A s Robert Barron tells the story, no one was more surprised than he was in July 2015 when he was named a new auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, serving under Archbishop José Gomez. To set the scene, Barron says he was in his residence at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary one lazy Sunday afternoon, stretched out on his couch watching some golf on TV.
“I love to do that on Sunday. I play golf, and that’s the sport I love to watch the most on television. I could spend hours watching golf,” he says.
(When I pointed out to Barron that that was a fairly shocking thing for someone who describes himself as an evangelist for baseball to say, he tried valiantly to argue for a both/and perspective. For the record, in all the hours I spent speaking with Barron for this book, it was the one time I found him completely unpersuasive.)
Earlier that Sunday, Barron had celebrated Mass and then had lunch with a Word on Fire benefactor, so he was looking forward to some downtime. Out of the blue, his private line rang, which struck him as odd because during the summer the seminarians are away and calls rarely come in during off-hours. When he answered, he heard the voice of Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, at the time still the papal nuncio to the United States. (Viganò was later replaced by French Archbishop Christoph Pierre.)
For those unfamiliar with the term, the nuncio is the pope’s ambassador in a given country. (The term comes from the Latin word nuntius, which means “messenger.”) Although the nuncio is the pope’s representative to the government of the country in which he serves, he also plays a lead role in the selection of new bishops in that country, and is therefore the one who calls the man who’s been selected to inform him of the appointment.
To this day, Barron says, he doesn’t know how Viganò got his private number—though he concedes that if the nuncio asks a fellow cleric for somebody’s digits, he’ll probably get them. In this case, Barron says the call informing him that he was to relocate to Los Angeles and become an auxiliary bishop lasted only about a minute—and the only reason it took that long, he says, was because Barron, born and bred in Chicago, thought perhaps Viganò was confused, mixing L.A. up with the Windy City, so he interrupted to be sure. (Barron’s perplexity was understandable, since about 95 percent of the time when a priest is named an auxiliary bishop, it’s in the diocese where he’s already serving. That was the case, for instance, with the two new auxiliaries named along with Barron. In fact, Viganò did indeed mean Los Angeles, telling Barron, “We’re sending you a long way from home.”)
The usual protocol in these situations is that the nuncio asks the candidate if he accepts the appointment, which theoretically leaves open the possibility that someone might refuse—although, given the emphasis on obedience in clerical culture, it’s generally understood that the expected reply is yes.
When the moment came that he was asked if he accepted, Barron says he flashed back on conversations he’d had over the years with the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who always told him that he didn’t like it when someone turned down a bishop’s appointment—rather than finding it humble, he said, George always regarded it as “cowardly and disloyal.”
“I said that if it’s what the Holy Father wants, I don’t know how I can say no,” Barron says. “That’s how I felt. Unless I’m dying, or there’s some dire reason, I couldn’t imagine saying no.”
One thing that might have entered Barron’s mind when he learned of his appointment as a bishop, but that he says never actually occurred to him, might have been the potential parallel with Fulton Sheen. On the heels of Sheen’s massive success as a television personality and evangelist, he was named the Bishop of Rochester, New York, in October 1966, his tenure lasting only three years, until he moved on in October 1969.
By most accounts, it was not a happy time. Sheen was an unquestionably gifted orator and teacher, but as an administrator, he didn’t seem to fare particularly well. His tenure came in the turbulent period after Vatican II, and perhaps the only area in which Sheen got high marks was irritating everyone almost equally. Liberals saw him as a throwback to the preconciliar Church, calling his decision-making style authoritarian and his positions on faith and morals unenlightened. Conservatives, on the other hand, chafed at his opposition to the war in Vietnam and his support of the Civil Rights movement. Moreover, because he’d had a falling-out with New York’s influential Cardinal Francis Spellman, most of Sheen’s fellow bishops kept their distance.
Since Barron’s résumé is likewise focused more on preaching, teaching, and media work than on governance, he might reasonably have feared that a similar fate could be in store for him. In reality, though, he says the thought never crossed his mind.
“Sheen was at the end of his career,” he says. “He was transferred to Rochester as the diocesan bishop in his seventies. Some say it was Spellman’s attempt to take one last shot at him. I must say, the idea of any comparison with my situation didn’t really occur to me.”
Although Barron is palpably sincere when he says he was “flabbergasted,” in all honesty, the fact that he became a bishop really shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. For one thing, serving as a seminary rector is one time-honored and reliable path to the episcopacy, not just in the United States but around the world. For another, as we’ve seen, the “New Evangelization” has been a towering priority for the Catholic Church since the era of Pope John Paul II, and on the contemporary American landscape, Barron is widely regarded as one of its most effective agents and role models. Even the decision to ship him off to Los Angeles makes sense in that light, since L.A. is Hollywood, it’s the entertainment and pop culture capital of the world, and if anyone’s going to have luck evangelizing that world, it may well be Barron.
In fact, probably the only plausible reason he wouldn’t have been made a bishop at some point might have been a feeling that he’d actually be more valuable to the Catholic Church as a full-time evangelist. That, however, is not how things broke, and so Barron set off to Los Angeles in the fall of 2015 and threw himself into his new role.
Both by conviction and by instinct, Barron is always extremely respectful of the Church’s chain of command. As a result, after he was named to Los Angeles, his first move wasn’t to elaborate a personal vision of how he saw his new responsibilities but rather to reach out to his new boss, Archbishop José Gomez, to find out what he wanted from his new auxiliary. Barron says that he called Gomez within a half hour of speaking to the nuncio, but that call was largely devoted to the logistics of announcing his transition rather than discussing a mission statement for his role.
As it happens, Barron says he’d met Gomez only twice before that moment, and the second occasion was a chance encounter in which the only words that passed between the two men involved Barron commenting that it looked as if Gomez had dropped some weight.
“So, I called him and said, ‘Archbishop, this is Bob Barron. I guess I’m coming out your way.’ He said yes, and I said, ‘Well, what’s next? What do I do?’ He answered, ‘We’re making the announcement on July 21.’ Stupidly, I said, ‘I presume that’s in L.A.?’ He said, ‘Well, yes!’ He said we’ll make the announcement, and that I’d stay at his house. That was it.
“My memory of that day is that I’m in this guest room at the residence in Los Angeles, across from the cathedral,” he says. “I’m looking out from the second floor, where you can see the Hollywood sign, and I’m thinking, What happened to me? Where am I? It was just surreal.”
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with a Catholic population north of 4 million, is the largest ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the country, and one of the biggest in the world. It’s so sprawling that for administrative purposes it’s divided into five pastoral regions. Gomez tapped Barron to head the region centered on Santa Barbara.
“To be honest I didn’t know where Santa Barbara was,” Barron says. “I knew it was a city in Southern California, but I had to go to Google to find out exactly where it was. Then everyone said, ‘Oh, gosh, Santa Barbara, that’s great.’ ” (A popular tourist destination, Santa Barbara is known as among the most beautiful, and affluent, settings in Southern California.)
Shortly after Barron arrived, Gomez told him he’d drive him out to Ventura to meet the priests who acted as deans of his new pastoral region. In the car on the way back, Barron recalls, he finally had the chance to ask his superior, “What do you want me to do?” Barron says the archbishop pondered the question for a while, and then gave a response that, for those who know Gomez, is vintage in its directness and clarity.
Gomez told him, “Be present to the people, give them hope, and teach them doctrine.”
“I remember saying to him, ‘Good. I got that,’ ” Barron says. “ ‘I can do that.’ ”
In trying to act on that job description—providing presence, hope, and doctrine to his people—Barron says he’s found the experience of serving as a bishop deeply rewarding.
Barron says that meeting his people has been a priority from day one. Characteristically, it wasn’t simply a pastoral instinct but also the product of a deep theological conviction born of decades of reading and study about what it means to be a bishop.
I want to be physically present, so I made sure I got out of this house every day during the school year, when things are really busy. From September until early June I was somewhere basically every day, whether it was a hospital, a parish, a deanery meeting, or whatever. In terms of confirmations, there were thirty-eight of them that first year. I felt very strongly about that. I wanted to get to know my region, and I wanted to be personally present so people can see me. I’m big on the bishop as symbol. I go back to Johann Adam Möhler [a nineteenth-century German Catholic theologian], who said that you need to have a single person who symbolizes the unity and the faith in a given area. That’s why the parish needs a pastor, because without a pastor, they don’t know who they are. The region needs a bishop to know who they are. I represent the apostolic faith, the archbishop, and the Church. I take that really seriously, and I try to express it in the first place with my physical presence.
One discovery produced by that ministry of presence, Barron says, was that despite stereotypes of Santa Barbara as posh and privileged, that’s not the whole story in his region.
“I discovered a lot of economic inequity, a lot of poverty,” he says. “The gang violence really surprised me. You knew about South-Central and East L.A., but out here I didn’t realize it. There’s also homelessness. You walk down State Street, and further down the water and towards the real trendy parts of town, and you find a lot of homelessness in Santa Barbara.
“I remember this letter I got, a really articulate letter, from a parishioner in Santa Maria, a town in the far northern section of my region. He said, ‘Bishop, I’m really concerned about the gang violence up here,’ ” Barron recounts. “I thought that area was bucolic, but there were hospitals filled with gunshot victims. So we invited the parishioner to come to a deanery meeting and talk to the priests about it.”
In general, Barron says, his drive to be present has reawakened a love for the pastor’s role he hadn’t had much chance to indulge for a while.
“One thing I’ve loved about being auxiliary bishop is, it’s a rediscovery of the pastoral side,” he says. “I did full-time pastoral work years ago, but not for a long time. But I do it a lot now, going out to see people, talking about prayer, talking to schoolkids and teen groups, trying to solve some practical problems. It’s all stuff I did years ago, but during my time as an academic, I didn’t do it that much.
“What I like best about being a bishop now is the liturgical side of it,” he says. “I like being in a parish, saying Mass, preaching, and greeting the people. I like confirmations. I like being out…for instance, at a school Mass. I’ll say Mass and preach and reach out to the kids. I like that part of being a bishop. You’re like the pastor of a big parish. So the Santa Barbara region is my parish, and I love greeting people and reaching out.”
In terms of offering hope, Barron is well aware that his ministry in Los Angeles unfolds against the backdrop of the clerical sexual abuse scandals. Los Angeles was especially hard-hit by the crisis, with cases that reached all the way back to the 1930s and continued through the 1990s coming to light in the 2000s. The archdiocese reached a settlement in 2007 with 508 victims for $600 million, which was the largest single payout ever made by the Catholic Church to resolve sex abuse litigation. To help fund it, a twelve-story Archdiocesan Catholic Center had to be sold off. Former Cardinal Roger Mahony’s handling of the scandals came under fire, and when he resigned, in March 2011, many Los Angeles–area Catholics believed he was doing so in disgrace.
Though Gomez didn’t say so explicitly, Barron is certain that the marching orders he was given were a product of that experience.
“I’m sure what he told me—give them hope, be present, and teach doctrine—was born of the struggles out here over the last fifteen years,” he says. “I think people got demoralized about the Church, and about everything that had happened.”
In that context, Barron says, he realizes that offering a hopeful, passionate vision of Catholic life is especially important.
I try to do it by being joyful, and reminding people that there’s more to the Church than the sex abuse scandal. I tell them the Church is an ancient community, going back to Jesus himself, and bearing the hope of the Cross and resurrection. I try to project a joyful, confident presence. To be honest, I think the smile goes a long way. I hope they see in me a joyfulness in being Catholic, that there’s more to it than the scandal we’ve been through—without for a second denying those scandals, and how terrible they were, but there’s more to it than that. I like to believe that gives people hope.
In many ways, when Archbishop Gomez pressed Barron to make sure he delivers doctrine to his people, he was preaching to the choir. As we’ve seen repeatedly through this book, a dumbed-down, “beige Catholicism” has been the defining bête noire of Barron’s career, by far the aspect of the post–Vatican II period that irritated him the most. He takes as an article of faith that people, including youth, are capable of handling a far more sophisticated version of what faith means than they often get, and failure to provide them with it often has left them ill equipped to handle the onslaughts of secular modernity.
I’ve taken that charge to present doctrine very seriously. I’m a teacher by nature, and I’ve taught doctrine for years, but now I’m not going to do it in the context of a classroom. I probably won’t mention Möhler and Schleiermacher too often from the pulpit. Nevertheless, I remember doing a homily on Holy Thursday down at the Ventura mission. It was great. We had a Eucharistic procession down the streets, and it’s such a beautiful place. I gave a rip-snorting homily on transubstantiation, without using the word, but I talked about the real presence and I did it in a doctrinal way. I’ve stressed the doctrinal side as a bishop, because I do think there’s been drift on that score. I’ve tried to preach and teach here in a more doctrinally conscious way: “Who’s God?” “Who are we?” “What’s sin?” “What’s redemption?” “What’s eternal life?” “What’s the Eucharist?” “What’s the Mass?” I’ve done that partly because the archbishop asked me to, and partly because I was already convinced it’s important. Whenever I get somewhere, I’m going to teach. I’ll do other things too, but I want to teach while I’m here.
One thing about the Catholic Church that’s constantly surprising to people, including most Catholics, is that new bishops are almost never given any explanation of why they were chosen, who put them forward, or what the logic was for assigning them to this particular job. Talk to most bishops even years after their appointments, and they’ll tell you they still have no idea why it happened.
For this reason, trying to explain why so-and-so was sent to a particular place is a time-honored Catholic parlor game. After the news broke that Barron was going to Los Angeles, two popular theories quickly made the rounds.
One was essentially political. By that stage, Cardinal Francis George had given way in Chicago to Archbishop Blase Cupich, today also a cardinal, who’s widely perceived as more liberal than his predecessor. Though Barron chafes at the liberal-conservative dichotomy, he does clearly identify himself as “postliberal,” so the thinking was that he might be more congenial to Gomez, who’s a protégé of Archbishop Charles Chaput in Philadelphia, a hero to the Church’s conservative wing, and seen as fairly by-the-book when it comes to matters of doctrine.
Barron, however, says Cupich had been nothing but encouraging to him since he arrived.
“I worked very well with Cupich,” Barron says. “When he arrived in Chicago, I was rector of the seminary. He never said a word to me about anything he thought was out of line. Once, there was a very difficult situation, where I had to make a tough call, and Cupich was right with me all the way. There was even a lot of flak afterwards, and he was right in my camp.”
Further, Barron says, given that he and Gomez hardly knew each other before July 2015, he finds any political reading of his appointment a stretch.
“If there was some ideological confluence, nobody ever told me about it,” he says. “I exchanged a handful of words with him. I can’t imagine there was some grand scheme, at least not that I know of.”
The more popular way of adding two plus two to get four was to posit that because Barron is America’s most visible and effective media priest, he was being shipped off to the West Coast to evangelize the highly secular entertainment and communications businesses.
Barron sees the logic of that hypothesis, yet he insists it was never part of the plan as it was presented to him.
“When I came out here, the reports were ‘Barron Goes to Hollywood,’ and ‘Media Star Goes to L.A.’ Well, maybe, but nobody ever said that to me. Later, I thought maybe that did have something to do with it, not in terms of the appointment itself, but maybe in the wake of it. However, nobody ever said that to me, either at first or down the line.”
Notably, of course, evangelizing Hollywood also was not part of the marching orders that Gomez delivered to his new auxiliary bishop.
“I honestly don’t feel like, boy, I’m here to reach out to Hollywood. Nobody ever told me that, and I’ve never received it as a mission,” Barron says.
He does acknowledge that his media experience and contacts in the industry do, in a sense, present a natural advantage in the Los Angeles area but says he wouldn’t overstress it.
I suppose it’s helpful, to a degree. I have been reaching out to the entertainment community here, and people involved in media. In terms of my own media work, I don’t know. We had it pretty well established and were able to continue it in Chicago, and now it’s here. I wouldn’t say that being here necessarily makes my Word on Fire work more efficacious. The contacts I’ve made, and the people in the entertainment world I know, are valuable, but in terms of the actual operation of what I do as an evangelist, it’s not really that significant. I think we had that in place before, we had so many projects already under way that we’ve continued, and it doesn’t have much to do with being in Los Angeles.
Granted, no one has ever charged him with trying to plant the flag of the faith in Hollywood or the entertainment industry. Still, given his background, aptitudes, and interests, it does seem a fairly natural challenge for Barron to take on. He says he does want to move in that direction, but his is a deliberately patient, quiet, and largely behind-the-scenes approach.
I’d like to be involved with that, and I’ve made some inroads with it. I’d like to try to evangelize people who are heavily involved in the entertainment world, and to give them a more substantial sense of the Church and Christianity. I prefer a quieter approach, one that reaches out directly to people. I don’t feel it as some pressing obligation that I have, but I would like to pursue it. It’s just been very preliminary at this point, but we’re trying to look at things like retreats and days of reflection for Hollywood people such as screenwriters, actors, producers, et cetera. I’ve got a couple contacts in L.A. who know that world pretty well, and they’ve been in dialogue with me. Through them, I’ve reached out to other people. We’re working on it, and I’d say the quieter, more direct evangelization of those involved in that world is a better path.
Once the ball gets rolling, Barron says, one role model he may propose to entertainment professionals is the great American Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, whose best-known collections of short stories include A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).
“Flannery O’Connor gives you all the drama you want, all the weirdness, but you’re communicating the real essential stuff of Christianity,” he says.
Theologically speaking, when Robert Barron became a bishop, he took on responsibilities not simply to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles or his own pastoral region but to the entire universal Catholic Church. Every one of the more than five thousand Catholic bishops around the world is understood to be part of what’s called the College of Bishops, which is seen as the successor to the group of apostles who followed Jesus, and who led the early Church after his ascension into Heaven. Just as the apostles formed a college around Jesus, meaning a body of people united in a single purpose, Catholic theology holds that today the bishops form a college around the pope. As a result, they’re all considered to have obligations to the whole Church throughout the world.
Barron obviously knew all that well before his appointment, but he says that one experience in particular since he became a bishop brought the point home to him in a new way. That experience was attending an annual course in Rome sponsored by the Vatican for newly appointed bishops around the world, which is known colloquially as “baby bishops’ school.” Because the courses are typically held in September and Barron wasn’t ordained as a bishop until September 8, 2015, he missed that year’s edition, and so he ended up going in September 2016.
“It was a great experience,” he says. “It’s a bit like a summer camp for bishops, because you stay at a place called the Regina Apostolorum, about five miles west of St. Peter’s and the Vatican. It’s a seminary, and so my room was a seminary room. It reminded me of my college seminary days. The bed was about two and a half feet wide, and we were all commenting on how the first couple of nights we were in great danger of rolling out and falling on the floor! The meals were good, I must say, in the typical Italian style.”
The most impressive thing about the program, he says, was how it brought home the universality of the Church.
The great thing about it was that I was with 157 other bishops, from all over the world. You’d come down for meals and you’d be at table with someone from Ecuador, someone from India, someone from Syria, someone from Boston…it made for a very lively exchange. Sometimes I was with English speakers. I can handle French fine, and there were a number of Canadians, a number of French, and then Francophone Africans, so I was able to handle that pretty well. My Spanish is okay, so I spoke some Spanish. My Italian is basically restaurant Italian, so I would try to make my way occasionally in Italian. It was a very illuminating process, and that was the best part of it, actually. There was a whole series of talks, from some pretty high curial officials in Rome. But the best part of it, frankly, was just getting to know these bishops from around the world.
At the end of the day, Barron says the experience of baby bishops’ school left a deep impression.
I would say I have a broader sense of the Church’s life. Yes, I’m the regional bishop of Santa Barbara, but I’m also a bishop of the Catholic Church. I knew that, of course, but that sensibility is stronger in me now. Yes, you’re assigned to this place, and there’s something very local about my responsibility. But I’m also a successor of the apostles and a bishop of the Catholic Church. I’m ordained a bishop not just for L.A., but for the whole Church. That can sound grandiose, and I don’t mean it in that way, but you’ve got this truly international responsibility. More important than my status as an American is my status as a Catholic, and as a Catholic bishop somehow connected to all the bishops of the world. That has impacted me, I think, and changed my consciousness.
As it happened, baby bishops’ school also gave Barron the chance to meet Pope Francis for the first time when he addressed and then greeted the new bishops. It turned out to be quite the memorable exchange.
It was a great moment. We were there with 157 bishops, and to the pope’s great credit, he gave a thirty-minute talk to us, it was not a short talk, and then he greeted every single bishop. I thought maybe he’d greet some, but it was every single one of us. It took a good hour to get through that process. That’s an eighty-year-old guy showing a lot of stamina! The three of us who were newly appointed for Los Angeles, Bishop Joe Brennan, Bishop Dave O’Connell, and myself, were together in line. In the past, Pope Francis had referred to us, when talking to Gomez, as “your triplets,” as in “How are your triplets doing?” So, when Bishop Brennan went up, he said, “I’m one of the triplets from Los Angeles.” I was two people behind him, and I saw the pope’s face light up. He said, “Oh, where are the other two?” We were right there, so we gathered around him. He spoke to Joe for a little bit, and then to Bishop O’Connell. Finally he turned to me, and I said, “Hello, Holy Father, I’m Bishop Barron.” He said, “Ah, el Gran Predicador!” meaning “the Great Preacher,” and then something like “who makes the airwaves tremble.” I’m choosing to take that in a positive way! I was very touched, because, honestly, I didn’t know if he knew me from Adam, or anything about the work I was doing. It was very moving…I’m still kind of going on the fumes of that. It was very moving to be with him, he’s super gracious, and it was wonderful.
Though Catholic bishops are constantly pressed to give their views on virtually every issue confronting the Church, they’re facing special pressure today to address the question of whether divorced and civilly remarried Catholics should, after a process of discernment with a priest or bishop, be able to receive Communion. Under traditional Church rules the answer has been no, but in a document on the family and married life titled Amoris Laetitia, released in April 2016, Pope Francis appeared to open the door to a cautious yes.
On the other hand, Pope Francis insisted that he did not intend to change Church teaching or Church law on marriage, and he clearly instructed priests that they were not to act on their own but rather to await guidance from their bishop. As a result, bishops around the world have been called upon to clarify how Amoris Laetitia will be implemented in their dioceses. Some have determined that the document does not reverse the traditional position, others have found that it creates new possibilities for allowing people to approach the sacraments, and many have not (yet) said anything at all. To date, Pope Francis has resisted attempts to compel him to say something more definitive, which means that, for now, the ball is often in the court of the local bishop.
In Los Angeles, determining the pastoral consequences of Amoris Laetitia or anything else does not fall primarily on Barron; rather it’s the responsibility of Archbishop Gomez. Still, Barron understands how important the issue has become in the life of the Church, and as he generally does, offers a balanced and nuanced perspective.
I read [what Pope Francis said about the divorced and remarried receiving Communion] in terms of what I learned in the seminary years ago, which is that there’s a difference between the objective assessment of a situation and the subjective assessment of guilt and responsibility. Those are two different moves, epistemologically. One is relatively easy, in that you can look [at a situation] and say, “Yes, that state of affairs is objectively wrong.” The other move is much more complicated. It’s the sort of thing a confessor has to do. The question is, To what degree are you responsible for this situation? The pope says, quite rightly it seems to me, you can’t simply look out and say any such situation is necessarily a mortal sin. I can say it’s less than the moral ideal the Church calls for, but I can’t say ipso facto that the person involved is in a state of mortal sin. I’ve got to do a much more thorough assessment of knowledge, engagement of both mind and will, and mitigating factors. I think that’s what he’s saying, and to me that’s classical Catholic moral theology.
Barron insists that none of that assessment of subjective responsibility involves any reversal of Church teaching.
“Someone in a state of mortal sin ought not to approach Communion, true. It’s been true, and it remains true,” he says. “But are you in a state of mortal sin? That’s a different question than whether you’re doing something objectively wrong. That second question is subtler. It seems to me he’s putting stress on that, and emphasizing the importance of the distinction.”
Barron also is not in agreement with some Catholics who find the teaching in Amoris part of a pattern under Pope Francis of downplaying the Church’s moral expectations.
“As I read Chapter 8 [the section of Amoris touching on the Communion question], I go back to the first part of the letter,” he says. “Francis is really strong on the moral standards. He says a gay relationship is not even analogous to what we mean by marriage; he says very strong things about gender ideology, about ideological colonization. I don’t see him dialing down the ideals. I see him dialing up the shepherd’s role, and I think that’s the right combination.”
As for the specter of different bishops appearing to offer different guidance, Barron says that if people understand what’s actually going on, there’s no problem with it.
It would be a problem if, and only if, different answers were being affirmed at the objective level. If one set of bishops were to say, “No, it’s no longer objectively wrong to be divorced and remarried,’ ” then we’d have a serious problem. But I think what’s happening is that Amoris is bringing more explicitly to expression what’s always been assumed at the pastoral level, and that’s not a contradiction. I think that’s acknowledging the complexity of these different subjective discernments. It’s not at all that one thing is objectively wrong in Bavaria, but it’s okay in Buenos Aires. I would argue that we’re not making that claim, and Francis is not making that claim.
“You still have to say there’s something objectively wrong, but the subjective apprehension of sin is a separate issue,” he says. “In that sense, the subtlety or indirection of the pope’s approach in Amoris is right. It’s appropriate, because you’re talking about a different epistemological level. The very ambiguity of it is appropriate to that level of discernment.”
Speaking in a strictly theological key once more, there is no such thing as “the American Catholic Church,” or “the German Church,” or anything else. The Catholic Church is universal, not nationalistic, and historically it’s fought titanic battles to prevent national loyalties from swamping that universal instinct—efforts to suppress Gallicanism in France in the seventeenth century, Josephinism in the Austrian Empire, and Febronianism in Germany in the eighteenth century, and even “Americanism” in the United States in the nineteenth century, are all cases in point. In Catholicism, neither teaching nor authority is decided on the basis of national boundaries. Moreover, bishops do not answer to a national superior but are directly accountable only to the pope.
Despite all that, national conferences of bishops today are among the most important and influential institutions in the Church. Bishops have long seen value in organizing themselves at the national level, because doing so allows them to pool resources, act in a coordinated fashion, achieve economies of scale, and engage national affairs more effectively. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which brings together all the bishops in the country, is a leading case in point.
As a result, when a new bishop is appointed in the United States, he becomes a member of the conference and is expected to take on responsibilities at the national level.
“Ipso facto you’ve got this national level, so you’re drawn into the conference of bishops and so there’s that dimension to it as well,” Barron says.
We’ve already seen one example of that aspect of the job, with Barron’s election in November 2016 as chair of the bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis. (The outcome was seen as a tribute to Barron and his reputation, since it’s rare for a newly appointed auxiliary bishop to be elected to a chairmanship that quickly.)
“Afterwards, Cardinal Wuerl [of Washington] talked to me. Then Cardinal O’Malley of Boston came up to say, ‘I want to congratulate you.’ I said, with all sincerity, ‘I need a crash course in the USCCB,’ and he looked at me kind of puzzled, but it’s true. I don’t really know the inner workings of the USCCB.”
At least Barron is clear on what his priorities—or to put it more accurately, priority—should be.
“What I want to do, and I’ll see if this flies, is focus on the nones. Getting after the nones should be a major priority—find them, bring them back, engage them, answer their questions. We’re losing young people in droves, and so we need to get them back. I think that should be a priority when it comes to evangelization.”
Part of what it means to be a bishop, therefore, is to be engaged at the national level, including in the social and political life of the country. An especially acute form that engagement often takes is reacting to the policies and priorities of whoever happens to be the U.S. president, never more so than in the era of the ever-controversial President Donald Trump.
As we’ve seen, Barron is not by nature a political animal (even if Aristotle defined all human beings as such). He doesn’t really care for the dynamics of partisan politics, and in any event, his real passion is the life of the mind, as well as the evangelizing efforts to which his intellectual and pastoral pursuits lend themselves. Nevertheless, he understands that especially now as a bishop, he can’t stay completely out of the fray, because there are important Gospel principles at stake and people rightly expect him to express them.
To begin with, Barron confessed he was as “flummoxed” by Trump’s victory as many other people were, assuming that in the end, Hillary Clinton would prevail.
“We had a meeting here at the house on election night with the deans of my region, and when it was over, I said, ‘Well, let’s go and watch the results.’ We all thought we knew what was going to happen, so it was a complete surprise.”
The first lesson Barron draws from the rise of Donald Trump is one that’s not terribly contested, which is that it reflects the various ways in which America has become a fractured society.
“It does say we’re pretty divided, and I get that,” Barron says. You see the election results, and then you see the Women’s March and all that, and the conclusion is that we’re a pretty divided country. It’s certainly witness to the polarization.”
In addition, Barron believes the Trump phenomenon illustrates the way in which a significant portion of the country felt neglected.
“I agree with those analysts who say there had been a certain ignoring of a large swath of the country, which reacted rather negatively to that,” he says. “There’s an anger within the body politic that’s reflected in the election of Trump, including people who have felt ignored and excluded from the process.”
In terms of Trump’s early moves, Barron resists being enrolled in the ranks of either enthusiasts or inveterate critics. We spoke in January 2017, so Barron was not reacting to anything Trump has done since that point or to the various statements the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued regarding aspects of Trump’s policies.
“I think Trump does address some things that probably needed addressing, that weren’t being talked about adequately,” he says. “I approved of the early moves about abortion, for instance. I like the language he’s used with the press about the March for Life, so I think that’s good. I think those things probably were overlooked.”
As for Trump’s executive orders to restrict immigration and the flow of refugees, Barron says, “I wrestle with it.
The Church has the stance of inclusivity. The Church doesn’t want to divide families, the Church doesn’t want to build walls, but fundamentally the Church wants to build bridges. At the same time, I think that we as a Church, and we as bishops, have been inadequate in articulating more completely what we mean when we say a country has a right to defend its borders. Almost everyone agrees that the way Trump is doing it is excessive, that building walls and so on is not advisable. That said, we pay lip service to the principle that borders can and should be defended, but in my judgment, we don’t articulate sufficiently what that would look like. Do we have a program of five steps that says, “Here’s a legitimate way to enforce immigration laws”? No, we don’t. Looking to the future, that’s something that concerns me. Yes, our message has to be building bridges rather than walls, but that doesn’t mean we want to encourage completely unrestricted movement. Governments need to strike the right balance, and we could probably be of more help in that regard.