The Family: Foundation of Civilization

Shannon: Thought we'd start with a quote by John Paul the second who, a long time ago, said that the future of humanity passes by way of the family. After he said that, a cardinal was Colombian cardinal was giving a speech in The United States, and he said that that very short phrase sort of sums up the irreplaceable relationship between the family and society. So it's a two way relationship. The achievements made by the family revert back to the good of society as a whole. And so when the family breaks down, the social fabric is broken and endangered, and we're seeing that today.

Right? And then on the other hand, anything that goes wrong in society has negative repercussions on the family. So this sort of a two way relationship, and the health of one supports the health of the other. But I thought maybe we'll get some opening comments now from, Drago. What's going on?

Drago: Yeah. I appreciate you hosting the space. I think we, was it a a week or so ago, we had the feast of the holy family. And, what a reminder of the importance of family in that the son of God himself decided to come through family as opposed to individually splitting the sky open and and, you know, coming that way. So, yeah, there's there's great mystery and value in family.

Shannon: Deacon Richard, any any opening comments on the foundation of society as as the family?

Deacon Richard: Yes. I I think, Adrago and and your opening comments are great. You know, I would say that, the family is the deepest learning institution that we have. Well, stop there and we can get into further discussion.

Shannon: Absolutely. When it comes to the faith, of course, the the church talks about the the parents of the first catechist. Right? And and not just in the area of faith, but just parents teaching children how to relate to other people, how to, learn learn that they can't always have what they want. Right?

Teaching them good behavior, which of course, a well behaved child is more likely to be a well behaved citizen that follows all of the laws. We're not an island, and we're social creatures. Right? And we have to, we relate to one another. And and these very disturbing things we've seen in the news lately, I mean, somebody was set on fire in in this in the subway in New York, and people just walked by.

I saw, on x yesterday, there was a homeless person came in, was screaming at people in this restaurant and breaking dishes, and nobody intervened because they were afraid. Not not because they couldn't physically stop him, but they're afraid that the authorities are gonna prosecute them. So so actual physical safety is is breaking down on the societal level, and we can we can see how a lot of the, what's going on on over the last many decades with the family as less people get married, more people cohabitate. There's a lot of, you know, even myself, you know, my father was married three three times after he divorced my mother, so there was this sort of rotating, cast of characters coming through, you know, stepsisters and stepbrothers. It's almost like different seasons of a TV show.

Like, okay, you're gone. Season one's over. Y'all are gone. Now now who's next? And this really does have have an effect on on society at such a such a big level.

Drago: Yeah. Indeed. And and that is interesting, how there's these public events that you mentioned where someone, shouts in the restaurant or even someone sets themselves on fire and then we don't even notice or do anything. And I suppose is that a reflection from the fact that, you know, if we are apathetic towards our own family in some sense or disconnected from our own family, then how much more even even so will we be disconnected from the our neighbor that isn't connected by family? And, and then I suppose vice versa to the extent that we detach from just those around us for from our neighbor, I'm sure that also has effects onto how we view family as well.

Deacon Richard: Yeah. I would I would say, you know, I was one of three children. I'm the eldest of three. And, you know, I have four children. And I can tell you as from immigrant parents and, you know, my my parents immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and met in Toronto.

But in the family, you learn some key life skills. You you learn, you have you learn what's right, what's wrong. If you have siblings, you learn how to share. You learn how to treat each other, with respect and you learn how to care if your sibling is sick or your parent is sick. You see the the empathy and the nurturing that comes in those everyday life circumstances.

And so what's, you know, what's been happening is there's not one thing that sort of caused this, but, you know, this inward looking right, and this is why the Lord says, you know, love thy neighbor as your as you love thyself. And so we we've become a society that's starting to look inward. What are the things that I can do for myself? And and how do I get how do I gain benefit from doing that? And it comes at a cost because you you rewire your brain and and you you you detach from what you've learned and you go out and you and you learn these other things that society is putting pressure on.

We see it in the workplace. We see it in in our circles of friends. We see it obviously through technology. And, and so this is where, you know, we we have to go back to those roots of what we learned, those experiences of sharing, caring, empathy.

Shannon: Couple of weeks ago, I hosted a, a conversation with, Sean, my friend Sean who writes a lot of great things. I'm actually in the process of searching for it right now. But he he wrote a thread and we based the whole, conversation on the thread, which was on the lies of the sexual revolution. And he talked about one of the sort of the key architects of the sexual revolution was a, a woman who was a Marxist and that these things just shouldn't happen to our society. They literally had as a goal the destabilization of the family.

And he talked about a book that sort of tells some of the story, which, I've not read, but it's kind of on my list. It's called the Auntie Mary. Right? Because when we think about the blessed virgin Mary, the model of motherhood, the perfect family, the holy family as Drago referred to was was that feast day was recently. But, you know, what they achieved in the in the sexual revolution, one of the lies is that sex is recreational.

There's no there's no no moral relationship to sex, and it's not morally bound to, you know, what the church teaches, the should be open to life, the procreative act inside Christian marriage. Now it's like if it feels good, do it. It's all about emotional satisfaction, physical pleasure with no, thought to the aspect of of commitment. But if you think about how much destruction has happened in people's lives, if everybody adhered to the Catholic view of sexuality marriage, nobody would have had a broken heart in the last fifty years that did so. Right?

And, like, nobody would be cheating on people. Nobody'd say I'm divorcing you because she's twenty years younger or whatever. So we think about all the amount of heartache from all the people we know and all the people, millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people, because people have moved away from God's, model for civilization, which starts in the family. And one of the big problems is when sex is about, because this is one of the ways the family gets destabilized, of course, infidelity, etcetera. When sex is about just your pleasure, there's no sort of moral law.

There is no logical it's a there's a moral boundary. But if you just say, well, it's just about if it feels good, do it. There's there is no law for how low into the abyss that goes. Bestiality, pedophilia, whatever. If you if you don't have a moral god's moral law, if it's just about what you enjoy, we we even seen that in the in the news even in the some of the very liberal writers wanna even like that are are they call it a minor attracted person.

You know, there's that that phrase whoever controls the language controls society. They're starting to try to shift the language on that. So the family is the bedrock of society. It's under a tremendous tremendous assaults from every side, and we have to all do our part to really do whatever we can. That means being a good member of your family, if you're, in a marriage.

But it also means we can all be praying for married couples in general. Any comments, Drago?

Drago: Yeah. Well, you started off mentioning, the Marxist, you know, behind the sexual revolution. And, yeah, I I just wanna kind of expand a little bit on that for a moment. So the average person in society who's engaging in this, in the last forty years, fifty years, this type of loose sexuality, sure they might be doing it because they see in the media it's portrayed a certain kind of way, you know, maybe from bar culture, club culture, etcetera. So they're just doing it because their appetites are stoked.

They engage in loss and they're just being controlled that way. But to your point, the more, architectural minds, those who more intentionally pull the levers of society and try to design things, there is a deeper motivation of destabilizing society so that you can usher in a different framework. And, you know, this has always been the case anytime Marxists are involved. I mean, I think even Karl Marx was a sexual degenerate, if I could say that. Even Hitler with training the youth, you know, at a young age you'd get them on drugs and expose them to prostitutes and just to kind of destabilize them, erode their psyche and their sense of moral grasp.

And so it's a way to usher in, you know, different frameworks, if you can kind of mess with someone's sexuality. And then, you know, I would also say this, as part of the Marxist goal of Utopia is this collective consciousness, mass awakening because the idea is that you know, everything is, constructs like starting from when we were in the garden, you know, pure creative united with nature and then all of a sudden when someone started working and creating, you know, gathering fruit or building a tree house or whatever it is, we started creating systems and structures and constraints. And one of those alleged structures from the communist perspective is the structure of family and all these things. And any structure that exists by definition has those it favors and those it does not, it creates an oppression. So even the institution of family, you could say creates a form of oppression because it privileges those who are within the family and and, at the exclusion of those outside.

And so, you know, all this to say, part of the attack on family is to then remove another social construct so that the individuals now, are free, which I'd say in a very Luciferian sense free. Right? It's not in not in a godly freedom, but in in the in the wrong freedom. And so you do that, then the individuals directly connect connect to the state or even if not the state, just this kind of mass collective, you know, orb, whatever you wanna call it, some kind of aura. Right?

So and and and that's kind of the goal. That's the goal. So that's why, the family is under attack at least from, you know, those types of actors.

Deacon Richard: Galatians five. Right? Galatians five verse 16. The works of the flesh live by the spirit, I say, do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the spirit, and what the spirit desires is opposed to the flesh.

For these are opposed to each other to prevent you from doing what you want. And so, you know, this is this constant battle of, the will and the flesh. Your mind goes one way, your your will goes another. And, you know, bishop Barron talks, at length about this battle about having Christ centered. And and that way he calls it the wheel of fortune or the wheel of misfortune, if you will.

You know, whether it's, you're you're you're achieving amazing success in the corporate world, you know, climbing the corporate ladder. Well, guess what? You know, it's not gonna last. And so, you know, when we when we hear about flesh and, the battle between flesh and spirit, this is this is why, from a Catholic, point of view, why the sacrament of marriage is so important because it's not just two people being bonded. It's it's Christ is there, bonding, the two in in matrimony.

And so so we need we need from a Catholic point of view, we need, to lean on the grace of Jesus, and and also we need to surround ourselves with people who, will help us in those battles.

Shannon: I don't know if anybody's familiar with the book, but, the great archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote a book, probably seventy years ago, called Three to Get Married. And it's also sort of representative of the trinity. Right? You have the the man and the woman and God. They're all in it's not just two people.

And that's what you do at the church when you come into a, sacramental marriage. I found I I did post that thread at the top of the space from Sean Baruub called The Sexual Revolution Was a Disaster. I encourage you to read that, but I did I did look up her name. So it's Kate Millet. She's a leading figure of the sexual revolution.

Time magazine called her the Karl Marx of the women's movement, and the thesis of her work is the family is a den of slavery with the man as the bourgeoisie and the woman and the children as the proletariat. She said that casual sex would free women from the slavery of marriage, and meaning, you know, she's painting this as as, you know, personal autonomy and liberation, but what she really wanted was it's just hard to believe that people would would want this, but this was her goal, societal destruction. They wanted to, rebel against the natural order, and it's really, really just crazy to me.

Drago: Yeah. I mean, the story of you're being oppressed and and need to be freed starts even from the garden where, serpent and the adversary try that that's the that's the pitch. He says that this rule, you know, this constraint of don't eat from the tree, it's meant to oppress you. It's because God, God is scared that you're gonna be like him and get power and and you're just gonna be oppressed. And so this story of oppression, as we know, just gets recycled, in in many use cases that the husband is oppressing the wife.

You know, that the, you know, one race is oppressing the other race that, the straight people are oppressing the gay people. And, it's just it's the common motif. And now don't get me wrong, of course, I mean, we have had wars, you know, we have had people tyrannically take power over other people like that, that is true. But this concept of there being like a universal pervasive system or law where, like, the fundamental structure of reality is oppression, you know, that's, that that's where kind of the the lie gets taken to its extreme manifestation.

Deacon Richard: It it it it's hidden in the, I guess, in the intention or the motive to to control. And, and so people buy into this notion that, if you're free, freedom looks like this. But what it really means is you from a Catholic lens, you're a slave to something else. And so being free, giving the God giving us free will, to choose him. If we choose something else, we're we've we've enslaved ourselves to to that, to that either ideology or to that vice.

And and so we're not really free. But that's what, that's what you know, the double diabling, right, to divide. And, and I think this was a little bit foretold by, maybe it might have been pope John Paul or or in in Fatima. I have to check the sources. But, may through revelation through mother Mary, she said, that the last great battle will be the family.

Shannon: This is where we see that sign, you are here. Here we are. I I looked, I I'm gonna deep quote from that thread that's at the top of the space. So so Kate Millet, this is the Karl Marx of the feminist movement. Her sister recounted a story that she went with her sister to a Marxist meeting, and they had this this discussion, how do we destroy the family?

And the the the response was we destroy the American patriarchy. How do we destroy that? By taking away the power. How do we do that? By destroying monogamy.

How do we destroy monogamy? By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and this is what it's about. They're basically just pushing promiscuity. It's in every song. It's in every music.

It's in almost every TV show. It's in every magazine. It's all over x sometimes. This push is to destroy the family. And, again, I just see why would somebody wanna do this?

But you have to remember what whatever the quote is that, you know, if if people pursue evil, God sort of gives them over to to darkness. Right? Their mind sin darkens the mind.

Deacon Richard: I would just say that, you know, the this is where I think the Catholic church is really been, strong in, in the sacrament of marriage. Certainly in Canada, you have to go through marriage prep. And, I would imagine it's the same all around the world, but, I know I haven't checked into that. But it's very detailed, and and it's quite lengthy. I mean, I think it's about six weeks, not six continuous weeks, but six continuous weekends and as a criteria to be married in the Catholic church.

And now there are some, like, we we see that some younger generations just feel that that's too onerous. But there's a lot of value in in instructing and informing the faithful around what a sacramental marriage is all about and what is the church's teaching on it. And and, you know, we we also see the impact of where if you're just kinda just sleeping through that, you know, you're you're leaving yourself open, to, to these, situations, where you where you feel, uninformed or you might not know, the importance of of of the sacrament itself. So so I think the church has got it right here. Now can we always improve?

Absolutely. And, I've I've heard too that that's been a bit of a, I guess, a a detractor for, a younger generation contemplating getting married in a, in a Catholic church. And one of the first things that the priest asks is why do you wanna get married in a sac in a in a Catholic church? And sometimes they get responses like, well, my parents told me to. And, you know, sir, priests are like, well, you this is not about pleasing your parents.

This is a sacrament. And that's not, you know, from their perspective, that that's not a good enough reason to get married into the Catholic church, because your parents are telling you. So so I think we we really have, we've done a really great job, in in terms of getting people prepared. And could we always do something better? Could could we use other means to another, formats?

For sure. But, we're not seeing that though because, again, we're we're battling. People feel that, you know, I'm I'm with my partner and we're cohabitating. You know, we don't really need to or we'll start a civil marriage. And and that's fine, but, it doesn't give you the proper armor that sacrament would give you.

Drago: I think, a creative challenge or task ahead of us is how do we frame our messaging as we talk to those around us in a way that casts a positive vision that they can strive towards? Meaning, we see a lot of the problems that, the sexual revolution, culture and and and things have presented before us. And so oftentimes, the default stance is to be reactionary. We say, well, look at this bad thing. Let's run away from the bad thing so we can get to like a not bad thing.

And, you know, and and and that is effective in in in some ways for sure. But also, you know, there's kind of this inner peace, this beauty, you know, is how do we cast the vision of even when you talk about sex and marriage only, you know, and and a stable family life, you know. You know, how do we present that image and, especially keeping in mind that these are interior realities of the heart on the inside. So for example, from a materialistic, atoms and quarks and, protons and neutrons perspective, When our culture thinks about sex, they just think well, you know, it's just a part of the body that touches another part and what's the big deal that I mean, you can have whatever mindset you want and maybe you have a bad attitude towards sex or a positive attitude towards sex or whatever. Mystical interior spiritual reality that occurs in these acts.

And and anybody with experience knows this. The problem is those internal attributes are harder to elaborate. You know, you almost have to become kind of poetic with your use of language. And so I think the creative task here is to communicate, especially to the next generations, the beauty of the interior life when it's well ordered and beautiful and when there's harmony and and joy and flourishing in community.

Shannon: I wanted to read an excerpt from Pope Francis in 2016, had an apostolic exhortation on the family. There was a a synod on the family. I think that was the year before. So let me just read a little very short passage from this. The Bible is full of families, births, love stories, and family crises.

This is true from its very first page with the appearance of Adam and Eve's family, with all its burden of violence, but also its enduring strength, to its very last page where we behold the wedding feast of the bride and the lamb. Jesus's description of the two houses, one built on the rock and the other on the sand, symbolizes any number of family situations shaped by the exercise of their members' freedom. So we as we make choices, this is not just true in our family relationships, it's true in our work relationships, in our friendships, in our in our wider social circle, we have the freedom to make decisions that can strengthen those bonds or weaken those bonds. But as a whole, we've become a society that tolerates absolutely everything. Nothing can interfere with the rights of the individual.

But it's so weird because we see that the common good is suffering. Look at the streets of San Francisco. It's not safe to walk down the streets. Look at the, what's going on in New York. We talked about what's happening in the subway.

Like, The United States has become one of the least safe countries because society literally is coming unglued. Part of it is what, you know, what Elon has has dubbed the woke mind virus. And he says something that sort of seems a little outlandish, but I but I really believe it, And that is the woke mind virus will destroy civilization. Like and and we see it with the breakdown of law. People that intervene if somebody's being attacked on the subway.

What was that guy's name? Daniel Penny. He's charged and the other people aren't. Or we see what's coming out of Great Britain. Decades of women being raped, but because they wanna have a certain policy, they don't wanna they don't wanna upset people that this policy might be contributing to it, so they continue to let women be raped.

I mean, these there should be like Nuremberg style trials for these people that are in in power over there. It's unbelievable that they can even fathom that this is correct. And when the fathers tried to intervene, they were arrested. It's just amazing. So Kate Millett has been very successful, her and her cronies, with with the destabilization of society.

I don't think I certainly don't think people are happier than than they were if, you know, people in in politics say, oh, you wanna take us back to the fifties or whatever. Yeah. I would if I could press a button because people were happier. Society was safer. Marriage rates were higher.

People, you know, could have a nice nice lifestyle. Now we we live in a time where people are really struggling just to just to make it and you were so Cardno Sara, I always quote his book on on silence. The world is so noisy. It's just so hard to get through the day and keep our relationships going. So, all of this is about trust.

When when trust in the family breaks down, look at the lack of trust in every single institution. A lot of Catholics don't trust the church. We certainly don't trust the government. Right? We certainly don't trust the media.

A lot of people don't trust the police. So this breakdown of trust starts at a lower level, and I guess because it's tolerated, it's it's it's tolerated, you know, at at a higher societal on a higher societal scale. I'll pitch to Drago for comments.

Drago: Any, mind virus, let's say, or any persistent idea that's very infectious and spreads is maintained through unfalsifiable statements, let's say, you know, appeal to hidden knowledge. So, well there's many examples of this but the one example that you said, that triggered me is that you okay the nineteen fifty's will look at things were better. So, okay. Well, if you're a promoter of the woke mentality, well, how do you deny that fact of of people being happier? Well, then what you say is that we actually don't know because people weren't allowed to talk.

So even in this case, you say, oh, women were happier. Well, that's just because they weren't given permission to actually express how they really felt. You know, this is kind of like, you know, even in like the the pharmaceutical industry with the whole, you know, autism and rise of autism, you know, they'll say, well we just weren't really good at measuring autism back then. So yeah, you know, your grandparents never had autism but maybe they secretly did and we just couldn't just couldn't know. So there's always this appeal to this kind of secret thoughts that people have inside and and and, you know, it's almost like a Gnostic type of thinking, the appeal to hidden knowledge.

And so, you know, what's my point in saying that is just more of like being aware about how, how the adversary works, and in this case meaning the true adversary, right, that you know Satan himself but, how people in collaboration with the adversary, the kinds of stories that have to be crafted in order to sustain the lies.

Shannon: Deacon Richard?

Deacon Richard: Yeah. I I would say that, you know, raising four children, and all four of them, you know, you tell them don't touch the fireplace or don't touch the stove. It's hot. But, you know, we've all been there. We we we burn our fingers, and we we learn our lesson.

And I do think that, you know, we know up and down the ages that that God permits things to happen, but he can draw all good things out of that. And and I do believe that, and I think if we're just looking at statistics, the mandate that the American electorate gave to, president-elect Donald Trump was was significant. I mean, it wasn't even close. And so what does that mean? And from a Canadian looking at American politics, you know, eventually, the truth sort of circles back.

Right? It's like, okay. Do you want that? And or you need to tell your children don't touch the stove. You're gonna burn your finger.

So sometimes as a society, we need to burn our fingers. And if you think about, you know, in Canada, we have a a big problem with with, impaired driving. In fact, in in Ontario where I live, the amount of charges that were laid over the holiday season was astounding. And so, you know, governments are sort of compelled now to to look at the consequences and maybe change the law and make it a little bit more harsher. But the reality is is that sometimes society needs to encounter these challenges and difficulties, and where they think that it might be a great idea to to to stray from moral law that has, you know, prevailed for such a long time, for them to go back.

And, you know, I I do think that at some point in time, things will get corrected and we're we're gonna see that. Well, things will get corrected to society. We'll start to figure out, okay. Yeah. We need to we need to get back to, what really worked for us.

Shannon: Another thing we we've seen the loss of in the last ten, twenty years is the lack of civility. I mean, we should be able to have friends that have totally different political views. And yet, in in recent last two or three elections, it's, oh, you voted for that person? You're not coming to Thanksgiving dinner. Like like this complete incivility, again, which is almost like it it in governance, like the governance of one, this one person just sort of like, I'm excommunicating you because you voted for Trump or Hillary or whatever.

We should be able to have, people in our lives that have different philosophies. I mean, I have friends that are Muslim, for example, but there just seems to be no tolerance for that. You know, back when they were implementing the sexual revolution in the sixties, tolerance. Well, first of all, tolerance is a very nice word. It sounds nice, doesn't it?

It's not a Christian virtue. You know, the virtues are faith, hope, and love, fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence. Let's turn that from memory. I was hoping I can remember all. We should not tolerate evil.

Like, we should not tolerate pornography because it's a first amendment, under free speech grounds. For example, something that harms society has no right to exist, and we should get away from the this individualistic, you know, it's whatever anything the individual wants, the society as a whole can't impinge on that.

Deacon Richard: The family is has been foretold by, I think, our blessed mother that that would be the last, be of the the battleground. And so we do need to remember and pray for, families, that, they continue to be strengthened and that, you know, that they collectively, continue to to practice the faith. And and dads play a huge pivotal role. I think there was a Pew Research very quickly that the family's less less likely to practice if the head of the father, the husband is not, practicing. So, you know, the the men of the household definitely played a pivotal role in in keeping the family, in the faith.

Shannon: Thank you, Deacon. Drago, final comments and tell us about holy habits. Hey.

Drago: Yeah. Thanks, Shannon. Well, I love what Deacon just said. You know, when we sin, it's not just individual, it affects everyone. But when we build a virtue, it's the same thing.

It's not just that you're improving your own life and and the grace and the merits, but you're actually helping mystically the whole body of Christ. And that's what happens when we pray together, etcetera. And so, yeah, lastly, I'll just say that, you know, unfortunately, a lot of times the Christian life in practice looks like, this back and forth where you you do the good things then you stumble mortal sin. You do it and and and mortal sin and it doesn't really feel like you're making progress or deepening when when actually God wants it to be, a journey of ascent, child becomes a teenager becomes an adult. And so what I invest my full time efforts in is providing holy habits, which is an app that helps people break free from sin and build habits for heaven so that they can be very conscious in their participation with the grace of God in their life.

And so you could download that in the App Store.

Shannon: Thanks, Drago. I just wanted to leave us with a quote from Psalms. It's Psalm eleven three. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? So as Deacon mentioned, we should be praying for families and trying to be more virtuous ourselves.

Just just like Deacon said, sin isn't private. So as we sin less, it also strengthens the body of Christ even even the people don't know, oh, you're not doing that sin anymore or whatever. It just it just has you know, we're all connected. And so we work on building virtue, focus on truth, goodness, and beauty, work on on building those virtues of temperance and prudence and, justice and courage. The other way to say courage is fortitude.

God will give us the fortitude to go through difficult situations. I'm sure all of us can relate to the fact that we've been through things we never thought we would or that we didn't think we'd make it through. God gave us fortitude at the right time. So read more about those virtues, study them, try to cultivate them in your life.