Chapters from Bishop Barron's book, Redeeming the Time

        
PART I – FIGHTING THE SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS
Click here to read Part 1.
  3 - Tintoretto and the Reform of the Church
  6 - The McCarrick Mess
  9 - Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind:
      A Reflection on the Irish Referendum
  12 - Letter to a Suffering Church: Conclusion
        
PART II – REACHING THE “NONES”
  17 - The Least Religious Generation in US History:
        A Reflection on Jean Twenge’s iGen
  20 - Spinoza, Secularism, and the Challenge of Evangelization
  23 - Getting Out of the Sacristy: A Look at Our Pastoral Priorities
  26 - Blasting Holes through the Buffered Self
  29 - Bill Nye Is Not the Philosophy Guy
  32 - Stephen Hawking: Great Scientist, Lousy Theologian
  35 - Doctor Strange, Scientism, and the Gnostic Way Station
  38 - The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon
  41 - Listening to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris
  44 - The USCCB Meeting, Jordan Peterson, and the “Nones”
  47 - What I Learned Talking with Thousands of Skeptics on Reddit
  50 - Apologists, Catechists, Theologians: Wake Up!
  54 - A New Apologetics: An Intervention at the Youth Synod
  57 - Why Accompaniment Involves Apologetics
  60 - Black Elk and the Need for Catechists
  63 - Go in Haste! Be Amazed! Treasure!
  
PART III – RESISTING THE CULTURE OF CONTEMPT
  69 - Social Media and the Culture of Contempt
  72 - The Internet and Satan’s Game
  75 - Pride, Humility, and Social Media
  78 - Thomas Aquinas and the Art of Making a Public Argument
  81 - Kathy Griffin and the Vanishing of Argument
  84 - Violence against Christians and the Waning of Reason
  87 - Love an Enemy This Lent
  
PART IV – CONFRONTING MORAL CHAOS
  93 - The Crown and the Fundamental Values of a Society
  96 - Paul Tillich and The Shape of Water
  99 - Breaking Out of the Prison of Self-Invention
  102 - The Doritos Commercial and the Revival of Voluntarism
  105 - Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Distinction between Fact and Fiction
  108 - Paul VI, Prophet
  111 - Porn and the Curse of Total Sexual Freedom
  114 - Michelle Wolf and the Throwaway Culture
  117 - Seeing Abortion
  120 - New York, Abortion, and a Short Route to Chaos
  123 - Love Is Both Tolerant and Intolerant
  126 - Why We Can’t Do Evil Even If Good May Come
  
PART V – DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE
  131 - Charlottesville and America’s Original Sin
  134 - Pentecost and the Fires in Our Cities
  138 - Martin Luther King Jr. and the Religious Motivation for Social Change
  141 - Acknowledging an Abyss, Finding a Bridge
  144 - We’re All Becoming Platonists Now—and That’s Not Good
  147 - Canceling Padre Serra
  150 - How the Star Wars Franchise Lost Its Way
  153 - “Wokeism” in France: The Chickens Coming Home to Roost
  156 - Daniel Berrigan and Nonviolence
  159 - The Surprising Message of Downsizing
  162 - Talking to Some Young Jesuits about Social Justice and Evangelization
  165 - Peter Claver vs. Immanuel Kant
  168 - Dominion, the Values of the West, and the Cross of Christ
  171 - Stretching Out to Great Things: A Commencement Address for the University of St. Thomas
  
PART VI – NAVIGATING POLITICAL POLARIZATION
  179 - Four Principles for Catholics during Election Season
  182 - Governor Cuomo and God’s Noncompetitive Transcendence
  185 - A Talk on the Hill
  188 - One Cheer for George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility
  191 - It’s Time for Catholics (and All Religious People) to Wake Up: The Real Danger Posed by the California Confession Bill
  194 - Why We Need a Distribution of Power
  197 - “Culture Warrior” and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
  
PART VII – FACING COVID-19 AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
  203 - Miracles from Heaven and the Problem of Theodicy
  206 - Pain Is Not Metaphysically Basic
  209 - Tragedy, Contingency, and a Deeper Sense of God
  212 - Should Suffering Shake Our Faith?
  215 - The Coronavirus and Sitting Quietly in a Room Alone
  218 - The Quarantine’s Three Lessons about the Church
  221 - The Book of Exodus and Why Coming Back to Mass Matters
  224 - Come Back to Mass!
  
PART VIII – SHINING THE LIGHT OF THE NATIONS
  229 - Pope Francis and the Evangelicals
  234 - Laudato Si’ Athwart Modernity
  237 - Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, and the Universal Destination of Goods
  240 - Why “What Are the Bishops Doing about It?” Is the Wrong Question
  244 - What Is Synodality?
  247 - The Ratzingerian Constants and the Maintenance of Harmony in the Church
  250 - A Case for Priestly Celibacy
  255 - The Question Behind the Question
  258 - The Benedict Option and the Identity-Relevance Dilemma
  261 - St. John Henry Newman
  264 - John Henry Newman in Full
  267 - Cardinal Etchegaray, Henri de Lubac, and Vatican II
  270 - The Evangelical Path of Word on Fire
  273 - he Word on Fire Retreat and God’s Wonderful Providence
  276 - Evangelizing through the Good
  279 - Tolkien, Chesterton, and the Adventure of Mission
  282 - Confirmation and Evangelization
  285 - Paul on the Areopagus: A Masterclass in Evangelization




Tintoretto and the Reform of the Church
BISHOP ROBERT BARRON
SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

I am in Washington, DC this week for meetings of the USCCB. Since formal proceedings didn’t begin until the evening,
I found myself yesterday morning with a little free time. So I made my way to one of my favorite places in the city,
the National Gallery of Art, which I frequented when I was a student at Catholic University many years ago.
At the close of a long session of walking and musing, I was drawn by an empty and comfortable-looking couch situated at
the end of one of the galleries. Plopping down to rest, I looked up at the picture right in front of me. At first
glance, given the color scheme and the peculiar modeling of the figures, I thought it was an El Greco, but closer
examination revealed that it in fact was Tintoretto’s depiction of Christ at the Sea of Galilee. The drama at the
center of the composition is the Apostles’ boat, buffeted by choppy waves, and St. Peter taking a gingerly, tentative
step onto the bounding main at the invitation of the Lord who beckons to him. My seated posture conduced toward
contemplation, and I spent a good deal of time with this painting, first admiring the obvious technical skill of the
painter, especially in the rendering of the water, but eventually moving to a deeper perception of its spiritual theme,
of particular resonance today.
Whenever the Gospels present the disciples of Jesus in a boat, they are, of course, symbolically representing the Church.
So Tintoretto is showing the Church in its practically permanent condition across the ages: at sea, rocked by waves,
in danger of going under. Indeed, with a handful of remarkable exceptions, every age has been, in some way,
a perilous one for the Mystical Body of Christ. The boat is filled with the specially-chosen Apostles of the Lord,
those who spent years with the Master, learning his mind, watching his moves, witnessing his miracles with their own eyes,
taking in his spirit. One would think that even if everyone else failed to follow the Lord, these men would hold steady.
And yet we see them cowering, timorous, obviously at a loss as the storm rages around them. And the Gospels,
in a manner that sets them apart from most other literature dealing with religious founders and their disciples,
do consistently portray Jesus’ inner circle as deeply flawed. Peter denied the Lord at the moment of truth;
James and John succumbed to petty ambition; Thomas refused to believe the report of the Resurrection; Judas betrayed his master;
all of them, with the exception of John, abandoned him on the cross, protecting their own hides. And yet Tintoretto shows
Peter tentatively placing his foot upon the sea, commencing to walk toward Jesus. The great spiritual lesson—shopworn perhaps
to the point of being a cliché, but still worth repeating—is that as long as the Church keeps its eyes fixed on Christ,
it can survive even the worst of storms. It can walk on the water.
The Catholic Church is once more enduring a moment of extreme trial in regard to sexual abuse. This time, the focus of
attention is on the failure of some bishops to protect the vulnerable, and in at least one terrible case, the active abuse
perpetrated by a cardinal archbishop. The whole world is rightly outraged by these sins, and the Church appropriately
feels ashamed. Many wonder, understandably, how those specially devoted to Christ could fall into such depravity.
But then we recall that every bishop today is a successor of the Apostles—which is to say, of that band that both sat
in easy familiarity with Jesus and denied, betrayed, and ran from their Master. In stormy times, the first Apostles cowered,
and their successors, we have to admit, often do the same.
But there are grounds for hope. They are found, however, not in institutional reform (as important as that is),
not in psychological analysis (as indispensable as that might be), not in new programs and protocols (as helpful as they might prove),
but rather in a return to Jesus Christ. Eyes fixed on him, hearts attuned to him, minds beguiled by him, action determined by him,
the leaders of the Church can, even now, walk on the water.
Tintoretto sheds considerable light on this issue of Apostolic weakness and strength in the very manner in which he has arranged
the figures in his composition. The painting is foreshortened in such a way that the disciples appear very small, almost doll-like,
whereas Jesus, looming in the extreme foreground, looks gigantic. As John the Baptist put the principle: “He must increase
and I must decrease.” When our anxieties and egos are placed in the foreground, Christ necessarily recedes. Crucial to the
reformation of the Church is the reversal of that perspective.


The McCarrick Mess
BISHOP ROBERT BARRON
AUGUST 9, 2018

When I was going through school, the devil was presented to us as a myth, a literary device, a symbolic manner of signaling the
presence of evil in the world. I will admit to internalizing this view and largely losing my sense of the devil as a real spiritual person.
What shook my agnosticism in regard to the evil one was the clerical sex abuse scandal of the nineties and the early aughts.
I say this because that awful crisis just seemed too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance
or wicked human choice. The devil is characterized as “the enemy of the human race” and particularly the enemy of the Church.
I challenge anyone to come up with a more devastatingly effective strategy for attacking the mystical body of Christ than the abuse
of children and young people by priests. This sin had countless direct victims of course, but it also crippled the Church financially,
undercut vocations, caused people to lose confidence in Christianity, dramatically compromised attempts at evangelization, etc., etc.
It was a diabolical masterpiece.
Sometime in the early aughts, I was attending a conference and found myself wandering more or less alone in the area where groups and
organizations had their booths. I came over to one of the tables and the woman there said, “You’re Fr. Barron, aren’t you?”
I replied affirmatively, and she continued, “You’re doing good work for the Church, but this means that the devil wants to stop you.
And you know, he’s a lot smarter than you are and a lot more powerful.” I think I just mumbled something to her at that moment,
but she was right, and I knew it. All of this has come back to me in the wake of the Archbishop McCarrick catastrophe. St. Paul
warned us that we battle, not against flesh and blood, but against “powers and principalities.” Consequently, the principal work
of the Church at this devastating moment ought to be prayer, the conscious and insistent invoking of Christ and the saints.
Now I can hear people saying, “So Bishop Barron is blaming it all on the devil.” Not at all. The devil works through temptation,
suggestion, and insinuation—and he accomplishes nothing without our cooperation. If you want to see the principle illustrated,
Google 
Luca Signorelli’s image of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral. You’ll see what I mean. Archbishop McCarrick did wicked things
and so did those, it appears, who enabled him. And we have to come to terms with these sins.
Before I broach the subject of how to do this, permit me to say a few words about unhelpful strategies being bandied about. A first one
is indiscriminate scapegoating. The great philosopher René Girard taught us that when communities enter into crisis, people typically
commence desperately to cast about for someone or some group to blame. In the catharsis of this indiscriminate accusation, they find a
kind of release, an ersatz peace. “All the bishops should resign!” “The priesthood is a cesspool of immorality!” “The seminaries are
all corrupt!” As I say, these assertions might be emotionally satisfying at some level, but they are deeply unjust and conduce toward
greater and not less dysfunction. The second negative strategy is the riding of ideological hobby horses. So lots of commentators—left,
center, and right—have chimed in to say that the real cause of the McCarrick disaster is, take your pick, the ignoring of Humanae vitae,
priestly celibacy, rampant homosexuality in the Church, the mistreatment of homosexuals, the sexual revolution, etc. Mind you, I’m not
saying for a moment that these aren’t important considerations and that some of the suggestions might not have real merit. But I am
saying that launching into a consideration of these matters that we have been debating for decades and that will certainly not admit
of an easy adjudication amounts right now to a distraction.
So what should be done? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has no juridical or canonical authority to discipline
bishops. And even if it tried to launch an investigation, it has, at the moment, very little credibility. Only the Pope has juridical
and disciplinary powers in regard to bishops. Hence, I would suggest (as a lowly back-bencher auxiliary) that the bishops of the United
States—all of us—petition the Holy Father to form a team, made up mostly of faithful lay Catholics skilled in forensic investigation,
and to empower them to have access to all of the relevant documentation and financial records. Their task should be to determine how
Archbishop McCarrick managed, despite his widespread reputation for iniquity, to rise through the ranks of the hierarchy and to continue,
in his retirement years, to function as a roving ambassador for the Church and to have a disproportionate influence on the appointment
of bishops. They should ask the ecclesial version of Sen. Howard Baker’s famous questions: “What did the responsible parties know and
when did they know it?” Only after these matters are settled will we know what the next steps ought to be.
In the meantime, and above all, we should ask the heavenly powers to fight with us and for us. I might suggest especially calling
upon the one who crushes the head of the serpent.


Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind: A Reflection on the Irish Referendum
BISHOP ROBERT BARRON
JUNE 5, 2018

I will confess that as a person of Irish heritage on both sides of my family, I found the events in Ireland last week particularly dispiriting.
Not only did the nation vote, by a two-to-one margin, for the legal prerogative to kill their children in the womb,
but they also welcomed and celebrated the vote with a frankly sickening note of gleeful triumph.
Will I ever forget the unnerving looks and sounds of the frenzied crowd gathered to cheer their victory in the courtyard of Dublin Castle?
As the right to abortion now sweeps thoroughly across the Western world, I am put in mind of Gloria Steinem’s mocking remark
from many years ago to the effect that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. I say this because abortion has indeed
become a sacrament for radical feminism, the one, absolutely sacred, non-negotiable value for so-called progressive women.
One of the features of the lead-up to the vote—and this has become absolutely commonplace—was the almost total lack of moral argument
on the part of the advocates of abortion. There was a lot of political talk about “rights,” though the rights of the unborn were never mentioned;
and there were appeals to “health care,” though the lethal threat to the health of the child in the womb was a non-issue. There was, above all,
an attempt to manipulate people’s feelings by bringing up rare and extreme cases. But what one hardly ever heard was a real
engagement of the moral argument that a direct attack on a human life is intrinsically evil and as such can never be permitted or legally sanctioned.
Accompanying the entire process, of course, was the subtext of the Catholic Church’s cultural impotence, even irrelevance.
Every single story that I read in advance of the vote and subsequent to it mentioned the fact that overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland
had shaken off the baleful influence of the Church and had moved, finally, into the modern world. How sad, of course,
that being up-to-date is apparently a function of our capacity to murder the innocent. But at the same time I must admit—and
I say it to my shame as a Catholic bishop—that, at least to a degree, I understand this reaction. The sexual abuse of children on
the part of some Irish priests and brothers, not to mention the physical and psychological abuse of young people perpetrated by some Irish nuns,
as well as the pathetic handling of the situation by far too many Irish bishops and provincials produced a tsunami of suffering and deep injustice.
And we must remember a principle enunciated by my colleague, Fr. Stephen Grunow—namely, that the abuse of children in any society,
but especially in one as insular and tight-knit as Irish society, has a tremendously powerful ripple effect. When a young person is sexually abused,
particularly by a figure as trusted as a priest, that child is massively and permanently hurt; but once the abuse becomes known,
so are his siblings, his parents, his friends, his extended family, his parish. Now multiply this process a dozen times, a hundred times,
a thousand times—again, especially in a country as small as Ireland—and you will find that, in very short order,
the entire nation is filled with anger, indignation, and a legitimate thirst for setting things right. I do believe that what
we witnessed last week was a powerfully emotional reaction to the great crimes of the last several decades. The deeply sad
truth is that the abuse of young men and women has given rise to an even more dramatic abuse of unborn children. When you sow the wind,
you reap the whirlwind.
Is there a way forward for Ireland? I think a significant sign of hope is the considerable number of people who took the extremely
unpopular stance against this legislative innovation. Knowing full well that they would likely lose and that they would be subject to
ridicule and perhaps even the loss of their professional positions, they courageously argued for life. On that foundation,
much of value can be built. But what Ireland most needs at this moment—and indeed for the next hundred years—are saints and mystics.
Moral arguments can and should be made, but if the Church wants to recover its standing as a shaper of the Irish culture,
it has to produce men and women who give themselves radically to the Gospel. It needs figures in the mold of Teresa of Calcutta,
Oscar Romero, Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day—indeed of St. Patrick, St. Brendan, St. Columbanus, and St. Brigid. And it requires
men and women of prayer, like the founders of the great Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican, Cistercian, and Trappist houses that
still dot the Irish countryside—and like the strange denizens of Skellig Michael, who for six centuries clung to the edges of the
world off the coast of Ireland and lived in total dependence upon God.
Finally, only prayer, witness, radical trust in divine providence, honest preaching, and the living of the radical Gospel
will undo the damage done last week.

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