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Living Echoes Podcast - Episode 01 - Bishop Gabriel Tetherow - Catholic Masculinity
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In this interview, the topic of Catholic masculinity is discussed. The speaker explains that there is a lack of resources on this topic from a Catholic perspective, with many sources being Protestant or secular. The guest, Bishop Gabriel Tetherow, talks about the importance of defining terms and begins by discussing the creation of Adam and his purpose. He explains that the masculine principle is defined by reason, and that men have the authority to guide and protect women and children using their reason, enlightened by faith. He also mentions the concept of effeminacy, which refers to the lack of reason. The goal of the interview series is to pass on the teachings of the Catholic faith to future generations. All right, so welcome everyone, this is the first of the Living Echoes interview series. So we are doing an audio book right now from Pope Leo's encyclical, On the Chief Duty of Christian Citizens, but this is our first interview or slash podcast that we're doing. And so I am very pleased to welcome His Excellency Bishop Gabriel Tetherow as our very first guest. So thank you so much, Your Excellency, for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It is definitely my pleasure. So the topic for tonight that we wanted to get into and explore was Catholic masculinity, because there's a lot of things you can find on the Internet about masculinity, but much of it doesn't have the Catholic perspective. You're either getting a Protestant version because they're allowed to be popular in the world and or you get secular people who have all kinds of weird things mixed in with their idea of masculinity. And then people who are trying to be Catholic either follow them and end up imbibing some bad ideas or they're not following anybody and they don't know how to behave and how to conduct themselves as a Catholic man. So first, though, just a quick introduction for yourself and your background and, you know, just tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Well, I I've been in the traditional movement for twenty three years now, I was ordained in the old right, but by a bishop that was not consecrated in the proper right. And so in 2010, I was conditionally ordained before being consecrated, obviously, in the Tuk line, but I also have the Dacosta line and Eastern Orthodox. So there was a movement to make sure that there was apostolic succession and there could be questions, as all people question about that. And so I have that line. And and then in 2000 and in the year 2000, I was consecrated a bishop in that line. And and now we have a seminary, two seminarians. We have a number of young men that are interested in the seminary, mainly from the YouTube channel, Priests for the Restoration of Catholic Life. And I'm the pastor here at St. Michael's, as well as Our Lady of Good Success Chapel. And we have two chapels, one in Cuba and one in Columbia. And we have two priests there. Columbia, I didn't know that. That's interesting. My my wife's half of her heritage is from Columbia. So that's cool. But yeah, we can get into well, I'm sure we'll do more interviews because there's a lot of things that I would love to talk to you about and get. I really feel part of the Living Echoes idea is to pass on, as Pope Leo said, to for the laity to pass on what they've been given by their fathers in the faith. And so there's a lot of good ideas. And I feel like people like myself, I have discussions with people all the time about these types of Catholic issues, but a lot of them don't get recorded. And so then we can't pass these down to posterity. And one of the ideas behind it, like why I'm doing the audio book and stuff, too, is I want my children to be able to listen to their father reading the real things from the Catholic faith that they can review when they get older and stuff and maybe pass on to their grandkids. And so I want to capture these ideas, these truths of the Catholic faith in this digital age so that people can get access to them. Perfect. That's tradition, right? Tradition. Right. And we want to pass it down. Traditionless. Right, exactly. We're not conservative. Exactly. That's a whole, whole other show we could do, which would be very worthwhile. So tonight, though, it is Catholic masculinity. So the first question we had. And we want to define our terms, and I've never even really asked anybody. Exactly, this is what is the definition of a man from the Catholic understanding, and then from that, what is man's proper function in light of that definition? Yeah, that's an excellent question, because, again, you're following the theological inquiry, which is the first principle is define your terms so that everyone, we all know what we're talking about. I think in the most practical way to approach this is to begin with Adam. And when God created Adam, he created him for a purpose. And that purpose, God gave him the power or the faculty to fulfill because he made him in his image and likeness. The image of God is freedom and the likeness is love. So he gave him the freedom to love and obviously to love God. And then God created all the creation that he had created. He gave to Adam, he gave him dominion over it. And he said to Adam, you name these. When you name them, you have dominion over them. And so Adam named everything and had dominion over everything. But then again, as you know, he was lonely for one like himself. God is, there's such a chasm between creation and God. It's called a generation. Right. And that generation is between God and man is huge. So, of course, God puts him to sleep and takes a rib from his side and forms woman and gives woman to him to name. And he names her Eve, right? So now he has one, as he says, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. All of this is in perfect harmony until, obviously, something happens. And that something will change everything. Not because it had an effect so much into the world, but it had an effect into the relationship of authority that Adam had. Because when Adam ate the apple. So let's just go to Eve for a moment. Eve eats the apple. She sees it. She sees it, but to Eve she sees it beautiful. But remember, she's one generation removed from Adam. She's taken from his side. Even though that chasm isn't as big, the chasm comes in reason. So she sees the fruit, she reasons, she sees that it's beautiful to behold and to eat. And her reason says then to eat it, even though Adam told her that God had said we are not to eat it. But because of her reason being lessened in this way, she's not as responsible. So she ate it and she tasted it. And she came back and she bore testimony to Adam. She said, I ate it and it's the best fruit. It's really good. And when Adam ate it, then all hell broke loose. Because at that moment, Adam disobeyed God. Eve disobeyed Adam, but Adam disobeyed God. Right. And at that disobedience, then, this act of disobedience of Adam's part, he came to know what evil was. Before that, he only knew goodness. He only knew the good and the truth. But now he has a privation. The truth is now error and the good is now evil. That's a privation. So evil and error don't exist. They don't have an existence. They're a privation of the good and the truth. And God is good and truth is God. And so it's a privation of God. So they were deprived of God. And in a sense, some of the Eastern fathers, the church fathers say that that God said to Adam, you want to be like me? Then now you will have everything that's under your authority be against you because you were against me. It'll work against you. So now you're going to have to toil. Now you're going to have to have all of creation against you. So when it comes to the masculine principle, the masculine principle is defined by the church is that of reason. A man reasons and his reason now, though, because of the fall, because of the knowledge of evil coming into his reason and the knowledge of error coming into his reason, he made an error in his judgment. With that knowledge now, he has to fight against his own reason and all of creation. So throughout the Old Testament, we see this. We see everything fall apart for man. Everything that he tries to do, it never works. He needs to be redeemed. And what Christ will offer to man then is this redemption. And it will come in the light of faith. So God will reveal to Jesus Christ the light coming into the world. He will reveal to man those things that man could not know otherwise than God revealing it, even more so than what Adam. You know, when you break a bone, it heals stronger. So the preternatural gifts that Adam had were overshadowed by the concupiscence, the knowledge of evil. And now when Christ comes, he reveals above and beyond that the knowledge of life and truth. And so now man receives from God the light of faith. This light of faith enlightens his reason. It sheds light upon his reason, which has been darkened by sin. And it brings not only the greater light, it brings God himself, truth, himself, the Holy Ghost into his soul when he receives that baptism. So for men, because we were created, because women were created one generation from man and given to man, man's reason then has to be the practical guide for women and children. So the masculine principle then is that one uses within one's soul, St. Thomas says, reason has three faculties or powers, memory, imagination, and understanding. So memory brings you to remember everything. Imagination is a meditation on it, too, and it brings you to understand. Once you understand something, you understand it to be either good or evil or true or error. If you don't have the light of faith, you can not understand it correctly. And a man would think that this is good or this is true, and then he tells his will to act upon it, and he acts. The problem is, though, that man has authority over his women and children. Not the authority to rule them, but the authority to guide them and to bring them back safely through the use of his reason, enlightened by faith, to the beatific vision, to what God created us to be. So the masculine principle then is that of reason. And there's a word in Latin which is really important here. It's, you see it in the translation and we just had it again, effeminate. Effeminacy or effeminate does not mean womanlike or like that. It means without the use of reason or without the use of reason. So children, when he says, let the children come upon me, it says the effeminate, right? Children are, all of them, boys and girls are effeminate because they haven't had the developed full use of reason. They still need to be guided. They still need to be directed. And that's the part of the father who, at the time he has children, should have the fullness of development of his reason and the light of faith on it. But most men are effeminate. They don't use reason, they use emotion, which is a feminine response. The first response of a woman is emotion and then she reasons. Women have reason too. They have a rational soul, not saying they don't, but their first response, because they nurture, is to have the emotion. And they have an intuitive nature that we men should really respect, especially in relationships to women, other women, and children, to the effeminate. We should trust them. But you should never trust a woman's instinct or intuition on another man, because oftentimes they're wrong. Only a man can really understand if another man is being rational and just or if he's effeminate. So in this, there's this balance, right? So by using reason through memory, and we must memorize God's divine law, we must memorize the divine scriptures so that we can apply those, and through imagination, we come to understand, and this is the only thing that a man needs to understand, that God is I am who I am, and as Saint John says, I am not. That's all we need to understand. If we understand that and believe that, we will not act until reason and faith come together and are in agreement or harmony, which is called beauty. That's a characteristic of beauty. And then we act. So men should not act, by the way. But there's this social pressure, especially for priests, that people say, give me an answer right now. Tell me what to do right now. Right. No, just let me make sure. Let me go through using the proper, make sure that what I am directing you to do is correct as God has revealed it. And everything that God has revealed in faith is reasonable, the church tells us, Saint Thomas Aquinas, right? So then we can know that we can act upon it. The action is the moral, right? A moral is a correct means to a particular end. And God reveals that correct means, I mean, that correct, yeah, the correct means, God reveals that in faith. He tells us, eat my flesh and drink my blood. That's the correct means, right? He tells us what to do. So men get in this situation with their relationships with women and children, relationship between men and men are different, but women and children, they get in this quandary because they are constantly trying to appease the other person. Right. They're just trying to guide them. They're trying to think in their mind to make peace rather than to guide them. But really, the reason why women and children rebel against men is because they're trying to take the place of God and they're trying to get their wife and their children to serve them. And even somebody who has a very limited use of reason understands that if you're not serving God, then why should I serve you? That's very true. If you're not obeying God, why should I obey you? I mean, it doesn't take very much to be able to reason that, even with a lesser reason. Right. And so then there's a rebellion because you're rebelling against God. So hopefully that gives somewhat of an answer to this. I know it's not directly hitting everything, but I wanted to make sure to lay a good context because within the context, the text has its meaning. And the context, again, of all that we're going to speak about tonight is that God created Adam the freedom to love. And he endowed him with a rational soul because freedom requires a rational act, a free act. So freedom is rational. And you can't force someone to love you. All you can do is give this goodness and truth to a person. And eventually they will come to love you, even if they don't at first. And so that's all that a man, in order to be masculine, needs to do is be a man who reasons. But if he's behind now in that, he needs to study. He needs to understand, as God reveals, that what God reveals is absolute truth. And if he just puts it into practice, if he just does it, if he would just take those, and there's many of them, just do it. Don't reason, well, this isn't going to work nowadays. Things are different nowadays. People aren't the same nowadays. Don't reason that way. Just do it. And you will see the results of it. Not immediately, but you will see the results because what it will do is create a respect and a security within your judgment. And most women and most children will readily obey a just and good law. They only rebel against the unjust and the unfair laws. Yeah, I think what you said about the man taking the place of God is a huge thing to understand because it's so stereotypical, for lack of a better word, of the modern man. They demand respect and they demand obedience. But they themselves, as you pointed out, they are not following the moral law. They are not putting any effort into learning the faith, if they even claim to be Catholic at all. They're not putting any real effort into the things that really matter. They're too preoccupied with football or, you know, some other idol or thing that they've put in their life, hunting, whatever it is that they do. They're more concerned with those things than they are with the things of God. Absolutely. And again, if you are not a city of the Conference, then you are falling in that trap, because what we have in the hierarchy, we are called fathers, right? For this reason, we are men, we are masculine, we are fathers, we have the authority and the hierarchy in the church, which is why we're Roman Catholic, is built upon authority. And that authority comes from above. All authority comes from above. So if the supreme pontiff is not obeying God, then no one else should obey him. Because what he will do is, if he obeys God, then he then has under him the bishops, right? So only the supreme pontiff can correct the bishops. I give a video on this and I had somebody come and call me a heretic. He's a follower of the people we know. I'm a heretic and all kinds of things, but it's true. So the supreme pontiff, he then does the moral act of a man. A man's moral act is to protect, defend and provide for. So when God gives into the hands of the supreme pontiff, he has the universal authority to protect, defend and provide for. The universal authority to protect and defend what God has revealed, the faith, and to provide for the faithful through the sacraments and all the others. He then gives that, all the encyclicals are addressed to the bishops, they're not addressed to the layman, they're not addressed to the priests, they're addressed to the bishops. The bishops then receive them. If a bishop is to be censored or disciplined, it can only come from the supreme pontiff. This is hierarchy. This is in order to ensure that things are kept. The bishops then in turn give to their priests, and the priests in turn give to the layman. The layman in turn gives to his wife and his children. And so in that order of hierarchy, when it is from God to man, not, it doesn't come from man to man to man to man. This is why there's an injustice and why people rebel against it. They're saying if this is coming from the man, but if it comes from God to the man, then there's, the rebellion would be the rebellion that Adam first had because of Satan's suggestion, right, that the rebellion of Satan. So, or Lucifer, I should call him Lucifer, because Satan is the opposite of a saint, a Satan is the opposite of a saint, so his name is Lucifer. This hierarchy then, when it's passed down, is the self-same thing that God gave the man whose head of the household gives to his wife and his children, self-same. He doesn't change it, he doesn't mitigate it, he doesn't have the authority to say, well, for my family, I need to change this. And when he does that, then he comes to this quick realization, hey, wait a minute, I'm a fallen man, I can use this, this is the reasoning, I can use this for my benefit. I can say to my wife, you know, woman, if I want to go hunting, I'm the head of the household, I'll go hunting. And if it means that you don't get to do what you want or the kids have to, well, I'm the head of the household, you're to be obedient. And unfortunately, many semi-traditional groups teach this, but what did God say? God said, husbands, love your wives, love is a sacrifice. And remember that he created Adam with the freedom to love. So that freedom to love, by loving his wife and his children, it is to give them not only the protection of the things that are, you know, part of the natural order to protect and provide them the things that are good for their body, but it's now to protect their spiritual life, to protect their souls, to protect their faith. And that is first and foremost, his responsibility and his duty, because of what he has received from God in his baptism has been redeemed. So when it comes down to the question of what this man, his responsibility, his duty is, it is that, to protect, defend the faith and to provide for his family the good that the faith brings to him. That means to go to mass, to provide confession time for his children, to teach them the faith. This is his responsibility. It may be his wife who does the teaching, but it's the father's responsibility to make sure that they are taught and they are taught correctly. And that sacrifice that a man makes of going hunting and watching football, even taking a better job, is a sacrifice that God commanded him to when he said, love your wives. It's a command. It's not a suggestion. It's an order, a moral order. And so now, because of sin, a man has to work to provide for his family on a natural level. He has to work to defend his family on the natural level, the mortal life of his family. But he doesn't have to work, as Adam didn't have to in the garden, for now what God has given to him. You don't have to work for this. It's freely given to you. You don't have to work for mass, to have the mass, or to pay confession. The priest, taking the place of Christ, he does that, makes that sacrifice for his children, who are those who are baptized. And so this proper ordering of things, this order is what Christ reorders back away from man to God. But now modern man has reordered it back to man again, has put God in second place and now put man in first place, and has taken what God has given and made it his own. And so he can change his things. He can redefine it. He can do this. And then he hands it on, not to the bishops, but to the laity, to the layman. So the layman says, what do I need the church for? Why do I need a priest? Why do I need the church? Why do I need to make the sacrifice? I don't need to do this. I can just teach my children my own teaching and teach them to be good people, teach them to be nice. And that's literally what the boomers and those types of generations did. Yeah, it was. That's how everybody was raised, it was more about. Be a good person, but again, what does that mean? It was not informed by the Catholic faith and therefore it was not using right reason about what being good even means. It was just everyone kind of defines for themselves what being good is. But Scripture says God alone is good, right? We just have that today. Jesus and Gabriel presenting by patron, you know, was the rich young man who came, you know, and said, good master. And our Lord said, why do you call me good? God alone is good. Right. In other words, Christ was saying, do you recognize me to be God? So when it comes to be like, just be a good person. Well, a good person, by definition, is one who is worshipping God, who gives back to God, who has God at the center of his life and the center of his marriage and the center of everything. God is the authority that we receive. You know, we only act by the authority that we have received from God to act and to act in his place. You, as the head of your family, have that authority and it comes through your marriage. So if you're not sacramentally married in the church, you don't have that authority. But it comes there to you and passed on to you. And the priest has the ability and has the obligation, I should say, to correct you and to defend and protect the faith and correct you and then provide for your needs that you can provide for your family. And so the ones who are the greatest benefactors of all of this are your children. And yet your children are receiving nothing, not your children, but children are receiving nothing of absolute value in the spiritual life because they may have all kinds of physical things. But if that made you happy, we would have a lot of happy people. And they're the most miserable. So, you know, and the men are the most miserable. Well, that's why the children. Oh, exactly. Like the men we're talking about who have all their stuff and, you know, their nice cars and motorcycles and prioritize all their hobbies over their family and God. They have all the things. They go on all their trips, you know, but if you meet them, they're some of the most miserable men who have miserable marriages. They're always complaining about their wife is nagging them and they don't want to go home at the end of the workday because it's even worse at home than it is at work. You know, it's the same. They're the ones who will describe their marriage as a ball and chain, you know, and then discourage young people and be like, hey, you don't need to get married. Like, it's just drudgery. It's just a ball and chain. Like, don't waste your time. It's like, but they have all the stuff, you know, but they're miserable. It comes down to love as a sacrifice, right? Love is a sacrifice. It's not a feeling. So when you get married, you sacrifice every other woman, every other man for this one. You freely do that. You freely choose that sacrifice. But in that, you are, and when you are married and when you have children, you still remain in relationship to God as a son. You still remain in relationship to God effeminate, right? It's not anywhere close to God's reason, your understanding, any of that. So you still need God as a father to guide you as a son so that you can be a good father and a good husband to your wife and to your children. And this is the problem, again, by the modernists who have told God to step aside. We're going to take over now. We're going to now correct your mistakes that have come throughout history. We're going to correct all of those, all of the, you know, the demands that you had that people believe in you and follow you. It's not a demand. God offers it. He offers it. He knows our freedom. And he created us to love him. And all he wants is for us to be back, repaired back to where we were when he created us. Because before I knew you, before you were in the womb, I knew you. He created each one of us, even before we were conceived in the womb. That person, when being conceived now, is conceived with original sin. And God established a hospital, the church, for us to be brought into for our whole life, to be repaired and brought back to that, what we were. When we achieve that through God's grace and our cooperation, then we see God in the beatific vision. And it doesn't say that we see God as he is because we will never be able to see God because of that chasm as he is. But we are seen as we are, scripture says. We are seen by God then as we were created. That's all the church is. This is what God has established and kept here and has provided for, divine providence, provided for every generation to come here free. But when you're in the hospital, there's rules. Right, right. You know, you can't just go around and start drinking everybody else's, taking everybody else's medication or causing, you know, disorder or anything like that. This idea that people are supposed to, that's what freedom is. That's not what freedom is. That's a lack of reason, right? That's effeminacy for one to do that. And again, there are a lot of 50-year-olds, what people would think of as bodybuilders who are married and have children, but they're effeminate. And sometimes some women like that because then with the disorder, they can come in and be dominant and call the shots. And so that, but they'll always call the shots wrongly if they don't have the correct use of their reason. They may have the light of faith, and a lot of women do. And that light of faith shines upon their emotions and keeps their emotions in check, but it will never substitute for the masculine principle. And that's why, again, by God's divine providence, only men are priests. Only men can take that place. Because if you had a female priest over a man who's the head of the household, you just now disordered the, put chaos into the order. You disordered it. Or a woman bishop or even a woman pope. And again, this would be a huge problem in relationship to reason and the necessity of reason to make. So the essence of reason is to make good judgment about what is true and what is error, what is good and what is evil. That's what reason does. It makes judgments. And that's how you can tell a man is still effeminate, because his judgments are not based upon reason, but upon feeling. And there's two primary feelings that most men, and this is one of your questions, that most men fall into, and that's anger and fear. So these two passions, most men, if they're emotional, they will act upon anger in relationship to their wife and children or those under them, if they have a business or something. Right. Or they will act in fear and cower away from. When a man is in charge and he's afraid, everyone under him is afraid. Because you took the stability away. You took the stability of truth away. When everyone is afraid, then you have, as we've spoken of, men that may have a great amount of knowledge, but they live in their basement behind their computer because they're afraid. They're always afraid. And so this fear has to be overcome. So what does scripture say? How do you overcome fear? Perfect love overcomes all fear. It comes back to that principle of love. God created Adam in his image and likeness, the freedom to love. And he took from Adam's side and created woman to love Adam and Adam to love God. And I know modern women don't like this. We're not here to please people, though. I know. That's why I'm not here to please people. I represent God to you. I don't represent you to God, right? I mean, that's a modernist sentence. I represent you to God. No, you don't. I just read an encyclical of Pope Pius XII where he stated that exactly, you know, that priests represent God to the faithful. Right. And if you don't, if you reject me because you reject the one who comes in his name, you reject God. So if men want to do that, they're free to do that. But there's a misuse of their freedom, which is theologically defined as sin and death. Sin and death is theologically defined as the misuse of our freedom to love. So the correct use comes back to love. So ultimately, the masculine characteristic is love, sacrifice. And we think of that as being a feminine characteristic because we think of it in the emotional sense of the good feeling or the niceness. We don't understand it in the correct order of things. It's a sacrifice. And a man should be kind and loving and generous to his wife and his children. He should give every sacrifice to them. He should be kind in his words. He should be gentle in his instructions. All of these things make him a gentle man. And to be a gentleman is a Christian. A Christian is a gentleman. But he only comes across because he's not confident in what decisions he's making or judgments he's making, because he's putting into that judgment his own understanding, his own benefit, his own what he would have to sacrifice. So remember, confidence comes from the Latin word confide with faith. Right. Faith enlightens reason. There is confidence. Confidence comes when faith enlightens reason and a man through reason makes a proper judgment. And he knows it's a proper judgment. Then there's confidence. And when he gives that judgment to his wife and his children with confidence, they feel secure and they will trust him. But men don't because they're effeminate. So they come in and they stammer and they say, well, what do you think? Or things go because they're afraid. Or they get angry and then they come about, all of a sudden they go way over the top towards their wife or their children because they're being self-centered. That kid's taking away something from me and I'm trying to watch a football game and I work all day and he's coming in here and they get angry. Right. A Catholic man who's a gentleman knows that the sacrifice that he makes in his wife and his children, that his duty is before God. And he also knows in gratitude what God has given to him. He's grateful for the faith. He's grateful for the divine revelation. He has that gratitude. That gratitude is the key point of being a gentleman. If you're grateful for what you have, you will be gentle and patient with others when it comes to them fumbling or stumbling over things. And as priests, we have to practice this all the time and we get a great opportunity in confessional because we are fathers. And we're not fathers by generation, which is the mortal part of being a father. And that's another reason why a man has authority over his wife because he holds the active principle of generation within him. She receives it in passivity and then she gives it back to him. And because of that, because he's the first principle, the first principle of something always has the authority. But that authority can't be abused. Right. So authorship. The man offers the child. The woman provides the photogram and then the woman gives the child back. That does not mean it's not her child. It is his. That's why the man loves and respects his wife. As a mother, he supports and defends her as a mother. He says to his children when they're being disrespectful to their mother, don't you dare be disrespectful to your mother. But he will turn to you when he can talk and say, but you are. And then it will be unjust and then you'll be hit in the quick and you will know it's true and you'll back away in fear. But what does a man do? A man says to himself, he says to his son, even if his son doesn't understand, you're right and I need to change that. And then he goes to prayer. He begs God with the ability to understand. He goes to scripture and he comes to take what God has given him, but he has rejected and he now with confidence comes back and applies that. And he makes sure that he is just. And when he's unjust, you know, I do this at the seminary. There's been a couple of times I've made decisions, judgments, and they weren't the best. They weren't just. And but because there's respect, they know the sacrifices made for them. So these young men, one of the young men came to me and said, may I speak to you? I taught them you always approach authority by asking the question. You don't make statements to authority. Well, right. Yes. Oh, no, I was just going to say that I think that. That ties into a lot of the male female relationship, too, because if the wife approaches the husband with the statement, yes, like she's coming at him like they are equal in authority. Yes. And that automatically puts the man on the defensive. And he's like, well, what is this? Now, the Catholic gentleman, like you were saying, he needs to be able to handle that properly and not just start screaming and yelling. Yes. It throws the order out of whack because the same way the child shouldn't come to the father and just like tell him what's going on. Yes. He should say, father, may I speak with you? Yes. The wife should ask the husband the same thing. Absolutely. And that's, again, the respect. And if she has respect for you, she will do that. She will do that. But have you had respect for the office, for what has been given to you? Right. And if you haven't, you cannot expect injustice for her to respect you. So this is a problem, right? So going back to the seminarian when he came to me, he had pointed out to me that I had mentioned doing one thing. And then when it came to doing it, I did something different. And that bothered him because he said, I've always known you to be just. And he said it without a character, which was good. It was on my character, and that's why it bothered him. What he didn't know was what happened in between the time I told him and when I made the decision which related to another person. And that's oftentimes what happens is when you have authority, and you have authority over several people, things, you have information which changes your judgment. Right. Now, what I should have done, and I told him, there's my injustice was. Injustice, since I spoke to him about it, I did have a moral obligation to pull him aside and say, I just want to let you know I had to change my mind over this. And so it's going to be this way. And he said to me, if I would have said that, he would have said, perfect. Right. But because I didn't, and because I did something different that I said to him, and that was unusual, that was an odd thing, it bothered him. Right. So I'm glad that you have an open relationship, especially when your children are older. And again, these are my spiritual sons. So, you know, and they've come to know that they can, they know that I protect them. They know that I defend them. They know that I provide for them, not only physically, but spiritually. And they only know that because we live together. We interact together. And I have to be consistent. There's a lot of weight there. You know, there's times when all throughout the day, people are asking me my judgment on things, and I have to weigh that. You get quicker with it by going to God. You automatically go, the Holy Ghost will remind you of all that I taught you, right? So you automatically go to that, and then you give it, and then it works out, and people come back to you and say, no, the advice you gave me was really, really good. And I, you know, if you're humble, you're like, well, it's not mine. You know, I just passed on to you. Of course, you always say, thanks be to God. I always do, or thank you. But all the credit goes to God, because he's the author of it. I'm just the instrument that gives it. But it works. And I had to learn early in my priesthood that, because I wasn't taught this. I was taught never back down, right? The socialist, communist thing. Never tell anybody that you're lying. Never back down. That's why we're in the political mess we're in, you know. Lie, lie, lie, but never admit you lied. Never back down, and everybody else. Never apologize. Yeah, never apologize, none of that. Don't make a retraction if you made a mistake. No, ever. And some people, even in tradition, traditional circles, if you ever make one mistake, they'll never trust you again, right? Even if you come and say, well, you know what, that's a good point. That was a mistake. Let me, you know, correct. It doesn't matter. You told them something, and they can never trust you again. Because it's a trust issue. And I understand why all of that's there. But again, bringing back to a Catholic man in relationship. We'll just say a Catholic man in relationship to others. Relationship to his wife. A priest in relationship to the church. In relationship to his children. A man, a priest in relationship to the faithful. It's all the same relationship. It all has the same authority and the same responsibility put upon it. That God has given you that responsibility. He has given you that authority. When a woman says yes to you marrying her, God has given you, at that moment, the authority over her. She hasn't given you the authority over herself. She has given, God has given the authority over you to her. To protect her. Defend her. Provide for her. Modern woman says, I don't need some man to protect me. I don't need some man to provide for me. And in saying that, they're saying, I don't need God to protect me. I don't need God to provide for me. I don't need the church. I don't need anyone. I'm an independent person. What happens in a herd of devils when the one decides to be independent? That's what the enemy goes after. And the devils are no different. Again, a devil is not just a spirit that once had authority and lost it. Men who once had authority and lost it are also devils. They teach contrary. They give contrary advice. They, bit by bit, bring one to ruin. And so a Catholic man has to understand that he is body and soul. And in his soul, he is a rational soul. His rational soul is enlightened by his baptism, by the light of faith. And it acts kind of like a filter between the world and his soul. Faith does. It filters out all the errors and all of that. And then he has, through memory, imagination, and understanding, he makes a judgment. Once he makes a judgment, and he knows that judgment to be good or true, he then has the authority to act, himself first, and those underneath him, his authority to act. And so St. Thomas puts in the soul is reason, with memory, imagination, understanding. And then the second part of it, it's not really parts, but he uses it this way, is the will. And the will puts into action what the intellect says is correct. Whether it's correct or not, it may not be. But nobody does anything contrary to what they think is good or true to themselves. It may or may not be objectively good or true, but nobody does something that they believe to be not good for them. Even suicide, the person is convinced that it's good for them. Right. It will stop some pain or relieve some suffering. Or he wouldn't do it. So then with the will, the will has the appetite, which motivates us towards life. That's what an appetite does. The natural appetites are water, food, air, and the sexual appetite. This motivates us towards our individual life, remaining, and the life of the whole of mankind. But when we receive baptism, that's elevated. And everything is elevated to the supernatural order. And so now the motivation in man is to the supernatural order. So he eats the body of Christ, which gives him life. He drinks the blood of Christ, which gives him, satiates, as our Lord said, his desire. He breathes in the life of grace, which is the life of God, through the sacraments and all of that. And then finally, he is regenerated in his baptism by becoming a son of God. And that's fulfilled when he sees God face to face in the beatification. And so there's a lot here to think about, I think, in relationship to men. But the homework for men is you can go online. You can put in all the places where fatherhood or husbands are talked about in Scripture. I would say be cautious in the Old Testament, because the Old Testament foreshadows or makes types of everything in the New. So if you want the practical guide, go to the New. It's all laid out there. And when you do believe that God has revealed this, and you put it into practice, be obedient to him, then it'll all start to be repaired. Your relationship with your wife, your relationship with your children, their relationships will all start to be repaired. They won't be repaired instantly. The redemption, the repair, because that will work through the faith that Christ gave. That's what he came. He came to repair. But if you do it without this church, if you do it without mass, confession, if you do it without the practice of your faith, it won't work. Because that all is coming through. All grace comes through the church. All of this life comes through her. It will work somewhat on a natural level. It'll make things better. But it won't work on the spiritual level. And the spiritual level is the decay that's taking place, not physically. Your children are growing, and they're healthy, and they have things. And it's the spiritual. And so a Catholic man provides for the spiritual and protects the spiritual, defends the spiritual, the souls of their children. They defend their memories and their imaginations and their understandings. They defend their desires and the food and water and all that. And they defend, finally, what St. Thomas puts, is the irascible, the sense of self. So the sense of self, you either think of yourself, know yourself, if you're in sin, to either be an enemy of God, and therefore you're afraid, or a son of God, and therefore you love. So this would be another topic, I think, sometime, would be St. Thomas's understanding of the soul. I have a chart that I write this out so that people, sometimes people are more visible. They understand by vision rather than by hearing. If you want to read St. Thomas, it's about 320 pages. If you trust me to condense it down for you and make it practical, because that's my job. But of course, there's still people that don't trust you. So anyway, that's with all these things. So I don't know about, if you can see that, I'm sorry, my battery is dying. I don't have my plug here. So I just needed to let you know that. I know it's going to tie into this interview, but it's a practical thing. That's fine. Yeah, I had to extend the interview time while you were talking, because we were going to run out of time on Zoom. So I was busy behind the scenes, too. It's okay. So like I said before, I talk a lot, I know. But I hope that, I mean, I really do appreciate the ability to be able to speak to you, and through you to whomever wants this, wants this faith, wants this truth, wants to ponder and think about it, who has the ability to stop and pause and think, discuss whatever, come back. This is what men should be doing in men's groups. Not talking about their experiences with their own understandings, and then getting advice about it, because that forms an opinion. But you can do something like this, stopping and talking about it, and then supporting one another, fathers and sons and friends. This is what men should be doing. And there's a lot here, because it involves the rational, the reason. And so men used to come together in the parlor and talk separate from women who went to the kitchen and talked, right? And those may be stereotypical, but there was a reason. You know, when we went in and talked about emotional things and pretty things and children and all that kind of stuff with their husbands, men went in and talked about world politics and problems, because the reason wants to be able to solve something. And that ultimately comes down to the conflict. Women want to talk about their emotions. Men want to solve that, but women don't want to solve it, right? They're not concerned about solving it. They just want you to hear it. And so men constantly, and I'm doing this all the time too, I'm like, my mind, instead of really listening, I'm like, okay, the solution to that is, and then I tell them that, and then they get angry. I'm like, well, why did you say it if you don't want the solution? Well, I just want you to hear what I have to say. That doesn't make any sense. It makes no sense whatsoever. So if you want to do that, can you talk to the other ladies? You know, and us men will, you know, one really quick little funny thing. We have work days four times a year, and it's always the men, all right? So all the men are invited to come on the Saturday. They know about it beforehand. And I put out a schedule of things that need to be done just to keep things up. You know, all right. So everybody gets here, and it's great. I say, here, can you, yeah, I put out the list. You know, people sign up, what they want to do, everything, all gets full. Well, one of the wives came, because she had to pick up her husband earlier, and she's like, I haven't got a lot of work done. She said, but nobody's talking. And we're like, bingo, we don't need to talk, we're working. Right. And we can't anyway, because we can't focus on two things at once anyway. We can't be talking and working. We've got to pick one. Exactly. And when one of my personers did that, he got hurt. There you go. You know. Serves him right for talking. I also have this little card, and it has this on and off switch, and it says men, and then you turn it around, it's like an airplane, you know, and it says women, right? I mean, we are, we're very simple, on and off. Just the facts, man. You know, and, you know, I need to teach this to people in the confessional, right? So somebody asked me one time, if you were Pope, would you change anything? And I said, yes. I would allow women to confess for their husbands, and husbands for their wives. Oh, boy. Then I get the real story. It's really funny, because sometimes they're coming back to back. Like, a man will come in, and then his wife will come in, over the same thing, and they have a completely different. Right. I'm sure that's interesting. It is. That's another part about being men, is that we need to be reasonable. We need to have that interaction with other men who are reasonable, and not effeminate. We need to have that. It needs to challenge us to grow, to become better. Otherwise, we will continue to fall back, and back, and back. You know, you don't use it, you lose it. So anyway, I encourage that kind of thing to be done. So if I was, I'll go ahead. To talk about truth, and divine revelation, not experience and opinion. That's what I'm trying to do, because the rest of the topics aren't even exciting anymore. Yes, exactly. They're not even fulfilling. I don't even want to talk about them. But so if I tried to summarize everything, the man is a rational creature. Yes. And he is masculine when he is acting rational. Correct. When he is not acting rational, he is not masculine. He is now becoming more feminine or effeminate. Yes. And so the way to be a proper man. Yes. Is to be rational in light of the faith of Christ. Absolutely. Since your reason has been darkened, you need the light of faith shining on it. Yes. So really, then, it's almost impossible to be a good masculine man if you're not a Catholic. Absolutely. You may be on a natural level, where you have all the characteristics, but you cannot be spiritually. No. So yes, that is correct. That's very important, because I think a lot of young Catholic men will get tricked into thinking that if they don't have some of the natural ability that some of the worldly men have, that they're not really men, or they're lesser than those men. But those men are the ones who are not in the faith. They are on their second wife, or whatever all their issues are. And so really, in God's sight, those men are not masculine. No. They're not. They're not defending or protecting. They become effeminate. So they enjoy the company of women more than men. All right. No, it makes sense. A lot of what you talked about here, I have experienced in my marriage, where I wasn't doing the things I needed to be doing. And I was blaming my wife, just like Adam did, right? Just like Adam. God, this woman that you gave me. That was a bad judgment. Exactly. Exactly. It's like, this woman that you gave me, she's the real problem. No. It's because you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. And any time I am really walking in the Catholic faith, the marriage is a lot better. And if I start doing too many things that are—oh, I think we lost Bishop Tetherow. I think his battery died. Well, we will leave it there. Next time, we'll pick up and do some more things. I really appreciate everybody who's watching. Again, this was the first interview that we're going to do. We're going to do more interviews with Bishop Tetherow and others on the Living Echoes podcast. And please continue to enjoy the audiobooks and the other things that we're doing. Please share this interview. I think there was a lot there to digest. But it was kind of a summary of the Catholic faith, too. You got a nice picture of how manhood and masculinity ties in with the Catholic faith, how it all works together, how there's a hierarchy to it. And there's a lot to process there. So I would encourage you to share this with any men that you know. If you're not a man and if you are a man, digest it and take it to heart. So thank you so much for watching, and we will see you next time on the Living Echoes podcast.
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