Merry Christmas： Let’s Talk About The End of the World - Michael Knowles & Bishop Barron EXPLAIN
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Summary
Advent is a season of looking forward to the end of the world and the coming of Christ. In this episode, Bishop Robert Barron talks about the dark side of Christmas, and how we can resist the temptation to overlook the dark aspects of Christmas.
Transcript
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It's Christmas Eve. We've reached the end of Advent. Christmas is upon us. We're all looking
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forward to this very, very joyful, not only day, but joyful season. And so, I thought this would
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be a great opportunity to talk about the end of the world. And joining me is my friend,
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His Excellency, Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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This has become an annual tradition, Your Excellency, where we come on and you educate
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everyone about some of the misconceptions and popular themes of Christmas. And I said,
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you know, this year, I don't know, maybe I'm just feeling a little salty or something like that.
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But I want to get into some of the darker aspects of the Christmas story because you're actually
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involved in this too. I was reading a book by Hans Urs von Balthasar, the 20th century theologian
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that you cite quite a lot. I was reading A Theology of History, where he points out something
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basic that hadn't really occurred to me, which is at Christmas, we commemorate the incarnation,
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you know, the baby Jesus in the manger and the animals and the magi and that. But also,
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we're not just commemorating something that happened. In a very tangible way, we're looking forward to
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the second coming. And we see images of this and figures of this. And that's going to be about
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as dramatic as the first, frankly, maybe more so. So could you talk a little bit about these,
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I don't know, the less saccharine aspects of the Christmas story?
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Yeah, good. I'm happy to talk about these kind of edgier sides of Christmas because the constant
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temptation, of course, the danger is we turn Christmas into a kind of harmless midwinter
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festival. And in fact, it's about something, and Balthasar got this, I mean, earth shattering.
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One way to look at it is Advent, we look back, we look around, and we look forward. So the Adventus,
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the coming of Christ, it happened 2,000 years ago. We remember that. Also, it's happening now
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because at the heart of Christian spirituality is Christ being born in us. You know, when Paul says,
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it's no longer I who live, it's Christ who lives in me. Or think of the little flower in that wonderful
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little scene in her book, her autobiography, when on Christmas Eve, the Lord is born in her in this
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decisive way. So that appeals to anyone, any Christian now. But then also we look forward,
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as you suggest, to the second coming, when Christ, the Adventus definitivos, you know, when he will come
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definitively at the end of time. So all three are part of a healthy Christian spirituality.
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You know, all three are a little bit unnerving, too. When he came 2,000 years ago, it said Herod
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tried to murder him, and all Jerusalem trembled. See, we overlook that in our sentimentalized
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Christmas. Christmas is a pretty dire business. You know, the new king has come, what did C.S. Lewis say,
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slipping clandestinely behind enemy lines, right? Because the enemy was poised. Think of that scene from
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the 12th chapter of Revelation, when the woman is, you know, in labor, and they said there's a dragon,
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a red dragon right there, whose purpose is to devour the child. Well, that's the prince of the
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dark powers, whose minions include people like Herod the Great, who were trying to kill the baby.
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So there's a dire aspect to it long ago. A dire aspect to it now, you bet. I mean, say, oh,
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Christ will be born in me. What a nice thing. Well, this sinner doesn't like that. I mean,
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sin in me rebels against Christ coming to be born in me. You mean, if he's born in me,
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I've got to stop doing all these things I've been doing, and I've got to change my whole life. I don't
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want that, so I resist him. And then the second coming, the ultimate coming. No, no, the sinful
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world kind of likes the structures the way they are, and they don't want the things summed up now
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in the risen Christ. So there's a dark edge to all of it. We want him to come, and we don't want
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him to come. And to be honest about it, that's reflected in the scriptural text, reflected in
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our own spirituality. Advent's a great time to look hard at that fact. Yes, I do want the Lord to come,
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and I don't want him to come. And to come to terms with that resistance is part of the meaning of
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Advent, I think. You know, one of my social media staffers here had an Advent picture that he was
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going to put on social media, and he was writing what he thought were the four traditional themes
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of Advent, hope, joy, I don't know, whatever the other two are. And I said, well, you know,
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in my understanding, the four traditional themes of Advent are the four last things,
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which are death, judgment, heaven, and hell. He sort of laughed about that. Seems like it's
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kind of the opposite. No, really, they're not opposites. They actually go together.
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But this idea that, yeah, it's the middle of the night, and there's this baby who is born in a cave,
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placed in a manger, and you have foreigners coming who are following a star who are probably
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Zoroastrian or something like that. And they're there because they know. They pass by Herod.
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They see that Herod means harm. They leave by another way, so significant, that they encounter
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Christ, and they go back by another way. And to your point, Your Excellency, we want the incarnation,
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but we kind of don't. And it seems to me we want the incarnation on our terms, on our personal terms.
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But what the incarnation is, as what the second coming is, is a global event, and the earth itself
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will shake. Yeah, I mean, you're saying a lot there, and it's all right. Even like Luke's famous
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account, which is in the minds of most people when you think about Christmas, but the church fathers saw
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has this very dark edge to it. Why are Mary Joseph going to Bethlehem? Well, they're being compelled to
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there by this great imperial act of Caesar Augustus calling for a census of the whole world. Well,
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that was seen in the Bible always as an aggressive act. To take a census meant you could control,
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manipulate, draft, you know, your people. So, this little couple is being kind of pushed around by
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this great power. The wood of the crib, the fathers long associated with the wood of the cross.
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The swaddling clothes, they associate with the burial bands around the body of the Lord.
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He's placed in a manger where the animals eat because at the culmination of his life, he's going to give
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his body and blood as food for the world. Even the shepherds and the angels, I made this point,
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an angel in the Bible is a fearsome creature. It's a high creature from a higher ontological plane.
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And so, when one angel breaks through, it's always a source of fear. But then we hear in that account
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that there's an army of angels appear. Well, you're meant to remember at that point, oh, we began the
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story with Caesar Augustus who had the biggest army in the ancient world. But the baby king has a bigger
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army and it's signaling there's going to be a conflict. The story of this child is going to be
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one of grace and redemption, all that, yes. But that involves conflict. There's going to be a battle,
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a spiritual battle. It'll culminate on the cross. Very important for us to see that dimension of
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Christmas, I think, lest we devolve into sentimentalism about it. The fact that Herod
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and all Jerusalem are trembling with anxiety, that's a very telling thing. Our resistance to Christ,
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and all of us sinners have it. We all feel it. If I'm really serious about Jesus becoming the Lord of
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my life, that's a fearsome business. That means a lot of rearranging has to be done inside of me.
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The good news, this is Dorothy Day had this great insight that the messy, stable, stinky, smelly,
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full of animals. How wonderful, she said, because it means that Christ can be born even in a messy
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soul like mine. Quite right. But once he's born in us, he wants to clean things up. He's the Lord
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Jesus, not a nice exemplar from long ago. He's an active spiritual presence who's rearranging me from
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the inside out. Well, that's a fearsome prospect. And then we say, may the same Lord Jesus be the Lord
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of culture and of society and of politics and everything else, that's a little unnerving.
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And we're meant to—the Christmas stories themselves convey it. Even like the wise men you
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mentioned, you know, the magi, the beautiful quest to find, you know, Christ. Yes, and it's an all
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science, all philosophy is looking for Christ ultimately. But, you know, T.S. Eliot's famous line,
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the hard coming we had of it, the difficulty of crossing the desert to get there. And then
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Herod, who's trying to kill the baby and trying to deceive them, they open the treasures of their
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hearts before the Lord. But then, as you say, they go back by a different route. Fulton Sheen said that,
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you know, no one comes to Christ and goes back the same way he came. So, it's always a change. It's
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something even wrenching about it. The Christmas stories are beautifully clear on all that.
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hallow.com slash Knowles. To your point on Christ as the lord of politics, too, ultimately. Obviously,
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there are principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places, but ultimately,
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Christ is in command of everything. And you see politics play such a role in the Christmas story.
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I'm not the first to observe that at the time that you have Caesar Augustus on the Prince of Peace
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on the throne in Rome. You have the true Prince of Peace being born within the Roman Empire.
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You have Caesar Augustus being called Filius Divi, son of the divine, because of the comet that heralded
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the death of Julius Caesar. And you have Filius Dei born in Judea. All of these parallels.
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Even the fact that Caesar Augustus claims authority over the whole world because he can institute this
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tax. Same with Christ. And so I wonder how we make sense of the role of the Christian in this polity,
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knowing that the political forces are so evil so often and are so often arrayed against the truth.
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I think there's an impulse to just run away to the desert and go be hermits or something.
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But I don't think that's exactly what we're called. How do we think about it?
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No, you're raising a really good and complex question, but you can see the seeds of the
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answer in the scriptures themselves. So, yes, the wickedness of Rome, and there's no question
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in their minds about that. And from Caesar Augustus to Pontius Pilate, I mean, they notice that to be
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sure. At the same time, the church fathers and Paul himself notice something that is precisely the
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orderliness and the relative peacefulness of that Augustan period, the sort of Pax Romana that was
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beginning at that time, and the technological advances of Rome, most importantly, the Roman
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road system. All of that made the spread of Christianity possible. If we were back in the chaotic time,
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you know, with Mark Antony and Octavian fighting and Cleopatra and the Battle of Actium, if that was the
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period, it would have been chaotic. But at the time, there was the beginning of this Roman peace,
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however corrupt it was, and yes, indeed it was, but there was a relative peace that enabled the
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Christian message to get out. Moreover, that it happened, as you say, in a corner of the Roman Empire.
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But to say Roman Empire was to say much of the known world in the West at the time, which enabled Paul,
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once he sees the risen Lord, to go from Damascus to Jerusalem, back to Tarsus, and then all through
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Asia Minor, and then finally to Greece, and then finally to Rome itself. What enabled that? Well,
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the fact that it was all part of one great empire. The Acts of the Apostles ends with Paul under arrest
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in Rome, kind of a house arrest, but yet declaring the kingdom of God to everybody. Well, see, to say
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Rome would say the center of civilization at the time, and that's where the Christian faith was planted.
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So that's the positive side of it, that they took advantage of the sophistication of ancient Rome
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and of the relative peace of ancient Rome to propagate the gospel, even as they were intensely
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aware of how corrupt Rome was. Now, fast forward a couple centuries, and you've got Augustine's great
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city of God, and it's a similar dynamic, right? Augustine is a Roman, really, to his bones. He's born in
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a Roman culture, loves it, laments, in many ways, the fall of Rome. Of course he does. At the same
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time, noticing, well, you know, the reason you fell, it wasn't because of Christianity. It was
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because of all kinds of vices that were grounded in the false worship of ancient Rome. So Augustine
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has that typical sort of love-hate, reverencing what was worth reverencing in Rome, even as he was
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critical of it. And calling for Christ, indeed, to be the lord of the political arrangement,
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which is not, say, theocracy. That's a, you know, we can have a long discussion about that.
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But it does mean that morally and spiritually, there's a lordship of Jesus over every aspect
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of life. And Augustine would have called that the city of God, right? But it's that point about
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the ambiguity, the good and the bad within the Roman polity. Yeah, I love the distinction you
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make, too, because today, people who don't know any better, or maybe they do know better and they're
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just being cynical, they'll say that any government that is in any way infused with religious principles
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is a theocracy. Theocracy is government by clerics. It's like hieracrats, you know? And a government
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that is infused with religious principles is just known as a government. It's just what all governments
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do, whether they're religious or irreligious. A very important point on, especially for our own
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day, where so many people, you know, we love our country instinctively. We currently, those of us
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in America, are living in the global empire. There's certainly a big parallel to Rome. It goes all the
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way back to the Federalist Papers. That was kind of the point. And yet, we recognize this manifest
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corruption all around us. I think it leads some people to say, well, if I'm going to be a true
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Christian, I need to get out of politics. I need to get out of history and the particulars. And yet,
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I can't help but notice particularity entering into history and even into political society
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is at the very heart of the incarnation story. Right. And, you know, there are some people
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throughout our history who were called to that kind of hermetical life and radically away from
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society. I think in the fourth century, and I include Augustine here in his younger days,
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almost every great figure in the fourth century wanted to get out of town and go to the hills.
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And this is Jerome. This is John Chrysostom in his early days. Augustine, certainly. Many were
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inspired by Antony of the Desert because the biography written by St. Athanasius had just come
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out. So, there are people called to that. In fact, the whole monastic tradition, in a way,
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enshrines that move. But that's not everyone. Not everyone's called to that. In fact, most people
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are called to an active involvement in the world. I think, Michael, I speak as an American and as a
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Catholic bishop, the genius of the First Amendment, I think, is it holds that tension very creatively.
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We don't want an established religion. So, the anti-establishment clause, right, that Congress
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shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion. That would be a sort of theocracy or a
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sacred public square, as Richard John Newhouse. You know, he didn't want the naked public square,
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which means a public square denuded of religion. But at the same time, he said, I don't want a sacred
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public square either. One that's just, you know, where, as you said, the clerics are running things,
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or it's, or an officially Catholic country or Jewish country or whatever. No, we don't want that.
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But at the same time, the First Amendment, but the free exercise of religion, which doesn't just
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mean private worship. It means a public exercise of religion where I can preach and teach, seek to
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influence society on the basis of my religious convictions. Right. That's not a violation of
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the establishment clause. On the contrary, that's an enactment of the free exercise clause. And I think
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part of, we'll give Madison credit there, the great genius of that First Amendment is that
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it holds that together very creatively. Now, in our history, in our jurisprudence,
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we often get that wrong. We'll oscillate between those two things. In my lifetime,
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we oscillated away from free exercise, it seems to me. Yeah.
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You know, toward an over-reading of the anti, of the non-establishment clause.
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So, I'd say let's go back to the First Amendment and all of its healthy tension. That's a good space to
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be in. And the roots of that are indeed in the Bible and the Church Fathers.
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Yeah. So much of, I don't know, modern life, I guess, seeks to just get rid of that tension.
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Maybe it's not modern. Maybe it's just an impulse in fallen man generally. I notice it's more
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prominent in women. My wife and I talk about this a lot, this desire to resolve kind of apprehension
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intention. But men have it too. And yet, you know, we have the story. We know how the story begins.
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We know the turning of the story, which is in the incarnation. We even know how the story ends. And
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yet, we're in this suspended time of history where we're supposed to do something, you know,
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and we're trying to figure out precisely what to do. So then, for the people who are considering
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Advent to be penitential, they're considering death, judgment, heaven, and hell. You know,
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they're taking this time seriously. And they're looking ahead to the second coming, which will
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come sooner than some people think, probably. You know, we don't know the day or the hour. It can come
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by surprise. Not even the son, but only the father knows. What should we be doing, you know,
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as the hours of Advent wane into the Christmas season, which is a day, it's not a season.
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What actively should we be doing to prepare ourselves? We should live as the church. So,
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Jesus says, you know, you're Peter. Upon this rock, I will build my church. The gates of hell
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will not prevail against it. The church represents the sort of planting of the seed of the Christ's
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life in the world. So, Christ comes, the incarnation. By the incarnation, we're saved. I'll say that now
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as a Catholic, not just the cross. That's the culmination of it in a way. But by the whole of the
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incarnation, we're saved. What's the perpetuation of the incarnation across space and time? Again,
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this is a Catholic perspective. It's called the church. So, it's through the official teaching
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of the church, through the sacraments of the church, especially the Eucharist, through apostolic
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authority, and all these, through the great saints. The Christ life is perpetuated. Go back to the Acts
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of the Apostles, the ascended Christ, who ascends not to go away, up, up, and away, goodbye, Jesus. It's not
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that. It's more like a general taking a point advantage on the heights so we can survey the
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whole field of battle. The ascended Christ sending his spirit into the church now to remake the world.
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See, the incarnation is all about God's remaking of his creation. We don't play a Platonic game.
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Christians are not Platonists who would say, well, the fallen world, or Gnostics, just bad,
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matter is bad. It's a mess. Let's get away from it as quickly as we can. That is not biblical
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spirituality at all. Biblical spirituality is the God of creation has never given up on his world,
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and he wants to save it. He wants to heal it. He wants to restore it, and then to raise it to the
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highest pitch of perfection. The incarnation is the means by which God is affecting this great
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healing of the universe. The church, the mystical body of Jesus, now continuing that work in the
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world. Now, as we wait for the final culmination, we call that the second coming, that lovely Greek
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term, it's in Paul, but the fathers loved it, anacephaliosus. Cephali means head.
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It does. It's a lovely word, anacephaliosus. And it's why it's rendered in Latin as re capitulatio,
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caput head, right? So, what sums everything up under the headship of Jesus, that's anacephaliosus.
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That's re capitulatio, recapitulation. St. Irenaeus loved that idea, but it's right in Paul.
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Aquinas loved it too. That's the second coming, if you want, is this moment of all things coming
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together in their healed, redeemed form under the headship of Jesus. So, to your question,
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what do we do in the meantime? Well, we live as the church. We live as the city of God,
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operative in the world, waiting for him. We're not going to make this happen, but we, under the
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prompting of his spirit, live according to his purposes. That's what we do in the meantime.
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One last question on this point, because you make a great observation about the new age,
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Gnostic religions that are some way like the old age, Gnostic religions, you know, that say
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matter is bad, the physical world is bad, time and history are bad, and so we just have to
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get away from the ick, you know, and abstract ourselves into the ether or something.
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And that's certainly not Christian. It's entirely contrary to the incarnation.
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But what about the tension also between universality and particularity? Because I think
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there's also this desire, especially in the modern world, to universalize everything and say that
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particularity, particular nations, particular individuals, particular religions, particular
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anything, is an error, you know, and everything just has to be kind of universal and gray, you know,
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whether we're talking about sex or peoples or ideas or anything like that. And in Christ,
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we have the universal king of everything and a particular man. How do we make sense of that?
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Yeah, it's one of the great philosophical questions, and they call it the scandal of
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particularity. The more recent forms go back to the Enlightenment. And to be fair, you know,
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the wars of religion ravaged Europe, 17th century. Most of the great thinkers, and it's Kant,
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Hegel, it's Schleiermacher, it's Leibniz, it's Spinoza, most of those great people wanted to deal
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with that problem. And they, okay, look, the religions are fighting, and, you know, this
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particular form of Protestantism against another form of Protestantism, they're all against Catholicism,
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and blah, blah, blah, we're all fighting, fighting, fighting. Can't we find, read Rousseau on this too,
00:23:58.620
can't we find some universal form of religiosity that goes beyond the particular battles that can all
00:24:07.160
bring us together? That whole idea of, can't we come together? They did it through an appeal to the
00:24:12.720
universal. So look at someone like Schleiermacher, who's the founder of modern liberal Protestantism.
00:24:18.480
It's the feeling of absolute dependency. I don't care whether you're a Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jew,
00:24:23.000
non-believer. We've all got that, don't we? Or in Kant, it's the categorical imperative. It's the
00:24:28.380
great moral imperative. Don't we all have that in common, no matter what our background? Look in the
00:24:35.520
20th century theologians, you know, people like Paul Tillich, is the breakthrough of the
00:24:42.440
unconditioned, that no matter where you are, everyone experiences something like that. So that's
00:24:47.940
the great fantasy, in a way, of liberalism, is to find this universal experience. But here's the
00:24:55.460
paradox, I think. Truth, yes, is always universal. I can't have Michael Knowles' truth and Bishop
00:25:02.380
Barron's truth. Truth is truth. Truth is universal. Two plus two equals four for everybody. Okay, so truth
00:25:08.080
is always universal. However, however, access to truth is often particular. And the modern mistake,
00:25:17.380
I think the Enlightenment mistake, was to say the route of access to truth has to be as universal as
00:25:23.620
truth itself. You know, so let's find it in this one great experience of absolute dependency or
00:25:30.400
something, where in fact, it's often the particular that is the route of access to truth. So I would
00:25:38.320
say, you know, Jesus of Nazareth, this very particular first century Jew who led a very peculiar life,
00:25:46.700
it ended in the most horrific way imaginable, and then a claim is made that is practically impossible
00:25:52.800
to believe. Okay, that's the particularity of Christianity. But we say the word, the word,
00:26:00.720
capital W, became flesh. The universal was given, we were given access to it by means of this very
00:26:10.200
particular fact, right? That's the paradox. And we try to resolve it. But when you say quite correctly,
00:26:18.280
when you try to resolve it too universally, it becomes this bland, gray religiosity. Or to give
00:26:25.160
it the contemporary, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. See, that's an appeal to the bland.
00:26:30.860
No, no, you're as particular as the bloody cross of Jesus on that grubby hill outside of Jerusalem in
00:26:39.020
the year 30 AD. We're as particular as that. We're as particular as we ate and drank with him after his
00:26:46.700
resurrection from the dead. You know, that, I think, breathtaking line from Acts chapter 10 when
00:26:51.300
St. Peter, you know, blithely telling the story of Jesus, and then, oh, you know, we ate and drank with
00:26:57.060
him after he rose from the dead. He's not talking about some myth or some grand universal thing. He's
00:27:02.340
talking about this guy that we knew, this Jesus from, you know, Nazareth, you know, up in Galilee.
00:27:08.680
That's how particular he is, right? But he knows that's the way into the most universal truth.
00:27:19.940
Yes. Even when I think about eating and drinking with him, you know, he broils the fish. And I think,
00:27:24.940
you know, in one of their bites of fish, there was probably like a little bone. And in one of their
00:27:29.500
bites, it was a little bit like it was, the particularity goes even down that far. Like when
00:27:34.760
you remember a good meal, though, there was more that was memorable about the meal than the fish.
00:27:39.640
And our access to truth, even coming by way of a particular teacher. It's not just that
00:27:44.860
teachers give us insight. It's, you know, Mr. So-and-so from the 11th grade. The idea that
00:27:51.580
we get access through a particular YouTube video, even. I'm not even being glib. Or where do we first
00:27:57.100
get our access to learning and truth? It's the particular mother who bore us. How fitting then that
00:28:02.780
truth himself would be born of a mother. Right. Remember in the first letter of John,
00:28:08.160
where he says, I want to talk to you about the word of life. Okay. The word of life. Boy,
00:28:12.520
this guy is at the highest philosophical level. Then he says, which we looked upon with our eyes
00:28:18.460
and our hands have touched. Now there's the Christian difference. The word of life became
00:28:23.540
available to them in this most particular way. This word made flesh, right? Whom they could see and
00:28:30.800
touch? Well, see, look at the church. That's why we worry about like building beautiful churches and
00:28:36.380
why we have sacraments that you can see and you can taste and touch and they're grubby and there's
00:28:41.700
oil. I think that after a confirmation when they have to bring a lemon over to me so I can wipe the
00:28:47.600
oil off my hands. And I've been smearing that on the kids' foreheads. That's the sacramental life
00:28:53.300
of the church. It's grubby in particular, you know. But that tension is super important.
00:28:58.780
And there's always the Gnostic temptation to resolve that problem, to flee from it,
00:29:04.720
to flee from particularity. We often want to flee from it, especially in our
00:29:10.060
sort of scandalized modern world. And yet, there it is. There's the Christmas manger.
00:29:17.560
Nevertheless, we're confronted with this undeniable fact of the pivot on which the world turns.
00:29:23.280
Your Excellency, that makes me a little less scared, though perhaps even more in awe of the
00:29:31.180
end of the world as we look ahead to it at the incarnation. I hope you've had a blessed Advent.
00:29:38.620
It's always a busy time for a bishop. You're running all over the place to liturgies. And
00:29:42.380
I was at a women's prison about a week ago doing a Guadalupe ceremony for the women there. So yeah,
00:29:49.020
it's an interesting time of the year. You know, I'm a mere layman. I'm not even a bishop. And I'm
00:29:54.520
already exhausted by Advent. All I'm doing is stuffing my face with cookies and wine. So that's...
00:30:00.000
Well, let's talk to your spiritual director about that.
00:30:04.560
Bishop Barron, thank you for being here. Wonderful to see you. Wonderful to see all of you.
00:30:11.100
What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God?
00:30:28.520
Meriton, I knew your father. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
00:30:39.160
You are my father, that the gods should war for my soul.
00:30:55.280
There is a new power at work in the world. I've seen it.
00:31:21.880
Vader Britain never rests in the hands of the great light.
00:31:42.500
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
00:31:50.080
So cling to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.