REBUTTING Jay Dyer’s “10 Reasons I’m not Roman Catholic”

Hey everyone. In today's video, I'm going to address Jay Dyer's 10 reasons he's not Catholic. Jay is an Eastern Orthodox apologist, so we'll be talking a lot about the differences between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Before we do that, though, don't forget to like this video, subscribe so you don't miss any more rebuttals like these, and consider supporting us at trenthornepodcast.com.

Now, I need to clarify something at the outset. I have a strict policy of not doing rebuttals to rebuttals of my rebuttals. I'm not going to get stuck in an infinite loop. So, if Dyer makes a rebuttal to this video, I'm not making another rebuttal. However, I do usually offer to debate people who make rebuttals to me, and I'll extend that offer to Dyer as well.

Now, actually, a few years ago, I invited Jay Dyer onto my podcast to talk about the papacy. And then he said he didn't want to talk about the papacy, he wanted to talk about divine simplicity. So, I looked him up a little bit more before agreeing to that, and I saw his conduct in other debates and exchanges with apologists. I found him to be very unprofessional and uncharitable. So, I didn't follow up on the dialogue invitation because I don't do dialogues with people who can't be professional. However, a debate is more structured, so I think we could have a good exchange in that kind of format.

Also, Dyer sometimes says, "Okay, if we're going to do a debate, it's got to be next week." Well, I'm pretty busy. When it comes to debates, next month I'm going to debate Alex O'Connor again on atheism, doing a debate on abortion with a philosopher who's written a lot on that subject. I've got a dialogue with an atheist on the historicity of Luke in September. So, my debate with Jay Dyer on, let's say, the papacy or on the authority of the apostles' successors might have to wait till the fall. Hopefully, he can accept that.

All right, with that out of the way, here is my rebuttal of Jay Dyer's 10 reasons he's not Catholic. From Catholicism, so let's start with the first one, which is the papacy. If the dogma of papal infallibility is the foundation stone of the Church, uh, that is what Vatican I says. *Pastor Aeternus* is very clear. We've done many videos, we've, we've outlined this many, many times. I'm not going to rehash all that. I will put below a couple of articles in the comments. I'll link two articles in the comments where I've covered this in detail. If you want to read, uh, the actual citations, it would take forever if I just sat here and read all the citations.

So, um, we know the elements that are laid out in Vatican I as to what makes the Church one, what makes it visible, what makes it unified, what makes it have its, uh, force and power in the world. And that's the office of Peter, the See of Peter, the See of Peter cannot ultimately be divorced from Rome. It always has that connection. Even during the Avignon Papacy, it still can't be divorced from Rome. And that's made again very clear at Vatican I and canon law and many of the documents that we've covered recently.

So, the question then is that if this is the one true Church, then there ought to be a continuity, there ought to be a consistency. And most Roman Catholic apologists will admit, uh, as Zabara did in the debate, if you, if you can find a dogmatic contradiction, then you've disproven the whole Roman system and the whole papacy because it's all built on this house of cards, you see. So, the first doubt and the first question that came into my mind is, again, why, if this is the foundation stone of the actual praxis of the Church, wouldn't it be the first dogma that is that is, uh, defended and defined at the ecumenical councils? Wouldn't Nicaea or perhaps an earlier council like Gangra have dealt with this dogma itself? Why is this the last extraordinary dogma?

So, Dyer's argument is that if something is foundational, then we should see a dogmatic definition of it very early in Church history. But there are several foundational theological truths that weren't defined until much later in Church history. The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist wasn't formally defined until the 13th century, after some people like Berengar of Tours began to promote the false symbolic view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Or consider Scripture. Consider, for example, the inerrancy of Scripture, Scripture being without error. I would say the infallibility of Scripture is just as foundational as the infallibility of the papacy. And while we do find references to inerrancy in Augustine and even as far back as Clement in the first century, but the ecumenical councils kind of restrict themselves on the matter. So, for example, the Councils of Florence and Trent, of the podcast, the council talk about Scripture being inspired and canonical, but they don't explicitly address the conditions under which Scripture is without error. And we don't see Popes or ecumenical councils teaching about this until the late 19th century and 20th century, when you have a lot of critics challenging Scripture. But this doesn't disprove that long before that point, the Church believed that Scripture is without error. Just like the 19th-century definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I does not disprove the long-standing belief in the Church that the Bishop of Rome will not lead the Church into error.

In the 16th century, Saint Francis de Sales said that the Pope, quote, "cannot err when he is in cathedra, that is, when he intends to make an instruction and decree for the guidance of the whole Church, when he means to confirm his brethren as supreme pastor and to conduct them into the pastures of the faith." In 622, an Eastern monk named Saint Maximus the Confessor said of, quote, "the most holy Church of the Romans, that it is in no way overcome by the gates of Hades, according to the very promise of the Savior. But holds the keys of the orthodox confession and faith. In him, it shuts up and locks every heretical mouth that speaks unrighteousness against the Most High." In 517, Pope Hormisdas said that, "in the Apostolic See, the Catholic religion has always been preserved unblemished."

Finally, while it may not have been formally defined, the papacy was affirmed at the early ecumenical councils. For example, at the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century, a public recitation of Pope Leo's letter ended with the bishops in attendance proclaiming, "Peter has spoken through Leo." In fact, the Anglican historian J.N.D. Kelly says, "By the middle of the 5th century, the Roman Church had established de jure as well as de facto a position of primacy in the West, and the papal claims to supremacy over all bishops of Christendom had been formulated in precise terms."

And then, that I think leads to the issues that I raised in the top five reasons, uh, that the top five easy ways to refute the P, the papacy. And the second of those top five reasons, you'll have that link below. You can read all this. This is not my, my second reason not to be a Roman Catholic. This is just the, the top five reasons that are easily, uh, demonstrable proofs that the Roman Catholic Church has changed its position dogmatically. And one of those examples I gave in that article was the death penalty. How this was formerly seen for many, many centuries in the Roman Catholic Church as an aspect of natural law. Natural law, obviously, can't change. And yet now, this is seen to be something that is, uh, accidental and changeable in relationship to, to natural law. And so, even the trads themselves in the Roman Catholic world, they're hotly debating, "Oh, Francis didn't really mean this, he didn't really mean that." You don't have to, even though the catechism, which is part of the normative ordinary teaching of the Church, has been, it gets updated to reflect these changes, and these updates, they still wrangle and cope and engage in the mental gymnastics to try to try to say, "Oh, but it's not really changed because the Pope can't actually go against tradition."

Actually, the Pope defines and interprets tradition. Okay, let's talk about the death penalty. Because no matter how you look at this issue, it doesn't disprove either papal infallibility or the infallibility of the Church as a whole. So, one option is to say that the teaching saying the death penalty is moral is an infallible teaching that can't change. And what Pope Francis says about it in the catechism is a prudential judgment. Catholics aren't bound to follow the Pope. He never declared the death penalty to be intrinsically evil, only that it shouldn't be used anymore.

Another option, though, is to say that the teaching that the death penalty is moral was never infallibly defined previously in the Church's history, even though it was a long-standing practice. So, as a result, this social doctrine can be applied in different ways throughout Church history and the best way to be able to serve the common good. So, in practice, this would make the death penalty sort of like slavery, in that the Bible and the Church allowed this practice in the past for a broad range of reasons to prevent greater evils from arising. And then, as time went on, this practice was not allowed, and it was restricted to promote the common good. So, that's, we could say with slavery, something that was allowed to prevent even worse evils like starvation, for example. But now, in the modern age, we do not tolerate slavery anymore. The death penalty was allowed in the past for a broad range of reasons, heresy, even crimes like theft, to promote the common good. Then it was allowed for fewer and fewer cases, up into the modern age, only for very, very serious crimes like murder. And now saying that it's not allowed for any crimes. So, as I said, you could pick either view of what makes the most sense to you. And neither one contradicts the teaching that the Pope is infallible or that the Church is infallible.

But I will say that Dyer's objection, his concern about moral flip-flops, it actually cuts against Eastern Orthodoxy in a more severe way, in a more substantive and immediate way, when we look at the issue of contraception. Look at Kallistos Ware. He's a very famous Orthodox metropolitan and author. In the 1963 edition of his book, *The Orthodox Church*, it says, "Artificial methods of contraception are forbidden in the Orthodox Church." This follows a 1937 encyclical from the Greek Orthodox Church that only allowed abstinence for married couples to space births. But after contraception became popular, you see things change in the Orthodox Church. Father John Meyendorff, in his 1975 book, *Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective*, writes, "The question of birth control and of its acceptable forms can only be solved by individual Christian couples." The 1984 version of Ware's book says, "The use of contraceptives and other devices for birth control is, on the whole, strongly discouraged in the Orthodox Church. Some bishops and theologians altogether condemn the employment of such methods. Others, however, have recently begun to adopt a less strict position and urge that the question is best left to the discretion of each individual couple in consultation with the spiritual father." By 1992, the Orthodox Church in America hosted a synod which said, "In all the difficult decisions involving the practice of birth control, Orthodox families must live under the guidance of the pastors of the Church and ask daily for the mercy and forgiveness of God." And the next year, in 1993, Kallistos Ware's book on the Orthodox Church said, "Concerning contraceptives and other forms of birth control, differing opinions exist within the Orthodox Church. In the past, birth control was in general strongly condemned. But today, a less strict view is coming to prevail, not only in the West but in traditional Orthodox countries." Of course, there are more conservative Orthodox priests and patriarchs who believe contraception is always sinful. But the problem remains. So, in that, there is no universal magisterium among all of the Eastern Orthodox Churches to help people know which bishops or patriarchs, metropolitans are correct on contraception and which are not. Without such an authority, everybody's free to decide what constitutes sacred tradition on this matter. And so, in practice, you get something that looks like ancient Eastern Christianity but feels like modern Western Protestantism.

Vatican I is very clear about that. Canon law is very clear about that. You have to follow the, not just the extraordinary teaching, but also the universal ordinary teaching of the papacy. That's made very clear at Vatican I. And in fact, it's a condemned proposition. And we showed, as we showed in our last article, that you only have to follow the extraordinary, uh, infallible teachings and not the universal ordinary teachings. That's actually a condemned proposition.

Dyer is correct. We aren't obligated to follow only what is taught as dogma or only what is infallibly defined. We also have to give what is called religious submission of mind and will to what the Church teaches in the ordinary magisterium, or what it teaches in a non-definitive way that could continue to develop. For example, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception wasn't formally or infallibly defined until 1854, but it was part of the ordinary magisterium for centuries before that point. The difference is that religious submission of mind and will requires us, at minimum, to not publicly object to a doctrine or lead people in rebellion against it. We could personally struggle with these doctrines and still not commit a grave sin. But dogmas, those things which the Church infallibly defines as being a part of divine revelation, must be believed. If a person rejects these teachings, then they commit a grave sin. I'll leave a link in the description below to articles by my friend Jimmy Akin that talks about how to weigh Church teachings and understand the different levels of authority behind them.

So, um, the next point I would say that is problematic for just the papacy itself, as I listed in my article, is that it is a power that grew to include temporal dominion. This is brought to the forefront of Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus's excellent essay, a letter that's about 80 or 90 pages that he wrote to Francis, the Orthodox bishop who wrote to Francis when Francis was elected. And this is the idea that no longer was it a spiritual power, but by the time of, say, *Unam Sanctam*, you have this idea that the Pope is actually over every, uh, uh, temporal authority as well, and he has the right to depose and pronounce, you know, basically in the civil sphere anything he wants. And that in order to be saved, every human creature must be subject to the Roman Pontiff, not just spiritually, but also in a temporal sense. And this, of course, corresponds to the third temptation, or to the temptation, the three temptations of Christ, right? One of those being the, to be given dominion over the entire world. And Saint Joseph Popovich has a great critique of this in his, in his book, *Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ*.

I think Dyer would agree with us that if Christ established a Church to guide us to salvation, then to be saved, we must be united to that Church. Dyer's main concern is that the 14th-century bull *Unam Sanctam* also seems to say that to be saved, every human being must be subject to the Pope as a temporal ruler or an earthly political ruler. Also, but the essence of this bull is that the secular order should take cues from the spiritual order, not the other way around. This was especially the case in the Middle Ages when secular kings often took it upon themselves to appoint people to spiritual offices, like saying who's going to be the bishop in that sense. Even Dyer would agree that the Church should have a say in how secular governments carry out basic moral principles. The Catholic Encyclopedia puts it this way: "From these authorities and from declarations made by Boniface VIII himself, the author of *Unam Sanctam*, it is also evident that the jurisdiction of the spiritual power over the secular has for its basis the concept of the Church as guardian of the Christian law of morals. Hence her jurisdiction extends as far as this law is concerned. Consequently, when King Philip protested, Clement V was able, in his brief *Meru* of February 1, 1306, to declare that the French King in France were to suffer no disadvantage on account of the bull *Unam Sanctam*, and that the issuing of this bull had not made them subject to the authority of the Roman Church in any other manner than formerly." In this way, Pope Clement V was able to give France and its ruler a guarantee of security from the ecclesiastico-political results of the opinions elaborated in the bull, while its dogmatic decision suffered no detriment of any kind. So, basically, what *Unam Sanctam* said was that the secular order should take cues from the spiritual order. That kings and secular rulers do not get to decide things like the moral law. God does that, and He's given us a Church to be able to understand that. And even kings should look to the Church when it comes to these important truths.

Where he, he compares this to, uh, the temptation of Satan, the Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky compares it to the temptation. And along with that, what, what has historically helped to prop up the temporal authority of the Roman See, and its basically god-emperor status in the civil sphere as well as the spiritual realm, were a bunch of forgeries. The Donation of Constantine, the Pseudo-Ambrose writings, the Samosian forgeries, the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, the Gratian Decretals, texts like *The Errors of the Greeks* that Aquinas relies on, which are all now admitted and known forgeries. Even the Vatican itself admits that all these documents are essentially later forgeries. Well, for centuries, those were used to prop up the, the authority of the Pope in the temporal sphere, among other things, right? The *Dictatus Papae* is another one of these great ridiculous documents, which are no longer appealed to by the Vatican itself. Hence, the, uh, scandal and doublethink of the Roman Catholic traditionalist world, trying to reconcile these centuries, these millennia of these, the last millennia of claims of just extensive, insane levels of power that have now been discarded under the cloak of humility on the part of the Vatican II Popes.

I agree that some political claims made by Popes throughout Church history, claims to temporal power, were based on forged documents, some of them based on things like the Donation of Constantine, a forgery that was attributed to Emperor Constantine in ancient Rome, claiming to give temporal power to the papacy. But the later dogmatic definitions of the papacy, like we have at Vatican I, were not based on that in any form. In fact, we knew that things like the Donation of Constantine were forgeries centuries before Vatican I's teaching on the papacy. And finding out that evidence you thought was reliable is actually a forgery, that's not just a Catholic problem. For example, Eastern Orthodox apologists have sometimes quoted letters from Saint Basil the Great defending the use of icons that turned out to be forgeries. They weren't written by Saint Basil at all. But the existence of those forgeries does not refute the genuine evidence you have in favor of iconography. Another example would be apocryphal or forged Gospels that claim to be the Gospel according to Peter, the Gospel according to Philip. The existence of these forgeries that some people in Church history might have taken as legitimate does not refute the existence of genuine evidence for the Gospels. And the same is true of the papacy. The existence of forgeries that were used to bolster papal authority in the Middle Ages does not detract from the genuine evidence we have that Christ established apostolic succession and gave a special charism to the Apostle Peter and to his successors.

The next point is that the supposed purpose for the papacy, which is to give us certitude and and certainty on dogma. The last hundred years of Roman Catholicism has proven that that doesn't actually work. And in fact, it is demonstrably the case that it does not solve the dilemma that it's supposed to solve. We know from Vatican I, the way it lays out a certain anthropology and a certain epistemology that could be classed as classical foundationalism, that essentially the way that you know the true Church, according to Vatican I, is that you just simply look at the history, tally up the facts, and you look and see which institution has existed for 2,000 years and has been infallible and inerrant. Right, it literally says that. You just kind of look at history and you tally up these facts and you check these boxes, and that's how you'll know that the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church. That's the epistemology based on, on the acceptance of the philosophy and epistemology and anthropology of Thomas Aquinas, right, which is again, classical foundationalism.

That's how you know. What Dyer is talking about here is the question of epistemology, or the study of how we determine what constitutes knowledge. Basically, how do we know what we know, or how do we know our beliefs are true and justified, or that there are good reasons to support them? Dyer is critiquing foundationalism, but I'm not sure exactly what he means by the term. Basically, this would be the view that our beliefs are inferred from other beliefs, but there can't be an infinite chain of beliefs, otherwise we couldn't justify anything. Instead, the beliefs have to terminate in foundational beliefs, or beliefs that we know to be true simply by thinking about them. So, when it comes to proving that God exists, for example, we start with the general reliability of our sense perception as a foundation, and then reason from that to a transcendent cause of the universe, or God. Or when it comes to proving Christianity, we start with reliable sense perception, move to reliable historical documents, and then use those documents to show that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. But Dyer is a presuppositionalist, which is more of a Protestant epistemology that says we have to presuppose Christianity is true before we can show it's true. You'll recall that in my rebuttal of John MacArthur, he made similar arguments as well, and I showed what's wrong with that. And Dyer reveals in another video how he went to a Protestant seminary named after one of the main guys who practice this approach to knowledge. And this is all important to know because the argument Dyer gives against Catholicism is actually Protestant in nature, and because of that, it cuts against Eastern Orthodoxy as well.

And then, when we come to the question of how do we know what the dogmas around Catholicism are, the answer is that we follow the Pope. And you follow the Pope when he's teaching authoritatively in extraordinary or universal ordinary magisterium. And you also have to follow the normative, not universal ordinary magister, ordinary magisterium as well, right? So all three of these layers of Roman Catholic dogma have to be followed, despite the fact of these sort of descending levels of authority that they possess. But then the question, though, is that how do I know that I'm interpreting these documents? Because it still has to get to me as the individual Catholic, right? It still has to get into my head. And so when we ask a question about certitude, and we say that instead of it just being like the Protestants, you read those books and interpret those books, then we just add on the, so let's say we got the Bible here as a Protestant. And the Roman Catholic says, "Ah, but you need the Pope to help you interpret the Bible." Then we stack that on, right? Well, now we've got just a bunch of more documents and writings and teachings and encyclicals and councils, right? Now we just added this book here of all the ecumenical councils, right, of the Roman Catholic system. Well, that still doesn't solve the problem that we've asked, which is an epistemic problem, an epistemic question of how we know with certitude that we're interpreting these documents rightly. Because remember, the original problem was that Protestants can't interpret the Bible correctly, they need the Pope. Well, how do I know that I'm interpreting the Pope correctly? It's a, it's a moving the problem back a step, and it's not actually answering the epistemic question.

So, Dyer's argument is that the Church can't give us certainty when it comes to biblical interpretation because now we have to ask, how do we know we're interpreting magisterial documents correctly? Do we need a magisterium that interprets the magisterium for us? But in his video on why he isn't a Protestant, Dyer says that one of the reasons is because in order to interpret Scripture, you have to include sacred tradition as well. But you can't divorce the Bible and its understanding and its whole ethos that goes into how to interpret those texts from the life of the Church and from the history of the Church. And that's what Protestantism has to do. Well, doesn't this just push the question back one step? It kicks the can down the road. Dyer's same argument against the Pope goes against sacred tradition too. How do I interpret sacred tradition? This is especially true in Orthodoxy, which is a decentralized religion that has many interpretive traditions and no universal way to codify them. What's interesting is that Protestants make this same objection and they act like interpreting the magisterium statements is as difficult as interpreting Scripture. Well, the two are not the same. Unlike sacred Scripture, the living magisterium can continually clarify teachings for each subsequent generation to make sure the body of Christ understands them. It's way easier to pick up the universal Catholic Catechism and see what Catholics believe than to do a survey of Eastern Orthodoxy. I mean, look at the question of marriage. The Catholic Church holds to the firm principle that remarriage after divorce constitutes adultery. This is what Jesus said in Mark 10, verses 11 through 12. But in Eastern Orthodoxy, it's murkier when it comes to the question of when remarriage can be allowed. It really depends on who you ask. Here is what Kallistos Ware says in his book on the Orthodox Church: "Orthodox canon law, while permitting a second or even a third marriage, absolutely forbids a fourth. In theory, the canons only permit divorce in cases of adultery, but in practice, it is granted for other reasons as well." One, in fact, one common Orthodox saying about marriage says that the Church, quote, "blesses the first marriage, performs the second, tolerates the third, and forbids the fourth," or three strikes and you're out.

So, to summarize, if Dyer's argument against the papacy being important for our knowledge of doctrine succeeds, if the argument works, then it also destroys the necessity of sacred tradition and it turns us into Protestants who would just presuppose *sola scriptura*. If we're going to be presuppositionalists, and if the argument fails, well, that's just one less reason to be Orthodox instead of being Catholic. The epistemological certitude question, by just moving it back a step, and so it's circular. Now, ultimately, there is an element of circularity to paradigm-level questions, right? We believe that as presuppositionalists, if we, if you follow through the transcendental argument or presuppositional reasoning, then you would know that, yeah, ultimately these questions are, uh, presuppositional or transcendental in nature. And so they can't be resolved by just appealing to another empirical fact and trying to interpret that empirical fact. Ultimately, it does resolve and and rely on the question of the individual being taught by the Holy Spirit. But you'll say, "Wait a minute, that sounds Protestant." But where we disagree with the Protestant is not the individual enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, because even a Roman Catholic could admit that. Where we disagree with both of these groups is the means that the Holy Spirit uses to enlighten us and teach us, right? So, we would say that this, the papacy doesn't actually solve this question. And when we look at the actual teachings of the papacy, we can actually demonstrate very easily that it has contradicted itself, especially after Vatican II, especially with Pachamama, especially with the ordinary magisterium. So, the Roman Catholic epistemology is, uh, doesn't achieve what it's supposed to achieve. It moves the problem back a step. And once you realize that, it kind of loses all of its force.

Dyer says, "Yeah, this sounds Protestant, but it isn't." Because there are other reasons to discount the role of the papacy in being our guide when it comes to knowing religious truths. But what are those reasons? Well, Dyer brings up the Pachamama incident, as it's come to be known since it happened in the Vatican Gardens. So, let's assume worst-case scenario, the festival in the Vatican Gardens, Pope Francis failed to rebuke visiting Catholics who engaged in idolatry. That would only prove he's a cowardly Pope. It would not prove he's not infallible. It would not disprove infallibility because the Pope not only didn't give an infallible teaching on this issue, he didn't give any teaching on this issue. He would have failed by leading, not leading by behavior. By this logic, you would say the Apostles didn't have divine authority because in Galatians chapter 2, Paul tells us that Peter, he believed the right thing about Gentile inclusion in the Church, but he failed to act on it and wouldn't dine with Gentile Christians. So, Peter's actions in Galatians 2 contradicted theology he knew and understood. It was a failure of virtue, not of dogma. And the same is true of the Pachamama incident. If it's the worst-case scenario, it could also be the case that this is just, uh, Catholics from that region offering praise and worship with innocuous symbols that are things that are symbols of nature and life and things that God created. It could also be that. But even if the worst-case scenario was true and idolatry was taking place, all this shows is that the Pope failed to do the right thing because he didn't exercise any teaching office whatsoever. So, the Pachamama incident can never, in principle, disprove the doctrine, the dogma of papal infallibility.

The second point, the third point would be that the, the modus operandi of the Church for the first millennium is synodal. You have canons that talk about bishops being anointed in the presence of other bishops, a metropolitan, nothing to do, nothing mentioned about the Pope affirming all bishops in the world. However, after the schism, that's how all bishops in the world in the Roman Catholic system come to be bishops. They have to be approved by the Pope himself directly. There's nothing about these, uh, college of cardinals that elect a singular monarch to rule the entire Church. In fact, in the ecumenical councils, you have the, the, the idea of an appellate structure, as we, uh, called attention to in the Eric Ybarra debate. But that is a far cry from Vatican I's infallibility. That is a far cry from the Pope being the god-emperor who has authority over all princes and monarchs, right, to depose them at will. Does that happen in the second, third, fourth century? No, it doesn't happen until later, as this doctrine evolves. And so, what we'll see is that the doctrine, the papacy itself, actually evolves. And Roman Catholics utilize the notion of evolution of dogma, as Cardinal Newman wrote about, to defend this idea.

Let's go back to the first century in a dispute that's highlighted in the letter of Clement. So, our earliest writing from a Pope after Saint Peter comes from Clement of Rome. This was someone that Tertullian says Peter ordained, and Saint Irenaeus in the second century describes Clement as Peter's third successor. Now, sometime in the latter half of the first century, Clement responded to a dispute in the Church of Corinth, now modern-day Greece, through a letter that we now call First Clement. And in it, he discussed the unjust dismissal of several leaders in the local Church. The fact that Rome was specifically sought out to resolve this dispute, and he charged the Corinthians to obey the words of the Holy Spirit, shows that Rome was not a mere brother church. The Church at Rome had unique prestige and influence among other churches. The 19th-century author Philip Schaff, who is an anti-Catholic writer, he goes even further, though. He describes this letter as, quote, "the first example of the exercise of a sort of papal authority." He says that the Church at Rome gives advice with superior administrative wisdom to an important church in the East, dispatches messengers to her, and exhorts her to order and unity in a tone of calm dignity and authority, as the organ of God and the Holy Spirit. This is all the more surprising if Saint John, as is probable, was then still living in Ephesus, which was nearer to Corinth than Rome. End quote.

So, Clement, who may have been presiding bishop or the secretary among the council of elders, we don't know exactly what the situation was when the letter was written. Clement demonstrates how local decisions about who should or who should not oversee the Church were not the prerogative of the local community alone, but ultimately fell to the Church of Rome to arbitrate, even in the first century. However, in recent years, there has been an emphasis on restoring communion with the Eastern Churches, and part of that includes restoring the ancient practice of giving local bodies more authority over electing their own bishops. In 2010, Georgetown University put on a conference on Catholic and Eastern Orthodox relations, and the USCCB endorsed several proposals to improve East-West relations. In one part of the proposal, it says this: "Subsidiarily, following the ancient principle recognized as normative for well-organized human structures, higher instances of episcopal authority would only be expected to act when lower instances were unable to make and implement the decisions necessary for continuing union in faith. This would mean, among other things, that in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, at least, bishops would be elected by local synods or by other traditional methods of selection. Those elected to major episcopal or primatial offices would present themselves to other church leaders at their level, to their own patriarch, and to the Bishop of Rome as first among the patriarchs, by the exchange and reception of letters of communion according to ancient Christian custom. The Bishop of Rome would also inform the Eastern patriarchs of his election." So, there is room for understanding the finer elements of the relationship between the successor of Saint Peter and his brother bishops and patriarchs. But we have to first acknowledge the central leadership role in the Church that Peter's successor plays. We don't believe that in, in the Orthodox conception.

So, the first millennium of the Church, the, the mindset of those Christians, especially at, say, the Sixth Council, was that they had no problem condemning a Pope, Pope Honorius. Now, it doesn't matter whether you, I know that Roman Catholics say what he wasn't really a heretic. It doesn't matter because the argument that I'm making is that if an ecumenical council, accepted as ecumenical, had the mindset that they could condemn the Roman See, then the, the dogma of Vatican I was not in anyone's mind at the Sixth Council. I'm not sure what Dyer is getting at when he's talking about Honorius. Of course, a Pope or an ecumenical council could render an unfavorable historical judgment upon a previous Pope for failing to check a heresy in the Church, which is what the ratified Third Council of Constantinople did in the case of Honorius. I'm not going to get into the whole affair because Dyer doesn't do that either. But I will say that the Third Council of Constantinople did not define that Honorius erred by binding all of the faithful to believe in the heresy of Monothelitism, which would contradict papal infallibility. It did condemn Honorius for following this view himself and causing that heresy to be spread throughout the Church. Pope Leo II confirmed the council's decrees, but he added the detail that Honorius was, was anathematized because he, quote, "did not illuminate this Apostolic See with the doctrine of apostolic tradition, but permitted her who was undefiled to be polluted by profane teaching." Since a Pope can err when he isn't making an infallible judgment, this only represents an unfortunate episode in the Church's history, not an example of a dogmatic contradiction. And as I know in my book, *The Case for Catholicism*, even Eastern Orthodox scholars like Jaroslav Pelikan or Father Laurent Cleenewerck do not believe Pope Honorius was guilty of heresy himself, but only that he was guilty of using ambiguous language that unfortunately allowed a heresy to spread in the early Church.

And you'll see this mindset actually reaffirmed in modern Vatican writings and theologians, especially if you look at something like *Introduction to Christianity* by Ratzinger, back when he was writing as a cardinal, on page 279 of *Introduction to Christianity*, actually admits that the lowest level of ex-cathedra pronouncements are the ones after Vatican I, and that we can't really speak this way in dialogue with the Orthodox anymore, as if this is a recent thing, and that there's no such thing as dogmatic pronouncements for the Virgin Birth. That's literally what he says in the footnote here when he's interacting with an extremely liberal theologian. Now, he, Ratzinger is a modernist. He was a liberal theologian for many, many, many decades, and he's actually interacting with an extremely liberal Dutch Jesuit theologian that he supposedly disagreeing with. And he says that, um, "in the matter of the Virgin Birth, this Dutch theologian is looking for an excellent dogmatic statement. He says, but in reality, such an assertion turns the history of dogma upside down and attributes absoluteness to a mode of exercising the teaching function only in regular use since Vatican I. This is unacceptable in view of the dialogue with the Orthodox, but from the, but also from the very nature of the matter itself." And even Schoonenberg, this Jesuit theologian himself, does not stick to it through thick and thin. In fact, dogma as a single tenet proclaimed by the Pope ex cathedra is the latest and lowest way of defining, forming dogma. The original form in which the Church states her faith in a binding way is the creed or the symbol in the profession of faith." And then he goes on to say, "To look for dogmatic statements like this prior to Vatican I is absurd." Well, that's an admission that Vatican I is an innovation, that it's an evolution of doctrine and and praxis for the Church.

When it comes to Cardinal Ratzinger, this is an excerpt from *Introduction to Christianity* where Ratzinger is going over the Virgin Birth and commenting on theologians who pushed the limits to say that the Church could allow belief that the Virgin Birth is a legend, apparently because there's no dogmatic definition that Christ was born of a virgin. Ratzinger says the Dutch theologian Piet Schoonenberg, who argued that you could believe this about the Virgin Birth, in his book *The Christ*, Ratzinger says Schoonenberg looks in vain, quote, "for a magisterial dogmatic pronouncement relating to the Virgin Birth." That he's being unreasonable for withholding belief in this doctrine just because there's no papal ex cathedra definition of it, like we have for the Immaculate Conception. So, the whole point of what he's talking about here is that infallible teachings come not just from papal ex cathedra statements, but also from the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church. At the most fundamental level, this would be the creeds that were universally agreed upon throughout Church history and unquestioningly say, "We believe in Jesus Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary." But we wouldn't expect Popes in the past to use the precise formulations given at Vatican I in their infallible teachings, that of course were given long before Vatican I. And indeed, there are many instances of Popes intending to teach something in an infallible way. So, the substance is there of infallibility, even if the precise formulations of it come later. So, using the particular form outlined at Vatican I is probably what Cardinal Ratzinger meant by saying this is the latest way of exercising infallibility, and you could also call it the lowest way, as Ratzinger does in this footnote.

The Dyer points out because there are more fundamental ways of exercising the charism of infallibility. God gave the Church. Paragraph 891 of the Catechism, for example, says infallibility is present in the Church, quote, "above all in an ecumenical council, which is where all the bishops of the world gather together in union with the Pope to solemnly define and infallibly, and in some cases, infallibly define matters of dogma." And of course, papal infallibility is not restricted to the dogmatic definitions we see in something like the Immaculate Conception. Popes have been intending to teach infallibly long before that. And many theologians say another example that when the Pope acts infallibly is when he canonizes saints. But to summarize, the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger says papal infallibility is different in scope or in the amount of times it's been used does not refute the concept of papal infallibility in general.

The next problem, the next reason I would not be Roman Catholic is the contradictions of Vatican II. Vatican II, in many, many, many places, contradicts, uh, prior dogmatic teaching. And I'll go to some of these examples for you. Some of the more blatant examples, one of which would be the, uh, ecumenical movement itself. If you read *Mortalium Animos*, the famous encyclical of Pius XI in the 1920s, it absolutely condemned as apostasy all forms of interfaith gatherings. And that document would actually be classed under universal ordinary magisterium because it was normative for the entire Roman Catholic communion. Vatican II is the complete, official papal Roman See acceptance of the most extreme forms of ecumenism, all the way up to what we see now with Pachamama. I already dealt with the episode involving Pachamama, so I'm not going to belabor the point here.

Dyer's argument seems to be that Vatican II's endorsement of ecumenism is somehow at odds with previous papal teachings that prohibited Catholics gathering with non-Catholics. On a side note, though, I want to point out that the 1986 interfaith gathering at Assisi, that Dyer criticizes, there are also prominent Orthodox clerics there, like the Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. But the main problem with Dyer's criticism is that he is assuming Vatican II is explicitly endorsing what could be called active communion with non-Catholics, or praying the distinctive prayers of their own religion as if we were professing allegiance to that faith. That's something Catholics cannot do as a matter of divine law that no Church directive could ever change. So, we can't pray with non-Catholics in this active sense, but we can pray with non-Catholics in the sense of praying in their presence, and this can include joint gatherings. In his book, *Ecumenical Associations*, James Oliver says Pope Pius XI both welcomed the separated brethren and clearly stated what was and was not possible for Catholics regarding dialogue with non-Catholic Christians concerning theological differences and unity. In 1949, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document on ecumenism that outlined when it was and wasn't appropriate. So, this isn't some radical post-Vatican II development. Here's a part of the CDF instruction: "The previous permission of the Holy See, special for each case, is always required, and in the petition asking for it, it must also be stated what are the questions to be treated and who the speakers are to be at an ecumenical gathering. Although in all these meetings and conferences, any communication whatsoever in worship must be avoided, yet the recitation in common of the Lord's Prayer or of some prayer approved by the Catholic Church is not forbidden for opening or closing the said meetings." So, it's true that divine law, as the Popes have pointed out previously, prohibits active participation in non-Catholic rituals. The Vatican II's declaration on ecumenism does not instruct believers to engage in that kind of act of communion. It says instead, "Witness to the unity of the Church very generally forbids common worship to Christians, but the grace to be had from it sometimes commends this practice." The council fathers do not say what kind of common worship this entails, but this can be understood as an endorsement of passive communion, where attendees pray next to each other or share in a common authorized prayer like the Our Father. Nothing in the Second Vatican Council contradicts earlier teachings that forbid Catholics from actively taking part in the unique aspects of non-Catholic worship services, such as in a way that would seem to be professing allegiance to those faiths.

So, for example, if you, uh, look at the decree on ecumenism, there is, uh, very early on in section three, a denial of the unity and communion of the Church to now be something that is dispersed amongst many, many, many conflicting groups. So, you have an outright denial of what Inzenger would call the doctrine, "No salvation outside the visible constraints of the Roman Catholic Church." Pope Pelagius II, Pope Pelagius, Pope Eugene IV condemned the idea that there are in fact martyrs outside of the Roman Catholic communion. Vatican II, in its documents on ecumenism, admits that there are martyrs outside of the Roman communion. So, I'll give you those right here. This is Denzinger 247, which goes on to state that there are absolutely no martyrs outside of the communion with the papacy. We're not talking about martyrs outside of generic Christianity, martyrs outside of the communion with the Pope himself. This is restated in Denzinger 714 at the time of Florence, where it specifically states that even if you die outside of communion with the Roman Bishop, you are not a martyr. So, there are no martyrs outside of the communion of the Roman Catholic Church.

Okay, so Dyer's argument seems to be that Vatican II contradicts the dogma of "no salvation outside the Church." Now, this is a topic that deserves its own video, but I don't see anything in the Vatican II documents on ecumenism or non-Christian religions that deals with the subject of martyrs. It's true, Eugene IV and Pelagius II taught that someone who experiences martyrdom but dies in the mortal sin of schism cannot be saved. But that's not the same thing as saying there are no non-Catholic martyrs, since someone could be non-Catholic and through something like invincible ignorance, not be guilty.

Of the sin of schism and die as a martyr. This is what the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism actually says: "The children who are born into these Protestant communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation." And the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers with respect and affection.

"For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect. The differences that exist in varying degrees between them and the Catholic Church, whether in doctrine and sometimes in discipline or concerning the structure of the Church, do indeed create many obstacles, sometimes serious ones, to full ecclesiastical communion. The ecumenical movement is striving to overcome these obstacles."

It then goes on to say: "Moreover, some and even very many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Church itself can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church. The written Word of God, the life of grace, faith, hope and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, and visible elements too. All of these which come from Christ and lead back to Christ belong by right to the one Church of Christ."

So there is no contradiction in saying it is only the Church through which we have salvation, but that God and His sovereign authority is free to extend the bounds of the visible Church to allow people to be imperfectly united to it.

This kind of reminds me of an episode from the Gospel of Mark, which says that the Apostle John, John said to Jesus: "Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him because he was not following us." But Jesus said: "Do not forbid him; for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon after to speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is for us."

So once again, there is no contradiction. Because the Church does not teach, and has never taught, that some other God, some other Savior, or some other Church is capable, in and of itself, to give salvation to non-believers. But it does teach that God and His mercy can make the Church's salvific resources available to people who do not formally belong to it.

The Council of Trent even infallibly taught the following: "If anyone says that the sacraments of the New Law are not necessary for salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them or without the desire of them, men obtain from God through faith alone the grace of justification, though all are not necessary for each one, let him be anathema."

So notice the references to things like the desire for the sacraments being capable of saving someone, or that not all of them are necessary for salvation. What this shows is that the Church has always taught that even people who have an imperfect union with Christ's Church, they can be saved.

In fact, a good book that goes into this subject in detail is *Salvation Outside the Church: Tracing the History of the Catholic Response* by Francis Sullivan. I highly recommend that book if you want to go deeper into the subject. Now, I am very aware of baptism of desire and all these different debates and and so forth within Roman Catholicism. But my point is that you can clearly see that Vatican II is taking ecumenism, uh, and moving into the point to where there's now actually communion with people who don't have the same faith.

This is proven by the fact that the Uniates have always been brought under the umbrella of the Papacy, even when they reject Trent, Purgatory. They, they hallow Saint Gregory Palamas. By Uniates, Dyer's talking about the 23 Eastern Churches that exist within the Catholic Church. So by, if he says Uniates, just think the Eastern Church, and in particular the Greek and the Byzantine Catholic Churches, because they would probably be closest in belief and practice to the Orthodox theology Dyer is talking about.

I'll include the video from David the Real Med White, one of our buddies, below, where he actually shows that Unitism, the Uniate Byzantine Eastern Catholics themselves, refute the absurdity of Rome Catholicism. Because you have people allowed under communion who don't have the same faith. They reject Purgatory, they reject Trent, they reject created grace, right? They believe in the Eastern Orthodox theology, a lot of it. And then they turn around and are told that if they accept the Papacy, they can be in communion, even though they don't hold to the faith. And thus, you see the changing of position on Saint Gregory Palamas, right? For ecumenical reasons, he's now a saint according to John Paul II. So it's just absurd.

Dyer links to another video that makes these points. I've watched it, but I'm not going to go through all of it, all the points that it makes, because that'd be more appropriate to do in a separate rebuttal. But I will address some of the errors in that video that Dyer's probably relying on. For example, the video claims that Catholic Melkites believe there are only seven ecumenical councils. But former Bishop John Elia of the Greek Catholic Church says this: "The Melkite Church participated fully in Vatican I, and Patriarch Gregory spoke clearly to his affirmation of the fullness of power enjoyed by the Petrine office. It would be a simple rekindling of the old controversy of conciliarism to suggest that some councils are less ecumenical than others. With the promulgation of the Holy Father, the doctrinal content of the various councils is a part of the sacred magisterial teaching of the Church to which Melkites in full communion with the See of Rome give wholehearted assent."

The video also says that when Eastern Catholics don't recite the Filioque at the Divine Liturgy, that means they reject the Filioque, which isn't true. It says Catholics dogmatize celibacy for priests, which is wrong. Celibacy is a discipline for Western priests, and the narrator misunderstands a citation in Denzinger that describes a regional council in the 4th century issuing a disciplinary judgment about celibacy, not an infallible teaching about celibacy.

It also says that Eastern Catholics reject Purgatory. They don't. Eastern Christians might use different vocabulary to describe cleansing after death, but in 1595, when the Ruthenian Orthodox Church came into communion with Rome at the Treaty of Brest, on the treaty they signed, it said: "We shall not debate about Purgatory, but we entrust ourselves to the teaching of the Holy Church."

Finally, the video said that Gregory of Palamas was condemned as a heretic in the Western Church, but he's a saint in the Eastern Catholic Church. Wasn't that a contradiction? Now, it's true, a lot of Western theologians didn't like his school of thought or Palamism, but the Church never formally condemned him. Pope Saint John Paul II even spoke positively of the spirituality based on Palamism in a 1996 address. In that same address, he said this: "How many things we have in common! It is time for Catholics and Orthodox to make an extra effort to understand each other more, recognizing with renewed amazement of fraternity how much the Spirit is working in their respective traditions, in view of a new Christian spring."

So to summarize, Eastern Catholics are fully Catholic and fully Eastern, and there's no contradiction between the two, even if there are differences. Pope John XXIII put it well. He said: "In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity."

Well, let's look, for example, at the Catholic, uh, and the relationship with the separated Eastern Churches. We are told that sacraments may be given to those in the Eastern Churches outside of communion with Rome. Um, so this is actually contrary to Lateran IV, Constitution 3 of Lateran IV, on heretics, which says that no sacraments can be given to those outside the visible communion of the Church. It also goes against Gregory XVI and Pius IX, who taught that "those who eat the Lamb outside the Church will perish." God does not approve of all sects, we are told in the traditional teachings of the Church. But here we're told that God is actually working through all of the sects and all the different schisms, according to the Roman Catholic mindset, that's, uh, that you can now share *communio in sacris*.

*Communio in sacris*, section 29 of the Decree on the Eastern Churches, even though the Eastern Churches completely reject multiple dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. So once again, we have to understand dogmatic teachings that do not change, and disciplines or even teachings about disciplines that can change. For example, the Church has always taught suicide is a grave matter and can be a mortal sin. So those who commit suicide can't receive a Christian funeral. But as our understanding has progressed, we have learned that many people who commit suicide, they're not of sound mind. They probably suffer from a mental illness, and so they lack the knowledge or ability to consent that would make this grave action a mortal sin. So while it is still possible to commit the mortal sin of suicide, such as if a criminal commits suicide simply to avoid going to jail, we no longer start with the presumption that everyone who commits suicide is in a state of mortal sin.

We can also apply this to the discipline of administering the sacraments. So an example of an unchanging teaching would be that it is a mortal sin to receive the Eucharist while you are in a state of mortal sin. Moreover, heresy is a mortal sin. The Fourth Lateran Council said of heretics: "Clerics should not, of course, give the sacraments of the Church to such pestilent people, nor give them a Christian burial, nor accept alms or offerings from them. If they do, let them be deprived of their office and not restored to it without a special indulgence of the Apostolic See." And the current Code of Canon Law says in section 915: "Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty, and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion."

But our understanding of what constitutes being in the sin of heresy or the sin of schism has changed, as we come to understand people merely born into non-Catholic groups are not the same as someone who formally rejects Catholicism and does so in a way that satisfies the modern definition of heresy, namely, the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith.

So the Code of Canon Law says of giving the sacraments to non-Catholics that we need to start with this foundation: "Catholic ministers administer the sacraments illicitly to Catholic members of the Christian faithful alone, who likewise receive them illicitly from Catholic ministers alone, without prejudice to the prescripts of sections 2, 3, and 4 of this canon." And Canon 861, section 2: "So, Catholic sacraments are for Catholics." But the Code goes on to say: "Catholic ministers administer the sacraments of Penance, Eucharist, and Anointing of the Sick illicitly to members of Eastern Churches which do not have full communion with the Catholic Church, if they seek such on their own accord and are properly disposed." The Code also allows this for Protestants if there is something like a danger of death and a manifestation of Catholic faith.

So a Protestant, for example, who's come to believe in Catholicism and is in danger of death, could be given the sacrament of Reconciliation and the sacrament of the Eucharist on their deathbed. And these people can be properly disposed to receive the sacrament, because as we've already seen, there is a difference between someone who is merely born into a non-Catholic community and genuinely seeks out the Catholic sacraments for some kind of grave necessity or reason, and someone who is formally guilty of the sins of schism and heresy. Since there's a difference there, we can see who manifests themselves to be properly disposed, in accord with the Code of Canon Law, to be able to receive the sacraments under these very limited circumstances.

And the key crowning example of the changes in dogma, uh, would be the Counter Syllabus, right? *Dignitatis Humanae*, the Declaration on Religious Liberty. Also, the Declaration on Other Religions. As we'll see. But this one is great because I can give you, if you read *Immortale Dei* and *Quanta Cura*, these are two papal encyclicals. They actually necessitate that the state be confessional. States must be Catholic. They must be confessionally Catholic. This is mentioned in the Syllabus of Errors, which is in Denzinger, Syllabus of Errors, within the Syllabus, these are numbers 77, 78, and 55. And almost all the pre-Vatican Popes. In fact, there's even the Feast of Christ the King that was instituted to combat the error of religious liberty. Religious liberty is another issue that we could do an entire episode on. But this also represents a development in Catholic teaching.

Previous teachings like the Syllabus of Errors are correct when they say "error has no rights." Error or heresy has no right or liberty to exist. But people have rights, and they can't be compelled to believe the truth. Thomas Aquinas even made this point when he argued against forced baptisms. So the religious liberty being condemned in those older documents is a kind that supports religious indifferentism and says all religions are basically the same. What Vatican II was defending was a person's right to be free in his choice of religion, apart from coercion by the state, to become Catholic. Vatican II dogmatically accepts religious liberty and that there should not be confessional states anymore. And since Vatican II, all those Vatican II Popes have been de-Catholicizing Catholic states. They actually say we should be secular. There doesn't need to be a confessional state. And then if you read the Decree on Religious Liberty, in section 3, it says the state exceeds its authority, uh, if it's, uh, if it, in other words, the state should not be confessional. If it tries to have religious bases, then it's exceeding its authority. But again, this is contrary to *Immortale Dei* and it's also contrary to *Quanta Cura*, so those are other encyclicals you could read that are contrary to the Decree on Religious Freedom.

What about the idea that the government must be Catholic, or what Dyer calls a confessional state? The Church has always taught that it can be beneficial for the state to lead people to their heavenly ends. And so the state could promote one religion over all others. *Dignitatis Humanae* even says that it is not dealing with the question of whether there can be confessional states that endorse one religion. It says: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." The Council did not prohibit such states and even seems to acknowledge they could exist, such as when it says in section 6: "If, in view of peculiar circumstances obtaining among peoples, special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society, it is at the same time imperative that the rights of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice."

The Vatican II document *Gaudium et Spes* says: "The Church and the political community are, in their own fields, autonomous and independent from each other." But this isn't some illicit post-Vatican II mandate of the separation of church and state. It actually corresponds to what Pope Leo XIII said 80 years earlier, before Vatican II, in *Immortale Dei*. Pope Leo XIII wrote: "Whatever, therefore, in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred to the salvation of souls or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be arranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority." Jesus Christ has himself given command that what is Caesar's is to be rendered to Caesar, and that what belongs to God is to be rendered to God.

In fact, the Church's decision to renounce its just claim to founding a confessional state can be valid when the goal is to increase her authentic Christian witness. Here is what the Second Vatican Council said about that in *Gaudium et Spes*: "The Church herself makes use of temporal things insofar as her own mission requires it. She, for her part, does not place her trust in the privileges offered by civil authority. She will even give up the exercise of certain rights which have been legitimately acquired if it becomes clear that their use will cast doubt on the sincerity of her witness or that new ways of life demand new methods."

So once again, there is no contradiction here. But the Church has developed in its teachings on this to recognize that in the modern world, there are basically no confessional Catholic states, places that formally endorse Catholicism as the state religion. But there are states like Muslim theocracies, communist dictatorships, that would crush religious freedom, and people should work against this tyranny. A Catholic confessional state could exist, but in the modern world, the Church would be better served by making sure every government affords its citizens authentic religious liberty.

It says that religious freedom is necessary for a global society to develop. A global society? Is that what we're here to build? A global government? Global society? That's at the end of the document. And then the most notorious of all, *Nostra Aetate*, the Decree on the Non-Christian Religions. The Decree on the Non-Christian Religions is completely contrary to *Mirari Vos*. *Mirari Vos*. It's completely contrary to *Immortale Dei* and *Quanta Cura*, number two. It is completely contrary to Denzinger-139. It is, uh, completely contrary to the Council of Vienne and Pope Clement V, which states that it is an insult to the Holy Name and a disgrace to the Christian and Catholic faith that the followers of Islam, in their temples and mosques, should meet to adore the infidel Muhammad. That is completely contrary to the fact that the Decree on, uh, Non-Christian Religions says that they worship the same God as we do.

So again, you can just go look at *Cantate Domino* of Eugene IV. You can look at Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne, uh, which is the 15th Ecumenical Council in the Roman Catholic system. You can look at *A Quo Primum* and all of these point out the errors of saying that all the religions basically have an innate truthfulness to them and that they're all seeking after God. This isn't that controversial, after all. It goes all the way back to the Apostle Paul in Acts 17. He told the Greeks there: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you." So Paul was saying there, they were right. The Greeks, they were right that there is a clearest example.

If we look at the unknown, you can also look at Romans chapter 2, verses 14 through 16, where Paul talks about how while the law written on stone was given to the Jews, the Gentiles have God's law written on their hearts in the form of a conscience. So they are able to know what God demands of them.

So in his 1907 encyclical on Modernism, Pius X said: "Modernists do not deny, but actually admit, some confusedly, others in the most open manner, that all religions are true." He said that modernists believe this because they ground the truth of religion solely in the conviction of a religious person's experiences. But that creates relativism. But this is not the same as saying that some religions have more truth than others. The 1908 Catechism of Saint Pius X even says this. It defines infidels in this way: "Infidels are those who have not been baptized and do not believe in Jesus Christ, because they either believe in and worship false gods, as idolaters do, or though admitting one true God, they do not believe in the Messiah, neither has already come in the person of Jesus Christ, nor as to come, for instance, Muhammadans and the like." Or by that, they mean Muslims.

And there is no contradiction in saying that Muslims worship the one true God, if we understand that Muslims, unlike animists or Hindus, they correctly embrace monotheism, even if they don't fully understand what God is like, like the God is a Trinity. Taylor Marshall, who is no fan of Vatican II, put it this way in a 2014 article: "One can direct adoration in the right direction, but not understand the target. For example, if you shot an arrow downrange, but you had poor eyesight and could not see the target, then you might shoot in the right direction without seeing the destination. You shot the arrow at the proper target, but you don't see, no perceive or understand the target. Moreover, in this case, the bow would be too weak to get the arrow to the destination. The arrow would fall short. This blind archer with a weak bow is Islam. They shoot their arrow in the right direction, toward the God of Abraham, but they do not understand the target, and their bow is too weak because their bow lacks the power of grace."

So the Muslim adores the one true God, "quote unquote," just as a blind archer shoots at the one true target. Yet the Catholic adores the one true God as a well-practiced archer who can see the target and has a powerful 70-pound bow, stringed with grace through Christ. Our adoration is carried to the heart of God.

Now, I would say that in terms of, uh, Hellenism and natural theology, they're actually being kind of consistent. Because natural theology does lead to that conclusion. But natural theology is not consistent with the previous doctrines of no salvation outside the Church. Actually, you need both of them. If by natural theology you mean discovering truths about God through the use of human reason, then you must have both doctrines. That's because if God holds men morally accountable for their lack of belief, then there must have been something else they could have done in order to believe in Him. Of course, nobody can will of their own human power the gift of faith, but in order to receive the gift of faith from God, one must be able to intellectually assent to the proposition "God exists." And if a person has no control over whether they choose to assent to that statement, then they can't be held responsible if they don't believe in God. So, "ought implies can." If there is a moral duty to become Catholic, then a person must be able to do something, even if it's a miniscule act of assenting to belief that God exists, in order to cooperate with grace and choose to carry out this moral duty. Otherwise, if it's all up to God, who believes and who doesn't, then you have the monstrously arbitrary God of Calvinism, not the true God that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox worship.

Denzinger 401, Denzinger 444, these state that the Catholic Church does discriminate against heretics and against schismatics holding public office, etc., etc. And yet we have here a statement at the end of the Declaration *Nostra Aetate* that the Catholic Church, in the mind of Christ, does not discriminate against anybody on any basis. Excuse me, it does. We discriminate against the wicked and those who worship Satan or those who worship demons and false religions. The end of *Nostra Aetate* is talking about discrimination when it comes to people's fundamental rights, not whether a Catholic confessional state could require certain officeholders to be Catholic, as the Church did in past documents. *Nostra Aetate* talks about how God is "Father of all," and as a result, "no foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned. The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion."

In the specific context, the declaration is talking about Jewish persecution and says: "In her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone." What this means is that we can and should call our Jewish brothers and sisters to embrace Jesus the Messiah by being baptized and being welcomed into the Church Christ founded. However, we should not violate a Jewish person's dignity by practicing things like forced baptism or forcing Jewish people to live in certain neighborhoods or wear badges identifying themselves. The fact that some Popes and clerics required this in the past doesn't make those things some kind of unchangeable teaching, any more than the Second Lateran Council's prohibitions on jousting or crossbows and war. Those prohibitions weren't infallible, unchangeable teachings either.

Hopefully, you see the pattern here and what Jay Dyer is doing. He tries to manufacture a contradiction by reading past magisterial documents through a fundamentalist framework. In fact, it even says that Hindus, in Hinduism, love God. Well, actually, no. Hinduism is not a path to God, and it quite literally is obviously leaving open through all this vague language a way to interpret this in any way that you want. Could the council documents be clearer? Sure. But by the same token, Second Peter 3:16 says there are passages in Scripture that are difficult to understand. God could have inspired the sacred authors to make those easier to understand, but He didn't. Instead, and we don't criticize God for that, we humbly accept what He's chosen to do and seek to understand His Word. Of course, the conciliar documents are not divinely inspired, and the passages in Vatican II are not infallible declarations, but they should still be humbly accepted and read in a charitable light.

So let's look at what *Nostra Aetate* actually said about Hindus and read it as charitably as possible: "In Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust." All this is saying is that Hindus try to understand God. They obviously misunderstand God a great deal, but at least unlike atheists, they recognize a divine reality and try to understand it and have peace with it. Our job is to use this common ground we have then and help Hindus see that the ultimate revelation of God is found in Jesus Christ. None of that is contradicted by what is written in *Nostra Aetate*.

The next thing I would point out is the bizarre practices that we see in the world of Roman Catholicism. Fatima, Medjugorje, Marian apparitions. That these actually oftentimes do take the precedence in people's lives over actually knowing the Scriptures, knowing the Ten Commandments, knowing the Bible. I mean, I met in a lot of the Trad chapels that I was in, I met people who they didn't even know the Ten Commandments, but they knew, they knew every little detail of Fatima. Now, I'm not saying that that itself disproves the entire religion, but I'm saying that these are tendencies and bizarre practices. You know, things like stigmata happening only after the schism. These, these instances and manifestations of pre-list, and many, in many cases, there are instances of just outright bizarre superstitions that are tolerated and advocated. Heart worship, you know, we've covered this with Snack Ortho Rose Neck. So Dyer isn't in a bind here, because if private revelations are still given to Catholics after the schism, that could be seen as divine endorsement of Catholicism. Of course, God is free to give private revelation to anyone, even a non-believer, and in doing so, that doesn't bind God to endorsing everything the per- everything else the person believes or does. However, if Catholic saints are receiving visions from God, or things like the stigmata, shouldn't that make us more open to their claims, not less?

Also, this argument's basically name-calling. It doesn't disprove these things have happened or shown that these kinds of revelation couldn't possibly be from God. After all, someone could make the same argument against the Holy Fire tradition of the Eastern Orthodox. This is the belief that every Holy Saturday before the Orthodox Easter, blue fire miraculously emerges from Jesus's tomb in Jerusalem. Now, some people get superstitious about it, and it's possible it's a hoax, but it could also be genuine. But if all I said in response was that the Holy Fire, the Holy Fire is just nonsense, that'd be no different than Jay Dyer hand-waving away the private revelations given to Catholic saints after the Great Schism.

Finally, here is what the Orthodox Church of America's website says: "Stigmata, such as manifested in Padre Pio, are foreign to the Orthodox experience, and as such, the Church has no official position in this regard. There have been, however, such phenomena as weeping icons and the like within the Orthodox world. And in such cases, an investigation is undertaken to ascertain the legitimacy of such things, and the Church is generally cautious in immediately proclaiming them to be miracles." So at worst, an Orthodox could simply be agnostic when it comes to things like the stigmata. This kind of phenomena would not constitute an argument against Catholicism.

If you didn't hear the talk that we did on the Jesuits and the whole Jesuitical system of manipulation, that is something that we would obviously reject as Orthodox. And I think that that itself is also something to be, um, it's, it's significant enough to make it into the top ten. I mean, if you read Father, uh, Malachi Martin's book on the Jesuits, he himself, a former Jesuit who is dubious, I don't think he's a trustworthy character, but nor are any of the Jesuits. I mean, he comes out of that school of deception and trickery and psychological warfare. Wait, is this Jay Dyer or conspiracy theorist Jack Chick? And so he, he's a perfect exemplar, himself admitting that this whole institution is nonsensical, as well as undermining it and being part of the problem at Vatican II. Malachi Martin was actually at Vatican II, and he was involved with Cardinal Bea as a peritus, and these guys are all a problem. Father Malachi Martin is a former Jesuit who was dismissed from the clerical state and later became a critic of the Second Vatican Council. He also made many sensational claims not backed by the evidence. For example, he took a quote from Pope Paul VI about the "smoke of Satan" entering the Church, which was a general reference to the disorder of the 1960s playing havoc with Catholic norms and traditions, and turned it into some kind of coded reference to a group of Satanists performing secret rituals within the Vatican. The bottom line is that Father Malachi is just not trustworthy, as Dyer himself admits. So I don't see what he's trying to prove by citing him.

So I would say that the, um, again, the manifestations of bizarre practices, the, the female "quote unquote" saints who are obviously involved in histrionics, and who liken their their ecstatic experiences to sexual experiences, which we've shown many cases with Snack Ortho Rose Neck. Go listen about talk. I'll have that in the description as well, where we covered the Jesuits. He covered this extensively from the traditions in France. I also did a talk with James Kelly many years ago about heart worship and the Sacred Heart superstition, which is an historian. Right? Splitting up the worship of parts of Christ is specifically condemned at Ephesus as an historian. Nestorianism was a heresy that was condemned in the early Church because it essentially split God the Son into two persons. So at this time, there were people who were saying that Mary is not the Mother of God, she's not Theotokos, she's Christotokos, the Mother of Christ. And in doing this, they kind of split God the Son. We have God the Son and Jesus Christ being almost two separate persons that are united together. We don't believe that. We believe in the Incarnation. There is always only one divine person, God the Son. But in becoming incarnate, the Son assumes a human nature that is joined to His divine nature. So we have one person with a fully human and a fully divine nature. And so I think Dyer's objection, I've heard other people say this, and I don't quite get it. The idea that devotion to Christ's Sacred Heart is Nestorianism because we're adoring Jesus's heart as if it were distinct from His divine person. But that's not what is happening at all in the devotion of the Sacred Heart.

A good resource on that would be Pope Pius XII's encyclical *Haurietis Aquas*, "The Devotion to the Sacred Heart," published May 15, 1956. And I'll read you two excerpts from it to show the devotion of the Sacred Heart is not Nestorianism. So why do we have devotion of the Sacred Heart? Section 22 says that "Christ's heart, more than all the other members of His body, is the natural sign and symbol of His boundless love for the human race. There is in the Sacred Heart, as Our Predecessor of immortal memory Leo XIII pointed out, the symbol and express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love in return." So devotion to the Sacred Heart is not some kind of superstition or devotion to the heart merely as a biological organ. The heart is what is instrumental for God the Son to have a human life. And of course, we look in Scripture, we see that according to the biblical authors, the heart was the inner essence of a person. Talks about thinking in your heart, for example. And even anatomy and biology thought that the heart served the role that we now understand the brain to play. So it's not superstitious devotion to an organ. It's a way of showing our devotion to Jesus Christ, who truly became man because of His ever-abundant love for us.

Let me read you paragraphs 85 and 86 of Pius's encyclical: "Though it is no longer subject to the varying emotions of this mortal life, yet it lives and beats and is united inseparably with the person of the Divine Word." It's not an Arianism. We have one person, the Divine Word, fully human and fully divine nature, and in Him and through Him, with the divine will. So we are not creating some kind of corporal Christ that is adored apart from the Divine Word. We recognize that the heart of Jesus is the symbol of God the Son, the Divine Word becoming man, assuming a human nature, and of course, having a human heart that beat, that stopped beating when He died on the cross, and then continued to beat at His resurrection and continues to beat this very day as He reigns in heaven. So all these manifestations that we see, even to the point of stuff that may or may not have been accepted, like flagellants and whipping oneself and all this stuff, these are manifestations of faulty, bogus theology. The mortification of the flesh. Saying Gregory Palamas actually castigates Barlaam, the representative of Roman Catholicism, for teaching mortification. We don't mortify the flesh. We believe the flesh will be deified. So we don't think the body is evil. And I think that in Roman Catholicism, you have the tendency to those things. And so these bizarre practices are just manifestations of pre-list.

I think many Catholics today would be critical of some medieval mortification practices. However, when it's done right, in a spirit of denial, not in a spirit of thinking the flesh is evil, mortification leads us closer to God. The more you can say no to the flesh, the easier it is to say no to the devil. Eastern Christians, like Dyer, would agree, which is why you have the wonderful writings of Eastern ascetics, the desert monks, the desert fathers. But distorted practices in either the West or the East don't refute the larger Church they came out of.

The next thing I would say is the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank has a history of centuries of money laundering, scams, trickery. And I don't think anybody can honestly believe that Jesus intended to set Peter up with a giant global bank by which he could be involved in mafia money laundering, right? And we know that the global elite, the top families in the world, are part and parcel too, uh, running the Vatican Bank. This is an easily verifiable fact. And those evil families are essentially closely knit for centuries with this Vatican Bank institution. And there's nothing like that in the New Testament. There's nothing like that in the first millennium of the Church. Giant global banking houses involved in usury? Give me a break. The Vatican used to forbid usury. And after the Renaissance hermeticist period of the Vatican, they actually affirmed the usage of usury. So you can actually blame the Vatican for the rise of usury in the Western world. But the Roman Catholics and the Trad's don't like to talk about that, because in the Trad mindset, the problems of the of the Church are post-Vatican II. They don't actually go back to the Renaissance, even though you can demonstrate that these problems go back to the Renaissance in books like *Occult Renaissance* by Church of Rome. Careful, Jay.

This criticism would undermine any sufficiently large church. For example, back in the mid-2000s, the Orthodox Church in America was involved in a financial scandal. Here's what the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2006: "Allegations of financial misconduct are rocking the Orthodox Church in America, whose former treasurer says top officials misappropriated millions of dollars in donations from agribusiness titan Dwayne Andreas, U.S. military chaplains, and ordinary parishioners across the country. The highest officers of the 400,000-member denomination, an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church, are accused of using the money to cover personal credit card bills, pay sexual blackmail, support family members, and make up shortfalls in church accounts." So this is not a Catholic problem. It's a problem that's going to arise whenever you have human beings and money, and the group grows large enough, or even if it's small. I mean, Jesus had financial scandal among the Apostles, since they carried a common money bag, and John 12:6 tells us that Judas would steal from it.

I'm also not going to address his points on usury because Jay is just asserting that usury is wrong without defining his terms. And the Catholic Church would agree, charging interest in a way that exploits the poor is wrong, but fair lending isn't usury. That's a topic for another time. My main point, though, is that this, everything he's saying is just an argument for reforming the Vatican Bank, not for rejecting the Catholic Church that Jesus established.

So, uh, the payment debt legal Talmudic framework that we get in this idea of Anselm and God had to pay God off and this kind of stuff. The, uh, super abundant merits of the saints, the, the super abundant merits of Christ and Mary, this treasure of merits that then can be like a giant sky bank applied to your account, to your temporal punishments that you, you owe temporal punishments, right? And then you have to pay these off. If you do a devotion at this site, Marian's site, the Pope has granted you 50 days of temporal indulgence. This is all nonsense. Total nonsense. Completely foreign to the first millennium of the Church. Now, I'm very aware, as a former Roman Catholic, of how you try to justify this with, oh well, in the early Church, the bishop could impose a period of penance where you couldn't come to the, if you committed adultery, you couldn't come to communion for 40 days a year or whatever. And so if the bishop wanted to, he could relax that temporal, uh, punishment. That is a far cry from this nonsense of this being calculated up as to thousands, 10,000 days in purgatory, where you're burnt for, you know, spiritually burnt for a thousand years. This is all absurdity.

First, Jay is wrong about the language of debt not being used in the first millennium as a way to describe how the atonement works. Consider Saint Athanasius, for example. In his work *On the Incarnation*, he writes: "The death of all was accomplished in the Lord's body, and that death and corruption were wholly done away by reason of the Word that was united with it. For there was need of death, and death must needs be suffered on behalf of all, that the debt owing from all might be paid."

Second, theological speculation about purgatory has been varied throughout the centuries, but the Church does not have an official teaching on the nature of purgatory, aside from the fact that purgatory is unpleasant because it involves temporal punishment for sin. When it comes to the Church saying that indulgences remit a certain number of days in purgatory, my colleague Jimmy Aiken explains this formula this way: "The number of days that were attached to indulgences were not understood as shortening time in purgatory, but as easing the purification after death by an amount analogous to the shortening of an earthly penitential period by the number of days indicated." Because some people were confused by thinking purgatory was shortened by a set number of days with an indulgence, the Church abolished the day figures attached to indulgences specifically to eliminate this confusion.

And by the way, for many centers, as I showed in my article refuting Dr. Taylor Marshall, who won't debate, who is a coward, by the way, he blocked me because he knows he would lose the debate, I actually showed from his article where he completely contradicts himself about the idea of inherited original sin. After Augustine, it was normative for many, many centuries in the West to have a doctrine of inherited guilt. Absolutely. It's mentioned multiple times. In fact, and I even point out in the essay refuting Dr. Marshall, two places where Denzinger explicitly contradicts itself on this very point. So I'll also try to include that, uh, below in the comments.

So that whole payment debt legal system is just complete nonsense, completely foreign to the the mindset of all the early Fathers. They don't teach this. They don't operate this way. It's an innovation that evolves over time. And then when we get Anselm with the idea of God paying off God and God in this debt exchange, this leads to the Reformers and their penal substitution theory, which leads to, as we said, Arianism or Nestorianism or some anti-Trinitarianism to be consistent.

The Catholic Church has not dogmatically defined the nature of Christ's atonement. Paragraph 603 of the Catechism says: "Jesus did not suffer punishment for sin on the cross in our place." So that would rule out Protestant penal substitution models of the atonement. But it still leaves the door open to understanding precisely how Christ's death atones for sin. One way you could define it broadly so that Catholics or Orthodox could accept it would be to say that Christ changed and elevated human nature so that by becoming man and dying, His human life became a source of value so good that it outweighed all the harm caused by our sins and undoes the curse associated with our sins. Admittedly, that's broad, and we could go into finer detail about talking about Christ's death becoming a sacrifice that pays a debtor, or the recapitulation of human life that heals humanity, which is more common in Eastern Orthodoxy. But either way, the Catholic view of the atonement that is defined by the Church is abundantly supported by Scripture. Christ died for our sins and paid a ransom for many or all, depending on which verse you look at. And what is not defined is left up to theologians to address, and that's something that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox theologians can collaborate on when they seek to explain this mystery of our faith.

The next point I would make is that the Roman Catholic Church has lost its liturgical heritage. And this is the kind of one of the key signs that the Roman Catholic Church is not the true Church. In so far as it has almost globally, yes, there are some reverent Latin Masses here and there, I understand that, but for the most part, the just aberrations and blasphemies and absurdities, everything from priests bringing the hosts in with drones, priests riding clown cars, circuses in the church, techno mass, using cookies, using pizza, using water, using beer, using Coca-Cola in communion, clown masses, puppet masses, Bergoglio himself, the Pope himself, presided over puppet masses. This is absurd. This is clown church. And so this shows, this is a sign to everybody that they have not only lost the faith, they've lost any sense of reverence whatsoever. And these abuses are not specific to some area, they're globally abuses in the Roman Catholic community because Vatican II is a giant innovation. It's a, it's a, it's a light-year's leap in innovation, way beyond any of the innovations before. So yes, in the Orthodox perspective, the Vatican has, um, in many instances in the last millennium, innovated in a, in a big way. But Vatican II is a lightning year's leap. And then when you get things like Assisi, Assisi I and Assisi II, these giant interreligious prayer gatherings, which are, uh, another other instances of apostasy according to *Mirari Vos*. Now you get Pachamama, which is the next level, the next layer of that.

This is so overblown. I mean, I've been to cringy masses, but I've never personally seen a clown mass. I mean, you have oddball stuff that shows up on YouTube, but the vast majority of masses that I've been to, they're adequate in their presentation of the liturgy, and they have valid sacraments. The fact is, the vast majority of masses and Divine Liturgies throughout all of church history, they're done.

In humble rural churches or even personal homes, they lacked the grandeur we see in high masses or solemn divine liturgies. But as long as they were carried out in the proper spirit and the rules of the time were followed, they would be valid and even beautiful in their simplicity.

Do I agree that a large number of parishes in America and Europe are kind of in a liturgical winter and they need a renewal? Sure. Do I think that means they do not represent Christ's Church? Of course not. It is Christ himself to whom I pray to to bring about renewal in the Church and, more importantly, renewal in myself when I attend the liturgy.

So, really, it's just following through, uh, in, um, the logic, the dark logic of being more and more consistent with itself in terms of its innovations and apostasy. Ninth, I would say that the, um, and by the way, the Orthodox Church does not lose its reverence. Even quote, "liberal Greek churches" in Orthodoxy still have reverent worship. So we still, at least, preserve. There are no clown masses in Orthodoxy. So we, uh, one of the clear ways that we know that we are the true Church is that we still preserve the reverent, holy, beautiful liturgical worship of God. And the Roman Catholic Church has abandoned this. And it's not just abandoned this in certain sections; it's abandoned it from the top down. If you read *Octuorum Fide*, which is a condemnation of the Jansenists, *Octuorum Fide* actually says that it is a condemned proposition to believe that the Holy See, the Roman See, can give bad and defective rites to the Church as a whole.

I agree the Eastern Church has maintained a beautiful liturgy. That's one reason I attend a Byzantine Catholic Church. But don't act like there isn't a liberal problem in Eastern Orthodoxy. When a religion stays small, it's easy to maintain doctrinal purity. But studies have shown that as Orthodox parishes get larger, the attendance at the Divine Liturgy drops to levels comparable to what you find at Catholic parishes. Other studies show that one-third of Eastern Orthodox identify as moderate or liberal. So it's not as neat and tidy as Dyer makes it out to be.

However, when it comes down to it, I would rather have an adequate liturgy that represents a Church that retains Christ's perennial teaching on contraception, divorce, the authority of Peter's successor over a beautiful liturgy that belongs to a theological tradition whose doctrines or moral truths are problematic or even false. So every Trad who believes that the Roman See has given these rites to the Church, which they have, is also condemned under *Octuorum Fide*. That's in Denzinger. Just go, just go read *Octuorum Fide*. Uh, so there you go. That's another clear instance of contradiction because all the Trads will say that the rites are problematic. Most of them. Some of them won't say that. Oh, well, we could clean these up and we could have a reverent Novus Ordo, or whatever. But strictly speaking, typically most of the Trads think that that, uh, uh, the fish rots from the head down, right? And the problem is the papacy. If they're being honest with themselves, right? It's not that the, oh, the papacy can't do what it wants to do. And, oh, a Ratzinger is hemmed in by a bunch of liberals and he's surrounded by liberals, he can't get his policies through. This kind of BS that we hear about, you know, come on, give me a break. He's the Pope. If he wanted to, he could excommunicate every liberal out there, but he doesn't do that. Um, and so the ninth point, I would say, is the theological points that we bring up. That we've done countless talks and lectures on. I'll include, I'll include links below for each one of these points if you want to delve deeper into that. But the addition of the Filioque. Everyone admits that this is an addition and a change to the Creed. For those of you who don't know, Filioque is a Latin term that means "and the Son." In the Creed, we say, "I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son." This is a sticking point among the Eastern Orthodox, who say the Holy Spirit only proceeds from the Father. However, the difference is really more of a semantic one than a theological one. I'll let Dyer unspool a little on it and then add my thoughts. Uh, and we had previous Popes who specified that the Creed could not be changed. They actually agreed with us, the Orthodox. They actually signed on to the Orthodox Eighth Synod, right, agreeing with us that the Creed can't be changed. And then after that, successive Popes said, "Oh, we reversed that decision. Now we decided that the Creed can be changed. We can add the Filioque. We can upset the balance of the Triad and the monarchy of the Father. The Father is no longer the sole monarchy of the Godhead. Now the Son participates in his specific hypostatic property." And so we get from that error on divine simplicity, absolute simplicity, the modal collapse. We get the errors of created grace, which flow from that. We get the error of the doctrine of noose, and just a mind, intellect, slash body dichotomy, duality in terms of anthropology and their view of man. We get errors on Christology, where there's a lot of Nestorianism in Latin Western theology, even even in Roman Catholic circles, they're a Nestorian oftentimes without even knowing it. We get the Beatific Vision heresy, which is Origenism, and which is Platonism, directly out of Origenism and Platonism.

Well, that's a lot he's throwing out there. But to focus on one issue, the East and West have made great strides over the centuries to resolve the dispute over Filioque. First, there is a recognition that the Spanish bishops added it to the Creed in the 6th century to counter the Arian heresy that denied Christ's divinity. As a result, if the Orthodox were to have communion with Catholicism again, we could choose to not recite that part of the Creed because it wasn't original to it. And the West actually didn't formally use the Filioque in the Creed until after the Great Schism in the 11th century. In fact, in 2003, the North American Orthodox-Catholic Consultation issued this joint statement which read, in part: "The Catholic Church acknowledges the conciliar, ecumenical, normative, and irrevocable value as the expression of one common faith of the Church and of all Christians of the symbol professed in Greek at Constantinople in 381 by the Second Ecumenical Council. No confession of faith peculiar to a particular liturgical tradition can contradict this expression of faith taught and professed by the undivided Church." Personally, I'm partial to the phrase, "The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son," which acknowledges the Bible's teachings about the Son sending the Holy Spirit, but also recognizes the Father's unique generative role in the Godhead. Now, I know for a lot of people, we're getting into pretty deep theological waters, but you could wrap it all up by saying this difference is not insurmountable between Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. In fact, the Catechism says the Western and Eastern traditions on the Filioque, it says of it this way: "This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed."

All of those things are completely rejected in the Orthodox Fathers. And if you go back to the, uh, Ecumenical Council, that's the Sixth Council, specifically the disputation with Purists, you'll see the same Maximus bases his Christological arguments on the essence-energy distinction, and the Council includes dogmatic statements about the essence-energy distinction in Christology. So the Roman Catholic Church no longer teaches those things and has explicitly, in many, many cases, denied the essence-energy distinction or actually said contradictory things to allow the Uniates to come in while they also affirm things like Trent, or Vatican I, where divine simplicity negates and excludes, uh, the the essence-energy distinction. The acceptance of Thomism, obviously, as the official philosophy of the Church. We could never unite with Thomism. Even, even Gennadius Scholarios, in the Orthodox Church, says that the main problem with us is that we could not ever accept Aquinas's divine simplicity doctrine. And he's one of the most, uh, favorable to Aquinas amongst the Eastern, uh, theologians. So, um, if we read, you know, the debate with the Barley Might by Saint Gregory Palamas, which I've covered many times, you see very clearly the two Triadologies, the two Christologies are night and day. They don't match up. They're totally different. That whole book is saying that Rome, Catholicism, is heretical. So so much for the ecumenical movements to try to blend Palamas with Aquinas. Yeah, I'm not even going to try to break down Jay's criticisms of divine simplicity or the essence-energy distinction because he's just referencing them and it would bog down our treatment of all of his arguments. But in a nutshell, Dyer says divine simplicity, the idea that God has no parts, even metaphysical ones, is false. So Catholicism is false. In favor of this, he, like many other Eastern Orthodox, would say there is a real distinction between what God is, which we can't understand, his essence, and what God does in the world, or his energies, which is something we can understand. This is also called the energies-essence distinction.

But is this an insurmountable difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy? David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, and he says the denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism. But David Bentley Hart also has views that are basically heretical when it comes to salvation. But because he's wrong on that issue doesn't mean he's wrong about the divine nature. But at the end of the day, this is a very complex topic, and Jay hasn't really given me enough to work with to offer a substantive critique. The early Eastern Fathers do affirm things about God that makes sense under the banner of divine simplicity. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, or Saint Gregory the Theologian, says, for example, that God is like a kind of boundless and limitless sea of being, surpassing all thought and time and nature. Moreover, we have to remember that Western theology is not the same as Thomism, as there are other views in the West like the philosophy of Duns Scotus that can come closer to accommodating Eastern philosophy or Eastern theology like Palamism. But this topic would best be served in another episode. So for now, I'd recommend checking out an article on the subject by the Byzantine Catholic priest Father Christian Capps, or Kappas, I don't know his last name is pronounced, Father Christian Capps, K-P-P-E-S, and an interview he did on Reason and Theology, both of which I'll link to in the description of the video below.

The last point I would say is that the Roman Catholic Church basically is, in our day, a tool of globalism. It's a tool of the international Anglo-American establishment, primarily. This came into being mainly at the time of and after Vatican II. And this is detailed by the traditional Catholic lawyer David Wimhoff. Himself, David Wimhoff is still a traditional Catholic, and he's written a giant 800-page book with a thousand-plus footnotes or so, documenting the CIA's usage of the Roman Catholic Church for its doctrinal warfare program. Again, he's not a conspiracy theorist; he's a traditional Catholic lawyer, and he's gone into great detail in his book, uh, called *The American Proposition*, John Courtney Murray, Time magazine, right? And *The American Proposition*, the CIA's doctrinal warfare program using the Catholic Church to turn it into an institution, uh, that was used for the promotion of Americanism during the Cold War.

So I looked up the book Dyer is referring to, and it's out of print, and the only review of it online doesn't exist anymore. So it's not much more to say about that. Look, I wouldn't be surprised if during the Cold War, the CIA worked with the Vatican to bring down a mutual enemy, Communism. NPR produced a report on this a few years ago, which said the following: "From the first day of his election, John Paul II's pontificate raised concern in Central Committee headquarters of the Soviets, KGB." The Canadian reporter Eric Margolis described it this way: "I was the first Western journalist inside the KGB headquarters in 1990. The generals told me that the Vatican and the Pope, above all, was regarded as their number one most dangerous enemy in the world."

So, um, there are some other runner-up, uh, critiques that we could make. Like, um, you know, randomly picking out guys like, "Oh, we just, we follow Augustine and Aquinas." Like, those are that's our two dudes, right? Like, giant shelves of Aquinas, right? Well, but, but no, wait a minute. This is a Church that's ecumenical. *Oikoumene* in the truest sense, in the classical sense, meaning the empire, right? The emperor is called the Ecumenical Patriarch, not the Pope, right? So this is a Church that is supposed to be universal. How can a universal Church be embodied in one dude? And so what we get in Catholicism ultimately is *sola papam*, right? The Pope alone. And what does all of Roman Catholic apologetics ultimately end up being? Papal lawyerism, defending the Pope and defending the office of the papacy. That's the whole thing.

So I agree with Dyer that when it comes down to disputes between Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxy, it's similar to when we have disputes between Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants. The ultimate issue is going to be authority. What is your authority? For Protestants, *sola scriptura*. Both Dyer and I disagree with that. For Eastern Orthodox, you would probably say, well, it's Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Uh, but you, you, I mean, people say, well, he's an Orthodox, he has a Magisterium. It gets kind of fuzzy defining what that is. It certainly doesn't have anything like the papacy to be able to unite all the Eastern Patriarchs. So just as we disagree about authority with Protestants, among Catholics and Orthodox who disagree, what is our ultimate authority? We both agree in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. But did Christ give us a Magisterium? And in particular, a Magisterium that has a visibly defining and unifying element?

So Dyer says, "Well, how can you have a universal Church with one man at the top?" I would say, "How could you have a universal Church without one leader?" Look at any other human organization. Look at countries, corporations, entities that spread throughout the globe around the world, any other kind of kingdom, nation, corporation, whatever human organization it may be, it has one leader to provide unity and structure to the organization. Even in Scripture, we look at the kingdom of Israel, for example. God is King over Israel, but Israel still had a human king. And even that human king had a prime minister or a chancellor of the exchequer to oversee the kingdom on his behalf. And that was the role of the Pope. Christ is King of the Church. He's King of the world. He's King of, uh, the Church to over, He's King of all, obviously. Christ the King. But the Pope serves kind of as his vizier, the chancellor, who oversees Christ's Church in his place. That's why we call him the Vicar of Christ. We think of Luke 10:16: "He who hears you hears me." He stands in Christ's place, not as a tyrant to lord his authority over other people, but as a humble servant, just like when Jesus said that among the apostles, "the least among you shall be the greatest." You, the one who leads shall be a servant to the others. And so that is the role of Peter to the other apostles, and of Peter's successors to the other bishops in the Church, to provide that unity. Because without it, without the Pope being kind of the hub of the wheel, instead, what do you have with Eastern Orthodoxy? Do you have a universal Church like Dyer is talking about? No, you have national churches. You have churches that are fractured. You have churches that are bound together more by ethnic and national heritage than by one universal deposit of faith lived and celebrated throughout the world.

So, and of course, there's a lot of other questions that can come up when we talk about Catholicism, Orthodoxy. But it's not bad if our focus is essentially on the papacy, or even on a broader question: What is the nature of the authority of the bishops, the patriarchs, their successors? Uh, do they all have an equal claim to authority, or does the Bishop of Rome have special authority? And so maybe Dyer and I will have a debate about that in the future. I don't know. But for now, I hope that you got a lot out of this video. If you want to learn more about the Catholic view of Eastern Churches, there's a lot of great resources out there. Aidan Nichols, the Dominican theologian, has a book called *Rome and the Eastern Churches* that is very good. If you want to learn about Eastern Catholic Churches, Catholic Answers has a booklet called *20 Answers: Eastern Catholicism*. You might find to be interesting. But, um, hey, thank you guys so much. Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to always catch more rebuttals that come up, and, uh, visit us at trenhornpodcast.com to continue to support the work we're doing here. Thank you guys. I hope you have a very blessed day. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you want to help us produce more great content like this, be sure to click subscribe and go to trenhornpodcast.com to become a premium subscriber. You'll help us create more videos like this and get access to bonus content and sneak peeks of our upcoming projects.