"...and then in the Class of 1973 I caught this ridiculously awesome shot of my new favorite bishop."

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The above is from a blog post by Brandon Vogt, the content director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, reporting on a visit he made to Mundelein Seminary in 2012.

I'm just going to leave it here without comment.

**********

Okay, I lied. Or, rather, I can't resist attaching another picture from the same post.

Bishop Barron on Genesis

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Exquisite theological poetry.

I've been quite critical of Bishop Robert Barron - the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles - a number of times before. If you're in the mood for punishment, see here and here.

Okay, also see here, here and here.

For the record, relative to many members of the extended Francis Junta, I don't think Barron is evil.

Rather, he is simply an incredibly annoying blatheramus.

More to the point, for all his faux-intellectualism, many of his arguments and views, far from being particularly profound or deep are merely shallow and silly.

Below is a transcript (I believe the first actual transcript) of a well-known YouTube video of Barron discussing the Book of Genesis. You may have seen it or heard of it, or you may have seen other videos of Barron making the same points.

Now, most people when they read Genesis (this is still me writing, we'll get to Barron's transcript in a moment) view it as in part a collection of stories. We start with the creation of the world including the creation of the first man from the dust of the earth and the creation of the first woman from his side. Then there is the Fall and man's exile from the Garden. Adam and Eve bear children, but their oldest son Cain commits the first murder and thereby receives a "mark." Years later, man's wickedness prompts God to send a Flood to destroy all the earth's creatures save a few members of the same family and a selection of animals given refuge in an ark whose exact dimensions are given in cubits. Soon after its narrow escape from that, humanity tempts God again by attempting to build a tower to the sky. God responds by creating the first foreign languages and scattering the newly confused peoples across the face of the earth. Then we meet Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael. There is a Covenant. We hear of Mesopotamia, Canaan, Egypt and many other places and peoples. Next there is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah where these cities are destroyed and Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt. Abraham's son Isaac is almost sacrificed. At the end of the Book, we learn of Jacob, Joseph and the beginnings of the Jews' slavery in Egypt.

I've left a few things out. There are of course angels and other mysterious beings who come and go. Also people often seem to live an extremely long time. We learn this in part through three genealogies that track individuals and nations over many generations going back to Adam.

It's natural for readers to interpret Genesis as making certain claims about things that happened thousands of years ago. To that extent, much of Genesis is history, or at least purports to be. Or at least appears to purport to be.

It's also of course natural for cynical moderns (I'm one of them) to ask whether any of this history, including people coming from ribs, and floods and arks, and angels and giants, and God nuking entire habitations of unwelcoming rapists is true.

But Barron rejects that. According to Barron, not only does Genesis not relate actual history, it doesn't even intend to. Instead it's sort of an extended allegorical poem.

Here is the actual video:

And here is the transcript:        

You know, I'm continually amazed how often in my work of evangelization the problem of Genesis comes up. What I mean is people that are just balking over what seems to be the bad science on display in the book of Genesis. They say, look how can you possibly make sense of this text that says God made the world in six days, all the species came into being, you know, roughly at the same time, that light existed before the sun and moon. I mean, come on, how do you square this very naive mythological cosmology with the subtle work of Newton and Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Genesis is just bad science. Who can take it seriously today? 

Well, here's a way to get at it. When looking at the Bible - and Vatican 2 is real clear on this - you've got to be sensitive to genre. What kind of text are we dealing with? See, people make mistakes about that all the time. It would be, it would be a mistake to look at Moby Dick and expect it to be a 19th century history, a mistake to look at T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and expect it to be a spy novel. You have to know what kind of text you're dealing with. 

So, what is Genesis? If I can borrow a page from father George Coyne, the great Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, he said, look, modern science commences in the late 16th, early 17th century with Galileo and Descartes and Pascal and company. The last biblical book is written around the Year 100 A.D. There's just no way that the Bible is modern science. Modern science didn't exist yet. So whatever is going on in the Bible, it's not what we mean by modern science. What Newton and Stephen Hawking and Einstein and company were doing is just simply not what the biblical authors are doing. Newton and company are following the ideas and principles of modern science, namely to observe, to form hypotheses, to test them with experimentation, draw conclusions, etc. Okay, so don't look at Genesis as bad science. That's like looking at The Wasteland as a bad spy novel. It's not a spy novel at all. Genesis is not science at all. 

So what is it? I would call it theology, mysticism, spirituality. It's a theological reflection on the origin of all things. 

So, what are some of the insights we gain once we get this genre issue clear? Well, there are many, many. Genesis is so rich and so multivalent. I'll just pick out a couple. 

Here's the first one. God makes the whole world. Now translate this, philosophically, if you want, into the non-contingent ground of contingency gives rise to all things. Even here and now. So creation is happening now. Genesis is talking theologically about something that's happening even now. God is giving rise to the world. How? How - through a nonviolent act of speech. God says "let there be light," and there's light. God says "let the earth come forth," and it comes forth. In almost all the mythologies of the ancient world, all the ancient cosmologies, the world comes forth in a great act of violence. God or the gods battle with some opponent. They wrestle a rival into submission, and in that act order ensues. By the way, notice how that myth is very prevalent even to this day. We still tend to believe that order comes through violence, through the conquest of a rival. There's none of that, though, in Genesis. God brings forth the world not through violence, not through conquest, but through a sheerly generous nonviolent act of speech. Link it now, if you want, to the great ethical teachings of Jesus, about the love of enemies, about non-violence. What he's recommending is not just a more correct ethical path. He's recommending to fall into line with the deepest grain of the universe - that God makes the world through non-violent love. There's a first theological theme in Genesis. 

Here's a second one. People of that time, the time the Bible was written, worshiped all kinds of gods, right? Some worshiped the stars. Some worshiped the moon. Some worshipped the Sun. Some worshipped animals, right? All these different features of creation were worshipped as gods. Now, what does the author of Genesis say? God created the heavens and the earth. God created the stars. God created the planets and the moon and the sun. God created all the animals. You see what he's doing, is he is dethroning all these false claimants to divinity. He's saying none of these is in fact God. But they all come from God and they bear witness to God. But he's enunciating, if you want, a great anti-idolatry principle. Nothing in this world is God. The true God is the creator of all things. 

Relevant message today? You bet. I mean, we worship all kinds of things, you know, from pleasure, to money, to power etc. No, no. God makes all those things. They're all under the aegis of God, but they're not to be worshipped. It's a second theological point. 

Here's a third one, and again I could pick many, many, it's such a rich text. Adam - now don't read it literally, we're not talking about a literal figure, we're talking in theological poetry - Adam, the first human being, names all the animals. He catalogues them. Kata logon in the Greek means "according to the word." God has imbued all things with intelligibility. Adam, noticing the intelligibility, names them, gives them their proper title. Who is he? The Church Fathers, read him as the first scientist. He's the first philosopher. He's the human being in his proper role as the steward of creation, and the one who names and orders all things according to God's creative intention. This is the great humanism that's implicit in Genesis: eat of all the trees, right, we hear. The Church Fathers said that's the great permission of Genesis. Adam and Eve, who are kind of at play in the field of the Lord, that stands for science, for art for politics, for conversation, for friendship -  all these forms of human flourishing under the lordship of God. Genesis is a great humanistic text. 

Now, those are three insights I could garner many many more. Read great commentators on Genesis. Read the great spiritual and theological interpreters of it. Get over the problem of Genesis as bad science. It's not bad science. It's not science at all. Rather, it is exquisite theology.

For the record, relative to the long sweep of interpretive history, this is a very modern view. While a small minority of Fathers and Doctors of the Church made or entertained claims that a few portions of Genesis were merely figurative, no Catholic theologians until quite recently would have endorsed the thesis that the whole thing was merely figurative.

Though Barron doesn't acknowledge it, if this view of Biblical interpretation is correct, Catholics and Christians got the first part of the Bible wrong for close to 2,000 years.

What is Barron's argument for the view? On the surface, frankly, it's inane. He begins with the straw man that some have viewed Genesis as some sort of science textbook. Then "modern science" is tautologically defined as beginning 450 or so years ago. Thus, since Genesis was written 2,000 years ago (it was traditionally dated to more than 3,000 years ago), its genre is not history or quasi-history but "theology, mysticism, spirituality."

Thucydides came before Newton. Thus, the History of the Peloponnesian War is mysticism.

Wait, what?

As far as I can tell, Barron never explicitly denies that Genesis is history, Rather, he denies that it's science or "modern science." But what he really means is that it's not history. This kind of dishonest bait and switch is par for the course for the new evangelist. 

But let's move on. Barron wants to take our history away. But what does he wish to replace it with? Genesis isn't (according to Barron) telling us about actual events. What is it telling us?

1) Non-violence is (in some sense) the way of the universe.

Given the actual text, this claim is more than silly. It's insane. Non-violence? Genesis states that the first naturally born human being was a murderer. After that, killing - by human beings and God - seems to appear on almost every page. Indeed, the violence reaches such a point that God decides to kill everyone (by drowning) except for eight lucky people. He also kills almost all the animals.

Did all this actually happen? Perhaps not. An alternative account (presumably endorsed by Barron) is that for more than a billion years, the engine of God's creation was the "survival of the fittest," with trillions of creatures killing other creatures in a violent and deadly struggle for resources. And to emphasize, they didn't just do this on their own. Rather, God set the whole bloody mechanism up as his preferred method of creation. Xenocidal meteor strikes also occur with regularity.

Do not misunderstand my point. I'm not claiming here that God endorses violence per se in Genesis or anywhere else. He'd have a bit more to say about that in Exodus of course. But using Genesis to, as it were, find Gandhi in "every grain of the universe" is an insult to hidden meanings.

If you've read some of his other writings, you would know that Barron very much likes (and wants you very much to know that he very much likes) Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But still.    

Finally, and not to rub it in, it's just not true to assert that all alternative religious creation stories feature violence as an essential component. I know a bit about this. It just isn't and they don't. Indeed, that's an insult to other religions that Barron, an arch-ecumenist, should be ashamed of. Actually, many creation stories, including one that was quite popular in the ancient middle-east, use sex. (I wonder why, the cynic might rhetorically ask.) The Chinese even have a rooster.

Exquisite. Theological. Poetry.

2) The moon is not God. Etc.

32,000 words to say that? Exquisite.

3) Adam was the first scientist.

Since, according to Barron, modern science didn't start until the Enlightenment, Adam was presumably a pre-modern scientist, which I guess means he didn't do repeatable experiments and probably put too much emphasis on Thomistic analogies.

But to be serious, since Barron does not think of Adam as a literal or historical figure, what Barron is really saying is that man or mankind was made to do science. Too bad it took him thousands of years to get past the allegory. 

Man was also apparently meant for politics, which if you think about it is pretty sick. And if Barron is implying that politics is also embedded in the deepest grain of the universe, I'm now going to get a bit violent...

4) Many, many others...

It's funny, though. In all the interviews and talks I've seen, he only mentions the above three. It's almost as if he has the lecture notes from some liberal 1980's seminary class up his sleeve. 

Enough.

This is the "new evangelization."

It's also religion for idiots.

If you're wondering why atheism or quasi-atheism seems to be currently in the ascendence, you need to look no further than Barron and his like.

Or for that matter, if allegory is all there is, why not just go Pagan? At least it would be more fun.

Or to put it another way, if allegory is all there is, why not just pick the allegory (from the sacred texts of any religion) that one likes best? If Genesis merely expresses theological truth, how do we know it is the truth?

Perhaps because it was Jesus' favorite, though, according to the text, Jesus did not believe Genesis to be mere allegory.

Of course, as we'll see next, Barron appears to believe that much of the Gospels are mere allegory as well...

Bishop Barron's Pelvic Issues

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Don't blame me, man. I wasn't the first one to put "Pelvic Issues" into a title.

Bishop Robert Barron did it.

See yesterday's Word on Fire Post: DAVE RUBIN, THE PELVIC ISSUES, AND LARRY DAVID.

At least I didn't capitalize the whole thing.

A few days ago Barron came under fire for being decidedly meek about the issue of gay marriage in an interview with openly gay comedian/journalist, Dave Rubin.

The bishop then doubled down with a blogpost and a "clarification" on his Facebook page.

Earlier, I had a bit of fun with that by imagining Barron as a Nazi era priest trying to cozy up to the German authorities.

At Mahound's Paradise, we are nothing if not charitable.

To take a page from Barron, I want to clarify that I wasn't equating Rubin with the authorities. As at least one Catholic blogger remarked, the sympathetic Rubin came off much better than Barron. He almost seemed taken aback that Barron didn't have the courage to defend a controversial Catholic teaching when given every chance.

One senses that the anti-PC Rubin is attracted to or at least curious about the Catholic faith. But who does he get to sell it to him? Bishop PC himself.

Word Slightly Warm.

But I want to make a few serious comments on the claim Barron made to conclude his post:

[T]here is a lot more to Christianity than the “pelvic issues.”

Every Catholic would of course agree. There is a lot more to Catholic teaching (or Barron's preferred "Christianity") than any issue or set of issues.

But I would counter - and here I'm going to try to use less crass terminology than the famous bishop - that issues involving human sexuality are fundamentally important to Catholic doctrine and yes, even evangelization.

That doesn't of course mean obsessing about them or shoving them in people's faces all the time. But one honestly gets the impression that Barron believes that that's what the "old Church" has been doing for the last 2,000 years, at least until the auxiliary bishop from Los Angeles came along. And that's where Barron the puffball is guilty of a kind of slander.

I attend a traditional Catholic church. I have absolutely no doubt that every priest and brother at the church would have been much more forthright in answering the "gay marriage" question than Barron was. At the same time, in the literally hundreds of homilies that I have heard, I don't think the issue has come up more than a few times.

Indeed, the situation is almost the opposite of what Barron wants to imply. One homily that stands out most in my mind is hearing one of the most orthodox and stern priests that I know lecturing the congregation on not being or acting "holier than thou" when others behave immodestly or immorally. The difference between that and the "who am I to judge?" relativism of FrancisChurch is subtle yet important.

But as Father Bart himself might say, I digress.

Reducing issues of sexuality to a sort of footnote to Church teachings is completely counter to the history and philosophy of the Christian message. It's also counter to basic theological logic. God gave us the ability to do one thing or at least participate in doing one thing that only He could previously do - create more people in His image. All questions of human sexuality revolve around that fundamental point. Reducing that to a mere "pelvic issue" is another sort of slander.

It has been claimed that the Church's teachings on sexuality are "beautiful." If you have a hard time wrapping your head around that, you have my sympathy. But let me propose that the claim begins with the insight above. The flip side, of course, is that abusing or corrupting that beauty may have consequences. Virtually every Church Father, saint, priest or philosopher up until the mid-twentieth century believed sexual sin to be among the most potentially damning of the sins. If Barron disagrees (and I think he does), that puts him squarely in opposition to almost all of the people he talks about in his $189.95 10-DVD Catholicism set. Perhaps he thinks he's smarter.

Or perhaps he thinks he's a better evangelist. Tell me again how many net new Catholics they had in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles last year?

No, immigration doesn't count.

I should suggest that the reason the Church's teachings on sexuality seem to be so often on the agenda is because they are among the things most obviously out of sync with the rest of the culture. This was similarly the case with the early Christians, whose views and practices on sexual morality were quite different from those of the Romans and other pagans.

These days you won't find many non-Christians disagreeing with, say, the value of the Golden Rule. I suppose Barron believes that this is why evangelists should emphasize that teaching (among others) as opposed to appearing to "police" what people do in their bedrooms. But as many have noted, the more you water down the message to what other people agree with anyway, the less reason you're giving anyone to think about switching sides. What difference does it make?

Sure, we also have the Resurrection (of Our Lord and also of ourselves). That surely is Good News if anything is. But when do you tell someone that some of whether or not they will be with Christ in Heaven may depend a bit on what they do or don't do in their (or someone else's) bedroom? Do you wait till after they become Catholic? Maybe you should spring it on them the night before confirmation, or tuck it into the fine print of that document we all sign.

Too late. You signed it. Now you're definitely damned if you disagree. At least, before, you could plead ignorance.

Unless of course it never comes to that. Perhaps you'll become a Catholic and no one will ever really insist on these things to you. I wonder whether Barron might not be in favor of continuing to kick the issue down the road, as it were, perhaps indefinitely, way past your confirmation - since "there's a lot more to Christianity." Why let a mere pelvic issue get in the way? Ever?

I can easily imagine someone else we all know saying that very thing. But it wouldn't be charitable to mention his name.

A Dream: Bishop Barron's Interview with Joseph Goebbels

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Robert Barron was elevated to Auxiliary Bishop of Köln by Adolph Hitler in 1941

For a bit of context, see here and here: The "clarification" was made yesterday on his Facebook page.

A few days ago, Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of Köln, gave an interview with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. It was subsequently printed in the newspaper, Das Reich.

In the interview, Barron said that while he disagreed with current government legislation regarding the Jews and other "enemies of the state," he "wouldn’t want to get on a crusader’s tank and try to reverse it."

This caused a bit of controversy among some Germans, especially those waiting out the war out in concentration camps. In response, Bishop Barron issued a clarification.

Statement by Bishop Robert Barron:

Friends, after reading a few comments, I know there's been some confusion about one of my answers during my recent interview with Das Reich. Of course, during any long, unscripted interview there will be things you wish you could have said more clearly, and perhaps this was one of them.

So to clarify: I don't support the government's decision to forcibly remove Jews and other undesirables to ghettos and internment camps, nor do I support the "harsh measures" against Jews and others that, at least according to rumor, are now being carried out by the SS on the Eastern Front. My heart and mind are united on that, and there's no confusion. I clearly stated my disagreement even as a government minister sat directly before me.

What I question is the prudence and wisdom of pursuing the issue any further. I believe that, given the present climate, opposition is best expressed through personal witness and education.

Again, please don’t misunderstand me: God asks us to protect and speak out in defense of the vulnerable. As Christ said, "all men are brothers." But I fear that for so many people in Germany today, religion is reduced to mere opposition to the war effort, and this is massively unfortunate.

My aim in that interview was to show the German people that there is a lot more to Christianity than its stance on "the Jewish question.”

Bishop Barron Talks Nonsense About Hell

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It doesn't look empty to me

This is a follow-up to Friday's more general post on Bishop Robert Barron's apologetics. Here I want to specifically evaluate one aspect of Barron's views on Hell.

Before beginning, I want to head off one possible misunderstanding. In the following, I talk about the chances or "odds" that an individual person or a group of people may be saved. In doing so, I don't mean to imply that those chances may ever be known in any particular case, nor even that they are chances in the conventional sense - that eternal salvation is metaphysically equivalent to, say, a coin flip. What I do want to do, among other things, is to point out the logical consequences of language. You can't claim both X and Not X. If A implies B and B implies C, then you can't claim both A and Not C. And so on.

Or to anticipate, if you claim there's a "realistic hope" of X happening, that means something. For example, among other things, it doesn't mean "there's virtually no chance" of X happening or "there's only a minuscule possibility" of X happening, etc.

In a number of well-known videos and articles (see here, here, here and here), Catholic apologist Bishop Barron argues that while

Catholic doctrine (claims) that Hell exists . . . the Church has never claimed to know if any human being is actually in Hell.

Barron, cites the views of Hans Urs von Balthasar:

Balthasar argued that . . . we may reasonably hope that all people will be saved . . . we may entertain the lively and realistic hope that all people will eventually be drawn into the divine love.

And then writes:

My own conviction is that Balthasar has this more or less right.

But Barron adamantly claims that the Balthasar/Barron view is not universalism - the view that everyone will be saved, or the view that we know in the case of each person that he will be saved. Instead:

When the Church says that Hell exists, it means that the definitive rejection of God’s love is a real possibility.

All of this is of course utter obscurantist nonsense.

Let's put Hell aside for a moment and ask a series of abstract questions having to do with odds.

When you flip a coin, is it realistic to hope that it might come up heads?

Yes.

When you flip a different coin, is it realistic to hope that it might come up heads?

Yes.

Is it realistic to hope that both coins will come up heads?

Probably. It depends what is meant by "realistic."

Okay, what about flipping 106 billion coins and getting heads on all of them?

The answer to the last question is No. At some point between 1 to 1 odds and 105,999,999,999 to 1 odds our hope becomes unrealistic.

The previous answers assume that there's a 50% chance on any flip of getting heads. But what if we're using a "trick" coin that, say gives a 99% chance of heads? In that case, we might have a realistic hope of getting all heads if we flipped 10, 20, 50, 100 or even 200 coins.

But we would still have no realistic hope for that 106 billion. The odds of getting 106 billion heads even with a coin that came up heads 99% of the time are over a billion to one.

Indeed, even if we define "realistic" conservatively as having, say, at least a 1% chance (which might be "realistic" but is still pretty small), then to have a realistic hope of getting heads on all 106 billion flips, the chance of getting heads for one coin would have to be on the order of 99.9999999%, give or take a few nines. That's not certainty, of course, but it's as close to certainty as virtually anything ever gets.

If I (being the ingenious and clever sinner that I am) use a magnet on a slot machine, giving me a 99.9999999% chance that I will come up a winner, in common-sense language, I would be perfectly within my rights to say that I know or I'm certain that I will win.

I would.

On one estimate, there have been approximately 106 billion human beings born on earth since 6,000 BC.

To say that we have a realistic hope that all of those were or will be saved, then (see above) there would have to be at least a 99.99999999% chance for each one of us, considered individually, to be saved.

It follows that there would be only a .00000001% chance (if that) for each one of us to go to Hell. To claim that that amounts to a "real possibility" is an abuse of common-sense language.

The main point is that the "realistic hope" of universal salvation contradicts the "real possibility" of individual damnation. You just can't assert both things at the same time. Or, rather, if you do, you're talking nonsense.

A subsidiary point is that Barron's "realistic hope" makes him for all extents and purposes a universalist. Or if he is not technically a universalist - for each person, there's a whopping .000000001% chance that he will not be saved - then he's a watered-down universalist. His giant frothing mug of universalism contains one atom of water.

Lastly, of course, those incredibly low "odds" for damnation are in complete contradiction to the words of Jesus, the opinions of the Church Fathers and the traditional formulations of the doctrine of hell by the Church.

I hope I'll be saved. I hope you'll be saved. I hope that that drunken, abusive guy who had a fatal heart-attack while in bed with his mistress will be saved. If I am a true Catholic and a magnanimous fellow, then I hope (or should hope) that Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot will be saved. Perhaps in some sense it is "realistic" to hope for Napoleon, etc. After all, God will forgive anyone if they sincerely repent.

But it isn't realistic to hope for all of them to be saved in sum. If Christianity is true, then they won't be. Not all of them.

Maybe Barron should have taken a statistics course.

Why does all of this matter? Well, obviously, logic matters and the truth matters, whatever one's purpose.

But beyond that, I think what we might call Barron's trickery is obvious. And I do mean trickery. It is incomprehensible to me that a man of at least middling intelligence, such as Barron, cannot see what he is doing. Obviously, Barron thinks scaring people with Hell is medieval or low-class or fundamentalist or whatever. Respected contemporary theologians or apologists just don't do it. And you know how much he wants to be respected.

Or to be more charitable, perhaps he thinks scaring people with Hell just won't work to convert them or get them to stay. (As I argued a few days ago, there's no evidence for that, whatsoever. Indeed, the opposite is much more likely.)

But he can't explicitly ditch Hell since it's such an obvious Church teaching. Hence, the bait and switch.

Traditional Catholicism is often criticized for putting inordinate importance on being Catholic. But of course, for the Church, being Catholic has always been a means to an end. The end (or at least one of the primary ends) is the salvation of one's soul. Or as the Church used to put it for the first 98% of its existence before people like Barron came along, the salvation of as many souls as possible.

The irony is that it's the anti-traditionalist Barron who really seems to have the fetish for being Catholic, without really telling us what it's for. By strongly implying that everyone will be saved, he's jettisoned the practical importance of saving people, and thus eliminated at a stroke what the Church historically affirmed as its most important mission.

And he calls himself an evangelist?        

*Post heading picture: The damned being cast in to Hell by Frans Francken II, Oil on oak – 1605-10

People Are Leaving the Church Because of YOU, Bishop Barron

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Warm oval vacuum

It is emblematic of the topsy-turvy world of contemporary Catholicism that Bishop Robert Barron is now considered one of the faith's top apologists.

I cannot imagine how any apologist could be less effective at evangelizing or converting anyone, or less effective at persuading potential apostates to reconsider leaving the faith. 

Here are some of the Bishop's most well-known snippets:

1. While there may be a hell, there's a good chance that it is empty. Whatever you do, you'll probably be saved anyway.
2. The Crusades were wrong.
3. Many of the most famous stories in the Bible are not literally true. But that doesn't mean they're false. The Bible should be evaluated in the same way that we evaluate the novel Moby Dick.
4. Some people put Catholicism down, but thats not completely fair. If you look at its history, it often comes close to emulating the ideals set out by Gandhi.
5. The best way for Christians to resist ISIS is through non-violent witness.

Any one of the above arguments or claims appears almost designed to keep you out of Church (or at least out of a Catholic Church) and back at your usual seat in the saloon.

But the problem with Barron goes deeper than that. I'm talking about his personality. Evangelization isn't just about what you say or even how you say it. It's also about you. I've known Christians (including at least one of the priests at my Church) who were so likable or compelling that they could stand on the sidewalk telling jokes or reading the telephone book or playing a fiddle, and by the end of the day, they'd have five new converts.

To me, Barron has anti-Charisma. He's so smarmy, so pretentious, so superciliously "don't you see, the Bible is true, but not true in the vulgar sense that you think," that if he were trying to convince me that A = A, I'd drop everything and become a socialist.

I know some might disagree. It is said that many  Catholics love Bishop Barron. On the other hand, few traditionalist Catholics seem to like him much.

And I admit that my dislike is almost visceral. As you might now be expecting, more of that dislike will come out below. Whether that says more about me or Bishop Barron is another question. You can be the judge of it.

In this post I want to look at one specific Barron piece - something he wrote just a few days ago for National Catholic Register, characteristically titled, Apologists, Catechists, Theologians: Wake Up!

Barron laments the fact that according to a recent study, for every one person who joins the Catholic Church, six will leave. This annoys him partly because he believes that the people leaving (or their teachers) are just not thinking.

After perusing the latest Pew Study on why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity, I confess that I just sighed in exasperation. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of those who responded to the survey, but the reasons they offer for abandoning Christianity are just so uncompelling. That is to say, any theologian, apologist, or evangelist worth his salt should be able easily to answer them. And this led me (hence the sigh) to the conclusion that "we have met the enemy and it is us."

What's notable about this passage is that Barron seems to be claiming that turning things around should be easy. Those who are leaving have merely bought into dumb arguments. And any Catholic "worth his salt" should be able to effortlessly knock down those dumb arguments. Hence the sigh.

Now, I think Barron is wrong about this, or, rather, it's an extremely misleading way of presenting the problem. But for the moment let's accept it - people are leaving the Church because they are stupid, or at least because they believe really stupid things - and then pause to ask the obvious question: why is this occurring?

It's telling that Barron never answers or even asks this, though he claims that the thing has been going on for fifty years. At some point in the mid-1960's, most Catholics simply stopped being intellectual. Darn.

But all is not lost. The way to combat this now is for the few surviving Catholic intellectuals (such as Barron) to exhort the slackers to (as Barron puts it) "pick up their game."

For the past fifty years or so, Christian thinkers have largely abandoned the art of apologetics and have failed (here I offer a j'accuse to many in the Catholic universities) to resource the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to hold off critics of the faith. I don't blame the avatars of secularism for actively attempting to debunk Christianity; that's their job, after all. But I do blame teachers, catechists, evangelists, and academics within the Christian churches for not doing enough to keep our young people engaged. These studies consistently demonstrate that unless we believers seriously pick up our game intellectually, we're going to keep losing our kids . . . 

This most recent survey indicates that intellectual objections figure prominently when these drifters are asked why they abandoned their faith. My cri de coeur is that teachers, catechists, theologians, apologists, and evangelists might wake up to this crisis and do something about it.

That's three uses of the word "intellectual" in less than two paragraphs. And to underline the method, he even brings in two phrases from a foreign language - j'accuse and cri de coeur.

I think they're French.

Bishop Barron wants to be an intellectual.

Bishop Barron is not an intellectual.

He's a muddle-headed suck-up who can almost always be counted on to take his claims from the current Zeitgeist and twist them (in an insult to the Zeitgeist) into propositions that wouldn't convince a twelve-year old.

Mind you, this is by no means to imply that there are no rational warrants for belief in God. Philosophers over the centuries, in fact, have articulated dozens of such demonstrations, which have, especially when considered together, enormous probative force. I have found, in my own evangelical work, that the argument from contingency gets quite a bit of traction with those who are wrestling with the issue of God's existence. What these arguments have lacked, sad to say, are convinced and articulate defenders within the academy and in the ranks of teachers, catechists, and apologists.

You see street preachers warning passerby that they will go to hell. Little did you know that in some hidden classroom, a media bishop was getting quite a bit of traction.  

It is not an exaggeration to say that Barron thinks Catholics are exiting the Church in droves because they haven't been exposed to the argument from contingency. To call that moronic is an insult to socialists.

Let's now look at the arguments that Barron claims people cite for leaving the faith - arguments that Barron thinks are "uncompelling" - as well as considering Barron's "answers" to them. Here are the arguments in Barron's words:

1. Modern science somehow undermines the claims of faith.
2. Religion just seems to be the opiate of the people.
3. Christians seem to behave so badly.

Now, as it happens, I actually think #1 is a very compelling argument. Indeed, it's probably the best argument the atheists have. Modern science does seem to undermine Christian faith. Among other things, modern science appears to contradict the claims of that centerpiece of our faith, the Bible. The Old Testament tells us that God created two human beings out of dust. One of their descendants built a huge boat and put a set of each kind of animal in it in order to save them from a world-wide flood. A few thousand years later, someone walked around the area we now call Israel performing miracles - including, among other things, raising people from the dead. In turn, He was raised from the dead and He and His mother later levitated into Heaven, etc.   

But modern science tells us that human beings evolved gradually from one-celled organisms over the course of over a billion years. At the time of the flood, there probably were 60,000 species of beetle (or whatever). It would be weird to think that those beetles scuttled into the ark on their own, and Noah would almost certainly not have had time to gather them up. If a body is truly dead, it cannot revivify itself. People's living bodies don't disappear forever into the sky. And so on.

Barron elsewhere has denied some of these "literal" Biblical claims, while reaffirming that the Bible contains deeper moral or theological truths. So, in the current piece his answer to the argument is that science and faith are completely separate entities:

(T)he sciences, ordered by their nature and method to an analysis of empirically verifiable objects and states of affairs within the universe, cannot even in principle address questions regarding God, who is not a being in the world, but rather the reason why the finite realm exists at all. There simply cannot be "scientific" evidence or argument that tells one way or the other in regard to God.

Let me make four points about the above.

First of all, this response is completely unconvincing to an atheist. Indeed, in my experience, atheists just laugh at it, as it has an almost desperate ad-hoc air about it.

Faith person: There's a gorilla in my living room. 

Atheist: No there isn't. Photographs, audio recording and chemical testing have conclusively shown that there is no gorilla in your living room. Plus he wouldn't have been able to fit through the door. 

Faith person (after thinking for a bit): He's not that kind of gorilla.

I know some of you have been exposed to that supposedly brilliant stratagem and may even think it's effective. It's not. Trust me. At most it's a postponement - a way for people who are so inclined to temporarily cling to something. In my experience, that something won't be the traditional Catholic faith, or it won't be so for long. And it's precisely one of the main responses that has been strongly put forward (contra Bishop Barron) by the Church for the last fifty years. We all know the results.  

Second, it has the effect of making the Catholic faith superfluous and unattractive. I don't know about you but I want to worship and interact with a being in the world not a reason. If all the wonderful stories in the Bible are simply fictions created for the purpose of, say, relating moral truths, it's not clear why I need anything more than those moral truths. And I do not think the argument from contingency is a sufficient replacement for Adam and Eve. Or the Moby Dick version of Adam and Eve. Or whatever.

I'm not as sophisticated as Bishop Barron.

Third, Jesus was a flesh and blood being in the world (or so the Church teaches). Indeed, that's the central Christian claim - 2,000 years ago, a time recent enough to be well-encompassed by the science of archeology, among other things, God walked on Earth as a man. I became a Christian and then a Catholic largely because I became convinced that what we might call the story of Jesus, including His resurrection, was true - not true in some goopy "spiritual" way, but true in, yes, an empirically verifiable sense, at least (contra Barron) in principle. And in turn, I can imagine evidence being discovered - they find Jesus' body along with documentary evidence indicating the whole thing was a hoax - that would, so to speak, un-convince me. I think Paul is with me on this:

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain.

The authors of the Gospels explicitly assert that they were eyewitnesses to incredible events - empirically observable things that actually happened in the world - and the reason they wish to relate these events is because they want to convince you that they really happened.

But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth—that you also may believe.

That was written by a religious fundamentalist named John.

The logical implication of Barron's view is that this design is pointless - "an analysis of empirically verifiable objects and states of affairs within the universe, cannot even in principle address questions regarding God." This is of course a rejection of the strategy of the very founders of evangelization - an odd way for a Christian apologist to proceed.

Lastly, Barron's claim that science and faith are completely separate entities was in fact condemned by the Church as a heresy. And this wasn't in, say, the fourth-century or the middle-ages or whatever, but only three or four generations ago in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (see paragraphs 6 - 16), authored by Pope Pius X. For all of Barron's harping on the "richness" of Catholic intellectual tradition, he seems oblivious to papal encyclicals, even those penned in the 20th century by saints. Obviously, the fact that Barron's view is heretical shouldn't mean anything to an atheist (although it should mean something to Barron). But a curious atheist just might ask this question: if the Church said X a hundred years ago, but now it says (you claim) Not X, on what grounds should it command my assent now?

Moving on the second argument - "Religion just seems to be the opiate of the people" - Barron responds that you could say the same thing about Atheism.

Marx's adage, of course, is an adaptation of Ludwig Feuerbach's observation that religion amounts to a projection of our idealized self-image. Sigmund Freud, in the early twentieth century, further adapted Feuerbach, arguing that religion is like a waking dream, a wish-fulfilling fantasy. This line of thinking has been massively adopted by the so-called "new atheists" of our time. I find it regularly on my internet forums. What all of this comes down to, ultimately, is a dismissive and patronizing psychologization of religious belief. But it is altogether vulnerable to a tu quoque (you do the same thing) counter-attack. I think it is eminently credible to say that atheism amounts to a wish-fulfilling fantasy . . .

That's fine as far as it goes, but it's sort of concedes a crucial point - that Catholicism acts like an opiate (whether it is or not). Ask a traditional Catholic mother of eight kids whether she thinks of her faith as an opiate. Or ask a nun or a priest or anyone who has made great sacrifices for their faith. To paraphrase the only baptized Catholic American president (who was speaking on a different issue), "we choose to become Catholics not because it is easy but because it is hard." But we do it of course because it is worth doing. That may not convince your atheist friend over the course of one beer, but it's much more compelling than "so's your Momma" (tu quoque).

By the way, Barron gets his intellectual history wrong. Marx wasn't "of course" adapting Feuerbach. Yeah, I've read a bit of Marx in between comic books. Barron is really not much of a scholar (though he wants you to think that he is). Not that that's here nor there but still.

To the last argument - "Christians seem to behave so badly" - Barron basically just says, "so what?"

God knows that the clergy sex abuse scandals of the last 25 years have lent considerable support to this argument, already bolstered by the usual suspects of the Inquisition, the Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, witch-hunts, etc., etc. We could, of course, enter into an examination of each of these cases, but for our purposes I am willing to concede the whole argument: yes indeed, over the centuries, lots and lots of Christians have behaved wickedly. But why, one wonders, should this tell against the integrity and rectitude of Christian belief? Many, many Americans have done horrific things, often in the name of America. One thinks of slave owners, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, the carpet bombers of Dresden and Tokyo, the perpetrators of the My-Lai Massacre, the guards at Abu-Graib Prison, etc. Do these outrages ipso facto prove that American ideals are less than praiseworthy, or that the American system as such is corrupt? The question answers itself. 

Relatedly, a number of young people said that they left the Christian churches because "religion is the greatest source of conflict in the world." . . . this view has seeped into the general consciousness, but it simply does not stand up to serious scrutiny. In their exhaustive survey of the wars of human history (The Encyclopedia of Wars), Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod demonstrate that less than 7% of wars could be credibly blamed on religion . . .

This is a popular sort of line (which is why Barron takes it) but it's not satisfactory. If Catholicism is true, one would expect it to make better people (in general or on average). Not perfect people, but better people. None of the Christian fathers or medieval theologians would have denied this. And one would also expect the great Catholic causes (or what were perceived to be great causes at the time by Catholics) to be meritorious.

On the subject of the Crusades, they were one of the central events of the Catholic experience for hundreds of years, approved and participated in by a long line of popes, saints and other prominent Catholics during the height of the Church's power. To condemn the Crusades - as Barron does elsewhere (and not merely for the sake of argument) - gives powerful ammunition to the anti-Catholic side. Even worse, it once again takes away one of the more powerful arguments for being a Catholic. For hundreds of years, we defended European civilization, at great sacrifice of blood, from a barbaric civilization worshipping a cruel and false god. What was your side doing, nailing narcissistic manifestos to doors and bitching in the salons?

Or so most Catholic apologists would have argued  . . . previous to about fifty years ago.

G.K. Chesterton, who Barron loves to quote, was an enthusiastic booster of the Crusades. Worse for Barron, he was in a sense an enthusiastic booster of religious wars. Or more accurately, Chesterton made the quite logical claim that if one's Catholic faith is the most important thing in the world (which of course it should be for any Catholic), then if anything is worth fighting for, shouldn't that be at the top of the list?

Christ and His Church are worth fighting for. Or rather, if you don't see me proclaiming that, how good an advertisement is that for my faith? If I said my wife wasn't worth fighting for, what would that say about my wife? And what would that say about me? 

Barron has recently come out as a seeming pacifist - a stance in clear opposition to historical Christian and Catholic teaching - arguing that "the non-violent stance" is the best response to ISIS aggression. For our purposes, that's another mark against his "apologetics." Most people will be repelled by this irrational sounding claim. As for the minority of Gandhi devotees who might sympathize, we might ask what reason they have to become Catholics as opposed to Hindus? After all, Hindus can still use the argument from contingency.

How does all this cash out, so to speak, on the ground? I wager that my Church - a non-SSPX traditionalist Church in downtown Chicago - is one of the only Catholic churches in the Chicago area where the majority of the parishioners believe both in the literal existence of Adam and Eve and the justice of the Crusades. Or in other words, we're one of the only churches where most of its members believe what the Church itself went out of its way to explicitly profess for the first 98% of its existence.  It's not a coincidence that my Church leads Chicago in promoting vocations, or that parish membership as well as non-parishioner attendance is thriving.

Traditional Catholic teachings are attractive, much more attractive than the post-Vatican II liberal-conservative synthesis popularized by Bishop Barron. You don't get Christians excited by claiming to be as good as Gandhi. You get them excited by claiming that the poorest soul at Catholic Mass has something infinitely greater than Gandhi ever had.   

Conversely, people are leaving the Church because of "apologists" like Barron. The people ask for bread and are given stones (though the Bishop would no doubt excitedly claim that Catholic stones are no worse than other stones). Barron shouldn't be giving lessons in apologetics; he should be taking them.

But I would be happy if he would just shut up.