Pints With Aquinas - 207: The Shocking Truth About the Papacy w/ Steve Ray

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

In this BRAND NEW episode of Pints with Aquinas, I'm joined around the bar table with Catholic-convert Steve Ray to talk all about the Papacy. If you're curious about the role of the pope in Catholicism, then this episode is for you! During this episode, you'll learn about: - What the Bible says about the papacy - What the early Christians believed about St. Peter, the first pope - Infallibility - and more! Check out Steve's website: https://catholicconvert.com/ See what the Early Christians believed about Peter's Papacy here: https://www.catholic.com/tract/peters-primacy 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/pints_w_aqu... MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist... Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecr... The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myt... CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequ... Website - mattfradd.com Facebook - facebook.com/mattfradd/ Instagram - instagram.com/pints_w_aquinas Twitter - twitter.com/mattfradd

G'day, how you going? Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. Today I am joined by Catholic convert Steve Ray to discuss a lot, I was going to say everything, but not everything, but a lot concerning the papacy. Where does the Bible teach the papacy? What do the earliest Christians believe about Peter? What's this deal about infallibility? Can't one Pope contradict a previous Pope? Many of these sorts of questions. This is really going to help you understand what the Catholic Church teaches about the papacy, about infallibility. Whether you're a Catholic or not, you're going to get a lot out of this. As I say, Steve Ray was a very committed Baptist, and according to him, anti-Catholic, who in his late 30s actually became a Catholic. He's got a ton of energy. He's a really terrific guy and you are going to learn a lot. Be sure to check out his website, catholicconvert.com. We speak about several

of his books on the papacy and John's gospel and these sorts of things. And you'll be able to learn a ton by going to his website, catholicconvert.com. Hey, before we get into the show, I have created a 21-day detox from porn course called Strive 21. We already have over 14,000 men currently going through the course. It's in Spanish. If you come down here, you can see what the men have been saying about this 21-day detox. Basically, every day for 21 days, you get a short video from me, a challenge you have to perform, and you're joining, as I say, a huge amount of other men in the comment section. And two really cool things about this course. One, it's 100% free.

That's pretty good. And two, you can be as anonymous as you want. So if you're a man who struggles with lust in any way, or you know a man who's really struggling with lust and wants to be free of pornography, please send them to strive21.com. That's strive21.com, as I say, 100% free, and you can be as anonymous as you want. All right, let's get into this discussion with Steve Ray now on the papacy. But I want to let you know that every time we do one of these videos, we also always have a post-show wrap-up section that only my patrons see. And so today's episode is no different. I ask

Steve to give us his honest and raw thoughts about what it means to be a Catholic in this day and age when it feels like there are many divisions within the church, many sort of infights. How do we deal with that? How do we be a faithful Catholic in today's church? So if you're a patron, be sure to go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd and to be sure to watch that as well. All right, here is my episode with Steve Ray. Thanks for being here. G'day, Steve Ray. Lovely to see you again. Thank you, Matt. I bet a lot of people aren't going to recognize me without my hat on. I can't wear my hat and the earpieces at once, but just so people maybe get to recall who I am, that's what I normally look like. Yeah. You went by a name. What was it? Jerusalem Jones?

Jerusalem Jones. How did that come about? Well, it was a magazine up here in Ann Arbor that Al Cresta started with Tom Monaghan called Credo. And I started the movie series that I was making on the Footprints of God where we filmed the whole story of history, the Bible and the story of salvation on location all over Israel and Egypt and Syria and Jordan and everywhere else. Well, anyway, the first day I got – didn't have the hat. My head was as sunburned as could be. My wife made me wear the hat. My head was as sunburned as could be. My wife made me wear the hat, so I started doing that. Al Cresta said, you look just like Indiana Jones going around all those

digging into caves and historical sites. We should call you Jerusalem Jones. That's how it came about. It's been there for 25 years. Fantastic. I even have a website. If you go to jerusalemjones.com, it takes you right to my website. Okay, awesome. Now, I've met your wife. She's such a beautiful woman. My wife and her got along really well. You and I spoke on a Catholic Answers cruise. We did.

Goodness gracious, seven or eight years ago now, I think. So it was nice to get to know you. That's about right. And we are happily married 43 years, and I say I love her more now than the day I married her. And this whole isolation thing we're in, I couldn't think of anybody I'd rather be isolated with. In fact, we've been so busy for the last 20 years, it's actually a little bit delightful to have this time to just be together. And we have four kids, all practicing Catholics, own their own houses, busy as can be, and 18

grandchildren. Beautiful. Congratulations. Now, I know this could be a whole separate podcast, but for those who are watching this and have maybe not heard of you, tell us about your conversion, maybe in a few minutes, if that's possible. I'll do the nutshell version. My parents were good pagans. They did not have any religious upbringing. They were from Chicago. My dad died seven years ago at 94 years old. My mom is still alive. She's 98 and a half years old and still as sharp as a tack. They were married 73 years. I was born a year after my mom and dad confronted the whole idea of Jesus Christ and the gospel through Billy Graham. He came to Detroit in 1953. My mom said she heard

him on the radio, fell to her knees in the kitchen, dropped her purse and her keys and started to cry and say, Dear God, save me, just like that man just talked about whoever he was. She didn't know it was Billy Graham. And my dad thought he was dying. He thought he had cancer. And he went and sat on the front porch. God, if you're up there, I don't even know if you exist, but reveal yourself to me. And the next day he went to work and a guy came up to him and said, Charlie, you need Jesus Christ in your life. Twelve years, twelve hours after he prayed that. Well, anyway, they'd had twelve years of miscarriages. My mom said, Jesus, now that I found you, please give us kids. I want to raise them to be Christians. And a year later, I was

born. My mom said that God always answered her prayers for me until I became Catholic. And then God must have misunderstood her prayers. But I was raised Baptist. We never missed church. We never missed Sunday school, vacation Bible school. My parents were converts, very devout, very excited. And they instilled that in us. And so I had two brothers that followed me, and we had a wonderful Baptist family life. And I tell you that I have nothing loved more than the way my parents raised me to love Jesus, to love the Bible, to fear hell and to aim for heaven and all the morals that went along with that. So I am not an anti-Protestant. I used to be an anti-Catholic, but I'm not an anti-Protestant. I still love all the good that's in Protestantism and all that my

parents raised me. And the best thing I think they gave me a love of scripture and seeking after the truth. Second best thing they did is showed me, demonstrated to me what it meant to be a loving husband and wife and raise kids. I had, and my wife came from a similar family. So we had that beautiful example of how to, a husband and wife are to love each other and to raise our kids. And we had a business plan when we got married, and it only had two points. Number one, and this is as evangelical Protestants, we're going to prove to the world that a man and a woman could be married in a monogamous relationship for a lifetime and put Jesus first in their life. Second of all, we're going to raise kids that

love Jesus even to the next generation, and blessed be God, both of those came about. But it wasn't without a lot of work, Matt. You can't just assume a family's going to happen. You have to fight it. You have to work it like a great masterpiece of art. When you make a mistake, go back and fix it. But that's kind of how – I was 15 years old. I was raised in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, drugs, free sex, rock and roll, all that stuff. And I'm not going to go into how I brought my parents great grief during a two-year period there. But when I was 17, I heard Billy Graham on the radio, and I slipped out the back door with my long hair. I know you can't believe it now, but I have pictures of me with long curly hair down my shoulders.

And I said to Jesus, I'm only 17 years old. I'm a rebellious hippie kid, but I'm going to make you the Lord and Savior of my life tonight. And that has been the guiding trajectory ever since. I never lived it perfect every day, but that has been the trajectory of my life, and I've never forgotten it. Well, my wife and I got married, had kids. We homeschooled our kids, even back when it was illegal to do that in Michigan. We hid. We were the pioneers. We could have lost our kids, but we bought an old farmhouse, and we raised our kids in the country. Nobody knew we existed until it became more legal and acceptable in Michigan. And our kids now thank us to the heavens for what we did for them.

now thank us to the heavens for what we did for them. But when I was 39 years old, I was a Bible teacher. I had my own business. We had 600 employees, and I'm doing $12 million a year in sales. But when I became Catholic, I lost interest. That's why I do what I do now. I sold my business. But we started it out of our dining room, my wife and I. And I started to realize the problems within Protestantism. Even though i was a bible teacher i have 20 000 books in my house and i did half of them back in those days because i wanted to know what the bible taught and what god expected of me and i was very good at teaching how to convert catholics because i thought catholics were a big cult and this whole thing about the pope which we're going to talk about today i thought was the biggest scam that's ever been foisted upon a trusting public. But at 39 years old, I began

to realize the problems within Protestantism, and that's another whole story. Now, you were pretty involved with teaching the faith and in your local Baptist community? I taught different Bible studies in different churches. I have such respect for that because when you often hear about conversion stories, it's very often, not always, but very often when people are kind of in that prime developing time of their life, I think it must be extra difficult when you're well-established in your faith, you've got community, you're maybe even making income, and then to make a switch like that. And all of our friends and family were evangelical we lived in a big evangelical bubble and

I knew or I would have known if I'd ever Step out and become a Catholic I would lose all of my friends and all of our family and we did When we made that decision neither one of our families would talk to us for over two years for a year And we lost every friend we had but I I had Bible study in my home every Monday night for probably eight years. We used to have 50 people every Monday sitting on the stair. Our whole house was packed. There was no room to sit. People were standing. We did a Bible study on Monday night, and churches were asking me to come and teach, and I did, and I loved it, and we did evangelism. And I taught classes on how to

convert Catholics, believe it or not, and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. But the Catholics, they were the biggest cult. Anyway, it took a period. Al Crest, a good friend of ours. Oh, he's wonderful. We'd been best friends for 12 years before his conversion, and he didn't warn me. He just said, Steve, Sally and I are going to become Catholic. And I said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You're way too smart to be a Catholic. But I tried to prove him wrong. And over a period of about six months, we realized he was right. And as I went through the problems, it didn't start with trying to find what was good about Catholicism. I didn't see anything good about Catholicism. It began when I started to wrestle with the problems of Protestantism. How many churches did Jesus start? Who is the final interpreter of Scripture? What morality sticks?

Because everybody has their own morality. Christians all, you know, some say abortion's okay, some say contraception's okay. Well, who says? I mean, the Bible, yeah, but we're all studying the same book, and how come we're coming up with all these different – So when I realized the big problems in Protestantism, I was one day on New Year's Day 19. I know I'm taking too long. No, this is terrific. I'm enjoying it. 1994. And it leads up to our topic. I was 11 years old. Continue. Yeah, you were 11. I was 39 years old. And it was on a New Year's Day. My wife and I were sitting

there with books open all over our living room floor. And we were studying all this about the Pope and about Mary and purgatory and all these big bugaboo issues, you know. And I just I sat down and closed my books and I started to cry like a baby. I just sat there with tears running down my eyes. And I said, Janet. Oh, she said to me, Steve, what's wrong? Why are you crying? I said, Janet, nothing's wrong.

I I just realized I'm I'm a Catholic. And so she said, oh, good grief. Next day we went to, I called Al Cresta and told him, hey, Al, happy New Year. I'm a Catholic. And Al says, well, what happened to you? I said, my pride broke. I'm not the pope anymore. See, in evangelicalism, when Martin Luther got—

Let's touch upon that with sola scriptura and what happens when everyone becomes their own pope in a sense. Please, yeah. And that happened to us because when Martin Luther broke from the church, he rejected one pope. But he didn't realize that he created a billion new popes. Because every protestant, when they decide to protest against the one pope in the church, where do they turn? Who's the pope of the new thing they're going to? Well, Martin Luther wouldn't ever claim to be the pope every single protestant protestant becomes their own pope in what sense because i'm the final interpreter of scripture now who's who do i turn

to for example if i'm a protestant who do i turn to for the final word okay you and me matt we're good buddies all right you're baptist and i a Methodist. We're having a good discussion going here, but we disagree on a lot of things. Say you're Presbyterian, you believe in infant baptism. I'm a Baptist. I say that's a wicked Catholic tradition. Okay, who's going to judge between us? Who's the arbiter? Well, the Bible is. Well, you're going to have your favorite verses, and I'm going to have my favorite verses, and we're going to end up hitting other but bloody in our noses. Who is gonna be the moderator? Who's gonna be the arbiter?

No Protestant would ever claim, well some nutcases do, but no real Protestant's gonna claim to be the final arbiter, interpreter, scripture setting of doctrine. And I realized that the more I loved the Bible, it was really my love for the Bible that was my downfall as a Protestant.

My great love of Scripture, I realized that it's not easy to understand. Even St. Paul's, Peter writes in St. Paul's writings, which are sometimes difficult to understand. Even Peter acknowledges that Scripture is difficult. Who becomes the arbiter? I become my own pope. I have to say, well, there's really nobody. I reject the pope in Rome, that's for sure. And Matt Fradd certainly isn't going to tell me what the final truth is. So Janet and I, I become Pope Steve. My wife is Pope Janet. And we now are the final, our determiners of what the truth is. Now, I may agree with Pastor Billy Bob down at the Baptist Church until he disagrees with me, and then I'm going to jump and go to a different church. And I was called a church hopper, one who would hop from one church to another

because once I would disagree with a pastor, look at right here, it says in the scriptures, and I'd argue and I'd say, you're not teaching the word of God, and I'd go and join another church. Okay, I want to take a pause from this fantastic discussion to tell you about our second sponsor, Hello, H-A-L-L-O-W. It's a Catholic meditation app to help you about our second sponsor, Halo, H-A-L-L-O-W. It's a Catholic meditation app to help you find peace

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this is really going to help you. It's really fantastic. Hallow, H-A-L-L-O-W dot A-P-P. Back to the show. And he would, I'd argue, and I'd say, you're not teaching the Word of God, and I'd go and join another church. So this is what happens when you don't have a pope, when you reject the pope. And I started to see all of that, see? And I realized this can't work. Martin Luther said, I am my own pope and council. Well, who gives you the authority to say that, Dr. Luther? I am Dr. Luther.

Were those actually his words? Yeah, I am my own pope and council. He said that? Yep. He said a lot of things that were, to be fair, pretty crazy. I wouldn't want to think of him as sort of illustrative of what most Protestants are today, or even were back then. I led a whole group of Catholic pilgrims through East Germany in the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, and we went to all the sites of Martin Luther on a Martin Luther pilgrimage, and I went there with a couple Lutheran scholars, and we debated him all the way around all those places. We debated

Martin Luther. Even at the church in Eisenach, or the Wittenberg door, I posted 500 reasons why we should stay Catholic. No. How long did that take you to write? I put it all, when people sent me it, I just cut and pasted it into a document. I wrapped it up with a ribbon. When I was there at the church door, I said, Martin Luther, you had 95. I've got 500 reasons why we should stay Catholic. And there was a whole group of Lutherans there when I did it.

It was pretty interesting. Anyway. Now, I'm just imagining, because we do have some Protestant viewers, and I'm wondering, nobody likes to have their position straw-manned, right? As Catholics, we're so used to that, right? Y'all worship Mary, and we're like, for goodness sake, at least understand what we're saying. Do you think that that's really a fair sort of representation or recounting of what Protestants would say about themselves, or are you just saying this is where it leads, whether you have that intention or not, or what? Let me put it as a former Protestant and as a Catholic.

And the way—that what I just told you is kind of a funny incident, which we did to exemplify the fact that we have good reasons to be Catholic. But like I told our group when we were there, Martin Luther, when he nailed those 95 thesis door, the Wittenberg church door, he was not intending to break with the church. He was not saying he rejected the authority of the Pope. At that point in his life, he saw certain abuses, which he was, in many cases, correct about, the abuses that were taking place. There's never been a golden age in the church. There's never been a perfect Pope. There's always been problems in the church because it's made of human beings like us.

And so at any point in history, we could come up with a list of things that need to be corrected in the church, I think. And Martin Luther did that. His problem was that he went too far. He went to the point of schism. Saying, like you and I may even say in the current situation, here's some things that we think the church needs to fix or to do better. And we could come up with a list of 95 of them and we could go post them on the door of the Vatican and say we would like to debate these issues. We would like the pope and the Vatican and the bishops to consider these 95 issues. There's nothing wrong with that.

That's perfectly within Martin Luther and your and my freedom and right to do, even obligation I think, in certain points. It's when you get to the point where you then reject, and at a certain point, he rejected it and then became very angry and anti-papal and caused a big schism. And that is the point where I would disagree with Luther, not the 95 Theses. So I understand the way I would say to Lutherans today is that there's not a lot of difference between Orthodox Catholics and Orthodox conservative Lutherans today. There's been discussions on the justification, all these things. Martin Luther, if he was in the church today, would not have reason to leave. The things that he used to split are mainly corrected. And so if you take the fire

out of the fireplace, there's a certain time where you need to put the fire back in the fireplace. Interesting. Good way to put it. And I would think that even many Lutherans would say that too at this point. Yeah. Why don't we, if you don't mind, why don't we kind of just back up? Because I'm really excited to dig into this topic. And I know, as I said, we have a lot of evangelical viewers who are really genuinely interested. I don't know about you, but it would seem to me that this sort of anti-Catholicism that you referred to, maybe back in the Jack Chick days, maybe into the 90s, it's still there, just like there's some sort of Catholics who are very triumphalistic and anti-Protestant. But the evangelical Protestants I meet seem to be very

open, at least to Catholics, to considering them as brothers and these sorts of things. And I think we're going to have a lot of very open-minded Protestants who want to know, okay, tell me, what is the papacy and where does the Bible teach it? So that's my question for you. Okay, and especially today when a lot of evangelical Protestants are realizing kind of that there's a certain chaos out there. There's megachurches, there's these different groups, and not everyone is representing Christ and the scriptures the same, and honestly, and a lot of evangelicals, and I know this because I've been reading these books about them and some by them, who are going back to the early church to see, you know, like, for example, 20 years ago, I wanted to understand my family better. So I went back and did genealogical studies and I found out where I came from.

And then I got the DNA test and all that. And I found out who I am of my relatives back to the countries they came from. What a fascinating thing. It gave us a sense of self-worth and self-knowledge to pass on to my kids. But I think evangelical Protestants were the same. I know for myself, I love I love Christianity. I love the Bible. I love Jesus. I love witnessing the faith of people. I loved all that. But there comes a point where even evangelicals say, maybe we should do a genealogy of where we're coming from, because there's a whole lot of us out here now different.

Where did it start? What did they believe and think when it all began? Because obviously, there weren't all these ideas. So they start doing a genealogical study, and they go back to the first and second century church. And that is really important for Christians to do. I think that you mentioned the evangelicals who are more open-minded. I see three kinds, maybe four kinds of Protestants today. Those who are pretty much apathetic, just kind of go to church because they've always done. A second category are liberal ones who go because it's a place where we talk about morals and we get the environment fixed and all these kind of things. A very liberal wing of Protestants who still are very devoted to the social and moral part of it. And then there are fundamentalists. That's the way I was raised, Matt. I was raised

in a Baptist, very fundamentalist, anti-Catholic tradition. So when I talk, that comes out a little bit, because that's the way that was my tradition. Just help me understand. That makes sense. That's fair enough. That's where you're coming from. Help me understand what an anti-Catholic and an anti-Protestant is, because if a Protestant looks at Catholics and thinks that what they're teaching is unbiblical, they would be right to object to what we teach. And I wouldn't say that that thereby makes them anti-Catholic. They might love Catholics and just think Catholicism is wrong.

So what's the difference between disagreeing with Catholics, even strenuously, and being an anti-Catholic? A lot of times, well, it's a big topic to discuss. We could do that for an hour. A lot of times anti-Catholics are people who were Catholic and who were converted out of the Catholic Church into Protestantism. And one of the reasons I think some of them are so anti-Catholic is if you and I are in a club, and there's a competing club down the road, and I decide to leave, you're in my club and go join that one. The only way I can show that new club that I'm really, really with them and not with the old one anymore is to say as much bad as I can about the old club. And I think there's a big element of that in Protestantism. When a Catholic leaves, they have to really let the people know that they left and that their loyalties are no longer there. And the best way

you do that is to become an anti-Catholic. I think also, though, it's more than that. I think also, though, it's more than that. I think the people who – and I'm in this category. I was in this category, is that I really believe that we were right and you were wrong. And you were going to hell. Surely that doesn't necessarily make you an anti-Catholic. It is because they make a distinction between anti-Catholic church and anti-Catholic believer. I love you as a Catholic.

I'm not anti-Matt Fradd. In fact, I'm very much pro-Matt Fradd. In fact, I love you so much, I want to get you out of the Catholic church so you get your soul saved. I want to get you away from the Pope who has you by the throat. He's got you this way, and you can't breathe or see, and I'm trying to get his grip off of you because I love you. I'm not anti-Matt Fradd, the Catholic, but I'm anti-institution. So why are you not right now an anti-Protestant in that latter sense? You love Protestants, but do you define yourself as anti-Protestant in that sense? No, because first of all, I have a bias. Let's admit it. I have a very positive bias towards the way I was raised. I can't see it as an evil thing. And what the Protestant church affirms, I also affirm. The Bible is the word of God. Jesus died for our sins. There's a trinity, two natures of Christ, atoning salvation. They are bringing people out of drugs and pornography and into a saving

knowledge of Jesus Christ. I see the Protestant churches are very good evangelical, let's say it that way, those who are really teaching evangelical Protestant, those issues I mentioned. I see them as a positive element because even Jesus said, if they're not against us, they're with us. And they're bringing people, many of them, are bringing people out of the drug abuse, out of Islam, out of alcoholism, pornography, everything else, and helping them find Jesus. And I see the Protestant Church in many ways as a wonderful, beautiful stepping stone all the way to the fullness of the faith in the Catholic Church. And Vatican II says that they're not our enemies, that many of those who recite the

there are brothers and sisters, though separate from them. So I'm not an anti. But let me say this with if I see the Catholic Church has turned upside down everything. All right. As a Protestant, I believe that the word of God is how we know about God. You say it's tradition. You nullify the word of God with tradition. I believe we're saved by faith alone. You say you get to heaven by works. I say you pray to God. You say you pray to Mary and dead saints. If I see the Catholic Church as promoting what is wrong and completely upside down and idolatry and a false view of salvation by works, and I have, as an evangelical, I would almost feel an obligation to go against the Catholic Church to expose those things. However, all of those

things are not true, what I used to believe about the Church. I was presented a caricature. I never saw the Catholic Church as she was. I saw a cartoon character that I was told it was. Yeah, I'm not saying you're doing this. I just think that sometimes Catholics dismiss Protestant as anti-Catholic when, if the Catholic Church is wrong, the Protestants they're referring to are right to want the Catholic Church to dissolve so that they can come to a more biblical, pristine view of the gospel. Also, who are you Catholics? You're so audacious, I would say. You're so arrogant and audacious to say you're the one church and that your pope is infallible.

Who are you to say you're the only church? I'm a good Baptist. I love Jesus. I love the Bible. In fact, I love the Bible more than most Catholics do, and I can sing better than most of you Catholics can. Who are you to tell me you're the fullness of the faith? You're the authority. You have an infallible pope. It does sound, it sounds arrogant, prima facie. Oh, audacious, audaciously arrogant. Well, I derailed us there. Sorry about that. But I think that was helpful to go into. But my question for you is, where is the papacy?

What is it, first of all, and where is it found in Scripture? Well, the papacy is not found in Scripture, to the sense that if you're going to go, I have my Bible open right here, and I can search for the word, let's see, Pope in the Bible. Oh, it's not there. Papacy. Oh, not there. But also, you're not going to find the word canon of scripture. You're not going to find the word Bible. Exactly. You're not going to find the word evangelical. So what we find is in the Bible, Jesus taught us things, and he gave what's called a deposit of faith to the church. I like in my movie I made on the Apostolic Fathers, I made a movie, and I showed it as the apostles hand off this big bag of millions of dollars to the church, and they deposit it in a

bank. And I'm even in an armored car at the time, man. I'm driving in an armored car with a guy with guns, and they escort me into the bank, and I take this big bag of money, and I deposit it in the bank, and I close the safe door. This is the deposit of faith that Jesus and the apostles left to the church is now like a big bag of money in the safe, and it's being safeguarded by the bishops. That deposit of faith has to be understood, developed, researched, and shared and protected. So if you take a big red cabbage let's say that and i and the apostles hand this to us now we have this big red cabbage beautiful but we don't to or to really get to the bottom of this red cabbage what it is we start peeling leaves away and we get deeper and deeper and we're seeing things we didn't see in the first century we're seeing oh look at this

here's another look how it's shaped this way and we get down and it's not a new cabbage it's the same cabbage but we're understanding it deeper and deeper through the centuries and that's what the church is even evangelical protestants have to accept doctrinal development and understanding because they did not have a new testament in the first century they did not have a new testament put together in the collection of 27 until the end of the fourth century that's a 27 until the end of the fourth century. That's a development of doctrine. End of the fourth century, we finally have, okay, 27 books, and these are them. There is such a thing.

So the papacy, even though the word pope is not used, the ideas, the concept of it, we don't have the word trinity. Let me look it up here, Matt, real quick here in the bio. Trinity, trinity. Nope, it's not in there either. Not in all 73 books, I do not see Trinity. And yet any Protestant would join with us in a fight against those who deny the Trinity. Why? Because it's a doctrinal development. It's a word we use to describe something we find in Scripture, but was never given a name. So the papacy is the same. We see certain things in the Scriptures that lead to it, all the way back from the Old Testament, because the church does not stand on its own. We are the leaves and the branches and the fruit, but the trunk and the roots are Israel. The Old Testament is the foundation. The new is built on top of the old. In order to

understand who we are and why we do what we do, whether it's having scripture and tradition, having a pope, having a blessed mother, the Eucharist, all of those things are rooted in the trunk and roots of Israel and the Old Testament, all the way back from the Old Testament. We'll do that in a minute. Prepare us for the fact that the church, which is the new Israel, if we're going to have a new Israel, you would think that its structure of authority would be something similar to the old Israel. And so we build the new early church built off the understanding that we're the new Israel. What was the structure of authority in the old Israel? Well, it's going to be the same in the new Israel, just a bit different.

And so in the scriptures, we can see the development right from the beginning of Jesus' words that there was going to be a leader. Every baseball team needs a captain. Every police force needs a chief. Every human organization has a leader or it spins off into chaos. Every human organization has a leader or it spins off into chaos. And Jesus knew that this was not only a divine institution, but also a human institution, and it was going to need a leader to be the source of unity like every other human institution has. And Jesus prepared his followers right from the beginning with the need for that leader and who that leader would be.

Okay, fair enough. Why think, though, that Peter's the leader when in 1 Peter 5, 1, he refers to himself as a fellow elder? What else does he refer to himself as? Peter. Peter, an apostle of Jesus. The word Peter, that wasn't his name. His name was Simon. His name is Simon. Yeah, break open Matthew 16 for us, because I know that you spent a lot of time in the Holy Land, and it was you who actually first helped me understand the significance of the location they were at when Christ gave Simon his new name. Caesarea Philippi on the northern border with Lebanon. In fact, to get there, we drive right along the Lebanese fence. And I'll tell you, Matt, had it not been for this virus thing, I would be there right now.

And I've been to that site in Caesarea Philippi over 100 times with leading groups and so on. I'm not going to go into all of the geographical aspects of that, which scream the papacy, which I do with my groups there. But I will say that when Jesus was there, he made a certain declaration. And he said, you are rock. You are Petros. Now, this is a name that was never given before. Peter was never called Peter. He's now maybe in his 30s, and he gets this new name, Peter. He never had that name before. His name was Simon. Simon was his name. And Jesus gives him a new name, Peter, which means rock. Now, there's a whole debate with Protestants about it being a pebble, and the real rock was Jesus. So we could go into that if you want to, but Catholics have it hands down. And I will mention this. I know

you're going to mention it at the end. I wrote a book called Upon This Rock, St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome. This is a book where I did all of this legwork and research. I can't tell you how many hundreds I know of people have told me they became Catholic from reading this book. But in there, I deal with the issue that Jesus was given a new name up there. Here's a huge rock, and Jesus went two days walking all the way up there to give this new name because of the backdrop. Yeah, tell us about that backdrop for a bit, for those who missed it. All right, you're making me dig into it a little more than I intended to. It's Caesarea Philippi. It was a pagan site of worship, and there was a huge rock, the foothills of Mount Hermon, and on the left-hand side, there was a big cave, and the cave had no bottom. It was water all the

way down.osephus in the first century said that people had taken a string of the rock lowered it down and they couldn't find the end of that so they called it the entrance into the netherworld or hades or the gates of hell and that's obviously still there today when you visit it's there today there's dirt and there's no more water because the earthquake filled it in but at the time of jesus there was only water and they thought that was the entrance down to the netherworld the underworld of the dead and the gods below it was the gates of hades that's what it was jesus and in front of that cave was a big white marble temple built by king herod the great out of marble imported from it from greece and you went through the pagans would come

through that temple and they would throw the water into the sacrifice to the gods down below, and they'd rush out back to see if blood was in the water, because the water was coming out. It's the headwaters of the Jordan River. If there was blood in the water, it meant the gods down below rejected the sacrifice. No blood, oh good, the gods have accepted. The god that was worshipped there was called Pan. And that city was always called Panias, P-A-N-E-A-S. Panias is the name of the city. Only Caesarea Philippi for a few years during biblical times. Caesar Philip was building his capital city, but it was always Panias, and today it's Panias, Banias. But this was a God, Pan, and he is the God of sheep and shepherds. So just think of what Jesus is doing with Peter.

He's appointing his new shepherd. He's the shepherd. He's appointing his new vice shepherd. He takes him up to a huge rock to give him the new name rock. And in front of there's a big temple, kind of like a church. And he says, it's not this. I'm going to build my real church on the rock, not that fake one. And you have a false sacrifice of living sacrifice.

I'm going to have the real sacrifice. And you're not going to serve the false Lord. It's going to serve the real Lord. This is the backdrop that Jesus went up into pagan territory to a pagan site to make that declaration in Matthew 16. You are rock and on this rock I'll build my church and the gates of hell won't prevail against it. Duh. It's right there in front of your eyes. It's the master backdrop for anything anybody ever said. So Jesus has given him the name Rock. Now, as an evangelical Protestant, I'd go here to my Bible

again and say, okay, let's look in the Greek, Matt. Okay, look in the Greek. It says you are Petros and on this Petra. Well, wait a minute. That's two different words, Matt. So he named Peter something different. He says you are going to be Petros, but it's on the Petra that I'm going to build my church. And what's the difference there in Greek for those of whom? Well, in Greek, every noun is masculine or feminine. Like. Mm hmm. It says you are Petra, the feminine uh you are petros well let me put it this way petra is a

feminine noun right you can't name peter petra because it's going to say well hello who are you hi petra and you know it's a feminine you can't name a 250-pound fisherman with tattoos all over his body. You can't name him Petra. So what they do is they put a masculine ending on a feminine noun. So it's Petra, but it has a masculine ending to it. He's given him the name Rock, but with a masculine ending. But Jesus didn't speak in Greek. That's just the way Matthew interpreted it. Jesus spoke Aramaic.

And in Aramaic, there is no feminine and masculine. Jesus said, you are Kepha. And on this Kepha, I will build my church. The wordplay there is absolutely. And isn't this what Paul refers to Peter as? He does, which is why I said, when you come to that verse where Peter says, I'm a fellow worker in the book of 1 Peter, he names himself Peter. What he's really doing is saying, hey, guys, I'm the rock, and I'm writing this letter to you as the rock. Because rock is the title, the name Jesus gave him, but it's more than a name. It's also a title. It's a title, the rock.

I am the rock writing to you. And so when Jesus appointed him as the rock to build his church on, he's not just appointing Peter, but he's appointing a new office. And how do we know that? Because the next thing he says is, I will give you the keys of the kingdom and what you bind will be bound and what you lose will be lost. We don't even pay attention to those words at mass. They kind of go one ear and out the other. What does it mean? I'll give you the keys of the kingdom. This is a corresponding blessing. He's already given them, he's made them the rock and the gates of hell right there in front of you at that cave won't prevail against you. And I'm also giving you the keys. He's compounding what he's just done.

The keys, I said when I was a Baptist, oh, I know what those are, that's the gospel. If I could come to Matt, and I can preach the gospel to him and get him to leave the Catholic church, then I have just opened the gates of heaven because Jesus gave me the keys. All of us have the keys. All of us have because all of us have the gospel. It's not Peter, but in that passage, the verbs are plural and singular. He says, I give you singular the keys. It's like in the south.

You're way south. I do live in Georgia. I have a southern wife. All right. So does your wife say y'all? Yes. And if there's a whole bunch of people, it's all y'all. All y'all.

That's right. Right. Now Jesus, when he said to Peter, I'm giving you the keys, he didn't say, I'm giving all y'all the keys. He said, I'm giving you, singular, the keys. Well, then you've got to say Baptist, Catholic, Jew, or whatever. You've got to say, well, what does that mean? Another thing we've got to realize. It doesn't matter, Matt, what I think the Bible means. What matters is what did it mean in its own historical context.

When the Jewish disciples heard Jesus say keys of the kingdom, what was in their mind? In their mind, the keys of the kingdom were what the king owned. They came from a country of kingdoms. There was a king. We got rid of those guys. You did too in Australia. We got rid of those guys, the monarchy. We even gave away the words and the terminology that goes along with it. We Americans are so full of democracy, we don't even think of terms of kingdoms and empires anymore. The keys of the kingdom were the keys that were owned by the king they opened the front gate they opened the treasury he that was his sign of authority that

he was the king every single king had a number two guy named over the house royal steward major domo vizier whatever you want in the scripture and where i'm referring to it's called the man who is over the steward over the house isaiah 22 i told you when we started we're going to go to the old testament because all that and isaiah 22 the king has a steward named shebna he had a special robe he had a special authority he carried the keys of the kingdom and what he opened no man would shut and what he shut no man would open he had the keys and you couldn't go to kmart or echo and have duplicates made this was not this was one set of these keys when he walked through the streets of jerusalem everyone bowed to him and he was called the father of jerusalem he was the royal steward the king delegated the

their big wooden keys back then like two by four keys they didn't have cool keys like we have big two by four keys and he carried him over his shoulder and when he walked they go clunk clunk bang bang everybody hear this guy coming because the keys would be banging and clanging over his shoulder and they represented his authority under the king his delegated authority jesus is the king of israel and the. Mary, when she heard the words of the 15th rose, the angel said, he is going to sit on the throne of his father, David. Nobody king had sat on the throne of David for 600 years. And now this new king comes, he's going to sit on the throne. And what does he own? The keys. And what is he doing here? He's delegating those keys to rock. The guy, he just made the rock. He's now given him the keys to be his number two.

He's going to be in charge of the kingdom. Why? Because the king is going to leave. Where's he going? John chapter 14, 1 through 3. I go to prepare a place for you. He's going to heaven. So when my absence, here you are, Peter, here are the keys of the kingdom. They are mine. I own them, but I'm going to delegate them to you. You are going to become my steward over the house. That's the papacy all the way back to the Old Testament. It's fascinating. I'm looking at it right now. I have it up on the screen, starting in verse 22. The key of the house of David I will lay on his shoulders, so he shall open, and no one shall shut, and he shall shut, and no one shall open. I will fasten him as a peg in

a secure place, and he will become a glorious throne to his father. It sounds very much like Matthew 16, right? Giving him the keys. Yeah, I wonder, when's the first time you came to realize that? Man, I'm so embarrassed to say. It took me, as a Catholic, to have wonderful Protestant converts like you to teach me about this. But when did you figure out this stuff? I have a confession to make. This is very embarrassing. Okay. There were many verses

in the Bible that didn't exist until I became a Catholic. I just didn't know. We call them now, and I'm not the only one, Marcus Grodi and others, we'll call them blip verses. You blip over them because they just don't fit my Protestant tradition. My mother said to me, Steve, there are some verses I have set them on the shelf because they don't fit with what I believe the Bible says. So in other words, here's a round peg and I have a square hole. How am I going to get that round peg into that square hole? It doesn't fit.

Now, this is my Baptist tradition. I used to say, Matt, that we read the Bible alone. We don't have tradition. It doesn't fit. Now, this is my Baptist tradition. I used to say, Matt, that we read the Bible alone. We don't have tradition. You Catholics have tradition. We don't. We have the Bible alone. But nobody is objective. Nobody comes to the Bible without a preconceived worldview or theological emphasis. No one. I was born and raised and spoon-fed Baptist tradition before I could ever read the bible by myself and when i started to read the bible it had to fit primarily with the tradition i already believed the bible did not inform my tradition my tradition informed what the bible said

so these verses another one is matt uh first p 3.21, baptism now saves you. What do I do with that verse? We're saved by faith alone, not baptism, but the Bible says baptism now saves you. This passage about Peter, the only way you can do it is to learn gymnastics. You have to learn every different kind of gyration and gymnastics to try and get around what that verse clearly says. Hmm. What about, I'm thinking, is it the Council of Jerusalem where Peter, you know, speaks and they remain silent? Acts 15. Acts 15. Sometimes when that's brought up, our Protestant friends will say that, no, if anyone's the head of the church, it's James because it was he that they listened to.

How do you respond to that? What's going on there? That is one of the classic arguments. And I used to use it myself, that James is the one that stood up and gave the definitive word. It's James that says we're going to write a document and a decree, actually. By the way, that word decree in Greek is dogma. We're going to present a dogma to the churches, and it's going to be by – it's James. Peter was silent sitting over there.

But let's look at it the way it was. The great dispute arose over whether Gentiles had to be circumcised before they could become Christians. The word Christian means Christ is the word Messiah. Hebrew is Messiah. Greek is Christ. Same word, anointed one. If you and I are Christians, it means we're followers of the Jewish Messiah. The Jews said you had to be circumcised, you and me Gentiles, before we could follow their Jewish Messiah. Peter said no. He said, I went to Cornelius. I was just at Caesarea Maritime just about a month ago, two months ago. And that's where

Peter brought the first Gentile convert into the faith. He was a Gentile convert. Peter was there. Peter couldn't believe it. In fact, it was so unbelievable that the Holy Spirit fell on them before they were baptized. That's the only time that happened. Usually you get baptized, but it was such an unusual thing. A Gentile, the Holy Spirit says, okay, I'm going to show you guys something. You can't turn away from this. I'm going to baptize them in the Holy Spirit, and now you can baptize them in water. So Peter had this experience. He stood up in the book of Acts, and it said, Peter said, it is by my mouth that God did this, and this is what I declare to you. And then it says, he sat and all the people fell silent. The authoritative word has been spoken. Peter spoke the authoritative word, based it on

Old Testament, New Testament, his own experience. And he sat down and said, there, that's the doctrine. James stood up and he said, what our beloved Peter just said. In other words, he quotes two authorities. James is the bishop of Jerusalem at this point. I forgot to mention that. Peter was at first, but he had gone on to become the bishop of Antioch and then on to Rome. And even St. John Chrysostom says that Peter was too big to stay the bishop of Jerusalem. He had to leave to become the teacher of the world. This is the early church fathers. When he left, James became not James the apostle. His head had already been cut off. This was James, the brother of our Lord, the cousin of Jesus. And he became called James the righteous. And he became the bishop of Jerusalem. So as the pastor of Jerusalem, as the one who is the bishop of that sea, of that diocese,

he stands up and says, there are two authorities I'm going to quote, and then I will summarize. I'm going to quote the rock. Peter just said this, and the prophet Joel says that the spirit would come upon all of us. So having quoted Peter, the authority as pope, and the prophet James, now as the pastor of this diocese, I am going to say we should write a document and do this. He's the administrator here, and send it out to all the people. Peter, far from being non-important here or marginalized, he is the source of infallible determination and theology, which James is depending upon just as the administrator. And he's equating the words of Peter with the Old Testament Scripture side by side as two authorities. Yeah. Now, I find it hard to understand how someone can look at the Scripture and not see Peter as the leader.

He's almost always, if not always, put up first when the apostles are sort of listed, Judas usually being the last or always being the last. But he's given the keys to the kingdom. It was after the resurrection that Christ had that encounter with Peter, asked him if he loved him, told him specifically to feed the sheep. He said it would be his faith that strengthened the brethren. So, okay, let's say I buy that. Let's say I buy that Peter was the leader of the apostles.

Is there any good evidence from the church fathers, that is to say the earliest Christians, that both Peter was the head, but they were also successors to Peter? Because I think some Protestants might say, okay, fine, I can agree that Peter was the head, but this idea that this headship somehow transferred down, there's no evidence for that. 250 pages, this is a 350-page book, but at least 250 pages, 300 pages are devoted just to the words of the early church, the first eight centuries. And what I can conclude is I have one whole chapter dealing with was Peter in Rome? And I know that was one of the questions you wanted me to address. Sure, some people dispute that, yep.

And I won't even waste time to deal with that. It's really a ridiculous claim because they say, well, the Bible doesn't say Peter went to Rome. Well, it doesn't say a lot of things. It doesn't tell you where Thomas went or where James and Bartholomew went. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. The Bible does not tell us everything that happened. But when you go to early church history, it is unquestionable that Peter went to Rome. In fact, there were those who said, his tomb is right among

us. I can take you out the Via Appia and show you where his tomb is. We can go to his bones if you want to. The whole question of Peter being in Rome was never, ever even questioned. The whole early church in unison affirms that he was in Rome. Peter and Paul were both in Rome was never, ever even questioned. The whole early church in unison affirms that he was in Rome. Peter and Paul were both in Rome, and they both died there. They shed their blood to build the church of Rome, to found the church of Rome. But in my book, I put that to sleep once and for all. I've got every documentation and arguments against it and for it in there. But the early church, my goodness, that's another whole thing. From the very beginning, recognized Peter as the Pope, not only two things. First, that there

would be a Pope and that Peter filled that position. And the word Pope simply means Papa. It means father. That's a word that came also later. He was the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome was recognized as the head of the church. That's where Peter went. That's where he established his chair. That's where the chair has always been. The chair is in Rome. And that's where the church always looked at. I'll give you one example. Please. That's from the first century. What I did in the book is I took two. See, for me, an evangelical, if you showed me that a fifth century father of the church said Peter was the pope, it didn't matter to me.

I had to go right back to the beginning because I was convinced, as are the Mormons and the Seventh-day Adventists and the Muslims and a whole bunch of others, that maybe Christianity was good for the first couple of years. But it rolled off the train track. It started out of the station, okay, but at certain points, picked by different groups, the train went off the track and got corrupted. The Mormons think that it was Joseph Smith who got things back on track again. The Muslims think it's, you know, Muhammad. Seventh-day Adventists have their own with Ellen Smith. And even as Protestants, we believe the same thing.

It's called the great apostasy. Christianity started out good, but at a certain point, whoop, the train went off the track and rolled down the hill. Martin Luther got the train back on the track again. So the question is, for me, it's a chain that goes all the way back. If I start with a link of a chain here and it goes out my front door, that chain has to go all the way to the apostles without any missing links. If I can find a missing link in that chain, I don't have to become Catholic. I only become Catholic because I was forced to become Catholic. I am a skeptic at heart. People said, if you're a skeptic, that means you're not a Catholic. Oh, no. Skeptic means I'm not going to trust anybody or anything until I prove it.

I am a skeptic, and that's why I'm a Catholic. I had to prove to myself that every one of those links in that chain all the way back to the apostles. If I could show that from the apostles to the second century there was no continuity, I don't have to be Catholic. I can stay where I am. Continuity in what sense? Like doctrinally? Doctrinally, organizationally. There's more than just doctrinal, because as a Baptist, I could claim to have doctrinal continuity, because I can say, well, you know, they didn't use the word Trinity, but they always did, you know, and I could go from the Bible. We

really skipped 1900 years for us as Protestants. We went to the Bible and what I think today, we really didn't care about church history that much. But there's an organizational, which I didn't realize that the church was an organizational entity as well as a spiritual entity. For me, it was an invisible unity. You love Jesus. I love Jesus. Hey, how about we get together on Sunday and sing some hymns and pray? Maybe you could share a few things, and I'll share a few things. That's the church. It's an invisible unity of all those who love Jesus. But there's no political or organizational, and I'll give you a quick example. How many people are in the upper room? We're coming up on Pentecost pretty soon. How many are in the upper room? 120. I'll make it

easy. I asked myself, why 120? And I'm getting back to the papacy by doing this. Don't worry, I'm not on a rabbit trail. Why 120? And when you look at it in the Greek, it doesn't say there were 120 people in the upper room. It says there were about 120 names. What a weird thing. I take pilgrimages. What if I said there were 50 names on my bus? Yeah. So my curiosity is immediately stoked. So I go on my computer. I have all the Jewish tradition, Targums and Talmud and Mishnah.

I go back and I put the time range. First century is the number 120 significant. And guess what I found? What? If you were in a big city like Jerusalem and you want to leave and start your own new community, you want to leave and start the new Jerusalem over here at 50 miles, and you want to set up your own city, your own civic government with courts and judges and rules and laws, you need to have a minimum of 120 people to do that. Wow. So what Luke is telling you is there's 120 names. It's almost like I have a ledger here.

And there's about 120 of us in the upper room. And we have just been appointed and commissioned to go out and start a new community. Guess what that is? It's called the church. And in the Knesset today, if you think I'm off base on this, how many members are in the Knesset today? 120 members. It still is based on that first century tradition. You need 120 to have a society, and they have 120 in their Knesset today in Jerusalem.

The church started with 120. The church is not just a group of people in the upper room who, hey, we love Jesus, buddy. Let's get together on Sundays, and maybe we'll break bread, and we'll pray together. This is all good, but the church get together on Sundays and maybe we'll break bread and we'll pray together. This is all good. But the church was intended right from the beginning. It was a civil institution. It was a government. They were leaving.

They're going to have their own courts, their own Sanhedrin. They were going to have their own legislature, which is what it means to bind and loose. Bind and loose are legislative judicial terms. bind and loose. Bind and loose are legislative judicial terms. So this does away with the whole idea of the church just being an invisible fellowship of believers. It has to do with the church as an institution. Now, I have to be able, back to the papacy now, I have to be able to prove to myself that I can go all the way back with no links missing, because if I can get a couple links missing, either theologically or institutionally, I can avoid becoming Catholic. And that's exactly what I wanted to do at first.

The last thing I want to do is be Catholic. These fathers of the church dragged me into the Catholic Church with my arm behind my back, kicking and screaming. They forced me to become Catholic. Tell us what church fathers kind of give us proof that they believed that the papacy is something that succeeded Peter. Well, let's just go to Clement to begin with. Clement, I did a whole movie on these guys on location. Clement, if you do the popes that are listed, Peter, Linus, Cletus, Clement, okay, fourth. He's the third successor. Let's deal with succession first, because you did bring that up, and I didn't do it. Succession.

Did they believe in succession? Yes, because when you had a royal steward with the keys back in Israel, when the royal steward died, you didn't throw the keys away. They belonged to the king. You gave them back to the king, and the king says, okay, now I'm going to appoint this guy, and he gives him the—there's a succession of royal stewards with the king. And the king says, okay, now I'm going to appoint this guy. And he gives him, there's a succession of royal stewards with the keys. There was never a time there wasn't a royal steward with the keys of the kingdom until there was no king anymore. So that is a succession. We in the United States have presidents. When one president dies, we had Lincoln and Kennedy got shot. The first

thing we were concerned about, who's going to succeed them? Oh, good. We didn't take the seal of the presidency down off the wall and throw it away. No, someone is going to succeed them. Oh, good. We didn't take the seal of the presidency down off the wall and throw it away. No, someone is going to succeed them. There's always going to be a succession until the end of time or until the institution doesn't exist. So in the whole idea of the royal steward, of course, there's going to be a succession. Peter doesn't say, okay, I've got the church started. I'm going to die now. Okay, everybody, you're all your own Lone Ranger apostles. Go out and start your own churches everywhere no there was a continuity it says peter was it then came linus he picked up the keys and sat in the chair and then cletus and then clement so let's

go to clement to tie back to the early church fathers clement wrote a letter to the corinthians wrote a letter to the Corinthians in, say, 96 AD. Jimmy Akin says as early as 60 AD. This letter to the Corinthians, written from Clement in Rome, was written in the second half of the first century. What does Clement say? He says, I am writing to you to correct a problem. First of all, who's he to get his nose into Corinth's problem? That's a thousand miles away. Isn't Corinth an independent Baptist church? Who's to tell Corinth what to do? Oh, we find out that Corinth had actually written to Rome to ask what to do in a problem. There was a problem in the church in Corinth. Can't their pastor and board of elders decide what to do? They write to Rome. Why? Because they recognize the Petrine office.

And Clement says, I'm so sorry that we did not get a chance to write to you yet to straighten out and answer your question. But we've had our own problems, meaning persecution. And we've only now have I had the chance to write to you, to tell you. And we speak, he's saying we, as in the royal plural, or as he had also, like we do today, a bishop, and he has those auxiliary bishops, their council. He says, I'm writing to you from Rome,

and it is the Holy Spirit and I that write to you. And if you don't obey us here in Rome, you are in no small sin. Who is he from Rome to write to them and say that? Now, interesting even more, John the apostle was still alive. John the apostle at that point is still alive in Ephesus, only 600 miles away. They're writing to Rome over a thousand miles away. Why not write to the last living apostle why not write to John say John you had your head on his breast at the last upper meal you were there at the foot of the cross we have a problem can you as a disciple of Jesus advise us what to do

here in Corinth with them they could have written to John but they didn't they wrote to Rome why because they understood that that was the seat of authority now of the universal church. And there's other things. He says, I will send my legates. That's a legal term. Those are representatives of the court. The whole book of Corinth written by Clement is full of authority of the Pope. Another letter that was written to Rome from Ignatius of Antioch, he died in 107, From Ignatius of Antioch, he died in 107. He wrote and he says, I am not writing to you as to one I need to teach, but I am writing to you, the teacher. You are the one who's been given the authority to preside over the world in love. And who was the pope at that point?

The pope at that point was 106 Peter Linus Cletus Clement. It was beyond Clement, and I don't remember the name. The only reason I ask that is I've heard some people say that. I have all the stories, I can tell you. Okay. The only reason I bring that up is sometimes I've heard people respond that, well, Clement was just an arrogant man. And so you've got an arrogant man presuming to have authority that he didn't have. If you take that claim, let me tell you who he was right here. It was Pope Alexander I,

who was Pope from 105 to 115. Clement died earlier than that. Ignatius of Antioch died in 106, and he's the one that wrote to Rome. Now, if you want to take the point that Clement was just an arrogant man, and that everyone just rejected his pompous authoritarian tome that he wrote or book, the church in Corinth read his letter out loud for centuries. It was read as an authoritative document from Rome by the successor of Peter. They read that. It was read in the mass in Corinth for many, many years. And as many of the early collections of the New Testament, that book was included in the canon of Scripture. Wow. And here we have an early document.

And you can even say, well, look it, there were some who Irenaeus. Okay, let's get who's Irenaeus. Well, Jesus taught John. John taught Polycarp. Polycarp taught Irenaeus. Well, Jesus taught John. John taught Polycarp. Polycarp taught Irenaeus. Okay, that's pretty darn close. Polycarp, Irenaeus said, I sat and listened to Polycarp tell me all the things that the apostle John did and the things that Jesus had told him.

Irenaeus had a disagreement with the pope at the time. I think it was Pope Stephen. And he had a disagreement with the pope about the date of Easter. And the pope was going to excommunicate a whole bunch of the churches in the East because they didn't accept his date for Easter. And he said, I have the authority. I'm going to excommunicate them all. Irenaeus, even before 200 A.D., writes and he says, dear father, I warn you that this is not prudent to do. He never challenged his authority to do it, only the prudence of doing it.

And there were many times in the early church where a bishop in another area would disagree on a dogma or not a dogma, but on a teaching or a practice or a discipline. But they may argue with the Pope in Rome at the time, but they never argued that he didn't have the authority to do it. Even the fact that they were trying to argue with him to see their point of view demonstrated their acceptance of his authority, and they never denied he had the authority. But seriously, through the whole of the early church from the beginning to the end. I'm going to read another one real quick here if I can find it quick. It's by Cyprian.

I wish I could just read this whole book to you here. I actually have that book on my bookshelf somewhere. It's definitely worth getting, I'd say. Okay. St. Clement, he talks about all of the things about the rock and the keys and so on. I'm not finding it right off. But he says that didn't Jesus choose Peter and make him the rock? He didn't make everybody the rock.

He made one chair, and that chair is the source of unity in the church. This is the one chair. He did not make many chairs, says Cyprian. He's in North Africa. He got his head cut off in 256 as a bishop of Cyprian of Carthage. And he had his head cut off in 256 AD. And he's a saint in the Catholic Church today in the Orthodox Church. And he said there was only one chair established, not many chairs. And Peter was given the, made the rock, and he was given the keys. And then he concludes with, if you are not in union with the chair of Peter, can you even consider yourself a believer? If you're not in harmony and obedience to the chair of Peter, can you even call yourself a Christian? This was how much it was believed back then. Interesting. Now, we're kind of touching upon infallibility here because we're talking about the weight

that the Pope has when he teaches in a specific way. And I think this probably is what trips up a lot of evangelical Protestants and our Orthodox brothers and sisters, the idea that they might say, okay, there was a leader of the early church, and okay, maybe the early church even saw that Peter was the leader and that there were successors. church and okay maybe the early church even saw that Peter was the leader and that there were successes what is infallibility and how do you how do you justify that from the pages of Scripture in history well it's very simple the Pope when he's been made the Pope everything he says is correct he can predict the baseball scores tomorrow and he certainly knows the weather and don't

anybody ever challenge him or think he doesn't and you have to obey him obsequiously because he's infallible and everything he says doesn't is it's very simple okay there you go next question a little tongue-in-cheek here now let me push my tongue back out of my cheek this is what I would have thought the Catholic Church taught when I was an evangelical and I know there's a lot of evangelicals smart enough to know that's not the case, but as a young guy growing up with that tradition, that's what I thought. But infallibility does not mean that. The Pope cannot predict the baseball scores, nor does everything the Pope says in private or public correct, nor does he claim it is.

Infallibility is when the Pope, acting as the pastor of the universal church from the chair of St. Peter, intends to define a doctrine or a dogma that is incumbent and obligatory on all people to believe, and he's making this definition without a gun to his head, what he declares from that position and under those conditions is an infallible teaching of the church, position and under those conditions is an infallible teaching of the church, and it cannot contradict any doctrine or infallible teaching that's preceded. In other words, any pope, any given pope is more limited than the pope before him, because the pope today is bound by the teaching, at least the authoritative and any infallible teaching of Pope Benedict or Pope John Paul II, who I had the blessing to meet twice and talk to twice. So every subsequent pope, his authority in a sense

is more limited or more bound than the one before him because he cannot define or teach doctrine contrary to what's been taught authoritatively before him. So infallibility is when all of those conditions are met, and he defines a doctrine like the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary to Heaven, the last times that an infallible teaching was made. Pope Francis to this date has not made any infallible definitions. That's what infallibility is. And the church, through her councils and her census fidelium, is infallible in the sense that the church as a whole cannot be led into error. So Pope Francis could, like, for example, his change in the catechism regarding the death

penalty. I'm not asking you for your specific opinion on this, unless you want to give it. But basically, you're saying it's possible that Pope Francis could have made a change to the catechism. That was incorrect. And I'm not saying that it is, but that is incorrect. But it wasn't an infallible statement. So that doesn't go to that issue. I would say that's the case. and I do disagree with what he said. You gave me permission to say that, because I think... Please, yeah, say what you want. Between Scripture and the whole tradition of the Church, and there's an excellent book published by Ignatius Press,

By Their Blood Their Blood Be Shed, something, I don't know the exact title, but it's an excellent book of Scripture and the whole tradition and teaching of the church so this is this is important because it gets us to paul confronting peter when partisans and say we shouldn't be disagreeing with the pope on anything so let's ask the question then i'll ask you or you can ask me is any pope beyond criticism no i have been accused when i have questioned i'm gonna be very careful in my terminology here. I gave a talk. It's all right if I mention the talk. Please.

Oh, I don't mind. This isn't Catholic Answers. I've got nothing to lose. You go for it. Okay. I gave a talk last September entitled, How Does a John Paul II Catholic Survive in a Pope Francis World? And if anybody wants to think, oh no, I'm some kind of nutter out there, I was given with five bishops in the room to the equestrian order of the Holy

Sepulchre for six states, and a major theologian or two who I won't mention here because they're both came up to me afterwards and said, and they're EWTN people, came up afterwards and said it was a great talk. So I'm not here some kind of a nutcase. An outlier, yeah. Yeah, an outlier, right. I totally accept and believe and have great respect for the papacy, and I may or may not agree with everything a current pope says or does. Let's put it that way. Right. That's a simple way to put it. Now, I have been accused by asking questions about,

Now, I have been accused by asking questions about, are certain things being said and done correct in the Vatican or with the current pope, that I've been accused of being a schismatic or a heretic because I would question or challenge something that's been said or done. And that is totally contrary to the whole understanding of infallibility. First of all, let's just deal with the question, is it okay? Is any pope beyond criticism? And I would start with Galatians chapter 2, verse 11, where Paul, who is not the pope, confronts Peter, who is the pope, and says, I confronted Peter to his face because he stood condemned. That's a very strong, powerful statement. And he did not feel that he couldn't confront the Pope of the time, and not only that, but in very strong terms and in public. And Peter did not say, you can't talk to me like that. Peter, in a sense, backed off of his position that he had. Now, first of all, let's get this straight.

Some people like to use this as an example that there is no such thing as papal infallibility because Peter made a mistake and Paul confronted him to his face, and that means there's no infallible pope. No, Peter, what he was doing in just two sentences, he had taught that a Gentile could become a Christian without being circumcised as a Jew first. But when the Jews and the Gentiles were together in Antioch, he was giving deference to the Jews and kind of pushing the Gentiles over there. Paul then confronts him and says, Peter, you taught the infallible truth, but you're not following up on your own teaching. You're being a hypocrite based on what you yourself infallibly taught. So like Tertullian said, it was not a matter of doctrine that Peter was chastised. It was a matter of practice. He was not living consistently with what he had himself taught. So Peter, when he hears Paul's criticism, he accepts that criticism, as any good pope or

bishop should do if a fellow prelate brings to him a reason why he is practicing or doing something wrong. He should not have the arrogance, well, oh, I am the pope. He should say, thank you, brother, and consider what the priests and the bishops say to him with an open mind. And that's exactly what Peter did when Paul confronted him. I want to point out, too, just for our listeners, that I've done a whole episode on this where we look at the pages of the second part of the Summa Theologiae, question 33, in which Aquinas is talking about fraternal correction. And in that, he talks about the legitimacy of correcting bishops and priests and bishops. So this is not a forced retreat in light of Pope Francis. I think that's what's important. Because what was interesting is I used to work at Catholic Answers, and whenever we would talk about infallibility, we would always make the stipulation, we're not saying everything he says is right, that you can't criticize him. And what's been very interesting to see is as faithful Catholics have charitably, sometimes not so much, but many times charitably tried to correct what Pope Francis is saying, you're getting the same Catholics who are saying, how dare you do that?

You're like, well, we're creating so much confusion for our Protestant brothers and sisters. We just said it was okay to criticize him. And now that Catholics are lovingly criticizing him at times, they're sort of thrown under the bus a bit, at least at times. I think that's true. I agree with you. And I think as the catechism, I'm just, I wish I had written this down. Sorry. So much to say.

The paragraph in the catechism that actually says that we have, and I have it, it's in my papers right here if I can find it. But it says that we have the obligation, the right and even the obligation to confront our prelates and to have our voice heard. And Pope Francis himself said, I welcome criticism. I welcome people to criticize and to challenge me. Well, you know, we'll put it up later. But it's very clear, this catechism paragraph that says that we do not have to be bootlickers. We're not just subservient or Altamontanists, which is a word you mentioned to me earlier in the day. We are also prophet, priests, and kings in the kingdom of God and in the church by baptism. We also have the obligation to read scripture, study tradition, and apply these things to our life within the

bigger teaching authority of the church. And if we— Yeah, I'm sorry. You keep going. I didn't mean to cut you off. And if there is any, whether it's a priest, a bishop, or a pope who says things or practices things wrongly, I hope that I don't have to do it, because it's really not my place. A bishop, the council of bishops, those who are cardinals should take that job. And they're the ones that should. But the catechism says that we have not only the right, but the duty to confront them at times with fraternal love over things like this.

That sounds very much what Aquinas said as well. Exactly. And also Augustine. Augustine says it too. He quotes Galatians 2.12. And he says these things and then august augustine picks up on his saint catherine of siena who was in the middle ages when the pope was away in avignon and had left rome she said in no un very dictatorial terms a woman said you get back

to rome and she chastised him. And you'd think, oh, my goodness, a woman can't chastise the pope and said he did the wrong thing, and yet she was made a doctor of the church. And then you follow it all the way through that this has never been taught that we have to obsequiously, with total obedience and total mindlessness, follow any leader, whether it's a political or a church leader. We do show them a great deference and submission of heart and mind to the authorities that Jesus has put over us. We even, any pope, no matter what he speaks, we respect him with the dignity that his office deserves and with the respect and the deference to him as a shepherd of the flock, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept or do or believe everything that's said. Sometimes I could see some Protestants saying, you Catholics will just kind of get out of anything.

You say that a pope can't infallibly define something that contradicts a previous pope, but when you look through the history of the Church, it would seem to be that way. But when you look through the history of the church, it would seem to be that way. For example, Pope Paul VI and Vatican II seem to contradict the church's teaching on no salvation outside the church. That's just one example. We could maybe give more. And it sounds like a Catholic will just talk himself out of it. He'll say, well, you know, it's difficult to define what is infallible, what's not infallible.

Do you not see that argument? Sure, of course. And I would have used that myself, too. And I think any argument like that is legitimate, and we Catholics have to think about it ourselves. I'm not a Catholic now defending everything, no matter what. I'm one that still is a skeptic. I still like to hear arguments and see, well, how would we as Catholics honestly answer that? Now, there's a lot of dishonest people throwing charges at us, and I get tired of those after a while, and I just blow them off. But once in a while, I get a very,

like today, I got a very concerned email with a very honest question with what you just said about salvation outside the church. And I gave him a long, just written, and it's on my blog. I put it up today on my blog at catholicconvert.com. But we, like I talked earlier about the development of doctrine, we also have a thing called discipline. Discipline and dogma are two different things. For example, that we were to fast and not eat meat on Friday. That was a discipline, not a dogma. It's not infallibly taught that a Catholic cannot eat meat on Friday. It was a discipline that the church imposed upon us for our own good for a certain period of time. Then it says, oh, you can't eat meat on Friday now. Oh, the Catholic Church, see what is infallible? It changes its mind all the time. No, we have to first understand the difference between a dogma, which is a teaching like the Trinity or the dual nature of Christ or the atoning death of Christ, and a discipline. I'll give you an example of my own family. I have four kids. When they were growing up, you could not lie. This was true.

This was true. And you are not allowed to do these things because those are dogma. In our family, these things are certain things are true. And I'm not going to let you drive the car until you're 16. So my kids, up until 16, the rule of this home is you cannot drive the car. But when he turned 16, guess what? I changed my mind. I said, okay, now you can drive the car. Now the kids, so what's wrong with you, Dad? Can't you make up your mind?

First you say, I can't drive the car. Now you say, I can drive the car. And guess what? When my kids turn 80, I'm going to take their keys away from them and say they can't drive the car anymore. How old are you at this point? I'll be about 120. But my point is, is that as a father, I could then again at a certain point, and I had to do that with my mother not too long ago, I had to do that. So is this a mean that we are waffling, that we don't know what we're teaching? We keep changing our mind that we're not infallible? No. Doctrine is something that's set in stone. Nobody can change the fact that

Jesus is both human and divine, that the Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those are certain things that are dogma teachings of the Church that never change. Disciplines do change and are supposed to change. But the example I gave wasn't disciplinary. I mean, it's no salvation outside the church. Good point. Point taken. Come back at me with this one, too, because I know you understand this and have a good way of thinking of this, too. Sure.

When you have a schism in the church in the 1500s with Martin Luther, and the whole section of the church breaks away. It had been taught before by many that there's no salvation outside the church. In other words, the church is the mother. And as the fathers of the church said, you can't call God your father if you don't have the church as your mother. These are not inseparable. The church is the mother. This is where you get baptized. The mother baptized. I don't baptize myself. The church baptizes me. The church confirms me. All these things, I'm in the church. These are the things confirms me all these things i'm in the church these are the things necessary jesus instituted his church as the means of salvation as the means of teaching passing the faith on all of these things it's in the church she's our mother we must be a member

of the church jesus said i will build my church and we're supposed to be under the authority of the church because he said if your brother sins against you take it to the church. And we're supposed to be under the authority of the church because he said, if your brother sins against you, take it to the church. Well, if you're it's there, you have to be part of this big thing. The city, the family, the mother, all of these images. Now you have all of a sudden a bunch of people break away. And you could say during Martin Luther's time, you broke away from the church. You are jeopardizing your salvation because the church is necessary. But now you come to our day, and you said that there are evangelicals out there who are very understanding of what we do.

And they recite the creed. And they get baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And they're willing to shed their blood as martyrs for Jesus. Now, can I look at them and say they're not saved? I have to be very careful because Peter said when he first went to Cornelius, he said, Now, I know that God is no respecter of persons, that whoever is willing to pray and seek after God, he will accept them. And what happens about the boy in Africa?

And I like to use this example. Here I am raised in Michigan in a Christian family, and I've been taught the Bible and I've been taught about Jesus. And my mom knelt with me in front of the green vinyl couch when I was four years old and led me in the sinner's prayer to have Jesus be my savior. Now in Africa or somewhere else, there's a little boy who's an animist and they worship the gods and the trees and then the clouds. And he and I both die at 13 years old and we're both standing before God. And God looks at me, says, Steve Ray, you knew Jesus, you proclaim Jesus, so you come into heaven.

And you, little native boy, you didn't ever use the word Jesus. You never prayed to me, so you go straight to hell. And the Catholic Church says, wait a minute. What kind of God would do that based on ignorance maybe that this boy had that's not his own fault? So we have to then say there are these people who love Jesus. And let's face it, some evangelicals know the Bible better than we do, some of them can sing better than we can, and are we going to say they're going to hell because they're not members of the card-carrying Roman Catholic Church? And so the Vatican II said, let's redefine this in a

different way. There is no salvation outside the church. That is still true, it is true. It is the work of Jesus Christ and the work of the church that brings salvation. And maybe somebody gets the benefit of that over there, but it's still the work of Christ that provides that salvation for him. Now, we want, and I use the example of a ship. We're all on the ship. Jesus sent out one ship. We're all on it. It has a pope, and it has a crew, and it has water, baptism. It has the food, the blessed, the ship is going across the ocean of time to the celestial city, but halfway across. And the 1500s, a bunch of guys say, we're sick and tired of the pope telling

us what to do, and we're tired of the same old food. And some of these people are beginning to stink, and I'm tired of this. I'm getting off. And they go down below the ship, and they find wood, and they find ropes, and they lash them together, and they make rafts. They throw their rafts over the side of the ship, and now they're on their own. Well, the early church said, well, if you're going to leave the church, you're on your own. There's no salvation. But then Vatican II said, but listen to them. They're singing over there. They're quoting scripture. They're claiming Jesus as their as it's both God and man and the Trinity. And they're reciting the creed. Look at some are even dying for their faith. You know, these also are our brothers and sisters in the faith, and they're saved through the same Savior

that started the ship across. No, those are our brothers and sisters, although they're separated from the ship. And our work of ecumenism is not to say, can't we just all get along? Our group, our work of ecumenism is to get everybody back on the bloody boat. Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying then is there isn't actually a contradiction. It's still true that you're not saved except through the church, but we have to understand what that means. We have to unpack it. And I suppose that this is partly to the point that we don't call our Protestant friends heretics anymore.

We call Martin Luther a heretic, Zwingli a heretic. Well, I call some of them that. Yeah. Or maybe we don't say it officially. I mean, if you've been raised in a Protestant family and nothing else, it's not like you made a conscious choice to break away from the church. Exactly. That's the distinction. And I think, say, for example, somebody who has been a Catholic all their life. And this is what I was answering this young man on my blog today. His parents were nominal Catholics and had him baptized.

But they left the church in the 60s, 70s, or 80s, whenever. And he became a theist. He believes God exists. And his mother's an atheist. Will they get to heaven? He says, my priest said they're okay as long as they're good people. Well, I said, your priest is partly right and mostly wrong, because they knew the truth, and they walked away and denied it. But then I have to say, how well did they know the truth?

Were they really taught the Catholic faith, or were they taught a watered-down caricature of what it really was, and then later in time were honestly convinced it was wrong, and now they're trying to live a good life and be good to people and kind and practicing a lot of what they learned as Catholics, but they reject the Church because they were never taught what it really was, and they were then convinced intellectually or otherwise that it was not true, and they really, really believed that. I'm not the judge of their soul at that point. God is. If it's an invincible ignorance. I had this problem with my own parents, Matt, because when I became Catholic, they were Baptists. I went to mom and dad and said, mom and dad, it's good to be Baptist, but it's only part of the truth. The whole fullness of the truth is in the Catholic Church. Who are you to tell us we changed your diapers, you little brat? Who are you to tell us we're wrong now? Well, I understand that. And they had been so taught as

early Christians against the Catholic Church. There was no way that I could say anything as their little baby in diapers. That's how they still saw me. That could change their mind. It's so ingrained in them. So will my mom and dad go to heaven or will they be damned to hell because they never became card-carrying Catholics? Well, I'll tell you where my dad is. My dad's in heaven. I told him, Dad, you're going to be surprised when you have to take a little stint through purgatory. But just remember, I told you, you know, you'll get out of there. But I have to, my dad, he loved Jesus more than anything in his life. There wasn't a day he went by he didn't tell people about Jesus and dying on the cross.

Yeah. And if your dad knew that the Catholic Church was the one true church, which he had to join, he would have. He would have. My dad was an honest man who taught me as a boy, follow the truth no matter even if it's false. Why didn't you become Orthodox, Steve? Because obviously we and the orthodox share many views uh the papacy is uh is a bit different of course but i can see today you know what's funny is we forget that there's mess wherever there's humans i think we in the

catholic church today we look at our church we see the divisions in our church that maybe we weren't aware of 10 20 years ago ago. It's scandalizing to us. And we look around for some other escape hatch. So some people are looking at orthodoxy. Of course, if it doesn't take you too long, go to a few orthodox Facebook forums and you'll see that there's so much division and backbiting, infighting there, just like there is everywhere else. But no doubt people are looking at orthodoxy because they want the tradition without the baggage of Catholicism, or at least that's how they see it. Oh, okay. I'm going to pull out another book here. I have a whole chapter in here, Crossing the Tiber, which means coming across the Tiber River to the Vatican. And it's my way of

saying it's my conversion story. I have a whole chapter in there why i became catholic and not orthodox because in my journey my wife and i went to orthodox classes for joining we went to their series of classes and started going to their liturgy they don't call it a mass it's a divine liturgy mainly because for me my mom and dad didn't know what orthodoxy was they thought they knew what catholicism was if i came home and said mom and dad janet know what orthodoxy was. They thought they knew what Catholicism was. If I came home and said, Mom and Dad, Janet and I are joining, I would have even put in an evangelical orthodox church just to help them over the hurdle. We're going to join an orthodox church. My mom and dad says, Oh, good.

Where do they meet? If I say I'm going to become a Catholic, they're going to say, You heretic! You! So it was easier for us to think going Orthodox. Plus, they don't have the whole idea of the Pope. And I was raised to hate the idea of the Pope. Then I could become an Orthodox Christian, have the seven sacraments. My mom and dad didn't know what it was, so they would have accepted it easier. They didn't have a Pope. And but then I started to think, wait a minute, it is very parochial.

In other words, there is no such thing as the Orthodox Church. It's often said that that is a misnomer. There are Orthodox churches. There is no Orthodox Church. You have the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Romanian, the Greek, the Russian Orthodox Church. And they are all separate churches based on ethnic origins. Cesaropapism, since we're talking about the Pope, these have their governments are the head of their church. This is what happened is that it became

where the Orthodox, it was the Caesar, the Roman Emperor was the head of the church. Orthodox, it was the Caesar, the Roman emperor was the head of the church. It was Cicero papism, the Caesar was the pope in a sense. And so you had all of these different geographical areas, ethnical areas have their own Orthodox churches, but they're not an Orthodox church. They have no central pope. They have in Constantinople what they call the ecumenical bishop, but he has no authority. He cannot say, okay, all the other patriarchs, we're going to get together and have a council. And in my book, Upon This Rock, I deal with all of the Orthodox main arguments against the Catholic Church. And I say that even the Orthodox themselves admit there's no authority within our tradition that has the authority to call another ecumenical council. And there could never be one, at least for another hundred years.

And they excommunicate each other. They disagree with each other. They can't even get together for a council. And they're ethnical. And they have not taken a strong stand on issues like divorce and remarriage. In an Orthodox, you can divorce three times and still get remarried, but only three times. Well, why three? Why not four? Who says three? Abortion is not held to like we do as strongly as we do. I think most Orthodox would be against it, but they don't have the dogmatic teaching like we do about things.

They want to leave things in this. Contraception would be another idea. Exactly. Exactly. so i realized early on that the orthodox they may know how to dress better at church they know how to their churches are far more beautiful than our churches they still sing those beautiful chants i go to a i go to a byzantine catholic church we've been going there for the last five years so i'm with you exactly it's beautiful and they still have the reverence for the liturgy, and they don't have all this liberal nonsense. And we don't sing these entrance songs like, gather us in the lost and the light. Totally.

That's what's so difficult. Suppose you're like, okay, I'm open to Christianity, and you go to the Orthodox Church, and you see that beauty. Then you go and hear that song. You're like, there's no way I would join this. I know. I know. And so with people out there, evangelicals listening to us right now, we have had very good popes and we've had very bad popes. We've had very good people and we've had very bad people. We've done and said stupid, wrong,

evil things, because not only is this a divine institution, it's also a human institution. And I told my wife, Janet, even if the church was perfect today, as soon as I join it, it's not going to be perfect anymore because I know me. And I joined a church knowing it was a hospital for sinners. That's why I'm here. And we may have lost some of our beautiful tradition in the churches today, but it's still the church. It's still the sacraments. And whether it's the Byzantine rite, and people should know that these other rites, the Melkite rite and the Byzantine rite, they're all still under the authority and unity of the chair of Peter.

Even though we have different styles or let's say different rites of worship, we're all celebrating the same seven sacraments. We still all have scripture and tradition. We still have priests, deacon, and bishops. We still have a veneration for Mary, and she's assumed into heaven. All those things we share in common with the Orthodox. But the big difference was they refused to accept the authority of the Bishop of Rome and the filioque, which is another issue, which I don't really think was an issue. It was an excuse. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, as we wrap up, please tell us. I mean, we've

alluded to a couple of your books. Feel free to allude to them again, and if you think of it, send me a text of some of the links you want me to share on this video, because I know you've written a lot of great stuff. What would you have people check out? Well, first of all, my website, catholicconvert.com. Everything is on there.

That's like the hub of the wheel. I lead pilgrimages to the Holy Land, thousands and thousands of people. We're kind of on hold right now, but in July, October, November, December, we're back in Israel with buses full of people. So go there, you'll find out all about my pilgrimages to Rome and Poland and our Catholic sites. I have all my books. I have given over 40 or 50 talks on the Eucharist. I have a talk about what we've just done called Peter the Rock, the Keys and the Chair, my conversion story, all those talks. I've also done, you've given me a chance to say it, so I'm going to.

We've done a 10-part video series on the history of salvation from Abraham to Augustine, all filmed on location. It's been a 20-year project. Ignatius Press and I have invested over $2 million to date to make that series. It's very fun. It's great catechesis for kids, by the way. So that's pilgrimages, writings and talks. And then I've got books. I've already showed you Upon This Rock, My Book Crossing the Tiber. I've got another one called St. John's Gospel. It's a 450-page book, a commentary on John's Gospel and all the background of the

Jewish and cultural to help you understand the Gospel. And I just finished a 500-page book on Genesis, which is being published by Ignatius Press right now. It's editing. And that's going through the whole book of Genesis verse-by-verse, 500 pages.

Goodness gracious, that's fantastic. Well, hey, thanks, verse by verse, 500 pages. Goodness gracious. That's fantastic. Well, hey, thanks for being on the show. Let me just ask you one final question. And this question is going to go not public, but to our Patreon supporters. Okay. Thank you very much for being here and watching the show. As I say, we have a post-show wrap-up video with Steve.

I ask him his honest and unfiltered opinion about the state of the church today and how we can be faithful Catholics in a church that so often feels divided. If you want to get access to that post-show wrap-up video, there's also the post-show wrap-up videos I've done with Trent Horn and Peter Kreeft and Scott Hahn and a bunch else besides. Go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. That's what this page is. Patreon.com slash mattfradd. Let's just check out what happens if you give $10 a month. You get a signed copy of my book on marrying and consecration, which I'll send to you. You get a couple of Pines with Aquinas stickers, rather,

that I send to you. You get regular video reflections from me that's just for you. You get, as I say, these post-show wrap-up videos. You get access to an ever-growing library of audiobooks, like on papal encyclicals, works on St. Thomas Aquinas. You get access to our meditations byowing library of audiobooks, like on papal encyclicals, works on St. Thomas Aquinas. You get access to our meditations by Thomas Aquinas for Lent and Advent. We're also doing book studies, like on The Divine Comedy, Flannery O'Connor.

We're currently doing one on the great books of Western civilization. You get access to all of that and much else besides just by becoming a patron. And you also help this show to keep going. just by becoming a patron. And you also help this show to keep going. We're currently in the process of translating a bunch of our little videos into Spanish so that we can better minister to Spanish-speaking Catholics. And all of this stuff, of course, costs money.

So if you want to just give us a dollar a month or more, go to patreon.com slash mattfradd, patreon.com slash mattfradd. And yeah, if you want to do that now, you can go over and watch that post-show wrap-up video I did with Steve. And if you are a patron, thank you so much. Very kind of you. Hopefully you got one of these beautiful, beautiful bad boys. But yeah, be sure to go check out this post-show wrap-up video because it was really, really, what do you say? Just raw in the most beautiful way. So I you're gonna really enjoy it and hey um subscribe that really helps us out subscribe leave a comment like share all that

sort of stuff god bless you thanks very much