The Terms Conservative, Catholic and Talk Radio DO Go Together-Chris Ferrara Interviews Mike

Mandeville, LA – The following is an excerpt of an interview conducted by Chris Ferrara on 10 May, 2015. You can read the entire interview at The Remnant Newspaper Online, here. Thanks to Chris Ferrara for the introduction to the interview.

“Remnant readers may know that I have become a regular guest on the Mike Church Show, Channel 125 on the Sirius Radio Network, which is known as Patriot Radio. The same channel features the “conservative” talk shows of Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Glenn Beck, along with Brietbart News.

I put the word “conservative” in scare quotes as to Hannity, Levin and Beck, but the remarkable thing about Mike Church is that he is an authentic conservative, by which I mean a conservative who views political, social and moral questions from a traditional Catholic perspective as reflected in the papal and conciliar Magisterium before the late unpleasantness of the imaginary “renewal” of Vatican II.

Indeed, over the past year or so Mike Church has emerged as the only traditionally Catholic conservative in talk radio today, anywhere in the world. And I mean traditional. Not only during my appearances on the show, but now thematically, Mike has turned the longest running political talk show on Sirius Radio into an unabashed presentation of the Social Kingship of Christ, traditional Catholic moral teaching, and even the traditional Latin liturgy as the solution to what is evidently otherwise a terminal civilizational crisis. I have been invited on the show numerous times to defend all of these things explicitly, to speak of the one true Church, and even to call upon conservative Protestants to enter the Church if they are serious about saving our nation and our civilization.

But, happy to say, Mike has been going even farther than I have during my appearances, including the on-air presentation of traditional Catholic sermons on faith and morals, the works of Michael Davies—that’s right, the works of Michael Davies on mainstream talk radio!—the encyclicals of Leo XIII, Thomistic philosophy, and other sources of Tradition. The result has been nothing short of phenomenal. While Mike has alienated some of his viewers in a largely Protestant audience, who wonder if his show should move from the Patriot Channel to the Catholic Channel, he has converted many others, and he hears from these converts almost weekly.

Mike Church puts the lie to “conservative” Catholics who say it is “imprudent” in our pluralist society to promote an explicitly Catholic approach to social and political issues such as abortion, “gay marriage” and the nature of true liberty, which does not consist of the “capitalist social order” promoted by what even the radical libertarian gadfly Kevin Carson has called “vulgar libertarians.” As I have said on Mike’s show again and again, the face of this nation could be transformed almost overnight if all the opinion-makers who profess to be Catholic followed Mike’s courageous example in proclaiming the truth that makes us free, rather than invoking the Constitution or the Spirit of 1776.

But Mike has also made it clear, as I have in my many appearances on his show, that the form of government created by the Founders and the Framers could serve the aims of social and moral regeneration in this country if only the correct principles on the origin and limitations of political power, and the dictates of the divine and natural law beginning with the Decalogue, were applied to human law, public policy and Constitutional interpretation. To be an advocate of the Social Kingship of Christ, which embraces all men and all nations, is not to be a monarchist per se or to call for a “theocracy,” as liberals and neo-Catholics alike describe the organic relationship between Church and State in their ignorant caricature of what the Church really prescribes for the sociopolitical order. All that is necessary is that men and nations look to the Church and accept her guidance as the conscience of the State. This means, of course, a call to conversion and social metanoia, without which society cannot be saved from self-destruction because without Christ, as Pius XI warned, “human society is tottering to its fall.”

Mike—and he alone in the desert of talk radio—has been courageous enough to declare this truth openly as the theme of a unique and potentially revolutionary use of the mass media. I urge Catholics everywhere to become listeners and supporters of the Mike Church Show as a shining example of how social change can be accomplished the Catholic way by means of the truth that makes us free.

The Interview

Ferrara: I have commented many times on something very unique that’s happening with your show in terms of its religious dimensions. Why don’t you tell me about how you arrived at the decision to go in that direction on the show?

Church: I don’t think I ever actually arrived at the decision. I just think it kind of organically happened or spiritually happened. It just unfolded that way. It just didn’t make logical sense anymore to continue believing in and promoting the idea, or I should say the fallacy, that there’s a man-based, human, secular solution to any of this, especially to our political problems.

When you consider… the modern conservative movement, which began with Barry Goldwater in the 1960’s, here we are 50 years later. Those issues have still never been resolved. The welfare state is still here. All the atrocities of the welfare state have been magnified and compounded. The regulatory state is still here. The interventionism, the warfare state is still here.

There’s no secular solution to what people claim they want to do politically. I think I just was fortunate, or blessed rather, to have been reading things and talking to people like you and others that were telling me: No, there is another way. The other way is that we need to restore, as Michael Davies put it, the Reign of Christ the King.

Ferrara: That’s the most remarkable aspect of this whole thing. Not only are you taking a religious approach, on Sirius Radio of all places, Channel 125, the Patriot Channel, but you’re taking a traditionally Catholic approach. How did you come to Tradition?

The Interview Continues Here.