 And I know we're live, but which is fine. It mentions Catholic World News. Can I mention CatholicCulture.org? Is that fine? That's where, obviously, where people find that. Sure. Yeah, Catholic World News is part of that, so. Yeah, right. Exactly. Okay. All right. Hey, friends. This is Dan and Stephanie Burke. You're watching behind the scenes, Divine Intimacy Radio. And we have a, you know, a lot of our shows, of course, we believe they're all important. This one in a very unique and powerful way. So I hope that you'll stay tuned to listen to the wisdom of Phil Lawler and concerns for, I think, what's coming again and preparing for that. Yeah. So make sure you like and share this. Right. Because it keeps the momentum going, and it's a good way to share what's going on. Yeah. And unfortunately, shows like this are going to get suppressed. So the way we overcome that is you share it and like it. Or the way we try to overcome anyway. So before we jump into the show, there's a new book I'm really excited about that. I asked Sophia Institute to publish called Prayer, Great Means of Salvation. It's a republication of something that went out of print by a doctor of the church, St. Elphonsus Luguri. And it is a phenomenal book. If you want to, and I promise you, even if you've been around the church for a long time, even if you're in your mind, you know everything about prayer, this book will surprise you in many, many ways in terms of what has faded into the woodwork, unfortunately, regarding authentic prayer and a Catholic understanding of prayer. So there's a promo code. What's the promo, Jordan? I got the code. You know, it's a discount. There's a discount on the book. The producer doesn't know exactly what the discount is. But if you, when you go to order that, if you put in 25 prayer, the number two, the number five and the word prayer all together, then you'll get some discount from Sophia Institute Press. So you can either go there, you can go to EWTN's Religious Catalog. I don't know if they have it yet. I do know they have the book we're talking about today. So always go to EWTN's Religious Catalog. As I always say, when you do that, when you buy the book from EWTN, a couple of things will happen. One, they'll actually send you the book and two, you'll help them to promote their ministry. So check out Prayer, Great Means of Salvation. Last thing I'll say before we start the show, because we're running a little late, is we have an event coming up in the next year, the Avalos Summit on Spiritual Warfare. So we have already sold more than half the seats. In fact, we sold more than half the seats by the end of the last summit. So Father Bishop Strickland will be there, Father Rippegger, Father McManus, Monsignor Rosetti, Kathleen Beckman, Ave. Maria University in Florida. So go to spiritualdirection.com forward slash events to find out about that. Yeah. Okay. Don't delay. All right. I think we'll get, let's get into the show because we're running a little late. All right, you ready? And your mark gets set, go. This is Dana Stephanie Burke with Divine Intimacy Radio, your radio Haven of Rest. Your Hermitage of the Heart. Your Monastery of the Mind where we lift our hearts and minds to Heaven to help us to face the storms of life. And we've come out of a rough storm recently in terms of the public health. And it looks like we're heading into another one at least. It's hyped as being another one, which we'll talk about in this show. But why don't you introduce our next guest, Stephanie? And then let's jump into how do we deal with what's coming and how can we as faithful Catholics face this and fight it and do what we need to do? Okay. So the author of Contagious Faith is the book Why the Church Must Spread Hope, Not Fear in a Pandemic was born and raised in the Boston area. Phil attended Harvard College and did graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Chicago before entering a career in journalism. He has previously served as director of studies for the Heritage Foundation as editor of Crisis Magazine and as editor of the International Monthly Magazine Catholic World Report. Philip Lawler is editor of Catholic World News and his writings have appeared around the United States and abroad, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. And I know that you wanted to mention as well, CatholicCulture.org. Yeah, that's where you find the bulk, I think of Phil's work and I, you know, to me, Phil has been a part of, I don't know, a heroic effort, CatholicCulture.org to really deal with the difficult issues in the church and to help the faithful understand those issues and he's been fighting this fight for a long time. So I'm honored to have you on the show. Phil, welcome. Thank you. I'm honored to be with you. So Phil's written a book that I think is really important and it's called Contagious Faith. The subtitle is Why the Church Must Spread Hope, Not Fear in a Pandemic. And Phil, you may or may not know, I was on a ventilator and came nine out of 10 people with my condition get COVID die. So I was on a ventilator. I was hospitalized for quite some time. And it just about wrecked me. So the pandemic is real. We all agree with that. We don't need to do any more qualifications of that. Or I should say, the virus is real. I call it a hoax-demic because the part of it's true and part of it's false, right? And I think this book, I will say to our listeners is really important, not as a retrospective, because everybody's really tired of talking about this, but really as a guide to helping us understand how to move forward. Because as of the time of this recording, Phil, it looks like we're heading toward another lockdown. Is that the way you're reading it as well? That's my fear. I wish I could think otherwise. But it seems to me that we're seeing all of the signs that the experts who, frankly, been very poor at predicting anything about this disease are going to tell us that we should lock down again. We're already seeing the drumbeat of requests for mandatory masks, mandatory vaccinations, et cetera. And so yeah, I'm very much afraid. This is not a work of history. This book is not a work of history. I think it will be useful to marshal the arguments that are going to be taking place all around the country and all around the world in the next few months. Yeah. So, Phil, why did you write this book? It's incredibly important. It's a great read. Why did you write it? Why do we need it? I wrote it because I was so stunned, so staggered that the churches were closed, that we did not have access to the sacraments at a time when we needed them. We always need them, but we particularly need them at a time like this. And since boyhood, I'd been aware of the possibility. It's a very live possibility in many parts of the world that churches would be closed by an oppressive government by persecution. But our churches were closed by our pastors, by our bishops, and that was something for which I was completely unprepared. And it shocked me, it scandalized me. And I thought it'd betrayed an attitude towards the faith that really needed to be corrected. What Douglas Farrow has called the health first heresy, that the church should first and foremost be concerned about our physical health. And I even heard that from a couple of bishops saying the number one important, the first priority for us is to care for the physical health of our parishioners. Well, if that's your first priority, you're in the wrong business as a priest. You're not a public health official, you're a spiritual health official. Yeah, it is kind of a bizarre statement. Number one concern is your your physical health. And obviously, as I mentioned, I expected to die. I completed my will shortly before entering the hospital. So it, you know, it was this, it's, it's a serious reality. And I'll have to admit to you, and I'm happy to have you react or rebuke me or whatever. But I'll admit, I, you know, I'm an advisor to a bit of a bishop. And I sort of let him off the hook with the decision to close things. Now he's one of the more courageous bishops. And really, I think we'll handle this differently moving forward. And the reason I let him off the hook is, is initially, I'm thinking, well, he's responsible that if people gather and they die, you know, and he didn't do something and everyone else did something the opposite, he's going to come under some pretty, pretty heavy fire for not doing something. Retrospectively, I disagree with my letting him off the hook, so to speak. Did, was there a moment at the beginning of all this where you, you hesitated with being critical? I mean, it's a lot, it's a lot easier now with hindsight to say there was a profound overreaction. But what, what's your view? If you had to go back, one, did you struggle at the beginning? And now what do we do moving forward? Yeah, I struggled at the beginning. I mean, I was scared. A lot of us were scared. And by the way, just let me say, I was aware of your health condition. And I think it, I was aware, I was, I was praying for you and I know many thousands of people were praying for you. And that's what the church should be doing, you know. Yeah. And, but yeah, when the first reports came through, I was scared as I think everybody was scared. Right. And then the first notion that we would spend two weeks to flatten the curve, and of course now it's looking more like two years and who knows how long it will go. Right. And I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. I don't know very much. I have to rely on what I'm told. And it's only gradually as I sifted through the incoming information that I realized that the panic that so many of us felt and I wasn't immune to it myself was not warranted. I mean, it was a serious disease. It was a disease that, that merited caution and normal measures to make sure you're healthy, to protect your own health, but not the kind of full bore panic that actually took over. Yeah. It was such an interesting, retrospectively, it was such an interesting thing to undergo. You know, Dan and I both had it. We were texting with our priest and and he was supporting us and trying to walk us through it and praying for us obviously and all of that. And like you said, thousands of people were praying especially for Dan because of his of his lungs and lung issues. But I have to tell you a moment of great hope when we talk about the fear that we all were going through is that our pastor at the cathedral, he drove here. He said, I'll be there in 30 minutes. He said, can you be standing on the porch? Father Brian Jarobek. Yeah. Yeah, Father Jarobek. And, and we did not ask him to come. And he said, I'll be there in 30 minutes. And I said, of course, and we had no mask. We had no hand sanitizer. We did have soap. We washed our hands. And I remember putting scarves around our faces and and and we stood out on the porch and he stood there shaking from his head to his toes with a q-tip in order to give us the anointing of the sick. And he fought every cell in his body that told him not to go, that told him that he was afraid. He fought every cell in his body in order to to pastor us, to administer the healing of the sick to us. And it was just such an extraordinary pastoral act. I'll remember it forever. I'll be grateful forever. But the fear that happened through this pandemic is real, as you said. It was it was true. It was. And God bless your pastor for doing that. And he was he was heroic. You know, a hero isn't somebody who isn't afraid, is someone who perseveres despite his fear. And that's what he did. Audinarily, parish priests are not required to be heroic in that physical sense. But sometimes they are. And this was one of those times. And I know other priests who volunteered to go into the covid wads. And they were following an age-old tradition of the priesthood. During the shutdown I had many people remind me that St. Charles Borromeo closed the the churches in Milan during the plague. And that's true. But he closed the churches and then he celebrated Mass at Dois. And he told his priests to serve the sick. He told them if they were risking their lives serving the sick, then they were what they were risking was martyrdom and a heavenly reward and that he would be the last one there standing if necessary. And that's the sort of bracing, contagious faith. That's why I called the book, Contagious Faith, because I believe that when you have that sort of faith, it's contagious. And what we had last year was a contagion of fear for which faith was the best remedy. Absolutely, a contagion of fear. I think that was the biggest threat we had. So how do we support our priests and our bishops? So we have about a minute and a half before we go to break. So how do we we can continue after the break if we run over? But how do we support our priests and bishops against this contagion of fear and help them to step fully into the contagion of faith? You know I have already heard from a number of different places of groups of Catholic people. Usually it's groups of men who have made an appointment and gone to talk to their bishop and said, please don't do this to us again. We will not tolerate another lockdown. And have told them, we know if there's pressure for a lockdown, you will be right in the focal point of that pressure. Rest assured we'll be there with you. Rest assured if there's a need for civil disobedience, which there might be, we're ready. In other words, know that you have loyal Catholics behind you. You're going to be getting a lot of noise from the people wanting a lockdown. Well, we're going to have some countervailing noise from people telling you we need the sacraments. We need to keep the churches open. We need your ministry and we'll support it. God bless those guys for doing that. We want to encourage others to do the same. We want to encourage people to read your book to prepare to give them perspective on how to deal with another impending lockdown coming. When we get back from the break, we'll keep talking with Phil Lawler, author of an important book, Contagious Faith, Why the Church Must Spread Hope, Not Fear in a Pandemic. It's available at EWTN's Religious Catalog and we'll be right back. Okay. On your mark, let's go. Welcome back. This is Dan and Stephanie with Divine. I gotta do that again. Reset. Welcome back. This is Dan and Stephanie Burke with Divine Intimacy Radio, your radio haven of rest. Talking with Phil Lawler about an important book, Contagious Faith, and about how we face and deal with more effectively what it looks like another impending lockdown. So before the break, Phil, you mentioned some courageous, faithful Catholic guys that you're aware of who went and met with their bishop and said, hey, please don't do this to us again. I think that, you know, a lot of what I hear out there and I get it, is critical of the bishops and critical of priests and all of that. I wanted to say, before we jump into more ideas, I'd like to hear more from you about how can we help mitigate another shutdown of our churches. But Stephanie and I travel a lot and we didn't stop really traveling once I got well enough to get on the road. We got on the road and, you know, as was allowed and we did events and things like that. I must say I can count, you know, only on my two fingers, two hands, priests who went out of their way in the midst of that context. They were obedient but they were very careful with how they were obedient and we received the sacraments over and over. That was not commonly, we didn't ask for any special treatment but people just cared for us out of their own love, you know, but I know that wasn't even common in most of the areas we went to. So even though a priest might have served us, it wasn't necessarily available for everyone for threat of reprisal or whatever. But aside from the obedience issue, which I do want to get into, what else have you seen out there? What is your advice to the laity, to priests, on how can we avoid this again in the future, the shutdown? Well, we have to be ready and we have to be ready with the arguments that I try to present in this book. The arguments for a sober evaluation of the risks that we face and what's a reasonable response to those risks because we take risks every day. Every time you get in a car, every time you walk down a flight of stairs, you're taking a risk and we take those, we weigh those risks as intelligent responsible adults and we should be weighing these risks and not giving into panic. And we should also be telling people that we expect to be treated as responsible adults and we'll make our own decisions about what's best for our health. Particularly by the way, in the church, I mean, priests are not public health officials. If I'm worried about my health, I talk to my doctor, not my priest, not physical health, I mean. And I don't mean disrespect to priests or bishops when I say they are not speaking with authority on public health matters or on medical matters. Let me make those decisions. And similarly, with our public officials, you know, the mayors and governors, they are not public health officials and they need to let us, they're not public health experts and they need to let individuals make individual choices. So we need to be proactive in asserting our rights to be treated as adults and to treat ourselves and our families the way we see it fit. Yeah. So the priests are under obedience to their bishop in matters of, you know, faith, morals, you know, the sacraments and such. Tell us about how obedience plays a part in this. Can a priest be denied the right to or his obligation to provide mass to the faithful to bring the sacraments? Can he be denied under the guise of obedience? That's a difficult question. A priest takes an oath of obedience to his bishop. He also is ordained for the purpose of ministering the sacraments. And there's plenty, I'm not a canon warrior. I don't know which takes precedence, but I think it's a tough question. I point out in the book that the few times that I'm aware of where a bishop questioned, I'm sorry, a priest questioned his bishop and asked, are you telling me this under obedience or is this advice, you know, and it could be medical advice, in which case it's obviously not authoritative. And in every single case the bishop declined at least at first to say anything to make it in order under obedience. I know a lot of priests, well, at least I wish I knew more, who were, shall we say, inventive in their obedience. So do we. The envelope. And those priests are my heroes. Those are the priests and I've noticed that they're reaping some rewards. For instance, my own pastor was one of those who pushed the envelope. Parking lot masses and confessions out in the fields, which is no joke in the winter in New England. And when the shutdown was lifted finally and the churches were open again, we noticed a lot more people in the pews of that church. I think that they're, again, it's a matter of contagious faith. You notice this priest who seems to get up in the morning wanting to administer the sacraments, which is what you want in a priest. And so people are going to flock to him. Yeah, I want to say among the ideas of of how to mitigate another shutdown is I would strongly recommend, and I would say on a scale of one to ten, we recommend a lot of things in the show. I'd put this out on a scale of one to ten. I'd put it out of three thousand is my recommendation. Is that everyone buy this book, buy two copies of it, one for yourself and one for your priest and give it to him. Write him a letter. This is emotional for me. Write him a letter saying, you know, not angry, not vitriolic, but one just, you know, I mean beg him if you need to and say and explain to him how difficult it was for you not to receive the sacraments. I think because they were able to, and I don't want to impugn priests, but I just don't like doing that, but because they're able to do that themselves, they're not really in tune with how incredibly painful it is for the faithful to be denied the sacraments. And so there's this, I don't know, this insensitivity, you know, so I would strongly recommend you write a letter to your priest, you write a letter to your bishop, all very kind, respectful, obedient, you know, get your bishop a copy of contagious faith, get your priest a copy of contagious faith, you read it, start a study group in your parish, get this message out because I'm not aware of a better resource written on this topic, not aware of anything as well-reasoned or complete. And I think it'll have an impact because I think, you know, Phil, one of the most beautiful moments in the last six months was a priest who was on a, his mass was being televised, he's religious, I've met him before, he has a reputation for being very holies in the phoenix area, and he said, he said something that blew my mind, he said, the greatest regret of my life, the single greatest regret of my life is withholding the sacraments. And he said, I will not do it again, which is fascinating because he's religious and he's holy and he's very obedient and he's under an extraordinary bishop, Bishop Olmsted. But I think, as you said, we need to be creative, that's another thing I loved during the, you know, the lockdown is how many priests were creative like your priest, right? And, you know, one priest, they couldn't give mass, they couldn't offer mass, but he gave us, they couldn't do it in the church, but he gave us mass in his rectory, you know, so whatever, whatever way they can be obedient, but be creative that I think we should encourage them to do, but what are other thoughts, Phil, about what else have you seen or heard out there to encourage our bishops and priests to keep the doors open? Well, I think another thing that has to be tackled head on is the argument that you need to get vaccinated, you need to wear masks in, you need to stay home, be out of love, that it's a pro-life initiative, that was repeated many times, and I think we have to put that in balance too. First of all, this life on earth is not the life we should be primarily concerned about, you know, there's, sometimes you come across in this debate, this notion that people have a right to live forever. Well, you know, we don't have a right to escape aging and disease, in the, you know, we will all face death, and then the notion that it is pro-life to withhold the sacraments tells you something about where your priorities are, but then just on a natural level and leaving aside the scientific debate, which as I'm sure you know is a very, everybody knows is a very lively debate about what works and what doesn't. One thing that is demonstrable is that the lockdown took a terrible toll, a terrible human toll, and it's not just a matter of economics, although that's not something to laugh off. There are the people who died because of the lockdown, not because of the disease, but because of the response to the disease, because they couldn't get medical treatment in time, cancer, screenings, psychological help, people who were depressed, who had addiction problems, who had severe depression and loneliness and couldn't get the help they needed. We've seen suicide rates spike, drug overdose rates spike, we've seen, and the cruelest thing of all, by far to me, was the thousands of elderly people who died alone in nursing homes, effectively prisoners, many of them suffering from dementia, not understanding what was happening, not understanding why their loved ones didn't come to tell them, please don't tell me that this was pro-life. And some of those were the results of deliberate policy decisions, which I think were unforgivable. Yeah, and to even take that another step forward is how many people left the church, you know, they were locked down, they had to stay home, they couldn't go to church, and effectively they were told it's the same if you watch it on TV, and their faith was diminished, they were probably hanging on by a thread, and they haven't come back. There are people, I know people in my family who have not come back to church and that to me is one of the greatest sin, they almost, you know, they had just a thread holding them into the mass, and now they're not coming back, and that just breaks my heart. So folks, buy the book, buy it for your priest, buy it for your bishop, write them letters, be courageous, meet with them, pray like crazy, fast, you know, we often think prayer is, you know, this little sprinkle-like salt on the on the food to make it taste a little better. Prayer can, the Lord will answer prayer and change the course of history when his people get on their knees and pray, and pray that the bishops are more courageous, that priests are more courageous, we're not criticizing them, we're saying we want your good, we want you to be better, please don't do this again, please be rational, and please don't tell people they're uncharitable for participating in things that they don't believe in. I think it's uncharitable to participate in deception, Phil, and I think a lot of what was put out as to the reasons why people should wear masks when they're driving in cars alone and and sitting 60 feet from anyone else, that's uncharitable. So thank you for writing this book and giving us a kind of a field guide to dealing with this really unprecedented experience of the of the COVID issues. Well thank you for that endorsement Dan, it means a lot coming from you because you certainly have the credentials to speak about this disease and to recognize that the fact that you recognize the the need for a sober evaluation is encouraging and I hope we'll be encouraging to others. Great, well with that our time is up, so until next time may the God of peace make you perfect in holiness, may he preserve you whole and entire spirit, soul, and body irreproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen. Thanks again Phil, Jordan let's put this in apostolate VA 2 when you get it