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.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, 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 Arnton. 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 Arnton, 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.

Yes, 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, 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, and 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 in 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 you know, 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 kind of put together all the pieces of what

I'd been taught already, and I firmly believed that I was a sinner in need of the grace of Christ.

So yeah, 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 first sort of taught me about Reformed theology 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 movement in the Baptist world. And so he exposed me to a lot of Reformed theology, he gave me, yeah, some good stuff, and sent me sort of on my path.

But then I found Reformed University Fellowship in college, and decided I wanted to go to seminary to learn more, and landed at RTS Jackson because it was close.

And 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've 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 obviously has, 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 at First Prez Jackson, even to this day.

Amen. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address, it's chrisarnsen 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 the 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.

And 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

Mass 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.

You know, to this day, Vatican City is actually, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 are these categories that with a pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority to promote the end of the society and direct its members.

The only duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led.

So you get that? The only duty of the laity is to allow themselves to be led.

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.

They, in fact, as you may know, that it wasn't even really until the 20th century where the reading, 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, but 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 a, you know, 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?

And this was a part of canon law, again, until 1917, which, you know, for people my age, they 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.

So 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. Wow. 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 and leave it for you to figure out what to do.

Wow. So 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 great 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, right?

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 after it happens.

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 it 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, we'll 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, 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 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 to 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, Bodhi Balcombe, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Phil Johnson, Josh Bice, 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. by going to GetWorldNow .com.

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Hello, my name is James Renahan, and I'm the president of IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas.

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S's in the middle. I hope to hear from you soon. God bless you. Chris Orenson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here.

I want to tell you about a man I have personally known for many years. His name is Dan Buttafuoco.

Dan is a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, but not the type that typically comes to mind.

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That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

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I serve as professor of preaching and oversee the doctor of ministry program at the Master's Seminary in Los Angeles.

I would like to recommend the church where one of my preaching students, Andy Woodard, serves as the pastor.

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.nyc. Have a great day. Welcome back, and I don't want you to forget about the

Reformation 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 gracebfc .com forward slash conference. Grace BFC, that's

B for Bible, F for fellowship, C for church, dot 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 Wedgeworth 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 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 be the case.

My friend Robert St. Genes, who is a very conservative Roman Catholic, who has been the

Catholic defender of the Church of Rome in several of my debates that I've organized.

I've organized close to 30 debates, I believe, over the past two decades.

Well, actually since 1996 was my first debate that I organized, predominantly featuring

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries on the Protestant side, and on a couple of occasions

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, and multiple Roman Catholic opponents.

And Robert St. Genes has been so dismayed by the rampant homosexual presence within the priesthood and hierarchy of his own church, and even went as far as saying to me that his son, who was going to different seminaries to inquire more about them because he had a desire to become a

Catholic priest, his son was extremely dismayed by the pro -homosexual positions taken by many of these seminaries.

And so I think you also have an innate problem, and perhaps you could correct me if you think

I'm wrong, Pastor Stephen, but they have a flawed view,

I think, of homosexuality to begin with. They believe that as long as a man takes a vow of chastity, it doesn't matter if he has a proclivity towards homosexuality that actually just dominates his sexual desires.

Even if he identifies himself as quote -unquote gay, that is not going to bar him from the priesthood, he just needs to be chased.

And of course, I'm assuming that kind of a thing goes on in this day and age in evangelical

Christianity as well, because there's some abominable things going on under the umbrella of evangelicalism.

But your typical truly conservative Bible -believing church is going to say if a man has those kind of proclivities, if he actually goes to the lengths of calling himself gay, he's not going to be eligible for a position of elder in the church.

Would you agree with that? Yeah, there's a few different sort of layers to that conversation.

There's the question of, you know, identifying being gay as sort of neutral until acted upon, and that's certainly a dominant position in the

Catholic Church. You know, the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, he still maintained that homosexual desires were what he called fundamentally disordered.

So he was making an older argument that homosexuality should still be viewed as a problem, even if not acted upon.

But many Catholics today have really moved away from that and want to kind of level the playing field and say as long as they're not acting on it, that's okay.

And that gets into some of their views about sexuality in general. You know, the older Catholic view was pretty negative about any kind of sex, right?

Basically, the only sex should be had is for the purpose of having children, and so if you're having, even within an otherwise valid upright marriage, if you're just having sex for pleasure, there were some

Catholics who would say that was already sin. Right, and they were all way off base on that end of the spectrum as well.

Yeah, but when you do that, what happens is you create an environment which is like, okay, well, we're all sexual deviants, you know?

Everyone is basically messed up sexually anyway, so that allows a sort of parallel between, you know, a celibate homosexual man and a celibate heterosexual man.

So that's one layer, but the other problem, this is probably the more profound problem today, ever since the

Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has wanted to be seen as on the side of the progressives.

They are fighting for freedoms, they're pushing forward into, you know, the right side of history, and the current

Pope is definitely of that stripe. He wants to be a friend of progressivism to include, in some respects, to include, you know, the modern

LGBT movement. He still would say that acting upon homosexual feelings is wrong, but when pushed on those sorts of matters, he likes to avoid them.

You know, who am I to judge? That's what he said when asked about it. And when you dig into that quote, the person he was being asked about, you know, who he said, who am

I to judge? It actually was someone who turned out to be a sex offender. So these things have an on -the -ground connection.

His wanting to be seen as a friend and proponent of sort of progressive vision actually led him to being soft on a sexual predator.

Well, the second part of Murray and Kinross Scotland's question slash comment is,

Ratzinger became Pope and was then mysteriously moved aside when every other

Pope is expected to die in office despite his health condition. Ratzinger was chief enforcer under the

Polish Pope. Do you believe he was moved aside because the extent of this scandal in the

Roman Catholic Church was becoming known, and it was considered potentially too damaging to have a serving

Pope accused of covering things up and moving guilty priests to other areas? It is interesting that I don't think that it is ever denied that today that Cardinal Ratzinger had every single case of sexual misconduct in the priesthood passed before him.

Am I right on that? Yes. My understanding is that Ratzinger wanted to reform, he wanted to clean up on this thing, but there were at least two problems.

One, he was not aware of how significant, how many gay priests there were in high positions of authority.

So that's one of the arguments, is that he realized he wasn't going to win. But secondly, he wasn't totally clean on this history either.

He had a couple of issues in his earlier tenure where there had been sex scandals and he had kind of helped move people around.

There was one case, I forget the priest's name, but he actually was accused of molesting young boys and they relocated him to a school for handicapped children.

I think that was in Wisconsin. So he was almost sort of put into a more you know, high vulnerability area.

The children are even more defenseless. Yes, yes. And that relocation happened under Ratzinger or Benedict's, you know, under his jurisdiction.

And so he had some big problems in his own past which kept him from being able to be effective.

It's also the case that I think he has Parkinson's disease. So it may just have been that he physically was unable to, you know, to keep up with this stuff.

That's also possible. Well, thank you, Murray in Kinross, Scotland. Please continue to listen to the program and contribute excellent questions to the program.

And please keep spreading the word about Iron Sharp and Zion Radio in Scotland, the UK and beyond.

Let's see here, we have Christian in Suffolk County, New York. And Christian says, do you think there is a connection between the cover -ups of Roman Catholic priests that have been guilty of sex crimes against children and the fact that there is a shortage of priests and the

Catholic Church has a superstitious view of this office as having supernatural powers that only they can possess, namely, especially the powers to consecrate the

Eucharist, and that these powers continue irregardless of whether or not the priest is excommunicated, that these priests are alleged to hold these supernatural powers until their death, no matter how scandalously wicked they may become and even disciplined within their own church?

Yeah, so two different kinds of questions there, right? The first one is much more of a sort of a practical human element, you know, people, they have a need.

Shortage of priests, so you don't want to deplete the ranks anymore. That probably plays a part in it.

You know, if you're hoping to keep a number of priests active, then there's pressure.

You know, I think small churches feel similar burdens. You know, you've got an elder or maybe a high donor in your congregation who's in trouble, and if you move in appropriately and discipline them, it might sink your congregation.

You know, people can imagine that kind of a world and problem. It's very common, but that could be a part of it.

And I think that second question is very, very significant. Yes, the priests are thought to have a particular mystical status.

They are, you know, able to consecrate the elements. They are mediators of grace.

They can lose that if the bishops, what they call laicize them, so they turn them back into laity.

Really? That's possible. Okay. It's extremely rare. Yeah, because I've even heard from Roman Catholic, former

Roman Catholic priests, in particular Richard Bennett, who's a Reformed Baptist today, and he says the

Roman Catholic Church views him as still possessing these powers, and they are terrified that he will use them for evil.

There is this terror of the Catholic Church that people who have these powers of consecration will use the elements of the mass and satanic rituals and all kinds of things that...

Oh yeah, and there are lots of anecdotes about what, you know, you read histories of Eucharistic miracles, but they also have these sort of strange

Eucharistic judgments where, you know, someone tries to steal a consecrated host, and on the way home, the host, you know, turns to blood or does something to show that they're guilty.

Those views are out there, and I think probably believed sincerely by lots and lots of Catholics, so yeah, that's something to that.

They can laicize a priest, it's just rare, and I think the bishops understand what a heavy sort of psychological blow something like that would deliver to a whole community.

By the way, can you pick up on the laicizing, I hope I didn't mispronounce that, of the priests when we come back from our break, because we have to go to a midway break now.

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Before we return to Stephen Wedgeworth, we just have a couple of more exciting announcements to make.

First of all, once again, this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, October 6th and 7th, our new sponsor,

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That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. That's also the email address where you could send in a question to our guest Stephen Wedgworth on the

Roman Catholic sex scandal in the priesthood. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name, city, and state and country of residence unless you're remaining anonymous for a personal and private reason.

And Stephen Wedgworth, before the break you were just starting to delve into a very rare phenomenon known as the laicizing, and correct me if that pronunciation is wrong, of Roman Catholic priests.

I've never heard of this before, but if you could. Yeah, well it's a good thing on the break

I went and double -checked when you asked that and it actually it turns out I spoke incorrectly.

Wow. They do use the name laicize. You see that in Catholic journalism.

People have been calling for various priests and cardinals recently to be laicized, but I double -checked and actually you're correct.

Even though they call it laicizing, the catechism says they cannot be reduced to a layman in the strict sense.

So Catholic Catechism 1583 says that someone validly ordained can, for grave reasons, be discharged from the obligations and functions of their ordination, and they can be forbidden to exercise their functions, but they cannot be made a layman in the strict sense.

So I actually was wrong. You're right. They use the name laicize, but that's not really accurate.

The most they can do is forbid the disciplined priest from carrying out his actions.

But yeah, technically speaking, he retains that spiritual gift.

Well, let's see here. We have another listener.

We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and B .B. says, are you aware of any move within conservative elements of the

Catholic Church to abandon the celibacy requirement of priests in favor of married priests?

I know that that outcry has come from some liberal elements who even go as far, obviously, as asking to accept homosexuality.

But other than that unbiblical concept, have you heard of a good movement towards married priests?

And even though, obviously, as Protestants, we do not believe in their concept of the priesthood, such a development may prevent the kinds of scandals that are occurring and harming and destroying the lives of children.

Mm -hmm. Yeah, I have not heard of any conservatives calling for that.

There may be some that I'm ignorant of. As you said, usually you hear that coming from the more liberal side.

The recent scandal in Germany showed that they had a wide -scale abuse there as well.

The German clergy are typically pretty liberal within the Catholic world, especially their bishops, and they responded to that crisis by asking for the celibacy requirement to be lifted, but they're liberals.

So no, I haven't seen it from conservatives. It seems unlikely that you would see that from conservatives because celibacy has been part of Catholic disciplinary practice for, you know, a thousand years.

Yeah, and there is no legitimate reason for a conservative

Catholic, or any Catholic, to be totally opposed to the idea because, as I mentioned earlier, and I have heard this numerous times from reliable sources within the

Catholic Church, let alone Protestants who are experts on Catholicism, that the celibacy discipline for priests is not dogma.

That can be reversed. Yes. So there is no real legitimate reason for any

Catholic to be adamantly opposed. In fact, I think it's lunacy that they're adamantly opposed when they see what's happening around them.

But the funny thing, right, that to be a conservative sometimes means you don't want to change, right?

Yeah, you're right. So to have something that's been in place for a thousand years, it's really difficult to change that.

So you see very few, and in fact it's a little bit startling for a Protestant perspective, but you'll actually see arguments from Catholics that'll say that the worst sin, worse than fornication, worse than pedophilia or homosexuality, the worst sin of all is the fact that these priests have betrayed their clerical vow.

And so in the Catholic mind, the vow to be a celibate holy priest is actually the most important moral principle here.

And so it's pretty unlikely that they would try to solve a lesser, from their perspective, a lesser moral problem by modifying something they have a higher commitment to.

Well, thank you, B .B. We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who asks, do you know if the celibacy rule amongst priests in the

Roman Catholic Church began, as I have heard but have not verified, that the

Catholic Church centuries ago did not want to have to be financially responsible for the wives and especially the children of their priests, so therefore they began to require celibacy.

I don't know if this is true or just a rumor that I've heard. Yeah, that's something

I've heard people talk about, especially in the modern day, you know, what would it take to change the celibacy requirement?

Well, practically speaking, it would require the priest to get a pay raise, right? So I've heard that a lot.

I don't think that that's going to be historically defensible. What's more likely the case is that a few things are present.

You had a desire for the monastic life, you know, that starts pretty early in the history of the

Church, and by the time of Gregory VII, they often will refer to that papacy, they'll call that the

Cluniac Reform, which is a monastery cluny. The Cluniac Reform really transformed the papacy into sort of the perfect monk, and a perfect monk should be the ideal candidate for the pope, and so that brought in the assumption of a monastic discipline, and so there was a prioritization of an aesthetic lifestyle that is probably the more plausible explanation for priestly celibacy.

Let's see here, we have we have

Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who asks, is a lot of this celibacy nonsense amongst the

Roman Catholic priesthood, which is an entirely unbiblical thing to mandate for anyone, something that stems from the

Gnostic belief that sex is sinful in any kind of category, or in any kind of circumstances, even within the confines of marriage.

It seems that the Catholic Church is schizophrenic on sex. They think that in order for Jesus to have his sinlessness and holiness preserved, his mother had to be a virgin, not only before his conception, but forever after.

But on top of that, there seems to be a schizophrenic attitude, since they insist that married couples be able to procreate, and have always been in favor of large families and against contraception.

There seems to be some kind of a contradiction here, but going back to my original point, is this somehow rooted in the

Gnostic heresy that claims that sex is always in some way a sin?

Yes, I think just to do sort of a typical historian qualification,

I don't want to talk about Gnosticism specifically, because that gets really complicated, but yes,

I think that it is true that starting very early in the Church, there became a view that having sex in any way, even when married, is sinful.

And even someone that we would all respect, like Augustine of Hippo, he says that even sex within marriage is sinful, but it's a venial sin, not a mortal sin, and if it's done with the possibility of procreation, then it is forgiven.

So it's a little bit tricky. He doesn't say it's not a sin, he just says it's a venial sin that will be forgiven.

So then all of these couples in their 50s and older who are prescribing to the drugs that we see frequently advertised on television, they're in sin just because they're enjoying their marriage until they're late in life, their sunset years or whatever they call those years.

Yes, and in fact, I believe it's Gregory of Nyssa, he's an Eastern Greek Church father, it might be

Nazianzus, I'd have to do a Google check and I'm not going to do that, so I'll let you guys double check me.

But one of the two Gregories, he actually writes about the ideal use of sex within marriage, and he points to the relationship between Isaac and Rebekah, and he says

Isaac is an old man, even when he gets married, and then he marries Rebekah, and after they have

Jacob and Esau, and I don't think this is biblically supportable, but Gregory says after they have

Jacob and Esau, they stop having sex. Which would be a sin unless both voluntarily commit to that, both members of the marriage.

This is just superstition and fairytale. Yeah, and so there's been a long -standing view that sex is always some level of sinful, and until pretty recently,

I think it was early 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church asked all of its congregants to abstain from any sex for three days prior to receiving the sacrament of the

Eucharist. And so that was an expected discipline for the laity. So if you're a priest, you're celebrating the

Eucharist every day, right? And so, of course, you're not going to be ever allowed to have sex, because you need to be available every day.

Right, well, if you could, before we go to the, in fact, let's go to the final break right now.

I'm going to go to the final break right now, and then we will be back for the remaining close to a half hour for you to conclude with the important things you want our listeners to remember, whether they are

Roman Catholic or Protestant or something else. And if you'd like to join us with the conversation yourself with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please, as always, give us your first name, 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. This break will be much shorter than the last one, so don't go away.

We will be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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We are now back with our guest today, Stephen Wedgworth, for the final edition of our show today on the sex scandal within the

Roman Catholic priesthood. If you have any questions, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com

And Stephen, I want you to lay out uninterrupted some of the most important aspects of this discussion that either we haven't addressed yet or that we haven't addressed yet in enough detail that you really want to have etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

Yeah, so first of all, let me just plug my website. It's called calvinistinternational .com

And if you go there, you'll find that I wrote a five, six -part series kind of talking about this issue and how it connects to the

Catholic claims of clerical authority. So you can get a lot more at that webpage.

But I wanted to try to make this pastoral and not seem like we're just sort of pointing at problems in someone you might say is our enemy or the bad guys in our story.

It's very easy to kind of fall into that trap in today's world. But I noticed this hitting me on a real pastoral level when

I saw some Catholics responding to the news of these sex crimes, especially the report that came out of Pennsylvania.

And I saw how it really puts them in a spiritual dilemma. They believe that their church is working against their own good, that it's a threat to them and their family.

But they still have to go and they still have to be submissive and obedient to priests who they don't trust.

And there's one Catholic commentator, he writes for the National Review and other sites, his name is Michael Brendan Doherty.

And he actually tweeted this line out and it really kind of moved me. It made me very sad for him.

He said, how much must God hate us to put the means of salvation into the hands of so many predators?

Wow. Now, when I read that, I was floored. This is a Catholic. He's gonna go to Mass again.

You know, he's gonna go to those priests that he's talking about to receive, in his mind, the necessary means of salvation.

But he feels that he is under a deep spiritual bondage. And to me, that's what this crisis really elevated, that at the end of the day, you can make all the qualifications, all the intellectual arguments.

The Catholic Church still is an institution where the faithful are held under an unquestioning, non -accountable authority that may not always be looking after their good, even on a human level.

And so I really want this crisis to cause people, Catholics included, to ask those hard questions.

Is this the gospel that the New Testament talks about? You know, when

Paul says, let no one take you captive to empty philosophy and they judge you as human regulations, does that look like the current

Roman Catholic Church? When Paul says, we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, and he says, a faith not of yourself, but by grace, not of works, lest no one should boast.

The reason that's important is that the only way we can be saved is if God does it, not us.

And that truth frees us from ever having to give any unquestioning authority to another fallen human.

The gospel liberates our souls. It gives us true freedom. And it's a tragedy that so many men and women who are, in their minds, truly following the teachings of Christianity are trapped in a religious institution that is not free.

It's not even morally trustworthy. And so I would hope that this scandal can be an occasion to test some of those foundational claims.

And I encourage people to ask those hard questions. Does this really look like the kind of religion that Jesus and the apostles taught in the

New Testament? And if it's the case that the leadership of this church are more committed to themselves, maintaining their own positions of power, keeping the institution going, if they're more committed to that than the personal well -being of the faithful, how can we, in good conscience, say that they are the one true church who everyone must submit to?

I don't think that they can. I think that argument is false, and we're seeing fruit of it over time.

The Protestant Reformation was necessary. It was absolutely necessary, and the doctrines that it promoted are the ultimate solution to this problem.

Yeah, there are lengthy reasons, more than we could enumerate here, why people remain in the

Roman Catholic Church and in false churches and in cults and other things. The answers

I have heard, I'll include my own wonderful sister, who I love dearly, who is still

Roman Catholic. Her answer is, just because I don't like some of the leaders in political authority in the

United States, and some of them do horrible and scandalous things, doesn't mean

I want to give up my citizenship to this country. I have heard that these things actually prove that the

Roman Catholic Church is the true church Christ founded, because it has survived over two millennia that has been saturated with these kinds of scandals and even worse, and they're still here offering the sacraments and the unique benefits that they claim come with the

Church of Rome. Some of it is that they cannot bring themselves to believe that their parents, their grandparents, and their ancestors are in hell or were wrong, that they misled them, that they were raised in a farce.

Now, of course, I'm sure you would agree, I have at least a strong confidence you would agree, that we are not claiming that every single

Roman Catholic who has ever lived is in hell, but we are not either claiming that every

Presbyterian or Baptist is in heaven, that it is what a person is truly trusting in that determines their eternal destiny, if they are placing their trust in the finished work of Christ alone as their only hope of salvation, we can expect them to be in heaven, but if they are trusting in their goodness, in their ceremonial observance, if they are trusting in their membership in any church, they are really walking on very thin ice, they should have no expectation of being in heaven unless they repent of these things.

Yes, and it's the good news of justification by faith alone that that can actually cover up all of our other mistakes, right?

We trust in Christ, and that is the grounds for our salvation, that it's trusting in Him, even if we have lots of other errors and mistakes in life.

And so, yeah, we're not asking anyone to say that all of their loved ones are in hell, far from it, we're hopeful that that's not the case, but we need to challenge people to look at the reality that's in front of them.

We've been in denial for too long here in the U .S., we were on round two, right?

You know, the spotlight, Boston scandals, I mean, that feels like so long ago, and yet right back in it,

Pennsylvania, and now they've got reports in New York, and Missouri, and Maryland, there's gonna be a lot more.

And so I would encourage people to look at it truthfully, see what's happening, and then test those claims of Rome and see if they really can hold up, or if the

Bible doesn't present a different gospel, a different church. Yes, and I have been wanting to arrange a debate,

I'm still not giving up on trying to find a willing participant from the Church of Rome to participate in this event, but I really want to arrange a debate between a competent Catholic and a qualified Reformed Protestant, perhaps

James White, or Tony Costa, or someone else, on the theme, is Pope Francis a faithful shepherd?

No Roman Catholic should say, I don't feel comfortable defending that, because if they are saying that, they really have no business remaining a

Catholic. It was funny when I asked my friend, Robert St. Genes, that question, would he debate that theme?

His only response to me was, is that a trick question? But because of the fact, they cannot turn the question around to us.

Just to give you an example of what happened with me when I was a new Christian and I had Mormon missionaries in my home, and during our very long discussion,

I came to the forefront of our conversation that Mormonism had intrinsically involved in its history and its theology grotesque racism.

They were taught for centuries that blacks could not only never become priests in their religion, but they could not progress into gods as other faithful Mormons would, that the most they could hope for would be to become the servants of whites in the afterlife.

And in fact, centuries ago, if one were to marry a black man or woman, you were eligible for the death penalty.

And you could go on and on and on. And when the Mormon in my living room said, well, who are you to talk?

You've got Baptists in the Ku Klux Klan. And I said, well, I believe that there are many morons and wicked unregenerate people who are

Baptists who will be in hell. Are you going to make that same claim about your prophets? There is a difference between those that were allegedly carrying on and presenting and declaring through divine revelation, the very oracles of God that have been written down in their sacred documents as inerrant and infallible.

There's a difference between that than what a person that Baptists claim have no authoritative power above them other than in a setting of church polity.

But the Baptists recognize their pastors and elders and deacons may be in hell if they are unregenerate and are in rebellion against the truth of the gospel.

The same would hold, I think, within the comparison between the

Roman Catholic Church and evangelical Protestants. We do not claim to have an infallible magisterium.

We do not claim to have a pope that is supposed to resolve all issues of difference.

And I've heard from Catholics that sola scriptura is the blueprint for anarchy.

They don't have that problem allegedly because they have a pope that resolves all these conflicts. This is complete nonsense.

There were popes who gave their blessing to the torture and execution of Protestants centuries ago, and there are popes who have covered up the molestation of children, and we could go on and on.

There is a difference, isn't there? Yes, and, you know, some Catholics will say, well, the pope is only infallible under very limited conditions, and sometimes they'll say,

I think, wrongly, you know, there are only a handful of infallible statements, and that's really all that matters.

But that's actually not the whole story either. You know, the Catholic Church, the First Vatican Council, says that the pope is to be given true obedience, not only in matters of faith and morals, but also discipline and government.

And so the expectation is you should obey. You should listen. And the way that that would make sense is that he's going to be a good person that is looking out for you, is guided by the

Spirit. He's really supposed to be their pastor. Right, and the claims of ex cathedra declarations being the only instances where they are infallible, that might be dogmatically correct, but that is not what the multitudes of millions of Catholics think or are even aware of when they view the papal office.

That's right, and there's a practical value. You know, what is it that the average Catholic is thinking about their relationship to their priests, bishops, and the pope?

And the answer is it ought to be, to make it worth anything, this is the man

God has put to save me, to bring me to grace and to look after me.

And I think it's a real tragedy when that's so obviously falsified, but the system has no allowance to resolve it.

And it just leaves them in a series of despairing moments and internal contradictions.

If you could, for one minute now, just to conclude, in summary, those things most important to you about this subject.

Yeah, as I said, I think that this really pushes us to ask those questions about the gospel and the definition of the church.

Did God set up a mechanical organization which we have to go to to get saved, but might otherwise betray us in every way?

Um, or did he institute a gospel of free grace where we meet

Jesus directly and then we come together in an orderly fashion to bear witness and to show our love to one another?

Does he trap us back under earthly regulations and laws, tyrannical structures, or does he set us free?

And this current crisis forces what sometimes are academic questions, sometimes very ivory tower conversations.

It forces those to get real, to look at your brothers and sisters directly in the face, to ask them what they're actually going to do about their own lives, their families, and their children, and whether or not that's consistent with what the

Bible teaches and the character of God as he has revealed himself. Well, I want you, certainly,

I know already, I want you back again and back again often on the program. Thank you so much,

Pastor Stephen Wedgworth, for being our guest today, and I want to make sure our listeners have your websites.

First of all, the Faith Presbyterian Church of Vancouver, British Columbia has a website, faithvan .com,

faithvan, for Vancouver, dot com. What is the Calvinist International website? Well, you just put it all together, calvinistinternational .com.

calvinistinternational .com. Also, don't forget, I should say, about the Reformation Conference this weekend, hosted by Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, featuring

Mike Abendroth. That's Saturday, October 6th, Sunday, October 7th. Go to gracebfc .com, gracebfc, standing for biblefellowshipchurch .com,

or call 717 -652 -5229, 717 -652 -5229, featuring

Mike Abendroth as the speaker. I want you all to always remember, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater