Being created in the image of God — Imago Dei — is a mission, an adventure and a command that each Catholic is called to carry out into the world. It’s also something people of faith need to rediscover living in today’s secularized culture, said Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, in the opening keynote address at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia Sept. 21. Standing before a crowd of thousands at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia and dressed in a traditional bishop’s cassock and zucchetto, Bishop Barron joked that he hasn’t become used to his new bishop clothes and his zucchetto keeps feeling like it’s going to fall off. The bishop was ordained Sept. 8. In his opening keynote address, which was simultaneously translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese and American Sign Language, Bishop Barron explored how each person is made in the image and likeness of God. It is through Adam, the first priest, prophet and king, that all of God’s children find their purpose as Imago Dei, the bishop said. As priest, Adam adored God. As prophet, he cultivated humanity and creation. As king, he took the Gospel message out to the world. All men and women are called to follow Adam’s example as priests, prophets and kings. "We’re made in the image of God — it means we’ve got a mission,” Bishop Barron said. That mission is to praise God, teach about him and “Edenize” the world. The Old Testament shows how the Imago Dei is compromised along the way. “Instead of worshiping God we worship all other kinds of things,” he said. “What always goes wrong with Israel is bad praise, running after false Gods. We’re the new Israel. The same rubric applies to us.” People lose their priestly identity by worshipping things other than God. They lose their prophetic identity when they make up their own ideas about what is true and right and they stop being good kings when they privatize religion and keep it to themselves. “Right praise” of the Lord — praise that is ordered completely and freely on him — is always the solution to the search for satisfaction. “If things are going wrong then the wrong things are being praised. To get it right, recover right praise,” Bishop Barron told the crowd. False gods like wealth or pleasure cannot satisfy the longing of the heart. “It’s only God that can satisfy the deepest longing of the heart,” he said. “We need to teach our culture how to worship aright.” To fulfill the mission of prophets, the faithful we must embrace freedom in God’s laws instead of what the current society says. Today’s world embraces a type of gnosticism and says “my will determines what is truth, which is a lie,” Bishop Barron said. “That’s inimical to the Bible.” Rather, only by embracing God’s laws and understanding them will people be truly free to live in his image and likeness and be happy. “It’s the shaping of desire so as to make the achieving of good first possible and then effortless,” Bishop Barron said. The bishop likened this to learning the game of golf. People who truly love the game and want to be good at it must follow the rules of the game and the rules of how to swing. They can’t just pick up any club and swing away expecting to be successful without instruction. In the same way God’s laws help us to be free as human beings. The church has the truth of what makes true freedom possible but people who say, “Who are you to tell me what to do?” have cowed Catholics into a “prophetic silence,” Bishop Barron said. “Friends, if we stop speaking it won’t be heard,” he told the crowd. This truth is rooted in the Catholic Church’s “extravagant demand” on her people to be saints. But that demand is coupled with an extravagant mercy. When following God’s laws, moral demand and mercy should be stressed equally. It’s not one or the other. “Moral demand, all the way. Extravagant mercy, all the way,” Bishop Barron said. To embrace Imago Dei, people must also fulfill their role askings, willing to go on campaign — like a military effort without the aggression or violence — to bring the Lord to the world. “Authentic Christianity is a faith on the march,” Bishop Barron said. Christ promises success if the church follows its mission. That promise came in Matthew 16:18 when Jesus told Peter that he would build the church through him and “the gates of hell will not prevail against you.” In Jesus’ time walls and gates protected cities from armies and intruders. Christ was telling the Apostles that by following him, people campaigning for the Lord would be able to break through Hell’s gates. “We’re the ones on the march. Hell has something to fear from us,” Bishop Barron said, adding a word of caution. “It’s not going to happen if we allow our religion to be privatized.” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council would be disappointed if they knew that today 75 percent of Catholics wouldn’t be attending Mass, he said. When they wrote about the call of the laity and the universal call to holiness they were seeking great Catholic laity to go forth into the world and sanctify it. “We to a large extent have lost our sense of mission to sanctify the world,” Bishop Barron said. Bringing it back to the World Meeting of Families, the bishop said that the family, as the basic cell of civil society, has a huge role to play in rediscovering that mission of Imago Dei. “The family is the place where the Imago Dei is burnished, where the Imago Dei is brought to life,” he said. Families that pray together, bless their kids when they go to bed at night and cultivate virtues and forgiveness in their children are learning right praise and teaching their children to go out into the world and teach that to the world. He called on the crowd to take up the mission of Imago Dei. “Do it confidently as teaching right praise,” he said. “Do it confidently as kings, people on mission, people on the march.”