Morality Has Deteriorated – Christopher Ferrara

 

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Everyone, almost everyone that you and I know, every circle that we run in, regardless of whether it’s even, even if it’s agnostic, non-practicing, lukewarm Protestant, Buddhist for that matter, Catholic, neo-Catholic, whatever the case may be, everyone acknowledges some form of a moral crisis.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  This is one of the reasons why, when we talk about the crisis that we have, the moral crisis that we have today – you know what’s amazing, Chris, is that everybody acknowledges there’s no moral crisis.  I don’t know anyone that’s in denial of the moral crisis.  Okay.  How do we know that we’re in a moral crisis?  How do we know?  Somebody at some point in time must have enunciated what is moral and what is not, otherwise morality could not be in crisis.  In other words, there must be a definition of morality for said morality to be in a crisis.  Everyone, almost everyone that you and I know, every circle that we run in, regardless of whether it’s even, even if it’s agnostic, non-practicing, lukewarm Protestant, Buddhist for that matter, Catholic, neo-Catholic, whatever the case may be, everyone acknowledges some form of a moral crisis.  ‘Muricah’s going to hell in a handbasket, etc., etc.

If we believe that the highest order of thinking – and philosophically speaking I can demonstrate this and I can prove this to you – the highest form of thinking is to think in terms of basing your thinking upon universals.  When you base your thinking upon universals, you are on the firmest, most solid ground that you can be upon.  It is the highest form of thinking.  Now, not all thinking can be universal because there are particulars.  If we base it on universals, morality, the moral law – what is the moral law, Chris Ferrara?

It’s the natural law.  It’s the law that was handed to Moses.  Moses handed it down to the House of David, handed it to Mother Mary and Joseph, the Holy Family who raised our Lord.  One carried him, one was his spotless virgin mother.  Of course, he lived an adult life and then left us a very, very robust set of rules and explanations of that morality to live by.  In other words, what we should all be able to agree upon is there is one morality.  There’s one moral code.  There can’t be 38,000.  That’s a recipe for Towers of Babylon and anarchy.  If you think there should be 38,000 moral codes, congratulations.  Call yourself an anarcho-capitalist hedonist.  You’re right there with the heathens and the pagans.  If we all agree that there’s a moral crisis, we ought to be able to agree what is the morality to return to to end the crisis, right?

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Chris Ferrara:  This gets back to Brownson’s essay.  The fundamental problem in social order today is a collapse of the moral order.  Morality has deteriorated, even among Christians.  They’ve compromised fatally on certain issues, two of them being, obviously, contraception, divorce and remarriage.  How can you call yourself a Christian if you believe you can put asunder what God has joined together in your marriage and take another wife?  Our Lord said that’s adultery, period.  How can you be a Christian if you take pills or use devices to prevent the conception of children?  That’s not Christianity.  That’s a rebellion against God and the natural order.

How do you defend the natural order reliably?  There’s only one way.  You need a teaching authority, otherwise men, because their reason is darkened, will fail properly to apply the natural law in all of these secondary cases such as contraception.  If you depart from reliance upon a teaching authority that is above popular sentiment, morality itself will drift along with popular sentiment . That’s why we have so many compromised Christians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.  The only solution to the crisis in our civilization is a return to Catholic teaching, Catholic moral teaching in particular.  The Catholic Church is the only church that has not defected from the fundamentals of morality set forth in the Ten Commandments, which the Church has infallibly defended and developed and applied in her teaching for 2,000 years.

Look around you.  Is there a single Christian church today – I’m not talking about individuals who happen to believe what Catholics believe.  Is there a single Christian church today that says contraception is absolutely forbidden, divorce and remarriage is absolutely forbidden?  No, there isn’t.  Most Christian denominations even say that in certain cases abortion is permissible, murder in the womb.  This is what happens when you depart from the infallible teaching authority of the Church.

It all comes down to this, Mike.  Did God reveal himself?  Yes or no?  Is Jesus Christ the God that revealed himself to man?  Does that revelation include his divine commission?  Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.  If God is God incarnate, and God incarnate is who he says he is, and if he founded a church, everything else follows. That’s why our entire civilization patterned itself upon the recognition borne in the divine supernatural gift of faith that there is only one church and only one religion.  When you depart from the one true church, you’re departing from the plan of God.  Whether you like it or not, whether you admit it or not, you’re rebelling against the order that he has established.  Now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a harvest that has been 300 years in the making.

Mike:  But don’t worry, those of you that are listening out there that are stamping your feet, screaming and hollering at your radio and demanding Ferrara’s head on a platter and that I step down as founder and chairman of the Veritas Radio Network and the Crusade Channel.  Don’t worry, because if we elect Donald Trump, that will fix everything.  You will be right back on the path.  You’ll be off the road to perdition and right back on the path to healing.  You have Trump haters and you have Trump lovers.  You have three schools.  You have those that stay, [mocking] “I’m not a Trump booster, but Trump is right about [insert the thing Trump is right about here.”  You have the Trump is right about almost everything and it’s about time we had somebody to stand up to the media.  I’m putting a yard sign up and I’m going all in Trump.  Then you have the Trump is evil, never Trump, won’t do it, Hillary or Bernie or somebody else.

Politically speaking, you have a division there.  It is a division that has warring sides upon it.  All the indications of war are there sans the bullets.  It is some of our contention that Trump, for whatever his motivations, whatever they may be – I did a monologue on this last week, where I said: What was Benito Mussolini’s big claim to fame as he rose to power in Italy?  The fascist dictator, what was his claim to fame?  He was going to make the trains run on time.  What are trains?  Trains came out of the Trump factory.  In other words, he was going to make the business of the trains work effectively for Italians.  No one thinks that in his early days that Mussolini – I’ve never read – that Mussolini was going to be the best friend, the BFF of Adolf Hitler and would introduce the kind of fascism into Italy that ultimately, when the Italians escaped from out under it, they hang Mussolini publicly and then they drawed and quartered his body and put his head on a pike on a bridge.  That was not the Mussolini that was going to make the trains run on time.

What I’ve been trying to tell the audience and anyone that will listen to me is, why do you think ‘Muricah is immune from this.  If anything, I’d say the Italians had a whirlwind, a veritable Fort Knox filled with residual grace that they could draw upon.  What grace are we going to draw upon so that conditions warrant some kind of a reaction to a market crash or something else that would presage the ascendency of a Donald Trump.  Right?

Ferrara:  We’re living in what I would call the graceless body politic.  There’s a limited correspondence, as I said earlier, between the body politic and the mystical body of Christ.  The consequences of that can only be disastrous.  If you don’t have God’s grace, you’re not going to live according to his will.  Now, we’re all sinners.  We all fall.  But with God and his grace, through the sacraments the Catholic Church offers, you can be restored to grace and live a life of grace after falling.  Even if you fall repeatedly, that’s what God’s mercy is all about.  Take away the action of grace in the soul, supernatural grace, the grace of the God that revealed himself and established a church to mediate his grace to the world, take that grace way and society falls apart.

Pope Leo XIII put it this way.  The relationship between the body politic and the Catholic Church is like that between a human body and the soul.  Cut off the relationship between the soul and the body and the body dies and rots.  Cut off the relationship between the body politic and the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and the body politic rots.  If anyone denies that we are witnessing a body politic in the state of decomposition today, then he’s just deaf, dumb, and blind, willfully so.

What we need to do is restore a connection between politics and religion so that the body politic regains the grace.  How do you do that?  There’s only one way.  You have to cut to the chase at this point, a civilizational decline, and tell people lovingly, charitably, and pleading with them to recognize this truth, that the only way back is through the church, the church that Christ founded.  The popes warned about this social collapse at the turn of the 20^th century.  They warned about it in the 19^th century.  They warned about it in the 18^th century when the wave of democratic revolutions was just beginning.  Pope Leo spoke of final disaster in our civilization in the 19^th century.

Pius XII said in 1950 that the condition of the world today is worse than it was at the time of the flood.  He also said the world is being divided into two camps: for Christ and against Christ.  That conflict is going to end either in the salvation of our civilization by Christ, or in its dire destruction.  That’s what Pius XII said, and that was long before abortion was legalized, sodomy was legalized, and political correctness began to persecute Christians to the extent that they would even dare to proclaim the truth.

Now we see Republicans, Mike, Republicans refusing to take a stand on whether men should use the men’s bathroom.  It’s over.  It’s over unless there’s a radical reconversion.  It has to begin with the individual, of course.  You can’t impose this on anybody.  The appeal that you’re making through this show, the appeal that I’m making now is to the individual to turn around.  That’s what conversion means.  Turn around and look back at where our civilization came from, from the womb of the Catholic Church.  Go back there and restore the relationship with that which gave birth to our civilization, the Holy Catholic Church.  Only then can we turn this around.

It’s going to take a miracle at this point, some kind of miracle of metanoia, social conversion.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen too often in salvation history that kind of reconversion comes after a total collapse of civilization, just as it did after the fall of the Roman Empire when Europe was traversed by barbarian hordes from one end to the other, yet Christendom was rebuilt on the ruins of that destroyed civilization.  I hope it doesn’t happen that way again, but the way things are looking, Mike, what do you think?  I think it’s inevitable.

Mike:  Look outside a Trump rally for an answer to the question.  The barbarians are already inside the gate.  The barbarians are butchering babies.  The barbarians have no problem now with instituting mass physician-assisted suicide on all the states on the West Coast now.  The barbarians don’t have any problem with sending sons and now daughters off to fight in unjust, non-declared wars.  The answer is clear.  It’s all around us.

Look, I’m going to give you a social indicator that some may say, [mocking] “Come on, Mike, that’s just trivial.  You’re just being trivial and stupid now.”  No, I’m not.  I’m going to give you an indicator of just how far the American Christian population has fallen.  Now, look, this is not to hold me up as the paragon of Christian virtue because I most certainly am not, and please do not use me as an example.  Read the lives of a saint for an example, not mine.  I can give you a visual on this.

Back in the day when I was on the old station in the old country – by the way, I would just like to announce that the old station in the old country has declined my offer that they should pick this channel up as it currently is being aired – they don’t have to do anything other than just rebroadcast it.  They have politely declined that offer, and also declined my offer to execute my employment agreement contract and fill in for the now seemingly permanently furloughed Glenn Beck.  I did make the offer.  I made it in writing.  I’ve now received a response: Mike, that’s really great.  Uh, how about no?  Like Steve Jobs returning to Apple, I really believe that someday it’s going to happen.

Let me give you a snapshot of this.  Back on the old station in the old country in the old days, many thousands of people signed up – before I had a Mike Church Show Fan Page, I just had my page.  Many people friended me.  I don’t know, of the 4,900 and some friends I have, I might know 300 of them.  I may have corresponded with 300 of them over the last ten years, over the last nine years.  I really don’t know most of them.  Many of them were just on my newsfeed.  I don’t really know them.  Sometimes they post vulgar stuff and I go and unfriend them so we’re not friends any longer.  Yesterday a gentleman popped up on my wall, on my feed.  I’m not going to tell you his name even though I have it right in front of me.  I’m not going to say it.  This was the content of his post.  I’ll try not to get too particular because I don’t want to identify the guy and make him the subject of this.

He was posting the great news that he and his wife of 20 years had renewed their wonderful marriage vows, how excited the couple were to continue married life together.  If we were to zoom in on the photograph, we would see the happy couple from just the neck up looking at one another wistfully or longingly and smiling.  When we pan the camera back, we notice that they’re standing in front of a bar.  That’s where the ceremony was held, inside a bar.  He is in a t-shirt and a pair of cargo short pants and Crocs.  She’s in what looks to be some sort of a mini skirt and high heels.

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There’s no minister around, but there is a throng of people similarly dressed.  Right there, that tells you everything you need to know about the fall of American Christian man.  Few Christians hold in their minds the thought any longer that marriage is a sacrament granted us and made permanent as a sacrament by our blessed Lord himself, the wedding at Canna, and in his discussions with the apostles and with the harlots and with the sinners when he discussed adultery and divorce.  Right or wrong, Chris Ferrara?

Ferrara:  If you begin by saying that marriage is not indissoluble, if you begin by rejecting our Lord’s explicit teaching that marriage is for life and that he who marries another who was put away causes her to commit adultery, if you abandon that, guess what?  You’re no longer a Christian.  You can call yourself a Christian.  If you accept one fatal compromise under revealed truth concerning the moral order, then you basically compromise all the truth.  It’s like removing a brick from the foundation of a home, a major cornerstone.  The whole edifice will collapse sooner or later.  Once you accept the divorce, of course, you’re going to accept contraception.  Once you accept divorce and contraception, what is left of the family, Mike?  Basically you’ve eroded the entire institution of the family.  Then it’s just a short step to abortion.

You might think you can draw the line, but how do you draw the line rationally and consistently with your own principles as a Christian if you accept some departures from the moral order in willfulness and rebellion while drawing the line at others?  You can’t do it.  It’s just a form of thinly veiled hypocrisy.  I’m not saying that because I’m holier than anybody.  You mentioned before you’re not an example of holiness.  Guess what?  Neither am I.  But the beauty of the faith is, the beauty of the sacraments is it makes it possible for fallen men to at least achieve a basic standard of morality and avoid what the Catholic Church calls mortal sin.  It allows men to obey the commandments of God through the operation of his grace.  If you abandon the grace of the sacraments, and you try to go it on your own, and you try to convince yourself that all you need to do is profess faith without living according to the law that Christ has handed down, you’re just deluding yourself.  You’re guaranteeing the collapse of not only personal morality but morality throughout social order.

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That is what Luther, by the way, lamented.  Luther introduced the idea that when you embrace faith, somehow that embrace off faith, which, of course, he did admit was a grace, elevates you above the law.  The law just convicts you of your sin and humiliates you and oppresses you and shows you the need to convert.  Once you convert, Luther said incoherently, somehow you’re no longer under the judgment of the law.  Even if you do continue to sin, you needn’t worry about it because you’ve been saved.  That’s a self-contradictory philosophy.  How can you say that you’re elevated and liberated above the law by God’s grace and then turn around and say the law applies but you’re no longer bound to its judgment?  You can’t do it.  Luther lived to lament the consequences of his own teaching, which he refused to admit were the consequences of his own teaching.  He himself said: What’s going on here?  Morality has suddenly collapsed in the German principalities.  He could see it all around him as people who rebelled with him against the Church, who stopped going to the Catholic mass, who began to accept his teachings because their itching ears wanted to hear it.  All of a sudden morality began to decline.  Luther himself lived to lament it over and over again.  He couldn’t believe what was happening.

End Mike Church Show Transcript