Category: Word on Fire

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Bishop Robert Barron

Daniel Berrigan and nonviolence

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, passed away April 30 at the age of 94. Though many younger Catholics might not remember him, Father Berrigan was one of the most provocative and controversial religious figures of his time.

Standing in the tradition of principled non-violence proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and others, Berrigan led the charge against America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict and its on-going participation in the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.

He was most famous, of course, for his leadership of the “Catonsville Nine,” a group of protestors who, in the spring of 1968, broke into a building and burned draft records with homemade napalm. To say that he was, during that tumultuous time in American history, a polarizing figure would be an understatement.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Shakespeare and the fading Catholic world

Last week the world marked the 400th anniversary of the death of the greatest writer in the English language and one of the three or four most significant artists the human race has produced. William Shakespeare simply contains so much.

In the manner of Dante, Homer, Michelangelo, James Joyce, and Aquinas, he seems to encompass the whole: every texture of feeling, every nuance of thought, the tragedy of sin, the most exquisite longings of the soul, the most confounding confusions, heaven, hell, and everything in between.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Why you should read The Great Divorce

In my capacity as regional bishop of the Santa Barbara pastoral region, which covers two entire counties north of Los Angeles, I am obliged to spend a good deal of time in the car.

To make the long trips a bit easier, I have gotten back into the habit of listening to audio books. Just recently, I followed, with rapt attention, a book that I had read many years ago but which I had, I confess, largely forgotten: C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

The inspiration for this theological fantasy is the medieval idea of the refrigerium, the refreshment or vacation from Hell granted to some of the souls abiding there.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Miracles from Heaven and suffering

As any apologist worth his/her salt will tell you, the great objection to the proposition that God exists is the fact of innocent suffering.

If you want a particularly vivid presentation of this complaint, go on YouTube and look up Stephen Fry’s disquisition on why he doesn’t believe in God. (Then right afterward, please, do look at my answer to Fry).

How can God allow suffering?

But the anguished question of an army of non-believers remains: how could an all-loving and all-powerful God possibly allow the horrific suffering endured by those who simply don’t deserve it? Say all you want, these critics hold, about God’s plan and good coming from evil, but the disproportion between evil and the benefits that might flow from it simply rules out the plausibility of religious faith.

The skilled and experienced apologist will also tell you that, in the face of this problem, there is no single, unequivocal “answer,” no clinching argument that will leave the doubter stunned into acquiescence. The best approach is to walk slowly around the issue, in the manner of the phenomenologists, illuminating now this aspect, now that.

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Bishop Robert Barron

First thoughts on Amoris Laetitia

On a spring day about five years ago, when I was rector of Mundelein Seminary, Cardinal Francis George spoke to the assembled student body.

He congratulated those proudly orthodox seminarians for their devotion to the dogmatic and moral truths proposed by the Church, but he also offered some pointed pastoral advice.

He said that it is insufficient simply to drop the truth on people and then smugly walk away. Rather, he insisted, you must accompany those you have instructed, committing yourself to helping them integrate the truth that you have shared.

 

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Bishop Robert Barron

The spiritual legacy of Mother Angelica

Mother Angelica, one of the most significant figures in the post-conciliar Catholic Church in America, has died after a 14-year struggle with the after effects of a stroke.

I can attest that, in “fashionable” Catholic circles during the ’80s and ’90s of the last century, it was almost de rigueur to make fun of Mother Angelica. She was a crude popularizer, an opponent of Vatican II, an arch-conservative, a culture-warrior, etc., etc.

Effective evangelizer

And yet, while her critics have largely faded away, her impact and influence are incontestable. Against all odds and expectations, she created an evangelical vehicle without equal in the history of the Catholic Church.

Starting from, quite literally, a garage in Alabama, EWTN now reaches 230 million homes in over 140 countries around the world. With the possible exception of John Paul II himself, she was the most watched and most effective Catholic evangelizer of the last 50 years.

Read Raymond Arroyo’s splendid biography in order to get the full story of how Rita Rizzo, born and raised in a tough neighborhood in Canton, Ohio, came in time to be a nun, a foundress, and a television personality.

For the purposes of this brief article, I would like simply to draw attention to three areas of particular spiritual importance in the life of Mother Angelica: her trust in God’s providence, her keen sense of the supernatural quality of religion, and her conviction that suffering is of salvific value.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Lessons derived from the Resurrection

The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs, and all the Christian faithful should leave their churches immediately.

As Paul himself put it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” It’s no good, of course, trying to explain the Resurrection away or rationalize it as a myth, a symbol, or an inner subjective experience. None of that does justice to the novelty and sheer strangeness of the Biblical message.

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Bishop Robert Barron

The disorienting quality of real prayer

Editor’s note: Because of its length, this column by Bishop Robert Barron is being published in a two-part series. This is the second part of the series.

Hans Urs von Balthasar observes that the beautiful elects the observer and then sends him on mission to announce what he has seen.

Not many years ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked a number of prominent popular musicians to name the song that first “rocked their world.”

Some of the responses were relatively banal, but the vast majority of them had a Joycean resonance: the respondents knew instinctively the difference between songs (however great) that had merely pleased them and songs that had shaken them out of their complacency and rearranged their vision things.

This kind of aesthetic encounter is the spiritual exercise that Irish Murdoch is speaking of.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Blasting holes through the buffered self

Last week, during the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, I had the enormous privilege of sharing a breakfast with Fr. Robert Spitzer, the inter-galactically smart Jesuit, who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science.

I had just finished Spitzer’s latest book entitled The Soul’s Upward Yearning and delighted in discussing it in some detail with him.

The ‘buffered self’

This text is, in my judgment, the best challenge to what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self,” that is to say, a self isolated from any sense of the transcendent.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Risen and the reality of the Resurrection

When I saw the coming attractions for the new film Risen — which deals with a Roman tribune searching for the body of Jesus after reports of the Resurrection — I thought that it would leave the audience in suspense, intrigued but unsure whether these reports were justified or not.

I was surprised and delighted to discover that the movie is, in fact, robustly Christian and substantially faithful to the Biblical account of what transpired after the death of Jesus.

Scene in the Upper Room

My favorite scene shows tribune Clavius (played by the always convincing Joseph Fiennes) bursting into the Upper Room, intent upon arresting Jesus’ most intimate followers. As he takes in the people in the room, he spies Jesus, at whose crucifixion he had presided and whose face in death he had closely examined.

But was he seeing straight? Was this even possible? He slinks down to the ground, fascinated, incredulous, wondering, anguished.

As I watched the scene unfold, the camera sweeping across the various faces, I was as puzzled as Clavius: was that really Jesus? It must indeed have been like that for the first witnesses of the Risen One, their confusion and disorientation hinted at in the Scriptures themselves: “They worshipped, but some doubted.”

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