To Light a Fire on the Earth Quotes

“When our lives revolve around Christ we find order and harmony. And by implication, whenever something other than Christ—money, power, pleasure, honor—fills the center, the soul falls into disharmony. The well-ordered soul begins to wobble and go off-kilter.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way,” he says. “It’s the Cross, participation in the Cross. It’s conforming to Christ, it’s Christ appearing vividly in our midst.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,” Ratzinger said, “namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue… To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Balthasar says anything beautiful first arrests you—you’re stopped in your tracks by it. Then, Balthasar says, the beautiful elects you. You’ve been chosen. Not everyone who hears Dylan becomes a fan, but I got elected. Finally, he says, the beautiful always sends you. You’re sent on a mission.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Holy people are those who realize that they participate in something and Someone infinitely greater than themselves, that they are but fragments of Reality,” he says. “Far from crushing them, this awareness makes them great, capacious, whole.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“One way I try to do it is to observe that in any other area of life that people take seriously, they naturally assume there’s legitimacy to objective values. Take a golf swing. Nobody would seriously say, “Just go swing it any way you want to, because who am I to tell you what to do?” Well, how would that work out? Horrifically. We know that in something like golf, you start to internalize objective ideals, and in that process, you become freer and freer. You become a freer player of golf, and you can actually do what you want to do. That’s true of anything—language, music, politics, anything. You begin to internalize objective values in such a way that they now become the ground for your freedom, and not the enemy of your freedom. The binary option we have to get past is “my freedom versus your oppression.” What we need to say is, No, no, the objectivity of the moral good enables your freedom, opens freedom up. Once you get that, you see the Church is not the enemy of your flourishing, but the condition for it.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Thomas Aquinas was asked, “What must I do to be a saint?” and he said, “Will it.” Be a saint, and you’ll unleash the power of grace and holiness.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“love the life of the mind, and I’ve spent my whole life studying and reading. Yet because of where we are now, the ‘true’ and the ‘good’ are offensive in a culture that is so radically subjective and relativist, and the minute you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got the truth for you,’ every defense goes up, and even more if you say, ‘I’ve got what’s good for you.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Only when you’ve had that experience of falling in love with something, Barron believes, will learning the rules that support it make sense. Otherwise, “rule-talk” is always going to seem like someone trying to control another, like an exercise in power rather than liberation to play the game well.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“One of Barron’s maxims is “The sure sign that God is alive in you is joy.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Pope Francis hasn’t changed the faith, but he has changed the conversation,” Barron says. “What Francis has done in terms of public conversation about the Church is to make it clearer to people we’re not just about sex. That’s been extremely helpful in our wider outreach.” By placing such an emphasis on humility and simplicity, on service to the poor, on concern for the environment and social justice, on immigrants and refugees, on opposition to war and the arms trade, and with his ardent outreach to the “peripheries” of the world, Barron believes, Francis has succeeded in lifting up aspects of the Church’s thought and life that were always there but that sometimes got lost amid a myopic focus on sex and the culture wars.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“When asked if he believes it’s realistic to think that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion could be overturned in his lifetime, Barron is cautiously optimistic. Probably not in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’d make a comparison with slavery. At a certain point in American history, nobody would have imagined the possibility of slavery being overturned. Very smart people, very morally plugged-in people, were defenders of slavery in 1830, 1840, including Christians at a very high level. Politicians at the highest level didn’t think slavery could be overturned in 1820 or 1840, and yet now slavery is unthinkable. It’s the same with civil rights. In the 1930s and ’40s, a lot of very high-placed people, including religious people, wouldn’t have imagined the overturning of Jim Crow, but now it’s a fact. I find that, by the way, from a theoretical standpoint, fascinating, how that happens in a society. How at one point something is commonly accepted, and fifty years later it’s unthinkable. I don’t rule out that, at some point, the same could happen with abortion. I hope, in God’s providence, it will become unthinkable that we’re murdering children at the rate of millions per year. I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetimes, because you and I don’t have that much longer to go! But I also don’t rule it out.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Yes, I do. It’s the right to life; it’s the protection of innocent life. If anything is the linchpin of a moral program, it’s the protection of innocent life. That’s why abortion does have a certain pride of place in the hierarchy [of moral concerns]. They’re all in the picture, but there is a proper ordering. Whatever threatens innocent life takes priority, morally speaking. Yes, I get the fact that people are especially preoccupied with abortion, but [the Church’s position] doesn’t mean we’re shills for the Republican Party. It means we’re trying to bring all of life under the aegis of radical love, but there’s a prioritization.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“result, he’s firmly persuaded that the Catholic Church must always speak its truths to the surrounding culture, without adjusting those teachings to make them more palatable.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“I believe baseball and the Church are deeply kindred spirits—both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates, both have communions of saints, both reward patience, and in both, casual fans can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Barron is convinced that the moral teachings of Catholicism are true, and that people who strive to practice them will live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. At the same time, he knows that in a postmodern, secular world, “rule-talk” often comes off as an attempt to limit people’s freedom, not to free them to become the persons God intends them to be. Therefore, the right way to deploy “the good” as a missionary tool is to start by showing people what a genuinely Christian life at its best looks like—and then, gradually, to lead people to appreciate the principles and norms which make that kind of heroic life possible.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“On any list of slam-dunk Christian classics, A Man for All Seasons would have something close to top billing. It’s the story of St. Thomas More, the great English lawyer and politician who refused to sacrifice his conscience in order to approve the divorce and remarriage of the king he served, Henry VIII. Barron has credited More’s life, and the 1966 film that captured it, with getting across three basic insights: We’re all responsible for upholding the rights of others; accepting one’s duties often leads to discomfort; and despite the second point, you don’t have to be gloomy about it.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“In Christian tradition, beauty, goodness, and truth are known as “transcendentals,” linked to the three core human abilities to feel, to wish, and to think. Jesus refers to them in the Great Commandment when he talks about the mind, the soul, and the heart, and inducements to take the wrong path with each of the transcendentals formed the core of his temptation scene in the Gospels. While Barron is convinced that Catholic Christianity represents the fullness of all three, he’s equally convinced that the right way to open up the Catholic world to someone is with its beauty.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“who can stand toe-to-toe with the best and brightest of the secular world, either in person or online, and swell Catholic hearts everywhere by making the faith appear not only plausible but more convincing, more humane, and ultimately more loving than its cultured despisers are. Here’s one clear sign of his success: In the English language, after Pope Francis, Barron is the most-followed Catholic figure on social media.”
― Robert Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age