Bishop Barron and Dr. Todd Warner conclude their conversation on modern Christian martyrdom
Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. Todd Warner finish a two-part discussion on anti-Christian persecution, hosted by Matthew Petrusek.
Summary
Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. Todd Warner explore the spiritual dimensions of anti-Christian persecution, arguing that the depth of evil in the world points to the existence of fallen spiritual powers beyond mere human sinfulness. Bishop Barron draws on the sex abuse scandal, the mathematics of invisible reality, and the thought of Thomas Aquinas to make the case for the credibility of demonic forces. The conversation then turns to the historical resilience of the Church — from Karol Wojtyła's underground resistance to Maximilian Kolbe's witness at Auschwitz — as evidence that the "imperialism of the martyrs" outlasts every earthly power that has tried to destroy Christianity. He closes with six practical responses to Christian persecution, ranging from prayer and staying informed to resisting softer forms of religious suppression at home, and reflects on how the story of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko — told to him by Bishop Alfred Abramowicz at a Mundelein Seminary banquet — shaped his own priestly vocation as a young seminarian.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The reality of fallen spiritual powers
Matthew Petrusek: I want to quote from the book What Do Their Deaths Demand? You write: "There exists a fallen spiritual force that lies behind the dysfunctional structures of society and the twisted wills of individual sinners. Jesus will indeed address both personal and institutional sin, but he knows that a successful engagement with those more obvious evils is predicated upon the defeat of the awful invisible authority that conditions them." Now, Bishop, how does a society that is scientistic, materialistic, distracted, incurious, cynical, and skeptical come to believe what you just wrote?
Bishop Barron: Here's my first observation. I think anyone who's lived a little while knows they can't explain the depth of evil they see simply by appealing to fallen human beings. There's a level of evil that is so deep, so profound, that you say, "No, there's something else going on." In another small book I wrote, Letter to a Suffering Church, I begin with that observation — that it was the sex abuse scandal that reaffirmed my belief in the personality of the devil. The sex abuse scandal was such a masterpiece of evil. When you think of how that scandal undermined the work of the Church in every way, compromised the Church in every way — it was devilishly clever in its design. It convinced me there's more here than bad human actors. Plenty of those around — I'm not excusing anybody — but I don't think that's enough.
Here's the second observation. If you're a scientist, there's no serious scientist who can do his work without mathematics. It's a basic feature of physics, chemistry, and biology that there's always a discovery of the mathematical intelligibility of reality. To say mathematical intelligibility is to say the invisible, because mathematics deals not with particular things but with intelligible patterns — numbers, equations, relationships. David Tracy said that the best access to the invisible today would be the sciences, precisely in their mathematical dimension. So when someone says, "I'm a materialist," no — we deal with the invisible all the time. Aristotle saw it and Plato saw it too: how the invisible and the visible are interrelated.
Now keep pressing it. God has made this wildly variegated world of physical things. Think of the variety of physical reality. We know about numbers and equations and relationships — we know about the invisible. Isn't it likely, given God's fecundity and his effervescent creativity, that the invisible world would also be richly variegated?
Think of Teilhard de Chardin. What are the odds that between us and God there just yawns this ontological abyss? Isn't it more likely — and here he agrees with Thomas Aquinas — that that area is in fact filled, like an ocean full of organisms, like our bodies with their trillions of cells? That the space between the visible world and God is in fact filled with a huge variety of the invisible.
Now take it one step further. If some of those invisible realities are creatures, we call them angels — pure intelligences. Isn't it likely some are righteous, having stayed in union with God, and others have fallen? That is of course the claim of the great tradition: that there are fallen invisible personal powers. We call them the devil. The trouble is, right away you think of a red suit and pointy horns. But no — we're signaling a very serious level of reality: an invisible but personal and fallen realm that has malicious intent toward our world.
I'm in my sixties now. I find that completely credible. If you'd asked me when I was a young student studying philosophy, I would have said I'm very skeptical — that's all symbolic language. But the longer I'm at it, the more I find it completely credible. There's a world we can't manipulate and control, yet it has an impact on our world. Some of that world — lower than God, higher than us — is benevolent toward us, and some of it is not. Those are the powers we're dealing with. We invoke them in the liturgy all the time. We're always talking about the angels, and we're asking for deliverance from temptation and from evil. The older I get, the more credible I find all of that.
The red dragon and the Church's role in history
Matthew Petrusek: In What Do Their Deaths Demand, you write: "When one reads history with the eyes of faith, he will easily see that the red dragon seen in Revelation has expressed himself through thousands of King Herods up and down the last twenty centuries, all of whom have had the same purpose: the snuffing out of the Christ life in the world. The struggle against powers seen and unseen has been a mark of the Christian Church from the beginning of its history." So, Bishop, in the twenty-first century, what role does the Catholic Church play in fighting the evils of Satan and his acolytes — and why does it seem that in our current state, we're still the underdogs?
Bishop Barron: I'm an Augustinian. In a way, we're always the underdogs. Augustine construed the Church as like a little Noah's Ark bobbing along a great ocean of a dysfunctional world. I think that's totally credible. You can point to certain eras and certain figures where the Church seems triumphant, but until the eschaton, the Church is more like Noah's Ark — a place of safety, a haven where a microcosm of God's good order is preserved, bouncing upon the very rough seas of a fallen world.
We're underdogs, and we have been from the beginning. Materialism and secularism are indeed threatening us today, but we've been threatened from the beginning. The waves of culture have crashed against us. The amazing thing is that we're still here. Noah's Ark is still bobbing along. At any point in the history of the Church, smart people could have said, "It's done." Go back to the ancient world — people like Celsus, talking to Origen, dismissing Christianity as hopelessly childish. And then look at key moments in our history when it looked like we were going under. We're still here. That's a strange mystery.
Our job is to be a haven, yes, and also a source of resistance. I always think of John Paul II. Young Karol Wojtyła — the Nazis have come in to conquer his country and his beloved Kraków. He goes to the underground seminary of Cardinal Sapieha, he and his friends, some of whom were killed because they were caught by the Nazis going to or from the seminary. John Paul survives. Then the communists come, and he continues in a slightly more public way, still hunkering down — think of those kayaking trips with young people, forming them in John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas and the great Polish literary tradition. For a long time, he was on Noah's Ark, preserving something.
And then that splendid moment when, as Pope, against all expectations, he speaks the great truths of Christianity in the public square dominated by a communist dictatorship. He unleashed the power of the gospel in a way that, in our own lifetime, the whole world changed because of it. That's how the Church operates: it preserves something, and then at key moments it resists evil and announces this great truth to the world. And then the powers of darkness re-gather and try again. Like the scene in the gospel when Jesus confronts Satan — "Be gone, Satan" — and Satan leaves, but to return another time. That's emblematic of the whole life of the Church.
We've won the victory in Christ, and so we go forward with confidence. Think of Maximilian Kolbe going to his death at Auschwitz — someone in the absolute belly of the beast, still resisting and witnessing to Christ. Where are the Nazis? They're long gone, thank God. Kolbe's influence is just beginning to gather steam. That's the way it works.
The imperialism of the martyrs
Matthew Petrusek: The director of your doctoral dissertation, Jesuit scholar Michel Corbin, once told you: "The only legitimate imperialism is that of the martyrs." What does that mean?
Bishop Barron: Michel Corbin is a great man — a Jesuit priest at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. I took a number of his seminars as a young doctoral student and was really impressed by him, so I chose him as my thesis director. He walked me through that whole time.
One of the debates at the time — this would have been around 1989 or 1990 — was whether the Church is too imperialistic, imposing itself with grandiosity and so on. Somehow that came up in the seminar, and he used that line: the only imperialism is the imperialism of the martyrs.
I love it because it catches a real paradox. It really is an imperialism. The martyrs are witnessing to Christ the King — he is the King, he is the Kyrios, as Paul said, the Lord, and he wants to be Lord of the whole world. "Go and preach to all nations." There is an imperialism about Christianity. We're not meant to hide ourselves away. As Karl Barth said, we're not meant to hide behind Chinese walls. And his counterpart Paul Tillich said it in German: Mit klingendem Spiel — we go out with fife and drum. That's the way the Church goes out.
But it's an imperialism not backed up by weapons, threats, or violence. It's backed up by the gospel, by love, by forgiveness, and by non-violence. Corbin catches that paradox beautifully: the imperialism of the martyrs. And that's what all these victims of anti-Christian persecution are — martyrs, which means witnesses, witnessing to this truth.
Why persecutors never learn
Matthew Petrusek: Do you think that those who are persecuting Christians recognize that they're almost playing into the Christians' hands? Christians recognize martyrdom. Christians recognize our Lord as the crucified Christ. In killing Christians for their faith, in a sense it's going to lionize those victims in the eyes of the faithful. Evil is evil and it can be irrational — it just wants to inflict harm without considering the consequences. Maybe that's the answer, but what's your sense?
Bishop Barron: They never seem to get it, do they? The Tertullian principle — the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. He saw that a long time ago, but they weren't convinced back then. "Oh, we'll get rid of these people."
Think of the Ugandan king who killed Charles Lwanga and his companions. Anyone watching that scene — these young men, teenagers and twenty-year-olds, being led out to Namugongo near the capital, speared to death or burned to death — anyone watching would have said, "Well, Christianity's done." Where is that king and his successors? No one knows. But to that site every year on June the third come a million African Christians. They never seem to get it. The more you kill us, the more we grow. They don't get it.
And that's again — the devil, of course, is extremely intelligent. He's a pure intelligence, as Aquinas would say, fallen but a pure intelligence. But in a way — talk to the exorcists about this too — there's an opacity about the devil. He doesn't get it. He does the same thing over and over again without seeing that it isn't working.
Matthew Petrusek: I asked Father Steve this question once — wasn't the devil aware that in inflicting the passion and the crucifixion of Christ, he would ultimately be bringing about his own defeat? And Father Steve said something to the effect that the devil hates so much that it obscures his logic.
Bishop Barron: I think that's right. The hatred blinds him. He's massively intelligent, but blinded by his hatred. We all know what that's like — you can be massively intelligent and yet be so blinded by hatred that you can't see clearly. That's probably the correct way to put it.
Cardinal George's meditation on Rome
Matthew Petrusek: There's a wonderful story you tell — I think it's also visualized in the Catholicism series — where Cardinal Francis George is musing from the Vatican balcony just after the election of Pope Benedict XVI, surveying St. Peter's Square. He was asked what he was thinking in that pensive moment. Could you reflect on that?
Bishop Barron: I love that story. He was standing next to Cardinal Pell, who was a good friend of his, and the camera caught them both. George had this extremely pensive expression on his face. The photo appeared in the Chicago papers, and people asked him honestly: what were you thinking?
He said he was gazing out toward the Palatine Hill — from the balcony of St. Peter's you can see in that direction, where the Roman Forum is, where the Imperial Palace was, where the emperor lived. The Circus Maximus was there on the other side, where the emperor could go and watch the games. The glory and grandeur of Rome. And he was looking over there thinking: "Where are you? Where's your successor? Nowhere. Your whole empire has turned to dust. There is no successor to Julius Caesar or Augustus Caesar or Marcus Aurelius. You're all gone. But the successor of Peter is right there, waving at the crowds, alive and well."
It is a remarkable thing. Even if you are a total secularist who doesn't believe in religion at all, just that fact is interesting to think about. How in the world has this institution survived when the great Roman Empire has not? Bob Dylan has a song — it's about the Jews, but the idea applies — all the empires that enslaved them are gone: Egypt, Rome, even great Babylon. They've all come and gone. But we are still weirdly here, with all our flaws. I'm a bishop of the Church — I know the flaws of Church people, and my own, better than anybody. But we're weirdly still here, and they've tried, God knows they've tried, to knock us out. That's mysterious. Even the most secularist historian has to find that a mysterious thing to think about.
Matthew Petrusek: There's a great Hilaire Belloc quote — you might recall it — where he says the proof of the divinity of the Church is the fact that with the way it's run, in all its knavish imbecility, it wouldn't have survived without the Holy Spirit for a fortnight.
Bishop Barron: That's exactly right. There's some power sustaining us despite the persecutions.
Six responses to Christian persecution
Matthew Petrusek: As we come to the closing minutes, we've answered a lot of the how and the why of modern Christian persecution. The obvious next question is: what are we to do about it? You summarize six responses. Let me go through them quickly. First: pray for the persecuted.
Bishop Barron: Nothing great ever happens in the Bible apart from prayer. It's not decorative, it's not secondary — it is essential. Anyone who becomes aware of this anti-Christian persecution should pray on a daily basis for those who are under persecution.
Matthew Petrusek: Stay informed.
Bishop Barron: That's why I wrote the book. A lot of Christians don't know about it. Many people have said to me, in light of this book, "I had no idea. I never heard those stories." Find out. The internet makes things so easy now — search anti-Christian persecution and you'll find a ream of information.
Matthew Petrusek: Persuade the government to take action.
Bishop Barron: In the measure that it can. Governments can't solve this thing perfectly, and I'm not calling for a crusade or a war. But there are some things governments can do. Encourage your legislators, encourage the president, write to your representatives, and urge them to take action.
Matthew Petrusek: This connects to a lot of your good work on the religious liberty commission.
Bishop Barron: Yes — this would be an extreme example of the violation of religious liberty, but indeed it is. Persecution is a violation of that principle. We're trying to find ways to use the legislative power of our country to fight against it.
Matthew Petrusek: Provide aid to the persecuted.
Bishop Barron: You can do it through all kinds of channels. Go online, look up organizations that are rebuilding churches, providing protection, providing food and shelter. Make a donation.
Matthew Petrusek: We covered this a little bit already — respect religious liberty at home. Any other comments?
Bishop Barron: If our religious liberty — a great American principle, the First Amendment — is respected, it becomes a beacon to the rest of the world. If people around the world can say that in America, the leading superpower, the dominant nation of the world, they respect religious liberty and battle against anti-religious persecution — trust me, people around the world look to that as a beacon of hope. When we allow it to slip and become less attentive to religious liberty here, that's a bad thing for the rest of the world.
Matthew Petrusek: And finally: resist soft religious persecution.
Bishop Barron: We could do a whole other show on that. The extreme examples are people being killed and churches being burned down. But there are softer forms, and you see them in forms of wokeism today — when religion is seen as on the bad side of the binary, as superstitious, oppressive, and disrespectful. So in different ways it gets mocked, limited, denied conscience protections, and Christians are not allowed to dissent from certain practices. That is alive and well in our country, and it was one of the things we were really fighting on the Religious Liberty Commission.
Hope for those whose prayers seem unanswered
Matthew Petrusek: Two last questions. What can you say to people who fear their prayers, their petitions, and even the policies for persecuted Christians go unanswered or insufficiently answered?
Bishop Barron: Keep going. Don't give up hope if what you want doesn't happen immediately. Things happen in God's time and God's way. But you do what you can. Think of Maximilian Kolbe — at the end of his life, in a concentration camp in 1942, with the Nazis on the march all over the world, he must have thought, "I've utterly failed. What a waste of time." On the contrary — he has become a great beacon to the whole world. Don't give up. Do whatever you can.
How the martyrs shaped Bishop Barron's own ministry
Matthew Petrusek: Finally, Bishop, how would you say the martyrs have informed your own ministry?
Bishop Barron: It was relatively late in my writing career that I really came upon these stories, and they had a bigger impact on me than I expected. For much of my time as a writer and teacher, they weren't all that central to me. But as they became clearer in my consciousness, they had a big impact — all the things we've talked about: the reality of evil at all levels, physical and spiritual, and also that imperialism of the martyrs, this power of the Church that is true up and down the ages.
I do tell a story at the very beginning of the book about a night at Mundelein Seminary. I was about twenty-four years old, a second-year theologian. We had a big banquet — everyone was in a good mood — and the guest that night was Bishop Alfred Abramowicz, who was actually a great man. He had confirmed me when I was in sixth grade, and I still remember it very vividly. Bishop Abramowicz was a friend of Karol Wojtyła — a Chicago Pole who spoke Polish and spent a lot of time in Poland, smuggling things into the country during the communist period. He knew Wojtyła very well, a kind of heroic figure.
That night, we were having our banquet and a good time, and he got up and gave a very moving speech. It was right after the death of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko — the young Polish priest at the beginning of the Solidarity era. The communists were still very much in charge, but the country had been inspired by John Paul II. The "We Want God" speech in Warsaw was 1979, so this was only a few years after that.
Abramowicz told the story of this heroic young priest who spoke the truth, challenged the communists, and was killed for his troubles — brutally put to death. But it sparked an enormous spiritual reaction and revival in Poland. He told the story in a very moving way and the whole room went silent.
What struck me that night was that I was twenty-four. Popiełuszko died at maybe thirty-five or thirty-six — not much older than I was. And it made everything so much more real. What the priesthood can mean. Having banquets and being nice to people is great, but there is the priesthood in its full configuration to Christ. That story had a big impact on me as a young man.
Matthew Petrusek: Bishop Robert Barron — shepherd, disciple, and champion of persecuted Christians. Thanks so much for this conversation. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
Bishop Barron: God bless you, Todd. Thanks.