/
RSS Feed
Episode Description
With recent statistics pointing to the increase in married couples choosing not to have children, author Tim Carney joins us to discuss his book, Family Unfriendly, which takes a close look at the countless ways American culture has become “a suboptimal habitat for the human family.” Carney traveled the country interviewing families and experts alike to determine why parenting is so difficult today, and why the results are falling so short.
As we wrapped up the Eucharistic Congress last weekend, where 60,000 Catholics gathered for five days of worship and inspiration at the final destination of the Eucharistic Pilgrimage, we visit with FOCUS missionary Anthony Cirillo to talk about the vital work of evangelization, and why it’s especially critical in our digital age.
Father Roger Landry also offers an inspiring homily as we prepare for Grandparents’ Day this weekend.
Bios
Tim Carney is a best-selling American author, newspaper columnist, and senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner. He serves as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC public policy think tank. His 2019 book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, was a Washington Post best seller, and his 2006 work, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, received the 2008 Culture of Enterprise Award. He has been published in the Atlantic, National Review, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on major TV networks. Mr. Carney holds a Bachelor’s Degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis.
Anthony Cirillo serves on the Philanthropy Engagement team for FOCUS, a missional organization that reaches out to middle school and high school aged students to help them find biblically based answers to the big questions of life and form relationships with Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church. He is the senior recruitment manager at the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, and previously served as Team Director for FOCUS Catholic as well as working in the mission field. He earned his Bachelor’s in Psychology from Xavier University. Mr. Cirillo lives with his wife and family in Cincinnati.
Father Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. Father Landry just completed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage this month and joined the historic Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, an event that coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 275 Transcript
| Grazie | Hello friends, and welcome to Conversations with Consequences. And we are the radio show and podcast of the Catholic Association where we aim to change the culture one conversation at a time. You can listen to conversations with consequences on the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network Saturday mornings at 7 a.m. Eastern, or catch the encore at 5 p.m.. They are also on Sirius XM Channel 130. Of course, our radio show is always podcast. Go to the Catholic Association, Dawgs podcasts, or directly to wherever you listen to your podcasts. Welcome back to Conversations with Consequences for this segment. I'm on with the entire Catholic Association team, Ashley Maguire and Maureen Ferguson and Lee Sneed. We're all very excited to talk to our next guest. His name is Tim Carney. He's a father of six. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, where you may have read his work. You're also going to want to read his new book that was just published. It's called Family Unfriendly How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. He went around the country traveling many states. He's going to give us the details, asking families and experts the same two questions Why is parenting so hard now and why are the results so bad? So welcome to the show, Tim. |
| Tim Carney | Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, give. |
| Grazie | Us like an overview of your book. I mentioned that you traveled around and made interviews. |
| Tim Carney | So the few phenomena that really jump out at me, one is just children are more anxious. There's pediatrician groups. All sorts of folks have said there's actually an epidemic of childhood anxiety. Parents are definitely stressed and the birthrate is falling to record lows. And, you know, we're we've had fewer babies almost every year in America for 15 years going on now. And that's through good economic times and bad economic times. And it's up and down the income scale. So to me, that points to a problem in our culture and that that we have a culture that doesn't adequately support families. Now, I'm a guy who thinks that the nuclear family is the most important institution we have, right? I think my job as a dad is up there. It's in my I'm a dad and a husband. That's my main job. But I also know that a nuclear family isn't sufficient to raising kids at a family needs support and that that comes from community institutions, that comes from the broader society to some extent, it comes from government saying family comes first and privileging family over everything else, and we no longer have that. And so that's why young people aren't. So it goes across all aspects of culture, parenting, cultures off the rails like local little leagues get replaced by these intensive, expensive travel leagues. You've got dating and mating culture is is all messed up and 20 year olds aren't getting married. The apps are getting to their brains that bad ideas about sort of against commitment. And ultimately our culture, our cultural values are not consistent with family. The idea of commitment, the idea of laying down your life for other people, the idea that we're supposed to sort of inherit or get a cultural inheritance, that we pass it down to the next generation. A lot of those things seem old fashioned. And so to have a healthy, happy family, you need to be kind of countercultural. You need to not do the all the super helicopter parenting. You need to embed yourself in a tightly knit community and that's just less and less common in the US. |
| Ashley | Tim, this is Ashley. I loved your story, talking about embedding yourself in a tightly knit community of the Friday night sports thing where you just found kids playing and then everybody else, I think, as you put it, just doing what they want. And I laughed because we found a similar thing in our little neighborhood where we moved to where when I first went to our Friday Night Lights, which is also on the blacktop turf at our church, I couldn't believe how kids were just like rolling around on the side. The parents had koozies and it was so much fun and it was almost like you could hear the pressure bells in the in the area release. And when we first moved to the neighborhood, I was so used to living in D.C. that I would sort of send my kids on recon missions to when they saw kids walking alone. I was like, No, they are not. Because I was scared for my kids safety. But I was worried about parents getting the cop, you know, calling the cops. Yes, leading to my question. I know people who actually had CPS called on them for letting their children, who are at least seven, eight, nine play alone, unsupervised in their front yard. So how did you achieve this community and what can parents do who just don't have access to something like that and have to live in fear of, you know, the CPS phone call for letting their kids be kids? |
| Tim Carney | It's definitely a question. And so that's why some of what I do in the book is so is kind of point towards parenting strategies and approaches. But a lot of it ultimately, I know has to be cultural. We need to have a culture that accepts more free range parenting. So one thing is that parents can absolutely lead the other kids in your neighborhood that are set to walk free, to walk around. That made it easier for you to say, okay, this is what I wanted. I wanted my kids will walk around and these other kids are setting this norm that does that. And in addition, So I used to live in Silver Spring, Maryland, where free range parents would get in trouble with with the cops. But at our local playground, I actually had the opposite experience where this one mother emailed me. She was like, So I keep meeting your kids at the playground. And I looked up. I found your email address on the neighborhood listserv and I just want to reach out to you. Your kids are really nice and I think it's great that you send them there unattended. She wanted me to like, hold her hand to become more free range. So that's going to be part of it is if it's just a cultural aspect, you can lead a community towards being more free range. But in some places they had to pass actual laws in some places to make it legal. So Utah passed a free range parenting law and that's what you might need in a place like Maryland. |
| Grazie | But Tim, explain for our listeners what's the connection between free range parenting and easier parenting? Because maybe that's not so obvious. |
| Tim Carney | Yeah, So the story I tell in the book is at a family fish fry when back when we lived, St Andrews was our parish in Silver Spring and I was talking to the pastor and he was saying, or the younger prince, actually he was saying how a lot of the things that parents used to do or have been to replace. And so feeding the poor is done by the county government and thus the CIO sports get replaced by these intensive elite sports, especially in Montgomery County, Maryland, and so he says, what should we be doing? What are the unmet needs of the people in the at this fish fry in this parish? And I said, to be honest, Father Bill, what we need is a place to bring our kids and ignore them while they run around. And that's the Friday night tee ball, which is really just like an excuse for letting the families run around, but also besides an actual outing, an actual neighborhood, when kids are free to roam the neighborhood, when there are sidewalks, when they don't get arrested by CPS for it, then the kids are healthier and happier and the parents get to relax. So first, on the kids front, the American the Pediatrics Journal recently put out an op ed saying that the rise in childhood anxiety is due to the fact that kids every minute as planned, that they don't get independent, play free from the supervision of adults. That makes their childhood less fun and makes them less able to come up with to, you know, to to deal with their own problems. |
| Grazie | So they are lacking inner resources. |
| Tim Carney | Yes. But when I say at the end of the the preface is spending every minute supervising, planning, driving and fretting and spending every dime on training, enriching and keeping kids busy isn't high quality parenting. It's just following the dumb rules of a family unfriendly culture. So, dear reader, please send the kids outside, grab a drink, and don't stop reading until someone comes back starving or bleeding. You know what I'm trying to do is evoke. |
| Ashley | Sunny. |
| Tim Carney | Evoke the experience that a lot of us had as kids of like getting kicked out and the door getting locked, and maybe we didn't like it at the time, but it definitely made us better. |
| Ashley | We definitely never came home until it was getting dark in my neighborhood and Reston, Virginia, all five of us, we would wander in the woods and play kickball in the neighborhoods. Never came home until it started getting dark. So, Tim, in your book, you you explore a lot of reasons for the baby bust and one of the obvious reasons is that fewer people are getting married or if they're getting married, they're getting married later. So of course, marriage delayed means children delayed means fewer children, of course. But you go all the way back and you mention this when you were giving us the overview of the book, the dating market, the dating culture, and amplified dating, and just how weird and distorted the dating culture has become such that young men are even afraid to ask a young woman out. So tell us. Share with us more what you talk about in the book on that point. |
| Tim Carney | Theoretically, dating apps should have made dating easier because they clear up the questions you know that all of us wrestled with when we were teens. College kids, young adult is like, I like him, does he like me? Yada, yada. So you get the double secret consent by the swiping on the app. So you're only connecting with people where you mutually have expressed interest. One of the things that I found excuse me, one of the things I found is that having that kind of double secret consent has programed people to the point where they think nobody's even allowed to sort of hit on me or ask me out unless I've given them permission to do it, which is the opposite, which would be totally illogical in a in an unamplified dating market because how are you supposed to find out if somebody likes you without talking to them, flirting with them, asking them out? But so now there are multiple polls that show lots of people think it's just inappropriate to ask somebody out. And that dating the friend of your friends, well, that's perilous because then if it goes wrong, then it creates all sorts of problems. But of course, friends of friends is the best possible way to meet somebody, in my opinion. And then there's even this story of this guy, Simon, who played on a coed volleyball team. And he really liked this girl on his volleyball team. He was afraid to ask her out because he thought it would be inappropriate. It would somehow be abusing the volleyball team connection to ask out a girl. And I was just thinking the point of a coed volleyball team is for you to meet somebody of the opposite sex because it's not a volume. |
| Ashley | And and not to mention that any sort of office romance now is completely verboten. And of course, that used to be a very natural place to get to know someone, meet them. You know, it's the stuff of sitcoms, but now it's completely foreboding. |
| Tim Carney | Yeah. And then so that moving, dating out of normal human interactions, out of circles, of friendships, out of social life into its own thing that's mediated through this app that's actually led to less dating, less marriage and later marriage. One of the questions I ask in the book is how can we have a sex recession given the sexual revolution? And I say, well, I think that actually the sexual the sexual revolution has led to this case where dating is scarier for women because it's just more assumed that, you know, first date casual sex is going to happen and who knows how that's going to go. And second, it's more terrifying for men to ask a girl out, because there, you know, one in six women said that that would be sexual harassment and then it turns young people into more perfectionists because there's this illusion of an infinite number of people out there. And so what we've got is not a world where everybody's free and happy and free of all the old fashioned rules, but we're more people are afraid and alone. |
| Ashley | Tim, do you find that this is Lee, by the way, people especially like in Catholic young adult communities and cities like D.C., are so worried about just like going out for coffee or ice cream or something completely innocuous, even if it's not going to be a total love connection. And you're not automatically like by the second date, discerning marriage and family. I mean, I feel like there's so many you know, I think there are people who are sort of rebelling against this anti-marriage culture, but it's almost going a step too far where they're missing sort of just the joys of getting to know the opposite sex by, you know, like I said, like having an ice cream, a drink, a coffee, you know, roaming through a bookstore. If there are books left like that kind of thing, like they're are they you know, are they jumping ahead to like, okay, is this marriage, is this marriage material or are we going to you know, we want the same things, You know, where do you fall on the spectrum of Catholicity? What about that? |
| Tim Carney | Well, I have this one experience. This is only obliquely answering your question because I haven't interrogated interrogator. Now I will start interrogating all the young reporters at the Examiner and research assistants at AEI about this. But I, I had this experience where I spoke at a Knights of Columbus chapter and the one guy who was about 30 came up to me afterwards, and he said, well, isn't the problem that women are all getting educated? I said, Well, I wouldn't exactly put it. And he cut me off. And he says, Because if I marry a girl and she has a master's degree, I then have to pay off all the debt that she incurred to do that. And that's just not appealing. And I just thought, wow. And I just said, I think you need to rethink what you want in a life. And if you have to pay off the debt, man up and do it. Okay. And I said, Well, but it would be a workplace education. You think it would be a worthless education for somebody. You want to be the mother of your child to have? Anyway, my point was that this was a guy who his rebellion against our current culture had led him into an almost misogynistic view. And it was a sort of Catholic version of what I see as this problem that, you know, where Andrew Tate, who is this horrible online influence or has this appeal to young men who just what they hear from their public schools is, well, you really should be more like women. You need to be feminized. All masculinity is toxic and so you see these two extremes. And I think that's absolutely deadly. If men are being pulled, young men are being pulled towards, you know, a violent sort of misogyny as the only option to being feminized. And that's one of the reasons I try to lay out a positive vision, which is, B, to use some Internet terms, a life guy and a proud dad of your your large adult sons. These are ways that people make fun of people like me on Twitter for, you know, gushing over our wife or bragging about our kids on online is to say, well, you know, these guys are just showing off. You know, we should have more guys who base their identity on being dads. The more of that that's out there, the more deadliness, as I put it, the more than that will be an actual positive role model. That's neither. You should be more like women or you should adopt this sort of misogynistic view. |
| Ashley | Yeah, Carter is actually my husband has actually been trolled online for referring to me as his bride, which I don't. Why do people even care? But they were really upset that, like a bride is a one time thing and you're done. But, you know. |
| Tim Carney | It's now I'm going to use that every time. |
| Ashley | That every time. Yes. That's a he does, too. He really he makes up occasions to use it. Now. |
| Grazie | Tim, why should people care in general that that there is a baby bust, that there's a demographic cratering going on? Because I find that a lot of people are not paying attention. And when you pointed out to them, they don't get the point. What's the. |
| Tim Carney | Point? And when you're when you're a guy, when you're a man like me, like saying, what is this, some Handmaid's Tale stuff? This is kind of creepy. I've repeatedly gotten that like, this is creepy, that you're caring about women's issues Now. First of all, having kids is not just a woman's issue. It takes two to tango. And and and dads should be involved in raising their kids. But second of all, there's tons of reasons. So the economic one is kind of the easiest one. We already have fewer children in America than we did ten years ago. The working age population is flatlining. And so in 20 years we could have a shrinking population of people who could possibly be working. And so that will just further the spiral. And that's what's happening in Japan and South Korea right now. And so what that means is there's fewer people to do productive work while there are more retirees than ever. So all your retirement savings are worth nothing. If there's nobody who answers a call when you, you know, on your pipes brings a leak and you need a plumber. But that's the economic reason. And to me, that's almost the least interesting. More importantly, babies and children make the world happier. And it was kind of funny. I found myself digging through all these papers, sort of establishing how people are more hopeful when children are around in the short term, In the medium term. In the long term, how happier people are more likely to have kids younger. And I realized I was looking for social science to prove that babies make us happy, which is actually an obvious thing to anybody who's experience life like that. But more importantly, I think the baby bust reflects a real cultural sickness. I think it reflects something deeper that's wrong with us. And in the last chapter of the book, I call it civilizational sadness, a belief that we're actually not good. In the second to last chapter, I talk about a culture of sterility, a real desire to eliminate risk from your life, which then leads to this total isolation of saying, well, other people's risk commitment is risk. Relationships are risk. I'm going to play it safe and just have transactions, just have one offs, just sort of live my life in the in the marketplace instead of in a in a thriving, life filled environment. And so those are the two cultural maladies that I think underlying our baby. |
| Grazie | Bust and replacing children with things like dogs. Right. |
| Tim Carney | So I'm I'm the most pro dog guy who's ever written a book about the baby bust. I love dogs. But yes, you're exactly right. There is this idea that the word for baby, though, still drives me crazy. People describe their dogs as like so or my babies just flesh baby or whatever. It's physical. |
| Ashley | Babies. |
| Grazie | When you take your dog to the vet, the vet, they're like, You're your dog. Your little girl is great. She's here. They're like, No, that's not my daughter. Not my girl. It's very annoying. And, you know, there's hey, hey, I is going to I'm sure is going to be wanting to replace children with young people. You know, they fake little ones that interact with you. |
| Grazie | That's sort of scary. |
| Tim Carney | Absolutely. And then one guy said to me, one bartender, when I told them what I was riding on, he said, none of my friends want a girlfriend because they say they can get from their phone anything they could get from a girlfriend. |
| Ashley | Wow. well, yak, yak, yak, well, she. |
| Grazie | But the phone won't nag you and nagging is what makes you straighten up and fly, right? |
| Ashley | Yeah. |
| Tim Carney | I did not sign up for this right now. Yeah. |
| Ashley | Tim, you talk about one of my favorite topics, which is another reason I think we have a baby bust, which is the way we've made motherhood and pregnancy so miserable and so controlled. And I laughed when I when you reminded me of the pregnancy rules because I've long since stopped paying attention to them. But I knew reminded me of when I was pregnant with my second how in one meal I managed to break three of them by having wine, raw cheese and tartar and I thought, I can do a citizen's arrest on me. But. But the truth. And then you pointed to an interesting statistic that I hadn't read before, which is, you know, not only do we bury women, pregnant women alive with this litany of really nonsensical rules, but but then we we've made motherhood the expectations and burdens of motherhood greater. And you point out the fact that women today, even though men are stepping up more than ever, the women are still, despite working outside the home more than ever, spending more time, mothering and so talk to us about that and how, you know, that further sort of deters people from being parents. |
| Tim Carney | Yeah. So this absolutely becomes this slog. And I was just actually thinking about the fact that a lot of people who say, I can never have kids, it's it's way too difficult. One of the things is they they somehow absorbed all of the while you're pregnant, you can eat cold cuts, don't touch dirt because a cat might have walked there, etc. All that stuff never, never touch you never have a single drink. And so they've absorbed that app and then they've also absorbed the idea of intensive parenting. And so the stat was that men since 1975 have doubled. So what they do is they measure how much of your week are you just doing parental duties. So that should be helping your kids with a homework, getting them dress. I imagine that a lot of it is in the winter, the 10 hours it takes to put on snow boots on a three year old. And so it's men have doubled the amount of time that they spend doing just parenting. And women, of course, since 1975 have been working outside of the home a lot more. Yet today's mothers spend 50% more time on just parenting tasks every week than their grandmother said in 1975. And so that reflects this. Again, this idea that parenting becomes this horrible, all consuming thing. And I just thought of it again today because as we're talking, new reports are coming about about the school closures during COVID and that kind of thing. And the same attacks on people like me who objected to the schools saying close is, I'm sorry that you have to spend time with your kids. you're admitting that you spending time with your kids is harming them. And it has to be from childless people, I assume, who make those obnoxious comments, because what they're imagining parenting is, is 172 hours a week of just you helicoptering and tying the shoes of this little one. They're not imagining that you're hanging out with other adults in a backyard barbecue with all the kids running around. They're not imagining that you're letting the kids run free. And so there is this myth, I assume, of people who don't have kids that you're supposed to do 24 seven parenting. |
| Ashley | Okay, Tim, this is Maureen again. So what? So what works? What are some of the solutions to encourage people to have more babies? And it seems like in the book you talk about sort of the cultural solutions, which maybe you could summarize by saying lighten up, lighten up, you know, enjoy kids, realize that they're, you know, that babies bring happiness, but then there are the policy solutions. So you have a very interesting discussion about feminist solutions. Work is there's a really interesting section of the book on that. And you talk about when you subsidize a thing, you'll get more of that thing. So there's the idea of essentially paying people to have kids. And I found your example of what they do in France to be super interesting and you say that's effective. So I'd love to hear more about that. But then you also say that the indirect subsidies don't seem to work. If you're subsidizing daycare, you're really subsidizing more work and playing into that idea of work at home. So tell us more about that. |
| Tim Carney | Yeah, So lots of so Europe started confronting its baby bust long before we did. I feel like it's just in the last two years that you've had and The New York Times has actually led the way on this. And their readers get really angry at the suggestion that we shouldn't be depopulating the planet. But Europe has been wrestling with their falling birthrates for about a decade or more, and a lot of the countries put into place all sorts of because they're more democratic socialist, all sorts of big government programs that are supposed to support family. What a lot of the Nordic countries did what I called they attempted. Second feminism are feminist fecundity. Fecundity, of course, meaning, you know, making bigger families, having more kids. And so they thought that big, generous paid leave and lots of subsidies for daycare would make the difference. And in the very short term, it did lead to a little uptick in babies. But then in the long run, it seems to have led to a decreasing birthrate in those countries and an increase in how people there rate the importance of work or his family. So a subsidy of daycare, There's a reason. I mean, this is it's like a gift to the Chamber of Commerce. It's telling people, okay, don't worry about your kids where the market's taking care of your kids. You just worry about your job. So that is the worst possible thing if you're trying to help people build bigger families. This is subsidized daycare. What France does and France has the highest birthrate in all of Europe. And it's not just because of immigration. Their native born have 1.8 babies. Well, Europe is 1.5. The U.S. is 1.6, 1.7. And so they throw a ton of money at parents. You have money, a baby bonus, a check. When your baby's born, you have a monthly allowance. They also pay what they call paid leave or, you know, maternity paternity leave. But it ends up being basically a stay at home mom benefit for up to the first three years before the subsidized preschool kicks in. And so they actually have had success and they what shows is that a vast majority of mothers, when they have the option to they stay at home rather than go back into the workplace, even though they would have free daycare at age is one and two. But the problem is they spend a huge, huge amount of their GDP on this. And again, they take themselves up from 1.5 to 1.8 and so massive spending can work. It was directly to the parents, but it's super expensive. And if it doesn't change your culture, it's only going to do so much well term. |
| Grazie | I think books like yours are what can actually change the culture by making people understand the root of of where this terrible idea that children are just burdens and they're too difficult to have is coming from. Right. So thank you for joining us. And the book is Family Unfriendly How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Tim Carney. And thanks for being with us. |
| Tim Carney | Thank you very much for having me. |
| Grazie | Welcome back to Conversations with Consequences. I'm your host is Dr. Gracie Christie, and we're delighted to have with us a focus missionary, Anthony Cirillo. he's at the University of Cincinnati working with some wonderful Catholic students there. Welcome to the show, Anthony. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Thanks for having me, Doctor. |
| Grazie | Maybe a lot of our listeners know what focus is, but maybe some don't. So can you explain to us what focus is? |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, absolutely. So Focus stands for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students and I'm a full time Catholic missionary to college students, and I serve on one campus at the University of Cincinnati. And we actually serve over 160 campuses around the US and a few in Europe. |
| Grazie | So 160, a little. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Bit more than. |
| Grazie | That. Now, you say you're a missionary, wear a robe, or do you look like everyone else? |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, I just wear rags. No, I look very much like everybody else. I'm actually married. I have three children. I'm 28 years old. I'm just a layperson fully on mission for these students. I'm a little bit older for our missionaries at this point because I've been doing this for four or seven years. But it's very huge blessing and it's been an amazing way that the Lord used me and worked in my life as well. |
| Grazie | So this is a tremendous commitment for a young married man with three children. |
| Anthony Cirillo | It sure is. Yeah. But we eased our way in. I started off not married and got married my time as a missionary, and we started our family on mission and it's not what I would have sketched out, but boy, the Lord has provided and he's really used our vocation as well and leverage that in the mission on campus. So better than I could have ever imagined. |
| Grazie | Wow. You know your life that the way that you're living it must be such a testament to the students that you evangelize. |
| Anthony Cirillo | I certainly hope so. My wife as well. It's a joy to be able to to bring in college students into our home. They get to see me, you know, to see the bread and butter things that we do. Our we mentor students, we lead Bible studies. We meet students where they're on campus. When I have Bible study, you know, it's so often over at my home, in my living room, usually, you know, one of them for the past couple of years is right after I put my kids to bed, I kind of roll out and roll out. I put my kids to bed and come downstairs. And usually there's a group of guys there on a Thursday night ready to read the Bible and pray together. |
| Grazie | What kind of hunger do you feel on campus amongst young people for God? |
| Anthony Cirillo | I think there's a hunger for for something true, for something that the matters I think there is I think everyone has a hunger for God in some way, but we try to fill it in many other ways, especially into the college campus. You know, there's just, you know, many different stereotypes, things that we try to fill that that God sized hole with, you know, we're hungry for for that living water Jesus talks about in John chapter four. But a lot of the students, you know, might be filling it with something else, whether that's alcohol, drugs, sex or even just like an addiction to success. But it is I think it is all pointing to wanting something more, wanting something that that's going to persist forever, that's going to matter. Desire for for intimate relationships. And you see how that the desire for intimacy can get skewed, can draw people to things that are not good or twisted. |
| Grazie | What about a desire for things that are wholesome and pure in a world that doesn't doesn't give us, doesn't reflect that back to us? |
| Anthony Cirillo | I think that is a desire deep down what I've found on campus with many people we'll talk about, say, relationships, because when you see those words, I think about like dating relationships, for instance. And I think there is the desire for for young people to have this. Yeah, that is wholesome, pure, true love. In pursuit of that, they might be settling for less, whether that's a hookup culture that's settling for, you know, that boyfriend or girlfriend that they just think, you know, maybe they'll just change or I can change them. And, you know, they take all these different concessions. But I think deep down there is that a desire for something good, true beautiful, which is comes from our creator, from God. And I think, you know, from my vocation searing as a married missionary, not that we are by no means a perfect family. No, but to show the students a little bit of our vocation, whether it's inviting them over for dinner or later tonight, I have people over to pray the rosary. We used to like a rosary, like a meditation on Tuesday nights. Now they get to, you know, come into our messy house, which we try to clean up. But, you know, with three small children, we don't maybe don't get everything picked up. We invite them into that. And, you know, my wife will pray the rosary with us and so they can kind of see, wow, this is a these are, you know, some 28 year olds who have kids and are praying the rosary is, you know, college students and sharing, you know, life with college students so we can kind of show them, I think sometimes like it is possible to be in a faithful marriage with children. That can be stressful, it can be hard, but it's really, really beautiful. |
| Grazie | So that's a great testament, a great witness that you give to young people to invite them into your home and see a young marriage and a young united marriage, a marriage united around God. And when so many young people, as we know, come from broken homes, they've never had that model to aspire to. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, certainly. I mean, we've we've just seen it. And even just other missionaries, you know, we've had at a time a couple of years ago, and she became my teammate right after we got married. And I remember she asked my wife at a dinner early in the year, you know, we've been married only a few months. She said. She's like, How are you guys married? And I'm over here. This sounds like much like I know I married up. I felt like, ooh, that really stung. And, and what actually the back story to that was, was she had come from a, you know, a tough, tough home environment, you know, where where there was a the marriage ended, you know, there was a divorce. And so she wasn't asking how did this guy, you know, get married this gorgeous, amazing woman so much as it was? How are you actually living this vocation? I don't think possible. And I do remember, thanks to God, you know, two years later, and this is a teammate who, you know, we spent a lot of time with together. She was there when our oldest was born, just in the hospital back in those pre-COVID days where you could have a bunch of people. But I remember my teammate, you know, at the end of her time, and we were on our team together for two years. She remarks that, you know, now that she saw that location as possible and the location of marriage is possible and attractive. And now I think she only got married. Yeah, but she's engaged and is just like, wow, we got to play a little bit of a role there that the Lord used us. We didn't you know, we didn't sketch it out like, we're going to make sure we invest in her and she'll have this, you know, conversion or something necessarily, but we're going to love her and invite her into our home life. And then the Lord did the heavy lifting. So it was awesome. |
| Grazie | I remember being a college student and I remember being very lonely sometimes. And my own children who've gone to college or are in college now talk about their loneliness. How big a factor do you think loneliness is in college students lives? |
| Anthony Cirillo | I think it's huge. I mean, especially even before COVID, you know, even before this, the social isolation, I think there's like something in the air that they're breathing that's like, if I don't live a certain way, if I'm not going out with everybody, if I'm at my in my room alone on a Friday night, that is the worst thing ever. And I think there's kind of can be this illusion that in order to have friends in college, you have to partake in certain activities, will say that's drugs, alcohol, going out, you know, and I think like a joy in part of my job is is showing the student like, hey, this is connecting people I love connect really is showing that student is now got anything you Friday night like I guess I have no other choice but to either sit in my room and twiddling my thumbs or go hit the bars with my fake ID and say, Actually, you know what? We actually are trying to create something different over here that's attractive and it doesn't just have drug sex and alcohol. You know, that's been that's been another just joy where it's like you can live fully alive without these substances. And yeah, sure, like students who are of age. Let's talk about how we can have a drink and not get drunk and what is sobriety actually mean or what is chastity actually mean? Like, we can really lean into those conversations, but yeah, totally. The college campus can be this place where everybody is. I'm surrounded by people, but I feel so alone. There can be many different reasons to that. |
| Grazie | And many college campuses have Catholic student centers. Newman Centers. Do you work with them or is this a completely separate thing, or do you inhabit separate areas of of that campus Catholic life? |
| Anthony Cirillo | That's a that's a great question. The way that we work with with focus is we always want to partner with that campus ministry on the ground. We don't want to create a separate thing we want to add and like supplement what they have going on and just make it better. We want to like broaden their reach. Hopefully, you know, we are we aren't going to create events that are like going to rival the Newman Center's events, but we might we also want to bring people to the Newman Center and bring them to Mass. And maybe we also want to, like, make some of those events better sometimes. Maybe there's like a suggestion of missionary makes it, Hey, like we thought about doing this, maybe this could help us reach more people on campus. So we very much want to come in and respect and honor what's been going on at the Newman Center and then say, how can we help? How can we add here? Never want to become like like a competitor. |
| Grazie | If you're just joining, we're talking with Anthony Cirillo. He's a focus missionary at the University of Cincinnati. Anthony, recently, over 175 students from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati attended seek 21. I know that Father Mike Schmidt, who was a guest with us, recently, gave an amazing message. How did it go over this year with the pandemic and the change that you had? I know that the format had to change significantly. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah. I mean, so C 21 if we rewind pre-COVID, C 21 was going to be in Saint Louis and we were hoping to have, you know, gosh, probably close to 30,000 people together over the New Year in an end, 2021. But obviously COVID changed that. Yeah, thanks to you guys. Like you said, we we actually have three campuses with focus in the archdiocese here and through some planning and some creative planning in collaboration with the archdiocese, we were able to kind of do a remote C 21 where C 21 this year was anyone could go around the globe because it was virtual. But we said, we want to create that conference experience as best we can in the safest way we can. We want to create that in Cincinnati for our students. And by the grace of God, we had 175 students from Cincinnati coming together from Mass to watch different keynotes to stream them for us, you know, in particular our campus, the University of Cincinnati. We actually had an opening night at a local brewery like a Catholic brewery down the street, and we just partnered with them and like, can we stream this and then have our people come here? And in the Humble Monk brewery sector in Cincinnati, check out Humble Monks. Really, really good. So yeah, we made the best of it. And it was it was a lot to pull together, but it was extremely enjoyable. And students who would not have maybe traveled with us to Saint Louis to go to like a normal Sikh in the past year, they were like, Well, I can stay in Cincinnati, I can pay to go to this. And then we're going to go to this brewery one night for the keynotes. You know, we're watching Sister Miriam and Bishop Baron is, you know, they're being streamed up on the wall of this brewery and we are hanging out, having pizza and you know, people are having beers. |
| Grazie | How much fun? |
| Anthony Cirillo | It was a lot of fun. Yeah. We're we're just grateful that, you know, we had so much support from our local supporters and from from the bishop and from our chaplains, too, to pull something off that was really special. One of the other highlights of it is we had an adoration night. So usually Sikh at the Sikh conferences, they're usually every year and they're usually in one location. And then everyone from around the country gathers together. You have these masses with 10,000 college students or 20,000 college students at mass together in one spot. And we'll also have these adoration nights where it's, you know, adoration and then confession being offered. And usually, you know, you're in a huge conference center and thousands of people are in adoration together in front of our Lord. We couldn't quite do that. But we had we actually had a downtown here at the cathedral. We were able to rally, you know, local priests and say, hey, we got, you know, hopefully 200 students coming in. We'd love for everyone to be able to go to confession that night. So we were with our chaplains. We rallied, you know, like 15 priests. And then, you know, all these students could go to confession. And some of them some of them went for the first time. Some of them went to adoration for the first time. And I was like, what a gift. You know, these sacraments are in our face. And it's, you know, I get to introduce students to the sacraments. I get to help them, you know, find the Lord in these ways. It's a joy. |
| Grazie | People who are that age go to college. They're like sponges. They're at the age where you are ready to change and grow and become how wonderful that they have people like you helping them to grow and change and become more like Christ. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, I hope that's that's all that we want these. |
| Grazie | Days of cancel culture and ideological division and political division. Have you felt that that things got a little dicey on the ground at the University of Cincinnati, or do you always feel that you operating in a in a welcoming space? |
| Anthony Cirillo | That's a great question. I think with COVID, some of there's like places where we would face outright opposition on a public university, just like students aren't really there right now. So whether that's like a here we have online classes and you know, a lot of people aren't just walking around outside, even though it's a gorgeous day, it's just not as much like foot traffic on campus. And that would be where we sometimes would run into those, you know, more like aggressors, like atheists or things like that. I'd say here, you know, students overall are really open to talking, really open to conversation. A lot of people were raised Catholic. So I think it's a great opportunity. You know, we talk about like the new evangelization. It's really that evangelization of areas that had been evangelize. John Paul talks about that. So yeah, so people are really open. Yeah, we haven't actually faced like a ton of like aggressive opposition. However, there is like a lot of people just don't care, you know, it's just, yeah, whatever. You know, I'll do that later. You know, I think relativism is still just so rampant. It's like, that's great. That's your truth. yeah. No, it's my truth. And, and, you know, it's sometimes just people don't even want to really talk about that is just kind of a lazy like, Yeah, you know, you get your opinion. I got mine leave me alone. You know? So some. |
| Grazie | Things. |
| Anthony Cirillo | I wish I would just say. I wish we had more of the people that are like, Hey, I'm going to plant my feet in the ground and I'm going to push against you and say, Hey, you're absolutely wrong. And I'd rather have that discussion than the like, like, whatever you believe that. I believe that. |
| Grazie | I agree. Right. Because it's in the discussion and the dialog that that you can open minds. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, exactly. Exactly. |
| Grazie | And hearts, of course. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah. You know, you just let the Lord come into that and just through friendship and, and charity, hopefully that's a powerful witness and, and then yeah, if you, if you have that opportunity like logically try to walk through a few things with people, that's great. But usually takes it takes a while. It's not one conversation as I'm sure you know. |
| Grazie | Anthony people who are listening, who maybe have a kid in college, how do they find out more about focus? How can they point people towards you? And also before before we get off, I want to hear about how you're funded and how we can help you. |
| Anthony Cirillo | sure. Yeah. Thanks. So I'd say if. Yeah, if you want to learn more about focus I would just go to WW w dot focus dot org f0cus dot org and. You can learn a lot about the campuses we serve. There's a tab that says find a campus and you can just basically search by state for a campus that we serve that if you are searching and you don't see that campus that maybe your child or grandchild is going to, There's another resource called the digital campus, which is like we have missionaries in Denver and across the country that will invest in students digitally and just reach out to them and mentor them from a distance. |
| Grazie | that's great. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yeah, it's it's amazing. I mean, we've yeah, there's been so many opportunities to just try to innovate. And I think COVID, too, has just pushed the envelope on innovating in that digital space. Very true. Yeah. And I'd say too, like if you also see a campus, you don't see your campus on there, start praying that, you know, we get to that campus or you know, if you have a connection to the campus or a connection somewhere like ask the question, Hey, look, I heard about this thing. Focus. Like, why doesn't this university have it? Like maybe knock on a door and ask the question? Yeah, that's been that's how I'm here at Cincinnati. It is a whole other story. |
| Grazie | And how can how can people donate to this great cause? Because I'm assuming I'm assuming this is the kept alive on donations and people being generous all across the country. |
| Anthony Cirillo | 100%. I mean we we I would say I don't just like I thrive on support research. We don't only survive. We want to thrive on the support. That's that's really what that looks like for every missionary is a team of dozens of individuals and families who are praying for that missionary and financially giving to support the whole budget of that missionary, the salary and then all the stuff that they need to buy on campus or everything. It's everything. So the way that you can support a missionary is you could also just go to give like focus dot org and then you could just say find a missionary and then if you know a missionary or you can look up me for instance, just Anthony Cirillo, CAIR, ILO, we have all of our support pages and you can make like a special gift or like a monthly gift to fuel our if you even have a campus near you say you know you have that a child or grandchild that's going to campus, you know, nearby and you want to support that team, you can look up that campus and there's even a way to give to a particular like team through our website focus dot org. So that's pray for us and then like give and then spread the word because so many people don't know that we're on 160 campuses. They don't know that we have over 800 missionaries serving on those campuses, that it's really in some some areas of the country. Focus is one of the best kept secrets of the church. I'm a little biased, you know, being a on campus missionary. |
| Grazie | But but Anthony Anthony, I'm 100% sure that you're doing tremendous work and exactly where you need to be, which is with the with the youth, the future of our country, the future of our faith. How wonderful that people like you are available for them. And I and I urge my listeners go to focus, talk and donate, find Anthony Cirillo or one of his brother missionaries or sister missionaries that you have. You have to interact. |
| Anthony Cirillo | Yes, men and women. Yet each team is about two men and two women, usually. |
| Grazie | wonderful. So please go to focus dot org and help these wonderful young people out. Thank you Anthony for joining us. |
| Anthony Cirillo | You very much. Dr.. |
| Grazie | And now, Father Roger Landry offers us, as is customary, a short and inspiring homily to prepare us for this Sunday's gospel. |
| Fr. Landry | This is Father Roger Landry, and it's a privilege for me to be with you as. We enter into the consequential conversation. The reason Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, last Sunday, as you remember, we concluded the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years, in the first national Eucharistic pilgrimage in the history of the church. This Sunday at Mass, we begin almost on divine cue, a multi-week journey as Jesus seeks to lead us more deeply into the mystery of His life, giving love in the Holy Eucharist that the pilgrimage, the Congress and the whole Eucharistic revival are trying to catalyze. The church has been focusing at Sunday mass this year, as we do every third year on the Gospel of Saint Mark. We continue chapter by chapter in this progression. We would have tackled this week St Mark's version of the miracle of the multiple alone, the only miracle of Jesus recounted in all four Gospels. But the church substitutes for us here St John's account of the same miracle because Saint John shows how Jesus used it as the launching pad for a long homily on the Eucharist, which will occupy our thoughts over the next five weeks. The miracle of the multiplication, loaves and fish was true miracle something that happened in Capernaum during the time of the Passover one year before the Last Supper. But Jesus used this miracle as a sign of what He was intending to do for us in the Eucharist. For the next several weeks. We will therefore providentially deepen our understanding of Jesus self gift in the Holy Eucharist. Today, we'll focus on the miracles of the multiplication of loaves and fish itself. This miracle loaves and fish teaches us very clearly about how God generally works and what He expects of us. When Jesus saw the FEMA sprouts, it could have easily worked a miracle from scratch. He created the heavens and earth out of nothing. Who fed the Israelites in the desert with miraculous manna and quails from heaven could have easily satiated the hungry crowd ex nihilo from nothing. He didn't need human or material assistance. But that isn't the way he acted. He first asked his disciples what their resources were. Where are we to buy bread for all these people to eat? Philip replied that not even six months wages, say $25,000 by today's standards, would have been enough to feed the crowd of about 5000 people. The only one who had anything was a young boy who had five loaves and two fish food. That wouldn't be enough to feed a typical family. Not to mention a strapping young lesson the Lord started with the young boy's generosity, even though, strictly speaking, he didn't need anything to work a miracle. He wanted to involve the boy, the apostles in the crowd. He wanted to start with what the people had and bring it to completion. This is the way God generally operates with us. He could choose to do everything himself, but he knows that that wouldn't be ultimately good for us. He could, just like a parent, often gives a child a project and helps the child complete it. So God out of love wants to give us the joy and dignity of being cooperative with him and what he's doing for us and for others. Look at the wonderful story of the Apostles. Just wanted to involve the simple man in the most important mission ever the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the salvation of human race. Rather than ascending into heaven. He could have chosen to stay here on Earth until the end of time. Traversed every land, preached in every town and village. Healing, exercising, forgiving and establishing the church. But he wanted these men to share in his mission. He gave them his message and his authority. They weren't necessarily talented men and worldly eyes. They weren't those who had humanly. There were those, rather, who had humanly meager starting materials. They were sinners just like us. But those capable of saying yes to God, offering to him their goodwill and their talents and allowing the Lord to multiply their offerings by His divine power. God wants the same from us, regardless of how many gifts and blessing fluid he's given us. He wants us to give them back to him so that he can do greater things with them. He might have received only a minimal education in the faith through religious instruction, but the Lord can use this to make us a great apostle. Like he did with Saint Peter. We might not be very gifted as a teacher, but with the Lord we might be the best of teachers to our children about what's most important of all. You might not have had much in the way of material possessions, but then we offer them to the Lord and He might use them to save others lives in this world or the next. He might be advanced in years or ill and think that we don't have much still to give, but offered to the Lord what we bestow can be incredibly fruitful. This lesson is a very concrete application, with the church celebrating this Sunday for the fourth time. The World Day of grandparents and the elderly, which Pope Francis instituted to be celebrated every year on the fourth Sunday, July, a date chosen transparently to connect it as closely as possible to the July 26 feast of Saints document in the parents of Mary and Grandparents of Jesus. In his message. In anticipation of the inaugural celebration, Pope Francis asked grandparents and fellow seniors, What is our vocation today at our age? It is to preserve our roots, to pass on the faith to the young and to care for the little ones. Well, grandparents and seniors may not be as physically vigorous as they once were. They still, he implied, five loaves and two fish to offer to God for the spiritual being a multitude. And he was not only summoning seniors to this work, but leading the whole world in appreciation for grandparents and seniors still have to give and do give. Just like the Lord never, ever goes into retirement, he stated. There's no retirement age from the worker proclaiming the gospel and handing down traditions to your grandchildren. Since he was elected the successor of Saint Peter at age 76. He hasn't slowed down and tried to live and teach the faith, citing the biblical figures of Abraham, Moses, Tobit, Eliezer, Elizabeth Zacharias, Simeon, Anna and Nicodemus, all of whose major contributions, salvation history took place when they were advanced in years. He urged grandparents and seniors to see themselves as still very important laborers in the Lord's Vineyard, beginning with the very precious resource of their prayer and the example of love for the Lord and the gift of time which they can richly spend with their grandchildren, teaching them, praying with them, playing with them, giving them encouragement and unconditional love, listening to their stories, attending their games, concerts and academic milestones, and in so doing, helping their children and in-laws to grow in their maturation as parents grow old is so much better because of the way so many grandparents and seniors live out. Their vocation in this Fourth World Day of grandparents is an opportunity to celebrate them, thank them, commit to spend time with them, recommit to the covenant of love with them, and pray for them. It's also a day for them to focus on passing on to subsequent generations the legacy of their Eucharistic faith and love. The Holy Eucharist is a reality to which the miracle of the multiplication in the loaves and fish point in the Eucharist yet again takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives once more, and a multiplication that's even more miraculous. Stretching across the centuries in every land from the upper room to the altar of our parish church. This is a sacrifice that has fed billions of God's children and prepare them for the heavenly banquet. And in the very wages established, He showed how he wanted to involve us intimate life. We used our grain and grapes, but bread and wine, the work of human hands. Because God intended from the beginning our own contribution in this one great sacrifice to the Father. When the priest prays during the beautiful dialog at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, pray brothers and sisters, that the sacrifice yours and mine may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father. We focus on the reality that the Eucharist is not just the offering of Christ, but together with Him, the offering of his whole mystical body, the Church. And there's one other detail from the miracle we should, because it's like we likewise placed in salvation the Eucharist. Clearly, Jesus could have worked the miracle without leaving leftovers, but he did so to overflowing, leaving 12 wicker baskets full of extra food. We could say he was intentionally leaving one for each apostle to remind each of them and us in a sense of what we're supposed to do with you. Because the food we received to live off it and share that food with others, rather than keeping the miracle of the multiplication to ourselves. Jesus wants us to share it, filling our baskets to overflowing so that we might lavishly share his gifts with others, offering our bodies, our blood, our callouses, our sweat, tears, our joys. However many loaves and fish we have out of similar love for God and others. So we prepare to share in this great and ongoing miracle this Sunday, but has asked Jesus to give us the courage and the generosity to offer our whole life to Him in a service so that he and feeding us may be able to use us and what he's given us to feed others. This is what the missionary phase of the national Eucharistic Revival begun just last Sunday, is all about. God bless you. |
| Grazie | Thank you, Father Landry. To hear more from Father Landry, check out his website on Catholic priest income. And you can also catch his writings at EWTN on National Catholic Register. A big thank you to all our listeners for joining us. I hope that this show was helpful. I hope that it gave you more peace and more hope and more joy and you go with our prayers. |