In this episode, I cover how to build an Army of Saints praying for your family and building up your Domestic Monastery during the Octave of All Saints.

Here are all the topics we will cover and here's ⁠the article if you would rather read this, plus all the prayers⁠:

1. What is the “Octave” of All Saints?
2. What’s a Plenary Indulgence?
3. How Do I Gain Multiple Plenary Indulgences During the Octave of All Saints?
4. Who Do These Plenary Indulgences Go To? How Do I Build a Prayer Army of Saints for My Family? The Multiplier Effect
5. What are the Regular Conditions for Receiving a Plenary Indulgence?
6. What is the Prayer of St. Gertrude to Release 1,000 Souls from Purgatory?
7. Where is Purgatory in the Bible?

St. Gertrude the Great was an amazing Benedictine nun of the 13th century. Like St. Teresa of Avila, she was espoused to Jesus. Pious tradition holds that Jesus promised St. Gertrude that a thousand souls would be released from purgatory each time the following prayer is said devoutly:

Eternal Father, I offer You the Most Precious Blood of Your Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen.

Jesus did not attach any particular conditions or requirements to the recitation of this prayer. The mercy shown to sinners in response to this intercessory prayer is just a direct gift from God.

“I’m not interested in anything that’s not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits. If I can’t keep it going, I’m not interested in it.“

— Morgan Housel

Quotes from the Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 64:

• Let him hate the faults, let him love the brethren. In the matter of correction let him act prudently and not too severely, lest while he desires to scrape off the rust too much the vessel be broken; and let him always keep an eye upon his own frailty and remember that the shaken reed must not be crushed.
• ... Let him so apportion all things that there be something to which the strong may aspire and something the weak may not shrink from.

This episode includes Warren Buffett’s Snickers Story, plus the following quote from Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanac, ch 3:

• “Charlie detests placer mining. Instead, he applies his ‘big ideas from the big disciplines’ to find the large, unrecognized nuggets of gold that sometimes lie in plain sight on the ground.”
• Charlie treats financial reports and their underlying accounting with a Midwestern dose of skepticism. At best, they are merely the beginning of a proper calculation of intrinsic valuation, not the end. The list of additional factors he examines is seemingly endless and includes such things as ...
• Above all, he attempts to assess and understand competitive advantage in every respect—products, markets, trademarks, employees, distribution channels, societal trends, and so on—and the durability of that advantage. Charlie refers to a company’s competitive advantage as its moat: the virtual physical barrier it presents against incursions. Superior companies have deep moats that are continuously widened to provide enduring protection ... Munger and Buffett are laser-focused on this issue: Over their long business careers they have learned, sometimes painfully, that few businesses survive over multiple generations. Accordingly, they strive to identify and buy only those businesses with a good chance of beating these tough odds.

Mounger’s Mental Models

• Circle of Competence - The first rule of competition is that you are more likely to win if you play where you have an advantage.
• First Principles Thinking - First principles thinking is the art of breaking down complex problems into their fundamental truths.
• Second-Order Thinking
• Probabilistic Thinking
• Relativity - Relativistic Thinking
• Thermodynamics - The 1st law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another; 2nd law, entropy always increasing
• Inertia - The stubborn resistance of the universe to change.
• Nash Equilibrium - When two or more participants in a non-cooperative game have no incentive to deviate from their respective equilibrium strategies after considering their opponent’s choices and strategies on a rational basis.
• Mr. Market - Benjamin Graham proposed imagining the stock market as a somewhat manic and not too intelligent profile who would stop by every day to call out prices.
• Porter’s Five Forces - The five undeniable forces are 1) threat of new entrants, 2) threat of substitutes, 3) bargaining power of customers, 4) bargaining power of suppliers, and 5) competitive rivalry.
• Phillips Curve - A historical inverse relationship between rates of unemployment and corresponding rates of rises in wages that result within an economy.
• Founder’s Syndrome - The situation where leaders of companies are so emotionally invested in them that they can’t effectively delegate decisions, leading to micromanagement and stasis.
• Paradox of Choice - The effect of how eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for users.
• Cockroach Theory - There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.
• Critical Mass - Minimum amount of something required to sustain itself going forward.
• Inversion - Much of success comes from simply avoiding common paths to failure
• Occam’s Razor

Dads establish the idea of home for their kids. Dads, get home to your kids, wherever home may be. I’ve tailored my life to work from home, so to be with my kids more, to establish a domestic monastery. This gives more opportunities for direct parenting and praying and going to Church together

The connection between fatherhood, the idea of home, and homelessness or rootlessness -- from Peter Kwasniewski’s new book, Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society, Chapter 5, "Fatherhood and the Being of the Home".

Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue:

Whence the Lord also says in the Gospel: “He who hears these My words and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house upon a rock. There came torrents of rain and rushing winds, and they struck upon that house, but it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.” As a consequence our Lord daily looks for it that we should respond by deeds to these His holy warnings. Thus it is on account of the need of correcting faults that the days of this life are prolonged for us, as by way of truce; and the Apostle says: “Art thou ignorant that the patience of God leads thee towards penitence?” For the Lord in His tenderness says: “I will not the death of a sinner, but that he may be converted and live.”

Just shared the new podcast on my blog -- read the article here.

Hilaire Belloc, letter of sympathy to Evan Charteris, whose father had just died:

Now what has come upon you is as hard a thing as any man can have to bear. The inanimate friends, which are the truest and which never betray, the walls and scents of home, when we lose these we lose, as it were, ourselves. It is a sharp foretaste of death ... To lose one's home, Evan, is to lose one's bones and one's skin. I know it. To lose unique and mutual affection is almost (in a mad metaphor) to lose one's soul.

Additional quotes from French Catholic Philosopher, Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)