Guest
Kevin Wells is a former Major League Baseball writer, award-winning journalist, and Catholic speaker. He is the author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, The Priests We Need to Save the Church, and Burst. Kevin is an active evangelist, writer, and podcaster (One 2 One Podcast) who has presented at conferences and seminaries nationally and internationally. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children. His most recent book is The Hermit: The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a Marriage, and a Family (Ignatius Press).
Link
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
During the dark spring of 2020, it seemed that so many of our spiritual fathers checked out. We were denied the sacraments and other spiritual aids at a time when we needed them most. But there were exceptions, priests who heroically ministered to their people in spite of the darkness. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point Home. I’m Eric Sammons, your host, chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit that like button, subscribe to channel, follow us on social media at @crisismag. Also, you can get our email, newsletter. Just put your email address, go over to crisismagazine.com, put in your email address, and we’ll send you articles every morning from Crisis.
And we have today with us a writer of Crisis. It’s really the only bio we need, but I guess I’ll give a little bit more than just the fact that you write for Crisis, Kevin. So, Kevin Wells is a former Major League baseball writer, an award-winning journalist and a catholic speaker. He’s the author of Priest and Beggar, the Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz. I’m just going to interrupt there. Did I ever have you on the podcast about that book?
Kevin Wells:
You did not.
Eric Sammons:
Oh my gosh, that is on me. I know we had articles at Crisis. Okay, I don’t have it sitting here right with me, but I’m going to recommend that book. We’re going to be talking about another book, some today, but The Heroic Life of Priest and Beggar, is that Ignatius as well?
Kevin Wells:
It is.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, so go to Ignatius and look up Aloysius Schwartz. That’s a great book. Highly recommend it. Also, The Priests, We Need to Save the Church, which I think is Sophia, right? And then your latest book, which is the Hermit, which is also Ignatius, The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a marriage, and a family. You live in Maryland with your wife and children, and you’re just an all-around good guy.
Kevin Wells:
Thank you.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, actually, I get more compliments about your writing than almost anybody. I mean, Anthony Esselstyn is probably number one because he deserves to be, but I do… You’re a great writer, and this book is another proof of that. Now, we might lose half our audience here. I don’t care. But you know I’m a baseball nerd. You’re a baseball nerd. You are a former Major League baseball writer. And so, I just got to ask you, who do you like this year to win it all?
Kevin Wells:
Well, there’s no doubt-
Eric Sammons:
I know you’re just going to say you’re Orioles, aren’t you?
Kevin Wells:
Well, no, I don’t think it’s going to be them. I wish I could say. Well, as you know, there is no dominant team, and I do think the team that has the most talent and the most potential, I can’t stand, and that is the San Diego Padres. Now, I don’t know if it’s going to be them, but man, are they loaded? My thought in the American League is there’s nobody, the Yankees are playing terribly. The Orioles are sort of stumbling in. You know what, I don’t have an answer, because there’s not a single dominant team in all of baseball. I hate to answer the way.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I mean you want to say the Dodgers have the most talent, but they’ve just struggled in the postseason so much that it’s hard to pick them. I personally like the Phillies, but we’ll see. As a lot of times it’s just a wildcard team that gets hot in October that ends up going to the World Series. So yeah.
Kevin Wells:
Really quick. So, last year we saw that happen with the Rangers, but even the Dodge, I thought the Dodgers would have close to a hundred wins at this point. They’re nowhere near that. The Phillies are stumbling. I think the Phillies lost. They are so nobody wants it. I mean injuries obviously. So I’m going to say it doesn’t matter what I say, but I think what you prophesize is right. It’s going to be a team that nobody expects because no one is a dominant major League baseball team.
Eric Sammons:
I kind of rooting for the Royals just because they’re just so terrible for so many years, since their last World Series run. It’s like it’d just kind of be cool to see a team like that just all of a sudden come out of nowhere. So, okay, this is not a baseball podcast, I apologize. But anyway, I had to do it. I mean, I got you here. I mean, I actually did a podcast. I hosted a podcast for about a year or so with my son about baseball, and it was a lot of fun. Every once in a while we’ve kind of revived it, but it’s fun to talk baseball. But what we want to talk about is really the church’s response, both kind of corporately and individually among priests and bishops to COD because that is a major part of your book here on the Hermit.
People might not even realize that when they first hear about it. They think it might be just about maybe your marriage or about certain one specific priest, but really it’s broader than that. I think it’s a good thing. You and I were talking on the phone the other day that there hasn’t really been a reckoning. There has not been a reckoning of what the church did during the time of COVID, and I think I’m hoping that this book kind of gets that started. So before we really get into that though, I just want to ask you, where were you, where was your family spiritually in every way before COVID happened? So, because as we all know, the whole world changed in March, 2020. I mean, most of us were just going along whatever. And what were you guys up to?
Kevin Wells:
Well, it’s explained in The Hermit. It was just released a week or so ago by Ignatius. My story’s unique, Eric, and I know we’re going to get into the heart of this podcast is going to be on the church’s response during that time. But I do feel compelled to say that I was in the dark night. It’s easy… Well, it’s not easy to throw out those type of terms, especially if you’ve not read John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila, and really understand it. Until you go through it, you really can only guess what it is. But just in brief, in 2009, I had a brain aneurysm and should have died. I had invasive brain surgery and the surgery failed. And anyway, a long story short, in the ICU room, if the priest and his assistant were on this podcast right now and told you what the experience, they would say something supernatural happened in that room, and I recovered and there was no explanation.
So in the aftermath of recovery, and when you have brain surgery, you’re messed up. I had to learn how to walk again. I couldn’t see. I was a rag doll. So during that time, I was this close to death and I was thinking a lot about my judgment. Part of me said, you’re not the right stuff. You’re not bad, but you’re not the right stuff. And when I came back, I really began to intensify my relationship with prayer with God, all the things that you would expect, Eric. More holy hours, more daily rosaries, new ministries, a prison ministry, all the things that I thought would bring me closer to God, and I wanted to love God.
Anyway, during this time, my wife, Christa, we’ve been married 25 years. How do I say this? A wound of shame from her past, we’ll call it a mother wound, opened up. She didn’t know about it. I didn’t know about it. And because she was scared, she felt like, Kevin’s going places, and I’m not with him, so I feel shame. It was the mother wound of shame that she knew as a little kid. So, she began to binge-drink red wine for many years in secret. And the dark night came in like a rumbling black storm clouds into my life, into our marriage, into our family. And it lasted. And I kind of get into that, into the book, The Hermit.
Now, to get to the point, at the very time that Christa began to recover, it was when she met a holy priest who is now a consecrated hermit, a Martin Flume. The very time she was getting to that place of healing, bishops worldwide said, “Shut your doors. Lock them, because COVID has come.” Scared me to death because I knew that the Herald from the television stations, the Anthony Fauci and the medical doctors was, “Isolate. Isolate. Protect your body.” I knew that it was isolation was the very thing that allowed Christa the secrecy to binge-drink for all these years. It was the hidden… So I said, “I’m sunk in the water. I’m dead.”
But one priest that I know of said, “My door’s open. Matter of fact, not only is it open, I’m going to intensify everything I do as a priest.” And I could expound on that for hours, but I’ll just say, it was during that time, early March, 2020, that rather than considering the body, he considered the burden of his identity, Father Flume did. And that was, who are the travailed souls? Who are the addicts, who are the ones right now where ghosts are rising up from their pasts, from their woundedness, et cetera. Well, I’m going to protect them during this time of isolation. So, that’s what Father Flume did for my wife Christa. And during that time of COVID, was when my wife became healed. And now, four or five years later, our marriage has never been better and my wife is healed today, I will say, because God worked through a holy now consecrated hermit in a forest, who saved my wife.
He took a staircase down into my wife’s shame, and just stayed there until he plucked out the wounds and walked back up with Christa healed. And every day I give, I thank God for sending Father Flume into my life, and Christa does as well.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think that’s something. When COVID hit, it’s like the laptop class was like, “We have to do this to save ourselves, to keep all this from happening.” And unfortunately, so much of the church went along with that. And so, shut down mass and sacraments all stuff. But I think we need to realize that there are a lot of souls out there that are literally on the edge. They’re hanging on by a thread. And if you take away their lifeline, which might be the mass, might be the community of the parish. It’s something related to the church, they could fall apart. They could fall back into sins, whatever the case of… Depression, whatever the case may be. And so just this complete, okay, we’re going to just shut everything down. Not recognizing that.
Because I think a lot of us who were maybe in… None of us are saints really, but that’s not going to happen to us. Let’s just say that. We just kind of ignore that. Okay, that’s not really, we don’t only think of that. It’s like the laptop class who didn’t care about the small business owner, who is going to just lose their job… Lose not their job, but lose their business, their whole livelihood that they’ve invested their whole life savings in, if we do this. Likewise, there’s those souls that are very close. Yeah, just go ahead.
Kevin Wells:
Just very in brief, Eric, I need to respond to that and put it into illustrated. At that time, January, February, 2020, leading up to COVID Christa was every day attending daily mass, making at least two, sometimes three hours of adoration. And she was making weekly confessions and having intensive spiritual direction, because Father Flume knew that she was essentially in love with this demon inside her. And he told her, “Hey, the only way you’re going to lose this thing is, you got to stick your nose in front of the sacraments. You’ve got to stick and Christa obliged it. So, the fact that bishops didn’t take into consideration, people like my wounded wife and said, “Slam the door.” That’s exactly what you’re saying, and that’s why my head was on fire. I’m like, “It doesn’t make sense.”
Eric Sammons:
One thing I want to be clear before we go on, just for people to know and you say it in the book is, your wife has given you complete permission to talk about her struggles. And so, you say it in the book. I just want to make sure people listen to podcast know, you’re not just talking about your wife having issues and she’s like, “What the heck’s he doing?”
Kevin Wells:
I like putting my wife’s junk out on the street.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. Yeah, I do.
Kevin Wells:
Actually, just for your viewer, Christa told me to write the book. What she said, Eric was this, “Kevin, I want you to expose my former life so a holy priest can be exposed in how he behaved during COVID.” I said, “No.” And five, six months later, she kept saying, Kevin, you can keep praying on writing it, but you’re praying is just delaying. Write the book.” So, it’s her junk. She said, “Kevin, write it.” Because she’s a new creation, she doesn’t care about that. Her desire was to show Father Flume during COVID.
Eric Sammons:
That’s beautiful humility on her part. Okay, we’re going to talk later about the bad response, but let’s talk about Father Flume. So, who was he? How did you get in contact with him? The title of the book is the Hermit, but he wasn’t a hermit then. And so, who is this father Martin Flume?
Kevin Wells:
Well, if you lined up 200 priests in the Archdiocese of Washington today, and you asked them who for 20 years was the most ascetic, ascetical priest, the most prayerful priest, the priest who really grinded the hardest for souls. If these priests were honest, 80, 90% would say Father Martin Flume. So this was a priest who from his earliest days in seminary, he understood that God had called him to save souls. So, what does he do when he’s in seminary? Well, every day he began to commit himself to a holy hour. He said, “Mary, now I’m your slave. I will take no days off. I will grind now. I will mortify my body. I will deny meats. I will deny alcohol.” Because in his thinking, he’s one who believes or has read the church doctors or the ascetics or the fathers in the desert. And he knew that meats and beers would inflame the passions, and he didn’t want to do that.
So, he amputated… At least he tried to amputate every measure of anything that would get in the way of him chasing down souls like my wife Christa. So, he was a holy archdiocesan priest in Washington for two decades before COVID came, well after COVID in 2021, and he began to see, I’ve come to believe, and I think he would say as much that the way the church responded worldwide at that time, and also our sort of collapsing social norms, our moral norms, that it came to him. I’d like “Mary, I want to offer the remainder of my life as a Holocaust. I want to turn myself over as an expiation for the church, for recovery of the priesthood, and for this world to be turned around. And if you’re one who doesn’t believe in penances and mortifications like what John Vianney did for 50 years as a priest, if you don’t believe in the supernatural warfare or what a priest can offer, then it’s hocus pocus.
But if you do believe that God responds to a single man who has turned over his life, to help heal a broken world and a badly broken church, then you’re like, “Yeah, thank God for Father Flum,” because not only is he helping the church, but he’s helping me because I’m part of the church.
Eric Sammons:
So, he was just your parish priest though, that’s how you first encountered him?
Kevin Wells:
Well, no. I think, Eric, I think in the past five years, a lot of folks have realized they need to travel to find priests. So, we traveled for 45 minutes every day to attend mass at his parish. But it’s almost like Jesus in the Scripture. People would travel miles to see Jesus. The analogy is the same, I think.
Eric Sammons:
And so ,I want to focus on that because I do think it’s related to the poor response by the church, the focus of Father Flum on asceticism. This is something we’d never really hear from our priest, and at the risk of being judgmental, we don’t really see it practiced in our priest. We don’t see it practiced in ourselves, so I just want to make sure that’s clear. That it’s not just the priest aren’t doing, we’re not doing it all. And I feel like that unlocks something. When I’m reading each day in the Breviary, they have a little bio, the saint of the day. And I do the old one, and today they were recording, it’s the St. Lawrence. Justinian, I think his name was. And he’s just this guy… I think he’s been dropped off the calendar now, but he was just this guy who was born in a noble family, had the opportunity to live a very rich, luxurious life, have a great marriage, that stuff.
And from an early age, he said, “Nope, I’m not going to do it.” And he lived what we would say are insane, an insane life for us. Aesthetics mean he always slept on boards, just a wood board. He slept on that. In fact, when he was near his death suffering near death, his followers want… They put him on a nice bed, because hey, you’re almost about that… He’s like, “No, this isn’t how I’ve lived. This is not how I’m going to die. Put me back on the boards.” And he slept on these hard boards and he lied there to his death. And just that life is just so foreign to us today, and that’s why Father Flume think stands out so much. Tell me if you agree with this, I feel like that aestheticism is the key that unlocks a vision beyond this world. Most of us are just consumed with this world type of things, but that sees beyond it. So, he can see things we just can’t see. Did you experience that with him?
Kevin Wells:
Oh, without question. I think the first thing to do is to identify why would someone partake in mortifications, severe penances? Why? And it’s a legitimate question. Well, here’s why. Because what mortifications would do… And we’ll just hold up John Vianney, who was famous for them for eating a couple moldy potatoes a week, for sleeping on the ground, for sleeping two or three hours a week, and then hearing 14 hours of confessions, why would he do this? Well, through his mortifications, he was able to control his disordered passions so he could almost tame it or meek it. Well, you want to, obviously it’s smart to look at your inflamed passions and sort of control them, but why would you do it? Here’s why. Because then you’re better able to discern how you can help souls because you’re always… Souls are always before you. Not your comfort, not your desire to sleep in for another hour or a steak dinner, because that’s all been thrown away. You’ve given yourself over to God for souls.
So, I agree. Because modern clergy, for the most part has rejected the need for, we have forgotten what they can do. So I’ll repeat mortifications, look into ourselves where we’re disordered and they tame us and they direct us to what is ordered and what is true and when is virtuous.
Eric Sammons:
So when COVID hit, Father Flum responds. And so, I guess we can’t get him in trouble anymore. He’s like a consecrated hermit. I’m just wondering, because I worry about saying too much about priests who did things that they weren’t quote, unquote, “Allowed to do during COVID. To this day, I still don’t want to, I know of certain things. I’m not going to publicly say it. So I just want to make sure we’re not going to get him in trouble, are we?
Kevin Wells:
Well, who knows anymore, Eric? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t have written the book if I thought that to be the case.
Eric Sammons:
So, what did he do that was like, how did he go beyond? Some priests you saw were literally, they hold up in their rectory and they didn’t talk to anybody. Most of them did of the okay, what we’re allowed to do in very minimal… And then some did more. And then there was a few heroic ones like Father Flume. And so what exactly did he do that was kind of against the rules that helped save souls, including your wife’s?
Kevin Wells:
Well, he did quite a few things. We’ll start with, so every day of a priest’s life, they would want to celebrate the sacrifice of the mass. So of course, that’s what Father Flum did during the day. One of COVID, he just didn’t leave the back door of his church unlocked. So, if somebody wanted to go in to make personal prayer before work in the morning at 6:00 AM, and he happened to be celebrating a private mass coincidence, quirk of fate, providence maybe. So, that’s number one. There was mass every day. Secondly, the day that COVID came, he told his parish secretaries and his workers there. We are going to open up perpetual adoration.
And he had this little rinky dink country parish. And they’re like, “No, Father, you can’t do that because we don’t have guardians of the hour. And plus people are scared to death to leave their house.” He said, “I don’t care. Until we get the spots, I will adore Jesus Christ. So, he spent hours and hours and hours in that early months of COVID adoring Christ in front of Blessed and Sacrament. And Eric, I want to say something here. This thought just comes to me for the first time.
So because he spent six to seven to eight hours some days in front of the Monstrance, what happens is the Holy Spirit gives him discernment. We know the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There’s discernment, there’s intuition, there’s fortitude, there’s insight, because he was in prayer. So, he knew how to respond as a priest during COVID. And I’ve often wondered, have priests stopped praying for them. Obviously we know holy priests, but I wonder about just priests who pray. If priests and bishops were not really praying during too much during COVID or they, you know what, we are kind of, everything’s crazy now.
Let’s just protect our souls of our parish and let’s lock doors. I do think if bishops, and I know many I imagine were, but if A, Bishop is attentive to the Holy Spirit through prayer, adoration, the rosary, mortifications, then I think the church worldwide at that time probably would’ve responded a lot more diligently and when prudently to COVID, when COVID came down. So I think prayer is a big component and the last of what Father Flume did then, because he knew how to respond because the Holy Spirit was speaking interiorly to him. But one other thing I want to say that he did, he got permission to do this every single night of the year. It doesn’t matter where he was, he would drive home if he drive his truck back to the parish. So at nine, he prayed the special form of exorcism prayers during times of travail.
And I was there for some of those nights. And let me tell you something, Father Flum was a mild-mannered, he was like a mystic, like a Moses. He had this big biblical old-Testament biblical beard, but he was always very measured. When he was praying in those prayers, his voice rose up and down like torpedoes splitting the water. He was picking a fight with Satan. I I’m telling you, you saw a shepherd of souls saying, “Come on down, I will crush you!.” And why could he say that? Because he had spent pretty much every day since seminary equipping himself four moments like these where Satan was running riotous because why? The Eucharist was shut down, no confession. You couldn’t even put a body in the ground because it was deemed unsafe. Well, he had set himself right for this time. So he was goading Satan in so he could step on his neck.
Eric Sammons:
Really the parallels to St. John Vianney are pretty striking just the life of a parish priest and what it’s supposed to be like. But we just saw that so rarely. You and I are in tune with some good priests and stuff, so we know of priests who are very good, but to the average Catholic, it just didn’t happen. And so I know you can’t answer this question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Why is it that literally every single bishop… One of the things, okay, just real quick step back. One of the things that went viral that I’ve ever done in my life was during that week of COVID, when the shutdown started, I made a map on what was then called Twitter, and I would put in black every diocese when they said we’re shutting down public masses. And I started on Monday of that week, I think that’ve been the 13th, something like that, of March, 2020.
And it was like maybe 20%. And I thought to myself, by Friday, I bet it’s going to be mostly full. Well, I was wrong. It was completely full by Thursday. And so I posted, so people were following this, what dioceses are… Because I go through it and I find out what dioceses are shutting down masses. And so literally, there was no exceptions to this. I think Fort Worth bishop did allow a parking lot mass. And the only one that didn’t allow that, and I think I’ve heard the Maronite Bishop in his eparchy, I think did allow a little bit more, but really every single diocesan bishop in America and in other places in the world, but let’s focus on America, they all just shut down the mass. And most of the time that included, like you said, no funerals, no weddings, no baptisms in some cases, and no confessions or very limited ways to do confession.
And so, why? What led to this happening where we could literally have not a single bishop standing up for and saying, no, we really do need to have mass available to the people.
Kevin Wells:
I’m going to try to answer it. I think I can answer it in three words. They weren’t fathers. But you said what led to it? The church at that time revealed what had been brewing for a long time. There was mediocrity in Chanceries, there was brokenness in priests, there was an inertness, sort of a bachelorhood mentality in so many parishes. So when you’re not, and again, equipped the way Father Flum equipped him through mortifications, through intense prayer, through a slavery to Mary in the vein of de Montfort, when you’re not set right, when something comes down like this and you’re not in prayer, devoted prayer, then anything goes because you forget your identity as a spiritual father and you’re more reactionary to what the bishop says or what CNN says, or what Anthony Faultier or nameless medical panels say. You just go with the flow.
But if you’re equipped for that time, your conscience tells you, “No, I don’t care if I’m the last one standing. No.” The burden of who I am is souls, not bodies, souls. I just think it’s a simple case. They neglected or forgot what a spiritual father does during calamity. So, I that’s my answer.
Eric Sammons:
One of my favorite stories from church histories, Pope Gregory, the great when he became Pope because his predecessor died in a plague that was ravaging Rome. And people need to realize when Gregory became Pope, Rome was a joke. The city of Rome was down to less than 20,000, maybe 10,000 people. There was a million during the height of Rome a few hundred years before. And a plague hits it. People are just dropping everywhere. And so, what is Gregory the Great, who actually at this point, if I remember the details correctly, the other Pope had died. All the people wanted him to be Pope, but the emperor had not yet confirmed him as Pope, and he actually sent somebody to the emperor to say, “No, don’t confirm me as Pope. I don’t want to be Pope.” But he was the natural leader and everybody looked to him.
So he said, “Okay, we’re going to do a procession around the city of Rome and we’re going to…” And not procession asking for the plague to go away. This is key. This is important. It was a procession begging for forgiveness for the sins they had committed that had brought about the justice of God. That’s what purpose of the procession was. People were literally dropping dead during the procession, and they were walking over bodies and stuff like in this procession. At the end of the procession, at the gates, St. Michael, the Archangel appears. And I think it was like he’s cleaning off his sword or sheathing his sword or something, representing, I’ve taken care of this. And sure enough, the plague abated. But I thought that was very interesting because that’s the most probably dramatic example in history. But that’s how Catholics have always looked at things like plagues and natural calamities, things like that.
It’s not that God is like, I’m going to send down this disease. It’s more a matter of, I’m going to allow these things to happen because I need some way to wake you people up because you’re not awake. And I feel like that’s a… I got into so much trouble and controversy when I had an article of Christ said that I think that Pachamama caused COVID. Now people of course took it to mean I thought literally that the scientific evidence or that some dogma. I was just saying no, I think that things like Pachamama led to God lifting his protection a bit and saying, “I got to wake you people up.” And so, do we have any bishops or priests that looked at it like that, that you know of? That looked at it like this is an opportunity that we need to realize, okay, we’re not being faithful to God.
Kevin Wells:
I have an answer to that. But first I’d like to say, I think that example of Pope Gregory the Great, I read his biography of… Eric, you called what he did as the most dramatic example of what is done during a pandemic or a plague. And I think it’s the most on-point impression response. It just warms your heart to think about that procession with people dropping dead. Also, I just want to say this, Gregory the Great, it wasn’t just a procession and St. Michael, the Archangel appearing after that. What he had to do was he had to go up to the barbarians and the viscose up north who were plundering Rome, just picking whatever it wanted, taking the women, just crushing Rome. And he had to take them on and convince them to stop. And not only that, “Hey, we want you to come into the Catholic faith.” So, this guy was, was one of the greatest heroes in the church. But anyway, to answer your question, what I saw was almost a replica… You asked about bishops and the response to COVID.
I saw 2018 all over again. So on June 20th, 2018 when the Washington Post broke the story of McCarrick, and we know all the rest of the Pennsylvania grand jury reports in the summer of shame, I thought at that time there was going to be the sackcloth and ashes penitential movement to will you forgive us? We will stick our nose in front of the monstrance all year in reparation for not exposing what we knew about McCarrick and the sins of the church. But that never happened. It never happened. It was just brushed away. And then the McCarrick investigation was just delayed, et cetera. So when COVID came… And you started the podcast with this, Eric, the church showed its face. Look, I’m not going to beat up the church. I have no desire to talk about the church’s response during COVID. It just didn’t show its best face.
However, there has not been a reckoning. Millions of Catholics have left the safety of the sacraments of the church after COVID. And most of these are young Catholics, they just are gone. And people can disagree, but I contend one of the reasons that the Eucharistic Revival was held was because bishops did know intuitively that man, they messed up.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think so too.
Kevin Wells:
Yeah, maybe it’s not public, but we got to do something about this. So they put on this revival. Good on them, I’m not here to judge that, but man, this was big. A matter of fact, I’m no historian, but this might’ve been as big a mistake that the Catholic Church has made in the history of the world.
Eric Sammons:
I’m sure you do too. I personally know people who were still going to mass, but you could tell they were on the edge. And sure enough, once the bishop said that mass isn’t essential, they took their word for it. And they said, “okay.” And they haven’t been back since. And it just, like you said, they were at least close to the sacraments on some level, and it was the safety of the sacraments, and there was something there. But now it’s like they’re just gone. And I don’t like to be Bishop Basher. I do think the problems in the church go beyond just pointing fingers at them. This is a case though, where that’s literally their job is… Their one job is the sacraments and getting them to us and things like that, and they were the ones who stopped it.
And I feel like that I agree with you, by the way, the Eucharistic Revival, which I’ve had a podcast about it, and I think there’s good things about it. There’s some things I can criticize. But I wonder how much the power of that revival is being held back because they didn’t start it with an apology. It’s almost implicit. They know that wasn’t a good idea, so we need to do something to fix it. Okay, good. I’m with you on that. But I feel like it’s in my spiritual life. If I wrong my wife for example, and then I realize it and I just try not to do it again, or I try to avoid those type of things just so it doesn’t happen again. Well, yeah, that’s good. I shouldn’t try to make it happen again, but I have not reconciled with her, because I never apologize. I never really said I was wrong. I’m sorry. And I feel like we need the bishops to say, “We were wrong to shut down mass.”
I’m willing to say, “Listen, I know it was a crazy time. I know there’s a lot of misinformation from Fauci and others. I get all that. I’m not here to beat you up. I do think though, that unlocks the spiritual benefits if they say they’re sorry first.
Kevin Wells:
Yeah, I agree. And it’s been said thousands of times, Americans or just human beings, we’re always willing to forgive. Hey, yeah, I’m a sinner too. I make mistakes. Let’s move on. Let’s get this thing right. Big deal. Who cares? It doesn’t matter. Even if it was the biggest mistake the church has made in 2000 years, okay, that’s fine. We made a big mistake. Now what are we going to do? It’s almost like, Eric, I was thinking with a Eucharistic Revival, if they wanted to put teeth into this thing, you’re right, start with an apology, but then say, look, the USCCB has given us multimillion, whatever millions of dollars to put this thing on. So the first thing we’re going to do, maybe it’s a three-year revival. In year one, is we’re going to donate a certain amount of money, maybe $10 million to every single priest who would like to install altar rails. And if there’s a Novus Ordo parish who has a tabernacle off to the side, we’re going to pay for you to re-engineer your parish to put it behind.
Just an emphasis just on that alone. Because that shows lady, you know what, they realize that maybe some of the things that they weren’t doing to bring people more sacredly in line with actually what the Eucharist is. Now, they’re actually making up for it. Well, Lady would love that. They would’ve been so forgiven and they would’ve cheered on the bishops. So yeah, I don’t know if it’s that old Wiley sin of the Garden, the sin of pride, and they just can’t cough it up. I am not here to judge. If I judge, I go to hell. It doesn’t matter to me. But yeah, an apology speaks volumes. And you might have done something wrong with your wife. I never have, Eric, I’ve never done anything wrong with my wife, ever…
Eric Sammons:
My wife doesn’t listen to the podcast, but she knows. She knows I have, and I have to go to her with that. But I think also something you said earlier, I keep coming back to in my head, and that is how Father Flume was prepared, spiritually prepared. A lot of people are quick to say, the bishops have no faith, that’s why they did this. I don’t think that’s true. I do think there’s a few, I question if they do. I just think most of us, they have a weak faith. And so when something significant happens like this, they’re not ready for it. And Father Flume though, he had gotten ready. And so I think it’s like if everything stays okay, we can make it. By just a thread, we can make it if we’re doing it.
I’m thinking this too, because my pastor this past weekend, on Sunday, he gave a homily. And it hit me, and he was talking about we try do spiritual minimalism. Basically we look around and say, “Well, compared to everybody else, I’m not doing so bad, so I can just keep doing what I’m doing.” And he’s like, “That’s a horrible mentality. You really should be striving for, like our Lord says, perfection. You should be striving for holiness. You should be striving to do more… Really look at yourself, don’t compare yourself.” I think that’s what we are all doing though. We’re all like, “Hey, let’s just look around everybody.” We’re all fine compared to each other, and then something hits and nobody’s ready. So, I really think that that’s the key with the bishops and the priest and the laity, but primarily the bishops as far as their impact is greater. They just had this get along, go along faith. They did believe, but it just wasn’t enough when calamity struck.
Kevin Wells:
Yeah, Eric, I think that’s very prescient. Forget about COVID for a minute. Even today with Kamala Harris or everything in politics. The debates about abortion, taxpayer funded gender changes, all of it. If a priest or a bishop was truly devoted to prayer, had given his life over to Mary, was attentive to her throughout the mysteries of the rogueries, as he walked around his chancery grounds and prayed it commodified himself, he would take every single one of these American Western society, this pus, all this pus that is drowning our children. He would take it on because he’d say, this is an injustice to children. It’s an injustice to my flock that they have to deal with this pus. And God tells me through prayer, through my penances to act like the shepherd that I am, and he would take it on fearlessly. And that’s what Father Flume did. It’s as simple as that. Because he was a man who had prepared himself for many years through prayer and penances, et cetera, he knew exactly what to do.
Eric Sammons:
I think it’s the devil’s work that saying we need to pray has become a cliché, because people do just dismiss it. But what Father Flume did and does, is truly pray. We’re not talking about a couple prayers before you eat and maybe a few minutes a day, something like that. No, we’re talking real prayer. Our friend David Torkington has written about this, a crisis recently, but also number of books, just the importance of a life of prayer that precedes everything. In fact, Father Flum’s, he’d be the first. A and Mortifications are worthless if he’s not spending all that time in prayer. But I’m hoping maybe there’s a bishop to listen this, but definitely some priests I know listen to this and they can tell their fellow, share it with their priest. I really think that’s the key is our priests and our bishops need to be in front of the blessed sacrament way more than they probably are.
And I understand the life of a bishop and a priest. I worked for a bishop directly for five years, and it made me really opening my eyes to what an awful job that is. It is horrible if you’re looking at outside the spiritual life just as a job. It’s a horrible job and you got to spend. But I think a bishop who spent five hours a day in front of the blessed sacrament is going to be a way better bishop, and maybe not get all his work done, than a great administrator who runs his diocese like a good corporation or something like that. Because I think that’s what COVID told us was that you’re just not ready, guys. We’re all not ready. But we just need… And this is really supposed to be an encouragement to priests and bishops not an attack on them. I think. I mean, I know you agree that we all need to pray more, but I mean our spiritual fathers, and that’s what we want to get back to, especially our spiritual fathers need to.
Kevin Wells:
So Eric, you mentioned that there’s a few priests that watch crisis, crisis Point. If I can be bold enough or arrogant enough to speak on behalf of laity. Laity thirsts for muscular priests. They thirst for priests willing to take to the hardwood of the cross by stripping themselves of comforts. They don’t want their pastors going out to opulent restaurants or driving around a $50,000 car or don’t want video games. They don’t want social media streams their pastor on that. They don’t want any of that. They want a priest who resembles Jesus Christ, this starved man from the cross, who only he poured himself out for one reason, souls. So I’ll circle back. How does this happen? A priest doesn’t just say overnight, “I’m going to be a muscular priest. I’m going to be Atlas. I’m going to put them all on my back. I’m Atlas.
Eric Sammons:
You’ll get crushed if you do that.
Kevin Wells:
What’s that?
Eric Sammons:
You’ll get crushed if you do that.
Kevin Wells:
Yes, you would. I do believe that it’s got to start with an intensive prayer life. So, it’s not just prayer. It is reading the church doctor. It’s reading the early documents. It’s learning the lives of the saints. Every single day of his life, John Vianney read from one book, it was called The Lives of the Saints, because he wanted to be a saint, so he became a saint. So, you can’t just put it in a box. Oh, prayer, prayer, prayer. Well, of course everything starts from prayer, but it’s the accoutrements that you have to tack on that say, okay, my identity is to save souls. Let me read the greatest of the grace, the Titans, the paragons down the years to help me become that muscular priest.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Absolutely. Reading Lives of the Saints, I know years, and this is probably 20 years ago, I think I started, it was just an inspiration that I think the Holy Spirit gave me was my kids. When it’s their bedtime, we pray, and then they have a half an hour where they have to read, once they can read, from the Lives of the Saints and they can also or sacred scripture. And I feel like that was a great gift that was given to me to think of doing that. And we’re still doing, my oldest is now 27 out of the house and stuff, but I still have a 9-year-old. I just am like, I want them every night to spend with the saints because saying nations of Loyola, of course, same story. He read the Lives of the Saints and it converted him, basically. And so we read that and it can tell us the ways to go. And I’ve been reading a few recently that have been very powerful, and I really do recommend that.
And speaking of saints, I want to finish up here by coming back to Father Flume. So tell us what happened. He’s not with the parish anymore, now, he’s a consecrated hermit. What do you know about the process that led him now and where is he? I don’t necessarily mean geographically, but what is he? Consecrated hermit, we don’t have those anymore. I thought So what happened?
Kevin Wells:
Yeah, it’s a very rare, it’s rarefied error, and you can understand why, because every morning he’ll rise between three 30 and four and his entire life thereafter, his hours of that day become a prayer and mortification. So, I can’t do it. I couldn’t do that. But some people actually can. I’m just imagining if Father Flume was four years into his being a hermit. One day he said, “I’m going to sleep in. This day I’m going to sleep in, and I’m not going to do my first nocturn, or I’m not going to do compline.” Well, all of a sudden he’s like, oh my gosh, I’m a whitewashed tomb. I’m a hypocrite. So you have to know you can do it, because it is one of the hardest things in the world to do is to turn over your life, amputate every measure of comfort and give yourself over to God.
So yeah, so he’s two years in to this, two and a half, three years into this light, there is such a thing in the church as a consecrated hermit, you disappear. He’s gone. He’s absolved. You will never see him again. He’s like absolved sin. He’s disappeared. He’s gone. So, he’s given his life over as a sacrifice to help-
Eric Sammons:
So it’s solitary though? He’s not living with monks or anything like that?
Kevin Wells:
No. Okay. Here’s what I’ll say. I can’t say too much, but-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I don’t want to reveal anything we shouldn’t.
Kevin Wells:
No, he’s on the grounds. So he’s in a forest, he’s in a cell. He lives in a cell probably no larger than your childhood bedroom. And basically his room is in front of a monstrance. That’s where he lives. So, he has a rain catcher for his water when it rains. He has a little garden. However, way off in the distance are cloistered nuns who requested that he actually become a hermit on their grounds.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Now, one thing I want to say is that throughout church history, there are many stories of hermits who go into the woods, go to the mountain or the desert, something like that, and they spend years like this. And eventually what happens is, God allows it so that people do come find out and come to them for the spiritual direction to learn from them. I kind of hope maybe that’ll happen here that I don’t want, I mean, it’s God’s decision, not mine, of course, but because that’s what happens sometimes. But usually it’s like decades they’re… I’m not saying tomorrow, I’m just saying usually it’s a very long time where they become so like Christ that then God says, “Okay, now I’m going to let you.”
What he’s doing right now is doing more for souls than any of us without ever talking to another soul, of course. But sometimes it does. The Lord opens those. Even St. Anthony, people ended up coming to him and things like that. So maybe that’ll happen. If it’s not God’s will, obviously I don’t want it to happen, but I mean, I just think, so we’re going to wrap it up. But I just want to encourage people to read The Hermit. I’ll put a link to it, of course, in the show notes. And we didn’t even talk that much about your family’s situation and your wife and things like that. We talked a little bit about that. And that, of course, weaves throughout the book, very the basis for the framework, so to speak. But really, it’s a story of a holy priest, a holy spiritual father. And boy, do we need those today, don’t we?
Kevin Wells:
Yeah, we do. I tell you what, Eric, if Father Flum does decide to step on out of that Hermitage 10, 20 years from now, my wife, Christa’s really going to be happy, because she’s been mourning ever since he left. So, it would be nice for my wife anyway, and I’d like to see him too.
Eric Sammons:
And I think, obviously we know we have his prayers and that’s what matters the most. And his aesthetical life, his sacrifices, mortifications he’s making. He’s making himself a victim for us. And so it just really, it’s so easy to get down about what’s going on in the church today, but to remember that there are holy souls. He’s not the only one, but there are holy souls out there who are literally giving up their lives for us. And I just think that’s a reason for encouragement in the trials and the crisis that we’re living through today.
Kevin Wells:
With you.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, Kevin, I appreciate it. Again, pick up the book. I’ll put a link to show notes. Until next time, everybody, God love you.