Podcast host Joe Rogan tore into The Vatican during a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” claiming that the Holy See was “a country filled with pedophiles and stolen art.”
During Wednesday’s episode, Rogan spoke with “TRIGGERnometry” hosts Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin — and the conversation quickly turned to culture, outrage, and how much of that Rogan believed was not necessarily fair or balanced.
“Even the outrage about things you should be outraged about, like Jeffrey Epstein, that outrage was balanced. Right? Sort of. Right?” Rogan began, noting that the outrage over Epstein was more or less universal.
“But what about the Catholic church?” he asked. “Like why isn’t everybody really freaking out about — I was just in Italy and one of the things that’s nuts is the Vatican is a country. It’s a country filled with pedophiles. It’s a country filled with pedophiles and stolen art. It’s a small, like hundred yard — Like what is it? A hundred acres, I think. Yeah. It’s a hundred acre rather, country inside of a city filled with pedophiles.”
Kisin pushed back, pointing out how lucky Rogan was to be in the United States when he made such statements.
“This is why I love America, man. Cause in the U.K., we have libel laws. So if you say something like that and you then have to be able to prove it, otherwise you can get sued,” he said.
“Well, you can kind of prove that,” Rogan argued.
Foster agreed, pointing out the fact that even into the 21st century, the age of consent was just twelve.
“I mean I read the other day that — I think it was until five, six years ago, the age of consent in the Vatican City was 12 years old,” he said, prompting Rogan to ask producer Jamie Vernon to verify the claim.
“Oh my God. The Vatican city’s equal age of consent being raised from 12 to 18, following the announcement of an overall — the Catholic church criminal code by Pope Francis,” Rogan said once Vernon had found what he was looking for.
The Zanardelli Code, which set the age of consent to 12 years old for Vatican City in 1889, was repealed in 2010 and changed to 18.
Rogan went on to reference several instances in which the Catholic Church was alleged to have known about molestation and instead of punishing the priests responsible, had simply moved them to where they might not be noticed.