https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=khvuajq-1V4
tone tone The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness. Pope Benedict XVI has passed on to his eternal reward, so we will pray for the repose of the soul. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen. Just, you know, Pope Benedict XVI was kind of the first pope that I had the ability to pay attention to. In 2008, I was barely in, no, 2005, 2005 was when he was elected. I was, I think, an elementary school kid then, and you’re not really paying that much attention to the pope at that age. So I wasn’t paying all that much attention to him. But when I started getting into high school, and especially when I got into seminary, that’s when he became a much more prominent figure to me. There was a particular quote from his encyclical Deus Caritas S that had a big impact on me when I was a very young seminarian. And I’m going to pull it up here. Here we go. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon in a decisive direction. St. John’s Gospel describes that event in these words, God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should have eternal life. That was a new idea for me, a new idea for me as a young seminarian. I kind of first encountered that my first year seminarian. You’re still, you know, 18, 19 years old, plenty, plenty to learn at that time in my life. So that made an impact on me, made me think about it because I think kind of my first draft, my default programming was just religion as moralism. And you know, it’s like that’s what I picked up. That’s what I got. But if you’re going to go deeper into these things, you’ve got to transcend that a little bit. You’ve got to be able to have a more real relation and participation with the person than just at being external observation. Benedict XVI, I think, was unfairly maligned as the people who called him the Panzer Cardinal or God’s Rottweiler. I think if he had been in another generation, he was the sort of person who would have really appreciated something like the Bridges of Meaning Discord server or a dialogue with Paul Van de Klay or John Breveke or Jordan Peterson. He genuinely embodied, I think, the best parts of searching for the truth of as St. Anselm would have it, faith seeking understanding. Really really doing that well. 1978 was when he was made Archbishop of Munich. And I don’t think he wanted to be a bishop at all. He really was most at home in the academy, most at home with his students. And taking on the burden of administration and leadership was almost certainly something he would have seen as a sacrifice, something that a great burden to bear. And no doubt it truly is. That’s what it is. But something he didn’t see himself as being especially suited for. That sense, I’m sure, only got that sense of not doing what he wanted to do, but being into what he didn’t want to do, was no doubt amplified when he was made the prefect of the CDF. And then when he was elected pope in 2005 at the age of 78, that was really a tough thing for him, I’m sure. Not something he was probably looking forward to retirement at the age of 78. And maybe finally getting back to some of those books he had always wanted to write relating to his students the way he would when he was in the university. And that was now no longer possible for him. So to act like he was just some rule thumping traditionalist, I think is slanderous and an unfair accusation. And I also think of the crowd that got together in the late 1950s, early 1960s that he was running a part of in that time of the Second Vatican Council. And I think the fate of the Church, of Christianity in Europe in general, I don’t think that what happened with the decline of Church participation, the decline of the faith in Europe to guys like Father Ratzinger and Hans Kuhn, Karl Rahner, Skillebeck’s, Yves Congar and any of those other new theologians, I think they really had a sense that there was something profoundly amiss, that there was something, perhaps even externally it might have looked good, but internally there was something that needed to change. That’s why calling an ecumenical council in 1962 was opportune. I think they saw clearly that the loss of faith in much of the Church was real, wasn’t something that we could just ignore. And it gave, I think Benedict, among them all, that whole crowd that I just referenced, he gave the best prophetic witness to it. It was kind of the end of a form of Christendom and kind of a new page in the Church. He saw that coming and even being able to see that and name that realistically, I think, is an incredible thing. Even if with some of those fellows I mentioned, they would later, as time went on, drift away from Father Ratzinger, have a real difference in opinion, some of them even being censured by the Vatican, but that crew kind of breaking up after the council. They all still saw that clearly. They saw kind of the trajectory of where the faith in Europe and much of the world was going to go. So I think that prophetic witness that they had was good. And finally, this wouldn’t be a live stream with me if you didn’t at some point have a reference to the traditional Latin Mass. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI greatly allowed greater use of the 1962 Roman Missal and some of the associated liturgies of that with his legal document Sumorum Pontificum. The key quote I think comes, it’s not numbered according to paragraphs, you’ll just have to look out with the… Here we have the classic Vatican website here with its beautiful, beautiful simplicity. In the history of the liturgy there was growth and progress but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too. And that cannot be of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the church’s faith and prayer and to give them their proper place. Needless to say, in order to experience full communion, priests of the communities adhered to the former usage cannot as a matter of principle exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new right would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness. So, what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too. I think he saw that clearly and as far as I’m concerned, one of his enduring legacies as Pope, as the leader of the church is that great space he opened up for a certain percentage of the church’s population to encounter that for the first time. And, you know, maybe it’s not something that we’re in a position to mandate for everyone but, you know, if let’s say 10% of the Catholic Church really finds that they experience God in the most direct and peaceful way through the traditional Latin Mass, I don’t see why it should be taken from them. You can see quite a bit of growth in that explosive growth frankly of maybe under a hundred sites in the United States where they would offer the traditional Latin Mass up to probably thousands in every state, I mean thousands across the country present in just about every state in the country. And the people who are dedicated to it are willing to work and sacrifice to it and they seem to have a lot of kids. So, that’s obviously not an extensive or exhaustive treatment of the life of Pope Benedict XVI but those are the things that I appreciated and I thought it would be remiss if to not say anything. Now I’ve got four listeners on YouTube right now and I also have a limited patience to speaking into the void. So we’ve got the StreamYard link, it should be available to somebody but if we don’t get anybody coming in soon I might just call it early but yeah. I had a good Christmas, obviously I signed up to work for Christmas. Oh, there’s Laura, aha, you gave into my blackmail. Yeah, I wanted to join anyway but I was waiting for you, I didn’t want to interrupt what you were saying. It sounded like I had a good cue to come on there. All right, all right. Did you ever get to do an audience with Pope Benedict? I never had that opportunity to even do like a general audience with you know 30,000 of my closest friends. Not with Pope Benedict but yes with John Paul II. So I was in Rome in probably 1998, maybe the spring of 1999 and I went into St. Peter’s Square on, it’s like a Wednesday at 10am right, for the general audience and it was great. There were you know guys talking rosaries and St. Peter’s Square so I bought one and then you know at the end of the audience the Pope blessed with all the religious articles that people have so I held the rosaries and it was a bit of an exciting time. Yeah, so that was JP too though. But I was very, very excited about Pope Benedict. I always loved him so when he became Pope that was like a dream come true. Yeah, I wasn’t in any position to understand the significance of anything because I was like a fifth grader. Yeah, well for people my age, because I was born in 1977, it was just super exciting to have a new Pope because JP had been there for so long. He was the only Pope I ever knew and so he was Pope until you know from, I may have been born under John Paul I actually, I was born in October 77. Do you remember when JP II was elected? I thought it was 78 but I have Google available. Oh yeah, that could be. So maybe I was born under Paul VI. But at any rate JP II was the first Pope I could actually remember right and then he when he died, what year was that? Was it 2005? 2005, Divine Mercy Sunday, which was kind of his big addition to the Roman calendar. Yeah, so I would, oh yeah, so I would have been, that’s pretty amazing isn’t it? So I would have been 27 when JP II died. So for my whole life I had known him as the Pope and I had come into the church with him as the Pope and he was just such a constant presence, right? And also he gave us our idea of what the Pope should be. But he was in some ways quite different from the Pope who had come before him. So it was just interesting to grow up under that pontificate. Yeah, it was like from like Pius IX to like Paul VI. No, no, no, it was a little less than that but the Pope didn’t really get out much for like a hundred years. There was that prisoner of the Vatican stage. Right, yeah. I don’t know, I think maybe Pius XII was able to get out a little bit more. That like things had cooled down in Italy and he could go about. And then Paul VI had that famous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and that was kind of a big deal that the Pope would be able to fly around and go places. But yeah, JP II definitely took that tour. He took a ticket to a whole new level, you know. He was always going somewhere. He was so outgoing. He was so, I don’t know, flexible. He spoke so many languages. He was funny too. I remember seeing like just a series of clips of him interacting with people and he really had like a quick wit and a sense of humor. I think Benedict XVI was happy to stay in his shadow. Yeah, yeah, I think so. To be the little details man. He was more of a scholarly, quiet guy. Yeah, he didn’t have like the rock star qualities, but I love that and that. I went to the Cardinal Ratzinger fan club back when that was an email list, circa like 2003. And I used to have a Cardinal Ratzinger fan club mug. Yep, got to have that here. That Stein, right? Yep, yes, yes. I’ve seen those. I’ve seen some of those older priests. No, it was the pub at the first seminar I went to. They had one of those Cardinal Ratzinger fan club Steins on display there. Yeah, so when I was living in Germany in 2000, somebody lent me his interview book with Peter Seewald, which is called Salt of the Earth. And I read that. That was probably when I first got really into him and kind of got excited about his ideas and just, you know, thinking that he was a good person. And I liked the way that he explained things. I liked his attitude. And then he also did God in the World, right, with the same journalist, I think. Yeah, yeah. So that was good. Yeah. And I’ve also read Jesus of Nazareth. Remember, I remember when that came out. I was like, that was like, I was around the same time the Motu Proprio came out, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was probably a book he’d been wanting to write for a while, and he was probably putting it off until retirement. And then, you know, it’s like, I guess I guess I’m not going to retire the way I thought I was. So I’m going to have to write it while I’m Pope. Yeah, that probably helped sales, too. Yeah, the day he was elected was so exciting because I think there was, there was a certain anxiety, right, amongst Catholics who took their faith seriously. Because in, well, John Paul II was kind of a rock star, but he was also somewhat embattled because there was always this large contingent that didn’t appreciate the fact that he was upholding certain traditions or whatever, right? Right. And there was some anxiety on the part of people who supported him that, you know, the next Pope was going to be more of a progressive, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. So then when they announced, you know, we were included in the TV when they were about to announce who was elected Pope, and everyone was like, and when they announced it was Cardinal Raskin, we were like, oh, we just lost it. We were so happy. Yeah. Yeah, I, I got to think about this actually. I think I was in sixth grade in 2005. So all of that stuff, you know, my experience of Catholicism in like 2005 was I had moved from Norway to Great Falls, Montana, and I had gone from kind of a more traditional liturgy to a more laid back liturgy, and I didn’t like it. I missed the incense. We would use incense every Sunday at the little church in Norway. They had a young parochial vicar there and the pastor just let him do whatever he wanted. So can we use incense every Sunday? Sure. Yeah. As long as you train the servers. And he had us, we were all super well trained. We have a cassock of surplus. It was good. And it just wasn’t quite the same. No, Stavanger, Norway. In your actual Norway, actual Norway. My dad was in the military. My dad was in the military. There was a tiny radar base in Stavanger, Norway, like a NATO radar base. And like my mom, like at first, it was a funny story because like at first we were supposed to go to Minot, North Dakota. My mom really didn’t want to go there. So she was like, you got to figure something out. And so we were all geared up to move to North Dakota, which, you know, ended up happening. And then dad gets a lead about this place in Norway and he puts in for it. So we did two years in Norway. Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah. So anyway, city of 300,000 people in Stavanger, Norway, one Catholic church. Yeah, not a lot of Catholics. Tiny little Catholic church, but then they had a Norwegian mass and an English mass. Oh, OK. Oh, that’s really interesting. Where was the priest from? Was he Norwegian? They were both Norwegians. Yeah, both homegrown. It’s like Father Rolf, the pastor there, he was a sailor and I think on a merchant vessel. And so he was, you know, he’s kind of living the sailor life, you know, not all that terribly pious. But it was like one night he was out on the deck. It was a calm, clear night. And I imagine you can see all the stars when you’re out in the open sea because there’s not a whole lot of light pollution out there. And it just looked up at it and said, there’s got to be more to this than whatever he was doing. And so he started exploring things seriously. He became a Catholic. He became a Catholic priest. And then Father Radar was like, he showed up at that church about the same time that we did. He was a young priest. He had just gotten done. I think he had gone to the English college in Rome because there just weren’t enough Norwegian seminarians to have their own college. And he was always wearing his cassock. He was always dressed super sharp, but he was always on top of things. And I just, you know, he I guarantee you he made an impact on me at levels that I cannot at this time comprehend. Nice. But here I am in my cassock. Yeah. Trying to be all super, but I’ll never be as stoic as he was. We just had that Norwegian temperament, you know. Yeah. I’m going to try and replicate that. Yeah. So anyway. So that’s where you were when the Benedicts were elected or you would just move to Montana? Just moved to Montana. OK. Just moved to Montana. Back at a Catholic school. And so we when the white smoke went up, we turned on ABC or whatever. And hey, there’s a new pope. We didn’t really know what it meant. But still exciting. Yeah, it’s still exciting. Oh, yeah. Get out of class. Get to watch TV. It’s not bad. Yeah. So many people were so elated after that election. I had a friend who told me like she went out to the grocery store the day Benedict was elected, like after after she knew that it was that it was him. She went out to the grocery store and she just she caught herself just standing transfixed by some lemons in the produce section. And like she just like she couldn’t move because she was just she was just processing. But like so happily, she was just like standing in front of the lemon thinking it’s all true. God really exists. It’s like it’s so amazing. Wow. Yeah, that’s something. Yeah. Yeah, that’s exciting. How was your Christmas? Yeah, it was fine. It was pretty typical. I don’t know. I have anything really interesting to say about Christmas. Did you stay at home or did you go? Yeah, we were home. My family. So I hosted Christmas for the extended family. It was nice. Gosh, that sounds fundamentally interesting. Really? Yeah, well, I mean, you get I don’t know. Like my immediate family is interesting enough to have all in the same room. Like you start adding extended family in there. You’ve got all these human beings. Yeah. And then it’s it’s always a complicated thing with the extended family because we’re related to them. But it’s 21st century America. So a lot of them live far away. I don’t have much contact with them. And like people are always going to change and you either change together or you change apart. And so it’s like, hey, I remember swimming at Uncle Tim’s pool when I was a kid. But now we’re like strangers. Yeah. Well, so so my family has been pretty good at staying chill. Like people don’t judge each other all that much over their opinions. And we stay in touch enough. It’s pretty fine. So well, so good. We have. I had my mom and my brother, but not his wife, because she went to see some other relatives. So I have my mom and my brother and my sister and her husband and my mother-in-law and my husband and kids. So even though it’s like extended, it’s it was like the inner extended family, not the inner extended family. Not a very broad family. And I think even with my broad extended family, I’m OK. We get along. We go. That’s nice. That’s nice. Yeah. I had to work on Christmas. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But now that I’m in West Fargo, I can get home in 10 minutes. Yeah. So when you like what do you did you go to your parents house after you said, yeah. Yep. So I had the 6 p.m. mass, which was decently attended, unlike the 4 p.m. mass, which was like, you know, you’re cramming them in with a shoehorn. Oh, yeah. Standing room only in the gymnasium where you’re getting a video feed and communion. Yeah. But everybody wants to everybody wants to go at four. I have no idea where those people park their cars. No conception of how that worked. Because there’s lots of snow and like we have less parking than normal because we’ve got all of our all of our snow piles. Hello, Andrew, friend of the show. Always welcome. Andrew can come on. Andrew can always come on. He knows how to do it. Yeah. And then. Yeah. But the 6 p.m. was just nice. It was like you didn’t have a whole ton of young kids there, which is delightful, but also chaotic. Yeah. So it was mostly like people who didn’t want to deal with the 4 p.m. crowds would still wanted to go on Christmas Eve. So it was like it had like people with older children who weren’t going to bounce off the walls. And I just went in there and said mass and then I went home and hung out with my family. All my brothers came up from the Twin Cities. So, oh, yeah. How many siblings do you have? I have three older brothers and one younger sister. My sister lives in town and all my brothers live in the Twin Cities. So it’s. Yeah, it’s a fun place. Hello. Merry Christmas, Andrew. Merry Christmas. It’s still Christmas. Yes. I don’t care what the radio stations say. It’s still Christmas. I always say to people, I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas. And then they go, I hope you had a great Christmas, too. And I go, man. The long uphill battle. Yeah. I’ve. Yeah. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. I’ve had a great Christmas. And it’s nice that they’re supplying us with purple candles because those are necessary and good. But, you know, it’s like they’re supposed to have this preparatory period where you’re kind of doing some penance, getting yourself good and hungry so that when that Christmas hits you’re just on cloud nine. But it’s like you really have to, I don’t even know if you could do what I’m envisioning properly by yourself. It’s like you’d need at least a small family cluster to like kind of hunker in and have enough momentum to go against that. Yeah. Yeah. If you’re doing it by yourself, it kind of, I guess, stinks. I don’t know. And Lent is better. Like we do Lent well. It’s never perfect. It doesn’t have to be. But people get the prayer fasting and almsgiving thing. It’s like, what are you giving up for Lent? Even people who aren’t all that terribly well catechized figure that out. So I just, I don’t know. Yeah. I wonder why Lent is like the time of penance and then Advent is kind of like, you know, meh. I blame it on Walmart. I’m blaming Walmart. And by Walmart, I mean American commerce and greed and materialism. I’m just naming that Walmart. If you’ve got people in a drunken and gluttonous stupor, I think they spend more money. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. And I gave up Twitter and Discord for Advent, but I didn’t make it the whole way. I showed up on both of them a few days before Christmas. So sorry. But it is harder than Lent because other people aren’t doing it with you. Like with Lent, I take super seriously. I would really never give up my Lent and penance like a week or a few days before Lent is over. I’d really write it out. And then I was kind of like, ah, whatever. Because you got the whole whole week experience. Yeah. It’s like that whole Easter’s coming, Easter’s coming, Easter’s coming. But we don’t have that whole Christmas is coming after the age of about seven when receiving presents is just less magical. Yeah. I was in third grade the first time I was disillusioned with opening Christmas presents. Like I’ve got more stuff. But to what end? I’ve already got my peak gift. And that was a Game Boy Color for my birthday in second grade. It’s like everything else is downhill after that. Oh, dear. Yes. What does your brother do? He got me a really nice sweater for Christmas. Oh, there you go. And I’m just super thrilled by it because I wear unless I’m wearing a cassock during six months out of the year, I’m wearing sweaters. So I have a nice one. Another nice one to add to the collection. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I do love cassocks, though. They’re swish. Oh, yeah, for sure. Lay people can’t wear cassocks, right? Unless they’re serving at altar. Oh, yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. I think I don’t know if do you call it a cassock if it’s in the choir? So we wear robes. I don’t know if you call that a cassock. They black robes. The choir director wears black. We were red. I’d need to see a picture of it. They’re probably just robes to let people know that you’re in the choir. We do have the white thing over it, too, like the altar service have. I don’t remember what that’s called either. The surplus. Yes, the surplus. We have surplus. So you’re wearing like a red robe with a surplus. Pretty much. Yeah, that’s I don’t. It buttons up like a cassock. I don’t really know how to refer to that, but I’ve seen it in a lot of places. It’s like, hey, you’ve got a liturgical world, but you’re not a priest. So we’re going to put you into the red. We’ve also had blue. Also have blue. Yeah. Well, I don’t have a red or a blue cassock, so. All right. That would be fabulous if I did. You don’t get it in like blue, red, purple and fancy flower patterns and all that. No. It’s black. Or white with black piping if you live in a really hot part of the world. Oh, interesting. So you’ll see like a lot of African priests if they’re going to wear a cassock. It’s white like the Pope, but all of the buttons and all of the lining have little black things. So people don’t think that you’re pretending to be the Pope. Fair. You know, it’s like sub-Saharan Africa. It’s 95 degrees consistently. So you don’t want to wear black wool there. Yeah. It’s a little different in North Carolina, I guess. North Carolina, North Dakota. Yeah, we can handle. Although I do have two, a summer cassock and a winter cassock. Oh, OK. But they’re both black. Anyway. OK. Are they different material? Yeah, the summer cassock is like a cotton poly blend and the winter cassocks, I think, 100 percent wool with a lot of lining on it on the inside. It’s also, I don’t know, I don’t know. Like I would wear my winter cassock during the summer if I had to go to a real fancy event and look good. Because it’s just it’s got nice shoulders and nice stitching. My mom always compliments me every time I wear my winter cassock anywhere. That’s good. Like always, you know. Always. So, hey, Andrew, how old were you when Benedict was elected? Well, when was he elected? 2005. Seven, I think. Oh, OK. Most I remember about him was we had a picture of him on the fridge. Oh, well, that’s nice. And then he retired. And we started saying, and with your spirit and that sort of thing. He retired after that. But yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I said it out of order, but that was pretty much all I knew about him. So one thing I noticed during his pontificate was that church music improved overall, kind of everywhere. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I started hearing things in American Catholic churches that you would never have heard just a few years ago. Yeah, I started hearing things in American Catholic churches that you would never have heard just a few years previously that were really kind of, you know, traditional and kind of classical and good. Yeah. And that was exciting. It was like, because I think going back to what I was saying about the anxiety people had at the death of John Paul II, there was this feeling that maybe John Paul II was going to be the last. The last pope you could describe as conservative or something. And then once he left, we were just going to open the fun games and everything was going to change. And then the fact that Benedict was elected, I think just kind of made a lot of people. It just removed that dynamic or that idea from a lot of people’s minds, even if it had only been there suddenly. I think people were like, maybe they weren’t really thinking about that explicitly, but it just kind of gave people this feeling more that like, oh no, stuff’s actually just going to kind of going to keep going. We’re going to really keep paying attention to the tradition. We’re not actually going to throw everything out. And Pope Benedict brought some things back. That’s good. He gave permission for the traditional Latin mass, but he also brought back some interesting people, garb and some other traditions. He had excellent taste in music. So somehow, like his example, he encouraged a lot of people, even just at regular suburban American parishes, to start playing better music from the whole Treasury of Catholic music, which was lovely. Yeah, sounds wonderful. You did a really good job getting the right people in the right places to improve the music at St. Peter’s Basilica. And so now when you go there, it’s just like top quality chant and polyphony, as the Second Vatican Council asked us to do. Just throw that in there. I look forward to going there then. Yeah, yeah. Is it still like that? Is the music still good in the Vatican? When I was there three years ago, I thought the music was fabulous. Okay, great. You just did a really good job. I mean, you know, it’s like, it’s just good. It was just good. And I don’t think it was like bad under John Paul II, but he just he just added a nice touch. A nice touch. He just improved it. Yeah. Really, really got things nice. Which is funny because I mean, it’s really funny. I don’t know. I think the most amazing thing about St. Peter’s Basilica is that there’s no type organ built into it. There’s no organ at all. There is one, but it’s like a console they have kind of set up. Oh, gosh. Kind of behind the altar, they’ve got a console set up. But, you know, in a lot of these a lot of the Gothic cathedrals, it was like, like they built the pipe organ into the architecture. Yeah. You know, it’s like we were envisioning having this and it’s just downplayed. I guess they’re just not that important in Romanesque buildings. I don’t know. We need an expert in art history or something to clear this up for us. Some guy who had some kind of training in architecture or something could probably answer that. Oh, if only we had one of those. Oh, hello. Yeah, I’m in my first semester actually. Okay. We won’t we won’t ask. We won’t lay too hard on you. Okay. But I will be taking a Renaissance and Gothic architecture probably next year. Nice. Nice. And that at some point it has to include a trip to Europe to see the great cathedrals and the little chapels. Oh, yeah, for sure. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff here in the United States. In my neighborhood, the Cathedral of St. Paul is pretty sick. The Basilica in St. Louis, I think, is underrated. But have you ever you ever been there, Laura, to the big Basilica in St. Louis? No, but I was going to say St. Joseph at the Basilica in Milwaukee is amazing. Have you ever been to Milwaukee? I have not. I’ve driven through Milwaukee on my way to other places. Yeah, right. There are churches in the United States that people would fly to go see in Europe if they were over in Europe. But people don’t think to visit them if they’re in America. But yeah, we have some really excellent ones. Yeah. But there’s no replacing the great Basilicas in Rome or, you know, the Gothic cathedrals in France. And just Rome is a ton of fun because there’s just a little church around every corner. And it’s like, wow, what a gem. This would be the nicest church in my diocese if we had one of these. Yeah. I was just talking with someone today about the trip I might take to Rome. And he was telling me, oh, you got to go see the Basilica of St. Peter. You have to go. He’s like, when I went in there and I saw the scale of it, I started getting emotional. And he said, I’m getting emotional right now. And I could see him like tearing up. I’m like, wow, that’s really something. The building is partly all the people who are there from all over the world, you know. Yeah. Well, it’s just to me, it’s crazy that like he’s just thinking about it and he’s still having that reaction. Yeah. If I can give you a little St. Peter’s Basilica tip, it’s real easy to get there at about 7 a.m. That’s what I was told. Yeah. The lines are short to get in. And everybody who’s there at 7 a.m. is there because they want to pray and to be in a sacred space. Whereas as the day draws on, you get more touristy people. And, you know, they’re certainly welcome to encounter the beauty and all of that. But yeah, different attitude while they’re in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t follow that advice when I went into the room. Everything I saw in the Vatican was super crowded when I saw it. OK. Now, the nice thing is, is that St. Peter’s Basilica can swallow a crowd, you know. So it’s like it could be quite busy in there and it’s still, you know, you could still have some just time to be there and watch things. Rather than like a more cramped tour, like if you’re doing the scabby tour, the excavations underneath St. Peter’s, it’s like you got to get. I think we might. Yeah. Oh, you should. It’s absolutely. Yeah, it’s also cool. It’s also cool. I can’t wait. Yeah, I’ve never been to Rome. That was like this spring that you’re going there, right? Yes, this spring. OK. You’re going to have to take lots of pictures. I’ll try. Hopefully you’ve got good Wi-Fi at whatever hostel or hotel or. Oh, yeah. For sure. I can send them to the Discord or something. Oh, yeah, I can’t wait. Sounds like it’ll be I mean, especially as an architect and Catholic together and a musician, I guess, to really be something to go see. And actually, I think we’re going to get to me and there’s this lady who’s going who’s a she’s working on her doctorate in music. And she’s one of the choir directors in the diocese and she’s going and we’re going to be singing at one of the Latin masses. Nice. Yeah, you you you you give me the full report on that. Yeah, I’ll bring maybe I’ll bring my microphone and, you know, record it. Absolutely. I mean, all those stone churches, you just got brilliant residents for chanting. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s just yeah, it’s just made it’s made for Gregorian Chant of Palestrina. Oh, yeah. Peanut butter and jelly, baby. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I can give you the the recording and you can replace your strange Halloween music. Yeah. Well, this this this time I did the two minute countdown. That’s a little a little more upbeat, a little more for the floor. But yeah, I could I could definitely stand to get some new countdown music. So is anybody listening right now? We have seven people. Oh, hey, I said, oh, wow. That’s pretty great. Yeah. And then sometimes these get views later on. Yeah. Oh, anyway, what you say? Yeah. Just give it a click baiting title. Well, Andrew says, what about St. Peter’s Basilica? Right. Or say that we destroyed Benedict the fact that the real truth about Benedict the 16th. Yeah. The real truth was, oh, hey, you know, you got people playing better music sometimes. And they were nice guys. Yeah, I really like them. That’s the real truth. That’s the real truth. I just liked him so much. So just today, when I was thinking about coming on here, I looked up his the homily that he gave at his installation. Do you remember that? No. Yeah, it was quite meaningful. I was I was I was on a college campus at the time, so it was very meaningful to a lot of us. It had this bit late at the end. He had advice to young people. And he says, are we not perhaps all afraid in some way if we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that he might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again, the Pope, he’s referring to John Paul II said, no, if we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No, only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so today, with great strength and great conviction on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people, do not be afraid of Christ. He takes nothing away and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open wide the doors to Christ and you will find true life. Amen. Amen. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Amen. Yeah, I should read that one more often. Yeah, there’s so much to read. Yeah. I’ll never get to the bottom of it. Yeah, I guess that’s a good thing. That would be quite the existential crisis if we were able to to expend everything that God and the universe had to offer to us. Yeah, yeah. Although I hear, I know one priest who said that the angels know everything about the natural world. Probably some of them. I guess angels can handle it. Sure, yeah. We’re going to get into some deep water here pretty quickly. Disembodied intelligences. Yeah, let’s not take away from that homily there. Yeah. Let’s not go from the, yeah. Yeah, that was definitely something I should read more because it can feel a lot of the time like something will disappear. He gave a lot of beautiful homilies. I remember every time I bothered to read a homily of Pope Benedict, I would usually end up with like little teary-eyed at the end because it was just touching. Wonderful. Now the link is in the chat so everybody can go put it on their list. Oh good. Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Now the link is in the chat so everybody can go put it on their list. Oh good. Just save that link, yeah. On the old reliable Vatican.va. Yes. Yeah. Beautiful in its simplicity. Good stuff. That was one of the first websites I ever used regularly because I wasn’t really a heavy internet user in the early years. There weren’t any girls on the internet until about 2010. Yeah. When I became Catholic, I got excited about the Vatican website and I used to love keying it up and looking at the parchment background and everything. Just, I just like pick up hope and just start looking for encyclicals and look through all the encyclicals because that’s, yeah. And I’m glad that they’ve got the whites on top of the parchment background because it used to just be the text on top of the parchment. Yeah. That was kind of hard to read. I think I saw that actually. I think I was there for that. If you go to, it’s still around if you find the right pope, you know, like they have the data just formatting on the website. That’s why. You know, you’ve got Italians running this thing and you’ll still find that on a few places. So that’s why I’ve seen that. I think I remember you talking about then something, something tradition. We don’t need to update this stuff. Yeah. Well, the Catholic Church updates its technology every 50 years or so, whether it needs it or not. Yeah. Well, so that’s another thing about the Pontifical of Benedict XVI was I, and I’m sure I’m sure a lot of other people got frustrated with the Vatican’s seeming inability to do that. I’m sure a lot of other people got frustrated with the Vatican seeming inability to understand like that there was the Internet and what that was going to mean for them in terms of how they related to the media. So there were a lot of there were there were a lot of sort of unnecessary media gaps, I think, during that pontificate that were basically caused by the Vatican. That were basically caused by people not just not being up up on the technology or up on. Yeah. Uh huh. Whatever how people used to be Internet. What they were thinking. Yeah. I, for one, am glad that the Vatican is not an early adopter on technology. Did you imagine a Vatican cryptocurrency? Like we’re going to wait until that space is good and sorted out with a full regulatory form before we’re going to have anything to do with it. Praise God. Oh yeah. No Pope coin yet. No Pope coin yet. No Pope coin. I could make one though. You could, yes. If I had the right programming smarts, I could just I could just make the Pope coin. Nobody could stop me. You know, you can invent your own cryptocurrencies. I could give you 100 Pope coins, Andrew. I’d be rich. Rich. Would you like name every crypto coin with Roman numerals? Pope coin, the first, Pope coin, the second. Oh, gosh. I should. I shouldn’t even contemplate these things. And then when you break it down into pieces, it turns into cardinals and bishops and priests. Yeah. Of course. Like cents and pennies. Yeah. 100 priests to a bishop, 100 bishops to a cardinal, 70 cardinals to a pope to be traditional. There’s no way this could go wrong. So do any of our other viewers want to jump on? Anyone have someone you want to reminisce about? I don’t know who’s watching. They’re always they’re always welcome. We do have, you know, some people who aren’t comfortable being broadcast over potentially billions of people. Yeah, I know. Frankly, I should be more nervous about this. Right. But the worst case scenario is that my bishop asks me to stop doing it and I say, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, basically, I just get on here and say Catholic stuff. So the worst thing I think that would happen to me is people would watch this and be like, whoa, that lady’s Catholic. Yeah. Maybe you could get like a crazy Internet stalker. I guess. But what would they stalk? Well, they just, you know, like, put together the shadows coming in from your window or coming up with their approximate vocation. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Be careful. I’m not that I’m not that hard to find. It’s like you could find my parish assignment on the diet, but you know, I’m going to have to do a lot of that. Yeah. And then I’m going to have to do a ton of that, too. That’s a good point. Yeah. That’s a good point. You’re going to have to do that. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m going to have to do that. hard to find. It’s like you could find my parish assignment on the Diocese of Fargo website. So what are you gonna do? Yeah. Just gonna cower in a corner? No. Yeah. Well, I guess we’ll see if anyone joins then. And if not, this thing doesn’t have to go two hours. And if we’ve given our fond farewell to Pope Benedict, then we can end it. Oh yeah, let me think. Is there anything else? I don’t know. I’m trying to think. It’s funny, we usually talk about like the exciting things that happened for the past couple of weeks in our lives. And like Christmas just happens and New Years. It sounds like I should have a lot to talk about. Well, how many masses did you sing at over the past week? Oh, good question. One, two, three, four, five, six, maybe six or seven. Maybe. If you count today, that’s like an extra three. It might be like eight. I don’t know. I mean, we got a bunch going on this week, actually, because Pope Benedict passed away. Last week, we didn’t really have any during the week. We had the midnight mass, we had Christmas mass, several Christmas masses. But this week we have like the masses of today. One, we were planning for Epiphany, and then two for Pope Benedict’s. That’s all I can think of so far. So yeah, it’s going to be actually kind of a crazy week musically. Yeah, what’s your funeral mass for Pope Benedict? When are you doing that? I believe that is Thursday is one of them and then Saturday is another. I think they’re both at like 7 p.m. No, wait. There’s one on Saturday. There’s one on Saturday at 12 p.m. That’s interesting. Oh, okay. That’s when we usually have the first Saturday mass. Yeah. We should do something here. Oh, do you? I mean, so we prayed for him at mass today and read the bishop’s letter. Oh, nothing too extravagant. I wonder if they’re going to do anything at the cathedral. That would be the place I think it is. But Bishop had the last week off after Christmas. He went back to Omaha for his family. So, okay. It hasn’t been on the ground much to plan things. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Well, a lot of these people kind of just scrambled together to do a Requiem Mass because I guess they really do like Pope Benedict. So my choir director friend, I think he put these two together. So, Oh, yeah, I would imagine Latin Mass people love Pope Benedict. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hopefully he’s praying for us up there. A lot of people praying for him down here. I. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do we need his prayers or does he need to pray for us? His prayers or does he need ours? Hmm. That’s a good question. Can’t people just pray for us? Well, you know, they’re in purgatory and then it’s less confusing. I imagine he probably got the apostolic pardon before he went. Oh, yeah. Plenary indulgence available at the time of death and should work. It should work. I go out and I give it to people at the hospital, assuming it works, you know, by the. Yeah. Oh, darn. The book’s not handy. By the authority which the apostolic see has given me, I grant you a full pardon and the remission of all your sins in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. Wow. And the books do not make it clear where that text is, so I just printed it off on a piece of paper and taped it on the front inside cover of my of my pastoral care of the sick book. So I case I get flustered. Oh, yeah. Exactly where it is. You don’t have to search through the book then. And it’s just your prerogative to give people that or do they have to do anything in particular? It’s my prerogative. It’s isn’t that like confession? No, it’s not confession. That sounds like the kind of thing you say. It’s very close to that, but it’s a full pardon and the remission of all your sins versus being absolved. So, yeah, I wonder what the Latin text is for. So, yeah, I wonder what the Latin text is for. Now you got a good question. Well, I mean, I guess the word remission is in there somewhere. And we translated that into English as full pardon. Full pardon. That sounds pretty intense. Have you ever done a video about indulgences? I have not. Because people talk about them on VOM sometimes and maybe some people would like to know more detail about them. What they what they are in the first place and then sort of what the history of them is. Because sometimes when people make comments about them on VOM, it sounds like they’re talking about paying taxes. Yeah. And honestly, there was some language in the Middle Ages that made it really sound like that. And the practice of assigning days of penance that this indulgence counts for. It just made it like like it’s just it wasn’t a helpful paradigm. You know, it made it all kind of a mercantile, you know. So here’s here’s a way of thinking about it is we got to think about purgatory clearly first. Right. And in order to think about purgatory, OK, what does it do? And you hear people talk about it in two ways. One injustice. You’ve committed these sins and you need to to pay back the debt. That’s the way that people talk about it. And another one is you have imperfections in your soul and nothing imperfect can enter into the kingdom of heaven. And so that needs to be stripped away before you can before you can enter heaven. And I think those two ideas are actually the exact same thing coming out from different angles, but that the second one is more opportune to talk about. And so why would God why would God ever punish his children? Well, for the same reason that a good father would punish his children in order to correct their behavior and draw them towards goodness. Right. The only reason, the only acceptable reason for that. It’s exactly the same with with our our father is he wants to correct us. He wants to bring us to the fullness of perfection there. Now, the thing is that God is absolutely in charge of the university. He creates everything by his will. And so, Andrew, yeah, I could send Saint Michael to you right now. Oh, good. Say, do you want to be cleansed of all of your vices? If I could just say yes, and God would create perfect dispositions inside of you by his immediate power. Right. I could do that, right? That’s the reason God couldn’t do that in purgatory as well as on Earth. So basically, the indulgences are a fact that Christ has given the keys of the church, given the keys to the kingdom to the church, and that we can God has basically promised us that he will do this. And he’s given the authority to that over to human beings, which is wild. It would be such authority and he like humbles himself in relationship to us by his promise. So I think that’s a more helpful way to think about it rather than looking at things like the treasury of merits and putting that into like fiducial fiducial terms. Yeah. Whereas if you and I think that was I bet you some brainiac scholar would be able to link that the theological currents in the 14th and 15th centuries, the rise of nominalism, the rise of volunteerism, where God starts becoming more arbitrary and less logical, not logical, logos, logos centric. And I bet you that’s where a lot of that language and practice came from. But it was also building up what was going for. And if you get back to the pristine theology of the 13th century, by that I mean St. Thomas Aquinas, you wouldn’t find those distortions in there. So time stamps about an hour and three minutes into this video. Okay. You can do a quick, quick link there. Oh, awesome. That’s a pretty rememberable one. Yeah. Anyway, that’s what I got on indulgence is off the cuff. So would you say like, obviously, God could just ask someone if they want to be perfect and then make them so. Correct. But then would you say perhaps the reason he often doesn’t is might have to do with giving us the opportunity to suffer through things kind of like how he gives us sacraments through physical ways. He doesn’t just give us those graces, like infuse them into us, he kind of gives them through like physical means like bread. So maybe having these indulgences and stuff through penances that we do and the suffering that we go through that we offer up. I figure it’s like a way that we get to participate that we otherwise wouldn’t have. So I guess it’s kind of like a good thing, I guess he does for us. Yeah, yeah. It’s, you put your finger right on it. The Father of the Church say that God allows our vices to remain so that we can imitate Christ in picking up our cross, following after him and struggling against the vices that remain inside of us. So it’s like, it’s like, that’s what we’re supposed to be leaning against. And another thing on indulgence too, for Thomas Aquinas, the measure of your holiness is nothing other than the intensity and perfection of your love of God and love of neighbor together, right? The intensity of the virtue of charity. Right. And so if you were able to say one Hail Mary, like perfect, intense fervor and charity, that would like sanctify you instantly. Wow. Right? We’re dumb, and we’re not able to do that. But like, like one perfect act of charity would just like shoot you straight up the celestial hierarchy or whatever. Nice. Or one extremely pious reception of the Holy Communion, but just like sanctifying you instantly. Like all of that power is there, which is, our hearts are tiny, and we’re incapable of really opening ourselves up to it. That’s another point on indulgence is, is that all of that power for is that all of that power for complete and perfect sanctification is always and already there. We just don’t take advantage of it the way we should. Yeah. So maybe I can give a concrete example, because I have this little thing that I photocopied a while back, which is from 1961. And this was just the front page of an old Catholic Bible that I found hanging around a school. And I noticed I had some information about indulgences in it. So I copied it just to have an example. So on this front page of the Bible, it says indulgences. The faithful who spend at least a quarter of an hour in reading Holy scripture with the reverence due to the word of God, and after the manner of spiritual reading, may gain an indulgence of three years. Wow. That’s so anything that’s got a time. Okay. So we don’t assign any timeline. So in the modern legislation on indulgences, there’s only two types. There’s partial and there’s plenary. So this one would be a partial in modern parlance. Right. And what those timeframes meant is that this is the equivalent of three years of penance. Yeah. And remember, it’s an indulgence, right? It’s not a justice. It’s an indulgence. It’s generosity. It’s mercy all the way down. But yeah, and that just, it’s just like you’re making a kind of mercurial there, you know? So is it saying that like the condition of your soul will be the same as if you had done three years of a given penance? I think so. And that’s why we don’t do it anymore, you know? I think so. And that’s why we don’t do it anymore, you know? Because there’s that little tag on the end of a plenary indulgence, right? Oh yeah. I’ve heard about this. In order to get the plenary indulgence, you need to be free from attachment to sin. Yeah, good luck. Yeah. But you can be. You can be. It’s possible. But easy? No, it’s not easy. And so if you’re not free of attachment to sin, your plenary will get shifted over into a partial. And I guarantee you that partial is going to be concomitant with how attached you are to your favorite sin. How do you know if you’re, oh, sorry. Yeah, there’s an interesting thing in St. Thomas Aquinas’s theology of charity is that the merit that you get, right? So the degree to which you love God and love your neighbor for the sake of God, that determines your overall holiness, right? Like, that’s where we look to see the measure of holiness. That, and your holiness in turn, your capacity to receive God puts you in your place in the kingdom of heaven. Um, all right, so we got that idea. What were we talking about before that? Indulgences? Oh gosh, there was a connection there. Oh, yeah, that’s a good question, actually. Yeah. Oh, years. So, so yeah, no, no, it’s, I remember it now. Thomas Aquinas says that it isn’t necessarily the intensity of like the love of God you have at the soul’s death, but like the greatest intensity that you ever had. So like, I think it’s just that you can’t represent that mathematically, but it’s like, you know, whatever your best moment was, is that that’s where you were at. And God takes that best moment rather than, you know, like your lowest moment. The measure of your holiness and your, and your merit, therefore, your combined merit in Christ, all of this in Christ, all of its being grace. It’s all grace. Yeah. In Christ. In case I triggered any Protestants here, we’re talking about our own merit. I know I still get a little bit triggered by the word merit too. I don’t use it a whole lot, but sometimes it’s the word for it. I get triggered a bit too. I mean, it’s just a tough thing. You got to go to session six of the council of Trent, man. You just got to get that. You got to get that down into your bones, you know, like two of my most useful things I learned in the seminary were going over justification and the council of Trent going to really harden to that. Thank you, Dr. Washburn. And then the second part of the second part of the summa and really hitting the theological virtues hard. Thank you, Dr. Frohle. Okay. Is that something that a lay person actually would be able to work through? You’d probably want to have a friend. Okay. I do have a friend that could probably do that. Yeah. Yeah. Is it me? Well, yeah, actually. I think if you want to. You want to find the Big Mac’s book club? Yeah. Book club, yeah. Would the word indulgence also apply to being released from a certain discipline in exchange for doing some other thing? I think we would use commutation for that. Oh, okay. But commutation? Yeah. So like, let’s say Laura is doing a business trip in Saudi Arabia, and she prudently foresees that she will not have access to a Catholic mass on a Sunday. Okay. It commutes her Sunday obligation into a pious reading of the scripture and the recitation of the Rosary. Okay. And then she wouldn’t need to go to confession because she came to her proper pastor and asked for the commutation. We’ve got that all written down somewhere. So like that’s what the Tower of Butter in Rouen would be like. Have you ever heard of that? That sounds pretty awesome. So Rouen in France, Rouen Cathedral, has a tower that is called the Tower of Butter. Is it made out of butter? No, that’s not why. Darn. It’s called the Tower of Butter because people had an opportunity, in order to finance this tower, people were offered the opportunity to be allowed to eat butter during Lent if they contributed money to the tower. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And a lot of people did because eating butter during Lent. Awesome. Awesome. In case you think that we do any fasting whatsoever, it’s like, oh my gosh. Yeah, this was back in the Middle Ages when the Lenten fast was really serious. No butter for all of Lent. I think even not even any eggs was more like the Orthodox fast. Yeah, no, I guarantee you it was much more like what the Orthodox do to this day. And even if you you don’t have to go that far back in the United States, and it’s like during Lent, you would have like multiple abstinence days during a week and like one fasting day a week during Lent. So there’d be like three days a week, you know, no dairy, eggs or meat. And then one day a week you were fasting, something like that. I saw this, saw it on Father Z’s blog because I got to stay on brand there. Anyway, like not that it was like 1890, you know, the bishop published the rules for fasting in his diocese in New Jersey. I was like, dang, I’d actually get kind of holy if I did that. Maybe I should. Yeah, maybe we should all, we can all make a pact in hashtag Catholicism. Maybe we can, Easter falls on the same date this year as the Orthodox do. We could just borrow their calendars. They’ve got these nice color coded calendars, you know, it’s like this is a fasting day. This is just an abstinence day. This is a free day. It’s usually Sunday. That’s kind of cool. Yeah. Well, I gotta go. Thanks for having me on. All right. Thanks for being here. Always welcome. All right. Have a good rest of your Christmas season, gentlemen, and have a happy week. You too. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. All right. All right. So what was the fastest way to get to the end of the year? All right. All right. So what was the fast again for Lent? I don’t have the details memorized. It’s rather more intense than our current measly discipline. But our current measly discipline of Exodus 90. It’s more intense than that. I don’t think it would be quite as intense as Exodus 90. Oh, OK. I mean, the cold showers, man. That’s the one reason I wouldn’t do it. Other than that, I probably already do most of Exodus 90. Oh, you’re anytime you go on Bridges of Meaning, you’re not doing Exodus 90. That’s true. No social media or any of that. Yeah. But like, what are they? They also do like what? One meal a day, right? So you fast according to the modern discipline Wednesdays and Fridays. Yeah. So one full meal and then two snacks, collations, if you want to be fancy about it, that don’t add up to a full meal. OK. Well, I was going to say. Unless it’s a solemnity. Oh, all right. Let’s see if any of the Exodus 90 boys are getting a solemnity. OK, looking at my calendar up here. Oh, tough luck. The 25th, the Annunciation of the Lord is on a Saturday and the 19th. Oh, feast of St. Joseph is transferred to the 20th of March, normally on the 19th, but it falls on a Sunday. Uh huh. We get no meat Fridays this Lent. We get no meat Fridays this Lent. Oh darn. Very sad. Yeah. I do eat meat, so maybe I don’t do that. But I was going to say I probably do the like one meal a day thing during the semester because as an architecture student, I have zero time to eat. Oh, OK. All right. I actually heard just before the year ended that one of the professors said that architecture is the most time consuming undergraduate program. So, yeah. Well, good on you for sticking with it. And I hope you design buildings that are beautiful and stay up. And stay up? I would hope so. Those are the two most important criteria for an architect is that you have a beautiful building and that it is structurally sound and does not collapse. Yes, that is true. Anything else is a critical failure. You roll the one. Oh gee, I would really hope anything I design would stay up. I mean, if it’s like a tornado or a hurricane or something, nobody’s going to get too upset about that. But would it just fall? That would be pretty embarrassing. Yeah. Pretty embarrassing right there. Yeah. So hopefully not. Yeah. But I still have a lot to do researching like what actually makes these churches beautiful. I mean, obviously you can just look at it, but actually figuring out how to recreate it is kind of a challenge. It is. It is. That’s the challenge. You ever heard Aquinas’s theory of beauty? Maybe. Yeah, it’s you’ve got unity, right? Which is one of the fundamental transcendentals. Oh, yes. Yeah, I remember that. And then you’ve got truth, right? So whatever physical form is supposed to represent needs to be consonant with God’s truth, basically, and the truth of what it’s supposed to be. So it needs to actually look like something. So abstract art would fail on that count. But they’re all kind of intertwined. And there’s proportion, so that all the different parts relate to the whole property. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, in terms of abstract art, I’m pretty sure a lot of like abstract artists and designers say they don’t really care about beauty. So I guess it makes sense. Mission accomplished. Yeah. I’ll go ahead and give you a sticker, you know. Yeah. Which is nicer than anything you’ve ever. Oh, goodness. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard about them anyway. Some of the buildings I’ve been shown in architecture that are like weird twisted stuff. The professor’s always like, yeah, these people wanted to build something that like everyone would hate. Mission accomplished. It’s like, yeah, exactly. They did a good job of that. So, yeah. But it’s tough. Yeah. And it’s like, you know, the less unified a piece is, the less the less truth there can be in it. Right. Because you’re not just looking at one thing now, you’re looking at multiple things. Yeah. So if you’ve just got like, if you’ve just got like a Jackson Pollock, you know, paint splatters on the wall, you know, you’re looking at a lot of things. You know, paint splatters on the wall. It’s like there’s no unity whatsoever. Like, literally, the only thing unifying that painting together is the canvas. Yeah. And so, so there couldn’t be, there couldn’t be, it’s like it can’t be an appropriate body to carry any any kind of intelligible form for the intellect to contemplate. But yeah, I guess it just becomes noise pretty much. It’s like there’s ways to do a collage maybe that is just noisy and messy and in another way that makes it like beautiful and and unified. Mm hmm. Yeah. And what were the other ones? I thought, I remember Bishop Barron saying there was one word that meant like wholeness or something like that. Oh, yes. I forgot about Claritas. Ah, Claritas. Yeah, brilliance. It shines forth. Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. So it’s not boring or dull. Yeah, but it’s got that. But, but that’s also, you know, like what is what is excellence? Excellence is a manifestation of being or of perfection or of goodness. So it’s all like his whole this whole theory of beauty is just rooted in trance. Yeah, yeah. Which is great. And that’s why we can have beautiful churches is because of the transcendentals. Absolutely. Why are you laughing? Some people don’t like transcendentals. Well, the transcendental properties of being are not terribly easy to understand. Oh, right, right. But they’re extremely easy to experience. Yes. There’s all of the everything, you know, and you don’t need words to explain it or abstract philosophy. It’s like you get it. Yeah. Fantastic. All righty. Well, I think we’ve about solved it. Yep. Fantastic. I’m feeling about ready to pull the plug to call it a night. Sounds good to me. It’s good to talk to you, Andrew. You got any parting wisdom for us? Oh, oh, gee. No, not yet. Next time. OK. You’re young yet. Nobody’s expecting wisdom on demand. So, yeah, although it would be very impressive. I mean, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. All right. Have a good one. You too. God bless you all.