Stay With Us: Evangelizing the Disaffiliated

greetings to everybody this talk is two years delayed for me because two years ago i was just about to give this presentation at the university series and i came down with shingles i wouldn't wish it at my worst enemy then last year i was going to give the same talk and covet broke out so now at least virtually i can be with you for this uh presentation as bob mentioned the title stay with us a reflection on the unaffiliated sometimes called the nuns the n-o-n-e-s those who would check none on the survey if they asked about their religion i think we all know what the number one problem is facing the church today but i think this is the number two problem if we're looking at our priorities the number two problem is this massive frankly disaffiliation of our own people especially the young so what i want to do in the brief time we have tonight is try to give at least a preliminary answer to three questions first of all who are they secondly why are they leaving and thirdly how do we get them back so i'll structure my talk that way if you're keeping score i'll just be trying to answer those three basic questions the first one is for the statisticians the empirically minded who are they second uh part of the talk is for the theoretician so what are the reasons they're leaving the third and i hope most important part of the talk is for all of us practitioners what do we do how do we solve this problem okay so first of all who are the unaffiliated you know a bit of of good news is we have actually a lot of data on this this issue has been studied a lot in recent years and let me share some of these statistics with you here's one that i find really illuminating go back to the early 1970s so when i was a little kid studies showed that about three percent of the country would have said in the early 70s that they have no religion so 97 of our country would have claimed some religious uh affiliation now i'm not saying they're all saints i'm not saying they were all you know practicing their faith beautifully but 97 of the country would have claimed some religious identity now fast forward to the year 1991 it's like 20 years later the figure has gone up 100 to six percent so it's an increase to be sure but still in absolute numbers not an extraordinary increase still 94 of our country would have claimed in 1991 that they have a religious identity but then go from 91 until today and you see an extraordinary increase today the figure is 26 percent 26 of our country now claims to be a nun to be unaffiliated no religious identity over a quarter of the country so somewhere around 80 million people in our country would now say they have no religion and you know i'm old enough maybe some of you listening are old enough to remember what it was like in the early 70s there there was something different i think in the social fabric when you had a country that still was largely religious you know many more practicing than do today things have changed and then when you look at younger people the numbers get even more disturbing look now at people under 30 that number rises from 26 to 40 percent 40 percent of americans under 30 would now claim no religion and dare i say it looking at young catholics it gets worse still catholics 30 and younger the number rises to 50 percent let that sink in a little bit everybody so we're all committed to the catholic church and catholic education and sacraments and everything fully one half of young catholics have now disaffiliated not encouraging number here's a stat that stays in my mind it's quite telling for every one person today joining the catholic church six are leaving and by the way that's the worst ratio of all the major religions so think of you know as you see people and with great joy coming to the church at easter time for everyone that joins roughly six are leaving another disturbing statistic read the work of gene twenge she's a sociologist at the university of san diego wrote a really interesting book called igen meaning the the generation that's raised on ipads and iphones right the the youngest set she has a chapter on religion and it's worth reading because she says there was an old um nostrum that said well sure a lot of young people disaffiliate from you know official religion but they remain spiritual meaning you know belief in god belief in an afterlife belief in you know fundamental objective morality etc she's showing and i'm not surprised that that nostrum is now exposed as false because the longer people stay away from institutional and formal religion the less connected to the spiritual they are so they're both less religious and less spiritual here's just one more um read christian smith from the university of notre dame he's one of the most i think insightful commenters on this this whole situation most young catholics both affiliated and unaffiliated will say something like this i'm going to give a quote that's very representative i'm so okay with uncertainty i think uncertainty is beautiful i think the most beautiful works of art are the ones that lead you to asking questions as opposed to those trying to supply answers to what something is my point here is the number of people among the young who are into the quest not into the answers provided by classical religion here's the last quote and it's from my colleague at word on fire brandon vaught by the way one of the more insightful commenters on this situation brandon said let's face it the church is hemorrhaging young people and i think the stats certainly bear that out okay that's a little overview of some of the statistics on who are the nuns who are those who are disaffiliating so second question how come they're leaving now something i find it's interesting uh when you bring up this question and i talk about this a lot on my online ministry everyone's got an answer everyone has got a uh a response there's a lot of pontificating around this question i know why they're leaving here's why they're leaving well and they're usually in complete contradiction with each other all these different uh pontifications the good news is again there's a lot of objective data around this we don't just have to rely on people's you know gut feelings and anecdotal uh stories there's a lot of objective data a lot of studies in which young people are asked the specific and blunt question well how come you left and they tell us and so i think it's best to stay with the objective data and not just with our our kind of private opinions let me draw your attention to two pretty recent pew forum studies that are very indicative so i'm just citing two here but it's very typical of the surveys done over the past many years when asked in the survey why they left a 2016 pew form study fully one half 50 percent of the respondents said lack of belief in religious teachings so they were given a number of options like you know here's or seven things check them off you know why you left fully 50 by far the highest lack of belief in religious teachings in a 2018 pew form study same question asked it now rose to 60 checked off i just don't believe the teachings of the religion you know here's the first observation everybody i find when when talking about this issue almost everybody reaches for a kind of behavioral explanation i think young people leave because they were you know mistreated they had a bad experience at mass maybe they're leaving because of the of the sex abuse scandals and all that and indeed i'll get there they do figure in these surveys but clearly across many years now the number one reason given is a more intellectual reason they just are not getting their questions answered they just don't believe what religion is teaching and this comes through in all the surveys it's often tightly correlated to the conflict between religion and science because in the minds of many young people today science that the physical sciences the hard sciences that's the model of real knowledge well religion seems out of step with science and if there's a conflict guess which one's gonna win in the minds of young people so the irrationality of religion at least in their minds is a major reason here's something from christian smith again the notre dame researcher he said 59 of the young disaffiliated that he studied agree with the statement that religion and science are in conflict with each other again in their minds which one's going to win you know trust me it's not going to be religion we'll get there when i start talking about how to address this thing but this is should be i think uppermost in our minds our young people are having they're having a hard time getting their minds around religion and science and religion conflict is one of the um the issues here's just a quote from some of christian smith's research this is from a young disaffiliated person now i wonder if god even exists i mean i believe god was once used to explain phenomena which are now explained by science that's a young man here's that one from a young woman i in all honesty i feel religion is a somewhat outdated notion and now that we have such scientific advances we no longer need a higher being to explain how we came to be i now put my faith in science again very very typical among young people okay another reason why they disaffiliate religion in the minds of the young seems to be associated with violence now keep in mind we're living in the you know post-9 11 period 911 stirred up a very old argument coming up out of the enlightenment namely since religion is irrational the only way religious people can adjudicate their disputes is through violence i mean is that a fair assessment of all the religion of course not but it gets deep into people's minds especially in the wake of something like 9 11. by the way it's no accident that the new atheists think of of hitchens and dawkins and sam harris who by the way have had a massive impact on young people i hear their rhetoric all the time the new atheist emerged it's no accident right in the wake of 9 11 because it stirred up this old idea about religion and violence here's a third reason for disaffiliation the conflict between the claims of religion and what i call the culture of self-invention the culture of self-invention now you know what this means all you got to do is watch the news listen to music go to any movie talk to most young people because it's the default position i think of most high school students and college students in america namely it's my prerogative to invent my life to define my values to define my identity my freedom determines who i am which you know is a is a very practical translation of jean-paul sartre's existentialism when sartre defined existentialism he said well it's the view that existence precedes essence for him that meant my freedom comes first and then my freedom determines who i am existence perceives essence sounds like highfalutin you know french philosophy well it was in 1947 now it's the default position of most young people the culture of self-invention well it does stand a thwart religion which makes very objective claims about what's true and what's morally right and that sets up a conflict with young people now as i mentioned you do indeed find in these surveys references to you know i was treated poorly by church you know ministers or by priests or or by parishioners you know here's one that kind of broke my heart i remember when i first read it someone said you know i i left my catholic church and no one ever called me no one ever inquired how i was doing no one from the church ever reached out to say hey we haven't seen you so you do indeed hear that that a lack of welcome in the community uh being treated poorly and then indeed i'm not i'm not trying to to uh under stress this it's just not the number one reason by any means but it's there the scandals you know i my almost my whole priesthood's been under the shadow of the sex abuse scandals i mean so i know all about that and young people they know all about that it's gotten deep into their minds and hearts and that is indeed a block no question about it i mean i've referred to the sex abuse scandal as the devil's masterpiece because it's undermined the church in practically every way including this you know including our capacity to reach out and engage young people so that is indeed a reason and then finally i'll say this um survey after survey the church's teaching on matters sexual is a block for a lot of those who have disaffiliated now if you look at at older disaffiliated catholics it's almost always the issue of divorce and remarriage you know it's interesting to me these uh synod that produced more satia that what 2016 i guess it was the issue of divorce and remarriage and and communion and so on that's very much the sort of prime sexual concern of an older generation of catholics pope francis generation now as you get younger what comes into focus is the question of gays that the church is at least seems to be cruel and exclusive toward gay people now get even younger get down to the igen generation it becomes the issue of transgenderism so that's true as you look at these surveys people say the church's attitude toward human sexuality is unrealistic or it's exclusive or it's cruel so those are indeed present okay so we know statistically you know who the this affiliated are we know their numbers and we can tell from these surveys i've just gone through a few of them but some of the main reasons why they've chosen to disaffiliate i think as we push forward in different ways it's just wise to be aware of these objective data so we don't just go on our kind of you know gut feelings about it okay i i went a little bit quickly through those first two questions because i think this last one is the most important and i want to spend the most time with it namely how do we get them back or if i might suggest this thing cuts in both directions how do we get them back but also how do we prevent them from becoming nuns in the first place how do we interrupt this tendency toward disaffiliation so that all the answers here are meant to cut in really both those directions and maybe i say this now as a as a pastor uh it's that second one that's maybe more important how do we keep how do we keep young people from wandering away from us okay so i'm gonna suggest uh five things there are many more things we can say but i'll just suggest five and these two mind you are based on a lot of statistical um surveys as you listen to young people and say well you know what what do you remember fondly or what would bring you back it'll be reflected now in some of the answers i give here here's the first one get young people involved in the works of justice get young people involved in the works of justice so as i said there's a lot of hesitation when it comes to the church's sexual teaching i am not arguing that we should jettison our sexual teaching not at all but i don't think when trying to reach out to the disaffiliated it's wise to begin with the sexual teaching it's what what they find uh problematic but they will say in survey after survey what i remember fondly or what i feel passionately about is the church's commitment to social justice they find that very attractive well it's a great part of our catholic tradition we have a beautiful tradition around doing the works of justice stretching all the way back to the first years of the church's life precisely by its moral profile it stood out against the environing culture how these christians love one another tertullian's famous line reporting what the pagans were saying the fact that christians wouldn't uh expose their their infant children on the mountainside if they were unwanted the fact that christians included the poor and the hungry and the homeless that was a deeply attractive evangelical element from the earliest centuries and then look at this litany we have this this cloud of witnesses dorothy day thomas merton jacques reynold hillenbrand mother teresa calcutta rose hawthorne not to mention francis of assisi vincent de paul peter claver martin de porres bartolome de las casas we have a wonderful wonderful history and tradition around justice and the works of justice well highlight it announce it boldly proclaim it bring these people forward young people find it very enticing good we should use it and even more importantly get them involved you know i deal not a lot with um our confirmation prep programs you know i confirm all these kids out here and i love talking to the teams that prepare them i talk to the kids themselves and again and again they'll talk about having that experience of going down and serving the homeless working in the soup kitchen going over to catholic charities and feeding the hungry of course they do of course they do it gets deep in their souls get them involved i love the stories from the ancient church uh the great church father origen the a young man named gregory came to origin and said i'd like you to teach me the christian faith origen said first come and live our life and then you'll learn our faith from the inside very good advice and that young man gregory is now known in the tradition as gregory thalmaturgas gregory the wonder worker he himself became a saint that's often how it works come join our life see how we live see our commitments and that has an evangelical power or this from uh jared manley hopkins the great jesuit poet appropriate now at the beginning of len to tell the story because a young struggling seeker came to him and said i'm just having trouble believing in god and hopkins said give alms he didn't give him an argument he didn't he didn't give him theology or philosophy he said give alms there's something about participating in the works of justice concrete care for the poor that has an evangelizing power it always has still does i want to give you a couple quotes here still under this rubric i'm quoting here from a guy named stephen bulovant who's a wonderful researcher over in england has looked very carefully at this issue of disaffiliation i'm quoting here from people who have left the church but are we are recalling what they they still uh savor listen i admire the fact that the catholic church is the biggest provider of health and education after governments in the world that's from a lady 64 who disaffiliated another lady says the church has soft power its reach is virtually ubiquitous and i believe this could be important in various ways for example monitoring modern slavery it also contributes greatly to education health worldwide it's so good for charity mind you as a disaffiliated person speaking but she's still savoring this element of the church's life and there are many more quotes i can give you but that's my first recommendation is start with justice i don't think especially wagging fingers around sexual matters is a good place to start again i'm not saying we get rid of it but i wouldn't recommend starting with that okay second recommendation use what pope francis calls the via pulchritudinous latin for the way of beauty now i've been on this theme for a while in fact you know i the privilege just a year ago right before covet hit uh the california bishops were over in rome for the odd limit of visit we had three hours with pope francis and he said basically ask me anything and so i kind of screwed up my courage and i actually asked him a question in spanish and i asked him about this about the the way of beauty and he spoke very beautifully about it here's my conviction in our post-modern culture when there is such skepticism about the true and the good right if you say well here's what's true you better believe it oh all the defenses go up or or worse yet if you say well here's the way you ought to be behaving oh people get defensive okay well try the third transcendental right the good the true and the beautiful try the beautiful just show the sistine chapel show a shark cathedral show someone how to read bride's head revisited how to read the stories of flannery o'connor how to read the poetry of t.s eliot show them the beautiful it's not as threatening immediately and it draws people in and again everybody we've got a great tradition around justice we've also got a wonderful tradition around beauty it's the glory of catholicism you know where protestantism did go through a kind of iconoclastic period when you go back to luther and the other reformers they got rid of a lot of beauty to me that's always a sign of corruption the church the catholic church has hung on to the beautiful as a bearer of evangelical power and so we have art and architecture and poetry and music learn it love it savor it and learn how to communicate that powerfully to young people you know i think here of uh cardinal martini who died about about 10 or 15 years ago now he was the archbishop of milan he himself was a bible scholar but he took advantage of i don't know if you've been there it's one of the great sites in all of europe the great cathedral milan and he would gather young people in the in the plaza in front and he would give a talk on the bible but part of the power that was he just gathered them in this gorgeous space looking up at the facade of one of the most magnificent cathedrals or i think of one of my heroes cardinal lustige of paris he was cardinal when i was a student in paris his mother died in the shoah he was from a jewish family and was for his own protection given to a catholic family during the war and during that period this young jewish boy wandered into a cathedral and he was converted it wasn't an argument it wasn't theology though he became a great theological mind it was the beauty of the cathedral it changed his heart i mean i totally get that listen now to a few quotes from steven boulevant studies again these are people who have disaffiliated but they're remembering what they savored here's a man in his 60s the catholic church has been a major cultural force in european history it has a time supplied and necessary spiritual discipline i can respect it for that here's a young man in his twenties who just affiliated i find attractive the history of the church our roots in the middle east are diversity in the world of fine arts and music another young man in his 20s disaffiliated but said i love the fine artistic and liturgical tradition of the church just one more it's not from a young woman i love catholic theology liturgy devotion art and music mind you she's she's left the church but she's still it's like echoing in her soul the beauty of the church use it learn it share it know know how to read these great texts know how to read a great cathedral i think our young people will be enthralled by the beauty of our church okay third um recommendation so justice beauty and the third one you probably can guess this from from if you've been following my work at all over the years if you paid attention to what i said is clearly the number one reason why young people are just affiliating clearly number one i don't believe these teachings science and religion all that so my third recommendation is stop dumbing down our faith i know i've been banging podiums for years on this and maybe i become tiresome but i don't care i think it's such an important theme intellectual objections are paramount in the minds of young nuns of those who are disaffiliating they're not getting their questions answered and and they are being evangelized very effectively by atheists in our culture who are giving them arguments they're not hugging them into atheism they're arguing them into atheism and we've got this brilliantly illuminating intellectual tradition but i'm not blaming vatican 2 vatican 2 is produced by the smartest people in the 20th century catholicism but in the wake of the council we entered into a program of dumbing down the faith and you know it you know it we now had about two three generations in the name i guess of relevance or whatever we we dumb down the faith we de-emphasize the intellectual dimension and it has been a pastoral disaster and you can see it everybody in the armies of the disaffiliated who claim that they do not have intellectual reasons for believing our faith i'm not reducing everything to the mind you just heard me talk about justice and beauty you know so i'm not saying it's all about apologetics or about arguments but by god it is about it is about intellectualism at least to a strong degree something i found in my years of pastoral work chicago and here and elsewhere i think we tend to be pretty good when we form our kids in uh prayer and spirituality i think we tend to be pretty good when it comes to the works of justice and getting them you know aware of the needs of the poor all terrific but i don't think we're particularly good at the intellectual dimension and it shows in the disaffiliation of many of our young people i again i'm not cast i'm blaming all of us bishops priests catechist teachers i mean all of us i think have to bear some of this responsibility and we all got to collectively pick up our game now here's some good news on this front precisely because of the new atheists there's been a sort of renaissance in catholic apologetics there's a lot of good material now um both in book form and video form a lot on social media on the internet that will help us answer the questions that people have so take advantage of it i mean learn it i i can give you good recommendations teachers out there in catechists to help your kids deal with the objections that come from the wider culture so that's that's some good news but you know gosh i i think we so underestimate what our young people are capable of i mean i've told the story a number of times so if if you've heard it i apologize but um this is many years ago now when my my niece was starting her senior year in high school at a well-known catholic high school outside chicago and my brother said well there's her books on the table so i went over and she had virgil in latin for her latin class she had shakespeare they're reading hamlet i think it was for english class she had einstein or some some complex you know physicist for science class and then in religion she had this like little paperback with a big picture on the cover this simple and that's her religion book so i said what is the problem here why is this young lady reading shakespeare in english in virgil latin and einstein in science and she's reading a comic book in religion why aren't we giving her thomas aquinas gk chesterton bonaventure augustine you know anyway end of harangue but i this theme everybody it's not just my little private hang up it's in the data it's in the data that a dumbed-down catholicism has resulted in disaffiliation so we got to pick up our game but we have resources that's the good news there are resources now but you know for all of us to learn our great intellectual tradition learn all those names i just mentioned and then share it with our kids is just hugely important okay just a couple more because i know i'm close to running out of time here's my fourth oh you know let me say this so i mentioned justice beauty and um and life of the mind i did the three transcendentals right justice the good uh the way of beauty the beautiful and then the intellectual the true the good the true and the beautiful use the three transcendentals in reaching out to our young kids okay but here's the fourth recommendation i have turn every parish into a missionary society you know go right back to vatican 2 everyone go there's a there's a clear line vatican ii to francis and all the popes in between the great impulse behind vatican ii was a missionary impulse my mentor cardinal george of chicago always said that he said the key to vatican ii is to read it as a missionary council it wasn't like trent or nicaea or chelsean trying to settle complex matters of doctrine that wasn't its main purpose its purpose was now to get the church out from itself and out into the world to let out the life now that's the new evangelization articulated by paul vi now saint paul the sixth saint john paul ii uh benedict francis of course read evangelii gaudium as i think the master text of pope francis pontificate they're all about the same thing which is a church that goes out from itself in a missionary spirit i think though and this is again pope francis is real strong on this we have a tendency to stay within ourselves you know no i'm a good catholic if i go to mass i receive the sacraments and maybe i go to a you know program occasionally and i take in some formation and you know i'm a good catholic well all that's of course terrific but as de lubach said after the words of consecration the most sacred words of the mass are go the mass has ended go and love and serve the lord go proclaim the the i can never get it right unless i'm standing at the altar um go in peace glorifying the lord by your life uh the whole idea is it's it's an outward thrusting move evangelize what are our parishes are they places where we kind of gather to hunker down or are they mission societies places where people are being formed to announce the gospel now to the wider world unless and until they become that we're not realizing it seems to me the dream of vatican ii are we satisfied catholics that this is pre-coveted 20 maybe of catholics go to mass on sunday 20 if you would ask the fathers of vatican 2 at the time of vatican 2 something like 60 or 65 of catholics in our country were going to mass well and they thought that was bad they wanted a revolution they wanted to now intensify our liturgical lives if you told them in the year 2021 only 20 are going to mass we shouldn't be satisfied with that no no our our job now having been to mass now we go and bring people in come on bring somebody back the priests can't do it all bishops can't do it all i mean it's it's up now to the to the faithful that's how how you're sanctified by by bringing others to sanctification turn every parish into a missionary society you know uh the great mega church protestant uh rick warren whom i met a couple years ago out here in california and um i'd read him before but i'd never met him and enjoyed talking to him and one thing he told me that stayed in my mind was he said everyone knows me as you know friendly pastor rick i got my hawaiian shirt you know i'm not putting on the ears he said all that's designed to bring people in you know he wants to attract them to his church good but they said what people don't realize is once they're in i make demands on them he said they got to go through a whole discipleship training program if they don't they're out once they've been trained as disciples now they're sent on mission they don't want to go on mission they're out in other words he's demanding that they now become trained missionaries i just wonder how many of us catholics think along those lines because we should we should that's the vatican ii vision having been sanctified having been christified at mass now go and christify the world i like that line that says um when you walk out the door of any church in the united states you have entered mission country it's true in that i mean you need to go to africa or to asia for mission country it's right outside the door of your church every time you leave mass do we see our parishes as training centers precisely for evangelists missionaries and disciples now again we could do a whole talk on that uh that would be a good a good focus for another 45 minute talk what would that look like but start thinking about it you and the pastor together you and your your friends and the paris start thinking about that what would that look like if we were a missionary society okay here's a fifth and final recommendation we have to be digital missionaries if we want to reach young people let me take you back to uh 2018. i had the privilege of being a delegate at the synonym young people gathering of bishops from all over the world with the pope every day was a marvelous experience there's a whole month in rome with the pope practically every day listening to talks from the bishops then we had smaller you know language group sessions and all around this question really of of young people and how to re-engage them well i listened for a couple weeks and what struck me was all these very good people but they were talking almost exclusively about what i'd call parish programs you know how can we make our parishes a better place where the young people can be instructed or how can we have a program that will bring young people in so finally i stood up at the synod and i said you know i think this is the wrong way to think about it we have armies of the disaffiliated so we know that they're not likely to come to our parishes i mean years ago that was true we kind of assumed catholics would come to be evangelized at our institutions and our schools and his parishes and seminaries but they're not we've got to go get them we've got to go out from our churches to get them but i said the good news is precisely when we're experiencing this crisis of disaffiliation we've also been given through god's providence the means to reach people who have disaffiliated and i mean here the social media and you know i i've said before it's a revolution as remarkable as the gutenberg revolution i think it's comparable to that the way it's changed and enhanced our our capacity for communication precisely when they're not coming to us we can go out to them through these social media and let's face it you know this i mean the vast majority of people 30 and under they live on the internet that's that's where they live and so we've got to invade that space creatively and we can we can know through the social media i've had a fair amount of experience with this because of my word on fire ministry um which began really as an experiment you know i i knew i wanted to evangelize i had an instinct that we could go beyond the classical kind of radio and television approach that we could start using these new media but when i started like you know in the early 2000s these things were in their kind of incipient stage i remember youtube came into being in 2006 and it was february 2007 that i put out my first um uh commentary on youtube well i mean i didn't know i had no idea if who was watching i didn't understand that world well at all and i was i was thrilled when like 300 people would watch one of my videos um my point is you know we we just kind of started small and my instinct was don't begin with you know finger wagging or don't begin with moral correction it's likely not going to work well with young people but rather begin by looking out at the culture and finding what the church fathers called semina verbi right seeds of the word it's going to be something in that film or in that book or in that news event or something going on in the culture that is redolent of the gospel there's something of the gospel there and if you can see it and point it out it might be a way of drawing people in well again it was an experiment i i was just you know kind of hoping against hope it might work and the amazing thing is i think it has over the years had that effect i got i mean so many stories i could tell about people that you know look you know father bishop i was an atheist i'm an agnostic i i would never think of coming to church but i stumbled on your video and that's they call it the sticky quality of the internet you know that you you start here but it links to here to here to here to here and before you know it you've you're watching something you never intended to well it happens a lot with the videos that i do someone you know um they're like bob dylan and they find out that i have a video on bob dylan they like the films of clint eastwood and i got this review of one of clint eastwood's movies they like history and that brings them to some commentary i did on you know it works i think it can work and i think parishes endeavoring to be missionary societies should get young people who know how to use this world and do it do it they've they've got this in their in their fingers i mean i don't i didn't grow up with this stuff i rely on these wonderful younger people word on fire that know how to use all this stuff but heck find them find young people and then i've told my brother bishops this i if i were bishop of diocese i would try to find some really bright young priest send him for doctoral studies but not to teach in the seminary not to run my education programs in the diocese i would send him to get a doctorate and then be my main person for outreach through the social media because i'll tell you one thing about it too is you you got to be smart you got to know what you're talking about you can't just say i'm full of good will and i want to reach out to the social media yeah but you're going to meet all kinds of questions and issues and objections and you got to be grounded in the great tradition to respond let me give you one example of this i don't know if you know about this website called reddit r-e-d-d-i-t i brought it up at the youth senate i remember and i brought it up at the at the usccb meetings and some of the the older bishops like what is he talking about well reddit is like a forum you know for discussion of issues you bring up different matters everyone jumps on and shares their opinion it's kind of you know rough and tumble um that's one thing you know if you want to get involved in the internet world you gotta have some thick skin people don't don't just play around on the internet i mean there's some pretty harsh language being used anyway reddit has a feature called ama which means ask me anything so i heard about this from one of my word on fire people and he said why don't you go on and try it so i did and i just said uh i am a catholic bishop who loves dialoguing with non-believers and atheists and searchers or something like that you know well it turns out i think the first time i did it i was the third most popular reddit ama of that year and i'm saying it not because oh they think i'm i'm so great they didn't know who i was from adam i'm sure but that i was a catholic bishop willing to wade into this sort of dangerous space but enormous reaction i did it a second time this is maybe a year ago i was the second most popular reddit ama of the year and again not because of me they didn't know me but that a catholic bishop would avail himself of this opportunity they responded like mad to it you know good good it shows the power of this kind of outreach and i think we got to be willing and able to uh to do it you know um and a word to the wise here because many asked me you know for advice about this don't give up start so young priests said to me how do i get going i said just how about you know put your sermons up how about share some reflections how about do a movie review or whatever start only you know 100 people watch so what that's how i got going for a long time 100 or 200 people watched don't give up okay let me bring it to a close i'm a little bit over time the last thing pray and i don't mean to sound like just a nice pious guy when i say that nothing in the bible ever happens outside of prayer i mean it's just indispensable in the spiritual order the famous story of monica praying for augustine over many many years before he was brought back to the faith make this the focus of your eucharistic adoration your parishes bring it to the liturgy so it's it's in the prayers of the faithful have groups in your parish that are specifically geared to pray for the disaffiliated let people bring forward names of particular people this is my grandson this is my daughter this is my mother they've disaffiliated let's pray for them so above all these other recommendations i would put prayer and don't give up it's a very serious problem we need to address it but we can address it relying on the grace of god thanks everybody always good to be with the university series thank you bishop baron we have a few questions from the audience for you uh going back to the data and the list of reasons why young people are leaving catholicism where on that list is the item of all male clergy it i must say it doesn't come up that much um the ones i mentioned i think are the dominant ones certainly you hear concerns about you know women priests etc uh generally speaking but i must say in my years of looking at this particular set of data i don't see that as a major reason for disaffiliation um you know people will be upset with the institutional church usually it means the scandals or it means our sexual teaching uh but i i don't really see that particular issue in regard to this um question sorry another question then the the nuns are attracted to social justice is there a link you think an explanation uh for the increase in attitudes against abortion as part of that yeah i i would certainly see it as a as a justice issue and if the church presents it that way which i think we we do um yeah i think it would make perfect sense that the um the commitment to ending abortion is just part of our social justice outreach on the subject of beauty you mentioned that we have these beautiful churches of the past the cathedrals so why are we today building churches that have no style or any kind of art and they look like poor first grade attempts yeah i i it's a big issue you're bringing up there i'm somewhat sympathetic with you i i'm not a big fan of bauhaus modernism and we did in the years i was coming of age like in the 70s and 80s we built a lot of churches in that style and i don't think that style bears the weight of revelation very well you look back at you know whether it's a basilica style roman style gothic style let's say a victorian gothic different forms that i think are able to bear the weight of revelation better now it's not to say that there's nothing in contemporary you know architecture that can do that i think there are but i think we got to be sensitive to that issue it's not like just trying to be trendy and stay up with the times the church in its art is trying to express its own life in plastic form and certain forms of architecture bear that better than others i would say but if you want details read someone like dennis mcnamara who does a lot of work on theology and architecture but i'm somewhat sympathetic with the concern because we there was a tendency when i was a young man to mute the beautiful and i think it was a somewhat protestantizing tendency because that is in the protestant reformers that they they wanted to mute the beautiful and we were imitating that in a way in the years after the council and that wasn't helpful um but that's again that's a big topic for a whole other talk absolutely uh as part of the uh the objections of the nuns uh that science answers everything do you have any ideas any thoughts on how to integrate catholicism with science yeah good in fact i i'm developing a paper right now on that and i think it's a hugely important issue here's the first observation i think it's important always to ask meta questions because they get us closer to religion so someone's a scientist right they're a physicist a chemist or a they're a astronomer or whatever and they are so caught up in in the wonders of that science how much it can know well ask the meta question namely why should the world be intelligible at all so every scientist physicist chemist astronomer whoever he or she is has to assume that the world she's going out to meet has an intelligibility or a patterned quality that corresponds to an acquiring mind otherwise the science would never get off the ground well where's that come from how do you explain the radical and universal intelligibility of the world and i think that opens the door wide to religion because now you're looking at well it there seems to be then some kind of intelligence behind radical and universal intelligibility and i think that's a way in to a religion science dialogue the best person i know on this is john polkinghorn i don't know if anyone remembers that name john polkinhorn was a high-level cambridge particle physicist right high-level scientist who at midlife left his uh profession to become an anglican priest and he's ordained an england priest and then did wonderful work reconciling science and religion science at the highest level particle physics all that stuff quantum mechanics and linking it to religion so read him but one of his observations is the one i just made about radical and universal intelligibility that's just one suggestion thank you apparently you have a great baseball analogy for how to teach the beauty of our faith could you share that please uh i've used baseball in different ways it might be um yeah i think i think what they mean is if you're teaching baseball to kids what you would never do is begin with the infield fly rule the infield fly rule is a is a very a particular uh technical rule of baseball it's a good rule by the way if you understand the infield fly rule it's good it makes the game better but you wouldn't dream of beginning with that right you begin as when i was learning baseball as a little kid our coaches had us get down and remember on our knees and and feel the infield and and smell the grass they they wanted us to like get and then they put the moves of the game in our in our bodies i mean they taught us the basic stances and i still could stand the plate you know in the way that they taught me to and then they got us playing got us hitting and running and throwing my point is they they drew us into the beauty of the game first right the the rhythm of it the the wonder of it the smell and the the feel the texture of it then once you play for a while you begin to understand oh that's why we have these rules oh yeah that's a that's cool that rule makes sense because if you do you know if you don't do that then the game was going to fall apart the rules then emerge naturally and organically out of the beauty of the game now here's the analogy a mistake we make in religion is we can commence with our version of the infield fly rule you know let's commence with uh debating details of sexual morality well that's not going to draw anyone into the game you know rather get them into the beauty of catholicism and then then they will eventually come to understand why we have rules including rules about sexuality but i wouldn't recommend beginning with those i begin with the beauty and the rhythm and the texture of the game i begin with the saints i begin with the liturgy i begin with prayer i begin with the smell of incense i begin with stained glass windows you know what i'm saying i begin with with mother teresa's sisters taking care of the poor and once you're into the game and you played it for a while the rules will naturally emerge from the texture of of the game i think that's probably the analogy they're they're thinking of one person asks do you think that fewer young people say they're religious because they're allowed to be unreligious in the past it was just not as accepted to be non-religious yeah it could be that could be and maybe that's okay you know because i don't want people to feel obligated or to be you know threatened or to be brow beaten you know so okay if you got greater range and freedom fine but i'll say this too this goes back several years i uh i met a lady at the parish and she said um you know my son he's about seven we're not making him come to mass we're gonna let him decide what he wants to do you know when he when he comes of age and i said to her yeah but would you accept that logic in any other area of life like would you say don't worry about practicing your violin just you know pick it up when you feel like it or yeah no don't go to you don't go to baseball practice just you know when you decide to go no i mean we we compel young people to do all kinds of things because we know that's a way they're gonna it's gonna enhance their lives and if we leave everything up to freedom um we'd never really we'd never experienced much we we'd settle for a very low level of attainment you know so i i'm i'm skeptical of the it's a hyper modern you know the stress on freedom freedom freedom freedom i mean freedom's overrated in that way some of the best things in my life came because i didn't have freedom i was told to do something and then it got into me in such a way that it made an experience possible that otherwise i wouldn't have had so that's a little editorial on the side about too much freedom and speaking of freedoms and uh intellectual freedom and colleges one uh attendee observes there's a problem in the the catholic universities our children go in catholic and leave non-catholic they're taught values that do not align with mature teachings especially in liberal arts and social sciences is this a problem yes yes yes and uh i'm i'm getting too old to to um you know prevaricate on this it is a very serious problem and it's statistically backed up over and over again the number of catholics that come into catholic universities and they they just affiliate they they lose their faith now i'm not doing some blanket condemnation of all catholic universities but there is a disturbing statistical indication that this is true and and too many of the catholic universities have allowed their catholic identity to even s and they've adopted much more of a secular model of of education and that's i mean what's the point my thing is we already got princeton and we already got yale and harvard we don't need more of those we need truly catholic universities that honor our own intellectual tradition and uh it should bother us big time that that way too many catholics are losing their faith even at the catholic universities so yeah that's a problem and i have another question from someone that she and her husband have three young children they check all the boxes for church attendance parochial school etc and yet they're having serious difficulty having their children baptized uh they can't find people to serve as uh godparents oh because they can't get a letter from their church saying that they attend regularly the majority of their close family and friends have left the church over the last decade yeah so yeah i get that barrier to baptism for their children yeah i know i get that i don't have a good answer i have to really sit down and talk to them but i do understand that dilemma is we're looking for godparents and looking for people to guide our young people into the faith and and that generation has become not exclusively but to a large degree disaffiliated so i i get the frustration i'm not sure i've got a really good answer to that one i can share some of those details with you after in the meantime others are asking are there any written course materials any information that would be good leave behinds for this things to study further i'll get this book we just um i mentioned brandon vaught earlier from word on fire he's got a book called return and we just did a reissue of it uh and it's all about this issue it's it's written for parents and grandparents to try to bring young people back and it's full of a lot of practical uh advice you know i would read christian smith to understand the uh phenomenon of disaffiliation but brandon might be helpful to um you know for like practical concrete tips of how to bring people back and re-engage them thank you and also on the subject of resources do you have something recommended that discusses the transcendental values the good the true and the beautiful oh well the classic source is an aquinas and people like that um but let me think no right i can't come up with something right off the top of my head something more accessible or more contemporary on that um dietrich von hildebrand the great uh german phenomenologist has a lot that's a little bit heavy though um you know joseph peeper another uh german philosopher who's pretty accessible those are a couple places to look but i'd have to think a bit more about a more accessible text aquinas is the classic place to look thank you back to schools for a moment how great is the impact of the leftist progressive education educators i should say of most catholic schools from grammar to university and their rejection of traditional orthodox catholic values well it does worry me yeah i mean and you know at all these different levels now and in california some of those moves that are still being debated and what our schools will look like what curriculums curriculum will look like especially at the university level there is that you know i've been a critic of this kind of woke uh mentality which has become so dominant in the universities and it comes up out of a french theorizing of the last century people like jacques derrida michel foucault and others who are not exactly friends of classical catholicism so i get that i mean i think it is a worry and you know that we hold to certain objective moral values we we hold a certain epistemic values and we do have a great intellectual tradition that bears those values and you know we should be attentive to it and not simply succumb to the whatever the trendy you know um philosophy of the day is so i i do worry about that yeah and it's i i do think it's creeping from the universities down to lower levels of education too in the high schools and grade schools so yeah it's a worry and do you think shifting gears here do you think young people see it as hypocritical when priests are anti-abortion and yet pro-capital punishment yeah that's an incorrect position i mean if you really are i'm not sure i know many priests who are um against abortion but for capital punishment no i mean i'm with john paul ii and pope francis in the catechism that would clearly see those as you know tightly related issues both involve an attack on life so no i think you're right it would be inconsistent to be for one and not the other um do you think there's something uh missing in our catechesis uh to the very young in our catholic schools yeah plenty that's right that's right rail against this dumbing down of the faith and at both the catholic schools and the catechetical programs yeah there's a lot missing i'd say the intellectual is is where we're weakest and i've been beating that drum for a long time i think we're good at a lot of you know as i say prayer the works of justice we're better at that uh building up community but i think the intellectual we are we are lacking in that and is there a way that uh we can communicate to all catholics and especially the lgbtq that we love and respect them even though we don't necessarily agree with their choices yeah we have to do it all the time and that's the basic stance we should always be in without exception so you know how we do that that's a good question and i think that's that's a question of prudential judgment what are the best ways to communicate the church's care and concern and love uh but absolutely we have to do that and related to evangelization how do you think covet is affecting evangelism and how can we get ahead of the restrictions yeah it's affecting it poorly obviously and one of my big worries and i've been bringing every meeting i've had in the archdiocese by zoom i've brought this up we were already in trouble before covet in terms of disaffiliation we were already in trouble with only 20 percent coming to mass now we've had a year where people have been kind of in the practice of not going to mass so that worries me a lot and i think we've got to be very proactive my own feeling now we should as an archdiocese be very proactive about getting our people to come back i've been encouraging everyone that's still coming to our restricted you know coveted masses make sure you're a missionary that when we can open the doors again definitively you bring one or two people back with you so it's affected us negatively for sure and we've got to be proactive missionaries and bringing people back and the second part of that again bob was what um was a second i can't hear you sorry i'm still on mute just getting ahead of the uh restrictions and i think you touched on that already with the uh the electronic media the social media the zooms yeah and you know please god this will be over i mean sometime soon i've been saying that for months but with the vaccines i hope uh now now in all of our counties here in la we can uh at least get a quarter of our people into inside church so that's a good thing up in my you know our region here we've not been able to do that for the past several months so you know keep pressing and i hope in a few months we'll be back amen and you mentioned by way of social media reddit are there other online forums where we would be likely to meet young people with questions well i i see i i i was sort of encouraging parishes to do it themselves you know is you set up a forum and it's easy as as um what i did on reddit which is you know i am a catholic priest eager to dialogue with anyone's got a question or you know uh they're atheists there that would like to ask me a question and believe me they'll come out of the woodwork i think you'd be very surprised that you'll attract people to it or you know here's my sermon or here's a review of a movie or here's this book i'm reading or um so i think i think priests and ministers in the parishes should do it and if you don't know how to use the um technology get someone you know 20 or younger to to teach you and just do it launch out duke and altum go out into the depths and speaking of depths where can we go uh to educate ourselves so that we don't dumb down our faith yeah as i say a lot of resources available now um at the risk of self-promotion i mean word on fire is all about that i mean we keep we're bringing out material both um you know in film and book uh constantly so go on the word on fire site and you'll find all kinds of materials um but there are a lot of good apologetic sources today um that are engaging the the new atheist a guy i really like is william lane craig the evangelical philosopher who has debated hitchens and dawkins and all the top atheists he's got some wonderful material now he's a i don't agree with him on every issue but he's very good i think in engaging the uh the atheists i was just on a program uh it's called unbelievable it's it's based in england and it's it's hosted by an evangelical protestant but he always has a believer and a non-believer on his program so i was on it'll air i think in april but i recorded it a couple weeks ago with this young kid he's from oxford super bright catholic of course who's lost his faith and is now a militant atheist so i was on with him and we had like a two-hour debate uh so my point there is there's a lot of sites out there now that that go into this whole issue of atheism and belief thank you what kind of activities can the church do to get young kids 10 and over in that age group involved in our faith in addition to just ccd classes yeah well you know about the real little kids but i mentioned the works of justice stuff is get them in trips to appalachia get them working with the homeless get them helping in in soup kitchens get them with catholic charities um i think young people respond to that very powerfully um you know we have these retreats of course out in our region that young people i think find attractive um you know so that kind of experience that the justice business then the prayer um and i i think these these um lively discussions about about the issues of life and death and meaning and god and science so i think all three of those the good the true and the beautiful get them involved in justice get them around liturgical and prayer events get them talking and critically thinking about their faith i think we do all those things with young kids and moving up just a little bit in age one of the attendees observes it appears that many catholic parishes do not have any ministries that cater to young adults those up to age 30. why is this and how can local parishes have groups that are aimed at this demographic and in addition there should be ministries catering to middle age the 30 to 50. alas these this group doesn't seem to uh exist in many local parishes what are your comments on yeah i agree and i would i guess i would send the challenge out too is volunteer you start the group so i don't know what age the questioner is but you know someone in the parish like in his or her 20s talk to the pastor and you start the group and it could be as simple as you know an announcement goes on sunday we're going to meet uh sunday night we're going to have a you know gathering or a discussion or watch a movie or something you started in terms of older people too i've always loved the catholic action model and i don't know why we dropped it after the council some of my my great heroes in chicago were priests involved in catholic action in the 50s which involve typically let's get all the physicians and nurses in this parish get them in one room let's break open the gospel let's do see judge and act and see what we can do to bring the gospel to our world next week bring the lawyers in the following week bring all the business leaders in next week bring um whoever whatever group you want uh and do a sea judge and act around the the gospel simple but some of the best and brightest people in the catholic church in the 1940s and 50s were involved in catholic action i revive it for people so in mid middle age who are now in the full flight of their careers good let's get them talking about the faith you know i knew a group in in chicago that all very high-powered people at a kind of a wealthy parish in the city and these men would gather i think one day a week at 6 30 a.m and they would have morning prayer together and then they'd do a sea judge and act about their um their work in high finance in law and in government and good good and if it doesn't exist you start it get it organized amen to that as well uh here's a question again referring to someone in the lgbtq community lgbtq community uh they're young how would you advise them reconnecting with their faith when fundamentally the catholic teachings conflict with who they feel they are as a person and again these are super complicated things and i'd much rather talk directly to somebody but i would say simply this is to realize that your deepest and most abiding identity is not around your sexuality but rather around your relationship with god that what's what's deepest and most abiding and most important about you is that you're a beloved child of god and begin with that someone created by god redeemed by christ loved loved all the way down because christ went went to the cross to save you that that identity is what's most fundamental and is right at the heart of the church and it's it's only out of that more fundamental identity that you'll come to understand something like your sexuality but what i would resist is the tendency to say that that that anyone's sexual identity is what's most basic about them i don't think that's true i think it's that we're a beloved child of god that's what's most basic and that's what the church is fundamentally addressing all the time thank you a number of questions have pointed to the media as a root of a problem with our children their influence starting from school and through television who we put them with makes a difference in people who can influence the media what would you say about this whole business of the influence of media versus uh influence of parents and peers and such yeah i mentioned gene twenge this professor from uh san diego and um the book called igen i recommend it but she talked a lot about the correlation between screen time and depression and i i think it's very credible that we have a generation now that's so attuned to screens and and they see reality largely on screens rather than you know directly and that that's a problem so you talk about the media you know when i was growing up i guess it meant television with like four stations um but now the media are so pervasive and the way they draw us addictively into their influence is bad and so i i would recommend i mean to parents of young kids i would keep them away from those screens as much as you can you know what i mean i don't mean the ones that are important for their education and so on but i mean all these kind of addictive uh machines what's that what's that movie um joey remember what's the name of that movie uh about the addiction of um iphones and everything the social dilemma yeah there's a movie called the social dilemma i highly recommend parents watch it uh i i was fascinated by it and it's a it's it's interviewing people who are very much involved with facebook and instagram and youtube and everything else and they know they designed all these machines to be addictive they designed them to draw us you know to themselves and how dangerous that is psychologically and i would say spiritually so i i would say to parents watch that movie and be wary of the amount of time your kids are spending on them and you know the the whole thing with teenagers and low self-esteem and the way that kind of awful culture of of backbiting and and critique and you know when you go into com boxes and and uh people put photos up and then they're attacked and there's something terrible about that world and so i'd be i'd be careful with it wary of it in regard to kids yes that uh social dilemmas on netflix and that was a really excellent picture you saw it yeah it's quite good i agree yeah my step-children that have seen it said oh we know all this stuff but it is still shocking to see it on the screen yeah yeah there's also a comment uh since we've heard so many negative things from one attendee a simple statement they went with their ucsb granddaughter to saint mark's last night and so impressed with the encouragement in reaching out to the college kids yeah it's a great parish i don't know if it was father john love who was there but he's the pastor say mark they do a wonderful job there right so i i would hold that up too as a great model yes um and another question that we haven't seen yet tonight is how is the church evolving with francis's study of possibly ordaining women deacons and do you feel this would positively affect our church population and if so why i i don't think it's going to happen i just looking at you know francis has has sponsored i think is it two separate groups to kind of study the question i the impression i have is that that's not gonna happen and i think it would cause trouble for our um our theology because of the way episcopacy and priesthood and the diaconate are linked together um that women should be drawn more and more and more into the life and ministry and leadership of the church absolutely but there be an issue there with the our understanding of the clerical state the understanding of of ordained ministry so i think that would cause some theological issues i like a lot how francis is is reaching out i think very invitingly to women and bringing them into positions of great leadership and responsibility and i always emphasize too that the most important thing in the church is being a saint and anyone man or woman can start being a saint tonight you know and and saints have by far the most power in the church um we associate power with office but that's only one very limited kind of power the real power look i mean who was the most powerful catholic of the 20th century i mean with the possible exception of john paul ii it would have been mother teresa of calcutta i mean i i would i think say that without hesitation she was the most powerful influential catholic of the 20th century um of the 19th century the little flower probably or bernadette of bernadette of lourdes you know so it's the saints that's where it's happening not so much in office and there's a question around it's not always our nuns that are the issue many christian churches pull in our young people and show them the beautiful yeah move it meantime has highlighted where our own parish liturgies homilies and services have been lacking now that we can mass up as the virtual front pew how can we help our parishes to understand how important our worship is to our youth yeah it is and and i could have given you a lot more quotes tonight of disaffiliated people who still remember the mass very fondly and the mystical experiences they had the beauty of the mass the community they experienced there so i quite agree with that we should be very attentive to music to homilies to the beauty of our liturgies absolutely on the question of disaffiliation and non-christian churches it's interesting they've studied that some dis affiliate into into more evangelical christian churches fewer disaffiliate into mainstream protestant but the overwhelming majority just affiliate into the ranks of the nuns so it is some some indeed go into other you know christian churches but the overwhelming majority become nuns they become unaffiliated so i think that's we should put our main attention but i quite agree with the point about the liturgy absolutely right and can you comment please on how we can go about handling this canceled culture oh i hate cancelled culture and i i've been writing a lot recently about i mentioned wokism i hate that whole approach and its roots are in very dubious uh philosophical perspectives but one of the ugliest faces of wokism i think is the canceled culture i just wonder i mean who are these perfect people that never think or do anything wrong that have the right to eliminate someone for making you know a faux pas or saying the wrong thing and see it's born too of an antagonistic social theory uh now the roots of that are back in nietzsche and people like that and they're behind a lot of the woke perspective catholic social teaching is not an antagonistic social theory but when you've got an antagonistic social theory that rests upon the us against them think of marxism i mean it's trying to foment social warfare the warfare of classes and so on but when you have an antagonistic social theory the cancer culture becomes one of its flowerings you know and it's particularly terrible i think we have to resist it the problem is that we even though i think stats show something like 85 percent of americans hate the cancel culture but yet we're also afraid of it that we succumb to it i think the castle culture people are like bullies and most bullies are cowards and when you stand up to them they back down and i think as a culture though we've been bullied and we should we should realize strength in our numbers and we should stand up to bullies and not cave into them anyway that's a talk for another day too indeed and uh the issue of harry potter books uh they were very popular and the films and there were incantations in them uh is there uh some way that we can properly counsel our children on the the reading of those books yeah i can't comment i just don't know them i know a lot of people who who are great defenders of the harry potter books but i must say i just have never read them so i can't say then we'll stick with the social dilemma yeah there have been several questions about uh resources so i'll get a hold of noel tomorrow yeah and see if we can put together a a reading list and then we can send that out to everybody yeah that'd be fine let me find all right well thank you very much bishop i certainly appreciate your time and the grilling that you took on our questions here tonight okay um all valid points i know they're things that you uh you know and love uh so i'd like to just say a couple of words in uh closing uh don't forget our presentation tomorrow everyone uh it's at lunchtime 12 15 dr paul ford from padre cerem on the uh the subject of horizontal surfaces in your home and how to turn them into walters in actual daily life and how your home can be a holy place so that's 12 15 tomorrow and then a reminder that as soon as we close here please stay online for about 30 seconds and wait for the evaluation to pop up we look forward to what you have to say and meantime thank you to all who helped put this on tonight the staff award on fire the staff at the university series my friend jonathan for standing by in case i needed him our webmaster ross gile has been on here too in the background so it it does take a village if not a parish to bring this to uh to fruition so thank you again bishop baron we really appreciate it my pleasure god bless you all

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Length: 86min 59sec (5219 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021