Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat the content director at Word on Fire and with me is Bishop Barron. Bishop Barron, great to have you.

Always a joy, Brandon, to be with you.

Today we're going to try something a little different than usual. Every single episode we welcome one question from a listener.

You can record your own question at askbishopbarron.com and each episode we choose one to play here on the air.

But we've been getting so many great questions from you guys that we decided we'd devote this whole episode to answering questions from our listeners.

So we're going to take several of them, somewhat rapid fire here.

The first question pertains to Pope Francis's recent exhortation titled The Joy of Love. Bishop Barron has had time to read through the whole thing.

He shared his initial reflections. You can find that at thejoyoflove.com. But here we have a question about what major themes stood out to him. Here's the question.

Hi Bishop Barron. I'm Ylond and I'm a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

I was wondering if with the publication of the new Apostolic Exertation, the Joy of Love, if there's maybe one or several messages that you think are especially important, particularly young people.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, good. Thank you for that question. I've written a little bit on the exhortation.

And people have focused understandably on the more controversial chapter eight, which goes into the internal form and all that business.

But you know what's jumped out at me as I read it. And I read it in one fell swoop. I read it in one sitting, which has a certain advantage.

I was struck by how thoroughly it reaffirms, confirms the classic Catholic teaching on family, on the importance and centrality of family, on the integrity of family life.

It's very clear opposition, for example, to gay marriage, to any kind of transgender speculation.

It's reaffirmation of Humane Vite, of John Paul II's familiarist consortio.

I saw it as a great celebration of the classic Catholic view of the family.

And I think we shouldn't overlook that. That's far more important. It seems to me in the mind of Pope Francis than the issues raised in chapter eight.

I also was really struck by that, I always call it the grand fatherly advice that he gives to married couples, or to engage couples.

I think in many priests, I've talked to have suggested this, that we ought to just make that a prerequisite for all of our marriage formation.

And that's pretty good. If we took that little section, actually pretty substantial section of Morsele Tizia, and just gave it to all these engaged couples, or used that as a foundation for our marriage preparation.

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