Here is my commentary on this video by Robert Barron. It is a reflection on some of the pertinent issues and points he addresses here. And it is a robust critique of some of his analyses.

Oh-oh! Looks like someone has deleted this video from YouTube! 😆 And so now, I don’t know exactly how this commentary (on a video that was there previously but has since been removed) will go down….but we shall see.

On the topic of how you get people in today’s secularized world to see the dire cause of their spiritual condition as a “cause worth fighting for” is that you need to be able to draw the link between the equally worthy cause of their spiritual wellbeing with that of say, the environmental crisis, for these issues are both but reflections of each other.

We have an environmental crisis not because it’s some kind of ‘distraction’ trumped up by the Evil One to divert us from noticing or focusing on the ‘real one’, the spiritual one, no!…but more properly, we have an environmental crisis PRECISELY because we have a spiritual one. Both are linked, and both need working on in tandem. We have global warming only as an indication that the Prophetic word from the Second Epistle of Peter will come to pass our way much sooner if we do not heed the warnings of the present time. Yes, the Conflaguration is a work of the Holy Spirit and a necessary one at that to renew the face of the Earth. But this transformation by fire can be halted and stalled for us to learn to renew our ways – our ways of relating with each other and with the world around us – which btw, have become so decrepit and so out of sync with God’s natural laws. And because they’re so out of sync with God’s natural laws, we are faced with an ecological crisis as symptomatic of us having, as a whole, to a large extent become severely disconnected from honouring those natural laws set in place by God, and through this dishonouring of them, we are dishonouring God Himself!

So, this time as St Faustina said, is the Time for Mercy…God wants to tell us that there is still time for His abundant mercy to embrace us before our Earth gets embraced by the Sun. The science, the data tells us that the Earth has been set on the path of a natural collision course with the Sun but also that our ribald ways of gross disregard and disrespect for the sacredness of life, of the creation has led to a “speeding up” of this process.

But there is HOPE and it can be halted, held back from enveloping us before we are TRULY ready. And this is why all the apparitions of Fatima tell us to pray:

Oh my Jesus! Forgive us our sins and save us from the fires of Hell. Lead ALL souls to Heaven, especially those who are most in need of Thy Mercy. AMEN!”

And notice, Our Blessed Mother’s call is an iteration of her Son’s Holy Will that ALL souls be saved…ALL. And we want to pass through the process of renewal as a PURGATION & CLEANSING, NOT AS A PUNISHMENT. Therefore, it is necessary for each and everyone to begin to look at their own spiritual life, just as Bishop Barron says in this video. Going down the escapist route of ignoring the dire state of our world in the spiritual sense “as if that can somehow cause it to resolve itself” will not be the resolve we need because ignoring something does not in and of itself guarantee that the problem will just eventually disappear. However, each and every one of us needs to be brought into awareness of the reality of our own individual spiritual states in order that we can be brought back into alignment with the Holy will of God for our lives.

And now to this idea that everybody is supposed to somehow automatically be able to be “all on the same page at once” with regards to understanding and embracing the Ignatian notion of The Two Standards, is quite frankly a ridiculous and unrealistic expectation. Why? Because everyone is at completely different points on their spiritual journey. In some peoples’ lives, the Holy Spirit has endowed them with the wisdom to understand the nature of The Two Standards and it’s meaning. In others, He hasn’t done that so those people are the ones who are going to be going like this: “Oh, yeah, I don’t know which one.” They obviously don’t understand this predicament because they do not really take it seriously and yes, they are in dangerous territory…they are worldly. That said, we cannot just assume therefore, that because they are worldly in this regard, then all is completely and utterly LOST for them, no! It is no business of ours to then simply relegate them to the scrap-heap of history just because they are still in the LOST zone. These people NEED SAVING! If anything, they need saving. They need to be taken from the clutches of the world and translated into God’s Kingdom of Light. But this process of translation can only be instigated by the Holy Spirit and it may or may not, depending upon God’s specific will for that person, take time.

And what’s more, is that it’s not a case either of “whether you like it or not” because if you have been unknowingly and forcibly conscripted by deception into something that you are not realizing is actually the Devil’s army, then, once you find out you are in the wrong army, then of course, you are going to want OUT. And, if we can stand on the Word of God, and know it to be TRUE, then we can rely upon the knowledge that there IS hope for those who are LOST like those who want OUT from the Devil’s army. God is truly a God of love, and so His righteousness and mercy go hand in hand. He does not want to leave those who were deceived in the place of their deception. He wants for them to be delivered. It is imperative that we not lose sight of the fact that Jesus came to – give sight to the blind, to heal the broken-hearted and to set the captives free – not to leave them in their states of bondage just because “they happened to fall into these states” whether by folly or without realizing it. And so we need to have a heart of longing to reach those held in bondage to Satan’s kingdom, to his standard. We cannot be content just to leave them in it. We need to become proactive like Jesus in helping them to exit that awful place of bondage.

My other gripe as regards all of this relates to this arrogant presumption held by Robert Barron that all people should be able to instantaneously grasp the depths of spiritual mysteries or doctrinal truths in all of their sublime wisdom, and all of this only because Barron observes that many are adept in scholarly fields of this & that and because he attended a Thomistic studies conference recently and observed a huge turnout does in no way account for the hundreds upon thousands who are not even involved in tertiary education at all! And this is why I have to say he is asking way too much too soon without having the heart to recognize that everyone is endowed by God differently with regards to comprehending and understanding spiritual truths. St Ignatius acknowledged this wide dispersion of depth in understanding and St Paul speaks of it when he talks about how God has dispersed the gifts of the Holy Spirit differently – to different degrees or extents and in different ways. There is an uncomfortable element of arrogant impatience littering the words of Bishop Barron here in this video on this topic of the crisis of our present age. I get that he is zealous for the idea of drawing people back to the Catholic Faith but he lacks the patience and dedicated willingness to understand the infinite variety of ways God can and does work in peoples’ lives to draw them back to Him. But it’s like Barron presumes blanketedly that everyone, regardless of the interstitial intricacies of their own life-circumstances and particular state in life, should be either automatically on the same page OR have no trouble in reaching that page almost with the speed of light, insofar as the ability to grasp spiritual knowledge and wisdom is concerned.

Robert Barron, is no doubt I might add, for the time being anyhow, in the league of high-brow Pharisees. For that is how the Pharisees in Jesus’ own time were in relation to their expectations of everyone who came under their leadership. They expected that everybody, no matter their own situation or circumstance, ought to be able to perfectly grasp and put into practice all the tenets of the Law they so fastidiously prided themselves on observing, and in a very legalistic fashion I might add. And sadly, Barron is following their example in this area, not Christ’s. “Aghh, that’s for the birds!”, he scoffs when asked by interviewer Colm Flynn about the moral efficacy of expecting the great vast majority of adolescents to be able to comprehend the intricate theological underpinnings of the Eucharistic mysteries. I was gobb-smacked to learn that Bishop Barron had such a high unrealistic expectation of swathes of kids all because he is entrenched in a further unrealistic belief that St Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica for beginners! It might do Robert Barron well and good and as a lesson in humility to learn that in this day and age, people on the whole have grown alot dimmer in some areas of socio-intellectual development and formation in spite of the fact that they have grown on a collective level, more aware and empathetic in other areas. And this socio-intellectual developmental lag exists because the quality of teaching even in Catholic schools has been compromised by:

1. a lack of harmoniously integrating the spiritual lessons from the Gospels on an intimate personal level so that an interior life of zealous searching and prayer begins in earnest early on,

2. the unfortunate trend (particularly in the pre-Vatican II era) of a theological re-framing of the Gospel message in stoicist terms and

3. secularization seeping in here and there without people even being aware that it’s happening.

In view of this then, it is important that those of us who are spiritually grounded in the faith-filled traditions and practices of the Church take every measure to guard our hearts in balancing humility with zeal to evangelize. Tact coupled with interrelational enthusiasm is optimal. To go all out there in someone’s face like a bull in a China shop will only be counterproductive in a great many instances, as Colm Flynn tried to assert on responding to Robert Barron’s charge that adolescents are fully capable of integrating the entire breadth and depth of the awesomely adorable simplicity of Eucharistic spirituality. It is NOT honouring to the mystery of God’s timing in the life of one’s growth and development to expect them to flourish fully and too soon and this even in spiritual things. I read recently an utterly spot-on rendition of this in a great book by Ronald Rolheiser entitled Chastity and the Soul: You are Holy Ground* and in this work, Fr Rolheiser cites a profound lesson which directly relates to the importance of learning to honour God’s timing in all things:

“Chastity is about proper reverence in every area of life, not just in the area of sex. In his book Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis shares this story: He had been watching a moth come out of its cocoon. The process was fascinating but painstakingly slow. After watching this interminably slow metamorphosis, he eventually lost patience and applied some heat to the moth. It sped up the process, and the moth emerged more quickly…. But because the process had been pressured to come to its culmination earlier than nature intended, the moth emerged with damaged wings. It could not fly.
In essence, chastity is proper reverence, respect, and patience. And, in a culture that is often characterized by irreverence, disrespect, and impatience, it is much needed. To be chaste is to experience people, things, places, entertainment, the phases of life, life’s opportunities, and sex, in a way that does not violate them or us. In brief, I am chaste when I relate to others in a way that does not violate their moral, psychological, emotional, sexual, or aesthetic contours. I am chaste when I do not let irreverence or impatience denigrate or cheapen what is gift, and when I let life, others, and sex, unfold according to their own proper dictates…” (p. 3)

And so it is with our personal and collective spiritual development. We need to be on guard, conscientiously cultivating our spiritual awareness but before we can even do that, God needs to prep our hearts for opening unto this process. And everybody is going to be on different pages in the whole scheme of things. That’s just the nature of life in evolution – the evolution of our world back into right relationship with God. When I speak of “evolution” here, I am not refering to the Darwinian concept of biological evolution as I do not subscribe to that notion anyhow. I am talking about “evolution” as mere process or stages of growth in our existence as a large family of created beings, beloved and sustained by God.

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Additional Reference:

* Rolheiser, R., Chastity and the Soul: You are Holy Ground, 2024, Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massachusetts, p. 3