Bishop Barron reflects on America's 250th birthday from a Catholic perspective
Bishop Robert Barron joins Matthew Petrusek on the Word on Fire Show to discuss the theological and political foundations of the United States on its 250th anniversary.
Summary
Bishop Robert Barron joins Matthew Petrusek on the Word on Fire Show to assess the American experiment on its 250th birthday. Barron argues that while the United States is not a Christian nation in the sense of having an established religion, its founding principles — equality, freedom, rights, and limited government — are deeply rooted in biblical conceptions of God and human dignity. He engages seriously with post-liberal Catholic critiques of the American founding, acknowledging the Hobbesian-Lockian strain in the founders' thinking while arguing that a concurrent biblical sensibility and classical understanding of virtue mitigate those concerns. Barron also addresses the legacy of slavery, affirming it as a genuine moral stain on the founding without accepting the claim that the country was founded upon it. He closes by connecting healthy public religiosity to the long-term viability of democratic self-governance.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Recent Events
Matthew Petrusek: Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrusek, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us. The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday, marking two and a half centuries since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That a country as expansive and diverse as ours has remained united under a single constitution for two and a half centuries — passing through multiple existential wars, including a Civil War, and numerous periods of traumatic political and economic upheaval — is a monumental achievement by any historical standard. How might we assess this moment from a Catholic perspective? What is it about the United States of America that is politically and morally distinctive? What binds us together as a people? Is it accurate to say that we are a Christian nation? If not, what conception of God is operative in the founders' references to the divine? And if so, what should we make of the future of America given the dramatic decline of church attendance among both Catholics and Protestants in recent decades? Perhaps most importantly for this moment, what can we learn from our collective past as Americans to guide us into the future? Here to address these questions and to share his experience participating in the recent Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is Bishop Robert Barron.
Welcome back to the studio, Bishop.
Bishop Barron: Thanks, man.
Matthew Petrusek: So today we're celebrating the United States' 250th birthday. This episode is actually going to air just after the 4th of July, so we're really close to the birthday itself. We'll be assessing the past and future of our country from a Catholic perspective. But before we do, what have you been up to lately?
Bishop Barron: So this airs early July. As we record it, I'm just back from Orlando. I was there with the other bishops of the country for what they call the spring meeting — takes place in June typically, about a three-day meeting. Then I was down for a couple of fundraisers for Word on Fire. So a little Florida jaunt. But also while we were there in Orlando, we bishops consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was a great moment — a lovely ceremony. I was also struck — I did a little exposé on it — that the President of the United States, President Trump, wrote a marvelous sort of affirmation of what we were doing, joining his will to ours. It was a rather extraordinary statement for an American president to make.
Matthew Petrusek: It really is. I'd say even historic.
Bishop Barron: I think so. I said it's kind of unprecedented, at least in my lifetime, that a president would be that upfront about affirming what Catholic bishops are doing.
Matthew Petrusek: And something very specific, too — to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, not just sort of generically.
Bishop Barron: Yeah. So anyway, that was an interesting moment and the ceremony was lovely.
Matthew Petrusek: Well, to set the table for today's conversation, Bishop, we'll be getting into a talk that you gave recently in Washington, DC, and a prayer as well. Tell us a little bit about that event — this Rededicate 250 event that you were invited to. How did that invitation come about and what did you do there?
Bishop Barron: I think I first heard about it when I was there for one of the religious liberty commission meetings. The past year I pretty much went to Washington every month for one of these meetings. I met a number of the people involved in the government, and I think I heard a rumor about this many months ago — whether we were going to have this event and whether I would be willing to speak. Then finally the invitation came formally. My perspective was: it's the country's birthday, it's on the National Mall, they're inviting a Catholic bishop to talk about the interface between American polity and Catholicism — why would I say no to that? Some people insist on reading everything through a relentlessly partisan lens. I just wasn't reading it that way. I was reading it as a celebration of our country, and it gave me the opportunity to reflect a little bit on that, which I think is a very important theme.
Is the United States a Christian Nation?
Matthew Petrusek: So we'll be exploring some of the key themes in the address and in the prayer you gave. Perhaps the fundamental question that many Catholics and certainly our Protestant brothers and sisters have in mind as we look to the past and the future of the country is this: is the United States a Christian nation? How would you answer that? Or perhaps do you find a problem with the premise of the question — that it might be conflating the political with the religious?
Bishop Barron: I'm a First Amendment man. The First Amendment to our constitution has this wonderful and lively tension. On the one hand, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So we don't have an established religion in the United States. Are we a Christian nation? Well, of course not, if by that you mean is Christianity somehow the established religion, or is Catholicism, or is Lutheranism? No is the answer to all those questions. Our founding fathers, who knew about established religions — and indeed, to be fair, some of them in their particular states had established religions in their constitutions — knew about it in the homeland of England. They didn't want that in the new country. They didn't want the government officially sanctioning and then requiring people to participate in a particular religion.
I always think of my hero John Henry Newman. When Newman becomes a Catholic in the mid-19th century, that was not just a little matter of going from one private belief to another. That meant his whole life had to change, because Anglicanism was the established religion of England — still is, but more radically in those days. It meant Newman had to resign from Oxford. It meant he couldn't hold any public position if he wasn't holding to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican religion. That's what an established religion looks like. The American founders didn't want that. So are we a Christian nation in that sense? No. Absolutely not.
Are we a Christian nation in the sense that certain values and ideals coming up from a biblical foundation — mediated largely through the Christian churches, because most of the founders were Christians — are indispensable to the way we think about and structure our democracy? Well, yes is the answer to that. In that sense, are we a Christian nation? Yes — only in that broad sense that these biblical values inform our political arrangement. That would be the way to answer that. You're probably right in suggesting it's a somewhat improper way to pose the question.
Our understanding of religion is conditioned by the First Amendment. The first part is non-establishment. The second part is the free exercise clause — there should be no restriction of the free exercise of religion, meaning not just privately but in the public space. Are Christians, and all other religious people, allowed to express their faith, to live their faith, to enact their faith in a public context? The answer to that is yes. The American approach is in between those two poles — not establishment, but free exercise. That's where I would try to frame the question.
The Founders' Conception of God
Matthew Petrusek: What conception of God do you think the founders had in mind when they were crafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
Bishop Barron: That's a complicated question. I would say it's an idea of God clearly coming up from the Bible, but conditioned to some degree by the Enlightenment rationalism of the time — therefore having a more deist tone than classical Christian theology would have. Biblical, but conditioned by certain changes that took place from the high Middle Ages through the rise of voluntarism, the rise of nominalism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. That represents a certain trajectory of ideas in regard to God. At the end of that — so now we're in the mid-18th century — there's a particular view of God that is not the same as Thomas Aquinas's. Do I think there was a kind of devolution? Yeah. I think it's a less adequate account of God.
Nevertheless, it was an account of God, and God was being taken very seriously. Here's a way to look at it: I wouldn't turn to Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine or Benjamin Franklin to get a really theologically precise understanding of God. Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson speaks of God, presumes the laws of nature and of nature's God, knows that our rights come from God. And I'll take all of that. All of that I think is really good and right and has an ultimately biblical foundation, though by the 18th century it's been nuanced and mitigated in certain ways.
Another kind of historical and conceptual question mixed together: to the extent that specifically Christian conceptions of God do animate and ground our founding documents, are they an expression of mere Christianity in C.S. Lewis's language, or as some have argued, are they distinctively Protestant in some way? Again, that's a subtle question. To give it the more positive spin, I'd say yes, there's something of that Lewisian mere Christianity — an idea of God that a lot of people could broadly accept, even though we'd make nuanced clarifications.
I'll give an example. John Adams certainly believed in God, but he was a Unitarian. By most accounts, Unitarians didn't believe in the Trinity. Well, that's a pretty serious defect if you're an Orthodox Christian. So broadly speaking, you could say it's more of the mere Christianity approach. Is it more Protestantized? The answer I think clearly is yes.
Now if you want to get technical: go back to Thomas Aquinas's understanding of God as Ipsum Esse — that in which essence and existence coincide, and therefore that power in and through which all created things exist, all things participating in God who is the active to-be itself. That's a more adequate account, and it has changed a lot by the time you get to the 18th century. It's because of voluntarism, nominalism, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment that you get a more deist conception of God — God as a distant supreme being, for example.
And to be fair, it's not just a Protestant problem. Go back to someone like Ockham in the late Middle Ages — God is construed now as a being among many. Scotus's univocal conception of being also gave us God as a being among others. I would argue those two late medieval moves led by steady steps to nominalism and therefore to Protestantism. Luther and company are very influenced by nominalist philosophy, and that influences their idea of God. Take another step: Luther's very competitive understanding of God in the world — if I get any glory, then it's taken away from God; for God to get all the glory, I need to have nothing; I'm nothing, God's everything; I'm justified by grace alone, faith alone. All of that, I've argued before, is the fruit of a competitive view of God, which in turn is conditioned by this inadequate metaphysics of God as one being among many. To that degree, I think that view of God — more Protestant than Catholic — is probably animating the minds of most of our founders.
Matthew Petrusek: I just want to pause and highlight, as you've just given us a brief history of ideas, how important metaphysical claims about the nature of God and reality are for political matters down the line. They are intimately connected.
Bishop Barron: You know, talk to anyone who's ever studied philosophy and they say, "Oh, philosophy — what a waste of time." But ideas have consequences. That's one of the basic insights. If you study any history — not just history of ideas, but history — you'll find that ideas trickle down and then have a massive effect on the ground. This shift that happened over many centuries, from roughly 1270 with Thomas Aquinas to 1776 — those 500 years — there are a lot of changes in the understanding of God, and that does have an impact on the way we think about our humanity and about our politics.
The Theological Foundations of Equality and Rights
Matthew Petrusek: Setting aside the historical question — which ultimately can't be answered with complete confidence about what was in the founders' minds — in terms of the actual coherence of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, does it have a coherent foundation absent a biblical conception of God and the claims that it makes?
Bishop Barron: I would say this: absent the idea of a creator God who is the ground of freedom, the ground of equality, and the ground of rights — apart from that, I think our democracy becomes incoherent. And that's saying a mouthful. That's a lot.
Equality. "All men are created equal." There's no political philosopher prior to this period that would put equality front and center. We're not equal. We're radically unequal human beings — in intelligence, in beauty, in virtue, in strength. We're all radically unequal. Classical political philosophy — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero — it's precisely our inequalities that must be taken into consideration when constructing the just state. Only certain people, for Aristotle, are capable of public life. Most people aren't. And the better you know that, the more just your society. In Plato, the three levels of society — you belong in one or the other.
So where does this come from, this idea that we're created equal? I've suggested it's that little word "created" that we tend to run right past. "All men are created equal." We're not equal in any other way. But we are equally creatures. We're all equally children of God. Take God out of the equation, and people have tried to appeal to our intelligence or our freedom or something — but it's going to fall apart. We're going to fall right back into these radically divided societies. So I think equality is deeply dependent upon an understanding of God.
Matthew Petrusek: You directly quote the great Bishop Fulton Sheen — who is to be beatified — in the address you gave at Rededicate 250, saying: "The Declaration of Independence is a declaration of dependence on God." Dilate on that a little bit.
Bishop Barron: I found that quote while I was writing this paper — I didn't know it until then. I was looking around researching, and I looked up Fulton Sheen and American democracy just to get a sense of what Sheen would say about this, and I came across that quote. I thought, that's really good — that says it. Because it really is a declaration of independence from Great Britain, affirming our rights and our freedom and so on. But we can do that only because we're affirming at the same time our radical dependence upon God — that our freedom, our equality, our rights come from God. "They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Take that out of the equation and what's going to happen? The rights will erode, because if they come from something less than God — from public consensus, from the government, from a social elite — they can be taken away. So it's wonderful what Sheen saw: that I can't really declare the great things I want to declare in the Declaration without affirming at the same time my radical dependence upon God.
Freedom, Dignity, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Matthew Petrusek: You also say in the address you gave in DC that freedom is so central to who we are as Americans — we who live in the land of the free — because, and I'm quoting you here, "freedom is essential to human dignity." Now the connection you make between dignity and freedom may come as surprising to some Americans who hear the word freedom in our civic context and think that means being able to do whatever you want with as little government intervention as possible. Indeed, the same sort of ideological understanding of freedom would say that's what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means — you get to define happiness. But you really push against that idea. Say more about why.
Bishop Barron: It's a key element. John Paul II was very strong on this — that human dignity, which is perhaps the fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching, has freedom as essential to it. No one wants to be bossed around, no one wants to have a boot on their neck, no one wants to be coerced in their action. Part of our dignity is that we have the freedom to — and here's the hinge — pursue the good.
When freedom is construed simply as self-invention, as my own choice and "don't tell me what to do," that becomes slavery in very short order. The classical understanding that John Paul II would have accepted, and Thomas Aquinas, is that freedom is an ordering of desire toward the good — that I'm free from the sin and attachment that keep me from attaining the good, freed from those distractions and attachments, and therefore free for pursuing the good.
Which is why — and this is very important — "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." There's a very modern way to read that, and who knows exactly what was in Jefferson's mind, where you could say: I'm not defining happiness, I'm just pursuing it any way I want. But I think you would persuasively argue that Jefferson had enough of the classical understanding in him — from Plato through Aristotle and Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, all deeply interested in defining what happiness is, that it has to do with the inculcation of virtue, with the pursuit of high goods — that when Jefferson says that, he's relating liberty to the pursuit of the good, of virtue. Is that the purpose of government? Is that the trajectory of our rights? I would say yes.
Now, that's a debate among those who look at the founding. Can you read Jefferson in a very modern way — that he's not really defining happiness, he's just saying pursue it any way you want? I don't know. I think it's fairer to say he's got that classical understanding, that happiness is correlated to virtue.
Matthew Petrusek: To follow that thread a bit further in terms of its implications: setting aside what was in the founders' minds, it seems your case is that if we define happiness as completely open-textured, having no objective content, that will actually undermine the very foundation of our democracy.
Bishop Barron: That's what I call the culture of self-invention, which has taken over today. I call it wokeism too — people get mad at me for that, but call it what you want. This idea that freedom is the right to radical self-definition, that it means freedom of choice, that I'm free from external constraint or even internal constraint so that I can choose whatever I want — that's not freedom in the biblical sense or the classical sense. Thomas Aquinas wouldn't have accepted that view of freedom.
And I think at their best, our founding fathers understood that, which is why life and liberty are ordered to happiness. The government is there to facilitate this process. And that's in line not so much with Locke and Hobbes — I think that's more in line with Thomas Aquinas. Now, that's where the debate comes down. To be fair, I've argued on different sides of this over the years, because there is a Hobbesian-Lockian strain in Jefferson, for sure. If you follow that all the way, you come to certain conclusions. I think the founding is complicated — you've got the Enlightenment strain, but you've got the biblical strain, and they're conditioning each other to some degree in these very fertile minds.
It's worth pointing out and worth celebrating as we come to our great anniversary: look at that moment in time when you've got Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and John Jay and John Adams — an extraordinary confluence of top-flight minds who were also politically engaged people. When does that happen? When has that happened in our history? I really do think there was something providential about the way these figures came together at that time.
Now, they're not Thomas Aquinas. If I were inventing a country, I'd go back to Thomas Aquinas. But they're pretty impressive, these figures, and thank God for them.
I remember years ago I was in Boston, speaking to the priests of Boston for their convocation. I finish the talk and I'm on the way to the airport, and this priest of Boston is driving me. We're going by and I see Braintree or Quincy, and I said, "Oh, that's where John Adams and John Quincy Adams are from." He said, "Oh yeah, you know, they're buried there." I said, "No kidding — I'd love to see that." It's a church, and we pulled up, and there they were — the graves of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. I was just very moved by that moment, to look at those graves and think about the courage and intelligence and the moxie of those people, the high intelligence of those figures that gave rise to our country. Thank God for them.
Matthew Petrusek: Great appreciation for not only the past generically, but for past people who made great sacrifices.
Equality, Freedom, and the Danger of Forced Equity
Matthew Petrusek: Bishop, you've already noted the importance of equality and its theological foundations. But there appears to be a conundrum with the relationship between equality and freedom, and it takes this form especially in a political context: the more equal a society, the less free it will be; the freer a society, the less equal it will be. How does the Constitution work that out?
Bishop Barron: We're facing this problem today — this sort of equity problem, a forced equality at different levels. That's not what the founding fathers were interested in. They were remarking our equality as children of God, our equality as possessors of rights. That has to be recognized and appreciated. It doesn't mean equity of outcome.
The famous debate today: are you for equality of opportunity or equity of outcome? It's A, not B. I would say equality of opportunity is something deeply American — it's an expression of justice. Equity of outcome — that's where you get the limitation of freedom. If you say we've got to be equal in all these different ways and the government is the vehicle by which we achieve that equality, now we're into a very totalitarian understanding. And one thing these people in 18th-century Philadelphia were not was totalitarian. They had a very keen sense of the danger of — in their case the British monarch, but they didn't want that. So that's an important distinction. We're equal in our rights, in our dignity, in our prerogatives, in our right to opportunity — all of that, yes. But a forced equality across the board? No. That's not what we want.
Patriotism, Piety, and Limited Government
Matthew Petrusek: Another line from your address that really stuck out for me is when you state — and I'm quoting you again — "Patriotism and piety are not at odds with each other." Now, some may hear that and say, "Ah, Bishop Barron, that is a classic example of the mixing of church and state." How do you respond to that critique?
Bishop Barron: The response is that the pious person — in the biblical sense — is going to recognize that the principles of the Bible are indeed ingredient in the founding of our country and in what makes our country great. And one we haven't mentioned yet: limited government. It is so important. Look across human history — there's such a tendency in us sinners to create absolute government. Look at the ancient world: deifying political leaders, all the time. Persia, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. Caesar — just a canny street politician — becomes a god after he dies. Caligula. The biblical accounts where the people around them are deifying their leaders.
The Bible hates that. The Bible — almost unique in the ancient literature of the world — hates that. It sees through it. All political arrangements are under God, under the authority of God. The founding fathers knew that in their bones, and they did not want a polity that arrogated to itself that kind of supreme authority. So they knew: limited government. And acknowledging the fallenness of everyone involved in government — which is why, read Madison and Hamilton, the checks and balances. That's a brilliant move, and it's born, I would say, of the Bible above all. Yes, you're good, but I'm suspicious of you, and you're suspicious of me, rightly, because I'm a sinner. And I'm suspicious of you, and the press is suspicious of the whole operation, and the whole operation is suspicious of the press, because we're all fallen. So the best we can do is balance each other, check each other. That's a biblical intuition.
So to add to your question: the pious person recognizes all these biblical principles as operative in the political arrangement of our polity. And so yeah, I'm a patriotic American. I believe in those things because I'm a biblical person. That's how I'd put it.
The Post-Liberal Catholic Critique
Matthew Petrusek: Before turning to our listener question, let's look to the future and in particular how we can move forward with confidence and wisdom amidst our current challenges. One of those challenges actually comes from within the Catholic intellectual tradition. As you know, there are some strands within contemporary Catholic political thought that are highly skeptical of the long-term viability of the American experiment, because they believe it's based on very flawed — irredeemably flawed — conceptions of God and humanity and virtue. How do you respond to what's typically called the post-liberal critique of the American experiment?
Bishop Barron: I respond to it with great respect first of all. I've had — not quite at this table but on the other program — both D.C. Schindler and Patrick Deneen on, and they're great representatives of that point of view. In fact, I asked both of them: okay, you're at the constitutional convention in 1787 — what would you have done differently? I asked both of them that question.
I understand their criticism. If you take the Enlightenment strain — and I'll trace it this way — from Thomas Hobbes, a 16th-century figure who says in the state of nature it's just every man for himself, and that makes life nasty, poor, brutish, and short. Therefore we kind of grudgingly accept government. We give our authority over to a sovereign basically to keep us from each other's throats. I've got to protect my right and you've got to protect your right, so we have a government that we've invested in to protect us from each other. What that is — and Hobbes is upfront about it — is a rejection of the classical view that the purpose of government is to make us good or to orient our freedom toward virtue. No, no, no. Government exists to protect us from each other.
From Hobbes to Locke — you can make the case that Locke is a softened but still basically Hobbesian understanding of government: rights-oriented, individualistic, bracketing ultimate goods. Thomas Jefferson — does he take in Locke, which means taking a Hobbesian view? Do you see it in the claim that the purpose of government is to protect our rights? All right. If that strain is there for sure, and if you follow it all the way, you get to the post-liberal criticism: that this is a very liberal, very modern understanding that has repudiated the classical view. Go back to someone like Leo Strauss and you'll find a similar argument — that the American thing can't really give rise to authentic justice and it's destined for collapse.
My argument would be: yes, there is that strain in the founders. If that's all there were, with no further check on it and no other perspective, then there'd be legitimacy to that critique. But was there also a deeply biblical sensibility? Were there at least the remnants of a classical understanding in a lot of these people? I would say yes to both of those, and that mitigates to some degree the Hobbesian element.
The other observation I make is the Tocquevillian insight — that yes, you've got the government and all its arrangements, but alongside of government you have religion that is flourishing in the public sphere and informing the society morally and religiously. And that adds this element of the spiritual and the moral to what is essentially a secular understanding of government. There's just complexity around the founding that makes it difficult. The post-liberals see something very real in the founding. I might suggest that their vision is a little too restrictive in terms of how the founders understood what they were doing, and perhaps also restrictive in recognizing the great accomplishments — including for Catholics — within the United States that this system has provided.
That's very interesting if you look at late 19th-century Cardinal Gibbons, in the famous speech in Rome when he becomes a cardinal, in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere — one of my favorites in Rome. He gives this famous address where he says just that: hey, say what you want, Europeans — because they were down on the American arrangement at the time — say what you want about this, it's really been good for us and we have flourished under these conditions. Well, that's not just whistling Dixie. That's no small claim to make, and it's an important one.
The Legacy of Slavery
Matthew Petrusek: How do you respond to those — and this is a particularly virulent but also powerful strand right now in our culture — who say the United States, the American experiment, is fundamentally flawed because it's based on this morally corrupt foundation of slavery, and so everything that's come after it is not a serious viable political option anymore?
Bishop Barron: Certainly the claim that it's based on slavery is silly. The sort of 1619 Project — that slavery is a kind of original sin — I get that. That it's there, kind of marring our polity from the beginning, that it's not solved substantially until the Civil War — there's no question. From the constitutional convention in 1787 all the way until 1861, it's the dominant concern of American politics. They hadn't solved that problem. And the best spirits of the time, culminating in someone like Lincoln, understood that we can't endure half slave and half free, and this is not going to work. This is politically and morally untenable. So I get that — that this thing was there in our polity and that problem had to be solved. I acknowledge all of that.
I'm not going to acknowledge, though, that our country was founded upon slavery or that our economy was grounded in slavery. I think the founders were conflicted about it. Jefferson, even as he owned slaves, says fiercely negative things about slavery. Washington, I think, was a deeply conflicted figure about it. Franklin was an abolitionist. The North tended in that direction; the South, for economic reasons and otherwise, in the other direction. It's a mixed bag, the founders, and they bequeathed to the country this unresolved problem. And it took Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and those people to finally figure it out. I would acknowledge all of that — this original sin that haunted our politics up until the Civil War. But I'm not going to say the country is rooted in it.
Matthew Petrusek: It's a false historical claim, and I think it's important to highlight that.
Bishop Barron: Yes, it is.
Evangelization and the Future of the American Experiment
Matthew Petrusek: Finally, Bishop, do you see a connection between effective evangelization and the securing — or perhaps the restoring — of the integrity and viability of the American experiment? I ask that also within the context of your observation of Tocqueville's recognition that the American republic is the comprehensive unification of the government and this sort of civic culture that's highly religious. If that drops out, do we lose the bottom to everything?
Bishop Barron: Yes. We're not advocating the establishment of any religion, but I think when religion is not exercised freely in the public square, our democracy is threatened. I agree with that, because as we've been exploring, without these biblical principles, the great foundations of our country are undermined.
Now, if you want — maybe another show we could do on this — look at some of the trends in our politics today when explicit Marxists and communists are presenting themselves. That's dangerous business. That means people who are really not sympathetic to the foundations of our country. And what's one of the marks of Marxism and communism? Atheism — an attack on religion. That's not a trivial problem at all. Maybe we do another show on that. But yes, to that degree, I think a healthy religiosity is important for a healthy democracy.
Listener Question: Praying for Politicians
Matthew Petrusek: It's now time for our listener question, Bishop. Today we have Brian from Columbus asking about the efficacy of praying for our politicians.
Brian from Columbus: Hello, Bishop. This is Brian from Columbus. You have created a tremendous organization. Thank you for all that you do. Ever since I can remember, a constant petition has been said at Mass — our politicians are always prayed for. Well, given today's state of most governments, is this an exercise in futility? Does God choose not to listen to this one? Or would it be much worse if we didn't pray for them? It just seems like a time waster. I would love to hear your insights. Thank you for your time.
Matthew Petrusek: I think I'm getting the gist — is it a good idea to pray for politicians? Should we do it? Is it a waste of time? Would it make any difference?
Bishop Barron: In the Catholic liturgy, when it comes to the prayers of the faithful, it's to some degree up to the celebrant or to a committee that puts these prayers together. But we are explicitly recommended to pray for the pope, to pray for the sick and for the dead, and also for public officials. So I always do that whenever I'm leading that prayer. It's just a spontaneous thing — I always pray at least for those four petitions.
And of course St. Paul instructs us to pray for those in political power. Anyone charged with the common good needs prayers, and prayer is always a good thing. In fact, pray for your enemies — let's say the people in charge you don't like very much. Pray for them especially. I remember there were times over the years when I've said, "And we pray for our president, for our governor," and so on, and people said to me, "How could you be praying for that — fill in the blank, if you're a Republican or a Democrat?" Look, I don't care who it is. I'm going to pray for anybody who's in political power. They can use our prayers. So no, I think we should definitely do that.
Matthew Petrusek: Well, thank you, Brian, for reaching out to us. Well, there's so much more to say, Bishop, but thanks. Look forward to the next one.
Bishop Barron: God bless you, man. Thanks.