Father Josiah Trenham on How Marriage Became the Cornerstone of Civilization and Why We Must Reclaim It Now

Marriage is the image par excellence that the prophets used for the relationship of God and his people. But if you look at the Old Testament, even amongst the greats, marriage got completely mangled. It's a brutal set of books. It is by going to the wedding feast of Ken by taking the common stuff of water and turning into the finest wine. He showed that his presence in a couple's life radically transforms it. Why all of this focus on love and marriage? Everything that Pope Paul V 6 said in his human IVIA came true. Even worse than he said, all traditional cultures have supported marriage as a keystone. We have this short-term experiment. It has gone very poorly. It's time for us to stop. We need to honor marriage again. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Llaya Rose Show. I'm delighted to sit down again today with Father Josiah Trenum who is the founder of Petristic Nectar. We talk all things marriage in today's episode. How did we get to the state of decline that marriage is in and really the sexual anarchy and chaos that we're in? What are the solutions? How do we get out of it? How can we come together as people of faith to reestablish God's beautiful design for marriage? I hope you enjoy. If you're married, this episode, I think, will be especially encouraging for you. But if you're not married, I think it's also very helpful. And if you're listening to it and you're wondering, what is my vocation? What am I called to? I hope this episode is also illuminating. And after this episode, we're going to have another segment over at rosreport.supcast.com with Father Josiah Trenum. You can go check it out there. We'll have our question reel. He talks about good habits for prayer as well as beard care advice and some other fun tips. Go check it out over at rosreport.supcast.com. Father Josiah Trenum, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Wonderful to be with you again, Laya. Honor to have you here and to to discuss you this part of your work that we didn't even get to last time. We had a great conversation, but there's so much that you do that I admire with regard to marriage and family formation. So, first of all, for those who are meeting you for the first time, give us a little bit of background on Father Josiah. I'm an Orthodox priest and have been for 30some years. I'm married to my wonderful wife, Katherine, for 37 going on 38 years. We have 10 children. Very lovely. She's here. She's very lovely. Yes, she is lovely. And here, it's wonderful to have her here. Hey, sweets. We have 10 kids together and seven grandchildren. Hoping for at least 50, please. At least 50. And uh I have been a pastor since I was ordained. For the last 27 plus years, I've been pastoring a parish called St. Andrew, which is in Riverside, California. I also have a ministry called Petristic Nectar. It focuses on high quality uh Petristic material, teachings of the church fathers, designed to nourish the spiritual, the spiritually thirsty with with the sweet teachings of the church fathers. That's really what we're trying to do both in books and in lecture series. We have an app with hundreds of incredible lecture series and when I say I don't mean lectures but series of lectures between five and 10 lectures each hundreds of them from the top uh teachers u who know the scriptures and the church fathers in the English language all for free you can get it on the app store we'll link it thank you father so you have done so much of your work on you're you're obviously shephering a church. I am. But you're also writing. I mean, we have your thesis here, right? Yes, you do. On marriage and virginity according to St. Konostum. True. We have Enduring Love, which you were kind enough to send me, which is a phenomenal manual here for people preparing for marriage. You've got the Protestic Nectar app. You obviously speak about this frequently. Um, I guess the first question would be why all of this focus on love and marriage? Well, uh, there's many reasons for that. I would say initially I I wanted to be married since I was 15 years old and my I'm not exactly sure why except my parents um I was happy to live in the family that I was in and I wanted to get on with my life and I felt like marriage was so noble. I it was still in the culture that way. When I was born, 75% of houses in America had a husband, a wife, and children. Wow. Of course, today it's like 41%. It's not even normative. It's tragic. And you're not even that old. Thanks a lot. But maybe I was born in this mid60s. I was born in the mid-60s and uh and it was just normal. I remember playing in my neighborhood. I knew all the neighbors. I walked to school. It was a mile to school. I walked on the sidewalks. It was no This is LA. And all my You walked yourself to school on the sidewalks of LA. When How many miles was that? One. It was one mile each way. Yeah. Yeah, there was a liquor store on the way that sell great bubble gum and and baseball cards and, you know, and I would save my money so I could get my bubble gum and baseball cards. It just wasn't a worry. Our schools, I went to public school in elementary school. They were always unlocked. We played there on the weekends. No, no prisons, no big gates around them. It was just normal. That was normal. Nothing went on on Sundays. I played sports my whole life. Never would any sport team have dreamed to have a practice or a game on a Sunday morning. Wow. Veron would never have happened. and it didn't happen. So marriage was uh marriage was normal. I remember going in and out of my friends families. I I didn't have friends whose parents were divorced and we just we were normal people. But that was normal today. That's not normal at all. When I moved into my house uh in downtown Riverside many many years ago in 1998, I went on to the computer to find out how many sex offenders were nearby. You know, they have that I don't know Law website or whatever it's called. 80 within a two-m radius. 80 within two mile radius. Yeah, it's really my kids obviously don't uh play outside like I did. And many many homes uh are the majority of homes don't have married couples in them anymore. But I knew marriage was from God. And when I was when I went off to college, I asked my dad, "Can I get married?" And he said, "No." I said, "Why?" I said, "I'm ready. I'm 15." You know, I was 6'1 at the time. I felt like, hey, I was ready to go. He didn't discourage me. He just said, "Look, you got to you got to get your stuff together." Uh so when I went to college, I was very blessed. Uh the first day of my second year in college, the first day of my wife's first year, I made myself available to be a servant to help all the young ladies who were coming in. All the freshman girls were moving into the freshman dorm and there was no elevator and they were on the third floor. So, I wanted to be of service. So, it I helped. I spent the whole day moving luggage up. It also gave me the opportunity, of course, to meet all these young ladies. And in our school, I went to a school called Westmont up in Santa Barbara. In the school, it is a beautiful school. U freshmen are not allowed to have cars. So, I was a sophomore. I had a car. Matter of fact, I had a pickup truck which could contain many human beings. And so I came back at the end of that day and I asked uh the girls, I just went up and down their hall and I said, 'Look, uh, you're new to town. If you'd like to go downtown and see downtown Santa Barbara, I'm very happy to buy frozen yogurt for any of you. I I knew the soft spot. Yeah, I knew the soft spot. What do you know? This sounds like an indiscriminate approach. Just like ask them all at once and see what happens. It was effective though. It was effective. 13 girls took me up on it and I very happily drove them down to downtown Riverside, bought all of their frozen yogurt. One of them so stubborn, she refused to let me pay. And when she went back and I dropped all the girls off, she put her money in my glove compartment and that was it. That's the first time I noticed my wife. Fast forward to March the 17th, the feast day of St. Patrick of Ireland. She went out with me finally on a date. My parents were coming to town. We went out to dinner together which was wonderful. One year later on March 17th of the next year. Uh I asked her to marry me and she consented and we got married May 22nd, 2 months later and we've been married for 37 plus years. And marriage has been such a path for the development of my heart and the overcoming of my weaknesses and passions. To see it in the scriptures and in the writings of the church fathers marriage presented as something holy as what the fathers call a path of salvation. Uh it has grabbed my heart. the interest in it has grabbed my heart and I began studying it very seriously when I was uh young in seminary and then I decided to go and do a doctorate in theology under an Orthodox prologist in the northern part of England at a university called the the University of Durham. It's one of the three old universities Oxford, Cambridge and Durham in England. And I did I did a doctorate on St. John Christom and that's the volume I gave you marriage and virginity according to St. St. John his vision for marriage uh as a mystery and as a holy sacrament and as a means of saving mankind and making a person uh godlike and fit for God's presence forever. His vision is what's really inspired me. Well, I'd love to hear you share more about that vision. What is John Chrism's vision of marriage? And this also sounds like you adopted it or you at least discovered it after you had met your wife. Yes. So this was how many years into Yes. We were married in 1988 and I didn't start my doctoral studies until 1997. So you're right about about a decade. About a decade. So I also going to want to ask and you maybe can speak to it when you answer about chsostm how your marriage changed if it changed when you fell in love with chsostum and and also discovered your orthodox faith. 7 weeks coffee is America's pro-life coffee company on a mission to fund the pro-life movement one delicious cup of coffee at a time and they check every box. This is pesticidefree, moldfree, organically farmed, low acid coffee that is absolutely delicious. 7 weeks coffee donates 10% of every single sale, including the sale you can make today, to prolife pregnancy centers. So go to 7weekscop.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Plus, get a free gift. And exclusively for my listeners, use code Laya for an extra 10% off your order. That's a 25% total savings on your first order plus your free gift at 7weekscop.com. [Music] How your marriage changed if it changed when you fell in love with chromium and and also discovered your Orthodox faith. Marriage uh is a path of Christian disciplehip and Christian disciplehip is about change every day until the second coming and even after the second coming once the Lord comes and the great judgment takes place and if we're privileged to hear those beautiful words come you who are blessed of my father inherit the kingdom which is prepared for you from the foundation of the world will continue to change in the sense of perpetual growth There is no end to the growth of the heart of a Christian. St. Gregory the theologian, one of the three what what we orthodox call the three holy hierarchs. St. Gregory the theologian, St. Basil the Great and St. John. These are what we call ecumenical teachers. They possess a teaching authority that in the west is only comparable to what you might ascribe to St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. Um in the east these three which are also doctrines of the church. I was going to say we love them in the Catholic tradition 100%. They're wonderful. They're unspeakably glorious and illumined. They loved God so much. They gave their lives to God uh so much. They spoke their theology from experience. They spoke of what they knew, what they saw. They were true theologians, not academic theologians. There are people with PhDs in theology all over the West. They don't know anything about God. They went, they did a program, they got a degree. That's not what the church means by theology. The ancient father said that the one who prays is a the is a theologian and a theologian is the one who prays. Theology is about experience. It's being able to speak from what you know about God. And these men were that they were all dedicated monks. So it's amazing that they spoke about marriage. And St. John himself spoke volumes about marriage. He had incredible parents. His father Sukundus died when he was relatively young but his mother Anthusa is a saint of the church and raised him after she was only 20 when she lost her husband and she dedicated her widowhood to his formation and his sisters. How what year are we in right now? He was born in 347. Yeah. And he fell asleep in the Lord in 407 in exile. He was exiled by the emperor. Power almost universally hates holiness. And uh he was he was exiled uh in 403 and spent four years in exile in the very corner of the Roman Empire where he uh died in as much as saints died right he fell asleep. Uh he reposed in the Lord and uh his soul was taken to paradise. He knew a lot about marriage from watching his mom and seeing all by by the way all three of those men Basil the Great, Gregory the theologian, John Chrisosta, all their moms are saints. Wow. And come from Wow. How wonderful. Incredible what what a true mother is. St. Basil the Great's the most famous. She raised 10 kids and I think six were saints. Six are saints. And his grandparents were also saints. His parents were saints. Incredible. St. Gregory uh the theologian's mom's a saint. Anyway, St. John wanted to be a monk since he was since he was young, but he had this all rich family experience also. But you said his his father died at his father was a high-ranking civil servant. So he was he was in the government. So he probably had very limited exposure to marriage. He or no? Did she remarry his mother? No, she did not remarry. She remained a widow. Remarriage uh especially in the early church was very much not respected. As a matter of fact, that wasn't just a Christian thing. That was a a pagan thing. In the Roman Empire, monogamy meant monogamy. Today, when you talk to a Westerner and you ask them to define monogamy, most people think Americans are monogamous. We are as far from monogamy as possible. Monogamy means you're married to one woman. If you're a man, you're married to one woman ever. Not at a time. Americans think if you're married to one at a time, you're monogous. You can get married, get divorced, get remarried, get divorced, get remarried, get you have five wives, but you're monogous as long as you're only quote married to one at the same time. That that is not what monogamy means. She was monogamous and uh she spent her and she invested her whole life in forming him, teaching him how to love God and surrounding him with incredible mentors and teachers. He also became a a spiritual son of a small monastic community there that were studying the scriptures. There was a catechetical school in ancient Antioch. This is modern Antakia in southeast Turkey today. Antioch was the powerhouse city of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. There was a palace there. It's where the emperor was when he was staging his wars against the Persians. He disappeared uh when he thought he was going to get ordained. He disappeared literally. He convinced his best buddy to get ordained and then tricked his buddy by suggesting he was going to get ordained, too. And then he he just escaped, went to the mountains. There's a mountain only a couple miles outside of the city of Antioch called Silios. It's only about 1,800 ft tall, but 300 monks lived in caves on this. Can you imagine going out with your friends, you know, in high school and you're going to just go say hello to some monks, right? It's like two miles, just walked. That's how he lived. And he ended up spending six years in a cave. Why why did he flee to the mountains and disappear in the first 300 years of the church? The appetite for the next life. Uh remember they lived the early Christians, our forebears lived through the unthinkable. They saw their savior murdered and they thought it was the end. And then he went into hell. He decimated the place. He turned the devil and the and the demons into screeching terrorized girls. Took everyone out, leading captivity captive, and then rose from the dead on the third day. For the first time, a man, more than a man, but not less than a man, a man got into the ring with Satan and wasn't KO'ed. Every other person up until that time, even the great patriarch Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, everyone who got into the ring with Satan and death lost. Doesn't matter how pious you were. Jesus got into the ring and destroyed his opponent. First person who's ever done that. And then came out the other side and announced that everyone who believes in him, though he die, yet will he live. I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live even though he dies. This completely blew the mind of everyone who heard him say this. He spent 40 days after his resurrection affirming his disciples that this was the new reality. And not only was it the new reality, but they needed to take this news that death no longer was the great terror of mankind. Remember St. Paul says in his second chapter of his epistle to Hebrews that death was like a great weapon that Satan used to keep people in constant fear and terror. People had no solution for it. They were going to the un unknowable dark place. No longer. No longer. Jesus said, "Look, you go and you tell everyone, announce my resurrection to the whole world. Proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Baptize everyone in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Teach them my ways. And lo, I'll be with you until the end of the age. and I'll come back and I'll raise everyone and it will be all glory and all kingdom and we'll drop Satan and darkness and death into the lake of fire and they won't bother us anymore. This is the future. This is our life. This is how we Christians live. And so in the early centuries, the question was, is marriage and family life legit? Can you actually get married and have a family and that be consent with the imminence of the kingdom of God? with the fact that that we're so close like why bother when we're this is heaven and earth at at this moment and souls are being lost let's go Jesus is going to come back anytime that's the point yeah many people were asking that it felt so worldly many people were asking that Jesus however affirmed to us that marriage continues one of the ways he did that was preparing us for this by going to a wedding feast himself and performing his first miracle there he radically changed the common stuff of marri You know, marriage is something God made for the whole human race, not just for Christians. It's human. And Jesus when he went and performed his first public miracle offset the temptation to think that marriage was p and no longer relevant to Christians. Of course, people we can understand why they might think that because Jesus didn't marry. Jesus and his mother lived in consecration and John the Baptist lived in consecration. So many people thought maybe marriage is done by going to the wedding feast of Cana and Galilee. By taking the common stuff of water and turning it into wine and not just little wine, the finest wine, he showed that his presence in a couple's life doesn't end marriage, but it radically transforms it. Christian marriage is not Old Testament marriage. Marriage, the way that God fashioned marriage, when God first made Adam and Eve, it's very unlike our life now. Adam and Eve were not torn by passions. They weren't looking for a spouse because they had lust burning inside of them. They were made whole and one flesh, not by sexual union, by the fact that God made Adam. And then in his great love, he put Adam to sleep and he took his rib out and he fashioned Eve, his wife, from his own flesh. And when Adam looked at her, he said, "This is now flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones. She shall be called Eve woman. That oneness uh was to be uh a glory for them, an absolute glory for them. That was the very good of creation. You remember when God made all the animals and fashioned the whole world and he made Adam on the days after God made things, he said it was really good. He looked and it was good. The creation was good. What he had made on this day was good and that day was good. And then he made Adam. but no Eve. And he said was not good. And then when he made Eve, he said very good. She is the very good of Adam's life. After the fall, when our first parents gave up their union with God and their union with one another, their marriage was catastrophically altered. Marriage fell in the collapse of mankind. In the great sin, in the original sin or the ancestral sin, marriage collapsed with them. And they went from being each other's partner in living in the uncreated light before God's face, dancing as his representatives, representing him as his image on the earth. They went from that to accusation. The woman you gave me and excuses, the serpent, right? We fell into sin. They hid from God. They hid from each other. Marriage got completely mangled. It didn't end marriage. But if you look at the Old Testament, even amongst the greats, it's far far far below Christian marriage. Polygamy was tolerated. Even the great, I mean, David had multiple wives. Abraham had multiple wives. If you read the book of Genesis from chapter 1 to 50, every type of marital problem, sexual deviance, family violence, it all it's all there. It's all there. Contraception is there. Uh homosexuality is there rape is there domestic violence is there polygamy is infidelity yeah all in the first chapter it's brutal it's a brutal brutal set of books it is hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the world it's been downloaded 10 million times I love because they have sleep stories they have the daily readings they have scriptural commentary you can listen to holy scripture I also love that has kids content for your little ones you can listen to stories you can listen to prayers that are specifically designed for children. An amazing way to help you pray together as a family. A lot is at stake. We have only one life to live and we've been given each day to make something beautiful for God. And that's why prayer is an essential part. It should be an essential part of all of our days. Hallow app is designed to help you pray and help you meet the demands of your day and listen and discern the voice of God in your life. So you can download Hallow today. Use the link in the description or go to hallow.com/la. you'll get three months free and use this incredible tool to deepen your relationship with God. So I I like to point out that to people especially in our context today in America where theology is at such kind of a low level. We do not hold we Christians do not hold what we call a Judeo-Christian ethic. There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian ethic. That's a language that was invented in the 1920s by politicians to justify collaborations and alliances. We have a Christian ethic. There is a Judeo ethic. There's a Judeo ethic about marriage, but it's far far below the Christian ethic. Read the Old Testament and you'll see um the Christian ethic shocked the disciples. Completely shocked them. When Jesus was incarnate and began teaching, he taught his disciples that marriage would continue. He honored marriage by his presence at the wedding feast in Canaa of Galilee. But then he taught them something that they just could not understand. He taught that marriage was indeoluble. He taught them that marriage uh is holy and that it can't be measured by Old Testament standards. uh but that he was going to recover what was at the beginning and establish true monogamy. So he forbade divorce and this completely scandalized the disciples. He told them if you if a man and woman divorce and remarry they commit adultery. And they said excuse me but Moses said all you had to do for divorce was write her a certificate and hand it to her. Which is true. Deuteronomy 24. That is the Old Testament ethic for divorce. God didn't like it then and he doesn't like it now. Malachi in inspiration quotes God as a prophet and says, "I hate divorce, says the Lord God. I hate it." That's God's attitude. Anybody wonders what God's attitude about divorce is. And he hated it then. But because humanity hadn't been redeemed by Christ yet, the standard that he asked of his people was very low compared to Christian times. Now that he's come and he's destroyed our enemies, he's atoned for our sins. He's joined humanity and divinity in himself. He's given us holy baptism. He's poured the Holy Spirit out on us on the day of Pentecost. Now, the Christian standard is here. And that's called fidelity. It's called love. Matter of fact, to be saved as a Christian, you have to learn to love your enemies. If you can't learn to love your wife and your husband, how in the world are you going to get be saved? A lot of Christians thought perhaps marriage was just done. We all should be just devoted monks and nuns. That was common. As a matter of fact, there were St. Paul even warned in his epistle to Timothy, his spiritual son, that the time was coming when men would forbid marriage. Paul for criticized that as a heresy. Christ hasn't abolished marriage. He's abolished Old Testament Jewish marriage. He has established Christian marriage and the Christian standard is very very high and this is what St. John Chrisostum lays out in great detail. He has this vision for how running the Christian road being on the race to serve Christ seeking first the kingdom of God that's universal Christian practice. You can do it in two ways. You can do it as a consecrated celibate what we know as monks and nuns. This is the highest way. This is St. Paul's way. St. Paul describes this in his first epistle to the Corinthians in chapter 7. He says, "I wish everyone was even as I myself am." That's the cry of everyone who loves God. He says, "Nevertheless, everyone has his own calling from God. One in this way and another in that." And then he describes marriage and monasticism. It's a matter of calling, right? You have a calling from God. So, the important thing is to discern that calling. He wants everyone to run the race. He wants everyone to fix their eyes on Jesus and run to win. He says that in his epistle to the Hebrews. And there's two ways to do it. You can do it as a monk and a nun. That's the most aggressive way. The goal there is no attachment to the earth at all. Instead, you're attached to your prayers. You're attached to the kingdom of God. I have a beautiful nun. We have a beautiful nun in our life. It's the first nun we really got to know. She lived near us when we were converting to Holy Orthodoxy in 1992. And we met her and we started talking to her and I asked her I said why did you become a nun? Without hesitance she looked at me and she goes esquetology the doctrine of the escaton the kingdom it's here. The imminence of the kingdom it's here. The veil is so thin between this life and the next. It was a just a perfect theologically perfect answer. Um and it is why our monks and nuns are doing what they what they do. But there's a beautiful synergy between true Christian families and monks. Monks and nuns. Uh, we look at them like the Marines. That's how we look at them. We're all in the army. We're all in the army, but monks and nuns are really the ones out there on the front lines. And we mutually support one another, right? So, our monasteries wouldn't exist without the support of our married people. Our married people come to the monasteries, they visit, they pray, uh, they venerate relics because our usually our monasteries are just full of the sacred relics. They're the keepers of the sacred bones of Christians full of grace and Christians come there to pray and to have their confessions heard and then they leave their offerings and they support the the plans of the monasteries. They help them to accomplish what whatever is necessary. There's this beautiful mutual support. As a matter of fact, the canons of the church forbid if any monk judges a married person as though somehow there's anything inherently sinful about marriage. Not only is he not a good monk, he's a heretic and he has just decimated any value of monasticism because monasticism is not a command. Monasticism is an is a an evangelical offering. It's a love gift that the monk or nuns give. They don't have to. They could have families and they can find the path of salvation in their families, but they choose to give up the beautiful for something even more beautiful, which is spiritual marriage. Weheartnutrition.com is a vitamin and supplement company that provides the highest quality researchedback ingredients customized and optimized to help you be healthy. What I also love about WeHeart Nutrition is that this is a family-owned company and they donate a full 10% back of all of their revenue to pregnancy resource centers to help moms and babies in need. So whether you are premenopausal or post-menopausal, whether you're looking to conceive, help improve your fertility, whether you're pregnant and this is a great prenatal vitamin or you're postnatal. Plus, I'm very excited to share this with my husband. Now we nutrition has come out with their first line of men's vitamins. And if you order today at weheartnutrition.com, get your vitamins. You can get 20% off using the code Laya. And if you spend at least $50, you will get a free signature bamboo capsule vitamin box. So go to weeheartnutrition.com today. Use the code Laya at checkout to get 20% off your purchase. That's weeheartnutrition.com. So in the time that St. John Chasm was first of all being a monk and then writing and becoming he would become a church a doctor of the church and a father of the church. She's both was the climate very like you said there was this question that everyday Christians were asking themselves should I even what's marriage is it should we even be getting married how prevalent was that question at the time the atmosphere was very different than today uh because today the presence of monasticism in the west is very small uh this is the case both in in my orthodox world and in your Catholic world in your Catholic world if we go back 60 years it was very different uh because you had about 15 to 20 times as many religious folks. Yes. Nun, they built the whole Catholic infrastructure of America. It dipped. It's kind of coming back a little bit now. There's a return to vocation. But yeah, the kind of sexual revolution stint really crippled everything. Yes. Like 95% Did you see did orthodoxy take a similar hit in the west? Orthodoxy did not have the western presence. Okay. So from 1890 especially because the Irish immigration in America from 1890 to 1955 you guys were just on a trajectory like this. I mean you honestly you were on a ascendant. You weren't on ascendant to to take the country over and many people were worried about this right especially when JFK was running for president. He had to literally say I will not allow my Catholicism to influence my policy. What an insane. What would you allow? Well and the early pornographers were vehemently anti-Christian. I mean, they really the sexual revolutionaries, they hated, guess, but they hated, you know, Christian strictctures and moral codes. Uh, I know we're going off on tangents here. I apologize, but it's so it's so fascinating. Do what do you think the the sexual revolution's impact right on the culture on Roman Catholicism? We talk about this on the show a fair amount, but I'm curious your take on this question. What was it? What would you say the why was it so compelling? Because there have always been hedonists. There have always been materialists. There have always been libertines, sexual libertines. The Roman Empire was full of them and Western civilization has had its share. Why was it such a ripe time? And and why was it so effective the sexual revolution and upending like you said now 70% of married couples were in, you know, intact families when you were growing up. Now it's, you know, less than half. Things have changed dramatically everywhere. Yes, they have. It's been a massive satanic assault, catechetical assault. I've always tried to convince my people that Satan is an extremely talented catechist. Oh gosh. Oh, he's unbelievable. Lord have mercy. He's a very, very talented catechist. And he came from multiple angles. Uh he got he won the entertainment industry and then gradually ramped up exposure to impropriy. So this that we didn't even know was like the frog in the kettle. you'd even know that what you're watching is completely inappropriate to be watching little by little by little by little. You know, before 199 I think 63, every script was sent to Cardville Spellelman in New York, right? That's a legion of moral standards, right? Christians were actually evaluating content and if he said no, it was no. It was no. Those days are are long gone and Satan has been uh educating our children. I was just This never stops. Actually has never stopped in my ministry. There's there's so many of our young people that go off to secular universities and the catechism begins immediately. Absolutely. It's thoroughgoing. It's as though it's the number one thing that the secular universities are committed to and that is establishing our children in an apostasy from moral norms. So I I my you know we just had Naomi Best on the show. I don't know if you've seen her story yet. She's phenomenal, but she's just this very brave, gentle spirit speaking out against the insanity in their therapy courses sexualizing, you know, pushing ridiculous stuff on the kids. But I remember being in freshman orientation at UCLA and I was just baffled because it's literally within hours, probably within the second hour of orientation, we're all there in the auditoriums and they're talking about how to put on a condom. Yes. And I was just like, what am I? Where did I enter in? Like why? And then there was a joke made. Oh, some of you might think you're not going to have sex, but haha, this is for when you change your mind. And I thought, how r how offensive and totally inappropriate. I'm here to get an education and you know, liberal arts and you're you're what is this charade that's happening here? So, but that's everywhere. Yes. When I was in college, which was a long time before she was, I took some summer classes at University of California, Santa Barbara, we were married. We were brand we were brand new married couple and I took two classes from a psychologist, his name was plumber from Britain, from London. And one was called feminism and sexism in which in the class he showed pornography numerous times. I just had to excuse myself. I'm sorry. Guess I'm That's just wild. I guess I'm leing. I actually went to see him though. I went to see him and I asked him. I said, "Why are you doing this?" I said, "Aren't you from England?" I said, "Weren't you Anglican?" He goes, "Yeah, actually I was." I said, "How did you just jettison Jesus? How did you do that?" And he said, "Well, you know, I'm gay." And he told me kind of his his little bit of his story. And I had a book with me. Actually, I brought a book by a Christian apologist. that I thought might help him. And at the end of our conversation, I said, "Look," I said, "I'm not trying to impose on you, but you kind of imposed on me, right? You didn't ask me if you can show something that I find completely morally repugnant. You just showed it." And I had to walk out. This is kind of embarrassing. I said, "So maybe you could also do something for me and read this book." And it was basically a an a an apologetical book using CS Lewis's Lord, Liar, Lunatic Argument. Love it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very beautiful, reasonable evaluation. And he said, "I'll read it." I said, "Well, I really appreciate that." And I came back and saw him like 2 weeks later and he gave me the book back. I says, "So, what' you think? What' you think?" He goes, "It scared me to death." That was his answer. You know, I didn't win him. I didn't win him. I had another that same summer I was taking. If it's true, it's true. And I'm saying I think he said more than that. I think he was saying I think it is true and I'm very scared. I'm very I didn't sense any repentance. Okay. I think he was just terrified of the fact that he was so out of accord with Jesus's standard and he knew that that spelled very bad things for his future, which it most certainly did. I hope he repented. I really gave it to him out of love and with a desire to help him. But I mean, that was a wild summer for me. I also took a class on geology that same summer from a Berkeley professor who was down teaching it. And his whole goal, his whole goal in the class was to mock the Bible, to mock Noah, to mock this, to mock that. and and I just went to his class and I just confronted him. I just said, "What is wrong with you?" So, this was what 30 years ago? This was in 1998. Okay. So, oh, we were married in ' 88. So, maybe 88 that summer. So, that was your experience in university in California. And my experience was the same and maybe worse because everything class was political. There was a class that was shown porn and I had a class that I had a whole thing with a meeting with the professor and he was kind of a sex addict, you know, professor effectively and he was obsessed with porn. would do these pornographic experiments, but it's just these are not unique stories, but it it just then you ask the question, well, how did we get to the point where there's divorce is rampant and addiction is porn addictions rampant? Well, there you go. There you go. The bigger question though is how did Christians tolerate this? Yes. How could our love be so cold that we would actually allow ourselves to be catechized by the devil and not by Christ? Our view of commit Christian commitment obviously was completely inadequate for the times and since we're in a much more serious position today in which the culture has gone even farther and now we're reaping the terrible benefits of depression and death and addictions that are just literally leaving people in doubters. Now it's time I think for us to wake up to wake up. It's way past that time and especially in this area area of marriage and family life that you're so interested in and I am as well. It's time for us to really articulate very clearly what the value of Christian marriage is. How it in fact saves man. How if you embrace it, it becomes a foundation upon which you can build your whole life. You know, it's not just a little aspect of your life. It's not just like something that you add to have a fun life. You have a good job, you know, you go to the gym and you have your wife or your husband. That's not it at all. For us, it's a fundamental orientation to life. And there's only two. If you want to serve God, you either serve him in consecrated celibacy or you serve him as a married person. And in both, the goal is not to do your own will, but to have a path of repentance. In the monastic life, it's to obey your superior. And you learn the virtues of obedience, stability, chastity, etc. In marriage, marriage has its own form of obediences. It has its own form of chastity, right? There are spiritual disciplines that are built into married life that if you use them, if you embrace them, you will be changed. Your heart will grow, your love will grow, your virtue will glow, your your intimacy with God will grow if you learn to establish family prayer. For instance, one of the great things St. John does is he teaches his people how to be devoted spiritually as a family. He talks about uh establishing a domestic typicon in your house. Meaning that a way that your house runs with regards to holy things. For instance, he asks that you set up a place to pray that's consecrated to prayer in your house. In the Orthodox tradition, we call it having a prayer corner and we usually have it facing east and we put icons there and incense and a candle and our prayer books and our prayer ropes, etc. And then we have that in so many Catholic homes. It's so normal. It's so normal. And even in the Protestants, they they have their little prayer room or I mean, it's innate that we would do this in our homes, have a sacred space in our home, place to be with God. Yeah. A place to be with God. And you see it, right? It calls you just like your church does, right? You you drive by your church and you love it. You make your cross. You can't wait till you to to the next service you're going to attend. It's the same in the home. It orients the home towards holiness. And then you do prayers together. You have prayers that you just do. I mean, all of my kids when they were growing up, they did the prayers. I would make the cross. I'd say in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that was pretty much it. They took this one, did that prayer, this one did this. Even the little ones could say, "Lord have mercy." And I'd say, "Do the 12 Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy." They had their spots, right? And they learned, "You don't live without God. You begin your day with God. You end your day with God. There are certain important things that you say." They said decreed every day. They said to our father every day. They make their cross every day. This is normal. This is just the Christian way of life and it's part of the path of a sanctified family. He he gives lots and if in this text that you have there he gives like 20 practical guidelines. It's amazing on how you can actually in marriage grow in your knowledge of God and become holy, become loving. There's two things I want to ask you before going down the track of Chrism's uh prescriptions advice and al and its impact in your life as well. But what you were saying earlier is so fascinating on a couple fronts. First of all, you were talking about the two vocations to celibacy or to married life. And of course, you have to ask, well, what about those that are single that have not married yet? They have not been consecrated. They're not sure what their path will be. They have maybe a desire for marriage. I'm speaking about many people I just know personally. Sure. And I think about too the two saints that our church is about to the Catholic Church is about to canonize and we have uh Carlo Autis blessed Pierre Georgio Fraadi who are will be now saints. Both of them prevocation. They died young so they didn't have a chance to be married or to be religious uh you know have a religious vocation. And so, you know, I'm curious your thoughts on the Lord's obviously has providence over all these things, but what is the and also just speaking to people listening who might be single and don't have one or the other vocation figured out yet, what this means for them. This is a hard time uh to be in a condition like that because we don't live in a marriage culture anymore and we don't live in a culture that honors monasticism anymore. So, both of those vocations are hard to discern. Uh I love to use an example. We have this incredible saint who was uh sent here to America uh in the early 1960s. He ended up going to San Francisco. He was an archbishop. His name is John. It's incredible. And he died in 1966 on July the 2nd. As a side note, he's an incredible he's he's been glorified as a saint. His body is incorrupt. He was buried. He was buried with no embombing in a crypt underneath the cathedral between 26th and 27th Street on Giri Street in downtown San Francisco of all places in the 60s. Can you imagine? And he's still incorrupt. Yeah. They when 1994 we opened this coffin and it fell apart. It was all oxidized. It fell apart. I have a little piece of the coffin in an icon of him in a little reoquaryy uh in in the icon and some hair because there that's all we could get. We lifted his head and shaved the back of his neck, the nape of his neck, and then the hair was distributed. What was the name again? John. John. Yeah. John of San Francisco. John of San Francisco. Beautiful. He he also was in Shanghai, China. He was Russian, and he fled the communists and he took 5,000 people to America. From China, first to China, then to the Philippines. And then he came actually and petitioned the United States president for permission and brought them here. And then spent hit the last years of his life serving people. He spent his nights. He he only slept an hour a night at midnight. He ate once a day and he would visit the hospitals at night praying for everyone. Doesn't matter who you were. He healed. He's called the wonder worker, the thav mater, which means a worker of great wonders because he did so many miracles and he still is. Still is all over all over the place. H anyway, that that uh we got to heal the schism so we can tell we got to heal the schism so we can recognize him as our as a as a saint, too. We'll we'll get there. We'll we'll we'll sidebar that later. But there she goes. You know, uh the what a wonderful guy. Well, here he is in the middle of this chaos, right? In the middle of this chaos. And he comes he he became a monk because he grew up as a young boy literally next door to a monastery with 600 monks. He played soccer. It has to be in the water. It has to be in the water. I think that's that's the thing with the tragedy. It's like why fight the culture battle as Christians? just preach the name of Jesus and that's it. And it's like, yes, of course, we're preaching the name of Jesus, but you can't create the foundation for fostering the the the appetite, the aptitude for the for the greater things and for for marriage, quite frankly, if it's not in the water. And well, you can make it in the water of your house. Yes. I'm sorry. I had my goal. I I would love to save everyone. I really would. I actually pray for that all the time. I always ask God, Lord, please send me more people. Help me to catechize and baptize more people more than I can possibly manage. So that it's clear to me and to everyone. Has nothing to do with me. This is completely you. This is completely you. But I told myself and my wife and I have reminded ourselves we have our kids. We're the water for our kids. I want our kids to and I this is I'm I'll leave to my wife to say if it has happened but I wanted them to love marriage by watching us just to love it and to love family life and to have the and to never want to be away from it. I've always wanted them to be close to us and close to each other and want to do the same thing to find spouses with whom they can run the race towards Christ and his kingdom together. And we can do that. We can do that in our families. Each person who has this vision if we catch the vision, right? 12 apostles changed the whole world. Yes. There was nothing in the water except the grace of God is more powerful than them. That's it. The blood of Christ and the Holy Spirit on their life. They made huge changes. And we can do this. Especially, it's should be easier for us now because now we've tasted a half century of this sexual revolution. Garbage. Garbage. Let's make an evaluation of it. Let's take it back to its roots. Let's chop it down and let's not tolerate this nonsense anymore. I have to ask one more question and your take on this which is we you're discussing very beautifully how you see the sexual revolution horrible impact and how we can start to renew the culture basically. But we've got to ask, so we did, like you said, Christianity in many ways was ascendant in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. You you do have a lot of post-modern thought and you know, all of the bad fruit of that. So, I'm not saying that the ideologies were uh there weren't horrible ideologies cuz there were. But what were Christian families not doing in the mid 20th century that maybe caught them off guard or caught them flatfooted? I have to just insert one thing that I can see very clearly which is the advent of contraception hormonal contraception the birth control pill early 20th century and Christian families just adopted it because it's a new technology of course the doctors are telling me it's good for me and the Catholics kind of did a scramble and they're like okay we got to have a teaching on this so we have human ivite and it says I mean it was always the christendom was always against contraception but specifically to note this is bad like remind people because there was confusion because the new technologies technologies are so exciting the doctors are you know science is telling us whatever whatever they think they're telling them and but I think it's getting caught flatfooted at the crisis of the moment not being in a posture of readiness and it's like the the thief comes to steal kill and destroy and you're not ready for it and so they literally take over the entire home and I would you say that that would you agree that that was part of it Or what would you say is the source of this? The embrace of contraception as normative cannot be overly emphasized as wreaking the destruction of the family. Everything that Paul Pope Paul Paul the 6th in his human IVI said everything he said came true even worse than he said. So if there is an argument for that being a prophetic document forgive me just read what he said was going to happen. It all happened in the my world in the orthodox world. Contraception and its forbiddance is as ancient as the church. In fact, I in that volume I have a whole chapter dedicated to Chris Osam's teaching on contraception. Even the ear the first Protestants were anti-contraception. Absolutely. For hundreds. We all were. And for hundreds of years until 1931% changed. Yeah. Yeah. And it it it was a lack of adherence a lack of proper instruction and adherence to the teaching of the church. No one suggested that the church taught otherwise. Chris systemm is very clear. All the all of the major forms of contraception today, spermicidal things, barrier methods, chemical treatments, they all have ancient precedents. Chrysum was very familiar with uh ancient gynecologies. I mean we the whole books which we still have in Greek and in Latin that describe in great detail this and it was strictly forbidden by Christians. strictly forbidden. The embrace of contraception has absolutely decimated us because it's taken the miracle of marriage which unites all of these things together so mystically in God's wisdom and it has brought broken them in pieces. So marriage does incredible things. It takes desire and it unifies it with sex. This is a huge problem in our culture today because desire and sex have been disconnected. there is a a catastrophic increase of autoeroticism of of masturbation which is a plague in our time. Right? So it's like sex is not only not procritive. It's not unitive. It's not unitive. It has nothing to do even with driving you to another another human being. It's turned in on yourself. So marriage addresses that initially, right? You have desire and you have sexual union. You have sexual union combined in marriage with love. You have love divi commi designed also and impacted with commitment. You have commitment defined by God by lifelong fidelity. It's an indissolible union that also includes children and parents and family life. All of those things together are bound up in marriage. So if you mess with marriage, any aspect of marriage, you are literally wreaking havoc on an entire society on something that that binds the society together. You can't just take bits and pieces. And what we've done is we've just completely shattered all of those things. Do you think no fault does a lot of people, especially in those sort of more right-wing conservative side, say, "Well, no fault divorce. That was the end of the end of the road. That destroyed everything cuz everyone just got divorced willy-nilly." societal compromises that have led to the destruction of normal human behavior in life and family life. Absolutely. And it's a great grief that the first state to embrace no fault divorce was our state in 1969 and that under Governor Reagan and Reagan, forgive me, I like Reagan legalized abortion in California. He also was the first divorced president we ever had in the United States. And forgive me, President Trump is the first twice divorced president we've ever had in this country. So, if we're looking to our Republican leadership to be champions of family life, I'm sorry, you need to look someplace else. You need to look to Christ. You need to look to the church. Uh because in society, we are in a terrible way in these ways. 100%. Contraception, no fault divorce, the legalization of sodomy. We That's a controversial one. Share share more of your thoughts on that. The idea in some ways that's the most controversial thing today is to criticize Yeah. No priest of the church of Christ is free not to censure sodomy. Especially when those who are pro promoting it are attacking the Christian church like crazy and suggesting that we're bigots simply because we're holding to Jesus's teaching. The idea that Jesus somehow endorsed or tolerated sodomy is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Well, even calling same-sex sexual activity between men sodomy, I think is offensive. is seen as offensive to most modern ears today. Of course, because we're evaluating it morally and we are supposed to be and you're naming the act. I think the other thing is it names the act and people are very squeamish about doing that. Strangely, we're so overtly sexual in today's culture, you know, and we're pushing sex, you know, it's everywhere. But then we're also squeamish about calling things by their Yes, we are. And I mean no judgment. The church means no judgment. The people the church is not interested in judging people. We're interested in saving people. Even Jesus, who is the judge, didn't come to judge. He said, "I didn't come to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through me." The judgment's coming. But we don't want anyone to be poorly judged. We want everybody to be saved and forgiven. We're 100% for every person regardless of their spiritual problem or their sexual deviance. We're for them 100%. I have plenty of former homosexual homo former homosexuals in my parish. What parish doesn't of any size? We don't. They're treated no differently than anyone else. Matter of fact, most people don't even know. Only their confessors know. So, this is not about love. We absolutely love those and we love them even if they hate us and we love them even if they say terrible things against us. There is a push, by the way, sidebar on that. This is such an important aspect of what you're what we're talking about with the sexual revolution and the, you know, the the defaying of everything, the fraying of everything. But I've noticed there's this approach pastoral, you could say. This is in the Protestant world. It's in it's in some parts of Catholicism. Obviously, the magisterium is the magisterium. That's unchanging. But you see this tendency to want to be particularly pastoral with people who struggle with samesex attraction or any number of sexual dev deviencies or disorders. And so they kind of fall back on the LGBTQ moniker, this title to kind of be a safe place to sort of without direct in, you know, trying to shame anyone, just sort of categorize people. It's also the name that the activists choose that are promoting this stuff. So they say, "Well, we want to be LGBT friendly here. That doesn't mean we condone same-sex behavior or we condone sexual activities outside of marriage or we're not, you know, we're not trying to change the marital teaching, the teaching on marriage, but we want to be LGBT friendly here." So there's this kind of I think struggle session that's playing out with some of the pastoral elements of just larger Christianity and and different fa you know factions of it about how to deal with this moment. What is your take on that? That's called poor pastoring without question. There's no precedent in the history of the church for such things. These problems I mean for the LGBT label as a proper label to use. It's worse than that. All the Catholic churches in the dascese of Riverside and San Bernardino fly the pride flag. No. Oh, 100%. 100%. I I I live right next to them. I have to endure this all the time. Not here. Not in our dascese. Who's the bishop? Someone used to be a lot worse though. Your bishop needs talking to Yeah. I'm not the one to do that. That's your area. Well, I don't know if that's I have a good friend who's a priest in the Orange is straighter. I think Orange is straighter. I'll write I'll write a letter to Pope Leo. Catholic dascese that I grew up in which is there are bad bishops as you know as you know. So well I'm I'm just pointing out how much this has permeated our Christian reality here. When I was just becoming a priest I had a friend who was a young Catholic priest uh in Santa Barbara. This is the arch dascese of Los Angeles which is the largest Catholic arch dasis in America. 4.4 million people. And Cardinal Mahoney, not not good. Yeah. Not good. Cardinal Mahoney opened a office for gay and lesbian ministry. And my friend went to see him and said, "What are you doing? We don't do that." And he said, "I'm the cardinal. What are you talking about?" He said, "Well, when are you going to open the office for liar ministry and when are you going to open the office for adulterer ministry?" And you know what happened to him? He had his faculties taken away. He had to leave the church just for that one conversation. For that opposition. Yeah. because he wouldn't. That's insane. Yeah. That is something we haven't touched on yet is the fact that the, you know, especially in the Catholic Church, the pre-exuse scandals lock step with the sexual revolution and this new like liberated ideology that infected seminaries. Absolutely. And that's a real crisis that hit the church. It is. And it doesn't just go away. The light needs to be shown on it. It needs to be publicly renounced. And Carl Mahoney was involved in coverup as I understand. Yeah, I I feel very bad about it and you have my sympathies about that. But in general, I'm But I will also just say one other thing. Sorry. Any every institution has been infected. It's not a Catholic problem. It's not a uniquely certainly Christian problem obviously. And to your point with orthodoxy, it sounds like you've been generally spared, but that's because you've been generally not here largely. Now you're here, but you're doing a different t. Thanks be to God. But I think no one Yeah. Yeah. I this is a universally traumatic moment for us. We need to recover our integrity. This hearkens back to what we were just speaking about earlier about the need for a theological reaffirmation of what we believe. Marriage is something from God. You know, earthly marriage is based upon a divine prototype. Marriage is the image par excellence that the prophets use for the relationship of God and his people. It's used by the prophet Isaiah. It's used by the prophet Jeremiah, by the prophet Hosea over and over and over again. It's the number one image through which Israel was to interpret its relationship to God by covenant. God is the husband and the people are the wife. That paradigm of the divine relationship influencing the human relationship is exactly what St. Paul takes in his beautiful teaching that we use in our wedding service from Ephesians chapter 5 where he describes the role of the wife and the role of the husband in relationship to these divine relationships. Right? The wife if to respect and obey her husband as the church respects and obeys Christ and the husband who gets far more difficult challenges. The wife pretty much just has to obey three verses. The husband gets nine verses and in those nine verses he's told that he has to love his wife as his own flesh. He have to lay down his life for her as Christ laid down his life for the church. He have to wash her with the water of the word of God and present her on the day of judgment pure and without blemish. Wow. You hear that? And I think husbands would rather have the wife's uh command that interesting. Yeah. And that so that even that comment that when you really think about what the commands how the commands are different. Yes. There's more difficulty or so you're saying you think the husband has a diff more difficult job. It's objectively he has three times the amount of commands and material than the wife does. The wife has a singular direction. It's hard for women especially if your husband's a trouble. I mean I've given my wife a lot of trouble. She's worked hard at respecting me even sometimes when I'm not respectable and that's when it really counts right. It's easy to love someone who's loving you, but when someone is maybe not doing so great or isn't so lovely to respect them or love them, then that's very, very honorable and very Christlike. But the husbands have a massive, massive task. But you see how Paul's using the divine human comparison, right? He's saying, look, Christ has shown us how to do this. Husbands look to him to know how to fulfill their earthly marriage responsibilities and wives look to the church to know how they should respond to their husbands. This shows how fundamental marriage is. Marriage is not a social contract. We didn't we didn't invest. It's not a construct made by men. The idea that you can alter something that God made as a foundational reality. I mean this is Genesis 1 and two. This is not something that was done you know in some political party. The idea that you can have politicians and judges redefine a foundational creation like this that is pre-political. There's nothing about marriage that is made by politicians. You either accept it or you don't. Well, I've noticing that people are no longer even concerned with marriage. They're now concerned with any number of arrangements that they just want to have revered and honored, even if not the legal benefits. I think about the polyamory is now the thing. Yes, sure. Open marriage is not the thing. So marriage, what is an what is an open marriage between two of people of the same that doesn't surprise us for people who don't have a heavenly ambition, right? For people who don't fear God. But if you fear God, that that should concern you greatly, right? If you actually believe in God, and forgive me, the vast vast majority of the world do believe in God. They may not believe in the true God, but the idea that it's only us. This is a distinctively corrupt secular post-sexual revolution reality in the West. This idea that we don't have to worry about the divine realm. It's just about the here and now. It's just about my pleasures. And whenever I think about that, I'm just going to suppress it. This is this is novel. This is absolutely novel. And it has never produced anything. There is no historical precedence for this. Forgive me. I of I often tell people these days because it gets a it's a shock value but it drives home a truth. We should not call the secular way of life as we see it today in the west pagan. It's not nice to the pagans. It's an insult to the pagans. the pagans, even the Greeks, who the pre-Christian Greeks, that's the closest cor uh corrupt culture that those who are in the LGBT movement might be able to appeal to. There is no parallel. There is no parallel. Why? Because they had a sense of reverence. Even the pagans had reverence for the men who were practicing pedarasti with boys had wives. And they would be the first to tell you that you need a wife because if you don't support marriage, your state will fall. The empire depends on strong families. They might have their boyfriend on the side, but they would never do that to replace their wife and their family. No, there were all sorts of laws in Greco Roman civilization that you followed or else the state is done, which is why it also factored into their legal code. And the vast majority of the pedarast pedarasti was not uh I I I'm sorry to be so explicit, but it was not a penetration. They knew that's nuts. That will ruin your health and destroy your body. It was so-called between the legs. This is how it was done amongst the homosexual uh men in ancient Greece. What parallel is that to the LGBT movement today? There is no parallel at all. There's no respect for marriage. There's no respect for family life and the consequences of their way of life are objectively destructive to their own health and happiness. The statistics for men who are in this movement are horrifying. Their health outcomes are just horrifying. No one wants to talk about it. No one talks about that. But they're irrefutable. Well, I think a lot of them if you're talking about like suicidality, they would say, "Well, we're not just that we're we're suicidal because society doesn't accept us or because of bi