Matt Fradd and Eric Sammons discuss building Catholic communities, the dangers of the internet, Pope Francis, and generally how to maintain one’s peace as a Catholic in today’s anti-Catholic world.
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Eric Sammons:
How can we, as Catholics, keep sane in an insane world? How can we stay Catholic when the world, and even, often, other members of the Church work against our faith? Let’s find out today on Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Before I get started, I just want to encourage people to subscribe to the channel, to like this episode, other episodes you listen to, let people know about it. The podcast is growing, and I appreciate that. Everybody who has subscribed, just want to encourage you to do that.
Also follow us on all the social media channels, at Crisis Mag. We’re on all of them, because we assume we’ll get kicked off of at least some of them at some point. Today, we’re going to talk with Matt Fradd. He is the creator and host of the popular Pints with Aquinas podcast, and he is the author and co-author of several books, including Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. Welcome to the program, Matt.
Matt Fradd:
Thank you, Eric. It’s good to be with you.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it is going to get me in trouble, but I want to ask a little bit about your background, because I asked my wife earlier, “Oh, do you have any questions? Any ideas, questions I should ask Matt Fradd?” She’s like, “Now, who’s that again?” She doesn’t really follow a lot of this stuff. I’m very familiar with you, and I think a lot of our audience would be.
Matt Fradd:
No, it’s okay, you don’t have to be. I just had Father Don Calloway on my show, and I actually had never heard his conversion story.
Eric Sammons:
Really? Oh, wow.
Matt Fradd:
So, I think I was the only one in the world who didn’t know much about Father Don Calloway before I had him on the show. So, it’s no problem. I’m from Australia originally. I grew up in a semi-Catholic family, decided I was agnostic around the age of 14 or so. When I was 17, I went to World Youth Day in Rome, and there experienced a very profound conversion to Jesus Christ, and came back very much on fire for the Catholic faith. I decided to serve as a missionary with a group in Canada called NET Ministries of Canada, where I ran retreats in high schools. And met my wife on NET, actually. And then, moved to the states in 2005, proposed to her in 2006. Oh, well in ’05, got married in 2006. Yeah. We lived in Ireland, lived in Canada. I’ve worked at Catholic Answers in San Diego. Long story short, I now live in Steubenville, Ohio with my four kids and beautiful wife.
Eric Sammons:
Awesome. Now, is your wife American, or is she Australian?
Matt Fradd:
She is American, yep.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So, that’s what keeps you in the country?
Matt Fradd:
Indeed. People say, “Do you love America?” Or, “Do you miss Australia?” I say, “I love my family more than Australia,” so.
Eric Sammons:
Right, exactly.
Matt Fradd:
Very happy to live here.
Eric Sammons:
And probably after everything happened with COVID in the past couple years in Australia, you probably are very happy to be in Steubenville, at that point.
Matt Fradd:
You know, when people keep talking about freedom of speech, I don’t think you really know what they’re talking about, until freedom of speech actually disappears in certain countries. And then you go, “Ah, that’s why the Americans are always talking about the importance of this.” So, I’m very glad to be here.
Eric Sammons:
Right. We minimize how important it is, like you said, when we don’t experience the opposite. But, we also tend to minimize when we have creeping things that just kind of start to, “Okay, this isn’t like Nazi Germany, it’s just a…” It’s like, “Okay, but, we don’t want to get to the point where we’re one step from Nazi Germany, and then we have to be against it.” A lot of things have to happen to get to that point. And, Australia, the images down there from COVID just are terrible. They literally had camps, or something like that.
Matt Fradd:
Well, my sister’s getting married this year, and I was told that if I go down without the jab, that I would have to quarantine. This is what they told me, how true this is, I haven’t looked into it. But, I’d have to quarantine the two weeks in a windowless hotel.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, my.
Matt Fradd:
Before being let out.
Eric Sammons:
Because science.
Matt Fradd:
Huh?
Eric Sammons:
Because science.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah, because science or something. So, it is quite bizarre. I mean, think about this. In Australia, it feels like all of the different news networks are singing from the same sheet of music. There’s no sort of big news group that’s mobilizing a significant contingent of the Australian population to sort of speak against the mainstream narrative. And so, for that reason, it feels a lot more peaceful when you’re there. Everyone just sort of agrees.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
If anyone steps out of line, you just quickly and effectively dismiss them as crazy or something. Whereas, in America, it can feel very explosive. It is, I think, at times, very explosive, because you do have these big news organizations, but they don’t agree. I would rather live here than over there, despite it feeling tumultuous.
Eric Sammons:
A couple months ago, I had Kennedy Hall on, who’s Canadian. He was talking, it sounds like very similar to Canada, where everybody’s just kind of like, “Yeah, well…” This is before the trucker convoy and everything. He was talking about, one of his frustrations was, he loved Canada, he loves being Canadian. But, he was frustrated by the fact that it’s like, there’s this artificial peace, where everybody’s like, “Okay, we’ll just go along.” There’s not really any resistance to it. Whereas, yeah, we, in America can sometimes complain that there’s constant fighting, but in some ways, fighting is a healthy sign-
Matt Fradd:
[crosstalk 00:05:32].
Eric Sammons:
… I would say, rather than just some artificial peace. By the way, just for people who are watching, it should be obvious we’re recording on Ash Wednesday, by Matt’s forehead. I have not yet gone to Mass, I’m going later today, but this will be up a couple days later. I’m trying to tell everybody, Matt doesn’t just constantly wear ashes on his forehead. It is Ash Wednesday today.
Okay. I want to talk a little bit, I want to have a conversation about, the Church today, the Catholic Church today, and being Catholic today, the challenges of it. And I just want to ask some questions about that, and kind of your take on it. We talked about this before we got on, that we’re all kind of trying to figure this out together. Nobody’s some great expert and knows exactly what we’re supposed to do, but I think it helps us all to talk about it and try to figure out.
I think we probably agree that the Catholic Church today, at least in the Western world, as we experience it, especially in America, is in a state of decline. Or, at least, its moral standing in the world is just gone, almost completely, from where it was maybe in the past. What would you say are the major factors that have led to that? Why is it that, if you go on Reddit or something like that, the Catholic Church is a joke? I mean, it’s a punchline. Why do you think that is that we’ve become, in a lot of ways, a punchline to the secular world?
Matt Fradd:
Well, beginning by saying, “Who am I?” I’m just a podcaster who’s trying to be a good dad, and live in a state of continual repentance. I’m not an expert, a journalist, or any of these things. So, take what I have to say with a grain of salt, but, certainly the sex abuse scandals are a massive canard in popular culture, when you discuss the cat Catholic Church. I also feel like there’s this sort of feminization of the church, where priests, bishops, and Catholic leaders have seemed, for decades, completely unwilling to address what needs to be addressed. There was a sort of spinelessness, and still is, that leads people to talk about sort of being nice, or other synonyms. But, we’re at war, we are church militant, and I’m looking for the battle cry. Not just the, be a nice little citizen, get along with everybody, and what we believe doesn’t really make a great deal of difference, because those who disagree with us are also going to heaven, and truth does exist, probably, but whatever.
It’s just a spineless mishmash of modernist crap that I think has made Catholicism a joke. I think Islam is false, and Muhammad is a false prophet, but I often think I have greater respect for the Muslims that I meet and interact with, than I do for myself, or many of the Catholics I interact with, because they’re bloody fasting seriously, and they seem to know who they are. And so, even though I think what they believe is false, as I said, I think I have more respect for them, sometimes. So, maybe it’s we don’t know who we are, and we’re kind of running after mainstream society, begging them to like us. It’s pathetic. Maybe that’s why we’re viewed as pathetic.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I like what you said, we don’t know who we are. I mean, also, it’s interesting. I have a friend, Russian Orthodox, and their liturgy can last two and a half hours, and they’re all standing the whole time. There’s no pews, or anything like that. This is somebody local here. At the very least, when you show up there, you’re like, “Okay, we’re taking this seriously,” because you have to show up for a two and a half hour liturgy, while standing the entire time. I mean, I’m not saying it’s some type of, let’s show how macho we are. But I do think, you don’t go there unless you’re serious about it. That you’re like, “Okay, I take my faith seriously.” Whereas, you know, the 55 minute nice homily, cushion seats, little bit of kneeling at a typical suburban Catholic parish, it does send a certain message. But, I think you’re right, that we don’t know who we are, and I think people aren’t attracted to organizations that don’t have a sense of identity. And-
Matt Fradd:
That’s a great point.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. If they don’t know who they are, why would I want to join them?
Matt Fradd:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Where does this come from? I know people might think this, but I’m not one who idealizes the 1950s, like it’s the perfect decade or something like that. But it does seem that, back then, at least can Catholics knew who they were. They didn’t eat meat on Fridays, things like that. They went to mass every Sunday. They went to confession on Saturday night, a lot. But, now we don’t. Why do you think we’ve lost that sense of identity, even since then, but just in general?
Matt Fradd:
I don’t know. I wish I did. I’m not a historian. I don’t know anything about history, much less the history of America, but I have to think it must have something to do… Well again, I think all I’m going to have to… I would learn much more from you, Eric, giving me your opinion, than me giving you mine. But certainly, the thing that maintains our identity is tradition. If I mock where I come from, and belittle the traditions that sustained those that went before me, then it’s like I have amnesia, at that point. So, I’m not sure what led to the severing of tradition, the despisal of tradition, but I would have to think that plays a major part in the sort of amnesia that the modern Catholic experiences.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Because tradition really does give us our identity, our group identity, who we are. I remember I read something. It was Cardinal Dolan, years ago. I don’t even know if he was Archbishop of New York yet, but he wrote something about Catholic identity, and it really struck me. We can all have our issues with the different Cardinals and Archbishops, but it was about the idea of how we’ve lost our identity, and these identity markers. The number one identity marker is on your forehead, right now, being a Catholic.
Matt Fradd:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
But, just in general though, no meat Fridays. A priest just told me recently that he found that more Catholics left the church in America after the Bishop rescinded no meat Fridays, than they did with the changes in the Mass. Now, I don’t know how accurate that is, and I’ve heard similar things. But I do know… I remember talking to somebody, we were doing at our parish, this was years ago, and we’re doing this come back… At Easter, and Christmas, we had this ad like, “Come back and ask any questions you want about the church at this meeting.” And I would just sit there. Because this is people, Christmas and Easter, Catholics who would show up. And I remember one of them, he really had a crisis of faith, because he said, “If the church can change the teachings on meat Fridays. And all of a sudden, it was a mortal sin the day before to eat meat on a Friday, but the day after, it’s okay.” Then, it called into him question about the entire teaching of the church.
Now, we both know there’s a difference between disciplinary measures, but for the average Catholic in the pew, it at least came across as a complete, almost a rejection of where we came from, of an important tradition, of an identity marker. Now, why they decide to get rid of that stuff, I don’t think I know the answer to that, [crosstalk 00:13:14], but they did get rid of it.
Matt Fradd:
The one thing that’s obvious, as the nose on my face, is the fact that young people want to be treated seriously, and they want a strong horse, not a weak horse. They want something that’s going to make demands of them. That is so clear, it couldn’t be clearer. No one wants to walk into a shapeless, spineless version of Christianity that has really no requirements of them except to be nice. Whatever the reason is, I don’t know, but it’s… I don’t know. I feel like a lot of young…I mean, look at the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson, for example.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
I feel like a lot of people, maybe we have spiritual formation, but we don’t really have human formation. So, we haven’t been told to be disciplined and why if we’re not disciplined, our life will become chaotic, for example. But, I mean, there’s a man who’s making demands on people, and he’s respected for it. Sometimes, we then turn to the church for our spiritual formation, and those demands aren’t the same.
And, I tell you what, I think one litmus test of the fact that people want these demands, and they’re flocking to it is, look at the religious orders that are exploding with numbers. These aren’t always infallible, of course, but look to the YouTube channels of people who are speaking about Catholic matters. You could find these different markers, and it seems to me that the ones who are just like, “Whatever, we can disagree.” No one cares. No one’s interested in that. We’re desperately looking for a rudder, for this rudderless shit we find ourselves in. And… anyway.
Eric Sammons:
At least for me, I think one of the most obvious examples is the growth of the traditional Latin Mass, popularity of traditional Latin Mass. I don’t think it’s because a bunch of people are Latin scholars, they love Latin. It’s kind of funny, because people know I’m of a big proponent at traditional Latin Mass. I am awful at language. I’m awful at Latin. I couldn’t tell you the first thing. My daughter is actually at Steubenville, majoring in Latin, and it’s just hilarious that she’s clearly got it all from her mother, who is a language person, but not me. It it nothing to do with the Latin that people are attracted to, especially young people, to traditional Latin Mass. I think what you said is, there’s just a sense when you…
I say it like this. When you walk in, I just feel like, I think, “Well, these people take this seriously. They may be wrong, but they take it seriously.” Just like you said, when you walk into maybe a… I would know, but walk into a mosque, I would guess, you would think that. But, when you walk in to Saint Suburbia, you just don’t get that feeling. I guess I could ask what is the answer, but I know what your answer’s going to be is, “I don’t know.” But, how can we turn things around, in a parish setting, particularly, so that… Because, I think that’s really where the weakness is, is that… I know we like to point fingers at the Vatican, and I think there’s some reason for that in our Bishops, but at the parish level is where we’re losing people, in my mind. How can we turn it around, at a parish level? What’s been your experience? What do you think is a way we could help turn that situation around?
Matt Fradd:
Well, I think anybody who’s serious about the Christian faith is probably already doing what I’m about to suggest, instinctively, and don’t need me to tell them to do it. And that’s, flock from those pansy parishes, and go where you will be fed spiritually. That’s what I doing. I mean, that’s what I did. When I was in Atlanta, I drove past 10 or 15 of them. No, okay. Let’s see. 5 to 10 banal parishes, to get to a Byzantine church. would say I’m like a refugee from a sea of these banalities, you know?
And I’m banal. I’m weak, I’m the coward. So, the last thing I need is a liturgy, a priest, and a homily that’s also cowardly. I’m in desperate need of people making demands upon me, and not constantly allowing me to sort of cut corners. So, I think people are doing that. And, I also think one thing we’re seeing after COVID lockdowns have been lifted, and that people are able to work from home, maybe, in a way that they weren’t before. And so, here in Steubenville, Ohio, we’re seeing more multiple families, I think as many as 20 families, over last couple of months, have moved to Steubenville, Ohio. They go into St. Pete’s here, which is a traditional church here in Steubenville.
They’re kind of banding together with other Catholics in order live a serious Catholic community. It doesn’t have to be Steubenville, it can be in multiple locations around the country, where Catholics are getting together and doing life in common. I think that’s really important, as well. Last night, for example, we had a Mardi Gras party [inaudible 00:18:07]. We probably had like two to 300 people jammed in this room, having drinks, having cake, celebrating, but then also talking about what we’re giving up tomorrow. The churches are packed here. My son isn’t like the weird one out. I’m asking him, “What are you giving up for Lent?” And he’s got a list of things he’s giving up, because his friends, that he rubs shoulders with, are also giving them up.
These aren’t weird kids who don’t know how to interact with other human beings. It’s just normal, human, Catholic wife. That’s what I see happening, and that’s what I’m excited about. It seems to me that the sort of modern Catholic family in vanilla American society is as in much danger of being destroyed as a child lost in the woods. If you remain there, you will die, so you need to find help. You need to find support, quickly. That’s what we’ve done, in having moved here, and that’s kind of our experience with other people. It’s like this very joyful life.
Eric Sammons:
When did you go to Steubenville?
Matt Fradd:
Over a year ago.
Eric Sammons:
Over a year ago, okay. I think-
Matt Fradd:
I’m not trying to promote Steubenville. Find a good, solid group of people who live almost within walking distance, hopefully, where you can just do life together.
Eric Sammons:
That’s something I’ve talked about, too, in the past, is the importance of community, and I think COVID really exposed that, and also gave us the opportunity. Like you said, because a lot of people started working from home, they can actually live wherever they wanted to. But, I think it’s important because, sometimes, there’s this idea of, we have this utopian idea community. Let’s all go out into the woods, we’ll build up a little city, and we’ll be all fine. It typically ends up poorly. It’s either a cultish type thing, or something like that.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
But the organic growth of communities… somebody I lived in Steubenville many years ago. I have a lot of friends in Steubenville. I went to school there years ago, I have kids there now. I think the reason Steubenville is a good example is because it specifically wasn’t set up as some… I mean, anybody’s been to Steubenville knows, it’s not set up as some utopian community. What happened was, is starting with Father Michael Scanlan, then just Catholics came, practicing, serious Catholics came and they started to build a community just organically, naturally. I think they’re trying to do that, for example in Ave Maria, Florida. That’s a little bit less organic, but it wasn’t set up as, let’s create a community. It was more set up as, let’s have a university, and then a community will build out of it. That one’s a little bit different, but I think that it’s a similar-
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. I was in Ave last week, or the week before, and there’s lots of families moving in who aren’t Catholic. So, you’re right, it’s not set up to be a little Catholic utopia, but the center of town is the church. So, there’s another option for us, yeah. We had a meth bust at the street across from our house, or the street over from our house. No, I shouldn’t laugh about it, but I mean, this is kind of life in Steubenville. My wife jokes, “You know, it’s safe in Steubenville, because you always hear sirens.”
It’s kind of cool. I’m starting to be challenged by people here in Steubenville to drop that insane dichotomy between those who are interested in the liturgy, and those who are interested in the poor. To blow that apart, as our blessed Lord did, and to get to know the names of the homeless in our streets. And the names of not just the homeless, but those who are seriously down on their luck. They’re all over the place. The fact that I don’t make a conscious effort to get to know their names is shameful. And so, I’ve repented with that, and I’m really trying to do that. It is cool, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. You can do that in different areas. Any big city typically has enough serious Catholics that you can inform community. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I think we have a great Catholic community here. Our parish, which is traditional Latin, traditional parish, as well. It’s in downtown, in a poor area. We have sisters down there who are helping the poor, or just walking into the priests, or walking around. We go down there, we try to help as well. One thing was a couple years ago, when the Black Lives Matter protests were going on, it kind of became famous. The mother superior of our order, she just went right into it, and she just was praying. She was talking to them, she was spray painting her own door with signs of like, “God loves everybody,” and stuff.
I mean, it was beautiful. I mean, just getting right into it. I think that’s something, like you said, they’re very traditional, but there’s not some dichotomy between, okay, because she loves tradition or the traditional liturgy, all of a sudden now she doesn’t help the poor. I mean, come on, no. There should be no divide there, although that’s a stereotype, sometimes. So, I think that’s a good point, is community.
I think it used to be controversial, the idea of you parish shop, so to speak. I actually do probably drive by 15 parishes to get to my parish, because Cincinnati being so Catholic, there’s a million parishes around. But, I think it’s just a reality of you have to keep your sanity. You have to keep your own faith, your kids’ faith, most importantly. And so, you have to go to a decent parish.
You come across, at least publicly, as kind of an upbeat and optimistic person. At least, that’s been my guess of where your podcast, and things like that. How do you kind of keep that when, honestly, it can be very easy to get cynical? I think, at least for me, it can… Honestly, you get cynical. When you see what’s happening in the church, when you see just over and over again, scandal, and just terrible things coming out of the Vatican, especially if you happen to be in a parish that’s not that great. How do you kind of keep a more, I don’t want to say positive, because it sounds kind of new agey or something like that, but [crosstalk 00:24:15]-
Matt Fradd:
[crosstalk 00:24:15] sanguine disposition, somewhat. Is that kind of what you mean?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Just to kind of keep going on, and not get beat down, I think it’s probably… Because I know a lot of people who are beat down. I think I feel beat down, at times.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
How do you not get beat down?
Matt Fradd:
Well, I don’t know if people still think that about me. As I’m getting older, I find myself becoming more cynical, but cynicism is a coward’s way out, because cynicism is a way of giving up, really. Giving up is a cowardly thing to do when you’re called to fire. If cynicism is giving up, then cynicism is cowardly. So, I don’t want to ever be cynical.
I don’t know. I imagine if somebody said, “How do you…” Think of a secular example, “How can you be so positive, when there’s all these terrible stories on the news of things that are going on all around the world?” In a way, you just have to stop caring, at least emotionally. You have to stop investing energy emotionally into the many terrible things that are taking place all around the world, because there are people who have a right to your emotional energy under your roof, and in your community. If you’re going to spend it on people in Ukraine, who we should pray for, and who we should help. But, if I’m going to get that emotionally invested in people I don’t know, such that I’m no longer able to invest emotionally in my son, my wife, and my other children. That’s clearly not a good thing.
When I say don’t care, I don’t mean ignore your duty to people in the outside world, but I think we can all recognize that to watch 24 hour news streams of horrible things that are taking place is just a bad way to live your life. I think that’s true of the world, and I also think that’s true of the Church. So, I just stop caring. Whether I should, or I shouldn’t, I don’t know, but it’s kind of working for me, I guess. I don’t really care what Pope Francis said recently. I just, I don’t care. I’d rather read the lives of the Saints, love my children, pray with my friends, do my morning and night prayer. You know, do the things I’d say I’m going to do to repent of my selfishness towards my wife, and my irritation I sometimes express towards my children.
Drink whiskey with my friends, occasionally. I want to just do the things that will enable me to love the people I’m being called to love, immediately. Again, just like I don’t mean don’t care about the terrible things that have take place in the world in an abstract way. I can’t be refreshing Taylor Marshall, Church Militant, and all these guys. I’m not even disparaging them, I’m just saying to live in that place. I couldn’t do without it just thoroughly taking me out, because I just become angry, or self-righteous, or something.
And so, I don’t live in those places. I’m sure Taylor and those other fellows at Church Militant, I’m sure they’d advise you not to be continually up to date on church ecclesial politics, either.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
That’s one thing, I think. Just not to keep refreshing those ecclesial political news feeds, while at the same time, not burying your head in the sand. Because, if I’m going to evangelize people, I need to know what people who need to be evangelized are interested in. So, things like Pachamama, and whatever Pope Francis just said. Those things, I think, are necessary to talk about, because prospective converts are asking those questions. I just don’t want to live there continually, because it doesn’t do any good for me. What do you think? What do you do?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point to balance between them, because… You know, it’s funny, here in Ohio, I don’t know if you heard this story, but JD Vance, who’s running for Senate, and I’m not endorsing him or going against him. This is just a story. He basically got in hot water because he said, recently, “I don’t care about what’s happening in Ukraine.” He meant it the same way you just said it.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
But, of course, a politician can’t say something like that. And his point was, simply, if I’m Senator of Ohio, I have to care about the people of Ohio. I have to serve them. I have to try to make their lives better. My job isn’t to be constantly concerned about what’s happening in Ukraine, unless it’s going to directly affect the people I serve.
And I thought, “You know, he’s actually right.” He might say a little indelicately, obviously, but he is correct in his general sense. I agree. I think that’s the key and, you know, here at Crisis, I try to have that, always, too, because our very name is somewhat pushing the narrative of you need to be in panic, you need to be in fear, and stuff like that. I hope we’re not doing that, because I always tell our writers at Crisis, “We have to write about what’s going on, we have to address the problems. But I want, in every article…” We don’t always succeed this. I don’t always succeed this, but we want every article to have something in there that says, what can we do? What can we do to make this a better situation? If people are leaving the Church and we’re talking about everybody leaving the Church, what can I do to make sure my kids don’t leave the Church or whatever? Make sure I make my parish a little bit better?
Matt Fradd:
We need to have trusted voices in the game, helping us navigate the crisis, which is clearly what you are trying to do. If I came to you and said, “All I do online is read Crisis Article magazines,” you’d be like, “Okay, what else do you do?” “Nothing.” You’d be concerned about it. So, it’s good that people are in these spaces. I don’t think any individual ought to be continually filling his mind or eyeballs with what’s going on, because… I was just walking down the street with my son the other day, and he was showing me how, when he tenses up his jaw, it kind of clicks. He was just fascinated by that, as we were walking along the sidewalk, and he wanted to show me. He was very interested in it.
I just thought, sometimes I think my kids… The Lord wants my kids to remind me how to be human. That’s a very cool thing to be interested in. Or, he’ll make a sound with his mouth, and then wonder how many other human beings have made that sound before. There’s got to be a number. What’s the number? That’s beautiful. I want to live in their world, and I want to be interested in what they’re interested in. It might seem more intelligent and responsible to always be up to date with the latest crisis in the Church, but it’s actually far more responsible to be interested in the little things my kids are concerned about. To condescend into their worlds, and to love them in there, and not to be aloof and to be detached from them, because Dad’s reading about important things. I just, I don’t want to be like that.
Eric Sammons:
Last year… I mean, I think we all come to this realization, or at least we try to, with our devices that are constantly with us. It was last spring or so, I had been thinking, “I’m probably spending too much time on my devices.” I remember I was… I can still remember it. I think it was in my family room. I had my iPhone in front of me. I was, of course, thinking I need to correct somebody who’s wrong on the internet, because that’s my job. My six year old daughter came up to me, wanted to do something, or something. I basically kind of brushed her off because, hey, somebody’s wrong on the internet, that’s far more important.
And, it hit me. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is awful. This is terrible. I mean, this is like bad parenting 101.” I ended up getting rid of it, and I got a dumb phone. So, now, my social media feed’s only on my computer, my work computer, in my office at home. So, if I’m not in my office, I actually can’t see what Twitter says. I can’t see what Facebook says, because I don’t want to see. When I’m outside the house, I have no idea what’s going on with that. And for me, at least, personally, it really did improve. I will admit, I fell off the wagon a little bit, and I’m like, “Okay, I need to get back on it.” It’s not an immediate thing for me. It’s probably like any addiction. But I do think practical things like that, I do think help keep our sanity, when so much is going wrong around us.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. I did the same thing. I don’t know how much you know about my kind of tech journey, but I take every August entirely off of the internet. No keyboards, no phone-
Eric Sammons:
Oh, great. I tried to contact you last August, and all of a sudden, I found out you’re completely off grid. And I’m like, “Oh, okay, no problem. [crosstalk 00:32:45].”
Matt Fradd:
It’s the price of peace. You have to act… Not that I offended you, of course, but you have to worry, “Gosh, people are trying to get ahold of me,” but it’s that price of peace and being with my family, that I have to be okay with people thinking I’m ignoring them, so that I can delve my kids’ lives. But yeah, same thing, I got a dumb phone, as well. You and I might be very similar, temperamentally. I’m not sure, because we have one desktop at my house, and my wife has the password for it. So, when I go home, there is actually no way of accessing the internet.
So, sometimes that’s annoying, right? Because I want to listen to something, or I want to watch something, but I can’t. That’s good for me, because I’m like you. I found myself, as I was playing with my children, wondering what someone said, and how I might say something back to them, and I’m like, “This is no way live.”
Eric Sammons:
Right. So, basically, what we’re trying to tell everybody, unsubscribe from our channel. No, but I think it’s funny, because there’s a book I read last year. Ah, I can’t remember the author. It was about deep work, and I can’t remember the guy’s name, but it was very much about this idea that you have to let your brain be completely focused on something deeper than like your internet feeds. So, if you’re… Whatever your job… It was a work related book, but I think it applies to life, that there have to be times during the day where you’re completely disconnected from the world. But, one of the things I thought was very helpful that he said, was he talked about the fact that you can’t always get back to people. You can’t always respond to everybody.
That was a very freeing thing to me, because I felt obligated. I mean, I’ve been involved with the internet, with email and internet and everything, since the 1990s.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
There’s a certain etiquette, there’s so many emails that you have to email them back. If you have to email them back within 24 hours, even. In fact, I saw this survey, it was actually from Franciscan, telling people… One of the things I said was the importance of emailing people back within 24 hours. I’m like, “That’s awful advice,” because, what happens is, you become a slave, then, to your email, to your messaging, your direct messaging, whatever the case may be, and you can’t actually live. You can’t let your brain get deeply into any subject. Instead, you’re just constantly answering people, and things like that. But the problem is, for me, at least, some people will think I’m rude. Some people will think I’m not for [crosstalk 00:35:20]-
Matt Fradd:
When I got a dumb phone this past August, I even changed my number. Because I realized, I had given my number to every human being I had met for longer than five minutes over the last 10 years or so. And so, then I got my new number, and then I got my smartphone, and I texted my new number to about 20 people who I wanted to be in touch with, and I got rid of my phone. I know people have been texting me, and probably still do, but I don’t care. Yeah. I’m the same as you. I just don’t get back to emails. I’ve just fully taken a like, I don’t care. I’ve got things to do. I don’t want to offend any individual person, but if that’s the cost, then I’m okay with offending individual people.
Eric Sammons:
Because, ultimately you’re… The idea is that, and it comes back to what you were saying about not caring about like things in the world, always. There’s a hierarchy of our obligations. Our first is, obviously, our own spiritual health, but then after that, is our family, our wife and kids, whoever we’re taking care of. Then, to our community, our parish, and then maybe it goes out. It gets weaker and weaker as you get further and further.
Matt Fradd:
That’s a good way to put it, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
And so, we really have a deep obligation to our wife and kids, our spouse, and our kids. We definitely have an obligation to our parish, our community. But, my obligation to… Like, when I see a video on Twitter or something like that about some horrendous crime that happened in, let’s say, Spokane, Washington, to me, it’s an emotional investment that was not worth it, because I can do nothing about that. But, yet, it got me jazzed up. And so I was a like, “Oh, I have to…” In fact, I turned off the setting in Twitter where a video automatically shows, when you scroll by, it automatically starts. Because, what I found was…
It was during Black Lives Matter protests that I did this, because I realized, it’s just trying to get me upset about these things that I have no control over it. I’m praying for the general situation, but just getting me hyped up because of the fact that I see somebody getting beat up, that shouldn’t get beat up, obviously, I don’t see how that helps me any to spend that emotional energy on that. If it’s my own kid, yeah, then I will.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I don’t know how many people would push back against that. If they were to do that, if they were going to say, “How could you not be possibly constantly thinking about what’s taking place in Ukraine?” You just go, “Okay, do you know there’s sex trafficking taking place in your town? Do you care? When’s the last time you thought about it? You’re a horrible individual. You should be concerned about that, as well as Ukraine, as well as people who are being murdered, as well as abortion, as well as ivory poaching in Africa.”
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
I think we call recognize we have a limited amount of things we can actually be emotionally invested in.
Eric Sammons:
How would you say is a good way for the average Catholic, when they’re impacted by bad things… So here’s probably the best example, is Pope Francis’s odd campaign to shut down, or at least diminish, the traditional Latin Mass. Well, that’s actually impacting people directly, because all of a sudden, they’re… I have friends, there was a traditional Latin Mass that was shut down in my diocese. I have friends who went there, and they’re not within an hour of a traditional Latin Mass.
They had vocations their… One of them, his son, was only seriously thinking about vocation because of, after he started going traditional Latin Mass, because he started getting in with the altar boys. He started realizing this is pretty cool. And now, this family was like, “We’re afraid our son’s vocation might get harmed. His faith might get harmed, because, now, we can’t… All we have available to us within an hour…” Because, this is out in a rural area, “Is some kind of weak like weak parish.”
How do they not take that anger out at the person who’s the Vicar of Christ, the leader of the Church, and get upset? And, and I just wondering… I know, again, I know we don’t have answers to that, but just, how do we deal with those type of situations, when they do impact us?
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. I don’t know. I think that is the role. None of us, with our little podcasts, are claiming infallibility, nor we saying that we’re right about everything. I wouldn’t say that about any podcast. I have different beefs with different Catholic personalities online, just like everybody does, including the people I’m about to mention, right? But, I do think the role that people like Taylor Marshall and others play, is by reminding us that we’re not insane. Because, sometimes when tradition is being attacked like that, you look around and you’re like, “This is crazy, right?” If the only people around you are like, “I don’t think so, stop being a spas about it. Just get over it.” It’s times like that, that people, I think, are drawn to these other commentators.
They’re like, “I knew it. I knew I wasn’t insane. This is wrong.” I feel that way about Daily Wire. When I see some of the insanities taking place in our culture, and no one’s addressing it. Like that guy or rather that female who now thinks she’s a man on the front of New York cover magazine, you know, who had some horror surgery done to make her somehow in some monstrous way, appear like a man who’s addressing that? And so I look at like Matt Walsh who was addressing I’m like, thank God. Like I knew I wasn’t insane that this person articulated it for me. I don’t know. So, I think there’s a role there for someone to kind reassure you that you’re not crazy. That’s probably the first step. And then, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s, maybe it goes back to what we said earlier. It’s about, well, maybe we’re just going to have to move from our…
We’re going to have to choose what we love. Maybe we love the idea of living on a rural farm somewhere. And we also love the idea of the Latin Mass, but again, maybe that’s just not an option, which stinks. Maybe it’s not an option. So, now maybe I’ve got to make a decision. Do I have to move away from my little rural paradise where I was teaching the kids all these great values about living on the land and killing animals and things like that? And into the city so that I can be walking distance to the Blessed Sacrament. That might be an option this person has to make, which isn’t ideal.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
But, you know, that’s kind of what we’ve had to do. I like the idea of living on the land, but I’m also living in like rundown rust belt Ohio, freezing cold, so that I can live alongside people who want to be saints, and where we have a beautiful liturgy and some holy priests, you know?
Eric Sammons:
The whole COVID situation really made this idea of moving so important, because how states dealt with it. I mean, the difference between the California and a Florida, a New York and a Texas. It’s astronomical, and it really has a direct impact on your life. And so, trying to find these places where we can.
That’s, honestly, what I try to do is try… The keeping people sane, because I remember, when Pope Francis first became Pope, I was working for a diocese, and I kept the kind of standard line. And at first, I really was like, I admit, I know some people were like immediately, “I thought he could be trouble,” whatever. I was like, “No, okay. I know nothing about him. I just assume he’s continuation of Benedict, and maybe JP II, maybe a little different,” whatever.
And then over time, obviously, I started to have a creeping realization that I was wrong. I remember when I first kind of publicly started to say, “You know, I think problems here. I think he’s not…” I just would start saying, “I don’t think he’s a good Pope.” I think there’s been bad Popes in the past, and so it’s not unthinkable that there are bad Popes… That there could be bad Popes in the future, or the present. That’s not an anti-Catholic statement. That’s just a statement of historical fact. I was amazed, because the number of people came to me and said… I will say, some people criticized me, say, “How dare you question? You know, you’re not good Catholic for saying something against the Pope publicly.” But then, a lot of people just quietly say, “Thank you because I was going insane. I was being gaslit.”
Matt Fradd:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
“I thought I was the one having the problem.”
Matt Fradd:
I think the reason people get so angry when you do say, “This is not a good Pope.” Can we just acknowledge that? Can we love him, pray for him, and acknowledge his [inaudible 00:43:39]? I think part of the outrage we encounter is from people who feel like they’re a stranger in the world, but the Church had their back. It felt like that for me. Even if my parish was a little crazy, I had John Paul II.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
Or I had Pope Benedict XVI. And now it’s like, “Who do I have?” So it’s like, okay, it’s chaos outside, and it’s chaos inside, and I can’t live in chaos. So, I think maybe that’s part of the attacking the messenger. Because it’s like, no, you cannot tell me it’s not safe in here, because it’s not safe out there. So, you’re telling me, I got nowhere where to go? That’s a terrifying sort realization, place to be in.
So, I understand the kind of anger people have, I think. But, yeah. It also, as you say, it’s just sobering. I like what you put there. It’s like, how is it okay that we’re okay to say there are bad Popes in the past? Well, today’s present is someone in the future’s past.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
So, let’s just get on with the job of sanctification. We have the catechism, we have the scriptures, we have the lives of the Saints. We have Lord Jesus Christ who loves us intimately, has a plan for our lives, knows us intimately, has a vocation for us, is calling us to save souls, and to save our own. And, so, we really don’t have much time to waste. So, I don’t know what else to do except to keep plowing ahead. Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
I also think it’s necessary to be very frank about what’s going on, because I think what happens is, when you either gaslight, or pretend it’s not, or pretend everything’s hunky-dory, I do think that leads people to look into things like [inaudible 00:45:27], look into becoming Eastern Orthodox, look at these other options that seem attractive on the surface, because they do seem to make a certain logical consistency. But the problem is, I think they miss, fundamentally, at the beginning… They have a false view at the beginning, which is that we have to accept that the Pope is always this great guy, or would never say these things that our current Pope is saying. I think when we disabuse ourselves of that, we do certain [crosstalk 00:45:58]-
Matt Fradd:
What’s funny is I was a Catholic apologist for three years, with Catholic Answers. We were continually correcting Protestants who thought that infallibility meant impeccability. And now, we have a Pope who’s clearly not impeccable, and it’s like, shut up, shut up. Don’t say it. It’s like, “Well, but I thought you… Okay now we’re all very, very confused.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I feel like all the people who… Catholics who told me, when I was looking into Catholicism as a Protestant, they always reassured me. “Don’t worry. We don’t worship the Pope. We don’t think he’s always right, you’re allowed to disagree with him.” Then, all of a sudden I disagree with him, and they’re like, “Wait a second. You’re a terrible Catholic.” But wait a minute, you told me I was allowed to do this before I became Catholic.
Yeah. It’s insane. Now, I wanted to ask you about your Pints with Aquinas. How do you think St. Thomas Aquinas can help us today, out of the mess? I love St. Thomas, as well. In fact, I just had a great… I’m reading through the Gospel of John, and I’m with and I’m reading his commentary on it. I literally do only one verse a day, because you can’t do more than that, when you’re going through Aquinas. Today, he had a great thing about the Samaritan Woman. Jesus has told her that your… He said like, “Your religion, your worship is… You don’t know what you worship, the Jews do, we do, because salvation comes from the Jews.”
And St. Thomas was saying how, if you don’t… Because God is simple, then you are either wrong or right about worshiping Him. And he basically was saying, “Catholics are right, and everybody else is wrong.” And it made me think that seems to contradict this modern idea that Islam worships the same God as us, because St. Thomas Aquinas seems to be saying, and you would know more than I, exactly what he’s saying on this. He’s saying, “No, because their conception of God is wrong,” and it’s not like they can get one little thing wrong, and everything else is okay, because God is simple. You get one thing wrong about him, you’re wrong about the God you’re worshiping. But anyway, that was an aside, because I thought of it. Where can Aquinas help us today, to figure out the mess that’s going on right now?
Matt Fradd:
Well, I mean, Aquinas had a deep and profound union with Jesus Christ. You know, he was a mystic. When he couldn’t understand something, he would often lay his head on the tabernacle and weep. He was more concerned about his relationship with Christ, and the truth of God, then what he might have to say on a particular given matter, despite who was begging him to talk about it.
I mean, I often think I’d like to go back in time and convince Thomas that he was wrong to stop writing the sermon. And maybe he was, I don’t know. But the fact that he kind of held his tongue shortly after that experience… He loved Jesus Christ. He loved the scriptures. You can’t read Thomas without running into a scripture verse almost every point he makes, every sentence he makes, you know? People often realize and understand that he quotes Aristotle a great deal, but he quotes Augustine more than Aristotle, and he quotes the scriptures more than both of them. So, he was deeply immersed in sacred scripture.
So, that’s one way, I suppose, maybe tangentially, I wrote a little book that came out last year called How to be Happy, and it’s all on what Thomas Aquinas has to say about happiness. Since we’re talking about the crisis in the church, and we’re talking about the stresses of living in modern day life, maybe it might be worth pointing to those things. In the Summa, Aquinas talks about five remedies for sorrow. I’ll go over these really quick. I promise, but-
Eric Sammons:
Oh, yeah, sure.
Matt Fradd:
If you’re sad, he says, “Well, the first thing you should do is do something pleasurable,” because pleasure is our anxiety repoing. Sort of like, if you’re weary, then you seek rest, sleep, right? In order to be refreshed. And if you are anxious or sad, you do something pleasurable in order to sort of regulate. I forget the exact order, but it also says we should seek the comfort of friends, because, when we share our burden with somebody else, we see their concern for us, and that gives us pleasure. And it’s also dividing the load that we’re carrying, so that we should really do that. We should seek the comfort of friends. He says that we should contemplate the truth, because unlike beasts who are satisfied with copulation, food, water, and rest, humans aren’t. When we get those things, and we’re at a state of peace, we then ask question about the fabric of reality.
This is often why it said that philosophy arose when it did, in a relative state of peace in Greece, hundreds of years, of course, before the time of Christ, the pre-Socratics. 500 years before Christ and Socrates, you know? What else does he say? He says we should cry. He says, “If you’re sad, you should.” He says tears and groaning. And, we’re upstream, I think, of a lot of weird caricatures of masculinity. And so, we might have the erroneous idea that men ought not to cry, but our blessed Lord and Savior you did, and so did Thomas. So, get over yourself. Tears and groaning.
He says this line that sounds like something my Mum says, or said, when I was five. He says, “Because a hurtful thing hurts all the more when we keep it shut up.” He says it’s really pleasing to a man when he can act on the outside the way he feels on the inside. And so, to cry, to pray for that gift of tears, to groan if we’re actually sad. I don’t know how many I’ve gone through. Is that three or four?
But the last one, which people often like, is sleep and baths. If we’re feeling exhausted and run down by all of this, take a hot bath, and have a sleep, because we don’t have bodies. We are bodies. We are our bodies. And so, if our body is exhausted, we are exhausted. And so, restoring the body is a way to restore the soul. I mean, it’s funny that the culture hijacks what Catholics drop, but when we drop rosary beads, people were hanging them around window, mirrors, and putting around the necks. But self care, this is really what Aquinas is talking about. He’s talking about taking care of our bodies, taking care of ourselves. Not in a selfish, sort of navel-gazing, solipsistic sort of way, but so that we can better relate to our Lord and to each other. So, those might be a few interesting things. I wasn’t meaning to plug the book, but if people are interested, it’s on Audible. It’s also available on Amazon, or whatever.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I’ll link to it.
Matt Fradd:
[crosstalk 00:53:02].
Eric Sammons:
I’ll definitely link to the show notes.
Matt Fradd:
It’s an easy read. I’m not a scholar or an intellectual, I’m merely a studious amateur. But, I think it’s quite good. It’s got good reviews, and things. And so, people could check that out [inaudible 00:53:14].
Eric Sammons:
It seems like Aquinas, one of the things he really can give us, is he’s very balanced. It’s like what you said about when you’re sad, seek pleasure. A lot of Catholics today might think, “Wait a minute, we’re not allowed to seek pleasure. That’s a bad thing.” Now, obviously during Lent, we should diminish some of that seeking a pleasure. But, it’s not that pleasure is a bad thing. Always, to me, it seems like Thomas, he hits that mean that gets it just right.
I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about the virtue of obedience, because I’m convinced that, in today’s Church, that there’s a misunderstanding of that virtue, that people think that means a subservient to, like almost say, “You obey no matter what, if it’s a church figure who says it,” but if reading St. Thomas, he makes it very clear, no, the only one that we obey unconditionally is God. There’s literally not one human being on earth that we are required to obey unconditionally.
And, he gives the balance of like, they have to have a sphere of authority over us, over whatever it is they’re commanding. They have to actually be our superior. It’s not just simply, they can’t command sin. We all know that one, but it’s more than that. And I just felt like, when you read that, you’re like, “Oh, wow, this is putting all the pieces together.” It’s not this extreme idea. Not this Protestant disobedience that led to Protestantism, but it’s also not this kind of weird treat the Pope as like a cult leader. It’s this median. I feel like Aquinas can really help us figure out a lot of the crisis in the church by getting that medium right there. Does that make sense?
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. Yeah, it does, and as you know, he has a whole part in the Summa under fraternal correction, where he talks about being able to… There is a time and place where one can correct, and should. Not just can, but should correct [inaudible 00:55:11] if they’re a serious sin. Now, we have to also understand our own tendency towards being arrogant, self-righteous, and all that. It’s sort of like anger. It’s like, well, I guess you can be angry without sinning, but look at you, you’re in idiot. Every time you’ve done that, you’ve usually sinned, so just go really easy with that. You know, I think similarly, when it comes to the maybe direct correcting of [inaudible 00:55:38], but it’s still something Aquinas says that we shouldn’t… Not just can, but should do, in certain instances.
Eric Sammons:
Right, because there’s this idea that Lumen gentium 25 makes it sound like we’re not ever allowed to disagree with what the Pope or church leaders. For those who aren’t aware, it’s a passage that talks about how we need to give religious submission of mind and will to the Pope. It’s taken the mean that we never can correct him, or anything. But, I think you’re, that the balance there, the Aquinas balance probably is, if we’re just doing it… We’re angry, or whatever, just lashing out, that’s not really what that’s not really appropriate, either, to do it that way.
Again, I think it comes back to what we were saying before about these concentric circles. If your Bishop is doing something that you believe is, after prayer and thinking about, is wrong, then yes, you should speak out against him. But, are you really required to say something that some Bishop in Ireland, for example, is doing wrong?
Matt Fradd:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
Is that really something you need to spend your emotional energy on? But, maybe your own Bishop. And, obviously, the Pope applies to everybody, but I think that’s probably healthy, as well, when we’re thinking about criticizing clerics. I know I fall into that, myself. I have a tendency, when I see something bad somewhere, I want to tweet about it, and I got to hold back on that.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. Maybe, maybe not. It’s really hard to know, isn’t it? These are confusing times, and I really am trying to give as much leeway to people as I can, precisely cause we’re in outrageously confusing times. I love traditions. I love the tradition of the Church. I love my traditional brethren. Sometimes, I think maybe I’m a trad. I don’t know what I am. I try to love Jesus, and be obedient to the Church’s teachings, and I love the traditions, and I try to implement them in my family. But certainly, criticisms can be leveled of people who are leaning one way, or the other, in any regard. And yeah, maybe there’s this desire to kind of make everything unduly black and white in every possible regard, in order to feel sort of safe and secure, in a way that maybe is artificial.
I don’t know. I actually do think that’s true. We’re always going to be dealing with some amount of chaos and uncertainty. Even if, as you just said, as it pertains to what you should be tweeting and talking about. I don’t know, those things that a individual Bishop says in Ireland do cause scandal, perhaps. Someone’s going to be saying, “That’s wrong.” So, I don’t know. It’s one of those things that it’s like, I wish there was an exact rule book with, “Here’s exactly what you should do today, and nothing else,” but there isn’t that. There’s prudence, which we have, have to pray for and develop.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I try to give a lot of leeway to Catholics that at least seem to be trying to figure things out, and they’re trying to determine, is this the right… They’re trying to live their faith, and it’s clear they’re trying to follow tradition, stuff like that. So, like you said, a good example, the ones you mentioned before, like Taylor Marshall and Church Militant. Do I disagree with some of the things they say and do? Yeah. But do I think they’re both trying, essentially, to make some sense out of the chaos in the Church, and try to make things better? Yeah, I do. I actually think they both, in both instances, they are. That applies to a lot of people. When people criticize somebody like Scott Hahn for not speaking out about this stuff publicly, I’m like, wait a second, what his work is doing is bringing lots of people in, helping a lot of people grow in their faith. We’re all on the same team.
But then, I would draw a line to somebody like a Father James Martin. No, I think he’s an enemy. And so, I’m not going to necessarily be like, oh, well, he’s just trying his best. No, I actually think he’s a wolf in shepherd… in a priest’s clothing. So, I do think there’s lines there. And I do think even that line I’m drawing, and maybe I’m wrong about it. Yeah. I don’t know. But it just seems like from what I [crosstalk 00:59:46]-
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. The other thing, too, is not every single Catholic with any kind of platform is all meant to be pointing the finger at the church crisis in the Vatican at all times.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Matt Fradd:
First of all, every Catholic, if they’re on social media has a platform. It’s not like 20, 30 years ago when only a slight few did. Every single Catholic who’s online has a platform. And surely, we’re not saying that every single one of them ought to be continually pointing to what Pope Francis may or may not have just said. You know, people are called to different things, and [inaudible 01:00:17].
Eric Sammons:
Right. I think we’re going to wrap this up, here. I just want to… Maybe if you could would say… Okay, so the happy… What’s the book called? Be happy, or?
Matt Fradd:
How to be Happy.
Eric Sammons:
How to be Happy.
Matt Fradd:
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Secret to a Good Life.
Eric Sammons:
So, definitely I want to recommend that to people. Your book about, Does God Exist? Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, your podcast Pints with Aquinas. I was told… It’s funny. I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll just say, somebody who is close to my family, I’ll put it that way. He was telling me how he listens to my podcast. He goes, “But my favorite is Matt Fradd’s. That’s the best one, because it’s just great.” I think you do have an excellent podcast. I think it’s great, because it allows people to just talk, and have a conversation. I’m tempted to call you the Catholic Joe Rogan, but is that a good thing, or bad thing? I don’t know. Because Joe Rogan, the great thing about him is just simply that he sits down and he lets people talk. He lets him talk about, and he brings [crosstalk 01:01:14]-
Matt Fradd:
No, I fully-
Eric Sammons:
And you do something similar.
Matt Fradd:
… and unapologetically stole his format.
Eric Sammons:
Oh.
Matt Fradd:
I say, a good borrow and a great steal. I fully intended to steal, because I just think… I just love the format.
Eric Sammons:
I just think the fact that he has people there with him in person. What we’re doing here is second best. It’s not as good as being in person, because you can’t have as full and as deep of a conversation online as you can in person. But anyway, so, I recommend people, if you don’t already… You probably already do, but if you don’t already, follow Matt’s podcast, please do that. Is there any final words you want to say to help people? Advice you want to give Catholics who are trying to figure out their way in this kind of chaotic world?
Matt Fradd:
No, not really. You know, one guy, I would just do a shout out for, who I think is doing a really good job of threading the needle, is Ralph Mark. I don’t know what you think about him.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Ralph’s great.
Matt Fradd:
[crosstalk 01:02:12].
Eric Sammons:
Oh, he’s great. I love Ralph.
Matt Fradd:
He’s going to be in the studio tomorrow, actually. So we’ll be live tomorrow. Well, whenever this airs, is obviously [crosstalk 01:02:18].
Eric Sammons:
Yeah.
Matt Fradd:
I just have great love for him. He’s only loves Jesus Christ. Whenever I’m with him, or whenever I read him, I want to be holy, repent of my sin, and read the Bible more. I think if you’re around somebody, or you’re listening to somebody and that’s your reaction, you should keep listening to that individual. So, I would recommend his work, and just beg the prayers of those listening. That sounds kind of trite. You don’t have to pray for me, but if you would maybe just offer a Hail Mary, one Hail Mary, just for me and my family, and the [inaudible 01:02:49], I would appreciate that.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Great. Great stuff. I had Ralph on last year, and he’s great, because he breaks all the stereotypes of… He’s a charismatic, but doesn’t-
Matt Fradd:
Yeah, I love him.
Eric Sammons:
People call him a traditionalist because of his views on salvation, and stuff like that. But he loves Jesus, is what I say, and he loves the Catholic Church. Like you said, when you talk to him, you do feel like, oh, I want to be a better Catholic, and that’s great. So, okay. Thanks a lot, Matt. I really appreciate you being on, and thanks everybody for watching or listening. Until next time, everybody. God love you.
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