The media claims that the outcry against Pope Francis is "ideological" and part of a "conservative coup." This is ridiculous for several reasons. Let's talk about them now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| The Vatican Secretary of State... | |
| Secretary... | |
| I don't know why I said it like that, but I did. | |
| Let's just go with it. The Secretary of State said today that Pope Francis is serene right now. | |
| He's feeling serene despite the allegations against him. | |
| And that's nice, isn't it? | |
| Isn't that nice to hear? He's serene. | |
| The entire Catholic world has descended into moral chaos, but the Pope is serene. | |
| Great. So wonderful to hear. | |
| And of course, the Secretary of State did not answer any questions about the substance of the allegations. | |
| He didn't have anything to say about that. | |
| It has been now four days since the Pope was credibly accused of personally covering up sex abuse, and this has been the Pope's response. | |
| Nothing. Not a word, but he is serene. | |
| So that's good. | |
| Now, the Vatican has issued no statement about these allegations. | |
| It did issue a statement, though, yesterday about something. | |
| And I remember I saw, you know, I finally saw the headline before I read the entire headline, but it said, Vatican issues statement. | |
| And then I said, finally. | |
| But then I saw that, no, the statement was to clarify comments that Pope Francis had made, which had offended gay people. | |
| People were concerned that Francis had said something that sounded like he was implying that homosexuality is a mental disorder. | |
| So the Vatican quickly clarified that. | |
| I mean, they came out and they said no. | |
| They issued that clarification right away because that's very important. | |
| This is the Vatican's priority, you see. | |
| It cares about soothing the hurt feelings of gay people, but as for the spiritual chaos and despair of devout Catholics everywhere, it has no evident concern. | |
| Now, has anybody offered a plausible defense of the Pope? | |
| Well, the liberal Cardinal Cupich, who is a disgrace of a man and an embarrassment to Christians everywhere, he said that Pope Francis doesn't have time to worry about this because he's too busy protecting the environment and caring for immigrants, and so he's too busy with all that to bother with these allegations. | |
| That's actually what he said. And he also said that he thinks the criticism of Pope Francis is really rooted in bigotry against Latinos. | |
| Now, I don't even think that such a thing is, we should dignify such a comment with a response, but I will respond to it anyway. | |
| To say, number one, that is idiotic, you disgrace of a man. | |
| Number two, Pope Francis, he's ethnically Italian, born to Italian parents in Argentina. | |
| So I think the racism charge, considering he's a white Italian man, that's a hard one. | |
| It's going to be hard to make that land. | |
| Now, the leftist media... | |
| They claim that there's a coup going on against the innocent Pope Francis being waged by terrible conservatives. | |
| And then you have people in the church who have been attempting to deflect from all this by slandering Archbishop Vigano, who's the man who made these allegations, accusing him of his own sex abuse cover-up. | |
| Now he's come out against those accusations and offered documentation to prove that they're false. | |
| So... Vigano, he came out with the original allegations, and he was accused of something. | |
| He came out with documentation proving that it's false. | |
| So he's very open, and he's responding, and he's engaging, as opposed to pretty much every person who was indicted by his allegations. | |
| They've all just clammed up and had nothing or very little to say. | |
| Besides which, as I've already said, It doesn't really matter. | |
| Even if Vigano were guilty of a sex abuse cover-up, which it doesn't seem that he is, but even if he had done that, it doesn't matter what he's guilty of. | |
| He could be guilty of the JFK assassination. | |
| It doesn't matter. It has no relevance to the fundamental question. | |
| The fundamental question is, was it true? | |
| Is it true? The allegations that he made, are they true? | |
| That's all that matters. And the weakest defense of all, of course, offered for Pope Francis is the one offered by Pope Francis. | |
| It's weak because it's non-existent. | |
| He offers no defense. | |
| He gives us no explanation. | |
| He just waves us off dismissively and says, basically, run along, I don't care. | |
| Which is, by the way, what he's been doing to faithful Catholics for six years. | |
| Can we imagine... | |
| That an innocent man would behave this way. | |
| It's hard to imagine. | |
| It's hard to imagine. | |
| It's hard to imagine that an innocent man would face these allegations and have nothing to say whatsoever. | |
| But Pope Francis has cover while he hides, and it is, as I said, cover from the liberal media I am fully accustomed to seeing the leftist media lie, mislead, slander, spin false narratives. | |
| I am not at all accustomed to seeing them lie, mislead, slander, and spin false narratives for the sake of the Vatican. | |
| These are very strange times. | |
| As I said, I will never get used to that. | |
| If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be going after the Pope while the media protects him, I would have been highly skeptical. | |
| Then again, if you had told me that Donald Trump would be president and Dennis Rodman would be our ambassador to North Korea, I also would have been skeptical about that as well. | |
| But these are the times we're living in. | |
| Of course, the primary lie that we're hearing from the media With regard to all of this is that this is an ideological battle. | |
| That's what they're telling us. This is a battle of the conservatives versus the enlightened progressives. | |
| There was a headline on Reuters yesterday that said, Defenders rally around Pope, fear conservatives escalating war. | |
| Yes, conservatives are the ones escalating things. | |
| It's our fault. It's our fault. | |
| It's not the fault of the homosexual networks in the church who have been covering up sex abuse for decades. | |
| No, no, it's not their fault. | |
| It's the fault of conservatives, you see? | |
| Now, what I want to do is I want to address the idea that this is all ideological, an ideological war, and Because that's what you're hearing everywhere, and if you're getting your news about this from the leftist media, that's probably the impression you have. | |
| It's a false impression for three reasons. | |
| Number one, there's nothing ideological about being opposed to sex abuse, unless we're saying that opposition to sex abuse is a uniquely conservative position. | |
| Number two, the ideology of Francis's critics Is irrelevant. | |
| Because no matter their ideological convictions, the question they are asking is valid and non-ideological. | |
| Did Francis do it? | |
| Is he guilty? | |
| That's the question. | |
| It is not an ideological question, and the ideology of the people asking it is irrelevant. | |
| On the other hand, Francis's ideology is And the ideology of the cover-up artists in the Vatican, that is relevant because it could be argued that their liberal, nonjudgmental, tolerant, open-minded perspective is what led them to support and promote and protect active homosexuals in the first place. | |
| As the floodgates are being opened here and more stories are coming out, we're seeing this kind of be fleshed out. | |
| LifeSite News has two or three articles about new allegations from other people in the Vatican about Pope Francis, and they all revolve around this. | |
| They all revolve around his tolerance for active homosexuals around him. | |
| There's one where he... | |
| He gave a Vatican apartment to a priest who was a known active homosexual and who had been accused of sex abuse, gave him an apartment. | |
| Knowing this about him, and this is coming from someone in the Vatican, told this to LifeSite News, knowing this about him, gave him an apartment, and the next thing you know, there's a gay, drug-fueled orgy going on in a Vatican apartment. | |
| You know, with this act of homosexual who Pope Francis had given the apartment to. | |
| So there's that kind of thing. | |
| And it would seem that his liberal ideology is not irrelevant to this fact. | |
| Number three, and this is the most important thing, when it comes to the essential moral teachings of Christianity, There is no conservative or liberal distinction. | |
| There aren't different versions or varieties, okay? | |
| Now, conservative versus liberal, that might make sense if we're talking about, in Catholicism, something like the liturgy, you know, how the mass is celebrated and so on. | |
| Conservatives will tend to favor more traditional, more reverent approaches, and their view is absolutely right because the liberalization and secularization of worship is an abomination before God. | |
| But here, maybe, you do find a conservative-liberal dynamic where, obviously, as always, We're good to go. | |
| Those who say the act is immoral are not conservative. | |
| They're just Christian. | |
| Those who say that it is not immoral, they're not liberal. | |
| They are actually rejecting the authority of Scripture, rejecting natural law, and if they're Catholic, they're rejecting the teachings of the church. | |
| That is not a liberal position. | |
| That is just an unchristian position. | |
| That is a position that, as a Christian, is not available to you. | |
| So when it comes to these moral truths, there aren't different ways of looking at it. | |
| There is only one way of looking at it. | |
| There is only one truth. | |
| There is only one thing you're allowed to believe if you want to continue being a Christian. | |
| Now, I am not at the moment interested in discussing whether Christianity is right about homosexuality or about any other moral point. | |
| That's beside the present point. | |
| The present point is simply that Christianity does have a teaching on these subjects. | |
| That's the point. And if you're not Christian and you don't agree with the teachings, well, fine, whatever. | |
| You don't have to agree with them. But if you claim to be Christian, you have to agree with the teachings. | |
| You can't disagree with them. | |
| The Bible clearly condemns the homosexual act repeatedly, including in 1 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Timothy, all across the Old Testament, most notably in Leviticus and Genesis. | |
| Moreover, Jesus Christ himself defines marriage. | |
| In both Matthew and Mark, he teaches that marriage is when a, quote, man and his, quote, wife come together and, quote, become one flesh. | |
| He defines marriage. | |
| He says this is what marriage is. | |
| He offers a definition. | |
| That's the Son of God. | |
| So what we are left with is a full, uncompromising, explicit consensus across both the Old and New Testament about the nature of marriage and the moral depravity of the homosexual act. | |
| Every church for almost 2,000 years affirmed these teachings. | |
| No Christian theologian or thinker of any note or For any legitimacy, found or claimed to find any pro-gay interpretation of any of the verses mentioned above. | |
| That is because no such interpretation can be found. | |
| It isn't there. It doesn't exist. | |
| We must either accept with humility the biblical view on this topic or we must throw the Bible out and Christianity along with it. | |
| And if we're going to do that, then we are not Christian. | |
| If we try to retain our progressive views, then we must be doing so on one of the following three foundations. | |
| Okay, so if you want to say, well, no, you know, the homosexual act is fine, or, you know, Or if you want to have, in general, a more liberalized idea of sexual morality, sex outside of marriage is fine, and so forth. | |
| Well, if you're going to do that, then you have to be doing it on one of the following three foundations. | |
| Number one, the Bible is wrong. | |
| Number two, this behavior was wrong during biblical times, but it is no longer wrong. | |
| Number three, the Bible actually supports this behavior, but its support is so subtle and hidden that nobody noticed it for 20 centuries until we came along and discovered it. | |
| As a Christian, the first foundation, the Bible is wrong. | |
| That doesn't work because it denies the moral authority of Scripture. | |
| And if Scripture contains moral error, and so much of it too, then we have no reason to believe anything else it tells us. | |
| And if we cannot believe what it tells us, then we have no reason to believe that our faith is true. | |
| So that doesn't work. For a Christian, that doesn't work. | |
| For a Christian, the second foundation that this behavior was wrong during biblical times, but it's not wrong anymore, that doesn't work because it trades objective morality for moral relativism. | |
| But moral relativism is incompatible with Christianity because on the Christian understanding, morality is grounded in and flows from an eternal, perfect, all-knowing, and changeless God. | |
| If morality is relative, then God is either imperfect and changeable or non-existent. | |
| Number three, the third foundation, that doesn't work either, that the Bible actually does support this behavior, but we didn't know it until now. | |
| That doesn't work either. | |
| Leaving aside the arrogance of that kind of view, where you're saying that every Christian in history was wrong about this, except for you, let's leave aside the arrogance of that. | |
| The problem is that it supposes that the Bible is so confusing and so incomprehensible that even its clearest commands and its clearest edicts cannot be known. | |
| This view suggests that the Bible may mean the opposite of what it says, and it may take a couple of millennia for us to realize it. | |
| So what opposite meanings will we discover in the year 4000? | |
| Perhaps by then it'll turn out that the Bible's references to Jesus as the Son of God actually meant that He's not the Son of God. | |
| I mean, anything is possible. | |
| And if anything is possible, then Christianity ceases to be meaningful or intelligible. | |
| And if it's not meaningful or intelligible, then it is literally unbelievable. | |
| It is not something that a person can believe, because it doesn't mean anything. | |
| So, none of this works. | |
| As I said, if you're not a Christian, then whatever, you can take any of those positions that you want. | |
| It doesn't matter. You're not a Christian, right? | |
| But if you are a Christian, you can't take any of those positions. | |
| Any of those positions undermines everything else you believe. | |
| It undermines the faith that you pretend to profess. | |
| So we are left with only two valid options. | |
| Be Christian and accept its moral teachings, or don't be Christian. | |
| Those are the only, that's it. | |
| And you can't say, well, but what if I think that Christianity is wrong about this, that, and the other thing, but I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. | |
| Well, but you don't really believe that, do you? | |
| Because if you're saying that the Bible is wrong about marriage, well, Jesus defined marriage. | |
| If you're telling me that he's wrong about it, then you can't possibly believe that he's divine, because then he can't be wrong. | |
| So you've just removed, by claiming that he spoke falsehood, he spoke out of ignorance, he spoke out of whatever, bigotry, you are removing his divinity. | |
| So no, you don't believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. | |
| You say you do, but you don't. | |
| Now, on the other hand, you might say, well, I believe he's the son of God. | |
| No, I don't believe that he said anything wrong. | |
| But he didn't really say those things. | |
| That was made up. He didn't really say. | |
| They put that into his mouth, and he didn't really say. | |
| Well, okay, but then how do you know? | |
| So that part never happened? | |
| Well, how do you know any of it happened then? | |
| How do you know the incarnation happened? | |
| How do you know the crucifixion happened? | |
| I mean, you're getting all of it from the same document, aren't you? | |
| You can't do that. You can't go through the Bible and start saying, well, that didn't happen, that didn't happen. | |
| Yeah, he didn't really say that. | |
| No, he didn't say that. That's false. | |
| That's completely wrong. | |
| No, that moral teaching is incorrect. | |
| But yeah, that and that, that's true. | |
| On what basis are you doing that? | |
| On what authority? | |
| Where are you getting this from? | |
| One more thing. I think this is a really important point. | |
| When we talk about accepting the moral teachings, you know, and I say, to be Christian, we have to accept the moral teachings, that is not the same thing as, I am not saying that in order to be Christian, we have to follow the moral teachings perfectly, or we cease to be Christian. | |
| That's not what I'm saying. Now, we do have to try to follow the teachings, but that's not the point. | |
| Obviously, nobody follows the moral law perfectly, least of all myself. | |
| You can be weak, imperfect, sinful, cowardly, and still be Christian. | |
| That's, Christianity is made for. | |
| Jesus says, I came to call, I didn't come to call the righteous, I came to call sinners. | |
| So that's, and that's all of it. | |
| And thank God for that. | |
| Because if only the strongest and most courageous and most qualified could be Christian, then I would be disqualified personally. | |
| But here's what we can't do. | |
| We can't categorically reject the moral law and say that it doesn't apply to us. | |
| We can't do that. We can't say that we worship God and then in the next breath say that His commandments are irrelevant. | |
| That doesn't work. | |
| I just think this is a distinction that for some reason people struggle with so much. | |
| Because anytime you get into this conversation, people say, oh, what, you're saying we have to be perfect? | |
| No, I'm not saying we have to be perfect. | |
| I mean, we strive to be perfect. | |
| We strive for holiness. | |
| But no, we're not saying that we have to be perfect right now. | |
| You take any moral rule, you know, we're not saying that you have to follow it perfectly in order to be Christian, but you have to accept it. | |
| You have to accept its legitimacy. | |
| You can't say it's not legitimate just because you disagree with it or it's inconvenient or it's hard. | |
| You can't do that. As a Christian, you can't do that for all the reasons I've just outlined. | |
| Because you're tearing down the legitimacy of Christianity. | |
| Which, you can try to do that from the outside. | |
| You can't come into the inside and do that. | |
| You can't come into Christianity and then try to tear down its legitimacy while claiming to be Christian. | |
| And this is also why people say, well, why are you so, you know, it comes to homosexuality. | |
| Why are conservative Christians so obsessed with this issue? | |
| Why are they talking about it all the time? | |
| Well, number one, we're not the ones who are always bringing it up. | |
| I would much prefer to live in a society where we didn't need to talk about this at all, where it never came up. | |
| But I'm not the one bringing it up. | |
| There is a loud voice out there, including a voice within Christianity, or people who claim to be Christian, who every day are saying, no, this is okay, we have to accept it. | |
| So they're the ones bringing it up, literally marching through the street, And those of us who are conservative Christian, when we resist that and we oppose them, what we're doing is we're defending the legitimacy of our religion because that's what's being called into question. | |
| It's not specific. | |
| It's not about homosexuality exclusively specific. | |
| It is about that as well, obviously, but that's not just it. | |
| This conversation isn't happening in a vacuum. | |
| The reason why we feel so necessary to rebuke Christians who hold this view is because they are calling into question our religion itself. | |
| And so that's why that needs to be met. | |
| And every age, you know, every era of Christianity, there have been heresies, there have been certain aspects of Christianity that have come under attack. | |
| And so those who love the faith and believe in it, it's necessary for them to rally around that truth and defend it and become obsessed with it. | |
| When they're not obsessed with it, it's just that there's a certain pillar of the faith that there's a movement trying to rip it down, and so we have to rally around that pillar and say no. | |
| And in our time, the heresy revolves all around morality, and especially sexual morality. | |
| The heresy basically is moral relativism. | |
| And it's a heresy when it's within Christianity, when you have Christians who say that morality changes or that we get to decide what's moral. | |
| And so those of us who love the faith, we have to rally around objective morality and say, no, you cannot tear down this pillar. | |
| All right. We'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks for listening, everybody. |