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).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 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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