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Patrick Neve of the #1 Podcast for Catholic young adults ‘The Crunch’ offers us an intimate look into his spiritual journey through the lens of a Catholic believer.
In this ATC Episode:
• We cover the genesis of 'The Crunch' podcast
• He candidly shares how this decision affected him and provides fascinating insights into the practice of adoration, a tradition that involves displaying Jesus in a golden structure.
• Fast forward to his high school days, and we find that a youth conference and the sacrament of the Eucharist playing a monumental role in his decision to commit wholeheartedly to the Catholic faith.
• Patrick shares how Catholic practices are deeply connected to his faith.
• We also delve into the concept of Catholic unity, the dangers of ritual repetition, and the unity that communal conformity can foster within the Catholic Church.
Brace yourself for an episode brimming with personal anecdotes, reflective musings, and enlightening discussions!
Connect with Pat:
Instagram: @thecrunchcast
Beliefs espoused by the guests of ATC are not necessarily the beliefs and convictions of ATC.
That said the intent of our podcast is to listen, remain curious and never fear failure In the discovery life giving truth. Many people we ardently disagree with have been our greatest teachers.
Hi. This is Graeat Lockridge and Jared Tafta on the Across the Counter podcast, where we create space for real people to have honest conversations. Today we have across the counter Patrick Nevy from the Crunch. It's a Catholic podcast specifically for young adults, but anybody can listen to it. I won't put you in jail.
Speaker 2:You won't put you in jail. I'll take all listeners, young or old. Yeah, pat, and you go about Pat as well. So, pat, tell me, where are you originally?
Speaker 3:from. I'm originally from a couple of doors around from the room that I'm in right now, so I'm in my. I'm in my, my childhood home. I live in Melbourne, Florida, and I stole my little brother's old bedroom to become a podcasting studio. But I'm a yeah, take that, Nick, you were just taller than me and cooler, whatever.
Speaker 2:I have your bedroom.
Speaker 3:No, seriously, I had to pin it up, I had to hide it for this. But right behind me, that little white square, if you can see it, that is a four foot tall, maybe three foot tall poster of him from his high school tennis team and he just looks so cute and so he's just so cool. Look at his tennis racket.
Speaker 2:And I'm just like I can't have that on podcasts.
Speaker 3:people will know that I'm the uglier brother and that's why I got into podcasting before it became a video medium and now.
Speaker 2:I'm upset because I have a anyway.
Speaker 3:So I'm originally from Florida.
Speaker 2:to answer your question Florida with baggage, florida with baggage and I'm back in Florida.
Speaker 3:I was in Pittsburgh for a hot minute, but yeah, I grew up here, went to church here, high school, here it was. It was a great place to grow up.
Speaker 1:Did you grow up?
Speaker 3:Catholic, I did. I've been Catholic my whole life and I I went through a period of my life looking back, it wasn't as dramatic as I thought it was when I was a kid, but I went through a period where I was like, very, like, lazy, or not very interested in my faith. But then that lasted like two years and in high school I was like right back at it. And so I've, with the exception of like maybe a couple of years of my life, I've always been very, very committed and interested in my faith, learning about my faith, and, yes, I've been Catholic my whole life, almost too Catholic.
Speaker 2:Almost too Catholic. That's awesome I also. I resemble your remarks Like one of my favorite jokes in the world is that you have a face for radio.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a class yeah.
Speaker 2:The audio medium is great and then they're like you need to video yourselves. I'm like that's, that wasn't part of the deal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, shut up, no, shut up, no, I don't, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Instagram feed is absolute garbage. We don't post like anything and the things we do post aren't we're just like.
Speaker 3:We got big on Twitter and we started a podcast Like we were excited to never have to show our faces ever. And then they were like hey, vertical video? And we were like no, thank you.
Speaker 2:No, thank you.
Speaker 3:I want to keep posting text and podcasting Like that's what I want to do yeah.
Speaker 2:I want to grow you got to do the videos, but it seems like we don't want to grow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you got to do the renegade. You got to do the renegade.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned getting big on Twitter Like yeah, Tell us about that, about the Crush cast and yeah yeah, about yourself, your partner.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so my partner, my life partner, ethan, your mom, your wife, that is not what I said, but you can.
Speaker 1:I didn't know Catholic changed their views on that. Yeah, we switched it up.
Speaker 3:I didn't hurt. Everyone thinks we did. I get that comment sometimes, but yeah, no, the Ethan and I we met so back in 2014, 2012, I think, was when anonymous accounts were huge, like an anonymous Christian accounts were huge on Twitter, like people would take a picture of a Disney prince or princess and be like the grumpy Catholic on Instagram or on Twitter and they would just post like generic Catholic content Remember, read your Bible and stuff like that, stuff that you see on Instagram now. And part of it was we were all in high school and so we didn't want to show our faces and we got me and Ethan. We had got, we gained some traction. Right, we had these accounts and we were part of this anonymous Catholic Twitter community where every month we get into, everyone would get in a big fight and there'd be a big drama thing like normal. And so Ethan and I got there posting jokes. That's how we met, because he one dime he just tweeted I could talk for 30 minutes about Catholic dating and I said me too, and he was the one to start a podcast. And so we did and we met for the first time. On our first episode, we had a conversation about Catholic dating and then we posted it on 9 11. So that was. We decided that was to be a good day to post our first episode.
Speaker 2:And so now our anniversary seven years later.
Speaker 3:Every time that fateful day comes around, I go man. Happy anniversary, ethan, I guess.
Speaker 1:Never forget your anniversary. Never forget your anniversary.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the easiest way to never forget your anniversary get married on 9 11. That's the few people know that trick, but yeah, we wanted to post it on Sunday and the next Sunday was just happened to be September 11. But yeah, so we a lot of we like to say like a lot of podcasts are two friends who started podcasting. We were two podcasters who became friends, so that's how we started. It was just awesome. We've been doing it for seven years. We've never taken a break, until this month actually, we're taking a break. Wow, yeah, we're just taking a step back and just doing patreon.
Speaker 2:What is? What has the production schedule been for seven years?
Speaker 3:It's mostly been when we were younger. It was hey, when can you record? Oh no, we have to get an episode out. Just record on Saturday night at midnight in our dorm rooms, and then he and I have always recorded remotely, so we've always been in two separate places. But now we've been producing three episodes a week. So we do our main show on Sunday, we do our bonus show on Friday. Yeah, a bonus show on Friday and then we do a dating show on Wednesday. So we had a bunch of people sending in dating questions and since that's since that's audience sourced, it's super easy to prep. So we just have them send in questions and we answer them on the fly. That's been fun, but that's been for about six months now. We did that and that was a lot, so we're taking a step back from that.
Speaker 2:It's just too much.
Speaker 3:We don't do this. We don't do this full time, right, like that's three hours of recording a week. If we were doing this full time, that's manageable Right, if we're just producing shows all the time. But we got jobs and kids. That's three hours of recording, but it's like how many hours of editing and communication, and yeah, we started paying his brother to edit. That was a huge step for us. And then, yeah, with the Instagram, the podcast takes up a lot of time now.
Speaker 2:I'll kick this into some deeper water because, like I'm sitting here looking at Augustine city of God and like thinking about a lot of Catholic forefathers as well, and we're in the Protestant realm but we also call ourselves denominational mutts, yeah, but I feel that a lot of the Catholic academics we've spoken to they've often been older to some degree, and so it's been a lot of doctrine, a lot of. I could have Googled that information type of conversation versus being able to just hear from someone that's grown up in the Catholic faith, and so I would love to just open the floor and hear Patrick Nevy's perspective on Catholicism, on your but from your life and your experience, and then Protestantism and Christianity in general. Is that valuable?
Speaker 3:I think yeah, okay, yeah. So, first of all, who have you had on from the Catholic academic world? I'm curious. We've had.
Speaker 1:We've had a couple episodes that I recorded before. Jared was even on, yeah, and initially I was going to go through all the denominations and I started with Catholicism. So it was a couple of local guys that have the biggest Catholic churches, were from Greenville, south Carolina, so I just interviewed them and it was wild man. One dude took me into his library, which has happened twice now. One dude took me into his library at the church, yeah, and there was like these crazy old books. This is from four, 500, I don't even know how many years, but it was like an impressive amount of years and it was like we can trace this saint to this saint. We're through down the line. This isn't Greenville, South Carolina, by the way. He's got folks.
Speaker 3:So I can't imagine why you would roam out like Roman.
Speaker 1:Catholic Vatican Dude.
Speaker 3:All right, craziest place in the world is St Anthony's Chapel in Pittsburgh, pennsylvania. Okay, it is the largest collection of relics. Besides, the Vatican is just in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1:And it's just weird.
Speaker 3:It's like this crazy church dude it like I'm Catholic and it made me uncomfortable but like going in it's just all of these, it's wild. Like no way is that the femur of Mary Magdalene. You're kidding me? That's ridiculous. Yep, One of two. One of two. I don't know if that was exactly the one, but anyway. So it's a crazy trip, really cool place, great place to go on, like Good Friday that's. You're just real dark, death, sad, scary, yeah. So that's a good question, cause like it's easy to get bogged down in the theological differences and I think that's. I think that's something that Catholics tend to do when they hang out with non-Catholic Christians. They're like have you heard of John six? I'm like, yep, bob, they've heard of John six. They can Google it too. Right, like we, we know what the points of, we know what the points of contention are. Right, but for me, that's just so funny.
Speaker 1:Catholics aren't Christian. Just kidding, yeah, that sort of stuff Right.
Speaker 3:It's like all right, let's get really hair splitting on what idolatry is. It's not really important. What really does matter is the. I think one big thing that Catholics can do is focus and emphasize on, emphasize the relationship, because that's like a that's. We got a bad reputation when it comes to relationship, relationship with Jesus, and so like when I. When I look back, testimony is a weird thing because you can paint a narrative for yourself and for me, the narrative I had painted for myself was I really never had a conversion, I never really experienced God in a profound and meaningful way. That was just not true. Looking back, I was born Catholic. I loved my faith. I took it for granted. I was like obviously, this is true. I'm a very trusting person and so when I'm learning something from someone who I trust, I'm just like, yeah, cool, that makes sense. I believed in Santa for far too long because I was like I've seen Santa. He goes to my church. The guy who plays Santa goes to our church. My mom says he comes every Christmas. So obviously that that was my thought process. So my my religion teacher said this so it must be true, and so that was all. I was very like I believe what the church teaches and let's figure this out, and so. But until it wasn't really until my, I went to middle school where I really started to wrestle with the things of the world, desiring a claim and relationships, and Do you know what? It wasn't a confirmation retreat, but it was a middle school retreat that we they had us go on in eighth grade and they took us into on Saturday night. They took us into the small chapel. On the side of the church is a little tiny room, and do you know what adoration is? Have you heard of this before?
Speaker 2:Adoration the word by definition or a habit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like the the word as like a Catholic practice referring to a Catholic. So there's a Catholic practice called adoration, now one of the big contentions in the Catholic Church that Catholics the process is the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and I know that one Google time, just for our listeners real, so they don't have to Google it in the meantime. But Catholics believe that Jesus Christ is Present body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, that it is no longer bread or wine, but it is the body and blood and soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. This is different than some other denominations that believe that Jesus is present Underneath bread and wine, but it is still bread and wine. That's called con substantiation. It's a more Lutheran idea. Catholics believe in transubstantiation, where it's a transformation, whereas in transform, something is trans it looks visibly different whereas a trans Substantiation, the substance has changed, whereas the form is not, and that's the word that is used to describe the phenomenon. It was used by St Thomas Aquinas the 1200s to describe something that the church has believed for a longer period of time than that, but that word is what the church has adopted. Describe what happens in the Eucharist is that it is no longer bread, but Everything that we would see and touch and taste remains, so the accidents of bread and wine remains. It still nourishes you. Still get too drunk if you drink too much of. It. Still poisons you, if there's poison in it, but it's Jesus, and so this is obviously Like a crazy. If you were to believe this, you would have to act differently, right. If you believe that a guy can say words over bread and wine and make it God, you would have to act differently, right. And so the church takes that so seriously that we have this practice called adoration, where you take the host out and the host is like a generic way to describe the Eucharist of a circle. Do you take the host out, place, hit place Jesus in a Of monstrance, like it's a demonstrae that's what it means and it's like a gold structure where you're displaying him and you get together with your boys in the room. If you get the homies together, one of them's got to be an ordained homie and he makes Jesus and Then you put him in the, put him in the structure, the gold structure, and then you place him on the altar and then it's a play. It's oh, it's a way to pray and you pray in the presence of Jesus. It's a very popular practice in in the church, mostly in the West, not in the east, but so this is a common thing that happens on retreat. So that's all backstory to what they're doing. So they're putting all these kids in this room and they're taking Jesus out and they put him in the Bonstrons and they put him on the altar and they're he's just there and it's silent and it's 50 middle schoolers in just silence. Now I know everyone else in that room knowing middle schoolers now I know this is before tic-tac, so it's probably a little better but knowing all that, like knowing middle schoolers now all those middle schools bored out of their minds, absolutely just I'm having like a religious experience, which makes sense because it's a religious activity, and so I'm just, I'm so filled with the Holy Spirit, like I feel God so present there. And I was just writing in my notebook that they gave us about like how much I wanted to give my life to Christ, like how much I wanted to work for him and further the kingdom, and and Then I left that room and I thought about school and my friends and what I wanted to do with my life and I thought to myself I remember thinking this was 13. I go, if that was real, if what actually happened really just happened, I have to change everything, like I have to fundamentally change everything about how I'm living my life, from the way that I talk to the way that I can knock myself around other people to the way that I plan for my future. Everything has to change if that happened. So I'm gonna pretend it didn't happen and and I remember making a conscious decision of a full act of my will to ignore that act of God in my life and move on with what I was doing. And that was a bad move like that year of my life was awful. That next year I, like I Really do feel like God. I do really believe that God withdrew some grace from me, just that's like the Job thing right, like he withdrew some of the blessing. Teach me what it was like, what it's like to live without him, because I firmly believe that I myself, patrick Nevy and not strong enough to live without the grace of God. Some people are strong enough to do insanely impressive human things without the grace of God. That's not me and so I, and also that's not a great place to be for them. That sucks, it's camel, I, the needle, that sort of thing. But that year of my life was intense depression, intense anxiety, like struggling, all of the developing like new bad habits that had never existed before in my life. And then a year later I Was in high school. This was my summer before my ninth grade year. I was invited by the high school youth group to all the while. I'm thinking I'm a perfectly fine Catholic, right? So the high school youth group invites me to this conference. It's called. It's named after a city in Ohio called Steubenville, which is where a big university is Franciscan University, and so it's called a Steubenville conference. And you go and it's like a you, it's a youth conference, it's. That's something that's familiar, right, that's common ground. So the one big like altar call night is we do a little different with the altar call at the end of the, at the end of the conference. I don't know if that's the case at Protestant youth conferences, but really it was a Saturday night adoration, and this is a little. This adoration was a little bit different. It was. It wasn't a quiet room, it was a big room with 3,000 kids in it and loud music, right, worship music and. But the Eucharist was still there and the priest took Jesus and walked him around the conference center or till. Every person to 3,000 people like it walk, walking by them, stopping and doing the. They call it benediction. It means blessing, it's a sign of the cross and Even though it was a different scenario, even though it was a different environment completely. It's louder, bigger. Jesus, far away. I felt the exact same feeling that I felt the year previous and I felt God saying do you, do you see you? This is where I want you to be, this is where I want you to be. I want you to be right here with me. I don't want you to be back there. Leave that life and Come be with me. And that's exactly what I did. I stopped talking to all of my friends from middle school, even the girl that I started dating. I ghosted her, which was crazy. I, last day of school, I gave her my first kiss, little smooch, and then I never talked to her again.
Speaker 2:Because, I was a Catholic should yes.
Speaker 3:Because I left the world. Haley, you don't understand. I left the world behind. Like st Francis, I Swore off kissing but little smooches. I left little smooches behind and I pursue.
Speaker 2:You are dead to me. You are dead to me.
Speaker 3:I am dead to the world. I am now alive in Christ. But like that was that year, was I come back to that often in my adult life? Yeah, this is what happens. This is what happens when I leave. God is God's. If you leave me, I'm not going, he's I'm if you. It's your choice. I'm gonna respect that choice. I'm gonna withdraw myself from you and it's hard because you don't think God doing that. But it's like sometimes when my son runs away, I don't chase him because he obviously wants to be away from me. Sometimes my son pushes me away. I go to give him a hug and he goes. No, I think, all right, that's fine, that hurts. I'm not gonna respect your autonomy, your little will that you got there, big will on. But yeah, so that was my. So those two experiences in adoration, it was so. My experience with Christ was so tied to that sacrament, and that sacrament, the way it's understood, is not Present in anywhere except the Catholic Church, and so that's why I'm so tied to Catholicism is because this deep, profound encounter with Christ happened in and through the church. I think that's true for a lot of Catholics. They just might not be able to articulate that I found a. I think that's actually true for most Christians. Like my girlfriend in high school, she believed that the Catholic Church was right about the Eucharist, but she remained Protestant. Her pastor even told her that she could feel free to believe that the Eucharist, that the communion at there. By the way, eucharist and communion same thing. Yeah, I okay great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're good on that.
Speaker 3:Okay cool. I one time one of the kids that I was working with in in youth group didn't know that and so I tried not to anyway. Or pastors like, oh, you can believe that communion is Jesus, and she was like I feel like I can't because you don't, and I was like not really the great best thing for pastors, say, but the thing that kept her from becoming Catholic was her community at her church and because she had a profound experience of Christ in and through the community at that specific church. I think that's. I think that that's what keeps people In the church where they are, is they have a profound and deep encounter with the Lord in that place and so it's hard to leave that place. Yeah, I don't know, many Catholics don't talk like that, but I think it's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is a common human ailment, oh, yeah, who's asked my wife?
Speaker 3:I am a very stubborn person. I'm right there. Yeah, sorry, you were talking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm pretty curious about you. Believe wholeheartedly Catholicism, 100%, but, yeah, so if you look at like Protestants or just like anybody that's not Catholic, that is, they call themselves a Christian. Hmm, how do you view them? Yeah, like, oh, they just they don't have anything going on, they don't have the full presence of the Lord, or is it more of like a we're all on the same team, or is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the Lord said two things that I like to think about often. I thought this was a biblical contradiction. When I first read it I was like hold on. But he says at one point I don't remember the context where he says this but he says whoever is not for me is against me. He's very clear on that If you're not on Team Jesus, you're against Jesus. That's likely the case and we see this right. Like in the 17th century we tried the whole. We could be good people without Jesus, right. And then just all the world wars happened and no, it's your again, human with crimes anyway, against humanity. So we see that is true. Like obviously right. But then later to the apostles, he goes up to them and he says they say, hey, jesus, we saw people casting out demons in your name, like we gotta stop them. And he says whoever is not against you is for you, right. And so I thought this was a contradiction at first. But it's not, because the person who is being against right is different Jesus. If you're not for Jesus, you're against him. So you have to be for Jesus, absolutely bare minimum. But Jesus obviously has some grace for people who are for him, not against the church, right, I and the apostles are like why aren't you on our team? Like why aren't you with us right now? And Jesus, it's okay, because they're for me and that's a good thing. So that's my perspective on denominational devices. As long as we're not against each other, we're for each other, and that might mean that we want each other to be doing different things. I think that's fair. But as long as we, like you said I think you recognize like we're on the same team, we're on team Jesus. So we're not Jesus is not against us, but we're also not against each other. Like we're for each other because we're not against each other. Is that is what I'm saying makes sense? Is that it does?
Speaker 2:It does Paradox. I'm fascinated in whether or not that's the common Catholic view.
Speaker 3:I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's a common Catholic view. I think it, in my expert opinion, I think it accurately reflects the way the church, the way the Catholic church, sees, the way it sees non-Catholic Christians, because this is a dynamic we've been dealing with forever. It's not new by any stretch of the imagination. The Orthodox churches or other autocephalus churches which is a $5 word that I love, sounds like an L. Autocephalus, yeah, cepha meaning rock, so Cepha rock. Autocephalus meaning it has its own rock, so it has its own Peter, that's what that word means. Autocephalus churches would be like the Russian Orthodox or the Greek Orthodox, right Like churches that have their own Pope. Essentially Protestant churches would not fall into that because they don't have a Pope. There's no real Pope, unless you want to count, like Andy Stanley, as a Pope.
Speaker 1:Good enough, yeah right.
Speaker 3:Anyway. So we've been dealing with this for a while. Okay, what do we do with these Christians who believe a lot of the same things we do and even have legitimate sacraments, Like we absolutely believe that if a bishop of the Catholic Church leaves the Catholic Church and says I don't want to be Catholic anymore, but he ordains a priest, we believe that priest is a priest and every Eucharist that he confets is the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus. Every, well, every baptism he does is valid, but that's because anybody can do a baptism. So I will tie. I'm going to do Google-able things for a second, because I want to tie it to what I said, right, the Catholic Church's perspective on ecclesiology is strange. Ecclesi, it's unique. Ecclesiology as a theology, theological discipline, is relatively new when you look at the Medieval's. Like Thomas Aquinas, he didn't have an ecclesiology. He was like here are the four parts of the summa who God is, who man is part two, part three. Who the God man is Easy like third part. And the fourth part is the sacraments. How does the God man interact with you personally? And so the fourth part of the summa is the sacrament. So he devotes like a quarter of his major treatise to the sacraments. The church sees the structure of the church in and through the sacraments, and so, like the body of the church is held together by holy orders, so bishops, priests, deacons and the laity of the church are held together by confirmation and baptism. And so Each of these sacraments imposes a character upon you that makes you more like, that makes your soul more like Jesus, more more conformed to his priesthood. And so the priesthood makes you super conformed, jesus priesthood, because it's the priesthood, confirmation, makes you super conformed, jesus priesthood. But baptism is like the barrier of entry. It marks you as a child of God. This is what the Catholic Church believes it marks you as a child of God, it forgives you of your sins, it infuses divine faith into you. So it's not something that you have in yourself, it's something that is given to you by God and it empowers you to grow in holiness. This is what the church believes about baptism, and it believed the church teaches that anybody can baptize anybody. I Don't know if you knew this. So if you and if you and your boys are just out out in the woods and you're both pagans and you're about to die Right, the about to die is important, because this would be an emergency situation right, you guys, even if you're both pagans, you can both baptize each other, as long as you say what Jesus said to do in the Great Commission Baptize. You baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit. You say I baptize you in the name of the Father, son and Holy Spirit, and that's baptism. And so the Catholic Church believes that every single person who is baptized with that formula is baptized, as long as they believe that they're undergoing baptism. All this stuff, right. And so the Catholic Church recognizes, and has recognized forever, that every Protestant who's baptized that way is a Christian through and through, and they were baptized outside of the normal law of the church. But that does not make them not a part of the church. They are, because they have been, because they have died with Christ and have been baptized into his death and therefore baptized into his resurrection. They are part of the body of Christ. And does Christ have two bodies? No, it's got one body, so you're part of the body of Christ. It's just there's something there that's not fully realized yet, and so it's. It's like concentric circles. So the Catholic Church will say the this is what we understand as a regular communion with the church. There are people who are Irregularly in communion with the church. They are, they're outside of the church, properly speaking, but they're not outside of Christ, and, and our hope is that we're all unified, because that's what Christ prayed for in John 17,. Right, they may all be one, and the Catholic Church takes that extremely literally. The Catholic Church believes and teaches that there's only one church, and so there are no denominations. It's just one church, and Some of us are all in it and some of us are not, and we want to all be in it, and one day we just all will be, because there's not denominations in heaven, there's one church in heaven, and so I think what I articulated out there with the my view of the two, they're not against you, there, for you. I do believe that's a an Accurate representation of what the church believes. Those thing, what we get is the Catholics believe everybody's going to hell. That's not Catholic, is that? Have you heard that?
Speaker 2:No, I haven't. I don't think we've heard a lot. It honestly feels like the tradition you grow up in leaves you blind to a lot of other traditions.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure, yeah, I don't know if you feel that, but yeah, that's why I wanted to talk to a bunch of different people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like what's going on?
Speaker 1:How do we have unity with people that we have no clue?
Speaker 2:What are you talking about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, people have wild thing there's all sorts of Catholics like Sounds weird to me because I didn't grow up in Catholicism.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, like sometimes when you talk about like adoration, or if you sit and listen to a Catholic professor go into the relics and the bones and the praying to the to dead priests and If I close my eyes and zone out a little bit, it sounds like I'm reading One of the Lord of the Rings Descriptors of the magic system. I'm just like okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes sense. Tolkien was it about Catholic? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or just when you're listening to something that's like almost sci-fi and you're just like.
Speaker 1:Okay it's our chain, yeah, yeah, and I don't mean that as a slide, it's just, I love that yeah, yeah, yeah so sometimes it's just okay.
Speaker 2:I have to wash my car today and I live in this world and I need to go to work and I need to, and so the arcane sometimes, I think, can create this. It's almost like a buffer layer that rebuffs the I'll say it this way, like this simple or the normal person, like it's too big, it's too grand, it's too magical, sure, yeah. And so that would be a question I would ask you is I don't know the right words.
Speaker 1:That is narcissism.
Speaker 3:Does that feel right. It could be narcissism. It's the idea that the spirit is good and the spiritual realm is good and the physical realm is evil. This is bad yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like something like the secret wisdom that you have to know to be able to be a Christian, and that's not the right word.
Speaker 2:I think that's a human arrogance.
Speaker 1:There's some trendy word that I've heard a lot of people use.
Speaker 3:Yeah it was like the biggest, the big bad for like 400 years in the Christian church.
Speaker 2:So no, I get what you're saying. Yeah, I guess I have a kind of yeah, finish your thought, and I have a question on that.
Speaker 3:Right, it's our culture. In a civilist culture where funeral pyres are more common and people see dead bodies more often and the relic, the simple tradition of the relics, is like, relics started because masses in the first several centuries of the church were set on graves. Right, that's relics, right, yeah, but you don't start with that when you're talking about narcissism. You don't like and I know people have legitimate criticisms of relics that are Catholic. It's like, hey, we're supposed to bury people. All right, can we just bury people please?
Speaker 2:For example, Can you just put those bones in, can you?
Speaker 3:just put them in the ground, Like in one sense I get it, In another sense I don't. And maybe there's. It's okay in moderation.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's one of those things, but I get it. We got to dig up all the saints.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you got to dig up all of them.
Speaker 2:She only had two femurs. Okay, we can't have 12 and spread the 12 St.
Speaker 3:Mary Magdalene femurs, unless it's a different St Mary Magdalene.
Speaker 1:I don't know, maybe it is Unless we sell them, unless we sell them.
Speaker 3:We're buying the reliquary, you're not buying the relics.
Speaker 2:That's an additional syllable there, so it's not.
Speaker 3:Reliquary. You're buying the gold box. It comes in. It just comes with a relic. You don't get to choose which one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that right A lot of stuff like it's funny.
Speaker 3:It's the same thing that happened with indulgence. Right, it was like you're not buying the indulgence, it's just you get an indulgence for doing a good work, and giving to the church is a good work. It's crap like that. It's okay, that's.
Speaker 2:Also, we're both in. We've both been in sales. What an easy close. Your family member is in purgatory.
Speaker 1:But you can speed that up. You got to speed it up.
Speaker 3:I would give every bit of money. I have. They codified it too. They're like this is 100 years off of purgatory, Weird.
Speaker 1:And that's why, the middle ages weird.
Speaker 3:That's why the middle ages is so like Arcane is the perfect way to put it. It feels arcane because it is old and like we look back and we're like that's so ridiculous, that's just so obviously ridiculous. But there's another part of it, right. We're American, we look at a caste system and we're like that's ridiculous. I can't imagine that happening in America, or maybe you can't. You see, like a monarchy, and you're like that's ridiculous, that's stupid, I can't believe it. And it's If you go back, though. It feels exact If you went back in time and you talk to them like this is normal. This is just Because they had a different idea of money back then than we do, because it wasn't as, first of all, money wasn't really as common for the average person, anyway, but it's, the thing with Catholic Church is dealing with is like Centuries upon centuries of practices and traditions that have been handed down and trying to remain consistent. It's like we need to be consistent. We can't just change things.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is my. I want to hear your heart because I have an opinion, but I'm not in the same perspective, right, you just described like a certain perspective, and then so, like human nature has a tendency, with trappings and tradition, to create rhythms that I ultimately lead to an idolatry of the tradition or the rhythm, or the trapping itself. And the Protestant Reformation, all the things like it's very young and so there's a lot less ritual, a lot less tradition, but how do you deal with the human tendency to just not get to the heart of that relational experience? Like it's just easier to just do the patterns that have been presented and that are saying, hey, we validate these because these had been validated for a thousand years, like more than Catholic or not. My question is these ingrained traditions that don't lead to life. What's your perspective on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the way I see it is, it's remedial. Do you know what I mean? It's I do not. Remedial is in like really remedial math. Right, you got to go back to basics.
Speaker 2:You got to do a lot of repetition.
Speaker 3:You got to do a lot of stuff that feels like a waste of time. So we're talking spiritual discipline situation yeah and I think it's like a marriage right. So let's imagine a perfect marriage right which we all have and everything is done out of it.
Speaker 2:I don't have to imagine it. No, I got one. I already got one. Maybe I love you.
Speaker 3:Listen to him baby, every no Wives don't listen to podcasts, that's a joke.
Speaker 1:She's dead. Did your wife listen to yours? Did your wife listen to yours?
Speaker 2:I've got to know. Yeah, this is for you, baby.
Speaker 1:Me either. So, I can say anything and it wouldn't matter.
Speaker 3:Wives don't listen to husband's podcasts. We have a Catching Fox. This is another great Catholic podcast. You should check them out. They're a little raunchy sometimes Not in a bad way, but his One of the co-hosts' wife listens to the crunch but doesn't listen to the Catching Fox Anyway. I love it or at least he came down stairs one day, heard my laugh in his living room off the Apple TV and he was like what are you doing?
Speaker 2:in my own home.
Speaker 3:In my own home we ripped off their podcast Two boys getting together hanging out talking about Catholicism because that was a new thing in 2016. Guys like to start podcasts. Anyway, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Sorry, so traditions are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, are trapping as being remedial. Like a marriage right. In an ideal marriage, every action, every act of love, every good thing, every good work you do for your spouse is done out of love and not done self-interestedly. Right. But let's say you have a marriage that's in jeopardy and it's hanging on by a thread and you sit them down for counseling. You say, all right, patrick, you need to buy her flowers. Okay, you need to buy her flowers on her birthday and on your anniversary and at Christmas. And you have to do it. And you have to wake up every morning you have to say I love you. And then you have to find three other times to do it throughout the day. Right, and so for the fur. There's two ways to look at that. One you can say he's just doing it because he wants to save his marriage. He's just doing it because he doesn't want to get a divorce. He's just doing it because someone told him to do it. He's just doing it out of whatever. He's not doing it because he loves her, that's fine. But at least he's doing it right, like that little will of, because if he didn't love her at all you just leave. If you didn't at least care a little bit. They just be, they just be done. And so these little traditions, so like a good example would be going to mass every week, this is your tradition. The Jews didn't have to go to the synagogue every Sabbath. That's not like it's something that we pick up from judeism. That's something that we kind of institute. Going to mass on holy days of obligation, saying the rosary, right, these are all things that are wrote and they're repetitious, but like people might not be doing that. People might be doing them out of a sense of obligation. They might be doing them out of a sense of duty. They might be doing them out of a sense of outpouring love and devotion for the Lord two people doing the exact same thing for different reasons. At least they're both doing it. And the guy who's doing it out of obligation, at least he's got a shot of eventually growing in his love and devotion. Now what happens if that tradition doesn't actually foster love and devotion? Kick it, get it out.
Speaker 2:That's fine.
Speaker 3:There's a reason why some traditions in the in in there's some prayer traditions in the church don't pan out. There's a reason why, you know, sat cloth and ashes don't really happen much anymore. Used to be a much bigger deal. Penitential pilgrimages to the holy land are not often given. Hey, in Remediation for your sin, go to the holy land. They used to happen. Sometimes it was a shorter walk back then, be a little bit of a trek for us now. But these things I that's that's my perspective is it's. It aids in the relationship because it provides a minimum. It provides a floor, because sometimes you're just your soul is weak. It's weak all the time, but sometimes it's just you need a floor to go down to and the floor is. I go to mass every week. I go to confession sometimes and I Say my, I say in our father before I go to bed Sometimes. That's what you can do and that's my routine. Maybe it's empty, maybe it's vain repetition sometimes, but at least it's. But it's not in vain, at least his repetition sometimes. But it's not vain because it's to the Lord and he can do something with it. Now, traditions that we're talking about like bingo happens on Monday nights Versus Tuesday nights those are some traditions I've come up against in my time working in parish ministry and sometimes those are the traditions people care more about. Like we've always done, we've always confirmed in eighth grade. We've always done confirmation in eighth grade. How dare you move it to ninth grade? That's, those are the ones that. But I don't know if you know this, but when the Catholic Church says tradition, we don't always mean like the practices themselves, we mean like an interpretive tradition. Have you been One of the professors say this when they were on the fight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I understand. Yeah, there's two, two delias, one like Scripture and then the other ones applied scripture throughout the church and that's something that Protestants don't like Basically mess with it all, and Catholics like rock and roll with that Like tradition, church practice.
Speaker 3:Catholics have a lot more traditions than most Protestant denominations, but everybody's got Both kinds of traditions. I would say, like there are. Think about the complementarian versus egalitarian debate. Right, those are interpretive traditions, that are. Some churches are egalitarian, some are complementarian and they won't Contradict those traditions because they, when they come up with a question, when a new thing comes around oh, now, all of a sudden, there's a, an AI bot that gets you pregnant. Is that okay? We'll use our interpretive tradition to determine whether that's okay. Probably, like that, that's everyone and then all other denominations. They also have the small t-tradition where it's like everybody celebrates Christmas on the 25th. That's a tradition. To Easter is a crazy tradition too. Like I'm surprised that we all get Easter on the same day. The Orthodox don't get Easter on the same day every year with us, like sometimes it's a week apart. It's wild, it's weird. Anyway, I won't go into that. I started googling.
Speaker 1:I want to go because people are building my deck without me right now and I've got to build this deck, so I want to do final thoughts. I know you've been marinating on something. You've written a lot of stuff down, so final thoughts will each go Jared first, I'll go, second, you go third. In the south was something saucy Sweet, just what. Whatever you want to talk about, just yeah, man, 60-second blast I.
Speaker 2:Really like what Pat said about if the tradition or if the habits don't lead to love and devotion, then drop them. But the the underlying theme of Having a basic pattern or rhythm that creates consistency, like you're our father's, something in terms of a you said it in terms of the ground floor you can return to to me when that's your peace and chaos. If you're making the bed in the morning, it's your absolutely. These are things I know to be true. I've known them to be true when the sun was shining, I'm known them to be true when it was evercast, and I know them to be true now that I'm pretty sure this boat is sinking and, and so I recognize the value of just ritual to that degree, or definitely just habit patterns. I can see that and I hear that, and that's not a Catholic thing, that's a human thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Now the value add to me, from my perspective, is it's a lot easier to have some communal conformity around those when you've got thousands of years of history and record, and then it is when you've just got a few hundred years of division. So I just love relating back to what you said earlier, which is, I believe that the healthiest process I know as well believe there's one church and so for me, the one church, the body of Christ. Like they are not, there is no division currently. The kingdom of heaven is here and it's here just as much as you know. When something tastes good and it doesn't taste rotten, or when something sounds good and it doesn't sound like disruption, christ is unified perfectly and always has been and always will be. I just love the way that all ties together. Do taste and see that he is good. Do what leads to love and devotion.
Speaker 1:Let's point out. So Jared's a Catholic, now Crazy.
Speaker 3:So you've guarded Jared, so we're ready to go.
Speaker 1:No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2:I was, and then not, and then he's a guy.
Speaker 3:He lost me at relics. They had me at unity. They lost me at relics again.
Speaker 2:They brought up relics for a second time. They're really into the bones, man. I mean, they got a sale going, it's nice 50% 50%.
Speaker 3:The heads are off.
Speaker 1:It's two for one on the femur. That's a fact. Okay, where was I going? So Jared's a Catholic. Number two my favorite thing about Catholics and this is like something that I'm meeting Catholic, I love them. This is my favorite thing 100% is the unity of Catholicism. I freaking love that. Like they've got everybody in the Roman Catholics and you can't. There's a lot of weird offshoots and things like that, but you go in Catholicism. Everybody's hearing the same Bible passage every week in mass. Oh yeah, that's wild, that is huge. Like it's like you preach on the poor and then you I don't know how many Catholics there are in the world, but there's a good bet and you preach on the point 3 billion. Yeah, you preach on the poor. You say hey guys, this is preach on the poor. We have got feed the hungry or give money to the poor this week, and then you got 1.3 billion people together that hear the same message and hopefully will act on that message.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you hope there'd be like a spike when the rich young man yeah, like in donations.
Speaker 1:So that's one of the biggest things for me that I think is just awesome. You know, the Protestant church like doesn't touch is like just the unity that, like the power you guys could have, is what you do. There is unity there, but I'm just saying like that, if everything works correctly, that's just a crazy amount of steam that you guys could have.
Speaker 3:That's fair. Yeah, I take that for granted sometimes.
Speaker 1:So thank you for pointing that out.
Speaker 2:I think that's massive.
Speaker 1:Number two. There is tons of things that I would disagree with, not on like this. You guys suck Like. You guys are doing it wrong. You're loving Jesus in the wrong way, and I know how to love Jesus better, and this is how you should love Jesus, not that it's funny how it evolves.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it is funny that kind of guy I love Jesus more than you and I can do it in a way that's better. So like you probably look at me loving Jesus.
Speaker 1:I'm better than you because deal with saints, but obviously I'm joking, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just that idea that, like repetition is awesome, like doing ritualistic repetitions to build a base, is really cool. But also the biggest thing for me is how do all of us not get to the Pharisee side of things? to where we're like, okay, if I do my the Eucharist this many times, or if I do my Hail Mary's or if I do whatever, there's so many different prayers, so there's a lot of cool things. If you don't know what to pray, you should pray this or you should pray that, which is awesome. But it's the idea of, like, how do you not get to the Pharisee side of this is the things that you need to be able to have so that you can love Jesus. It's not you and Jesus, it's you, mary and Jesus, you, the saints and Jesus, which I wouldn't say is necessarily like a terrible thing. But I'm also not sure about how all that works together. And is that necessarily beneficial? Yeah, so that would be my final thought of yeah, is it beneficial? Not necessarily like you guys aren't loving Jesus in the right way, but some things we do, I'm sure, are not beneficial. So it really comes down to less of like theology and more of is it beneficial for me?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll answer that with my final thought, because it was like I'll take it back to my little testimony that at the beginning was like the scent of the Pharisees was thinking they were safe or thinking they were done. Right, we have Abraham for our father. If you had Abraham for your father, you would do what Abraham did. And he kept pursuing me, he kept coming after me, he kept answering when I called him. And you're not doing that. Just fundamentally, the Pharisees were not doing that, the Israelites were not doing that. It had been 500 years since a prophet had arisen and they were not answering God's call. And so that's, I think that's the scent of the Pharisees, and it comes from a human desire to feel safe, to feel done. We want to rest, we want to stop. Newton was wrong. Objects in motion desperately want to stop moving. We just want to die.
Speaker 2:We want it to be over with right.
Speaker 3:We want to rest in that. So everyone's. That's what everyone talks about retirement People to save for retirement when they're 20. People try to make so much money they don't have to work another day in their life. We want to get to the point where we're done, and so some people go into hopelessness and say I'm never going to be done, so I'm going to stop trying. Other people say, well, let's just move the bar down here and then we're always jumping it, but it's high enough that other people don't. We're always. We're always just like, but like. We've lowered the basket down to six feet and we're just putting away buckets. But the little two foot tall guys over here that are there, they're not in the habit yet. They're not tall enough to do this yet there we get to feel morally superior to them. So the bar is not so low that it's possible for everybody to come in. The bar is just high enough for other people to be wrong and for me to be right, and it's a human desire, so it's. I think that's how you, that's how you stop being like a Pharisee, or you avoid that, and I think that's that is a sin that everyone is tempted to like. We throw a Pharisee back and forth across the aisle right.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's a sin that we're like there, but before the grace of God goes, patrick Nevy. But it's just. It's so tempting to want to be done and to be like, look God, I am saved. Whether you want to say you saved yourself, or you were saved by faith, or you were saved by faith and baptism or faith or whatever, like whatever you were saved by. You want to say I'm done, like I'm finished, I'm safe, I'm done. But you're not done because God is calling you further up and further in. It's calling me deeper and when I stop saying yes to his call, that's when he starts to withdraw because I'm withdrawing from him. It's not he's not him withdrawing from me, it's really me withdrawing from him. So I think that's how you avoid the Pharisee thing. Just keep whatever you believe about salvation. I don't care. Whatever you believe about salvation, as long as you keep following him, you're going to be good, as long as you keep saying yes.
Speaker 1:Did you just quote Chronicles of Narnia Silver Chair, with the further up, further in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did Crypto-Crypto-Catholic CS Lewis.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Anglican so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, who knows, that's at the end of the Silver Chair.
Speaker 2:Did you just know that? I know, I was like that's not a Catholic phrase.
Speaker 1:That's an Aslan phrase. I love that. I think about that all.
Speaker 3:I think about having a lot of them. I think about further up and further in Possible.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the Across the Counter podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars. Wherever you got this podcast, thanks for watching.
