B ishop Robert Barron and I share passions for both baseball and Catholicism. Speaking for myself, I believe baseball and the Church are deeply kindred spirits—both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates, both have communions of saints, both reward patience, and in both, casual fans can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.
Another thing baseball and Catholicism have in common is that fans love to speculate about the future, especially in terms of who the next hot commodity in “the show” will be. There are whole TV programs, blogs, columns, and so on devoted to which pitching coach might land a manager’s job, which minor-league prospect might be a game changer, which star player on a struggling team might get traded to a contender, and so on. Similarly in the Church, a time-honored parlor game is to speculate on which priests are being groomed to become bishops, which bishops in small dioceses might get bigger ones, who’s going to make the cut the next time the pope creates new cardinals, and who might be in line for a major Vatican gig. Of course, the granddaddy of all such exercises is trying to guess who might be the next pope.
Generally, such guesswork misses more than it hits, but that doesn’t stop people from being fascinated by it. It’s anybody’s guess what Barron’s future may hold, but one thing does seem a reasonably safe bet: He’s unlikely to finish his career as an auxiliary bishop. Barron simply has too much of the “right stuff”—intelligence, media savvy, a solid commitment to Church teaching yet a capacity for nuance and pastoral sensitivity, and a personality that allows him to engage and win over a wide range of people.
Ironically enough, while the rest of us can’t help thinking about what the future may bring, Barron himself doesn’t seem terribly preoccupied with it. Right now, he’s loving the chance to dive back into direct pastoral contact with people in his Santa Barbara region of L.A. after spending most of his career as a professor and seminary administrator. At the same time, he’s still fully engaged with the work of his Word on Fire ministry—churning out YouTube videos and writing columns, rounding out his new CATHOLICISM: The Pivotal Players film series, and giving talks. He’s also keeping one foot in the academic world, among other things publishing a book on 2 Samuel in 2015 as part of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series.
As we saw in the last chapter, it’s not that Barron doesn’t have ambitious plans for Word on Fire, wanting to see it become nothing short of a full-fledged movement in the Catholic Church. However, one has the sense that he is fundamentally a happy man just as things stand, and that if the phone never rings again with a higher gig in the Church, he would be satisfied.
To say Barron is content, of course, is not the same as to say that everyone else is content with Barron. We saw in Chapter 1 that he sometimes draws criticism from both the left and the right—some liberals view him as too uncritical of the Church and triumphalistic about it, and some conservatives worry that his capacity for nuance can mean “going soft” on matters such as same-sex marriage, the need to combat Islamic radicalism, and even the theological debate over whether it’s legitimate to hope that Hell is empty.
None of that blowback, however, seems to ruffle Barron’s feathers. He’s heard the criticism, is aware of it, and may even think there’s some merit to it. At the end of the day, however, he appears comfortable in his own skin. As an evangelist, Barron believes in being fast on one’s feet, and also in being flexible. As he puts it, “If it works, great. If it doesn’t, try something else.” He’d apply the same principle to himself—if you find my approach helpful, fantastic. If not, try someone else.
(Although that principle would seem to be no more than common sense, it’s utterly characteristic of Barron that he invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein to explain it, arguing that one of the weaknesses of modern philosophical liberalism is that it tended to be overly “univocal” in its approach to method.)
Barron also isn’t overly concerned about what his good friend the late Father Andrew Greeley described as the “original sin” of the clerical world, which is envy. Greeley, who experienced a fair bit of clerical envy himself, often said that the minute a Catholic priest gets a touch of fame and success, others will come out of the woodwork to try to tear him down, and Barron concedes he’s had a few brushes with that tendency.
“People claim, ‘Oh, he’s just trying to get attention,’ stuff like that,” he says. “Whenever you go into the media, that’s automatically the problem. People always say, ‘He’s an attention hog, just trying to make a name for himself, never met a microphone he doesn’t like.’ ”
Once again, however, he doesn’t seem overly perturbed.
“I’m a sinner, I’m sure there’s some of that in me,” he says, “but I also know that’s part of the game.”
Robert Barron, in other words, is a calm man in an increasingly hysterical time. If he were to offer no other contribution to the Church, and to the world, his gift for being both unwaveringly firm in his convictions and unflappably gentlemanly in the way he goes about articulating them, might alone qualify him for Time or Business Insider lists of the world’s most intriguing personalities.
None of this is to say that Barron is anything less than forceful in his presentation of what he sees as the beauty, goodness, and truth of the Catholic tradition, or that he’s incapable of mounting a strong defense of that tradition when he feels the situation calls for it. Rather uniquely among today’s public personalities, however, Barron is able to be forceful without using force, and to deliver a defense without getting defensive.
As a final query about Barron, therefore, it’s worth pondering what that basic calm is about.
Part of it is his upbringing and background. Barron was born into a solid Catholic family in Chicago but one, he says, that was never overly “demonstrative” about its faith. His childhood experience involved prayer and regular Mass attendance, but no sense of spiritual and cultural warfare, and gave him the ability to relate to people of different walks of life without instinctively passing judgment or feeling the need to wag a finger.
Part of it too is his intellectual formation. Granted, it’s not as if academics are incapable of being demagogues or bombasts, and there are plenty of examples of that. Still, when one’s rhetoric is routinely peppered with terms such as propaedeutic, exegetical, and epistemological, it’s frankly a little more difficult to come off as fire-breathing and confrontational.
Then there’s Barron’s passion for teaching. In one way or another, Robert Barron has always seen himself as a teacher, which involves exercising the fine art of persuading people that something is worth knowing, and then guiding them as they come to know it. Teachers who routinely berate or get into shouting matches with their students, who become defensive at every question or every perceived slight, don’t succeed in conveying a love of their subject, which may also explain why for Barron, restraint and patience are often the better parts of virtue.
Part of it as well is a conscious decision, born of Barron’s sense of what works evangelically in a postmodern, secular culture.
You’re not going to get a lot of nones coming back to church if you’re ranting and raving. I don’t want to be part of the outrage machine. You have to begin with the positive…I did a video on this, taking as my point of departure the image of Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan walking up the aisle of St. Patrick’s in New York, because that’s one of the great evangelical icons of our time. When I first saw him do it, walking up and the smiling and the backslapping and everything, I was just captivated. I’m not Dolan, but I try to offer some version of this more inviting way of doing things, finding positive things in the culture you can identify with. That’s a conscious strategy.
I suspect, however, that the real explanation for Barron’s calm lies in his faith—not just the content of it, because plenty of Catholics who believe in the same things do become unraveled in trying to explain or defend their positions, but how deeply persuaded Barron is that what he’s trying to say to the world is completely, thoroughly true.
In effect, it’s the “smartest kid in class” syndrome, though in this case Barron would say the real smarts come not from himself but from the great tradition. In any event, if you’re sure you know the answers, then you never have to sweat the test.
In the end, that calm resolve has been key to Barron’s success, and it is also why he’s such an important role model for Catholicism in the twenty-first century. That’s likely nowhere more the case than in the ever more polarized, and ever more secularized United States. What Barron offers is a road map to a Catholic way of engaging the culture that’s simultaneously clear about what the Church stands for but also open, and that attracts rather than alienates.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to invent sound bites to capture the Barron spirit: “Clarity without clamor,” “acuteness without acrimony,” and “passion without polemics” are all formulas with which I toyed, but in the end, better judgment prevailed, and I opted to let Barron speak for himself.
Perhaps the vintage expression of the Barron spirit came in one of those rare moments when he almost did lose his cool. It happened in 2014, when Bill Maher, the atheist comic who hosts Real Time on HBO, interviewed Christian political activist Ralph Reed. Among other things, Maher got Reed to agree that he suspends his critical faculties when it comes to his religious beliefs, which drove Barron to go on YouTube to respond.
Faith is not infrarational, meaning “below reason.” That’s credulity, that’s superstition, that’s accepting things on no evidence, that’s childish. God gave us brains, and he wants us to use them. Authentic faith never involves a sacrificium intellectus , as the medievals said, a “sacrifice of the intellect.” In fact, that’s a sign that your faith is inauthentic. If you feel obligated to leave your mind aside to have faith, it’s not real faith. Real faith is not infrarational, it’s suprarational, it’s beyond reason, but inclusive of it…There may be darkness on the far side of reason, but never on the near side. There’s never a suspending of one’s critical faculties. Authentic faith awakens the mind.
That, in a nutshell, is how Robert Barron sees the great Catholic tradition, meaning its art, its saints, its literature, its theology, all of it. Nothing in his experience has ever awakened his lively mind in quite the same way—and he wants yours to be awakened too.
To put his basic drive into more spiritual terms, Robert Barron wants your entire life to be set ablaze with the “Word on Fire.”