Transcript

Um, is it working?

There we go.

There we go.

Okay, fantastic.

Um, so thank you very much for coming out.

And thank you very much for letting me come to speak to you at St. Thomas Aquinas.

I have to admit that when I got the invitation several months ago, I- I look- I always look up the venue where I'm gonna speak, and I found the parish and started reading about it.

And I was deeply intrigued because it seemed to be such an exemplary parish expressing the Catholicity of the Catholic faith.

You have one of- two of my favorite patrons from East and West, Thomas Aquinas and Saint Basil the Great on the same campus.

East and West, A- American clergy, Cameroonian clergy, Filipino sisters from the Dominican order.

I said, "This is the place I've- I've got to go." And I understand like, the architecture ha- has been im- imported from Europe via Pittsburgh, I think.

So it's just like, you know, what part of the Catholic faith is not expressed here?

So, uh, what a great thrill for me to be able to come out and talk to you.

So, um, uh, my day job is I host a radio show for the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network, and the title of the show is Called to Communion.

And it is a show pitched primarily to non-Catholics.

And the tagline of the show is "What's stopping you from becoming a Catholic?" And I invite people to kind of call in and hit me with their best shot, so to speak.

And then, I do the best that I can to answer people's concerns and explain things about the Catholic faith that maybe they didn't understand.

And my- my, you know, my qualifications such as they are for the job is that I myself am a convert to the Catholic Church.

And probably the most, uh, distinct thing about my passage into the Catholic Church is that I had every possible objection you could imagine to Catholicism.

And it- it took me a good 10 years to work through all of them before I was persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith.

And I'm a pretty thick-skulled individual, so that- that took me through theology degrees and undergraduate and graduate school, ultimately PhD studies in Church history and Reformation theology, uh, before I finally was persuaded of the truth of Catholicism.

So what I do in my work is essentially try to recapitulate for other people, uh, the kind of answers that were compelling to me to bring me to the Catholic faith.

And most of the show consists in the kind of standard Protestant polemics that you would expect, "Well, you know, I'm not Catholic because you Catholics worship Mary." Or, "Where is purgatory in the Bible?" Or, "What about all the abusive Catholic clergy?" Or, you know, you've heard the kind of standard remarks.

Uh, but every once in a while, uh, we get one that's just really, really compelling and stands out in my memory.

I- I think my favorite objection to Catholicism, this fella called me and he said, "Dr.

Anders, you know, you're always asking what's stopping me from becoming a Catholic.

Well, I- I've been listening to your show for, oh, I don't know, about six months now, and I think I can say with certainty that what's stopping me from becoming a Catholic is you."

And, uh, I thought, "That's actually a pretty good...

That's a pretty good argument." Many people ask me, "What do you think is the most compelling reason for somebody not to become a Catholic?" And I said, "Oh, that's simple.

It would be Catholics." Right?

You know, those of us who don't live the faith as generously or charitably as we should.

Uh, but other times they're- they're a bit more serious, cut deeper to the heart.

Um, I had a, uh, a man call me one time, in all sincerity, and he said, "Dr.

Anders, uh, I am a Satanist.

I am a Satanist.

Uh, but- but Satanism isn't really working for me." And I'm thinking, "Surprise, surprise." You know?

Uh, "In particular, I- I find that it doesn't really facilitate the moral life." And I went, "Fancy that." You know?

"Uh, can you help me?

Can you...

Do you think Catholicism would do a better job?" "You think?" "It- it might." Or the Protestant man who said to me, this I think may be one of my favorite questions of all time, he said, "You know, my own tradition separates faith and morality.

And I have the faith, but I don't have morality.

And do you think the Catholic sacraments could be the thing that I'm lacking?" And that's actually gonna be a major theme of our talk today.

All right, so, um, uh, I was asked to speak to you today on the theme of the book that I have out, published with EWTN publishers, How the Catholic Church Saved My Marriage.

And, uh, you know, people ask me, "How did you come to write this particular book?" Because EWTN approached me and said, "Would you write a book for the network?" And I said, "I would love to." And I think they had in mind a sort of standard work of Catholic apologetics, kind of what I do on the radio show, answering typical objections to Catholicism.

But that's not the book I wrote.

A- and the reason why, that I didn't write the book that way, the reason why is the- the ultimate end of the Catholic faith is not for us to be full of answers to, uh, abstract questions of theology.

The ultimate end of the Catholic faith is that we might be transformed in charity, right?

Saint Augustine said in his book On Christian Doctrine that the entirety of our faith, the whole dispensation of our religion, whether it be scripture or liturgy, doctrine or sacraments, has but one end, and that is to lead us to charity.

He says, "We treat these things like a road or a chariot, the end of which is to take us to charity." That is their utility.

The ultimate end of the Catholic faith is not doctrinal propositions, but the realities to which they point, namely the transformative love of God.

And if the Catholic faith, in my judgment, cannot touch you......

In your marriage, which for most people is the most intimate relationship that they have, then I would contend that it's of no value.

But the church teaches, of course, that it is precisely in these very mundane matters, like families and children and the prudent decisions of normal daily life in which our Catholic faith has the greatest utility and value to us.

And so because the Catholic faith had had a transformative impact on my own family life, which as you'll see, is central to my own conversion, I said, "That's a, that's a story worth telling." Um, you know, I have a good friend

who, uh, who was Protestant like I was.

When I became Catholic, he was really mad at me.

He was very angry at me.

And he would not talk to me about Catholicism for many years.

We, we used to work together in a Protestant school.

And I also happened to be related to him, he's a second cousin, and he had sort of vouched for me to get me, you know, into this job in the, in the school.

And then I had the, uh, the indecency to, as they put it ...

A- Anders poked, you know.

I, I went over to the other side.

And so he was left with egg on his face and he was pretty upset at me for becoming Catholic.

But we continued to be friends and we would go out to lunch together and we'd talk about our families, but I couldn't really talk about Catholicism.

That was sort of off the table.

Then after, maybe about seven years I think, he finally realized, "Why I'm being uncharitable to Anders not letting him talk about his Catholicism." So he sorta opened up and we began to share about the Catholic faith.

And, uh, at one time I asked him, his name's Jed.

I said, "Jed?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "You're a Protestant, right?" He says, "That's right." I said, "You believe in the Bible alone?" And he said, "That's correct." I said, "Okay, let me ask you a question." "What's that?" "How do you know the difference between a dogma and an opinion?" He said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Well, you know, a dogma, dogmas are those things that all Christians have to believe, like the dogma of the Trinity or the incarnation.

An opinion is something that people could legitimately disagree on without it actually rupturing the unity of the church.

How do you know the difference between a dogma and an opinion based on the Bible alone?" And he said, "Huh."

And six months later, he was Catholic.

Because we'll get into this, once you unpack the logic of the question, you realize it's only when you have the magisterium and the Catholic Church and sacred tradition that you can adjudicate that question.

'Cause the Bible alone won't tell you whether a disagreement is substantive or not, right?

So anyway, so Jed becomes Catholic and then, um, couple of years later, he and I were driving from Alabama to Steubenville, Ohio for a, for an apologetics conference.

And, uh, on the way up, he'd been Catholic, I don't know, three or four years.

I said, uh, I said, "Jed, you've been Catholic for a while now.

What, what difference has Catholicism made to your life?"

And honestly, I thought he was gonna say, "Well, you know, I have so much more certainty in my active faith now that I know the difference between dogma and opinion," right?

That's not what he said.

He said, "David,

it's the difference it's made to my marriage

because of the dignity with which I now regard my wife."

And that's been my experience as well, and that's what I wanna share to you, share with you today.

I'm gonna tell you why.

All right.

Also, wanna say this is not a talk only for married people.

All right?

I imagine a lot of you're married, but even if you're not married, I have, I have something to tell you, I hope.

Because see, the, the, our culture's attitude about marriage is that marriage takes the, the shape of the romantic comedy, you know, the genre of romantic comedy.

And what is, how does a romantic comedy work?

Well, ultimately, life, the universe and everything in the romantic comedy must converge on the question of my own private romantic or erotic attraction.

And that, that's ultimately what marriage serves to facilitate and to hallow.

I have some soulmate that satisfies me and all of my longings and everything else has to converge to, to bring that to pass.

And so, marriage is just an institution to serve that utterly subjective sense of what I need and what's important to me.

And, uh, and, and the rest of reality can kind of, well, you know, be damned as it were.

And that's really the way our culture thinks about marriage.

If I- ...

if I am attracted to a tomato, I should be allowed to marry a tomato, right?

It's whatever serves my ultimate interest.

But that's not at all the way the Catholic Church understands marriage.

Marriage is not just a private institution to serve my own particular romantic or erotic predilections, but it's very much a public institution for the good of society and par- in particular, in sacramental marriage, for the good of the society of the Catholic faith.

And so marriage, believe it or not, the church teaches, is an ecclesial state.

Now, what do I mean by that?

Well, it's pretty obvious that that father, the ordained person, uh, he's not, he's not ordained to satisfy some, some private fancy of his own.

He, he's ordained to serve you, the people of God.

His ordination is a, is a sacrament of service to put himself in a very determinate way to the, to the service of the people of God.

That's why when he gets ordained, did he get ordained on the beach?

Right?

Did he or- get ordained, uh, uh, uh, on a rollercoaster ride at the top of Space Mountain in Disney World?

No.

He gets ordained in a cathedral because the setting conveys the nature of the sacrament.

It expresses why the sacrament is there, for the service of the people of God.

In the same way, some people say, "Well, you know, I'm getting married as a Catholic, but why can't I get married on the beach?

Why can't I get married under the ocean?" I knew a couple one time that got married underwater in scuba gear.

Why can't I get married at the top of Space Mountain at Disney World?

For the very same reason, because just as the priesthood is a sacrament of service for the people of God, marriage is a sacrament of service, not just to serve my own private good, but to serve the good of the family....

and the good of the people of God.

So if you're not married, how does marriage serve you?

Let's take the paradigm case of an unmarried person in the Catholic Church, a priest.

Why does a priest need the sacrament of matrimony?

All right.

Well, for one blindingly obvious reason, I gave a talk once to a, um, to a conference of priests and I was urging the priests, "Please preach Catholic doctrine.

Preach Catholic doctrine." And there was a- a Nigerian priest, uh, who was very enthusiastic and he jumped up and he said, "Yes, yes.

This is what I'm always telling my people.

I tell them, 'People, have babies.' Where do you think priests come from?

They don't, they don't grow on mango trees.'" You know?

So at a very material level, you need families to produce priests.

Right?

But there's another, also even more sublime reason I think that priests need marriages.

You know, a good friend of mine, Father John Paul Zeller at The Network, Franciscan, um- uh, Franciscan friar told me when he was discerning a vocation,

uh, he told his spiritual director, you know, "I'm not sure if I'm meant to be a priest because I so much want to be a father." And his spiritual director said, "Well, there would be something wrong with you if you didn't want to be a father.

No man who doesn't want to be a father should become a priest." Right?

Because the priest is a father to his people, so priests need families to learn what fatherhood and motherhood look like so they can express that in their vocation of service.

Right?

Um, now,

so, you know, some of the goods that marriage has for the whole people of God, we already talked about one of them, the replenishment of sa- of Catholic society.

Make more Catholics.

Another one, modeling fatherhood and motherhood, but also modeling charity in a- in a particular way.

Uh, the love that Christ has for his bride, which we're gonna talk about as we move along.

All right.

Um, and, um,

one other thing.

As I give this talk, I wanna make it clear that I am not presenting my own case as in any way exemplary.

Right?

And when I say that the Catholic Church saved my marriage, I don't mean by that that the Catholic Church perfected my marriage and that, uh, and that you should look to me as some kind of example.

Eh, I, I, I have known, in my marriage, deep tragedy, deep loss, uh, personal failure, crushing doubt, re- all kinds of problems, and, uh, and no hint of triumphalism is implied.

All right?

And many non-Catholics, I should add, uh, some of my own family members, have had better marriages and more virtuous lives than I have.

So I'm not here to set myself up as an example, I'm really here as a catechist, as a teacher, to propose to you elements of the Catholic faith illumined by my own, uh, somewhat poor example.

All right, so, with that by way of introduction, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the way I grew up.

Um, and this is to talk about my Protestant upbringing, n- not so much to cast shade on Protestantism as to draw, by way of contrast, what are some of the really l- illuminating and brilliant aspects of the Catholic faith.

So I grew up in, uh, Birmingham, Alabama, which at one time, according to the demographers, was the most Protestant city in America.

If you measure by church attendance per capita, it was the most Protestant city in America.

And the only Catholics I knew growing up were ex-Catholics.

And we had lots of them in our church.

And I used to ask them, you know, "Well, did you grow up a Christian?" And they would say, "Oh, no.

I grew up a Catholic." All right?

And that was the, that was the attitude.

Right?

If you were a Catholic, you couldn't be a, a real Christian.

And I really kinda thought that Catholics were

sort of neurotic nutjobs who felt like they could climb to heaven on their own rosary beads, and, uh, they were superstitious and, and, uh, and bound by, you know, slavish tradition to a, to a tyrant who lived in Rome.

So the worst possible caricatures of Catholicism that you could imagine.

And the only good Catholic was a converted Catholic.

You know, one that we had persuaded to become Presbyterian or at least Evangelical, as we were in our tradition.

Um, so I had absolutely no interest in Catholicism at all, except as the targets for conversion for proselytism.

Now, you know, some of the things that I thought were wrong with Catholicism and the way I characterized my own religious faith, uh, we held extremely strongly to the Protestant principle, the Lutheran principle, that a man is saved by faith alone

and not by any kind of transformation of his moral life.

All right?

So being moral is all well and good, uh, and commanded by God, but ultimately, it's not dispositive for the question of eternal life.

It's faith alone that brings one to salvation.

Um, and Catholics, of course, believe differently.

Um, so another thing that we believed, and I've already alluded to this, was the idea that the only religious authority you needed at the end of the day was the Bible, the Bible alone.

That the Bible was God's instruction manual on the Christian life.

That everything needful for faith and morality and practice could be found in the pages of sacred scripture.

Now, you, you Catholics, you've probably heard this about Protestant doctrine before, but there are some implications

of the scripture-alone principle that you may not have considered.

All right?

Excuse me, just one second.

So it's not just, it's not just that the Bible is a sufficient guide to questions of faith and practice.

There's actually, very often implied in that, a certain kind of moral theology, and, uh, like what, what morality fundamentally is implied in this doctrine of scripture alone?

Let me unpack this for you a little bit.

Right?

On the Protestant view, or at least many Protestants would hold-...

that because everything I need to know about morality is in the Bible, morality is reducible, it's reducible to the, the prohibitions or the admonitions of scripture.

The, the sort of literal denotative sense of the words and that if something is not written specifically in the Bible, then it is a thing indifferent or permissible.

All right?

Now, uh, so let me give you an example if I can think of one.

All right, um, well, clearly the Bible says, "Thou shall not commit adultery." So adultery is ruled out.

All right?

Um, there are other prohibitions on, say, certain forms of sexual behavior that are specifically prohibited in sacred scripture.

But there's an awful lot of things in that domain that are never mentioned in the Bible explicitly.

And so, if you apply the Protestant principle, you would conclude, well, all of those things are a matter of indifference, and you can take them or leave them.

Eh, one place where this plays out quite, quite prominently w- as it relates to marriage would be the question of contraception.

And, uh, well, Pa- uh, Protestants quibble about this.

Their sort of dominant view would be that's not something the Bible addresses and therefore that's not a moral question.

It's a, it's an indifferent question and people can make up their own minds about it.

Um, now, that's not the way Catholics think about morality at all.

So the Protestant view is something called Divine Command Theory.

The way something is right or wrong is simply because God has commanded it explicitly in the pages of scripture.

But the Catholic view is that morality is the science of human happiness, and ultimately our moral acts are aimed at the flourishing of the human person according to his or her nature.

And so things like rational reflection on the nature of the person, what actually leads to a flourishing human life, eh, eh, privately or in society, that those kinds of considerations are, are very valuable to, to our moral life and our moral reasoning.

And as such, there really is no domain of human experience or human action that's outside the realm of the moral life.

Everything can have moral significance if it impinges on the question of human flourishing in, in our private life or in society.

And I can come to moral conclusions about things that may not be mentioned in the Bible.

So you can reason about things like the morality of contraception or abortion even if I don't find those specifically delineated in scripture through prohibitions.

And in fact, most of our moral choices that we make on a day-to-day basis, we don't make with reference to some proof text from sacred scripture.

You know?

Example.

Um, you know, my, my kid is struggling with his algebra homework at 8:00 at night and I'm exhausted.

Can I go to bed or do I have to stay up and help him with his algebra homework?

Right?

That's a prudential choice made in the moment based on an intimate knowledge of my child, whether he can do this independently, whether he really requires my help, and what charity demands in the moment.

These kinds of prudential mo- moral choices, which are 99% of the moral choices, choices that we make, can't be answered by simple reference to an abstract formula drawn from a specific prohibition of the Bible.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Okay.

If I, if I lose you, don't...

You know, let me know.

So sola scriptura, with all that that implies, was built into our experience of the faith.

All right.

Here's another principle of Protestantism that was very important for my understanding of marriage down the road.

The Protestant idea that there are no priests, there are no ordained persons in the church with a special, uh, function, a special office to offer sacrifice or sacraments.

The Protestant view is that everyone is a priest,

which is in some ways tantamount to saying no one is, right?

Particularly when you eliminate the notion of sacrifice.

Now, what are the implications of that for the way you live your life or the way you live your marriage?

Well, if there are no specific states of life...

And this is...

The Catholic view is that there are states of life.

If there are no specific states of life set out, ecclesial states of life to which I can give myself as a mode of sanctification, then, then how do I serve God in the world specifically?

Well, in my community, and this is very common in Evangelical Protestantism,

since all you need is faith,

the most important thing I can give to another person is faith.

Since all you need is faith, the most important thing you can give to another human being is faith.

And therefore proselytism, right, the task of trying to actively make converts by persua- by persuasion or manipulation becomes, uh, really a preeminent way of serving God.

And everything else and every other mode of life becomes sort of subservient to that aim of proselytism.

And so when encouraging young people to think about their vocation in life, you would often hear discussions like this.

"Well, you know, you can be a, a Christian businessman because the sphere of business is a place where you could, quote-unquote, witness for Christ in your business life." Or, "You could be a Christian doctor because in your medical practice you could witness for Christ in your medical practice." But, but whatever it was you did professionally or where you went in the world, it all was sort of subsumed under this goal of proselytism and making converts.

That's they way witness for Christ was conceptualized.

Because at the end of the day, all that really matters is faith.

Right?

And so, uh, uh, no one ever told me this explicitly, but the way this translated into my view of marriage is that marriage itself becomes a sort of launching pad, economic, domestic, however you wanna conceive of it, for this work of going out into the world and making converts.

Right?

It's like marriage itself didn't have its own proper utility....

right?

It didn't have its own proper ends, but it like everything else, was ordered ultimately towards this, this, uh, conversionistic, proselytizing account of Christian service out in the world.

All right.

Now, that's very different from the Catholic idea that marriage has its own proper function, its own proper ends internal to itself, namely the good of the family, the raising up of children in virtue, right, as a service to the wider community, yes.

But, but specifically by conforming ourselves to the pattern of Christ's charity.

Right.

It's a very different way of thinking about serving God in the world.

Now, um ...

I wanna say one other thing about this life of virtue.

Now I've mentioned that growing up Protestant

was all about faith alone, it was all about the Bible alone, it was all about conversion and v- and proselytism.

But I don't want to imply by that, that the people I grew up with were themselves lacking in virtue.

Right?

In fact, many of the people I grew up with, as Protestants, were very, very virtuous people.

My parents were very virtuous people that had a strong Christian marriage.

My grandparents, many of my friends and neighbors were virtuous people.

But they were virtuous, not because of, but in spite of, their Protestant doctrine.

They were virtuous because they had been raised in a culture that inculcated certain values and virtues in them.

Many of them...

You know, my parents grew up in the late 30s and 40s, uh, when that sort of thing was more common.

I grew up in the 70s.

A lot changed over those 30 and 40 years in American culture, as you well know.

And so, whereas my parents could draw on a wellspring of human tradition and cultural values that they took for granted and never had to articulate, I grew up in an environment where, you know, my peers and my culture had lost a lot of that foundation of just sort of basic human goodness, and I was left with the, sort of the mere doctrinal propositions of faith alone and Bible alone.

And so, I felt like my own life lacked a lot in the virtue department that my parents would've taken for granted.

Now, in that, um,

uh, with that background,

I met the woman who would become my wife in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1989.

I was a freshman at Tulane University.

Uh, my wife was from New York, I was from Alabama.

She had grown up Catholic, uh, but was an atheist by the time she made her confirmation, and faith, uh, had meant absolutely nothing to her.

Now, w- when I met her, I had myself not been a deep practitioner of my faith for quite some time and lived a kind of worldly life.

But, uh, I was immediately impressed with Jill because she was a person of deep seriousness.

And, uh, I came to realize that she'd had an awful lot of suffering in her life; had difficult family background, alcoholic parents, a lot of abuse.

And, uh, and something about her gripped me.

I felt like that I needed to share the Christian faith with her such as I knew it, because I knew I didn't have the resources to meet her spiritual needs or emotional needs, but maybe Jesus did.

And so, she actually responded to that appeal and began going with me to the Presbyterian church.

But because she's a better person than I am, she immediately was gripped by the idea that, uh, this is something that should require of me a total donation of myself.

I should throw myself into this Christianity business whole hog.

And she said, "You know, we ought to...

We gotta switch colleges, move from Tulane and go to a Christian college and prepare for Christian ministry." And, uh, believe it or not, I actually responded to that appeal.

So we transferred out of Tulane.

Uh, we went to Wheaton College in Illinois, which is an evangelical Protestant school, began to study theology and train for Christian ministry, and shortly thereafter, I got engaged and we were married in 1992.

Now, um, we didn't have any marriage preparation.

Uh, we didn't have any discussions about the timing or, or the bearing of children.

Uh, we didn't have any talks about what marriage actually was or what purpose it served or why it existed.

It just seemed like a cultural given.

And in fact, I think both of us entered into marriage with this sort of very Protestant idea that, "Okay, we're gonna get married so that then we can go out and serve God." All right.

As if, as if marriage and serving God were two distinct states.

And, uh, my wife had the idea, she was captivated by the idea of foreign missions, which is a sort of celebrated activity in Protestant Christianity.

We, we revered missionaries the way Catholics often revere Catholic religious, somebody's whose life is totally consecrated to this form of service.

Now, I had a different idea.

I, I became captivated by the idea of academic theology and university teaching and seminary professorship.

So we, we went to college, we went to ultimately grad school and seminary both motivated in a sense by the idea of serving God.

But beneath the surface, there were two very different conceptions of what that would look like.

My wife thinking ultimately we would go into Christian missions, maybe overseas.

Me thinking I would land a professorship at a Protestant seminary or a graduate school.

Um, it goes without saying, of course, that we used contraception in marriage because no one told us not to and we didn't really have an articulate philosophy about the bearing of children.

We figured kids would happen when they were ready.

Now, what I...

What we found after we were married for a few years is that we had very different ideas there as well.

And, uh, she began to want to have children pretty soon after we got married, and I had, uh, a more utilitarian view that, "Well, you know, I've got all...

I've got, gotta get my seminary degree, gotta get a PhD, gotta write a dissertation.

Uh, we should put this thing off for three, five, six, seven, 10 years." And that became, uh, uh, an incipient source of conflict in our relationship.

She ultimately won the fight.

We started having kids in 1995, for which I'm very grateful.

But the seeds of conflict were born there at the very beginning....

because we didn't have a consistent articulate view of what marriage was or why it existed, nor did we have a consistent view of what it meant to serve God.

Because we had no doctrine of vocation, right?

Which flows, again, out of our, I really felt like deformed Protestant understanding of the sacrament of matrimony.

Am I making sense?

You guys following me?

Okay.

Now , so with that background and those tensions beginning to build in our married life, um, I went to seminary and ultimately to graduate school where I did a PhD in the history of theology with an emphasis on the Protestant Reformation and the thought of the reformer John Calvin.

Um, I think I'm one of the few people who can say in the world that John Calvin made me a Catholic.

Ah, but he did.

All right, now, so, I, I, I'd like to tell you,

um, something about

what I learned, uh, when I was in seminary.

Um, well, you know, actually I'm gonna back up.

Was in seminary, we did actually conceive a child, our first child, Jonathan.

And when Jill got pregnant, and I learned that she was pregnant, I turned and I looked at her and I said in utter seriousness, I said, uh, "Okay, Jill, now we have to be perfect.

Now we have to be perfect, we have a child." All right?

And believe it or not, that's what the Catholic Church teaches.

Jesus says, "Be you perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." All right?

What I didn't have, what I didn't have, is I didn't have a theology or form of practice that facilitated moral perfection.

I didn't have a way to grow towards perfection in the moral light.

I understood the need for it, out of love for this infant that had come into my life.

I had absolutely no way to achieve it.

All right?

And, uh, and so when those tensions began to build, right?

And this, with the, with the birth of children, like, eh, far from resolving that conflict, it got even worse.

And here's why, all right?

I did not give up my aspiration, but the way I would serve God in the world was by being an outstanding academic.

All right?

And it's easy to justify pride and vanity under the description that I'm doing this for God.

Okay?

And it was a lot of pride and a lot of insecurity and a lot of vanity in my determination to serve God by excellence in the academic world.

And I poured myself into my studies with a kind of obsessive fury that would lead me to spend 15, 17 hours a day in the library, you know, reading thou- literally thousands upon thousands of books while my wife began to sag under the weight of family life and the care of children.

All right?

And those of you that have kids can understand what I'm talking about.

So the, so those tensions that were, mm, beginning to build became more intense as we began to have kids and the pressures of family life pushed in on us.

There is a secular psychologist named, uh, John Gottman, who has some theories about the breakdown of marriages and has a, a process that he describes as the, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" for failing marriages.

He says it goes like this.

It begins in criticism.

Begins in criticism.

It, it moves to defensiveness,

um, followed by stonewalling which is, you know, you criticize me, I get defensive, uh, and then I finally just shut down emotionally, all right, when I'm tired of being criticized.

Uh, and then it ends in contempt.

And he says, "When you make it through the four stages of criticism,

defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt, that the odds of divorce are astronomically high." All right?

And we eventually recapitulated all of those steps to the point that

by, I think, around 1999, my wife actually said to me, and this is how the book begins, she said to me one day, "I hate you and I want a divorce." All right?

And so while I'm simultaneously pursuing a degree in Christian theology with the goal of serving God publicly through a ministry of teaching, my marriage was literally falling apart.

And one of the things that precipitated the breakdown of my marriage was precisely my theology.

My theology of ministry, the way I understood serving God, and my utter lack of a theology of marriage or family life or vocation or virtue or morality or moral transformation.

So there was a direct connection between the breakdown of my marriage and the deficiencies of my Protestant theology.

Now again, I wanna emphasize, many Protestants have wonderful marriages and virtuous lives.

This was my case.

Now, um, so while my marriage is falling apart and I'm still obsessively studying the Christian faith...

How am I doing on time?

Okay.

Uh, my studies in Reformation theology began to surprise me.

All right?

So one of the things that I began to discover, Protestants all have this idea that Luther's doctrine of faith alone is a recovery

of ancient Christian tradition.

And by studying 2,000 years of church history, I began to discover that that was far from true.

Right?

In fact, the, the earlier I went in church history, the less and less like Lutheranism Christianity became.

All right?

Saint Augustine of Hippo is the one father of the church that all the Protestants allude to constantly as their, as their model, as their progenitor.

So I read thousands of pages of Augustine and I was shocked, absolutely shocked, to discover that Augustine of Hippo was a Catholic.

All right?

That was, that was sort of devastating to me.

And, uh, it was prompted by that realization...Ah, ah, I- I said, "Okay, well maybe I need to push earlier into the tradition." So I went back and recommitted myself to the study of Saint Paul, from which Lutherans draw their doctrine.

And I read only the best in Protestant scholarship on Paul, and I came to the very disturbing conclusion that the best in modern Protestant scholarship also concludes that Luther had radically misread Saint Paul on the nature of salvation.

Uh, then I read, uh, Protestant histories, Protestant scholarship on the history of the doctrine, and discovered that the best in Protestant scholarship concluded that Luther had been an innovator, that he had made up his doctrine out of whole cloth, it had no precedent in the tradition.

So justification by faith, whoosh, out the window.

Right?

When I began to study the issue of scripture alone, right, Sola Scriptura, again, I had the same problem.

I, uh, I, I, I, I said, "W- when does this doctrine emerge in church history?" And really, the truth of the matter is, is it emerges in 1519 in a debate between Martin Luther and the Catholic polemicist, John Eck.

Luther and Eck were debating, uh, various matters, and Eck pushes Luther to the wall, rhetorically.

And he, he, he forces Luther to admit that his doctrines had already been condemned by the Council of Constance in 1415.

And Luther says, "Well, you know, Eck, you're right.

My doctrines were condemned by the Council of Constance, but you know what?

So much the worse for the Council of Constance.

I reject sacred tradition.

I'm gonna stand on the Bible alone." And so what I began to realize about Luther's doctrine was it wasn't a, a principle that he had derived from the data of revelation itself.

It was something that he was forced into by polemical necessity.

When the weight of tradition was against him, he simply rejected it.

That's a, that's a reactionary doctrine, not a principled reflection on divine revelation.

And I began to realize that there were serious problems with the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

Some of them I've already mentioned.

One of them in particular, this issue of, how do you know the difference between a dogma and an opinion?

So consider, if you're looking at the Bible alone, two Protestants read the Bible, and they disagree on some matter.

Well, the disagreement itself isn't the big issue for me.

The issue is, how do you know if your disagreement is substantive?

Over what kind of issues should Christians divide, and when can they tolerate differences?

See, the Catholic Church has a principled way of dealing with that.

In the fourth century, Catholics disagreed.

They disagreed radically over the question of, how is Jesus divine?

How is Jesus divine?

The Arians gave one answer, the Orthodox gave another answer.

Constantine said, "Could we please just all get along?" Right?

And the Catholic Church said, "No, this is an issue that is determinative for Christian faith.

We, we, we will dogmatize about it." But on other issues, the Catholic Church says, "Hey, we're fine.

You can disagree about this, it doesn't matter.

You can hold different opinions." I'll give you an example.

In the late 16th century,

Dominicans and Jesuits got in a big fight over this question.

Does God grant efficacious grace based on his knowledge of future counterfactuals?

And I'm sure that keeps all of you up at night.

Right?

And, uh, here's the funny thing.

The Dominicans said, "Absolutely not.

To hold that opinion is Pelagian and heretical."

And the, uh, and the Jesuits said, "Absolutely so.

And to hold the contrary, uh, you know, it makes you a Manichean."

And they each condemned the other as a heretic.

So they took the matter to the Pope

in a, in a famous meeting called the Congregatio des Auxiliis, and they wore out two popes.

They killed the first one.

They warned h- h- he died during the, during the Congregatio.

The second one, uh, listened to all of their debates, and he said, "Okay, guys, here's what we're gonna do.

Uh, you go home, go back to your schools, teach theology.

I forbid you to call each other heretics.

I'm going to consider the matter, and when I've decided, I will let you know."

It's been 500 years,

and the church has decided either one of those opinions is allowable, even though they're diametrically opposite.

So not every matter is a dogma in the Catholic faith, but we have a principled way to tell the difference, namely the Sacred Magisterium.

All right?

But without that, there's literally no way to know.

And so the problems with Sola Scriptura began to mount for me, whoosh, that went right out the window.

All right?

Um,

but...

More importantly...

Well, I'll, I'll share one other, one other sort of key moment.

Um, and, and this was the, the first moment I had a serious challenge to my doctrine of Protestant morality, right?

Um, I was at the University of Iowa at the time, and they would often have speakers come in.

And they, and they invited a man from Loyola University of New Orleans, a fellow by the name of James Gaffney.

And he was invited to come in and give a lecture on the ethics of abortion.

And I was a Protestant, so I was pro-life.

A lot of Protestants are pro-life.

But I would've based my objections to abortion on biblical principles.

So I was interested to hear what this Catholic fellow had to say.

So Gaffney comes in, and the first thing he says is, "Uh, this is not a talk about politics.

I'm gonna take the political question off the table.

I'm not advocating for pro-life as a political policy.

I'm just talking about the underlying morality of the act." So right away, he had sort of lowered the emotional temperature in the room and allowed pro-abortion people, uh, to feel less threatened by his remarks.

He says, "I'm not seeking to impose this on you in a political way in this talk, just talk about the morality of the act."...

then he proceeded to give about an hour long lecture in which he discoursed on the morality of abortion without ever raising the question of divine revelation of scripture.

And he used arguments like the following.

He said, um, "So, uh, if you were driving down the road

at night in the rain and you saw an object, uh, in the road and you couldn't tell, is that a cardboard box or is that a child?

I can't tell.

What, what, what would you do in an instance like that?

Would you, would you slam on the brakes or the gas?

Well, anybody would slam on the brakes.

If you don't know the status of the object, you stop to consider it before you plow right through it." And he says, "So even if you hold that we cannot know the humanity of the fetus,

the, the rational principle would be to stop rather than proceed.

And we behave that way in our daily life." He says, "There's another argument.

Um, uh, the principle of the, uh, of the golden rule.

Don't do unto others what you would th- would, would not want them to do unto you." And he says, "Look, y- you can, you can do this with people because you're able to put yourself in their shoes.

You know, you wouldn't say of a tree, 'I wouldn't chop down a tree because I wouldn't wanna be chopped down.' I, I'm not a tree.

That doesn't make any sense, right?

But I can do that with a human being.

If I can, if I can perform the imaginative exercise of placing myself in someone else's shoes, then I know that that principle applies.

Well, can I say, 'If I were a fetus?' Can I conceptualize it?

Can I imagine that?

Well yes, because we were all fetuses at one time and I can imagine if I were a fetus, if I were an unborn child, would I want to be aborted?" You know, when I, when my daughter was about five or six years old, we actually went and prayed in front of an abortion clinic, uh, with some regularity.

Uh, which has since closed, by the way.

And, uh, and we explained to my daughter what abortion was and why we were praying in front of the clinic.

And she looked up at me and she said, "Daddy, why would someone do that?

They wouldn't want to have been aborted."

And it struck me that, that, that the five-year-old child had better logic than many moral philosophers, right?

So Dr. Gaffney began to lay out some of these arguments, but what really impressed me, as a Protestant listening to him, is that when he finished his lecture, there was a young girl in the audience who said, "You know, when I came into this lecture, I was actually in favor of abortion.

I considered abortion to be the morally licit option, but after listening to you, you have changed my mind.

I now understand abortion to be immoral." And as a Protestant listening to that, I was blown away because do you know how many secularists I had converted by preaching, "Thus saith the Lord.

The Bible says..." None.

I had never managed to turn someone's moral opinions 180 degrees

simply by reference to divine revelation.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, "If your opponent does not admit the principles of love- of revelation, there is no arguing with him about revelation." And yet here, a Catholic moral theologian ap- appealing simply to the principles of natural law

had successfully persuaded someone to change their point of view.

That made a deep impression on me and began to undermine my confidence in the m- the moral sufficiency of the doctrine of the Bible alone.

All right?

Um, but, but then it began to dawn on me that the Catholic faith,

um,

by proposing that salvation consisted in a transformation of the moral life, by proposing that moral knowledge requires more than just sacred scripture and actually can appeal to a philosophical consideration of the flourishing of the human person, the thought occurred to me, "I need that.

I need that.

Because my marriage is failing right now because I lack that transformation of my moral life.

I lack that transformation and virtue.

I lack those principles of sound, prudent reasoning that would enable me to make good, concrete moral choices in the moment.

Perhaps I need the sacraments of the Catholic Church." A, a key moment for me, I, I, I was, uh, still in proselytizing mode and I was on the phone with a friend of mine who's not a Christian and had recently committed to memory an excellent apologetical book on the reliability of the New Testament.

We began to have a debate on the reliability of the New Testament, and I absolutely wiped the floor with this guy.

I mean, I had hundreds of arguments.

I had tons of scholarly resources.

He had none of that, and I just demolished him in debate.

Now, what did I think would happen at that moment?

We finished and I sort of laid down the gauntlet, as it were, rhetorically, and he said to me, "Yeah, but David?

I don't like Christians."

And I thought to myself, "Neither do I.

Myself chief among them," right?

And so moments like that, I began to realize

how much my deficient theology and practice had actually made me into a bad and obnoxious person.

You know, when you meet someone who thinks that their goal in life, the way they serve God is to make you think like them, they make really bad dinner guests, you know?

Which I realized that I had become.

And so

from that point of view, I, I, I began to consider...

How am I doing on time?

Just a second.

That, uh, that perhaps I needed, perhaps I needed the Catholic faith.

Now, um, I, uh, uh, I would like, I had planned to go in much greater depth actually into the sacrament of matrimony itself, the nature of sacraments and the nature of grace, right?

And, uh, I'm gonna run outta time, so I'm not gonna be able to get into all that part of the discussion.

I ran a little bit long, I'm sorry.

But I will tell you this much, right?

That at the heart of the Catholic sacrament of marriage-...

is the idea that marriage, like all sacraments, is a sign of a spiritual reality that we find in Jesus.

And what is that sign?

Saint Paul tells us.

It is the love that Christ has for his Church.

To purify her, to encourage her, to build her up in charity and sanctity so that we can hein to the knowledge of God.

All right?

And that's the ultimate end of the married life.

And so, b- by giving oneself to the state of marriage, one can draw on this symbology of Christ in the Church, day-by-day, to nourish one's conception of oneself with one's spouse, in a way that perfects the personality and leads both of us to a, to a deepened experience of God.

Where our service to the Church and our service to ourselves and to the immediate family is not based on Proselytism.

But it's based on creating this community of love in which I model the love that Christ has for his Church.

So that began to appeal to me and I recognized, okay, this, this, this may be the solution to my marriage problems.

Right?

Ultimately, my marriage is falling apart because of my own lack of morality, facilitated by my bad theology.

Here, the Catholic faith has offered me this tremendous alternative and it promises moral transformation.

It promises a view of married life itself that's transformative if I will reflect upon and meditate and internalize the meaning of the sacrament.

That's wonderful.

So here's what I'll do.

I'll go and tell my wife that I need to become Catholic.

So I go to my Jill, I go to my wife, and I say, "Jill, you know, I, I, uh, I think I need to become Catholic." And she said to me, "David, you're absolutely nuts.

You are crazy.

I grew up Catholic.

You know, Catholic, Catholicism is about running to mass, running out of the parking lot without speaking to anybody.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's pointless ritual.

It's utterly meaningless and I'll have nothing to do with it." Right?

And so actually, I, I lost the courage of my convictions.

And for, uh, I think about a year, I sort of lapsed into no faith or almost patent unbelief because I didn't, um, I didn't have the courage to follow through with my convictions, particularly in the face of the opposition of my wife.

And then again, because she's a better person than I am, eventually she realized that, uh, that I was just languishing.

I had just imploded morally.

And so she said, "Okay, y- if you need to become Catholic, y- you go do this 'cause I'd rather have you Catholic than have you, you know, this, this worthless lump on the couch that does nothing, you know?

So go become Catholic if you need to." But she was not happy about it.

So I go off and I become Catholic, and still, our marriage is rocky.

It's not, it's not better yet by a long shot.

And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm Catholic but she doesn't really like it.

And so, um, you know, I, she didn't want me going to confession.

My parish had confessions on Saturday afternoon.

And that, you know, she didn't like me away from the kids and taking time away from the family.

So, I had to figure out, I, I need to, um, I need to find a way to go to confession on the sly.

Some way where, where Jill won't notice or won't care.

And I discovered that there was this institution about five miles from my house that, that I had previously not really known anything about that ha- that heard confessions every day.

Every day.

I could go at 11:00 o'clock, five days a week, Monday through Friday, during my lunch hour at work, and I could go to confession.

And it was, it was staffed by these Franciscan priests, all right?

Uh, the, the, the, um, uh, the, the, um, uh, e- and they were, uh, they were founded by this, by this nun named Mother Angelica.

And, uh, and they were attached to this institution called EWTM.

So I actually started going out to EWTM, not to make Catholic radio, uh, but to get my sins forgiven.

And while I was there, I met a man named, uh, Angeles Shaughnessy.

He's dead now.

He was a Capuchin friar.

He was on loan to the network for a while.

And I discovered in the confessional, um, a power that I had never found any place else in my entire life.

You know, as a Protestant, you believe in the forgiveness of sins, and you really hope it applies to you.

Right?

'Cause the issue is if you have true faith, well, you're forgiven.

So how do you know you have true faith?

It's a dilemma.

It's a dilemma for the Protestant.

A friend of mine once said, "The elect know for sure they're going to heaven and I might be one of them."

Right?

That's the Protestant dilemma.

If I have true faith, I'm forgiven.

How do I know I have true faith?

Right?

Um, dear God, please forgive me.

No, I'll try that again.

Dear God, please forgive me.

One time, when I was in college, we used to have this prayer chapel at the university, a Protestant prayer chapel.

I- imagine an adoration chapel without the blessed sacrament.

That's kinda what it was like.

And kids would go in there and they would pray and they would, they would write prayer requests, prayer intentions, out of a little sticky note and put it on a table in hopes that other people would take it up and pray for them.

I used to go in there and I would pray by myself and I would pick up these notes, re- read what other students had written.

And often times they were, amounted to confessions of sin.

"Brothers, please pray for me.

I'm struggling with this.

Please pray for me, I have this doubt.

Please pray for me, I've stumbled in this way." It began to occur to me, you know, this, this cry of the human heart, this need for affirmation, this need to have forgiveness expressed in a tangible way.

Wouldn't it be nice, you know, I'm sitting in this darkened, quiet room all by myself, wouldn't it be nice if God would reach down in this context and say to me, "It's okay, Dave.

I've got this.

You're forgiven."?

And the first time I went into the confessional,

it's like my mind was blown.

Because of course, the priest said, "Through the ministry of the church," and I remembered Jesus' words in John chapter 20, "I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit." And I recognized that, that desire that I've had for so many years, to have this tangible expression of forgiveness has been given to me in the sacrament of confession and what an encouragement that is.

What an encouragement that is in, uh, in my life of faith.

So I started going to Father Angeles and I found him to be the most compassionate confessor I've ever imagined.

He had this way of drawing you into deeper consideration.

I'd finish my confessions and he would say, "Is there anything else?" Like he had all the time in the world.

"Okay, okay.

Let me think, Father."...

"very good.

Is there anything else?" You know?

But always compassion.

And I would share with him about my marital troubles and my, and my sufferings, and he would say, "It's okay for you to feel this way." He would validate my feelings and encourage me.

Never condemn me.

And just help me along in my faith, and help me along in my faith.

And, you know, when I went to my wife with all of my arguments, and all of my academics, and all of my scholarship about religion and tried to persuade her of the truth of the Catholic faith, I got absolutely nowhere.

Right?

She was fed up to here with me and my academics, which for years she had seen as a obstacle to family life and something that took me away from her and from my children.

She didn't want to hear it.

So finally I realized, maybe that's not the way to make this happen, and I said, um, "Okay, Jill, there's this priest at EWTN.

His name's Father Angelus.

Would you go see him, maybe go to confession to him one time?" She said, "No, absolutely not."

I said, "Please?" And she said, "No, get off of my case.

I won't do it."

And, uh, and I said, "Pretty please?" And she said, "Look, David, I will not go, and I, I don't ever want you to mention it to me again." "Okay, okay, okay.

Please?"

And she said, "Look, I will go one time, one time, uh, if you promise to never mention it to me again,

just to get you off my back." I, I said, "Okay, deal." So she goes to Father Angelus.

Then the next week she goes back,

and then the next week she goes back, and then the next week she goes back, and then the next week she goes back.

And then I had to leave town on a business trip, and I left and I called her up one day and I said, "So, so what are you guys doing?" And she said, "Well, I, I took the children to daily mass."

And I, after I picked myself off of the floor, you know- ...

I, I was like, "Wow.

That, that's kind of amazing." And I came back home and I found my wife vigorously practicing the Catholic faith.

One night I woke up

and my wife's not in bed, and I, I look over the edge of the bed and she's on the floor playing the rosary, at like, you know, one o'clock in the morning.

I was like, "She's more Catholic than the Pope." Right?

And, uh, and, and years later, years later, I said, "What did Father Angelus say to you?

What did he say to you?" And she said, "He told me something that no one had ever told me before.

He told me that my suffering had meaning, that my suffering had value." And her life to that point had been little more than suffering.

You know, a couple of years after she came back to the vigorous practice of the faith, she met a canonist in our diocese who pointed out to her that our marriage was probably invalid for a variety of sort of, you know, canonically, technical reasons I won't get into.

Probably invalid.

He said, "Your va- marriage is not valid in the eyes of God or the church.

You need to have your marriage convalidated." And, um, you know, it was no, it was no counselor, no therapist, it was a canon lawyer that threw out a piece of red tape at us, told us we had to go restate our vows in front of a Catholic priest.

And, uh, you know, neither of us wanted to, really wanted to.

Right?

Because we'd been through so much, we'd had so much suffering.

The idea of standing up again and reaffirming our commitment to an institution that had called us, caused us, at this point in our life, so much pain was very, very difficult.

But for love of God and for love of our children, we made this decision that we would recommit to something for no romantic reasons whatsoever at all.

At this point, we were still living somewhat at enmity, but beginning to come together on the question of the meaning of marriage, the value of family and the Catholic faith.

You know, someone asked my wife one time, "So why did you convalidate your marriage?" She said, "In order to suffer." Right?

Um,

but then an amazing thing happened.

After that convalidation, things really, genuinely began to change.

All right?

And we, for the first time ever, began to live our life with a common vision of what marriage was for.

Uh, it wasn't about foreign missions, it wasn't about academic success or teaching theology in a seminary, right?

It was actually about committing ourselves to the common good of this institution, for the love of these children, to raise them up in the life of virtue, to be nourished and transformed by sacramental grace, whether or not it pleased me.

Whether or not it pleased me.

In some years after that decision, I, I, I s- I remarked to a, a friend of mine, I said, "You know, y- you've known me for 20 years.

You know the trouble and the trials that my wife and I have been through, but I can say right now that I am living a life of marital bliss." And my friend, his name's John, he said to me, "I can tell David, it's obvious.

Things have changed.

Things have definitively changed and it is because of the presence of the Catholic faith in your life." You know,

probably one of the calls I got,

uh, that meant the most to me over the years, uh, a lot of times people will write their questions to me in the form of a letter.

And I get a letter one time from this fellow and he says, um, "Uh, Dr. Anders, my, my name is Brother David

and I'm a Melkite monk,

um, and I live on a tower outside of Damascus in Syria,

and I listen to podcasts of EWTN.

And I heard this podcast of an interview that you and your wife gave with Barbara McQuiggin on the show The Good Fight,

and, I, and I, I listened to this show and I have to tell you, Dr. Anders, that, that you're okay,

but your wife is fantastic."

And so I, I read that and I, I, I yell, I say, "Jill," I run downstairs, I say, "Jill, Jill, Jill.

Saint Simeon Stylites is alive and well and he listens to EWTN and he thinks you're fantastic." All right.

Now, um, I wanna, I wanna end here with just a-...

brief citation

from the Second Vatican Council, from the document Gaudiem et Spes, which is the constitution on the church in the modern world.

It's a description of marriage that I think is the most beautiful description of married life I've ever read and, uh, and, and definitely describes what I aspire to.

The council says, "Authentic married love is caught up into divine love and is governed and enriched by Christ's redeeming power and the saving activity of the church

so that this love may lead the spouses to God with powerful effect and may aid and strengthen them in the sublime office of being a father or a mother.

For this reason, Christian spouses have a special sacrament by which they are fortified and receive a kind of consecration in the duties and dignity of their state.

By virtue of this sacrament, as spouses fulfill their conjugal and family obligations, they are penetrated with the spirit of Christ, which suffuses their whole lives with faith, hope, and charity.

And thus, they increasingly advance the perfection of their own personalities as well as their mutual sanctification, and hits...

And hence, contribute jointly to the glory of God."

Amen.

All right.

Uh, I think I'm right at an hour.

An hour and five minutes, so I'll stop there.

And, uh, if, if you wanna do some question and answer, we can have some discussions.

Could be about the content of the talk, the sacrament of matrimony, or you could hit me with your best shot if you want to.

And if anybody's interested when we're done, I brought, I brought 10 copies of the book, right?

And I can, I can let y'all have those for $15 each.

That's all I could fit in my carry-on suitcase.

But, um, anyway.

So I'll...

Yes, sir.

Question.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Repeat the question if somebody has a question.

Okay.

So does somebody have a, a, a question or a comment or a concern or an issue?

Yes, sir.

Um, thank you.

That was

a helpful Appreciate that.

Uh, it doesn't seem like we Yeah, but I Thank you kindly.

But, uh, my question is related more to marriage and,

um, I have some...

Like, a close friend who...

His brother, going through, um, kinda like a divorce almost.

Yeah.

Um, but it's based on

his brother-in-law, or his brother being, um, like more pietistic and like, very narcissistic,

putting everything back to scripture.

So I wanna s- I guess throw that question up to you.

Like, what would you recommend maybe for him to start with?

Like, the Protestant, um, but haven't been open to anything 10:00 PM also, you know, like thing, scripture or, um Yeah.

Okay.

Let me back up, make sure I understand this.

So you, you see...

You've got a friend whose marriage is in trouble and your diagnosis is that the husband is a narcissist and he justifies his egotism by an appeal to the Bible.

All right?

Been there, done that.

Okay?

I understand that very well.

So, um, h- here's, here is the difficulty when you are dealing with, um, with a narcissist, particularly one who rationalizes his narcissism through ideology.

And that, that's what we're talking about, right?

Um, you know, the, the problem with the ideologue is that they have an answer for everything, they can explain everything, right?

And, and they are in love.

And look, I've been there.

I know what this is like from the inside out.

They're in love with their own ratiocination.

Like, they, they, they, they adore their own intellect and their ability to construct a system that can, that can explain everything and crush the opposition, gives them a great sense of control and power.

Okay?

And that, that's what drives this, is, "My, uh, my insecurity, my need for control, my need for power, that craving for, uh, an answer for everything, right?

That I can crush the opposition, is ultimately driven by that, that insecurity and that vanity and that pride." Well, you know, the best answer I've ever had to that was one of my children who's very blunt and, and, uh, and, uh, and plainspoken, said to me one time, he said, "Daddy,

you are always right about everything and nobody cares."

Um, y- you know, the, the problem with that way of being in the world is that, well, first of all, the, the ideologue who thinks that he has an answ- answer for everything, doesn't, of course, right?

He, he generalizes from a few cases and seeks to explain all cases, right?

He thinks he can grasp all of reality because of his knowledge of a few principles.

And so n- no ideology is sufficient for our, our grasp of reality.

Um, and, um...

You know, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's profoundly destructive of persons.

Profoundly destructive of persons.

Now, w- what is the Catholic response to ideology, right?

Ehh, basically, that moral decision making, moral living does not flow primarily from our knowledge of propositions, right?

And see, an intelligent person is not necessarily a rational or wise person.

Every conspiracy theorist that I've ever met is typically fairly intelligent.

You know, they can construct a perfect explanation of reality if you just grant that all of the British Royal Family are lizard people.Right?

You, you give me that one hypothesis and I can explain all of the behavior, right?

Um, a- and I don't care if you're a communist, I don't care if you're a capitalist, I don't care if you're a distributivist, who...

Uh, I don't care if you're a fundamentalist, or an integralist.

Wh- whatever your ideology is, it usually begins from some basic premise.

If you just grant the premise, I can explain all of reality, right?

But what, what happens with an ideolo- with an ideologue, they're so in love with their intellect, they don't, they, they don't admit the exceptions.

They don't admit the cases that don't fit their theory, right?

They dispense with them.

And that is the essence of irrationality, right?

The difference between intelligence and rationality.

An intelligent person can construct a system, but a rational person will dismantle it in the face of contrary evidence, and a wise person knows how to do that.

So what does the Catholic faith say about moral decision-making?

It's not based on deduction from, from these systematic premises.

It's grounded in, uh, the em- the empirical experience we call prudence, right?

The prudent moral decision maker is docile.

They are teachable, right?

They can, they can receive correction.

Um, they, uh, they, they practice circumspection, right?

They, they look to contrary cases.

They consider other alternatives.

They take counsel, right?

And that disposition, it seeks, you know, it's docile, it takes counsel, it's circumspect.

That's what good moral decision-making is, is, is made out of.

Now, ah- how do you...

How do you bring a narcissist and an ideologue to that, to that realization?

I mean, that, that's the work of conversion, u- ultimately.

And I, I think it happens when their ideology runs flat up against the rock of reality.

And it, it...

And their, and their families break down.

Their marriages break down.

The children, you know, become wayward or go off on drugs or something.

It ta- typically takes...

Well, what does scripture say?

Dying to self, right?

It takes conversion and that often is a shattering personal loss.

You know?

I mean, I, I alluded in my own talk, at the beginning, to the fact that my wife and I have experienced shattering personal losses that tr- greatly transcend m- marital tensions that we talked about.

Things that I haven't brought into this discussion, right?

That, that, for me personally, made me, uh, ul- ult- ultimately radically unsatisfied with the answers of mere intellection.

Like my ability to articulate and to give an, uh, a reasoned argument for something is wholly insufficient for the task of living a moral life.

Um, so, you know, can I, can I get down in the weeds with a fundamentalist and, and argue with them at the level of first principles about the Bible?

Absolutely.

You know, and I do that frequently.

Will that convert him?

Not until he's ready.

Yes, sir.

I've read all your books and the part that really, uh, stuck out is that 50 hours was when your wife, Fran, looked toward and, uh, that was overwhelming how beautiful that was.

I was wondering what, how much joy you experienced and what part of it Yeah.

Thank you.

So,

you know, ah, the...

I, I, I...

It's, it's, i- if you've ever had a marriage fail, or been in some deep, deep marital trauma,

ah, you know that I, I don't think there could be anything more painful except maybe the death of a child.

Right?

I mean, it is just the most shattering experience in the world.

And one thing I brought into marriage and I...

This I credit to my Christian parents who are not Catholic, was the conviction that marriage was for life, right?

That I was never gonna abandon my wife or my family, that I would die first.

And, uh, you know, the, the day that my wife said to me, "I hate you and I want a divorce." Which I mean, I wasn't gonna concede to the divorce, but I, I, I had this realization, I have lost my wife.

I took for granted that I would not lose my wife.

I've lost my wife emotionally.

She's gone.

She may be here in body, but she is a stranger to me.

Utterly gone, right?

What have I done with my life?

I don't...

This happened when I was 29 years old.

I'm like, you know, I got another

60 years to go.

Another 50 years to go.

I have to live like this for 50 years?

This is gonna be intolerable.

This'll be a living hell.

Right?

And, um, it, it wasn't so much that my wife prayed the rosary.

That was a means to an end.

It was that she forgave me.

It's that she forgave me.

Like, I, I made light of it, but her standing up at the convalidation and saying, "Yes, I'm willing to recommit my life to this man who I have heretofore hated,

and to give it another shot, recognizing that he's not perfect and I'm not perfect.

And we're gonna commit to this, not for our own private pleasure but for some greater good." And that love is a choice.

Love is a sacrifice.

Love is a decision to offer myself, to donate myself to someone who doesn't deserve it.

Right?

And that's what all of us have to do.

That's what Christ did for us, right?

That was tr- radically transformative.

And it, it, it wasn't just an idea.

I mean, it, it made a tangible difference in the way we related to one another, and continues to, to this day.

Do I continue to exasperate my wife?

All the time.

Right?

And she exasperates me, you know?

But that determination to put aside our petty private fancies and to surrender whatever my pet peeve is-...

and to love her, and for her to love me in spite of our personal failures, right?

For this, for the good of our children and the good of our family and ultimately for the love of God makes all the difference in the world.

I have a, uh, just a brief story instead of a question.

Yeah, sure.

It bubbled up yesterday.

Uh, I recently crossed paths with a close friend, um, who's a physician.

We're both physicians.

And we were at the, uh, swimming pool and he shared a experience with one of his patients.

He said, "Jerry, I had a remarkable experience with a young woman who I've been treating for 30 years for anxiety and depression.

And she confided in me that she had had an abortion.

And that confession to me...

Um, I listened and I affirmed her, and I had this brilliant idea after that visit.

I wonder if we could set up something in medicine where people could confess, um,

their deepest, darkest secrets.

I think that would be healing."

And he had some real presbyterian background.

And I said, "You know, there's something called, uh, reconciliation in Catholicism." "Oh."

Yeah, it's, uh...

Carl Jung apparently said that he, he never had any truly devout Catholics who were avid practitioners of confession that needed his therapeutic ministrations, right?

Um, that there is, it's, it's, it is a...

I find it to be one of the most profoundly cathartic experiences.

Now, you know, the church teaches us that the sacraments are valid ex opere operato, meaning by the working of the work.

Provided the proper matter and form are used in the sacrament, it's objectively value- uh, i- valid, regardless of the charity of the priest.

However, the church also tells us that the sacraments are effective in addition to ex opere operanto, uh, operato, they're also, uh, efficacious ex opere operantis.

Meaning the charity of the priest absolutely can condition how, how you apply the sacrament to your life and whether you allow its validity to make a change in you, right?

And so, in my own experience in the confessional, while it's always valid and I'm always absolved, when I have a confessor who cares, right?

One who actually makes himself present, one who will listen

with...

I won't say without judgment, but with the proper kind of judgment.

Not the condemnation of the person or the personality, right?

But the judgment that you've sinned and you're forgiven, and you're not condemned, and you're not a wicked, evil sp- person just saturated with evil.

But to encourage me in the life of faith and not hold my past failings against me, and to ultimately to love me, right?

That kind of relationship with a confessor, I find makes me want to be good for love of his love.

You know?

And I have, I, I have a few times in my life had relationships with confessors that were, you know, bordering on spiritual direction where I've been consistent in going to the same priest week after week without anonymity to really give an account of myself and my moral struggles.

Um, and, and that kind of relationship becomes, in itself, a powerful motive for change.

When I think, "Oh, you know, for the last five weeks I've been telling Father that I did this and I did this and I did this.

And it's the same this and this for the last five weeks." I don't want to tell him that on Monday, right?

Because he's been so good to me.

So for love of his love, I will, I will, I will resist this temptation on this occasion.

Um, you know, I've, uh, I've, I've had priests ad- advise me to a particular devotion that I did not want to do, right?

And that I wouldn't have done but for love of his love, you know?

And so, the- there's the objective validity and then there's the charity of the priest.

And together, I find that they are just an of incalculable benefit.

So, I'm 25 and I feel like there's this, I've noticed a kind of cultural change that's happening.

What kind of change?

A cultural change.

Yeah.

Where a lot of young people today are afraid of getting married because

put it off, put it off, put it off.

Or even saying like marriage don't know.

So I wanted to know what you say to young people today who might be afraid of marriage?

Yeah, thanks.

I appreciate the question.

So, w- young people today seem afraid of marriage and what would I say to them?

Well, um,

I, I was talking to a seminary professor few months ago, a Catholic seminary professor.

And we were talking about some of the scandals that had happened in the seminaries, you know, in the 1980s and '90s.

Um, sexual sins, this kind of thing.

And I said to the, this priest, I said, "Father, do you, do you find that that's still the problem?" He said, "No.

That seems to have gotten cleaned up.

A lot of that's been cleaned up." He says, "But we have a new problem." I said, "Okay, what's your new problem?" He says, "The new problem is that we have a crop of immature narcissists

who don't want to leave their dorm rooms and they want to spend their time playing World of Warcraft or watching The Office." Right?

And they don't do their homework.

All right?

These are, these are men that are training for the priesthood, right?

And it's because they've...

The culture has conditioned them, right?

To be, to be narcissistic and self-absorbed and entertainment-driven and distractible.

Not given to recollection and not given to service.And it's going to be a very high hurdle for these guys to develop the virtues necessary for their state of life.

It doesn't mean they shouldn't become priests, but it means they have to really carefully attend to the deficiencies in their own, in their own lack of formation and virtue.

And this is what ha- happened to me, r- in the marriage state.

And so, the, the last thing in the world I want to do is to give someone an idealistic doctrine of marriage and say, "Oh, marry, marry, marry, marry, marry because it's the solution to all your problems." It is not the solution to all your problems.

And if you come into marriage with a lack of virtue, that lack of virtue is going to make marriage extremely difficult.

So from one point of view, their caution about marriage is warranted.

It's warranted.

You know, there was a time when kids married very young.

Teenagers, 19, 18, 17 years old even, they might marry.

And sometimes, I think Catholics have a tendency to idealize, you know, the Victorian era or even the 1950s or when their grandparents got married at the age of 19 and it turned out wonderfully.

But we don't live in that culture anymore.

And those grandparents that got married at 19 or 18 or 17 typically grew up on farms, worked hard, and had, had assimilated, you know, an ethic of work, and family life, and virtue that they took for granted, that we can no longer take for granted.

And so, uh,

m- marriage is a noble calling, it's a necessary calling,

and, uh, but it definitely requires a transformation in, in virtue, right?

And a training in virtue that we cannot take for granted.

And the, the, the worst enemy of marriage, or one of the worst enemies of marriage, in my judgment, is, is this romantic fallacy, that marriage, if it exists at all, exists to serve my own private fancy, or my erotic passion, or my sense of romantic attachment, or whatever.

And what's happened is the logic of that romanticism has, has just eliminated the need for the institution altogether.

Right?

Because at the end of the day, if my life is about gratifying my own personal predilections, then marriage is an impediment to that.

And that, that's where our culture has gone.

I'd rather be able to just sit and play World of Warcraft, you know, or watch The Office and I don't wanna be bothered.

And, yeah, I don't know if you, if you, are, are familiar with the term Hikikomori.

Hikikomori in Japan is a, is a sort of demographic class of young men who eschew marriage and social life and literally spend their entire lives playing video games, locked alone in their rooms.

Okay?

Um, so, like, how do we...

And we're, we're seeing this begin to emerge in American culture as well.

How do we combat this?

W- but not simply by promoting marriage, uh, as an idealistic cure, right?

Um, I think the problem is much deeper than that.

Um, you know, and I think that we ourselves have to allow ourselves to be, to experience reality.

You know, the reality of the social world, the reality of the natural wor- world, the reality of good truth and beauty, right, that really call us out of ourselves into deep self-sacrifice.

Uh, pursue, um, tasks that require, uh, you know, a great deal of dedication.

Crafts that, uh, uh, that initiate us into a tradition.

I mean, uh, sports are a good example of, of things that...

I mean, it, it's, it's of some benefit, right?

You, you have to learn how to work as a team.

You have to learn how to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the team.

You have to acquire certain virtues of fortitude and so forth.

Um, you know, how many kids today grow up playing musical instruments compared to how they would have done it, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago?

My son recently had a talent show at his grammar school, Catholic grammar school, and there were like two kids that got up and played piano quite horribly, you know?

And I thought, you know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there would've been at least, you know, half a dozen that could've played passably well, right?

There are just so many barriers to developing these kinds of disciplines in our life.

So, uh, you know, I, I, I want people to marry, but I don't wanna just present it as an idealistic answer to a problem that goes so much deeper than that.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

So, um, uh,

marriage in the Catholic teaching is a, is, is a particular kind of virtuous friendship, right, in which I give myself, uh, to my spouse in a self-sacrificial way for the sake of raising a family.

Right?

The, the goal of married life, the end of married life is that we create a kind of community called the family.

And it's not to serve my own private pleasures, right?

Now, there is...

L- let's take an analogous case

that I often get, which is, well, what is the difference between marriage and cohabitation?

Like, the material form of life seems identical.

Man, woman, household, right?

What's the difference?

The difference lies entirely in the intent.

It's not in the, the mechanics of the act, or the mechanics of the domestic situation.

It's in the intent.

It's the difference between saying, "I would like to cohabitate with you and share physical intimacy with you for as long as I find it pleasant, for as long as I find it convenient," compared to someone who says, "I would like to cohabit with you, and I would like to share physical intimacy with you

until we die.

And I'd be willing to give up the pleasure and the intimacy, you know, given the exigencies of our physical, and moral, and social situations, because I am committed to this institution, whatever it might cost me, until death do us part." Like, it, it is a radically different moral act, right, because the, the intent is radically different.

And so the same thing goes with, with acts of physical intimacy, right?

"I, I would like to share physical intimacy because it is pleasant," is a very different moral act from, "I would like-"