TRANSCRIPT
Father Robert Barron
Rector, Mundelein Seminary, Chicago/Founder, Word on Fire Ministries/
Producer, “Catholicism” DVD series
Catholic Media Conference Opening Keynote Address
“Six Suggestions About What Would Make the New Evangelization More Effective”
June 19, 2013 Denver, Colo.
Transcribed by The Colorado Catholic Herald, Colorado Springs
Thank you very much. God bless you all for being here tonight.
I wanted to compliment Denver, because it really is true. This has become a hub of the New
Evangelization and a lot of the really “happening” things in the Catholic Church are happening here. And
I do trace a lot of it back, as everyone does, to (World Youth Day in Denver in) 1993 – that extraordinary
moment that we hope soon-to-be-saintJohn Paul II summoned the American church to new heights.
And so it started here, so appropriate in the Mile High City, this “duc in altum,” which can mean either
“go to the depths” or “go to the heights.” Frassati saw it, didn’t he … “verso l’alto” in Italian… go to the
heights. That’s wonderful that it was proclaimed here in the Mile High City, so thank you for that.
I want to talk about everyone’s favorite topic – the New Evangelization. The popes have been calling us
to this. And they’re right; it’s what the Church needs. I’ve been on the front lines the last 10 years or so,
doing apologetics and evangelization. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people. One thing I love about
YouTube ministry is, boy, it takes you outside the walls of the church. It’s great that we talk to each
other from time to time and encourage each other. But Internet ministry takes you way outside the
walls of the church. And I’ve learned a lot about what’s blocking people, what’s working and what isn’t
working.
The talk here is “Six Suggestions About What Would Make the New Evangelization More Effective.” And
I’ll be right up front about this. I’m a professor of theology, and I’ve been teaching for many years. It’s
content, content, content! Students will often ask me how to get involved in new media, or how to get
involved in radio, Internet and TV. I say, first get immersed in the “old technology” of books. I want you
reading, reading, reading. It’s content that matters.
We do need to learn the new media and how to use them. Thank God, at Word On Fire – and two of
them are here tonight – there’s a wonderful group of kids that help me with all the technicalities. If you
told me right now, “Father, go upload that video to YouTube,” I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’d turn to
them, so thank God for them. But the point is, it’s content that finally matters.
So, there are six things I want to recommend. I promise I won’t go on too long about any of them.
Here’s the number one suggestion for the New Evangelization: Lead with beauty. You know the three
transcendentals of goodness, truth and beauty. I’m going to argue with von Balthasar here that we
should lead with the beautiful. I’ll give you one great example from the 20th century. The best Catholic
novel of the 20th century, in my judgment, is Evelyn Waugh’s great “Brideshead Revisited.” And you
know the narrator of that wonderful story, Charles Ryder, is like a lot of people today – sort of a cool
agnostic. He comes into the Catholic world a bit like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, like he’s
looking at this strange phenomenon of Catholicism. And he’s a self-proclaimed agnostic. But what draws
him in first? Beauty. He comes to Brideshead, the great manor house, and that’s a symbol for Waugh of
the church – Christ as the head of his bride, the church, etc. So the manor house symbolized the church.
And the first thing that draws Charles Ryder in is the beauty of the place, which he finds utterly
captivating. Then, in the course of the story, he’s drawn eventually into the moral demands of the
house, symbolized by Lady Marchmain, his friend Sebastian’s mother. Now he balks and resists, as we all
do, but eventually comes to appreciate that. And only at the end of the story does he accept the truth of
Catholicism, where he sees it as, in his words, a “coherent philosophical system.”
Now, here’s what I find interesting. It’s exactly what Urs Von Balthasar recommended. Begin with the
beautiful, which leads you to the good, which finally leads you to the true. See, here’s the problem – and
you know this. In our post-modern culture, people balk like mad at truth and goodness. If you say, “Hey,
you’re not thinking right about this, here’s the truth,” what do you hear in response? “Who are you tell
me what’s true? That’s nice for you. I’ve got my truth, you’ve got your truth.” It’s the… you know how
kids do this… the “whatever” [makes a W with fingers and then turns it sideways like an E]. It’s the
whatever culture.
Or even worse, if you begin with the good and say, “The way you’re living right now, that’s not right.” All
the hackles go up. Everyone today is a descendant of Frederick Nietszche. I think, even more than Marx,
Nietzsche is the great influential philosopher of the 19th century. What was once the very high culture
of Europe in the 19th century is now on the lips of every teenager in America – what I mean is just that -“your truth, my truth . . . I invent myself . . . who are you to tell me what’s good.” In fact, if you do, that’s
just a disguised power play. Any teenager today would use that language; it’s right out of the Nietzsche
playbook. It has just come trickling down now over a long period of time.
I think it’s better to start with the beautiful, because the beautiful doesn’t raise the hackles in people in
quite the same way. If you just say, “Look at that. I’m not telling you what to think, I’m not telling you
how to behave, but look at that.” You go to Sainte Chapelle – that’s why we used it for the “Catholicism”
series cover – just walk in and look at that. Walk into the Sistine Chapel – look, look. Walk into Mother
Teresa’s motherhouse in Calcutta and watch the sisters. I’m not telling you what to think, just watch.
Here’s the wager: once you are captivated by the winsomeness of the beautiful, you are then led to the
good, namely, how can I participate in the life that made that beautiful thing possible? Then, once
you’ve lived that life for a time, then you understand the truth of it from the inside.
Here’s an example I often use to explicate this. When I was about 7 years old, my father took me to
Tiger Stadium in Detroit – I grew up just outside Detroit. It was my first pro baseball game. And I
remember vividly to this day coming up out of the bowels of the stadium, and there’s the bright, green
grass of Tiger stadium and the white uniforms of the players. I watched my first pro baseball game and I
was utterly captivated by how beautiful it was, which led me immediately to say to my father, “I want to
play. I want to get into that myself, I want to do that.” And then, once I played for a long time, I
understood baseball from the inside –even the more arcane rules, like the infield fly rule, I appreciated
that. I went from the beautiful to the good to the true.
I’d like to suggest for the new evangelization, we Catholics have the beautiful. We’re a beautiful religion.
We’ve emphasized it from the beginning. We never threw it away, at our best. Start with it, lead with it,
and then bring people to the beautiful and the true.
OK, second suggestion for the New Evangelization, and this one, everybody, is a cri de couer: Don’t
dumb down the message! Look, Vatican II was made possible by the intellectual cream of the church of
the mid-20th century – the von Balthasars, the De Lubacs, the Daniélous, Rahners, Ratizingers and
Wojtylas. The Vatican documents themselves are at a very high level of intellectual expression. More to
it, read Ross Douthat’s book “Bad Religion.” He comments that, in the mid-20th century in the Englishspeaking world, both Protestant and Catholic, there was a flourishing of intellectual life. Think of Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene and J.R.R. Tolkien. Think of the Niebuhr brothers, Paul Tillich, Fulton Sheen,
Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day – you could go on and on. T.S. Eliot. Look at this extraordinary flourishing
of intellectual life. That’s what produced Vatican II – it comes up out of that tradition.
And here’s why it’s a cri de couer.I came of age right after Vatican II. I went to first grade in 1965 – now
look at everyone doing the math:I came of age in the late 60s and 70s. We didn’t get a smart,
intellectually-rich Catholicism. We got dumbed-down Catholicism. It was the “banners and balloons”
Catholicism of my youth. I know – they were good people trying to reach out to the culture, trying to be
accessible, I get it. But I say to you, that was a pastoral disaster of the first order – dumbed-down
Catholicism. My generation, the first one that got it, grew up. And when you grow up and life hits you in
the face, and a culture that despises religion comes at you -- and I’ll talk to kids today as the new
atheists come at them -- banners and balloons aren’t going to do it. A flattened-out, dumbed-down
Catholicism is not going to carry the day. And that’s why a lot of people in my generation left the faith,
or why a lot of people in my generation who stayed had very little to pass down to their kids, and all
them are tongue-tied and are hand-wringing because they don’t know what to do.
Dumb-downed Catholicism was an intellectual mistake and it was a pastoral disaster. John Henry
Newman said that one of the clearest signs that Christianity is developing properly is that it stubbornly
thinks about the data of revelation. He’s dead right about that. The minute the church stops thinking, it
starts decaying, it starts moving into corruption. That’s what happened, I think, in the years after the
council. Look, too, at our great tradition. Everybody from Paul to Chrysostom to Jerome to Augustine to
Thomas Aquinas to Newman himself, all these people have a very strong, passionate, emotional
connection to God. Yes, indeed, the heart is very strong in all those people. But, by God, so is the head.
My generation got this big bifurcation between heart and head. “Oh, I’m not a theologian, I’m not a
heady intellectual, I’m a man of the heart.” Well, la-dee-dah, that’s never been a good idea in our
tradition. Our great people have never driven a wedge between the head and the heart, but we
inherited that.
You know what’s happened now: an entire successor generation, mine and another generation, make
two generations, have come to expect a dumbed-down Catholicism. I find if I’m giving a homily and I use
a three-syllable word, I’ll get people after Mass saying, “Oh Father, come on, you went a little high
there. It went over our heads. The kids aren’t going to be able to keep up with it.” These are lawyers and
doctors and investors. I’ll say to them, “You’re a doctor, you went to medical school, you read the New
England Journal of Medicine. You’re a lawyer, you went to law school, you read case studies of great
complexity. You’re a private equity investor. You’ve taken over entire businesses. What do you mean if I
use three syllables… why do you expect religion to be presented to you in this flattened-out, dumbeddown way?”But somehow, we have come to expect that, and that has been a disaster.
During the “new atheist” thing when it was really hot several years ago and Christopher Hitchens was
talking everywhere, I was on a Canadian radio program. This guy was interrogating me about Hitchens,
and at the end he said, “Father, wouldn’t you admit that at least Christopher Hitchens got you Catholics
thinking about these things for the first time?” I paused to let my annoyance sink in, and I said, “You
know, I represent the oldest intellectual tradition in the West. Trust me when I tell you that we were
thinking about these things a long time before Christopher Hitchens.”
Here’s another story that I just think it’s unanswerable. When my niece was going into her senior year in
high school – a very high level Catholic high school in the Chicago area – it was the end of the summer
and I was at my brother’s house and he said, “Go take a look at Nila’s books. She’s getting ready for her
senior year in high school.” It was a big pile of books, and the top book was “Hamlet.” Not Reader’s
Digest Hamlet or “Hamlet for Dummies,” but the whole text of Shakespeare. Under Hamletwas Virgil’s
Aeneid in Latin. So the most complicated poem ever written in Latin was one of her books. Underneath
that was her science book, a big, bristling Einsteinian thing with complex equations. Underneath that
was a big paperback with a picture on the cover and big print and pictures inside -- her religion book. I
said to my brother, “Does this bother you at all? She’s reading Hamlet for English class, she’s reading
Virgil in Latin, and she’s reading a comic book for religion.”
And so I went out and bought her volume one of Aquinas’ “Summa contra Gentiles,” “Confessions” of
Augustine, “The Mind’s Road to God” by Bonaventure, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Chesterton’s
“Orthodoxy.” And I presented those to her a week later and said, “These are the Catholic version of
those other books you’re reading.”
Here’s the thing: the Communists didn’t come in and make us do this, we did it to ourselves. We
dumbed down our own religion; our own people present these books to our kids. Let’s change it. I think
that’s key to the New Evangelization.
Read John Paul II – just to hear him again… talk about a man of wide culture. He’d reach out to the kids,
absolutely, no one’s better. But here’s someone who is versed in Aquinas, Augustine, Kant and
contemporary philosophy. That’s the model.
Number three: Preach with ardor. When John Paul II in Port au Prince (Haiti) in 1983, when he first used
the term “New Evangelization,” he said it’s got to be new in ardor, new in expression and new in
method. So now I’ll say a word about ardor.
Aristotle --go readhisRhetoric -- says that finally, people only really listen to an excited speaker. That’s
still right. If you can’t muster the enthusiasm and energy to get yourself excited, how do you expect your
audience to be? So ardor is key to this communication we call the New Evangelization.
But here’s the broader ecclesial framework. I’m with Cardinal George, my boss, when he says that
Vatican II was a missionary council. That’s right. Vatican II wasn’t primarily looking at doctrinal matters,
like the early councils were. Go back to Chalcedon and Nicea and so on. Or the Council of Trent, a
heavily doctrinal council. Vatican II wasn’t interested so much in that. Rather, it was interested in
bringing the “lumen” to the “gentium” – to bring the light of Christ to the world. The whole idea of
“open up the windows?” Don’t read it primarily as, well, “let the modern world in.” It was rather, to let
the life of the Church out. The image is really Noah’s Ark: the life has been preserved; now it’s time to
let it out. Don’t crouch behind medieval walls, but rather let the life that the church has preserved out
to transfigure the world, to Christify it. That’s the missionary impulse of Vatican II. And I think, when you
look at those texts, you see it on every page – ardor, energy, fire, missionary spirit. I tell my students at
the seminary, “You all got to have the hearts of missionaries. Maintaining parishes, that’s great, we
always have to do it, but that ain’t enough. You have to have the hearts of missionaries to do it. Ardor.
Here’s the problem again: What happened after the council? And this is the Church I came of age in…
Was it really a Church filled with missionary ardor, with a confident, bold addressing of the culture out
of a clear sense of what Catholicism is all about? The answer to that is no. The Church, in my view, was a
kind of a hand-wringing Church, a Church that was simply unsure of itself, full of doubts, questions,
wondering and reassessing. That is a very bad evangelical stance.
Now here’s a clue from Pope Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger was pre-eminently a man of the council. He
was at all the sessions of Vatican II, helped to write many of the major documents, played a huge role.
Right after the council, he along with Schillebeeckx, Rahner, Kung and De Lubacand all the great figures
become members of the editorial board of Concilium magazine. It still exists. The stated purpose of
which was to perpetuate the spirit of the council. But then, in about 1970, De Lubac, von Balthasar and
Ratzinger broke with Concilium and formed a new journal called Communio. Both journals still exist
today.
What’s really instructive is to read the essay that Ratzinger wrote explaining why he broke with the
Conciliumboard. Again, this is a man preeminently of the council speaking. He said, “I don’t think it’s
ever a good idea to perpetuate the spirit of any council.” The Church has paused only 20 times in its long
history for a council, and thereupon hangs a tale. Only rarely does the Church pause and, as it were,
throw itself into suspense to entertain some fundamental question. Go back to Nicea, Chalcedon and
Constantinople, when the Church is debating about who is Jesus Christ – nothing is more fundamental.
Or the Council of Trent, when the Church is dealing with the challenge of the Reformation. Or Vatican I.
The Church will throw itself into suspension and pause and ask these fundamental questions. Okay, we
need it once in a while. But, Ratzinger argued, I think quite persuasively, “It is always with a certain relief
that the Church turns from a council to get back to its life, to move out of the stance of self-questioning,
now back with confidence to do its work and to live its life.”And see, he and von Balthasar and De Lubac
identified that not as concilium but as communio – communio grounded in the Trinitarian persons,
expressed in the mystical body of Jesus, and through preaching and teaching – that’s the life of the
church.
What we don’t want is a permanent council. I don’t know if you read John O’Malley’s book, which is kind
of a popular history of Vatican II, but as I read the introduction it was kind of one of those “light bulb
over the head” moments for me. Because O’ Malley made this sociological observation. It wasn’t an
evaluation, it was a sociological observation. He said: “Vatican II was the greatest meeting of all time.”
What he meant was, thousands and thousands of people over four years met. I say the light bulb went
on because that explains a lot about the Church I came of age in. For most people of that generation,
the greatest event ever was a giant meeting. I’m a seminary rector, I understand meetings. The Church
needs to meet, yes indeed, but not permanently! I don’t want the meeting to go on forever. I want us
now, having clarified our roles and strategies, good… now let’s get back to it.
I think what John Paul II intuited, as I hear his call for a new ardor. He intuited that we kind of got stuck
in a conciliar mode, questioning, wondering, doubting, reassessing, handwringing – that’s antievangelical. What we need is ardor – get out and do the work. Those who saw the (“Catholicism”) series
know how strongly I believe re-affirming the Resurrection is. What saps us of ardor is getting wishywashy about the Resurrection – “It’s a myth; it’s a legend; it’s a symbol; it’s a literary device; it’s a sign
that the cause of Jesus goes on, blah, blah blah.” I’ve heard it. I grew up with that. That was the standard
Christology when I was coming of age. When you turn the Resurrection into a bland myth or symbol, you
take all the ardor out of the Church, because what you sense on every page of the New Testament is this
“grab-you-by-the-lapels” quality. They’re not training in bland myths, symbols and legends – that’s all
faculty lounge kind of talk. The New Testament is not written in a faculty lounge. It’s written by people
that want to grab you by the lapels and tell you something that’s so life-changingly important that
you’ve got to hear it. The Resurrection is the key to ardor – we’ve got to be real clear about that. Then it
fills the sails with the wind that we need.
Here’s number four: Tell the great story. Tell the great story of salvation history. My favorite biblical
author is N.T. Wright, who just stepped down as the Anglican bishop of Durham. He’s a great
practitioner of the modern biblical method, but he also is a deep Christian believer. Here’s a remark that
N.T. Wright made that took my breath away. He said, “The Christology of the last 200 years – both
Protestant and Catholic – has largely been Marcion-ite in form.” Now what does that mean?
Well, Marcion, in the second century, was a heretic who basically wanted to get rid of the Old
Testament. That’s a witness to a fallen god, get rid of all that business . . . get rid of much of the New
Testament too, said Marcion. This was resisted by St. Irenaeus, one of my great heroes. Up and down
the centuries, we need to keep resisting Marcionism that will bracket the Old Testament. Now, what did
Wright see? He saw, if you look back toFriedrich Schleiermacher, the founder of modern liberal
Protestantism, follow Schleiermacher to people like Ritschl, Bultmann, Rahner, Tillich and David Tracy,
what are you going to find? You are going to find a presentation of Jesus in which the Old Testament is
never even mentioned. Now think about it, and this is for the theologians, for Schleiermacher, Jesus is
the man with perfect God-consciousness. For Paul Tillich, Jesus is the one who experiences the new
being. For Karl Rahner, Jesus is the one who is man in the presence of absolute mystery. For Bultmann,
he’s the man who utterly makes the right choice.
The trouble is, Jesus has now been deracinated; he’s been divorced from his Old Testament roots. it
turns him into a bland cypher with no evangelical power. Here’s what the first evangelists saw: they saw
that this Yeshua from Nazareth was the fulfillment of the expectation of Israel. That’s why they kept
saying, “According to the writings . . . , according to the Scriptures. . .” They appreciated him as the
climax to a great story --the story of salvation, which begins with creation, followed by the fall, followed
by the formation of a people after God’s heart who then become the magnet to the rest of the world,
followed by the coming of the Messiah, who is the climax of the story of Israel. Temple, covenant, law,
prophecy -- what is all that but the means by which Yahweh is trying to effect a union between himself
and his people, the way he was forming a priestly people so that that priestly people, in turn, would
gather the rest of the world. Mount Zion, where all the tribes of the Lord go up. When the Son of Man is
lifted up he will draw all things to himself. What he’s saying is, I myself on the cross am the climax of the
story of Israel.
That is why, when the doctrinal commission says that, in Jesus, two natures come together -- divine and
human, without mixing, mingling or confusion -- what is it saying? He’s the true temple. He’s the true
prophet. He’s the fulfillment of the law,he’s the fulfillment of the covenant. He is the magnetic point,
now, around which the whole world will revolve. And that’s the message Paul had – Jesus Kyrios, Jesus is
Lord, which means there is now a focal point for time history, nature and everything else. See friends,
that’s evangelization.That’s evangelization, that the story has reached its climax and I want the whole
world to know it.
When you turn Jesus into a bland cypher, when you deracinate him and pull him up from his Jewish
roots, he becomes something bland. A teacher of timeless truths. A guru and a mystic – ho, hum. There
are a thousand of those around. I like mystics. I like gurus. But there are thousands of them. Jesus is not
that, he’s the climax of the story of salvation. Learn it. That’s what I love about these biblical
movements, including the Augustine Institute here, trying to teach Catholics again the Great Story.
People say, “Oh Father, you can’t expect the kids today to learn the Bible.” There was a 9-year-old girl,
the daughter of someone who works in our Word on Fire office. She came in one day – a real bright kid.
And she has watched all the Star Wars movies, all six of them. And, honest to God, this kid could give
you chapter and verse of the entire Star Wars saga. I can say Han Solo and Princess Leia. I mean, she’s
way beyond that. She gives you every little detail of the Star Wars saga. Don’t tell me kids can’t learn the
Bible. Don’t tell me they can’t learn every detail of the Great Story that really matters. In fact, the best
of the Star Wars stories is an imitation of the Bible. So learn it and teach the kids and let them know who
Jesus is.
Fifth suggestion: Stress the Augustinian anthropology. So Augustine Institute, this is for you. The single
greatest expression of Christian anthropology in the entire tradition is on the first page of Augustine’s
“Confessions. “We all know it: “Lord, you have made us for yourself; therefore, our heart is restless until
it rests in thee.” There’s no better statement of Christian anthropology anywhere. Everything in
Christian anthropology seems to be as a footnote to that statement. Here’s a neat thing – a priest at
Boston College corrected me on this. I had been saying, “Lord, you made us for yourself, for our hearts
are restless until they rest in thee.” And he said, “But Augustine doesn’t say ‘our hearts’ but ‘our heart is
restless.’” And it’s an important point because it’s signaling that this is what brings all of us together. I
don’t care what culture you’re from, what your background is. What we all have in common is a hungry
heart, as Bruce Springsteen put it. Lord, You made us for Yourself. Therefore our heart -- universal --we
all have this in common, is restless until it rests in Thee. Nothing in this world satisfies the hungry heart.
Listen to every sermon by Billy Graham. Billy Graham and John Paul II are the two greatest evangelizers
of the 20th century -- what do you hear in every one of them? Some version of that. Some version of
“You’ve tried this, this, this and that, haven’t you, and you’re not happy. I’ve got what will satisfy you
hungry heart.” That’s the heart of evangelization, and if we lose confidence in that message then we’re
going to lose confidence in our own power to announce the Gospel.
Think here of the great C.S. Lewis, when he called Joy nothing but this deliciously restless quality of the
heart. Lewis pointed out that it’s not just in bad times of life that we realize this, but precisely the best
times of life – the times when you’ve succeeded, you’ve achieved, you’ve come to knowledge, or
goodness, justice, joy or pleasure –precisely at those moments is when the hungry heart asserts itself.
“There’s got to be more. That’s not enough.” The great biblical story here, it seems to me, is the priests
of Baal in Elijah up on Mount Carmel. Go back to the story of Kings 1, by the way. It’s a beautiful story of
evangelization.
Elijah’s the one prophet left and there are 450 priests of Baal. “But I’ll take you on; you erect an altar to
your gods and I’ll erect one to Yahweh, and we’ll see what happens.” So, they erect altars to their gods,
and they hop around and beg and cajole, they pray, and the whole morning goes by. Now it’s high noon,
and Elijah wonderfully mocks them. “Where are they? You’ve been calling all morning and where are
your gods? I don’t know, maybe they’re napping. Maybe they’re off on vacation.” In fact, my Hebrew
scholar friends tell me that a sense of the Hebrew there is, “Maybe they’re in the bathroom. I don’t
know where they are.”
Then the priests of Baal take out their knives and slash themselves until the blood flows; they hop and
they cajole and nothing comes – there’s no fire. Of course, Elijah calls upon Yahweh and fire comes
down and consumes the sacrifice.
But here’s the thing. There’s much more to this story than simply, “My God’s bigger than your god.” It’s
not just “I won.” It’s telling a very profound storyof a Gospel truth. Think of those priests of Baal as the
avatars of all those false gods we worship. Think of the altars as all of the altars we erect too – wealth,
honor, pleasure, power, the goods of the world. Those are from Thomas Aquinas by the way -- the big
four substitutes for God: wealth, honor, pleasure and power.
What do most of us do? We spend our lives hopping around those altars seeking fire, seeking the
satisfaction of our hearts. What’s the point of the story? It won’t come. Why? Because, Lord, you made
us for yourself. We have an infinite hunger, a hunger for God, and no amount of wealth, honor, pleasure
or power will satisfy it. And so we get frustrated, and in our frustration we become addicted. And now,
with a sort of desperate quality, we hop around those altars.
Listen, now, anyone who’s been through an addiction – though, in some ways, fellow sinners, all sin is an
addiction – they hop around those altars to the point of even harming themselves. Sound familiar?
Those of us who’ve sought wealth, power, pleasure, honor? Addicts -- think of the woman at the well
here. She comes every day to that well, and (Jesus says), “You get thirsty again, don’t you?” Yes, yes.
That’s all of us. Augustine said she symbolizes the church, she’s everybody. “I want to give you water
bubbling up in you to eternal life. I want to give you the one thing that will satisfy the longing of your
heart,” (Jesus says). Elijah calling upon Yahweh is precisely that move. Only in that way will the fire
come.
How many priests of Baal were there? 450. How many prophets of Yahweh? One. How many priests of
Baal are there today? There are millions of them. They’re thick on the ground. The avatars of wealth,
power, pleasure, honor – listen to any song, go to any movie, read any book. Listen to people talk. Boy,
the priests of Baal are thick on the ground. You know what we need to do Christians? We need to mock
them -- and not in a meanness of spirit, but because they’re doing terrible damage to people. What they
lead to is the addictive behavior of those people hopping around the altar. We need to mock them
publicly, and we need to remind people how to call upon the true God.
You know, 75 percent of Catholics stay away from church. We say, “That’s too bad, ho hum.” The fathers
of Vatican II are turning in their graves over this. Go back to Guardini and those people… the Liturgical
Movement people. What did they want? They wanted more people at Mass, they wanted the Mass to
come alive! If you would have told Romano Guardini that in the year 2013 (that) 75 percent of American
Catholics were staying away from Mass . . . you know what they do, though, when they stay away from
Mass? They go right to the altars of the priests of Baal, trust me, and I deal with them every day. Not just
kids, all kinds of people on the Internet forum, every day. And you see the same addictive pattern.
That’s why, see, evangelization is not just whistling Dixie, it’s not just a little affair of the mind.
Evangelization is bread and water, it’s fire. It’sgoing to save people, quite right. And we’ve got to recover
that.
One more (sixth):The Irenaen doctrine of God. I mentioned Irenaeus already, second century theologian.
Dies probably a martyr in the year 200 in Lyon. Do you know what you see when you read Irenaeus over
and over again? “I learned this from Polycarp, who learned it from John.” He’s just a generation
removed from those who heard the apostles. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was burned at the stake,
one of the great stories. He was taught by John, the apostle, who rested in the breast of Jesus. So
Irenaeus is teaching really fundamental, biblical stuff that goes right back to the apostles. And what’s his
great insight about God? It’s this: God doesn’t need us, and that’s such good news. God doesn’t need us;
God is God. That means the whole world has been loved into being. To love is to will the good of the
other. It’s all God can do, God has no need of us. Therefore, the very existence of the world – your
existence tonight – is a sign that you are right now being loved into existence. God is not our rival. God’s
not in competition with us. Instead, what does Irenaeus say in his great one-liner? Destroy all of
Christian literature and keep this one line and you’ve got the whole thing: “Gloria dei homo vivens” – the
glory of God is a human being fully alive. That’s the Irenaen doctrine of God, and he opposed the
gnostics of his time. Read all of Irenaeus to get that whole story, but he taught this great doctrine of
God.
What do you hear from every atheist, both the classical atheists and the new atheists? You hear the
repudiation of the Irenaen doctrine of God. Go back to Feuerbach and Marx, Freud and Sartre – the
classical atheists -- and what do you find? You find that the “no” to God is a “yes” to man – that’s
Feuerbach. You see in Marx, “We’ll never be free as long as we’re worshipping God.” John-Paul Sartre
said, “If God exists, I can’t be free. But I am free, therefore God doesn’t exist.” They’re assuming a
competitive, antagonistic attitude.
The new atheists are just more mean-spirited repeaters of those old arguments – read Hitchens,
Dawkins, Sam Harris and company. You’ll find just a more mean-spirited version of those arguments. We
Christians need to be clear about who God is. If we fall into their trap, then we fall into the Bill Maher
Trap, which is that God is just this old pre-scientific myth, old bronze-age speculation. It’s these poor,
benighted yahoos from long ago that invented wish-fulfilling fantasies. You hear it every day. And mind
you that a study just came out: our kids are becoming atheists. When do they become atheists? In high
school, between the ages of 14 and 18. How are they becoming atheists? Through the Internet. It’s very
disturbing.But, you see, where are we? That’s what bugs me. Where are we to be out there in the public
space contesting this false view of God? That the true God is not in competition with us. The true God
wants us fully alive.
Go back to the ancient myths, the gods and goddesses of the myths of ancient times. By the way, in
certain circles today, you hear people say, “Let’s bring the old gods back.” I’m with Augustine – gods and
goddesses, give me a break. What do you find with the old gods and goddesses? That they are in
competition with humans. Think of Prometheus – he steals fire from the gods. And aren’t they happy
about it? Aren’t they thrilled? No, he’s punished for all eternity. When the gods or goddesses break into
the world, what happens? Things blow up, people are incinerated, because the gods are in competition
with us. They desperately need our praise, and they resent it when we don’t praise them. Do you want
them back? I don’t.
Now, look at the Bible. When the true God breaks into the world, what happens? Moses saw a bush that
was on fire but was not consumed. “Ah, I must go and look at this,” he says. Thank God he did, because
that’s how the true God manifested himself. When the true God, who doesn’t need the world, comes
close to the world, He makes it luminous and radiant and doesn’t consume it. Think how powerful that
image is. When the true God comes close, the world is more radiant and luminous, more fully and
beautifully itself, and it is not consumed. The burning bush is but an anticipation of the Incarnation,
when God becomes human, but in such a way that He doesn’t destroy the humanity He becomes, but
rather elevates and perfects and makes it radiant. That’s the true God, and we can’t allow the atheists to
have the stage on this one, because believe me our young people are listening to them.
You know, talk about ardor? Watch Christopher Hitchens on YouTube sometime. Ardor, intelligence,
passion for his message? Yes. Rhetoric? He’s got it all. Why aren’t we there? We’ve got to be there. With
this great arsenal that we have – the beauty of our tradition,the telling of the great story, with ardor,
with a keen sense of what fundamental anthropology is, with a keen sense of who God is. I think if we
do that we can fulfill this great dream of John Paul to launch a New Evangelization.
God bless you all tonight for listening.