← The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 484: Bishop Barron Joins Catholic Voices Podcast (Part 2 of 2)
00:16:54
Today we’re bringing you the second half of a conversation between Bishop Barron and 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...
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Word On Fire Show. I'm your host, Matthew Petrusic. Today we are bringing you the second 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 this conversation, they explore Bishop Barron's unique methods for public speaking and preaching, among other related topics. Enjoy.
- [00:34]
B
So we're going to just move now to talking about our week here in London. So we've been preparing for it for longer than expected. So we were meant to have it in September. Gone. And you were. You were there in Rome on the Thursday.
- [00:48]
C
Yeah.
- [00:49]
B
And then later that evening, the Queen died.
- [00:50]
C
The Queen died, yeah.
- [00:52]
B
I remember talking to. To your brother John on the phone. I think you're in a restaurant in Rome.
- [00:57]
C
We're in a restaurant with my brother and father, Paul Murray. I don't know if your listeners know him, but a, you know, great spiritual teacher at the end of Angelicum in Rome, an old friend. And we were out for dinner, and before dinner he said. I said, you know, the Queen evidently is quite ill. And he said, oh, I would. I'm sure she'll be, you know, she'll survive for many more. And then in the course of that dinner, we got the word that she had died. And so we made. It was difficult, but it was the right decision not to come because, you know, that week was very chaotic here. And so, anyway, reschedule for now, and here we are.
- [01:27]
B
Yeah. And it's been a fantastic start. So at this point, we had Parliament on Monday. So you had a tour of Parliament, but you'd never had a tour of Parliament before. Just share with us a little bit of your impressions.
- [01:37]
C
I loved it. I was saying to someone this morning, it really was one of the most memorable days of my life yesterday, because I love history and I love, you know, British history and all that. And I'd been around Parliament, I've certainly been in Westminster Abbey, et cetera. I'd never been inside the Parliament building. And every room, not only are they stunningly beautiful rooms, but with so much historical resonance. So you walk into Westminster hall, and that's where Thomas More, you know, was tried. And then you go next door, what was the chapel, but it's where the House of Commons met, like at the time of the American Revolution. And Edmund Burke would have been arguing his position in that room. And then you cross over into the present House of Commons and been destroyed during the Second World War and then rebuilt. But Churchill would have been in this place. Then you go across and there's the House of Lords and there's that gilded throne. I mean, there's so much resonance. And speaking as an American, obviously, we broke from, what do I say? England, Great Britain, the uk. We broke from you guys. But at the same time, we're all, in a way, culturally English. I mean, we're so influenced by English history and so on. So to go in a place like the Parliament is very moving. I found it very moving. And then the chance to give the talk there to that marvelous audience last night, including several MPs, it just made it one of the most memorable days of my life.
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, it was a packed crowd and I think there was at least 20 members and peers of all houses, you know, Catholic, Christian, and we took as a theme for that. So Pope Benedict had given an historic address when he visited for the Papal visit in September 2010. And the theme of the speech, really, there's a line in it, he said, religion isn't a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation. It's an excellent speech, well worth reading. And so we're kind of playing with those themes. What is it that you hope to say to them or what you're trying to say in that speech?
- [03:41]
C
I think just to remind everybody of how Christianity is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we've been shaped willy nilly by it. I mean, whether we know it or not, it's in the cultural DNA of anyone who's been influenced by Christianity. I closed the speech and I was very happy. I think he was a peer, you say, right, from the House of Lords. It was an older gentleman and I had made reference to the Union Jack and I said, which as I look out over the Houses of Parliament, hovering over the whole thing, is the Union Jack, which is three crosses kind of interposed on each other. Right. I said, how odd, when you think about it, that central to this national symbol is the instrument of torture on which a young Jewish rabbi is put to death around the year 30 AD. That's the image, that's the symbol that we have and how deeply strange that is. And it speaks to the distinctiveness, the uniqueness, the wonder, the odd quality of Christianity that holds. God became one of us, died for us, was raised from the dead. That that reality is in the flag which hovers over the whole of the British establishment, you know, And I remember he said to me, I've been in this House, you know, for 40 some years, and I've never thought of the Union Jack that way. And I thought, okay, that's the point I wanted to make. That's what I wanted to convey.
- [05:14]
B
That's the job of a great preacher, isn't it? Because there's so much within a church, but it's a kind of. They lack potency if a preacher can't bring them to life. To say what is the fact. It's almost kind of just preaching reality as it ought to be seen, in a sense. Yeah, that kind of prophetic role of preaching.
- [05:34]
C
One thing I was very happy to be able to begin the speech with Gandhi. And I mentioned, sometimes it takes the outsider to look at a text with really fresh eyes that Christians have been reading Matthew 5, 6, and 7 for centuries and centuries and turn the other cheek and resist not evil and love your enemy, et cetera. And it become, oh, maybe kind of a banal abstraction for a lot of Christians. But Gandhi reading it for the first time, it took his breath away. And he realized, this is fresh, this is new, this is something that could actually work. And then, by God, he proved that it could work. And then he was imitated by some of the key players in the 20th century, from King to Tutu to John Paul II. And what I argued last night was that's the dynamite of the church. That's the power of the church. And Gandhi, the outsider, saw it, but he helped Christians to realize, oh, yeah, that is at the heart of our great message. And then I tied it to the doctrine of creation and God making the world through a nonviolent act, tied it to the ethic of the sermon, then finally to the paschal mystery, the dying and rising of Jesus. And I just. I guess I wanted to do in a way what. What Gandhi did for his Christian audience. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way, or I'm seeing it with a fresh perspective. That was my goal last night.
- [06:54]
B
And it's revealing of blind spots. I think one of the things. There's a concept called the curse of knowledge. It's like the longer that you've participated or studied in something, the harder it is to remember what it was like before.
- [07:06]
C
Yes.
- [07:07]
B
And you know how much of evangelization is impeded because, you know, we don't realize what we don't know. These blind spots exist. So, yeah, that kind of sense of the curse of knowledge. How do we help people? How do we help evangelists actually to get over the curse of knowledge?
- [07:21]
C
I mean, how awful that Christianity has become for many Christians, a kind of, oh yeah, tired old Christianity. Oh, yeah, that's Christianity. Where Christianity is, when you get it, it's always fresh and always strange and always unnerving, and it compels you to see in a completely way, Paul's saying, I know one thing. Christ in him, crucified.
- [07:45]
B
What?
- [07:46]
C
That would have struck them as the oddest possible thing to be proclaiming. You're proclaiming someone who was crucified, you know, and then, so to get that, what's at stake there, why he could say it with such blithe confidence. It's only in light of the resurrection and Jesus Christ is Lord, you know, we say, oh yeah, Jesus Christ is Lord. It's a nice, pious, spiritual sentiment that was a bomb going off in the ancient world when Caesar was the Lord and these first Christians with no army behind them and no institutional support whatsoever, were blithely saying, no, Jesus is Lord. That's why they all ended up in prison or most of them ended up killed, because the powers that be knew exactly what they meant. Well, the fact that we've lost that, that we would never hear a phrase like Jesus is Lord and say, ho hum, that we wouldn't hear that and say, that's a revolution. That's an explosion. So that's part of what I want to recover is that very liberating oddness of Christianity.
- [08:53]
B
And I think that kind of links in with, in a sense, odd figure to English people if you're not Catholic. This kind of figure of Thomas More. It's a big. It's a big theme of the, of your. Of your week here. I think I hadn't watched A Man for All Seasons until. Until you'd spoken about. I think you're saying it was your favorite film.
- [09:12]
C
Yeah.
- [09:12]
B
You kind of watch it periodically. So what does Thomas More mean to you? And we're going, of course, to visit his cell in the Tower of London. This week we're going to have a reception at the Great Hall, Lincoln's Inn, where as a young lawyer, he was received to the bar in the 15th century. What does Thomas More mean to you?
- [09:28]
C
It means a lot to me. And it began with the movie so I would have seen A Man for All Seasons when I was 16, probably for the first time. Maybe a high school teacher of ours showed it to us. I forgot, but I've watched it, no kidding, every single year of my life since then. When I was a professor at the seminary, I would always have a little evening on his feast day and I'd invite. It was during the summer, so the fellow faculty members come to my room and watch man for All Seasons. I always showed it to my students during the school year. And you know, Paul Schofield, the great Shakespearean actor, plays Moore in such a memorable way. So in my imagination, of course, I know the great Holbein portrait. I know what the historical Thomas Moore looked like. But I always think of Paul Schofield. I mean, I always think of the figure from that play. And I could probably recite most of that play by memory, by heart. And it had a huge impact on my own thinking and my own prioritization of values. It's a prime example of a saint teaching Christianity more than the theologians do, even as I reverence theology. But a saint teaches you what it's about. And that image of Scofield playing more still, I mean, sings to me. So that's how More came to mean a lot to me.
- [10:46]
B
And one of the elements of this week that I'm really looking forward to is we're doing a conference on the theme of sharing the Church's. And I think in many ways it's a significant moment in England for the UK because since the pandemic, I would say it's probably going to be one of the largest gathering of Catholics in the uk. So we're so grateful to have you there. But I think your address. You're going to speak about the role of the laity in evangelization. So what is it you're going to say?
- [11:13]
C
Well, maybe just stay with More for a second, because he's a great layman, he's not a priest. He thought he might want to be a priest as a young man. And he always had an intense spirituality, but precisely as a layman, precisely as someone in the world. So more as a lawyer and then as a politician, then as a statesman at the highest level, becomes Lord Chancellor of England, so the highest appointed position in the realm. A literary figure of great significance. I mean, known throughout Europe, Utopia and other works. He's a model of Christian humanism. You know, there's something beautiful about the monastic or Carthusian life and all that. But More exhibits the lay style, to use Balsar's language, the lay style of being a Christian in the world. And that's super important now. And see, look at Vatican ii, the universal call to holiness, the call of the laity is now to sanctify the secular order. So the order of politics and law and science and entertainment and business, finance, that's not my job. As a priest or bishop. That's the laity's world. Now go forth and christify it. Well, see, More knew that in the 16th century. I mean, More understood that in his bones. And then the other side of it, he lived that life as richly as it could be lived. But he knew, okay, push has now come to shove because I cannot stay in this position and be true to my conscience because of what Henry VIII is doing. Because of the moves Henry VIII was making, More knew, I can't with integrity, continue. And then he resigned from that life and then paid the ultimate price for that integrity. So he's, in both those ways, such a model of a lay commitment to the world.
- [13:02]
B
One of our great patrons for Catholic Voices is John Henry Newman. Just seeing the kind of links there between, you know, kind of conscience and, you know, when he converted in 1845 and stuff, I think his sister never spoke to him again. That sense of. Yeah, there's a real English theme. I mean, what. What's your sense in. In the UK for Catholics, you know, having to make those kind of conscientious decisions? How can figures like Newman and More help lay Catholics, as, you know, they kind of feel at the coal face. That's what prevents us from doing evangelization. Right. It's the sense of the fear of what's going to happen with this. What would your advice be to Catholics? To encourage them?
- [13:42]
C
Yeah, because you're right, Newman didn't pay the ultimate price the way Moore did, but he paid a price by God. I mean, he paid a huge price by becoming a Catholic. And then he lost the world that he moved in so comfortably. You know, think of Newman prior to 1845 is a major player, you know, in the establishment life here in England. And then he had to give most of that up. He recovered it by the end of his life, in a way, you know, after the apologia Privita suva, and he becomes sort of a revered elder figure. But he did sacrifice a lot to be a Catholic. I find whenever I come here to England, it always strikes me how alive the 16th century is whenever I move in Catholic circles here, we're never far from Tyburn. We're never far from the great sacrifice of the martyrs. It's still very much a lively proposal in people's minds. Okay. In a way, that's a gift of grace, isn't it? Because from those figures, you take courage. Seems to me that you can and should be Catholic despite any opposition. We're not facing what Edmund Campion faced. We are facing opposition, you know, from a secular culture.
- [14:54]
B
So polite persecution.
- [14:55]
C
Yeah, but it is a real persecution. You know, the secular world is often hostile to us, stands athwart our purposes. We face, you know, ridicule sometimes and contempt. Okay, well, heck, we can handle that. If Thomas Moore could face the chopping block and Edmund Campion could face, you know, Tyburn tree, we can certainly face a little, you know, public opposition. So maybe especially here to take courage from these great figures.
- [15:25]
B
So thank you so much, Bishop Barron, for joining us. And I want to give the last word to Newman in a sense, because I think it's quite central to both the missions of Catholic Voices and Word on Fire is this sense of emancipated laity. You know, Newman in the 19th century was saying, I want an educated, well instructed laity. I wish to enlarge their knowledge, to cultivate their reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are. What are the bases and principles of Catholicism? And 150 years later, I still think in many ways we're trying to live up to that vision. And of course, I think, you know, I'm grateful in the way that Catholic Voices helped me to do that and Word and Fire has really inspired me, inspired millions around the world to do that. So just so grateful to you, Bishop Barron, for joining us today, for being in London for this week, all the fruits that we have and, and thank you all for watching. God bless.
- [16:18]
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.