Flesh and Blood

The election of Pope Leo XIV led to immediate negativity toward the 267th pontiff from some Catholic corners. But is that the voice of the Spirit — or “flesh and blood”?

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00:00-00:10
As I watched the recent coverage of the papal conclave from both secular and Christian media there was a real sense that something profound was taking place.

00:10-01:42
You could you could feel it coming through the airwaves and even though maybe secular analysts couldn’t put a finger on it we as Catholics can. We were watching prophecy being fulfilled before our eyes on a global scale. Jesus said in Matthew 16, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Well, after Peter died 2,000 years ago, that rock didn’t just suddenly vanish. As we see in Acts chapter 1, when Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide, went after he died, his office, as it says in Acts chapter 1, was filled by the Apostle Matthias. And so too with all the Apostles, including Peter. When Peter died, his office was taken by another, and the keys of the kingdom that Peter held were then passed to his successor, all the way down to the 267th successor, Pope Leo XIV. But even despite this sense of the profound happening, even before the smoke from the Sistine Chapel had gone out, there were already critics in the Catholic media going on their webcasts and so on and finding dirt on Pope Leo XIV and finding a way to put this papacy in the most negative light possible right out of the starting gates. So my question is were they acting in the Spirit or were they acting in flesh and blood?

01:48-01:49
(dramatic music)

01:57-02:01
– Hello, I’m Mark Mallett from Countdown to the Kingdom and thenoword.com.

02:02-02:03
Well, what do I mean by that?

02:03-02:05
Were they acting in flesh and blood?

02:05-02:07
Well, let’s just go right to that gospel.

02:08-02:12
And I’m actually referring to what Jesus was saying to Peter.

02:13-02:16
And you’ll remember he put a question to the apostles.

02:16-02:26
He said, “Hey, who do the people around here say I am in the Caesarea Philippi region?” And the apostles answered and said, “Well, some think you’re John the Baptist.

02:26-02:32
Others say that you’re Elijah or Jeremiah.” But Jesus really didn’t want to know what the people thought.

02:32-02:34
He wanted to know what the apostles were thinking.

02:34-03:08
And so he said, “Well, who do you say that I am?” And immediately Simon looked at Jesus and said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” This is profound, and the reason is, is because, and many people don’t understand this, but in the Old Testament, that terminology, Son of God or Son of the Living God, was equal to saying, “You are God.” The Jews understood this, which is why they wanted to crucify Jesus, because He was claiming to be the Son of God.

03:09-03:16
And they said to him, “You are claiming to be God.” And so they plotted to crucify him.

03:17-03:20
And so when Peter said that, it was a profound revelation.

03:21-03:31
So Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, “for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, “but my heavenly Father.

03:31-03:41
“And so I say to you, you are Peter, “and upon this rock I will build my church “and the gates of the netherworld “shall not prevail against it.

03:42-03:47
“I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” And so there you have it.

03:48-03:54
It was not flesh and blood, not human thinking, but the Holy Spirit who revealed this to Peter.

03:55-04:07
And yet, two or three paragraphs later, Jesus, you know, begins to explain to the apostles, look, the scribes, the chief priests, they’re going to put me to death and I will rise on the third day.

04:08-04:25
And then Peter, perhaps feeling a little overconfident at that point, having the keys of the kingdom now in his right pocket, turns to Jesus and says, “God forbid, no such thing shall ever happen to you.” And Jesus immediately says to him, “Get behind me, Satan.

04:25-04:27
“You are an obstacle to me.

04:27-04:37
“You are thinking not as God does, “but as human beings do.” That is, Peter was starting to think again in flesh and blood.

04:38-04:58
And so I turn again to what some of these critics of Pope Leo XIV were saying, and frankly, a lot of these are the same people who kind of established themselves as the official opposition of Pope Francis, who seemed to appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of orthodoxy in Catholic media.

04:59-05:05
And you see, the thing is, are they thinking in terms of the Spirit?

05:05-05:22
‘Cause they believe, hey, look, we’ve gotta protect the faith, we have to guard sacred tradition, we have to be part and parcel of the sense of the faithful, the sensus fidelium, who are helping the whole church along in proclaiming the truth and the gospel to the world.

05:22-05:23
Now, I get that.

05:24-05:38
But when we start to look at the papacy as a kind of a political office, and we use social media the same way people approach Donald Trump or Justin Trudeau or, you know, Macron and so on.

05:38-05:42
When we begin to treat the papacy like this, you’ve lost the narrative.

05:44-05:49
And you are thinking as human beings do, thinking in flesh and blood.

05:50-05:52
Why? It’s for this reason.

05:53-05:58
This is not something Jesus said to the kings and the princes of his day, but he said to the apostles.

05:58-06:05
He said to them in the Gospel of Luke, “Whoever listens to you listens to me.

06:05-06:36
Whoever rejects you rejects me and the one who sent you.” Who sent me? And that’s the Father in heaven. You see the Apostles were given the authority to teach and to preach the gospel. We know this from Matthew 28. Jesus, before he ascended into heaven, he said to them, “The Great Commission, go therefore into to the nations, teaching them all that I have given you to observe, everything that I have commanded you, you teach them that, and make disciples of the nations.

06:39-06:42
And those who listen, Jesus said, they will be my sheep.

06:43-06:54
As we heard in the gospel just this morning, before this webcast, the day I’m recording this, Jesus said in John chapter 10, my sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me.

06:56-07:06
Well, the thing is, Jesus appointed these shepherds, these mere men, these 12 apostles, to be the shepherds, to be the ones who we are to listen to.

07:06-07:17
Again, Jesus said, “Whoever listens to you,” he said to the 12 apostles, “listens to me.” And so, the question now is, how are you approaching the Pope?

07:17-07:20
Are you listening for the voice of Jesus?

07:20-07:23
And if you are, then you’re operating in the Spirit.

07:24-07:46
But if you’re listening for how you can critique the Pope, for every false step, if you start to look at his past and the mistakes that maybe Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost made in the past, with maybe how he handled sexual abuse cases, you know, and again, maybe he handled them well or he didn’t, but I hope that you’re getting your facts straight.

07:46-07:51
And I’m pretty sure that the Cardinals are fairly aware of the whole situation.

07:51-08:13
remember that when he was a bishop back then, there weren’t standards put in place. And a lot of priests and bishops and even some of our popes, the way things were handled were handled in an internal way. And some of it was good and some of it was awful. And some people were really deeply hurt by the church not facing these crimes that happened.

08:13-08:15
So we recognize that.

08:15-08:21
But still, why do we judge someone from something 25 years ago?

08:22-08:23
What’s the golden rule?

08:24-08:26
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

08:27-08:29
Do you want people to judge you?

08:29-08:36
To go online and say, “Well, 25 years ago, Mark Mallett did this.” I mean, that would be awful if someone did that.

08:36-08:41
Who I am today, I hope, is not who I am from who I was yesterday.

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Not who I am today.

08:43-08:49
And the Catechism calls this “not bearing false witness.” It’s the 8th commandment.

08:49-08:52
Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.

08:53-08:56
And it breaks it down in the Catechism what this really means.

08:57-09:14
One of the points of this, it says in No. 2478 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is to avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor’s thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way.

09:15-09:20
So we need to start to listen to what our Pope is saying.

09:20-09:23
And case in point is the papacy of Pope Francis.

09:23-09:29
Unlike Benedict XVI, unlike John Paul II, they were fairly precise in their papacy.

09:29-09:33
It wasn’t perfect, but they were fairly precise in everything they said.

09:34-09:34
Not so Francis.

09:35-09:36
He spoke off the cuff.

09:37-10:40
times he said things that were left unfinished, that weren’t given a proper context. Many of his documents he released were ambiguous. They were confusing. You had to really take a thread from here and a thread from there and a thread from there and knit it all together to understand it in a hermeneutic of continuity. But many people approach Pope Francis through a hermeneutic of suspicion. And that’s thinking in the flesh. That’s thinking as human beings do. And many people now are continuing this with Pope Leo XIV. Why? Because he said, he praised Francis and is saying we’re going to continue to follow in that step. But what does he mean by that? Well, he said in his own words, he says, “We need to follow,” he said, “what Pope Francis said and I quote, “masterfully and concretely set forth in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, from which I would like to highlight several fundamental points.

10:40-10:44
So Pope Leo XIV is telling us what he’s going to take from Francis.

10:44-10:48
Now here’s the people who are thinking in flesh and blood.

10:48-10:57
They’re just saying simply, “Oh, if he’s just going to take anything from Francis, then I’ll have nothing to do with him.” You are thinking as human beings do.

10:59-11:04
As there were many things Pope Francis said during his papacy that were completely within sacred tradition.

11:05-11:08
They were completely part and parcel of our Catholic faith.

11:08-11:09
They were bang on.

11:10-11:14
And yet there were other things Francis said that were his own opinion.

11:14-11:19
Or he wandered into scientific opinions, medical opinions, case in point.

11:20-11:27
He said we need to keep the planet at a 1.5 degree mean temperature and embrace carbon pricing.

11:28-11:36
And I was listening to this and I’m going, “You know what Pope Francis, there’s a whole lot of climatologists and scientists who completely disagree with you.

11:36-11:38
You’re entitled to your scientific opinion.

11:40-11:41
But we don’t have to agree with that.

11:42-12:10
I don’t have to agree either with the Pope when he came out before hardly anyone had been injected and said, ‘These are safe and effective and everyone should be taking them.'” I was astonished and in fact I’ll admit I was appalled by that statement because I was already reading researchers and scientists who understood what those gene therapies were all about and they were warning and their warnings have come true in spades.

12:11-12:19
And therefore you have to understand that the Pope has only a mandate to speak and preach and teach on faith and morals.

12:20-12:23
It doesn’t mean he can’t have an opinion on other things.

12:24-12:27
But it’s only, his mandate is only on matters of faith and morals.

12:27-12:36
So let’s say when it comes to climate change, the Pope needs to say, and he can say, as part of faith and morals, we need to be good stewards of creation.

12:36-12:44
And in his document Laudato Si, Pope Francis said many excellent things about how we’re polluting the planet and poisoning it.

12:44-12:46
And I’ve written articles on this.

12:46-12:47
The great poisoning.

12:47-13:04
being poisoned from every direction. But on other matters, I didn’t hear Jesus speaking through Pope Francis. I heard Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the man, speaking, not Pope Francis.

13:04-13:25
And so, what I’m talking about here is a matter of discernment. We have to be able to discern again. And the problem today is we’ve got this false dichotomy going where there’s two extremes happening now. Where either the Pope, you know, many people who believe everything the Pope says, you have to obey it. You just have to obey it.

13:25-13:28
He said they’re safe and effective and I have to take it and I have to take it.

13:28-14:15
Look, he’s not your doctor. The Pope doesn’t know everything about medicine and everything that’s being proposed and injected into human beings. I’m sorry, he doesn’t. That’s not his mandate. And so that’s one extreme. The other extreme of course is people looking that the Pope has to be absolutely pristine and perfect in every absolute thing he says and if he doesn’t you completely reject his papacy. But there’s a middle road and that’s to discern and listen for the voice of Jesus when the Pope is exercising what is called in Vatican II his authentic magisterium. And we have to recognize that. And as we’ve learned in the papacy of Pope Francis, that was a hard process.

14:15-14:23
And we were being forced at times to have to delve into and understand when the Pope was speaking authoritatively and when he wasn’t.

14:24-14:26
And I think we had to work far harder than we should have.

14:27-14:32
Unfortunately, Pope Francis was being much more of a Jesuit at times than he was a Pope.

14:32-14:34
Sorry to all the Jesuits out there, I apologize.

14:37-15:14
So the thing is Pope Leo XIV is speaking calling the Church, as he said to the Cardinals, “I am asking you to renew together today with me,” this is Pope Leo speaking, “our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” Once again, you’re going to find a lot of what Cardinal Zen called “toxic traditionalists” who completely reject Vatican II, completely reject our current popes, coming out and saying, He’s following Vatican II, therefore I will not follow him.

15:15-15:19
But Cardinal Zinn really answered this, and I thought he answered it well.

15:20-15:31
When he said, “The problem is you cannot blame on the Council all the wrong things that happened after it in the Church.” For instance, I’ll give you one example.

15:32-15:34
I had this conversation with my own bishop just recently.

15:35-16:13
We were talking about the Vatican II documents and how there’s nothing in the Vatican II saying that we need to abolish ad orientum, the priest facing the altar, or that we should abolish communion rails and communion on the tongue. You won’t find that in the Vatican II documents. But what you will find is bishops who took liberties and what we could even say abuses to forward a modernist agenda that has watered down the faith, that has… what’s the word I want to say…

16:14-16:27
neutered the sacred in our church. And really the beauty and mystery of the liturgy has been destroyed in many aspects. And so what do we need to do?

16:27-17:05
Well many people are saying, “We just need to go back to the Latin Mass.” But here again we have to stop thinking in flesh and blood and as human beings do. We have to recognize that Cardinal Zen that the Holy Spirit as they gathered in this council at Vatican II just as the Holy Spirit was present at all councils the Holy Spirit was present at this council and the Vatican II fathers were absolutely right. They recognized that there were abuses happening in the in the Latin Mass. There were things happening where the people were were not quite connected to what was happening in the liturgy. And they wanted to fix that.

17:05-17:33
They wanted to bring back vernacular. They wanted to get rid of what Benedict the 16th called medieval accretions, repetitions and things that were just not necessary. And they went too far. And therefore Benedict the 16th says there needs to be a reform of the reform. And I’m praying Pope Leo the 14th is going to be this Pope that will carry forward Vatican II in the spirit in which it was intended.

17:34-17:36
And my Bishop was agreeing with me, saying, “You’re right.

17:36-17:58
These things aren’t in the Vatican II documents.” And now I’m seeing with priests in Canada, or my friend Richard Father Howlman from Grace Force, they’re now starting to implement these things at Orientum, Communion Rails, a little bit of Latin here and there, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater that we saw some modernists do.

17:59-18:03
And I’m telling you now, those liturgies are beautiful.

18:03-18:11
The first time I saw one where the priest was doing these things, it was in Saskatoon, Canada, Saskatchewan.

18:12-18:14
And I wept through the entire liturgy.

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The bishop was sitting there.

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He was present.

18:17-18:18
It was beautiful.

18:18-18:32
And I heard the Lord say in my heart, “This is what I intended.” And so we need to pray for a spirit of generosity and gentleness and meekness and humility before this papacy.

18:33-18:40
If you’re dictating online what Pope Leo XIV needs to be saying, you’re in the wrong spirit.

18:41-19:15
The real spirit of us needs to be, what is Pope Leo XIV, what is Jesus saying right now to us through Pope Leo XIV. It’s going to be different than the popes before him to a certain degree because he has his own spirituality. He has his own formation through the Augustinian spirituality and so forth. We need to be listening in this new era of Pope Leo XIV to what Jesus is saying. And hopefully Pope Leo XIV, this is the thing, hopefully he’s obeying our Lord.

19:15-19:45
Remember on that beach after Peter denied Jesus three times? He turned to Peter and he said, “Do you love me?” And three times Peter said, “I love you.” To which Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep, feed my flock.” And after the third time Jesus said to him, “Good, you love me? Then follow me.” And this is what Pope Leo XIV needs to do. If he’s going to feed us properly as sheep, he needs to be following Jesus carefully.

19:46-19:53
He needs to be listening to the Good Shepherd so that he in turn is feeding us, the flock, with Christ’s own words.

19:54-19:57
Which is why you and I need to be praying for Leo XIV.

19:59-20:02
This is why we need to be preserving the unity in the body of Christ.

20:03-20:12
Those of you who are out there bashing our Pope, previous Pope, who are bashing already Pope Leo XIV, repent.

20:13-20:14
Stop it.

20:15-20:30
“We are called,” said St. Paul, “to strive for unity, thinking the same thing, being of one mind and one heart.” Yeah, I know, we are all feeling a bit apprehensive because of the tensions that happened.

20:31-20:32
The Pachamama scandal.

20:33-20:47
Again, the scientific and medical positions that Pope Francis publicly took and caused a lot of problems in the church and for the faithful because of that. And it’s unfortunate.

20:48-21:16
As I’ve said before, you know, our popes, we’ve had popes who fathered babies, who’ve bet women, who’ve sold their papacy. And we could have a pope who dances naked on the Vatican walls. But here’s the thing. He still holds the keys of the kingdom and Jesus will still hopefully speak through him from time to time. In fact, we have never had a single 2,000 years have an ex-cathedra error.

21:17-21:27
That is a pope who in defining or clarifying a dogma from the seat of Peter, ex-cathedra, from the seat, we’ve never had a pope make that error.

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And something contrary to what was handed to him through sacred tradition.

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And that is a testament to Jesus’ promise.

21:37-21:56
Peter, you are a rock, and on this rock will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Yeah, we may have popes again who will scandalize the faithful, who will rock the boat of Peter, who might even to a certain degree shipwreck it, but they will never completely destroy it.

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That’s Christ’s promise.

21:59-22:03
And so today the call is not to put your faith in Pope Leo XIV.

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He is a man.

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He is flesh and blood.

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But put your faith in Jesus and listen carefully for the voice of Jesus, for when Jesus is speaking through the Pope, when He’s speaking through your bishops, when He’s speaking through your priests.

22:20-22:26
Heck, when He’s speaking through you and me, because the Spirit speaks through prophecy.

22:26-22:28
He speaks through words of knowledge.

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He speaks to us when we evangelize, when we give words of encouragement, when we build each other up, when we quote scripture to each other.

22:38-22:52
And the only way we can hear Jesus is when we’re like Peter in that moment, when we’re listening to the Spirit, when we are meek and humble of heart, not thinking in flesh and blood, thinking as human beings do.

So grateful for your prayers and support.
Thank you!