← The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 529: The Art & Means of Communication (pt. 1)
00:28:26
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrusic, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us today. We're bringing you a special episode, a conversation from our very own Evangelization and Culture podcast, hosted by Dr. Todd Warner. Recently, Dr. Todd, as we like to call him around here, sat down with the Word on Fire CEO, Father Steve Gruno and Bishop Barron to talk about social media. But rather than retread the usual tropes of social media conversation, Dr. Todd hosts a richer and more intimate conversation on the topic through the lens of evangelization, art, communication, and more. Please enjoy this first segment in which we'll look specifically at the art and means of communication.
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B
In a 2020 interview about social media with the National Catholic Register, Bishop Robert Barron noted, quote, social media can function as a wonderful means of evangelization. I would strongly urge the rising generation, those who have social media in their blood and their fingers, to delve deeply into the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the Church and then endeavor to propagate that wisdom through this marvelous tool. Start a website, make videos for YouTube, launch a Facebook page, and dedicate these to the Gospel. Paul used parchment, ink and the Roman roads. You use what our culture makes available today. He goes on to say, I would also give the following spiritual before you say or write anything on social media, whether you are publishing your own material or responding to someone else, ask this simple do these words of mine constitute an act of love? Remember that to love is to will the good of the other. Bishop Robert Barron and Fr. Steve Grunow on the evangelizing power and pitfalls of Social Media. Now my name is Todd Warner and this is the Evangelization and Culture podcast from Word on Fire. My guests today are none other than Bishop Robert Barron and Fr. Steve Grunow. Bishop Robert Barron is the Bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester here in Minnesota, and is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Father Steve Grunow is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago who also serves as CEO and Executive Producer for Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Let's begin with segment one, the Art and Means of Communication. Communication should be simple, but in fact it is often difficult. Ralph Nichols, a University of Minnesota communications scholar, insisted, quote, the most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them. Close quote Stephen Covey, the celebrated author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, asserted, quote, the Biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand, we listen to reply. Close quote. And perhaps newspaper publisher William H. White captured the challenge of communication best by saying, quote, the greatest barrier to communication is the illusion that it has taken place at all. Close quote. So, Bishop Barron and Father Steve, first of all, thank you guys so much for being here.
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C
My pleasure. Thank you, Tod.
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B
As we begin this conversation about the Catholic faith and about social media, let's start with the first fundamental question. Why is communication so important? And yet why is it often so difficult?
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C
Well, at the heart of the missionary impulse of the church. Right. Go and preach to all nations. So Christianity is not a kind of private mysticism whereby the goal of it is simply to be alone with the alone. As Plotinus said, when you have an experience of God, you're sent on mission. Jesus sends his disciples right from the beginning on mission. And the whole point is to communicate. Now, go right from that to Paul vi. And the Church is a mission to evangelize. So communication is not incidental. It's not a secondary concern. It's the primary concern of the church is to communicate the good news. The fact that at the heart of the word gospel is news, some news that we need to propagate and has to be propagated in every generation. So no communication belongs to the heart of the matter.
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B
Father Steve, would you weigh in on that?
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D
I'll hit the angle of why it's difficult. It's difficult because of sin. I mean, we have a story at the. One of the foundational stories in the Bible is the Tower of Babel. And it's essentially a story about communication. But it's not just about communication with one another. It's about communication with God. And when that communication with God is off, it causes the scattering, it causes the misunderstanding. So I'd say that it becomes difficult because in our narrowness and our finitude and in our sin, we can speak to one another, but we can't communicate with one another all the time. Yeah.
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B
Well said. Over two millennia, the ability of priests, bishops and popes to spread the word of God has ranged from proclaiming from the pulpit to exhorting in the public square, to distributing papal encyclicals. And before we get into the age of mass media like radio and television, could you explain how, for 1900 years, the word of God reached the ends of the earth?
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C
Well, think of the great missionary journeys. I mean, there was this impulse from the apostles on to go out. I mean, Paul goes around the eastern Mediterranean. He ends up in Rome he wanted to go to Spain and Spain meant the ends of the world. And then great stories about St. Thomas going the other direction, all the way to India. So there was this propulsive quality to Christianity from the beginning. Again, not a self contained mysticism, but it was a mission to announce that something had happened and they just felt this obligation to tell the world about it. So they themselves went out. They used, as I mentioned in that quote that you cited, the Roman roads, the very fact that there was a means of transportation that was very advanced in that part of the world. They took full advantage of that. Peter and Paul go to Rome because Rome was the center of the empire, therefore it was the hub of communication for the known world. So I think they had communication on their mind from the beginning. Now fast forward to the great missionaries. So from the beginning, throughout Europe the missionaries go, think of Boniface in Germany, think of Patrick in Ireland. Now go to the age of exploration and you have the Jesuits and you've got Francis Xavier going to the Far east, you've got Jesuits, Franciscans and so on. Coming to the new world that's deep in the Christian heart is to go out. And that's how it went, to the ends of the world.
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B
Father Steve, I want to ask you because Bishop and I were talking earlier about the difficulties of getting into a particular airport because it has one flight and the weather could be questionable and so on. And you think about Paul traveling by foot, if you will, from, you know, from where he was all the way to these various far, far flung areas. Do you think that the work that was required back then would be too daunting for the modern world that's comforted with all its transportation, all of its instant communication and so on. How would the gosp among us people, if we were relying on the same modes of communication that St. Paul, St. Peter and the other disciples were working?
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D
You mean putting us back in time?
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B
Yeah, let's say our, if you will, the metal we have nowadays and all the comforts we have. Would the word of God get to the ends of the earth? I mean, I believe in God, the Holy Spirit, but how would our part go?
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D
Well, the first thing I want to say is that the great propulsion that Bishop Aaron's talking about, the spreading of the gospel, happened through God's grace. I mean, that was the animating reality that forced it outward into the world. And you know, we talk as Catholics with the infusion of virtues, particularly at baptism, faith, hope and love, or the cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, what all Those things, all those virtues have in common, and we don't talk about it enough, is risk. All of those things make us take risks. You will take great risks out of faith. You will take great risks out of hope. You will take great risks out of love. And we can go through the cardinal virtues as well in that sense. So it was this infusion of grace, which is the power of the Holy Spirit, that just animates Christians to endure hardships, to go where they're not welcome, to set out on mission in dangerous and difficult places. I think that that's behind it. So that still animates the life of the church. I think at times, modern conveniences mitigate our receptivity to the virtues as making us risk bearers. Cause I think we fall into what Bishop Barron's talking about, like, well, I've got these virtues, and I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna contemplate them. And then in the comfort of my own home, I'm gon faithful and hopeful, and it'll be a consolation for me. It's not a bad thing, but it's not the full thing. So it's like, take Christians who are animated by the Holy Spirit. They've been infused by God's grace. Take them back in time. They're gonna do what Paul did. Because that's what Christians have been doing for centuries. And we're at our thing is the church is always at our best when that's what we're doing. When we fall into kind of the pseudo crypto mysticism, everything goes off the rails.
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C
Can I tell a quick story? Because as we're talking about the missionary impulse, the ends of the world, my great hero, and Father Steve's too, was Cardinal George. And Cardinal George was a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. And that was a missionary order. And they prided themselves on being the order that went to the ends of the world. And it was, I think, in the 19th, maybe early 20th century. They had gone to western Canada and the Yukon and Alaska, and they decided to. We're gonna send our people as far as they can possibly go until there's no one else to declare the word to. So the missionaries went up to, like, a distant village in Alaska, and they said, Jesus Christ is Lord and risen from the dead. And are there any other people? Oh, yeah, there's some further up there. And then they went. And then Jesus Christ is Lord risen from the dead. Is there anybody else? Yeah, there's another. And they went until finally someone said, no, we're in. At which point they said, Jesus Christ is Lord. And they returned to Rome and they told the Pope, we did it. We declared the gospel to the ends of the world.
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B
Wow.
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C
And Cardinal George very much had that ethos, you know.
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B
Yeah. Fantastic. Pope Benedict XVI once said, art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith. Is it fair to say that paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows served as the original social media evangelizers? And what was the power of the spiritual message? Messages conveyed to pilgrims and parishioners who looked upon Notre Dame's rose windows, the Serrazzi Chapel's Caravaggio paintings, and the Academia statue of David.
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C
Yeah, there's a lot to that. And of course, that's a big part of my ethos that we're on fire. And I got that from Balthazar. So Ratzinger, Benedict XVI was very much a Baltasarian that way. Now a high academic. Both of them were. They both love words and the life of the mind, but they intuited there's something that's really primordial about beauty, and I'm more and more persuaded. D.C. schindler argues this, that of the three transcendentals, the good, the true, and the beautiful. The beautiful is maybe the most important because it's what gets your attention. First you have to be amazed by something, the splendor of it. And then you can ask about its truth and about its goodness. But the beauty has to grab your attention and now go right back to Jesus, the transfiguration. Jesus himself in his beauty is what got their attention. Right. So then the church has used the beautiful, as you suggest there, to evangelize. Part of it was indeed to catechize, was to communicate truths about the faith. So think of a parent bringing her child and say, well, now there's Moses and there's Elijah and pointing to statues on the cathedral. But I think it's more primordial too. It's just the sheer beauty of the cathedral awaken someone to the power of the transcendent. So, yeah, that's the first use of colored pictures in those Gothic cathedrals.
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D
I just think there's always been a relationship between art and technology. So we don't oftentimes think of paint and brushes or the tools that sculptors use. That's technology like that. But it is. Yeah, you know it is. And so that technological forms lend themselves to artistic forms. So the Gothic cathedrals are an artistic form, but they're made possible by innovations in technology. So it goes with all art, painting, architecture, so on and so forth. So there's kind of a relationship between the two of them. And I think what we're seeing now in our culture is the breakdown of the relationship of art and technology, that we have a technological form that's available to us, that's in our pockets all the time and directing the course of our life and tethering us to all these good and bad things. But it's divorced from art. It's divorced from aesthetic expression. So in the past, the Church has used these technological innovations that we see expressed in the Gothic, the Baroque, the Romanesque, even in the modern. But now it's like the technological form that is kind of. The culture is developing. It has an uneasy relationship with the arts. And so that's going to be, I think, one of the evangelical challenges that's emerging right now.
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B
Bishop, you're reacting to that notion of the divorce of the technology from the aesthetic art aspect. What are your thoughts on that?
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C
Yeah, I mean, one should serve the other. Beauty is always more fundamental. And if technology sort of is separated out and it becomes a servant of scientism, that's the real danger now, I think, is the scientific mode of knowing becomes dominant. Technology is its servant. But technology ought to serve the beautiful, because that's one of the transcendentals that connects you to God. So that's an important reconnection we need to make.
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D
People are finding through AI ways of being artistically expressive. However, it's disembodied from the elements of creation in a way that other technological forms that lend themselves to artistic expression are not. And it's almost that there has to be some type of incarnational aspect to the relationship of technology to aesthetics in order for it to work. And I don't know if we're there yet or even if it's possible. I think we're in the early stages of finding out whether the current technology can do that.
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B
On that note, I want to ask you, let's say, AI with the hands of some person who knows how to operate this, but largely creates 50 portraits purely from AI and then we have 50 portraits from the masters, and we put them all in a gallery, and you brought a bunch of young people to walk through and to see these. Many of them are unschooled. And which ones are the masters? Which ones are artificial intelligence? What I'm hearing you say is it doesn't matter what one's recognition necessarily is of what is authentic, what is not.
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D
I think I have to clarify the way you express that.
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B
Yeah.
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D
You're saying a person is instructing artificial intelligence to create a facsimile of portraiture. It's not creating. It's not painting a portrait.
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B
Right.
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D
So there's a disembodiment aspect of it. So they're creating a facsimile. But there was this French postmodern philosopher that talked about, you know, that you end up with simulations of reality rather than reality itself. So it's just. And that much our culture is captivated by simulations of reality. Like, we don't eat. We have flavors of food that are derived from chemicals that give us the sense that that's the food we're eating, but it's not related to the actual thing. It's the same thing that we're seeing with kind of AR AI and aesthetics. It's like, so through the example that you used, it was like, no, you're asking technology to do something. Then we're going to hang these portraits and say, judge for yourself if you can tell the difference. Well, if we can't tell the difference, that in itself is kind of a damning of the AI technology because it's not doing anything unique or new, or it's just simply sorting things to make it look a little bit different. So, again, I think that it's not. We don't have a relationship between technology and aesthetics currently with the current technology that we have, we're trying to get there. But to say that's where it is, that's just not the case, or I don't believe it's the case.
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B
Many of us have seen the first video footage of a Pope, Pope Leo XIII, in 1896, with subsequent newsreels revealing Pope Pius X, Pope Benedict XV, Pope Pius XI, up through, like 1939. What's your sense of the impact such footage? Now we're talking about kind of media through the forms of newsreels and so on. What's your sense of the impact such footage had on the faithful who know of the popes but would never hope to get to Rome themselves? So what does that kind of reach mean?
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C
You know, I have a memory. This goes back to about 1965, probably, or 66. I'm a little kid. I'm at St. Thomas More Parish outside Detroit, and there was some gathering. We were outdoors, I remember, and it was Paul vi, that the Pope was giving a blessing maybe to the country or something, and we were all there and it came through loudspeakers, I remember, and it was the Pope probably speaking Latin. But my parents, I mean, they're very interested and they got all of us Kids. And we all sat there outdoors and we heard the voice of the Pope coming from Rome. And I remember it was a big deal. There was something kind of mystical about it. And it's funny how all these years later, I still remember that. And that was the impact just of a disembodied voice coming through a radio or on a speaker. So, no, I imagine that that did bring people close to the papacy. And of course, a lot of that shifted with Pius IX, 19th century, where the person of the Pope became important a way that he had not been before. I always think it's interesting that, look, I'm someone who's doctorate in theology, I taught for 20 years, I'm a bishop of the Church. How many popes can I name? Let's say prior to. I could cheat and say, oh, there's 23 Johns, but I mean, really, how many Popes can you name?
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D
We could do it.
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B
I mean, actually, I'm sitting in a room with people, I think they could.
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D
Actually name a lot.
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C
But the point is that the Pope personally wasn't that important. But the media did bring the Pope to people's consciousness in a powerful way.
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D
The Pope was more important as an enduring office in the Church than a person, because if you were in 14th century Europe, there could be. The popes were coming and going, and people didn't know necessarily who they were, but they knew there was a Pope. They knew there was a succession going on. But, you know, the real breakthrough with the attentive attention to the papacy was when Pius VII made his way to France for Napoleon's coronation. And as he went there, the crowds began forming and they were going nuts. Because prior to that, if you wanted to see the Pope, you could. You got to go to Rome. That's where he was. And I think there was also a realization on the part of the Church, like, you know what, we're kind of limited here. If we take the Pope out, which really blossomed in the 20th century, we can really galvanize the Catholic faithful. But you mentioned Pius ix. He was probably the first Pope that people saw pictures of, like, lots and lots of the pictures of the Pope were just propagated all over. And he had a. There was much more kind of a sense of, that's the Pope, that's the Pope. And plus, he had a really long reign. But popes and mass media, you have these little breakthroughs that you mentioned, but the one who really broke through was Pius xii. And we look at his kind of, you know, appearances, which are very formal and stuff like that. But he was all in to being photographed, to being filmed, to communicating. So that I think that that's the real kind of beginning of the modern era of papal communication or papal engagement with communication technology was, you know, you have these things, and I think it was Pius. The Vatican raider was established before Pius xii, but he's the one who kind of said, we're gonna use these resources. And he did so effectively, and then you just have it escalating. So the papacy has been using communication technology, and their advice to the faithful has been repeatedly that we should use it too.
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B
Archbishop Fulton Sheen enthusiastically brought his Catholic faith to the primetime television viewers, saying, if you do not live out your faith enthusiastically, maybe you don't have any faith. Close quote. Tell us about Archbishop Sheen and how his television ministry served as an inspiration for your own style of evangelization.
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C
Yeah, it really was. I've said many times, and this is true, that he was important for my parents generation. My parents knew Fulton Sheen. They would have heard him on the radio, watched him on TV by the time I came along. So, like, into the 60s and 70s, he had kind of faded from that scene. So my generation of, let's say, seminarians, we weren't all that taken with Fulton Sheen. We didn't know that much about him. He skipped over our generation to the next. And it was because of ewtn, other outlets sort of rebroadcast Fulton Sheen. And I must say, during those years, he came back on my radar screen a bit. I remember I had it in my car for a long time, little cassette tapes of his talks. It was a retreat or something. And I listened to them in the car, and they were so good. They were so smart and compelling and well communicated. Then I began to watch him a bit on YouTube, and you'd see a master at work, you know. So I discovered him kind of late. But to me, the most important thing about Sheen was that he combined the high academic. He was a very cultured man, had the advanced degree from Louvain. I mean, knew the sources of the great tradition, plugged into the culture, and then found a way to communicate that in a winsome manner. That combination was dynamite. That's why he had the impact he had. There were a lot of academics doing their work. There were popular communicators, but he found a way to bring them together. Now, that was my inspiration. I thought, that's what I want to try to do in our time. So he continues to be. And as we record these words, we just got word that they're going to go ahead with his beatification, which I'm delighted by. But he continues to be. We have a picture right outside our studio here. He continues to be a great inspiration.
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D
You know, there's another evangelist who we were inspired by, a Protestant evangelist. It was Billy Graham, who also effectively used communication technology to advance the gospel. And so, you know, there's a lot of examples that word on fire, Bishop Byrne have drawn from to kind of animate his own mission. But I'd say Fulton Sheen's an inspiration. But I don't want us to forget about Billy Graham because he was very influential.
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C
It is true. When I was a young man, I watched Billy Graham. I watched Charles Stanley. Remember that name.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And I like about Charles Stanley, kind of Protestant preacher, smart, you know, he articulate guy and had the passion of the gospel. So, yeah, I admired those people and their communication skills and their knowledge of the Bible, you know, so the Protestants have always brought to their game, you know, a deep immersion of the Bible. Something I'm always happy about. When people say to me, you know, I'm surprised that you're. You're a Catholic bishop, but you talk about the Bible so much and you're preaching. I'm happy about that because, to be honest with you, when I was coming of age and even the way I was trained to preach my generation, it wasn't very biblical. We were very much encouraged to talk about people's experience, talk about psychology, talk about the culture. The Bible wasn't the main focus, and I've tried to make that the main focus of my preaching.
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D
I also think that the lack of focus on the scriptures has handicapped a lot of evangelization in the life of the church. It had at times almost replaced the scriptures with a kind of experiential expressivism or emotivism, that it was like, well, what's the point of this? What's really grounding it? And the Scriptures ground us. And how you really take the scriptures seriously and you read it, you pray with it, you have to come to the conclusion, like, we're not gonna do better than this. Like, my individual experiences are not gonna do better than this. And the things, our individual experiences and things, they're just gonna fade with time. There's a continuity that's God given in the scriptures that's necessary for the life of the church. So fundamental to our communication shouldn't be like we're talking. It should be, we're talking about the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ as expressed in the revelation of the Scriptures, the fulfillment of the Scriptures, as we say in our profession of faith, it's essential to evangelization. It's not secondary. It's essential. And if you're going to try to coax people into friendship with Christ through another means, you better be grounded in the Scriptures yourself in order to do that, or you're gonna fail miserably. So it's, you know. And think, what do Sheen and Billy Graham have in common? They have in common these sacred texts, the sacred texts that we call the Bible. And so, and I think that good preachers know the Scriptures.
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C
Do you know that story about Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham meeting on a train?
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D
No.
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C
They were on a train, I want to say, like D.C. to New York or something like that.
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B
This isn't a Hitchcock movie, is it?
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C
No, no.
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D
It would be a good one.
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C
And I think it was. Sheen came up to Billy Graham and said, I heard you're on the train. Would you mind if we shared a prayer? And the two of them prayed. And I always think of that scene of this train moving along and the two probably greatest evangelists of the 20th century who had great respect for each other.
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A
That does it for us today. Thanks for joining us on the Word on Fire Show. If you're interested in learning more about how Word on Fire can help you grow closer to Christ, become a better evangelist with and for others, and work for the common good, consider joining the Word on Fire Institute. Check us out at institute.WordPress.org that's institute.WordPress.org we'll see you next time.