Pints With Aquinas - 229: What Does a Bad Pope Mean for the Church? W/ Joe Heschmeyer

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Today I chat with Joe Heschmeyer, author of the new book, Pope Peter, about the papacy, papal infallibility, and the current crisis in the church. Get Joe's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Pope-Peter-Defending-Distinctive-Doctrine/dp/1683571800/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=pope+peter&qid=1602508105&sr=8-1 Joe's blog: https://shamelesspopery.com/ SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/ Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT  Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day everybody and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. This is Matt Fradd here today with Joe Heschmeier, the author of the new book, Pope Peter, which I absolutely devoured this weekend. I read the whole thing, lined it up good and proper. It was so fantastic and Joe was so kind enough to agree to come on the show. So today we are going to be talking about the current, shall we say, scandal of the papacy. At least that's the way it's perceived, and maybe that's the way it is. We're going to be talking about the papacy in general. We're going to look at biblical proofs for the papacy. And one of the things I really appreciated about this book that Joe wrote

is it wasn't until chapter 9 of this book that he argued for Peter being the rock upon which Christ built his church. And so you're going to hear new arguments for the papacy that you may never have even considered before. It's going to help strengthen your faith and it's going to help you respond to those who want to know more about the Catholic church. But one thing I'm excited about and that Joe is going to be part of is this upcoming apologetics conference. And so this is going to be, yeah, this is going to be fantastic. This is next week, virtual Catholic apologetics conference. We have over 50 speakers.

So we're hoping you can join it, everybody watching. It's virtual, so no matter where you are, you can watch it. October 23rd through 25th, it'll be absolutely free during that time. So please be sure to click the link in the description and go to virtualcatholicconference.com slash PWA 2020. We've got even people like, let's see, Dr. Peter Kreeft, Jimmy Akin, Dr. Ed Fazer. I think I said Dr. Scott Hahn. We even have some Protestants like William Lane Craig, who's very Catholic friendly, who'll be giving a talk. And of course, Joe Heschmeyer, who is our guest on the show today. So it's gonna be real. It's

gonna be great. All right, Joe. How are you going? Good to have you. It's going great. I'm glad to be here. It's hard not to just sit back and watch the show. You know, like I'm used to just sitting passively and watching you talk. So the fact that I actually have to like talk back to the screen now is kind of a surreal experience. Oh man, it's a real honor to have you on the show. I don't know if other people find, find this, but I think in this day and age where we're always carrying around our phone and our pockets, some of us have these bloody smartwatches. It's really difficult to concentrate on anything of substance. And so this Friday, my wife was leading an among the lilies retreat for some ladies up in the North Georgia mountains. And so I actually put my laptop and my phone in her suitcase and I spent the weekend reading your book. And it's crazy because if I had my phone on me,

I wouldn't have been able to, you know, I would have read your book and then I would have watched a Joe Rogan clip and then watched like some stupid cat video and then saw how many retweets I got on something. So it was really cool just to sit back and read your book. So congratulations on it. First of all, you must be super proud to have it out there. It feels amazing. I'm very happy. And everything you just described about reading it is doubly true for writing it. I mean, it was very much a matter of putting all the devices away to actually get some stuff done. And even just turning the internet off to be able to type on my computer without being distracted by 20,000 notifications and all of that stuff. That's the modern world. Yeah, yeah.

And it really is. I really have high praise for this book. It felt like reading a book by Brent Petrie. Brent Petrie straddles that line between the academic and the layman, at least in how he presents his kind of his work. You have over 400 footnotes in this book, and it's only got like 250 pages. That's kudos on that.

But yeah, I really felt like reading it, it could have been called like Jesus and the Jewish roots of the papacy because it was so steeped in Scripture. Your arguments were so cogent and persuasive. And as I said in the beginning, it wasn't until chapter 9 that you get to the upon this rock bit. So I want to really encourage everybody to go out and get a copy of this book. I'm not just saying that because Joe didn't even ask me on my show. I was the one who hounded him for the interview because I thought this was just so excellent. So please go and check that out.

We're actually going to be giving away three copies of Joe's book to you, no matter where you live in the world. All you have to do is leave a comment and subscribe. And for extra points, be sure to share this video on social media. We'll look that up and then we'll let you know very soon the three winners, and we will post a copy of Pope Peter defending the church's most distinctive doctrine in a time of crisis. So I want to begin there, Joe, towards the end of your book. In fact, it's the last paragraph. You say something that honestly, I was pretty impressed that Catholic Answers decided to print

because it would seem that in this whole controversy around Francis, they've been pretty silent. I'm not saying maybe they haven't been and I haven't been paying attention, but I haven't heard much from them. But they allowed you to write this. So I want to read this and then kind of maybe get you to frame the discussion because you also begin the book with Francis. You say this. The church right now is going through a period of crisis. Man, I'm blind. At least in part because of bad papal and episcopal leadership. Wow. The household of God, which is the church of the

living God, is going through the roughest patch it's seen in centuries. Love this line. Pretending otherwise is dishonest, and it sets non-Catholics up for disappointment. So I just want to kind of begin by just talking about this. I've heard you speak elsewhere about the fact that you grew up in the John Paul II pontificate, and then we had Benedict, and we kind of, I don't know, you probably had the same experience as I do. You kind of look around and you're like, okay, there's some crazy things going in different parishes, but at least the Pope's got our back. And then I, like you, was super into defending whatever Pope Francis said in the beginning. And then I slowly stopped defending it. And then I had some real questions about some of the things he said, and it really bothered me. And I know it bothered you too. So

tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. Okay. There's a lot there. I think the first thing is just, you know, in that paragraph, what strikes me is that it's just, it seems so obviously true. Like, if you just say, here's all the things going on in the church right now. Are things going well? Are they going poorly? Are people coming in? Are they leaving? You can make a pretty clear objective case that things are going badly in a way they haven't been this bad in a long time. And it's kind of surprising that so many Catholics either don't want to talk about it, or they totally want to whitewash it, or they rush to the other extreme, and they just kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's like, okay, we got to find

something in between those two extremes, those two poles. But yeah, so in my own journey, I definitely started off more as like, defend everything the Pope says. Because, you know, there's a certain amount of just like filial respect and obedience you know you want to give them the benefit of the doubt and a lot of the early critiques seemed rash they seemed kind of uncharitable and unfair and from people who are kind of perennially complaining but they started to make some good points and he started to seem kind of unclear on a lot of things. And for me, the kind of the turning point, I mentioned this in the book, where I just sort of stopped that knee jerk defending of the Pope was a series of comments that he made related to the Zika virus, which was, you know, the the dry run of coronavirus back in like 2016. So with Zika, it's still a terrible disease in Latin America. One of the consequences is that it can lead to birth defects, where you have abnormalities in the shape of the baby's head and all of this. And so a reporter asked him whether avoiding pregnancy might be the lesser of two evils in regards to this.

Now, the question, as it was framed, is really ambiguous. Does she mean abstaining? Does she mean contraception? She doesn't really spell it out. But rather than clarify that, the Pope just kind of says, oh yeah, it is the lesser of two evils, or it could be the lesser of two evils here, because there's a contradiction between the Fifth Commandment and the Sixth Commandment. That thou shall not kill is going up against the sexual morality that's broadly under the don't commit adultery. And that was just such a bad, like, first of all,

we've said as recently as like a few days before, the New York Times had a thing talking about how it wasn't okay to use contraception in response to Zika, just like they did run a piece like a year before, but he couldn't use contraception in response to AIDS. And all of that is true. Like we've never said, well, if there's a disease or if you're worried about a birth defect, if you're worried about X, Y or Z, then contraception is OK. That totally undermines the church's teaching. And if you understand why the church teaches, why she does, then you'll understand why those aren't good arguments against it. And so he's playing into this ambiguity. And at first his response, like I said, is just kind of ambiguous.

But then the papal spokesman actually clarifies, yes, he does mean contraception here. So if you were giving him the benefit of the doubt, as I was, as many people were with the initial comments, that while it was just badly expressed, the papal spokesman eliminated any ambiguity in the wrong direction, so to speak. But also he has this whole thing where he's imagining that the Ten Commandments can contradict each other, which is pretty specifically condemned in Veritatis Splendor. That, that whole line of reasoning, like God doesn't contradict God. He's never going to put you in a position where you have to choose between disobeying him or disobeying him. Uh, because that's not what a just and a loving God does. So the whole framing of it was really bad. When I got to kind of that moment, it was like, no, no, there is no twisting or turning of these words.

That is just like, OK, there's no twisting or turning of these words that results in. Oh, yeah, this is what the Catholic Church has always taught. And I think that was kind of a wake up call for me that like I need to pivot how I'm approaching Pope Francis, because there's still a lot that I really do like about him. Like, uh, I lived in Italy at the time that all this was going on and he's an amazing preacher and he often preaches on the basics of the gospel in a way that is just really like inspiring and empowering. Like if he was a local diocesan priest, you'd be like, oh yeah, he's good. But like, don't go to him for like tough theological questions, but he's not a local priest. He's the pope and so that creates a whole other kind of set of issues i feel like there was almost an unintentional gaslighting by those of us who were trying to defend pope francis

at all costs because you got these people who were like legitimately trying to make sense of this like that seems problematic right and we're like absolutely not and here's why and i feel like really like we kind of maybe some of us are to blame for where some people went we're like no i freaking i'm not insane and i know that this is wrong and really i think what it's done is it's and this kind of where this book stems from it kind of has given us the opportunity to clarify the papacy to rethink the papacy i suppose there'll be some people who are, when I say rethink, I guess I mean on a lay level, not ecclesially, but there'll be some people who'll think,

okay, all of this is just sort of like backpedaling, right? It's kind of like what we do with evolution, you'll say. Someone will say, well, really, when you look at Genesis, it envisions the world being created over a period. And some people say, okay, this is just, you're just re-looking at this through modern science and you're trying to make it fit. And so I suppose there'll be some people who think we're doing that as well. But yeah. I think there honestly is a little bit of backpedaling, but not from the church's position,

but maybe from an overly confident or even kind of arrogant way that we put matters before. You alluded to this before where under JP II and under Benedict, there were a lot of crazy things that happened at the local and even diocesan level, but you knew the Pope had your back. So there was a real sort of de-emphasis of legitimate local authority, a real de-emphasis of the bishop as like a successor to the apostles, and more it's just like, well, these are the obnoxious middle managers, but if you talk to corporate in Rome, then you can get what you want. You know, like it's it's more like trying to deal with like the fast food worker who won't accept the coupon that you know is good. Like that was kind of the the approach like and then you get Francis and suddenly you don't feel like you can just call corporate and get what you want. And it's like, oh, yeah, maybe I've been just stepping over all of the legitimate levels of authority because I thought I could get a better case at the Supreme Court level.

And that's just not the way it was supposed to be in the first place. Oh, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, sorry. Here's what you say on page 13. You say, as Catholic apologists sometimes do, I once took a posture of triumphalism. To be sure, like anyone familiar with the history of the church, I knew that there were some bad popes, but the problem always seems safely distant. My entire life had been spent amid the pontificates of Carol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, two of the brightest and holiest men

of the 20th century. It seemed a given that in Rome, we would always have a sort of theologian in chief, a pope capable of articulating the nuances of Catholic doctrine with brilliant lucidity. Yeah, I mean, that's it exactly right i'll just that's what i'll do throughout this interview you'll say stuff and then i'll sum it up with what you've already said just in a more succinct way and you're like and you can say that sums it up brilliantly yeah that's exactly what i was trying to say just now uh yes this is why i take so many edits before you get exactly like what you want to say succinctly yeah because the idea that we could still go through bad popes is sort of surprising and shocking uh the fact that it isn't just some like quirk of medieval history that you get right on like a catholic trivia contest

but it's actually like a potential living reality is is shocking and scary so if the case for the papacy that we've been making in the past few decades, say, depends on the pope being JP2 or depends on the pope being Benedict, that's not going to work. You need to have something that can withstand like your Julius the War Pope or, you know, whoever, you know, like you need something that can handle the really bad popes. You need something that can handle the popes who don't know how to handle their authority. Even popes like Boniface VIII, for all the good that he does,

he's still a pope who maybe throws around his authority too much. And you have that going back very early on in the church. Even to the second century, you get this whole controversy over the dating of Easter. And sometimes the popes, they act badly. And so a defense of the papacy that doesn't account for the history

is is a poor defense and and you know like i said in the book it sets you up for disappointment there have been plenty of people who they have an idealized version of the papacy they have an idealized version of what unity is going to look like in the church they come in they get promptly ignored once they're no longer in rcia uh they get the cold shoulder. They hear heretical homilies. Bad things don't get corrected at the Jocelyn level. And they get really disillusioned, and they walk right back out the door they came in. And that's a problem. And I can't solve all of the problems that I just mentioned there.

But the one that we can at least solve is letting people know, don't be surprised when these things happen. Because this is not going to be the panacea against that. That's a really great point. Joe, when you started kind of, to use a maybe lack of a better term, red-pilled on Pope Francis, and you started to realize like, okay, like there's legitimate criticisms I can level here, and that's okay. Did that cause you to question your faith? Did you, like like many others begin to look into things like SSPX or orthodoxy or some other non-pope option I didn't because I'd already had kind of the intellectual foundation laid like even before that I think I could have told you intellectually

you know the bishops they are the successors of the apostles they're not just vicars of the pope they're not just middle management and there was actually a fantastic, well, you mentioned SSPX, there's a fantastic description by Louis Boyer on Lefebvre, Archbishop Lefebvre, the founder of SSPX. And he talks about kind of what disillusioned lefebvre and all of the scandals that happened in the 60s how he'd been like lefebvre had been a very orthodox bishop in doing mission stuff in africa and he'd been kind of like oblivious to how bad things were going in europe and north america so when he has this kind of like shock to the system where these bishops in in boye names names or at least heavily alludes to who he means like the bishop in Quebec

had gotten his spot as the bishop by denouncing his predecessor as a modernist and that was under the the big like anti-modernity period in the early 20th century uh and then he turns out to be a raving modernist himself as soon as it becomes expedient in the 60s and so he's seen things like that happen of just like these, these craven political lackeys who don't seem to have any belief in an Orthodox faith. And he jumped ship and he freaks out. So I'd had to kind of grapple with that, you know, years before when I'd read this essay. And so I think I was maybe more prepared to be red pilled, so to speak. So I don't know if that helps. But that was my own journey, just like, I guess, grappling with these things a little bit at a time so it wasn't a huge shock to the system.

Yeah, well, I think it is a very huge shock for the system for many people right now, and that's why this book is so important. You begin the book by arguing for why the church isn't merely invisible and why it is something you can go out and find. And I wanted to ask you why it was important to begin the book on a pope with that argument, and maybe you can critique some of the reformers' views of an invisible church. Yeah, I think twofold. Number one, if you're going to say Peter's the head of the church, you should probably define your terms. I used to be a lawyer, and before that I was a debater. And in those two fields, you have to define your terms at the outset, because otherwise we don't know what we're talking about. So there's part of it that's just like, if your idea of the church

is just the invisible collection of the saved, then the phrase Peter is the head of the church is meaningless. Or whatever it means, it doesn't mean what it meant to Jesus. It doesn't mean what it meant to the apostles. It doesn't mean what it means to me as I'm writing this. So let's make sure we have an understanding of what we mean by church. The second reason is that like living in the US, this is I don't know what it's like down there in Florida. But here in America, it's it's just like there's there's craziness around the idea of church because we're living in a post Protestant country. So people just assume, well, there's just a Christian church and then denominations that all are like equally valid. well, there's just a Christian church and then denominations that all are like equally valid. This isn't an argument that people have concluded to. It's a presupposition that they're beginning from. And it's really hard to get people to challenge that because it's not based on some Bible verse. It isn't like there's somewhere in the Bible where you see like, you know, Andrew sets up the Baptist church and, you know, Philip sets up, you know, there's nothing like

that. Rather, it's nothing like that. Rather, it's just we're building on centuries worth of assumptions that date back in some form to Luther and before him to Jan Hus and John Wycliffe, and then kind of going in a bad direction. But without ever really having any idea why we ended up in the spot that Protestantism has largely ended up, that's a huge impediment. So I wanted to kind of drill in. So I have a chapter that just says, basically, here's why the major Protestant positions are wrong. And then a chapter on here's why the Catholic position is right. One thing I was thinking today, I was drinking a coffee, kind of going over my notes here again, and I was thinking about this, and I really don't want to kind of character the Protestant position. And again, as you point out in your book, and which

is obviously true, there isn't a Protestant position. There's not Protestantism, but Protestantisms. But sometimes I wonder, like, if you were to strip the New Testament of any reference to church leadership or church authority, you really would have no difference in Protestant communities. Like, suppose the Bible had nothing to say about church leadership and nothing really about the church, except in as much as it's like a group of people who love Jesus. And what would happen? What would result from that? I think you'd still have people coming together to read the scriptures, to pray together. You'd still have people who are trying to serve the poor in obedience to what Christ said. And you would naturally have a sort of leadership because you

would say, well, this person's a more faithful expositor of the scripture than other people. And so we're going to listen to him. So it really feels like, and it's the case that Protestantism has a really impoverished view of the church. Would you agree with that? I absolutely would agree with that. I even have an example of that. So I stand C.S. Lewis, like he is amazing. I've listened to the audio tape or audio, whatever, Lewis. Like he is amazing. I, I, I've listened to the audio tape or audio, whatever, not audio tape. It's, it's 2020. I've listened to the, uh, online audio book of like the letters of C.S. Lewis. Like I, I love him, but his letters where he talks about Catholicism, you see just like a real area of like an intellectual blind spot, a real weakness. And, and it's exactly what you just described that Lewis's position on the church wouldn't be any different

if the church was totally silent, or rather, if the Bible was totally silent on the church. So he describes it at one point and says the reason he isn't Catholic is the same reason why he wouldn't just accept any of the conclusions about Plato made by a platonic society. In other words, he compares the church, the Catholic church here, to the idea of a group that just forms to implement and interpret the teachings of Plato and all of this. And it's like, well, that's exactly what the church doesn't claim to be. The church doesn't just claim to be, here are some followers who've decided to come up with their best understanding of what's going on. You know, like you've got that right now with any major thinker. You've got, you know, your East Coast Straussians and your West Coast Straussians. You've got your

Kantians. You've got your fill in the blank. Like any major thinker, religious figure, philosophical figure, political thinker, whoever, they're going to have the devotees who are loosely organized in whatever groups they decide to kind of assimilate into. And so, yeah, if Jesus was silent about the church, if the New Testament was silent about the church, we would get Protestantism. So when Jesus says, upon this rock, I will build my church, before we even get into what does he mean by upon this rock? What does it mean to say, I will build my church? And it seems like if nothing else, it means we shouldn't end up with what we'd get without that like because they've nullified you know scripture warns against nullifying the word of god you've literally nullified it if if jesus making this promise makes literally zero difference in your understanding of

the church yeah one of the things you mentioned in here is a term coined by your friend brian cross ecclesial deism and here's how he defines it, and then I'll have you kind of explain it further. Ecclesial deism is the notion that Christ founded his church, but then withdrew, not protecting his church's magisterium. So the idea, of course, with deism, as you know, but for our listeners, is that God sort of wound up the universe like a clock and then abandoned it, and sometimes Protestantism kind of tends to this idea of ecclesial deism. Can you explain that a bit more? Yeah. So, you know, like you just said, this kind of watchmaker God, you know, you wind up the

church, you set everything in motion, then you just sit back and let whatever happen. And so if things get corrupted, if things go off course, if things break, you've got a non-interventionist God who doesn't really care enough to step in and fix it. Well, of course, no Protestant believes in that kind of God, at least since like the 18th century. Instead, you have this kind of view that God winds up not just the whole universe, but the church. He builds a church, he winds it up, he gives it the Bible, he lets it go, and then maybe he preserves the Bible from corruption, but he doesn't preserve the church from interpreting it heretically for centuries. Like, really, if you are going to hold to, for example, if you're going to reject regenerative baptism, which, again, not

every Protestant does, but enough do, for instance, the Baptists. If you're going to say that, you're going to have to say everyone for 1 for 1500 years didn't understand these documents that were written by the apostles. No one understood what God was revealing in the scriptures. And that seems like a huge indictment of God, right? Like, who is it? Wooden, the UCLA coach, who was an English teacher who said there's a difference between I taught it and they learned it.

And he was saying the mark of a teacher is not just that you said the words. The mark of the teacher is that just that you said the words. The mark of the teacher is that someone actually understood what you were saying. And if you don't get to that level, you failed as a teacher. And so to say no one understood the apostles preaching means that the apostles failed and it means that Jesus failed because all they left behind was a book that wouldn't be understood for centuries later, if at all. But once you go down that road, why believe we understand it now? Because doesn't that just seem like arrogance?

If we're going to have the audacity to say no one actually got what Jesus meant, it seems ridiculous to then add, and tell me, or and tell Luther. You know, you've got a German monk and a French lawyer. Like a French lawyer? a french lawyer who trusts french lawyers it's like two of the worst kinds of people yeah it's like if i'm just gonna put two pejorative words just lost all of i just lost all of my french patronage that's okay continue yeah well i mean i was a lawyer so i can i can half make that joke. So yeah, but that idea that they finally got it is as absurd as the modern scholar who says,

oh, everyone's been interpreting this until me in this academic paper. Like, we rightly laugh at that person as having an audacious view where they don't really care what it means. They're just trying to get tenure. They're trying to make waves enough to get cited because you don't take that kind of claim seriously. Luther and Calvin are doing that sort of thing. And it's

outrageous. It's ridiculous. In the book, I mention, I believe his name is Norman Fox, who was a 19th century Baptist who taught at William Jewell College, not far from here in Kansas City. And he proposes this model that what Jesus meant at the Lord's Supper was just a common table blessing. Like he rejects any kind of sacramental view or even like the more commemorative views you'll find in other forms of Protestantism. And he says, no, no, this is just like every meal is the Lord's Supper. You pray together and you like have this sharing together. And he acknowledges in his book on this, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no one's ever held this before. But then he points out, but that's also true of our positions on and then X, Y and Z doctrines that are like held by mainstream Protestants. Like no one was a Presbyterian in the early church. No one was an Anglican.

You know, like once you accept that, then this isn't any crazier than that. And the thing is, like Fox is right that those ideas are equally crazy. Yeah. And and so it is it's that kind of idea. Yeah, I think it was Ulrich Zwingli in his work, A Day Baptismo, who essentially says, when it comes to the issue of baptismal regeneration, I can only conclude, really? You can only, nothing else?

I can only conclude that all of the fathers and doctors have been in error. That's his words, which is a super arrogant thing to say. Again, it doesn't mean he's wrong, but it would seem to mean that Christ has abandoned his church and no longer, and was wrong when he said the Holy Spirit would guide it into all truth. Which is another way of saying it doesn't mean that he's wrong, but it does mean that he's wrong. But really. Yeah. But really.

But really, what I want to ask you, Joe, is what do we need to prove to prove that Peter was the pope? Like, what's the lowest bar? If you were going into a debate right now and they said, prove to me that Peter was the first pope, obviously you wouldn't have to explain the development of the papacy over the ages, which we'll get to. You're just trying to prove enough to kind of win the argument. So what is that bar that someone would need to cross to show that Peter was the first pope? And then we'll dig into the scriptural references that support that. Yeah, I think you'd have to show that Jesus established the structure of the church. So that's the first part. It's going to be established by

Jesus. It's not some later development. Second, that he establishes it with a hierarchy. Like, it has to be visible, has to be structured. Third, that Peter hierarchy like it has to be visible has to be structured third that peter or there has to be one office so to speak uh one person occupied by one occupant who is entrusted with the care of the rest of the church in some way now the the in some way there's doing a lot of work because what that's going to look like is going to differ in the same way that if you're going to talk about the structure of the family and explain the role of the father, you're going to have to say, well, yeah, not every father is going to look the same. And the way you lead your family will depend a lot on the family and on the circumstances your family faces and the age of your kids and all sorts of all of these sorts

of things. It's not going to be cookie cutter, but there's going to be some essential trait of you're entrusted with a particular kind of servant leadership. And we should expect to see that. Like if you have that, and if we have enough evidence that this is meant as a permanent institution and not as a one-off, then we have the papacy. But see, even if you were just trying to prove that Peter was the first Pope, you wouldn't yet have to prove that it was meant to be ongoing. True. You'd really be going for the first three of those. So would it be enough just to say, are we trying to do more than prove that Peter was the leader of the twelve? What are we trying to do in addition to that just to show that Peter was the first pope?

Yeah, we want to say that the difference between Peter and the others is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. In other words, it's not just the primus inter pares, the idea that Peter is first among equals, but that he's actually given a unique authority or a unique assignment by God that is not equally dischargeable by the other eleven. That isn't just something that's given to everybody. So what's the difference there when you say not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind? Suppose it were just a difference in degree. Like what's the distinction there? Yeah, so like the difference between a bishop and an archbishop is a difference in degree.

They're both bishops. They have the same ontological status. And the difference is only a juridical one, that the archbishop is the head of like a jurisdictional region, but he is the head of a province and other bishops kind of report to him. He is not the bishop to those bishops. He's not entrusted to basically more than an honorary kind of authority. This is true also of like a primate in countries that have primates, like the primate of all Ireland and all that. Like you don't have like a special, you're not a rank above Bishop. It's just a different implementation. So anything like that. College of Cardinals is also purely honorary. So that kind of thing isn't what we're looking for here. We're looking for clear evidence that what Peter gets isn't just, yes, we have a lot of,

because like James and John would be, or Andrew, James and John would be the ones I'd use as they're clearly given a place of honor regularly, right after Peter and before all of the rest of the 12. And you can see this in every list of the apostles. It's always Peter first, and then some permutation of Andrew, James and John, and then everybody else, and then Judas. That's the way the lists kind of work. Well, that second tier there, we would say that's a list showing some sort of honoring to the so-called pillars of the church, to use the language Paul uses in Galatians. But pillars isn't, as far as we can tell, some sort of special status that they have. Like, it isn't like this is some permanent institution where there's always going to be pillars in the church. This is something that's just honoring this kind of unique role that they have or this special role they have.

So we have to show that what Peter has is somehow different than just that. Because I think one of the best arguments you can make against the papacy is just, well, how do we know it isn't just that kind of authority? Like what Andrew, James and John have. How do we know it's not just honorary or just in recognition of Peter's natural traits, but not something that's going to go on to his successors? Okay. And this would be the argument many of the Orthodox would make, right? That Peter is a first among equals? Yeah, exactly. So it's going to be just precisely that. They're going to believe this kind of idea of primus inter pares. And I don't think that evidence is very strong historically. Like there was always something

more than just the respect you would pay to a patriarch or to an archbishop or to a prime. Okay, well, let's start digging into some of the scriptural evidence for why Peter was the first pope. And we're going to save Matthew 16, 18 for a little later on because I want to get to some of these. I called it a new argument for the papacy, new not because no one had discovered it until you, but that many of us will go straight to Matthew 16, 18 and overlook the other ones.

So would you give us some arguments for why Peter was the first pope apart from Matthew 16, 18? Yeah, you want to start with Luke 22, the Last Supper? That's where I begin in the book. Once we get into jumping into the papacy properly, or jumping into Peter properly, I start with the Last Supper, because it's somewhere where I don't hear people go, but it seems so clear, and it is a much better place to start. There's two reasons why I don't start with Matthew 16. Number one is I think that it reduces the debate, where people think it all just comes down to, well, you think this, I think that, this father thinks this, this father

thinks that on interpreting like upon this rock. And that's way overly simplified. But second, it's because I think it can lead to a distorted understanding of the papacy where it's just about power and kind of a secular understanding of power. Luke 22 is going to purify that because at the Last Supper, the disciples are arguing about which of them is the greatest. Like, they're falling into the same trap we fall into, thinking about power in these very kind of worldly secular ways. And Jesus does a few things in order. Number one, he calls them out for this, and he tells them not to rule the way the Gentiles do. Number two, he affirms that they really do have this kind of leadership to rule. The root

word in Greek there is where we get words like hegemony, like power, you know. And then he ensures that this is actually like a perpetual institution. This isn't a one-off. He talks about them continuing to rule on 12 thrones in heaven. But he tells them that they should rule as servants. And he says, behold, I'm among you as one who serves. So that's number four. He lays out what true Christian leadership looks like. Yes, you are leaders, but don't be like Gentiles. Be servant leaders, to use kind of the modern parlance.

That to be an authority is to lay down your life for the ones that you are called to serve. That's what Christian authority and Christian leadership looks like. But then the kicker is he then turns to one of the 12, Simon Peter, and says, Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to sift all of you like wheat. And I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brethren. So if I could, I'd like to unpack that a little bit. First of all, like, Satan's after all 12 of them. He's already gotten Judas. He's after the rest. And so you might expect Jesus's response to be to, you know, I'm going to use my divine power to solve this immediately. Or barring that, you might expect him to at least say, I'm going to pray for all 12 of you, and Judas needs it the most, but all of you are going to abandon me in one way

or another between now and tomorrow. But he doesn't do any of the things that I would have done in that situation. He does something radically different, where he chooses Simon Peter and says that he's going to pray for him specifically. And in the Greek, you have this switch from the you plural, the you all, you 12, to the singular, likeeter you simon peter uh and so he prays for the one but then second he does this with an acknowledgement that peter is still going to fall so that's included within this idea that when you have turned back strengthen your brethren he's not just saying the pope is the pope because he's going to do everything right he's not just saying like i'm going to give you you this premise on you never making mistakes

or never like he's alluding to probably the worst thing any Pope has ever done throughout all of history, which is deny Christ three times. Wow. Uh, and yeah, I've never, I've never thought of it like that. You know, I think when we read the story where we feel so I do at least feel sympathetic towards Peter, because you can tell he's got a big heart and that the stakes are high. Like if he admits he himself may be persecuted. But you're right. It's a terribly awful thing to do. Like if Pope Francis today denied Christ three times, there would be a lot going on on Taylor Marshall's YouTube channel.

Yeah, I think I would jump over there for a little bit until I got frustrated. Yeah, so that kind of idea is huge. So he's including that within the understanding of the papacy, that there's always this idea that Peter isn't just Sirach, he's also the stumbling block. Oh, yeah. I mean, we can get to that later, unless you want to get into it here. I'll just allude to it, I'll just put a pin in it to say we'll get back to that. But then very clearly he says strengthen your brethren, right? Like what does he just say? He says to lead is to serve. All of you are to serve the church. Peter, you're to serve the rest of the

apostles. Like that kind of idea is where we get this idea of servant of the servants of God. That is, I think, the number one best way of understanding the papacy, that if you understand that Christ creates leaders in the church to serve the church, like the idea of priest is offering sacrifice is pointing to the idea that power is for service, like it is to offer sacrifice and to make a sacrifice of yourself for your people and for God's people. And then Peter is called to serve even those who serve. Like that's the crux of what the papacy is in a nutshell. If that's true, if Peter is given that role, that's what we're trying to say with the papacy. And you could almost say, and nothing more, because it really is very little more than that. Because if that's true, that's everything

we've been arguing for. You know, whether the Pope should wear a tiara or whether he should wear this side of the... Everything else is just relatively meaningless on the question of, okay, is someone set up as a servant of the servants of God? And is service the attribute of a leader? If those two things are yes, we've got Peter as the Pope. I love what you brought together in one or two of your chapters on the three different fishing incidences. I'm sure you could unpack this for hours, but do you want to touch upon that? Because I especially like what you had to say about dragging the net in, what the net represented, and how it's the Pope's job to maintain the church without rupture. Yeah, so let's talk about two of the three fishing miracles now. We

can bring in the third one if you want to. So there's two that are well known. The first one's in Luke's gospel, it's Luke 5. Peter is there with three other apostles, or future apostles, and they're fishing. Jesus is preaching by the seashore. He gets into Peter's boat. He tells them to cast out into the deep. They cast out, they catch a miraculous catch of fish so big that the nets tear. And Jesus uses this as a teaching moment and says, Peter, out of all of the four there, I'll make you a fisher of men. So that's already pretty loaded. It seems very symbolic that if, you know, this net symbolizes being a fisher of men, an evangelization. This would seem to represent the church in some way. That gets really reinforced in Matthew 13, 47 to 50, when Jesus uses as his example of the kingdom of God, a net containing good and bad fish that are then separated out at

the end of time. So the kingdom of God is clearly the kingdom of God on earth there, because it's talking about before the last judgment. So you're dealing with the church in the world. He's not talking about bad fish being in heaven. So we're dealing with the net represents the church very clearly in Matthew 13. Then in John 21, you have the second memorable, or actually the third fishing miracle, but the second one people remember, which is Peter is there with six other apostles this time, and Jesus has risen. Peter says, let's go fishing, and they say, we will go with you. Now already, if we're using fishing as a motif for evangelization, and if the net represents the church, the fact that Peter calls for them to go fishing,

and they say, we will go with you, John is not including insignificant details. and they say, we will go with you, John's not including insignificant details. John doesn't include insignificant details. When Judas leaves the Last Supper and John says, and it was dark, he's not just like, and by the way, did you know after the sun goes down that it's not as bright out? Like he's clearly saying something more.

And so too here, he's clearly saying something like, Peter is a fisher of men and the others fish with him. That's what he's saying here. So then they go out, but because they're not with Christ, they catch nothing. And then Jesus appears on the shore and he tells them to cast their nets on the other side. And they do. And they catch a fish so large that they can't drag it in. So all seven of them together are unable to bring it in. Peter then recognizes, or actually John, who's kind of the model of the theologian, recognizes that it is the Lord, and then Peter jumps in the water and swims to him. Jesus is there preparing

breakfast on the seashore. There's this idea of like a common meal with the Lord. There's a whole significance to this. But then Jesus sends Peter single-handedly to bring the nets in. And at Jesus's command, now remember, seven of them together couldn't do it. At Jesus's words, Peter by himself can bring the nets in. And John mentions the nets didn't tear. And the Greek word there is schisma, where we get schism. So the net of the church isn't torn because it's guided by Peter, who is led by Christ. And the church fathers, St. Augustine

has a beautiful passage on this saying, this is the church throughout history. Like we are headed towards the eternal shores. And apart from Christ, the Pope and the bishops can do nothing, right? But with Christ, there is this possibility of the church actually being one, actually being united, not going into schism, at this kind of command of Jesus. And I think it really shows, like, Peter has this special role, but it isn't just because Peter is individually apart from Christ so strong. It's because Jesus is telling Peter, I want you to do this, and therefore he's able to do it. wrong. It's because Jesus is telling Peter, I want you to do this, and therefore he's able to do it. I want to push back on one of your insights, only so you can clarify it. You say that the other seven, or was it six, who were with Peter were unable to kind of haul the fish to Jesus, and you say that Peter did it single-handedly, and that's a very interesting

point. But I'm looking in the text, and I don't see this. I do see, like, the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish. Yes. We're unable to haul it in. Yes. Right, so I'm just wondering if this is an overreach on your part. No, so in verse 6, it says,

so they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in for the quantity of fish. So they're able to drag the net, but they can't actually bring it ashore. So in verse 6, it says they weren't able to haul it in. I'm looking at that, yeah, okay. In verse 10, Jesus said to them, bring some of the fish that you've just caught. Verse 11 says, Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore,

full of large fish, 153 of them, and although there were so many, the net was not torn. Fair enough. What about verse 8, where it says, and this is after Peter jumps towards Christ, it says, the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish. Didn't they drag the fish to the shore? They didn't drag it to the shore. They dragged it to about 100 yards off. So they weren't able to actually bring it. They weren't able to haul it in. They weren't able to bring it ashore. And it's only like there's a whole dynamic.

Like this might sound like just parsing, but John is intentionally including all of these very detailed kind of interactions for a reason. He's showing something about the limits of what we're able to do apart from Christ and apart from the command of Christ and what the leaders of the church, what the apostles are able to do apart from Christ. Right. So, so yeah, they're able to drag the net, but they are not able to haul it in and they're not able to bring it ashore. And then when Jesus says, bring some of the fish you, you just caught, he's able to bring the entire net, seemingly single-handedly. And when I say seemingly single-handedly, I mean, even though he says this to all of them,

verse 11 suggests that only Peter does it. It says, so Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore. Wow, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, yeah. Have the church fathers commented on this? I think Aquinas referred to somebody saying that 150 fish referred to 150 nations or something to that effect. But what are you drawing this from when you talk about the net as the church? Oh yeah. Well, part of the issue of the net of the church is just Jesus's words in Matthew

13. Part of it also is Augustine's commentary on this passage, because Augustine does talk about this and talks about it in an eschatological sense, meaning like he views it not just about the church now, but as a sort of vision of the end of time. But this is like, he's not denying the historicity of the miracle. He's saying like, this is not just a miracle telling us Jesus really is risen. This is a miracle telling us how things are going to go from here forward. And if you read it in that sense, then you've got really three different things going on here in John 21.

Like John 21, iturally, is a sort of standalone chapter, meaning John 20 has sort of a natural end to the gospel. John 21 is basically structured like an epilogue. It's an epilogue that deals with a few things. Number one, this miracle that we're just talking about that seems to be about the church throughout history and throughout time. Number two, you have Jesus telling Peter to feed my sheep, tend my lambs, tend my sheep. Then you have the prophecy of the death of Peter and the ambiguity of what's going to happen to John. All of these are forward-looking, past the time that the events are actually taking place. All of them are saying, what happens next? And they're kind of pointing forward into the life of the church, including the death of Peter, including the special role Peter's going to play, and including this sort of role of the church throughout history.

Well, I want to kind of reiterate what you've said here, because it's really profound, by reading you. You're welcome. You say, and this is excellent, he is capable, that is Peter, at Christ's urging of doing what the other apostles were incapable of doing, bringing the catch home to the eternal shores without tearing the net. If we are the fish and the kingdom is the net, Peter is given a unique role in leading the net towards the shore to ensure that it doesn't tear. And as you said earlier, the Greek word used here for torn is schisma? Yeah, I think, yeah. I think that's how you say it. That's how I've been pronouncing it. Yeah, or schisma.

I don't know. But I love that idea of the Pope is to keep the church together. And as you say, when you look at it that way, the Pope is really the servant of servants. Yeah. And so one of the terms that some of the Eastern church fathers used for him is the icon of unity. And it means a couple things number one like if you want to be united to the visible church make sure you're united to the bishop of rome uh and this is a profile it's a simple kind of point but a profound one like we're

called to be one in the church but the risk is that you have all of these different groups saying but we're the ones who get everything right so everyone should be united but they should be united among us or they should be united under our authority or with our doctrines. And you need some solution to that. So the Pope is icon of unity. That doesn't mean that he's always going to be the one to single-handedly solve every problem, but it does mean that where he is, the visible church is. And so if you want to be part of the visible church, as Jesus says, then find him and be united to him. But two, it also means be part of the visible church as jesus says then find him and be united to him uh but two it also means that one of the special roles that the pope has is is bringing

people together so in canon law there is a strong discouragement of priests getting too involved in partisan politics and the explanation given is that the priest is to be a bridge builder and so he should be a source of unity and of harmony that what you or I may think is the most prudential thing may be something too reasonable Catholics can disagree on, but it shouldn't be something that divides us. It shouldn't be something that separates us. And the priest should be in the service of the unity of what we actually need to be united in, rather than in creating some side issue, even an important one, and saying everyone has to agree on this program or on that issue or whatever, if it's not something that you literally have to believe in as a Christian, as a Catholic. So in other words, like every priest is called to be a bridge builder, but the Pope is called

to be Pontifus Maximus, the supreme bridge builder. And we usually talk about this in relationship to God, you know, bridging this chasm between God and man, but it should also be between man and man. It should also be a bridge builder in that other sense of being a real source of unity. So to that end, I think it's legitimate to say, if the Pope doesn't do that, he's not doing the fullness of what he's called to do as the Pope. All right. Well, what I want to do next is get into Matthew 16, 18, and then we're going to take some questions from the many people who are currently watching the show, over 300 people right now. And I know we have some Orthodox brothers and sisters in the chat. And so I look forward to maybe digging into that topic as well.

But before we do, I wanted to just pause and say thank you to our sponsor, Halo. Halo is a Catholic prayer and meditation app that will help you build good habits so you can pray better. It's very easy to sit down to pray and you're not really sure how to or how long you should be praying for or what to think about. And this will help you with that. It's got daily and gospel reflections. You can sit down and do Alexio Divina, having a man or a woman kind of read the scripture to you. You can play Greg and do Alexio Divina, having a man or a woman kind of read the scripture to you. You can play Gregorian chant in the background. They even have sleep stories, all sorts of things. It's the number one rated app in the United States right now.

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your screen, this is not just good for a Catholic app. This is just a great app. So go check it out. hallow.com slash Matt Fradd, hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. Now, Joe, as I said to you, I think over text, I thought it was amazing that it wasn't until chapter nine that you began talking about upon this rock, I will build my church. And I thought that was just great rhetorically, you know what I mean? Because if you can convince me by these other things, and I am convinced, and then you turn to Matthew 16, 18, it's almost like, okay, I give up. I accept it. It must be true because it is so blatant here. And I know that Catholics and Protestants sometimes accuse each other of these mental gymnastics, get around what they don't want to accept, and I'm sure I'm guilty of that as well.

But it really does seem to me like I don't know how clearer you would need it to be. So why don't we kind of dig into this verse? I don't know how you want to do this. I kind of like the idea of pulling up the verse itself and maybe going through it. Yeah, I like that idea. Do you? All right. So I'll pull this up and we'll read it and we'll go over it and then you can stop wherever you want to stop. Where would you like to start? What verse? Let's do verse 16. Okay, verse 16 through what? Let's go through 19 for now. All right, here you go, everybody. We're about to do a Bible study. Simon Peter replied,

you are the Christ. Okay, so maybe you want to back up one more just so we can get Christ's question there. Christ said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter. So why don't we read it through and then we'll go through. Yeah, you know, let's actually go back to 13. Let's go back to 13. Let's said more of this. You know what? Let's go to chapter one. Let's really begin with Genesis.

We really, if that's, you know. The Jewish roots of the paper. Exactly. Okay. Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that I am? And why don't I throw this up on the screen for everybody so that they can see it. Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist,

others say Elijah, others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

All right, let's do this. Yeah, the first few verses, the reason I thought it might be a good idea to go back to 13, is 13 to 16, Fulton Sheen has a really good exposition of this, where he says you have here all three models of church governance. So first you have Jesus saying, who do men say the Son of Man is? And the reply is, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, others Jeremiah, one of the prophets. In other words, they form different denominations, they hold different doctrines, they come to different

conclusions. This is not, now when he's talking about who do men say the Son of Man is, he's not saying who are the people acting in bad faith saying the son of man is. Implicitly here, he's talking about the people who are awaiting the Messiah. And even they, left to their own devices, are likely to come to different contradictory conclusions. And you'll notice all of them were wrong, that none of the denominations they formed were proper. None of them were correct. All of their systems probably had some scriptural foundation. Like, you can see why someone would think it was Elijah, because there are these kind of Messianic Elijah prophecies in the Old Testament. You can see why it'd be one of the prophets, because Exodus ends by saying that God's going to raise up a prophet

like Moses. So you can see how, like, they're getting something. There's some doctrinal basis they're finding in scripture, but they're coming to contrary conclusions. So that kind of, if you will, Protestant model doesn't work. But then he says to the 12, who do you say that I am? And 11 of them are silent. Without Peter, they say nothing. And if you look at the history of orthodoxy after the schism, that's kind of what happens. You don't have any binding ecumenical councils. You don't have any real engagement at a group level with the problems of the day. There's not even a consensus within Orthodoxy now as to how many ecumenical councils there are. Metropolitan, sorry, Bishop Callistus Ware talks about this, where some say there are seven, some say there are eight, some say there are nine. We don't even know how many there are. We don't know which people we should be united with because there's these differing camps. So, you know, the Russian Orthodox are right now in schism with the patriarchal metropolitan in Constantinople. And you have this whole question of, okay, so you have this kind of falling silent of the others. And then the last option is the papal model. And that's Peter answering on behalf of the twelve, saying,

you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And he's doing it not by his own brilliance, but as Jesus is about to say, because he's guided by his Father in heaven. Okay, very good. Let's continue here. As you say, Peter speaks up, and he says something about Christ, and then Christ says something about him, which is interesting. And one of the first things he says is something people often miss. I've definitely

missed in the past. Simon bar Jonah. What does that mean? Yeah. So bar is son and it has kind of an interesting usage in Jewish expression because it's used in a lot of non-literal contexts, like a bar mitzvah, it means you're the son of the law. So when we talk about Barnabas as a son of encouragement, or we talk about the sons of thunder, son is used in a way we don't normally use it in English. I can only think of like one or two expressions where we say son of, and I'm not going to mention one of those on the air. You know, what I was just thinking too is Pope Benedict pointed this out, that when the crowds had to choose between Christ and Barabbas, Barabbas is son of the father. So they had to choose which son of the father, as it were, they wanted. Yeah, it really presents him as a counterfeit Christ, that it's kind of this man-made, earthly kind of son of the father

against the real heavenly son of the father. So yeah, like son of, in that sense, is huge. And there's a parallelism here too that we lose in English, because Peter's just said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus replies, blessed are you, Simon, the son of Jonah. Now, what makes this weirder is Jonah is not Simon's father. John is. We know this from actually the Gospel of John. Multiple times it mentions Simon, son of John. So what does he mean in calling him the son of Jonah? And I think the best answer to that is that you have at the beginning of Matthew 16, this reference. When the Pharisees and Sadducecees demand a sign he says you won't get any sign except for the sign of jonah and the sign of jonah is this really rich kind of idea on on the most

obvious levels referring to the death and resurrection of christ but it also refers to the preaching ministry of jonah in which he says 40 days hence and nineveh will be destroyed and 40 years after the preaching of christ jerusalem's destroyed in 70 a.d and then have the idea that the whole reason Jonah's controversial is because he goes to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, and he brings the Gentiles to God. And that is the ministry Peter in particular is going to have. If you read in Acts 10, he's the one who opens the doors to the Gentiles. So in all of those sense, his unique role played in being the first one to proclaim the death and resurrection of Christ in Acts 2, and the opening of the doors, also the warnings he repeatedly gives to the Sanhedrin throughout the early chapters of Acts,

and then the opening of the doors to the Gentiles in Acts 10. You see that he really is working as the son of Jonah, the bar of Jonah. That is probably not a reference to a literal descent, but it's also intentionally a parallel to saying Christ is the Son of the living God. And you say in your book, too, this idea that Peter says something about Christ, Christ says something about Peter. What do names signify in the Bible when God changes someone's name? Let's talk about that. Yeah, so this is huge. I mean, there's so much to say about names and about words. Like, if you think

about the fact that all creation happens through the proclamation let there be light like literally all of the created universe comes about through names through words and then you have uh the creation of adam and the first thing he's entrusted to do is to name the animals jesus is known as the word and the word is made flesh. Words and names are critical in the Bible, and we often miss this. Because we think about Genesis as these kind of just-so stories that just tell us these kind of fun little fables, but there's actually these profound things going on with the role of names. So when you see something like Jacob changing to Israel, or Abraham changing to Abraham, there's an actual relationship change that's the result

of an encounter with God that changes the whole trajectory of their life, and in many cases is related to an actual covenant change. We see this especially clearly with Abraham. So Abraham becoming Abraham is a good model for understanding what's about to happen in Simon becoming Peter. Because that name change tells us something huge, something probably covenantal is happening right here. This isn't just like a nickname, like Sons of Thunder. Okay, very good. All right, well, Protestants will often respond to this, and they'll say, okay, when he says, you know, you are Peter and on this rock, he's using two different words for rock. And the word he uses for Peter actually means stone. So you can't

actually get out of this that Peter is the rock. If anything, Christ might be referring to himself, right? He's saying you are a little rock, but upon me, I will build my church. Some others, of course, have said that he's building his church on the confession, which is something we're all called to make. Why isn't that a satisfactory response? So, sorry to have us jump around so much in the Bible, but I want to go to John 1 to answer both halves of that question. Let's do it.

Because, yeah, in John 1, you might just want to pull this up, because it starts with verse 19 talking to 1 19 yeah it starts with 19 and goes to the end of the chapter which is uh verse 51 so that's a lot probably won't all fit on the screen i'll just kind of allude to these things kind of as they go sure um but john is obviously he's proclaiming and he explains that he's not the christ he's the one who's explains that he's not the Christ. He's the one who's, who's coming to prepare the way for the Christ. And then there's this whole sequence of, of days.

There's a six days going on here between John one and John two, because it's falling on the model of Genesis. Amidst this, there's also this role of naming, right? Because that's what happens in Genesis one and two. And so in verse 29, you have John the Baptist saying, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So the first proclamation of Christ that we get chronologically isn't from Peter. Yeah, it's not from Peter at all. It's probably from John the Baptist. And we know, we'll see very soon, that Peter is not going to be the

first. And then he goes on in verse 34 and says that this is the Son of God. So he's even proclaiming him in very similar terms to what Peter's going to do in Matthew 16. And then he does it again in verse 36. He said, Behold the Lamb of God. And this time, two disciples hear him, and they start following him. And then they proclaim him as rabbi, as teacher. One of them is Andrew, who then in verse 41 goes to Simon and says, we've found the Messiah, which means Christ. So Peter's not even the first one in his family to proclaim Jesus as the Christ. His brother tells him. So in other words, if you're trying to say, well, the reason Christ said this about Peter is because he stepped out and he said what hadn't been said before. Is that kind of the

argument? Exactly. Because as you go on, there's more and more. Nathaniel does the same thing. Philip does the same thing. Throughout John 1, the only person I think who gets mentioned, who doesn't proclaim Jesus as the Christ, is Peter. And in the midst of that, Andrew brings Peter to Jesus. This is verse 42. Jesus looked at him and said, so you are Simon, the son of John, you shall be called Kephas, which means Peter or rock. So it tells us two things. Number one, Peter is clearly not being chosen because of his confession of faith, because he's the only one not making one. And two, it also tells us that he doesn't say Petros, he says Kephas, which is Aramaic for rock. In

other words, this whole idea that there's a distinction between the two mentions of rock, upon this rock I'll build my church, and you are Peter, which means rock, those are the same word in Aramaic, Kepha, which is transliterated into Greek as Kephas. So what he actually says is, you are kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my church. So this whole idea of a patros patra distinction is arguing off Greek that we know Jesus didn't speak because we know that he said it in Aramaic, because John tells us explicitly that he says it in Aramaic in verse 42. And this is something that even Protestant scholars are now conceding, correct? Yes. And so I actually mentioned several Protestant scholars in the book who basically say,

were it not for papal claims, no one would take seriously this idea that this meant anything other than Peter. Because to believe this, you have to believe that in the midst of a blessing, like the structure here is that of a blessing right like he's saying i'm going to give you these blessings i'm going to give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven i'm going to give you the biting and loosening whatever you bind on earth will be bound on earth will be loose on earth will be loosed in earth all of this is specific to simon peter he calls him by name he calls him son of jonah and we're to believe that in the midst of that literally halfway between those two points he suddenly switches the subject to no one knows what, either a confession

or himself or faith kind of nebulously or something. And Protestant exegetes who reject this can't decide what it is. I actually quote one guy in the book who all but says it's anything but what it seems to say. I don't know what it says, but it better not say that. Like it's one of these Protestant scholars who just like cannot accept this conclusion. But that's the natural direction you would read this were it not for all of these arguments about the papacy. Like, this is the plain reading. But isn't it the case that Augustine suggests a couple of translations of this verse? It is true.

I should also mention here that as much as I love Augustine, he is not a scholar of Greek or of Aramaic. So he originally thinks that this is about Peter and then later suggests, well, maybe it's about the faith of Peter. There is a sense in which we can affirm that it's the faith of Peter, as long as that's not to the exclusion of it being Peter. So if we say like, oh, you know, candidate X's message and his charisma really won him the election, we don't mean that some sort of like nebulous charisma apart from the individual is what won. So saying his charisma and his message won the election is not to the exclusion of saying candidate X won the election. It's just saying why candidate X won the election. If we understand it that way, we can talk about Peter's faith and his confession of faith as being the rock Jesus builds upon, but as Peter's, not just

as just generically anybody's. It's still hyper-specific to Peter, and to lose that renders the verse basically inscrutable and meaningless in a way that I think that if you read most Protestant commentaries on it, you lose any sense that something is happening to Peter with the phrase, upon this rock I'll build my church. And then it just becomes this weird thing that's out of place. How do the Orthodox interpret this verse? That's a great question. I didn't get much into Orthodox scholarships.

I will defer largely. I've seen Orthodox scholars who say it is about Peter. I've seen a lot of Orthodox who just kind of parrot the Protestant arguments on it. So there's probably, if I had to guess based on my very limited reading on that, I'm going to say you're going to find a difference of opinion. It's been said that a lot of modern Orthodox polemics is using Protestant arguments against Catholics and Catholic arguments against Protestants. And I think that's probably what I've, that so far is what I've seen in the

limited reading I've done on Orthodox readings of Matthew 16. Yeah, that's fair. Here's a question, we often kind of breeze over this. What does he mean by the gates of hell shall not prevail against it? What does it mean for gates to overcome something? This is an interesting point. Yeah. So when we talk about the gates of a city, that is a reference to the city itself. That's it is a kind of like saying a set of wheels to refer to the car. There's a technical term for this in English and it escapes me right now. But it's this idea that if you say like, oh, I got some wheels for my birthday, I didn't. But if I was from a much wealthier family and I could say that I wouldn't just mean literally.

And my family would probably be like four wheels just four wheels yes uh but normally that's a reference to like a car and so likewise the gates of hell sometimes you'll see people saying oh well gates is a defensive reference and so this is about the church triumphing even over hell that's a it's a beautiful interpretation but i don't think that's a very faithful interpretation to the way the gates of kind of expressions are used, where you'll hear throughout the Old Testament gates of the city as a reference to the city. That's really fascinating, because I had heard that interpretation as well. And you're right, it is beautiful, and sometimes the beautiful interpretation is the one you want to go with. But what you're saying is the gates is referring to a city. So it's hell itself will not prevail against it.

Yeah. And notice that if the church falls into apostasy, the gates of hell win. Because it is like in a real sense the power of death here. But the gates of hell isn't just meaning like satanic. It's also just meaning like shale. It's Hades here is what's used. All right. I know you devote a whole chapter to this next couple of sentences here.

So I know you can, people will have to go buy the book, but let's try and touch upon it. Again, this is a strange thing for modern ears. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Not sure what that means. Someone says, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose will be loosed. What?

What does that even mean? How would you understand this? So let's unpack both parts. And here we're going to go fully Jesus and the Jewish roots of the papacy. In Isaiah 22, you have the giving of the keys to the house of David, to Eliakim, and it is creating him as the highest kind of administrative authority within the kingdom. And there's a whole fascinating dimension to this, because if you read in the chapter, it talks about,

did I say Ezekiel or Isaiah? It's Isaiah 22. So in Isaiah 22, he talks about fastening him like a peg in a sure place and him becoming a throne of honor to his father's house. This is all wrapped up in the giving of the keys to Eliakim. But also wrapped up in that is this idea that I'll clothe him with your robe and bind your girdle upon him and commit your authority to his hand. He'll be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. commit your authority to his hand. He'll be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. In other words, you have this fascinating interweaving of royal authority and

priestly authority being promised to Eliakim. And so in 2 Kings 18, when the Assyrian king comes and demands to speak to the king of Israel, it's Eliakim who goes out. He's not actually the king, but he's rather the representative of the king, if you will, the vicar of the king. That's what vicar means. He's the representative of the king and is able to act on his behalf. And so in 2 Kings 18, 18, you see Eliakim going out and kind of fulfilling that function. So when Jesus is giving the keys of the kingdom to Peter, which no matter how you interpret upon this rock, you can't deny that he says, I will give you, in the singular, the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

This is not something he gives to the entire church. This is not something you see it given anywhere else to anyone else. You see Jesus possessing the keys himself in Revelation, and you see Peter possessing them here in Matthew 16. Don't we see elsewhere, sorry to cut you off, Christ giving this authority to the other apostles as well? We do not. We see the binding and loosening authority in Matthew 18 given to the church globally, or corporately. You don't have the giving of the keys of the kingdom with that.

The keys of the kingdom is only given to Peter. So that's a common mistake because people associate the binding and loosening with the keys. And it's easy to understand why. These are two separate things with a separate history to each one. On the keys, Jesus is only giving this to Peter. It is his high priestly as well as royal authority. And that's the way it appears in Isaiah 22. It's the way that we see it lived out in 2 Kings 18.

And there's really fascinating kind of scholarship about the way that like both this, like that Eliakim is a very strange figure in the Old Testament because he seems to be acting as both a priest and a royal authority. So that's the keys in a nutshell or the background of the keys in a nutshell,

that he's being given that kind of authority. And so it is an authority of administration. It's also a priestly authority. But the binding and loosening is one that's really fascinating, because in the Jewish context, this referred to what we would now call infallibility. And I know that sounds crazy to say, but it's pretty darn clear from reading Jewish sources. So actually, the Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, I quote in the book, that said that the various rabbinical schools had the ability to bind and loose, which was the ability to interpret basically the Talmud, I'm sorry, the Torah in a binding way. So they could say, okay, well, in practice, this means X. For instance, if you're told you're not to work on the Sabbath, here's what it means to work. Those kind of like interpretive questions

fell under the heading of binding and loosening. And it was viewed as infallible that the rabbinical body and the Sanhedrin were viewed as receiving its ratification and final sanction from the celestial court of justice, which is, I don't don't know pretty amazing like this idea that you can kind of act with divine authority on these questions of interpretation because as many laws as there are in the old testament there are still going to be ambiguities that arise and you're still going to need some sort of interpretive authority and so if that interpretive authority can steer you wrong, then you could find yourself in a situation as a faithful Jew, where being faithful to what you're told to do by your leaders makes you a violator of the law. And that's an unthinkable kind of consequence. So Jesus actually reaffirms this authority in Matthew 23, when he says to

follow the teaching of the Pharisees, but not to do whatever they say, or not to do whatever they do, because he says, do whatever they tell you, but don't model their examples, they don't practice what they preach. So he explains this because he says they sit in the seat of Moses, the cathedra of Moses, which is where we get the phrases like ex cathedra

when the Pope speaks that way, or even like the word cathedral, the seat of authority. So this kind of idea is really rich and really fascinating. There's little threads of this throughout the New Testament. For instance, in John 11, when the Sanhedrin gathers to discuss the death of Jesus, Caiaphas stands up and he says, you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation should not

perish. Now you might think this is horrible blasphemy. He's talking about killing Jesus. But John says of this that Caiaphas did not speak of his own accord, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. In other words, John takes it almost for granted that as high priest, the Holy Spirit is guiding him and is helping him in a prophetic kind of way. So when we're talking about binding and loosening, that's what we're talking about, that this is the kind of authority being given to Peter. And in the book, I point out that this isn't just like biblically supported. There's actually a really solid logical case you can make that without this kind of authority,

it's actually impossible to live as an Orthodox Christian. Anything else you'd like to say on this verse before I ask you for some patristic backing on your interpretations and the interpretations of other Catholic apologists? Yeah, well, I'll say just a couple things on the verse. Number one, this kind of catch-22 I alluded to, Jesus calls for us to, like in John 17, Jesus prays that his disciples will be one, as he and the Father are one, and he prays not only for the apostles themselves, but for those in the future who will come to believe in him through his testimony.

This is the only time we see Jesus explicitly praying for us, and his prayer is that we'll be united, that we'll be one. So this idea that a lot of Protestants have, that you choose truth or unity, but you can't have both because other people are wrong. So you either have to be in a group over here with all the other people who are right, or you have to give up truth so that everyone can be united. Those are two non-acceptable answers. Because Jesus says that we're to be united, and so to not be united is actually to disobey. It's to go against this final prayer that he has for us. On the other hand, of course, that unity can't be a unity in heresy. That's not a workable solution either. So the options are basically this. Either Jesus creates a situation such that to be united to the visible church is to be united to orthodoxy.

This is the basis for both the infallibility of the church and the infallibility of the pope. Or we find ourselves in a situation where we have to choose to disobey Jesus through schism or choose to disobey Jesus through heresy. And as I mentioned at the very beginning of the episode, a good God doesn't force you to choose one of his commandments against the other. He doesn't force you to choose disobeying him one way or disobeying him the other way, because that would make obedience impossible, make orthodoxy and faithfulness to God literally impossible. So that kind of catch-22 is the situation Protestantism finds itself in, choosing to disobey Jesus on orthodoxy or choosing to disobey him on unity. And that's clearly not a workable solution. The only solution to that

is some way of being united in the truth. Okay, give us some patristic backing, if you can, for some of the claims you've been making here? What are the earliest Christians have to say about Peter's primacy and maybe the continuation of the papacy after Peter? Yeah, so we've got a lot. The first thing that we see after the death of, well, actually not even after the death of all the apostles, after the death of some of the apostles is the first letter of Clement, which is written about 96 AD. That's the best dating of it. is the first letter of Clement, which is written about 96 AD. That's the best dating of it. And Clement is the Bishop of Rome, and he is the third Pope after Peter, Linus Cletus Clement. You might notice that from the Roman canon at the Mass. We pray asking for his intercession all the time in Mass. So he's written by the Corinthians who want to settle an internal

controversy within their church. I want to point out a few things. Number one, John is still alive at this point. John seems to die about the year 100. He writes Revelation, the best series that he probably writes at about 90. So he's alive and still seemingly pretty active. He's with it. And the Corinthians have a controversy there in the east.

John is in the east. He's on the Isle of Patmos. And the Corinthians have a controversy there in the East. John is in the East. He's on the Isle of Patmos. And the Corinthians don't write to him. Incredibly, they write to the Bishop of Rome. And we don't know exactly how early they write, but we do know that in 96, when Clement replies, he apologizes for the delay in his response on account of the persecution of the church in Rome. That they write to him early enough that 96 is like a belated reply. So that shows us something of the authority of Peter's successors in Rome. It shows us something of the way they were viewed by the other early Christians. That is short of an explicit proclamation. It's just a lived reality of the role of the papacy. When you want explicit proclamations, I think one of the clearest early ones is Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in about 180

in Against Heresies, in book three, chapter two, when he talks about apostolic succession. He says all of the apostolic churches can trace their history back to the bishop, back to the apostle, rather, who founds them. And they keep track of every bishop from that apostle on through the ages. It's one of the ways that they showed that they were Orthodox. They weren't some heretical sect, but they're actually part of the apostolic church is they were founded by an apostle and then led by the apostles and their successors. And he says all of them can do this, but because it is necessary on account of its preeminent authority that everyone should agree with the Church of Rome, he just gives us the list of all of the bishops for the

Church of Rome. Now again, that's 180. That's so early on here that we see it just taken as almost an assumption that everyone knows that if you're going to be Orthodox, you have to be in union with and agree with the Church of Rome and the bishop of the Church of Rome. And then he gives us, I think it's the first 14 bishops after Peter. That kind of role is just super early on. One of the ones I don't, I can't remember if I mentioned St. Optetus of Melivus in the book or not. He is a little later. He's a little before St. Augustine. So we're dealing with like early, mid to late third century, like his whole life. I think he dies in like 397. So he's about 25 years

before Augustine, more or less. So they're alive at the same time, they overlap somewhat. And he writes against the Donatus. He leads this kind of anti-Donatus charge that Augustine will kind of inherit. Augustine writes of him that says like his conversion and the conversion of some others were like a great gift of silver and gold to the church by God. So he's held in very high esteem by people we hold in very high esteem, whether we're Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox. Well, Orthodox don't always love Augustine, but Catholic or Protestant at least. But Octatus, when he's talking about this, says, basically, if you want to be Orthodox, you need to be united to the visible church. And then he goes on this very lengthy explanation about how you can know which one's the true church. And at one point he says this. He says, you cannot then deny that you do know that upon Peter first, the city of Rome was bestowed the

Episcopal cathedral, the seat, again, we've talked about this in Matthew 23, on which sat Peter, the head of all the apostles, for which reason he was called Cephas, that in this one cathedral, unity should be preserved by all, lest the other apostles might claim each for himself separate cathedrals, so that he who set up a second cathedral against a unique cathedral would already be a schismatic and a sinner. In other words, he's saying even if another apostle tried to create an apostolic see to rival the apostolic see, Rome, he would be a schismatic and a sinner. When you look at the Pentarchy in the early church, you have Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome, where Peter was. You have Alexandria, where Peter's disciple,

Mark, created the episcopacy there. And then you have Constantinople, which claims to be connected to Rome by virtue of being the new Rome, so to speak, in the East. So all of these apostolic seas that make up the Pentarchy are united to the apostolic sea, Rome. And so you'll sometimes see apostolic cathedrals or apostolic sees used to describe these five churches. But anytime the apostolic see is used, it only ever means Rome. Anytime any of the church fathers use it, there's this idea that it has a central apostolic authority

because of Peter and because we all have to be united with it and we all have to trust in it. That's the heart of what we're talking about with the Pope as the icon of unity. You all have to agree with this church. You have to be in union with this church. And if you're not,

then we know your schismatics and sinners, maybe even heretics. Okay, I want to take some questions from our patrons and then some questions here on YouTube. If you need to go, Joe, just hang up on me and I won't be offended. But this is just a really riveting discussion and I'm so grateful for it. I want to remind everybody that we're giving away three copies of Joe's book. We'll even pay shipping. All you got to do is

subscribe, leave a comment, and for a bonus point, share this on your social media. We'll take a look at the comments below. And I don't mean comments in the live chat, by the way. I mean, after the thing has been recorded, you could comment now or later. We'll be doing this this whole week, giving away three of these books. And I'll let you know in a YouTube comment after we've kind of looked into it, who the three winners are.

So again, leave a comment below, subscribe, smash that like button. And for an extra point, please share this on social media because I think this is great information that needs to get out there. Also want to remind people, of course, that we're having this Catholic Apologetics Conference coming up soon. It's a virtual Catholic Apologetics Conference.

Joe will actually be speaking there as well. So please be sure to check it out. It's free from October 23rd through 25th. And we've got people like Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. Ed Fazer, Trent Horn, Dr. Peter Kreeft, Steve Ray, gee whiz, Father Mark Goring, Father Chris Prochaszko. And we're going to help you answer a ton

of different objections to Catholicism and how to articulate the faith better. And again, 100% free. And you can just join from wherever you are in the world because, you know know it's virtual so that'll be fantastic so really looking forward to that all right i want to get some questions here joe and some of these of course you have addressed but it might be good to kind of circle them again um why don't we try to be somewhat brief because we have a lot of questions

coming in so you won't be able to answer them as sufficiently as you'd like, perhaps, but here we go. Antonio Bale says, there is no doubt the main disagreement between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Why is the Catholic church right in its claim of papal supremacy versus the Orthodox who still claim primacy? We definitely see primacy in both the New Testament and the early church, but where is the further support for the supremacy of Peter? Of course, you've already given us some answers to that, but maybe you want to take another go at it. Yeah, just to kind of sum up things I've said before, I'll do that. So in Luke 22, when Peter is given this special role of strengthening the brother bishops, that is not just primacy, because no one else gets that.

In Acts, the 12 are referred to at one point as Peter and the 11. That clearly shows Peter is understood as different in kind from the other 11 apostles. And we actually have numerous instances of that kind of talk. The angel says, go tell his disciples and Peter. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, when he's talking about the resurrection appearances, also distinguishes Peter from the others. When he's talking about the ability to take a believing woman along with him, he talks about Peter as unique from the others. So repeatedly, we have these kind of distinctions made between the apostles and Peter. That doesn't deny Peter is

an apostle, but it does pretty clearly deny he's only an apostle, that something unique is given to him. Papal supremacy is one way of expressing that. The only worry I have with it is it sounds too dictatorial to a lot of modern ears, that if you instead think of it as Peter as the servant of the servants of God, and that not all 12 are called to be the servant of the servants of God, you're getting to the same truth, but in a way less likely to maybe trigger people in the wrong way or be misunderstood in the same way. And again, we're not just changing language to make it more palatable to modern ears. This is something that dates back to the gospel in which Christ exemplifies this means of

leadership. Exactly. It's really just explaining better what we mean by papal supremacy, that we don't mean what you might be understanding from the way supreme leadership looks in other contexts. And then I'd also, again, bring up Optatus. Like when he mentions that none of the other apostles had the ability to set up these separate apostolic sees that would be rivals to Rome. That's just historically true. I mean, you can't point to them. We don't see, you know, Thomas goes to India and no one thinks that the head of the church is in India. So there's clearly this sense. And we see this in the lived experience that Eastern controversies, they would write to Rome.

rises up within Rome itself. The Pope doesn't write to the Bishop of Constantinople to say, please help. But that regularly happens in the opposite direction, for instance, with monothelitism or any of these other heresies that rise up in the East. St. Jerome has a scathing letter talking about how all of the heresies seem to begin in the East and be settled by the Bishop of Rome. I mean, this was just a lived experience. That's not just primacy. That's something more. is just a lived experience. That's not just primacy. That's something more. Benjamin Handelman, who's one of our moderators, an amazing bloke as well. Benjamin, thanks so much. He asks this, one of the biggest attacks against the papacy I hear is that it was, sorry, is that it there was no monarchical bishop until the mid-2nd century in Rome, and therefore the dogmas proclaimed at Vatican I can't be true.

What do you feel is the strongest evidence for the papacy during this time, and how does it counter those claims? Yeah, so if I may just put in a plug here, I just did a piece for Word on Fire, and I also linked to it on my own blog, Shameless Potpourri, where I respond to Dr. Jerry Walls on exactly this issue. Cameron Bertucci had Walls on the show, and he made this claim. This claim is laughably bad if you actually read the evidence for it.

So there's this idea that you don't have a monarchical bishop until the mid to late 2nd century, but there's literally no evidence that there was ever anything other than a monarchical bishop. It's just an argument from silence. But the thing that's wrong with this argument from silence on the one hand is that imagine for a second if it's true. Imagine that Peter goes to Rome, which we know from 1 Peter that he did, and then he sets up something like a collegial model of governance. He sets up something like a council of elders, and that's the authority structure.

of governance. He sets up something like a council of elders, and that's the authority structure. Now, we know from 1 Clement, I believe it's verse 42 of his letter, where he views the apostles as having set up the structure of the church. And that's clearly the understanding of the early Christians, that it is not up to them to just invent a structure of the church. It's up to them to take the structure that they're given. There are even, by the second century, these appeals to tradition, these appeals to the authority of like, this is the way the apostles did it. When there's a controversy over the dating of Easter, the controversy is exactly because John the apostle used a different calendar. He used the Jewish calendar instead of the Roman one. And so they're arguing the authority of John against the authority of the Bishop of

Rome. And the Bishop of Rome wins, and Council of Nicaea affirms it. But on both sides, there are these appeals to tradition and to apostolic tradition. Nobody thinks you can just come along and invent a new structure and that's okay. So if they'd created just a council of elders or something, somewhere along the way that disappears. And it disappears darn early because when St. Ignatius of Antioch is writing to the Romans in 107, he refers to being a bishop of Syria. And he assumes they know what that means. He assumes that they know that there's one bishop per city, not a council of elders. He doesn't argue about it. He doesn't say, like, I know you guys do things differently. He says, pray for me because they have no shepherd, but Jesus now

back in Antioch. Uh, and so that kind of like the assumption of everyone by 107 is that there is one bishop per city. The idea that somewhere along the way, Rome was still the, the single outlier. We don't have a single like documentary case of any diocese anywhere created by an apostle, headed by anything other than one bishop per city. So it's this stunningly bad kind of argument when you dig into the actual documentary resource for it. The argument that Walls makes is that Ignatius never mentions bishops in his letter to Rome. And as I mentioned my response, he does it twice. I just alluded to that here. Like it's just factually untrue. Ryan Pope, that is his last name, asks, Jay Dyer and other Orthodox Christians claim that as

Athanasius and other bishops could hear appeals from other seas, that the early popes didn't have universal jurisdiction in Christendom, and that this was a later development. How should we answer this objection? Yeah, so the two basic principles in governance are subsidiarity and solidarity. Solidarity is this unifying principle. Subsidiarity is a principle that everything should be solved at the most local level possible. And that's true today. That's not just like true historically. Like if there's a controversy in your church, the next step shouldn't be the Pope steps in and settles it. The next step should be that you solve it locally. And if you can't solve it locally, you solve it regionally. And this is not just like a basic principle of good

jurisprudence and, you know, of efficiency, although it is that too. Like when you look at the model Jethro sets up of the judges under Moses, this is what he does. But it's also just the idea that it's more human, that it's more face to face. And so as a practical reality, the Pope can't possibly handle every theological dispute that comes up, every dispute that comes up of any kind. Okay. Colin Carr says, this could be a totally unrelated question, but I think it's relevant enough to ask. Some extremely skeptical Protestants have told me in the past that they believe the Pope could be the Antichrist. Obviously, I don't hold this view, but could a Pope in theory... Well, so first of

all, let's just kind of... I want to address that issue there as the Pope as the Antichrist, because you have that... You mentioned that meme that you saw online where you have like these... the founders of these different religions, which I want to get to as well, which is somewhat related. But then he asks, could a Pope in theory ever be the Antichrist? What's the Catholic Church taught about this? Yeah, so the Pope can't in theory be the Antichrist. What's the Catholic Church taught about this? Yeah, so the Pope can't, in theory, be the Antichrist, because what would that mean? It would mean that as a Christian, Christ has called us into unity, but he actually is like tricking us, and there's this one time, and we don't know when it's going to come, there's going to be this one time where being in unity and obeying the pope is actually sinful and heretically wrong that is an insane view of

jesus not just of the church like that is a crazy view of jesus that he's going to set us up basically for this trap that if you obey the pope if you do what the pope tells you to do if you believe the faith of the church one time it's going to be you know this terribly wrong thing to do and i think that that doesn't pass the smell test on just a really basic level. I'd say the second thing is, if you look at the argument for the Pope being the Antichrist, it's also really bad. It's a misinterpretation of a lot of things. I will say this, what the argument gets right is that in Revelation, when there's this talk about kind of this Antichrist-like authority. It's connected to the whore of Babylon who's on the seven hills. The seven hills is a reference to Rome very clearly,

but to the Roman Empire. The Vatican is not on one of the seven hills of Rome. She's actually outside of the walls on the hill Vaticanus. It's not one of the ancient seven hills. So if John meant prophetically to be warning against the Vatican, he got his geography wrong. Seems much more likely that he's referring to kind of the embodiment of the anti-Christian political authority of the day. And one of the ways that we know this is that the number 666 is the numeric value of Nero's name in Hebrew. Okay. Very good. Okay. So we've got a lot of people watching right now live, and I'd love to take some of your questions or objections. So if you want to write

your question or objection in the live stream for Joe, I'm happy to display it up here on the screen and see what Joe's response is. How are you doing? You doing all right? I think so, yeah. I hope I'm not going too long. I actually have a good chunk of free time, so I'm happy to do this. Thank you again. Very kind of you. Alexander says, Matt Fradd, how important is it that the papacy is geographically based in Rome? That's a really good question. In one sense, not very important.

not very important. In one sense, I mean, we clearly see from history, the Avignon papacy, when Rome got so crazy that the popes actually kind of fled to southern France and they lived in luxury there. So it didn't make them not the popes, but they still remained, even there, the bishops of Rome. They didn't become bishops of Avignon. So in that sense, it's very important. They didn't become bishops of Avignon. So in that sense, it's very important. And there's actually, if you want to go down this road, there's one reading that there's a prophetic mention of this. When Jesus says, if you have faith, you can take even the mountain and have it thrown into the sea, that she who rules over the waters is Rome.

And so the mountain is a reference to Daniel 2 and the creation of the church. And so the mountain going into the sea, so to speak, is the papacy moving to Rome permanently. And the creation of the kingdom not built by human hands, as Daniel 2 talks about, right there in the heart of the Roman Empire, seems like it's a pretty serious kind of prophetic authority. It's certainly true that it's one thing that's kept the papacy from just being some sort of universal office apart from real life people. Rome will keep you humble. I mean, like, I was a seminarian in Rome for three years. They don't fall into the same kind of clericalism other places do, because like every fifth person has a color. And so, you know, the chaos and the craziness of Rome, the total lack of efficiency of Rome, I think there's something really in the plan of God that he designed it this way. But certainly we see from the very earliest days,

this idea that it was Peter's successors in Rome, not his successors in Antioch, that continue on this office. And even the bishops of Antioch seem to have this idea. Okay, Bible Outreach says, hey, does the fact Pope Honorius was a monothelite and later condemned as a heretic make the papacy meaningless? Nope, but it does mean a bad situation for him. So for who? For Pope Honorius. You don't want to have your legacy be like you were condemned after your death. Pope Honorius is condemned not for actually teaching heresy himself, there's no evidence that he did so, but for permitting ambiguous proclamations that could be used to justify heretical positions. So there's a whole fashion history of this. The monothelite

controversy arises in the East, and it's dealing with Eastern categories about energies and energia in a way that is kind of inaccessible to most of the Westerners who are looking on. So they write, even though it's the emperor and the bishop of Constantinople, and you have all of the kind of leading lines in the East, they write to the Pope. And the original way they write to him is so ambiguous that it seemed to be perfectly orthodox thing that they're saying. But if you've got the background of what they were saying and why they were saying it,

it actually was meant to support heresy. Honorius affirms this almost certainly out of just sheer ignorance because he doesn't know the background of what's going on. And then it's used like, oh, well, look, the Pope backed us up to kind of help spread the heresy. Quickly, when they realize what's going on. And then it's used like, oh, well, look, the Pope backed us up to kind of help spread the heresy. Quickly, when they realize what's going on, the Popes actually take a very

strong stance against this and condemn it. And in the process, like Honorius's name is not well remembered now. Now, the important thing to remember here is, I think, a fewfold. Number one, papal infallibility doesn't mean the Pope's never going to say or do something wrong. Number two, papal infallibility is not a gift to the Pope, it's a gift to us. I've alluded to this a couple times throughout. But papal infallibility basically means this. The Pope can say, you have to believe X to be in my church. And we know that we have to be in the Pope's church to be united in the way that christ wants

us to be united so if the pope can demand that we believe something false in order to be in his church we're in a situation where we have to choose schism or heresy and that's impossible so infallibility just means you're never going to be put in that position it does not mean that the pope isn't going to take too wide of a latitude and allow heretics to run around unpunished. We have plenty of cases, even in very recent history, of popes allowing heretics to go around unpunished while they confuse the faithful and draw people away. And God will deal with that as he sees fit. Infallibility doesn't protect against that. So I think it doesn't disprove the papacy. It doesn't mean the papacy is worthless.

So I think it doesn't disprove the papacy. It doesn't mean the papacy is worthless. It does discount certain false understandings of the papacy. Robert Boylan, who's had some very interesting and I think insightful things to say here in the comments section, says that according to Chapman, condemnation of Honorius, he did teach this heresy, albeit as a private theologian, and he says that Steve, Ray, and others do agree with Chapman. Yeah, so based on what I've seen of the evidence, it seems like he just approves. They send a document to him, say, is this an orthodox expression of the faith? He says yes. It isn't something he's written himself. And the simple reason we would know that this is the case is because monothelitism isn't even an issue in the West. The basic issue is that in the East, you're still dealing with like the consequences of all of the earlier controversies from Nestorianism and monophysites. He comes up with a new position, monothelitism, that tries to take kind of a murky middle ground and leave it ambiguous enough that we can just say good enough because he's trying to unite the empire against the threat of Islam to the east. The west doesn't have monophysites. It's like not really a live controversy there.

And it isn't facing Islam at the time. And so like there just isn't the same kind of live controversy or appeal. And the emperor doesn't isn't the same kind of live controversy or appeal. And the emperor doesn't have the ability to kind of throw his weight around in the same way by the eighth century in the West. So in that sense, like the Pope is just kind of dragged into an argument he doesn't know much about. And his initial best guess as to what's going on

turns out to be bad and supports the heretical side. And then they figure out what's going on, and they state orthodoxy clearly. I think any kind of modern dispassionate judgment is going to say, Honorius gets a bit of a bad rap. He should have probably been more informed about what was going on in the East, but he's not trying to teach it himself because he doesn't know it well enough to even teach it in the first place. Okay. Now, I'm not sure if I'm picking up on half of a comment here and missing the first part, but Joshua Moore, it looks like he's exploring other options to Catholicism for different reasons. He asks, and I'm not sure how to answer this,

but when Vatican I required intellectual submission to ordinary magisterium, does this mean we must violate the law of non-contradiction? No. Okay. Maybe find out more from him. Yeah, I've just asked him to kind of explain a little bit more about what, because I'd love to have his thoughts up here. He says, regrettably, none of my Catholic brothers address this, so I'm now exploring orthodoxy. Okay, I just want to kind of point out from a kind of like heart level, like not one of these theoretical levels. I know you and I have spoken about that idea that, you know, you come to the church and you've read your way into the church. You get into the church, you become very disappointed.

And that's not unlike somebody who's only read beautiful accounts of marriage and doesn't have a realistic account of how marriage will look and then gets married. It's like, what is this? But, you know, like suppose you got these people that go into their local church and it's really run poorly. You've got like 800 extraordinary ministers for some reason. They're not going to let you receive Holy Eucharist on the tongue for some reason. They've got altar girls, which apparently is okay. The music is terrible, and the whole thing is very hokey. And then up the road, we have the Orthodox Church, and the music is glorious, and they reverence the Eucharist.

What am I to do? Are you seriously telling me to kind of stay in this hokey church when it's my only option? It almost seems like a slow death that you're calling me to. What would you say to something like that? I would almost say that it's a mark of the church that things are going to be run badly. I mean that fairly seriously. Hilara Bellic has that line where he said, I'm responsible as a Catholic, I have to believe as an article of faith in the divine institution of the church, but anyone else could just take as evidence that

no institution was run with such knavish imbecility would last more than a fortnight. That the church is so badly run, but the fact that it's outlasted every government on earth and every institution on earth points to it actually being from God, because you can't just say, oh, it's due to the human ingenuity, because that's often painfully lacking. And you see this even in the apostles. Like, look at the way other religions describe their founders, where they make no mistakes and all of this, the apostles and even the prophets before them are huge screw-ups. And it's often in spite of their failings that we're able to come to Christ in his church. You see this with the kings in Israel.

Also see it with Peter. So I mentioned Matthew 16 where where he makes Peter a rock. And immediately after that, Peter says, you know, God forbid that you should have to go to your crucifixion, Lord. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan, you become a scandal. And that's a rock that you stumble over. So he's playing on Peter's new name as the rock to say he's also the stumbling stone. And Father Ratzinger had a beautiful essay saying it hasn't become less that way ever since Peter. Like the Pope is always those two things.

So we should expect the church to be badly run. We should expect the church to have all the human error. Matthew 13 says it's a net containing good and bad fish. We should expect to find a lot of bad fish. And we're not promised it'll only be at the level of the laity. So to kind of press that marriage analogy, you could imagine somebody kind of getting into marriage validly, and then realizing this sucks, and there's a way more attractive option down the road if you want. And some Catholics might find themselves in that position.

They're like, okay, I'm Catholic, and that's great. All that you're saying about the Pope and stuff, cool. It doesn't concern me because it's theoretical knowledge. What I have to experience every week is abuses in the liturgy. And what it sounds like you're telling me is I have to put up with that and make the best of it as opposed to going to the Orthodox Church down the road. Is that what you're saying? That is what I'm saying. C.S. Lewis has a brilliant part.

And that feels as unloving as saying to somebody in a valid marriage that they have to make the best of it because this is, it would be against God's will not to. And I would say the same thing there. I mean, I'd try to butter it up in both cases, right? But when the rubber hits the road, it's either, well, did Christ create this or not? And in both cases, the answer is, yeah. And so there you go. C.S. Lewis talks about this with the headship of the man, that you have a certain natural headship that's sort of a laugh. He calls it a paper crown. And then you have the headship that St. Paul describes in Ephesians 5, but that that's a crown of thorns. So that you really don't know what male headship looks like until you have the wife who is totally awful to be married to. So you have the wife that really is a sacrifice constantly.

That the rest of us who are in happy marriages, my wife is listening, we'll have a different, no, I'm just kidding. So the rest of us who are in happy marriages just don't know what it is to actually be like Christ to the church. And so there's very much an eyes wide open view of both the church and of marriage in scripture. And in both cases, the problem is not that the church or that the marriage wasn't described with warts and all the problem is that in spite of that, we went in with kind of these rose tinted glasses. And then because it wasn't our ideal, we want to walk.

Well, I got a warning for anyone in that situation, like anywhere that doesn't accept centers and human messiness isn't going to be a place that welcomes you uh that like the good thing about this is that you know all of us are part of the problem alexander scholden neeson's line that'd be really easy if the line between good and evil is just like us versus them but in fact the line between good and evil is in my own heart that's a much harder situation but that's situation we find ourselves in and not just as catholics not just as christians but as human beings yeah and i know it's is in my own heart, that's a much harder situation, but that's the situation we find ourselves in.

And not just as Catholics, not just as Christians, but as human beings. Yeah. And I know it's not always this simplistic when somebody leaves the Catholic church, say, for a schismatic group or an Orthodox church or something like that, but it can be very tempting to leave the church for sort of aesthetic reasons. And sometimes it's not that, right? Sometimes we feel like the truth is on the other side. And I'm in no way, I don't want to compare orthodoxy to Protestantism, all right? I'm a huge fan of the orthodox and think we're, well, I'm not putting them in the same camp. But if you were to abandon your local crappy music church for the Orthodox Church up the road because you had this sense that it had more sacredness to it and you could kind of connect with God, it's a kind of a similar argument that someone might give for why they're joining an evangelical church. I mean, it's just like a preference. It's like, well, when I go to this evangelical church, like I actually feel like I'm praying and I feel like the music really helps me and I feel like I'm connected to God in a way that I haven't been before. And I think the Orthodox and the Catholic

would be like, okay, cool. I get it. And yet not a good enough reason. And I think maybe there's something similar here. The model is an Exodus. On the Exodus, the Israelites are being fed manna from heaven, but it's like bread from heaven and it's a rough go and they start moaning for the flesh pots of Egypt because they want to be fed more. And so when I hear people say they're leaving the Catholic church because they're getting fed more at the Orthodox church down the street or the evangelical church down the street, I can't help but think about the flesh pots of Egypt. Now, again, maybe an even more inflammatory connection than either of the ones you... Neither of us are calling Orthodoxy Egypt.

inflammatory connection than either of the ones you... Right, right, right. Or even Protestantism. But the idea is that the motivation of the heart in each of those three cases, there's something similar where you're going for the comfortable or the thing that feels on a very human level to be uplifting rather than the hard go that you're actually being called to by God. Now, I wish we were always in the promised land. I wish that we didn't go through the desert on our journey there. But that is, in fact, what we often are experiencing. And that shouldn't shock us, given everything Jesus talks about, given what happens to the Twelve.

I'm sure there are more comfortable options than martyrdom, but they weren't the ones that the apostles were called to. So earlier, Joshua Moore asked a question about whether we're called to kind of ignore the law of non-contradiction. And he explained a little bit more about what he meant here. This is the guy who's looking to orthodoxy, maybe to leave the Catholic church. He says, we are required to submit both ordinary and extraordinary magisterium. The former is with submission of intellect and will. How can one submit in conscience to what they know is wrong?

Well, I think they wouldn't submit in conscience to what they know is wrong. I think there's maybe a twofold answer here. I feel like there's probably still more backstory where he is really struggling with some very particular issue. Apologize to Joshua. It's difficult to kind of get to the crux of it when

you're not on the line with us, so we'll do our best. I can speak sort of generally. The submission of an election will required for the ordinary magisterium is not absolute in the same way that it is for the extraordinary magisterium, or else you would have no difference between the two. In other words, the ordinary magisterium can, in principle, state things inaccurately. Not in a way that you're just going to be heretically wrong, where to follow it is to go to hell or something, but to be at least unclear, less precise. And the role of theologians is often to help shape that conversation. So in that sense, there may be these extraordinary situations where you say, yes, yes, yes, but we could say this better. We could say this more clearly. And the intellect of

your intellect and the submission of your intellect and will doesn't mean you have to turn off your intellect and will. So in that sense, like, I don't know. Again, I feel like we'd have a more fruitful conversation if you just said, here's the issue I'm struggling with. How do we make sense of this? So I guess if you're listening you feel free to say that in the comments sure uh robert boylan again is an lds so it's so cool to have people from different religions um and i by the way i got huge respect for lds obviously disagree with religion but every lds person i've ever met has been one of the greatest people i've met ever so well done lds for being amazing he says how does one preserve belief in, and this is a good question. Here's what I want to ask you to

do, Joe. I want you to steel man this, maybe kind of flesh it out, make us nervous before then responding. Okay. Because it is something that warrants attention. How does one preserve belief in the infallibility of the universal ordinary magisterium with the public problematic theological moral statements of Francis? Yeah, that's a great question. Okay, so you have, I'll steel man it, and say the things he says are often, at best, ambiguous. They're often things where someone reading it would think he's saying this really extreme thing. You have, in addition to that, you have him sitting down with people like, what's his name, Eugene Scarlino, whatever.

I'm pushing his name, I'm sure. But the atheist journalist who doesn't take notes and just recalls these interviews from memory. And then after every time he meets Pope Francis, he's like, oh yeah, he said this really crazy thing he's never said publicly. And then Pope Francis doesn't meets Pope Francis, he's like, oh, yeah, he said this really crazy thing he's never said publicly. And then Pope Francis doesn't really come out and clarify it. And so an ordinary person is like, well, I would clarify.

If someone accused me of saying that, darn well, I would come out and say, no, I didn't deny hell. And not just that, but that you would have a moral obligation to it. You would have a moral obligation to it. Like when that bloke, it became heard that, sorry, it was heard that Pope Francis maybe denied the divinity of Christ. Like, wouldn't you have a moral obligation to clarify that? Like if I accidentally did this on my blog and it started getting talked about online, I would think that I would have an obligation to set the record straight. And I'm not the pope when the critics of jesus refer to him um as what is it they refer to him as a sadducee no a samaritan and a blasphemer jesus explains that he's not a blasphemer and the church fathers are left in this situation where they're like is he admitting to being a samaritan

and if so in what sense because they can't imagine someone is going to say something false about that in your presence and you're going to just let it slide uh so there is that question of like the moral obligation totally it's true like it totally makes sense and i think it's probably sinfully wrong in in a situation you or i would find ourselves in not to not to do with something similar to to correct the record my understanding based on people i've talked to who have a better understanding of the situation is that he was trying to be like he's basically doing a long game trying to win over this journalist and i appreciate the evangelical impulse there but i think there's a risk of putting the person you see before the literally billions of people that you don't see who are potentially

led astray by one guy misstating your position and and so again i think it's probably well intentioned but yeah like all of those things point to the fact that again remember we talked about the pope is like the icon of unity and he's not promoting unity if he's if he's promoting confusion and ambiguity let's give another example here with the Pachamama statue, which seems like very much an act of idolatry, if not an act of idolatry. It seems an idolatrous thing to put a statue of Mother Earth, I think she represents, on an altar,

and then the Pope is there. This seems really disgusting, and I'm sympathetic when Catholics say, this is an absolute scandal, and they're so sick and tired of being shushed by like mainstream people like me who tell them they shouldn't be offended because we all have to play nice and pretend that we all agree on everything or else this could seriously undermine people's Catholic faith. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like

I've probably been guilty of that too. So I guess I just should take this opportunity to say, I'm sorry to anyone who maybe I, I downplayed, uh, the genuine objections you might've had genuine worries that you had. I, I think the solution people come to that, therefore the papacy is not true. Look,

if the papacy is true, even with like the middle ages, even with popes, you have like kids out of wedlock. Um, then it's true. Even now also to the person who said it looks like i'm sweating that is absolutely true i'm under like three lights so no worries and it's kansas it's probably

still hot where you are it is it was like 83 yesterday and i'm in long sleeves i didn't i didn't plan perfectly for this but yeah so uh i got myself off track there yeah i was just saying like yeah the papacy has always had these kind of issues. And so to the extent that in the past we've put forward kind of a triumphalistic picture of like, oh, the papacy, no mistakes, no errors, no struggles. That's kind of never been true.

That wasn't even true under JP2. You know, we talk about Pachamama, but you also have like the Assisi conference in 1988, 1989, whenever that was, when JP2 gets the leaders of all the world religions together to pray for peace and assisi and you've got like pagans who are offering pagan sacrifice possibly to demons in catholic churches that's messed up and like even even cardinal restinger was like that's too far don't don't that like you know so yeah so that's really that kind of thing do that. Don't do that, please. Really. That kind of thing. I think we would just say, these are legitimate problems. But just like we'd

say, I believe in the two-parent family, despite, insert laundry list of things that your dad may have done wrong, or any dad may have done wrong. You're going to have those things. This structure has to be able to accommodate that, or it's just mythological. has to be able to accommodate that, or it's just mythological. If we had an example of a Pope worshiping an idol, would that interrupt your belief in papal infallibility? It would not interrupt my belief in papal infallibility. It could throw into question the validity of that Pope's office. The reason it wouldn't interrupt papal infallibility is because uh what what would

interrupt that would be something like the pope saying to be part of the church you now must worship an idol um that sort of thing the pope can commit mortal sin popes have commit mortal sin um and in that sense you see what i mean like, uh, we, we don't want to say, again, we don't want to say papal infallibility means the Pope is never wrong. We don't want to mean, to mean that he never sins. We don't want it to mean that it protects his personal life because it doesn't mean any of those things in history shows the opposite. It just means that we are protected from having to choose between being in the same church as that guy and heresy. You know what I mean? You never have to choose schism or heresy. Orthodoxy and unity are always simultaneously

present in union with the Bishop of Rome, even if in his own heart, he's not holy. In his own heart, he may be even astray in matters of the faith. And one of the reasons we know this is like, not every Pope is automatically canonized. Like, not every Pope is, are we even assured is in heaven. That's a pretty low bar to clear, you would think as the Bishop of Rome, as the Pope, and only like what, a third of the Popes have been canonized. So in that sense, like, I think it would be a real big red flag for that Pope. It wouldn't be a red flag for the papacy or for papal infallibility. Okay, here's a question for you. I know that if I was to say to you, like, how could you believe in papal infallibility? Like, when maybe one day the Pope, like, infallibly defines something that's heretical, and you might say

something like, and I think you did say something in your book, that would be like saying, like, well, I get that you take the scriptures to be inerrant but what about when it teaches something wrong and you would be like well it doesn't because it's inerrant and you would say something similar about infallibility but can we just use a weird thought experiment okay or a thought experiment that's very non-catholic pope comes out tomorrow and he defines something you know i could see catholics desperately trying to get around it well he's not technically invoking his infallibility. Suppose he does do something like that. What would it take for you to be like, okay, Catholicism is not true, or papal infallibility is not true, or maybe what would you do? Yeah, that's a really good question.

So I think there's two parts. One, I still reject the premise of the argument. I know you just said you reject the premise of the argument, but I wanted to really stress that. It's like saying, well, suppose you found a three-sided square. What would you do then? And it's like, well, that's sort of a nonsensical thought experiment. Suppose Jesus contradicted God the Father. Which one are you going to follow? Like, if you understand what we mean by Jesus, what we mean by God the Father, then you can see why that's never going to happen. Likewise with the inerrancy of the scriptures, likewise with the infallibility of the church broadly likewise with the infallibility here because

if that were to happen here's what you'd be faced with like if the pope were to just unambiguously come out and say everyone has to believe this heretical thing well now what are we left with that we have to separate from union with the church set up by christ and then we have to go to what one of the orthodox churches i say one of the Orthodox churches because right now, some of your viewers may not know this, the Orthodox are in schism with each other. Probably the biggest schism in centuries. I'd love you to dwell upon this just a little bit. And I don't do this for the sake of airing the dirty laundry of Orthodoxy, but I do it for the sake of showing that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Because I think there is this temptation when you don't belong to a particular

communion and you are within your own and you see all these scandals and you look over the fence, it can seem like that's a great option. Let's talk a little bit about orthodoxy and why Catholics shouldn't become orthodox. Yeah, this is kind of the Rod Dreher option, right? I mean, just to call out someone who did this. There's a bit of a Benedict Option joke in there, but I couldn't make it in time. So Dreher was one of the first to cover the sex abuse scandal. And he's horrified, rightly, by what he sees. And so he leaves the Catholic Church and becomes Orthodox. And lo and behold, there are sex abuse scandals in Orthodoxy.

They just don't get the same kind of media coverage or play. And the structures are different. So it looks a little different. They don't keep as good of records. So it's a little harder to document it and everything else. But he discovers after kind of making the jump that the grass wasn't as green as it looked on the other side. And good on him for kind of owning that after making that jump. But the same is true. We just warned against like, look, if you come in with a really naive view of marriage, you're going to really struggle once you find out that it's not like that. Same is true of the Catholic Church. Same

is true of leaving the Catholic Church for orthodoxy or fill in the blank. Even Mormonism, all of the Mormons that are super awesome, but a lot of that is because... You're breaking up a little bit there. Or you're just really good at sitting still oh and we're reconnecting oh there you are hello hello oh sorry sorry i don't know what happened no problem you began to speak about um lds yes so i i like you have met amazing lds people but if you get in the numbers a ton of people leave the LDS church. There's a lot of bad stuff that's happened.

There's a lot of like abuse and corruption and everything else. In other words, no matter where you turn, when you really get into that place, the grass isn't that green once it becomes your own yard. So I think that's just a good thing to, I guess, bear in mind. So to get into the particular question of the Eastern Orthodox, right now, the Russian Orthodox Church, which accounts for about two thirds of the Orthodox in the world, is broken off communion with the ecumenical patriarch, which is, in theory, the highest bishop in the highest see in Orthodoxy. There are huge existential threats right now to the continuation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople because Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has really restricted the ability of the Orthodox there to practice freely and of their seminary and everything else.

So I have no idea what the future of that looks like. But right now, to be Orthodox, you have to choose one of these two sides. And a lot of the breakdown is not over any theological issue. And a lot of the breakdown is not over any theological issue. It's over these really annoying political issues about Russia's interference with Ukraine. And so it really is you see both sides acting more in service of a bunch of political ambitions rather than in pursuing Christ. It is grossly scandalous and it is heartbreaking to someone who loves the Orthodox. And yeah, again, some of that's the view from outside, right? But the point is, to leave the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy, you then have to say which Orthodoxy, because any of these churches can cut off communion

with one another. Dude, this has been such a joy. I'm really grateful. I want to remind everybody to go out right now. Just go buy it off Amazon or Catholic Answers, Pope Peter. As I said, I read it in one weekend and I underlined it and I just thought it was so fantastic. So go check that out. We're also giving away three copies of this book for free. No matter where you live in the world, we'll pay for shipping as well. All you have to do is leave a comment below, click subscribe and share this for an extra point on social media. And within the coming, I'd say, week or two, we'll announce who those three winners are.

Joe, again, thank you so much. I just can't thank you enough. This is such a service to the church right now. And yeah, it's awesome, dude. Any final words? You know what I forgot to do at the beginning, and I feel terrible about it, is I didn't ask you to introduce yourself.

So I told you I was going to do that, and then I didn't do that. So maybe tell people where they can learn more about you and the work you're involved in. Yeah. Okay. So my blog is Shameless Potpourri. My podcast is called The Catholic Podcast and you can get it at cathpod.com. And I work for a group called School of Faith. And I think if you want something really cool, And I work for a group called School of Faith. And I think if you want something really cool, if you're someone who maybe wants to grow in the praying of the rosary, you can go to dailyrosary.net.

And every day... He started to break up a little bit there. It's a good thing we're coming on the two-hour mark, everybody. Did I disappear again? Yeah, you did. All right. Well, you're frozen on my screen here for some reason. Can you still hear me all right?

I can still hear you. Hey, let's just look at my face while you talk. Go. Perfect. The best of both worlds. So dailyrosary.net is just a cool new way of praying the rosary where it's like five new meditations every day followed by a decade of the rosary and although it's a new way in one sense it's actually very similar to what saint dominic did and facing the albigensian heresy if you read derrick lagrange in his life of dominic or if you uh read leo the 13th talking about the history of the

rosary he would he would just preach pray a decade of the rosary preach pray a decade of the rosary so this is that style of rosary. So if you want to hear that sort of thing, I've occasionally written some of these, but it's more the group I work with, and especially my boss, Dr. Mike Shearslick. It's a pretty BAA way to pray the rosary. Very good. All right. Well, thanks again, dude.

I really appreciate having you on the show. Oh, my pleasure. All right. God bless. Thanks.