Washington D.C., Sep 1, 2021 / 18:00 pm
Bishop Robert Barron said on Tuesday that the Harvard University chaplains made a “complete and abject surrender” by electing an atheist as the president of their association.
“What does bother me,” Barron wrote in an Aug. 31 op-ed for the New York Post, “is the complete and abject surrender on the part of the presumably religious leaders at Harvard who chose this man.”
“If a professed atheist counts as a chaplain — which is to say, a leader of religious services in a chapel — then ‘religion’ has quite obviously come to mean nothing at all,” he continued. Barron is the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire Catholic media.
Last week the New York Times announced that Greg Epstein, an atheist and humanist chaplain at Harvard University, was unanimously elected as the “chief chaplain” of the Harvard Chaplains, the association of more than 40 chaplains serving Harvard students of various religious denominations.