Why Pope Francis' election could be invalid according to John Paul II document
Summary
In this episode, John Henry McCartan sits down with the host of the popular show We Go There, Patrick Coffin, to discuss Pope Benedict's resignation and why it may have been the best thing that ever happened to the Catholic Church.
Transcript
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There is an incredible document that was made by Pope John Paul II.
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It actually talks about the rules for elections and says that if violated, it nullifies the
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election of a pope, who is not then pope, and there doesn't even have to be an announcement
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That document exists, it's called Universi Dominici Regis.
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Very few people would be willing to talk about that, especially in the current context.
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Almost all of you, perhaps all of you, know him.
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He is The Patrick Coffin Show, a super popular show, and his moniker is We Go There.
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Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
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So, I recently had on the show Dr. Edmund Mazza a fascinating talk about his research into
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In fact, you did a show that was sort of a succinct version of seven reasons why Pope Francis
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And it was startling, startling in that you would go there.
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And without trepidation, and I know you to be a very faithful Catholic.
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And this is the thing, with Dr. Mazza it was the same.
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Someone who's willing to live their life with faith amidst the struggles that that takes,
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But they're doing so, as you do, out of love for Christ, love for his church, and a willingness
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I know you've been on the show before, but for those who might know, give us, or might
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not know, give us sort of the 20-second version of Who's Patrick Coffin?
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I'll begin after the tiny amoeba began all life on earth, and start with my entry into
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I was born and raised in Nova Scotia, I went to McGill University in Montreal, ended up at
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the University of Toronto and the Stratford Festival.
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But I found my true love, which is theology, after I recommitted my life to Christ as a
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I got a master's degree from Franciscan University of Steubenville, was recruited then to a film
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And through, I won't bore you with the whole story, but cutting to the chase, I auditioned
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and got the job of host of Catholic Answers Live, which I did happily from 2009 to 2016.
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After which time, I started my own podcast and membership site, which you can find more
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And every Tuesday, I get to drop the most amazing conversations with people that I call sages
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And these are people who have either been beaten down and shamed and banned and deleted, who
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Or they have some wisdom to distill about, what's the DNA of our culture?
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What do we mean by the West or Western civilization?
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What are the foundational building blocks of what we call culture?
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To your question about the fear and trepidation, there was plenty of that when I began to see
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I remember you were way ahead of the curve on how deep the rot was at the Vatican after
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And I remember reading some of your coverage at LifeSide News, and I remember kind of wincing,
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You were on it like a hound dog with a bird in the forest, and then another one, then
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It did not seem to compute with me that our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the greatest
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teacher in history and imaginable, would will for his church one diabolical confusion after
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Everyone listening and watching right now has their own first domino where they thought,
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For some people, it was the night of, or the fact that the press made a big deal about
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his brown leather shoes instead of the, you know, I guess sinful red leather shoes that
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Pope Benedict wore, paying his own bill, carrying his own luggage.
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And then we got who am I to judge with respect to homosexuality.
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Then we got Amoris Laetitia chapter eight, which indeed provides a loophole for divorced
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and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion.
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And as John Gravino has proven so well in his book, Confronting the Pope of Suspicion,
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Amoris Laetitia is the official codification of 1960s and 70s era dissent.
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Uh, the dissent that, that, that grew like weeds under Paul VI and was never really tamped
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Even the norms of humana vitae were never, uh, there was no disciplining of priests and prelates
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who, who, uh, disagreed publicly with that teaching.
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Well, when, when John Paul II took, took the, the chair of Peter in 1978, uh, it was a new
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And, uh, John Paul II, um, suffered very few fools gladly.
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And a lot of the dissent either vanished, went away, or, uh, in its own way, um, got sublimated
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and, and put into this, into what I would call the shunt tracks of the church and things
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And then in 2015 and 2016, we had the synods on the family.
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And that's when Amoris Laetitia, the resulting apostolic exhortation arrived, especially section
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And by that time I'd already realized there's something seriously wrong with the church.
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And we can't keep saying, why did God give us a bad Pope?
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Well, you know, we Catholics are used to talking about our bad Popes, whether Medici Popes
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or Borgia Popes, but this is not merely a bad Pope.
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A bad Pope is a man who in his private life is a sinner, as we all are.
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He has assaulted in a very deliberate way, the deposit of faith, the things of sacred tradition,
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and has allied himself with all of the enemies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, by the way,
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all the worldly powers, global acclaim, plaudits and cheers from the New York Times and CNN,
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all the legacy media love Francis in a similar inverse way to which they hated previous pontiffs.
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So here you have pontiffs, and Jumpall II reigned well into his 80s, who commanded the largest
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live event in human history at World Youth Day in Manila.
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So how is someone reviled by the New York Times and that cabal able to draw millions?
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I think it was 5 million people showed up that day in the Philippines.
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And yet Francis is revered by these worldly powers and hard left journalists.
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He's their cheerleader and their mentor and their model.
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I've had the unmerited privilege of meeting both John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, both
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And the crowds were jammed, sitting in standing room only.
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Whereas with Francis, it was, I won't say a trickle, I want to be accurate, but it wasn't
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anywhere near the public unconscious love just to be with these great men of God and to listen.
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With Francis, it was more, let's just say modest.
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So the evidence that I collected, at first, it drew my attention because of the things that
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And by the things that really don't matter, I mean the behavior of Francis and the focus
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on the St. Gallen Mafia and the March 13th conclave.
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Which, by the way, I think the evidence is clear.
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There were canonical crimes committed in that conclave that were identifiable in a very
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obvious way by Austin Ivory, author of this book.
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And he's not even called Pope Francis in the subtitle.
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This is a very hard to find original edition in English that came out the year after Francis
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And it was immediately attacked by his former boss, Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the Cardinal
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Archbishop of London, saying the chapter on the conclave never happened.
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Well, guess which chapter I raced to when the book arrived in my mailbox.
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And that chapter, I'm writing a book about this myself, by the way.
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And that chapter describes in a very casual way the very behavior that John Paul II made
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punishes with excommunication in the document you referenced, Universi Dominici Gregus from
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This is the highest level of papal document, short of a dogmatic definition.
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This is a solemn summary of the prescriptions and proscriptions of how future conclaves are
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Conclaves, the actual gathering of the cardinals to elect the pope.
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The gathering of the cardinals to elect the pope and the day of voting and so on.
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It all has to be in accord with these prescriptions and proscriptions.
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And the reason I say this is the thing that was the noisiest, the thing that got my attention,
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but not the most important, is that there's something upstream from that.
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Just to go through your laundry list, I notice, you know, some of the things that caught most
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The whole Pope Francis himself talking about how civil unions are the way to go, meaning
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All sorts of things that rattled, as you were saying, which domino is it that's going to
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convert you to the other side or convince you that something is really, really amiss, much
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You were mentioning that some people didn't see early on.
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On the day of the election, at the election, in fact, right when the Pope first comes out
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onto the balcony after the election, he brings with him those cardinals, the Carmelingo,
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yes, but also those who are most important to him among the group of cardinals.
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But you noticed Cardinal Daniels were there, Godfrey Daniels, who was horrifically anti-life,
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anti-family, known by people in the pro-life, pro-family movement as, you know, one of the
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Interestingly about Daniels, he is not only a pariah for the faithful who are pro-life and
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family, even for those outside the realm of life and family who are concerned about sexual
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Cardinal Daniels was caught on audio tape explaining to the sexual abuse victim who was the biological
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nephew of another Belgian archbishop who had abused his own biological nephew.
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Basically, it's the same script with these guys, John Henry.
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For the good of the church, you have to forgive, et cetera, et cetera.
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I don't have a transcript because if I read those things, I lose my lunch.
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But it's the same shutting down of a legitimate hurting soul.
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A child, the one about whom our Lord warned about something about millstones and being
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Here's the highest ranking member of the church in Antwerp, Belgium, basically telling the victim
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to shut up so he could protect his brother Bishop.
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And that's the beginning of a long list, but it's bad enough.
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So he was part of the photo op on the loggia that night, March 13, 2013, over Francis' left
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I'll give you the moment in how many hundreds of millions of people are watching that.
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And it's a statement about his priorities, his agenda.
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Cardinal Daniels was then invited as a special appointee of Pope Francis.
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Cardinal Burke was, of course, sidelined in the most unbelievable way, as has happened
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to Cardinal Serra, Cardinal Müller, and other cardinals who had been the stalwarts under
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So some unbelievable times we've been living through.
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There's an additional contrast here, since you're talking about the treatment of Cardinals
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And that is the protection of actual either pedophiles or predators, like Bishop Gustav Zancheta
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from Argentina, who is now going to jail or is in jail.
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These are criminals who identify strongly with the support that then Cardinal Bergoglio, now Francis, protected, both in jail.
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So, you know, the phrase birds of a feather means something.
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Someone's going to say, oh, Patrick Coffin claims that the Pope.
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I'm saying that over time you see a pattern of good men being fired or ignored or sidelined
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That should be of concern for people who are Catholic, Protestant, or atheist.
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So one of the comebacks, and just to play devil's advocate,
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They promoted them because of financial gain or sexual who knows what or perhaps blackmail.
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Many people have said, oh, we've gone through worse even in the past.
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So if you're watching, listening to us now, think of your pastor.
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If you discovered that your pastor was having an affair with his housekeeper,
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you wouldn't necessarily conclude that his sermons on chastity were hypocritical.
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Maybe they were meant for him, and he's not living up to his own ideals.
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So someone can be a sinner in private, living a kind of double life.
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But some of the Borgia popes were actually, although they had mistresses
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and they had even murders committed, mafioso style,
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So whether they were buying hookers on Friday and having people killed on Saturday,
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by Sunday, the documents that they wrote and produced and promulgated
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or the homilies that they gave were faithful to the gospel,
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to the standard of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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That standard is being undermined, usurped, attacked, contradicted.
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Almost every time he gets a chance to, there is some slight against sacred tradition.
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And by slight, that runs the gamut, all the way to suppressing the traditional Latin mass,
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which according to Pope Pius V is irreformable.
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So why would Francis deliberately target hotspots of Catholic orthodoxy,
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of evangelization, of large families, of generosity with fertility,
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people like the highest profile homosexualist in the Catholic Church,
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Fr. James Martin, who's now, with the help of Martin Scorsese,
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producing a documentary version of his book, Building a Bridge.
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How do these people get promoted with the Pope's own handwriting,
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but people who are faithful to Christ to the point of heroism are denied?
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Meanwhile, Katy Perry, Hollywood Romans like Leonardo DiCaprio,
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But people like Cardinal Zan, the retired cardinal of Hong Kong,
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That's just a small summary of the proof I'm talking about.
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So we have this dire situation about, you might say it from some respects,
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the worst Pope ever in the history of the Church.
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You're saying that the very papacy itself is in question.
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And let's go back to the discussion that I guess first led you down this road
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about Universi Dominici Gregius, this document, this, as you said,
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Apostolic Constitution, highest teaching document in the Church
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So unpack that one for us, and what does it mean for the Church?
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I did mention it in the first iteration of my evidence video.
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And some people have said, hey, Patrick was confusing
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and you can put a link in your show notes, John Henry,
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I won't read it because it's a little bit technical,
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they can find out that behaviors that are illegalized canonically
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by the late John Paul II describe vote blocking, schmoozing,
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treating the papal office like a political office,
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arranging quid pro quo deals behind the scenes,
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The biography of Cardinal Daniil's also mentions it.
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other than that prescribed in the current Constitution,
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or should the conditions laid down here not be observed,
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the election is for this very reason null and void,
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without any need for a declaration on the matter.
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Consequently, it confers no right on the one elected.
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You don't need to be a canon lawyer to understand
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that a man who's excommunicated cannot be Pope.
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The trouble with this piece of evidence, John Henry,
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is that it becomes difficult to establish in a canonical court forum,
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because the cardinal electors who perform these illegal acts
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would be part of the dynamism of adjudicating on it,
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But that alone invalidates the papacy of Francis.
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It doesn't even mean he's necessarily a bad man.
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I think if you can't see that Francis is a bad man,
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you can't be Pope if someone else occupies the office of papacy.
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In fact, he appointed some of these men with red hats.
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but also an astute reader of human nature in many ways.
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other than that prescribed in the present constitution?
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without any need for a declaration on the matter.
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This is analogous to a decree of nullity for a marriage.
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from something else that takes precedence over it.
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who was fluent in the mother tongue of the church,
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of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
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which updated the P.O. Benedictine code from 1917.
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surrounding a valid renunciation of the papal office.
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and the pastor of the universal church on earth.
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The Roman pontiff obtains full and supreme power
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Therefore, a person elected to the supreme pontificate
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obtains this power from the moment of acceptance.
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If the person elected lacks episcopal character,
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however, he is to be ordained a bishop immediately.
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because there's a way to put a red bow on this here.