In this special episode, Bishop Robert Barron joins us to talk about his new book, Arguing Religion, and why he thinks Catholics should re-judaize Catholicism. He also talks about the differences between Catholic and Protestant theology, and explains why he doesn t believe in God. And he explains why God's existence is not contingent on the existence of causes, but rather, a contingent set of causes that are non-self-explanatory. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius, for sponsoring this special edition of The Sunday Special. Go check out their products and services right now! Get your quotes and apply in minutes, this instant! You can do the whole thing on your phone right now, and you can do it in minutes! Want more Sunday Specials? Check out our newsletter! Subscribe to our new weekly newsletter, The Catholic Reporter, where we cover all things Catholic, Protestant, and Millennial news and culture. Sign up for a free copy of our newest issue of the newsletter, Holy Grail: A Catholic s Guide to Christianity and the Catholic Faith. Subscribe today! Learn more about your ad choices, including which Catholic priest you can become a supporter of our new show, Holy Grail! and which Catholic church you should be a Catholic priest should be your first guest on the show! If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron! of the show and review our ad-free version of Holy Grail? Subscribe here! Thank you for listening to the show? Subscribe and subscribe to our newest episode of The Catholic Answers, Subscribe to Catholic Answers Radio, a podcast produced by the Catholic Answers! Subscribe to this podcast! Subscribe on iTunes! Enjoy this episode of Catholic Answers Only, a Catholic Lens, a publication dedicated to the Catholic Reporter? Subscribe to the podcast by Catholic Answers Media, Inc., a Catholic Answers and Catholic Answers? Subscribe on Podchaser, a magazine dedicated to The Catholic News, a new edition of the Catholic Review, by a Catholic Review? and much more! Get the latest Catholic Answers to all the Catholic News and information about religion and culture and culture, from the Catholic Criticism, from all the good stuff going on the world, including the Catholic Republic, your choice of Catholics everywhere else, from every Catholic Review and more. , from the world s best vids, including a Catholic News Agency, including The Catholic Review. Catholic News Service,
00:00:12.000Christ is the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
00:00:14.000Here we are on the Sunday special with Bishop Robert Barron, author of Arguing Religion We're going to get to all things Catholic Church related, religion related, life, afterlife, God, death.
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00:01:40.000I have to say that I've gotten an enormous number of requests for you to come on the show, particularly in the aftermath of an interview we did a couple of weeks ago with Pastor John MacArthur, and I'll have some questions about differences between Catholic and Protestant theology in just a minute.
00:01:53.000Let's start off with a personal question.
00:01:55.000How did you decide to enter the priesthood?
00:01:56.000Was this something where, as a child, you thought, this is what I'm going to be doing?
00:02:00.000When I was a little kid, I came from a Catholic family, went to Mass on Sunday, but I wasn't all that interested in religion.
00:02:05.000I wanted to be a baseball player, so I was a Cub fan from Chicago.
00:02:09.000I wanted to be a shortstop for the Cubs until I was about 14.
00:02:12.000And when I was 14, I'm in high school religion class, and one of the professors taught us one of Thomas Aquinas' arguments for God's existence.
00:02:20.000And I'm sure no other kid in the room was the least bit affected by it, but for some reason, it affected me.
00:02:26.000I went home, went to the library, back in the day when we actually went to libraries and got books out, and I got Mortimer Adler's, you know, The Great Book Series, and I found the one on Thomas Aquinas, and then read that section understanding almost none of it.
00:02:40.000But it started me, honestly, on a path I never left.
00:02:45.000And the priesthood came, you know, further down the pike, but it started then when I was 14.
00:02:49.000And baseball is still an interest of mine, but I realized I was going down a different path then.
00:02:57.000That's really fascinating because when you speak with a lot of religious leaders, they tend to come from the perspective that they got into religion specifically through the Bible.
00:03:04.000And Aquinas' proofs of God's existence are really non-biblical in nature.
00:03:09.000I mean, they're natural law-based more than anything else.
00:03:11.000I mean, this is really what you argue in your book, Arguing Religion, is that that's where people should start.
00:03:15.000Maybe you can discuss a little bit what's your favorite Thomistic proof of God's existence and why you think it's convincing.
00:03:20.000The one I heard probably as a kid was the proof of motion, so the first argument of Aquinas.
00:03:25.000But the one I developed in the book actually is not specifically Aquinas.
00:03:51.000We have to come finally to some principle, some reality, which fulfills the conditions of everything else, but itself does not have any conditions to be filled.
00:04:07.000So, in various ways, Proofs 1, 2, and 3 in Aquinas are versions of that argument.
00:04:12.000And I think most people intuitively sense it.
00:04:16.000So, you know, there's this massive consensus gentium across the ages that God exists.
00:04:21.000I mean, the vast majority of people across human history have held that God exists.
00:04:24.000Now, they can't formulate arguments in a strictly philosophical way, but they sense it, it seems to me.
00:04:31.000They sense the even essence of this world, and therefore the need for an ultimate ground, you know?
00:04:36.000So I think that proof makes explicit what a lot of people implicitly intuit about the reality of God.
00:04:43.000So in your book you talk a little bit about the probably largest kind of pushback to that specific argument, which is the idea of sort of base matter, that there is no God, that at the very root, the only real cause is just the matter itself.
00:04:57.000How do you respond to sort of the Bertrand Russell base facts argument?
00:05:00.000You know, a lot of people would say, look, I buy the argument.
00:05:03.000There's got to be some sort of, you know, final ground for the existence of things or some ultimate cause.
00:05:09.000The problem is what the proof uncovers is not just a first cause in a long series.
00:05:14.000It uncovers that which is properly unconditioned in its reality.
00:05:18.000So that which exists entirely through the power of its own essence.
00:05:22.000That means something which by its very nature is unlimited in being, because there's no condition that's set for it.
00:05:29.000When you say matter, you're saying being at the opposite end of that spectrum.
00:05:34.000Matter is entirely malleable, it's entirely full of potentiality.
00:05:39.000It's the opposite of octus purus or the unconditioned.
00:05:43.000So the one thing this reality can't be is material.
00:05:47.000Which is why people like Aquinas and many others would say the first mover, the uncaused cause, is not a body of any kind, not material.
00:05:54.000So it's a facile answer but it can't correspond to what that proof actually uncovers, the unconditioned reality.
00:06:02.000You talk a lot in your book, Arguing Religion, about skepticism and why you think that skepticism is unwarranted in many cases.
00:06:11.000Maybe you can talk about the limits of skepticism, because we think that all of Western civilization, or at least the post-Enlightenment civilization, is built on the idea of being skeptical.
00:06:18.000But when it comes to religion, obviously skepticism has been used to tear down religion.
00:06:39.000If I'm making a mistake about absolutely everything, at least I know I am.
00:06:43.000So, Augustine uses that to refute a radical skepticism.
00:06:47.000Anyone that engages in rational discourse is not a radical skeptic.
00:06:51.000I mean, anyone that engages in what we're doing now, some kind of conversation, is appealing implicitly or explicitly to some objective standard of truth.
00:07:02.000So a complete radical skepticism is just incoherent.
00:07:06.000It can be used as a tool, you know, as a kind of provisional tool to move the mind along, but you can't accept as a worldview a radical skepticism.
00:07:15.000It's more post-modernity, I think, that moves in that direction of a, you know, kind of dismantling of all the epistemic and moral systems.
00:07:23.000You can't finally do that and have something like a rational discourse.
00:07:26.000Okay, so when it comes to skepticism, you talk again in the book about skepticism, and your chief response to people who are skeptical about religion is that there are perfectly rational reasons to believe, particularly in God.
00:07:37.000And you use the Thomistic proofs, as we were discussing, which are non-revelatory in nature.
00:07:42.000They're basic rational—trying to reason from the nature of the world to what that world is about.
00:07:48.000But it seems to me that most of the people who are skeptical of religion are not actually skeptical of God, per se.
00:07:52.000They actually like the idea of God, in essence.
00:07:55.000How do you get from that to the Bible?
00:07:57.000How do you get from that to Revelation, which obviously makes a lot more stringent claims that have to be tried against reason and very often are found wanting?
00:08:08.000I mean, one is that Aquinas is basing that approach on the Bible in a way.
00:08:12.000I mean, because the heavens proclaim the glory of God, the Bible says, or Paul, you know, from the visible things of this world, we can move to the invisible things of God.
00:08:19.000So within the Bible itself, there's a kind of warrant for what we call natural theology or philosophical proof.
00:08:25.000But yeah, I'd say this, Aquinas refers to his famous arguments as a type of monoductio, Latin for leading by the hand.
00:08:33.000The way you take a little child, like, come on, let me help you, let me show you, you know, how to walk.
00:08:38.000So the philosophical arguments can lead someone who, let's say, is totally outside the realm of the religious, to the point where they might be able to accept what's given in Revelation.
00:08:48.000To accept the revelation of the Bible might be too much for someone, especially today, who's completely outside the ambit of religion.
00:08:54.000But the arguments might awaken the mind sufficiently, or give a sufficient warrant to say, yeah, I'll take a look at the Bible.
00:09:03.000I use the example of getting to know a person, right?
00:09:07.000So I'm meeting you for the first time today.
00:09:09.000But I did, you know, a fair amount of looking into your background.
00:10:04.000I think that's the analogy for reason in relation to faith.
00:10:07.000When it comes to God, you can discover an awful lot of things through the mind, by looking at the world and reasoning about it, and lots of our great thinkers have done that.
00:10:16.000That can lead me into the forecourt of the temple, if you want.
00:10:20.000But at a certain point, Our great tradition claims that God speaks.
00:10:25.000We don't mean that literally, but I mean that God has revealed something about his own heart that we couldn't have guessed on the basis of reason.
00:10:34.000I have to say, okay, I believe or not.
00:11:13.000So, what's the answer to that for you?
00:11:15.000Why is it that we can't just, given all of the premises of a universe created by an intelligent being with a plan and with kindness and goodness, why do we need a set of commandments?
00:11:26.000Why do we need Or in the Christian view, a savior to come down and change the nature of the world itself.
00:11:33.000Well, in answer to the first question, Aquinas and our tradition would tend to say the Ten Commandments correspond roughly to the first principles of the natural law.
00:11:40.000And so in a way... Yeah, Maimonides says the same in ours.
00:11:46.000See, I would just now speak as a Christian and say, there's no way on the basis of philosophical arguments that I can ever know That God loves me to the point of giving his own self as a gift to me.
00:12:00.000That God died that I might come into union with him.
00:12:04.000I mean, there's no way I could learn that through philosophical argumentation.
00:12:09.000That God is love, I mean the great central Christian claim, which is a Trinitarian claim, right?
00:12:15.000If God is love, There's lover, beloved, and shared love within the very nature of God.
00:12:21.000Well, the first Christians knew it from the cross of Jesus, you know?
00:12:25.000That God so loved the world, He sent His only Son into our dysfunction, drawing now the Son back to the Father in the Holy Spirit to save us.
00:13:10.000We've been brought to a certain point by our minds, but then from that perspective, from that point, we're able to make this act of loving acceptance more easily.
00:13:22.000But no, we can't reduce it to reason, or you'd never guess that, that God is love to the point of death.
00:13:27.000I think there are serious questions to be asked about whether reason alone can bring you to the point of Even beyond the Ten Commandments, how far reason can get you?
00:13:36.000Because there are limitations to the moral societies that have been created by human beings.
00:13:41.000And if it were really true that we could create a moral society under any circumstances simply by the act of reason alone, human beings all over the world have been capable of reason.
00:13:48.000And yet, the goodness that we've seen in terms of rights and prosperity, all of this only arises in the context of one civilization with one specific history.
00:13:58.000Well, that's of course a very interesting thing.
00:14:00.000I'm thinking, too, though, in the Christian context, of the love of one's enemies.
00:14:03.000That's not an entirely rational principle.
00:14:05.000I mean, that's something that's, we'd say, the result of a supernatural grace.
00:14:10.000See, you can really love your enemy, that you will the good of your enemy for your enemy's sake.
00:14:17.000So, not that it were down to your benefit, but you love—that's, again, acquaintance—to will the good of the other as other, even your enemy.
00:14:27.000You won't find that in the great Kantian system, for example.
00:14:31.000But you find it at the heart of the gospel because it's predicated upon grace, the love of God that goes all the way to the limits of God-forsakenness, that God loves us, his enemies.
00:14:45.000If we're capable of that, it's because of grace operating in us.
00:14:49.000Not just because of our own musing or our own, you know, will to excel.
00:14:55.000That's the result of pure gift, you know?
00:15:00.000So all of that belongs to the properly theological dimension of Christian thought and behavior.
00:15:05.000So in a second, I want to ask you some very awkward questions about differences between our two religions and how we live together in peace and harmony.
00:15:12.000But first, let's talk about how you're going to sleep better.
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00:16:20.000Okay, so I promised awkward questions, and so there shall be.
00:16:22.000So let's start with the most awkward of the awkward questions.
00:16:24.000I don't really care about this question particularly much, but I get this question a lot, which is As a Jew, how does it feel that there are other religions that don't think you're getting into heaven?
00:16:33.000So let me ask you, what's the Catholic view on who gets into heaven and who doesn't?
00:16:36.000I feel like I lead a pretty good life, a very religiously based life in which I try to keep not just the Ten Commandments, but a solid 603 other commandments as well.
00:16:45.000And I spend an awful lot of my time promulgating what I would consider to be Judeo-Christian virtues, particularly in Western societies.
00:17:05.000However, Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit Christian faith can be saved.
00:17:12.000Now, they're saved through the grace of Christ, indirectly received.
00:17:15.000So, I mean, the grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience.
00:17:19.000So, if you're following your conscience sincerely, or in your case, you're following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved.
00:17:27.000Now, that doesn't conduce to a complete relativism.
00:17:29.000We still would say the privileged route and the route that God has offered to humanity is the route of his Son.
00:17:38.000Even Vatican II says an atheist of goodwill can be saved because in following his conscience, if he does, John Henry Newman said the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.
00:17:50.000It's a very interesting characterization that it is, in fact, the voice of Christ.
00:17:57.000He's the divine mind or reason made flesh, that when I follow my conscience, I'm following him, whether I know it explicitly or not.
00:18:04.000So even the atheist, Vatican II teaches, of goodwill can be saved.
00:18:08.000So is Catholicism acts-based or faith-based?
00:18:10.000Because this has been sort of the traditional distinction between Judaism, for example, and Christianity, is Judaism is a very acts-based religion, where it's all about what you do in this life and that No, I would say it's love-based.
00:18:47.000Aquinas says faith is the door of the spiritual life.
00:18:50.000Without faith, you can't get into the spiritual life.
00:18:52.000That means a trust in the divine love.
00:18:55.000Now, having made that great fundamental act, are you now called upon to be fully engaged—mind, will, passion, body, everything—in response to that love, a love awakening love in you?
00:21:16.000See, love means willing the good of the other.
00:21:21.000That might take the form, as it does, for example, in the great prophets, of calling somebody out and saying, look, what you're doing is repugnant to God's will.
00:21:37.000So that tough love, sure, that's a face of love.
00:21:41.000So if you prioritize tolerance, you're marginalizing what belongs at the very heart of the matter, which is the willing of the good of the other.
00:21:50.000Do you think that religion, mainline religion, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, is having trouble specifically because people are mistaking one for the other?
00:21:58.000I can see it in my Jewish community, right?
00:21:59.000I mean, I can see that the Orthodox are growing.
00:22:01.000We continue to grow as a sect of Judaism and, as I would say, the most authentic sect of Judaism that actually cares about the words of the Torah.
00:22:10.000Kids tend to stay involved, but other sects of Judaism tend to fade away over time.
00:22:14.000But that's not stopping the Jewish community from thinking, OK, the way I'm going to get these kids who are disenchanted back into the synagogues is with guitar and pizza and parties.
00:22:23.000We went down that road in the Catholic Church.
00:22:24.000I grew up in that time after Vatican II, you know, and it rather massively didn't work.
00:22:30.000No, I think, as the great spiritual masters, they all know this.
00:22:33.000I mean, Dostoevsky famously saying, you know, real love is a harsh and dreadful thing.
00:22:37.000So real love is not this sort of bland, you know, namby-pamby, anything goes, you know, I'm okay, you're okay.
00:22:43.000On the contrary, real love wants the good of the other, and so it makes demands.
00:22:50.000It upsets people very often, the real thing.
00:23:44.000The point is to be good to those that can't return the favor.
00:23:50.000That's tough stuff, both for you and often for the other person.
00:23:54.000And right, the modern tolerance is kind of a vague simulacrum of that.
00:23:58.000I want to ask you some basic kind of Catholic doctrinal questions because I think we in the general public who aren't Catholic have some basic views about Catholicism that are likely wrong but well accepted.
00:24:09.000So papal infallibility, can you just define that?
00:24:11.000How far does the Pope's infallibility go?
00:24:13.000Do I have to take everything if I'm a Catholic that he says at face value?
00:24:16.000Is some of it political interpretation?
00:24:18.000What is the vicar of Christ and what is just him saying things?
00:24:24.000That's the important thing within Catholic ecclesiology, the theology of the Church.
00:24:28.000When the Pope speaks, we say, ex cathedra, from the chair, in the formal manner, on matters of faith and morals, for the sake of the entire Church.
00:24:46.000We speak about the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.
00:24:50.000Now that means the bishops in union with the Pope teaching on a key matter of faith and morals in general consensus around the world.
00:24:57.000We recognize that as an infallibility of this ordinary teaching of the Church.
00:25:02.000But the Pope himself, it's on such rare occasion, Now, the Pope does deliver himself of formal teachings like encyclicals, which have to be taken with tremendous seriousness.
00:25:12.000But might a Catholic, you know, quarrel here and there with something in an encyclical?
00:25:38.000So the pope is always treated with enormous respect.
00:25:41.000But the infallibility is a very, very narrowly defined No, that's not Catholic teaching.
00:25:55.000And what's Catholic teaching as far as how doctrine develops?
00:25:57.000So over the course of centuries, where's the limitations?
00:26:00.000Because what we see in the Orthodox Jewish community, and we're seeing this now, is in Orthodox Judaism we have this idea of the oral law, which is the interpretation of the text of the Torah, and this continues over centuries, and it leaves open the possibility, if you're not careful, of people People straying from the text so far that they are actually contravening the text.
00:26:18.000I assume that you've had some similar problems in Catholicism itself as well.
00:26:23.000So how is interpretation limited in sort of Catholic doctrine?
00:26:26.000Yeah, I go back to John Henry Newman there, who says that ideas don't exist on the pages of books, but in the play of lively minds, he says.
00:26:34.000So you and I talking right now, it's an example of an idea is developing, it's unfolding.
00:26:40.000So Newman says the way the seed grows into the great tree, My preferred one from Newman is the way a river begins very small but then it deepens and broadens and takes in all kinds of influences as it moves through space and time.
00:26:53.000And so like the idea of the Incarnation, as Saint Peter took it in, As St.
00:27:01.000Paul articulated it, now as Chrysostom articulates it, as Jerome articulates it, as Augustine and Aquinas and so on, that's the river deepening and broadening over space and time.
00:27:12.000Now, to your point, because ideas develop, they can corrupt.
00:27:18.000So it can be the case that you've deviated from the essential meaning of an idea.
00:27:22.000That's where the authority of the church comes in.
00:28:44.000So this raises another question, which is, if the church is the umpire, The critique that's been made, particularly by Protestants, Pastor John MacArthur sat in the chair that you're sitting in just a few weeks ago, and his argument was basically that by the 15th century, the Church had become more of an obstacle than a middleman, less a conduit to the truth of the Bible, and more of an obstacle to people understanding the truth of the Bible.
00:29:07.000Has there ever been a time when you think the Catholic Church has done that, or has the Catholic Church always served its purpose of being sort of the middleman between God and the normal Christian?
00:29:16.000Well, you know, I'd say a couple of things.
00:29:17.000One is the principle Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, right?
00:29:23.000That's an ancient patristic principle.
00:29:26.000So when Luther picks that up as a great reformer, that's a Catholic principle.
00:29:30.000Of course, the church is always to be reformed.
00:29:33.000The church, you know, in its particular expressions and the particular people that play these roles can, you know, can go off-beam sometimes.
00:29:43.000However, I don't want the umpire off the field because then the play is going to unravel.
00:29:50.000And I would dare say, you know, I say it with great affection for all my Protestant friends and for Protestantism, but the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism is not a good reflection of Jesus' great prayer that they might be one.
00:30:04.000One of the guarantors of unity is precisely this umpiring voice of the Church.
00:30:12.000Would you pick up Hamlet and hand it to a kid and say, off you go, just read it, you'll be fine, you'll understand it?
00:30:19.000No, I mean, we surround Hamlet with this complex interpretive apparatus and a tradition of reception.
00:30:27.000And we help someone read that complex text through that interpretive lens.
00:30:33.000That's why I think it's borderline irresponsible just to pick up the Bible to say, now, off you go, read it.
00:30:39.000When it comes to the unity of the Church, an argument could be made, and it has been made by folks like Sam Harris, for example, that the unity of the Church is what led to theocracy for hundreds of years.
00:30:47.000That basically, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Peace of Westphalia, you have Catholic dominance across the continent of Europe, and that results in a certain level of intellectual stagnation, he would argue.
00:30:59.000It results in A hidebound attempt to victimize people of other religions.
00:31:07.000How does Catholicism make room for other religions in the absence of Protestantism, for example?
00:31:13.000I mean, is the rise of Protestantism seen by Catholicism as a bad thing in the sense that it does all the things that you've talked about before, or does it provide room for the flourishing of more than one type of religion and a certain level of diversity that's good for the conversation?
00:31:28.000Yeah, you're raising a complex set of questions there.
00:31:30.000I mean, to the degree that modernity as we know it politically emerged out of Protestantism, which I think it did in many ways, many important ways, the Church has found an awful lot of good within modernity and doesn't advocate now, certainly, this kind of alter-throne relationship sort of thing.
00:31:45.000We don't advocate, you know, taking over the government and the Church running political affairs.
00:31:51.000There's a legitimate independence, a legitimate To that degree, I think it embraces very much the modern sense of pluralism and a certain separation between the church's preoccupation and that of politics.
00:32:10.000You can go back to history and say, well, it was done differently a long time ago.
00:32:15.000I think to that degree, we'd embrace a lot of those modern reforms.
00:32:19.000Okay, so I want to ask you in just a second about contrasting various popes over the past, the course of my lifetime, I'm not that old, so only three, but I'll ask you to compare and contrast in just a second.
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00:33:36.000So when last we left our subject, I was going to ask you about the three popes of the last 25 years, 30 years.
00:33:44.000So Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis.
00:33:47.000As a Jew, I get to criticize Popes however much I want, which is great for me, but my perception has been that Pope John Paul II, obviously a historic figure in many ways, particularly in his anti-communism, Pope Benedict A traditionalist, one of the great religious thinkers of our time, and I've been highly critical of Pope Francis, who's been perceived by the media as much more progressive on politics, much more focused on issues like global warming than, for example, abortion.
00:34:10.000Do you think that that is a mislabel of Pope Francis's actual legacy, or do you think that the media are doing a responsible job in covering what exactly Pope Francis is doing?
00:34:19.000Yeah, I mean, every pope has a specific emphasis.
00:34:23.000I mean, so John Paul coming out of his great struggle with communism, and that massively influences his social thinking.
00:34:29.000Benedict, I think, coming out of his European cultural background and wanting very much to re-evangelize Europe.
00:35:16.000In Centesimus Annus, you know, he says the church advocates the market.
00:35:20.000He prefers to call it that rather than capitalism.
00:35:22.000But, very clearly says A market circumscribed morally, circumscribed legally, a market that is not simply open to the free play of buying and selling, etc.
00:35:37.000So I think Francis picks up on that side of it.
00:35:40.000Maybe without the balance you found typically in a John Paul, but that's also typical of the prophets.
00:35:45.000They tend to be a little over the top.
00:35:49.000What do you think of the critique that's been made by a lot of folks that he's a devotee of liberation theology?
00:35:53.000No, I think that's almost demonstrably false, because at a certain point in his development, I mean, he knew the liberation theology movement and turned against it.
00:36:28.000It's an embrace of kind of the people.
00:36:30.000Now, not in the Marxist sense of the term, but more in this Latin American sense.
00:36:35.000So, I think he's demonstrably not with liberation theology.
00:36:38.000Well, the media have been, obviously, very pro-Pope Francis, much more than they were, obviously, with Benedict or with John Paul II for most of his life.
00:36:47.000As he approached his death, obviously, they became much more pro, because this is typical in how the media treat people who they perceive to not agree with them politically.
00:36:56.000The focus on the Catholic Church more broadly, beyond Pope Francis, by the media, has been almost entirely, in the past couple of decades, on the number of sex scandals.
00:37:04.000What do you think is the best way for the Church to deal with sex scandals?
00:37:08.000Do you think that the media are basically picking on the Church as opposed to other institutions in society that have had similar problems?
00:37:15.000And I'm always reluctant, you know, to lead, as I'm doing right now, to lead with that, looking defensive.
00:37:20.000But I think that's certainly fair to say.
00:37:22.000That this problem is a universal human problem.
00:37:24.000You can find it in almost every institution, every society.
00:37:29.000I would say in God's providence that it was brought to light so dramatically in the church to force, you know, to bring it to the world's attention.
00:37:38.000And it's part of what the church is bearing.
00:37:43.000But for the sake of the world, that what we've had to wrestle with, I think, now is benefiting other institutions.
00:37:49.000But it is fair to say that the problem is much wider than Catholicism.
00:37:54.000One stat that I think is very interesting is across the board and across the decades, you look at the numbers, and when they're presented in kind of a raw form, you say, how, you know, horrific.
00:38:02.000And of course, one act of child sex abuse is horrific.
00:38:06.000But when you look at the numbers, they almost always correspond roughly to the national average of about 4%.
00:38:13.000You look at men across society, roughly 4% engage in this behavior.
00:38:19.000That's almost how it breaks down across the board within the Catholic Church.
00:38:23.000So in that sense, too, it's unfair to say it's a uniquely Catholic problem.
00:38:27.000Having said all that, I think it is important that it's being brought to light precisely in that framework so that we can bring healing to it and maybe deeper instruction than to other institutions as well.
00:38:41.000I don't think the media is picking on the church in this measure.
00:39:16.000What do you make of the schism that seems to have been breaking out inside the Catholic Church at the upper echelons over the handling of the sex abuse crisis by the Vatican, for example?
00:39:25.000I'm very hopeful of the February meeting coming up, when the Pope is gathering the presidents of all the Bishops' Conferences from around the world.
00:39:32.000I'm very hopeful that will make some important moves.
00:40:29.000Everybody in the church wants to address this thing at the level of protocols and the level of deeper conversion.
00:40:36.000We're debating, I think, how best to do the first one.
00:40:38.000What do you make of the critique that comes up every time one of these sex abuse cases comes up where folks basically suggest that the problem is chastity within the priesthood, that we should allow priests to get married?
00:40:47.000No, you're talking about celibacy, because chastity is the problem.
00:40:57.000It's not celibacy, and that's demonstrably the case.
00:40:59.000That's been shown across the decades, that celibacy is not the cause of this problem.
00:41:06.000At the moral level, it's a deep infidelity.
00:41:09.000It's a failure to live up to our own teaching.
00:41:13.000Our teaching is eminently clear on the score.
00:41:17.000So it's priests, sadly, tragically, not living up to the teaching of the Church.
00:41:21.000But no, I certainly wouldn't blame it on celibate priesthood.
00:41:25.000The overwhelming majority of child sex offenders are not celibates, so I wouldn't correlate it to celibacy.
00:41:32.000And to get into even more controversial territory, obviously the Church has come under significant fire for its perspective on homosexuality.
00:41:38.000I always find this puzzling since this has legitimately not changed neither Judaic or Christian theology for a solid several millennia at this point.
00:41:44.000But nonetheless, it is raised every single time and it seems to be raised every time there's a scandal inside the Church where folks suggest that many in the hierarchy of the Church itself suggest that there are a disproportionate number of homosexual Yeah, I mean, there's never been really good or definitive studies on that issue of, you know, number of homosexuals in the priesthood.
00:42:12.000I mean, it'd be very hard to determine that on statistical grounds.
00:42:15.000That the majority of cases of sexual misconduct have been male-on-male sexual violence, that's true.
00:42:23.000And I think that's certainly worth looking at.
00:42:25.000To your first point, Yes, the consensus gentium across millennia, across the cultures has been, you know, that sex belongs within marriage between a man and a woman who are faithful to each other and open to life.
00:42:40.000I mean, that was the standard consensus.
00:42:42.000That most human beings tend to fall away from that ideal, sure.
00:43:15.000But that shouldn't compel us to change the teaching.
00:43:17.000So what exactly is the Church holding on abortion as well?
00:43:20.000So obviously abortion is another area where the Catholic Church has come under significant fire.
00:43:24.000Again, this has always been Catholic Church policy, but it does not matter.
00:43:27.000The media, every time the Pope expresses that he is pro-life, seem to react with shock and horror as though something new has happened.
00:43:32.000Yeah, and that's a good point that Pope Francis has been very strong on the pro-life issue.
00:43:36.000The direct taking of an innocent life is prohibited.
00:43:40.000I mean, that's a fundamental, I would say, THE fundamental principle of the natural law.
00:43:45.000All the other principles are derived from it.
00:43:47.000The direct killing of the innocent is always prohibited.
00:43:50.000It's intrinsically evil, to use our language, intrinsice malum.
00:43:54.000In other words, no motive or circumstance could ever obviate the truth of that.
00:43:59.000If that goes, Everything goes, it seems to me.
00:44:02.000Now, you know, I came of age at a time in the Catholic Church when the proportionalist approach was very popular.
00:44:08.000In fact, it was being taught to a lot of us.
00:44:10.000Namely that, well, you know, things aren't intrinsically evil.
00:44:13.000You look at the good and bad consequences of an act, and you kind of add them up, and if there's a proportion between them, you know, then make up your mind.
00:44:22.000The trouble with that is, at the end of the day, I mean, anything can be justified.
00:44:27.000And if you can justify the direct killing of the innocent, it seems to me the whole moral program falls apart.
00:44:32.000And that is why the Church has taken such a strong stance against abortion, because it's such a clear instance of the violation of that principle.
00:44:43.000So to sort of finish up the hot-button political section of this particular interview, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about the Catholic Church's decision to recognize the Catholic Church in China, which is obviously being cracked down on in severe fashion and basically run in many ways by the Chinese government.
00:44:57.000Do you think that's a good decision or a bad decision?
00:44:59.000You know, I'm going to sort of hold off on answering only because I don't know enough about what's on the ground there.
00:45:06.000My instincts are to respect the so-called underground church that has lived in dire circumstances, often under great persecution.
00:45:14.000But I want to be careful because I really don't know What's on the ground in detail?
00:45:19.000I don't know what was animating or motivating the Vatican decision there.
00:45:23.000My instincts are with the underground church.
00:45:28.000But I wouldn't want to say much more about it because I don't claim to know enough about what's on the ground.
00:45:32.000So I discussed this with Pastor John MacArthur.
00:45:34.000What do you think are the significant philosophical differences, put aside sort of the story differences where we accept the first half of the book and not the second half, between Judaism and Catholicism?
00:45:43.000So, aside from Jesus and the acceptance of Jesus, where do you think there are real significant philosophical differentiations?
00:45:51.000But let me say this first, though, about Judaism and Catholicism.
00:45:55.000One thing I feel really strongly about is it's the re-Judaizing of Catholicism that is evangelically so important.
00:46:03.000Precisely when you divorce Catholicism from Judaism, you get these distortions of Jesus so common today.
00:46:09.000Jesus as teacher of timeless spiritual truths, Jesus as guru, Jesus as Gnostic master.
00:46:19.000Jesus is, as Paul said, the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
00:46:24.000Jesus is the climax to the story of Israel.
00:46:27.000Therefore, not to know Israel is not to know Jesus.
00:46:31.000Not to know Torah and covenant and temple and prophecy is not to know Jesus.
00:46:37.000The very fact, I'll tell you here, this is an interesting thing.
00:46:39.000So, when a Protestant minister comes out to preside at the liturgy, he'll wear either a business suit or he'll wear his doctor robes.
00:46:47.000Because the heart of the matter is teaching, right?
00:46:49.000The pulpit you're going to teach if you're a doctor or a teacher.
00:46:52.000When I come out, especially as a bishop who's a kind of a high priest in the Catholic thing, I come out in the robes of a temple priest, including the mitre of a temple official.
00:47:41.000It's reached its fulfillment in Jesus.
00:47:43.000That's why Paul goes into the synagogues first.
00:47:46.000So when he comes into Corinth, or he comes into Athens, or wherever he goes, his first move, of course, is to the Jews, because they'll get the story he's talking about.
00:47:56.000Talking to Gentiles is a far more complicated business if you're an evangelist.
00:48:00.000Because the story of Jesus won't make sense apart from Judaism.
00:48:04.000So there I want to insist upon this deep congruence.
00:48:09.000And it does have philosophical overtones.
00:48:46.000My manner of being is being itself, not this particular instance of being.
00:48:52.000So that's of enormous philosophical importance coming up out of Israel, into the church, and then finally into its own philosophical thinking.
00:49:28.000And that's important for our theology, for our liturgy.
00:49:31.000I was just going to ask you about that, because for a long time a dominant strain of Catholic thought was replacement theology, the idea that the Jews had sort of been left behind and that the new covenant had been made with the folks who followed the new church.
00:50:45.000So you can't make sense of him apart from Judaism.
00:50:48.000So one of the things that, as an Orthodox Jew, I often feel when I speak to people who are either Catholic or Protestant, people who, again, believe in the validity of the Old Testament but also believe in the validity of the New Testament, is that one of the ways in which differentiation is made is by saying that certain things were lacking in Judaism that are now present in Christianity that had to be fulfilled by Jesus, that without Jesus, these things could not have been fulfilled.
00:51:10.000And I guess that is the question that I'm asking is, where do you see those things?
00:51:13.000Because very often I hear that man is a sinful creature and that we need Jesus in order to take on our sins because otherwise we couldn't live in the world, basically.
00:51:24.000Or that Judaism is not forgiving enough, or not loving enough, or not in favor of atonement enough.
00:51:30.000And I think as a Jew who prays three times a day for atonement, has a full day devoted to atonement on Yom Kippur, has a full month before that devoted to atoning in preparation for the atonement on Yom Kippur, with all of this stuff, I get the feeling sometimes as a Jew that one of the ways the Christians differentiate from Judaism is by miscasting the nature of Judaism.
00:51:48.000That's why I'm asking for some specificity.
00:51:52.000All the institutions of Israel—Torah, Temple, Covenant, Prophecy—their purpose is to bring divinity and humanity together, I would say.
00:52:01.000So, Zion, the temple, Yahweh's dwelling place, the tribes go up and they commune through sacrifice, you know, with the Lord.
00:52:16.000Our wills are off kilter, but they come together, ideally, through the Torah.
00:52:19.000The prophets, God speaking, as it were, through them, and they're trying to draw us back to Torah and temple, etc.
00:52:26.000Covenant, you know, all of it is meant to bring them together.
00:52:29.000What's at the heart of Christianity is that divinity and humanity have met now perfectly in these two natures.
00:52:39.000I'm purposely kind of Greekifying the language now, but it's all Jewish talk.
00:52:44.000Translated for Greeks at the time, but it's all Jewish talk.
00:52:48.000I want Yahweh and his people, Yahweh and Israel, have now met in such a perfect union that I can speak of it as a hypostatic union, as a union of person.
00:52:59.000The hypostatic union of two natures, divine and human, in one divine person, that's who Jesus is.
00:53:05.000That's what I mean when I say he's the fulfillment of the temple, the fulfillment of the Torah, the fulfillment of prophecy.
00:53:12.000What they want has happened now fully in him.
00:53:18.000That's why the great scene of the Roman soldier piercing the side of the crucified Jesus, out comes blood and water.
00:53:23.000The blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism is one way to read it.
00:53:27.000But the other way is the fulfillment of Ezekiel.
00:53:30.000At the time of the renewal of the temple, When the Shakina of Yahweh comes back, what will come forth from the side of the Temple but water, life-giving water, for the renewal of the world?
00:53:40.000And so, these first-century Jews, looking at Mashiach Yeshua, are saying, look, there it is!
00:53:48.000In this great act of sacrifice on the cross, now read in Temple language, Divinity and humanity have met.
00:53:59.000And the sign of it is the coming forth of water from the side of the renewed temple.
00:54:05.000Now, all of it's dependent upon the resurrection.
00:54:07.000If Jesus Christ had died on the cross and stayed in his grave, none of this would make a lick of sense.
00:54:12.000Everything I'm saying would be a lot of hooey, and Christianity would just be a waste of time.
00:54:17.000What got it off the ground was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which is what convinced these first century Jews.
00:54:24.000And I think, you know, like Rabbi Shaul, studying at the feet of Gamaliel, who knew everything I've been talking about, and a thousand things more, when he met the risen Jesus, That's what he got.
00:54:44.000I think he's trying to piece it together.
00:54:46.000He's trying to piece it together how the promises made to Israel have now been fulfilled in this most unexpected way through a crucified Messiah who's risen from the dead.
00:54:56.000But when he figured it out, out he comes to Corinth and Philippi and finally Rome to announce this new Mashiach, you know?
00:55:06.000So it's a deeply Jewish movement that makes sense only in that context.
00:55:12.000When you abstract from it, you undermine its evangelical power.
00:55:16.000I'm going to ask you in one second, one final question.
00:55:18.000I'm going to ask you specifically about Jordan Peterson and biblical movements without the Bible per se, without the divinity of the Bible per se.
00:55:26.000But to hear the answer from Bishop Barron, you first must be a subscriber.