Joe Heschmeyer breaks down Mel Gibson’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, rebutting his schismatic arguments for Sedevacantism.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Mel Gibson. The guy behind things like the passion of the Christ, Braveheart signs if you’re into sci-fi. He sat down on the Joe Rogan show and had a pretty fascinating interview. There were a couple of things that I really liked and one kind of direction he went that I think is fiercely poisonous. So I wanted to highlight both what I think he nails and what I think he gets really dangerously wrong. First, what I think he nails, I think he boldly proclaims the gospel about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In an easy to understand sort of 32nd soundbite,

CLIP:

I regard the gospels as history. It’s a verifiable history. Some people say, well, it’s a fairytale. He never exists, but he did. And there are other accounts verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up, that yes, he did exist. And the other aspect of that is that all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there, every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody.

Joe:

Bear in mind Mel Gibson’s not a theologian, he’s not an neologist. Maybe you might nitpick the way he says this or that, but frankly in a conversational format with Joe Rogan, I think this was a great way of laying out a pretty thoughtful case pointing to actual evidence. The gospels are historical accounts, you got this extra biblical evidence and he has that great line. Nobody dies for a lie. And this, I think it’s struck a chord with people and I saw numerous people quoted afterwards. The second thing that he does that I think we would do well to remember is he is unabashed about standing up against corruption in the church. Things like sexual abuse and deviancy and the like and that I think again, if you read the comments, people are relieved to say, oh look, a Catholic who’s not afraid to call out erring and malicious and abusive predators in the Catholic clergy.

And so if you’re a Catholic Washington, you’re probably like, well of course. But bear in mind, people outside the Catholic ranks may not realize that you are as disgusted by those things as they are. So let that be known. However, Mel Gibson turns his sight not so much against just the sexual abuses, but also against what he views as kind of theological abuses and in particular, but more than that to the true church spread. You are a of the, I have all respect for the way you defend Christ. I agree with you 100%. The consider church of Levi two is a counterfeit church. This is why I built a Catholic church that only worship traditional. You’re welcome to

CLIP:

Come and say from time of course being called to and being excommunicated by her hago like a badge honor when he consider she is a total apostate and false,

Joe:

You might have picked up on that directly. Joe Rogan. You have little bit things aren’t what they seem, that kind of language. He doesn’t explicitly just say Pope Francis is not the Pope, but elsewhere, he absolutely does say that. So for instance, he wrote an open letter to Archbishop Vigano when he was excommunicated, applauding the fact he got excommunicated and saying he doesn’t think the Catholic church that we all know is the Catholic church. He doesn’t think it’s the real

CLIP:

Church. I agree with you 100% that the post cons say your Church of Vatican II is a counterfeit church. This is why I built a Catholic church that only worships traditionally. You are welcome to come and say mass there anytime. Of course, being called amatic and being excommunicated by her ha Burgo is like a badge of honor when he consider he is a total apostate and expels you from a false institution.

Joe:

So I think that’s clearer. And there’s different shades of city of Aism. Some people have said that there hasn’t been a pope since by 12, others will say since Benedict the 16th. So Pope Francis isn’t a true pope in terms of Mel Gibson. He comes from a family where his father was an outspoken city of a contest, a man by the name of Hutton Gibson, who was very clear that he didn’t believe that there had been any pope since Pius the 12th, that from 1958 on the Catholic church has not had a pope. And that everyone from Pope John 23rd forwards has really been an anti pope. And not only, well more than just an anti pope, he’s also going to argue they’re spies. Now, I should caveat here, obviously father’s views aren’t automatically his son’s view. Not many of us would want to just be associated with every theological or political view of a family member. But in this case, not only is Mel Gibson saying a lot of the same arguments that his father was on record making, but he also in the Joe Rogan interview talks a little bit about both his esteem for his now late father and kind of the influence he had on him religiously

CLIP:

As a child. One accepts things on faith because you’re raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it. And my dad was a pretty smart guy. He was like Mensa smart, real smart back in 1968. He won Jeopardy, right? Really. And then they brought all the jeopardy winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them too. So he had a mind like a steel trap.

Joe:

So Mel Gibson’s father was by seemingly any measure a genius, and he used his genius intellect to argue for the idea that the only true Catholics on earth were those who rejected the Pope and the visible Catholic church in his words, all the faithful. So every faithful Catholic quote will have nothing to do with the post conci heretical structure or its anti popes. They do not recognize heretic puli as pope. They do not accept heretic wia pop on puli as pope. So it’s not just that he doesn’t think they’re popes, he doesn’t think you’re Catholic if you think they’re pope because all the faithful reject them. And in fact, he doesn’t just think, as I said, he doesn’t just think they’re anti popes, he’s convinced they’re actually spies put there at least in one case by the communists. So he’s convinced that John Paul II was really a communist spy. He made this claim on the radio in 2010 and he’s made it elsewhere as well.

CLIP:

You’re looking from a devout traditional Catholic position at John Paul ii. What did he say? He was a complete plant. He was a Russian agent or a communist agent from the beginning. He’s the only bishop that could get out of Poland without any trouble during the Communist control.

Joe:

So again, Hutton Gibson is making these claims. In 2010 decades after John Paul II helped to bring down communism in Europe, he helped organize resistance to the USSR. He helped to organize what became known as the published solidarity movement. He helped to bring down the Iron Curtain, but apparently Hutton Gibson argues this was all because it was a communist plot to bring down communism in Europe. I don’t know how that reasoning works, but I highlight it to say this is one of the things that can make the city of a contest debate really tricky. The people who believe in this stuff tend to be committed to certain positions on not any clear evidence whatsoever, often just repeating rumor and innuendo even when those rumors and innuendo fly in the face of everything we know. We have plenty of evidence that John Paul II was outspoken against communism, but we’re supposed to believe that he was secretly a communist.

Those kind of things that makes this debate kind of tricky because it can be hard to find fruitful common ground, but I’m going to do my best to do that. Looking at a couple aspects of why Mel Gibson believes city of Aism is true in his own explanation again as he gives it to Joe Rogan, I realize it’s not like a technical treatise or anything like that. Fair enough. Additionally, I should say this at the outset, some people just believe the pope isn’t the pope because they think he fell into heresy. They think he got something wrong on doctrine. I understand a lot of the doctrinal questions. I understand a lot of that theological stuff is tricky. That’s usually a weak case, meaning if you’re a Catholic and you say, I disagree with the Pope on X, that’s usually not a sign that the Pope is wrong, particularly if you’re speaking in an authoritative magisterial sort of way.

There’s a lot of caveats and things we go into in all of that, but I want to focus instead because that’s not the case that Mel Gibson makes. He instead makes the case that we don’t think there’s a real pope because there was a fake election that the papal election in 1958 was a sham and this kind of disrupted the whole chain of Pope since then. This is rooted in what is sometimes called the Siri theory or the Siri hypothesis, and if you’re wondering, this has nothing to do with the question of whether your devices are listening to you, I’m all in on that conspiracy theory. That is obviously true. It is instead the claim that in 1958, the papal conclave that allegedly elected Pope John the 23rd actually elected a different guy, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri. And so this theory is based on a real fact and that real fact is on day one in the morning of the papal conclave, the smoke looked white at first instead of black

CLIP:

First. There was an event in the Vatican where they elected John the 23rd Pope, right In 1958, I was two years old, he was elected and it was a very funny thing that happened in the conclave. Usually there’s white and black smoke that goes out of the chimneys to tell you we have a Pope Haba must papa. And the white smoke came out and everybody cheered and they went crazy. And then about a half an hour later, black smoke came out that never in history has that happened, that the white smoke came out and then the black smoke came out. So white smoke means we found a new pope. Black smoke means no pope. That’s right, they’d have votes or there’d be one reason or another they’d have a round in the conclave and black smoke would come out many times, many times maybe. Maybe it would take two weeks, but never was it known that white smoke came out, then black smoke came out. So what was the scenario that somebody was elected and that maybe something else happened and he was pushed aside and someone else was put in. So it was power struggle, some kind of power struggle.

Joe:

So as I say, there’s a little bit of common ground that we have on this. In 1958 on day one in the morning, there really was smoke from the Sistine Chapel that it first looked white, it was just kind of a trickle of smoke, and then one of the priests covering the conclave for Vatican radio even got excited and announced It’s white, it’s white, we have a pope. And so people living in Italy were convinced, okay, we have a pope. But then a few minutes later, more smoke came out and it was very clearly black. That’s from the news reports the day of. So that’s where we all kind of agree. There’s two possible theories for this. One theory is simply that smoke signals aren’t exactly the most sophisticated technology despite Mel Gibson claiming that never was it known that the smoke would go from white to black.

Confusion over whether the smoke was white or black or going from looking white to looking black is actually something of a recurring phenomenon. As you can see from this 1978 footage of the papal conclave that elected John Paul ii, this is 20 years later and you see the same thing happening. It starts off looking kind of black to looking gray, to then looking white and you see the crowd rejoicing. I’ve got the sound off, but you can hear people rejoicing in St. Peter Square and then the smoke goes back to very obviously black. Now what’s going on here? Well, there’s not really a controversy as far as I know about what happened in 1978. It’s just the problem of trying to use smoke signals to communicate pple elections. To make black smoke, you burn up the cardinal’s voting ballots, plus you add an additive. At the time you would use something like tari pitch, but the problem is if the ballots burn up first, the smoke’s going to look white at first or if the pitch isn’t overall the ballots right?

If you get something where there’s not pitch being burnt, it’s just ballots, it’s going to look like white smoke. And this was such a recurring problem that in 2005, the Vatican actually stopped using Tari pitch in favor of a more reliable chemical method to make black smoke. They also helpfully now ring the bells of St. Peter’s if the smoke should be white. So if there’s an election of a pope, you’re not just left particularly at night trying to decipher does that smoke look more white or black? This is like a monochromatic gender reveal. It doesn’t work very well because you’re using some pretty old school technology we’ll say. So that’s one explanation, right? The reason you have smoke that looks white at first is it’s their first time doing it is day one. It’s their first attempt to do it. It’s not a very precise mechanism, and this is something that we know as a matter of history had been screwed up multiple times.

Even the prior papal conclave when they wanted to have white smoke, it was more gray looking and they had to then have the guy helping run the conclave go and announce to the Vatican radio. Oh yeah, we actually did elect a pope because the smoke was ambiguous. So that’s one I think straightforward explanation. But there is another explanation, and it’s the one that Mel Gibson is pointing to that there was a power struggle or a power grab, and in particular allegedly the reason the smoke looked white for a few minutes on day one was because the Cardinals had actually elected a pope, a secret pope, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri. Now Hutton Gibson Mel’s father, it claimed that he was duly elected but then was forced to step aside by conspirators inside and outside the church. And these shadowy enemies threatened to atomic bomb Vatican City. Now to be clear, Hutton Gibson is not basing this off of anything. Cardinal Siri said, Cardinal Siri never claimed anything of the like. He instead appears to be indebted to the work of an American layman by the name of Gary Giuffre who came up with this theory in the 1980s.

CLIP:

Cardinal Siri, A of great renno as a negotiator and peacemaker between labor and management evidently fit the Mason’s need to the letter moments after his election on 26 October, 1958, Siri was persuaded in a most brutal fashion to step aside in a forced papal abdication known by all present to be completely invalid. Masonic Cardinals had even voted for him to ensure his election and acceptance of office only to demand his immediate resignation. Five minutes later by threatening to annihilate the church, they then offered peaceful coexistence between the church and her persecutor. If a compromised candidate could be found as a caretaker pope, the conclave had been vitiated and two days later the caretaker turned out to be Angelo Roncalli, a mouthpiece for the Masonic agenda who was sought by the forces of antichrist to head the church not as pope but as anti pope. In this way, they hope to perpetrate a death grip on the church’s structures with a succession of figureheads devoid of any guidance by the Holy Ghost, for only by subjugating a true pope who was unknown to the outside world and replacing him with a false shepherd with the Freemasons arrive at the total realization of their goal.

Joe:

So let’s unpack the theory theory and looking at several different dimensions of it. First you’ve got just the logistics. One of the problems with the theory is that in modern history, no pope was ever elected that quickly, meaning everyone should have been cautious of the idea that within the first two ballots on the morning of day one, they’d already elected a new pope because you need a two thirds majority or two thirds plus one depending on what period of history we’re talking about. And if you go all the way back to 1700 and I think you can go even further than that, you’ll find that the fastest the papal conclaves had ever worked was two days, and that was two easy candidates. Pope Leo the 13th in 1878 and Pope Pius ii, the one who just died in 1939. Both of those men prior to becoming Pope had been sort of the right hand man of the Pope before and were already well-known beloved figures.

They were obvious kind of shoo-in candidates for Pope and it still took at least three ballots and two days of voting, but we’re to believe that on the morning of day one, two thirds of the Cardinals had already settled on someone and moreover that they’ve settled on Cardinal Siri. Now you might ask why Cardinal Siri? There’s no explanation given other than he seemed like the right fit for the Freemasons, but if you think about it for a few moments, he doesn’t seem like a good fit for the Freemasons at all. He’s an outspoken conservative traditionalist. There’s a reason he’s beloved by se of a contest because he stands for all this stuff that modernists hate and we’re to believe that two thirds of the Cardinals got in there and immediately decided on that guy even though he wasn’t the obvious choice prior to the papal concl, I know his name had been mentioned, he wasn’t the sort of Pius the 12 kind of figure where it was the right hand man of the Pope before him.

He didn’t have that role in his relationship to Pius ii. So that’s already something that should set up some red flags, like how likely is it that they had a proper election that quickly and why in the world would the Masons be voting for a guy who is really anti-free masonry if you accept all this theory? The second problem is, okay, think about the bad guys plot here. You’ve got, depending on who’s telling it, Freemasons or communists or modernists or spies of some kind, and these guys are apparently ruthless kind of movie villains. They’re willing to nuke the Vatican if they don’t get their way, they’re willing to do something. Again, the details of the plot are vague and seems to depend on who the storyteller is. Assume for a second that that story is right and just imagine it if you will, as a Hollywood plot.

You’ve got the villains and they want something they want to take over and control and subjugate the Catholic church. What would the obvious plot be? Well just install a pope of your own if you can force all the cardinals to do your bidding, which the Siri theory has to presuppose. They got all of the Cardinals involved to lie about who the Pope was. Why couldn’t they just have all the cardinals involved elect their guy as Pope in the first place and you don’t have to have all the lives and everything else. In fact, you wouldn’t even have to announce on the floor, we’ve got a bomb and you’ve got to vote our way. You could just do that to two thirds of the Cardinals plus one and win the papal election that way seemingly. So the whole series theory is bizarrely convoluted. We’re to believe that they don’t install their guy.

Instead, they for some reason install a guy they hate Siri, who they then let be Pope for 30 minutes when he doesn’t come out on the balcony for some reason and then they tell him he can’t be Pope or at least he can be Pope, but he has to pretend he’s not Pope so they can install a caretaker anti Pope. In theory, this Catholic traditionalist is just fine apparently going along with this again convoluted plot of electing a false guy as Pope and what he now knows to be a sham council. And the obvious question is why are any of these things happening and this theory doesn’t do a good job of explaining those details at all. Why is Siri going along with this? Why is anyone else going along with this? Why are the bad guys doing this in the first place instead of just electing their own guy? The closest you get is Giuffre suggests well they need a real pope to be there because if you have a real Pope, you can’t elect a new one. And so you need Siri ironically to stop the election of a true pope. Now that theory fails for a lot of reasons. I’ll explore those in a second, but I want to let Giuffre lay out the theory.

CLIP:

The true Pope who had Vainly hoped to prevent a catastrophe for the church by delaying his public claim to office brought about something far worse instead for as long as he lived his very existence prevented the election of another true pope. He was mocked in his election, which was repeated and again suppressed at successive conclaves.

Joe:

Okay, so again, assume that this theory is right for a second and see if it makes any sense. You need cardinal theory to become Pope, sir because then you’ve got a valid pope so you can’t elect a new Pope, so then you can’t have a real pope to rival the anti Pope. Well, one obvious problem is you already have a real Pope to rival the anti Pope in this scenario because Siri is the Pope we’re told vaguely that he’s just decided to delay publicly acknowledging it, but he never claimed to be Pope. That was not a delay. He just never said he was Pope. And not only does he never say he’s Pope, as we’re going to see, he happily participates in the Second Vatican council. He acknowledges Pope John the 23rd as the Pope he contributes to future papal conclaves. So we have to believe on the one hand that Siri is this good holy Orthodox traditional cardinal who becomes Pope and that he’s a total moral coward who for fear of death or destruction or something, basically apostasizes like pretends a false pope is a real pope, pretends a false church is a real pope and while being Pope actively works to undermine the church for the sake of an anti pope and why, it just is totally unclear why this happens in this scenario.

Now again, go back to the crux of the theory. You need Siri to be Pope because that prevents anyone else from becoming Pope Siri could defeat this plan easily in two ways. One is just publicly saying he’s Pope and then the other cardinals be like, yeah, he’s the pope. Plenty of people have threatened to kill us in the past, the Communists, the Nazis, all the way back to the ancient Romans, and we don’t deny the faith just because it’s inconvenient or maybe fatal. We don’t give up the spiritual good for the sake of the biological one. Fine, some people are going to renounce the faith under pressure, but to accept this theory, you have to believe every single cardinal apostatize basically. But the other way he could defeat it is he wouldn’t even have to announce he’s the Pope publicly under Cannon law at the time, all he had to do and today as well, all he had to do was resign.

No one has to even officially accept it. He could just say, okay, I’m no longer Pope. He could tell the other cardinals in the room, the only other people on earth in this theory who know he’s a pope, he can just say, alright, I’m not the pope anymore. And now they can go and elect a real pope. Remember Cardinals theory participated at future papal conclaves. So if he was for some reason really worried about John the 23rd, he could just wait until John the 23rd died and then say, I resign as Pope. Now you can have a clean papal election. There’s even h... Read more on Catholic.com