Bishop Robert Barron addresses the erosion of biblical knowledge among young Christians, framing Christmas as God’s incarnation to heal humanity’s brokenness, not just the crucifixion. He critiques post-Vatican II focus on social justice over apologetics, citing figures like Hitchens and Peterson’s influence, while warning that woke ideology—rooted in Nietzsche and Foucault—replaces moral responsibility with power dynamics. Europe’s Christian decline, from Czech communism to secularization, underscores the need for urgent evangelization, prioritizing Jesus’ lordship over institutional preservation despite slow progress. [Automatically generated summary]
If you were called into some magical meeting where they said to you, what is the one thing you would like to see the church doing that it's not doing?
What would it be?
It would be evangelizing more effectively.
I'm with Vatican II and John Paul II and Benedict and Francis II.
I mean, the number one concern of the church right now should be declaring the lordship of Jesus.
It's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Bishop Robert Barron.
I hope you've heard of him.
You should have.
He is the founder of Word on Fire.
He's the bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester, Minnesota.
And he's just a famous speaker and theologian.
And he's been called one of the church's best messengers.
And you can find out for yourself.
His homilies and sermons are on YouTube, and they are absolutely excellent.
And I want to talk to him today because, you know, many years ago, I was speaking at a Christian school.
It was an evangelical school, and there was a pastor who had been there for quite a long time.
And I asked him what had changed over the years.
And this was for pretty young kids.
And he said, the difference now, after, you know, several years, is that when kids come in now, they've never read the Bible.
They don't know who Noah is.
This was a Christian school from parents who are devout Christians.
They don't know who Noah is.
They don't know any of the stories.
And we're really starting from scratch.
And I have noticed that myself in young people, and I've noticed it in people who respond to me on the air and in the things that I write, that there is actually no foundation with many people for their Christian faith.
And so I want to talk to the bishop about Christmas, which I think is an important topic, but also about the state of the church today here and around the world.
Bishop, thank you so much for coming on.
It's a real pleasure to meet you.
I've admired your work for a long time.
Well, thanks, Andrew, very much.
Thanks for having me on.
So when you hear something like that, when you hear that young people in a Christian school have never heard of Noah and don't really know the stories, and this is my experience as well.
I mean, I make references to the Bible, things that I would think everybody knows and nobody does.
I remember George W. Bush once making a reference to the Good Samaritans and the press saying he was speaking in code to evangelicals.
I thought that was wonderful.
How would you, if you're talking to a group of people who have no reference point to the Bible, how would you describe Christmas to them?
Christmas is God coming to join us, God with us in Manuel.
God has joined to himself a human nature, to put it in more philosophical language, but it means God has entered into our histories, entered into our humanity in order to heal us and to save us.
The church fathers often saw the incarnation as the great saving event.
So it wasn't focused simply on the cross.
That's the culmination of the incarnation, you might say.
But it's the incarnation itself, that God becomes flesh.
God becomes one of us.
That's what heals us.
And that's what Christmas is about underneath all the sentimentality and superficiality.
It's God becoming one of us that we might become sharers in his nature.
You know, C.S. Lewis once said that before you can give people the good news, you have to deliver the bad news because they no longer feel that they're broken.
They no longer feel the same.
Do you find that in speaking to congregations and speaking to people?
Yes, absolutely.
And I often focus my Christmas preaching in just that way, that you won't appreciate Jesus as Savior unless you are really convinced deep down that you need a Savior, that you can't save yourself.
I often go back to the 12-step process, which a lot of people know about or they know someone that's gone through it, where the opening move is to admit your helplessness in the face of this addiction, whatever it is.
Well, the church fathers would have recognized all sin is a type of addiction.
Pride has taken over my life.
Envy is the driving passion of my life.
Anger dominates me, et cetera.
Well, until I admit, look, I can't solve this problem on my own.
So I'm not an Aristotelian.
I think I just habituate myself and I'll cultivate certain virtues.
That's true to a degree.
But when it comes to what's really wrong with us, we're helpless.
I often say to Catholics, we sing during Advent that ancient hymn, oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.
I don't think we really attend to what that means, but it was this relatively common practice in the ancient world of people being kidnapped and held for ransom.
And in that situation, far from home, far from any resources, all you can do is hope that you'll be ransomed.
You'll be paid for.
Well, that's got to be the attitude of every sinner is I'm held captive by my sin.
It's not a minor problem, not something I can solve through my good efforts.
I'm captive to my sin, and I need a savior who's going to come like this is Lewis, too, I think, like a mechanic.
If he's going to fix the car, he's got to get in under the hood and under the car and get his hands dirty.
He can't declare the car fixed from the outside.
He has to get in there and fix it.
Well, that's the incarnation of the Creator coming into our human nature, into our human condition to fix it.
But you've got to know you need a Savior before you can really appreciate Christmas.
If you looked at the last 10 years, say, I mean, 10 years ago, I started saying that I thought that there was going to be a revival and that that revival was going to come down from the top instead of from the streets, that intellectuals were going to realize that they were talking nonsense and that their materialist philosophy doesn't really make sense.
It doesn't hold together and it's not scientific either.
If you looked over the last 10 years, would you say that the movement toward faith is getting worse or better?
Are more people moving toward faith or are they moving away from it?
Well, better for sure the last 10 years.
I mean, go back 25 years and the beginning of the new atheist movement, which happened not accidentally, right after September 11th.
So September 11th revived the old kind of Enlightenment trope that religion is irrational, therefore violent.
And so that was on massive display on September 11th.
And the new atheists kind of exploited that to say, yes, look at religion, what it's done.
I'm proposing this new kind of rationalism.
And I can testify, boy, I've been talking to young people for all that time.
A lot of them were beguiled by the new atheists, even though the arguments weren't new at all.
They were all tired retreads of Marx and Sartre and Nietzsche and so on.
But what was new, I think, was that moment in our history, the tragedy of 9-11.
And people said, yeah, that's the ugly face of religion.
So 25 years ago, I was much more pessimistic.
When I first started doing my work online and started doing kind of Catholic apologetics, I met with a lot of the new atheist disciples, right?
But what's happened is, and a lot of reasons for it, but what's happened is that's been turned around.
And there really is a revival of interest in, to put it generically, the things of the spirit or something beyond a merely materialistic view.
But even in the particular religions, especially Catholicism, and we've been able to measure that recently, the numbers of baptisms and confirmations and so on.
I think our friend Jordan Peterson had a lot to do with it.
I give him a lot of credit.
I once told him, I said, you live up to your name.
You're like the River Jordan for a lot of people.
They cross you to get into religion.
Even as he sometimes is hesitating on the far bank himself, but a lot of people have crossed him to get into the religions.
But the way he's challenged people intellectually and morally, I think has been really good.
We've appealed in a much more efficacious way to young men.
But, you know, I think part of it, Andrew, is just that a generation grew up and said, okay, the new atheists, if they're right, I came from nothing.
I'm returning to nothing.
There's no objective moral value.
There's no point and purpose to life.
I'm just dumbly here for no purpose.
Well, you know, once they got over the, yeah, you know, stick it to religion, they looked at that worldview and found it properly bleak.
And then I think they were much more open to entertaining the proposals of religion.
You know, I always found it shocking.
You know, I was a big fan of Christopher Hitchens as a writer.
I thought he was one of the prose writers of his time.
Yeah.
And I was amazed at how he would descend into illogic and irrationality the minute he would start talking about this and how little the new atheists knew about theology at all.
I mean, Stephen Smith is still railing against the ghost in the machine and sort of like, it was not that good of an idea to write.
Quite right.
Well, here's it.
I'll say two things.
One is, yes, true.
They didn't engage religion in a serious way at all.
It was all straw men, straw gods they were knocking down.
And they just never seriously engaged the, let's say, philosophically astute theistic tradition.
They didn't even bother with it.
They were just, you know, imagining God as some crazy being within the confines of the universe and so on and so forth.
But I'll also say this.
We, church people, are to some degree to blame because in the Catholic context, after Vatican II, not because of Vatican II, but after Vatican II, we dropped a lot of our intellectual arsenal.
We de-emphasized the intellectual dimension of the faith.
I grew up with that.
I was educated after the council.
The entire stress really was on social justice.
To be religious meant to be committed to caring for the poor and civil rights, right?
Well, as a result, when the critics emerged, as they did after September 11th, we were denuded of our weaponry.
We had nothing to fight back with.
Watch some of those early debates between Hitchens, who again, just he's retreading tired little arguments, using empty rhetoric, et cetera, but with a mellifluous British accent, which we Americans always fall for.
We're suckers.
But anyway, but watch the pathetic efforts of the Christian apologists and so on to battle him.
I look back and I'll say, don't say that.
Don't you know what Aquinas said about this?
So we are to some degree to blame for this.
Now, couple that, mind you, with the scandals.
Couple the sex abuse scandals with a church that had forgotten how to make a case for itself, and then the new atheist critique that comes after September 11th.
That's a very bad farago of influences that led to this decline.
I think happily we are turning a corner on that, though.
You know, I was once joking with Jordan Peterson that I told him I was going to stop asking him about God because I felt like the bad guy in a cowboy movie shooting at his feet to make him dance, you know.
And he laughed, but he said, you know, I hope that my struggle with this is an invitation to people to enter into that struggle.
And I thought that was a really good answer.
I mean, I thought it was a very sound way of thinking.
Is there a sense in which before people get to the church, there's some post outpost that they have to hit before that, that maybe that outpost doesn't exist, the bridge doesn't exist?
I think of C.S. Lewis here.
He said before the evangelist comes, there should be an apologist who would clear up a lot of false conceptions, answer fundamental questions, kind of clear the ground.
Then he imagined the evangelists would come in and announce Jesus Christ, announce the resurrection.
Because he felt that, and there's something right about that, there's so much static that within the general culture, so many nagging questions and misrepresentations of religion that they don't hear the evangelical message.
And there's something right about that, that a fundamental apologetics has to be done.
I just finished Ross Dalthit's book called Believe, which is a kind of a C.S. Lewis type book to lay out, you know, for people today.
It's different than Lewis's because Lewis uses the moral argument.
Dalthett uses this sort of argument from intelligibility, which I think suits more scientifically minded people today.
But maybe you need the Lewis's and the Dalthuts to kind of clear the ground before the evangelist speaks.
You know, one thing that I've noticed that people don't really talk about is the aggressive hostility toward religion among the intellectual classes.
I mean, I've certainly seen this.
You know, I worked in Hollywood, and I remember after Mel Gibson brought out his beautiful, beautiful picture of the passion of the Christ.
I went into a couple of meetings and heard other people go into meetings saying, you know, this makes a lot of money.
You know, he basically paid for this out of pocket, which, you know, Gibson has big pockets, but still, he paid for it out of pocket and made about a billion dollars.
And they would just say, we don't want to do that.
We know it makes money.
And these are Hollywood people.
They're supposed to only be about money, which is not really true.
But they would say, we don't want to do that.
I've seen him.
I've seen God edited out of narratives, biography, bio pictures like the one about Johnny Cash, where his engagement with Christ, which was his whole story, was cut down to maybe 10 seconds.
The story about the runner who was tortured by the Japanese.
His conversion was just entered out of the film.
Do you find that that is still there, that that hostility is still there at such a high level?
You said you were being more optimistic, but do you feel that that's drawing back at all?
No, I think it's still there in the elite part of the culture for sure.
Like, you know, I read a range of different magazines and publications, make sure I get left, center, and right.
But you read the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Rolling Stone, I mean, all of which I read, there'd still be a very fiercely anti-religious ideology in place.
The New Yorker never misses an opportunity to go after religion.
Even like you're reading along, the article has nothing to do with religion, but suddenly there's an attack on religious people.
So, no, I think it's still there in the elite culture for sure.
The Johnny Cash one is a good, I like that movie a lot, you know, Walk the Line, but I noticed that too.
Papacy's Intellectual Revival00:08:53
Johnny Cash took his Christianity very seriously and it changed his life.
And it's what got him out of his addictions and all of that.
But you never know it from the movie.
There is that like one scene where he's approaching church in a sort of reluctant spirit.
But no, no, I think the high culture, the elite culture is still pretty hostile to religion.
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So, the reason I ask this is because the reason I thought that there would be a revival is I find there's a lot of, I was interested in the Romantic period.
And during the Romantic period, when religion had fallen apart because of the French Revolution, there was this Oxford movement that kind of struck back against that.
And it really did transform things for about a century.
It was pretty powerful.
And I was kind of expecting the same thing.
And I'm not sure that I'm seeing that.
And I'm wondering, I mean, I'm wondering what you're seeing in the churches.
You said you're more optimistic.
I'm wondering why, what it is you're seeing now.
Well, I'm more optimistic seeing the stats and the reality on the ground.
As a bishop, I preside at what we call the rite of election.
That's when people are declaring their willingness to come into the church.
And so you do indeed see numbers across the church increasing rather dramatically.
You see it at college campuses.
I've been to a number of them, and the number of young kids who are coming into the church.
So I do see it there.
And yeah, John Henry Newman is one of my great heroes.
And, you know, part of the Oxford movement, a big part of it, there was a liturgical side to it and all that.
It's more experiential, prayerful side.
But a very big part of it was an intellectual renewal.
And, you know, led by Newman and his colleagues.
See, that didn't happen after Vatican II.
What happened, unfortunately, in the Catholic Church was a sort of anti-intellectualism began to hold sway.
The years I was going through school and seminary, there was a very strong anti-intellectualism.
It was what I would call sort of Kantianism, the reduction of religion to ethics, and usually social ethics, you know, care for the poor and so on.
So that's what was missing.
We didn't have the Oxford movement the same way, and that's one reason.
Now, after the new atheists, after 9-11, there has been a revival in Catholic apologetics.
And that's been a great thing.
That's maybe in God's providence, a gift of the new atheists, is it inspired a lot of us to get back into the conversation in an intellectual way.
You know, compared to when I was a kid, there's now there's an explosion of websites and podcasts and books about evangelization, apologetics.
So maybe, you know, and I can point to some on the intellectual side too, some signs of a renewal.
But that's an intriguing proposal, actually, that something like the Oxford movement is the needful thing.
You know, you spoke about the scandals in the Catholic Church, and there's a new pope now.
And I don't know.
I don't know exactly how to pose this question.
I mean, I'm an Anglican Catholic, and we feel very strongly, and I feel very strongly, that the Catholic Church is the last bulwark.
If we lose the Catholic Church, that's it.
The sea of darkness just flows over everything because nobody, because it really is the lodestar of the church.
There's no question about it.
And I'm wondering how you feel about the state of the church, I guess, right now.
Has it improved?
I mean, I lived through two of the greatest popes, I think, in history.
I couldn't believe John Paul II and Benedict were in the same building at the same time.
It was like when the founding of this country, it was just amazing that they had been brought together.
I have not been as impressed after that.
And I'm wondering how you feel about the state of the church right at this moment.
Well, I think it's true that John Paul and Benedict, and you're right, John Paul was a world historical figure.
Benedict was arguably the greatest theologian among the popes.
And that includes Gregory the Great and so on.
What they did is they stabilized the church after the council and gave a definitive interpretation to its texts.
Because what happened was in the wake of Vatican II, there were a plethora of readings.
We had left, center, and right battling about how to interpret the council.
It was the long papacy of John Paul, 27 years, and then Benedict was eight years.
So you have 35 years of a stabilizing of the church and a stabilized reading of the council.
I think that's their great accomplishment.
Not to mention John Paul and the fall of communism.
So that little side, that little footnote, you know.
But in terms of the church, they stabilized the church after the council.
One way to look at Pope Francis is in a way he put wind in the sails of the old guard liberals that were kept at bay during the John Paul Benedict years and gave them a kind of fresh lease on life.
But you know what?
I think it's really interesting, Andrew, is you look at the kind of shopping list of what liberal Catholics have wanted for decades.
So it's married priests, women priests, it's changing, you know, birth control and sexual ethics, gay marriage, et cetera.
None of that happened under Francis.
So Francis rhetorically signaled the kind of greater openness or a greater flexibility.
But none of that happened in his papacy.
And I was actually there.
There were two rounds of this Synod on Synodality, and I was elected as a representative of that.
So I was there.
And believe me, there were people, certainly in the first round of the synod, who were proposing all kinds of things.
None of it happened.
None of it happened.
So there is this mysterious, I think, activity of the Holy Spirit that keeps the church online, even as things get a little bit shaky.
Now, with Pope Leo, you know, I think we don't know for sure.
Most of us didn't really know him very well.
I'm encouraged by a lot of the signals that he's given, sort of reverence for the traditions of the papacy.
I think he's a very thoughtful, prudent man, not given to rhetorical excess.
And some indication, I think, that he might be more open to giving greater permission to the Latin Mass.
Again, we don't know that, but there's some indication of that.
So, you know, we'll see.
He's meeting with all the cardinals in January.
And that's under Francis, that was very rare.
He hardly ever met with the cardinals.
But Leo now, you know, within the first year of his papacy, is going to call all the cardinals together.
There's some thought that it'll be about liturgy.
Now, maybe that means partially the Latin liturgy.
I don't know.
So I think we're still kind of waiting and seeing.
I met him during the synod.
He was also a delegate and very quiet the way he is now, very quiet, retiring fellow.
There were a lot of big egos at the synod.
He wasn't one of them.
He was the way he is now, this kind of modest, retiring fellow.
We had one conversation really, and it was about Chicago.
We're both Chicagoans.
And we talked about that.
So that's really my only contact with him.
And, you know, we'll wait and see.
Yeah.
So stepping back to look at the larger picture for a minute.
Power And Persecution00:08:45
You know, one of the things that always strikes me about some leftist philosophy that's based on intersectionality, where they have some kind of fantastical chart of who's got power and who hasn't got power.
And the people with less power are always the good guys and more power are always the bad guys, which simply isn't so.
But then I look at that and I think it seems to me that the church across the world is one of the most persecuted outposts there is.
I mean, I think maybe it's possible that Christianity is now the most persecuted religion.
I mean, it's always hard to beat the Jews on that one, but like it's still, you know, it's still pretty amazing how bad things are.
And that doesn't seem to count on the intersectionality chart.
What is your feeling about the church in the world right now?
Well, on that point, I think there's no question that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.
And partially due to the fact that we are all over the world, and there are Christians all across the globe.
But look in Middle East, look in Africa, places like Nigeria, look in Asia.
Look in our country in a more mitigated way.
So we're not putting people to death, but there's a persecution institutionally of Christians.
No, there's no question about that.
And it's an issue which has oddly, as you suggest correctly, fallen through the cracks, as though it's not even there.
When it's an extraordinary example of persecution.
But you're right.
The reason is if Christians, well, they're in a powerful position.
They're a dominant religion, so they can't be victims, so we're not going to pay attention to them.
But that's crazy.
And of course, that whole way of thinking with its roots in Nietzsche and especially Michel Foucault in the last century has been such a blight on our society.
To me, that's in some ways the essence of wokeism is that popularization of critical theory, at the heart of which is this idea of what matters is power and power relationships among various groups.
The trouble is that it undermines biblical ethics, which is always an individualist ethics.
Go back to the book of the prophet Ezekiel.
If your father sinned, well, it's not going to blame that on you.
Your son committed a crime.
I'm not going to blame you.
You're responsible.
You are responsible for your good and evil acts.
Well, that was a breakthrough in consciousness.
So we're like, you know, 500 BC, but that was a breakthrough because people did think in very global tribalistic terms.
Well, there's a kind of neo-tribalism with this crazy woke stuff.
And what tribe do you belong to?
Are you with a good tribe or a bad tribe?
And then what really worries me is if you belong to a bad tribe, so look at me, I'm a white man, so right away I'm in a bad tribe.
Well, violence, sure, is justified against people like you because of all the trouble you've caused and all the power that you've abused.
Sure, why not?
So biblical people, it seems to me, have got to really rise up against this weird neo-tribalistic approach to morality, which is wreaking havoc all over the world.
So yeah, that's my take on Christian persecution, which is a serious problem.
It is morbidly hilarious that Foucault essentially destroyed himself in keeping with his philosophy.
And that's the guy they want to follow.
It's like he actually followed his philosophy right into the grave.
I always go back.
I studied in Paris for my doctorate.
I was there 89 through 92, right?
And Foucault died, I think it was in 84 or 5.
So he just had died a few years before I got there.
I can tell you, you know, when you walk around Paris, there's a restaurant and a bookstore on every block in Paris.
And looking out from the windows of almost every bookstore was the owlish visage of Michel Foucault.
His books were featured in every bookstore.
Well, it took a while, but that trickled down.
The influence of Foucault and his colleagues eventually got into the academy in America.
And then from the academy, it got into the minds of a couple generations of students.
And then my reading is the summer of 2020, that awful summer, it spilled out into the streets.
Wokeism, you know, especially in its violent expression.
That's popularized Foucaultism.
That's, to me, is the biggest cultural challenge we're facing.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And it's amazing how ideas trickle down.
I mean, the guy is incredibly difficult to read.
And I think, unlike some of the postmodernists, I think he was a grifter in his philosophy, but he's very powerful.
You know, recently, I lived in England for a long time.
And recently I said to some English friends, to different English friends in different places, I pointed out that people were being arrested or at least threatened with arrest for praying silently and could be arrested for praying silently in their homes if their home was close enough to an abortion clinic.
And I said, is there some point where you guys stage a revolution or something?
And they all said the same thing, which is, we don't care.
We don't care about this.
We do not care about this issue.
And yeah, I was kind of appalled.
I wonder, is Europe gone?
Have we lost Europe as part of Christendom, as it were?
I worry about it for sure.
And the England thing, I agree with you, is just bizarre.
It's deeply corrupt.
And, you know, as an American, we're so accustomed to this sort of etiquette of free speech and so on.
Boy, when that disappears, we're in some serious trouble as a democracy.
I do worry a lot about Europe.
I was in Germany this past summer, and the church is on the ropes in Germany.
There are little pockets of resistance and little pockets of Christianity, but it's in serious trouble.
England, France, Italy, and look at the birth rate.
To me, that's always a telling thing.
The birth rate has collapsed in these countries.
You know, Poland is still, there's a sign of hope, I think, in Poland.
But I was also in the Czech Republic.
I was invited to give a paper in Prague, and I'd never been to Prague before.
What a city.
Great city.
Beautiful city.
Gorgeous city.
But the faith is gone.
And the people that were hosting me, good Catholic people, they gave me little ground for hope that the communists, for a couple of generations, just knocked it out of the people.
And so even grandma, because like in our country, maybe young people lost faith, but grandma still has it, right?
In the Czech Republic, no, grandma doesn't have the faith.
And so the speeches I gave over there, I kept saying, oh, your city is the most beautiful in Europe.
And I am so impressed by it.
Then I would say, but you know where these buildings came from, almost without exception.
They came from a Christian culture.
They were expressive of a Christian ethos and milieu.
So I said, that's what worries me.
When that's gone, you know, what will happen to this culture?
Yeah.
I do worry about it a lot.
I'm running out of time, but I've got to ask you one last question.
If you were called into some magical meeting where they said to you, what is the one thing you would like to see the church doing that it's not doing?
What would it be?
It would be evangelizing more effectively.
I'm with Vatican II and John Paul II and Benedict and Francis II.
I mean, the number one concern of the church right now should be declaring the lordship of Jesus.
And I think we're getting better at that, but we're not doing it the way we should.
So evangelization is more important than our institutions.
And sometimes we get too drawn into the maintenance of our institutions.
But, you know, at the beginning of the church, there were no institutions, right?
There were no Catholic hospitals, schools, parishes.
There was no Vatican.
There was no Roman Curia.
But there were evangelists.
There were people declaring the Lordship of Jesus.
So that's the needful thing today, I think.
That's really interesting.
Bishop Robert Barrens, thank you so much for coming on.
I could talk to you for a long time.
I hope you'll come back as many other people.
But it's nice to meet you.
I hope you've had a Merry Christmas, and I hope to talk to you again soon.
Good.
God bless Andrew.
Thanks.
God bless you.
Thanks.
Really, really interesting man.
And if you haven't seen his stuff on YouTube, go on.
He's so easy to find.
But like I said, some of them are short homilies, 15 minutes or something, easy to listen to and always, always intelligent and well thought out.
But we will be back with the Andrew Clavin Show the first, let's see, the first, the second Friday in the new year is when we come back.