Catholics Are The SUPERIOR Christians, DEBATE w/ Jay Dyer, Tim Gordon, & The Lore Lodge
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We were hanging out here at the old Tim Cassidy's right before the show.
And I'd made a comment about fertility rates being low, but among conservatives still around like 1.8, to which I think it was Phil Labonte responded that Catholics have a higher-than-replacement rate fertility at like 2.4.
And then I was like, is that true?
And Mary Morgan was also on the show, and then I think she mentioned something about divorce rates are also really low.
And then I jokingly said Catholics are the superior Christians, and to which everyone chuckled, and I antagonistically said, should I tweet that?
Because I just knew it.
Cause a storm, you know, a storm.
And then Mary and Phil both said yes.
And I was like, okay, so I did.
And here we are now.
Do I have the, we don't have the, oh, I can pull, well, whatever, we don't have the tree pulled up.
But now we're actually going to have that debate because admittedly, I'm a lapsed Catholic.
I was 10 years old when my family left the church.
So what do I know?
So I brought in a handful of gentlemen to have this conversation.
And have this debate over the religion, the denomination.
I've been Orthodox for the past eight years, Orthodox Christian.
So I think there's some key things that stand out as the reason why Catholicism is not superior.
One would be the contradictions that I think have occurred in Catholic dogma, particularly after the first millennium.
You have the notion that the temporal supremacy of the Roman bishop is necessary for salvation from the time of dictatorship.
He's the world emperor.
And if you don't believe that, you will lose your salvation.
So that was clear dogma in the Middle Ages.
Nowadays, post-Vatican II, when we go to the documents of Vatican II, Vatican II, that is no longer even mentioned.
In fact, it's de-emphasized.
And in fact, many of the Vatican II popes have called for the de-Catholicizing of various Christian states.
So one would be that there's a contradiction there.
The relationship of the church to the other religions, for example, in the Middle Ages, you have the condemnation of Muslims at the Council of the Inn as the abominable sect of Muhammad.
Nowadays, post-Vatican II, post-Ecumenism, post-Nosteroetate, which are Vatican II documents, not only is Islam a salvific religion, we can actually go and pray in the mosques towards Mecca, which the last several popes have done, exemplifying their faith.
Yes, we would argue that the first thousand years of Christianity, as you look at it from the council's perspective and the canon law and the church father's teachings, the So it's exactly the same as the first thousand years of Christianity.
Rome and the papacy is what has departed, particularly in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries.
I've recently began inquiring into the Anglican Catholic Church, which is not the Anglican Church is in the Church of England, nor is it the Episcopal Church.
It actually split off from that in, I want to say, 1978 with the Episcopal Church's decision to begin ordaining women.
So it is a conservative Anglican theology.
And to be perfectly honest, I don't really disagree with much of what Jay just said.
Our church largely does tie itself back to the pre-12th century Christian church, tries to emulate that, and that's kind of the position of the Anglican Catholic Church, is we are not the one true church.
We are not the perfect representation of Christianity.
We are doing our best to retain Christianity prior to councils like the Council of Trent that we felt changed the religion too much.
So like Jay said, it's very much the 11th century and back is what we consider to be the unified church.
We make this claim based on many premises, but the first ones are this, indefectibility.
Can never defect.
It won't defect.
Our Lord promised that when the Spirit of truth comes in Scripture, He'll guide you into all truth.
In John's Gospel, gates of hell won't prevail against the Church of Matthew's Gospel.
In 1 Timothy, the Church of the Living God is the pillar and bulwark of truth.
And therefore, our Lord is a liar if...
And, you know, this is a little bit funny because what I'm going to be doing is talking about super specific church terms, religion terms, with Jay today.
And then we'll be talking about more broad things because really Protestantism isn't technically a religion.
It's a faith.
But we can talk about things like the ecumenical councils, the first seven ecumenical councils about which Orthodox and Catholic agree.
Something like four of these first four ecumenical councils.
I'll read you chapter and verse.
The Orthodox has a view of the Pope, which is the Church's view.
The Church's second millennium view of the Pope.
And the Orthodox defected on this.
Now, Protestants defected.
They represent the soul of defectibility.
Indefectibility means that nothing's going to change.
Protestants are a religion that sprang forth from the earth like Athena from Zeus' head in the 16th century.
But Orthodox Catholic debates are more specific because we have to talk about what the – at the very least, the first seven ecumenical councils require and the first seven ecumenical councils about which Jay and I agree.
If you go to, like, number three, Ephesus involves the patriarch of Constantinople, the highest guy in their second millennium church, being fired by – being requested to be fired by other Eastern Orthodox guys like Cyril of Alexandria.
He writes the pope and he says, can you excommunicate?
The patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius, because he's saying this absurdism, like unto what many Protestants say today, that Mary's the mother of Jesus, but not God.
And so, kind of like Dwight Schrute says in The Office, if you are the guy that's actually boss, you can make a firing.
And tons upon tons upon tons of first millennium Eastern thinkers from the Eastern lung of the Church associated with Orthodoxy, but also Catholic saints like...
and tons upon tons of the councils, also Nicaea.
Two, Constantinople III.
Constantinople IV, we kind of disagree with them about it.
And even the Union of Florence at the Council of Florence, which is an ecumenical council, it was called by an emperor.
A lot of people don't know this.
We had a reunification of the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and it was a legit unification.
31 out of 33 bishops in whatever it was, 1439, of the Orthodox came and voted for unification, including the Patriarch of Constantinople.
And then they went home and essentially they were strong-armed into nullifying the unification.
The Orthodox always being centered in Constantinople were close to the emperor.
The first thing Constantine did after he legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan is he moved the capital from Rome.
To Constantinople.
He named the city after himself, which is a badass move.
Chad move.
It is Tim City.
Constantine City.
And so the Orthodox, over the remainder of the first Christian millennium, they had the Patriarch of Constantinople, who would be elevated to the second most powerful under Rome, eventually.
And they always had—they were next to the Emperor.
And so they were always— Alongside the Emperor, and of course there's multiple Orthodox churches, so they don't even agree on things like whether—they can't be one.
They can't be true to the Gospel because they don't agree on things like whether you can have divorce, whether you can have contraception, whereas the Roman Catholic Church, under the single sign of unity.
The pope, which everybody hates, they are kept together.
And the second millennium Catholic view of the pope is exactly what the first millennium view of the pope was.
There's gay blessings that are allowed in Francis' encyclical, which was a change from the previous Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is basically the successor to the Holy Office.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm not trying to be rude to Tim, but Tim didn't actually mention or address any of the actual contradictions that I listed.
He came up with a list of sort of...
I would say equivocations on the way that different church fathers use the word head.
Basil in his letters, for example, talks about the Bishop of Antioch being the head of the whole body, the head of the world, because in his reading, Because he was dealing with the schism in Antioch.
So this flowery language a lot of times is used amongst many of the church fathers.
You have at the Seventh Ecumenical Council the phrase, the gates of hell will not prevail against, and then guess what?
They use the emperor.
I don't think anybody believes that Matthew 16 is about the emperor.
But we can find in the Acts of the Councils, if you have like Price's books and whatnot, multiple examples of this sort of language that's used.
But that doesn't equate to the idea of Vatican I. And like Tim Bull said, Not only do you have changes in practice or praxis such as the complete revolution in the most holy thing in the Roman Catholic Church, the liturgy itself, you have a Protestantization after Vatican II, a liturgical revolution.
that's more important than other types of issues like, you know, can we have the death penalty?
I think for Roman Catholic theology, In fact, Francis said in, I think, 2017, I have the reference if anybody wants to look and see, but he said that the reforms of Vatican II are dogmatic, magisterial, and irreformable.
That means that you cannot reject any of the things of Vatican II that you don't like, even if you want to debate the status of them.
So not only have the morals and the ideas changed, What about Unum Sanctum?
Unum sanctum is the 1302 decree of Pope Boniface that to be saved, not only must you be in communion with the Roman Pope, you must also accept...
The Roman bishop is the emperor of emperors.
In fact, all the same terminology that's used in the first statement about this in Dictatus Pape in 1090 is repeated not only in Unum Sanctum, but also all the way into the 1800s, into the syllabus of errors attached to Vatican I. So you're telling me that from the 1300s, from 1100 to 1300, all the way up to Vatican I and the syllabus of errors, all the rejection.
That they had of the proposition that the church and the state could be separate and that you don't have to believe in the temporal supremacy.
That wasn't dogma, even though it was necessary for salvation.
The most important thing for the listeners out there is, if there's a head of the church So we have to start at the beginning.
It's not equivocation.
This is as direct as we can be.
If there's a head, and we should be specific.
Let's be specific to the actual councils about which we agree.
And this is what Jay is going to be trying to avoid today, is that the seven councils that they accept defines...
I'll read some to you in a second from Ephesus, from Nicaea II, from Constantinople III, IV.
If there's a pope that is a meaningful boss that is appealed to with a kind of appellate supreme jurisdiction, then Roman Catholicism has to be true because it's the only one of the three sects that represents this.
So listen to what was said at Ephesus, signed on to by the Orthodox.
"Holy and blessed Peter, the prince and head of the apostles, the column of faith, the foundation of the Catholic Church, the prince of the apostles, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, and that to him was given the power of binding and loosing sins, who until this day and forever lives and judges in his successors." Now, what happened leading to the third ecumenical council, Ephesus, is you have this guy Nestorius that's teaching falsely, he's the patriarch of Constantinople, that Mary was mother to
To answer his claim from Ephesus and the idea of an appellate jurisdiction, everyone is well aware of this.
In fact, the Vatican itself has a great commentary on the meaning of this appellate structure in the recent document from Chi-80, which is a Vatican-approved document on exactly what was going on.
It's an approved document.
So this is what Rome nowadays says.
Tim doesn't like what Rome says nowadays, It doesn't matter because this is what Rome says nowadays.
When you have a visible sign of unity, when you have one Holy Roman Catholic Church, the four marks of the church, this comes from Nicaea I. When you have one, there's, of course, this is what they're playing on.
It's a strong rhetorical position.
Naturally, there's going to be lots of disparity within the religion, and so documents have to be ordered hierarchically.
What's called the depositum fide, what never changes.
Best represented in real time by something called the Acta Apostolic Assetis is something that is airtight.
And there are tons and tons of liberal scholars since Vatican II, since Vatican I, that present opinions that they light on.
Francis is probably the worst pope we've ever had that do not make it into the Acta Apostolicus Edison, certainly don't make it into the deposit of faith.
I thought we'd come here and talk about the first seven councils because it's that which we agree about.
And I see it too.
Let me just get this out.
It says this, if you think that I was quote mining Ephesus, Jay, "primacial authority everywhere on earth was given by the people." Through the same Apostle, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church has held till now and will hold for all time primacy and sovereign authority.
So you have the lineage there.
It's for all time.
It's primacy.
It's sovereign authority.
If there's a head of the Church that can fire other guys, then this is the kind of Pope that the Roman Catholic Church describes as the Bishop of Rome.
Well, it's highly inconvenient to the Catholic argument that you misunderstand it.
The Pope's relationship to all of the other churches is specifically this.
He is, sorry, to the bishops, is this.
He's collegial.
He has this ex cathedra power to declare infallible.
When, and only when, he makes the claim.
And most of the time, the only two times we know that he's used the power in the last thousand years, everyone misunderstands it.
What he did first in 1854 and then in 1950 is he pulled all the bishops of the world to make sure that this ex cathodic power, which is not oracular, he's not divining out of his head magical truths that have never been taught.
The Pope, because the Roman Catholic Church is the one church that goes all the way back to Scripture, the Pope wants to make sure that bishops always and everywhere have taught How does this answer the objection?
Sorry, and then it would sound to me, the issue of removing a pope would be Well, the first question, yes, correct, is the notion of that authority, whether he actually possesses the Vatican I authority that Tim is reading back into the many examples that contradict his reading.
For example, Pope Vigilius is literally excommunicated and suspended at the Fifth Ecumenical Council.
That's from Richard Price, the famous Catholic scholar's translation of the Acts of the Council.
The argument is not that the Pope has no relationship to the bishops, so he deflected and defeated a straw man.
The argument is that And then now at Vatican I, it says the literal opposite, that no council is above or can fire the pope.
So it's a complete contradiction.
And it's not just Vigilius.
Tim said in his opening statement that the church via the Roman See cannot defect.
If it could, it would lose one of its constituent components.
He did defect.
All he did was write one letter that contained heretical statements, and the church at So again, indefectibility, the notion of authority is all fluctuating and elastic depending upon what Tim needs to be the case at the time.
And his only answer was a tu quoque, and he didn't address any of the things that I read.
I want to build on what he just said, too, because if Honorius, Had declared monothelitism ex-cathedra to be the truth, what would you have to believe?
What does this mean to you, Tim, if you were to hear Constantinople III?
Because if the claim is that I'm expanding upon the view, you know, the Catholic view of what the Orthodox view of popes might have been in the first millennium, then just explain what this language means.
The Church has never erred from the path of the apostolic tradition, nor has she been depraved by yielding to heretical innovations.
but from the beginning she has received the Christian faith from her founders, the princes of the apostles of Christ, and remains undefiled to the end according to the divine promise of the Lord and Savior himself.
You have to differentiate between, which no one in this audience, 10% at most will know, between material and formal heretics, which is going to take another five minutes.
I'm not going to get out what I want to say because I'm defending this position.
Look at Constantinople IV.
You can't have material heretics.
You can't have formal heretics.
Constantinople 4, what does this mean to you?
This is the 879 version.
It was originally convened in 869.
That's the Catholic version.
I'm reading from the Orthodox document.
Listen to this.
What do you do with this?
For just as the apostolic throne, having received the keys of the kingdom of heaven from the first and great high priest, Jesus Christ, through the chief of the apostles, Peter, he has the authority of universal binding and loosing.
Binding and loosing is the power to forgive sins, which Protestants don't have at all.
Orthodox have it, but except this is an Orthodox document.
I would like to hear from you guys, what about the arguments you've made or believe makes your denomination superior in the true sense of the word superior?
Are you saying that it's because you're right?
You are correct?
Or is there something about your belief that inherently better serves the people and God?
I mean, just to be very clear, the Anglican Catholic position, and by extension the Methodist position, because Methodists are Anglicans, is that the Methodist Church, the Anglican Church, all of them, they're not the superior one true church.
They are a group of Christians in their genuine best effort attempting to...
We are Catholic up until the end of the 11th century.
Do you think that any of the people who composed the documents and the canons at the seven ecumenical councils believe that the church was divided amongst a bunch of different sects?
Well, don't you agree with the idea that Protestants are trying their best, and whether they're Methodists or whether they're Anglican doesn't really matter?
The ecclesiology that the people the first thousand years had, did any one of them have a branch theory or that the church is divided amongst a bunch of groups?
What Jay's asking him, for people out there listening, about ahistorical, when a Protestant claims...
They might agree in abstracto, which is why I called it abstract enlightenment rationalism.
They might agree in abstracto with what was going on with the Orthodox or with the Catholics.
They're always going to favor the Orthodox because none of these groups like the Pope or the unity required by a papacy.
But what Jay was asking here is, For it to be true Christianity, true, true Christianity in its truest sense, it's got to be one holy Catholic and apostolic.
There's a problem for the one mark and the Catholic mark for Orthodox, but Orthodox are actually Christian insofar as they have the seven sacraments, and all of their bishops can be traced back to one of the apostles.
That's what he was asking about ecclesiology.
So when they say, well, I agree with this, but no Protestant has...
I'm going to get very reductive and simplify everything to a ridiculous degree and ask questions that maybe are ridiculously rudimentary for the average Christian.
When it comes to Mosaic Law, laws of Leviticus, do you all follow those or are they considered archaic?
How does the Old Testament play a role in how you live your lives and what rules you follow?
So does that mean that when it comes to all of the Old Testament's rules, are there some that remain based on Jesus said outright, these are still to remain and these are not to remain?
How do you, and this is not a question, how do you know which, I don't imagine that Jesus addressed literally every single rule or law.
Probably one way we disagree with him is to a degree, not totally, but, I mean, Orthodox and Catholics agree that there is an oral tradition that's passed down from the apostles.
So you have the written text of the New Testament, which the early church didn't have a Bible.
They had some documents, they had some letters, and they had tradition, and they had the church service.
So everything was kind of done in a liturgical service way.
You would be getting catechized orally, and then eventually the Bible gets collected in later centuries.
To be the canon.
So basically tradition and the Bible lets you know what things carry over and what don't.
And that's one of the reasons why the councils have church law.
So this is going to be a kindergartner-level urban liberals' argument for the Christians right now when I say this, but is it not one of the instructions of God to be fruitful and multiply?
Pentecostals have a 2.1 fertility rate, and Hooterites have 6 to 7 fertility rate.
After that, conservative Protestants, 1.8, Catholics, 1.9, Orthodox, 1.9, Jehovah's Witness, slightly less than 2, Protestants, 1.5 to 1.6, liberal Protestants.
1.5 and unaffiliated Christians 1.3 to 1.8.
So the Pentecostals and Hutterites, according to just a cursory search, are the only actual groups that are being fruitful and multiplying.
And that's, to be honest, only the Hutterites, the Amish, Anabaptists, everybody else ain't having kids.
No, you don't, because Orthodox and Roman Catholics excommunicate people that don't believe in imagery, and most Protestants historically have allowed it to be something that's an opinion.
So, when we're looking at this, Aristobalis is the earliest we can go back with the Anglican Catholic Church because of the union between the churches in Kent and the churches in Scotia.
You understand that from the Orthodox perspective, it doesn't matter if you have a laying on of hands If you leave the faith of the Church, none of that from the Orthodox perspective even matters.
Okay, okay, so I think there's an interesting view between the three of you and what a superior denomination would be, and it's largely about what you think to be true to the religion as opposed to what the religion does and what its adherents do.
I don't want to diminish that because obviously that's extremely important to know the truth and the history of things.
But from my perspective...
I take a look at the adherence to the religion and what they're doing and whether they can actually follow what they're being told to do, and it largely feels like they mostly don't.
I mean, again, like if I was going to go off the sheer numbers— The problem is Gandhi.
Well, but maybe truth is first and foremost, I think, for most of us, or all of us here.
Because we assume that the true religion will bear the fruits that go along with what's true, first and foremost.
So just having numbers isn't necessarily an indicator of the true religion because you can have a lot of people who convert to a false religion or who think that they're converting and it's really just like Santeria or something like that in South America.
It's a fair metric in some political sense, but it's also, soteriologically, who goes to heaven or not, it's a bit of a crass metric.
We should be having lots of kids, and obviously Roman Catholicism is marked as the only solidified version of Christianity on Earth that stayed against contraception.
After the Anglican Lambeth conferences of 1910, 1920, 1930, where all the other sects of Christianity capitulated.
But it's true, and it's fair enough for people to say, particularly after Vatican II and the liberalizing popular trends among Catholics, almost as many Catholics contracept as Protestants or Orthodox.
This isn't quite true if you go to a Tridentian Latin Mass.
You're going to see big, big, big families.
Which Jay pointed out.
But I do think that everyone should, each of the three of us here, should have a segment to state some sort of answer to the posit, if that's cool.
What's your case for why you are the best version of Christianity, best major segment?
It actually addressed the point I was trying to make to you earlier.
So, like, if you go back to the early church, there was a group called the Arians, and the Arians believed that Jesus was a creature.
But the Arians were also very into morality and pushing morals.
So they were, at least outwardly speaking, moral.
Kind of like Joseph's Witnesses, you could say.
But Arians had apostolic succession.
But they lost the church and the faith, even though they had the mechanical succession.
Likewise, Christianity can't be identified as Hutterites or Amish because it's a historic religion.
So it has to be tied to the historic succession, not just of the bishops, but the So when you look at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th centuries, you don't see anything like Anglo-Catholicism.
You don't see anything like Hutterites or Amish.
You see people coming together, having councils with bishops, with the Eucharist, with monastics, with, you know, the episcopacy, with, you know, relics, with all the things that characterize Christianity.
The marks of natural religion, qua religion, are really important here, and they do set off a kind of rift where the Protestants are alone.
They're a voice crying in the wilderness, and we have to acknowledge that, and that's what I tried to acknowledge at the very beginning.
The basic marks of religion, even the pagan Greeks had some of these.
You would say Buddhism doesn't, Protestantism doesn't, but even some of the polytheists.
They have things like smells and bells.
Having an altar is something from even pagan Greek religion, but for sacramental Christians, the Jews had them.
Right, sacramentals, sacrifice, blood sacrifice, which really, from Judaism to Christianity, became sacrament.
Precepts.
The daily things you have to do.
What are the five precepts of Catholicism?
A sacerdotal order, ritual, or what we call liturgy.
These are things that are lacking in Protestantism.
I'm not saying this to be rude or exclusive, but when you're dealing with what I actually say makes the Roman Catholic faith the superior form of Christianity, is at the first ecumenical council ever.
Which was Nicaea, where we defined the most important stuff about the Trinity.
There were four marks of the Church laid out, that Christ promised us the Church would never defect, it would be this way until the end of time, it would be one.
So there can't be competing sects.
There can be arguments within one sect, but there can't be actual different competing sects.
Holy, this means sacraments.
Catholic, this means worldwide.
And, of course, apostolic, this means that there has to be a direct line of every bishop in the world back to one of the apostles.
We would say, with all due respect, Protestantism, by and large, lacks all four.
Now, we do not make the same claim.
The Church doesn't make the same claim about Orthodox Christianity.
They have real bishops.
That the Church acknowledges, and that means that they have all seven sacraments.
Sevenness means complete.
So there's a different conversation that needs to happen between Catholics.
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You heard it because we're arguing about the first seven councils versus a kind of quater Once again, we acknowledge and hold the first seven councils.
There's a chat here I'm going to read that's somewhat insulting to me.
H. Bronson says, this was always the problem with Tim hosting the debate.
You know it's going to turn into something he brings up with no.
Epistemic Foundation.
My view is kind of like, yeah, probably because I don't follow any of these religions or I do believe in God.
I guess theist is probably the best word, not deist.
But if I can't be convinced, if you can't convince – if you find somebody like, yeah, they believe in God, it's like, okay, here's why we're correct.
If it's esoteric and hard to understand and you can't easily explain why your religion is correct – To someone like me, then how do you convert people?
None of us really are trying to be evangelical because when you bring everyone into a room, the Catholic and the Orthodox are going to be debating councils and specifically what the constitutions require.
So it sounds boring and stupid, but it's actually important.
The way anyone would evangelize, I guess, since you do have a more secular audience, is by saying Christianity is demonstrably true.
You have to ask which version of Christianity, to the 85% that are already convinced correctly that Christianity is true, you have to say which of the competing sects...
That's what we would say if we're kind of putting it in broad, forward-facing terms, and that's precisely what it is.
Personally, my opinion is that the Catholic Church is trying to maintain as large a base as possible, and so you end up with people like Francis, and I forgot the name of this guy, this Filipino guy who said some, like, all these gay websites, I mean literally gay websites, not insulting them.
I think it was in, like, LGBT Nation or whatever, were saying, like, this is the good guy.
He should be the Pope.
Because he was saying things like, it's time to recognize gay marriage or whatever, or, like, things like that, going beyond what Francis had said with blessings.
The Vaticanistas all said that this is what, between him and the Cardinal of Bologna and some of the other far-left cardinals that were considered papavili, popable, at the last conclave last month.
This is specifically why they weren't selected, even though they're considered most popularly, because we tried this with Francis, and it's true.
I would never deny, as probably one of Francis' best-known American lay critics, who is Catholic, the Church is trying a bad approach.
To winning over converts since a little bit before Vatican II.
And what they're actually finding now, and the boomers and the dinosaurs in the cardinalit are finding to their chagrin, is that they're really mad about it.
I'm saying that the current leadership seemed to be their political strategy of, we need more converts, so let's say what we have to say to get them to conversion.
The basic language, the basic terms of this debate.
It was mandated all that time for those centuries to be necessary to be saved.
Which the Vatican no longer believes for salvific purposes.
They might theoretically still believe it.
Who knows?
But I think Vatican II contradicts that with the de-Christianizing principles.
But the point is that ever since the papal states, ever since the 11th century, especially with the Gregorian reforms, the papacy has united itself with and tied itself into politics at an intense level.
And that's not all totally the fault of Rome or just power seeking.
You had the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to the vacuum that allowed the papacy to step in.
But by the time that we get to Dictatus Pape, just a couple of things that we have in this document, the pope alone can use the imperial insignia.
All princes in the world must kiss the pope's feet.
This is the only name in the world.
He alone may depose all emperors.
He alone may confirm all bishops.
the Roman sea has never erred and will never err unto the end of time.
The Roman church is founded by God alone.
The Roman church alone can call itself universal.
It can alone depose or reinstate bishops.
Now, already we've seen that from dictatus papi in the 11th century.
That's a contradiction with the way the councils acted and operated in the first several centuries.
So the Roman bishop becomes a geopolitical world power, particularly in the 11th century, comes to its nadir, you could say, a few centuries later.
So this is the council in the 1960s that was called by John XXIII originally to update, to make the Roman sea and the Roman church more amenable to the world.
A giornamento was his terminology, to open the doors and to let the world into the church.
So Vatican II was, I mean, it's true that it was called by John XXIII.
But what happened at the end of Vatican I in the 1870s is the Franco-Prussian War interrupted it.
Vatican I is famous.
If we look at both of the last two councils of the Roman Catholic Church, Vatican I and Vatican II, they're both vastly misunderstood.
The reason Vatican I is vastly misunderstood is because the Franco-Prussian War interrupted it literally in between the two goals of Vatican I, laying out the power of the Pope, clarifying the power of the Pope as it had always been for 2,000 years, 1,800 years, and laying out the power of the bishops because it is a collegial relationship.
That the Pope has to them, even though he is the Prince of the Apostles.
It got interrupted and separated by the Franco-Prussian War.
So Vatican II, so it ended up looking, by the way, like just the Pope's powers were laid out.
The powers of the bishops were never edumbrated because of the sudden conclusion of that.
It was never actually concluded until John XXIII concluded it.
Almost 100 years later, 85 years later, right before he said, okay, we need to have a Vatican II to get to what the power of the bishops are.
Council of Florence was, but an ecumenical just means that it's all the world, all the bishops of the world.
Vatican I concludes suddenly getting just to what the power of the pope is, which gave it a lopsided look, our ecclesiology afterwards.
Vatican II needed to be held to get to what the power of the bishops were.
Once we started getting more liberal popes, like John XXIII and Paul VI, who were the two popes alive during Vatican II in the 1960s, they changed the agenda.
Actually, it was Karl Rahner and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who a lot of people think was a right-winger in the Church.
He was not.
He and Rahner together changed the agenda from finishing what Vatican I was supposed to do, lay out the power of the bishops, to...
Really, what they were doing was quoting things from Pope Pius X, a very based older pope.
They're quoting even from medieval popes who acknowledged things like, technically speaking, The Muslims are monotheists.
Technically, they're one of the Western religions.
TECHNICALLY THEY WORSHIP THE ONE TRUE GOD, BUT THEY WORSHIP THE ONE TRUE GOD IN THE FALSE WAY.
TRADS, YOU KNOW, RAD TRADS, ORTHODOX, EVERYONE GETS WORKED UP ABOUT THIS, BUT IT TURNS OUT THAT THIS IS A VERY, VERY OLD MEDIEVAL TERM THAT THE CHURCH IN Because Vatican II says the same about Hinduism.
It says, "Throughout history to the present day, there is found among different peoples a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the events of human life.
At times there is present even a recognition of a supreme being or still more of a father.
This awareness and recognition results in a way of life that is imbued with a deep religious sense.
The religions which are found in more advanced civilizations endeavor by way of well-defined concepts and exact language to answer these questions.
In Hinduism, people explore the divine mystery and express it both in the limitless riches of myth and the accurately defined insights of philosophy.
They seek release from the trials of the present life by ascetical practices, profound meditation, and recourse to God in confidence and love.
In its various forms, testifies to God the essential inadequacy of this changing world.
It proposes a way of life by which people can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation and reach supreme elimination either through their own efforts or with divine help.
So, too, other religions which are found throughout the world attempt in different ways to overcome the restlessness of people's hearts by outlining a program of life covering doctrine, Moral precepts and sacred rites.
Explain, because you said you understand the sense-reference dichotomy, explain how by sense, answer is affirmative, and by reference, it would be a negative answer.
We can be referring to the same thing.
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If you think Cleveland is Cincinnati and I think it's Cincinnati.
The creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to humanity, they endeavor to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God's plan, and whose faith Muslims eagerly link to their own.
Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet.
His virgin mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke.
Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead.
For this reason, they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms, deeds, and fasting.
It does seem like they're saying, as far as I can tell, Muslims are worshipping the same God.
What I interpret from that is that they were trying to say there is one true God, and even in that regard, they're saying other religions are seeing it improperly and doing it wrong.
So I want to highlight, too, that I think Tim will have to admit this, that post-Vatican II, we can see the actions of the papacy, how they interpret this document, because they, in many cases, literally will go pray in mosque towards Mecca.
Benedict XVI did it.
Also, John Paul II did it.
Excuse me.
Benedict XVI and Francis both did this, where they went to the mosque, they reverently prayed towards Mecca.
That's an outward expression of the interior disposition in Roman Catholic moral theology of their faith.
So there's another statement beyond Nostra Tate III, which is Lumen Gentium 16. It says, "The plan of salvation includes those that acknowledge the Creator, first among whom are the Muslims.
They profess the faith of Abraham and together with us, That refutes you.
Because the position that this is taking, imagine it like this.
There's a rock concert, an arena, stadium.
And Catholics are all – let's just say from the argument presented in this book, Catholics are all looking directly at the stage and Muslims are in the back behind it hearing a different bassy garbled version of it.
They're cheering for Freddie Mercury but they're hearing some weird version of the song.
When I hear that, what it's saying is that all of these different religions… They're doing things the wrong way towards the right God, because there is only one God.
No, as the Catholic, there has to be a distinction between monotheism and polytheism.
On the basis of natural religion, everyone out there who's listening to this knows, okay, there are three Abrahamic religions, which was posited by Lumen Gentium.
There's Judaism, Islam, Christianity.
Community College Intro to Religions 101.
There are polytheisms.
There are only three monotheisms in the history of the world.
Now, there's only one correct monotheism, which posits a triune God.
They say that they get this wrong.
This is repeated throughout the sacred constitutions of Vatican II, that Jews and Muslims, even though they're monotheists, they get it wrong.
They don't worship a triune God.
This is said countless times in the documents.
That's why we don't have the index, they believe or they falsely think that.
That language is reserved in the Vatican II documents for the polytheism.
So all they're doing there, and it's written by Jesuit liberals.
We're squinting toward a bad interpretation.
They say, correctly, they worship the one true God.
Pius X says this in his personal catechism.
He's a trad favorite.
Two other medieval popes say the exact same thing.
Whether Jay Dyer or Laura Lodge likes it, Well, but he's branding.
Fair enough.
I'm trying to help you brand.
But with regard – this is the last statement.
With regard to the polytheists, that's why they always say they falsely claim that, they falsely believe that, they falsely search for, they seek for.
Okay, so the distinction is monotheistic politics.
This is correct, and everything Tim said there we would agree with, except that from the Orthodox perspective, we reject the whole idea that there are Abrahamic monotheistic faiths.
So even though Muslims might see themselves as that, when we look at the Old Testament revelation, we believe that it is the Trinity explicitly revealing itself in the Old Testament.
They don't know the name per se of the word Trinity, but it's Yahweh, his angel messenger, and his spirit are revealed.
And in John 5 through 9, when Jesus debates with the Pharisees, who were the monotheists,
If Abraham believed in the Trinity, then the whole Abrahamic religion thing falls apart.
And Jesus says that to have Have faith in him makes you a child of Abraham.
Galatians 3, Paul says the exact same thing.
So when Vatican II acknowledges that they have the faith of Abraham together with us, we believe that is a denial of Jesus' teaching in John 8 that you can be a child of Abraham without faith in Christ.
My response is kinda like, The modern American ICBM is 1,250 times stronger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is also possible that there – it is also true that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons that are substantially weaker because they have not yet discovered the means and the capability by which to build such a powerful bomb.
So, I think it could be said that you may have discovered hidden truths and the true path towards God and religion and Muslims.
I think the argument would be that Muslims are openly rejecting Christianity.
Well, the problem is not just worship, but Vatican II uses the term of adoration, which in Catholic theology is more specific than just a generic idea of natural theology.
Adoration is something that's a specific term for adoring the Eucharist in Catholic theology.
And I would also point out that in my opening statement, I mentioned the fact that the Council of Vien, which is a medieval Roman Catholic theology, which was involved in the Crusades, that attitude today that you see here is completely different.
It's different than the attitude then in the Middle Ages where it was the abominable sect of Muhammad in the council.
They call crusades against the Muslims to protect the Holy Land.
on the eastern side, it's not quite as linear because there's the immediate Arab move into the north, and then the Turks convert, and they come back down south.
632 to 750, 119 years, That's kind of the reversal.
So, I will say, Islam, the ability of Islam to move after 732 was largely due to the Turks coming in at a time that could not have been less ideal for Christians.
These two were, well, thankfully we were the same at the time, were in conflict.
There was a schism that had happened about Then you get the Battle of Nanzikert in 1071, and the Byzantine Empire collapses in on itself because everybody wants to be emperor.
And ironically, the church wasn't strong enough to enforce one single emperor.
In the West, the church wasn't strong enough to convince people, hey, we need to go drive the Turks out, and had to use Jerusalem as a little bit of a carrot on a stick.
So the Muslims came in at a time when Christians were more divided than they'd ever been, and we were unable to resist the tide until 1095, when we were able to assemble an army large enough to go in and fight it.
But at that point, the Franks didn't want to stay over there.
The Saracens became too numerous, too powerful.
It was a long period of strife that was largely caused by Christianity's inability to come together.
There was an argument a few years ago, maybe like seven years ago, where a lot of people, including myself, made the argument that the US would become a Muslim nation.
Because Muslims have a substantially higher fertility rate than basically every other group, including Christians.
And that combined with mass migration, you see the emergence of places like Dearborn, Michigan.
However, with the recent trend towards Christianity among the Gen Z, and it's not just that conservatives and Christians had more kids, we're actually seeing an ideological shift.
I think a large portion of why we're seeing young Gen Z be more Christian is just because of their parents.
But I think around half—we
which may happen, we are seeing a lot of people start to have kids again, then I think the US is on track to become a conservative Christian nation.
In fact, one of the global elite books that I lectured through was Jacques Hattelit's book, Brief History of the Future, in 2006.
He warned that for the technocratic elite, one of the things they had to be concerned with was the possibility of a rising traditional Christian ethos in the West and in the U.S. So they actually war-gamed that out.
A few years ago, the Saudis were noted for, I think, putting 60-something billion into funding mosques in the U.S. and Islamic education centers.
So I think they were really pushing for that.
But Islam has had a rough go on the Internet, especially in the last couple of years.
They're losing bad, and then a lot of younger people are turning towards Christianity.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, Islam is having a hard time because they had a really strong push in the 2010s online, and a lot of people were getting into Islam, but now a lot of Christians are doing pretty intense, hardcore apologetics.
Like, we had that debate with Daniel Kikachu and Ejaz together, me and Sam Shamoon on Fresh and Fit.
That got millions of views, and it was like 90% just dominated.
Well, so with skateboarding, what happened was the industry completely collapsed because there's no young people anymore.
And the stewards of the industry failed to cultivate a new generation of skateboarders.
So what happens then is...
When the water goes down, it exposes the scum in the reef.
And so now some of the most prominent voices in the industry are degenerate, cringy, rage bait.
And so what happens is these companies try to figure out how to sell to whoever they can, and you end up with advertisements, or there may be an inverse correlation here that… Young guys say, I don't have anything to do with this.
Because scooting doesn't do that.
Scooting doesn't.
And that's growing massively in popularity.
All the skills are now, in terms of action sports, are going in that direction in BMX.
And this is what happens when, you know what I think it is, to relate this to the conversation, abject degeneracy.
Freaks the average person out no matter what.
No matter who they are, where they're from.
It is a shock to the system.
So skateboarding started promoting.
There's one individual who's a morbidly obese man who's trans and does weird sexualized fetish poses.
But it's like a big fat guy.
And a lot of young men are like, I don't want to have anything to do with that.
I think now we're seeing a lot of young men shift towards Christianity that's in the polls.
That may be a good explanation as to why skateboarding is struggling to market itself to a younger generation because all the big magazines are basically being like, here's the trans and the queer stuff.
Yeah, well, last year was the best year in the new evangelization, which is what John Paul II set out to do, using media, using the self-immolation of popularity.
The conservative Protestant churches aren't as good at marketing.
We are not nearly as good at telling people we exist.
The Roman and Catholic and the Orthodox churches are both very visible.
I think that's why you see so many Protestants converting right now.
I think if more Protestants were aware of churches like the Anglican Catholics, There are a lot of churches that fly the pride flags, even Catholic churches.
They tend to be in liberal areas, and I view that largely as the church is looking at the political views of the community around them, and they're probably saying to themselves, in one year, this church will be a coffee shop unless we get— What do we have to do?
But I do believe, while that's largely true, there's an inverse of go broke, get woke, in that a lot of companies try to adopt wokeness as a marketing tactic to try and get – but they don't understand hippies don't have money.
Well, it's a boomer marketing appeal that was really – I'll speak to the Catholic position.
It was really popular during and around Vatican II, and they thought that kids wanted monkey's music and long hair and masks and tambourines and shit, and they simply didn't.
What they wanted was what's perennial and true, and that's really what's – Let me say this.
So the Enlightenment was all about individual atomistic liberties, which were premised on the idea that there's no authority, there's no hierarchy, hence why they were opposed to church and state.
Eight of the 13 states had establishments of Christian religions and the First Amendment to the US Constitution was written, assuming that all 13 would, and what the establishment clause means literally was that Congress wasn't allowed to disestablish the state legislature-established sects of Christianity.
That's literally what it means, and it was a Masonic U.S. Supreme Court in 1947 in a case called Everson v.
Yes, it did originate from operative Masons in the late 1300s as a Catholic organization which very explicitly held that you must love the church with God and the church.
