Tag: robert

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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

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

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

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

The Doritos commercial and voluntarism

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the absurd reaction of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) to the lighthearted Super Bowl commercial produced to advertise Doritos.

In the 30-second clip, a pregnant mother, undergoing an ultra-sound, is annoyed by her husband who is absent-mindedly munching Doritos while their baby’s image is displayed on the screen.

But as the father moves the corn chip, the baby in the womb moves with it; and when the mother throws the bag across the room, the child reacts so keenly and purposively that he decides this is the moment to be born.

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison

In spite of our sinfulness, God rescues us

Dear Friends,

By the time that you read this, we’ll likely have jumped right into Lent. It’s one of those years in which the gap between the end of Christmas and the start of Lent is a bit abrupt. Nevertheless, in so many ways, the readings of this past Sunday end up being particularly fitting for a pre-Lenten exhortation — especially in this Year of Mercy!

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Bishop Robert Barron

The Revenant and search for higher justice

Alejandro Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant is one of the most talked about movies, and for good reason.

The opening 20 minutes, which feature a frighteningly realistic Indian attack and a horrifically vivid mauling by a grizzly bear, are absolutely compelling viewing. And the remainder of the film is so involving that this viewer at least felt physically sick as he followed the sufferings of the main character.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Saint of light, saint of darkness

Like so many others around the world, I was overjoyed to hear of the recent decision of the Vatican to canonize Mother Teresa, a woman generally recognized, during her lifetime, to be a “living saint.”

Mother Teresa first came to my attention through Malcolm Muggeridge’s film and attendant book, Something Beautiful for God. Of course. Muggeridge showed Mother’s work with the dying and the poorest of the poor on the streets of Kolkata, but what moved me the most were the images of the saint’s smile amidst so much squalor and suffering. She was a very bright light shining in exceptionally thick darkness.

Demonstrating love

Mother’s life reveals so many aspects and profiles of holiness, but I would like to focus on three of them.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Pope Francis wants you to read Dante

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the birth of the great Catholic poet Dante Alighieri. Michelangelo reverenced Dante, as did Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, and T.S. Eliot. In fact, it was Eliot who commented, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

One of Bob Dylan’s finest songs, “Tangled Up in Blue,” contains a reference to Dante: “She opened up a book of poems, handed it to me/It was written by an Italian poet from the 13th century/And every one of those words rang true and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul.”

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