Joe gives advice to Catholics on how to respond to scandal in the Church, in light of recent allegations brought forward against Alex Jurado.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I think it’s important to talk about some of the allegations involving Alex Jurado better known online as voice of reason. Now, I hate internet drama and I don’t think it’s spiritually healthy to get involved in gossip of who did and said various things, but there are some important reasons. I think this particular set of allegations are ones that I should step in on and I’ll explain why. First, the allegations I get into all the salacious details basically involve this. There are allegations of various sexually inappropriate communications with him and adult women and one allegation of sexually inappropriate conversations with a teenage minor. Now as of the time of this recording Tuesday evening, Alex has disputed the second of those and both are scandalous and both are leading a lot of people to have a lot of thoughts.

We’ll just say that, and I’m not in a situation where I can tell you the truth or falsity of various allegations. I don’t know. I found out this whole controversy yesterday morning, seemingly a day after everyone on Twitter, and I’m not here to share some new gossipy information, anything like that. I have nothing to share nor would I want to share it. What I do have is this a little bit of guidance from having gone through some of this more than some of you have. So let me explain why I think it’s important for me to address it. Number one, I praised Alex recently and he’s said some very nice things about me, given that it’d be very strange to just say nothing in this context. Number two, he’s someone who’s had some affiliations with Catholic answers. Now he’s not like in a Catholic answers apologist, but he is someone who’s been on the radio show before and someone who we’ve promoted various things that he has said.

And so again, it’d be strange to just pretend like that didn’t happen. But the most important reason I think is the third one, which is that I think many of the people who are experiencing this, who are watching all of this play out in real time are people for whom this is the first time that they’ve looked up to someone in the Catholic world and then felt like that person was going down in flames. And then the emotional and spiritual damage that that can cause is something that I think we have to seriously grapple with. Now, some of you watching like me are old enough to remember 2003 where there was just a tidal wave of scandals when the first stories about priestly sexual abuse were made public and it was seemingly one scandal after another. And if you’ve survived that, you’re probably in a very different position than someone who say is a recent convert or this is their first time really grappling with this because we can say, look, in some ways this is a tale as old as time.

You go back to the early 11 hundreds and you’ve got people like Peter Avalard, the most famous philosopher in Europe who is preying upon a female student. He actually takes her on as a student to seduce her. He ends up getting her pregnant, her uncle who’s a priest finds out and as Peter Castrated, and it becomes this huge Europe wide scandal that we still remember 900 years later. Thanks be to God, this isn’t like that. But the notion that people can know the faith really well and still not be in good control of their own passions isn’t a new story, but it is a story that I would suggest the internet is making worse. And so I want to address a few things. Number one, as someone who’s in this public facing Catholic space, how do we navigate that? Well, number two, what do you do if you’re someone who is reacting to this and this is really hurting?

And number three, how do you make sure that you yourself don’t go down that road where you end up leading a double life or you’re not practicing what you preach? So I want to actually begin with those who have been really helped, whether it’s by Alex’s stuff or anyone who maybe you’re watching this six months from now and it’s some other person whose channel I didn’t even know about, or maybe it’s the priest at your parish. What do you do when someone has really benefited you spiritually and then they’re embroiled in some kind of scandal?

I’d say a few things. Number one, it’s not crazy that this would have an impact on your faith because part of good persuasion is what Aristotle calls ethos. Now, ethos means this, that when you’re persuading someone, there’s basically very broadly speaking, three ways to do it. There’s logos just, okay, here’s the argument. Let me give you all of the details. There’s pathos where they tug your heartstrings. You could be doing something to end suffering and you already know that, but I’m going to make you feel a little guilty for it. Maybe you’re going to do something about it you weren’t going to before. That’s pathos. But then the last one is ethos. It’s actually the first of the three. I’m giving them in reverse order, but it’s where the personal character of the speaker is, what matters. Now, I think you see this in various ways.

It’s why celebrities endorsed products. If it’s somebody you look up to, you’re more likely to buy the thing that they’re endorsing. And Aristotle says, we believe good men more fully and more readily than others. But I think that’s true. So this is particularly true. It’s a matter in which exact certainty is hard to find. And opinions are divided where you can’t just say, oh, well it’s obviously X, and you are not in a position where you’re going to do the scholarly work to figure out if it’s X or Y. You’re going to probably be likely to trust the person who believe on a bunch of other stuff when they tell you it’s X instead of Y. We do this on all sorts of things, economic policy, all sorts of complicated things, right? Like we are not doing all the homework ourself, we’re trusting the people that we admire and hopefully they’re leading us in a good direction.

But given that anything that undermines your ethos, anything that makes it look like you don’t have that integrity undermines the thing you are telling people about. And that’s a problem when the thing that you’re telling them about is Jesus Christ. Now, Aristotle is very clear that ideally you’re not just going off of a vibe, I’m paraphrasing him, but it’s not just how people feel about you before you begin to speak, but there is something in your demeanor and your presentation rhetorically that helps persuade me. But nevertheless, how you carry yourself, what I think of you, whether you seem slimy or trustworthy, that impacts how likely I am to believe you. And I think that’s kind of obvious. Now, Aristotle actually pushes back on those of you who would say personal goodness doesn’t matter at all because he is like, of course it does. His character, speaker’s character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion that he possesses.

And think about it, if you’ve got someone who seems dishonest and they’re telling you a story and you’ve got someone who seems honest and they’re telling you a story, obviously you’re going to trust the honest person. And once you undermine that, once you impede the ability of others to trust you in what you’re saying, you do tremendous damage to your ability to operate rhetorically. If people think that you’re slimy, if they think you’re sleazy, they’re not going to trust you and you might have really important things you’re trying to say. So ethos matters, and this matters in a particular way for Christians. Think about it, the famous apologetics verse verse Peter three 15 where it talks about making an alogia a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you takes for granted that your ethos is such that people are looking to you and wanting what you have.

And it’s not pure logos, it’s not pure logic. It’s also that you have a hope in you that is a personal witness that, and so not everyone is called to be a professional apologist, but everyone is called to have that kind of ethos where that is the most effective kind of rhetorical tool that you have, and it’s the most effective evangelical and apal tool. Like when you know somebody is really holy that works better than anything else and to not be holy, then that takes away your most effective tool that’s bad, not just for you, but for anyone you’re trying to reach positively. Then Cardinal Joseph Rader described the two, what he calls only really effective, apologetic arguments for the church, the saints that the church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. In other words, there’s something where people can logically dismiss the syllogism, but they can’t really dismiss radiant holiness and incredible beauty.

But if you are only appearing to be holy and then aren’t, that damages one of the most important witnesses to the truth, that is a real serious spiritual problem. And I say all this to say, you can’t just trivialize people who are feeling really rattled right now. It makes perfect sense given everything we believe that they would because there’s this sense that, okay, hey, this person told me about Jesus Christ and it made a lot of sense, but then it turned out they were being duplicitous in this other area of their life. So how do I know that they’re not being duplicitous when they’re telling me about Christ? That is such an easy argument to fall into. So how do we separate those things that as important as your holiness is the holiness of Christ and the truth of the gospel, don’t depend upon it that whether you are a saint or a sinner, whether you’re headed to heaven or hell, you can still witness the truth of the gospel.

And so on the other end of that, we should get in the habit of separating the art from the artist, separating the argument from the person making it. And I think that we’re actually well positioned to do that now, and I’d say that for a few reasons. Number one, many times at least speaking personally, when I hear something interesting, whether it’s something about apologetics or anything, the argument maybe by someone whose channel I’ve never seen before just randomly kind of pops up the algorithm just dishes up somebody I think, oh, that looks interesting. I click on it, think, oh yes, that’s persuasive, and I know nothing else about that person. So I’m in the habit of already separating their personal integrity from, well, are they at least telling me the truth about this? Maybe they lie about everything else in their life, but do they seem to be telling the truth here?

And if they are, I should take that seriously. Well, I would suggest doing the same thing here. Now, back in many moons ago, father John Carpi, who was one of the first kind of internet Catholic celebrities, had a very public fall from Grace, and it was pretty scandalous and he announced he was leaving the priesthood over it. And I know people who had been helped tremendously by Father Carpi, and I knew people who didn’t want to acknowledge that these allegations seemed to be true. They immediately wanted to shut down any conversation and accuse everybody else of gossip and let’s let not talk about, and then I had people who were literally taking his DVDs. This was a media technology we had back in the day, kind of like a little YouTube disc, and they were destroying them because they were so heartbroken over the betrayal.

And I would suggest, while that’s a completely understandable response, the things he was saying, if they’re true, remain true today, they don’t depend upon his personal holiness. Now, maybe we listened to two of them because we thought he was solely, but they don’t depend upon that. So the second example I’d give maybe even more extreme than that was this essay I found by a professor Howard Jackson, and it’s super nerdy. I mean, the title is Ancient Self-Referential Conventions and their Implications for the Authorship and Integrity of the Gospel of John. What it means in plain language is a lot of the modern scholarly theories about the so-called Jo and I community in the fourth gospel presuppose an origin of the gospel of John that is just not at all what real life looks like. And this scholar in 1999 is like, Hey, that’s not how the ancient world worked at all and calls out a lot of things that scholars didn’t, and even now we’re kind of taking for granted about a community authoring the gospel, and it’s like that’s not how things work.

And it was brilliant. It cut through a lot of the nonsense and it just seemed in many ways, like just plain old common sense with someone with a scholarly back and he’d done a bunch of work on gnosticism and everything else, doesn’t seem to be a Christian, just a scholar who knows how the ancient world works, and realized that a lot of the modern critical scholars were being very uncritical in imagining where the New Testament documents came from. And I thought, wow, this is really sharp. This is brilliant. Why don’t I know more about this professor Howard Jackson? Well, and tragically the reason is he was the perpetrator in a murder suicide, so about the worst scandal you could possibly come up with. And you know what? His article is still brilliant.

I think we do this with historical personalities more than we do it with people in the modern age or people in our own time. I can enjoy the art of Caravaggio without enjoying the fact that Caravaggio was on the run from a murder charge. I can appreciate the brilliance of the Declaration of Independence and separate that from the fact that the writers, despite speaking beautifully about independence, treated other human beings as property, treated them as slaves, as chattel slaves, totally hypocritical. I can separate the art from the artist. I can separate the brilliant argument from the one making it, and I would encourage you if you’re able to do that, go through the grief. It’s okay to feel betrayed. It’s okay to be sad, but it’s also okay, and it’s even good to be able to say, okay, but the truth is still true, and I can’t let that just completely undermine my confidence.

So that’s what I say to the people who are feeling a little jittery, not at peace right now. What about those of us who are on the other side? Now, I’m going to say some words both to, again, if you want to say Catholic creatives or people who are, if you have some channel that you are promoting Christianity, then I’m talking to you, but in a broader way, I think I’m really talking to anyone who is publicly Christian. Maybe it’s not a channel, maybe it’s just at your office, people know, oh yeah, this is the guy I talked to about Catholic stuff, or this is the guy who really believes in Jesus and takes him very seriously. Here’s our religious fanatic, whatever it is. If that’s you, then I have a passage for you to maybe take to prayer, and it’s James chapter three. I’m going to read the whole thing and then I want to talk about it a little bit at a time, but first, let’s just read it together.

James says, let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness for we all make many mistakes, and if anyone makes no mistakes and what he says, he’s a perfect man able to bridle the whole body. Also, if we put bits into the mouths of horses that they may obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Look at the chips also though they’re so great and are driven by strong winds, they’re guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs, so the tongue is a little member and boths of great things, how great a forest is set of blades by a small fire. I want to unpack every part of that because I think this admonition, it is striking that sins of the tongue. How are you communicating and is it glorifying God is associated with this role of being a teacher?

I mean in one way of course it’s, but I think it’s something to take to heart. I think it’s fair to say that we don’t talk about this very often, that if you feel called to become a teacher of the faith in whatever capacity, you are asking to be judged with greater strictness, that your sins are worse than the sins of the person who isn’t putting themselves out there publicly. Now, it’s good that you’re putting yourself out there publicly, but it means you have to be all the more serious about fighting for holiness because now if you fall, you’re not just a scandal and a disgrace for yourself, you might be bringing other people down with you. And so as you are thinking about this, the small organ, the tongue, this little rudder, your rudder can lead you in the wrong direction. That might be true more than one rudder, that you have to guide this well, and if you can master that you’re in a good spot, but it is not enough to be a teacher and to not have good control of what you’re saying.

That doesn’t just mean like preaching false doctrine. Jesus warns in Matthew 12 that on the day of judgment, men will render account for every careless word they utter. Those are hard words that by your words, you’ll be justified, and by your words, you’ll be condemned that you might be damned for something that you just allowed yourself to go into because you weren’t being disciplined. What about this next part, James warns that we all make many mistakes. Now, I think there’s a way of misreading that, and I’ve already seen people misread that, and it happens every time there’s a scandal where the people who really like the person who’s at the center of the scandal, they downplay it by universalizing it, and they say everybody’s a sinner. And the people who really don’t like that person, they pounce and they’re just like, what a horrible person this guy is, and that happens very predictably.

Anytime there’s a scandal, and I think that these are hypocritical reactions to be totally frank with you. On the one hand, not all sins are equally bad. Look, if any sin disqualified you from being a public teacher of the faith, then no one could teach the faith. On the other hand, surely we would all agree that some sin should disqualify you from publicly teaching the faith. And so there’s this question of, well, where do we draw that boundary? Where do we draw that line? But let’s not just give platitudes of we all make mistakes to justify blurring a line that actually needs to be drawn. On the flip side, we can draw the line in such a way where somebody we don’t like is on that side and we’re on the good side and not deal with the fact that wherever you are on that spectrum, you are still a sinner and your sin is a scandal and it is a problem and it needs to be addressed.

So keep those things in view. Let’s not relativize sin, but at the same time, let’s not pretend like sin is something only my neighbor deals with. To that end, I would suggest a good theme that I’m going to be exploring of darkness and light because we see it all over scripture, and it’s one of the things that in rule 13 of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s rules for discernment, he talks about and he gives this motif of basically the devil as a sexual predator or whatever, a false lover. He says, our enemy, that means the enemy of human nature means the devil may also be compared in his manner of acting to a false lover. He wishes to remain hidden and does not want to be discovered. If such a lover speaks with evil intention to the daughter of a good father, to the wife of a good husband and seeks to seduce them, he wants his words and solicitations kept secret.

He’s greatly displeased If his evil suggestions and depraved intentions are revealed by the daughter to her father or by the wife to her husband. That’s I think a pretty clear example. It seems completely straightforward. If somebody is sexting you and you say, this person who sent me this really inappropriate message that thwarts their plan right away. Well, that is true both literally. And it’s also true as a good spiritual metaphor that the devil, I’m not going to say the devil sexed you, but the devil will try to tempt and seduce you, and the way to call that out is to bring it to your father in heaven or just bring it to the light. If you’re dealing with a temptation, one of the ways you can defeat temptation frequently is just talking about it with other people. So if you’ve got a temptation to look at pornography, you can text some friends and say, Hey, say a prayer for me.

This temptation has come up, and a lot of times the temptation just goes away that the devil doesn’t want his depraved intentions to be brought to the light, and so they dissipate. It doesn’t work every time, but it’s a really effective, pretty painless technique that gets rid of a lot of spiritual problems. And one of the things the devil tries to do is convince you it’s too shameful to bring temptation to the light. You haven’t even done anything but just the fact that a temptation is coming your way. You should feel bad about that, so you shouldn’t tell anyone about it. You should be clouded in shame and you should face the devil by yourself and then see where that goes. Now, once you say that out loud, it’s like, well, obviously that’s the stupidest thing in the world. Obviously you’re not going to win that fight.

Bring it to the light, go to your priest, go to your friends. Go take this stuff publicly and watch how much of it goes away. And if you yourself are doing things you don’t want brought to the light, if you are acting like the devil in this analogy, stop doing that. Know that the deeds that you’ve done in darkness can be brought to the light. Here’s the part where I think the internet plays this really unique and destructive role. Obviously, when Ignatius of Loyola is writing these words, the internet doesn’t exist. People could be sneaky, creepy, seducers back then. It is way easier to be a sneaking creepy seducer now, or maybe you’re not on the seducer end. Maybe you’re someone who you’re receiving temptations and you can keep them private, you can play around with them in your mind. You can give some kind of flirtatious response and see where it goes, or you can bring it to the light.

But here’s the catch, although more than ever, it seems like you can live this double life really easily where you have maybe an alternate account. I think the kids call it an alt, where you have just two accounts, two personalities, et cetera. More than ever, all that stuff can be captured in a screenshot shared publicly, and you can be humiliated before the whole world that the deeds done in darkness can be brought to light at a moment’s notice in this humiliating way. Now, look, it is a hard thing. It’s a hard thing to be expected to live in a and upright way when temptation can reach into your home, into your device more easily than at any point in the past that even if you are practicing custody of the eyes when you’re out on the street, even if you’ve got good safeguards in place to not fall into any of that junk, you can still have an ad or a short or anything like this where there’s something provocative and it’s just right there in your face.

You’ve done everything you can and there you go, anyway, and that can feel very unfair. I empathize with that. So what here’s, I mean by that in the book Silence, this is of course not an endorsement of the book Silence or the movie. I haven’t actually read the book. I remembered this line... Read more on Catholic.com