M y day job as a journalist is covering the Vatican and the papacy, and if there’s one ironclad conclusion I’ve come to after twenty years on this beat, it’s this: The papacy, as we’ve come to understand it in the modern era, is an impossible gig. I’m talking not about the official descriptions of the papacy in sources such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church or the Code of Canon Law, but rather about the popular understanding of what it means to be pope.
Think about all the things people now expect popes to be. They want popes to be world-class statesmen, able to wave a magic wand and make wars, or poverty, or other social ills disappear. They want popes to be Fortune 500 CEOs, responsible for everything that happens in the Catholic Church around the world. If my parish doesn’t have enough paper clips this month, by God, then the pope should do something about it. We also expect popes to be intellectual giants, with something incisive to say about whatever’s bubbling in the culture. If a scientist somewhere develops a new cloning technique, for instance, and the pope doesn’t address it, many people would take that as an abdication of responsibility. We want popes to be media rock stars, dominating the airwaves, and if they’re not, we begin talking about their papacies as failures. (Just ask Benedict XVI about that one.) Finally, of course, people also expect popes to be living saints, embodying a path of holiness and virtue for the entire world, and if there’s even a hint of irascibility, or ego, or any of the other classic forms in which real human beings sometimes fall short of the ideal, people go nuts.
The truth, which anyone would recognize upon a moment’s reflection, is that doing any one of these things even moderately well is a life’s work. Rolling them all up into one job description, therefore, is a prescription for perpetual frustration and heartburn. The net result is that popes always have to choose where to invest their time and resources, prioritizing one thing over another, which is a choice generally driven by their reading of what their life experience has prepared them to do especially well, and by what God’s providence expects of them at a given moment in time.
At a lower level, Bishop Robert Barron faces something of the same dilemma. By this stage in his career, he’s distinguished himself in multiple fields. He’s an academic and a theologian, very much interested in the life of the mind. He’s been a pastor and still understands himself as a pastor, someone devoted to the care of souls. For a long time he was a molder of future priests, culminating in his role as rector of Mundelein Seminary in Chicago. He’s a media personality, forever in demand to comment on the issues of the day vis-à-vis the Catholic Church. Now he’s a bishop, responsible for his own pastoral region of Santa Barbara in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and also a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which means he also faces obligations on the national scene.
While Barron takes all of those demands seriously, it’s clear that when he gets out of bed in the morning, he doesn’t fundamentally think of himself as an intellectual, or a celebrity, or an administrator. Instead, if Barron had to choose one word to describe how he sees himself and his role in the Church in our time, it would probably be this: evangelist.
When asked if he sees himself primarily as an evangelist, Barron doesn’t hesitate.
“I’d be happy to take that title,” he says. “I was trained as a theologian, so I was trained to do technical theology, to write, to teach, which I did for a long time and still do. But I’m happy to claim that title, because I think there’s something global about that term. Aquinas was an evangelist. I reverence Pope Benedict, and he was a great evangelist at the intellectual level. And he was very keen on the engagement of the secular culture at the high academic level. I think the great theologians are evangelists, and I think especially now it’s what’s needed.”
Given that evangelist is the way Barron sees himself, it’s critical to consider more closely how he views the evangelical enterprise in order to grasp the role he plays in the Catholic Church in the early twenty-first century, both in the United States and on the universal level. We’ve already established what Barron sees as the right way to evangelize a secular culture, which is to begin with what’s beautiful about Catholic life, and then proceed from there to the good and the true. As a result, this chapter focuses more on the background to his understanding of contemporary evangelization, and the techniques necessary to support it, rather than on its content.
Before diving in, we need to make two preliminary points about how Barron sees evangelization—what it is and, just as important, what it isn’t.
First, for Barron evangelization is not an exercise in marketing or salesmanship, though there are certain natural affinities among these activities. His fundamental concern is not about third-quarter sales numbers or market share but about the welfare of the individual people who come into his orbit.
In a certain way, it has something in common with marketing, but I hope the main difference is that the evangelist is not dealing with a product but a person. You’re trying to draw people into a friendship. Evangelization isn’t about a concept or an idea, but about a friendship with Christ that you have, and that you want someone else to have too. In that sense, it’s not like marketing at all, which is always in some way trying to sell a product. But it is like marketing in that it’s telling a story as convincingly as you can. In the end, though, it’s about sharing a friendship, an intimacy that’s enlivened you, and that you feel will benefit other people.
A further distinction from marketing is the way Barron measures the success of his evangelizing activity.
I’m always delighted when someone says, “Because of something you did, I’m coming back to Mass.” There’s the ultimate goal. You measure success by whether people are coming to Mass, which is the source and summit of the Christian life. Some people say, “Because I heard you, I’m thinking about the faith again,” or “You made me see things in a new way.” Good, I’m happy with that too, because it means I’m drawing people closer. The ultimate measure, however, would be the Mass. It would be full communion with the Catholic Church and going to Mass on a regular basis, receiving the sacraments, that’s the measure of it. You draw people at all kinds of levels in different ways, and I think you measure success relatively at different stages, but getting them to come to Mass and enter more deeply into the life of the Church is the ultimate aim of it all.
The second caveat is that Barron is in complete agreement with recent popes, including Pope Francis, and other Church leaders who have insisted that although the Catholic Church should be bold in its missionary efforts, it must never practice what the Vatican usually calls “proselytism”—which in that context usually refers to overly aggressive or manipulative forms of evangelization that don’t really respect people’s freedom.
“I’m with John Paul II,” Barron says. “Never impose, always propose. We should never be browbeating, aggressive, prideful, and all that. You don’t want to impose the faith, and it’s counterproductive anyway. It’s almost self-parodying: You know, ‘Here’s the Prince of Peace, and let me knock you over the head to make sure you accept Him.’ Or, ‘Here’s the Lord of nonviolence, let me bomb you into submission.’ Of course, that’s ridiculous.”
Yet Barron doesn’t want anyone to take that as a prescription for going soft or slack in terms of the Church’s missionary drive.
“By God, we should propose with a lot of energy and enthusiasm,” he says, “convinced that we have the best thing on the market. I think that’s the right way to do it.”
With those stipulations read into the record, we can move to what Barron considers the right way to evangelize with energy.
In contemporary Catholic argot, Bishop Robert Barron would be seen as a prime mover in America of what’s called the New Evangelization. To get a handle on how Barron understands his role, therefore, we first need to get a sense of what New Evangelization actually means.
The term originated with an Italian priest named Monsignor Luigi Giussani, who was the founder of a Catholic movement called Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation). In general, the ciellini, as Giussani’s followers are known in Italian, have been seen as embodying a more conservative brand of Catholicism, more interested in changing the world based on the teaching of the Church than in changing the Church based on the insights of the world. Comunione e Liberazione, which is based in Milan, was seen as a sort of “parallel church” during the tenure of the Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who during the 1980s and ’90s was the preferred candidate of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church to become the next pope.
Despite all that, Giussani wasn’t primarily a political figure but a theologian and intellectual, whose core idea was that the Christian faith in its most primary form isn’t a set of doctrines but rather a relationship with Jesus Christ. Morals and doctrines, as Giussani presented things, are important, but they are secondary to the encounter with Christ. As a result, he was critical of any effort to expound Christianity that didn’t begin with the person of Christ. From there, he drew the conclusion that what Western culture really needed was a “new evangelization,” meaning a new determination to preach Christ to the world.
Giussani initially presented that idea to Pope John Paul II, who was beguiled by it and in many ways could be said to have incarnated it. John Paul began to call for a “new evangelization” frequently, which is how the phrase entered Catholic conversation. Then came Pope Benedict XVI, who was an admirer of Giussani, and one of whose last public acts before being elected pope was to travel to Milan, at his own initiative, to celebrate Giussani’s funeral Mass in 2005. Benedict was so convinced of the need for a new evangelization that in 2010 he created a new Vatican department, the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, to carry the project forward—and that came despite Benedict’s well-known skepticism about ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
At the time, Pope Benedict said that “the process of secularization has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church,” so the new pontifical council would “promote a renewed evangelization” in countries where the Church has long existed “but which are living a progressive secularization of society and a sort of ‘eclipse of the sense of God.’ ”
Barron believes that what distinguishes the New Evangelization from the old isn’t content—now, as it was then, it’s about preaching Christ as the Risen Lord—but rather the fervor one brings to it, and perhaps above all, the modes of expression and media one employs.
In terms of the techniques that drive the New Evangelization, Barron believes it’s listening to the culture and figuring out how best to engage it.
It’s a matter of being aware of our times. How do you say it to an early twenty-first-century audience? We live in a time that’s racked by secularism, racked by skepticism about religion, that’s experienced 9/11. I think that’s a huge phenomenon, because the new atheists emerged in the wake of 9/11. It reawakened the old Enlightenment argument that religion is irrational, therefore it’s violent. So, what are the new expressions you have to use to get this thing across to people today? It’s also a question of new methods, including the new media, social media, and all that business. We’ve got these tremendous new methods to evangelize.
It’s worth saying at this point that Barron believes the rise of social media is the most important communications revolution since the printing press, more decisive even than the telegraph, radio, and television in terms of the way people receive and process information.
Barron grants that quite often, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook don’t exactly bring out the better angels of people’s natures, seeming to give them license to attack and demean those with whom they don’t agree, but he insists that his own experience shows that another path can succeed.
When we got going with the YouTube commentaries, and that was right at the beginning of YouTube itself, I wanted them not to be mean and polemical. I’ve tended to avoid polemics. I don’t respond to people like that, and I don’t provoke. I wanted them to be smart, so my typical YouTube video lasts for nine or ten minutes, which is fairly long for that format. They’re basically video versions of my columns. We wanted them to be positive, and encouraging, reaching out to the culture in a more open way. We didn’t go the route of quick, nasty, polemical, or provocative…I didn’t do that. And we’ve been pretty successful.
For Barron, it’s not really a question of whether social media are a flawed forum, because every new media technology throughout the ages has had its defects.
I remember being at a conference years ago at the Vatican on the new media. It was hosted by [Cardinal Gianfranco] Ravasi’s office [the Pontifical Council for Culture], and I was invited to give a presentation on what I was doing. Someone was making all the usual critiques of the new media, and legitimately so. Then one of the bishops got up—he was a Polish bishop, I can’t remember his name now—but he said, “My grandmother used to complain that the telephone is a very inelegant form of communication.” And then, he said, “Of course she was right.” There was a long pause. Eventually, I think, people realized, would any of us for a moment think we shouldn’t use the telephone? I thought his point well taken. Every new mode of communication has a shadow side.
Under the heading of “new ways,” Barron also believes it’s important to be paying attention to what’s bubbling in the culture, including popular culture, to see what one might be able to pick up on or employ as a bridge to talking about faith. To illustrate the point, he cited the example of House of Cards, the acclaimed Netflix series about an utterly amoral American politician.
Recently I was binge-watching the show, and Frank [President Francis Underwood], who’s this really demonic sort of figure, has ordered a drone attack. It’s killed both soldiers and civilians. He’s at Arlington Cemetery for a funeral and a bishop is preaching. You can tell it’s kind of affecting him. He calls the bishop and asks to meet him, so they go to an Episcopal church, late at night, and the bishop comes in, and they talk a bit about Isaac and Abraham and the Son of God. Frank asks, “May I be alone to pray for a moment?” The bishop leaves, and Frank looks up at the crucifix and says to Jesus, “So, love is what you’re selling? Well, I’m not buying.” Then he spits at the crucifix. When he takes his handkerchief to wipe off his spit, the corpus [the image of Christ on the Cross] falls off onto him, and then shatters on the ground. I thought that was an interesting little moment. I’m very alive to that sort of thing, how is this Christian instinct still around? I love how it pops up everywhere.
This, then, is Barron’s understanding of the New Evangelization: a confident, Christocentric presentation of Catholicism, attentive to the questions being asked today, and deeply conversant with all the new ways those questions are being asked and answered, especially in the digital realm of social media.
Although there’s a sense in which Barron is today an ecclesiastical bureaucrat, since he’s now a bishop and has administrative responsibilities, he’s keenly aware that the most effective forms of evangelization generally don’t spring to life as the products of some institutional initiative.
“That’s totally my instinct,” he says. “I’m with Cardinal Newman, who said that nothing great is ever accomplished by a committee. That doesn’t mean they’re useless; they accomplish certain things. But nothing great is accomplished by a committee.”
For an example of the point, American Catholics might think of Mother Angelica, the founder of the EWTN media network. To be sure, her feisty brand of conservative Catholicism wasn’t to everyone’s liking. She once publicly excoriated then-Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles for a pastoral letter he produced on the Eucharist, saying if she lived in Mahony’s archdiocese she would offer “zero obedience” to such a heterodox approach. Over the years liberal Catholics have often rued the rise of EWTN, arguing that it presents an overly dogmatic and selective version of what Catholic life is about.
Whatever one makes of EWTN, there’s no denying the fact that at the time it began broadcasting, in 1981, the U.S. bishops’ conference had been looking at trying to establish a national Catholic presence on cable television, and they would eventually pour millions of dollars into an effort that ultimately proved fruitless. In the meantime, one charismatic Catholic nun, who at the beginning, had nothing but Scotch tape and glue, managed to build the world’s most successful Catholic media empire. In effect, it was a lesson in how content is king—you can buy all the hardware and delivery platforms you want, but if you don’t have content that people are willing to walk across hot coals to access, none of it will really matter.
Barron says Mother Angelica and EWTN offer a compelling example of how effective evangelization generally works.
“I think certain people emerge through God’s grace, and they lead the way, and then eventually committees help to focus it, but it’s usually great figures that get the ball rolling,” he says. “Whether it’s Fulton Sheen, or Billy Graham, or Matteo Ricci, or whoever it may be. At the beginning, it’s not driven by bureaucracy. It’s not driven by official programs. Programs have to be developed around the charism or person, not vice versa.”
In reality, Barron says, the key to the success of the Word on Fire ministry is that it too was born outside any bureaucratic structure, and has continued to develop without being subsumed into officialdom within the Church.
I’ve been around Church bureaucracy for a long time, and it takes care of itself. I’ll go out on a limb here—Word on Fire succeeded largely because it operated outside of the Church bureaucracy, and that was because of Cardinal [Francis] George, God bless him, plus my own instincts. I don’t mean to bad-mouth Church bureaucracy, because it’s absolutely essential and the people who serve within it are critical, but there’s something about bureaucracy that’s resistant to real creativity. The bureaucratic element of the Church exists to serve the charismatic, but the trouble, and it happens very often in the Church, is that the charismatic element gets smothered by the bureaucratic. What we did at Word on Fire is to build our own bureaucracy, with people I know and trust who are committed to the mission. In other words, we’ve created our own bureaucracy that will serve our mission.
That’s not to say, however, that Barron believes that the infrastructure and resources of the Church’s official structures have no role to play, or that they can’t be useful in promoting the work of evangelization. In November 2016 he was elected to head the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, and he sees several possibilities for it to play a positive role.
“A committee can help the bishops understand things,” he says. “If we could explore and propagate best practices in regard to the use of the new media, for example, and help dioceses get geared around this issue, we could produce some positive results. We could help bishops think about the things bugging the nones, and how we could reengage them. If we can assist them with that, it might be very useful.”
Any salesman will tell you—and salesmanship, in a terribly inexact sense, would be the secular analogue to evangelization—that the key to success is knowing your customers. In the same way, Barron is clear about whom he’s trying to evangelize. Although he spends a fair bit of his time addressing already convinced Catholic audiences, that’s not really his target demographic. Instead, Barron’s bold ambition is nothing short of evangelizing secularism itself.
Barron describes the people he’s trying to reach in terms of two basic cohorts. First are lapsed, fallen-away, and alienated Catholics, people who have left the faith, often because they’ve imbibed and accepted parts of the secular critique of religion and the Church. Second, Barron is angling to engage the “nones,” people of no religious faith, many of whom have had no contact with the Catholic Church at all, and who carry around a bushel basket full of prejudices and instinctive biases against it.
“I’m much more interested in those who are drifting toward secularism, so those who are moving away from the Church world completely,” Barron says. “I want to get to those people and engage them again. Catholic insider baseball is largely irrelevant to the people I’m interested in. I’m more worried about the nones than I am about the nuns, I guess. Those are the people I’m focused on.”
Though Barron is not especially self-promotional, he’s self-aware enough to realize that there are certain aspects of his personality and background that dispose him to be effective in reaching out to those groups.
It’s hard to reflect on that, because I don’t think I ever went into it thinking, Oh, I’ve got the right personality for this work. In retrospect, though, I think I can identify certain qualities. For instance, I’ve never used, or rarely used, a directly confrontational approach. I try not to go into warfare immediately. Once in a while, like with the new atheists, I’ll do a little of that, and actually get into it and battle away. But it tends to be a more, I think, winsome, more positive approach…I think my YouTube videos are the same thing. I think that quality too, a certain calm intelligence, a certain invitational quality, is consistently in play.
Barron believes his personal background, including his family and his early experience of the Church, as well as his enchantment with the entire breadth of the Catholic experience, helped equip him to project that sort of style.
First of all, I just love the Catholic Church’s cultural and artistic and spiritual tradition. I find it very beautiful and life-giving, and so that naturally comes out. I’m eager to tell you about it. I’ve also always been a teacher, so most of my life I’ve taught in a formal way. I remember even as a kid I always liked teaching, explaining something, or bringing something to the table, so I’m kind of a natural teacher, I think. I’m pretty articulate, so I can usually say what I’m thinking. The verbal thing, which I think I got from my mother…my dad was a great man, a beautiful, holy man, but my mother is the talker in the family. My brother and I both got our communication skills from her. Also, we’ve talked about the postconciliar time in the Church that I’ve reacted against, but I actually came of age in kind of a relatively calm and happy period, so it’s not like I was in this deep confrontational situation. It was a friendlier kind of Catholicism that I came of age in, and maybe that shaped me in some ways too.
Asked if his nonconfrontational, “friendly” tone is a matter of instinct or deliberate choice, Barron says it’s a little of both.
“It’s born of an awareness of where we are in the cultural moment,” he says. “You’re not going to get a lot of nones coming back to church if you’re ranting and raving. You have to be more inviting, finding positive things in the culture you can identify with, so that’s been a conscious strategy.”
He went on,
I think you have to read the signs of the times, what’s going to be effective? Yes, I could do that [be more pugnacious], but would that be effective? Would I actually bring more people to church with that style? I would say no. So, some of it is personality, but some of it is reading the signs of the times. What do you need to do at this moment? And sometimes I do get tougher. I can show you lots of videos when I take on a more pugnacious tone, with “this is really bad” and “we have really got to be against this” on certain issues. Maybe at a different time in the Church’s life that approach would be called for more often, but now we’re trying to attract the nones. That approach is just not going to do it. The question we always have to ask is, “What’s going to work now?”
That focus on the positive, however, doesn’t mean that Barron wants Catholic evangelists to play down the Church’s distinctive identity, or to shrink from being clear about the truth claims discussed in the previous chapter.
Cardinal Newman made a comparison with an animal navigating its way through its environment. An animal that is utterly resistant to the environment will be dead in short order, but an animal completely open to its environment is also dead in short order. To be alive is to be in this subtle space of both resisting and assimilating. There’s the Church. It’s a living body, which indeed it is. It’s got to be holding off, all the time. It’s got to be defining itself, but at the same time it has to be assimilating and taking in. If it’s not doing both those things, it’s dead by definition. That’s the trick, and the great figures in the Church have always done that; they’ve struck this delicate balance. Pope John Paul II was a prime example of it, I think. Talk about someone who knew legitimately how to hunker down, and yet also reach out like mad. It’s a delicate operation, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Of course, I understand that at the abstract level, almost nobody would disagree that the Church should be doing both these things. The hard part is to figure out when to do what. I come back to the analogy of the animal kingdom: Let’s say a porcupine has moved to the countryside and is doing pretty well, assimilating and eating and taking things in, and then suddenly it’s being attacked. At that moment, the porcupine will stop and put every single quill up, sit there, and hunker down and defend itself with all its might. Those are the sorts of concrete judgments the Church has to make all the time.
When you are listening to Barron talk about the fine art of evangelization, you notice that certain adjectives keep coming up: nimble, quick, and canny are obvious favorites. They reflect his view that while personal conviction, knowledge of the tradition, and zeal for the missionary enterprise are all essential, they have to be rounded out by good instincts for where the target audience is at any given moment, and which strategies are likely to reach those folks best.
“I think an evangelist has to be nimble, and smart, and know all that is up there in Grandma’s attic so you can respond to the needs of the time,” Barron says. (“Grandma’s attic” is a favorite Barron image for talking about all the expressions of Catholic culture over the centuries, from literature and art to liturgy and spirituality, including the doctrinal and theological tradition.) “You’ve got to be nimble and know what you can use.”
That’s why, as mentioned earlier, Barron’s stock advice to aspiring evangelists is to “read, read, read,” meaning to immerse oneself in Catholic thought and teaching, and in the great works of Catholic literature. Secular nones sometimes ask a lot of smart questions of believers, Barron says, and without a solid intellectual foundation, evangelists will find themselves flustered, frustrated, and ultimately, ineffective.
Again, however, Barron stresses that being nimble isn’t being infinitely elastic.
“I know sometimes part of that nimble presentation is to put up your quills,” he says. “Sometimes you have to present what you’re against, not just what you’re for. You’re a little porcupine moving through the environment.”
Asked to name some of the great evangelizing role models of the modern age, Barron rolls out many of the usual suspects—Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, even Mother Teresa, who may not always have been evangelical in the explicit sense but whose life and example had powerful evangelical resonance all over the world. Then, however, Barron comes to a more counterintuitive answer, at least from a Catholic point of view: the great atheist intellectual and pundit Christopher Hitchens.
Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949, Hitchens was among the most extraordinarily prolific writers and commentators of his generation. He authored, coauthored, edited, or coedited thirty books, beyond a staggering output of columns and essays as well as television appearances and speaking engagements all over the world. A self-described socialist, Marxist, and “anti-theist,” Hitchens was an acerbic critic of religion, seeing faith in God as a form of totalitarianism that erodes personal liberty. The title of a 2007 bestseller by him pretty much sums it up—God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything . Hitchens often had a special animus for the Catholic Church, among other things penning a blistering critique of Mother Teresa in 1995 called The Missionary Position, which accused her of indifference to the causes of poverty and willingness to take money for her missions from dictators, human rights abusers, and other dubious benefactors. He died in December 2011, his last words reportedly having been “Capitalism. Downfall.”
We learned earlier that Barron never had any personal interaction with Hitchens, and that there was only one case in which Hitchens ever engaged his work, which came with regard to an essay Barron had written on Brideshead Revisited . Nevertheless, Barron was a careful student of Hitchens’s work, and he insists that Catholic evangelists could learn a lot from Hitchens—and they need to, he insists, because although Hitchens himself may be gone, his disciples and followers are still going strong.
“The disciples of Hitchens and Dawkins are out there, and man are they feisty and angry,” he says, referring to another noted atheist intellectual, Hitchens’s fellow Englishman Richard Dawkins.
Barron speaks admiringly of the qualities Hitchens brought to his own brand of evangelization.
He was smart and articulate, but unapologetic. It wasn’t a namby-pamby, “let me reach out to you and talk about your experience” sort of presentation. He was a smart guy, convinced he was right, and willing to share his ideas in an articulate way. It was done with a consciously media-savvy approach. He knew how to reach a wider audience, and he knew how to use the media. He was a great debater. He knew the arguments and counterarguments very well, and he was nimble and fast on his feet. He was able to respond to objections. It was so disheartening to me, in the early years with the new atheists like Dawkins and especially Hitchens, when Christians went up against them, it was like feeding them to the lions.
Barron acknowledges that some of those Hitchens victims were well-meaning but ill-equipped Catholics.
“Some of them were bishops and archbishops, and they were completely destroyed by Hitchens,” he says.
One exception on that dismal landscape, Barron added, was a Protestant philosopher, theologian, and apologist named William Lane Craig, who’s the founder of an online apologetics ministry called ReasonableFaith.org.
“Craig was one fellow who really stood up to Hitchens,” Barron says. “He’s Evangelical, and deeply grounded in the philosophical tradition and the scientific tradition. He gives the new atheists a run for their money. He’s the best Christian [apologist], and they knew it too. One leading skeptic, Sam Harris, said that Craig is ‘the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.’ ”
“The Catholics who went forward [to challenge modern atheists] were terrible, and I’ll tell you why,” Barron says. “After Vatican II, we threw away all of our apologetic weapons. When I was coming of age, apologetics was a bad thing. It was defensive, it was anti-ecumenical, it was antiquated, and we’re not into that anymore. Then along comes September 11, which seemed to confirm the Enlightenment view that says religion is irrational and violent, and we were unprepared.”
From there, Barron draws a fundamental conclusion about how the evangelical enterprise has to work in the face of such determined critics.
The banners-and-balloons way was not up to the task. Hitchens was offering hard arguments, and we weren’t ready to give answers. That’s why I’ve reacted a bit to the sort of romanticism about simple language, and the aversion to highfalutin concepts. Man, we need highfalutin concepts right now. We need counterarguments. We need smart people who can really delve into our own tradition and meet the opponents, because they’re not backing down. They’ve got science, they think, they believe science and philosophy are on their side, and they use the idea of a link between violence and religion all the time.
The way atheist pundits such as Hitchens and Dawkins deploy language, Barron says, is another area in which Catholics could learn some lessons.
“Dawkins is awful in his intellectual arguments,” he says. “I completely disagree with him, but look at the way he uses language in his writing and public speaking. It has massive appeal to young people, because it’s imaginative, it’s edgy. Watch Hitchens as he skewers his opponents. It’s a very creative, theatrical use of language.
“Then you switch to the Vatican’s website, and you get these long gray pages of text,” he says. “That’s not going to do it. That’s an example of how we need to be much more creative, theatrical, nimble, and smart in the way we do our work.”
In the end, perhaps the greatest backhanded tribute Barron could offer came in response to a question about whether he’s the “Catholic Christopher Hitchens.”
“I’d say no,” he replied, “but in many ways I wouldn’t mind being that. I admire Hitchens for many reasons, and I wrote some nice things about him. Man, if I had his facility with language, and his breadth of culture…he had a great grasp of the literary tradition, the artistic tradition, and if I had his rhetorical gifts, I’d be happy to claim that.”
As a footnote, Barron notes that Hitchens’s brother Peter, formerly an atheist himself, is now a “passionately believing” Anglican. “I was on vacation and I had a dream that the two Hitchens brothers were arguing, because I had been reading Peter Hitchens, and it was like two sides of my own brain fighting each other.
(“If anyone is the Christian Christopher Hitchens,” Barron says, “it’s Peter Hitchens.”)
Robert Barron, unabashedly and unmistakably, is a St. John Paul II sort of Catholic cleric. He was swept up by the boldness of John Paul, his swagger and confidence and bravado in presenting the Catholic faith to the world, and he doesn’t hesitate to say that John Paul deserves to go down as one of the great Doctors of the Church.
“There’s something about Wojtyla’s breadth of mind that I think he would qualify,” Barron says, using John Paul’s given name, Karol Wojtyla.
Yet Barron also very much has a both/and mind, which makes him a big Pope Francis fan as well. In fact, Barron believes that history’s first pope from the developing world, perhaps without thinking about it in quite these terms, is a living role model of the kind of evangelization that works in the cultural milieu of the early twenty-first century.
“Pope Francis hasn’t changed the faith, but he has changed the conversation,” Barron says. “What Francis has done in terms of public conversation about the Church is to make it clearer to people we’re not just about sex. That’s been extremely helpful in our wider outreach.”
By placing such an emphasis on humility and simplicity, on service to the poor, on concern for the environment and social justice, on immigrants and refugees, on opposition to war and the arms trade, and with his ardent outreach to the “peripheries” of the world, Barron believes, Francis has succeeded in lifting up aspects of the Church’s thought and life that were always there but that sometimes got lost amid a myopic focus on sex and the culture wars.
“Pope Benedict was a great evangelist at the intellectual level, and he was very keen on the engagement of the secular culture at the high academic level,” Barron says. “But I would say our prospects are better under Pope Francis than they were before in terms of the engagement of the wider world. It’s a skeptical world, skeptical for reasons both intellectual and moral, and this pope has been extremely effective in reconnecting to it.”
Barron is especially enthusiastic about Pope Francis’s 2013 document Evangelii Gaudium, which he sees as a sort of Magna Carta for effective evangelization in our day.
When I read Evangelii Gaudium, my first reaction was “Yes!” These are my themes; it’s what I’ve been talking about for years—not that Pope Francis consulted me, because, believe me, he didn’t! For example, he strongly stresses the via pulchritudinis (way of beauty), and when I read that, I said, That’s right out of my playbook. Don’t begin with the true or the good, begin with the beautiful, and it leads you to the true and the good. But begin with the beau geste, the kind gesture. You know he’s a master of the beau geste. He’s not a theologian and he’s not an academic, but he’s a genius at the beautiful gesture that draws people to Christianity. Then there’s a sense of urgency, how an emergency will concentrate the mind, focus the mind. This is not bland spirituality, but a message of immediate urgency that we have to announce to the world, and I think that comes through strongly in Pope Francis. Then there’s his sense of joyfulness, which echoes Gaudium et Spes. It’s the Beatitudes as the heart of Christian life. We all think of the Church as giving laws, wagging fingers, and clarifying sexual ethics, but in the great tradition, certainly Aquinas, the project begins with beatitudo , with happiness, with joy, and that’s John Paul II and Vatican II, and I saw it very strongly in Evangelii Gaudium. I love all that stuff, you know, and to me, it’s the great statement of his papacy.
Barron believes it’s especially striking that Pope Francis has been able to pull all this off in the wake of the Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandals. On the other hand, he argues, Francis seems to have intuited the only way for the Church to recover.
“That’s the genius of Francis, frankly,” he says. “We were at an absolute low ebb of credibility after the scandals, especially on sexual ethics. We kept just harping at sexual ethics? I think we had zero credibility, and we wouldn’t get anywhere. It’s like Gallipoli,” he says, referring to a famous battle during the First World War in which Allied forces, primarily troops from Australia and New Zealand, were forced to withdraw after massive losses.
“It was a good cause, but the wrong strategy,” he says. “I think Francis’s genius was to change the subject, and it was an astute strategic move.”
Barron is no naïf, so he’s well aware that some Catholics, including some conservatives who are among his biggest fans, don’t always see Pope Francis in such rosy terms. At times, they find the pontiff alarming, confusing on doctrine, and given to appointing more liberal figures to senior positions than either of the previous two popes. Barron says he’s aware of those objections but fundamentally doesn’t share them.
To my mind, if you read Francis honestly and faithfully, there’s nothing in him that’s opposed to the great tradition, or that undermines either John Paul II or Benedict. I think there’s a tremendous continuity. The difference is in style, pastoral outreach, focus, audience…those have all changed, I suppose, but I don’t see anything substantially different. I wouldn’t feel that the pope is turning us in some dramatic new direction. I try to emphasize the hermeneutic of continuity between him and the other popes, partly in order to reassure Catholics who are more on the inside and may have those concerns. And if you doubt me on this score, take a look at Pope Benedict’s own words about his successor. He strongly affirms that though there is a difference in style between himself and Francis, there is no difference in substance.
Moreover, Barron says, whatever objections some commentators or bloggers may have, Francis remains enormously beloved at the grass roots.
“Most Catholics I deal with, when you go into parishes, they just love the pope,” he says. “I don’t see a great divide over him. I just finished a preface to a book that Orbis Books is bringing out with a title like Francis Speaks to Priests. They had sent me all these texts of his sermons, speeches, and exhortations to seminarians and priests, and it was a delight to read. It’s bracing, and funny.”
That said, Barron worries that sometimes Francis’s emphasis on the beautiful, his emphasis on mercy rather than judgment, and his dialogic style, can be misunderstood.
There is a sense among some that Francis is this kind of hippie, an anything goes, everything’s fine, sort of figure, but this is completely out of step with his use of the image of the Church as a field hospital. That’s an intense, dire image. You go to a field hospital if you’re mortally wounded in battle, or severely wounded, and you need immediate care. Field hospital does not imply “Oh, everyone’s fine.” It’s acknowledging that you might not even know it, but you’ve just been very, very seriously wounded. You need a lot of intensive care. The assumption is, at the objective level, there’s a lot wrong with us, especially in a postmodern world. We’re very badly wounded, and therefore the Church has to bring to bear lots and lots of pastoral care. That’s the combination to get right. My fear is that Francis is read wrongly over and over again. So many people say to me, “I love this new pope,” and when I ask why, I often get a response like “Because he’s not as tough, and he kind of understands us.” Well, yes, but don’t take that to mean he thinks anything goes, that everything is just peachy. The field hospital is a super-Augustinian kind of image. Augustine said the Church is like a hospital where we’re in intensive care our whole life long. That’s Francis, and I think that part of it tends to get overlooked.
For Barron, the bottom line is that Pope Francis has successfully opened new evangelical horizons for Catholicism—the result, he believes, not of watering down doctrine or jettisoning tradition but of making a strategic calculation to back up a bit and then move down a different path.
“As I read Francis, it’s a Gallipoli kind of moment,” he says. “Yes, we could keep pouring all of our energy into the sexual issues, but let’s change it to environment, let’s change it to the poor, to immigration, and to other parts of our Church. That has had a very liberating effect, and I don’t mean that for a minute cynically.
“I don’t think he’s a bit soft on abortion, for instance,” Barron says. “He’s said very strong things about it. He’s not soft on transgenderism or same-sex marriage, but he’s changed the subject. It’s Gallipoli: ‘Look we’re getting mowed down over here. We’re not making any progress, so maybe let’s bring some men and material elsewhere in this grand struggle.’ That’s what I see him doing, and it strikes me as just the right move.”