John F. MacArthur, Jr.
Well, thank you for coming tonight. I am going to put on the hat of sort of a professor and historian tonight. I am so used to getting up and saying “take out your Bible,” but that wouldn’t help, since the Catholic priesthood isn’t found anywhere in scripture, so we can’t start there. I want to talk about the scandal of the priesthood, because obviously we are all made very much aware of the tremendous tragedy that is playing out before us in the immorality of the Catholic priesthood. And what I would like to do is to give some historical perspective to that, some sense of the bigger picture of what’s going on in the priesthood. And in order to do that, I have to talk a little bit about the scandal of the priesthood itself. So it’s a bit of a play on words. It’s a bit of a pun, if you will, when I talk about the scandal of the priesthood.
I’m not just talking about the current scandal. I’m talking about the whole scandal of the priesthood itself, as the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic church. Let me give you a little bit of background.
There’s a lot that could be said about Roman Catholic theology. We could expose its errors, which are numerous; we could talk about its sources of revelation or divine truth that are outside the pages of scripture, or we could talk about the corruption of the mass. We could talk about the idea that Mary is the co-redemptrix which, of course, is really a blasphemous concept. We could talk about the idea that God is a tough guy, and if anybody wants grace out of God, it’s only Jesus who could get it from Him; but you can’t expect to go to Jesus because He’s pretty tough himself, so you need to go to Mary, because nobody can resist his mother. And so she’ll talk to Him and he’ll talk to the father, and Mary
will get you what you need, or some saint. We could talk a lot about those things; concepts of purgatory, concepts of the sinlessness of Mary, the virgin birth of Mary, a lot of things about Catholic theology that we could speak about; most notably their erroneous doctrine of justification, which cuts people off from the kingdom of God. But what I want to talk about is the scandal of the priesthood, and give you some sense of what the priesthood really is all about.