TRANSCRIPT
Father Robert Barron
Rector, Mundelein Seminary, Chicago/Founder, Word on Fire Ministries/
Producer, “Catholicism” DVD series
Catholic Media Conference Opening Keynote Address
“Six Suggestions About What Would Make the New Evangelization More Effective”
June 19, 2013 Denver, Colo.
Transcribed by The Colorado Catholic Herald, Colorado Springs
Thank you very much. God bless you all for being here tonight.
I wanted to compliment Denver, because it really is true. This has become a hub of the New Evangelization and a lot of the really “happening” things in the Catholic Church are happening here. And I do trace a lot of it back, as everyone does, to (World Youth Day in Denver in) 1993 – that extraordinary moment that we hope soon-to-be-saintJohn Paul II summoned the American church to new heights. And so it started here, so appropriate in the Mile High City, this “duc in altum,” which can mean either “go to the depths” or “go to the heights.” Frassati saw it, didn’t he … “verso l’alto” in Italian… go to the heights. That’s wonderful that it was proclaimed here in the Mile High City, so thank you for that.
I want to talk about everyone’s favorite topic – the New Evangelization. The popes have been calling us to this. And they’re right; it’s what the Church needs. I’ve been on the front lines the last 10 years or so, doing apologetics and evangelization. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people. One thing I love about YouTube ministry is, boy, it takes you outside the walls of the church. It’s great that we talk to each other from time to time and encourage each other. But Internet ministry takes you way outside the walls of the church. And I’ve learned a lot about what’s blocking people, what’s working and what isn’t working.
The talk here is “Six Suggestions About What Would Make the New Evangelization More Effective.” And I’ll be right up front about this. I’m a professor of theology, and I’ve been teaching for many years. It’s content, content, content! Students will often ask me how to get involved in new media, or how to get involved in radio, Internet and TV. I say, first get immersed in the “old technology” of books. I want you reading, reading, reading. It’s content that matters.
We do need to learn the new media and how to use them. Thank God, at Word On Fire – and two of them are here tonight – there’s a wonderful group of kids that help me with all the technicalities. If you told me right now, “Father, go upload that video to YouTube,” I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’d turn to them, so thank God for them. But the point is, it’s content that finally matters.
So, there are six things I want to recommend. I promise I won’t go on too long about any of them.
Here’s the number one suggestion for the New Evangelization: Lead with beauty. You know the three transcendentals of goodness, truth and beauty. I’m going to argue with von Balthasar here that we should lead with the beautiful. I’ll give you one great example from the 20th century. The best Catholic novel of the 20th century, in my judgment, is Evelyn Waugh’s great “Brideshead Revisited.” And you know the narrator of that wonderful story, Charles Ryder, is like a lot of people today – sort of a cool agnostic. He comes into the Catholic world a bit like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, like he’s looking at this strange phenomenon of Catholicism. And he’s a self-proclaimed agnostic. But what draws him in first? Beauty. He comes to Brideshead, the great manor house, and that’s a symbol for Waugh of the church – Christ as the head of his bride, the church, etc. So the manor house symbolized the church. And the first thing that draws Charles Ryder in is the beauty of the place, which he finds utterly captivating. Then, in the course of the story, he’s drawn eventually into the moral demands of the house, symbolized by Lady Marchmain, his friend Sebastian’s mother. Now he balks and resists, as we all do, but eventually comes to appreciate that. And only at the end of the story does he accept the truth of Catholicism, where he sees it as, in his words, a “coherent philosophical system.”
Now, here’s what I find interesting. It’s exactly what Urs Von Balthasar recommended. Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which finally leads you to the true. See, here’s the problem – and you know this. In our post-modern culture, people balk like mad at truth and goodness. If you say, “Hey, you’re not thinking right about this, here’s the truth,” what do you hear in response? “Who are you tell me what’s true? That’s nice for you. I’ve got my truth, you’ve got your truth.” It’s the… you know how kids do this… the “whatever” [makes a W with fingers and then turns it sideways like an E]. It’s the whatever culture.
Or even worse, if you begin with the good and say, “The way you’re living right now, that’s not right.” All the hackles go up. Everyone today is a descendant of Frederick Nietszche. I think, even more than Marx, Nietzsche is the great influential philosopher of the 19th century. What was once the very high culture of Europe in the 19th century is now on the lips of every teenager in America – what I mean is just that -- “your truth, my truth . . . I invent myself . . . who are you to tell me what’s good.” In fact, if you do, that’s just a disguised power play. Any teenager today would use that language; it’s right out of the Nietzsche playbook. It has just come trickling down now over a long period of time.
I think it’s better to start with the beautiful, because the beautiful doesn’t raise the hackles in people in quite the same way. If you just say, “Look at that. I’m not telling you what to think, I’m not telling you how to behave, but look at that.” You go to Sainte Chapelle – that’s why we used it for the “Catholicism” series cover – just walk in and look at that. Walk into the Sistine Chapel – look, look. Walk into Mother Teresa’s motherhouse in Calcutta and watch the sisters. I’m not telling you what to think, just watch. Here’s the wager: once you are captivated by the winsomeness of the beautiful, you are then led to the good, namely, how can I participate in the life that made that beautiful thing possible? Then, once you’ve lived that life for a time, then you understand the truth of it from the inside.
Here’s an example I often use to explicate this. When I was about 7 years old, my father took me to Tiger Stadium in Detroit – I grew up just outside Detroit. It was my first pro baseball game. And I remember vividly to this day coming up out of the bowels of the stadium, and there’s the bright, green grass of Tiger stadium and the white uniforms of the players. I watched my first pro baseball game and I was utterly captivated by how beautiful it was, which led me immediately to say to my father, “I want to play. I want to get into that myself, I want to do that.” And then, once I played for a long time, I understood baseball from the inside –even the more arcane rules, like the infield fly rule, I appreciated that. I went from the beautiful to the good to the true.
I’d like to suggest for the new evangelization, we Catholics have the beautiful. We’re a beautiful religion. We’ve emphasized it from the beginning. We never threw it away, at our best. Start with it, lead with it, and then bring people to the beautiful and the true.
OK, second suggestion for the New Evangelization, and this one, everybody, is a cri de couer: Don’t dumb down the message! Look, Vatican II was made possible by the intellectual cream of the church of the mid-20th century – the von Balthasars, the De Lubacs, the Daniélous, Rahners, Ratizingers and Wojtylas. The Vatican documents themselves are at a very high level of intellectual expression. More to it, read Ross Douthat’s book “Bad Religion.” He comments that, in the mid-20th century in the English-speaking world, both Protestant and Catholic, there was a flourishing of intellectual life. Think of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and J.R.R. Tolkien. Think of the Niebuhr brothers, Paul Tillich, Fulton Sheen, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day – you could go on and on. T.S. Eliot. Look at this extraordinary flourishing of intellectual life. That’s what produced Vatican II – it comes up out of that tradition.
And here’s why it’s a cri de couer.I came of age right after Vatican II. I went to first grade in 1965 – now look at everyone doing the math:I came of age in the late 60s and 70s. We didn’t get a smart, intellectually-rich Catholicism. We got dumbed-down Catholicism. It was the “banners and balloons” Catholicism of my youth. I know – they were good people trying to reach out to the culture, trying to be accessible, I get it. But I say to you, that was a pastoral disaster of the first order – dumbed-down Catholicism. My generation, the first one that got it, grew up. And when you grow up and life hits you in the face, and a culture that despises religion comes at you -- and I’ll talk to kids today as the new atheists come at them -- banners and balloons aren’t going to do it. A flattened-out, dumbed-down Catholicism is not going to carry the day. And that’s why a lot of people in my generation left the faith, or why a lot of people in my generation who stayed had very little to pass down to their kids, and all them are tongue-tied and are hand-wringing because they don’t know what to do.
Dumb-downed Catholicism was an intellectual mistake and it was a pastoral disaster. John Henry Newman said that one of the clearest signs that Christianity is developing properly is that it stubbornly thinks about the data of revelation. He’s dead right about that. The minute the church stops thinking, it starts decaying, it starts moving into corruption. That’s what happened, I think, in the years after the council. Look, too, at our great tradition. Everybody from Paul to Chrysostom to Jerome to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Newman himself, all these people have a very strong, passionate, emotional connection to God. Yes, indeed, the heart is very strong in all those people. But, by God, so is the head. My generation got this big bifurcation between heart and head. “Oh, I’m not a theologian, I’m not a heady intellectual, I’m a man of the heart.” Well, la-dee-dah, that’s never been a good idea in our tradition. Our great people have never driven a wedge between the head and the heart, but we inherited that.
You know what’s happened now: an entire successor generation, mine and another generation, make two generations, have come to expect a dumbed-down Catholicism. I find if I’m giving a homily and I use a three-syllable word, I’ll get people after Mass saying, “Oh Father, come on, you went a little high there. It went over our heads. The kids aren’t going to be able to keep up with it.” These are lawyers and doctors and investors. I’ll say to them, “You’re a doctor, you went to medical school, you read the New England Journal of Medicine. You’re a lawyer, you went to law school, you read case studies of great complexity. You’re a private equity investor. You’ve taken over entire businesses. What do you mean if I use three syllables… why do you expect religion to be presented to you in this flattened-out, dumbed-down way?”But somehow, we have come to expect that, and that has been a disaster.
During the “new atheist” thing when it was really hot several years ago and Christopher Hitchens was talking everywhere, I was on a Canadian radio program. This guy was interrogating me about Hitchens, and at the end he said, “Father, wouldn’t you admit that at least Christopher Hitchens got you Catholics thinking about these things for the first time?” I paused to let my annoyance sink in, and I said, “You know, I represent the oldest intellectual tradition in the West. Trust me when I tell you that we were thinking about these things a long time before Christopher Hitchens.”
Here’s another story that I just think it’s unanswerable. When my niece was going into her senior year in high school – a very high level Catholic high school in the Chicago area – it was the end of the summer and I was at my brother’s house and he said, “Go take a look at Nila’s books. She’s getting ready for her senior year in high school.” It was a big pile of books, and the top book was “Hamlet.” Not Reader’s Digest Hamlet or “Hamlet for Dummies,” but the whole text of Shakespeare. Under Hamletwas Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin. So the most complicated poem ever written in Latin was one of her books. Underneath that was her science book, a big, bristling Einsteinian thing with complex equations. Underneath that was a big paperback with a picture on the cover and big print and pictures inside -- her religion book. I said to my brother, “Does this bother you at all? She’s reading Hamlet for English class, she’s reading Virgil in Latin, and she’s reading a comic book for religion.”
And so I went out and bought her volume one of Aquinas’ “Summa contra Gentiles,” “Confessions” of Augustine, “The Mind’s Road to God” by Bonaventure, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy.” And I presented those to her a week later and said, “These are the Catholic version of those other books you’re reading.”
Here’s the thing: the Communists didn’t come in and make us do this, we did it to ourselves. We dumbed down our own religion; our own people present these books to our kids. Let’s change it. I think that’s key to the New Evangelization.
Read John Paul II – just to hear him again… talk about a man of wide culture. He’d reach out to the kids, absolutely, no one’s better. But here’s someone who is versed in Aquinas, Augustine, Kant and contemporary philosophy. That’s the model.
Number three: Preach with ardor. When John Paul II in Port au Prince (Haiti) in 1983, when he first used the term “New Evangelization,” he said it’s got to be new in ardor, new in expression and new in method. So now I’ll say a word about ardor.