I’m so glad I found Bishop Barron over the last 3-years. Although throughout my life I considered myself a Catholic/Christian hearing his talks has brought me back to the faith in a unique and wonderful way. Thank you Bishop Barron for all these great talks and videos. My father named me after St.Thomas Aquinas but I never really understood the significance of how special he was until Fr. Barron’s videos. Recently my father ( who is 94 years old ) proposed that in regards to the 80 % of fallen away Catholics that we should all pray for them to come back to the faith. In other words a campaign for practicing Catholics to pray for the fallen away Catholics. This is something we rarely hear about coming from the clergy or even as part of the Prayer of the Faithful at Mass on Sundays. Prayer 🙏 is the most powerful way to change the heart. If we as practicing Catholics ( 20%) prayed for on regular basis for that 80% who do not go to Mass I believe we would make a difference.
Absolutely fantastic.Thank you God Bless always Bishop. PRAY that your talk will be heard and listen too by the youths of the world at large.Most of all that our Catholic youths take in what theyYve heard strengthen them to go out and evangelise for our Catholic Faith.
Bishop, you are amazing. I've been following you for many years now. Today I have to say that I'm starting to feel called to be a priest, and you might have had an influence on that. No decision taken yet, but the interest is there, where it had never existed in me.
As a former none I can tell you that the reason so many young, former Catholics do not like certainty, and "romanticize the quest" is because they have seen and experienced judgement and hypocrisy coming from the institutional church, and they do not want to rest there in that place of judgement and hypocrisy. At least that was my stance when I stood outside the church. Total valid, even healthy reaction. Bishop Barron is criticizing these people of unformed faith or theology as if they are on the same sort of spiritual footing as he is as a learned man of the church. He is coming off as smug; although I agree with everything he says, his criticism is only valuable to explain to those of us who have faith why those who don't are at a disadvantage spiritually or existentially. You will never build bridges with those people you are trying to reach with this approach. Bishop Barron is making these great, well-informed arguments that will have absolutely no effect in the culture at large. Just want to add that Bishop Barron's description and discussion about authentic faith makes some very valuable points that should be memorized and repeated by those of us who have religious faith when our faith is challenged as being childish or superstitious.
Not just young people are uncomfortable with assertions made by humans about who or what God is, older philosophical agnostics are reasonably sure that no human can know any such thing. Theologians overlook our manifest human limits and that they share these.
The 7 minute introduction glorifying Bp Barron was a bit off putting. What was the point....to convince the audience that the speaker is worth listening to?
I'm a ex-Roman Catholic Christian, now a nonreligious skeptic. I suppose you could say I "left" the Catholic Church when I realized the historical claims Christianity made about Jesus were unsustainable and that Christianity simply wasn't true. I didn't so much have any dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church (though I had serious reservations about many of its doctrines), I simply worked out that Christianity generally was unsustainable intellectually. At the age of seventeen I found myself on the sidelines of a debate between my school's most annoying evangelical Christian and a skeptic. Even though I generally agreed with her (despite finding her highly irritating), I had to admit he got the better of her in the argument. Every time she tried to say "Jesus said x" or "Jesus did y" he would respond "How do you know?" She didn't have much of a response to this other than "It's in the Bible" and some rather weak assurances that the Bible's accounts were historically true. Given that this struck me, as a budding young historian, as a rather feeble argument, I decided to go and research the historical basis for my Christian beliefs. I was confident that once I'd done enough reading on the matter, I'd be able to hold my own against a similar skeptic's questioning. Several years later, after an enormous amount of reading and study of modern scholarship on the question of the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity, I realized that Jesus was not the Son of God and the second person of the Holy Trinity, but was actually Yeshua ben Yosef, a Jewish rabbi and apocalyptic prophet and that Christianity was a gentile religion that evolved out of a Jewish end times sect. After years of studying philosophy, I also realized I could no longer sustain a belief in any religion. So while I'm not a bitter ex-Catholic and am not an atheist, I have no regrets at all about leaving the Catholic Church and abandoning religious belief. My Catholic upbringing and education has given me an understanding of religious faith and a very solid knowledge of the Bible (better than most Christians I come across) as well as a good understanding of western history, since it was so heavily influenced by Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. But my philosophical stance these days is humanism. I identify myself as an agnostic with some possible deistic leanings because I do consider deism but I don't claim to know the exact origin of the universe and we may never know for sure.
Since you claim to be an agnostic, maybe you would be comfortable praying to the unknown god to show itself to you. Investigate miracles outside of natural law, and you may begin to see that the creator actually exists. God bless you.
When you say that you "realized the historical claims Christianity made about Jesus were unsustainable and that Christianity simply wasn't true.", what do you mean by those claims?
I am still wait ing to hear that Jesus is the way the truth the life for youth today ,not even a suggestion in the experience of a marvellous presentation of the church’s evangelism.Why not??
There is unlikely to be one reason for people leaving Christianity in general or the Catholic Church in particular and, in any case, and answer has to be somewhat speculative. It is clear that in regions where education levels are higher, religiosity is much lower, and that university graduates are far less likely to maintain their childhood faith than people who only finished high school. So, one important reason is that knowledge and the ability to think clearly about complex issues lead to a loss of religious faith. No doubt the scandals that have enveloped the Catholic Church almost regularly also contribute to the Church’s loss of adherents. People either reevaluate their faith and realize they do not really believe in any organized religion, or they transfer allegiance to another Christian church. The rapid loss of priests in many areas, and the consequent closure of churches and merger of parishes make regular attendance at mass more difficult, especially as church attendees tend to be among the older generations in most Western countries. I study history as an amateur, but don't let the word amateur fool you. I knows my history, and I have bothered to do the research. As a rationalist, I believe strongly that people should do all they can to put emotion, wishful thinking and ideology aside when examining any subject and that they should acquaint themselves as thoroughly as possible with the relevant scholarship and take account of any consensus of experts in any field before taking a position. Through my biblical studies, which draws on disciplines ranging from archaeology, ancient history, cultural backgrounds, textual criticism, literary criticism, historical backgrounds, philology, and social science, I came to the conclusion that Christianity isn't true and the same goes for many other religions, which is why I'm no longer a cradle catholic but instead I'm a nonreligious skeptic. I have no use for comfort so it was through my education and intellectual pursuit for truth, I lost my faith completely. Let me make it clear, I'm not an atheist but I consider all religions to be wrong, with regards to their extraordinary claims, such as the assertion of many religions of originating from divine revelation(e.g. Abrahamic religions).
There was a politician (now dead), who was baptised a Catholic and then became a non-theist and would sometimes ridicule those who believe in God. Throughout his good adult life until he died at the age of 80 requested to return to Church and he was given a Christian burial. 'Great things happen when God meets with people'.
As someone who likes to think of himself as an "engaged" or "open-minded" atheist (setting aside ambiguities about what exactly "atheist" even means), I intuitively "get" the presentation of religious belief as *moral postulates,* particularly as a way to reconcile beliefs that seem to elude consequentialist logic. The Catholic Church appears to hold many such beliefs, and to be in principle staunchly opposed to reasoning apparently reducible to pure consequentialism. For example, the assertion that human life is inherently valuable really can't be reduced to arguments about utility. And it's not something that can be proved, because it's not a statement that makes any provision for its own falsification. Obviously, that's still very non-committal. An acceptance, in principal, of moral postulates hardly amounts to an acceptance of Christ's divinity and so forth. But the notion of faith as moral postulates makes intuitive sense to me. Obviously any deductive logic will rest on postulates (definitions, whatever), and any inductive logic will necessarily rest on epistemological assumptions. To me, as to Bp Barron I'm sure, the sort of philosophizing I'm engaging in is not (hopefully!) merely an exercise in abstract logic or an attempt to scrutinize human intuitions. Obviously religious and/or abstract moral belief, when acted out, can have huge practical consequences psychologically (i.e. at the level of the individual) and politically. Therefore, I like to think I also have a pragmatic attitude toward viewing Catholicism or other religious traditions as competitors to the other "-isms" of the world. A statement like "Catholicism beats Communism" sounds trite and obvious to me (and even a bit offensive to the former), but I think things get more interesting when one starts comparing religious teachings to -isms (for an American, anyway) closer to home. Obviously, hearing opposing viewpoints is (with a few qualifications) a very good way of determining truth. And with a lot of political dialogue rather stale, I've been very interested to listen to what is, for me, a fresh perspective implicitly on political questions. Therefore, I appreciate the outreach of the Church if only for my own selfish reasons.
Young people think nothing of having bastard children today-- never thinking of what this does to the bastard. They don't get married-- just keep procreating. This is destroying the family and society. The culture is beyond base and the stupidity and ignorance is downright cruel to everyone.
Just me but I think the younger generation is more christ like, loving, and the oldsters are the real nones who have a pretense of religion but live like practical atheists.
How to teach our youth to want to be good (god). The trick is to "be" uplifting with words and actions. I don't think "in search of the nones" or the culture of formation or whatever is interesting. I think in order for our prescious youth to dream of being good (god), the Bible needs to be translated into something a little more "desirable". Perhaps "Love, magic and metaphysics". Love is the supernatural superpower that energizes the magic of metaphysics. It's magic transforms misery into joy. Ugly into beautiful. Conflict into harmony. And this march of life into the dance of life. Like Merlin turns lead into gold. And Jesus turns water into wine. Magic (not sermons and lectures) would be taught. For example: "metaphysical martial arts" would teach that one truth can defeat a million lies. Because... 1 (truth) x 1,000,000 = 1,000,000. But 0 (lies) x 1,000,000 = 0. Therefore 1 truth can defeat a million lies. Or a sermon on the magic of "surfing" how to become come a good magical surfer on this inside out, upside down, double twisting, reverse vortexing paradox called "life". Or "explosions of joy" aka. celebration. When 2 sparks collide in harmony, an explosion of joy whereby the joy created is greater than the sum of the parts. Which is opposite of "Art of the Deal". The book of ignorance teaching US the fine art of sucking the joy out of life. The fine art of appreciating (loving) could be taught. So we can accumulate light, warmth and love to be as bright of a star as possible. And how not to extinguish our light and warmth with ignorance (greed), so we do not become the darkness and emptiness that surrounds the stars. The things that Jesus was really trying to teach is not being taught. So instead of being a magnet. He is now chasing youth away by the droves by boring them to tears.
Stop giving communion in the hand bring back alter rails stop changing the words of the gospel to include everyone ie if it says sons don't add daughters if it say brothers don't add sisters. From the top to the bottom the Catholic Church has drifted away from the centre of God. The Catholic Church has become worldly. Just teach the gospel as its written remind the world of the devil and stop watering down miracles. I listened as a twat of a priest explained that the miracle of the feeding of the 5000 was just a case of everyone sharing their pack lunches. When I asked another priest how he could have come to this conclusion he said well we don't follow a Baker. How can any come to the truth if the priest hasn't got a clue. But don't forget all is well don't worry the Lord is not asleep just his church
Thank you Father pray for us Amen 🙏✝️🕊️❤️
I’m so glad I found Bishop Barron over the last 3-years. Although throughout my life I considered myself a Catholic/Christian hearing his talks has brought me back to the faith in a unique and wonderful way. Thank you Bishop Barron for all these great talks and videos. My father named me after St.Thomas Aquinas but I never really understood the significance of how special he was until Fr. Barron’s videos. Recently my father ( who is 94 years old ) proposed that in regards to the 80 % of fallen away Catholics that we should all pray for them to come back to the faith. In other words a campaign for practicing Catholics to pray for the fallen away Catholics. This is something we rarely hear about coming from the clergy or even as part of the Prayer of the Faithful at Mass on Sundays. Prayer 🙏 is the most powerful way to change the heart. If we as practicing Catholics ( 20%) prayed for on regular basis for that 80% who do not go to Mass I believe we would make a difference.
Absolutely fantastic.Thank you God Bless always Bishop. PRAY that your talk will be heard and listen too by the youths of the world at large.Most of all that our Catholic youths take in what theyYve heard strengthen them to go out and evangelise for our Catholic Faith.
Bishop, you are amazing. I've been following you for many years now. Today I have to say that I'm starting to feel called to be a priest, and you might have had an influence on that. No decision taken yet, but the interest is there, where it had never existed in me.
Good for you. Prayers. Be open and inspired! God bless you!
As a former none I can tell you that the reason so many young, former Catholics do not like certainty, and "romanticize the quest" is because they have seen and experienced judgement and hypocrisy coming from the institutional church, and they do not want to rest there in that place of judgement and hypocrisy. At least that was my stance when I stood outside the church. Total valid, even healthy reaction. Bishop Barron is criticizing these people of unformed faith or theology as if they are on the same sort of spiritual footing as he is as a learned man of the church. He is coming off as smug; although I agree with everything he says, his criticism is only valuable to explain to those of us who have faith why those who don't are at a disadvantage spiritually or existentially. You will never build bridges with those people you are trying to reach with this approach. Bishop Barron is making these great, well-informed arguments that will have absolutely no effect in the culture at large. Just want to add that Bishop Barron's description and discussion about authentic faith makes some very valuable points that should be memorized and repeated by those of us who have religious faith when our faith is challenged as being childish or superstitious.
I have greatly enjoyed this great speech.
Bishop Barron starts at about 7:30 mins.
Not just young people are uncomfortable with assertions made by humans about who or what God is, older philosophical agnostics are reasonably sure that no human can know any such thing. Theologians overlook our manifest human limits and that they share these.
The 7 minute introduction glorifying Bp Barron was a bit off putting. What was the point....to convince the audience that the speaker is worth listening to?
I'm a ex-Roman Catholic Christian, now a nonreligious skeptic. I suppose you could say I "left" the Catholic Church when I realized the historical claims Christianity made about Jesus were unsustainable and that Christianity simply wasn't true. I didn't so much have any dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church (though I had serious reservations about many of its doctrines), I simply worked out that Christianity generally was unsustainable intellectually.
At the age of seventeen I found myself on the sidelines of a debate between my school's most annoying evangelical Christian and a skeptic. Even though I generally agreed with her (despite finding her highly irritating), I had to admit he got the better of her in the argument. Every time she tried to say "Jesus said x" or "Jesus did y" he would respond "How do you know?" She didn't have much of a response to this other than "It's in the Bible" and some rather weak assurances that the Bible's accounts were historically true.
Given that this struck me, as a budding young historian, as a rather feeble argument, I decided to go and research the historical basis for my Christian beliefs. I was confident that once I'd done enough reading on the matter, I'd be able to hold my own against a similar skeptic's questioning. Several years later, after an enormous amount of reading and study of modern scholarship on the question of the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity, I realized that Jesus was not the Son of God and the second person of the Holy Trinity, but was actually Yeshua ben Yosef, a Jewish rabbi and apocalyptic prophet and that Christianity was a gentile religion that evolved out of a Jewish end times sect. After years of studying philosophy, I also realized I could no longer sustain a belief in any religion.
So while I'm not a bitter ex-Catholic and am not an atheist, I have no regrets at all about leaving the Catholic Church and abandoning religious belief. My Catholic upbringing and education has given me an understanding of religious faith and a very solid knowledge of the Bible (better than most Christians I come across) as well as a good understanding of western history, since it was so heavily influenced by Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. But my philosophical stance these days is humanism. I identify myself as an agnostic with some possible deistic leanings because I do consider deism but I don't claim to know the exact origin of the universe and we may never know for sure.
Since you claim to be an agnostic, maybe you would be comfortable praying to the unknown god to show itself to you. Investigate miracles outside of natural law, and you may begin to see that the creator actually exists. God bless you.
When you say that you "realized the historical claims Christianity made about Jesus were unsustainable and that Christianity simply wasn't true.", what do you mean by those claims?
I am still wait ing to hear that Jesus is the way the truth the life for youth today ,not even a suggestion in the experience of a marvellous presentation of the church’s evangelism.Why not??
There is unlikely to be one reason for people leaving Christianity in general or the Catholic Church in particular and, in any case, and answer has to be somewhat speculative.
It is clear that in regions where education levels are higher, religiosity is much lower, and that university graduates are far less likely to maintain their childhood faith than people who only finished high school. So, one important reason is that knowledge and the ability to think clearly about complex issues lead to a loss of religious faith.
No doubt the scandals that have enveloped the Catholic Church almost regularly also contribute to the Church’s loss of adherents. People either reevaluate their faith and realize they do not really believe in any organized religion, or they transfer allegiance to another Christian church.
The rapid loss of priests in many areas, and the consequent closure of churches and merger of parishes make regular attendance at mass more difficult, especially as church attendees tend to be among the older generations in most Western countries.
I study history as an amateur, but don't let the word amateur fool you. I knows my history, and I have bothered to do the research. As a rationalist, I believe strongly that people should do all they can to put emotion, wishful thinking and ideology aside when examining any subject and that they should acquaint themselves as thoroughly as possible with the relevant scholarship and take account of any consensus of experts in any field before taking a position. Through my biblical studies, which draws on disciplines ranging from archaeology, ancient history, cultural backgrounds, textual criticism, literary criticism, historical backgrounds, philology, and social science, I came to the conclusion that Christianity isn't true and the same goes for many other religions, which is why I'm no longer a cradle catholic but instead I'm a nonreligious skeptic. I have no use for comfort so it was through my education and intellectual pursuit for truth, I lost my faith completely. Let me make it clear, I'm not an atheist but I consider all religions to be wrong, with regards to their extraordinary claims, such as the assertion of many religions of originating from divine revelation(e.g. Abrahamic religions).
There was a politician (now dead), who was baptised a Catholic and then became a non-theist and would sometimes ridicule those who believe in God. Throughout his good adult life until he died at the age of 80 requested to return to Church and he was given a Christian burial. 'Great things happen when God meets with people'.
As someone who likes to think of himself as an "engaged" or "open-minded" atheist (setting aside ambiguities about what exactly "atheist" even means), I intuitively "get" the presentation of religious belief as *moral postulates,* particularly as a way to reconcile beliefs that seem to elude consequentialist logic. The Catholic Church appears to hold many such beliefs, and to be in principle staunchly opposed to reasoning apparently reducible to pure consequentialism. For example, the assertion that human life is inherently valuable really can't be reduced to arguments about utility. And it's not something that can be proved, because it's not a statement that makes any provision for its own falsification.
Obviously, that's still very non-committal. An acceptance, in principal, of moral postulates hardly amounts to an acceptance of Christ's divinity and so forth. But the notion of faith as moral postulates makes intuitive sense to me. Obviously any deductive logic will rest on postulates (definitions, whatever), and any inductive logic will necessarily rest on epistemological assumptions.
To me, as to Bp Barron I'm sure, the sort of philosophizing I'm engaging in is not (hopefully!) merely an exercise in abstract logic or an attempt to scrutinize human intuitions. Obviously religious and/or abstract moral belief, when acted out, can have huge practical consequences psychologically (i.e. at the level of the individual) and politically. Therefore, I like to think I also have a pragmatic attitude toward viewing Catholicism or other religious traditions as competitors to the other "-isms" of the world. A statement like "Catholicism beats Communism" sounds trite and obvious to me (and even a bit offensive to the former), but I think things get more interesting when one starts comparing religious teachings to -isms (for an American, anyway) closer to home. Obviously, hearing opposing viewpoints is (with a few qualifications) a very good way of determining truth. And with a lot of political dialogue rather stale, I've been very interested to listen to what is, for me, a fresh perspective implicitly on political questions. Therefore, I appreciate the outreach of the Church if only for my own selfish reasons.
th-cam.com/video/UWktcW5iR6M/w-d-xo.html
Young people think nothing of having bastard children today-- never thinking of what this does to the bastard. They don't get married-- just keep procreating. This is destroying the family and society. The culture is beyond base and the stupidity and ignorance is downright cruel to everyone.
Just me but I think the younger generation is more christ like, loving, and the oldsters are the real nones who have a pretense of religion but live like practical atheists.
I think they are well meaning, but with no framework they can and have easily fallen into the relativism that Bishop Barron talks about.
How to teach our youth to want to be good (god). The trick is to "be" uplifting with words and actions. I don't think "in search of the nones" or the culture of formation or whatever is interesting.
I think in order for our prescious youth to dream of being good (god), the Bible needs to be translated into something a little more "desirable".
Perhaps "Love, magic and metaphysics". Love is the supernatural superpower that energizes the magic of metaphysics.
It's magic transforms misery into joy. Ugly into beautiful. Conflict into harmony. And this march of life into the dance of life. Like Merlin turns lead into gold. And Jesus turns water into wine.
Magic (not sermons and lectures) would be taught. For example: "metaphysical martial arts" would teach that one truth can defeat a million lies. Because...
1 (truth) x 1,000,000 = 1,000,000.
But
0 (lies) x 1,000,000 = 0.
Therefore 1 truth can defeat a million lies.
Or a sermon on the magic of "surfing" how to become come a good magical surfer on this inside out, upside down, double twisting, reverse vortexing paradox called "life".
Or "explosions of joy" aka. celebration. When 2 sparks collide in harmony, an explosion of joy whereby the joy created is greater than the sum of the parts. Which is opposite of "Art of the Deal". The book of ignorance teaching US the fine art of sucking the joy out of life.
The fine art of appreciating (loving) could be taught. So we can accumulate light, warmth and love to be as bright of a star as possible.
And how not to extinguish our light and warmth with ignorance (greed), so we do not become the darkness and emptiness that surrounds the stars.
The things that Jesus was really trying to teach is not being taught. So instead of being a magnet. He is now chasing youth away by the droves by boring them to tears.
Stop giving communion in the hand bring back alter rails stop changing the words of the gospel to include everyone ie if it says sons don't add daughters if it say brothers don't add sisters. From the top to the bottom the Catholic Church has drifted away from the centre of God. The Catholic Church has become worldly. Just teach the gospel as its written remind the world of the devil and stop watering down miracles. I listened as a twat of a priest explained that the miracle of the feeding of the 5000 was just a case of everyone sharing their pack lunches. When I asked another priest how he could have come to this conclusion he said well we don't follow a Baker. How can any come to the truth if the priest hasn't got a clue. But don't forget all is well don't worry the Lord is not asleep just his church