(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSite journalist Frank Wright and Father Charles Murr join John-Henry Westen on this week’s episode of Faith & Reason, in which they discuss the attempted attempt to stop the NatCon conference in Brussels, the attempted stabbing of Syrian Orthodox Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, former President Donald Trump’s position on abortion, and more.
On Tuesday, the socialist mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, Emir Kir, ordered police to shut down the National Conservatism Conference to “guarantee public safety.” The event, held near Brussels, featured many high-profile guests, including Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Brexit initiator Nigel Farage.
While Kir said that the “far-right” was “not welcome,” he himself was expelled from the Socialist Party in 2020 for meeting with politicians from the Turkish “far-right” Nationalist Movement Party. Anthony Gilland, chief of staff of the conservative think tank MCC and one of the local organizers, told Politico that one of the reasons the police gave for shutting down the event was that counterprotests were scheduled in the afternoon and police could not guarantee the safety of the participants.
Having set up a blockade, police did not allow people to enter the conference, including former French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour and the event’s caterers. A court order allowed the event to proceed after the police blockade was challenged by ADF International.
Wright explains that using “public safety” as an excuse to shut the event down is reminiscent of the French Revolution, during which the Committee of Public Safety conducted thousands of executions in the name of public safety. He also notes that people were opposing the event over “national conservatism,” something he says they called fascist, and that they think they need to fight “the politics of extremism” with “violent suppression,” something done with apparent success in this case.
Looking again to the French Revolution, Wright explains that most do not realize that of its victims, about 1,700 were aristocrats, whereas anywhere from 170,000 to 200,000 were civilians, many of them Catholics. They were killed in an attempt to shield the public from ideas the revolutionaries did not like, because they were not “insane” like their own.
“The situation that you’re seeing here is a typical tactic of left-wing and liberal progressives, because what they are doing in effect throughout the whole panoply of social and moral decay is attempting to defend an agenda of insanity by appealing to public safety,” Wright says of the attempted shut-down, stressing that the problem here deals with private speech.
“It’s important to remember that the communists, the revolutionaries, mainly of the left, have been the people who’ve been doing this for centuries, and it’s nothing new from them,” he says.
Murr says that the left’s attitude of portraying themselves as open to new ideas amazes him, as they are “closed-minded” when faced with reality. “They are closed,” says the priest. “They don’t want to hear anything that’s going to get in the way of the direction that they’re taking themselves and the world.”
Over this past weekend, prominent Syrian Orthodox bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed while saying the Divine Liturgy in Sydney, Australia, by an Islamic extremist who yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the stabbing. Others suffered injury while attempting to defend the bishop, but no one suffered serious injury. Emmanuel was reportedly seen praying over the assailant in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and has forgiven him publicly, calling on his congregation to do likewise.
Wright notes that he read just before air that the assailant may have severed one of his fingers during the attack. Murr, meanwhile, admits that he had already been listening to the bishop and that he “inspires” him, while he also hopes that he would enter “full communion” with the Catholic Church. “His zeal is fabulous,” says Murr.
Murr further stresses Emmanuel’s forgiveness, observing that witnesses said he forgave his assailant while laying on the floor suffering the stabbing. “This man only becomes greater in my eyes,” the priest says.
“First of all, he was great to begin with, because he proclaims the truth, and the truth is so refreshing to hear today,” he continues. “But then to see the example … He talked the talk, but he walked the walk. He actually put into practice what all of us hope that if we’re in such a situation, we would be able to react that way. He actually did. I think it’s phenomenal.”
Earlier this month, Ben Affleck’s youngest daughter, Seraphina Rose, announced that she identified as “transgender,” deciding to go by the name “Fin” and appearing at her grandfather’s funeral during Easter week with a buzz cut and wearing a black suit and tie. She becomes the latest in a series of children of Hollywood stars to call themselves “transgender,” including her stepsister.
Wright notes that there is much to say about the “transgender trend,” the “industry that’s grown up around it,” and the social contagion spread through social transitioning, which affects both children and parents, such that the idea of having a gender-confused child becomes fashionable in certain circles. However, Wright stresses that one should never forget how “simply … insane this is.”
While we can judge progress as the attempt to “achieve man’s distance from God,” transgenderism is the most “fundamental” way of doing so, attacking the idea of creation, with Wright also noting the satanic symbolism it uses. “The attempt to do this is obviously an attempt to glorify men in the place of God, and it ends in disaster and the annihilation of the human spirit,” he observes.
Murr, referencing the decision of Charlize Theron to allow her three-year-old to determine its own gender, says, “This is insanity. It’s insanity. And to call it anything less than insanity is insane.”
Agreeing with a point Wright made, Murr says that if people were allowed to speak frankly about gender theory, “we would be able to squelch it.” The problem, he maintains, is that the gender movement has a “practical monopoly” in the media and that they “twist and turn everything to their desires, and you cannot get a word in edgewise.”
Wright, looking to Murr’s point, says that the reason speech laws exist is because “there’s simply no rationale to this other than you have to prohibit anyone being able to speak rationally about these issues because they simply can’t be defended.”
Westen, meanwhile, points out that the rationale used behind gender ideology is now being employed to amputate fingers, as a 20-year-old Quebecker recently had two healthy fingers amputated after suffering from body integrity dysphoria (BID), a rare condition in which one desires to remove healthy limbs, believing them not to be his own.
Wright opines that “it would now appear [mutilation] depends on the ability of the industries around it to monetize it.” He recalls doing an investigation into the “transgender mind virus” and found that an “industry” had grown around it, noting that an Irish politician who pushed for liberalizing gender treatments for children was married to a man with “significant holdings” in a pharmaceutical company that supplied the hormones and helped monetize gender surgeries.
He also speaks to a socio-political dimension to the gender movement – power and influence. “We have to acknowledge the socio-political dimension, which is that these things can confer status and advantage upon you. Now you can get legal privileges by wearing a wig,” says Wright. He notes that the more “deranged” one is, and the more harm one does to himself and society, the more legal privileges one enjoys and the more likely one will be promoted. “You’ll find that this is an extremely lucrative business,” he adds.
He also notes that it will give a degree of notoriety or fame, opening a “pathway to significance” for those living “nihilistic, empty lives of passing fancy” in a sensationalist consumer culture that values nothing but gender theory. Hence, gender confusion does seem “immensely attractive” to a society bereft of values. “It is, in a very obvious dimension, to the loss of God,” he says.
For all this and more, tune in to this week’s episode of Faith & Reason.
Faith & Reason is available by video via LSNTV on YouTube, Rumble, Banned, and right here on LifeSiteNews.
It is also available in audio format on Acast. To subscribe to the audio version on various channels, visit LifeSite’s Acast web page here.
We’ve created a special email list for the show so that we can notify you every week when we post a new episode. Sign up now by clicking here.