Surprising lessons from 10,000,000 YouTube views

In Surprising lessons from 10,000,000 YouTube views Fr. Robert Barron reflects on that milestone.

He writes…”John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, C.S. Lewis, and Fulton Sheen all wrote substantive but accessible articles for the mainstream press, and YouTube is a comparable arena today. If intellectually serious believers absent themselves from the wider conversation and retreat to their libraries and classrooms, the public space will belong to the atheists and secularists.

“As to my general approach, I have tended toward what Cardinal Dolan of New York calls “affirmative orthodoxy,” which is to say, emphasizing what the Church is for rather than what it is against. I have also adopted the patristic method of seeking out semina verbi (seeds of the Word), hints and echoes of the Gospel that can be found, often in distorted form, in the high and low contemporary culture. Accordingly I have argued that Spiderman, Superman, “True Grit’s” Rooster Cogburn, “Gran Torino’s” cranky Walt Kowalski, “The Shawshank Redemption’s” Andy Dufresne, and Frodo the Hobbit all convey some dimension of Jesus Christ; and I have maintained that both Christopher Hitchens’s essays and the “Twilight” films speak inchoately but surely of the longing of the human heart for God.

“We find ourselves at a moment in the history of communication comparable to the early sixteenth century. The printing press constituted a revolution not only in communication technology as such but more specifically in the propagation of the Gospel. Something very similar, but even more explosive, is at work today. The social media provide tools for the announcing of the Good News that Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Newman, and even Fulton Sheen never dreamed possible. The best way that I can celebrate the 10,000,000 views on YouTube is to invite many others to join me in declaring Christ from the rooftops and to the ends of the world.”

Let us join in this powerful means of evanglization.