The Matt Walsh Show - August 30, 2018


Ep. 94 - The Media Continues To Run Cover For The Vatican


Episode Stats

Length

23 minutes

Words per Minute

150.27806

Word Count

3,594

Sentence Count

235

Hate Speech Sentences

25


Summary

Archbishop Vigano accuses Pope Francis of covering up sex abuse, racism, and institutionalized homophobia in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis denies the allegations, and offers no plausible defense. But is there any defense at all?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The Vatican Secretary of State, secretary, I don't know why I said it like that, but I did.
00:00:06.700 Let's just go with it. The Secretary of State said today that Pope Francis is serene right now.
00:00:16.060 He's feeling serene despite the allegations against him. And that's nice, isn't it? Isn't
00:00:22.860 that nice to hear? He's serene. The entire Catholic world has descended into moral chaos,
00:00:28.260 but the Pope is serene. Great. So wonderful to hear. And of course, the Secretary of State
00:00:35.600 did not answer any questions about the substance of the allegations. He didn't have anything to say
00:00:42.260 about that. It has been now four days since the Pope was credibly accused of personally covering
00:00:49.060 up sex abuse, and this has been the Pope's response. Nothing. Not a word, but he is serene.
00:00:55.280 So that's good. Now, the Vatican has issued no statement about these allegations.
00:01:03.680 It did issue a statement, though, yesterday about something. And I remember I saw, you know,
00:01:09.600 I finally saw the headline before I read the entire headline, but it said,
00:01:13.420 Vatican issues statement. And then I said, finally. But then I saw that, no, the statement was to
00:01:20.540 clarify comments that Pope Francis had made, which had offended gay people. People were concerned
00:01:27.320 that Francis had said something that sounded like he was implying that homosexuality is a mental
00:01:31.980 disorder. So the Vatican quickly clarified that. I mean, they came out and they said, no,
00:01:36.880 they issued that clarification right away, because that's very important. This is the Vatican's
00:01:42.520 priority, you see. It cares about soothing the hurt feelings of gay people. But as for the spiritual
00:01:49.200 chaos and despair of devout Catholics everywhere, it has no evident concern. Now, has anybody offered
00:01:59.340 a plausible defense of the Pope? Well, the liberal Cardinal Cupich, who is a disgrace of a man and an
00:02:12.160 embarrassment to Christians everywhere, he said that Pope Francis, Pope Francis, you know, doesn't
00:02:18.240 have time to worry about this, because he's too busy protecting the environment and caring for
00:02:23.460 immigrants. And so he's too busy with all that to bother with these allegations. That's actually what
00:02:28.700 he said. And he also said that he thinks the criticism of Pope Francis is really rooted in bigotry
00:02:35.940 against Latinos. Now, I don't even think that such a thing is, we should dignify such a comment with a
00:02:44.680 response. But I will respond to it anyway. To say, number one, that is idiotic, you disgrace of a man.
00:02:54.840 Number two, Pope Francis is, he's an Italian, he's ethnically Italian, born to Italian parents in
00:03:05.100 Argentina. So I think the racism charge, considering he's a white Italian man, is, you know, that's a
00:03:16.640 hard one. It's going to be hard to make that land, okay? Now, the leftist media, they claim that there's
00:03:23.680 a coup going on against the innocent Pope Francis being waged by terrible conservatives. And then you
00:03:30.720 have people in the church who have been attempting to deflect from all this by slandering Archbishop
00:03:37.200 Vigano, who's the man who made these allegations, accusing him of his own sex abuse cover-up. Now,
00:03:42.760 he's come out against those accusations and offered documentation to prove that they're false. So
00:03:50.180 Vigano has, you know, he came out with the original allegations, and he has, and he was accused of
00:03:57.780 something. He came out with documentation proving that it's false. So he's very open, and he's
00:04:02.800 responding, and he's engaging, as opposed to pretty much every person who was indicted by his
00:04:09.600 allegations. They've all just clammed up and had nothing or very little to say. Besides which,
00:04:16.160 as I've already said, it doesn't really matter. Even if Vigano were guilty of a sex abuse cover-up,
00:04:25.440 which it doesn't seem that he is, but even if he had done that, it doesn't matter what he's guilty
00:04:29.680 of. He could be guilty of the JFK assassination. It doesn't matter. It has no relevance to the
00:04:36.160 fundamental question. The fundamental question is, was it true? Is it true? The allegations that he
00:04:44.260 made, are they true? That's all that matters. And the weakest defense of all, of course, offered
00:04:51.920 for Pope Francis is the one offered by Pope Francis. It's weak because it's non-existent.
00:04:59.360 He offers no defense. He gives us no explanation. He just waves us off dismissively and says,
00:05:05.900 basically, run along. I don't care. Which is, by the way, what he's been doing to faithful Catholics
00:05:11.640 for six years. Can we imagine that an innocent man would behave this way?
00:05:21.920 It's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine that an innocent man would face
00:05:30.180 these allegations and have nothing to say whatsoever. But Pope Francis has cover while he
00:05:36.020 hides. And it is, as I said, cover from the liberal media. I am fully accustomed to seeing the leftist
00:05:45.320 media lie, mislead, slander, spin false narratives. I am not at all accustomed to seeing them lie,
00:05:52.500 mislead, slander, and spin false narratives for the sake of the Vatican. Okay, that is, these are
00:05:57.880 very strange times. That is, as I said, I will never get used to that. If you had told me 10 years ago
00:06:04.260 that I would be, that I would be going after the Pope while the media protects him,
00:06:10.260 I would have been highly skeptical. Then again, if you had told me that Donald Trump would be president
00:06:15.880 and Dennis Rodman would be our ambassador in North Korea, I also would have been skeptical about that
00:06:22.460 as well. But these are the times we're living in. Of course, the primary lie that we're hearing from
00:06:27.380 the media with regard to all of this is that this is an ideological battle. That's what they're telling
00:06:35.820 this. This is a battle of the conservatives versus the enlightened progressives. There was a headline
00:06:41.480 on Reuters yesterday that said, defenders rally around Pope, fear conservatives escalating war.
00:06:49.660 Yes, conservatives are the ones escalating things. It's our fault. It's our fault. It's not the fault of
00:06:55.340 the homosexual networks in the church who have been covering up sex abuse for decades. No, no, it's not
00:07:00.000 their fault. It's the fault of conservatives, you see. Now, what I want to do is I want to address
00:07:06.580 the idea that this is all ideological, an ideological war, because that's what you're hearing
00:07:15.780 everywhere. And if you're getting your news about this from the leftist media, that's probably the
00:07:21.020 impression you have. It's a false impression for three reasons. Number one, there's nothing
00:07:26.660 ideological about being opposed to sex abuse, unless we're saying that opposition to sex abuse
00:07:33.060 is a uniquely conservative position. Number two, the ideology of Francis's critics
00:07:41.240 is irrelevant, because no matter their ideological convictions, the question they are asking is valid
00:07:50.740 and non-ideological. Did Francis do it? Is he guilty? That's the question. It is not an ideological
00:07:59.420 question, and the ideology of the people asking it is irrelevant. On the other hand, Francis's ideology
00:08:07.600 and the ideology of the cover-up artists in the Vatican, that is relevant because it could be argued
00:08:15.400 that their liberal, non-judgmental, tolerant, open-minded perspective is what led them to support and
00:08:23.060 promote and protect active homosexuals in the first place. And as the floodgates are being opened here
00:08:31.840 and more stories are coming out, we're seeing this kind of be fleshed out. LifeSite News has two or
00:08:39.720 three articles about new allegations from other people in the Vatican about Pope Francis, and they
00:08:48.240 all revolve around this. They all revolve around his tolerance for active homosexuals around him. Like
00:08:55.580 there's one where he gave a Vatican apartment to a priest who was a known active homosexual and who had
00:09:04.040 been accused of sex abuse, gave him an apartment, knowing this about him, and this is coming from someone in
00:09:09.680 the Vatican, told this to LifeSite News, knowing this about him, gave him an apartment, and the next
00:09:16.300 thing you know, there's a gay drug-fueled orgy going on in a Vatican apartment, you know, with this
00:09:24.700 active homosexual who Pope Francis had given an apartment to. So there's that kind of thing. And it
00:09:30.720 would seem that his liberal ideology is not irrelevant to this fact. Number three, and this is the most
00:09:43.780 important thing, when it comes to the essential moral teachings of Christianity, there is no
00:09:50.960 conservative or liberal distinction. There aren't different versions or varieties, okay? Now, conservative
00:09:58.840 versus liberal, that might make sense if we're talking about in Catholicism something like the
00:10:03.480 liturgy, you know, how the mass is celebrated and so on. Conservatives will tend to favor more
00:10:09.000 traditional, more reverent approaches, and their view is absolutely right because the liberalization
00:10:14.100 and secularization of worship is an abomination before God. But here maybe you do find a conservative
00:10:19.280 liberal dynamic where obviously, as always, the liberals are wrong as they are wrong about basically
00:10:24.140 everything. But when it comes to the moral truths, when it comes to something like the homosexual act,
00:10:30.460 for instance, which is what a lot of this revolves around and where the supposed ideological war hinges
00:10:35.880 in the church, but here there is only one correct Christian position. Those who say the act is immoral
00:10:43.940 are not conservative, they're just Christian. Those who say that it is not immoral are, they're not liberal,
00:10:52.260 they are actually rejecting the authority of Scripture, rejecting natural law, and if they're Catholic,
00:10:58.580 they're rejecting the teachings of the church. That is not a liberal position, that is just an un-Christian
00:11:04.260 position. That is a position that, as a Christian, is not available to you. So when it comes to these moral
00:11:12.400 truths, there aren't different ways of looking at it. There is only one way of looking at it.
00:11:18.540 There is only one truth. There is only one thing you're allowed to believe if you want to continue
00:11:26.180 being a Christian. Now, I am not, at the moment, interested in discussing whether Christianity is
00:11:33.860 right about homosexuality or about any other moral point. That's beside the present point.
00:11:40.080 The present point is simply that Christianity does have a teaching on these subjects. That's the point.
00:11:51.040 And if you wish to, and if you're not Christian and you don't agree with the teachings, well, fine,
00:11:56.380 whatever, you don't have to agree with them. But if you claim to be Christian, you have to agree
00:12:01.980 with the teachings. You can't disagree with them. The Bible clearly condemns the homosexual act
00:12:10.900 repeatedly, including in 1 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Timothy, all across the Old Testament, most notably
00:12:17.400 in Leviticus and Genesis. Moreover, Jesus Christ himself defines marriage. In both Matthew and Mark,
00:12:24.140 he teaches that marriage is when a, quote, man and his, quote, wife come together and, quote,
00:12:29.220 become one flesh. He defines marriage. He says, this is what marriage is. He offers a definition.
00:12:37.520 That's the Son of God. So what we are left with is a full, uncompromising, explicit consensus across
00:12:46.620 both the Old and New Testament about the nature of marriage and the moral depravity of the homosexual
00:12:51.840 act. Every church for almost 2,000 years affirmed these teachings. No Christian theologian or thinker of
00:12:59.220 or any legitimacy found or claimed to find any pro-gay interpretation of any of the verses mentioned
00:13:06.100 above. That is because no such interpretation can be found. It isn't there. It doesn't exist. We must
00:13:12.060 either accept with humility the biblical view on this topic, or we must throw the Bible out and
00:13:18.460 Christianity along with it. And if we're going to do that, then we are not Christian.
00:13:23.500 Again, if we try to retain our progressive views, then we must be doing so on one of the following
00:13:35.880 three foundations. Okay, so if you want to say, well, no, you know, the homosexual act is fine,
00:13:47.000 or, you know, or if you want to have a, in general, a more liberalized idea of sexual morality,
00:13:54.880 sex outside of marriage is fine, so forth. Well, if you're going to do that, then you have to be
00:14:00.700 doing it on one of the following three foundations. Number one, the Bible is wrong. Number two,
00:14:07.280 this behavior was wrong during biblical times, but it is no longer wrong. Number three, the Bible
00:14:16.600 actually supports this behavior, but its support is so subtle and hidden that nobody noticed it for
00:14:22.760 20 centuries until we came along and discovered it. Now, as a Christian, the first foundation,
00:14:29.640 the Bible is wrong. That doesn't work because it denies the moral authority of Scripture.
00:14:33.700 And if Scripture contains moral error, and so much of it too, then we have no reason to believe
00:14:40.140 anything else it tells us. And if we cannot believe what it tells us, then we have no reason to believe
00:14:44.580 that our faith is true. So that doesn't work. For a Christian, that doesn't work. For a Christian,
00:14:50.120 the second foundation that this behavior was wrong during biblical times, but it's not wrong anymore,
00:14:54.660 that doesn't work because it trades objective morality for moral relativism. But moral relativism is
00:15:01.440 incompatible with Christianity because on the Christian understanding, morality is grounded
00:15:06.060 in and flows from an eternal, perfect, all-knowing, and changeless God. If morality is relative, then God
00:15:11.880 is either imperfect and changeable or non-existent. Number three, the third foundation, that doesn't work
00:15:21.740 either, that the Bible actually does support this behavior, but we didn't know it until now.
00:15:25.720 Now, that doesn't work either. Leaving aside the arrogance of that kind of view, where you're
00:15:32.660 saying that every Christian in history was wrong about this, except for you, let's leave aside the
00:15:40.820 arrogance of that. The problem is that it supposes that the Bible is so confusing and so incomprehensible
00:15:49.420 that even its clearest commands and its clearest edicts cannot be known. This view suggests that
00:15:58.160 the Bible may mean the opposite of what it says, and it may take a couple of millennia for us to
00:16:04.940 realize it. So what opposite meanings will we discover in the year 4,000? Perhaps by then it'll turn
00:16:12.280 out that the Bible's references to Jesus as the Son of God actually meant that he's not the Son of God.
00:16:17.460 I mean, anything is possible. And if anything is possible, then Christianity ceases to be meaningful
00:16:22.620 or intelligible. And if it's not meaningful or intelligible, then it is literally unbelievable.
00:16:28.880 It is not something that a person can believe, because it doesn't mean anything. So none of this works
00:16:37.220 as a Christian. As I said, if you're not a Christian, then whatever, you can take any of those
00:16:43.760 positions that you want. It doesn't matter. You're not a Christian, right? But if you are a Christian,
00:16:48.120 you can't take any of those positions. None of any of those positions undermines everything else
00:16:53.980 you believe. It undermines the faith that you pretend to profess. So we are left with only two
00:17:00.100 valid options. Be Christian and accept its moral teachings, or don't be Christian.
00:17:07.220 Christian. Those are the only—that's it. And you can't say, well, yeah, but what if I think that
00:17:16.560 Christianity is wrong about this, that, and the other thing, but I believe that Jesus Christ is
00:17:21.660 the Son of God. Well, but you don't really believe that, do you? Because if you're saying that the Bible
00:17:28.600 is wrong about marriage, well, Jesus defined marriage. If you're telling me that he's wrong about it,
00:17:34.160 then you can't possibly believe that he's divine, because then he can't be wrong.
00:17:40.760 So you've just removed—by claiming that he spoke falsehood, he spoke out of ignorance,
00:17:49.820 he spoke out of whatever bigotry, you are removing his divinity. So no, you don't believe that Jesus
00:17:55.860 Christ is the Son of God. You say you do, but you don't. Now, on the other hand, you might say,
00:18:02.300 well, I believe he's the Son of God. No, I don't believe that he said anything wrong, but he didn't
00:18:07.180 really say those things. That was made up. He didn't really say—they put that into his mouth,
00:18:11.000 and he didn't really say. Well, okay, but then how do you know—so that part never happened? Well,
00:18:16.720 how do you know any of it happened then? How do you know the incarnation happened? How do you know
00:18:20.780 the crucifixion happened? I mean, you're getting all of it from the same document, aren't you?
00:18:23.820 You can't do that. You can't go through the Bible and start saying, well, that didn't happen. That
00:18:29.820 didn't happen. Yeah, he didn't really say that. No, he didn't say that. That's false. That's
00:18:33.480 completely wrong. No, that moral teaching is incorrect. But yeah, that and that, that's true.
00:18:39.080 On what basis are you doing that? On what authority? Where are you getting this from?
00:18:44.520 One more thing. I think this is a really important point.
00:18:54.440 When we talk about accepting the moral teachings, you know, and I say to be Christian, we have to
00:18:59.760 accept the moral teachings. That is not the same thing as—I am not saying that in order to be
00:19:05.520 Christian, we have to follow the moral teachings perfectly, or we cease to be Christian. That's
00:19:11.500 not what I'm saying. Now, we do have to try to follow the teachings, but that's not the point.
00:19:17.480 Obviously, nobody follows the moral law perfectly, least of all myself. You can be weak, imperfect,
00:19:25.000 sinful, cowardly, and still be Christian. That's—Christianity is made for it. Jesus says,
00:19:29.740 I came to call—I didn't come to call the righteous, I came to call sinners. So that's—and that's all of it.
00:19:35.280 And thank God for that, because if only the strongest and most courageous and most qualified could be
00:19:41.060 Christian, then I would be disqualified personally. But here's what we can't do. We can't categorically
00:19:50.500 reject the moral law and say that it doesn't apply to us. We can't do that. We can't say that we
00:20:01.700 worship God and then in the next breath say that His commandments are irrelevant. That doesn't work.
00:20:07.500 So that—you know, I just think this is a distinction that for some reason people struggle
00:20:11.200 with so much. Because at any time you get into this conversation, people say, oh, so you're saying
00:20:15.900 we have to be perfect? No, I'm not saying we have to be perfect. I mean, we should—we strive to be
00:20:20.860 perfect. We strive for holiness. But no, it's—we're not saying that we have to be perfect right now.
00:20:27.540 You take any moral rule, you know, we're not saying that you have to follow it perfectly in order to be
00:20:33.820 Christian. But you have to accept it. You have to accept its legitimacy. You can't say it's not
00:20:41.620 legitimate just because you disagree with it or it's—or it's inconvenient or it's hard. You can't do that.
00:20:47.120 As a Christian, you can't do that for all the reasons I've just outlined. Because you're tearing
00:20:54.260 down the legitimacy of Christianity, which it's a—you can try to do that from the outside.
00:21:04.420 You can't come into the inside and do that. You can't come into Christianity and then try to tear
00:21:09.120 down its legitimacy while claiming to be Christian. And this is also why people say, well, why are you so,
00:21:15.980 you know, it comes to homosexuality? Why are you so—why are conservative Christians so obsessed
00:21:22.440 with this issue? Why are they talking about it all the time? Well, number one, we're not the ones taught—we're
00:21:27.340 not the ones who are always bringing it up. It—I would much prefer to live in a society where we
00:21:34.000 didn't need to talk about this at all, where it never came up. But I'm not the one bringing it up.
00:21:40.800 There is a loud voice out there, including a voice within Christianity, or people who claim to be
00:21:48.360 Christian, who every day are saying, no, this is okay. We have to accept it. So they're the ones
00:21:54.940 bringing it up, literally marching through the street. And when—those of us who are conservative
00:22:02.840 Christian, when we resist that and we oppose them, what we're doing is we're defending the legitimacy
00:22:11.220 of our religion, because that's what's being called into question. It's not specific. It's not about
00:22:17.700 homosexuality exclusively specific. It is about that as well, obviously, but that's not—that's not just
00:22:24.280 it. This conversation isn't happening in a vacuum. The reason why we feel so necessary to rebuke
00:22:32.400 Christians who hold this view is because they are undermining—they are calling into question
00:22:37.300 our religion itself. And so that's why that needs to be met. And every age, you know, every era of
00:22:49.360 Christianity, there have been heresies, there have been certain aspects of Christianity that have come
00:22:55.420 under attack. And so those who love the faith and believe in it, it's necessary for them to rally
00:23:02.180 around that truth and defend it and become obsessed with it. When they're not obsessed with it, it's just
00:23:07.680 that there's a certain pillar of the faith that there's a movement trying to rip it down, and so we
00:23:13.540 have to rally around that pillar and say no. And in our time, the heresy revolves all around morality,
00:23:22.000 and especially sexual morality. The heresy basically is moral relativism.
00:23:29.000 And it's a heresy when it's within Christianity, when you have Christians who say
00:23:32.560 that morality changes or that we get to decide what's moral. And so those of us who love the faith,
00:23:39.600 we have to rally around objective morality and say no. You cannot tear down this pillar.
00:23:49.020 All right. We'll leave it there. Thanks for listening, everybody. Godspeed.