I n the history of American Catholicism, 2018 marks an important, if somewhat underappreciated, milestone. It’s been fifty years since Archbishop Fulton Sheen, arguably one of the best natural preachers the Church in America ever produced, delivered his last live broadcast on U.S. commercial television. Anyone today south of, say, sixty years of age, probably doesn’t have personal memories of watching Sheen in his prime, but for those who do, it’s almost impossible to overstate what he meant.
I grew up in rural Western Kansas in the 1970s and ’80s, a child of the post–Vatican II era in the American Church. I never saw a Sheen show until much later in life, but I remember my grandparents telling me about getting together with neighbors in front of the one small black-and-white TV they had in the early 1950s, on Tuesday nights, to watch Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living on the DuMont Network. Expected to be a flop, it was mostly just the New York–based Sheen standing in front of a blackboard with no notes and no cue cards, talking about the faith. Instead of tanking, it became a massive, runaway hit, even challenging Milton Berle at one point for TV’s most popular show. (Berle once quipped, “If I’m going to be eased off the top by anyone, it’s better that I lose to the One for whom Bishop Sheen is speaking.”)
I remember asking Grandpa and Grandma what they remembered from those broadcasts, and they couldn’t summon many specifics, except to say that “we learned a lot.” What came through with crystal clarity, however, was the pride they felt about Sheen’s success. It’s important to remember that this was all happening at a time when anti-Catholicism was still very much part of the fabric of rural American life—just a decade before, my grandpa had to join a few other Catholic men of the small town where they lived in standing guard as their parish was being built, for fear somebody might try to burn it down. In that context, to see a Catholic bishop holding his own with the country’s most popular stars, even winning an Emmy over Lucille Ball, Arthur Godfrey, Edward R. Murrow, and Jimmy Durante, did more for their Catholic self-esteem than anything else they could ever recall. It told them, “We’ve arrived!”
In a different way, we too live in an era of widespread hostility to belief—if not always to Catholicism specifically, although there’s certainly some of that, then to religious faith in general. American Catholics today generally don’t have to worry about Protestant bigots swooping down with pitchforks and torches to destroy their parishes, but they do have to cope with an elite snobbery that says religion is backward, benighted, superstitious, and dangerous because of the primitive hatreds and prejudices it unleashes. They have to live in a culture that tries to force them, in a thousand ways, to separate their minds from their hearts—telling them that if they insist, for sentimental or psychological reasons, on clinging to a religious faith, it can’t have anything to do with the way they see the world, or with their lives as professionals and as citizens.
That, by a short route, brings us to Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles, born and bred in Chicago, who is to American Catholicism in the early twenty-first century what Sheen was in the mid-twentieth. Barron is the Catholic personality in the English-speaking world today who can stand toe-to-toe with the best and brightest of the secular world, either in person or online, and swell Catholic hearts everywhere by making the faith appear not only plausible but more convincing, more humane, and ultimately more loving than its cultured despisers are. Here’s one clear sign of his success: In the English language, after Pope Francis, Barron is the most-followed Catholic figure on social media.
(For those unfamiliar with the argot, an “auxiliary” bishop is one who is not the head of a diocese but rather assists the bishop in charge. Because Los Angeles’s Catholic population is so sprawling, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has several bishops, five of whom are responsible for different regions. Barron is the Episcopal Vicar for the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region. His status as an auxiliary, however, doesn’t mean he’s any less a bishop, a point we’ll explore in a later chapter.)
Such is Barron’s reputation that when he met Pope Francis for the first time, in 2015, wondering if the pontiff would have any idea who he is, Francis exclaimed: “Ah, the great preacher, who makes the airwaves tremble!” Presumably the pope meant tremble with excitement, not fear, since Barron is nobody’s idea of a fire-and-brimstone televangelist.
To be clear from the outset about the nature of this book, I’m a journalist with a reputation for interviewing senior churchmen on whatever the news of the day may be, from the latest chapter in the Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandals to debate over papal proclamations. While I touch on such matters with Barron, this is a different sort of work, because Robert Barron is a different sort of churchman. He understands that scandals, controversies, and divisions sometimes drive people from the faith, and so he knows he must address them. At the same time, Barron is fundamentally a missionary, driven to change the conversation about the faith—to start not with secondary aspects of Catholicism but with its beating heart, meaning expressions of Catholic art and culture that capture the heart, and a rich Catholic intellectual tradition that fires the mind.
It’s on those fundamentals, therefore, that this book concentrates.
To come back to the comparison between Sheen and Barron, the common term isn’t exactly that both are big-time media personalities, although that’s certainly true. Barron’s ten-part documentary series CATHOLICISM, a tour de force showcase of Catholic belief, art, thought, and culture, aired on virtually every public television station in America beginning in 2011, and has made Barron the most recognizable Catholic priest in the country. That series has had two follow-ups so far, 2013’s CATHOLICISM: The New Evangelization and 2016’s CATHOLICISM: The Pivotal Players .
Nor is it that both Sheen and Barron succeeded in a commercial broadcast arena that’s normally tough terrain for religion, especially clergy talking seriously about the faith. Barron’s Word on Fire program on WGN America is a powerhouse, and like Life Is Worth Living, it has an appeal well beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
In truth, however, Barron’s media profile is quite different from Sheen’s, largely because he lives in a different time. Yes, he’s succeeded in the conventional broadcast and print arenas, but Barron is also nearly ubiquitous in the world of social media—YouTube broadcasts, blogs, podcasts, tweets, Facebook posts, online chats, and on and on.
Moreover, on a personal level, Sheen and Barron represent contrasting personality types. Where Sheen held himself with an almost theatrical degree of pomp, Barron comes off as relaxed, self-deprecating, a sort of intellectual everyman. (Case in point: Despite having studied for years in France, he’s not a foodie, professing to be content with a Whopper.) Where Sheen could be personally thin-skinned, often involved in conflict with ecclesiastical superiors or fellow clergy, Barron is a remarkably nice guy for being so accomplished, and it’s virtually impossible to find anyone with a cross word to say about him personally.
One could go on cataloging differences. For example, Sheen was keenly aware of his standing in Rome, at one stage appealing directly to Pope Pius XII in a dispute with his archbishop, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. Barron, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who is much more likely to recite lines from the latest intellectual tomes by Charles Taylor or Simon Blackburn than from the most recent Vatican decrees, and he’s definitely not the sort of cleric who makes a point of checking the Vatican’s news bulletin each day to see who’s up and who’s down in court politics.
Further, their focus is different. Sheen was keenly political, emerging as one of the most powerful anti-Communist voices of his day. Perhaps his most famous single broadcast came in February 1953, when he paraphrased Shakespeare’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar to suggest that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin would soon have to “meet his maker.” (Stalin died just a week later, adding to Sheen’s legend.)
Barron is hardly apolitical, and he would conventionally be seen as mildly “conservative,” but his primary focus is not on politics, either in America or in the Church; instead it’s on deeper cultural and intellectual currents. Plus, he’s got that rare ability of only a handful of massively successful intellectuals, which is to know what he doesn’t know—one that even Sheen’s best friends will tell you didn’t always come naturally to him.
Barron himself is well aware of the contrast.
“I watch him now, and say to myself, you could never pull that off today,” Barron says. “The way he does it is impossible, because the 1960s happened. That self-conscious theatricality just wouldn’t work.”
Yet there is a real analogy between Sheen and Barron, based on four points.
First, both men flourished in the media world by defying conventional wisdom that you have to dumb stuff down in order to sell it. Both were legitimate, accomplished intellectuals—Sheen earned a doctorate at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, becoming the first American ever to win the Cardinal Mercier Prize for best philosophical treatise, while Barron received his doctorate from the Institut Catholique de Paris, learning to speak fluent French and organizing his thesis around an analysis of Thomas Aquinas and Paul Tillich.
What made Sheen, and what makes Barron, so mesmerizing is that both intuitively understood that when faced with the challenge of trying to get across something complicated, the trick isn’t to avoid the complexity but to find engaging ways to explain it. Do that, both men were convinced, and people will respond. This way of putting it, however, smacks of strategy, which is probably a cart-before-the-horse mistake. Maybe a better way to say it is that both men were passionately in love with ideas, they were convinced that the Catholic Church has some awfully good ones, and they devoted their lives to helping others discover the same passion.
“I lived through dumbed-down Catholicism, so I don’t want that,” Barron says. “I want a smart presentation, but one that also emphasizes the beauty of Catholicism. Smart and beautiful are my two priorities.”
Both Sheen and Barron, moreover, drew on the life of the mind in eras in which it wasn’t taken especially seriously as a mass-market communications enterprise. Sheen was up against Milton Berle and Lucille Ball in prime time. As Barron will explain later in this book, he came of age in the Church in a period when the dominant idea of how to communicate the faith was to start with people’s experience, first and always, and only later try to show how the Christian Gospel might speak to that experience. While he’s a strong believer in making things relevant, Barron is convinced that too often essential content was sacrificed in the process. First, he says, you have to immerse people in this “strange, exotic world” of the Gospel and Catholic culture, and only then will you be in a position to suggest ways that world might illuminate and elevate theirs.
One vintage Barron maneuver is to respond to the atheist critique that religion is anti-intellectual by saying the problem is that atheists drop their questions just when they get truly interesting. They’re great at explaining, say, how human life evolved from lower species, but what about why there’s life at all? Why is there anything at all? At that stage, he says, they generally just shrug, or claim that such queries are fruitless—which, as Barron points out, is essentially an abdication of the intellectual journey.
Second, neither Sheen nor Barron ever divorced his own success from that of the Church, never allowed his own celebrity to become bigger or more central to him than the mission of the Church. Sheen famously put in a brief (and troubled) spell as the Bishop of Rochester, New York, and he also gave sixteen years of his life to heading the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an organization supporting Catholic missions overseas.
Likewise, Barron in 2015 happily accepted his appointment as an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles despite the fact that he knew it would compete for his time with his media ministry. He’s thrown himself into the role of a local shepherd with characteristic zeal. He’s also determined to see the circles that have formed around his Word on Fire programs become a full-fledged ecclesiastical movement, so that its contributions to the Church will survive him. He enjoys the life of a pastor, devoting great care to his homilies, cherishing his time in the confessional, and relishing the time he’s able to spend moving around the Santa Barbara region of the Los Angeles archdiocese getting to know ordinary people and hearing their stories.
Perhaps that’s key to the fascination of both men: When Sheen spoke in his day, and when Barron speaks now, we don’t simply hear a charismatic orator. We hear the voice of the faith, of the Church, of a two-thousand-year tradition reaching back to Jesus Christ and passing through centuries of accumulated human and divine wisdom. In other words, precisely because Sheen and Barron were communications geniuses, they grasped that what they had to communicate is much bigger than themselves.
Third, both Sheen in his time and Barron in his have been enormous boons to American Catholic pride.
For my grandparents, living in a period of crass and relatively unthoughtful nativist bias against Catholics, seeing Sheen become a popular culture phenomenon was extremely reassuring. It told them—and, perhaps, just as important, it told their neighbors—that Catholics could not only punch their weight by the accepted standards of American culture but could match and even exceed the highest of those standards.
For Catholics today, living in a time of intellectual and cultural prejudice against religion generally and Catholicism in particular, the fact that Barron can take the stage alongside the best and brightest of the secular world and match their logic premise for premise, match their command of history chapter by chapter, match their humor and wit bon mot for bon mot, and make the “splendor of the truth,” to use the phrase St. John Paul II employed in a 1993 encyclical, visible even to the most hostile minds, is enormously satisfying. In fact, Barron does much more than that. By the end of his patient exchanges with secular atheists, he usually has unmasked their positions not as the results of precise scientific logic but as simple prejudice—admittedly, prejudice often cloaked under a fabric of argument, but prejudice nonetheless.
I’ve often suspected that the lone difference between the farmers in the 1940s who wanted to tear down my grandparents’ parish with their hands and today’s class of atheist pundits who want to tear down the faith with their minds is that the latter went to college. At his best, Barron puts an exclamation point on that suspicion.
The fact that Barron has delivered such a boost to Catholic pride in the aftermath of the Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandals, which were (and remain) a cancer in terms of both the Church’s moral authority and its public image, is especially remarkable.
“Everywhere I go in the United States, I hear Catholic people say, ‘We’ve got to try to recover a sense of our identity, a sense of our confidence, a sense of our pride in being Catholic,’ ” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York in a testimonial for Barron’s CATHOLICISM series.
“This project does that in spades,” Dolan said, referring to the video series. “In tying together art and culture, history and literature, beauty and truth, which is what the timeless genius of CATHOLICISM is all about, he does it magnificently.”
Noted Catholic author and St. John Paul II biographer George Weigel called the series “the most important media project in the history of the Catholic Church in America.”
That’s not to say, of course, that Barron is without critics. On the left, columnist Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter has criticized Barron for propagating an overly “heroic” model of the priesthood, arguing that it valorizes machismo and often goes hand in hand with what Winters describes as “intransigency regarding doctrine.” On the right, a 2015 interview in which Barron counseled nonviolence in response to the Paris terror attacks led one Catholic blogger to accuse him of promoting “dhimmitude.” (The headline of the piece was “The Incredible Shrinking Bishop Barron.” The reference is to a concept in Islamic law that consigns non-Muslims, such as Christians, to second-class citizenship.)
More basically, some on the Catholic left find Barron too acquiescent to the status quo in the Church, so eager to extol and evangelize that he ends up “going soft” on the need for criticism and reform. On the Catholic right, it’s the potential for another form of “going soft” that sometimes alarms people—that by intentionally leading with beauty in making the pitch for the faith, emphasizing romance over judgment in the first instance, missionaries such as Barron may blur, or take the edge off, the Church’s countercultural message.
As one especially ardent Catholic blogger put it in 2013, “I find this idea of evangelizing through beauty as the first principle to be one of the most dangerous ideas ever uttered in modern Catholicism. It has the potential to turn our faith into the religion of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism.”
Yet in an acrimonious age, in which snark is often the currency of the media realm, nobody ever plays to universal acclaim. For the record, Barron acknowledges often being perceived as a conservative, but insists he’s not “antiliberal” but rather “postliberal” because he sees “something permanently valuable in the liberal move.” He also has no patience for today’s more militant, hard-core conservative Catholics, for whom one distinguishing trait is often hostility to the reforming Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
“There’s no going back behind Vatican II,” Barron says. “To suggest otherwise is just silly, it seems to me. I lived through the implementation of the council, and that was problematic in many ways, and I reacted against it. But there’s no going back, as if Vatican II is a moment we should forget about. I have zero interest in that. I have no nostalgia for the period before the council, and anyway, I didn’t know it experientially. I reverence the Vatican II documents. They represent the best of twentieth-century Catholic scholarship and spirituality.”
Whatever one calls his outlook, Barron’s success would suggest that, for a lot of folks, including many Catholics, he’s put something fairly attractive on offer.
This brings us to the fourth element of the analogy between Sheen and Barron, because while both clearly knew who the enemies of the faith are, and both were expert debaters who could debunk a sloppy argument or mean-spirited accusation, neither man was fundamentally negative. Though they could tear down when the situation called for it, their core desire was to build up—to help people discover the beauty of the Catholic experience, progressively order their lives around it, and then construct the kind of deeply humanistic culture in which such an aroused Catholic conscience naturally flowers.
One of Barron’s maxims is “The sure sign that God is alive in you is joy.”
Whether in his CATHOLICISM series or his YouTube videos or his speeches or his Word on Fire program, at his best Barron comes across as subtly intoxicating—subtle because he’s neither a fire-breather nor a demagogue, and he relies on persuasion rather than intimidation. Intoxicating because he’s so relentlessly positive and persuasive, talking about Catholicism the way rock fans might talk about how Bob Dylan changed their lives (and, in fact, Barron is a huge Dylan fan). His point is that if you’re a music lover, and you find an artist who totally turns your world upside down, you’re naturally going to feel driven to share that with others. That insight is the root of all authentic Christian missionary work, all the more so when you’re dealing not with a cool album but with someone’s human happiness and eternal destiny.
To put it as simply as possible, Bob Barron is a man passionately in love with Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, and he wants you to feel it too—not because you’ll go to Hell if you don’t, but because your life will be richer, more satisfying, and better if you do.
In Catholic parlance, the word for such missionary work is evangelization . In that sense, Barron could perhaps be described as the best English-language evangelizer of the early twenty-first century—not, perhaps, in the sense of the raw number of converts for which he’s responsible, though that tally is considerable, but for his capacity in his time to do what Sheen and other great evangelizers reaching all the way back to St. Paul did in theirs, which is to understand their culture from the inside out. He’s able to convince men and women in all walks of life that Christianity has the answers to the questions they weren’t even necessarily conscious of asking.
One proof of the point is that in early 2017 Barron agreed to be interviewed on a highly popular YouTube program called The Rubin Report, hosted by Dave Rubin, who’s been described as “a thirty-nine-year-old pro-choice, pro-pot, recently gay-married atheist with a strong allergy to organized religion.” After the hour-long show, the avalanche of positive comments on social media about Barron from convinced atheists was positively stunning. Here’s a sampling:
• “I’m a hardcore atheist, but this guy is amazing.”
• “Yeah! I’m only at 7 minutes, and he’s definitely not making me a theist, but I love that [Rubin] chose a priest who seems rather smart.”
• “Robert Barron is my favorite religious intellectual. I’ve been subscribed to him on YouTube for over ten years as a stone-cold atheist.”
• “I’m not atheist…more ummmm, spiritual (though that is a vague term I agree), but I really do enjoy listening to a damn good interview with a damn intelligent and well-read man who can really articulate his belief and faith.”
The bottom line is that Barron walked into the lion’s den of the social media world, and if he didn’t quite convert the lion, he certainly appeared to have tamed it. (By the way, just to illustrate Barron’s penchant for never assuming his audiences can’t handle meaty stuff, two minutes into that video he’s summarizing Aquinas’s third argument for the existence of God, the one from contingency, and wielding phrases such as “a sufficient explanation for the contingent reality of the world.”)
One element of Barron’s appeal to secular critics, I suspect, is that he’s so reasonable, yet so palpably Catholic. The late Pope Paul VI once said that the great rupture of modernity was that between faith and culture, which has been reflected in Catholic intellectual life. The Church has had a host of talented figures fully committed to the life of the mind in the last fifty years, but many found their explorations taking them progressively further away from traditional expressions of the faith. Catholicism has also had many great apologists in the same span, but few who could truly be termed distinguished scholars or thinkers. Barron, by contrast, probably incarnates the classic Catholic synthesis between faith and reason more thoroughly and overtly than virtually any other living figure—or at least one with a Facebook following of 1.5 million, a Twitter following of 100,000, and more than 20 million views on YouTube.
Today Sheen is a candidate for sainthood, having been declared “Venerable” in 2012 after then Pope Benedict XVI approved a decree recognizing that he had lived a life of heroic virtue. His cause seems to be heating up again, after being sidetracked by a nasty public spat involving his family; the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, where he was born; and the Archdiocese of New York, where he achieved fame and where his remains had been interred in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
I have no idea if Barron similarly will one day be considered as a possible saint, but it doesn’t matter. What more than twenty years of covering the Catholic Church tells me right now is that Bishop Robert Barron is among the most compelling, influential, and captivating figures in Catholicism in our time. His story demonstrates that the Church is not consigned to a permanent future of decline and of intellectual retrenchment, but it can remain true to itself and still withstand the best shots secularism wants to take, coming away stronger and more appealing.
This book is the result of roughly twenty hours of interviews with Barron at his residence in Santa Barbara, California, during August and September 2016 and January 2017, coupled with study of his writings, video presentations, and speeches, as well as conversations about Barron with a cross section of people in the Catholic Church. Although I set things up, this is very much Barron’s story, and therefore primarily his book.
Since Barron is also a massive baseball fan, perhaps it’s best to introduce the rest of the story this way: Enough with the pregame chatter…let’s play ball!