word on fire – Page 4 – Madison Catholic Herald Archive (2001-2025)

Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of Cosmos, a television series which recently made its national debut.

The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature about the 16th century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the spot where he was put to death.

In MacFarlane’s cartoon, Bruno is portrayed as a hero of modern science, and Church officials are, without exception, depicted as wild-eyed fanatics and unthinking dogmatists.

What is our fundamental problem?

The first reading for Mass on the first Sunday of Lent this year, taken from Genesis 3, deals with the creation of human beings and their subsequent fall from friendship with God.

Like a baseball coach who compels even his veterans to re-learn the basics of the game every spring, the Church invites us, during the spring training of Lent, to re-visit the spiritual fundamentals. And they are on no clearer display than in this great archetypal story.

‘Priest, prophet, and king’

Editor’s note: This week we begin publishing the column “Word on Fire” by Fr. Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries, which reaches millions of people by utilizing the tools of new media to draw people into or back to the Catholic Faith. Father Barron is the creator and host of Catholicism, a groundbreaking, award winning documentary series about the Catholic faith. The series has aired across the country on PBS and EWTN and has been seen and broadcast in parishes, universities, schools, and media outlets throughout the world. The documentary received a Christopher Award for excellence. Father Barron and Word on Fire also released the documentary Catholicism: The New Evangelization in 2013.

A classic characterization of Jesus is that he is priest, prophet, and king. As priest, he sanctifies, that is to say, he reestablishes the lost link between divinity and humanity; as prophet, he speaks and embodies the divine truth; and as king, he leads us on the right path, giving guidance to the human project.

You might say that, as priest, he is the life; as prophet, he is the truth; and as king he is the way.