(LifeSiteNews) — Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion Sebastiaan “Bas” Rutten told his reversion story in a recent interview with Taylor Marshall and revealed that he now attends the Traditional Latin Mass and prays the Rosary daily in Latin.
Rutten won the UFC Heavyweight Championship in 1999 and was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2015. He is considered a pioneer and legend in the sport of Mixed Martial Arts. He is also an actor who has appeared in numerous movies and TV shows.
The fighter told Marshall that when he was 10 years old he watched a tree and asked his teacher where the tree came from. His teacher replied, “They planted it there, idiot.”
“Yeah, dude, I understand that,” Rutten recalled retorting. “But if you go to the tree before, the tree before, the tree before, you go all the way back. Where do they come from? And he, of course, just thought that I was an idiot. But that was always in my head.”
The former UFC Champion recalled that he was confirmed in the Catholic Church, but that when he was 13 or 14 years old, his parents decided not to go to church anymore.
But he didn’t lose a sense that there are supernatural realities. He went on to describe how many years later, between 2004 and 2006, his house was seemingly haunted by a ghost. Rutten would wake up in the middle of the night and feel an immense pressure on his chest so that he could hardly breathe. He also reported other supernatural occurrences, like seeing a woman walking around in his kitchen at night while his wife was sleeping in bed, or a curtain in his kitchen flapping as if someone had just run through it.
When Rutten was filming a movie in 2014, a friend invited Rutten to a talk by Leo Severino on the subject of “how the world came together.”
“Now, if he would have said, ‘we are gonna talk about Jesus and God,’ I would have said, ‘I’m up in my room; I’ll see you guys in an hour’,” Rutten stated. “But he didn’t; he said it is about how the world came together.”
“And the first thing Leo said: ‘The leaf fell from the tree’—that’s literarily his first line.”
“’Let’s go backtrack that leaf,’” the fighter continued. “And he goes back to the branch and then he goes to the tree before, and he goes to the tree before, and he goes to the tree before.”
Severino laid out a “very solid proof for the existence of God, of a Designer” which led to Rutten being “full on in” on the Catholic faith.
The former UFC champion explained how his wife did not take his conversion seriously in the beginning as she thought it would just be “another six-week episode” due to Rutten’s ADHD condition. However, as Rutten started attending Mass and praying the Rosary daily, his wife began to see changes in him. For example, he stopped drinking and got bad habits out of his life.
“So, then I asked her to marry me for the third time,” the former UFC champion said. They were together for 30 years already, but this time they would marry inside the Catholic Church.
Rutten’s wife agreed to marry him and the following day, she went to Holy Mass and signed up for RCIA classes to become a practicing Catholic herself; she had been baptized in the Catholic Church but not confirmed.
“So in one day she already decided, bada-bing, bada-boom, here we are, and now I’m talking to you,” Rutten told Marshall.
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According to Archbishop Viganò:
the visible church, to which the world gives the name of Catholic Church and of which it considers Bergoglio as Pope, is no longer Church...
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Bishop Joseph Strickland, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Fr. James Altman, and two dozen more faithful Catholic priests & scholars are publicly calling out Pope Francis for his outrageous, dangerous, and heretical teaching concerning reception of Holy Communion.
Pope Francis stated that "faith" is the only requirement for those who wish to receive Holy Communion in his June 29 Apostolic Letter on the liturgy, Desiderio desideravi.
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For those in mortal sin, repentance and absolution must first be sought in the Sacrament of Confession before receiving the Eucharist*.
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*However, if a Catholic is unable to attend Confession but has a grave reason for receiving the Eucharist (such as a priest who may be required to celebrate Mass at a given time but who is unable to go to Confession), such a person must be confident to the best of his ability that he have perfect contrition for any mortal sins that he may have committed before receiving Holy Communion in an exceptional situation.
MORE INFORMATION:
Full statement by Catholic bishops and scholars correcting Pope Francis' heresy - LifeSiteNews
Why Rutten likes the Traditional Latin Mass
When asked by Marshall why he liked the Latin Mass, Rutten replied, jokingly: “I always say for fun: ‘No cellphones go off. They like to take their faith a little more serious’.”
“I like the way it’s been done for 2000 years,” the former UFC champion explained, adding “We are there for Jesus.”
“I like basic stuff,” he continued, explaining that he became so good at fighting because he mastered the fundamentals.
“It’s the same with the faith. It’s been there for 2,000 years. I want to do it as they did at that time. That’s why I like the Latin Mass.”
Rutten also drew on a Japanese martial art to explain his outlook on the Catholic faith.
“I say this to Catholics all the time: the word that you should use a lot is ‘osu.’ It’s a karate word, everybody greets each other like that.”
He explained that the word “osu” is made up of two Japanese words that mean “to push” and “to endure.”
“To push and to endure, that’s the Catholic faith,” Rutten proclaimed. “And that’s life in general. If you want to excel at something, you are gonna have to push and to endure.”
“If it has been done over centuries like that, I want to do it like that.”
The Rosary is ‘mediation, but it also gives me a sense of power, a protection’
When asked why he likes to pray the rosary, Rutten said that “the reason I miss fighting a lot is because it’s peace for me. Finally, my ADHD stops, all the noise from the outside stops, […] and I have that also with the Rosary.”
“…I pray the Sorrowful Mysteries when I’m in pain,” Rutten explained. “When I’m stretching, I go, ‘Come on, dude, you can’t pull out right now because he [Christ] went through way more stuff!’”
“Once they told me that with the Rosary every bead is like a shotgun blast to the devil—oh, sign me up,” the former UFC fighter said, adding that “You’ll slap him [Satan] in the face when you do it in Latin. Whoa, let’s start doing everything in Latin then, because…we need to fight that guy, and he is everywhere.”
“That’s why I like it. It’s mediation, but it also gives me a sense of power, a protection,” Rutten concluded.
The MMA fighter has been talking about his Catholic faith in interviews for years .
Marshall said he recently met Rutten for the first time at a Kevin James comedy show in Dallas, Texas. Rutten is a good friend of James, a fellow Catholic best known as the star of TV’s “The King of Queens.”
The two practicing Catholics, Rutten and James, have appeared together in episodes of “The King of Queens” and the MMA-themed movie Here Comes the Boom.