We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I'm
joined by Alec Torres. He is co author of the new book Persecuted from
Within, How the Saints Endured Crises in the Church. Alec is a former
speechwriter for President Trump, also for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's ghost written for Cabinet
secretaries, of bassadors, national media personalities, and business leaders. He's also
the co founder of Alligraph, a strategic writing, comms and design firm,
and Alec lives with his wife, children and dogs in Texas. Alec,
thanks for joining the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Yeah. Of course you mentioned actually before we started the tape Rooin in
here that you know, you're a longtime ghost writer. Such an interesting field
of work, and you know a lot of people actually don't know how interesting
it is, of course, because the ghost writers aren't the ones talk in
the media. A lot. Could you give us just a little bit of
your background background on your career. No we mentioned President Trump and Speaker McCarthy.
How'd you end up where you are? Alec Yeah, no, happy
to share. It's it's uh, it is a weird career, but but
it's a wonderful one. It's it's not one that anybody really expects to get
into. I guess most people think, if you're going to start writing things,
why don't you just write under your own name? Uh? But but
in many ways, it just felt led into it. I graduated from Yale
back, you know, about a decade ago now, and just just kind
of stumbled into a writing job. I was working for National Review at the
time, and then from there got a call one day somebody said, hey,
would you ever be interested in being a speechwriter? Well, heck,
why not? That seems fun. Can you at least get me out of
New York. I didn't really like it there, so they moved me off
to DC. I started working for Kevin McCarthy then, and you know,
one thing led to another, works for the President. So I certainly didn't
plan it, but my goodness, it puts you, It puts you right
in the middle of some some pretty amazing things. And the benefit for me
too is I get to write about absolutely everything, anything under the sun,
anything that my boss has wrote on, or anybody that hires me wants to
write on. As long as I agree with it and I'm game, I
get to dive right in. Keeps it interesting? That absolutely sounds like it
keeps it interesting. Tell us about the new book, of course, and
your co author on this, what sort of brought this book into being?
What did you want to do with this book? Yeah, thank you?
Persecuted from within? Was it kind of started as just a flash, an
insight or something, and I'd call it led by the Holy Spirit. But
I was sitting there and I was looking I'm a Catholic, and I was
looking at the church, and I was looking at scandals within the church,
and I mean, this applies all over the place too. It can be
scandals with than the Protestant Church to a lesser degree, scandals with government,
things like that. And I wanted to know, how should a Christian respond?
How am I obligated to respond when those in power do things that I
think are terrible or that I disagree with, or they cause controversy, whatever
it may be. And I wanted to act in the best way that I
could. I wanted to act as a good Christian should. And I realized
I really didn't actually have the answer to that. You know, a priest,
or a bishop or even the Pope says something that I don't really like,
what do I do? So I thought, Okay, let me what
if I asked the people who do know what to do, who have shown
that they need what to do. So I looked at great Christians, incredible
Christians from the past twenty centuries of the church, and decided to look at
their lives when they were persecuted by members of the church itself, by a
hierarchy within the church. So I had that idea, and I brought it
up to a friend of mine, Josh Charles. He's the co author of
the book. He's another White House speech writer, and he loved it too.
So we decided to run with it and thank God for his help because
I'd written history before, but I never got into biographies like this, and
it was a heck of a lot of work. I have to say,
it sounds incredibly almost Sissifian. Also, just to go into people's to dip
into people's lives and with all of the actually, I imagine this might even
be a bigger challenge than an asset. Obviously, it's a huge asset to
have access to the libraries around the world via the Internet now, but that
has also make things so difficult when you're trying to kind of pin down specifics
about people's lives, about different moments in time, what is that like.
In a strange way, our training as speech writers really helped us out a
lot, because you know, you find I would get these prompts so you
know, whatever, whatever it really is, you know, the presidents to
speak on X issue. It could be healthcare, could be better, and
it could be whatever it is. And you look at it and you say,
I have a thousand works, you know, call it one thousand,
called fifteen hundred, called three thousand, whatever it is. There's no possible
way you are going to do full justice to a subject in that small amount
of words, especially when you count things like you have to acknowledge where you
are, recognize certain dignitaries and people. There's a lot of factors that go
in play. So that selective choice of what to focus on and what not
to is an odd skill, but it's a vital skill in this day and
when we are just bombarded with information. To take an example from the book,
one of the great saints we look at is Padre Pio. He's a
person that a lot of people know about, Catholic or not, and his
life is astounding. There's a million one things you can write on. People
really know him for a lot of miraculous things that happened in his life.
But we set a lot of those miracles off to the side and decided to
focus on another aspect because we start writing on that and gosh, there's been
biographies, multi volume biographies written on the guy. We're never going to cover
it. So it was a judgment call. We had to make pretty much
every page of the book no I can imagine. Do you have This might
be a weird question, but do you have a favorite of the people that
you wrote about in the book? Is there anything that just resonates or connects
with you or maybe was especially compelling to you for any reason. That is
a hard question I asked to did mostly because I don't want to say,
oh, I love Paul. There are some that were more fun to work
with than others. I do admit but it kind of depends on what subject
I'm dealing with that certain saints shine out. Just to give an example,
I can't exactly say he's my favorite, but there is one we covered,
Saint Thomas Moore, and he lived under Henry the Eighth when the Anglican Church
was breaking away from the Catholic Church, and really what he did his time
echoes our own in so many ways. Because his king wanted to be able
to divorce his wife and remarry for the sake of having male children. I
mean, this is a massive schism. It's a very big subject in history.
But he was an advisor to the king, Saint Thomas Moore, so
he had to figure out how in the world do I show loyalty to my
king, to my ruler, give him good advice, but also not violate
my principles and the teachings Christian teachings about marriage. Well, gosh, how
do we not violate our principles and uphold Christian teachings about marriage nowadays, especially
in the political sphere as it is so looking at his life and having negotiated
those competing loyalties was fascinating. He's the patron saint of lawyers, and I
think politicians or something like that. So working in politics, I had I
had reason to look at him a lot. But he's one of the many
that really stood out to me in the book. Yeah, no, that
makes sense. Is there one who you think? I mean, probably the
obvious answer here is all of them, because you wrote the book about all
of them. But is there anyone that you think has a sort of arc
that is particularly applicable to Catholics and sort of twenty twenty three America. Ooh
that I'm the moment you said that, I'm seeing like bits and pieces of
each of their stories, you know, popping into place, and it's maybe
the most important one to look at here is actually Saint Paul. He's kind
of he's a somewhat of a surprise addition to this because you think persecuted by
the Church himself. Everyone knows Paul was persecuted by all sorts of folks.
They don't readily think of him being persecuted by the Church. But there's this
kind of there's a story and acts where he was. He went to Jerusalem,
reported to the chief priest there and or rather the chief leaders in the
church, including James the Greater who was the Bishop of Jerusalem at that time,
and they essentially told him, hey, you know, we love you,
we love what you're doing, but there are some people who are a
little worried that you're not following Jewish law as much. And at the time
that was still an open question. How much do you follow the Jewish law
and ceremonial practices, how much do you not? So they told him,
Okay, go to the temple and purify yourself and we should all be good.
You'll convince them that you're good. You're still following Jewish law. YadA,
YadA, YadA. Not to get too bogged down in the details,
but long story short, he did that knowingly, knowing that this would expose
him to some pretty bad pushback. I mean, this is after he had
been thrown out of cities and stoned and shipwrecked, all these terrible things that
already happened to him. So what happens, well, you know, is
the Jewish opponents in the cities find him and they try to kill him right
then and there. The only reason he was saved was because the Romans got
involved. So that's sort of one part of the story. Why is that
important to today? Well, he showed what it's like to follow leaders that
tell you to do things that may even put you at risk or that seems
stupid, but he recognized that there wasn't a moral, principled reason why he
should not submit in that circumstance, why he had an obligation to follow them.
And on the flip side, there was another story of when he contradicted
Saint Peter, who was the chief of the Apostles, to his face,
and it's because Saint Peter was contradicting the moral laws of the Church. He
was contradicting the true teachings of Church about salvation. It wasn't the moral laws
actually was salvation. It's I'm happy to get into the story. There's a
reason we had to write a book about it because so many of these details
deserved being oh okay, well, well, essentially what happened was is Peter
he also kind of succumbed the pressure from this the Jewish wing of the church
at this time, and he said he decided he wasn't going to eat with
non Jewish Christians anymore because that wasn't allowed. Jews were not supposed to eat
with gentiles. Obviously, it was just insulting to the gentiles who had converted.
But also it implied that that Peter, the chief of the Apostles,
really did believe that you had to follow the Jewish ceremonial law to be saved.
That's that's not a small matter. I mean that that tells all these
gentiles. I'm sorry, like Jesus may have died, but you know,
maybe not for you, that this could have really put peoples at stake at
risk. So Peter, in that circumstance, he says in Galatians, he
confronted Peter to his face. He contradicted him to his face, and he
asked him direct questions like do you really believe what your actions seem to be
saying here. So for a person who willingly submitted himselves to James and put
himself at grave risk that he ended up being almost killed by a mob and
then thrown into prison by the Romans to then turn around and contradict a leader
in that circumstance, I really think his life shows the complications that we face
as Christians of how to live a life of obedience to the truth, of
supporting our leaders as God calls us to and praying for them and loving them
as God calls us to, but also not being silent when it actually is
very important and we have to stand for the truth. It's a complicated,
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Is one of these stories, do you think underappreciated or is one that
people aren't as familiar with as maybe they should be. There are actually severally
here that I think people don't know about too well. One of them is
a saint, Saint Bruno. He lived in the eleventh century, and he
lived in a time when well, well, let's just say, if people
are worried about scandals within the Catholic Church today, this time would have given
people a run for their money. There was gross sexual im morality within the
church, priests and bishops and even popes living with their mistresses. It was
so bad later historians called it the pornocracy. It was a gross time.
And on top of that, civil disorder all over the place. I mean
there were kings competing over lands, or kings competing with ecclesial authority. Emperors
were involved. Rome was invaded by different armies and then thrown off by other
armies. The pope was running into exile and coming back. I mean that
our times are unique in many ways. There are a lot of things we
should be concerned about. But gosh, if you were going to lose faith
in an institution, that period of time may have been in because it looked
bad. And Saint Bruno comes on the stage, and he was very clear
about the issues of day, about the moral issues, but also about the
relationship between the Church and the state, which was still being very much negotiated
at that time. The reason I find his story so fascinating is because in
many ways he was asked to put at risk and to sacrifice what so many
of us are in our lives. I mean, we write about saints who
were who were excommunicated, or who were martyred, or who were killed or
something like that, and that could happen, you know, never say never.
I really hope it doesn't. But for most of us, we're asked
for something a lot less. We're just asked to sacrifice, maybe our reputation
or maybe a promotion, maybe a friendship, you know, standing for the
truth and standing for Christian doctrine. Nowadays it has costs, but they aren't
as they aren't as high of costs as so many have faced in the past.
So with Saint Bruno, he saw the relationship between church and state,
and essentially an emperor was demanding the right to appoint and to control church leaders
within his jurisdiction, which which isn't allowed. That's something that simply can't be
done under duress. He literally captured the Pope, put him in prison and
said I'm not going to release you until you sign on and let me do
this. And the Pope signed on. So Saint Bruno called him on it.
He had previously been a high advisor to the pope, had a ton
of power and authority, and he said the Pope was wrong, you can't
do this. So boom, all of his power, all of his authority,
all of his high rank, everything like that got pushed off to the
side, and you know, he kind of ended up on the outskirts.
He died, not in the center of things. It was a risk he
was willing to take. And I always mentioned this in interviews with Catholic authors,
but as a Lutheran, I'm not super familiar with all of the different
contours of your faith. But the book really is addressing this major question that
anybody in an organized denomination thinks about, which is when to obey when to
disobey in authority? And your book addresses that through these stories. What should
people be thinking about? And I know this question weighs heavily on a lot
of Catholics minds these days. What is that? How should what is that
question? What is the way to think about that question? You know?
And how do some of these examples help people think about that question? It's
it is probably the question at the core of the book. And I know
I just spouted a lot of church history and and a lot of things that
maybe Protestants wouldn't care as much about. I still think that the principles within
the story are very good, and there's there's many examples that that have that
draw out truths that are really applicable to all Christians. The reason I say
that is because it's it's not just that Catholics have to obey the Church.
And that's why I'm writing about this. No, no, no, it
starts with Jesus. Are the first chapter of our book is about Jesus,
and he's pretty darn clear that any faithful Christian has to obey authority. You
know, he Christ himself, put put himself under the authority of ponscious Pilot.
And ponscious Pilot wasn't a church leader, he wasn't a Jewish, he,
you know, wasn't a follower of Christ by any stretch of the imagination.
He was created by God. And yet Jesus put himself under his jurisdiction
and allowed conscious Pilot to sentence him the debt. There's a great mystery there
about how to negotiate that. And doesn't matter the denomination that you're in,
we are going to face it. If you're a Catholic and you have you
know, the Pope says something or does something you disagree with, you're going
to face it. Well, if you're a Protestant, even a in a
very decentralized church, and say your pastor, I don't know the siphon's way,
church money, or has an affair or whatever it is, you're going
to have to decide how do you do you throw off that church? Do
you leave that church because of that? Do you stick around? How do
you negotiate with that? That question of obedience isn't a Catholic thing. It's
it's it's at the core of what it means to be a Christian. When
to obey the authorities that God put on earth and when do we have a
higher obedience to what God demands. Now you also have a part where you're
helping non Catholics talk about this sort of secular culture that everyone that it's it's
hard not to be consumed by because we kind of all exist in it.
And again, another thing that I bring up a lot with Catholic authors,
and maybe the listeners know exactly where I'm going with this, but it's just
the sort of renaissance of things like the Latin mass, the growing interest among
even maybe especially younger conservative leaning people to follow Orthodox Catholicism after years of hearing
over and over again that you know, the more orthodox the church seemed to
people, the less success it would have at recruiting young people and you know,
people alike, young, old, whatever it is. It seems as
though that's panning out to be the opposite. But with that context in mind,
how can non Catholics talk or how can Catholics talk to non Catholics about
this culture? The I think you see the same trend lines through especially in
the Catholics, but also but outside of it as well. I'm a convert
myself. I'm actually married to a non Catholic and you know, she's evangelical,
and there's this weird it's almost like the horseshoe theory. There's all those
sorts of things that are very that there's big disagreement on. But between low
church Protestants and sort of Latin Mass attending Catholics, like I am, all
of a sudden, you look and you're like, wait a second, We're
we have different theologies, we're approaching things from extremely different perspectives, but both
signs are saying and I want something solid to stand on, and that's what
the Catholic that's what the sort of orthodox Catholic movement is turning on. I
need to have something that isn't going to change on me, that that has
been the case, has always been the case, and will always be the
case. And how the times are shifting and the tides are always churning,
and how we negotiate that in the secular environment gets harder and harder. But
you know, the Bible verse I was reading this morning was about a loop
sticks. I want to say about building your house upon the rock of Christ's
word is teaching his life. That's where you got to build it, and
everything else is just kind of extra. I know. You also address the
question of what people might get wrong. And I want to ask if there
are examples or lessons from all of the stories that you did deep dives into
and spent so long thinking about and putting, you know, pen to paper
to tell these stories. Are there lessons for uh, you know, how
how to respond and how not to respond as Christians in a broken culture.
One of the hard lessons I really learned from this was that if you go
back from Jesus to Saint Paul, to the very early Church and the three
hundreds with Saint Athanasius, Middle Ages like Saint Bruno, you know, all
the way to today with Padre Pio and Fulton Sheen. The the hard,
hard lesson I learned was that Christians that the rule is to obey, and
it's not just church leaders oftentimes it's even civil leaders. This gets very,
very messy nowadays. It's a hard thing to deal with and I can find
I speak for myself in this, there's there's this tendency to want to buifur
kate our lives and to respond one way as a Christian and one way as
a conservative. You know, I see Biden doing something terrible, or I
see the the church or the culture, or I say politics or culture doing
this and that, and I want to I want to just start running people
through the mud and driving them out of town. And then I go to
church and I and I try to be all pious and say, you know,
oh, of course I pray for my leaders, and you know,
I submit to proper authority in this and that. The number of times I
saw saints and great Christians submit to bad leadership, not morally bad, not
not those who teach air that will guide people towards sin, but just things
that were stupid, that were really imprudent, or that you know, in
our in our modern parliamce would be lead our country in the wrong direction.
The number of times that they did that, trusting that God was still guiding
things, and then they didn't need to engage in slander or in gossip,
or in ad homine attacks or anything like that. It showed a trust and
a depth of faith that I know I need to emulate in my own life
much much more. Now, Can you talk to us actually about the specific
example of Padre Pio. I think that's a story obviously that many many Catholics
are very familiar with, but also just from the perspective of people interested in
history, so fascinating tell us about Padre Pio alec This actually leads perfectly together
because Pandre Pio is one of these great examples of obedience in the face of
I mean crimes against him really, that are, if you put yourself in
hissues, you'd wonder how you could do it. So Padre Pio was this
capuchin friar in twentieth century. He lived in a very small town, kind
of on the eastern side, low down in the south of Italy, and
he didn't seek out any fame or fortune or anything like that. He just
wanted to live in his friary a life of prayer and penance. But he
got what Catholics call the stigmata, that the wound, the visible wounds of
Christ in his hands and on his feet. This was this is one of
those things that we mentioned in the book because it's important for the story,
but we don't get in, we don't dive in too deeply. Suffice to
say that it was studied by multiple medical examiners. It was filmed, it
was photographed, They were legitimate. They were miraculous. Nobody had There wasn't
a worldly explanation for it. And what it did was it brought a ton
of attention to Quadre Pou, frankly, a lot of unwanted attention. He
wanted to wrap his hands up and kind of go on, but people noticed
and you couldn't keep it hidden. So essentially the church authorities looked at this
and thought at first he was a fraud. They wanted They were like,
you are trying to make money, You're trying to get fame for yourself.
I don't know what's going on here, but but this doesn't seem legitimate.
So they put restrictions on him that he had a growing band of people around
him that were getting overly emphatic, and they wanted to tamp down the temperature.
So they put restrictions on him that were kind kind of just ridiculous.
They barred him from saying massive public, They banned him from hearing confessions.
At one point, they even ordered his superiors order that would be passed by
people in the hall. He wasn't really allowed to talk to them. He
could acknowledge them with a nod, but just walk by. I mean the
idea that anybody has the right to do that is just shocking. But for
Padre Pio, he had vowed obedience as a friar, and he actually submitted
to all of this. He actually he had a friend, his name was
Emmanuel Brunado, and he did what the political thing would be. He went
to Padre Pio and said, how about this. What if I published a
book detailing all these scandals inside of Rome, you know, abuses and mistresses
and you name it. We'll get all this out there as a way to
blackmail them to releasing these restrictions on you. There's a caveat here that obviously,
when they're wrongdoing an air you should address that, you should fix that.
It's not going to keep these things in the dark. But Padre Piu
saw it for what it was. It's one thing to sort of air dirty
wanndry to address it wrong. It's another to do it to blackmail people for
the sake of your own benefit. And he told him not to do it.
He told him that he wasn't going to run these people's name through the
mud for his own benefit. And he waited patiently until essentially divine intervention came
to relieve him of these years of what he called his imprisonment. So that's
his life is so stocking in so many ways because he was actually just in
many respects a normal person. Yes he had the stigma, and yes he
had all these miracles attributed to him, but he was a sinful human being
just like all of us. He faced temptations, just like all of us.
Imagine yourself being having all of those restrictions put upon you and not lashing
out at the people who are doing it. I can't imagine having that strength
by the grace of God. Now this is a more maybe a more current
question or a more pragmatic question. How are if the if they are,
how are in your estimation Catholics perhaps being persecuted from within maybe all over the
world that we sort of think of these things through an American lens. But
is that happening? Do you see that that's happening. I think one of
these questions probably that you think a lot about, is where to draw the
line, where how to define sort of persecution from within? You You can
have disagreement within, you can have you know, disagreement, or you can
have poor leadership within. When that becomes persecution. Obviously the definition is consequential
and has much gravity. What does that look like today? To the extent
that it does Alec, it's very much the case today. I don't think
I would have felt as strongly about it had it not been happening today.
You know, I have no problem with academics. They're great, and sometimes
it's very worth exploring questions that aren't salient to today. But you know,
Josh and I wrote this book knowing it really was relevant in the American lens.
We can see it when you know pro life priests are are defract or
are censored, and then priests who are extremely friendly with the gay movement are
elevated. There's a bishop in Tyler, Texas, Bishop Strickland. People may
know about him. He gave us a wonderful endorsement of our book. The
details are still swirling out there. We don't know all the information, but
he is being investigated by Rome and may be forced out of his position.
But then we see other bishops who, let's just say there, they're not
exactly pillars of Orthodoxy, and they're elevated to the highest stature, sometimes even
to cardinals. We saw this with the now cardinal who's from San Diego in
California, and globally in the church, there's, I guess, to put
a finer point on it, there is discussions right now about contradicting fundamental teachings
in the church, whether it's blessing same sex unions, or allowing women priests,
priestesses, or you know, any number of really hot but moral issues
in the West, and by the looks of it, the hierarchy, the
senior leadership at a bare minimum, seems to be pushing this very very aggressively,
while those who are against it are either completely silent or if they do,
talk out or sideline. And this isn't even to mention I'm a Latin
Mass attending. This isn't even to mention restrictions on the Latin Mass. It's
a unique thing for Catholics because we recognize that just because all of these things,
If you look at this from a worldly perspective, you'd say, why
in the world would you stay in an organization like this. I mean,
if you're a conservative, orthodox, traditional Catholic, it seems like everything is
a rate against you, all your leaders are a raided against you. Why
do you stay? And that that I mean that is one of the reasons
why we wrote a book. We wanted people to know that if they are
putting, if they want their leaders to be perfect, and if they need
their leaders to be perfect in order to keep their Christian faith, their Catholic
faith, then their faith is in Man and it's not God. So these
political issues are extremely salient nowadays and weighing upon people. They weigh upon anybody
who recognizes that they have an obligation to authority above their own and have to
deal with it like that is one full place to leave this conversation about a
book with a fantastic cover. The art on the cover of your book is
beautiful. Again. The book is called Persecuted from Within How the Saints endured
crises in the church Alec. Where can people go pick up a copy?
I recommend most people go to Sofia Institute Press. They're a publisher. I
have a bit of an antipathy towards big tech companies, so I usually prefer
that Sadly, these issues aren't going anywhere, so if you don't get it
into days shipping, you'll be okay. But that being said, can't find
them or don't know where that is on Amazon, and it's at Barnes and
Noble. You know, if you're throw in the title, you should be
able to find it. Wonderful well. Alec Torra's co author of the book
Persecuted from Within How the Saints Endured Crises in the Church. Thank you so
much for joining us today. Really appreciate you having me. You've been listening
to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinski, culture editor
here at the Federalist. We will be back soon with more. Until then,
the lovers of freedom and anxious for the Frame