Bishop Robert Barron's online videos have drawn over 84 million views
Nicknamed the bishop of the Internet, Robert Barron has produced more than 1,000 online video commentaries with over 84 million views, reviewing films, books and music through a Catholic lens. His 10-part documentary Catholicism, shot in 16 countries, began airing on American public television in 2011.
Born in Chicago on November 19, 1959, into a family of Irish descent, Barron grew up in Detroit and then suburban Western Springs; his father was a national sales manager for a food distributor. He started reading Thomas Aquinas as a freshman at a Dominican high school and graduated from Benet Academy in 1977. After a year at Notre Dame he moved to Mundelein Seminary, then earned philosophy degrees at the Catholic University of America, writing his master's thesis on the political thought of Karl Marx.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin ordained him for the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 24, 1986. After three years as an associate pastor he went to Paris, earning a doctorate in 1992 with a dissertation reading Aquinas alongside the theologian Paul Tillich. He is fluent in French, Spanish, German and Latin, and supports Hans Urs von Balthasar's position that there are solid grounds to hope everyone may be saved.
From 1992 to 2015 he taught systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, serving as its president-rector for the last three years. In 2000 he founded Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, a non-profit whose programmes have aired on EWTN, WGN America and YouTube. Pope Francis made him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles in 2015, and in 2022 the ninth bishop of Winona–Rochester in southern Minnesota.
His reach extends well beyond religious outlets: he comments for NBC and Fox News, and national television syndicated his 2016 series Catholicism: The Pivotal Players. A sequel to the original documentary appeared in September 2013, and his website archives more than 500 homilies.
Source: Robert Barron
