EMHC's and the McDonald's Mass

[00:00:11] Efficiency rather than reverence seems to be the priority at many Catholic parishes regarding how they celebrate the Mass. And this leads to the rise of the extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion armies. Would it be really so bad if a Mass was longer than 60 minutes? That's what we're going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I'm Eric. Sam is your host, editor in chief of Crisis magazine. We're getting started. You know what to do. Smash that like button, invade the like button. Kind of like the eh. EMHC armies invade this the the altar during Mass and hit that like button. Subscribe to the channel. Also you can follow us on social media ris. You can also go to crisismagazine.com put in your email address and we'll send you an email newsletter every morning, usually with our two opinion pieces of the day. Finally, for those who are watching the live channel, thank you. On YouTube, thank you very much. And Facebook, I believe. Feel free to join the live chat and at the end of the program we'll address some of those comments and questions in the live chat. [00:01:20] Okay, let's go ahead and get started here. Let me pull something up here real quick. Okay, so what I have. What's going on here? Technical difficulties. There we go. Okay. [00:01:34] I have, I have found like I, I attend a traditional Latin Mass now and I have for a number of years, but I've been to a lot of, I mean for years I was just went to my diocesan parish and I sometimes when traveling or something like this, I will go to a regular diocesan Novus Ordo parish as well for Mass. And what I've noticed is, what I noticed for many years is there is a golden rule, and that is a Mass, a Sunday Mass cannot last longer than 60 minutes. [00:02:04] Now sometimes this rule is somewhat understandable because maybe the parish has a lot of Masses that morning, like one at 7:30, one at 9 and at, at 10:30, then at noon. And because of parking situation, whatever the case may be, they need to get people in and out. And I get that. I understand that. I'm not saying it's okay still in that situation. I just get that. But you still have the 60 minute rule in a lot of parishes that simply don't have that problem. They might have two Masses on a Sunday. Yeah, maybe they schedule them close together, but they don't need to. They could have at 8:00 and 10:00, for example, 8:00 and 11:00, they get, you know, three hours in between. [00:02:43] So the, the, the practical considerations Aren't really. That wouldn't really be that big a deal. [00:02:49] But instead you have your 60 minute masses. Now, in defense of a lot of pastors and priests, I know for a fact that if they had Masses that were typically longer than 60 minutes, they get a lot of complaints from people and they might get people leaving their parish. [00:03:05] So it's a ground, it's a, it's from the bottom up. Is, is kind of where this is coming from in a lot of cases. [00:03:12] But what happens then is because we have this 60 minute rule. I mean, it's an unspoken rule, but it's a 60. You know, basically what happens then is that parishes are very cognizant of what can we do to make sure the Mass is very efficient. [00:03:27] It reminds me in a lot of ways, I don't know if you've seen the movie the Founder, I think it's called, with Michael Keaton, and it's about the Ray Kroc who ran McDonald's for a very long time. He's not technically the founder of McDonald's, that's kind of the irony of the, of the title. But he bought out McDonald's very early on. But what he was attracted to with McDonald's was how efficient their system ran that you basically, they could get people in and out very quickly with a burger and fries, whatever this is back in the 1950s and this was unheard of, most places you had to sit down or even if you had a drive through, it would take a long time. They might get your order wrong, stuff like that. McDonald's had a very small menu, but most importantly, they had a system in which they could create their meals very quickly for people, get them in and out. And of course, if you know anything about business, this is a very good thing for business because high turnover in that situation is very good because you get more customers, more money. It's great. I'm not saying the food's any good. I'm just saying that from a business standpoint, it makes sense. [00:04:28] I feel like, though, a lot of Masses or parishes are run like that, where it's like, okay, we need to be efficient about everything we do. [00:04:36] We need to make sure the homily is never more than eight minutes. We need to make sure communion time doesn't ever last more than maybe eight minutes. [00:04:45] So if we have a lot of people, we need a lot of Eucharistic ministers. I'll just shorten it that. We all know the official title is Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion and the intention of them it's lay people are supposed to help distribute Communion if it's an undue burden for it to go too long because of a lack of priests or deacons to distribute Communion. Now, of course, undue burden is something that is just used as an excuse to say, father doesn't feel like it lasts very long. Or again, there's pressure to make sure it's under 60 minutes, the entire Mass. But here's the thing. I really believe this is a. [00:05:24] It's missing the entire point of the Holy Sacrifice, of the Mass. [00:05:30] It's missing why we go to Mass, why we celebrate Mass, why we're there. It's missing the point of Sunday. [00:05:36] What is more important to do on Sundays on the Lord's Day than to be at Mass? [00:05:43] Absolutely nothing. There's nothing more important to do. That is the high point of every Sunday. It should be. [00:05:50] Sunday is a day of rest, but more importantly, it's a day of worship. It's a day that we worship God. And the best way, and the primary way we do this, do that as Catholics, is at Mass. [00:06:02] If Mass happens less than hour and five, hour and 10, or God forbid, an hour and 15 minutes, why is that a problem? What else is there to do? Where do you have to go? I understand. Just real quick, there are people who have to work on Sundays due to their job, and they can't help it. And maybe they need to run whatever. We don't, though, schedule everything around them. The norm is most people don't have to work on Sundays. [00:06:28] And frankly, you don't set everything up for, like, the few, the exceptions of people who do. And they can usually find ways around it. [00:06:35] If your Mass is an hour and a half on Sundays, why is that a problem? Again, where else do you have to go? What is more important for you to do than to be at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on Sundays? Now, the fact is, a lot of people may not say it explicitly, but they do have other things to do. They have sports to go to. That's a big one. They have the youth sports, youth sports to go to on Sundays during NFL season. They have a football game maybe to go to or to watch. [00:07:03] They have, you know, maybe they're running errands that day. Maybe they're deciding to go shopping that day. Whatever the case may be, maybe they just don't want to be there. They'd rather be at home. [00:07:14] The problem is, is that we have made Mass something that is, we fit into our schedules rather than scheduling our lives around it. And that's really what we should be doing. We're not utilitarians. We're like, okay, let's have the most efficient worship of God we can. Remember the Mass points to the Heavenly Liturgy. [00:07:39] That's what we're doing in heaven, by the way. I'm not saying that's all we're doing, but the primary thing we're going to be doing having is heaven is worshiping God in the liturgy. Do you think in heaven they're saying, oh, we better make sure we cut it off to, you know, 60,000 years. [00:07:55] However you would measure time, and you don't really measure time in heaven, but you know what I mean? They don't care about that. They're just like, we don't want to do anything other than worship God. Now I get in this fallen world, we can't have masses that last 10 hours. I get that. Because we do have limitations. We have physical limitations. We have obligations to family, to certain things. All that is understandable. I'm not calling for 10 hour all day Masses, but I don't think it's unreasonable. I don't think it's too much to ask for Masses up to two hours long as a norm. My parish are typically about an hour and a half, and I know a lot for a High Mass, Low Mass is an hour, and that's not uncommon. And I know nosordo parishes who have more elaborate, reverent Masses that can last up to an hour and a half. [00:08:45] And sometimes you might only have one priest. And so you have to distribute communion to everybody at the altar rail by himself. And that takes longer. [00:08:55] And that's actually kind of where this discussion came up, as I saw on X. Am I talking about, like, if we only had priests distribute Communion takes so long, wouldn't that be a problem? Wouldn't people complain? They would complain, but they shouldn't complain because again, where else are they going to go? What else do they have that's more important to do? And if communion is very long, why is that a problem? You can pray during communion. It's a great opportunity to pray. You just, if you're near the front of the line, let's say you just received our Lord. [00:09:24] So you can pray with the presence of the Lord directly within you. Sacramental presence. If you are near the back of church and then take a while, you can pray preparing for that sacramental encounter. If you have little kids who can't sit still, fine, you take them out, you take them to the back, whatever the case may be. That's Understandable. Nobody's saying that you can't do that. [00:09:48] The point is that this focus on efficiency. And it's the same thing. It's the exact same attitude that we see in the moving of certain masses to the closest Sunday, like the Feast of the Ascension or the Feast of the Epiphany. It's a matter of, okay, we have to schedule the Mass around our lives rather than our lives around the Mass. The reality is the Mass should be the high point of what we do each week. Sunday Mass should be kind of the central focus of each person's life, each family's life. And so making it last a little bit more than 60 minutes should not be a big deal. In fact, it should be something we almost look forward to and think, wow, this is great. I get to be here longer. The central part of my week is extended even more. [00:10:36] If you're watching a great movie, are you mad if it goes over two hours long? [00:10:41] If you're watching a great game, like watching at the baseball game, and it's going and it's like this exciting game that you just can't, you know, you can't get your eyes off of, are you mad because it goes over three hours? [00:10:52] Not if you're a real fan. [00:10:55] If you have a great book that you're reading, are you mad that it's 600 pages rather than 300? If it's this awesome book that you love, no, you can't. I mean, in fact, I know my. Whenever I reread Lord of the Rings, I'm always upset at the end because it's over. I wish it would just keep on going on and on and on. Because it's such a great book, we should have a similar attitude towards Mass. Now, don't get me wrong. [00:11:19] There are Sundays. I'm at Sunday Mass. And I also think, like, I need to get out of here. I got stuff to do. Whatever. It crosses my mind as much as the next guy. I'm not saying every Sunday. I'm like, oh, I just want to be here all day, and I want nothing else to do. I'm human like the rest of us. We all think like that at times. I'm just saying, no. We should recognize that. What we should be thinking as Catholics is we should be thinking, I want a Reverent Mass, a beautiful Mass, no matter how long it takes. I don't care about efficiency. In fact, that's something I think we should recognize. [00:11:55] Worship and efficiency are really not related to each other. Worship is meant to be extravagant. We're meant to give everything. I'll be honest. Our Eastern Catholic brothers and sisters are better at this than we are us Latins. Because if you go to an Eastern Catholic liturgy, I was just at 1 this previous Sunday. There's so much repetition and so much, like, unnecessary things in the liturgy, actions and prayers and words, and I put that in quotes, unnecessary, because of course, there's no such thing as necessary unnecessary. I mean, there's the necessary of the sense of, yeah, I had the sacramental consecration, things like that. But what I mean is there's no, like, okay, this one, we can throw this out. And that was the attitude in the 60s. Let's throw things out if we don't think they're necessary. That's a. That's just not the way we should be thinking about the Mass, about the liturgy. It should be extravagant. It should. Now, I get that there's low Masses that are. That are shorter and things like that, but even those have lots of prayers in them. At least in traditional Latin Mass, they have a lot of prayers in them that are quote, unquote, unnecessary. [00:13:04] So I really believe that this is an important thing. And, and I mean, it should not come as shock to anybody. I don't think there should be eucharistic ministers, lay eucharistic ministers at all. [00:13:16] But, like, for a lot of reasons, theological reasons and witness reasons, but just for the idea of efficiency sake, that is not an argument for it, because it just simply shouldn't matter if a parish finds that they're having problems with the Masses kind of running into each other. Spread them out some more. [00:13:39] And just, you know, if you have a mass at 2:00, yes, I do realize that's a burden on the priest, you know, to do that. But that's what you signed up for. I mean, I'm very sympathetic. I'm very. I try to be sympathetic towards priests and the duties they have, and I very much understand that. But this is what you're here for, is to celebrate the Mass. And so let's not try to cut that time down just for the sake of efficiency. I also think this ties in very much to what I talked about last week and I wrote about last week. With so many people leaving the Catholic Church now, it might be counterintuitive because people might think like having longer Masses means less people will be likely to come because they're going to be turned off by the idea of going to a longer Mass. [00:14:22] And I understand there might be some people that might be the truth with but here's the thing. [00:14:28] I believe that one of the primary reasons why so many people fall away from the church is because their experience of Catholicism at the local parish where they don't see people act like they claim they believe. [00:14:43] What I mean by that is they say they believe all these things about God, the Catholic leaders say, and people in the church say they believe all these things about God, but then they don't act like it. They act like it's. Who cares? Like, I mean just the fact that you would say that the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and that we worship and adore it and that is a source and summit of our lives. And yet we also say, let's get through this thing quick and get out of here. [00:15:12] That sends a message. That sends a message to people that they don't really believe. And so why should I believe? I'm going to go elsewhere. That's why they might go to a Protestant evangelical church which is very much on fire and very much does believe what they say they believe. [00:15:30] And so when they compare, like we know as Catholics that the Catholic faith is the true faith, the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. But a lot of Catholics grow up not knowing that, not really understanding at least. And so when they see one parish, a Catholic parish, it doesn't really. All it cares about is getting people in and out. And in a Protestant non denominational church that doesn't mind going long, but really is on fire. What they believe they're going to be more attracted to the Protestant church. That's just the way it is. I mean I remember years ago I went to a, before I became Catholic, I went to a black Baptist church. That thing lasted. Their service lasted maybe three hours, I think. I mean it just went on and on and on. And they were the whole time preaching and singing and really into it. I mean it was a full body experience and you were exhausted. I remember taking, I had to take a nap. I was like only 20 something years old and I still had to take a nap afterwards. I was so tired. They believed what they say they believe. Do Catholics? [00:16:31] Do Catholics? I mean, I think that's what people are asking and there's finding they think the answer is no. So they're leaving. [00:16:39] So let's get rid of the Eucharistic ministers, but more importantly, let's get rid of this efficiency mindset. The McDonald's mass, I call it, let's go to the McDonald's mass and be like, okay, what matters is the worship of God, the proper and reverent worship of God. That means we go a little bit over 60 minutes. Fine, that means we have some, some problems in the parking lot, people coming and going, okay, maybe we'll, if it's a long term problem, we'll change that. But honestly, if it means there's some parking issues, that's, that's a small price to pay for giving a true and beautiful and reverent worship of God and not this efficiency McDonald's mindset. [00:17:19] Okay, so I think I've beat that drum enough. Let me talk about something else here. My next topic I want to talk about is the situation of the Christians in Syria and others in Syria. If you remember, we've been told for so long that Assad, the leader of Syria, is an evil man. He's a dictator, he's anti democracy, he's anti everything. And so we have to get rid of him, we have to topple him. Made many efforts over the years to do that and finally he was removed back in December, I think it was, it wasn't that long ago, just a few months ago. [00:17:55] And people rejoicing, hey, look, this is great. Another dictator, just like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or whoever, another dictator has been overthrown. A win for democracy, a win for freedom. [00:18:07] But of course, many people, including myself and others, said no, this is probably going to be worse for the minorities in the community, particularly the Christians, because no matter how bad you might say this certain dictator is, they often brought stability and therefore safety to the minorities, which means the Christians and the Jews, in the end, often even the members of Islamic sects that aren't the majority, it brings them safety and they can continue to worship and live their lives. And that's exactly what's happened here. Now with the overthrow of Assad a couple months ago. What we're hearing about, and I will say it's a confusing situation. I've heard conflicting reports. I've heard as much as 7,000 Christians and I don't know how to pronounce this, but I think it's Alwites, that's a sect of Islam, have been murdered in the last few days. That sounds high. I don't know if that's true, but it might be. But there's definitely a lot of reports of a lot of people dying. But the neocons on both the left and right, they were moralistically telling us, oh, you know, how good we should feel that another evil man like Assad has been overthrown, but it just is again, a comic book interpretation of world events, of politics. This idea that if we don't have a, you know, American democracy with a free election, everything completely set up in another country, then we need to do everything we can to overthrow it. Not recognizing that often by doing that, we make things worse than they were when it got started. [00:19:53] And that's what happened here. It's what happened in Iraq. I mean, frankly, Iraq is worse off than it was under Saddam Hussein. Now, of course, everybody will say, oh, you are defending Saddam Hussein or Assad or people or Muammar Gaddafi or whoever. [00:20:07] No, I'm not defending them. I mean, if they're dictators or dictators, I'm not saying it's ideal, but that ain't America over there. Their history is not the same as ours. This is the best probably situation they can hope for for Christians, which is who I care about the most. I'm not saying I don't care about others who live in those lands as well. But Christians are my priority because I am a Christian. And so I want Christians to be protected worldwide. Just like as an American, my top priority is Americans as a Christian, as a Catholic, my top priority is Christians and Catholics. And they are best protected by right now, by leaders like Assad in Syria, by Hussein in Iraq, people like that. And when you remove them, it makes it much worse. The exodus of Christians out of the Middle east over the past 20 years because of policies like George W. Bush's and stuff like that has been just astronomical and been tragic. Christians are disappearing from the Holy Land because of the actions of the United States. [00:21:08] I'm not saying that Muslim extremists aren't directly to blame as well. I mean, they are, but they wouldn't have the opportunities or the incentives to, you know, the motivation, the provocation if it wasn't for us neocon foreign policy. [00:21:26] Now, unfortunately, President Trump, who's so good on a lot of these foreign policy incomes like Ukraine, is not so good in the Middle east, mostly because of the influence of Israel, the Israeli lobby here in America. But the point is, is that we need to learn our lesson that we sometimes have to accept, you know, some bad, some bad leaders, bad situations for the, for the overall. It's a better than the alternative type of situation. I mean, a perfect example that is, look what happened after World War II. The west accepted the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin, for goodness sake. Joseph Stalin is one of those evil men who ever lived, and yet the United States gave him half of Europe because they knew the alternative was worse. [00:22:15] So when you, the neocons today have their moralistic, you know, preaching about like, oh, we can't do a deal with Putin, we can't give him anything, he's bad, or we can't let Assad stay in power, whatever, tell that to Churchill and FDR and people like that who gave half of Europe to Stalin. [00:22:32] And it would have been worse if they had not. And that's the thing. It was awful that they did, but it likely would have been worse. And they saw that, they're willing to do a deal with the devil. And I think the same thing applies in Ukraine now with Putin. And the same thing applied. I mean, I wish we hadn't kicked outside with just letting Assad continue to lead in Syria, even if it's not ideal, even not perfect, it's better than the alternative, which is what we're getting now. So pray for the Christians in Syria that are under persecution, that are under threat. Pray that they would be protected and that stability would come back to that region. I mean, that's the only way we can stop it is through prayer and fasting. [00:23:11] Next topic, how many voting cardinals in the next conclave? Okay, I brought up this question last week on accident, became a little bit of a discussion and controversy. [00:23:22] The rules of a conclave as set by Paul vi, Pope Paul vi, and it hasn't really been changed significantly, is that any cardinal who is under the age of 80 is a cardinal elector at a conclave. He is eligible to vote at a conclave. Politics also said there's a maximum of 120 cardinal electors in a conclave. [00:23:44] Well, right now, and you know, Pope Francis looks like he's doing better. He's recovering. He might be. He might return, leave the hospital soon. [00:23:52] But if he died now, there would be a 137 voting cardinals eligible for cardinal electors. In other words, 137 cardinals who were under the age of 80. [00:24:05] So what does that mean? Does that mean all 137 vote? Does it mean they kick out 17 for some reason? Only 120 vote? I asked this question because I wasn't 100% sure the answer, so I thought I'd just share it with everybody here. [00:24:17] The answer is all of them vote and are eligible to vote because essentially what's happening is by Pope Francis selecting them as cardinal under the age of 80, he is saying that he is basically going over the rule set by Paul VI for 120, the max 120 rule, and he has as the Pope, the authority to do that. It's just an ecclesiastical law. It's not like a divine law or anything like that. There's nothing where Jesus said there has to be 120Cardinals and so he can do that. He doesn't even have to announce he's doing it. He just simply by selecting more 120, he's saying, yeah, you're all eligible to vote. So I'm not keeping the 120 limit. Now the question might arise, well, what is the purpose of the 120 limit? Does it have any binding force? The answer is no. It's actually silly. It's a silly rule. I mean, I think it was just Paul, Paul VI saying, hey, future post, I think it's a good idea to keep it to 120. You can do whatever you want, of course, but that's just my own idea. So it causes more confusion than anything. I bring this up a little bit because I, I would not be surprised if the next conclave has over 120 voters. And then whoever the Pope is somebody doesn't like and says, oh, it's an invalid conclave. The Pope's not really the Pope, because there was more than 120 and the rule was 120. So let's nip that in the bud. That's something the Pope can easily override. And he has by. By. He doesn't have to even say he's doing it just by that he's overriding the rule. He just by having more than 120. He is. So I just wanted to bring that up as something for us to know when the next conclave comes so there's not a dumb debate about it. [00:25:54] Next thing I want to talk about was a little bit deeper, which is should Christians vote for non Christians for political office? I bring this up because Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio, which is my state. This is next year, so I will be voting in that election. And I have already come out and say I support Vivek Ramaswamy. I plan to vote for him. Now, not everybody has the deadline to announce your running has not yet been met. So it's possible somebody else might throw their hat into the ring, in which case I might change my mind. I don't think I will, but I might. And so I am publicly supporting Vivek Ramaswamy. I think he'd be a great governor. I like a lot of things he says. He's not perfect. Of course he's not. But I think he would bring the same energy that Trump brings to the country that Elon brings the Doge and things like that. And so I think, you know, overall, I think he'd make a great governor. I got some pushback for this because some people said, some Catholics said I wouldn't vote for him because he's Hindu. I think he's in. Yeah, he's not Catholic, he's not Christian. And I don't think we should. I don't want a non Christian running our country, you know, running my state or whatever. And there is, by the way, a Christian candidate, Yost, who's running against him. I think his name, David Yost, something like that. And so there is an alternative right now in the primary, I'm talking about the Republican primary. [00:27:12] And so there is an alternative. [00:27:14] I just disagree with that line of thinking. Now, I want to say I do think the ideal is Catholics practicing faithful Catholics in public office. Heck, practicing faithful Catholics as a monarch is probably the ideal. [00:27:30] So I definitely do. And a state that preferences, the Catholic religion might tolerate other religions. And I think, I personally think it should tolerate other religions. But my point is I don't even have a problem with that. And I think that'd probably be the ideal. However, we live In America in 2025, we are far, far, far from that. And in fact, we also have many, many, many Christian people who say they're Christian who run for office and are just simply terrible politicians, terrible leaders, terrible government officials. [00:28:01] Some of them aren't even bad Christians. Some are terrible Christians. I mean, you know, people like Nancy Pelosi, who claims to be Catholic, but but is awful. I'm not talking about that. I'm even talking about like just lukewarm Republicans who are Christian in name, but really they don't govern in any meaningfully Christian way. [00:28:17] That's what we have so much of. And so for me, the religion of the candidate just simply isn't that important to me that right now. What matters to me is will this candidate do a good job in our current situation to get through to us on a better path? [00:28:36] If he does, will he like, for example, work to end abortion? Will he work against like the woke culture? Will he try to balance the budget, try to stop the spending, try to cut out programs that are antithetical to Christianity, that harm the state, things like that? Those are the things that matter to me. [00:28:54] His religion is just not that important when it comes to being a politician, a government official in America today. Maybe one day we get to a point where I can use that as a factor. Now, if two candidates were 100% equal, one was Christian, one was Hindu, I'd vote for the Christian. If they're 100% equal. That's probably never going to happen though. You can't really have that. But I think Vivek stands head and shoulders above other candidates. And so even though he's not Christian, I will willingly vote for him when he runs for office. So that's my and I know not all Catholics agree with me on that one, but that's my viewpoint is that it's more of a pragmatic view of where we are today as a country and our political system that I'm more than willing to vote for a non Christian if I think he is overall a better candidate in a lot of other ways. I'm not going to just say no, no Christians, no non Christians allow. [00:29:49] Lastly, I want my white pill of the week. Have these each week. I like to do this. And that is the nih. National Institutes of Health will not use aborted babies in research under Trump. This is we found this out. Jay Botticere Bhattacharya. I think I pronounced that correctly, believe it or not. Who was awesome during COVID Awesome. He was nominated as the next director of the nih. And during his hearing, his confirmation hearing, he said that the Trump administration basically has ordered that no aborted babies use in research. [00:30:20] I think this is a huge deal. I think this is great news. And I think the scandal of our government using aborted babies and our and our in pharmaceutical companies using aborted babies and of course the pharmaceutical companies in the governments are and agencies are always interrelated and how they do these things, they get grants and all that stuff. [00:30:41] The use of aborted babies in research is a scandal that is, I think, way too much under the radar. It came up some during COVID but it's a horrific practice, has been going on for decades and it's on the level of like Nazi horrors that we've heard about, that we've read about. And yet nobody seems to really cry out about this, this. And in fact not only that. The great scandal is many Catholic, including Catholic leaders and moral theologians seem to act like it's not that big a deal. A great example this is Father Matthew Schneider LC who loves every vaccine that's ever been created and acts like it's no big deal that aborted babies are used in the research. He will explain it away and it's a real scandal. He should not be a public figure in his, his Order which itself be suppressed. The legionaries of Christ. He should be suppressed or quieted, not allowed to say these things. But he's not the only one. The fact is, a lot of Catholic leaders, priests, bishops, are silent about this or even supportive of it, act like it's not a big deal. The fact is, it's a horrific practice. I don't care if it was from one aborted baby from 1965 or. And it's not, by the way. It's not. But even if it was, that alone would be immoral to ever use things that were based upon that experimentation of that. That image and likeness of God. But the truth is they continue to use aborted babies in research, and they continue to basically harvest organs, harvest other parts of images of God that were aborted in their mother's womb. And it's just a terrible thing. So the fact that. But Acharya said that they would not do that in the NIH under Trump, I think is a wonderful thing. It's a white pill because it's like it's yet another move in the right direction. It's another thing. So praise God and be thankful, and let's thank God for that action and let's continue to pray for the end of abortion, but also the end of research of these aborted babies. Okay, so finally, I just want to jump in here with the live chat again. I really love it when people comment in the live chat. I'm happy to comment on it. Daniel Verney says it's called the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for a reason. It is our opportunity to unite our sacrifice with Christ's perfect sacrifice. Too many people say, I don't get anything out of mass. Dino, that's a great point, because what we see is like we, you know, we're supposedly going to the sacrifice of Calvary. It's, it's the representation of this holy sacrifice of, of Calvary represented in the mass. Christ is giving his life up for us on the cross, and we're not willing to give up 61 minutes for him a week. I mean, come on, we unite our sacrifice. So if it means we're going to be late to something or we're maybe getting a little squirmy or whatever in our pews. We unite that to Christ's perfect sacrifice. And like you said, too many people say, I don't get anything out of mass. Well, do you understand what's going on? Are you really invested in it? Are you really paying attention? Are you really praying beforehand, praying afterwards? Are you preparing yourselves doing the readings, maybe the night before, you know, reading about what the Mass is, things like that. If you do, you will get a lot out of Mass. [00:33:54] Another comment from James. Brother Richard Heilman proved a reverent Mass will fill the pews. His church was full before he got moved. Yeah, Richard Heilman, great priest. And you see this in so many parishes that if a parish takes the Mass seriously, people will come. [00:34:13] The fact is we are going through a great realignment in the Catholic Church in America and I think other countries as well. I just don't like to speak about countries. I don't have firsthand knowledge of a great realignment in the church. What I mean by that is we're seeing parishes are growing or dying based upon their faithfulness to Catholic doctrine, their faithfulness to Jesus Christ. So parishes that are the more faithful they are, the more they're growing because people are moving to them, people are driving to them, making sure they go to that Mass instead of the local one, which frankly can harm their faith because of the, the way that Mass is celebrated, the way the faith is presented, things like that, and more importantly could harm their kids faith. When you have 840 people leaving for every 100 people who join, that means at the parish level things are going wrong. And it's, you cannot say that the parish is not harming people's faith if everybody's leaving the faith because of the parish. [00:35:11] That's just the reality. [00:35:13] And so when priests are faithful, when parishes are faithful, the people will come. I'm not saying like all of a sudden, if every parish is faithful, we'd have billions of people going to the Catholic Church. But I do say that right now there's a realignment in the church that parishes are faithful, are growing, and parishes that are not are dying because people, the sincere, authentic Catholics, are hungry for the faith. They're hungry for the, the fullness and the boldness of the Catholic faith being preached, being worshiped, the God being worshiped. And so if that means mass is over 60 minutes and new, no eucharistic ministers and long communion lines, so be it. Faithful Catholics don't mind. We don't complain about that. We love it because it means lots of people are there and that we're truly worshiping God rightfully and reverently. Okay, I think I'll cut it off there. Appreciate the people in live chat again. Until next time, everybody. God love.