In this episode, Trent Horn comments on the controversy surrounding Pope Francis’ endorsement of Fr. Martin’s LGBT Conference and shows how Protestant criticisms of the Pope can be used to undermine Christianity itself.
Transcript:
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn, and today I want to talk about when Protestants weaponize Pope Francis. Now, Pope Francis has said a fair number of things that cause confusion, and he can be rightfully and respectfully criticized when he’s failed to provide the clarity he really should provide as the pastor of Christ’s Church. But I also think that some Protestants, who take advantage of this to argue against the papacy, are doing something that can be turned against the Christian faith itself. It’s not a smart strategy.
But before I tell you why, just a reminder. Please like this video and subscribe to our channel. If you want to take part also in my weekly patron-only live streams every Wednesday night, check us out at trenthornpodcast.com.
All right, so last month, Pope Francis sent a handwritten note to Father James Martin to support a conference he was going to put on at Fordham University that took place this June. Outreach, which calls itself an LGBTQ Catholic Resource, released the Pope’s note on June 14th, then said this in an article accompanying it.
“In a letter dated May 6th, 2023, Pope Francis has sent his greetings to attendees at the Outreach LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference to be held at Fordham University in New York City from June 16th to the 18th. The handwritten letter, sent to James Barton, SJ, the editor of Outreach, thanks him for all the good you are doing and promises his prayers and good wishes to all the participants of the conference. ‘I send my best regards to the members of the meeting at Fordham University,’ wrote the Holy Father. ‘Thank you for delivering it to them. In my prayers and good wishes are you and all who are working at the Outreach Conference.'”
What I want to talk about today are the responses that I saw from two Protestant apologists, Jordan Cooper, who is a Lutheran, and James White, who is a Reformed Baptist. Cooper said in a cheeky way, “Behold the unchanging Church and the infallible magisterium.” He then offered more tweets to follow up what he meant, and I’ll talk about those later. James White had a more forceful response on the Dividing Line.
James White:
Because your Pope doesn’t agree with you. Oh, he may say, “Well, you know it’s disordered,” and he’ll repeat some of the stuff’s been said. If you believe that, you don’t write these letters, and you know it. You know it.
Trent Horn:
Now, there’s a simple Catholic response to all of this. The doctrine of papal infallibility only protects the Pope from error under very limited circumstances. The Pope will not err when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals and intends to define a dogma. Likewise, the bishops as a whole will not err when they intend to define something at an ecumenical council.
Now, Cooper and White know this, so they give basically one of two responses. First, there’s the claim that the letter to Father Martin is evidence against papal infallibility. We just need a wider understanding of that doctrine. Second, there’s the claim that the letter to Father Martin is not evidence against papal infallibility per se, but it undercuts the pragmatic benefits of being Catholic. One is a principled argument, the other is a pragmatic argument.
Let’s start with the principled argument, which I worry mirrors how atheists attack biblical inerrancy. Yes, another case of when Protestants argue like atheists. Buy my book. So how does that happen? Before I get to Cooper and White’s specific arguments, I want to talk about a more general kind of argument like this. I’ll use the Protestant philosopher Jerry Walls as an example.
So Protestants will sometimes say that the papacy is not of a divine origin, because if it were, it wouldn’t cause so much confusion. The Pope shouldn’t only be infallible when he speaks ex cathedra. If the Pope were really the Vicar of Christ, they say, we’d observe many other things the Holy Spirit prevents the Pope from doing. For example, the Holy Spirit would ensure the Pope at least has basic moral integrity. That’s what Jerry Walls says, at least.
So Wall’s argument is that if the papacy has a divine origin, then, “All popes would meet the basic New Testament standard for bishops, or at the very least be persons of sincere faith in Christ and basic moral integrity, because the Pope is the chief shepherd, who is uniquely chosen to lead the Church, and who represents a providentially guaranteed succession beginning with Peter.” This means, for example, that the bad popes of the Middle Ages show the papacy doesn’t have a divine origin, even if they weren’t being heretical, if they were just being really immoral.
But as I note in my book, when Protestants argue like atheists, atheists say the same thing about the Bible. The 18th Century philosopher Thomas Payne wrote in a pamphlet, called The Age of Reason, the following. “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God.”
First, notice the exaggeration. If you’ve read the Bible, you know the spicy topics are pretty rare, but some atheists exaggerate that for rhetorical effect. Likewise, when apologists like Jordan Cooper say, “The Pope offers no guidance or help to the world, but consistently confusing statements,” he’s also engaging in similar rhetorical exaggeration.
That’s why I said to Cooper in reply online, “I don’t mind the jabs, as it helps start conversations.” I said that, because Cooper admitted earlier to ticking-off Catholics with his post. “What’s hard would be generalizations, like the Pope offers no guidance. He says gender ideology is terrible and says abortion is like hiring a hitman. That’s good guidance. The Bible shows God often uses mediocre people. In fact, sometimes God uses morally corrupt people as leaders.”
Consider the Book of Judges that describes how God raised up certain judges to deliver Israel, but some of these judges committed evils on par with the bad medieval popes, or even worse. For example, Gideon led God’s people into idolatry by creating a golden ephod that they worshiped. Samson visited a prostitute, and he broke Israel’s ritual holiness laws. Or what about Jephthah? He vowed to sacrifice a human being in order to win a battle, and he ended up sacrificing his own daughter.
And finally, though he wasn’t a judge of Israel, the Bible calls Lot righteous, and he served as a judge at the gates of Sodom, but Lot offered his daughters to a rape hungry mob. And later in Genesis, he got so drunk, he ended up having intercourse with them. Well, a Protestant would probably say, “Christianity does not teach that everyone God chooses to lead his people will have basic moral integrity. That’s merely an assumption on the part of the critic.”
All right. Well, Catholics can say the same thing to Protestants. Catholicism never teaches that the popes God chooses will always be moral, that they will always make the best judgements. Besides, God probably does not even choose the Pope like he chose the Judges in scripture. He allows the cardinals to elect a pope. Pope Benedict XVI even said the Holy Spirit might only ensure the cardinals don’t pick the worst pope, not that they will pick the best one.
Or consider this. Some people get mad that Pope Francis says things like, ‘Consuming fake news is like having coprophilia,’ a sexual attraction to feces. That’s gross, right? How could the Vicar of Christ ever talk like that? Well, Muslims like to say the Bible is not the word of God, because it symbolically talks about apostate Israel being a prostitute who lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Here’s Muslim apologist Shabir Ally saying the Bible is not the word of God, because a divinely inspired book just should not sound like this.
Shabir Ally:
That a certain woman lusted after men, who had members the size of that and whose emission was the extent of that, like horses and donkeys. If a book describes history by gratuitously including sexual imagery, those parts of that book cannot be the word of God. And I would say that the Bible often does this. And in fact, why don’t you read it from the Children’s Bible, so that folks can be sure what is there in the Children’s Bible, Young Explorer’s Bible, your international version, I’ll leave that with you. It’ll be here when you come back.
Trent Horn:
How would a Protestant respond to this? He’d probably say that these verses do not contradict Proverbs 35, which says every word of God is pure, because he would say with a straight face that God is free to talk about humans having donkey-sized penises with impressive rates of ejaculation, because he wants to make a graphic point about idolatry, full stop. But if you say anything like that about why the Pope might use shocking language, well, that’s just Pope-splaining, and it should be ignored.
So to summarize, it’s self-destructive if Protestants redefine papal infallibility, even implicitly, in order to say that if the papacy has a divine origin, then the Pope would not only never err ex cathedra, he would say what a divinely chosen Vicar of Christ ought to say, at least according to their standards. If you go this route, it opens the door, though, for non-Christians to say the Bible is not inerrant, because it doesn’t meet their personal standards of what a divinely written text ought to say.
So back to White and Cooper, I would ask them how many bad prudential judgements is the Pope allowed to make while still being the divinely protected Vicar of Christ? One? A dozen? 100 and a 20-year pontificate? How many? Was St. Peter no longer an apostle, and we should question the inerrancy of his letters, because he made a bad prudential judgment in Galatians 2 by not dining with gentile Christians? Wouldn’t that action reveal in his heart that he doesn’t really believe in the gospel or that we’re saved by faith in Christ and not works of the law? Of course not. That’s a silly argument.
Peter’s moral failing says nothing about his personal theology. Thomas Shriner, a reformed theologian, says, “Peter and Paul still agreed, theologically. Paul rebukes Peter, because the latter acted against his convictions.” Now, consider the following argument from James White that claims Pope Francis’ letter is on par with the infamous letter Pope Honorius wrote to the Patriarch Sergius, where the Pope seems to defend the heresy of monothelitism or that Christ has only one will.
James White:
I remember a Pope named Honorius, wrote a letter to Sergius, another bishop in the East, and what he said in that letter on a theological issue led to his being identified as a heretic and anathematized by every person who took his position as Bishop of Rome for 400 years. This was a letter to a priest, a person with position in the Church, similar to an Honorius’ letter to Sergius, on a matter of faith and morals, on a matter of application of faith and morals in the Church.
Speaker 6:
Right.
James White:
And they always want to go, “Oh no, no. It’s just a personal letter. It doesn’t matter.” It shows what he believes.
Trent Horn:
James, what are you talking about? Francis’ letter to Father Martin is like Honorius’ letter to Sergius? Here is the translated text of Pope Francis’ letter. It goes, “Dear brother, thank you very much for your email. Thank you for all the good you are doing. Thank you. I pray for you. Please do so for me. I send my best regards to the members of the meeting at Fordham University. Thank you for delivering it to them. In my prayers and good wishes are you and all who are working at the Outreach Conference. Again, thank you. Thank you for your witness. May Jesus bless you and the Holy Virgin take care of you. Fraternally, Francisco.”
There’s nothing doctrinal in this letter, nothing. How do you get from this letter to Pope Francis probably thinks homosexual conduct is moral? That’s the heresy that you’re insinuating. Pope Francis doesn’t even use social media, so I doubt he knows about all the controversial things Father Martin says. The Pope is an 86-year-old man who has bad advisors. He probably just thinks Father Martin only wants to help gay people love Jesus. Should the Pope fire his bad advisors and take better control of the Church and recognize what Father Martin is really doing? Absolutely, and he can be criticized for failing to do that, but those actions do not disprove the papacy or prove that Pope Francis is a heretic on homosexuality.
White also claims that Pope Francis’s behavior with Father Martin shows that the Pope pretends to affirm Church doctrine, but he’s secretly part of a long-term plan to change Church teaching.
James White:
Oh, he may say, “Well, it’s disordered.” He’ll repeat some of the stuff that’s said. If you believe that, you don’t write these letters, and you know it. You know it. And I recognize that it would be difficult on a practical level to make a fundamental change in one step. I get that. But he’s not doing it in one step. He’s filling the Papal Biblical Commission with his acolytes, the cardinals with his acolytes, and that is changing everything.
Trent Horn:
Of course, this is just a conspiracy theory without any evidence presented in its favor, and that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. After all, it’s possible the Pope isn’t malicious, he’s just being careless or naive. What’s hard is that Father Martin does not outright reject the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. He has what sounds like an orthodox take on the issue in an article in America Magazine, called “What the Church Teaches About Homosexuality.”
What makes Father Martin sneaky is that he casts doubt on the teaching by promoting articles that make it seem like it lacks biblical support or doing things that make homosexual conduct seem like any other minor sin we don’t even notice. In fact, White even compares the Outreach Conference to the Protestant Revoice Conference, one that’s held among Presbyterians. Here’s what he says.
James White:
And if you’ve got these high level people performing mass at the Catholic equivalent of the Revoice Conference, don’t tell me you actually believe that’s the sacrifice of Christ.
Trent Horn:
Tim Challies, who is a conservative reformed Protestant, summarizes the controversy over the Protestant Revoice Conference. Here’s what he says.
“Those who advocate the conference and those who do not have this common ground. One, no party is currently advocating for changing the view on the sinfulness of homosexuality in the PCA. Two, all agree as appropriate to call on people to be celibate rather than act out in a way that is sexually sinful. Three, all agree that homosexuals can be redeemed, and both parties earnestly desire to see such happen. Four, all have an orthodox evangelical desire to minister the gospel to those with same-sex attraction. The real source of disagreement, then, is language in terms such as gay Christians, sexual minorities, and LGBT+ Christians.”
That sounds like some of the people who were speaking at the Outreach Conference, and Father Martin would probably say he belongs to that non-dissenting group. That would explain how he would get support from Pope Francis, because Martin is not explicitly dissenting from Church teaching.
Now, there were people at the conference that do dissent from the Church’s teaching, people like Father Bryan Massingale, who is an openly gay priest, he calls for gay weddings to be performed. But once again, Father Martin is a slippery character. Check out my video on that subject. And he can always retreat to saying that he’s just asking questions. He’s not challenging Church teaching, he just wants to be welcoming. You shouldn’t believe that, but it’s a far cry from saying that the Pope wishing Father Martin well is on par with Pope Honorius, who sounded like he was defending a heresy, the heresy of monothelitism, in his letter to Sergius, a letter that actually does talk about doctrine, unlike the letter from Pope Francis to Father Martin. That is just a letter of well-wishing, an imprudent well-wishing, but a non-doctrinal one.
Also, there’s a good case that Honorius was not a heretic in the classic sense of the word. As I argue in my book, The Case for Catholicism, even non-Catholic scholars, like the renowned historian Jaroslav Pelikan, doubt Honorius was teaching the heresy of monothelitism or that Christ only had one will. And later conciliar condemnations were about Honorius’ failure to stop a heresy, not him binding the Church to the heresy.
White also seems to be saying that if you have to awkwardly explain it, it doesn’t have a divine origin, or if you have to awkwardly explain something like Pope Francis, then that thing you’re awkwardly explaining is not really guided by the Holy Spirit. Here’s what he says.
James White:
For Catholic apologists since Francis became Pope, full-time job making excuses for Francis. That’s what you do, you make excuses for Francis. That’s not what you guys were doing with John Paul II. What are you all going to … How many red pills is it going to take, and on what basis could you ever say he was wrong? You can’t. You can try, but you’ve accepted an unbiblical office.
Trent Horn:
But the idea that an awkward explanation shows the thing you’re explaining is not guided by the Holy Spirit, that can be turned against the Bible itself. The heretic Marcion told Christians in the 2nd Century, “Are you sure the Old Testament is as inspired as the New Testament? Man, you seem to have a lot more trouble explaining the Old Testament with its wrathful God and the commands to kill women and children than you have for explaining the New Testament.” If the Bible is equally inspired, even though parts of it may require more explanation, then the Popes can have equal authority, even if some of them require more explanation for the difficulties they raise than others.
Now, some Protestants complain about the explanations and caveats related to papal infallibility, like how it only applies under narrow circumstances. The late Protestant apologist, Norm Geisler, said, “Once all the qualifications are placed on papal infallibility, both in theory and in practice, it is defrocked of its glory.” But in Geisler’s own works defending the inerrancy of scripture, he applies qualifications to inerrancy. He says it only applies to the original autographs, which allows copious errors to appear in later manuscripts. He says inerrancy does not require the Bible to use scientific language, exact numbers, or even record the exact words that Jesus or the apostles used on different occasions. For example, here’s William Lane Craig explaining how there is a difference between what the Bible says and what the Bible means.
William Lane Craig:
What the doctrine of inerrancy affirms that the Bible is true in all that it teaches. Now, notice that that’s different from saying that the Bible is true in all that it says. For example, when Jesus says if you have faith like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds, then you can move mountains. Jesus isn’t teaching botany there. He’s teaching a lesson about faith. And so the fact that mustard seeds turn out not to be the smallest seeds in the world, that there are orchids that have tinier seeds than mustard seed, is not a reflection at all on Jesus’ teaching, because it’s a teaching about faith, and he uses a culturally relative illustration of how even small faith can have great impact.
James White:
The whole doctrine of papal infallibility is utterly irrelevant.
Speaker 6:
It’s a joke.
James White:
Because the Pope is right, unless he’s wrong, and you never know whether he is wrong or not.
Trent Horn:
But atheists make the same objection to biblical inerrancy. They describe inerrancy as saying the Bible is right, unless it’s wrong, and if it’s wrong, those parts aren’t literal or need context to explain them, as can be seen in this atheist cartoon.
Speaker 7:
“Every word of God is flawless. He’s a shield to those who take refuge in him.” “Mmm.” “Let us love one another, for love comes from God.” “Mmm.” “A priest’s daughter, who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death.” “Gasp.”
James White:
Out of context. That’s not what it means. You’re leaving out the important parts of it. Now, come on, come on. You twisted the meaning of that. [inaudible 00:21:41] the Bible. The historical context. You’re leaving out the important parts of that. Why you have to take one verse on its own. That’s for a different time and a different culture.
Trent Horn:
So if White can mock Catholics for claiming that not everything the Pope says falls under infallibility, then atheists can mock White or William Lane Craig for claiming that not everything the Bible says falls under inerrancy. When Catholics give similar explanations for Bible difficulties, that’s not considered Bible-splaining to roll your eyes at. But when they say the meaning of Pope Francis’ words have been misunderstood, or he is trying to say X, not Y, well, that’s just eye-rolling-inducing Pope-splaining designed to cover up an error.
Now, I do want to be fair that some Catholic apologists will try to excuse every single thing Pope Francis says and try to make it seem like he never makes mistakes. We should not do that. Papal infallibility is not like biblical inerrancy. The Bible is without error in everything that it asserts. The Pope is only without error when he makes specific assertions, like ex cathedra statements. That means the vast majority of the time, the Pope can err, and when he does make an error, it should be noted.
But those instances of error say nothing about whether the papacy has a divine origin, because the Church never claims the Holy Spirit will prevent all types of papal error. If Protestants are allowed to defend biblical inerrancy by narrowing its scope and saying the Bible does not have to say everything atheists wished its said or didn’t say, then Catholics are allowed to defend papal infallibility by narrowing its scope and saying the Pope does not have to say everything Protestants wished he said or didn’t say.
For example, if you can argue against the papacy because the Pope failed to say what you think he should have said, then what do you do with atheists who say the Bible, God’s very word, should say what they think it should have said, like the Bible should have clearly condemned evils like slavery or directly killing civilians in war.
Speaker 8:
I don’t think that we should expect to find in a book, whose author is the divine moral author and wants people to understand that slavery is a bad thing, I don’t think we shou... Read more on Catholic.com