Bishop Barron: Establishing 'order of priests,' building physical 'institutes' is next big goal

Bishop Robert Barron, a controversial cleric on both the secular left and right for his talks on ethics and evangelization, says the Catholic Church needs a new order of priests for a new, secular world.

And the bishop thinks his team can be the group to establish it.

"One of my dreams is to establish an order of priests," Barron told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. "Go back to the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits. They all responded to a need of their time — what they perceived to be this pressing spiritual need."

Barron, of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, 62, is the most widely-followed online Catholic cleric in the country, aside from Pope Francis himself.

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"We have mostly lay people. It's a mostly online presence, but we want to set this thing up institutionally and establish Word on Fire centers in all the major cities," Barron said. The centers "would be centers of evangelization, of instruction, of liturgy — that would then influence the wider culture."

While Barron's episcopal office concerns his parishes in Minnesota — where he is already widely known — his public influence stretches around the world via his books, videos, radio shows and documentaries with his Word on Fire ministries.

"Who would doubt — today, in our culture — that the pressing spiritual need is how to reach the unaffiliated?" Barron asked. "How to evangelize a secularized culture?"

The bishop continued, "So I would dream of an order of priests who would share my charism, which is, you know, teaching and preaching, using the media, engaging the culture."

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One reason for Word on Fire's success is its educational infrastructure.

The Word on Fire Institute touts itself as a "digital platform offering members specialized training, community discussions, live presentations, and more."

The institute offers courses, lessons, and guidance on Catholic apologetics and evangelization. It's run mostly by laity, but in cooperation with church prelates and the wider Catholic hierarchy.

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"I'm not going to be here forever," Barron told Fox News Digital. "I don't want this just to fade away with me. So that's what's next, I would say — the institute, the order, establishing ourselves all over the country.

Word on Fire CEO Fr. Steve Grunow, who runs the day-to-day operations and big-picture planning for the ministry, is wholeheartedly behind the idea.

Grunow explains, "It's the ‘institutionalization’ of the Word on Fire Institute. Because right now the institute is mostly an online phenomenon. But we want to create it as a physical campus, a physical place — so that is kind of next."

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Bishop Barron recently saw major success in his evangelization work after an interview with actor Shia LaBeouf, who converted to the Catholic Church while working on a biopic of St. Padre Pio.

"I had a gun on the table. I was outta here," Shia recalled in the nearly 90-minute interview. "I didn't want to be alive anymore when all this happened. Shame like I had never experienced before — the kind of shame that you forget how to breathe. You don't know where to go. You can't go outside and get like, a taco." 

"But I was also in this deep desire to hold on," he added.

LaBeouf described talking through his feelings and learning about the Christian understanding of sin and forgiveness as key to pulling him out of the darkest time in his life.