Bishop Barron at the World Meeting of Families

Bishop Robert Barron, recently ordained to the episcopate and now serving as an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, does not waste his words.  I once had the privilege of interviewing him for about 20 minutes.  That relatively short conversation resulted in two long question and answer interview articles published a few years ago in The Criterion.

Well, Bishop Barron didn’t waste his words in the first keynote address given today at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia before some 20,000 attendees who have come here from more than 100 nations. His address was titled “Living as the Image of God: Created for Joy and Love.”

Given that his address was some 50 minutes long, this could become a very long blog post.  Here are some excerpts, however:

Bishop Barron exhorted his listeners “not to drive a wedge” between the Church’s moral demands and its call to show mercy to all.  To illustrate this seeming paradox, he cited G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in which the early 20th century English Catholic convert author said that the Church’s proclamation of both the full humanity and full divinity of Christ had “set the tone for the logic of Catholicism up and down the centuries.”

“He said, ‘We like red. And we like white. And we have a healthy hatred of pink.’ … Red and white. Both flags flying. Moral demand—all the way. Mercy—all the way. That’s the prophetic speech of the Church.”

Bishop Barron also reiterated that the Second Vatican Council’s universal call of holiness is to send forth lay Catholics in all walks of life out into the world to sanctify it, but that this is in part being short-circuited because so few people now go to Mass.

“Did you ever wonder why our society is becoming increasingly secularized,” he asked his listeners. “A lot of reasons. But I’ll give you one of them. Because so many Catholics have stopped going to Mass.”

He then concluded by presenting to his listeners the power of a family fully immersed in its faith.

“A family where basic moral truths are taught and, above all, lived is a family that is learning how to engage in prophetic speech, that learns how to go out to the wider society and speak this important truth.  Families where the virtues of courage and prudence, of forgiveness, of non-violence are cultivated, that’s a family that can now go out to teach the world those same virtues.”

The first full day of the World Meeting of Families will take place tomorrow in which there will be two keynote addresses and two breakout sessions. I’ll try to give a summary of some of them tomorrow.