Christopher Ferrara on Relinking America

Governing Authority Comes From But ONE Sacred Source

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “The Fundamental question, which you’ve been touching on this show, and it’s a radical question, it’s a frightening question to a lot of people, is:  Where do we go for advice on moral issues, the moral issues of our time that are ripping this society apart?  Is there in fact an authority that is ultimately infallible in these matters of faith and morals?”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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Over this mighty multitude God has Himself set rulers with power to govern, and He has willed that one should be the head of all, and the chief and unerring teacher of truth, to whom He has given “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” “Feed My lambs, feed My sheep.” “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not.” This society is made up of men, just as civil society is, and yet is supernatural and spiritual on account of the end for which it was founded . . .

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Mike:  This is the key point.  Before our Lord departs and says: I will always be with you, but I’m going to leave you with the paraclete.  In St. John’s gospel he talks about how: You don’t understand, guys, I have to leave or he can’t come.  But it’s okay.  I’m coming back someday.  I’ll always be around.  I’m going to leave you somebody that you can rely on.  He’s very clear in what it is that he instructs the apostles and disciples, or however you wish to characterize them, in what he tells them to do.  You will go forth and you will teach all men of all nations that which I have taught you and those commandments which I have left for you.  There’s no questions marks in there.  There’s no ambiguity whatsoever.  This is a very clear mission statement.  I told you what to do.  You’ve seen me rise from the dead.  You’ve seen me raise Lazarus.  You’ve seen all the miracles.  You believe, now go do it.  Then he leaves, he ascends, obviously.

For 14 or 15 centuries, this governed the affairs of men.  Then along comes these enlightenment creeps.  In the last 500 years, we are now witnessing the end of that.  What we’re basically doing by denying that there is one divinity and one teaching that was given to use by one Christ – there weren’t 37,000 of them that came here; there was one.  By denying this, we’re denying Him.  You’re actually denying divinity.  This is what I have learned through you and through others over the last year.  It’s a denial of divinity.

If you start running around denying divinity, you can find excuses to incinerate entire civilian populations with nuclear weapons in 1945.  You can find excuses to bomb civilian populations in countries you can’t point to on a map with drone strikes.  Yes, you’re taking civilians out.  Are they Muslims?  Probably.  Are they terrorists?  You don’t know and there’s no proof that they are.  There may have been one out of the 38 that you just took out, but with no consequences, no shame, no reproach, no question, no investigation whatsoever.  This is what also gives the gravitas and the seeming inevitability behind abortion, murdering unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs, for Heaven’s sake.  All these things are related.  To try and make this more difficult than it needs to be, I think is – the Hungarians seem to have figured it out.  They obviously went: I think we’ve been overthinking this and the Commies certainly overthought it.  Why don’t we go back to first cases?  What do you say about that?

Chris Ferrara:  The fundamental question, which you’ve been touching on on this show, and it’s a radical question, it’s a frightening question to a lot of people, is: Where do we go for advice on moral issues, the moral issues of our time that are ripping this society apart?  Is there in fact an authority that is ultimately infallible in these matters of faith and morals?  If the answer to that is no, guess what?

Mike:  We’re screwed.

Ferrara:  Jesus Christ is a false prophet who left us orphans.  He came, he went, and he left us in a state of confusion where we have 25,000 different denominations that are all contending with each other, excommunicating each other.  The question is: Did he leave a teaching authority that is, in these essential matters of faith and morals, infallible?  It has to be infallible.  What does it mean to say that it’s infallible?  It means only that when it comes to matters of faith and morals, these fundamental questions of right and wrong, and theological questions of the first order, there has to be an authority that doesn’t lie to us, that can’t mislead us.  The very existence of contradictions among various Protestant denominations indicates that none of them can be this authority.

Now, you have to look to the one authority whose teachings have remained consistent for 2,000 years.  There’s only one such church today.  Only one church today still condemns contraception without exception, divorce without exception, abortion without exception.  Right now that church is in the middle of a crisis, a crisis in which some people are trying to overturn 2,000-year-old teachings.  They won’t succeed, but they’re going to create a lot of confusion in the attempt to succeed.  There’s only one church that teaches these things consistently.

That’s why Malcom Muggeridge, for example, an atheist, a great Catholic writer from Canada, converted to Catholicism.  He was an opponent of institutionalized religion.  This was during the time of the controversy over “Humanae Vitae” and contraception.  There was a committee that was going to recommend to Paul VI, and in did in fact recommend to –

Mike:  They did recommend to Paul VI, right.

Ferrara:  Right, that he should join the Protestant sects, get with the times and approve the use of the contraceptive pill.  Paul VI, as a person of liberal inclination, was inclined to go along with this.  Yet, when the commission’s recommendation came before him and he had to write the encyclical, he couldn’t do it.

Mike:  He couldn’t do it.  Paraclete wouldn’t let him do it.  Holy Ghost wouldn’t let him do it.

Ferrara:  And when Malcolm Muggeridge saw that this liberal-inclined pope advised by a liberal commission still maintained the teaching in the midst of an age where every single indicator was that he would change the teaching, he knew there must be some kind of supernatural guidance that was protecting this church from a catastrophic mistake.  He knew at that moment that this was the one true church and he became a Catholic.  This is the question you’re asking your listeners: Is there a one, true church?  There has to be.  If there isn’t, Christ was a liar.  It’s that simple.

Mike:  It is simple, but, again, when we evangelize on this and when we talk about this publicly, the first thing that comes up is, [mocking] “You’re supposed to be a political talk show host.  I don’t want to hear this religious crap.”  As I said, Chris, I’m out of the closet now.  I apologize to the audience.  For 21 of my 22 years in broadcasting, I had the order in the wrong order.  We weren’t mixing politics and religion.  I had it backwards.  We’re going to talk about things that matter that we’re dealing with in our lives today, and they all have something to do with – most of them are morally-based.  They all have something to do with religion.  The politics are not going to solve those matters of morality.  You can ban abortion tomorrow, but if you don’t have men and women that have had a conversion and a change of heart and are not on a path to sanctifying grace, they’ll probably still find some way to kill babies.  As a matter of fact, I am assured they will find some way to kill babies.

Ferrara:  Mike, what you’re doing when you bring religion into politics is, you’re discussing politics in the fullest sense of the word.  Cardinal Manning put it this way: All political questions are ultimately religious ones.  If you think about it for a minute, you have to recognize that all political questions ultimately get to a question of right and wrong.  The question of right and wrong is not a majority decision but a decision based upon objective moral truth.  If you’re going to look for objective moral truth, you have to go to an authoritative source of that truth that will not lie to you.  This brings you inevitably back to the question I posed a few minutes ago.  Is there one true church?  You can’t conduct politics without the guidance of a teaching authority when it comes to moral questions.  That’s why we’re in a state of chaos in this country today.  That’s why the whole Western world is in a state of moral collapse, because it no longer has the guidance of the Church as the conscience of the State.

Mike:  Chris Ferrara is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  His book Liberty, the God That Failed, we have it in hardcover and paperback in the Founders Tradin’ Post.  What we’re talking about here is in the book.  It’s a history tour of the Enlightenment through the American Revolution to the beginning of the last century and where the wheels have spun off and where we have been misled.  It’s a great book.  Find it autographed and dated by Chris in the Founders Tradin’ Post at MikeChurch.com.  I want to talk to Bill in Pennsylvania.  Bill, you’re on the Mike Church Show with Chris Ferrara, author of Liberty, the God That Failed.  How are you?

Caller Bill:  I’m doing fine.  I appreciate you taking my call, Mike.  It’s an honor to talk to you again.  Chris, it’s a real honor to talk with you.  I look forward very often to your interviews or your back-and-forth with Michael Matt on The Remnant.  You guys do a great, great service to many Christians out there and I wanted to thank you.  Before this, when you were talking about Wesleyan University, I wanted to bring up, I wanted to bring up, Mike, to you, something a priest that you and I both like to listen to, he had a sermon.  One of the things that he mentioned was, at the time, Father [unintelligible].  He made the comment after the Anglicans approved the use of birth control.  He said at the time, this was in the 1930s, that these sects will work out the logic of their ways, and in 50 to 100 years there will be the Catholic Church and paganism.  I don’t know if we’re there yet or not, but it seems like we’re really close.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about real quick – you can comment on both and I’ll jump off.  I was curious.  I’ve listened to Michael Davies’ segments on the French Revolution, and I’ve read other things on the French Revolution as well and the atrocities that took place.  Essentially, first the clergy went and then everybody else in the church pretty much was massacred, and then anybody else was fair game to massacre.  I had read somewhere, when it was brought to Jefferson’s attention what was happening and who was actually being slaughtered, I don’t remember exactly the quote, but it was sort of callous.

Mike:  Bill, we’re going to run out of time.  I know the answer the Michael Davies gave.  Chris, you know it as well as I do.  Tell me what Jefferson’s shocking response to the atrocities being committed during the great Reign of Terror, which included the executions of priests and nuns because they would not take the State’s vow, was.

Ferrara:  He said essentially better half the world should perish than that this revolution in France shall fail, which was a prefigurement of what Lenin said, better that two-thirds the world die, or something along those lines, as long as the remaining third is Communist.

Mike:  To answer your question, Bill, what Jefferson basically said was: That’s just the price of liberty, too bad.  Of course, we know that Jefferson was not a devoutly religious man by any stretch of the imagination, so, quite frankly, he just didn’t care.  If you want to look this up for yourself, I’ll give you the Google search string.  Type into Google or Bing or whatever: Thomas Jefferson, Adam and Even letter.  Go read that and you may be shocked.

Ferrara:  He’s basically saying humanity would be destroyed and you would have the new Adam and Eve conceived in liberty, a new race of man.

End Mike Church Show Transcript