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In this episode Trent rebuts three absurd conspiracies about Catholicism.
Does James 2:10 say all sins are equal?
Transcription:
Refuting Three Absurd Catholic Conspiracy Theories
Catholics have long been the targets of lurid conspiracy theories and in today’s episode we are going to refute three of the silliest ones, starting with a recent conspiracy that’s been shared on social media.
The Pope John Paul II/Jeffrey Epstein Connection
In the wake of the recent release of material from the Epstein files some people claimed Pope John Paul II was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and cite this picture. This X user says: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell being personally blessed by the Pope. Interesting. 🧐
But a raised eyebrow does not an argument make. The Pope blesses thousands of people every year and he doesn’t do a background check on them beforehand. Other people point to this email from one of Epstein’s assistants saying Jeffrey Epstein lived at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II implying that the Pope knew about Epstein’s activities.
Given that people have lived with serial killers and not even known it, it’s not surprising if some bad people lived at Vatican City and the Pope never knew about it. But the evidence Epstein lived at the Vatican is as flimsy as the evidence that Epstein un-alived himself.
In the email from 2015, ten years after JP2 died, some kind of contractor says he’s trying to paint columns in different styles for Epstein and writes:
He wants me to finish each column different as when he was living with Pope John Paul the Second in Vatican, he looked at variety of different columns captured in wars. He told me that every Pope demanded to have a column from every conquered country, so there is a collection of different columns in Vatican.
But there is no such collection of columns from the Pope conquering anything so this is probably just a jumbled recollection of something a tour guide told Epstein when he was in Rome in 2003 when JP2 blessed him that he then told this restoration specialist ten years later.
Now John Paul II does share some blame for the clergy abuse crisis and McCarrick scandal. Part of this was due to the Pope having grown up in Soviet occupied Poland where communists would use slander and lies to target people. So if someone like McCarrick denied allegations against him, Pope St. John Paul II was more likely to imprudently believe these denials.
But if you think a literal saint was actively involved in the sexual abuse of minors because there is a picture of him meeting one of the perpetrators at a public ceremony, then you need to log off and go see visit Jesus at church for a hard reset.
Jack Chick’s Fever Dreams
Jack Chick was a fundamentalist Baptist cartoonist whose tracts are probably the most widely published comic series in the world. He’s published over a billion of these things in over 100 languages all basically saying if you don’t accept Chick’s particularly theology, then Giant faceless Jesus will send you to hell.
His most famous anti-Catholic tracts include the tastefully titled Death Cookie about the Eucharist, Why is Mary crying?, and are Catholic Christians? where Chick claims Catholics are automatically citizens of the Holy See, which would be awesome because if you have a Vatican passport you can visit over 150 countries without needing a visa. Of course, that’s not true and these passports are only granted to people like Cardinals who reside in Vatican City and other diplomats.
But the Chick conspiracies about Catholicism get even more ridiculous. In the 1980 discontinued tract my name in the Vatican?, Chick claims that the name of every protestant in the world was in “the big computer in the Vatican”. How did the Vatican get the name of at the time 500 million Protestants around the world from churches no one’s even heard of?
Yes, the tract says the Inquisition is alive and well after killing 68 million people for heresy. Which is a higher death toll than the Black plague which wiped out one third of Europe in the 14th century. It also says, “Adolf Hitler was an instrument of what is now called the dicastery for the doctrine of the Faith” and the Inquisition is on its way to do the same today to true Christians around the world once Catholicism gets global power.
The rest of the tract is about an ex-priest named Alberto Rivera who is the source for many of these absurd claims who tries to expose this plot but can’t because Catholics keep getting his book banned or silenced. But in 1981 Evangelical author Gary Metz published an expose in Christianity Today showing there is no evidence Rivera, aka Alberto Romero, was ever a priest but there was evidence he was involved in financial fraud and other crimes. Metz ends his article saying,
“Rivera, who now lives in California, was asked for an interview to discuss the discrepancies in his tale, but he posed so many restrictions before he would agree, that a legitimate interview was not possible. He did say that any wrongdoings prior to his conversion to Christ in 1967 were done under the orders of the Catholic church, and that any wrongdoings since his conversion are fabrications by conspirators.”
Rivera also wrote the foreword to an 19th century conspiracy from an alleged former nun named Maria Monk called, “Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed. Monk claimed the sisters at a convent in Montreal were raped by priests in the seminary next door who accessed them through a secret tunnel under the convent. If a baby resulted, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Similar elements were borrowed for the Alberto comic strip with the setting placed in Spain. However, scholars consider the book to be a hoax and the non-religious debunker Joe Nickell writes the following in the Skeptical Inquirer:
the fantastic assertions she made were investigated thoroughly at the time by Protestant clergymen who were permitted to inspect the actual convent, discovering that its interior was incompatible with Monk’s descriptions. Much additional debunking evidence followed. Nevertheless, the book saw many editions, and by the 1920s reportedly sold over 300,000 copies. Over four decades later, states Stein, it “was still going strong.” Copies like the one I found continue to lie in wait for unsuspecting readers.
The Alberto comic strip also includes the claim that the Catholic church sends girls like agent Marie to seduce Protestant pastors or even just create up false charges of adultery against them before moving on to their next target. Also, in the comic Rivera says the Catholic church assigned him a beautiful girl to pose as his girlfriend named Carmen, when in reality, according to Metz,
“Rivera was living at one point with a woman in Costa Rica named Carmen Lydia Torres . . . he and Torres were married in 1963. Their son, Juan, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1964, [but] died in El Paso in July 1965, after his parents had fled New Jersey leaving numerous debts and a warrant for their arrest on bad check charges.
This reminds me of the Redditors who will say Catholics are a bunch of pdf-files and then promptly get arrested for possessing pdf-file material. Or as the Bard would say, “The Lady doth protest too much.”
Silly Seventh Day Adventists
My favorite Seventh Day Adventist conspiracy theory is National Sunday Law, which was popularized in a book by Jan Marcussen which claims the Catholic church will use the government to force everyone to worship on Sunday, something Adventists oppose because they believe God wants us to worship on the Sabbath, or Saturday instead of Sunday, the Lord’s day. even though the earliest Christians gathered to worship on Sunday, not Saturday.
The book, which is more of a booklet, claims the change to Sunday is a part of a plan to keep people under the evil system of worship identified by the mark of the beast in the book of revelation. It shows up everywhere often through anonymous people paying to bulk mail it to entire towns.
National Sunday Law is full of end times prophecy but the book gets updated in parts to try and keep the warning about the end being near relevant. For example, the original 1983 version mentions wars and soviet tanks while the post 2001 version describes 9/11. But there are many parts where you can see the text is stuck in the 80’s. This includes putting the drug “crack” in quotation marks, and saying crime doubles every ten years, which doesn’t account for crime rates plummeting after the 80’s.
But even in the 80’s the author should have known that the second Vatican council’s teaching on religious liberty would preclude putting people to death for worshipping on Saturday and the U.S. has a very robust protection of religious freedom in the first amendment.
The book makes a big deal about the sin of not keeping the Saturday Sabbath because apparently once you disobey this commandment you might as well murder, steal and break all the other commandments. It says, “If you break one, you break them all (James 2:10,11). It’s like two lovers – it’s either all or nothing.”
Okay O Town.
Also, check out the link below for why James 2 does not say committing one sin is the same as committing all sins and for more information on why Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, wants us to worship him on the day he rose from the dead check out this episode from my colleague Joe Heschmeyer at Shameless Popery.
Other seventh-day Adventists, claim the Pope is the beast of the Book of Revelation who is a powerful religious ruler who, according to Revelation 13:18, has a name that is numbered “666”. Some Adventists claim the Pope has a Latin title Vicarius Filii Dei, or vicar of the Son of God, and that since roman letters have numerical value, these letters add up to 666.
The problem with this argument is that the Pope is the vicar of Christ. Vicar of the son of God isn’t one of the pope’s titles. This myth comes from an error in a 1915 article in Our Sunday Visitor that was later corrected, twice. However, Seventh Day Adventists continue to make this false claim because they think it supports their 666 narrative.
You also have to arbitrarily assign values to letters in Vicar of the Son of God that don’t normally function that way in Latin (for example, the IV in Vicarivs would normally be read as “4,” but the Adventist calculation gives it a value of 6).
What makes more sense is that this verse refers to the Roman emperor Nero who brutally persecuted Christians in A.D. 64 and whose name Nero Caesar adds up to 666 in Hebrew and Aramaic.
But you know whose name does add up to 666 if you change the letters to Latin equivalents? Ellen Gould White, the founder of seventh day Adventism.
Alright, so those are three absurd Catholic conspiracy theories, leave a comment below about other conspiracy theories you want me to examine and don’t forget to like today’s episode and support us at trenthornpodcast.com to help us keep creating awesome content. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.