Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vaatthi, host and I'm here in our new radio studio with the great Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, welcome.

Brandon, it's always a joy to be with you and especially here are our first time recording in our new studio in our Word on Fire Headquarters in lovely Santa Barbara.

So when I was a name-box delivery goodship and I was sent out here to the Santa Barbara region, my residence is right near this beautiful mission and to make a long story short we decided to move the real leadership and production side of Word on Fire here.

And so we're in a lovely spot on the campus of the Santa Barbara mission and I just couldn't be happier and we built it out now as an office and a studio.

So we're recording from that place today.

You know, I've one of the things that's excited me the most about opening up this Word on Fire Office here of all places is that this mission was established by one of the great evangelists of the Americas saying, Unipero, Sarah, talk about the significance of that of opening an office right where he began his evangelistic work.

Well, I'll tell you something. This is now about 10 months ago. I just got in here and I met with one of the officials of the Franciscan Province out here in California and we're talking about a number of things financial and institutional.

And he himself said, you know, you've got this ministry of Word on Fire and I wonder if you ever think of moving it out here and he said, we've got some space at the mission and I frankly had never thought about that at that point.

He's the one that made that connection. He said, the missions were built by Sarah and his disciples to evangelize the totally unavangelized culture of the time.

Now we're all about the new evangelization. He said, we're on Fire as part of that and it would sort of participate in the classic mission of this place.

And I said, yeah, that's kind of a cool idea. And I don't think it was the first time I thought of it. But then as the year has gone by, we moved in that direction.

And I agree. I was visiting the grave of Unipero, Sarah several months ago. He's up in Carmel and thought of this, you know, intrepid missionary building these places at a time when it was like really difficult to do that.

And now we've got a new sort of challenge to evangelize. So I'm delighted that we're here in this historic place.

Today we're going to be discussing the topic of something you've coined beige Catholicism, beige Catholicism. It shows up in a lot of your books and writings.

There was a recent interview that you did where they titled it, how not to be a beige Catholic.

Let's start off by just defining that phrase. So what is beige Catholicism?

Yeah, it's a phrase I started using many years ago. And I first got back from my doctoral studies and began as a writer and a speaker. It's a phrase that I used.

I remember a father Andrew Greeley, who was my fellow of Chicago priest, sort of picked it up. And he began to write about it and talk about it.

If people knew my name early on, it was probably because of that phrase, beige Catholicism.

What I mean by it and meant by it is a Catholicism has become bland, has become apologetic, unsure of itself, hand-ringing, overly accommodating, that's allowed as distinctive colors to bleed into beige.

So it's hard to distinguish it from other religions, hard to distinguish it from the wider culture.

That's what I was worrying about. And it was the Catholicism I thought had been produced by the post-concilier period, by the poor reception of the council, the church that I grew up with, the church of the 70s and 80s.

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