Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization,

using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent

and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the

transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today, we invite you to join Bishop Robert

Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we have a great privilege this year because the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross, September the 14th, falls on a Sunday. So we have a chance to reflect a bit

more deeply on this marvelous and frankly disconcerting odd feast. Now, how come I say it that way? Well, let me take you back to this very morning. So I always wake up early. I do my holy hour, the first thing. And I go to my chapel. And in my chapel, I have a chair, and I'm facing the altar in the tabernacle for the holy hour. And right in the front of the altar, I have this golden cross,

was given me by a friend many years ago.

And it's beautiful.

It's kind of in the Gothic design, very elaborate.

And it's very prayerful.

The minute I see that cross, I kind of move into a prayerful frame of mind.

But if you were to strip away the decoration, the gold and the filigree and the gothic,

you know, trimmings and all that, and you brought it back to what it essentially is, a Roman cross,

you'd see it indeed as something terrible, as something brutal and awful.

And all the poetry of this feast is summed up in the fact that I've got on that altar

that awful thing, that awful thing in gold and decoration and filigree. I'm weirdly exalting

this horrific thing. You know, again, if someone came back from the ancient world and they were

brought into that chapel and said, here's a place where this man is praying,

it's a religious room. And he'd look at that decoration and say, well, wait a minute,

...