The Free Press: Two Drinks with. . . America’s Most Media-Savvy Bishop, by Madeleine Kearns:
Bishop Robert Barron … began his Catholic media empire, Word on Fire, with the simple conviction that the Church should be more involved in mass media. As a priest in Chicago, he broke into radio in the late 1990s, TV in the early 2000s, and was on the ground floor of YouTube in 2007.
Today, Word on Fire has over two million subscribers on the latter platform, plus 3.1 million Facebook followers and many more on Instagram and X. More than 500,000 people subscribe to receive Barron’s Daily Gospel reflection by email, where he writes about the lives of saints, unpacks scripture, and explains how Jesus’ message resonates today. Plus, he regularly appears everywhere from NBC to The Daily Wire. …
Naturally, Barron’s visibility has attracted criticism. Progressive Catholics accuse him of being a right-wing stooge—partly because, last year, he accepted the Trump administration’s invitation to join the Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty. …
Meanwhile, traditionalist Catholics see him as a liberal squish. After his recent friendly interview with the podcaster Dave Rubin—a libertarian atheist who is in a gay marriage and has employed surrogates to have kids—one traditionalist podcaster wrote: “What Barron is doing is NOT CHRIST-LIKE,” adding, “Jesus would have told Rubin and his gay husband to stop sinning, end their blasphemous marriage, and give their children to a Catholic adoption agency.” …
Again and again, we return to Barron’s sales pitch for Catholicism. So often in public life, the Church is associated with restriction—no sex before marriage, no abortion, no divorce. But the bishop wants to remind people of the “good news”: that there’s a loving God, extending an invitation to eternal happiness to everybody.
“When the Church says no to something,” he says, “the ‘no’ is in service of a greater yes. But we got pretty bad at articulating what that yes was.”
Barron calls his style “affirmative orthodoxy”—demanding, but fundamentally positive. “We say: Here’s what the church is for,” he says. “Not what we’re against.” …
Barron engages with others in a spirit of charity, and, in line with church teaching, strives to avoid rash judgment of others. When I asked his thoughts on Father James Martin—a high-profile priest who is controversial within the church for embracing LGBTQ identities—Barron says, “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Does Barron agree with Martin? “I think what he says explicitly in his writings is: ‘I’m building a bridge to people that often feel isolated from the life of the church,’ and I agree with that,” Barron says. “But that doesn’t mean I simply accept everyone as they are.” He then quotes what he calls a “beautiful line” from his former mentor, the late cardinal Francis George of Chicago: “All are welcome in the church, but on Christ’s terms, not their own.”
It’s not only the company Barron keeps that invokes the ire of the hyper-traditionalists; it’s also his theology. In 2011, for instance, he shared a YouTube video endorsing the idea articulated by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar that we can “reasonably hope” hell is empty.
Barron stands by this, invoking another authority: “Pope Benedict said, ‘I think a tiny handful die and go right to hell. I think most of us go to purgatory,’ ” he says. “I think that’s largely right.” But: This is “where the right wing goes after me,” he adds, explaining that hyper-traditionalists think this attitude minimizes the seriousness of sin and could lead people to complacency. …
It’s the combination of high moral standards and limitless mercy that makes Catholicism so appealing, says the bishop.
Is that why there’s been a Catholic boom? I mention the record numbers of converts coming into church last Easter—most of them young. “I do think social media has had a lot to do with it,” he tells me. “We found a way to reach younger people that we didn’t have before.”
But more than that, young people, Barron says, are adrift in a “complete desert,” surrounded by the idea that “we come from nowhere, we’re going nowhere. There’s no objective moral value. We live in a pitiless, pointless universe.” The message is: “Do the best you can, everybody!”
When I ask what the defining vice of our era is, he nominates sloth. Specifically, a “kind of spiritual laziness and indifference.” All of us naturally want to think deeply about how to live a good life, he suggests, but our culture has made us shallow and nihilistic. And as Pope Leo outlined in his letter “Magnifica Humanitas,” AI may exacerbate this trend. If we outsource deep thought to machines, says the bishop, “we stop arguing and musing and moving from premise to conclusion, and doing our own explorations and examinations.”
How can the Church resist this? By focusing on what congregations find compelling, says Barron—which is, of course, exactly how he built his media empire.
“The mind wants truth, and the will wants the good, but before you get there, it’s the beautiful that breaks through,” he says. “Catholicism has always known that; that’s why we’ve used the beautiful—whether it’s Dante or Gothic cathedrals or the Sistine Chapel. We know how to use the beautiful, the dramatic, to break through.”
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