O’Reilly, Sin

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “All of these things are symptoms of a larger problem.  This is just the larger problem of man as man after the fall, although there have been ages of faith that went on for hundreds upon hundreds if not millennia of years that this did not occur.  Certainly it was possible.  It’s that man cannot manage his own affairs without, one, authority from above and then, two, obedience to that authority from above.  Once he separates from that authority, it’s over.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  In order to preserve your high and lofty position at Fox News, looked the other way.  I shouldn’t have to tell any of my Roman Catholic friends that right there, that’s a sin against the principle of solidarity.  The whole point of this is this.  We talked yesterday about ethics.  Last week I talked about the unethical behavior of United Airlines and other airlines of selling seats on airplanes that they know they don’t have but they sell them anyway.  What’s the point?

All of these things are symptoms of a larger problem.  This is just the larger problem of man as man after the fall, although there have been ages of faith that went on for hundreds upon hundreds if not millennia of years that this did not occur.  Certainly it was possible.  It’s that man cannot manage his own affairs without, one, authority from above and then, two, obedience to that authority from above.  Once he separates from that authority, it’s over.  It may take a little while.  There may be some residual graces that will come into play.  Ultimately, you will be playing handball with the curb as low as you can get and with the force of the darkness and of Mammon.

We shouldn’t even have to explain this, which is why I say you don’t get to get a separate confession when you go to confession on Sundays, if you go, or when you get to the judgment seat and say: Mitter St. Peter, please, those sins you’re showing me, those happened while I was at work.  Sorry, pal, there’s one judgment here for one set of sins.  You don’t get to say: Wait a minute, I want to go in front of the business judgment seat.  I want to go in front of the career judgment seat.  Malarkey!  Only a fool would think such a thing, which is why – it’s another one of these heresies of modernity that somehow the lives that we lead when we’re in business, when we’re working at our vocations are detached from the lives we lead when we’re not working our vocations.  They’re all linked together.  You might even say that your vocation is pursued as a way to assist in what you’re doing when you’re not cobbling shoes or baking cakes or making radio shows, working at universities, whatever it is that you do.  They’re all related.  They all require the same ethical standards.  There aren’t ethical standards any longer.  They’ve been eviscerated.  There is a remnant of an ethical standard, which is what makes some people jump up and down and scream and holler about sexual harassment.  It’s just that, a remnant.  It’s only done, by the by, out of this fake sense or this fake urge or fake movement towards equality or promoting equality.  Again, malarkey.

John Horvat writes about this today “Time to Stop the War on Inequality.”  This is from TheWeek.com on the O’Reilly story, headline from Jeff Spross, “Fox News dumped Bill O’Reilly over money. It’s that simple.”  That may be the fact.  That is an accident of the original sin.  That is, ethics.  It’s amazing to me that so many people protest so mightily against the study of or even the discussion of simple ethics.  Why?  I continue to receive comments on the website and emails from people saying, [mocking] “Why are you obsessing over ethics?  There are a lot more important things to talk about.  Why aren’t you talking about Trump building the wall?  People want to hear about walls.”  Yes, I’m sure they do.  The ethical breaches extend further than just the ones that are shoddy about economics or about finances.  Spross writes this.  He concludes that this is all about sexual harassment.

[reading]

At the start of April, The New York Times reported that Fox News had paid $13 million over roughly 15 years to settle various sexual harassment claims against The O’Reilly Factor host. At the time, I wrote that the scandal didn’t yet threaten O’Reilly’s kingship over cable news — but that could change if the exodus of advertisers grew large enough. So it has come to pass.

In the week following the Times revelation, half the show’s advertisers jumped ship, and the evacuation only grew as time went on. [Mike: Then he lists some of the usual suspects that took aim at O’Reilly, for obvious reasons, and ultimately some of them prevailed.]

That brings us to the final brute reality: O’Reilly is insanely rich and powerful. The O’Reilly Factor is Fox News’ biggest profit source, which in turn is 21st Century Fox’s biggest moneymaker. O’Reilly is paid $18 million a year, and had dominated the cable news ratings for 15 years straight. He has the money, lawyers, and other resources to protect himself should anyone take exception to his bad behavior . . . [Mike: Again, don’t you see the ethical breach there? So, through the ill-gotten gains of financial resources, he is able to continue the ill-advised and sinful activities that he’s performing while he’s working at the ill-gotten gains.]

In other words, the thing that brought O’Reilly down — the gargantuan flow of money from his advertisers and media empire . . .

[end reading]

Mike:  Here’s why this stuff matters and it matters to you.  Once the breach is crossed, once you’ve unmoored from the attachment to the source of ethics, which is the teaching of Almighty God himself and the teaching of his Son, Our Lord himself, once you’ve unmoored from this, the errors – what does error create?  [mocking] “Mitter Church, we’re not going to go through this stupid exercise again.”  We might have some new listeners.  What does error create?  When you’re in error and you have left the firm, loving, charitable, guiding hands of the truth and you descend into error and the error is not corrected, what does it produce?  More errors.  You can’t get back to truth from error without admitting mistake, without humility.  You have to have the humility to admit a mistake, and then you have to undo the mistake and understand or realize what the breach was or where the break was made and to go back and fix it.  You step into the breach and fix it.  You apologize for your sins and you move on.  Once you descend into error, errors are going to create more errors.  You keep rinsing and repeating.  [mocking] “It’s just limited to sexual harassment, Mitter Church.”  No, it’s not.

Here’s the proof for this.  To try and demonstrate this, and to win the doubting and wayward out there over to the side of the argument that you should be on, this is from Michael Fumento.  Fumento published this last month, in March.  They republished it at The American Conservative website yesterday after O’Reilly was sacked.  It’s worth reading.  I’ll share part of it with you.  Here’s the headline, “Bill O’Reilly Disgraces War Reporting.”

[reading]

Nations should only go to war when necessary. If only that were as obvious to everyone as it sounds. Yet history, including American history, has few examples of “necessary” wars. It always seems so easy and exciting at first; so much to gain and so little to lose. Nothing has changed that dynamic; indeed, Hollywood pushes in the opposite direction as it’s doing even now with “American Sniper.” But if there’s one countermeasure you can almost always count on it’s this: real war correspondence. The kind that describes or visually depicts the awful brutality, the pain, the waste of war. All war.

Which is why, especially when the U.S. media are cutting budgets for overseas reporting of any kind, Bill O’Reilly’s “faux pas” really matters. The only real “pay” in war correspondence is the reporter’s gratification. That increases correspondingly with the importance and danger of the job. It kept poor depressed reluctant Ernie Pyle going right until a Japanese machine gun blew his head open. He never wanted to go to Japan; he wanted to go home.

[end reading]

Mike:  If you don’t know who Ernie Pyle was, Ernie Pyle was a pool reporter, and I believe he also carried around with him an 8 mm movie camera.  Some of the footage that we have from the battles of Okinawa and Iwo Jima and those in the Pacific theater – I’m not sure about the footage; I do know about the reporting.  We have it because Ernie Pyle was there.  Fumento is right.  There was a movie made about Ernie Pyle and he didn’t want to go.  He fought, as would you.  If you’ve seen, for example, recently Hacksaw Ridge, who would want to be anywhere near the top of that cliff on Hacksaw Ridge?  Who would elect to do such a thing?  The only possible motivating factor for that would be love of neighbor and love of country, to protect and defend, and that could include your friend and also those you left behind to protect.  There’s no other logical reason for being there.  If you’ve seen this, then you’ve seen it.  I think Mel Gibson did a phenomenal job of depicting just how horrid and how anguishingly, with great anguish you should view war, we should view war.

End Mike Church Show Transcript