Pope Francis, "Growth" and "Consolidation," and Trent Horn

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I hope we offered an important discussion today regarding Pope Francis, the direction of the Roman Catholic Church, the impact of leftist ideology, and the vital role of Scripture as an unchanging standard.

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Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I just now tweeted it, so we'll see who is able to catch on fairly quickly.
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We are live here in Phoenix. Let's see, we head out on our next road trip one week from today, and I'm thankful that the weather looks like it might be below 100 degrees on that day.
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I would not mind that at all, especially when loading stuff. In fact, I saw a few 78 degree lows over the weekend, and you need to understand, for us, it hasn't been down there since June.
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Sometimes that would be the case all the way back into May. Like I said, summer skipped us in June and then shot us real, well, what?
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What? No. Not going to.
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Anyways, so a week from today, we start heading out and we will be in Amarillo toward the end of next week, and we'll be speaking there on one of the talks on the way out, and then just got to scoot out to Pennsylvania, get in there, get set up, and get ready for the debate on the 16th with Gregory Coles.
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Lots of folks are contacting us now. There's clearly a very serious concern on the part of many people about the influence that the
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Sprinkle Coles Center for Face Sexuality Gender group is having amongst evangelical churches, that they are speaking at a large number of churches.
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Certainly, what I've seen online, there's one particular interview.
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If you just put in Gregory Coles' interview on YouTube, you can watch the same things that I've seen.
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There was the pastor that was interviewing him had no pushback at all on anything, and I think that is a problem.
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I think a lot of people are sort of scared to have any type of pushback, lest you be seen as some kind of terrible, heartless, mean person or something like that.
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Boy, this shirt really is blue on these cameras. It's not quite that blue in real life, but it's sort of like itchy glows.
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Well, if 4k makes it more blue than it is in real life, then there you go.
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We'll run with it. I'll make sure to bring this one because I bet you with the color -changing background, it should drive you completely insane.
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And I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, so lots of folks concerned about all that and I've still got a lot of listening and reading and a lot of work to do between now and then for that debate.
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I'd like to at least have a good outline of it before I leave. But I've got books to listen to on the drive, so I can't really finish it.
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And in fact, that just reminded me I need to contact the folks there and ask about whether we're going to be using
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PowerPoint slash keynote. I assume we will. And I've been told the location, the venue is really nice, that it's a weird name, but really nice.
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So we should be able to do that. So I need to have that, you know, going on.
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And of course, I'm also thinking through I'm speaking twice aside from the debate at a conference in a church.
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Then the next week, of course, is G3 and I've got the presentation, the
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Wednesday presentation. I think I speak Friday morning in the plenary session at G3. There's probably
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Q &As in there. I just don't even know what they are yet. And so, yeah, there's a lot heading my direction and then all the all the little things you have to remember.
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I don't think I have yet done a trip where I remembered everything and didn't have to buy something along the way that I had at home.
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But I just forgot it. Not major, major stuff, but yeah, it's just sort of how it goes.
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And I'm watching the gas prices going through the roof. Heading up to five bucks a gallon for diesel again and that could just be a long weekend coming up, you know, right before I leave and maybe that'll come down a little bit afterwards.
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Who knows? We all know that if the elites get their way and we all just roll over and play dead that they're going to imprison us in little cities where we can't ever leave and never visit anywhere again and just work for them and that's that's what they want.
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And it seems that a large majority of people in the United States are like, okay, sounds good to me.
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So there you go. Okay, today on the program,
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I want to start off with a I was actually looking at some, one came across my feed right before the program started, about mobs coming for Scott Hahn.
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The funny thing was the one that popped up immediately, that the revolution comes for Scott Hahn, dated yesterday from Crisis magazine.
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He wouldn't link to what he was talking about. So I do a search and I find an almost identical article called
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The Mob Comes for Scott Hahn from Our Sunday Visitor from December 20th of 2021, almost two years ago.
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So I'll admit I'm not sure what that's all about. I'd be really interested.
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Evidently, he's not maybe as big a fan of Francis as some people think he should be.
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I don't know how anybody who knows the history of Roman Catholicism could be a big fan of Francis.
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I'll just be honest with you. But who knows. Anyway, I can't say because I couldn't really track anything else down there, but I may do so again.
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Speaking of Francis, let's talk a little bit. Let's do a little
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Roman Catholicism here at the start. Well, it'll be most of the program actually. The Reverend James Martin is a
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Roman Catholic priest who is well known for his pro -LGBTQ stance.
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It has been documented numerous times over the years that Pope Francis is very amenable toward Fr.
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Martin. We've mentioned a number of times he'll write personal notes.
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Martin will be doing a conference on these issues and he'll write and hope they have a wonderful time and blessed by the
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Spirit and all the rest of this kind of stuff. When we talk about Roman Catholicism and its claims of consistency, its claims of being the 2 ,000 year old
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Church, we have true reasons, we have good reasons to question that claim on numerous grounds.
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You would not need to have had a man by the name of John Henry Cardinal Newman, a celebrated convert to the
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Roman Catholic Church in the late 1800s. You would not need for him to have developed the concept of the development of doctrine if there was a consistency over time.
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The first Vatican Council in the 1870s, when it promulgated the doctrine of papal supremacy, papal infallibility, a lot of people point out that this just simply wasn't a historical stance to take.
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That if this was what had been believed by everyone at all times, there wouldn't have ever been a need, for example, for the great councils.
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Why need the Council of Nicaea just if everybody believed that the
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Bishop of Rome was the Vicar of Christ on earth and had infallible authority over Christ's Church?
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Why even bother just appeal to Rome and the
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Vicar of Christ will answer the question for you. But clearly that's not what anybody believed back then.
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So how could you promulgate a doctrine that says that this is, you have to believe this or you're anathema and call it the ancient and constant faith of the church when it clearly wasn't the ancient and constant faith of the church.
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You have to find some way of emptying that claim of what it's supposed to mean and filling it with something else.
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So Newman comes up with the development hypothesis and that way, you know, there's a hilarious but excellent little short video where they take that commercial that you'll see late, probably still see it late night.
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They've got some type of a patch or something and you know, you got water pouring out of a tank and they just take that patch and slap it over it and it seals it immediately and you're supposed to buy this stuff and think it's actually gonna work for you.
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And they replaced the the seal name with just slap some
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Newman on it. So it doesn't matter what you look at in history.
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You can look at Honorius. You can look at the pornocracy. You can look at how councils functioned in the ancient church and when it doesn't fit the modern
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Roman Catholic narrative, slap some Newman on it. It just had to develop and so what they they do is they claim that there is this root, you know, it's the acorn growing into the tree, you know, and an acorn doesn't look like that big huge tree once it's developed but there's a connection between them, you know.
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And so that's what you have with Roman Catholicism. And so yes, it is the ancient church.
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Yeah, it doesn't believe the same things and you know, I've said over and over and over again, no one will even bother to try because they can't and they know they can't.
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There was no one at the Council of Nicaea that believed as dogma everything you must believe as a
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Roman Catholic today as dogma. Nobody. So you have to explain that and they they come up with various ways of doing so.
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So what's fascinating is if the current
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Pope who started off his pontificate, you know, being asked about homosexuality on a plane ride, and who am
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I to judge? And who talks to a young kid about his atheist dad and yeah, his atheist dad's gonna go to heaven because he had his kids baptized, you know, no problem.
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And at first it's real easy, well, you know, these aren't official statements, but when it gets repeated over and over and over again, and when he does officially change the
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Catholic Catechism of the Catholic Church to say that capital punishment is a sin, when the
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Council of Trent's Catechism specifically said that it is an authority given to the state and that it's just and righteous and required by scripture, these are doctrinal changes.
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You start realizing, yeah, this guy would not have fit in only 50 years ago, but certainly not 100 years or 150 years ago or anything before that.
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No bishop of Rome would have recognized him even as a compatriot, as a fellow bishop.
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And so the handstands that you have to do to make that work and to figure out what this development can actually add up to is pretty difficult.
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And so I reposted this thing about Pope Francis invited
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James Martin to participate in a major weeks -long gathering of bishops and lay people at the
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Vatican later this year. There's only a certain number of people being invited from the United States. He's one of them.
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This says something. When Pelosi and Biden go to Rome and the
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Pope gives them the mass, this says something. These people are some of the greatest promoters of sexual perversion or the destruction of pre -born life, the destruction of already born life in mutilating boys and girls and the fantasy of transitioning and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
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And he makes sure, hey, we're not making any statements about that. You are left going, how exactly are you supposed to know what the
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Pope believes today? How are you supposed to be in communion with him exactly when he's doing these types of things?
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And he does it with consistency. Are you supposed to just close your eyes and mind and just come up with excuses?
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What are you supposed to do? And so here he is doing it again.
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He's doing this right in our faces. But the majority of conservative
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Catholics have just, you know, over the past number of years, how many, when did he become
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Pope? It's been about 10 years, hasn't it? Somewhere around there. Have just had to learn how to Francis it.
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That's another way of saying spin it, but it's, you have to Francis it. And I don't know who the next
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Pope's going to be, but really good chance he's going to be very much like Francis, if not even worse. And so we'll have to keep coming up with new words all the time for how you can keep pretending that there is some objective meaning to saying we are the 2000 year old church.
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There's got to be some content to that, that is now becoming more and more nebulous with each passing day and more and more impossible to define.
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And so when I posted this, someone helpfully pointed out that our
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Lutheran friend had posted a clip from an article earlier this month.
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And I don't have it up on Twitter right now. Sorry. I just have the article itself where the
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Pope took questions from young Jesuits in Portugal.
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Now what's useful about this, some of you,
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Algo and people like Algo will remember that when we were, when
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I was doing majority debates overseas with Muslims, we would talk a lot about, you know, from about 2006 to, you know, 2016 for about 10 years or so, we would cover some really in -depth
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Islamic topics on, on the program.
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Well, to the person who just texted me and you know who you are, um, this one will be an interesting one for you.
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In fact, the comments I was just making, I was here wondering, is he listening? Is he going to find this interesting?
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Is he, what's, what is his comments going to be on this? Um, anyway, we, we went into some in -depth on Islamic topics and, and things like that.
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And one of the most useful things that we found at that time was listening to Muslim scholars talking to Muslims.
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That was the best way to really get an understanding of the
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Muslim mindset and what was really being said. And so here is
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Francis talking to his fellow Jesuits. Now, the
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Jesuits did not start off as flaming liberals. Um, they were the
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Pope's henchmen in the counter -reformation. They were flaming conservatives, flaming literally because they resulted in lots of people flaming, um, literally.
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And, but what's fascinating is that they adopted theological perspectives that were meant to undercut
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Protestant foundational beliefs, especially in scripture. Um, their founder
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Ignatius Loyola was famous for saying, if the church should pronounce what appears to me to be white, to be black, then
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I shall pronounce it to be black as well. Um, and so the idea was full fidelity to the epistemological authority of the church led them to adopt perspectives that they would then, you know, you've heard about Jesuitical reasoning and Jesuitical, um, infiltration of schools and things like that.
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Uh, they would then promote perspectives that would undercut any other authority, specifically an authority of scripture.
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Well, it was, it was effective. The counter -reformation was effective in, in Europe. Um, but once you start doing that, it's a little bit like what's happened to Mormonism.
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The Mormons sent their young people out starting a few number of decades ago to get
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PhDs outside of Utah. And what they didn't count on is these people then came back infected with a critical methodology that Joseph Smith and Mormonism cannot survive.
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And so they have a generation coming up in leadership that doesn't really believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.
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Doesn't believe the book of Mormon is some ancient record and it's destroying what's left of the, of the
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Mormon church. It's, it's, it's either just going to wither and die or it's going to eventually fracture. Um, the only thing keeping it going right now is just, just filthy rich is what it is.
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So in the same way, the Jesuits ended up being infected by the virus they tried to infect
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Protestantism with. It did infect Protestantism and you've got these liberal mainline
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Protestant churches don't really believe much of anything at all. There's certainly no threat to Rome. Uh, but the
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Jesuits became the flaming liberals of the Roman Catholic church.
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There are almost no, uh, exceptions to that other than Mitch Pacwa.
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I mean, he's the one utter weirdo as far as the Jesuits are concerned. And so I say that with great respect.
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So here's a liberation theologian.
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Um, we, we know Francis is so far to the left of Cardinal Ratzinger that trying to put these two together and say, here was, here are two infallible leaders of the one true church just creates a cognitive dissonance that is just too much for a lot of people to handle.
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And he's talking to young Jesuit, um, people training for the priesthood, stuff like that.
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And so he's asked a question and I want you to hear his answer uh, because this is going to transition us into, um, a clip from Trenthorne because we have to remember
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Francis has significantly more impact upon the direction of the Roman Catholic church than Trenthorne does. Um, and so here, here's what the, the, the, the guy had here, guy named
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Francisco. Pope Francis, I would like to ask you a question as a religious brother.
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I am Francisco. Last year, I spent a sabbatical year in the United States. There was one thing that made a great impression on me there.
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And at times made me suffer. I saw many, many, I saw many, even bishops criticizing your leadership of the church.
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And many even accused the Jesuits who are usually a kind of critical resource of the Pope of not being so now they would even like the
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Jesuits to criticize you explicitly. Do you miss the criticism that the Jesuits used to make the Pope, the magisterium in the
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Vatican? Francis responded, you have seen that in the United States, this situation is not easy.
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There is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.
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I would like to remind those people that now I'm not sure why they're throwing foreign terminology in here and whether,
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I didn't bother to look it up, whether it is Portuguese, you know, he speaks multiple languages,
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Spanish, Latin, but it's the term indetrismo. And then they give a parentheses, being backward looking, being backward looking.
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I'd like to remind people, remind those people that being backward looking is useless.
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And we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals, as long as we follow the three criteria that Vincent of Lerines already indicated in the fifth century.
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Now, you're probably familiar with Vincent for his, we believe that which has been believed always and in all places.
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Well, that sounds nice. Even he didn't do that, and he got into trouble as to his orthodoxy.
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But he defines these, he defines Vincent's perspective as doctrine evolves,
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In other words, doctrine also progresses, expands, and consolidates with time and becomes firmer.
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I'm sure all this is in translation, and that's where some of the issues are, but is always progressing.
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Now, if that's the last phrase, sublimator aetete, anyway, but it's always progressing.
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Change develops from the roots upward, growing in accord with these three criteria.
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Well, three criteria that are defined how?
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You see, you need to recognize whether it's Catholic or Protestant, the mindset of the progressive theologically begins with the fundamental rejection of any objective standard.
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That's not where Rome was in the past, but it is now.
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So how does it survive that? Because that's an absolutely transformational type of thing.
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Vincent of Lorraine makes the comparison between human biological development and the transmission from one age to another of the depositum fide, positive faith, which grows and is consolidated with the passage of time.
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What is consolidated? If you have a definition in church history, when for 400 years, every man who ascended the papal throne condemned with anathema as a heretic,
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Honorius, Bishop of Rome, for 400 years, 400 years.
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Can that be changed? What does it look like for that to be consolidated?
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You see, you can fill these words with almost any meaning you want. And once you give to the
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Pope the right to define such words, is there any way to stop any kind of fundamental radical transformation of the
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Roman Catholic Church over decades and centuries? Ask yourself that question.
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So he says, change develops in the roots upward, growing in accord with these three criteria.
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Let us get to specifics. Today, it is a sin to possess atomic bombs.
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The death penalty is a sin. This is what he says. The death penalty is a sin.
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At one time in Roman Catholic history, it wasn't. Now it is. There's been a 180 degree turn.
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Rome used the death penalty. The history of the Inquisition, while disputed, there is no question that many lost their lives at the hands of Rome.
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You've had popes apologizing for these things. So is this consolidation?
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If consolidation can mean complete change, 180 degrees turning around, then what can't be changed?
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So today, it is a sin to possess atomic bombs. Really? So Germany was this close, the atomic bomb.
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And it was only because we had German scientists that we got there first.
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The use of those weapons, as horrific as they are, saved lives in World War II.
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I'm not gonna get into that debate right now. It's really not much of a debate. Everyone understands that the invasion of Japan by the
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United States, some of the allies would have been involved somewhat. But that would have been on our plate.
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It would have resulted in minimally a million United States casualties, and many times that in Japan itself.
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The number of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a tiny percentage of how many would have died, and how much longer the war would have gone on.
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So how is it a sin if evil people, if Germany was that close, how is it a sin to stop them and to use the same technology against them?
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So I guess if having an atomic bomb is a sin, having a conventional bomb must be a sin as well, right?
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I mean, there are some whopper of conventional bombs. There are some fuel air bombs that are close to at least a small nuclear device.
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So all bombs would be a sin. That means all bullets are a sin, right? And so if you don't want to sin, you shouldn't have these things, and therefore you should just allow evil to run amok.
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See, it's not, it's just progressivists, leftists like Francis, you know, rose -colored glasses.
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They really do. But anyway, the death penalty is a sin, so this is a complete shame.
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You cannot employ it, but it was not so before. So he's admitting, here's what
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I'm talking about when I talk about progression. Progression can result in complete change.
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180 degree turnabout. As for slavery, some pontiffs before me tolerated it, but things are different today.
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So you change, you change. But with the criteria just mentioned, the problem is those criteria have no objective connection to history.
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The liberation theologians of South America have utilized that language to justify anything.
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And remember, we're talking about this in the context of him inviting Martin to the
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Vatican, who is openly LGBTQ, not just supportive, but promotive of these things.
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Yes, no, this is not a Twitter recording. I've got a
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Roman Catholic friend watching, so that's what that's about. I mean, this is just how we do it now.
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I guess you've not been watching for a while. He's busy with other things, I guess. All right, so this is what progression is.
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He's literally saying, so you change, you change. But with the criteria just mentioned,
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I like to use the upward image. That is ut anus consolidator.
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Same stuff he said before. Always on this path, starting from the root with sap that flows up and up, and that is why change is necessary.
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So who gets to determine that this is upward change?
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If you can already change death penalty, you can already have it in the Catechism of the
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Sin. So we know how progressivists think.
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We know how they understand things. So what is to keep over time, not overnight, but over time, what is to keep over time?
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The Francis Revolution from in 20 years, in 30 years, progressing upward to a recognition of the arguments that James Martin is already promoting, and Francis is clearly not condemning in regards to LGBTQ.
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Why can't it be an upward progression to come to recognize the gift
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God has given to his church in his gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered children?
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Because I hear that all the time. I mean,
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I'm preparing for a debate on homosexuality right now, and so I'm, you have to read all sorts of stuff that I haven't had to read for a while, but I'm having to read it now, and this is a standard argument.
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And you can't be backwards looking. That's what caught me about what
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Francis said. We can't be backwards looking. How do you hold anyone responsible to a unchanging standard without looking back at it?
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How does that work? You see, liberation theologians don't want you looking back.
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They only want you looking forward as they redefine the language and redefine the faith in the process.
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So always on this path, starting from the root with sap that flows up and up, and that is why change is necessary.
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Then he says, he talks about Vincent Lorenz, he talks about here our understanding of the human person.
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Now, check this out. Let me repeat this. Vincent Lorenz makes the comparison between human biological development and the transmission from one age to another of the depositum fide.
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Now remember, from our perspective, the apostolic depositum fide is right there.
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Here's the apostolic depositum fide. This is what the apostles taught.
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This is what the spirit of God gave to us. And despite the
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Jesuits, and despite Trent Horns buying into this, this is ontologically unique.
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It is theanoustos, and it doesn't just mean life -giving. It is life -giving. That is a partial truth, but it is an insufficient truth because it is life -giving because it's
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God -breathed. God's breath is what gives life. So here's the apostolic depositum fide.
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So he says, and the transmission from one age to another of the depositum fide, which grows and is consolidated with the passage of time.
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It grows. That's why many a Roman Catholic doesn't care that there was no one at the council of Nicaea that dogmatically believed everything they have to dogmatically believe today.
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Well, that was back then. The depositum fide has grown.
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It's become clearer, I would argue, anything but.
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But it's become clearer, and it's grown, and it's consolidated.
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Now see, when I think of consolidated, I think of truths that become so fully grounded in our understanding in Scripture.
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For example, when we believe in the deity of Christ as revealed in Scripture, there have been things that have helped us to defend that belief to a greater extent than we could in the past.
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We have made discoveries. I think of Granville Sharp's constructions and issues like that.
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Consolidation is not change. It's not the death penalty is given by God for protection from evil to...
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it's a sin. Okay, that's not consolidation. That's de -evolution or evolution or change.
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But the idea that the sap from the root at one point said
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X, and now it says not X, is not a rational position to take.
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But it's what Francis is saying. So he says, here our understanding of the human person changes with time.
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Really? I can hear James Martin saying that.
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I can hear all of the promoters of LGBTQ perspectives saying, well, you know, up until the last 20 years, the church, in big, vague terms, the church didn't understand what we've come to know.
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You see, psychologists and psychiatrists have helped us to understand things that were just never known before.
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And now we understand that there are people that just, this is their orientation. This is what they are.
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God made them this way. And it's terrible that up until now, this just did not give us enough insight into mankind.
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It had to be the late 20th and early 21st centuries where we finally come to understand all those prophets and all those apostles.
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They were clueless. They had no earthy idea I can hear that.
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I can hear that. So our understanding of the human person changes with time.
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And our consciousness also deepens. I'm sure that's his understanding of his contribution.
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Death penalty is a sin. That is a deepening of consciousness.
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The other sciences we know he fully accepts
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Darwinism. The other sciences and their evolution also help the church in this growth and understanding.
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Now stop right there. So what happened to the three -legged stool was scripture, tradition, and magisterium.
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Now we have a four -legged stool with human sciences.
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And believe you me, you know who kicked that door wide open? His name was
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Thomas Aquinas. Kicked that door wide open.
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And so now we have the other sciences and their evolution.
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Evolution is inevitable in this world. Also help the church in this growth in understanding.
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Growth in understanding which can completely reverse previous positions.
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It really makes me wonder. I mean I'm just theorizing here in passing.
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If what he's done with capital punishment is a preparatory step, it's real easy.
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I mean liberals hate what the bible says about law and what the bible says about capital punishment.
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They hate it. So you would be offending a relatively small group within your own constituency to just simply close the door on it.
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Because there are already lots of people had your position anyways. And it just makes me wonder if that's sort of the first step toward the rest of this growth in understanding.
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Our understanding of the human person changes with time. Our consciousness deepens.
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And look, we've talked on this program over and over in the past. The current argument from the affirming side amongst
45:31
Protestants is this is a work of the spirit of God. The spirit of God is leading us to recognize the gift to the church of the
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LGBTQ community. And they've likened it to Pentecost. Now as absolutely insane as that is, there's a lot of insane stuff being believed today.
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And so that can always be put under evolution, growth, and understanding.
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And this is the language of the bishop of Rome. I'm quoting him here. The other sciences and their evolution also help the church in this growth in understanding.
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And then here's the last sentence. Now there's more to it.
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You can read it. The view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.
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The view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.
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That's the pope. That's Francis talking about growth and change and evolution and consolidation and progress and saying the view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.
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Now obviously, there have always been areas where disagreement was allowed even within Rome Catholicism.
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So you could dodge this statement by pointing to that. You can point to, well, even in the last dogma that was defined about the bodily assumption, the church did not define infallibly whether Mary died or not.
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So you're allowed to hold either position. Now one position doesn't make any sense. If she had no personal sin or original sin, why she would die?
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I don't know. But you can go that direction. But that's not what he's talking about.
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That's not even the context in which he's speaking. He's talking about fundamental change and evolution.
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And so when he says the view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous, he's talking about the big ticket issues.
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And he's saying the door is open for growth and understanding from X to not
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X because he's done it. Might he do it with something else?
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I don't know. Is this a long -term thing? I would imagine there is a bunch of Roman Catholics sitting out there who have been red -pilled, sitting there going, oh great, the
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Protestants are on to what's going on. We know this is happening. I'll bet you there's a bunch. The people that are the most concerned about Francis, I think they came to these conclusions long before I ever did.
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The view of church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous. He goes on to say, but some people opt out.
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They go backward. They're what I call inditristi.
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When you go backward, you form something closed, disconnected from the roots of the church, and you lose the sap of revelation.
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You hear what I just said? If I can open my drink. You lose the sap of revelation.
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I remember talking to a Roman Catholic years ago who had come to the conclusion, he said, you know, in our more honest conversations, you can't look at church history and look at the definition of the bodily assumption without fundamentally coming to the conclusion that revelation is ongoing.
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It's ongoing. We've always said that it ceased the apostles, but the reality is the way we look at tradition, the nebulosity of tradition, the fact you can't define what tradition is, but then we use it to define dogmas like this.
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That's continuing revelation. Here he's talking about the sap of revelation, not an objective historical, there it is, this is what's always been believed, the ones for all delivered the saints faith.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is far too objective for anyone that far on the left. When you go backward, you form something closed.
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So you see, in the leftist mind, openness is beautiful, but it's always, it's not an openness to the past.
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It's an openness to revision of the past, redefinition of the past, abandonment of the past, but it can never be.
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As you see this all across academia, when progressivism rots out the academy, the only thing you can do is to continue the revolution.
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You can't do scholarship that simply establishes the truthfulness of what's already been believed.
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You have to do radical stuff. You have to change all the time. So whenever you see these wild leftist professors getting booted out of a classroom and screamed out of a classroom by their own students who have become more leftist than they are, that's the process.
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That's all you can do. It becomes completely destructive. So if you don't change upward, you go backward, and then you take on criteria for change other than those our faith gives for growth and change.
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Now, I wasn't going to spend all that much time on that, but how is that relevant?
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Well, I did not send this, and I'm sending it now. Okay, now I've got the speakers right.
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I was sent this clip. I didn't need Trent Horn to prove my point as quickly as he did.
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This is just a few days old. We all know who he's referring to in this clip, but I want you to think with me what all this means in light of what we just looked at from Francis.
52:42
So let's take a look at it real quick here. I also think this is helpful, Joe, because more when I hear, you know,
52:48
Protestant apologists making certain arguments like, well, we know that Peter says that Paul's writings are
52:54
Scripture, so therefore they're Scripture. Okay, so what makes Peter Scripture in the first place? You saw the problem there.
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But even they're saying, well, look, we have early on this testimony that the writings of Paul are Scripture.
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What do you do, though, when you have modern scholarship that calls into question whether Paul really wrote especially things like 1 and 2
53:15
Timothy, for example? I think most critical scholars don't hold that Paul wrote these, but the
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Catholic position would still survive even if one of Paul's disciples, for example, wrote one of those letters and attributed it to him, because the
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Church doesn't infallibly declare all of the historical circumstances of each writing, it just declares.
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Okay, now, I didn't do it. I should do it.
53:41
I may still do it. Part one, I need to go back and find, because it's on a cassette tape, but I think
53:51
I recorded it. It might still be available online somewhere, but the debate,
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Denver, Colorado, the night that I debated Gerry Matiticks on the first night of the papacy, Carl Keating and Patrick Woodrid versus Ron Nemec and Johnson, I think the last name was
54:17
Johnson, Jackson, Jackson and Nemec, just a wipeout victory for the
54:24
Catholics, but key question asked by the
54:31
Catholics, how do you know Matthew wrote Matthew? The Catholic Church is the answer to your question.
54:38
You're dependent upon the Catholic Church. That's not what
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Trenhorn believes, because evidently the Catholic Church can't tell you that Matthew wrote
54:50
Matthew. Or that Paul wrote 1st 2nd Timothy. So that's the first thing, is in 30 years, the fundamental argumentation, epistemologically speaking, has changed for the unchanging
55:03
Church. How does that work? Now, some might argue back, well, the people that are debating didn't present sola scriptura like you do.
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Yeah, they were fundamentalists. They weren't reformed, but I can show you,
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I can show you easily my understanding of the self -attesting, because this is all video against the self -attesting nature of scripture, in Calvin.
55:31
Okay, we can go earlier than that if we want to, but we can do that with Calvin. So, they would never read
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Calvin. Not they, as in Catholics, the fundamentalists would never read
55:45
Calvin and would consider that to be a strange thing to do. So, that issue aside,
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I want you to, I have said for years that no matter how hard my
56:01
Roman Catholic debate opponents try, they cannot avoid the epistemological reality of sola ecclesia.
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The Church defines what scripture is. The Church defines what scripture says.
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The Church defines what tradition is. The Church defines what tradition says.
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And so, there is nothing else. It's not a three -legged stool.
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It's a one -legged stool. And a one -legged stool is very uncomfortable, no matter how you slice it.
56:41
You could spin on it for a while, but, you know, once that rotational momentum is gone, you're done.
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But think about what Trenhorn just said. Scripture's entire validity is dependent upon the
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Roman Catholic Church. Even when the Roman Catholic Church cannot tell you what theanostos means, you have to depend upon a modern
57:11
Protestant scholar a year ago to tell you that. Can't tell you what theanostos means.
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Can't tell you who wrote 1st and 2nd Timothy. It's not apostolic. So, the term apostolic becomes an ahistorical term.
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It no longer has any connection to the actual apostles. Can't tell you who wrote it, but did you hear the language?
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The Catholic position still survives. Survives what?
57:45
Critical scholarship. Now, unlike Trent, I have been dealing with critical scholarship for a long, long time.
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And I've been dealing with the attacks on Pauline authorship of the
58:04
Colossians for a long, long time. And the argumentation is based upon theories.
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Theories of what the Church, how the Church was organized early on, which you have no knowledge of outside of Scripture anyways.
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Theories about uses of vocabulary, as if you would use terms in the frequency when writing a personal letter that when you're writing to a church.
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No, you don't. And you could do that with Pope Francis if you want. Read his encyclicals, read his personal correspondence.
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Oh, he couldn't have written all of that because there's different word frequencies. Brilliant. Literally, you read the critical commentaries and these are their reasons.
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They have presuppositions as to how the Church was formed in that time period that says this couldn't have been written at that time.
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It's all theoretical. So I've been dealing with this for a long time, but Trent just goes, well, you know, there's a lot of scholarship that says otherwise, but our position survives.
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The Protestants hitch their wagon to this and their position can't survive.
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What do you mean survive? On life support maybe? Because now you have a
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Church that believed one thing all along and now needs to believe something else because look, you cannot prove to me that the view of the
59:48
Roman Catholic Church down from the Reformation onward was that Paul didn't write 2
59:56
Timothy and you could have forgeries in the New Testament. Hey, you know where that's come into your schools?
01:00:03
Because you'll get that at Boston College. Believe you me, I know that's what they have at Boston College. I get that.
01:00:09
You know where it came from? The Jesuits. They kicked the door open and sure, they reject all that stuff.
01:00:19
I get it. But survives? It survives.
01:00:27
The only way to come to that position is that this has nothing to do with the
01:00:33
Catholic position. It's just, it's somewhat of an annoying distraction.
01:00:40
Just believe whatever the Church says. Okay? And what if your
01:00:47
Church gets hijacked by a whole line of Pontiffs who are into consolidation, progression, growth upwards, um, sap of revelation, and each one, the next
01:01:04
Pope, he makes the next change. The next Pope, he makes the next change. You can't stop it, can you? You have no way to do it.
01:01:11
You can't look backwards and say, but that's not what we believed in the past because you've already changed that. You've already kicked the door open to that.
01:01:19
You can't stop it. You just can't. Just admit it.
01:01:26
That's the fatal flaw. You can't stop it. Well, there are just certain things you cannot be changing.
01:01:33
There, anything can be changed over time as long as you allow this kind of leftist propaganda, leftist worldview that deeply influences your current
01:01:47
Pope to then, look, he's been
01:01:53
Pope long enough. Every single person on the papal biblical commission was either chosen by him or reinstated by him.
01:02:04
Every single one that influences your higher education that influences the next generation of all your priests and therefore your bishops.
01:02:15
Don't tell me they don't have a massive amount of impact upon the coming generations.
01:02:22
And once you into that worldview and it becomes the essence, look at what we're looking at in the
01:02:29
West right now. Why are we seeing such degradation of law? Why is the West moving away from the
01:02:37
Christian heritage that we had that gave us such things as innocent until proven guilty?
01:02:44
That's a Christian concept. Why is it that we have judges who no longer care one wit about the law?
01:02:54
Because they're abandoning the Christian foundations that gave stability to the
01:02:59
West. So what we're seeing judges do in the legal realm, the bishops do in the theological realm in Roman Catholicism.
01:03:12
And it just takes a few generations. That's all it takes. And you got no way to stop it.
01:03:21
Got no way to stop it. There is a point in time, I would suggest there was a point in time when if things had been different, there might have been a mechanism to somewhat consolidate and hold on to where Rome was at that time.
01:03:42
But the papacy wouldn't allow it. And the eventual hyper exaltation of the papacy to the heights that you see, especially in the 19th century, ended any possibility of doing that.
01:04:00
You can't stop this evolution, this growth, this consult. You can't stop it.
01:04:07
You can't do it. The mechanism is not there. Because this is gone.
01:04:16
It's gone. This is your one apostolic depositum fide. You deny its sufficiency.
01:04:24
It's done. Can't stop it. Can't stop it. So it is fascinating to me that Trenthorne represents, look, a radical change.
01:04:37
Radical in the sense of in the United States, Catholic apologetics has always been extremely conservative.
01:04:47
It's not that you did not have skeptical argumentation used in the past.
01:04:53
Read the Catholic controversy. Going all the way back to the Jesuits of the Counter -Reformation.
01:04:59
But like I said, that ended up infecting the church itself. And now you have it internally.
01:05:09
So our experience, our modern experience of Roman Catholic apologetics and the debates that have been done, now it's entering a new phase.
01:05:23
And my assertion is quite simple. Protestant apologists that do not stand firm on solo scriptura eventually stop debating this issue because they eventually stop debating everything.
01:05:37
They don't do apologetics. And Catholic apologists who will start going down this road, yeah, there's lots of forgeries in the
01:05:47
Bible. And yeah, we don't really know. You either are left just being, it's whatever the
01:05:53
Pope says. And I can't, I'm not even going to pretend to defend what the
01:05:59
Pope says historically, biblically, or anything else. It's just a complete fideism toward the papacy, which you can't debate that way.
01:06:12
You can't go there, especially with Francis. Or it leads to sede -vacantism.
01:06:21
And you go, you know what? We had a consistent belief up to such and such a time.
01:06:28
And at that point, you need to go find Jerry Matitox and apologize to him and finally get him to finish his first book, which he never did, and get him back out there.
01:06:41
Because those are the only choices you got. Those are the only choices you got.
01:06:48
So anyways, I'm going to keep the You Will Noah Harari tweet for the next program.
01:06:54
There was a statement from Dr. Harari that we need to look at because, man, does it illustrate why one of the key issues in a few weeks, when we have the
01:07:12
Q &As and we have the inevitable discussions about Christian nationalism and the degradation of the
01:07:23
West and the church's prophetic role, all this stuff is going to come down to the hellish foundation of secular epistemology.
01:07:39
Secularism is the anti -Christ religion. Everything that Christ stands for, secularism denies.
01:07:50
And that is what is in control of the academy, that is in control of governments in the
01:07:57
West. And that's why we see the West bowing the knee and collapsing and saying, enslave us, enslave us.
01:08:07
That's what we're doing. That's what's happening. And we'll talk a little bit about that on the next program.
01:08:14
So thank you for listening to the program today. I know that was all sort of on, there was a lot of, not too many people are talking about this.
01:08:25
I get it. But we need to. And it's really, really important.
01:08:32
And it does have application way beyond just talking to your Roman Catholic neighbor. It really, really does.
01:08:38
So thanks for listening. What? Yes. Okay. Well, when
01:08:43
Rich tells me to remind you about the travel fund, he's the one that keeps the books. So he's probably sitting there going, yeah, you're going to fire up that big old diesel engine and start getting 10 miles to the gallon as you head across the
01:08:56
United States. And so, yes, if you want to help us get to Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and back again, some of you might just want me to just get that far and then not come back again.
01:09:10
But hey, we have a mobile studio now. So it wouldn't really help you one way or the other. Mannheim, Pennsylvania, Atlanta, Georgia, down through Louisiana, and back again, it's a 5 ,100 mile trip.
01:09:24
I have my thing up here. Yeah, 5 ,080. And there'll be a number of times
01:09:32
I disconnect the truck and drive. So it'll probably end up being 52, 5 ,300 miles of driving.
01:09:38
So 28 days on the road. Travelfund .aomin .org is how you can help to make those things happen.