TheOboeMan

Dominus Tecum doing the Lord's work on and off /r/Catholicism

Hi Bishop Barron. First I want to say thanks for all the evangelization work you do. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen on /r/Catholicism say they’re coming back to the Church or are coming for the first time or are considering coming to the Church, at least in part, because of your work. I know you’re busy, and that you’re looking for questions mostly from non-Catholics, but I hope you’ll take the time to answer at least one or two of the questions I have below from a concerned Catholic.

My fiancee doesn’t really use reddit, but when I explained to her that you were doing an AMA (and what an AMA is), we sat down together and came up with some questions for you. I’ve broken them into section so you can skim for context, but made the questions themselves larger so you can jump to them in case you don’t have time for an in-depth reading. I understand if you can’t get to all of them and can only answer some, and appreciate any effort to answer any number of them.

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We’ve both been quite mobile over the past few years, and we’ve experienced some quite difficult things with regard to confession times in various dioceses. For example, in the midwest, she has experienced things like calling seven different churches asking to schedule a confession time and being told, with each phone call, that the priest was too busy, as well as one occasion in a different midwest diocese where a priest showed up so late to scheduled confession time that only two minutes remained, and there was a line of twelve people outside. She has also gone to normal scheduled confession times in multiple parishes in Seattle and been told that the priests weren’t available that week because they were on vacation. In all of these instances, there was no notice on the websites she had checked to obtain the confession times. From my own personal experience, in the East Bay Area, in the Diocese of Oakland, there was not a single parish when I lived there that offered confession during the week. Well, there was one that had a time scheduled on Tuesday nights, but no one was ever there on the Tuesdays I went. As for the rest, their only scheduled times were on Saturday afternoons. In Miami, where I’m living now, it’s not much better. Only two parishes in the whole city (or at least in the area around my apartment that masstimes.org finds parishes for) seem to offer weekday confessions, although these two at least seem to offer it every day. And, if I didn’t own a car, there’s no way I could ever reasonably get to them. My home city of New Orleans seems to be an anomaly in this, that lots of different parishes there offer confession at lots of different times. I know I’m not the only person who regularly finds himself in need of the confessional in the middle of the week. The questions on this one are:

Q1 Do you know why this has become the case in the U.S. (that Confession is largely unavailable)?

Q2 What can you and your fellow Bishops do to fix this problem of a seeming lack of availability of Confession throughout the U.S.?

Q3 What can we, as laity, do to help fix this problem in our own diocese while still respecting the authority of our pastors and Bishops?

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Somewhat related to the first section, we have both experienced being kicked out of a church that was being closed while we were praying. For both of us, this happened while we were doing penance just after a regularly scheduled confession time. I understand the need to lock churches in a city, but I’m wondering if this is even acceptable for a priest to do? I know that we are able to pray in our own homes, but my fiancee and I, at least, both find the beauty of the church to be a much more conducive atmosphere for prayer than the plain walls of an apartment living room. We do hope to one day have a chapel in our home that mimics the beauty of the church, but until then, the church is the only place we can go to experience the beauty of Catholic art and architecture. So the questions for this section are:

Q1 Is it okay for a priest to kick people out who are very obviously doing their penance post confession?

Q2 If that is okay, how can we find an atmosphere conducive to prayer elsewhere when we, at least currently, do not have the money to build home altars for worship?

Q3 If that is not okay, how ought we to respond to such an event?

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This section comes almost entirely from my fiancee, as it’s something I agree with her on, but that I had never really given much thought to until she brought it up. We’ve noticed that a large number of religious and priests in the modern day have foregone wearing their religious garb. That is, nuns don’t wear habits anymore, and priests have stopped wearing cassocks. Because of this, lots of opportunities for witness are missed. The habit is an eschatological sign to the world, and the cassock is a sign of death to the world (that is, the priest dies to the world in order to live for Christ). This is deeply troubling to us. The questions we have for this section are:

Q1 Why has this happened? Historically, theologically, practically? What are the reasons that priests and religious have stopped dressing in religious garb?

Q2 Do you (and also, do the members of the USCCB generally) see this as a real concern for our church in this country, or do you (and also, do the members of the USCCB generally) think that people like my fiancee and myself are blowing this out of proportion (I don’t want this question to come across as disrespectful or rude; I genuinely want to know if we’re being overly scrupulous about this)?

Q3 If you see this as a real problem, is there anything you think the laity can do to help fix it while still being respectful toward our priests and religious?

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I am concerned, personally, about the lack of Latin in our liturgy today. I don’t mean the Tridentine Rite versus the Novus Ordo. I mean that I don’t understand why it is so difficult to find even a Novus Ordo where, at the very least, the common Mass parts like the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei are sung/chanted/spoken in Latin. I love the parish of St. John Cantius in Chicago, IL, where English Novus Ordo, Latin Novus Ordo, and Tridentine Rite Masses are all offered every single Sunday, and I wish more parishes could be like this, although I know that is practically difficult. I know that Vatican 2 reaffirmed the position of honor Latin has among languages in the Church, and insisted that Latin ought to be used where it can in divine liturgy. So my questions here are:

Q1 Do you (and also, do the members of the USCCB generally) see the lack of Latin being used in our churches in America as a problem to be addressed?

Q2 If so, what can Bishops do today to address the lack of Latin in the Church?

Q3 What can the laity do about the lack of Latin while still respecting the authority of our pastors and Bishops?

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Finally, my fiancee and I are going to be married in less than a month. I’m worried about our future children’s souls, as they will be growing up in a world where

1. The Catholic Church has had numerous scandals exposed (and may possibly undergo more scandals in the near future) which have given it a terrible name in the United States
2. The pressure placed on faithful Catholics to abandon the Church’s teachings is ever (and seemingly exponentially) increasing in the West and
3. The things which were once in place to aid the faithful in their daily lives, such as seeing their pastor in the store in his cassock, or the sisters in their habits, or being able to attend confession or pray in a church before the tabernacle and surrounded by art that reminds them of scripture and tradition whenever they need to, or the mystery and reverence of the Mass, seem to have been stripped away from common life.

Q1 Do you have any advice for new parents (I know we technically aren’t new parents yet, but God willing we will be a year from now) about how to raise our children to love God and keep them in the faith their whole lives?

Thank you again for all your hard work for God’s Kingdom and in advance for answering this list of, admittedly, quite possibly difficult questions.

That's both funny and sad.

Sounds fake.

Don't know if you're still answering questions, but I'm a recent graduate with a Cyber Security degree who has been working in the industry for about a year. I'm part of a massive, global company with multiple divisions and am doing a leadership program that ends next summer with me rolling off (hopefully) into a Cyber Security role in this company's healthcare division.

I've been looking into the CISSP certification, and now that it's pretty much definite that I'll be in a healthcare organization, am considering instead the HCISSP. Which would you recommend for someone entering the Cyber Security workforce in a healthcare industry? Do you think the HCISSP is too niche and would limit me in the future? Any other career development advice you could give would also be appreciated!