Dr. Garrett Dirkmaat (65:42)
No, I haven't seen that movie in 25 years. So if I'm wrong about this, you know, cut me a little bit of grace. But, you know, the whole idea is you have this woman who's trying to hide. And so she goes in and she pretends that she's a nun. And she, of course, is not a nun. And, you know, hilarities ensue, as you might imagine. But there's a point where the, the monsignor, you know, the, the, the priest or bishop of, of the, the place where these nuns live, he is giving a sermon and he, he references Mary Magdalene. He says, mary Magdalene. Again, I, I literally haven't seen the movie in like 25 years. So I. There's no possible way I'm quoting it even kind of close, but he says Mary Magdalene was no stranger to sin. And then comically, you know, for laugh, says, in fact, she was no stranger to just about anybody. And, you know, it's a nice little joke. It's a good way to start a sermon, I guess. But it is following along this claim that Mary Magdalene wasn't Just someone who had been possessed by seven devils, but that she was actually the sinner woman that was apparently a woman of the night that was talked about in Luke. And so when you see that talked about in tradition, it is almost always coming out of Catholic tradition. It's still what's believed in Catholic tradition today because it was a pope that taught it, and that's where it was taught. You know this. If we were to go, I'm not going to read the whole homily because I don't want everyone to convert to Catholicism just yet. But, you know, in part of it, he says, what, my friends do. We think love is if not fire, what is sin if not rust? Hence it is said that many sins are forgiven her because she has loved much. This means she has completely burned away the rust of sin because she is mightily aflame with the fire of love. The more heart of a sinner is consumed by the fire of love, the more fully is the rust of sin consumed. Dearly beloved, I've completed my literal explanation of this story. Now let me give you the mystical interpretation of what has been said. If it seems good, whom does the Pharisee who relies on his spurious righteousness represent but the Jewish people? And whom the sinful woman coming to the Lord's feet and weeping, except the Gentiles who have been converted. She came with an alabaster flask. She poured out the ointment. She stood behind him at his feet. She wet his feet with her tears. She wiped with her hair the feet she had moistened, and she did not cease to kiss the feet that she had wiped. The woman represented us. If we return to the Lord wholeheartedly after we have sinned, if we imitate the distress of her repentance. So, you know, something a little, you know, at least kind of. I mean, I guess it depends on your range of anti Semitism, if you decide whether that's sort of anti Semitic or if it's like really anti Semitic. I mean, in the 600s, you know, at this point, the church had gained the ascendancy over the Mediterranean world. In the early days of the church, some of the biggest opponents to Paul and to other preachers was the various Jewish communities where they were claiming that Jesus was the Messiah. So it is a little late, you know, 591, to still be coming at them that hard. But this is how he interprets this. The Pharisees saw this and was envious because when the Jews saw the Gentiles preaching the God, they were consumed by their own malice. Our Redeemer recounted this woman's actions as if they were the good deeds of the Gentiles so the Jews might be. Might recognize their evil state. The Pharisee was rebuked so that the faithless people might be exposed through him. I entered your house and you gave me no water for my feet. But she has wiped my feet with her tears. Wet my feet with her tears. Water is outside of us, but our tears are within us. The unfaithful people never bestowed the things outside themselves for the Lord's sake. But the Gentiles, when they had been converted, poured out for him not only their possessions, but even their blood. I mean, you can tell that Gregory is a. I mean, well, he's the Pope. I mean, he's the leader of all Christendom. He's sort of a good speaker, right? He. I'm sure if he had a podcast, it would have many, many, many more followers than we do. So he does speak with some beautiful illusions. But in essence, he's making the connection. And the connection is never made before that. All of the connections made after that are made because he's the one who teaches it. But in none of our early Christian fathers, even those who give us commentary on the New Testament, none of them say that Mary Magdalene is the same person who anointed Jesus's feet and, you know, wiped her feet with her hair, was this sinful woman. It's a tradition that comes from Gregory the Great. Now, speaking of popes, I know we've already gone on a little bit long, but if we wait till our next episode, well, there won't be a Pope by the next episode. Some people have wondered, how exactly do we get to where there is a pope? And that'd be a very long episode in and of itself. The interesting aspect of it is in the Christian world, you have these diametric opposites. You have the Catholic Church, and to a lesser extent, lesser impact on us, the Orthodox Church, claiming that when Jesus was on the earth, that Jesus established a church and that that church was headed by the apostles and that there were offices in that church and there was authority in that church and there was a hierarchy in that church. And that, of course, is something that sounds pretty good to a Latter Day Saint, right? A Latter Day Saint's like, go on. Now, what's interesting is Protestants thoroughly reject that idea, and they have to out of necessity, right? If you're claiming that salvation has nothing to do with ordinances, it has nothing to do with baptism, it has nothing to do with whether or not you confess your sins to the priest. It has nothing to do with confirmation. Salvation is purely based on faith alone. If you have faith, then the grace of Christ is applied to you and the grace of Christ saves you. And that's it. So, so they of course, are going to argue that the New Testament doesn't demonstrate an organized church with a hierarchy. Sure, the apostles are who are listened to the same way that we listen to, you know, an amazing preacher or a pastor today. But there's not a structure that's created with authoritative offices and authoritative ordinances. And so you have this division in Christianity where you have one arguing that Jesus gave authority and Jesus created structure, and that structure existed forever even after the apostles were gone. And that authority still held, you know, with the Pope who's, you know, Peter's considered to be the first bishop of Rome. And then, you know, they name their, he names his three successors. That's how you get the next three popes. And that over the course of the next several hundred years, those popes become more powerful. They are intended by God to be the leader of the entire Christian world. And they are, you know, until the Great Schism where the, when the Eastern churches break away and then even more so when the Protestant churches, when the Protestant Reformation takes place in the early 1500s. For the. There, there are, I mean, there's a 2,000 year history of popes, right? So I can't, in what is now the five minutes of overtime in the podcast, go through all of them. But it's not up until, it's really not up until the latter part of the first Christian millennia that they even really set the way that popes are going to be called. And that's because by this latter part, you end up having these various different popes claiming to be pope at the same time. Well, what happens when one person says that they were voted in and they're pope and someone else is voted in and they're also pope? So you now have two people that are in charge of the entire Christian world, except that both of them obviously can't be both the, the pope at the same time. Sometimes these are called in history the anti popes. And in particular the anti pope, Constantine ii, is someone who claimed he was the Pope. Now this is 767 A.D. if you're wondering, you know, how long ago this is. And so they hold a council. And what comes out of that council is it's the first Lateran Council, or first Council of Rome, if you want to call it that what comes out of that is a decision that the only way the pope can be made, the pope, is no longer the way it's been in the past, because the pope before has been, you know, the King of the Lombards says that this guy's pope and I have an army, so guess he's Pope. You want to fight about it. I mean, that's exactly, you know, how that was done in some cases. There were popes that were elected, like, by proclamation of the people. Right. The people of Rome were like, oh, you know, Bill is the Pope. No one was, you know, named Bill, but this person's now the pope. And so what comes out of that is at least the method. Now, they're not always going to follow it, but at least the argument that the method of choosing a pope is going to be through the cardinals of the church. Only the cardinals could be elected pope. So you can't just be anybody and become pope. And there are several hundred cardinals in the Catholic Church, interestingly, the only ones who have the right to vote in the papal conclave. So after the pope dies, they moan the. They moan. They mourn the pope for a series of weeks and then they hold a papal conclave in the Sistine Chapel where these cardinals get together and they vote on who should be the next pope. Interestingly, there's an age limit to which cardinals can vote. You have to be under the age of 80 as a cardinal to have the right to vote. So, like, if you were to juxtapose that against a Latter Day Saint apostleship right now, it's like, well, we got a lot of people that have a pretty big vote coming on the other side of that. But of course, it's not a vote in the Latter Day Saint church, and that's how the pope is selected. And then famously, they put different smoke up the chimney so that you know when the pope is selected. Also, interestingly, you're going to see a lot of this over the next coming several weeks. How could it be otherwise since this is all you ever get anymore? And that is a claim that the death of Francis is heralding the second coming of Jesus. That because Francis died. And this isn't just your random, average, everyday guy with a YouTube channel that's arguing this. It's because there was a early Catholic archbishop in the 1100s named Saint Malachy who had like visions and predictions, and he claimed that you'd get to the end of the popes, that there'd be only 109 popes. And St. Francis was that and so that after that there'd be a couple of years period of, you know, all kinds of anarchy, and then the second coming would be ushered in. So what's funny is you're thinking, no, no one's ever going to bring that up. My son Riker, who's on a mission in Tucson in America, had a member of the church actually bring this up to him about whether or not there was going to even be another Pope, because that would be a fulfillment of prophecy that there were no more popes. And the second coming. It's such a weird thing, I think, to be a Latter Day Saint and to think the way that we're going to know that the end times come is because of a Catholic archbishop in the 1100s, that that's how God decided to tell us. He didn't want to tell us with, I don't know, the prophets who actually hold the keys. He decided to tell us through an obscure Catholic bishop that if we just so happen to know about, then we'll be ready. So, I mean, you can take that for what it's worth, but thank you so much for listening. Sorry, this was a little disjointed. I apologize that maybe people didn't want to know that much about Mary Magdalene, or at least Richard didn't want to talk that much about how much he despises Pope Gregory.
