Transcript

Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining me on the show here today.

Absolutely!

Thanks, Austin, for having me on the show.

It is absolutely my pleasure.

I came across your work a good while ago, and it's been one of those interviews that I've been kicking around in my head for a bit.

I'm glad that we were able to do it here today.

So, we're going to be talking a little bit about some myths of Catholic history, but I want to start kind of just in a getting-to-know-you way.

Out of curiosity, I mean, you've written very extensively on Church history, and you've given kind of special attention to some of the areas that might be perceived as like the roughest areas.

We're going to get into a couple of those today.

We were actually just talking about a forthcoming book for you that is kind of variations on that theme.

I'd be curious what draws you to this work specifically.

That's a great question.

I mean, you know, years and years ago now, I read some works by Diane Moczar, who is a Catholic historian.

She wrote in this vein as well, and I found that they were very unique books at the time.

I mean, we're talking, geez, the '90s, I guess—mid to early to mid-'90s, maybe even late '90s.

I think some of her works came out.

But she wrote several books, one titled Seven Lies About Catholic History and another Ten Dates That Every Catholic Should Know, these kinds of things.

When I read her books, you know, geared for a popular audience, they were history from a Catholic perspective.

I thought that since her works had been many years ago, that was an interesting kind of niche area that I could bring forth my love of history and share that with a more popular audience throughout the Church.

So, that's really what kind of took me on that path of writing in this specific kind of myth-busting or Catholic presentation of history arena.

Well, it's a very engaging way to read Church history, and I think, you know, most of the people that watch my videos won't be the type of people that maybe need the encouragement to get into this because, you know, they love this kind of stuff.

They're using their free time to watch an hour-long video on Church history, right?

But I think for so many others who might think, That sounds like a snooze fest!

Why would I read a book on Church history?—coming

from this angle of, you know, you thought it might be like this, but actually it's like this—could be a kind of disarming way to get into it.

So, I appreciate what you do with that.

Today, I want to focus on your book The Real Story of Catholic History, where you debunk 20 centuries of myths about the Church.

I think we were going back and forth; it's like 55 myths total in there, which is a whole lot.

I guess 20 centuries is a lot of time to go over.

Before we kind of get into the specifics, today we're going to be focusing specifically on the medieval period because I think that's an often misunderstood area.

But I want to ask, just in general, as you're doing this work—and you've been doing it for some time now—do you have a sense of where these myths come from?

Is it the case that there's often maybe like a kernel of truth, but then it gets distorted or taken in a different direction?

Or is it just like fabrications through and through?

You know, for the most part, are these myths just coming out of nowhere?

Perhaps it's a mix, but I'd be curious what are some of the trends you see.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting question in terms of the origins of some of these myths.

Many of them, I think, share the same kind of origin story, if you will, in terms of they’re usually derived from or come from some critic—or, you know, it goes so far in some cases to say enemies of the Church, the Catholic Church, you know, generally, but also religion, or I guess specifically in religion generally, especially the Christian faith more broadly.

I think each time period in history comes up with its own kinds of myths or presentations or misrepresentations of history and historical events and persons, depending on the group that has an animus against the Church or against the Christian faith in general.

Some of those myths then find themselves into popular literature—books, for example, you know, popular stories or popular works of fiction.

Many times, they find themselves into media presentations—movies and other things.

Some, frankly, are even taught within academia.

I mean, I could tell you the many things that I learned as an undergrad that I have now found out later were not accurate.

It’s not necessarily that people misrepresent the events or persons of Church history purposefully.

I think in some cases that is true, but in many cases—and I think in most cases—it’s just people repeating what they have heard or what they have been taught.

Sometimes that’s based on whatever the available academic research is on a certain subject, and then along comes a scholar who looks at information or documents in a different light or a different way, or even rarely uncovers some new document or manuscript that people weren’t aware of before.

But more often than not, it’s manuscripts or documents that we know of but are now looked at in a different way or looked into to answer a different question than they had previously been used for.

Then that changes how that material is presented and understood or is challenged.

I think there’s a lot of growth in these areas.

So, it’s not necessarily always nefarious, although I do think in some cases that is true.

But generally speaking, it’s just, again, people with some form of criticism of the faith of the Church, and then they find something interesting about a particular topic or history or a certain person.

It’s just taught and repeated, and many people just hear it, and then they don’t know any different.

It’s actually fascinating work for me because when I give talks in parishes or events or whatnot, or when people say they’ve read my books, it’s encouraging for me that they will come and say, Oh, I never knew that before.

I've never seen it from that perspective, or I always thought X—fill in the blank.

And then, you know, to give them that new perspective is gratifying.

I'm sure it is, especially that idea of, Man, I never looked at it in this way, and You've helped me learn something new.

I think, you know, for anyone that teaches in some capacity—whether it's through videos, books, or in traditional classrooms—that's the kind of feedback that people want to hear.

So, I'm glad that that's been the case for you.

This is a bit off the cuff here, but I'd just be curious: have you noticed any trends within that?

I mean, you mentioned there are all these different sources.

I'm thinking in terms of, you know, in days gone by, we had like the Jack Chick tracts, right?

Which seems to be less so today.

I feel like he's waned in popularity, right?

You know, kind of the approach of the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon.

Like, we've cut this, you know, like the types of arguments that fit in little booklets that are, you know, about that big.

But are there trends you're seeing now that are kind of maybe—whether it's the topics that people are going to—that this is kind of the really buzzed thing right now, or kind of approaches?

I'd just be curious, as you've worked in this and seen it evolve, is there something that you see kind of coming up more now than perhaps it used to?

Yeah, that's—you know, so you mentioned Jack Chick.

I mean, I grew up in at least part of my time in West Texas, so I was Catholic then, but you know, those were very prevalent documents in that area of the country at the time.

I don't know if they still are; I haven't been back to West Texas in forever.

But I agree with you.

I think your assessment that, you know, those kinds of very just polemic, you know, over-the-top, in-your-face kind of criticisms are not as prevalent as they used to be.

For me, some of the things I see are more nuanced.

There’s a lot—especially in the areas that I focus on—you see a lot of, like, in academia.

There’s definitely no longer an agreement or a holding on to certain myths of the past that we may have been taught as undergrads or before.

The subject matters have moved into a crusade that we’re going to talk about later, but that’s one specific area where there’s just been a growth of an amazing amount of scholarship over the last generation or so.

But that understanding hasn’t really filtered to a more popular audience.

So, what you see among people who have kind of a cursory knowledge of an event or a historical time period is still rooted in what was kind of the academic presentation 60 years ago, 50 years ago.

That’s kind of the trend I see, where good historians—whether they’re Christian, Catholic, or not—doesn’t matter, have an understanding of a certain historical time period.

But then that understanding is not reflected in the popular understanding, which hasn’t caught up to it.

That’s what I run into an awful lot: people who were taught something 30, 40 years ago—whenever their last formal education was, 20 years ago—and they hold on to that narrative.

But the narrative has substantially changed because of some good academic research over the last 40, 50 years, and they’ve never heard it.

It’s not just been presented to them that way in any kind of media presentation or any kind of movie or documentary, even.

Part of it, I think, is because some of these older myths are really sensational.

And they're, you know, people like the salaciousness of it and the sensationalism of it.

Sometimes real history—I mean, I find it always interesting—but sometimes you have a story or narrative that is maybe more fun than the real version.

So, yeah, it does strike me that at times the made-up version makes for a better movie, right?

Like, the Da Vinci Code story of the canon is probably more entertaining, perhaps, than the real story of the canon.

I think that goes along with a lot of the things that we're going to talk about today that happen a little later in Church history.

I think you mentioned kind of the narratives that surround things, and the first kind of idea I want to look at is something where the narrative is baked into the terminology itself, and that is the Dark Ages.

So, we've come to refer to this period of time after the fall of Rome as the Dark Ages, which kind of loads all of these background assumptions about what this period was—particularly that, well, there wasn't a lot of light in it, but it was kind of backwards.

We had this kind of peak of ancient pagan society, and then it all kind of goes down until we get to the Renaissance or something like that.

But I'd be curious, you know, at the very outset—and I know you've written a whole book on this—but when people talk about the Dark Ages and they kind of have that assumption that I just laid out, what are they missing?

What are they overlooking with that?

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Yeah, they’re missing quite a lot, right?

I mean, that term Dark Ages fits into many of the things we just talked about right before, in terms of it being a sensational, you know, kind of emotive term to use, right?

It fits with a lot of, you know, Hollywood presentations of any movie set in the medieval period.

You know, it's usually dark—there's dark lighting, there’s dark costuming.

It's always muddy; it's always raining.

I mean, a lot of these movies take place in England, so, you know, sure, maybe it rains a lot there.

But okay, you know, mud and violence and blood everywhere, and people were uncouth, and everybody's walking around with a turkey leg like in the Renaissance Faire, and what have you, with bad table manners and this and that.

So, there's this emotive, evocative image of what life was like back then, and we miss substantial amounts of things about that period, right?

I mean, we forget that the Middle Ages were a period of time—or even the so-called Dark Ages—and there's debate within the academic community as to how we date things and how we classify things as time periods.

No historian today of any mettle is going to use the term Dark Ages.

It's still used in a popular setting, but not at all in the academic setting anymore.

So, this kind of falls back to what I was talking about earlier: how you see a lot of these things in the academic world now that have moved forward, but the popular area hasn't caught up to it yet.

But so, we're missing things like, you know, parliamentary democracy, right?

It's a creation of the Middle Ages.

The university system is a creation of the medieval period, right?

Massive amounts of growth in architecture and different styles of architecture and art.

I would even go so far as to say those are kind of the more obvious ones, but one area I think that we really do miss in our understanding of this period is an understanding of the relationship between Church and state, especially in the Western part of the world, right?

So, with the fall or the collapse of governing authority from Rome at the end of the 5th century through the medieval period, you have the kings and dukes, and all this power revolving down into local ethnic, at the time, Germanic chieftains.

Over time, you see the development of these European kingdoms and then eventually, much, much later, nation-states and what have you.

But in the West, because I think of that collapse of central governing authority in Rome in the 5th century and the rise of the Church in terms of bishops and the role of bishops in urban areas and in those previously administrative regions of the Roman Empire—especially the Bishop of Rome—you see a struggle in many ways between Church and state, right?

A tension.

Sometimes it's a healthy tension, I like to describe it, and other times it's more full of, you know, violent tension between the two spheres, if you will, between the secular and spiritual spheres.

But that's, you know, when we think of the Middle Ages or we think of the Dark Ages, people hear that term, and they think of, you know, Church and state locked together, and the Church dictating what the state does and telling the state what to do.

We think, Oh, we're so enlightened in our modern era because we have that separation, if you will, right, between Church and state.

So, the Church doesn't tell—religious figures don't tell secular figures what to do.

But we miss the fact that that was never the case in the Middle Ages, in the medieval period, in this book called Dark Ages.

There was this great tension, and it's a uniquely, I think, at least in terms of the history of the Church, a uniquely Western relationship and outgrowth of that geopolitical situation at the time.

So, I think that's something that comes out of these ages that we don't recognize and focus on as much, but I think we should.

Yeah, you know, that's really interesting because it's an example of really turning some of the myths on their heads.

In the outline I gave, it was kind of just a broad idea of these were bad, kind of backwards times.

But to really get to the point of our conversation, people don't just think that these are bad, backwards times; they seem to lay some of that blame on the Church itself.

By talking about the relationship between Church and state here, I think you're showing that it might actually be the opposite of what some people are thinking regarding the Church's role in all this.

But maybe for those who are blissfully ignorant of the myths that are going on here, it might be worth just saying for a minute what kind of fault is laid at the feet of the Church for this time period?

What are some of the specifically Catholic myths about the Dark Ages, in terms of what people think about the Church during that period of time?

Yeah, I think so, and of course, we can correct those.

But I realize that in my initial outline, I might not have given what some of the myths about the Church that people are coming to this time period with.

One I mentioned, you know, just a minute ago, is the idea of a Church-controlled society—the Churchmen who told secular rulers what to do, kings and dukes and whatnot.

There is this kind of general, I think, pervasive myth in many cases about this time period where the Church was this omniscient, omnipotent, autocratic institution, and it was the same in every area of the Western world.

And that's not true, right?

The relationship between Church and secular rulers varied depending on what area of Christendom in Western Europe you're talking about.

You know, there are certain myths, for example, that the Church chained Bibles in cathedrals or churches because they didn't want people to read, right?

Or they didn't want people to have access to the Scripture.

That's a prevalent one, right?

That's still heard.

You know, the Church was concerned about making sure that everybody believes the same way, and there is a certain amount of truth to this.

I know we're going to talk about that in a minute.

But, you know, because of that, it went out and arrested people for believing differently and tortured people and even killed people, you know, by the tens of thousands or even millions by some accounts, depending on the different sources you read.

So, there's that general sense of—or even, I'm sure we'll get into this topic too—that the Church was concerned about all the infighting that was going on among second, third, and fourth-born sons in Europe who couldn't inherit the land of their families.

To get them to stop fighting in Europe and causing havoc, they decided to call the Crusades and send everybody off to fight the Muslims in North Africa and in the Holy Land.

So, again, there are certain elements of truth to some of these things, but, you know, very much in large part, they are completely historically inaccurate.

That's helpful; I appreciate that.

It does tee up where we're going to go with the rest of this conversation quite nicely.

I want to pivot now to the Crusades.

I think the Crusades have had this kind of remarkably long shelf life in the popular imagination of everyday people in the West, just considering how long ago they happened.

But they seem to still have an active role in shaping what people think about the Church and about Christ, perhaps in general as well.

You've already touched on one myth related to the Crusades, this idea that...

They were essentially born out of this desire of, like, what do we do with these second, third, and fourth, fifth sons who are going to fight each other or have all this kind of pent-up aggression, however you want to say it?

So, let's send them off on a crusade; that sounds like a great solution.

But another myth that you point out is this idea that the Crusades were driven by a hatred of Muslims.

This was kind of—and I think when we say something like that, we import all types of baggage that we have now over ethnic wars or wars of religion and whatnot.

So, I want to start with what do some of these myths—whether that's the second, third, fourth, fifth-born son myth, or perhaps more specifically this idea that the Crusades were born out of a hatred for Muslims—what does that get wrong?

Yeah, so, you know, it gets around many different things, right?

So, just before I answer the question directly, I think it's important—and I try to emphasize this when I teach and when I give presentations and in my writing—that we have to understand historical events from the perspective of those who participated in them, who lived through them.

And that's hard for us to do because we have to take our, you know, we have to get out of ourselves, if you will, and kind of get out over or out of our modern mindsets and put ourselves into a mindset that may be radically different from our own.

But I think that the most effective way to truly understand these historical events—doesn't mean we agree with them or that we justify them or whatever—but it helps us to explain them and understand why people acted the way that they did, you know, centuries and centuries ago.

In the case of the Crusades, I think it's very, very important for us to get into the mindset of medieval people and their relationship with Christ, the relationship with the Church, and the society that they had, which was, you know, very much linked and integral to the faith—the Christian faith, the Catholic faith.

That's not to say that everybody there, you know, was a perfect Catholic or a perfect Christian; obviously, that's not true.

It's not true in any age, right?

Definitely not true now.

But, you know, people aren't that much different.

They did understand, you know, their society in a much different way.

You do see, at the end of the 11th century, especially with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks into what was then the Byzantine province of Anatolia—now modern-day Turkey—and the pressures that that group of people placed on the Byzantine Empire, if you will, and the request for help that they sent to the West to send, you know, what we call crusaders to them.

It was motivation that, at least for the first Crusade and even we could say for multiple subsequent Crusades, the motivation was not hatred.

That motivation, frankly, was love.

When you read some of these contemporary accounts, chronicles, or charters that these individuals left for us when they sold their land to be able to finance their participation in the Crusade, they told us, you know, why they were going, and it was rooted in—I like to describe it as love in three ways, right?

The love for God.

They literally, truly had a deep and abiding love for Christ and His Church and for God.

The Pope asked them to go on these expeditions and these campaigns, and for them, that was something that was important and something that was worthwhile to do.

Not everybody, obviously, but a large number of people bought into that and did that.

And you know, for us, I think in some ways modern people struggle with that.

We struggle with, really?

You made this radical life decision rooted in belief in God and, you know, in your adherence to the Church?

Yeah, they did.

You know, that's who they were; that's how they believed—many of them, most of them, frankly.

And then, you know, it was love for God; it was love for their neighbors.

Reports had been coming back from the Holy Land from pilgrims from Europe who had gone to the Holy Land and been harassed, you know, by Muslims.

Not to say that always happened; there were times of great peaceful journeys.

But in the 11th century, the violence started to increase, and harassment started to increase.

Then, even just reports of indigenous Christians living in the Holy Land who were being harassed—those reports came back to Europe and influenced people to want to go and help their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, to protect them from harassment, from violence, and from death.

And then also, love and concern for themselves, right?

They were provided this unique spiritual opportunity to participate in what they believed and saw as a pilgrimage—a penitential pilgrimage at that—which had certain spiritual privileges attached to it by the Pope: indulgences.

You could go and receive that, and that was a unique opportunity for most of the people at that time.

So, out of concern for their own salvation and love for themselves, we could say in a good way, love for their eternal souls, they left and went and participated in these things.

So, it wasn't really rooted in, you know, hatred of Islam; it was rooted in love for Christ, love for the Church, love for their neighbor, love for themselves, and concern for their own salvation—recognizing, obviously, that, you know, Muslims or Islam was, you know, the enemy, if you will, of the people who were occupying, in their minds, ancient Christian territory.

It was their job and their opportunity, if you will, to go and liberate that.

That's really helpful.

You've written another book—one that I admittedly haven't read—but it's titled The Glory of the Crusades, which I think is a provocative title in some ways because I think the knee-jerk reaction for most Christians would be to probably use a maybe less exciting kind of word there, maybe like The Shame of the Crusades or something like that.

I'd be curious, so when you—obviously, you know part of that's, I imagine, to catch people's attention—but when you say something like The Glory of the Crusades, is the glory of the Crusades in their accomplishments, or is it in that motivation that you're talking about there, out of kind of the love for their brother Christians?

Just out of curiosity, as someone who hasn't read that book...

Yeah, so great question, and I address that question in the book.

You know, about why I titled the book The Glory because you're right, the reaction to it was, in many camps, a very emotive and knee-jerk reaction to the use of the word.

My publisher, I'm sure, didn't mind that it was a little bit, you know, provocative.

But what I meant by that—actually, I use that term specifically for two reasons.

Really, one is my understanding that, you know, the Hebrew word that’s used for glory of God most often in the Old Testament is the Hebrew word kavod.

My understanding of that meaning is that it means something important or heavy—so heavy in weight or something really important.

So, I used that term; I chose that term The Glory of the Crusades because I wanted people to understand that the crusading movement occupies a significant period of time in Church history.

It was an integral movement within the Catholic Church for eight centuries, depending on how you want to date it, anywhere from 600 to 700 years.

Part of it is a reaction to what you said a minute ago about maybe we should call it The Shame of the Crusades.

Some people might argue that, and my counter to that is, well, no, right?

We shouldn't. It's not really shameful, but we need to understand that there are some—not saying that there weren't events or actions that occurred that were shameful—individual crusaders doing, you know, crazy wild things.

But because this occupied such a long period in time of Church history, and so many people were motivated to go on these Crusades, and Popes for centuries encouraged people to do so, it's incumbent upon us as Catholics today to truly understand what these events were and why people went.

So, there's an importance behind it.

We can't just bury our head in the proverbial sand, if you will, and just say, Well, we're just going to ignore those 700 years of Church history and say those were bad, and just leave it at that.

I think that's a cop-out, right?

We can't do that; it's not honest.

So, we have to look at these events honestly.

That was one reason I used it.

The other reason is from a quote from Hilaire Belloc, who was an English Catholic historian, politician, renaissance man—did all kinds of fun things, but an interesting man in and of himself.

He wrote a book on the Crusades in the '30s, and he was writing at a time right post-World War I, you know, the downfall of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the establishment of all of these different colonial mandates in the Holy Land.

So, you had the French in Syria, you had the British in Palestine, and there was a lot at the time—there were a lot of crusader imagery that was used by these colonial powers in a very, you know, victorious sense, right?

Oh, like we have returned!

You know, we finished what the Crusaders weren't able to do; we're occupying the Holy Land, you know, these kinds of things.

Belloc took great umbrage with that terminology and that imagery, and in his mind, he said, Yeah, we've returned to this area of the world.

We, you know, Europeans have returned to this area of the world, but we returned bankrupt from those who came before us.

In terms of, you know, the gloriousness of their lives and the gloriousness of their motivation, as you mentioned, which was, you know, a faith-filled motivation overwhelmingly.

So, he was using the term the glory of the Crusades or the glorious time of the Crusades as a way to kind of, you know, shock his own 20th-century world, where people were more secular, or he saw the rise of secularism and a loss and a lack of faith.

He learned a lot from these people who went and why they chose to do that, you know, that they risked life and limb to go on this very, very, you know, scary, long, adventurous pilgrimage.

So, why did they do it?

The simple answer, you know, I mean, I was taught as an undergrad that it was greed, right?

It was greed; they wanted money, they wanted land.

And that just, when you peel back the onion on that justification, just doesn't really work.

I mean, not to say that there weren't some who thought they were going to get rich by going on crusade; they quickly found out that was not going to be the case because warfare is expensive, no matter what century in which you fight it.

So, yeah, I think that from the gloriousness of it, we can learn who these people were, how they saw themselves, how they saw their relationship to Christ and the Church, and we can learn a lot spiritually from them as a result of that.

You know, one of the really interesting things about studying Church history—and I think your answer has really brought this out—is to see the gaps in what might have motivated people in the past versus what motivates us today, or what are the things that we take for granted as just simply the way everyone would see things that other people don't share.

Oftentimes, you know, C.S. Lewis has that great preface on the Incarnation where he talks about kind of our blind spots, right?

And how history helps us kind of trade our blind spots for others or see our blind spots that we so often miss by only looking at our times.

I think the Crusades can do that in a way for us to see that these people were maybe motivated by something—if we have a charitable reading of it—that we could ask ourselves: are we motivated so strongly by matters of faith to take up such consequential actions?

I think someone could get that out of that, even if they did say at the end of the day, you know, maybe I wish this would have gone slightly differently or that would have gone slightly differently.

But we can still kind of have that charitable engagement and try to learn from the past.

One of the tricky points of learning from the Crusades specifically that I think would be remiss not to bring up, just given the very diverse nature of my audience—it's almost evenly split between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox—and so talking to the Catholic and Orthodox dialogue here, it's something that's been a sticking point for a long time and has lived long in the memory, and that is the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

So, for those that aren't familiar, perhaps what happened here?

And maybe, I mean, as much as we can answer a question like this, why did it happen?

Yeah, so how much time do we have?

There's a lot going on in the lead-up to the Fourth Crusade and what happens during the Fourth Crusade.

But to summarize it, basically, right, so you have—at this time, just to kind of level set everybody—you had the Third Crusade, which had happened, you know, it basically finishes around 1192. It was only partially successful; it was launched to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem, which had been captured again by Saladin, the famous Muslim general.

The three major monarchs of Europe at the time went on this Crusade, so they were only partially successful.

Jerusalem is still in Islamic hands.

So, the Pope at the time, Innocent III, decides he wants to call another Crusade to hopefully, this time, complete the deal and once again liberate the Holy City of Jerusalem.

So, he calls a Crusade.

A couple of barons and noblemen in France decide that they are going to take the cross and go.

They decide, well, you know, we're going to follow the same plan as the Third Crusade—or at least the French and English contingents of the Third Crusade.

We're going to sail; we're going to take transport ships and go through the Mediterranean to get to the Holy Land faster.

Previous Crusades had marched overland, but the problem is that these are all landlocked French noblemen; they don't have a fleet—they have no ships.

So, they have to go get those ships.

They decide to send ambassadors down to Italy, and there are really two places they could go at the time: Genoa and Venice—to try to negotiate a contract for merchant vessels or troop transports.

They end up going to Venice.

Venice agrees, but the Crusaders make the fundamental mistake of their entire operation, which influences the rest of the events of the Crusade.

When they enter into treaty negotiations with the Venetians, they grossly overestimate the number of troops that they thought were going to take the cross and go on this Crusade.

They told the Venetians they would have 33,500 troops.

They didn't have that number; they didn't have those troops signed up already.

They just assumed that they'd be able to get that number.

It was really ridiculous that they went that high, but they did.

So, Venice decides to suspend their merchant activity for an entire year, right?

They don't do anything except for build this fleet of transport ships for this Fourth Crusade.

So, a year goes by, and in the summer, the Crusaders are supposed to arrive in Venice and get ready for transport and bring money with them.

The Crusade noblemen who entered into this treaty—the whole idea of how they were going to pay for it was, you know, everybody has to pay their own way, right?

So, nobody's paying for this except for you, the individual Crusader.

So, people show up.

They were estimating 33,500; they had less than 12,000 to show.

So, that's a significant problem, right?

There's a significant deficit that you have to make up, and so they don't have enough money to pay the Venetians.

You can imagine the Venetians are quite angry at the situation, right?

We suspended our merchant activity for a year; we basically put our city into bankruptcy, if you will, unless we get money from you.

So, give us some money!

Nobody knew how to fix that.

The Crusade noblemen didn't know how to resolve the issue.

So, the Doge, the leader of Venice at the time, a man named Enrico Dandolo, says, Okay, well, I have an idea.

Across the Adriatic is this city called Zara, which used to be part of Venetian territory but is now actually under the control of the King of Hungary.

We want that back, so why don't you come with us, attack that city, capture that city for us, and that'll alleviate your debt?

Now, the problem with doing that—sounds like a win-win for everybody—but the problem with that is that the city of Zara, the King of Hungary had taken the Crusade vow.

He hadn't actually gone on Crusade yet, but he'd taken the vow, so his lands were protected by the Church, right?

So, anybody who attacks his lands would be automatically excommunicated.

Some Crusaders decide to leave once this decision is made; they're like, I'm not going to participate in this.

But most went, and then when they sacked the city of Zara—a Christian city—already the Crusade is in a precarious position.

A group of French Crusaders goes to Rome; they apologize to Pope Innocent III, and he lifts the excommunication of them.

The Venetians, interestingly enough, are never excommunicated, so they're excommunicated through this entire time.

They're not even really technically Crusaders.

Then, once you've been excommunicated, you are not really, technically, legally a Crusader anymore, but they didn't care.

While they're wintering—this happens late summer, early fall, so it's not sailing season in the Mediterranean—they winter over, if you will, in the city of Zara.

While they're there, representatives from a Byzantine prince by the name of Alexius Angelus go and meet with the Crusaders and say, Hey, we need help because our prince—his father used to be emperor, but he was deposed by his brother.

Our prince wants to restore his father and his rightful claim to the throne in Constantinople.

So, if you go with us and with him to the city and help restore us, he will finance the rest of your expedition to Jerusalem.

He will restore union between the Eastern and Western halves of the Church.

He'll also give you a contingent of troops to go with you to fight in the Holy Land.

Again, win-win-win-win-win, right?

Now, Pope Innocent III, through all this, hears reports that representatives of Alexius Angelus have come to the Crusaders.

He writes a letter to the Crusade leader, Boniface de Montferrat, and says, Don't have anything to do with this.

Don't participate with this guy.

He's met his representatives and has been traveling all through Europe trying to get people to help him.

Do not do this; just go to Jerusalem.

They don't listen; they go to Constantinople.

Long story short, ultimately, they do succeed in putting him on the throne, but there's a palace coup where another courier by the name of Morsophilus decides to get rid of Alexius Angelus and his dad because they brought these Crusaders who created havoc around the city.

People weren't happy with the presence of these Westerners outside the gates of Constantinople.

He couldn't pay all the money that he promised the Crusaders either, so he was doing things like taking jewels off of icons or taking sacred vessels.

He was opening up the tombs of emperors and taking out jewels and using sacred vessels and melting them down and giving that to the Crusaders in payment.

So, he wasn't very popular among the people either.

This Morsophilus, a court advisor, decides to get rid of Alexius Angelus and his dad.

Then he declares himself to be emperor—he's Alexius IV. The Crusaders are upset and angry because the guy who was supposed to give them money ultimately gets strangled in jail by order of Alexius IV. So, it causes some significant problems, and they decide to sack the city.

You know, and then they write a letter back to Innocent and say, Okay, by the way, we sacked the city, and we've established this Latin Empire of Constantinople.

Isn't everything just great?

How this all worked out?

The Pope was not happy at all, to say the least.

If you read his letters from the time, he was really angry and had very choice and strong words that he wrote in these letters.

The sacking of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade is in 1204; it's probably one of the most infamous episodes of the Crusades.

But it's understandable from a certain perspective—not justified at all, obviously.

Part of the reason why there's such animosity still between East and West over this is that once the Crusaders got into Constantinople and established that Latin Empire, they did, over the years, take many sacred relics and artwork, both secular and spiritual, from Constantinople and ship it back West.

It was a great flowering of this once-majestic Christian city.

It was Christian-on-Christian fighting, which was ridiculous to begin with.

It causes problems, as you mentioned, even today.

Frankly, I think the problem when people talk about this event is that it's usually one or the other, right?

I mean, some Orthodox or Easterners like to always blame the West, you know, and Western Crusaders and even the Pope for these events.

And I think, you know, more Latin Roman Western people tend to just kind of dismiss the Eastern, you know, the Byzantine perspective and say, Well, you know, you shouldn't have invited us in the first place; otherwise, they wouldn't have been there, type of thing.

So, I think there is blame on both sides of the house in this historical event when you look at it, and it's just unfortunate that it continues to have such a negative impact on East-West relations today.

I really appreciated a phrase you put in there: understandable yet not justified.

I think that's a really important kind of frame to have as we go through history—that just because we seek to understand something in its original context doesn't always mean that we're saying, Okay, and that means that it was a good thing.

Just because you can understand someone's motivations here, I really appreciate the context that you gave for that and the breadth of perspective that we're getting through that.

Obviously, like you said, we could talk about this for hours and hours; you could write multi-volume works on this alone.

But I think that was a wonderful background on what's going on there and equally, perhaps, what's not happening there, right?

Like, this isn't the Pope saying, Hey, go do this; this is going to be great.

But that you have a really complicated mess of economic factors going into this and people acting, thinking they're acting kind of on behalf of the Church when, in fact, they are not.

So, I think that was all really helpful.

We could dive deep into that, but I want to give a little bit of time, with the time that we have left, to the thing that I don't know if it's second—I would say it's probably only second in infamy to the Crusades—which is the Inquisition, at least from this time period.

So, you know, you write, The Hollywood version of the Inquisition isn't the real story.

So, what is the real story of the Inquisition?

Again, we could do three hours on this, but kind of in brief, you know, if someone has the idea that the Inquisition was about the Church creating this secret police to go around and make sure everyone had all their doctrines checked off correctly and on pain of torture—if that isn't the story, which I think is more or less the Hollywood version of the story—what is the story?

Yeah, being a Hollywood version of the story is sometimes like that Mel Brooks musical, right?

The thing that's on the Inquisition—humorous and funny as it is—not historically accurate in many ways.

But so, what is the Inquisition?

Yeah, again, this is one of those topics that's very dense and I think very difficult and multifaceted, frankly.

But I also think it's very difficult for a modern audience to truly understand the context in which the Inquisition arose.

The Inquisition was not a monolithic entity; it varied greatly depending on the time and place.

Initially, it was established in the 12th century to combat heresy, particularly in response to groups like the Cathars and Albigensians in southern France.

The Church sought to address what it perceived as threats to the faith, and the Inquisition was a means to investigate and root out heresy.

The process involved inquisitors—often members of religious orders—who would investigate allegations of heresy.

They would gather evidence, question witnesses, and provide a chance for the accused to defend themselves.

While there were certainly abuses and instances of torture, especially in later periods, the Inquisition was not solely about creating fear or enforcing doctrine through violence.

It was also about pastoral care, in a sense, as the Church believed it was saving souls by correcting errors in belief.

The goal was to bring people back to the faith rather than simply punish them.

So, while the Hollywood version often paints a picture of a ruthless, secretive organization, the reality was much more complex, with a mix of motivations, methods, and outcomes.

Understanding this context helps to clarify the intentions behind the Inquisition and the historical circumstances that led to its establishment.

You know, it is really incumbent and important upon us, as we talk about this issue or this event, to delve into—or again, go back to that trying to understand things from the perspective of those who lived during those times, right?

Again, this is not justification for things, but you really can't understand the Inquisition without understanding how medieval people saw heresy and how they viewed it.

We live in a—I'll put it this way—we grew up in a modern pluralistic society where people can have differing opinions, people can believe differently, they can worship differently, which is fine.

But that's not the world that medieval people grew up in, right?

That's not even remotely their world.

They had no comprehension of that and understanding of that.

Not to say that there weren't different religious groups within medieval Europe; obviously, there were Jews and Muslims in certain areas of Christendom.

But in many areas, there weren't, so it was, in some ways, a very monolithic type of society, at least from a faith perspective.

So, again, I mean, the best way to understand this really—and I think a key distinction that people miss when talking about and thinking of the Inquisition—is a few things.

One is the understanding that heresy in the medieval world was both a secular crime and a spiritual crime.

There was an ecclesiastical component or a Church component to this, a spiritual component, and a secular/political component to it, right?

From the Church's perspective, someone who is engaging in heresy or teaching heresy is a threat to the soul of the faithful, right?

Those who are preaching something in error place another person's soul—and their own—in danger, right?

In eternal danger.

So, from an ecclesial perspective, spiritual perspective, the Church wants to help that person, you know, give up that error and embrace the truth for their own good, as a matter of charity, spiritual charity.

Whereas from a secular perspective, secular rulers at the time recognized and knew that heresy usually results in violence, and it can be popularly motivated violence—people who are just angry at those who are espousing these things.

It causes unrest, and a secular official is always concerned about peace, unity, and security, right?

This has been true throughout the history of the world; this is what political movements really want above all things.

So, from a secular perspective, those who are engaged in heresy were threats—active threats.

You know, we would use the term national security threat, if you will, to the society, right?

And so, to their job of protecting the society, they had a punishment and a crime for the crime of heresy, as did the Church.

So, we have to keep that in mind first of all: the understanding of heresy and the two elements of it.

Then the other thing I think that is also often misunderstood about the so-called Inquisition is that there were really two distinct phases of what we kind of call the Inquisition, and they have very differing histories, although with some similar components.

So, what I mean by that is that the first kind of instance of these inquisitors, these medieval inquisitors, is in the 13th century.

In the early 1200s, you have the rise of Albigensianism and Catharism, a heresy in the south of France.

Initially, Pope Innocent III tries a preaching campaign to eradicate this heresy, but it doesn't work.

There are some secular and economic factors associated with these religious factors as well.

Ultimately, he calls a Crusade that leads to a violent 20-year civil war within what is modern-day France.

At the end of that, although the political situation stabilizes as a result of the end of the civil war, the heresy still exists.

So, the Church decides that it needs to send specially trained theologians to this area to talk to people and to root out this heresy that way.

This leads to the establishment of the medieval inquisitors—papally appointed, trained theologians who would go and talk to, you know, in areas where heresy was found.

Then later on, it's not until really the 15th century that you have the establishment of these institutional tribunals, which we could properly call the Inquisition in these areas.

But they all operated differently from each other, right?

There was one in Rome; the most famous of these is the Spanish Inquisition.

But they were in other areas of Christendom as well, and they're not linked; they're not necessarily united.

They're not all doing the same thing.

They have similar procedures and follow certain legal protocols, but they're vastly different.

In Spain, the Spanish Inquisition is an organ of the crown and is brought forth because of this unique situation in Spain, both politically and culturally.

You have the presence of individuals who come from Muslim or Jewish backgrounds who convert to the Christian faith.

However, there was this kind of division in Spanish society between groups of people known as Old Christians—people who had come from families that had been Christian for generations—and those of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds.

Many of these newer Christians had become very important or came to occupy significant positions in Spanish society, leading to some jealousy among the Old Christians.

There was this great cultural tension between these groups in Spain that the crown, again focused on peace, unity, and security, wanted to end.

So, King Fernando and Queen Isabel utilized the Church and this Inquisition to try to bring about this unity by rooting out these conversos.

These were people who converted publicly; outwardly, they seemed Christian, but inwardly, they still practiced elements of the Muslim faith or Jewish faith.

There was a lot of concern among some of these Old Christians and other elements of Spanish society that this was some kind of, you know, fifth column in Spanish society that would open the city gates to whatever invading Muslim army might be coming.

So, there's a lot of, you know, playing on popular fear and conspiracy theories and stuff like that as well that led to this.

I guess that's, you know, in a nutshell, kind of the Inquisition of the papal inquisitors.

We have the difference between these medieval inquisitors and the institutional tribunals of the Inquisition, but there was never any all-encompassing, monolithic, omniscient, omnipotent institution throughout Christendom that controlled everybody's religious thoughts, as is commonly understood, I think, with the Inquisition.

That's helpful; that was in a nutshell, really well.

I think, you know, maybe if we were to get to what is essentially, I think, the thorniest part of this for people.

But I guess before I do that, I'll say I really appreciate, again, the importance of context here.

It is so foreign for us, who grew up in a kind of multicultural environment—not just multicultural, but something that is very multi-perspectival, if you will, religiously, ethnically, all of these things diverse—where we just take it for granted that we have slogans like diversity is our strength.

These various things that are just kind of in the water, but we haven't even really reflected upon.

In a similar way, these people would have just taken for granted that diversity of belief wouldn't be your strength and that differences of belief are bad for the state.

That would have just been kind of natural for them.

So, as hard as it is for us to wrap our heads around that, and whether we agree with that in the end or not, I think it's really important for us to think about that, as you said.

But with that being in mind, I think especially given where we come from, the hardest thing for people is kind of reports of torture in this time.

I came across Ron Hassner's work on this; he has a great line called bureaucratized torture, relating to the Inquisition, specifically the Spanish Inquisition.

What he means by that isn't that it's this great big machine that you think of with bureaucracy torturing everyone, but actually, it's pretty methodical and measured in how it's being used.

Nevertheless, any element of torture is really hard for Christians and Catholics to wrap their heads around.

So, what would you say to those people who have this idea of torture being part of the Inquisition?

Maybe kind of measure out in what way it was and in what way it wasn't, but also how people ought to think about this if they want to have a charitable Christian perspective on this?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you're right; that is kind of the hot-button topic of this historical event—the use of torture or its application or even the availability of torture, we could say, right?

So, it is important, as you mentioned, to kind of understand the historical context and facts and separate facts from fiction because there's a lot of misinformation about torture and the use of torture in these instances.

Many of those involve the numbers of people that were tortured, why torture was utilized, or if it was even utilized, and the whole purposes behind that.

So, a couple of things I think to kind of level set right: the situation and understanding the context.

First, it's essential to recognize that torture was not unique to the Inquisition; it was a common practice in medieval society and throughout Europe at the time.

It was often used in various legal systems, not just by the Church.

The Inquisition, while it did have its own procedures, operated within the broader context of medieval justice, which included the use of torture as a means of extracting confessions or information.

Second, the use of torture in the Inquisition was regulated.

There were specific guidelines about when and how it could be applied.

It wasn't indiscriminate; it was supposed to be used only in certain circumstances, and there were attempts to limit its use.

For example, the Inquisition often sought to obtain confessions through questioning and persuasion before resorting to torture.

Third, the numbers of people tortured during the Inquisition are often exaggerated.

While there were certainly instances of torture, the scale is frequently misrepresented in popular narratives.

Many accused individuals were tried without torture, and the Inquisition's primary goal was often to encourage repentance and reconciliation rather than punishment.

Finally, it's crucial to approach this topic with a sense of historical empathy.

Understanding the motivations and beliefs of people in the past doesn't excuse their actions, but it does provide context for why they acted as they did.

This perspective can help us grapple with the complexities of history and recognize that moral standards and societal norms have evolved over time.

In summary, while the use of torture during the Inquisition is a difficult and troubling aspect of history, it's essential to understand it within its historical context, recognize the regulations that governed its use, and approach the topic with a nuanced perspective.

So, the papal inquisitors and medieval inquisitors I talked about earlier in that first phase of this, you know, history of the Inquisition, were established in 1231. Torture as a means—a tool that was available to inquisitors to utilize during their procedures—wasn't approved for them until 1252. So, 20 years into, if you will, the initial instance of these inquisitors, that wasn't even available for them.

That's an important note to make: initially, the Church didn't set out to torture millions of people or tens of thousands of people, right, at all.

Whereas in secular courts, that was a very common tool used for secular crimes.

So, we have to understand that distinction.

The other thing is to understand that part of the rise of the inquisitors, if you will, was a legal revolution and a revolution in terms of understanding legal procedure.

Prior to the 12th century, right, in most of the places of Europe—both in secular law, if you will, and in ecclesial law, for lack of a better term—there was no established real canon law before then.

You can point to the procedure known as accusatorial procedure.

The way that that happens, right, was that the state didn't go and investigate, or the Church didn't go and investigate crimes; it was by accusation.

So, if you know you hurt my brother or killed my brother and I'm angry, I would go to my duke or my secular lord and accuse you of doing that.

Then he would call you up, and you would swear an oath that you didn't do it, or you would confess that you did, and then some punishment would be given.

But if you confessed you didn't, and I challenged that, then we could solve that in a multitude of different ways, right?

The secular ruler could just make a judgment based on the testimony of who he thinks is accurate, or we can settle it through some kind of ordeal—either that, you know, by combat or through some other forms of ordeal, right?

Water ordeal or fire ordeal, other kinds of things.

But in the 12th century, there was a revival, really, of ancient Roman legal practice and legal treatises.

The Church adopts this practice, or many of these ancient Roman legal imperial practices.

So, it moves from an accusatorial procedure to an inquisitorial procedure.

An inquisitorial procedure is, again, where the state—or at least the Church—goes out and investigates a crime, collects evidence, gets testimony, and then the most important thing that needs to happen in an inquisitorial procedure is confession.

Someone has to confess that they have committed this crime, right?

They have to admit to it.

As part of that, torture was seen as one tool with which inquisitors and secular officials could utilize to elicit a confession.

That gets me to my biggest point here: how to understand the use of torture.

It was used, but why was it used, and how did they see that they were using it?

So, torture—we tend to think of when we hear torture that it was a form of punishment, that people were just brought before the Inquisition or even secular courts, and because you disagreed with what the Church taught, then you were handed over to these hooded monks who just whipped you and beat you and did all kinds of things to you, right?

In reality, the use of torture was often justified by the belief that it was a means to an end: to save souls.

The Church viewed heresy as a grave danger not only to the individual but to the community as a whole.

Therefore, the idea was that if someone was in error, it was a matter of spiritual urgency to bring them back to the truth.

Torture was seen as a last resort, a way to compel a confession that could lead to repentance and reconciliation with the Church.

This perspective doesn't excuse the use of torture, but it does provide context for how it was rationalized at the time.

Understanding this mindset is crucial for grappling with the complexities of the Inquisition and the historical realities of that period.

That's the image we have in our minds of what happens, but that's not what happens at all, right?

So, it was never a form of punishment; it was always utilized as a tool to elicit confession.

There were very specific restrictions and safeguards and protocols put in place for inquisitors to actually utilize torture.

For example, it could only be used once during the course of a proceeding.

There was a time limit; in the Spanish Inquisition, there was a time limit associated with how long the session could last.

Certain people were exempted from torture, such as professors—which I'm very happy about—clerics in some cases, pregnant women, the elderly, and children.

Members of nobility were also exempted from torture.

You could appeal later on in inquisitorial proceedings if they said they were going to torture you; you could appeal that decision.

So, it wasn't just the whim of one inquisitor; it was a kind of collective decision that was made to be able to utilize that tool.

Interestingly enough, the torture methods we think of—again, extreme violence on someone, maiming, killing, violent, bloody kinds of things—were not allowed.

In fact, torture methods could not break the skin, could not cause any blood to be shed, and could not permanently maim or harm someone.

They couldn't lose a limb; they couldn't suffer permanent physical damage.

Again, this is not at all to justify the use of torture in these proceedings; it's important to keep the factual context around it so we understand what this was used for.

Many inquisitors, frankly, didn't like to use it.

Bernard Gui, who was a very famous inquisitor in the 14th century, wrote a manual on how to be a good inquisitor.

He didn't like using the method and didn't necessarily recommend it be used because he found it to be massively ineffective.

Any time anybody confessed under torture, the whole point was to elicit a confession.

If someone confessed under torture, then the confession had to be repeated the next day when the person was not being tortured, right?

It was understood that anything they said during a torture session could just be a confession made because they wanted to stop the torture, which is completely understandable.

But it had to be a free-willed confession.

Until you were asked again the next day, Do you believe this?

What you said yesterday, is that accurate?

Do you still hold to that?

Again, it doesn't justify it, but at least it helps us to understand that there is not this wanton use of violence that we kind of associate it with.

Also, one other point that I think is extremely important is that torture was never performed by any cleric.

No one in the clerical state could perform torture.

It was always a member of the secular authority—the secular arm—who performed the actual torture.

Now, clerics were present during the torture sessions, including scribes.

We have testimonies; we have transcripts of these sessions that you can read and look at, and that's how we know about a lot of them, right?

But it was never something that was inflicted on by a monk or by a priest or a bishop or anything like that, which we typically kind of see.

You know, you search Google for Inquisition, and especially go under the image option on Google, and that's what you see—all these images of hooded monks or salacious priests, you know, smiling as blood is being drawn out of these people and, you know, these horrible methods.

So, there is that indeed.

Thank you so much for clarifying things like that.

But people will come across other things, I think, if someone’s a Christian for long enough.

They’ll hear things that have happened or maybe haven’t, but at least they hear about things in the history of the Church that are really difficult for them to deal with, and they don’t know how to make sense of it.

Just in general, when people come across things like that, what advice do you have for them in terms of where they should turn to get information, and what posture should they have towards pieces of information they learn about Church history that feel really troubling to them?

I think that would be a helpful place to kind of wrap up here before we really start to close.

Yeah, no, fantastic question.

It is something that is quite frequent.

People will read something or hear something that will be shocking, will be scandalous.

For me, Church history should never be— you know, the events of Church history should never be something that leads someone away from the faith, right?

At least that shouldn't be the end result of the interpretation of the event.

So, a couple of points, right, to think about as you read something, hear something, or see something in Church history that's scandalous or shocking.

First of all, think about what we've talked about all through our time together tonight: try to understand the historical context first.

So, just take kind of an immediate step back from the reaction.

Recognize you're having a reaction to an event or a person based on who you are and how you've grown up and the circumstances in which you live.

Just recognize that it's not passing judgment; just say, Recognize that that's your reaction, and that's fine, but be conscious of it.

Then take the next step of, like, Okay, well, why?

Why would somebody do this, or why did this happen?

So then, from their perspective, from a contemporaneous perspective, begin to investigate that a little bit further.

You know, I always recommend, too, don't read just one source, right?

Look for multiple perspectives on the issue.

Seek out scholarly works that provide a range of interpretations.

Engage with both primary sources and reputable secondary sources.

This will help you develop a more nuanced understanding of the events and the motivations behind them.

Finally, maintain a posture of humility and openness.

History is complex, and our understanding of it can evolve as we learn more.

It's okay to grapple with difficult truths and to hold questions without immediate answers.

This process can ultimately deepen your faith and understanding rather than diminish it.

Don't just read one account; go to multiple different accounts.

Look at different authors—look at Christian authors, non-Christian authors.

How do they address this in their work, right?

Don't just read my books; read somebody else's book.

Get a different perspective.

I feel like that should be commonsensical, and this is not to be pejorative to anyone or whatever, but I know it's not.

I feel like it should be.

I was raised and trained that way—to think critically and to read something in a source and say, Well, let's verify that source, or Let's look at it directly.

So, try different sources, talk to different people, get different perspectives on it.

Ultimately, you have to come to a source that you trust, and hopefully that source is trustworthy, right?

That the source is not just going to whitewash something in Church history.

I would like to say too that we need to learn about our Church's history and the actions of the men and women who have come before us and say it’s warts and all.

I mean, they were sinners; they were fallen yet redeemed creatures just like us.

We can learn from them, right?

The times they exercised virtue and the times that they didn't, just like we do.

So, that's not something to be shameful about or to be shocked at in a negative way or in a way that leads us down a path that loses our faith.

It's a recognition of human nature, right?

There's always a human element to the Church.

I mean, those of us who have faith know that there's a divine element to the Church as well, but there's most assuredly a human element, and that's what we study mostly in Church history, right?

The last thing I would recommend, Drew, is just, you know, with anything that's scandalous, at the end of the day, right, as Christians, we believe and we hold to the person of Jesus Christ.

So, that's my faith.

My faith is in Christ; my faith is not in men, right?

I can be emboldened in my faith by the saints and the men and women who have come before me, by people who didn't do that.

But at the end of the day, I have to root myself back in Christ and realize that I'm following Him and His Church, and I'm not following, you know, this particular saint or this particular pope or this particular knight or this particular whatever.

It's Christ.

Well said!

Well, Steve, this has been an absolute joy.

We'll wrap up here with kind of four rapid-fire questions that are very uncreatively called the Final Four, and these are just kind of one phrase or one sentence answers—perhaps even one word.

The first is just: what has been the most fruitful habit or spiritual discipline in your life?

Yeah, so for me, that's really, as a Catholic, the sacrament of confession.

I find it to be an antidote to pride sometimes, and it gives me a focused element of self-reflection in my own life.

So, for me, that's really been very spiritually beneficial throughout my life.

Outside the Bible, what has been the most impactful book on your life?

So, it's A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken.

If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it.

If you could give your younger self one piece of advice when you were kind of first setting out on this journey of investigating Church history, what piece of advice would that be?

I can't fulfill that extra 10 seconds or something, so two things: one is to be more mindful of language studies—really focus much more on language studies and take those more seriously, and expose yourself to different languages.

So, that would be one thing I would like to do.

The other suggestion to my younger self is to, I guess, one way to put it is to grow a thicker skin.

What I mean by that is, you know, there's always a critic.

Critics are always going to be people who criticize your work in whatever you do.

Younger Steve would get an email or some form of criticism and just want to go nuclear on that person, right?

Show them how they're totally wrong and write all these emails and yada yada yada.

Older Steve has learned that some of those just aren't worth dying on.

You know, there's always a critic, and you're not going to change them.

If they felt the need to email you because they're angry at something you wrote, there's probably something else going on in their lives.

So, the older Steve prays for that person now instead of wanting to hammer them over the head with an email.

That is a much better reaction.

The final question is one I delight in asking all my guests.

It centers around the idea that this channel is named Gospel Simplicity, and it's very often pointed out to me that the topics can be a bit on the complex side.

So, to kind of bring it back to the name of the channel, in one sentence, what is the Gospel?

Yes, so the Gospel is walking with God in the love and freedom of Jesus Christ.

That's my response.

Well said!

Well, Steve, thank you so much; this has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you, Austin; I appreciate it so much!

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