Why Catholics Can’t Reject Vatican II w/ Timothy Gordon

hello and welcome oh man i was eating like a coconut protein ball and i nearly choked and died right there live on youtube my name's matt fradd and today joined around the bar table will be my good mate tim gordon we are going to discuss why a catholic cannot reject the second vatican council and uh we'll chat for about 30 minutes and then we'll start taking questions and objections and all sorts of outrages here on youtube or from my patrons before i get into the interview though i need to let you know that there is five days 90 begins so if you are wanting a challenge for the new year because 2020 has been easy for you you know you've done i mean what's what's been so bad about 2020 right 2021's coming you might want to take your spiritual life to the next level for 90 days you and a small group of men uh pray fast take on extra penance and for 90 days you know grow in the spiritual life go to exodus nine zero dot com slash matt frat if you are interested in this join the wait list as i say starts in five days and 13 hours we're gonna have men from all around the world who are going to be journeying to easter that's why it starts on january 4th by the way so that you can end on easter sunday so if you've been thinking about it go to exodus nine zero dot com matt fradd to learn more there is a link in the description below timothy gordon nice to have you on the show nice to be here man thanks for having me back what is uh new in your life uh i know you guys had a move recently i know rules for retrogrades is blowing up tell us a bit about that what's not new you know i'm in a new place i'm in mississippi and southern mississippi loving it and doing rules for retrogrades the podcast full-time and i'm in a doctoral program studying thomas aquinas and i'm doing yeah i'm doing lots of shows a day writing or editing three books got three classes in the works i'm teaching online zoom teaching people about aristotle's ethics and church history on timothy gordon.com so things are busy but they're good how the heck are you man i am very well uh christmas has been crazy and chaotic for a number of reasons but overall i'm doing well um what are you what is your thesis going to be on regarding thomas aquinas not sure i might pick up what i was i would remember i was doing i was i'd just gotten into a doctoral program in rome when uh my daughter abigail was born there was emergency we talked about that on your show over a year ago and uh so i might pick up what i was going to do under father kevin flannery one of the most famous thomas in the world or i might do something else it depends what they want it's always dependent in a doctoral program on who wants to do what with you but yeah we'll see good for you that's cool i i think like if you had i think maybe four years ago if i had have said i want to get a phd i think it really would have been for the ego um you know because who doesn't want to feel like an expert in in something whereas today i actually am attracted to pursuing a phd uh and probably for ego but also because i love to do a deep dive into a topic of interest i i just love losing myself in in a particular area of study yeah precisely that's that's what it is it's less i've been to law school and i've been to grad school they're kind of like polar opposites law school everything's about looks and you know presentation they teach you really how to present yourself it's law school is more about ego than than deep grad school deep grad school is about studying what you're passionate about in your socks you know and taking extra classes you don't get credit for to learn uh you know greek at the last minute or do a do a countledeen reading group for for no credit it's it's the kind of polar opposites i don't think it is ego yeah cool well today uh we've titled the video why catholics can't reject the second vatican council and let me just kind of set this up a little bit i feel like just like if you want to use the kind of categories of left and right right on the on the left within the church um it seems like you have people who are pushing to sort of overturn things that were said in veritatis splendor right about intrinsically evil acts it would seem that there are some people who want to say that say homosexual acts can be good um no one seems to be coming right out and saying it but there's this like idea in the air that they're trying to promote that maybe uh whereas on the right and again forgive me if these categories are terribly unhelpful it seems like you have this unspoken idea that pope francis is not really the pope that the second vatican council was invalid and the novus ordo is not a legitimate mass and i don't know of anybody saying those things maybe you do certainly people in the comments section on my videos will say things like that but i just wanted to have you on the show to kind of discuss this side of it and part of the reason i wanted to have you specifically on the show is you know if i had jimmy aiken or trent horn on the show to discuss why catholic can't reject the second vatican council there'd be a lot of people who have like trad leanings who'd be like well of course they would say that they're catholic answers whereas i feel like you are uniquely hated by both sides of the church for some reason you have people who consider you trad and then you i guess had some falling out uh recently or over the last few years with people in more traditionalist catholic circles i know there was something that happened with you and and uh taylor marshall i didn't follow that closely do you want to maybe talk to that a little bit yeah well historiographically it's relevant it would seem to be one i should say i'm writing a book on the second vatican council and most specifically the hermeneutic of continuity is one of these books i started out writing to prove and not opposite but at glancing blows a differently placed thesis than what the research turned up i i was more anti-vatican too when i was contracted by tan books to write this book i was more vaguely anti-vatican too when i began on tnt which let's let's face it that's taylor and tim that was a sensation it was a rebranding moment for taylor marshall you know where he went kind of from well-respected somewhat known uh normie protestant convert guy that somewhat vanilla you know he defended pope francis very publicly to kind of catholic bad boy and i would i went from being from the people that knew me more known as a conservative thinker who also was catholic to the opposite a catholic thinker first and we were both kind of catholic bad boys and it was an exciting time because we're taking on summer of shame mccarrick you know to some extent in in unspoken ways the pontificate of francis but with that rebrand what's happened what's happening during tnt and after is we're making it different places taylor and i we're just business partners you know we didn't know each other going into it but as we kind of researched for what became infiltration when we were originally going to write that book together and then we kind of split it off we're each going to do our own version of infiltration i'm still working on mine it's one of my three books i'm working on i was turning up different research that didn't square with the narrative that i'd been hearing in traditional circles and you know i still most of my following is still kind of traditionalist they're just an open-minded kind quite simply there are a lot there are things one-liners that are trotted out um in among traditionalism that are flat wrong one of them being that vatican ii was the only pastoral ecumenical council it was suey generous and this really sticks out when 20 of 21 ecumenical councils according to the misnomer are all dogmatic all of them except for vatican ii why would that be no there are like three or four other ones medieval councils that did not pronounce or define dogmatically that was a head scratcher moment for me they will um they will typically cite this part this quotation by paul vi on january the 12th 1966 without citing the rest of it um they will say the council has invested its teachings with the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium which ordinary magisterium is so obviously authentic that it must be accepted with docility and sincerity by all the faithful according to the mind of the council is expressed in the nature and the aims of individual documents actually that's what the part they won't read they'll always read a part where where pope paul says i'm not going to declare something dogmatically and then he reads that let me just go right to one of the favorite trad talking points the syllabus of errors promulgated by pope pius ix they love it because he's saying you know i love it too i'm not we're not always distinguishable me and the trads i love the syllabus can you just pause and explain what you mean by trads because i'm sure to some people that's like a disparaging term and like me i'm like i guess i'm a trad i you know so what do you what do you mean when you say trad well i'm glad you said that because no one knows i mean you and i are traditionalists because we love the latin mass i mean i i this is the one aspect of vatican ii that that you know is i think in a full unadulterated way the way that most traditionalists describe it it's is okay we we we probably need to return to the latin mass not that that's my job it's the other documents in vatican ii that people who call themselves traditionalists say fell into some sort some level more or less formal of doctrinal error and that's what i've researched as just false there there is no doctrinal error in the other documents of vatican ii so broadly speaking i guess you and you and i are trads maybe i'm considered a little trouty than you but you love the latin mass too and and want to go back to traditions more acutely speaking it just means um that it it has designations for whether or not you accept either the validity of or the the uh realistic plausibility of the practice practicability of the creatures of vatican ii in its documents that's a more acute definition okay i would love to hear kind of how you kind of grew in this understanding because it sounded like you were saying when you joined taylor marshall to do those videos where you were clearly scratching an itch right people were just furious and wanted somebody to say what was in plain sight um that you were kind of more skeptical of the second vatican council i want to know like why that was and and what i mean you've kind of expressed it a little bit what it was as you began to investigate that kind of changed your mind on that because i think a lot of people they would see the abuses that have taken place after the second vatican council i have confessed on this podcast more than once that during a high school mass on a tape recorder for the closing hymn i played a metallica song mama said from loud and that's disgusting and but like i mean maybe shame on me but like shame on like the parish and the church and the priest a good song to be fair it's a good song but nobody taught me that you shouldn't kind of so obviously there are a lot of abusers that that kind of followed on the heels of vatican do you think that that's why a lot of people want to just reject it outright and is that perhaps why you were skeptical of it yeah let's let's just state right out up front it's a combination the the mistrust for vatican ii is a combination of the post-hoc ergo propter hoax fallacy and good solid reasoning post okay proper hook means um it's a fallacy it means yeah i believe i believe that this is caused by this because this was after this right um to some extent it's that in another more complex way that i'd like to talk to you about here today it's not in in some ways vatican ii what before during and after the council was the coming out party i still believe this it's well documented that the research turns up this as well there was there was a an ill intent by many of the most powerful people there and that they they caucused effectively they they won many to their their side i mean even the most conservative people there arch bishop lefevre signed all the documents which trads also will get mad if you bring up but it's true so they were effective terrifically efficient at caucusing um toward the end of i think an evil intent you know skillobix one of the kind of lefties there famously said we know what we're gonna do with the documents well we we made them sort of anodyne now but we're gonna stretch them later you really do see that with the latin mass i so i i am fully trad when it comes to what happened with the liturgical abuses it's obvious i call it binder drop theory if i'm a substitute teacher in a classroom of seventh graders and at 2 57 p.m all 30 of the students drop their binders all at once it's ubiquitous to assume that there's not some sort of prefabricated plan in place is absurd if to believe that that was just a coincidence right at 257 that all of the binders the parishes across america and 99 of them are doing the weird amalgamation concoction novelties in the mass that are like quasi-creative in a hippie seventies way and just just stupid and anodyne pizza coke masses we've heard those terrible things yeah yeah how are people all doing that at once so so there had to be some plan so that's that's a really solid basis that traditionalists have on on the behalf of traditionalists for believing there's got to be some plan it's got to be from vatican 2 and it was their meeting at my my school where i was in the doctoral program before the pontifical gregorian university in rome where i studied under father kevin flannery they were meeting there at night during the council the the lefties were and they were changing the rules by day so that's real i uh just have to insert my own anecdote here i was speaking at a men's conference in kansas and i forget where but the church i saw a photo of how the church used to look and it was breathtakingly beautiful and now it was whitewashed and just not beautiful and i said to the guy this is a bloody tragedy you know and he was probably in his i don't know 50s or something i forget but he said shortly after the second vatican council they took these statues out into the parking lot and all the school kids smashed them with hammers and i just was incredulous i thought there's no way that's true that's like why would you even say that and he called over a friend of his who was in his class and sure enough he kind of backed it up yeah yeah that's we all smashed him i just couldn't believe it i mean it was to your point about this all happening around the same time this didn't sort of spring out of nowhere i guess yeah it's not it's not to be believed and let me just say though that the liturgical abuses which don't here's my defense okay here's my entire position okay when we judge the 21 ecumenical councils matt what we mean juridically what we're what we're judging not that we're in a place to judge but we use our minds to judge we're judging the documents or the sacred constitutions so there's a very real and a very meaningful distinction between talking about the second vatican council in terms of what happened at the council what happened what all these lefties did to cardinal italiani the number two in the church you know venerable old conservative good soul how they treated him the way lefties treat everyone when they get together in in groups they mistreat them they was it was horrible they pulled they turned off the mic on him that's real when he was speaking he was half blind um it was is a pitiable scene it was bad i have no doubt about that but when we talk about vatican 2 x post from our position now we're talking about the documents and here's my whole point the documents contain in some places ambiguity and in some places not even much ambiguity they don't contain error even sacrosanctum concilium the liturgical document that seems to be the one that's really especially vague and doesn't have errors in it but was very clearly used by the concilium the kind of subcommittee group they they seized upon the vagueness to go and write bad stuff into it within the next three to six years so that's true but the other documents that get attacked relentlessly by fellow traditionalists when you go and you look at the spots that they're saying oh look at this line like i a lot of times they added a word they literally will have added a word to make it worse the same like martin luther did or if you look a paragraph above or below there's something so thornally catholic that you can't even believe it came from vatican 2 and it explains away any ambiguity there it's the opposite experience matt that one has when one checks on vatican 2 then one has when they check on the magisterium of francis every time i go check into a francis quote i find 10 more things that are bad the original quote was as bad as i thought and it's really bad i've been researching vatican 2 for the better part of a year now and almost everything i look at is it gets way better you see what i mean when you check on it it gets way better and you're like okay this was a misnomer or just a kind of fib about the council that's not true with francis and since tnt broke up there's been kind of two camps of traditionalist there's there's marshall and and some of those people i won't go through all of who they are but they say that vatican ii is really dubia cardinals who i mean these are the guys that put it on the line they went against the living monarch pope francis to say he's he says bad stuff you look into it and it's really bad this is a full-on crisis that i can too you look into it and it's not bad he said the hermeneutic of rupture is made both by those who see in vatican 2 a distancing from the authentic faith thus an error even a heresy and also by those by means of such a rupture with the past want to daringly make a courageous departure toward new shores however the presumption of rupture in the teaching and the sacramental action of the church is impossible even if for only theological reasons in other words there are two camps of traditionalists right i'm i'm somewhere near the front of the other camp where i'm like look i'm with the dubia cardinals i'm with the two surviving guys burke and bran mueller who are opposing this pontificate because it really is doing bad things but it's not the ordinary magisterium of vatican ii and then the other side of traditionalists who are what i'd call the more mainstream traditionalists are saying francis is the apotheosis of vatican ii um even archbishop vegano who i much revere and respect has has drawn very closely together vatican ii and this pontificate he said you know if you look at pachamama just look at dignitas humane and that's that's really not true the one thing i wanted to read really quickly if i if you'd permit me please after i after i read you uh about six minutes ago that segment that never gets read in pope paul vi is speech they say look it's not or it's not extraordinary magisterium vatican ii it's one of the few not the one the ecumenical councils that is not making a dogmatic definition so it's not extraordinary magisterium he does affirm that it's ordinary magisterium and he well knows that the syllabus of errors trads lovett of 1864 anathematizes that condemns their position in paragraph 22 it says the obligation it's condemning this view the obligation by which catholic teachers and authors are strictly bound is confined to those things only which are proposed to universal belief as dogmas of the faith by the infallible judgment of the church do you realize how big that is it's the the syllabus is condemning that point of view the point of view that this mainstream group of traditionalists have that say all we have to listen to is extraordinary magisterium not ordinary magisterium if you're a catholic this is the answer to your question here today the title of the show if you're catholic you must take all ordinary magisterium which encyclicals don't ipso facto count as by the way they'll also throw that point well then you have to listen to every encyclical ever written now it's got to be repeated habitual teaching in encyclicals so laudato see first time for write a first impression uh it's not the same thing but all the councils even the four or five that are just pastoral are ordinary and you have to receive them with what is called religious submission you mentioned uh that these conciliar documents and certain passages within them are sort of unfairly maligned can you point out specific passages that people point to to say look this is an error do you have that in front of you or i do i do i i'd love to um one of one of the greatest ones is dignitados umane who which i will say this argues for religious liberty it's a badly defined term to be fair but i could read you from pope pius xi i could read from pope pius xii who are pre-conciliar i could read you something from pope pius ix that sound exactly like uh religious liberty so the traditionalists often critique this is sort of the big game vatican ii and and you know john courtney murray kind of liberal at the council made up religious liberty made it up out of whole cloth the the extraordinary magisterium by the way had never figured on had never pronounced on religious liberty there had only been these other ordinary pronouncements by popes on religious liberty and it was it's a really mixed question um but pope pius x pope pius xii were generally for it suarez was generally very for it now let me read to you um a controversial traditionalist passage moreover it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship and the full power given to all of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever in thoughts conduce more easily to the corrupt uh to corrupt the morals and minds of the people and to propagate the passive and differentism this is from favorite passages that traditionalists will cite now dignitatis humane it talks about the fact that the state cannot compel non-believer non-believers to worship and this is throughout all of the late medieval studies like i said suarez even pope pius ix who went through the famous edgardo mortara affair where he took away a jewish kid from a jewish family because he'd been baptized even pope pius ix you know he's the one that broke up the ghettos and he said he he had four i think public synagogues in rome even though there are two types of state secular and uh and confessional in rome the pretty much the one state anymore that's a confessional state he allows public worship so this is what's meant by dignitados umane as religious liberty i mean if there are four public synagogues in rome a confessional state city-state then we don't know exactly what can be wrong about articulating that this should be legal particularly in states that aren't secular all a document has to do with the church is to say that confessional states are still good and are still listed and and dignitas humane leaves this in place but like i say pope pius xi in um uh mit brennender sorjay says in paragraph 31 the believer has an absolute right to profess his faith and live according to its dictates laws which impede us this profession and practice of faith are against natural law i'm reading that because that's pius x we all trust him he's pre-conciliar this is this is all dignitatis who monet is saying um okay any any other passages you want to point to or yeah i mean so so archbishop vegan oh i i love and and respect for what he did after the summer shame said if the pachamama could be adored in a church we owe it to dignitatis humane that's really unfair that's really unfair dignitatis umani says this okay this does not sound like what you're expecting after you listen to that quote by um archbishop vegano first the council professes its belief that god himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve him and thus be saved in christ and come to blessedness we believe that this one true religion subsists in the catholic and apostolic church subsistence is the strongest form of of existence expressing that in thomas aquinas to which the lord jesus committed the duty of spreading it broad among men um in lumen gentium another passage that gets criticized is lumen gentium 16 just above it lumengencium 14 is very related to what i just wrote in dignitatis says this sacred council wishes to turn its attention firstly to the catholic faithful basing itself upon sacred scripture and tradition it teaches that the church now sojourning on earth as an exile is necessary for salvation necessary christ present to us in his body which is the church is the one mediator in the unique way of salvation not the privileged path you know which which you hear from people after the council but the unique way of salvation this is vatican ii in explicit terms he himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the church for through baptism as through a door men enter the church whosoever therefore knowing that the catholic church was made necessary by christ would refuse to enter or to remain in it could not be saved this is hardcore this is this mat this blew my mind when i read it that this is of the vatican ii document two paragraphs up from a place where all the trads i used to do it too criticized lumen gent 16. sounds like you know the council of trent maybe address the fact that those lines that were thought to be ambiguous have been clarified by subsequent people i think like the cdf for example isn't that the case what i've found in so my my my book is looking into essentially ambiguity that is weaponized like one senior par charles pope says about francis he's no longer weaponized ambiguity it's just weaponized outright attacks on tradition but what i've found is that soccer sanctum concilium seems to have been drafted in an anodyne way there's no liturgical abuse wired into it but it it seems to have been allowed especially by boonini the guy who was running the concilium and who really got away with it and pope paul vi let him get away with it and young ratzinger went and expressed concern and says this guy on this subcommittee concilium which is charged with instantiating a new mass out of this very ethereal um uninstantiated document sacrosandum concilium he's running a muck with it and so it does seem i can't defend there this is where cyclosangdom controlling does seem to have lent itself to the abuses but not the other documents how do we go from sacrosanctum concilium to what we have today because of course psychosexual contribution the document on the liturgy says nothing about the priest facing the people it says gregorian channel to be given pride of place etc etc so how do we go from that to and this goes back to what you had to say i guess about the binders dropping on the floor at about the same time yeah no i mean i i think it's just all of the um the shadow council this is again why you can't be vatican two is a complex question you can't just be all in or all against you're not allowed to be all against if you're catholic you can't be all in if you're this is what i say to my friend chris plants who's like rah-rah vatican too i'm like don't don't go too far they were really doing shadow council at gregoriana by nightfall they were really really upset and they were saying even during the council just like traditionalists say just like me and taylor read on our show the skill of x quote we know what we're going to do with this ambiguity later and binder drop theory it's just yeah there's no rejoinder to that but similarly when it comes to no strategy and and lumen gentium and dignitatus humane there there's not even a lot of ambiguity i'm struggling to write this book because i thought it was going to be that in each of the sacred constitutions it's ambiguity the intent was bad but the original public meaning the text of the language i'm a scalia originalist is good so i'm kind of parsing intent from text and the meaning of text really adheres in the original public meaning not the in intention of the author if the author is using secret words to signal esoteric meaning to a secret crowd the way they i guess they kind of were with sacrosanctum concilium if if the theory's right then the words still mean what the original public meaning was the original meaning at the date public meaning the way a reader who wasn't in the know would have read it the first meaning of dictionary definition terms at that date that's the meaning so i thought i was going to be doing more parsing and culling that way i'm really not the only the only document where there seems to be much ambiguity is sacrosanctum concilium all these other con trad complaints i haven't gone through all of them but in dignitatis and monet lumen gentium and nostraete they all come out they all have a big problem with um in um a combination of lumen gensium and nostrate the the council documents signifying that islam is one of the three monotheisms that worship the one god well then i did some digging and i found the catechism of pope pius xi who's obviously a hero to myself and and other traditionalists saint society of saint pius the tenth his catechism literally calls um islam the one true faith i mean literally because i'm sorry i'm sorry the worshipping the one true god let's clarify that because that's going to be taken down no no not the one true faith the one true god whereas in the vatican ii documents all it had said is one the one god i mean it's one of the three monotheisms and both vatican ii and pope pius x are both right they both distinguish and edward phaser makes the same distinction the difference between sense and reference one can reference the christian god and not understand his trinitarian aspects one can reference even as a christian the christian god and not understand his eucharistic aspects i mean think about it protestants who don't accept the real presence they are denying christ's existence in the only place that exists anymore on earth does that mean they're not christians no does it mean a monotheist is not a monotheist because he doesn't understand and even in in really wickedness it's a great point i mean even people like dr william craig who i've had on the show denies divine simplicity so my conception of god and his conception of god right the catholic verses his conception is vastly different and yet we wouldn't say that he's not worshiping the one true god yeah exactly divine simplicity is a great early example the cappadocians they said that god's attributes um did not disrupt divine simplicity even though the divine attributes were essentially what what thomas would call a proper accident to god well god can't have proper accidents that doesn't mean that gregory of nissa you know in basil the great are worshipping a different god it means there's a dichotomy between sense and reference and they're getting it wrong now with the muslims they in really condemnable ways are ascribing really wicked features to the the abrahamic god and in many cases it's it's really really condemnable and we should all say this is this is violent and evil and um people were mad at me you know last summer because i i would teach islam by teaching robert spencer so i'm not a great defender of islam i'm just saying catholic church has always acknowledged that they are one of the three monotheisms yeah but this is interesting it's almost like um the way protestants view the deuterocanonicals they read it almost like expecting to be suspicious expecting to find error it sounds like there might be those in the church who read the second vatican council the same way or the second american council documents whereas as you've pointed out like previous popes and previous councils have said things that are you know pretty much the same thing as what the vatican council has said in different language but absolutely that's a great great comparison it's i couldn't believe it when i read these things and it's almost the double take you do when you're like wait this is i read the big quote from vatican too i mean even bishop robert baron sound i thought he was like slightly right of vatican too that's always my impression but kind of close to it he slightly left of what vatican ii is saying about the unique way the salvation oh sure the christ is the unique way to solve it i could not believe it and look matt any honest reader when they go to these passages and they see him not only will you draw jaw drop to the floor but then you have to say okay this isn't the enemy document that i thought it was and there are people that will be honest about that and then there are people that will hold to their bias i want to be one that sticks with the truth because the truth is jesus and even if it surprises me i want to be one of these guys like antonio sochi who wrote the great fourth secret of fatima book he wrote that book to defend the church's position on the third secret of fatima and the research turned up the opposite you gotta be honest and and that's what happened to me as i set out to write this book hmm awesome hey before we jump into questions is there anything else we should kind of uh well i actually wanted to ask you about maybe help us understand the the meanings of say the herman munich of of continuity and rupture that's good that's good yeah i mean hermeneutic of rupture is essentially an interpretation of the documents of vatican council 2 upon which the far left in the church in the far right agree intellectually they don't agree in terms of their attitude uh there too the far left and the far right say look vatican ii is suey generous it's council number 21 that breaks with all tradition the left celebrates it the far right is obviously mad about it the way i would be if it were true then there are two hermeneutics of continuity okay one's wrong one is ratsering ratzingarian and correct the the one that people me and taylor actually did this as one of our final shows we kind of debated hermeneutic of continuity the the wrong version says everything in the council documents squares nicely without applying a hermeneutic a hermeneutic is an interpretive aid right it squares nicely on its own that would just be continuity that wouldn't be a hermeneutic of continuity i'm mainly thinking of sacrosanctum concilium here how does this square up with this coca-cola mass that i i'm seeing here with the clown pants and the hoverboard and the the priest brought his dog and he's wearing an earring during that well right hermeneutic of continuity too is the right one it's look there's stuff that got out of whack because whatever the boomers called it uh uh spirit of vatican ii okay but why does why is the spirit not conforming more with the text that's a reasonable question that we have to ask it's a reasonable suspicion that tradition is traditionalists have fully reasonable fully honest would be dishonest not to raise this suspicion the spirit of the council doesn't match up with the documents of the council allegedly and so we have to apply a hermeneutic an interpretive aid to make sense of it because when there's ambiguity it's a canon of interpretation that judges have used for a thousand years the church uses the same basic presumptions we have to make this square with tradition and we don't do it by pounding in a puzzle piece that doesn't fit we do it by looking to suarez or pope pius xi or pope pius ix or pope pius xii i didn't read you all their quotations oh okay even though extraordinarily something like religious liberty has never been pronounced upon there are all of these thinkers in bellarmine suarez even thomas aquinas says a lot that would not be anathema to what is today called religious liberty it's a it's a matter of first impression and so instead of pounding in the puzzle piece that's what we're doing we just have to see how the puzzle piece is fitting when we're incredulous that it fits that's hermeneutic of continuity the proper way that makes sense so okay so there's these this ill intent uh in people who are in the council but it didn't end up in the documents it sounds to me that's what you're saying so it's like prior you've got these people who are trying to push a particular agenda that's contrary to church teaching and afterwards as well but it sounds like what you're saying is the church documents while there are some ambiguities it's good uh how do you explain that well i explain matt through the holy spirit and i explain it because it's it's amazing awesome action to guarantor the documents even as against their own authors i mean isn't that amazing when it's it's like if you set out to write you know my own mother wears military boots or something like that and the pen won't let you do it right it's like that wow that's amazing because or the holy spirit keeps the pen from letting you do it like no that would that would be mean to your mom she doesn't wear military boots right so that's what it is traditionalists did not make this up i've researched that it's happening at the council i even heard of um one cardinal would would every night urinate on otaviani's door i never verified whether that was true or not but just bad behavior yeah these are not acting like prince of the time but then but the holy spirit guarded the documents that's all i'm saying yeah yeah i mean surely it's the case that if we read other church documents uh from other councils it's i mean ambiguity can also be in the eye of the beholder i guess and i'm sure that there are other documents that are considered ambiguous in previous councils you know you know the funny thing this is another one of those those um aspects of history that that just cracks me up the syllabus of errors promulgated in 1864 a favorite trad document because because pi's the knight is just going through and picking stuff out that's wrong it was so ambiguous itself it had ambiguities that uh um cardinal uh bishop dupenloop had to go through and correct it for pius the ninth and pius ix later praised him and said well thank you for doing this um because it was unclear what he was condemning in the original syllabus of theirs so dupenloop goes through and corrects it and then later is praised for it i mean if you're going to condemn a bunch of stuff it sounded like they're condemning religious liberty at one point where there wouldn't where there would be like forced observance of roman catholicism and that from like the year 500 but you know pope leo says no do this through sweetness of preaching we've never affirmed that you force at the point of sword that's islam uh you know the unbeliever so yeah even the favorite tread document had ambiguity in there it probably wasn't weaponized but it was just bad writing and within two and a half years dupe and loop had to go through and collect correct it all this stuff happens ambiguity happens i don't believe it happened at vatican ii in something like sacrosanctum concilium accidentally i believed it was what i call codified heteroproxy they did within five years make a you know pretty much a bad new mass out of it but the mass is still valid until it's not hopefully the church will well i i you know that is my position on the new mass i hope we can all go back to one uniform tlm i think it's pretty clear what fruit that's wrong that's another traditionalist point that i think is strong the the the statistics on the mass are bad because the weaponized ambiguity before we jump into questions i have one more one more question for you it's more of a practical question and then we'll take some questions here live how does one remain like faithful to the church's teaching while remaining in love with jesus christ um obviously these two clearly aren't contrary but sometimes you encounter people maybe i myself have been that person who seems far more concerned about how tall those bloody candle sticks ought to be than i am about my relationship with christ and i'm not saying the size of the candlesticks doesn't matter obviously how we worship is is important um but how do we how do we kind of hold this with good humor like how do we love our lord uh promote the traditions of the church without kind of white knuckling it because i i see a lot of that i also see the opposite like when i go to latin mass i see a lot of beautiful happy families you know and they're not like that right maybe it's more on youtube people are like that but yeah how do you do that how do you balance that i don't know it's a good question it's a really hard question that's it's not become as pope francis calls people like us traditionalists uh rigids but to still care i mean to to maybe be fair and to sing the other side a bit i mean think of what what uh my friend patrick coffin calls the judas protocols right take take the really fine garments and sell them and give them to the poor that's like judas reasoning in his condemned judas brain pre-condemned judah's brain oh this is how to sound holy and jesus is like no no the poor you always have but it actually matters to do stuff right to get me a a proper a kingly garment and you're like whoa if you read that having been brought up in the 80s and 90s that's a great point it sounds like heresy yeah yeah yeah no seriously you're like well okay so jesus actually cares about what i wear and again i'm a dressed down kind of guy as lots of my my critics will will say i'm not a guy that wears a three-piece suit to uh the dinner table every night i don't wear a three-piece suit to bed right i don't order my pizzas in latin but uh but that's i do have to remind myself that like okay you think about jesus with the genus protocol so i have to dress up a little bit the average person going to latin mass might need to let their hair down a little bit more who knows but if they're still it's still right like you said matt there's still concomitants there's still a natural fit between loving jesus and loving the way that the liturgical forms are celebrated because we're doing them for him so maybe to just be mindful this is all for jesus because he died on a cross for me as we say and for all of us for the whole world that they might be saved most people laugh at him and spit on him very few will be saved and that's tremendously sad to both he and his mother and so i'm going to i want the candles to be the correct like i want this mask to follow the proper liturgical forms that's how you unify those yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's good um yeah yeah okay good all right i had some other brilliant insight but it probably wasn't as brilliant as i thought so let's go on let's take some questions here from first question comes from benjamin handleman he says can timothy speak to how sspx get the council wrong their name is often thrown out as the only true place one can attend mass in the west because one i mean like let's let's state the facts what they are i spx in in archbishop lefebvre did amazing amazingly good work in the 70s and 80s to kind of connect that it's it's a chronological bridge in the 70s and 80s so i want to forget either the first thing i just said that they did great work in the 70s and 80s and in a lot of ways in a lot of ways not all still do great work and then part two that if you attend fssp latin mass they are a break off from sspx so there's a kind of tendency now to say oh there's no difference between sspx and fssp well well there is there is fssp and they get called bootlickers if you if you talk to fssp to ask them have you ever been kind of maligned by some not not all sspx yeah there's a rivalry there because one split off the same the same one that's how kind of split offs work you know there's there's a natural rivalry there but so it's unclear what this small orders actual sspx now what their actual positions are on their website it could be found that they're discouraging people from ever going to a novus ordo mass even look i probably have the same point of view about how bad the mass is but they don't have the dispensatory power to tell you stay home if you can't hate them there are people out there like i definitely also don't pretend i'm a middle ground or something that's that's ridiculous between the mccarrick left church and sspx i'm very very very sympathetic and um i guess ecclesia day the letter from um pope john paul ii through ratzinger does say it's very dangerous but you can attend an sspx chapel for mass but you have to be very careful not to give a formal adherence to a schismatic spirit so what is that i don't know but you got to check your own soul because there's a lot of there's a lot of um schismatic spirit whether or not they're actually schizomatic is a canonical question i don't really care i'm a i'm a domestic philosopher not a canonist but just be careful if you go that you don't start talking about people that go to the novus ordo like they're less than you because they're not it's the work of our lord that made any form of mass better uh worthy of our salvation you're not better for going if you go to a movie on sunday afternoon you and your wife and your kids go to the other movie because you can't agree on a movie and let's say you get back together later that night and you're talking about the two movies you and your wife saw and your kids saw at the dinner table there's no merit in the fact that you and your wife saw a better movie and then the kids are like i wish i'd gone to that one so as between people that go to latin mass and novus ordo there's no merit on the part of the goer the church-goer you know and that that's where i do see that spirit somehow i i was talking with a priest friend of mine i was kind of complaining about this poorly celebrated liturgy i went to i was all indignant about it anyway matthew listen to me you don't deserve a good liturgy you deserve hell and all right good yeah good that's so good that's what matt fred deserves so good another question here from catholicism uh question in what way is the pachamama scandal and the ancient conversion of rome greece and their understandings of soul invictus logos different try and sum it up again in what way is the pachamama scandal and the ancient conversion of roman greece and their understandings of sole invictus different well well parchamam is not for one thing i'm not saying it would be justified even if even if it were setting out to do this but it's not aiming to convert anyone it's aiming to take a a catholic map and the so-called amazonian right which i think francis and his cronies are cooking up even as we speak it's straightforwardly a false god brought in for adoration or worship it's unclear during a catholic mass it is like the number one thing that got the israelites in trouble you know it's what kept you know moses out of out of um pure paradise state so it this is big no no big big big no-no so it's distinguishable in any way from i don't know say the pantheon in rome we kicked all the other false gods out pantheon means all the gods and we converted it to a catholic chapel that's that's like the opposite it's reverse action we kicked out all the false gods they're bringing in false gods goddesses like uh pachamama opposite based byzantine says i always love reading these names that's my favorite part about reading questions do you think another council is necessary to clear up the confusion in the church even if vatican ii was fully orthodoxy after which i don't think are that vague and i don't think there's any badness lumen gentium i don't think it's that vague i don't think there's much badness and um no strategy i think it should it should clear these things up and by the way it should clear up some of the remaining questions can i just say this of vatican one remember vatican one was was not ever closed because the franco-prussian war broke out it wasn't closed until the start of vatican ii they were not done deliberating um france the francis pontificate has proven the need for more gloss real real development meaning more detail not not change more detail on what is meant by papal infallibility for if if number 266 doesn't make you wonder that what would so vatican 2 vatican 3 call it should clear up that question of the infallibility from vatican one much needed after francis's pontificate and should clear up some of the issues mainly the mass from two and by clear up i mean let's just go back to the tlm universally yeah i would love it for those who are watching uh be sure to subscribe because shortly we're going to be hosting a debate between a catholic and orthodox on whether the first vatican council's you know definition of papal infallibility is dates back to the patristics and to the to to christ obviously so that should be good um let's see solo christo says matt fradd will you ever get michael lofton oh yeah on pines with aquinas from what i've seen of michael often he seems like a really cool guy and i'd be definitely open to having him on the show uh this person says what do you think of new movements that come out of vatican to like neocatecumental way that's for me i i get asked that like every third show i do and um i'm very very very wary that's all i can say of new new news just always a buzzword i mean i'm i'm that trad news dangerous uh v zui says how to distinguish between ordinary magisterium that we have to agree with and that we can reject can we reject amoris laetitia why cannot reject bona fide authentic ordinary magisterium which basically any ecumenical council the three or four or five pastoral councils even though they're not dogmatic they are still doctrinal and so far as they have some teachings they're automatically ordinary ordinary magisterium that's not so with the ordinary papal magisterium it's very complex making the determination what papal encyclicals are and are not ordinary automatically but they're not part of the magister even though they're magisterial documents they're not automatically ordinary magisterium if they're a matter of first impression so like i gave you the example la dato see pretty much everything francis writes no one's ever written before and when he does cite now he only cites himself that's the only way he can get any citations because what he's doing is a rite of first impression so it's not autumn it's not considered an encyclical or an exhortation it's not considered ordinary magisterium until it's been habitually repeated in multiple documents how many is multiple i don't know but it's not ordinary magisterium just by virtue of the fact that it's an encyclical john derosa says matt and tim great to see you two teaming up what are each of your favorite documents from vatican 2 and why um i love i mean i love all of them i love dave verbum if i want to kind of get a you know re-injection of enthusiasm to why i should love and revere the sacred scriptures i'd love to read that guardian spezz i love sacrosanct and chilean i mean that's what's so funny it's like if you encounter somebody and they talk about the spirit of vatican 2 like this is a spirit of vatican 2 mass and you've got the guitar band and all this and you're like a bit like when you read what the second american council said about it like you all should know the ordinary in latin you know yeah i i mean i've just been drawn to again i'm still leery and this is all kind of new to me defending some of the documents so dignitatis though particularly if you go watch on my channel timothy gordon rules for retrogrades on youtube my interview and with my brother dave of thomas pink the oxford philosopher who gives the best account for how dignitatis umana is really just saying stuff that bellarmine and suarez said before about religious liberty it's amazing and there are not ambiguities in dignitas humane it might be the most hated document by certain quarters of traditionalists and i think it's the clearest of the documents so i don't i'm still new at defending them and loving i'm still not in that chris plants my buddy please he was like such a cool guy i got to say i've seen him a few times with who's that other bloke declaws richard the clue yeah he seems like such a cool guy i really have a lot of love for him i really helped to turn me around just pointed out it's like hey you thought i would like yell at him i'm like look man i remember if i'm wrong just tell me please tell me because i mean you know that's funny sorry to cut you off but i remember him saying in a youtube video because i i i have to be honest i haven't really followed this like i actually don't watch taylor marshall i see a couple of snippets here and there this whole thing that happened i really wasn't following it a great deal but i remember richard saying in a video that he had a lot of respect for you because it's not every day that you encounter someone's like okay yeah that helped change my mind and i was wrong and i accept this now thank you so i don't know if you if you saw that video i think i did i think i did or he just told me in person yeah whenever whenever somebody on the internet admits to being wrong and angel gets its wings i think that's what thomas aquinas said somewhere it's true well it's it's a beautiful thing isn't it we're supposed to be lovers of truth lovers of god and any youtubers that are out there particularly led or lady or ordained youtubers that are out there saying that they're always right are ridiculous no there's one thing i'm not going to say i'm wrong when you haven't shown me that i am but the clue was like no tim you don't know and let me show i mean i'm a domestic philosopher i'm not a theologian so he showed me and i'm deeply grateful to any of you out there who who you know have a good citation don't call names they're just like look look this goes directly against what you're saying check it out i love that i think it'd be good for us to remember this right like people on youtube are people they're not it's it's almost like we expect people to be open to truth but we also expect them to be like a catechism that never errs has no false opinions never teaches error but it's like it's yeah it's it's a great responsibility to be on here because i know i've said things that are false i'm sure you know that thing i just did the other day about santa claus i had somebody sent me like several articles about why i'm wrong i'm like crap maybe i am i feel terrible i gotta maybe if i'm wrong i gotta fix this you know i responded to you man on your i said you know your friend matt fradd yeah yeah go watch my thing i was like i raised some points where i was like i think matt might be overlooking this oh good good see this is my point like we need to be i think give each other grace right because it's like just because you have a youtube account it actually doesn't make you infallible it doesn't make you the oracle at delphi i mean look man it's so weird like here's why okay people all want to ask about what happened with tnt right and it's very relevant to what you just said let's do it when when people when you there are two types of youtubers the type that are like yeah let's debate and if you beat me then awesome if you beat me there's no point shaving uh november third style right if you beat me fair and square this is just maybe the difference between people that played sports and people that don't if you just beat me then i respect you and i think you're awesome if we both think we're the best basketball player in the room then let's square off it's not an ugly thing it's a beautiful thing contest let's debate and i've you know to i've asked taylor marshall to debate me on this this new vatican ii stuff not because we're enemies because we agreed on basically everything else and it's the opportunity for the victor or whoever prevails to convert the other person people used to say about me and taylor iron sharpens iron like like st paul that's the only way iron sharpens iron if you beat me and i know okay i'm the second best basketball player i know i'm really good so you beat me you must be better then we're friends that creates camaraderie look at what happened between me and trent horn because trent the reason i actually like trent a lot and respect it well there are multiple reasons but one is that he debates and he'll get on the sticks and and um yeah i like to be willing to debate like you got you can't just go back to your tribe talk smack and then not debate people right and so what would you debate taylor on if he would agree to a debate hermeneutic of continuity and and the vatican ii documents themselves look he was saying i mean this this happened on his show where he was reading i can't remember if his nostrite or lumenegencium on what vatican ii says about the muslims and he added in a word he said he literally said he told his crowd that it said that you know uh vatican ii says the muslims worship the one true god it says the one god and then i pointed it out to him or i think plants did no no actually and it's the catechism of pius the tenth says the one true god vatican two just says the one god both are right muslims do worship them in a very diabolic way difference between sense and reference but he wouldn't he wouldn't respond to it and i'm like why not thank me and just be okay cool we need to have somebody start a kind of gofundme page where we raise money to get you and taylor to have a debate i'm happy to host it um taylor seems like a great guy he obviously loves our blessed lord he's done a lot of good so i don't know i'm open to that i've hosted several debates now it's always fun and just kind of giving people equal time sometimes it's great to let people have a conversation like with betsy then with when you debated trent on feminism i think you and trent would both agree it would have been awesome to have a moderator so that each person has their allotted time to say what they have to say so i'd be open to that i don't know if he'd be open to that it sounds like you've reached out to him and he said no but yeah he look he's a good man he loves our lord i just think he needs to see this which is real goes back to the 1800s how do you say it goes back to the 1800s but it began in the 1960s in 1960 there's a contradiction there but yes yes he's a he's he's a good lover and a faithful lover of our lord i just think you have to get out and debate people and look it kind of kind of drove us apart and then things go cold and if you're not talking the not talking part is just so lame it's like let's let's just talk at least off here hopefully you're always chatting yeah and then that's not it either the cool part about trent i know i talked a lot during trance but he also brought me on as a guest that's why it's better if you are debating to go on someone else's show that way right so it was kind of it was kind of ambiguous right because he did bring you on as a guest but he wanted to debate this topic so in that sense i would think there ought to be equal time but if there's some kind of ambiguity about okay is this a debate is an interview i think that that was the problem that's why i actually do like doing moderated debates because you know it's just everyone gets to say no one can say it was unfair you know so anyway by the way trent horn's book on socialism is excellent very good everyone that doesn't read it but that hasn't read it or doesn't have it should go by see i don't what i don't like matt is um false false or just cosmetic civility i like real civility so anytime i i say look you know tim staples said this on the pope you know and and uh gay civil unions but he's in i have to be honest there i don't think you should i don't think this is right but his book on mary's beautiful and i think you should go read it it's one of the best apologetic books on the blessed mother of it's the best i've ever read you know it is funny i did that little video where i was talking about like pope francis and the ambiguity and i was like can somebody please address this you know not just people who deny his papacy and someone please address it and i i talked about all the gaslighting going on because all these faithful catholics are like this isn't right right and no sooner had i released that video i think was a day later tim staples who i love who used to be my boss at catholic answers released a release to post and it was basically like calm down i'm like this is what i'm talking about no i know i know i know calm down spa be real debate can can we say that in in in faithful catholicism i don't see i don't like the term trad i don't like the term rad trap i don't like whatever it's just you're either an orthodox catholic or you're not and that includes all of us that includes traditionalists even includes radical traditionalists includes you it includes me and we just need to like disagree you disagree with me about that but we agree about this like is that a surprise we don't have to hate each other we don't even have to not be friends me and chris plants don't agree about a lot of stuff but we're really close friends and he can help me to learn in areas where our weaknesses of mine what do you say though to those who say well this is uh divisive and these are sort of things ought to be discussed privately not publicly i think c.s lewis said something like that regarding christians and the different denominations you know we really shouldn't be arguing about this this is like an in-house kind of affair i know that's why william craig won't debate other christians for example uh yeah so what do you say to that it's wrong that's why because error needs to be exposed well the other thing too is it's so public anyway it's like who do we think we're hiding this from it's like youtube exists right also about this lewis and and and you know maybe maybe william lane craig he's ces lewis had this major kind of blind spot right it's that he's converted to christianity by a catholic j.r.r tolkien the master and he converts probably for cultural pressure reasons to anglicanism and he was always kind of catholic adjacent you know c.s lewis and so i think it that that that remark probably stems more from sort of a blind spot like look i don't want to i don't want to go up against catholic debaters because i know i'll lose um and that's i said i wouldn't psychologize and i did it but but i think it's it's outright wrong we have to i just think it also is wrong because it presupposes that when you debate someone you don't like them like when someone i'm not just saying this and it's not just because i'm a lawyer philosopher when someone's like i disagree with you tim and here's why i'm like oh this is good i i'm interested and when they say here's why it's fine i don't like being called horrible names on the internet so we're not going to be friends that way that makes me want to box you but if you're like here's why you're wrong i'm going to give you the three reasons i'm like this will be good i'll either learn or i'll look smarter than this yeah hey we got a bunch of questions you want if we try to get through these uh a little quicker yes conor says where did all the priests who wanted to undermine the church at vatican 2 come from good luck saying that quickly yeah well remember pius the 10th and even leo the 13th you know uh 50 to 70 years previous to this had been talking about modernists in their midst even even you know gregory and pius ix are talking about it that's why he published the syllabus of errors they came from 150 years before that good all right that was quick directional faith says we talk a lot about our differences and how things are uh but what is the way forward how do we attempt repair uh attempt to repair the division in the church just real quick i wouldn't i would say in response to this like this is such a difficult question right because we only have our little realm of responsibility you know like we can't actually affect things that are at a major level most of us can't and it's sort of similar to like how do we fix our country you know but uh what would you say in response to that remember our lord and savior was batting what was this batting average for conversions i don't know but it was low he he did not judge himself by the perfectionist standard that everyone you evangelize has to be evangelizable he said if if people won't hear you in one town shake the dust from your sandals and go to the next in other words if my lord can't do that then we can't so what we need to do is clarify and correct error get all the error out of the teaching like charitably like this but you do it through debate and you do it through remembering the facts don't care about our feelings they don't don't call names that's what dumb people do get the joke um and just just clarify and just just you don't have to and people say charitable this terrible that it you don't have to worry about that just clarify and don't call names and just say c byzant says what about those who aren't convinced idol was pachamama since she was an amazonian goddess and the andean natives don't worship amazonian amazonian gods yes what do you say the objection that that wasn't an idol she wasn't considered a deity this was something else i don't know the same thing that you know defenders amidst moses's group would have said oh that's not really bail it's just people just say stuff but it really was pachamama that everyone has even the pope in the vatican has said it was so sorry yeah it's interesting like in thomas aquinas where he talks about polytheism and other things he he talks about how like these other gods that we talk about these are demonic spirits and i think we often forget that it's not like you have god and you have these other things that we worship that aren't divine uh anyway [Music] and it said uh 7 or 7 30. i forget go ahead 200 people now we've learned zoom classes work aristotle's ethics is one of the most important classes a catholic or a non-catholic could ever take it's life-changing it's you know he's the philosopher of common sense but it's still better to read the 10 chapters of the nicomachean ethics under guidance ask any of the 200 people that were in that inaugural class it's live taught by me they're not just modules it's life-changing i promised them that and everyone's just stoked about it so i decided to begin another one i'm not even done with the other ethics section it's still going into the spring but i'm starting another one january the 19th go to timothyjordan.com and take these classes i've taught these classes with slides for years i love the ethics and you will too awesome tim do me a favor i'll put that in the description below but maybe uh remind me if i forget so that people can check it out um i think we just had some technical difficulties people are complaining about things freezing up so sorry about that hopefully things are better now i'm not sure but uh tim thank you kindly for being on the show all the best with your three books beautiful family say hello to your lovely wife and uh your your doctoral program so it's a lot to get done thanks a million matt i i really appreciate you being uh such a good all-around dude and being so responsible with the medium that you have and you know have it having me on twice i just uh you're really a genuine secret seeker after the truth i i appreciate that i think you deserve your large and growing audience and you've proven worthy finally thank you i hope that's true god bless you tim there's all peace thanks

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 68,809

Rating: 4.7336683 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: VZc8lrqzjHY

Length: 71min 17sec (4277 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020