Lawmakers must rediscover their call by God to pursue justice, Bishop Robert Barron told members of Congress and staff on Tuesday.
“In Catholic theology truth itself, goodness itself, justice itself, are simply names for God,” Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, said to an audience of members of Congress, staff, and others at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.
The bishop told legislators that they were right to think of their role pursuing justice through public service as a vocation, and they were really called by God to do so.
“When you were seized by a passion for justice, I would say you were called by God at that moment,” Barron said. …
There are three transcendentals that culture is based upon, Barron said, the “true,” the “good” and the “beautiful.” Politics, he said, is especially connected to the “good.”
Barron exhorted members of Congress “to find it, to fight for it, to propagate it.”
“What animates that work?” he asked rhetorically of the pursuit of the “good” of those in public service. “It’s a passion of justice that lies at the bottom of the soul,” he said.
God called those in public service through a desire for justice, he said, emphasizing the need for “bringing our lives into harmony with the integrity and beauty of that call” where “everything I do is about serving justice.”
That, he warned, might make members “unpopular,” “less rich,” or see them “attacked.” However, he added, “The way you measure life now is how you respond to this call.”
And last night Bishop Barron spoke to a few hundred people on the past, present, and future of Word on Fire near Union Station, where I met him after his remarks:
Bishop Barron has been a spiritual support for me for years. An honor to meet him tonight. Pray for our priests and religious.