(LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this month, Catholic speaker Jason Evert was scheduled to give a chastity talk in Australia. The event was targeted by self-proclaimed “witches” and eventually canceled. The curse backfired, though. Evert managed to schedule talks at three different schools after the cancellation, and they were livestreamed to eight others. 

Evert joins me on this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show to discuss the talks, Our Lady’s involvement, his ministry, and how a protester once poured tomato soup on him.

Recounting the story of how the “witches” canceled one of his talks, Evert tells me that it happened during his seventh trip to Australia; the previous six were without issue. The day before he was set to leave, some were telling him that a group of people were attempting to stop him from going to a couple of Catholic schools. Before boarding the plane for Australia, he attended Mass and, before a statue of Our Lady, said nine Memorares consecrating the trip to her. The “witches,” he says, were flooding schools with phone calls by the time his plane landed.

“Some of them were actually parents of the school saying, ‘We don’t want this happening now,’” Evert relates.

“Some of these quote-unquote ‘witches’ are just political activists that call themselves witches, but they’re not actually involved in the occult, but then some people that we saw were messaging were actually involved in witchcraft and things like that.”

The “witches” were also calling hotels where Evert was supposed to speak in an effort to get them to ban him. Others were attempting to reserve tickets to his events so that others could not attend.

Three schools ended up canceling their in-person events and made them optional livestream events; those interested in seeing Evert’s talk would only be able to attend with parental permission. At the same time, the media began covering the story, claiming a “homophobic” and “misogynistic preacher” was coming. One school offered to livestream Evert’s event to eight others, and a couple of other schools took the place of those that opted out of his talk.

At the end of one of his talks, a protester managed to get past security and, in front of a thousand students, dumped a can of tomato soup on Evert’s head. To the gasping crowd, Evert invited all of them to pray for the man who dumped the soup and led them in a Hail Mary. After security escorted the man out, he attempted to come back with two wears and was wearing a hoodie with his face covered. One of the security guards, someone who was former Australian special forces, managed to tackle the trio and eventually stopped them from entering.

“It was such an opportunity for us to intercede for that guy, because what you see from him is just anger,” Evert says about witnessing before his assailant. “But… there’s something always under [anger] which is hurt, and under hurt is a wound that Christ hasn’t been invited into. And so I think with all of our intercession for that man’s brokenness, God willing we can see him in heaven one day and then we’ll just tease him like, ‘Hey, tomato guy, I remember you!’”

READ: Jason Evert’s chastity talks were targeted by ‘witches,’ but Our Lady had bigger plans

Halfway through the episode, Evert discusses what he sees at his talks and what young people are asking him.

Recalling student reaction to his talks, he says that they noted the media lied about him. One girl told him on Instagram that she was nervous coming into the talk, but she later felt disgusted and wanted to cry because what she heard about the presentation was wrong. She added that the talk will lead her to view herself differently, thanking Evert for what he said. Evert tells me he is not there to shame. He also notes that young people have been “starving” for the message he brings over the past half-century of Catholic education.

At the question-and-answer session at one school, twice as many students showed up than the room could fit. The session, Evert recounts, lasted 75 minutes, with the students “bombarding” him with questions about authentic love, how they should know if the boy they’re seeing is “the one,” how to break free from porn addiction, and the like. “Their hearts are made for love, their minds are made for the truth, and chastity offers them both,” he says.

Normally, he explains, the questions that he receives most often are how far is too far, usually from the boys, and how a girl knows that she is with the right boy or if he really loves her.

To the first, Evert says that the question is the wrong one to ask, comparing it to seeing how close one can get to hitting oncoming traffic while driving. What he tries to do, rather, is to wake up the boys’ consciences to sin. He asks them if they would be comfortable with their future wife doing with another boy what they wanted to do and to act accordingly. To the girls, meanwhile, Evert says that their value as women do not come from their virginity but that their sexual value comes from their value as women proper – in their giving the gift of self.

Deliberate sexual arousal belongs in the sacrament of marriage, he says. While he admits that this is “demanding,” he notes that if one cannot control his libido, then saying yes to the other means nothing.

In terms of what has changed, Evert explains that the good has gotten better while the bad has gotten worse.

Teen sexual activity rates, for instance, have consistently been falling, but some girls are now calling themselves asexuals because of what they have seen of human sexuality on their phones and in pornography. Porn addiction has increased not only among boys but also girls.

“This has all come through the phones,” Evert tells me. “When it comes to the confusion in terms of what it even means to be human, the gender ideology, things like that, so much of that has been accelerated from Instagram, TikTok, and these kids, the anxiety levels going through the roof pretty much paired with how much time they’re spending on social media.”

Meanwhile, the greatest perpetrators of sexual abuse against children are now boys 11 to 15 who want to reenact what they saw in pornography. However, Evert finds that when one shows the young the “truth of hope and chastity,” they accept it. “Steve Jobs said, ‘People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,’ but how can these young people know what they want if we never give them the fullness of the Catholic faith?” he asks.

Toward the end of the show, Evert tells me a story of an American girl who went to Australia to visit her boyfriend. Upon discovering that he cheated on her, she decided to give her virginity to someone she would meet on a dating app after being fed up with disappointing men. When doing background checks on the perspective men on Instagram, a video of Evert inviting people to pray for the “witches” while he was in Sydney showed up in her feed. She watched it, told Evert about what happened, and he invited her to his next talk. While at Eucharistic adoration, she said God gave her many graces and she went to confession.

“Now, if the witches didn’t start this whole thing, she still would have been on Instagram and that dating app, looking to hook up and lose her virginity at the age of 25, but because these so-called ‘witches’ launched this whole thing, she was exposed to this message, and her soul, she said, was saved,” Evert says.

For those interested in Evert and his work, his website can be found here.

The John-Henry Westen Show is available by video on the show’s YouTube channel and right here on my LifeSite blog.