Hutton Gibson - Beliefs

Beliefs

Gibson is an outspoken critic of the modern post-conciliar Catholic Church and is a proponent of various conspiracy theories. He disseminates his views in a quarterly newsletter called The War is Now! and has self-published three collections of these periodicals: Is the Pope Catholic?, The Enemy is Here!, and The Enemy is Still Here!

Gibson believes that the Second Vatican Council introduced explicitly heretical and forbidden doctrines into the Catholic Church in order to destroy it from within. He also holds that every pope elected since John XXIII, inclusively, has been an anti-pope or illegitimate claimant to the papacy. This doctrine is called "Sedevacantism", from the Latin words Sede ("seat") and vacante ("vacant"), and affirms that the Pope's seat is effectively vacant because those occupying it do not do so legitimately.

Gibson has been especially critical of the late Pope John Paul II, whom he once described as "Garrulous Karolus the Koran Kisser". His allegation that the Pope kissed the Qur'an is corroborated by a FIDES News Service report of June 1, 1999, which quotes the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Raphael I, as having confirmed to the news service that he was personally present when John Paul II kissed the text sacred to Muslims:

Gibson has also used his newsletter to argue against Feeneyism.

At the January 2004 We The People conference, Gibson advocated that the states secede from the Federal government of the United States and that the United States public debt be abolished.

Gibson provoked widespread outrage when remarks questioning how the Nazis could have disposed of six million bodies during the Holocaust were printed in a March 2003 New York Times Magazine article.

In his interview for the article, he dismissed historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated: "Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," he said. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?"

Across the table during the interview, his wife, Joye, who had been quiet for most of the visit, suddenly looked up and "cheerfully piped in 'There weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe,'"

"Anyway, there were more after the war than before," Gibson added.

"The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and 'financiers' to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler 'had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs,' he said".

Gibson was further quoted as saying the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews" and that the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control: "Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. 'Anybody can put out a passenger list,' he said". Gibson publicly questioned the extent of the Holocaust. One week before Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released in American film theaters, he told radio talk show host Steve Feuerstein that the Holocaust was fabricated and "mostly fictional". He said that the Jews had simply emigrated to other countries rather than having been killed, a view which some observers described as Holocaust denial. He claimed that census statistics prove there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before. Gibson said that certain Jews advocate a global religion and one world government. Gibson’s family claimed that Steve Feuerstein misrepresented himself when he called Gibson and never revealed that he was being taped with the intent to broadcast his comments on his show, Speak Your Piece.

In the early 1990s, Gibson and Tom Costello hosted a video called Catholics, Where Has Our Church Gone? which is critical of the changes made to the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council and espouses the Siri Thesis that in 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, the man originally elected pope was not Angelo Roncalli, but another cardinal, "probably Cardinal Siri of Genoa" (a staunch conservative candidate and first papabile). Gibson stated that the white smoke which emanated from a chimney in the Sistine Chapel to announce a new pope's election was done in error; black smoke signifying that the papacy was still vacant was quickly created and the public was not informed of the reason for the initial white smoke. A still photograph of a newspaper story about this event is shown. "Had our church gone up in smoke"? asked Gibson. He stated that the new pope was forced to resign under duress and two days later, the "modernist Roncalli" was elected pope and took the name "John XXIII". In 1962, Roncalli, as Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. In 2006, Hutton Gibson reversed his position on the Siri Thesis, asserting that this theory was based on a mistranslation of an article written on October 27, 1958 by Silvio Negro for the evening edition of the Milan-based Corriere della Sera. A similar event also happened in 1939; in that case a confusing mixture of white and black smoke emanated from the Sistine Chapel chimney. In a note to Vatican Radio, the secretary of the Papal conclave at the time, a monsignor named Santoro said that a new pope, Eugenio Pacelli, had been properly elected regardless of the color of the smoke. Pacelli took the name Pius XII.

Gibson endorsed Ron Paul for President in the 2008 United States Presidential Election. In January 2010, he made an appearance on the far-right-wing radio show, The Political Cesspool, to promote his views. In August 2010, he made another appearance on The Political Cesspool during which he made a widely-discussed allegation that Pope Benedict XVI is "homosexual" and that "half the people in the Vatican are queer". During the same interview, he also claimed that the Pope was a Freemason.