Category: Word on Fire

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Fr. Robert Barron

We’ve been here before

Recently, I had the privilege of spending four hours in the Sistine Chapel with my Word on Fire team. Toward the end of our filming, the director of the Vatican Museums, who had accompanied us throughout the process, asked whether I wanted to see the “room of tears.”

This is the little antechamber, just off of the Sistine Chapel, where the newly-elected pope changes into his white cassock. Understandably, tears flow in that room, once the poor man realizes the weight of his office.

Papal memorabilia

Inside, there were documents and other memorabilia, but what got my attention was a row of albs, chasubles, and copes worn by various popes.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Love, tolerance, and making distinctions

Last time, I wrote a piece on Bruce Jenner’s transformation into Caitlyn Jenner. I argued that the manner in which Jenner spoke of his transition reflected a Gnostic anthropology, which is repugnant to a biblical view of the human being.

I didn’t say a word about Jenner personally; I urged no violence against him/her; I didn’t question his/her motives. I simply made an observation that the moral and spiritual context for transgenderism is, from a classically Christian standpoint, problematic.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Bruce Jenner and St. Irenaeus

Two news items from last week put me in mind of St. Irenaeus and the battle he waged, 19 centuries ago, against the Gnostic heresy.

The first was the emergence of Bruce Jenner as a “woman” named Caitlyn, and the second was a “shadow council” that took place in Rome and apparently called for the victory of a theology of love over John Paul II’s theology of the body.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Experiences in Hospitalland

Recently, I spent six days at a place only about a 10-minute drive from my home, but I had entered a country as “foreign'”to my experience as Botswana or Katmandu.

I had taken up residence in Hospitalland. I was brought in for an emergency appendectomy and had to undergo a second surgery, due to complications.

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Fr. Robert Barron

The Avengers and Nietzsche

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their colleagues in the Inklings wanted to write fiction that would effectively “evangelize the imagination,” accustoming the minds, especially of young people, to the hearing of the Christian Gospel.

Accordingly, Tolkien’s Gandalf is a figure of Jesus the prophet and Lewis’ Aslan is a representation of Christ as both sacrificial victim and victorious king. Happily, the film versions of both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have proven to be wildly popular all over the world.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Cardinal George and Catholicism

Fourth and last in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.

The other principal sign of the exhaustion of the liberal project is its hyper-stress on freedom as self-assertion and self-definition.

In Cardinal Francis George’s words, “The cultural fault line lies in a willingness to sacrifice even the Gospel truth in order to safeguard personal freedom construed as choice.”

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Fr. Robert Barron

Modern Culture and science

Third in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.

The second major feature of modernity that Cardinal Francis George identified is an extreme valorization of the physical sciences, or in his own words, “the imposing of scientific method as the point of contact between human beings and the world and society into which they are born.”

The founders of modernity appreciated the sciences not only for their descriptive and predictive powers, but also for their liberating potential. Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, and many others held that the mastery over nature provided by burgeoning physics, chemistry, medicine, etc., would free the human race from its age-old captivity to sickness and the strictures of time and space.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Thoughts on Cardinal George

Second in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.

The one who would proclaim the Gospel in the contemporary American setting must appreciate that the American culture is sown liberally with semina verbi (seeds of the Word).

The first of these, in Cardinal Francis George’s judgment, is the modern sense of freedom and its accompanying rights.

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Fr. Robert Barron

A lion of the American Church

First in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.

Cardinal Francis George, who died April 17 at the age of 78, was obviously a man of enormous accomplishment and influence.

He was a cardinal of the Roman Church, a past president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the archbishop of one of the largest and most complicated archdioceses in the world, and the intellectual leader of the American Church.

A number of American bishops have told me that when Cardinal George spoke at the bishops’ meetings, the entire room would fall silent and everyone would listen.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Problem of Catholics leaving Church

A survey by William J. Byron and Charles Zech appeared in America magazine. It was conducted at the request of David O’Connell, the bishop of Trenton, and its focus was very simple: it endeavored to discover why Catholics have left the Church.

No one denies that a rather substantive number of Catholics have taken their leave during the past 20 years, and Byron and Zech wanted to find out why. They did so in the most direct way possible: they asked those who had quit.

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