This interview is in preparation for our November live seminar at the Word on Fire Institute, “Catholic Social Teaching: The Church’s Evangelical Dynamite,” with our assistant director, Dr. Joshua Bitting. We offer these live seminars on a regular basis to engage with salient topics for evangelists in the culture. Sign up for a free trial to watch the seminar and bring your questions—the latter half of the seminar includes a live question and answer session!
NELL: Joshua, it’s a real treat that we get to watch you teach live! Your background is in theology, and you do a remarkable job running the day-to-day of the enormous Word on Fire Institute. Tell us a little about this seminar: “Catholic Social Teaching: The Church’s Evangelical Dynamite.” The title alone is very intriguing.
JOSHUA: Thank you, Nell! It is a joy to serve with an excellent team to support the work of evangelization in such a practical way at the Institute. As an added bonus, I am delighted to have the opportunity to teach this upcoming seminar, the topic of which I believe is of enormous evangelical significance. One might say that Catholic social teaching is having a “moment” with the election of Pope Leo XIV, the new challenges and opportunities presented by AI, and the seemingly intractable clash of political ideologies across the globe. The harmony and complementarity of faith and reason that Catholic thought contributes is sorely needed in our time of mass confusion and disorientation. As St. Paul the apostle put it, the Gospel is δύναμις (power), not merely an informative message but rather an energizing source of evangelical dynamite. Instead of sitting on this dynamite, we need to blow up the dynamite of the Church through our evangelical efforts, to show how it responds to the deep wound at the heart of every human person and at the heart of every culture.
NELL: As it’s a two-day seminar, your focus the first day is “Salt, Light, and Leaven: The Christian Vocation in the World.” The Christian vocation in the world is such a beautiful way to frame it. It’s easy to stay in our Catholic bubbles where we feel known and comfortable, but we are called to bring the lumen to the gentes (as Bishop Barron reminds us)—the light to the nations. How will you encourage this in your seminar?
Light is a course of illumination to guide us.
JOSHUA: The first day of the seminar will lay the groundwork by focusing on the call, the vocation, of each of the baptized to become a saint. As you suggested in your question, to be a Christian is to be called out of oneself and one’s own comfort zone and to be called into the great adventure of serving Jesus Christ in the midst of the seemingly ordinary rhythms of daily life. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus uses the images of salt, light, and leaven to speak of the vocation of the Christian in the world. None of these elements exist for their own sake; rather, they exist for the sake of something else. Leaven is added to dough to make a loaf of bread. Light is a course of illumination to guide us. And salt is a preservative for meat and other foods. To be a Christian, in other words, is to undergo the transformation of living for one’s own self to living for another—for Christ and, through Christ, for all of those for whom he gave his life, for everyone without exception.
NELL: An equally interesting title is given for our second day: “Poverty, Community, and Eucharistic Companionship: Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day.” These two Catholic figures are giants in the applied understanding of Catholic social teaching, though they’re sometimes taken out of context or misunderstood. How did their love of Jesus present in the Eucharist inform their love and service of the poor?
JOSHUA: Peter Maurin and Servant of God Dorothy Day cofounded the Catholic Worker Movement in the midst of the Great Depression. Maurin was a cradle Catholic—one of twenty-three children—raised in rural France. Dororthy Day converted to the Catholic Church after having experienced a profound conversion at the birth of her daughter, Tamar. Both Day and Maurin shared a deep love for Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist and in the poor. For them, as for many saints up and down the centuries, it was unthinkable to separate the Christ whom they receive bodily in the Eucharist from the Christ whom they encountered in the poor. It is precisely because of their great devotion to the Mass––both were daily communicants––that they were compelled to see Christ in each and every person they encountered. They stand as salutary reminders to us all of the truth that St. John Chrysostom expressed in the fourth century:
Do you want to honor Christ’s body? Then do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honor him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where he is cold and naked. For he who said: This is my body, and made it so by his words, also said: You saw me hungry and did not feed me, and inasmuch as you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did not do it for me. [Matt 25:34ff]
NELL: Is there anything in particular you hope our participants gain from attending this seminar?
JOSHUA: Above all, I hope that participants will be both encouraged and challenged. Encouraged to draw from the wisdom of the Church’s rich social doctrine and from the lives of these two modern exemplars, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. And challenged to recommit themselves to the adventure of Christian discipleship. My hope is that this seminar will inspire, equip, and empower lay evangelists in particular to proclaim and embody the call to holiness and evangelization—and by so doing, to “Christify” the culture, as Bishop Barron encourages us to do.