflecting on the conference theme of A House United.
00:02:18.000 As Catholics who uphold the Church's teaching on life, faith, family, and freedom,
00:02:22.340 we cannot afford to be divided and silent while our courageous priests are unjustly persecuted
00:02:29.800 and cancelled for faithfully serving Christ.
00:02:33.540 So join me in standing with our Cancelled Priests at this two-day event
00:02:37.500 to find out more about the conference and venue.
00:02:40.540 Visit www.cancelledpriests.org slash second-anniversary.
00:02:47.820 I hope to see you there, and now back to the program.
00:02:52.340 Joshua Charles, welcome to the program.
00:02:54.580 Thank you, John Henry. It's an honor to be with you.
00:02:56.840 You've played a huge role in my conversion, and I love LifeSite, so thank you.
00:03:00.800 Oh, praise God. Let's begin as we always do at the sign of the cross.
00:03:04.240 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:03:09.100 Amen.
00:03:10.040 So, this is very interesting. You're republishing a book, first published in 1885.
00:03:15.440 Why do that?
00:03:16.160 Well, it's funny. I read it during the lockdowns in 2020, you know, that uneventful period of life
00:03:21.780 for all of us, and it was remarkable in its prophetic prescience, I guess you could say.
00:03:28.260 Essentially, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII had written Humanum Genus, which was his encyclical against
00:03:33.780 Freemasonry, for those who maybe don't know. And at the end of that, he called on Catholic 0.68
00:03:38.800 clergy, Catholic claimant to tear off the mask of Freemasonry.
00:03:42.160 And so, a father, well, Monsignor Dillon, George Dillon, he was an Irish priest who was a missionary
00:03:47.760 for many years in Australia. He saw it as his duty to comply with what the Pope said and to
00:03:53.600 tear off the mask of Freemasonry. So, while he was in Edinburgh, he was going on, I think he was just
00:03:59.040 going on a lecture circuit in the UK, but he was in Edinburgh at the time, and he delivered a number
00:04:03.660 of lectures on Freemasonry to do just that, and he reduced it to a book, and it was published the
00:04:09.120 following year. So, that book I read in 2020, and despite it being published 140 years ago,
00:04:16.660 almost, I was stunned by how relevant it was, not only to the last, you know, previous 140 years,
00:04:23.200 but frankly, to what we've potentially been going through since 2020.
00:04:28.340 Unpack that for us. So, Freemasonry, a lot of people regard it as, you know,
00:04:33.940 well, that's like a conspiracy theory, that whole thing. Unpack this for us. Is it a conspiracy
00:04:40.440 theory? Even if it wasn't back then when it was, you know, in its heyday, it surely seems it doesn't
00:04:47.020 exist now, doesn't it? I would say it's been so wildly successful that most people don't even
00:04:54.000 realize it anymore. I would say that most of the concepts that most modern people believe
00:04:59.360 are Freemasonic in origin and spirit. We could go into a lot of different aspects of that. There's
00:05:06.980 political aspects, theological aspects, but politically, I mean, we outlined in the description
00:05:12.800 of the book kind of the highlights of everything it covers. So, among the thing it covers is here
00:05:17.840 was the agenda. They wanted to destroy the temporal and then the spiritual power of the papacy.
00:05:24.100 They wanted easy divorce laws across the world. They wanted marriage to be as easy to break,
00:05:30.520 or if not easier, than a business contract. So, think no-fault divorce and whatnot. 0.98
00:05:35.260 They wanted completely secularized education. They didn't want the church or any Christian 1.00
00:05:40.520 influence in it whatsoever. They wanted complete and total separation of church and state.
00:05:46.580 They were animated by a socialistic, communistic sort of agenda. I could actually go into a little bit
00:05:51.660 more detail on this at a later point, but highly materialistic. And ultimately, it was leading
00:05:57.900 toward a form of sort of pantheistic nature worship. And I'm sure many in your audience would think,
00:06:04.120 like myself, that that sounds quite familiar. And the reason it's heading toward a sort of
00:06:10.880 pantheistic nature worship, and we can get more into detail if you want, but essentially,
00:06:15.600 the fundamental difference I've concluded between the Catholic faith and Freemasonry,
00:06:21.140 and really, Freemasonry is a term—somebody doesn't have to be a card-carrying Freemason to
00:06:26.340 be a Freemason, in the sense that Leo XIII and Monsignor Dillon are talking about, and they both make
00:06:30.560 this clear. Freemasonry is just kind of their catch-all term for occultic sort of associations
00:06:36.160 that are engaged in these sorts of things, these plots to overturn Christian civilization. 0.64
00:06:40.220 But the essential difference is, we as Catholics believe that we can't save ourselves. We must be
00:06:46.280 given the Holy Spirit in baptism and the sacraments if we fall, and that we're given this by God's
00:06:52.360 grace, and that when we're given it, our souls become a temple for His presence. So we believe that
00:06:58.260 the soul, our soul, must have the divine come and inhabit it. The root of all occultism is the opposite.
00:07:05.200 It's that the divinity already resides in human nature, waiting to be, you know, latent, so to speak,
00:07:12.080 waiting to be unlocked by their gnosis, their knowledge, their particular knowledge, their rituals,
00:07:17.180 their signs, their symbols, and that in this is salvation, rather than a participation in the divine
00:07:23.180 nature itself. They believe it's already there. And so when we're heading toward pantheism, it's sort of the
00:07:27.900 sense that the divine is intrinsic to nature itself, and you don't need grace. That's why I coined a term in
00:07:33.940 there. You know, I come from Protestantism, and so I wanted to use a sola something, because, you know,
00:07:38.280 a lot of the Protestant heresies were sola scriptura, sola fide, whatever. So I describe this as sola 0.76
00:07:43.640 natura, nature alone, and I compare it to Satan's fall. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas said, Satan,
00:07:50.940 the reason why Satan fell, wasn't that he thought he could become God. Satan's too intelligent to know
00:07:56.320 that, to believe that. It was because he wanted to partake of the beatific vision without grace. He wanted
00:08:02.220 to do it by virtue of his nature alone. And that's fundamentally what all occultism and all
00:08:06.880 Freemasonry is about. Poplio XIII calls it naturalism, but it's this idea that nature itself
00:08:12.180 is sufficient to attain its final end, which we would call the beatific vision. And of course,
00:08:17.300 which we as Catholics say is completely and totally irreconcilable with the faith.
00:08:21.520 You've sort of mentioned all the ills that we're currently dealing with in society,
00:08:26.040 and we'll skip the first one about that was directly about the papacy. But you mentioned
00:08:30.840 their divorce, sex ed, separation of church and state, communist agenda. How in 1885? And why is
00:08:39.460 that the agenda? Okay, so they want to go to nature worship, but why these things?
00:08:44.280 I think ultimately because it lowers the horizon of human destiny. It lowers it from a divine end,
00:08:52.140 one that can only be attained by the help of the divinity, the one that can be attained by
00:08:56.820 ourselves. You shall be as gods. This all goes back to the garden. I mean, I quote from a number
00:09:02.280 of Masonic sources, direct Masonic sources. This is not—I encourage Catholics, if you're looking for 1.00
00:09:06.880 quotes and stuff, don't rely on brainy quote and things like that. Like, find the actual books.
00:09:10.840 Archive.org is a great website. But from actual Masonic books, where they explicitly claim that they are
00:09:18.000 the restoration of the pagan mystery system that preceded the incarnation of our Lord.
00:09:24.640 And we know from Paul, who I believe is quoting the Psalms, that the gods of the nations are demons.
00:09:30.500 So before the incarnation of our Lord, there was literally an active alliance between humans and
00:09:36.340 the demonic. And this was holding the world in thralldom to ignorance and superstition. And of course,
00:09:42.640 the Jews were monotheistic, but even they kept falling back into various forms of idolatry and
00:09:47.400 paganism. And so—and then our Lord comes, and what does He do? He raises the horizon of human
00:09:52.680 destiny. He brings all the insights of Plato and Aristotle and all the wonderful visions of the
00:09:58.980 prophets of Israel. He shows that they're actually kind of one and the same thing, and He raises—it says,
00:10:03.660 no, the ultimate promised land is heaven. But to bridge that gap between the infinite creator and
00:10:09.400 the finite creature, you need grace. You need—your soul needs to become a temple. And so the Christian
00:10:14.300 mysteries end up supplanting and destroying, really, defeating the pagan mysteries.
00:10:20.460 Well, Freemasonry sees itself as a restoration of these pagan mysteries. That's what many of them
00:10:25.880 say. Now, another point that Leo XIII and Monsignor Dylan make frequently is that not every person who's
00:10:31.760 a Freemason, especially the lower levels, it's not like they know about all this. This is—and many of
00:10:37.200 them have been suckered, frankly. That's essentially what they say. And so the reason why they want to
00:10:42.740 restore these pagan mysteries is because it's the pre-Christian system in which man was finding
00:10:48.160 salvation in some faux attempt to be like God, which is what Satan had tempted us into in the
00:10:54.780 first place. That we do see. I mean, that is rife today with different indigenous movements and
00:11:01.400 back to the earth and the mother God that we hear about from a lot of our own spiritual leaders.
00:11:07.280 Unbelievable, the whole Pachamama scandal and all these things. But they are very much going back 0.88
00:11:14.340 to a pagan worship. I remember I was here in Canada when Pope Francis came to Canada and they
00:11:19.160 had the witch doctor shaman guy, you know, blowing bone whistles of four directions while, you know,
00:11:26.080 the Catholic clergy there had their hands on their chest, eyes closed. But literally saying,
00:11:31.800 you know, I want to ask the grandmother of the West or something like that, the Western direction,
00:11:36.680 to open the circle of spirits to come and join us here. That sounds to me like exactly like what
00:11:41.820 you're talking about. Like a kind of pagan former thing that existed before, but it's trying to be
00:11:47.560 brought back in, not only to secular culture where it's coming on strong there too, but also even into
00:11:54.960 the church. I'm not going to cite the sources I've read. You know, my spiritual director always knows
00:11:59.580 about it. And there have definitely been some sources where we're like, nah, let's not go there.
00:12:03.340 These things, we need to be very careful about these things. But I essentially became convinced
00:12:08.000 through my study of this topic, Masonic sources themselves, that the essence of what they were
00:12:13.620 doing was, and it's like I said before, a reestablishing, I guess you could say, of an active
00:12:19.520 alliance between human beings and the demonic. That's what they're all about. And I, the, another way I
00:12:25.860 phrased it in the book is, you know, the difference between the Catholic faith and occultism is we
00:12:30.380 believe our souls need to become a temple for the divine, and we can expel the divine if we
00:12:34.780 purposely choose to sin. They believe the divine is already within us. Another way that I think is
00:12:39.520 helpful to think about it is we believe we can only be saved by being incorporated into the second
00:12:44.680 atom. They believe you can be saved by remaining in the first atom, nature bereft of grace. And so
00:12:51.740 that's why there is a sort of magical approach to nature among all these movements, because they
00:12:58.320 really do believe the divinity is already latent within nature. They don't believe that that infinite
00:13:03.940 gap requires grace to be bridged. And so that's what all this supposedly secret knowledge is about.
00:13:10.480 And that's frankly, you know, I actually, in law school, somebody tried to recruit me to the Masons,
00:13:16.220 and I was very tempted. I was a Protestant at the time. Now, Masons never say, will you join up? 0.98
00:13:21.440 They don't do that. Their policy is they will wait for you to ask. Because when you ask, there's
00:13:27.380 already enough curiosity and probably vanity and pride that's been stirred up to get you to ask in
00:13:32.980 the first place. I mean, I mean, my goodness, I grew up watching National Treasure, like this idea
00:13:37.060 of being part of the secret fraternity that exercises, you know, control, punching way above
00:13:41.540 its weight, whatever that's, that appeals to all sorts of vanity and pride and whatnot. So fortunately,
00:13:46.160 I didn't do it. Something was holding me back. And the guy who was asking me seemed like a decent guy in
00:13:50.660 many ways. But, and, but then I got back home to California after law school, and the People's
00:13:55.580 Republic of California, as we call it. And, and then another man who I met, who was a very senior
00:14:00.760 leader in Freemasonry, he also started to meet with me. And I hadn't quite become Catholic yet. But I
00:14:05.500 was beginning, I hadn't read Monsignor Dillon, but I begin was beginning to read all sorts of stuff. So I
00:14:10.560 think this, this whole idea that if you have this certain gnosis, that you kind of access this
00:14:15.660 mystical knowledge of nature, at the higher levels, I think it's meant to work on the very same thing
00:14:21.680 that caused our parents to fall, our first parents, pride, you shall be as gods. That's what it's all
00:14:26.480 that's what it all comes back to.
00:14:27.720 This is interesting, because this is a different look at Freemasonry than we're used to. Most of us
00:14:35.040 know Freemasonry and think, well, is this thing with 33 degrees, it's kind of like the Knights
00:14:41.480 Columbus, but the pagan version, and it's kind of anti-Catholic. And you're saying the degrees is one 0.74
00:14:49.080 thing, but there's not even that many people are doing it anyway.
00:14:52.480 Frankly, I don't think they even have to. I don't think you have to be a card-carrying Freemason to be
00:14:56.400 fundamentally Freemasonic these days. I think you just need to take Oprah at her word. I think you just
00:15:01.580 need to believe along the lines of what Oprah believes. There's a lot of new ageism that's everywhere
00:15:06.140 in our culture. There's a lot, I mean, when you read a lot of the World Economic Forum stuff, I've seen
00:15:10.520 you report on Yuval Harari and Schwab and all those folks. I've been reading Yuval Harari's books.
00:15:17.920 They're even worse than people realize. I mean, they really have reduced everything to the material
00:15:24.400 horizon, everything. And they believe that they can eventually control this material horizon,
00:15:32.560 such that, I mean, as Yuval Harari says many times, we shall basically be as gods. And Yuval Harari,
00:15:39.580 in his book, I'm doing this for memory, he literally talks about, we will exceed, you know,
00:15:44.920 because in the past, the pagan gods used to be men, used to be women, and then they were later
00:15:49.720 divinized. And so Yuval Harari talks about, we're going to exceed them. We're going to exceed Zeus.
00:15:55.940 We're going to exceed Neptune, et cetera. So it's very, very creepy. And so I think the reduction of
00:16:01.480 everything to the material, and that's why it's related to socialism and communism. You know,
00:16:04.860 Marxist whole theory of history, dialectical materialism, was that you have a thesis and an
00:16:10.140 antithesis, antithesis, and that provides the impetus to reach a new synthesis. Now,
00:16:16.140 I think a good way, well, here's my book, well, my book, you know, I edited it. But I think a good
00:16:21.380 way to explain it is maybe people are familiar with the idea of potential energy. You know, if your book
00:16:26.180 is laying on your desk, there's no potential energy there. But when you lift it up, you know,
00:16:30.720 the gap there provides potential energy. And the higher the book gets, the higher the potential
00:16:35.480 energy. So when you're seeing a bifurcation, and I mean, as we're seeing a lot today, the wider and
00:16:42.900 wider that gap gets, the more potential energy is there. And that potential energy provides the
00:16:47.960 impetus to push the society forward in the direction that they want to go, which is why we constantly see,
00:16:54.000 at least in America, I know you Canadians are way on top of things, you know, but, but, you know,
00:16:58.840 we constantly seeing no matter what we do, we're constantly going in a more leftward direction.
00:17:03.220 But really, this is the, it's their attempt, it's their Marxist materialistic dialectic attempt to
00:17:09.600 literally control history. And when you hear, when you look in a lot of Masonic sources, they really
00:17:14.960 do think of themselves, they say the difference between a beast and a man is the same as a man and
00:17:20.440 a Mason. So there really is this, I mean, Albert Pike talks this way, Manly P. Hall talks this way.
00:17:26.420 I mean, I got that specific line from the 1723 Anderson's Constitution's well-known Masonic
00:17:32.000 document. So they really do believe that they have the forces of history within their control
00:17:37.600 through this sort of materialistic paradigm. And, and so it's a, it's very real.
00:17:44.080 They really do believe in a whole class of untermension. They, they actually believe themselves
00:17:49.860 superior. Yeah, I believe so. And, and, you know, and to be very clear, my goal, and I was explaining
00:17:57.380 this to you before we, we started my goal with this book, when I was reading, I was like, people need
00:18:02.060 to read this, not because I think we all need to know the inner sanctum of Freemasonry. I don't think
00:18:08.800 any of us need to know that, frankly, but I think, you know, at least in a Catholic church,
00:18:13.000 I'm very empathetic with a lot of people who have different views of what's going on today.
00:18:17.100 I don't claim to fully understand the crisis we're in. I don't think you would claim that either.
00:18:21.120 I don't think any of us should, but there's a, there's a class of Catholics who, the moment you
00:18:25.880 bring up a topic like Freemasonry, they immediately shut down and say, conspiracy theory, conspiracy, 1.00
00:18:30.340 it's, it's, it's false, stupid, whatever. I'm sorry. I mean, I quote Robert Moynihan inside the 1.00
00:18:36.180 Vatican, very respected scholar, friend of Joseph Ratzinger at the time. And I saw this article in April of
00:18:43.560 2020, as I was reading this book, but as we were all going through the first shutdown almost worldwide
00:18:50.540 of the public celebration of Easter, since the Diocletian persecution, perhaps, he was saying
00:18:55.640 he had recalled during this time, a conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger, but we're just prior to
00:19:00.420 his becoming Pope. And he asked him what the gravest threat to the church was. And he said, Cardinal
00:19:05.880 Ratzinger, very quietly in his normal way, didn't say anything for a bit, but then just looked at him
00:19:11.260 and very solemnly said, it's Freemasonry. Okay. And then we have multiple popes, not just Pope Leo
00:19:16.700 XIII, but many before him. And it's even in canon law to this day that you cannot be a Mason and a
00:19:21.540 Catholic. There's severe penalties for it. So there are many Supreme Pontiffs that were warning about
00:19:25.920 this. So if you want to say that this sort of stuff is a conspiracy theory, tinfoil hat sort of stuff,
00:19:32.540 then you must also say, and I think the gauntlet needs to be thrown down. You must also say that
00:19:37.940 multiple Supreme Pontiffs of the Catholic church were tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.
00:19:43.840 If you're willing to do that, fine. You're at least intellectually consistent. But if you're not,
00:19:48.220 then stop. Now, on the other side, we have some people who think, you know, one of my dear friends
00:19:53.280 who everybody in the audience would know, but I won't mention it, says there's not a Mason under every
00:19:57.340 rock. And even Leo XIII says this. He says, we cannot blame all the problems in the church on
00:20:02.120 Freemasonry. Okay. Monsignor Dillon says this too. So we need to be careful about that because I think
00:20:07.680 there can sometimes be a tendency to externalize the source of all evil. This is one of the reasons
00:20:12.120 why I always watch your show. You always bring it back to, well, first of all, you're a very
00:20:15.800 arenic guy. You're very peaceful. And St. Francis de Sales says the number one thing we need to
00:20:19.620 maintain is our peace of soul. And so we can't just externalize all the sources of evil and vice in the
00:20:26.480 world. We really have to be aware of our own souls. And so I want to avoid that extreme as well.
00:20:31.380 So just a quick note before we return, if you would like to stay up to date on LifeSite's
00:20:38.440 coverage of the latest life, family, and culture news, subscribe to one of our many newsletters
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00:20:49.080 coverage to millions around the world, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation
00:20:53.660 at give.lifesitenews.com. And now back to the video. One of the things that I noticed about
00:21:01.700 the list that you gave, it goes right along with Cleons Goosen's list. Cleons Goosen was
00:21:09.660 one of the guys under Reagan who worked on communism. He wrote The Naked Communist,
00:21:15.840 which is, at least according to Reagan, the greatest book on communism. But it goes through
00:21:20.980 this laundry list of the goals of communism that sound exactly like what you mentioned.
00:21:26.180 There's the goals of Freemasonry, about divorce, about sex ed in schools, about separating the 0.94
00:21:32.400 church from the state, things like this. What is the relationship there between Freemasonry and
00:21:38.120 communism?
00:21:39.160 Well, we know that the Holy See came into possession of a lot of documents related to these sorts of
00:21:46.000 groups, the Alta Vendita. Some of the sources are quoted in Monsignor Dillon's book.
00:21:50.980 And I think my personal opinion is that the popes never quite revealed fully their hand in terms of
00:21:59.120 how they knew what they knew. We know the Vatican has long had arguably the best diplomatic network
00:22:04.440 in the world, best intelligence network, whatnot. But they knew from the very beginning that there
00:22:08.660 is definitely a relationship between occultism and the revolutionary movements that were sweeping
00:22:14.580 Europe in the 19th century, many of which were overtly Marxist. But we had a predicate,
00:22:20.680 and Monsignor Dillon talks about this, we had a predicate with the French Revolution,
00:22:24.200 and this itself had been preceded by Voltaire, whose entire purpose was to destroy the Catholic
00:22:30.320 Church. And this goes in line with the whole nature alone thing. When you believe in nature alone,
00:22:35.580 you believe man's reason is sufficient to attain his end. And so when you have Voltaire and the whole
00:22:41.840 so-called enlightenment, you have this overemphasis on man's reason and his ability,
00:22:46.220 the ability for our brain to understand completely everything it needs to know for its final end,
00:22:51.300 which of course we completely reject as Catholics. It completely, all the truths of faith, it knocks 1.00
00:22:57.280 out. And so all of that had been prepared, you know, a century or so before Marx. And then Marx comes
00:23:03.560 along, and you know, combining with Hegel, the whole, again, as I said earlier, the dialectical
00:23:08.040 materialism, Marx kind of provided this, well, set up these two bipolar aspects of society,
00:23:14.320 and that will provide the impetus to go forward. It's very interesting because I think one of the,
00:23:18.520 it's one of the shorter chapters, but one of the most important chapters in the book is called
00:23:23.040 the War Party and the Intellectual Party of Freemasonry. And Monsignor Dillon basically talks
00:23:29.460 about, Monsignor Dillon, here's what he claims. He claims, and Pope Leo XIII endorsed this,
00:23:34.740 so I'm assuming Pope Leo XIII didn't see anything crazy wrong with this. Monsignor Dillon claimed
00:23:40.280 that there was a secretive directory that centrally controlled all or most of the occult groups in the
00:23:46.980 world that were seeking to overturn Christendom, okay? He claimed that this directory was headed by
00:23:55.360 one individual with a very, very few people around them that knew about it, and that this one
00:24:01.880 individual, he actually gives one example, at least of who he thought one of them was at the time,
00:24:06.640 Lord Palmerston. He was the British Prime Minister, 1840s, early 1850s, somewhere in there.
00:24:12.020 And he gives all sorts of evidence for why he believes Lord Palmerston was the head of this
00:24:17.420 directory at the time. And so he believes that this directory has successors. It's like a sort of dark
00:24:23.700 apostolic succession in a way. The final successor of this directory will be Antichrist,
00:24:29.780 and that most people don't know the identity of this guy at any given time. But this directory
00:24:34.880 centrally controls everything. And what it does is it has what's called the intellectual party
00:24:39.400 and the war party. The intellectual party is the ideas, the legislators, whatever. The war party is, 0.64
00:24:45.080 I guess we could say, the activists, the street demonstrators, maybe those who get violent.
00:24:49.820 And basically, I think this was, I may be forgetting a detail or two, but basically the intellectual party
00:24:54.800 always knows what the war party's doing, but the war party doesn't always know what the intellectual
00:24:59.500 party's doing. So they're kept separate. But the point is, is that they can, they can look at what's
00:25:04.500 happening in our society. I really do wonder sometimes how much of the gender stuff and the,
00:25:10.000 I mean, when I grew up, you know, Democrats, and by the way, I hardly think Republicans are angels.
00:25:14.700 So I'm a Republican, but oh gosh, don't get me started. But, but the Democrats were abortion should 0.76
00:25:19.240 be safe, legal, and rare. Okay. Now it's like, no, this is a positive good. It's good for women to, 0.94
00:25:25.700 to have an abortion. And then with the gender stuff, you know, I don't, you know, your audience
00:25:29.780 doesn't need a news update on that, but it almost feels sometimes that again, they're, they're
00:25:34.340 purposely stretching out the difference between the two poles of society. And it, we all feel that
00:25:41.380 tension. And so it's meant to push us somewhere. And, and so anyway, that's why I think there's a
00:25:47.160 connection between the naturalism, the sola natura, the communism. It's all meant to lower the horizon
00:25:54.720 from the divine horizon of heaven as the ultimate goal to this earth as the ultimate goal. And
00:26:00.240 ultimately, when you do that, human desire, autonomy becomes the rule of the day. So apply that to
00:26:06.480 marriage, easy divorce laws, no fault divorce, no fault divorce was a very Masonic sort of thing.
00:26:12.560 We know for a fact that I'm forgetting which Tim Gordon has talked about this before,
00:26:16.880 but the justice who wrote the Everson opinion in 47, I believe he was a Hugo Black. I think it was,
00:26:23.580 he was a Freemason, you know, getting, getting prayer and church involvement out of schools,
00:26:28.540 the guys behind contraception, allowing pornography. There were, there was, there were definitely
00:26:32.760 justices on our Supreme Court who were Freemasons, and this was their entire goal. In 47, they 0.92
00:26:39.420 completely reinterpreted the first amendment. The first amendment very clearly says Congress shall
00:26:44.280 make no law. Okay. So it applies to Congress. And throughout our history, up to 1890, various U.S.
00:26:50.320 states had religious establishments. They were allowed, you know, Presbyterian here,
00:26:54.180 Congregationalist there, whatever. But in, in 47, they completely reinterpreted the first amendment
00:26:59.360 to apply to the states via the 14th amendment. Tim Gordon talks about this a lot, but that was not,
00:27:05.900 you know, I think there are some problems with the founding. I'm working on a book on that right
00:27:09.200 now. So, you know, I think there are good things about the founding, some very problematic things
00:27:12.940 about the founding, but that was certainly not the founding intention that the first amendment
00:27:17.660 would be applied to the states. And so, but that was a Masonic attempt to basically invert
00:27:22.820 the constitutional order and even prevent religious establishments at the state level.
00:27:27.680 And so all these things are meant to, you know, there's a divine horizon, there's a natural horizon.
00:27:33.140 It's meant to lower it to the natural horizon. And frankly, I think there are plenty of forces
00:27:38.900 on the capitalistic side. I think, I think to divide the world between capitalism and communism
00:27:43.120 is becoming increasingly naive. In my opinion, we're seeing the forces of rank corporatism.
00:27:50.640 I think Soab Amari has a new book on this, or will be having a new book on this, a private
00:27:55.380 tyranny. We all know what it's like. You guys have been building a new platform to avoid this
00:27:59.660 very issue. So whether it's controlled by some central state apparatus, which maybe it will
00:28:04.660 be with AI. I mean, who knows the possibilities of AI and the ability to track all sorts of things
00:28:10.160 and do it quickly and whatnot. But if, whether it's controlled through a state apparatus or
00:28:14.240 corporate apparatus, what does it matter? And I feel like the warning of this came from
00:28:18.160 Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself. There was no one who was a more anti-communist warrior than
00:28:22.800 Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And in his 78 address to Harvard at the Harvard commencement, he bluntly said,
00:28:29.760 I don't want to recommend American, the American model to my country. You're spiritually, 1.00
00:28:35.360 you're spiritually exhausted. You don't even follow the basics of your own founding. And no,
00:28:40.860 you are not the model I want for my home country. So there, and Fulton J. Sheen talks a lot about
00:28:45.920 this. He talks about how, and so does Christopher Dawson, a great Catholic historian. Look, I'm for a
00:28:51.340 free market. I love all that stuff. But at the same time, we have to realize how much of our life,
00:28:55.620 we saw this during COVID, the essential places of business. Churches? No. You know, strip joints? 1.00
00:29:02.440 Sure. Home Depot? Yeah. Grocery stores make sense. Obviously, you need food. But all sorts
00:29:08.160 of things, and churches are not. Why? Because in our modern society, it's all about the sort of
00:29:13.380 fulfillment of our short-term desires. The divine horizon has been completely lost to where we don't
00:29:19.020 even see churches as essential business anymore. I mean, they're not a business, but you know what I
00:29:22.920 mean? That's a really, really good point. But there's just something confusing here. If they're
00:29:28.300 talking about wanting human nature is enough, you'd think reason is what they use. But they
00:29:37.780 seem to be dismantling reason. That's what's really, really weird. The whole trans thing 1.00
00:29:42.260 is getting completely bizarre. People are being forced to say stuff that they know is untrue.
00:29:50.020 That's obviously untrue. This is becoming total insanity. You know, beyond the horrific things
00:29:59.760 they're doing to kids and the operations and whatever else and giving them drugs that are
00:30:04.300 going to harm them forever. But now you have people identifying, adults identifying as babies
00:30:08.540 and being treated as such. And they make a mockery of human reason. Where's the appeal to,
00:30:16.300 yeah, we've got it all together. We don't need to go to spiritual because they're making it insane. 0.90
00:30:22.260 That's a very deep question and a very appropriate one. I write about it a lot in the introduction,
00:30:27.440 why this is the case. Essentially, I'd say this is happening because the Catholic faith is true.
00:30:33.080 And what do I mean by that? The Catholic Church has always said the natural law is binding on all of us.
00:30:38.740 It's kind of summarized in the Ten Commandments, whatnot. But we've also always said, again, as we've said
00:30:43.600 throughout this conversation, we cannot attain our end without grace. That means we cannot even
00:30:48.820 perceive, let alone follow, the natural law with any real consistency in a state of original sin.
00:30:58.100 We need grace to fully perceive and then to fully will these things. St. Thomas Aquinas in his,
00:31:05.740 you know, his treatment of grace in the Summa is very, very clear about this. So that's why when you,
00:31:12.540 when nature rejects grace, it doesn't become more natural, it becomes unnatural. It becomes less than
00:31:19.380 itself, just like Adam and Eve became less than what they were intended to be when they rejected
00:31:25.460 God's commandment. So I think that's why. And also with the Enlightenment, because the transcendent,
00:31:32.440 we started looking at nature as something to be manipulated and control for the purpose of power.
00:31:38.160 Whereas, and that's always been a temptation in human life. You know, we can't say it was never
00:31:42.460 like that before. But in the medieval mindset, the ancient mindset, let's just assume, you know,
00:31:47.620 the medieval Christian mindset, you know, nature was sacramental, meaning you looked at something in
00:31:53.820 nature and you automatically associated it with the divine. How does this natural thing point to that
00:32:00.100 which is higher than itself? That really changed with the Enlightenment with, you know, Descartes,
00:32:04.760 I think, therefore I am. The Newtonian project to basically, they wanted to arrive at certainty.
00:32:10.440 After the fall of the Magisterium or the rejection of the Magisterium, it didn't fall, but the
00:32:13.980 rejection of the Magisterium by much of, by a good deal of Christendom, there was this aching search
00:32:18.760 for certainty. How do we know? How do we know? How do we know? And so this, this went from the
00:32:22.500 theological realm with Protestantism and bled into the philosophical. And the Enlightenment project was
00:32:27.860 basically, we can arrive at certainty through a set of axiomatic processes in our mind. And but then
00:32:34.240 what that does is it changes the view of nature from sacramental to mechanistic. So that's why I think
00:32:40.200 you have two things at the same time, you have this regression into unnatural irrationality,
00:32:46.920 as you've talked about, while at the same time, we have those who are, I mean, we're making
00:32:52.260 technological, you know, leaps and bounds that are astounding right now. AI is obviously the most
00:32:58.020 recent example, but it's like the epitome of this purely mechanistic approach to nature,
00:33:03.720 this pure, purely materialistic, anti-sacramental approach to nature. And so that's why I think we
00:33:09.520 see both ironically at the same time. That's my theory, at least.
00:33:14.400 There's another thing, though, the aim that we talked about originally, but we went on specifically to
00:33:20.420 bring it up later. The aim of Freemasonry specifically against Catholicism. It's funny, 1.00
00:33:26.480 it's not just Christianity generally. No, but it's really about Catholicism in particular.
00:33:32.320 Tell us about that. And what is their program for destroying the church?
00:33:36.880 So here's where I'll get a little bit to the eschatological. I've lectured about this elsewhere.
00:33:41.300 I didn't write about it a ton in the book, but it's my theory. I think it fits really well.
00:33:45.320 Let's go to 2 Thessalonians 2. I'm sure much of your audience knows it. It's a topic I've been
00:33:49.900 studying a lot, reading all the patristic commentaries. So 2 Thessalonians 2 is where
00:33:53.880 St. Paul talks about the coming of the Antichrist. There are some Thessalonians who thought the day
00:33:58.820 of the Lord was at hand, and Paul was writing to them, no, no, no, don't let anybody deceive you
00:34:03.100 about that. No letter from me, whatever. These are what will happen. These are the things that
00:34:06.580 will happen before the day of the Lord. Okay. So he actually doesn't use the term Antichrist.
00:34:11.360 He uses the term man of lawlessness, which has been unanimously interpreted to refer to Antichrist.
00:34:17.180 So, and I do talk about this a bit in the book, the introduction. So I thought, okay, well,
00:34:24.100 if Antichrist is the man of lawlessness, then what is the church taught is the source of law
00:34:29.180 fullness. Okay. Obviously we know that's Jesus Christ ultimately, but just how does that play
00:34:34.360 out in the world? Well, the church has always taught the two powers, the spiritual power and
00:34:39.260 the temporal power. We know from Romans 13, the temporal power holds the sword and they hold it for
00:34:45.080 justice, to enact justice against evildoers and to support the righteous. Okay. And we also know
00:34:49.460 the spiritual power with the hierarchy. They have the authority to speak for God. Here's the thing.
00:34:55.540 Prior to the incarnation, both of those, they didn't, the pagans didn't conceive as a temporal
00:35:00.920 and a spiritual, but that was part of the problem. The temporal and the spiritual were completely the
00:35:04.920 same. This is why you have the divinization of emperors. This is why pharaohs were seen as gods,
00:35:11.160 essentially walking, you know, living gods. You know, this is why Caesar and Augustus and all
00:35:16.480 these guys were divinized by the Roman Senate after they died. Okay. So there was no separation
00:35:22.280 between temporal and, and the divine, I guess you could say, which again, aligns with what I was
00:35:27.620 saying about sola and the Torah, that there was no distinction with Christ. We know give to Caesar
00:35:32.720 what is Caesar, give to gods what is God. We saw a type of this in Israel where the priesthood and
00:35:37.560 the kingship were separated, right? And the king had to write a book of the law that was in the
00:35:41.960 custodian of the priests is Deuteronomy 17. So we see a type of it in Israel. And then in the church,
00:35:46.660 we see this kind of, this is the Catholic political theology for, you know, I mean, I don't know how
00:35:52.700 many people still hold to it now. I still do, but, but for 2000 years, even my confirmation
00:35:57.780 saint, St. Ignatius, I call him the red pill because he really showed me my Protestantism was not
00:36:01.860 tenable, but, but even he talks about, you know, the authority of the emperor and he says,
00:36:06.740 and the authority of the bishop. I mean, even he in 107 AD about is making the same distinction.
00:36:12.760 Now, why is this distinction important? Because the temporal power, a purely natural power bereft of
00:36:18.860 grace is not capable of leading people to God. It's just not. It needs the spiritual power in the sense
00:36:24.840 that our minds without grace, we need grace to discern the natural law, to discern what God requires.
00:36:30.420 The same thing with the temporal power, the temporal power requires the spiritual power
00:36:34.340 to lead it in the right direction. And the most famous articulation of this is Pope Galatius the
00:36:39.220 first to, I think, Emperor Anastasius, I quote from it in the introduction, but he makes a very
00:36:44.440 interesting distinction. He's refers to the temporal, it's often referred to as the two powers. But when
00:36:49.220 you look at the Latin, he refers to the temporal power, potestas, he refers to the spiritual authority,
00:36:56.080 authority, auctoritas, okay? Those are very different. You know, one is a sword and one is
00:37:01.180 authority, right? Prior to the incarnation, as I was saying earlier, the world was completely
00:37:05.980 controlled by this alliance between the humans, humans and demonic through the pagan mystery system,
00:37:11.220 okay? Now, what does Paul say? He says there's this mystery of iniquity, but it's being restrained
00:37:16.120 by something. And I'm sure you know this topic well. The word is katakon. Now, he refers to it in two
00:37:21.660 different ways. He refers to it as a neuter it and an individual he. Now, there's debate about this in
00:37:28.620 the fathers, and I don't want to get too in the weeds. If you have a follow-up question, I can. But
00:37:31.560 essentially, there's this restraining influence that is holding back the mystery of iniquity,
00:37:37.140 which Paul says is active in the first century, okay? And then Paul says there will be a point where
00:37:42.620 this restrainer stops restraining. And at that point, the Antichrist will burst forth, okay?
00:37:48.280 Okay. So, here's the short version right there. This is such a big topic. I'm sorry.
00:37:53.960 In Apocalypse 17, St. John, you know, writing about 80, 90 or so, he refers to this beast that
00:38:00.900 will come back, which I think is Antichrist, but also the system that reigned. When Satan was
00:38:06.000 tempting our Lord, I'll give you the kingdoms of the world, this was the beast system. This was the
00:38:11.140 beast system he was trying to tempt our Lord with through some other means than the cross, 0.96
00:38:15.660 okay? Which is why Jesus called Peter Satan when Peter wanted to prevent him from being crucified.
00:38:21.100 So, St. John in Apocalypse 17 or 18, he refers to this beast that is not, so in 80, 90 is not,
00:38:29.000 that was, so sometime before 80, 90 was, and will be again, okay? So, my personal opinion is that that
00:38:39.240 is the pagan mystery system, the ruling of demons over humanity through an active alliance between
00:38:47.420 them, and that the Catholic Church, and they talk about this in so many of their writings,
00:38:52.940 the Catholic Church suppressed this. Not perfectly. This is not a utopia. Christendom was not perfect.
00:38:59.200 There were problems. There's human sin, all that kind of stuff. But the Catholic Church suppressed this,
00:39:04.340 and you see this in all their writings. They, again, Albert Pike, Manly P. Hall, whatnot,
00:39:10.400 usually through subtle references, but sometimes very overt. They basically say, yeah, the Catholic
00:39:14.460 Church was keeping down the enlightenment of the human race. It was keeping down this gnosis that we
00:39:18.320 could all access to, you know, do the sorts of stuff we've been talking about. But we're restoring that.
00:39:24.280 We're bringing it back. And I personally believe that's very, very related to the catacombe no longer
00:39:31.060 restraining. I don't think it's done restraining just yet, but I think my personal opinion is it's
00:39:36.140 getting quite close. I can expand on that further, but that's why I think the Catholic Church is their
00:39:42.240 number one target. Yeah, they want to go after Christians in general, but they're very, very clear
00:39:46.860 in many of their writings that the big kahuna is the Catholic Church. Because frankly, Protestantism 0.72
00:39:52.760 doesn't have the same view of grace that we do. You know, Protestantism has redefined grace less as an
00:39:58.100 ontological reality and more as a legal construct. It's like, yeah, well, demons are not threatened by
00:40:05.260 legal constructs as much as they are changed souls, souls that actually are infused with the grace of
00:40:11.440 God, right? So, yeah, they want to go after Protestantism, but frankly, there's a long history
00:40:15.600 of Protestant ministers being Masons and not having a problem with it. You know, many of the early 0.97
00:40:19.860 American ministers were Freemasons and no one had a problem with it. They didn't see it as
00:40:23.560 incompatible with Christianity. Oh, and then the Popes have always declaimed Freemasonry from,
00:40:29.220 I think, 1738 was the first one. I have a whole list of all the papal statements against Freemasonry,
00:40:34.400 but this is why. The Catholic Church is the big kahuna in the room because it is the one that
00:40:39.940 suppressed this pagan mystery system. One more point. When you read the Church Fathers, it's very,
00:40:45.360 very interesting. I have a set of, like, references I'm building about the building of the Catacon.
00:40:50.080 There are all sorts of stories in the Church Fathers about encounters between the priesthood
00:40:55.820 and, you know, the demonic, frankly. I don't necessarily believe every single one. Not every
00:41:00.920 single one is retold by a saint or whatever, but literally the demonic speaking, causing statues to
00:41:08.400 speak, false miracles, magicians. One of the most famous stories that was widely believed by early
00:41:13.260 Catholics was this encounter between St. Paul and St. Peter with Simon Magus before Nero, I believe. 0.83
00:41:18.920 Simon Magus, you know, Magus coming from a magician, and the prayers of the apostles stopped him,
00:41:24.940 right? So there's this, as the Church is expanding, that was one of the key apologetics that people
00:41:29.960 like Augustine and others would say, Eusebius would say to the pagans, like, look at these prophecies
00:41:34.580 from the Old Testament and look at what's happening all around you. The pagan altars are falling,
00:41:38.460 the temples are falling. And then there are a number of stories where, like in Alexandria,
00:41:42.220 I believe Sosamin was the historian who talked about this. They uncovered these pagan chambers
00:41:48.140 of doom, I guess you could call them, where literally as the pagan system was dying, they found
00:41:52.860 chambers that were full of dead bodies. And even as there were pagan emperors, like Licinius,
00:41:58.940 he was confronting Constantine. Right before their final battle, he's cutting open pregnant women, 0.92
00:42:04.620 and not to be too graphic, but he's cutting open pregnant women, cutting open their children, 0.92
00:42:08.040 and reading their entrails. I mean, to try and figure out if he could get an omen for the battle.
00:42:13.460 I mean, so there's this constant struggle with this pagan mystery system. And then when you look
00:42:16.880 at what the Church was suppressing, even during the medieval period, not to say everything was right 0.89
00:42:21.180 and just, of course, but it was suppressing women and witchcraft and sorcery that was constantly about
00:42:27.820 abortion, constantly about contraception, sacrificing children. Now, why would they want to do that?
00:42:32.740 Well, frankly, I think this is how the demonic locks the human will into their own agenda. If it's like,
00:42:39.360 if I can get you to kill a child, then I've got you. There's literally nothing else you won't do 0.99
00:42:44.380 at that point. So yeah, this is a big topic, but everywhere, this is why they see the Catholic 0.57
00:42:49.620 Church as the great, and frankly, the alliance between the temporal and the spiritual powers that
00:42:55.940 the Church has always believed were the source of lawfulness, and not perfection, but lawfulness.
00:43:00.720 They want to destroy that alliance between throne and altar. They always did. And by the way,
00:43:05.680 I'm not here saying, I'm not a monarchist. I'm fine with monarchy, but I'm fine with a
00:43:09.860 constitutional republic. But that's what they wanted to destroy, the alliance between
00:43:13.540 temporal and spiritual. And so I think the catacomb is likely Christendom. It's the Church.
00:43:19.500 It's the sources of lawfulness that oppose the coming of the man of lawlessness. And so when that
00:43:25.620 catacomb stops restraining, we know what comes next. And it certainly seems that there's a
00:43:30.700 case to be made that it's getting closer and closer to no longer restraining.
00:43:34.700 Hi, everyone. This is John Henry Weston. We hope you enjoyed this program. To see more like it,
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