Avoiding Babylon
Avoiding Babylon was started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these difficult and dark days, when most of us were isolated from family, friends, our parishes, and even the Sacraments themselves, this channel was started as a statement of standing against the tyrannical mandates that many of us were living under. Since those early days, this channel has morphed into an amazing community of friends…no…more than friends…Christian brothers and sisters…who have grown in joy and charity.
As we see it, our job here at Avoiding Babylon is to remind ourselves and those who enjoy the channel that being Catholic is a joyful and exciting experience. We seek true Catholic fraternity and eutrapelia with other Catholics who, like us, are doing their best to live out their vocation with the help of God’s Grace. Above all, we try to bring humor and joy to the craziness of this fallen world, for as Hillaire Belloc has famously said:
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
Avoiding Babylon
The Most Important Naval Battle You’ve Never Heard Of (Full LOCALS Version)
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Avoiding Babylon +
Access to the FULL show on audio!A feast day tied to cannon fire says something bold about how we remember. We’re diving into the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary by walking straight through the Battle of Lepanto—where oared galleys crashed, matchlocks hesitated, and a Pope asked the world to pray. With historian and translator Ryan Grant joining us, we unpack the short, seismic papacy of Pius V, the messy politics behind the Holy League, and how a legitimized “nobody,” Don John of Austria, became the man who went when others stalled.
If you grew up with tidy naval myths, prepare for grit: tercios turning decks into land battles, Venetian galleasses not quite living up to the legend, and an Ottoman center that overreached into defeat. We test the claim that Lepanto “didn’t matter,” weigh what changed in practice and morale, and face the quieter question beneath it all: does providence still speak through history, or do we flatten everything into accident? The rosary, rooted in Dominican habit and grown through centuries of practice, becomes more than beads here—it’s a culture of attention and courage that still shapes homes, parishes, and hearts.
We also zoom out to today’s tensions: continuity versus rupture, liturgy and identity, and the risk of letting politics rewrite the past. Along the way, you’ll hear personal stories of losing faith and finding it again, the humbling truth about bishops in every age, and why the liturgical calendar is not nostalgia—it’s a map for living time with meaning. If you’ve wondered how a battle from 1571 can steady a weary modern Church, this conversation hands you the thread: pray, study, act, and let the saints change your pace.
If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs courage, subscribe for more history with teeth, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway—we read them all and they shape what we explore next.
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Oi, Vay, I've realized we have been pretty anti-Semitic. We need to shut that down.
SPEAKER_05:That is what seven thousand dollars gets you, everyone. It's October 7th, Rob. How could you play that? Are you sick? What are you talking about? Why would I not play that? Are you crazy? The Feast of the Most Holy Rosary. Why would I not play that?
SPEAKER_03:I can't believe you've played that. That's just outlandish. Anyway. And we have Ryan Grant joining us shortly. Um stop. Get me off screen. I hate this. Knock it off. Okay, so we have Ryan Grant joining us shortly. Um I uh I I actually texted Rob before the show and I said, I think we need to start paying very close attention to the liturgical calendar because a lot of the Marian feast days on the liturgical calendar are there because they mark a historical event in Catholic history, like something something significant in in Catholic history, and they're usually named after a Marian feast day, but they something important happened. They they attribute it to Our Lady's intercession, and then they put it on the calendar.
SPEAKER_05:I just would like to point out I brought this up like two or three years ago, and you're like, No, no, no one will watch those. No, that's not what I said. That's basically what you said.
SPEAKER_03:No, I said I don't have the time to like learn about this stuff, but what happened today? So I'm look, I'm uh like going to the traditional liturgy for what seven years now. Um, I've heard about the Battle of Lepanto for years. Uh, here's my request for the Lepanto poem in Hawaiian pigeon and pigeon. Yeah, they wanted in Hawaiian pigeon. Um, uh, possibly we could maybe possibly do Hawaiian pigeon, chest of infinite. Not no more scripture. I I felt dirty after doing scripture, yeah, yeah. No scripture, but anything right after um, but uh so what happened today. Uh I I've been hearing about the Battle of Lepanto forever. Our friend Michael Hitchbourne, one of our best friends, has the Lepanto Institute, but I've never done a deep dive into it, and I spent the whole day today learning about the Battle of Lepanto, and not just that, I I fell in love with Pope St. Pius the fifth.
SPEAKER_05:I have it in Pigeon, by the way, whenever you're ready.
SPEAKER_03:I'm sure. Um, I fell in love with Pope St. Pius V today. Um, the events that were happening in Europe during his papacy are just unbelievable. You have in 1571, so so he only had a six-year papacy. He's he's elected pope in 1566 and he dies in 1572. Yep, he uh he he basically is elected pope right after the council of Trent closes. He uh uh gives us the Tridentine Mass, like he's the one who actually you know puts it down uh uh formally. I don't know what that would be called, but um probably he probably gets it. There you go. There you go. He promulgates uh uh the trident the tridentine mass, he excommunicates Elizabeth the First, who's this is after Henry the Eighth, his it's Henry the Eighth's daughter, she's basically slaughtering Catholics in England. He excommunicates her and tells Catholics they no longer owe her fealty. Like you guys don't have to actually obey her. Um, you have he can you imagine a pope doing that today? Unbelievable. Like he calls together the Holy League, Mike. Uh so Mike Lewis is in the chat. Um, my priest brother's first homily as a deacon was 14 years ago today. He preached on the rosary in the Battle of Le Ponto. Mike, we're going to do your article, and I'm gonna uh because uh Mike Mike wrote an article about Trads. He mentioned me and Brian Holdsworth in it. Um, and I think he has some fair criticisms in it. So um, if you want to stick around for that, Mike, if you if you can I give Mike a can I give Mike a free local subscription?
SPEAKER_05:We're giving Mike Lewis a free local can I give Mike a free local subscription? I'm gonna charge you personally five dollars for it.
SPEAKER_03:Mike, DM me your email, I'll get you one. Yeah, we can do that. I'll get you a free local sub, Mike. Um, but we yeah, so we have Ryan Grant coming on, but I think he'll be a good guest for going through some of Mike's critiques. So we'll go we'll do that. But um, so Pope St. Pius V is Pope during all of these tumultuous events in history. So while this is going on, France is kind of at war with Spain and they're allied like with the with the Muslims in some ways, because they kind of want the Muslims to defeat Spain.
SPEAKER_05:Spain, so were the German Protestants, so were the German Protestants, right?
SPEAKER_03:Now, Spain just discovered the new world, so they kind of have their resources stretched. Uh okay, that's kind of funny. So you have um uh Spain is kind of uh extended it in the new world, right? They're they're down in the in the west Indies and they're you know dealing with what they have over there, so they don't really want to get involved. England is in turmoil because they just had their revolution in their country. So what happens is Pope St. Pius V calls together the Holy League, but the Holy League, it it's basically Charles V's bastard son comes to this. Uh so Ryan just popped in. Um, Ryan, I watched your uh video today on on the Battle of Lepanto. Uh you did it a couple years ago on Steve Cunningham.
SPEAKER_01:Right, that was years ago, goodness. I almost forgot about that.
SPEAKER_03:And I got a chance to watch that. So we've I've been looking for a good show to have you come on. I didn't want to have you just come on for some random, you know, shoot the crap show because like you're you're you're somebody who can actually bring some substance and value to a conversation. So this conversation is one of the perfect ones to have you on for. So when you mentioned that you were free tonight, I was very happy.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, we bring other people like Joshua Charles on for the stupid crap shows.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, exactly. He's he's here for our lowbrow commentary, but um, so yeah, so I I I was just telling them I haven't I've never done like a deep dive into the Battle of Lepanto, and I fell in love with Pope St. Pius V today, just learning about the whole situation that's going on in the world during this time, and and I was getting to the part where so Charles V's bastard son then comes to lead the poly league. Now, the it's kind of interesting because at this time you have primogeniture is a very big thing in Europe. So second-born sons don't really have an inheritance, so they are typically the guys who will go and join like the Knights Templar and all these different leagues because they want to kind of make a name for themselves because they don't have this inheritance of lands and things like that. But Charles V's son, uh Don Don John, is not even he's not he's not even like a legitimate son, he's he's born to a dancer, and he ends up being legitimized by Philip II, and then Pius V brings him to lead this charge, and it's basically like all of Europe is in disarray at this time, and they won't come together to defend Italy from being invaded by the Turkish uh Ottomans, and he kind of leads this charge.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it and on top of that, before we even get to Le Panto, the relations between the Spanish and the papacy had largely broken down, politically speaking. And, you know, there's no question in religion, but politically, it starts actually with um Philip II, you know, when he's uh after Charles V had retired and finally made him de facto king of Spain, Philip uh gets ticked off with Pope Paul IV, because Pope Paul IV issued a bull, and Trads know this bull, although we're not going to talk about the reason why Trads tend to quote it tonight, Cumex Apostolitas Officio. And in that bull, apart from the questions about papal elections and such, they say that any monarch, any aristocrat, any office of state, any elected head, you know, also who's guilty of the crimes of heresy schisms excommunicated and loses their secular office, too. So Paul the second uh put uh Philip II, um Henri II in France, they're all mad about this. So what um Philip does, he breaks off diplomatic relations with the papacy altogether. Pius IV kind of works with him and says, Come on, you know, can't we get something together just to help Trent? So they he re-establishes, and then after the Council of Trent, he you know, Philip you know brings in all of Trent's reforms and then he breaks off diplomatic relations again to show, hey, I'm independent even though I'm a true Catholic.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so it's like what's also interesting because I I I was I did like a deep dive into Pius V same Pope Pius V today because I didn't really know much about him, right? But he was a grand inquisitor for the the Roman Inquisition, right? And he actually has a bit of um uh butting heads with Pope Pius IV because Pope Pius IV wants to make his 13-year-old nephew a cardinal, and Pope I I forgot Pope Pius V's actual birth name, but he uh Michael, Michael Gisfiere. Okay, so he he kind of butts heads with Pius IV and and says, No, this isn't this is no good, you can't do this. And Pope Pius IV sends him out of Rome, and on his way out of Rome, Pope Pius IV dies, and then they call a they call a conclave, and he ends up getting elected. And in order to kind of show that there's no animosity, he chooses the name Pius V in a way to try to you know show the continuity between them and to show that there's not any animosity there between them. It was very diplomatic what he did, right?
SPEAKER_01:It was also an act of humility on his part, too, uh, to take the name of someone that he had suffered under. Actually, if Pope Paul IV had lived longer, he might have ended up uh in jail because what Pope Paul IV, at the end of his reign, he just starts thinking everybody's a heretic, starts putting people in jail at random. And uh what there's a Spanish bishop that Paul IV thinks is a heretic, he wants him hauled into Rome for a trial. And after Gislieri had interviewed him, he said, No, there's there's nothing wrong with this. This he's perfectly orthodox. And Paul IV is absolutely frustrated, he repents of ever having made Gislieri a cardinal, and he dies a month later. So if he was gonna do something about it, he he lost his chance.
SPEAKER_03:The uh man, and I had never read Chesterton's poem either. Um, and I read it today, and there's this one stanza in the poem that just really stood out to me. And it's uh, the north is full of tangled things and text and aching eyes. Now he's talking about northern Europe, how they're going through the reformation and they're obsessed with sola scriptura, right? That's that's what he's talking about there. And dead is all the innocence and of anger and surprise, and Christian killeth Christian in narrow dust in a narrow dusty, and Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, and Christian hateth Mary that kissed that that God kissed in Galilee. That line, Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee. I had to stop reading and like really think about that. And it's just what was going on at this time in Europe was just, and then the last line of that is but Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. That while all of this turmoil is going on in in Europe, and you have countries at war with each other, and nobody will heed the call to stop them, to stop the Muslims from coming. The you get Don John of Austria comes in with the crusader spirit, this bastard, and he just goes in and he's ready to ready to go and and and take charge of the situation. It's a it's a pretty amazing turn of events.
SPEAKER_01:It's an it's an incredible, uh, just all the movements that are happening, and clearly, you know, you see God's providential will at work, honestly, with the way which it was a hopeless situation. Um, you even had the Turks invaded Vienna in 1529. This is not the famous invasion people are more familiar with, where uh Sobieski, the king of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, comes down with the wing hussars. That's 150 years later. 1529, Vienna just barely you know managed to survive. And the Turks withdraw their army, you know, and still no, you know, the the there's fighting in the Holy Roman Empire, nobody's they they they're demanding more concessions out of Charles V in order to bring in more troops to defend the eastern marches of the empire. Uh the French more or less support the Turks, not directly, of course, but indirectly because that's the way to weaken the empire in Spain. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_03:So now now, how much earlier before this is does Spain drive the Muslims out? Like is it is it recent or 1992 as well?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we're about 80 years or so.
SPEAKER_03:I mean so it's within within a century.
SPEAKER_01:Even then, I mean, they were relegated to the smaller kingdom of Granada, and so they you know weren't a major factor in the general Spanish life. Then, you know, finally there, you know, Isabel and Ferdinand lay, you know, waste to the Kingdom of Granada and then uh annex that into the Kingdom of Spain. They also reformed the Spanish army, and that's one of the bigger things than that, because they're starting to play a role in the European stage after Granada. They end up intervening in Naples, which had been an Aragonese possession, and the French had taken it over during the Italian wars, and they actually reformed the army because their army was designed to fight you know the Muslims in Granada, right? And in Andalus, way back in the day. So they reformed it to make it a more major European army. And what they do is they pick up on the Swiss Pike Confederate uh the Swiss Confederacy, their pikemen, and in the Holy Roman Empire, how you had Lans Connects. And Lance Connects were like another reform based on the Swiss model. And there was a guy named Martin von Frusberg, and he's called the father of the Lans Connects. He uh was classically trained, and he'd read you know about Alexander the Great's Pike phalances and whatnot. He sees the Swiss, and he look at this disordered mass as basically meant to march out to stop our cavalry charges. What if we could make them mobile, like the ancient phalks and combine cavalry, the way Alexander's army was meant to work, and thus should get you know the Lance Kinnects, which in German literally means land knights because they're armored up like uh a knight on horseback, yet they you know are you know big you know you know big masses of pikemen, basically. And they were private military corps, they were mercenaries, they'd go for the highest bidder. That's why when their payment goes into arrears in uh 1527, they march on Rome, and of course, there's a big contingent of them that are Lutheran because some of the Lance Connect corps went Lutheran, some were still Catholic. And but ultimately it you would you'd fight together if uh your your pay was good enough, you didn't care. So the uh the Spanish incorporate those reforms early on under Maximilian I, and they see what's going on there, and so they incorporate the pike, and they also incorporate it into swordsmen and and uh archibisers or riflemen, and so that becomes the Spanish tercio, which is you know a mix of pikemen, shot, and swordsmen to guard your flanks. So they and that became the dominant battle in a unit, you know, basically until the 30 years' war. So they they and they're on in they design their ships so they have large contingents of tercios that can engage using those same tactics. And so naval warfare warfare for a very long time was based around the Roman principle of taking a naval battle and turning it into a land battle, yeah. Now the the Romans say, yeah, good, and there's uh you know so with the tercio, the pikemen, you know, they're they're loose enough where the the arcubusers will run in, and the way the arcubus uh works is if you if you everyone knows a flintlock, right? You guys shoot a flintlock? Yeah, a matchlock was the weapon at that time, the archebus, it's a matchlock. And the way the match, like do you guys know much about matchlocks? No.
SPEAKER_05:Same thing as flint lock, but instead of using flint to strike steel and split.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a split rope. Yeah, it's a rope made out of so uh soaked in saltpeter, and it would uh you you'd light it, you're coil it around your arm, or there were even little uh hooks on the stock of the the rifle the way I wouldn't say rifle, it's the wrong term, but of the archivist in order to put it in. Then you'd you know you'd open your pan, you put your primer in, you'd you'd close that, you'd you know, do just like with a flint lock. What's that?
SPEAKER_03:Can you find a picture of it, Rob?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a sec. Yeah, see, but uh anyway, then you do the ramrod, just like you.
SPEAKER_01:If you've seen any film on a flint lock, you know, it's the exact same you know, principle mechanism. You got bandoliers on, you pour that in with yours, your shot. Then uh, you know, you put it usually you had a stand, they all have stands, like in the picture, you see them with stands, and they'd stick it. Yeah, so the match goes into a trigger uh based on the trigger mechanism. When so when you you open up the primer, you pull the the trigger mechanism that comes in, big flame goes up, and it may yeah, it may shoot immediately, it may take a few seconds. Oh, wow. Sometimes up to 10 or 11. If you ever shot one, it's it's kind of wild the differing rates, even when you have the same primer, it it depending on how it's not like you're like, okay, I'm lined up, I'm ready to go.
SPEAKER_03:It's like, okay, I'm lined up, okay, hurry up. There we go. There we go. What I found what I found so interesting about uh listening to uh because as I'm hearing about all these different stories, I'm imagining like pirate ships going at each other with cannons going at each other and them trying to take the ships down because I'm thinking of a naval army in like the 19th century or something, but watching what what you what you presented, I couldn't believe the the style of boats they used and how they actually fought these battles.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, the boats that they used they they were galleys, and it's actually the very last conflict uh in terms of uh in naval galleys. Yeah, it's great. Um if you if you're not used to this, Rob, is that going to break the that means that's a good load of the primer, and it's a well-made primer that uh back in the day though, you don't know who's making your loads, you can't unless you're doing it all yourself. Uh you might not get that effect, it might be and then you wait, and then it then it fires, and you've got to be patient and sit there, even though you know you might get shot in the middle of it, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the the galley boats, they're basically like 25 guys. What is it? What are they called?
SPEAKER_05:Galley asses, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So there's basically like oars sticking out of the boat, 25 or so on each side, and you kind of have like slaves rowing the boat, and you go towards each other basically, and then you try to board the enemy ship, and you have hand-to-hand combat. So they they if you because I even had somebody today try to downplay the role of divine providence in this battle. As this guy Tom that I go back and forth with, and he tried to downplay the role of divine providence. Like modern historians, they say that you know the Christians actually outnumbered the the Turks, and and he and he tried to just downplay it. But when you read the accounts, the wind is at the back sails of the Turks and they are racing in.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and so there's so many things that favor the Turks in terms of men, at least, what's uh the the best historiography that you can do, you're coming up with almost even numbers, but in terms of ships, the Turks have uh greater ships, larger number, and they had been successful in nearly every naval engagement. Just a few years before that, you have the Battle of Dara, similarly against the Venetians, the Spanish, and the the Papal Fleet, and the the Ottomans had defeated them pretty soundly. And and again, the numbers were almost even, right? They didn't have the gun galleuses and the Venetians. We'll talk about those in a minute. They actually don't play that big of a role in the battle, but just in the outset. But the galleys, you know, because you think of Master and Commander, you think of Horatio, Hornblower, all these wonderful things to watch, by the way. That's not the world of naval warfare we're at in the 16th century. You're still at galleys in the Mediterranean, just like in Roman times, uh, except now they got guns, and you're mostly aiming to board the enemy ship and make it a land battle, or you're looking to ram the enemy ship and sink it. And any number of those things, you know, come into play. The uh you actually facing off, giving a full broadside. That's Trafalgar, that's you know, master and commander type of stuff, which it's wonderful, actually, all that, but it that's hundreds of years off, and it's it's a bloody bat, and this was a bloody battle in terms of the the number of people fighting, the number of people lost, especially on the the Turkish side. There were I mean, some estimates give it as high as 40,000 lost on the Turkish side.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you don't see casualty numbers like that again until World War I. Like that's the next side, it's hundreds of years later before you see a battle.
SPEAKER_01:But you get uh that, and then you have the fact that the Turks outnumber the Christian fleet, and they there are some mistakes that Ali Pasha, who's the the Admiral uh the Turkish side, makes he instead of trying to he does a flanking maneuver on the wrong side, but he also tries to you know get in and leak because he's taken advantage of the wind. He wants to take out the center. It's not a bad idea, but the normal way that the the Turks work is to remove the flanks and then take the center and then have that's the whole point of that crescent formation. They want so it's not it's not a religious the crescent versus the cross, it's just a really and then that's like a secondary effect, actually. It's it it actually has a purpose, just like the cross formation on the Christian side, it's not just a religious thing. There's actually a tactic there, navally speaking, that's to keep the strength of the middle and to repel flank attacks. But um, you know, they they put Ali Pasha put so much into the center that the flanks aren't able because then because what they did at Dara, the flanks take out the flanks and the Holy League fleet, and then the uh they they overwhelm the center, and that's how they they completely vanquished the Holy League at Dara. This time they they didn't go for the same tactic, which could have worked actually, uh apart from Divine Providence. They um Alepasha takes decides to just try to take the center out right away. The uh now the Venetian galleys had had laid waste to a lot of his vanguard in the center, but they end up, you know, they because I saw some historical documentary, I think it was on the History Channel, and I usually watch those things mostly to get the talking heads and buy their books and see if they're full of nonsense or if they actually have primary sources and things invalid arguments to make. But in this, you know, in this documentary, they're drinking this huge deal out of these Venetian galleuses, and they're the forerunner of the stuff you see 100 years later, right? They're they're they're higher off the water, they're still a galley, but they're they're much higher off the water, they're it's harder to hit them, and it's almost impossible for the Turkish ships to board them. So it is very useful. They also only six of them, and they end up trailing off out of the main battle, and they don't come back until the end of it, so they don't actually matter that much for the battle. It's largely um, you know, Kelowna and Dunwan of Austria, Spanish and the Holy League fleet, the Spanish Tercios uh mowing down the Turks on as soon as they're able to get the hooks in and board the ships. And and it's also the disastrous uh fall of the the Turkish right flank, which um I can't remember which admiral, I believe it was Sebastiano Veneer that uh on the Christian side that goes after them, uh, because it was Venetians, right? Uh on the on the Christian left flank, Turkish right. Well, they end up completely vanquishing the Ottoman right, and then those ships are able to return to the middle, where uh you know Don Juan and Marcantonio Colonna are completely smashing Ali Pasha's flagship El Sultana. And and of course, the other fun thing so Cervantes, Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, he actually boards El Sultana and in his left hand blown off, right? But present on El Sultana is all of Aliasha's treasure because he was actually formerly in disgrace by and he was only put back into place because uh the Sultan didn't have enough uh um skilled sailors to take the fleet where he wanted them to go, and he wanted them to land an amphibious force in Italy. He actually didn't mean for them to fight the fight a for a formal battle. On top of that, he wanted them to weather in a different spot away from Lepanto. But by the time Ali Pasha gets the orders, it's too late, and then the Holy League is already ready to box them in into the peninsula by uh Lepanto. So there's that, but then um Aliasha Ali Pasha, because he you know he knows the soul under his treasure while he's gone, he's got all of his hold on, hold on, hold on. YouTube removed our video, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_05:Stream was stopped because it did not comply with YouTube's policy.
SPEAKER_03:You you fired the gun, I told you. Oh no, dude, the new gun rules. It doesn't, it doesn't say of course what the reason was. It was definitely that gun. I knew it with all those new rules. That was a YouTube video that I played. I'm just telling you that's what it was.
SPEAKER_05:No, because because YouTube's policy is for semi-automatic weapons. That was not a semi-automatic weapon.
SPEAKER_03:I wonder why. Uh, I wonder what happened. Do you think they'll put it back up, or you think we got a channel strike?
SPEAKER_04:Um I don't know. Damn it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't think it's my cigar.
SPEAKER_03:Content that shows someone live streaming while holding, handling, or transporting a firearm isn't allowed on YouTube. I knew it. As soon as you're gonna get it.
SPEAKER_05:Wait, wait, wait, where did you get that message? Where did you get that message?
SPEAKER_03:I didn't even pull my piece. I knew it.
SPEAKER_05:Wait, where did where are you seeing that?
SPEAKER_03:This is why you took the gun show off of your stupid chat. Where are you where are you seeing that? In the in the um in the stream, the the in the app we have, the uh studio. In studio let me pull it off. Okay, so if we think if you think we made a mistake, you can appeal our decision. I'll leave that to you. So what does that mean? Do we totally lose it?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What happens with our channel now?
SPEAKER_05:Nothing.
SPEAKER_03:You sure?
SPEAKER_05:I'm pretty sure.
SPEAKER_01:Can we get the stream back up? Might have to create another one. Uh, we can't get this one going again.
SPEAKER_05:I can I add another man.
SPEAKER_03:That's so that's that's unbelievable. I knew it. A match lock, a bloody match lock. I knew it because and I didn't know YouTube put those new rules in. I know because I watched Rob's show yesterday.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, we talked about it yesterday, but it specifically says semi-automatic weapons.
SPEAKER_03:It it's like you have to prove it's from a gun range or something. Like, I just I think you even need to be careful about the past videos you guys have up where you're like showing stuff on the floatbox are semi-automatic, but but really come on. I know it's an historical thing you're trying to show.
SPEAKER_05:Well, I wasn't we weren't live streaming with a weapon, we were live streaming showing another YouTube video.
SPEAKER_01:That's so yeah.
SPEAKER_05:So I'm sure I can appeal successfully.
SPEAKER_03:It's just a stupid algorithm. Okay, it's a bot. A bot took us down for sure, but that's so crazy. Holy cow! AI overlords. So, all right. So, we I mean, uh all right, so I mean, we can continue the show, we can always edit it later and put it back up.
SPEAKER_05:We can edit, yeah, we can put it back up.
SPEAKER_03:You can just edit that clip out and then put it back up.
SPEAKER_05:No, even well, I'll be able to appeal it just fine, but I there's no way to fix the live stream now.
SPEAKER_03:It killed that. Some people go to locals, locals, and we can leave it on X. We'll leave it.
SPEAKER_05:I can't even, it won't even let me type in the live chat to tell people to go somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, wow, I can do it on X. Let me say, because everyone will probably. Be running to your account saying, Hey, what happened? Where'd it go?
SPEAKER_03:That stinks. Ryan's freaking Ryan's first time coming on, and the fly and the stupid show gets killed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I've had this happen to me before with the rundown. That's so annoying. Oh no.
SPEAKER_03:All right.
SPEAKER_05:Uh, I guess you can't even talk about the history of firearms anymore or history that includes firearms.
SPEAKER_01:I uh you could probably do a pre-recorded and get it pre pre-screened and then all the stuff then directly.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but on a live stream it would be a problem. I got everybody saying Pelican Plus. I don't even know if they're never mind. Oh man, Facebook is still up. Uh Rumble's up. I see Rumble comments. I still see uh X comments are up. Ron doesn't look like he knows. Um, all right, so we still we still have, yeah. Hopefully everybody will know to go to uh X and watch it. We'll have to pop this up later. All right, we're still live streaming. We're still streaming. We'll fix this later. Uh we'll we'll maybe even cut out all this oh my goodness stuff and then we'll give it a where well now I might as well just grab an AR and sit here with an AR in my lap the rest of the ship.
SPEAKER_05:Screw them.
SPEAKER_03:Um all right, so let's finish the let's finish the Le Panto talk though. So uh Ryan, before we got cut off, where do we leave you?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I think we're talking oh I was talking about Ali Pasha. Yes. Sultan Ali Pasha.
SPEAKER_05:The treasure on his ship.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so he had all of his treasure on his flagship Al-Sultana because of the fact that he he was afraid that if he left it in Constantinople in his palace, then the um the Sultan would have plundered it all in his absence. And so he kept it on the ship, and then of course, uh he gets shot, if I'm not mistaken, he gets shot by an archivist bullet right in the head. And then, you know, so he's done. And after the uh the Spanish secure the ship, they plunder all the treasure uh along with the standard and the flagship, and then you know, once the morale drops in the Turkish center, and they they more or less collapse fairly easily. And then the last uh you know, you know, fight was on uh the Christian right or the Turkish left of the battle. So and that and was and that was commanded by uh Doria, and he he missed his position, right? And so he didn't uh you know, you didn't get in place, and so he got you know trapped by the Turks, but now other ships notice that he's in trouble. Um he uh I'm trying to remember exactly you know how all that you know falls out because uh Ule Shali, uh who's the commander in the Turkish left flank, he swings around to Kelowna's flank, right? And so and Doria's in the wrong spot. So then they get into really tight you know battles, and you know, which look more hand-to-hand fighting, and it's uh you know, it's a long run. But eventually the uh the left uh flank of the fleet is able to come and help out the Venetian Gallius has come back and shoot some of the rear guard of the the the Turks. The Janisseries, the Janisseries are if you don't know what the Janisseries are, they're an elite corps in the Ottoman infantry. They were originally they're almost six, they're all kidnapped. They're like the SEAL team six, yeah, because they're all kidnapped Christians, they're actually drawn from Christians, they're abducted, they're children from Christian parents that are forcibly taken and forcibly converted to Islam. And you know, a lot of times they're castrated, uh, sometimes they're merely circumcised according to Islamic law when they're 14. They um, but mostly it's to keep them loyal, right? So a lot of them end up being eunuchs, they fight um you know with all kinds of the elite, you know, uh tools and uh of the trade. They're very elite core, and so and there's different ranks of them and everything, but they're more you know, for for land warfare, they've never really made the it became the equal, say, of the Spanish fighting at sea. So, and that's that's another weakness that the Janissaries have in that. And so and what happens during the a lot of the pitched fighting between ships, they run out of bullets, they run out of weapons, they run out of power, powder, so they end up getting massacred uh during all of it. Uh, is that they end up not made mattering really for the battle like you'd think they were.
SPEAKER_03:The thing is, like when the Turks would go to war, um they were so horrific in what they would do to just civilian populations after the armies were defeated, like they would go through, they would slaughter all the men, they would take all the children and women and and just put them in part of the slave trade. So after these battles are actually done, the Christians show no quarter to to the Turks, they they just completely massacre them, and especially those who are able to like operate those ships, right? Like they they they want to make sure they're not able to go back and like put together another core of fighters to continue on.
SPEAKER_01:Here's a fun bit. So, right before this battle, only about seven years before this battle, you have the knights of Malta and the Siege of Malta, right? So the commander of the Knights of Malta was La Vallette, and this guy is a man's man, he doesn't take uh crap, he's he's 70 years old leading the knights in battle at Malta, right? Well, when he was young, he was abducted by a Turkish raid. You know, they they'd kill, you know, raided the village, and he was taken as a and made as to be a galley slave. And eventually, you know, he grows up, he escapes, he gets back to Europe, becomes a knight of Malta. As a knight of Malta, during uh a Maltese raid, you know, back when they were still housed in Rhodes, uh, he finds the Turk slaver that sold him into slavery, so he makes him a slave on his own galleons. Wow, look at that.
SPEAKER_03:It's so interesting that like the knights of Malta still exists, right? Like a lot of these orders still exist into the modern into the modern day. Now, I mean, they kind of got gutted under Francis a bit, uh, but uh they were gutted before.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, no part of it to the whole crusading era, you know, is is just anachronistic now. So, what is even the point of the knights of Malta? And this become even before Vatican II, this is a big problem for them. What what's the point? Are and are they kept in million military readiness? No, a lot of it's honor, a lot of it's like um pla you know, place for nobility or or other people, you know, various honors do so you know social work even before Vatican II. Uh a lot of that is really the case. So, and of course, there's a real sense in which they are still serving the church and they are still just not as cool as when they've got cords and guns and and and grenades and all the cool things that they had in their like they had this one thing, they had this hoop that almost like a hula hoop, right? Except it was wrapped around with uh, you know, again, it was uh cloth and rope that was soaked in uh saltpeter, and they'd light that on fire and send it down a hill as the Turks were like as they you know coming up because the Turks they have a lot of clothing, it's easy to catch on fire. All it has to do is touch them practically, and they're you know, and they load it up with pitch and saltpeter and all these things, and these hoops of fire just come down, and the front, you know. Imagine like you're the front, you know, vanguard of this army, it's gonna charge in, and you're getting you know hit with all of this this fire hoops, and you're trying to avoid it, and now you're on fire. It's inexplicable. You just stop, it takes all the impetus out of your charge, and then it drops the morale for the guys in the back, and you have to basically stop the whole thing and regroup, and then you do, and then you don't see the hoops of fire, so you start running in, and next thing you know, there's explosions and half your legs missing because they're throwing crocades, hollowed out cannibals full of gunpowder and shrapnel, right? Almost like a little shotgun blast. They just throw these things out there, and you know, and that's some of what they did at um when the the Turks were assaulting uh both St. Almo and St. Michael's. So it so that happened, that's just a few years before. Massive victory didn't affect the fleet, but affected their their army, their morale, their numbers. So you mentioned something earlier that you're arguing with someone who's saying, hey, modern historians say this battle didn't matter, whatever. That's a common thing. And you try to watch any kind of uh secular history documentary on Lepanto, and they're gonna say, Hey, you know, this this battle didn't really matter much. The Turks rebuilt their fleet in six months, it wasn't a big deal. No, no, no, no, no. And this is all, you know, again, revision. You know, you have this term revisionist history, and there is a sense, there's a sense in where that's a positive thing and where it's a negative thing. Where it's a positive thing is where you're revising according to the sources, according to documents, archaeology, what actually happened during a period of time. On the bad side of it is when you're revising it based on politics, based on the view you want to put to events. And modern moderns are not unique in terms of revisionist history. There's different you know, epics where people revised history, the English during the English Civil War, they revised uh the very unpopular last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, or last decade of Elizabeth's reign. It's very she was very unpopular. People wanted change all around. Uh, you know, people did not remember Elizabeth as a golden age going into the Stuarts. But once you get to Charles the First and you have the failed raid on Cadiz, hey, Francis Drake, he raided Spain, he took Cadiz, no problem. And now here the Duke of Buckingham, Charles is a little lackey there. He he can't even get close to the city and failed in New Rochelle. All these failures now get get this kind of revisionist history going, hey, but it was glorious under Elizabeth, and that's where the golden age moved.
SPEAKER_03:You also have it after the Enlightenment, there everyone is trying to downplay the miraculous, everybody's trying to materialize everything, right? So when I went to when I went to um Italy, we visited um uh the the how the Holy House of Loretto. And now the legend behind the Holy House of Loreto is that angels carried it from Nazareth all the way to Loretto. And the woman giving us the tour tells us that story, and then she's like, But really, there might have been um a crusader by the name of Angel, and he brought it. And I'm like, but I'm like, listen, I don't want to hear that, I want to hear the legend because the legend is actually important, right? So, and and even this event, like, no, the divine providence in it is actually very important because it it it it's good for for all of us to just believe the the legend, and it and it gives you a grander understanding of God's providence in the workings of humanity, because in the end, you're actually going to find out that God did have his hand in all of the events of history and that they're all working towards his glory in the end. So these things that we want to write off to just these you know materialistic coincidences are not really those at all, they are God's hand in all of these events.
SPEAKER_01:Um and you look at the I mean, you look at certain things I've already laid out, like in the battle, how the Turks, as they were, they had cr defeated a similar fleet, and the differ, but there's a difference in their tactics all of a sudden, which doesn't really make sense, even by a seasoned naval commander. And that allows for you know the victory, where previously they had almost as many ships at Dara, not quite as many, and uh that that failed. And and so what this one succeeded, why? Uh ultimately, I think you know, Pius V leading everyone to pray the rosary for the victory at Lepanto, and you look at the effects of it. Um, there's two things. So, in point of fact, historically, the Turks did rebuild their fleet in six months, they were still a menace, but they weren't nearly as bold. As I was just gonna say, as confident and as bold as going and conquering. You know, it'll take another hundred years to get another Holy League against the Turks, and that happens uh during the War of Spanish Succession, the Holy League, uh the Second Holy League, where Eugene of Savoy just crushes the Turks at Zenta, and in many other places too, he crushes them. But that's another bit of uh battle splanning that'll get us going forever and ever. Um, but really here, they don't you know materialize another Holy League, you know, for that time, but the Turks still do not send an amphibious force to Italy, they do not try to invade Rome, which was the plan, they do not uh you know to stray beyond Greece. They're actually nervous about it. So that there is a change, and it's also a moral victory. So even Elizabeth over in England rings the bells uh to to note the triumph of Lepanto once news of it reaches England. So, and of course, how did that news reach England? Well, it's their spies in the English college in Rome that hear about it and pass on the report, but anyway.
SPEAKER_03:And you think and you think about the the effect it has on the church, right? So now now the Pope institutes the Feast of Our Lady of Victory and then and then Gregory changes it to the Feast of Our Lady of the Road of the Rosary, and now the rosary is now it's a practice spread throughout the church because of this feast day. It has has very practical effects to to how it affects the life of the church. I was telling Rob, um, I want I want to start paying closer attention to the liturgical calendar, especially the old calendar, because a lot of these historical events are enshrined in that calendar under different Marian feast days. These these historical events that took place, and you name it, you know, different, you know, Our Lady of something, you know, and it winds up if you look deeper into where that feast originates from, is from some historical events.
SPEAKER_01:Exultation of the Holy Cross last month. Yes, where does that come from? It comes from the final war between the Eastern Romans and the Persian.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And the you know, the assassinates had invaded and taken all of Roman territory in the east, and they took the true cross from Jerusalem, took it back to Persia, and they they were you know on the verge of completely crushing uh the Eastern Roman Empire. They'd besieged Constantinople, they'd make a deal with uh the proto-bulgars, the Avars, right? And they were besieging on the other side. And it's a guy from North Africa, Heraclius, and he he sails to Constantinople, uh, usurps the throne from the the previous emperor, who was a big loser, and he uh reforms the army and he realizes the situation. There's only one way to make this work. We're just gonna march right into Persian territory, make them pull this back. And he does that, he goes in the heart. Oh, you know, he takes back uh Khatesiphon, or um, which is just a little bit north of Baghdad, he goes even further uh in into Persian territory, and the Persians are great, and they they move back, they're on a forced march, and then he smashes them and they have to go to peace. And so Roman territory is restored, the true cross is restored, Heraclius he tries to carry it in, and as uh the the ancient uh who the historians that relate this, uh Zonoras, who's a Greek historian, he relates this. Um, there's a couple other historians that relate this from the time. So uh Heraclius is robed in all the gold and and splendor of a Roman emperor in Constantinople, and he tries to carry the true cross back into Jerusalem, and he feels stopped by this invisible force. And Saint Sophronius comes to him, whether by divine light or just seeing what's going on and figuring it out, who knows? But he says, You can't carry the Lord's cross, robed as a king as you are, as a Caesar, the Caesar is under whom he was put to death. No, you need to come in as he was, poor and humble. So Heraclius strips down to his tunic and he carries the cross, and then he's able to enter the city without any further problem and puts the cross then back into the church of the holy sepulchre, such as it was at that time.
SPEAKER_03:That's amazing. I love hearing stories like that. I saw um this kid Christendom quarterly. I don't know who he is. Uh, I just started following him, but he he wrote he wrote this, and I I kind of liked it. He said, Be the bastard that set sail. That's what the battle of Lepanto means for you, Western man. There is much the there is much the church saved the West. There is much the church saved the West at the Battle of Lepanto posting. This simply plays into the Catholic fail uh failing of waiting for our hierarchy and our institution to win the battle. Nothing can be further from the truth. Lepanto is the story of how the least likely man risked everything for the sake of the cross. This is the lesson we need to take from uh this is the lesson men of Christendom need to learn. Here's the story, and then he kind of goes through the story just about how uh Don Don Juan really was a nobody. He was he was a bastard, and he comes and he kind of puts this this thing together. Um, and he said, uh, among the princes of Christendom, he was the last man you'd pick. No inheritance, no wealth, no claim to rule. Yet when the Ottoman fleet gathered in the waters just beyond Italy, this forgotten son was the one who answered because no one else would. Yes, the Pope called for the defense of Christendom, and that is more than we have today, but no one sent Don personally. Uh nobody sent Don Juan personally, no one gave him the wealth to outfit an army. The most likely outcome was that they'd all die. Don Juan went because someone had to. That's the pattern of every important battle in Christian history. One man alone, often betrayed by his Christian brothers, under-resourced, and the only small band of bet uh bed-dragged warriors standing in victory against the pagan hordes. No crusader victory was ever a triumph of Christian unity. Most of Christendom sat Lepanto out. France stayed home, Protestant Europe stayed home, even the most of Italy stayed home. The Holy League was a minority of the willing, a handful of ships and a handful of men who made the decision to go, and that's the truth. History turns on the ones who go, not on the ones who wait for orders, not on the ones who whine about the hierarchy, the ones who go. Western man today stands on another shore. The pagan fleets are at our shores again. Our clergy are cautious, our politicians are compromised, our institutions are asleep. So, what now? You do the same thing Don Juan did, you go. I kind of like that. You know, it's like we're we're we're in a situation where we're all complaining about oh, our hierarchy doesn't do the role week, man. It's it's okay. Like God's going to raise up saints in these times, and we have to really, I'll tell you, man, like especially the liturgical calendar is so important because a day like today, if you've been slacking on praying the rosary, today's the day to get back into it. Before you go to bed tonight, if you haven't done so yet, it is the month of the holy rosary, it is a very important time. Um, I'm I'm I was talking to my wife earlier. My wife just ordered a consecration to Our Lady today. Um, I'm going to start my fasting again because I kind of slacked off on that the last couple of weeks of summer. But it's time to get our spiritual lives in order and a day like today. Um I learned more today about Catholic history than I have in a long time, and I was kind of excited to come on and talk about it tonight.
SPEAKER_05:And then YouTube said no. And YouTube said no.
SPEAKER_01:We'll get it back up. We'll get it back up. Right? No, it no, that's absolutely the case. And you look at the rosary as a devotion, and we see it at different places. Um, you see it in Alanist uh de uh I don't know. Um, what's his name? De La Roche. Um, you see uh, you know, it has very many, it's the Dominican tradition, it's the Dominican rosary, right? And Pius V as Dominican brings that to to be you know a popular devotional life of the church, and it was a devotion, and you see it sprinkled around in different places. You see it in England pre-Reformation, you see it in big revivals that happened, like Alanis de la Roche in uh uh you know in places in Germany, and it has all the hallmarks of because you get this thing, well, come on, uh the Our Lady didn't reveal the rosary of Saint Dominic, it developed over time. There's no evidence in all the lives and chronicles of Saint Dominic of Our Lady giving the rosary. And you see this amongst historians, right? And at the same time, I think it's fair to say, one, we have so many popes who've talked about uh Dominic receiving the rosary from Our Lady. It's it's really hard to say, all right, um, yeah, popes can err in questions of fact. Maybe that is wrong in questions of fact. But my inclination is to look the other way and say, no, there's actually truth in that, it just doesn't unfold in this very neat way you see it laid out after you know in the in the counter-reformation period. Rather, it's that Dominic has these mysteries at part of the tradition of the Dominican order, and that is essentially the rosary that our lady gave to him. And this is popularized amongst third order, third order Dominicans and spread around and becomes a thing, and then it becomes a thing in pre-Reformation attempts reforming the church on the part of Dominicans, like Alanis Delaroshan. You look at the mysteries of the rosary, it goes back to all the traditions of Saint Dominic that you see perpetuated by Hermana Hermando Romani and um uh Jordan of Saxony, right? Jordan of Saxony is the guy who makes the Dominican order. St. Dominic's got the vision, he has the energy, he has the he plants the seed, but it's under uh Jordan of Saxony that the flower of the Dominican Order blossoms, and most people have no idea who it is, but without Jordan Blessed Jordan of Saxony, there is no Dominican Order.
SPEAKER_03:It's it's it's it's like you said, it's yeah, maybe it wasn't neatly packaged the way we have it now under Saint Dominic, but that's never how the church's tradition works out, it's just never how it goes.
SPEAKER_01:And so there's all kinds of rosary devotions that even predate Dominic. Yeah and it's not like the rosary, there was never anything else like this ever before. All of a sudden Dominic gets it and now he's got it. No, it's rather this was all organized in a very specific way, and then that's what develops in the Dominican tradition, and then through Pius V, through the occasion of the ponto, is then given and recommended to the entire church, and then becomes a thing in the church and never ceases to. It becomes a mainstay. Now, other religious orders have the rosaries, the Franciscans have the rosary, the servites have the rosary. You look at other, you know, it differs from the Dominican rosary, but the Dominican rosary is the one that becomes dominant in the life of the church, and that is again part of divine providence. And that's very much like what Pope Leo the Thirteenth talked about in his encyclical on the rosary.
SPEAKER_03:So Nicole says, Our oldest daughter has the coolest feast of the rosary story. Before she was even dating someone, she said she would get married on October 7, 2023, because it was a Saturday. She ended up meeting her husband and getting married on that date. They both made their consecration that year, uh, that the their consecration that day as well. And the rosary played prayed aloud before their wedding mass. Yeah, like things like that. There where you see God's providence working and things, and especially our ladies' providence. Like, um, I was talking with someone this morning, they were saying they're like uh they they pray their rosary on their commute on the way in, and I do that too. That's that's when I have time to pray my rosary. So I pray it on the way in in the morning. Um, and I it's hard to meditate when you're driving and trying to pay attention to other things, but sometimes if you can't meditate, like the most important part of the rosary is just developing a deeper devotion to our lady and just having a love for her and her just that relationship with her. So even if you're not great at meditating, things like that, it's very important for your for your devotional life and for your love. This whole thing, I'm like, I'm I am going to pray for Pope St. Pius V's intercession constantly after, and that's kind of the joy of learning about the saints, right? Like, once you get an insight into the life of that saint, you start to develop a love for that saint and you start to like see something about them where now you have this kindred spirit with that saint, and that's what God wants from us. He wants you to love your older siblings in the faith. So maybe he'll grant you a little favor in that saint's honor because he wants you to grow more and more attached to them.
SPEAKER_01:That that's I mean, that's what the whole point of the communion of saints and and that we are not alone, we are not just here. It's like we have them up there as well as the church suffering, praying for us and praying for the deliverance of the church today. And and he actually made a point earlier about the hierarchy. Nobody waited for the the lazy hierarchy to get you know in order pushing this. And you look at the whole history of bishops. I'm actually writing a book now on the history of bishops of saintly bishops, principally. And when you see in every age of the church, most bishops are mediocre. You have uh it's either attributed alternatively to St. John Chrysostom and Saint or Saint Peter uh um Eulogus. I'm not sure which one actually said it. I gotta look back, but is that the road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops? That's in the fourth century. That's not that's not like a modern thing. Most bishops in the history of the church have been mediocre, and then you have a a minority that are saintly and a minority that are evil in almost every generation.
SPEAKER_03:You just what's what's interesting is the reason you only think that the bishops of the past were good is because you only tell the stories of the saintly ones, right?
SPEAKER_06:Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:So those are the ones that live on, and those you and you read the story of some saintly bishop from the fifth and seventh century, and you're like, This is what the church was like, and it's like that's not actually what the church was like, it's no, not all the bishops are like that.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, 500 years from now, people will remember Bishop Schneider, but probably not probably not Supic, you know, right?
SPEAKER_03:Exactly. Like you almost tell the stories of the of the heroes, right?
SPEAKER_01:So more infamous, like Tolly Rand.
SPEAKER_05:We remember Toly Rand because he's specifically so I mean people will remember McCarrick, obviously.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sadly. Um, better if we didn't, but uh in Felicitous memory. But uh yeah, you see things of this nature, and but in Augustine, you know, you look at you get in the early the fifth century say you have Saint Augustine, everyone knows St. Augustine, you have Saint Ambrose nearly you know, just a generation before overlapping with him. You've got you know a few other holy bishops, and you know what about all the other bishops? Great. Well, they don't get the name. Some of them were just just good bishops, not particularly bad. You had the Donatist bishops, yeah. You don't know their names, you don't know their names, you just know that kind of sanctioned. Um, we know like Augustine's bishop was actually Greek, he didn't speak Latin well enough. That's why he made Saint Augustine preach for him, um, because he noticed that Augustine was an eloquent preacher, whereas his bishop didn't know Latin particularly well enough to preach in it. So, but he but he knew Greek, and it was you know he was an okay bishop, wasn't a great bishop, wasn't a terribly bad bishop. Again, and that's the case for most bishops in the history of the church, just doing their job, doing their thing. Some of them have their vices, they have their problems. It's the ones that stands out are that you get your Saint Francois de Salls, and you get your St. Robert Bellerman's, and you get your St. John Fisher's and your Saint Charles Borromeo's and uh, you know, other really venerable bishops in the in the past, Bishop Gulti, um, just trying to think of you know the other like more recent exact Bishop Sheen, at least uh well, there's debate about him after Vatican II and what he did in his diocese in Rochester, but um you know you know that there's there's holy personages, good bishops, um, you know, Cardinal Wiseman in the 19th century. You've got uh Cardinal Berlet Beruet. I can't I suck. I can read French, but I can't Cardinal Berroulet, you know, in the 17th century, great French bishop.
SPEAKER_03:Um yeah, so look, I I listened to uh Chris Check did a talk on Lepanto today, and he talks about St. Pope Pius the Fifth. And I just want to play this clip real quick because this send it to me. He doesn't have any guns, does he? No, yeah. You know what? I'll put it into the chat actually, Rob. Hang on. Um, let's see.
SPEAKER_05:Just because we're not on you YouTube, doesn't mean we have to go back to you putting your phone up to the microphone.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay. Uh it's only a minute, so it's perfect. It's going through now. Just give it a sec. Um, yeah, it's just uh Pope Pius V, the things that were going on in the it should be through there now. He's just such a heroic man that you see why they canonized him.
SPEAKER_00:Um pure life. An aged Dominican priest, Michael Gissieri, when he ascended the chair of Peter, faced two foes, Protestantism and Islam. He was up to the task. He had served as grand inquisitor, and the austerity of his private mortifications contrasted starkly with the lifestyles of his Renaissance forebears. During his six-year reign, he promulgated the Council of Trent, published the works of Thomas Aquinas, issued the Roman Catechism, issued a new missile, the very missile today that's used at the extraordinary form, issued a new breviary, created 21 cardinals, excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, and led aided by St. Charles Borromeo, a reform of the clergy and the episcopacy that had grown soft and degenerate.
SPEAKER_03:It's like that can happen anytime. Like it can happen anytime. We all think like we have Pope Leo. For 20 years, and we think we know what we're gonna get in his papacy. World events could change the the whole uh uh uh like the the like the what the hell word am I looking for like the the the prediction history the course well even the course of his papacy what he may think he's going to do history could things could pop up that just change what he winds up doing.
SPEAKER_01:It could be you know God could intervene and we get another conclave before you ever think possible, like we don't know 20 years of Moore's synodality could be something happens, it gives him a sobering moment and says, you know, this isn't good. Or I mean you gotta here here's a great example from antiquity. You have Pope Vigilius. Pope Vigilius was deacon under Pope Martin. He uh was it Pope Martin? I might be getting his his predecessor mixed up. Um he kind of favored uh you know the monophysite heresy and found a common, you know, kindred spirit in the Empress Theodora. So she promised him that she would get him into power as Pope, and once he's Pope, he will, you know, you know, restore all the patriarchs that her husband, that Justinian, in in line with the other with the the Orthodox Pope said got uh deposed from office. So because she's a monophysite, right? Well, what happens is he, you know, first he uh is intruded on the papacy, arrest the Pope, put him in the Black Sea in exile somewhere, but you know, all through intrigue with um Theodora uh not sorry, Theodora. Um well yeah, Theodora the Empress, and um Belisarius, who's the the general in uh the Roman general in uh Italy. So when I say Roman, that's the Easter, that's Byzantine Empire. Um I don't like that term as they were trying to make it something other. They saw themselves as Roman, but anyway, that's that's a speech for another day. So he you know he's in Italy, he's the power broker in Italy, so he gets the Pope arrested, sends him out, and he intrudes Vigilius in as an anti-pope. So then uh, you know, Justinian finds out the Pope is in jail somewhere in the Black Sea. Hey, who ordered this? I didn't order that, orders and be released, and you know, who does it? Nobody actually knows. Was Vigilius involved? We don't actually know. Maybe it was probably more Belisarius, but they engineered for the thing to shipwreck and he dies of starvation in some island. So the report is in the Pope is dead, and there and of course the Roman clergy had not accepted Vigilius as a real pope, and now Belisarius is still pushing, he's our guy. So he passes from being an anti-pope that is of dubious orthodoxy, to a true pope. The Roman clergy elect him because it, well, we don't we don't exactly know if he's a heretic or not, but also uh Belisarius is here with the sword, and we better elect him. So they do. So now, as Pope, Belisarius is is sitting there, he's getting missives from Constantinople. Theodora is saying, Hey, when are you gonna do what we agreed upon? At a certain point, he writes a letter. Lady, I cannot do what we agreed upon now that the office of the Sea of Peter is laid upon my shoulders. And I it's quoted in Warren Carroll in full. I found the original of it that it's quoted in the the historian Zoneras in the Greek. Um, but it's an interesting letter where he basically is that, yeah, I promise to do all this stuff, but now I have to manage the Sea of Peter. I have to, I can't do that. So, you know, he the revenge that he gets is that um during the three chapters controversy at the Second Council of Constantinople, he doesn't agree with Justinian. So Justinian throws him in prison to think it over for a long time, and so he has his own little bit of suffering for uh all the part he played in it. But it's interesting, you would look at that on the ground. Um, all right, here's a guy who's promising to the empress, and it was known generally, that he's gonna restore monophysite patriarchs, he's going to um you know make you know the the good money would say he's gonna push the monophysite heresy, and he doesn't, yeah, he he he does the opposite. So if that can happen, and and and he was not noted of being particularly good life even when he was a deacon.
SPEAKER_03:So if that can happen, anything can you know ultimately and and the thing is no matter what's going on, it's God knows what's happening, he has his hand in history always, like whatever is happening right now, it is all going to work to his glory in the end. So I I try not to uh I try not to worry too much about it, Ryan. What uh the before we jump over to locals, we're gonna go over to locals in a minute. Um, is there any chance at you translating um um what the heck was it? Um man. Uh my I'm sorry, guys. I'm I'm tired. Rob, what is it the um his his uh commentary on the apocalypse? Um whose Cornelis Alapiday's commentary on the apocalypse.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I I would have to email Loreto because they're the ones doing that, and they've been paying people if I I worked actually, I did uh the commentary on third John that appears in their volumes um of the third letter of John. I translated that one. And I know they they probably have somebody working on it right now, so I would ask them, and I'd probably do it for them since they're doing that if I did. Um, you know, as I've worked for them before, so it'd be easy. I've just been so busy and I've been behind incredibly like and I've only just gotten back on the horse, really, from the the blow of my first wife dying. Yeah, and it's largely uh, you know, with the help of my second wife, whom I don't deserve, who's too good for me, honestly. But um so I just finished Bellerman's uh treatise on images and relics, and I'm I'm just overseeing all the bits that are coming back from editing now. Images, relics, uh the planet it's the whole section on the church triumphant that's in that second volume of the controversies. I did part of it years ago on canonization. I finally finished up the last bits, and um, and but then everyone's asking me for moral theology, and I gotta get back in the horse on that one. It's just so tedious. That's the problem. Is it's it's like one of those things, it's it almost made me hate Latin. It's like my job, it's my tool. I want to get freed up and get be a millionaire so I could sit in a hammock and smoke cigars and be the wheel. He's making fun of homosexuals.
unknown:That's rather what I'd be doing.
SPEAKER_03:It was uh there's a father wolf sermon where he translated part of part of the that commentary that is just so out of this world that it made me want to read.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've read parts of it before. I've never sat down and read it all cover to cover, but it's dynamite though. I mean, everything from Malopita is dynamite, but that especially uh that apocalypse. And that's like I remember when I was working with the people at Loretto, they were saying that's like the most sought-after thing. We're just trying to get these other things in order. And um, I don't like I translated a preamble for the Acts of the Apostles, and I never got I got called away for other stuff and I wasn't able to continue with it. And that's when I stopped with them. Um, that wouldn't be a bad gig to get back into if I could find a way to free up the time.
SPEAKER_03:Um, and you uh you guys started doing the rundown again, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and so it's kind of kind of it's hard because it's just a hobby thing. We're not even sure what we're doing anymore. We just get on and start blabbing. That's kind of like my occasion to bluviate and um I don't know, just to have a little recreation, just say making fun of uh news events really largely. And uh I get to put my mediocre editing skills to to work on some video and uh do a little AI face swaps and put together. Actually, I did a fun one. I don't know if you saw it the last show we did uh where I took um Pope Leo's comments about Supage saying, you know, uh it's not really pro-life to uh you know oppose abortion, but then uh you know support the what are we doing, how do you call it bad treatment of immigrants, right? Oh yeah. So I put together a little clip with an AI narration of uh you know people like calling for like we got to get healthcare to illegal illegals. This is pro-life, but uh criminal aliens who rape children in prison. This is not pro-life, you know.
SPEAKER_03:It's kind of funny because you have on the left, they all think every immigrant that comes in is a saint and an evangelist, and on the right, we think that every immigrant that comes in is a murderer and a trend de Aragua, like but but like there's some in the middle there and stuff, but it's just it's such a political make distinctions, and so that's why, like, kind of like where I was years ago with racism or even anti-Semitism, like as an ethnic Jew, anti-Semitism mattered to me for a long time.
SPEAKER_01:Now I hear it, yeah. I'm just not interested. Racism, they've they've cried Wolf on that so much. I mean, you're racist if you notice, you're racist if you don't see colors, like um, words are violence, but silence is violence. It's like, come on, you guys, well, which is it? You know, but but it's all communist doublespeak and every level of it. So migrants are the same thing, and I'm at the point, it's like, and a lot of people don't like my opinion on this, but I think if you got some guy who broke the law, came in the country illegally, and he's working at some Mexican restaurant, and he's got stable living, and he's been here for a year and a day, and he hasn't done any further crimes. There obviously has to be some penalty for entering illegally, but there's got to be he's a whole different class from these guys who come in, start dealing drugs, pedophiles, murder people, get you know, kill people with an 18-wheeler, they shouldn't even be driving, um, yeah, all these types of things. Like, no, that that's a different class altogether. Like, really, Reese should be focusing on them guys right now, and then follow up what kind of I don't know, maybe maybe that's the wrong way, but that's kind of how I feel about it. Like taking a guy's setup roots and he's not causing any further crimes, he wants to bring his family here and he likes it. And all right, you did wrong. There's got to be some penalty for having done it wrong, but he's not the same class as these other creeps that you're gonna do. Yeah, there should be an order to which alligators, these guys that rape kids. I don't care, but but these other guys, you know, they guess you got to distinguish not every migrant is some like saintly thing, just like you said, but they want to class it, it's all one thing. We're only supporting migrants no matter what. It's like, wait a minute, yeah. Well, what about with these guys who violate what the Catholic catechism of the Catholic Church says about the rights of countries to take in migrants or not to make their own laws to regulate migration? It's in the catechism of the Catholic Church that the countries have the right to determine you know how how they will bring them in, if they will, et cetera. But no, no, no, no. We just gotta you know let them all in and no matter what, without any uh consequence. I mean, I'm sure how's that working in London right now? How's that working in London?
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's the thing. I yeah, I mean, we don't have to do a whole discussion on immigrants, but it there's there's a lot that also comes into breaking the fabric of your society apart if you let people from other nations come in and stuff like that. So it's it's just a deep conversation. We'll we'll do another night. But all right, so we're gonna go over to locals. I want to go through Mike Lewis's article. I think Ryan's actually the perfect guest for it. Um, so um, yeah, we'll head over there. If you guys are not locals members, we'll try and get this video up on YouTube. Rob will contest it with YouTube and see if if we have to edit that second album, we'll edit it.
SPEAKER_05:I can't promise it'll be up tomorrow, but I'll I'll I'll try.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, we'll do what we can. So if you guys aren't locals members, that's where we get to you know talk a little bit different. We could we could show uh musket guns getting shot and we don't get uh banned things like that.
SPEAKER_01:So media's press.com. I've got a lot of lives of the saints. I've got obviously people know me for translating Bellerman and Alfonso Segori. I've also got like the only translation of John Fisher's treatise where he he shreds Luther and Luther's sacramentology from A to Z. Uh, it's called Against Luther's Babylonian captivity is the title of the book. Um tastic book. I got lives of saints like Cardinal Baronius, actually, is not formally canonized, but awesome life. Nobody buys that book because, like, who's that guy? I don't know. Man, it's a spiritual powerhouse, that book. So I just encourage you uh to go in and look at that. And I don't do modern politics, I don't publish anything on Vatican II, I don't publish anything on the new mass, I don't publish anything on the the general trad issues because I I want to do something that's good for recouping the faith and that everybody can read, because everyone who goes to the Nova Sordo should be reading my books. Not because I need that filthy lucre, I do, but that's not why, because these books are good for your soul. That's why I put them back into print.
SPEAKER_03:So that's my Mediatrix Press, right?
SPEAKER_01:Right, www.mediatrix press. You can just divide it up in your head, media tricks T R I X, if you will, uh.
SPEAKER_03:We always want you to support uh people that are doing good work, and Ryan's work is actually very valuable. So if you guys can shoot over to Mediatrix Mediatrics Press and uh pick something up to help help them out.
SPEAKER_05:Should we uh talk about our own sponsor? This video, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I mean I don't know that we gotta butcher this this whole video. I mean we can, but yeah, go ahead. I mean we'll get it up on YouTube. Yeah, we have uh we we I'm not not not knocking the sponsor, I'm saying because the video's not on YouTube. I don't know if we'll get it back up.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, maybe maybe not.
SPEAKER_03:This video's kind of all over the place. No, obviously, recusin' sellers, guys. If you can support reccuers, they are our favorite sponsor because they're our only sponsor, but they're also amazing. And uh, oh, they changed the code. The uh use code base at checkout for 20% off in honor of Christ the King. Uh the end of the month. It's it goes until the end of the month. You can get 20% off. Then after October, they're gonna lower it back down to 10%. So if you guys do want to help out the show, go to Reggie Sensellers.com, use code base to checkout, get your 20% off. After that, it goes down to 10%. This is the best time to do it. And uh yeah. So all right, Rob, take us out, head us over to locals.
SPEAKER_05:Okay, I'm just gonna remove the couple that are still live here.
SPEAKER_03:It shows YouTube's still live. That's what's interesting. Let me pull up the locals chat.
SPEAKER_05:Okay, we're live just on locals.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, give me a sec. Let me uh log in here.
SPEAKER_03:Um all right, Rob, you can pull that Mike Lewis article up.
SPEAKER_05:Let me find it here.
SPEAKER_01:I haven't read it yet, so there's all it's vanilla reaction.
SPEAKER_03:Um Molly said uh that you you probably know the sponsor, Recuent. I think they're in your where you're in Idaho?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think they're in Idaho, right? No, they're in Washington. Washington?
SPEAKER_01:Oh well, where in Washington, because Washington's right across the border from me.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I think it's close to you. I know, I know Molly's been there, so I can't believe it.
SPEAKER_01:Because Miami is like Spokane, Callville, Newport, all those areas like on the border, and then you go further out by the Cascades, you get over the Cascades, and that's where you get toward Olympia and Seattle and all that. It's like four hours away from me. But Spokane's like 30, about 30 minutes away from here, about 50 minutes from my house.
SPEAKER_03:Um, okay, we got the article up. All right, let's pull it up. Okay, so traditionalists often argue that traditionis custodis and diocesan limitations on the Tridentine Mass are unnecessary, punitive, directed at sincere Catholics who only want to worship as their ancestors did. Some even insist there is no real cause, only hostility or cruelty from Rome and the bishops. Recently, on X, author and Catholic convert Sarab Omari, observed that Pope Francis saw certain disturbing trends looming on the distant horizon and took what seemed like harsh steps to cons to some conservative Catholics in the Anglophone world in response to critical yeah, critics like uh Brian Holdsworth claim that such trends are never substantiated and are nothing more than a lazy conspiracy theory. Another traditionalist YouTuber, Anthony Abadi of Avoiding Babylon, asks, What do you think is the true motivation driving these men to restrict the traditional liturgy?
SPEAKER_01:Hey, you got an honorable mention.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Uh many of the responses to Holdsworth and Abadi's post from traditionalists were typical. They hate the piety and truth, they hate piety and true devotion, Satan, evil, the diabolical disorientation, spoken of by Sister Lucia, modernists, globalists, leftists, and so on. Some non-trads offered responses suggesting that the behavior and rhetoric of trads were to blame. Eric Salmons, a traditionalist, responded, they legitimately think the TLM and overall the trad movement is a threat to their conception of the Catholic faith and their right. Although I don't agree with Salmons that the traditionalist movement is a threat to the Catholic faith, I do believe that it is a threat to unity of the Catholic Church. As friends, as the French bishops wrote of the movement and their assessment of traditionalism in their country, we are witnessing two worlds that do not meet. Is there any way to bring traders back into the fold? Is there a way to accompany them towards full communion with the Pope, bishops, and overwhelming majority of the faithful? Do they even want to be in communion with the rest of us? That's a difficult question. The epistemic certainty of so many trads that their understanding of the faith is the absolute truth is remarkable. Despite being a tiny minority in the Catholic Church and virtually non-existent in most of the world, and having very little clout in the hierarchy, they do not lack confidence that someday their movement will take over the church. All right, scroll down.
SPEAKER_05:Such a small movement that he has to spend his whole talking about money.
SPEAKER_03:Uh the polarization cannot continue indefinitely, can it? Okay, so real talk. I would like to respond to Holdsworth and a body as clearly and specifically as possible. But first, here's the general restriction. So uh the rest of all right, why don't you scroll down a little bit? Let's actually get to um uh let's see. Okay, so the real reasons are neither hidden nor mysterious. There are countless concrete examples that bishops and the Holy See witness daily, both online and from reports they receive. Calling the Pope a heretic or otherwise constantly criticizing his teachings and decisions as contrary to the Catholic faith, claiming that official teachings such as Amoris Letitius, Fiducia Supplicans, or the revision to the Catholic catechism of the catechism on the death penalty, are doctrinally erroneous or incompatible with tradition, accusing major papal documents of promoting Marxism, Freemasonry, or other ideological corruption, like fratelli tutti, la data see. Uh, okay, attributing the liturgical reform to Masonic, Jewish, or Protestant infiltration, signing petitions or open letters accusing the Pope of heresy or calling our cardinals a bishop. I mean, he's got he's listing things we're we're we are guilty of, insisting that synods and synodality are part of a coordinated plot to destroy the church or undermine his doctrine, declaring that traditionalism is true Catholicism while dismissing the church after Vatican II as a different or false religion, novus ordoism, new church, bogus ordo, I'll add. Uh treating Bishop Strickland, Burke, James Altman or excommunicating Carlo Mario Vigano as martyrs for defying the Pope and his teachings, giving platforms to figures like Strickland, Berg and uh all those guys, uh Taylor Marshall, Kważnevsky, and so many others, all of whom routinely undermine or reject papal authority and post-Vatican II teachings, falsely accusing indigenous Amazonian Catholics of idolatry and world panic during the synod, uh Amazonian synod, falsely accusing Indigenous Canadians of paganism during the Pope's visit, referring to I we don't have to go through all of it, but you can we make a list of everything that uh that Mike Lewis and his were guilty of so I mean the thing is he's not wrong in those accusations, like those those that's a pretty fair assessment of our criticisms and things like that. So is there a possibility of unity for trads like us with Mike Lewis?
SPEAKER_05:No, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Look, I can make a distinction because Mike Lewis is a bad actor, he's a disruptor, he purposely stirs the pot, he calls up chanceries to attack pure priests, no sort of priests that preached something he doesn't like, and for some reason he's got some clout. Although it would be nice to know precisely why he was dismissed from the USCCB, uh, as uh what was he, a graphics editor? Yeah, graphics designer. It would be nice, interesting to know why that was, but I I I don't, you know, maybe it's perfectly nothing, and that that's fine. Uh you know, I'm just curious about it. But you know, he got some clout where he can, you know, pull, and there's even people in the Vatican that love him, as we just saw. Uh, I can't remember the fellow who was some communications office that oh, they're doing exactly the work of the church or whatever. Um, really, he's not, you know, he he's definitely you've got a lot of venom and hatred for the traditional side. And I think it he's got family members that went trad. And I don't know this is the case, I don't know anything about him. Just knowing these little details, I wonder, putting it this way, I wonder if there isn't just a chip on his shoulder because he can't understand why these family members would want to be trad.
SPEAKER_03:Well, leaving even with it, leaving Mike Lewis specifically aside, the criticisms he's making are generally what I don't think that's like unique to Mike Lewis. I think I think what he's saying is accurate in the accusations that in this article, anyway, yes. Yeah, that's all I'm saying. So, like his his accusations, like we do kind of hold those positions. So is there is there a reconciliation that can be made, not with Mike Lewis, but with the like when you have a a bishop like the Bishop of Charlotte where he's right taking out kneelers because I mean it seems to me like that's not even a trad issue there, too.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, he's drinking fully of the 1970s Kool-Aid, he's a true believer in everything that was the 1970s. Yeah, he's a totally I think if you're talking about like the mainstream of Catholics, conservative Catholics, if you will, I guess, Catholics that you know go to the Nova Sorto that ostensibly believe the same things we believe, and there's priests in the Nova Sorta too believe the same things we believe, uh what the church has always and ever believed. I know many of them. Actually, uh, not give too many details. A very good friend of mine is a diocesan priest. Uh, we were together in college, you know, but they see a lot of the same things that we do, and they don't necessarily want to go as far as we do, but they they see it, and actually, this particular diocesan priest, you know, we used to argue about liturgy and we're arguing about the operatory mostly. And we finally agreed to disagree as we get into bit acrimonies. We dropped it, friends for years, he gets ordained, whatever. All of a sudden, out of the blue, he sends me a text hey, you remember we used to argue about that? You were right, and what happened is it so you said the traditional mass, and it reoriented reoriented his perspective.
SPEAKER_03:Well, well, I was going to say, like, the things Mike Lewis is bringing up isn't specific to trads, like as he would some of it is it's I know many people in the Novus Ordo who are just typical Novus Ordo Catholics who would feel the same way.
SPEAKER_01:Um, you start naming names of people I meant JSMF years ago, um not a trad. Yeah, conservative, yes, Catholic, yes. I she's just trying to lean that way, but uh you start thinking of people who are critical of Amoris or Fiducia Suplicans, African bishops. You're saying the African bishops are all closet rad trads that are calling the Pope a heretic, um, even though they clearly collectively uh attacked Fiducia Suplicans, at least the ones that weren't living in Rome forever. Um, and then you get uh Joseph Seifert. Anyone do you know Joseph Seifert? Who he is? Um he was the head, uh he was part of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He was the head of a lot of groups of philosophy, big phenomenologist, big JP2 guy, one of those figures of intellectual life in philosophy and even a little bit in theology, uh, during the JP2 years, way back in the day. Um, he wrote a letter to Monsignor Baptista Rey during the last conclave citing Vigano and suggesting the conclave looking to vegano and whether or not Francis was actually a heretic. I'm like the idea of Joseph Seifert saying anything like that during the JP2 years, is unbelievable. He is not a trad, not a trad at all. He goes the Novasorto is fine with the Nova Sorta, fine with Vatican II, whatever. Um that's how unnerving Francis was for him, right?
SPEAKER_03:I heard Larry Chap, like you you know who Larry Chap is Larry Chap, who's like the most post-consiliar, um, like a communio guy. He was saying in in the interregnum that if we got another Francis, he's like, we're gonna go start our own thing, like the SSPX, like a novice order version of the SSPX. Society of Paul VI is coming along. Yes, it's literally that was the joke. I'm like, he's going to go start the Society of St. Paul the Sixth. This guy is so crazy. Like, like Francis was so bonkers that even your most normy post-consciliar, like hermeneutic of continuity guy was just like baffled by it, right? And I think um it what's interesting is especially like that bishop in Charlotte, like you said, he's like wedded to the 1970s. I I think that a guy like Mike Lewis doesn't really grasp how much that liturgy is married to the spirit of that age.
SPEAKER_01:That it is like talk about backwardists and like like you know, in diatrice, like these are guys who no, the the the backwardists are all these uh mostly bishops, curial officials, whomever, who are stuck in stuck in the it doesn't, it doesn't it doesn't the felt banners, the all of it.
SPEAKER_03:It's all the bell chancellor on the altar, the clowns, the and I love it all, and I think like what Francis did was made those normy people who loved JP2 and Benedict, and that you know, those guys they all like went to the traditional Latin mass as a way to escape some of the insanity that was going on during Francis, and they fell in love with tradition, right? And it's not the like the average person at your diocesan Latin Mass is not like a uh well-read society guy, like they're not Archbishop Lefebvre fanatics, they're not like they really are just Catholics who love their faith, and now they're at the diocese, they love the tradition.
SPEAKER_01:People who say these kind of things, you know, they they have not spent any time in a traditional mass. I've spent time in the Nova, you know, I used to spend time in the Nova Sorta way back. I know people who do currently, but um you know, they don't have any good experience of any kind of traditional community, they haven't talked to people, they haven't gotten a sense of where people where people are at, they don't know anything about it, so they just create this caricature. All these people run around, and most people who go to the traditional mass, even a fraternity parish or institute of Christ the King parish, even a society of Pius X parish, to be honest, they don't think about the Pope every day. They don't even society sermons don't talk about oh Vatican II this and the Pope this they'll come up for sure. But a lot of society sermons are just very just general, talking about themes that are either related to the gospel of the day or some principle moral theology or the catechism, and it doesn't delve into Vatican II crisis or anything like that.
SPEAKER_05:I hear more about politic church politics from novus ordo parishes than I ever do in trends.
SPEAKER_03:Somebody just said I noticed a very strong JP2 lover to Novus Ordo hater pipeline. Like there's like those people who really were like JP2, like JP2 Catholics once once Francis came, they found the TLM and they like they hate the Novus Ordo.
SPEAKER_01:Like even on the intellectual side, like as I mentioned, Joseph Seifert, another one would be Janice Smith, who's another JP2 Catholic, not a trad. Um, you know, suddenly is uh on you looking at this. Hey, well, what is this teaching? How does this teaching accord with what the church has always and everywhere believed? Um, and you have even had like Ed Peters, who is like he has forgotten more about theology or can of law than most people, including Lewis, ever knew, to be perfectly honest. It's how brilliant and learned that man is. Pulls it, you know, he he keeps it close to the chest. He didn't run out attacking the late Holy Father, didn't come out attacking, but he would just make some very moderated notes and criticisms based on church teaching, just limited things that he felt he could do because respecting that he's a seminary prof, he can't just come out and say probably what he's really thinking about some of these things. Just very moderately, you know, careful you know, considerations on these documents. And he gets let go by Bishop Weisenberger, and they get Lewis out there saying, Yeah, this has been a long time coming, and Peter's going out and he's part of the beard conspiracy against who remembers Lewis promulgated the beard conspiracy that all these prelates are wearing beards as a side of that Francis.
SPEAKER_03:So, okay, so now okay, now I'll ask you what do you think is the true motivation of these bishops who are restricting the traditional liturgy? Because I think he's not wrong in what he's what his thesis is. In essence, though, because he's saying that the the point isn't that Trads think all these things, the point is that these things are being said these, but more than that, these bishops do not see any continuity with the Catholicism from before the council. So, like like Benedict did what he could to make a hermeneutic of continuity. That was his big thing. It's like we have to have a hermeneutic. You can't just see this as a hermeneutic of rupture. This was this wasn't a rupture at the council. This is we have to make it fit so that everything that came before continues on. But these bishops that are in now, and they seem like the guys that uh that Leo keeps elevating because, regardless of what he says, personnel is policy, and he does seem to still be picking these same kinds of bishops that Francis was. And these guys believe in a hermeneutic of rupture, and they do not see any coherence between post-conciliar Catholicism and pre-conciliar Catholicism.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I think Lewis is exactly right, and he's called it exactly right, in as much as there. I mean, Massima Massima Fagioli, that uh one liberal theologian, uh, great beans, Max Beans, from the West he he laid it out correctly, you know. I think exactly right when in terms of not not uh as I think he was right, but the contrast, he says, Hey, you can't have it's one thing about this traditional mass, whatever little tiny bit of the church that wants that can get it, but you can't have your pre-Vatican II ecclesiology. He was very clear about that. Why? Because there is a rupture in the minds of does there have to be? That's what Benedict was trying to make the point that there was it, there didn't have to be, but at least in the way in which so the common current and modern churchmen is there is rupture, they believe there's a rupture, and it allowing the traditional mass really, in fact, does I mean, and salmon's was quoted in that article. I think Salmons is again calling exactly right. They really do see if we allow the traditional mass, we allow everything that comes along with the tradition. That's the stuff we want to get rid of. The animal stalendi is so strong. There was a Franciscan monastery in the Netherlands, and they destroyed their library of old books. And when they were asked by a newspaper why they're doing this, they said we need to make sure the trads don't get it. There you go. That's the animal stalendi that in the 70s this meant new iconoclasm, destroying the older vestments. Make sure, you know, for some reason they identified the Roman uh chasuble as being an emblematic of Tridentine liturgy. I'm not sure why, but then that had to go, period. So the or the fiddleback chasable, if you will. But the the Roman chasable, it is a bit of a novelty in the tradition, you know, gothic vestments and conical vestments, things like that are much older, but just the same. Um, it's based on a form by St. Philip Neary, and it became kind of the common chasuble in the Counter-Reformation period in Rome and in other places, the Jesuits notably always had it. It expressed the principle of the Roman right, simplicity. And that's why it became the common, you know, one of the norms. And because, but somehow that got so associated with the traditional liturgy that had to go. So, all right, are we gonna bring back you know wonderful vestments that they had in the fourth century or the fifth century? We know from art and iconic no, we're gonna get a polyester chasable with spooky on the back of it, because we can, and rainbows and yeah, like rainbow stoles and no chasable, or or the chasable outside the or the stole outside the chasable, hey, because that's different, and we can do it, and uh the destruction of high altars that immigrants built, by the way, in the in a lot of places in this country have high altars and churches that were built by immigrants pinching their pennies, adding the sweat and labor of their brow when they had time outside of their own work to build the churches that they worshipped in that they meant for their children and their children's children to be worshiping, worshiping in. And the boomers came in and just said, We're gonna throw it all out. We don't care about you immigrants who built this stuff. We're we're better, we know more, we're adults in the church now.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, talk about colonization, right? Like ideological colonization, like that's really what they did. It's just it's um, I I I don't know. I look, you see this every single article that is being written right now about like this this surge in Gen Z and millennials that are coming back to the faith, they're all going to traditional forms of Christianity, right? I mean, you do have this contingent of Gen Z guys who came into the church and they're like the most ardent Pope defenders, right? But even those guys like they long for tradition, like they want to kneel, they want to receive on the tongue, they're they they just their their understanding of um like submission to the pope is just because they're usually coming from Protestantism where there's no authority and they don't have any concept of like okay, is this okay to even question the Pope on to they're just whatever the Pope says is the greatest thing ever, you know, and they'll defend it all. But I do think even once they settle in, they're gonna start to see the the thing that they converted to isn't like the Catholicism that they came into the church because of is not the Catholicism that the hierarchy is preaching. It's a it's a very it like it's so it's so bizarre to argue with Protestants now about Catholicism and tell them the teaching of the church, and then the church itself doesn't actually teach that anymore from right from the hierarchy.
SPEAKER_01:And that and I had that with um a there's a Presbyterian minister that I used to smoke with all the time. We had great conversations, largely because he knows what the church teaches, so it used to teach anyway, or whatever, and he it still does, but obviously and so I didn't have to cut through the BS with him. We didn't have to get through the idolatry, the Mary, all this stuff. And he himself, as as a as a Presbyterian minister, was like, No, I try to get people to say, Hey, we can praise Mary because it's right there in in Luke 148. We can praise Mary, all generations will call me blessed. Um, and then there's like, well, that sounds too much like Rome. He's like, Well, we're not going as far as Rome, because obviously he wouldn't agree with Mary and intercession, he wouldn't agree with um you know what what he seems as exaggerated forms of Marian piety in the church, but he also understood that Catholics aren't idolaters because they understood he just rejected the distinctions of hyperdulia and dulia and such, but he didn't but he didn't, you know, think that because he knew we understand that, so we understand we're reserving true worship for God alone and giving veneration to Mary and the saints. So he understood that distinction that we're not idolaters. So it was easy to talk to the guy. We had great conversations, especially theology and all these things. But he told me that when Benedict was elected, he was happy that now there is a Catholic poop again, right?
SPEAKER_03:It's like I heard James White say, he's like, I can't argue with these modern Catholics, I'd rather argue with like a set of Acantists or like a real track.
SPEAKER_01:It's easy for them. So you're saying Rome is not necessary for the sufficiency of faith? Okay, well, I'm gonna keep doing up doing that. You know, it's an easy argument for them, and then you know, morally, it's like not to sell my set of Acantis Brothers short at uh, you know, love them. And but for a non-Catholic, getting into these complicated distinctions when the Pope is the Pope or he's not the Pope is too much for them. Yeah, they don't have the background for the ability to really interpret it. So if you're gonna come to apologetics with them, why you got to be the Catholic faith, but to our Catholic faith, it's like they look at it as hey, where you're asking me to switch to another denomination. I'd be curious for feedback from a set of Acantist priests or apologists who's worked with Protestants who's you know what his experience has been, honestly. Because again, I don't want to straw men them um just because I don't agree with them, but but I know Protestants who've dealt with Cet of Acantists and they just said, You're telling me Rome's not necessary for the faith. Okay, great, I'll keep the one I'm doing, and that's gonna be kind of their attitude. So uh I'd be curious if they had any successes overcoming that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's a it's a man, everything's just so busy. I don't know. So, Mike, to to if you do see this, um I don't know. I don't know if there is a way to bring unity between what you what you uh what oh not just you, what the hierarchy is presenting and what we see as the because all I can all I can know is uh going to tradition has had such a huge impact on the way I live my life, the way I run my family, and the fruits of the way that's been done is all the proof I need. It's like you judge a f a tree by its fruit, and the fruit that I've witnessed from my switch to going to tradition has been more concrete than my original conversion when I went to the novus or 10-15 years or any of that. So it's hard for me, uh, you know, to to to then start taking on this moral laxity that it appears that the church is now talking about because that's all it comes down to. It's all moral laxity, essentially.
SPEAKER_05:It's like you know, I mean I I I was in communion with that part of the church, yeah. And that's why I stopped practicing with faith for 10 years. Me too. I you know so I I was more in communion with that side of the church when I wasn't going to the sacraments than I am now. So, no, I'm I'm not going to be in communion with that sort of stuff again because it it led me away from the faith, and I'm not doing that again, right?
SPEAKER_01:My story is a little bit different because it went hard in on the track because I didn't know anything about anything. And coming into the faith, and then like the went to Steubenville, the charismatic stuff that was kind of interesting. And then what year was this? Uh 98. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_03:You've been in you've been in the church for a long time. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Well, 96 is when I came to the church. How old are you, Ryan? Uh 46. Okay. And so I was raised agnostic and then Jewish. And as my mother was a convert from Judaism to the Catholic faith, but then Vatican II happened and she left the church, Woodstock, all these other things, came, you know, and then um when it married my dad, was going to be um there they had to go through this annulment process. We're like, what the heck is this? Why don't we just go Episcopalian? They've been they're the same thing, and but they're more modern and they're with it now, right? And that was the attitude. So they went interestingly, they went to the oldest episcopal church in this country, St. Peter's in Hebron, Connecticut, which my dad wasn't big on, but he's like, whatever, because he was a congregationalist Protestant. And so uh, of course, they but they're like the priest faced the altar still, or the minister, he faced the altar still at this episcopal church. It was more Catholic than the first communion for bread, what was doctrinal and what they knew to be bread at an altar rail and received, but anyway, that that's another thing. So um, and I was you know, I was raised Jewish for a number of years because we're like we didn't do anything, and then that's kind of what we reverted to to have some sense of religion, and then my great-grandmother died, who was an Orthodox, and then that kind of everything stopped because all her children were mostly atheists and they were just keeping up all the ceremonies and festivals for you know for appearances, and they didn't all keep kosher. Like I remember one uh relative who's cooking bacon, and she came out, I hear I smell b pork, and he says, Oh Ma, it's turkey bacon. She kept kosher, but they didn't, so um, but then you know she died, and then uh the Jewish ritual disappeared, and then I went through some troubling times as a young teen, and I said, You know, I I need this Jesus guy, I don't know anything about him, but I need something to there's gotta be some something there. It was just this kind of movement, so we went back to the Episcopal Church. Then my mother was watching Mother Angelica had this desire to receive the Holy Eucharist again, so she got everything worked out, got her life worked out, came back into the Catholic Church, and then brought my brother and I. And then we were Catholic at that point. I didn't know anything about it. Okay, same thing, whatever, you know. And it was only gradually over years that I actually learned what what it actually the faith actually is, and I was learning it in the Novus Ordo, I was aware there was this traditional mass, there's this mass before Vatican II, it was in Latin. I imagined it was just like the masses in Steubenville, but in Latin. And to buttress that idea, they had a Novusordo Latin mass once a month, so that kind of buttressed that idea. Oh, that's what they used to do. Okay, you know, and then uh someone who's now a fraternity of St. Peter priest, Father uh Romanowski, he took me to my first traditional mass, it was a solemn high mass, and I was blown away. This would have been '99, uh, later part of '99.
SPEAKER_03:So this is like before Samorum. It's it's was it a society mass or was it an invaluable mass?
SPEAKER_01:It was diocese in Pittsburgh. Uh Saint Boniface in Pittsburgh. Father Myers was the priest at the time. Uh, I don't know if he's there now. Actually, I wonder what happened to the guy. He was a good priest, solid priest. But anyway, so he said the traditional mass there, and and so it was a solemn high mass. I was just blown away. I'd never seen anything like this. I'd been in the Novusordo in Latin, and they had a school and they had chant, and I didn't know anything, and I didn't know Latin at the time. And so I went and I saw this mass. I was like, wow, that was amazing. And then I would try to tell people why I thought they was being like, Oh no, you shouldn't have gone there. Oh, that's schismatic. Oh, that but wait, but it was a diocesan mass under the bishop. Yeah, it doesn't matter. We've got to get too good rid of all that, and like people were just poo-pooing us left and right.
SPEAKER_06:So weird.
SPEAKER_01:So then that created the opposite reaction. I became the insufferable young trad that with almost like the Avon lady is coming to sell you.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, way before it was cool, too, like way before it was in. That's so funny.
SPEAKER_01:And little did I know I was turning people off from it because I was just so passionate about this thing, I got into it, but I still went to the novice and I hadn't made that that break yet. And then in the intervening years, you know, I'd learned Latin. And then when I married my first wife, we we settled into a place that had the Novus Rubb in Latin because we were in California and it was a desert liturgically. And and I just kept noting, and as I was like, all right, you know, as I'm getting into a little bit, and then I just started noticing things, and I start noticing, you know, well, the one, the lack of ritual from the traditional mass, all these things that are absent. I'm like, yeah, we have stolen God, come on, we got we got a better mess than most people around here have. And then I just start noticing, I start listening and like, did I hear that right? And I don't have like a missile for the Novosuran Latin. So I go online and look it up with the for that Sunday was, and I start parsing out the Latin I'm like, this does it actually make any sense. So I look it up, and maybe I got it wrong. So I start I look up online, I try to get it forums, and I find people are discussing it, people are discussing why it doesn't make sense. Yeah, this is a big problem. Uh Father Z talked about some of that stuff, you know, he would do like what did the prayer really say? And then he would just admit, yeah, back even in his days, trying to reconcile the two, yeah, this doesn't really work. And so that's kind of how I I kind of came to that. And and then especially as my Latin got better and I got you know hit Cicero really hard, and then I'm listening, I'm like, some of these prayers are just barbarous for Latin. And and there was a point where I I was just I just started praying my Tridentine missile during the mass, just like I did in the English Nova Sordo. And I got to a point, I just stopped, I said, That's it, I can't do this anymore. And my wife wasn't my late wife, wasn't quite sure why she said, All right, so we went Byzantine because I couldn't take the Latin Nova Sordo anymore. And that was the last time I was at the Nova Sordo, it was 2006. I just could not do it anymore. Wow, that's so and it was a Latin Nova Sordo, which a lot of Catholics out there would give their right arm to have a Latin Nova Sordo with Gregorian chant done by nuns, and and you know, as opposed to whatever's going on at the you know Saint uh Bozos of the Church of What's Happening Now kind of parish, which they're stuck with when they have bishops like Bishop Martin who's taking out any form of reverence that even making they they'd give their left arm for a Latin Nova.
SPEAKER_05:That's what I don't understand.
SPEAKER_01:Here I am, I'm like, I can't go to it, I won't do it anymore. You know, and I'm I recognize that, and I don't want to be mean to people that would love to have a Latin of a Surah They're wrong. That's my own personal journey in the whole thing. But in the intervening years, actually, when I was going trad and I was going to traditional mass often, I fell away from the faith. I became an atheist. And but it was a personal thing to me, it wasn't anything due to any mass whatsoever, as I read Nietzsche. And I read and I got a little bit arrogant at a point where I was actually all of a sudden I was like doing things that were definitely above my pay grade in terms of reading philosophy and getting it. And I read Kant, and I read about half the critique of pure reason, was making notes and I actually understood what he was talking about and didn't like any of it, obviously. But you know, getting into and then again a bit of Feuerbach and so uh the mistakes that Feuerbach had made in rejecting so much in metaphysics and everything, and then I get to Nietzsche and I said, Oh, this can be a slam dunk. And I read Genealogy Morals and I stopped and like wow, and I read it again, and it created so many doubts where I just gave up the faith. We kind of keep pretending, would still go fingers crossed to mass and everything, but I I basically had stopped believing. And at a certain point, you know, and that is even through my graduation at Stubiland, it was a certain point about a year later, that I just had this light that helped me get through it. And of course, really what it was it was a cloak, you know, it was a cover for my own personal sins, reading, you know, you know, Nietzsche and and not having to deal with my own personal sins or my baggage from my childhood and so many things. So then, you know, and I came back, and then it was it needed to be the traditional mass or some traditional form of liturgy when I came back, and that gave me you know the comfort, the assurance, the antiquity, the you know, that just to get back to things that were ancient. And that also, you know, sparked me you know into history and and you know, going and doing so much that I didn't do when I was in college to learn how you actually do history, you know. I was just so in love with it. But but ultimately, really, you know, what is it was God and somebody was praying for me, or people were praying for me. I did not deserve to get the faith back. Here I was, I already had this grasp of of theology that I should never have been given. I mean, look, I I should be a guy, instead of being fat, I should be laboring somewhere in some job site doing that. That's the kind of work I should be doing, but because I'm not that smart, I just have a decent memory to remember stuff. Just the same, I I kept, you know, kept at it, kept, you know, working at it, you know, and and I and I gave up when I should have kept going. And I did not deserve to get the Catholic faith back. But God, you know, someone out there was praying for me, and on the other side of this life, I'll know who that is. And uh God gave me the faith back, and I didn't deserve it. And I remember that, and I was anything and just stop and give thanks to God for the gift of the Catholic faith because again, I don't deserve it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, Rob and I both have similar, similar experiences where we lived the lives that we absolutely did not deserve to receive our faith back, but God was merciful and gave us our faith back. I know it was the prayers of my own mother, so but um, all right, so we're coming up on two hours, Ryan. This was awesome. Um I'm sorry that our stream got killed on YouTube. Hopefully, we'll get it back up so that everybody can see because I think the especially the like the Lepanto stuff, I just think it's so important for people to know, and I think it's such a pleasant break from doing church politics, even though we kind of did it on locals. But that main show, I I think I think all these events in Catholic history are important. If we do another one on the liturgical calendar, I'm gonna reach out to you if you know anything about that specific event, and we're gonna have you back on and we'll discuss that also. Sounds great, and uh, yeah, throw us an invite to the rundown. We'll come on and come hang with you guys one night.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we'd love to do it. Actually, it'd be fantastic to have you guys on and change change up the the experience for a little bit. Someone might uh be interested to see you and Mike go at it.
SPEAKER_03:I mean Mike, oh man, I I I talk to Mike on the phone now and stuff. We have a good time.
SPEAKER_01:No, he's great. It would just be great to get a like a rant going.
SPEAKER_03:I had a conversation with Mike on the phone last week for like an hour. We talked. He was asking me some stuff. So, but um, all right, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on, man. We'll we'll do it again soon.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:Sounds good. All right, take us out, Rob
