To Light a Fire on the Earth by Robert Barron

Author:Robert Barron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

EVANGELIZATION AND POPE FRANCIS

Robert Barron, unabashedly and unmistakably, is a St. John Paul II sort of Catholic cleric. He was swept up by the boldness of John Paul, his swagger and confidence and bravado in presenting the Catholic faith to the world, and he doesn’t hesitate to say that John Paul deserves to go down as one of the great Doctors of the Church.

“There’s something about Wojtyla’s breadth of mind that I think he would qualify,” Barron says, using John Paul’s given name, Karol Wojtyla.

Yet Barron also very much has a both/and mind, which makes him a big Pope Francis fan as well. In fact, Barron believes that history’s first pope from the developing world, perhaps without thinking about it in quite these terms, is a living role model of the kind of evangelization that works in the cultural milieu of the early twenty-first century.

“Pope Francis hasn’t changed the faith, but he has changed the conversation,” Barron says. “What Francis has done in terms of public conversation about the Church is to make it clearer to people we’re not just about sex. That’s been extremely helpful in our wider outreach.”

By placing such an emphasis on humility and simplicity, on service to the poor, on concern for the environment and social justice, on immigrants and refugees, on opposition to war and the arms trade, and with his ardent outreach to the “peripheries” of the world, Barron believes, Francis has succeeded in lifting up aspects of the Church’s thought and life that were always there but that sometimes got lost amid a myopic focus on sex and the culture wars.

“Pope Benedict was a great evangelist at the intellectual level, and he was very keen on the engagement of the secular culture at the high academic level,” Barron says. “But I would say our prospects are better under Pope Francis than they were before in terms of the engagement of the wider world. It’s a skeptical world, skeptical for reasons both intellectual and moral, and this pope has been extremely effective in reconnecting to it.”

Barron is especially enthusiastic about Pope Francis’s 2013 document Evangelii Gaudium, which he sees as a sort of Magna Carta for effective evangelization in our day.

When I read Evangelii Gaudium, my first reaction was “Yes!” These are my themes; it’s what I’ve been talking about for years—not that Pope Francis consulted me, because, believe me, he didn’t! For example, he strongly stresses the via pulchritudinis (way of beauty), and when I read that, I said, That’s right out of my playbook. Don’t begin with the true or the good, begin with the beautiful, and it leads you to the true and the good. But begin with the beau geste, the kind gesture. You know he’s a master of the beau geste. He’s not a theologian and he’s not an academic, but he’s a genius at the beautiful gesture that draws people to Christianity. Then there’s a sense of urgency, how an emergency will concentrate the mind, focus the mind.

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