Dr. Scott Hahn returns to the John Henry Weston Show to discuss his new book, "Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body." In this episode, Dr. Hahn talks about why religion is so important in our society, and why it should be seen as an essential virtue.
00:00:00.160Welcome to this special episode of the John Henry Weston Show, where we are very pleased to bring you back a guest that is very well known to you, Dr. Scott Hahn, who has actually done it again, written a book that's very timely, and we're going to want to hear about all about really what to do in our society to bring us back to sanity.
00:00:52.180It's great to be with you again, John Henry.
00:00:53.720Well, you have really a knack of writing books that pertain to the moment.
00:01:00.480Now, that's Providence, I'm sure, but last time we spoke to you about a book about death and resurrection of the body, right in April of last year, during the height of concern about death due to coronavirus.
00:01:14.540And here we are talking about the future for rebuilding society in the midst of what seems like societal breakdown.
00:01:23.040Well, I would like to be able to take all the credit, but I can't.
00:01:27.700You know, we wanted a book to come out in time for Easter, dealing with the resurrection.
00:01:32.260So, Hope to Die, the Christian Meaning of Death, and the Resurrection of the Body seemed timely, but little did we know how timely it would prove to be with the pandemic.
00:01:40.720And likewise, we were targeting a late fall date that would coincide with the presidential election.
00:01:46.660But when that presidential election just happened, you know, it is right and just why the future of civilization depends upon true religion.
00:01:56.240Again, took on a divine timeliness for which we could take no credit, but express much gratitude because the message is not only timely, but also timeless.
00:02:05.440And I think that's what so many Catholics in America forget, that there really is a perennial philosophy.
00:02:11.640There's a perennial teaching about the relationship between the supernatural order and the natural order.
00:02:17.840And so easily and so frequently, these two are merged and confused.
00:02:24.340And so, like, you know, St. Thomas would say, we distinguish to unite, not to confuse and not to separate and oppose,
00:02:32.040but in distinguishing between the natural order, where we're humans, and the supernatural order, where we're children of God.
00:02:39.300You know, that distinction is something that is seismic and almost impossible to exaggerate.
00:02:47.560And so what I decided to do with my co-author and good friend, Brandon McGinley, was to seize the nettle, you know, to talk about religion.
00:02:56.780In some ways, the most offensive topic, the most misunderstood subject, you know, and not just going back to Marx,
00:03:03.680whom we quote in the beginning, when Marx describes religion as the opium of the masses.
00:03:08.780But even among faithful today, and I'm reminded of what it was like to be growing up in the 70s,
00:03:15.180where you would hear Christians singing one song like, I'm not religious, I just love the Lord, you know, or I'm not religious, I'm spiritual.
00:03:23.940That's been much more common, say, the last 10 or 15 years.
00:03:27.440But it's sort of like, you know, Princess Bride.
00:03:29.520You keep using that word, but I don't think you, you know, I don't think it means what you think it means.
00:03:33.940And so we go back to classical antiquity, you know, so that, in a sense, we press pause when it comes to the Judeo-Christian tradition,
00:03:44.140or what we would call supernatural revelation, with regard to the true religion, the Catholic faith.
00:03:49.300And we just look at religion through the eyes of, well, Plato and Aristotle, but especially Cicero,
00:03:55.180and a little bit of Seneca, because it's surprising to people to discover that religion is an essential virtue.
00:04:02.980That in the natural law tradition, you have many different virtues, and virtues are, to the soul, as far as the ancients were concerned,
00:04:12.520what muscles are to the body, or what intelligence is to the intellect.
00:04:17.440Virtues, what make you a vir, a man, mature, so that you can do more and more good,
00:04:22.560more and more easily, for more and more people, that's virtue.
00:04:26.160And there are many virtues, you know, honesty, thrift, patience, magnanimity,
00:04:29.900but they're basically grouped under the four cardinal virtues, because cardinal means, you know, it hinges on these things.
00:04:37.120And so prudence, and temperance, and fortitude.
00:04:40.340But the chief moral virtue of the four cardinal virtues, for the ancients, for Augustine, for Aquinas, is justice.
00:04:47.620Making sure that you're capable of giving to others what you owe them.
00:04:52.040I mean, that's sort of like, plain and simple, except that we usually approach the virtue of justice from below.
00:04:59.600Looking at, you know, the low-hanging fruit of transactional justice.
00:05:03.820You know, you pay for your groceries before you leave.
00:05:47.960So we're in a situation right now where it seems like the world is honestly a billion miles from the concept of God.
00:05:58.860In fact, it seems like secularism is coming on like a storm.
00:06:02.560We are being hounded out of any kind of religious perspective in the public sphere.
00:06:10.040It really does seem like they're invoking a state religion of anti-religion.
00:06:15.780And yet, you're proposing this way forward.
00:06:18.280Explain that for us, if you would, please.
00:06:20.200Well, you know, I just feel as though Catholic Americans can end up being much more American than they are Catholic.
00:06:26.300So you've got to go back to the basics and lay the foundation in every generation.
00:06:29.780And so, you know, we speak in the book about this bank robber that took place in Sweden back in the 70s when two robbers took, I think, four people hostage.
00:06:41.360And for five days until the Swedish police finally got them out with tear gas and force.
00:06:46.200But in the trial, the world was shocked when these hostages spoke out in defense of their captors.
00:06:52.020And that's how the Stockholm Syndrome entered our vocabulary, because we discovered something that psychologists have known.
00:06:58.760You internalize the mentality and the way of thinking of your captors just as a coping mechanism.
00:07:06.600Well, you know, in certain traumatic events, it's perhaps more understandable.
00:07:11.720But I do think in order to kind of cope with a secular society, and it's not just secular, it's secularistic.
00:07:19.080That is to say, it regards religion as irrelevant, purely relativistic, and downright dangerous if you dare to bring it out of the public square to conduct social discourse.
00:07:42.860And so suddenly, you know, we wake up and we're outraged.
00:07:47.040And, you know, we are offended because we're not able to exercise our rights as Americans.
00:07:51.960You know, forgetting some of the admonitions of the New Testament.
00:07:55.240Don't be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come upon you.
00:07:58.740You know, look at the Lord and recognize that he basically achieved his kingship through the Paschal mystery, through the death and the resurrection.
00:08:09.400But, I mean, through a torturous death, we sort of glamorize crucifixion with jewelry, forgetting that it was devised as the most perfect form of torture to bring someone to the state of shock, but keep them from lapsing into unconsciousness.
00:08:25.660Not just for hours, but sometimes for days.
00:08:28.120And there were no loincloths back then, so it wasn't only excruciating, it was extraordinarily humiliating, out in public.
00:08:35.280And if this is how God achieves the redemption of the world, then we should see, as members of his mystical body, that we're called upon to suffer.
00:08:44.600He didn't suffer and die to exempt us or spare us, but rather to endow our meager sufferings with a redemptive capacity that they would never have on their own.
00:08:53.220And so, again, we shouldn't be terribly surprised that what was known for centuries as liberalism, that was really inherently, but in a disguise, a form of virulent secularism.
00:09:05.620And the agenda, the narrative was always progressive, that as we distance ourselves from religion, we approach more and more freedom.
00:09:15.380And, I mean, there's so many flaws with that way of thinking, you almost have to go back to the alphabet, the multiplication tables.
00:09:22.120And that's why we're looking at the virtue of religion as the highest form of justice.
00:09:28.400It is right and just isn't just a line lifted from the liturgy.
00:09:32.440I mean, it is a truism, except that people don't realize that if it is right and just to give God thanks and praise always and everywhere, it's our duty, but it's also our salvation, then just look at what's implied.
00:09:44.700It would be wrong and unjust not to give God thanks and praise.
00:09:58.560And the catechism is pretty clear on this point.
00:10:01.640If I could just quote for a moment, paragraph 2105, where we read that the duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially.
00:10:12.040This is the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one church of Christ.
00:10:22.520Then it goes on to quote Vatican II, by constantly evangelizing people, the church works toward enabling them to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, but also the laws and the structures of the communities in which they live.
00:10:36.380The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each person the love of the true and the good.
00:10:42.620And it goes on to talk about the true religion and the social kingship of Jesus Christ.
00:10:47.600It also acknowledges freedom and other things, too.
00:10:50.520But it's like we've got to get back to that and recognize that all of this is inherent in the parting words that Jesus gave the disciples when he said in the Great Commission of Matthew 28.
00:11:01.020He said, hey, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.
00:11:04.160He doesn't say all authority in heaven and earth will be given to me at the end of time.
00:11:10.000Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, not just in all nations, but the ethne themselves.
00:11:16.480The communities are to become followers, faithful followers of Jesus.
00:11:21.520And he speaks of baptism, but also of teaching them whatsoever I have commanded you.
00:11:25.820And it's like not just the common denominator, you know, not just the social justice or the private morality that we have overlapping still, although it's shrinking.
00:12:05.480It was just everyday life, marriage and family and friendship and neighborhood.
00:12:09.520And I think we've got to get that ball moving again.
00:12:11.580I think we've got to recognize that a lot of these sacred mysteries that we call Catholic doctrine have sort of faded away so that most of what we think about are the social and the political controversies and how to employ a sort of minimalist, reductionist approach, natural law.
00:13:15.640You have to respect all the religions that are out there, by the way, now including Satanism.
00:13:20.780And how are we supposed to live in a society where you're pushing your one tiny religious view and you're so extreme, hardly any even of your own leadership in your church believe what you're saying right now?
00:13:35.120Well, one of my favorite illustrations in the book is the wrong way run of the defensive end for the Vikings, Jim Marshall.
00:13:42.560Back in the early 60s, he was already breaking records and he has four or five in the NFL, but he's never made it into the Hall of Fame, probably because of this one event where he picked up one of the 30 fumbles that he recovered.
00:13:57.560He holds the record for recovered fumbles, but this time Billy Kilmer fumbled for the 49ers.
00:14:03.120He ran it back to the end zone, celebrated it by tossing the ball and promptly gave two points to the 49ers because he ran the wrong way.
00:14:15.820He wasn't out to betray his teammates.
00:14:18.080We tend to act in terms of what we think is right.
00:14:21.180And on the football field of life, I think many Catholics believe that pluralism is the prescription.
00:14:27.740And I would say, no, pluralism is the description.
00:14:31.580Pluralism is the empirical fact of our everyday life.
00:14:34.400And we've got to get used to it at one level, but at the same time, we should recognize that pluralism is the problem, not the solution.
00:14:42.300And when Jesus says, make disciples of all nations, he adds in the end, and I am with you to the end of the age.
00:14:50.160And so when I came out with this sort of book, you know, it was really the flip side of a book that we did about, oh, three years ago for Emmaus Road called The First Society, The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order,
00:15:03.320where I indicate that it's not by taking over the Capitol or, well, I didn't use that illustration back then.
00:15:09.400It's just simply by living the sacraments, in particular for most Catholics, living the sacrament of matrimony.
00:15:15.680And I hearken back to Father Keefe in my doctoral seminar, my first society on religion and society.
00:15:21.880That was when Newhouse had just come out with the book, The Naked Public Square.
00:15:25.660He was still a Lutheran, hadn't become a Catholic or a priest, but he was sort of approaching this through John Courtney Murray and others just saying,
00:15:32.940okay, we should all be allowed to bring out into the public square our beliefs and have those inform our voting.
00:15:39.260And so in the doctoral seminar, we were half Catholic and half evangelical, and I was still a Protestant, but I was en route to the Catholic faith.
00:15:48.040And so as we were debating and discussing this, Keefe just sort of opined unexpectedly.
00:15:53.580Staring out the window, he said, you know, if Catholics simply live the grace of matrimony,
00:15:58.040for one generation, the result would be a transformed society, a Christian social order.
00:19:47.120It's the city of Steubenville, not the rest of Ohio.
00:19:49.760Well, okay, it's Ohio, but not the other 49 states.
00:19:53.320No, it's all of America, but not the other nations.
00:19:56.060No, make disciples of all nations makes that a non-option.
00:20:00.440And so it really is assembling our beliefs and realizing that all of this was hiding in plain view.
00:20:07.440All we got to do is turn around and recognize, okay, these building blocks have got to be reassembled,
00:20:15.520and we're going to do it in order to get home to heaven, the kingdom of heaven.
00:20:19.940And in the process, we'll let the chips fall where they may.
00:20:22.620We're going to be good Americans, but we're going to remember what Paul told the Philippians in Philippians 3.20.
00:20:28.940He said, our citizenship is in heaven.
00:20:31.120And he uses the technical Greek term for Roman citizenship, polytuma, but he's reminding the Philippians that they have dual citizenship.
00:20:41.940They're Philippians, but they're also children of God called to be saints.
00:20:46.240And so we're Americans, but first and foremost, we're Catholics called to be saints.
00:20:50.920And so we've got to think in terms of election cycles.
00:20:53.620But as Catholics, we also have to think in terms of generations and centuries because that's what Mother Church is teaching us.
00:20:59.180And if we do that, we're going to plant the fall crops so that we have food in the winter.
00:21:03.700But we're also going to plant forests we might never live long enough to see so that our grandkids, and now we have 20 of those, and so we've got skin in the game.
00:21:11.920But our grandkids are going to end up with wood to build their houses, their furniture, and to stack their fireplace so they're warm in the winter.
00:21:23.200But with, you know, the sacraments, with spiritual correction, with an honest desire to experience the grace of conversion, not just 35 years ago when I entered the church, but, you know, three and a half hours ago when I was doing my morning prayer.
00:21:37.260You wake up, and just as you have to be aroused from your physical slumber each day and throughout the day, we need this grace of conversion that is ongoing, it's lifelong, it's daily, it's hourly sometimes.
00:21:51.120But it's never going to be easy if it always involves carrying a cross.
00:21:55.460And so we should look at America and say, yeah, on the one hand, it's so much worse than we thought it would be.
00:22:01.400On the other hand, it's causing us in that darkness to recognize that the light is much brighter than we thought it was, that the good news is infinitely greater than the bad news is horrendously bad.
00:22:14.040But it's just natural to have this gravitational pull downward where we're just looking at the bad, and we're kind of not exaggerating it, but fixating on it, whereas we ought to be contemplating the sacred mysteries and say, wow, okay, I believed them when I was young.
00:22:29.420But they're not only just as true as I thought they were, they're more beautiful than I imagined, and more powerful.
00:22:36.200You know, I think all of this, again, is non-controversial.
00:22:40.340And so it's not about, you know, launching a consistent tirade against all of these different groups that have really strayed, not only in the world, but alas, yes, in the church.
00:22:51.840But that, too, is something that we have forgotten.
00:22:55.240We might fixate on the 50s when Fulton Sheen was winning Emmys, forgetting the fact that, okay, that was the exception.
00:23:03.060Full seminaries, you know, the convents, too.
00:23:05.340That was never ordinary in the history of the church, you know, and so there was a strange confluence in American society, you know, all the way until it carried JFK into the White House.
00:23:15.360But press pause and say, let's get back to ordinary time because Catholic history has never been that way in any consistent manner.
00:23:24.580Even in the 13th century, as Father Walsh called it, the greatest of centuries, there was so much tension, so much infidelity disguised as, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:23:36.200You know, I don't mean to go on, but this has been inside of me ever since my earlier books.
00:23:41.260I'm so glad you started with the concept of suffering because I think that really, in living this out, in living out the faith, it's very challenging, particularly on that granular level of your own personal relationship with Christ, but also in your families.
00:23:54.560These are hard things when you live with your spouse and you raise your children.
00:23:58.760The temptation to not follow through with the gospel with regard to these very difficult situations with your children, you know, as they get older, they get into bad relationships, they might get, God forbid, but into bad marriages.
00:24:14.740How do you deal with that if they get into relationships that are, you know, homosexual and so on and so forth?
00:24:23.120These are massive challenges for people.
00:24:26.100And yet, with It Is Right and Just in your concept in the book of always keeping focused on the eternal realities and basically making heaven the goalpost and vision of the whole of life and realizing that that is true love, it gives a clear direction then for how you're supposed to take on these very challenging situations, even in family life like that.
00:24:52.880If I could get you to Scott, I'd love you to talk about the current reality that we're living in right now in the United States with a Catholic president who is very much in his push anti-Catholic in terms of where he's going on life, on family, even on faith.
00:25:15.960In this time where he professes himself to be Catholic, goes to Mass, that just on his first Sunday of the presidency, he came out of Mass.
00:25:28.920Address that, if you would, in the vision coming from your new book, It Is Right and Just.
00:25:35.300Okay, so I'm reminded of a couple of verses.
00:25:39.040You know, on the one hand, we read in John 18, 36, where Jesus is being interrogated by Pilate, you know, and he refers to his kingdom not being of this world.
00:25:51.580Well, yeah, but my kingship is not of this world because if it was, my servants would fight.
00:25:56.960And so he goes on not to say, my kingship, therefore, is not in this world.
00:26:02.180But when you look at that moment and you freeze frame it, you recognize that even the 12 disciples who had spent three years with him still didn't get it.
00:26:11.080I mean, the triumphal entry, Palm Sunday, we're on a roll.
00:26:15.020We're going to take Jerusalem by storm.
00:26:17.760It'll be winning the popularity contest, you know, and that was never the divine plan.
00:26:22.800The other thing I'm reminded of is in Psalm 33, verse 12, there is a verse, blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.
00:26:31.240Now, we usually assume that referred to ancient Israel alone, you know, not to other nations, except you remember that God said to Moses, Israel is my firstborn son.
00:26:41.380That's my message for you to deliver to Egypt, which implies that the human race is one big family, not only from Adam, but from God the Father.
00:26:52.900And so those of us who are called by Christ, we are called into the world to use the supernatural grace to bring about natural unity as much as possible.
00:27:04.240When in the last 70 years has this been clearly taught?
00:27:35.480And so looking at the situation and seeing how deeply divided the church has been, and not just after Vatican II, but it was already these seismic fault lines perhaps were imperceptible in the 50s.
00:27:50.020But I'm a student not only of church history and salvation history, but American Catholic history.
00:27:55.860When I go back and I recognize that there are fundamental flaws, you know, whatever you think of the theory of evolution, it fits into the physical realm, not the spiritual.
00:28:06.520And yet you adopt that as a worldview and progressive narratives then end up being objective fact.
00:28:15.700You know, so wherever we fall on the spectrum of opinion when it comes to the theory of evolution with regard to natural science, it doesn't work in the spiritual and the social realm.
00:28:26.180And yet I think Catholics imbibed it so deeply that they just kind of assumed that this super dogma is going to unite the natural and the supernatural Catholics in America and the entire West.
00:28:41.740And so right now, I think a lot of Catholics are wandering around without a compass or a map, and they're kind of wondering, who do I listen to?
00:28:50.940Because it's not just the nation that is deeply divided by a Catholic president who professes to be interested in unity.
00:29:11.820In other ways, it brings a sense of peace and calm because it emphasizes not only the lordship of Jesus Christ and prayer,
00:29:19.460but the fact that redemptive suffering has always been the order of the day for anyone who wants to get here to heaven.
00:29:26.280And, you know, that's what hope is about.
00:29:28.040It's not the election cycle so much as a difficult future good is how hope is defined.
00:29:35.080But when we look at that as Christians, as Catholic Christians, we recognize that becoming a saint is indispensable.
00:29:42.380Without holiness, you will not see God, Hebrews tells us.
00:29:45.420But if holiness, if sanctity, if sainthood is the goal, we've got to recognize it's not just a difficult future good.
00:29:53.460The object of our hope is humanly impossible.
00:29:56.680It's only something that supernatural grace enables us to be.
00:30:01.060And even the sacraments don't make holiness easy or automatic.
00:30:06.660It's possible, but it's going to be very difficult.
00:30:10.300It's involving a carrying of the cross.
00:30:12.340And, again, these themes are not denied for the most part, but they're ignored because we want to kind of cash in on what we can do in our political action with regard to our faith.
00:30:24.340And harness as much of the Catholic population as we can.
00:30:28.100And, again, there's nothing wrong with that.
00:30:30.300But if that's all you're doing, there's something profoundly wrong with that.
00:30:40.500And what would you like to say at the end?
00:30:43.160I am grateful and proud to be the editor-in-chief of Emmaus Road and Emmaus Academic.
00:30:49.640And Emmaus Road Publishing published this, as well as Hope to Die and The First Society in most of my recent books, along with Dr. Ralph Martin's book, Church in Crisis.
00:30:58.540So go to stpaulcenter.com, stpaulcenter.com.
00:31:03.920And in a matter of weeks, in fact, on Ash Wednesday, I'm also releasing a series.
00:31:11.160Journey Through Scripture has done a number of series, the Bible and the Sacraments, the Bible and the Virgin Mary, the Bible and the Church Fathers.
00:31:17.360But this time, it is cultivating Eucharistic amazement.
00:31:20.880It's entitled Parousia, the Bible and the Mass.
00:31:23.800It'll be free throughout Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday.
00:31:27.620And we've harnessed R.D. Delgado, who has Hollywood experience, a faithful Catholic as well.
00:31:34.340And we've put together something that I'm convinced is exciting.
00:31:37.680You know, Parousia is the Greek word for presence.
00:31:41.180In our Webster's Dictionary, it's the word for the second coming, because fundamentalists have generally hijacked and redefined it.
00:31:48.360But when we profess the real presence of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and he is that, regardless of who's in the White House,
00:31:54.960we recognize that wherever the Eucharist is, there is the King, and wherever the King is, there is his Kingdom.
00:32:09.900Again, the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings, even when I denied it for years as a Protestant.
00:32:14.520And even when I'm distracted, that reality is not about conjuring up warm, fuzzy feelings.
00:32:21.420It is the objective fact of the sacred mystery, the Mysterium Fidei.
00:32:26.360And, you know, I'm really excited about Parousia, the Bible and the Mass, especially because throughout Lent of this year, it will be available for free online streaming.
00:32:36.440And so, again, stpaulcenter.com for the book, stpaulcenter.com slash mass.
00:32:44.460And that's how you can get access to this new series.
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