What is Catholic masculinity? What does it mean to be a man? What are the proper roles for both men and women in the family? We’ll talk with Kennedy Hall, author of “Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity” about this controversial topic.
Links:
Terror of Demons
The Kennedy Report
Watch on YouTube:
Transcript:
Eric Sammons:
What is Catholic masculinity? What does it mean to be a man? We’ll talk about that today on Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and editor in chief of Crisis Magazine. I just want to encourage people to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to it, wherever you watch it. I’d appreciate it. Also follow us on all the various social media sites @CrisisMag. And you can donate to Crisis Magazine. Just go to crisismagazine.com/support.
Okay. Today we have Kennedy Hall. He is our first time three peat guest here on Crisis Point. So you’re beating Peter Kwasniewski by about a week, because he’s going to be on I think next week, his third time as well. So he is the author of a couple books including Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. He’s a host of the Conservative Talk Radio show, the Kennedy Profession on the Crusade Channel. A great show. He regularly writes for Crisis and he’s a contributing editor to OnePeterFive. So, Kennedy, you have to have a beard to be a real man, right?
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah, you do. I’ll update that at bio too. I had to take time away from the radio show for family reasons. But everyone should still check out the Crusade Channel because it’s a wonderful place. But I work for LifeSiteNews full-time now.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, great. Well, congratulations.
Kennedy Hall:
Thank you. And I do have my own YouTube channel I started called the Kennedy Report. So I resurrected an old show. It’s doing pretty well. Anyway. So if you want to hear controversial takes that make everyone upset but you agree with, you can check that out at the Kennedy Report on YouTube. And what Peter Kwasniewski has more than me in spades as intelligence. Although, I do make up for that by having more beard than him. So that’s-
Eric Sammons:
That’s right. Exactly.
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
And we are kidding everybody. You don’t have to have a beard to be a real man. But, yeah. Thank you. I copied your bio from the last time and I should have first asked.
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
But, great. Okay. So LifeSiteNews is where we’re going to find all your writing, correct?
Kennedy Hall:
Yep.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Great. And Crisis, right? You write for Crisis as well regularly and OnePeterFive and then the Kennedy Report on YouTube, right?
Kennedy Hall:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. I’ll make sure I will link to that in the show notes so that people can find it easily. I’m sure if they just search on Kennedy Report, they’ll probably find it. But we’ll do that as well. Okay. So first I just want to ask a little bit about your background. Growing up how were the roles of men and women presented to you in your upbringing? Because I think this really defines a lot of people, how they see their father and mother in their own life. And how was that for you?
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah, sure. So I grew up in your average North American family. Divorce, a broken home, that sort of thing. None of this is to criticize my parents. But it’s what it was. So from a young age… And I had a stepdad for a while and stuff and all the things that come with that broken family. And from a young age I was always very… I guess the word is curious about what a man should be. Someone’s trying to walk into my office here. Guys I’m on a call. Go please.
Eric Sammons:
See, he is actually a father.
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. It’s my three-year-old. No, he is not three yet. Anyway, you just can’t train two-year-olds anymore. So understand working from home. So I was always curious about what a man was going to be. Just naturally. It wasn’t something and presented to me from some role model. It was just, “I’m a man. I will be a man. What should that be?” When I was a young kid, it manifested itself a lot in feats of strength. It still does. I love weightlifting still. But not that everyone has to.
For me, that was clearly a man thing. So I tried to do that from a young age. So when I was a teenager, I had some really great role models as football coaches. I actually talk about them in the book in the introduction. And I don’t know. From as far back as I can remember, I saw the men that I respected the most were leaders. They commanded a presence of respect, but because they themselves worked harder than everybody.
So I had this one coach, Mr. Mike [Stroceli 00:04:09]. He’s just for football here in this part of Ontario. He was a legend. He’s won a bunch of county and state or province championships and things like that. And he was a wonderful man. And he said to me once, he said, “Kennedy, if I’m not outworking the players, then there’s a problem.” And he meant that. I mean, during the football season, he would sleep like four hours a night.
We watched film all the time. It was like being in a preparatory NCAA prep school, but at a publicly funded Catholic school because he just decided to do all of that extra work for free. So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to take that question of what a man is so seriously. Because I saw a man like him who was exceptional in his duties and his responsibilities, and the fruits of that was obvious.
People respected him. People were made better under him. His family respected him, his wife respected him. He was just all around. And I wanted to get to the heart of that. And when I discovered the faith or rediscovered it I guess, then it took a new dimension.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So how then would you define masculinity? Because, I mean, just this week, the nominee for Supreme Court couldn’t even say what a woman is. So we probably should have our definitions here. So what would you say masculinity… What does that mean?
Kennedy Hall:
Sure. Well, the word for man in Latin is vir. Okay. And the word for strength is strength or virtuous, virtu. So etymologically speaking, to be manly is to be virtuous. That’s what the language tells us. In fact, you’ll find in older writings, you’ll find things like so-and-so acted manfully in a certain situation. And they could say it about a woman or a child. It just means acting virtuously.
So as far as masculinity for example, versus femininity, masculinity is a perfection of the male. Okay. It doesn’t mean you are a man or you’re not a man if you’re not masculine. It’s a metaphysical perfection when it comes to our character. That being said, there is a natural masculine and feminine thing we see in society. For example, if you were to look at a landscape and you saw very jagged mountains, you might say there’s a very masculine quality of that landscape.
Versus if you saw a meadow or something, you might say it more of a feminine quality. And you’d see this with how you decorate a little boys’ room versus a little girl’s room. It just naturally happen. It’s funny, even in this world of gender confusion, one of the other things that’s so common is gender reveals. And everything’s blue, everything’s pink when we’re finding out you’re having a boy or girl. So we know this is a very natural thing.
Of course, the postmodernists would call it a construct. But I don’t know. I think postmodernism is a social construct. But anyway. So masculinity as far as what it means as characteristics of males would be a virtuous perfection. So all men who are masculine are males, but not all males are masculine. That old syllogism from Aristotle. All men are mortals, but not all mortals are men.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Kennedy Hall:
So it can be applied to males, but not necessarily all males have it.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So if we say masculinity is being virtuous, then as femininity, obviously we’re not saying women should not be virtuous, obviously. If we say that, what is femininity then? How is that different? And yet obviously it’s still a call to virtue.
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. So it’s politically incorrect, but we need to look to scripture. Personally, I believe Genesis is literal history. So man is created first. Okay. So we have to go back to the original sin. And I do this in the book. And the reason why the word man is tightly linked to the word strength or virtue is because to be virtuous, there is a certain resistance, a show of strength that is necessary to do so at all.
This applies to both men and women. But what we see in the creation is that man comes first and he’s given certain responsibilities. Basically he’s called to be a servant leader. That’s basically what he is. And Christ shows us that perfectly, where he leads the whole human race by serving the whole human race. The last will be first, the first will be last. It’s this paradox of being a Christian.
And when we go back to the original sin, what we find is that the original sin we give to Adam, even though it was Eve who took over the fruit first. Because there’s an automatic failure on behalf of Adam in the sense where he did not resist manfully or enough the temptation to do something and partake in sin that his wife had offered him. Okay. And this is why he has the greater sin in a sense. Like what Christ says to Pilate.
So it’s not that men and women both aren’t virtuous. Of course, they are. But it’s just in the order of creation that God has ordained it to be. There is this primary responsibility that is put on men’s shoulders to demonstrate this to be an example. And the analogy that I use all the time is… I love using sports analogies. But the captain of your team doesn’t necessarily have to be the best player. He doesn’t have to score the most goals or baskets or whatever.
But his role is to lead the team in a way that facilitates everybody else ability to thrive so they can be better at what they are. Okay. And same thing for a coach. So he should work harder than everybody else. He should be competent in everything. But it’s more of the overall vision that he has and the way to facilitate everyone’s thriving. So if we look at men who demonstrate this in their families.
Roles between men and women can change depending on technology and work. And, I mean, these things are a little bit contextual. But nonetheless there is a certain stability and a rock, a foundation that the man can offer in the household that is unique to him. So I think that’s why… Of course, both men and women are virtuous. But there’s a primary impetus to it from the masculine creation.
Eric Sammons:
So talking about roles in the family, I think that’s where we get our major controversies. Because obviously in today’s world, the standard view is that there are no really distinct masculine or feminine roles in a family. That they’re essentially interchangeable. And that’s why of course, we also… You can have two daddies. You can have the gay marriage and things like that. But you mentioned that roles can change depending on culture technology, different things. What would you say then is the fundamental role that can’t change for a man in his family?
Kennedy Hall:
Well, we should put ways. People can choose to change the roles however they want, and that’ll be either effective or ineffective. So like the Lutheran church, you could choose to have a female pastor but it’s an absolute disaster. Okay. So I guess go at it, do whatever you want but you reap the consequences. But as far as the things that have to remain constant in order that things are ordered and people thrive, then that’s a different conversation. So I would say primarily the father has to be, the man has to be the…
What’s the term in the New Testament? The katechon. The thing that stops the antichrist. You have to be the katechon in your family in so far as you are the spiritual head of your family. Now, of course, you could be incapacitated because you’re injured or in a coma or something. Okay. These are the exceptions. But these exceptions prove the rules, just the way we see everything in life.
Now, as far as rules that can change, the reality is, is that, and this can probably transition into this as well, we live in a disordered time in history. It’s well beyond order. Okay. So yesterday I was talking to my wife about… There’s a book… I’m going to mess up the name, but I believe it’s called Councils of Perfection for the Christian Nother. It’s quite a good book. I think Sophia publishes it. I don’t know.
It’s actually like Terror Demons for Women. She found it. Some lady she knows has been reading. It’s great. And it makes the distinction between an imperfection, a venial sin and mortal sin. So an imperfection is something like where you ignore… Or, sorry, you don’t have a virtue cultivated. So the analogy was, if you walk by a homeless person and you feel no desire to help that person.
I don’t want to get too social justice here. But you know what I mean? If you see it and you’re not moved by it at all, you’re, you’re missing a certain perfection because we are called to love our neighbor. Okay. And serve the poor and all that sort of stuff. As much as it’s turned into the whole faith by the leftest, that is obviously a part of the faith.
Whereas a venial sin would be, you walk by a homeless man. You have the means to give him some money or do something or say hello, whatever. But out of a hardness of heart you decide not to. So you’ve intentionally made the decision to not do something you know you ought to do. That’d be the venial. And then moral would be, I don’t know, hitting him in the face or something. You walk by or something crazy. Okay.
So what we have in this society is we have a very imperfect society. We have a society that’s just completely disordered. Okay. So I just turned 34 years old. Before two weeks to steal the spread, I was playing rugby. And I was talking to this young man who was 20 or 21. And that time we were either expecting or just had had our fourth child. And he said, “Oh, man, it’d be great to have big family, but who can afford it?” He just said it like that.
And he’s 21 years old. I mean, he doesn’t have any kids. He’s not married. And I’m like, “I’m a teacher.” I mean, I’m fine. That’s just to illustrate that. The concept of how to live in our society is just completely upside down. It’s topsy turvy. It’s a revolution. It’s turned back against itself, is what has happened. So we have to look at the roles of men and women in our society through, in my opinion, the lens of imperfection. And what I mean by that is we don’t even know what perfection is supposed to be. So we have to start at that place and then work from there. And then, yeah, that’s the basics of it.
Eric Sammons:
I remember my first job after I got married. I was 25 or something like that. And my wife and I were both working when we first got married. And then when we had our first child, which was a year, year and a half later I guess it was, she stopped working to stay at home with our oldest. And I remember I was talking to my boss at work about this, just how she staying at home. He was very sincere. He was not a believer or anything like that. He was very sincere.
He said, “Boy, I wish I could do that. I wish I could afford to have my wife stay at home with my kid.” I think he only had one at the time too. And I thought to myself, “Hold on a second. You’re my boss.
Kennedy Hall:
You’re my boss.
Eric Sammons:
You make more than me. But then he here’s the thing, it sincerely did not cross his mind, the wrongness way of saying that. Obviously, if he made certain life decisions, he could. I don’t know his situation. He might have had tons of student debt, he and his wife. I don’t know anything like that. But the fact is that he just was immediate like, “I can’t afford to do that.”
And I think that’s an example of the imperfection you’re talking about. This was in Washington D.C. area, which is ridiculously expensive to live and stuff like that. But my wife and I had made decisions leading up to my child being born before we were even married, that led to her ability to stay at home right from the beginning. But I think that’s a big part of, I think, what we’re talking about here, is these roles.
I think it was marriage prep or something. Somebody said the role of the husband is the three Ps. Priest, protector and provider. And the priest, he’s the leader of the family in spiritual matters, particularly. He’s the head. he’s the priest of the family. He’s the protector. It’s his duty to make sure nothing happens bad to his… And obviously, physically that’s true. You protect if somebody came and invaded the house. To be the father or husband, you’re the first one in a line of defense trying to stop it.
But more importantly, spiritually, he’s protecting, he’s not letting garbage come in through the internet or TV, whatever. But then the provider, I think that’s the one where a lot of people have a problem today. And what does that mean? An example is Little House on the Prairie. One of the greatest-
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. I love that too. I love that book-
Eric Sammons:
… book there is ever. Are you telling me ma wasn’t providing as well? I mean, she was. I mean, obviously pa was in charge. But, Mrs. Angles, I mean, she is working her tail off to provide and in certain ways by helping out with the farming and everything like that. So where did we draw that line in 21st century Western countries of the provider of the family, the man or the woman, the woman staying at home and all those issues?
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. That’s a really good question. And this is the crux of the matter nowadays. Okay. Let’s make up a fictitious couple and we’ll analyze their life. And they’re Catholic. We’re assuming we’re talking about Catholics here who want to live virtuous. They want them and their children to go to heaven. That’s prima fascia. Okay. So if you’re just an average person living in an average city with an average parish, right, and an average school.
I mean, you have the basics available to you. Well, there’s certain things you’re going to have to say, “Okay, am I comfortable putting my children in a certain school?” And if you’re not, and you know that there are grave dangers there… And this is relative. You could put your kids in an incredible Catholic school, and because they’re around other human beings, something bad could happen.
Okay. But moral certainty. One of my priests explained it to me. He says, “Moral certainty is all we can have except for things like metaphysical certainty for mathematics.” If I put a pizza in a room of 14-year-old boys who just got back from football practice, I will bet my mortgage that they’ll eat it within 10 minutes. I have moral certainty that’s going to happen. Okay.
Kennedy Hall:
So we have moral certainty about certain things. I know if I put my kids in a certain school, it’s very likely if not certain that they’ll be shown pornography by someone’s smartphone or something like that. Okay. So basically, it’s like, you have to look around at your life and you say, “What are these matters where it’s not just a matter of perfection? It’s a matter of me or I not sinning through omission or commission.” Because we just don’t want to sin. Okay.
So if you’re a couple and you both make $50,000 a year. Let’s pick a number. Okay. And you do that and you have a house that’s a two car garage, and you’ve got two vehicles and you’ve got a time share. And you are ish with your money. You’re not wasting all your money on Ponzi schemes, but at the same time you’re just like, “Oh, we’ll keep have the credit card low. And that’s all we care about.”
And you’ve got the new smartphones and you’ve both got memberships to the golf course or the gym or whatever. You’ve got all these things that just add up and you realize, “Wow, we’ve got a lot of preacher comforts here.” Eat out frequently, whatever. But you think to yourself, you go, “Okay. We’ve had kid. We’re having our second kid. We’re rosary praying Catholics. We are trying to be good Catholics. And, oh, my goodness so and so is at the nice little daycare right now with a nice old lady down the street, and it’s totally great. So and so is got to go to that school. We either have to move to a completely new state or county or province to find a good Catholic school, or we’re going to have to homeschool.”
Now, the reason why you think why we have it is because you’re thinking to yourself, “I know by putting my kids in a certain circumstance that they will encounter something that will harm their soul. And that’s my fault, therefore it’s a sin.” That’s failing in priestly role and protector as the father. So at that moment you have to go from imperfections, i.e we live in a disordered world with student debt and terrible marriage prep. It sounds like you had a decent one though.
We go from that to, now it’s a matter of heaven and hell. So now what to we do? So, yeah, at that point, regardless of people’s thoughts about how much a husband should provide or whatever, there’s a decision you have to make that is vital. Okay. So that’s where we should make that decision from. Because then now you can have a multiple different ways of attacking the decision.
You pick up a Dave Ramsey book or something like that, and you say, “We’ve got 100 grand of debt, and we could literally sell these three things and knock off 70,000 of it. And we could sell our car and knock off another 10 because we live close enough walking distance. And if you stay home, you don’t need a car.” And you follow these things out and you go, “Wow, if my wife comes home and starts homeschooling the children because we need to, because there’s no other option. Okay. If my wife comes home and does this, really we only need to replace $10,000 a year.
Because after income tax and the cost of working and the vehicle, it’s actually not that much different. You can look at it like that. Then it becomes a more manageable problem. So if we go back to this analogy that you used with ma and pa and Little House… I read my kids those books all the time. In the past women were always working insofar as doing things that were useful as part of the providence of the family. This has always been the case.
The worst thing that has ever happened, in my opinion, one of the worst things that’s ever happened to this understanding of male, female roles in a marriage has been the 1950s stereotype of the housewife. You read about this when the West and Canada was being industrialized in the 1950s and ’60s. Calgary is basically a city they made it of nothing. It was oil city. They just made a financial city because there was oil in Alberta. It’s all new. It’s all flat. Whatever.
And there was this epidemic of alcoholism amongst housewives out there. Because they would move out there from Toronto and places in the East where they had culture and community and all this stuff. They’d move out there to these beautiful, massive homes, all the latest technology. Husband was making $100,000 dollars a year and he would come home at 6:00 o’clock. And basically she didn’t have to do anything. She didn’t have anything to do. She would just drink. Okay.
That’s a stereotype of this arbitrary roles in the household. So what we see is what is the constant in male, female relationships and marriage over time? The constant is those three Ps you talked about. But it’s not that the mom can’t do anything besides watch the children. That would be absurd. It’s the welfare of the children is the primary thing. And then everything else has to facilitate the welfare. And this goes back to the leadership of the husband.
You don’t have to make 200 grand a year to make sure that everything is hunky-dory. What you have to do is facilitate the situation. So maybe you have grandma who’s close by who’s wonderful. Maybe your wife is a nurse and she works full-time and she wants to go down to working part-time. Well, grandma’s great. She’ll take the kids couple nights a week or whatever. She works the night shift. You work it out. And that’s totally fine because you’ve made that work. But really, to summarize, you have to put the welfare of your children first. And it is in my opinion sinful for a father to neglect to do that by a sin of commission or omission.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. The calculus involved in making these decisions, I think there’s so many false assumptions.
Kennedy Hall:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
Or misunderstandings. Like for example, my kid has to be on this soccer team or my kid has to be at this good preschool or this school, or I have to have this level of house or whatever, or I have to have two car, whatever. All these assumptions we make. And I think honestly the vast majority of people don’t make those in some bad way. They’re not materialistic in the sense of, they’re just sinfully trying to get most for themselves. They just see this is what everybody does and so this is what we’re going to do. But I think what you’re suggesting is take a step back, look at from a 64,000 foot view and say, “Okay, what is my goal here? What is my mission? My mission is to get me, my wife and my kids to heaven.”
Kennedy Hall:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
And so anything and literally anything that stands in the way of that has to be eliminated as best possible.
Kennedy Hall:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
Obviously, we live in fallen worlds. It’s impossible to get rid of it completely, but we do everything we can. Okay, so my own philosophy is… And I’ve told my kids. I have six daughters and one son. I’ve told my son this explicitly and I’ve said to my daughter as well, is that, it’s very important to me in my own marriage that my wife never feels like she has to work.
Kennedy Hall:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
That’s very important. Now, obviously I get disabled, something like that, situations like that, we can’t always control. But if I can help it, if it means I’m slinging burgers at McDonald’s in the evening, I don’t care. I don’t want her to ever have to work. Does that mean though she can never do some work like from home and do something? Obviously not. We don’t ever depend on that. I would never live off of that.
And I told my son do the same thing. When you decide one day to get married, you have to have the same attitude. Don’t ever make your wife feel like she has to work. But the truth is, because I thought that from the beginning when we first got engaged, like I said, we made all these decisions. One decision we made when we first got married, we both had jobs. And what we did was we took 100% of my wife’s income and we put it towards paying off student debt.
And we did not live off that at all. Because we knew, okay, once we had our first kid, whether it be in nine months after the wedding or nine years, whatever God decides, that we would be used to living on one income. And sure enough in God’s Providence, we literally made the last payment on our student debt the month before my first daughter was born. My wife stopped working like a… It was like a month before she was born or two months before she was born. That was when we made our last payment as well.
So when my first daughter was born, we didn’t have any student debt. And more importantly, we were used to living off of my income, which was modest at the time. I mean, I was just out of college and everything. It wasn’t like some grandiose. I was a computer programmer, so it wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t like… It was-
Kennedy Hall:
You weren’t on Wall Street or something.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Right. It was entry level. I mean, it was definitely entry level. So I think those are things where we get hung up it seems to me today on the whole issue of a wife working outside the home. And really the priority isn’t that. The priority is what are you doing so your kids get to have it and you get to have it, right?
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. Now, we should say some hard truths, well, though. I’m not very good at meditating. I’m supposed to meditate because I’m in the third order. Anyway. But I’m terrible at it and I’m trying to get better at it. So I’m reading The Soul of the Apostolate. Okay. That’s what I was told. That’s your bootcamp for interior life. So I’m reading the Soul of the Apostolate. And I’m very guilty of this. Everything in your life has to be animated by Christ. Okay. That’s basic. Okay.
Nice fun words to say, but what does that mean? Excuse me. It means every single thing that you do, you have to put prayer before that thing in some capacity. John Henry Weston who runs the LifeSiteNews is incredible at this. He’s extremely biased in earnest in his faith. And every single meeting you ever have with a guy, it starts with prayer. And every single day we have at LifeSite, it starts with a decade of the rosary. And it’s very sincere. That’s how he lives his life and it’s no joke.
And there’s a reason why him and Steve Jalsevac have been able to take such a difficult. I mean, talk about controversial. Try to working at LifeSite. And there are people that hate us. I mean, you can only handle the stress if you have a prayer life like he does. That’s the only possible way you could ever do it. Otherwise, to be honest, I think you become a nervous wreck.
So everything in our life has to be animated by a love for Christ, a love for souls. So that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as a love for the church. And also it doesn’t mean that… Let’s say we want to do good for other souls, but we actually can’t neglect the health of our own soul and those who are closest to us. That’s primary. Okay. I mean, now I’m in a traditional setting. But for a while I was in a conservative charismatic setting. And let’s be honest, a lot of great universities out there.
There’s a few good Catholic ones still. But it’s a university where both men and women are going to. And universities educate young men and women to go into the workforce relatively speaking. I mean, there’s certain things you could do just for fun. You’d want to go study Mariology or something like that because you just want to be an author and a mom or something. That’s fine. But my point is I saw a lot of this stuff coming out of these places and there was a justification of, “Well, here is the new Catholic way to have the work life balance.”
And I would see a lot of young couples try to do this. In my personal view is that it was an excuse to compromise on things that they wouldn’t have otherwise compromised on. So what we have to do there is we have to say, “Okay, why do you want your wife to work? Or why is she saying that we need to do this because it’s somehow a good thing to do?” And this comes back to the perfection thing. With all respect, it’s great to be a teacher. It’s great to be a youth ministry leader. It’s great to, I don’t know, work in some kitschy Catholic graphic design firm or something like that.
There’s lots of things. You could say, “Well, this is really good because I’m here, I’m only working halftime but I’m making nice things. And they’re spreading around Instagram and it’s pictures of Mary.” And it’s like, “Okay, that’s nice and everything.” But you don’t have to do that. And to be honest, you don’t have a special charism that makes you infallibly impeccable at doing it.
You just are decent at graphic design. In reality, you probably should want to be home with your children because that would be the perfection. And this is what the catechism of the Council of Trent says. Some traditional Catholics take it too far and say, “This means you have to stay at home or have to whatever.” But it says a mother ought to, I’m paraphrasing, but should want to fulfill these roles.
So this is like an examination of conscience. You have to do it for real. And you have to say, “What areas am I just a finding something that is less than ideal in order to do something that I prefer for me rather than what would be God’s will for my life?”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I mean, that’s real challenging, what you’re saying, because it really does go against the assumptions we all have. I mean, the idea of women like you’re talking about going to university, well, when you go to university, you pay a lot of money. And the purpose of it, like you said, is typically to get a job. And now obviously, because of our imperfect society, women are and men are marrying much later in life. That’s just what’s happening because of our culture.
Whereas in the past, I think a more healthy environment is when men and women were marrying much younger than they do now like the average, like late 20s or something like that. I think it’d be more healthy early 20s at the very least. It’s funny, because my wife was a feminist and she was a Catholic feminist. And so then she’s no longer a feminist. I told her I wanted to always provide, she didn’t have to work. I also made clear I didn’t want her to either. I didn’t want her to… This is when we were dating.
I mean, if you have a conversion, I understand. But you don’t want to drop this on your wife five years into your marriage without any warning I think. But we talked about this when we were dating. So she knew going in. But I do know that for her, having a university degree. She was political science and Russian studies and all this. She had her own dreams of a career when she was in college.
But ultimately for her, it was like, “No, I want to take care of my kids.” She has this phrase. I’m going to butcher it. She got it from somewhere else. But she likes to say where it’s like, in the work world, she’d offer a little bit of herself to a lot of people. But with her kids, she offers her entire self to these few people. She gives literally everything to them.
Now, of course we’re talking about masculinity in the male role. But my duty then I would guess is to make sure that happens, that she can do. That I do everything I can so that she can actually do that, give her entire life. Because, I mean, 24/7, she has no time off from being a mother. I don’t have any time from being a father. But she spends it directly with the kids just about 24/7 with homeschooling home.
But, boy, when you go to university, you’re expected to get a job. And to get a job for a while, I mean, you take four years, spend all that money. You’re not going to want to work for a year and then quit. That’s a hard thing to do.
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. In this book, I beat up on men including myself. But not because I’m just trying to be nasty. I also offer all the tools to better yourself and the inspirational stories and things. But we do need to take an honest account and say, “I mean, why on earth would you want to be a stay-at-home mother in today’s world with what a man is presented as?” Because it’s presented to you as, he comes home and he wants supper on the table.
Nothing wrong with having supper on the table. I’m just saying that’s the extent of it. It’s like you do all the things and he has a life of comfort because you provide it for him. That’s basically what it’s presented as. Okay. It’s like the stereotypical sitcom situation. I’s only been in the last 60, 70, 80 years where a man did not have to consistently do physical things in order to keep up his household.
Both men and women have always been in that boat. The laundry machines and… There was the spin ones with the… Whatever it maybe, 80 years ago or 100 years ago. That was a little bit of help. It was a physical thing until Maytag or whatever came out. And so there’s always been this necessity that a husband has to be active in taking care of the house, taking care of the children, taking care of the providence for the family. And the wife was always as the Bible says a helpmate.
They would do a lot of the same things together. There was a lot of natural collaboration. This is something that’s missing in our world today because the way that we work, we so often work far from the home. And that’s actually very modern. Okay. That’s really a thing that happened with the suburbs. Because, I mean, just logistically, think about the way that you would work in an old European city.
So in the way that you’d live 150 years ago, you’d be working in a European city or a European styled city like an old colonial city in America or Canada or Mexico or whatever, where there is a complete organic relationship between everything. Church, family life, business life manufacturing. It was all there. It was all there. Okay. Or you’d be out in the rural areas where the majority of people were. And there you had a very strong communitarian life because you had multi-generational living and you had…
Your neighbor might have been a concession down the road, but you saw your neighbor every day and you could just literally drop your kids off there and it was normal. And your husband would be working either on the farm or if he was a tradesman, usually was a tradesman or a farmer. Let’s say a blacksmith shop. Blacksmith shop was literally attached to your house or just on the same property.
So there was never this massive separation between all the aspects of life. Okay. And so that’s something that we have to take account of as husbands and say, “Okay, if we’re going to want to facilitate a more traditional lifestyle where everyone has the chance to thrive, then we also have to make changes in our life.” You can’t say, “I don’t understand why she just want to do this. I make 100 grand a year.” It’s like, “You’re gone for 12 hours a day.” And you’re not only gone, you’re in a different city for 12 hours a day.
Farmers work lots, but they’re in and out of the house six, seven times a day. They say hi. They don’t miss meals and so forth. But you’re literally in a different world. It’s nothing to do with the family. Then you come home and you come back into this world and we live in different worlds for the majority of our time that we spend awake. Anyway, these are massive cultural issues to consider. But it can’t just be that you say, “Okay, now it’s time to come home, sweetie.” It has to be, “Okay, now, what are we going to do with our family life to make this better for all of us?”
Eric Sammons:
So let’s give a few practical-
Kennedy Hall:
Sure-
Eric Sammons:
… bits of advice. First of all, I just want to mention the book, obviously Terror of Demons. It’s great. And I liked how there was a lot of talk about the cultivating virtue in the man’s life. Taming the horse, you mentioned. You talked about exercise. Obviously, doing everything you can to avoid pornography, the reduction of screens, the smart device, all that stuff.
But what would you say are maybe the top few bits of practical advice? Let’s say it’s a family where maybe it’s both incomes or at least the man’s away and stuff like that a lot, and they’re having some of these issues. What practical steps can a man take to take a more leadership role in his house, to have a more masculine role in what he’s doing in the family that doesn’t necessarily mean moving out to a farm in another state?
Kennedy Hall:
Yeah. I don’t live on a farm. I live in a tiny little village near farms, but I’m not a farmer. I work on the computer. I can’t even fix my roof without a bunch of help. Okay. So primary. Let’s just say you’re starting off… Well, if you’re starting off with absolutely nothing. You’ve literally just discovered the faith and you have a secular marriage and things. Well, then you’re just going to have to go back to the basics and you just have to live in a state of grace.
And I’ve been there. We had a very secular marriage and then I had the conversion. And the first and foremost thing for about a year was just… I went to mass every Sunday. I prayed the rosary by myself. I just led by example. I started becoming a better person. So my wife said, “Well, this is Catholic thing…” She’s baptized, but we weren’t practicing. “This thing is working.”
So that’s the primary thing. You’re going to have to… Wherever you’re at. It’s funny though, if I think about it. I can’t think of anyone I know who has, and I can use this term in the broad sense, a traditional piety. What I mean is, even if they’re Novus Ordo attending Catholics or whatever, a very old Catholic rhythmed way of a prayer life. I don’t know a single person like that who doesn’t have something like a traditional home life.
It’s almost like they go, “If the wife is the beating heart of the family, she’s the hearth and home.” If she’s the beating heart of the family, then there’s something about the… It’s almost like the man creates the scaffolding. I don’t know the right analogy. But he creates the framework or the infrastructure. And then she just naturally fits in to that. So the first thing would be getting your own prayer life in order. Okay. A practical step is you can start leading the rosary. The nice thing about leading the rosary is trying to lead… What’s the word I’m looking for? Not an inspirational prayer. Not inspiration. When you’re praying off the top of your head, what do you call that?
Eric Sammons:
Spontaneous.
Kennedy Hall:
Spontaneous. There you go. That shows I don’t do it very often. It’s been a long time.
Eric Sammons:
But I was a protestant. I can’t help it.
Kennedy Hall:
It’s been a long time since I was at a praise and worship thing. When you’re trying to lead prayer. The nice thing about the rosary is it’s not awkward. You just say the prayers that everyone knows and you follow it. So for first thing is the prayer. Now the second thing, once you’ve come to the place where your heart has changed and you’re in the position where you want to do this thing, then you’re going to have to take a stock of your life.
And you’ve mentioned a book before that you read when you got married. There’s more guys In this, but one of the guys I think is very helpful is Dave Ramsey. It helps that he’s a Christian. I mean, he’s not my theologian, but he has a very practical and I think very measured approach to all these things. He offers very practical steps on how to get your financial life in order. And this is not me becoming a millionaire. It means trim off all the excess, which is a very Christian thing.
We’ve got to trim off the dead branches because the bad trees cannot bear good fruit. So you’re going to take a look at financial life in your home and you’re going to say, “To get our life the way we want it to be, whether that means stay at home, whether that means career transition, whether that means combination thereof, whether it means, okay, we got to find a Catholic school and you work part-time.”
Whatever the thing is, whatever you’re going to do, you’re going to have to make some changes. It’ll be a little bit surgical. So you should have some guidance in doing so. More than I can offer in the next couple minutes on this show, I would check out Dave Ramsey’s works. I find them very helpful. And then after that, now you’ve come into this new way of life. You’re going to face other problems because you’re are going to be doing the right thing that God wants. So you’re going to face lots of other problems from Satan, and that’s always what happens.
So there you’re going to have to take it very seriously about how you continue to protect your home as you change this. You’re going to find things that are so frustrating like family members are all of a sudden going to think that you’re a whacko in there doing that. Financial troubles will just surface. This is always the case. When couples try to live a virtuous pious Catholic life, all of a sudden all of the cars break and the roof needs to be fixed. It’s without fail. Okay? So you’re going to have to rely more on God in these situations.
And then from there, it’s going to be a matter of consistency. You’ve made the situation, you’ve created the team, you’ve got the new playbook and now you have to make sure that you don’t fall back into bad habits, which means you’re going to have to do a continual reassessment of things to make sure you’re not falling into bad habits or even just complacency. And if I may grift the book for a second here.
Eric Sammons:
Please do.
Kennedy Hall:
Well, the reason I wrote like this is, there are about 10 chapters in here and all of them have different themes. So for example, let’s just say you’re facing a problem of your children are becoming a screen consuming age. There’s a chapter in there on how to do media. Let’s just say your children are becoming at the age where pornography would be something that their friends they might meet even in a good setting would be into. There’s a chapter on that.
Let’s just say you’re realizing as a father that you’re just not physically up to the par and you’re tired. You can’t chase the kids around all day. There’s a chapter on that. So I would say having this resource would also help you keep that fire lit and then something that you can go back to.
Eric Sammons:
Right. So I thought the book is very practical. I really appreciated that, that it gives… But it’s not afraid to say controversial things. At one point you say like throw away your phone if you have to. Because if it’s leading to pornography or some type of sin like that, it’s not worth it no matter what. So you’re willing to go there. You’re not going to hold back. And so I really like that as well. One final question I did want to ask you is-
Kennedy Hall:
Sure-
Eric Sammons:
… we can’t have this conversation about bringing up St. Joseph. Obviously, Terror of Demons. So what is the role of St. Joseph in all of this?
Kennedy Hall:
Sure. Well, it’s funny. I did not write the book with St. Joseph in the forefront of my mind. And then I went on a retreat after I’d finished writing the book, and I realized it was in a chapel with a beautiful image of the holy family, and it was a silent retreat. So I was actually shutting up for once of my life and listening to God. And the word terror of demons just kept coming into my brain.
And it was obvious to me that this book was modeled after the ideal Catholic man and who was at that St. Joseph. So then after that, I went home and I wrote the appendix, which is all these devotions to St. Joseph, which I think I’m quite proud of. So we look at St. Joseph as the model of our lives. And what is he? He’s all the things I’ve described. He’s facilitating a life for virtue and thriving. He’s making the difficult decisions like having to go to Egypt, which is like…
I mean, that was the last two years I really was really scared what was going to happen to us in Canada with all the COVID stuff. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have to… I figured out a route to get across the border. Let’s put it that way. It’s funny. From the North. Everyone’s always coming up from the South. I figured out the one from the North. In my mind, it was there. I said, “I might have to do this. I might have a moment where I’ll be in the middle of the night and I’ll have a dream metaphorically or really, and will have to leave like Joseph had to take the holy family.”
I hope it doesn’t happen, but I have to be prepared to do that because Joseph did that. And he also died before his son went through his passion. They call that the passion of St. Joseph. So you also have to be prepared to facilitate the continual or perpetual thriving of your family even if you die tomorrow, which practically means things like life insurance and debt. I mean, that’s the main thing in today’s world.
You also have to be the leader but at the same time in the background, because you’re allowing everyone else to thrive. Again, it’s like the coach. You’re not on the ice. Everyone else is. But they’re doing the best because of you. And if they took you out of the equation, they wouldn’t thrive that way. And he never says any words in scripture, but obviously he would’ve spoken in real life and whatever.
But that’s the point, is it’s not about his words. It’s about his actions. I mean, God chose Joseph not just to be betrothed to the mother of God, but to raise God. And it’s really crazy when you think about that. And we know Christ true natures. I’m not a theologian, but whatever the humanity of Christ was, St. Joseph was the head of God’s humanity. It’s nuts. It’s bananas. I can’t even fathom the type of man you would have to be to not only be chosen to do that, but to actually do it. So develop a devotion of St. Joseph because he’s literally the perfect example.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I think we’ll end with that because you can’t get any better than frankly modeling yourself after St. Joseph. And there’s no better advice than that.
Kennedy Hall:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
So I just want to recommend everybody to check out this book, Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity by Kennedy Halls from TAN books. I will put a link to it in the show notes and also to other ways you can find out about what Kennedy’s up to. Unlike me who didn’t seem to remember at the beginning still. Thanks a lot for having and for being on this show, Kennedy. I really appreciate it.
Kennedy Hall:
Thanks for having me, Eric.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, everybody. Until next time. God love you.