A t first glance, there’s a seeming paradox in Bishop Robert Barron’s attitude toward “the good,” roughly meaning personal morality and what constitutes a well-lived life, as an evangelical strategy. On the one hand, he’s keenly aware, from long experience, that for today’s lapsed Catholics and “nones,” meaning secularized folks with no religious affiliation, opening the pitch for belief with “the rules,” a catalog of moral prohibitions and restrictions, is generally an exercise in futility. Almost invariably the response is “Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do?” Moreover, Barron believes that Catholicism’s rules make sense only to someone who’s already been enchanted by the faith and the Church, and being hit over the head with rules at the beginning isn’t a very reliable pathway to enchantment.
On the other hand, Barron recognizes that throughout the course of Church history, the most powerful missionary calling cards Catholicism has ever been able to play are the lives of its great saints—people, in other words, who embodied “the good” in an especially compelling or remarkable way. As he puts it, “The concrete living out of the Christian way, especially when done in a heroic manner, can move even the most hardened unbeliever to faith, and the truth of this principle has been proven again and again over the centuries.”
As he notes, that lure of the good life has been part of Christianity’s appeal from the very beginning.
In the earliest days of the Christian movement, when both Jews and Greeks looked upon the nascent faith as either scandalous or irrational, it was the moral goodness of the followers of Jesus that brought many to belief. The Church father Tertullian conveyed the wondering pagan reaction to the early Church in his famous adage, “How these Christians love one another!” At a time when the exposure of malformed infants was commonplace, when the poor and the sick were often left to their own devices, and when murderous revenge was a matter of course, the early Christians cared for unwanted babies, gave succor to the sick and the dying, and endeavored to forgive the persecutors of the faith. And this goodness extended not simply to their own brothers and sisters but astonishingly, to outsiders and to enemies. This peculiarly excessive form of moral decency convinced many people that something strange was afoot among these disciples of Jesus, something splendid and rare. It compelled them to take a deeper look.
What was true for the early Church has remained the case across time, Barron notes, from the revival of Catholicism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led by St. Dominic and St. Francis, the great “beggar saints” who brought Christianity back to its roots and “produced a revolution in the Church and effectively re-evangelized armies of Christians who had grown slack and indifferent in their faith,” to the towering Catholic moral and spiritual heroes of the modern age, such as St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa. Barron explains,
There’s a wonderful story told of a young man named Gregory, who came to the great Origen of Alexandria in order to learn the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. Origen said to him, “First come and share the life of our community and then you will understand our dogma.” The youthful Gregory took that advice, came in time to embrace the Christian faith in its fullness, and is now known to history as St. Gregory the Wonderworker. Something of the same impulse lay behind Gerard Manley Hopkins’s word to a confrere who was struggling to accept the truths of Christianity. The Jesuit poet did not instruct his colleague to read a book or consult an argument but rather said, “Give alms.” The living of the Christian thing has persuasive power.
So, what gives? Is Barron saying that “the good” is the right way to capture hearts and minds in the early twenty-first century, or is he saying that it’s a concept one should begin to unfold only somewhere down the line, once someone has already begun moving toward the faith? Perhaps the way to resolve the paradox is with that well-worn bit of wisdom about good writing, which Barron would say is equally applicable to evangelization: “Show, don’t tell.”
Barron is convinced that the moral teachings of Catholicism are true, and that people who strive to practice them will live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. At the same time, he knows that in a postmodern, secular world, “rule-talk” often comes off as an attempt to limit people’s freedom, not to free them to become the persons God intends them to be. Therefore, the right way to deploy “the good” as a missionary tool is to start by showing people what a genuinely Christian life at its best looks like—and then, gradually, to lead people to appreciate the principles and norms which make that kind of heroic life possible.
The best place to begin to understand how Barron thinks about “the good,” therefore, is with those legendary role models of holiness and goodness who, over the centuries, have so fired the imagination, and so often led to bursts of creativity and renewal in both the Church and the wider world. As he puts it, “I’m convinced that, at this moment, we need good arguments, but I’m even more convinced that we need saints.”
In 1985 then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, gave a series of extended interviews to Italian Catholic journalist Vittorio Messori, resulting in a book that, in English, was titled The Ratzinger Report . It was the book that made Ratzinger a Catholic superstar, not to mention a lightning rod. Messori led his subject, who was then the Vatican’s doctrinal chief under Pope John Paul II, through all the controversies of the day, from women priests to the limits of legitimate Catholic dissent.
Ratzinger answered all those questions patiently and clearly, but then insisted that none of that was really the heart of the matter when it came to persuading people of the Christian faith.
“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,” Ratzinger said, “namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”
It’s a sentiment that resonates with Barron, who sees the saints as among the most powerful examples of the Catholic genius.
“Looking at concrete lives is a very good way to get into the Catholic world, maybe better than ideas,” Barron says. “That was John Paul II’s instinct in making so many saints, and I think [focusing on the saints] grabs people’s imaginations more fully.”
(For the record, John Paul II canonized 482 saints during his almost twenty-seven-year papacy and proclaimed 1,338 people “blessed,” the final step before sainthood. That was not only more than any previous pope but more than all previous popes combined.)
For his 2016 follow-up to the CATHOLICISM series, titled The Pivotal Players, Barron chose twelve thinkers, artists, mystics, and saints who, in his estimation, not only shaped the Church in their day but also changed the course of civilization.
• St. Francis of Assisi, the great medieval apostle of poverty, peace, and creation.
• St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian who, in many ways, is Barron’s intellectual hero.
• St. Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century mystic who was also bold enough to rebuke the popes of her time.
• Blessed John Henry Newman, the famed English convert and nineteenth-century theologian. (Blessed means Newman has been beatified but not yet canonized, the formal act of declaring someone a saint.)
• G. K. Chesterton, the twentieth-century English journalist best known for his paradoxical wit and whimsical novels; he surprised the world by converting to Catholicism in midlife.
• Michelangelo, who lived in the Renaissance and was perhaps the greatest artist in the history of Western civilization.
• St. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop and theologian whose works The Confessions and City of God remain among the all-time classics of Christian literature.
• St. Benedict, the great developer of Western monasticism, who in the sixth century helped keep the Church alive as the ancient Roman world crumbled around it.
• St. Ignatius of Loyola, sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuit order, whose relentless missionary spirit bred a society of missionaries determined to carry the faith to the edge of the world.
• Bartolomé de las Casas, a sixteenth-century Spanish missionary who served in Chiapas, Mexico, and is widely considered a progenitor of human rights.
• Flannery O’Connor, a twentieth-century Catholic writer who radically changed our idea of what religious fiction could be.
• Fulton Sheen, the pioneer in Catholic evangelization through the media, and a patron of Word on Fire.
All twelve, Barron believes, embody the Catholic penchant for beauty and goodness in their fullest sense, meaning living a life in which holiness, passion, and love shine through in an arresting way. Anyone who becomes familiar with their stories, he believes, will wonder what it was about Catholicism that inspired lives like that, and from there, the door is wide open to leading someone progressively deeper into the faith.
“I wanted this series to reflect the variety of Catholicism, so we have Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, who are pretty academic,” he says. “But we also have an episode on Catherine of Siena, which is very lyrical and poetic. We have an episode on Francis, which basically tells his life story and doesn’t delve so much into theological ideas. And then we have Bartolomé de las Casas, who defended indigenous people against colonial authorities.
“I wanted to show the full range—men, women, the ancient church, the medieval church, the contemporary church, plus the wide spectrum of issues their lives touch on,” he says.
One especially powerful example of a saintly life Barron likes to cite is Mother Teresa of Calcutta (now called Kolkata), who was herself canonized by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016, as one of the high points of his special jubilee Holy Year of Mercy. Here’s how Barron once talked about the legendary “Saint of the Gutters”:
John Paul II was the second most powerful evangelist of the twentieth century, but unquestionably the first was a woman who never wrote a major work of theology or apologetics, who never engaged skeptics in public debate, and who never produced a beautiful work of religious art. I’m speaking, of course, of St. Teresa of Kolkata. No one in the last one hundred years propagated the Christian faith more effectively than this simple nun who lived in utter poverty, and who dedicated herself to the service of the most neglected people in our society.
In the end, Barron says, if he could teleport someone contemplating the Catholic faith to see anyone, or any group, in action, in order to persuade them of the appeal of Catholicism, he’d send them to India.
“I would take them to Calcutta, and show them Mother Teresa’s nuns working,” he says. “I’d bring them there and say, ‘Look, I’m not going to tell you what to think or how to behave. Just look at them. Just watch them for a while.’ In itself, that would probably be enough.”
Barron is convinced that the stories of the saints represent an especially effective way to respond to the Church’s most ferocious critics.
“We have to out-narrate them,” Barron says. “Pope Francis says we have to out-love them, but the out-narrate part means that we have a more compelling story to tell. That has an extraordinary evangelical power, and I’ve always had the intuition to lead with the saints.”
Moreover, Barron believes that familiarity with the lives of the saints can help disabuse some popular misconceptions about Catholicism. High on that list, he says, is the impression that the Catholic Church is a patriarchal institution, basically a “boys’ club,” in which women have no opportunities to lead or to exercise power.
I usually deal with that by talking about the great female saints. Who is truly powerful? What is real power? We tend to identify power with office, but genuine power comes from sanctity, power comes from holiness. In the nineteenth century, I’ve argued, the most powerful Catholics were the “Little Flower,” St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Bernadette of Lourdes. The most powerful Catholic of the twentieth century was Mother Teresa, no question about it. Or, think about a Mother Angelica. Talk about power! I think that’s the key to it. Real power comes from holiness, and there’s absolutely nothing preventing a woman from becoming holy. Thomas Aquinas was asked, “What must I do to be a saint?” and he said, “Will it.” Be a saint, and you’ll unleash the power of grace and holiness.
(St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known as the “Little Flower,” was a French nun who died at twenty-four and whose writings, including The Story of a Soul, have shaped the spirituality of countless Catholics around the world. St. Bernadette of Lourdes was a young French peasant girl to whom Mary is believed to have appeared in 1858, and who inspired the construction of the Lourdes shrine, where miraculous healings are believed to occur and which has become Catholicism’s most beloved pilgrimage center for the sick and disabled. Mother Angelica was an American Franciscan nun who founded the EWTN media network, succeeding where bishops and Catholic officialdom had failed, and was widely considered one of the most influential Catholic personalities of her time.)
Finally, Barron believes that a focus on the saints illustrates another point about Catholicism, which is that its moral teaching ultimately isn’t intended to hem people in but to allow them to excel, to flourish, and to be great.
The Church is interested in making saints. It’s not interested in making spiritual mediocrities. It wants saints. Who’s a saint? A saint is someone who’s radically conformed to love, because love’s what God is. That’s the whole point of the moral life, of the spiritual life: to help you conform to love. Is that extreme? Yes, because we want saints, we want people to go all the way with offering the gift of themselves. We’re not interested in lowering the bar, or making adjustments, or saying it’s okay to settle for mediocrity—our idea is, take it all the way!
If you want to understand the Catholic concept of goodness, in other words, you can certainly read tracts on moral theology, or look up Church teaching on various points in official collections. But if you want to grasp what all that doctrine is intended to foster, by far the best place to see “the good” in flesh and blood, in life-changing action, is by coming to know the saints.
Perhaps the most powerful model of the “radical conformity to love” Barron describes among the saints is found in the martyrs, meaning Christians who laid down their lives for the faith. Martyrdom has always been an important chapter of the Christian story, from believers in the early Church who were killed for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods of imperial Rome to great saints of the Middle Ages, such as Thomas Becket and Thomas More, who refused to compromise their beliefs for the sake of the state, to modern martyrs killed in what Pope John Paul II used to call odium caritatis, “hatred of charity,” such as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was assassinated while saying Mass in 1980 because of his strong stands in favor of the poor and against human rights abuses.
In the early twenty-first century, martyrdom remains a stunningly common fact of Christian life. One high-end estimate for the number of Christians killed each year for reasons linked to the faith is 100,000, while the low end is usually around 7,000 or 8,000—which works out to a range of between one new martyr every five minutes and one every hour. As Pope Francis repeatedly has observed, there are more new martyrs today than in the early Church, and they come from every Christian denomination, creating what Francis calls a vast “ecumenism of blood.”
Centuries of Christian experience show that the example of the martyrs is a highly effective missionary force, drawing people to wonder what it is about the faith that would induce so many to make the ultimate sacrifice. The early Church Father Tertullian once said that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” and this is a rare case of a theological maxim for which there’s actually empirical confirmation. It’s a statistical fact that today the greatest danger zones for Christians often are also the places where the Church is growing most rapidly.
That’s not to say, of course, that most Christians aspire to martyrdom. The late Protestant scholar David Barrett, who pioneered the statistical study of global Christianity, liked to tell the story of once addressing a group of Evangelical businessmen committed to using their wealth to spread the Gospel, when someone asked: “Professor Barrett, can you tell us what’s the most effective missionary tool the Church has?”
“Based on all our research, I’d have to say the answer is martyrdom,” Barrett replied.
As he described the scene, there was a long silence in the room, and then someone raised his hand to ask: “Professor Barrett, can you tell us what the second most effective missionary tool would be?”
Yet the plain fact of the matter is that the stories of the martyrs pack a uniquely powerful punch. Consider, for instance, the story of the Italian Consolata Sister Leonella Sgorbati, who was shot to death in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Sgorbati had studied nursing and then, after becoming a missionary sister, served in a series of hospitals in Kenya before heading to Mogadishu in 2001 to open a training center for nurses. She would move back and forth between Kenya and Somalia for the next few years, and had returned to Mogadishu on September 13, 2006. At the time, Sgorbati was one of only two Westerners left in the Somalian capital because the city was in the grip of Islamic militants. Mahamud Mohammed Osman, a father of four children and a devout Muslim, was Sgorbati’s driver, bodyguard, and friend, and he was standing next to her when gunmen staged their ambush. The two were shot as they walked thirty feet from the hospital to the sister’s home. Osman tried to shield Sgorbati’s body with his own, and he took the first bullet. They died together, their blood mingling on the hospital floor. Sgorbati’s last words reportedly were “Perdono, perdono,” meaning “I forgive.”
It’s an undeniably haunting tale, and many might say that Sgorbati’s life and death represented Christianity at its very best. Today, the cross that she wore during her life is on display in Rome’s Basilica of St. Batholomew, which is entrusted to the Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio and dedicated to modern-day martyrs.
One could go on listing examples, such as Father Jacques Hamel, an eighty-five-year-old French priest whose throat was slit on July 26, 2016, by assassins professing loyalty to ISIS, in Normandy, while he was saying morning Mass. He is now a candidate for sainthood. The point, however, is that in terms of getting across what the Catholic Church understands by “the good,” introducing people to even one martyr often is more effective than untold hours of moral exhortation.
Barron believes the stories of the martyrs are so compelling for a simple reason.
“If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way,” he says. “It’s the Cross, participation in the Cross. It’s conforming to Christ, it’s Christ appearing vividly in our midst.”
When Barron spoke at World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, in July 2016, shortly after Hamel was killed, he says he set aside his prepared text and talked instead about the French priest and the role of the martyrs in Catholic life. (World Youth Day, launched by St. John Paul II, is a global gathering of Catholic youth held every two or three years, which has become one of the largest regular events in the world, routinely generating crowds in the millions. Despite its name, it actually runs for a week.)
I thought, the only way Europe’s going to be reevangelized is through the martyrs. In some ways, it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Argument will be part of it, but it’s the martyrs. Martyrs will reevangelize Europe, and maybe it’s missionary martyrs as in the early centuries of the Church’s life. Missionaries from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, coming to Europe and dying for the faith…The martyrs are participating in who Jesus is. In some ways, we’ve so domesticated the Cross that we’ve forgotten not just that Jesus died, not just that he was put to death, but that he was humiliated. It was the most humiliating, the most dejecting, the most dehumanized way for a person to die. That’s why Paul says, “I’m not ashamed of the Gospel.” Why should he have been ashamed of his message? Well, because he was talking about this horrific pain, torture, nudity, humiliation—all of it. That’s what the martyrs do; they’re embodying Christ on the Cross. The Cross is the great display of divine love, and that’s what the martyrs do; they show it.
In terms of understanding the depth of God’s love, Barron says, “There’s no more intense expression of it than martyrdom. It’s showing forth the heart of God, showing forth the Cross, which is where that heart is most clearly on display.”
Part of the reason Barron may be so sold on the saints, and especially the martyrs, as the right way to introduce the Catholic concept of goodness is that in the technical language of moral philosophy, he upholds a “teleological” view, from the Greek word telos, meaning “aim” or “goal.” The idea is that the morality of an act depends upon whether it’s oriented to its proper end, and it’s the understanding of morality that great thinkers in the Church such as Augustine and Aquinas inherited from Greek philosophers such as Plato and, especially, Aristotle.
Here’s how Barron lays it out: “Classical moral thinkers considered the ethical act in terms of its purpose or finality. What makes an act good is its orientation toward its proper end. Thus, since the end of the speech act is the enunciation of the truth, speaking a lie is morally problematic; and since the end of a political act is the enactment of justice, unjust legislating is unethical, et cetera.”
In that sense, Barron believes, the saints and the martyrs illustrate what morality is all about. It’s not a matter of checking boxes to make sure you’re following the rules but rather one of becoming the kind of person whose own life is fully ordered to the good, and thus has the power to change the world. In other words, it’s by looking at the saints that one understands why morality matters, and what it’s intended to produce.
To expand on that point, he turns anew to Brideshead Revisited : “You’re beguiled by the beauty, great, come on in and look around. But then the house will make a moral demand on you, and you have to change your life.” His point is that once hooked by the beauty of the faith, people will be more receptive to the idea that such beauty is inextricably connected to a way of life.
Part of what’s gone wrong in the modern age, Barron believes, is that the concept of morality being measured by its proper end has been widely abandoned.
With final causality relegated to the margins, morality became a matter of self-expression and self-creation. The extreme instance of this attitude can be found in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. The nineteenth-century German opined that the supreme morality—beyond good and evil—was the ecstatic self-assertion of the Superman, and the twentieth-century Frenchman held that the “authentic” person is the one who acts in accord with her own deepest instincts. Sartre famously argued that existence (unfettered freedom) precedes essence (who or what a person becomes). That’s the polar opposite of [morality] ordered to objective finality.
Conceding that all this may come across as “hopelessly abstruse and irrelevant to the contemporary situation,” Barron insists it’s anything but, because he believes that idea has corroded our moral instincts and bred a basically “do-it-yourself” way of thinking about what goodness and the good life really mean. It’s also, he says, made Catholic moral teaching almost impenetrable for lots of people raised in this cultural milieu.
“The modern person instinctually says, ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ or ‘Who are you to set limits to my freedom?’ And the Catholic instinctually says, ‘Order your freedom to an objective truth that makes you the person you are meant to be,’ ” he says.
Interestingly, Barron says the basic problem with postmodern thought on morality is that it’s “boring.” If there’s no objective good to which to aspire, no heroic ideal to push people beyond their natural instincts and to call out the best version of themselves, then there’s no moral adventure to be sought, no drama to be played out, nothing really beyond a bleak and bland landscape of “I’m okay, you’re okay.”
How to resist that slide into moral ennui? Barron thinks one effective way is to shift the focus for a moment away from morality and into other walks of life, where people seem far more willing to embrace the idea that there is an objectively desirable purpose to things, and they’re often willing to make the effort to adjust their behavior accordingly.
One way I try to do it is to observe that in any other area of life that people take seriously, they naturally assume there’s legitimacy to objective values. Take a golf swing. Nobody would seriously say, “Just go swing it any way you want to, because who am I to tell you what to do?” Well, how would that work out? Horrifically. We know that in something like golf, you start to internalize objective ideals, and in that process, you become freer and freer. You become a freer player of golf, and you can actually do what you want to do. That’s true of anything—language, music, politics, anything. You begin to internalize objective values in such a way that they now become the ground for your freedom, and not the enemy of your freedom. The binary option we have to get past is “my freedom versus your oppression.” What we need to say is, No, no, the objectivity of the moral good enables your freedom, opens freedom up. Once you get that, you see the Church is not the enemy of your flourishing, but the condition for it.
Finally, Barron is utterly convinced that when Catholic moral teaching is criticized as harsh, unrealistic, or overly demanding, the best response is not to water it down. It’s to explain that the Church may be extreme in its demands but it’s also exorbitantly, almost wildly extreme in its mercy too, a point he believes Pope Francis has brought home with special clarity.
The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue…To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church. However, here’s the flip side. The Catholic Church couples its extraordinary moral demand with an extraordinarily lenient penitential system. The Church mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality.
Barron explains this duality between high expectations and deep mercy with a concept he borrows from the English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton: “bipolar extremism.” For him, this is not the name of a psychological disorder but rather the best way of grasping the Catholic moral instinct.
“Chesterton didn’t like this rather than that, nor did he like a compromise between the two,” Barron says. “He always said the Church likes red and it likes white, but it has a healthy hatred of pink. Further, it doesn’t want red alone and it doesn’t want white alone; it wants them both at full intensity. His ground for that was the incarnation: Jesus is not a little bit human and a little divine; he’s fully human and fully divine. He believed that this peculiar logic imbues all of Catholicism, and he was dead right.”
Importantly, Barron worries that an inadequate grasp of this balance between ideals and mercy can produce distortions not merely among secularists who reject the very idea of objective aims in the first place, and lapse into a sort of moral complacency, but also among fervent believers who’re striving to live up to those ideals and are ill equipped for what happens when they fall short. He says he sees that tendency, for instance, among some of today’s young seminarians, meaning men studying for the Catholic priesthood.
“It’s the shadow side of the John Paul II generation. I know this generation well from my many years of teaching at Mundelein, and I admire this coterie of young people immensely. But I’ve noticed that they have a hard time dealing with moral and spiritual failure, with not living up, at every moment, to the heroic ideal.”
In that sense, he believes, Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy is especially important.
As I look at Francis, I see a good trainer. You don’t just name the pain or the problem; you say, “I’m going to work with you every day. I’m going to tell you how to do it; I’m going to stay with you. I’ll do it with you.” Watch those training programs on TV—there’s always a moment when the person kind of breaks down and swears at the trainer, and the trainer has to yell back, and then there’s the moment of tearful embrace and “God bless you, you’re doing great.” There’s the Church in its pastoral outreach, and that’s how I read him. It’s wrong to see him as indifferent to the struggles of the human race, or thinking everything’s fine. He barks at us, but he also walks with us and will embrace us depending on the circumstances.
All this, by an intentionally long path, brings us to Barron’s take on what is usually the most contested zone of the Church’s understanding of the good life in the postmodern era—its teaching on sexual morality. Ask Barron what are the most common objections he hears about the Church’s approach to sex, and it’s a depressingly long list.
“That it’s oppressive, it’s puritanical, it’s anti-joy, it’s anti-body, it’s the Church imposing itself illegitimately on people,” he says. “It’s unrealistic, it’s hopelessly idealistic, it’s out of touch with the way people actually live. I mean I hear all of that; I could go on. We’re anti-human, we’re anti-body, we’re anti-pleasure. We’re dualistic and platonic and it’s just an impossibly high ideal.”
In the teeth of it all, when one listens to Barron talk about sexual morality, three broad principles seem to emerge:
• Don’t put the cart before the horse, meaning don’t become so focused on the fine points that the true fundamentals of the Catholic faith never come into view.
• Don’t water down or avoid the teaching but rather try to help people see why ultimately it expresses a yes rather than a no.
• Get past the notion that the Church is “sex-obsessed” by making sure people grasp that this area of morality is hardly all Catholicism cares about.
On the first point, Barron uses the example of a seminarian interviewed by The New York Times roughly a decade ago, who was asked what he wanted to preach about once be became a priest and had the chance to speak to his flock every Sunday from the pulpit.
The fellow said, “I really want to tell people that they have to stop masturbating.” Now I’m not in favor of masturbation, so don’t misconstrue me, but you’d never finish the Gospel of Matthew and say, “Okay, what the evangelist really wants me to know is that I shouldn’t masturbate!” You wouldn’t finish the Book of Revelation, or read Paul’s Letter to the Romans and say that’s what it’s primarily about: getting my sexual life in order. That’s important, obviously, but it’s a question of where this teaching fits in a much bigger picture. I became convinced, and am still convinced, and as I’ve mentioned before, 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.
For precisely that reason, Barron says, he deliberately avoids extended discussions of sexual morality in his CATHOLICISM series.
“I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “I want people to feel the infield again; I want them to smell the ballpark. I want them to feel Catholicism, to know the essential stuff. Furthermore, we won’t get the sexual stuff right until we get that right.”
That said, Barron is unabashed in insisting that once you understand the ends it’s intended to promote, and the kind of life it’s intended to foster, Catholic teaching on sexuality is right on the money, and he’s uncomfortable with any attempt to back away from it. Here, for instance, is how Barron responds when asked if he believes the fight against abortion deserves pride of place among the Church’s other social concerns.
Yes, I do. It’s the right to life; it’s the protection of innocent life. If anything is the linchpin of a moral program, it’s the protection of innocent life. That’s why abortion does have a certain pride of place in the hierarchy [of moral concerns]. They’re all in the picture, but there is a proper ordering. Whatever threatens innocent life takes priority, morally speaking. Yes, I get the fact that people are especially preoccupied with abortion, but [the Church’s position] doesn’t mean we’re shills for the Republican Party. It means we’re trying to bring all of life under the aegis of radical love, but there’s a prioritization.
When asked if he believes it’s realistic to think that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion could be overturned in his lifetime, Barron is cautiously optimistic.
Probably not in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’d make a comparison with slavery. At a certain point in American history, nobody would have imagined the possibility of slavery being overturned. Very smart people, very morally plugged-in people, were defenders of slavery in 1830, 1840, including Christians at a very high level. Politicians at the highest level didn’t think slavery could be overturned in 1820 or 1840, and yet now slavery is unthinkable. It’s the same with civil rights. In the 1930s and ’40s, a lot of very high-placed people, including religious people, wouldn’t have imagined the overturning of Jim Crow, but now it’s a fact. I find that, by the way, from a theoretical standpoint, fascinating, how that happens in a society. How at one point something is commonly accepted, and fifty years later it’s unthinkable. I don’t rule out that, at some point, the same could happen with abortion. I hope, in God’s providence, it will become unthinkable that we’re murdering children at the rate of millions per year. I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetimes, because you and I don’t have that much longer to go! But I also don’t rule it out.
Finally, Barron says he often finds that one good way to help people appreciate how the Catholic Church approaches sex is to shift the focus for a moment to some other topic of moral concern more congenial to a postmodern sensibility.
One thing I find helpful is to move out of the sexual arena for just a second. For instance, go back to the Church’s teaching on what constitutes a “just war.” It’s every bit as demanding as sexual teaching. If you follow it, and all of its rigorous details, one could argue there’s possibly never been a just war. World War II, maybe, in terms of the motives for the war, but the way it was fought? Forget it—Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo, none of it would correspond to the requirements of a just war. Now, would you say we better dial it down, that we’re being unrealistic? In 1945, if you had polled Catholics in America on whether we should drop the atomic bomb, I’d say 95 percent would have said, “Yes, of course. End the damn war, save lives!” So, should we have lowered the bar; should we have said, “Bring it down, it’s unrealistic?” Today, I think most people would say no, the Church should stay very high in its moral demand.
As a corollary, Barron believes that taking the discussion out of the arena of sexual ethics also can help people better appreciate the link between high expectations and deep mercy in Catholic morality.
“Consider the man who dropped the bomb from the Enola Gay, who was Catholic,” he says. “I don’t know anything about his inner life, but let’s suppose he came to confession and said, ‘I want to confess that I dropped this bomb and killed 75,000 people, and I feel this great regret before God the Father and I want to confess my sin.’ He’d receive total absolution of his sin, right? So, the Church is extreme in its demand but it’s also extreme in its mercy.”
In the end, Barron concedes that no amount of rhetorical repackaging and pastoral accompaniment will make Catholic teaching on sex anything but a tough sell for a broad swath of the contemporary culture, but as he sees it, that’s no excuse for bowing out of the conversation.
“Do we need shepherds who are willing to walk and accompany people? Yes, I’ll say it as passionately as Pope Francis,” he says. “Now, is this all going to work out really well in the confines of a fallen world? The answer is no. Will this be a source, for some people, of permanent frustration? Yes, it will. I get that, but I don’t think we have another choice.”