December 25, 2024 • 31 mins
Newt is joined by Bishop Robert Barron, the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and the founder of “Word on Fire” with a special Christmas Day message.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Good morning and Merry Christmas to you and your family.
This morning I'm joined by Bishop Robert Baron, the ninth
Bishop of the Diocese of Wenona, Rochester and the founder
of Word on Fire, which I recommend to everyone. Bishop Baron, welcome,
Thank you for joining me on News World here at Christmas.
Would you mind starting us off with a message about
(00:26):
Christmas and what it means to you?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
It's good to be with you, and Merry Christmas to
all the listeners today. You know, somebody the Church Father
said over and over again, was God became man, that
man might become God. And it might seem a little
peculiar at first, but it's based in the Bible, namely,
that God becomes one of us precisely to draw us
(00:49):
into his life. So the Greek fathers talked about theosis
in their language, but Thomas Aquinas picked it up in
the West. He used the word deificazio deification that we
become sharers in God's nature. God became one of us
that we might become sharers in his own life. And
that I think is the deepest meaning of Christmas. It's
(01:11):
the message of the incarnation, So not just a sort
of a strange one off, but somebody that's at the
very heart of our human life. That God is not
just a moral exemplar for us, but God is calling
us into intimacy with Himself. And that happens through the incarnation,
and that's the message of Christmas. God becomes this little baby.
(01:34):
God joins us in our weakness, our vulnerability, our finitude,
that we might become sharers in his own nature. I
always call it the marvelous humanism of Christianity. There's no humanism,
ancient or modern, that holds out a higher ideal for
human beings than Christianity, because the ordinary goal of the
Christian life is to become a sharer in God's nature.
(01:56):
So the humanism of our tradition is grounded by in
this great feast of Christmas.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
In your own experience, how did you open up to God?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, Chris, I'm born and raised a Catholic, and so
I was, you know, brought up in the church and
going to Mass, and my parents were very devout Catholics.
An experience that I remember very vividly is I'm a
kid of what four or five at the time, maybe,
and simply watching my father at prayer on his knees
at Mass. You know, I thought of my father as
the most powerful person in the world, and to see
(02:33):
him humbly in the presence of a power greater than himself.
That had a huge impact on me when I was
a little kid. But then in a more refined way,
when I was in high school, I discovered Saint Thomas Aquinas.
And though I was a believer in God, to be sure,
but when I came across the arguments for God's existence,
I realized that you could think about God in a
(02:54):
very serious way, an intellectually serious way, And that beguiled
my when I was a kid and led me to
books and ideas and all that, and then it began
to reach into deeper parts of my soul. It reached
my heart. But I say, the witness of my parents,
especially my dad, and then the emergence of Thomas Aquinas
in my life when I was a teenager, those both
(03:16):
had a huge impact on me.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
As you have grown in Christ, you created word on
fire which anybody can access in the world. What led
you to that? It's a great profound breakthrough in being
able to share the Gospel worldwide. You do it as
well as anybody I know.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I appreciate that, you know. I was a teacher at
the seminary outside Chicago, so I had been sent for
my doctoral studies to Paris. Loved books, Love the Life
of the Mind, got my doctorate, was able to travel
through Europe, and I had all those great experiences. Came
back and I was a teacher for a number of years,
taught courses. I began to write books. I was on
the Catholic speaker circuit, you know, going around giving retreats
(03:58):
and talks and so on. But it occurred to me
by the late nineties, so I've been teaching now for
seven or eight years, that there was so much more
we could do. I could spend the rest of my life.
I thought, you know, writing books for a relatively small
audience and giving talks to rooms of two or three
hundred people. But I said, why not do what Fulton
Sheen did back in the thirties, forties and fifties. I mean,
(04:19):
why not use the technology available to us now? When
I started, it still was basically TV and radio and
that sort of thing. So I went to WGN Radio
in Chicago, the biggest radio station, and I said, just
for fun, tell me how much would it cost to
have a little sermon show. And they said to me, well,
for fifty thousand dollars, we'll put you on at five
(04:40):
point fifteen on Sunday morning. So I went to my
parish and I said, you know, just that, if you're
willing to help me, I can get on the radio
at five point fifteen. And God bless them, they did.
They gave me the money, and that's how it started.
It grew then to a website, and then I started
recording a number of talks I've been giving though got
on Catholic television, and my profile, you know, grew a bit.
(05:04):
And then we had a breakthrough with the Catholicism series,
which was modeled after Kenneth Clark Civilization, which is a
show that impacted me when I was a kid, this
great English art historian taking us all over the Western
world and showing us the great works of art. I said,
why not do something like that with Catholicism. So again,
scrape together the money. Somehow we did that, and that's
(05:26):
then really what brought it to a different level. And
then we began the podcasts and the YouTube and all
that business. But it started with just my conviction that
we should be doing more, that we could do more,
that Fulton Sheen was the model, but we had kind
of dropped the ball after Fulton Sheen. So that's what
inspired me.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Bishop Sheen made Christianity totally practical and totally irrelevant, and
did so with a sense of humor. He was a
great showman.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
He had a certain genius and part of it, you know,
was he was very highly trained in Catholic philosophy and theology.
He had the agrege, which is this advanced degree in
theology from Louvain University. So Sheen was a high level academic.
But he also had his finger on the pulse of
the culture. He understood American culture. For example, he used
(06:13):
a lot of psychology, used a lot of Freud because
he knew that Freud was sort of making his way
into the culture. He engaged in a lot of polemics
against communism, which was a major political theme of the day.
So he combined a rich Catholic intellectual formation with a
keen understanding of the culture. And as you say, I
think the humor was very important for Sheen. The greatest
comedians of the day. You know, Jackie Gleison and Milton
(06:36):
Borough admired his timing, his comic timing, so she was
able to pull that off in a rather extraordinary way.
And at the time there were what a handful of
TV stations, and so if you get on television in
those days, you were reaching much of the country.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
It's hard nowadays, with the extraordinary range of opportunities to
remember what it was like back then.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right, there's a flip side to it, because now you know,
we can be twenty four to seven all over the
world and all these different platforms. Sheen had to rely
on people coming at a particular time on the radio
or TV to hear him. In a way, we're in
a much better position than Sheen was in.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
You make the point that when we talk about the
Christmas Story, we look at Luke's account, the story really
opens up by invoking two of the most powerful people
in the world. It says, well, Corinius was the governor
of Syria, and when Caesar Augustus was king of the world,
census was called. It never quite occurred to me until
(07:32):
I read your work that I've always seen that as
kind of placing it historically. But there's also drawing a
contrast that these two guys had secular power, but here
comes this little baby who in fact will have far
more power.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
There's no question about it. I mean, Luke, all the
Gospel writers were literary as well as theological geniuses. And
the way he uses Quairindius and Augustus to kind of
haunt your mind as you read that story. So these
figures would have had all the things that we associate
with worldly power. They honor and prestige, and they had
armies behind them, and they had a comfortable place to
(08:08):
live and all of that. And then Luke tells this
story of this little nothing couple making their way to
this dusty outpost and the baby, it can't even be
born in the Travelers hostel, is born in a cave
or a stable, is put in the place where animals eat,
is wrapped up. In other words, has no power, no prestige,
no honor. Yet And I think the key to that
(08:29):
story is at the end when the angel who always
inspires fear in the Bible, when an angel appears from
another dimensional system, but then appearing with the single angel
is an entire army of angels. And see that's no
accident that an army is associated with the Baby King,
which is far more powerful than the army associated with
(08:51):
Quirinius or Caesar Augustus. And what I find extraordinary there is,
here's a man writing this story, let's say, around the
you're eighty or so of the first century, when Christians
were a tiny, tiny minority in a handful of cities
in the eastern Mediterranean. And yet he was saying very clearly,
this baby, this Messiah is more powerful than Caesar. And
(09:14):
at the time, I mean, it was an incredible thing
to say. But yet it's true, isn't it. I mean,
we're still here and Caesar is long gone. I mean, Christianity,
those following the Baby King were still a great world
power two thousand years later. The Caesars are long gone.
And so the gospel writers they got something, they understood something.
(09:36):
I think here even in our own time. You know,
you and I lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
Who would have guessed when I was a teenager in
the seventies and someone told me that the Soviet Empire
would collapse with barely a shot being fired, and that
the pope would be a major player in it. That
would be wild fantasy. That's what happened. And the Christmas story,
(09:58):
you're quite right, is about that dynamic that the true
King and the true army are more powerful than the
armies of the world.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Kristen I did a movie called Nine Days the Change
the World. How about John Paul the second going back
and it's astonishing the impact he has and thegree to
which he suddenly arouses the Polish people.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
You're quite right, and that's it's marvelous your documentary and
that whole story is marvelous. But it calls to mind
the Stalin line. Right, it was about Pius the twelfth.
How many divisions does the pope have when the pope
critiqued him, Well, the successor of pis the twelve brought
down the successor of Stalin without a single division. But
it speaks to spiritual power, which we've always known about.
(11:05):
Spiritual power can change the whole world.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
There's a great line in the movie where George Weigel
quotes stalem and then says, you know, it turned out
that the pope had far more divisions than Stalin never imagined.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
That's quite right, and that signaled in the Christmas story
when this invisible army. I don't sentimentalize the angels of Christmas.
They're on every Christmas card and we sentimentalize them, but
they're not sentimental figures. In the Bible, angels are always
ferocious figures. They're fearsome figures. And now you get an
army of those together. That's what's associated with the Baby King,
(11:38):
which means the powers of the world should tremble seecause
at the heart of Christianity is a sort of taunt
to worldly power, because we hold up the Cross, which
struck first century people as exceedingly strange that you would
hold up the image of someone being tortured to death
by Roman power. But that's the kind of delicious poetry
(11:58):
of Christianity, as we hold that up as a sort
of taunt to the world to say, well, We're not
afraid of what you can do to us, because God's
love is more powerful than anything that you have. And
that's not just wishful thinking. You can see it in
the John Paul story.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
What do you think most Christians miss from the celebration
of Christmas?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
They miss the radicality and subversiveness of it, the two
things we've been talking about, because we sentimentalize it that's
the problem. It's Dickens, and Dickens was a great figure
and a great Christian. I don't want to be bad
mouthing Dickens, but we associate Christmas now with you know,
the Dickenzie in London, and we sort of romanticize it.
But Christmas in the Bible is subversive and it's radical.
(12:41):
God becomes one of us that we might become sharers
in his nature, and God becomes one of us in
order to lead a great spiritual army whose purposes to
conquer the world. And so in Jesus, the risen Christs
go forth and proclaim the Gospel to all nations and
to bring them under the lord ship of Jesus. Well,
(13:01):
that's not WEISTLM.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Dixie.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I mean, that's a very powerful summons. And the lordship
of Jesus means just that that he wants all of
life brought under his sovereignty. I think that's what people
miss when it comes to Christmas.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I always look back on this with amazement that here's
this very small number of people who in their hearts
are so passionately, deeply committed that within a century they're
a worldwide movement. You look at that and you think
something mystical happened.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Something happened, Well, you know, I rely there on nt Right,
the great biblical historian, because Wright said, presin from religion
for a minute. Just from a purely historical standpoint, what
is very hard to explain is the emergence of Christianity
as a Messianic movement. And what he meant was, at
that time and place, the clearest sign possible that you
(13:55):
were not the Messiah of Israel would be your death
at the hands of Israel's enemies, because the Ziah was
meant to be the king of the nations. And so
if someone wanted to say, look, your guy is not it,
all you'd have to do is say, look, the Romans
put him the death. Well, Christianity didn't hide that. On
the contrary, Paul says, that's all I preach is Christ
and him crucified. But at the same time they said, yeah,
(14:17):
the one that Caesar crucified, he is the Messiah of God.
And then to your point, it shows something happened. Even
to explain the emergence of this movement apart from the resurrection,
it's very hard to explain it.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
It's the empty tomb, is the moment of realizing that
the effort of the establishment, both the Jewish establishment and
the Roman political establishment, has failed, that Christ in fact
is not dead. He was temporarily gone and is now
back right.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
The most fundamental form of charigmatic preaching, so called the charigma,
being the basic good news. The basic form is Caesar
killed them, God raised him. That's what the first preacher said.
You kill them, your people, kill them, God raised them.
That's the coarigma, and that is a subversive sort of message.
That's a very challenging message, which is why most of
(15:11):
the first Christian preachers ended up in prison and put
to death, because the powers that be understood that. They
knew how radical this message was. Even Paul saying again
and again as he does, Jesus curios, Jesus is Lord,
because Kaiser was curios. Caesar was lord in that time
and place, and so to say no, not Caesar, but
(15:31):
Jesus is Lord. That's why Paul was in prison a lot,
and why they eventually cut his head off is they
knew how subversive that was. We've lost a lot of
that edginess. I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Part of it is you have to have people who
believe so deeply that they regard having their head cut
off as a reasonable trade. It is in that sense,
in the early days a religion of martyrs. Over and over.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Again witnesses and the blood of the martyrs the seat
of Christians is told said, and that's exactly how it worked.
But see it still works. When I was filming the
Catholism series, we were in Namogongo near Kampala, and that's
where Charles Lwanga and his companions were murdered in the
late eighteen hundreds, and anyone watching that would have said, well,
that's the end of Christianity. But now every year on
(16:17):
his feat stage Dune the third, something like a million
people converge on that spot. And when I was there filming,
I was just sort of moved to quote Tertullian. I said,
the blood of the martyrs is still the seat of Christians.
And take a look. And then the camera panned out
to this enormous crowd. So it's still true, still.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
True, when you are at Mass and you take the Eucharist,
the representation of Christ and the degree to which Christ
is in you. Two thousand years later, as experienced by
well over a billion, three hundred million people, is an
astonishing statement of faith.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, it's the distinctive mark of Catholic Christianity is we
don't think of Jesus as simply an inspiring teacher or
a distant historical figure. We eat him and we drink him,
We take him into our bodies. The Church Father said
that it's the way we become immortalized, so preparing ourselves
to live forever. Well, we become immortalized through the Eucharist,
(17:17):
so that the kind of wonderful, gritty realism of our
eucharistic faith, that Jesus is really truly and substantially present.
That matters a lot, because otherwise it's easy to think
of him, make him a very abstract figure. But no,
we eat him and we drink.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Him, and in that process there is a personal experience.
It seems to me that when you go, for example,
in Rome, to certain key places where there are martyrs,
and you realize these people, in a sense, were happy
to be martyred. They were dying in the absolute faith
of rebirth, and they felt that the people who weren't
(17:57):
prepared to be martyred were much poorer and we're not
going to in fact be reborn.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, and I think that's true in those days and
true in our time. Think of a Maximian Colbay and
the depth of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, but willingly gives
his life to save someone else. That's someone who's living
in a different plaine. That's someone who's opened up a
depth dimension to life. It's still true the Great Martyrs,
and that's still the source of the church's deepest life.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
What was it like to move from Los Angeles to Minnesota?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
It felt like come. I loved LA. I'm from Chicago originally,
and I was a priest there and I was rector
of the seminary there. Loved Chicago, but I'm very used
to the Midwest and Midwestern weather. I was sent to California,
to my infinite surprise. I was made an auxiliary bishop
out in LA and I was based in Santa Barbara,
which is one of the loveliest places in the whole country.
I loved it beautiful. But when I got the call,
(19:21):
and that's how it happens in the church. No one
ever talks to you. You've had no advance warning whatsoever.
It's not discussed with you in any way. You just
get a phone call out of the blue and it
was you've been appointed at Bishop of Wenona, Rochester, Minnesota.
My first thought was, I got to take out my
Chicago winter coat again, which had been hanging up for
six years in my closet. It felt like coming home.
(19:41):
I felt like coming back to a culture I was
very at home with.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Given modern technology, do you find it for all practical
purposes as easy to do? Word on fire from Wanona
to Rochester.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
We're moving our studio to Rochester, right near the Mayo Clinic.
We're moving right downtown. We had it in Santa Barbara
at the wonderful Santa Barbe Remission. We were on the
grounds of the mission. We just picked up all the equipment,
shipped it out here and we've rented a space and
we're building it out now as a studio. But see
to your point. People said to me, oh, you know
you were out in Hollywood, and wasn't that better for communication.
(20:14):
I said, well, first of all, I wasn't in Hollywood.
I was two hours out in Santa Barbara. And secondly,
I said, we had our own equipment and studio, and
I can do it just as well from here as
I could from there, So that doesn't make a lot
of difference.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
How much of your time does it take because it's
brilliantly done.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Well, that's due to my team. One of my team
members is right here next to me, is I record this.
We have about sixty people in Dallas, Chicago, now Rochester.
They're the ones who's so good at the creative side
of it and the tech side. I'm not very good
at the tech side of it. I would say it
takes about ten percent of my time. I usually write
a column every week, I do a commentary every week.
We filmed sermons, I have a couple of podcast shows.
(20:53):
So maybe takes ten percent of my time. But most
of my time now I'm the bishop of the diocese,
so I'm going to you know, meetings, doing liturgies this morning,
had masks, and then going for another mass later in
the day. So that's my work. That's ninety percent of
my work, and this is about ten percent.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I was very impressive. Your YouTube videos have been seen
by over ninety million times.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's one hundred and twenty million now, I think, is
it one hundred and twenty million?
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, And my wife is one of the half million
people who get your daily email reflections. She literally has
told me of several people who've come to her and
who have been moved to convert to Catholicism by listening
to your reflections.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I mean, that's the whole plaison detre. That's the entire
reason we're doing this. So nothing makes me happier than that.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I mean, I think it's very important because every generation
has to operate within the world that they've discovered. I
was really struck a couple of years ago. I was
reading a novel about Paul and the Corinthians, and I
hadn't realized it, but the Romans had created this amazing
postal service. And one of the reasons you get all
of Paul's letters is whether he's in Malta or wherever
(22:01):
he is, he can literally write his dispatches and mail them.
And so here is the secular Roman imperial male carrying
this subversive message all over the Mediterranean.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
That would eventually undermine Caesar. And that's been observed, you know,
for a while. So I think Christopher Dawson makes that
observation too, that at the moment when it was most needed,
there was a political structure. Think of the Roman roads,
as you say, the Roman postal system and relative peace.
So we just finished all the awful civil wars with
Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra and all that was over,
(22:36):
and so there was a kind of a relative peace
obtaining in the Roman world, and that enabled the message
to get out. And Paul used the technology of his time,
which was Roman roads and parchment in the postal system.
So that's what every generation has to do.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Can you talk about the Word on Fire Institute and
why you decided to found it?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Yeah, Well, the Werdifire Institute was founded what about four
years ago now, and the idea it's a kind of
a think tan that's part of his purpose. We're gathering
fellows who are supposed to do research and writing and
producing of courses. So it's an online reality for the
most part. So people join the Institute, they become members,
and then they get access to all of our video material,
(23:16):
but also to specialized courses in theology, spirituality, practical evangelism,
et cetera. So the idea of the Institute is on
the base of the fellows in their work to form
lay people in the work of evangelization, because finally they're
in the front lines of it. I want to form
lay people to evangelize their own families, their own kids,
(23:38):
their own workplaces. So that's the point of the Word
on Fire Institute. And we do it through the fellows
and the courses and articles and books that they produce.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And one of your biggest impacts has been the award
winning documentary series Catholicism, which you syndicated, which was nominated
for an Emmy. That was a pretty courageous thing to
tackle a project of that size.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You know where that came from, I'll tell you exactly.
It was at a board meeting. This is the early days.
We didn't have much of a reach in those days.
And a board member said to me, father, you know,
if you're going crazy, dream big, what's your dream project?
And I laid out that project. I said, what Kenneth
Clark did in the seventies for Western Civilization, I'd like
to do for Catholicism that we go all over the world.
(24:22):
We'd film the most beautiful places, we would do it
at a high level of production value. So they paused
and they said, well, how come we can't do that.
I said, well, first of all, I need the permission
of my bishop. It was Cardinal George at the time,
was a great hero of mine. I said, then we
probably need I don't know, several million dollars, and so
they started working at it. They went down and talked
(24:43):
to the cardinal without me that the board went down
and said could you give him permission to do this?
And he said yes. And then we started fundraising and
we scraped the money together. When we got enough for
an episode, we'd go and we'd film and all that,
and then we back to zero. We started filming by
the Way twenty oh eight, and it was in the
fall of twenty eight that the economy collapsed, and so
(25:05):
a lot of our donors I remember saying, hey, father,
I want to help you, but I can't right now.
The stocks are so bad and I'm losing money. So
we scraped our way over two years and then got
that thing filmed.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
We did a little bit of that in our couple
of movies we made, including Nine Days That Changed the World.
You hope you can pull it all together, because you
can't start until you're sure you can actually get it done.
It's a huge project.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
It is a huge project, and the people involved in
that were marvelous, and one of them was Mike Leonard.
I don't remember that name. Mike was with The Today
Show for many years. He did the kind of human
interest stories feature pieces on Today's Show. And I knew
him from my parish in Chicago, and he's the one
that linked us to a lot of NBC people around
the world and so on. But we were sitting I remember,
for episode one, we're filming in the Holy Land and
(25:51):
we are in a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem and we're
having dinner, and he said, you know, the church has
been going through such a time. This is twenty oh eight,
so we're just a few years after twenty oh two,
and he said, I wonder, you know, this could be
a tipping point, maybe we could start moving things back.
And so that state, in my mind, that's what we
(26:13):
wanted to do, was present the Catholic Church in its truth,
its beauty in a way that would be evangelically compelling.
And we didn't know when we were making it.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
We had no.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Idea what the distribution strategy would be. We had no
idea if we could get it widely viewed. And it
was PBS came through and then they syndicated it and
it went all over the country.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Well, it's an amazing achievement. And now you have your
newest book, The Great Story of Israel, Election, Freedom, Holiness,
and I gather that's the first of a two part series.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
It is, and that's growing out of this wonderful Word
on Fire Bible project. So we've now published two of these.
The third one's coming out pretty soon. It's just an
exceptionally beautiful, I think presentation of the Bible. We have
the biblical text, but then it's surrounded by commentaries. It's
a bit like the glosses from the Middle Ages when
they would have the text and then the commentary. But
(27:07):
we're drawing from the Church Fathers, from a quinas, from
John Paul the Second, from Chesterton and Newman and everybody else.
And then I've got some commentaries in there too, and
then also on the page are beautiful works of art.
And so it's just a very holistic approach. And our
hope was to draw people that wouldn't normally pick up
a Bible and they see small prints in double column
(27:28):
pages and lots of footnotes and they say, I'm not
going to read that. That this would draw them into
the beauty of the Word of God. And the first volume, heck,
I think that sold three hundred thousand copies. It was
just the Gospels, and then we did the rest of
the New Testament, and the third one coming out is
the first five books of the Old Testament. So my
book there that you referred to, it grew out of
(27:49):
that project. So as I'm doing all this commentary in
the Bible, it grew into really a book length thing,
and that's volume one. I'm looking at roughly half the
Old Testament. There we all under the rubric of trying
to draw people back to the Bible.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
When you go back in the in the Middle Ages,
there was a lot of effort to use beauty to
bring people together. Many of them couldn't read that. They
could see the pictures. They could get a feel for
the storylines if you will.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, but see the church I grew up with. I
come of age in the seventies. Right. First of all,
we dumbed it down. That was a huge mistake. Is
a smart tradition, but we dumbed it down. My generation
got butterflies and banners Catholicism, and it was a disaster pastorally,
because what happens is kids grow up and they have
serious questions and they're getting nothing like serious answers to them.
(28:40):
The second thing we did wrong in that period is
that we uglified Catholicism. Look at the churches built at
that time, the seventies and eighties. They're like these empty
Bauhause modernist structures and had nothing of the charm of
the Romanesque or the Gothic or the ancient basilicas and
they became just sort of empty gathering places. Well, dumb down.
(29:01):
Uglified Catholicism is not compelling to people. And you know,
my generation answered by leaving in droves.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
So one of the things I've been animated by is
a desire to make it beautiful and to make it smart.
And I think those two things are appealing to people.
They always happen.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I have a good friend, Liz lev who is a
remarkable student of religious art and history, and she says
that the Sistine Chapel in Michaelangelo was the Church's answer
to Martin Luther, that the effort to say to people
that there is a glory, there's an amazing beauty. And
of course you visit the Vatican Museum, you're sort of
(29:40):
surrounded by it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
It's amazing It's a very good point about Luthor because,
as you suggest there, he was against what he called
the theology of glory and he wanted purely the theology
of the Cross. And there's a complex history behind that.
But the Catholic Church responded with Michaelangelo, and with Bernini
and with Caravaggio, responded with beauty. You do display the
(30:02):
glory of God through artistic beauty. And I think one
of the signs, one of the clearest signs of corruption,
is when we start destroying beautiful things. And we did
that at a time of the Reformation, we did it
in the ancient Iconoclass period, and honestly, we did it
in my lifetime. We destroyed a lot of beautiful things,
and that's a sign of corruption. Dumbing down Catholicism and
(30:25):
uglifying it are signs of corruption.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I think that's right. And listen, I think you were
one of the people standing firmly for tradition. It's a
remarkable thing, and I want to thank you for joining me.
I want to wish you a very very merry Christmas
and a happy New Year. And I want to encourage
our listeners to visit your website. Ad word on Fire
dot org, where they can find more of your sermons,
(30:49):
articles and books. And I want to thank you personally
for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Mister speaker, thank you very much. Merry Christmas to you.
It was a joy to talk to you today.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Thank you to my guests, Bishop Robert Baron. You can
get a link to word on Fire on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan
and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the
show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the
(31:23):
team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of Newsworld can sign up for my three free weekly
columns at gingishthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich.
(31:45):
This is Newtsworld.
Good morning and Merry Christmas to you and your family.
This morning I'm joined by Bishop Robert Baron, the ninth
Bishop of the Diocese of Wenona, Rochester and the founder
of Word on Fire, which I recommend to everyone. Bishop Baron, welcome,
Thank you for joining me on News World here at Christmas.
Would you mind starting us off with a message about
(00:26):
Christmas and what it means to you?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
It's good to be with you, and Merry Christmas to
all the listeners today. You know, somebody the Church Father
said over and over again, was God became man, that
man might become God. And it might seem a little
peculiar at first, but it's based in the Bible, namely,
that God becomes one of us precisely to draw us
(00:49):
into his life. So the Greek fathers talked about theosis
in their language, but Thomas Aquinas picked it up in
the West. He used the word deificazio deification that we
become sharers in God's nature. God became one of us
that we might become sharers in his own life. And
that I think is the deepest meaning of Christmas. It's
(01:11):
the message of the incarnation, So not just a sort
of a strange one off, but somebody that's at the
very heart of our human life. That God is not
just a moral exemplar for us, but God is calling
us into intimacy with Himself. And that happens through the incarnation,
and that's the message of Christmas. God becomes this little baby.
(01:34):
God joins us in our weakness, our vulnerability, our finitude,
that we might become sharers in his own nature. I
always call it the marvelous humanism of Christianity. There's no humanism,
ancient or modern, that holds out a higher ideal for
human beings than Christianity, because the ordinary goal of the
Christian life is to become a sharer in God's nature.
(01:56):
So the humanism of our tradition is grounded by in
this great feast of Christmas.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
In your own experience, how did you open up to God?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, Chris, I'm born and raised a Catholic, and so
I was, you know, brought up in the church and
going to Mass, and my parents were very devout Catholics.
An experience that I remember very vividly is I'm a
kid of what four or five at the time, maybe,
and simply watching my father at prayer on his knees
at Mass. You know, I thought of my father as
the most powerful person in the world, and to see
(02:33):
him humbly in the presence of a power greater than himself.
That had a huge impact on me when I was
a little kid. But then in a more refined way,
when I was in high school, I discovered Saint Thomas Aquinas.
And though I was a believer in God, to be sure,
but when I came across the arguments for God's existence,
I realized that you could think about God in a
(02:54):
very serious way, an intellectually serious way, And that beguiled
my when I was a kid and led me to
books and ideas and all that, and then it began
to reach into deeper parts of my soul. It reached
my heart. But I say, the witness of my parents,
especially my dad, and then the emergence of Thomas Aquinas
in my life when I was a teenager, those both
(03:16):
had a huge impact on me.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
As you have grown in Christ, you created word on
fire which anybody can access in the world. What led
you to that? It's a great profound breakthrough in being
able to share the Gospel worldwide. You do it as
well as anybody I know.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I appreciate that, you know. I was a teacher at
the seminary outside Chicago, so I had been sent for
my doctoral studies to Paris. Loved books, Love the Life
of the Mind, got my doctorate, was able to travel
through Europe, and I had all those great experiences. Came
back and I was a teacher for a number of years,
taught courses. I began to write books. I was on
the Catholic speaker circuit, you know, going around giving retreats
(03:58):
and talks and so on. But it occurred to me
by the late nineties, so I've been teaching now for
seven or eight years, that there was so much more
we could do. I could spend the rest of my life.
I thought, you know, writing books for a relatively small
audience and giving talks to rooms of two or three
hundred people. But I said, why not do what Fulton
Sheen did back in the thirties, forties and fifties. I mean,
(04:19):
why not use the technology available to us now? When
I started, it still was basically TV and radio and
that sort of thing. So I went to WGN Radio
in Chicago, the biggest radio station, and I said, just
for fun, tell me how much would it cost to
have a little sermon show. And they said to me, well,
for fifty thousand dollars, we'll put you on at five
(04:40):
point fifteen on Sunday morning. So I went to my
parish and I said, you know, just that, if you're
willing to help me, I can get on the radio
at five point fifteen. And God bless them, they did.
They gave me the money, and that's how it started.
It grew then to a website, and then I started
recording a number of talks I've been giving though got
on Catholic television, and my profile, you know, grew a bit.
(05:04):
And then we had a breakthrough with the Catholicism series,
which was modeled after Kenneth Clark Civilization, which is a
show that impacted me when I was a kid, this
great English art historian taking us all over the Western
world and showing us the great works of art. I said,
why not do something like that with Catholicism. So again,
scrape together the money. Somehow we did that, and that's
(05:26):
then really what brought it to a different level. And
then we began the podcasts and the YouTube and all
that business. But it started with just my conviction that
we should be doing more, that we could do more,
that Fulton Sheen was the model, but we had kind
of dropped the ball after Fulton Sheen. So that's what
inspired me.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Bishop Sheen made Christianity totally practical and totally irrelevant, and
did so with a sense of humor. He was a
great showman.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
He had a certain genius and part of it, you know,
was he was very highly trained in Catholic philosophy and theology.
He had the agrege, which is this advanced degree in
theology from Louvain University. So Sheen was a high level academic.
But he also had his finger on the pulse of
the culture. He understood American culture. For example, he used
(06:13):
a lot of psychology, used a lot of Freud because
he knew that Freud was sort of making his way
into the culture. He engaged in a lot of polemics
against communism, which was a major political theme of the day.
So he combined a rich Catholic intellectual formation with a
keen understanding of the culture. And as you say, I
think the humor was very important for Sheen. The greatest
comedians of the day. You know, Jackie Gleison and Milton
(06:36):
Borough admired his timing, his comic timing, so she was
able to pull that off in a rather extraordinary way.
And at the time there were what a handful of
TV stations, and so if you get on television in
those days, you were reaching much of the country.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
It's hard nowadays, with the extraordinary range of opportunities to
remember what it was like back then.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right, there's a flip side to it, because now you know,
we can be twenty four to seven all over the
world and all these different platforms. Sheen had to rely
on people coming at a particular time on the radio
or TV to hear him. In a way, we're in
a much better position than Sheen was in.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
You make the point that when we talk about the
Christmas Story, we look at Luke's account, the story really
opens up by invoking two of the most powerful people
in the world. It says, well, Corinius was the governor
of Syria, and when Caesar Augustus was king of the world,
census was called. It never quite occurred to me until
(07:32):
I read your work that I've always seen that as
kind of placing it historically. But there's also drawing a
contrast that these two guys had secular power, but here
comes this little baby who in fact will have far
more power.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
There's no question about it. I mean, Luke, all the
Gospel writers were literary as well as theological geniuses. And
the way he uses Quairindius and Augustus to kind of
haunt your mind as you read that story. So these
figures would have had all the things that we associate
with worldly power. They honor and prestige, and they had
armies behind them, and they had a comfortable place to
(08:08):
live and all of that. And then Luke tells this
story of this little nothing couple making their way to
this dusty outpost and the baby, it can't even be
born in the Travelers hostel, is born in a cave
or a stable, is put in the place where animals eat,
is wrapped up. In other words, has no power, no prestige,
no honor. Yet And I think the key to that
(08:29):
story is at the end when the angel who always
inspires fear in the Bible, when an angel appears from
another dimensional system, but then appearing with the single angel
is an entire army of angels. And see that's no
accident that an army is associated with the Baby King,
which is far more powerful than the army associated with
(08:51):
Quirinius or Caesar Augustus. And what I find extraordinary there is,
here's a man writing this story, let's say, around the
you're eighty or so of the first century, when Christians
were a tiny, tiny minority in a handful of cities
in the eastern Mediterranean. And yet he was saying very clearly,
this baby, this Messiah is more powerful than Caesar. And
(09:14):
at the time, I mean, it was an incredible thing
to say. But yet it's true, isn't it. I mean,
we're still here and Caesar is long gone. I mean, Christianity,
those following the Baby King were still a great world
power two thousand years later. The Caesars are long gone.
And so the gospel writers they got something, they understood something.
(09:36):
I think here even in our own time. You know,
you and I lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
Who would have guessed when I was a teenager in
the seventies and someone told me that the Soviet Empire
would collapse with barely a shot being fired, and that
the pope would be a major player in it. That
would be wild fantasy. That's what happened. And the Christmas story,
(09:58):
you're quite right, is about that dynamic that the true
King and the true army are more powerful than the
armies of the world.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Kristen I did a movie called Nine Days the Change
the World. How about John Paul the second going back
and it's astonishing the impact he has and thegree to
which he suddenly arouses the Polish people.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
You're quite right, and that's it's marvelous your documentary and
that whole story is marvelous. But it calls to mind
the Stalin line. Right, it was about Pius the twelfth.
How many divisions does the pope have when the pope
critiqued him, Well, the successor of pis the twelve brought
down the successor of Stalin without a single division. But
it speaks to spiritual power, which we've always known about.
(11:05):
Spiritual power can change the whole world.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
There's a great line in the movie where George Weigel
quotes stalem and then says, you know, it turned out
that the pope had far more divisions than Stalin never imagined.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
That's quite right, and that signaled in the Christmas story
when this invisible army. I don't sentimentalize the angels of Christmas.
They're on every Christmas card and we sentimentalize them, but
they're not sentimental figures. In the Bible, angels are always
ferocious figures. They're fearsome figures. And now you get an
army of those together. That's what's associated with the Baby King,
(11:38):
which means the powers of the world should tremble seecause
at the heart of Christianity is a sort of taunt
to worldly power, because we hold up the Cross, which
struck first century people as exceedingly strange that you would
hold up the image of someone being tortured to death
by Roman power. But that's the kind of delicious poetry
(11:58):
of Christianity, as we hold that up as a sort
of taunt to the world to say, well, We're not
afraid of what you can do to us, because God's
love is more powerful than anything that you have. And
that's not just wishful thinking. You can see it in
the John Paul story.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
What do you think most Christians miss from the celebration
of Christmas?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
They miss the radicality and subversiveness of it, the two
things we've been talking about, because we sentimentalize it that's
the problem. It's Dickens, and Dickens was a great figure
and a great Christian. I don't want to be bad
mouthing Dickens, but we associate Christmas now with you know,
the Dickenzie in London, and we sort of romanticize it.
But Christmas in the Bible is subversive and it's radical.
(12:41):
God becomes one of us that we might become sharers
in his nature, and God becomes one of us in
order to lead a great spiritual army whose purposes to
conquer the world. And so in Jesus, the risen Christs
go forth and proclaim the Gospel to all nations and
to bring them under the lord ship of Jesus. Well,
(13:01):
that's not WEISTLM.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Dixie.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I mean, that's a very powerful summons. And the lordship
of Jesus means just that that he wants all of
life brought under his sovereignty. I think that's what people
miss when it comes to Christmas.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I always look back on this with amazement that here's
this very small number of people who in their hearts
are so passionately, deeply committed that within a century they're
a worldwide movement. You look at that and you think
something mystical happened.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Something happened, Well, you know, I rely there on nt Right,
the great biblical historian, because Wright said, presin from religion
for a minute. Just from a purely historical standpoint, what
is very hard to explain is the emergence of Christianity
as a Messianic movement. And what he meant was, at
that time and place, the clearest sign possible that you
(13:55):
were not the Messiah of Israel would be your death
at the hands of Israel's enemies, because the Ziah was
meant to be the king of the nations. And so
if someone wanted to say, look, your guy is not it,
all you'd have to do is say, look, the Romans
put him the death. Well, Christianity didn't hide that. On
the contrary, Paul says, that's all I preach is Christ
and him crucified. But at the same time they said, yeah,
(14:17):
the one that Caesar crucified, he is the Messiah of God.
And then to your point, it shows something happened. Even
to explain the emergence of this movement apart from the resurrection,
it's very hard to explain it.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
It's the empty tomb, is the moment of realizing that
the effort of the establishment, both the Jewish establishment and
the Roman political establishment, has failed, that Christ in fact
is not dead. He was temporarily gone and is now
back right.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
The most fundamental form of charigmatic preaching, so called the charigma,
being the basic good news. The basic form is Caesar
killed them, God raised him. That's what the first preacher said.
You kill them, your people, kill them, God raised them.
That's the coarigma, and that is a subversive sort of message.
That's a very challenging message, which is why most of
(15:11):
the first Christian preachers ended up in prison and put
to death, because the powers that be understood that. They
knew how radical this message was. Even Paul saying again
and again as he does, Jesus curios, Jesus is Lord,
because Kaiser was curios. Caesar was lord in that time
and place, and so to say no, not Caesar, but
(15:31):
Jesus is Lord. That's why Paul was in prison a lot,
and why they eventually cut his head off is they
knew how subversive that was. We've lost a lot of
that edginess. I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Part of it is you have to have people who
believe so deeply that they regard having their head cut
off as a reasonable trade. It is in that sense,
in the early days a religion of martyrs. Over and over.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Again witnesses and the blood of the martyrs the seat
of Christians is told said, and that's exactly how it worked.
But see it still works. When I was filming the
Catholism series, we were in Namogongo near Kampala, and that's
where Charles Lwanga and his companions were murdered in the
late eighteen hundreds, and anyone watching that would have said, well,
that's the end of Christianity. But now every year on
(16:17):
his feat stage Dune the third, something like a million
people converge on that spot. And when I was there filming,
I was just sort of moved to quote Tertullian. I said,
the blood of the martyrs is still the seat of Christians.
And take a look. And then the camera panned out
to this enormous crowd. So it's still true, still.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
True, when you are at Mass and you take the Eucharist,
the representation of Christ and the degree to which Christ
is in you. Two thousand years later, as experienced by
well over a billion, three hundred million people, is an
astonishing statement of faith.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, it's the distinctive mark of Catholic Christianity is we
don't think of Jesus as simply an inspiring teacher or
a distant historical figure. We eat him and we drink him,
We take him into our bodies. The Church Father said
that it's the way we become immortalized, so preparing ourselves
to live forever. Well, we become immortalized through the Eucharist,
(17:17):
so that the kind of wonderful, gritty realism of our
eucharistic faith, that Jesus is really truly and substantially present.
That matters a lot, because otherwise it's easy to think
of him, make him a very abstract figure. But no,
we eat him and we drink.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Him, and in that process there is a personal experience.
It seems to me that when you go, for example,
in Rome, to certain key places where there are martyrs,
and you realize these people, in a sense, were happy
to be martyred. They were dying in the absolute faith
of rebirth, and they felt that the people who weren't
(17:57):
prepared to be martyred were much poorer and we're not
going to in fact be reborn.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah, and I think that's true in those days and
true in our time. Think of a Maximian Colbay and
the depth of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, but willingly gives
his life to save someone else. That's someone who's living
in a different plaine. That's someone who's opened up a
depth dimension to life. It's still true the Great Martyrs,
and that's still the source of the church's deepest life.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
What was it like to move from Los Angeles to Minnesota?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
It felt like come. I loved LA. I'm from Chicago originally,
and I was a priest there and I was rector
of the seminary there. Loved Chicago, but I'm very used
to the Midwest and Midwestern weather. I was sent to California,
to my infinite surprise. I was made an auxiliary bishop
out in LA and I was based in Santa Barbara,
which is one of the loveliest places in the whole country.
I loved it beautiful. But when I got the call,
(19:21):
and that's how it happens in the church. No one
ever talks to you. You've had no advance warning whatsoever.
It's not discussed with you in any way. You just
get a phone call out of the blue and it
was you've been appointed at Bishop of Wenona, Rochester, Minnesota.
My first thought was, I got to take out my
Chicago winter coat again, which had been hanging up for
six years in my closet. It felt like coming home.
(19:41):
I felt like coming back to a culture I was
very at home with.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Given modern technology, do you find it for all practical
purposes as easy to do? Word on fire from Wanona
to Rochester.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
We're moving our studio to Rochester, right near the Mayo Clinic.
We're moving right downtown. We had it in Santa Barbara
at the wonderful Santa Barbe Remission. We were on the
grounds of the mission. We just picked up all the equipment,
shipped it out here and we've rented a space and
we're building it out now as a studio. But see
to your point. People said to me, oh, you know
you were out in Hollywood, and wasn't that better for communication.
(20:14):
I said, well, first of all, I wasn't in Hollywood.
I was two hours out in Santa Barbara. And secondly,
I said, we had our own equipment and studio, and
I can do it just as well from here as
I could from there, So that doesn't make a lot
of difference.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
How much of your time does it take because it's
brilliantly done.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Well, that's due to my team. One of my team
members is right here next to me, is I record this.
We have about sixty people in Dallas, Chicago, now Rochester.
They're the ones who's so good at the creative side
of it and the tech side. I'm not very good
at the tech side of it. I would say it
takes about ten percent of my time. I usually write
a column every week, I do a commentary every week.
We filmed sermons, I have a couple of podcast shows.
(20:53):
So maybe takes ten percent of my time. But most
of my time now I'm the bishop of the diocese,
so I'm going to you know, meetings, doing liturgies this morning,
had masks, and then going for another mass later in
the day. So that's my work. That's ninety percent of
my work, and this is about ten percent.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I was very impressive. Your YouTube videos have been seen
by over ninety million times.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's one hundred and twenty million now, I think, is
it one hundred and twenty million?
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, And my wife is one of the half million
people who get your daily email reflections. She literally has
told me of several people who've come to her and
who have been moved to convert to Catholicism by listening
to your reflections.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I mean, that's the whole plaison detre. That's the entire
reason we're doing this. So nothing makes me happier than that.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I mean, I think it's very important because every generation
has to operate within the world that they've discovered. I
was really struck a couple of years ago. I was
reading a novel about Paul and the Corinthians, and I
hadn't realized it, but the Romans had created this amazing
postal service. And one of the reasons you get all
of Paul's letters is whether he's in Malta or wherever
(22:01):
he is, he can literally write his dispatches and mail them.
And so here is the secular Roman imperial male carrying
this subversive message all over the Mediterranean.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
That would eventually undermine Caesar. And that's been observed, you know,
for a while. So I think Christopher Dawson makes that
observation too, that at the moment when it was most needed,
there was a political structure. Think of the Roman roads,
as you say, the Roman postal system and relative peace.
So we just finished all the awful civil wars with
Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra and all that was over,
(22:36):
and so there was a kind of a relative peace
obtaining in the Roman world, and that enabled the message
to get out. And Paul used the technology of his time,
which was Roman roads and parchment in the postal system.
So that's what every generation has to do.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Can you talk about the Word on Fire Institute and
why you decided to found it?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Yeah, Well, the Werdifire Institute was founded what about four
years ago now, and the idea it's a kind of
a think tan that's part of his purpose. We're gathering
fellows who are supposed to do research and writing and
producing of courses. So it's an online reality for the
most part. So people join the Institute, they become members,
and then they get access to all of our video material,
(23:16):
but also to specialized courses in theology, spirituality, practical evangelism,
et cetera. So the idea of the Institute is on
the base of the fellows in their work to form
lay people in the work of evangelization, because finally they're
in the front lines of it. I want to form
lay people to evangelize their own families, their own kids,
(23:38):
their own workplaces. So that's the point of the Word
on Fire Institute. And we do it through the fellows
and the courses and articles and books that they produce.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And one of your biggest impacts has been the award
winning documentary series Catholicism, which you syndicated, which was nominated
for an Emmy. That was a pretty courageous thing to
tackle a project of that size.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You know where that came from, I'll tell you exactly.
It was at a board meeting. This is the early days.
We didn't have much of a reach in those days.
And a board member said to me, father, you know,
if you're going crazy, dream big, what's your dream project?
And I laid out that project. I said, what Kenneth
Clark did in the seventies for Western Civilization, I'd like
to do for Catholicism that we go all over the world.
(24:22):
We'd film the most beautiful places, we would do it
at a high level of production value. So they paused
and they said, well, how come we can't do that.
I said, well, first of all, I need the permission
of my bishop. It was Cardinal George at the time,
was a great hero of mine. I said, then we
probably need I don't know, several million dollars, and so
they started working at it. They went down and talked
(24:43):
to the cardinal without me that the board went down
and said could you give him permission to do this?
And he said yes. And then we started fundraising and
we scraped the money together. When we got enough for
an episode, we'd go and we'd film and all that,
and then we back to zero. We started filming by
the Way twenty oh eight, and it was in the
fall of twenty eight that the economy collapsed, and so
(25:05):
a lot of our donors I remember saying, hey, father,
I want to help you, but I can't right now.
The stocks are so bad and I'm losing money. So
we scraped our way over two years and then got
that thing filmed.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
We did a little bit of that in our couple
of movies we made, including Nine Days That Changed the World.
You hope you can pull it all together, because you
can't start until you're sure you can actually get it done.
It's a huge project.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
It is a huge project, and the people involved in
that were marvelous, and one of them was Mike Leonard.
I don't remember that name. Mike was with The Today
Show for many years. He did the kind of human
interest stories feature pieces on Today's Show. And I knew
him from my parish in Chicago, and he's the one
that linked us to a lot of NBC people around
the world and so on. But we were sitting I remember,
for episode one, we're filming in the Holy Land and
(25:51):
we are in a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem and we're
having dinner, and he said, you know, the church has
been going through such a time. This is twenty oh eight,
so we're just a few years after twenty oh two,
and he said, I wonder, you know, this could be
a tipping point, maybe we could start moving things back.
And so that state, in my mind, that's what we
(26:13):
wanted to do, was present the Catholic Church in its truth,
its beauty in a way that would be evangelically compelling.
And we didn't know when we were making it.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
We had no.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Idea what the distribution strategy would be. We had no
idea if we could get it widely viewed. And it
was PBS came through and then they syndicated it and
it went all over the country.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Well, it's an amazing achievement. And now you have your
newest book, The Great Story of Israel, Election, Freedom, Holiness,
and I gather that's the first of a two part series.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
It is, and that's growing out of this wonderful Word
on Fire Bible project. So we've now published two of these.
The third one's coming out pretty soon. It's just an
exceptionally beautiful, I think presentation of the Bible. We have
the biblical text, but then it's surrounded by commentaries. It's
a bit like the glosses from the Middle Ages when
they would have the text and then the commentary. But
(27:07):
we're drawing from the Church Fathers, from a quinas, from
John Paul the Second, from Chesterton and Newman and everybody else.
And then I've got some commentaries in there too, and
then also on the page are beautiful works of art.
And so it's just a very holistic approach. And our
hope was to draw people that wouldn't normally pick up
a Bible and they see small prints in double column
(27:28):
pages and lots of footnotes and they say, I'm not
going to read that. That this would draw them into
the beauty of the Word of God. And the first volume, heck,
I think that sold three hundred thousand copies. It was
just the Gospels, and then we did the rest of
the New Testament, and the third one coming out is
the first five books of the Old Testament. So my
book there that you referred to, it grew out of
(27:49):
that project. So as I'm doing all this commentary in
the Bible, it grew into really a book length thing,
and that's volume one. I'm looking at roughly half the
Old Testament. There we all under the rubric of trying
to draw people back to the Bible.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
When you go back in the in the Middle Ages,
there was a lot of effort to use beauty to
bring people together. Many of them couldn't read that. They
could see the pictures. They could get a feel for
the storylines if you will.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, but see the church I grew up with. I
come of age in the seventies. Right. First of all,
we dumbed it down. That was a huge mistake. Is
a smart tradition, but we dumbed it down. My generation
got butterflies and banners Catholicism, and it was a disaster pastorally,
because what happens is kids grow up and they have
serious questions and they're getting nothing like serious answers to them.
(28:40):
The second thing we did wrong in that period is
that we uglified Catholicism. Look at the churches built at
that time, the seventies and eighties. They're like these empty
Bauhause modernist structures and had nothing of the charm of
the Romanesque or the Gothic or the ancient basilicas and
they became just sort of empty gathering places. Well, dumb down.
(29:01):
Uglified Catholicism is not compelling to people. And you know,
my generation answered by leaving in droves.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
So one of the things I've been animated by is
a desire to make it beautiful and to make it smart.
And I think those two things are appealing to people.
They always happen.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I have a good friend, Liz lev who is a
remarkable student of religious art and history, and she says
that the Sistine Chapel in Michaelangelo was the Church's answer
to Martin Luther, that the effort to say to people
that there is a glory, there's an amazing beauty. And
of course you visit the Vatican Museum, you're sort of
(29:40):
surrounded by it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
It's amazing It's a very good point about Luthor because,
as you suggest there, he was against what he called
the theology of glory and he wanted purely the theology
of the Cross. And there's a complex history behind that.
But the Catholic Church responded with Michaelangelo, and with Bernini
and with Caravaggio, responded with beauty. You do display the
(30:02):
glory of God through artistic beauty. And I think one
of the signs, one of the clearest signs of corruption,
is when we start destroying beautiful things. And we did
that at a time of the Reformation, we did it
in the ancient Iconoclass period, and honestly, we did it
in my lifetime. We destroyed a lot of beautiful things,
and that's a sign of corruption. Dumbing down Catholicism and
(30:25):
uglifying it are signs of corruption.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I think that's right. And listen, I think you were
one of the people standing firmly for tradition. It's a
remarkable thing, and I want to thank you for joining me.
I want to wish you a very very merry Christmas
and a happy New Year. And I want to encourage
our listeners to visit your website. Ad word on Fire
dot org, where they can find more of your sermons,
(30:49):
articles and books. And I want to thank you personally
for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Mister speaker, thank you very much. Merry Christmas to you.
It was a joy to talk to you today.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Thank you to my guests, Bishop Robert Baron. You can
get a link to word on Fire on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan
and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the
show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the
(31:23):
team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners
of Newsworld can sign up for my three free weekly
columns at gingishthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich.
(31:45):
This is Newtsworld.
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