June 21, 2024 Show with Dr. Robert Sungenis on “Did Jimmy Akin Accurately Represent the Roman Catholic Church’s Teachings at His Recent Debate with Dr. James R. White”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross and sports legend

Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 21st day of June 2024.

And I have a warning, warning, warning. This is not a modern, squishy, mushy, gushy ecumenical program.

As I know, I will be accused of conducting today no matter what I say. But today we have an interesting program.

As anybody who listens to this program regularly knows, I very rarely interview a

Roman Catholic, being a Reformed Baptist myself, a committed Calvinist.

But today we are making an exception. We have an old friend of mine on the program by the name of Dr.

Robert St. Genis. He is a Roman Catholic apologist, author, debater, and founder of Catholic Apologetics International, also known as CAI.

And today we are going to be discussing, did Jimmy Akin of Catholic Answers accurately represent the

Roman Catholic Church's historical and dogmatic teachings at his recent debate with Dr.

James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries on the theme, How Does One Find Peace with God?

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Robert St.

Genis. Thank you, Chris. It's been a few years, and I'm happy to be back with you.

Yes, it has been quite a number of years. In fact, the last time you were on, a very dear friend of mine who is now in heaven,

Richard Bennett, many of my listeners may recognize that name. He was a former

Roman Catholic priest who had converted to Evangelical Protestantism and was a

Reformed Baptist evangelist and author. And he was heartbroken when

I interviewed you the last time. And he actually called me up and said with his thick

Irish accent, Oh, Chris, what have you done? What have you done? You broke my heart,

Chris. This isn't the Chris Arnson I know. And I kept explaining to him that it wasn't intended to be an ecumenical platform.

At that time, we were addressing a conservative Roman Catholic evaluates the

Roman Catholic Church's most liberal pope in history. This was after Pope Francis became the pope.

And so I did get other negative feedback, but I stuck to my guns, and I'm sticking to my guns now that just because I have a friendship with a

Roman Catholic and because I have once in a blue moon a

Catholic on my show doesn't mean I'm a bleeding heart, mushy, gushy, squishy, modern ecumenist.

But the reason, as you know, that you're on the program today is what

I just mentioned earlier about the recent debate that took place. This was not one that I arranged and hosted.

This took place in Houston, Texas. The debate was arranged, hosted, and moderated by Pastor Brian Gunter of First Baptist Church in Livingston, Louisiana.

Two -day debate with Dr. James R. White and Jimmy Akin of Catholic Answers.

And we're going to be evaluating that from a conservative

Catholic viewpoint, even though Jimmy Akin and Catholic Answers, I'm sure, would identify themselves as conservative

Catholics. There seems to have been a change in direction in the manner with which the field of apologetics is being practiced by Catholic Answers, and perhaps specifically

Jimmy Akin in this case. There was a time when you could count on Jimmy Akin to be very openly and vocally opposed to Protestantism and even, more specifically, evangelicalism.

But there was more of an approach of an ecumenical love fest at that recent debate.

And we'll get into that for a moment. But before that, since this is a very timely occurrence, which just happened actually yesterday morning, when you and I had dinner last night at Pitt Street Station restaurant here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I wasn't even aware that this happened.

But Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has been summoned by the

Vatican because he apparently is being charged with schism due to some very caustic comments that he has made publicly about Pope Francis.

And apparently, according to you, this has been going on for quite some time. He called

Pope Francis a liberal servant of Satan, demanded his resignation, and even suggested that the

Vatican Swiss Guard arrest the 87 -year -old pontiff, according to the

Washington Post. And he was saying in this letter, this open letter, a lot of things that you probably agree with as far as your disagreements with Pope Francis.

But I assume he, in your opinion, went overboard in denying him his papal office.

If you want to speak for yourself here and say anything else that I failed to mention about Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano and this recent severe criticism of Pope Francis, which is basically leading him to a penal canon trial on the charges of the crime of schism and denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis.

Yes, let me add to that a little bit to sort of round things out. First of all, his name is pronounced

Vigano, the accent on the O, so people don't get confused.

He was from what, 2009 to 17, something like that.

He was there for eight or nine years as the papal nuncio to the

United States, and he had his office in Washington, D .C. The papal nuncio basically is like the pope to the bishops in the

United States. The next highest up would be Pope Bergoglio, Pope Francis.

So he had a very high position. And as you said, since Bergoglio is a liberal through and through, and he was that way when he was in Argentina, very staunch, intolerable, a liberal for the liberal cause, as most

Catholics are today, I would say, I would easily say that 90 % of Catholics today are liberal.

Wow. And that, yeah, I would make that, you know, you might lower it down to 85, possibly 80, but anything above 50, you're in trouble, big trouble.

And that's the way it's been for a while, for decades. Even John Paul II, as conservative as some people think he was, had some wacky liberal ideas that he pushed through.

Yeah, you were actually fired from EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network, the

Roman Catholic network run by, at the time, Mother Angelica, because you were openly critical on your program of Pope John Paul II, correct?

Yeah, well, Mother Angelica had nothing to do with my firing from EWTN, that's for sure.

That came from the management, the board, let's say, particularly a guy named

Colin Donovan. I don't know if he's still there or not. Me? Yeah. But, you know, is he?

Okay. So they just draw their line in the sand, and that is no criticism of the Pope, no matter what he does.

And I still think that they have that today, although they allow, what's his name, Raymond Arroyo, to have a lot of freedom in that area, because he's on Fox News with Laura Ingram a lot of times.

So he's got a name for himself that you don't want to push him too far, or else he'll pack his bags and go somewhere else.

He has the privilege of doing that because he's very popular. So they let him go.

But anybody else, first thing you know when you go down to EWTN is no criticism of the

Pope. I think, though, that Pope Francis is straining credulity down there at EWTN because he's so out on left field that even

EWTN is wondering where the line should be drawn now, because it's not the same as it was when

John Paul II was in. So, yeah, they have a whole different can of worms to deal with with Francis.

But anyway, getting back to Viganò, like I said, he was the papal nuncio for eight years or so.

And so, you know, you can't be a jerk and get that kind of position. You have to know.

You have to know a lot of people. You've got to know your

Catholic faith. You have to be faithful. You know, you have to toe the line in order to get into a position like that.

And he had a lot of authority as well. And I guess something happened while he was papal nuncio with Bergoglio that he just couldn't take it anymore, you know, because as a

Catholic, and you may even know this growing up as a Catholic, there's a lot of crap you've got to take that goes on inside the church, internally, externally, that you just sort of put on the shelf and you live with it and you move on.

And he reached that boiling point where he could not do so anymore. And he's been like an open faucet since then of criticism of Pope Francis and this whole entourage.

I mean, there was a guy on, who was his name? Father Gumco or something like that.

I just learned from he says 80 % of the cardinals are gay. 50 % of the bishops are gay.

Somewhere near that for the priests. And so, you know, and it goes on and on and on and it never stops.

They try to cover it up when it gets exposed in the news. And everybody thinks everything's okay now, but it's not.

It's the same old story over and over again. And he knows it because he's in the upper echelon of Catholicism.

He has to know everything. And so anyway, he's been saying that Pope Francis is not the

Pope. He's been saying that, you know, this guy should be burned at the stake. And, you know, I didn't hear that one.

No, no, I'm just making that up. I'm just, you know, using history's response to some heretics as you probably could say.

If he lived centuries ago, Pope Francis likely would have been burned at the stake. Wouldn't he have?

Yeah, well, you don't burn the Pope at the stake. That's just one thing you have to accept.

And being a Catholic is the Pope is the Pope. And he's not going to be gone from your midst until the

Lord decides to take him in death. And you're stuck with him until then. But see, this revolves around something larger at issue here.

And that is the structure, the hierarchy, the physical presence of the

Catholic Church. The reason it has survived for 2 ,000 years, and we've had some doozies, really, some real monsters as popes.

And, you know, it's more than like two dozen throughout the 2 ,000 years. There's been what, 266 popes,

I think. I forget the exact number now. But out of that, you know, 10, 15 % were real scoundrels.

And people had to put up with them. But the byword was, look, the institution has to survive.

And the only way the institution can survive is if there are aberrant voices out there, we give them a little rope, enough to hang themselves, so to speak.

Until they get to the point, like Viganò has gotten, where the pope's no longer the pope.

Everything Pope Francis says is heresy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The church will give you a little rope, you know, to voice your opinion.

But after you cross a certain line, it's over. And that's where it is now with Viganò. He's been such a staunch and unrelenting voice of criticism that the

Vatican has said, OK, your time's up. And that's why he's being called to the Vatican now. And he will be convicted,

I believe, because they can't let something like this go. And he's going to serve as an example for anybody else there who basically is overshooting himself in the sense of an overreaction, where now he's trying to tumble the institution.

And when you reach that point, you know, it's not the same thing as just criticizing the pope.

Making a mistake on his Wednesday address, you know, you're going after the whole enchilada

Viganò is, and that's why he's being called. Now, to repeat what

I said earlier, I'm assuming, and you could clarify whether I'm correct or not in this assumption, that you agreed with most of what

Viganò was saying, but you just disagree with his reaching the point which

I can't see it being anything else but state of vacantism or state of accountism, however you pronounce it.

The system that has been adopted by our mutual friend Jerry Matitix, once one of the most beloved

Roman Catholic apologists around, once the darling of Catholic answers, who has come to believe that there has not been a genuine pope, if I'm not mistaken, since Vatican II.

And is that where you believe he went overboard, reaching that point?

Yeah, and Jerry and I have had discussions on this as far back as 2004.

We took a trip together to Ireland, and we stayed at the house of another study mechantist, and he and Jerry ganged up on me, actually, when we went out to dinner.

They didn't tell me they were going to do this, but they ganged up on me, and they started, because they wanted to get me in the pond with them, and so they challenged me on any point that they felt was relevant to convince me to be a study vacantist like them.

And it all boiled down to one basic idea, and that is, look, you can have any opinion you want of whether this guy is a pope or not, but that's as far as it goes.

It doesn't go any further than an opinion. Why is that the case?

Because you have absolutely no authority. Absolutely no authority.

And that's what makes the Catholic Church the Catholic Church. It's a hierarchy of authority, and the guy at the top, which is the pope, holds all the cards.

So there's really, you know, he could come as close as possible to being exactly what

Jerry thinks he is, but that's where it stops, and the case is over.

Period. Done. And that's what I told him in my argument, is you have absolutely no authority beyond what your opinion is.

And what are the parameters, the guardrails that are imposed upon you as someone who considers himself a faithful Orthodox Roman Catholic in regard to what you can say in criticism of the pope?

You can, as Canon 2 .12 of the Code of Canon Law 1983 says, you have the right and duty to bring to your pastors things that, from your expertise, you know, like, in other words, you have to be educated.

You just can't be any Joe off the street, you know, complaining. You have to be educated in your field of expertise.

And with that and due respect for the office of the pastor, and in this case, the pastor would be the pope, with due respect, you can give your opinions to the pastor about the needs of the church, whether it's moral issues or faith issues, okay?

And that's what gives us the right, as a Catholic apologist, to say what we believe the pope might be doing wrong.

And we also have the right to give that information, it says in Canon 2 .12,

to fellow Christians. So that's what makes it public. So you have the right,

I mean, you're not going to go whispering in the ear of some Christian, you're going to be telling them outright, in public, what you think is wrong with what the pope is doing.

You know, take, for example, his recent encyclical, you know, Fiducia Supplicans, which allows for the blessing of homosexuals.

So, you know, we all have the right to give our opinion, but that's where it stops. We have no authority, whatever, to get rid of that document.

Now, as far as the Catholic catechism, the

Catholic catechism contains things within it that the traditionalist

Catholics would openly oppose, things that are not dogma that are included in there, like, for instance, that Muslims adore the same one true

God as Roman Catholics do, and that kind of a thing. Are you bound to not publicly oppose the

Catholic catechism? No, because the Catholic catechism, which itself says, is not infallible.

This is written by men without the charism of infallibility, and that's repeated in the catechism, and that's, as a matter of fact, even the

English translation of the catechism that was put out in 2000 by the

USCCB says that very thing. So, no, we are allowed to criticize the catechism, but again, it has to be understood that that's the limit of your authority because it's just an opinion.

You have the right to complain to your pastor and to fellow Christians, and that's it.

It's over. But you do have the right to do that, and I can think of a lot more issues in the catechism besides the

Muslims and us worship one God. I mean, even in that one itself, if the catechism had gone on the next paragraph and said, but there is a distinction, and that is that the monotheistic

God of Catholicism is composed of three independent persons,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that makes it different than the Muslim God Allah, you see, but they didn't do that, and that's where the problem comes in.

So, the impression you get after you read that passage, I think it's in 850 or something, paragraph 850, or right around there, the impression you get is, no big deal.

Muslims, Catholics, all the same. No difference. Worship the same God. Let's move on.

That's the kind of impression you get, but of course, that's not Catholic tradition. So, the catechism is written in such a way, and most of the guys that wrote it were liberals, even

Ratzinger, who put his imprimatur on it. Half the days he was a liberal, half the days he was a conservative.

You never really knew what was going to come out of him, whereas with Francis, you know it's all going to be liberal.

So, you had a lot of liberals behind writing the catechism, and you see that throughout the catechism.

You see their ideas, and of course, you had a lot of the same thing in Vatican II. I mean, the liberals actually were honest about that, and they came out and said, yeah, well, one paragraph was written by the conservatives, and the next paragraph was written by the liberals, so everybody could live together.

I mean, that's Vatican II, for Pete's sake. So, it goes far back. Liberals have been invading the

Catholic Church for a very long time, since the late 1880s or so, and they've made some inroads, and that's where the problems are coming in, and then you get a guy like Viganò, who had, what, he's what, 90 or something?

So, he's been around. He knows what the tradition says, and you're the papal nuncio.

Nobody's going to push you around. You know what the truth is. But sometimes what happens with people in the

Catholic Church, they get so fed up with it, they can't control their emotions or the overreaction that's going to take it to get people's attention, and then the whole thing falls apart, which it's doing right now for him.

So, to boil it down to its core, you believe that popes, as this present one, can develop unthinkable anti -Christian ideology, but somehow

God, and I'll apply this to Roman Catholic theology, even though it usually doesn't come up, this word, but, and God and His sovereignty somehow is restraining a pope from ever dogmatically defining these anti -Christian, anti -biblical, anti -historical ideas that even defy

Roman Catholic history. So, is that what, basically? Yeah, well, like St.

Paul said, if you want to know what's going to happen to the Church, let me tell you. In 1

Corinthians 10, verses, what, 6 and 11, or 5 and 11, he says, let's go back and look what happened to Israel, and I hope the same thing doesn't happen to you, which means he's implying that the same thing could happen to you, right?

So, when he goes back and looks at the history of Israel, he picks some incidents that happened that were, you know, off the wall, apostate, heretical, whatever words you want to use, they were wrong, and they were immoral, too, like a lot in the

Catholic Church are today. I mean, if 80 percent of your cardinals are gay, I mean, come on, something's wrong with this system, but you had the same kind of immorality back in Israel, and he picks that time where God actually killed 23 ,000 of them in one day for their immorality, and Paul says, now, look, why were these things written down?

They were written down for you who live in the New Testament, who's just about to come to the end of the ages, you know, so time is short, and you're it.

You're on the stage now. Israel was before. Now it's your turn, so let's see what you're going to do, and so what we learn from this is, hey, if you want to find out how the church is going to be run, go back and see what happened in Israel, and man, if you look real close, you see what you wonder how they survived sometimes because they were so wicked.

On almost every page of the Old Testament, you have some sin that crops up that's just about to destroy them, and somehow they survive.

If you look at the kings of Israel, you had, what, 20 kings in the north. Every single one of them had a bad epitaph.

This king did evil in the sight of the Lord, and out of Judah, you had 20 kings.

Ten of them were so -so, and only three of them were really good, and even David, the one that was considered good, committed adultery and murder, so I mean, look, that's not good prospects for what's going to happen to the church, and if you look at Catholic church history, like I said, we've had a lot of doozies in the papal office, and you can imagine how many are going to be in the cartel and the bishopric if the popes get back, so I mean, this is, when you get educated as to what this is all about and what to expect, it's only going to be a small amount of people that actually remain faithful in the

Catholic church, and that's what we see today. Like I said, 90 % of them are liberal.

How did that come? Well, same thing that happened in Israel, so that's how we can live with it, by knowing that God was the one who forecasted this.

There was a time in Elijah's day where you had probably about 10 million people.

This was in the 800s, because when they came out of Egypt, they had 600 ,000 men, which means they probably had about two or three million people with women and children included, but by Elijah's time, you had about 10 million, and you can only find 7 ,000 that hadn't bowed the knee to the devil, for Pete's sake.

You know, that's like 0 .014 % of the people, and so it's like, okay, you know, we can have all these great plans, but give man free will, and this is what's going to happen, and that's what we're seeing today in the

Catholic Church. Okay, we have to go to our first commercial break, and please do not go away, because we're going to be right back after these messages with more of Dr.

Robert Syngenis, and we will be critiquing Jimmy Akin's representation of the

Roman Catholic Church during recent debates in Houston, Texas with Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. If you've just tuned us in, my guest today is an old friend of mine on the opposite end of the

Tiber that I am on. His name is Dr. Robert St. Genes, founder of Catholic Apologetics International, one of the more conservative

Catholic apologists left in existence. And we are, if you want to boil it down to its essence, we are today agreeing about how much we disagree.

And that seems to be something that many Catholic apologists are no longer doing.

They seem to be taking a much more soft, gentler approach that is more driven by modern ecumenism than by historical accuracy as to what

Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants believe. And of course, there are multitudes of evangelicals out there doing the same thing.

But today we are going to be critiquing debates that were recently held.

And we are going to be basically dissecting some things that occurred there.

And we're having Robert St. Genes, as a conservative Catholic, let us know what his opinion is as to regard the accuracy of the statements that Jimmy Akin made during this debate, which actually, as I said earlier, surprised me very much because I can remember hearing

Jimmy Akin on the Catholic Answers radio program, and being very critical of evangelical doctrine and so on.

And he is taking the approach of trying to win us over with, I guess, what he views as love.

I don't personally believe it is loving to dilute the truth of how different we are as far as Roman Catholics and evangelical

Protestants are concerned. But one of the clips—in fact, this is the only clip

I'm going to play. The rest of it I'm going to leave to your memory of—predominantly, we're going to be addressing his comments, that's

Jimmy Akin's comments, on justification by faith alone, which is a core doctrine of evangelical

Protestantism, at least it's supposed to be. And also, I'd like to get into, if we have time especially, the anathemas pronounced at the

Council of Trent, because that seemed to be totally diminished in its condemnation of Protestants, as I always viewed it as being.

But I'm going to play a clip that probably startled me more than anything in both debates.

It is Jimmy Akin's response to James White when James White brings up the pro -homosexual agenda of Pope Francis.

And here we have Jimmy Akin's response. I think that the

Pope's view—I think you're misreading the Pope's view of homosexuality, and I don't understand exactly what you've asked me.

Can you restate the question? Well, it just seemed to me that air conditioners and the idea of blessings of irregular relationships, especially in light of the

Synod of Synodality, is a really long stretch that's not appropriate. Wouldn't you agree?

I think that in both cases, we have the Church doing something that is not prohibited by either

Scripture or apostolic tradition. You may have different valuations in terms of which ones you approve, but I don't see a difference in principle in what's happening here.

And I frankly think you're misreading the situation, perhaps because you haven't followed the

Catholic press on this closely enough. But giving a blessing—it has been clarified that this does not involve giving a blessing to a union, but to two individuals.

I understand that. We'll stop the clip there. So please respond and tell us how you would have responded to James White's questions about Pope Francis's pro -homosexual ideology.

Well, I can tell you very easily it wouldn't be what Jimmy Akin said, that is for sure.

I just wanted to say, Chris, my end of this transmission is a little choppy.

I don't know if you got my message during the break, but I could hardly make out what either

White or Akin was saying totally, because it was so choppy. That's interesting, because people in the audience,

I have been asking certain people who I knew were listening, and they said that the audio is fine, so I'm not sure why you're hearing it in a choppy fashion.

No idea. Okay, so I checked my connections. Everything seems to be okay, so I'll go on with what

I think I heard. So this is the dilemma that Jimmy Akin is in as a

Catholic apologist, and most Catholic apologists are in the same dilemma, and that is if the

Pope says or does something that is off -kilter, not kosher, wherein everybody who's listening knows something's a little off here, even the most conciliatory judges would say, it doesn't sound right.

It's not passing the sniff test, and so they have to make a decision right away, and that is, what am

I going to do? Am I going to defend the Pope and make it sound like, hey,

I'm really a Catholic apologist here, and the apologist's job is to make what the Pope says look good, because that's what an apologist does, like a political apologist, for example.

That's his job, and that's what the news media does for President Biden.

Whatever he does, they make it sound good because they're apologists, or are you going to say, look, this guy's not perfect.

That's obvious. He's had some real faux pas in the 10 years he's been

Pope, and now we're getting to an area where, hey, I know that Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed totally because of one big sin, and this

Pope seems to be angling toward that like a freight train that can't be stopped ever since he got into the pontificate.

I mean, from when he said on the plane, you know, who am I to judge?

To fiduciary supplicants, this guy has not taken his foot off the gas. So now you have to decide as a

Catholic apologist, what am I going to do? Am I going to go with my moral gut that's telling me something's wrong here and I need to say it, or are you just, well, it's not the same thing,

James. I think we're looking at things a little differently from different perspectives, you know, and you give this goobledygop kind of, let's try to get away from this question as fast as possible.

So I'll say some words here that sort of put you off, then maybe we can move on to the next question, because this is a debate anyway, right?

That's what it appeared like to me that he was doing. He wasn't really going to call the Pope out for saying or even intimating that homosexuality was okay.

And sometimes from Pope Francis, you get two different messages.

Like two weeks ago, in a private conversation he had with some of his top cardinals, and there were some bishops there, he off the cuff said to one of them, there's too much faggotry in the

Catholic seminaries. And the news media caught hold of this and made it front page news.

And they, the, you know, the woke people came out and said,

Oh, he's racist. He's this, he's called them faggots, you know, can't use that kind of language.

That's what they were concerned about. I didn't know they were a race. Hey, don't you know, everything's racism today.

So, and so he got called on the carpet for that. And the next day, very next day,

I mean, after the worldwide news that he called them faggots, the next day, he apologized for what he said, you know, okay,

I shouldn't have called him faggots. And I don't know to the, I don't know what extent there was to that apology.

Like, well, I'm going to retract the whole substance of the thing. Like, I didn't really mean there were a lot of faggots in the seminary, or he just meant that I used the wrong word.

I don't know to this day, two weeks hence, I don't know. But you know, he's given mixed signals.

So the Catholic apologist is looking at him and going, Oh, you know, what do I do?

I get, I get mixed signals from the Pope. I don't know exactly where we stand in all this.

And, and then he's waiting for some clarification. He doesn't get it. And so he's left with that dilemma.

Do I go with my gut? And, you know, like, would another way to say that would be, what would

Jesus do? You know, the old, the old wristbands we used to wear? What would Jesus do?

I'm a Calvinist. I never wore those. You know, the

Pope should wear it around his neck. He needs that kind of reminder. But that's, that's the dilemma.

Sometimes a Christian apologist or a Catholic apologist will get into as the Pope does this, would

Jesus do this? And he knows in his gut, Jesus wouldn't do that. You see, he wouldn't give blessings to homosexuals.

Jesus would be the first one to say, look, you guys, you're in big sin.

And unless you repent of your sin, now you would say in a polite way, of course, that Jesus always did.

But if you don't repent of your sin, you're on your way to hell, just like those people in Sodom and Gomorrah that you read about.

That's what he would say. And we all know that, that Jesus would say that. But the

Pope, wow. So we all know that he's gone astray. It's just a matter of who's going to admit it.

And when they admit it, they're going to be straight faced about it and call a spade a spade, you see.

But Jimmy, he's of the opinion. Well, we, you know, as a Catholic apologist, I just can't do that kind of stuff, you know.

And, you know, I can't make the Pope look bad because I'll lose my job at Catholic Answers.

And as a matter of fact, let me say this about that whole thing. When they had their previous president,

Carl Keating, he avoided the subjects of criticizing the

Pope. Of course, he had an easier time with John Paul II than we did with Francis. But he's a lot different than the president now,

Christopher Chek, who is a guy who's much more conciliatory than Carl Keating ever was.

So it's a situation where you have two different masters calling the shots, and that's why you see

Catholic Answers today being much more ecumenical than you remember it being in the old days of Jimmy Akin.

But the thing is, that is not going to help Catholic Answers in their efforts to win over evangelicals through ecumenical love, because as far gone as a lot of evangelicalism is, kind of candy -coating

Pope Francis's pro -homosexual comments and beliefs is going to just further outrage at least many evangelicals, unfortunately not all.

Yeah, with Pope Francis, it's like they know that. Catholic Answers know that.

They have a ticking time bomb, and they're just hoping he dies before he actually breaks the dam.

And so they're all sitting with their fingers in the holes in the dam and hoping that it goes away, that the water level starts to drop by itself, and that's if Francis is taken out of the way.

Until then, they'll keep putting their fingers in the hole of the dike, and hopefully it won't collapse on them, and they can still, you know, go on as they've been going on.

But they're at the precipice, and they would have to know that with a guy like Francis. And they're just hoping everything, you know, will subside eventually.

Now, if they can legitimately criticize

Pope Francis in a guarded way, as you are doing and have done, what is stopping them from basically saying the same kind of thing you would say?

Come on, Chris. How long have you been a right? Come on, man.

You've been around the block. You know human beings. Um, you know, there's good ones out there, and there's bad ones, and there's some mediocre ones.

You know, we've got a lot of mediocre ones, the Catholic Answers. You know, you can, you rock the boat by getting into it, but don't start rocking the boat when you're sitting down in the boat, because you're just going to cause problems.

So this is an organization that wants to get by without rocking the boat a little bit too much so that somebody out there notices, oh, what's happening to Catholic Answers?

You know, we don't want that. Okay. And I hate to say this, but a lot of it runs around how much money they're going to make.

Okay. I mean, that's just, EWTN is the same way. That's why they fired me.

Can you imagine me getting on EWTN and saying, hey, I have a really hard time with Pope John Paul II calling that interreligious prayer day where he's got

Muslims, and animists, and Buddhists, and everybody else praying to their own gods for what?

World peace. You know, I have a real problem with it, and that's why I got fired from EWTN, because I said, hey, there's no way

I am going to accept that. And so, you know, they cut the cord, and, you know, they make millions of dollars per year just being, you know, the kind face of Mother Angelica.

That's why they keep putting her out there, even though she's been dead for, you know, five or six years or so.

So, yeah, you know, it's all human, and when it's human, there's a lot of things that are just not going to bring the truth out.

I think you and I both know that, so that's what I meant when I said, Chris, where, you know, you know the same thing

I do, why these things happen. And we have to go to our midway break right now, folks.

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This is Chris Arnzen of Iron Arnzen.

He is the founder of Catholic Apologetics International. He is a world -renowned Catholic apologist, and we are critiquing, or should

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And we will be returning to that discussion with Bob St. Genes momentarily. I just have a couple of important announcements to make.

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And going back to the clip that we just played before the break of Jimmy Akin basically explaining away soft -peddling

Pope Francis's beliefs about homosexuality, what about the line that he gave that what he was really talking about was blessing individuals and not unions?

Because initially the entire media, whether it was liberal or conservative, was saying that Pope Francis was blessing same -sex unions as long as they are not viewed as a marriage.

And then it seemed to devolve into a softer approach where it was the blessing of individuals involved in those same -sex relationships.

First of all, did that really happen in your opinion or to your knowledge? Yeah, that did happen.

Okay, but even that, why on earth is a special blessing being given to people in open rebellion against God in the way that they are expressing sexuality?

Well, you know, life tells us when you do something wrong and you try to cover it up, everybody knows what you're trying to do by covering it up.

And you only make the situation worse because now you feel guilty for what you did, but you don't know how to get out of it.

So you keep covering it up and covering it up and hope everybody goes away eventually, which is what has happened actually.

But the media got it right. If the claim is that you want to bless individuals and not the union, whatever they want to call it, well then tell the people to break up the relationship and then come back to the priest individually and ask for a blessing instead of having both people there, both men there, and giving them a blessing as a couple.

If that's what the dividing line is, individuality, okay, we'll make it individual, and nobody's going to have a problem, except that we're going to expect the priest or the bishop who's giving the blessing to say, hey, by the way, you know, living in a homosexual relationship, even though your partner isn't here, is a mortal sin, and you will go to hell for that.

Do we hear any of that? Of course not. Okay. So this is just a ploy. You bless the individual, not the couple.

It's just a ploy. Okay. You and I both know that. But this is the game that the

Vatican has been playing. They, more than half of their prelature is gay.

So how are you going to defend these guys? Because if you come out and strong against homosexuality, basically you've condemned more than half of the prelature, the priests, the bishops, and the cardinals.

Okay. So we play this game as long as we can until it's finally exposed, and when that's going to happen, and where the bridge finally falls, we don't know, but we're heading toward that.

Okay. Well, let's move on to the primary area where you had serious problems with Jimmy Akin's approach at representing the

Roman Catholic Church on justification. And he was really taking the approach, unlike approaches that I've heard years ago, especially when

I started organizing these debates, where the

Catholic apologists were pretty much saying with crystal clarity that evangelical

Protestants are dead wrong. Martin Luther was dead wrong. The Reformation was dead wrong on declaring the heresy of justification by faith alone.

And Jimmy was basically using a much softer approach by saying, well, that could be true if it's just worded a little bit more clearly, and that's kind of the approach he was taking.

Just in your own words, please continue to give your examination of this.

Yeah. He went to the point where, because there was

Lutherans and Catholics talking together, he concluded from that that if Catholic apologists now insist on taking an argumentative approach to Protestants, they're on the wrong track.

You're talking about the Lutheran -Catholic joint declaration on justification, which was not some kind of official document that all evangelical

Protestants supported, nor Roman Catholics. This was basically more of an agreement between at least moderate to liberal people from both camps, right?

Yeah, well, that's what you normally get today. The only ones that are talking to one another from different aisles of the faith are liberals from both sides, because these guys are just of a different mold.

They're more prone to pat each other on the back and say, yeah, we know life is tough, and it's hard to understand these things, and so let's be friends and walk the same path, and we all love

Jesus and all this. Those are the guys that take that kind of position, the liberals.

And we know what liberals are like. We see it today in our politics. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and let everybody know that, wow, we all want to just be friends, but inside, my gosh, they're some of the most intolerable people that you'll ever meet.

At least the conservatives on the outside say, yeah, we're intolerable. We only want the right moral things, and the heck with you if you don't.

The liberals, no, they're squeamish about that. And so they get very friendly, and that's where you find for the last, what, 50 years, we've had all the ecumenical movements among liberals, and so we understand where that's all coming from.

And, you know, like I said, the Catholic privileges, about 90 % liberal. So, yeah, these guys make a perfect match in heaven to talk to one another, and yet still, you know, they said, even said in the joint declaration, yeah, we want to be friendly with one another, but we're going to hold to our beliefs, you know.

Oh, okay, well, let's see how that works out. And so, because they're diametrically opposed to one another.

I mean, for 500 years, we've all known that, and all of a sudden, you know, we come to this point where, wow, maybe we don't, you know, believe different things, as Jimmy Akin is trying to tell us.

It's just a matter of quibbling about words. My goodness. Not one Missouri Synod Lutheran or other conservative

Lutheran that I've interviewed on this program, or even had conversations with privately, said that they had any involvement in that document and have no support for it whatsoever.

Yeah, you know, the Wisconsin Synod, Missouri Synod, you know, all of them, they know that somebody's trying to pull the rug out from under them, and they're not going to have any part of it.

So, this is just the nature of the churches today. The World Council of Churches, you know, that offered support for this, they're all in on it.

They're all liberal, and they're trying to just dilute all the doctrines so that we can just all hold hands and sing kumbaya together.

So, that's been going on for quite a while. Now, long time... Go ahead, I'm sorry. No, you better, if it's on the same topic, because I was going to switch to another topic.

Oh, yeah, it is on the same topic. I was just going to say that a longtime friend of mine, decades long, going back to the 90s, who is...

He would claim to be a conservative Catholic. I would categorize him as more of a moderate, left -leaning

Catholic, but he is pro -life. He is opposed to same -sex marriage and that kind of thing, but will, most of the time, from what

I understand from our conversations, he will vote politically liberal and that kind of thing. But he, whenever we have conversations, because he is a lot more ecumenical than I am—in fact,

I don't even know if you really could call me ecumenical at all when it comes to Roman Catholic relationships—but he will always bring up the joint declaration, the

Lutheran Catholic joint declaration on justification, and I'll tell him, it is not an official document either from Lutherans or from your church.

He said that... Yeah, even Charles Ratzinger refused to sign that document. He refused to go to Regensburg, Germany, where the signing took place, to sign it, and he was the

CDF, the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So, was

Ratzinger in error? I'm sorry, not Ratzinger.

Was my friend in error when he said that there was some kind of public affirmation that this was a wonderful thing by Ratzinger?

It was so bad that the whole thing was about to fall apart until Ratzinger intervened and changed some of the wording that was so atrocious that I don't think even he could believe it.

But, you know, with Ratzinger, you never know what you're going to get because on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he's very conservative, but on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, he's a liberal.

Okay? We've known about that for a long time with him. But the fact is, he held the office of the

CDF, and he didn't sign the document. The only one that did was Cardinal Cassidy, and he's an ecumenist who had absolutely no authority in the

Catholic Church to equate this with Catholic dogma. If that wasn't the case, then since 1999, the

Catholic Church would be rewriting her catechism, because everything that was in the joint declaration was against what the catechism was saying.

Okay? But have we made any movements to do that? No. And is it going to happen? No. The catechism is going to remain the way it is.

So let me go to the topic I wanted to go to to show you the stark differences between us and the

Lutherans to this very day. That is, some try to say, well, you know, Luther was a lot more strict in his doctrine than the

Lutherans today. Well, maybe there are some Lutheran liberals out there, but not the joint declaration. What they wrote in the joint declaration is spot on the same as what

Luther believed when he wrote his, when he tacked his theses against the Wittenberg door.

Okay, nothing's changed in that regard. The only thing that changed were three instances where the

Catholics changed their doctrine. Wow. To accommodate the Lutherans. Yeah. So even though these were left -leaning

Lutherans, they still were remaining faithful, according to your understanding, of Martin Luther.

That's right. Believe it or not. And because when push came to shove, what were they going to do?

Where were they going to go? They could go to the formula of Concord. They could possibly look at Philip Melanchthon.

But they're basically the same. And the only real issue that Melanchthon brought up against Luther was his belief in double predestination.

And of course, most Lutherans will vociferously reject that idea. Yeah, yeah.

So, but everything else, like the imputation of Christ's righteousness, forensic, the whole forensic idea of justification, the idea that you can't lose your salvation, what else?

Imputation, as far as Romans 4 .4 was concerned. All those doctrines were to a

T preserved by the Lutheran side in that Lutheran… Even the belief that you can't lose your salvation?

I didn't even know Luther believed that. Yeah, Luther did believe that.

Wow. And that's interesting, because you'll never find a Lutheran pastor who will state that.

Yeah, well, it's because he's not following Luther on that particular thing. Because once Philip Melanchthon came along, and he split the

Lutheran church practically in two, they were getting different ideas, and they were having a hard time, believe me.

Now, he brought the Lutheran church farther away from Calvin and more close, in some ways, to Rome.

Not fully, obviously. Right, right. Regarding the nature of man, especially, and the decrees of God, as far as election and predestination.

Yeah, and that's another thing, as far as how they viewed man. I mean, Luther believed that man was sinful regardless of whether he had a conversion to Christ or not.

He was still sinful on the inside, and the Catholics believe, no, it's not sin. We call it concupiscence.

It's just a proclivity to sin, but it's not sin. So that's another area where they disagreed and tried to cover it up in the

Joint Declaration. But the area where the Catholics gave in was three paragraphs wherein they basically said that – how can

I put this to get it accurate? – that the works that come after justification aren't classed in a salvation category, basically, is how

I can put it. They talked about renewal following the faith.

They sometimes talked about that real faith is made real faith because the works sort of qualify the faith.

What else did they do? Well, to sort of shorten this, basically, on that issue, you can't find a statement by the

Catholics in the Joint Declaration that says works justify a man.

You won't find it. And in order to sort of ease that through, the

Lutherans were saying, yeah, but renewal is important. When you have the right faith, the renewal comes and sort of just flows out of you, and we believe that with the

Catholics, that if you have good faith in God, then the works are just going to come, but they have no justifying application that you can say, as James 2 .24

says, man is justified by works and not by faith alone. So that's the big giveaway by the

Catholic side, and that's, I think, why Jimmy Akin is probably on his crusade that, well, as long as we use the words faith alone in the right way, we all agree, because we all agree that you have to have good faith.

That's a staple. That's not going to change. So how do we define if you have good faith?

Well, the way that Protestants are used to doing it, even Calvinists or Methodists or Baptists, doesn't make any difference.

They say faith alone justifies, because the good works that come out of the faith qualify the faith as good faith, as justifying faith, and that's as far as we have to go.

We don't have to say that works justify. We just say that works qualify, and so you can say faith alone, and that's exactly what

Jimmy Akin said in the debate. Yeah, and he was making a big deal about not quabbling over words, and it almost was nonsensical, and if Jimmy is listening,

I do—by the way, I do plan on giving Jimmy Akin and Catholic Answers a recording of this discussion today, because if they want to respond, in fact, especially if they want to respond with Dr.

St. Genes on my show, I'd be more than welcome for them to do that. But the quibbling over words, how are you supposed to be involved in a public, moderated, scholarly, theological debate without using words?

I didn't even really—I didn't understand where he was coming from. It sort of just begs the question, doesn't it?

I mean, come on. What are you talking about? We're quibbling over words, and the passage he gets that from—was that 1

Timothy 2 .14, 15? The context is not talking about men of faith trying to find the right words to categorize their doctrines, wherein, like I gave the example in my video of homoousios or homoiousios, you know?

One means Christ is like God. The other means Christ is God. So, I mean, is that a quibbling over words?

I mean, we got two different words here, and Jimmy's telling us we can't do that. No, that's not what the context is talking about at all.

He's talking about heretics in the church who try to sidetrack the discussion into a quibbling about words and forget the true substance of the doctrine that they're trying to defend.

In other words, they're trying to confuse people because they want these people to come to their side of the fence on what the true doctrines are, okay?

He's not talking about Christian men debating with words what the truth is.

I mean, my gosh, if we can't do that, then we can't do anything, like you said. How are you going to do that without using words, you know?

So, this is just an excuse he came up with. Maybe he feels guilty or something after all these years in arguing with people, and now he sees he needs to be nicer and more ecumenical, and one problem in getting to that plateau is because, you know, maybe we're using wrong words, and we really don't understand that.

We really do believe the same thing. Well, no, that's not the case. We don't believe the same thing.

I mean, if one side is that, yes, you have to have good faith, but you have to add works to that so that you are justified also by works, and then you are on your way to salvation if you continue with good faith and good works.

I mean, that's pretty clear. That's what the Catholic teaching was, and as a matter of fact, the church said, well, how do we accomplish that?

And they said, here's the way. We infuse the baptized person with faith, hope, and love, where you could say works, so that at the same time, he receives all of these virtues, so then he can be justified.

That's as far as Trent went. It never said, well, first you receive the faith, and then sometime later, you know, you may or may not add works.

It says, no, when you're baptized, you receive all of these at the same time by the grace of God, and that's what justifies you.

I mean, it couldn't be any clearer that we have two distinct doctrines here. By the way, if anybody listening, perhaps you are a huge Catholic Answers fan, and you're saying to yourself, oh,

I've heard about this guy, Bob St. Genes. He's out of his mind. He's not an adequate or legitimate representative of the

Catholic church, and he's a real schismatic troublemaker, and on and on and on.

I want you to know something. In fact, Bob, you may not even remember this, but the reason why

Robert St. Genes, my guest today, debated James White in the year 2000 at the

Great Debate Five on the theme, justification by faith, was because Jimmy Akin was originally scheduled to debate

Dr. White on justification by faith, and for some reason had to pull out of the debate, and he called me weeks before the debate.

I even had to change posters, and he said, I can't make the debate that you're doing there on Long Island, but I've got somebody to replace me,

Robert St. Genes. So obviously, Jimmy knew you well enough that he thought at that time you would do a fine job standing in his place at that debate in the year 2000.

I'm sure that he knew what you believed well enough that he wasn't rejecting the notion or afraid of that notion, so this should dispel any idea that you haven't done your homework on this or that you're not representing

Rome correctly, because you haven't changed. You haven't changed. Not one iota, no.

I mean, ever since I wrote the book in, what, 97 it was published, called

Not by Faith Alone. Right, he must have known the contents of that. He must have.

I think, yeah, I think by that time he did. When was the debate, 1995? No, it was 2000.

The second. Oh, 2000. Okay, yeah, he definitely knew about that. As a matter of fact, Carl Keating had endorsed the book.

He was the president of Catholic Answers at that time, and I got all the top guys that were in apologetics at that time, including

Scott Hahn, who wrote the foreword, Stravinskis. We know about him, but who else?

We had Peter Kreeft. We had Pat Madrid, Bishop Bruskowitz out in Nebraska.

I mean, I had about 12 top guys put their endorsement on that book, and it was one of the first ones to come out in a very long time.

No one had really taken a stab at this, and I felt compelled to do it because we did, as a

Catholic apologist, we didn't have anything we could turn to except, you know, excerpts from the catechism or something, but nobody had put it all together, let's say, in a book where it tied out all the dots together.

So, yeah, so he did know about that book, and the other thing he keeps pushing is that we're imputed with Christ's righteousness, okay?

That is not Catholic doctrine. We are not imputed. That's Reformational doctrine.

What's that? Reformational doctrine. Yeah, yeah, through and through. Which we would believe is Biblical, obviously.

We didn't believe, we hadn't even had those words used. The word forensic was never used in regard to justification or imputation, and yet he's saying that we're imputed with Christ's righteousness.

I don't know where he's getting this from. Well, Scott Hahn, as you probably know, who was formerly

Presbyterian, just like you were at one point, Scott Hahn likes to use uniquely

Reformed vocabulary at times, but putting a Roman Catholic spin on it, and keeping his audience enchanted because they're hearing something that they've never heard before as Catholics.

Maybe, I don't know if Dr. Ricken is doing the same kind of a thing or not. Yeah, Scott and I have had our discussions about this, and we had a very big difference many years ago on how you explain how works are not part of justification.

And his big thing, I think it's what got him into the Catholic Church, was the idea that the works of the law that Paul uses in Romans 3, 28, where it says a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law, under Scott Hahn's understanding, that referred only to the ceremonial law, circumcision, all the pastoral, whatever, the priestly activities and all that, and not to any work that you did, like moral works.

And they used to say, well, all the ceremonial laws from the

Mosaic Law have been abrogated, but not the moral laws. Well, no.

I mean, this is where Luther did have an insight, and so did Augustine. It's just that the

Catholics needed to maintain it, because, you know, it's real easy to say, oh, you know, well, the works of the law only refer to ceremonial works, and put a period after that.

That's real easy to do. To explain how moral works are also not justifiable, well, that takes a little digging.

That takes a little work. And as I said, I think that's where Luther had an edge that people were listening to, because the guys before Luther, what's his name, there's like three or four different theologians,

Catholic theologians, that were opting for this sort of ceremonial law approach.

And Luther said, no, that's not going to work, because you got passages like Titus 3 .5, which says no good works that we do are, you know, going to justify us.

We are justified by the grace of God and all that. So somebody needed to say, when

Paul condemns works of the law, he's condemning the whole law, whether it's moral, civil, ceremonial, whatever.

The Mosaic law is not going to save you. What's going to save you is faith. But then you have to figure out, okay, so why does

Paul put works in there as a justifying element that will eventually give you your salvation?

And that's where we need to treat this properly, because Jimmy Akin certainly didn't do it, but that's the

Catholic doctrine, that works justify. So that needs explanation. And the way I've explained it is that Paul condemns works wherein we do it without grace and therefore put

God into debt, and basically we're saying to God, you owe me because I did my work.

And Paul says, you can never come to God that way, that God owes you. God owes nobody anything, as he says in Romans 11 .35.

And so we say, okay, so then what about the works that Abraham did that gave him justification?

Well, they're works that Abraham did after he's already been justified by faith.

He became a recipient of God's grace that allowed him to do work that God was not going to pay him for, but he was going to give him a reward for.

And so you take it all out of the category of debt, and that's how we've been able to answer that passage.

And by the way, we have to go to our final break. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Robert St. Genes. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

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United States if you are the victim of a serious injury or medical malpractice. We are now back.

And I want to remind our listeners or inform them for the first time that this Monday, my dear friend

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries is joining me along with Dr. Joseph Boot, the founder and president of the

Ezra Institute. They are going to be discussing racism. What is it really and who is really guilty of that sin?

And Dr. Boot is also my next keynote speaker at the next free Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon on Thursday, October 10th.

If you want to register, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put pastor's luncheon in the subject line.

But we are now back with Dr. Robert St. Janice, an old friend of mine. We are on opposite sides of the

Tiber River. And I am not an ecumenist, but I value my friendship with Bob.

And I've always enjoyed my times with him before and after debates. And one of the things

I wanted to ask you, and of course, I'm hoping, actually, that Jimmy Akin does agree to come on the show with you to discuss these things further.

But is it possible that he has not changed his views on justification and other serious matters, but just changes or just has changed the manner with which he publicly defends them and articulates them?

You know, I'd like to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. But I will just say one statement.

I did not find one place in that debate, the justification debate, where Jimmy Akin said that Catholics are justified by the infusion of grace into their soul, at which time they receive faith, hope and love as required by scripture.

Not one time. So if you don't teach that, which is the most basic doctrine of justification in the

Catholic faith, then you either don't know the Catholic faith or you're deliberately dismissing that idea in favor of imputation and faith alone.

So, I mean, I'm going to call it like it is. As you know, I always do. And that's my opinion.

Now, what about his declaration, his joyful, giddy declaration to everybody in that audience at the debate?

Guess what, everybody? Nobody here is under the anathema of the Council of Trent, if you could comment.

Yeah, well, the ones that would be applicable to would be those who have left the

Catholic faith, that is, those who were baptized into the Catholic faith. Like me.

Like you, yeah. You're still under anathema, Chris. Yes, Patrick Madrid actually told me that, too.

Yeah, okay, so you got two votes for you. Yippee!

But see, I think the difference here is that Jimmy Akin was trying to say that nobody is under the anathema because the definition has changed.

No, it hasn't. All that happened was there was a change in wording from the 1917

Code of Canon Law that used both the word anathema and the word excommunication.

When you get to the 1983 Code, the word anathema is not used, but the word excommunication is.

And previous Catholic teaching, including the 1917 Code, told us that there's no difference between anathema and excommunication.

They're virtually the same thing. One is just a little bit more technical than the other, which is excommunication.

So he had that all wrong. And then he didn't make the stipulation that anybody in that audience who was baptized

Catholic and left the Catholic Church under their own volition are definitely under anathema still, and so that needed to be clarified also.

Well, I have time for one of the two questions that a listener has. He happens to be somebody who's a mutual friend of both of ours, but he's on my side of the tiber,

Pastor Joel Saint of Independence Reformed Bible Church in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. Yes, I know

Joel. I haven't seen him or talked to him in a while, but he's always interesting. Yes, and he asks his second question that it's the only one

I have time to read. What can we say about a church that tolerates a pope who espouses sinful positions while persecuting an archbishop for pointing out that fact?

Well, what do you say about the kings of Israel who were all, most of them were all evil, and yet God tolerated them and didn't take them out of office until they died?

Are we going to blame God for allowing them to continue in that kingship office? No, of course not, because those kings had a free will, and God says you have that free will as long as you live.

If you mess things up, you're going to be judged for it. Okay, so we have no more power to eliminate the pope from office than God took the king out of office.

Okay, we all have to tolerate evil people to whenever God decides to take them from this world, and that's just the way the world runs.

Well, I guess I have time to quickly get an answer for the first question he asked. If Vegano is excommunicated, does that make him a

Protestant? Well, according to many Catholics who use the tens of thousands of Protestant denominations, even though many of them are not in any way, shape, or form connected with Protestantism, I guess some would say he was a

Protestant, but how do you respond to that? No, he's not a Protestant until he says, you know,

I reject the Catholic faith because all the doctrines are wrong, and blah, blah, blah.

That's the only way he can become a Protestant. He would actually have to affirm the Protestant Reformation teachings, though, as well.

Yeah, you're fading out. I'm still having the same choppyness, so I didn't quite hear what you said.

I was just saying that to be truly Protestant in a Reformational sense, he would have to affirm the doctrines of the

Protestant Reformation also, not just reject them. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. It's not just a negative that has to be in place where he is negating what the

Pope is saying. He has to make a positive affirmation of another faith that's opposite the

Catholic faith. All right, well, thank you, Pastor Joel, and thank you,

Robert St. Janice. We're out of time, and I really do look forward to having you back on the program to discuss something similar where we can agree about how much we disagree and the seriousness of our disagreements.

It's very refreshing to me, and I want to remind all of you that James White and Dr.

Joe Boot are my guests on Monday. I hope that you all have a blessed, safe, and Christ -honoring weekend and Lord's Day, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater