October 3, 2018 Show with Steven Wedgeworth on “The Sex Scandal in the Roman Catholic Priesthood: A Conservative Protestant Christian Response”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 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 whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's.

Our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this third day of October 2018. Don't forget that this weekend, this Saturday and Sunday, October 6th and October 7th, the Reformation Conference of Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania will be taking place on the theme, Why the Reformation Still Matters, featuring guest speaker Mike Ebendroth.

He is a pastor, an author, a conference speaker. He's been a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio a number of times and if you want more details on this conference, Why the Reformation Still Matters, go to gracebfc .com, that's gracebfc, which stands for Bible Fellowship Church, gracebfc .com forward slash conference, gracebfc .com forward slash conference.

You can also call Grace Bible Fellowship Church for more details at 717 -652 -5229, 717 -652 -5229. And the reason, one of the reasons that I mentioned this conference right up front is because my friend Pastor Josh Miller of Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the one who strongly urged me to interview the guest that we have on today for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

That's Pastor Stephen Wedgworth, who is the Associate Pastor of Faith Presbyterian Church of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is a congregation within the PCA, Presbyterian Church in America. And today we are going to be discussing the sex scandal in the Roman Catholic priesthood, a conservative Protestant Christian response.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Stephen Wedgworth. It's good to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. Before we have you do as we normally do, have our first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, please let our listeners know about Faith Presbyterian Church.

Of Vancouver, British Columbia. Yeah, so Faith has been in existence for about 40 years. It is in the city of Vancouver on the east side, and our members live all over the suburban areas as well. The senior pastor is Mark Jones, who your listeners may be familiar with some of his books.

He co-authored a Puritan Theology with Joel Beeky, and he's written a number of other books, Knowing Christ, Faith, Hope, and Love. It has a really important, in my opinion, important international ministry.

He travels to Brazil, China, Africa, and works with young and upcoming churches there.

We've got to get him on the program, too. I happen to be a close friend of Dr. Joel Beeky, so we've got to get Mark Jones on as well sometime. Yeah, so it's a pleasure to work with him. I'm.

Pretty new. I just got here in April. Prior to that, I had been down in Florida for a number of years. I graduated from Reform Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and I've been.

A pastor in various capacities for about 10 years. Praise God. Well, what we normally do when we have a first-time guest is we have that guest give a summary of the kind of religious atmosphere they were raised in, if any, what providential circumstances our sovereign Lord rose up in their lives that drew them to Him and saved them.

And if you could give us yours, since you're our first-time guest, give us your testimony, a summary of that. Sure. So I grew up in South.

Mississippi in a small town, actually Jones County, so I made the movie The Free State of Jones not.

Too long ago. Oh yeah, I saw that movie with Kevin McConaughey. Yeah, so that's where I was born,.

1983, and my family were members of Eastview Baptist Church, just sort of a small neighborhood.

Church in the Southern Baptist Convention. So in other words, you're a traitor then,.

Since you're a Presbyterian. Well, I had an experience that is not entirely uncommon, but that church was very much, it was a very typical kind of rural Southern Baptist Church. It was very much an Arminian church, it had scheduled revivals, and most of what, you know, people would expect to come with a revivalistic Arminian world.

Great folks, they loved the Lord, they helped me have a firm commitment to the scriptures, and I was evangelized at, I think, at the age of eight. I went down and walked the aisle and met with the pastor, and we prayed together, and you know, after a course of meetings, I made a profession of faith, because I came to put together all the pieces of what I had been taught already, and I firmly believed that I was a sinner in need of the grace of Christ.

I was baptized at the age of eight, and stuck with the church for the most part. When I was a teenager, I sort of dabbled in worldliness and rebellion, and I never left the faith, but certainly put a few toes over the edge.

And so when I was in college, I was sort of called back to a more full embrace of my faith, and that was sort of when I met Reformed believers. The pastor who was a Baptist, his name was Dr. Cary Kimbrell down in Laurel, and he would probably be a big fan of sort of the Founders.

He gave me, yes, some good stuff, and sent me sort of on my path, but then I found Reformed University, and decided I wanted to go to seminary to learn more, and landed at RTS Jackson, because I had enjoyed my time there, and yeah, have kind of been on the way ever since.

Lots of people and influences to bring me where I am,.

But yeah. I have interviewed folks from the PCA church in Jacksonville, Mississippi in the past. Some of them are not still there. They have relocated to other places, but Derek Thomas would be one, and Ligon Duncan would be another, and I'm sure more than I can remember right at this moment.

But that church has a very historic and profoundly prominent place in the history of Reformed theology in the United States. Yes, and I have some good friends that are members of First Prez Jackson, even to this day.

Amen. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address. It's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Well, we are discussing the sex scandal in the Roman Catholic priesthood, a conservative Protestant Christian response.

You and I know full well, Pastor Stephen, that the Roman Catholic Church does not exclusively hold the sole reputation for child molestation, for child abuse, for sexual misconduct and sin, pedophilia, we could go on and on and on with that.

But I believe there is something unique about this sin and this scandal and the magnitude of it in the Roman Catholic priesthood. Would you agree with that assessment? Yes, I think particularly.

The way that it connects to their institutional claims of authority, it becomes pretty unique. And they seem to have been dogged by this in a pretty major way for at least 100 years, they've had it on their reputation for a while and people are calling attention to that more and more.

Well, we recently had some news that came to the surface that totally shocked and horrified many as to the numeric level of sex abuse of Roman Catholic priests and young boys here in the state of Pennsylvania, where this show is broadcasting from.

Quite a mind-boggling level of reports, credible reports of this nature. One of the reasons that has spawned the idea of having me do this show today, because we are doing the show from Pennsylvania.

But one thing that I wanted to bring to the discussion, because I think sometimes people even within the Catholic Church, but perhaps more predominantly outside of the Catholic Church, I think that they make the wrong conclusion in thinking that the celibacy of the priesthood, and by the way I wholeheartedly oppose this, I do not believe it is biblical, I think that some Protestant scholars and theologians make a credible case that that kind of thing, the required celibacy of ministers, because I don't even believe there are New Testament priests other than the priesthood of believers, some would argue that the requirement of celibacy would be among what is listed as the doctrine of demons, so I'm not defending that at all, but I think some make the mistake of thinking that either this is the case or that that is the argument Protestants are making, that celibacy turns men into either homosexuals or pedophiles.

I am not making that argument at all, but I would say that I think that when you have a system of church polity where you have priests and all members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, ordained hierarchy, who are required to be celibate, I believe you are attracting people that may have some kind of a homosexual proclivity to begin with, because they're not expected by their family, friends, loved ones, neighbors, and society in general to ever seek out a spouse to get married, etc.

I don't know, what is your opinion about that issue? Yeah, I think that.

You say two good things there, you know, we don't want to make any argument that says, you know, celibate men, in virtue of being celibate, are somehow more likely to be perverts or sexual predators. Sometimes our churches or people in our churches will talk that way, and they don't realize that they're actually placing an unfair slight and burden on faithful men who are single.

We have to remember that the New Testament does talk about believers that will be called to a life of singleness and celibacy, so we don't want to insinuate that, you know, being single as an.

Adult male is somehow automatically suspect. Right, in fact, in some cases amongst Bible-believing Christians, we would believe that the Bible teaches that, in some cases, a man would be required, because of certain circumstances, to remain single for the rest of his life.

And of course, there are many men who just choose never to be married, and there's nothing sinful about that. The Apostle Paul, we have no record of him ever being married, so obviously there are many men outside of the Roman Catholic Church who voluntarily remain celibate.

And when I say that there are some who may be required to remain that way within Bible-believing evangelical Christianity, I'm speaking primarily of, there may be particular sins or something in the person's life where a church or congregation may insist that this person remain unmarried for the remainder of their life, for some reasons that, you know, there's all kinds of different circumstances.

But anyway, I'm sorry. You can even imagine someone called to a particularly high risk or high time commitment ministry, missionary work of that sort, where it would not really be possible for them to be a good, effective husband and father.

You know, you can think of examples where it would make sense. But the second thing you said is that when you have an entire institution where the leadership are all single men, and everyone knows that, and they're working largely with young single men in training situations, right, in colleges and seminaries, then you are changing the dynamic.

And when you give these people some sort of mystical status of authority and power, I think at that point you're playing with fire. You're putting a lot of very dangerous elements together, and especially in our day and age where sexual temptations are everywhere.

You're kind of, in my opinion, being very foolish and asking for trouble.

Now, I have heard differences of opinion about the actual scandal that we are familiar with through the very frequent, more frequent than we care to acknowledge, reports in the media about sexual abuse of priests and young men.

There's a disagreement amongst those not only within Bible-believing Christian churches, Protestants, but even amongst some in the Catholic Church. Some are calling this scandal a scandal of pedophilia.

Others, including men that I very highly respect, not with the intention of minimizing the seriousness of the crime or the sin, but to expose what's really going on here as more of a cover-up of the rampant homosexual proclivity amongst priests in the Roman Catholic Church.

This is not really about rampant pedophilia, it's rampant homosexual abuse of adult male Roman Catholic priests, or by, I should say, adult male Roman Catholic priests against pubescent males. These are not infants, these are not prepubescent children in their majority, although we have heard about the prepubescent incidences.

But it seems to me that because most of humanity acknowledges this as a horrific crime and sin, there is an agenda, perhaps, amongst those on the left and those who are either homosexuals themselves or advocates of that activity, that they don't want to connect homosexuality with this scandal, so it has become a pedophile scandal rather than a homosexual scandal.

I think that there is great credibility to that assessment that many of my friends in conservative Protestant circles are saying, and even some of my conservative Roman Catholic.

Friends. Yeah, there was an article on the webpage The Federalist by a Roman Catholic writer who works at Hillsdale College, and his name is Paul Rahe, I may be mispronouncing that, R-A-H-E, so Rahe or Ray, Paul Ray, and the title was called, How the Pederasty Cover-Up Will Make Civil War Within the Catholic Church.

And that article is very interesting, because he shows you that it's not, as you say, it's not a full-blown pedophilia scandal, but it is older men and young male or prepubescent men, so young adolescents.

That's really the bulk of this controversy. You mean post-pubescent? Well, around puberty, so 10, 11, 12, 13, that kind of a spectrum. That's the earliest you're seeing it in big percentage, and he says it's 81 are adolescent or teenage boys.

Other than that, they're sort of a spectrum, and you do have full-blown young, young children, but you also have adults and you have females involved in some of these sex scandals, and the reason that that's noteworthy is that it still involves a spiritual authority sort of taking advantage of a woman.

So those happen as well, but he says something about 80, 81 involve older men with sort of adolescent, teenage males. That's what.

He's finding. Now, what can you tell us about why you believe that, being a Protestant, a system of hierarchy and polity and requirements of those whom the Roman Catholic Church calls priests, and we know that many within the Anglican Church also, some of whom we would consider brothers in Christ because they actually believe in the gospel.

I'm thinking of more on the line of the 39 Articles folks, who actually in some cases believe nearly identically with Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists and others, other than some matters of polity, but they use the term differently than a Roman Catholic priest would, where they would claim that these priests have powers, such as the powers to consecrate the bread and wine during the in such a manner that it actually becomes the physical body and blood of Christ.

But what is innate to that system of hierarchy and its celibacy that has gone back centuries? It wasn't always the case because even the more learned Roman Catholic knows that even the Apostle Peter, who they claim is their first pope, they know that he had a mother-in-law, they know that he must have been married, and even those that are more discerning and literate when it comes to church history know that men that they claim are their early popes were married and priests were married until a certain point in history.

But this has been something that has been a practice in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries, and it might surprise some, but it's not a dogma. This is something that the Roman Catholic Church can change and be consistent within their own bylaws and the way that they differentiate between disciplines and doctrines and dogmas.

They can change this, they can reverse the celibacy issue. But tell us about your own thoughts about the roots of this problem to begin with.

Yeah, so one of the things that I came to learn studying about Roman Catholicism that really helped make some of the issues very clear. For Rome, they define the church, and we're talking about the visible church at this point in their system.

They wouldn't even necessarily want to make big differences between the visible and invisible, but for the visible church, they define it as really a political institution, and you could even use the language of a kingdom or a commonwealth.

To this day, Vatican City is actually a nation. They have a representation at the UN, right? They have ambassadors. They define the church politically, and they think of their clergy as the ruling class.

And the clergy have an allegiance to the church that is more important than any other earthly, social, political allegiance. They have certain laws, certain standards, and this is very important. At the very top is the pope.

They maintain that the pope can be judged by no one. That's one of their claims. And you see that as early as Gregory VII and some of his controversies against the European magistrates and emperors. It makes it into what they call the Decretals by Gratian, which is a list of church laws.

And even to this day in the current canon law, it says the first C, which S-E-E means the Episcopalian jurisdiction, the first C is judged by no one. So they start off right there saying that the top of their hierarchy cannot be held under anyone else's authority.

And then they really just kind of work down the chain. And so the bishops and archbishops are next in line, and they have authority over everyone under them, and then you get down to the priests. And the priests really do occupy a higher position than the laity, and you see this argument being made by Catholics that their duty as a layperson is simply to submit.

I'm going to quote from Pius X, this is 1906. He says, "...the Church is essentially an unequal society, comprising two categories of persons, pastor and flock.". He says, "...so distinct that the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority to promote the end of the society and direct its members.

The only duty of themselves to be...the.

Only duty of the laity...". Yeah, there you go. And I'm assuming you would gather from that that they are looking for loyalty above anything else. It really doesn't matter what your average Catholic believes unless he makes something very scandalously public.

And it really...the Catholic Church never has seemed to be that concerned about the laity being trapped in ignorance. In fact, as you may know, that it wasn't even really until the 20th century where the private reading of the Bible was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps after Vatican II.

I can remember being in Catholic school for eight years. At some point, we were all instructed that we had to purchase Catholic Bibles that remained in our desks the entirety of our time there. For those eight years, I don't recall, maybe once or twice we pulled it out for some reason to read the Christmas account of the birth of Christ or something.

But, I mean, it really...the loyalty is what they first and foremost are requiring.

And you see this even when it comes to civil and criminal law situations. So going, you know, way back in English history, Thomas Beckett, famous Bishop of Canterbury...

Love that movie, love that movie, by the way.

Yeah, and we can easily romanticize that story and kind of tell it in modern terms of, like, you know, a tyrannical government persecuting the faithful Church. But if you go back and look at the history of that argument, and I don't want to say that there are really any good guys there, so don't get me wrong, but if you go back and look at that argument, Beckett's position, the reason he was eventually killed, is he argued that the clergy were not subject to criminal jurisdiction.

That they didn't have to be arrested and sent to, you know, the police, the sheriff, the king, but rather the Church should handle any issues amongst the clergy. That was the cause of that debate, and he was killed for that very principle, that the clergy have an immunity even from criminal prosecution.

So you mean the root of that was not Richard Burton's abandoning the friendship with Peter O'Toole in favor of his loyalty to the Church?

No. And this was a part of canon law, again, until 1917, which, you know, for people my age, say, well, that was so long ago. But when you remember the Catholic Church, how old it is, until 1917, they actually would prescribe penalties for anyone that would take a clergyman to a secular court.

If your priest is messing around, yeah, if your priest is messing around and you call the cops on him, you could be in trouble.

Wow.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this is all starting to meld together here.

Yeah. And actually, I said that wrong, I'm sorry. That 1917 was the year, that was the latest rendition of that canon law, but I misspoke. It was rewritten in 1917. It actually wasn't removed. Now this is going to sound really crazy.

It wasn't taken out of the books until 1983. So, yeah, that was really not that long ago. And when they took it out, they didn't put anything else in its place. They just deleted that line. There still could be a strong peer pressure not to report your clergy.

Yeah, see, that is one of the stark contrasts that we have between the sex scandals that exist within evangelical Protestantism and the Church of Rome. Now, of course, please, I'm not trying to put a cloak of purity on evangelical Christianity as if congregations and denominations never cover up sex crimes by those in their leadership or membership.

I'm not saying that, but there is much more of a systematic presence historically in operation that has been used to cover up the crimes and sins of priests, where a priest found guilty of molesting a child or children or many, many, many children, is not reported to the police.

He is simply shipped to another parish where he will likely do the same thing again, and that has happened, as you obviously know, many.

Times. Yeah, you know, the false of Protestants and other churches, they're real. We should never ignore those. Typically, though, typically you don't see sex abuse cases becoming known, you know, on any sort of big level, and then the offender trying to be salvaged, right?

You know, usually if either the Protestants say it didn't happen, they'll claim that it wasn't real, or if it does become provable, well, then it's over, right? You have to say, okay, this person is in grave sin, they need to be arrested or something.

You don't see them trying to salvage that person's ministry, and with the Catholic Church, you know, their greatest strength is their greatest weakness. They're this giant, unified, international institution, and so we're seeing sex scandals in the U .S., but we're also seeing it in Mexico.

We're seeing it in Chile. You're seeing it in Ireland. You're seeing it in Germany. You're seeing it in the Netherlands. You're seeing it in Australia, and that starts to raise your concern that, wait a minute, if this is happening in every country, and sometimes at alarming rates, you know, in Australia they said it was something like seven percent of all the clergy in the whole country, you know, that's a lot that they were being proven that they were sexual offenders, and you're seeing it in all of these countries, and you're seeing similar techniques.

So in Ireland, for example, when it started to become known that their priests were engaged in this abuse, the institutional authorities, the bishops, and people who work for the diocese, instead of reporting them, they actually took out an insurance policy to cover their eventual liability lawsuits that they knew would come.

So that's a paper trail of proof that they were thinking about this problem, and what will they do about it, and they opted to put in a contingency plan to sort of pay the bills, and you start to see things like that happen in other places, and you see this sort of paying off people before their cases make it to court.

That happened in the Pennsylvania report, I believe. It's also something you saw in the Boston scandal. You've seen that in other places. Same kinds of responses, same kind of techniques coming from an institution that's connected and has a unified leadership.

This is what makes it.

Different. We have to go to our first break right now, and Murray and Ken Ross Scotland will get to your question when we return from the break. If anybody else would like to join Murray and Ken Ross Scotland with a question for Stephen Wedgeworth about the sex scandal in the Roman Catholic priesthood, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and I can readily understand why a theme like this might lend itself to people asking personal and private questions.

But other than that, please give us your first name, city, and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. We will be right back with more of Stephen Wedgeworth and our discussion on the sex scandal within the Roman Catholic priesthood.

James White here, co-founder.

Of Alpha and Omega Ministries and occasional guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I'm so delighted. My friend Chris Arnson will be heading down to Atlanta for the next G3 conference from January 17th through the 19th, 2019, where I'll be joining a very impressive lineup of speakers on the theme A Biblical Understanding of Missions.

Speakers include John Piper, Steve Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Phil Johnson, Josh Weiss, yours truly, and many more. I hope you all join Chris and me for this phenomenal event. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's.

G3conference .com. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the Pastors Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am .com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the Pastors Study by calling in with your questions.

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Conference this weekend, Saturday, October 6th, Sunday, October 7th, at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, pastored by Josh Miller, with guest speaker Mike Abendroth, who is a pastor, an author, and conference speaker, and a guest a number of times on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

The theme of Mike's conference there at Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Harrisburg is, Why the Reformation Still Matters. That is Saturday, October 6th, and Sunday, October 7th. For more details, go to www .gracebfc .com forward slash conference, Grace BFC, that's B for Bible, F for fellowship, C for church, .com forward slash conference, or call 717 -652 -5229, 717 -652 -5229.

And Pastor Josh Miller, so enthusiastically recommended that we have as our guest today, whose interview we are now returning to, that's Pastor Stephen Wedgworth of Faith Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, British Columbia.

We are discussing the sex scandal within the Roman Catholic priesthood. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And we have Murray in Kinross, Scotland, who says, Do you consider the Roman Catholic priesthood to have now reached such a low level that men who have already developed sexual desires that they can't or don't want to control look at the priesthood as a safe place to practice their immorality with the added incentive of a certain amount of protection from the church almost guaranteed?

Has it got that bad now? And then I will follow up after you respond to that. Murray has a second part to his question.

Yeah, well, that is certainly the topic that has recently sort of set the Catholic world afire. There was this letter that was written by Archbishop Vigano, where he basically said as much. He said that the current pope has got a cadre of close friends who are homosexual clergymen that are trying to cover up and preserve space for a sort of a gay clergy element.

Now, I'm not a Catholic priest. I don't have access to those inner imaginations, so I can't confirm that, but that seems to be something that conservative Catholics are very worried about. And I think that that's sort of their major crisis right now within their world, is they think that could well.