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Episode Description
With Archbishop Charles Chaput’s recent piece highlighting Catholic women who work indefatigably for the Church, we speak with one of them: Mary FioRito of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. A recognized voice for women, family, and moral ethics, Mary talks with us about the feminine genius, and why “God’s rules exist to keep us happy.”
We also check in with Katy Faust just ahead of the inauguration and discuss whether the tide might be turning toward a culture more open to ‘Pro-Child Politics’. In her new book, Katy calls for adults to prioritize the rights and well-being of children above their own self-interests, and demonstrates how children are the primary victims of the lies of woke ideology.
Msgr. Roger Landry also offers an inspiring homily to prepare us for the Baptism of the Lord this Sunday.
Bios
Mary FioRito is an attorney, public speaker, radio show and podcast host, and an EPPC Cardinal Francis George Fellow, specializing in human life issues, abortion, and ethics. She has a degree in English Literature from Loyola University Chicago, and a Juris Doctor from Loyola School of Law. She served as Director of Pro-life Activities for the Archdiocese of Chicago, and was named the first female Vice Chancellor for the diocese in 2000. Newsweek Magazine listed her among their “Women of the New Century,” and she received the “Woman of the Year Award” from St. Joseph College Seminary. Her writings have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, National Review, and many religious publications. She is a contributing author to two books and has appeared on all major Chicago area news outlets as well as NPR, EWTN, and religious media. As a Cardinal George Fellow at the deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, she advises on the Women and Children First initiative. Mary resides in Chicago with her husband and three daughters.
Katy Faust is founder and president of Them Before Us, a global children’s rights non-profit, and author of the book by the same name. She publishes and speaks widely on marriage and family and justice for children. Her articles have appeared in Newsweek, USA Today, The Federalist, Public Discourse, WORLD Magazine, Washington Examiner, The American Mind, and The American Conservative. She serves on the advisory board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and helped design the teen edition of CanaVox which studies sex, marriage, and relationships from a natural law perspective. She co-authored the book, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. Her third book, Pro-Child Politics, has just been released. Katy and her husband are raising four children in Seattle.
Monsignor Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, and the National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA. He writes for numerous publications, is a frequent speaker 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. Monsignor Landry traversed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage in 2024 and joined the historic Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, an event which coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood. He was recently appointed the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 300 Transcript
| Ashley | Hello friends, and welcome to Conversations with Consequences. 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 consequence, says on the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network Saturday mornings at 7 a.m. Eastern, or catch the encore at 5 p.m.. We are also on Sirius XM Channel 130. Of course, our radio show is also a podcast. Go to the Catholic Association dot org or directly to wherever you listen to your podcast. Welcome to Conversations with Consequences on EWTN Radio. I am your hostess, Ashley McGuire, alongside my T.A. colleague and friend Betsy Fentress, and it's great to have a friend of the show back with us. The one and only Mary Fiorito. Mary's known for her intellectual prowess and all things within human life issues and abortion law, and she holds the Cardinal Francis George fellowship at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and was just recently highlighted by Archbishop SHAPIRO for her wonderful contributions to the church. Welcome to the show, Mary. |
| Mary Fiorito | Thank you for having me, Ashley. And Betsy, it's a pleasure to be back with you. |
| Ashley | Mary I read the article by Archbishop SHAPIRO where he highlights a handful of women, and I think we you and I and Betsy and I know almost all of them, but what was your reaction? Did you know he was going to be writing about you or did you just wake up and see what's featured? |
| Mary Fiorito | The his actually, his assistant had reached out to me the night before because he wanted to check a particular factual piece about, you know, my my time working alongside Bishop Approcci. And so then told me I was going to be mentioned in this article, and I immediately said, please don't put me first. I think all of us who know the other ladies mentioned would would want to defer to them. And so I did know I did have a little bit of advance notice. And he said, You're going in whether or not you like it. So I said, it's already first things already has it? I just wanted to check this particular factual point. So it was very humbling. You know, he Archbishop SHAPIRO and Cardinal George had a very special friendship within the bishops conference, I think in part because they were both members of religious orders rather than being diocesan priests. And for those who don't know, it's it's really only within relatively recent history that the Holy Father has started making men from religious order bishops prior. I can't read was probably about 40 years ago when this changed. It was only bishops were only drawn from the diocesan priesthood. And so there was a change in that. And so now, you know, you see Cardinal Sean O'Malley, you know, who is a Franciscan, and Archbishop SHAPIRO, who is that? He has a Capuchin and then Cardinal George was a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. So, you know, men who are religious priests are sort of formed in a different way. You know, your seminary experience is different. Your your mission experience is different. So they had just developed a, like I said, a special friendship over the years. It was it was sort of a mutual admiration society that they had going there with each other. So when you're the executive assistant to an archbishop or a cardinal, as I was, you often get to know other cardinals and archbishops fairly well because they speak to each other frequently. And, you know, sometimes you're involved in meetings. So just over the years, I got to know him. So it was very kind that he that he remembered me and I my very first boss at the archdiocese. So this is you know, I worked there for 28 years. So this is going back 35 years now. I remember him saying to me, and this was in reference to Cardinal Bernardin, you know, you can tell a lot about a bishop or a cardinal, by the way they treat their personal staff. And I was very struck by that. You know, But, you know, Cardinal Bernardin was, you know, very exemplary in that regard. He was very kind to his personal staff. He knew that a lot of his success and he acknowledged a lot of his success was because of the hard work of the people behind him and that include for Bernadine, a woman religious named Sister Mary, Brian Costello, who was a sister of Mercy, who was his chief of staff. It's been very interesting for me, just as a comparison to look at the new Trump administration and all of the attention that's being paid to Susie Wiles as the first female chief of staff. And I was just thinking, my goodness, I can look back at multiple different archbishops and cardinals, most many, if not most of whom were women, who were their chiefs of staff. So, you know, the church was way out ahead of the curve on that. |
| Ashley | It's so true. The church the church has been ahead of the curve on so many things. You know, I've written about this with humanity today. It feels like the science is catching up with church doctrine, you know, with the explosion of all this interest in natural fertility. And I think people so often forget about or don't don't think about the fact that we were making women doctors of the church when when most people didn't even think a woman should be educated. |
| Mary Fiorito | We had the first women hospital presidents. We had the first women university presidents in this country. So, you know, again, two roles. My goodness. Can you imagine, for example, if a woman was named the next president of the University of Notre Dame? I mean, we would have stories from around the world. But as a matter of fact, in many different Catholic colleges and universities, women, sometimes women religious, but sometimes they women, they've held those roles for more than 100 years now, hospital presidents, too. I mean, overseeing major medical centers and hospital care systems. So, you know, I think part of it with us, actually and Betsy, you know, we don't we don't brag on ourselves very well, if that makes sense. And I know, you know, for myself, I'm not comfortable doing that, you know, I mean, I just don't feel like I should get any kind of particular credit for doing my job, if that makes sense. You know, you know that line from St Luke's Gospel where the Lord says to the apostles, When you've done everything that you were asked to do, just say that you are an unworthy servant. And so, you know, you have that admonition. And I think that's something that we as Catholics, we do take that to heart so we don't blow our own horns or talk about how how much we're doing and, you know, the sphere or the other sphere, we just sort of do the work. |
| Betsy | Did you always want to work for the church? How did you kind of ease into that role? |
| Mary Fiorito | Yeah, that's that's a really good question. So I actually got so I'm a lawyer by training and my last year in law school, I actually got recruited for the FBI, which is kind of hilarious. And and the FBI at that time was going to a lot of different Catholic schools. And in fact, you know, this was kind of a big brouhaha in the late eighties and early nineties that some some Catholic universities and colleges that were more social justice oriented refused to let the FBI and the CIA, CIA come on to campus to do recruiting. But my understanding is they that Catholic employees seemed to do better in those institutions because we understand hierarchy and we understand authority and submitting to authority in a way that people raised in different religious traditions or no religious traditions wouldn't understand. So but at the time, the requirement for women was to run a six minute mile, and literally that was like the deal breaker. I'm like, I was the recruiter who I still have her card. I just kept it as a, you know, a souvenir to show my children. I'm like, That is a deal breaker. There's no way I would have. I was not a particularly athletic person. So that was the deal breaker. But as it happened, just very providentially, the position of the Respect Life director in Chicago had come open and Cardinal Bernadine was given my name. I was the president of Loyola Law School's Law Students for Life, which, when I think about it now, was really bad name because it just sounds like you never want to leave law school. You want to be a law student for life, which is not what I wanted to do. And an auxiliary bishop in Chicago who knew me through that, through my position there at the law school such as it was, gave Cardinal Bernardi my name, and he asked me at the time Helen Alvarez had just become the spokesperson for the U.S. Bishops Conference Pro-Life Secretariat, and he really wanted to have a woman who had legal training in that office. So he personally asked me I had some other offers at the time, but there was something about I can't explain it other than I felt God telling me, I want you to take this job. This is what I want you to do. And so that's so that's what I did. And then, you know, I stayed there. And then when Cardinal Bernardi passed, you know, he died kind of young of pancreatic cancer. When Cardinal George came in, I continued on in in the role of respect Life Director. But then Bishop kept Rocky, He admits he poached me poached from that particular department and made me the first female Vice-Chancellor in Chicago and sent me away for some Canon law studies. I don't have a degree in canon law. I have like a certificate. But you know, essentially he brought me on to his staff and then then Cardinal George made me his executive assistant, which was kind of like being the chief of staff, of his, of his personal office after that. So that was sort of my trajectory. Mary. |
| Ashley | There's such a obsession, an external obsession, I would call it, with women in the church, you know, and we both know as people who've worked in and with the media that it's like something they can't seem to I think it mostly relates to ordination, but there's just a general kind of fixation on this silly trope that, you know, women are oppressed, yada, yada. But you've had an interesting you know, you've had several decades of being a woman in the workforce in a time when that has been evolving and a woman working in the church, in the church hierarchy at a time when that's evolving, I mean, what how has that experience changed or has it been unchanged? And what are the what are the misperceptions? |
| Mary Fiorito | Yeah, well, I'll start with your first question. Actually, I, I think that the church, in terms of the way it treats women employees, at least from my experience, there has been a little bit of a growth, if you will, in that area, because, you know, when I started at the archdiocese, we didn't have any paid maternity leave and you could take as much of your accumulated sick time as you wanted. But we didn't have paid maternity or paternity leave per say, which, you know, just for a human institution, much less a pro-life one, wasn't very consistent. But, you know, as knowledge and understanding of the importance of those early bonding months with your infant became more clear and there was I do think there was probably some outside societal pressure for the church to change some of the obligations that it had towards its female employees. Now, you have to balance that against, you know, right up until probably the early eighties, the majority of our workforce in our schools, in our elementary and high schools were people who were religious. And so by that I mean a member of a religious order who's a consecrated person. And so as that started to change, as that demographic started to change, to be more single women and then married women and then, you know, men who were fathers and taught in some of our high schools, I think it just it was the employees themselves bringing this need before whomever they needed to the head of the religious order or the bishop to say this, you're going to start losing really good talent if you can't make these particular accommodations. Now, you know, that's just sort of one example. But I have to say on the other end of that, we did have I mean, there was, you know, at one point where I was very sick with one of my pregnancies and had to be on bed rest for a considerable amount of time. And not only did they let me use all of my sick days, but they allowed me to work from home. Bishop Approcci went and bought me a laptop back when those were like $2,000 for a simple laptop, you know, back in the dinosaur age. But he said, no, there is no reason that that we can't accommodate you during your illness. So, you know, that was I think there's a lot of stories like that where it might not have been a policy written down in the policy book, but there was a lot of accommodation in sort of a quiet way that acknowledged not only the importance of being kind to people who are going through a difficult time, but also they wouldn't have done that if if the contributions you were making were not significant. They knew I need this person's gifts and talents looking at these particular things at least half time or I this office won't run the same way, right? So I think it was kind of a balance thing. But then, you know, from the outside and you just have to kind of scroll through Twitter for 3 minutes and, you know, this obsession with ordination and the association of ordination with power. And, you know, yes, I mean, it is true. It is only, you know, men who govern from a certain perspective. But that doesn't mean that women aren't contributing in other ways. You know, I was I was really struck by an it was an older interview of President elect Trump and the first lady, I think, and the Ellen show of all places, and probably not long after they were married. And she was asking and I was first of all, struck by how deferential he was to her, how deferential he was to his wife. But then also, Ellen said, you know, well, like what? What is he like to live with as a husband? Does he take out the garbage? Does he you know, And she kind of laughed and she said she said, listen, he has his job. I have my job. Our housekeeper has her job. We all just do our jobs. And no one no one is worried about who's doing what and how we're splitting up the time. And no one is keeping tabs on each other. We we know what our jobs are and we do them, and we do them to the best of our ability. And I thought, well, that's, you know, and this is like ten years ago. I mean, this was really kind of forward thinking at the time, you know, And Ellen didn't have a follow up to that either. So I think like in the church, when you see people making the deepest contributions, you know, they're doing they're doing their jobs and they're doing them well. You know, I often think of you remember when that whole Beijing conference for women was going on. I think you ladies are younger than me, so you probably don't remember it in as great a detail. But Gertrud Minghella, who was the head of this U.N. commission for the Beijing Conference on Women, said of Saint John Paul. The second, If everyone thought like him, we wouldn't need a world conference on women. And remember, he chose a Harvard Law professor, Marion Glendon, to represent the church at that conference. So, you know, again, I think sometimes we have sort of a PR problem in trying to explain the proper role of women in the church in a way that it resonates with people, or at least they can receive it and can try to understand it. And then again at the same time to where bumping up against other Christian denominations that don't want to see women in kind of leadership roles in some ways. I mean, this whole trad wife phenomenon and I don't know if you ladies have discussed this yet on your show, but that's at the same time you have, you know, the the fight for equality and women's priesthood and women's ordination and all that. And then that's pumping up, oddly enough, against the Trad wives. |
| Ashley | Yeah, it's pretty weird. |
| Betsy | I am glad that you brought up now Saint John Paul the second and you were kind of living what he was writing about philosophically and theologically on the, you know, the feminine genius. What was it like to be doing that? And then alongside here come all of these amazing letters, encyclicals, that fleshed that out on a theological level? |
| Mary Fiorito | Yeah, it was. That was a great privilege to be working for the church during his pontificate. And this is not to take away from Pope Benedict, of course, who also had, you know, incredibly beautiful things to say about the gifts that women brought. And oddly enough, so just one little plug for Saint Help. I hope he will be Saint Benedict. And in fact, I believe he will be. But he was the first pope to choose consecrated lay women to be his household staff. So up until that point, there had always been women from religious orders. Saint John Paul, the second head of Polish religious order, who were his household staff. But Pope Benedict the 16th, chose the consecrated women from communion and liberation. That was the first time that that's ever been done. So they are they are consecrated people who live in community, but they're technically they're laypeople. And so he and, you know, the joke is they're a very, very well-educated sort of intellectual group of women and men who serve the church. And I mean, the head of the community here in Chicago is a nuclear physicist at Fermilab's, for example. So the joke, the kind of the running joke was he chose the women of community and liberation because they were the only ones that would be able to understand what he was talking about because they were also well read. But it's a slight digression. But John Paul, the second, you know, starting with that letter to women that was read out of the Beijing conference I just spoke about, you know, to Mueller arresting to charge him. I remember one time I was giving a presentation on women in the church at a let's just say a very sort of progressive, well-to-do parish in the Chicago area. You know, probably 20, 25 women came. It was a Saturday morning sort of Lenten reflection thing. And I was just reading parts of the letter like literally verbatim and not adding any of my own, you know, insights into them. And a couple of the women started to cry. And one of the women looked at me. She said, Why has no one ever told us this? And she was so just baffled. I mean, again, you know, again, actually, to go back to sort of your opening point, you know, the church's teaching on healthy fertility and healthy sexuality and and that you don't need to be on a synthetic steroid to be sexually available to a man. You know, that that's not part of your your dignity as a woman, that there are other ways when you need to regulate you know, your your children are space them that are so much more respectful of you as a woman. You know, I remember from my talking about NFP at our marriage encounter weekend, we were the only couple that weren't already either living together or sleeping together and contraception. And I remember just telling the deacon couple who, you know, because they were astounded that we were following church teaching and asked us about it. And I said, you know, why does everything have to be on me? Why should I have to take the steroid that can lead to blood clots, that can lead to stroke, that can lead to weight gain and migraine headaches. Why is all the responsibility for really what is a mutual thing? Right. You have you know, you're not going to get pregnant on your own. So it's mutual fertility. Why is it always on the woman? And they didn't have an answer. The man said, you know that That's a very good point. And, you know, you couple that with, you know, new phenomenon that we have now, you know, just understanding the role that being on hormonal contraception can have on your choice of mate. I don't know if you if you're familiar with that comedian Taylor Tomlinson, do you know of her? She's she's quite popular. She's not Catholic. She's she was raised in a Christian household. But I do not get the sense as has anything to do with religion anymore. But she has a whole pit in one of her standup routines about how she wants to go off of birth control because she wants to meet herself and then, you know, she and the other women in the audience and it's a mostly female audience are all laughing. And then she says to the audience, you know, how many of you have ever tried to get off birth control and a lot of them say that they have. And then she asks one woman, What was that like for you? And she said, I broke up with my boyfriend of six years because he smelled differently. And so, yeah. |
| Betsy | wow. |
| Mary Fiorito | So all of sex psychology today has had articles about this. It so impacts every cell of your body when you're taking that that you literally will be attracted to the wrong person if you're on if you're on the birth control pill, when you when you meet somebody and you start dating them and when you go off it and this we see this happening in some marriages, in fact, some marriage tribunals are even looking at this. You know, how like if you're chemically impaired on the day of your wedding, like if you're drunk or if you're high or something, that that's not you know, that's an impediment to the validity of the vows. So in the same way, if you're on hormonal contraception from the time you meet that person and through your engagement and your marriage, and then you go off because now you want to get pregnant and now all of a sudden this guy repulses you, It can be argued, it's fascinating. It can be argued that that's that's a physical impediment to the validity of your vows. So, you know, again, the church was way ahead on all of this. Right. That that that women's dignity demands that they not be charged with the entire you know, I don't want to call it a burden, but the responsibility of when you're going to have your children and how you're going to space them. |
| Ashley | Mary, I have one follow up question that I want to ask, and that is you talked about adhering to church teaching and being so much outside the norm. And we recently had Ryan Anderson on who wrote a really lengthy, very important piece in first things about the future of the pro-life movement. And he makes a point that I haven't been able to start thinking about, which is that so much of that work actually needs to happen within the church because marriage is the best protector of innocent life because of how significantly less a married couple is to abort their child. Right. And we have so many people think he said that 2% of Catholic couples on their wedding night were chaste. And so as somebody who's worked in all echelons of the church, what do you think about that and what should we be doing better to actually educate? And I would even say like inspire people who even agree with us about these issues to better and more fully embrace church teaching as a way forward for the pro-life movement. |
| Mary Fiorito | Great question. Here's the thing. I'll go back to a thing my mother used to say one of my mom isms. She said, God gives you rules to make you happy, not to make you miserable, not to frustrate you. God gives you rules to make you happy. And when you look at all of the church, you know, the quote unquote, rules about human sexuality that the church offers to us that asks us to abide by, they all lead to human happiness, right? So people act out of self-interest primarily. I mean, I just especially when you've got teenagers or 20 somethings or 30 somethings. And if you explain the church's teaching on chastity and on marital relations in a way where you present its benefits, right, the benefits to the couple itself, because couples who don't cohabitate have a significantly lower divorce rate. There's on every measurable metric metric, as you point out, people who are who marry younger and have their children younger have much happier lives and children in particular. And our friend Helen already has written on this extensively the greatest point of privilege, if you will, in this country. We talk a lot about privilege and white privilege and this privilege and that privilege, the greatest privilege you can have in this country is growing up with your your married parents absolutely filled with people who are not divorced. Everything from your educational level to what kind of job you get to your mental health, everything is going to be better if you grow up in a house with married parents. And now this is not to say that there are not heroic single parents out there doing the best that they can with very, very difficult circumstances. But the optimal gift that you can give to any child is not the nicest stroller or crib or the most expensive Montessori school. It is giving your child the gift of growing up in a house with two married parents. And but ask the average person, many of them, they don't. They don't know that no one's ever shared that kind of data with them. And it's all like I said, it's all data driven. This is all very solid social science research that's been done now. But the church is not doing a lot as well. I shouldn't say a lot, but, you know, I think pre-K not needs to be completely scrapped, thrown out and come back and start with something new because it is seen as a hoop that people jump through. You know, as one person said to me, I already know how to balance my checkbook. I don't need somebody telling me how to do that. You know, we have largely failed with both pre-K, Ana, as a program. And then sadly enough, with what we called CCD when I was growing up. But the religious education programs that kids who go to public schools experience and, you know, Pew had a study that came out about Pew Social Research, had a study that came out about five or six years ago where they looked at Catholics who had gone to Catholic schools all the way through, Catholics who had only gone to Catholic high schools, and then kids who had only gone to public schools, but had gone to a CD. And by the time the CD, kids were young adults, 95% of them no longer went to church. 95%. So we're doing something wrong there. And and then it just you know, it it just snowballs from there. Right? Then, of course, you're not. You could care less what the church says about cohabitation or about premarital sex or about, you know, any of these other kind of things, you know, And at a time now, I don't know if you ladies saw that horrible and I do mean horrible program or documentary about this young woman in England who's a part of this only fans group. And. and now you know she she terrible documentary called I Slept with 100 Men in one day. And now a couple of days ago, she came out with a new whatever many documentaries that she's now slept with, a thousand thousand. |
| Betsy | I saw that. |
| Mary Fiorito | I mean, you just and she's a beautiful young woman. And you just look at that and it's it's hard to watch it and not get emotional as a mom, you know, as a mom of a young I have a daughter who's 23, you know, and you just think, is this the model of womanhood that we want to hold up to young men? You know, what happened in this young woman's life? And apparently her parents are not opposed to what she's doing because she's making so much money doing it. You know, is that's the culture that that we're in. But again, to approach it in a way to say everything about your life will be better if if you wait on every measurable label level rather but to I think we need to this is what JP Ganz has been doing with some of his work on marriage, is to encourage parishes to do more for married couples, but also to make sure that that marriage as an institution is seen as better economically, better, socially, etc., etc.. That's what I'm really hoping for from the Trump administration. We shouldn't be penalizing. I mean, it's literally in the in the IRS code, the marriage penalty, there's a penalty for you if you get married increasing the child tax credit. We should be make incentivize marriage. People work from incentives, incentivize it, make it something that is desirable and, you know, not something that you think you can put off until your mid to late thirties. |
| Ashley | Well, Mary, true, we so appreciate everything that you are doing. The church and women are all the richer, for your example and your your decades of service and your writing And so it's a tall it's a tall order and one that we'll we'll keep pressing on with because as you as you've made it so clear, it's it's so essential. So we thank you. We thank you for your time and for joining us. And where can people find you and follow your work online? |
| Mary Fiorito | Well, you can go to the Ethics and Public Policy Center to my Scholars page there at e, p, c dot org and just look for Mary FIORITO. And you can also see Ryan Anderson's work there as well. And you can follow me on Twitter at Mary Fiorito. |
| Ashley | Thank you so much. Mary. |
| Mary Fiorito | Thank you. Ashley That's a happy New you. |
| Betsy | Mary. |
| Ashley | Welcome back to Conversations with Consequences here on EWTN Radio. We have child and family advocate Katie Foust with of them before us here to discuss her new book that I was happy to contribute a chapter to. It is called Pro Child Politics Why every cultural, economic and national Issue Is a Matter of Justice for Children. Welcome back to the show, Katie. |
| Katy Faust | Always good to be on EWTN and all your fantastic hosts that are covering a lot of things that people ignore. But the have a very direct connection to the rights and well-being of children and thus the thriving of our nation. |
| Ashley | Well, Katie, I'm a mom of five and I have really come to be aware of the harsh reality that we live in a world that doesn't care about children. And so I was really excited to see that you were putting together this book, this collection of experts covering so many different topics about the way our culture devalues children and what we can do to change that. But tell us a little bit about the book and where did you when did you first get the idea to put this together? |
| Katy Faust | Yeah. Well, I just want to reiterate, like we all say, that we care about children and I think a lot of us do in some ways until it gets in the way of what we want. And then it's like, know me, my rights, my desire, my ideology, my comfort, my advancement, my social acceptance. Like what we care about kids, but just not enough to override our own personal agenda or personal comfort. So that isn't land. That is a worldview that's characterized by injustice. Because ultimately what we're saying is the adults don't need to do hard things. We will force the kids to do hard things instead. So my nonprofit them before us, largely takes this framework of putting children before adults, putting them before us in matters of marriage and family, parenthood, reproductive technologies, modern families, divorce, that kind of thing. But what we have found is in our work in the marriage and family world is if you first prioritize the rights and well-being of children, you get the right answer on all of those different manifestations of family formation and family questions. You get it right in the personal space and the policy space, and we've applied that to social issues in the past, have put children before adults on cultural issues like transgenderism or, you know, sex segregated spaces or age verification laws around pornography or even things like drag queen story. Our if you put the rights of children before adults, you get the right personal decisions and policy decisions. So my executive director, you know less than a year ago said what if we did that with all of politics? What if we applied the them before us? Let's put children before adults to everything, not just social issues. So that was sort of the genesis of this project. The problem is I thought, I can't write about why immigration is a matter of justice for children or I'm not an expert on the national debt or taxes like it would take me ages just to know enough about those subjects to give you ten pages on why we need to prioritize children. And then I went. Hold up a minute. I know the people that can write those topics. You know, I know Laura Reese at the Heritage Foundation has been doing immigration work for nearly three decades. And I was put in contact with you, who is an expert and has a lot of different experience on matters of religious liberty. And we know the people at the American Principles Project who have been fighting to enact age verification laws for pornography all across the country. So I was able to tap into people that are subject matter experts, many of whom have been doing this for decades, and say, can you just give me 3000 words? Take your area of expertise on policing and frame it. What would happen if we put them before us? What would happen if we put children before adults? And the exact same thing happens when you apply this like we do in marriage and family. And that is you get the right personal decisions and you get the right policy prescriptions in every single case. |
| Ashley | You know, you mentioned age verification. And I want to say I'm surprised, but I'm not. It's been fascinating to see the states that have actually passed laws requiring that and those horrible online platforms, they just leave. And it just shows that they would rather just leave than actually spend one minute or ten, which is probably all it would take to implement this software to just protect minors. We're talking young children, minors, not even necessarily older teens and young adults. So, you know, with all of these chapters that you pulled together, what were some of the kind of standouts or surprises or things that really popped out for you that you maybe didn't hadn't thought about before? |
| Katy Faust | Well, I'd say 8 to 10 of these chapters I was pretty familiar with. You know, if it has that, it sort of touches the social fabric like I'm in it. So the chapters on masculinity, written by Ken Harris and the president of Promise Keeper, is the chapter on femininity, written by Peter Keenan, who is like one of my favorite Twitter followers. You know, pornography, race, marriage, life. I was pretty familiar with a lot of that. Things like ESG and I the fiscal issues, I have a lot to learn on those topics. And so the great thing about this book is it sort of functions as a primer for those of us that may not know quite as much about economics or may not necessarily be up on all of the digital technology developments happening in the world or maybe are not very dialed into national security. And it's like we have given you very concise distill down to 3000 words, the basics on all of those different topics. So personally, it was the economic issues and it was the national issues where I feel like I had my eyes opened and really the contributors did such an incredible job of directly connecting the lies about all of these subjects with child harm and then outlining the truth about all of these different areas, whether it's, you know, energy or the environment or border security directly to child protection. And that's that was our goal. Our goal was. Nothing is off limits when it comes to child protection. Every single thing when we get it wrong is ultimately going to harm children. And if we want children to thrive or if we want our nation to thrive, we have to do a course correction. |
| Ashley | You mentioned digital technology, and I was recently at a meeting with. It was a it was a devastating meeting. It was with parents of their whole survivor parents and their children had all died as a result of something related to exploitation on social media. So sextortion. I didn't even know what that was. And I was at that meeting because there was a push at the end of this last Congress to try and once and for all passed the kids online safety Act. And this is something that has bipartisan support that you just don't find anymore. And even Joe Biden said he was willing to sign it. President Trump and his advisors have indicated that they're for it. And it was, I have to say, disappointing to see that it didn't make it into the final the final, you know, package that they voted on at the end of the last Congress. But we're starting a new Congress. We have a new administration. And there's a dramatic scene change that's happening right now. Are you optimistic that this could be an opportunity to actually stop talking about these things and start implementing them at the policy level? |
| Katy Faust | Well, I think along with a lot of other advocates for children's life and family, I was disappointed by especially the platform changes and the way the platform changes took place in the GOP that unfortunately, we forsook some non-negotiables about the rights and well-being of children, namely their absolute right to life and the critical importance of married mothers and fathers in a lifelong union delivering to children the only bedrock of thriving that has been proven throughout the decades of social science research. So that was disappointing. But I will say that this administration, maybe not the very top of the ticket, but so many other people that are surrounding him have a full, unobstructed view and embrace of natural reality, especially biological reality. And that is always going to bode well for children whenever we are operating in the domain of a reality, as opposed to ideology, we're going to be able to come to the kind of conclusions that protect children. So I am hopeful and it does feel like there's a sea change, not just as it relates to the transgender movement, which I think we have had trans wear on a way down the other side of the mountain. The edifice is crumbling, thank God. And now we can look again at some other areas where we have rolled over and handed children to be devoured by wolves of technological or legal or cultural narratives that ultimately destroy them. So I am hopeful, especially with Mark Zuckerberg reversing himself on censorship. I think all of us have experienced some level of shadow banning or monetizing because we have dared to challenge some of the now culturally untouchable conclusions about family or supposed reproductive rights or whatever. I mean, without them having filters in the way our content, the truth, the truth about children, the truth about men, the truth about marriage, the truth about women, the truth about our bodies. And that truth is, you know, as they say, like a lion, you don't need to, like, sit around and defend it. You just let it go. The truth is going to defend itself. And we have been working against a lot of different manifest nation censorship, certainly a lot of social pressure to keep our views to ourselves. And a lot of that has gone. There is now a boldness. You know, I have seen a radical change from even the five or six years ago when I started them before us to now where people feel very confident denouncing two men, procuring a child through surrogacy and going home with the hosp from the hospital with this unrelated baby, you know, whereas even three or four years ago I would post about that on acts and not get a whole lot of feedback. Now people just retweeting it and say, Whoever makes this illegal, I'm voting for them. So I feel like the will to speak truth is gaining traction and the impediments to speaking truth are crumbling away. So I am hopeful for the next four years and hopefully beyond that, we're going to return to a society where we can be a little more explicit about who children are and what they need and all of these different realms. |
| Ashley | I'm glad you mentioned the changes in the GOP, because I think, you know, the we're right to be sort of, you know, wise as serpents about this. And, you know, it's one thing that I found interesting is that one of the loudest advocates I would say for like children and really raising the alarm bell about like the declining birth rate, which is very much tied to selfishness and like me, me, me and this idea that, you know, children are this kind of nuisance or impediment is Elon Musk. And he's you know, I recently saw a quote of his or he said, My children didn't ask to be born or something like that. You know, I owe them everything. And I'm kind of like you also have, you know, like nine children by how many different women. So we're in this kind of like brave new world where it's like someone like him is is speaking the truth and actually enabling others to speak the truth and almost kind of can't also see the truth right in front of him. But I don't know. So I guess of all of these all of these different topics and issue areas in the book, if if you were advising President Trump, you know, what would be your top the first three things you would do? Well, a. |
| Katy Faust | Lot of the beauty of this project is not necessarily that we're bringing new information to especially people that would identify as conservative, like these are things that conservatives have long believed and advocated for. In fact, I think another one of the really incredible distinctiveness of the book is that it brings together sort of the historical three legs of the conservative stool, like the economic conservatives, the social conservatives and the foreign policy conservatives. And so, again, that is the miracle of putting them before us. Like when you actually prioritize the next generation and not immediately what is good for me as a politician or me in terms of, you know, my own convenience or my own identity or whatever. When you prioritize the kids, you get conservative policy. And that's what Mollie Hemingway said in her blurb at the beginning of the book is like, you get genuine conservatism with this. So I don't necessarily think that if J.D. Vance picked up this book, he would be like, Wow, something new that I didn't know about economics. What this book has to offer, especially for people who consider themselves conservative, conservative policymakers, lawmakers, is a new way of messaging the best ideas in a way that resonates not just with the ordinary man, but is actually sort of coalition building language. Because at least in word, we want to protect kids. This shows you how to do it and it directly connects bad policy or lies about these different areas with child harm. So to me, that is incredibly valuable because it's hard for me to make sense of, for example, the national debt. Like, I hear those numbers and I can't even put them in context. But when I hear Phil Kerpen, who wrote our debt chapter, say, Let me explain to you what this is and details out how much each child will owe of national debt. About $75,000 the day they're born. Probably close to $200,000 by the time they are 18 and emancipated debt that they did not choose that they don't benefit from, and yet they have to pay. He's like, let me tell you what that is. That's called fiscal child abuse. That is the kind of thing that gets me engaged about whether or not we should approve the new debt ceiling raise. So that is what's valuable about this approach, is not necessarily that it has groundbreaking new insights into economics or national security, you know, challenges. It is this is how you're going to communicate it in a way that resonates with the ordinary person and has the potential to really build a coalition. |
| Ashley | We're almost out of time. But, you know, another, you know, issue that has messaging challenges is the issue of IVF. And President Trump has said he's going to mandate coverage of it. How do we better message on that issue? It's so difficult. You know, we all want everyone who wants a child to be able to have a family. I mean, it's the most innate natural human impulse, and yet it's an industry that's just fraught with horrors and abuse. So how do we better message that going into this administration. |
| Katy Faust | The way we message with everything else? We take the focus off adults and we put it on children. I would say that maybe the only thing that rivals the adults longing to have children is children's longing to be known and loved by their mother and father. That truly is the most universal longing, so much so that it's actually enshrined as a fundamental natural right and the most widely ratified treaty in the world, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. So we have to make it, like everything else, a matter of child protection. We have to say that of the millions of embryos created, it's an injustice that only 2 to 7% are born alive. It's an injustice that 93 to 97% of them will be screened out of existence, sex selected out of existence. They won't make the grade. They'll be thawed and discarded. They'll be donated to research that this is fundamentally an issue of child protection. And that's how we have to message about it. |
| Ashley | Well, Katie, you're certainly leading the way in a new frontier. That I hope is the beginning of a new chapter in a society that comes back to its senses and and begins to view children as a beautiful gift to be cherished and protected and to be put before our own interests. So thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find out more about your work and where can they buy the book? |
| Katy Faust | Come to them before us dot com and subscribe and follow us. We have so much going on. We are on a warpath to defend children. The book Pro Child Politics can be purchased at any place where you buy books. Amazon is great fun and all was great, but you know, get it and let us equip you on how to defend kids in every realm. |
| Ashley | Thank you so much, Katie. |
| Katy Faust | Great to be with you. |
| Ashley | And now Father Roger Landry offers us a thought provoking homily to prepare us for this Sunday's gospel. |
| Fr. Landry | This is Monsignor Roger Landry, national director of the Difficult Mission Societies. It is a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday's gospel, when we will participate liturgical in the most famous wedding of all time because of who is on the guest list. We meditate on the wedding feast of Cain every Thursday as we pray the second luminous mystery of the Holy Rosary. Often we pray about what it reveals about the sacrament of marriage and how Jesus takes the water of the institution of marriage from the beginning, with Adam and Eve and raises it to the wine of a sacramental encounter with him. Or we focus on how Grace brings the marriage between a Christian man and a woman into the marriage between Christ and the church. In fulfillment of what Isaiah prophesied with words we ponder every Christmas as a young man marries a virgin. Your builder will marry you as a bridegroom. Rejoice in his bride. So shall your God rejoice in you. The wedding feast of Cain is an implicit revelation, not just of Jesus's miraculous power, but of his spousal love, the nuptial intention of his incarnation, even though no one except Mary would have had any clue about it at the time. I'd like to examine the scene under three different angles, what we learn about Mary's intercession. What we learn about the way Jesus generously exercises merciful power. What we learn about the servants zealous cooperation. Each of these has much to say about our Christian faith and life. Let's begin with what the scene reveals about the Blessed Mother and your Jewish wedding. Celebrations like the one taking place in Khana would last eight days with three sumptuous meals a day. Wine was served throughout the octave. It was generally the happy celebration of life of Jews, which is why Jesus often returned to the image of a wedding banquet to describe the joys of heaven. Rather than leaving on a honeymoon, the couple would remain reigning, so to speak, as king and queen over the celebrations. We can only imagine how embarrassing it would be today if at a wedding reception, the banquet hall ran out of food or beverages early in the celebration. Even though most people would sympathize with the couple and blame the banquet facility, it would still be terribly embarrassing for the family and the ancient world. It would have been incalculably more so because the family itself, through the reception, if they ran out of supplies, especially with days to go during the reception, it would have been an embarrassment that likely would never have been forgotten. Mary was at the wedding and noticed the impending catastrophe because before the wine steward caught on to the predicament before the couple did, before even their parents did. Mary saw the problem. The reason why there was no wine left was probably because the others were drinking so much that they weren't paying attention. Mary's love made her notice the details that others were missing. Terrebonne The problem. She went to her son. She didn't twist his arm. She didn't try to persuade him that he should act. She simply said they have no wine. Confident that her son, even though it wasn't his hour for working public miracle because that would inexorably precipitate the cross. She trusted that he, out of mercifully merciful love, would miraculously intervene. She knew that he loved that couple even more than she did. The episode reveals two things about Mary's maternal intercession. First, Mary seeks to solve problems by bringing them to her divine son. Some of our Protestant brothers and sisters say that Catholics shouldn't pray to Mary because Saint Paul writes Christ is our sole mediator between God and man. They charge. We should eliminate the middle woman and bring all our needs directly to the blessed fruit of her womb. Well, there's obviously nothing wrong with praying directly to Jesus, but at the same time, Mary's intercession is no threat to her son's power. In fact, it reveals her son's power because it depends entirely on his power. When we pray to Mary, we ask her to bring our needs to our son, just like she brought the need of the couple in Ghana. We also learn that Mary acts like she didn't Cana often before we even know we have a problem. She recognizes, for example, that one of us may have a really tough weekend in store and she's already interceding for the help need to cope. She foresees that some of us will have severe temptations and she's already sprung into action. She sees that some of us are in financial or health difficulties and she's getting involved before we even ask. She grasped that several of us will need a good confession, and she's intervening for a priest to be there. Her maternal love looks out and acts out of love before we're often aware that we are in need. The second thing is the miracle. At the wedding of Cana reveals is something stunning about the way Christ exercises his merciful power. Christ was and is the creator of the universe. He formed the oceans with just a word. He could have easily filled those 630 gallon water jugs with wine. But just a thought or syllable or an answer. Fonzarelli snap of his finger. In an instant, he could have created thousands of jugs filled with cognac or champagne or anything he wanted. But he didn't act that way. Instead, he turned to the servants and said, Fill the jars with water. He wanted to involve the servants in his miracle. He wants to include us to saving work. You created us without our consent. To Saint Augustine once said, doesn't want to save us without our consent. And he doesn't want to save others without our cooperation either. That brings us to the third thing. The episode teaches us how we're called to respond to Jesus inclusion of us in his saving work. Saint John tells us simply that when the servants had received Mary's instruction to do whatever Jesus told them, and when they had heard Jesus imperative to fill the charge with water, they filled them to the brim. Those five words conceal an awful lot of effort. The ancient world. There was no faucet tight, internal plumbing and no hose tied to water pipes in order to fill jars. The only place that the servants could get water to fill the jars was the central well in Canada. Because the jars were made of stone, they would have been extremely heavy to carry to the well. Filled with 30 gallons of water, which would weigh another £250 as they would have been. It would have been impossible for them to carry those jars back. The only way the jars could have been filled would have been by taking little leather and ceramic water containers back and forth to the well. If we imagine that there were five servants, each with a hefty two gallon container in each hand, it would have meant that they would have had to have made nine trips back and forth to the cane as well to get enough water. That would have been a grueling exercise, even for those who are strong. Yet they filled the 30 gallon water, just not to 80% or 90%, but to the point of overflowing. They zealously did their part. And Jesus used their reference as the raw material for his incredible miracle. And what a miracle it was. She's converted all 180 gallons of water into wine in a way that made the wine steward himself take notice. How much wine are we talking about? But I have the privilege to take pilgrimage groups to Ghana. I always explain that we're used to looking at wine in 750 milliliters bottles. We know that there are 3.8 liters to a gallon, 180 gallons times 3.8 liters per gallon. It's 684 liters poured into 750 milliliters bottles. There would be 912 bottles. Think about that for a moment. That's the equivalent of 7612 bottle cases of wine. No wedding, even for eight days, could consume that much. But just like Jesus worked, the miracle of the multiplication of five loaves and two fish and left 12 wicker baskets full of fact fragments, one for each of the apostles. So Jesus worked this miracle as a sign of what He himself does when we cooperate in response to the servant's generosity, his generosity is even greater. That's something that should inspire us to be just as enthusiastic and zealous in our correspondence to the Lord's, including us in a saving plan as they were in Qana. So we prepare for Sunday mass. We know that Mary is praying for us and advising each of us to do whatever her son tells us. Relax. So many places, the new wine of faith that Jesus gives and true joy is often being sucked out of life. So many rituals and ceremonies ring hollow. She wants to incorporate us in his mission to help people to see that there's something far greater than even the greatest human pleasure. A better wine that they await, for which he's made us to thirst. That mission is the reason why the church exists and the reason why you and I exist. And said Mass, that Jesus seeks to strengthen us for that mission. Not by turning water into great wine for an eight day feast, but turning bread and wine into his own body. Blood, soul and divinity, to strengthen assiduous others to come to the Eternal banquet. The Miracle at the Wedding Feast of Cana was a prelude to this greatest miracle of all. We follow Mary's command to do whatever Christ tells us by doing this in memory of him. And we go to mass, seeking to allow Jesus to fill us to the brim with His grace and love with his life. So that being so transformed by this spousal union with him, we may go on a mission to bring everyone to the wedding feast that will last into eternity. God bless you. |
| Ashley | All. Thank you, Father Roger Landry. Make sure to catch all of his great work at Catholic Precinct. Com Or you can follow his writings at the National Catholic Register. Go to NC, register dotcom. And until next time, we wish you all the very best. And you go with our prayers. |
