Catholic bishop and Orthodox artist discuss materialism, scientific arguments for Christ, reunification

A Catholic bishop and an Orthodox artist are asking believers and non-believers of all backgrounds to open their minds to a world more complex than what is visible.

Bishop Robert Barron, the most widely followed Catholic bishop in the world outside the Vatican, hosted his second annual Wonder Conference focusing on the intersection between faith and science.

Fox News Digital sat down with the bishop and his guest speaker, Orthodox liturgical artist Jonathan Pageau, to talk about how human beings should conceive faith and science in their daily lives.

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“People are victims of indoctrination,” Barron told Fox News Digital about the increasingly atheistic culture in the Western world. “When it comes to materialism, materialism isn’t something the sciences yield. Materialism is a philosophy. It’s a philosophical view, and it’s ultimately incoherent […] You cannot be a scientist and not believe, at least implicitly, in the invisible – that’s to say, in the purely intelligible pattern.”

Pageau feels similarly, telling Fox News Digital that one of the main goals of his work is “trying to kind of shatter some of the presuppositions that people have” about what God is.

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Bishop Barron stands at the podium of his lecture set at Word on Fire Studios. (Word on Fire Ministries)

“What are we talking about when we talk about ‘God’?” he asked during the interview. “There’s still people that think that God is basically a guy – an invisible guy that is just equal to all material reality. And that’s what the ancients talked about when they talked about ‘gods.’”

“Ultimately, the source of all reality is the transcendent God,” Pageau continued, adding that he hoped his artwork and speeches were “helping people see that again.”

The 2024 Wonder Conference, held this year in the Barron’s home Diocese of Winona-Rochester, is focused on the theme of “Nature and the Human Body.”

The conference ran from Aug. 2 to 4 and boasted speakers from a variety of backgrounds, including theoretical physicists, priests, scholars of gender studies, philosophers and computer scientists.

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“The human body is at the core of today’s most controversial topics, including evolution, artificial intelligence and gender ideology,” according to Wonder organizers. “It’s become more important than ever to become confident when talking with friends and family about these topics.”

In addition to the hundreds of Catholics attending the conference in-person, its lectures and keynotes were livestreamed for free online.

Pageau spoke at Wonder on Saturday in a lecture titled “The Body as a Symbol and the Symbol of the Body.”

The Orthodox liturgical artist has become popular through his YouTube series “The Symbolic World” – videos that examine patterns of meaning and symbolism in Scripture with lectures such as “Sacrifice: The Paradox of Salvation” and “Ritualized Behavior from Animals to Church.”

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Bishop Barron administers the sacrament of confirmation to a teenage parishioner while celebrating a Catholic Mass. (Word on Fire)

Barron said he originally met Pageau through mutual academic connections, including behavioral psychologist and lecturer Dr. Jordan Peterson.

Barron and Pageau, despite their denominational differences, preach a similarly complex and intricate conception of God rooted in the earliest theologians of Christianity – from a time when denominational distinction did not yet exist among believers.

It was Pageau’s methodology for explaining the Scriptures that ultimately convinced Barron to collaborate with the Orthodox speaker – a focus on early Christian leaders that Barron also picked up earlier in life after what he described as an unsatisfying catechesis.

“It was [Pageau’s] way of reading the Bible, which is very patristic, based on the Church fathers. And I grew up with a very rationalistic approach to the Scriptures that was kind of a spiritually dead end, actually. And I came upon the fathers eventually,” Barron told Fox News Digital.

He continued, “But when I heard Jonathan speaking about them, I thought, ‘That’s right. That’s the best way to open up the meaning of the Scriptures in a way that honors the Scriptures.’”

Jonathan Pageau and Bishop Robert Barron agreed that while they both would love to see the Orthodox and Catholic churches enter back into communion with one another, an authentic and sustainable reconciliation is unlikely to come in their lifetimes. (Word on Fire)

“The major difference, as far as I’m concerned, would be the papacy. That is the major point of demarcation,” Barron said of their divergent beliefs. “Now there is a theological dimension to it, to be sure, but it’s also a juridical issue.”

And while both would be thrilled to see the Catholic Church and Orthodox Communion reunite after nearly 1,000 years of schism, neither wants such a reunion to be rushed or haphazard.

“I’m sitting here with Bishop Barron and I love him very much, and I appreciate our discussion,” Pageau said. “But I honestly hope, at least in the short term, that [unification] doesn’t happen. And I know that sounds might sound mean at the outset, but I think that we […] have to be careful not to gloss over things.”

He continued, “Like if we are going to have reunification, it has to be a true unification that heals the things that make us different. If we just try to plow over it, and we try to impose it top down, or we try to just make it happen, for kind of political or… ideological reasons. I think that it will cause a lot of chaos down the line.”

A pre-recorded discussion between Barron and Pageau is soon to be published on the bishop’s YouTube channel, in which the two dive deeper into their shared approach to theology and Christian witness.