Bishop Barron: 'Shadow boxing' around moral issues

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Father Robert Barron was a young priest and a professor of systematic theology at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary in the 1990s when he complained wistfully to an older priest that the Catholic Church was not using its spiritual, literary, academic and artistic patrimony – the wisdom, beauty and truth of the ages – to fully engage a microwave culture disaffected and distrustful of all things religion.

It wasn’t exactly a “get off my lawn” comment of exasperation, but his friend called him on it.

“Well, what are you doing about it?” he asked the young priest.

That fraternal shot across the bow a quarter century ago sparked the creation of Father Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, which through its groundbreaking PBS documentary video series “Catholicism” and its Silicon Valley-worthy use of social media has, at the very least, proclaimed a faith, in all its beauty and spiritual and intellectual integrity, previously hidden to millions of those too distracted to have heard it, much less believe it.

Moving the needle of cultural conversation is heavy lifting. Now the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles – he was ordained a bishop in 2015 – Bishop Barron uses any available platform to engage the culture. He will be in New Orleans on Monday, Oct. 4, to deliver the homily at the annual Red Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, marking the opening of the judicial year.

Bishop Barron probably could think of a few easier audiences than a cathedral full of judges and lawyers, but for someone who addressed members of Congress in 2019 about the “vocation” of pursuing justice, it is yet another chance to enrich the conversation about the search for truth.

“I’m delighted to have the opportunity,” Bishop Barron said last week from his office in Santa Barbara, California. “I preached at a Red Mass in Honolulu a couple of years ago, and I very much enjoyed that. This is a very important segment of the culture. It’s a place where we can evangelize the culture.”

Bishop Barron has a social media audience that might be the envy (well, that’s someone else’s problem) of the latest thing on TikTok. He has: 3.1 million followers on Facebook;  449,000 on YouTube; 338,000 on Instagram; and 181,000 on Twitter.

That kind of platform gives him cross-cultural gravitas.

In discussing the basis of just laws, he points to St. Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of the law in the Middle Ages.

“Thomas would say every positive law – you might say those are laws written in stone, the laws that govern a society – have to be grounded in the natural law,” Bishop Barron said. “The natural law is what (the prophet) Jeremiah would be talking about – the law written in your heart. There are great principles of the moral life that we would hold in the human heart.

“And then Thomas goes on to say the natural law is grounded in the eternal law, which is the same as the mind of God. So, what makes a positive law just is a relationship to the moral law and, finally, to God. That’s how the church would get at this issue of law having its own integrity, and lawyers and judges having their own proper realm of activity. Nevertheless, all they do is ordered finally to the moral and to the spiritual.”

When Bishop Barron addressed members of Congress, staff and others at the Library of Congress two years ago, he urged lawmakers to rediscover their call by God to pursue justice. He even mentioned that a lawmaker’s decision to become a public servant was a “vocation” because at some life-changing moment they were seized by a passion for justice.

“For members of this (legal) community, it was when they were fired by a sense of justice – that they wanted to do what was right, they wanted to be just and make a more just society,” Bishop Barron said. “My point is, if you press on that question and keep probing, you’re going to come finally to God because God is, we would say, justice itself. So, you’ve been seized and ordered by God when you realize your life is all about doing the works of justice. I would indeed see all they do as a vocation that comes ultimately from God and is ordered to God.”

Incivility is cost of encounter
Bishop Barron’s social celebrity is such that when he does express an opinion grounded in the Catholic tradition, he naturally opens himself up to social media trolls of all stripes – even from those within a divided church itself.

He is a big boy, but the avalanche of vicious attacks in the public sphere, fueled by the cloaked comfort of anonymity, can be wearisome.

“It’s very difficult because we’ve lost the capacity to have real argument,” Bishop Barron said. “I’ve been on that theme for several years. I mean that almost literally – we’ve forgotten the principles that should undergird a civil argument, an argument in the public space about moral issues. We tend to see them as private convictions of this camp and then private convictions of another camp, and all we can do is hurl invective at each other.

“But if we believe in argument – if we believe in something like a public truth, that we access it through certain logical means – on that basis we can really have a conversation and a public argument. I’m calling for a return to argument, which is midway between violence on the one hand and a sort of bland toleration on the other hand. I think both are bad things. Real engagement, real argument – let’s say around an issue like abortion in our culture – I think it’s possible. But we’ve largely forgotten how to do it.”

A moral framework
That loss of reasoned argument, he believes, is the result of not sharing “a common moral framework.”

“For example, within a Catholic moral framework, there is something like the idea of an intrinsically evil act,” Bishop Barron said. “So whenever someone is advocating for abortion, invariably they will argue in a consequentialist way that, well, under certain terms, that you should allow it because good things will happen or a mother’s life will be enhanced.

“But Catholic moral philosophy would repudiate that kind of moral reasoning. We talk about certain acts being intrinsically evil. Why? Because they go against the very nature of what it means to be human. That’s another point where we don’t have a common frame of reference. Our culture ‘hyper-privileges’ freedom, freedom of self-expression. Classical, moral philosophy would not hyper-stress freedom that way. So, if there’s some breakdown of a shared moral framework, that makes real argument difficult.

“It’s like there’s not even a single ring into which both boxers can get. We’re both shadow-boxing, in a way, in our own little realms.”

There is hope
Despite the times when he feels as though he is advancing arguments in the middle of an inferno, what has given him hope over the last 20 years is “the very fact that people are still interested in religious and moral matters.”

“Even those shouting at me online, even those who are disagreeing, nevertheless are coming in great numbers – and they come to listen,” Bishop Barron said. “I’ve used the image of Herod listening to John the Baptist. Even though he imprisoned John the Baptist, Herod still loved to listen to him preach. I think there are a lot of people today who are like that. Even as they’re kind of programmed not to be religious or disagree with these arguments, they listen, they come online and they engage. I think that’s a sign of hope.”

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Details on Red Mass, Monday, Oct. 4, at St. Louis Cathedral

Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert E. Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and host of the “Catholicism” documentary on PBS, will deliver the homily at the annual Red Mass marking the beginning of the judicial year Oct. 4 at 9:30 a.m. at St. Louis Cathedral.

Archbishop Gregory Aymond will be the principal celebrant of the Red Mass, sponsored each year by the St. Thomas More Catholic Lawyers Association. Judges, lawyers and others involved in the legal profession, no matter their respective faith traditions, are invited to attend.

Participants will assemble at 9 a.m. for the procession, which will begin at 9:15 a.m. A reception will follow at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel.

The Mass will be broadcast live on WLAE-TV Channel 32 and simulcast at TheDailyMass.com.

Bishop Barron has served since 2015 as the episcopal vicar of the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region, one of five regions that comprise the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He received a master’s degree in philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 1982 and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1992.

Shortly after his ordination in 1986 as a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, he served as associate pastor at St. Paul of the Cross Parish in Park Ridge, Illinois, and later was appointed to the theological faculty of Mundelein Seminary, where he served as president-rector from 2012-15.

Bishop Barron is a No. 1 Amazon bestselling author and has published numerous books, essays and articles on theology and the spiritual life.

Bishop Barron’s website, WordOnFire.org, reaches millions of people each year. He is one of the world’s most followed Catholics on social media. His regular YouTube videos have been viewed more than 50 million times, and he has over 3 million followers on Facebook.

Bishop Barron’s most recent project is the Word on Fire Institute, a new hub for spiritual and intellectual formation, training members of the Word on Fire movement to proclaim Christ in the culture.