Church Teaching on Suic!de | Fr. Patrick Briscoe & Fr. Gregory Pine
February 27, 2025
Fr. Gregory: This is Father Gregory Pine.
Fr. Patrick: And this is Father Patrick Briscoe.
Fr. Gregory: And welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoyed the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. So, Father Patrick, here we are at the end of the month of February, which our novice master referred to as the four months of February.
So for those in cold weather climates, you have been ready for summer for the last two and a half months. And, you find yourself yearning for warm, consoling or otherwise encouraging podcast topics. And so we’re coming at you with something else.
Fr. Patrick: Correct. Among the many things that I hope President Trump accomplishes in this next administration, I hope for an end to daylight savings time. I think all people of goodwill do. And I think people hope that we can make it through February with more joyous horizons. I think that’s the other, that would be the other major campaign platform, but that’s kind of hidden under ending daylight savings time. One single issue voter in that respect.
Fr. Gregory: When I saw that tweet in the interregnum, I thought, everything is possible. Just absolutely everything is possible. No, so to transition into our topic, insofar as we want to afford it space and time and come before it with a certain respect and reverence, especially for the people who have undergone loss in their families, among their friends, with people to whom they’re close. We thought it worthwhile to treat the topic of suicide. Because I think sometimes we retreat from topics which involve a confrontation with difficulty or a confrontation with sadness. But it seems like it’s in those places, most especially that the Lord ministers with his mercy. So, Father Patrick, we’re going to talk, in this episode about the theme of suicide. What do you think are some good kind of principles to have on the table or conversation starters to pursue?
Fr. Patrick: I think the first is that, so many people’s lives have been touched by this, touched by suicide. In fact, I was I was with, I was, preaching a parish mission around Thanksgiving. So it was just after Thanksgiving, and, I woke up one morning to a text message from a friend telling me that her husband had taken his own life. And as a priest, this happens with increasing and devastating regularity, honestly. So I think just like as we begin our conversations about any pro-life issue, the place to begin is to recognize that people’s lives are touched by this. And that you don’t have to go far or look far to know someone, whose life has been covered with the shadow. And I think that that’s worthwhile because, it means that our conversation isn’t happening in a, in a kind of removed space. I mean, this is something that everyone who has ever loved an attic fears and knows, I would say in an, in an intimate way. And it means that when, when we bring up this question about the nature of suicide as priests, we, we bring it up because we’ve talked with people who have who have, who have lost, ones that they’ve loved and we ourselves, of us people we’ve loved through it. And I think, I think that always helps. Right. Because when you begin an investigation into a moral issue, a lot of times it can it can seem overly condemnatory or, or it can seem removed from the real experience of everyday life. And that’s not the case with us, and with our experiences and our priesthood on this issue. So, so that’s where I would want to begin, just to, to to know and to say that so many people’s lives are being touched by this, and that that we ourselves have experienced this in our priesthood and that we’re beginning a conversation about this question really freely from the from the heart of the faith. And alongside those, those, who have who have run into those who have experienced this, of this horrible, this horrible thing.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. And I think to I mean, in addition to the person that we had the, the historical note, that now is a difficult time for people who struggle with suicidal ideation, just statistically speaking, on account of the fact that, like, we’re still kind of weighing or measuring the effect of the pandemic in our lives or the effect of our kind of recognition and then reaction to the pandemic in our lives. And we see those effects, like in education, for instance, in industry. But I think you also and everyone has registered their effects in mental health. So this is a place in which people are feeling really weak and really wounded. So I think that we supply a kind of explanation of the church’s teaching, in part to furnish people with principles, you know, whether for their own thinking or thinking through with other individuals so that they can formulate arguments, here. I just mean arguments as elaborations so that, like, like it’s it’s ultimately going to be reality, which pulls us out of our own emotional and psychological torture. And torment. And I think it’s like we’re trying to furnish the things themselves, you know, like the reality itself as a way by which to journey onward. Soldier forward to mixed metaphor.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, I think the pandemic is such and such an important point to note, because fully 25% of America’s young people considered taking their own life during the during the harshest part of the Covid 19 lockdowns and, even, perhaps more horrifically, in the last year in Canada, 5% of the population died through made through medically assisted, death. Which is a devastating number. And the number is going to continue to climb. And even if MAID and other similar programs which are new, which we’ve now seen legalized in Britain, and will certainly be legalized in other countries, even if that’s a little bit different than, than, than suicide, strictly speaking, we need to identify those cultural trends and tell everyone why we as Catholics are so committed to life, even life that seems difficult to live.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. So in this episode, we’re not going to speak a great length about physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. Insofar as those topics have like pretty profound cultural, sociological and legislative implications. Perhaps like another episode, maybe we could do a guest episode with John Keown.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, that’s a great idea. We there’s a number of experts. We could, we could, we could get on. Should.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. But, we thought that, like, for this, we could just, kind of take stock of what the Church sets forth for contemplation and then unpack some of that. So, okay, when we talk about suicidal ideation, I think sometimes it’s helpful just to kind of distinguish among the pertinent factors like what’s going on, because I think that you’ll encounter this in the Sacrament of Confession as a confessor, maybe you’ve brought it to the sacrament of confession as a penitent for the listeners. So, like, what’s sinful? What’s not sinful? I think with any kind of mental affliction, there’s always some of that calculus that we’re trying to do. So I don’t know if you have ways in which to sort.
Fr. Patrick: Well, when we talk about what the Church teaches, we of course mean what Saint Thomas teaches. Okay, maybe, maybe I need to reverse that. So when we talk about what Saint Thomas teaches, we mean what the Church teaches. Yeah. One of the first things that Saint Thomas brings, he makes three main points when he considers, when he considers this question about whether it’s ever lawful for man to take his own life, and he considers it with, with a kind of delicacy that, that I think is, is very important to note, because a lot of times we say medievals aren’t aware of of psychology. They don’t give a lot of space to the human condition. But this is one place where Saint Thomas does, and he does it in a very moving and beautiful way, I think. And the first, the first thing, the first major point that Saint Thomas makes is he says that suicide is opposed to the natural inclination that every person to have. So every person has because they’ve been created by God, a certain love for themselves, a natural inclination toward the good for their own person. Right? And suicide is a turning away from that. It’s a turning away from the good which you desire for your own self, from the ability to love yourself. Right. It’s a turning away from from the proper self-love.mAnd that when we use the word love, we may say we may. We may think, oh, that has, a kind of inflated sense, really. We’re talking about the good of self-preservation. Everything that is alive wants to preserve its own life, so it doesn’t have to be too inflated or too, too high falutin. We’re just talking about the desire to continue to live that every person has that and that suicide, suicide is a wrong against that natural inclination, against a natural good to preserve our own life.
Fr. Gregory: And I think that’s helpful insofar as what we’re dealing with here is metaphysical bedrock, like everything that is, wants to keep being. So when suicide is on the table emotionally and psychologically, that means that something has gone wrong. So I’m thinking of a related question that Saint Thomas asks. He says, is it ever possible to hate God? And he asks it because, you know, you’re entertaining the various sins opposed to the virtue of charity, and he’s trying to get after it in its most terrible sense. And so he asks this question first and he says in himself, no, because God is all good. But under a certain aspect or seen from a certain vantage. Yes, insofar as he forbids us transgression and he punishes wrongdoing, sometimes we can see him, as it were, as evil. And I think we’re dealing with something similar in our own case now. We’re not all good in the way that good as God is all good, but we’re good, and we want to keep gooding just in the ordinary, ordinary, metaphysical course. And so when we begin to see our own life as an affliction, something that would be better snuffed out, than continued onward with, that means that we’ve begun to see our self from a certain vantage or from a certain perspective, as bad. Right? It’s like the weight of sorrow, or the length of duration, or all the obstacles or hindrances that we encounter, or the various oppositions and things that were made to endure, like the cumulative effect of all of those things, is to make of one’s judgment on that. This is bad, this life is bad. So I think that often enough, it’s a matter of addressing what has led us to that conclusion. Like, how have we come to formulate this opinion of ourselves, and how do we get to the root of it? Not that we’re going to be able to like, do that with perfect clarity or decisive judgment, but I think it’s like just to say we’re naturally we’re built to love ourselves naturally will we’re built to go after those things which build us up, which continue us in existence, which see us through to the end of our days in the ordinary course, you know? So. So something’s gone wrong, you know, physically, emotionally, psychologically, so as to make this kind of obscurity or this kind of difficulty so potent, so powerful, spiritually speaking. So, yeah, I don’t know how competent we are in those matters on account of the fact that it’s like probably the psychologists, who have, you know, the best insight into the psychological and the emotional and maybe other persons besides. But nevertheless, we can say something about that. Right?
Fr. Patrick: And I think it underscores it underscore something, you know, you said metaphysical bedrock, right? The point is that this is a fundamental desire to continue to be and to desire to not be shows that shows that there’s a suffering or a brokenness there. And I think that’s that’s the very point of Saint Thomas’s argument is saying, no, you ought to want to love even yourself at this level. And when that’s not possible, there’s a real there’s a real illness going on. So at the same time, you know, as you’re pointing out, this belongs to the domain of psychology, right? It’s a warning. It’s an indicator that there’s that there’s something awry if you can’t say, no, I have this I have this desire to continue to be.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, okay. With that kind of as metaphysical bedrock as I have now referred to it. A couple of times we can think about another argument that Saint Thomas gives, not because like, all right, let’s talk about suicide with Saint Thomas Aquinas on account of the fact that we’re just here to repeat the things that Saint Thomas Aquinas says. But I think it gives us a good basis for what the goods are at stake. And the next thing he says is like, listen, you’re a member of a family, you’re a member of a polity. What do we mean by that? Like a nation, a country, or like a municipality of some sort, you know, like you’re a member of a polity, you’re a member of a Church and we have organic images whereby to account for all these things. But I think especially the Church, like you’re part of a mystical body, that is to say that like you are together, head and members, the one worshiping Christ, and you’re made to be together as members of the Mystical Body. And so when you act against yourself in this way, you act against the whole body. So maybe I don’t know if you have thoughts there about, yeah, family polity…
Fr. Patrick: When you are, when you are missing, when you are not there, the whole Church suffers, the whole Church suffers. And Saint Thomas makes this point in a few places in interesting ways. Right? Like when he talks about the nature of our prayers, he says that some things have been ordained in God’s providence to come to pass only because we pray for them. Well, if you’re not there, if you’re not bringing these things up in your prayers, things, things that were included in God’s providence that were contingent will not be. All of us are making, all of us are making an impact. In history, not not just the history, not just the history, of our own lives, not just our own story, but in the story of the Church and the story of salvation. And I think that the reason God gives us gifts is that they would be used for the body, for the Church. And when they’re not used for the church, we all suffer. So this is a perfectly reasonable conclusion. You could see exactly why Saint Thomas would say this, because every person has been created, with something beautiful to offer. And when, when therefore, we don’t offer that, we notice something missing. Our novice master would always tell us, would often tell us, brothers, God doesn’t need you, but he can use you. And that’s that’s cruel at first to say, like, well, especially when it’s being threatened at you by a by a big Boston Irishman. God doesn’t need you. It sounds like you’re packing and headed home any moment, but but, but the point is that God wants us to want to want to contribute to his life. God wants us to want to contribute to the building up of his body, the Church that each of us has gifts and talents, to to contribute to this project. And and when we don’t when those gifts aren’t there, that absence really is noticed. It really is noticed and it’s felt by the whole because there are things that God has intended, you know, not just in his providence for our prayer, but for the whole of our life. They can only be accomplished by us as as individual persons.
Fr. Gregory: And I think too, sometimes we well, I think that we’re inclined in the 21st century to conceive of all goods as individual goods, kind of particular goods. It’s like there might be things that we share, but we only ever enjoy them insofar as we cash out on them. You know, like you can only enjoy the strategic oil supply if you use it. You know, you can only enjoy the insurance funds if you use it. You can only enjoy an item from the candy jar if you use it. So basically, like the things that we think about as if they were common goods are in fact just groups or heaps of particular goods, individual goods. But there are genuine common goods at stake, like the life of a family is a common good. The relationship that obtain amongst parents and children, children and parents. There’s something beautiful about that. Like, I am proud to be a member of the Pine family, and I’m conscious of the fact that I am a member of the Pine family, or like even silly things like I’m proud to be a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. Like, I was walking down the street the other day and this guy had an Eagles thing on and I was like, go birds. He’s like, go birds! You know, like he had his AirPods in. That’s the only thing that he could probably hear the entire day. But it’s like, that’s worth saying and that’s worth hearing back. Like we actually pertain to these thick things like these thick communities, family polity and church. And we’re meant to prefer the good of the family, the liberty to the Church, to our own. Not in that we’re just a cog in the machine, like the wheel or like a kind of gear in the machine, but in the sense that, like, these goods are more our goods than the individual goods. The particular goods, like these goods, are transcendent and shareable and not diminished in our common possession thereof. And they like, really enrich our lives. And it’s like, yes, you might be like in a terrible spot. You might be pained and just riddled with suffering in one way, shape or form. But it’s like you can belong to someone, you can belong to something, and you can. You can contribute to something. You can contribute to something. Like even if you don’t think that you matter, even if you don’t think that anyone cares, that’s always that’s always available to you, you know, even if it means that, like you occupy the place in the mystical body that is at this stage of the game, suffering. That’s still a precious place you know, that’s still a precious thing. So okay, let’s then turn to the last. And here I think this is probably one of the ones that’s most sensitive. I think, like a lot of people’s encounter with the Church’s teaching can sometimes be difficult, even traumatic in certain cases because they just hear judgment and condemnation and they don’t necessarily understand, like the horizon as to like, how does this pertain to salvation? So like, you know, you’ll hear it said that the church buries people who bury sorry, I’m speaking English here. It buries people who take their own life, like in separate plots or you hear it said, like funeral rites for people who take their own life are somehow different. And you think this is nuts. Like, this is totally insane. This can’t be rational. This can’t be reasonable. It’s an outmoded, outdated, you know, ancient or medieval institution that exists exclusively for the oppression of men and women. It’s like, hold on, you know, it’s like, hold on…
Fr. Patrick: Let’s see what’s actually at stake.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, let’s see what’s actually the stake.
Fr. Patrick: So at the heart of the Church’s claim is that life belongs to God. Life belongs to God. To give life belongs to God to take. And that actually by taking your own life, you are subverting God’s justice, his mercy, and his judgment. Because you become the arbiter of your destiny. You become the one who seizes control of your eternal designs in that moment which thwarts God. It’s a fundamental offense to to God and to what belongs to him. And so I think that I think that that’s interesting. Right? Because we can meet that claim. The people say, well, the church isn’t merciful by saying, well, actually, this teaching is because the church insists that God is merciful. That only God can judge and that when someone takes his or her own life, that person is acting in God’s place and in fact is refusing God’s mercy in a in a really difficult way. Now, we should also say that whatever happens after life is a mystery known to God. Yeah, that God is God is powerful. He’s got plenty of time. He can do whatever he wants because he’s God. And, that means that after death, we don’t know what happens. And then we have we have to insist on a kind of a Gnosticism, which allows us, therefore, to have hope. And for that reason, the church does, in fact, pray for those who have taken their own life, those those who have committed suicide. I think part of what you were alluding to, Father Gregory, is, is deep in the Catholic imagination. You know, in the 1917 Code of Canon law, it did say that those who by deliberate choice take their own life, they’re not to be buried in the Catholic cemetery. They’re not to be given Catholic funeral rites. So we do have prescriptions like that, from the past. But even then, if you look at those words in the 1917 code by deliberate choice, that allows for, for, for a full breadth of interpretation, you know, having mercy, especially on those who would be suffering, anguishing from a kind of psychological condition. That said, the Church would always understand that someone suffering from a psychological condition is not thereby acting from his or her own freedom, that there’s a constraint there. So I think those points are important to make that again, that the Church prays for those who’ve taken their own life. That God is merciful and we have a kind of a Gnosticism about how that mercy plays out in his life. And that, in fact, even from that 1917 code to to today, from the 1983 code, there’s been a shift in how the Church has addressed this legally.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, yeah. And I think, too, I’m focusing on the words that you used takes life. I think people hear that. And I think sometimes people will misconstrue the divine causality or people will misconstrue God’s, as it were, involvement in the dealing of death. Because like we did this to ourselves, you know, like we did this to ourselves in the sense that our first parents chose against God. And part of the punishment that we as a race incurred was death. So this is not part of God’s original plan. God’s original plans are good. They’re not fragile, they’re not volatile, the real. And they are abiding in a certain sense. Right? But in choosing against them and choosing ourselves on our own terms, we excluded the ordinary kind of means whereby God was to bestow his life upon the human race unto ages of ages, and we incurred death as a punishment when left to ourselves. So there’s a sense in which, like all sin of vice, it’s punishment is self-inflicted, right? We are left to ourselves and we do harm to ourselves at our own hand. This is to speak way more broadly than suicide. This is just to say like, right, we as creatures have a kind of self-destructive streak. And it’s not as if, like God is inflicting punishment from one side and the other, as if he’s somehow rejoiced or delighted in the opportunity to deal out this torture. That’s not the case, you know, like that’s not the case. God is just right. So he will kind of furnish us with our just desserts. But he insists on justice precisely to show a more copious mercy. Like, when you think about it, God could have pardoned our sins in any way he saw fit. You could have snapped his fingers, but he chose that his Only Begotten Son take human flesh, suffer, die, and rise precisely so that in that manifestation and communication of divine life we would see in most potent fashion how much God loves us, how how much we’re worth dying for, you know? And like, ultimately, the horizon of our homing like that is to say, the whole purpose of our life. So in insisting on a certain justice, in the case of his satisfaction, he unleashes a more copious mercy. Right, so like God, only as it were, insists on justice so as to bestow mercy. So it’s not as if he’s schizophrenic or of two minds about the matter. He’s just undoubtedly so. But he is merciful. And so, like when Saint Thomas talks about the virtue of hope, he says, what we have to do is we have to be on the way. We have to use the means that God appoints and not despair or presume, because to despair is to fail to be on the way and to presume is to fail to be on the way. But he says, if you have a choice, presume, because when you presume, you’re laying hold of mercy in a weird way, right when you despair, you’re laying hold of justice in a weird way. And he says it’s more so that he is merciful than that he is just all things being equal. Right? So but at the end of the day, obviously it’s better. It’s better to hope, that is to say, to be on the way.
Fr. Patrick: When they wrote a letter about this, the bishops of England and Wales, they have this amazing quote, which, which hits hard. He says it is hard to live. The bishops say “it is hard to live if we feel a burden to others. But suicide leaves those behind with an even greater burden.” And I think that that that line is so powerful because it strikes of the matter, you know, when you’re suffering, when you’re in it, when you can’t see this call to greater mercy, right? When you, when you when you can’t move beyond all you can think of is, is this is the only way I have out that this, that this is the way to peace. This is the way to steal my restless heart. This is the answer to the to the horizon of my longing. And it’s not true. Because greater sorrow comes and is in fact transferred from you to those you love. Right? Which is what this what this quote gets at leaves those behind with an even greater burden. And that’s so remarkable. And and you know, this underscores the principle we were talking about, right? That each of us, is not an independent agent, but we belong to others. We belong to to communities. We belong to the church. We belong to the Philadelphia Eagles. We belong to, we belong to, we belong to all kinds of all kinds of, groups that make real claims on our heart. And that that to resist that is, is to, is to forsake all of those loves.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. And I think to like there are any number of beautiful testimonies in the tradition, tradition broadly conceived, which give us some modicum of hope. In the sense that, like I say this often, it’s not about the hand that you’re dealt. It’s about how you play that hand. Right. So you might feel like it’s, it’s like might feel like emotionally and psychologically you’ve been dealt a raw hand. But the question is, are you willing to play it because God gives you the grace to play it? So I think of like Walker Percy, I think it’s Paul Eli said the greatest, like, maybe the greatest miracle of Walker Percy’s life is that he didn’t kill himself, because, I mean, that sounds flippant…
Fr. Patrick: I love that.
Fr. Gregory: You know, it sounds flippant, but like his grandfather had taken his own life, his father, I think, had taken his own. Like maybe his uncle had taken his own life, but like his male ancestors had all had this struggle and they had also come to it in one way or another. But he kind of, as it were, tapping into the deep roots of his Christian faith, and sufficiently aware, as you get from all of his writings, sufficiently aware of his own difficulties, right, his own weaknesses and wounds, he kind of came before his life as a beggar of a certain sort. And like you get that in message in a bottle, you get that and signposts in a strange land. You get that in lost, in the cosmos, you get that. And like a lot of his fiction that like, he doesn’t know why life is so hard, but he has a kind of trust that his life can be lived. Which is beautiful. Right? So I think about that often, but there are like any number of testimonies to something similar. I’m sure you have a few stories. Yeah.
Fr. Patrick: Fortitude is the virtue, right? That that allows us to persevere in the face of death. And we often think of the fortitude that is had by the martyrs, the courage that’s had by soldiers. But the reality is that that fortitude for most of us is just going forward day to day. Hoping just just to make it to tomorrow. And that’s what the virtue of fortitude is to head toward the horizon of tomorrow. Regardless of what’s going to come. Yeah. The Percy testimonies, very beautiful. And certainly the prayers of the Church that are offered for those who, those who have taken their own life are very beautiful because they entrust that soul who has suffered, such a horrific fate really, really to the open, open seas of God’s mercy. There’s just so much there that we don’t know so much that we don’t understand, and so much, actually, that that the church is not going to pronounce upon. So I think this is one issue that people end up being very confused about what, what, what Catholic teaching actually is.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. And I think, like for those who are like, all right, give me something concrete at this stage, give me something clear as it concerns, you know, like the actual dispensation of sin and forgiveness. How does this work? Basically, we would teach that in all things being equal, suicide is a grave sin, right? Because it’s the killing of an innocent person. So but in order for a grave sin to qualify as a mortal sin, you have to have some modicum of knowledge, some modicum of consent, right, as acting upon a grave matter. And so the question here is whether one is able to know, able to consent, given certain emotional and psychological conditions. Right. Those would be pertinent considerations. And often enough, what we’re saying is we don’t know.
Fr. Patrick: We don’t know.
Fr. Gregory: All right? And also we’re looking at the tradition and seeing like many people in their last moments, repent of their decision. And you can think of how that’s portrayed, like artistically, for instance, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, you know, like of those the late repentants, like, I think that that testimony is beautiful and moving. In that case, it’s usually people who are killed who then take the word of the Blessed Virgin Mary to their lips with their last breath, and that proves sufficient. Like, I don’t think we appreciate at times how much God is poised to visit mercy upon those who call out to him.
Fr. Patrick: “…now and at the hour of our death we pray….”
Fr. Gregory: Exactly. And so you have that line from a Father Brown story, which was reprised in Brideshead Revisited, that he lets us wander the very edge of the world, only to pull us back by a twitch upon the thread. So, like, for instance, Saint John Vianney, we think of this saint who’s like, got this big forehead and this kind of terrible mean. And he’s probably like a really severe guy and hears confessions for 17 hours a day so he can just dole out terrible penances. Not the case. Sweet penances, which he himself did with and for his penitence. But there was an instance of a woman whose son had taken his own life by throwing himself off a bridge in the town, and when she asked what would become of him you might expect of John Vianney, the guy who had a side altar dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, above which read the words his head was the price of a dance. Not like the most fun loving type in the ordinary sense, he said, “We don’t know. He said he may have repented on the way down and we commend him to the mercy of God.” All right, so we hope for ourselves and we hope for each other in that way, you know, because we have confidence that he has begun a good work in us. He’ll see it to completion, even if with all of our efforts, we try to complicate that story, you know? So final thoughts?
Fr. Patrick: Pray always. God’s got plenty of time. He’s got plenty of love. He’s got plenty of mercy. And if you’re listening to this episode and you know someone that you think is on the brink of this issue, reach out to them. Let them know you love them and try your best to get them the help that they need.
Fr. Gregory: Amen. All right, squad. God love you. All right? And God love those whom you love. Especially cognizant of the fact that sometimes it’s sad and sometimes it’s long. So somewhat somber. But, alas, there are things in life that are somber, and we are willing to walk there with you. Because what else is this for? So it’s Godsplaining, you know, the things that we ordinarily say at the end of an episode, I will repeat some of them as my memory affords. But check out Godsplaining.org for updates on events, because it’s always good to come together. That’s the point of the podcast, so that we can have meaningful sacramental encounters as the Lord mediates his mercy through those ordinary means. You’ll also find that Godsplaining.org links and stuff like merchandise and social media channels and blood donors and such. All right. Know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us and we’ll look forward to chatting with you next time on Godsplaining.