Ep. 2069 - The Pope MOGS Modernity And Liberalism In France

The Michael Knowles Show

The episode explores the intersection of religious tradition and modern political shifts, beginning with the Pope's visit to France to conde

Key takeaways

• Pope Francis used his visit to France to take aim at the legality of assisted suicide, stating that legal does not equal moral.
• The Pope's mass on the Champs-Élysées featured altar servers with Down syndrome to affirm human dignity.

Main topics

• Pope Francis in France
• Catholicism and Relics

Notable quotes

What is legal is not necessarily moral.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a defense of traditionalism and restraint agains

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Okay, fellas, since Hollywood can't do anything right anymore, we did their job for them. The Daily Wire's newest movie is an ode to the great funny action films of the 80s and 90s. Good guys win, bad guys lose. No one apologizes for it. Check out Run, Hide, Fight Infidels, now streaming only on The Daily Wire. This episode is presented by Good Ranchers, delivering Speaker 2 (0:18) 100 % American meat Speaker 3 (0:19) from American farms and ranches straight to your door. This month, get a free four-pound Angus ground beef bundle with your first order at goodranchers.com slash Knowles. K-N-W-L-E-S, Good Ranchers, American meat delivered. Speaker 2 (0:31) The Pope goes to France to condemn abortion, Speaker 3 (0:34) assisted suicide, and the French Revolution. The Pope also said mass in front of nearly a million people. I guess Catholicism is not totally dead over there in France. Then back to the States, 50,000 people flocked to Missouri to attend mass and venerate the jawbone of a bishop. People clearly, at the very least, have a lot of questions about the Catholic faith. Then the midterm polls turn even worse for Republicans as Darlene Graham finds herself in a statistical tie in South Carolina. But despite all of the winning, The leading left-wing thought leader is furious that Democrats are not leaning into how much they want to trans the kids. So Speaker 2 (1:15) there's still hope. Even though things are looking a little rough right now, there is still hope that the Democrats are Speaker 3 (1:20) simply too crazy to allow themselves to win. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. Speaker 3 (1:42) Welcome back to the show and stop wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Have you seen Run, Hide, Fight Infidels yet? No, you have to watch it because it is somewhat farcical. You know, it's a little, they turn it up to 11. It's very wild. It's madcap. It's extremely entertaining. Only Daily Wire subscribers get to see it. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. But also. It might be a documentary. You could also call Run, Hide, Fight Infidels the Democrat slate for Senate and governors in 2026. You got the jihadis. You have the trans communists. You have the jihadi trans communists. Anyway, so go check it out. DailyWire.com slash subscribe. Really great news. Before we get into all the bad political news, there is some really good stuff. France, speaking of jihadis, France has had some troubles over the last... 250 years. France, the eldest daughter to the church, also the site of one of the worst events in the history of the world, the French Revolution. France, which is just always gumming everything up, spreading secularism, inviting all of the Muslims to come and take over the country. It's just, it's France, you know? I mean, we don't even, we renamed French fries. That's how irritating the French became. And yet, Even in that decadent, liberal, secular, riot-filled, increasingly Islamic France, the Pope shows up. And everybody is filled with awe and wonder. The Pope shows up. He holds an open air mass on the Champs-Élysées. Upwards of a million people showed up. I think it was like 700,000, maybe more people just lining the streets of France. And I know a lot of people are worried because they think that recent pontificates have been kind of liberal. They say, oh, no, the Pope is going to go there and he's just going to talk about how we need to welcome even more Muslim immigrants. And it's going to, we need to have even more liberal policies. That's not what happened. The Pope, I'll just get through a few highlights of this brief official visit to France. The Pope takes square aim at an increasing scourge, a particularly left-wing policy taking over the West, that is, assisted suicide. Speaker 1 (3:51) I know that for some of you, because Speaker 3 (3:58) of particular illness, Speaker 3 (4:02) At times terrible pain, your horizon may appear dark, uncertain and without hope. But no human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity. On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. Speaker 3 (4:31) It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral. Beautiful. He goes on. Those are just the highlights. He's talking about assisted suicide, which now kills 5 % of the Canadians who die every single year in America's evil top hat, which has been legalized throughout Europe and which has led to that story we talked about. Even what was it? four days ago, five days ago, medical assistance in dying, euthanasia against the patient's will. Euthanasia against the patient's will is called murder. You hear these stories out of Amsterdam, out of Belgium, of elderly people, mentally handicapped people, poor people, depressed people who are being killed. They're being killed by the state because the state doesn't want to pay for their medical care. We're told that the left, all they want to do is offer us free health care. The free health care is a lethal injection. And the Pope shows up and the Pope, who has this little bit of a reputation as kind of a liberal, he shows up to France, this seat of European liberalism, and he goes up and he says, enough is enough. This is always immoral, always unacceptable. The intentional killing should never be considered a normal thing. In certain cases, it might be justified, like in the case of a just war, in the case of self-defense, in the case of double effect. This should never be considered normal. And by the way, just because something is legal, according to the civil law, does not mean that it's moral. So he's taking aim at this positivist vision of law that says that if legislators put their name on a piece of paper, that somehow something becomes licit in the true sense. Beautiful, profoundly conservative, deeply Christian, very, very important. He's completely right when it comes to assisted suicide. He then, on the Champs-Élysées, He decides to hold mass. And who does he choose to serve at mass? You know, in the Catholic mass, we have altar servers. He chooses six people with Down syndrome. And why does he choose the people with Down syndrome? One, to affirm the dignity of every human being, including people with mental disabilities. But two, because not only is he taking aim at assisted suicide, killing the elderly mostly, along with the mentally handicapped and the desperate, but he's also taking aim at abortion. Because in France, 96 % of people who have Down syndrome are murdered in the womb by the people, by their mothers, with the sanction of the state. And so what does he do? The Pope shows up to France and he says, I'm choosing the survivors, the people who survived being murdered with Down syndrome. I'm going to choose them to serve at the holy sacrifice of the mass. The most important thing we Catholics believe in the entire world, in the very presence of God himself, body, blood, soul, and divinity in the blessed sacrament. Beautiful, beautiful statement Speaker 2 (7:22) from the Pope. Speaker 3 (7:25) Then, you'd expect in modern France, if you were to show up and do some kind of mosque service, if you were going to play that call to prayer, you'd expect that would fill the Champs-Élysées. But no, no, no. This was mass, and all the people show up. Almost a million people, as far as the eye can see. If the Champs-Élysées were longer, there would have been more people. Then, also on the Champs-Élysées, you have priests, not the pope, but priests just showing up, sitting on little blocks and chairs. hearing confessions and all these people coming up and giving their confessions. Who knows? Some of these people might not have been to confession in months or years or decades for that matter, going up, hearing their confessions, which comes from the gospel when Christ says, I give you the Holy Spirit. You have the power to forgive sins. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Whose sins you retain are retained. This is where the sacrament of confession comes from. And the priests are just... doling out God's grace and God's mercy. In France, you never thought, you didn't think this was possible to happen maybe anywhere in the world today, but especially not in France. And then the cherry on top, cherry on top of the sundae, the priest shows up and he prays at a staircase that commemorates the clergy, the religious martyred by the French Revolution. So this guy, the chutzpah. To show up to France to say your policies are evil, they're completely immoral. I don't care if your legislature passes them. They're completely evil and immoral on abortion, on assisted suicide, not just France, but all of Europe. By the way, your revolution was evil too. which it was. The French Revolution was one of the most evil acts ever in the history of the world. So he goes and he prays at the staircase for the martyrs of the French revolutionaries, those who were martyred by the French revolutionaries, I should say. And the open air mass took place at the Place de la Concorde, which was the site of the executions by guillotine in the French Revolution. When the Catholic monarch, monarchs, the king and the queen, were executed by the liberal revolutionaries. Okay, what do we take from this? Even if you're not Catholic, what do we take from this? I can't help but notice that all of these empires have tried to destroy the church. The French Revolution was fought to destroy the church in no small part. The Ancien Regime, which was taking aim at the monarchy, but also at the church. The people who sat on the right of the National Assembly were the defenders of the monarch and the church. The people who sat on the left of the National Assembly, it's where we get political right and left from, they were the ones who took aim at the monarchy and the church. And after that revolution, almost 250 years later, the revolutionary governments fell and fell and fell. How many republics have we had in France thus far? But the church remains firm. How about the other empires that tried to destroy the church? The Soviet Union and all of the Soviet Union satellites. throughout the 20th century. They tried to destroy not just orthodoxy in Russia, but also the Catholic Church. And guess what? They failed. The Nazis tried to destroy the Catholic Church. They failed. Half a dozen Islamic caliphates over history tried to destroy the Catholic Church. They failed. Revolutionary France, as I mentioned twice, really took aim at the church the first time around and in the Third Republic. All the descendants of all the liberal polities that came about because of the French Revolution. Let's go back a little further. The Roman Empire tried to destroy the Catholic Church. Guess what? The Catholic Church remains. The Roman Empire is long gone. Spanish Republicans, we call them the Republicans. They were the communists in... in Spain that happily Francisco Franco defeated. Those Spanish Republicans were murdering priests, raping nuns, doing all manner of evil, trying to stamp out Catholicism. Guess what? They got stamped out instead. Several English monarchs, Oliver Cromwell, the Mexican revolutionaries, the Italian nationalists, on and on and on and on and on. How many political powers have said, It's over. The church is done. The age of mystery and mysticism and superstition, they call it. That's over. And now we have this enlightened form of government. And guess what? They all met the dust. And the church remains. It's really inspiring stuff. There's a lot of bad politics going on right now. And yet, you look at that and you say, goodness gracious, maybe God actually... does have a hand in history. Maybe he actually controls history. Maybe it's all going to end up all right, despite a lot of trouble in the meantime. Okay. A lot of people have questions about, I mean, because Catholicism is really on the rise in France. Baptisms are way, way up year over year. 35 plus percent increases in baptisms year over year. We're seeing this happen in the United States too, but especially in France. And so in the US, Catholicism also was dominating the headlines last week because of the beatification of Fulton Sheen. I mentioned him at the very end of one of the shows last week, but it's created a lot of chatter on the internet because of one of these kind of weird things that Catholics do and other more traditional flavors of Christianity. But Catholics are really known for it, which is we have relics. So Fulton Sheen was this bishop. He had a TV show, Life is Worth Living. Big, big hit TV show. He was the first televangelist. He died many decades ago, and now he's been beatified. So that's another step on the way to being canonized a saint. And as part of the beatification and the mass and the ceremony, the church showed his jawbone. They took his jawbone from this dead archbishop. And they put it in a reliquary and people venerated this relic. And a lot of modern people say,