I have been watching Bishop Barron online for over a decade. I became a member of his enormously popular “Word on Fire” apostolate, and I spent much of last year helping Brenden Thompson of Catholic Voices organise his upcoming visit to the UK.
I, along with hundreds of fellow Catholics, met the bishop at St Patrick’s Church, Soho Square on Tuesday this week. It was billed as a networking event where Catholics from across the country, and a few from across the pond, could meet and support one another. The day before meeting us, the bishop celebrated Mass at Westminster Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.
Brenden, whose wife had just given birth to their 3rd daughter, directed the event with more aplomb than you might imagine a man in his situation could muster.
Catholic Voices teamed up with Word on Fire to deliver the largest Catholic evangelisation conference since Covid. Brenden, aware of everything those in the audience share, but also of the differences between them, joked about attempts to get the label straight on the Catholic Voices branded mugs as Bishop Barron’s brother presented the group with a digital mock-up of a new conference centre they are hoping to open in the US.
When Barron, who has been bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in the US since 2022 and has over 3.1 million followers on Facebook, addressed the group, he was everything one might imagine him to be: erudite, personable and engaging.
He spoke of the five key people whose principles ground the work of Word on Fire, namely, Irenaeus (he quotes Latin with a Chicago twang), Augustine, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas and Fulton Sheen – each offering something to the modern evangelist about how to reach those restless hearts.
And then, there it was, the line we had been waiting for: “a plague on both your houses,” he said as he warned of the danger of falling into one of two traps as evangelists – a kind of religious anger on one side, and a bland tolerance of everything on the other.
He had once been in conversation with the late Christopher Hitchens, after which a journalist turned to him and said: “come on Barron, you must admit, Hitchens got you thinking”. At this Barron lights up and says: “trust me when I say to you that we didn’t need Hitchens to get us thinking, we have 2000 years of thought, from Irenaeus to Aquinas, Augustine…”, reeling off another ten names and declaring with some frustration that the reason the new atheists got a foothold in the culture was because “we repudiated much of our own tradition and threw away our weapons”.
Barron makes clear that he is a Vatican II man, but that he understands it as part of the great tradition of the Church and not as a point of departure from it. Q&A followed and he was asked a number of questions about beauty as a way in to God, an idea that underpins the Word on Fire approach. He was just great. Magnanimous, gracious and happy to share one of his breadsticks with me before departing for another engagement on his packed London visit.
It was, however, after the main event and during a period of relaxed networking that I was struck by an unexpected encounter. I met, for the first time, Fr Paschal Uche. When Pope Benedict XVI died at the end of last year, I had rewatched some footage from his visit to the UK and saw a young man standing on the steps of Westminster Cathedral welcoming Pope Benedict on behalf of the young people assembled there that day.
“We are a truly living church that offers great opportunities for young people to encounter and share the love of Christ,” he said. “Pope John Paul II said that our faith is a noble and authentic adventure and we really desire for other young people to experience this. It is our prayer that your visit inspires us to be saints, saints of the third millennium.”
Ten years later, in 2020, that young man was ordained priest at Brentwood Cathedral.
As a group of us walked to a nearby café to talk more, I watched how he greeted and interacted with people along the way. He is, like Barron, a gifted communicator, able to put people at ease in his presence. More than that though, he radiates the gifts of the spirit and simply loves Jesus.
After laughing at me for taking a photograph of a QR code – whatever happened to ordering from a human? – we spoke about Catholic education, authenticity, the hunger young people have for something to give their lives to, and the need to reach out in love without compromising on truth. “When you love someone,” he said, “the gospel just sounds different”.
We spoke about a number of initiatives that we are working on and the ways in which we might be able to support one another as we go about the work of evangelisation. There is no doubt that we live in dark times, but God sends rays of light and Fr Paschal Uche is one of them. After more than 10 years waiting, I came for Barron, but I stayed for Uche.
Katherine Bennett is a Religious Education teacher, Catholic Herald columnist and “Catholic Voice”. She was commissioned as deanery mentor for evangelisation in Southwark by Archbishop John Wilson in March 2022.
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