WOF 195: What Makes Us Happy?

The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture

Brandon Vogt

God, Vogt, Catholicism, Catholic, Faith, Christianity, Barron, Religion & Spirituality, Christian, Church

4.9 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The annual United Nations World Happiness Report, which measures the happiness of different countries, is always dominated by Scandinavian nations. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland have always been in the top ten. But what’s striking is that these happiest countries are also those which rank among the least religious. On the flip side, most African countries, which tend to be the very religious, consistently land near the bottom of the U.N. Happiness Report.

What does Bishop Barron make of this? How should we actually define happiness, and what have the great thinkers and saints throughout time said about finding happiness? That’s what we discuss in today’s episode.

A listener asks how we reconcile all the violence/competition seen in nature with the Creator God of peace.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vot, the host and the content director
0:07.4	here at Word on Fire and joining us fresh off of his retreat with all the other priests
0:12.4	of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop Barron, welcome.
0:17.5	Hey Brandon, always good to hear from you, always good to see you.
0:20.3	You too, now tell us, you just got together with some 400 priests around the Archdiocese,
0:26.2	so what was the atmosphere like? What did you guys do?
0:28.9	Good, good. We were in Palm Desert, which is about 130 miles east of LA, but a place
0:34.2	that could accommodate all of us. And it was a chance to kind of renew our priesthood in
0:39.8	the wake of the scandals and to talk through this period. And the focus really was on that
0:45.3	was how do we move forward and how do we renew our sense of what our priesthood is about.
0:51.3	So we heard some talks, we had liturgies, of course. We had blood sacrament at a ratio,
0:55.6	a confession, but we also had a lot of time in these table conversations, talking among
1:00.4	ourselves. Chance of socializing, we're a huge Archdiocese, so priests all over the place,
1:05.9	there are lots of us, and we're from a lot of different backgrounds. And so we need to get
1:11.1	to know each other a little bit better, and that was part of the purpose of the day. So they were,
1:14.9	they were very good days, I thought. It was super hot when I arrived in Palm Desert,
1:20.5	it was 114 degrees. So when I pulled in, you basically stayed inside, you know,
1:26.2	in your air conditioned space, because I walked a couple times outside and forget it. I just said,
1:31.8	I can't handle this. When I came home, it was, it was, my left is 105. When I got back to
1:37.6	Santa Barbara, it was 75. So it was a 40 degree difference, you know, or 30. What was the feeling
1:43.6	like among the other priests there? Now, you know, we're a year, year and a half into this latest
1:49.0	sexual abuse crisis. What was your view of how many of these priests are handling it?
	...

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