Bishop Robert Barron, the prominent US bishop, has been visiting the UK this week, making speeches to legislators, evangelists and business leaders, and celebrating Mass at Westminster Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.
On Saturday he is due to head up a one-day conference in central London on “Sharing the Church’s Story”.
Barron, the Bishop of Winona-Rochester in Minesotta and a former auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, is the founder of the Word on Fire Institute and a former rector of Mundelein Seminary in Chicago, his hometown.
With 600,000 Youtube subscribers and 3.1 million followers on Facebook, Barron is one of the most prominent voices of anglophone Catholicism on the internet.
His trip to the UK began with a talk in the Palace of Westminster on Monday 6 February on “What Christianity brings to the public conversation”, organised by Mike Kane MP, chair of the Catholic Legislators network.
Barron was also due to celebrate Mass for parliamentarians in St Mary’s Undercroft, one of the chapels attached to the Houses of Parliament.
Other events in his itinerary include lunch with Catholic evangelisation leaders and a visit to the cell of St Thomas More in the Tower of London.
Barron’s visit concludes with a special one-day conference at the QEII centre in central London, where he will give a keynote address to an audience of Catholic educators, evangelists and ordinary faithful and take part in a question and answer session with historian and broadcaster Tom Holland.
Speaking to The Tablet, Brenden Thompson of Catholic Voices, the group organising Barron’s visit to the UK, said he hoped the bishop would “teach us how to reach people who are searching for answers in a way that is fresh and compelling”.
As “a trailblazer in using new media as a means to evangelise”, Thompson said, “with reach beyond the usual Catholic audiences”, the organisers of the visit “hope that his example can show us that the the task of evangelising is not something for Catholics to fear”.
“Despite the challenges” he said “there are great opportunities to share the Church’s story.”
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