I magine you’re back in grade school, your best friend lives about a mile away, and for some reason the phones are down. Now imagine that somehow you learn, maybe from your older brother or sister, that some big kids are planning to beat your best friend up if he takes a certain path to school that morning. Do you drop whatever you’re doing and run over to your friend’s house to warn him? If you’re any kind of friend, the answer is probably yes.
In very simplistic fashion, that was often the sort of motivation underlying much Catholic missionary work over the centuries. Famously, generations of Catholics grew up being urged to pray for the “pagan babies,” premised on the belief that if those babies didn’t grow up to come to faith in Jesus Christ and baptism in the Catholic Church, their eternal salvation was at risk. What drove many missionaries, in other words, was the firm conviction that they needed to save people from such a fate.
Now, imagine you’re back in grade school again, and this morning instead of your older brother telling you that your best friend is in danger, he shares with you a new rock-and-roll album he just picked up. You’re blown away, it opens up a whole new world for you, and you’re absolutely convinced your best friend should hear it too, because it might have the same effect on him. Once again, do you go running to your friend’s house to catch him before school, in order to share this amazing new discovery? Once again, most real best friends probably would.
That, in a nutshell, is the Bishop Robert Barron approach to missionary work. He wants to draw you into Catholic faith and practice, not because he thinks you’ll be punished if you don’t become a part of the Church but because he thinks it’s so amazing, so rich, so powerful—in three key words—so beautiful, good, and true—that your life will be infinitely better because of it.
Consider where Barron decided to film his landmark CATHOLICISM series:
• The Holy Land of Israel, including Nazareth
• Rome, including the Sistine Chapel
• Poland
• Germany
• Spain
• Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India
• New York City
• Ephesus, Greece
• Lourdes, France
• Guadalupe, Mexico
• São Paulo, Brazil
• Manila, Philippines
• Uganda
• Orvieto, Italy
• Florence, Italy
• Ireland
Barron didn’t select those locations just because they help illustrate core principles of the faith, though they do. He picked them because of the drama, the pageantry, and the iconic power each setting wields. In other words, he went to those locales not only because they capture truth and goodness but because they’re beautiful.
In Christian tradition, beauty, goodness, and truth are known as “transcendentals,” linked to the three core human abilities to feel, to wish, and to think. Jesus refers to them in the Great Commandment when he talks about the mind, the soul, and the heart, and inducements to take the wrong path with each of the transcendentals formed the core of his temptation scene in the Gospels. While Barron is convinced that Catholic Christianity represents the fullness of all three, he’s equally convinced that the right way to open up the Catholic world to someone is with its beauty.
In a 2015 essay for a book on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, subtitled The Legacy of America’s Parish Church, Barron unpacks the idea, after noting that many people today find talk about “truth” off-putting, seeing it as a way of imposing one’s values or opinions on others.
There’s something more winsome and less threatening about the beautiful. “Just look,” the evangelist might say, “at Chartres Cathedral or the Sainte Chapelle, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or the mosaics at Ravenna.” “Just read,” he might urge, “Dante’s Divine Comedy or one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems, or Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. ” “Just watch,” he might suggest, “Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity at work among the poorest of the poor.” The wager is that the encounter with the beautiful will naturally lead someone to ask, “What made such a thing possible?” At that point, the canny evangelizer will begin to speak of the moral behaviors and intellectual convictions that find expression in the beautiful. If I might suggest a simple metaphor, when teaching a young person the game of baseball, a good coach begins, not with the rules or with tiresome drills, but rather with the beauty of the game, with its sounds and smells and the graceful movements of its star players.
We’ll come back to that baseball analogy in a moment. For now, however, we might express the essence of the point this way: Barron is wholeheartedly convinced that Catholicism is true and good, but he’s equally convinced that, at its best, it’s also gorgeous, fun, fulfilling, life-affirming—and that if you can break through the cultural noise to get people to see all that, they’ll respond.
Several of the defining passions of Barron’s life came together early. As we’ve seen, he was a teenager when he discovered his “two Thomases,” Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Merton, who remain lodestars of his faith today. His childhood was also when two other powerful forces captured his heart and mind—the game of baseball, and rock and roll, perhaps especially the music and poetry of Bob Dylan. It’s instructive to see how Barron speaks about both, because it’s clear there’s a nexus uniting all three that has something to do with the attractive power of beauty.
In baseball, as we’ve mentioned, Barron is a die-hard Cubs fan, despite his recent relocation to Los Angeles. (He did actually throw out the first pitch at a Dodgers game on “Catholic Night,” however, so he’s not quite fanatical in his loyalties.) He played the game himself from Little League through high school, generally at the shortstop position, and he wasn’t bad, several times making all-star teams. He was playing other sports too, including basketball and football, but it was clear that America’s Game had a special pride of place in his heart.
Barron always emphasizes that it was the love of the game that came first, well before he mastered its fine points. It was the smell of the grass, the “crack” that a cleanly hit ball makes when it leaves the bat, the “smack” of a well-fielded ball entering the glove, the infield ballet required to produce a ground ball out, the combination of speed and cunning and power good teams have—just the poetry in motion of it all. The passion he felt for the game, and his drive to share it, he says, was in some ways his first taste of what it means to evangelize.
“I’m an evangelist for baseball. You love something, and you want to share it. Something beautiful has seized you, and you think baseball is terrific, and you want to let people know why. If someone says to you, ‘I hate baseball; it’s boring,’ you want to grab them by the lapels and say, ‘Let me tell you why it’s not boring. Let me explain it to you.’ And you can do that in a way that’s not browbeating.”
Only when you’ve had that experience of falling in love with something, Barron believes, will learning the rules that support it make sense. Otherwise, “rule-talk” is always going to seem like someone trying to control another, like an exercise in power rather than liberation to play the game well.
“My analogy is the infield fly rule,” Barron says. “It’s a good rule, and I love it. I remember distinctly when I learned it in Little League, but there’s no way I would have been drawn into the splendor of the game through that rule. To compare it to the life of faith, if you’ve got someone who wants to know what Catholicism is and who Jesus Christ is, you’d never start with the Pauline privilege!”
(Note: The infield fly rule states that a fair fly ball in the infield, which in the judgment of the umpire could be caught with ordinary effort, is an automatic out, in order to prevent dropping the ball on purpose and catching runners off base. The Pauline privilege is an aspect of Catholic marriage law which states that when two nonbaptized persons are married, the marriage can be dissolved if one partner converts to Christianity and the other leaves the marriage.)
Barron recalls his early baseball coaches as in the sense he’s describing, natural-born evangelists.
When I was learning baseball, I had these good coaches. They were young, probably in their twenties, but seemed ancient to us. One of them says, “I want you to get down on your knees, and I want you to feel the infield.” What he was doing, I understand now. When you’re trying to field the ball, you get kind of skittish. If you’re really uncomfortable with the grass and the dirt and all, you’ve got to get over it, because you have to be comfortable moving in to get the ball. He was literally having us feel the infield. Then they had us watch filmstrips of baseball players to notice the various positions of the bat, where your hips should be in relation to the swing, how high your elbow should be, et cetera. Then, of course, they got us playing. And we played terribly, we were throwing wildly and striking out, but having a blast. It would never have occurred to them to say at this stage, “Let me clarify first the infield fly rule.” I think what happened in my experience growing up is something like that. In the Church, we started with the infield fly rule. People looking at it would have said, “Catholicism…I guess it’s all about rules, especially sexual ethics. It’s about getting your sexual life in order.” I became convinced, and am still convinced, that a huge swath of Catholics do not know the fundamentals of Christianity. They don’t know the beauty of the game. They don’t know what the infield feels like. They don’t know the texture of it. I want them to feel Catholicism, to know the essential stuff. Furthermore, we won’t get the sexual teaching right until we get the essentials right. It will just seem like arbitrary rules being imposed on you, which is how it feels to a lot of people.
In many ways, filling that gap, and in so doing, restoring the proper sequence between falling in love and then learning the rules, has become the idée fixe of Barron’s life and career. Today, he says, his favorite sports parallel comes not from baseball, which he can’t play anymore, but from golf.
“Golf is a baseball swing on the ground,” he says with a laugh. “Notice how golf people are obsessed with rules. We love them. Once you get a few rules and know how this thing works, we love it, reading Golf Digest and so on. There’s solace in the rules. We understand what the Psalmist was talking about: ‘Lord, how I love your law! I meditate on it day and night!’
“Rules are not the enemy of golf,” Barron says. “Rules are what make it possible, and what free you to be a good golfer. That’s the right way to approach the rules of Catholicism too, but the trouble is we have this rule book and people bicker about prohibitions all the time, especially in regard to sex. Many wonder, Who needs it? I think that’s the reaction of a lot of people my generation and younger. Who needs all that?”
Around the same time Barron was developing his appreciation for the proper place of rules in evangelizing through baseball, another equally strong passion began to flourish. He discovered the music of Bob Dylan, and to hear Barron tell it, nothing would ever be quite the same again. (To this day, he’s got a picture of Dylan he once drew in his residence, along with Merton, Aquinas, and a beloved fellow Chicago priest.)
I discovered Bob Dylan right around the same time I discovered Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Merton. Remember the Concert for Bangladesh album that came out in the early seventies? I’m twelve years old, and I was just discovering rock and roll. That’s when I was listening to the Beatles, and that was the connection. My brother gets Concert for Bangladesh. I was listening to it on the record player, the vinyl. I’m listening to George Harrison’s music, and then my brother turned over the record and I hear Harrison say, “I want to bring on a friend of us all, Mr. Bob Dylan.” I’d never heard of him, but the crowd went berserk. Here’s this really peculiar voice, but I was just old enough and had enough experience in school to get poetry and language, and so I’m listening, and he sings the first song I ever heard by him, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” He does “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Just Like a Woman,” his biggest songs. I was particularly blown away by “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” The language, the voice, and the people responding to it…that was it. I’m kind of an obsessive guy, so with Aquinas and Merton I went all the way, and with Dylan I started going all the way.
According to Barron, it’s not just the poetry of the lyrics or the quirkiness of the voice that drew him to Dylan but also the strong religious sensibility the singer exudes.
Do you remember at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when Springsteen inducts Bob Dylan and says the snare drum that opens up “Like a Rolling Stone” is like kicking open the door to your mind, and this whole world opens up? This is cliché to say, but the Old Testament prophet is the right rubric for Bob Dylan. He’s Biblical. He’s a lot of things, of course, but above all, from beginning to end, he’s Biblical. He’s the one, perhaps more than anyone else in pop music, who brings the Biblical worldview into our time. Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie, Elvis, and others influenced him, but it’s the Biblical take which drives his interest in sin, judgment, eternal life, and God. One of his later songs, called “I’m Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door,” has stayed with me. Often when I’m in prayer in my chapel I’ll look up at the tabernacle and say, “I’m just trying to get to Heaven before they close the door.” When it gets down to it, that’s all I want. I’m just trying to get to Heaven before they close the door.
Once again, Barron says he was seized with such a strong passion for Dylan that he felt compelled to share it, instinctively leading him down a path that he would today recognize as a kind of evangelization.
It’s sharing something that I find so compelling and life-giving. I became a Bob Dylan evangelist immediately. I remember saying as a little kid, “Have you ever heard of Bob Dylan? He has a crazy voice, but it’s actually great once you get it. You’ve got to listen to this song.” I’ve had people all my life ask me, “Bob Dylan? Why? He’s terrible!” But from the time I was fifteen, I’ve been a Dylan evangelist, and I don’t think I’ve ever been offensive about it. I think people see a guy who really loves Bob Dylan, and is articulate about him, and can tell you why he likes him. He can introduce him to you. Balthasar says anything beautiful first arrests you—you’re stopped in your tracks by it. Then, Balthasar says, the beautiful elects you. You’ve been chosen. Not everyone who hears Dylan becomes a fan, but I got elected. Finally, he says, the beautiful always sends you. You’re sent on a mission.
Another point Barron absorbed from his love for Dylan, he says, is not to be bashful about asserting the superiority of your passion over other possible choices. Today, he thinks, there’s sometimes too much skittishness about missionary activity for fear that it may seem to treat Catholicism as better, truer, than other faiths—but he insists, if you’re truly convinced of that, why wouldn’t you want to share it?
“Do I think Bob Dylan is superior to the vast majority of singers and songwriters? Yes! Absolutely! And I can demonstrate it if you want. I’ll sit down and show you,” he says. “I’m convinced of it, and frankly, I want you to be convinced of it too. I think it’d be great if you listened to him too, because he’s wonderful, and I think he is better than the other ones. But I don’t think that’s offensive to people. It’s the enthusiasm of the missionary.
“So, do I think Catholicism is the fullest way to live the way of Jesus Christ? Yes. Do I think Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God, and the Way and the Truth and the Life? Yes, I do. I’m not apologizing for it, and I’m so on fire about it I want you to know it too.”
From baseball and Bob Dylan, therefore, Barron took a strong core belief that the right way to expose people to a new idea, a new way of life, is to start with what makes it beautiful, relentlessly help them see and feel that beauty, and only then introduce them to the structures and rules that make such a way of life possible.
Beauty, in other words, is the key to it all.
Naturally, a mind as voracious and given to reflection as Barron’s isn’t content to rest its case for beauty simply on the examples of baseball and Bob Dylan, even if those early tastes of enchantment helped launch him down this path. He also grounds the argument in early Church Fathers, such as Origen, and in several leading Catholic thinkers of other eras.
An obvious point of reference is the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who as we learned in Chapter 1, has long been a touchstone for Barron’s own thought. Balthasar’s famed multivolume work on theological aesthetics, which rolled out over two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, features this line, which resonates deeply with Barron’s approach: “Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—the whole person quivers. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it.”
“The beautiful leads to the good and the true,” Barron says. “But I think strategically, and I got it from Balthasar, it’s better to start with the beautiful in our postmodern society. That’s not cowardice. It’s a strategic thing.”
Another passage from Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, intended to drive home what he saw as the inseparable bond uniting beauty, truth, and goodness, captures much of both Barron’s thinking and his operational style.
Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
Barron also cites Cardinal John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English convert to Catholicism, and his famed Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, in which he referred to something called the illative sense. “It is a grand word for a common thing,” Newman conceded. In essence, it means the natural capacity of all people to sense when they’re in the presence of something remarkable, inspiring, ennobling—in a word, something beautiful.
Here’s how Andrew M. Greenwell describes the idea:
The illative sense is what allows us to take our concrete human experiences—whether they be of nature’s beauty, of the demands of conscience (the feeling of guilt, the pangs of remorse, the search for forgiveness), of the sense of the contingency of life, of the peaceful joy elicited by the shallow breathing of your sleeping child beside you in bed, of the honor given to a soldier who sacrificed his life for his fellows, of the haunting beauty of the second movement of Schubert’s “ ‘Piano Sonata in A major,” of the pathos of G. M. Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall,” of indeed any created good or beautiful thing—and come to the conclusion that there must be a transcendent reality behind it all, ultimately, He whom we call or know as God.
In other words, the illative sense isn’t about ars gratia artis, the celebrated MGM motto that means “art for the sake of art.” It’s rather a recognition that the encounter with something beautiful, something so obviously transcendent and powerful, often leads people to wonder how such a thing is possible, what might have fostered it or inspired it, and from there an openness to the divine and to religious thought is often born.
“Leading with beauty has always been important for me,” Barron says. “I’ll bring Newman into this. He would ask, ‘Why does a person assent to something?’ Argument, he felt, was only a small part of it, what he called formal inference. The illative sense is what assesses a variety of experiences, hunches, intuitions, and thoughts together. I always loved that in Newman.”
Predictably, for someone who spends a lot of his time on YouTube trying to reach unchurched youth, Barron appeals to a contemporary movie to make the point.
Take the abortion debate. Both sides are talking like mad, arguing endlessly. But the movie Juno offers an instructive approach. The main character goes to a clinic for an abortion. She meets a protester, who happens to be one of her high school classmates, and the young woman says, “Your baby has fingernails!” The next scene shows people in the waiting room of the clinic drumming their fingernails, examining their fingernails, cleaning their fingernails—and then Juno decides not to have the abortion and she abruptly leaves. That’s the Newman thing, yes, there are arguments you could make, but it was this kid saying “Your baby has fingernails” that led her to assent to the proposition not to have an abortion. There’s something similar in Catholicism. We have this Grandma’s attic, this grab bag of liturgy, song, saints, prayers, processions, public displays, arguments, and so on, and we’ve got to be flexible and creative enough to use all of it.
Barron says that during the course of his own life, it’s often been those moments of preconscious appreciation of something beautiful that have left the deepest spiritual and personal impression on him.
“It’s [Paris Cardinal Jean-Marie] Lustiger walking into Notre Dame Cathedral, or it’s Paul Claudel, in the same spot where I stood in 1989, looking up at the north rose windows [of the cathedral] and saying, ‘That’s it, that’s it. I believe.’ I get that, I totally do.”
At a theological level, and in keeping with his penchant for both/and thinking, Barron insists that the Church must always hold two teachings about itself in tension. On the one hand, the Church is the spotless Bride of Christ, a thing of great beauty and purity. On the other hand, it is also an earthen vessel, composed of flawed and fragile human beings. “As a Catholic, I hyperinsist upon the idea of the Church as the Mystical Body,” he says, “which means the body is essential. It’s not like a vague purse that carries [the faith] around. But then the other side of the Pauline image is that there is a distinction between the treasure and the fragile vessel that carries it, so that’s the theological point you have to insist upon. The Church in its beauty and integrity, in its sacraments and its teaching, remains the spotless Bride of Christ, yet it’s also this fractured, fragile vessel. That’s the kind of theological clarification I’m trying to get across with people.”
In other words, Barron’s emphasis on beauty does not mean, as he understands, ignoring or refusing to confront the ugliness, the sin, corruption, and hypocrisy, that can also be part of the Catholic life.
“In the CATHOLICISM series, there is this intense little scene where I’m in a darkened church and I talk about the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch hunts and everything else. ‘Was this a terrible moment?’ I ask, and I keep saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Then I say, ‘Even today there’s the sex abuse scandal. Were some priests and bishops horrifically derelict in their responsibilities?’ I say, ‘Yes,’ and we kind of let it echo in the church.”
Barron’s conviction, however, is that in today’s cultural vortex, the ugliness is often easier to see, and so the task of the evangelist is to lift up the beauty so that it’s clear why intelligent, well-meaning people would put up with the ugliness, even give their lives to trying to eliminate it, in service of something much greater and more compelling.
One striking thing about Barron is that he has a fairly expansive notion of what “beauty” encompasses. When pressed for examples of beauty in Catholic life, he’ll refer to stock cases in point, such as the soaring architecture of Gothic cathedrals, the haunting melodies of religiously inspired music, great works of art by masters such as Caravaggio, and gripping works of literature such as Dante’s Divine Comedy . Yet in the same breath, he’ll also invoke, say, the grace of Rory McIlroy’s golf swing. He even points to the selfless service to the poor offered by Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity sisters—despite the fact that those missions routinely bring the sisters face-to-face with the most appalling, most repugnant, ugliest situations in which human beings can live and die.
Here, then, are four examples of what Barron has in mind when he talks about the beauty of Catholicism; they are all part of his basic evangelical strategy for where one should begin in presenting the faith to the world: “First the beautiful, then the good, then the true.”
First published in 1945, the classic novel Brideshead Revisited by English writer Evelyn Waugh charts the life and romances of the book’s protagonist, Charles Ryder, who’s introduced as a sort of breezy agnostic, through the England of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Brideshead refers to a large manor house and estate owned by an English Catholic family, and it functions in the novel as a sort of metaphor for the Catholic Church writ large.
To Barron’s way of thinking, Brideshead Revisited is a compelling example of the power of great Catholic literature to capture the deep movements of the soul that lead to faith.
Brideshead begins with the beautiful. We have the narrator, Charles Ryder, who’s like many people today. He’s a secularist, an agnostic. He’s first intrigued by the beauty of his friend Sebastian, who then brings him to this gloriously beautiful place, Brideshead. He’s a painter, so his artist eyes are engaged and he goes through the house and it’s the beauty of it that draws him in. Then, the book unfolds as the story of how the beautiful leads him to the good and to the true. The moral demand of the house eventually becomes clear to him. At the very end, the truth claim of the house becomes clear, and he becomes fully engaged. Christ is the head of his bride the Church, and thus Brideshead is an icon of the Catholic Church. Often, what draws you is the beauty of it all.
Here’s how Barron explained the same point in a 2013 column on the novel:
In the course of his many visits, Charles came, of course, to know the inhabitants of the house, Sebastian’s strange and beguiling family. Especially through Sebastian’s mother, the aristocratic and devoutly Catholic Lady Marchmain, he became familiar with the moral demands of the Catholic Church, especially as they pertained to Sebastian’s increasing problem with alcohol. For many years, Charles joined Sebastian in his friend’s rebellion against these strictures, but in time, he came to appreciate their importance, indeed their indispensability. Finally, at the very close of the story, we learn that Charles, the erstwhile agnostic, had come to embrace the coherent philosophical system of Catholicism and to worship the Eucharistic Lord, who was enshrined in the beautiful chapel at Brideshead. Many years after entering that chapel as a mere aesthete, he knelt down in it as a believer.
As a footnote, Barron’s zeal for Brideshead Revisited led to the only indirect contact he ever had with Christopher Hitchens, whose aggressive “evangelization” on behalf of atheism and against religious faith made him an obvious point of reference throughout Barron’s career. In 2002, Barron says, he published a book called The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path, which included a section on Waugh and the novel. Hitchens, he says, apparently read the book and talked about it in an article, agreeing with some things and disagreeing with others, but obviously feeling that Barron’s treatment of Brideshead was important enough that he needed to engage it. (We’ll deal with Barron’s thinking on Hitchens, and what Christian evangelists might be able to learn from him, in Chapter 5.)
Rounding out Barron’s personal list of all-time great Catholic books, by the way, are The Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos; Divine Comedy, by Dante; and The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (Of course, Dostoyevsky came from the Orthodox tradition, not Catholicism, but Barron says there’s enough shared sensibility to make the Russian writer’s great works imminently “Catholic.”)
When Barron was living and studying in Paris, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, his residence was just a fifteen-minute walk from the historic Cathedral of Notre Dame, and he eventually found himself giving tours to visiting pilgrims every Wednesday. The experience, he says, led him to a lifelong love affair with the great cathedrals of the world, which have often been dubbed a sort of “Summa Theologica in stone,” meaning an artistic and architectural expression of the whole Catholic faith.
“That turned out to be really influential in my life,” Barron says. “It started me on this whole medieval passion, with the cathedrals and the rose windows and all these things that I’ve used extensively in my theological and evangelical work.” Barron says he’s always been moved by the stories of people who came to their faith through being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the cathedrals—people such as the great French Catholic poet Paul Claudel and Cardinal Lustiger of Paris.
Notre Dame and Chartres are meant to disorient you. In fact, when you come in you’re always in the darkest part of the building on purpose, so you come out of the bright light into the dark so you’re disoriented, kind of lost, and then your eyes gradually adjust and it gets brighter as you go to the front. That’s on purpose, it’s an initiation process. When you pass through a portal in a different dimension of experience—and I know I’m sounding like Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone here—it’s meant to awaken a higher consciousness.
Barron calls Chartres—formally, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres, widely seen as the apex of French Gothic design and mostly constructed between 1194 and 1220—“my favorite place in the world.” He elaborates:
I used to go there whenever I could. I went one weekend, Friday through Sunday, and I stayed at a little hotel, and my purpose was to look at everything in the cathedral. What happened to me, and this is very von Balthasar too, is that my Old Testament imagination was awakened. You walk around Chartres outside, and it’s dominated by the Old Testament. It’s the prophets, the patriarchs, the stories of the Old Testament. Then you realize the Patristic world that all this came out of. You don’t get Jesus apart from Israel, and Chartres brings that home in a compelling, beautiful way.
Barron believes places such as Chartres pack such a spiritual punch precisely because they lift us out of the ordinary, out of our usual expectations of physical space, and put us in a place where we’re “uncomfortable.”
“Chartres always has that impact on me, like a ship,” he says. “It’s like you’re riding a battleship or a starship or something, when you climb up on one of the towers. But the boat image, of course, is on purpose. It’s a Noah’s Ark, it’s a place of haven; you’ve stepped out of something into something else. It’s the sense of the word ecclesia —you’ve been called out to a new place.
“I don’t want to feel comfortable in church; a church should not be a domestic space,” Barron says. “I want to feel transfigured in a church, and the great ecclesiastical architects knew how to produce that feeling. There’s a lot there in terms of evangelical power.”
Asked if he could take a potential convert to one place on earth to demonstrate the power and magic of Catholicism, where it would be, Barron doesn’t hesitate: “It would be Chartres,” he says. “I’ve always said Chartres is the most beautiful covered space in the world. Now, I haven’t seen all the world, but I’ve seen a fair amount of it, certainly a lot in the Catholic world, and I’d bring him to Chartres, I think, if I were trying to convert him.”
On the Catholic landscape in the United States, Barron says his favorite example of beauty in stone is the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Not only where it’s situated, the way it hovers over the city, but the exquisite beauty of that building; it has an obvious transcendent quality to it,” he says. “The way it’s designed, it’s very clever, because it has an intimacy to it when you’re inside, even though it’s a massive building. I’ve both preached and lectured in that space, and it’s always left an impression.”
Barron’s aesthetic tastes can be remarkably eclectic. He veers back and forth between the classics, such as Gregorian chant and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and modern pop songs, such as Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” and pretty much anything U2 ever recorded.
“To me, rock and roll has always been religious,” Barron says. “It’s weird to say, but there’s something about the primal quality of rock and the way it opened up, for me and my generation, the soul, in a way. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ the U2 song, has that same kind of religious power.” He’s serious about his interest, playing a little guitar himself, and spends a lot of time listening to all sorts of music.
Barron’s fondness for Gregorian chant, for instance, is clear from the score for CATHOLICISM . It’s a fifteen-track musical score composed almost entirely by Steve Mullen, a veteran musician and composer who, among other things, has produced scores for programs such as Wild Kingdom and The First 48: Missing Persons . Drawing on melodies from traditional Gregorian chant, titles of pieces in the sound track include “The Mystery of God,” “Mary, Handmaid and Mother,” “Veritable Despair,” and “Amazed and Afraid.”
Developed mainly in western and central Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries, Gregorian chant in many ways is the most distinctive musical genre in the Latin Catholic Church, and in many ways it’s music at its most elemental: monophonic, unaccompanied, and when done right, hauntingly beautiful. Yet Barron is no enemy of ornamentation, referring to instances of soaring polyphony such as the works of Palestrina and Mozart’s Requiem as other great entries in the Catholic musical library. (In that sense, Barron would probably stand with emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, who once said of Mozart, “His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence.”)
Ever the attentive evangelist, Barron sees an analogy between coming to appreciate difficult portions of a piece of music and accepting the moral demands that are part and parcel of what it means to be a believing, practicing Catholic.
There are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, moral absolutes, and the saints are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us. We wouldn’t presume to excise those sections of Beethoven that are “unpleasant,” or those features of French that are too difficult, or those dimensions of morality that are hard to live up to. The Word of God, preserved in the Church, is a supreme value of this type. We shouldn’t therefore speak of choosing sections of it that we like and leaving behind those that bother us. Rather, we should let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us.
As we’ve already seen, Barron considers movies to be terrific evangelizing tools, especially for young seekers, who may be drawn in by a conversation about a popular film and then led to a deeper exploration of matters of faith. That’s not to say, however, that his view of cinema is purely instrumental. At their best, he believes, movies can be powerful religious works in their own right—and his test for what counts as a “religious” film, it turns out, is anything but conventional.
Asked for a sampling of his favorite “Catholic” films, Barron serves up an idiosyncratic mix of usual suspects and fairly outside-the-box entries.
On any list of slam-dunk Christian classics, A Man for All Seasons would have something close to top billing. It’s the story of St. Thomas More, the great English lawyer and politician who refused to sacrifice his conscience in order to approve the divorce and remarriage of the king he served, Henry VIII. Barron has credited More’s life, and the 1966 film that captured it, with getting across three basic insights: We’re all responsible for upholding the rights of others; accepting one’s duties often leads to discomfort; and despite the second point, you don’t have to be gloomy about it.
Barron says, “My favorite line is from an early scene with More and Richard Rich, a young, ambitious Cambridge graduate who wants a position at court. More tells him that he can find him a job as a teacher in a local school. Crestfallen, Rich complains, ‘If I were a teacher, who would know it?’ More replies, ‘You, your friends, your pupils, God…not a bad public, that.’ That statement sums up the whole Christian spiritual life, in many ways. You’re playing to one audience. To use Balthasar’s language, it’s not the ego-drama but the theo-drama that matters.”
This choice comes with a caveat: Barron is referring to the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston, although he also liked the 2016 update with Jack Huston. The film is an adaptation of the 1880 Lew Wallace novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and focuses on a once-wealthy Jewish prince whose life is ruined by a Roman commander, and who goes about seeking his revenge. In the end, witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus changes him. “Even though he is on film for only a few brief scenes, Jesus is the key to the entire drama,” Barron says. Heston’s character, he says, came to understand “God’s forgiveness of the sins of all of humanity, and thereby found the grace to become a vehicle of forgiveness to someone who had harmed him so awfully.”
Here’s where Barron begins to think a bit outside the box. Gran Torino is a 2008 film starring Clint Eastwood that tells the story of an aging curmudgeon and widower in Detroit, alienated from his own children, who improbably befriends the children of a Hmong immigrant family next door. When the brother and sister are menaced and then attacked by members of a gang, Eastwood’s character goes to the gang’s house, standing outside and berating them loudly, drawing the attention of the neighbors. He then gives the impression of drawing a gun, even though it’s only his cigarette lighter, causing the gang to shoot him to death—but because the killing was done in public with so many witnesses, this time the gang is swept up by police, and the brother and sister are free. Barron says that it’s “one of the most Christological movies ever made,” and that Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, “joins a list of a handful of really great cinematic Christ figures.” (He also puts Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke, Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and E.T. on that list.)
Fargo, a dark comedy crime thriller produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, tells the story of a desperate car salesman who hatches a fake kidnapping plot, which predictably unravels and leads to a series of murders. The bad guys are pursued by a massively pregnant police chief, Marge, played by Frances McDormand. Barron believes the Coen brothers are Jewish versions of the great Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, in that her stories too were usually very funny, shockingly violent, and ultimately deeply spiritual. Barron sees Marge as an element of grace running through the story, “an agent of transformation willing to go to the margins and bring back those who have been alienated.” In that sense, he says, she calls to mind “the Church at its best.”