00:01:50.420Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
00:01:52.840In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:01:57.500Michael, I want to start with something which is near and dear to your heart and mine.
00:02:01.740Previous to your work at Lepanto Institute, which you founded, you worked for American Life League.
00:02:07.040And there you spent much of your time, as did I, during those years, fighting for the cause of charity, really, toward pro-abortion politicians.
00:02:16.940trying to get the Holy Father's teaching at the time, John Paul II and Benedict's teaching,
00:02:24.580that pro-abortion politicians not be given Holy Communion, both as a need for reverence for our
00:02:30.860Lord and the Blessed Sacrament, but also for their own souls. Because as we know from the
00:02:34.140scriptures, you know, they eat and drink damnation to themselves when they're allowed to do that.
00:02:39.240And yet there were a lot of bishops in the United States who wanted nevertheless to give them that,
00:02:45.760particularly one cardinal who is now not a cardinal nor even a prelate anymore. He's just
00:02:53.940Mr. McCarrick after he was laicized for his abuse. We just saw that resurrect itself during
00:03:02.200this pontificate in the weirdest of ways. We saw a big deal happen over Cardinal Cupich of Chicago
00:03:12.420wanting to give a Catholic award to pro-abortion Senator Dick Durbin. Why don't you explain for
00:03:20.200us the background of what that was? Canon 915, which is the code of the canon law of the Catholic
00:03:26.080Church, expressly forbids Holy Communion to be distributed to an individual who is in a state
00:03:31.980of obstinate, persistent, grave manifest sin. What that means, obstinately persistent, means that
00:03:37.220after correction, they continue to persist in it regardless of the corrective measures that have
00:03:42.260taken uh and it's got to be grave so it has to be of mortal sin worthy uh level of a problem
00:03:49.500grave manifest meaning it's public it's something that people can see it's not something that's a
00:03:55.260clandestine indiscreet meeting with a paramour it's it's something that's actually uh public
00:04:01.380knowledge so grave manifest sin i'll never forget i actually had a conversation with cardinal george
00:04:07.540back in, gosh, I want to say it was 2010. I met with him to talk about Canon 915.
00:04:15.320And he told me in the meeting, he started off by saying, well, yes, pro-abortion politicians are
00:04:20.400not to present themselves for Holy Communion. And I said, well, your eminence, with all due respect,
00:04:24.920that's Canon Law 916. Canon 916 says that those who are in a state of grave sin should not present
00:04:32.320themselves for Holy Communion. And so the onus is put on the individual. But Canon 9.15 says that
00:04:39.360those who are in a state of persistent grave manifest sin are not to be distributed to Holy
00:04:44.940Communion. It's not supposed to be given to them. I said, putting the onus on the one distributing
00:04:49.360communion. And his response to me was, well, that's according to your own interpretation.
00:04:54.440And I said, your eminence, I'm confused. How else am I supposed to interpret it? And he said,
00:05:00.160i don't have to tell you that oh my gosh yes and i said uh i'm not trying to be belligerent your
00:05:06.800eminence i'm i'm a loyal son of the church and i'm turning to you a prince of the church who
00:05:14.280is to tell me how i'm supposed to understand the church's teachings to explain to me what this
00:05:20.160means and uh he kind of went off on a tangent and then changed the subject and never came back to it
00:05:27.220Wow. And that was Cardinal George, one of the, you know, better bishops in the U.S. At the time, he was the head of the USCCB. Well, we have to remember, he came into the leadership of the USCCB, I think it was after Wilton Gregory.
00:05:42.740And Wilton Gregory was the one who collaborated with then Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. They collaborated to hide what Cardinal Ratzinger had said to them about denying communion to pro-abortion politicians.
00:05:58.820specifically. They hid his letter, put it in a back pocket, and then told their brother bishops,
00:06:05.740oh, well, Rome said that it's up to the individual bishops in their dioceses to make a determination
00:06:10.960as to whether they're going to give communion to pro-abortion politicians. So this is all the
00:06:14.280backstory here, to say that there's a state of confusion about this. But there was never a state
00:06:20.820of confusion about this in Rome, that is, until about 2013 when things started to change. With
00:06:27.200Pope Leo coming in, you know, Dick Durbin was being given this award for a lifetime achievement
00:06:34.080award from a Catholic institution that falls directly under the responsibility of the Archbishop
00:06:41.740of Chicago, who is now Cardinal Cupich. And Cupich, of course, was elated to give this award to Durbin.
00:06:50.440and pope leo was asked about it and pope leo's response was to kind of walk around the issue
00:06:58.720without ever addressing it directly and and to kind of say well you know if somebody calls
00:07:02.960themselves or says that they're in favor of the death penalty they're not really pro-life yeah
00:07:07.060in fact you know what let's let's just review that tape right now because the the exchange
00:07:11.540is really stunning let's watch i just wanted to ask one thing that has become a bit of a
00:07:15.740divisive subject in the U.S. right now, with Cardinal Cupich giving an award to Senator Durbin.
00:07:25.560Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because he is pro,
00:07:30.760or rather, he's for legalized abortion. How would you help people of faith right now?
00:07:37.080Decipher that, feel about that, and how do you feel about that?
00:07:40.140I'm not terribly familiar with the particular case.
00:07:46.580I think that it's very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during,
00:07:53.320if I'm not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.
00:07:58.360I understand the difficulty and the tensions, but I think, as I myself have spoken in the
00:08:03.820past, it's important to look at many issues that are related to what is the teaching of
00:08:08.980church. Someone who says I'm against abortion but says I'm in favor of the death penalty is not
00:08:14.640really pro-life. So someone who says that I'm against abortion but I'm in agreement with the0.53
00:08:22.220inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States, I don't know if that's pro-life.0.68
00:08:27.620So they're very complex issues. I don't know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would
00:08:33.740ask first and foremost that there be greater respect for one another and that we search
00:08:39.080together, both as human beings, in that case, as American citizens or citizens of the state
00:08:45.240of Illinois, as well as Catholics, to say we need to really look closely at all of these
00:08:51.960ethical issues and to find the way forward as church.
00:08:55.580The church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear.
00:08:59.620It was weird to me that at first Pope Leo says, yeah, no, I don't know the situation that well. And then he goes on to say I was 40 years and blah, blah, blah. And it's not like as a Chicago native himself, he's totally unaware of Dick Durbin's stance. I mean, I don't think. Your thoughts on that?
00:09:19.900Whether he's aware of Dick Durbin's response or position or not is kind of a side issue because what he expressed in his statement was the seamless garment that was proposed first by Cardinal Bernadine of Chicago.
00:09:35.440So it seems that the Chicago way has made its way to Rome. And through that Chicago way, we're now seeing this kind of a mealy mouthed approach to grave manifest sin that was expressly forbidden by Cardinal Ratzinger and later Pope Benedict.
00:09:54.100So I don't know how he can feign ignorance about Dick Durbin's positions, but then express the seamless garment and say that, you know, well, unless there's anybody who can have this total pro-life position, this whole life position, which I think is what they all like to call it now, then really nobody's worthy.
00:10:15.220So therefore, everybody's worthy of an award if that's the way we're going to approach it.
00:10:19.620It's funny because the pro-life movement being the movement for life was never against the0.52
00:10:26.220church's teaching, which never changed until with Francis and the Catechism, that the death
00:10:32.200penalty was legitimate in cases where it was needed, et cetera, et cetera.
00:10:36.260But also as a deterrent that the governments had the permission from God to use the death
00:10:45.640penalty. The pro-life movements never contested that. Now apparently it's changed, which of course
00:10:53.160it can't. But nonetheless, it's a really odd thing because pro-lifers themselves are being put in a
00:10:58.300position where in order to say now you're pro-life, at least according to the 14th, you have to deny
00:11:05.340part of the church's teaching. How have you wrestled with that? What have you done with that?
00:11:11.300This is the basic tactic of socialists and modernists, is to reframe and redefine the entire framework of the conversation. They want to change the narrative so that they're no longer talking about the one issue that you're focusing on, and now you're talking about a broad range of issues, which is whataboutism on one hand, but it's also a red herring on the other.
00:11:34.020They're effectively trying to put the pro-life movement, which was specifically anti-abortion
00:11:41.400when it came out, when it started, it was specifically anti-abortion.
00:11:45.040They're trying to pigeonhole that so that now in order for you to be against abortion,
00:11:50.900you have to be against all the other things that the socialists on the left-hand side
00:12:02.520i've been pro-life my whole life uh when i was five my mother took me on a a pro-life march
00:12:08.680in san diego um and she recalled to me a little story where i was i was four the first year that
00:12:17.460she took me and then i was five the next year and i said do we really have to go again i said
00:12:22.620are they still killing babies here i was five years old still you know just kind of blink blink
00:12:29.420It's unconscionable to equate, say, abortion, which is the direct intentional murder of a baby, with what Pope Leo called harsh treatment of immigrants without actually really establishing how that treatment is being handled or who it's being handled with.
00:12:47.760And, you know, they never want to talk particulars on that matter.
00:12:50.460It's a political football for them just to maneuver things to push their leftist agenda.
00:12:55.220It has been, though, for a lot of people, an issue of conscience, because they hear from
00:13:01.240Pope Leo XIV, basically, in order to be pro-life, you have to be against the death penalty.
00:13:07.240They know the former teaching of the Church that the death penalty is legitimate.
00:13:12.360It's very hard when you hear the Pope saying, in order to be pro-life, you have to be against
00:13:17.820the death penalty, and you know that you're not supposed to.
00:13:20.520At least that's what 2,000 years of church teaching have said.
00:13:23.600Now, some people actually just say, it's above my pay grade. Therefore, yeah, I'm totally against death penalty. I'm going to fight it with the same vigor I do abortion. And because it's, hey, it's all the same. But some get lost in that, don't know what to do. It's very, very difficult. That was a very categorical statement. It's in the new catechism from Francis as well.
00:13:46.500At the same time that we're being told that capital punishment is, you know, somehow against the Imago Dei, it is an affront, it's not pro-life, it can't be admissible, etc., etc.
00:14:00.880At the same time that we're getting from those parts of the church about the death penalty, they are very much in favor of the spiritual death penalty, which is excommunication.
00:14:11.480So I don't know how you can be in favor of excommunication, which is worse than the death penalty, because now we're talking about the death of the soul. I don't know how they can be in favor of excommunication and be against physical death, which is what capital punishment is.
00:14:31.480and at the same time you know when we look at just humanity itself we are all under the death
00:14:39.160penalty god said at the very beginning if you uh if you eat the fruit you will die there it is
00:14:46.260consequence for a violation death penalty and adam and eve ate the fruit and guess what now
00:14:53.520humanity suffers death we would not have suffered death prior to that but now we do we are all under
00:15:00.520the death penalty. And all through Scripture, the Old Testament, you have God issuing the death
00:15:06.940penalty for certain offenses. But, you know, the death penalty is not intended to be simply
00:15:14.920a punishment. It is also a mercy, because none of us knows the hour of our visitation. None of us
00:15:22.220knows the time of our eternal judgment, except for those who are going to be scheduled for execution.
00:15:29.400And they have that opportunity to make themselves right with God, to turn and say, you know what, I have committed an offense that is just and right. And they can say with the good thief who was to our Lord's right. And he said to the other one, the bad thief, he said, our punishment is just, but this man is innocent.
00:15:52.320And then he turned to our Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
00:15:55.300And our Lord did not turn to him and say, oh, what they're doing to you is unjust.
00:15:59.540You shouldn't be here, you know, under the death penalty.
00:16:17.900It is a mercy for them to know the hour of their visitation.
00:16:21.620and to prepare themselves ahead of time i want to underline you said some amazing things there but
00:16:27.100that first thing you said about the unbelievable hypocrisy of those who say oh the death penalty
00:16:34.700is so terrible yet they're all for excommunication which as you said i mean typically what it means
00:16:41.660is the death of the soul eternal punishment that's just stunning that never occurred to me i want to
00:16:47.680also address something here that um that happened we had you on uh months ago already with regard to
00:16:54.240your just unbelievable deep dive into leo the 14th and his communist ties give us a nutshell of that
00:17:02.940again i encourage everybody to go watch our former show with michael or read his full report over at
00:17:08.060lepanto institute which catalogs it like with chapter and verse like no one else can but give
00:17:14.860us a little snippet just to remind people of what the major findings you were with regard to leo and
00:17:20.200communism hey my friends it's going to be a really historic night on september the 24th archbishop
00:17:26.640fulton j sheen will be beatified in st louis missouri that same evening life site news is
00:17:33.460hosting a special celebratory banquet just steps away from the stadium where the beatification is
00:17:39.620taking place. We will have Bishop Sheen's own favorite mitre with us for veneration. Come and
00:17:45.760celebrate Blessed Fulton Sheen with lifelong Sheen promoters Terry Barber and Alan Smith. Father
00:17:52.920James Altman, our beloved friend, will also be speaking to us there. And there are only a few
00:17:58.620tickets left, so be sure to get them while they're available. Hotel rooms are already very difficult
00:18:05.460to find. Most are already booked, but LifeSite has secured a block of rooms exclusively for those
00:18:11.900who join us for the dinner. Reserve your seats today. The link is below. I look forward to seeing
00:18:17.800you in St. Louis. So it starts in 2014 with the Institution of the World Meeting of Popular
00:18:25.620Movements. Everybody remembers Pope Francis in 2015 receiving that communist hammer and sickle
00:18:32.100crucifix, but nobody remembers why he was in Bolivia. He was in Bolivia for the second world1.00
00:18:38.220meeting of popular movements. And Evo Morales sat next to him throughout the entire proceedings
00:18:42.820after he had given him that that horrific crucifix. And the thing is, the world meeting
00:18:48.200of popular movements being instituted by Francis is intended to bring together what he calls
00:18:55.180popular movements. They're effectively communist organizations, MST, La Via Campesina, UTEP.
00:19:01.460I might add pro-abortion, pro-homosexual communist organizations.0.56
00:19:05.180Oh, yes, very much so. But these organizations, when we say communists, we're not we're not being hyperbolic.
00:19:12.860These organizations actually cite Karl Marx. They do read alouds of the Communist Manifesto.
00:19:20.360Many of them march through the streets with hammer and sickle flags.
00:19:23.460So this is not just a colloquialism to call them communists. They are actual literal communists pushing communist ideologies. And so Pope Francis gathered them together and he had these meetings with them.
00:19:38.080Well, in 2025, so Pope Leo, he became pope five months later, they convened the Fifth
00:19:46.620So the meetings were held at a place called Spintime Labs, which is a communist-run,0.69
00:19:52.120squatter-occupied building in Rome.0.74
00:19:54.420And after several days of meeting, they processed over to Rome at the Pope Paul VI Center, and
00:20:03.400Pope Leo received them in a private audience.
00:20:06.240and in that private audience he said very laudatory things to them. He said the banner
00:20:11.620that you unfurl is so relevant that it merits an entire chapter in Christian social thought. Keep
00:20:17.160in mind these are communists and he's basically saying that their ideas are worthy of Catholic
00:20:23.700social thought. He said yours is a cry to find solutions in a society dominated by unjust
00:20:29.860systems, forgetting that communism is the most unjust system you can imagine. He says,
00:20:36.700this is poetry. You are social poets. He said, it is beautiful to see that the popular movements,
00:20:44.080even before the requirement of justice, are moved by the desire of love against any individualism
00:20:51.020and prejudice. Again, these are communists. They're not motivated by love. They're motivated by power.
00:20:56.920he says your effort is ever more necessary and he then says they open up the unprecedented
00:21:04.580possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a worldwide scale so here he's
00:21:12.500acknowledging yeah they're communists and he wants the redistribution of wealth right there
00:21:17.520in in that whole thing uh he goes on he says i am encouraged to see how popular movements
00:21:23.280organizations of civil society and the church are addressing these new forms of dehumanization.
00:21:29.060Of course, communism is the most dehumanizing ideology that has hit modern man. And then he
00:21:36.300says, this makes you champions of humanity, witnesses of justice, poets of solidarity. And
00:21:42.760he said many, many, many other laudatory things. But the bottom line is these are communist,
00:21:48.400pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, pro-trans, and also pagan. Some of these organizations are deeply involved
00:21:57.420in dark satanic rituals. And he said those beautiful things to those organizations and0.98
00:22:04.860individuals. I just find the irony so painful for him to say those things about them and have such
00:22:13.160harsh things to say about traditional Catholics, specifically with regard to the SSPX.
00:22:19.820This report of yours, and by the way, it's not just a report. You had it with video. There's
00:22:26.560no denying anything because you had it in spades, but it hasn't gone anywhere. I mean, yes, we
00:22:33.700featured it at Lifesite, obviously, and a few other places have, but none of the big mainstream
00:22:39.500places. Even the Catholic big mainstream have given this coverage. That stuns me in a way that
00:22:48.140is inexplicable. Even places that would have covered Francis doing something haven't picked
00:22:53.940this up. I have another example of exactly the same thing that was unearthed as well, and that
00:23:01.040was with regard to Leo naming a pedophile a bishop. Now, I don't say pedophile lightly in the
00:23:08.420same way you wouldn't. We have his book, Bishop Labaka, who worked in the Amazon, and he describes
00:23:16.280himself how he allowed young children to touch his genitals past the point of erection, not quite to0.97
00:23:24.740the other point, he says. He also describes how he allowed a homosexual young man to sleep with1.00
00:23:32.560him nude in his bed and these are his own writings and this is the man made a venerable on may 22nd
00:23:39.260by leo the 14th that story as well has gone nowhere it's like it doesn't exist even though
00:23:48.540it's out there i i'm just stunned by these things the fact of the matter is that you have an
00:23:53.320individual who if he were a teacher at a school would be arrested and thrown in prison with the
00:23:59.960He tossed to the wayside and probably would be would be taken care of by the inmates, if you know what I mean.
00:24:06.940That's not the behavior of of somebody worthy of veneration.
00:24:10.580That's the behavior of a criminal who is abusing children and use, you know, he wraps everything.
00:24:16.820And I've read the excerpts. He wraps everything in terms of anthropology.
00:24:20.920But anthropology is not Catholic teaching, nor is it is it a natural understanding of morality?
00:24:28.540because the anthropology that he's putting forward starts with the Hobbesian idea that,
00:24:34.820well, man is naturally good. And because of his natural goodness, we don't have to have
00:24:40.040the sense that the natives are wrong, that nativism is actually a good thing. And we should
00:24:47.100be going back to our tribal selves because they had this sense of natural goodness and beauty,0.99
00:24:54.040which is completely false, completely false. No, the natural goodness and beauty that belongs in0.99
00:25:01.580the human heart and the human soul comes from the Catholic Church, and it comes to the Catholic
00:25:06.000Church through Jesus Christ and through the graces that he gives to us because of the Catholic Church
00:25:11.860and because of his sacrifice on Calvary. It does not come through some natural nativist goodness
00:25:16.560that is inherent in man. But that's the kind of anthropology that this guy was starting with,
00:25:21.720And through that understanding, he was actually facilitating homosexual and encouraging homosexual and erotic behavior, which is not becoming of anybody who would call themselves Christian.
00:25:34.620One of the quotes that came to me by one of the writers who writes for Life State once in a while, Robert Morrison, he unearthed this quote from, it was actually from Cardinal Ratzinger.
00:25:46.900Now, Cardinal Ratzinger was involved, obviously, in the 88 excommunications, later became Pope, and then lifted those same excommunications, interestingly, without any sign of repentance.
00:26:01.380In fact, the society never changed his stance.
00:26:03.860But Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, he really wanted reconciliation and worked toward it very strongly and was much criticized for it.
00:26:16.100because one of the things, one of the concessions, if you will, was to allow for some criticism of
00:26:24.480Vatican II. And there was a hue and cry from all sorts of quarters in the church. But he pointed
00:26:32.960out that the hue and cry was also coming from those who were leftist, if you will, in the church,
00:26:39.640but ones who rejected what and he sat there while they rejected all of John Paul's teaching
00:26:45.620and then his own later on but these are the words of Cardinal Ratzinger pointing out this hypocrisy
00:26:50.140he says there is a glaring contradiction in the fact that is just the people who have let
00:26:57.840no occasion slip to allow the world to know of their disobedience to the pope and to the
00:27:04.420magisterial declarations of the last 20 years who think they have the right to judge that this
00:27:11.680attitude, that's the attitude of the Holy Father now toward the SSPX, is too mild and who wish that
00:27:20.560an absolute obedience to Vatican II be insisted upon. I thought that was hilarious because it is
00:27:28.360funny that the very folks who were the ones during the day of John Paul II and Benedict,
00:27:37.320in fact, the very same bishops who were, like we talked about just before, insisting on communion
00:27:44.300for pro-abortion politicians, while they knew the Holy Father was demanding that it not be,
00:27:49.780those same bishops right now today are telling the ssbx obey obey obey the hypocrisy that i see
00:28:00.260right through this is that they're demanding an absolute obedience to the second vatican council
00:28:04.560while they themselves are not obedient to it didn't uh sacrosanctum concilium say that latin
00:28:09.940should have primacy of place within the church didn't it also in indicate that uh chant is to
00:28:16.180be maintained, and yet they've abandoned Latin, they've abandoned chant, and they've put in place
00:28:21.880their own abominable practices as if it was something that the Second Vatican Council
00:28:27.080wanted, which it absolutely and patently did not. So when we talk about this absolute obedience to
00:28:34.940the Second Vatican Council, what are we even talking about? What obedience? Who's obedient
00:28:39.520to what? And what things are required and which ones are prudential? And if there's a prudential
00:28:45.760element to this well if if there's nothing that is obligatory on a matter of faith and morals
00:28:52.800within the second vatican council then what does obedience mean what are we being obedient to
00:28:56.760what what demand or what decree or what law was instituted through the council the answer is
00:29:03.140nothing and so when when we have these disagreements and you have uh you know the society
00:29:09.440saying you know there are problems with this document and that document and the fact that
00:29:13.700Cardinal Fernandez says, yeah, we don't want to talk about that, but we'll talk about anything
00:29:16.820else. Well, then what's there to talk about? I guess there's the weather, but it's not like
00:29:22.360that's going to save anybody's soul. One of the things that happened that Bishop
00:29:25.100Follet talked about was that he found it very odd that he would get told one thing by the Holy
00:29:32.140Father in a meeting, which did happen, and then later get told something else. He inquired about
00:29:38.280this. He said, what are we supposed to do with that? And they were like, not everything that
00:29:42.940comes out of Rome is from the Holy Father. And his response was, how are we supposed to tell
00:29:47.800what's from the Holy Father and what's not? And Filet's response was like, what I would do if I
00:29:55.060could was say, well, all the things I agree with come from the Holy Father. And those that I don't,
00:29:59.280don't come from the Holy Father. But that's specifically forbidden in church teaching.
00:30:04.780So these things are, they are the most troublesome things that we can imagine. If we're trying to
00:30:11.300live the faith, if the faith means everything to us, which it should, then you want to live this
00:30:15.880out. And that brings me to a sort of final point that I wanted to raise with you. One of the things
00:30:22.120that I find most distressing right now is the whole thing about condemning one another. Because
00:30:29.740we're in a time of, I think, diabolic disorientation, like probably has never existed
00:30:36.360before, such that all of the people in the church who sort of get it at one level, sort
00:30:44.160of understand that, look, if Leo were your pastor of your parish, and last week he met
00:30:51.500with James Martin, and right after that he allowed the LGBT group in your parish to process