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The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 482: Bishop Barron Joins Catholic Voices Podcast (Part 1 of 2)
00:16:46
Today we’re bringing you the first half of a conversation that Bishop Barron had with Brenden Thompson during a trip to London. Brenden is Programme Manager of the Word On Fire Institute in the United Kingdom where he works to promote the faith in a...
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm your host, Matthew Petrusic. Today we're bringing you the first half of a conversation that Bishop Barron had with Brendan Thompson during a trip to London. Brendan is program manager of the Word on Fire Institute in the United Kingdom, where he works to promote the faith in a deeply secularized culture. In his conversation, they explore Bishop Barron's unique methods for public speaking and preaching, among other related topics. Enjoy.
- [00:37]
B
It is my pleasure to be in St. Patrick's SoHo Catholic Church in London with Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop, it's great to be with you, Brendan.
- [00:46]
C
Good to be with you.
- [00:47]
B
And we're here because you're on a tour of London on the mission of London for the week. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But I've been really excited to talk to you about your approach to public speaking and preaching. One of the best introductions I ever heard of a speaker was that the speaker came on stage and. And they said, I want to thank God for all of the hours of prayer that this person has spent, all of the quiet study, all of the conversations that they've had that have led them to this moment. So as, you know, kind of like if you look at an iceberg, everything below the waterline, and I was. I was conscious as I looked through all your content. I don't think you've ever spoken, say publicly about that kind of, you know, under the hood of Bishop Barron's approach.
- [01:29]
C
Yeah, you know, calls to mind Fulton Sheen. And of course, we're at this place that Fulton Sheen or administered when he was in England. But Sheen was asked one time toward the end of his life, you know, he gave a sermon and someone said, archbishop, how long did you work on that sermon? And he said, 45 years. You know, so it's that same idea. Your whole formation, in a way, goes into it, and you're relying on everything you've read and heard and done before. So there is that under the surface quality of the iceberg. But it's a subtle, complicated process, I would say, if you really dig into it, how you get ready for even a short presentation. The one I gave this morning was about 20, 25 minutes. But there's a bit of process behind that.
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B
It's been attributed to various American presidents, so I'll just say anonymous. But they were asked to give a speech, and they said, how long is the speech? He said, because if it's half an hour, give me a couple of weeks to Prepare. If it's 10 minutes, give me a Month or two to prepare. If there's no time limit, I'll begin now.
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C
That's right.
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B
So I think it leans into that sense of. The distinction, I guess, is between proxima and remote preparation. So remote preparation, the cultivation of virtues, the learning of attitudes, skills and knowledge that helps one to be a speaker. And then they say the proximate. I've got this talk with this particular deadline, so maybe we just. Just scale back to the kind of remote preparation. So, you know, you've done theological studies, studies for the priesthood, your seminary rector, bishop. What's that kind of remote. What are some attitudes or principles that could help somebody who's trying to be a. You know, in public speaking or preaching?
- [03:11]
C
Remember years ago, a teacher of mine at the seminary said, preachers are like sharks. You know, you're going through the water, all you're doing is looking for food all the time. So you're. And that's true, though. You're always aware. I could use that. Oh, yeah, that's good. That story, that insight, that perspective, that idea. That book I just read, that'd be good for. And usually, you know, which talks are coming up. And so in your reading, and one thing I would say, read, read, read, read, read and read. If you're going to be a public speaker, you're trading in words. And to be immersed in the world of words and to be at home with words and to use them as tools and to love them, have a refined sense of words, that's really key, I think. But you're like a shark. You're always on the lookout for a good image, a good idea, a good turn of phrase. Remember in, what was the movie, Shakespeare in Love? Remember? And they show Shakespeare going through the town, and he hears one guy yelling at the other, you know, the plague on both your houses. And he goes. He kind of made a mental note of it. And there's something of it, I think, in public speakers.
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B
So do you have, like, a notebook? Do you keep them kind of analog, like a written notebook, Digital?
- [04:22]
C
I don't do that, but I would make mental notes. Yeah. And I would relate things to talks I know that are coming up. So for this tour, you know, of London, I knew the various places I'd be speaking, and I'll give you an example. So last night I spoke at Parliament, and I began with the story about Gandhi, the young Gandhi, coming to London. Well, at the time, this is many months ago, I was reading Gandhi's autobiography for another project. And I'm reading along, and he tells this marvelous story about when he's a young kid, shy, afraid, coming to London and then finding the Bible and finding the Sermon on the Mount. And I think, hey, hey, that would be really good for my talk in Parliament. So I went, I remember, to my computer. I was in LA at the time, and I did write that up as a little vignette and thought, okay, I'll use that for that talk.
- [05:11]
B
And there's a good organizing principle, like Cicero talks about his kind of five canons of speaking or communication. So you've got invention, which is, you know, kind of bringing that process basically, of the shark of finding the different arguments that would come through and distilling and that processing. So. And then arrangements of bringing it into a kind of, you know, logical, coherent structure that makes sense. Style, memory and delivery. And it's always struck me that particularly nothing against priests and preaching, but there's so much of, I guess, theological formation that means you do a lot on, let's say, invention, so the crafting of an argument and arrangement so you can have many wonderful university sermons. But that style, memory and delivery, what does that look like for you?
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C
Well, and I rely a lot on Aristotle's back in his rhetoric from the ancient world. Every good persuasive speech has to have logos. There has to be logic, arrangement, and arguments being made. And I like the word argument. It's not a popular word, but it's a good word that every persuasive speech and a homily is certainly that should have an argumentative form. I don't mean contentious. I mean, it's laying out a demonstration of some kind. So it has to have a logical structure. But the second thing Aristotle said is pathos. There has to be feeling. It has to be pathetic in that literal sense that the feeling and the passion of the speaker comes through. Fulton Sheen put it this way, that people only really listen to an excited speaker. And that's true, isn't it? If you're not excited about what you're saying, why should the people get excited about it? That's why Sheen said you should never read from a text. Because the answer would be, well, look, if you can't memorize a darn thing, how do you expect me to remember it? A pathos. And the final thing for Aristotle was ethos. The character of the speaker has to come through, and he thought that was the most important thing. If you're saying one thing and you're living in a totally different way, and people know that, or they can sense that you will not be Persuasive. So those three things you mentioned, memory, very interesting to me. Like the talk at Parliament. I'll give you an example. So I would have put those notes together. I don't write it out word for word. I have kind of like talking points, elaborated bullet points. I would have written that last spring probably. And then we were supposed to be here in September. It was called off, so I kept it at my computer. Well, I took it out maybe a week ago. Right. Oh, there's the talk at Parliament. Okay, you're right. I got Gandhi. And then I did this. Well, then in the course of the flight over here, the course of that first full day, I basically memorized the talking points. So I had about six pages maybe of elaborated talking points. I like to reach the point in a talk like that if someone just took my notes away or hey, we lost your notes, it wouldn't bother me. And I don't think I looked at them very often last night because I basically had them memorized. So that's what I do with, let's say a 45 or 50 minute presentation. And I do use some of those old medieval memory techniques. They talk about the house of memory. You imagine a house with his different rooms. And the first part of your talk with the Gandhi. Oh, yeah, come in the Gandhi. He's in that, you know, front room. And then I go from that room into the kitchen. Oh, and that's where that next part of the paper is. I go from the kitchen into the, into the dining room. And that's where that third part is. And I go upstairs in that first front bedroom. That's the fourth part of my talk. So that's the house of memory. And you put the different parts of your talk in the different rooms. That's extraordinarily helpful. And that's an ancient technique, the Greek technique. Yeah, yeah. But we've kind of lost that. I think maybe the computers have not helped us there. We think everything is, you know, can be stored in a computer, but learning how to store it in your brain, and that's just a super useful way to do it.
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B
So sometimes there's a. Maybe an immature way of thinking about it that somehow the scriptures mean that you've got to do everything off of the cuff. And of course there are moments, I think, when you're called to do something extemporaneously. The Holy Spirit might, you know, guide you to kind of set aside. But have you ever been challenged on that, that sen. Of kind of memorizing things?
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C
Challenged meaning that you shouldn't do it that way.
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B
You shouldn't do it. Yeah.
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C
No. The trick is, and I learned this from Sheen, really. Sheen would speak in his television performances for about 30 minutes without a note in front of him, not reading anything, but speaking very articulately. How'd you do that? And Sheen would say, well, the hours of preparation and what he used to do. He was a great linguist. He would speak the talk out loud in French and then in Italian to make sure he had it in his mind, the ideas. And then he would speak it through in English, and then he was ready to go on the air. I do that. So if I have the outline, basically, I don't do it in the different languages, but I'll talk it out loud, like in a car or in my room if people won't think I'm out of my mind. But I will speak it out loud and walk around the room and then try something. Or that word didn't work, or. No, that connection wasn't properly made. And that's how I refine it. I did some of that in London here, walking along the rock over the Thames, and I was speaking some of that Parliament talk out loud. So that's how I work it, I think.
- [10:35]
B
You also said that if you just continue to think about the ideas, you're kind of processing all of the stimulus that you're receiving, that eventually all you're doing is saying, you think so you don't need to. You know, when somebody asks me what my name is or where my address, don't think about. I don't have it memorized. In a sense, it's integrated.
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C
Right. But it takes an enormous amount of preparation, that's true. To reach that point where you have that freedom from the text and you've so internalized it. But you have to have the logos in place. A lot of people my generation, you know, were taught, hey, you know, get rid of that text, and, you know, just speak from the heart. And the problem with that was logos took a vacation. So it was a lot of pathos and a lot of free association. And let me tell you about my vacation. But it didn't have a logical structure, argumentative form. And see, that isn't compelling to an audience because if you can't follow what's being said and A doesn't follow from B and from C, you lose interest. That's when you drift off. So you have to have the logos. But if you're missing pathos, same problem. Someone's droning his way through a speech and doesn't seem at all interested in his own speech, audience won't get interested. So it's that combination of the two things. But it takes a lot of time and effort to internalize rhetoric to that degree.
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B
And I guess one of the other challenges a speaker has is that if you think of the Venn diagram of those three modes of persuasion, so the logos, the ethos and the pathos, different talks will sit differently. There's a kind of constellation. So if you're giving a legal speech, then of course you want it to major on logos and less on pathos. You know, if you're an angry mob, it's pure pathos.
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C
Right.
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B
So in terms of modulating. So I've, you know, I've kind of noticed the difference between the talk at Parliament yesterday, say, and the talk to kind of an in house Catholic audience today. So how do you do some of that kind of modulation as you move between those modes?
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C
I think the single hardest thing in public speaking is fitting your speech to the audience. That's the hardest thing. What is my audience? What are they open to? What are they capable of? What level should I go at? I find that's the hardest thing. I remember one time, years ago, there was a conference at Mundelein Seminary. Very high level, it was the Bible and something, and it was very high level academic. So I prepared this very serious paper, 20 page academic paper. And I read it because that's what we have to do. And afterwards this lady came up to me and she said she had listened to my sermons and all this. And she said, what was that? And I said, well, it's a paper. She goes, I brought high school kids down from Wisconsin. They didn't know what you were talking about. I said, well, ma', am, it was an academic. Well, yeah, but it was a complete waste of our time. I'm sorry, but. So that was an example of the speech not fitting at least that part of my audience. That's maybe the hardest thing, is to get that right. You know, if the rest of your life all you have to do is write academic papers and deliver them in a way that's really easy. When I went to Oxford a couple years ago, after the Newman canonization, I had this serious paper, 20 pages, epistemology, all this stuff, that's easy. Get to a podium, got text in front of me, you just read it, you know, with a little bit of energy. But that's easy. Last night is much harder. When you have an audience in front of you and you want to engage them, you have something substantive and logical to say. But you don't want to just read, you know, words. That's more challenging, that's more of a performance. Then, you know, sometimes it's appropriate to read a paper That's. Sometimes that's the right thing to do.
- [14:06]
B
It's easy. And good. Good public speaking often requires you to repeat yourself quite a lot because otherwise it's the pressure of kind of constantly having new things to say. So I guess I notice, you know, if you're giving a speech sometimes there's, you know, the kind of barren highlights. Oh, there's Baron's best bits, in a sense. So do you find, like, it exhausting to have to do it again and again, finding that passion?
- [14:25]
C
No, if the audience is different, I don't. And to that point, I do think it's very important in teaching and public speaking that you have. Not that you're, I hope, you know, tediously giving the same talk all the time, but that there are certain points of reference that come through a lot and then people. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I got it. Oh, yeah, that's. That's. Yeah. Because that's an old principle too, is. Is repetitio mater studiorum. You know, repetition is the mother of studies. And so when you hear something repeatedly, that's helpful to people.
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B
So just before we go to go to a break, have you got a. Pope Francis recently gave advice. You know, he's given various advice to priests on preaching. What would be Bishop Barron's advice to priests on preaching?
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C
Well, I would. Logos ethos is not bad. I mean, stay with Aristotle's recommendations from the rhetoric. But, you know, I think the needful thing at the moment is probably more logos. I think to keep. Make sure that the speech you're giving has a beginning, a middle, and end has an argumentative form. It's making a point in a coherent way. And that you could. This was said to me years ago. And it's helpful that you could put the theme of your sermon on one of those little signs outside the church. If you're going by a church and there's a sign with a little, like, motto on it, you know, if you can't do that, you haven't distilled it enough. You haven't thought it through sufficiently. So can you put the theme of your sermon on one of those little signs in, like, a handful of words? I'd say that.
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B
Thank you. So we're just going to take a break, and after the break, we're going to explore a little bit more about Bishop Barron's tour to London and the kind of big theme of the life of St. Thomas More.
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A
Thanks for watching. If you enjoy this content, please remember that there is much, much more available inside the Word on Fire Institute. The Institute is an interactive online Catholic community, now nearing 30,000 members strong, who have the common goal of evangelizing the culture for Christ. Join us today@institute.WordPress.org that's institute.WordPress.org God bless you and we'll see you again soon.