Bishop Robert Barron to graduates: Reject “cultural assumptions”; “pray without ceasing”

Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, recently received two high honors at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

The first was the inaugural awarding of the Prize for Excellence in Theology and the Arts, bestowed by Benedictine College’s Center for Beauty and Culture. The Center is directed by Dr. Dennis McNamara, one of the hosts of the heady and popular The Liturgy Guys podcast.

McNamara presented Barron with a custom illuminated manuscript page illustrating the story of the bishop’s episcopal motto, Non Nisi Te Domine, and commended Barron for his leadership in the New Evangelization.

Benedictine College also bestowed on Bishop Barron an Honorary Doctorate, along with Patrick Reilly, founder and President of the Cardinal Newman Society. As part of receiving the doctorate, Barron agreed to give the college’s commencement address.

Barron began by recounting his past couple days’ experience in meeting the faculty, staff, and students of Benedictine: “What an uplifting community…I was deeply edified by the experience.”

He then placed himself on a level with those graduating: “Receiving an Honorary Doctorate today makes me a member of your class…so, fellow graduates, I’m talking to you.”

Barron marveled at the opportunity of studying on a campus with two active monasteries, St. Benedict’s Abbey on site and Mount St. Scholastica just across town: “A place filled with the mind and spirit of St. Benedict…I want to share with my fellow graduates some simple rules of life that I think flow from the heart of that great saint…Benedict said a monastery should be a school of the virtues, and clearly the most important virtue for him was humility.”

Sounding a note consistent in his Word on Fire homilies over the past few years, Barron warned against listening too much to oneself: “Our trouble comes from a refusal to attend to the voice of God, and a concomitant insistence on listening to ourselves. The key to salvation is a capacity to hear the voice that transcends the ego and its concerns, a voice that calls us beyond our petty preoccupations to the high adventure of the spiritual life.”

We must be wary, Bishop Barron continued, of reducing everything to “the merely subjectively satisfying…The higher voice summons us to break free of the black hole of our egotism and to come into contact with aesthetic values, with moral values, with epistemic values, all of which are grounded in the God who is supreme goodness, supreme truth, and supreme beauty.”

Barron then quoted St. Thomas Aquinas: “humilitas veritas: humility is truth and gets you in touch with these realities…Young friends, the entire point of your education here was to inculcate in you a sensitivity to these great objective values, to teach you what to reverence, and only the humble person can take in such lessons.”

Speaking of “the roots of our spiritual problem” and our current “cultural assumptions,” Barron referenced Nietzsche, “who taught that so-called objective values are illusory, and [that] we must move beyond a bourgeois morality of good and evil. In the space opened up by that move, the will of the powerful rightly holds sway.”

Barron continued by drawing a line through modern continental philosophy: “This attitude is perpetuated by Jean Paul Sartre, the founder of existentialism, for whom existence—personal freedom—always precedes essence: who or what one is…Michel Foucault, a disciple of both Nietzsche and Sartre, and perhaps the most influential philosopher on the contemporary scene, held to the non-objectivity of both truth and value, and construed all human affairs as a battle of the powerful against the powerless.”

These ideas, Barron said, are now the norm: “What was once bandied about in Parisian coffeehouses is now the default position—you know this—of most of your peers in the West. Wokeism corresponds very much to this program…But all of it is repugnant to a Christian way of life, which involves a surrender to a will and a voice beyond our own.”

Barron then quoted from St. Benedict’s Rule: “‘This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.’ Humility is the virtue that makes this move possible.”

Humorously highlighting Benedict’s ninth degree of humility, “The monk should be reluctant to speak unless asked a question,” Barron drew from its enduring wisdom: “Consider for a moment how our culture obsessively emphasizes the finding and expressing of one’s own voice. Now, there is of course something valuable to this, for unjust oppression should always be opposed. However, in the final analysis, it’s not what I say that matters, but rather my capacity to listen to what God says.”

Barron next highlighted the Benedictine virtue of stability, “a particular and radical expression of the virtue” for monks or religious who commit to one monastery for the rest of their lives, but “in a wider sense, it can and should be practiced by all of you graduates.”

Stability, Barron noted, is not prized by the current milieu: “Our culture today is marked by a dramatic instability, born of what St. Benedict called the dictatorship of relativism. If it’s only my truth and your truth, and nothing like The Truth; if there’s only what’s good for me and what’s good for you, and nothing like what’s good in itself, then we drift. We move restlessly from activity to activity, from goal to goal, from lifestyle to lifestyle. We become like the hapless farmer described by Fulton Sheen, planting wheat then corn then soybeans but tearing each crop out of the ground before it comes to fruition.”

A layperson’s practice of Benedictine stability, Barron implied, is countercultural: “The spiritually stable person knows what she is about, has her life grounded in fundamental and unchanging values: faithfulness to one’s spouse; protection of one’s children; forgiveness of one’s enemies; care of the poor; openness to life; and above all of these and binding them all together love, which is willing the good of the other…Properly stable in this spiritual sense, you can wander all over the globe. You can engage in a myriad of activities; you can be as creative as you want to be. But stability is the condition for the possibility.”

Referencing St. John Paul II’s encyclical Laborem exercens, Barron next spoke of the fulfilling virtue of work for people because it is “activity that fulfills them and enhances their dignity and engages their powers. We become more human, more ourselves, through our work.”

Barron connected daily work with being itself: “For if John Paul II is right, we cannot so neatly separate who we are from what we do. Sigmund Freud is someone with whom I rarely agree, but the founder of psychoanalysis says something I consider very importantly right. When asked the secret to his psychologically healthy life, Freud responded, ‘Lieben und arbeiten,’ love and work, implying satisfying relationships and satisfying employment.”

Quoting William F. Buckley, Barron pointed to the many benefits of work: “‘Industry is the enemy of melancholy,’ meaning that a privileged path out of depression is getting to work. Therefore, my fellow graduates, find something that you love, and then do it: day in and day out; when you feel like it, when you don’t feel like it. It will benefit others, it will make you happier, and it will give glory to God. Not a bad combination.”

Barron concluded by focusing on the other half of the familiar Benedictine formula of ora et labora—prayer—by telling the story of his pre-ordination retreat nearly forty years previous at St. Meinrad’s Archabbey in Indiana.

“I rose very early…to join the monks in prayer…I opened the side door of the abbey church and was struck first by the golden light inside. But then, I was just overwhelmed by the chanting of the monks. To that point in my life I had never heard that kind of singing except on records. Keep in mind that liturgical music at that time was more or less four-chord folk songs played poorly on guitars. So as they sang, these monks of Meinrad, so harmoniously, so prayerfully, so hauntingly, it was as though a door opened in my soul, a door that, thank God, has never shut again. I distinctly remember saying to myself that morning, I just have to deepen my life of prayer. Of course I had been praying throughout my life, especially during my years in the seminary, but the chanting of those monks of St. Meinrad just compelled me to bring things to a new level.”

With a display of sentiment rare for him, Barron counseled the graduates to pray always: “My sincere hope is that your years here, in the shadow of the Abbey church, have effectively opened up the door of prayer, and that this door never shuts your whole life long…There’s never a wrong time to pray. The cultivation of your relationship with the Lord must the top priority of your life—period…If you remember one thing that this old bishop told you on the day of your graduation, let it be this: pray without ceasing.”