The Making of “Heaven in Stone and Glass” | Bishop Robert Barron Transcript

Panel discussion on the making of Bishop Barron's Gothic cathedral documentary "Heaven in Stone and Glass"

Bishop Robert Barron, filmmaker Rob (Spirit Juice Studios), and Father Steve discuss the creation of the documentary film Heaven in Stone and Glass, covering its long production history, the role of Scripture in Gothic cathedrals, the evangelical power of film, and the objective nature of beauty.

Summary

Bishop Robert Barron joins Rob Kaczmark and Branden Stanley from Spirit Juice Studios and Father Steve Grunow for a panel discussion about the making of Heaven in Stone and Glass, a feature-length documentary on the great Gothic cathedrals of France. The film had a long gestation — the script was written around 2019, but COVID, Bishop Barron's move to Minnesota, and other obstacles delayed filming until the following summer, with Spirit Juice making three preparatory trips to Europe before Bishop Barron joined them. The panel argues that the Gothic cathedrals are fundamentally biblical buildings, and that understanding Western civilization requires understanding the scriptural revelation that animated their construction. Bishop Barron makes a strong case for the objectivity of beauty against postmodern relativism, using Notre-Dame's near-destruction as evidence that most people intuitively recognize transcendent value when it is threatened. The panel closes with a shared call to Christians to respond to great art not with nostalgia but with creative confidence — to build and create in the present as an act of faith.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction: How Word on Fire and Spirit Juice Studios Came Together

Father Steve: So today we're blessed to have representatives from both Word on Fire and Spirit Juice Studios. Let's start with an exploration of how this relationship began. How did you all meet, and how did this project specifically get off the ground?

Bishop Barron: Gosh, we met many years ago. I met Rob — it's got to be fifteen years ago, maybe, in the early days of Word on Fire. You were filming a fundraising project for us or something. That's right. That was the first time I laid eyes on you, and then we worked on several things together over the years, including one on sacraments, The Mystery of God — we did these more academic presentations. So I've known you for a long time, and we keep conspiring together. Rob is such a wonderful filmmaker, so our relationship goes back a long time.

Rob: It's funny, Bishop — something I remember was filming the premiere of Catholicism in Chicago with Cardinal George. You were on stage. I remember my cameras were off to the side, and the directors of that film were brilliant, and I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh, maybe one day. Maybe one day." And that day is right now. I'm just so grateful for the trust and the support. Thank you.

Bishop Barron: You're welcome. It was my first time seeing this on the big screen. I've seen it on computer screens and at various iterations, but I was just overwhelmed. Seeing all the editorial choices you guys made — they really showed themselves off on the big screen.

Rob: It helps to have really great script writing and content, Bishop.

Bishop Barron: Love fest. It was beautiful.

Rob: Love fest.

The Long Road to Production

Father Steve: We'll get into some weightier matters in just a moment, but we're all curious — we want to hear what it was like to film this project. Of course, it didn't just happen all at once. This is over the course of a long time. So please give us a bit of a backstory, your experience, some fond memories, and some unexpected challenges.

Bishop Barron: I'll give a little bit of the backstory first. I wrote the script for this right after the Catholicism series. What you saw at the beginning — I was reflecting on the impact it had on the world. I wrote up that script around 2019, and then of course COVID hit. So 2020, 2021, we couldn't go to Europe, we couldn't travel. Then 2022, I was named bishop in Minnesota during the summer, so I was moving my whole life. We couldn't do it then. So last summer was the first time we were able to film over in Europe. But the script, the text, was written a long time ago.

Rob: I remember when the project was kind of getting started, we had a meeting in Chicago. A couple of lovely gentlemen from Word on Fire came out, and we were sitting and talking about how we could create this, going over the script. They said, "This has to be a sixty-minute piece. Father Steve wants to make sure you're able to do this and get it done on time and on budget" — because films have a tendency to run over budget and over length and kind of last forever. And we said, "Absolutely. What do you think about doing a feature length instead of just sixty minutes?" Nope. It needs to be sixty minutes. Make sure you get it done on time.

And then I remember when we recorded Bishop's monologue. We got it back into the editing suite and timed it all out — and that was before we had added in the time for the asides, those moments where he could speak candidly. It came in at sixty-two minutes, and I thought, "That means we have to make it longer than that." So that was a good realization.

Father Steve: Backstory — give us the backstory. So many years had passed from the conception of the film to its actual execution and production. It's a relief to see it, but it's a beautiful relief. I think it's a magnificent picture, and it was meant to be shown on a movie screen.

Father Steve: Which is itself testimony to something. If you think of the cathedrals, you think of great art — and one of the unique characteristics of the American artistic enterprise is film. As the Church has in the past developed great art and architecture, we've been a bit behind in filmmaking. But we've been hoping, through the efforts of Word on Fire and studios like Spirit Juice, that we can change that. We hope this is the beginning of something special for the Church and for the culture.

Filming in Public — and Without Bishop Barron

Father Steve: One of my favorite features of how you frame and edit the film is having those candid moments — where Bishop is about ready to speak and then the proper camera gets turned on. Tell us more about what it was like to film in public, and what it was like to film when Bishop wasn't there. I know you had to do a lot of work on the ground.

Rob: We took three different trips before Bishop was able to make it out and film. We knew that on those three trips we had to get everything possible to fill in all the gaps. We knew there were certain sections where we'd need Bishop looking up at a rose window, or being in a specific location and talking us through things. For those first three trips, it wasn't the most difficult to film in the cathedrals because we could be fairly covert and move around. It got a lot more difficult on that final trip, when we wanted Bishop in the middle aisle of Reims Cathedral with the rose window behind him and no one else in the shot — and we couldn't close the cathedrals. People were walking back and forth. So we had so many team members lining the aisles off camera, telling people, "Please stay back, stay back" — in French, of course, which just complicated things even more.

Bishop Barron: Do you notice, in some of the shots — you had three separate trips before I filmed — the coloration tells you it's wintertime. Some of the drone photography is really beautiful in that way, and then some shots have very much a summer feel, because you filmed at different times. But it brought out the texture of the buildings beautifully.

One of the things I mentioned to Rob when we were talking about the conception of the film was that I wanted the cathedrals filmed in every season of the year. The reason for that is that these are not just mountains of stone. They're organic realities — actually living buildings, immersed in the human experience, immersed in human communities. Time passes, seasons change, the light changes on these cathedrals, revealing new aspects, new perspectives. You can catch a glimpse of that in the film. It's best to think of these things as living stones, organic realities, rather than just some architectural feature set in the middle of an urban area.

The Candid Asides — and the Voice Behind the Camera

Father Steve: Bishop, one of the distinctive features of your work — and it's certainly present in this film — is the candid conversation. You have your script as the backbone, but we saw this in Catholicism, we saw it in Pivotal Players, and now we see it here. How do you decide what to say when you're asked a spontaneous question?

Bishop Barron: Part of the purpose of that is precisely not to have something carefully prepared. The standups — the more formal ones — are part of a script I memorize for that purpose. That has its own challenge: you have to deliver a paragraph or two of text in front of the camera, often while people are looking at you and wondering what's going on. But then the whole point of those asides — and they do break up the film in a good way, establishing a certain rhythm and pattern — is that Rob will just ask me something and I'll start riffing on the theme.

Rob: That's your voice, Rob — that was me asking the questions. I was both nervous and, after the first day, I felt extremely privileged. I had been going through some more challenging things in life leading up to the trip, and selfishly in a way I used it as an opportunity. These cathedrals are beautiful, but for most of us they're so far away. I wanted to bring in the human aspect — so that when someone watches this, especially if they're going through something, they feel that. I cherished those conversations. I was trying to channel some of the emotions I was experiencing at that time and just have a genuine conversation.

Bishop Barron: And that goes back to the Catholicism series from many years ago. We had the same kind of idea — formal presentations and then these asides. I think people do like that. It loosens the tension a bit. I'm just riffing on whatever he asks me about and we see where it goes.

Father Steve: Here's an insight that just occurred to me. I was present for the filming of the Catholicism series — you started in 2008. When we were filming in those public spaces, people would come up and say, "Who is that? Is that Bishop Barron?" Something has definitely changed since then.

Also, Rob — Bishop Barron asked you to do the standups, to be the voice asking the questions, and I remember your reticence.

Bishop Barron: I basically spiritually commanded you to go for it.

Rob: When a bishop tells you to do something, you do it. There's no question. You just go for it.

Bishop Barron: You did an excellent job.

Rob: Thank you. I remember it was the second or third day, middle of the day after a long morning, and I fumbled and asked you a question and you said, "I don't know what you just asked."

Bishop Barron: It didn't make the final cut.

Rob: Yeah, it didn't make the final cut. With the complexity of those cathedrals, no matter how much time we spent in them, there was always something new to learn. In all, when everything is said and done, we were there for over forty-five days filming, and still by the end of it you'd look at something and think, "Wow, I never noticed that before." It's great to have those moments where you just stand there and go, "I'd kind of like to know more about that."

Father Steve: How many cathedrals total?

Bishop Barron: Basically five. There's one shot of Laon Cathedral, which I really love — you went there in winter, I think, to get the shot of the oxen up in the towers. I've always loved that. But we concentrated on five: Amiens, Reims, Sainte-Chapelle, Notre-Dame de Paris, and Chartres were the main five.

The Bible as the Foundation of the Cathedrals

Father Steve: Now, I want to be attentive to where we are — a beautiful Museum of the Bible. Thank you for being such gracious hosts. This is certainly a theme in the film: the role the Bible plays in grounding and animating the nature and purpose of the great cathedrals. Bishop Barron, Father Steve — if you could draw this out, what role does the Bible play?

Bishop Barron: It's everywhere. I remember — this was back when I was a doctoral student, a long time ago — I got on the train and went down to Chartres by myself. I left on a Friday, checked into a hotel, and spent the entire weekend with a really good guidebook — not a tourist thing, but a serious book on Chartres. I looked at everything: every window, every sculpture. I climbed the towers. Then I finished the weekend with a big Mass at the cathedral. It was a magical experience. But my enduring memory of that was how it stirred my biblical imagination.

This might strike you as odd, but it's true that when I was going through school, including seminary, we tended to mute the Bible. The Bible was not a major focus. There was a big stress on experience and all that — I won't go down that road — but we weren't super biblical. One of the ways that was really awakened in me was that trip long ago to Chartres Cathedral, because it's covered with the Bible — Old Testament and New. This was a deeply biblical people that produced it, and it's how they learned the Bible: by reading these buildings. That trip awakened something in me a long time ago, which has led finally to the Word on Fire Bible and a two-volume commentary on the Old Testament. A lot of that started with Chartres Cathedral. So the Bible is everything.

Father Steve: Every crack and crevice is biblical in some way. The buildings just instantiate the biblical text. If you want to see the biblical text artistically and architecturally represented, look at the Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes when you read a book about the history of the cathedrals or see other documentaries about them, they stress the architecture, the mathematics — but not that which is the condition for its possibility, which is biblical revelation.

Take that even further and deeper. The cathedrals, as Bishop Barron says in the film, are a manifestation of the flowering of Western civilization. They're close to the root of what our civilization is about. How are you going to understand that civilization? You have to understand it biblically. Take the scriptures, take the revelation of God in the scriptures away from Western civilization, and it'll fall apart — and it also won't make any sense. The same is true of the cathedrals themselves. They're biblical buildings. If you want to understand them, you have to immerse yourself in the Bible, because they're telling the biblical stories. The Bible is the condition for the possibility of these great artistic and architectural monuments that we all revere.

Rob: In Chartres Cathedral, the stained glass windows tell the whole story of Jesus — the entire gospel from start to finish. There's the circle and the square that we talk about in the film: the circle representing the divine nature of Jesus, the square representing his human nature. If you look at the windows, you can see Jesus in a bunch of different scenes, but it's the gospel from beginning to end. It's really remarkable how entrenched it all is.

Father Steve: And you can imagine the priests in the Middle Ages taking people through the cathedrals and instructing them in the scriptures from everything represented there. But here's the challenge — particularly for us who are Christians. Could we read the cathedrals? Could we walk the perimeters and say, "That's the prophet Isaiah, and this is what he's saying about Jesus," or "That's the Exodus," or "That's the Nativity"? Could we identify them? Are the scriptures still richly woven into our own lives so that we can understand not only our faith but our civilization itself?

There's a challenge that exists in the cathedrals for us all. But also, we Christians are necessary for the interpretation of those buildings and of our civilization itself, because we hold the biblical revelation so dear. The cathedrals tell the story of biblical revelation, but we ourselves have to help people understand that's what those buildings are meant to do. They're not just meant to awe us with architectural and artistic wonder. They're meant to awe us with the wonders of the revelation in Christ as communicated in the Bible.

The Evangelical Power of Film

Father Steve: What unique evangelical power does the medium of film have? We do a lot of videos, a lot of audio content, and we stand behind all of that. But there's something distinctive about film that Bishop Barron has recognized from the very beginning. How can we define it?

Bishop Barron: The full evangelical power of film has yet to be unleashed, because it's the Church that has to do that. It's the Church telling its story in an artistically vibrant way through cinema — and the Church has been the missing player in that story. The story of our culture is really instantiated in film in so many ways, but the Church has been kind of outside of that artistic project, and probably outside of it for too long. Until the Church really enters into it, I don't think you're going to see the full evangelical power unleashed.

The reference point should be the high art and high architecture of the Middle Ages, manifested in the cathedrals — coming out of the Church, out of this participation of the Church and the culture and the society together in a kind of harmony. We want to see that represented in film. Well, we have to make those films. And you've got to make them with the cathedrals in mind: what is the highest expression of this particular artistic endeavor? How is Heaven in Stone and Glass meant to be represented not just in stone and glass but in all the artistic endeavors of life? The Church was doing that for centuries, but not so much anymore. And the fact that we're not doing it has caused an impoverishment of art and architecture that's all around us.

Father Steve: I remember years ago I was in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris with a mentor of mine. You look at that magnificent Gothic expression, the stained glass — there's no finer stained glass really anywhere. And he said, "Well, these are the first movies, because you've got colored pictures telling a story." And everything about that is true. That vivid, luminous, colorful telling of a story — we were doing that in the Middle Ages. And we're an incarnational religion. We're not an abstraction, not a philosophy. It's based upon these narratives coming up out of the Bible, especially dealing with Jesus. And to portray that in a vivid, luminous, colorful way — well, there's filmmaking for us.

Bishop Barron: I was remarking to these guys backstage — I mentioned in the film how much Kenneth Clark's Civilisation meant to me as a kid. No one's better than Kenneth Clark in terms of narrative. But the advances in filmmaking since then — go back to the early '70s when that came out. He showed these beautiful things, but what we have now with the drone photography and all of the elaborate editorial devices — it's so much richer than what was possible back then.

Father Steve: Do you remember the title of his episode on the cathedrals?

Bishop Barron: The first one is "The Skin of Our Teeth" — when civilization is kind of falling apart.

Father Steve: Right. And then "A White Garment of Churches." It's very evocative. Things start to fracture and come apart, civilization is trembling, and then Christianity enters into its role as a civilizing force and covers Europe in a white garment of churches. And those churches weren't built to be isolated parishes — they were a network, created by a vast system of roads connecting all the pilgrimage destinations, all the cathedrals together. What was the Church doing there? It was reviving civilization itself.

So when you think about your religion as Christians and you think about the Church, it's meant to do that. One of the great civilizing forces of human history is Christianity. And how does it do it? It sets up a network throughout an area of churches — and these particular churches, built in the age of the great cathedrals, were a beautiful garment that extended across the lands to draw people in. These great temples were rising. People had to come see them, come into them. And there was a reinforcement of the great story of revelation. That's what they found there. They found the sacraments, the very things that would make them holy. They found a call to the witness of mercy in the culture, and civilization starts to revive. When you talked about Kenneth Clark, that suddenly struck me — you had the moment of fear that this thing is tenuously coming apart, and then the emergence of the great churches, and civilization starts to happen.

Spirit Juice Studios and the Goal of Catholic Filmmaking

Father Steve: Rob and Branden Stanley, your production company is called Spirit Juice. Tell us a little about your self-understanding when you're creating a film. What is the meta-goal you have in mind in terms of evangelization?

Rob: With any of these films we're creating — let me step back for a second. I think that often in Hollywood, films are set up as an end in and of themselves. You go to any number of blockbuster films, you watch it, and that's kind of it. You go home and continue with your life. I doubt too many people are going to see The Odyssey and then think, "Man, I need to rethink my life a little bit here." But the beauty of the work we're able to do in the Church is that it is a means to something else. It's not an end in and of itself. The goal is not just to come and watch the film on the screen. The goal is to inspire people to change something.

What I like about film is that it combines beautiful imagery, beautiful music — it has all of these different masterful elements that, like a cathedral, can come together into something much larger and more inspiring. Film is the most expensive medium, but it's the most powerful medium. It's the reason why you can watch a thirty-second commercial and want to buy that product. It's the reason why people dress up in costumes from films that have moved them. It changes people emotionally.

As Catholic filmmakers — and that term is loosely defined — I think what makes you a Catholic filmmaker is that you're pointing to something greater and inspiring people to do something better, leading them closer to God. That's the responsibility we have in creating a film like this. It leads people closer to God while watching the film and after the film, and it's something they can go back to. The Passion of the Christ is probably a good example — everyone can think of how many people had huge conversions. I know people in my own family who weren't going to church, watched the Passion, and went back to church. That's the capability you can have as filmmakers.

Beauty Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder

Father Steve: One of Word on Fire's enduring and foundational propositions is that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder — there's an objectivity, even a universality, to it. How can we make that case to a highly secularized, skeptical, postmodern world? Is it a case we must simply show, or is there still an argument that could be made underneath it?

Bishop Barron: Both — and I feel very strongly about this. Here's my conviction: if you take something seriously, you stop being a relativist. All this appeal to relativism — "my truth, your truth," "well, you think that's beautiful, I don't" — we say those things as long as we don't really care. Once we care about something, we get very interested in the objectivity of it. When people say, "I'm an ethical relativist," you ask: what about slavery? Is slavery just your opinion that it's wrong, or do you think it's really wrong in itself? Oh, no — slavery is wrong in itself. Well, that's what I mean by objective moral value. The same is true of the beautiful.

When you're in the presence of what's really beautiful — like a Gothic church — see how weird, not just wrong but how weird, it would be if you walked through Chartres Cathedral and said, "Yeah, it's nice." Truly great works of art aren't there for us to sort of assess. They rework us. They get inside of us. And the cathedrals were clearly meant to have that kind of power, and they still do.

This "beauty in the eye of the beholder," "my beauty, your beauty, my truth, your truth" — that's such a dead end. And I think that's why young people are responding — and there are a lot of indications recently that they are responding — to a vivid presentation of the faith. Because that drab materialism and relativism produces no energy. When I walked into these buildings, it changed my life. That's not an exaggeration. It changed not just my imagination — it changed my life. And the Church has been for centuries the great advocate of objective truth, goodness, and beauty. Our postmodern relativistic culture is such a spiritual dead end for people.

Father Steve: You know, a lot of buildings come and go. A lot of historic buildings have burned down. But Notre-Dame — when it was burning, everyone was trembling. And then we didn't just knock it down and put something in its place. People from all over the world contributed to the restoration of that building. I think it's because most of us knew intuitively that if that goes, we are all diminished in some way. Notre-Dame and these Gothic cathedrals are so beautiful that we all know intuitively they're a route of access to God, and therefore they connect us spiritually to something that transcends ourselves. In other words, they have objective value. We've reduced so much in our culture to being subjectively valuable, thereby trivializing it. But we couldn't do that with these cathedrals. And it wasn't until one of them was so grievously threatened that enough of us saw the gravity of what we were witnessing and the importance of saying, "We're not going to lose this one."

We're not going to lose this one. And I think that's a spiritual attitude all of us should cultivate. When we see what's beautiful, when we hear what's true, when we see goodness — it's something we appreciate, something we propagate, but also something we have to protect. We have a responsibility towards it.

Rob: I almost think about Notre-Dame in relation to something I've wrestled with a lot in my life: why does God let bad things happen? I think it locks a lot of people away from the faith. But I think the burning of Notre-Dame is a little bit of an analogy for that, because it did ignite something in so many people. I think about the Bible verse — "what you intended to hurt people, God intended for good" — something close to that. God used that to bring people closer. And I think about your own life: what are the hard things going on, what are the things that are burning in your own life? Maybe God is using that to turn your focus to something greater and a deeper appreciation.

Branden Stanley: I think working in Catholic media is both a blessing and a bit of a danger. What I mean is that we are surrounded so much by the beauty of our faith every day in our work. There's a tendency, when you're in that long enough, to get a bit desensitized to it. I know there are plenty of times I'll be working on a piece, listening to beautiful speeches, hearing incredibly deep elements of our faith, learning so much from Bishop Barron and many others, and I get to the end of the day and I just don't want to pray — because I've been surrounded by so much of my faith. There's a tendency to become a little desensitized.

And when we look at the cathedrals — the amount of people we met in France who lived in Paris and had never been inside Notre-Dame. They became so desensitized to that beauty right in front of them. We have to find some way to break out of that. We get into this habit sometimes of thinking, "Oh, it must have been easy for the apostles because Jesus was right there." No — clearly they struggled. It must be easy for people in Paris with all these beautiful cathedrals right there. But they don't go in. And so I think it's a wake-up call for us too. Whether we have a cathedral like that right here or we don't, we have to constantly be seeking that out.

Father Steve: And we have a responsibility towards the civilization that the cathedral instantiates and represents — a custodial responsibility for it, but more than that, we have to tell the story that grounded that magnificent work of art. Because we are the interpreters of it.

Responding to Iconoclasm and Ideological Hostility

Father Steve: We live in a time of iconoclasm, as you all well know. We have the problem of indifference — those who walk by Notre-Dame and don't even notice it's there. But we also have a contingent, especially in the West, who look at a building like that and say it is ugly because it represents the patriarchy, or supremacy, or imperialism. What can we do as evangelists — keeping the theme of beauty at the core — to retrain those eyes that have been ideologically hijacked to see what we're calling beautiful, and what is objectively beautiful, as the enemy?

Bishop Barron: Part of it is regaining our nerve and our courage. I came of age in a time when the Church was often in a hand-wringing posture, coming hat in hand to the culture. That was a disaster and a dead end. Those buildings were built by people who were deeply confident in their Christianity, and there's no reason why we can't be either — and recover those buildings, but also make ones of our own, works of art of our own that express the faith in that confident way. I have little patience for that apologetic, hand-wringing Catholicism that I came of age with. I like the boldness of these buildings.

I'll tell you a quick story. When I was a student in Paris, one of my classmates — a priest from Chicago — came over to visit me. I said, "We've got to go to Chartres, my favorite place." So we got on the train, went to Chartres, and I showed him all around. I remember he finished and said, "Yeah, you know, it's nice. It's just too bad it's so liturgically incorrect." And I knew exactly what he meant, because I was trained the same way — our church should be in the round, people close, you see everything, denude it of a lot of symbolism because you want to concentrate on the consecration. And I remember — I was about thirty years old at the time — I said to myself: you're wrong. Chartres is right. Whatever you think is wrong with it — no. You're wrong and Chartres is right.

We have to just regain that sense of confidence in our own Catholicism and boldly proclaim it, own it, be confident about it. Europe — it's a complicated question. I think the two world wars and the Holocaust broke something in the European Christian spirit, and we haven't recovered from that. But I don't look there for a vibrant Catholicism. You want to see a vibrant Catholicism, it's over here. And it's kind of interesting that an American bishop goes over and explains the French cathedrals, because I don't think they're doing it with the same sort of panache. They're the ones who built them and gave this to the world. But Europe — it's just tricky and complicated. They don't have the confidence.

Rob: I think it starts with our kids. It starts with reinstilling in our children this understanding of beauty and the importance of it. I have four kids, with a fifth on the way. The youngest can't really speak, can't really sit and read books and tell what the words are saying — but they can sit in a beautiful church and look around and just experience it. So many times my kids — and we're blessed to be at a beautiful church in Chicago, so there is beautiful architecture here in the United States too — the amount they have learned from just looking and asking, "What is that? Who is that?"

One of the things I was told a long time ago, when I was talking with someone about how do you keep your kids on the straight and narrow — you can't keep them there. At some point they have to make their own decisions. But you show them. You immerse them in all of those things that are true, good, and beautiful. And if you do that effectively enough, they will know when they're seeing something that's counterfeit. They'll know when they're seeing something that is not true, good, and beautiful. So in a lot of ways, the churches are a wonderful way of doing that — immersing them in these things.

Father Steve: You talked about these attitudes, which are essentially forms of nihilism. Well, how did that get into our civilization? And where were we Christians as it was growing and spreading? What were we preoccupied with that we weren't noticing it, weren't being attentive to it? Because the response to nihilism — the counter-response — is faith, the capability of an act of faith. And how do you come to faith? The scripture says that faith comes from hearing. So there has to be some witness to what faith is — witness in preaching, witness in the life of a saint, witness in our way of life.

When we see nihilism growing and spreading around us, some examination of conscience on our own part as Christians is necessary, because it's growing and spreading because there's nothing counteracting it. And the thing is, we have the very thing — if we're believing Christians, we have the antidote, the antibody to it, which is our faith. Are they seeing it? Are they hearing it?

The cathedrals are meant to be a manifestation, in physical form, of an act of faith. Those buildings were built as an act of faith in God. In a sense, they're a testimony themselves to an anti-nihilism. But if we see them only as tourist destinations rather than places of worship and pilgrimage, they're not going to be able to do what they're supposed to do. We as Christians are God's response to the nihilism that infects humanity as a result of sin. That's why we have the gift of faith. That's why we've been given it. The remedy is: we have to show up.

Honoring the Past Without Falling Into Nostalgia

Father Steve: Father Steve and Bishop Barron — one of the warnings you give at Word on Fire is to beware of religious nostalgia, and how dangerous it is to think that the solution to our problems is to look back and say, "If only we could be in that place and everything looked like that again, all of this would get fixed." So how do we use this great project — which could, and certainly does within me, invite a kind of nostalgia for Western civilization as I imagine it used to be, but of course never really was as I imagine — how do we take the goods of the past and not misuse them in the key of nostalgia?

Bishop Barron: I go back often to an experience when I was six or seven years old and my father brought me to a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It was the first professional baseball game I ever saw. I have a vivid memory of it to this day. I was caught up in the beauty of the place, the feel, the colors, the sounds, the play of the Detroit Tigers. But what it led me to was: I want to play. I want to play. Even though I knew perfectly well I couldn't play with the Detroit Tigers. But I started Little League the following summer.

I think when you see a great work of art like Chartres, you think: I want to play. I want to make something beautiful, or I want to contribute. So it doesn't mean looking nostalgically back to the past and lamenting the present. No — it's: I want to play. Maybe I'll never play at that level, but the roots of Word on Fire go back to those days when I was in Paris. The first day, I just dropped my bags off — mostly in anxiety and jet lag — and walked down to Notre-Dame and stood there for half an hour at the rose window. That weekend at Chartres — those are the deepest roots of Word on Fire. I saw all this great stuff and thought: all right, I want to play. I won't play at that level, but I'll play.

That line is from Balthasar: "the beautiful stops you" — aesthetic arrest. That's me at the half hour looking at the window. It stops you in your tracks. And then, he says, it elects you, chooses you, and then it sends you on mission to go and proclaim it — and to do it yourself. So it's not nostalgia. It's an inspiration for our own activity.

Father Steve: Nostalgia is dangerous business when it seizes hold of religion, because if we're living in the past, we're usually living with an idealized unreality. It usually comes from a lack of confidence that meaning and purpose can be found in the present. So we just say, "Well, things were better back then." But let's be honest — the civilization from which the cathedrals were rising had a lot of problems. I wouldn't want to live in the thirteenth century. Let's be honest about that. And yet look what they built. Look what they created.

The evangelical challenge of a film like this is not "let's live in the past." It's: what are you building and creating right now? Look what they did with the lack of resources they had, the lack of technological know-how, the lack of modern science and pharmacology — they didn't have any of those things, and they raised these things up and pushed civilization forward. So too it should be with us. I would hope that when people see this film, one of the questions provoked in them is: what are we building and creating? And let's get at it.

Honoring Tradition While Creating Something New — The Craft of Filmmaking

Father Steve: Rob and Branden Stanley, as creative types — how do you honor the past and use its resources while authentically creating something new?

Rob: In this piece in particular, there are lots of technological advances that make a film different than it was in the '70s or '80s. But there are ways of honoring the tradition in film and merging that which has been there for a long time with some of the more modern techniques. One of my favorite parts of the film — I'm partial to it because I love actual film, shooting on film — we were trying to figure out how to convey that Bishop Barron and others have learned about these cathedrals through various points in time. It's not just modern day. There's been a fascination and a love of these cathedrals throughout the years. The thought was: what if we show it in the mediums of the time? We don't have videos from the 1700s or 1600s, as cool as that might have been. But we do have the ability to shoot some of it on film. And so we did shoot some of those sequences on actual Super 8 to bring some of that in.

People sometimes say, "Music was so much better in the '70s or '80s." I'm not here to debate that. But people have a tendency to retain the best of an era and forget about the stuff that wasn't as good. As we look at filmmaking, we can find the best that the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and early 2000s had to offer, retain that, pull in the new technology, and merge those in a way that looks like something.

Bishop Barron: Watching it again for the first time on the big screen was wonderful. I'd think, "Ah, that's why they put me there," or "That's why the shot was set up that way." I always found that great fun — watching you technicians at work as you make that happen. I love that. I'm more philosophically minded, but I love watching artists at work.

I always found that great fun — you know, as you guys would confer about how the lighting was going to go. I remember the scene on the very first day at Amiens, when I did that little Goethe thing — I said, you know, Goethe's last words were "more light," and we were trying to get it so that the light would burst through right at that moment. And then that beautiful scene walking around the labyrinth — I love that.

Father Steve: Well, they're artists. They understand the technical nature of their craft, as all artists do. But ultimately, film is an act of artistry.

Father Steve: Bishop Barron, you are known as a very fast walker.

Bishop Barron: Yeah.

Father Steve: So when we were filming those scenes in the labyrinth, there was a conversation beforehand — it was decided to shoot it in slow motion.

Bishop Barron: Oh — is that okay? Good.

Father Steve: So all of those scenes — it looks good.

Bishop Barron: Yeah. I'll just say that when we were in California, there's a saint who founded all the missions — Junípero Serra — and his great motto was "always forward."

Father Steve: With Bishop Barron's walking, it's always faster.

Bishop Barron: It's a trot. Definitely.

Father Steve: It's keeping us all in shape. We're all very slim.

The Presence of the Obscene and the Body in Sacred Architecture

Father Steve: I want to make sure we get this on the table as well, because I think it's fascinating that you really focus on it, Bishop. The presence of the obscene, the body, the shocking, and the scandalous right there in the entryway. Say a little about how this teaches us how to handle the reality of scandalous and obscene things in the world.

Bishop Barron: In the piece, I referenced Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare — all of whom include the body and the kind of shocking, body-sexual humor. In the classical writers, certainly in the medieval writers, there's something of the "everything belongs" thing — that yes, the saints and the sinners, the good and the bad, the ugly, it's all in God's creation, and somehow in God's providence it fits. They want to see how God operates in all things, in all aspects of life. And I think a sense of humor has always been one of the great marks of religious people. The loss of a sense of humor is a sign that you've lost your religion, because then you start taking things in the world so seriously, and you become a real problematic person — you think salvation can be found through politics or economics or whatever.

Religious people have a sense of detachment and therefore fun. "Wherever the Catholic sun does shine, there's music and laughter and good red wine," as Hilaire Belloc said. So I think that's all part of it. Read Chaucer — if you have puritanical sensibilities, you're not going to get very far without being scandalized. Much of Shakespeare, too — it's sometimes lost in the sixteenth-century language, but there's a lot of body and sexual references. I think there's something very healthy about it. When I used to give tours in Amiens, I always finished the tour out in front at the facade and pointed out that devil to the people. There's also Saint Denis standing there with his head cut off, the head talking to you. They were kind of at home with things we'd find a little strange.

Father Steve: The Church has to be close to the raw and real facts of human existence. The Church also has to be close to sinners. Yes, because the Incarnation of God in Christ moved close to those realities. So if we as Christians are unable or unwilling to move close to the real, raw facts of life and also close to sinners, how close are we actually to Jesus? How well do we know him? Because those are the dark and dangerous places that he went. That's where he inserted himself, even to the shedding of his own blood. So when you see this panoply of the cathedrals — all these facts of human existence — what you're seeing is a manifestation of how close Christians should be to their Lord and his mission. We can't absent ourselves from things that make us uncomfortable as Christians, because then we're not imitating the Lord of our life. He wants us to be around the unsafe and the uncomfortable, because that's where he went.

Creating Religious Film Without Manipulation

Father Steve: How do you create a film — a religious film, a film with great religious significance — without that yucky, manipulative factor that so much religious media has? Because this is a good example of a great film that's religiously significant, but you don't feel like it's an infomercial, like you're being sold something. How, at the level of craft, do you do that?

Rob: I think in a lot of ways, going back to this idea of not removing everything of the world to show only a scene that is too perfect — when people are watching a film, they want to be able to trust that what you're telling them is accurate and true. And if we get to the point where we remove everything that could offend someone — even things like the demons on the outside, the gargoyles — if we remove so much of that that people feel we're giving them only part of the story, you lose trust. And you lose the ability to convince people of your argument. You lose the ability to show them how to actually live in reality. Often times religious films can be created in such a way that says, "Oh, well, things are just all perfect if you do this." And if you approach it from that perspective, people are going to tune out.

Branden Stanley: The other thing I would add is that you have to put your heart into it. When things are authentic, people feel a sense of connection to a film. For me, I remember — it was at Reims Cathedral — we would get there a little early, and before Bishop arrived I had a chance to pray in the adoration chapel and just had a spiritual experience in that time. And I think when you bring yourself into these spots and you have your heart in it, it allows you to do something so it doesn't feel cheesy. Because our lives aren't cheesy. It's often when you see something manufactured on the screen that it can feel like that. Immersing yourself in whatever it is and bringing a part of yourself into it allows it to be authentic and hopefully resonates with people.

Closing Reflections: What the Film Asks of Its Audience

Father Steve: So much more we could get to, but we're almost at time. I'd like each of you to respond to this question. You've just given a big portion of your life to creating something beautiful and very meaningful. To this audience and to all future audiences — what would you say? This is what I want you to do having watched this film. Branden Stanley, we'll start with you.

Branden Stanley: I think that making a change in our Church, making a change in our country, doesn't start at the top. It starts with all of us. It starts with little decisions and little calls to holiness, little calls to be better. And I think that in this world right now, we've gotten into a spot where it's "you do you, I'll do me." No — let's get back to calling each other to be better, and looking at things like the cathedrals and saying, "Yeah, we can do better. We can make a change. We can do better if we all will that and all do our part."

Rob: I would say: you see the cathedrals and they're beautiful, they're grand, they have all this stuff — but they were created in those small moments. You saw the opening sequence, the actual people creating them, sawing, making small moments that make little difference in that particular time. And I think that's what I want someone to pull away from: God works in those little times. It's really the people in your life, your family members, those things. God is served in the small ways, because in the small ways he can do grand things.

Father Steve: Manifest your faith to this culture as Christians — less by arguing and more by building and creating a civilization that represents Christ. That's what I would hope people would take from the film.

Bishop Barron: Come closer to the Lord. The cathedral is meant to be a great symbol of Christ — of heaven, of the well-ordered soul, all of that is true. But ultimately, it's a symbol of Christ. And the whole purpose is to crucify you. When you go into a building like that, you're being crucified. You're being turned into the image of Jesus. And so that's what I would hope: that people watch the movie and say, "I want to enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ."