The Vocation Stories of Bishop Barron & Fr. Mike Schmitz

welcome everybody i'm john barron from word on fire catholic ministries and what we are doing today is seizing an opportunity i'm here in orlando florida where the good news conference is about to get underway and the two men who are delivering the keynote addresses at this very large gathering of catholics just happen to be with me now we've got bishop robert barron and father mike schmitz and it's no doubt that they are maybe predominantly responsible for the fact that this conference is sold out at this point um so everybody's thrilled and looking forward to seeing you two uh over the weekend they of course are two of the most prominent and most widely followed catholic churchmen in the u.s they are master evangelists speakers authors uh bishop baron is of course the founder of word on fire and everybody knows father mike from his ubiquitous energized and very smart videos not to mention the bible in a year podcast which earlier this year became the number one podcast in the world and has held pretty steady since then and though they are appearing on different days at this conference we knew we couldn't pass up the chance to find some time to get them together for a conversation um thanks to father mike and and bishop for making the time to make this happen and here we go unrehearsed unedited unvarnished um uh uh hopefully interesting conversation with uh with with two great uh leaders um i just talked about where you guys are now um you know what what has developed with with your careers but i wonder if we can go back a little bit to the beginning um when you you kind of first felt that that something clicked inside of you where you knew that something more important was happening with you with your catholic faith something that that probably ultimately put you on the path to the priesthood and i think in both cases something happened during the high school years so father mike yeah no i uh thank you and it's this is an incredible honor for years i've uh referred to myself as the poor man's father baron and so this is this is i know i can't say that anymore because i can't be the poor man's bishop baron i'm just poor man's father um but uh back in yeah i was raised catholic and uh i'm the fourth of six kids and so sunday mass every single sunday and uh i was i would always say that i in catholic elementary school that uh i didn't i didn't like it i didn't like going to church i but you could only in my family could only miss mass if you're too sick to do anything else for the rest of the day so there were times where i i tempted but it's hard to get away with that when your mom's a nurse and your dad's a doctor i fooled him a couple times i don't think they were fooled but at one point uh when i was about 15 or so i had this conviction it was it's only an act of god's grace because um i had this conviction this awareness of personal sin and it wasn't like anyone came into my life and pointed it out it was well i know what the sins are because i went to catholic school i went to you know go to mass on sunday but all of a sudden it was like oh my gosh that's what i that's what i've done and i remember remember thinking so clearly i i can't save myself i need a savior and it was ding you know kind of one of those light bulbs of oh my gosh everything they've they've given me the answer my entire life but i never cared about the question and so now all of a sudden i have the question and the question is is really i'm desperate for an answer and i have it automatically so i knew two things i knew once i need to pray and i didn't know how to pray and so i remember uh i had a rosary hanging on the bed post and my mom would pray the rosary every night but i wasn't gonna ask her mom how do you pray the rosary because i thought she would freak out and so i just thought i went to a religious set on wednesday night and mrs sophie heglin was our teacher and there was this booklet called youth praise the rosary and i said mrs can i kind of borrow that that booklet like sure you can have it you know take it forever and so i would have the booklet have my rosary and just that's how i started learning how to pray and then i knew i needed to go to confession and i didn't know the rules as far as uh saturdays and you know when you have confessions so but i knew where the priest lived so i got on my bike and i rode across town and knocked on the door 10 o'clock on a tuesday morning and he was there and i always say he was there because priests only work one day a week and uh and uh i said father can i go to confession sure come on in i went to confession and i remember walking out of that rectory and i had three clear thoughts in my head my first was god thank you so much i was just overwhelmed my gratitude of just i walked in here with all this sin and i'm walking out completely forgiven because of you jesus like thank you so much my second thought was god if you want me to be a priest i'll hear anyone's confession any time they ask and i'd never thought of being a priest before because you don't like church you don't think about being a priest too often and my third thought was thank you god second thought i'm gonna be a priest i'll hear anyone's confession anytime they ask my third thought was oh she's really cute like so that that's set up the uh the roller coaster of junior high high school whatever college of just kind of god what do you want me to do but that was the beginning yeah and uh where all of a sudden everything they've been telling me mattered to me deeply and uh it was the beginning it was incredible yeah well and you you had a similar encounter with grace in high school and you were right down the hall at the time you know first of all i most of my life i've been in seminary work and so i've heard a thousand stories of of vocation and call and i never tire them because i'm always fascinated by how god tailors his grace to a particular person you know so flannel o'connor talks about the breakthrough of grace that happens in people's lives and in the case of of priests it happens in a particular way very unique way and so that was your yeah the way the lord found you know um your heart mine was at fenway high school i said john was down the hall because he was a year ahead of me at fenway and um it was early in the afternoon and we were just in from the playground as i remember so it's all these sweaty guys fender because of all guys school all the time and this young dominican friar taught us one of aquinas's arguments for god's existence and it's sort of like you i'm born and raised catholic i went to mass every sunday and you know i never doubted god's existence but i never thought about it deeply never thought you could think about it deeply and i don't know why for some reason it just hit me with an extraordinary power of the reality of god and i started um looking for books this is of course long before the internet and i went to our library and found this big tome uh on thomas aquinas you know and tried to start reading this thing and i didn't really understand it but i was fascinated by it and that's how god kind of broke into my life though he was present to me of course as a as a catholic kid but that's the moment when things kind of you know awakened in me and that started me on the path no kidding that i'm still on and when i chose my motto as a bishop i chose aquinas's you know non-nizite dominate i'll have nothing except you and aquinas has followed me all my life so i think of it really i think god's grace happened through a saint through aquinas who kind of broke into my life and said okay you you know i want you to do something that's how it started for me that's incredible you know it's funny you mentioned even just finding books um i'll go back to my mom uh kind of like when i talk to our students i say you know how your moms have a bunch of a stack of books that they want to read someday second magazines they want to read someday and they're like yeah like that's my mom she had all these catholic books these catholic magazines and uh tapes and that was that was i thought well what do i do now and then we'll borrow this book in this book and um through that just reading those books listening to those tapes realizing like you met you had mentioned there's a way to think more even more deeply about this and i remember even just encountering the reality of the eucharist how jesus is truly present and i i don't say freaked out i flipped out um but i remember running downstairs into the kitchen and like to my siblings like do you know that jesus is really present eucharist yeah they're like yeah no like that's really him we know and i i don't know if i was sick that day or what but it that just was this well then i need to be close to him yeah because that's where he is and it hit yeah incredible did it become like a voracious reading experience i read so much yeah yeah it was just such a gift so my best friends became uh people like well i didn't see this is the this is why the poor man's father baron because i didn't go to aquinas i went to you know people who learned from aquinas so i love dr peter craft just was was so so insignificant bishop fulton sheen was so cs lewis um these people who made big concepts really accessible let me tell you about fulton sheen because so here i am 14 15 years old and i get this big tome of thomas aquinas i'm trying to read it and my father our father said to me you know kiddo maybe you could find something a little easier and and he mentioned fulton sheen yeah so i went to the library and got this fulton sheen book which did indeed make a lot of that easier but reading was so important to me that was a way in which is why a lot of my work has been against this anti-intellectualism which held sway believe me when i was a young guy there was almost an animus against the intellectual life and that's terrible in my judgment that's the way i got into it right that's what and people you mentioned craft there's a whole generation of people your age and younger who were drawn back to the faith by peter craft oh he's been so he's an extraordinary teacher and a great writer but books books have played from you know look at augustine on such a huge role yeah in people's journey to the lord yeah i would say that um and the kind of people that i was drawn to i think are the kind of people like as we continue to talk the people i emulate and so i remember c.s lewis at one point he was giving a talk to um i think it was seminarians and i i think it was called they might have referred to themselves as youth ministers or you pastors or something in the anglican church and he said that he believed the final exam for people before they for the anglican men before they get ordained shouldn't be answering big theological topics in big theological way it should be here's a big theological topic communicate this in a way that the ordinary doc worker can understand and he said because you can't if you can't do that we wouldn't send you to burma if you didn't speak burmese we wouldn't send you to china as a missionary if you didn't speak chinese and so why would we send you to you know south london if you don't know how to communicate in such a way that the people living in south london could understand i think i do remember that vaguely in lewis and it reminds me of um billy graham's something similar namely he said any christian preacher at the drop of a hat should be able to explain the gospel to any group that shows up so if there's your church or whatever it is hey um you know a bishop a group of six-year-olds have shown up okay you should be able to drop ahead to explain the gospel though yeah uh bishop a group of uh academics from uh you know villanova have shown up explain the gospel to them if you can't do that at the drop of a hat you're not qualified yeah and i've always thought that's right like what is the gospel and can you explain it to any group at any level without dumbing it down yeah right without doing it with integrity but able to address uh people at different levels and all that i think that is true you

Channel: Word on Fire Institute

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Id: vtICKO1FmWA

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022