April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
REV. ROBERT BARRON
A YouTube evangelist
Recently, my son had major surgery. The night before, I couldn't sleep, so I turned to YouTube to watch clips from some of my favorite TV shows.
I clicked on the HBO series "Rome" and, after watching a few scenes, saw a video titled, "Father Barron comments on Rome." I assumed this would be a priest's home movies of a trip.
To my surprise, it was a Catholic priest named Rev. Robert Barron talking about the characters on this TV series and what they can teach us about our faith.
I searched Father Barron's name on YouTube and found approximately 200 clips on everything from character Tony Soprano of the TV show "The Sopranos," to musician Bob Dylan, to commentator Bill Maher's attacks on religion. After watching for more than three hours, I knew I had to speak to this man.
Father Barron works out of Chicago and is the founder of "Word On Fire," a website that offers blogs, articles and videos. I called him to see how a priest ends up doing commentary on everything from St. Thomas Aquinas to Clint Eastwood.
Father Barron told me: "My boss in Chicago took me out of the seminary and said, 'I want you more active in evangelizing, much like Pope John Paul did.' I decided the best way to reach the largest number of people was through the media and this new thing called YouTube. I raised some money and decided to do these short opinion pieces on pop culture and connect with people of faith."
Today, there are more than 200 videos by Father Barron on the site; he's had 2.3 million downloads. I asked if he was trying to reach out to people of faith or recruit people who don't have God in their lives.
"Both, really," he said. "The second-largest religion in the world is lapsed or ex-Catholics and those who have turned away from church and God. I wanted to use pop culture references to reconnect them to their faith."
Watching many of the videos reminded me of being a child at St. Joseph's School in Troy, where a teacher would take a reference from my own life and show me the connection to God. Father Barron's videos are six minutes or less and draw a direct line between characters we know and what they can teach us spiritually.
Tony Soprano, he notes in one commentary, "has the three things we all crave: wealth, power, adoration. Yet look at how unfulfilled he is. He's deeply unhappy; his marriage is coming apart; his relationship with his children is strained. It's a perfect illustration of why we need God in our lives."
Father Barron likes to use the phrase "wired for God" in his videos. "St. Augustine said our hearts are restless and we have a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. This is our longing for God," he noted.
"I see it all the time in my pastoral work. People come to me and say they have achieved everything our culture said they should have [in order] to be happy, and they are not. That is the yearning for God. That's what's missing and we are wired that way."
Some of Father Barron's videos - especially those that challenge what he calls the "new atheist movement" - receive thousands of negative comments. He's fine with that.
"As Catholics, we have been too passive in defending our faith, and we need to engage these people with strong intellectual arguments," he explained.
Father Barron pointed to Bill Maher's 2008 movie "Religulous," which poked fun at people of faith and took some extreme stories from the Bible - Jonah in the belly of the whale, for example - and used them as "evidence" that all of the Bible is nonsense.
"The Bible isn't a single book, but a library of books; and, like any library, you have different sections," said Father Barron. "Some are factual; some are poetry and use storytelling to make a point or teach a lesson.
"As for Bill Maher and that movie, he just lined up straw men who didn't really know their faith and knocked them down. It was intellectually dishonest."
I asked about Catholics who have left the Church over the clergy sex abuse crisis. "It is the worst scandal in our history and the Church should be called to responsibility," the priest began. "Lay people have a right to demand answers and demand better.
"That said, to use this as a reason to turn away from church and God is an excuse. You are upset about how they handled something, so you'll toss away your salvation because of it?"
Father Barron also addressed how God can allow suffering and evil in the world: "God allows evil to bring about a greater good. God doesn't interrupt, but lets the world have its own integrity. John Polkinghorne, a noted physicist and priest, once pointed out [that] the very thing that allows for evolution allows for cancer to happen. You can't have one without the other - and you can't have it both ways."
Father Barron now speaks to millions. His criticism of PBS for banning religious programming on its public TV stations, for instance, just led them to air a mini-series called "Catholicism."
I sometimes think we are all ships lost at sea, and no matter how choppy the water or thick the fog, there is a light in the distance trying to guide us to the shore. For me, on a recent night when worry over my son cost me sleep, that light was Father Barron. Just watching his videos and talking to him on the phone has me thinking and praying more.
He's right: We are wired for God and, without our faith, there is nothing you'll find at the mall or ATM to fill the void that resides in all of us.
In the battle for our very souls, it's nice to have him working for the good guys.
(John Gray, who is Catholic, is a local newscaster and journalist. Father Barron's commentaries can be found on www.youtube.com or www.wordonfire.org. Learn more about the PBS series at www.catholicismseries.com.)[[In-content Ad]]
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