The Michael Knowles Show - May 10, 2026


Middle East's Horrifying Secret Exposed ｜ Fr. Kiely With Michael Knowles


Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

156.53503

Word count

7,065

Sentence count

433


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:30.000 My friend, Fr. Benedict Keeley, has traveled from the UK to the Holy Land, to most recently Egypt, and now here to America.
00:00:39.640 And it is entirely an open question as to where Christianity is most persecuted in the world.
00:00:46.400 Fr. Keeley, first of all, thank you for being here.
00:00:48.760 Thank you, Michael, for having me as always.
00:00:50.740 You're from a nominally Christian country.
00:00:53.260 It seems to be, I don't know, the fastest growing Muslim country probably in the world.
00:00:57.580 you've still got a little sand on your cassock, I think, from Egypt. Now you're in America where
00:01:03.060 the rights of Christians have been precarious for years. All I see on the internet are conflicting
00:01:12.660 claims about where and how Christians are most persecuted. There's no question that by the
00:01:18.500 numbers Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, but we see the desecration
00:01:24.420 by an IDF soldier of a crucifix in southern Lebanon. Then we see many more videos, I think,
00:01:31.680 of Christians being beheaded by Muslims in Nigeria or Middle East. And then we see these
00:01:39.800 incursions on religious rights, even in the West. Where does the threat lie?
00:01:46.800 The threat's universal. As you said, it's worse in some places than others. We're not
00:01:51.260 actually getting our heads chopped off yet in England although remember in
00:01:57.020 France just in 2015 Father Jacques Carmel Catholic priest martyred in his
00:02:02.260 parish in Normandy by jihadists so it's not not happening the problem is
00:02:09.380 it's a slow thing in Europe in terms of taking over public space the the praying
00:02:14.600 in public that's becoming quite evident there's no need for it praying in the
00:02:20.240 street, etc. In England, there are arrests, for example, of street preachers, Christian
00:02:27.340 street preachers. No imams are arrested for preaching in the street, but Christians are
00:02:31.960 being regularly arrested now because people find their words offensive. That's all you
00:02:37.200 have to say now. A street preacher in England is saying, preaching the gospel and perhaps
00:02:42.780 alluding to Christian teaching on sexuality. And someone in the crowd has to say, I find
00:02:48.280 that offensive and they can be arrested.
00:02:51.000 However, the Imam, who's also in fact preaching almost the same thing, at least in terms of
00:02:56.000 human sexuality, is never arrested.
00:02:59.180 But yes, in Africa now it's exponential, the killing of Christians, Nigeria as we've mentioned,
00:03:06.160 but also recently, in recent days now, jihadists are spreading across Mali, Burkina Faso, they've
00:03:12.220 probably just about taken over Mali.
00:03:14.660 The French left a few months ago, the Russians were there, they've actually had to surrender
00:03:20.040 in the last few days, jihadist expansion across Africa, which will also then feed into a very
00:03:29.420 serious migration problem again for Europe that will probably make the last migration
00:03:34.340 crisis in 2015 into almost nothing.
00:03:37.960 This is going to be millions of Africans being driven across into Europe.
00:03:43.060 So things are going to heat up a little bit.
00:03:46.260 You know, this is the point that I find very, very confusing because to bring it to a very
00:03:54.860 recent head in terms of the headlines, I was as distressed as anybody to see the IDF soldier
00:04:02.300 desecrate the crucifix.
00:04:03.840 I was pleased to see, to some degree, the IDF take responsibility, but the prime minister,
00:04:08.660 Benjamin Netanyahu, came out and he said, we're going to prosecute this person and it's
00:04:12.620 totally unacceptable. But I was distressed as anybody to see that. However, I've noticed that
00:04:18.900 some people have reacted by seeming to go soft on Islam. And it's a disturbing trend I'm seeing on
00:04:26.880 the right, among Christians, where I think, folks, if your political analysis is leading you to go
00:04:36.020 soft on Islam, which has been attempting to conquer the West since at least 732, and really
00:04:42.300 even a little earlier than that, maybe something's gone wrong in one's calculation.
00:04:48.160 It's a question of balance, and that's unbalanced, obviously, as simple as that.
00:04:54.500 Yes, there are some...we lose a number of members of the audience the moment we start
00:05:00.100 discussing Israel, but in terms of balance, we have to be very fair and very accurate.
00:05:05.420 I remember once a cardinal went to Iraq in the very early days when ISIS was beginning
00:05:11.660 in 2015, I think, and one of the things he said, which has always struck me, stayed with
00:05:16.700 me, was he said, when you're talking about the persecution of Christians, you must talk
00:05:21.200 with complete honesty and complete transparency.
00:05:25.300 We must also, in a sense, talk about everything that way, with honesty and transparency.
00:05:30.300 Are there problems for Christians in Israel?
00:05:33.020 Some problems involving, for example, spitting at Christians in Jerusalem, perhaps some insults.
00:05:41.180 There are serious problems with the settlers attacking some of the Christian villages.
00:05:46.860 And that must be vociferously condemned.
00:05:49.800 However, it is a fact that it's probably the safest place in the Middle East to be a Christian.
00:05:58.080 They are equal citizens obviously in Israel, Palestinian Christians or all the kinds of
00:06:03.700 Christians.
00:06:04.700 But no, there's a curious marriage, the French call it Islamo-gauchism, Islamist leftism.
00:06:15.580 This peculiar marriage of the left and Islam which is strong in France but also now very
00:06:22.580 much in England.
00:06:23.580 several Muslim MPs in England standing for a Muslim party. The Labour Party, the Labour
00:06:29.060 government is playing very much to that audience. It's a very stupid marriage, a marriage made
00:06:36.940 in hell and it will end very badly. It'll end in a very bad divorce because Islamists
00:06:42.520 have one agenda and they will use as many useful idiots as they can and they are useful
00:06:47.920 to them and they are idiots. And in the end they will find out that they are. It's really
00:06:52.660 also the subject of the French novelist Wilbeck in his novel, Submission, about an imagined
00:07:01.840 takeover of France by an Islamist government, but it's looking less like a science fiction
00:07:09.040 novel or in the future, much more likely. It's fear, Michael. Once again, let's be brutally
00:07:17.280 honest. Christians, maybe 500 years ago in the Crusades, chopped a few heads off. We
00:07:24.700 haven't been doing that for a long time, thanks be to God. But if you insult Islam, your life
00:07:29.960 is in grave danger.
00:07:32.140 Of course. You know, the Islamo-gaushism, I really like this phrase, because we see
00:07:38.040 it throughout the West. And some people scratch their heads at it. They say, how on earth
00:07:42.580 could the rainbow-flag-waving leftist team up with the Islamists?
00:07:47.200 This doesn't make any sense.
00:07:48.200 And I thought, well, it does make sense if you recognize they both have the same enemy,
00:07:51.980 which is our civilization and the religion that animates our civilization.
00:07:55.460 So I'm not really surprised.
00:07:57.360 Obviously, once they vanquish us, they'll have to deal with each other and that probably
00:08:01.340 won't go...
00:08:02.340 It will be bloody.
00:08:03.340 Yeah, it will be very bloody.
00:08:04.340 It's sort of like the Iran-Iraq war.
00:08:05.840 You kind of just want them both to lose.
00:08:08.780 you understand that they have a common enemy. And then you see the right, which is obviously
00:08:14.340 very, very afraid of it. And you see even right-wing political parties, including in
00:08:18.740 the UK, taking a little bit of a softer stance on Islam. And I suspect the reason they're
00:08:24.000 doing it is they think that the demographic change is just insurmountable at this point.
00:08:28.900 When you look at certain places in Europe, 40% of the births are to Muslims. And it seems
00:08:34.060 to me they say, all right, our civilization's over. We're not having kids. We're not embracing
00:08:38.560 the faith, we're not spreading the faith, and so we'll become a museum and we'll hope
00:08:44.840 that our new population aren't too tough on us, which is a politics of despair, and I
00:08:51.800 don't think it's going to work out.
00:08:53.020 We can't despair.
00:08:55.240 We may be living through what Tolkien called, or we are living through what Tolkien called
00:09:01.080 the long defeat, his idea that all of human history is in a sense the power of evil keeps
00:09:07.680 fighting back, but we do win in the end. There's a wonderful Anglo-Saxon poem. I can't remember
00:09:16.160 the name of it at the moment, but it's about a group of warriors, Anglo-Saxon warriors,
00:09:21.200 who are in a final battle, as it were, and they all know they're going to die.
00:09:25.520 But there's some beautiful speeches of the men, the commanders saying, you know, we know we're
00:09:30.960 going to die, but we're going to fight to the death anyway. And I'm not using that sort of
00:09:35.200 of military language, thinking we're all going to have to fight to the death, but we do in
00:09:39.300 a sense have to have that spirit that if we give up on our civilization, which you're
00:09:45.340 quite right is the reason why there is that marriage.
00:09:48.860 The Islamists hate our civilization and want their own civilization.
00:09:54.000 The left, the Greens, the Ghoshis, whoever, also in a sense hate our civilization and
00:10:00.800 imagine that Islam might be better, but we have to fight, whether it's physical or spiritual.
00:10:09.980 We must fight.
00:10:11.720 If we have to die, then we go down fighting, but not giving up.
00:10:15.420 That's not the Christian spirit.
00:10:16.760 So then, what do conservatives, right-wingers, Christians, what do we do to fight back?
00:10:24.380 Because 10 years ago, at the beginning of the Trump era, we were all excited there was
00:10:29.500 going to be this new kind of populism. There was a resurgence of nationalism, contrary
00:10:35.740 to liberal globalism. You had this broad alliance that brought together kind of centrist liberals
00:10:41.640 with traditionalists, nationalists, a lot of Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews.
00:10:48.460 It seemed very hopeful. And now we were looking toward the end of the Trump era. I don't know,
00:10:54.500 things seem at least a little more trepidatious, if not a little more pessimistic.
00:11:01.680 So what does a coalition look like now for the ordinary Christian who sees all the numbers
00:11:07.720 going in the wrong direction and wants to mount a Charles Martell-like, Lepanto-esque
00:11:14.740 final stand?
00:11:15.740 To use that example of these early battles that have pushed back the spread of Islam,
00:11:19.400 the final great one is the Battle of Vienna, 1683, Jan Sobieski.
00:11:23.280 Now there are calls to remove a statue of Jan Sobieski in Vienna that says that's not
00:11:28.380 a good sign.
00:11:30.380 Would that we had a Charles Martel or a Don John of Lepanto, it doesn't seem like we've
00:11:36.720 got anybody like that.
00:11:38.520 We have to, we have to...a preacher greater than I once talked about building a house
00:11:45.520 on a firm foundation, and if you'll recall, he said that a house built on sand will collapse
00:11:51.340 when the wind and the rain come. There's really no foundation for Western civilization unless
00:11:58.760 it's built on Christianity, and robust Christianity, not wishy-washy, rainbow Christianity. So
00:12:06.960 we need to be unafraid of our faith, strong in our faith. This is why perhaps the so-called
00:12:13.480 quiet revival is encouraging for us. But it's only a revival when the young people who come
00:12:20.200 to church, find something solid. They find some meat with their potatoes. If they find
00:12:26.240 all it's just potatoes, they'll leave. They don't want vegetarianism. They want something
00:12:30.640 solid. So I think we need to be a lot more, not triumphalistic, not arrogant. I always
00:12:38.540 think of Pope Benedict XVI's motto, Caritas in Veritate, speak the truth in love, but
00:12:45.040 But speak the truth.
00:12:46.180 We must speak the truth.
00:12:48.840 And the Pope in fact, Pope Leo recently gave a beautiful homily about the need to, in terms
00:12:56.220 of language, of using truth.
00:12:58.720 In fact he's the first Pope I think in history who used the phrase Orwellian.
00:13:04.840 But more than that he was talking about words meaning what they're meant to mean, not as
00:13:11.900 As Humpty Dumpty said, words mean whatever I say they mean.
00:13:15.600 Neither more nor less, Humpty Dumpty said.
00:13:18.360 We Christians must say what we mean and mean what we say.
00:13:22.780 So you mentioned this quiet revival, which is encouraging.
00:13:27.740 What will it look like?
00:13:28.860 You have 38% year over year increase in adult conversions to the Catholic Church in the
00:13:34.500 US.
00:13:35.500 That was after the previous year, which also had just about the same number of increased
00:13:39.580 conversions.
00:13:40.700 You're seeing France reporting much, much higher levels of adult conversions.
00:13:44.920 So it's all good.
00:13:46.080 Very young people, particularly drawn toward tradition, more traditional forms of the liturgy
00:13:53.440 and flavors of Christianity, especially Catholicism.
00:13:58.740 How does that translate into a political transformation?
00:14:01.580 Not, look, I care about their souls and obviously that's the most important thing, but from the
00:14:06.160 basic political level of preserving Christendom, which now we call the West, what is that going
00:14:13.040 to look like, if anything?
00:14:15.260 It transfers, I think, into what we would call authentic conservatism, not necessarily
00:14:20.940 a party called a conservative party, which certainly, again, in the United Kingdom has
00:14:27.140 really abandoned all conservative principles.
00:14:30.300 It transfers from Christian orthodoxy, Catholic Christian orthodoxy, into then political orthodoxy
00:14:38.840 in terms of marriage, the support of the family, marriage between a man and a woman, the support
00:14:45.760 of the family, encouraging family life birth rates.
00:14:49.760 The subject is so huge, but it's simple stuff.
00:14:54.360 I have a friend, in fact, you probably know him, but I have a friend who was whining one
00:15:00.880 day about the state of Europe and what was going on, and another friend, this other chap
00:15:06.400 is not married, and another friend said to him, stop whining, get married, and have kids.
00:15:15.160 Begin the domestic church.
00:15:17.000 Have five, six, seven kids.
00:15:21.040 It's small.
00:15:22.040 Small is beautiful.
00:15:23.040 the transfer will be, because we can't sort of sit on our laurels in terms of this quiet
00:15:29.480 revival. I think it's going to be more like Benedict XVI said when he was Father Ratzinger
00:15:35.440 in the 1960s, when he talked about a smaller, purer church. Because apparently, if you look
00:15:41.920 at statistics, more people are leaving the church than are joining. But that could be
00:15:49.480 that those generations, my generation and older and a little bit younger, who were never
00:15:55.320 catechized, but that the younger people who are coming in now are coming in, many of them
00:16:01.140 non-baptized. They know nothing about the faith and they want the old ways to God. They
00:16:09.520 want beauty, truth, and goodness. If they find it, this is going to be authentic. If
00:16:15.520 they don't find it, as I said about the meat and potatoes, if the church thinks it's business
00:16:20.200 as usual, then they're gonna lose this quiet revival. It is not business as usual. Chesterton
00:16:27.360 once said, people say you can't turn back the clock. He said, it's very easy. You just
00:16:30.860 get the clock and turn it back. You can turn back the clock. So let's not be afraid in
00:16:35.740 some ways of turning back the clock.
00:16:37.420 Yes. The young people, anecdotally, but the plural of anecdote is data, the young people
00:16:42.540 who are coming into the church now and returning to the church, they want orthodoxy. They want
00:16:48.240 tradition. They want smells and bells. They want what the fathers taught and the doctors
00:16:53.180 of the church taught, and they don't really care if some innovator in the 1970s thought
00:16:58.060 he had a bright idea. You see this among the clergy, too. The clergy, in terms of self-identification
00:17:04.660 as conservative or progressive, for the boomer priests, it's overwhelmingly progressive,
00:17:10.580 progressive, huge swaths of progressive clergy. For the young priests, they're all trads.
00:17:16.900 They make me look like a Democrat. They're all slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.
00:17:20.740 And so this is all very encouraging to me. This has led to a debate in recent weeks over
00:17:26.900 whether the new Holy Father, Pope Leo, is a liberal. I keep seeing this. It was a bit
00:17:31.800 of a spat between the Pope and the president.
00:17:33.760 Really? I must have missed that.
00:17:34.760 You might have. Yeah, I must have missed that.
00:17:36.760 you'll miss it. But I saw people contending that Pope Leo is a leftist, a hippie, a communist.
00:17:46.200 And I thought, I follow this relatively closely. That is not my understanding of Pope Leo.
00:17:52.840 Am I misguided?
00:17:53.840 No, I think it may be fair to say because of his time in Latin America, et cetera,
00:18:00.000 He may politically lean perhaps a little bit more towards the left, but he's an authentic,
00:18:06.500 I know it's a very low bar, he's an authentic believer, it is a low bar for the Pope, but
00:18:11.940 he's an authentic believer and he's solid, he's taking things very slowly.
00:18:17.880 I think he's seen, shall we say, some of the confusion of the previous decade or so, which
00:18:25.040 caused a lot of problems for many, many people. It's not being disrespectful of the late Pope.
00:18:33.040 The Francis era was a little tough at times. Well, one of our mutual friends,
00:18:36.960 priest friends used to say that he shouldn't speak on the plane because, you know,
00:18:42.560 oxygen doesn't reach the brain when you get to the high altitude. So it's the people,
00:18:47.920 I think all the people press conferences should stop on the plane, not just Pope Francis's.
00:18:52.720 But no, I think that Leo was, there were some questions and I think again, valid questions,
00:18:59.120 which we once again have to be transparent and honest about perhaps some little confusion in
00:19:04.240 his language in his little spat with the president about peace and war. And
00:19:11.520 we need once again, some clarity. This is the other thing I think young people want when they
00:19:17.680 come to church is clarity, not confusion. There's enough confusion everywhere and everything
00:19:23.220 in their lives is confusing. You want to go to one place where it's clear, clear and clearly
00:19:30.260 taught and clearly explained and logical and rational and intelligent. They don't want
00:19:35.880 to be talked down to. And I don't think this Pope talks down to anyone, but perhaps there
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00:20:56.660 What does that mean for the other Protestant denominations?
00:21:01.200 I hate to pick on your own country, but the Church of England has just appointed a lady as the Archbishopress of Canterbury.
00:21:09.880 century. You have King Charles is now the defender of faiths rather than the defender
00:21:16.180 of the faith, which is supposed to be his job as the head of the Church of England ever
00:21:20.840 since Henry VIII decided he didn't like Rome so much. And so what is the state of the rest
00:21:29.700 of the flavors of Christianity?
00:21:31.640 The establishment. I've used the image of a sort of a facade or a stage set. If you visit England, as many Americans do, they come and see apparently a beautiful Christian country.
00:21:47.620 They see the Westminster Abbey and the churches and the facade of the state, the coronation. But it is unfortunately now very much a stage set. Behind it, there isn't much.
00:22:00.260 I mean, Britain has passed abortion up to birth. Luckily, they just defeated, for the moment, a suicide bill right up to the last stage.
00:22:12.960 Religion is weird. Christianity is weird in England. Tony Blair's spin doctor famously said, we don't do God, which is an awful thing.
00:22:22.620 once again, I'd say, well, you're an idiot then. You're considered pretty weird still in England
00:22:29.080 if you're a Christian. Although, again, it's beginning to change because of this so-called
00:22:35.640 quiet revival. But it's not changing with that group of people who are the intelligentsia,
00:22:40.500 the connoscienti, the controllers of the media and academia. And they're rather, I think,
00:22:46.400 nonplussed by this, that these young people are sort of rejecting everything we stand for. Well,
00:22:51.320 guess what, they're rebels, you know, they're rebels with a cause, as opposed to without
00:22:55.820 a cause.
00:22:56.820 The 60s, the Soissons-Huitards, the 60-8ers were rebels without a cause, just pulling
00:23:01.580 everything down.
00:23:03.060 These are people who say, it's a bit like, I may have used this analogy before, it's
00:23:07.640 a bit like in the original Planet of the Apes, if you remember the original one with Charlton
00:23:12.440 Heston, that final scene where they're in the desert and the sands blow and suddenly
00:23:18.880 they see sort of bits of Times Square or something. I think a lot of young people are feeling
00:23:24.260 like, well, here's our collapsed civilization. We're going to have to rebuild this somehow.
00:23:32.000 So we're back in a sense to what you asked about how that transfers into a political
00:23:36.620 thing. It's real work. And we may as Christians, Michael, not see the results, but that's a
00:23:43.040 very Christian thing again. The men that built the cathedrals of Europe all died before they
00:23:49.620 saw their work created. Think of Notre Dame or Chartres or something. But they built something
00:23:56.800 knowing it was for the future. Yes. Gaudi is actually lucky to have died
00:24:00.920 before the finishing of Sagrada Familia. Just about finished, isn't it?
00:24:05.820 You mentioned suicide, and there's two levels to this. There's the civilizational suicide,
00:24:09.660 which a lot of us are feeling, the decline in birth rates, the notion that we used to
00:24:14.420 be a proper country.
00:24:15.420 It's a meme that goes around.
00:24:16.420 You see videos from 20, 30 years ago, much less 60, 70 years ago, you say, we used to
00:24:21.660 be a proper country.
00:24:22.720 People kind of behaved well, dressed well, and what happened to us?
00:24:25.980 But then there's the personal level, which is that increasingly throughout this country,
00:24:29.700 the UK, Canada, America's evil top hat, they keep spreading suicide bills.
00:24:36.020 And I once sat with Peter Singer, who is the most amiable monster you've ever met in your
00:24:41.200 life.
00:24:42.200 Very charming.
00:24:43.200 I believe Reinhold Heydrich had great conversation and played the violin.
00:24:48.260 Yes.
00:24:49.260 He makes the argument, not just for abortion, infanticide, philosophically, basically consistent
00:24:56.740 argument, but especially we were talking about euthanasia, so-called, good death, but it's
00:25:01.100 the worst death, it's suicide.
00:25:03.180 And I think his argument resonates with more people than the Christian argument.
00:25:07.680 His argument is that when people are sick, very old, they're in a lot of pain, they know
00:25:13.120 the end is near, that it's cruel to force them to continue and suffer, and really we
00:25:18.760 ought to give them the mercy to kill themselves or to kill them ourselves, you know, with
00:25:24.380 their consent, sometimes without their consent.
00:25:26.920 And that's the merciful thing to do.
00:25:29.300 Now, I obviously don't agree with that, but I do see it resonating and I do see these
00:25:34.460 suicide bills spreading.
00:25:36.380 How do we as Christians tell people that they're wrong not to want to see granny suffer?
00:25:42.540 First, there are very practical things.
00:25:46.060 It's a bit like one of the cardinals said a number of years ago, you can't just condemn
00:25:51.520 abortion.
00:25:52.520 You've got to do something.
00:25:53.520 homes for young women to have their babies and etc, etc. We need, for example, to strongly
00:26:02.080 support palliative care. I know I'm based still in the USA. Palliative care isn't really
00:26:10.100 a big thing. Hospices, they've come more in recent years.
00:26:13.940 In the UK, you mean?
00:26:14.940 No, in the US.
00:26:15.940 Oh, in the US.
00:26:16.940 In the UK, there are a lot of hospices, but a lot of people don't have that experience.
00:26:22.520 They think I'm going to die in terrible pain and probably unfortunately in the hospital
00:26:27.000 system they will.
00:26:28.620 When you see good palliative care, the hospice system, no human needs to die in pain.
00:26:34.340 It can be handled.
00:26:36.220 So that's the first thing, a very practical response.
00:26:40.040 But then we come back to the whole sense of what is a human being?
00:26:45.400 We believe man and woman made in the image and likeness of God.
00:26:49.900 And we must honor with the greatest honor that person, the person, body and soul.
00:26:58.000 And it's that sense of autonomy.
00:27:00.900 The reason why I think suicide, one of the reasons why suicide is becoming in theory
00:27:06.500 so popular is because obviously of the thought of autonomy.
00:27:10.600 We create ourselves.
00:27:12.480 We are, we decide, we don't decide when we're born, but in a sense it's decided for us.
00:27:19.340 But we certainly now will decide when we die, we decide what sex we're going to be, or even
00:27:25.100 maybe we become an animal.
00:27:28.680 We are God.
00:27:29.840 And you see, suddenly, for us believers, we're back in the garden.
00:27:35.140 We're back in the garden where someone is whispering to us, the deceiver is whispering,
00:27:40.540 you don't have to believe any of this.
00:27:42.620 You can be like God.
00:27:44.540 You can decide.
00:27:45.540 And all through human history, that's the voice.
00:27:48.960 that voice is now very powerful and that voice is very accepted. So I think we have a very
00:27:56.100 difficult task to help people who have no conception of the person and the person made
00:28:04.340 in the image of God of why this is wrong. But you can't just say it's wrong. You've
00:28:09.880 also got to do a lot about it as well.
00:28:12.340 There's a scandal aspect to it as well, I think. It's the only thing that makes me feel
00:28:16.860 a little sorry for Gavin Newsom. I have very little sympathy for Gavin Newsom.
00:28:20.640 Please help me. I can't find anything.
00:28:22.260 Here it is. When he was younger, his mother decided she was going to kill herself. And he's
00:28:28.220 talked about this publicly. He got a call from her one day, said, all right, Gavin, if you want
00:28:32.540 to see me, Tuesday's my last day, so you can come on over. And she basically roped her son into
00:28:37.440 killing her. And I've known people who have suicide in their family. It never goes away.
00:28:42.680 even when they tell you the pain goes away, it doesn't. It's a scandal that can persist
00:28:46.840 for generations. And to rope someone else in on this is, I think, terribly callous to
00:28:53.960 the rest of one's family. You know, we focus so much on the pressure that old and sick people feel
00:29:00.360 to kill themselves, which is really horrifying. And in Canada now, if you stub your toe or you
00:29:04.920 can't make your last Klarna payment, they offer you a little bit of poison. And so this would
00:29:09.320 would really be good for you. But look, that's horrible. This story is coming out of the
00:29:14.140 Netherlands of a woman fighting, children being euthanized.
00:29:18.060 Depression.
00:29:19.060 Yes. All horrifying. But it's also wrong for the family members who are then scandalized
00:29:25.980 by this, who have to go on living with this. It's the worst thing you can do to any member
00:29:29.000 of your family is to kill yourself. Which then leads us to a key Christian concept and
00:29:36.080 an important political concept, which is the common good. For most of my upbringing in
00:29:41.400 politics, it was only the commies who talked about the common good. And if you talked about
00:29:46.560 it, you were suspect of being a commie yourself. Then some conservatives started to bring this
00:29:50.940 back in, to re-inject a very libertarian, Ayn Rand-infused politics with notions of
00:29:56.220 the common good and classical political philosophy. Where do you think that project stands now?
00:30:02.040 But that, of course, is Catholic social teaching as well. This is the point. I know you were very enthused. I remember when you heard the name of the new pope, Leo, because, of course, Leo XIII is his predecessor in name. That was his great project, Catholic social teaching.
00:30:19.380 This is a gift that we can offer the world.
00:30:22.800 This is very important that this is translated into language that people can understand.
00:30:29.240 It's a gift that we have, but when you receive a gift sometimes, or you have a gift,
00:30:34.320 sometimes people put it in a closet and lock it away or don't even want the gift.
00:30:38.700 We've got to have men and women who are able to articulate this political philosophy.
00:30:44.060 And that was, I think, is encouraging that there are people, especially in the U.S. now,
00:30:47.960 political figures, often Catholic political figures, who are really using this concept,
00:30:55.780 Catholic social teaching, the common good, as the basis of their philosophy. It's less
00:31:01.060 so in Europe, and once again, back in England, it's not there really at all, which is why
00:31:07.220 I think the conservative project, you might call it in England, is really struggling because
00:31:12.280 there isn't a solid foundation. So I guess that's a very encouraging thing, the common
00:31:19.460 good.
00:31:20.460 Right, and that's a good point. I hadn't even considered that, but from the perspective
00:31:24.340 of the UK, it does seem like there's a bit of a weak foundation there. You have archbishoprisses
00:31:30.900 and things like that. It's a little tricky to figure out what you're actually grounding
00:31:34.540 your political project on because I think it was Cardinal Manning who says all human
00:31:38.920 conflict boils down to theology, boils down to religion. So then zooming out a little
00:31:45.640 bit past the West, bringing us back to the place where we started, where are the hotspots
00:31:53.360 for Christian persecution? You obviously run a very important organization, nazarene.org,
00:31:58.300 which I highly encourage everybody to go donate to and go support. Where should we focus?
00:32:04.320 The president of the United States himself brought some attention to the plight of Christians
00:32:08.500 in Nigeria, but there are too many places to count. Where should Christians put our
00:32:15.100 focus and our money?
00:32:16.600 We have often not just compassion fatigue, but sort of action fatigue. We don't know
00:32:22.440 what to do. So often good Christians, Catholics, Christians, hear of persecution and think,
00:32:28.500 almost throw up our arms and say, well, what can I do? There are very practical things,
00:32:32.340 thank you. Charitable works, helping Christians stay, that's my charity, to stay in their
00:32:38.460 where they've been from the beginning, but to stop migration as well, advocacy in terms
00:32:45.660 of speaking to legislators.
00:32:49.020 Where are the hotspots?
00:32:51.100 Still the Middle East is hot, obviously we're in the middle of a war, so this is causing
00:32:57.200 tremendous worries for the Christian population in Iraq, Syria, etc., all over the Middle
00:33:02.360 East.
00:33:03.360 Africa, as I mentioned earlier, is a real burning hotspot.
00:33:07.940 talk about ISIS having been defeated. The caliphate was defeated in Iraq and Syria,
00:33:14.940 although ISIS is re-emerging. But in Africa, it's not defeated at all. It's growing hugely,
00:33:21.240 mass persecution. But this is also not just a problem. You might say, oh, well, that's
00:33:26.480 bad. That's tough. You know, poor Christians. This is a political problem. Do we want to
00:33:32.100 lose that entire continent almost to Islam, an aggressive, dangerous Islam, which will,
00:33:38.840 as we said in the beginning, began with the sword and has continued with the sword. Islam
00:33:44.220 is not a religion that is preached and then people convert listening to the preaching.
00:33:49.400 It's a religion of the sword. That's not being Islamophobic. It's being realistic. It's never
00:33:56.700 changed. So that's a real hot spot. The Far East in certain places, even places like the
00:34:02.900 Philippines, it's really across the globe. It's an anti-Christian phenomenon, predominantly
00:34:11.680 Islamist. In India, aggressive Hinduism, even Buddhists in places like Burma or whatever
00:34:19.240 you meant to call it now.
00:34:20.400 You always think of the Buddhists as so nice.
00:34:22.280 little fellows in orange outfits. No, they can be in places like that can be persecuting
00:34:28.560 and they're persecuting Muslims, it has to be said. But if the West itself is not Christian,
00:34:38.240 people who say, oh, well, we need another crusade. Well, you've got to have crusaders
00:34:41.600 to have a crusade. And unfortunately, and I do mean unfortunately, we don't have any
00:34:46.780 crusaders really. We may have to have little enclaves, little benedict options, whatever
00:34:54.240 you want to call it. But as I said earlier on, it's back to the family, it's back to,
00:35:00.540 and you have a lot of hope in the United States here, good places, good communities, a lot
00:35:06.680 of good young people, getting married, having families, being supported by the church. These
00:35:15.040 These are all very hopeful signs, but we mustn't forget our brethren who are suffering.
00:35:22.580 Because the church, I've said this before, the church, St. John Paul II used to talk
00:35:28.040 about the church breathing with two lungs, the lung of the east and the lung of the west,
00:35:32.700 and we mustn't forget that the church began in the Middle East.
00:35:37.260 Our faith is an eastern religion.
00:35:39.420 A lot of us in the West almost can't quite comprehend that, but we are an Eastern religion.
00:35:45.860 You go to the Middle East, where I've been since 2015, they're singing in Aramaic, speaking
00:35:53.620 in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, just in Egypt, where I was just now.
00:35:57.980 The Copts have been there from the beginning, persecuted for 1,400 years.
00:36:03.300 Strong faith, believers in miracles.
00:36:06.340 Miracles are normal there.
00:36:07.520 The priest was telling me about a man in a wheelchair who just got up during Mass one
00:36:12.360 day.
00:36:13.360 They filmed it.
00:36:14.360 It was only eight years ago.
00:36:16.240 And he said to me, you know, for us Copts, miracles are normal.
00:36:21.740 This is our faith.
00:36:22.740 This is where we come from.
00:36:23.740 And we really lose something in the West if we are disconnected from our roots.
00:36:31.040 So that's part of the reason that we support our brothers and sisters in the East because
00:36:35.960 they're our family and they're our roots. You mentioned the war in Iran, which was
00:36:41.640 the cause or the circumstance of that little tiff between the Pope and the President. A little spat.
00:36:47.560 How are Christians to think of the war in Iran? Or is there a single way to think about it?
00:36:52.920 I think you've hit the point. Simplistic solutions and punditry, I know it might be
00:37:00.040 necessary uh for income for certain people but uh simplistic solutions are not the answer
00:37:08.120 deep thought is required i remember when i first went to iraq in 15 uh isis was just down the road
00:37:14.040 and a lady said to me lady who helped me at the beginning an american lady she said when i got
00:37:18.360 off the plane she said father you've got to realize that everything you think you knew you don't know
00:37:24.840 It's very complicated.
00:37:26.020 And she was dead right.
00:37:27.840 I mean, that's a good little bit of humility to be told that and learn that
00:37:31.200 because most of the people who comment have never been there.
00:37:35.940 Or if they've been there, they've been on one of those flying visits in one of those huge SUVs
00:37:40.520 and they come in for two days and leave.
00:37:42.720 And it's extremely complicated.
00:37:46.380 but the Christians always suffer in these conflicts because they are the minority they're
00:37:55.080 always in the middle and they they're suffering in Iran remember again Christians have been in
00:38:02.720 Iran since the beginning this isn't a new church there's a lot of talk about many people converting
00:38:07.780 to Christianity in Iran which is true but Christians have been there from the beginning
00:38:13.600 ancient churches in Iran, in Persia.
00:38:17.940 Weren't the Magi's or Astrians from somewhere around there?
00:38:21.720 Probably.
00:38:22.760 But, you know, the Armenian church has been there from the beginning and other Christians.
00:38:27.860 The Assyrian church of the East, as it was called, was huge there, right back in three-something, four-something.
00:38:36.040 But, yeah, in Iraq, the Christian community is suffering because the militias there are controlled by Iran.
00:38:42.700 and so they're surrounding a lot of Christian towns.
00:38:46.020 They've been being bombed.
00:38:46.960 I was speaking to one of my friends, priest in one of those towns,
00:38:50.300 and I said, how are you doing?
00:38:51.260 He said, well, the local sheer militia headquarters is 500 yards away
00:38:56.000 and it's been bombed.
00:38:58.220 So I said, how are people doing?
00:39:01.400 He said, well, we're all just worried.
00:39:02.980 We're worried because it keeps coming, keeps coming.
00:39:07.020 They never have peace.
00:39:08.940 But the Lord didn't promise us that.
00:39:12.700 From the beginning, a friend, I wouldn't call him a friend, that's presumptuous, but the great
00:39:18.860 patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, great man, a patriarch Ephraim, very big jolly fellow
00:39:26.220 with a big beard. I remember him talking once and he said, we always hear about the four marks of
00:39:32.460 the church. Any catechized Catholic would know what the four marks of the church are, one holy
00:39:38.540 Catholic and apostolic but Patriarch Ephraim said there are actually five marks of the church a big
00:39:45.180 beard big no yeah no yeah no that's jihadi as well yeah one holy Catholic apostolic and he said
00:39:51.740 persecuted because the church has been persecuted from the beginning and it will be persecuted until
00:39:57.900 the end that doesn't mean we don't do anything about it but we have to be ready for it uh if
00:40:05.260 where being an authentic Christian, it's quite likely in some way, shape, or form will be
00:40:09.760 persecuted, even in the West, more so now. So our care, compassion, and concern may be
00:40:19.180 almost even selfish. I joke in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt, I say, you know, sometimes you may
00:40:25.660 have to come in the future, you may have to come and help us. And sweetly, they say, we will,
00:40:30.020 we will you know but a priest said to me one time when I went to Iraq early on he said
00:40:38.020 we will remember those who helped us we will also remember those who did not and that I've
00:40:48.320 never forgotten it because it sent a chill down my spine because how many of us some of us are
00:40:55.060 trying in our own little way, but how many are indifferent? Indifference is more dangerous
00:41:02.580 than anything else. Right. And just to plug your work a little
00:41:07.700 bit further, it's very important, one, to help these people who, you know, we live fairly
00:41:13.820 decadent lives in the West, even today. Speak for yourself, man.
00:41:17.220 I live in...look at where I am in this great... In your big study, yes, I can smoke
00:41:21.100 bars when I like, but Christians where the faith began do not get to live decadent lives.
00:41:26.600 And so it's very important to help them. And on top of that, it's very important to be
00:41:30.600 prudent, to have an eye to the political, because we live in time and space in the suspended
00:41:35.560 period of history between the nativity and the second coming. And so it's very important
00:41:41.100 what you're doing, which is helping Christians to stay where they are. This would appeal
00:41:47.120 even to non-Christian right-wingers. They say, stop the migrant crisis, but also to help them
00:41:51.620 to defend their homes and to continue to practice the faith where the faith has been practiced for
00:41:58.360 2,000 years. Well, I'm very grateful to you, Michael. You've been very supportive from the
00:42:02.220 beginning and personally, and by having me on the show, things like that. But yes, it is. I was
00:42:09.180 thinking about this funnily enough today that when I started, the first thing I wanted to do was just,
00:42:14.600 Yeah, help them stay so they could have jobs, stay in their land.
00:42:18.360 I'd never thought about migration, but then slowly it began to dawn on me as well that, yeah, this is the answer.
00:42:24.340 You keep people in their own countries working.
00:42:28.980 They don't want to leave.
00:42:30.320 So in our own little way, now we're in our 10th anniversary year this year from starting in Iraq.
00:42:37.220 Now we're in six countries.
00:42:39.380 I can't even hold my hands up properly.
00:42:41.440 But Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Armenia, just simply giving a small amount of money.
00:42:51.780 We don't loan a small amount of money, comparatively speaking, to help someone start a family business.
00:42:59.120 Or if they've started a business, to help it to be secure and stay.
00:43:03.080 Simple things, a coffee shop, a little farm, a taxi service, women-run businesses.
00:43:08.940 almost anything you can think of as a startup we help and thanks be to god over these 10 years
00:43:16.360 most of them i think we have success rate of almost 90 percent people don't sell up because
00:43:23.020 if you've got a job and you're looking after your family when i was in iraq in in august i was
00:43:28.920 everyone i was asking what why did you stay why did you stay or why is this important that you
00:43:36.020 stayed through our help and they said because this is where we're from we've been here from the
00:43:40.360 beginning and we don't want to leave it's our land we have a future now but if there's no job
00:43:48.240 there's no future they leave they want to leave so it's small but beautiful so help them stay
00:43:56.460 go to nazarene.org and give what you can father keely wonderful as always to see you thank you
00:44:01.920 very much michael bless you
00:44:06.020 Thank you.
00:44:36.020 Thank you.
00:45:06.020 You