(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of Faith & Reason, John Henry-Westen and Frank Wright discuss outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer escalating the conflict in Ukraine and sparking concerns about World War III, Pope Francis approving the Mayan rite of the Mass with female leadership and ritual dances, the new preacher to the papal household promoting a homosexual reading of the Gospel, an urgent plea for President-elect Donald Trump to pardon all pro-life prisoners, and more.
The panel began the episode by discussing Biden’s decision to provide Ukraine with American long-range missiles, which Ukraine then used to strike Russia. Russia responded by amending its nuclear doctrine to state that “an attack from a non-nuclear state, if backed by a nuclear power, will be treated as a joint assault on Russia.” This news has led to speculation that we are on the brink of World War III.
Wright stressed that while reports of the outbreak of World War III are premature:
Now I don’t think it’s going to lead to World War III. The Russian foreign minister responded to the permission, speaking in Rio de Janeiro. Sergei Lavrov said the Russian nuclear posture remains defensive and not a first-strike posture. And then he followed those remarks by saying the Russians are going to do everything they can to avoid nuclear war. So this does not sound like the Russians are going to respond to this reckless permission with an escalation beyond the nuclear threshold.
By the way, this reckless permission is not the first time. And together with the use of American-supplied – and some say operated, but certainly American-guided – attack missiles, Russia claimed to have shot down seven of eight of those missiles, as it has done in the past.
Wright also underscored that Keir Starmer and the British government are trying to escalate the conflict by providing Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that were also fired into the Kursk region of Russia, despite the prime minister denying that he had given such permission.
“The important thing to remember here is that no government … has been more aggressive in pushing for escalation and the use of weapons like these in Ukraine than that [of] the United Kingdom. And its missiles were used last year in Crimea to attack what was described as over-the-horizon radars, whose only use is for Russia to detect a first strike due to [an] attack on its territory. It has no role in the Ukraine war,” Wright said.
“It’s also committed acts of described terrorism in Kursk, and recent reports show the British military have been training guerrillas to continue the war in Ukraine beyond a ceasefire. So the question is, why would these people seek to perpetuate war? And I think that’s the larger question here,” he added.
Westen jumped in to ask about the British scuttling a proposed peace deal between Russia and Ukraine just weeks after the war began.
“Well, Boris Johnson denied doing so, but he urged Zelensky weeks after the outbreak of the war, when Zelensky was on the point of signing a ceasefire with the Russians, he urged Zelensky not to do so. … The former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who was present at the negotiations in Istanbul, supported these claims, as have others,” Wright responded.
“So, yes, it does appear that Boris Johnson, the [then] British prime minister, was the man who prevented the outbreak of peace weeks after the Russian invasion. All this could have been avoided. Instead, he promised full-throated support from Ukraine, from NATO, and from the U.S. and the United Kingdom to escalate to a NATO-backed proxy war with Russia,” he added.
Later in the episode, the panel turned to news from the Vatican, where Pope Francis recently approved the new Mayan rite of the Mass, which features women taking the place of the priest incensing the altar, female lay leadership of other parts of the Mass, and pagan ritual dances.
Westen emphasized that this is part of the Vatican’s plans to introduce female deacons.
“They’re trying to inch closer and closer to a female diaconate. Now we’ve talked about this before in the program. If you have all these things, you have women reading, you have women distributing Holy Communion, you have women doing incense, you have them leading parts of the Mass, and then doing ritual dance … you’ve already got a sort of female diaconate in practice, even though it’s not officially sanctioned,” the host said.
Wright noted that the Vatican is just following the blueprint created by the documents of the heterodox German bishops:
But at that time when I was reading that, I thought, ‘This is a blueprint for a sort of Protestantism to be adopted by the Vatican.’ And it would appear that that is being materialized. Now if you care to go and look back at these documents, I think you’ll see that they have basically foretold what’s happening this week. Because everything in them, which was largely hand-waved away by some people saying, ‘Oh, look, it’s just the Germans being silly,’ this has turned out to be a blueprint for what we’re seeing now.
And again, this isn’t accidental, and it isn’t isolated. It matches perfectly the wider liberal-global agenda, which is an alarming coincidence, to say the least.
For more discussion on the escalation of the war in Ukraine, the new Mayan rite of the Mass, and much more, tune in to this week’s episode of Faith & Reason.
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