 All right. We are live. Thank you for everyone for tuning in who has joined this webinar with us tonight. I am Jordan Burke, the host. I am incredibly excited. I've been looking forward to this probably for at least two weeks straight since they asked me to kind of step in for my dad and host one of these things. I'm very very excited and particularly about the topic that we're going to be covering overcoming sinful thoughts with Father Moro, who wrote a fantastic book that we're going to be diving into. But just to introduce Father Moro, I'm going to read a little bit of his about the author. Father Moro worked for 12 years as an engineer before entering the seminary and being ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Washington in 1982. He was a host for three years of Catholic faith live, a radio program on which he explained the Catholic faith. He's the co-founder of the St. Catherine Society and St. Lawrence Society for Single Women and Men respectively, which are still active in the Washington D.C. area. Father Moro has an STL and moral theology from the Dominican House of Studies and a doctorate in sacred theology from Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. He's written numerous books including Christian Dating in a Godless World, which is formally titled Christian Courtship in an Oversexed World, which is now in its fourth printing published by the great and powerful Sophia Institute Press, who also published this book. And he has other books called Be Holy, Achieving Chastity in a Pornographic World, Who's Who in Heaven, Overcoming Sinful, Anger, Fatima and Belief, and Amazing Saints. All of these writings can be found at CFalive.com. Father Moro, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thank you Jordan. As we were talking kind of before we started, and I'm probably going to say this numerous times, I'm incredibly excited about this topic. And as soon as Sophia sent this book, I knew that I had to read it. Normally I don't lead these webinars, but I took the book off the counter. I started diving into it. I started highlighting it. I don't know if you can see I have a bunch of pages marked, all sorts of different things taking notes. I love this kind of stuff. And I'm very excited to be able to sit down with you and kind of pick your brain. And, you know, as we mentioned, we have some questions that we'll get into later. But so thank you again for joining. This is going to be, I have very high hopes for tonight. Great. My pleasure. Now, I was curious as I was going through this book and judging kind of looking back on the books that you have already written, what was the impetus? What kind of prompted you to write this particular book? Because it's such a, well, actually, let's back up. I should ask, if you were to describe this book to people who haven't read it yet, how would you describe it to them? Well, just how to clean up the thoughts that keep you from getting close to God? Okay, I like that. Very sad. I like that. Overcoming simple thoughts, simple thoughts that keep you from getting close to God. Now, and so back to the original question, what kind of prompted you to compile all these thoughts together to kind of combat them? What was the process there? It was the publisher. They promoted the title. And I started writing about overcoming sins. And I started writing about the seven deadly sins. And they said, no, no, no, that's not what we want. And so they sent me a whole lot of about half of the chapter titles here are from them. And about half are things that I came up with later. So, so then, so they're sending you titles of these, these chapters. But obviously, you have the ability to fill the chapters with content, with personal experience, with advice, with stories on each one. Did you find that kind of a difficult process? Or did this just come kind of easy to you again, based on the books you've already written? You know, what was this difficult at all for you? Or did it just kind of flow? No, I mean, there's a lot there. So it took me a while to do it. But no, I mean, once I got started on a topic, I was able to start writing pretty quickly. And so it wasn't that hard to put it together. I mean, I have tons of quotes on the saints, which I have in my computer that I can refer to. And, you know, I'm very familiar with the scriptures and so on and these things. So it wasn't hard to pull out all that together. Out of curiosity, you mentioned the saints and you do quote the saints very often in your book, which I very much appreciate. As someone who studies the saints myself. Did you have any particular saints that you can, I mean, I have a guess, I read it. So you mentioned Augustine quite a bit. But did you have any particular saints that were very just at the forefront of they had something to say about almost every one of the chapters? Well, as you said, Saint Augustine is the most quoted saint we have in the church because he taught rhetoric. And so he's a very effective promoter of the faith. But I'm just trying to think, well, some of the like three survival is very important. Saint Margaret of Cortona is important to me because she's a saint for our time. She's the, you know, counterpart of Saint Augustine. And also she she had a wonderful vision of of a beautiful throne in heaven that was just beyond her imagination. And the Lord told her that was prepared for for Lucifer. But he lost it by his sin. And it would be given to Saint Francis of Assisi because he was so humble. So a lot of those saints, I love the Carmelites. John of the Cross is amazing. He has wonderful, romantic things to say about heaven and so on. And a lot of people don't understand, don't realize that John of the Cross had a great sense of humor too. You won't find it in his writing. But when he taught, and when he taught the Carmelites, he had these little quips all the time and they were all rolling in the aisle, laughing at what he had to say. So John of the Cross is a wonderful, wonderful saint. And I think everybody should get to read him. Although I got to say this, he's very difficult to read. Right. He's very difficult. But the easiest things of his to read would be the spiritual canicle. Don't start with a dark night of the soul as I did when I was in the seminary. It's very difficult reading. I heard that that's a common mistake. Everyone wants to jump into the dark night and they kind of find themselves in a place where they're very lost and confused. It's not conducive for understanding such a powerful saint. I learned that I had to, when I read John of the Cross, I had to skim John of the Cross. And then I went back and read him and understood him better once I knew more about theology. But he's not, he's not a saint for a beginner. You know, the saint for a beginner would be Saint Therese of Lycia, Anthony of Padua, some of the, oh, Lady of Fatima is one of my favorite books ever and one of my favorite apparitions. So it's a wonderful teaching tool for the church and especially for children. Right, right. And in terms of quoting the saints, you know, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Augustine, I'm curious since we were talking about this, I started off Augustine in Confessions and that was something that I related to in my own personal journey and my experience. But there are times where that even seemed very heady, a little bit above my pay grade, so to speak. It's not really Saint Augustine. Right, right. If you had a, go ahead, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was going to ask if you had a recommendation for those, since we're on the topic of recommendations, to jump into Augustine, where would they start? There are some biographies on Saint Augustine. And a lot of them are good. One of them was by Trape and another one is a little longer book. I can't remember the name of it, but it's fairly recent, like in the last 10 years. So there are some quite understandable books on Saint Augustine, but mostly not the ones he wrote because he was very philosophical and just difficult reading. Yeah, and it's interesting because I'm not so familiar with Saint John on the Cross as I am with Augustine, but Augustine still taught on different ways, I should say, alluded to different ways of recognizing when he had thoughts enter his mind that were not as a Ignatius of Loyola would say of the good spirits. And I feel like this is kind of what we're talking about in this book. Did you run across any saints in particular who just really, truly understood the concept of not every thought in my head is my own? Does that make sense? Well, you mentioned too, I mean, Augustine and Saint Ignatius, maybe Teresa Vavilas, she, oh, and also, I don't have, I don't have many quotes by Alphonsus Liguri, but he was, he was a psychologist and understood the thoughts that are harmful. And of course, Thomas Aquinas, he was certainly a great moralist and most of our moralists were good at psychology long before we understood that, that, that area of study. Right, right. And I'm glad you mentioned Alphonsus. I'm reading his Sunday sermons for every Sunday of the year. And it's, it's pretty incredible. It's life changing. It's good, really good stuff. But you're writing in particular, you in this book have hit every thought that I think is most common to most people thought different thoughts they struggle with from I've already committed a moral sin, I may as well commit some more to I am the best talking about pride, revenge, I'll show her how it feels to even go ahead. It's only a venial sin. And I'm fascinated by, and I know you said that Sophia provided some of the chapters, but you also provided some of them. And I'm fascinated by the wide range of topics that you covered so quickly and concisely in this book. And did you have any that you really just, you know, not, is it, were there any that you hear constantly as a priest, whether obviously not breaking the seal of confession, but people come to you with struggles all the time. This is what I'm struggling with. Were any of those highlighted in this book? Well, as we mentioned before the program, the whole subject of of shustering is a great is a great issue is a great subject to to deal with for people because a lot of people are mystified by suffering. And they don't always see the link between suffering and sin. There's another thought also that comes in when one woman actually told me, she said, I can't control my feelings. That's just me. And I told her, I said, it's true, you can't control your feelings. But that's not you. What you are is what you expect and what you dwell on and what you allow to dominate your thoughts. If you have negative thoughts, you don't have to dwell on them. You can just say, Yeah, yeah, that's a valid thought. I mean, I'm not happy with that or whatever. But I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm going to dwell on giving thanks to God for the for the gifts that I do have and not complain about some of the things that that happen in in life. So some people, in fact, one of the chapters was the issue of thinking we deserve everything we have entitlement. And that's a big issue, according to Father Byron, the former president of Catholic University, among our young people that they think they deserve everything they have. And it was fascinating to me to do the research and discover that those people who thank God for three or four things every day, they don't get depressed. It's an antidote for depression. And so that's so important, because when people don't come to me and said, Oh, Father, I'm so depressed, I say, I want you to thank God for three or four things every day. And one young woman, she said, I'm going to start a Thanksgiving journal, a gratitude journal. And she's about 28, 29 years old. And she's had a rough time and growing up. But she's she decided that she would put together a gratitude journal. And I think that's a great idea. Right. Right. One of the things I highlighted in that chapter was words such as thanks and Thanksgiving appear 260 times in Sacred Scripture. Right. I feel that fascinating. Right. It's very clearly very important. And then the other thing that you highlighted that I that I highlighted because you talked about it was the word Eucharist meaning Thanksgiving and the connection there. This is powerful stuff for people to realize. I also really appreciate now that I'm looking at this chapter, you added prayers to the end of each one of these portions that you talked about. And kind of a way I saw it as kind of a way to help combat whatever those thoughts are that they're dealing with. I asked, you know, before we were chatting a little bit before the show, and I asked if you were familiar with the vagrius who wrote Talking Back. And that book is primarily scripture based. So if somebody if one of the monks who have a vagaries was with had struggled with a particular thought, here are the verses. Here's the scripture X, Y, Z to go through to help combat it. And I think you did a very great modern version of that. And I just really appreciated that. But suffering. I, I, we, again, we chatted a little bit before we started the webinar. And I really wanted to highlight what you talked about on suffering. And you sure enough said the same thing. That's one of the things you wanted to talk about. So I'm curious, what exactly did you want to talk about? Because I'm sure that I have similar notes. Well, there are several books written on suffering. And what I decided to do in this chapter was to write something that was a little bit more succinct, not a whole book on suffering, but just a chapter on suffering, so that people that are not ready to read a whole book on suffering can read this chapter and get an idea of what some of these books have said and realize that God is in charge and he knows what he's doing. And I mean, I had to tell that to one of my spiritual directees. I said, you know, he knows what he's doing. Don't you act like you're saying to God, look, if I could just take over for a few days, I could get everything fixed right. And then I'll give it back to you. But I don't think we could, we couldn't do that. He's got it all figured out. But he's got a plan. And the worst thing in the world is not suffering. The worst thing in the world is sin. And that's what causes suffering. John Paul II said, but you can see it in Jesus on the cross, that there's a complex relationship between suffering and the sin of the world, not necessarily my suffering from my sin, but the suffering is somehow related to the sin in our world. And goodness knows, we have a lot of sin in the world today, and we have to try to help people to overcome those sins and turn back to God. Right, right. And you covered it very well. And I noted that out of all the chapters in the book, this is the one that you spent the most time on appropriately, and partially because you break it down so sinkily into different parts, you know, the value of suffering, the wounds of Christ, you know, should we pray for healing, so on and so forth, trusting. And I think, I mean, it resonated with me, as I think it would with a lot of people who go through this, partially because of my own life experiences, but also because of kind of the world that we live in currently, what's going on today. And I believe that culture is kind of telling us, you know, live your best life. You don't need to suffer. Suffering is not right. And unfortunately, we run from it. And you do a brilliant job of highlighting what the saints have taught on that, you know, Augustine, our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. You know, Fulton Sheen, when the devil is stripped of all his trappings, the ultimate goal of the demonic is to avoid the cross, mortification, self-discipline and self-denial. I mean, those two quotes alone are very, very powerful. Absolutely. Saint Augustine had, I mean, all the saints had a good understanding, a great understanding of suffering. And some people have written, you know, that, well, the reason they're suffering is because God can't control it all. He can control it all. He's in charge. He can help you avoid suffering. But there's this permissive will of God, or sometimes I would call it the reluctant will of God, that allows us to suffer for some greater good. And it's all for some greater good. It's all planned out. And so there's nothing wasted. It's it's not like God looks away and then we start suffering and say, God, get back here, you know. But he's got his eye on us all the way. And he knows our suffering. And he knows his, you know, but he suffered first before we did, you know. So he knows about suffering. And he knows the and if you look at Jesus on the cross, you see the link between sin and suffering, because that's why he died on the cross. And so we, we are to be other Christ in some sense, that we are to do what we can in our own feeble way to make up for some of the sins in the world. And as a priest, that's my vocation is to be to be a victim for the world. That's that's one of the things that we're called to do as priests. But everybody is called to to share in that in that mission in one way or another. So I often pray for when I start a session of counseling, spiritual counseling, I say, let us pray that we will come to to rejoice in the sufferings of Christ and in the sufferings that we endure, so as to share in the redemptive mission of Christ. We're all called to share in that mission of redemption and to make up for suffering so that we can be closer to God, make up for sins through sufferings so that we can be closer to God. And all the saints had a sense of that, all of them had a sense of that, especially the Carmelites. I'd say the Carmelites really had a beautiful sense of that. Right, I totally agree. I totally agree. It reminds me of Alphonsus again, the uniformity with God's will. And the takeaway from that is everything is either willed or permitted, willed or permitted. And it's all for the greater good, exactly as you said. I'm curious, could you, you've said a lot of profound things so far, but talking about priestly suffering, could you expand on that a little bit? I think it's really kind of apt for our time and what we're experiencing in the church, if you'd be willing to. Say that again now, could I do what? Could you, would you be willing to expand on your comment on priestly suffering? Yes, that's not in the book of course, but yeah, I mean, we, Bishop Sheen used to say, you know, you're a priest and victim. He had some beautiful retreats that are recorded. One is renewal and reconciliation. And the other one is core liquid tour. And those, those retreats are available on in CDs or whatever. And he spoke wonderfully about the victimhood of a priest and the fact that we are supposed to be victim because we're in the in the person of Christ. And so one of the ways he said we could share in that victim would be, victimhood would be to make the holy hour, to make the holy hour every day. And it's very interesting to me how that holy hours, in other words, at the Eucharistic holy hour, a holy hour before the Tabernacle, which is where most of the saints made their holy hours. And he got into that because he heard the story of a Chinese girl when the Communists took over and they went into the church. The priest could look down and see the Tabernacle and he saw the soldiers ripping open the Tabernacle and throwing out the hosts on the floor. He knew exactly how many hosts there were. There were like 30 hosts here. And so this little girl would come every day for 30 days and she would kneel before the Blessed Sacrament that was spread upon the floor. And then she would lean over and with her tongue pick up one host and consume it and then go home. And on the 30th day the Communists found her and they put her to death. And when she heard that story he said, well, the least I can do if she did that is to make a Eucharistic holy hour every day. And most of this priest in my diocese, which is a Washington diocese, Washington DC, most of the young priests are doing that. They're making a holy hour every day before the Blessed Sacrament. It's beautiful. And I know lay people that have committed to making a holy hour every day. When one woman who had six children and she was suicidal and she was going to Mass every day and that wasn't enough to keep her from being suicidal. And she heard Sheen, and by the way anybody can hear the talk by Sheen on YouTube, just type in Bishop Sheen, a holy hour talk. But anyway, she heard the talk and she said, I'm going to make a holy hour every day. And that made all the difference in her life. And she she started to accept the situation with her children. She started to stop arguing and fighting with her husband. She founded a prayer group that at that point had 100 women coming every month to pray together. And a good number of them are praying every week a holy hour. So this is a great gift that we have. But it's more than that. I mean, the sharing and the cross of Christ is more than that. In other words, we have to be willing to make sacrifices as our Blessed Mother said at Fatima. When you make a sacrifice, you can actually save a soul from going to hell when you make a sacrifice. So we just finished Lent. But every Friday should be a Lent for each of us. And we should make our penances on every Friday. And some people fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. And fasting is not always just food because penance, as the Lord said to Saint Catherine of Siena, is about not just about denying the body, but denying the will. Now, very often it is denying the body. But for example, my most difficult penance that I do on Fridays and Wednesdays is I don't read any sports news at all. And I told my spiritual director, I'd rather give up food than be able to watch my sports news. So there are different things that we can do for sacrifices. We should all be making sacrifices, especially on Friday. Right. I love that. I wrote down every Friday should be a Lent. That's a powerful quote. And it seems like maybe a roundabout way to come to this. But as we mentioned at the beginning of the question, it isn't in the book, but you do talk about sadness over the church and the chapter of I can't control my feelings. And so I think it was apt for people to hear and understand the suffering of faithful priests and the necessity for the lay to pray for them and support them in any way that they can. That was also that aside, sadness over the church was also a very fascinating aspect of this book. Speaking of which, for those who want to get a copy of this book, overcoming simple thoughts, you can get a 20% discount code by texting get to 844-311-4761. It's on the screen there for you. Go ahead and text get to 844-311-4761 and get 20% off and get yourself a copy of this book. It is, I think could be described as a powerful handbook to keep in your back pocket if it was a little bit smaller, but to keep in your back pocket to combat a lot of these things that are very common. These are thoughts that everybody deals with in one way or another, or maybe not all of them, but some of them for sure. So church sadness, suffering, you touch on church morality, which I thought was very fascinating. And that was the chapter I don't believe everything I read. And this is interesting to me because I kind of exist in the Catholic social media sphere. And it seems that right now, again, in our current time, we have a lot of issues with people kind of picking and choosing what church teachings they want to follow. And you did a really great job of talking about, in particular, the teaching on morality. Could you expand on that a little bit, just in general? Obviously, we don't need to go into specifics, but I think it's an important point to touch on. Yeah, I mean, if you read the Lives of the Saints, you know they accepted and embraced with joy. They embraced every moral teaching of the church. And so the moral teachings of the church have proven to be very, very right. And the social sciences are our best friends when it comes to trying to evaluate the happiness that comes from living the moral teachings of the church. And the moral teachings of the church are not some arbitrary set of rules to get us to obey God. They are the manufacturer's operating specifications. And if you want your life, you want your personhood to operate properly, you should follow the moral teachings all the way. And if you have a car and you decide that you don't want to put gasoline in the gas tank, but you want to put in, as Bishop Sheen said, put in Chanel number five, your car is going to smell very good, but it's not going to run. And so people will wonder why they're not happy when they don't keep the moral law. And again, the social sciences confirm that people that keep the moral law are much happier. And if you look at the Lives of the Saints, you know that they were all happy. They were all happy and wonderfully happy, even in suffering, they were happy because they knew that they were connected to God and they were living the way he wanted them to live. And that's the moral teachings are the blueprint for finding happiness that totally connected. So we're quite wrong when we think that, well, if I just, you know, disregard this teaching or that teaching or this from the Bible or this from church teaching, then I'll be happier. We're quite mistaken. If you want to be happy, you should keep the moral law. Right. Even to the point you quoted St. John Paul II in a speech he gave on moral teachings in 1987, and he said, it is sometimes claimed that descent from the Magisterium is totally compatible with being a good Catholic and poses no obstacle to the reception of the sacraments. This is a grave error. He's incredibly clear. And I'm glad you put that in there. And then, of course, you tie it back to Scripture, you know, talking about Paul being knocked to the ground for persecuting the church. So, you know, again, this isn't just, I'm struck by the fact that this book isn't just, okay, I have this thought that comes into my head. It's not of God by any means, and I need to reject it or I need to combat it. But also, here's why you do, you go into this is the teaching, this is the truth. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but that truth provides a foundation for a more effective means of combating whatever these thoughts are that come into our head. Is that accurate? Yeah, absolutely. We're ready to respond to the invitation of God to live a certain way. And that's going to help us with every aspect of our life and help us to find peace. And another thing is, too, when you people, when they live the moral law, they, they have peace and they have joy. And a lot of people that don't live the moral law, well, they don't have joy. I mean, they think they're doing fine. But it's like being an addict. And as long as you get your fix twice a week, then you, you're all right. But if you don't get that fix, you're going to be a mess. But with Christians, our fix comes every day with our prayer life and attending the Holy Mass. We have tremendous opportunity for our being recharged. In fact, my pastor here, he tells people, when you have your cell phone and it runs down, you got to plug it in, right? And so it's the same thing for us. We got to pray. We got to get to mass. We got to participate in the spiritual activities of the church in order to keep our charge, charge up and to be able to function properly. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. One of the other things that you mentioned that you wanted to touch on that's very important is heaven, hell and purgatory. And I'd love for you to expand on your thoughts there. Yeah, okay. So this is actually how I got into this. When I first started teaching as a seminary, and every Thursday, we had to go out and do apostolate. I would teach in a Catholic school. And my compadres who would drive with me, they'd say, how do you get people to listen better than kids are bored with what I am saying? I said, I got a beautiful way, just talk about heaven, hell and purgatory in the first two or three classes, and they'll listen to you for the whole year. And they do. They don't forget that because it's a great motivation to live the faith. And one of the reasons that the practice of the faith of Christianity, Catholicism in particular, has dropped off is because we don't talk enough about the last things, about heaven and hell and purgatory. So first of all, heaven, we got to realize that heaven is not just, some people have a picture of heaven as just a bunch of clouds in the golden streets and stuff like that. It's a lot better than that. And one woman told me, she said, I was talking to my friends and she said, well, they think heaven is just the beatific vision. Just look at God. And I said, it's a lot more than that. It includes the beatific vision, which is the intimacy with God. But the saints, saying, Greg, really great, said the husband of every Christian soul is God, for she is joined to him by faith. So we're going to be in a kind of marriage. And that's based on several passages of scripture, including Isaiah 62, as young men, as a young man marries a virgin, your builder shall marry you. As a groom, rejoicing his bride, so your God shall rejoice in you. So there are other passages in scripture that like heaven to be in a perfect marriage with a perfect spouse. But John the Cross goes way beyond that and speaks so poetically about the marriage with God. I just love his teaching and I copied out quotes from his book, the spiritual canonical, about the marriage with God that it's going to be so beautiful. And now Margaret Mary, Saint Margaret Mary, was tempted not to become a nun, even though she knew she had a vocation. And she wrote that the Lord appeared to me one day after Holy Communion and he told me, and these are her words, that he is the most beautiful, the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most accomplished among all lovers, and that he had chosen me to be his spouse. And she said when she heard that she didn't hesitate any longer to become a nun. But there's more because Bishop Sheen has this insight and he was not only a great theologian, but a great philosopher. And people kind of put him down because he was a popularizer. But Jesus was a popularizer. So she knew all this stuff backwards and forward. He could have written stuff that nobody would understand and everybody would have phrased him for being so brilliant. But he didn't care about that. He wanted to save souls. So he was a popularizer and he made it clear that the fact that there's no time in heaven is something very interesting because you can imagine if you've ever hugged someone and you wish it could last forever, in heaven you can do that because time is all at once. You don't have to wait for anything and time is all compressed into the present. So if you want to and we're going to be embracing God in heaven and we're going to want to be with God at all times and we will be, but we can do a hundred other things at the same time because there's no time. And so all the time is compressed into the present and you can keep up with friends in heaven without any effort because you have in this sense, because there's no time, you have plenty of time to spend with everybody. And friendship is one of the nicest things, worldly things that you can find in this creation is to have good friendships. And of course, the most important friendship is with God. But we have all these other friendships, especially with people who love God that are so beautiful. And so everything will be happening at once. And there's this wonderful, beautiful marriage with God who was so extraordinarily beautiful. And when I, when I see, in fact, I tell people in confession this, when I see a beautiful woman, I don't have the kind of thoughts that people in the world have a tendency to think. I say, Lord, you did a nice job on that one. And I say, if that's how the image looks, I can't wait to be married to the original. So this is a healthy way to look at members of the opposite sex. So that's heaven. And a lot of people don't have a good understanding of heaven. And we need to help people do better with that. And we can, we got to teach our kids about heaven, about the joy of heaven. Now, all right. So I say to the kids in school, so what happens if you say, well, I don't want to go to heaven? It's too much work. I just don't want to do it. And I asked the kids, well, what's the alternative? And they know pretty well. Yeah, it's hell. And I said, well, wait, do you think anybody goes to hell? Yeah, a lot of them, they know that. There are some contemporary theologians that are trying to doubt hell. But St. Augustine said, there's no way of waving or watering down the teaching on hell, because our Lord was very specific about it. And what happens is people start to doubt that the hell or doubt that anybody's there, because they get away from scripture. And that's how you get into a lot of errors. You start to think, well, based on what I know, maybe there's no hell, maybe there's no there or no one there and all that. But that's not what it says in the Bible. And so we have to be faithful to scripture, if we're going to have the true faith. And then of course, you have some people who say, well, I want to just try for a purgatory. In fact, one of the holiest women in our parish, she said, before I read your book, that was my that was my goal. And she said, it's not my goal anymore. I realized that God does not want me to go to purgatory. He wants me to go straight to heaven. And so that means we have to live saintly lives. And so God is not called us just to be good. He called us to be holy, be holy for either Lord or God, I'm holy. You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. He said, if you want to enter the kingdom, you must love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And that includes your enemies. And that doesn't mean we like our enemies. That means we're concerned for the good of our enemies, for everyone. And without without exception, no matter what they do, we want them to be happy. And they want them to be saved. So one woman said to me, you know, I really don't like so and so. And I don't wish them well. I said, you want them to go to hell? Oh, no, I don't want them to go to hell. I said, well, then pray for them. You can do that without much effort. And that's how you can love your enemies, that's how you can begin to love your enemies is to pray for them and to pray for them every day. And especially pray for, I'd say, especially pray for politicians, politicians that, well, they seem kind of nasty sometimes, and they seem to be doing things that are totally against what God wants. And we got to pray for them. We won't give up on them. We have to pray for them every day. Right. So you just gave a beautiful nutshell of chapter 29, Heaven Sounds Boring to Me. 26, I don't think that there's a hell. And 28, I'm just aiming for purgatory. So for those who are following along, these are the things that are covered in this book. I'm curious, though, what is, why do you think that this, you know, well, two things really, this, I don't think there's a hell. Where does that come from? Because it's so clear in scripture, as you said, is it this, is it maybe if I'm being, if I'm walking on the side of being a little bit more intense with it, is it people not wanting to own up to their actions? Or where does that come from? Yeah, I think, I think sometimes that's the case. But in the case of theologians, they are saying, well, God is good. God is loving. God is merciful. So maybe this is not compatible with who God is, this eternal suffering. And so they say, well, maybe it's only suffering for a while. Of course, that's an old idea. Origen had that idea in the early church in the third or fourth century. And the church condemned that at account. So they said, no, you can't say that, because it says in scripture that it's eternal. You can't, you know, change the words of scripture. So it's that's why so many people get into so many errors, because they think, well, based on what I know, and then and then they violate scripture, and they get into all kinds of trouble. So the church has grappled with this issue of hell. And, you know, I admit that it's very hard to imagine that people are going to hell. But we've had private revelations at Fatima, the children of Fatima saw many, many, many souls in hell. And to use a more contemporary source, that's St. Maria Faustina. She saw hell. And she said, the Lord showed me hell so that I could tell the world that there is a hell, and there are people there. And she said, most of the people that go to hell are people that believe that there was no hell. Interesting. Interesting. This is very reflective of the screw tape letters. That's one of the things I kept coming back to. Yeah, kept coming back to as I was reading through this. So the other question I had was just because it seems so confusing to me, you know, there's the one about hell and then purgatory. And I can't help but wonder is it a lack of formation where people kind of treat purgatory like this backup plan? I mean, you may have, my dad says it all the time, if you're aiming for purgatory, you have a hell of a backup plan, literally. So what is something that we can kind of share with people to help them break out of that particular sinful thought? Because it seems as if, if they hold on to that, it's a very risky, it almost seems more risky to me and correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems more risky to think that, oh, I can aim for purgatory than it is to think that there is no hell. Because it's almost this self deception of, oh, I have something I can fall back on. Yeah, one of the things I mentioned in the book, when for people that say I'm just trying for purgatory, I do mention, I said, do you know what purgatory is like? The saints have told us what it's like. And in fact, I was reading the Navina to the Divine Mercy recently. And on the eighth day, there's a prayer for the souls in purgatory. And Jesus speaks of the tremendous sufferings that people have there. And he says, I love these people. But they have to meet justice and bring about justice. So we are given the opportunity to make up for our sins. And it's very, very arduous purgatory, very arduous. And it makes sense, it should make sense to us that if you look at Jesus on the cross, and he was divine, what he had to suffer for sin, it makes sense that it's going to be very arduous to make up for our sins. So the Lord has called us to holiness. He's not called us to just be good or just to die in a state of grace. That's not enough. He wants us to be holy. He wants us to be saints. And there's a wonderful story about Sister Lucia that's actually in my book on Fatima as well, about her First Communion. And after her First Communion, she went over to the statue of a lady and she said, Mary, make me a saint. Please, make me a saint. And that's something all of us, each one of us, should pray every day, Lord. I ask St. Joseph every day, as I go by his statue, I ask the Blessed Mother as I go by her statue, make me a saint. I ask St. Anthony, who's my favorite saint after the Blessed Mother, make me a saint. I know it's going to be a lot of work for you, but please take care of it. And if we don't want to be a saint, then we have to go back and read Scripture again, because Scripture calls us to become saints, Ephesians. We've called to be holy and blameless in this site. And so you start linking together all these quotes about holiness and you realize that, yeah, God expects a lot from us. He's going to give us a lot to do it. He's going to help us tremendously. But he's also going to have mercy on us. I mean, people that have been sinners, like St. Augustine, St. Margaret of Cortona, so many saints that have been sinners became saints because they surrendered to God and said, Lord, have mercy on me. And there's only really one kind of person that goes to hell, and that's the person that doesn't want God's mercy. Right. Yeah, very powerful. And someone who doesn't want God's mercy is probably, I think it would be safe to say, is very much dwelling on a lot of these thoughts that are in this book. People should realize that every day is spiritual warfare. It's a battle. You know, Ignatius talks about it. Yeah, and discernment of spirits. And these are very clear. As I was reading this, I wrote, this book almost could have been called, you know, What the Devil Whispers, right? These are the lies that he whispers to. I think that may be a better title. Yeah, I think this title could use a little jazzing up. Yeah. Well, anyway, sorry, Sophia. But yeah, it's What the Devil Whispers. These are the lies that he's constantly, you know, putting into our head. And if we don't have the understanding and the discernment to combat these things, we end up in a very dangerous place. And so again, this is just, I would highly recommend people go out and buy this book. It is very powerful. And it is full, you know, especially when you pair it with other great books from Sophia, you're given all the tools that you need to overcome and to become a saint, as Father is talking about. Now, before we get kind of into the question segment, there was a chapter that was near and dear to my heart. I loved all of them. But one in particular is avoiding unchacity. And you had so much, it would have been easier for me to not highlight things, I think. It would have been a little bit easier reading for me. But this is so, this is something that touches me because it's something that I've struggled with in the past. It's something that I now help men overcome currently in my own kind of side ministry or outreach. Is there anything that you can, I want people to go out and buy it and read it. But is there anything in particular about avoiding unchacity that sticks out to you, that you can kind of give some word to? Yeah. Well, one thing I mentioned in the book is it's from John Paul II. It's from Thomas Aquinas. It's from Aristotle. And that is that the problem that people have with chastity is that the mind says, I don't want to do this. And the heart says, I got to have it. And so the solution is to convert the heart. And John Paul II says that if you remind yourself the values of chastity, then you actually, he says, graft reason onto your appetite. So I would say converting your appetite, converting your heart so that you are convinced, mind and heart, that this stuff will not make you happy. And once you get convinced of both ways with the mind and the heart, then there's not a conflict. And that's what chastity is. Chastity is not having a battle and winning, but it's converting the heart so that every fiber of your being believes that unchastity will not make you happy. And so there's a list of reasons in the book. There are actually, there's other reasons besides the reasons I gave there. But I had a man who was out of the seminary years ago and I told him to pursue this. I said, just remind yourself over and over again the reasons why it's better to be chaste. For example, you don't want to trivialize sexuality. I'm able to live by reason and not be controlled by my urges. And I want to honor the members of the opposite sex. So he worked on that. He read that and he worked on that for a whole year. And he said, I think I've gotten it. I think I'm there. I don't have this battle anymore. Self-control is where you have a battle and you win. But self-control is not a complete virtue. Because as Aristotle said, to do what's, to have a virtue, you do what is good joyfully and easily and promptly. So if you're having a battle, that's not joyful. That's not easy. That's not prompt. So chastity is where you actually are so convinced in every fiber of your being that this unchastity will not make you happy, that you're able to find peace and not have such a struggle. I dealt with one guy who dealt with using pornography and sexual sins for 20 years, every day, every day. And I got him to work on this list of reasons. And so it's a card, actually, I often give out to people in confession. It's called The Truths About Chastity. And some priests have bought, you know, purchased or acquired, you know, 100 copies. And so they can give them out in confession. And they're on our website. But so, you know, I give those out. And as one guy, he started to pray more. He started to go to Mass more. And he said, one year, some, a whole bunch of extraordinary things happened in my life. And it really woke me up. And he said, he said, now I've been reading the card and I had put it aside because it didn't make any difference. But I went back to it. And I was going to confession every week or two. And I started to go to Mass during the week. And he said, now I hardly ever fall. He falls maybe two or three times a year, maybe less. And so I actually asked him to write his story. And I have his story as an appendix, in a book that I wrote on Achieving Chastity. And by the way, that book is going to be updated and revised and come out again in May. It's going to be called Achieving Chastity, not in a pornographic world, which was the original title, but in an unchaste world. Because a lot of people don't want to carry around a book that says pornographic world on the front page. So anyway, so this is something that people have been working on. And a lot of them have done extremely well, extremely well. And I'm so delighted to see that people that have made that effort are able to come to the point where they're living chastely and they're happy. They're really happy. Saint Augustine said, you know, he was, he had broke out of that cruel slavery to lust when he chose chastity. And he struggled for it, but he finally got it. Right, right. And as I mentioned, I struggled, all right, it's near and dear to my heart, because I struggled with it for so long, many, many, many years. And by the grace of God was over, only by the grace of God was able to overcome by firstly recognizing a lot of what you talked about, which is what are the lies that I'm being told. And for me, just as an example, it was, I'm not worthy. And that drove a lot of, you know, the acting out as we kind of call it in the industry now. So also very important. And again, they can find, is that book carried by Sophia in the unchaste world? No, that's carried by, it's carried by new publications in Kentucky. And is that on your website? It's on our website. Yeah, it won't be coming out, then the new edition will not be coming out until May, maybe late May. I've been working on it, and I've added a lot of new stuff in that book. Yeah. Great, great. I'm looking forward to reading it. So now I think we have about enough time. If you don't mind, we'll get into some user submitted questions. Are you good with that, Father? Sure. Awesome. And as, as people have probably seen scrolling on the bottom of the page, again, if you want a 20% discount off of overcoming sinful thoughts, how to realign your thinking and defeat harmful ideas, text, get golf echo tango to 844-311-4761-GET to that number on the screen, and you can get 20% off. And I highly recommend it. I've been recommending this book quite a bit. I'm going to continue to. It's going to be a staple in my rotation. So to the questions, we have quite a few user submitted questions. I'm excited to hear your answers on. Our producer will pop them up on the screen. The first one, Father, I don't know if you can see that, but for those who are listening, what can we do if mental health problems cause unwanted evil thoughts? Well, I guess the first thing to do is to, to work on the mental health problems. I mean, not every, every problem is solved by a priest or whatever. Sometimes if you go to a good, I would say, Christian or Catholic counselor, they can often help you with some of those mental health issues. And then once you work with them on that, and you have patterns of behavior that they've invited you to pursue, then you, you want to use the grace that God gives you to the sacraments and the mass and so on to, to make those solid in your life and to, to be really strong in keeping your eyes fixed on the Lord and, and rejoicing in the gift of God. But sometimes you do need a good Catholic counselor to, to help you with some of the issues that you may still have in your life. So that's fine. I mean, we, we have in our parish, we have a couple of, one in particular that comes to mind or a counselor that who attends mass every day. And that's, that's a great, that's a great recommendation in my book, that somebody has a lot of grace and able to, to do counseling and, and she charges very little. So she's, she wants to promote the kingdom and it's beautiful to see that. But yeah, if you have a mental health problem, don't expect the priest to solve it. You may need, you may need some, some therapy to help you. And then we can solve some problems. But we're not psychologists. And, but although I would say this though, the bishop, she used to say that confession was psycho, psychoanalysis on the knees. And I think I have a story in the book about a young girl who went to confession and a psychologist watched, watched her and he was just amazed to see the difference from the time she walked into that church and she was all nervous and fidgeting. And then she went to confession and she comes out and she's totally at peace. He said, I don't think I could have done that in my field of psychoanalysis in several hours, what happened in 12 minutes or whatever. So there is some value in going to confession to help you with your psychological issues. But there may be some issues that you need to work with a psychologist about. And a good Catholic psychologist and that's a blessing if you can find someone like that. Right. Right. And as you mentioned in the book too, for even minor thing or what can be considered a little bit more practicing, you know, a Thanksgiving at the end of every day. What are your top three things? Yeah. Right. Right. That's a big one to get rid of depression. It's such a beautiful thing. That in the sacraments, it makes a very powerful, powerful method to overcome a lot of a lot of our common struggles. So second question, please. Thank you. Can you close the door permanently to sinful thoughts or will they cause us or will they be with us until we pass on to eternity? Well, okay, there's a difference between a sinful thought and a sinful or an attemptation. We're always going to have temptations. The devil is always at work. St. Catherine of Siena was so holy and the devil showed her a man and woman having sexual intimacy. And she just kept saying, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And she was so disturbed by that. And then later Jesus appeared to her and she said, where were you? What are all this stuff was going on? And he said, well, did you like, did you like what you'd like these things? Or did you hate them? She said, I hated them. He said, well, you can see that I was there then with you. And so that's one of the things I tell people that struggle with impure images. I say, when you have an impure thought pop into your head, just keep saying, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, over and over and over again. I'm thinking something colorful. It doesn't have to be a cathedral. It could be a ballgame. It could be a sunset at the beach. It could be something that just is attractive to your mind. And a lot of the older writers on morality have promoted this thing where you bring your mind over to something else colorful, something interesting to get your mind beyond that. But you can make it a reflex action. You'll be able to say, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, when you have an impure image pop into your head. So those images are not sinful. If you embrace them, yeah, that's sinful. But if you say, Lord, help me to get those out of here. And you use the methods that are available to get rid of those images, then there's no sin. If you wait a while, then yeah, there's some sin. And if you wait a long time, there could be a mortal sin, as our Lord said in sacred scripture, that if you have these thoughts and you give into them, then you're committing adultery in the heart. So what you want to do is when you have an impure thought is to immediately say, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus over and over again. And the devil hates that name. And I love that name. I love saying that name. But and then you think of something colorful. Now I told one guy, I said, think about a Redskins game. And he said, Father, I can't do that. It's too depressing. So you have to pick the things that you're going to think about that won't be depressing. But the Redskins at that time were having some very lean years. So I think it's something colorful. And baseball game, whatever. Grand Canyon, something like that. So that's how you get rid of these ideas or these images, the images. But thought is something that you say, Well, yeah, I like that. I'm going to embrace that. That's what's sinful. When you embrace something, that's a temptation. But if you don't embrace a temptation, then there's no sin. Right. Right. That's one of the things I teach my guys that's so, so, so important is that every temptation is an opportunity for virtue. We're going to have these temptations, but they're presented so that you can choose virtue. Right. Right. So that leads into our second question. It's kind of, you kind of already, or I guess our third, you kind of already answered it, but there's a different twist on this one. I suddenly started having, suddenly started having impure thoughts. I'm happily married and don't understand why I'm getting them. What can I do? Yeah. So it's pretty much the same we talked about because if somebody as holy as St. Catherine of Siena had these thoughts, well, you can imagine that the devil's going to be active with us as well. And doing, trying to put the same thoughts into our head. But you can develop a habit of immediately saying the name of Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And immediately think of something colorful. That's attractive. That appeals to you. Something you find interesting. You don't want to, you know, change your thought and think about a garbage dump or something. That's not going to help you. But you've got to think of something colorful, something beautiful. And that's how you can push out these thoughts. And also there's another thing I think that John Vianni said that you should make a sign of the cross when you have one of these thoughts. Make a sign of the cross. Right. Very powerful. Yeah, you can, you can think of things that confuse you as well. I have a friend who I found out recently eats their tacos with ranch, which I find disturbing. But it would be a good distraction if anything kind of popped up for me on that note. How do I avoid intrusive and voluntary and unset up upsetting, upsetting thoughts? Thank you. Sorry, I'm having trouble reading here. That hound me especially in prayer. Okay. So these are temptations too. Okay. And what happens is the devil says, well, if I can't get you to sin, maybe I can just ruin your peace and ruin your joy. So these, these thoughts come in and like I'm angry at so-and-so. Okay. Well, if you're angry at so-and-so, you either do something about it or you embrace the feeling as, as a sacrifice and say, Lord, I offer this feeling as a sacrifice for sinners and even for the person that, that, that hurt me. But then, so you're doing some, you can't just suppress those thoughts because they'll wait for a moment of weakness and then they'll come pouring out. So you, you just say, well, yeah, I mean, I was hurt by so-and-so and it's valid for me to be angry, but I'm not going to have residual anger. I'm not going to keep that anger. I'm just going to say, that's what happened. I can't change it. If the person is not going to apologize and make up and make peace, well, then I have to move on. And I got a lot of good things in my life that I can focus on, that I don't have to focus on the ways that I've been, that people have been unjust toward me and that I can just keep my eyes focused on Jesus and know that he's given me so many beautiful riches, especially in his church and his sacraments and prayer and especially the holy sacrifice of the mass. What a great gift we have there. So what we have to do is just say, well, I'm not going to let that take over. I refuse to let that take over. And there are times, I suppose, when it's difficult to do that, but you have to say, keep thinking about the positive elements of your life and just say, I am not going to let that dominate me, because that's going to ruin my peace. And this is what happened with the scantils in the church, all right? The devil got certain people, priests or bishops or whatever cardinal, to do immoral things. And then what he did was he got people to be so upset about it. Some people stopped going to church. So the devil won twice. He got the bishop or whatever to do evil stuff. And then he got other people to be so upset about it that they gave up their faith. And St. Paul says, what can keep us from the love of God? Nothing, persecution, nothing, scandals, nothing can keep us from the love of God. So nothing, nothing, nothing should ever keep us from drawing close to God. Yes, it's a shameful thing that priests and bishops and so on have done some things that are very, very wrong. But these things have been going on for a long time. And at the time of Jesus, one out of 12 betrayed him. So these things are, there's always going to be sinners in the church and even in high offices. We've had popes. We've had popes that were big sinners. One pope sired many children. One point he says, I think I'm going to get married. And he said, you can't get married to the pope. And so it was just an evil. One pope, when he died, they looked at his body and there was steam coming out of his mouth and of his ears and of his nose for several days after he died. So we should not be surprised. We should be hurt. Yes, we should be hurt and we should be scandalized. But we should not be destroyed by the fact that there are some people in high levels in the church that have done evil things. If you read about priests and bishops in the past, they may not have been sexual sins, but they're all kinds of sins that were committed. And we should understand that being a bishop doesn't mean you're for all sin. And we have to pray for a bishop. We have to pray for a priest. You have to pray for a cardinal. St. Jose Maria Escrivaz said, there's no such thing as a bad priest. There's only a priest for whom not enough people pray for. So we have got to pray for our bishop. We've got to pray for our pope every day. I don't want to hear all this stuff. The pope did that and so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, there are some things that make me uncomfortable, but the biggest thing is we've got to pray for him. And especially when we pray the rosary, we're supposed to pray three prayers for the Holy Father as part of actually two prayers. Our father in the Hail Mary is enough, but we say three a lot of the time. But we pray for the prayers for the intensive, the Holy Father. And that's one of the requirements that you have to fulfill in order to receive a plenty of indulgence. And I mentioned plenty of indulgence, I think, in the appendix of the book about what we can do for the souls in purgatory. And some people think, well, you have to go on a pilgrimage. You have to go here. No, you just say the rosary in a pious company with other people. Or you say in a public place of prayer or you say the station of the cross. And then you say the prayers for the Holy Father. You go to confession within 20 days before or after. So that means if you go to confession every 40 days, you can receive a plenty of indulgence. And you receive communion that same day. And the hardest condition is you have to be detached from all sin, including venial sin. That does not mean you're free of all sin. It means you're detached. Detached means if there's anything you know of in your life that's sinful, you have to be willing to work on it. And so I was, I was driving with some teenagers to an event and the light turned yellow and I sped up to get through the light. And then on the other side of the light, I said, I got to work on that. I got to do better on that. And one of the kids said, Father, you know, you can't get a plenty of indulgence because you have these sin. And I said, no, I said I want to work on it. Remember? Or if you want to work on it, you're not attached. And you got to be willing to work on all your sins to get a plenty of indulgence. Right. Right. It's very important qualification. We have another question here. What is something proactive? Hold on now. What is something proactive that we can do to guard our minds and our thoughts? Proactive. Okay. So, well, certainly meditation, meditation on the life of Christ, especially in the rosary. There's some wonderful people that I know that pray the rosary all day long. My mother used to pray 15 mysteries of the rosary every day. Back then they were only 15 mysteries. John Paul had a little five. But so to keep our minds focused on the Lord and to read about the saints, that's so important to read about the saints. That's proactive because the saints, you read a lot of the saints and what happened in their lives goes into your subconscious and it comes out when you start to act and you start to want to act with the saints acted. And it's so beautiful because it gets beyond our resistance to want to change. You know, somebody said, I think you ought to do such and such. I said, well, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. But then if the saints says that they did it and they don't even ask you to do it, but they did it and you say, yeah, maybe I should do that. That's what happened. Saint Ignatius. He read about the saints when he was sick. He was trying to get a romance novel to read when he was sick. And they say, we don't have any of those. We have a life of Christ and we have the lives of the saints. So he started reading the lives of the saints and he wasn't a great guy when he started reading these lives of the saints. And he said, oh man, look at what they did. I think I'd like to do that. I'd like to do what they did. And so that changed his life, reading the lives of the saints. So it's so important that if you want to make progress in addition to prayer, which opens you up to everything you read, to read the lives of the saints and read a little bit every day. I've been reading 10 pages a day for 40 some years. And that's not much, 10 pages a day. I don't recommend you read lives of the saints like you read a book, like a novel or whatever. No, just a little bit every day. And 40 years of reading 10 pages a day, it adds up. And what I did was, and I've encouraged other priests to do this, is when I was reading the lives of the saints, I did what you've done and that is to highlight or underline the things I saw and mark the pages. Then I would go back and copy out those quotes from the saints. So I have a list of almost 1600 quotes from the saints or stories on the faith. And so when I write a homily or when I write a book, I go and look things up on that list of quotes. So it's so important to read the saints, very important. And many of the saints said, you've got to do that. You've got to do that. I couldn't agree more. It's been life-changing in my experience and my reversion to the faith. And it is really kind of a a gasoline on a fire, so to speak. So another question we have here is, do we have to confess sinful thoughts even if we resist acting on them? No. Those thoughts are temptations. And if you say, I'm not going to accept that, I'm not going to act on it or anything like that, that's not a sin. That's a temptation. A lot of people confess their temptations, but they don't have to. As long as they reject them and say, well, that's a temptation, that's from the devil, I don't want that. And so I'm not going to embrace that. So we don't have to be dominated by thoughts that pump into our heads that we have not welcomed. So you sin when you embrace a sinful thought or a sinful idea or a temptation, when you embrace that and say, yeah, that's what I want, then that becomes sinful. So this one is a little bit complicated. What are the sinful thoughts that you see women are deceived into believing? Maybe easier said, what are the most common sinful thoughts that you have heard from women? That might be an easier way to say that that women are deceived into believing? Well, sometimes, sometimes your wife will tell me that her husband is failing in this regard or that regard or some other regard. And they they pick they focus on that and they let that fester in their mind. And I said, you don't have to you don't have to focus on that. You don't have to. I mean, yeah, you're probably right that he does things wrong and so on. But I have found a book we look for years to find a book, a good book for men to read on marriage and for women to read on marriage. And the book that we found was Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelen. And it's it got six million copies in print. Most books do not sell the first 5000 copies. And this book is six million in print. And the women that have read this and put it into effect have told me, Father, my husband cannot do enough for me. He's always asking me something more that he can do for me. And it's a way of just acting toward a man. And of course, if you want to have a successful marriage, you must embrace the virtue of humility because you'll never be successful otherwise. But acting toward a man to appreciate him to accept him to appreciate him and to admire him. And the first four or five chapters are really beautiful about how so many women change their marriages. And some of the marriages were really bad. One woman, she said her husband had never given her a birthday card for eight years, in eight years, not once. And she started doing this stuff in this book. And I actually buy several copies at a time. I think right now it's out of print, but it's going to be back in print soon, the mass market version. But this is a wonderful, wonderful book. And sometimes I keep it in my confessional. We give them to our couples that come for marriage preparation. Is this book compatible with 21st century feminism? Absolutely not. It's considered an old fashioned book, but it's extremely effective. So I'm interested in effectiveness. I'm not going to worry about the politics of all this. But that's one thing a woman does is she starts to focus on the negatives in her marriage instead of building. In fact, I do tell couples you don't find a good couple or a good spouse, you build one. So that means the way you treat your spouse, it makes all the difference in whether you have a happy marriage or not. And one person can save a marriage by just doing the things that they need to do to build up their spouse. One person can do that. Because when you do that, your spouse starts to come to life and they start to do better. So another issue that could come up with women, but it comes up with other people too, is looking at people and saying, well, that person's a nerd or that person's a jerk or whatever. And I tell people, when you do that, I want you to say right away, that's a child of God. And if you do that, you're not going to say, you know, have negative thoughts and be judgmental about people and say, well, they're no good. They don't know what you're doing. They're a mess or whatever. Just say, that's a child of God. I say that so often when I have an image of somebody, that's a child of God. And so we're all in this together. We're all in this journey together. And so we've got to pray for each other. And we should never stop praying for each other. And everybody, especially the people we don't like, we need to pray for. So I hope that answers the question adequately. Absolutely. That's fantastic. I think we may have time for two more. Let's do this one. I struggle with anorexia. And although I know it's an illness, I feel that I am committing a sin by hurting my body, by starving it. Am I committing a sin or is it my illness? It's both. I think the saints, I think Thomas Aquinas said that our culpability is reduced a little bit by habit. But our culpability is not removed. That's the thing. Even if we have a habit or this tendency to starve ourselves and get into a bad pattern, that doesn't mean that we're not to blame for what we do. We are partly to blame. Everybody has a certain amount of freedom. Nobody has their freedom totally taken away by addictions or whatever. So our culpability is reduced by these bad habits that we may have to be involved with anorexia. But what we need to do is, again, this is similar to the whole thing on chastity, and that is to make a list of reasons why we don't want to be anorexia. And look at those reasons. We don't try to suppress it. We try to convert it. We try to convert that inclination to go in that direction. And so what happens is you suppress something like that. You may be able to go along for a week or two or three weeks or even six weeks, but then all of a sudden in a moment of weakness, it explodes. And you do some terrible things. The same thing happened with chastity, but it could apply to anything we're addicted to or any behavior we're addicted to. And so we need to, in fact, we made a list, an analogous list to the list we have for people trying to be changed, for people that are overeat. And we listed all the reasons why it's better. I think it's on our website. Reasons why it's better to be trim and to stay trim. And there are all these reasons that we need to look at and believe and look at it over and over and over again. And by the way, for any, this thought just came to me a couple of days ago, and I haven't gotten, had a chance to test it that much yet, but I asked one person that I knew struggled greatly with chastity. And I said, what I would like you to do is take a decent size cross. I'm thinking of maybe a 10 inch cross or whatever and hold it in your hand and look at it for five minutes every day and just look at it and think about what's there. And I don't know if it will work, but it just came to me recently as an idea that it could help people that are struggling with things over and over again. So I think that could help too with anorexia. But the whole idea is to, in fact, I didn't know this, but Father Benedict Groschell, may he rest in peace, he was a psychologist and he said, my book on chastity was, was a, an example of cognitive therapy is that you remind yourself of the truth about the situation over and over and again until you embrace the truth and your mind and heart embrace the truth. So with anorexia, yeah, the truth is, if I keep doing this, I'm going to be a total mess. So but if you have anorexia, it may be that you do need at the same time to impress upon your heart, upon your, your appetite that you don't want to splurge and eat too much. So everything in moderation and again, the way you convert your heart on that is to remind yourself over and over again the benefits of living prudently. That's fantastic. This is a, this has been a great, I very much enjoyed this. For those who want to dive deeper into discernment and overcoming sinful thoughts, we offer a lot of free courses at apostelaeva.org, A-P-O-S-T-O-L-I-V-I-A-E.org free courses, overcoming habitual sin, discernment of spirits, things of this nature that help out in this. And finally, for those, I highly, highly, highly recommend picking up overcoming sinful thoughts, how to realign your thinking and defeat harmful ideas published by Sophia Press. It's been a great read. This has been a great, it's been great talking to you. And I very much enjoyed it. Thank you for answering all these questions. I know some of them were, were a little bit, I don't know if they, well, they're all great. I loved all the questions. It was helpful for me as well. So, thank you for your time. And is there anything that you would want people to know about for you, your website, any, any of, anything of that nature? Well, just pray for us that we're able to get some of the books that we have out to, we actually have a grant to provide our Christian dating in a godless world books to give free boxes of those books to groups that ask for it. So if they contact us through our website, cflive.com and ask for a box of the books on Christian dating, we'll be happy to send them a box. Wow. Awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. So again, if anyone wants to pick up this book, Sophia Institute Press, Overcoming Sinful Thoughts, you can get that 20% off code by texting get to 844-311-4761. And if you've read it, or if you want to dive deeper, go to apostolive.org to explore the courses to help you better overcome habitual sin, battling sinful thoughts and discernment of spirits, all there for you, free a great companion to this great book and great guide. Father, thank you so much for your time and you will be in my prayers. Thank you. Thank you very much. God bless you. You have a great night.