Steven Crowder vs. Pope Francis

Trent Horn:

I got an email the other day from someone saying, “Hey, Trent, can you check out this video from Steven Crowder talking about Pope Francis?” So I thought I would oblige them, and it’d be a good subject for today’s episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast. Welcome. I’m Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker Trent Horn. If you don’t know who Steven Crowder is, he is a conservative YouTube personality and commenter.

Trent Horn:

He comments on political issues, on current events, and he offers a conservative perspective and kind of a wacky perspective. I don’t know if provocatoeur is the right word, but he does provoke reactions. There’s things that he says that I don’t agree with. It’s not entirely my sense of humor, but there’s other things he does that I think are really cool. Like he’ll go to college campuses and have a table that says, “Change my mind on X.”

Trent Horn:

And he’ll sit down with people and he’ll have conversations with them. And he engages them. I’ve never seen him be aggressive or anything like that. I think that he takes a more assertive style in his conversations, but at least he’s going and having conversations with real people. I’m always in favor of people who do that. So that being said, I don’t agree with everything he says, and I certainly don’t agree with what he said recently on his show about Pope Francis.

Trent Horn:

He was not happy about Pope Francis giving an address at a recent international vaccine conference or summit. He was none too happy. What I want to do is I’m going to play the clip of what he said, and then I’ll offer you some of my thoughts on it.

Steven Crowder:

I know that there are a lot of Catholics out there, and I’m not Catholic, and I have talked about how I disagree with some of the theology, but I know there are a lot of great Catholics who do not agree with this current Pope on issues that don’t relate to spirituality. I want to be clear, this is not an attack on Catholics. However…

Speaker 4:

There’s no hope with Pope.

Steven Crowder:

There is no hope with the Pope. Stupid little red shoes. Here he is saying, the Pope, that we need to abandon individualism and liberty for the collective good. We’ve had to translate it. This is an actual… He gave us at a vaccine conference.

Speaker 5:

[Foreign language 00:02:21].

Steven Crowder:

Well, and I know that the whole thing with the Pope is he’s only infallible on issues of spirituality and speaking at the cathedral, but you know what? We’re supposed to be reverential to the Pope, but I’m not.

Steven Crowder:

Communist pope.

Trent Horn:

Okay. So let me offer a few thoughts here. First. You don’t have to agree with everything that the Pope says. When the Pope is speaking as a private citizen, for example, offering his opinions on a social or a political matter, you don’t have to agree with them. You should still respect him, especially if you’re Catholic and you recognize that he is the successor of St. Peter, but you don’t have to agree with him. But, you should respect everybody, right? You should respect people, but you don’t have to respect their opinions. So when the Pope offers a personal opinion on a matter, you can take it or leave it. This is also true, even on matters related to faith and morals. That when the Pope is not speaking in his capacity as the Bishop of Rome, as the pastor of Christ Church, you don’t have to agree with him in any form.

Trent Horn:

Pope Benedict, the 16th, for example, wrote a series of books called Jesus of Nazareth. And he offers his reflections on the life of Christ, but he makes it very clear in the books that this is not an act of the magisterium. It’s not a teaching of the Catholic faith. So, you don’t have to agree with it. It’s just Pope Benedict and Cardinal Ratzinger’s opinions as a private theologian. So in the case here, we have Pope Francis giving an address at this vaccine summit. And this is not meant to be teaching for Catholics to accept. It’s his thoughts related to vaccines and his encouragement to other people during the pandemic. And you can agree with it or not agree with it. And frankly, for me, I agree with some of it. And I have concerns about other parts of it. Number two, when you’re critiquing other people, you should follow the golden rule, treat others how you would want to be treated.

Trent Horn:

So what’s going on in this clip? Crowder takes a very short clip of Pope Francis, I think it’s less than like 10 seconds long, and then immediately has this big emotional response to it. And he calls the Pope a communist. Now, if you think about it, there’s a lot of people who don’t like Steven Crowder, who try to do the same things as Steven Crowder. Like they’ll take a ten second clip of Crowder telling an off-color joke and they’ll say, “Oh, see, Steven Crowder is a racist. He’s a bigot.” And they’ll say, “Steven Crowder is a Nazi.”

Trent Horn:

Well, I don’t think you’re really taking Crowder’s position very seriously if you’re going to immediately jump to saying he’s a racist or a Nazi based on 10 seconds of something he said, that you’re not really giving it a fair hearing.

Trent Horn:

So if Crowder would want people to give him a fair hearing, then he should give other people a fair hearing that he disagrees with. So, like I said, just as it’d be wrong to say from a ten second, out of context clip or a rush to judgment, Crowder’s a Nazi or a racist, you shouldn’t say that about Pope Francis. Also, frankly, it’s not good to say everybody’s a communist or everybody’s a socialist just because you disagree with them on political matters. Because it’s like the boy who cried wolf. That if you say, it’s like when conservatives are saying Barack Obama, he’s a socialist, he’s a socialist, he’s a socialist. And he’s really not compared to somebody like Bernie Sanders or people who are even further left than Bernie Sanders. But if you say that, people are like, “Well, I kind of like Obama, maybe socialism isn’t so bad.”

Trent Horn:

So that’s why when you label your opponent with these dramatic terms, like he’s a communist, he’s a Nazi, it becomes the boy who cries wolf. And it’s not a responsible way to engage people that you disagree with. Another example that I think Crowder should appreciate that he’s a Christian, he’s not Catholic, but he’s a Protestant Christian is that atheists love to take the Bible, like parts of the Bible that are difficult, out of context and then say, “Look at how stupid the Bible is.” And they’ll quote passages, like in Colossians where it says slaves obey your masters. And then you can imagine an atheist just like giving the middle finger to the Bible and middle finger to God. Like, “I don’t have to listen to God.” I would ask Crowder, what would you do if an atheist just took a few passages from the Bible that are difficult, read them, mocked them, gave God the middle finger, and then that was it?

Trent Horn:

I’m sure you would think that that atheist is not seriously considering the truth of Christianity, seriously considering what Christianity is. By the same token, just give the same treatment, give the same latitude to someone like Pope Francis when you’re engaging. You don’t have to agree with him. I don’t agree with Pope Francis on everything. But we should always try to treat other people fairly. And finally, I think what’s most important is this clip that Crowder has focused on doesn’t show Pope Francis as a communist at all. He’s saying, look, you shouldn’t give into individualism. You have to think about the common good. Saying that life shouldn’t be completely about you doesn’t mean that life is never about you. Saying that people should not engage in individualism doesn’t mean they should cease being individuals. Rather what the Pope is saying, going all the way back to Pope Leo the 13th saying that we as Christians, we are individuals, we have Liberty, but we don’t have unlimited Liberty.

Trent Horn:

God will judge us based on how we use our Liberty. Do we use our Liberty to help the poor, to help the least among us? I mean, imagine if we said, “I don’t have to help the poor. I can do what I want. I don’t have to help these other people.” Well, yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. Even if you’re not religious, there’s basic elements of morality you should be able to recognize from your conscience saying you do have these principles. And if you’re Christian, they’re staring you right in the face anytime you read the gospels and you hear what Jesus has to say. So the fact that the Pope calls us not to be individualist or really to be selfish is kind of the underlying theme here. It doesn’t mean he’s saying we should go and be full-blown communists. Because here’s the thing, I wrote a book with Catherine Pakaluk called, Can a Catholic be a Socialist?

Trent Horn:

And the answer is no. The church has condemned socialism for 150 years. And Pope Francis has also done that. Pope Francis has said that Marxist ideology is wrong. And when he addressed Congress during a visit a few years ago, he talked about the positive role of business and he quoted his encyclical Laudato SI what it says about the positive role that private businesses play. In quoting it he said, “Business is a noble vocation directed to producing wealth and improving the world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.” So the whole point of what Pope Francis is saying in this address is that we’re in an unprecedented crisis and we shouldn’t turn in on ourselves. Rather, we should be concerned about our neighbor, whether he lives across the street from us or across the world from us.

Trent Horn:

So, to be fair in that regard, especially related to COVID 19, what the Pope was saying about individualism and the common good, he’s focusing specifically on the subject of vaccine patents. Should the legal protections given to vaccine manufacturers over the copyright they have over their vaccines be temporarily suspended to promote greater distribution of the vaccine to people around the world? It’s a tough question. So I think to give the Pope a fair hearing, I’m going to play for you the address that he gave. And as I play it, I’ll read the subtitled translations for people who are just listening to this video or listening to the podcast, because I believe he’s giving the address in Spanish. And then we can give an actual fair hearing to what the Pope said.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:10:11].

Trent Horn:

Dear young people in age and in spirit

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:10:24]

Trent Horn:

Receive a cordial greeting from an old man who does not dance or sing like you.

Trent Horn:

When I met Pope Francis briefly in 2013, my wife and I did, after we got married, we did sposi novelli. When you go to St. Peter’s Basilica for the Wednesday audience, and if you dress up in your wedding attire and you get the right paperwork, you go, and usually the Pope just blesses a whole group of you, blessing you in your new marriage. And we thought he was just going to wave at us or do a group blessing and that’d be it. But instead we were all walked out in a line and he went and greeted each one of us individually. And I was like, “Oh man, what are we going to do?” So we had actually purchased a Papal Zucchetto from the shop, his taylor.

Trent Horn:

And we offered it, to switch with him, to get his Zucchetto, and we were explaining this to him like, we’re going to switch this new Zucchetto for the one he was wearing. And he took my wife’s bridal tiara and he says, “How about I take this?” And I said, “You’re the Pope. You can have whatever you want.” So, even though there’s things I disagree with the Pope on, he does have that genuine humility, and he has a good sense of humor.

Trent Horn:

The Pope goes on to say that the pandemic has worsened previously existing social and environmental problems. And that we, as a society, need to address the root of these problems that already existed. And that’s where he starts to talk about the issue of individualism. So let me play that.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:00]

Trent Horn:

In these diseased routes, we find the virus of individualism.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:09]

Trent Horn:

Which does not make us freer or more equal or kinder.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:17].

Trent Horn:

Rather, it makes us indifferent to the suffering of others.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:25]

Trent Horn:

And a variant of this virus is closed nationalism.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:33]

Trent Horn:

Which prevents, for example, an internationalism of vaccines.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:12:42]

Trent Horn:

Another variant is when we put the laws of the market or intellectual property over the laws of love and the health of humanity.

Trent Horn:

So what the Pope is saying is, look, this is a global pandemic, but not everyone is able to respond to it equally. COVID-19 is doing a lot of damage and causing a lot of harm and death and suffering in India, for example. And India has a less developed health care infrastructure than other Western nations. So what do we do? Do we just stand by and do nothing, or do we, as other nations that have more advanced infrastructure, better access to vaccines and treatment, what do we do to help people around the world? Now, what I would say to Pope Francis is, actually market mechanisms do provide a way to be able to do that. What’s ironic is the person that Pope Francis should be most concerned about was actually a few weeks ago, it was President Biden.

Trent Horn:

It was American executive policy, at least American foreign policy, that was preventing companies in the U.S. from exporting medical goods and supplies to India that they originally, if you remember that… Well, here, let me play a clip of that. So this clip is from an Indian news site, and it’s an exchange between a reporter and a representative of the U.S. State Department asking him, okay, when will the U.S. lift the ban on exporting raw materials to produce the COVID-19 vaccine? There are companies in the U.S. that wanted to sell raw materials to produce the vaccine to other manufacturers in India, but the U.S. had an export ban preventing them from doing that. I want you to listen to the representative from the State Department and his rationale for that and compare it to what Pope Francis said at the summit at Vax Live.

Speaker 6:

So India is currently facing a horrible surge in coronavirus infections. And we reported that they’ve asked the United States to lift the ban on the export of vaccine raw materials, which basically threatens to slow that country’s vaccination drive. When will the administration decide on that?

Speaker 7:

What I will say broadly is that the United States, first and foremost, is engaged in an ambitious and effective, and so far successful effort to vaccinate the American people. That campaign is well underway, and we’re doing that for a couple of reasons. Number one, we have a special responsibility to the American people. Number two, the American people, this country has been hit harder than any other country around the world, more than 550,000 deaths, tens of millions of infections in this country alone. But there’s also a broader point here that I made yesterday, that it’s, of course, not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated, it’s in the interest of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated. The point the secretary has made repeatedly is that as long as the virus is spreading anywhere, it is a threat to people everywhere. So as long as the virus is spreading uncontrolled in this country, it can mutate and it can travel beyond our borders.

Trent Horn:

So we’re actually helping people in India by vaccinating people in the United States, which actually doesn’t make a lot of sense because the most vulnerable people in the United States have already been vaccinated. We did a tiered rollout. And so the people who are most at threat by this remember are people with a compromised immune systems, and really people over the age of 70. Those are the people who are, maybe 60, you could put it low enough, but those would be most at risk, we’ve already vaccinated them. So I think if Pope Francis was really going to critique people, he should be critiquing the leaders in America right now, Biden and other members of his cabinet and the state department, who who were focusing on vaccinating people who are relatively low risk to this disease, when we could be helping other countries around the world with many high risk populations that have not been vaccinated yet.

Trent Horn:

And in fact, the criticism of this policy from people who would normally support the Biden administration, it ultimately led the administration to reversing the ban on the export of the raw materials. So that’s the theme that the Pope is getting at when it comes to the conflict between individualism and nationalism, me first, my country first, and the broader obligations responsibilities we have to other people. Where I would disagree with the Pope is that when you allow people to freely exchange with one another, they can actually benefit other people in an indirect way, even across global borders. But then this also gets to the issue though, of intellectual property laws and patents on vaccines. And let me just zero in on the part of Pope Francis’s address that Crowder takes issue with on his show, because then that goes right into the issue of vaccine patents.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:17:27].

Trent Horn:

That our creator instills in us a new and generous spirit.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:17:37]

Trent Horn:

To abandon our individualisms and promote the common good. So he’s not saying governments should go out and deprive people of all of their Liberty to promote the common good. He’s saying, God gives us a generous spirit to promote the common good, to promote others, rather than just to fall into individualism.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:18:06]

Trent Horn:

A spirit that encouraged us to create greater access to vaccines and the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:18:24]

Trent Horn:

A spirit that allows us to generate a different economy, one that is more inclusive, fair, and sustainable.

Trent Horn:

So, all right. So, I think we can agree. Look, we have a moral responsibility, not just to our neighbor across the street, not just to people in our own faith, but to everyone. When you think about the parable of the good Samaritan, the young lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor? Who is my neighbor?” Well, it’s everyone, because the command to love your neighbor as yourself in Leviticus 19. So this is not something that Jesus just invented ex nihilo. The Jews already knew to love their neighbor. It was in Leviticus 19. But in that passage of scripture, it is very clear that neighbor was your fellow Israelite. And then you have the big moral revolution when Jesus says, “No. Your neighbor is not just your fellow Israelite. It’s not just your fellow Christian. It’s your fellow man.” And then he tells the parable of the good Samaritan.

Trent Horn:

So we all agree that we have a moral obligation to help others. Where we disagree and where I might disagree with the Pope, is that we might disagree about the means by which that we use to help other people. So take the issue of vaccines. One side says that the patents on vaccines that prevent their formulas from being shared and for them from being produced by other companies, that is inhibiting the spread of a life-saving drug in the middle of a pandemic. And so government can act in the interest of the community to suspend those individual rights, to promote the common good. The other side of the debate would say, well, if you do that, if you temporarily suspend these vaccine patents, then you’re going to decentralize drug manufacturers from investing in vaccines.

Trent Horn:

Because if let’s say you have a company, to create a vaccine, it’s billions of dollars of research and development goes into the creation of these vaccines. And it is a marvel that we got the vaccines as fast as we did. I in fact, have Pope Francis saying, we need to increase the spread of these vaccines to have more equitable access to them. Get government out of the picture. When China released the genetic makeup of the COVID-19 virus, when they released that, two days later, two days later, it was either Moderna or Pfizer, they had the formula for the vaccine. They had the vaccine ready in the middle of March last year when we were all starting the lockdowns. They already had a vaccine, but we couldn’t get the vaccine administered to anyone until December. What was that? Nine months later. We had to wait nine months for the vaccine because you have to go through all of these regulatory hurdles, when you could have done other things like doing challenge trials.

Trent Horn:

I signed up for a challenge trial. I signed up for a trial saying, Hey, look, inject me with the vaccine or give me the vaccine, then give me COVID 19. Let’s see if it works. And, that’s my free choice. I’m not going to say that other people have to do that or something like that. I didn’t end up doing it. I wasn’t called. And a lot of companies and governments said that’s unethical. And that’s a whole different debate. Normally in vaccine trials, to see if a vaccine works, you give a person the vaccine and you follow up with them over the course of a few months to see, in their daily life, did they contract the disease or not. In a challenge trial, you speed that up by a few months by giving someone the vaccine and then giving them the disease itself to see if they develop symptoms.

Trent Horn:

So, it’s more dangerous, but you can get the vaccine out a lot faster. So I agree with the Pope, that if there’s life saving medicine, even if you don’t believe in the COVID-19 vaccine, just substitute any life-saving medicine you do agree with, how do we get it out to people in the most efficient way possible? And to me, free market mechanisms help. It doesn’t mean that government has no place. One reason MMR was spread so effectively in society was that you had inoculation programs in public schools, or maybe that wasn’t MMR, that might’ve been polio. But public health programs and government have a role in this as well. I’m not somebody who thinks government can never do anything. I just think the government, oftentimes, is really inefficient, bureaucratic, has a lot of red tape, and it ends up hindering things more than helping things.

Trent Horn:

So should the government suspend copyrights, patents, on vaccines in order to allow them to be accessed easier and produced easier in different countries? There’s two sides of the debate. And I would say that they’re both reasonable. I probably fall more on the side of that suspending vaccine patents in the long run is going to do more harm, because then companies may not feel it’s a good investment in vaccines if they’re not able to retain the patents on them. We’re seeing this in Canada, for example. In Canada, there’s a much smaller percentage of Canadians who have been vaccinated, even though Canada has more of a government sponsored healthcare system than the United States. And one of the reasons is that you don’t have a lot of drug manufacturers in Canada because the government doesn’t afford these kinds of intellectual property protections.

Trent Horn:

And so you have these unintended consequences. You think, all right, we’ll just suspend the patent, get the vaccine out there. What happens though if the drug companies choose to not make these drugs in response to that? Now that’s, maybe, what I lean towards, but I totally see the other side. I’m not going to say that they’re unreasonable people. I see both sides. And this is what we call a prudential judgment. A prudential judgment just means different ways of pursuing the good, different ways of using reason to pursue the good, and people are going to disagree about that. But just because I might disagree with the Pope on this prudential judgment, that does not make the Pope a communist. Because here’s the thing, no right to private property is unlimited. Some people have caricatured my position, the position I and Catherine Pakaluk argue in our book, Can a Catholic be a Socialist?, as saying that we believe the right to private property is absolute.

Trent Horn:

We do not believe that. There’s some people who might think that, but it’s not. If the right to private property were absolute, imagine if someone said, “I want individualism. I want unlimited copyright protection on my intellectual property.” If it was, you would have some negative consequences. For example, if there was unlimited intellectual property rights, you could not have the doctrine of fair use. So think about it. If you have unlimited rights over your intellectual property, let’s say somebody took this video and wanted to critique me and they show a clip of it in their own video. I could say, “Hey, I never granted you permission to do that.” Or let’s say Steven Crowder wants to critique a video on TikTok or on some of their YouTube channel or something from Vox or whatever. Steven Crowder critiques other people’s intellectual property all the time and he doesn’t ask them for permission to do that because it’s covered under the doctrine of fair use.

Trent Horn:

Fair use says that you can take someone’s intellectual property if it’s for the purpose of commentary, critique, review, if it’s transformative, there’s a whole bunch of rules related to fair use. But the point I’m making is that if intellectual property rights were unlimited, were absolute, I could say nobody can ever quote my books. No one can ever mirror my videos to comment on them. Everybody could do that. But that would make us worse off because we would be interacting with each other less. So you always have to go away from the extremes. You don’t want to extreme unlimited individual property rights, but you also don’t want just government or society managing everyone’s property rights and denying the individual their natural right to private property to sustain themselves. I cover all this and more in my book with Catherine Pakaluk. Be sure to check it out.

Trent Horn:

But the Pope has always walked that line in respecting both the right to private property, recognizing it’s not absolute, and the Catholic tradition of the universal destination of goods, that God created the world for everyone, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t own parts of it. And in doing so, owning it and transforming it and using it, do so to the benefit of other people. All right. So, I hope that that was a helpful look at least on what the Pope is saying about individualism in the narrow context of access to vaccines, vaccine patents, copyright, things like that. Then Crowder and his cohost go into more of a general criticism of Pope Francis. So let me play that and I’ll give you my thoughts on that exchange.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, well, no. To a lot of Catholics, they would just take offense to it.

Steven Crowder:

Right.

Speaker 4:

And they would say, Oh, well, he was talking about making sure that we’re not self absorbed in everything that we do. And to maybe provide-

Steven Crowder:

You mean like living in a city of gold and having a man whose only job is not to make Pope shoes, not to make red shoes, to make the Pope’s exclusively red shoes?

Speaker 4:

Just like that. I’m not sure who chose the red shoes and why that has to stay a thing, but-

Steven Crowder:

Don’t be a narcissist says the Pope.

Trent Horn:

All right. So what’s interesting in this is that Crowder’s cohost is kind of onto it. He’s saying, “Well, he’s just saying don’t be a complete individualist. Care for other people.” And then Crowder just zooms past that when yeah, he was making a really good point. But I think his attempt to try to say that Pope Francis is kind of like a hypocrite, saying like, Oh, we should be individuals.

Trent Horn:

We should care about others. But Pope Francis lives in the Vatican, a city of gold with his red shoes, like acting like royalty. That is not this Pope. Pope Francis has always been marked by his humility. Sometimes it’s a humility that can lead to doing imprudent things. So I don’t always agree with it. But he has strived to be humble. And that was from the very beginning of his pontificate. For example, when the Pope was elected, he did not move into the luxurious papal apartments in the Vatican. Instead he took a much more modest two bedroom apartment. This, I have here from Catholic news agency, I think it’s CNA. It says, this was back in 2013, Father Frederico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said that the Pope is experimenting with this type of living arrangement which is simple, but allows him to live in community with others, both the permanent residents, priests and bishops who work at the Vatican, as well as guests coming to the Vatican for meetings and conferences.

Trent Horn:

So here, the Pope chooses a simple two bedroom apartment and he lives a very simple life in the Vatican. And he does so to live in community with other people. And finally, the thing with the red shoes, and Crowder even says in the video, he doesn’t always wear red shoes. Pope Francis has walked that tradition back. You’ve probably seen pictures of Pope Benedict wearing red shoes. And you’re like, what’s going on with this? It’s a symbol of royalty. The Pope is the vicar of Christ. He is the Viceroy, if you will. He is the Regent, the overseer, of the kingdom of God on earth. Just like you had in ancient Israel, you had the King, you also had a chancellor or a Viceroy underneath him to oversee the kingdom. And that is the Pope’s job. So he is Regal in that respect. And the red shoes, I believe in ancient Italian customs, at least in a Truskin royalty, wearing red shoes was a symbol of royalty.

Trent Horn:

And then people would kiss the Pope’s shoes and later 20th century popes have moved away from that tradition. And we see this, when you look at the papacy from the early part of the 20th century, like in 1903 versus 2020, there is a move away from the Pope being an aloof figure, one who doesn’t leave the Vatican. Pope Saint John Paul the second really revolutionized that with all of the trips he did around the world. That the Pope was really viewed as an aristocrat that was very inaccessible. In a lot of papal and cyclicals, you go back a hundred years, the Pope would write using the magisterial, we, instead of talking about, I, for example, he’ll use we. And that still shows up in papal documents, even up to the present. But much, much more pronounced that the Pope would act in ways similar to other Royal courts.

Trent Horn:

In the 20th century, we have a move in the papacy to be more accessible. And so that’s why Pope Francis said, no, I don’t want to wear the red shoes. He just wears black shoes. He wears red on special occasions formally and things like that. But the bottom line is that when the Pope is saying, we ought to care more for our brother or sister, he’s not being a hypocrite in this regard. And when Crowder says, Hey, Jesus was pro Liberty. I don’t know. Yes, Jesus did not want us to be enslaved to sin or even enslaved to worldly powers, but it doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want to do. Freedom is not doing whatever you want. Freedom is having the ability to choose the good. And so think about the teachings of Jesus. That true freedom is found in obeying Christ and loving our neighbor as ourself, in caring for our neighbor, even in loving our enemy, instead of hating our enemy and loving our enemy.

Trent Horn:

We’re not free to disobey Jesus when it comes to that command. You go further on in the writings of Saint Paul, for example. We see that in the Liberty we have as Christians, we also have a moral responsibility and duty to one another. In Philippians 2:4-6, Paul says, “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility, count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” And that’s what the Pope is saying here. To not go into individualism saying, I’m only going to look at my interests in the pandemic and my country’s interests. Well, we have to look at everyone, though we can disagree about the best way to care for our interests. We all got to agree, you got to help the poor. Archbishop Chaput once said, “If you don’t care about the poor, you’re going to hell.” That’s Archbishop Chaput who said that.

Trent Horn:

And I think that’s great. If you think, “Oh, the poor don’t matter. Who cares about them? Let them die off.” Well, you’re not going to be doing well at the final judgment. Let me tell you that. But we can reasonably disagree with one another about the best ways to combat these problems in our world. Problems of poverty, problems of lack of access to basic necessities to healthcare. And we should be engaging in dialogue with another to do that, not just throwing out zingers and attacking one another. So that’s what I would say to Crowder. And if he’s listening to this, Hey, stand up for the truth. Do so in a way that you would want other people… Engage others in a way that you would want them to engage your content. And if Steven Crowder ever wanted to talk about this more at length or about Catholicism, I’d be happy to oblige him. So I hope this has been helpful for you all, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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