Bishop Robert Barron argues modern unhappiness stems from secularism’s rejection of God, linking 20th-century persecution—including Bolshevism and clergy scandals—to a loss of Christian values, with Vatican II’s implementation often diluting supernatural emphasis. He critiques "ordered freedom" as self-absorption, contrasts grace over sin, and warns AI risks moral collapse without divine grounding. Persecution persists despite reforms like the 2002 Dallas Accords, with states like California enforcing anti-Catholic laws, while Mass attendance plummeted from 70% in 1960 to 19%. Barron insists Christianity’s crucified God remains uniquely transformative, but secular ideologies—from Marxism to unchecked tech—threaten humanity’s soul. [Automatically generated summary]
The Catholic Church got super liberal, and then all of a sudden, everywhere you look, people you know are converting to Catholicism with a pretty kind of traditionally Christian orientation.
I don't think I've ever received more texts about any guest than I did about you.
From Catholics I know, from non-Catholics I know, but the Catholics all wanted to hear details on, you know, factions within the church, and I'm not going to ask you any questions about that because I don't understand any of it.
It means that you've lost a sense of connection to the values that should be calling you out of yourself in an act of love, and you've now come to reverence your own freedom, your own autonomy.
So what gives my life meaning is the fact that I've chosen something.
I've determined my life.
If the Bible has one message, it's that.
That when you live your life that way, you get lost.
When you deify your own psyche, your own ego, you get lost.
The joy of life comes from forgetting in this great ecstatic act.
You forget about yourself and you lose yourself in some great value.
Now that could be sports, that could be politics, whatever it is.
But then the supreme value in which all the other ones participate.
We call God.
God is the highest good, the sumum bonum.
That's why you love the Lord your God.
That's the first commandment, right?
But when the culture's lost that, which ours is in danger of, you by definition become unhappy.
You get caved in around yourself.
And then you fuss around in this kind of addictive way.
That's how I would diagnose the thing spiritually.
It's like a kid with all kinds of athletic ability, but if a coach never directs that ability toward the achievement of some good, that he can become a great tennis player or a great golfer, then the freedom begins to kind of stew on itself.
No, direct freedom, direct talent, direct energy.
And our culture, see, it's like, I think of this, If you have banks to a river, the river has energy.
It just opens up in this big lazy lake, and everyone's just sort of lying on their air mattresses, right?
Now, I'll tolerate you.
You tolerate me.
I won't bother you.
But then we're not getting anywhere.
The point of the banks is not to restrict me, it's to direct me, see, towards some good.
Well, religion has played that role for much of our history.
And in the measure that religion gets marginalized, and in the measure that we deify our autonomy, welcome to the unhappy world that many of the young people are living in, sadly.
Very early on, when I was in my early 20s, before I was a priest, but I got into what we call the Liturgy of the Hours in the Catholic Church, which is this daily prayer at certain points during the day, imitating, by the way, the seven times you pray in the Bible.
John Paul II, toward the end of his life, you know, he said, I know different types of prayer, but I found the longer I live that all prayer is basically a petition.
And there's something really right about that, that no matter how, you know, kind of high and elevated your prayer is, at bottom you're saying, you know, Lord Jesus Christ, have pity on me.
Evil is, a clients would call it a privatio, a privation of the good.
Evil is a...
It's a lack, right?
But whatever is, is good.
So, for example, take the devil as an example.
Is the devil good?
Sure, of course.
In the measure the devil exists, has a mind, has a will.
All that is good.
What's evil about the devil is the corruption of mind and will and power, right?
That's why, like, Satan and Dante, this is highest of angels.
Full of goodness.
God doesn't make anything that's not good.
But it's become corrupt.
So the trick there is always to focus on the good, because being in good are convertible terms.
Whatever is, is good.
Think of the mystics who talk about, you see like a little bug crawling across this table, that's an avenue toward God.
Because if you look at this little tiny bug, let's say, but the more you look at it, I mean, incredible complexity and richness and density of its being.
Of course it speaks to you of the creator of all things, that whose very nature is to be, right?
So all being reflects God.
And if you have the eyes to see, that's what the great saints have.
They see that all the time.
We sinners tend to focus a lot on the lack, right?
We focus on the cavity, not the tooth.
The idea is look at the tooth.
Always acknowledging the cavities, because there are plenty of them, but the focus should be on being, being good or convertible terms.
They talk about the transcendental properties of being, which means wherever there is It's good, it's true, and it's beautiful.
Now, why is it good?
Well, because it corresponds to the will in some ways.
There's, you know, yeah, I want to study this glass.
It's interesting.
And look at it.
Beauty of it, you know?
It's true because it corresponds in its intelligibility to an inquiring mind.
The mind wants to understand that thing.
What is that thing?
It's beautiful because it's radiant, you know?
Go back to, like, James Joyce, the famous scene, you know, in the portrait of the artist.
When he sees the woman, he eventually would marry Nora Barnacle, and he sees her out on the strand, and he has this rapturous description of her, remember?
And at the end of it, he says, Oh, heavenly God.
And that's the way it works, is the beautiful, this particular girl he sees out in the surf, but she speaks to him of God.
So that's why whatever is, is good, it's true, and it's beautiful.
So, if you could distract people sufficient that they never had the time, Or the inclination to notice things that are real, you would trap them in a kind of hell.
Now, psychodynamically, is when we focus on all this kind of lack and anxiety and frustration within us, it is a kind of preoccupation with what's not real.
That's true.
I'm not denying the psychological reality of suffering, but metaphysically speaking, And if I'm focused on that, then I'm going to get myself in non-being.
During Lent, this past Lent, I did a resolution for the first time that one day a week I put the phone away.
And I did it.
And it was a little bit of a struggle, but not terrible.
And I thought, that's a good thing.
When we bring our guys now into priesthood studies, we have what's called the propedeutic year, this year of kind of preparation before the formal study begins.
And the thing that all the guys say they like...
So for the entire year, I think once a week you can check it for emergencies or something, or someone's got access to it in case of emergency, but they take the phones away from the guys.
Jean Twenge is a psychologist from San Diego that I read a lot, and she has a book called iGen about the generation that came of age totally with the iPhones and iPads and stuff.
And she said there's a direct correlation between screen time and depression, which I find perfectly plausible.
Leonard Sachs, you know, the great psychologist, also a physician dealing with young people now for decades.
So, I learned that from Fulton Sheen, taught now a couple generations to do every day an hour of uninterrupted prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
So as a Catholic, I have the blood sacrament in my house.
So first thing I do in the morning, I get a cup of coffee and I go up to my chapel.
So that psalms and canticles and readings that appreciate.
Yeah, so I'll have the book and I'll read the psalm.
And usually then spend some time meditating.
And then do the next one, you know.
And then I might, let's say, between the Office of Readings, which has to do with the Church Fathers, I read something from the Church Fathers, and usually from the Bible.
Maybe between that and morning prayer, I'll do the Rosary.
And I might do another form of prayer between morning prayer and midday prayer.
So I'll work my way through the office, the Liturgy of the Hours.
I pray all the time for people who have died because you're aware of it when you're in pastoral ministry.
Some people who've died, they're not formally canonized by the church, but in an informal way, I think of them as being already in the presence of God and I'll pray for their intercession.
Cardinal George of Chicago was a great mentor to me.
Creation, in the theological sense, has little to do with that.
That's all about development of biological forms.
Okay.
Creation is something much more dramatic.
Creation names...
So, I mean, like right now, here you and I are sitting here in this table, in this room, is entirely conditioned form of existence.
By which I mean it is, but it doesn't have to be.
I could have missed the ride up here today.
You could have gotten sick.
This thing could have fallen on the table.
It could be a thousand degrees and we'd be incinerated.
It could be a thousand degrees below zero and we'd be frozen.
There are a million things that make this set of affairs real, but it doesn't have to be.
It doesn't have to be the case.
So how do you explain that?
Well, you can't appeal endlessly to other contingent things.
You have to come, finally, to some reality whose very nature is to be.
that's not contingent, not finite, not evanescent, not dependent, but whose very nature is to be.
What's your name?
See, Moses was asking a very sensible question for this worldly perspective.
So, hey, what kind of glass is that?
How tall is that glass?
What kind of table is this?
That's a nice table.
What kind of table is it?
So you're a god, obviously.
You seem to know a lot about me.
So which one are you?
Are you the god of the mountain?
Are you the god of the place?
Are you the god of these people?
Who are you?
Which one are you?
What's your name?
And so when God says, I am who I am, he's saying, dumb question.
That is not the right question to ask here.
Because I'm not a conditioned state of affairs.
I'm not a being among many.
My name is I am.
I am who I am, right?
My nature is to be.
Well, now we're talking about the Creator.
See, the Creator is the one who is here and now undergirding all the finite reality, who is right now, this is a great line from Herbert McCabe, the theologian, he's singing the world into being the way an opera singer sustains a song.
God, the ground of being, is singing this finite world into being.
That's creation, see?
So, now, within creation, I can talk all day about the Darwinists and how this life form developed into that life form, and I'll let them debate that.
But the religious question remains, no matter what you say about that, the religious question is about, why is there something rather than nothing?
And if you ask that question, it means you haven't grasped the solution.
If you say, who created the creator?
Well, then you haven't grasped.
No.
The argument leads towards something.
That doesn't need to be created, that can't be created, whose very nature is to be, and who therefore is eternal, we'd say, outside of time, immaterial, outside of space, right?
So all the finite things or the characteristics of finite reality can't apply to that reality.
That's why we say God's eternal or why he's immaterial and so on, immutable.
That means nothing that characterizes finite things should characterize him.
No, look, my ministry, Word on Fire, emerged around that time, so right around the year 2000.
The New Atheists emerged after September 11th, which is not surprising, because September 11th stirred to life again this old kind of enlightenment idea.
Religion is irrational, therefore it's violent.
Because they can't settle things through argument, they have to settle them through bombs and guns.
So that's an old argument that goes back to the 17th century.
It was revived massively after September 11th.
The New Atheists, I think, rode that wave in a big way.
Now, they were gifted rhetoricians, especially Hitchens, right?
I admired Hitchens.
I read Hitchens always with great pleasure.
Dawkins, less so.
Sam Harris, I think, has rhetorical gifts.
But there are arguments...
They were old hat.
They're borrowed from Marx and from Freud and from Feuerbach especially.
So nothing new at the intellectual level.
They were new in their nastiness.
So the classical atheists, think Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, you got the sense they knew they were dealing with a formidable opponent when they were fighting religion.
The new atheists, it was like they were dealing with an idiot child.
And so that's what was so annoying about them, I thought.
And their arguments were pretty bad.
And they were so aggressive toward religion.
They did a great service, though.
I'll say this.
They awakened the Christian churches in many ways.
The apologetic weapons that we threw away 40 years ago, we were compelled to pick up again.
So a lot of us got into the game to kind of battle the new atheists and to draw upon the very rich intellectual tradition, especially of Catholicism.
So in that way, they did a service to us.
Also, I wrote a paper on this one.
I called it Thomas Aquinas and Why the New Atheists Are Right.
Because the new atheists, they make this mistake we were just talking about.
They will construe God as some kind of big being.
And, okay, is there this big being or not?
Some say there is.
Some say there isn't.
So it's like Bigfoot.
You know, some say there is a Bigfoot.
Others say there isn't a Bigfoot.
Let's go look around for evidence and find out.
Well, you'll never find God that way.
God isn't a being.
God isn't a thing in the world, right?
He's the reason why there's a world at all.
Therefore, you're not going to find him in the world.
Therefore, you can't say things like, oh, there's no evidence for God, as though he's like a chemical reaction or something.
If you were to say, all that there is is the secular world, right?
As a materialism or eminentism or scientism, in the political sense, secularism, meaning all that there is is the world that I can see and measure and so on.
That's hiding from God.
That's saying, I'm not going to worry about God.
God doesn't impinge upon me.
That's the buffered self.
Charles Taylor, the philosopher, calls it that.
I'm buffered from any contact with the transcendent.
That's an attempt to hide from God.
It doesn't work.
And see, what I think, Tucker, is really interesting is the fact that religion is experiencing a revival.
A lot of the news you read doesn't really have a lot of inherent meaning, but this does.
Starting May 19th, the Hallow app is leading a consecration to Jesus through Saint Joseph.
You might be asking, why Saint Joseph?
Why now?
Well, consider this.
Joseph was the man God himself trusted with his own son.
He wasn't a king or a warrior.
He was a carpenter.
He was a quiet and steady man of unshakable faith.
In an age that mocks humility, can you imagine the basis of wisdom and a relationship with God?
It's time we looked to someone who embodied humility, not for applause, but for God.
The series is not just about St. Joseph.
It's about what happens when you follow his example, when you trade noise for silence, when you stop chasing relevance and start seeking holiness and all of that.
It's important to remind yourself of that we do every day.
So every week on Howl, you'll hear reflections grounded in the Gospels, pray powerful prayers like the Litany of St. Joseph, and hear glory stories from throughout church history, not myths, not legends, actual intersections, and power from a saint who's been quietly helping people for thousands of years.
Hallow is the world's number one prayer app, and experiences like this are why my family and I cannot get enough of it.
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He doesn't require it, and that's a super important point.
The Bible and the great tradition make it over and over again.
How could the one who made the entire universe from nothing possibly need anything from it?
It's just a logical contradiction.
The ancient gods of Greece, sure, they need all kinds of stuff.
Remember that scene, it's in The Odyssey, I think, where as the sacrifices are being made and the gods are desperately lapping up the blood of the sacrifice because they need our loyalty and so on.
All the animals in the field, they all belong to me.
But that's a very important point because it's not that we're playing some game of codependency with God.
God needs nothing.
That's the best news ever.
God needs nothing from us.
What he wants is...
And when we say, Lord, I'm opening my heart to you, I'm ordering my life to you in this great sacrifice of praise, God delights because now we're going to find the joy he wants us to have.
That's St. Irenaeus, my great intellectual hero.
The glory of God as a human being fully alive.
The glory of God is not putting us down.
And boy, they finally got around honoring me sufficiently.
So that's old paganism.
But it haunts the Christian mind still.
It haunts our minds.
But the Bible is always trying to dismiss that demon.
God wants our sacrifice because it's good for us.
God gets nothing out of it.
Think of it.
It bounces off of the rock of the divine self-sufficiency and comes back to our benefit.
So when I pray to God or I offer the sacrifice of the Mass to God, I'm not giving God anything he needs.
God needs nothing.
But it bounces off of that self-sufficiency to me.
It redounds to my benefit.
So go into the Catholic Mass.
We offer the sacrifice of Jesus to the Father.
We represent the sacrifice of the cross to the Father.
Oh, because the Father needs it?
The Father needs nothing.
But it bounces off of the Father's self-sufficiency and comes back as food for us.
So now we eat.
We eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus.
We consume the sacrifice.
It's for our benefit, not for God's.
But your question is really a good one because it leads us into that very important spiritual space.
Both Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen, I mean, arguably the two greatest evangelists of the 20th century, said the same thing, which was the objection to God is rarely truly intellectual.
It's a moral objection.
The moral demand of God becomes too great.
If he's one spiritual figure among many, he's a great teacher, like the Buddha, he's like Muhammad, he's like Confucius, well then I can kind of handle him.
I can put him in a corner and say, okay, that's interesting, I'll abide by some of that, and I also like what the Sufi mystics say, and I also like what Moses says here.
But see, Jesus, as C.S. Lewis saw so perfectly, is qualitatively different than that, and that's why he's a problem.
Because if he is who he says he is, Not just one teacher that I can listen to, but he's God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.
That's the way the world is going to react to him.
Now, what's the good news?
The good news is, having endured all of that, he returns.
And I always think of this, you know, if we were, Holly was telling the story, you never heard the Jesus story, but here's this guy, this horrible thing, and these people betrayed him and denied him and they crucified him, and now he's back.
I can't be back with a machine gun.
I'm back for vengeance.
He's back with shalom, a word of peace.
And so the way I put it in Christianity is this, we killed God.
And God returned in forgiving love.
And that's why, as Paul said, I'm certain neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor height nor depth nor anything else could ever separate us from the love of God.
How does Paul know that?
Because we killed God and God returned in forgiving love.
That's salvation.
That's the word of grace, if you want.
That's the good news.
That's what they went careering around the world to their deaths proclaiming was that.
You know, Paul, I preach one thing, Christ and him crucified.
Because that's the message.
We killed him, God raised him up, and he returned in forgiving love.
You could do the Leo XIII, you know, who gave us the St. Michael prayer and who supposedly had an intuition or a sense that the 20th century would belong to the devil.
And to my mind, it's kind of hard to argue with that.
If you believe in the devil, as I do, and you see what happened in the 20th century, it's kind of hard to imagine it wasn't to some degree.
The devil would have a unique control over the 20th century, and so he formulates the famous St. Michael prayer that we still pray in many churches, asking for the protection of Michael the archangel.
He died 1903, so it would have been like around 1900, so late 19th century.
And many would say, Well, it was born out by the 20th century.
Like, you know, for me, in my own lifetime, see, when I was a young guy going through school, we were still very much formed by a more liberal Catholic view.
The devil, literary device, a symbol, you know, for evil.
I won't get it exactly right, but it's an invocation of St. Michael to defend us in battle against the devil who sends his minions for the destruction of souls.
No, but see, one of the problems is when Christians forget that and they hand the world over to Christians, Well, of course we're not going to do well in the battle.
But when Christians know, our job is to be fully engaged in this great struggle.
And we're going after you, hell.
We're coming after hatred, violence, stupidity, superstition, scapegoating.
We're going after you.
We're on the march.
When I was coming of age, we didn't have that language.
Why?
It was an attempt.
I know, because the people that taught me were good people, and they were positively motivated.
I know that for sure.
They felt the church needed to be relevant to the modern world, and that the modern world should set the agenda for the church.
That was a big part of the mentality, that we had been in a fortress too long, we'd been in a defensive crouch, we had demonized the world, and so now we need to go out to the world in a confident spirit.
And that's definitely the Catholicism I got as a young man.
But see, here's something I've always found kind of puzzling.
So I come of age right after the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965.
I went to first grade in 1966.
So that's the church that I inherited very much.
Vatican II was written by people who had experienced the worst of the 20th century.
Mostly European intellectuals, French, German, a lot of them.
Americans, Swiss and Italians, Swiss, right, are the people that wrote Vatican II.
And they experienced some of the worst horrors in human history.
I would say more the result of the sexual revolution and of a loosening of moral strictures.
There was, I sense this, even as a young man, there was a sense of, you know, we've repressed stuff too long, and we really need to be more expressive, and there's too much of this obsession with, you know, sexual sin.
And then the whole culture was, you know, going through a sexual revolution, and, you know, stop repressing, and, you know, be yourself, and express what you're feeling.
And I think a lot of priests, frankly, got caught up in that cultural movement.
Because we can measure it.
The sex abuse, the clergy sex abuse spiked by the 70s into the very early 80s, and then it began going down.
And then after 2002, when the church put in all kinds of important restrictions, the so-called Dallas Accords being first among them, it's fallen off the table.
The statistics have gone completely down.
So we can measure a spiking of it right at the height of the sexual revolution.
So the Catholic Church got, in American political terms, which are a pretty limited way to describe it, but got super liberal.
The Jesuits, the Mary Knowles, pretty liberal.
This is my non-Catholic perspective.
And then all of a sudden, everywhere you look, People you know are converted into Catholicism with a pretty kind of traditionally Christian orientation.
That's such an interesting, it's kind of the last impulse you would think in someone who's devoted his life to, you know, being a member of the clergy.
Yes, and we keep, you know, analyzing the thing too, is the supernatural.
During the modern period and then into the postmodern period, it's subject to a withering criticism on the part of secularists, rationalists, the scientistic mentality, a materialistic mentality.
So if you accept that criticism, like, well, all the supernatural, you know, mumbo jumbo.
So what's left is, well, it's, you know, moral commitment.
There was a book done some years ago, I've got the title of it now, but a guy that did a very careful study of all the great wars going back a couple thousand years.
And the conclusion was something like 8% could be traced to a religious cause.
But that's part of Enlightenment historiography.
It's one of the myths of Enlightenment historiography that religion is the problem.
It's the origin myth of modernity.
Modernity emerged out of the myths of a superstitious religion and out of a primitive pre-science, let's say.
And so we have to regularly bring out these sort of boogeymen to knock down again.
Like, yeah, religion, bad.
Superstition, bad.
And look at now this enlightenment, reason, enlightenment.
But no, that's all simplistic.
And it betrays a deep lack of appreciation for the intellectual tradition within the religious sphere.
But that's part of the way they've told the story.
And of course, may I say too about violence?
I always have to smile when people, oh, religion is a source of violence.
Give me a break.
Look at the 20th century.
Corpses piled up in the 20th century, and it was not religion that did it.
Because, again, when I was coming of age, it was very much all religions, you know, they're kind of the same, and we all climb the holy mountain by different paths.
No, I completely repudiate that.
No, completely repudiate that.
I'm with Tom Holland, you know, not Spider-Man, but the popular historian, Tom Holland.
Christianity bequeathed to the West these deeply weird ideas like we're all equal, we're all subjects of dignity, that you should care for the poor and the marginalized.
They didn't just come up out of Enlightenment rationalism.
And as technology advanced, first incrementally, then exponentially, and now we're on the verge of, Like Singularity with AI, those ideas became stronger and more dominant.
So there's a connection between technology and the belief that man is God and all the suffering it results.
So technology is not bad in itself, but when you couple technology with a sheer celebration of autonomy or a bracketing of God, I don't blame poor Kant for that.
Kant had a very vivid sense of God as a moral guide.
You do indeed with someone like Nietzsche, you know, you get to a sense of Ubermensch and it's just, it's human autonomy expressing itself.
That's a very dangerous combination and you bring high technology into that and you don't anchor it in something of spiritual, moral.
But the 21st century sees a continuation of those trends, like, in a way that you couldn't even imagine 15 years ago or 25 years ago at the end of the last century.
That's the whole AI thing, which, you know, I kind of half understand, but it always makes me nervous when I think about it.
And I see, you know, instances of it, chat GPT and all that.
And it's kind of amazing, like, most technology breaks through, like, oh my gosh, that guy can actually compose a novel in, you know, a minute or whatever it is.
But it's frightening, because it's got to be grounded in a moral vision.
It has to be, or it will become a Frankenstein's monster.
I mean, she saw that, by the way.
It's very interesting about Mary Shelley.
I mean, she saw that coming.
She saw exactly what will happen when we become God.
I mean, because I spent my whole life watching what the enemies of civilization do.
That's like my job.
And the thing that triggers them most of all is Jesus.
Like, there's nothing that comes close, and I think the whole point of the trans thing was just to, like, figure out who believes in Jesus and who doesn't.
No, because as you were suggesting, there's an ideology in place that they want all the kids to subscribe to, and we stand to thwart that.
We have a different anthropology, and they want hospitals where abortion and euthanasia and all that, and where gender surgery is being done, and the church has to stand against that.
So as believers say, like what you just said, they're going to be, well, they are already being punished in the state of Minnesota and in the state of California.
And, you know, the church at its leadership level has tried to affect an organized response.
I mean, so on a regular basis, I'm chair right now of our bishop's committee on laity, youth, and family life.
And we've issued strong statements.
We meet as bishops with the leadership of Minnesota once a year.
We met with the governor.
We met with most of the top leadership.
We lay out our positions on things.
In California, what does the governor say?
Not much that's helpful.
In California, there was a law, one like it, just passed in Washington State, but in California, to compel priests to break the seal of confession in the case of child sex abuse.
And we fought that, and we roused the people, and the people inundated Sacramento with so many petitions that they dropped it.
So we figured that was a victory.
But these battles are just ongoing.
That's why religious liberty is a serious issue in our country.
Well, I think at their best, and some of the best would be, but I think we've been out of practice in a way.
That we've so internalized practices of accommodation that it's probably hard to imagine, you know, that we would be standing athwart, let's say, a government or standing athwart a law.
I think for a lot of Catholics, that would be still kind of a new idea.
I've been involved in a couple conferences about AI, and when people start talking about it, I always go back to Thomas Aquinas and those people that no matter what this thing is, which I would say is mimicking consciousness, it's not conscious.
Consciousness has to involve something immaterial.
As I was saying earlier, if you're entertaining a pure mathematical idea or pure abstraction, that's a sign that your mind is not simply ordered to the material.
And the brain might explain imagination, but it can't explain pure conceptualization.
I don't think a machine is, in principle, capable of real conceptualization and real intellection and will.
So whatever's going on with AI is a simulacrum of consciousness, not the real thing.
Now, having said all that, it doesn't take away the fact that you just said, might they develop in a way that's really repugnant to our own interests?
And I think, yes, the answer to that is yes.
And yeah, I worry about that.
The Vatican, I know, is very interested.
They've had several conferences on AI.
One of the first things the Pope said, our new Pope, was about AI.
So it's on their mind, for sure, that it's, talk about your Frankenstein's monster, right?
This thing that we've created that might turn on us.
We grew up about a 25-minute drive from each other.
So I grew up in Western Springs.
He grew up in Dalton, which is just off the south side of the city.
I was in the southwest suburbs.
He's about four years older than I am, so we're around the same age.
He would have come of age as an Augustinian, which meant he was in the order side of things.
I came of age as a diocesan priest.
So we didn't really share an educational background.
I came to know him a little bit at the last two synods.
So the last two Octobers, under Pope Francis, we had these synods.
Gathering about 400 people, 300 bishops, about 100 lay people to talk about a lot of important issues.
So for two Octobers, the current Pope and I were both at the Synod.
So in that capacity, I saw him.
I talked to him a couple of times.
He's a very quiet man, very kind of reserved.
We talked a little bit about Chicago, a shared background there.
I was never at a table with him at the Synod, but I know someone who was, and he said he was by far the quietest guy at the table, which I thought was interesting.
But he's also the father of the modern Catholic social teaching tradition, beginning with his famous letter called Rerum Novarum, which means about the new things.
And that's a very interesting letter, Rerum Novarum.
Well, among many others, fierce opposition to socialism, fierce defense of private property, zero truck with Marxism.
That's very clear.
And by that time, you know, Marxism was kind of a coming thing.
So, very clear on that.
On the other hand, it's the first great ecclesial gesture toward unions, that labor unions were good.
But it also invoked a principle that goes back to Aquinas.
But behind Aquinas, it goes back to the Church Fathers and the Bible, which is called the unionism.
And what that means is, since the whole world belongs to God, ultimately, God makes the whole world from nothing.
It belongs to God.
It doesn't belong to us.
We are stewards of it, to use biblical language, right?
So Leo said, everyone has a right to private ownership, private property.
I own this house or whatever.
But when it comes to the use of what we own, he said, Once the requirements of necessity and propriety have been met in your own life, everything else you own belongs to the poor.
That's Leo XIII.
That's a pretty strong statement.
So, private property, yep, you got a right to it.
But is your life basically okay in necessity, propriety, you know?
Yeah, I'm doing all right.
Well, then everything else you have belongs to the poor.
That the common good should be your primary preoccupation.
It was Ambrose of Milan who said, if you've got two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you.
The other belongs to the man who has no shirt.
So that's the tradition.
And that goes back to the Hebrew prophets, right?
It goes back to Amos and Isaiah and those people.
That's what that letter is about, and it's echoed by all the popes coming up through the 20th century, including up to Francis, the idea of the universal destination of goods.
So it's not, it's certainly, it's against socialism, against Marxism.
We like the market economy.
That's a basic principle of Catholic social teaching.
We like the market economy.
But we're not laissez-faire, anything goes, make as much money as you want, sort of capitalists.
The church has been against it from time immemorial.
Now, the transition that took place was once we kind of understand the dynamics of a market economy better, what it tends to mean now is, you know, loaning at exorbitant interest or loaning in a way that's deeply abusive toward others.
He didn't talk about usury specifically, but he has a paragraph where he says, do we support the market economy?
If by that you mean one that encourages entrepreneurship, that is based upon private property, that allows even for a profit motive, and he goes through various things, the answer is yes.
If by that you mean one that is completely unregulated, legally or morally, one that exploits the poor, one that excludes most people from participation in it, then the answer is no.
And so he kind of sets the parameters for how we think about the economy.
And that's part of where the instruction should come from is the pulpit.
You know, has that broken down generally in our society?
Probably.
But that's part of the church's job, is to preach that clearly.
And that's where, you know, that's people like Dorothy Day, the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, would come in these more radical voices.
But, you know, sometimes you have to shout to get people's attention.
And I think Dorothy Day is a good example of someone that she reverenced the Catholic social teaching tradition, but she felt that in certain ways it had been so ignored that she needed to shout.
But I know for a lot of people, the Bible can be very difficult and just trying to plow through it.
I mentioned that by ministry, Word on Fire, we have an edition of the Bible that I think is beautiful.
It's full of great artwork, but also it's got the biblical text, but then surrounded by, literally surrounded on the page by commentary from Scripture.
So as you read the Bible, wait, I'm lost.
I don't know what's going on.
Okay, read this commentary.
It might be a good way for someone to get into it.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
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