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Dec. 16, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Bishop Robert Barron | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 31
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I want to re-Judaize Catholicism.
In many parts of the Protestant movement, there's a desire to de-Judaize the operation.
Catholicism lifts it up.
It doesn't want to leave it behind.
Christ is the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
Here we are on the Sunday special with Bishop Robert Barron, author of Arguing Religion We're going to get to all things Catholic Church related, religion related, life, afterlife, God, death.
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Well, Bishop Barron, thank you so much for joining the program.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure to be with you.
I have to say that I've gotten an enormous number of requests for you to come on the show, particularly in the aftermath of an interview we did a couple of weeks ago with Pastor John MacArthur, and I'll have some questions about differences between Catholic and Protestant theology in just a minute.
Let's start off with a personal question.
How did you decide to enter the priesthood?
Was this something where, as a child, you thought, this is what I'm going to be doing?
Not really.
When I was a little kid, I came from a Catholic family, went to Mass on Sunday, but I wasn't all that interested in religion.
I wanted to be a baseball player, so I was a Cub fan from Chicago.
I wanted to be a shortstop for the Cubs until I was about 14.
And when I was 14, I'm in high school religion class, and one of the professors taught us one of Thomas Aquinas' arguments for God's existence.
And I'm sure no other kid in the room was the least bit affected by it, but for some reason, it affected me.
I went home, went to the library, back in the day when we actually went to libraries and got books out, and I got Mortimer Adler's, you know, The Great Book Series, and I found the one on Thomas Aquinas, and then read that section understanding almost none of it.
But it started me, honestly, on a path I never left.
It just sort of set my mind on fire.
And the priesthood came, you know, further down the pike, but it started then when I was 14.
And baseball is still an interest of mine, but I realized I was going down a different path then.
That's really fascinating because when you speak with a lot of religious leaders, they tend to come from the perspective that they got into religion specifically through the Bible.
And Aquinas' proofs of God's existence are really non-biblical in nature.
I mean, they're natural law-based more than anything else.
I mean, this is really what you argue in your book, Arguing Religion, is that that's where people should start.
Maybe you can discuss a little bit what's your favorite Thomistic proof of God's existence and why you think it's convincing.
The one I heard probably as a kid was the proof of motion, so the first argument of Aquinas.
But the one I developed in the book actually is not specifically Aquinas.
It's more an amalgam of his three.
I would call it the argument from contingency.
Namely, the world that we experience is a contingent world.
It's non-self-explanatory.
So it exists, but not necessarily.
It exists through an amalgam of causes.
They themselves are non-self-explanatory, so we have to go further in our quest for the sufficient explanation.
That can't go on indefinitely.
We have to come finally to some principle, some reality, which fulfills the conditions of everything else, but itself does not have any conditions to be filled.
The actus purus, Aquinas calls it, right?
Pure act or pure energy.
That which exists through itself.
So, in various ways, Proofs 1, 2, and 3 in Aquinas are versions of that argument.
And I think most people intuitively sense it.
So, you know, there's this massive consensus gentium across the ages that God exists.
I mean, the vast majority of people across human history have held that God exists.
Now, they can't formulate arguments in a strictly philosophical way, but they sense it, it seems to me.
They sense the even essence of this world, and therefore the need for an ultimate ground, you know?
So I think that proof makes explicit what a lot of people implicitly intuit about the reality of God.
So in your book you talk a little bit about the probably largest kind of pushback to that specific argument, which is the idea of sort of base matter, that there is no God, that at the very root, the only real cause is just the matter itself.
How do you respond to sort of the Bertrand Russell base facts argument?
You know, a lot of people would say, look, I buy the argument.
There's got to be some sort of, you know, final ground for the existence of things or some ultimate cause.
The problem is what the proof uncovers is not just a first cause in a long series.
It uncovers that which is properly unconditioned in its reality.
So that which exists entirely through the power of its own essence.
That means something which by its very nature is unlimited in being, because there's no condition that's set for it.
When you say matter, you're saying being at the opposite end of that spectrum.
Matter is entirely malleable, it's entirely full of potentiality.
It's the opposite of octus purus or the unconditioned.
So the one thing this reality can't be is material.
Which is why people like Aquinas and many others would say the first mover, the uncaused cause, is not a body of any kind, not material.
So it's a facile answer but it can't correspond to what that proof actually uncovers, the unconditioned reality.
You talk a lot in your book, Arguing Religion, about skepticism and why you think that skepticism is unwarranted in many cases.
Maybe you can talk about the limits of skepticism, because we think that all of Western civilization, or at least the post-Enlightenment civilization, is built on the idea of being skeptical.
But when it comes to religion, obviously skepticism has been used to tear down religion.
Yeah, I mean, in its modern form.
I mean, go right back to Augustine and his battle against what he called the academics, you know.
See, follow or assume, Augustine says, if I make a mistake, I am.
Descartes' cogito ergo sum is just a riff on that.
I mean, he learned it from Augustine.
If I'm making a mistake about absolutely everything, at least I know I am.
So, Augustine uses that to refute a radical skepticism.
Anyone that engages in rational discourse is not a radical skeptic.
I mean, anyone that engages in what we're doing now, some kind of conversation, is appealing implicitly or explicitly to some objective standard of truth.
Of moral goodness, you know?
So a complete radical skepticism is just incoherent.
It can be used as a tool, you know, as a kind of provisional tool to move the mind along, but you can't accept as a worldview a radical skepticism.
It's more post-modernity, I think, that moves in that direction of a, you know, kind of dismantling of all the epistemic and moral systems.
You can't finally do that and have something like a rational discourse.
Okay, so when it comes to skepticism, you talk again in the book about skepticism, and your chief response to people who are skeptical about religion is that there are perfectly rational reasons to believe, particularly in God.
And you use the Thomistic proofs, as we were discussing, which are non-revelatory in nature.
They're basic rational—trying to reason from the nature of the world to what that world is about.
But it seems to me that most of the people who are skeptical of religion are not actually skeptical of God, per se.
They actually like the idea of God, in essence.
How do you get from that to the Bible?
How do you get from that to Revelation, which obviously makes a lot more stringent claims that have to be tried against reason and very often are found wanting?
The miraculous, in many cases.
Well, I'll say a couple of things.
I mean, one is that Aquinas is basing that approach on the Bible in a way.
I mean, because the heavens proclaim the glory of God, the Bible says, or Paul, you know, from the visible things of this world, we can move to the invisible things of God.
So within the Bible itself, there's a kind of warrant for what we call natural theology or philosophical proof.
But yeah, I'd say this, Aquinas refers to his famous arguments as a type of monoductio, Latin for leading by the hand.
The way you take a little child, like, come on, let me help you, let me show you, you know, how to walk.
So the philosophical arguments can lead someone who, let's say, is totally outside the realm of the religious, to the point where they might be able to accept what's given in Revelation.
To accept the revelation of the Bible might be too much for someone, especially today, who's completely outside the ambit of religion.
But the arguments might awaken the mind sufficiently, or give a sufficient warrant to say, yeah, I'll take a look at the Bible.
I use the example of getting to know a person, right?
So I'm meeting you for the first time today.
But I did, you know, a fair amount of looking into your background.
I've seen videos you've done, etc.
I came to my own conclusions about, you know, watching you in action and reading about you.
Now I'm meeting you for the first time.
I'm learning more about you on my own terms.
So I'm using my mind to learn different things about you.
I mean, let's say over many years, then we became friends and I came to know you more and more.
At a certain point, you would tell me something about yourself.
If our friendship deepens sufficiently, that I would never have guessed or known independently of that.
At which point, I'd have to make an act of faith.
I'd have to say, yeah, I believe that.
I can't prove it.
I can't know it directly.
Now, it's consistent with everything else I've learned about you.
It's not some egregious claim, right?
But finally, I've got to say, yeah, I believe Him.
I've come to trust Him.
I think that's the analogy for reason in relation to faith.
When it comes to God, you can discover an awful lot of things through the mind, by looking at the world and reasoning about it, and lots of our great thinkers have done that.
That can lead me into the forecourt of the temple, if you want.
But at a certain point, Our great tradition claims that God speaks.
We don't mean that literally, but I mean that God has revealed something about his own heart that we couldn't have guessed on the basis of reason.
I have to say, okay, I believe or not.
I have to say, I accept that or not.
But reason can predispose me to that point of acceptance.
That's how the Catholic Church sort of does it, the play of faith and reason.
Moving into the forecourt of the Gentiles is not a bad place to be, because it predisposes you to the point of the act of faith.
But you need more than reason.
I mean, philosophical reason would not be sufficient for someone seeking real communion with God.
So, why not?
I mean, this is the argument, obviously, that Aquinas asks about.
He says, why, in addition to natural law, do you actually need a Bible?
Why do you need Revelation?
So, what's the answer to that for you?
Why is it that we can't just, given all of the premises of a universe created by an intelligent being with a plan and with kindness and goodness, why do we need a set of commandments?
Why do we need Or in the Christian view, a savior to come down and change the nature of the world itself.
Well, in answer to the first question, Aquinas and our tradition would tend to say the Ten Commandments correspond roughly to the first principles of the natural law.
And so in a way... Yeah, Maimonides says the same in ours.
Yeah, and so in a way, that's true.
There's an overlap between the two.
See, I would just now speak as a Christian and say, there's no way on the basis of philosophical arguments that I can ever know That God loves me to the point of giving his own self as a gift to me.
That God died that I might come into union with him.
I mean, there's no way I could learn that through philosophical argumentation.
That God is love, I mean the great central Christian claim, which is a Trinitarian claim, right?
If God is love, There's lover, beloved, and shared love within the very nature of God.
How do we know that?
Well, the first Christians knew it from the cross of Jesus, you know?
That God so loved the world, He sent His only Son into our dysfunction, drawing now the Son back to the Father in the Holy Spirit to save us.
I can't guess at that.
There's no argument for that.
It's congruent with the God who's the unconditioned act of being itself and all of that.
There's no way I would have guessed at that.
I couldn't come to that on my own.
That was revealed.
And then from the depth of my heart, I say yes to that.
I accept that revelation is true.
And the same is true, I think, within Judaism as well, you know.
But that's the play between faith and reason.
I've never been at home, I love Kierkegaard, but I've never been at home with the leap of faith thing.
Because especially the way it's used today, as though it's simply this wild leap into the dark.
No, it's not that.
We've been brought to a certain point by our minds, but then from that perspective, from that point, we're able to make this act of loving acceptance more easily.
But no, we can't reduce it to reason, or you'd never guess that, that God is love to the point of death.
I think there are serious questions to be asked about whether reason alone can bring you to the point of Even beyond the Ten Commandments, how far reason can get you?
Because there are limitations to the moral societies that have been created by human beings.
And if it were really true that we could create a moral society under any circumstances simply by the act of reason alone, human beings all over the world have been capable of reason.
And yet, the goodness that we've seen in terms of rights and prosperity, all of this only arises in the context of one civilization with one specific history.
Well, that's of course a very interesting thing.
I'm thinking, too, though, in the Christian context, of the love of one's enemies.
That's not an entirely rational principle.
I mean, that's something that's, we'd say, the result of a supernatural grace.
See, you can really love your enemy, that you will the good of your enemy for your enemy's sake.
So, not that it were down to your benefit, but you love—that's, again, acquaintance—to will the good of the other as other, even your enemy.
That's not a rational thing to do.
You won't find that in Aristotle.
You won't find that in the great Kantian system, for example.
But you find it at the heart of the gospel because it's predicated upon grace, the love of God that goes all the way to the limits of God-forsakenness, that God loves us, his enemies.
For our own sake.
If we're capable of that, it's because of grace operating in us.
Not just because of our own musing or our own, you know, will to excel.
That's the result of pure gift, you know?
So all of that belongs to the properly theological dimension of Christian thought and behavior.
So in a second, I want to ask you some very awkward questions about differences between our two religions and how we live together in peace and harmony.
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Okay, so I promised awkward questions, and so there shall be.
So let's start with the most awkward of the awkward questions.
I don't really care about this question particularly much, but I get this question a lot, which is As a Jew, how does it feel that there are other religions that don't think you're getting into heaven?
So let me ask you, what's the Catholic view on who gets into heaven and who doesn't?
I feel like I lead a pretty good life, a very religiously based life in which I try to keep not just the Ten Commandments, but a solid 603 other commandments as well.
And I spend an awful lot of my time promulgating what I would consider to be Judeo-Christian virtues, particularly in Western societies.
So what's the Catholic view of me?
Am I basically screwed here?
No.
The Catholic view, go back to the Second Vatican Council, says it very clearly.
I mean, Christ is the privileged route to salvation.
God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we might find eternal life.
So that's the privileged route.
However, Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit Christian faith can be saved.
Now, they're saved through the grace of Christ, indirectly received.
So, I mean, the grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience.
So, if you're following your conscience sincerely, or in your case, you're following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved.
Now, that doesn't conduce to a complete relativism.
We still would say the privileged route and the route that God has offered to humanity is the route of his Son.
But no, you can be saved.
Even Vatican II says an atheist of goodwill can be saved because in following his conscience, if he does, John Henry Newman said the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.
It's a very interesting characterization that it is, in fact, the voice of Christ.
If he's the Logos made flesh, Right?
He's the divine mind or reason made flesh, that when I follow my conscience, I'm following him, whether I know it explicitly or not.
So even the atheist, Vatican II teaches, of goodwill can be saved.
So is Catholicism acts-based or faith-based?
Because this has been sort of the traditional distinction between Judaism, for example, and Christianity, is Judaism is a very acts-based religion, where it's all about what you do in this life and that No, I would say it's love-based.
God is love.
God so loved the world, he sent his only son.
that are more based on you believe in the truth, the way, and the life, and now you're in.
Where does Catholicism actually stand, or is that division too stark?
No, I would say it's love-based.
God is love.
God so loved the world, he sent his only son.
We're being drawn into the divine love.
Now, do we have to accept that love as an act of faith?
Of course.
Right?
So God makes this great offer in Christ.
Is it accepted in faith?
Yeah.
Aquinas says faith is the door of the spiritual life.
Without faith, you can't get into the spiritual life.
That means a trust in the divine love.
Now, having made that great fundamental act, are you now called upon to be fully engaged—mind, will, passion, body, everything—in response to that love, a love awakening love in you?
Yes.
So we'd use the language of cooperation with grace, that grace comes first, accepted in faith.
Luther was right to that extent.
If Luther had said, gratia prima, we'd be fine.
Grace first.
That's true at any time you're relating to God.
If you're saying, I'm going to do it.
I'm on my way to climb the holy mountain.
Well, then you're on the wrong path.
Just by definition.
So of course it begins with grace.
But then God, who's not competitive with us, He wants us fully alive.
And so God invites us now to respond, body and soul, everything we've got, in love to the love that He's offered us.
So I'd put it that way.
It's grace and then cooperation with grace, which manifests itself in a life of love.
And that's what salvation consists in.
See, one thing too, Ben, think of it this way.
What gets me to heaven?
Well, what is heaven?
Paul says, you know, the three things at last—faith, hope, and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
Because in heaven, faith fades away.
I don't need faith anymore.
I'm seeing.
In heaven, hope fades away.
Who needs to hope?
You got it.
But love endures, because love is what heaven is.
So if you say, well, I don't care about love.
It's just pure faith.
Well, what are you going to do all day in heaven?
That's what heaven is, is the act of love.
So it begins here below, as we cooperate with grace.
I'd say that's the Catholic way of looking at it.
So how do you square that with the sort of modern perception of what love is?
So many people in Western society believe that love is essentially tolerance.
Whatever my friend wants to do, I'm on their side, I'm with them, I have to boost their self-esteem.
And that's the ultimate love.
If I were to Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, tolerance is the great modern virtue.
So you might say that, you know, diversity is what we accept and therefore tolerance is the great virtue.
But see, tolerance would not really be a Christian virtue.
view on the over-application of tolerance in your book.
Yeah, I mean, tolerance is the great modern virtue.
You might say that diversity is what we accept, and therefore tolerance is the great virtue.
But see, tolerance would not really be a Christian virtue.
Love is the virtue.
Now, it can include what we mean by tolerance.
But the trouble is this.
See, love means willing the good of the other.
That might take the form, as it does, for example, in the great prophets, of calling somebody out and saying, look, what you're doing is repugnant to God's will.
That's willing your good.
That's not coming down hard on you.
That's willing what's best for you.
So that tough love, sure, that's a face of love.
So if you prioritize tolerance, you're marginalizing what belongs at the very heart of the matter, which is the willing of the good of the other.
That's the virtue we want.
Do you think that religion, mainline religion, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, is having trouble specifically because people are mistaking one for the other?
I can see it in my Jewish community, right?
I mean, I can see that the Orthodox are growing.
We continue to grow as a sect of Judaism and, as I would say, the most authentic sect of Judaism that actually cares about the words of the Torah.
It's growing.
Kids tend to stay involved, but other sects of Judaism tend to fade away over time.
But that's not stopping the Jewish community from thinking, OK, the way I'm going to get these kids who are disenchanted back into the synagogues is with guitar and pizza and parties.
We went down that road in the Catholic Church.
I grew up in that time after Vatican II, you know, and it rather massively didn't work.
No, I think, as the great spiritual masters, they all know this.
I mean, Dostoevsky famously saying, you know, real love is a harsh and dreadful thing.
So real love is not this sort of bland, you know, namby-pamby, anything goes, you know, I'm okay, you're okay.
On the contrary, real love wants the good of the other, and so it makes demands.
It upsets people very often, the real thing.
So it's not sentimental.
We've hyper-sentimentalized a lot of religious language and that's caused huge problems.
There's something kind of spare and bracing about the Aquinas language of willing the good of the other.
And that can take a softer form if you want, it can take a harder form depending on the circumstances.
But the focus is always on the other, as other.
It's like when the Lord says, you know, to love your enemies, as I was saying.
That's the great test of love, because if it's your enemy, it's not someone who's going to pay you back.
So if I'm kind to you, that you might be kind to me.
Well, that's not love, right?
That's an indirect egotism.
I will give you a party that you might give me a party in return.
That's why in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says exactly that.
Don't give a party for those who can repay you, right?
Don't loan to those who can pay you back with interest.
That's not the point.
The point is to be good to those that can't return the favor.
That's tough stuff, both for you and often for the other person.
And right, the modern tolerance is kind of a vague simulacrum of that.
I want to ask you some basic kind of Catholic doctrinal questions because I think we in the general public who aren't Catholic have some basic views about Catholicism that are likely wrong but well accepted.
So papal infallibility, can you just define that?
How far does the Pope's infallibility go?
Do I have to take everything if I'm a Catholic that he says at face value?
Is some of it political interpretation?
What is the vicar of Christ and what is just him saying things?
It's very narrowly defined.
That's the important thing within Catholic ecclesiology, the theology of the Church.
When the Pope speaks, we say, ex cathedra, from the chair, in the formal manner, on matters of faith and morals, for the sake of the entire Church.
He's speaking infallibly.
It's happened precisely twice.
Since the thing was declared formally.
So this is a very, very rare thing.
We speak about the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.
Now that means the bishops in union with the Pope teaching on a key matter of faith and morals in general consensus around the world.
We recognize that as an infallibility of this ordinary teaching of the Church.
But the Pope himself, it's on such rare occasion, Now, the Pope does deliver himself of formal teachings like encyclicals, which have to be taken with tremendous seriousness.
But might a Catholic, you know, quarrel here and there with something in an encyclical?
Sure.
It's not an infallible statement.
Much less certain prudential judgments of a pope.
A pope might make a judgment, a prudential determination about a policy within the church, or a political judgment.
Is one obliged to accept that?
No.
I mean, we approach the pope always in an attitude of deep respect.
He's a successor of Peter.
He's the vicar of Christ.
He's the guarantor of our unity.
So the pope is always treated with enormous respect.
But the infallibility is a very, very narrowly defined No, that's not Catholic teaching.
And what's Catholic teaching as far as how doctrine develops?
So over the course of centuries, where's the limitations?
Because what we see in the Orthodox Jewish community, and we're seeing this now, is in Orthodox Judaism we have this idea of the oral law, which is the interpretation of the text of the Torah, and this continues over centuries, and it leaves open the possibility, if you're not careful, of people People straying from the text so far that they are actually contravening the text.
I assume that you've had some similar problems in Catholicism itself as well.
So how is interpretation limited in sort of Catholic doctrine?
Yeah, I go back to John Henry Newman there, who says that ideas don't exist on the pages of books, but in the play of lively minds, he says.
So you and I talking right now, it's an example of an idea is developing, it's unfolding.
So Newman says the way the seed grows into the great tree, My preferred one from Newman is the way a river begins very small but then it deepens and broadens and takes in all kinds of influences as it moves through space and time.
And so like the idea of the Incarnation, as Saint Peter took it in, As St.
Paul articulated it, now as Chrysostom articulates it, as Jerome articulates it, as Augustine and Aquinas and so on, that's the river deepening and broadening over space and time.
Now, to your point, because ideas develop, they can corrupt.
So it can be the case that you've deviated from the essential meaning of an idea.
That's where the authority of the church comes in.
So we're not just a debating society.
That's a danger across the ages, but especially today, is to turn the church into a debating society.
So let's all just get together and we have this open-ended conversation and we never decide anything.
No, the danger of corruption there is extremely high.
So the church, through its bishops and through the Pope, ultimately, It's like an umpiring voice.
I might use the baseball analogy.
The play is going on, there's a bang-bang play at second base, and the call is made, right?
You're out.
And people might dispute it, you know, you're crazy, you didn't see it right.
But if we allow that to go on, that dispute, the game just unravels, right?
The game ends.
So real baseball people like umpires.
Even though we boo when they come on the field, but a real baseball person likes the umpire.
Thank God, thank God the umpire's there to say, no, look man, you're out, okay?
I know, you don't like it, but off the field and the game goes on.
See, and that's the right rhythm.
The game of theology is this play of lively minds.
Good.
Theologians and people talking and arguing and back and forth and the thing developing.
But occasionally, And if you over-umpire, like over-referee a basketball game, that wrecks the game too, right?
Call on every little thing.
So occasionally, the church would intervene to say, nope, nope, nope, that's not it.
That's too far.
That's a unraveling of the idea.
Now, play ball.
Off you go.
So this raises another question, which is, if the church is the umpire, The critique that's been made, particularly by Protestants, Pastor John MacArthur sat in the chair that you're sitting in just a few weeks ago, and his argument was basically that by the 15th century, the Church had become more of an obstacle than a middleman, less a conduit to the truth of the Bible, and more of an obstacle to people understanding the truth of the Bible.
Has there ever been a time when you think the Catholic Church has done that, or has the Catholic Church always served its purpose of being sort of the middleman between God and the normal Christian?
Well, you know, I'd say a couple of things.
One is the principle Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, right?
The church must always be reformed.
That's a Catholic principle.
That's an ancient patristic principle.
So when Luther picks that up as a great reformer, that's a Catholic principle.
Of course, the church is always to be reformed.
The church, you know, in its particular expressions and the particular people that play these roles can, you know, can go off-beam sometimes.
However, I don't want the umpire off the field because then the play is going to unravel.
And I would dare say, you know, I say it with great affection for all my Protestant friends and for Protestantism, but the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism is not a good reflection of Jesus' great prayer that they might be one.
One of the guarantors of unity is precisely this umpiring voice of the Church.
I'd furthermore say this.
Would you pick up Hamlet and hand it to a kid and say, off you go, just read it, you'll be fine, you'll understand it?
No, I mean, we surround Hamlet with this complex interpretive apparatus and a tradition of reception.
And we help someone read that complex text through that interpretive lens.
That's why I think it's borderline irresponsible just to pick up the Bible to say, now, off you go, read it.
When it comes to the unity of the Church, an argument could be made, and it has been made by folks like Sam Harris, for example, that the unity of the Church is what led to theocracy for hundreds of years.
That basically, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Peace of Westphalia, you have Catholic dominance across the continent of Europe, and that results in a certain level of intellectual stagnation, he would argue.
It results in A hidebound attempt to victimize people of other religions.
How does Catholicism make room for other religions in the absence of Protestantism, for example?
I mean, is the rise of Protestantism seen by Catholicism as a bad thing in the sense that it does all the things that you've talked about before, or does it provide room for the flourishing of more than one type of religion and a certain level of diversity that's good for the conversation?
Yeah, you're raising a complex set of questions there.
I mean, to the degree that modernity as we know it politically emerged out of Protestantism, which I think it did in many ways, many important ways, the Church has found an awful lot of good within modernity and doesn't advocate now, certainly, this kind of alter-throne relationship sort of thing.
We don't advocate, you know, taking over the government and the Church running political affairs.
There's a legitimate independence, a legitimate To that degree, I think it embraces very much the modern sense of pluralism and a certain separation between the church's preoccupation and that of politics.
So we have no quarrel with that.
You can go back to history and say, well, it was done differently a long time ago.
I think to that degree, we'd embrace a lot of those modern reforms.
Okay, so I want to ask you in just a second about contrasting various popes over the past, the course of my lifetime, I'm not that old, so only three, but I'll ask you to compare and contrast in just a second.
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So when last we left our subject, I was going to ask you about the three popes of the last 25 years, 30 years.
So Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis.
As a Jew, I get to criticize Popes however much I want, which is great for me, but my perception has been that Pope John Paul II, obviously a historic figure in many ways, particularly in his anti-communism, Pope Benedict A traditionalist, one of the great religious thinkers of our time, and I've been highly critical of Pope Francis, who's been perceived by the media as much more progressive on politics, much more focused on issues like global warming than, for example, abortion.
Do you think that that is a mislabel of Pope Francis's actual legacy, or do you think that the media are doing a responsible job in covering what exactly Pope Francis is doing?
Yeah, I mean, every pope has a specific emphasis.
I mean, so John Paul coming out of his great struggle with communism, and that massively influences his social thinking.
Benedict, I think, coming out of his European cultural background and wanting very much to re-evangelize Europe.
I would say that's maybe key to him.
Francis coming out of his Latin American, specifically Argentinian, background.
You know, I think a certain suspicion probably of American capitalism is in the Pope's, you know, thinking in his intellectual wheelhouse.
He's a prophetic type voice, so he's critical.
He does what the prophets often do.
He criticizes what he takes to be all these excesses within the capitalist system.
He's not so much a constructive thinker there.
Like, what's he proposing as the way forward?
He's, you know, in the sort of Jeremiah mode, I think, of putting his finger on excesses.
Now, read John Paul II on the market economy, for example.
He's a great advocate of it.
In Centesimus Annus, you know, he says the church advocates the market.
He prefers to call it that rather than capitalism.
But, very clearly says A market circumscribed morally, circumscribed legally, a market that is not simply open to the free play of buying and selling, etc.
So I think Francis picks up on that side of it.
Maybe without the balance you found typically in a John Paul, but that's also typical of the prophets.
They tend to be a little over the top.
That's how I read Francis.
What do you think of the critique that's been made by a lot of folks that he's a devotee of liberation theology?
No, I think that's almost demonstrably false, because at a certain point in his development, I mean, he knew the liberation theology movement and turned against it.
It's more of a populism, I would say.
It was not the embrace of the Marxist option.
He was very influenced by a Frenchman called Gaston Fossard, who was a mid-century French Jesuit, sharply critical of Marx and of Marxism.
And so, I think Bergoglio consciously departs from liberation theology.
He opts for a different path.
It's more of a populism.
It's an embrace of popular piety.
It's an embrace of kind of the people.
Now, not in the Marxist sense of the term, but more in this Latin American sense.
So, I think he's demonstrably not with liberation theology.
Well, the media have been, obviously, very pro-Pope Francis, much more than they were, obviously, with Benedict or with John Paul II for most of his life.
As he approached his death, obviously, they became much more pro, because this is typical in how the media treat people who they perceive to not agree with them politically.
The focus on the Catholic Church more broadly, beyond Pope Francis, by the media, has been almost entirely, in the past couple of decades, on the number of sex scandals.
What do you think is the best way for the Church to deal with sex scandals?
How serious is the problem?
Do you think that the media are basically picking on the Church as opposed to other institutions in society that have had similar problems?
Well, there's something true to that.
And I'm always reluctant, you know, to lead, as I'm doing right now, to lead with that, looking defensive.
But I think that's certainly fair to say.
That this problem is a universal human problem.
You can find it in almost every institution, every society.
I would say in God's providence that it was brought to light so dramatically in the church to force, you know, to bring it to the world's attention.
And it's part of what the church is bearing.
A legitimate punishment, I would say.
But for the sake of the world, that what we've had to wrestle with, I think, now is benefiting other institutions.
But it is fair to say that the problem is much wider than Catholicism.
One stat that I think is very interesting is across the board and across the decades, you look at the numbers, and when they're presented in kind of a raw form, you say, how, you know, horrific.
And of course, one act of child sex abuse is horrific.
But when you look at the numbers, they almost always correspond roughly to the national average of about 4%.
You look at men across society, roughly 4% engage in this behavior.
That's almost how it breaks down across the board within the Catholic Church.
So in that sense, too, it's unfair to say it's a uniquely Catholic problem.
Having said all that, I think it is important that it's being brought to light precisely in that framework so that we can bring healing to it and maybe deeper instruction than to other institutions as well.
I don't think the media is picking on the church in this measure.
Thank God for the media.
You know, that revealed the thing when the church, to be frank, was not as willing or able to deal with it.
Thank God, in a way, for the Boston Globe that brought this thing to light.
So, I don't really quarrel with that, you know.
I think, just as in the Old Testament, God using Cyrus.
I mean, God can use even enemies of Israel to affect Israel in a positive way.
Did God use enemies of the church, in a way, to help the church?
Yeah, I think so.
What do you make of the schism that seems to have been breaking out inside the Catholic Church at the upper echelons over the handling of the sex abuse crisis by the Vatican, for example?
I'm very hopeful of the February meeting coming up, when the Pope is gathering the presidents of all the Bishops' Conferences from around the world.
I'm very hopeful that will make some important moves.
I'll confess to being disappointed.
As a member of the Bishops' Conference, last November we gathered and we wanted very much to vote on some very specific measures.
Protocols that would address this issue.
And the Vatican asked us to pause.
They didn't say, you know, it's over, don't do it.
They said, pause.
Could you wait till February?
I'll confess to being disappointed, along with most of my colleagues, I think.
Might there be good reasons for that?
Yeah.
They didn't give us the reasons why we're to pause.
It could be the Vatican wants a singular, universal protocol.
Didn't want us operating independently.
There might be some canonical considerations.
What we're proposing might have been out of step with canon law.
That's why I'm hopeful the February meeting will take some very specific steps.
So I wouldn't speak of SISM.
Everybody in the church wants to address this thing at the level of protocols and the level of deeper conversion.
We're debating, I think, how best to do the first one.
What do you make of the critique that comes up every time one of these sex abuse cases comes up where folks basically suggest that the problem is chastity within the priesthood, that we should allow priests to get married?
No, you're talking about celibacy, because chastity is the problem.
I agree.
It's lack of fidelity, it's lack of following biblical sexual ethics.
That is the fundamental problem.
It's not celibacy, and that's demonstrably the case.
That's been shown across the decades, that celibacy is not the cause of this problem.
At the moral level, it's a deep infidelity.
It's a failure to live up to our own teaching.
Our teaching is eminently clear on the score.
So it's priests, sadly, tragically, not living up to the teaching of the Church.
But no, I certainly wouldn't blame it on celibate priesthood.
The overwhelming majority of child sex offenders are not celibates, so I wouldn't correlate it to celibacy.
And to get into even more controversial territory, obviously the Church has come under significant fire for its perspective on homosexuality.
I always find this puzzling since this has legitimately not changed neither Judaic or Christian theology for a solid several millennia at this point.
But nonetheless, it is raised every single time and it seems to be raised every time there's a scandal inside the Church where folks suggest that many in the hierarchy of the Church itself suggest that there are a disproportionate number of homosexual Yeah, I mean, there's never been really good or definitive studies on that issue of, you know, number of homosexuals in the priesthood.
I mean, it'd be very hard to determine that on statistical grounds.
That the majority of cases of sexual misconduct have been male-on-male sexual violence, that's true.
And I think that's certainly worth looking at.
To your first point, Yes, the consensus gentium across millennia, across the cultures has been, you know, that sex belongs within marriage between a man and a woman who are faithful to each other and open to life.
I mean, that was the standard consensus.
That most human beings tend to fall away from that ideal, sure.
I mean, that's always been the case.
But that that's the ideal?
Almost everybody up until really a handful of years ago accepted that.
Which is why it is rather an act of hubris, you know, to say like, how in the world could you hold this?
I mean, everyone has held this view.
And there are good reasons grounded in the natural law, I'd say, you know, for that perspective.
That people fall away from it?
Sure, they always have.
That even people within the Church are falling away from it.
Tragically, yeah.
But that shouldn't compel us to change the teaching.
So what exactly is the Church holding on abortion as well?
So obviously abortion is another area where the Catholic Church has come under significant fire.
Again, this has always been Catholic Church policy, but it does not matter.
The media, every time the Pope expresses that he is pro-life, seem to react with shock and horror as though something new has happened.
Yeah, and that's a good point that Pope Francis has been very strong on the pro-life issue.
The direct taking of an innocent life is prohibited.
I mean, that's a fundamental, I would say, THE fundamental principle of the natural law.
All the other principles are derived from it.
The direct killing of the innocent is always prohibited.
It's intrinsically evil, to use our language, intrinsice malum.
In other words, no motive or circumstance could ever obviate the truth of that.
If that goes, Everything goes, it seems to me.
Now, you know, I came of age at a time in the Catholic Church when the proportionalist approach was very popular.
In fact, it was being taught to a lot of us.
Namely that, well, you know, things aren't intrinsically evil.
You look at the good and bad consequences of an act, and you kind of add them up, and if there's a proportion between them, you know, then make up your mind.
The trouble with that is, at the end of the day, I mean, anything can be justified.
And if you can justify the direct killing of the innocent, it seems to me the whole moral program falls apart.
And that is why the Church has taken such a strong stance against abortion, because it's such a clear instance of the violation of that principle.
So no, no, we stand with it.
We have and we will.
So to sort of finish up the hot-button political section of this particular interview, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about the Catholic Church's decision to recognize the Catholic Church in China, which is obviously being cracked down on in severe fashion and basically run in many ways by the Chinese government.
Do you think that's a good decision or a bad decision?
You know, I'm going to sort of hold off on answering only because I don't know enough about what's on the ground there.
I'll tell you what my instincts are.
My instincts are to respect the so-called underground church that has lived in dire circumstances, often under great persecution.
But I want to be careful because I really don't know What's on the ground in detail?
I don't know what was animating or motivating the Vatican decision there.
My instincts are with the underground church.
But I wouldn't want to say much more about it because I don't claim to know enough about what's on the ground.
So I discussed this with Pastor John MacArthur.
What do you think are the significant philosophical differences, put aside sort of the story differences where we accept the first half of the book and not the second half, between Judaism and Catholicism?
So, aside from Jesus and the acceptance of Jesus, where do you think there are real significant philosophical differentiations?
Well, that's a big aside though.
That's the heart of the matter.
But let me say this first, though, about Judaism and Catholicism.
One thing I feel really strongly about is it's the re-Judaizing of Catholicism that is evangelically so important.
Precisely when you divorce Catholicism from Judaism, you get these distortions of Jesus so common today.
Jesus as teacher of timeless spiritual truths, Jesus as guru, Jesus as Gnostic master.
Jesus is, as Paul said, the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
Jesus is the climax to the story of Israel.
Therefore, not to know Israel is not to know Jesus.
Not to know Torah and covenant and temple and prophecy is not to know Jesus.
The very fact, I'll tell you here, this is an interesting thing.
So, when a Protestant minister comes out to preside at the liturgy, he'll wear either a business suit or he'll wear his doctor robes.
Because the heart of the matter is teaching, right?
The pulpit you're going to teach if you're a doctor or a teacher.
When I come out, especially as a bishop who's a kind of a high priest in the Catholic thing, I come out in the robes of a temple priest, including the mitre of a temple official.
I use incense.
There's an altar.
A sacrifice takes place.
The Catholic Mass is unintelligible apart from the temple, apart from Jewish worship.
And so, to re-Judaize the operation is the key to evangelism.
Because the good news that Paul has, and Peter, and James, and John, is not some Gnostic insight.
It's not some change of consciousness.
The good news is, you know the promises made to Israel?
God has said yes to all of them.
Do you know the great story of Israel?
It's from creation, to the fall, to the formation of the people, and Torah, Temple, and prophecy.
You know that great story?
It's reached its fulfillment in Jesus.
That's why Paul goes into the synagogues first.
So when he comes into Corinth, or he comes into Athens, or wherever he goes, his first move, of course, is to the Jews, because they'll get the story he's talking about.
Talking to Gentiles is a far more complicated business if you're an evangelist.
Because the story of Jesus won't make sense apart from Judaism.
So there I want to insist upon this deep congruence.
And it does have philosophical overtones.
The belief in the one God.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is God alone.
That is of enormous philosophical significance.
And I would say, it's one more, is what's your name?
Moses is asking the Lord, what should I tell him?
I am who I am.
Aquinas reads that, of course, as the one in whom essence and existence coincide.
He's being asked, which god are you?
There are a lot of gods.
Which instance of deity are you?
And then the great answer is, that's the wrong question.
That's the wrong way of thinking about the Creator God of Israel.
I am who I am.
My manner of being is being itself, not this particular instance of being.
So that's of enormous philosophical importance coming up out of Israel, into the church, and then finally into its own philosophical thinking.
But I want to re-Judaize Catholicism.
Because the thing is, in many parts of the Protestant movement, there's a desire to de-Judaize the operation, right?
That we've overcome that and we've kind of left that behind.
Catholicism lifts it up.
It doesn't want to leave it behind.
That's why the permanence of the covenant made to Israel is so important to us.
This covenant's not been violated.
God can't say no to the great covenant he made.
It has permanent validity.
And that's important for our theology, for our liturgy.
I was just going to ask you about that, because for a long time a dominant strain of Catholic thought was replacement theology, the idea that the Jews had sort of been left behind and that the new covenant had been made with the folks who followed the new church.
Where does that stand right now?
I mean, what does the Catholic Church think of the idea that the Jews have sort of been superseded in history?
Yeah, we're against supersessionism.
Go back to Paul's line.
That's the one to me that sums it up.
Christ is the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
So you won't understand him apart from Israel.
He's the fulfillment of Israel.
We've been grafted onto the branch of Israel.
All of that.
That's not supersessionism.
It's a fulfillment theology.
It's a fulfillment of the covenant theology.
But the covenant made to Israel remains a valid covenant for that reason.
It's been brought to its fruition.
So that's why I'm not going to simply reduce it and say, well, there's no difference, because I'm an evangelist.
I mean, I'm a Christian evangelist.
I want everyone to know the good news, the Evangelion about Jesus.
But it's Jesus, the Jew, who's the incarnation not of just any old God.
He's the incarnation of the God of Israel.
He's the God that spoke to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to Moses.
That's the one I'm talking about.
And he became incarnate in Jesus.
So you can't make sense of him apart from Judaism.
So one of the things that, as an Orthodox Jew, I often feel when I speak to people who are either Catholic or Protestant, people who, again, believe in the validity of the Old Testament but also believe in the validity of the New Testament, is that one of the ways in which differentiation is made is by saying that certain things were lacking in Judaism that are now present in Christianity that had to be fulfilled by Jesus, that without Jesus, these things could not have been fulfilled.
And I guess that is the question that I'm asking is, where do you see those things?
Because very often I hear that man is a sinful creature and that we need Jesus in order to take on our sins because otherwise we couldn't live in the world, basically.
Or that Judaism is not forgiving enough, or not loving enough, or not in favor of atonement enough.
And I think as a Jew who prays three times a day for atonement, has a full day devoted to atonement on Yom Kippur, has a full month before that devoted to atoning in preparation for the atonement on Yom Kippur, with all of this stuff, I get the feeling sometimes as a Jew that one of the ways the Christians differentiate from Judaism is by miscasting the nature of Judaism.
That's why I'm asking for some specificity.
Here's what I would say.
All the institutions of Israel—Torah, Temple, Covenant, Prophecy—their purpose is to bring divinity and humanity together, I would say.
So, Zion, the temple, Yahweh's dwelling place, the tribes go up and they commune through sacrifice, you know, with the Lord.
It's the place of encounter.
The law is meant to bring us into conformity with the will of God.
Yahweh speaks His will.
Our wills are off kilter, but they come together, ideally, through the Torah.
The prophets, God speaking, as it were, through them, and they're trying to draw us back to Torah and temple, etc.
Covenant, you know, all of it is meant to bring them together.
What's at the heart of Christianity is that divinity and humanity have met now perfectly in these two natures.
I'm purposely kind of Greekifying the language now, but it's all Jewish talk.
Translated for Greeks at the time, but it's all Jewish talk.
I want Yahweh and his people, Yahweh and Israel, have now met in such a perfect union that I can speak of it as a hypostatic union, as a union of person.
The hypostatic union of two natures, divine and human, in one divine person, that's who Jesus is.
That's what I mean when I say he's the fulfillment of the temple, the fulfillment of the Torah, the fulfillment of prophecy.
What they want has happened now fully in him.
That's why the great scene of the Roman soldier piercing the side of the crucified Jesus, out comes blood and water.
The blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism is one way to read it.
But the other way is the fulfillment of Ezekiel.
At the time of the renewal of the temple, When the Shakina of Yahweh comes back, what will come forth from the side of the Temple but water, life-giving water, for the renewal of the world?
And so, these first-century Jews, looking at Mashiach Yeshua, are saying, look, there it is!
In this great act of sacrifice on the cross, now read in Temple language, Divinity and humanity have met.
The Atonement's been effected.
The Covenant's been fulfilled.
And the sign of it is the coming forth of water from the side of the renewed temple.
Now, all of it's dependent upon the resurrection.
If Jesus Christ had died on the cross and stayed in his grave, none of this would make a lick of sense.
Everything I'm saying would be a lot of hooey, and Christianity would just be a waste of time.
What got it off the ground was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which is what convinced these first century Jews.
And I think, you know, like Rabbi Shaul, studying at the feet of Gamaliel, who knew everything I've been talking about, and a thousand things more, when he met the risen Jesus, That's what he got.
And it took him a while.
It goes off to Arabia we hear.
Paul goes off to Arabia.
Where did he go?
I don't know.
No one knows where he went.
But he went away.
Then he's in Tarsus for a number of years.
What's he doing?
I think he's trying to piece it together.
He's trying to piece it together how the promises made to Israel have now been fulfilled in this most unexpected way through a crucified Messiah who's risen from the dead.
But when he figured it out, out he comes to Corinth and Philippi and finally Rome to announce this new Mashiach, you know?
So it's a deeply Jewish movement that makes sense only in that context.
When you abstract from it, you undermine its evangelical power.
I'm going to ask you in one second, one final question.
I'm going to ask you specifically about Jordan Peterson and biblical movements without the Bible per se, without the divinity of the Bible per se.
But to hear the answer from Bishop Barron, you first must be a subscriber.
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Bishop Barron, thanks so much for coming.
It really has been a pleasure having you.
I've really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for the time.
God bless you.
God bless you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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