00:09:18.020and then the church in which the Holy Scriptures
00:09:20.260came to be as an expression of God's revelation.
00:09:24.960It does seem, you know, when God in the Old Testament, which, you know, is prefiguring the new, when he tells his people to worship him in a certain way and to pray in a certain way and to organize themselves in a certain way, it boggles the mind of modern people who want everything on their own terms.
00:09:44.300That's exactly it. God calls us to himself in the integrity of his own being, not to make our own God. Like in the Old Testament, the story of the Tower of Babel, the people thought that they could build a structure to reach up to God instead of worshiping exactly as you put it, worshiping in the way in which God teaches us.
00:10:09.960And they had it all in the Old Testament scriptures and all of the details about divine worship to respect God as the origin of all being, the source of all being, and our participation in his being, but as his children, not as other gods.
00:10:30.700Right, right. Well, on the particulars of what God tells us to do, we have a question from one of our Hebraic writers here. This is, let me see if I can pull it up. Here it is. This is from, I lost it. Here we are. This is from my Jewish friend who happens to be sitting right over there, who's an associate producer of this show, Jacob Falach, who says, with respect to his eminence and Catholics at large, how do, nothing good is going to follow from that.
00:11:00.080With respect to no offense intended, you know you're going to hear the most offensive thing ever.
00:11:04.080He says, how do Catholics reconcile the belief that Jesus is the figurative third temple as described by the prophets as well as the final sacrifice for humanity's sins?
00:11:13.740When Ezekiel specifically gives the temple's measurements, 500 by 500 cubits, and also says sacrifices will occur on it by the priests.
00:11:23.180Was Ezekiel therefore a fraud according to Catholic belief?
00:11:53.580becoming one with us in order to save us.
00:11:56.740And so in the Old Testament, Ezekiel, all the law and the prophets sometimes is called, is all pointing, leading to our Lord.
00:12:10.340And he himself said in the Sermon on the Mount, I've not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to bring them to their fulfillment.
00:12:16.960And so we understand that all of the care for the dimensions of the temple, for the appointments in the temple and so forth, all of that is in view of this perfect dwelling of God with us by the redemptive incarnation.
00:12:38.780And so, we accept the book of the prophet Ezekiel as part of the canon of Holy Scriptures for us, as it is also for the people of Jewish faith.
00:12:53.520And we see nothing contradictory in it.
00:12:58.440You know, I was just reading through Genesis yesterday, actually, and it occurred to me, a lot of the commentary, especially from atheists and unbelievers, is they'll try to debunk the Bible.
00:13:11.820And if you try to debunk the Bible, you will succeed at whatever it is you're attempting to do.
00:13:16.980You know, even in the first two chapters of Genesis, you can find an apparent contradiction, which is in one of the tales of the creation, the plants come before the humans.
00:13:27.340And in the other tale, the humans come before the plants.
00:13:30.060So in modern times, people will just say, well, there you go.
00:16:05.000That's not necessarily going to be the case,
00:16:07.180but I think betting odds are he's going to be right.
00:16:10.220And this is true for all of the great doctors of the church, church fathers.
00:16:13.300St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Leo the Great, Irenaeus, all the great fathers of the church, and they all fundamentally are in agreement with each other, but studying these truths from different angles, from different approaches, and even using different metaphors, different forms of literature to present the truth.
00:16:41.300Yes. Even when some of my Protestant friends would kind of razz each other about religion,
00:16:48.200and they would go after me and say the Eucharist is a kind of developed tradition or praying to
00:16:53.140Mary, to use the example we just cited. That's a new thing you Catholics invented. And I think,
00:16:58.660well, you know, the early Christians kept pretty good notes. So you can go back to Justin Martyr
00:17:02.900and the very early Christian writers talking about the Eucharist. You can go back to the,
00:17:08.380I think it's the Rylan's Papyrus with the first prayer to the Blessed Mother in the second century.
00:17:13.480Yes, so to him precede him under your protection.
00:21:34.680And this was a controversy between the West and the East in antiquity, because the original creed says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
00:25:22.760And I think they're the font of a lot of other related concerns about the violence, for instance, in society today.
00:25:30.840I think when you want a society, well, we just saw in these days in Massachusetts, they signed into law, law which permits the killing of a baby right up to the moment of birth.0.64
00:25:44.500And the governor who signed it is ostensibly Catholic.
00:25:47.020Yes. This is an image I saw of these young women cheering on. I don't know if they were young mothers or whatever, but there's something about that that's so disordered.
00:26:43.160I see many more families now with more children, and that's also a good sign.
00:26:49.100And I remember when I was a young priest, there was this idea that also supposedly inspired by a care for the planet that people shouldn't have more than one or two children.
00:27:00.760And I remember when I was a young priest, this mother came up to me in tears.
00:27:05.380It was in the Catholic school, and she had announced to one of the teachers that they were going to have their third baby.
00:27:12.680And the teacher said to her, don't you think you should have more regard for the invite?
00:30:39.800who's the Archbishop of Utrecht, Cardinal Willem Eich.
00:30:43.120And he's told me that in the last years in Holland,
00:30:47.140where it seemed like the church was dead, really.
00:30:50.860I mean, their participation was so low
00:30:53.140that now the young people are coming back in great numbers.
00:30:56.520But he told me, he said, they want the traditional liturgy, they want something that speaks, not that the more recent usage is valid, there's no question about that and so forth, but the more ancient usage communicates more fully and more richly the divine action.
00:31:20.140That this is our Lord Jesus Christ who's come down to renew on the altar, to make sacramentally present his sacrifice on Calvary.
00:31:31.060And the young people are simply, they're attracted.
00:31:45.900Yes, as one young person said to me, came to see me to ask me some questions, he said, I've come to see you, and don't tell me that I'm all all right, I'm a sinner.
00:31:56.240And we all are, but I think this is really a positive sign.1.00
00:32:02.460But as far as I can see, there will be an ever greater number of Catholics
00:32:11.100who are worshiping the way that we worshiped for over 15 centuries.
00:32:15.800And there's nothing contradictory about that.
00:32:18.140But there's this idea that somehow the form of the Roman right up until the reforms after the council is all bad, no.
00:32:31.580Well, you know, I will get back to the Twitter questions, but one just for myself on this point, which I care about a lot.
00:32:51.700But why wouldn't I avail myself of all the help I can get?
00:32:55.560And I think that for the people who say, well, the new form of the Mass is valid, so why don't you just go to that?
00:33:01.200I say, yeah, it's valid, and I can, and I do go to that sometimes.
00:33:04.420But if you have a lot of young people who are desiring this use of the Mass that we had for 1,500 years, that they feel is speaking to them and nourishing them in a special way, and they're really drawn to that, why would you restrict that?
00:33:24.020Pope Francis restricted the traditional Latin Mass after Pope Benedict had liberated or acknowledged that it never should have been suppressed in the first place.
00:33:33.080So, where would you say that stands right now as we're in a new pontificate looking ahead?
00:33:38.780I'm not asking you to predict the future, but how do things look right now?
00:33:42.100I think that the most important thing is for those who love the traditional Latin Mass
00:33:50.780to make known to their bishops and to the Holy Father most of all
00:33:55.960their desire to worship according to this form
00:33:59.560and that they're not calling into question
00:34:02.200the validity of the Second Vatican Council,
00:34:05.400but that they're simply saying that this form of the Mass,
00:34:09.900which was never suppressed and never could be,
00:34:12.640the fact of the matter is it's been celebrated continuously
00:37:53.060A circle is a circle and a square is a square.0.72
00:37:55.300God doesn't contradict himself in his revelation when we, St. Thomas is brilliant on this, but also other great theologians, but we, in the revelation that God gives, even in the miracles that he works, they all are perfectly in harmony with the beauty of creation and express its perfection.
00:38:47.640in the Christian conception. And in it, he was quoting this Muslim writer Ibn Hazm, who said
00:38:52.980that in the Islamic conception, in this kind of voluntarist conception, God is totally transcendent.
00:38:58.440So, if he wanted to demand that his followers worship idols, he could do that. Whereas the0.88
00:39:03.940Christian understanding of God, as synonymous with the logos, is different. It's not pure will.0.74
00:39:10.140it's reason also. Yes, absolutely. And that is a distinct difference between Islam and
00:39:20.780Christianity. But even for instance, if we take the story, it's a powerful account of the sacrifice
00:39:27.820of Isaac. God promised Abraham and Sarah that they would have a child even though they were
00:39:32.860advanced in years, and they had the child Isaac, and then God, to test Abraham's faith,
00:39:39.980he told him to sacrifice Isaac, which would be really a contradiction, but it wasn't God's will.
00:39:48.700And in fact, and so poor Abraham, heartbroken, leads this little boy up to the mountain
00:39:55.980to sacrifice him according to the Lord's command. And at the moment when he was going
00:40:02.380to sacrifice him, an angel comes and stops him and says, no. And so, God can test us in various
00:40:12.460ways, but he doesn't contradict himself. And Isaac, of course, he had his son Jacob, and then
00:40:20.980the 12 sons of Jacob, and the whole from which descends then our Lord himself.
00:40:27.480And even not merely, I was just reading that this morning or last night, that not merely is God testing Abraham's faith, but he's also prefiguring what he himself will allow to do.
00:40:42.220Our Lord carried the wood of the cross to Calvary, and God gave what he would not ask us to do himself.
00:40:54.700He offered his own son for our salvation to save us.
00:41:01.680Next question from Oreo, with an I, not like the cookie, O-R-I-O, says,
00:41:09.480Would it be beneficial for the world if the Vatican gave up its wealth?
00:41:14.540We hear this question a lot throughout history.
00:41:16.720No, it would be detrimental to the world because the Vatican's wealth is all history and beauty,
00:41:25.100all having to do with the history of the church, with the beauty of her worship.
00:41:29.680And these are the great treasures of our tradition.
00:41:33.440And to give those up would be a sign of a lack of respect.
00:41:39.480for the tradition itself and would deprive the future generations
00:41:44.200of being able to see, for instance, what they see in the Vatican museums
00:42:31.240I was very attracted to those arguments.
00:42:33.960But then I realized not only would it be a bad thing to do, but it wouldn't help the poor.
00:42:39.580You would actually be robbing the poor in the sense that when we used to build big great cathedrals and we had lots of beauty all over our churches, that is a gift to the poor.
00:42:49.940You know, I'm a successful cigar salesman.
00:42:52.320I sell enough cigars that I can go travel to places and see nice art if I want to do it.0.53
00:42:57.640But it was the case for a lot of the history of Christendom that peasants could go and see
00:43:04.280the most beautiful marvels that I now have to pay a lot of money to get on an airplane to go fly
00:43:10.100to the places that still remain. These were opportunities. These were open to everybody.
00:43:17.780And I even think of it not to belabor the liturgical point, but I think I was in Italy.
00:43:22.160I go to a mass at a papal basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore, and I'm there with my family,
00:43:27.020but I'm the only Italian of the crew. The rest of my family, they don't speak Italian.
00:43:31.380So they're saying the mass in Italian, and so I can understand it reasonably well. They can't
00:43:36.880understand it. But the changing of the liturgy to the vernacular is supposed to make it more
00:43:41.960accessible to everyone. And I thought, all of these people here are tourists. None of them
00:43:45.680are Italians. Italians don't go to church anymore. So they're all tourists. Probably none of them
00:43:49.360speaks Italian, very few of them. And ironically, had the liturgy not been put into the vernacular,
00:43:56.720the liturgy would have been more accessible to everybody who was in this room.
00:44:00.060It would have, in fact, seemed like their home parish, even if it were on the other side of the world.
00:44:03.800I remember when I was a boy, sometimes neighbors or people we knew would take a trip to a place like Japan or something.
00:44:13.140And it was always their comment that they went to church,
00:44:17.060and the Mass was exactly the same as in my hometown of Richardson Center or wherever it was.
00:44:23.320And that's the beauty of the Latin liturgy.
00:46:55.960And I remember as a boy, too, I grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin.
00:47:02.440Thanks be to God, my parents sent me to a Catholic school.
00:47:05.780The sisters there were teaching us to sing Palestrina and, of course, Gregorian chant.
00:47:11.520And we were just simple farm children.
00:47:13.620you could have said well you know those farm children just entertain them with guitar music
00:47:18.500or something but in fact we were being given a great gift and to this day i have such an
00:47:22.980appreciation for that beautiful music that uh and of course god willing it's more and more
00:47:29.700sung in the churches churches too but yeah i agree and i have and uh i was raised not with
00:47:37.300the beautiful gregorian chant no i was raised more with the guitar music and every day that
00:47:42.100that goes by. I hear less and less of it in church, and I'm happy to see it. Apropos of that point,
00:47:47.660Tyler Lazarus writes, if Cardinal Burke could bring any Christian from the first century into
00:47:53.340a Catholic mass today, what would that early Christian recognize? You know, you sometimes hear
00:47:59.240that a lot of what we consider distinctly Catholic is a creation of the Middle Ages, and if you took
00:48:04.920a first or second century Christian into a mass, they just wouldn't recognize any of it.
00:48:09.360Oh, I think what they would recognize would be the substance of worship as they worshiped, but with all of the deeper appreciation for it and the beauty and so forth, which they knew that in their form of worship,
00:48:35.460but has found along the centuries this ever greater development in terms of the rites themselves,
00:48:44.440the beauty of the vestments and vessels, and so forth.
00:48:47.100But fundamentally, they would recognize the same, well, actually, the Mass begins with the same prayers
00:48:58.120that the high priest used before entering the temple with the prayers at the foot of the altar, Psalm 42,
00:49:03.640and the other prayers that quote the scriptures and so forth.
00:49:10.560But then they would see the proclamation of the Word of God
00:49:15.340and then its realization in the offering of the Mass.
00:49:20.560And I think they would be deeply moved to see how that great mystery
00:49:26.000that they knew had founded an ever-fuller expression along the centuries.
00:52:56.080But to say, yes, to say that the battles of Lepanto,
00:52:58.800Vienna, Poitiers, that those were not just wars,
00:53:02.120I think they were probably pretty just, you know?
00:53:04.620Good enough for St. Pius V, good enough for me.
00:53:06.700Yes, and sure, times have changed with the kind of weapons and things we have, but the people still have a right to defend themselves against unjust aggressors.
00:53:18.000Yes, and I know we have mere minutes left, but this has been too highbrow for Twitter.
00:53:23.500This has been much too polite and highbrow.
00:53:25.720So I'll give the usual denizens of Twitter one question before we go.