A Meditation on Bishop Barron's Prescription for (Re-)Herding the Sheep

Rubens: The Miracles of St Francis Xavier (Patron of Missionaries)

His Excellency, the excellent Bishop Robert Barron, has proposed a recipe for bringing back the loose and the lost.

Bishop Barron’s five paths for bringing the unaffiliated back to the Church - articulated by Gretchen R. Crowe, November 11, 2019.

In his presentation, Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary of Los Angeles and chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, suggested five paths that he believes would be useful in reaching out to people who are alienated from the Church.

First, Bishop Barron recommended that young people become more involved in the work of justice, as young people resonate with the Church’s outreach to the poor and the needy.

Bishop Barron said that studies show that the more involved young people are in the work of justice, the closer they stay to the life of the Church.

The many college-age people with whom I am acquainted and who serve well the whole mission of the Church are those who have embraced a solid foundation in Tradition, the deep story of the Church, which fuels their desire to serve the Lord they encounter in the Liturgy and, as Saint Teresa of Calcutta reminded us, Jesus disguised in the materially and spiritually impoverished, the homeless and the affluent alike.

Mission

As the saying goes, you can share only what you yourself possess. Catholics who have allowed themselves to be found, formed and constantly moved by God are those who understand that when the Mass is clearly oriented to God, as is habitually the case in traditional liturgies such as Divine Worship and the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, not forgetting the Byzantine and other Eastern liturgies that preserve ad orientem worship, they are more deeply formed and moved more by that Mass that clearly and confidently exposes souls to the saving action of Jesus Christ. To paraphrase Mahler*, traditional Mass is a fire to be preserved because it ignites in the soul the lasting desire to serve God and neighbour.

One Naples parishioner, Greg Colker, was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism but first attended a “standard” American Catholic parish, “not at all particularly traditional, not at all particularly liberal,” he told the Washington Examiner.

The traditional liturgy proved transformative for him, and he described it as “something that has formed from the heart of the church to form us into better people.” He added, “There’s this big lie that the traditional stuff is legalistic and rigid. I have found it to be anything but. I have found the teaching to be clear and useful.”

By contrast, a liturgy oriented to man, a liturgy that is timid and glosses over the Passion of Jesus Christ, tends to do little to form in souls the image of the Risen Saviour Who, become the Lord of our lives, then lives and loves in and through us to bring souls to Himself. To love the Lord of the Liturgy Liturgy is to live the Liturgy in daily life. To be Catholic is to be liturgical, to be immersed in the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Truth, blessed truth and statistics.

The facts speak for themselves: vocations to both the priesthood and religious life are constantly rising in communities that center themselves upon Christ in traditional liturgy. There younger people discover the Real Presence and respond to that Presence.

The second method for bringing back the unaffiliated, Bishop Barron said, is leading with beauty. Today, young people don’t like being told what to do and think, but what’s so attractive about using beauty is that “I’m not telling you what to do, I’m showing you,” he said. What does this look like concretely? This could be, he said, the beauty of churches or, perhaps less conventionally, the beauty of websites. “This is how most people find us,” he said.

Yes! The beauty of the Ordinariate Liturgy, for example, attracts people to discover the truth and goodness of communion in Jesus Christ. Anyone who has ever been in love knows that beauty - real beauty! - moves us beyond narrow self interest, allows us to embrace the heights and depths of human existence, and enables us to see and touch the beauty in others to lead them to the One Who loves us and desires for us a life of truth, goodness and beauty in communion with Him. The soul in love with her Creator is a soul that seeks her Groom and serves Him wherever He may be found. He, being the faithful Groom, loves His Bride and gives her every grace to sustain her in love, hope and joy. God gives to the faithful soul His very life - the Body and Blood of Christ offered in every Holy Mass.

Beauty is a divine name. God is beauty in a preeminent way. As St. Thomas points out, ex divina pulchritudine esse omnia derivatur—"the divine beauty is that from which all being is derived." Therefore, God seals each being He creates with its own secret mark of beauty. Love helps us to discern the beauty—and the dignity—that God has placed in each soul.

When the Mass is beautiful it is a clear window through which the light of God reaches into the soul to lead it into rapturous encounter with Jesus. Conversely, when the Mass is made banal by elevator music, narcissistic priests who make themselves the center of attention, and by a "worship space" that resembles a shopping mall, i.e., a cacophonous barn little or no different than the places that reduce people to mere consumers, is it any wonder that people barely develop a lasting commitment to the Lord and to His Church and to the mission to save souls?

If the Eucharist is the "source and summit of the Christian life" as Vatican II rightly reminds us, why, then, do so many clergy miss the obvious implications of that doctrine? That is, Mass should resemble a summit, not a ditch of mediocrity into which the soul, starved of beauty, plummets. Mediocre celebrations of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass merely make mediocre men and women.

In the words of Fr. Zuhlsdorf and others: save the Liturgy, save the world.

Third, the Church has to stop dumbing down the Faith, Bishop Barron said. We now have at least two generations that have received inadequate catechetical formation, he added, and many questions remain unanswered.

Yes! Give people the Truth, capital 'T'! Make clear the Truth of Jesus by celebrating Mass with the dignity it deserves. Too often the manner in which Mass is celebrated is ignorant of detail, bereft of theological nuance, and therefore produces spiritually and morally illiterate Catholics. Which is to say, people learn little about how to pray and act because the voice of the Holy Spirit is crowded out by technology and other distractions, by liturgical sins of commission and omission.

Big screen displays have their place (... a pub? a mall?), but not in a church. Too often the Novus Ordo liturgy is no different than a lecture... because it often takes place in a church that resembles a lecture hall. The Mass can and should be a drama of epic proportions, a home wherein the theological drama of our redemption in Christ is made palpable by glorious music and architecture that reminds one of the heavenly life to come. Because those liturgical and artistic elements are rightly ordered to the Incarnation rather than themselves as purely functional delivery systems, the art of the Church becomes a vehicle through which the Holy Spirit communicates love, hope and joy to receptive minds and hearts.

The heart - the arena in which the person is formed to love by and with a Grace-fueled love.

Contemporary liturgy is often wordy without wonder, chatty without charity. Heads get bigger while hearts wither. Traditional liturgy restores to the worshiper the opportunity to unite head and heart in an adventure of discovery, in the discovery of the Christian adventure. Traditional liturgy, because it is theological art, faith-fully engages the imagination. Because it avoids the treasure of great art and music that the Church has fostered, contemporary liturgy tends to offer a diet of fast food that cannot satisfy the deepest longings of the heart.

Fourth, Bishop Barron recommends turning every parish into a missionary society.

The Ordinariate, which preserves well that aspect of the Anglican Patrimony of hospitality, i.e., the charity through which flows the grace of Jesus Christ Who desires communion with all who allow themselves to be open to His invitation, is adept at fostering a primary missionary society in every parish. The fellowship that routinely occurs after Divine Worship, the Mass of the Ordinariate, is the training ground for missionary discipleship because people discover how to speak and act the Faith and meet Christ face-to-face in the Body of Christ, the Church. To discover God therein that locus of faith and hope and love is to be strengthened to discover also the image of God in the "pre-Catholic" community and to lead others - the lost, the lapsed and the listening - to the wellspring of life in Christ.

Finally, Bishop Barron recommends creatively using new media to reach the masses who have become disengaged with the Church.

Yep. The printing press was a great thing. It's time to master technology and use wisely new media to engage people, hearts and heads united.

* "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler