Memory, Sex, and the Making of “The New Man”

The full text of the speech given by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. at the “Into the Breach” men’s conference held in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday, February 3rd.

(CNS Photo)

“Some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.” Those words are usually attributed to George Orwell. I’m not sure he ever actually said them. But in an age when gender is supposed to be fluid and the meaning of “male” and “female” has become ambiguous, they do ring true. So let’s be clear about our purpose today.

“Into the Breach” is a men’s conference in the most thoroughly binary sense. We’re here to recover what it means to be men, and especially how to live as Christian men of substance and virtue. So we’ll try to do that together. The theme for my remarks is “memory, sex, and the making of ‘the new man’.” I’ll deal with each of those topics in turn because they connect to each other in some important ways. But I want to start with memory for a reason.

Romans have been living with the Catholic Church and her leaders for 2,000 years. So the city is a mix of deep piety, deep skepticism and a very unique sense of humor. The evidence is everywhere, because Rome has a lot of religious goods stores. And in one of the finest of those stores, right next to a beautiful collection of rosaries, is a stand of greeting cards with the face of a befuddled, 90-year-old cardinal. The caption reads: “Yes, I have Alzheimer’s . . . but at least I don’t have Alzheimer’s.”

The ironies of old age can be a rich vein of comedy, and our culture has dozens of Alzheimer’s jokes. And some of them are very funny. But of course, the reality of Alzheimer’s isn’t funny at all. A number of my friends have children with Down syndrome. One of the things they live with every day is the fact that 75 percent of persons with Down syndrome will sooner or later develop Alzheimer’s disease. So the child they nourish and love today, and tomorrow, and forever, may one day forget who they are.

That’s a fierce kind of suffering. And some of the men in this room know exactly what I mean because you have a parent or spouse or sibling or friend who’s struggling right now with the same disease. Loving a person with Alzheimer’s is like watching that person, and everything you’ve shared together, slowly disappear.

Toward the end of the original Blade Runner movie, Ridley Scott’s great science-fiction film, a dying android, as his life slips away, grieves that all of his astonishing experiences, all of his memories and their meaning, will be “lost in time like tears in rain.” It’s a haunting line, because androids are machines. They have no soul; no yearning for eternity or anxiety about the unknown. But humans do, which is why our very human fear of death, of losing the past and all we’ve seen and loved, can be so poignant and intense.

That’s the anguish every person feels in the presence of Alzheimer’s. Memory is a cornerstone of our identity. It’s the storehouse of everything we’ve learned, all of our love, all of our experiences, and all of their meaning. Memory gives the storyline to our lives. It shapes how we understand the world and approach the future. So when we lose our memory, we become a kind of non-person. We lose part of our substance. And that means that other people have the power to tell us who we are and what our lives mean – whether they’re speaking the truth or not.

So where am I going with this?

Just as memory anchors each person’s individual story, history plays the same role for cultures, nations and communities of faith. History is our shared memory. When we Christians lose a strong grasp of our own history — our own unique story and identity – others will gladly offer us a revised version of all three – a version that suits their own goals and bigotries, and not necessarily the truth. And then some very ugly things can happen. A community dies when its memory fails. So our memory as a Christian people matters. And I want to recall one particular piece of our history as Christian men, because it speaks to us right here, today.

Exactly 900 years ago, in A.D. 1118-19, a small group of men came together in Jerusalem to form a religious community. They were pilgrims. The First Crusade had retaken the city from Muslim rule in 1099. The men, who were all from Europe’s knightly order, had come looking for a life of common prayer and service. They got both, but not in the way they intended.

As warriors, the men had skills. As knights, they came from respected families with important connections. The roads leading to Jerusalem and other holy sites were infested with brigands and Muslim raiders that would rob, rape, murder or abduct many of those making the journey. The Christian rulers of the city needed help in protecting the travelers. The men had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. And their first task, under obedience, was to patrol the roads.

They began that work with nine men too poor to afford anything more than the clothes they were given by pilgrims. Twenty years later, the Holy See approved the rule of their religious community, the Poor Brothers of the Order of the Temple of Solomon — the Knights Templar. The Templars went on to become the most effective Christian fighting force in the Holy Land for nearly 200 years. They had dozens of recruiting and support communities throughout Europe. And they were so successful that they were finally persecuted and suppressed through the jealousy of the French king.

A lot of nonsense – some of it vindictive, some of it ridiculous, much of it just false – has been written about the Templars. If you want facts, read Malcolm Barber’s The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, or the work of Jonathan Riley-Smith or Thomas Madden. Or read St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s great reflection on the Templars, “In Praise of the New Knighthood.” But pay special attention to that expression “the new knighthood.”

Knighthood in medieval Europe began as a profession of heavily armed male thugs – men obsessed with vanity, violence, and rape. It took the Church and royalty centuries to tame and channel it. But it provided the animating ideal at the core of the Templars: to build a new order of new Christian men, skilled at arms, living as brothers, committed to prayer, austerity, and chastity, and devoting themselves radically to serving the Church and her people, especially the weak. The ideal of this “new knighthood” was often ignored or betrayed. Then and now, humans are sinners — all of us. But the astounding thing is how much more often and how much more fruitfully the ideal was embraced, pursued and actually lived by the brothers, rather than abused.

My point is this. C.S. Lewis described Christianity as a “fighting religion.” He meant that living the Gospel involves a very real kind of spiritual warfare; a struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us. Our first weapons should always be generosity, patience, mercy, forgiveness, an eagerness to listen to and understand others, a strong personal witness of faith, and speaking the truth unambiguously with love. For the Christian, violence is always a last and unwelcome resort. It’s to be used only in self-defense or in defending others. But at the same time, justice and courage are also key Christian virtues. And I think they have a special meaning in the life of the Christian man.

Men need a challenge. Men need to test and prove their worth. Men feel most alive when they’re giving themselves to some purpose higher than their own comfort. This is why young men join the Marines or Rangers or SEALs. They do it not despite it being hard, but exactly because it’s hard; because it hurts; because they want to be the best and earn a place among brothers who are also the very best. Men joined the early Capuchins and Jesuits not to escape the world but to transform it; to convert the world by demanding everything a man had – every drop of his energy, love, talent and intelligence — in service to a mission bigger and more important than any individual ego or appetite.

This is why the ideal of knighthood – despite all the videogame fantasies and freemason conspiracies that the modern world tries to attach to it – still has such a strong hold on the hearts and imaginations of men. As men, we’re hardwired by nature and confirmed by the Word of God to do three main things: to provide, to protect, and to lead – not for our own sake, not for our own empty vanities and appetites, but in service to others.

We men – all of us, both clergy and lay — bear a special responsibility because the Gospel tasks us as leaders. That doesn’t make us better than anyone else. It takes nothing away from the genius of women or the equality of women and men. But human beings are not identical units. We’re not interchangeable pieces of social machinery. Christian equality is based not in political ideology but in the reality of the differences and mutual dependencies of real men and women. As creatures we’re designed to need each other, not replicate each other. And this, by the way, is a key reason why modern culture is so conflicted about the body.

On the one hand — in today’s good “progressive” thought — we should be free with our bodies to have as much sex as we want; with whomever we want; however we want; wherever we want; whenever we want. On the other hand, the body’s a downer. It’s a big disappointment. It’s awkward. It gets fat. It wears out. Then it dies. It’s a defective piece of equipment, and it doesn’t do what my will desires. When we understand this dynamic, then things like transgenderism, transhumanism and all the other curious sexual delusions of our age start to make more sense.

Again, men are meant to lead in a uniquely masculine way. The great saint of the early Eastern Church, John Chrysostom, described every human father as the bishop of his family. All of you fathers here today are bishops. And every father shapes the soul of the next generation with his love, his self-mastery and his courage, or the lack of them.

In the end, protecting and building up the Gospel witness in our age is the work of God. But he works through us. The privilege and challenge of that work belong to us. So we need to ask ourselves: What do I want my life to mean? If I claim to be a believing Catholic man, can I prove it with the patterns of my life? When do I pray? How often do I seek out the Sacrament of Penance? What am I doing for the poor? How am I serving the needy? Do I really know Jesus Christ? Who am I leading to the Church? How many young people have I asked to consider a vocation? How much time do I spend sharing about God with my wife, my children and my friends? How well and how often do I listen for God’s presence in my own life?

The Church has lots of good reasons why people should believe in God, and in Jesus Christ, and in the beauty and urgency of her own mission. But she has only one irrefutable argument for the truth of what she teaches: the personal example of her saints.

So what does that mean? It means the world needs faithful Catholic men, men with a hunger to be saints. The role of a Catholic husband and father — a man who sacrifices his own desires, out of love, to serve the needs of his wife and children – is the living cornerstone of a Christian home. The Church in this country may face a very hard road in the next 20 years, and her sons need to step up and lead by the witness of their daily lives. We need the friendship of real brothers in the Lord to be the disciples and leaders God intends us to be. And there’s no better place to pursue that friendship and renew our vocation as Christian men than right here, today, in the time we spend together as brothers.

Now because I made such a big deal about the importance of memory, some of you will remember that I also promised to talk about sex and the making of the “new man.” So I’ll finish with those two items.

Since most of you are familiar with those two little details called the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, I’ll mention the obvious things just briefly. Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t put yourself in a situation where the idea would even occur to you. Don’t mislead and abuse women, and damage your own dignity as a man, by sleeping around before marriage. And if you’re already doing that, or did that, or you’re toying with the idea of doing it sometime in the future, stop it, now, and get to confession. Finally, don’t demean your wife, your daughters, your mother and your sisters by poisoning your imagination with porn. It steals your time and your heart from the people who need them the most — the wife and family you love. Pornography exploits and humiliates women. And it dehumanizes men at the same time. God made us to be better than that. Our families need us to be better than that.

Those are some of the don’ts. The dos are equally obvious. Do love the women in your life with the encouragement, affection, support and reverence they deserve by right. Do be faithful to your wife in mind and body. Do show courtesy and respect to the women you meet, even when they don’t return it. Chivalry is dead only if we men cooperate in killing it – and given the vulgarity of our current national environment and its leaders, we certainly need some kind of new code of dignity between the sexes. Finally, those of you who marry, do have more children, and do invest your time and heart in them. America is facing a birth bust, and it’s a sign of our growing national selfishness. Children are the future. They’re the cement of love in the covenant of a husband and wife. They’re also an anchor to the imperfection and beauty of reality. They’re the single best antidote to selfishness.

Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and all the other blots on recent male behavior are merely a symptom of an entire culture of unhinged attitudes toward sex. Women are right to be angry when men treat them like objects and act like bullies and pigs. But a real reform of male behavior will never come about through feminist lectures and mass media man-shaming by celebrities and award ceremonies. In a lot of men, that kind of hectoring will only breed nominal repentance and inner resentment. A man’s actions and words change only when his heart changes for the better. And his heart only changes for the better when he discovers something to believe in that transforms and gives meaning to his life; something that directs all of his reasoning and desires. In other words, when he becomes a new man.

That expression “new man” has an interesting past. In ancient Rome, the novi homines or “new men” were men from the lower classes who earned or bought their way into public prominence and leadership. In a sense, they reinvented themselves. In the Renaissance, “new men” were humanists who made themselves indispensable as advisers to princes because of their literacy and scholarship – the tools of the new learning. But since the Enlightenment, and especially since the French Revolution, the “new man” is the man unencumbered by the chains and superstitions of the past – Promethean man who repudiates any memory or morality that could obligate him to the past, and who creates his own identity and future.

Thus the “new Soviet man” and the “new Aryan man” of the last century were creatures of ideology. They were meant to be healthy, learned, unselfish, and zealous in advancing communism or national socialism, without the help of any god. Both of these “new” men failed. They ended in the gulag, the Holocaust, mass murder and war. And every similar effort will always fail because we don’t and we can’t erase the past. We don’t and we can’t create ourselves. And when we try, we destroy the very thing that guarantees our humanity: the reality that none of us is a god, but all of us are sons and daughters of the true and only God.

By the way, we Americans should remember that the words novus ordo seclorum are stamped on our own Great Seal of the United States. A “new order of the ages” – that’s what the Founders intended this country to be. The potential for good in those words is exactly matched by the potential for vanity, ambition and evil. And the less biblical we become as a people, the more the balance tips in the wrong direction.

There’s only one way any of us will ever become a genuinely new man – a new man right down to our cell structure; the new man our families, our culture and our world need. It’s by giving ourselves totally to God. It’s by putting on the new man in Jesus Christ that Paul describes in Ephesians 4 (22-24) and Colossians 3 (9-17). And the kind of new men we become demands the armor Paul gives us in Ephesians 6 (11-17) – because, like it or not, as Catholic men, we really are engaged in a struggle for the soul of a beautiful but broken world.

To put it another way: The “new knighthood” St. Bernard once praised never really disappears. It’s new and renewed in every generation of faithful Catholic men. And brothers, that means us. It’s a vocation that belongs to us, and nobody else. The rules of our order – all 22 of them – were written down 500 years ago by the great Catholic humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his book, The Manual of a Christian Knight. It’s a dense text for the modern reader, but here’s the substance of what he says:

Rule 1: Deepen and increase your faith.

Rule 2: Act on your faith; make it a living witness to others.

Rule 3: Analyze and understand your fears; don’t be ruled by them.

Rule 4: Make Jesus Christ the only guide and the only goal of your life.

Rule 5: Turn away from material things; don’t be owned by them.

Rule 6: Train your mind to distinguish the true nature of good and evil.

Rule 7: Never let any failure or setback turn you away from God.

Rule 8: Face temptation guided by God, not by worry or excuses.

Rule 9: Always be ready for attacks from those who fear the Gospel and resent the good.

Rule 10: Always be prepared for temptation. And do what you can to avoid it.

Rule 11: Be alert to two special dangers: moral cowardice and personal pride.

Rule 12: Face your weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Rule 13: Treat each battle as if it were your last.

Rule 14: A life of virtue has no room for vice; the little vices we tolerate become the most deadly.

Rule 15: Every important decision has alternatives; think them through clearly and honestly in the light of what’s right.

Rule 16: Never, ever give up or give in on any matter of moral substance.

Rule 17: Always have a plan of action. Battles are often won or lost before they begin.

Rule 18: Always think through, in advance, the consequences of your choices and actions.

Rule 19: Do nothing — in public or private — that the people you love would not hold in esteem.

Rule 20: Virtue is its own reward; it needs no applause.

Rule 21: Life is demanding and brief; make it count.

Rule 22: Admit and repent your wrongs, never lose hope, encourage your brothers, and then begin again.

Maleness, brothers, is a matter of biology. It just happens. Manhood must be learned and earned and taught. That’s our task. So my prayer for all of us today is that God will plant the seed of a new knighthood in our hearts — and make us the kind of “new men” our families, our Church, our nation, and our world need.


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About Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap. 7 Articles
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap. is the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia and author of Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living (Henry Holt), as well as Living the Catholic Faith: Rediscovering the Basics and Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life.

16 Comments

  1. “Do show courtesy and respect to the women you meet, even when they don’t return it. Chivalry is dead only if we men cooperate in killing it – and given the vulgarity of our current national environment and its leaders, we certainly need some kind of new code of dignity between the sexes. ”

    Chivalry is dead and must die because the culture in which it originated has not existed for more than 6 centuries. It can only exist in a true political community in which mutual obligations and standards of respect exist between “knights” and “ladies.” Women who are strangers who fail to show respect must be given the appropriate response — this is required by justice, which does not mandate unconditional “niceness.”

    There will be a new code of dignity when men assert themselves and LEAD women to follow this new code. Any refusal to accept this new code by women must also have the appropriate response. Niceness will not convert the leaders of feminism, nor will it contain their poison.

    • Well said. The key quote is this: “…men are meant to lead in a uniquely masculine way.” But to lead whom?

      Can a man lead if none follow? I suppose he can lead by example, in hopes that others eventually come around. But the old chivalrous code was clear that coming under the mantle of a man’s protection meant accepting the duty to follow his lead. Rebelliousness put one outside the mantle of protection.

      Compare to the Geneva Conventions of warfare: combatants that obey the rules of jus in bello should receive the privileges accorded to same, and combatants that flout the rules must not, lest barbarous conduct be rewarded. (Our politicians’ and generals’ failure to enforce the latter point has aimlessly exacerbated bloodshed on both sides.)

      Chivalry requires that with responsibility comes authority. In the old movies, when danger arrives, heroes take action and damsels do as the heroes tell them. Modern entertainment prefers ‘damsels’ who sass the men and show them up with kung-fu (despite physics), and this mindset alienates both men and women from the opposite sex.

      So my leadership advice for young men is this: Test potential wives for ‘sass’ and weed out the ones who show indications of unwillingness to follow their future husband’s lead. Be very clear that a boyfriend is not a husband and a husband is not a boyfriend (e.g. as boyfriend, you will not pay her bills; as husband, you will not sleep on the couch).

    • I certainly respect your right to offer your opinion, though I cannnot shake the sense that you have missed the whole point of the Archbishop’s discussion. Think a moment of when Jesus began his ministry. He did not suggest a way forward that depended on how other’s would respond to his message. His entire life, during that ministry, was a living example of how WE were to live, that we might find true and final communion with God, His father. We might spend an entire lifetime rebuked, in one way or another, by all those around us, including our loved ones. If so, then that is the Cross to bear. But do not for a minute, nay a second, consider that effort wasted. Jesus didn’t….and if NOTHING else, that puts us in pretty good company. I will pray that you find a path to this understanding…and the strength to embrace it. Go With God, my brother.

  2. What a great bishop! A faithful teacher, a true son of “the Father of lights, in whom there is no shadow of change.”

  3. “living the Gospel involves a very real kind of spiritual warfare; a struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us.”
    Last Sunday I watched the movie “Dunkirk” again. I was reflecting on it as a metaphor for the spiritual battle in life. What a great movie! Then the next day I saw this article by Archbishop Chaput. No coincidences. And what a gift is Archbishop Chaput. I will feast on this article for a long time to come.It’s not one you read only once. It’s a keeper.

  4. Thank you Archbishop Chaput for this magnificent article on Men…You managed to reinforce just exactly what our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles handed down to us from generation to generation….It is most unfortunate it became lost due to the changes in both changes in tradition and policies of our religion and country….Thank you so much for instilling in our men and women just exactly what’s needed regarding virtue and the closeness to God in order to achieve our common goals as Catholic Christians to attain Heaven….

  5. What an awesome message!! Thank you Lord for our wonderful Bishop Chaput, continue to bless him and enlighten him to guide your flock. I am saving this article and sharing it with the men in my family and beyond. It is full of hope and truth, it is a roadmap to raise the kind of men this world desperately needs. Thank you Bishop Chaput, May our Blessed Mother keep you in her loving care.

  6. It’s a nice message and Archbishop Chaput is one of the good guys. But the good Archbishop, like almost all clergy, is still woefully out of touch with the social reality in the West.

    Appeals to men to embrace their role as a Christian leader are worse useless without the a priori demand that women submit to Christian leadership. Christian leadership can not be imposed, it is necessarily cooperative. If there is a single prominent Catholic cleric doing this someone should let the rest of us know about it.

    To ask Christian men to “have more children” is absurd when the vast majority of Western women, “Christian” or otherwise, and especially “Catholic” women, have no desire for children other than as a social accessory. If the Archbishop is telling us that men should demand that their wives fulfill their duty to bear children, the Archbishop ought to say that.

    Perhaps the Archbishop could begin by banning the liturgical abuse which allows female lectors and female extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist in his diocese. (Apologies if he has indeed done so.)

    Men certainly must avoid the temptation of pornography in all its forms, but where are the exhortations for women to turn off the equally damaging female wish-fulfillment dopamine roller-coaster of exhorting “likes” from strangers on social media?

    Publicly shaming men, as a group, and exhorting us to do better is good. We need it. There is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with recognizing our shameful faults and resolving to avoid temptation and do better.

    Where is the public shaming of women who obtain no fault divorces?

    Where is the public shaming of women who become pregnant before marriage?

    Fornication and adultery are deeply disordered and sinful. If a woman voluntarily associates with a powerful man and, without any threat or exertion of physical force on his part, trades sexual favors to him in exchange for fame and money, how many persons have engaged in the sin of fornication?

    In what capacity is “A new order for the ages” compatible with the traditional order of “Love the Lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, [and] love your neighbor as yourself.” Would a restoration of this traditional order be “new”?

    If Jesus Christ is Lord, then what is democracy? Are the good, the beautiful, and the true subjective conceptualizations of what the present majority deems them to be?

    It’s tremendously heartening and fulfilling to hear the good Archbishop speak approvingly of Catholic knights who took up arms and risked their lives to defend and protect adult pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.

    If a virtuous Catholic man encounters someone on the street ripping a baby from her mother’s arms and crushing the baby’s head, is the virtuous Catholic response to be limited to praying for the Holy Spirit to change the heart of the murderer and to perhaps hold up a sign saying murder is wrong? If that is not the virtuous limit of a proper response, does this change when the mother is inside a medical building and the baby is inside the womb?

    Is defense of the innocent today limited to courts of law which specifically refuse to recognize the 10 commandments as a legitimate source of legal precedent?

    If our response to the unrepentant murder of millions of innocent babies is to get a group of people and go for a “march” to some prominent secular monument, are we presuming that marching will propitiate God to send us a miracle, or do we just think that “marching” is a form of sympathetic magic? “As above, so below?” What’s the estimate of how many marching steps it takes to equal one innocent life saved? Dear Jesus forgive us, why have we not yet begun to import illegal migrants and pay them an insufficient and unjust wage to have them do the marching for us – think how many lives we could save if we didn’t have to do physically demanding work like marching for ourselves!

    Millions upon millions of people have been deliberately ripped from the bosom of the true Church because of heresies which put their mortal souls in danger of eternal damnation. Had Erasmus of Rotterdam declined to engage in civilized argument with heretics but instead demanded that unrepentant heretics be put to death lest they pollute the minds of others, how many more human souls would today avoid heresy and enjoy the blessings of the sacraments within the one, true, holy Catholic church?

    If I were to do nothing, in public or private, that some people whom I love do not hold in esteem, here are a few things I would not do:

    Read speeches by a Catholic Archbishop.
    Go to Mass.
    Go to confession.
    Make time for daily prayer.
    Identify as Catholic.
    Oppose artificial contraception.
    Tithe to my parish.
    Raise my children to believe that Jesus Christ is the begotten son of God.

    Am I to stop loving these people, or cease doing these things?

    Archbishop Chaput calls on Catholic men to be Catholic. We ought to be amazed and ashamed and righteously angry that his message is considered “courageous”.

    We live in a society which is visibly in thrall to the Evil one. We live amidst moral depravity on par with the orgiastic infant sacrifices of Babylon and Carthage.

    A courageous Catholic man today would sacrifice his fortune, job, friends, social respectability, and yes would even leave his family if necessary to follow the Lord.

    A courageous Catholic priest today would expect every night for his rectory to be firebombed by those who disagree with what he preaches in public.

    And a courageous Catholic bishop would be in jail or a martyr.

    Here’s the difference between the “new Knighthood” of the Templars and saccharine appeals to Catholic men to be “leaders” today: the men who first joined the Templars expected it to kill them.

    Deus Vult.

    • “Publicly shaming men, as a group, and exhorting us to do better is good. We need it. There is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with recognizing our shameful faults and resolving to avoid temptation and do better.”

      Well, if anything the public shaming of men by the “righteous,” even if cloaked in humility, needs to stop, so long as they, bishop, priest, Catholic intellectual or writer, are strangers to their audience. The sort of accountability required for shaming can be found only within a group of men that has demonstrated their friendship and loyalty for one another, and under such circumstances, shaming doesn’t need to be public in order to be effective, it is just a form of fraternal correction. It is time for Catholic bishops to stop presuming the powers of their office; to become true shepherds for their flock they must first become a member of their community.

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