The Eric Metaxas Show - Robert Moynihan

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Vatican expert Robert Moynihan outlines some of the "testimony that shook the church and the world" with his book about the man behind the revelations, Archbishop Vigano.

Welcome to Hour 2. We're going to be talking with Mr. Moynihan, who's written a book on Archbishop Vagano. That's going to be coming up in our next segment for this hour, very important subject. But right now I continue my conversation with our friend Larry Alex Taunton. You can go find him at Larry Alecston.com. Larry, first of all, real quick, what are you doing in Brazil? I know why I'm in Charleston, South Carolina. What are you doing in Brazil? Well, I'm working on two research projects for two upcoming books. Also, I'm here to focus on, in South America. I'm not just in Brazil. I go from here to Colombia to the Venezuelan border. As soon as our interview is over, I am interviewing a young lady who is a Venezuelan refugee. Her family fled that country. And basically, Eric, one of the things that I want to.

accomplished when I'm here is, as you very well know and our listeners, those who are younger than us, let's say Jen Z and millennials, many of them think that socialism is a very good thing. It sounds Christian to them. The people in South America know better. They have seen the utter devastation of socialism. They have experienced it. And for instance, the woman that I will be interviewing, she has fled. Venezuela. I don't know if your listeners are aware what's going on there under Maduro's

socialistic governance, but it is impoverishing. It has not, it isn't impoverishing. It has devastatingly impoverished an entire country. Refugees are pouring out of that country into Colombia, Brazil. They're working their way over to Ecuador, to Peru. Some of them are chancing the ever dangerous dairy and gap in an effort to get to Panama and work their way up to America. The average Venezuelan has lost more than 20 pounds in the last year simply due to lack of food. I mean, this is what's going on. And so I, you know, as you know, I don't, I don't just want to pontificate from, you know, from, you know, D.C. or Chicago or Atlanta, rather, I'm your guy in the field and I'm going to give you a picture of what this is like. So when

I wrote the Grace Effect, which was a focus on European socialism. I published that book in 2011, I think. This time I'm giving you a picture of South American socialism and what it looks like. Well, look, these books are important. It's one of the reasons we're friends because there are very few people who seem to be talking about these things. They couldn't be more important. We need to understand if you care about the poor, you had to be. better be an enemy of socialism. If you don't care about the poor, but you only care what your

friends think of you, then you can virtue signal and pretend to be friendly to socialism. But God will judge us if we actually care about the poor or don't. And if you care about the poor, you need to understand socialism harms the poor, devastates the poor. Otherwise, I would be all for it. Larry, your book around the world in more than 80 days. I'm hoping people will get a copy of that, if only because Amazon has tried to suppress the book. But you write about this from the point of view of the whole world. And as you go around the world and you compare the systems that they have to the American system. What I ought to accomplish in my book around the more than 80 days, Eric, is that, you know, 69% of Americans have never left the country.

Now, there's a reason for that. It's very expensive and it's very difficult. I mean, the United States is practically a continent. And I would wager that the other 31% of them, most of them, have maybe been on a Caribbean cruise or a mission trip somewhere, perhaps a fishing trip to Canada, or maybe they got drunk in Tijuana. I don't know, but most really haven't seen the world. So I decided today people are used to virtual tours.

and travels and doing things like this via Zoom, I decided I would take them around the world. I had already been to nearly 40 countries before I began this project, and it expanded to 55 countries before I was done. But the book is I take people to 26 countries around the world to basically say to them, before you burn America to the ground,

you need a glimpse of what the rest of the world is like. And I say for the end of the book, those countries that the left would hold up as models for us, that they would say, these are the countries, that we should be like France and the Scandinavian countries. And I'm kind of, you know, revealing the lie that the left is feeding to many Americans, who, again, don't really know any better because they haven't really seen the world. And along the way, I'm acquainting you with Islamic terrorism. I'm acquainting you with the devastation of socialism, with Marxism.

And I hope that by the end of the journey, you like me are glad to get home and say, wow, I want to kiss the ground and say, God bless America. Well, you know, it's funny because as you know, I have a book out now called Fish Out of Water, Search for the Meaning of Life. I talk about my upbringing and how my parents, because they came from places beyond our shores, my mother came from Germany, which became East Germany. which is why she escaped at age 17. My father came from Greece, which had experienced the horrors of the war and the Nazis and Mussolini, and then the war with the communists, the civil war. So my parents, even without intending to train me to know there is evil in the world.

There are kinds of governments. There are kinds of political systems, communism at the top of the heat, that are evil, that harm people. And I knew this growing up in a way that, my American friends did not know. And I write about that in the book because I even remember my mother taking me to East Germany in 1971 to visit our relatives. We want to see our sweet relatives.

I will never forget. I was seven and a half years old crossing the border into East Germany, seeing the guard dogs, the barbed wire, the soldiers with the machine guns, and realizing at age seven and a half, this is designed to keep people inside. This is the world's largest prison. This is unbelievable. Most Americans haven't seen this, which is the point you're making. There is nothing more important than understanding this is real.

It's coming for us. And if people do not stand up for those handful of us like you or me or Dinesh D'Souza or a number of our friends who are speaking out about this, they're going to come for you. And so I just want to say, you know, support our programs, buy our books, do support our sponsors. We're in a ridiculous war right now, and there are fewer and fewer people willing to speak against it. And folks, they are coming for you. They hate our whole system. But the cancel culture wants to knock out people like Larry Taunton because he's speaking the truth. Larry, we've just got a couple of minutes left here.

I want to have you back soon. But what do you think is going on in this country here with the impassee? impeachment and this craziness right now. We've just got about a minute or so. Well, Eric, I watched at the beginning. There's some type of little, you know, I don't know if you want to call it a commercial or an announcement where Joe Biden and his wife appeared. And the bar booed vigorously. I loved it. I knew in that moment I was among friends. But I think the rest of the world, and particularly in the third world, they see all of this it's ridiculous, and it's because it's only naive Americans to think elections can't be

rigged. The rest of the world knows that this is the way politics works. They know this. And let me throw this in before we go. My host here have been nothing but lovely. They have accommodated me with this room. They shut off the music in the hotel so that we could do this interview. These are wonderful people. If I could, I would hire them all. Well, it is interesting. People are around the world. I just want to say to those of us in America, we're fighting for the rest of the world because we have a bulwark against fascism and against communism and Marxism. We need to fight. We need to understand that these are tough times. I'm sorry, we're at a time. Larry Taunton, my friend,

God bless you. Thanks for being with us. When I looked over Jordan and what did I see coming for to carry me home? Hey there, folks. It's here from Taxis Show. I'm really excited about my next guest because we're going to talk about Archbishop Vagano. Many of you listen to this program know nothing about Archbishop Vagano. That needs to change. And the change begins right now because I have Robert Moynihan on. Robert Moynihan, welcome. Thank you, Eric. Pleasure to be here. Tell us a little bit about yourself before you leap into. how you came to write a book about this heroic figure, Archbishop Vagano. I'm a writer. I grew up in Connecticut. My dad was an English professor. We had seven kids in the family. We were Catholic in the 60s. Moynihan is Catholic? I thought that was, that's not Jewish? It's an Irish Catholic name. It's a little bit Irish, I think. Yeah. Okay, what part of Connecticut? My dad eventually was a teacher, was a

at the University of Connecticut, famous for the Lady Huskies, who played basketball. Much of my family went to Yukon, so I'm right there with you. I'm a Connecticut boy, too. I, okay, so you grew up in a Catholic family, you're a writer. At what point do you decide you want to write about this amazing figure, Archbishop Fagano? Because a lot of people, as I said, listening to this program, they don't know who this guy is, and I'm dying to hear about him. Well, in a sense, he is a truth teller, a whistleblower who came out of a very high-ranking position in the Vatican, the very central government of the Catholic Church. So it would be like someone coming out of our United States government who had reached one of the top posts. And then he said there's too much corruption, too many problems here that are harming the image of the church and harming other people, particularly.

sexual abuse. And we're kind of treating it without the intensity and the clarity that we should. And he issued a testimony saying I myself would receive information and hand it up to my superiors so I know what was happening. And sometimes they didn't answer or they took action that was insufficient. And this is the whole story. When did this blow up? This blew up in the summer of 2018.

After five years of Pope Francis, Vigano had already retired. He was past 75 and living in Italy. And the United States in New York, Cardinal McCarrick was deemed in June of 2018 credibly to be accused of having abused a minor sexually. And if you don't mind my saying so, any of us who know about this, no, this is the tip of the iceberg. I mean, McCarrick and others did truly, truly evil things.

And so here you have an archbishop, I keep saying vagano. You said it's, how do you say it? Vigano. Vigano. No, he knows this is going on. I cannot imagine what it would be like to see this happening from the inside, to do what you can, and then to feel like you're not getting anywhere.

So in 2018, I mean, I remember he writes a letter. Is that right? Well, he called it a testimony. It was an open letter, yes. And he basically blows the lid off of the, the corruption is a really nice word for it. We're talking about evil. Yeah.

In the Vatican, nothing more horrible than to find it there. What happened when that letter became public? There were two reactions or sort of two extreme poles of reaction. The first was thankful that somebody had finally cut through all of the soft talk, all of the evasive talk, all of the cover-up and said, no, this is what happened, this is what we did. These are the men who made the decisions. Often there was a reason. They wanted to be careful. But in the end, the result was that the abuse continued and no action was taken. And the other extreme was that he was a Judas, that he had betrayed his own fellow

bishops and leaders of the church who had this longstanding practice of speaking very quietly and handling in very private way such things. And that maybe he had broken his oath, not to tell secret that he had learned during. Well, you see, that's the problem. Some people in the Vatican, they confuse the Vatican, they confuse the Holy See with La Cosa Nostra. And the problem is, it's not a crime organization. It's the Holy Church of Jesus Christ. And so the idea that they would think, oh, you know, he's a stool pigeon. We can't have that here is the very antithesis of what people expect from their church. So of course, Vigano is a hero. What made you decide that you want to wanted to write this book about him. And give me the title again. Finding Vigano.

Finding Vigano. Speaking of which, where is Vigano? Because I thought, you know, initially I thought perhaps he would be somebody who wrote a book about these things, but he didn't. He's in a very quiet and private place, which is unknown to anyone except myself. Is that true? Wow. Is he like in a condo in Vegas? Did he get plastic surgery? What are we talking about? He grew a beard and he was always clean-shaven throughout his career. And he lives very quietly and reads the Internet and writes and studies. Some people know his telephone number, which they had from the time when he was. was the nuncio or ambassador of the Vatican to the United States of America in Washington, D.C. And therefore, he had contacts with many journalists, Catholic journalists in particular.

But he said, when I asked him and I said, people need to know more about you, why you did this, what the larger background is and what your view of the other great issues facing the church is. and he said, well, I can talk to you about it. I said, no, I think I need to come find you. And he said, well, let me think about it. And a few days later, he called me. Actually, I was in Russia at the time, visiting leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church

because that's been something I've been working on for many years, a type of bridge building between the East and the West, the Catholics and the Orthodox. And he said, I've made up my mind, I'll let you come see me. Now, why, I don't really want to know the answer to this because I'm afraid I already know, but why would someone who is an archbishop who served so many years in the church would be in this kind of hiding? Whom does he fear? Well, you know, I don't think he's afraid.

I just think he decided to be prudent. And we just passed through the feast actually of Thomas A Beckett, who in the 1100s was martyred because he had stood up against the King of England. But the King of England didn't do anything about him. The King of England said to some of his men, this troublesome priest is causing my image and my plans to be in difficulty. But he issued no order. and then some of his soldiers went down and said, we better carry out for the king something that will help him. And they actually physically removed that archbishop.

So if anybody wants to read a nice dramatic work written by Thomas Stearns Elliott, it's called Murder in the Cathedral. But I have to say, you know, when we're talking about, about the Church of the Middle Ages or the late Middle Ages or the 12th or 11th centuries, you think of it as a corrupt, worldly institution in many ways. The power, the political power and the church power were melted together and terrible things happened, of course. Today, under Pope Francis, you would think that there would be less of that.

still think that there are dark actors who would, could act imprudently against someone like Archbishop Vagano? There are, there are mysterious shadows that I've encountered over many years where I've been writing about the Catholic Church and the Vatican. There was a commandant of the Swiss Guard, which handles all security for the Pope. He was shot to death on the 4th of May, 1990. along with his wife, it was a blamed on a young Swiss guard who didn't receive a promotion, but there were many mysteries about the entire case.

And years ago, when I met Archbishop Paul Kazimir Marchinkas, who I reported on and got to know, met many times, he died in 2006. But in those prior years, he said, come to see me before I die, and I will tell you things that will curl your hands. hair. And what he meant was that there's a great, there are many great temporal powers. Forgive me, forgive me. We're going to go to a hard break here. We'll come back with that sentence. Folks, don't go away. Let there be no doubt, big tech and the far left have joined forces to purge America of conservative views. But even if you keep your accounts, you don't have to give big tech websites access to your data. That's why I choose to protect my online activity by using ExpressVPN.

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The book is Finding Vigano about this heroic Archbishop currently in hiding because he has said many brave things, which unfortunately are true. And there are dark actors who don't like. that. You were just saying, Robert, that this other priest, was it a priest? I didn't remember. An archbishop. The archbishop told you that someday I'll, you know, I'll tell you these things. Now, did he, did you get to? I called him, and he said not yet in early 2006. And then in February 2006, he said, okay, I'll see you. I'm in Sun City, Arizona. I said, okay, I'll fly out to see you this weekend and on Friday he died.

Did he die under mysterious circumstances? He was, I cannot say, no, I don't think so. Just that I never left the idea that people are hard to pin down and these stories have never been fully told. And the church is a, the church is the body of Jesus Christ, the continuing presence of Christ, he has enemies. The first time around, they crucified him. And the same thing will happen to his body.

Well, except when it happens from within, that's what makes it so difficult. And there are so many people losing their faith. Of course, they shouldn't, but they confuse the nefarious figures within the church with the church. do you in this book which is it's pretty new how many months has it been out it's been out about six weeks okay well even even newer um finding vagano by robert moinehan is there anything in there that we can talk about now that that he told you that that he hadn't previously made public that we should know Well, the thing I do is concentrate on him as a man and why this actually respected church insider finally converts, as it were, and like Paul on the road to Damascus, basically falls off of his horse as a kind of respected Vatican prelate and says, we have been tempted and we've yielded to the test.

temptation to place our facade of fidelity to Christ above the reality of an infiltration that has made us betray in many different ways, the gospel of Christ. And bit by bit, this figure, Vigano, became a truth-teller, not just about the abuse crisis, but about the doctrines and the trendiness, the willingness, the willingness to compromise with the modern world of the present Roman Catholic Church. Well, I assume he's referring to Pope Francis in that because I just assume so. Would that be right? Yes, that is true. Because obviously, do you get into what happened with Pope Benedict? Because many of us who were not Catholics like me, but who were nonetheless pro-Catholic and Christian, were

saw in Benedict the real hero and were deeply disappointed when he chose to step down. I know Pope Benedict quite well. I've met with him dozens of times. I've talked with him for hours. I knew him in particular when he was a cardinal because he was much more accessible. We spoke of the church and the modern world. The effort that the church has made to continue to speak about a divinity, a transcendent God in a world that's very material, very imminent. And in a sense, he was a great theologian and professor. I enjoy talking to him. But the Vatican and many of his opponents thought that he was too distant, too cold,

and really too faithful because they thought the church needs to make an accommodation with modernity. So when he was elected, it was sort of the last effort to call a halt to the things that have happened in the church, which are similar to many of the mainline Protestant churches, which is an accommodation with a general trend in the modern world to go away from traditional church doctrine and to accept the new teachings of modernity. So Benedict- I mean, excuse me, that's that's heresy. That's a joke. The very idea that anyone would be discussing that seems to me preposterous. I don't even know what that means. It's kind of like saying, listen, you know, the devil has more power now.

Let's make a little bit of a deal with him. What do you say? I mean, the very reason the church exists is not to do that. So I get very confused. I mean, it's one thing about saying, hey, let's have guitars at the masses. that's something that you might do, or you might say, let's start doing the masses in English and not only in Latin, but when you are talking about doctrine, I'm just fascinated that these voices expect to be taken seriously. It's the same thing that happened in the Roman Empire, but in a different modern way. The Roman emperors said, we are gods.

we are actually divine. And the Christians would say, well, we accept your authority as men. We're not going to revolt against you, but we cannot worship you as a God. We have a Lord, one Lord, and that we won't. And the Emperor said, listen, just take a little pinch of incense. Put it here above the flame. And have it offered to me as to a God. And everything will be fine.

Because it's a structural thing. It's who is in charge. It's control. And the Christians at that time, some of them agreed. Well, I know. Excuse me for the sirens. I live in Manhattan where we still have occasional sirens, but there are no people. So it's a mystery.

We'll be right back with Robert Moynihan. The book is Finding Vigano. Folks, I'm talking to Robert Moynihan. I neglected to say he's the founder of Inside the Vatican Magazine. and an expert on things in the Vatican and so glad to have you as a guest on this program. I wanted you to lay out, or you were saying that you would be able to kind of lay out the progress of what it was in this archbishop that made him slowly find his way to where he wrote this big letter in the middle of 2018. The Archbishop is a traditional Roman Catholic Italian. He became a priest in the late 1960s.

He was quickly seen to have a lot of talent. He was brought into the Vatican diplomatic corps, where they have their most capable, their most intelligent men. It's considered the greatest diplomatic service in the world. They have embassies all over the world because the church is all over the world. and in those countries, the Vatican ambassadors report back to Rome on everything that is going on culturally, politically, matters that will affect the church.

They take a political dossier and a religious dossier. What's happening in the church in religious education, religious orders, priesthood, and what's happening in the country, civil war, efforts to, control the activities of the church, say, in a communist country. And Biggino had an outstanding career and was finally raised to a position that was about number five in the Vatican. And everything that would pass through his hands would go, the next stage was the Secretary of State and the Pope. So when he saw that there was a problem in the embrace of the capable and clever,

and intelligent Cardinal McCarrick at that time, now just Mr. McCarrick, because he's no longer a Cardinal. Figuino saw that there had been accommodations made that had harmed many people and were harming the church. And then he developed as he reflected on this and understanding that it wasn't just the abuse of young people, but it was the change in church teaching itself to accept this kind of activity increasingly. Is what you're saying that, you know, I've heard the phrase the Lavender Mafia. In other words, is it the idea that we don't just say, oh, it's terrible, boys were raped, but that we begin to give in to the ideology behind that and begin to say that we're going to to find ways over time to change church doctrine on sexuality. Because it does seem to me that

that is what's happening under this Pope. Well, it's a very delicate and contested point. And there are nuances here. But there's no question that there has been the growth in what we called the lavender lobby or mafia, which wishes to mainstream a certain type of acceptance of homosexual tendency and activity. And this is not in keeping with the traditional teaching of the church, but they are developing arguments to try to bring it into keeping today. and the process has speeded up under this present pontificate. Well, we know, of course, that this has happened, certainly in the mainline Protestant church.

And, you know, living in America, it's a free country, people can do what they like. But one of the things that I, as a non-Catholic, have always valued about the Catholic Church, is that they don't need to change with the seasons or with the zeitgeist, that the teaching of the scripture, the teaching of the faith doesn't change. And of course, Catholics have been particularly heroic with regard to the unborn and led the way to getting evangelicals and others to see the sanctity of those in their mother's womb. So it's very strange to me when we're talking about something as foundational as sexuality. I mean, when you have John Paul II and others, you know, working out the theology of the body. We're not just talking about, you know, what makes you feel good.

We're talking about things that go to the very heart of what it means to be made in God's image. To try to find your way around that, it strikes me as sophistry. I don't really understand how else to see it. I agree with you, Eric. This is the battle on the moral level of our time. And it's an effort to change the teaching and to say it was a, it was a, perhaps for people of that time, but no longer today with our new understanding of human nature and human fallibility, woundedness. So it's presented as a more gentle, more merciful church, but it's precisely a different anthropology. What is man?

And it's in this sense that Viginal took the next step in his analysis and said it's part of an overarching vision of embracing the imminent and eliminating the idea of the holy or the sacred or the divine or the transcendent. So the whole prior history of man had these two stories in which we in a house, we lived in a house with the first story of the material world and the second story of heaven, of the immaterial world, the spiritual world, the world of the soul, and that things mattered on that level. We want to eliminate. that entire concept. Collapse the second story down into the first. And this is very attractive to communist governments and now increasingly to the government that is materially

secular humanist, increasingly dominant in the West. And it's preparing for a humanity that no longer thinks itself of sufficient dignity even to have a soul that can be damned. Because it doesn't doesn't have a soul at all. That's the issue. And I know you're familiar with Father Newhouse's book, The Naked Public Square, which of course is now old. 1984 is not any longer yesterday. But that's, of course, what's been happening in the West and increasingly. And the problem is that once this occurs, we lose that very important defense of human dignity of don't kill someone because he has inherent dignity. Don't kill the unborn child, but don't kill the infant, don't kill the handicapped person.

And this is why the battle that Vigano has fought inside the Catholic Church has now been extended to a cultural battle dealing with political issues, the American election, etc. Forgive me, we're going to, we have to cut you off again. We'll be right back final segment with Robert Moynihan. Don't go away. pulling logs cab over pete with a reefer on and a jimmy hauling hogs we is heading for bear on i1 o about a mile out of shaky hey there folks i've got the privilege and honor speaking with robert moynahan an author of many books uh including the new one which i hope you'll get it's called finding vigeno and it is about this heroic archbishop who was number five at the vatican decided to speak out very boldly um in the Archbishop's letters to President Trump, he talks about what many of us are seeing. It's called

cultural Marxism. It is an atheistic, secularist, materialist view of the universe, including human beings, where, of course, we don't have souls. There is no heaven. There is no God. The question is, how is it possible for the Catholic Church to lean in that direction? I don't, that's what I don't get. There's an aspect. of Marxism, which is attractive. It says we will bring justice here on earth. We won't wait until heaven. And the Jesuit order in particular had large numbers of its men embrace this around the world and work for social justice for the end of poverty right now here and there. They don't want to see children hungry and suffering. They say we need political change right now. We're going

to leave aside or making a secondary position the traditional teaching that we need to baptize and structure for communion. And what is lost in this is that the defense of human dignity comes from the embrace of this understanding of an objective, eternal, inalienable right that's attached to something outside of time and space and change. And so the danger becomes an imminent or humanistic vision, which starts as something attractive, but ends up as an iron cage. Well, we know the devil always comes as an angel of light. He doesn't say I'm evil, follow me. And I guess it was Buckley, your fellow Catholic who talked about the desire to imminentize the eschaton, right?

I mean, that's really what utopianist schemes always are. attractive. They can say, hey, we can have resurrection in heaven without the cross. Let's go for it. That's basically it. We can get to heaven without Jesus. We can make a tower of Babel with bricks that we made with our own hands. I mean, it's the same old lie you can be as gods. But to see it happening at the top levels of the Vatican makes me wonder sometimes if we are in the end times, because this is very dramatic. Well, I've asked the Archbishop. In fact, I had a conversation on the 12th of March. I said, today, all the churches in Italy are closed. He said, yes, it's unbelievable. I said, has it ever happened before? He said, never. Never did every church in Italy stop celebrating a public Catholic mass. And I said, in the book of Daniel, it speaks of the end time when it says, the sacrifice shall cease. And I He said, I don't know if this is the fulfillment of that, but it seems that it possibly could correspond to this incredible change that there is no public representation of the sacrifice of Christ

throughout the entire country, which was the center of the Catholic Church. Having written a long book on Martin Luther and still being a pro-Catholic, non-Catholic, I have to say, I know the church has been through some very dark times, but it's fascinating to me that right now, it should be led by someone like Francis, who in many ways ought to know better. It's horrifying. So I'm very glad for the voice of Archbishop Vigano and for your book, Finding Vigano. I'm sorry that we're out of time. We'd love to have you back, Robert Moynihan, because it's important that we talk about these things. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Eric. Folks, get a copy, Finding Vegano.