WOF 531: Social Media in Light & Darkness (pt. 3)
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Matthew Petrusek, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you for joining us. For the last two episodes, Evangelization & Culture Podcast host Tod Worner has been having a conversation with Word on Fire's founders about social media—a phenomenon that has certainly played a prominent role in the life of our own ministry. But what about its shadow side? How might faithful Catholics engage in social media? How might the Church? How do we cultivate a rich spiritual life in this ever-unfolding age of social media? Here to discuss this with Tod Worner and Fr. Steve Grunow is Bishop Robert Barron.
Topics Covered
00:00 | Introduction
00:49 | Examining social media's shadow side
14:32 | Can teachers of the faith use social media without oversight
22:18 | How we prepare for online ministry
27:58 | Join the Word on Fire Institute
Links:
- Word on Fire Institute: https://institute.wordonfire.org/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Matthew Petrusik, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute |
| 0:04.5 | and the host of the Word on Fire show. Thank you for joining us. For the last two episodes, |
| 0:08.8 | evangelization and culture podcast host, Todd Warner, has been having a conversation with Word |
| 0:13.5 | on Fire's founders about social media, a phenomenon that has certainly played a prominent role |
| 0:18.7 | in the life of our own ministry. |
| 0:22.7 | But what about its shadow side? |
| 0:26.1 | How might faithful Catholics engage in social media? |
| 0:27.3 | How might the church? |
| 0:33.5 | How do we cultivate a rich spiritual life in this ever-unfolding age of social media? |
| 0:38.6 | Here to discuss this with Todd Warner and Father Steve Grunow is Bishop Robert Barron. |
| 0:53.2 | In a 2020 interview with the National Catholic Register about the troubles with social media, |
| 0:54.2 | Bishop Robert Barron asserted, quote, the vitriol, character assassination, and just plain hatred that one comes |
| 1:00.3 | across every day on social media is massively disheartening. Years ago, if someone wanted to complain |
| 1:05.1 | about an opinion piece, you have to sit down, compose a letter, sign it, find an envelope and stamp, |
| 1:10.0 | send his vitriolic |
| 1:10.9 | missive to an editor who most likely would take one look at the diatribe and toss it into the trash. |
| 1:16.2 | Today, anyone in his mom's basement can dash off a hate-filled message and with one press of a |
| 1:21.3 | button posted on social media where it sits unedited for all the world to see. Further, the very |
| 1:27.1 | anonymity of the process encourages the venting of the most heinous and hurtful kind of rhetoric. A particularly disturbing phenomenon in the social media era is the Twitter mob, which we call the ex-mob now, I guess, by which I mean the awful gang up on someone, amounting to a kind of feeding frenzy with the collective goal of totally destroying the person. |
| 1:45.2 | And of course, extremism on one side of the ideological spectrum conduces to extremism on the other side, |
| 1:50.6 | close quote. So we've been talking about a lot of the aspects, the good aspects of social media, |
| 1:56.0 | the evangelizing aspects of social media, the hopes for social media. Let's talk a little bit about |
... |
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