Audio only:
Fr. Moses McPherson, an Orthodox priest, had released a few videos explaining his problems with Catholicism. Joe gives his response.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and one of you recently asked in the comments if I would respond to some attacks on the Catholic Church made by a Russian Orthodox priest in YouTuber. Father Moses McPherson. Now if you’ve never heard of him, father Moses is a Protestant convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. He was originally ordained as a priest of the Orthodox Church of America, but left that for some reason to become Russian Orthodox. These days he does things like making Mr Beast style videos on YouTube.
CLIP:
Today we bought this 2 million mansion and we’re going to transform it into a church. Hey, that’s me, father Moses, top of our new church building.
Joe:
He’s also perhaps the most public face of movement amongst extremely online orthodox guys where he’s promoting what he calls absurd levels of manliness. He’s a bodybuilder who posts images of his muscles and he makes videos like this.
CLIP:
A lot of people ask me, father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels? Well, today we are going to explore those behaviors which will take you up and take you down. We have this beautiful chart here that is going to show us where we place modern day activities.
Joe:
Father Moses even made a chart to measure how hot and holy different women were in a video that thankfully has since taken down, but in which he argued that the hottest and holiest women were nuns. And look, I know that Father Moses doesn’t represent all Orthodox. He doesn’t represent even all Russian Orthodox. In fact, when the BBC ran an article on Father Moses and other Orthodox presenting Russian orthodoxy as absurdly masculine, the Russian Orthodox Bishop of London wrote a public letter denouncing this as a distortion of orthodoxy and saying, I want to say that if you’re here because you think that’s what we’re here to do, then you are a fool. This is stupidity. So despite those strong words, it’s probably worth pointing out that Father Moses is part of this kind of changing face of American orthodoxy. Let give you just one data point.
Back in 2007, orthodoxy in the US looked like a normal church. There were slightly more women than men, but the gender balance was roughly equal. Now it is swung wildly in the opposite direction. Orthodox men outnumber women about two to one in the us. So I think Father Moses is worth replying to both for the false claims he’s making, but also for the false version of Christianity that he’s espousing. And speaking of espousing, I’d like to personally espouse my gratitude to all of you supporting me@shamusjoe.com. Your direct support makes this show possible without us needing to take sponsors or anything. So for as little as $5 a month, you can get access to the sources for each episode, exclusive q and a live streams and a community of Christians who are passionate about going deeper with their faith. So if you’d like to help us out, please visit chim joe.com and subscribe the day and know of my gratitude for you. Alright, so maybe you’re old enough to remember the obsession with masculinity preach by evangelical Protestants like Mark Driscoll who said of the man of sorrows that I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. But Jesus getting beaten up is a pretty major part of the Christian gospel and I think it’s also worth pointing out here as Father Moses himself does.
CLIP:
If you’re a hard and dangerous individual, you don’t need to tell other people that. It’s always the people who are telling everybody about how tough and how awesome they are that are the least tough and the least awesome.
Joe:
I would only add to this that I think a hyper fixation on how manly you think you are is extremely unmanly. But let’s turn to his arguments against Catholicism. What does Father Moses have to say about Catholicism? He has some curious takes. For some reason, many of the Orthodox objections to Catholicism that I’ve seen seem to be in areas that we actually agree. For instance, I once had an Orthodox priest tell me that the difference between Catholics and Orthodox is that Catholics use only 66 books in their Bible while Orthodox use 73. That was surreal for me as a Catholic to hear because we Catholics use 73 books in our Bible. I was reminded of that surreal reality when I heard a clip that Father Moses posted from one of his sermons, which he entitled Orthodox Salvation verse Catholicism. So I want you to listen and see if you can spot the error
CLIP:
When we get into the heart of what it means to be an Orthodox Christian, meaning that it is to be in this relationship with God, where God transforms the person through this deep and intimate relationship and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is not similar to Catholicism. Catholicism does not have this theology.
Joe:
First thing to say is that is a great description of salvation. The only problem is this is literally Catholic theology. We agree. The only reason it’s not similar to the Catholic view is that it simply is the Catholic view. As the catechism of the Catholic church explains, the Holy Spirit heals and transforms those who receive him by conforming them to the Son of God and that the fruit of the sacramental life is that the spirit of adoption makes the faithful partakers in the divine nature by uniting them in a living union with the only Son, the savior. In other words, when we get to the heart of what it means to be a Catholic Christian, it is to be in this relationship with God where God transforms the person through this deep and intimate relationship and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is the exact theology that Father Moses claims that we don’t have.
And we see this not just in the church’s theological writings, but in her spiritual mystical writings as well. After all, as the catechism points out, prayer and Christian life are inseparable since we find in both the same transforming union in the Holy Spirit who conforms us more and more to Christ Jesus, we see these themes most clearly in the writings of CARite masters like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. If you want a good introduction on their spirituality, I’d recommend Father Thomas Dube the fire within. In that book, he explains the core and essence of the transforming union are nothing other than a complete identification with God in love. And this spiritual marriage of the soul with God is celebrated in the whole book of the song of Songs. And it is no wonder that mystics for the last 20 centuries have gravitated to the song of Songs to explain mystical contemplation. So I’m grateful to all of the Orthodox and Catholic commenters who gently pointed it out to Father Moses and recognize that this priest appears to be ignorant of even the basics of Catholic theology and spirituality. But this isn’t Father Moses’ only argument against Catholicism. He has a longer video called Priest confronts Catholicism in which he lays out several arguments. I want to take each of the major ones in turn beginning with his first one.
CLIP:
This is a criticism of what I see currently happening in Catholicism, especially as it relates to the numerous people that contact me on a regular basis that are struggling with their faith in the Catholic Church and the consistent themes that I see coming up and the criticisms of what is actually happening there. So the thing that stands out to me probably most is that it is an occult like atmosphere. People are ingrained and indoctrinated from a young age that they do not have the freedom to ever leave the Catholic church.
Joe:
He says that this is an occult like atmosphere, but I think it’s clear from his whiteboard that he means to say that Catholics are cult-like not that Catholics are engaging in occult practices specifically. He seems to be arguing that Catholicism is like a cult because people don’t feel free to leave. Now, obviously people do leave. He claims that numerous Catholics are contacting him on a regular basis, and I don’t think that he means that these Catholics are worried the Knights of Columbus are going to go round them up or something. Rather, his argument seems to be that Catholicism is a cult because people feel guilty about leaving. They are worried about leaving because the Catholic church claims to be the one true church and teaches that schism is a damnable sin. There’s some truth to that, but without even a hint of self-awareness, he goes on to say this.
CLIP:
Obviously as an orthodox Christian, Roman Catholicism is not a church. There is one holy Catholic and apostolic church that is going back to the Eastern patriarchs for 2000 years.
Joe:
There are two admissions worth recognizing First Orthodoxy makes the same claim Catholicism does. Namely it claims to be the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. Now if that claim is true, then people should feel guilty and hesitant to leave the body of Christ. But obviously the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church can’t all be right in claiming to be the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And I think Father Moses reveals the weakness of his own church’s position on that question when he claims it goes back to the Eastern patriarchs for 2000 years. The true church isn’t just Eastern and never was read the church fathers and you find vibrant Christianity in both east and west severing. Half of that tradition severs your claim to catholicity universality. And precisely the strength of the Catholic claim is that it is Catholic.
It is universal. The church lays claimed about the Eastern and Western fathers and the church is truly global, whereas you can see from a map that Eastern Orthodoxy looks like a regional schism from the church that even a thousand years later has failed to spread much beyond the former Soviet block. But in either case, I hope it’s clear why an Orthodox priest arguing that the church is a cult for acting like the one true church that no one should leave is a bit ironic. What about his other bullet points? Do they fare any better or are they also self-refuting? Well, his second point is on sexual abuse. I want to say at the outset, any kind of sexual abuse is horrible, particularly so when against a child, and even more so when at the hands of someone ordained to serve as a priest of Jesus Christ, it would be better for those wicked men to have mills stones tied around their necks and to be thrown into the sea. And it’s also a horrible scandal that many bishops covered up abuse rather than handling it properly, taking priest out of ministry, reporting them to the police and the rest. But Father Moses treats the abuse scandal as something unique to the Catholic Church and as a clear debunking of the claim that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the church.
CLIP:
When somebody says, oh, the gates of Hades will not prevail against the Roman Catholic Church, I don’t know what prevail would mean then because if people are caught and then hidden and then covered up and then sent somewhere else, and then Bishops will not even release the names of those who’ve been accused. And then on top of it, we all know that with abuse cases there are a huge percentage of which that go undocumented. People do not even bring them up.
Joe:
Although the Catholic church has received the bulk of media focus on abuse cases, this is in no way a distinctly Catholic phenomenon. And that’s true whether we’re talking about the sexual abuse or the coverups. For instance, looking into the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia, the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse found 4,000 alleged victims of more than a thousand alleged abusers. And of the 1006 alleged abusers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had turned to zero of them into the authorities. So sadly, this impulse for institutional coverup is pretty widespread and well-documented across the board. So if you’re part of a large religious body and you don’t know of any abuse cases in your church or denomination, that might not be a sign that everybody in your church is so holy. It might be a sign that there’s systematic failure to properly report and handle abuse.
And that’s true within Eastern Orthodoxy as well, particularly in those places where it’s a state church and a country with a checkered track record on freedom of the press. And we see it in the Russian Orthodox Church in the US as well. Just last year, arch priest, Matthew Williams, was discovered to have abused his own daughters when his wife Elizabeth reported the abuse, which he admitted to church authorities. The church ignored its own policies for investigating allegations. It delayed reporting him to the police and it waited months before disciplining him, months in which his erratic and dangerous behavior continued to escalate. And even after he had physically abused his wife, sexually abused his children, taken the children from their mother metropolitan Nicholas Father Moses’ own metropolitan, still wrote to Elizabeth to suggest that there’s always a chance to look forward and mutually build a strong family.
The Metropolitan then wrote an email which he accidentally copied her on complaining not about the priest, but about her saying she shouldn’t be telling the church what to do and how to the flock, in my opinion. Now, my point is not that this scandal as bad as it is disproves orthodoxy, I don’t think it does. But according to Father Moses’ standard, it seemingly would the third charge Father Moses levies is a charge of relativism. Specifically this idea that because we believe that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, therefore we treat the Trinity as negotiable or not important and therefore we’re relativists
CLIP:
Next the relativism. Well, we’ve seen these modern Catholic debates regarding the God of the Muslims and that somehow the God of the Muslims, although that God is not Trinitarian, is somehow the same God of the Roman Catholics.
Joe:
So Father Moses is claiming that the idea that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is relativism and he argues
CLIP:
Christians never, ever thought like this. This is so foreign to Christianity that I would say anyone who teaches this type of relativism is clearly not a Christian.
Joe:
I’m curious as to whether he would say the same thing explicitly about Patriarch Carroll, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and the man most Orthodox regard is the spiritual head of all Orthodoxy. As Trent Horne pointed out, patriarch Carroll explicitly holds to the very beliefs that Father Moses claims make somebody not a Christian.
CLIP:
Here’s video of Russian patriarch Caril saying, Christians and Muslims each turn to the same God, the Creator. And here’s a 2023 address where the Russian patriarch said We, Christians and Muslims, no one confessed that God is the true creator of the world and the only lawmaker when Jay Dyer saw this posted on X not knowing its source, he said, thanks for proving you’re not Christian, LOL.
Joe:
So unless Father Moses is willing to openly argue that the patriarch of his own church isn’t a Christian, I think it’s clear this is not a good argument for online Orthodox to continue to try to wield against the truth of Catholicism. I think if anything, it shows the chasm between online orthodoxy and the real thing. So let’s look at his fourth and final main point on the papacy.
CLIP:
It has usurped the understanding of conciliatory. Where is this now? Today? In the early church, we had councils with bishops, with patriarchs, with priests, with deacons, and those relationships were conciliatory. They worked together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to come to an understanding of what it was that God was transmitting to us, what it was that we needed to hear.
Joe:
Ironically, the Catholic Church has continued to have ecumenical councils after 10 54 and the Orthodox Church. So if the argument is that we need ecumenical councils in order to discern what God is saying to the church, surely that is an argument in favor of Catholicism and against Eastern Orthodoxy. Our most recent council ended in 1965. The most recent council generally accepted by the Russian Orthodox ended in 7 87, but he is right about one thing. Unlike his other arguments, the papacy is unique to Catholicism, but I think that this is actually a good argument for the Catholic Church instead of against it, as I explained recently in giving my own reasons for why I’m not Orthodox. You can check that video out right here for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.