Bishop Barron on the New Pope, the Foolishness of Atheism, and Why Young Men Are Turning to Christ
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Do you think that Christian persecution is on the rise?
Oh, I know it is. It's documented. 20th century was the worst century for Christian martyrs of Christian history, all the previous centuries combined. It's the most persecuted religion. If two friends like each other, that's fine. But Aristotle says that won't last, that relationship. What makes it last is when the two friends together fall in love with a transcendent third. And now together we look to that. Now we really find a bond. When the bride and groom together look to Christ, now they'll stay married. If they're just looking to each other... it'll founder.
The Catholic Church got super liberal. And then all of a sudden, everywhere you look, people you know are converting to Catholicism with a pretty kind of traditionally Christian orientation.
This is how I would characterize ecclesial liberalism, a tendency to reduce the supernatural to the natural. That was going on for a long time. Yes. In very recent years, there's been a keener interest in the supernatural dimension of the faith.
I don't think I've ever received more texts about any guest than I did about you. From Catholics I know, from non-Catholics I know, but the Catholics all wanted to hear details on, you know, factions within the church, and I'm not going to ask you any questions about that because I don't understand any of it.
Good.
I want to start as broad as I possibly can, which is, it seems like a lot of people in the West are unhappy, and it's measurable, suicide rates are. Yep. at record highs and birth rates are at record lows. And those are not signs of confidence in the future. Those are signs of despair.
Why are people unhappy? Well, they've lost a sense of God. I mean, God is the supreme good. And when you lose that sense of God and you collapse back in on yourself, that St. Augustine defined sin as curvatus in se, I'm caved in around myself. When you do that, you are by definition unhappy.
How can we abandon our ego?
When you lose a sense of objective value grounded in the supreme value of God, almost again, by definition, you become unhappy. What does it mean to cave in on yourself? It means that you've lost a sense of connection to the values that should be calling you out of yourself in an act of love, and you've now come to reverence your own freedom, your own autonomy. So what gives my life meaning is the fact that I've chosen something. I've determined my life. If the Bible has one message, it's that, that when you live your life that way, you get lost. Right. When you deify your own psyche, your own ego, you get lost. The joy of life comes from forgetting in this great ecstatic act. You forget about yourself and you lose yourself in some great value.
Now, that could be sports, that could be politics, whatever it is. But then the supreme value in which all the other ones participate... We call God. God is the highest good, the sumum bonum. That's why you love the Lord your God. That's the first commandment, right? But when the culture's lost that, which ours is in danger of, you, by definition, become unhappy. You get caved in around yourself. And then you fuss around in this kind of addictive way. That's how I would diagnose the thing spiritually.
When you are in love with the idea of choices, I thought the whole point of the West was choices.
Well, but you have to know what your choice is for. When you deify choice itself, when you say autonomy, that's my God. No, choice is for some good. And the idea is to order freedom, right? Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is ordered towards some good. When it's disordered, it tends to collapse upon itself. That's what we got. The whole point of America, I thought, was choice and freedom for its own sake. Well, and I would argue it's not for its own sake. And if that happens to us, something's gone wrong. The founding fathers, you know, they weren't in the full sense of the term. It wouldn't have the full Catholic imagination as I would like it, but they certainly had a sense of the objective good.
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