Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:10 Welcome back to another edition of Big City Catholics, our di and podcast with Bishop Robert Brennan, the Bishop of Brooklyn, and myself, Father Chris Heu. Today we are joined with a very special guest, Monsignor James Sha Monsignor is the President of the University of Mary, but he is probably more popularly known as the author of this great essay, great little book that Bishop Brennan loves. So very much has gifted to all of our priests here in the diocese, from Christendom to Apostolic mission, Pastoral strategies for an apostolic age. Monsignor, were really happy that you're here with us, but before we begin, let's start with prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Calling forth the Holy Spirit, We pray, Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and in kindling them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and they shall be created and
Speaker 2 00:01:03 You shall renew the face of
Speaker 1 00:01:05 The earth in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So this quite an interesting podcast where, where
Speaker 2 00:01:12 We're not exactly in the big city, are we?
Speaker 1 00:01:14 No, no. This
Speaker 2 00:01:15 Is far from and out in the, uh, country of Huntington in Lloyd Harbor at the seminary of the Macular Conception, where many of us, at least some of us older guys studied because this is a seminary that was built by Archbishop Malloy, then Bishop of Brooklyn. And all of this was one territory, and it's been shared by the priests of the diocese until this seminaries merged about 10 years ago. And done what he became the main campus for preparing priests. But I studied here, coming, being here this week brings back a lot of very good memories. I'm
Speaker 1 00:01:47 Sure. I'm sure. I I came to this, uh, seminary when I was in high school. Okay. And it was actually this seminary that was a major part of my vocational story. It was Eucharistic Adoration in the Crip Chapel. And I said to myself, Whatever I have to do to live in this beautiful seminary, that's what I'll do.
Speaker 2 00:02:04 <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:02:04 That was the start of it, as God's humor would have it. I never lived in this seminar. That's
Speaker 2 00:02:09 Right.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 The seminar everywhere. But, but we're here as a group of priests from the diocese for our priestly convocation Bishop. How's that been for you?
Speaker 2 00:02:17 The first part of the convocation of the priests coming Monday, Tuesday, and then all of us were here together on Wednesday. And then, uh, some will be staying now for Thursday, Friday. So been great. The priests are so glad to be together, be we have not been able to do that in a meaningful way, really, except for the charism mass and my own installation. So this has been a very important time for us, and I thank all the people I've, I've asked your prayers and you've been generous with those prayers because I can see the fruits of those prayers and we're very, very grateful now as the keynote, of course, on Wednesday when we gathered with the priest, um, Monsignor James Shay joined us and gave the keynote talk, as you say, from Christo to Apostolic Mission. Wow. We're living in that age of Apostol mission. Thank you so much for joining
Speaker 3 00:03:02 Us. Hey, I just wanna say that this for me, I'm a North Dakota priest. This is really the big city <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:03:09 I'm
Speaker 3 00:03:10 Scared outta my wi by all these
Speaker 4 00:03:11 People everywhere are dozens of them. Dozens. It does it tell us,
Speaker 2 00:03:23 You, you're president of the, uh, University of Mary in North Dakota, in Bismark, North Dakota. It's really for a lot of us here, I know for many families it's been long on the map. You've sustained about 10 years of constant growth, but for a lot of us, it was your essay, your book that kind of made us take notice of University of Mary. Yeah. And you were the youngest at the time of your installation. The youngest college president in the United States.
Speaker 3 00:03:47 I was inaugurated at 34, and for 10 years I was the youngest college president in America. I think that I was usurped by a sister, a Nashville, Dominican, you know, Cardinal Dolan calls them the Dixie Chicks, <laugh>
Speaker 4 00:04:00 <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:04:01 A Nashville Dominican, who is the president of Aquinas College now, which is their small college that they have down in Nashville. But she's from Hebron, North Dakota,
Speaker 2 00:04:09 University of Mary launches a number of very competent people in a number of fields. Tell me about your top program and other
Speaker 3 00:04:16 Programs. Yeah, so we're, we're a university about 4,000 students in five schools. So we have a School of Arts and Sciences, which has the fastest growing Catholic studies program in America. We have a school of Education behavioral sciences, which was one of our first initiatives. You know, University of Mary was founded as Mary College in 1959 for the education of teachers and nurses. And that's another one of our schools, The St. John School of Health Sciences, which is our largest school. And that has the number one nursing program in America. And we have doctoral degrees in nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy. Then we have degrees in exercise science, athletic training, radiologic technology, respiratory care premed, all of those things. And then we've got a school of business, of course. And then our newest school is the Ham School of Engineering, and we offer three different fields in engineering and then construction management out of that.
Speaker 3 00:05:09 And so it's quite a project. We're the most affordable, serious Catholic university in America. We have an amazing program where if you graduate from a Catholic high school, the minimum institutional aid commitment the university makes to is free room and board. So free room and board for graduates of Catholic high schools. We have a campus in Rome, we have a campus at Arizona State University, which is the largest public university in America. They have 90,000 students, and we're right in the middle. We occupy an old church. It used to be the Newman Center, and then they built a great big Newman Center around it. But it's 110 year old church. It's the oldest church in the, in the valley of the sun. It's been deconsecrated and now it's a kind of study library based on Oxford Commons. And that's a domestic exchange. And I think we've got probably, probably eight other satellite campuses doing various things around the country. And so it's a, a major operation and we're faithfully Christian and joyfully Catholic. We're really proud of our identity and, and there's a lot happening there.
Speaker 2 00:06:09 And I, that I think is key and that clear identification. And I love two words you use faithfully. Yeah. Uh, Christian and joyfully Catholic. That's right. Because those two a adjectives are really key to it all. And my contention is, you know, part of being Catholic means being excellent. Yeah. So it's not like you're running a strong Catholic university or a strong academic university. You running a strong, joyful Catholic. That's right.
Speaker 3 00:06:34 Excellent. You know, a lot of people make that false economy. That's true. It's, Yeah. I'm annoyed by it. It's, it's, it's very untrue. It was, it was one of the premises behind the Land O'Lakes sort of initiative in the late 1960s that Catholic universities needed to come into their own and that we were being held back by, you know, the intransigence of sort of dogmatism and hierarchical governance and all these different kinds of things. And that in order for us to come into our, um, incoming into our own as, as academic institutions of excellence like Yale and Harvard and Stanford and other places that we would need to abandon our religious identity. That's chronicled interestingly by James Birch and his 5 billion, It's only 800 page, uh, book. The Dying of the Light. Yeah. The light is not dying at the University of Mary. It's No,
Speaker 2 00:07:22 It's,
Speaker 3 00:07:22 That's great. It's kindled and it's, it's burning strong
Speaker 2 00:07:25 And it's an important institution in an important age. And this is what introduced me to you. I told you earlier that a priest from Columbus, uh, introduced me to your essay and then gave it to me in book form, is you said you really, it was never really marketed. And I, if, if I recall my first copy of it didn't even have your name. I think it was just, just a publication of the University of Mary.
Speaker 3 00:07:48 Well, and and that's how we published it completely. It's just the University of Mary. Now I did, I did the introductory. Right. I have my name on the, on the, sort of preface on it. Right, exactly. But, you know, I've been shy about the whole thing in that it really is a work that arose from a conversation among friends. And there's a group of friends, priests and scholars and and others who I've met through the years who sort of convened around some of these early ideas and were talking about them over the course of many years. And there's nothing, I mean, it's, it's so funny to me because it's less than a hundred pages long. Uh, there's nothing really revolutionary in it. It's a recapitulation of the p mager of the past 50 years or so. It's all there in seminal form in the speech that post Saint John Paul II gave him Port Pro in Haiti, when he used the phrase New evangelization for the first time.
Speaker 3 00:08:39 He said it would be new and arter method and expression. And we think it's new also in circumstance <laugh>. Exactly. And so, yeah, I, I think I first spoke about it to the finance council of the Diocese of Phoenix. Bishop Olms said it had me down and, and I talked to them and then he had me back to talk to the priests about it. But it was in very rough form then. And then, you know, we kind of whipped it into shape. It was kind of ready to be published. And I have a bad conscience about this. And so I'm here with a bishop and a priest. And so I don't know if this is a reserve sin or <laugh>, how that, how that works. You know, there are certain things where you have to get a special permission for absolution. But it sat on my desk gathering dust for two, three years.
Speaker 3 00:09:20 Yeah. I just didn't have time. You know, the, the re the requirements of my responsibilities are pretty great and I just needed to get around to it, needed to get around to it. Then the pandemic happened and we had a little bit of extra time and we published it through University of Mary Press, which is just a, a small imprint. It's a humble thing. And, and we put it up on Amazon, but really, I think the first run might have been, been five, 600 copies. We published it as an internal piece. I wanted the people who work at the University of Mary to have a better sense of why we were so crazy. You know what I mean? Cuz they're like, Here we go again. You know, you know what, what's going on? You know, we, why can't we just be like other places and, you know, sort of be lazy and drift along, get around, get along with everybody and charge too much to our students and why can't we be like the other places?
Speaker 3 00:10:11 They weren't really asking that, but that's what we published it for. Right. And what was funny, published it in May of 2020, so in the midst of the pandemic over the summer, we were surprised to see like an uptick in sales on, uh, Amazon. And then I was so surprised because we don't exist to make Jeff Bezos any richer. You know, that's not a priority for me. And so by, but by September we were selling 150 copies every single day out of our bookstore, every day, 150 copies. Wow. And so we were sending out like spiral bound copies with notes of apology saying, I'm so sorry we ran out <laugh> and uh, we'll get, we'll send you a real copy, but here's one to Todd you over. And we were just very, very surprised and embarrassed that we didn't realize that this would touch a nerve. But diocese, they're calling and ordering thousands of copies. And then one bishop had a study group in every parish in his whole diocese, they did like a, a study guide for it. Can you imagine a stu Now this is how far our culture has collapsed. We're doing study guides for 95 page essay. You know what I mean? It already is for dummies. But, you know, <laugh>, where's the spark nose version? Is there a spark version?
Speaker 2 00:11:19 But you see the, actually this gets to the point you began a national conversation. Ah, that's what I think I'm so grateful for. You began a national conversation and one of the things that's so impressive among the people I've shared it with, no matter where people stand on the proverbial political
Speaker 3 00:11:36 Spectrum. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:37 They all identify with what you say in the book. They all identify, they, they realize that we need to take a, we live in a new reality. Yeah. And we need to take a new way of looking at things. And we, the temptation is always to fall back to, to
Speaker 3 00:11:52 The old. Yeah. Well, there are a couple things that I'm pretty weary of. One of them is, uh, sort of Catholic celebrity. Uh, which is one of the reasons why we were, we were keen to just put University of Mary on the front. Right. And let that be. Cuz everybody now is like, How can I get famous and all that? Well, that's dangerous. You know what I mean? It's, it's a, it's, it's noble. If if it's, if it's deal for the gospel, it's not good if it's ego. You know what I mean? So I'm, uh, you know, I impatient with that. I'm also very impatient. Uh, and I said this a little bit to the priests toward the end and the question answer session. I'm really impatient with the way that the left right kind of divide, which is, which arose out of the French Revolution and modern politics and all these things, and which we've adopted the sort of political spectrum of our, of our nation, The way that that's tearing up the church as well.
Speaker 3 00:12:44 And I worry about it not just because I'm sort of repelled by it into intellectually. I worry about it from a practical standpoint because it's made my students very worried about their future. You know, I think that, that when, when I look around, I said this to a group of parents two years ago when they were dropping off their freshmen. I said, We're driving our kids crazy with fear. I said, Remember when we were young, you know, those of us who came of age and who were in our forties, fifties, sixties, whatever, there was turmoil and discord in the world in which we grew up. But by and large, our parents pulled up their pants. You know what I mean? And they said, Okay, don't worry about it. It's gonna be okay. Your future's secure. We're taking care of you and we're gonna, you have this talk over here and maybe our voices will raise this high, but whatever.
Speaker 3 00:13:30 But the vitriol, which I suppose is made possible along with all the possibilities and promise of social media and, and sort of virtual platforms, it really has allowed people to be trolls unaccountable in their sort of criticism. And so I just don't like that because I, I feel like it's my responsibility. This is why we say joyfully Catholic. It's my responsibility to have a campus of 4,000 students who feel like they're in a place where they can learn and dream, dream god's dreams for them, which they can't do if there's, and carrying the best news ever. That's right. It's the best, the best news you could ever deliver. The it's the best. Well, and this is, this is the other thing. If, if I can say something about it, the essay, so this spoiler alert, Do I have to go spoiler? How does that work?
Speaker 3 00:14:15 You know, so on page five of it, almost at the end of the book, <laugh>, you know, in the, in the last, in the last section, we talk about, uh, the key task of an apostolic age as the conversion of the mind to a new way of seeing. And then we try and give a little attempt to tell the gospel story in an epic form format. Because one of the difficulties with the sort of modern progressive mindset, which is the mindset that, that's opposed to the Christian imaginative vision, is that it, it makes all these promises. It doesn't keep 'em. And then, then it devolves into such a boring, dull mind numbing. I mean life, life under that regime becomes one damn thing after another. You can beep that out, right? I don't know how sensitive people are here in New York. The, and so people go in search of this, look at the popularity of Marvel comics and, uh, Game of Thrones and, uh, the Harry Potter series and Star Wars and, and Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia.
Speaker 3 00:15:17 People are really looking for this. Well, the high saga that really came true was the gospel of Jesus Christ. Which eclipse, I mean, it has the best heroes, the best sort of, uh, villains. Uh, the, the highest stakes, the most spectacular, uh, reach, the most surprising twists of plot. I mean it's very, very, very exciting. One of the kind of outgrowths of it, we did this, we have this small website called Prime Matters and it's, uh, it's very lightly branded. Again, we're not out for notoriety, but we have lots of ease. Droppers. I think there are probably 11,000 people or something who get the first draft, which is like draft. We spell like a draft of beer, you know, and we have a, a section on there. We have, by the way, videos, I don't know if you've seen them, bishop videos based on the book.
Speaker 3 00:16:07 And so we do, we unpack the Christian mythic narrative. We impact Chris Apostolic mission. They're little primer videos to sort of wet the whistle. I have not yet seen that. Oh, you the videos of But, but like interviews. I've not seen that. No, no. These are, these are like, these are like cartoons, you know, not cartoons. What do they, what do they call like shorts? They're like shorts. Yeah. They're animations. You gotta help us out for the Chris. Sure. Still in the, you're young and all this. But, but we've got that. And then we did another section called the Chris Christian mythic narrative where we tell, unfortunately it's my voice, but we tell the whole thing from before creation to the contemporary moment in seven minute segments. And so it's like in podcast kind of form, you know? That's right. And it's really, really bracing because it's true. And that's the wonderful thing about it. And so we want our young people to know that that's, that that's where the high stakes are. Cuz otherwise you start to believe in politics and that'll let you down every time. That's so true. Time.
Speaker 1 00:17:09 You mentioned, you know, in your talks today about the nostalgia of, um, you know, and so that's, that, it's interesting cuz you, you just basically, you left it at that. There's the, the time for nostalgia is, has passed, but you don't mention which sense of nostalgia might someone be thinking. Because if you're talking to, you know, a variety of ages, range of ages, some may say, Oh, I have this nostalgia for the seventies and the eighties. Others who are maybe newly ordained have a nostalgia for the fifties and sixties that they never lived or experienced. Can you just expand on that?
Speaker 3 00:17:44 Yeah. Well, let me start by correcting the record. I, I didn't say, uh, the time for nostalgia has passed. And if I did, what I meant is the time for nostalgia is never, in other words, it, it really doesn't matter what you have, what time you have a nostalgia for. It's an escape from the present. Pop Saint Paul is sixth was once asked, Holy Father, tell us the most, the most important day of your life. What's the day that made you who you are? And he thought for a moment, and you know, Giovanni Bei, right? He lived an extraordinary life and painful life. You know, think of the weight of inheriting the second Vatican council, working through the documents, closing Hemani vik, uh, the 1970s, all these things. And, you know, he could have said the, the day that he was elected universal shepherd, uh, was the most important day or the day he was ordained a priest or the day he was born or any of those things.
Speaker 3 00:18:40 And finally he said, Today, it's all I have. And I think that that's the way that God calls us to live. If you look at the life of Jesus, he isn't aiming for achievement so much as perseverance. You know? And he revolutionizes the circumstances by his almost startling presence to the circumstances. It's really an amazing thing. And so I think in then I quoted the Lord of the Rings, this thing, uh, where photo and Gandolph are talking and photo says, I wish this had never happened. I wish it didn't happen in my time. And Gandolph says, So do I. So, so do all who live in such times. But that's not for them to decide. All that is for us to decide is what to do with the times we've been given. And so I just, I really dislike nostalgia, partly again, gosh, this is a very confessional moment, <laugh>, uh, because I'm prone to it. You know what I mean? I, I like history and I like story and, and I'm prone to, to idealize other times like my future or the past of the human or these types of things. But all of that's just garbage. Uh, Jesus wants us to live now. God is present here, and so let's do it. Carpe diem, right? Amen.
Speaker 2 00:19:51 Something that fits placed us here together, you see that very clearly. Got it. And somehow in his providence, God placed all of us in this time here to do this
Speaker 3 00:20:00 Work. So does he know what he's doing or not? Or I have to hope. Yes, I do. I think we, I think we should hope that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:20:06 And, and in fact, I do. I think none of us would be living the vocation we are living if we didn't hope that mm-hmm. <affirmative> if we didn't really believe it and trust it with all of our being. Your title really says it all. And I think that's worth because some people who are listening may not have been familiar with the book. So the title really says it all, Going from Christ to Apostolic Mission. And I think you're laughing
Speaker 3 00:20:30 At me. No, I'm laughing because the title is from c Him to Apostolic Mission, Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age. Nobody would ever title a book like that if they wanted to sell copies of it, <laugh>. You know what I mean? It's a it's just awful.
Speaker 2 00:20:42 But it says it all. What's the acronym for that? But, and you know what I often use, I say that the Diocese of Brooklyn here in Brooklyn and Queens Uhhuh really epitomizes both, you know, people in Brooklyn who grew up even before me, would I say, you know, everything in Brooklyn was everybody identified by their parish. They didn't identify by neighborhood. Where did you live while I lived in St. Brendan's or I live at St. Jane and now we live in this age where there's such, and it's exciting, there's such a diversity people and growth people and people coming home. But preaching the gospel today means using a different vocabulary than most people. Yeah. Really mean. So in a nutshell, your premise is that there was a Chris in Dim re reflects the time and basically the vocabulary, the structures all support that Christian vision. That's correct.
Speaker 3 00:21:31 That's right.
Speaker 2 00:21:32 The, um, reality, the Apostolic Times goes back to the time of the apostles. That's right. And that they were preaching and telling a new story in a new era, sometimes with little resource and great difficulty. But speaking this with the power, if you will, of the Holy Spirit, the, the exciting power of the Holy Spirit. And, and then one of the issues today for us is that we are living in a time that calls for apostolic mission. Yeah. And yet we're using a lot of the structures of Christ.
Speaker 3 00:22:02 That's right. Yeah. So for the first 300 years or so, every Christian was a missionary because the Greco Roman culture had a very powerful imaginative division of its own. And it was opposed to Christianity. After the edict of Milan, of Constantine and other dynamics, Christianity came to challenge and then overcome that vision incorporating aspects of it into its own. But since that time, society in the West has been a series of cindo cultures, and now we find ourselves in a new apostolic age where we're all missionaries again. And the great catastrophic error that we can make is to operate in a cindo mode when we're actually in a new apostolic age. That's the catastrophic error. And we can see what happens when, when you try it. Think about places like Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Quebec generation, two generations ago, they, they were the most Catholic places in the world.
Speaker 3 00:22:56 Some of them were the most Catholic places the world had ever seen in Quebec. They had a seminary with 800 beds. And it was full, Not like in my dad's lifetime. I read a statistic once that one in 10 women in Quebec was a religious sister in like the 1950s. And now it all fell apart. Belgium was the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia. Ireland had, uh, protection for the unborn child in its constitution. All of that was just voted out by popular sort of revulsion just a couple years ago. And so the church was doing business as usual, and the whole darn thing fell out. And that's really catastrophic. And it can happen, but it doesn't have to happen because we can, we can shift, we can allocate resources differently. We can be more strategic and thoughtful about how we go about things. And I think God is calling us to do that.
Speaker 2 00:23:47 And there's something very exciting. Yes. Rather than ruining the day. There's something very exciting about living today. Yes. And being charged with this kind of apostolic mission. But it does take some creative thinking.
Speaker 3 00:23:58 It takes a whole lot more courage. You know, the besetting sin of a Christ. Time is hypocrisy, Right. Pretending to care more about God and truth than you really do. The besetting sin of a apostolic age is cowardice, pretending to care less about God and truth than you really do. And so we're called not to be cowards, but to be joyful and to make sure that when we preach the gospel and witness to it, that it's, that it's conquering spirit is intact. Because otherwise we just become the sour face. Saints that St. Teresa Aler warned us about, God deliver us from sour face. Saints, I tell our students all the time, Cheer up. Holy cow. You know what I mean? You're young and, and on the doorstep of your lives and you're here at the University of Mary's saving a lot of money. Uh, we have 24 7 dining, and so you can get the f freshman 50 instead of the freshman 15.
Speaker 3 00:24:48 They've got a lot to be happy about. And all, all of us do not just material things, not just material or, or visible consolation, but we live in a very exciting time. It's, it's so good because in an apostolic age, the highest hearted people show up and Christianity was made for a fallen race. You know what I mean? And, and so this is, this is an opportunity for us. You know? Do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was wandering around like zombies saying the word unprecedented. Unprecedented. I, I I thought this was, I was like, what are you talking about unprecedented? Is it unprecedented for people to be in danger, inconvenienced subject to sickness and death? And that's not true. You know what I mean? It's not true that it was unprecedented. It was unprecedented in very particular narrow ways. But in general, our struggle with the question of death is the central question of human existence. And praise God that he sent his son to deal with, he went for the jugular. He dealt with our real enemy death, not piddling around with other things. You know,
Speaker 2 00:25:55 You know, you, you speak about what that means for the church. You speak about what it means in terms of the formation and preparation of priests, but you also raised what does it mean for families?
Speaker 3 00:26:05 Well, so here we go. Anybody who's been a priest for 10 minutes has had someone come up to him and say something to the effect of, Father I, I, I wander the earth with unbearable shame. I I don't know what we did wrong. Our parents, when, when they were raising us, they took us to church, taught us how to pray, got us the sacraments, sent us to Catholic schools, and we kept the faith. We did the same with our children. They've all left. Our grandchildren aren't even baptized. What did, what do we do wrong? How did we screw this up So royally, you know, people are really, and what they don't realize is that the ground shifted right underneath their feet. It's much, much harder to raise families in an apostol age than in a Christ town. I'll give you an example. I grew up, now this is gonna shock everybody.
Speaker 3 00:26:53 Hold on. Bulk of your seatbelt. Father Chris <laugh>, dozens and dozens. I I grew up in a town with dozens and dozens of people, 200 people in my hometown. And I didn't even grow up in the town. I was in a farm two miles north of it. And my parents raised eight children on that farm. And everybody in town was helping to raise all the other kids in the whole town. So my parents, all the other parents, my teachers, my coaches, the Catholic priests and the Lutheran minister were all on the same team. And they were like, Okay, we got all these kids and we got 18 years and they've all got a, a whole lot of original sin and we're gonna raise him to be good Christians, to give back and to be virtuous and all that. My younger brother, uh, number four of the eight is raising his six, soon to be seven, uh, children on the same farm.
Speaker 3 00:27:37 It's nothing like that for him and his wife. Everything is shifted in rural North Dakota. We're not talking, you know, Wall Street, we're talking rural North Dakota. Everything shifted. And he and his wife have to be much more intentional, much more strategic, much more thoughtful because they can't rely on support from the ambient culture to help them to raise their children to love God. And so these are the challenges that face us in our time. But you know, it's always been a responsibility of parents to ensure to the best of their ability that their, that their children keep the faith. But there you have it. So we talk about the family as the domestic church that can happen in families. And you can't blame parents who thought, Okay, I'll just do what my parents did, business as usual. But that's not the way to do it now. And if, if we as priests and bishops go about the same thing, we're making the same mistake, and then we'll have this, we'll wander around with the same shame. What did we do wrong? I did the same thing that the last bishop did. But things are changing.
Speaker 2 00:28:36 It's a, it's a powerful challenge. And again, a great, great conversation. Yeah. The other thing is, it's not without hope. Oh. And that's one of the things I think you deliver so well. Spoiler alert, I pointed it out into groups, but I love that chart you have of the first evangelization meeting on the
Speaker 3 00:28:52 Day, Pentecost,
Speaker 2 00:28:54 I love it. All the resources. And you look at what, what were the resources that the 11 apostles had and, but they had the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that you and I have today. But the other thing is, you've got to this with the priest a little bit. You spoke in a broader way, but maybe stepping away from the book, but I was caught by your analysis of 19th century France and you using, We work with statistics, we work with reports and projections. Yeah. But we really do need to leave room for the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 3 00:29:21 Yeah. Because other, it's not to surprise us, otherwise sociological analysis or whatever it is, will be erroneous because it doesn't take those types of things into account. And so, you know, I think, so we're in the midst of this Eucharistic revival right now. Fine. And I'm a big proponent of it. I think it's one of the most important things that's happened. And it comes out of this Pew Center study about the belief of Catholics regarding the real presence. Well, okay, so, uh, what are we gonna do about it? We are gonna do something about it, but we ourselves can't, The Holy Spirit really needs to be the protagonist in this kind of revival. And in France you saw that, you know, anybody looking with a reasonable scientific vantage, Ed France at that time in sort of the ravages after the revolution would've said, Gosh, the church is done. But that's not what happened. Instead, there was a terrific flowering in religious life and priesthood in all of these different types of things. And that can happen again here. I don't have a good way to predict it, but God is full of surprises. He's just the best.
Speaker 2 00:30:20 And he absolutely.
Speaker 3 00:30:21 What did they say? Deo optimo Maximo, right? Yeah, that's right. It was, the Romans thought it was Jupiter, but we know who it is. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:30:28 Yeah, that's right. Monsignor, this is just a, a fascinating conversation and we could go on for a long time. Yeah. But we try to keep a podcast to a certain time. We'll just ask the Lord to bless your work, to bless our work and to renew within us that, that fire of evangelization. Yeah. In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord God, we thank you for the gifts that you provide for us and for the people who inspire us with your love, we ask you to be with us. That we may be your faithful, joyful witnesses in the world, credible witnesses and all that we say and all that we do through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Amen. Male mighty God bless you, The Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you, Monsignor, for being with us and with our priest today. And thank you for your extra time with this podcast.
Speaker 1 00:31:17 Yes. Uh, this concludes another addition of big city Catholics, Sar Doin podcast. Monsignor. She thank you so much for your time with us today and for joining us on this podcast and for sharing your insights. We're really very, very grateful that you were able to join us. And to our listeners, we hope that you share this podcast. We hope that you like it and share it with others. And we'll see you again next week. God bless.
