'Tridentine spirituality' will save the world
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
129.61797
Summary
David Torkington is a spiritual theologian, author, lecturer, retreat guide, and broadcaster who specializes in prayer, Christian spirituality, and mystical theology. He is the author of 10 books on prayer and spiritual life that have been translated into 13 languages and sold more than 400,000 copies in numerous countries around the world. He has spent the rest of his life trying to inspire Catholics with the truth, which is to return without delay to the profound contemplative spirituality bequeathed to the early Church by Jesus Christ himself.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
And so a new spirituality was accepted that gradually grew stronger and stronger with the
00:00:06.900
years. It was the me, me, me-centered spirituality, an anthropocentric center, me, my pleasure,
00:00:14.400
what I want, and now. And this is the spirituality that has taken over the church.
00:00:20.260
Hey, my friends, I've got a real treat for you today. I want to introduce you to someone.
00:00:32.000
I'm going to go through his bio. Yes, yes, yes. But I want to introduce you to someone who
00:00:36.740
has the answer, the answer to our crisis in the church and in the world today.
00:00:44.680
I know that's a big claim. And you're going to get to the same answer that you've heard a billion
00:00:54.360
times before. You've got to pray. But wait, it's true, and everybody knows it's true, but there's
00:01:07.300
a how involved. And this interview explains the how, like I guarantee you, you have never heard
00:01:16.640
before. And he gives the how. And you know, while I was talking with David Torkington, who is my guest,
00:01:25.360
I had all sorts of questions, and I couldn't ask them, because he answered everything.
00:01:36.140
David Torkington is a spiritual theologian, author, lecturer, retreat guide, and broadcaster
00:01:43.360
who specializes in prayer, Christian spirituality, and mystical theology. He's actually super famous.
00:01:50.040
You know, for the past 50 years, he's been communicating to huge audiences all of his study
00:01:59.200
on, and it's really self-study. Because during David, he was 12 years as director of a London
00:02:08.220
retreat and conference center, followed by his tenure as dean of studies at the National Catholic
00:02:13.800
Radio and Television Center in London, where he gained meaningful insight into the decline of the
00:02:19.400
moral and spiritual life in the church today. So he lectured on mystical theology at the invitation
00:02:26.820
of the Angelicum and the Dominican University in Rome. David has spent the rest of his life trying
00:02:32.680
to inspire Catholics with the truth, which is to return without delay to the profound contemplative
00:02:39.320
spirituality bequeathed to the early church by Jesus Christ himself and its development from St.
00:02:46.360
Paul to St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Now, he's a very celebrated author,
00:02:52.340
10 books on prayer and spiritual life that have been translated into 13 languages and sold more
00:02:58.620
than 400,000 copies in numerous countries around the world. Right now, he's got a 10-part series out
00:03:07.640
on Essentialist Press, and I'd very much encourage you to go to EssentialistPress.com to take part in that.
00:03:14.860
It's a free 10-part series. But for a taste of it, listen to this interview with David Torkington.
00:03:20.640
Hello, LifeSite friends. To celebrate the momentous overturning of Roe v. Wade,
00:03:27.940
we at LifeSite have minted just under 10,000 brand new limited edition pro-life silver rounds.
00:03:34.440
Each round is stamped on the back with an image of the Supreme Court of the United States featuring
00:03:39.200
the date that the High Court delivered this historic victory. And on the front of our pure silver rounds,
00:03:44.680
we feature LifeSite's logo, surrounded by brilliant sunbursts and draped with olive branches. And each
00:03:50.120
round commemorates LifeSite's 25 years of pro-life pro-family reporting in America, Canada, and beyond.
00:03:56.620
These one-troy ounce rounds are 0.999 pure silver, and LifeSite has just under 10,000 in stock.
00:04:03.640
They're beautiful, historic, and forever enshrining the most important American pro-life victory of a
00:04:09.300
generation. This first edition LifeSite silver round is the perfect gift for
00:04:14.560
yourself or anyone you love that collects precious metals and is passionately pro-life.
00:04:20.560
And each purchase helps directly fund LifeSite's pro-life and pro-family mission.
00:04:25.820
This is the first precious metals collectible of its kind that is directly supporting LifeSite's
00:04:30.800
worldwide mission that you know, love, and trust. And now it can be yours while limited supplies last.
00:04:37.120
Get your one-troy ounce rounds of 99% pure silver today by clicking the first link below.
00:04:44.140
And celebrate life with all of us at LifeSite News.
00:04:47.380
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:04:57.220
So, you've already unpacked something for us that's very interesting because what I'd love
00:05:03.280
to get to is your understanding of the Church right now, and particularly how you came to
00:05:12.060
a new understanding of late of what's going on with the Francis papacy.
00:05:16.980
Well, I was rather naive 30 years ago. Nobody—you see, I was a traveling speaker, lecturer all over
00:05:24.660
the world. And at one stage, I was the Dean of Studies at the National Catholic Radio Television
00:05:31.080
Center here in London. And I met so many people from all over the world. I was invited here,
00:05:37.220
there, there, and everywhere. And this is how I became aware of the sex abuse on an industrial
00:05:45.200
scale in the Church. Now, an ordinary parish priest wouldn't know what I knew because he didn't travel
00:05:51.480
around. So, of course, that's how I found out about it. Even when lecturing—I say even when
00:05:58.000
lecturing in Rome, because I was asked to go and lecture on mystical theology by the Angelicum.
00:06:03.960
And it was there I met Dominicans from all over the world and found that what I had discovered
00:06:09.520
elsewhere was everywhere, but nobody wanted to know. So the only thing I thought I could do—my
00:06:17.540
parents were dead, my brothers were dead—but I did have a wider family. And the wider family
00:06:25.600
family that I belonged to simply couldn't believe it when I tried to tell them the truth. They simply
00:06:34.060
couldn't believe it. And I had a very nice letterback saying, David, we're so sorry to hear about all
00:06:39.640
this, and can we help you? And reading between the lines, what they were actually saying was,
00:06:46.500
can we send you a one-way ticket to the nearest funny farm? They couldn't believe it.
00:06:53.120
And so I realized I thought now I was free to speak out, but I wasn't free to speak out.
00:07:01.880
That's why I decided to go back to deepening my own prayer life in the next 30 years, and during
00:07:09.640
that time to go back to study the Catholic mystical tradition from the very beginning, so that when
00:07:19.620
people started to ask the question about prayer, I would have something, I would have a body of work
00:07:28.240
to place before them. And in fact, I did that. And I was so involved in doing that, that I became
00:07:35.580
rather naive. And this was my naivety. I believed, rather like an alcoholic. They say that an alcoholic has
00:07:51.280
to get so low that he realizes he becomes so disgusted with him or herself that they then turn their lives over to God.
00:08:04.800
And I thought that this would happen with a sexual abuse. I thought they would become so disgusted with themselves
00:08:13.940
that they would change, turn their lives over to God, and I would be there with the question that they were asking.
00:08:21.800
And the question I thought, in my wildest imagination, they would be asking is, tell us how to get back to prayer,
00:08:30.300
the deep prayer that you find in the early church. And so I was preparing the ground. But what I didn't realize was
00:08:40.340
that far from being disgusted, they began to look, first they had a year of mercy, and this was the
00:08:49.900
trigger for me, because I was writing for, I've been writing a column all my life for Catholic newspapers in
00:08:56.340
England, the Catholic Herald, the New Universe, the message of St. Anthony, and so on and so forth.
00:09:02.320
All of a sudden, it came to the year of mercy, and I couldn't make it out. Everybody had to be
00:09:10.400
forgiven without even having to say they were sorry, or look for forgiveness, or go to confession.
00:09:16.700
And it was this that alerted me to the fact that something was going on.
00:09:20.700
Then more and more people began to tell me the unimaginable. And the unimaginable was this.
00:09:30.160
That the very people I thought, who were going to be so disgusted with themselves that they'd repent,
00:09:37.460
they'd convert and keep repenting and turn back to God. On the contrary, they wanted to
00:09:42.240
institutionalize their sinfulness. They wanted even to sacralize their sinfulness.
00:09:48.720
And I couldn't believe that this was happening to begin with, when people started to tell me.
00:09:55.480
But gradually, drip, drip, drip, I began to realize, through people like yourselves, perhaps
00:10:01.280
more you, and I don't mean you personally, I mean you and your magnificent 70, I think it is,
00:10:08.860
your magnificent 70, more than anybody else, were credible. So I had to believe what was going on.
00:10:17.740
Of course, the more I went into it, the more I realized the terrible state that we were in.
00:10:24.400
And therefore, I believed that I had now to come out of hiding, to come out of my
00:10:31.620
Rip Van Winkle, had to come down from the mountain, if you like, and start to try to call people back to
00:10:39.740
prayer, not just call people back to prayer in a vague, woolly sense, but to show them precisely
00:10:46.300
and accurately what was the teaching of the New Testament on prayer, what was the biblical
00:10:53.680
spirituality to which we must return. Because I also found out everywhere, people were saying,
00:11:01.200
we've got to, I'm talking here about what I would call the remnant, let's call the remnant,
00:11:05.640
you know what I mean. But they themselves are diverse, with disagreements and so forth,
00:11:12.200
amongst themselves, we've got to stop quarrelling. And we've got to do what
00:11:17.960
Cardinal Burke told us to do, tells us to do, what Cardinal Muller tells us to do, what Archbishop
00:11:30.080
Vigano tells us to do, what Bishop Strickland tells us to do, what Bishop Schneider tells us to do,
00:11:37.420
and that is back to the person of Christ. He's the heart, the centre of the church. He's the head
00:11:45.220
of the mystical body. But not just to go there, because Christ is not static. He is as active now
00:11:54.240
as he has ever been. And he is doing now what he did while he was on earth. And that is, he is
00:12:01.300
continuing to offer himself hope with all who are in him. The great liturgist Joseph Jungmann said,
00:12:10.980
Christ never prays alone, never prays alone, for he prays with the mystical body. Now we pray in,
00:12:19.400
with, and through him to the Father. But what I'd really like to do, if you'll give me the time,
00:12:29.380
instead of talking about just platitudes, about prayer in general, I want to go back to the scriptures.
00:12:37.660
I want to see, first of all, how Our Lady herself prayed, how she was taught to pray,
00:12:46.480
and then how she taught her son, Jesus Christ our Lord, how to pray. Because
00:12:54.920
we have got to learn from him. He came not just to
00:13:00.600
preach and tell us how to pray, but to show us by his example.
00:13:07.660
Now, when Christ was about two or three years of age, I've not had children. I don't really know
00:13:15.940
when they begin to speak. But the moment our Lord was able to speak, Our Lady taught him
00:13:23.040
a most important prayer that she herself had learned from St. Joachim and from St. Anne.
00:13:31.840
And that prayer is called the Shema. And she taught this prayer to Our Blessed Lord as he was a child.
00:13:42.860
Now, it's important to understand the inner nature of this prayer,
00:13:47.840
because this prayer gradually becomes Christianized, and we should be using it today.
00:13:54.420
The prayer of the Shema incorporates into it the first and the greatest of the commandments.
00:14:07.560
Our Lord said, this is the greatest of the commandments, and it sums up all the others.
00:14:13.080
And this prayer is to love God with your whole heart, and with your whole mind, with your whole body,
00:14:21.220
and with your whole strength. Now, that is incorporated into the Shema that is said by the Jews first thing in the morning.
00:14:30.280
It would have been said by Our Lady first thing in the morning.
00:14:33.620
Now, she teaches it to her son, Jesus Christ, so that the day ahead is therefore sacralized
00:14:51.580
to become the means through which we offer and sacrifice ourselves to God.
00:15:04.980
When he was old enough, he went with St. Joseph to the synagogue.
00:15:13.120
And if they couldn't go because they were working,
00:15:16.300
they would stop at nine o'clock, at twelve o'clock, and three o'clock,
00:15:22.200
So, there's Shema was now said publicly with other Jews.
00:15:26.260
When our Lord, of course, began his public ministry,
00:15:31.120
he now went to the synagogue with his disciples.
00:15:35.440
They'd learned their Shema, and they said their Shema together.
00:15:39.840
Now, after the resurrection, after the Holy Spirit had been sent,
00:15:45.820
of course, Our Lady was there with them on that first Pentecost day.
00:15:51.080
She also, with the apostles, continued to say the Shema.
00:15:58.560
But now there was a difference, because now they said their Shema
00:16:17.280
And they continue to go to the synagogue, where they said their Shema.
00:16:22.020
But now they said it in, with, and through Christ,
00:16:31.040
This, of course, is the prototype of our morning offering.
00:16:41.220
I've got no new gimmicks to put over and to encourage people to participate.
00:16:49.620
And we have forgotten it, because we wouldn't be in this terrible state
00:16:53.820
if we'd have forgotten, if we'd all of us together
00:16:57.500
remembered our Christian Shema, our morning offering.
00:17:03.780
Now, I was first taught this morning offering by my mother.
00:17:11.960
My mother's father, my grandfather, died in 1946.
00:17:20.340
My grandfather was the last of the Lords of Spenithor.
00:17:30.660
They were recusants, but he lost all his money.
00:17:35.520
His grand houses, the castle they owned in Yorkshire, their estates,
00:17:40.720
that was lost because everything had to be paid out
00:17:49.120
And for our viewers, let me perhaps make this point.
00:17:53.160
The word recusant comes from the Latin, and it means those who refused.
00:18:08.020
So they refused to go to the parody of mass that was being said in the churches
00:18:13.380
that had been reconditioned from the Catholics.
00:18:20.540
And so I received this morning offering from my mother
00:18:28.700
because in recusant times there were two great pillars.
00:18:34.740
I know you were talking about pillars the other day.
00:18:37.220
I'm going to introduce you to two different pillars, only slightly different.
00:18:42.280
One of them was the pillar which was the offering of Jesus Christ,
00:18:50.560
After the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent wanted to emphasise more than ever
00:19:00.580
the sacrificial nature of our Catholic faith, of our Catholic spirituality,
00:19:07.660
and this was manifested in a dramatic way in the Tridentine Mass.
00:19:14.160
But there was another pillar too, and that was the pillar of our sacrifice in, with, and through Christ
00:19:30.240
And together now we had the Tridentine Mass with the Tridentine spirituality.
00:19:40.480
As our offerings were gradually offered together with Christ day after day,
00:19:53.680
So that now we began to offer when we went to Mass in, with, and through Christ.
00:20:05.500
And as we received God's love, we began to contemplate the glory of God
00:20:18.800
Now this is, if you like, that what I'm calling the Tridentine spirituality
00:20:25.300
is not something which is just for those who happened, like myself, to have descended from Catholic
00:20:37.600
recusants, because it is merely the mirror reflection of the spirituality of the early days of the church.
00:20:47.480
So it's just that what I'm calling the Tridentine spirituality that satellites and orbits the Tridentine Mass,
00:20:56.960
it's just that it is, we see it in modern times, in a way that we can understand perhaps more easily.
00:21:03.840
Although all the time in the talks that I'm giving, we mentioned those, I think, before we started to speak,
00:21:10.340
and maybe I'll mention them now, I have just completed 10 talks, thanks to Essentialist Press,
00:21:20.820
that are free, and they are filling out what I'm talking about now.
00:21:27.520
They are a 10-part series of the Catholic traditional prayer from the beginning.
00:21:32.920
And it is totally free, you'll be delighted to know.
00:21:37.120
All you do is to go to Essentialist Press, sign up, and I'm actually up to number four, I think, at the moment.
00:21:44.980
And please join us, because we now want to take the offensive,
00:21:49.940
and the offensive is through prayer, in, with, and through Christ.
00:21:54.860
But I think it's essential that we pray together,
00:21:57.940
not just at the same time, but within the same person, within the same person of Jesus Christ,
00:22:05.020
and in the way that he learned to prayer, to pray.
00:22:10.180
In other words, to, if we only go, you don't have to change anything,
00:22:21.200
by going back to the way in which Jesus Christ, our Lord,
00:23:16.740
You'll probably give me chapter and verse of when,
00:23:19.840
But when Pope Benedict first went on the internet,
00:24:20.340
if you do anything without offering it to God in your day,