(LifeSiteNews) — Jack Maxey returns on this week’s episode of Faith & Reason, in which he joins Father Charles Murr, Liz Yore, and John-Henry Westen to discuss the latest news from the Vatican, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and who funded the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl commercial.
At a Monday press conference for the Pontifical Academy for Life, LifeSiteNews Vatican correspondent Michael Haynes asked Mariana Mazzucato, a pro-abortion atheist appointed by Pope Francis to the Academy in late 2022, whether it was appropriate for someone with her views to be working at the Vatican. Mazzucato objected to Haynes’ question, claiming that she never wrote the words “religion” or “abortion” in her publications, and stated that it was “sad” Haynes brought up an X post she reposted that “did a very good job in just raising hypocrisy around some of these issues” rather than the content of the press conference.
Yore praises Haynes for the question, saying that pro-life people are being “gaslit” by someone supporting abortion. Yore also draws attention to Mazzucato’s support for climate change in the same conference, with Mazzucato claiming that climate change will cause 83 million excess deaths by the end of the century.
To Yore, climate “alarmists” are pushing the United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals “under the rubric of climate change.” Mazzucato herself was once a contributor to the World Economic Forum (WEF). For Yore, what people need to realize about sustainable development is that “it is a depopulation agenda, wrapped in fancy words so that you won’t look at the actual goals.” She cites goal 5.6 of the UN’s sustainable development goals, which proposes “gender equality,” including access to “reproductive health and reproductive rights.”
“(Haynes) exposed what her real agenda is, which is climate change,” Yore asserts. “This is who Pope Francis is relying (on) in the Pontifical Academy for Life! This is his consultant. And he’s placed consultants like pro-abortion consultants throughout the dicasteries. And this should give us all grave concern.”
Yore urges LifeSite readers to sign a petition to Pope Francis asking Mazzucato be removed from the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Haynes himself makes an appearance, saying that he thinks Mazzucato’s appearance at the conference is “poignant” given that she is a recent appointee, and that it is “quite important for journalists to be able to pose these questions to members of the Academy for Life, because the Academy for Life is, ostensibly, a Vatican academy, which is ostensibly supposed to be supporting the cause of life.”
Haynes further observes that the Pontifical Academy for Life is “not what it was some years ago,” in part due to the changes Francis has made. He also thinks that academics like Mazzucato show a “new style” in the Vatican, whereby the Church is not fighting contraception and abortion but “almost supporting those lobby movements through the work of its own Pontifical Academy for Life.”
Meanwhile, Sister Linda Pocher, a nun invited to a meeting of Francis’ C9 cardinal advisers to talk to them about the role of women in the Church with an Anglican lady “bishop,” Jo Bailey Wells, claimed that Francis is in favor of a female diaconate, but that “we are trying to understand how to put (it) into practice.” Speaking to Wells’ involvement, Pocher said that Wells addressed the cardinals on how the Anglican church decided to “ordain” women and what it did for them.
“It’s interesting to see that (Francis) is moving at a frantic pace to change things that John Paul II wrote in an encyclical cannot be changed,” Yore opines. “We’re going to see that behind the scenes. It’s obviously apparent that they’re going to be putting in processes to … have a female diaconate,” she continues. “I don’t know if the plan is to move towards ordaining women to the priesthood, but the Pope is apparently doing all these things.”
Fr. Murr recalls that one of the things that Msgr. Mario Marini told him and another priest in conversation about then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was that the Argentine was against women’s ordination. Murr also admits he has difficulty believing how someone could say that he is convinced of one thing and then say the opposite.
“Does all of this bother me? Of course it bothers me. I’m a Catholic. It has to bother me,” he says. “But at the same time, when push comes to shove, no, it doesn’t bother me, because I know this cannot be, and I know that that soon it will be taken care of.”
Murr further compares Francis to a lost man driving a car, not asking for directions and always speeding up.
“I see a lot of these things as (an) almost frantic attempt, almost in panic mode, to get things done,” the priest admits. “I think death is really an issue with (Francis), and he wants to get a lot of things done before he dies.”
At the beginning of the month, Tucker Carlson traveled to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. The full interview, over two hours long, was posted online last week and continues to garner hundreds of millions of views on social media. Putin told Carlson midway through the interview that U.S. presidents do not run their country, but rather the intelligence agencies, discussing meetings he had with former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
For Yore, however, the interview represents a missed opportunity. While Carlson spoke with Putin about peace in Eastern Europe, Yore observes that there was no mention of the message of Fatima in it.
“It hit me, ‘Oh my gosh! This is the question! This is the opportunity!’” Yore laments. “‘This is the moment in history, when the leader of Russia should have been asked about Our Lady of Fatima’s message, the message that has been spurned by popes for 60 years, the message that needs to be brought to the world and to be carried out.’”
Yore hopes the interview can be a catalyst for talk of the Fatima message and wonders if the laity can ask Putin to speak to Francis about consecrating Russia and only Russia to the Immaculate Heart.
Murr, reacting to Yore’s opinion, suggests that someone should send Matt Walsh to interview Putin and bring up the question, the answer being “of great importance to at least 1.5 billion people on the planet.”
Maxey joins the conversation toward the end of the show, when the group discusses a video of children dressed in risqué costumes, wearing wigs with bandages over nipples in the streets of Spain.
Murr addresses the video first, being a resident of Spain. He notes that while the children are dressed like “prostitutes” and were “parading down the street,” no one expressed outrage. In terms of immorality, the priest says, the video is “about the worst you can imagine.”
Yore, a child protection lawyer, says that what the video shows is a “logical extension” of socializing children in public schools. “This is a world turned away from God turns to Satan, the sexual exploitation of children,” she maintains. “It’s the darkest of the dark arts.”
“How many times have we said gender ideology is about not only mutilating children in the womb, but if they’re lucky enough to survive birth, it’s the mutilation and exploitation of children outside the womb,” she adds. Yore further notes that seeing something like the parade on a public street is “especially jarring,” yet videos like the one from Spain are easy to come by on the internet, often full of violence.
Maxey, who once lived in Madrid for a time, notes that Spain is a divided country, especially in terms of Catholicism, recalling the Spanish Civil War. There is in Spain, Maxey says, a “strong anti-papist movement.”
“The subtle message of the left in Spain really is both socialism and the destruction of the Church, which they see as their number one enemy towards some future utopia,” he states. “We saw this in a lot of the Latin countries in the early 20th century.”
Focusing on the content of the video, Maxey asserts that it shows the “hypocrisy” of those claiming that LGBT content for children is not about their sexualization, and that similar allegations of abuse have been leveled against the Biden family.
“The whole world has a problem with child sexualization and the protection of the predators who promote it,” he says. To him, the video is “symbolic of a much larger problem than that the whole world is confronting today.” Connecting the issue with children being “trafficked” across the U.S.-Mexico border, Maxey says “they’re not all ending up in kindergartens, I can assure you.”
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