In this episode, Trent gives an update on how his family is handling the recent severe winter weather hitting the state of Texas as well as his thoughts on whether Catholics should support “cancel culture”.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Well, when it rains, it pours. And sometimes when it pours, you get frozen rain and sleet and snow and ice. And the electricity stops running, the water stops flowing, you’ve got sub-zero temperatures outside and buildings that weren’t made for this kind of weather. And when that happens, it can become a little bit of an emergency. But hey, God is good, trust in him. Though it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. And you know me, if you listen to my podcast, you know I’m all about preparedness.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. There are two things I wanted to talk with you about today. Number one, originally I wanted to talk about cancel culture. See, I imagined this week it’d be a little chilly, I’d be sitting with my hot cocoa, talking about cancel culture. That’s originally what I thought was going to happen this week, or at the end of last week, when I’d be recording these episodes. But things have changed.
So I’m going to talk about cancel culture here in a bit, but first I want to give you a personal update on our situation. We’ve only been here in the Fort Worth area, we’re in a suburb of Fort Worth, it’s a wonderful… a lot of Catholic communities here, homeschooling communities, it’s been rated one of the safest places in Texas to raise a family. So I love it, it’s great. What I’m not loving, though, is the weather here. I think you might’ve heard, I probably mentioned this to the podcast, I was recently in Fargo. I gave a talk there. And when I got there, I told the people in Fargo, “I hate your weather.” I said I love the people there, but I hate the weather. And it followed me back to Dallas. The other night, it was outside, or no, this morning, this morning, it was zero degrees outside of our house here in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex area. Zero degrees.
With wind chill, it’s dropped down to -13, -15 here in Dallas. I thought the winters in Dallas would be 20s, 30s, teens maybe at the worst, not sub-zero kind of weather. We’re usually prepared for a lot of things, but I didn’t think that it was going to go like this. So let me give you an update, because a lot of people have been texting me, calling me, emailing me, saying, “Hey, are you guys okay? Are you guys all right?” Most of our friends back in California are watching this on the news and they’re saying, “Hey, are you guys okay?” All right, well here’s the situation. Some of our pipes have frozen. Now, relatively speaking, we’re doing better than other people. Relatively speaking, we’re doing well. I’m very grateful that, at least as of this moment that I’m recording, we have electricity, we have heat, we have water in most of our fixtures. So we did our best to stop the pipes from freezing.
I lived in Kansas for two years, but I never remembered… I lived in an apartment, so I had, like, one faucet and I would just leave it dripping when it got really cold. And I thought I could do the same here in Texas. I went and found the sinks at the end of the line. These are the sinks that usually only have cold water, I can barely get hot out of them, because they’re at the far end of the line. And so I left them going at a drop and I did other things to try to combat the freezing measures.
But I don’t think anything I could have done could have prepared the house for what it was slammed with. So I’d say three of our sinks, the pipes are frozen going up to them. One of the toilets, the intake is frozen. So in order to get that toilet to work, we got to put water in a bucket, pour the bucket into the upper part of the toilet. But I’m thankful that at least there was hot water into the showers. The other toilets and sinks are working. So all things considered, it’s going all right.
But I was still concerned about the water. So to jump further ahead in what’s going on, so that was the biggest thing that hit us, is that we got some frozen pipes. But we knew a lot of other people who had been without power and they said online, “Oh, it’s just going to be a rolling outage, 45 minutes, an hour,” they said. And we had friends telling us they’d been without power for six, eight, 24 hours. And it’s dangerous when you have buildings that are not well-insulated and the temperature has dropped outside to zero, five degrees, it’s not good.
So last night, actually, we had some friends, their power had been out during the day, they had a wood-burning fireplace to keep themselves warm. But as night was approaching, they were wondering, is their power going to come back on? And it hadn’t yet. And this was a family, a pregnant mom and five kids, so the husband, pregnant wife, and the five kids came over to our house and we put them in two of the bedrooms. The rest of the Horn clan huddled together in our master. And thankfully, we live in Texas where you have houses where there’s space to have people over. We could have never had a family like this over to our home in California. And California has blackouts and has emergencies, as well. So we were able to help them.
And if you’re local in the Texas area and you’re doing well, be sure to reach out to your neighbors, your friends, people from your church, make sure people are doing all right. Because even when this episode, if it airs tomorrow, we’re still going to get snow, we’re still going to have cold weather conditions. So [inaudible 00:05:21] something to be concerned about. And Matthew and Thomas had a grand old time, we had the five kids over here, they’re downstairs playing Candy Land. And we’re talking with the adults and they’re just grateful to be able to have a warm place to go. And we were just like, “Wow, I can’t believe that this turned into an emergency so quickly.” And that’s something, if you go back to my previous podcast episodes and you watch my disaster prep and my preparedness episodes, I’m big into prepping. And one rule of prepping is that emergencies sneak up on you. It happens faster than you realize.
But usually there’s warning. Unless it’s something like an earthquake or a lightning strike, usually there’s warning, “Hey, things are not good on the horizon,” you can see. And we had warning for this storm. Meteorologists predicted the weather, they were right. And so we knew that it was going to be coming in several days. And you know what’s hard for me, do you ever do this? At least with my personality, a lot of times I think back, I’ll go back in time in my mind and think, “Oh, if only I had done this differently,” “Oh, I wish I had done this differently.” And sometimes you get obsessed with that. And so I thought, “Oh, if only I had gone back, we could have just packed up the car, gone to Phoenix, and just enjoyed the sun for two weeks, stayed with my parents, stayed with friends, and not had to deal with any of this.”
But we really couldn’t because we had people coming in to renovate our home during the week, so we needed to be here. Last weekend, I also traveled. I was down in Houston speaking at the Fullness of Truth conference. So they were able to have a conference, there were COVID protocols and all that, so people were safe. And I went there and I gave a talk on sola scriptura and a talk on sola fide. And I was glad I was there. And in fact, on Thursday, I’m going to share the sola fide talk with you, Justification by Faith Alone: What is the Catholic Perspective on Justification? Be sure to check that out here later in the week. So we really couldn’t have traveled. I could have rerouted my flight, but honestly I thought it wouldn’t hit us as hard as it did.
Now, here’s one thing I’m super grateful for. So I was down in Houston Saturday and we were wrapping up the conference. And I knew Sunday was going to be the big snow storm, Monday was going to be the big freeze. And so I was done with the conference on Saturday. My flight to get home was at 4:00, it was about an hour flight back to Dallas from Houston, so an hour, 4:00 to 5:00 PM. Then I get a notification on my cell phone, it says that my flight had been canceled and it had been rescheduled for Sunday morning at 7:30 AM. And so I thought, “Oh, that’s inconvenient. I got to spend the night in a hotel.” But I got to thinking more, “Why are they canceling flights all of a sudden? I know it’s cold, but the snow hasn’t started yet. The snow is going to hit on Sunday. That’s going to be a really bad time to travel. I might not be able to get home Sunday. I don’t know when I’ll get home.”
So I had a rental car. The host graciously provided me a rental car to get to and from the airport. And I’m glad that I did. So I called Enterprise up and I said, “Hey, can I just change my drop-off location from Houston to Dallas?” And they said, “Yeah, you can do that. There’s a nominal fee.” I think it was $150, but that’s how much it would’ve cost if I had just stayed in the hotel for another night and flown back on Sunday. So I hopped in the car at 1:30 and I drove without stopping from Houston back to Dallas. And I decided to do that because the forecast for Saturday was no snow. It was really weird driving down the highway because all the trees were covered in icicles, gray and misty and foggy and icicles hanging from everything. So it was pretty, in kind of a creepy sort of way. But I was grateful that the roads were in decent condition.
So I got back home at about 6:00, which was the same time I would have gotten home if I had just flown anyways. And so I’m grateful I did because I’m looking at my phone, and so my flight on Sunday was canceled, as I thought it would be. Do you know when my flight was rebooked? Wednesday. So I would still be in Houston and my wife would be home with our three kids dealing with frozen pipes. And now, even worse, there’s concerns about the electricity. We’ve had these rolling blackouts, some have been longer than rolling, frankly. We haven’t been without power, we might be without power soon. But one of the water treatment plants in Fort Worth is out of power. And so they can’t treat the water. So Fort Worth did a boil water advisory.
So I went out and I got my water bob. The water bob is a inflatable plastic bag you hook up to your bathtub and it has a siphon pump to it. And you can fill it with about 100 gallons of water. So I started filling it with that. And then eventually, they were telling us that we eventually will probably be under a boil water. But even worse, because the water is not treated, they’re running out of water. I just got a message on Twitter here about an hour ago, here’s what it says: “As we feared last night in our conservation message, the water system has now reached critically low levels. The stores in our water towers have been depleted, leaving only what is left in the pipes.” And so our water pressure is really low. And I think that’s because eventually the water might not come out of the tap.
But before I left for Houston, we already had emergency water, but I wanted Laura to be prepared. Just like with the pandemic. If you remember, I went to Australia before COVID-19 really slammed us, and I bought emergency supplies for Laura so she wouldn’t be high and dry if I got stuck in Australia. So before I went to Houston, I knew the storm was coming, so I went and I picked up some extra of those three-gallon Kirkland water containers. So just in bottled water, I would say we have something like, I don’t know, 40 or 50 gallons. Filled up in the water bob, there’s probably 80 gallons in there, so we have water.
And you just got to be prepared. What would you do if the electricity didn’t come out of the outlets and water didn’t come out of the pipes and gas didn’t come out of the stove? Are you prepared? Are you prepared to at least make it a week? Do you have flats of water? Do you have non-perishable food, crackers, beef jerky, things you can keep in a pantry to be able to sustain you at least for a week? I’m not talking about the end of the world or the apocalypse. But at least if you’re prepared, then you’re not going to be a strain on other people.
And, as I mentioned in my COVID response, if you’re prepared and you take care of yourself, you’re able to take care of other people who might not be prepared or have had something unfortunate happen to them [inaudible 00:11:47] Jesus says [inaudible 00:11:49] greatest commandment, love Lord your God, and then love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t love your neighbor unless you love yourself. If you don’t take care of your own needs, then you won’t be able to take care of the needs of other people. So it’s not selfishness. Selfishness is when you put your needs in front of other people’s needs. Self-interest is when you put on your oxygen mask before you put on the mask of the person sitting next to you. You got to put your own mask on first. And then when you do that, you can take care of other people.
So we’re doing all right, pray for us. Just pray for Texas that this gets resolved here soon. The forecast on Friday/Saturday is we’ll have warmer temperatures. I think it’ll start to thaw things out and we should be back to some sense of normalcy. The thing that I am concerned about is our pipes froze. We did our best to keep them from freezing, but they froze in our master bath. And the master bath in our house is located above the garage, and I checked the thermometer in the garage and it was 32 degrees in there. So I’m pretty sure the pipes that were in the ceiling of the garage are going around it. They froze. There was nothing, even leaving it a trickle, nothing was going to stop that from freezing. So there is a possibility that on Friday or Saturday when the pipes thaw, they may have burst, and then we might have a leak, might have to deal with pipes and all that stuff. And there’s probably a lot of people here with burst pipes and plumbing issues. Pray for people, offer them practical support when you’re able to do that.
Lent is upon us. From the time I’m recording now is Fat Tuesday, tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Pray, penance, alms giving, that’s the third one we always tend to forget. Give to a charity. One of my favorites is the Against Malaria Foundation. For just $5 you can send a malaria net that will save somebody’s life in Central America. But if you can give to help people, who’ve been really impacted by this severe winter weather, then we should do that. We should be able to provide for people.
And as for me on Fat Tuesday, I am sad because I think all the restaurants have been ordered closed for energy and water conservation efforts, so I can’t go out and stuff my face for Fat Tuesday. So I told Laura, I’m just going to go into the pantry and just eat a bunch of the emergency Nutella because it’s Fat Tuesday and I feel like doing it. Mardi Gras, people. Alrighty. So that is the update on our home situation. Pray for us and everybody else, what they’re going through.
Now on to cancel culture. So the reason I wanted to talk about this was you probably heard the story last week that a star of Disney’s The Mandalorian was fired because of a post that she put on social media, her name is Gina Carano. And this is what she wrote. She said, “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different than hating someone for their political views?” Okay. You can’t compare the disagreement that we have over politics to people who are rounded up and sent to gas chambers. I do not like comparisons to the Holocaust unless they are apt, unless they are as close as possible.
So you can compare the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust. You can compare the purging in the Soviet Union, the purging of the Kulak farmers [inaudible 00:15:08] the Holodomor, which means to murder by starvation in Ukrainian. And I believe you can compare the mass killing of the unborn to the Holocaust. Though there are important differences, you still have millions of human beings legally being killed.
So it’s a dumb post. But you know what? What makes people upset, I think, about this is other people on the show can make dumb political comparisons to the Holocaust and nothing happens to them. So Pedro Pascal, who is in The Mandalorian, he played Maxwell Lord, I think, in the new Wonder Woman, which I have not seen and I will not see. I know everything that happens in the movie and I know that it’s terrible, so I’m not going to see it. I’m not going to see the new Wonder Woman and I’m not going to see Star Wars: Episode IX. As far as I’m concerned, those movies, they don’t exist.
So Pedro Pascal made a social media post where he compared the detention of migrant children on the US-Mexico border to the detention of children in Nazi concentration camps. And however you feel about the situation of migrants at the US border, that is not the same thing as children being sent to gas chambers. That is absolutely not the same thing. And it’s stupid, but he doesn’t get canceled. And so I think what they’re really concerned about is, they think that it’s inconsistent. It’s like the social media mobs will get together and they’ll cancel a particular group of people, namely conservatives, but not liberals or other people. So I think what people are mad about, especially among many Catholics that I speak to, is this inconsistency, but not really cancel culture itself.
The term “cancel culture” is a loaded and ambiguous phrase. Because ultimately, when you strip it down to its bare essentials, there’s nothing wrong with expressing your negative approval to an idea or to a particular person who holds an idea, or expressing disapproval to an institution hosting a person that is promoting a certain kind of idea. I’m big into free markets. Did you listen to the Economic Round Table? I believe in free markets when it comes to commercial transactions. I also think we should have a free marketplace of ideas. When we have a free exchange of ideas, that’s good, that’s good for us sifting through what’s true, what’s false. And we should be very careful about someone wielding the pen of censorship.
Now, I know some Catholics would really like to have the pen of censorship. And I see where they’re coming from. With the stroke of a pen, if I could get pornography off the internet, I would, I absolutely would. And so I think there’s reasonable accommodations to things that should obviously be censored. But this idea that if only we could wield the pen and censor atheists and censor Muslims and only have Catholic stuff out there, I would say be careful. If you create something that has this kind of power to censor, and only allow one particular viewpoint to rise to the top, what happens when that is used against you?
That’s why we should have a free marketplace of ideas. And the idea of cancel culture, if a group of people get together and say, “We don’t like this person,” and the institution affiliated with that person, they have a free choice. They can say, “Well, you people, you’re silly. We’re not going to listen to you. And we’re going to keep supporting this person.” Or they can say, “You know what? You’re right. What this person did was reprehensible. They are going to be disciplined. Or, we may terminate our relationship with them because we also really disapprove of what they said.”
I’ll give you two examples: a recent one and a not-as-recent one when it comes to so-called cancel culture. So just a few weeks ago, Cardinals For Life, which is the pro-life club at the Catholic University of America, canceled a talk involving Abby Johnson. Abby Johnson is a pro-life advocate, she’s a former employee of Planned Parenthood. That’s what she’s going to speak on.
But on social media, she’s also expressed many other controversial opinions. She has controversial opinions on vaccines, specifically on whether it is moral to take the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines because they were tested on cell lines that were derived from experiments with aborted fetuses. She says that it’s wrong. And people have engaged her online [inaudible 00:19:24] question and she has said that she rejects church teaching on the principle the remote cooperation with evil when it comes to vaccines. She was speaking at the Stop the Steal rally, she also did a video where she said that she understood why police would racially profile her biracial son. So I’m just putting these details out here so you understand why some people objected to Johnson and didn’t want her talk at Catholic University of America.
Eventually, the Republican Club at CUA picked up Johnson’s talk. Now, here’s my thing. You might be thinking, “Trent, how can you be defending canceling Abby? Abby should be allowed to be there and to speak and share the truth. And they’re just trying to silence her.” But here’s my thing. Do you really want anybody who is invited to a Catholic university to speak there?
Let me give you another example from 2017. Theological College canceled a talk with Father James Martin after people protested and wrote emails saying that they didn’t think the university should be supporting Father Martin and the highly ambiguous things that he says. What’s hard with Father Martin is that there’s not a statement he utters that you can just pin down and say, “Yep, that’s a heresy. That’s heretical,” because he always qualifies what he says. Or on social media, if something is heretical, he’ll retweet somebody else saying it and he’ll say, “Well, my retweets aren’t endorsements. This is just something that we should think about.” I think he did that a while back on the Bible and slavery, that if we don’t agree with the Bible on slavery anymore, on the permissibility of owning slaves, why should we agree with it on homosexuality? But Father Martin didn’t say that, he retweeted someone who said that, and then says, “Well, my retweet’s not necessarily an endorsement.” It’s something interesting to think about.
And that’s what’s hard with Father James Martin. There’s nothing you can say, “Here’s heresy. Here’s just flat-out heresy.” There are priests and theologians out there that are flat-out heretics, people from Catholics for Choice, other things like that. But Father Martin hasn’t publicly uttered something like that, though he has said many ambiguous things that I think are even more dangerous. And if you know a heretic straight-up, you know to avoid this person. But if Father Martin has things that are just ambiguous and are this slippery path that leads into heresies on moral or theological truths, then that’s a big cause of concern.
And I’ve been critical of Father Martin for a while. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything, I can’t think of any person who is wrong about everything. But he does post things that are troubling and I would protest if my alma mater, the Franciscan University of Steubenville, hosted a talk with Father James Martin. Or if they had a speaker from Catholics for Choice, or if they had a morally reprehensible speaker at my alma mater, I would say, “No, this sullies the name of the university I matriculated from. So I would be opposed to that.” I would voice my opinion and the university would be free to listen or not listen. As long as it’s freedom, as long as people are peacefully assembling and voicing their concerns, the host, the institution, the company, they can choose to respond or not respond. And sometimes they do respond, and sometimes they don’t.
For example, do you remember, I think it was last summer when everybody was talking about racism, the summer of anti-racism, and there was a movement on Twitter to try to get Trader Joe’s to change the name of some of its food? They have these little cutesy names. For Italian wine or Italian olive oil, instead of Trader Joe’s Olive Oil, it’s Trader Giotto. Instead of Trader Joe’s Salsa, it’s Trader Jose’s Salsa. For Asian foods, instead of Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, it’s Trader Ming, though I think they totally missed the ball. I guess they’re trying to say if you translated Joe into another language, what would it be? If you’re a Chinese listener, is Ming basically the Chinese equivalent for Joe? If it isn’t, then they should have called it Trader Cho’s, like C-H-O, right? That would make sense. Trader Cho’s Orange Chicken, that would make sense to me. And some people said that it was racist.
And then I think initially, someone from Trader Joe’s said, “Yeah, we’re going to pull this,” But then the full corporate statement came forward saying, “No, our customers like this. It’s not racist. We’re not going to change it.” So I would say, “Okay, that’s good. That’s helpful.” And [inaudible 00:24:03] freedom involved. And there’s no use of force. Because there is one kind of cancel culture that I think is awful, and that is violent protests against speakers. That’s happened to me. Go onto YouTube, search “Trent Horn Brock university,” and you can watch me being heckled at a university. To me, that is cancel culture. That is when I go to a place to give a talk on pro-life, people come voluntarily to hear me, and others come not to engage me on the issues, but to just shout loudly to keep other people from hearing me. That is definite cancel culture. And that is what I think is bad.
Though I do think you could extend that to big tech, Twitter, Facebook shutting down discussion of things, even on issues, well, I’ll give you an example. YouTube canceled LifeSite’s YouTube channel. LifeSite, for a while, was just doing pro-life work, but they got more involved in kind of conservative politics and things like that over the past few years. And I don’t agree with them on… there’s a lot of articles I’ve seen for them that I don’t agree with. But I am concerned and people have said to me, “Why do you care if LifeSite is taken down, Trent? They say things about COVID vaccines that aren’t true. You don’t even agree with them.” Right, but it’s about that double standard. They’re not canceling YouTube channels that talk about how the unborn aren’t human beings. If someone makes a video and says that a fetus isn’t a human being, it’s just a clump of cells, or says something that’s inaccurate about abortion, or inaccurate about homosexuality in favor of those views, they’re not getting censored.
So I agree, the double standard amongst those who were in charge of the major social networks, that is discouraging if there’s only a few platforms to interact with other people. We should have a free open marketplace of ideas. That’s why I think the government, and I’m not usually a big fan of big government, obviously, you know me and my politics, which, I should also make a distinction. When you listen to the podcast, I try very hard to distinguish Catholic teaching from my personal view. I have personal views. People [inaudible 00:26:06] describe me as a conservative, some people will call me the world’s youngest boomer. That’s fine. If you might be more described as a politically liberal Catholic, as long as you think abortion should be illegal, as long as you think marriage is a union of a man and a woman, if you’re a politically liberal individual, that’s fine.
I can have a lot of common cause with you. What divides us is very trivial compared to the major elements of the faith that unite us, as long as we agree on the essential elements of the faith. But if you identify as a politically liberal Catholic that wants legal abortion, that sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, well, then you’ve departed from the faith. So I am concerned about big tech doing this. But I do think that on college campuses or… And really, it’s spread. I used to only see this on college campuses, but now that these people have graduated and have taken positions of leadership, like at the New York Times and other places, they’ve brought that mentality with them to shout down voices they don’t agree with. I’m fine peacefully expressing disapproval and waiting for a response to that. I am not okay with shouting down other people and preventing them from speaking in the first place.
So even, let’s take Father James Martin. I would be okay him speaking at the Franciscan University of Steubenville if it was not just a talk he’s giving where he’s being promoted but it’s a critical, open panel where people can ask him tough questions about his book, Building a Bridge, or Building Bridges. So I think that if you disagree with a speaker and say, “Okay, I don’t want them just to be celebrated at this talk. Let’s have a forum, let’s have a panel. Let’s have a debate where someone debates this person on this idea I find reprehensible so there’s someone who can take them to task. That’s something I think that would be good.
The other thing with cancel culture that I don’t like is that, I was fine with publicly expressing disapproval for figureheads, for celebrities, for politicians, for activists, for people who are public figures. I would consider myself a public figure, and so criticizing me, even in harsh language online, that’s fair game. But other people, especially wives and children of these people, that’s not fair game. Or people who are not public figures, they’re just regular people on social media.
And I think cancel culture also rears its head when an online mob gets together and wants to mete out disproportionate punishment to someone who makes a mistake or a faux pas online. And you get people who just will casually type, “I hope she gets fired,” and not thinking about what’s this going to do to this person’s livelihood? Did this person do something truly serious enough to deserve being fired? If it’s somebody who molested somebody, sure, I hope they get fired and I hope they go to prison and I hope they repent of this terrible sin that they’ve committed.
But when it’s someone, especially a young person, like a kid. There was that story, I think a few months ago, about this student, I think it was an African-American student, he held onto a video of one of his white classmates and she had just gotten her driver’s license. And she shouts an ethnic slur, she shouted the N word, but not the traditional N word, she shouted the N word you might hear more among hip hop artists. So she gets her driver’s license and she says something like, “Word up, N-I-G-G-A.” I’ve spelled that, and not even the traditional N word, I wonder if this podcast will be censored. Well, we’ll have to see. That’d be ironic if this podcast gets canceled. That would be very ironic.
And so then he posted it, and I think the New York Times covered it and the college that she went to rescinded her application. And I thought that that was absurd. She was not directing an ethnic slur at anyone. She was saying something that many hip hop artists and many members of the African-American community say every day. You might say, “Well, she’s being insensitive. She doesn’t understand.” Then give her a chance. Is she apologetic? Is she contrite?
What’s really ironic about this, is the same people who promote this kind of vindictive, vengeful, unforgiving cancel culture online, these same kinds of people, if you ask them about Christianity, they would say that they cannot believe in a God who would send somebody to hell. They would say they couldn’t believe in a God who would damn someone for all eternity. But these people have no problem damning someone to secular damnation. They chastise Catholics for believing in religious damnation, but they support secular damnation or secular excommunication, just, “Oh, you said this a racist thing.” Even if you did something wrong, you can’t apologize, there’s no forgiveness, you lose your job. Anytime your name is Googled, you’re fair game to criticize, and we can continue to bring this up forever.
We should not have a culture of cancellation. We should have a culture of mercy, forgiveness, and repentance. Imagine if God took the attitude towards us that people online take towards other people who commit secular sins. Racism, insensitivity, misogyny. Those are secular sins most people today recognize are wrong. They’re also sins. Misogyny is a sin, racism is a sin. I’m hoping to do a podcast on racism here in a few weeks. But imagine if God took the same attitude they did, just, “Here’s your punishment. You’re damned. That’s the end of it. No second chances.” We don’t need a culture of cancellation. We need a culture of forgiveness, repentance, mercy.
Now, if somebody wants to be obstinate and say, “I’m going to be racist and I don’t care,” that’s one thing. All right, you’ve chosen to place yourself outside the bounds of polite society. But if you make a mistake, we should be forgiving and compassionate to others because God, our Father has been merciful and compassionate to us, and not just believers. That’s why I love 1 Timothy 4:9-10. That’s why I love 1 Timothy 4:9-10. It says, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, or to this end we toil and strive because we have our hope set on the living God who is the savior of all men, especially of those who believe.”
I love that. God is a savior not just of a little tiny elect, God loves the entire world. And because he loves the whole world, all people have the offer of salvation. God is the savior of all men, especially of those who believe who’ve received God’s grace, but of all people. Or as we say in the Fatima prayer, “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are in most need of thy mercy.”
So this Lent, I’m probably going to be off social media, frankly, for Lent. But if you’re on social media, extend some mercy. That’s a digital alms-giving that we can give to other people because it’s in short supply there. So, O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to have in, especially those those like me and you, those who are in most need of thy mercy.
Thank you all so much. Keep praying for us. I’ve got to talk I’ll be able to share with you all on Thursday, and then of course, a wonderful free for all Friday this week as well. Thank you all so much. God bless. Have a wonderful day.
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