Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer responds to Mike Gendron’s recent appearance on Allie Beth Stuckey’s podcast “Relatable,” addressing his numerous lies about the Roman Catholic Church.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Last week, Mike Gendron will an Ellie best show to talk as an ex-Catholic about what the Catholic church really believes. Now that’s a sketchy premise in general. It’s like calling somebody to find out what their ex is like as a way of finding out the truth about them, but it’s particularly a problem in the case of Mike Gendron. For one simple reason, he’s a liar. Now, if you’ve watched this channel, I try not to assume the worst about people. People are wrong a lot, but they’re usually not lying. They’re just mistaken. But in the case of Mike, I’m going to show you seven of the claims that he made. There are many others I want to show you, seven in particular that are just obvious outright lies. Now how about other lies and not false? Well, for one, I’m one of the ones who caught him lying.
Now, last year I called out several of his lies, many of them the same ones. He’s continuing to pedal and he can’t pretend that he didn’t see the video because he commented on it to let me know I’d gotten a number wrong, and sure enough, he was right. I had gotten a number wrong. I quickly owned it and corrected it publicly. Meanwhile, the log of lies in his own eyes has remained completely unchanged and he continues to pedal them without apology or correction or amendment, even though there’s no way he doesn’t know that they’re false. These are things he can’t help but know were untrue because I showed the evidence that the things he’s saying the Catholic church teaches are not in fact Catholic teaching. So he’s lying about not just small issues, it’s not just that we disagree Catholic with Protestants. He’s lying about what it is. The Catholic Church teaches on major issues like Mary and the Eucharist and how we get to heaven and the 10 Commandments, and he has no fewer than three lies that he tells Ellie ba, stucky about the Bible itself lies that don’t even make a lot of sense together. So let’s start with Mary. Is it true as he claims that the Catholic church invented the assumption of Mary in the year 1950? This is among all the many false claims he makes, probably the funniest one,
CLIP:
But yet the Catholic church esteems Mary as sinless, they teach the immaculate conception that she was conceived without sin and then they teach that she lived a life without sin. And so that was pronounced in 1854, the dogma of immaculate conception. Well, Catholics began asking the question, well, if Mary never sinned and sin is what causes death, where’s Mary? And so in 1950 they had to come up with another infallible dogma that Mary was miraculously assumed into heaven.
Joe:
Okay, I want to make sure you’re getting this timeline right because it’s pretty important. He starts with the true fact that in 1854 the dogma of the immaculate conception was dogmatically defined. And according to Mike, this causes for the first time after 1854 Catholics to begin to wonder what happened to Mary? Did she die at the end of her life? What happened to her body? All those questions apparently only come up after 1854 for the first time and the Catholic church is like, oh, we didn’t think about that. And so in 1950 they just invent the dogma of the assumption of Mary, which in Mike’s mind is that Mary never died and also is this uniquely Catholic thing from the 20th century. Now it isn’t like he’s just on the spot and just espoused out a bunch of stuff he has no idea about and just says Nonsense. No, this is a story he has told over and over again in prepared talks even with slots.
CLIP:
And then in 1950, Catholics began asking questions, wait a minute, if Mary never sinned, and sin is what causes death, where’s Mary? So they had to come up with another infallible dogma. Mary was miraculously assumed into heaven. These are Roman Catholic traditions that departed from the faith of the apostles
Joe:
As I pointed out last year. It doesn’t matter whether you claim that they started asking the question in 1950 as he says then, or 1854 as he seems to be saying now, either way, it’s absurdly nonsensical history. How do we know that? Well, let’s talk about a few things. Number one, the dog member. The assumption is not that Mary never died. He said at the end of Mary’s life, whether she died or not, that is an unsettled fact. You can take either of you as a Catholic that at the end of her life she’s taken up body and soul into heaven says nothing about whether or not she died. Second, the idea that Mary’s assumed into heaven at the end of her life is not something that was invented in 1950. It’s not something that Catholics invented after the immaculate conception or because of the immaculate conception.
Case in point, the Eastern Orthodox who haven’t been in union with the Catholic church for about a thousand years celebrate Mary’s dorm mission and assumption into heaven. On August 15th, the Coptic Church, which hasn’t been in union with us since about 4 51 ad celebrates it on August 22nd, the local church in Palestine has continuously celebrated the feast of the assumption of Mary on August 15th since the start of the five hundreds. The point there being unless his claim is that Pope Pius the 12th was a time traveler. Every word he said there is obviously a lie. And I say lie because I pointed all of that out to him last year and he’s continuing to tell the same literally impossible story that is an insanely obvious false presentation of history. No one who knows anything about church history would possibly agree with him. Here he cites to zero sources and yet he keeps spreading this nonsense and Protestants keep eating it up.
Now I get it. Not everybody knows about church history. Maybe you’ve never seen all of the old Christian art celebrating the assumption like this piece from 1376 or any of the numerous other depictions of Mary being assumed into heaven that are well before 1950, well before 1854. By the way, let’s just point out that the Coptic and Orthodox churches don’t celebrate the immaculate conception and still believe in the assumption of Mary. So the idea this all a reaction to the immaculate conception is literally demonstrably untrue. But look, if you don’t know anything about Eastern Christianity, if you don’t know anything about church history, if you don’t know anything about liturgical art or devotional art in general, hopefully if you’re Catholic or ex-Catholic or aware of Catholicism, you at least know about the rosary. So let’s talk about the glorious mysteries of the rosary. The first glorious mystery is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The second is his ascension into heaven. The third is the assent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. You know what the fourth is? The assumption of Mary and it always has been. It wasn’t until 1950 all those old ladies prayed in the pews, all the medieval peasants praying throughout all the centuries and Mike’s imaginary what happened? They just get to the fourth glorious mystery and they’re like, dang, road closed ahead. We’ve only got three glorious mysteries. I can’t wait till the church publishes a sequel. I’m really looking forward to finding out where this series ends. What in the world are you talking about Mike Genin, the idea that people were just what? Getting through 60% of the glorious mysteries and then being like, I guess we’ll have to wait 800 more years until the church defines what happens next. So yeah, I think we can safely conclude that this claim is pretty demonstrably false. No less absurd though is Mike Jenn’s claim that Catholics literally believe that Jesus leaves heaven at every mass. Now, to frame this Ali best Stuckey who is not Catholic, ask Mike about Catholic views on the Eucharist and she doesn’t get Catholic doctrine quite right, but you can tell she’s trying in response Mike gives, we’ll call it an effort, but really a pretty blatant lie.
CLIP:
Talk about that, why that’s important to Catholic doctrine and why we don’t believe
It. It’s really amazing the imprimatur of the Catholic church has given on this statement. When the priest speaks the words of consecration, he reaches up into the heavens and brings Christ down from his throne to power greater than saints and angels. He speaks in low Christ omnipotent. God bows his head in humble submission to the priest’s command, and so that’s what the Catholic church believes. The priest calls Jesus down from heaven through the quote, miracle of transubstantiation. The wafer becomes his physical body and blood, soul and divinity.
Joe:
What are some clues that Mike is lying here? Well, for starters, he quotes some passage from memory verbatim. He’s used it enough times that he can quote it on the spot just like that, and he claims this is Catholic teaching, but he introduces it in this really weird way, kind of indirect way. He doesn’t say pope, so-and-so said this or X ecumenical counsel said that this paragraph of the catechism says this. No, he doesn’t do any of that. He says the imprimatur of the Catholic church is on this statement. That’s not how imper madders work. But then he says, because of that, that’s what the Catholic church believes. Now you should know two things. Number one, this is not the first time he’s done this. On the comments to my post, he quoted verbatim the same thing, but strangely also forgot to mention what it was he was quoting.
What pope is this? What church council, what catechism? He doesn’t tell us. Why might he not tell us? I want to suggest two reasons. Well, number one, it’s not true. The idea that Jesus leaves heaven at every mass is explicitly denied by the Catholic church over and over and over again and has been for centuries. So for instance, Pope St. Paul six explicitly says that while Christ is present corporeally, this is not in the manner in which bodies are in a place that he’s not what’s called locally present, that at Amast Jesus doesn’t bodily leave heaven and come down to earth. And this is not some new idea from Paul the six he is quoting basically verbatim St. Thomas Aquinas who says the same thing back in the 12 hundreds. Christ’s body is not in this sacrament as in a place. Well, why not? Well, as Mike Jenner is quick to note, if anyone actually believed the fake Catholic teaching he claims the Catholic church teaches, that would be ridiculous, that would be very stupid, and we can actually agree with him. If anyone was dumb enough to believe the thing he claims, we believed that would create some real logical and philosophical problems.
CLIP:
So what do we say to Catholics? It’s got to be a false Christ by the authority of scripture because in Acts 3 21, we see that Jesus must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything. In Hebrews 9 28, we read He will return a second time and not to deal with sin.
Joe:
Look, we can absolutely agree If the pretend view that Mike says is the Catholic view was really the Catholic view, it would mean that every mass triggered the second coming of Christ, that the apocalypse starts anytime mass happens and Christ returns to judge the living in the dead. He is bodily returning to earth and his local presence, he’s leaving heaven. Now of course, St Thomas Aquinas will point out that’s only the first of the many absurdities. If you understood his presence to be like that what’s called local presence in theology, then it would mean that Christ physically leaves heaven to go to mass in Cincinnati, meaning can’t also be in Jerusalem. Now, Aquinas doesn’t use Cincinnati because it doesn’t exist yet, but you get the idea. It would mean there could only be one mass on one particular altar anywhere in the world where the sacrament was.
You couldn’t have the Eucharist in multiple Tabernacles. You couldn’t have the mass in multiple places. This would of course be an absurdity and seemingly you couldn’t have Christ present in more than one host if you’re going to follow that logic. The way he’s presenting the argument, right? What he’s describing is a logical absurdity, which why the church has always denied that. In fact, if you want a technical term for what we believe happens, it’s transubstantiation. The fourth ladder in council describes it that way. St. Thomas Aquinas describes it that way. It’s described that way for centuries. Why does that matter? Because location or place isn’t part of substance. It’s an accident. Now again, I understand if ordinary people aren’t familiar with this, but don’t lie and say the Catholic teaching is that not only the substance but also the accidents of Christ are present in the Eucharist because that is 180 degrees wrong.
The whole point of saying this mode and not another mode is to say we don’t believe Christ is physically leaving heaven for the Eucharist. That is absurd. He is denying something we deny. The problem is he’s claiming we believe the thing that we explicitly don’t. So why is he claiming that? Well, it all comes back to that mysterious quote that he for some reason isn’t citing the source of. Now you might’ve guessed now why he’s not citing it, because it’s not church teaching, it’s not church doctrine. It’s not coming from a pope or a church council or a catechism or anything authoritative. It’s coming from a popular book called The Faith of Millions by a priest named Father John O’Brien written in 1938. The reason he claims its official church teaching is because it has the imprimatur of the bishop of Fort Wayne. Now, prior to this, I had not realized Catholics believe in the infallibility of the bishop of Fort Wayne and all of his priests, but apparently in Mike Jen’s imaginarium, that’s how this works.
So let’s say a few things. Number one, it is possible for a Catholic priest to say something wrong. It is possible to say something wrong even in a book that has been read and nobody caught the mistake. And so it has the imprimatur and the nihill obste. That is not a denial of church teaching. It doesn’t automatically make something Catholic teaching just because an editor didn’t catch something. But third, if you actually read the book, and I don’t think he has read the book, the reason I say that is there’s a lot of anti-Catholic books out there that quote that one line out of context, and I hope for his sake he hasn’t read it because if you have read it, you’ll realize this isn’t just a total perversion of Catholic teaching. It’s a total perversion even of this book. So for instance, this line from the book, it’s not actually from the chapter on the Eucharist.
It’s from a chapter talking about the priesthood and talking about it in really poetic sort of terms. If you read the book, you’ll find in the chapter on the Eucharist, the priest actually makes clear he doesn’t literally think Jesus is leaving heaven. That Christ’s mode of presence in the Eucharist is not extended in such a way as to occupy space that Christ isn’t spatially or dimensionally present in the Eucharist locally present in other words. And then he quotes favorably another priest who he says that what God has done, the body of Jesus means that it is ceased to be extended when we’re talking about the Eucharist and all at once is freed from the fers which bound it to place. It is not so much that it is in many places at once as that it is no longer under the ordinary laws of space at all.
Now you can say that’s a good or bad explanation of Christ’s mode of presence in the Eucharist, but the point is it’s explicitly denying the thing that my gender is claiming that this book teaches and therefore the Catholic church teaches. So does Jesus leave heaven for the Eucharist? Of course that’s false. Catholics do not believe that at all. Speaking of heaven, what about the idea that Catholics don’t think you can go directly to heaven? Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard this claim before. To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever heard this claim myself, but Mike Jenen claims this is what he believed when he was a Catholic.
CLIP:
And I’ll never forget every time I got on a plane Monday morning, I always had this great fear. If the plane goes down, will I end up in purgatory or hell? Because heaven wasn’t an option. Why? Why? Because even the popes believe they have to spend time in purgatory. Oh really? Yeah. When the last couple of Popes died, they had other cardinals come in and perform the sacrifice of the mass for the purpose of getting the Holy Fathers out of a place called purgatory. Is
That the repose of the soul? Is that what that
Means? Right. They were offering sacrifices for the sins of the popes. And so yeah, there was not an option to go to heaven directly. You had to go through the purging fire of purgatory.
Joe:
As with the last point, we can find some common ground Catholics and Protestants can agree that Mike Jenn’s vision of the Eucharist is dumb. We can also agree that he should be worried about that plane going down and it’s not because of purgatory, it’s much worse than that. Revelation 21 verse eight warns that all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death, they will not enter heaven. An unrepentant liar is damned forever. So that’s the problem. And hopefully Catholics and Protestants alike can say, yeah, we believe in Revelation 21 verse eight. We don’t want to affirm lying as something that a Christian can or should do, but we can go beyond that. What about Mike’s claim that not only he but actually the whole Catholic church including the popes teach that nobody goes directly to heaven?
Well, this is of course a lie and is lie explicitly denied by the catechism of the Catholic church in paragraph 10 22. It distinguishes between those saints who enter heaven immediately and those who enter heaven through purification purgatory. And this is not some new distinction either. In the next paragraph it quotes Benedict to 12 back in the year 1336, making the same distinction to be sure as Catholics, we believe some people go to purgatory, but it is an utter lie to believe that we think that all of the saints go to purgatory because explicitly we don’t. This is yet another false teaching by Mike Jenen. Alright, let’s shift gears here a little bit and talk about the 10 Commandments. Is it true that the Catholic Church removed one of the 10 Commandments? That’s what Mike claims.
CLIP:
You said that they removed the second commandment from their catechism and turned the last commandment into two, right? I don’t think I realized that. Can you explain that?
Yeah, just open any catechism of the Catholic church and you’ll see the traditional 10 commandments on one side of the page and then the Roman Catholic Commandments and you’ll see a blank space where the second commandment is and then you go down and you see they created two commandments for the last one. They’ll shall not covet a neighbor’s goods or their neighbor’s wife. They turn that into two
So they can say that it’s the 10 commandments still. So they have to split up.
Joe:
You’re not going to believe this, but Mike Jenen is actually lying. Again, we didn’t rip out the second commandment and leave a blank space rather. This lie is just a major part of his shtick. In fact, if you look at the thumbnail for the video, you’ll notice it’s the 10 Commandments with the Protestant numbering and the Pope in front of them with the question Catholic commandments. So to get the true story, I once again want to appeal to Protestants This time I’m going to appeal to some Lutherans. Now, if you can ignore the fact that this Lutheran pastor Brian Wolf Mueller is recording this video while driving, I keep waiting for the truck behind him to slam into him. It was nerve wracking. If you can avoid getting distracted by that, here’s a quick breakdown of the fact that there’s multiple ways of numbering the 10 Commandments and this is nothing new.
CLIP:
Now there’s four different divisions that different churches have used. There’s the Roman Catholic numbering, there’s the Lutheran numbering, there’s the Jewish numbering, and there’s the numbering that the Reformed or evangelicals or other protests that I’d suppose it’s aside from the Lutheran, it’d be the Protestant numbering. And that also happens to be the same as the Eastern Orthodox numbering. Now that point is slightly ironic. So
Joe:
Why are there four ways of numbering the 10 Commandments and why is it ironic that evangelicals follow the Eastern Orthodox numbering? Well, the first thing you should know is that the 10 Commandments are not numbered in the Bible, meaning any set of numbers you apply are a manmade addition to make sense of how there are 10 commandments. The second thing you should know is that the Bible doesn’t actually call them the 10 Commandments, rather they’re called the 10 words. Here’s another Lutheran pastor Chad Bird who explains the importance of that difference
CLIP:
Because in the Bible they’re never called the 10 Commandments. They’re always called the 10 words. And the first of these words in the Jewish reckoning is actually God’s way of reminding his people who he is, who they are and what he’s done for them. This becomes the foundation upon which all of the other commands and prohibitions are built.
Joe:
Yeah, let’s start there. The beginning of Exodus 20, God spoke all these words saying, I’m the Lord, dear God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Now, if you’re looking for commandments, nothing is commanded there in verse two, but if you’re looking for words that certainly seems like a word of the Lord and indeed the one that kind of underscores everything else he’s going to say. And so Paul Finkelman, who is a law professor and legal historian talks about how Jews typically treat this as the first word, the first commandment. Meanwhile, Catholics and Lutherans treat this as part of the first commandment along with the instructions not to worship other gods or engage in idolatry which all flow from this thing. He is our God and we are his people, excuse me. Non Lutheran protestants tend to actually remove this part of the 10 Commandments entirely treating it simply as a preparatory statement.
So if I made a little chart, if you’re watching the video form of this in Exodus 20, we have Exodus two in both the Jewish, Catholic and Lutheran numbering. It’s not in the Protestant numbering. Jews consider verse two to be the first commandment verses three to six to be the second commandment. Catholics and Lutherans consider verses two to six to all be the first commandment. It’s all there, it’s just numbered differently. Protestants remove part of the 10 commandments, they remove verse two and then begin verse three as the first commandment and then treat verses four to six as the second commandment. So there’s a few things to notice here. First, you’ll notice we did not get rid of the prohibitation against idolatry. That’s verses four to six. The only difference is for us, it’s in the first commandment for evangelicals, it’s in the second commandment.
The catechism talks about this in paragraphs 21, 29 to 21, 32. The idea that we’re like, oh no, idolatry is cool. That’s not in our 10 commandments is just outright fiction. It’s a lie and it’s not as if the evangelicals were around first and the Catholics came along and renumbered, we were around before the evangelicals were second. If anyone could be accused of removing anything from the 10 Commandments, it’s got to be the evangelicals who don’t have verse two because they don’t consider it part of the decalogue even though Jews, Catholics and Lutherans do. But then the third and final point, and this is the funny irony that Pastor Wolf Mueller points out, it’s not as if numbering it according to the Evangelical numbering instead of the Lutheran or Catholic or Jewish numbering is going to make a hill of beans of difference about the fact that we have icons and religious images. Case in point, the Eastern Orthodox follow the same numbering that Protestants do
CLIP:
When visit an orthodox church. It’s like where’d they get all these pictures of the
Joe:
Saints? They get all these pictures of the saints. Indeed, the point there is it is quite simply untrue that the Catholic church removed a commandment from the Bible. Okay, now we’re going to pivot to the final three and the final three are thematically linked because they’re all lies. Mike Gendron tells about the Bible and what’s really fascinating about this is that Mike doesn’t seem to bother with even something like I don’t know, logical consistency. He’s going to on the one hand claim that the Council of Trent add seven books to the Bible and on the other hand, claim the Council of Trent banned the Bible and he doesn’t bother to explain how both of those things could be true or how his version of history makes sense even on its own terms. But as it is, both of those things are lies. So let’s break down these lies one at a time, beginning with the claim that the Council of Trent added books to the Bible. Here’s Mike’s claim.
CLIP:
And so we know that they cannot be inspired by God because God’s word is inert. They weren’t added to the Catholic cannon until the Council of Trent. The reason it was added then is because they needed some justification for the doctrine of purgatory and indulgences. So in second Maccabees, they saw when the maccabean were killed, many of them were wearing pagan amulets around their neck, and so they sent alms back to Jerusalem for the repose of their soul. So the Catholic church said, see, there is an intermediate place and we can offer alms for the dead in order to get them out of an intermediate place. And so they added the apocrypha in order to try and support their doctrine of venial sin, purgatory and indulgences. But we don’t do things just because the Jews did them.
Joe:
I want to do a couple things. First, let’s highlight another area. We can find some agreement. If second MacAfee is scripture, which Catholics and Orthodox and Coptic Christians, basically everyone who’s been around longer than the 15 hundreds believe, then that certainly helps prove our claims about venial sin and purgatory and indulgences. But according to Mike’s timeline, again, his imaginary version of history, you don’t have to worry about making sense of why the Orthodox and Coptic churches agree with us. You can just say, well before the 15 hundreds, actually these weren’t part of scripture. They weren’t in the Catholic canon. That’s his claim, not just Protestants are right. These never should have been in the Catholic Bible. His literal claim is that they weren’t in the Catholic Bible until the reformation happens. Protestants start asking questions about purgatory and venial sin and the like in the early 15 hundreds and then in the 1560s at the Council of Trent, they add these seven books, which he calls Apocrypha we call Deutero Cannon.
Doesn’t matter what term you’re going to use, but the point is all of this is very clearly demonstrably nonsense. It’s just lies. It’s just outright lies. He can’t point a Catholic church document from before this period saying these books aren’t part of the Bible. No. On the other hand, if you actually look back in history, you’ll find things like the Ecumenical Council of Florence in which the Catholics, the Orthodox and the cops at a council and an ecumenical council affirmed which books were in the Bible in 1442 and explicitly on their list is Tobit Judith Wisdom Ecclesiasticus, AKA, AK Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees. In other words, they affirm exactly the Catholic Bible as it stands today. And this was itself nothing new. These are the same books that you’d find in the Latin Vulgate. And by the way, these are the same books affirmed at the Third Council of Carthage way back in 3 97.
So are we to believe that the church fathers at the Council of Trent, excuse me, the Council fathers, well I guess they are church fathers because in his view they time travel back to the early church and they also are involved in the third Council of Carthage in 3 97. This is incredible. I had no idea. People in the 1560s had this kind of time travel ability. Now look, this is a silly lie, but it’s one many Protestants, unfortunately belief you can read the historical records yourself. You do not need to take my word for it mean I quoted the sources. You can read ’em on screen, you can go do the research yourself. It is simply factually incorrect to say Catholics added seven books to the Bible at the Council of Trent. There was not a Protestant bible around that. We then added to there was a Catholic Bible that Protestants came along and removed seven books from Mike’s claim is simply false. It is objectively untrue. It is a lie, but I’ll give him credit for this. The man dreams big. If you’re going to base things not on any factual information or sources, why not just use your imagination? Why not claim as he does that the Catholic church actually outlawed the Bible at the Council of Trent. That’s an amazing claim. It would be astonishing if it were true. You think Protestants would mention that a lot, right? But we have to hear it from Mike because no one else has ever heard of
CLIP:
This. And so at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church actually placed the Bible on the list of forbidden books because they recognized as people were reading it, the truth was setting them free. And so I think modern day Catholicism doesn’t discourage the reading of the Bible. In fact, they have their own scripture or studies now, but for the longest time they actually had the Bible on the list of forbidden books and discouraged people from reading it.
Joe:
I’m sorry to all of you who are really big imagination people, but this is unfortunately another lie by Mike Gendron. The Council of Trent not only did not do that, it did basically the opposite of that. It ordained in decree that the Latin vulgate be published in the most correct manner possible. This led to a really healthy movement to get better copies of the biblical text. So it was followed in short, ordered by an updated version of the New Testament in English in 1582. Then an updated version of the Latin Vulgate called the Clementine Vulgate in 1592 and then an English version of the Old Testament in 1609. That old and New Testament together called the du Reams ended up being really influential on a Protestant translation on Anglican translation a couple years later called the KJ jv. So did the Catholic church put the Bible on the index of forbidden books and ban the Bible?
Of course not. It did the exact opposite. It encouraged Bible reading, it just wanted good reliable versions with accurate footnotes and translations. Now this is part of a much bigger lie that is really kind of the underlying lie. Mike tells in almost all of the versions of history that he gives, all the versions of theology, all the versions of his own testimony that he gives that in this version the Catholic church is kind of cartoonishly villainous where it hates the Bible. I don’t know why it keeps copying the Bible and distributed it around the world, but it’s all because it actually hates the Bible and doesn’t want anyone to read the Bible. It discourages Bible reading because this would be really bad. So Mike tells different versions of this story. If you notice in that last clip, he treats that as something that used to happen and now, oh, maybe it’s gotten better.
They actually have some Bible studies these days. That’s what he’s telling Ali Ecky today. As recently as two years ago, he was claiming that the Catholic church still doesn’t want people to have bibles. So you’ll find various forms of this claim, all of them equally false. Sometimes he’ll say at the Council of Trent or in the early years after the Reformation, the Catholic Church forbade anyone from reading the Bible. Other times he’ll claim this continued to happen even up to his own lifetime into the 1980s. Now, this is a story he actually still tells Ali best ducky. So he has not gotten past this lie. The truth is it’s actually easy to find centuries worth of proof, written evidence of the Catholic church, popes and bishops telling people to read the Bible. Now, it’s true we don’t always do that. Sometimes Catholics are bad at reading their Bible, but that’s because of spiritual laziness and lukewarmness and the usual suspects.
It’s not because the church is telling us not to do it. So I’m going to give you one example, but there are many, many, many more at the third plenary Council of Baltimore. This is not like an ecumenical council around the world. This is a council of all the American bishops. If you’re familiar with something like the Baltimore Catechism that comes from these councils of Baltimore in 1884, the American bishops send out a letter to their people reminding them that the most highly valued treasure of every family library and the most frequently and lovingly made use of should be the holy scriptures. That’s an important thing to note for two reasons. One, in the 18 hundreds, a hundred years before Mike Jenen leaves the Catholic church over not being allowed to read the Bible. You have the American bishops telling families you need to a own a Bible, and B, don’t let it gather dust.
Read the Bible and it’s not some new crazy 18 hundreds American invention. They quote Pop Pius six in the 17 hundreds who reminds us that the faithful should be moved to the reading of scripture. And then the council quotes St. Paul himself in Romans 15 that whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. They’re applying this explicitly to the laity before concluding that we hope that no family can be found amongst us without a correct version of the holy scriptures. And then it gives a recommendation saying, among other versions we recommend the Du. That’s the Duwe reams, the version I mentioned before. All that’s to say English versions of the Bible were explicitly being encouraged for laity to read at home as a family. This is not some new post Vatican II thing.
This is not some 21st century thing in response to Mike Jenin or whatever. This is not something that happened after the 1980s. In fact, you can go back all the way to the Council of Trent and find a succession of popes and bishops saying very much the same thing. One of the things that was equal parts amusing and frankly disheartening was discovering in the course of preparing for this episode, an 1889 article in the English Catholic magazine, the tablet or newspaper, the tablet in which it’s responding to the exact same lie that the Catholic church forbids the Bible or at least discourages the Bible. And in response, the author, Charles Diamond, who was the editor at the time, gives a long litany of examples proving that this isn’t true. And then he concludes at the end of this, it seems strange that in the teeth of facts like these Protestants should accuse the church and her pontiffs of discouraging and forbidding the reading of the Bible.
And then he says, it is not easy to believe in the good faith of those who do so. And I really like that. That is a nice 19th century Catholic, British polite way of saying, I don’t think you’re this dumb. I think you’re lying. And the reality is 135 years after that was written, we’re facing the same easily disprovable lies from anti Catholics. Now this particular lie, Mike Jenen is this is very much part of his own story because his whole shtick, his full-time job is coming to speak before Protestants about what the Catholic church really believes. And so he presents himself this basis after 35 years of being a devout Catholic. I had a crisis of faith when I began reading the Bible for the first time. Now if you know in I OTA of anything about the Catholic church, you should know that sentence doesn’t make sense.
How can you claim both to be a devout Catholic and to never have read scripture And you’re 35, you’re a grown man and you’ve never opened a Bible and you’re still calling yourself devout because this matters because he’s obviously not following what the church is telling him to do. But it’s important that he claims to be devout because if he said I was a lukewarm Catholic, I didn’t spend a lot of time caring about what the Catholic church taught, then no one’s going to bring them to their parish, to their church to find out what Catholics really believe because he obviously doesn’t know. So he has to pretend he was this incredibly devout Catholic and yet simultaneously he can’t say I was devout. I read the Bible all the time because then you’d find out devout Catholics actually read the Bible and that’s not part of the bigotry he’s trying to pedal. So he has to hold this preposterous vision that he’s a devout Catholic even when starting a Bible study and simultaneously he’s afraid to read the Bible. Now here’s how he tells this story. This is from again, last week. He’s still pedaling this pretty obviously fictional version of his own life.
CLIP:
In my family upbringing. I was an altar boy for seven years and learned the Latin and the responses to the priest and the mass. Later on I was responsible for bringing the first little rock scripture study to a Dallas church. In fact, it was St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. And it was then that I began reading the Bible for the first time and for 35 years I owned the Bible. But it just sat on the coffee table collecting dust because the priest told us, don’t even try reading it. It’s too difficult. If you have any questions, just come to us.
Joe:
Now I’m going to acknowledge that the outset, these are the hardest kinds of claims Mike makes to disprove because he’s really good at telling these stories about nameless individuals behaving in ways that real people don’t usually behave, but it’s always the most convenient for the narrative. So he’ll tell these stories about these wicked priests being like, don’t listen to God, listen to us and acting like these two dimensional stock villains. But because he never names the names of anyone living who can defend themselves or refute his account because all of these are private conversations, maybe so private, they only exist in his imagination. It’s very hard to demonstrably disprove them. But I think we can at least point to some strong evidence he’s lying here. Let’s start with the fact that it’s pretty unlikely even illogical that the same Catholic priest is letting you start a Bible study and asking you not to read the Bible.
But also bear in mind this is happening in the 1980s, Mike Gendron goes to an evangelical seminar in which he decides that he believes in Sola script Torah in 1981. In 1985, he leaves the Catholic church. So he is got this period of time where he’s clearly theologically confused, not believing what the Catholic church believes, but also not leaving the church. And somewhere in this period of time, seemingly these kind of stories are happening. Well, why is that implausible? Well, because by the 1980s, this is well after the second Vatican Council. Now you already saw from the time of the Council of Trent forward, there’s a very strong evidence of the church repeatedly calling upon the laity to take scripture reading more seriously. But the Second Vatican Council is very famous for having done this in a very strong sort of way. So in the document de verbum, they call upon all the Christian faithful to learn by frequent reading of the divine scriptures, the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ.
And then they quote Saint Jerome, that ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. So to believe Mike’s version, you’d have to believe that the priest said, I want you to be ignorant of Christ from the Catholic perspective. That’s what this seemingly fictional priest would be sane in doing that ikin do goes on to remind us that there’s actually many ways we can connect with scripture. We should do so on a regular basis in the liturgy, in devotional reading through instructions suitable for the purpose. And in various other eight, you can have a prayer meditation book that has scripture and you can just read the Bible devotional. You can get the Bible at mass. All of these are really good ways of accessing the Bible. And all of them we’re told should be done in a spirit of prayer because this is how God and man talk together.
We speak to God in prayer and we hear him when we read the divine saying, that’s from St. Ambrose. Now you’ll notice that’s from the early church as well. So this is not some new 20th century sort of thing. The idea that we should be praying and reading scripture is very much at the heart of what the Catholic church has always taught. But that’s not Mike’s version. No. Maybe you could say, okay, well maybe this was a really bad priest, that maybe this priest didn’t believe Vatican two or what the church had always taught, or we had some confused idea. Or maybe he just said something, Mike misunderstood that. Well, I’ll explain the hard stuff. And Mike hears that and says, oh, I guess I’m not allowed to read it. That’s not what you can imagine. Various conversations that Mike is misconstruing maybe. But there’s a couple problems with that.
Number one, Mike, at least according to his own telling, I have no idea if even this part is true. Mike, by his own telling, is literally a rocket scientist by this point in his life. And yet he’s afraid he can’t read the Bible on his own. Does that even seem like a plausible? How could you be that smart and dumb at the same time? But second, it’s hard to ascribe this to just one bad priest because in other versions, Mike tells it isn’t just one bad priest, it’s a bunch. It’s all of the priests he meets. Everywhere he goes, are all these equal two dimensional stock villains? So two years ago, he and Benny Hen’s nephew make a video called Why does the Catholic Church Keep Bibles out of people’s hands? Now, you might notice he claims not to believe that now, but two years ago he was making a video about it. In that video, Benny Hins nephew asked him this,
CLIP:
Roman Catholics will deny what we’re about to say, but we see it proven time and time again in the way that their priesthood operates. They work hard to keep the scriptures out of the hands of the people. Why is that such an effort on their
Joe:
Part? Honestly, it’s pretty wild to begin a video by being like, I’m going to tell you something about another group they’re going to say is a lie, because that’s a pretty clear indication that you might be lying. But also the whole why did Catholic or why does the Catholic Roman Catholic Church keep the Bible out of people’s hands would be like me making a video. Why are there so many unicorns? And then answering, Mike Jenin won’t tell you this, but it’s because he’s breeding them in his backyard. It’s like, what are you talking about? And Mike doesn’t reply to this by saying, Hey, that whole framing of things is obviously untrue. The reason Catholics keep telling you it’s not true is because it’s not true. Instead, he tells a bigger version of two of the stories we heard from him recently. First he tells a story about the Council of Trent forbidding Catholics from owning Bibles, but he actually has an even juicier detail that’s equally fictional.
CLIP:
So the Roman Catholic Church placed the Bible on the list of forbidden books. In fact, if you were a Catholic and you had a Bible in your possession, you could not have your sins forgiven until you returned the Bible to the church.
Joe:
I find that detail really fasting because first of it was so obviously a lie. How is your confessor going to know? I feel like you might have a Bible at home. You better bring it back to the church. What do you mean bring it back? Did you steal it from the church? If you stole it from the church, you should bring it back. But the idea that all of these popes and bishops telling you, please read the Bible, have it at home. It’s your most treasured thing in your family library. They actually meant you better not have it and we will not forgive your sins if you do. It’s just a fascinating version of reality, let’s put it that way. But in this mic also tells a more embellished version of his own story. Whereas I alluded to before, it’s no longer just one, two dimensional priest telling him he’s not allowed to read the Bible. It’s all the priests.
CLIP:
Now today, keep in mind that I traveled all over the world. I was under many different priests in my 35 years as a Catholic. Every priest told me, don’t even try to read the Bible. It’s too difficult to understand if you have questions come to me. So that was another way of discouraging Catholics to be true disciples of Christ, to abide in his word. They know the truth will set them free.
Joe:
So am I saying that Mike Jenner and his line about his personal testimony as well as church history? Yeah, I am real. People don’t really speak and act the way that every person in his story seems to. It just doesn’t seem plausible. Again, maybe you could find one really bad priest who has a very warped understanding and is super clerical and doesn’t think the lady should be reading scripture. But every priest you’ve encountered anywhere for 35 years, if you read the comments, you’ll see one after another person just being like, what are you talking about Mike? And speaking of Mike’s, this video comes out two years ago. It’s 2022, and at the start of 2022, what the number one podcast in all of America was Father Mike Schmitz, the Bible in a year podcast where a Catholic priest reads every word of the Bible in the course of a year in podcast form so that ordinary people will encounter it.
And it’s not like he does this for just like a tiny group of people. This podcast was number one on iTunes throughout much of 2021, certainly at the start of 2022. And here Mike comes along in mid 2022 asking why this is a Catholic church? Keep the Bible out of people’s hands. It doesn’t, Mike, you’re lying. So that’s the seven things I wanted to cover. And believe me when I say there are many more things we could talk about, the point here is not Mike’s a Protestant, I’m a Catholic. We’re going to read some things differently. The point here is that Mike is lying about what the Catholic Church believes to make it easier to rebut this fictional version of Catholicism.
CLIP:
It’s just you have no integrity. That’s the worst thing I could say about anybody.
Joe:
So the thing is clear, I don’t think Mike has a lot of integrity. I don’t think he’s a good Christian. I don’t think he’s a good witness to what Catholics believe. I don’t think he’s a trustworthy person. You should invite into any public space to find out anything you expect to be true. But I want to be really clear as I close up this video that there are definitely a lot of good faith debates between Catholics and Protestants. Should we read the Rock of Matthew 16 as Peter, or is it his confession of faith or is it Jesus reasonable? Christians might read that differently, but none of the things I’m talking about here today are like that. This would be like if I said, oh, you know the problem with Protestants, they all think the rock of Matthew 16 is a hail bop comet and we all have to kill ourselves to ride it.
No, those kind of falsehoods don’t belong in Catholic Protestant dialogue. They don’t move us closer to one another in love. They don’t bring us closer to Jesus in truth. And that’s the level of discourse that Mike Jenin consistently offers. Ultimately, though, I would suggest that Mike is not just a bad faith actor, but actually the symptom of something that we tend to get wrong as Christians. I recently heard a comedian named Josh Johnson say something I thought was profound. Now, he was talking about politics, but I think there’s something we can learn here as Christians.
CLIP:
I think it’s important for someone to go where most people oppose them and express their ideas. I think it’s important because it’s important for us to have discussions that are real, a discussion where the person who believes the thing said the thing to you, and you’re not hearing it secondhand from someone you already agree with. Part of why we are the way we are right now is that people don’t really want to listen to someone that they’re diametrically opposed to. They want to hear from someone they already like, but someone you already tends to believe what you believe. So then we’re playing telephone with each other’s ideas sometimes, right?
Joe:
If we’re not careful, it’s really easy for us to just play telephone with one another’s ideas and theology and distort them in the process while we kind of get caught up in our own echo chambers where we talk about one another when we should be talking to one another. And in those kind of environments, vipers and Conmen like Mike Jenen thrive, they pedal vicious lies knowing that most of us are too comfortable and complacent to bother to find out if those lies are even true. So I would suggest that the solution is not just talk about other people, people with whom you disagree, but to make time to talk to people that you think are going astray or that you think are wrong. And so I want to commend Ali best ducky for sitting down a few months ago with Trent Horn because I think that call conversation went way better than her conversation with Mike Gendron for a pretty simple reason.
The two of them disagreed. She was finding about Catholicism from a Catholic who could exchange ideas with her, who could clarify misconceptions she had, who could push back where appropriate. That’s going to be a much more fruitful conversation. Now, in that spirit, I want to make an offer to those of you non-Catholics who are watching this. First of all, thank you. Thank you for making it through the episode. Thank you for being open-minded and getting out of the echo chamber. But I also want to give an invitation as well as a challenge, by the way, to Catholic viewers, if you wonder as a non-Catholic Y is the Catholic church teaches X or Y thing. Maybe it’s something Mike mentioned. Maybe it’s something you came in with that you just find confusing. I invite you to ask it below. I’m not going to be offended, right?
I’m inviting you to do it. I will do my best to respond to at least some of the questions. And I know there are many smart holy Catholics who watch this show and subscribe, which is great. And I encourage them and invite them to give the good answers I know they’re capable of giving. Meanwhile, to you, Catholics, I would say please jump in the comments, answer questions, but do it graciously, generously. And please recognize that especially for those people who didn’t grow up Catholic. There’s a lot of confusion. Maybe they don’t know Catholics, maybe they know bad or lukewarm Catholics. They’re going to come away with a lot of good and legitimate questions. This is an opportunity to show both the truth and the love of Christ. So please, to everyone listening, let’s be charitable. Let’s be loving. Let’s model Christianity and how we interact. And I hope to hear from you in the comments for to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.