Catholic Priest STUNS Evangelical's with Bold Facts

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Hello everybody and welcome back to the channel. I thought it would be fun to look at Bishop Barron's responses to two clips two clips of Protestants basically asking Bishop Barron about their Protestant objections against Catholicism. So we're going to look at two different questions and responses by Bishop Barron and I want to interact and react along the way. As you guys all know, I am a Protestant Evangelical. So I'm probably going to have a different opinion and perspective than Bishop Barron. But just know just because I'm rebutting and arguing a little bit here doesn't mean I don't have profound respect for Bishop Barron or that I don't love Bishop Barron. I absolutely love Bishop Barron. I loved getting to spend some time obviously online with Bishop Barron and having a conversation with him. Great Catholic Bishop, great person to talk to and I know just from his character and how much influence he has. I really do believe God is working through his life profoundly. So let's go ahead and watch what he has to say and as I said I will interact with these two different questions. Thank you Bishop Barron. I am Carol a Protestant from Maryland. My top concern is the first commandment and Catholic spending disproportionate amount of attention on Mary and the saints such as Michael help me in battle rather than focusing time on and praying directly to the only source of power the Trinity. Thank you.

[00:01:28]Yeah, good. It's a question that goes back of course to the 16th century. It's been around for all these all these years. You know to your first point though and I'm glad you mentioned the first commandment. There's nothing at all against the first commandment because Catholics don't worship anyone but God. The Trinitarian God is the sole object of our worship. Whatever we give to the saints including to Mary is a type of reverence. Mary gets a sort of hyper reverence we'd say but we never move into worship. If someone moves into that stance they are indeed violating the most basic of the commandments. So, it's not that. Second observation is this, I don't think it's disproportionate.

[00:02:04]Think of every single time a Catholic prays. We pray in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's the Trinity we're invoking.

[00:02:11]Think of all of our liturgical and sacramental expressions.

[00:02:14]They're all done under the aegis of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The The mass, all of the prayers are directed precisely that way. So, whatever happens happens under the aegis of the Trinity.

[00:02:26]Third observation.

[00:02:28]See, what's the Trinity's job in terms of us? So, the Trinity exists in itself as this great, you know, supreme value.

[00:02:35]But, in terms of us, look, the Father sent the Son all the way to the limits of God-forsakenness so as to gather us back into the life of the Holy Spirit.

[00:02:45]The Trinity is all about the work of salvation.

[00:02:49]Who are Mary and the saints but those that we recognize as having been to a very high degree sanctified, right?

[00:02:56]They've been trinitized. Therefore, the light that they have is simply reflective light. Whatever glory they have is a glory that comes from the great work of the Trinity. Therefore, it's not competitive. And I've talked a lot about that and I I I put my finger on it as a major point of demarcation. I think Protestants tend to think, in my judgment, too much of the God-world relationship as a competitive one. That the the more glory you give to the world, the less you're giving to God.

[00:03:24]No, on the contrary, I would say. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. And And fully alive here means sanctified. And so, as you look at a saint, you look at the Blessed Mother or a great saint and you say, "Oh, I give honor to this figure." Well, ultimately, I'm giving honor to God. It's like saying, "Look at the moon, how lovely that is." Well, yeah, it's lovely, but only because of the sun, right? So, I wouldn't put it, and I'm speaking as a Catholic, in that competitive framework.

[00:03:51]But, I'd say every time we honor one of the saints, we are indeed worshipping the Trinity. That last line of Bishop Barron was super fascinating. He says that by honoring the saints or giving reverence to the saints, you are in fact worshipping the Trinity. Now, I do think it's important to make the delineation, right? He's not saying that the saints are God, but because they have been um divinized because of theosis to say that the saints are in Christ. They are partakers of the divine life is in fact true. That is kind of an Orthodox theologically coherent and correct way of viewing it, right? So, in a sense, you can say when you're praying to the Trinity, you are in fact praying to the mystical body of Christ and therefore you are praying to the Trinity. And I and I understand that. There is one nuance that I disagree with because I am a Protestant Evangelical and I will bring that out in just a second, but I want to mention this idea, this Protestant intuition that many Protestants have because of let's say icons or because of, you know, um visible saints, statues within houses, or pictures of Jesus. It goes that extreme in many cases. Um that this is somehow worshipping uh these things rather than God and thereby breaking the first commandment. I think that that intuition that Protestants have is unfounded precisely because if you go into the documents of the Catholic Church, they make the distinction between reverence and latria, right? You, you know, Thomas Aquinas talks about this with Jesus.

[00:05:16]Jesus gets latria. He gets worship. Um He doesn't get veneration and I don't know all of the ins and outs of that, but what's important to see is that there is a distinction that is made within the Catholic documents. And so to say or or basically insinuate that Catholics worship saints um is ungrounded and unfair because in their documents that it flat out says that they don't. So, it's really you deciding you want them by necessity of their theology to be doing something that they claim they aren't doing. Um that's not fair. I don't think that's that's a fair position. So, Bishop Barron gets to this idea of theosis and divinization.

[00:05:52]And he talks about, as I mentioned in the beginning, that if you are honoring or giving reverence to the saint, that you are in fact worshipping the Trinity.

[00:06:01]Um, I think that many Protestants would hear that and have an obvious problem with that because it sounds like he's making creating a double standard and I already kind of brought broke down why I think if you make the proper delineation that's not actually happening. What's interesting about it to me though, is I think one thing is missing from this analysis. In my personal perspective, um, and you can take it or leave it, but I think it's really important to see that the Trinity is three persons in one essence, but the Son has taken on flesh and has a resurrected glorified body. Okay, and you're like, holy moly, where are we going with this?

[00:06:41]What I want to say and is this.

[00:06:45]I think it would be true that you can talk about the divinization of Mary, of the other saints after they have the resurrected glorified body.

[00:06:56]That's what I think is so important to see here. It's not like they go up to heaven and they're in the mystical body of Christ and therefore they're completely divinized. No, because to be completely divinized to have your glorified resurrected body because God has become divinized in his resurrected body. Does that make sense? In his humanity. So, it seems to me that the only way we can talk about, um, you know, honoring or venerating the saints as being worship of the Trinity is when they fully have received their glorification. Does that make sense? So, that's the only distinction I would make. So, this intermediate state of being in heaven, uh, or in paradise it's as it's referred to in the gospels when the thief dies on the cross, um, is not the same thing as being fully divinized or glorified when we receive our resurrected bodies. Does that make sense? So, I think to talk in this way is a a bit premature from my theological understanding. Okay, let's continue and this is the last question uh that Bishop Barron takes and we will react at the end.

[00:07:49]Hi Bishop Barron. My name is David from Michigan.

[00:07:52]I'm a Pentecostal Protestant chaplain and I have an ever-growing love and respect for my Catholic brothers and sisters.

[00:07:58]A friend I led to Christ in high school recently converted to Catholicism and I am happy for him.

[00:08:04]What opportunities are there for me to continue to work with Catholics and foster greater unity and joint efforts within Christ. Thank you.

[00:08:14]Good. Thank you for your your ministry and thank you for your good you know healthy ecumenical attitude there. I'd say first of all, find those points of contact. I think you're already doing that but keep finding the points of contact. So it's easy enough to name you know where we differ Protestants and Catholics but there's so many areas where we're seeing things eye to eye especially when we're up against a common enemy which is modern secularism. So I think to to bring Protestants and Catholics together around those common concerns to find all the things that we hold you know biblically and doctrinally uh in common that's a great place to start.

[00:08:52]Also I'd say to you you know keep exploring Catholicism. Um so you're attracted to different aspects of it or you see it alive in in some of the young people you're serving. Good.

[00:09:04]Ask them what it is what it is that they find so intriguing about Catholicism.

[00:09:08]Keep looking. Keep searching. Keep your mind open um and especially keep your eyes on the common points. I think they're are good ways forward.

[00:09:16]Yeah, I definitely would agree with Bishop Barron here that we need to be amplifying the common points that we share. Uh there are lots of common enemies within our modern world. There's Mormonism for example in the United States. They are a non-Trinitarian sect that claim to be Christian when in fact they deny orthodoxy and I think that many evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox can actually rally together and say what makes a person Christian is the creeds. It's the creeds and submission to the scriptures and submission to the tradition that has been handed down on both sides that point to that fact that Jesus is God and Jesus is man and he must be those two things. I think mainly it would be that Jesus is God.

[00:09:59]That's kind of the issue that we have in modernity. Jesus is basically a moral exemplar, a good man to emulate, but he's not, you know, incarnate Yahweh.

[00:10:09]And so I think that that's kind of doctrinally the thing that we need to be rallying around and I think Bishop Barron's ministry is a testament to it and that's why as an evangelical I love Bishop Barron because I think he points people back to that fact.

[00:10:23]I think that there are points of disagreement and I actually think it helps to have as Alister as he's a philosopher, he says that contrast is a mother of clarity.

[00:10:32]To be clear, to have an assurance of what you actually believe. It's good to know what other people that are different than you actually believe and I think that many times many Christians know what atheists think or what Muslims think, but they don't know kind of the inner workings of the debates that exist within Christendom and I think that it really refines and sharpens your faith not only to have a more ecumenical mind that Bishop Barron brings out here as well, but also to have a better understanding of why you actually believe what you believe.

[00:11:00]And I think it's only I think it's a lot like iron sharpening iron, you know, this is what I think and this is what I think. This is what I how I came to this conclusion. This is how I came to that conclusion. And, you know, if that makes you a Catholic in the long run because you've actually sought the truth, I think that's great. I would be all for that. If it means that you have a better understanding of evangelical Protestant theology and you actually know why the Protestant Reformation happened or why you're an evangelical um because of the differing views through history and your own study of scripture, then great. I I just what I don't think is good is ignorance. Ignorance is not bliss as it's often said and I think that it is good to have these ecumenical dialogues. Not only does it bring it closer to one another, but it also sharpens our faith. All right, that's all I have for this video. Please be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next. Bye.