PART 1： Freemasonry, the Black Hand, and ‘War with the Antichrist’ ｜ Joshua Charles
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Summary
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
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When you look in a lot of Masonic sources, they really do think of themselves,
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they say the difference between a beast and a man is the same as a man and a mason.
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But that's why I think the Catholic Church is their number one target.
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Yeah, they want to go after Christians in general,
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but they're very, very clear in many of their writings that the big kahuna is the Catholic Church.
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He was asked, who is the greatest of all enemies threatening the Catholic Church?
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Isn't that like people with tinfoil hats believe in that stuff, none of us?
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Well, there's a new book out by TAN Publishers,
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and it takes a deep dive into Freemasonry in a very interesting way.
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He is a number one New York Times bestselling author.
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He is a historian, a classical pianist, and a former White House speechwriter for the Republicans.
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He came into the Catholic Church from Protestantism in 2019.
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And you know, this is going to be super fascinating.
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We're going to divide this up into two parts because it's a really deep dive,
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You'll see on this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.
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As you know, the times we are witnessing in the world,
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and specifically the Church, are both perilous and shocking.
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Catholic clergy defying the Church's 2,000-year-old teaching with impunity,
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and good priests suffering calumny and marginalization,
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even a point of being cancelled by their own bishops.
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That's why LifeSite News is proud to sponsor and support the upcoming second annual
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Coalition for Cancelled Priests conference at the Rosemont Hilton near Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
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I will be speaking there at this event, which takes place on June 23rd and 24th,
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and reflecting on the conference theme of A House United.
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As Catholics who uphold the Church's teaching on life, faith, family, and freedom,
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we cannot afford to be divided and silent while our courageous priests are unjustly persecuted
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So join me in standing with our Cancelled Priests at this two-day event
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to find out more about the conference and venue.
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Visit www.cancelledpriests.org slash second-anniversary.
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I hope to see you there, and now back to the program.
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Thank you, John Henry. It's an honor to be with you.
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You've played a huge role in my conversion, and I love LifeSite, so thank you.
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Oh, praise God. Let's begin as we always do at the sign of the cross.
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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So, this is very interesting. You're republishing a book, first published in 1885.
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Well, it's funny. I read it during the lockdowns in 2020, you know, that uneventful period of life
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for all of us, and it was remarkable in its prophetic prescience, I guess you could say.
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Essentially, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII had written Humanum Genus, which was his encyclical against
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Freemasonry, for those who maybe don't know. And at the end of that, he called on Catholic
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clergy, Catholic claimant to tear off the mask of Freemasonry.
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And so, a father, well, Monsignor Dillon, George Dillon, he was an Irish priest who was a missionary
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for many years in Australia. He saw it as his duty to comply with what the Pope said and to
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tear off the mask of Freemasonry. So, while he was in Edinburgh, he was going on, I think he was just
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going on a lecture circuit in the UK, but he was in Edinburgh at the time, and he delivered a number
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of lectures on Freemasonry to do just that, and he reduced it to a book, and it was published the
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following year. So, that book I read in 2020, and despite it being published 140 years ago,
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almost, I was stunned by how relevant it was, not only to the last, you know, previous 140 years,
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but frankly, to what we've potentially been going through since 2020.
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Unpack that for us. So, Freemasonry, a lot of people regard it as, you know,
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well, that's like a conspiracy theory, that whole thing. Unpack this for us. Is it a conspiracy
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theory? Even if it wasn't back then when it was, you know, in its heyday, it surely seems it doesn't
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exist now, doesn't it? I would say it's been so wildly successful that most people don't even
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realize it anymore. I would say that most of the concepts that most modern people believe
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are Freemasonic in origin and spirit. We could go into a lot of different aspects of that. There's
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political aspects, theological aspects, but politically, I mean, we outlined in the description
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of the book kind of the highlights of everything it covers. So, among the thing it covers is here
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was the agenda. They wanted to destroy the temporal and then the spiritual power of the papacy.
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They wanted easy divorce laws across the world. They wanted marriage to be as easy to break,
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or if not easier, than a business contract. So, think no-fault divorce and whatnot.
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They wanted completely secularized education. They didn't want the church or any Christian
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influence in it whatsoever. They wanted complete and total separation of church and state.
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They were animated by a socialistic, communistic sort of agenda. I could actually go into a little bit
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more detail on this at a later point, but highly materialistic. And ultimately, it was leading
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toward a form of sort of pantheistic nature worship. And I'm sure many in your audience would think,
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like myself, that that sounds quite familiar. And the reason it's heading toward a sort of
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pantheistic nature worship, and we can get more into detail if you want, but essentially,
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the fundamental difference I've concluded between the Catholic faith and Freemasonry,
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and really, Freemasonry is a term—somebody doesn't have to be a card-carrying Freemason to
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be a Freemason, in the sense that Leo XIII and Monsignor Dillon are talking about, and they both make
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this clear. Freemasonry is just kind of their catch-all term for occultic sort of associations
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that are engaged in these sorts of things, these plots to overturn Christian civilization.
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But the essential difference is, we as Catholics believe that we can't save ourselves. We must be
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given the Holy Spirit in baptism and the sacraments if we fall, and that we're given this by God's
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grace, and that when we're given it, our souls become a temple for His presence. So we believe that
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the soul, our soul, must have the divine come and inhabit it. The root of all occultism is the opposite.
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It's that the divinity already resides in human nature, waiting to be, you know, latent, so to speak,
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waiting to be unlocked by their gnosis, their knowledge, their particular knowledge, their rituals,
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their signs, their symbols, and that in this is salvation, rather than a participation in the divine
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nature itself. They believe it's already there. And so when we're heading toward pantheism, it's sort of the
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sense that the divine is intrinsic to nature itself, and you don't need grace. That's why I coined a term in
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there. You know, I come from Protestantism, and so I wanted to use a sola something, because, you know,
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a lot of the Protestant heresies were sola scriptura, sola fide, whatever. So I describe this as sola
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natura, nature alone, and I compare it to Satan's fall. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas said, Satan,
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the reason why Satan fell, wasn't that he thought he could become God. Satan's too intelligent to know
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that, to believe that. It was because he wanted to partake of the beatific vision without grace. He wanted
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to do it by virtue of his nature alone. And that's fundamentally what all occultism and all
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Freemasonry is about. Poplio XIII calls it naturalism, but it's this idea that nature itself
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is sufficient to attain its final end, which we would call the beatific vision. And of course,
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which we as Catholics say is completely and totally irreconcilable with the faith.
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You've sort of mentioned all the ills that we're currently dealing with in society,
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and we'll skip the first one about that was directly about the papacy. But you mentioned
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their divorce, sex ed, separation of church and state, communist agenda. How in 1885? And why is
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that the agenda? Okay, so they want to go to nature worship, but why these things?
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I think ultimately because it lowers the horizon of human destiny. It lowers it from a divine end,
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one that can only be attained by the help of the divinity, the one that can be attained by
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ourselves. You shall be as gods. This all goes back to the garden. I mean, I quote from a number
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of Masonic sources, direct Masonic sources. This is not—I encourage Catholics, if you're looking for
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quotes and stuff, don't rely on brainy quote and things like that. Like, find the actual books.
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Archive.org is a great website. But from actual Masonic books, where they explicitly claim that they are
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the restoration of the pagan mystery system that preceded the incarnation of our Lord.
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And we know from Paul, who I believe is quoting the Psalms, that the gods of the nations are demons.
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So before the incarnation of our Lord, there was literally an active alliance between humans and
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the demonic. And this was holding the world in thralldom to ignorance and superstition. And of course,
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the Jews were monotheistic, but even they kept falling back into various forms of idolatry and
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paganism. And so—and then our Lord comes, and what does He do? He raises the horizon of human
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destiny. He brings all the insights of Plato and Aristotle and all the wonderful visions of the
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prophets of Israel. He shows that they're actually kind of one and the same thing, and He raises—it says,
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no, the ultimate promised land is heaven. But to bridge that gap between the infinite creator and
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the finite creature, you need grace. You need—your soul needs to become a temple. And so the Christian
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mysteries end up supplanting and destroying, really, defeating the pagan mysteries.
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Well, Freemasonry sees itself as a restoration of these pagan mysteries. That's what many of them
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say. Now, another point that Leo XIII and Monsignor Dylan make frequently is that not every person who's
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a Freemason, especially the lower levels, it's not like they know about all this. This is—and many of
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them have been suckered, frankly. That's essentially what they say. And so the reason why they want to
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restore these pagan mysteries is because it's the pre-Christian system in which man was finding
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salvation in some faux attempt to be like God, which is what Satan had tempted us into in the
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first place. That we do see. I mean, that is rife today with different indigenous movements and
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back to the earth and the mother God that we hear about from a lot of our own spiritual leaders.
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Unbelievable, the whole Pachamama scandal and all these things. But they are very much going back
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to a pagan worship. I remember I was here in Canada when Pope Francis came to Canada and they
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had the witch doctor shaman guy, you know, blowing bone whistles of four directions while, you know,
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the Catholic clergy there had their hands on their chest, eyes closed. But literally saying,
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you know, I want to ask the grandmother of the West or something like that, the Western direction,
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to open the circle of spirits to come and join us here. That sounds to me like exactly like what
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you're talking about. Like a kind of pagan former thing that existed before, but it's trying to be
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brought back in, not only to secular culture where it's coming on strong there too, but also even into
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the church. I'm not going to cite the sources I've read. You know, my spiritual director always knows
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about it. And there have definitely been some sources where we're like, nah, let's not go there.
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These things, we need to be very careful about these things. But I essentially became convinced
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through my study of this topic, Masonic sources themselves, that the essence of what they were
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doing was, and it's like I said before, a reestablishing, I guess you could say, of an active
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alliance between human beings and the demonic. That's what they're all about. And I, the, another way I
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phrased it in the book is, you know, the difference between the Catholic faith and occultism is we
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believe our souls need to become a temple for the divine, and we can expel the divine if we
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purposely choose to sin. They believe the divine is already within us. Another way that I think is
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helpful to think about it is we believe we can only be saved by being incorporated into the second
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atom. They believe you can be saved by remaining in the first atom, nature bereft of grace. And so
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that's why there is a sort of magical approach to nature among all these movements, because they
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really do believe the divinity is already latent within nature. They don't believe that that infinite
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gap requires grace to be bridged. And so that's what all this supposedly secret knowledge is about.
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And that's frankly, you know, I actually, in law school, somebody tried to recruit me to the Masons,
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and I was very tempted. I was a Protestant at the time. Now, Masons never say, will you join up?
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They don't do that. Their policy is they will wait for you to ask. Because when you ask, there's
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already enough curiosity and probably vanity and pride that's been stirred up to get you to ask in
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the first place. I mean, I mean, my goodness, I grew up watching National Treasure, like this idea
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of being part of the secret fraternity that exercises, you know, control, punching way above
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its weight, whatever that's, that appeals to all sorts of vanity and pride and whatnot. So fortunately,
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I didn't do it. Something was holding me back. And the guy who was asking me seemed like a decent guy in
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many ways. But, and, but then I got back home to California after law school, and the People's
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Republic of California, as we call it. And, and then another man who I met, who was a very senior
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leader in Freemasonry, he also started to meet with me. And I hadn't quite become Catholic yet. But I
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was beginning, I hadn't read Monsignor Dillon, but I begin was beginning to read all sorts of stuff. So I
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think this, this whole idea that if you have this certain gnosis, that you kind of access this
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mystical knowledge of nature, at the higher levels, I think it's meant to work on the very same thing
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that caused our parents to fall, our first parents, pride, you shall be as gods. That's what it's all
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This is interesting, because this is a different look at Freemasonry than we're used to. Most of us
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know Freemasonry and think, well, is this thing with 33 degrees, it's kind of like the Knights
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Columbus, but the pagan version, and it's kind of anti-Catholic. And you're saying the degrees is one
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thing, but there's not even that many people are doing it anyway.
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Frankly, I don't think they even have to. I don't think you have to be a card-carrying Freemason to be
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fundamentally Freemasonic these days. I think you just need to take Oprah at her word. I think you just
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need to believe along the lines of what Oprah believes. There's a lot of new ageism that's everywhere
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in our culture. There's a lot, I mean, when you read a lot of the World Economic Forum stuff, I've seen
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you report on Yuval Harari and Schwab and all those folks. I've been reading Yuval Harari's books.
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They're even worse than people realize. I mean, they really have reduced everything to the material
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horizon, everything. And they believe that they can eventually control this material horizon,
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such that, I mean, as Yuval Harari says many times, we shall basically be as gods. And Yuval Harari,
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in his book, I'm doing this for memory, he literally talks about, we will exceed, you know,
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because in the past, the pagan gods used to be men, used to be women, and then they were later
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divinized. And so Yuval Harari talks about, we're going to exceed them. We're going to exceed Zeus.
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We're going to exceed Neptune, et cetera. So it's very, very creepy. And so I think the reduction of
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everything to the material, and that's why it's related to socialism and communism. You know,
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Marxist whole theory of history, dialectical materialism, was that you have a thesis and an
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antithesis, antithesis, and that provides the impetus to reach a new synthesis. Now,
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I think a good way, well, here's my book, well, my book, you know, I edited it. But I think a good
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way to explain it is maybe people are familiar with the idea of potential energy. You know, if your book
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is laying on your desk, there's no potential energy there. But when you lift it up, you know,
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the gap there provides potential energy. And the higher the book gets, the higher the potential
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energy. So when you're seeing a bifurcation, and I mean, as we're seeing a lot today, the wider and
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wider that gap gets, the more potential energy is there. And that potential energy provides the
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impetus to push the society forward in the direction that they want to go, which is why we constantly see,
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at least in America, I know you Canadians are way on top of things, you know, but, but, you know,
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we constantly seeing no matter what we do, we're constantly going in a more leftward direction.
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But really, this is the, it's their attempt, it's their Marxist materialistic dialectic attempt to
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literally control history. And when you hear, when you look in a lot of Masonic sources, they really
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do think of themselves, they say the difference between a beast and a man is the same as a man and
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a Mason. So there really is this, I mean, Albert Pike talks this way, Manly P. Hall talks this way.
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I mean, I got that specific line from the 1723 Anderson's Constitution's well-known Masonic
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document. So they really do believe that they have the forces of history within their control
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through this sort of materialistic paradigm. And, and so it's a, it's very real.
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They really do believe in a whole class of untermension. They, they actually believe themselves
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superior. Yeah, I believe so. And, and, you know, and to be very clear, my goal, and I was explaining
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this to you before we, we started my goal with this book, when I was reading, I was like, people need
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to read this, not because I think we all need to know the inner sanctum of Freemasonry. I don't think
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any of us need to know that, frankly, but I think, you know, at least in a Catholic church,
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I'm very empathetic with a lot of people who have different views of what's going on today.
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I don't claim to fully understand the crisis we're in. I don't think you would claim that either.
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I don't think any of us should, but there's a, there's a class of Catholics who, the moment you
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bring up a topic like Freemasonry, they immediately shut down and say, conspiracy theory, conspiracy,
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it's, it's, it's false, stupid, whatever. I'm sorry. I mean, I quote Robert Moynihan inside the
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Vatican, very respected scholar, friend of Joseph Ratzinger at the time. And I saw this article in April of
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2020, as I was reading this book, but as we were all going through the first shutdown almost worldwide
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of the public celebration of Easter, since the Diocletian persecution, perhaps, he was saying
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he had recalled during this time, a conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger, but we're just prior to
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his becoming Pope. And he asked him what the gravest threat to the church was. And he said, Cardinal
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Ratzinger, very quietly in his normal way, didn't say anything for a bit, but then just looked at him
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and very solemnly said, it's Freemasonry. Okay. And then we have multiple popes, not just Pope Leo
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XIII, but many before him. And it's even in canon law to this day that you cannot be a Mason and a
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Catholic. There's severe penalties for it. So there are many Supreme Pontiffs that were warning about
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this. So if you want to say that this sort of stuff is a conspiracy theory, tinfoil hat sort of stuff,
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then you must also say, and I think the gauntlet needs to be thrown down. You must also say that
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multiple Supreme Pontiffs of the Catholic church were tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.
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If you're willing to do that, fine. You're at least intellectually consistent. But if you're not,
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then stop. Now, on the other side, we have some people who think, you know, one of my dear friends
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who everybody in the audience would know, but I won't mention it, says there's not a Mason under every
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rock. And even Leo XIII says this. He says, we cannot blame all the problems in the church on
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Freemasonry. Okay. Monsignor Dillon says this too. So we need to be careful about that because I think
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there can sometimes be a tendency to externalize the source of all evil. This is one of the reasons
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why I always watch your show. You always bring it back to, well, first of all, you're a very
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arenic guy. You're very peaceful. And St. Francis de Sales says the number one thing we need to
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maintain is our peace of soul. And so we can't just externalize all the sources of evil and vice in the
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world. We really have to be aware of our own souls. And so I want to avoid that extreme as well.
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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
00:20:43.060
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coverage to millions around the world, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation
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at give.lifesitenews.com. And now back to the video. One of the things that I noticed about
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the list that you gave, it goes right along with Cleons Goosen's list. Cleons Goosen was
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one of the guys under Reagan who worked on communism. He wrote The Naked Communist,
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which is, at least according to Reagan, the greatest book on communism. But it goes through
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this laundry list of the goals of communism that sound exactly like what you mentioned.
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There's the goals of Freemasonry, about divorce, about sex ed in schools, about separating the
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church from the state, things like this. What is the relationship there between Freemasonry and
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Well, we know that the Holy See came into possession of a lot of documents related to these sorts of
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groups, the Alta Vendita. Some of the sources are quoted in Monsignor Dillon's book.
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And I think my personal opinion is that the popes never quite revealed fully their hand in terms of
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how they knew what they knew. We know the Vatican has long had arguably the best diplomatic network
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in the world, best intelligence network, whatnot. But they knew from the very beginning that there
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is definitely a relationship between occultism and the revolutionary movements that were sweeping
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Europe in the 19th century, many of which were overtly Marxist. But we had a predicate,
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and Monsignor Dillon talks about this, we had a predicate with the French Revolution,
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and this itself had been preceded by Voltaire, whose entire purpose was to destroy the Catholic
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Church. And this goes in line with the whole nature alone thing. When you believe in nature alone,
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you believe man's reason is sufficient to attain his end. And so when you have Voltaire and the whole
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so-called enlightenment, you have this overemphasis on man's reason and his ability,
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the ability for our brain to understand completely everything it needs to know for its final end,
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which of course we completely reject as Catholics. It completely, all the truths of faith, it knocks
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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,
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
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,
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
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,
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?
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
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.
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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,
00:42:04.620
and not to be too graphic, but he's cutting open pregnant women, cutting open their children,
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
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
00:42:44.380
at that point. So yeah, this is a big topic, but everywhere, this is why they see the Catholic
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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