Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vat, the host and the content director here at Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Joining us is his excellent C Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, good to talk with you.

Hey Brandon, always good to see you and hear from you. Even though we're a continent away from each other.

That's right. It was exciting for me to see pictures just a day or two ago of a big gathering you held at your

Episcopal residence there in Santa Barbara where you brought all the priests and religious of your region there for a nice dinner and good camaraderie. Tell us about it.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite moments in the summer. We actually have four of these dinners. We have two for the deacons and their wives and then we have two for a priest and the second one for priest.

We also invite the the women religious to come. And they're just a lot of fun. And in my backyard and we have tacos and fellowship.

And I give a little kind of fervorino or review of the year. But the idea is to thank all these good people for helping us.

And I especially love the one when all the sisters come because we have a lot of religious in my region.

And these sisters that do I mean tremendous work with the sick and with the poor in a completely self-effacing way.

You know to see them there and and their fellowship and good cheer and one of my favorite moments.

I forget her name now, but there was a wonderful young sister from Korea who is in the region for the summer studying English.

Well, she comes in with this bag and the other sister said, this is a giftbishop for you. I said, oh, isn't that nice?

You know, so I take it out. Well, it was amazing. It's this candle. It's this big huge candle on the front of which is my coat of arms.

And on the back, it says word on fire. So she had made this candle because she had been following word on fire in Korea for many years.

And anyway, that was a highlight for me.

That's really good. Well, I'm sorry to say that from that good news, we have to turn to some more troubling news because the focus of this episode is on what I'm calling the Eucharist problem.

It's in regards to this recent Pew Research Center study. It's been getting a lot of attention, especially online, that discovered after they surveyed a bunch of Catholics in the pew that just one third, actually a little less than one third of US Catholics agree with the church that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ or to turn it around.

So they found 69% of Catholics in the United States believe that the bread and wine and mass are just symbols of the body and blood of Christ. And as you observed, when you kind of poured a little deeper into the data, that number goes up to 80% when you look at Catholics 40 and under 80% of young Catholics believe that the Eucharist is merely a symbol.

What was your initial reaction to this?

It was anger, to be honest with you, it was anger. And again, I'm not cast in blame. I'm angry at everybody in the church because, look, our job, one of our principal jobs as Catholics is to pass on the faith in its integrity.

Yes, we care for the poor, yes, we worship God as Pope Benedict XVI said, but we also cataclyze. We also evangelize. We also teach the faith.

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