Now, I've got to ask you about the current scandal that's come out of the Vatican in
the last week and, you know, Deacon Nick, so many Catholics have become angry over this.
There's all this Pope-splaining going around about what the Pope really meant about same-sex
civil unions.
Yes.
and i have heard from so many catholics that say this is the straw that broke the candles back
and they're leaving this evil church now you and i both know that's not the answer that's not the
answer at all but um dick and nick i'd like to hear your thoughts on this matter and i don't
want you to hold back either
So, what are your thoughts about the Pope's recent scandal about what he said?
Yes, the first thing is I'd say he's expressed his personal opinion in his endorsement of homosexual
civil unions and it's not binding on the conscience of the faithful.
Okay, let me stop you there. I've heard this that, you know, this is his personal opinion.
Yes. But I go back to Deacon Nick. Jesus didn't express his personal opinion and then teach
something different.
And that's where I got all caught up in this.
Why isn't his personal opinion aligned with the church's teaching?
Well, I'd say, well, unlike Jesus, we're all sinners.
And so even though he's Pope, I mean, you know, I'm a deacon, I'm a sinner, we're all
sinners.
So that comes into play here.
And we all have
personal psychological backgrounds and influences you know we even though we've
been freed from original sin by baptism we still suffer from concupiscence which
kind of warps the way we think the way we express ourselves
You know, like St. Paul says, you know, why is it that I do the things I don't want to do and I don't say the things I want to say.
So that comes into play. We have to think about that. So that's why there's this mismatch can happen.
But it's tragic, I'm not downplaying it, you know, when he accepted to be Pope, he took on a very serious position.
If you think of other Popes that we've grown up with, Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict,
They are very careful in how they spoke and, you know, their encyclicals are very different to the encyclicals that we've had from Pope Francis.
You know, they referenced a lot of previous existing magisterial texts to support their statements.
Well, if you look at the latest encyclical from Pope Francis
He mostly quotes himself.
Um, so, um, he's not care- this is the problem I've had with him, is he's not careful enough
of this precious...
faith that's been handed to him to safeguard and to confirm us and this is one of the roles of the pope is to confirm us in our faith and to act as a focus for unity, he hasn't lived up to that responsibility.
And I've struggled with that myself and
I I've had trouble like in the when we're at mass and it you know he gets the part of the mass where it says and we pray this together with Francis our Pope.
I found that very painful and difficult at times and I can't hide that fact.
You know, you brought up a really good point, and it really helped me, Deacon Nick, when you said that Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II,
they were careful about what they said. I think you nailed it.
I've asked myself, is it that we know that Pope Francis isn't an intellect like
Benedict or Pope John Paul II. He doesn't seem to be. Would you agree with that?
Yes, I mean Pope John Paul was a trained philosopher and he taught philosophy in universities, underground universities in Poland and you know Pope Benedict is one of the great theologians, academic theologians.
our time but combined with that they also were great pastors they had a great
pastoral sense of caring for the people of God caring for the flock and the way
Pope Francis talks they're not the way he expresses himself at times isn't
caring he doesn't think of the impact
of the way he talks has on faithful Catholics. It's very peculiar.
It's almost careless at times.
Yeah, it's careless the way he talks, he just talks as he sees it, but the way he should
see it by now...
You know that when you get to that position, you know, he's been a priest, he's been a bishop, an archbishop, a cardinal, and then he was chosen by the conclave to be Pope.
It should be second nature to him to speak with the mind of the church, but this is what causes us so many problems is often he contradicts the perennial Magisterium of the church and I know
all kinds of people come out and say he hasn't and they try and it's like bending over backwards
to square a circle but the fact of the matter is he does contradict like this statement he made on
endorsing civil unions for homosexuals. That completely contradicts, for instance,
there were two magisterial documents on the pontificate of Pope John Paul the
second, the pastoral care of the homosexual person and also a document on
civil unions and they both drew on the whole perennial teaching of the church
to give us the correct teaching and to say we can't accept civil unions because
They're pretending to be marriages, they're pretending to be unions, and the homosexual state is an inclination towards sin anyway.
So it's not pastoral to encourage people to enter into civil partnerships.
Well, and of course, Father James Martin, as you know, has taken the words literally
and has just blown up social media saying that the Pope accepts civil unions.
He's been on any TV news channel that has invited him on saying this, and it's misleading.
I mean, it's totally misleading.
Well, it's like they're saying that the church has changed its teaching because Pope Francis has said this in an interview, they're saying that basically the church is completely reversed its teaching.
That's why I said, you know, it's his personal opinion, but it's contradict.
How I looked at it is Jesus our Lord knew that human beings would distort his teaching.
In his own ministry he confronted the distortion of God's commandments by the Pharisees.
and he knew when he was instituting the church, founding the church, that there would be this
problem of people, for all kinds of reasons, distorting his teaching. So he set up three means,
I call them a three-fold lock, to safeguard his teaching from distortion. His sacred scripture
sacred tradition and the perennial Magisterium and you have to have all three
interlocked together to safeguard the Church's teaching. Now on all those three
elements sacred scripture, sacred tradition and the perennial Magisterium
Pope Francis' statement endorsing civil unions fails on each of those three
levels
So, we know that what he said is his personal opinion and isn't the teaching of the church.
You know Deacon Nick, I just did a video that I'll be posting later, but you know I thought about all of this Pope-splaining that has gone on since Pope Francis became the Pope.
And how it emotionally charges me.
Now, I know that's Satan working.
You know, he wants us to be emotionally charged because that hardens our heart.
But at the same time, we can't allow the Pope
to continue to upset us.
So I think your next book should be
a Catholic survival guide to Pope Francis.
Well, we'll have to see what I write next.
I have to see what I'm inspired to do,
but I'd like to write a book.
I would like to write a book to help Catholics.
I think it's needed because Deacon Nick, like I said, so many people have said to me, this
is the straw that broke the camel's back.
The church is evil.
No, the church is not evil.
What would you say to those Catholics who feel that way, you know, who want to abandon
the church?
Well, the first thing I'd say is, you know, that ancient saying, maximum of the church,
there's no salvation outside the church.
We have to hold on to that. It's like the law of gravity. You can't ignore the law of gravity, you can't ignore that self-understanding of the church.
There's no salvation outside of the church.
The other thing is...
That the church isn't evil because the church is the bride of Christ, right?
So, if you're seeing, and we're all seeing something evil in the midst of the church,
is to think of it, it's not the church, it's something alien that's grafted itself onto the church.
So let's look at the history of the church.
Let's go back to the Aryan crisis.
Right.
So, you know, that was the first, really that was the first great heretical crisis in the
church.
And, you know, the Council of Nicaea was convened to challenge the heresy.
I mean the church was working out its Christological theology and its Trinitarian theology
because of the in response to this crisis and that was something good that came out of it.
But the fact of the matter is even after the Council of Nicaea for like 100 years,
the church was divided between Arian Catholics and true Catholics and lots of the bishops had
become Arians and they were persecuting the faithful Catholics. If you go and read
Saint Athanasius' history of the Arian crisis, he gives like a diary. So the Arian Catholics,
or the Arian heretics rather, they were killing faithful Catholics. They were kicking them out
of their churches and murdering priests and religious and consecrated virgins. So
They were calling themselves the Catholic Church, but it was heretical.
But it existed at the same time as the true Catholic Church, and the true Catholic Church
because, you know, the gates of hell won't prevail against the true Catholic Church,
survived and thrived and grew out of that crisis.
So we've always got to, if we see something that's evil in the church,
we've got to say, well, that's not the church, that's something that's attacking the church.
And then think of what Pope Leo the, is it the 13th?
I always get confused at the numbers, is, you know, he had this vision when he was at
mass and he saw
the devil and the host of the demons coming towards Vatican City and you know
that people said his face went deathly white and he looked like he was
stricken they thought he was really ill and that's when he wrote the the long
prayer to St. Michael and then he wrote the shorter prayer to St. Michael the
Archangel that used to be said at the end of mass
And so, you know, in that vision that Pope Leo had, he saw the threats that were coming
towards us.
And then, you know, remember what Pope Paul VI said.
Right.
The smoke of Satan.
the smoke of satan was in the church. I'd say it's not just the smoke of satan now it's like a blaze
but always to when you see that and they're disturbed by that always to hold on to the
fact that that's not the bride of christ
the bride of Christ is perfect and holy and beautiful. That's something else alien to it.
And we're right to reject the alienness, but not the church. Never, never, never use that.
That's what the devil's using that horror and scandal to drive us out of the church into the, you know, the great apostasy that, you know, is it that we see described in Scripture.
So we must resist that.
I mean, it's right to feel horror and scandal, but not to let it drive us out of the church.
And not to let it consume us too, you know, we cannot let this consume us.
I think the internet and Twitter and social media are fantastic.
That's why we can have this conversation. That's how we've got to know each other.
But the downside of it is this 24-7 news cycle, where you hear what's going on, what Pope Francis is later saying is, what Father James Martin said, what Cardinal Tobin and all the others.
And it's poison. It can be poison to the soul, all this negative.
things that are said so we've got a fast we've got a fast that abstained from
social media this is what Cardinal Sarah says you know Cardinal Sarah has this
practice I don't know if it's once a week or once a month where he goes and
spends a whole weekend in silence
It's really important that we get away from all this toxic and then just immerse yourself in the wonderful treasures of the faith and
Get you know get a good book of spirituality or get I mean really what immerse yourself in sacred scripture
and and the tradition of the church like get get the commentaries of like Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Augustine and read these really good Catholic commentaries about the Bible.
And if you immerse yourself in God's revelation, it's like taking a multivitamin booster to your spiritual immune system.
So no matter what happens in the church, you'll have been so pumped up with your spiritual immune system that you'll get through it.