I think Bp Barron is seeing with increasing clarity something like a continuing mission that Ven Fulton Sheen began, addressing major issues in contemporary culture with intellectual power. Sheen saw the major cultural challenges of his time in Freud and Marx. Bp Barron's agenda includes the New Atheists (as opposed to the Old Atheists Freud and Marx) and various forms of Gnosticism, but I'm also beginning to see a systematic outreach to Evangelicals, which is completely in the spirit of Sheen, who had good relations with Billy Graham and Robert Schuller.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Catholic apologists, like Dr David Campbell, who seriously address the issues in New Age. I spent about ten years in misguided wandering there in my teens and 20s, to the point that I took up Zen Buddhism. It would have been extremely helpful if serious intellectual analysis of this sort of thing had been available to me in the 1960s and 70s -- it certainly wasn't to be found in the Philosophy or Religion departments at my elite university.
At about 12;20, Bp Barron talks about people in a Christian context who also believe that everyone but them has it wrong, and only they have the real story. It's hard to avoid seeing the ordinariates in that context, with people on discussion forums identifying themselves as "ordinariate Catholics" with a certain smugness. I suppose the misguided little groups in the ordinariate aren't a major area of concern for Bp Barron, since he's dealing with real-world issues in the Areopagus, and it's Bp Lopes's job to deal with his own wandering flock, if he gets around to it.
Do people in the ordinariates follow Bp Barron?
