Bishop Barron offered the following intervention at the Vatican during the 2018 Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment.
Jesus’ encounter with two erstwhile disciples on the road to Emmaus provides a beautiful template for the Church’s work of accompaniment across the ages.
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Anyone even vaguely acquainted with my work knows that I advocate vigorous argument on behalf of religious truth. I have long called for a revival in what is classically known as apologetics, the defense of the claims of faith against skeptical opponents. And I have repeatedly weighed in against a dumbed-down Catholicism.
Also, I have, for many years, emphasized the importance of beauty in service of evangelization. The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the Sainte Chapelle, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the Cathedral of Chartres all have an extraordinary convincing power, in many ways surpassing that of formal arguments.
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Second in a two-part series on a Pew Study about why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity. Part one looked at, first, the relationship between religion and science and, second, the dismissive “psychologizing” of beliefs. In this second part, Bishop Barron examines two more reasons young people offered in the study for “walking away from Christianity.” His analysis of the source of the problem, included in part one, is reprinted here in the first two paragraphs.
For the past 50 years or so, Christian thinkers have largely abandoned the art of apologetics and have failed (here I offer a j’accuse to many in the Catholic universities) to resource the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to hold off critics of the faith. I don’t blame the avatars of secularism for actively attempting to debunk Christianity; that’s their job, after all.
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First in a two-part series on a Pew Study about why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity.
After perusing the latest Pew Study on why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity, I confess that I just sighed in exasperation. I don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity of those who responded to the survey, but the reasons they offer for abandoning Christianity are just so uncompelling.
That is to say, any theologian, apologist, or evangelist worth his salt should be able easily to answer them. And this led me (hence the sigh) to the conclusion that “we have met the enemy and it is us.”
