Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. This is episode number 200, 200 episodes that were in. I'm Brandon Vat the host. I'm here with Bishop Baron who's been with us for I think basically every episode. We've shared some talks and other things but Bishop first of all 200 episodes. That means we've been talking for almost a hundred hours.

I know. Well, poor Brandon, I'd say. No, it's amazing. I remember vividly our first one because I was down at my room in LA. It was just gotten here.

It was the day after you were made a bishop. You remember that? That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and I had forgotten that detail but I remember sitting at my desk there in my room down in LA and we did the first broadcast because you would say, hey, this is an idea. We could maybe take something you've written but talk about it in more detail and I, oh yeah, it's a good idea.

And that was when I was still in Chicago, right? And then we make this big transition. So 200. No, it's hard for me to believe. 200 episodes nearly 8 million downloads to date. So lots to celebrate and lots of thanks to all of our listeners. I know you guys have been listening religiously not to use a pun.

Several people have emailed me this said, I've listened to all the episodes twice. I thought, oh, wow. We don't. I would. I didn't think about this but that means we've been very consistent doing them once a week because I've been here for four years. So we got 200 episodes like 50 a year. Right. So we're basically every week. I'm not just going to make sure we've missed a week. Yeah. So quite amazing.

There's another benchmark that we just crossed to the letter to a suffering church book which you wrote to address the sexual abuse crisis. We decided to donate all of the proceeds to charities serving victims of sexual abuse. But that book has now been distributed over a million times. A million copies have now reached Catholics in the pews. I assume you're equally excited about that.

Yeah, I think you said it, Brandon, when that book first was coming out, I just finished it. And you said, I think we'll sell a million copies of this. And I thought, oh, great if we do. But I was kind of skeptical. But yeah, we've gone beyond the million mark of sales.

So yeah, I'm proud of it. At the same time, I'm always aware how grim the book is. Like a grim, the topic is. And it's not like a moment of celebration, I suppose.

But still, I'm happy that the book has been widely distributed and has been, I hope, thought provoking for a lot of Catholics. And more than thought provoking, as you know, the purpose of that book is to encourage Catholics to stay and fight.

But this is not the moment to be leaving the church, but to be staying and to resolve to fight for it. You know, so that's my deepest hope with that book.

If you don't have your copy yet, we still have some left. You can get them at sufferingchurchbook.com. You can get a free individual copy. You just covered the shipping and handling. And we also are offering them to parishes. You can order a big bulk amount for a very low price. So sufferingchurchbook.com.

Okay, Bishop, the purpose of this episode is to help all of us make sense of the major theological trends and camps in the church today, which have emerged since Vatican II.

I realize this recently, reflecting on some of the recent word on fire show episodes, we throw around a lot of names and a lot of schools and terms and things.

It's hard to fit all these together into a coherent structure. And so I was hoping you could help us make sense of all of these theologians in schools just floating out there.

So before we get to Vatican II, let's move back just a little bit and start with Vatican I. What happened at that council and how did it set the stage for what was coming?

Yeah, we could go back to the beginning of time, I suppose, trying to understand the flow of ideas. But I think it's helpful to begin with Vatican I. So 1870, Vatican I in response to a lot of the both political but also ideological movements of that time.

Vatican I was a sophisticated council. A lot of important people were there. The writers of the documents were at a high level.

I like the text of Vatican I. Only a few because it was a truncated council. The Frankl Prussian war broke out and so the bishops all kind of scattered. But what we have of Vatican I are great texts.

I qualified Brandon, kind of ideologically speaking, as a nuanced, careful, smart, no too much of modernity.

So think now of Hagel Kant, Marx especially, and the church responding to these streams of thought with again a careful nuance, but pretty clear no.

Now go right after Vatican I. So Pope I is denying to call the dies in 1878 and he succeeded by this extraordinary man who takes the name Leo the 13th.

A great pope for a lot of reasons. But Leo the 13th certainly would have affirmed Vatican I would have affirmed this great no if you want.

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