WOF 012: L.A. Congress Recap
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bishop Barron recounts his time at the annual Los Angeles Religious Education Congress held from February 25-28, 2016. He shares about his talk on 1 and 2 Samuel, having breakfast with philosopher-priest Fr. Robert Spitzer, and the best approaches to evangelization. A listener asks about the nature of sin and whether it's a privation of the good or something real and substantial.
Find bonus links and resources for this episode at http://WordOnFireShow.com and be sure to submit your questions at http://AskBishopBarron.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vott, the content director at Word |
| 0:06.7 | on Fire, and with me is the great Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop Barron. We are always happy |
| 0:12.3 | to have you on this show. Well, the feeling is mutual. I'm very happy to be with you. |
| 0:17.0 | Now it's funny. We're now halfway across the, all the way across the country. You're |
| 0:21.3 | an L.A. I'm in Orlando. We were just together yesterday in the last few days, though, at |
| 0:25.7 | the L.A. Religious Education Congress, which is kind of there in your backyard. It's in |
| 0:31.6 | Anaheim. Now tell us what is this Congress? You've been going to it for years, haven't you? |
| 0:38.0 | Yeah. Well, it's probably the biggest event in American Catholicism. The roots of it stretched |
| 0:43.4 | back all the way to the 1950s when I think they organized a series of talks for the |
| 0:48.1 | Catechists and teachers in L.A. And to make a long story short, it just grew and grew throughout |
| 0:53.7 | the 50s, 60s, 70s. And I think by the 80s, it had really become a sort of national phenomenon, |
| 0:59.8 | where people began coming from all over California, then all over the West, and then all over the |
| 1:04.1 | country and indeed the world. And so by the time I first came, it would have been like the mid to late |
| 1:10.3 | 1990s, maybe. It was a phenomenon. It was the event attracting upwards of 40,000 people. So nothing |
| 1:18.7 | quite like it in the American church. And it's a gathering of all these people to listen to a variety |
| 1:24.2 | of speakers. It's been a little bit controversial over the years because of some of the speakers |
| 1:28.8 | they've had. My approach was always, if an organization like this gives me a platform, they don't |
| 1:36.8 | censor my words. Well, why not? Why wouldn't you go to address the audience? Not that I agreed with |
| 1:43.0 | every speaker. I didn't and I don't. But I think it's a great opportunity. So I went beginning |
| 1:49.7 | in, I say the late 90s and then they invited me pretty much every year after that. And I couldn't |
| 1:54.8 | always come, but I tried to come typically. So I did, oh, I don't know, 9 or 10 appearances, maybe. |
| 2:01.3 | I was the keynote speaker twice over these years. So it's been a great forum for me. I've |
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