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Robert Barron | – Saints and Smartphones

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Robert Barron
By Bishop Robert Barron
46 Comments

Are you addicted to your phone? Surveys show 61% of people sleep with their phones and 75% grab their phones as soon as they wake up. In this episode of “The Word on Fire Show,” I reflect on this problem (including on my own smartphone use), offering guidance from some of the greatest saints and spiritual masters in the Catholic tradition.

A listener asks whether saints feel emotions in heaven, such as feeling sad when friends or family on earth struggle with sin.

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About The Author

Bishop Robert Barron These are brief and insightful commentaries on faith and culture by Catholic theologian and author Bishop Robert Barron. The videos complement his weekly sermons posted and podcasted at WordOnFire.org.

Comment (46)

  2. As always Phenomenal! Bishop Barron has helped me immensely and more than words could proclaim … I pray more of us sinners find this distinct avenue to the narrow path. Thank You Father, Thank You.

  4. Connect with reality is being a responsable person.Phones are created to keep us more and more separatedFROM OTHER'S lives and the ugly really bad thing is that we THINK THAT WE REALLY NEED THEM. THERE'S A MASTER PLAN TO KEEP US SEPARATED…..

  9. I am watching you now because you showed up in my Facebook feed. There is a lot of junk out there. Be selective about who/what you like and you can get valuable content. That being said, I'm guilty. Can't wait at a stoplight without the distraction. It used to be the car radio, but that is all junk these days.

  10. Regarding the Bishop's question on whether the speed at which we access content for the sake of learning now (i.e., Bible verses, etc.) is contributing to a lessening of the impact/lasting quality of what we are learning: I do think this can be the case. I say this as someone who studied Theology at a graduate level using the two mediums for research fairly interchangeably (i.e., picking the dusty books/periodicals from the library shelves, such as old commentaries on the gospel of Luke, or America magazines from the 1970s… then quickly whipping out my smart phone to research a quote from Von Balthasar, or a video from then Father Robert Barron!); I do think there is a qualitative difference in the capability for the information to sink in if you are doing it in a somewhat memorable way. A memorable way may be reading a particular work at a library you really enjoy, or while in adoration with our Lord, etc. These are my initial thoughts. Love the show, keep up the great work.

  11. It's not an addiction to the phone, it's an addiction to the visual and auditory information available via the internet, with the phone serving merely as the most convenient gateway. We are addicted to sensory information (ie information coming from outside ourselves), regardless of the medium through which we access that information.

  13. I bought an alarm clock a year ago to get rid of my addiction to the smartphone, and it kinda sorta worked for a while until it didn't. My alarm clock is currently unplugged and I'm back to the smartphone alarm. I'm SO glad you guys are finally talking more about smartphone addiction. It. Is. Vicious.

  19. At about 17 minutes in they discuss Augustine and what he’d think about smartphones. If anyone is interested, I recommend a book I just read called Plato at the Googleplex, a philosophical book that discusses what an ancient philosopher would think about the internet.

  28. "The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide. And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical."

    -G.K. Chesterton, "Heretics"

  29. Imo it seems better to check emails and social media on a computer, rather than on a smart phone. Because it can encourages you to set a certain amount of time to check all of that rather than throughout the day. It allows you to exercise self control.

  30. I don't know a ton about John of the Cross, but based on Bishop's commentary of the spirituality of the notion of smart phones, it really resonates with me. I'm a (technically) millennial but I'm also one of the few still living with a flip phone. I see everyone around me looking down, and I'm the only one looking up and out at the world. I have friends who when we get together will pull out their phone mid conversation…and I will wait until they finish to keep talking. I always ask, "Sorry am I boring you?" Because I don't want that conversation to feel interrupted by their addiction.

  31. For most of our history as human beings, once we met the basic needs of survival, our eyes were aimed upwards towards the heavens in response to religion in one form or another.

    Now, in our historically unusual primarily secular society, our eyes are instead turned downwards towards our cellphones.

  33. I miss fossiking around in big old libraries. But the smart phone is just the delivery system. The real addiction is social media. I don't think there is any going back from where we are as a society with this. So we have to think up productive and benign types of social media. One possible solution for Catholics? Spend the time you would spend messing with your phone, praying the Rosary or the Hours, or contemplating or reading Scripture–and not on your phone! P.S. My wife is 50 y/o but I still often wake up in the morning to see her asleep, clutching her phone.

  37. Hebrews 13:8  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Google, or smartphones, won't outlast eternity. Focus on the Hearts garden. Get pulling the weeds of sin up. "GOD"- cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees and flowers and grass—grow in silence. See the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta).

  39. Your Excellency, I think the church has to look towards revitalizing the RCIA programs in the church. Many people like the idea of coming to a Christian Church but the process of becoming initiated in the church is a very long and cumbersome process. For example, in a non denominational church, one has to profess that Christ is there Lord and Savior once in public and they are considered a member. In most Baptist churches you have to be baptized to be considered a member. Now I am not saying someone has to go to one mass and take the Eucharist to be confirmed but it’s very hard to evangelize others when we have to tell them it takes months or even years of formal teaching to become a Catholic. I am part of a small parish in Southern California and the RCIA process takes 9 months. In some parishes it’s as long as two years. And many parishes do RCIA differently, some do every rite for Catechumens and some are as simple as the Priest doing the confirmation rite.

  40. While holding my phone to use it as a phone and call my wife i often forget i have a little computer and ask her things over the call, or i even might forget where i put it while im talking on it and my leg cant feel it.

  42. I made a shift a while ago where I don't use my phone unless I have a specific purpose in mind before I reach for it. Often people will take it out and then explore it. That is a big no. That is the addiction. Same as opening up your fridge when you weren't even planning on making a meal.

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