Transcript
A (0:03)
Okay.
B (0:03)
We're going to be joined by Dr. Tom Williams. He's a colleague of mine from when I ran Breitbart as executive chairman. Dr. Williams is from Rome, lives in Rome, and he's going to talk about
A (0:16)
the importance of Holy Saturday and Easter
B (0:20)
Sunday, the entire Easter weekend in the Catholic community, in the Catholic faith tradition. One of the smartest guys I know, Dr. Tom Williams, joins us next in the world.
A (0:30)
Dr. Williams, before I get into. You've written this book, and it's really. I want to spend a better part of the hour going through the argument in the book, because I think it is of this weekend, the holiest weekend in the Christian calendar for people to contemplate exactly where we are as a faith in the persecution directed towards the faith. Walk us through, from a Catholic perspective, the. The importance of Holy Saturday. You know, people know Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ, Holy Thursday with the Last Supper and the arrest Gethsemane. And then you've got. But Holy Saturday kind of a lot of times gets lost in the mix and obviously with Easter. But what's the importance of Holy Saturday and particularly this belief of Christ's ascent into hell?
C (1:19)
Yeah, there are two things. Thank you, Steve. And it's good to be with you on this very, very holy day. There are two traditions that go way back. One that goes back furthest is the one you just mentioned, the idea of Christ's descent into hell. It's a hell that's a little different than the way we understand hell today, in the sense that he went to lead out the souls of the just who had died before his coming. It's a basic Christian belief that up till Christ redeemed the world, up to the time of his suffering on the cross, all those good and holy prophets, men and women of God, who had lived since the time of Adam, since the fall of Adam and Eve, they had not been able to go to heaven. Heaven had not been opened to them. A savior was needed. And the traditional understanding of that was that they were in hell. Hell not as in condemned for all time, the way we think of hell as having been judged and found unworthy, but hell more like our understanding of limbo, the old traditional sense of kind of in a waiting place or in a place of the dead, a gehenna like place. And that Jesus goes. And there's a beautiful homily from the second century, one of the earliest Christian texts we possess outside of biblical texts, where the author describes Jesus talking to Adam and his conversation with him because he is the new Adam and inviting him to stand up and to take his rightful place. And then these crowds, the multitude of the just who lived in times before Christ, rejoicing in the salvation that has finally come to them that they are now able to enter heaven.
