Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer breaks down Mel Gibson’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, rebutting his schismatic arguments for Sedevacantism.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Mel Gibson. The guy behind things like the passion of the Christ, Braveheart signs if you’re into sci-fi. He sat down on the Joe Rogan show and had a pretty fascinating interview. There were a couple of things that I really liked and one kind of direction he went that I think is fiercely poisonous. So I wanted to highlight both what I think he nails and what I think he gets really dangerously wrong. First, what I think he nails, I think he boldly proclaims the gospel about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In an easy to understand sort of 32nd soundbite,
CLIP:
I regard the gospels as history. It’s a verifiable history. Some people say, well, it’s a fairytale. He never exists, but he did. And there are other accounts verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up, that yes, he did exist. And the other aspect of that is that all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there, every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody.
Joe:
Bear in mind Mel Gibson’s not a theologian, he’s not an neologist. Maybe you might nitpick the way he says this or that, but frankly in a conversational format with Joe Rogan, I think this was a great way of laying out a pretty thoughtful case pointing to actual evidence. The gospels are historical accounts, you got this extra biblical evidence and he has that great line. Nobody dies for a lie. And this, I think it’s struck a chord with people and I saw numerous people quoted afterwards. The second thing that he does that I think we would do well to remember is he is unabashed about standing up against corruption in the church. Things like sexual abuse and deviancy and the like and that I think again, if you read the comments, people are relieved to say, oh look, a Catholic who’s not afraid to call out erring and malicious and abusive predators in the Catholic clergy.
And so if you’re a Catholic Washington, you’re probably like, well of course. But bear in mind, people outside the Catholic ranks may not realize that you are as disgusted by those things as they are. So let that be known. However, Mel Gibson turns his sight not so much against just the sexual abuses, but also against what he views as kind of theological abuses and in particular, but more than that to the true church spread. You are a of the, I have all respect for the way you defend Christ. I agree with you 100%. The consider church of Levi two is a counterfeit church. This is why I built a Catholic church that only worship traditional. You’re welcome to
CLIP:
Come and say from time of course being called to and being excommunicated by her hago like a badge honor when he consider she is a total apostate and false,
Joe:
You might have picked up on that directly. Joe Rogan. You have little bit things aren’t what they seem, that kind of language. He doesn’t explicitly just say Pope Francis is not the Pope, but elsewhere, he absolutely does say that. So for instance, he wrote an open letter to Archbishop Vigano when he was excommunicated, applauding the fact he got excommunicated and saying he doesn’t think the Catholic church that we all know is the Catholic church. He doesn’t think it’s the real
CLIP:
Church. I agree with you 100% that the post cons say your Church of Vatican II is a counterfeit church. This is why I built a Catholic church that only worships traditionally. You are welcome to come and say mass there anytime. Of course, being called amatic and being excommunicated by her ha Burgo is like a badge of honor when he consider he is a total apostate and expels you from a false institution.
Joe:
So I think that’s clearer. And there’s different shades of city of Aism. Some people have said that there hasn’t been a pope since by 12, others will say since Benedict the 16th. So Pope Francis isn’t a true pope in terms of Mel Gibson. He comes from a family where his father was an outspoken city of a contest, a man by the name of Hutton Gibson, who was very clear that he didn’t believe that there had been any pope since Pius the 12th, that from 1958 on the Catholic church has not had a pope. And that everyone from Pope John 23rd forwards has really been an anti pope. And not only, well more than just an anti pope, he’s also going to argue they’re spies. Now, I should caveat here, obviously father’s views aren’t automatically his son’s view. Not many of us would want to just be associated with every theological or political view of a family member. But in this case, not only is Mel Gibson saying a lot of the same arguments that his father was on record making, but he also in the Joe Rogan interview talks a little bit about both his esteem for his now late father and kind of the influence he had on him religiously
CLIP:
As a child. One accepts things on faith because you’re raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it. And my dad was a pretty smart guy. He was like Mensa smart, real smart back in 1968. He won Jeopardy, right? Really. And then they brought all the jeopardy winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them too. So he had a mind like a steel trap.
Joe:
So Mel Gibson’s father was by seemingly any measure a genius, and he used his genius intellect to argue for the idea that the only true Catholics on earth were those who rejected the Pope and the visible Catholic church in his words, all the faithful. So every faithful Catholic quote will have nothing to do with the post conci heretical structure or its anti popes. They do not recognize heretic puli as pope. They do not accept heretic wia pop on puli as pope. So it’s not just that he doesn’t think they’re popes, he doesn’t think you’re Catholic if you think they’re pope because all the faithful reject them. And in fact, he doesn’t just think, as I said, he doesn’t just think they’re anti popes, he’s convinced they’re actually spies put there at least in one case by the communists. So he’s convinced that John Paul II was really a communist spy. He made this claim on the radio in 2010 and he’s made it elsewhere as well.
CLIP:
You’re looking from a devout traditional Catholic position at John Paul ii. What did he say? He was a complete plant. He was a Russian agent or a communist agent from the beginning. He’s the only bishop that could get out of Poland without any trouble during the Communist control.
Joe:
So again, Hutton Gibson is making these claims. In 2010 decades after John Paul II helped to bring down communism in Europe, he helped organize resistance to the USSR. He helped to organize what became known as the published solidarity movement. He helped to bring down the Iron Curtain, but apparently Hutton Gibson argues this was all because it was a communist plot to bring down communism in Europe. I don’t know how that reasoning works, but I highlight it to say this is one of the things that can make the city of a contest debate really tricky. The people who believe in this stuff tend to be committed to certain positions on not any clear evidence whatsoever, often just repeating rumor and innuendo even when those rumors and innuendo fly in the face of everything we know. We have plenty of evidence that John Paul II was outspoken against communism, but we’re supposed to believe that he was secretly a communist.
Those kind of things that makes this debate kind of tricky because it can be hard to find fruitful common ground, but I’m going to do my best to do that. Looking at a couple aspects of why Mel Gibson believes city of Aism is true in his own explanation again as he gives it to Joe Rogan, I realize it’s not like a technical treatise or anything like that. Fair enough. Additionally, I should say this at the outset, some people just believe the pope isn’t the pope because they think he fell into heresy. They think he got something wrong on doctrine. I understand a lot of the doctrinal questions. I understand a lot of that theological stuff is tricky. That’s usually a weak case, meaning if you’re a Catholic and you say, I disagree with the Pope on X, that’s usually not a sign that the Pope is wrong, particularly if you’re speaking in an authoritative magisterial sort of way.
There’s a lot of caveats and things we go into in all of that, but I want to focus instead because that’s not the case that Mel Gibson makes. He instead makes the case that we don’t think there’s a real pope because there was a fake election that the papal election in 1958 was a sham and this kind of disrupted the whole chain of Pope since then. This is rooted in what is sometimes called the Siri theory or the Siri hypothesis, and if you’re wondering, this has nothing to do with the question of whether your devices are listening to you, I’m all in on that conspiracy theory. That is obviously true. It is instead the claim that in 1958, the papal conclave that allegedly elected Pope John the 23rd actually elected a different guy, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri. And so this theory is based on a real fact and that real fact is on day one in the morning of the papal conclave, the smoke looked white at first instead of black
CLIP:
First. There was an event in the Vatican where they elected John the 23rd Pope, right In 1958, I was two years old, he was elected and it was a very funny thing that happened in the conclave. Usually there’s white and black smoke that goes out of the chimneys to tell you we have a Pope Haba must papa. And the white smoke came out and everybody cheered and they went crazy. And then about a half an hour later, black smoke came out that never in history has that happened, that the white smoke came out and then the black smoke came out. So white smoke means we found a new pope. Black smoke means no pope. That’s right, they’d have votes or there’d be one reason or another they’d have a round in the conclave and black smoke would come out many times, many times maybe. Maybe it would take two weeks, but never was it known that white smoke came out, then black smoke came out. So what was the scenario that somebody was elected and that maybe something else happened and he was pushed aside and someone else was put in. So it was power struggle, some kind of power struggle.
Joe:
So as I say, there’s a little bit of common ground that we have on this. In 1958 on day one in the morning, there really was smoke from the Sistine Chapel that it first looked white, it was just kind of a trickle of smoke, and then one of the priests covering the conclave for Vatican radio even got excited and announced It’s white, it’s white, we have a pope. And so people living in Italy were convinced, okay, we have a pope. But then a few minutes later, more smoke came out and it was very clearly black. That’s from the news reports the day of. So that’s where we all kind of agree. There’s two possible theories for this. One theory is simply that smoke signals aren’t exactly the most sophisticated technology despite Mel Gibson claiming that never was it known that the smoke would go from white to black.
Confusion over whether the smoke was white or black or going from looking white to looking black is actually something of a recurring phenomenon. As you can see from this 1978 footage of the papal conclave that elected John Paul ii, this is 20 years later and you see the same thing happening. It starts off looking kind of black to looking gray, to then looking white and you see the crowd rejoicing. I’ve got the sound off, but you can hear people rejoicing in St. Peter Square and then the smoke goes back to very obviously black. Now what’s going on here? Well, there’s not really a controversy as far as I know about what happened in 1978. It’s just the problem of trying to use smoke signals to communicate pple elections. To make black smoke, you burn up the cardinal’s voting ballots, plus you add an additive. At the time you would use something like tari pitch, but the problem is if the ballots burn up first, the smoke’s going to look white at first or if the pitch isn’t overall the ballots right?
If you get something where there’s not pitch being burnt, it’s just ballots, it’s going to look like white smoke. And this was such a recurring problem that in 2005, the Vatican actually stopped using Tari pitch in favor of a more reliable chemical method to make black smoke. They also helpfully now ring the bells of St. Peter’s if the smoke should be white. So if there’s an election of a pope, you’re not just left particularly at night trying to decipher does that smoke look more white or black? This is like a monochromatic gender reveal. It doesn’t work very well because you’re using some pretty old school technology we’ll say. So that’s one explanation, right? The reason you have smoke that looks white at first is it’s their first time doing it is day one. It’s their first attempt to do it. It’s not a very precise mechanism, and this is something that we know as a matter of history had been screwed up multiple times.
Even the prior papal conclave when they wanted to have white smoke, it was more gray looking and they had to then have the guy helping run the conclave go and announce to the Vatican radio. Oh yeah, we actually did elect a pope because the smoke was ambiguous. So that’s one I think straightforward explanation. But there is another explanation, and it’s the one that Mel Gibson is pointing to that there was a power struggle or a power grab, and in particular allegedly the reason the smoke looked white for a few minutes on day one was because the Cardinals had actually elected a pope, a secret pope, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri. Now Hutton Gibson Mel’s father, it claimed that he was duly elected but then was forced to step aside by conspirators inside and outside the church. And these shadowy enemies threatened to atomic bomb Vatican City. Now to be clear, Hutton Gibson is not basing this off of anything. Cardinal Siri said, Cardinal Siri never claimed anything of the like. He instead appears to be indebted to the work of an American layman by the name of Gary Giuffre who came up with this theory in the 1980s.
CLIP:
Cardinal Siri, A of great renno as a negotiator and peacemaker between labor and management evidently fit the Mason’s need to the letter moments after his election on 26 October, 1958, Siri was persuaded in a most brutal fashion to step aside in a forced papal abdication known by all present to be completely invalid. Masonic Cardinals had even voted for him to ensure his election and acceptance of office only to demand his immediate resignation. Five minutes later by threatening to annihilate the church, they then offered peaceful coexistence between the church and her persecutor. If a compromised candidate could be found as a caretaker pope, the conclave had been vitiated and two days later the caretaker turned out to be Angelo Roncalli, a mouthpiece for the Masonic agenda who was sought by the forces of antichrist to head the church not as pope but as anti pope. In this way, they hope to perpetrate a death grip on the church’s structures with a succession of figureheads devoid of any guidance by the Holy Ghost, for only by subjugating a true pope who was unknown to the outside world and replacing him with a false shepherd with the Freemasons arrive at the total realization of their goal.
Joe:
So let’s unpack the theory theory and looking at several different dimensions of it. First you’ve got just the logistics. One of the problems with the theory is that in modern history, no pope was ever elected that quickly, meaning everyone should have been cautious of the idea that within the first two ballots on the morning of day one, they’d already elected a new pope because you need a two thirds majority or two thirds plus one depending on what period of history we’re talking about. And if you go all the way back to 1700 and I think you can go even further than that, you’ll find that the fastest the papal conclaves had ever worked was two days, and that was two easy candidates. Pope Leo the 13th in 1878 and Pope Pius ii, the one who just died in 1939. Both of those men prior to becoming Pope had been sort of the right hand man of the Pope before and were already well-known beloved figures.
They were obvious kind of shoo-in candidates for Pope and it still took at least three ballots and two days of voting, but we’re to believe that on the morning of day one, two thirds of the Cardinals had already settled on someone and moreover that they’ve settled on Cardinal Siri. Now you might ask why Cardinal Siri? There’s no explanation given other than he seemed like the right fit for the Freemasons, but if you think about it for a few moments, he doesn’t seem like a good fit for the Freemasons at all. He’s an outspoken conservative traditionalist. There’s a reason he’s beloved by se of a contest because he stands for all this stuff that modernists hate and we’re to believe that two thirds of the Cardinals got in there and immediately decided on that guy even though he wasn’t the obvious choice prior to the papal concl, I know his name had been mentioned, he wasn’t the sort of Pius the 12 kind of figure where it was the right hand man of the Pope before him.
He didn’t have that role in his relationship to Pius ii. So that’s already something that should set up some red flags, like how likely is it that they had a proper election that quickly and why in the world would the Masons be voting for a guy who is really anti-free masonry if you accept all this theory? The second problem is, okay, think about the bad guys plot here. You’ve got, depending on who’s telling it, Freemasons or communists or modernists or spies of some kind, and these guys are apparently ruthless kind of movie villains. They’re willing to nuke the Vatican if they don’t get their way, they’re willing to do something. Again, the details of the plot are vague and seems to depend on who the storyteller is. Assume for a second that that story is right and just imagine it if you will, as a Hollywood plot.
You’ve got the villains and they want something they want to take over and control and subjugate the Catholic church. What would the obvious plot be? Well just install a pope of your own if you can force all the cardinals to do your bidding, which the Siri theory has to presuppose. They got all of the Cardinals involved to lie about who the Pope was. Why couldn’t they just have all the cardinals involved elect their guy as Pope in the first place and you don’t have to have all the lives and everything else. In fact, you wouldn’t even have to announce on the floor, we’ve got a bomb and you’ve got to vote our way. You could just do that to two thirds of the Cardinals plus one and win the papal election that way seemingly. So the whole series theory is bizarrely convoluted. We’re to believe that they don’t install their guy.
Instead, they for some reason install a guy they hate Siri, who they then let be Pope for 30 minutes when he doesn’t come out on the balcony for some reason and then they tell him he can’t be Pope or at least he can be Pope, but he has to pretend he’s not Pope so they can install a caretaker anti Pope. In theory, this Catholic traditionalist is just fine apparently going along with this again convoluted plot of electing a false guy as Pope and what he now knows to be a sham council. And the obvious question is why are any of these things happening and this theory doesn’t do a good job of explaining those details at all. Why is Siri going along with this? Why is anyone else going along with this? Why are the bad guys doing this in the first place instead of just electing their own guy? The closest you get is Giuffre suggests well they need a real pope to be there because if you have a real Pope, you can’t elect a new one. And so you need Siri ironically to stop the election of a true pope. Now that theory fails for a lot of reasons. I’ll explore those in a second, but I want to let Giuffre lay out the theory.
CLIP:
The true Pope who had Vainly hoped to prevent a catastrophe for the church by delaying his public claim to office brought about something far worse instead for as long as he lived his very existence prevented the election of another true pope. He was mocked in his election, which was repeated and again suppressed at successive conclaves.
Joe:
Okay, so again, assume that this theory is right for a second and see if it makes any sense. You need cardinal theory to become Pope, sir because then you’ve got a valid pope so you can’t elect a new Pope, so then you can’t have a real pope to rival the anti Pope. Well, one obvious problem is you already have a real Pope to rival the anti Pope in this scenario because Siri is the Pope we’re told vaguely that he’s just decided to delay publicly acknowledging it, but he never claimed to be Pope. That was not a delay. He just never said he was Pope. And not only does he never say he’s Pope, as we’re going to see, he happily participates in the Second Vatican council. He acknowledges Pope John the 23rd as the Pope he contributes to future papal conclaves. So we have to believe on the one hand that Siri is this good holy Orthodox traditional cardinal who becomes Pope and that he’s a total moral coward who for fear of death or destruction or something, basically apostasizes like pretends a false pope is a real pope, pretends a false church is a real pope and while being Pope actively works to undermine the church for the sake of an anti pope and why, it just is totally unclear why this happens in this scenario.
Now again, go back to the crux of the theory. You need Siri to be Pope because that prevents anyone else from becoming Pope Siri could defeat this plan easily in two ways. One is just publicly saying he’s Pope and then the other cardinals be like, yeah, he’s the pope. Plenty of people have threatened to kill us in the past, the Communists, the Nazis, all the way back to the ancient Romans, and we don’t deny the faith just because it’s inconvenient or maybe fatal. We don’t give up the spiritual good for the sake of the biological one. Fine, some people are going to renounce the faith under pressure, but to accept this theory, you have to believe every single cardinal apostatize basically. But the other way he could defeat it is he wouldn’t even have to announce he’s the Pope publicly under Cannon law at the time, all he had to do and today as well, all he had to do was resign.
No one has to even officially accept it. He could just say, okay, I’m no longer Pope. He could tell the other cardinals in the room, the only other people on earth in this theory who know he’s a pope, he can just say, alright, I’m not the pope anymore. And now they can go and elect a real pope. Remember Cardinals theory participated at future papal conclaves. So if he was for some reason really worried about John the 23rd, he could just wait until John the 23rd died and then say, I resign as Pope. Now you can have a clean papal election. There’s even historical precedent for this in the Great Western schism, which we’re going to talk about in a second. Gregory the 12th resigns as Pope to avoid any confusion over who the Pope is. So the church can just have a clean papal conclave with no dispute about who the authentic Pope is.
So he could have done that very easily and defeated this whole convoluted plan, but he doesn’t and no cardinal presence says, Hey, we actually elected a different guy. I remember very distinctly we even set up the white smoke, which by the way is another huge problem with this plan, right? So remember, according to this plan, the terrorists have decided that they’re going to elect Siri just long enough for him to accept the papacy so that then you can’t make somebody else’s pope fine accept all that theory. Why in the world would you let them send up the white smoke? Why have this 30 minute gap where the smoke looked white? If what you want is for only the guys in the room, the College of Cardinals to know he’s the Pope and you want no one else on earth to know he’s Pope, send up black smoke right away.
But that doesn’t happen according to this theory. The whole theory is premised off the fact that the smoke looked white, and if the theory is true, why would the smoke have looked white? It doesn’t make sense. That’s such an obvious, it’s like tripping the alarm. If you’re robbing the bank, you don’t let the alarm go for 30 minutes and then say, ah, turn it off. Now this would tell the whole world there’s a pope plus you would expect in that time if there really was a pope, that Siri would’ve gone out as popes often do to the balconies and greet everybody in St. Peter Square. He doesn’t do that again. The more obvious reason why is because he hadn’t been elected Pope. But according to this theory, it’s totally inexplicable. If they’re holding them all hostage, why are they letting them send up white smoke? So those are some of the problems with the theory. There’s a few more.
Cardinal theory, as I alluded to before, was an active participant in the Second Vatican Council and he’s in an interview in 1963, talked about how it may take 50 years for us to fully appreciate the Second Vatican Council and that as the Holy Father himself indicated, the approach is a pastoral one. Who is the Holy Father in question there? Well, very clearly it’s John the 23rd who’d spoken about the pastoral nature of the Second Vatican Council Elsewhere in the interview he refers to Pope John’s matter magistrate as a pape and cyclical. Now according to this theory, all of these are calculated lies. He’s supposed to be saying this, while he doesn’t think John is Pope, he doesn’t think moderate magistrate is an encyclical. He doesn’t think the second Vatican council is a council. Why is he doing this? Told vaguely. It’s like some plan to protect the church.
He’s lying to everyone about who the pope is which are and aren’t ecumenical councils and what are and aren’t papal and cyclicals, but that theory doesn’t even make internal sense. No matter how good or bad you think cardinals are, this whole theory is so convoluted and involves people to act not just in malicious ways but in truly irrational ones. The good guys and the bad guys alike are acting in ways that don’t make any sense. So that’s the first kind of big picture problem with the Siri theory and that view of state of Acon. There’s another dimension to it as well, which Mel Gibson mentions, which is that it’s not just the smoke that has led them to it because remember they’ve gotten from, oh, that smoke looked white before it looked black to this whole convoluted theory about secret terrorists in the Vatican and Cardinal theory being like, why would you think Siri was the one elected other than just pure wish fulfillment? All of that stuff, all of that is just based on a couple slivers of evidence. One of those pieces of evidence is the smoke looked white and then it looked black. That’s true, it much more easily explained, but that is a true piece of evidence. The other piece of evidence is that Pope John the 23rd took the name John the 23rd, and we’re supposed to believe that that is a signal that he’s an anti pope.
CLIP:
Of course, the man who came out was a man called Angela Roncalli and he was John the 23rd. Now it’s interesting to note that never had a pope taken the name of another pope ever before in history.
Joe:
Once again, he’s claiming something has never before happened in history. That happens a lot. I mean, remember his name is John the 23rd because 22 other guys had taken the same name before him. So the idea that no Pope’s ever taken another name before, it’s the same name as another pope. Anyone who knows anything about the papacy knows that’s not true. I think he’s just misspeaking here. I think what he’s trying to say is not that it’s a problem that he took the name Pope John, but that he took the name Pope John the 23rd. For this reason,
CLIP:
This man took the name of a known anti pope from the 15th century that Cosmo deci put in there as his own man, I’ll get you in the chair and then everything will be rosy, everything will go good for business, whatever. He was putting him in there for some corrupt reason and there have been corrupt men in that place before. I mean there’s Alexander the sixth and Julius Thei. The sixth is the fourth. I mean some of these guys are, they’re not saints. So he took the name of a known anti pope from the fifth century who actually said, yes, I’m an anti pope. Sorry, I’m not the right guy. There was more than one. And he confessed to being and he wanted to square things with the Almighty I guess. So he confessed to being an anti pope and so he took the same name as that guy, John the 23rd. So it’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean why would he do that?
Joe:
But even if the objection is oh, he took the literal same name of an anti pope, that is something that had happened multiple times in history and he’s just factually wrong about this. So anti Pope John the 23rd, he arises during what’s called the Westerner papal schism. This period from 1378 to 1417, and there are actually seven different guys who claim to be Pope but aren’t five and Avignon, two in Piza and all five of the ones in Avignon, Clement the seventh and eighth Bennet the 13th and 14th, two guys to taking the name be the 14th, neither of whom were actually Pope. All of those names get reused by later Pope. So you have a fake Clement thei in the 14th century and then you have a real Pope Clement thei in the 16th century. Why? Well, because we don’t accept that those guys were really the pope.
So their names doesn’t, they don’t count. If you’re thinking about, okay, I want to take the name Pope John, how many Johns have there been? You don’t count the anti popes in that list. And so all John the 23rd does is the exact same thing, Clement the seventh, Clement the eighth be the 13th, then the 14th did when they took their papal names. They’re taking this name that an anti pope had tried to claim and they’re not recognizing the claim because the guy doesn’t have a real papal name because he’s not a real pope. And John the 23rd is actually pretty clear about this. He’s not trying to honor anti Pope John the 23rd. He’s taking the name because he doesn’t recognize him as legitimate when he is discussing. And one of the very first things he talked about was why he took that papal name, which is a pretty common thing when a Pope becomes Pope, you ask him why did you choose that name?
And he’s very clear that he wanted to honor his father, he wanted to honor St. John’s, the church that he grew up in, and he wanted to honor the 22 Johns of indisputable legitimacy notice, which John is he not mentioning there? The one who isn’t of indisputable legitimacy, the false John anti Pope John the 23rd. So he’s not honoring him, he’s treating him the same way prior Pope had treated the Avignon anti popes as just saying, you don’t get have this name because you are not really the Pope. So it’s a very strange thing to criticize him for. It would make much more sense to criticize him if he’d taken the name John the 24th because then you’d say, wait, are you acknowledging the legitimacy of anti Pope John the 23rd? That would make sense as a critique. It makes no sense as a critique that he doesn’t acknowledge an anti pope’s legitimacy all that to one side, the whole theory that John the 23rd is an anti pope and he’s leaving a little Easter egg by taking former anti Pope’s name.
Why would he give a little clue to everyone that if you go far enough down a rabbit trail, you’ll realize, wait, if he telling us he’s the anti pope, why would he do that? Even as a theory, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. Okay, so all that’s to say the theory, theory and all of its kind of related forms is built on evidence that is flimsy or outright false and requires everyone involved to behave in ways that make seemingly no sense. It goes against all of the available evidence that no one involved in the 1958 papal conclave thought that they’d elected Cardinal Syria as Pope nobody and nobody expected them to elect somebody on the morning of day one if they knew anything about papal history or how long it takes At Concl, the whole theory is built on not just straws, but on, well, it’s up in smoke.
What about a positive case though? Because I think it’s easy to get overwhelmed in these conversations. You’ve got somebody who’s gone really way too far down the rabbit trail into some internet deep dive about Arc Cana and like, oh, here’s the secret history of the Vatican. That can become really overwhelming to know. How do you talk to someone about that? Do I have to read 50 different articles alleging different theories about who really the Pope was in 1958 or all of these things? Do I have to debate the theological merits of everything that happened at Vatican two or in the wake of Vatican two? I would suggest no, and I don’t even think it’s healthy to try to do that, particularly if you’re talking to someone as brilliant as Hutton Gibson who’s just settled on an idea that’s obviously wrong, but it probably is smarter than the people trying to correct him.
It’s very easy, right? It’s very easy to end up in a situation where you become fixated even as a very intelligent person on a totally false theory. And the problem is it’s very hard to pull people away from that. I want to give one way that we can go about trying to do that. I’ll give the caveat that it’s going to have mixed success, but the positive case against it of Aism is not just that it’s wildly implausible, but that it’s actually theologically impossible for a few reasons. I’m going to lay it out as a syllogism. The first premise is just this. If the line of popes from Pope John the 23rd to Pope Francis today is not valid, then we can never have a pope again. So if the city of a contest theories are true, it’s not just that we don’t have a pope, it’s that we never can have a pope.
Why is that? Well, because to have a pope, you need two things. Number one, you need valid electors, and number two, you need a valid electoral process. And you and I cannot make cardinals, we cannot make electors of the Pope. We also cannot make an electoral process for the church. This is something that is laid out by successive popes. They will lay out the electoral process for future papal elections. So for instance, when we’re talking about the 1958 election of John the 23rd or Pope Siri, depending on which view you take, that’s governed by Pope Pius II document and he has an episodic constitution explaining the electoral procedure. There’s only two things you need to know from that. Number one, it is required, legally required that the next conclave happened within 18 days of his death. Number two, the only people allowed to vote in it are cardinals.
Pretty obvious, but that’s a recurring part of this that no layman, no non cardinal priest or bishop, no king, no whatever else can vote, only cardinals can. Okay? So now consider the of that the death of Pope Pius. The 12th was October 9th, 1958, which is significantly more than 18 days ago, and the actual 1958 conclave happened 16 days after. So even if you want to say, okay, well maybe they secretly elected Pope theory, well, he died in the seventies and in fact all of the Cardinals who were appointed by Pius II or before died by the end of the 1970s. So what’s the problem? Well, number one, you can no longer hold a legal election because you’ve missed the window of time. And number two, even if you tried to hold an illegal election, you don’t have anyone to vote in it because you don’t have any cardinals except for those that you allege were created by anti popes.
So there’s nobody to vote and nowhere to vote. There’s no conclave and nobody to participate in a enclave or to call one or anything like that. You hopefully see the problem. So we end up with a situation where it becomes impossible if the state of a contests are right, it’s impossible to ever have a pope ever again. This has led some state of a contest to try to just say, well, let’s just illegally elect a pope because we can’t do it legally because clearly we miss a window and we don’t have anyone who can legally elect it. No Cardinal agrees with us that there’s not a pope. And so you’ll see these kind of grasps at straws to create their own Pope. Maybe the most famous of these was anti Pope Michael, the first from here in Kansas. He claimed to be elected by his mom and dad and three other laypeople.
And the whole world kind of laughed because it’s preposterous, it’s transparently not a valid or legal election. And he died in 2022 and his successor anti Pope Michael ii, even though he has a backdrop of St. Peter’s on his official image, doesn’t actually live in Rome. He lives in the Philippines with his wife and kid. He’s just a regular layman. He’s not a priest, he’s not a bishop. He’s certainly not the bishop of Rome and he is not recognized by anyone as that, and he wasn’t legally elected to that. So it’s easy to sort of laugh at that or mock that, but recognize what’s going on here. The reason people are resorting to these kind of wild attempts to illegally elect a pope is because they can’t legally elect a pope because if they recognize the legal electoral process, they would have to recognize Pope John the 23rd and his successors all the way down to Pope Francis.
So you can’t really end up in enclaves because that’s just an obviously illegal move. So instead you’re stuck in this position of having to say, well, I guess there’s no pope and never will be a pope again. And while I’ve been focusing in this video on Mel Gibson’s form of state of Acon, there’s another increasingly popular form on the internet now that says, yeah, we’re fine with John the 23rd. We’re fine with Paul the six John Paul, the first John Paul the second, the 16th, but we don’t accept Pope Francis. And the problem is that you end up in the exact same place. Now, one caveat. There are of course still Cardinals alive who were made cardinals by Benedict the 16th and his predecessors, they’re not getting any younger, but there are some who still exist. But the problem is if you think the last valid Pope was Benedict the 16th and he didn’t really resign, you’ve got the same canonical problem, which is that the election of Pope Francis was governed by the electoral laws set by Benedict the 16th.
One of the last things he did before announcing his resignation was creating a moto proprio outlining what that electoral process would look like, and he largely just tweaked what John Paul II already had in place. One of the things he lays out is that you have a maximum of 20 days from the beginning of the vacancy of the sea. So that 20 day window is triggered by one of two events depending on how you understand things. Either it was triggered by Pope Benedict resigning, and then you have within that 20 day process, the beginning of a conclave that elected Pope Francis. Or you could say, I don’t believe in any of that, and I actually think that Pope Benedict was still Pope until he died on December 31st, 2022. But even there it’s been more than 20 days and there’s been no conclave. So the fact that we’ve now gone two years, more than two years past that date shows that you couldn’t, who in other words could possibly call a conclave who has the legal authority to do so?
And the answer is nobody. And if nobody has the legal authority to call a conclave, then they can’t just claim somebody is the pope. Remember the Western schism, which I mentioned before, the whole reason you have three different guys at the same time claiming to be Pope is there was a real pope in Rome. There were a group of disaffected cardinals who didn’t like that choice. So they tried to hold their own concl without legal authority and put their own guy on the throne in Avon, and he wasn’t valid. He wouldn’t have been valid even if the Pope in Rome happened to die a moment before they declared their guy as the Pope. It’s not a conclave. Even if you have a cardinal or even you have multiple cardinals, you need a valid conclave as well. They don’t have that. Neither did the ones in Pisa who tried to resolve this situation.
So you need not just cardinals but a conclave and you can’t get a conclave by just ignoring the laws about how you get a conclave. So whether you think that the papacy stops with Pius 12, or whether you think the papacy stops with Benedict the 16th, you’re stuck in the same place that if you don’t accept the line of Pope that includes Pope Francis, then you have to say, we not only don’t have a Pope, we never can have a pope. So that’s the first premise of the argument. Second premise of the argument is if we never have a pope, then Vatican one is false, not Vatican two Vatican one because Vatican one pastor attorneys is really clear that we will always have the papacy. We’re told explicitly that our Lord Jesus Christ, the prince of shepherds and great shepherd of the sheep established in the blessed apostle Peter for the continual salvation and permanent benefit of the church, the papacy, which must of necessity remain forever by Christ’s authority in the church, which founded as it is upon a rock, will stand firm until the end of time.
So it’s kind of a convoluted sentence or complicated sentence, but what is being very clearly said there by the council is Jesus established the papacy not just for the first generation, not just for the first 20 generations or 20 centuries, but for all time that the papacy is an ongoing perpetual institution. And indeed Vatican one includes an anathema clause against anyone who would deny this says therefore, if anyone says that it is not by the institution of Christ, the Lord himself, that is to say by divine law that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the Holt church or that the Roman pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in this primacy. Let him be anathema. So it includes this clause of damnation or a clause of anathema against those who would deny papal succession as a perpetual reality. But notice if the first premise is right, if state of Aism is true, they deny the very thing they’re instructed in 1870, not 1970.
In 1870, they’re told you can’t deny that this is a perpetual succession. So premise one, if the line of Pope from John the 23rd to Francis, or even if you just want to say Francis isn’t valid, then we can never have a pope again. Premise two, if we can never have a pope. Again, Vatican one is false because it uses its authority to declare that isn’t true the conclusion. Therefore, if the line of popes from John the 23rd to Francis isn’t valid, then Vatican one is false. Or if you want to take the converse a more positive version of that, if we can trust Vatican one is true, then we can trust state of Acon is false. You can’t both believe in the first Vatican council and state of acon because they have opposite theories of the papacy and they cannot, as far as I can tell, be harmonized.
So that’s it in a nutshell. The state of Ahan views of people like Mel Gibson may be popular. Oh, he’s speaking out against church corruption, but in reality he’s articulating a wild theory of a fake papal election that is built on virtually no evidence, contrary to all of the available evidence and which is theologically precluded by just reading what the First Vatican Council says about the nature of the papa. For all those reasons, I would suggest we should reject any form of state of aism and we can trust that the Pope really is the Pope for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.