Bishop Robert Barron spoke on political commentator Tucker Carlson’s show on June 2, 2025. / Credit: CNA/EWTN News
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 16:29 pm (CNA).
Bishop Robert Barron sat down with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson this week to talk about the Catholic faith and discuss some hot cultural topics. Carlson, an Episcopalian, began the June 2 interview by saying that his friends urged him to have Barron on his show.
“I don’t think I’ve ever received more texts about any guest than I did about you,” Tucker told Barron. “From Catholics I know, from non-Catholics I know.”
Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic ministries and bishop of the Winona-Rochester Diocese in Minnesota, and Carlson discussed a wide range of subjects, including how to find happiness, prayer, grace, persecution, technology, and the future of the Church.
Finding happiness
The interview began with a discussion about happiness. Carlson cited falling birth rates and increased suicides as evidence of a widespread lack of happiness in the culture.
“The joy of life” comes when “you forget about yourself and you lose yourself in some great value,” Barron said.
“God is the highest good, the ‘summum bonum.’ That’s why you love the Lord your God. That’s the First Commandment. But when the culture has lost that, which ours is in danger of, you, by definition, become unhappy,” Barron said.
In order to find happiness, people must let go of their egos and pursue “the good,” he said. “The ego is like a black hole … that will draw everything into itself, suck all of life and light and energy into itself. Nothing can escape.”
People who feel unhappiness have “lost a sense of God” and therefore lost “the supreme good,” according to Barron. “The best people are those who breathe life into a room. And that happens because they’re not preoccupied with the ego. They’re captivated by some objective good, and they want to show it to you.”
What is true freedom?
The discussion turned to the topic of freedom.
If we focus too much on choices in our lives, we will “get lost,” Barron said.
“I thought the whole point of the West was choices,” Carlson responded.
“But, you have to know what your choice is for,” Barron said. “When you deify choice itself, when you say, ‘Autonomy, that’s my God.’ No, choice is for some good.”
He continued: “The idea is to order freedom. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is ordered towards some good. When it’s disordered, it tends to collapse in upon itself.”
“The whole point of America, I thought, was choice and freedom for its own sake,” Carlson responded.
“Well, and I would argue it’s not for its own sake,” Barron said. “If that happens to us, something’s gone wrong.”
Of the founding fathers, Barron said they didn’t “have the full Catholic imagination as I would like it, but they certainly had a sense of the objective good, and that the purpose of life is to find that good and be ordered toward it.”
“An ordered freedom is what they were interested in, not freedom for its own sake.”
“Your freedom has to be disciplined and directed,” he continued.
“Our culture, it’s … banks to a river, the river has energy. It’s going somewhere. You knock down the banks. You say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be limited. Don’t set limits to my freedom.’ It just floods the fields.”
When asked by Carlson what are the banks that we’ve demolished, Barron said: “The life of the mind, the moral good, religious good, aesthetic … When that’s lost, the banks are knocked down.”
Barron explained: “The goal for the Bible is not autonomy, it’s theonomy.”
“God, ‘theos,’ … becomes the law of my life … When God becomes the norm of my life, I become more myself. I find who I really am. If I jettison God and I say, ‘No, I’m the leader of my own life,’ I get lost.”
“What does Jesus say? ‘The one who loses himself will find it. The one who’s trying to hang on to himself is going to lose it.’ Lose your freedom in God’s greater freedom, and you become now authentically free.”
Prayer and God’s transcendence
Barron spoke of prayer as a way to let go of ego. “Prayer is a conscious exercise in overcoming autonomy. It’s a conscious exercise to say, ‘I want to get out of my preoccupations. I’m placing myself in the presence of God.’”
Prayer is a way to “overcome” and “calm the mind,” Barron explained. He highlighted that the rosary is a “meditative prayer” that can really help the mind “open up to a deeper consciousness or a deeper awareness.”
When distraction occurs during prayer, Barron instructed people to “acknowledge” it. “Don’t try to fight it,” he said. “Acknowledge it and then go back.”
Related to the topic of the transcendent nature of God, Barron said: “You’re not going to find him in the world … you can’t say things like, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence for God,’ as though he’s a chemical reaction.”
“God is, at the same time, as transcendent as you can imagine, not a thing in the world, and as imminent as you can imagine. He’s higher than anything I could imagine, and he’s closer to me than I am to myself. Now, figure that one out,” Barron said.
When Carlson asked if God needs our sacrifice, Barron responded firmly: “He doesn’t require it.”
“How could the one who made the entire universe from nothing possibly need anything from it?” Barron said. “It’s just a logical contradiction.”
“He wants the openness of heart signaled by the sacrifice, because he wants us to be alive. And when we say, Lord, ‘I’m opening my heart to you. I’m ordering my life to you in this great sacrifice of praise,’ God delights because now we’re going to find the joy he wants us to have.”
God “needs nothing,” Barron said. “We eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus. We consume the sacrifice. It’s for our benefit, not for God’s.”
Christian persecution
During the interview, Barron highlighted the fact that the 20th century has been “the worst century for Christian martyrs [in] all of Christian history.”
“Now, around the world, we are by far the most persecuted religion,” he said. “It’s a crime. It’s an outrage. We talk in a demure way about religious liberty in our country, which is indeed under threat, but you want the real threat to religious liberty? It’s in different parts of the world. People are being killed for their Christian faith.”
Barron pointed to the late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII, who believed “the devil would have a unique control over the 20th century,” so he formulated “the famous St. Michael prayer … asking for the protection of Michael, the archangel.”
“It’s hard to argue” that Leo XIII’s premonition was not real, Barron explained. “If you believe in the devil, as I do, and you see what happened in the 20th century, it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t to some degree.”
Religion and violence
When asked if Christianity leads to violence, Barron said: “It’s one of the myths of enlightenment historiography that religion is the problem.”
There was a “careful study of all the great wars” conducted, Barron said. “And the conclusion was something like 8% could be traced to a religious cause.”
“There’s the totality of human dysfunction. God’s response to that is not to more violence. It’s to respond with forgiving love. That’s Christianity … It’s not a religion of violence,” he said.
Technology and faith
In the course of the more-than-hourlong interview, Barron and Carlson discussed digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence.
“We’re all addicted to [them],” Barron said in reference to smartphones. “Those machines were designed to be addictive.”
He highlighted a program whereby priests have given up their phones for a whole year as a part of a study. Barron said the result was that “they all feel liberated.”
“They all come back saying, ‘It was the best year of my life, and I read books again, and I talked to people. I cultivated friendship. I played games. I played sports … That’s almost an illustration of Augustine’s ‘incurvatus in se,’ that I’m ‘caved in’ over my iPhone.”
Barron mentioned another study that found a “direct correlation between screen time and depression,” which he said he finds “perfectly plausible.”
“Look how unhealthy it’s making our young kids,” Barron said. “I think taking those things out of the hands of our kids would be a great idea, at least to some degree.”
Later in the interview, however, Barron said “technology is not bad in itself.” It becomes a problem when “you couple technology with a sheer celebration of autonomy or a bracketing of God.”
Artificial intelligence is “frightening” Barron said. “It [has] to be grounded in a moral vision … or it will become a Frankenstein’s monster.”
We cannot try to “become God” and “decide to dictate terms to reality. It’ll turn on us and wreck us,” Barron said.
Pope Leo XIV and the future of the Church
When asked what changes Pope Leo XIV may make as the new pontiff, Barron said “I don’t know.” But he did share that he thinks the pope has “made some interesting gestures” so far.
Pope Leo’s use of Latin and his appearance in the mozzetta on the loggia after his election was a “gesture toward more traditional Catholics,” Barron said.
At the end of the interview, Carlson ran a paid advertisement of the Catholic prayer app Hallow, a sponsor of the podcast interview, offering listeners a three-month free trial with the code “TUCKER” at Hallow.com/Tucker and promoting the app’s consecration to Jesus through St. Joseph.
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Glad they expressed an objection, and bless them, even though I have my doubts about how strongly they feel it.
Hopefully they’ll encourage priests to share this info with us in the pews. That hasn’t been a thing in the past & many Catholics I know believe that IVF is prolife because it can result in a birth.
If Catholics think IVF is prolife why do we expect Pres. Trump to know any better?
Hope so too. But over the last four decades or so, I’ve never heard a single pro-life homily, except from unique figures like the late Father Richard Neuhaus and the late Monsignor Phillip Reilly. And I’ll also concede a pro-life very early morning homily from whichever priest joins us on the bus to Washington for the annual March for Life. Speaking of which, decades ago some would march with a sign that read, here are your people, where are our bishops?
Nonetheless, in more recent years a few have trickled in.
Everything we do in life is a source of witness. I wish I could remember this when I occasionally cuss.
What lies behind this debate over IVF is not merely a bioethical dispute about embryos or medical technique, but a profound philosophical crisis — the triumph of moral relativism over the classical and Christian understanding of truth, being, and human dignity.
Relativism is not new. It has a history — indeed, it has the history of humanity’s fall. The first relativist was not a man, but the Devil. His argument in Eden — “You will not die … you will be like God, knowing good and evil” — was the prototype of all later moral subjectivism. The serpent’s logic introduced the fateful idea that good and evil are relative, that truth is negotiable, that divine law is a matter of interpretation. This primordial “hermeneutic of suspicion” toward God’s word continues, refined and intellectualized, in every age.
The Sophists of ancient Greece were its first human spokesmen. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras. Against them rose Socrates, insisting that the soul must conform itself to truth, not truth to the soul’s desires. This same battle — between the arrogance of the self-measured man and the humility of the truth-seeking man — is the one we still fight today.
In Christian philosophy, neither Plato nor Aristotle reduced being to thought. The mind was to receive, imitate, and participate in what is. Truth, therefore, was objective, ontological, and binding. But with Descartes — “I think, therefore I am” — a seismic reversal occurred. Being was subordinated to consciousness. The “I” became the measure not only of truth but of reality itself. This idealist revolution was the philosophical fall of modernity, giving rise to the many descendants of Cartesian egocentrism: pantheism, atheism, Marxism, and, in the moral order, the sexual revolution.
From this genealogy arises the modern “culture of death,” in which even life itself is defined by utility, convenience, and control. IVF, therefore, is not just a medical act; it is a metaphysical declaration. It asserts that human life may be produced, selected, frozen, or discarded at will — that man may be both the artisan and the arbiter of being. It is the culmination of the Cartesian project: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I produce, therefore I am.”
The bishops are right to condemn IVF, not only because it destroys innumerable embryonic lives, but because it corrodes the very notion of what it means to be human. Each embryo is not a potential human being; it is a human being with potential — a person who already is. When human life becomes a byproduct of technique, children cease to be gifts and become commodities. Love yields to manufacture; procreation becomes production.
This is why IVF, for all its apparent compassion, represents a deeper spiritual crisis than abortion itself. Abortion kills; IVF redefines. It teaches society to see life as raw material, to accept that the most sacred mystery — the transmission of life — can be mastered and mechanized. It turns the womb into a laboratory and the act of love into an industrial process.
In this sense, IVF is the emblem of the technological relativism of our age — the same relativism that began in Eden, found its philosophical expression in the Sophists, and took metaphysical root in Descartes. Its logical end is the abolition of man, the transformation of the human person into an object of design.
The bishops’ warning is therefore prophetic. To reject IVF is not to reject science; it is to defend the ontological dignity of life and the integrity of love. If man is no longer born of the gift of persons but of the will to power, then even the family, the first temple of human communion, becomes an artifact. Against this new Babel, the Church stands as the last custodian of the truth that life is sacred because it is not ours.
Paolo thank you for this well-crafted comment.
It was a pleasure to read.
That relativism was the devil’s action from the beginning is an eye opener in this age of post-Fiducia supplicans which relativises mortal sin for Ecumenical New Church.
Kind regards
CN
I agree. A well expressed thumbnail history of vanity to which we might add the current relativism of “diversity” and subjectivism of “discernment,” that is discernment without humility. And we know how easily we forget true prophesy. Benedict began his papacy with a reflection on the poison of relativism, and the first day of Leo’s pontificate began with his validating cultural prerogatives for interpreting Fiducia Supplicans.
Thank you, friend in Christ, for your kind words. The problem of Western civilization, as Peter Kreeft might say, is that we have lost the forest—the meaning, the poem—for the tree—the signs, the characters of the poem. Descartes saw only the tree; postmodernity has destroyed it altogether. Nietzsche and the deconstructionists do the opposite of Aristotle: they use the hammer, not the trowel. The remedy, as Don Bosco saw in his dream of the two pillars guiding the ship of the Church, remains the same—the Eucharistic Kingdom and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“Catholic bishops criticize Trump’s IVF expansion: Every life is ‘sacred and loved by God’”
And, yet, so many of our bishops are ambivalent about the moral horror of abortion. Case in point: Cupich’s wanting to give a lifetime achievement award to a Catholic politician who was an outspoken supporter of killing unborn, defenseless babies. And furthermore you could count on both hands the number of bishops who came out publicly against his doing so. But when it comes to Trump and IVF, the bishops suddenly find their voice. We’re not having any more of your fecklessness
Here’s what I have to say to all our bishops and to Pope Prevost: Stop the politicization of Christ’s Church. The Church does NOT belong to you; it is Christ’s.
Indeed notice the lack of outrage of the bishops at Cardinal Cupich’s efforts to honor Democrat Senator Durbin, who favors allowing the killing of unborn babies or their silence over the pro-abortion policies of Presidents Biden, Obama, etc. ; and notice how the Pope honors Cupich by naming him to an office in the Vatican; and notice how the Pope wants open borders in other countries but keeps his own little country with some of the most strict anti-illegal aliens laws in the Western world. How applicable to all of them is
Matthew 23:13
For the Vatican’s laws and practices against illegal immigration see
Vatican Promises Stiff Penalties for Illegal Aliens Crossing its Border
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/01/16/vatican-promises-stiff-penalties-for-illegal-aliens-crossing-its-border/
IVF is expensive. Are taxpayers going to get saddled with much of the cost? Achieving a viable pregnancy might cost $50,000. If you expand this to a million cases,you will be talking billions of Dollars. Where is that money coming from?
Welfare/food stamps are expensive. Public schools are expensive. Vouchers are expensive. Health Care is expensive. Not many Catholics object to those things. IVF is just one more thing I guess the tax payers will have to dig deep to fund.
The same place Medicaid surgical gender mutilation money come from. Taxpayers.
Over the years, my wife and I have paid a lot of taxes. It’s discouraging to think what our tax dollars go to.
Since we sometimes disagree, I wanted to say, “Hear, hear!” Living in Oregon for 35 years has been especially discouraging on the tax front. Taxes are very high here (and 5-10 billion more just passed a few weeks ago), and most of them are wasted: corruption, ineptness, horrible agendas, lousy public education (ranked 45th in the nation for decades), etc. It’s maddening.
Guess your state hasn’t quite mastered the make everything free NY practice of just sending the bills to the generations of the future.
It’s discouraging indeed Mr William.
And much borrowing
Going seamless garment on us? Movement in the right direction is not to be welcomed unless every aspect of their governance meets your approval?
When have more enlightened than thou progressives ever cared about cost?
I am definitely opposed to Trump’s efforts to increase access to IVF.
However, I see the action of the USCCB as typical – send a letter to the president, or congress.
As much as I oppose Trump’s action on this, he is not our chief teacher of the faith, and sending a letter to him does not fulfill the teaching function of the bishops.
They need to teach the evil of IVF in their diocese, and have their priests do the same.
There are people in my parish who think that IVF is a good thing.
A lay person explaining to someone why IVF is not a good thing does not have nearly the effect that a priest would have saying the same thing from the pulpit.
If only the clergy had been onboard with the promotion of NFP and opposing contraception, we might not be in this situation. I gave up trying to teach NFP when the priests refused to support my efforts and assured people that contraception is okay if your conscience said so.
So, Democrats say…We must kill children in vetro. If children survive our attempts to kill them, we must kill them immediately after birth. We must also allow hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked and work as slaves. Bishops say the democrats must be honored with lifetime achievement awards for their efforts at killing and trafficking children. OR, we at least must overlook the killing because trafficking children is such a good practice.
Republicans say…We must make it easier for childless couples to conceive via IVF. Bishops immediately write a letter condemning the republicans.
Got it.
One of my college roommates had four children. Two went to Notre Dame, one to Catholic University of America and the last to Loyola. My friend and his wife are fervent Catholics and brought their children up similarly. Two of his fully Catholic-educated children had four children – two each all of whom were born as a result of IVF (to my friend’s consternation). The tuition for “Catholic” education just at the university level for all four probably cost him no less than $400,000.
Exactly, DR. Until we properly teach Catholics about IVF (or at least attempt our very best) how do we expect someone like Donald Trump to get it?
One has to wonder if this expansion is additionally a Trumpian gift to his Log Cabin Republicans who need IVF to fabricate their families. Two men can now borrow/hire an egg/s (from a female friend or relative perhaps); each man may even donate their own sperm to have “half-siblings” (split -cycle) and so perpetuate the “romantic mystery” that each of them are the “fathers”, and then hire a woman (another friend or an industrial ally) for the gestational period, while the two men sit back until birth, when they will place both their names on the birth certificate, the whole case being sealed (in many states) so that the child will never know its biological or birth mother (since the child may actually have both). I would have liked to see the bishops take the opportunity to call out this pre-meditated, psychological, child abuse.
It’s a shame when adults purposely deprive a child of a parent but these days an IVF or surrogacy child can use DNA testing to track relatives down and hopefully information on their parent’s identity.
So. Yet again.
The Catholic Church, identified as the USCCB in America, has apparently satisfied itself as to its’ apostolic mission by publishing the referenced letters of the four bishops. There is nothing here to suggest an evangelical purpose. There is nothing to suggest a clear exhortation for the moral education of the Catholic Laity. Check the boxes; file for any future need or evidence.
The American institutional Catholic Church is in spiritual stagnation, blissfully mis-understanding the primacy of its’ real purposes, and quite detached from the needs of the Laity and its’ potential in behalf of the secular world. For this world sorely needs bishops who do less “Ruling”, and a great deal more “Teaching”. Exemplify, and require of pastors, specific dogmatic instruction (such as a homily like the above note by Paolo Giosue)
Bishops need to effect real moral knowledge and living by their community. The killings by Catholic persons and hospitals in their dioceses, whether by IVF, by killing from organ/tissue harvesting, by hidden euthanasia, etc. must be acknowledged and stopped.
Well said and amen, Roger Miller.
Oh … now we hear the bishops with their prophetic voice. I seem to recall that then-USSCB president Archbishop Gomez had a strong pro-life letter to Biden in 2021, but Cardinals Cupich and Tobin prevailed on Bergoglio (do you think that was a hard sell?) to make Gomez stand down and withdraw the letter. Well, aren’t we all happy they have finally found their voice. Oh, yeah, that’s right! Biden is no longer president. The USCCB never skips a beat when it comes to “speaking truth to power.” Oh, maybe they do skip a beat … all depends on whether the president is democrat or republican.
Yes. Now “hopefully” the child can track down the mother that never met the father; the mother who perhaps is a lesbian who thinks she’s a man yet bears children for money – an excellent reunion!
It’s important Inigo. Your parent is still your parent. Inherited health issues are another concern, too. Knowledge is a good thing. And so is forgiveness.
mrscracker – I recall many of your comments to my comments and you always avoid the issue or change the subject in our conversations until the conversation ends in silly tautologies (“Your parent is still your parent”). I need no reminder about the importance of knowledge and forgiveness which I add to truth and honesty. You do your work and I’ll do mine. And as always, I will let you have the last word… you wouldn’t have it any other way.
More kudos to Paulo Giosue for his wonderful concentrated comment above!!
I’m definitely filing that one away for future reference.