Catholic Priest Confronted by Fox News Host with RAPID FIRE Questions ON AIR

[00:00:00]I mean, look, my father was a was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and that for him meant, you know, FDR and Harry S.

[00:00:05]Truman and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

[00:00:09]I lived through the, you know, presidency of Bill Clinton, a kind of moderate Democrat. But then, you know, through Bernie Sanders and others, the party is really wrenched to the left.

[00:00:19]And I think that's disturbing. If if our, you know, we have the two-party system, if one of our two parties has has gone that far to the left where explicit socialists, even I would say borderline communists, are being proposed as serious of candidates, I think we got a problem in our body politic.

[00:00:37]>> Bishop Barron sat down with Fox News a few weeks back ahead of the re-dedicate 250 event. You'll have to intuit the questions because the Fox News host didn't actually include them, but the questions have to do with wokeism, socialism, and liberalism. What does Bishop Barron have to say about these topics? Stick around to find out and then I will react at the end.

[00:00:56]>> So, I'm speaking now really as an American, just concerned about the balance in our political system that has been wrenched so far to the left that that's concerning. Now, you mentioned Mayor Murk Dhani and I actually saw his inaugural address. I don't know why why I was I was watching TV and it was on and when he used that phrase, "the warmth of collectivism", it just triggered something in me. I thought, "Collectivism has been such a disastrous concept over the last 100 years or so." And so, that prompted me to speak out against it.

[00:01:28]But it's it's that extreme leftward drift of the Democratic Party that does concern me as an American. I I know when Bernie Sanders first emerged, that would have been probably a 2014, 2015 and there was, you know, a 70-something socialist from Vermont who's proposing these radical policies. I thought, "Well, he'll never go anywhere." But of course, he was, you know, quite successful in 2016. He was so successful in 2020 that basically a deal had to be cut to keep him out of the out of the nomination process. Um yeah, that did surprise me. Now, you could say in light of um the universities shaping more and more the minds of younger people and the universities have become, you know, fairly radical politically. That's partly where it comes from. But yeah, I mean to go from let's say Bill Clinton style Democratic Party to Bernie Sanders, that's a pretty big shift in a relatively short time. I'm against socialism precisely as a Catholic.

[00:02:26]Catholic social teaching is against socialism. Go back to the very beginning of it, Rerum Novarum, the great document by Pope Leo the XIII, end of the 19th century. It begins practically with a condemnation of socialism. It makes several arguments against it. And it begins the tradition of Catholic social teaching favoring what what the church calls the market economy. We might say capitalism.

[00:02:48]It tends not to use that word, but rather the free market economy. Now, to be sure, the church calls for a circumscription of the market economy both morally and legally. So, not just a free-flowing anything goes capitalism, but one that's circumscribed morally and legally. So, that's certainly the case.

[00:03:07]But that said, it it prefers the market economy to forms of socialism. And then of course, so that's more theoretical.

[00:03:14]But look at the history. So, beginning with Leo the XIII, late 19th century, well then we saw all sorts of iterations of socialism all over the world resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and the extraordinary uh failure of socialist economies whenever they've been tried. So, I have objections that are both theoretical and practical. Um sometimes, you know, when I was over in in Rome for the Synod on Synodality, I would hear people talking about the economy that kills and the reference was to capitalism. I would say, "The economy that kills? I mean, capitalism, like like all economic systems is going to be flawed because it's made up of flawed human beings.

[00:03:57]But, the economy that kills, socialism is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people the last, you know, 100 years or so. So, on both theoretical and practical and moral grounds, I stand athwart socialism. I've been an outspoken critic of wokeism, which I define as the popularization of critical theory. So, this um intellectual movement that emerges largely in the French and German academies mid-20th century. Think of the Frankfurt School, too. Um finds its way from the European academy into the American academy.

[00:04:30]And then it gestates there for a couple decades and then comes roaring out uh 2020, uh which was kind of a honest horribilis in many ways.

[00:04:39]Um I think it be seen as a time when the ideology of wokeism found its way now into the streets. Well, see, part of wokeism, because of its roots in critical theory, is anti-religious.

[00:04:52]One of the marks of wokeism is a calling into question of objective truth. Seeing everything in terms of power relationships. So, if I make a truth claim, it's not really truth, it's about my desire to be, you know, powerful.

[00:05:04]It's the complete relativization of of moral value.

[00:05:08]Um the dividing of society into oppressor and oppressed. I mean, all those marks of wokeism. But, one of its one of its principal uh characteristics is an antagonism to religion. Because religion stands against many of those principles.

[00:05:22]Religion stands for objective moral value grounded in God. It does not want to see society as simply a a clash of oppressor and oppressed. Think of Catholic social teaching here, which is predicated upon the cooperation of different economic uh classes. Um so, I think for all those reasons the wokeist mentality uh stood against religion. And in the measure that wokeism has taken over some of our institutions, that's concerning for religious people. See, and I I've identified it as the great alternate religion in our society right now.

[00:05:57]Is this culture of self-invention. If there are no objective values, that there is no God, it really finally a matter of of my choice, my decision. I decide what my values are. Um I think that's that's the principal problem religion's facing in our country right now.

[00:06:13]>> The principal problem our culture is facing is a culture of self-invention.

[00:06:18]We get to decide who we are instead of allowing God to define and shape us. And that is a key issue that Bishop Barron is bringing out here, and I want to think through it a little bit uh right now. The question is, do I allow God to define me, or am I shaped and defined by the culture around me? And I want to think about that latter because I think our culture is very, very deceptive.

[00:06:41]It's incredibly deceptive. Our culture and its lies and its narratives masquerade as our own personal decisions and freedoms.

[00:06:52]I think it's me choosing, but if I'm honest, what's really going on is I'm being influenced by the culture.

[00:06:59]I mean, look at all the choices that you have in a supermarket for uh an example.

[00:07:03]You think you're there and you have all these choices, but it's really the marketing, it's the positioning of the products and the the the the propaganda and the advertisement that really is influencing you. And the more you think about this, the real the reality is you realize how you aren't actually free. How you are addicted. You're addicted to caffeine, you're addicted to candy, you're addicted to consumerism. And what this shows is that you aren't free. You are a slave to a certain type of deceptive freedom.

[00:07:35]So, what's the solution? And I began thinking about this.

[00:07:38]So, Bishop Barron is talking about this culture of self-invention. Well, the the opposite of that would be to find your identity in Christ, to find your identity in who God created you to be.

[00:07:51]And an implication of living into the identity that Christ has for you, Jesus himself says, "Take my yoke upon you."

[00:07:58]There is a type of constrained freedom that is the ultimate type of freedom. It's the only way to actually live freely. And Bishop Barron talks about this a lot, and he likes to use the analogy uh of playing golf. So, who is more free to play golf? Think about it in this way. The person that has practiced and memorized the movements in their muscles, or the person that shows up once a year to the summer uh charity scramble?

[00:08:26]What's your answer? Who's more free?

[00:08:29]Well, if you're thinking about this biblically, and if you're thinking through this in the worldview of a Christian, the answer is the person who has practiced, the person who has the muscle memory.

[00:08:39]The disciplined person, the sanctified person is the truly free person.

[00:08:45]Because you have to ask the question, what is the objective of golf? Is it just to have a good time, or is to shoot the lowest score?

[00:08:54]Well, when you think about the purpose or the telos of golf, it's to shoot the lowest score.

[00:08:59]So, likewise, the freest person spiritually is the person that sins the least.

[00:09:04]They don't need attempt after attempt, rather they memorize and walk in the rhythms of the faith.

[00:09:11]They become sanctified, and in being sanctified, they are truly free to live, to live unto God.

[00:09:20]We don't need a haphazard freedom that says that we can do whatever we want, or we can become whatever we want. What we need is a freedom that submits to the yoke of Christ. Something to be thinking about. God bless and peace.