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Our society has all but given up on protecting the innocence of children. This is a grave matter, one the Catholic Church must speak up against, and Bishop Thomas Paprocki joins us to do just that.
Cy Kellett:
How did the modern world turn out to be so abusive of children? Bishop Thomas Paprocki, next.
Hello and welcome to Catholic Answers Focus, the podcast for living, understanding, and defending your faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. And today we tackle a tough subject with a tough Bishop. Let me just say it right out. The modern world has become abusive of children. We congratulate ourselves on being an open society, a free society, a modern society with modern values, but we need to stop congratulating ourselves. We’re hurting our children.
We have built a society that is over-sexualized and far too violent, and this is traumatizing our children and leaving them with hurts. And we need to stop building ourselves up and thinking that we’re better than previous generations. What we need to do is start protecting our children. Start keeping them free from the traumas that we are inflicting upon them, because we want to have a society that is enjoyable for adults and easy for adults to access all kinds of pleasures. Many of those pleasures is not good for adults, but they’re disastrous for children.
Bishop Paprocki is the Bishop of Springfield, Illinois. He has come to the attention of many Catholics and has become kind of a leader among many Catholics because of his strong, forceful, defense of human life in all of its stages and his clarity that the Catholic Church is not going to give up until human life is protected in all of its stages. One of those stages is childhood, and we need to do a better job of protecting human life in the childhood stage. More about that with Bishop Paprocki right now.
Well, Bishop Paprocki, thank you very much for being here with us.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
You’re welcome.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve read a good number of your columns and one struck me. As a matter of fact, I kind of wanted to stand up and cheer when I read it. And it’s about the sexual revolution and its primary victims being children. And I don’t think this is talked about enough. And so I wanted to just get into one of the paragraphs with you and see if we can kind of open this up so that people can consider the situation that we’re living in. You wrote, “Clearly the greatest casualties of the sexual revolution in contemporary culture are children. The devastation of young people must stop. What is needed, first of all, is to recognize that sexual activity outside of marriage is a sin, followed by our renewed commitment to the virtues of chastity, purity, and marital fidelity.”
And then you wrote, “Given the current cultural disregard for traditional forms of morality and sexual restraint, this will be a long and uphill struggle.” I thought, “There’s an understatement.”
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
But I wanted to start there. I mean, where do you think we are in this long and uphill struggle? And I’ll confess, as a Catholic, we’ve worked so hard as pro-life people. I feel like people know the Catholic Church’s position on life issues and many people have been at it for, now it’s coming up on a couple of generations. But this side of the story, the fact of children being badly exploited by a culture that is hyper-sexualized, we haven’t been battling at. And I feel like we need someone to lead us and to get into that battle.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, I think that we’re sort of back at the beginning when everything started with the first Christians in the Roman Empire.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So when you look at marriage, marriage was not established by the Catholic Church. It’s not a Christian institution, it’s a natural institution. So, the natural union of a man and a woman who gives their consent to each other for the generation and education of children, that’s what marriage is all about. And you don’t have to be a Christian to do that.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And we recognize the validity of non-baptized people, as well. And so you had the situation, even in the Roman Empire, where an institution of marriage existed. In fact, a lot of our canon law in marriage comes right out of Roman law.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
It is.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yes. So, the whole idea of the contract, the consent of the parties. What Christianized the sacrament of matrimony is really our Lord’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. And then the fact that to baptize, to enter into marriage, by that very nature, they establish the sacrament, the sacrament of marriage. So a marriage between two non-baptized people is valid, but it’s not sacramental. Marriage between two baptized people is not only valid, but it’s sacramental. And so that’s just adding a dimension or a component to it, but it doesn’t really establish marriage in itself.
And so I think when we look at the early church when it first started, what the Christians were bringing was a whole different ethic of sexual morality that was contrary to the ethos that surrounded them in the Roman Empire and, in fact, from Greek culture, as well. And it was just very much understood that to be a Christian was to adopt a different way of living.
And I think that’s important for us to recognize, because here we are 2000 years later, and in terms of this being a long and slow uphill battle, it’s seen maybe it’s peaks and valleys.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Okay, yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So, during Christendom, you had in Europe, you had the identification of the European countries with being very Christian in their outlook. And then with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, having a break in that, and then where we are today, which we find ourselves in a very secular environment, I think is bringing us back almost to those times of the Roman Empire.
And this is in a very short time. I mean, I remember growing up in the 1950s when it was, even in our country, very much the sense that we were a Christian country.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And so the idea of praying even in public was kind of taken for granted, a lot of Christian values and our values about marriage. And so some of the things that we are seeing are very recent, for example, the so-called same-sex marriage. 10, 15 years ago, that was kind of unheard of, but here we are today.
So I think in that sense, we have to say, “Well, okay, we recognize as the early Christians did that the Roman culture, they didn’t set out to overthrow the empire.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
In fact, our Lord made that clear, with talking to Pontius Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world. And so I think as Christians, we have to remind ourselves of that, that we should be involved in politics and, having just completed an election, that it’s important for us to be good citizens, but at the same time to realize, as our Lord did and taught us, that our kingdom is not of this world. And so we live perhaps by values that are different from the world around us.
Cy Kellett:
But the world around us, I don’t think will survive its own values if it keeps going. It is a pluralistic society and all, but there is a basic issue of safety.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
That if children can’t be raised in safety, then you’ve destroyed the very basis for your society. And they can’t. Whether it’s what they find on the internet or in media, or what happens in their home. Children of divorce are clearly more vulnerable than children of whole families.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
I mean, on the one hand, you say, “Well, we live in a pluralistic society and we have to,” it’s a dialogue. I mean, but on the other hand, part of that dialogue has to be, “If you keep going that way, you won’t have a society anymore.”
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Oh, absolutely. Yes. We have to have the dialogue. We have to give the example, and we also have to do what we can to promote those values. So, as I said, marriage is a natural institution. And so in that natural institution of a man and a woman raising their children, children deserve and have a right to a mother and a father. And so it really is harmful to children if they grow up in an environment where they don’t have a mother and a father so that has implications for divorce. So people who are divorced and now suddenly children find themselves in this divided situation where they get to spend time perhaps with each of the parents, but it’s not the same as living together in the same house, so the children are being harmed in that way.
And then with the idea of civil unions or same-sex marriage, with adoptions of children that again, it’s different. You’re being raised by two fathers or two mothers is not the same as having a mother or a father.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And so that is something that we have to fight for and we are fighting for. So we have this case that we’re waiting for the outcome that was just recently argued in the United States Supreme Court, Fulton v. The City of Philadelphia, where a case involves Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, basically telling Catholic Social Services that if you don’t place children with same sex couples, we are not going to renew your contract. And so that’s what happened.
In fact, the same thing happened to us in Illinois back in 2011, and we were faced with that same dilemma. And so originally, when Illinois passed, it was before same-sex marriage, it was called the civil union. And one of these Orwellian titles, the Religious Freedom Protection Act, though there wasn’t much religious freedom in there except to say that churches were not going to be forced to do civil unions. Well, thank you for that.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
But yeah, outside of that, there was not much. So basically one day when it came time to renew our contract, we applied for a renewal. And I said, “Well, we can live with that if they do indeed recognize and respect our religious freedoms.” Well, the state came back and said, “No, you have to place children with same sex couples.” And we said, “We’re not going to do that.” And so the state basically said, “Oh, well, then we’re not going to renew your contract.”
And our argument, our legal argument, was that the state can’t discriminate on the basis of religion. So we had our religious beliefs for the reasons for doing what we were doing. And the state said, and the judge, in fact, ruled in the state’s favor saying that you can’t force the state to sign a contract. The state can contract with whoever they want. And that’s true to some extent, but we do also have laws against discrimination. So, the state could not refuse to contract with a contractor simply because they were black or a woman.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, the same thing for religion. They should not be able to discriminate against a contractor because of their religious beliefs. Well, we chose at the time not to pursue that litigation. We just didn’t feel that the courts would be receptive or the time would be right.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
But now I’m very happy to see that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia is promoting that. It’s going all the way to the US Supreme Court. And we’re hoping that we’ll get a good decision from the Supreme Court that will protect the children because, again, it’s the children who are being harmed.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
You’ve got an ideology here. People are trying to promote the ideology of same-sex marriage and to the point of denying children the opportunity to be placed in a Catholic environment with a mother and a father. And this even came out in the testimony in the hearing before the United States Supreme Court, Catholic Social Services received no applications from anyone who wanted to place children in a same sex household. And meanwhile, there are plenty of other agencies that could do that.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So in terms of the marketplace, there were plenty of opportunities for those who want to place children with same sex couples, they could do that. But why force the Catholic Church to do that only for ideological reasons? And then the outcome of this is we see this in Illinois. And I think I’ve heard that’s the same thing in Pennsylvania and other places where there’s a shortage of foster homes.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
We have parents that are very well-trained. In fact, Catholic Charities around the country were often the ones who instituted foster care programs. We go out of our way to make sure that we have good parents and good homes for these children to come into. We’re doing a great job. And we were recognized by the state as some of their best foster care agencies and they put us out of business.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And now there’s a shortage of foster care homes. And we’re saying, “Well, we’d be happy to do it if you let us.”
Cy Kellett:
But it points to something that has actually been pointed out to me on some occasions that the sexual revolution is treated as a privileged kind of revolution. And so that nothing can get in the way of that. So if you invoke the idea of discrimination on the basis of race, well, with the sexual revolution if you said you had an abortion doctor, for example, that was aborting black babies at a much higher rate than white babies, no one would ever bring a case of discrimination because abortion is sacred. And we don’t let anything interfere with that.
Now, gay marriage is sacred. We don’t let anything get in the way with that. Increasingly, the gender ideology, that’s a sacred thing. We’re not even allowed to have discussions around that. So you have women, for example, in women’s sports who are obviously being discriminated against because men are being allowed to compete against them because the men call themselves women, but you can’t talk. You see what I’m saying?
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
There’s this special status for the sexual revolution. I don’t know how we break through that.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, I think what we saw here is you have to remember that those who are arguing for these special privileges, or special rights as they might call them, did this in an incremental way themselves. It started with domestic partnerships, even the terminology.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So domestic partners, and then that wasn’t enough. Now we have to have civil unions. And then each step of the way there was sort of this statement of, “This is all we want. If you give us this, we’ll be fine.” And then domestic partners wasn’t enough. Now we have to have civil unions. Well, then that was not enough. We have to actually have the terminology of marriage. And then again, the sort of the implication, all we want is for recognition for same-sex marriage and just leave us alone. Well, then that wasn’t good enough either.
Cy Kellett:
Right, yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
You have to bake our cakes and be the photographers at our weddings, and you have to provide social services like foster care according to our standards, rather than what you believe in. And so I think the pushback on this, maybe in some ways, needs to be incremental as well.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So we’ve been doing that with the struggle for pro-life, for example. It became pretty clear even shortly after Roe v. Wade, that we were not going to get a constitutional amendment. We were not going to get Roe v. Wade overturned in the immediate future. So instead, we’ve been chipping away at it.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So parental notification, parental consent, ultrasound laws. We find that’s a great influence for a woman to actually see the ultrasound and see, “No, this is not just a blob of tissue,” as Planned Parenthood would like to have them believe, but no, they see fingers and hands and arms and legs and a head. And no, they realize, “This is a baby and I’m not going to kill my baby.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So we’re able to make progress in that, even though we still don’t have a constitutional amendment, and even though Roe v. Wade has not yet been overturned. We hope it will be someday if we take these incremental steps.
And so in the arena of foster care, for example, well, I think this is a very important case and I hope that if the Supreme Court rules in our favor, that the churches, Catholic Charities, would be allowed to get back into the foster care business.
Cy Kellett:
So, it’s kind of a bit by bit clawing back-
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
I think so.
Cy Kellett:
… returning to sanity kind of thing.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
The media is not our friend in this regard, either. I mean, it’s astonishing to me how many Catholics will pay for something like HBO television or something that actually promotes virtually everything that we would say that’s destructive, that’s anti-human, anti-Christian, and yet we’ll pay for it. We have to have a cultural mindset of standing up to the culture, as well.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, we do. And I think we have to use those means of technology ourselves. I think, again, going back to when I was a child, the means of communication were much more limited. You had your three major networks and a local station like WGN in Chicago, where I grew up.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And then you had your local radio stations and a couple of newspapers. And if you wanted to get your word out, like even the diocese would have a newspaper and the parish would have a bulletin. Outside of the printing press and publishing books, that was about it. Whereas today there’s such a plethora of secular stations, I think the three big networks don’t have the influence the way they used to-
Cy Kellett:
No, that’s true. Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
… because there’s so many other things people are watching, but also the opportunity is for Catholics to take advantage of that. So, Catholic radio, like we’re doing right now, and podcasts and videos, just there’s been a mushrooming of all kinds of very creative uses, I think, by very faithful Catholics that are getting the word out there. And so I don’t think we should sell ourselves short, either, that we’re actually doing some very good things. But it’s a more crowded marketplace now than perhaps it used to be.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
But it’s out there for those who are looking for it, and again, by just getting these programs and radio stations and video podcasts and livestream masses and things like that, we’re getting our voice heard.
Cy Kellett:
And at the same time, however, that incrementalism also works culturally in addition to legally. And so the idea that, I mean, it just seems so fast now that you go from maybe 20 years ago there was a kind of a fringe movement for so-called gay marriage. There was really no movement for this transgenderism. And now you’re a bigot if you’re not 100% on board with all of that.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
I want to kind of get your take on the transgender kind of ideology as also being one that’s dangerous for children, makes the world very dangerous for children.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, absolutely. And I think there what’s really disturbing is particularly when you see parents buying into this with very young children.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And what I’ve studied on this and materials that I’ve read or workshops that I’ve attended, for example, through the National Catholic Bioethics Center, Dr. Paul McHugh, for example, is a psychiatrist who actually was in charge of the transsexual program at Johns Hopkins University and he discontinued it some years ago because they were finding that it was not helping people. So someone would go through the hormonal therapy and then have a sex change operation and then they’re still not happy, realizing they thought this would bring them happiness and it didn’t. And so he said this, “Actually, we’re not helping people by doing this.” So they discontinued it. Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins has reinstated that because I think for ideological reasons these days.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
But I think what we see there, what’s unfortunate as I was saying, with parents who will buy into that for their children. So Dr. McHugh has talked about this, that we have to recognize that children go through stages. And so if a young boy who wants to play with girls toys, for example, or vice versa, a girl who likes sports and athletes, when I was growing up, we called a girl like that a tomboy.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And even these days, well, why what’s wrong with a girl playing sports? And girls should be allowed to be involved in sports. We have Title IX and protection of women’s rights in athletics and education and things like that. But for parents to say, “Well, my little boy likes to play with girls toys, so maybe he’s really a girl,” and then start doing hormonal therapy and then you can’t legally do anything in terms of surgery until they’re, I think at least an adolescent, but I think that’s simply child abuse-
Cy Kellett:
Right. It is. Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
… if you’re starting to do that with such young children. And the thing Dr. McHugh has pointed out is that in most cases, children who have some ambiguity about their sexual identity, they outgrow it, or their gender identity.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Also, it’s important to note in that, that the idea that they not only outgrow this, but the fact that what we’re talking about here is really, you might say it’s a mental illness that requires counseling. So my policy that I adopted in my diocese on gender identity, I point out, yes, we have to deal with people who have gender dysphoria, as it would be called, a confusion about their gender identity, treat them with compassion and understanding.
But again, Dr. McHugh makes a great analogy that he talks about the analogy of a young person who has anorexia.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So, an eating disorder. So let’s say you’re a high school counselor, and a very thin student comes into your office and says, “You know what? I’ve got a weight problem. And I want you to help me to lose weight.” A responsible counselor would say, “No, you don’t have a weight problem. I’m not going to help you lose weight. I think perhaps you’re anorexic and we need to get you help to deal with your anorexia.”
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So similarly, if a student, a boy, walks in a counselor’s office and says, “You know what? I think I’m a girl. I want you to help me to change my identity.” A good counselor responsibly would again, be compassionate and understanding, but say, “You know what you’re dealing with, what’s called gender dysphoria. And we’re not going to just simply-”
Cy Kellett:
But in your state of mind, you’d probably go to jail if you said that as a counselor.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the thing.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah. The person’s mental state doesn’t match reality for whatever reason.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
So we change reality rather than help them with the mental state. And not only just that person’s, we have to change reality for everybody. You have to have bathrooms and everything has to change rather than say, “I’m sorry that doesn’t comport with what’s real.”
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Well, there’s an irony there as well, because you have, in terms of sexual orientation, you have laws, I believe in California and other states, where psychiatrists, counselors, psychologists are not allowed to give what they would call reparative therapy. So a homosexual person or someone dealing with same-sex attraction goes to a counselor and says, “I want you to help me to become heterosexual.” It’s against the law to do that.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And yet, ironically, a transgender person can walk in and say, a man can say, “I think I’m a woman. I want you to help me to do that.” And then legally he has to do that.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Right. It’s divorced from reality.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
It’s just ideology all the way down. But here’s the thing though. I am excited when I see you write a column about the sexual revolution turning into child abuse, becoming a society of child abuse. I know that the person watching this who’s not Catholic and maybe is hostile to us says, “Oh, look at him, he’s a Catholic Bishop. They should talk. They’re child abusers, those Catholics.” I mean, it does seem that our moral authority is compromised because of the child abuse within the Catholic Church.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Oh, well, definitely. I mean, that’s something that is indeed shameful. And we have to recognize that. That’s an issue that I’ve been working on for decades now. So I became Chancellor of the Archdiocese in Chicago in 1992 and my very first assignment was to help write the policies and establish a review board. And so for 10 years as chancellor, I was dealing with these cases in Chicago and then later as a Bishop.
So I think I’ll also have to say though, at the same time, that I think the Catholic Church has made great strides in that we’re in many ways, I’ll say something also that probably most people wouldn’t agree with or in the general public’s [inaudible 00:00:25:42], I think the Catholic Church has made more strides than anyone else in this area. Even Pope Francis has said that and he got criticized for it, too, but I think it’s true because you learn from your mistakes. And yes, there were some very bad things that happened, particularly in the 60s and 70s and 80s, but by the time when all this kind of blew up publicly in 2002 within the Archdiocese of Boston, which was kind of the center of attention of all that, since then we had the charter, the norms, that were adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and we have a zero tolerance policy that’s in place now.
And we do an annual audit of all of our dioceses and reporting on the numbers and they’re just way, way, way down. So I think we are acting responsibly now. We don’t get much credit for that, but yes, has our moral authority been hurt by that? It certainly has been. So there are people will just say, well, they won’t listen to us and say, “Well, you’ve lost your moral credibility.” So again, we have to earn it back bit by bit.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And we do that. I think with Bishops, like yourself, who have the courage to say the sexual revolution has become child abusing, it has led to just horrors and dangers for children. And I’m grateful for you for doing it, but, okay. So let’s say we’ve got our average, here we have a lot of Thomas Aquinas college graduates, a 21 year old coming out of Thomas Aquinas College or Steubenville or whatever Catholic University you want to say. And they say, “Bishop, I agree with you. What’s my role? I’ve got my entire life as a lay Catholic ahead of me. The society seems to be falling apart. What’s my role in this long uphill struggle to return to sanity and safety for children?”
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
I would say their role is to be the best possible Catholic that they can be in whatever their vocation might have to be.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So I think, yes, you could become a priest. You could become a religious sister. Those would be great vocations, but that’s not the only path to holiness. Certainly the Second Vatican council talked about the universal call to holiness, and that was not something new with the Second Vatican Council, either. St. Francis de Sales, in his Introduction to Devout Life talks about how every person, regardless of their status in life, you could be a soldier, you could be a farmer, you could be a merchant, an artisan, a trades person, we’re all called to holiness.
So, for example St. Josemaria Escriva talks about just bringing holiness into your everyday work, so whatever you’re doing. And so if we have someone, for example, that is in the world of sports, an athlete. I’m very involved with the group called Catholic Athletes for Christ. I’ve written a couple of books about that. I have a book called Holy Goals for Body and Soul: Eight Steps to Connect Sports with God and Faith.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
I just finished another book. It’s going to be out, hopefully after February, by Ave Maria Press. It’s called Running For a Higher Purpose: Eight Steps to Spiritual and Physical Fitness. So I’m a marathon runner. I’ve done 24 marathons. I like and I play hockey. I’m a goalie and they call me the holy goalie, so I’ve got this sports background. But I use that as an example because sports in many ways has become a new religion for a lot of people. It’s like people would rather do their sports on Sunday morning than go to church.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And so you have to recognize that. So again, you take someone like St. Ignatius of Loyola and his principal was, “You go, you enter people’s lives through their door, and you bring them out through your door.” So sports, for example, sports is a great entree into especially young people’s lives.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And so you go into their world in sports and you bring them out in the world of faith. So an athlete, for example, so athletes and children look up to athletes and they’re heroes and heroines. And so if you have an athlete, again, you don’t have to leave your vocation. If you’re called to be an athlete, be a good athlete. But as you’re doing that, can you talk about your faith?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Can you make your faith public? And for you to be able to acknowledge your relationship with Christ and to talk about going to Mass and the sacraments, and have a great influence in doing that. I mean, I see that even just in the ways I get involved in sports. I help coach our hockey team, Sacred Heart-Griffin High School in Springfield. And so I gave them all rosaries last year for Christmas as a little Christmas present. And the goalie that was helping coach the goalie was not Catholic. And a few weeks later after a game, which we lost, he asked me if he could talk to me. And I thought, well, he wanted to talk about the game, feeling bad about the loss. And he said, “No, no. I want to ask you about the gift you gave me for Christmas.” He said, “You gave me that rosary.” He said, “I’m not Catholic and I don’t know how to use it.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
“Can you show me? Can you teach me how to pray the rosary?”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
I thought, “Well, that’s tremendous.” I would’ve never had that opportunity, would never had that conversation either, even, but for the fact that I entered his world in the world of sports and a simple act of giving him a rosary was something that opened a door for him and that he wanted to know more about the faith.
Cy Kellett:
I suppose, it fits perfectly with the incarnational theology of Christianity, but to the greatest, this huge, massive world historical problem we have of confronting the sexual revolution, you give a very local answer. Live your Christian life. Live your Christian vocation wherever you are. And there we want the big answer.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Give me something big to do, but really that won’t work. You’ve got to stay with the local answer.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Stay with the local, and also to be patient with this. I mean, if you look back in history and you see how things have changed when in a period of time, when something that would seem, this is never going to change, and we go back to the 19th century.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So I’m from Springfield, the land of Lincoln and you go back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates and our society was so divided. We fought a civil war over slavery.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
And I think if you said to people back in the middle of the 19th century, that someday there would be no slavery and someday we would be fighting against any form of racism. So we had to go through the abolition of slavery, through the abolition of segregation, to now trying to just fight racism in itself. And for people to say, “Well, who would have thought back in the 19th century that we could do that?”
Let’s take another, something else, much more recent. When I was growing up, it was very fashionable to smoke cigarettes.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
On television, you had TV ads, the Marlboro Man, and you had even on television interview programs, people would be smoking while they’re interviewing and talking on it.
Cy Kellett:
Sure. Right.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
So that was a thing you did in public. And now that has so completely changed, that the idea of smoking has got this stigma attached to it. And that’s less than half a century, I think, where that has taken place. And we have to remember that when we think sometimes, “Well, abortion is so steeped in our culture that it’ll never change,” I’m not so pessimistic about that. I said, if we can eliminate slavery, we can eliminate abortion.
Cy Kellett:
God bless you, Bishop. Thank you for that. Because I really feel like we need to hear that sometimes, because it does feel like we’ll just do our best and shuffle off this mortal coil and it’s in God’s hand. Maybe a thousand years from now, we’ll fix it. But there’s hope in these things. Thank you, Bishop.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
You’re welcome.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you for taking the time with us.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki:
Great to be with you.
Cy Kellett:
It’s refreshing to talk with Bishop Paprocki. He talks in a measured way. He talks in a reasonable way, but he says things forcefully. And he writes in a forceful way about needing to be concerned about what our culture is doing to our children. Certainly what our culture is doing to children before birth.
But in many ways, we focus so much on overturning Roe v. Wade or winning battles for Supreme Court seats so that Roe v. Wade can be overturned and so we can again be defending the lives of children in the womb, that maybe we have been lax in allowing all kinds of aspects of our society to become really harmful to children and not fighting against those things that are harmful to children, that traumatize children.
So I hope maybe this will start a conversation. I hope that it will start a conversation. I know it’s a conversation that Bishop Paprocki would very much like to get started and to get a little fire underneath it, what’s happening to our children, not just before they’re born, but once they’re born and all the way up through their being raised and coming to adulthood.
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Thanks for joining us. This is Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and we’ll see you again next time, God willing, right here when we do this again.