Appearing live from the Vatican on Breitbart News Saturday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 for the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, Larry Kudlow and Michael Novak spoke to co-hosts Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News contributor Austin Ruse about John Paul II’s legacy and the impact he had on the world and their lives.
Kudlow said John Paul II was a “big influence on me during my formative years leading up to my conversion.” He said though much is said about Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II overthrowing communism, he has always been struck by John Paul II’s “be not afraid” line that taught him to “be not afraid to do the right thing, be not afraid to do the religious and moral thing, be not afraid to stand up.”
Kudlow said that the “great battle of our time… is not the economy, it’s the secularization that is happening throughout Europe and the United States.”
He said John Paul II often spoke about that topic before saying he fell in love with Catholic Mass in 1992 at a time when he was abusing drugs and alcohol. Kudlow said he “liked the rules, order, smoke, water” and everything else at a time when he “had no order in his life.”
Michael Novak, the Catholic philosopher and scholar who is with the American Enterprise Institute, talked about John Paul II’s legacy and said people would have called him crazy if he had said in the 1970s that communism would be gone 30 years later. He mentioned that during the Carter administration, the joke used to be that “you lose a country, gain a restaurant.”
Novak credited Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and spoke about how powerful it was when people in Poland who felt like they were 1 of 100 non-communists all of a sudden realized that they were a “vast majority” and that had been concealed from them.
He said John Paul II’s legacy can be seen in the “new humanism” that centers on Jesus Christ, the human rights revolution and the third great wave of democracy, and the general battle for life.
Breitbart’s Dr. Sebastian Gorka said that had Pope John Paul II been from Hungary, there may not have been an end to communism because of the “peace priests” that took oaths of fealty to communist regimes in places like Hungary. Gorka said luck would have it that John Paul II was from Poland.
According to estimates from the Holy See, 1-2 million people are expected to be at the Vatican this weekend as the Popes are canonized in St. Peter’s Square.
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