Bishop Barron discusses his work on the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission
Bishop Robert Barron speaks with Matthew Petrusek about religious freedom, its philosophical foundations, and the threats it faces in contemporary American life.
Summary
Bishop Robert Barron joins Matthew Petrusek on the Word on Fire Show to discuss his recently concluded service on the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission. Barron explains that he was unexpectedly invited to join the commission and accepted, drawing inspiration from Father Theodore Hesburgh, who served on sixteen presidential commissions under five presidents. He argues that the principal threat to religious liberty in America today is what he calls "the culture of self-invention" — a philosophy rooted in European critical theory that denies objective values and a stable human nature, and which he contends has worked its way into healthcare, education, the military, and other major institutions. Barron also addresses the philosophical foundations of religious liberty, tracing it to human dignity and the natural law tradition, and discusses the tension between appealing to religious freedom as a legal protection versus mounting broader natural law arguments in the public square.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Background
Matthew Petrusek: Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrusek, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us. Bishop Barron has long defended religious freedom as a universal human right as part of his ongoing advocacy, which includes a new book on how to confront persecution against Christians. He has recently completed serving on a Presidential Religious Liberty Commission charged with ensuring that people of all faiths can participate fully in society without fear of violence or unjust discrimination. One of the few Catholic ecclesial voices on the commission, his work addressed multiple abiding and practical questions. For example, at the conceptual level: what is religious freedom, and what role should the government play in protecting it? How can we define religious freedom in a way that prevents one religion's exercise of their freedom from infringing upon the freedom of other religions, or on those who claim no religion at all? And at the more concrete level, where right now are the greatest threats to religious freedom, and what can we do to combat them? Here to address these and related questions and to discuss his experience serving on the presidential commission is Bishop Robert Barron.
Recent Diocesan Activities
Matthew Petrusek: Welcome back to the studio, Bishop.
Bishop Barron: Thanks, Matt. Always good to be with you.
Matthew Petrusek: Today we're discussing your work on the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, as your term is drawing to a close. But before we do, what have you been up to recently?
Bishop Barron: I feel like I've been driving all over the diocese. My life as a bishop — it's true of most bishops in a diocese — you spend part of your time at the chancery office going to meetings, meeting with people, and making the kind of administrative decisions you have to make. But a lot of the job of bishop, I think, is being out with the people. You have to go where the sheep are, if you're the shepherd. Very recently I went to one of our big high schools here called Cotter School. Cotter is a great place. It's got great grade school kids and high school kids. It's named for my predecessor, the first bishop of Winona. It's just a really vibrant place. I had a Q&A session with the upperclassmen that was really good, and then Mass with the whole community, and then I had lunch with the kids in the cafeteria. I love doing that. I've kind of prioritized the high schools in my diocese and try to get out to see them as much as possible.
Matthew Petrusek: I know they love it when you arrive and visit. That's the school where my son was going until very recently — he just graduated there.
Bishop Barron: Right.
How the Commission Opportunity Arose
Matthew Petrusek: Let's now turn to the topic. You recently completed a term on the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission. We'll look at both conceptual and practical questions related to your work there. But before we do, tell us a little bit about how this opportunity actually came about. It's not something you were looking for.
Bishop Barron: No, it was a complete surprise. I got a call out of the blue from someone at the USCCB, the Bishops' Conference, and they said, "The White House is looking for your number." I said, "What?" I was really flabbergasted — "What does the White House want?" I thought I was in trouble. It turned out they wanted to reach out to me about this prospect, and once I heard it, I thought, "Well, why would I say no?" Here's an opportunity to be around the table when public policy is being formed in regard to a very important matter. The bishops of our country for the past, gosh, twenty-five or thirty years have made this a high priority — religious liberty. So I thought, why would I say no?
The inspiration I had was Father Hesburgh, the legendary president of Notre Dame University back in the late twentieth century. Hesburgh sat on sixteen presidential commissions under, I think, five presidents. I got that verified by my friend Father Bill Miscamble, who's a great biographer of Hesburgh. I thought, well, good enough for Hesburgh, good enough for me, I suppose. There's no way Hesburgh could have agreed with all those presidents — they were from different parties. But I think he felt, as an American and being given the opportunity to bring Catholic teaching to bear, why would you say no? That was pretty much my attitude.
Matthew Petrusek: What other kinds of members were on the commission?
Bishop Barron: It was an interesting mix of people. You had some very legal types — people who have argued these cases before the Supreme Court. You had religious leaders, so myself and Cardinal Dolan was on it. You had someone like Ryan Anderson, who's the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is a major Catholic think tank. You had cultural figures — Dr. Phil was on it, the famous Dr. Phil, who was actually very good. I thought he was very bright and contributed quite well. Eric Metaxas is on it — Eric, who's a well-known biographer of Bonhoeffer and a kind of public commentator on various things. So it was a mix of people from different walks of life, all of us having some real relationship to this matter of religious liberty.
Matthew Petrusek: Were there other religious traditions represented as well?
Bishop Barron: There were indeed, both on the commission itself and on the advisory council. So there was the commission itself and there was an advisory board, and we had people there from all kinds of different religions.
Structure and Format of Commission Meetings
Matthew Petrusek: What was the basic structure of your committee work, and especially what did you do when you had to travel to DC — which was pretty frequently?
Bishop Barron: More than I expected. It was roughly once a month we met, between last June and now — we're just ending as we record these words, it's like mid-May. The way it worked was we gathered typically at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, which is just right off the Mall. The reason for that, I discovered, was they have a little theater that seats maybe three or four hundred people. We were up on a stage. I didn't really imagine it that way — I thought we'd meet in a room, just the twelve of us, and we would discuss matters. But no, it's a public event. We were arranged usually on two tables facing each other on the stage, and then the theater is filled with viewers who were taking the whole thing in. Plus the press was there — I think every time the press was pretty well represented. The president came once, in September, and the press were there in great numbers then.
It was a public hearing, is a way to think about it. We brought in what we called witnesses — people who might be scholars talking about religious liberty and the founding fathers, religious liberty and the jurisprudential tradition, and so on. We also had people who were in the military, in healthcare, and in education, witnessing to ways religious liberty is being threatened in those environments. The one in education — that's the one the president came to. We had kids themselves: grade school, high school, and university students all talking about ways that their religious liberty was threatened. So it was an interesting variety of people — some high academic types, some very serious legal types, and then also ordinary people who were wrestling with this issue.
Matthew Petrusek: Could those watching — the public — could they ask questions?
Bishop Barron: Not the public, but we could. The witnesses would speak — and they were, I must say, excellent, almost to a person. They were really good, interesting, well-prepared statements. Then we would interrogate them. After maybe three would speak, the chairman — a good guy named Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, who chairs the committee — he would say, "All right, everybody, what's on your mind?" And then we would signal we wanted to speak and we could ask a question, make a comment. We would talk among ourselves too, but all in the full glare of the audience. So it was a public happening and just a lively conversation.
The Role of a Bishop on a Federal Commission
Matthew Petrusek: Pulling back to get more of the conceptual questions — one question that's come up frequently is how you understood your role as a bishop, not only of the Catholic Church but of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, whose primary charge is caring for his flock here. How did you understand your work serving on a federal commission so closely related to the government?
Bishop Barron: I didn't see them as in conflict. Someone would say to me, "Oh, now that you're a member of the Trump administration," and I'd say, "No, I'm not a member of the Trump administration." Someone in the Trump administration is someone who's charged with implementing the policies of Donald Trump — the cabinet members and so on. We're on the other side of the ledger, if you want. We're there to help formulate policy, to make recommendations to the president: here's something you might do in terms of legislation or executive order. So we're not implementing the decisions — we're trying to shape the decisions.
What was my role? I thought it was to bring the Catholic perspective to bear. I never felt any pressure like I've got to conform to something. No — I'm here as a Catholic bishop, and my job is to raise questions and make comments that are congruent with the Catholic tradition and are using that tradition to inform this process. If someone disagreed with me, that's fine. That's their prerogative. We're going to formulate a final report to the president. He can take it or leave it. He can say, "I don't like this," or "I like every bit of it," or "I like some of it." I never felt a compulsion to say things in a certain way or to be careful. Never. I felt I'm going to speak my mind as a Catholic bishop. Also, I'm an American citizen, and the president of the United States invited me to be on this commission. I saw no contradiction between my being a Catholic bishop and an American citizen, and never felt pressure from either side. Taking Hesburgh as my model, who did this with great aplomb, I tried to do it in the same way.
Matthew Petrusek: There are some who argue, especially from a secular perspective, that it's okay for religious people to serve on bodies like this, but they must leave their religion at the door. How do you respond to that?
Bishop Barron: Well, that's repugnant to America — repugnant to the First Amendment. The free exercise of religion means it's not just a matter of private worship or something I whisper to my co-religionists. It's something I can exercise in the public forum. That's a good example of it. I can bring my perspective to bear in a public debate. I'm not imposing my religion. I'm not using the secular arm to compel people to see things my way. But I'm entering into the public debate precisely as a Catholic and as an American, and I think there's no contradiction there.
Defining Religious Freedom: Its Moral and Anthropological Foundations
Matthew Petrusek: Let's give some more clarity on what defines religious freedom, because it can be kind of an unwieldy concept. From a specifically Catholic perspective — we could perhaps even say a natural law perspective — where does it emanate from, morally and perhaps even anthropologically?
Bishop Barron: Human dignity, I think. And that's why it's interesting, Matt, that it comes out of the specificity of my religious tradition. As a biblically shaped Catholic Christian, I believe in the intrinsic dignity of the individual, made in God's image and likeness. Part of that dignity is that what is most precious to me — what's in the treasure house of my conscience — should never be coerced. There should never be some external coercion imposed upon my convictions in regard to the deepest and most precious things in life. Your religion, your relationship to God — there should be no coercion of that inner sanctum of the conscience. That's where it comes from.
It's a paradox in a way. It's precisely as a biblically formed Catholic that I hold to the principle of religious liberty. And I think that's exactly what was in the mind of the vast majority of the founders of our country — they didn't see a contradiction. They saw it coming up out of their Christian convictions. I say it's a paradox because it's your Christianity that's preventing you from imposing your Christianity on somebody. It's your very Christian convictions that tell you you've got to respect the religious liberty of everybody else.
Now, can and should we have lively religious debate? Yes. My job as a Catholic — I want to bring Christ to everybody. I want to bring the fullness of Christ, which to my mind means becoming a Catholic Christian. Fine. But I can't do it in a way that is coercing or using the secular arm to coerce people. That's where religious liberty comes from.
Matthew Petrusek: Let me play devil's advocate here. Some, again from a more secular perspective, may hear that framing of religious liberty and say, "Yes, absolutely — and what that means is that religion has to do with the conscience, it has to do with your interior life. Please feel free to have these debates, but all outside of the public sphere." How do we frame religious liberty in such a way that it's understood as having a place in public life as well?
Bishop Barron: Well, what goes on in your conscience will manifest itself publicly. You say, "Here's what I've come to in conscience," and the Constitution gives you the right to the free exercise of your religion. These are my convictions. You can't coerce me in that regard, and you can't compel me to privatize what my conscience has dictated to me. Now, as long as I'm not being aggressive to you, I'm not trying to impose myself on you — but I can freely exercise my religion. I think that's the part of the First Amendment we tend to overlook: the free exercise clause. We underplay it, or we turn it into "the right to worship as you choose privately." No, no — the exercise. It's out in space. That's where I exercise my religion. And so there's got to be freedom in that arena.
Religious Freedom as the "First Freedom"
Matthew Petrusek: You've often described religious freedom as a "first freedom" in the sense that it's a foundational freedom for other freedoms. Say a little bit more about how it plays that role.
Bishop Barron: I think for two reasons. One is in our constitutional framework, the First Amendment talks about religious liberty — it's the first liberty guaranteed by the Constitution, so just in a chronological sense. But also, I'm following John Paul II here: it's the most basic of the freedoms, the most basic of the rights, because it is so precious to us. It's what's most elevated, what's of primary concern to me. And so all the other liberties and rights flow from it in a way — they're related to it as periphery to center. So if religious liberty is compromised, the other ones are close behind.
And I think that's been demonstrated over and over again. In the totalitarianisms of the last century, what was their opening move? Go after religion. They knew what they were doing. Karl Marx says the first critique is the critique of religion — before you get to the critique of politics or economics or culture, you get to religion. The great dictators knew that. The great totalitarians knew that. You first restrict religious liberty, and the other ones will follow.
Limits of Religious Freedom
Matthew Petrusek: You've touched on what might limit religious freedom in terms of aggressivity or certainly violence. Say a little bit more, in terms of its conceptual framing, about how we can define religious liberty in such a way that one religion's exercise of its liberty isn't going to infringe upon other religions or on those who claim no religion at all.
Bishop Barron: That's the great test case. Let's say my religion, my conscience, dictates that it's okay to abuse children — or let's say, to sacrifice an animal, or let's say my religious convictions are leading me to do morally repugnant things. Well, no — there's a moral limit on it. And I would say as a Catholic, it's the limit provided by the natural law: there's a consensus around certain moral behaviors that are prohibited by the natural law.
But then, as an American — let's say my religion says that you shouldn't have any rights. My religion dictates that you don't have a right to vote, you don't have a right to free assembly, my religion says you don't have a right to religious liberty. Well, being an American now precludes that possibility. So there are restrictions inherent to both the moral system and the political system that keep it from running rampant — like I've got some completely unlimited religious liberty. No, it's hemmed in both morally and politically.
The Government's Role in Protecting Religious Freedom
Matthew Petrusek: Given religious freedom defined in this way, what role does the government have — not only in respecting it but also in protecting it?
Bishop Barron: I think the operative word is "protecting." The Congress should make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. So first of all, it's like "do no harm" — Congress can't make a law that is going to set limits to my religious liberty. There's a negative dimension to it. But yes, it's also to protect it.
I'll give you an example. This happened early on in our time on the commission. The state of Washington was proposing a bill that would require Catholic priests to break the seal of confession in matters of child sex abuse — motivated by the very good desire to eradicate child sex abuse, but grossly overreacting to say that a Catholic priest is obligated to break the seal of confession. The option for priests would be either excommunication or imprisonment. I and many others raised our voices to say this is a gross violation of the free exercise of religion, and happily a judge intervened to circumvent that. But the government should be vigilant in that regard — that it does not allow for these violations of religious liberty. It protects it, and the Constitution itself guarantees that Congress shall make no law that would set restrictions to the free exercise of religion.
Church, State, and the Jeffersonian "Wall of Separation"
Matthew Petrusek: You've already touched on this, but religious liberty in the American context is so often framed — incorrectly, but still framed — as the separation of church and state, this bright line which, as you pointed out, does not appear in the Constitution. At this more theoretical level, is it even possible to have a constitution, governing principles, a moral foundation that's completely devoid of any kind of religious content?
Bishop Barron: Well, it depends on what level we're at. At the thirty-thousand-foot level, I would say no, because our very Declaration of Independence — Fulton Sheen had a great line I ran across recently: the Declaration of Independence is in fact a declaration of dependence upon God. It is indeed independence from a corrupt English tyranny, but at the same time it's a clear affirmation of dependence upon God. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Take God out of it, and equality and rights both evaporate. So the Declaration itself is, if you want, religious. It's a clear affirmation of the role that God plays in guaranteeing equality, freedom, and rights. At that level I would say no, you can't really separate religion out.
Now, what does the First Amendment say? It talks about the free exercise, but also the anti-establishment clause — Congress will make no law regarding the establishment of religion. Good. That means I don't want the government determining here's the one religion that we're all going to get behind, that the government is going to foster this religion and not the others. I love that, because I don't want the government involved in propping up one religion or another. That would involve in fact the violation of religious liberty. That's the separation, if you want — we don't want a system like the one they were rebelling against, the English system where there was an official state-sponsored religion. I'm glad the founding fathers said no to that.
The problem is, as everyone points out, the famous Jeffersonian line about the wall of separation — it's in a letter he wrote to a Baptist convention. It's not in the Declaration, not in the Constitution, not in the Federalist Papers. It's not in any of our founding documents. It's in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote. And even what he meant by that — we had a scholar come in to talk about it — there's a lot of ambiguity about what Jefferson himself meant by that phrase.
But even if you say Thomas Jefferson felt, in this private letter, there should be a wall of separation — to take that as a foundational statement of our constitutional position is absolutely problematic. What happened in the jurisprudence, going to the Supreme Court level from roughly the mid-twentieth century up until fairly recent years, is that that principle took on exaggerated importance. It was stressed in such a way that we got ourselves into this mess whereby any presence of religion in any public setting is just a violation of the Constitution — we can't have anyone praying, no Ten Commandments, none of that. But that's a gross overreading of a particular line from a letter written by one founding father, not something elemental to our Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. That's a big part of the problem.
Happily, the jurisprudence of the last twenty years or so has been reversing that, and we've been moving away from the Jeffersonian wall of separation. A fair reading of the First Amendment — and I'm no great legal expert, just a fair reading — is that the two elements of it, no establishment of religion but also the free exercise, read together give us a healthy environment. That was kind of nonproblematic for a lot of Americans up until the mid-twentieth century. You look at the nineteenth century, even the early twentieth century — they didn't have these huge problems. It was problematized in the mid-twentieth century, I think, because of a hyper-stress on the Jeffersonian line, and behind that as well some political aims — misusing that line.
The Principal Threat: The Culture of Self-Invention
Matthew Petrusek: Let's now turn back to your work on the commission, and especially identifying the major threats to religious freedom right now. Let's start at the higher cultural level. What kinds of ideas are circulating in society and the culture right now that are undermining religious freedom?
Bishop Barron: If there's one thing I hope to be remembered for in this commission, it's a point that I kept making. I made it in the very first meeting, I made it in the last meeting when I was summing things up, I made it a lot during the sessions — and that is that the principal threat to religious liberty in our country is what I've called the culture of self-invention. There's a kind of alternate religious view — by which I mean a really overarching grand view of the whole — which says something like: there is no God, there are no objective values, it's all a matter of my choice. It's a valorization of freedom. Think of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 1992 — the way they formulated that principle: "It belongs to the very nature of freedom to determine the meaning of the universe." All this.
What's happened is that that philosophy has worked its way into our institutions and into our minds. I've argued for years that it's the default position of most teenagers in America, but it's also expressed institutionally all over the place — the idea that you're imposing values on me, that's your opinion and not my opinion, it's all up to me to decide. That philosophy — call it what you want, I've called it wokeism, if you don't like that term I don't care what you call it — it's born of European critical theory, it's got all kinds of different tangled unhappy roots. But that philosophy is the greatest threat to religious liberty, because its advocates correctly intuit that the principal enemy of that philosophy is religion. The religions that believe in God believe in objective values, they believe in a stable human nature. Once all that's in place, the woke philosophy is going to give way.
That's the war as I read it. It's being fought in universities — although they've largely won at the university level, I think. But it's being fought institutionally, it's being fought personally. In my judgment, that's the greatest threat to religious liberty.
Matthew Petrusek: How about at the institutional level right now? Are the threats emanating from corporations, healthcare, public education, higher education, government — all of the above?
Bishop Barron: All of the above. In the course of the year, we had sessions on healthcare, sessions on education, a session on the military that was an eye-opener for me — I hadn't thought that deeply about the military. It's the woke philosophy that's made its way into these institutions. In education — we both come out of that world — you can see the effects of it there, where any attempt to bring religion into that public conversation and the educational framework is met with enormous resistance, an appeal made to the Jeffersonian divide to say no, no, that can't happen here. In healthcare, there's that massive problem of conscience protection. There are all kinds of people in the healthcare world whose religious faith tells them a certain medical procedure is repugnant. Do they have the right to absent themselves from it, or are they being imposed upon by this philosophy of self-invention? So yes, it does manifest itself in all kinds of particular ways — healthcare, education, military. But I think it's worked its way into most of our institutions.
Testimony That Surprised and Unsettled
Matthew Petrusek: What are one or two stories that you heard in the testimony that really unsettled or surprised you?
Bishop Barron: I remember one — the day we had the kids come in. A little girl, during COVID, wore a mask that said on it "Jesus loves me." And she was prohibited from wearing that. The teacher told her she couldn't wear that. It didn't even say "Jesus loves you," which would maybe be more of an imposition — it was just "Jesus loves me." But in a public school, no, we can't have that.
There was a young kid too — in one of the schools there was a Christmas pageant, and the kids were invited to do skits and songs. A student sang a Christian song at Christmas time and was told, "No, no, you can't do that. You can't be singing that Christmas song here." Silly, in a way — would anyone in the nineteenth century or early twentieth century have ever raised a question about that? But an aggressive woke philosophy will raise questions about it.
Solutions: Legal, Legislative, and Cultural
Matthew Petrusek: Let's now turn to what the committee thinks can be done about it. What are some solutions that emerged among all of you?
Bishop Barron: Here I'm probably less sure-footed, and I would turn to all the legal people. There were people on the commission who were very good at knowing how to nuance and express these things legally. I'll cede to them when the report comes out, because they would have had some of these concrete recommendations about executive orders the president can do, or even legislation. We were always tending toward legislation if you can do it, because it's less ephemeral — the trouble with executive orders is they can be undone by the next executive. But I kind of let my legal people speak to the details of that.
Matthew Petrusek: What about at the level of winning over public opinion or argument? One danger I've come across is if you appeal to religious freedom in order to defend not participating in something — say you're a doctor in a hospital and you say, "I'm not going to participate in this abortive procedure or this gender reassignment surgery, and it's because I'm appealing to my religious freedom." The danger is that you've now put what's an objectively immoral act into the category of kind of religious preference, or "this is just something that's been privately revealed to me." How do we position the overall debate of religious freedom and giving individuals its protections without retreating into the private space of revelation?
Bishop Barron: I know what you mean there. Maybe it's a kind of expedient, because what's happened — I go back to someone like John Courtney Murray, who felt that the natural law provided what he called "articles of peace": in a religiously divided country, at least we can all agree on these basic moral principles. But that's collapsed from his time. He's writing in the 1950s and still had confidence in something like a shared moral perspective. So that's collapsed, and maybe the expedient of the moment is to appeal more in religious language.
Even though, as a Catholic, I'm not going to argue on specifically religious grounds against abortion or against euthanasia — I'm going to mount a natural law, philosophical argument that I hope would appeal across the board. I'm less confident than John Courtney Murray was that it'll work. I think of Stanley Hauerwas, the great Methodist theologian. He never liked the natural law tradition. He was before Congress many years ago, and there was an abortion-related law under consideration. They asked him for his opinion, and he said, "I'm against this law." They said, "Why?" He said, "Because Christians don't kill their children." And they said, "Well, I understand that, professor, but can you mount a more general argument?" And he said, "No, that's my argument. Christians don't kill their children." So there's that — just a bold affirmation of the biblical perspective. Catholics have tended to move toward natural law. I think it's culturally less promising than it was. But if we can use religious freedom in order to at least protect ourselves — yes, I think that's, as I say, a kind of expedient.
Religious Freedom and Evangelization
Matthew Petrusek: Finally, before turning to our listener question — Bishop, as the founder of Word on Fire, what relationship do you see between protecting religious freedom and evangelization?
Bishop Barron: We've got to have the freedom to evangelize. If you start seeing evangelization in the public sphere as somehow imposing your religion, as a threat to others — no, no. You have to have the right. Jesus gives us the command to declare to all nations. Having the right to do that politically is very important for Christians. God knows, over the centuries there have been lots of limitations on it. Look around the world today — there are many countries where you cannot in any way evangelize. That's something we've got to keep our eyes on. A point I made a lot, and one reason I think our committee should continue in some form, is that religious liberty around the world is a major concern, and one of the faces of it is the prohibition against evangelization.
Thank God, in this country we have the right to evangelize — not to proselytize in some aggressive way, not to be imposing my faith, but the right to declare it publicly and to invite argument about it. Thank God we have that right in our country. That's something our founding fathers saw, and we should celebrate it.
Listener Question: Should Christians Get Hung Up on Denominational Differences?
Matthew Petrusek: Now time for our listener question. Today we have Charlotte from England, who is an Anglican Christian asking whether or not we should really get hung up on denominational differences.
Charlotte (listener): My name is Charlotte. I'm from the south of England. I want to ask: to what extent should we, or should we not, get hung up on denominations of Christianity? I was baptized into the Church of England. I was confirmed into the Church of England almost by default — it's my community, it's where I live, it's the church here in the village, my friends, my family. To what extent is this important or not?
Bishop Barron: It's a good question. I'll say it positively first. Of course there are enormous points of contact between Catholicism and, for example, especially a high church Anglicanism — a lot of points of contact liturgically, in practice, and in belief. With other Protestant denominations too, lots of points of contact. We should start with that. An ecumenical conversation should affirm that and not move into a simply antagonistic framework.
Having said that, I think the differences make a difference. I'm with John Henry Newman. I don't hold to the Kantian view — by which I mean the idea that deep down, isn't it all about being a good person, about ethics? Kant famously said religion all comes down to ethics. Liturgy and dogma and all that is fine, it's meant to lead you to be a morally upright person. A lot of people today — I would call them casual ecumenists when it comes to religion — say, "Well, you're a Catholic, I'm Anglican, you're a Jew, you're a Muslim, as long as we all agree it's nice to be nice, isn't that what matters?" No, I don't hold to that.
I'm with John Henry Newman, your countryman. Read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua — he makes this agonizing journey from achingly high Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. It was a gut-wrenching, soul-wrenching process for Newman because he took the doctrinal issues so seriously. So somewhere in there is the right answer. You don't want to so emphasize the differences that you forget these enormous points of contact. But don't succumb to that casual ecumenism that says doctrinal differences don't matter. I think they do matter.
Matthew Petrusek: Well, thank you, Charlotte, for reaching out to us. Well, we're out of time, Bishop. Thank you — another great conversation.
Bishop Barron: Yeah, thanks, Matt. Always a pleasure.