Guest
Dr. R. Jared Staudt is a teacher, writer, and speaker committed to helping others enter into the living and vibrant tradition of Catholic culture. He previously served as Associate Superintendent for Mission and Formation at the Archdiocese of Denver and Visiting Associate Professor at the Augustine Institute. He is currently Director of Content at Exodus 90. He and his wife, Anne, have six children, and he is a Benedictine oblate. He is the author of The Primacy of God, Restoring Humanity, and The Beer Option. His latest book is How the Eucharist Can Save Civilization from TAN Books.
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Transcript
Eric Sammons:
A new book makes a provocative case that is the Eucharist that can save our falling civilization. We’ll find out what the author means on today’s podcast. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and the Editor in Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, let me just encourage people to smash that like button and also to subscribe to the channel. Follow us on various social media channels. We are @crisismag on Twitter, Facebook, all the major ones. Also, we’re in the midst of our spring fundraising campaign, so go to crisismagazine.com/donate. All of our content is available for free, but it’s obviously not free to produce. So we just really appreciate your donations, your prayers. I had a couple of people during this campaign say, I really don’t have the money, but I’ll pray for you. And I know people say this, but I really do mean it sincerely, that we very much appreciate the prayers.
We understand that not everybody’s in a financial situation where they can donate, but if you are, we do appreciate it. Okay, so let’s get started. Our guest today is Dr. R. Jared Staudt. He’s a teacher, a writer, and a speaker. He’s committed to helping others enter into the living vibrant tradition of Catholic culture. He’s previously a superintendent for Mission and Formation at the Archdiocese of Denver and visit a visiting associate professor at the Augustine Institute, but now he is the Director of Content at Exodus 90. He and his wife Ann, has six children and he is a Benedictine oblate. [cell phone ringing] And of course, you should turn off your cell phones before you do this, which I didn’t do.
R. Jared Staudt:
I was looking at mine because Do you have a Light Phone?
Eric Sammons:
Yes, I have a Light Phone. Okay, now we’re going to promote our Light Phone.
R. Jared Staudt:
I’m like, oh wait, but I thought mine was on vibrate.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, that’s great. I’m just going to keep this in the podcast. I am not editing this out because we’ll do a little promotion for Light Phone. That’s hilarious that you also have one. I know my wife has one, so when I hear it I always think, oh, is that my wife’s or is that mine? So it’s a very unique ringtone.
Anyway, so other than being an owner of a Light Phone, Dr. Staudt is married, has six children, and Benedictine oblate, he’s the author of Primacy of God Restoring Humanity, the Beer Option, and also his latest book, which we’re going to be talking about today, is How the Eucharist Can Save Civilization. And it’s from Tan Books. And you’ve been on the program once before. So welcome back. So thanks for coming on.
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah, thanks for having me again.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it’s great. As an editor of Crisis, I always am trying to find good titles for my articles that we publish. You want to be provocative without being clickbaity and things like that. And I feel like your title really did a great job because how the Eucharist can Save Civilization, I feel is a very provocative title because it does make you ask yourself, I don’t know how many people think, connect the Eucharist with saving civilization that I think is very provocative about it, very good about it. So let’s kind of talk about a little bit, take a step back for a second. The Eucharist is often called the source and summit of the Christian life. Because I know this is an important point in your book, but let’s first kind of say what is meant by that. We hear it all the time, but what really is meant when we say it’s a source and summit of the Christian life?
R. Jared Staudt:
Just a quick note about the title. Tan asked if I wanted to name it how the Eucharist Will Save Civilization. And I very intentionally said, can save civilization. Not that it will, I mean our civilization might collapse. That’s looking ever more likely. So the Eucharist can save civilization. I would say if it does become the source and summit of the Christian life in us, there really is nothing more powerful in the universe. And people say, okay, is that just a pious sentiment? But no, it’s true. What really is there that is more transformative for human life than the Eucharist? There is nothing. I mean, God is giving of himself for us to eat. And so that really is why it is the source of the Christian life, because Christ is made present to us sacramentally through the Eucharist. And as we consume the Eucharist, we are made into Christ.
We are his body in the world. So it is the source. The summit, because he is drawing us into his own communion with the father. You see this in the last supper discourse. He says, father, may they be one just as you and I are one. That is the kind of communion that he is offering us through the Eucharist. And so that truly is the summit deification is offered us through the Eucharist in the Christian life. I would say that the thesis if the book is that the Eucharist is not just to be believed, it is to be lived. It is really meant to become Christian life for us. That as we are united to Christ by becoming one flesh with him, that he lives in and through us in the world and that we are tabernacles of Christ and that everything that we do should flow from the communion that we have with Christ and the Eucharist. And there really is a cumulative effect that if we really do allow Christ to transform us. And that’s a big if. But if that really does happen, then we will see the effects of the Eucharist flowing out through us into the world.
Eric Sammons:
Now you say how the Eucharist can save civilization. Now I think I understand also as an editor, you want to keep your title short, but there are multiple civilizations in the sense that there’s of course Western civilization what we think of, but there’s other civilizations. There’s in the East, of course Chinese or whatever the case may be, Muslim, Ottoman, different African civilizations, things like that. But I’m guessing that you are talking about our Western civilization. So first of all, just what civilization are you talking about? And also is it, why is that civilization worth saving?
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah, there’s an important point to be made here that the claim of the book it is true, it’s provocative, but at the same point, the Eucharist has saved civilization already. And in the year 300, if you were to say, okay, the Catholic faith will be instantiated in one kingdom in the world right now, what do you think it’ll be? Well, you have Armenia, you have Ethiopia those are other kingdoms and they did become Christian very early on as well. And you say, I think it’s more likely that maybe somewhere out on the periphery. But it was like, no, the empire that is trying to destroy the church, that’s the one that will embrace the Catholic faith most fully. But then of course it collapsed. And so if we’re talking about the Eucharist and civilization, of course we’re going to be drawn first and foremost to the civilization that grew out of the church, literally around the altar.
And if you think of all the great fruits of civilization that we love, even classical music, it literally came out of the church’s tradition of Gregorian chant, all of the great painting and architecture. For the most part it completely was produced to surround the sacrifice of the mass. And so it’s no exaggeration to say that the Eucharist is the heart of Western civilization, the civilization that the church birthed. But what about today? So are we saying, well, we’re going to save that civilization? I think it’s actually more likely at this point that western civilization will be saved somewhere else. And the reason why I wanted to say that about where’s it most likely that Western civilization will continue, and I made that comparison to the Roman Empire in the year 300. Well, where does it look most like that scenario right now? Well, maybe it is China, this really brutal dictatorship where they’re saying we’re going to destroy Christianity.
It’s possible. Or could we see the fruits of Western civilization having a rebirth in Africa or really Latin America maybe taking a leading role. So I do mean saving Western civilization, but that does not necessarily mean European civilization per se. And Christopher Dawson said that Medieval Christendom was a combination of Greek learning, Roman law, the Christian faith and the Germanic peoples. And I think that those seeds are important, and I think that we can see how they can be continued in new and creative ways throughout the world. So I think there will be some continuity, but I also think that the future of a Christian civilization may also be distinct from what we knew in the past.
Eric Sammons:
So it could be, for example, a Catholic civilization, so it has the Christian faith is the basis, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be German people. It could be for example, Greek learning and Roman law on some level, but not necessarily with that history because obviously the Roman Empire had that already. And then the Christians basically took it over, took the good parts of it, got rid of some of the bad parts of it. And so are you saying something similar, for example, in China, which has no history, no tradition of Roman law or anything like that, but potentially the Eucharist could convert that into a Catholic civilization? And that’s what you’re referring to.
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah. But I think there are ways in which we could see even some of the fruits of Greco-Roman civilization coming to China. John Wu is actually the one who wrote the Chinese constitution prior to the fall to communism. But that constitution is still being used in Taiwan, and it was written by a Catholic. Why? I think because he was able to draw into this new expression of a Chinese republic, the whole tradition of Christendom, and he could bring it forth in a new way. So for instance, what was really something that resonated in the Roman Empire with new converts, it was this understanding that Justicia actually extended, justice actually extended in a deeper way to women, children, slaves, so that some of the virtues of the Romans could actually be deepened through the Christian faith. And I think we could say that in China for instance, there needs to be a deeper understanding of the human person. And Greek philosophy could help, and there needs to be a deeper understanding of the nature of justice.
So just like the church fathers were able to draw upon Cicero for the whole tradition of Roman law and Justicia and how that relates to the virtues, I think that is really something that we could bring to places like China. And we could see how they might actually continue important strands of Western civilization in a way that is very unexpected. And we know it’s possible because I just gave the example of John Wu writing the Constitution of the Chinese Republic.
Eric Sammons:
Now, when we talk about civilization, I think the average person, when you ask them what’s the civilization? They would probably give some type of generic answer as a common values that people brought together in a common values and something very generic like that. But something you said I think goes deeper into what civilization is, what you’re talking about when you said it was founded upon the altar. And I think so what is the framework that makes a civilization as you’re defining it here and which the Eucharist can save?
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah. So to take a step back, first, I talk a lot about culture in the book, and that’s just a very foundational concept, culture as a shared way of life. And Christopher Dawson, the same historian I mentioned in relation to Christendom, said that there’s also four elements that make up a culture. A given group of people in a given place with shared practices, especially economic practices, but educational and so forth. But that all of that is bound together by the fourth element of religion and morality. That gives us the broadest horizon on what life is really about, what it is for, what is the purpose of our shared life together. If you don’t have that, well, then you begin to see the unity of the culture breaking down. So a civilization is just a higher level of culture. And of course the word arises even just from the word for city, civis in Latin.
And so it is a culture that has higher practices of politics and economics and the arts and education, but the same principles apply. So just like religion is the heart of culture, we can certainly say that religion is the heart of civilization because it gives us this sense of what the ultimate goal is, why we’re all working together and what we’re trying to achieve. And Dawson made the point that even in our own culture, we do have a religion. Communism in and of itself is a pseudo religion, that it has certain beliefs and hopes and that it is messianic in the sense that it’s trying to rally people together for some kind of utopian hope that everything will be better if we simply organize things different on the economic level. And it’s hard to get away from that. But our current culture, it seems like our religion is really fragmentary because it’s based on the self.
So maybe even the opposite of communism is that we have a worship of the individual and our own desires, which ironically I think does even leave us open to communism. And so in the book, when we think of the Eucharist, what kind of civilization would the Eucharist renew right now? I think it is one that’s based on communion, where that the human person is not obliterated like in a communist system, but is actually drawn into a communion with others, which is the goal of culture and civilization. And that communion is actually meaningful and can last because it is also transcendent. And that transcendent perspective actually enables us to build a better way of life, even on a material level because it helps us to know what those material things are for ultimately.
Eric Sammons:
Now you say of course to say the Eucharist can save civilization, which assumes that it’s either already lost or is in the fourth quarter down by a bunch of points. So what is it about Western civilization that is lost? I mean, you mentioned the emphasis on the individual or the community, but obviously we’re also not trying to be communist here, as you already talked about. And I like that point about the Eucharist being communion because that’s not communism, but it’s not individualism either. It’s that beautiful connection of the two kind of taking away the bad parts and bringing together good parts. But what is lost about our civilization today? Obviously there’s a lot of problems in our civilization, but what would you say is fundamentally what have we lost from what we had had before?
R. Jared Staudt:
Well, if you just looked at Dawson’s definition of culture and then therefore of civilization from the first three levels, a group of people living in a particular place with shared practices, you might say, well, everything’s great. The economy, okay, there is some uncertainty right now, but hey, we’re chugging along and we have a good standard of living in the United States in particular. So everything seems okay on the level of civilization. But if you bring back that fourth element, the one that is actually the most important and is the heart of everything else, we can simply say that civilization has already collapsed. That it is a shell, it has the outward elements, but it has lost its soul. It no longer has the animating principle from within. And I love the line from the sermon on the mountain when Jesus said, seek first the kingdom and everything else will be added onto you.
But what happens when you say no to the kingdom of God? Well then you lose everything else. And I think we’re beginning to see that. Pope Benedict the 16th said that when there is no respect for the dignity of human life, there is no longer any justice because everything is an arbitrary expression of power. And so when God is eclipsed, man becomes eclipsed. And so we see this. Can we say that we have a stable civilization when we are mutilating children, when we’re murdering the unborn, when we don’t even know what marriage is any longer? Primitive cultures knew what marriage was and what it was for. We are beneath primitive cultures, what would’ve been called savage cultures in the past. We’re more savage than the savages. We’re more barbaric than the barbarians because even the barbarians had moral codes, they understood what marriage was, they understood that the divine was higher than the human and more important.
So I think civilization has collapsed from the inside. And once again, when you reject the kingdom, you lose everything else as well. And you can see that happening. And it’s not generally happening in the sense of, well, the political and economic system is collapsing, but it’s more like we’ve cut off the highest and now from the viewpoint of the lowest, the most foundational, and that is human life in the family, we see it crumbling at that level. And when that goes, everything else will come with it.
Eric Sammons:
It is interesting because I feel like it is the whole classic case of the frog in the boiling water in that you could look at certain things and say, hey, everything is fine. Like you mentioned, I mean, our standard of living is very high. We actually have a very low poverty rate. People can get an abundance of food in most cases. People can work jobs, all that stuff. We can travel very easily. And so when you say our civilization has collapsed, our culture has collapsed, I know when I’ve said similar things a lot of people are like, you’re just somebody who’s just trying to find all the negative, just really it’s not true. So because I think they don’t recognize, like you said, the more fundamental issues, which is, for example, we don’t even know what difference between a man and a woman is, and we act like a man can say he’s a woman now he’s fundamentally a woman somehow.
And obviously killing our own children, same-sex marriage thing, not knowing what marriage is. And so I think it is very difficult sometimes to wake people up that things are very bad in the things that matter, even though they might be fine in some of the things that don’t matter quite as much. Obviously it’s good not to have poverty, a lot of poverty. We want people to be eating things of that nature, but we also want to understand what marriage is, what life is not killing their children. Now, the connection of the Eucharist to civilization, I still think that most people don’t see a clear connection. How does my reception, for example, of the Eucharist, which is on one level a personal thing. When I receive the Eucharist, I have a personal connection obviously to Jesus Christ at that moment, and it personally can impact me, but how does that then translate to saving the culture? Because I am not saving the culture. And so how does my reception of the Eucharist change, potentially save the culture?
R. Jared Staudt:
Well, once again, we have to look at the things that really do matter. If people were to acknowledge Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist and to truly open up their lives to him and they were to be transformed in that encounter, well then they would be most likely to come to know the truth, the truth about God, the truth about themselves. They would be more likely to get married and to have a family. They would be more likely to reconcile with others, especially if there’s a shared communion through the Eucharist. We would then be inspired even in our work and economic practices that they be something that flows from this communion rather than running contrary to it. Because how can you say that you have communion with Christ if you are harming your brother? Is that we are really working to extend this communion to other people. And so some of it is, well, what do you think matters more? Is it the stock market or the relationships that you have in your parish? People will obviously often ask a theologian, what do you think about what’s going on with Pope Francis and did you hear the latest thing about this? And sometimes I just say, oh, listen, I have many opinions about that sure, but let me ask you a question. How does that impact your life?
What about the things that are really making up your shared way of life with other people? Can the Eucharist transform that? Because if you look at the way that the civilization was built up in what we call the dark ages, the period from 500 to, you could say 800 or a thousand or whatever, however you want to demarcate it, but the culture was built up around the monastery. And so that you actually had one community who was worshiping together and their worship of God was then extended to the rest of their lives, that their prayer, their ora shaped their labora. And that their labora, their work, became this extension of their prayer. And so that there was peace and communion, maybe not perfect because are on earth in the monastery. And that the monastery became an oasis then. The local pagan people, the country folk not only learned the Catholic faith from the monks, they learned agriculture from the monks.
They went to the monastery for healing of body. And soul. The first network of hospitals in Europe were from monasteries. They went to the monastery for education. And so it all came from the Eucharist. Literally. Like I said, even if you look at our public school system today, and of course we could complain about our public school system, but where did that even come from? Well, ultimately you could trace it back to the monastery schools because in the Roman world, there was not a large network of schools that people could just come to. It really was through the work of monks and later on through religious that we really even see the desirability for everyone to receive education. And even the way of organizing that education came from the Catholic church. Why would we do that? Because we thought differently about life and we treated one another differently because we are in communion with Christ.
So I would say today, when we think about our own current civilization, we should begin by thinking locally and say, the Eucharist really can change my parish community. I think what is needed for that is a deeper community than just coming to mass and leaving as soon as possible. But when it comes to even the bigger things, well, how did communism fall in Poland? John Paul II visited Poland beginning in 1979, he had a series of visits and gathered millions of people together. And of course, there’s the famous mass in Warsaw where everyone chanted for a very long time, we want God, we want God. It was from the mass that this cry for freedom echoed forth through Poland, and that led to the solidarity movement. So if we really are allowing the Eucharist to transform us, it will once again, immediately start building culture in our lives, which will have a ripple effect. But even on the bigger level, it can awaken consciences, it can make things happen that didn’t seem possible previously. If the spiritual world is stronger than the material world world and more powerful, then we should expect that it can make things happen in the material world. Have we lost faith in that. We need to come back to it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think I like your point about the building, the local community. I was very sad the other day. I was driving over to my mom’s and she lives real close to a Catholic church. She’s not Catholic, but she lives right next door to Catholic church. It’s not the church parish we go to. I was driving by and it was 12:10 and on a Sunday, and there was absolutely nobody in the parking lot or anywhere near, and I was like, oh, do they have a super early mass? No, they have a mass at 11:00. They have a mass at 11:00, and their parking lot was empty at 12:10 on a Sunday. So first of all, father’s given a pretty quick mass, that’s one thing, but also it’s like nobody wanted to stick around. They wanted to get out of there.
And I thought that was very sad because in my parish, people are there for sometimes hours afterwards just hanging out, having community, things like that. So I do think it’s very important. I want to play a little bit of devil’s advocate, hopefully I’m not actually on the side of the devil. Push back a little bit to what you said about Catholics. And I know you’re concerned about certain things going in the church, and it’s not that we’re saying there’s nothing… When Catholics say, what do you think about Pope Francis or the bishops this, but connecting to our topic here, we see an effort to minimize or even eliminate certain traditional practices. Obviously the traditional Latin Mass itself, but even for example, ad orientem, there’s resistance often to communion on the tongue. And I would argue these things like ad orientem, like communion on the tongue, foster a deeper eucharistic appreciation adoration and therefore are practical ways that lead towards your thesis. But a layperson can’t do anything about that. A layperson can’t change if the bishop says no, ad orientem for example. Probably your answer’s going to be, I don’t know, but how does a layperson try to foster this devotion to the Eucharist and foster a eucharistic life that builds civilization when perhaps his bishop or her bishop is doing things that really denigrated or undermine that goal?
R. Jared Staudt:
And to go back to the original point is one of the things I try to really stem off is the devil using things that are genuinely bad in the church to discourage us and to prevent us from doing what we actually can do. And so that leads into this question, well, what can we actually do in these difficult circumstances? And one of the things that I recommend very heartedly in the book is that the Eucharist shape how we spend our time. And so on Sunday, that does include making this really the Lord’s day. And I do encourage people to gather for what used to be called even the Agape meal, a community meal on Sundays to really be an expression of the communion that we have stemming from the Eucharist. But in terms of even fostering a greater devotion to the Eucharist more directly, I think it needs to come from adoration.
And so if your parish has an adoration chapel, it needs to be a priority to spend time before our Lord. And if there is no adoration chapel, try to just get into the church. I know from my own experience, it makes such a difference to pray before the tabernacle. Do it with other people. So can you have a group of people who are devoted to adoration of the Eucharist? And I know there’s even some groups in parishes that call themselves the knights of the whole Eucharist, that it could be the goal of this group to promote not even in a political way, because if it seems like you’re lobbying your pastor who’s against what you’re trying to do, then it just ends up maybe even doing more harm than good. But just gathering people to really give the Lord the honor and devotion that he deserves.
And I wonder if we do that, if that will open up graces for change within our parishes and our diocese. If you think, what can we really do? I love how the guardian angel of Portugal said to the children at Fatima, make everything you can into a sacrifice. That our lives should be eucharistic in the sense that we are not only receiving Christ and his sacrificial gift to us, but that in being drawn into Christ in this community, we become a sacrificial gift. And so we can try to encourage people to pray together before mass, to pray together after mass, to gather throughout the week, specifically to honor our Lord and give him greater devotion to read books about the Eucharist together to read Ratzinger’s spirit of the liturgy, which even addresses some of these issues. Because ultimately, I think a lot of people don’t believe in the true presence in the Eucharist because they don’t see it.
They might hear it occasionally. They might be at a catechetical class or they might hear something from the pulpit, or even these words, this is my body. They might hear that, but do they see it? And so Pope Benedict did encourage us to receive communion, kneeling, on the tongue. And of course, communion on the hand is an indult. So it’s not even the universal practice of the church. It is something that bishop’s conferences have applied for this indult to receive special permission for. But it is true that when we have a casual approach to the Eucharist, how we receive the Eucharist, if we’re talking in church and we’re not really showing attention and devotion to our Lord as he’s present in the tabernacle, that what people see is well, then this is just a normal space like any other space. Or they might think, well, that must be a piece of bread because people treat it’s a piece of bread.
And so I do think that there’s much that we can do to strengthen this devotion and to acknowledge our Lord’s presence, eucharistic processions. Times of public adoration, not just an adoration chapel, but after mass we have adoration today. I’d like everyone to stay for as long as they can, and we are publicly adoring the Lord together. That’s powerful. And if we want to see change, I think just the renewal of the spiritual life in the church, then we need to pray and sacrifice for that to happen.
Eric Sammons:
So I think the Bishop should have put you in charge of the Eucharistic revival. Speaking of the Eucharistic revival, though, I know among a lot Catholics there’s skepticism, or cynicism is probably the better word towards it, because the bishops haven’t had the best track record on doing things in the past. What are your hopes for Eucharistic revival as far as, and how can Catholics use Eucharistic revival as a means for saving civilization and building up this devotion to the Eucharistic? Because that is, as much as we can be cynical about it, the intention is a good one, which is to foster belief in the real presence of the Eucharist and devotion to it. So there’s no question the intention’s a good one. Now the question is what can we do? You’ve already said a few things, but is there anything we do in conjunction with Eucharist revival specifically to try to make this happen?
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah. So I was invited to give a talk about this book at a parish, and I said, hey, I’d be happy to give a talk, but why don’t we make it into a revival? Let’s have a revival. And what I meant by that is I said, let’s gather people together and let’s have an invitational talk to say our Lord is inviting you to relate to him in the Eucharist in a renewed way. Ultimately, the revival will happen if we deepen our faith in the Eucharist. And in order to foster that from this invitational talk, we’re going to adore the Lord together right now. So the first talk actually will lead into this shared moment of adoration of acknowledging Christ as our Eucharistic king, and then following this time of adoration, then there’s really going to be an invitation then to do something differently afterwards.
How are you going to live as if Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist? How will that change your life? Because if the answer is it doesn’t, then it means, which unfortunately, I think is true, that we as Catholics are leading a secular life. So I think the success of the revival will be if we have a deeper faith in the Lord’s presence, and we live differently because of that. And I think every day should be different. If you’re not able to make it to daily mass, then please pray and act a spiritual communion every day, because every day you should be honoring the Lord in the blessed sacrament. He’s right there. Are we ignoring him? If he really is the answer to the problems of our civilization, well then he’s certainly the answers to the problem in your life as well. But is he there being ignored? Is he being hidden? So if I see concrete changes in parish life that a parish is doing more to acknowledge and to honor and to live out our Lord’s Eucharistic presence, and that actually changes somebody’s life so that their life is more focused on the Eucharist then I could say we have experienced revival.
Eric Sammons:
One final topic I want to address, which is somewhat very different from the other ones. We talk about, you say the Eucharist savings civilization, which in an American context, that sounds a bit like the church taking over the state. In our country, we have this very hardcore tradition of separation of church and state, for better or worse, probably mostly worse. But the idea though is how can the Eucharist save civilization in the context of America where we had the separation? The answer might be, well, we just dropped that tradition of separation of church and state. But how does that work in the American context?
R. Jared Staudt:
Well, there are famous lines from the founding fathers of Republic, if you can keep it from Benjamin Franklin, or you have quotes both from Washington and Adams saying that a republic depends upon religion and morality. And so I think we can see what happens when a democracy, a democratic republic becomes unmoored from you. It’s not even a formal relationship to the church per se, but when it becomes unmoored from something more foundational or more transcendent than itself, because a republic doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So we elect representatives to supposedly act on our path, et cetera, but what do we want them to accomplish? What are the principles from which they will act? What are the goals that they are seeking to achieve? And that’s where the hollowness of our civilization is becoming more and more manifest. So I would simply say that the Eucharist can strengthen our democracy by giving it something to work with. Because right now, Plato says that the end of a democracy is tyranny because the mob is simply swayed by popular opinions and emotions ultimately.
Eric Sammons:
Is Plato a guy who lives right now because he is just joking out the window?
R. Jared Staudt:
So yeah, if we’re just swayed by whatever the popular thing is. Oh, I think Plato knew what he was talking about. And so ultimately that leaves us susceptible to manipulation by someone or something, ultimately someone and that’s why democracy leads to tyranny. So we pride ourselves on freedom as we become less and less free, and we are more subject to all kinds of manipulations. So I think the Eucharist can teach us what freedom really is. And in Catholic circles, it’s very common to hear the difference between freedom from and freedom for. But in this case, I think it’s really applicable that our democracy seeks freedom from. That’s what we think freedom really is, although we end up being manipulated by consumerism. But freedom is really for something. It’s ordered towards something. And in this case, I think the Eucharist teaches us that freedom is for gift, that a democracy will be successful when we are willing to sacrifice for the things that matter most.
Because even debates about abortion, it’s basically people saying, I should never have to sacrifice against my will for someone else. And it’s hard to even conceive right now how anyone would even want to defend our country and lay their lives down for it, because we are basically raising a generation of people who do not know how to sacrifice. But the Eucharist is essentially a sacrifice. It’s a gift that comes about through death, and that death brings about life. And so maybe our democracy needs to die. And by that, I’m not saying it has to be gotten rid of, but we need to learn to die to ourselves that this current way of thinking needs to end. And that we need to understand that the freedom that we have has a purpose and that we will actually not be happy unless we learn to die to ourselves and to our desires.
Eric Sammons:
I like that. That’s a great tying in because you’re right, ultimately we are not teaching our young people to sacrifice. And that’s what the Eucharist is. I’m going to end it on that because I think that was a great point. I want to encourage people from Tan Books, How the Eucharist Can Save Civilization. I really think it gives us a, there’s a lot of books on the Eucharist and they’re great. Obviously any book on the Eucharist is probably great, but I just feel like this is a different take that you’re not going to get most places because it brings Eucharist. Eucharist impacts our entire lives, our entire world. And so I think the idea that you’re actually practically talking about how can it actually impact our entire world, and I think that’s great. So I really appreciate you being on and for writing this book. It’s been great.
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah, thank you.
Eric Sammons:
Where can people find out more about what you’re going on? Exodus 90 or what?
R. Jared Staudt:
Yes. So I am writing regularly for Exodus 90, so you can find me there at exodus90.com. And my own blog is at buildingcatholicculture.com.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, buildingcatholicculture.com. I will link to both of these in the show notes so people can find them. I’m just writing this down, so don’t forget. Okay. So I’ll link to those so people can find them. I appreciate the work you’re doing. Keep it up.
R. Jared Staudt:
Yeah, you too. Thank you.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, great. Until next time, everybody. God love you.