Bishop Robert Barron is one of the leading evangelists for the Catholic Church. Bishop Thomas John Paprocki is one of the leading canon lawyers for the Catholic Church. The two have known each other for decades, going back to their time together as priests in Chicago. For the first time, they sat down together for a joint interview. Catholic Times editor, Andrew Hansen, interviewed them both on the diocesan podcast, Dive Deep, to get their thoughts on the “number one thing” on a variety of faith questions. This is part one of two of their interview (answers are edited for clarity). The next edition of Catholic Times will have part two of their interview.

Q. What is the number one thing you struggle with it comes to our faith or God?

Bishop Barron: For me, it’s the one that’s classic for almost everybody which is the problem of suffering, the problem of evil, and how do you reconcile great suffering. Of course, the older you get the more you’re aware of great suffering. How do you reconcile that with the existence of an all good, all-knowing, all perfect, God? I’ve wrestled with that as I’ve dealt with struggles and difficulties and tragedies in my own life, but you know one thing that always strikes me is that at the heart of our biblical tradition in the Old Testament, there is a book that wrestles precisely with this matter. The Book of Job. You’ve this example of someone wrestling with this problem (Job), and it’s right at the heart of the Old Testament. It’s one of our sacred texts. That’s always given me hope that as I wrestle with it, it has been wrestled with from the beginning, and we reverence that wrestling in our own sacred text.

Bishop Paprocki: It should not be too surprising that my answer is the same — it’s the issue of suffering. I think it’s probably the same answer for a lot of people in terms of faith. Why does God allow suffering? We all struggle with that and asking the question: “Why?” In the end, our Lord told us that we’re going to suffer, and we’re expected to carry our cross and sometimes by going through those sufferings and carrying the cross, we reach the great glory that our Lord has promised us.

Q. What is the number one thing you wished people appreciated more about the Catholic faith?

Bishop Paprocki: I think they don’t appreciate the importance of going to Sunday Mass. According to the statistics, the majority of Catholics, at least in our country, don’t go to Mass every Sunday, and they may even consider themselves good Catholics. Some Catholics only go on Christmas or Easter. Others may think, “Well, if I go twice a month, that’s good enough.” But actually, going to Mass on Sunday for us Catholics is the fulfillment of the third Commandment to keep holy the Sabbath, and the Sabbath is Sunday, and that doesn’t happen twice a month or twice a year. It happens every week. There’s a Sabbath every week for us. The Sabbath is Sunday because it’s the day our Lord rose from the dead and so, to see that not just as an obligation, but it is something that He’s telling us that we need to do it for our own good and to worship our Lord.

Bishop Barron: There’s a tendency I think on the part of a lot of people to think the Church is puritanical when it comes to sexuality, that it’s legalistic, that it’s wagging its finger. I’m always with the old line, “Wherever the Catholic sun does shine, there’s music and laughter and good red wine.” The Catholic Church celebrates the sensual, celebrates the embodied, celebrates sexuality. When it says, “No,” it’s always a “no to a no,” which means it’s a “yes.” So, if the culture has skewed things in a certain direction, it has gotten it wrong, and the Church says, “No to that,” what it’s doing ultimately is saying, “Yes.” So, the Catholic Church is the great religion of “yes.” It affirms life. God wants us fully alive and that includes every aspect of life which means the embodied, it means the sexual, but I think we tend to be seen by a lot of people as puritanical and legalistic, but if you really believe in something, you like laws, because laws make you better. I always say this as a golfer. Golfers love the laws of the golf swing. We want to get better at it. Tell me more about the golf swing so I can hit that ball better. So, in a similar way, in the moral life, those who want to be fully alive, they say, “Tell me more, help me, guide my life.” But people underappreciate that. They see the Church in a negative light as puritanical and finger wagging, and I think that’s a mistake.

Q. What is the number one thing someone should do to help draw them into a closer relationship with God?

Bishop Barron: Doing a holy hour. I’m a big Venerable Fulton Sheen (of Peoria) fan and Fulton Sheen every time he met with priests, he told them do a holy hour. Every day, spend an hour of uninterrupted prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. I think it’s the best thing we can do to get closer to the Lord. It revolutionized my life when I was younger. Even as a younger priest, I didn’t do the holy hour. For our generation, it wasn’t emphasized. My parent’s generation knew about Fulton Sheen, but then the younger fellas in the seminary and the younger priests picked up on Fulton Sheen, and I’ll confess it humbly, I learned a lot from them, and the holy hour is central to my own spiritual life now, so I always tell people, that’s something you can do concretely.

Bishop Paprocki: Go to Mass every Sunday. That’s the best way to get close to our Lord. In terms of closeness, he’s coming right into our hearts when we receive him at holy Communion. I went to Nigeria once on a pastoral visit and we were visiting the churches there, where 90 percent of Catholics go to Mass. You get this great sense of community, and I think that’s the thing that maybe people are missing sometimes. There’s a whole sense of when somebody’s missing from the community, we feel it’s a difference. I’m sure we all had an experience of a church that is packed full of people. It’s just so reinforcing to have so many other people around. When we’re not there, when we are absent ourselves, the community misses that. It’s important for us to realize that what we bring to church is ourselves and to help build up the community and that is a two-way street that helps to reinforce our faith.

Q. What is the number one thing in our society or culture that people of faith need to be on guard about?

Bishop Paprocki: I think they need to be on guard, especially young people, with the falsehood that science is opposed to faith. They’re getting that message, unfortunately, that faith is just a bunch of made-up stuff and science has an answer for everything, and if you just follow science, everything’s going to be fine. Bishop Barron himself has done a lot of great work in this regard. Father Robert Spitzer, a Jesuit priest, who has a whole program on the relationship between faith and science, and so I would really reinforce that to look out for that pitfall that I think many young people are falling into thinking, “Well, I can’t be a religious person because I’m a scientist, or I believe in science.” They’re definitely compatible and going back to St. Thomas Aquinas, he showed how faith and science are compatible. The Church is on the forefront of science. Copernicus was priest, and he discovered the whole idea that the sun does not revolve around the earth, it’s the other way around. So, the Church is very important in the relationship with science.

Bishop Barron: First, I’d really emphasize what Bishop Paprocki just said because in study after study, young people say that when you ask, “How come you’ve left the Church?” they’ll say, “Because religion and science are incompatible.” George Lemaitre, the formulator of The Big Bang Theory, was a Catholic priest, but how many people even know that? So, I would reiterate that. Certainly, I’d add simply this, what I call the “culture of self-invention.” I think is rampant, meaning, “I invent values, I decide who I am, I decide what’s important, I decide my own gender, I can manipulate my body, I decide.” So, the culture dictates to a lot of young people that it’s up to you, that you decide, and that is just deadening to the soul. The soul awakens when objective values appear values of the mind, moral values, aesthetic values, the beautiful. When that appears and now you’re drawn up out of your little crammed self into this world of objective truth and beauty and goodness, that’s when you come alive and the Church has been for centuries a great advocate of these objective values. I think that’s the cultural problem today is that has all gotten reversed. “I invent values,” and the problem there too is then we lose all community. You’ve got your values, I got my values, you have your values, and we don’t meet anywhere, we’re just caught up in our own wills. So, I’d say the culture of self-invention is a huge problem.

Q. What is the number one thing a married couple should be doing to keep their marriage vibrant?

Bishop Barron: I go back to Fulton Sheen who said that it takes three to get married. You need the husband, the wife, and Christ, and you need the husband and wife who are subordinate together to Christ. Look at that old principle that a friendship becomes stronger when the two friends don’t just like each other, together they love what Aristotle calls the “Transcendent third.” It’s the same thing with a married couple: the marriage is stronger in the measure that together they both love Christ. That’s what’s going to strengthen a marriage. Make sure that third person, the person of Christ, is involved.

Bishop Paprocki: I would specify the way to keep Christ as part of your marriage is to pray every day. For them to intentionally do that — to put aside some time. It doesn’t have to be a long period of prayer, but I would even encourage engaged couples to practice that. They talk about so many things such as what it’s going to be like when they’re married and sharing finances and what the house is going to be like and things like that, but are they ever comfortable saying, “Hey, let’s just take a few moments to pray with each other,” and if they’re comfortable praying with each other, that will go a long way in helping them also get through the difficult moments or the tensions and the difficulties.