Robert Barron Quotes

Meek - free from the addiction to ordinary power - you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world.

One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.

Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".

In the, Dei Verbum, there is a great statement of Vatican II: The bible is the word of god but in the words of men.

Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church.

It has been suggested that the heart of sin is taking oneself too seriously.

Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations.

Who had the biggest army in the ancient world? Caesar Augustus in Rome, and that is precisely how he was able to dominate that world. Nevertheless, his army is nothing compared to this angelic stratias that has lined up behind the new emperor. Remember Isaiah's prophesy that Yahweh would one day bare his mighty arm before all the nations. N.T. Wright has magnificently observed that the prophecy finds its fulfillment in the tiny arm of the baby Jesus coming out of his manger-crib.

Christianity is not a set of private convictions that we cultivate inwardly or whisper among ourselves. It is the message that the whole world needs to hear. We who have heard it must become agents of subversion and transformation.

So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

According to the basic narrative of the Old Testament, God’s answer to human dysfunction was the formation of a people after his own heart.

But the true emperor, Luke is telling us, arrives vulnerable and exposed, because the good life is not about the protection of the ego, but rather about the willingness to become open to the other in love.

The twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner commented that “God” is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand, that isn’t God). All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: “I am who am.

But the true emperor, Luke insists, is not the one who feeds himself but who is willing to offer his life as food for the other. At the climax of his life, this child, come of age, would say to his friends, "This is my body, which will be given for you' do this in memory of me" (Lk 22:19).

Joseph Ratzinger commented that the opening line of the Nicene Creed, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God), is a subversive statement because it automatically rules out any rival claimant to ultimate concern. To say that one accepts only the God of Israel and Jesus Christ is to say that one rejects as ultimate any human being, any culture, any political party, any artistic form, or any set of ideas.

Nostalgia, it’s nothing but pain,” Robert said. “It’s memory poisoned by the anguish of loss.

no one in the biblical tradition ever is granted an experience of God without being subsequently sent. Scriptural religion is a religion of mission.

When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

When at the consecration the priest moves into the mode of first-person quotation, he is not speaking in his own person but in the person of Jesus—and that’s why those words change the elements.

Jesus turned upside down many of the social conventions of his time and place precisely because he was so concerned to place the instantiation of the Kingdom of God first in the minds of his followers.

Adam, we hear, walked in easy fellowship with God in the cool of the evening and spoke to him as to a friend. This ordering of Adam to God meant that our first parent was effortlessly caught up in adoration. The term "adoration" comes from the Latin ado ratio, which in turn is derived from "ad ora" (to the mouth). To adore, therefore, is to be mouth to mouth with God, properly aligned to the divine source, breathing in God's life. When one is in the stance of adoration, the whole of one's life - mind, will, emotions, imagination, sexuality - becomes ordered and harmonized, much as the elements of a rose window arrange themselves musically around a central point.

If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way,” he says. “It’s the Cross, participation in the Cross. It’s conforming to Christ, it’s Christ appearing vividly in our midst.

Thoughtful Christians must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth. — BISHOP BARRON

When our lives revolve around Christ we find order and harmony. And by implication, whenever something other than Christ—money, power, pleasure, honor—fills the center, the soul falls into disharmony. The well-ordered soul begins to wobble and go off-kilter.

Therefore in this more biblical way of looking at things joy (beatitude) is the consequence and not the enemy of law. What Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, is that new law that would discipline our desires, our minds, and our bodies so as to make real happiness possible.

The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited religious site in the Christian world, surpassing Lourdes, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and St. Peter’s itself. People still go there by the millions every year in order to commune with La Virgen Morena, many journeying to her over many miles on their knees.

The English word sin is derived from the German term Sünde, which carries the connotation of sundering or dividing.

It is fascinating to note how often in the history of Christianity the teaching concerning Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist

If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn 4:20).

One of Barron’s maxims is “The sure sign that God is alive in you is joy.

Thomas Aquinas was asked, “What must I do to be a saint?” and he said, “Will it.” Be a saint, and you’ll unleash the power of grace and holiness.

No country, leader, political party, culture, civilization, moral ideal, or rival god can compete with the one God.

one’s deepest sense of freedom is coincident with an embrace of the God who is the ground of one’s being.

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,” Ratzinger said, “namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.

if we really want to change the current course of our culture and challenge its guiding ideas, then we need to start with the author of that culture. That means examining man himself.

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.

No one saint could ever exhaustively express the infinite holiness of God; and therefore, God makes saints the way he makes plants and animals and stars: exuberantly, effervescently, and with a preference for wild diversity.

Holy people are those who realize that they participate in something and Someone infinitely greater than themselves, that they are but fragments of Reality,” he says. “Far from crushing them, this awareness makes them great, capacious, whole.

This Church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people.” What the Pope is signaling here is that the Church, as his predecessor Paul VI put it, doesn’t have a mission; it is a mission, for its purpose is to cause the merciful face of Jesus to gaze upon everyone in the world. It is not an exclusive club where only the morally perfect are welcome, but, rather, a home for sinners, which means a home for everybody. And

The successful evangelist does not stand aloof from the experience of sinners, passing easy judgment on them, praying for them from a distance; on the contrary, she loves them so much that she joins them and deigns to walk in their shoes and feel the texture of their experience.

Balthasar says anything beautiful first arrests you—you’re stopped in your tracks by it. Then, Balthasar says, the beautiful elects you. You’ve been chosen. Not everyone who hears Dylan becomes a fan, but I got elected. Finally, he says, the beautiful always sends you. You’re sent on a mission.

Only when you’ve had that experience of falling in love with something, Barron believes, will learning the rules that support it make sense. Otherwise, “rule-talk” is always going to seem like someone trying to control another, like an exercise in power rather than liberation to play the game well.

The Emperor Napoleon is said to have confronted Cardinal Consalvi, the secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, saying that he, Napoleon, would destroy the Church—to which the Cardinal deftly responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?

love the life of the mind, and I’ve spent my whole life studying and reading. Yet because of where we are now, the ‘true’ and the ‘good’ are offensive in a culture that is so radically subjective and relativist, and the minute you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got the truth for you,’ every defense goes up, and even more if you say, ‘I’ve got what’s good for you.

But above all, fight by your very holiness of life; fight by becoming the saint that God wants you to be; fight by encouraging a decent young man to become a priest; fight by doing a Holy Hour every day for the sanctification of the Church; fight by coming to Mass regularly; fight by evangelizing; fight by doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

The liturgical person discovers who he is in the context of a community that listens to and explains the Bible and acts in accord with it. In this, he stands opposed to those whose identity is shaped by the heroes, ideals, and norms of the environing secular culture and to those whose sense of self is formed by the texts and practices of other religions.

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.” There is “an ethic, even a ‘spirituality’ of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people,” because “every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.

We should think of others not as objects to be used, or annoying people in the way of realizing our projects, but rather as those whom we are called to serve. Instead of saying, “Why is this annoying person in my way?” we should ask, “What opportunity for evangelization has presented itself?” Has God put this person in your life precisely for this purpose? Reflect: How are evangelization and love connected?

The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue… To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church.

The Christified person knows that his life is not finally about him but about God; the Eucharistized person understands that her treasure is to be found above and not below. Wealth, pleasure, power, honor, success, titles, degrees, even friendships and family connections are all relativized as the high adventure of life with God opens up. The eternalized person can say with Paul, "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me," and "We have here no lasting city.

In the end, we are not Catholics because our leaders are flawless, but because we find the claims of Catholicism both compelling and beautiful. We are Catholics because the Church speaks of the Trinitarian God whose very nature is love; of Jesus the Lord, crucified and risen from the dead; of the Holy Spirit, who inspires the followers of Christ up and down the ages; of the sacraments, which convey the Christ-life to us; and of the saints, who are our friends in the spiritual order. This is the treasure; this is why we stay.

Bygones" The weatherman says heavy rain, instead it dribbles like an old man unable to urinate. In the small orbit of the car, daylight clings to my collar, simmers in sweat, but I shall drive despite this meridian fry. I travel in the tremble of tin and tires. Up ahead, Barron Lake, your lost butterfly locket, Woodport, the warm rocks before the dive. The sun legs gently over the turbine hills, and always with a little luck I find your house, where torn cotton knits dry on an iron gate, and a vintage bicycle sinks in the garden. Over rum we discuss the length of our severance, agree to let bygones vanish amid the fray. Then kisses wheedle the lower back down till daybreak quiet as cat paws... treads the bedroom floor.

One way I try to do it is to observe that in any other area of life that people take seriously, they naturally assume there’s legitimacy to objective values. Take a golf swing. Nobody would seriously say, “Just go swing it any way you want to, because who am I to tell you what to do?” Well, how would that work out? Horrifically. We know that in something like golf, you start to internalize objective ideals, and in that process, you become freer and freer. You become a freer player of golf, and you can actually do what you want to do. That’s true of anything—language, music, politics, anything. You begin to internalize objective values in such a way that they now become the ground for your freedom, and not the enemy of your freedom. The binary option we have to get past is “my freedom versus your oppression.” What we need to say is, No, no, the objectivity of the moral good enables your freedom, opens freedom up. Once you get that, you see the Church is not the enemy of your flourishing, but the condition for it.

Notice how wickedly and cunningly the serpent tempted Eve: “God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The basic sin, the original sin, is precisely this self-deification, this apotheosizing of the will. Lest you think all of this is just abstract theological musing, remember the 1992 Supreme Court decision in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Kennedy opined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Frankly, I can’t imagine a more perfect description of what it means to grasp at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If Justice Kennedy is right, individual freedom completely trumps objective value and becomes the indisputable criterion of right and wrong. And if the book of Genesis is right, such a move is the elemental dysfunction, the primordial mistake, the original calamity. Of

The simple fact of the matter is that on account of the mysterious curvature of the will that we call original sin, we deviate from the very actions and attitudes that will make us happy. In

noncompetitively

Catholicism consistently celebrates the coming together of contraries, not in the manner of a bland compromise, but rather in such a way that the full energy of the opposing elements remains in place.

Meek—free from the addiction to ordinary power—you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world.

People in oppressive political situations are so afraid to give voice to their convictions that they lose confidence in the very category of truth and in the power of speech to bring clarity and liberation.

theodicy

In Christian tradition, beauty, goodness, and truth are known as “transcendentals,” linked to the three core human abilities to feel, to wish, and to think. Jesus refers to them in the Great Commandment when he talks about the mind, the soul, and the heart, and inducements to take the wrong path with each of the transcendentals formed the core of his temptation scene in the Gospels. While Barron is convinced that Catholic Christianity represents the fullness of all three, he’s equally convinced that the right way to open up the Catholic world to someone is with its beauty.

I believe baseball and the Church are deeply kindred spirits—both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates, both have communions of saints, both reward patience, and in both, casual fans can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.

who can stand toe-to-toe with the best and brightest of the secular world, either in person or online, and swell Catholic hearts everywhere by making the faith appear not only plausible but more convincing, more humane, and ultimately more loving than its cultured despisers are. Here’s one clear sign of his success: In the English language, after Pope Francis, Barron is the most-followed Catholic figure on social media.

On any list of slam-dunk Christian classics, A Man for All Seasons would have something close to top billing. It’s the story of St. Thomas More, the great English lawyer and politician who refused to sacrifice his conscience in order to approve the divorce and remarriage of the king he served, Henry VIII. Barron has credited More’s life, and the 1966 film that captured it, with getting across three basic insights: We’re all responsible for upholding the rights of others; accepting one’s duties often leads to discomfort; and despite the second point, you don’t have to be gloomy about it.

Barron is convinced that the moral teachings of Catholicism are true, and that people who strive to practice them will live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. At the same time, he knows that in a postmodern, secular world, “rule-talk” often comes off as an attempt to limit people’s freedom, not to free them to become the persons God intends them to be. Therefore, the right way to deploy “the good” as a missionary tool is to start by showing people what a genuinely Christian life at its best looks like—and then, gradually, to lead people to appreciate the principles and norms which make that kind of heroic life possible.

result, he’s firmly persuaded that the Catholic Church must always speak its truths to the surrounding culture, without adjusting those teachings to make them more palatable.

The Church calls people to be not spiritual mediocrities, but great saints, and this is why its moral ideals are so stringent. Yet the Church also mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality.

The successful evangelist uses the Scriptures in order to disclose the divine patterns and, ultimately, the Pattern who is made flesh in Jesus.

Successful evangelists are persons of the Eucharist. They are immersed in the rhythms of the Mass; they practice Eucharistic adoration; they draw the evangelized to a participation in the Body and Blood of Jesus.

So prospective evangelists, do what Jesus did. Walk with sinners, open the Book, break the Bread.

God is a great gathering force, for by his very nature he is love; but the devil’s work is to sunder, to set one against the other.

Whenever communities, families, nations, churches are divided, we sniff out the diabolic.

It’s easy enough to notice how often dysfunctional families and societies finally collapse into an orgy of mutual blaming. That’s satanic work.

Jesus has entrusted to his Church the means to apply this victory—the weapons, if you will, to win the spiritual war. These are the sacraments (especially the Eucharist and confession), the Bible, personal prayer, the rosary, etc. One of the tragedies of our time is that so many Catholics have dropped those weapons

And when a politician abuses his office and uses his power for his own aggrandizement, Biblical people should rise up and protest with all of the insistence, courage, and eloquence of Nathan in the court of David.

mimetic

anodyne

Hitler was one of the shrewdest manipulators of the scapegoating mechanism. He brought the deeply divided German nation of the 1930s together precisely by assigning the Jews as a scapegoat for the country’s economic, political, and cultural woes.

ersatz

desacralizing

valorized.

scapegoaters, but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim.

But in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, this stunning truth is revealed: God is not on the side of the

The central tragedy of the sexual abuse scandal is that those who were ordained to act in the very person of Christ became, in the most dramatic way, obstacles to Christ.

Summa theologiae

An aggressive reason that seeks always to grasp on its own terms will never come to know deeper dimensions of reality, including and especially the personal. Such depths can be plumbed only through something like a faith that accepts and receives.

God is not one more intelligible object among many, not a supreme existing thing among other existing things, not simply the highest value alongside other ethical goods. Rather, God is that which is intelligible in itself, that which exists through the power of its own essence, that which is good by its very nature.

The Soul’s Upward Yearning by Fr. Robert Spitzer, the intergalactically smart Jesuit who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science,

Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless. This is because such things are not simply means to a further end but are done entirely for their own sake. Thus watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is more valuable than making money. The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while getting a haircut and making money are in service of something beyond themselves. This is also why the most important parts of the newspaper are the sports section and the comics, and not, as we would customarily think, the business and political reports. In this sense, the most useless activity of all is the celebration of the Liturgy, which is another way of saying that it is the most important thing we could possibly do. There is no higher good than to rest in God, to honor him for his kindness, to savor his sweetness—in a word, to praise him. As we have seen in chapter three, every good comes from God, reflects God, and leads back to God, and, therefore, all value is summed up in the celebration of the Liturgy, the supreme act by which we commune with God. This is why the great liturgical theologian Romano Guardini said that the liturgy is a consummate form of play. We play football and we play musical instruments because it is simply delightful to do so, and we play in the presence of the Lord for the same reason. In chapter one I spoke of Adam in the garden as being the first priest, which is another way of saying that his life, prior to the fall, was entirely liturgical. At play in the field of the Lord, Adam, with every move and thought, effortlessly gave praise to God. As Dietrich von Hildebrand indicated, this play of liturgy is what rightly orders the personality, since we find interior order in the measure that we surrender everything in us to God. We might say that the Liturgy bookends the entire Scripture, for the priesthood of Adam stands at the beginning of the sacred text and the heavenly Liturgy of the book of Revelation stands at the end. In the closing book of the Bible, John the visionary gives us a glimpse into the heavenly court, and he sees priests, candles, incense, the reading of a sacred text, the gathering of thousands in prayer, prostrations and other gestures of praise, and the appearance of the Lamb of God. He sees,

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

The most oft-cited line of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Doctrine is situated in this context: “In a higher world it may be otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” So indeed, Pope John’s Newman-like image of the “flourishing garden of life” effectively holds off a stuffy traditionalism.

am persuaded that theology and spirituality are fundamentally one. The more we know about God, the more our lives change. In these articles and sermons, I try to show some practical implications of Christian doctrine. In section five, “The Way of Nonviolence,” I have brought together articles that center around the theme of

The Cartesian reliance on subjectivity as foundational can be seen in almost all of the great modern thinkers. Kant affects a Copernican revolution in epistemology and metaphysics, orienting reality to mind rather than mind to reality; and the starting point for his ethics is not behavior, virtue, or nature, but the categorical imperative discernible in the very structure of the will.4 Similarly, Hegel engages in a careful phenomenology of mind and, at the conclusion of his mammoth philosophical project, apotheosizes human consciousness. This modern turn to subjectivity is especially evident in many of the leading Christian theologians

In their bitter words and their even more bitter tears, I would sense both a deep love for the Church and a practically bottomless disillusionment with it.

seems so thoroughly thought through, so comprehensively intentional. Certainly,

clear implication is that the failure to accept, protect, and love a child—or, what is worse, the active harming of a child—would preclude real contact with Jesus.

And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.

the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest” (Luke 22:24). In the course of his public ministry, Jesus had, time and again, railed against grasping at power—“the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt.

To say that one accepts only the God of Israel and Jesus Christ is to say that one rejects as ultimate any human being, any culture, any political party, any artistic form, or any set of ideas.