Fr. Barron on The Next Generation

No, not that generation!

With the death of so many great intellectual giants, who's next to step up to the plate and lead the charge? Certainly I think Fr. Barron is doing some marvelous things, and he raises a good point in this video clip: we need to 're-sell' Catholic Christianity to the post-modern world. Towards the end of this clip, he mentions his 'You-Tube Interlocutors' who blithely criticize Christianity with arguments that are as old as the Church herself. His retort: "I've read Nietzsche, Marx, etc.; which serious Catholic theologian have you read?"

That is certainly part of the story, getting the Faith's intellectual tradition out there. But in order to do so, we must also very much engage and affirm what is true and good in this culture.

When I was in the seminary, another seminarian (not from this diocese) totally shrugged off the movie Shrek, a movie which I think is fantastic (the first, not necessarily the sequels which just went for the gags.) His response: "I reject everything that is in pop culture."

My thought continues to be that he will not be able to speak to today's young people. But the further challenge then is to engage our young people there and get them to read Aquinas, Augustine, John Paul II, Ratzinger/Benedict; etc. (I would say Balthazar, but I don't understand him!)

Part of this struggle is also revising history to understand the crucial role that the Church played. From the Deep in History Conference on the English Reformation (EXCELLENT SERIES), Joanna Bogle mentions that one of the lasting impacts from Henry's dissolution of the religious orders was the plight of the poor. No one took care of them, helped them, gave them the dignity that they had as a person. Instead, Parliament made it illegal to be poor in Britain. Great idea, and so typically British.

Why do I embrace the new technologies? To get this message out there. But it takes all comers to be able to do so.