 Today I have the great privilege of interviewing Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, also known as Dr. Cates. It's a honor to have you here. Thank you so much, Patrick. Dr. K, you hold a BA in liberal arts from Thomas Aquinas College, an MA and a PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of America with the specialization and the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas. And after teaching at the International Theological Institute in Austria, you joined the founding team of Wyoming Catholic College where you taught theology, philosophy, music, and art history and directed the choir and scola until 2018. Today you are a full-time writer and public speaker. You've written and edited many books, including your most recent one, The True Obedience in the Church, A Guide to Discermin and Challenging Times, and your works have been translated into 18 languages, so quite an accomplishment. Tan Books is pleased to be releasing your new book, The Once in Future Roman Right, Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy After 70 Years of Exile. And this book is scheduled to release on October 4th, so right around the corner. But before we discuss your great book, I want to ask you a few questions, personal questions. Many of people have seen your articles on LifeSite News, One Peter Five, and the list goes on, but few of us know you as a person. So, Dr. Kay, you were born in a suburb of Chicago and then you were raised in New Jersey. Can you tell us a little bit about your Catholic faith growing up? Yes. I'm the youngest of six children. I always went to church with my family. My parents were very devout mask-overs every Sunday. I realized in retrospect that the parish that I grew up in was a rather liberal parish. I understand that, of course, as a child, not having a larger picture of the world and much understanding of what was going on in the church. But nevertheless, it got me started in church music. I sang in the children's choir. I sang later on in the adult choir, and that gave me a certain discipline for rehearsing music. And we did sometimes sing very good music, other times not so good music. But yes, it was a good, I guess I would say, I'm grateful for the fact that I grew up in a Catholic family and that I developed those habits early on of not only going to Mass, but singing at Mass, which has become such a huge part of my life. Later on, I discovered in high school, Pergorean chant and polyphony and other kinds of wonderful classical music, and that has become one of the main passions of my life after that. Excellent, excellent. And then as a youth growing up, what kind of books did you enjoy reading, both Catholic and non-Catholic, that really kind of stirred the faith? Well, to be honest, I don't think I read much explicitly Catholic literature until I was a senior in high school. I had an intellectual conversion in senior year. It was thanks to a philosophy class. I took, taught by a very inspiring and eloquent teacher who was himself a Catholic convert. And although it was a political philosophy course, he had us reading St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas along with Aristotle and Plato and many other amazing authors. And it really fired my imagination and it gave me such an enthusiasm for learning that I never had before that I decided actually to study philosophy from that point onwards just that one course in high school made me want to become a philosopher, but a Catholic philosopher mainly through reading St. Thomas Aquinas. So that's when my, the real intellectual adventure began for me. Oh, was that a Catholic high school? It was an all boys Catholic private school, yes. A Benedictine high school, in fact. And when you're not writing, which, you know, it seems to be, you do that a lot. What do you enjoy reading today? Like, what are you currently reading? I, I really love to read books out loud. I've been doing that in my family for, oh, probably, I mean, over 20 years, almost every evening we get together and we read something out loud. Now it's just my wife and I at home, but we still do that. We still try to keep that up, not necessarily every night, but many nights each week. So we've read nearly every novel of PG Woodhouse. He's my favorite comic author. I think he's a real voice of sanity and he's hilarious too. But we read nonfiction as well. We just recently finished my wife and I reading James Matthew Wilson's book called The Vision of the Soul, which is very profound and very beautifully written. I highly recommend it. It's a pretty heavy lifting book. It's a big fat book, but it's extremely well done. I've enjoyed recently reading Father Brian Houghton. He wrote this novel called Judith's Marriage in the 1970s, mid-70s, and it's a very incisive look at the changes in the Catholic Church at that time. Beautiful book. But if you were to say like, if you could take like two books with you, you always get that question. You're in Stranded Island. What would you, what would you take with you? Oh, that's, that's a difficult question. I think from an intellectual point, well, I would, I would take a Bible with me. You got to have the Bible. If you're going to be on an island, you're going to do a lot of lexiodivina and prayer, so you better have the Bible. But from an intellectual point of view, I think I would take the Summa Theologiae. There is a one volume edition of that in Latin, which shows you could kind of sneak that whole thing in on the under the other arm. But I don't know. I mean, I think if I, if I had stereo equipment on the desert island, I would want to take my set of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach on 170 CDs and spend my time really getting to know that music intimately. Yeah. Very good. Now, how about saints wise, you know, you mentioned, you know, previously when you were in high school, you know, some of the, you know, like I think you mentioned Saint Augustine. What, who are some of your, your favorite saints and, and why? Yes. That's a wonderful question. That's actually a really difficult question because the saints are so colorful and so, so full of variety and they've, and at different points in my life, it's, you know, different saints have played a major role, almost like, I think the saints, if, if they see that we're serious about the faith, they intervene in our lives. You know, it's like when Jesus says, it is not you who have chosen me, but I have chosen you. I think the saints pick us out and they, and they start to put them, kind of insert themselves into our lives. So for me, obviously Saint Thomas Aquinas has been a huge influence on me all through my life. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on Saint Thomas, on the ecstasy of love and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. And you know, I would say in terms of like the whole framework of how I think about the faith is tomistic. It's deeply informed by Saint Thomas. But another influence on me was Saint Louis Marie de Montfort and his true devotion to Mary. And not just that, but the secret of the rosary and his book on, on Jesus Christ as the eternal and incarnate wisdom and just a bunch of things by Saint Louis de Montfort that I read, there's a whole, there's a volume called God Alone that has all of his writings in it, which I studied. And that was, you know, profoundly nourishing to me. Saint Benedict is, has been another huge influence on me just reading his rule. As you know, I'm a Benedict in Oblate and I read the rule every day, you know, there's a little piece of the rule every day that monks and nuns and oblites are supposed to read and think about and try to apply to their lives if you're a layman. And, and so I've read the rule now, you know, probably a couple of dozen times. And I just find that in all sorts of subtle ways, the way that Saint Benedict thinks is the way that I think now. Could you give me like a specific way, maybe an example, like where you felt like that saint was, even in your writing and your speaking, it was just out of the blue, it just came and it was like, this is a divine inspiration from a saint. I can, well, I don't know if I, I don't want to say that I've had like a mystical experience, but, but I'll give you two examples. So in our family, we have the custom of picking a saint for each year on January 1st out of a hat. And we've got, I don't know, a couple of hundred saints in there and we pick out the saint and that's your special saint for the year. And so a couple of years ago, I pulled out Little Nelly of Holy God, who you know, I'm sure you know about her. She's not canonized, but we have a book. Yes. Her tan book's great little classic book. Exactly. And I've read that and my children have read it too. And that's how I got to know about her to begin with. And that's why she ended up, you know, as one of the saints listed, you know, sort of like you could say like equivalent canonization, you know, we all know that she was, she died in the odor of, of sanctity. And so I picked out her name and it was that year that I felt a tremendous desire and need to write a book about the Holy Eucharist. And that became my book, Holy Bread of Eternal Life from, from Sophia Institute Press. And in fact, in the forward to, or in the preface to that book, I say, I think the reason that I did this book at this time was because Little Nelly was my patron for this year and she wanted me to do this. She, you know, she obtained that, that grace for me. And then this past year, my, my patron saint for the year was Saint Rita of Kasha. And the thing that's neat is about that is that Saint Rita, it was her feast day, the day that I became a Benedictine oblate that I made my final ablation was May 22nd, the Feast of Saint Rita. Then I picked her again last year as my patroness. And I ended up having a similar experience. I finished a book again for Sophia Institute Press on the, on marriage and family and pro-life themes. And of course, Saint Rita is one of the great patron saints for marriage, you know, and especially for, for, you know, trouble and difficult marriages. So anyway, these, I think the saints are much more active than, than we realize sometimes. Absolutely. And in terms of saints, and then we earlier, we talked about devotion. Is there a, if you were to say like your favorite devotion, would you say the rosary, the holy face, is there, there's one out there that you just, you said like Dr. K, you know, like I always joke, you know, the saints are like, oh, you know, Saint Therese of the child Jesus, you know, if you, if you were religious and what would it be? Dr. K of, it would, it would, it would probably be Dr. K of the solemn high mass or something like that. If you could use such an expression. No, I mean, in fact, there, there are two things that have been very important to me as a Catholic for a couple of decades now. One is the rosary, the daily rosary. And at night, before bed, that's, that's, that's become my, my sort of night prayer. We also, in our family, when our children were younger, we would sing compliment, like a sort of miniature compliment, and we would sing it in chant. And so it's, it's, we did that for a long time, but in more recent years, we just shifted to praying the rosary. So that's, that's, that's a pillar. And then the other thing is the divine office, the monastic divine office in Latin. I try to pray one or several pieces of that every day as, as the Benedictine obliques. Beautiful. Dr. K, I, I've read that you went to Georgetown for a year, and then you started at St. Thomas or Thomas Aquinas College in California. What made you decide to lead Georgetown? And maybe can you speak a little about, about the importance of it? Obviously, besides the obviestries, but, but, and then also, you know, what made kind of the importance of attending a Catholic university? You know, we have many parents that are watching the show and, you know, finding that solid Catholic university. So maybe you can speak on that a little. Yes. Well, so to be honest, I went to Georgetown University more because my parents really wanted me to go there. You know, it has a prestigious reputation and my brother had gone there before me. You know, and I, in my heart of hearts, I really wanted to go to Thomas Aquinas College for precisely the reason I said earlier that I felt I had fallen in love with St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Plato, Aristotle. I wanted to read those kinds of authors. I wanted to read the great books. You know, I didn't really want to go to a conventional university after discovering those things, but I'd already been accepted. My parents really wanted me to go there. So I gave it a shot. There was an honors program that I went into. And the first problem was that as freshmen in the, in the honors program, the liberal arts seminar, they started us with the 19th century. So we were reading, in literature, we were reading Dickens and Wordsworth and, and I think we read some Blake, even though he's a little bit earlier. And then, you know, in philosophy, we were reading Firebock and Hegel and Marx and all the students were so confused because they had no preparation. They hadn't studied anything prior to these authors in high school. And so it was, it was like coming into a really long conversation very late and being expected to, you know, participate in that conversation, you know, the great conversation of Western philosophy, which goes back, you know, 2,500, 3,000 years. And so I found it to be really academically incoherent. And I thought, why are we not starting with the Greeks? Why are we not going in a chronological order? You know, why aren't we starting with logic and, and, you know, the fundamentals and building on that instead of throwing us into Marx, for goodness sakes. And so that was one problem, but also just the, the environment at the college, at the university was so un-Catholic. I mean, it's a, it's a Catholic and name-only institution, just like unfortunately many of our politicians are chinos as well, right? I mean, I don't need to mention names. We all know who the problem is in this country or who the problems are. And so, you know, although I met a few really good Catholics there, overall it was a, it was a sort of saturated and secularism campus with, you know, lots of drinking and fornication and drugs. And really, it gave me, it gave me such a sour taste that I also realized, you know, I need a good moral environment. I need to go to a place where people are practicing the faith, taking it seriously. And so I always say to parents who are thinking about college, don't get caught up in the reputation of the college, don't get caught up in how many students attend, you know, what, what you need to think about is what are the people like on campus? What are the students like? What kind of friends are your children going to make when they go to that college? If you, if, if you, if a Catholic goes to a college with 200 or 2,000 students who are generally more practicing and more devout, they'll make a lot more friends than if they go to a university with 10 or 20,000 students that's very secular. It's almost counterintuitive, but the smaller the campus, the better the experience for the student. That's, that's the case. And that's, I've seen that verified in so many instances. And then following your undergrad, as I mentioned earlier, you, you learned a master's in philosophy and a PhD in philosophy from the Catholic U. And your dissertation was on the ecstasy of love in Aquinas. Can you speak on this topic? Like why, why this topic? It's a very stirring topic. So I was, I was really struck at one point in grad school when I was, you know, hadn't decided yet what I would write my dissertation on. But I had taken a course on the ethics of St. Thomas. And of course, when you study the ethics of St. Thomas, you quickly realize that it's all about love. It's all about charity, the love of God poured into our hearts. And so we spent a lot of time on the treatise on love in the Prima Secundae of the Suma and the treatise on charity in the Secundae of the Suma. And in the, in the Prima Secundae, St. Thomas has a question, it's question 28, called on the effects of love. And he, he asks, you know, is union an effect of love? Is mutual indwelling an effect of love? Is zeal an effect of love? Does love wound the lover? So he's asking these questions that sound much more like mystical theology than you typically expect to find in the kind of sober, rational, scholastic that St. Thomas is and that he has a reputation for being. But one of the questions or one of the articles there was his ecstasy, an effect of love. And St. Thomas says yes. And he explains various ways in which love draws the lover out of himself. It draws him out in his affections. He, he spends his time doing things for the beloved, not for himself. His and it draws him out in his thoughts towards the beloved. He's not thinking about himself, but about the beloved. And so both in terms of cognition and in knowledge and in terms of appetite or desire, you know, love makes the lover ecstatic. And I just found this to be such a beautiful and suggestive and rich idea that I thought, well, gee, I mean, you know, I should look into this some more. And I discovered to my surprise that almost nobody had gone deeply into this question. It was mentioned here and there. And this or that book or article that Thomas said this, but nobody had written a full study on what he means by the ecstasy of love. So that's that that's why it became my dissertation topic. And I discovered going through his writings that he talks about ecstasy and the related related idea of rapture, raptus and ecstasis in Latin. He talks about them in some 70 places. And so it comes up in a lot of different writings. And I looked at all of those and compared them and contrasted them and so on. It was a fascinating project and very also spiritually, I would say spiritually nourishing, which is not what most people think when they think of a dissertation topic, you know, they think, oh, what a chore to get done with. But for me, it was so enriching. That's beautiful. I mean, I often think about some of the saints, you know, Teresa Vavola, you know, that is in the famous, she's a famous statue of her right in Rome, Bernini with the arrow pointing through her. And often we think of the brides of Christ as having this ecstasy, this union, but even the male saints, you know, that they had this rich union with God. Right, exactly. And one of the things that was really helpful about working on ecstasy and equinus is that you very quickly realized he wasn't talking about extraordinary mystical phenomena. I mean, that there are extraordinary mystical phenomena and the term ecstasy is often used in the connection with somebody like Saint Teresa of Jesus. But Saint Thomas was trying to describe a characteristic of true love in general, even in natural love, even, let's say, in a great sort of romance that love will draw the lover out of himself towards the beloved. Of course, it will do so imperfectly until grace is involved. But he's trying to describe something that's true about human psychology and about how human nature is. Thanks. Now, and it says you helped found Wyoming Catholic College in 2006. Did you end up teaching as far as your dissertation? Did you end up teaching someone like a course on that? Or is that just, you know, have you utilized that dissertation going forward? Yes. Well, you know, so Wyoming Catholic College, like Thomas at going to college, is a great books program for four years. So it's going to be dealing with maybe more what you could call meat and potatoes subjects, you know, something like the ecstasy of love. It would be perhaps too particular and there aren't electives. But it certainly, you know, that theme does come up. It came up, for instance, when we read in class Pope Benedict the 16th encyclical deus Caritas est, where Pope Benedict in the first part of that encyclical talks about Christian love as agape and as, and as eros. And what's the difference between these two kinds of love? One is more of a needy, need-based love and the other is more of a giving and self-giving love. And actually the notion of ecstasy is right there in deus Caritas est. So it certainly came up. And then what made you decide to leave teaching and then do you miss teaching? Is there times when you're writing, you're like, I wish I was back in the classroom. Yeah. Oh, sure. I do miss teaching sometimes. Although fortunately, you know, as a big part of my work right now, I travel around a lot giving lectures at least once a month. I'm on the road giving talks. And when I go and give a talk somewhere, I always make sure that there's a Q and A period. And that feels like being in the classroom again, you know, with a good lively Q and A is like a seminar class for me, at least it feels that way. And then I often, you know, end up having meetings with people. And I feel that I'm still teaching, even though now I'm teaching primarily through the medium of writing and lecturing. But yeah, I mean, certainly I've also taught some online courses and that has kept me kind of in the game. Now, not only do you have this, you know, the book coming out on the Roman rite, but I'm more excited to have a future book, probably most likely next summer on sacred music that you've written. What kind of music do you enjoy listening to? Yeah, I have my favorite composers, for sure. I mentioned earlier Bach. Generally speaking, when it comes to, let's say, secular music or instrumental music, I'll say secular music, Baroque composers are my favorite. So Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli, all these amazing Baroque composers, as well as some some ones that are maybe less lesser known like Books de Huda. And but I also really love certain modern composers as well. I have a great love for an Estonian composer named Arvo Pert, who's probably the most performed living composer. He was born in 1935, so he's getting quite old now. But his music is really special. It's luminous and rather and somewhat mystical, I guess you could say, and very intense. And it has a pretty high degree of dissonance, but in such a way that there's a luminosity to the music. And he's always setting to music religious texts, whether Latin texts or Slavic texts, you know. So I really love Arvo Pert's music, but also Goretsky, a Polish composer, Goretsky, an English composer, John Taverner. There are quite a few modern composers whom I've really grown to enjoy. As far as Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, I mean, those are my beloved sacred music genres. But there I have the good fortune of just singing in a men's scola every Sunday at the Latin Mass, and we sing that music. You know, we sing it for the purpose for which it was made. And do you like to listen to music when you're writing, or is it just, like, maybe in your car, or just at night time before you go to bed? I used to, you know, I think sometimes people develop, or they change over their lives, their listening habits change. When I was in grad school, I used to, like, when I was working on my dissertation, I used to blast romantic symphonies, you know, like Brahms and Wagner, and, well, Wagner not for symphonies, but Brahms and Mahler and Brookner, you know, and Schubert, and I'd have all these things on really loud. And now I think, how can I possibly have concentrated? You know, I hope the writing is coherent. Because now when I write, I actually prefer to have it either quiet, or maybe some quiet instrumental music, broke music. Yeah. There's this, I spent some time in a monastery, a Benedictine monastery, and there was a quote that I read from Blessed Columba Marmy, and I think he said something like this, he goes, there's some nuns when they sing, they bring the angels delight, there's other nuns when they sing, they put the demons to flight, you're referring to the bad voices. But I think about, maybe reflect on chant and how it brings God so much delight, and also at the same time it repels the demons, you know, exorcists talk about this, listen to chant, and just the importance. And I didn't know if you want to just talk real quick about just the beauty of chant and that spiritual battle too. Yeah, my goodness. No, you're absolutely right about that. Gregorian chant, you know, you could almost say it's like musical holy water. You know, when you get sprinkled with it sonically, you know, it turns your mind to God. It purifies your passions, your intentions. It's music that is purely sacred. It has no other function. It's not like, many other kinds of music can have like a multi-purpose, like a multi-purpose tool, you know, you can use it in different contexts for different reasons. But chant is specifically and exclusively sacred, and everybody knows that. I mean, even Hollywood seems to do that, because if they want to evoke Catholicism, you know, they go and find a beautiful church and they have Gregorian chant playing, because everybody knows that this is Catholicism, right? I mean, everybody except, unfortunately, some, you know, some of our clergy don't seem to have gotten the memo yet about that. But, you know, so chant is, it's a kind of wonderfully strange music for us, because it doesn't have a regular metrical beat. So you can't, you know, you can't, it's not like marching music or waltzing or something, it doesn't, it floats and flows along because it's following the shape of the words. It's, you know, the music is following the words and is illuminating the words. And there's a kind of spiritual, like a subdued spiritual joy and elation in those chant melodies, if they're sung well. But I think it just carries your soul, you know, to God. And I've been singing chant now for 30 years, more than 30 years, actually. And I just love it. I never get tired of it. It's an eternally fresh music. You know, and I can't really say, I mean, there's almost no other piece of music that doesn't become cloying if you listen to it too much. Like, I've heard that too many times. I don't want to, you know, even like, with all these four seasons, as great as it is, if you listen to that every day, you get tired of it. But I've been singing chant, you know, at least every week, if not more often, for over 30 years. And I love it more than ever. I'd like to talk a little bit about your spiritual life. You know, you have a son that's, you're a Benedict Ablai, and then your son is a Benedictine monk in Ireland. Can you tell us about how, you know, the Benedictine spirituality influences your own life? Yes. Well, it has a huge influence just because Benedict's main principle for his monks is that nothing should be put before the work of God. That's how he says it. And the work of God, the phrase in Latin is Opus Dei, means for him divine worship. It means liturgical worship. And so, Benedictine monasticism is essentially a form of life organized to gather people in an optimal way for celebrating the sacred liturgy. That's the pinnacle of their life. That's the purpose of their life. If you were to say, what is the raison d'etre of a monk or a nun, it's to worship God liturgically. And obviously then that means that the rest of their life is ordered to that. So, their private prayer, their meditation on scripture, even the work that they do, whether they're making rosaries or making candles or whatever they might be doing, you know, to support the monastery, publishing books, all of that is meant to be taken up and made into a liturgical offering to God, almost like the offertory gifts are offered up to God. And so, the centrality of the liturgy, which is typical of monastic life and of Benedictine life in particular, is of course that my greatest interest and passion has always been the sacred liturgy, and that's what I write about the most. So, I feel like there's quite a natural fit there. And the Benedictine life also reminds us of the primacy of God and of prayer and of the spiritual life over all worldly and earthly concerns, even in the church. So, in the church, you know, praising and honoring God, adoring the Lord takes precedence over, let's say, evangelizing and feeding the poor and whatever. All those things are extremely important. The church has always done them and always will do them. But if they're going to be sanctified, if they're really going to be Catholic, they need to be rooted and founded on the liturgy and on glorifying God for his own sake because he's worthy of glory. So, I think that monasticism is a permanent reminder to us of seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you. And my conviction is that a large part of the crisis in the church is having inverted that so that now the motto seems to be, and unfortunately even for high-ranking officials in the Vatican, the motto seems to be, seek first the things of this world, seek first political solutions, seek first immigration policy, and let the kingdom of God worry about itself or seek that when you've got some spare time. And when you make that inversion, God cannot bless that because it's disordered. When I see monks or religious monks, I'm like reminded of eternity. I look at them and just that, for all eternity, praising God. Now, what advice would you give to parents to having a son that's a Benedict and monk and raising a child? Like, did you guys pray that one of your children would become a monk? And then also maybe that idea of detachment, it's a tough thing to, you're blessed with a child that goes to the seminary or religious life, but then when push comes to shove, then you don't see them as much. So it's a sacrifice. And even St. Therese, I love what she said. She goes, my parents will be blessed a hundredfold more than me, you know, that passage about whoever leaves everything behind. And she goes, that applies to parents as well. So just maybe if you can touch on that. That's beautiful. Yes. Oh, by the way, I should have said earlier that St. Therese is also one of my favorite saints, and but I won't get into that right now since you asked me a different question. No, I mean, I think, no, you're right about the sacrifice. It is a huge sacrifice. I think, you know, even more for the mother than for the father. I mean, the father, they both miss their children when they go away, you know, to college and when they go off and maybe they get married or whatever they do. And they don't necessarily stay close to the home. I mean, if they do, that's a great blessing. But children going off, even if they do stay in the same town, there's always a sense of separation and a necessary and healthy kind of distance that has to form, you know, so that the children can form their own life and can take up what their own state of life is supposed to be. And I think that mothers feel that very acutely because, you know, I mean, they bore the child in their womb and they nursed the child and they took, you know, that there's such an intimate bond between the mother and child that I think the sacrifice is huge for them. Whereas fathers are kind of like, oh, you know, be well, be successful, go off and do your thing, you know, and, you know, make sure you stay in touch. But, you know, so that they kind of want to like push them out of the nest in a certain sense. But no, as far as vocations go, I mean, I just think it's inherent to Catholicism that we should always be asking the Lord to raise up vocations to the priest and religious life. And therefore, in honesty and integrity, we should we should also be asking God, do that with our own children. It would be strange to pray to God for priests and religious but only from other people's families. I mean, that's absurd. We should ask. But at the same time, you know, I think no parents should be disappointed if a child doesn't become a priest or religious. You know, our prayer should always be, God's will be done. And Lord, if you want to give a vocation to this family, please do it. You're free, you're sovereignly free to do so. I am ready to surrender my child. And already that's what that's what God is asking for. We can't make anything else happen, right? We have to trust His grace. That's a good point. Because I think sometimes, you know, you seem very, obviously traditional circles, people kind of pressure their children to be priests or religious and that can backfire on you. And I always loved, you know, the story about Fulton Sheen that his parents always prayed that he would have to be a priest, but they never told him. So that always struck me, you know, just pray for that. And if it happens, you know, pray for above all, pray that your child becomes a saint. Exactly. That's the most important thing. Yeah. And I think that what parents can do and should do is make sure that their children are reading the lives of the saints, make sure that it's a normal idea that men that young men and women become religious or that men enter the priesthood, that that's just normal, right? There's nothing strange or unusual about that. And also then to take the children to visit a monastery from time to time, you know, go to Clear Creek on a family trip and spend a couple of days there or go and visit, you know, have your son who is 18 or something, go and spend a vocation retreat at, you know, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter in Nebraska or something like that. In other words, let them have experiences where they can pray deeply and ask the Lord, what do you want me to do? Because if we don't ask, we won't receive. That's what I was reading about St. Alphonse. It's like his parents would always take his dad would take him on a retreat with him. So it's, I mean, if you read the lives of the saints, you realize from a young age, their parents were cultivating that vocation. So and then after you shared on your pre-order pages, I think a couple, maybe last month, I read about your future book, The Once in Future Roman Right. I kind of chuckled a little bit. A priest had a comment. He goes, referring to you, he goes, you write faster than I can read your writings. He goes, yeah, you write faster than I can read your writings. Where does, and then I guess I want to know, where does your inspiration come from? And have you always been, you know, blessed with this skill, you know? So my, as for as long as I can remember, writing has been something I've enjoyed doing. I mean, even when I was in grammar school, I was in a Catholic grammar school. So I went to Catholic schools all my life, except for two years, two, two painful years that were out of public school. But there was one summer or there was one school year when my parents were going on, were going to go on a long trip. And they wanted to take me with them because I was the only child at home at that point. They were going to Australia and New Zealand. So this can be a really special trip. And they said to the principal, can we take our, you know, can we take our son out of school and bring him with us? And the principal said, of course, as long as he writes a report afterwards, that, you know, has to be a very detailed report and we'll count that as his schoolwork, right? So this is a neat opportunity. And I wrote this, I think I wrote like an 80 page account, which I lost. I'm disappointed because I think it would have been hilarious to read it now. It's like, you know, fifth grade or something. I wrote this log account of Australia, New Zealand and my thoughts about it. So anyway, so I've always enjoyed writing. My father helped me to be a good writer. He used to look at my writing. I would give him my writing assignments and he would critique it with a red pen and he would say, you know, don't use which in this case, use that and, okay, this comm is in the wrong place. And, you know, he was a real good teacher for me in addition to the teachers I had at school. But no, I mean, once I fell in love with, once the intellectual life was activated and energized in me by that philosophy course I mentioned, you know, then I don't know what it was, but I realized that there's something about writing down your thoughts as you're reading books or as you're having conversations with people and then reflecting on it. There's something about writing which, which hones your thinking. You don't really know what you think until you write it down, until you try to write it down. A lot of people think they know what they think, but they don't really, they're confused and there's a lot of, you know, things are mixed up in their heads. And when you sit down and write, okay, here's the argument. You quickly say, oh, I think that premise is weak or there's a missing link here or there's, what's wrong? Something's wrong here. It's not actually as clear as I thought it was. So writing then almost becomes like a diagnostic tool and like a mirror that you hold up to yourself and to your thoughts to be more rigorous, to be more demanding. And if you, it's also like writing a journal or writing a diary, which is also something I've done for a long time, not always, but for various periods of my life. And I find that extremely fruitful spiritually as well, to reflect on the day to say what, you know, what went well, what went wrong, almost like the Jesuit examination of conscience, but to do it in written form. And, you know, obviously I have to be sure that that book, you know, doesn't get into the wrong hands. But, but yeah, so I think writing is a wonderful spiritual discipline. In fact, I think Father John Hardin many decades ago wrote an article called something like writing as a spiritual discipline, which I had never seen until recently. But, but I, so anyway, that's something I've just had the habit and I've developed it for so long, that now it's, it's relatively easy for me if there's some topic that excites me, or that infuriates me, then, then to, you know, to sit down and write. Do you keep like a little journal with you? I was just wondering, you know, if you're in, you know, in the middle of mass, or you're in prayer, and you know, this thought comes, you're like, okay, Lord, I got to focus on you, but I'll come back to that later. But there you go. So I have this little, I have this little notebook. I have lots of these. And I, and I always carry this in a pen around with me, or at least most of the time, if I remember to. And yeah, I would say it's actually almost an occupational hazard at this point, because there are oftentimes when I'm sitting in mass, in high mass, or solid mass, doesn't usually happen in low mass. And something about the liturgy will inspire me so much, like, I'll see something I've never seen before, I'll think of some connection that I never thought of before. And I'll just quickly pull out the notebook and jot down a couple of words, you know, like, because I want to come back to that later and think about it some more. So it's neat. And then switching gears, the Latin mass also referred to as the extraordinary form. I'd like you to describe the most beautiful liturgy that you've ever attended. Perhaps it even moved you to tears. Where was it? Take us through it. You know, what was the occasion of it? That gosh, that's a hard question, because in fact, attending traditional masses for over 30 years now, I've been moved to tears many times, just either usually by the splendor of a liturgy. For example, there's one very memorable liturgy I can tell you about. It was in an abbey in the Netherlands called Rolduk. The celebrant was Archbishop Alexander Sample, the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon. And he was invited to a conference on the sacred liturgy to which I was also invited. And he gave a talk, I gave a talk at that conference. And we actually were part of a round table panel discussion as well. And I got to sit next to him at the closing banquet, which was really neat, because then I got to talk to him for about an hour, which was a great privilege. But he was the celebrant for a pontifical solemn mass in this medieval abbey with incredibly high gothic windows. And just the ceremonial and all of the ministers at a pontifical mass, there are many ministers. The whole sanctuary was full of ministers wearing those beautiful vestments. And the sunlight was streaming through the windows and the incense was billowing up and the organ was playing and the chant scola was singing. It was like this, it was a heavenly experience. It was a transcendent experience. And I was definitely teared up by that liturgy. Just, I think, just the sense of overwhelming beauty and glory. Recently, it's been all over the news, Bishop Baron interviewed Hollywood star Shaila LaBeouf, as we know Shaila converted the faith while playing St. Padre Pio. And in that interview, Shaila talked about the Latin Mass, how it affects him so deeply. Why do you think so many young people are gravitating to the Latin Mass? Well, I mean, he himself said in that interview, and of course, this has been memed now to death practically. But he said, I don't, when he goes to the new Mass, at least as it's celebrated in most places, he feels like they're trying to sell him something. And when he goes to the Latin Mass, he doesn't feel like anybody's trying to sell him on some program or some platform or some idea. But it's just a kind of, it's a sort of secret that you stumble into. It's like, it's like the traditional Latin Mass seems to be like lifting the veil on heavenly worship. And you just get to participate in that and you get to be there and enter into it. And even just by quietly watching it, it's transformative. It's so powerful, it's like a magnet that draws the heart towards the mystery of the Eucharist. And this is what Pope Benedict XVI said as well, all the way back in 2007, in his letter to the bishops, he said, after the council and the liturgical reform, it was expected that the interest in the Old Mass would eventually die out as people, as people who had grown up with it died out. He didn't quite say it that bluntly, but that was the idea. But he said, but meanwhile, it's been shown that young people are attracted to the Eucharistic mystery in this form. And I think it's just that note of mystery, that note of the full focus and attention is somewhere else. It's not on the congregation, it's not on me. I'm not being put under the spotlight. I'm not being expected to perform. It's not about me, it's about God. And that theocentric nature of the old liturgy is so attractive, especially in a time where we're saturated with commercialism, so people are always trying to sell us something, and they're always trying to convince us to be or to do or to look a certain way. And to be able to look away from yourself and to be completely caught up in the divine is such a privilege. It's like a rare gift for us in this day and age. It's almost, I could be mentioned before, it's like gazing on the beatific vision. You're taken out of yourself. It's the ecstasy principle that I was talking about. Now, concerning your new book, The Once in Future Roman Right, you recently posted on Facebook, it is unquestionably the book on which I have worked hardest, of which I am the most proud, and I can't wait for you to see it. Can you tell us why this is a case? Yes. So this book is definitely the fruit of 20 years' worth of thinking and writing. We have it right here. Sorry to interrupt, right behind. What I've realized over the years, I mean, there are things about all of my books on the liturgy that I appreciate, that I think each book has something to give to the reader. I wouldn't suggest that this new book supplants the old ones. They all have their own focus and their own purpose. But what I've realized after all this time is just how profound, at what a deep level are the differences between the revised and reformed mass of Paul VI and all of the sacramental rites of Paul VI and the whole and the divine office of Paul VI, then everything. Paul VI gave the Church essentially a new form of worship in every respect, at every level and in every area. How profound the differences are between that and the traditional liturgy of the Church. I think most people who attend the Latin Mass will instantly see many differences, especially if compared to what you would find at any random look up in the phone book, local parish, Catholic parish, and you go to that. Between that and say a mass that has a lot of silence, that has lots of chant, where the priest is facing eastwards with the people in one direction towards the east, which represents the risen Christ and the Christ who is to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. They'll see these obvious differences and those differences are hugely important, but there are much deeper differences to almost what I would call on the genetic level, not on the superficial level, but on the genetic level in terms like the very material and the very concepts and the very principles of the rubrics and so on. In this book I was able I think finally to articulate fully what is it that is so different about these these rites, to such an extent that I come to the conclusion, which of course will be controversial for some readers, that there is only one Roman rite and it's not the rite of Paul VI, but it's the rite that the Church of Rome always celebrated going all the way back to the fourth century, at least the fourth century in terms of its Latin form. This is what I'm calling the Roman rite, the once and future Roman rite. Along those same lines, what does the traditional Latin mass offer, particularly to the Church, without using anything else to contrast it with simply looking at it in isolation, or I guess what would you say the most beautiful elements of the Tridentine rite that enriched the Church as a whole? I did mention earlier the theocentricity, the really intense focus on God, which almost in a way seems to ignore the people, but it ignores them in order to fold them into something greater than themselves and to draw them out of themselves into the heavenly worship of the Lamb of God. But I also think that there's a kind of gritty realism to the prayers of the old mass. It takes sin and salvation very seriously, the need for grace to do anything good, our fallen condition, the weaknesses of our fallen condition, the temptations, the need for militancy, for conversion. There are many themes like this that are prominent in the old liturgy when you look at the text of it that are kind of muted or even silenced in other, you know, in more recent liturgies. And so I think there's a whole school of what you could call traditional Catholic attitudes and thought that are embodied in the traditional missile, the Tridentine missile. And we need to hear those truths because those are exactly the truths that are most being denied or forgotten right now. So there's been a great attack on both human life and as we know the attack on the Latin mass, one involves biological life and the other on supernatural life. Do you see any similarities between these two attacks, both of which are meant to bring life to the world and both are reflections of God himself and heaven? Yeah, I mean the basic problem of of modernity, I would say, is that modern thought, modern philosophy and then modern culture following from those things is is egocentric and individualistic. It really it emphasizes the atomic individual. You know, it's really about me, myself, and I. You know, that's that's what you get beginning with Descartes, the kind of the father of modern philosophy. And you you see it just unfolding and I would even say unraveling over all the centuries until you get to the radical individualism, which is really empty of meaning that you see now something like transgenderism where people just want to define who and what they are and they just by their own will, by their sheer willpower as if they were God for themselves and as if they were creating themselves right, which of course is completely false and that's why there's so much unhappiness in the modern world. People want to act like God. They want to be God and you can't be God if you're a creature and that's going to lead to to misery and to sin and it's going to lead to insanity actually. If you really I mean I think Friedrich Nietzsche, part of the reason why he went insane, it was not just syphilis, but it was his nihilistic philosophy is so inhuman that it actually destroys the will to live. It makes you go crazy. So the problem with modernity is egocentricity, individualism and traditional liturgy is a kind of healing remedy and medicine and balm for that and it takes us out of ourselves and away from those errors. You touched on this a little bit but why do we need the traditional lab mass now, even more so because you argue that it's not a fad, an aesthetic whim, or preferential taste, but something very close to the identity itself of the Roman church that cannot be substituted for. How is this so? The basic concept of tradition has been superficialized. Some people think tradition just means any old thing that's been handed down or even anything that I decide has value so I can say as of today it's a tradition that we do such and such. Well that's kind of an abuse of language. I mean tradition doesn't just begin right now because I say it does. No, the real concept of tradition or parodysis in Greek is the whole inheritance of the church from each age that is passed down to the next as from a father to a child. And that inheritance begins with the apostles and of course the core of it, the heart of it is apostolic tradition and the deposit of faith but we need to think about that as being like a jewel in a gold setting and the gold setting is what the church develops over all the centuries of her prayer and devotion and piety and theology as the appropriate sort of surrounding for the apostolic inheritance. So the reason why liturgies grow and develop over the centuries both in east and west is because of this natural desire on the part of human beings to embellish and enrich what they love and to give it their best and to give God their best. And so we have this sum total, our heritage, made up of ecclesiastical traditions and of apostolic tradition and of dominical tradition what Jesus himself gave us. All of these things combined are what we mean by tradition as Catholics and all of it is valuable even if you can make distinctions within it. It's all valuable for us and it's all something that unfolded under the guidance of divine providence and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I mean Christ said, I will give my spirit to you to lead you into the fullness of truth. That fullness of truth includes the fullness of the liturgical worship of the church and so it's literally absurd for Catholics at a later age to turn their back on a huge part of the tradition of the church that's like turning their back on divine providence and on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It's very serious. The once in future Roman right you so beautifully wrote the following. This is what we see in the lives of the great mystics. It is the liturgy that forms and grounds and permeates their interior life keeping it healthy strong balanced rich and fruitful preventing it from veering off into the arbitrariness sentimentality idiosyncrasy pride or vanity the interior life of grace hidden in the soul is reflected represented exemplified in the exterior sayo I can't even sayo economy of the traditional liturgy. It is the mystical life of the indwelling trinity writ large translated into the language of ritual ceremony and prayer enacted in the choreography of ministers brushed upon words savored and melodious chant nestled and thundering silence so beautiful how does the Roman right specifically form the interior life of a person perhaps you could cite a few examples of the saints as well in there. Well I mean the traditional Roman right is a very complex form of worship that it demands if you many different dispositions and Dieter von Hildebrand was really great about drawing these things out it demands if you a certain humility that you have to submit to the detailed rubrics and their regimentation you have to allow yourself to become an instrument or a tool in God's hands that's especially true for the clergy and the ministers and the singers. It demands if you a certain bodily discipline because there's a lot of kneeling and it demands of you receptivity that you have to in a way you have to let God hollow you out and fill you with grace and the liturgy exemplifies that in many ways you know it exemplifies the principle of John the Baptist you know he must increase and I must decrease so there's a real humility there there's a there's a I guess I would say the traditional liturgy really cultivates the habit of listening of listening deeply to the word of God and to and and responding to it not necessarily just with lips or with bodily actions but with the heart and with the mind and with faith which are of the mind which is of the mind and so even like the way that active participation is understood it's there very much in the old liturgy but it's a more interior form of active participation which is the more important and the more fundamental kind of participation. I'm just even going back to the rule of Saint Benedict right the first words listen you know it's the Saint Benedict the whole liturgy the idea of listening. Saint Thomas Aquinas one of your heroes died around I looked up the age they say it's around 49, 48 or 49 and yet he accomplished so much with God's grace he is the Catholic Church's greatest theologian and philosopher since his passing in the 13th century no saint has ever come close to writing something like the summa theologica you called the once in future Roman rite your magnum opus your greatest work involving 25 years of research almost half of your life. Dr. K you're still very young in your early 50s where do you go where do you go after this book? Well as I mentioned to you and I think for good reason the the next two books that I worked on after that one was on marriage and family and pro-life issues with it with a with a lot of consideration on the questions of contraception and abortion and so that was just a different direction you know you you when you finish a book like once in future Roman rite you don't try to do the same thing over again you know you have to move in a different direction and then the other book about sacred music which we touched on and of course that's related very intimately related to the liturgy but it's its own area its own focus and so yeah I mean but frankly there's just the Catholic faith is so so enormous it's such a it's such an endless world that I I'm quite confident that I'll never run out of things to think about it to write about you know God willing. Let's return to Saint Thomas Aquinas the following is related from the Butler's Lives of the Saints I know you've heard the story before on the Feast of Saint Nicholas in 1273 Aquinas was celebrating mass when he received a revelation that that so affected him that he wrote and dictated to that he dictated no more leaving his great work unfinished to brother Reginald he replied the end of my labors has come all that I've written appears to be so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me when later asked by Reginald to return to writing Aquinas said I can write no more I've seen things that my writings that make my writings like straw do you ever feel like Saint Thomas Aquinas and what you've written appears to be straw compared to the traditional Latin liturgy itself and how so yes actually I frequently feel that way I and one of the one of the reasons why I keep writing is because I feel as if it's impossible to capture the the the wonder and the beauty and the depth of this reality of the whole liturgical tradition of the western church and really of both the eastern and western church over the past 2000 years and I like to say 3000 years because we also take into account Israel and the worship of Israel in the temple in the synagogue which is part of traditional Christian worship as well integrated into it I feel as if it's impossible to do justice to it it's so grand it's so awesome it's so intricate and subtle and so I do often feel even even when I've given something my best shot that you know that no one will be able to to capture this in words or even in the greatest poetry and so yeah I mean I but I think that's wonderful it's wonderful to be to be confronted with realities that you can only gesture towards and grope at and and maybe tiptoe up to but at the end of the day you're going to fall silent before the majesty and the and the mystery of it it's kind of like the young boy they'd say it was right the infant Jesus that appeared to st. Augustine on the seashore yes and st. Augustine was trying to comprehend the mystery of God and I don't know the whole story behind that but I think he said like it'd be easier for maybe you can put the ocean into the shell you know or into this hole then for you to put the mystery of the Trinity into your mind kind of like that same thought process right final question the moment of death most of us do not ponder enough and st. Benedict said that we must keep death daily before our eyes when you die what do you pray that your greatest contribution to the catholic church be oh well really the the the number one thing that I hope that the Lord can do through my work is to reawaken in the minds of Catholics the central and constitutive role of tradition for us and can reinvigorate our attachment to that beautiful beautiful well doctor it's been an honor and a privilege to have you here for this interview and we're so excited for your your new release it's coming out in october 4th the once in future roman right we asked it all you viewers to please go and get this book and read it share it with others it's a it's a treasure it's the fruit of 25 years of dr. k's sacrifice and again just please check that out it'll be available at tan books on october 4th so thank you so much