Bishop Robert Barron reaches a huge online audience with his Word on Fire ministry. What’s his secret, asks Melanie McDonagh
There aren’t, frankly, many Catholic bishops who have to field questions about how it is they’re so brilliant at reaching young people, but that’s Bishop Robert Barron for you. He’s known as the Bishop for the Internet (though his actual see is Winona-Rochester), because his Facebook following and YouTube hits are so huge. What Fulton Sheen – another US bishop, and one of his heroes – did for the age of television, Bishop Barron is doing for social media with his Word on Fire website. “I could have stuck with talking to other Catholics in a small room,” he observes, “But I thought: we have to address the wider culture and use the media in a creative way. I’m an academic, but it seemed an obvious thing to do. I didn’t have a grand plan.” It was entering territory that can be hostile to the Church, but “I have a certain joie de combat,” he says cheerfully.
If he’s combative in his approach, he’s genial with it. His demeanour in person – he’s on a trip to London and we meet in his hotel in the old County Hall building – is upbeat and kindly. It helps that he’s tall and friendly-looking (his family background is Irish). He wears a Roman collar and pectoral cross. Does he think priests should wear their clerical collars? “I do”, he says. “Especially now. It’s important for us to say we’re still here.”
I asked him what he made of the recent findings of the Office for National Statistics that suggest that fewer than half of Britons identify as Christians, and barely a third of young people do so. He’s not surprised. “We’ve been through that in America,” he says. “Polls show that 50 per cent of young Catholics aren’t religiously affiliated. It’s the problem of our time. It’s what I’ve been trying to address for the last couple of decades and I wanted to do it in a way that was truthful and beautiful. Young people say they respond to beauty in the Church.”
A recent bit of outreach has been on the online social platform Reddit, where he bills himself as a Catholic bishop who loves talking to agnostics and atheists. “I actually like talking to people who don’t agree with me,” he says. He’s taken part in its online forum sessions, Ask Me Anything, three times and each time he’s been one of the top two participants in terms of audience engagement, behind big figures such as Bernie Sanders (another youth favourite). In fact, you could say that he appeals to young people for the same reason that Sanders does: he’s authentic.
So… what’s the formula? “Truth and beauty,” he says crisply. “Never underestimate what young people are capable of. I was advised not to be over-intellectual in my approach, not to be seen in front of books, because young people wouldn’t get it, but it’s just not true. In survey after survey, young people are asked what puts them off the Church, and they say that it’s because science refutes religion, and the sexual abuse scandals don’t help one little bit, but the other thing they say is that Christianity is unintelligent.” His own background is in philosophy, and he’s impatient with the so-called New Atheists: Dawkins, Hitchens et al. “Their arguments are just so poor, so old,” he says.
Another recent encounter was with a young Oxford undergraduate, Alex O’Connor, whose Cosmic Skeptic website explores questions of philosophy and religion.
There are, he thinks, underlying reasons for the flight of the young from the Church: “It’s the self-invention culture, whereby it’s up to the individual to invent their own values. Religion is seen as an imposition on freedom.”
He was an early adopter of social media. “I tried YouTube the year after it came out, in 2007, when I was a university professor and before I was a bishop,” he says. “The pieces were short but I tried to address things in a substantive way.”
Would he like preferment – to be an archbishop – or is he happy sticking with his diocese and his internet ministry? “I’ll go wherever the Church sends me,” he says. However, he’s clear about the episcopal role. “I’m a teacher. A bishop is a teacher. That’s what Ambrose and Augustine were – I’m not comparing myself to them – and if a bishop finds he’s getting stuck in administration, something’s going wrong.”
Part of the genius of Bishop Barron is that he has managed to escape getting embroiled in the culture wars that have divided the American Church. It’s not that he dodges the divisive questions (when I ask about President Biden he says bluntly, “He’s terrible on the life issues”) but says it’s just not where he starts out. “It was a conscious choice,” he says. “I try to present the reality of the Catholic faith. If you start out with the hot-button questions, you can set up barriers.” The end result, he says, is that he’s disliked by people on the left and right of the Church. Asked if he’s more sympathetic to the late Pope Benedict or the present Pope Francis, he won’t be drawn. He has met Francis several times as a bishop. “I like him”, he says.
He supports the Synodal process on the simple principle of Cardinal Newman – “I’m a Newman man” – that the Church should listen the laity, “but it doesn’t mean we do whatever they say”. He agrees with Pope Francis, that “we don’t decide doctrine by popular vote”.
He’s a traditionalist in the sense that he strongly believes that the priority for the Church is to resurrect its own intellectual tradition, but he doesn’t agree that the resurgence of the church lies in the wider celebration of the Tridentine Rite. “I don’t think it’s the way forward or the way to bring young people back”, he says. In his own diocese he’s happy to allow the Extraordinary Rite; but for himself, he says he wouldn’t be able even to say a Tridentine Mass. “I’d be able to read the Latin”, he says, “but I wouldn’t know the gestures; I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“I start out with Truth and Beauty. You know, in the last century, some of the most interesting and influential individuals – people like Graham Greene and Chesterton – became Catholics. We have to ask what happened after that.”
The obvious answer is Vatican II. Or rather, as he’s keen to make clear, the cultural revolution that followed the Council. He doesn’t have much patience with traditionalists’ hostility to the Council, nor with the progressivists who want to go beyond it. He reels off the list of distinguished theologians who participated in it – “some of the greatest intellects in the Church, the best and brightest”, and includes Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI. “I nail my colours to the mast with the Catechism of 1992 [another Ratzinger project].”
As for the great stumbling block to evangelisation, the abuse scandal, he says the answer to the problem isn’t just establishing protocols, it’s perpetual vigilance. “Where you have vulnerable children, you have people willing to exploit them.” What he doesn’t blame for the abuse is clericalism, or indeed celibacy. As for the wholesale demoralisation the abuses have caused, he says, “In the last 2,000 years, the Church has been through worse. We don’t give up.”
He has advice for Catholics who take to the internet to engage in religious argument; he says drily that all too often the first thing you see online is the Church bickering with itself. “It’s evangelically uncompelling.” And his rule for those Catholics engaged in those arguments is: “Before you press the send button, ask yourself, is this motivated by love?” It’s a simple question, but it’s funny how rarely we ask it.
For more from Bishop Barron, visit wordonfire.org
(Photo: © Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)
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