Dr. Matthew Petrusek: What unique evangelical power does the medium of film have? Word on Fire does a lot of videos, a lot of audio content. Of course, we stand behind all of that. It’s great, but there’s something distinctive about film. Bishop, you’ve recognized this from the very beginning. What is it? How can we define it in a succinct way?

Fr. Steve Grunow: The full evangelical power of filmmaking has yet to be unleashed because it’s the Church that has to do that. It’s the Church telling its story in an artistically vibrant way through cinema, which it’s been the missing player in. The story of our culture is really instantiated in film in so many ways, but the Church has been kind of outside of that artistic project, and probably outside of it for too long.

Until the Church really enters into that, you’re not going to see, I don’t think, the full evangelical power unleashed. The reference point should be the high architecture of the Middle Ages as manifested in the cathedral. It was coming out of a participation of the Church and the culture and the society together in a kind of harmony, but it was coming out of the Church.

We want to see that around us. We want to see a representative film. Well, we have to make those films. And you’ve got to make them with the cathedrals in mind. What is the highest expression? What is the highest expression of this particular artistic endeavor? How is Heaven in Stone and Glass meant to be represented, not just in stone and glass but in all the artistic endeavors of life? The Church was doing that for centuries, but not so much anymore. And the fact that we’re not doing that has caused an impoverishment of art and architecture that’s all around us.

Bishop Barron: I remember years ago, I was in Saint-Chapelle in Paris with a mentor of mine. He said, “Look at that magnificent Gothic expression there: the stained glass. There’s no finer stained glass really anywhere. These are the first movies because you’ve got colored pictures telling a story.”

And it really is true, that vivid, luminous, and colorful telling of a story. Well, we were doing that in the Middle Ages, and we’re an incarnational religion. We’re not an abstraction. We’re not a philosophy. It’s based upon these narratives from the Bible, especially dealing with Jesus, and stained glass windows portray that in a vivid, luminous, colorful way.

There was filmmaking for us. I mentioned backstage how much Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation meant to me as a kid. And no one’s better than Kenneth Clark in terms of narrative. But I said, “Boy, the advances in filmmaking since then.” Go back to the early ’70s when that came out and he showed these beautiful things. But boy, what we have now with the drone photography and all of the elaborate editorial devices, it’s so much richer what we’re able to do.