Welcome to a special America First One On One with one of my Salem colleagues who's

written a very important book, letter to the American Church that I can now

celebrate as a movie on our platform on our

streaming platform at Salem now.com and the man behind both is the one and only

Eric Mataxus. Welcome back Eric, it's been a while.

It's an encouragement every time I see you or hear from you, my friend. Thank you.

All right, so let's start by setting the scene for why this book had to be written and why it's been

turned into a film.

And I'll start from my personal context.

As you know, I'm an immigrant to this nation, a legal

immigrant to America and for me one of the attributes of the American Spirit, which really goes back to our

founding, the founding fathers, the war against the greatest empire the

world had ever seen and then the spirit of the pioneers,

a colonialist, go forth a young man, is courage, is fortitude.

And I have been greatly disturbed by what I see as a diminution of that virtue, especially during the COVID years, and especially when it comes

to our church communities and our church leaders.

You're not supposed to do this.

As a Catholic, I'm a cradle Catholic.

You're not supposed to church shop.

The system is meant to be, you go to the church nearest to you in your diocese and I'm a bad

Catholic because I don't do that anymore because I've kind of had it with my

priest in 2024 still making announcements at the beginning of the mass

...