Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

One of the hazards of doing a podcast like mine is that I pre-record the episodes.

Usually that's not a big deal, but sometimes I'll record the episode at one point in history,

and then when the episode airs, the national mood shifts a little bit.

Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast. I'm your host, Catholic Answers Apologists and Speaker, Trent Horn.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we talk of apologetics, theology, how to explain and defend our Catholic faith,

and that's what we're going to talk about today.

I thought it was interesting last week on Thursday was the first episode for 2021.

If you couldn't tell in the episode aired on the 7th, which was a day after the events at the US Capitol

and all of the chaos that unfolded there.

And so when you heard the podcast, I'm sure you figured, oh, Trent probably recorded this like a week or two ago

when things were a lot different.

However, those events last week, and it's interesting now, I am pre-recording this episode just a day or two after that.

So by the time it airs, who knows what's going to happen in the future.

But, and I was actually already scheduled to do the interview we're going to do today,

but I think the interview is actually very appropriate because it deals with the subject of authority and illicit authority.

So those events, you know, the unacceptable behavior and riots had happened at the US Capitol.

What do you do? The overarching question is, what do you do when you think the fundamental authority is not really an authority anymore?

When you think it's just completely illicit, bankrupt, what do you do if you have that mindset about your fundamental authority?

So we saw that with people contesting elections and things with the US government.

But today we're going to talk about, set a vacantism, a view that some people hold that the chair of St. Peter is empty, that there is no pope, your Catholic.

But you don't have a pope because you believe the current pope is not really the pope. He has illicit authority.

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