In this episode of The Next Crusade, Father Calvin Robinson is joined by ex-federal agent Kyle Seraphim to discuss his new book, "Defence of the Seven Sacraments: An Apologia for the Church of England."
00:12:01.540Since Vatican I was in 1870 and Apostolicae Curiae was issued in 1896, it suffices to
00:12:09.220say this was not an infallible statement.
00:12:12.720Also if Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1533 and the new ordinal did not come into play
00:12:17.500until 1552, would that mean there were two decades of valid but illicit ordinations taking place in
00:12:23.340the Church of England? It seems that would be the case, and this provides further proof of the
00:12:29.340continuation of the Church and the affirmation of the Church of England's Catholicity.
00:12:37.100The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York put together a response to Apostolicae
00:12:43.180Curae, Sapiens Officio, in which the archbishops demonstrated biblically the validity. More
00:12:52.060importantly, they pointed out that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox liturgies would
00:12:56.940be found guilty by the very same measure as those of which they were accused. During Queen Mary's
00:13:04.160reunion of the churches, not a single priest was deprived due to a defect of order. Many remained
00:13:11.820in office without reordination. Some were even promoted in the Roman Catholic Church.
00:13:18.680Even if it were true that Anglican orders were null and void in 1896, would it still
00:13:24.420be the case today? Old Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bishops have been involved in Anglican
00:13:29.700consecrations since the Bonn Agreement in the 20th century. In 1922, the Patriarch of
00:13:36.060Constantinople recognised Anglican orders as valid. Other developments in this area
00:13:41.240have occurred. Last year, Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury commissioned a pair of
00:13:48.020Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops at a joint ceremony. Pope Paul VI gave his ecclesiastical
00:13:53.780ring to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby has inherited his ecclesiastical ring from
00:13:59.520his predecessor. In my humble opinion, Anglican orders have only come into question really and
00:14:07.280truly, since 1994, when they ordained their first woman. Since women cannot become priests or1.00
00:14:13.780bishops, and the Church of England does not have the authority to unilaterally decide otherwise,
00:14:19.240anyone ordained since 2015, when they consecrated their first woman bishop, would certainly need to
00:14:25.920provide evidence of their apostolic succession to demonstrate that they were not ordained by a woman,
00:14:30.600or by someone else who had been ordained by a woman. The waters have been muddied, but this is
00:14:36.840a very recent innovation. I recommend reading the conclusion of the Anglican Roman Catholic1.00
00:14:42.080International Commission, ARCHIC, of 1990. Regardless of whether one thinks Anglican
00:14:49.300orders are valid or not, whether one thinks the Reformation was a success or not, or whether
00:14:54.100one likes Henry VIII or not, it is silly to argue that the Church of England is an entirely
00:14:58.380separate entity from the Church in England before the Reformation, and that it is a new
00:15:03.820invention, completely separate from any heritage. The church in England was active prior to St
00:15:09.480Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory I. It is assumed that
00:15:16.780Christians arrived in England via France, or Goal at the time, because there is evidence of
00:15:21.460Christian activity as early as the second century. Records of the Council of Alls in 314 AD and the
00:15:28.880Council of Arminium in 359 AD showed the presence of British bishops. By the time the authorities
00:15:37.640arrived in England from Rome in 597 AD, there were many Christians living across these lands.
00:15:44.000It is well documented that one of Augustine's first challenges was to unite them all under
00:15:48.440his authority. That included Christians from Wales, Cornwall, Ionia, Lindisfarne, to name just a few.
00:15:55.460and the English battle against foreign authority has never ceased.
00:16:00.580The Church of England was not under direct Roman authority until 664 AD
00:16:05.840and that's only because the Roman and the Celtic Christians were fighting over the liturgical calendar
00:16:11.260and they had to seek a higher authority to settle the matter of which date Easter would land on.
00:16:17.000The problem of authority, however, was never truly resolved.
00:16:21.140There were grievances over Peter's pence, foreign taxation, and of course the issue of the now infamous indulgences being used to fund St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
00:16:32.580There were many issues bubbling up under the surface around the time of the Reformation, which could essentially be seen as the first Brexit.
00:16:40.100The split from Rome was not theological, but ecclesiastical at first.
00:16:44.720The Church of England did not cease being Catholic immediately.
00:16:48.160It ceased being under Roman authority.
00:16:51.140And there are those that would argue and say that they are one of the same,
00:16:54.920and I will address that in another monologue,
00:16:56.460which will more broadly explore Catholicism and Catholicity.
00:17:01.300But suffice to say, the deposit of faith is paramount.
00:17:05.240That does not undermine the importance of communion with Rome,
00:36:53.960In fact, this has been one of those things that has affirmed.
00:36:56.340The fact that we're still standing is actually bananas because there's just not an easy,
00:37:01.320there's not an easy analog for seeing someone say, you know, the federal government is wrong.
00:37:05.700all of you are wrong and what you've done is evil and then you don't get crushed because
00:37:10.720historically everybody gets crushed but i think i'm uniquely suited in a couple of ways number
00:37:14.800one i married very well and so my spouse is the the background that really puts me into a place
00:37:20.580that i know that i've got i'm not fighting a two-front war most people are they're they're
00:37:25.380dealing with doubt and and dissent in their own house and then they have to go out and project
00:37:29.720strength and that's impossible to do for most men uh and and rightly so i mean if your house is
00:37:34.120divided. You're going to struggle with this. So my wife has always been in the corner. That's
00:37:37.480been incredible. My children understood very early on that we were going to have some difficulty.
00:37:42.740And I've had these moments of affirmation that have moved me along. They're completely illogical
00:37:50.200things that happened. If you have the entirety of your governmental organization say that you're
00:37:55.860wrong, you've done something evil, immoral, you're stepping out of the path of what is considered
00:38:00.580acceptable for our employees. If you don't doubt yourself, you're probably a psychopath. There's1.00
00:38:06.340something wrong with you if you don't look and go, could this be me? Did I completely miss the
00:38:11.780thread here? And I would do that on a fairly regular basis where I would sit and I would just
00:38:15.200go, did I miss something? Because I have the capacity of being wrong. I've been wrong plenty
00:38:19.620of times in my life. And so when those things would happen, I would get this phone call from
00:38:23.520someone that I hadn't spoken to in six years, somebody I met at the FBI Academy or maybe a
00:38:28.000stranger who picked up the phone and knew one of my friends and said, hey, I felt compelled to reach
00:38:31.700out to you and share this story with you. And it'd be a story about some FBI senior executive that
00:38:36.260was involved in, you know, sexual behavior that was unbecoming of a senior executive, you know,
00:38:40.700sleeping with a secretary or something, or they were stealing, or they were breaking the law in
00:38:44.580this way, or they were, you know, whatever they were doing, it was just a reaffirmation. It's like
00:38:48.460the enemy that you are facing is an enemy, and it is legitimately on the wrong side of these things.
00:38:55.260And I think that the last election we had kind of affirmed some of these mandates were incorrect.
00:39:01.120One of the funniest things that I have is I'm currently in the middle of a lawsuit with my federal government.
00:39:05.000I'm suing the current administration because they carry on from the old administration.
00:39:09.420And they haven't rolled over, by the way.
00:39:11.720And we're suing them for COVID improprieties.
00:39:15.000We're suing them because of the things that I said they did.
00:39:18.580And I know that we're right because, number one, they have black letter violations of Title VII, which is our religious protections in the U.S.
00:39:25.640The second thing that's really funny is that we're suing them.
00:39:28.760And the man who did the things that I allege he did was fired for the very reasons I've alleged by the guy that I helped get into the office that I currently continue to call out.
00:39:37.960So Kash Patel fired a guy named Spencer Evans specifically for his overzealous and inappropriate implementation of COVID policy.
00:39:44.740And I'm the one who gave Patel the name of who this guy is.
00:39:47.800And the federal government is still defending the implementation of those policies, despite the fact that they fired him for those.
00:40:02.400And I think what I say in kind of a little pithy way is that you cannot do reform with the same people.
00:40:07.560And so 90 plus percent of the American federal government, I imagine whenever there's elections, I studied party politics in the UK.
00:40:13.660And I think that when you replace somebody and the overwhelming number of bureaucrats and the infrastructure remains the same, you're not going to get reform.
00:40:21.540What you're going to get, this is the concept of a deep state, which is not sexy and it's not a movie and it's not meeting people and handing envelopes off in a parking garage or something to this effect.
00:40:31.520It's just people who know that their job outlasts whatever the current elected administration is every time.
00:40:38.020They are the power. And I do want to get to the current administration, but I just want to touch
00:40:41.980on something you mentioned when you said that you may lose your home and you had a family,
00:40:47.240you had a young family, because that's so significant and people need to hear that.
00:40:50.760Quite often when I'm talking to people about the spiritual war that we're in, they'll say,
00:40:54.380you know, I would speak out, but I've got to look after my wife. I've got two kids. I've got young
00:40:57.740kids. Everyone has something. Everyone has something that they love or someone that they
00:41:01.640love and they have to protect, which is good and ordered. However, there is a priority system and
00:41:06.860God and truth comes first. And that's difficult to put across to people when you say, you may
00:41:11.500have to lose your job to be in the right here. And that means you may have to think about how
00:41:15.780you're going to feed your family. You may lose your home. You may have to think about how you're
00:41:19.320going to put a roof over your family's head. How did you balance that? Well, my wife and I had a
00:41:24.180single question that was really easy to answer for us. And so we just moved from there. But I do
00:41:28.300think that if you think that you can do the right thing and there will be no cost, then I think that
00:41:33.840you have probably have a very different belief system than me. If you look, and this is the
00:41:38.060argument I think that is in favor of why I know that Christianity is what it is and why it rings
00:41:42.820true to me. And it's not something I thought about beforehand, but the original 12 disciples,
00:41:47.220one betrays and 11 minus, I guess, 10. So John made it out and he sort of like escaped to an
00:41:52.880island. You've got 10 that were put to death in various unsavory ways. And people went, yeah,
00:41:59.160that's so true that I'm willing to be part of that. And I understand that it might involve my
00:42:02.780life. So broadly speaking, we have law enforcement, law enforcement and military. And the idea is,
00:42:10.140and having been in both sides of that, you're theoretically pledging your life. And what I saw,
00:42:15.120and I think COVID was a big revealer of this, is that we had people who theoretically have pledged
00:42:18.720their life to protect us and our way of life and our safety and our liberty and so on. And those
00:42:23.780people weren't even able to lose their job. And how on earth would they lose their life to protect
00:42:28.040me so that made a very uh poignant impact on me and so i remembered something real simply my wife
00:42:33.060and i had this conversation we're in new mexico this is as we were putting our house on the market
00:42:36.540which was a was a thing it was a beautiful house it was on two acres we were out and we could see
00:42:41.440the mountains in our backyard i used to tell people we had about a five million dollar view
00:42:45.020for you know one tenth the price kind of thing i could look out and see the mountains which were
00:42:49.160called the organs outside of las cruces new mexico and they were maybe 500 600 meters from the base
00:42:55.060of my backyard to to the foothills before they went straight up a couple thousand feet i mean
00:42:59.120it was it was incredible and we had all variety of wildlife and the kids would go and do these
00:43:04.260nature walks with me in the back and we had you know coyotes and we had rabbits and we had
00:43:08.060tarantulas and these weird monster creatures that look like a cross between a spider and a scorpion
00:43:13.880it was all weird stuff out there it's just fun cactus and mule deer and all that and the
00:43:19.460conversation was real simple it's like we're standing in the master bedroom which is beautiful
00:43:22.500and great look at the kind of the sunset.
00:43:25.340And my wife goes, you're going to have to answer one day.
00:43:28.580You know, you're going to have to explain to your children
00:43:30.500and you're going to have to be able to say,
00:43:33.240the world is completely not the way that I intended it
00:54:18.280Well, it's a shame. Do you have any hope that the institutions can be reformed?
00:54:22.760Not at all, but that doesn't mean that I don't have hope. I just don't have hope in institutions.
00:54:27.340I actually don't think that—I think right now, and I think this may be the case in England,
00:54:31.520although I've studied it far less in Britain, that I think these institutions have built up
00:54:36.940scaffoldings and the principles that they were built on had been eroded so aggressively that
00:54:41.160they are just they are sort of subsisting the status quo continues because that's what has to
00:54:46.260happen i tried to explain it to a doctor uh who is an atheist interestingly enough in las vegas
00:54:50.540this weekend and she said you know there must be something we can do and i said why why must there
00:54:56.140be something and you know obviously if you live in a world where this is it then you hope for an
00:55:00.340outcome that's going to win and my colleague was with me and he said you're a christian right she
00:55:03.600said no and he said well you'll never understand what's going on here which is even more interesting
00:55:06.940to me but i think i think broadly speaking we're dealing with and this is a really ugly way of
00:55:12.200explaining it we're dealing with a multi-polar multi-faceted self-interested and self-propagating
00:55:18.740organism of government and so even if you were to be able to defeat certain aspects of it or
00:55:24.940certain agencies within it and you were able to reform them the the culture and then also sort
00:55:30.260of the self-interest of mike benz calls it the blob it continues to absorb that stuff so if you
00:55:36.060fix one agency and the agency will either be kicked out, discarded, or it will collapse and
00:55:41.580then it'll grow itself back up in the same way in its own image. And so I don't think we can do it.
00:55:45.720I think it just has to naturally collapse. I just don't know when that'll be.
00:55:49.340It's refreshing to hear you say that. I think it's a perspective that is mostly found amongst
00:55:52.960American Christians, traditionalist Christians at least, what the media would paint us for, right?
00:55:58.140Back home in Britain, it's hard to get that message across because conservatism is about
00:56:01.860preserving, right? And so it's about preserving those institutions because they were good when
00:56:05.420they were founded, such as the BBC or the MI5. And now they've progressed so far to become either
00:56:12.780entirely liberal or entirely Marxist, whichever lens you look through, to the point that all
00:56:17.460you're preserving now is the enemy. You're not preserving what was good. But they've become so
00:56:22.180used to the fact that their whole ideology as a conservative is to preserve. And so they can't
00:56:26.320break free of that mindset, which is why the institution will outlive them. But would you
00:56:32.040say you have to become an accelerationist and you have to help the institutions become destroyed or
00:56:37.460do you just sit back and wait because then you become passive the argument for a christian is
00:56:42.580obviously we're in the world but not of the world so we do have to partake but how far do you draw
00:56:46.260that line that's a great question by the way and i think that is the question that most people
00:56:51.080struggle with so i'll answer that with um just to reflect on what you said about conservatism
00:56:56.400And I think that most people who are conservative are making a very easy mistake to make. They are conflating patriotism with nostalgia. And I credit that to my friend Steve Friend who pointed this out to me. They love something, but that thing doesn't exist anymore.
00:57:13.760And so again, so now you're out there and you're propagating the enemy by preserving it. And I always ask people, it's really hard to get people to answer the question. You just ask conservatives, what are you conserving? And I want specifics. And I want to know what mechanism by which are you conserving it? And the answer is that you basically are not in the culture. You might be able to narrowly affect things in your own space.
00:57:33.720regarding the question of acceleration. I think it's a legitimate answer. I think it's a reasonable
00:57:38.880thing to think of. Um, I'm not there. There's a cynicism that goes along with that as well.
00:57:44.220And I'm not prepared to say that, um, you know, the enemy of the system or, uh, you know,
00:57:48.920encouraging the system to its own demise is going to be where I'm at. Cause I don't know that I have
00:57:51.940that power. And it's, it's, it's almost too dark and cynical for me to get excited about. I, I get
00:57:57.280it. I know where it comes from. I also think that there's an, an attitude of, uh, you know,
00:58:02.420maybe just war and appropriate violence if used properly,
00:58:05.420if we knew who the people were that needed to be taken off this planet to be
00:58:09.820able to sort of make human beings prosper again,0.90
00:58:32.420They said the right things. They knew the right things. They claimed they were going to do the right things. They got in. They didn't do it. So I know the federal government is out of my reach, even in the place like my former agency where I worked. And I'm maybe not an expert, but I've talked to all the experts that need to be discussed. And we had, I don't know, a couple hundred years worth of experience on a 20-page PowerPoint plan of here's where your day zero action's in, your day one. And here's the actual people you need to remove. And here's the people you need to secure in your positioning. And here's how you get rid of people that are not with the agenda.
00:59:02.000we had a really detailed war plan to go in and solve this problem and and it failed um and again
00:59:09.000like i said i was talking to the person who was going to go in there and make that decision
00:59:11.640so i can't fix the federal government i know i can't fix my state government my state government
00:59:15.080i live in texas it's enormous and uh it's as untouchable as the the federal and i also found
00:59:21.400out that i can't really fix anything even in the town i live in there's maybe 60 000 people live
00:59:24.920in the town and i live in a neighborhood where we have a two-way stop sign and it should be a
00:59:29.000four-way stop sign because on a regular basis, people run into each other there probably on a
00:59:32.300weekly basis, definitely a few times a month. And so I reached out to them and I said, you know,
00:59:36.140I'd really like an $800 stop sign. If you leave it, I'll put the post hole in myself. Like I'm
00:59:39.920happy to do the work on it. We need to put a stop sign here so people can stop and not running and
00:59:43.620stop running into each other. And I can't affect that change either in the world. So what that has
00:59:48.220done, and you know, there's one way that you could look at it in sort of a bleak way, but what I think
00:59:51.720it does is it, it removes the average person from the analysis paralysis of looking at an enormous
00:59:57.080menu and saying, what do I choose? Have you ever been to the place In-N-Out? It's a burger place
01:00:03.020that was, okay. Have you ever been to this? Oh yeah. Animal style fries. Yep. So In-N-Out
01:00:08.240basically gives you the option. Do you want a cheeseburger? Do you want a hamburger? And how
01:00:11.320many patties do you want? That's the only thing they sell. And I think that, and they do a booming
01:00:16.080business. There's always a line out the door because people can go in. They know exactly what
01:00:19.180they're going to get. I know exactly what I can do. What I can do is I can work on, I call it the
01:00:22.260six Fs. I think it's really easy. I started off with four. I got up to six. I think it's the right
01:00:25.960answer. These are F-bombs that everybody can hear. The first one is faith. You can work on that. We
01:00:30.260all struggle. Every one of us is deficient in faith, so there's unlimited work to do there.
01:00:34.460We can all work on our families. We all have better ways of relating to people in our own
01:00:38.240household, so we should do that too. I think we can all work on our physical fitness. There's not
01:00:42.200a person I know. Even the top-tier athletes are working to cut off that edge, and most of us are
01:00:47.020not top-tier athletes, so we can work on fitness. I think in the United States, we work on firearms.
01:00:51.880That's a thing. That's your ability to defend yourself from external force and be able to
01:00:55.100Keep those people inside your household safe from whatever external pressures come in.
01:00:59.900And then you have to worry about your fundamentals of food or food and farming.
01:01:03.860So you can kind of have a little slash in there, whether you store food and can it and freeze
01:01:08.060dry it, or whether you're out there growing it yourself or a little mixture of both.
01:01:11.200These things allow you to continue on when everything else fails.
01:01:13.960And the last one, you kind of have to have fun with it because this is kind of a ridiculous
01:01:16.200time to look out there and you could be in a very dark place.
01:01:19.600So some gallows humor is probably welcome.
01:01:21.180so i i've kind of looked rather than saying accelerationism i'm like what what do i actually
01:01:26.540have the ability to move the needle on and my needle is pretty narrow in scope and i'm if as
01:01:31.960long as i accept that that's true and i think it is true then that's where i'm going to spend my
01:01:35.860time and so i'm i do a podcast on a daily basis talking about sort of the sadness in american
01:01:41.280politics and we do it with a very very healthy dose of sarcasm and and sort of sardonic wit
01:01:46.240but it's not because i want everyone to think that there's something they can go change it's
01:01:50.560It's like, you know, I kind of have the trademark of like nothing, you know, nothing's going
01:02:17.620And I also think that that lets people, again, my buddy's point, if you're not a Christian, it's very difficult to accept that this is it. Here you are. You may be a man. You may be of above average cerebral capabilities. You may have some physical capabilities in the world to affect change in your little space. And you recognize that like, I can't even change my neighbors. I can't even make my neighbor mow their grass if they don't want to.
01:02:38.840So how much change and how much push can I really expect from any of these larger bullseyes?
01:02:44.540And so I just looked inward and said, I know what I can affect.
01:02:47.440I can affect my two-year-old daughter.
01:06:47.120So there is a role in there that is more active than passive.
01:06:50.600And I think people probably, when they see it and they recognize what they're being called to do, then they go, oh, yeah, that's what I'm preaching.
01:07:05.520I mean us as Christians together to step in.
01:07:07.860That's where charity should be first and foremost.
01:07:10.080If there's a neighbor in need, you as a Christian should step in and help them.
01:07:13.180And we'll push back a little bit on the local politics thing, because I think you could, as a church, take over your local government.0.99
01:07:19.580You could get that stop sign put in by getting rid of the wets who are in those positions already and make sure you guys get elected instead.1.00
01:07:26.580I agree. I think that's true only if you have real elections.1.00
01:07:29.560And I'm fairly confident that if elections were actually important, then we wouldn't be allowed to do them here.