Dick Kiernan rents a room in his New Hampshire home to a man from his church. In his account of Catholic men’s ministry in Uganda, that ordinary arrangement becomes a way to support missionary leaders thousands of miles away.

“With $800 a month, I can hire five Pauls in Uganda by renting a room in my house,” Kiernan said.

Paul is a Ugandan ministry leader Kiernan first met through an Alpha connection in 2007. Their relationship became part of a wider effort to develop Men of St. Joseph International across Uganda and into neighboring countries.

For Kiernan, the work begins with men taking responsibility for their own spiritual lives and families. From there, it reaches into parishes, dioceses and the wider world.

“We start in our own lives. We start in our own families. We start in our own parish,” he said. “But then the global mission comes. So there’s an order to it.”

Addressing Catholic men’s ministry leaders, Kiernan described a mission built around finding local leaders, supporting their work and forming them to develop other missionary disciples. He said Men of St. Joseph International had reached 26 countries, with its stated mission extending to every diocese and every parish in the world.

“The harvest is great. Send workers into the field,” he said.

A call to protect and serve

Kiernan described his ministry background as 36 years of full-time work, including 13 years in the Diocese of Manchester’s office of spiritual renewal and 15 years with Alpha New England. He joined the Men of St. Joseph global team after its 2024 gathering in Rome.

The work remains personal. Kiernan said he has five adult children and is praying for two to return to the faith. Another had recently returned.

His account of the movement’s beginnings reached back to men’s retreats in New Hampshire in the 1980s and the launch of Men of St. Joseph in 1994. Years of retreats, Cursillo and charismatic renewal had already brought men together. In 1994, he said, the ministry reached 30 parishes in one year.

New England bishops subsequently asked whether it could spread across the region.

Kiernan credited the Promise Keepers’ approach to ambassador teams and church teams with helping Catholic leaders organize their work. The underlying call, he said, was for men to give themselves in service.

“We’re all called to give up our lives to care for others,” he said.

He pointed to his longtime collaborator Don, a retired firefighter, and to police officers and priests as examples of men whose work involves protecting or serving others.

“Like St. Joseph, husband, father, worker, protector of the family, protector of the church, we’re called to be missionary disciples,” Kiernan said. “Those are how we appeal to men.”

From one parish to a province

In Uganda, Kiernan said, growth has come through introductions, parish gatherings and relationships with clergy.

He described meeting a priest named Father Joseph at a retreat center near Kampala. The priest invited him to Jinja, where Kiernan met men from the parish, including Matthias, a leader in his diocese’s men’s association.

Matthias became a provincial leader, helping bring Men of St. Joseph into his own diocese and then into others.

On a return visit in 2026, Kiernan said, a gathering drew 70 leaders representing 22 of the diocese’s 44 parishes. The following day brought another meeting with 25 men.

“We go to places. We talk to the men. We talk to their priests. We talk to bishops, and we tell them what we’re doing,” he said.

Kiernan said a bishop he identified as Bishop Francis had become an episcopal advocate in Uganda, introducing the ministry to fellow bishops and giving the team an office in his home diocese.

“Everywhere we go, we are seeking to be in union with the local bishop,” Kiernan said. “We have chaplains in all of our Men of St. Joseph groups.”

At the time of the presentation, he said the effort had reached about 13 of Uganda’s 19 dioceses. The team hoped to reach all 19 by the end of that year.

The scale of some gatherings left him overwhelmed. He described visiting a parish with more than 800 Men of St. Joseph members and attending an occasion that brought together five bishops and about 4,000 people from the diocese.

“I’m thinking of Peter when he had a big catch of fish,” Kiernan said. “Go away from me, Lord. I’m a sinful man. My life is never going to be the same with these opportunities that we have.”

Pray for them, fund them, form them

Behind the visits is what Kiernan called the “home team”: people who support particular leaders through prayer, funding and formation.

“We adopt leaders. We pray for them. We fund them. And we form them so that they can be effective leaders,” he said.

Some supporters have family or professional connections overseas. Others develop a relationship with a missionary or support a provincial leader through their parish men’s group.

Kiernan described an initial sponsorship of $150 a month, divided into a $100 stipend, $35 for ministry expenses and $15 for administration. During questions, he said provincial leaders’ support could reach about $300 to $325 a month to include travel, training and administration. He reported that the team was funding six leaders for a combined $1,750 a month.

His own contribution included the income from renting a room. He used Paul’s reported government salary of $120 a month to illustrate the purchasing power of American support.

The emphasis, Kiernan said, is on investing in people who can form other people.

“We are putting all of our funds into forming these leaders so that men can become missionary disciples,” he said.

He estimated that the African work had reached about 26,000 people, including conference attendees. He described conferences as a beginning, with regular involvement and transformed lives as the goal.

Seventy-two hours for a transformed life

Kiernan summarized the Men of St. Joseph formation model as 72 hours a year: a monthly parish gathering, an annual conference and an annual retreat.

“The Men of St. Joseph is about the transformation of men to be husbands, fathers, workers, protectors of the family, protectors of the church, missionary disciples,” he said. “This is our vision.”

He drew on Teresa of Avila’s spiritual framework to describe a progression: deliverance from mortal sin, a transformed life through abiding in the Lord, and a well-ordered life in which every area becomes fruitful.

“This is very much a spiritual mission,” Kiernan said. “We’re equipping men to become spiritual leaders that can multiply missionary disciples.”

Existing men’s associations can become partners in that work. Kiernan said the team seeks opportunities to collaborate with Catholic groups while bringing its particular emphasis on spiritual formation and discipleship.

He also argued that American parish and diocesan leaders already possess experience they can share overseas: organizing introductory meetings, speaking with clergy, conducting conferences and retreats, and developing leadership teams.

“If you can do all those things, then you’re qualified to mentor someone or to go and help start them,” he said.

Forming the leaders themselves takes sustained work. Kiernan pointed to biblical studies, Church history, Vatican II and subsequent Church documents, discipleship and leadership skills as subjects under consideration for their training.

“It took Jesus three years to form his leaders,” he said. “So it’s going to take us time.”

Local men leading their own mission

Asked about working across cultures, Kiernan began with listening.

“You have to talk to them. You have to find out what their lives are like,” he said. “You have to listen to them and find out what their culture history is.”

His goal is for local men to take responsibility for the work. He described teams covering outreach, prayer and formation, communications and events, Church relationships and funding.

“My goal is that all of these guys would take up all those positions and that I would work myself out of a job,” Kiernan said.

“Everywhere we go, we’re seeking to have local leaders take over their mission.”

He said the wider vision includes continental teams that can sustain their own work. Funding remains a constraint, but developing leaders who can form other leaders is an even greater one.

“Our leaders, forming them and their leaders being formed, those are other key limiting factors,” he said.

“Lord, here I am, use me”

Kiernan’s invitation to the audience began with prayer and the relationships already present in their lives.

“Pray, ‘Lord, here I am, use me,’” he said. “The starting point is pray. Consider the global connections you have.”

He described possible introductions through men from other countries, missionary priests and clergy serving in American dioceses. Those relationships, he said, can lead to local people prepared to build the ministry.

Other ways to participate include funding a leader, joining the quarterly news distribution, arranging conversations with parish leaders or exploring a missionary trip. A group could also develop a relationship with a province or country.

Kiernan said another global gathering in Rome was planned for November 2027, offering a chance to meet leaders from different countries.

“The mission field is open,” he said. “It’s available for the Lord’s guidance.”

The opportunities carry a personal cost. Near the close, Kiernan returned to the sense that the work had changed the course of his life.

“All these opportunities scares me to death,” he said.

His response was to invite more men into the work: to pray, to support a leader and to help another man become capable of carrying the mission himself.

This talk is one of many from the Heroic Men: Future of Catholic Men 2026 Convocation. Get the replays and the PDF ebook free, here.

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John Chick put a question to Catholic men gathered for the Heroic Men 2026 convocation: A father may be willing to die for his son. But what is he willing to do every day?

“How many will live righteously for his son?” Chick asked. “And that’s the heroic man. That’s the heroic journey.”

Drawing on his years in football, his upbringing in Wyoming and his work in prison ministry, Chick described a familiar gap between the inspiration men receive at a conference and the habits they return to at home.

“We’re here fired up for a few days, but then I got to go home to my own devices,” he said.

Alongside John Mark Grodi, Chick outlined an approach to Catholic men’s formation built around four words: prayer, virtue, vocation and brotherhood. Their presentation connected spiritual growth with physical discipline, service and the accountability of men who expect each other to show up.

“You’re the hero of your story through Christ,” Chick said. “And you’re also the first one that’s going to let yourself down.”

A father’s faith beyond the church walls

Chick said his earliest memories of the Holy Spirit were tied to his father’s works of mercy.

Growing up in a devout Wyoming family, he accompanied his father to a soup kitchen, a nursing home and a jail. When someone needed help on a ranch, his father volunteered.

“Those were the encounters of the Holy Spirit that I remembered that impacted me beyond the church walls,” Chick said.

That faith also brought a sense of community. Wherever he competed in Wyoming, he said, someone who knew his father through the faith would be there in support.

Leaving home for Utah State University brought a question that followed him into adulthood. He pointed to the communal life described in Acts 2:42 and asked where Catholics experienced it during the rest of the week.

“Where is that between Sundays?” he asked. “I struggled to find that for most of my life.”

Football provided a form of brotherhood. His Catholic upbringing kept him going to church on Sundays, where his future wife, who had been raised Mormon, accompanied him while exploring the faith herself.

“She was already a better Catholic than I was,” Chick said.

As she went through RCIA, he began learning more about Catholic apologetics. He listened to Catholic radio during long drives and encountered teammates returning from missions with a strong commitment to their faith.

An injury season in 2008 brought another opportunity. Chick said he fell in love with Jeff Cavins’ Bible Timeline study. He and his wife began hosting it in their home for teammates as his career took them to different teams.

“Come here and let’s go over the Scripture together,” he recalled telling them.

Coming to know Christ through prayer

Grodi described a different path toward the same questions about faith and daily life.

His father, Marcus Grodi, had been a Presbyterian pastor. John Mark recalled his father being asked at a hospital whether a dying man would go to heaven, then recognizing that ministers from different churches might give different answers.

The question of teaching authority eventually led his father into the Catholic Church and into ministry supporting other pastors exploring that journey.

John Mark grew up around converts, hearing his father’s story and attending conferences with him. As a teenager, however, he began wrestling with what it meant to put his faith in Christ.

He studied philosophy and theology to address his intellectual questions. But he described a decisive experience in simpler terms.

“It was simply being with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and listening to him that I rediscovered what I had always hoped and believed was there,” Grodi said.

“Faith is a response to God reaching out to us, and we can come to know him.”

That understanding changed how he approached prayer.

“We expose ourselves to God. We listen to him, and we come to know him and be known by him,” he said.

Grodi described prayer as a journey that requires time, commitment and a place on a man’s calendar. Vocal prayer remains part of that life, he said, while men are also called to listen and come to know God intimately.

“As you go through life, exposing yourself to God, listening to him, you change,” he said.

When a men’s group keeps repeating the same struggles

Years later, after marrying and having children, Grodi was attending a men’s group that met regularly and read books together.

One morning, a member observed that they came every week and said the same things. They had failed to pray as they intended. They had given their wives too little time. They had spent too much time on their phones.

“We say the same old things,” Grodi recalled.

The conversation stayed with him. He began studying the virtues through the catechism, St. Thomas Aquinas and Josef Pieper, seeking to understand the habits the men wanted to break and those they wanted to build.

He described the Church’s teaching as “a coherent spiritual psychology helping us understand who we are through the cardinal and theological virtues.”

“Deeper than that, the Church calls us to build these virtues, these habits of your soul,” he said.

For Grodi, the four pillars of their work fit together around that interior transformation.

“Prayer is our relationship with God. Vocation is our relationship with the people that God has given to us and called us to minister to,” he said. “But that middle point of virtue, that’s who we are becoming in the process.”

Ordinary actions carry both an outward act and an inward motive, he said. Eating breakfast, exercising, working or kissing one’s wife all raise a question about why a man is acting.

“Is it because this is the right thing at the right time?” Grodi asked. “Is it out of love?”

Chick called the alternative “autopilot.”

Bringing urgency to the heroic life

Chick said men readily respond to images of heroism. Rocky and Braveheart can get them fired up. The harder task is acting on that desire.

“That is more than knowing the thing but acting on the thing,” he said.

Football had given him a structure that made preparation urgent. Whether a player practiced hard or failed to prepare, a game was coming.

“It was urgent, so you took care of it,” he said.

Chick described applying that sense of urgency to spiritual formation and physical training through the process of becoming an Iron Saint.

“Virtue combats vice. Vice weakens all men. We all got vices,” he said. “How do we make it urgent?”

The purpose, he said, is to help men answer the responsibilities God has already given them.

At the time of the presentation, Chick described himself as director of prison ministry for the Diocese of St. Augustine in Florida. He said the practice of undertaking monthly missions had led him into that work.

When he invited men into prison ministry, he heard competing explanations. Younger men were working and raising children. Older men were retired, tired or dealing with physical pain.

“The heart of what we do here is so that we can show up to the call God has given us,” Chick said.

‘There’s no neutral territory’

Grodi said their approach challenges men to bring every part of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

“There’s no neutral territory in your life,” he said. “There’s no neutral time. There’s no neutral money. There’s no neutral decisions.”

That includes eating, drinking, phone use and care for the body, he said. He connected physical stewardship with a man’s ability to give himself to God and to others.

“When you pray, you pray with your body,” Grodi said. “When you embrace your wife or play with your kids, you do it with your body.”

“Caring for our body is part of how we do justice to God and the people around us.”

Chick connected that teaching with Romans 12:1 and the call to offer one’s body as a living sacrifice. He described exercise dedicated to another person’s needs as a form of active prayer.

“How we define active prayer is inspired action dedicated to intentions greater than self,” he said.

Prayer intentions are central to the brotherhoods they lead, Chick said. Training serves the stewardship of body, mind and spirit.

“My commitment as a brother coming in here is to steward what God has given me,” he said.

Progress, presence and men who show up

Chick described three training tracks: one for men with more experience or gym access, another using equipment such as bands, dumbbells and kettlebells, and a third requiring equipment-free movement.

The coaching principles emphasize incremental progress and participation.

“One percent better every day,” Chick said. “Progress over perfection.”

“Presence over performance,” Grodi added.

Chick recalled a priest who joined because he wanted to become faithful to moving his body. Seven months later, the priest was still sending photographs and reporting weight loss of 55 to 60 pounds, Chick said.

The priest had developed his own workouts. What mattered to Chick was the continued commitment, supported by the brotherhood.

“Having the brotherhood to help him stay obedient to what he wanted for himself allowed him to show up,” Chick said.

He also described a man in Ontario who initially rated his fitness at zero or below. Four months later, Chick said, the man was sending photographs and updates as he worked toward small daily improvements.

“Those are the stories that make my day,” Chick said.

A weekly rhythm of prayer and accountability

The speakers described a fraternity that combines prayer, formation, physical training and shared goals.

Grodi said men have three weekly meeting options and commit to attending one. Meetings include prayer, a formation segment and a “lightning round” covering the past week’s major win and loss, followed by a resolution for the coming week.

“What’s your main resolution that God’s calling you to this week?” he asked. “The main task or habit or change that God’s calling you to make.”

Members share long, medium, and short-term goals, update them monthly and use an accountability channel to ask brothers to follow up on specific commitments.

Chick described a training week with build days, sustained exercise, mobility and preparation. A sustained session might include a rosary walk. Friday brings shared prayers, petitions and penance alongside a physical challenge.

The program also includes a live workout by Zoom. What each man undertakes, Chick said, depends on his starting point.

Grodi described the aim as “training the body and training the spirit together,” with men supporting one another in bearing fruit in their vocations.

Chick encouraged participants to bring three or four men with them. He said a nearby brother provides a particular kind of accountability: someone who expects a man to arrive, and whose own commitment depends on that meeting.

He knows that dependence himself. Men arriving at his home to train give him a reason to get up early.

“Have I wanted to stop? Yes,” he said.

Giving from what a man has received

Chick returned to the responsibilities of husbands and fathers through a teaching he draws from Father Larry Richards: “I am third.”

He described that as an order of priorities: first fruits to God, then to his wife and children, while also caring for the gifts he needs to serve them.

“I have to give fruits to myself,” Chick said. “And that’s through spiritual and physical discipline that allow me to show up as a better husband, father, brother, son, friend and neighbor.”

Grodi brought the presentation back to grace, action and the support men owe one another.

“God’s grace, taking flesh in our free cooperation with that grace,” he said.

“We have to be men of deep prayer, but also men committed to action and supporting each other in action.”

The fraternity’s work, Chick said, includes helping each man develop a personal rule of life and providing brothers who help him remain accountable to it.

“Men grow in collision with other men,” Grodi said, “in challenge and accountability and encouragement.”

This talk is one of many from the Heroic Men: Future of Catholic Men 2026 Convocation. Get the replays and the PDF ebook free, here.

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On “We Leave No Man Behind,” Mann describes the impact he almost missed, the uncertainty facing faithful men and a call to pray daily, connect weekly and invite monthly.

Chris Mann enjoyed the Monday night Bible study he helped run. He looked forward to thinking about Scripture, talking about it and seeing the men who came through the door.

Then one of those men prepared to leave the state, and Mann learned how much those evenings had meant.

Ryan, a young man in his early 20s, was trying to figure out what came next in life.

He knew he wanted faith to be part of it. Before moving, he sat down with Mann for conversations that revealed something Mann had barely understood while it was happening: The group had given Ryan support, confidence and a sense of being grounded.

“I was always happy to see him. We had good conversations. I knew he was digging in, but I had no idea it meant as much as it did,” Mann said.

Speaking with host Dominic on Heroic Men’s “We Leave No Man Behind,” Mann returned to that experience as he described the work of ministry, the uncertainty he sees among men and his own experience of trying to manage life alone.

“What I thought I was doing was good, but the Holy Spirit was doing so much more,” he said.

An evening that reached beyond Monday

For Mann, the Bible study was something he enjoyed doing each week. For Ryan, it became a point of stability.

“That Monday night became sort of a foundational moment in his week,” Mann said. “Whereas for me it was an evening, for him it kind of seemed to have an impact beyond that.”

The Scripture mattered. So did the community around it.

Ryan was spending time with other men who took their faith seriously and chose to make room for it. Mann described the significance of seeing peers make that commitment, particularly for a man who feels alone in his workplace or social circle.

“Some of it was to be able to have other people who, yeah, this does matter,” Mann said. “I’m giving up my Monday night to come here on purpose. This is an important thing.”

Mann had seen good conversations and participation. Ryan’s departure gave him a glimpse of how far their impact extended.

“The Lord’s always doing things that we never see,” he said. “And every once in a while we get that beautiful little glimpse.”

Good men asking where they fit

Asked about the condition of men in his community, Mann pointed to uncertainty alongside the concerns that receive broader public attention, including loneliness and addiction.

“I think what I see is a lot of uncertainty,” he said.

He described men who feel pushed down, unsure how to act or where they belong. Some want to provide. Others want to make a positive impact. In his view, the messages they encounter can leave them asking how to contribute.

Mann acknowledged that cultural conversations have brought legitimate problems into view. His concern was the absence of a clear way forward for men who want to respond constructively.

“I think there’s a lot of good guys out there who want to do well, who want to live out their masculinity, who want to exist in the world and don’t quite know where or how,” he said.

Those questions can arise in conversations within ministry. Sometimes, he said, a man becomes aware that something in his life needs attention through a conversation, a podcast or what he understands as the Holy Spirit working on his heart.

When faith becomes a cycle

Mann said he also sees faithful men caught in a pattern of obligations: Mass on Sunday, work on Monday, taking the children where they need to go. Even attending a men’s group can become another point in that repeating schedule.

“It becomes this cycle that they go through that sort of becomes what feels right,” he said.

The challenge, in his account, is helping men look beyond those recurring responsibilities toward a sense of mission.

“Listen, there’s a level of mission and call here,” he said.

Mann described that call as larger than bringing home a paycheck or maintaining a few points of contact with faith. Through his own ministry and conversations with men around the country through Heroic Men, he said he sees men responding.

“Men are being stirred up,” he said. “That’s, I think, undeniable.”

His approach begins with helping men reconnect with meaning and purpose.

“Your life is about something,” Mann said. “There is a purpose here. There’s a mission here.”

For him, that means helping a man see more in his faith than the obligation to be a good person or obey the commandments. He encouraged men to engage with the life God has given them.

“Get plugged in, catch some wind in your sails, and see what happens,” he said.

“A pretty terrible lone wolf”

Mann’s concern about isolation came from experience.

“I was a pretty terrible lone wolf,” he said.

From the outside, he appeared to be getting things done and meeting the expectations the world placed before him. His experience inside those accomplishments was different.

“I was checking off a lot of the boxes the world would look at, but it was miserable,” he said.

Mann described himself as an introvert who can be comfortable alone. Still, carrying everything by himself became isolating. He remembered wondering whether anyone else saw the things he saw or thought the things he thought.

“I can’t be the only one who thinks this,” he said. “I can’t be the only one who sees this.”

That growing dissatisfaction helped bring him toward action. Asked whether the pandemic prompted the change, he placed his own earlier experiences in his mid-20s. He also recalled conversations during the pandemic in which other men began looking toward a new horizon.

“This can’t be it,” Mann said.

Offering what he has

Asked how he sees himself differently today, Mann answered with one word: “Surrendered.”

He described a familiar pressure in himself and other men: the belief that he has to be the one who gets everything done. Taking action matters, he said, but an effort built entirely around personal initiative carries its own limits.

“I should be taking action, and that action should be offering myself in service of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, wherever God is calling me,” Mann said.

Earlier, he said, he was more driven by particular results. He wanted to make sure things happened and worried about whether he had said something the right way.

His approach now centers on being present, listening and offering what he has.

“I’m here. I’m going to be present. I’m going to listen. I’m going to offer what I’ve got,” he said.

The possibility of getting the words wrong remains. Mann said he has come to understand that the work reaches beyond his ability to deliver everything perfectly.

“The Holy Spirit doesn’t need me to be perfect,” he said.

That sense of surrender, he said, is one of the defining differences between the man he is now and the man he was five or 10 years earlier.

Prayer as roots, brotherhood as strength

The conversation closed with the Heroic Pledge: pray daily, connect weekly and invite monthly.

Dominic described it as a way to build an identity of prayer, brotherhood and personal outreach. A heroic man, in that working definition, takes the first step.

Mann compared the pledge to a tree, beginning with prayer as its foundation.

“Talk to God daily. That’s your foundation. That’s where you’re drawing in nutrients,” he said. “That’s your core.”

He emphasized that prayer does coexist with loneliness and challenges. The starting point, he said, is surrendering one’s life to God.

Brotherhood then brings strength, resilience and help discerning a path forward. Mann pointed to people whose accomplishments involved teams, companies or movements.

“There’s always more to it than that one person,” he said. “That brotherhood really strengthens you.”

Outreach extends the commitment beyond the support a man receives for himself. Mann emphasized a face-to-face relationship and the importance of looking outward.

“At some point you’ve got to break beyond that,” he said. “You’ve got to get a bigger horizon.”

For Mann, the outreach component helps orient a man toward that breakthrough. His own Monday night experience showed how much can happen when a man makes himself available, even before he understands the effect.

“A hero is a man who strengthens others.”

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"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." — Joshua 1:9

God said this to a man, Joshua, who was staring down the barrel of an impossible job.

Moses, the greatest leader of the Israelites since Abraham, was gone.

And now Joshua was in charge.

Talk about a leadership challenge.

This might sound like a deep breathe and lean in moment, or maybe a fake-it-till-you-make-it one. But it’s not either.

The source of strength isn’t Joshua himself, nor is he supposed to get by on spit and a prayer.

God always gives everything needed to follow his commands. In this case, he commands strength and courage first, then hands over the reason it's possible: I will be with you. Joshua isn’t supposed to save himself or figure it out. God has that power, and God is with Joshua.

That feels nowhere near heroic, which is good news for us, because we rarely do.

How many times have you received an invitation to something, and immediately thought “Nope. No way. Can’t do it.”

Maybe that invitation will show up from your family tonight. Maybe it’s the idea of a pledge to pray for men who might need you.

You don't need the fear gone before you step up, in big or little ways. You just need eyes on Christ. If he wants you to carry out the task, he’ll provide what you need.

And also; this is also not a call to be taken up alone.

Joshua had elders around him. They were men who remembered God's faithfulness, and could remind him of it. That's what brotherhood does: other men holding the promise steady when your grip on it slips.

This is why brotherhood is part of our heroic pledge, to build up and strengthen the prayer support we send others. God is with us, often working through the presence of others. There are places in life we just can’t get to alone.

It is easy to underestimate the power of prayer. Most of us are running around on a 2% battery, and it shows. We’re tired, irritable, short with people, hard on ourselves.

Prayer is recharging. A small daily prayer builds you back up. Prayer brings down fresh air from heaven into your soul, so that you can take a full breath, and stand straight.

And you can help do that for others, when they are too weak to do it themselves.

The heroic pledge is an act of heroism, because you’re stepping up for yourself, and for others, before anyone asked you. And then you’re holding your ground.

So, take the ground in front of you today. One step. That’s it. Don’t cover a million miles. Just one. God already said He'd be there waiting.

Be strong. Be courageous.

You are not alone in this.

“…the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

Start by picking three names, and pray for them.

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A trucker stood in the entrance of a Catholic church, looking through the glass doors toward the crucifix. When Adam Janke greeted him, the man apologized and offered to leave.

“Glad you’re here. What’s your name?” Janke recalled asking.

“My name is Tom. I’m going to hell.”

Janke put down the boxes he was carrying and asked what had happened. The conversation that followed, he said, brought the man and his wife into the Catholic Church and gave them a community to turn to when she was diagnosed with cancer about a year later.

Speaking with hosts Tom Hornacek and Dean Patterson on “Men Answering the Heroic Call,” Janke, introduced as chief operating officer of St. Paul Street Evangelization, described an approach to reaching men that begins with a greeting, a meal and a willingness to hear what another man is carrying.

“Men want to be respected, valued, wanted and loved,” he said.

Visit St Paul Street Evangelization

‘You do belong here’

Janke was working as a parish director of religious education when he encountered Tom in the church entrance. The trucker told him he traveled for a living and had felt a need for God.

He had gone into a Catholic church, sat down and looked at Jesus on the cross, trying to figure out how to speak to God. According to the account Janke recalled, a woman working there saw his tattoos and questioned whether he belonged.

Tom took that encounter as confirmation of what he already believed about himself. He had committed crimes and done things he regretted, he told Janke.

In his travels afterward, he sometimes slipped into the back of Catholic churches, hoping to be as close to Jesus as he could before he died and went to hell.

Janke offered him a different response.

“Brother, you do belong here. You’re meant to be here,” he recalled telling him. “God put you here today. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk more.”

The two got to know each other. Tom and his wife entered the parish’s Christian initiation program and eventually joined the Church, Janke said.

When his wife received her cancer diagnosis, they had a Christian community around them.

Janke returned to the moment in the hallway. He could have kept walking with his boxes. Instead, he stopped.

“That conversation might have never happened, and who knows where he would be today,” he said.

A return to the faith, and a place to belong

Janke’s own path began with baptism in the Catholic Church. He grew up Lutheran after his mother married his adoptive father, then became Baptist in high school.

“Thanks be to God that I fell in love with Jesus at that point,” he said. “Fell in love with the Bible, with my faith, and really began to learn what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus in a world that is broken.”

Catholic friends later invited him to explore their faith. He and his wife spent about three years doing so, drawn toward its spirituality and the sacraments.

“We could receive the Eucharist. We could receive forgiveness in the sacrament of confession. We could receive anointing of the sick,” he said.

Understanding their marriage as sacramental also deepened his sense of responsibility as a husband and father. The couple became Catholic in 2005, he said, and he continued in ministry as a Catholic layman.

The hosts recalled that food and the presence of other teenagers had helped draw him into a high school Bible study. Janke said being known helped him stay.

“Other teenagers know me and I know them. I want to be in this Bible study. I want to go to this church.”

That sense of belonging mattered when he entered Catholic parish life, too. He wanted to be valued for what he could contribute while remaining open to the healing he needed.

He described the welcome in a simple phrase: “Oh, good. Adam’s here.”

Taking the parish mission into everyday life

Janke said St. Paul Street Evangelization was founded in 2012 to help Catholics participate in evangelization through their everyday encounters.

He described a parish’s missionary responsibility as extending to everyone within its boundaries. Reaching those people requires lay Catholics to participate, he said.

“Can Father reach everybody on his own? No way. He needs us as Catholic men to be part of that journey.”

The organization’s street teams establish a public presence where people can approach, talk, receive prayer and begin a friendship. Janke described the purpose as building “that bridge of trust to the local church.”

He said that experience also helps participants speak about faith with their families and the people they encounter elsewhere.

After one workshop, a young man named Armando told Janke he felt called to serve homeless men in Florida. Janke responded enthusiastically, but Armando pressed the point.

“You don’t get it, Adam. I have a burning in my bones that I need to start doing this ministry,” Janke recalled him saying.

Janke also shared a personal example: His wife baptized her father on his deathbed. He connected that moment to growing bolder in evangelization.

From six men to 90, one lunch at a time

Asked how to reach men who have become disengaged from the Church, Janke pointed to ordinary invitations.

“We’ve got a lot of stress on our shoulders,” he said. “We’re trying to take care of our families. We’re trying to be there for our kids. We’re trying to figure out how to live this life.”

His approach is to offer a specific time and a meal.

“Let’s go grab lunch. It’s on me. You got time next week, Tuesday?”

Small talk can open the conversation. Then comes a more direct question: “Now, what’s really going on in life?”

Janke said a friend named Jeff began inviting men from his office to lunch, paying the bill and listening. He then invited them to his Wednesday men’s group.

“I watched his men’s group grow from like six guys to 90 men,” Janke said.

He described the invitation as “free from pressure,” a way to draw men into study and prayer together, where the Gospel could be proclaimed.

“They feel confident and comfortable now that they feel actually part of this group,” he said, describing how those relationships helped men give their lives to Jesus more deeply and return to the Church’s sacramental life.

Earning the right to be heard

Listening comes before the invitation, Janke said.

“We need to earn that right to be heard by listening to what’s going on in their mind, to hearing their story first, to hearing their concerns, and then we can minister in that place.”

He recalled a friend who worked as a diocesan evangelization director. One day, after Mass, the man sat in a pew with his arms crossed. His life had fallen apart, Janke said, and he was struggling.

An older man approached and asked, “Excuse me, young man. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” the friend answered.

The older man challenged that response and asked what was really happening. The friend asked whether he truly wanted to hear it.

“That’s why I asked.”

The encounter gave the friend someone to speak with, Janke said, because another man had been willing to approach him and listen.

“That’s where we feel like other guys know us and we know other guys. And so I want to be here now.”

An invitation can receive a refusal

Janke also urged men to accept that people will sometimes decline an invitation. He described much of evangelization as planting seeds.

A declined lunch, beer or conversation can receive a simple answer: “All right. God bless you.”

When a man is interested but has a scheduling obstacle, Janke suggested finding another time: “Let’s put our schedules together.”

He said men can also respond to a direct challenge. Recalling a conversation with a Catholic who said he lacked time to return, Janke asked whether he worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the man said no, Janke offered to meet him for confession.

“Guys need a challenge. Men need a challenge,” he said.

Prayer, friendship and the next invitation

The hosts asked about men who hesitate because they feel they lack the knowledge to evangelize. Janke pointed to the Samaritan woman, who encountered Jesus and then went to tell others about him.

Drawing on his own experience, he said, “99% of the time it’s listening, responding to a person in that moment,” offering prayer, meeting for coffee and introducing someone to God’s love.

He encouraged men to ask God for boldness and a willingness to let the Holy Spirit work through them.

“God, set up the divine appointment for me,” he said.

The episode also covered the organization’s medals, prayer cards, online courses and parish workshops as resources for that work.

Patterson connected the conversation to the Heroic Pledge, describing its goal of one million men participating by 2033. He outlined a daily commitment to pray for three men, a weekly effort to meet a man and offer brotherhood, and a monthly invitation for another man to take the pledge.

“Offer to be a brother to him,” Patterson said. “Listen to him. Talk to him.”

Janke’s account of the trucker returned to the same starting point: a man saw someone standing at the entrance of his church and took time to say hello.

“It was all the Holy Spirit,” Janke said.

Men Answering the Heroic Call brings Tom Hornacek, Dean Patterson and their guests together for candid conversations about faith, family and the battles men face every day. Through personal stories and practical Catholic wisdom, this Heroic Men series calls men to deepen their relationship with Jesus, build real brotherhood and become the men God created them to be.

Watch on YouTube · Listen on Spotify

From Thor’s surrender to St. Joseph’s example, Danielle Rose’s prayer and his father’s lessons, Rob explores faith under pressure, raising sons who take responsibility, and getting through life one brick at a time. He also shares how fitness, fellowship and faith with F3 sharpen his own example, and how a heart-to-heart with another man turns shared pain into brotherhood.

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Rob Kaczmark had prayed for another child.

When his wife told him she was pregnant the morning after a friend prayed with him, he saw a reason to celebrate.

The anticipated birth would fall around the anniversary of his sister’s death. After losing someone he loved, he thought the family would welcome new life.

Then came the first ultrasound. The technician left to get the doctor. The heartbeat he had expected to hear was absent.

“It felt like a cruel joke,” Kaczmark said.

Speaking with host Dominic on Heroic Stories, the Spirit Juice founder described grief, frustration with God and the work of continuing to trust while questions remain unanswered. The conversation moved from a Marvel movie to family loss, prayer, fatherhood and the example men can offer one another.

“I think surrender has been a theme I’ve had for a long time,” he said.

When strength means surrender

Asked for a story of heroism that inspires him, Kaczmark chose a scene from “Thor: Ragnarok.”

He described a powerful character being stripped of the things he had relied upon, then turning to his father for strength. For Kaczmark, the scene connected with his own experience of trying to push through hardship.

“I have to fully surrender to God and give it all to him,” he said.

He also pointed to Thor’s decision to save his people while allowing their physical home to be destroyed. Kaczmark connected that sacrifice to a man’s responsibility for his family, wherever the family lives.

The appeal, he said, was seeing a hero face losses and respond to them.

“Living for Christ, living that gospel message out, is really lived out in those hard times,” he said.

For men leading a family or a business, those decisions can arrive from several directions at once. Faith supplies a moral compass, he said, while the daily work still has to be done.

“You’re always putting God first in that,” he said. “But you’re realizing you have to also put the reps in to get through to the other side.”

Showing up for his sister

Kaczmark said he likes certainty. His calendar is scheduled, and he likes knowing what comes next.

His sister’s cancer diagnosis confronted him with circumstances he could neither organize nor fully understand. The family received information in pieces while trying to navigate her illness.

He began asking what having every answer would change about his responsibility to her.

“What I’m supposed to do is be there for her, show up, call her, talk to her, do whatever I can,” he said.

He said his sister died in May 2024. Looking back at her illness, he described the desire for information as connected to a desire for control.

“I think we find freedom in being obedient to serving those around us,” he said.

A prayer, a pregnancy and a loss

Kaczmark said he and his wife already had two boys and hoped for another child. While attending a conference at the University of Notre Dame, he met Catholic musician and speaker Danielle Rose after a holy hour near the grotto.

She asked what she could pray for. He told her about their hope for another baby.

“We’re going to pray right now,” he recalled her saying.

The next morning, his wife told him she was pregnant.

“Okay, God, thank you. This is amazing,” he recalled thinking.

The couple had experienced a miscarriage before their first child, and his wife was nervous about the ultrasound. Kaczmark had felt confident. They had already shared the pregnancy news with family.

When the appointment brought another loss, he struggled to reconcile what had happened with the prayer and the hope surrounding the pregnancy.

“It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense,” he said.

He described the experience as a source of frustration he was still working through. He also said anger can exist within a relationship, including a relationship with God.

“It’s okay to be mad at people that you have a relationship with,” he said. “It’s a matter of what you do with that anger.”

One brick at a time

For overwhelming days, Kaczmark returned to advice from his mother: take the next hour as it comes.

He illustrated it with a family story. His uncle, tired after a late night playing in a band, arrived at a manual labor job to find an enormous quantity of bricks that needed moving.

The work looked impossible when considered all at once. The way through it was to move one brick, then the next.

“The only way it’s going to get done is one brick at a time,” Kaczmark said.

He applies that approach when his own schedule feels overwhelming, bringing his attention back to the person or task immediately in front of him.

“Be fully present in where you’re at,” he said.

Discovering a faith he could turn to

Kaczmark said his mother made faith central to family life. His father became Catholic when Kaczmark was baptized.

As a child, he experienced Sunday Mass and religious education largely as obligations. In middle school, a prayer helped him understand his relationship with God differently.

“God’s here to help me?” he recalled thinking. “It was this epiphany.”

He began praying daily and added the Serenity Prayer. He said both prayers remained sources of strength.

A high school pilgrimage to Medjugorje deepened that experience. He recalled days of praying the rosary and walking up Apparition Hill, away from the technology that ordinarily occupied his attention.

“This God stuff is real,” he recalled thinking.

He compared remembering those experiences during difficult periods to remembering the early days of a relationship with a spouse. Earlier experiences of closeness can remain sources of strength when the relationship becomes harder.

Christ at the top, his children close

The conversation also turned to Kaczmark’s tattoos. He described religious images covering much of his body, including Jesus, Mary, saints and Old Testament imagery.

His favorite is an image of Christ on the top of his head.

“It’s a reminder to put Christ at the top,” he said.

Another carries his boys’ names in their own handwriting. They wrote the names, and the tattoo artist reproduced them.

The tattoos became a starting point for discussing a parent’s love and the way caring for children helped him understand God’s love.

Kaczmark recalled moving his son out of the path of a large cart. His son saw the push and questioned it; his father had seen the danger approaching.

“As much as we love our kids and our spouse, it’s still imperfect love,” he said. “But God loves us perfectly.”

Preparing sons to take responsibility

Asked about his heroes, Kaczmark named his father and St. Joseph.

He said becoming a father helped him understand aspects of his own upbringing that had been difficult to appreciate as a boy. He now thinks about preparing his sons for circumstances they will encounter years ahead.

One lesson concerns their response when something goes wrong.

He described children losing at sports and placing blame on a referee or another player. He tries to bring his boys’ attention back to what they can do themselves.

“The only thing you have control over is your reaction to what’s going on,” he said.

He connected that lesson to ownership and leadership, drawing on an idea he had heard from businessman Gary Vaynerchuk about treating everything as one’s responsibility. He acknowledged that an example involving a driver being hit by someone running a red light could take the idea too far.

The practice he valued was examining his own response rather than concentrating on blame.

“You have to take full ownership of all of this,” he said.

Learning from other men

Kaczmark said he also learns by watching other men live out their responsibilities.

He described attending F3 workouts at 5:15 a.m., built around fitness, fellowship and faith. The early start initially seemed beyond him, but he said the experience brought him into regular contact with men who served their families and communities.

“Seeing how they talk, seeing how they model their lives, and it’s constantly serving other people,” he said.

The value extended beyond exercise. Being around those men gave him examples he could carry into his own life.

“I learn a lot through osmosis, being around other people that are doing it better than I am,” he said. “I get better because of that.”

Being there for a man in pain

At the end of the interview, Dominic asked whom Kaczmark wanted to serve beyond God and his own family.

“I would like to be here for other men that are going through a hard time,” he said.

He recalled speaking with a man from his workout group whose father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Kaczmark’s experience with his sister gave them something painful they could discuss together.

The man was physically strong, someone Kaczmark described as a tough guy. The conversation still mattered.

“Dude, thank you,” Kaczmark recalled him saying.

For Kaczmark, that encounter connected his own suffering to the service he hoped to offer.

“The suffering and pain unites us all, and it allows us to reconnect with other people,” he said.

Some stories I can’t shake. Like these three, from the morning of 9/11, and the world is falling apart:

• Butch Huntley, a Maine roofer, watched the towers fall on television, hopped on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and drove over 500 miles from Lubec, Maine, straight to New York City to help.

• Erick Robertson drove for 48 hours straight to reach Ground Zero with his rescue dog to help out.

• Jason Thomas and Dave Karnes, former U.S. Marines, drove to the site and played a crucial role in finding and rescuing trapped police officers.

There are more. Here’s what awes me. No one asked them to do anything.

They just showed up.

These men are heroes.

If we list off the men we know on one hand, I guarantee some of them feel like they can’t breathe, they can’t get out from under the crush and pressure of their lives.

So I decided to add a daily notification to my phone.

Every night at 9 p.m. my phone pings. It’s a little Google reminder with a list of names on it. I stop, and I pray for those guys.

That’s the first line of the Heroic Pledge. Pray daily, and lift up three men by name.

Thirty seconds. “Lord Jesus, I offer to you these men and their families. Strengthen them, heal them, help them as they need. Lord, not as I will, but as you will… [list the names.]”

Most days I remember. Some days I forget. It’s ok. We keep going.

You see, I didn’t get into it only for them.

That’s why this Pledge is a particularly heroic habit.

It’s not a 30 day challenge. It’s a habit. It’s a heroic habit. No matter what. I’ve pledged to have their back and pray for them.

Think about the monks. A Carthusian gets up in the middle of the night and prays for a world that will never know his name, never thank him, never text him back. Nobody would say he’s ‘failing’ because the world didn’t reply.

Those 3 heroes on 9/11, and others like them, didn’t drive down because they wanted laurels and accolades. They saw a need, and went to work.

Someone patting your back was never the point.

I’m not a monk. I’m not a marine. I have a phone that pings at 9 p.m.

It was never about what I could get from them.

It’s about the kind of man I want to be. If you haven’t taken the pledge yet, check it out.

Start by picking three names, and pray for them.

About the Pledge

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Most people start a conversation saying, “How are you?”

For some time now, my response has been simple: “I am blessed.” But, in recent days, that answer has taken on an even deeper meaning.

Within a matter of hours, I discovered wood rot in a recently purchased trailer.

Then my daughter accidentally locked her keys inside the car, resulting in a $100 service call.

Shortly afterward, while backing up the trailer so my wife and daughter could go camping, my wife turned too sharply and smashed the rear window of our truck.

It would have been easy to focus on the inconvenience, frustration, and expense. But the following day, while attending Mass, I began to reflect on the many blessings God has poured into my life.

• I have been married to the same beautiful woman for almost 42 years.

• Together, we have been blessed with eight wonderful children and 17 grandchildren whom we love dearly.

• We have a comfortable home and two vehicles in the driveway.

• I have work that allows me to do what I love: introduce men to our Lord Jesus Christ and help them grow in faith.

When I look back over my life, I realize how many extraordinary opportunities God has given me.

• I had the privilege of meeting Mother Angelica and appearing on her program on EWTN.

• I brought a rugby team to Italy and experienced that beautiful country.

• I travelled across Canada with my family in 2000 and through the United States in 2010.

• For our 30th wedding anniversary, I travelled to the Holy Land with Jeff Cavins.

These are only a few of the many adventures and graces I have received.

I have also met countless remarkable people along the way—some well known, others known only to those closest to them, but all gifts from God. Most recently, I completed our annual motorcycle ride. It was our longest ride in time, and it gave us the opportunity to enjoy one another’s company while witnessing the beauty of God’s creation.

I am surrounded by brothers who stand beside me as we organize men’s conferences, serve the Church, and support one another through life’s difficulties. Their friendship and prayers are blessings I never want to take for granted.

During my years as a police officer, I witnessed much darkness and encountered some of the evils of this world. Yet God continually helped me remain focused on His goodness, mercy, and gifts.

A few years ago, my son played the lead in White Christmas. One of the songs reminded us that, when we are worried and cannot sleep, we can count our blessings instead of sheep. That advice contains a profound spiritual truth.

Saying “I am blessed” when things are not going well does not mean ignoring life’s challenges. It means choosing to remember that God’s goodness is greater than any temporary difficulty.

So, the next time someone asks how you are doing, pause for a moment. Count your blessings—and remember to give thanks to God.

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At the 2025 Heroic Men conference (amongst the plethora of things taken away by this once-treading-water Catholic man) was an aside by Father Deacon Andrew Bennett.

He challenged the audience to not live solely as “Catholic Lite”.

For whatever reason this one sentence and what it meant really stuck with me. What does this really mean? What are the costs for doing this? Is my faith not merely something to be held onto privately?

Perhaps the most perverse of the questions I put to myself, what if the profession of my faith offends someone?

I have been blessed with a great career, under a dynamic employer who has provided me the tools and training I require to perform my duties in a manner defensible and transferable to a worldwide stage.

I have no complaints with them, save the recognition that I discovered about my Catholic Lite-fused reflection; I have been serving two masters.

Contrary to the warning of our Lord that “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth”, Matthew 6:24, that is exactly what I had been doing.

I’d been beating that “go along to get along” drum, and adhering to the “religious neutrality” policy (that seemingly only applied to Christians), to ensure that my “Catholicism did not offend” the sensibilities of those around me.

While my motivation in my employ is far from chasing wealth, I can definitely point out the pursuits of two other worldly desires in the form of honour and power that produced this mindset in me.

In chasing these desires what did I do? I put my lamp under a bushel making sure that I did not offend.

I conformed to the behaviours and practices of my secular, and at times militantly atheist peers, opting to enjoy wide acceptance and a smooth day to day existence rather than stand firm in the truth.

While at the time, and on the surface now, that may have seemed prudent, there was indeed a cost. In exchange for shallow and transactional friendships, I no doubt made myself lukewarm to the Lord.

As I continued to unwind things further, I found that this mindset seeped into my homelife.

Church did not have the primacy it had in my youth under my parent’s roof. Catholicism was simply now one thing amongst many that formed our family identity, and sadly not the most important.

Attendance at mass was dependant on the demands of the social itinerary with friends with whom the topic of faith, was at best, a bit of colour during conversations about hockey and vacations.

When protests against the church arose, an accountable defense were the furthest things from my mind as I opted to shrug my shoulders indifference or join in on the pile on to maintain social status and the perceptions of others.

The Spirit led me to make a conscious decision to unapologetically drop the “lite” and embrace my faith.

In the workplace I used the blunt instrument “protections” of other faiths and ideologies to unapologetically demand my space as a Catholic and be afforded the same respect doled out to others.

Has there been a cost? Undoubtedly. I don’t get the same volume of visitors to my office and have others jump back like a vampire touched by sunlight when they see Chesterton’s biography of Saint Thomas Aquinas prominently on my desk.

Invitations to the social gatherings have also slowed, and typically include ribbing when I do get them. That said the benefits have immeasurably outweighed the costs as promised by our Lord.

My family life is the most faith-centered and thriving it has ever been, with my wife “patching over” from a Protestant denomination.

Having seekers and atheists approach me to query about the faith and Holy Catholic church has been more fulfilling than any promotion or award could ever be.

While my journey back to being on fire for the Lord and his church started a couple years before my attendance at that 2025 mens conference, (with due credit to a tattoo artist Anglican priest shaking my fetters off the Holy Spirit within me as he plied his trade), I do lament the time with the Lord that I lost.

I can’t be worried anymore about the meaningless things of this world.

It’s not worth practicing ‘Catholic Lite’ if it means missing opportunities to live in gratitude for God’s clear blessings in my life.

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Hey brothers, every Wednesday, we work to send you a short, inspiring post (we’re trying to get better all the time).

Are you interested in a particular topic for men? Drop a comment here. The most upvoted comments get our attention!

In 2033, the world will mark the 2,000th anniversary of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Two thousand years since the stone was rolled away. Two thousand years since death was defeated. The question is not whether Christ still reigns.

Spoiler Alert: He does; Christ is King.

The question is whether Catholic men will finally begin living like we believe it.

When I pray about what I want the Church and our country to look like in 2033, I don’t picture perfection. I picture restoration.

I picture churches full again. Men joining the priesthood. Men leading their families in prayer instead of passively sitting on the sidelines. Fathers who know their children’s hearts. Husbands who love their wives sacrificially. Communities where men are no longer isolated, addicted, angry, or hopeless, but united in brotherhood and purpose.

Most importantly, I picture Catholic men rediscovering authentic leadership.

Not worldly leadership built on ego, status, or power. Christ-centered leadership built on sacrifice, humility, courage, and service.

Recently, I attended a law enforcement leadership training course that challenged me deeply, not just professionally, but spiritually.

As a detective, leadership matters. Men watch how you carry stress, conflict, tragedy, and responsibility. But the more I sat in that class, the more I realized the same truth applies everywhere else too; in our homes, parishes, ministries, and friendships.

The crisis facing our culture is not simply political or social. It is spiritual. Too many men have forgotten who they are and Whose they are.

That is why my ministry to men, Tehachapi’s COR Men, has become seriously important to me and a cornerstone of my weekly routine.

What began as a simple idea at Saint Malachy Catholic Church in Tehachapi, California, has turned into something powerful. Every Tuesday night, men from all walks of life gather together. Some are lifelong Catholics. Some have been away from the Church for years. Some aren’t even Catholic at all. But many are carrying wounds, addictions, anxiety, broken marriages, or loneliness. Yet week after week, men keep showing up.

Not because we have all the answers, but because men are starving for brotherhood, truth, and purpose.

We pray together. We challenge one another. We laugh, eat, worship, serve, and have honest conversations most men have avoided their entire lives. And slowly, you can see walls coming down. Men are returning to the sacraments. Husbands are becoming more intentional. Fathers are becoming more present. Friendships are being forged. Christ is moving.

That is the renewal I pray to see by 2033.

But it will not happen accidentally.

If we want restoration, Catholic men must stop waiting for someone else to lead. We must become the leaders our families, parishes, and communities desperately need. We must mentor younger men.

We must reclaim prayer, Scripture, the sacraments, and authentic masculinity. We must stop settling for comfort and start pursuing holiness.

The rebuilding starts now.

Not in Rome.

Not in Washington D.C.

Not somewhere far away.

It starts in our homes. Our parishes. Around fire pits and cups of coffee with friends, dinner tables with our family, adoration chapels, and men’s groups on ordinary Tuesday nights.

Christ already won the victory.

Now it is time for Catholic men to live like it.

Dylan Johnson, Grand Knight, Council #7821
Founder, Tehachapi’s COR Men
Saint Malachy Catholic Church
Tehachapi, California

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Why Is It So Hard for Men to Say Yes?

Why is it that we men often focus so much on the cost or inconvenience of committing to serve others or the Church?

At Heroic Men, so many ministries to men all accept that it is just a given that men are hard to get engaged. I see it all the time, and I bet you do too. Your church needs new finance committee members or other volunteers, or you want a few guys to help an older woman update her house.

I am no different. I often think first of how it’s going to take away from my time and eat into my leisure. I often think, “I am not the right one. They need to get another guy more qualified.”

That mindset almost cost me a new level of friendship with God and new insights about Him and about me.

I said “yes” to serve in a ministry despite my brain screaming, “Don’t do it!”

One big insight: They probably could have gotten someone else more qualified, but by just showing up, God is actually the one doing His work through us. In my case, He worked through me even though I wasn’t fully on board.

“I Don’t Feel Called to That”

Seventeen years ago, I was approached by one of the founding leaders of the Twin Cities Residents Encountering Christ (REC) prison ministry. I knew her well. She was in my parish. I knew very little about the prison ministry.

But, being a guy, I turned her down almost before she had finished her invitation.

“I don’t feel called to that.”

I didn’t even give it a minute to discern. And that was that.

But she approached me again and asked me to pray. I declined again.

She approached again. Then again.

I was so annoyed that if I knew she was in the church, I ran the other way. After all, what did a little, judgmental guy from the suburbs of Milwaukee have in common with any of these guys locked in maximum-security prison?

She Finally Wore Me Down

After two years of declining, she asked me again.

She wore me down.

I decided to agree to serve in the next weekend retreat. But I had a plan.

I can’t believe I am saying yes to this, but once the retreat ends, I can tell her that I tried, but I am just not what God has in mind for me.

It was the only way I could get her off my back.

The REC retreats are a two-day encounter with Christ that starts well before the actual events. I endured all the prayer and preparation knowing this was my one, and only, retreat.

The two-day weekend event happens inside the prison and follows a carefully and prayerfully executed process to help inmates die to self, then rise to new life in Christ. It is a powerful, life-changing weekend for many of the men.

Then I Walked Into Stillwater Prison

Retreat weekend came.

I was assigned as a table leader to six inmates, four of whom were serving at least one life sentence.

I put on my best face, but I was equal parts annoyed, intimidated, and terrified to be there. Stillwater Prison could easily be where the movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed.

Getting seated and meeting each other, I felt surprise and a little confusion.

The kindness the inmates showed each other and to me was almost over the top. I felt totally respected.

Two hours into the retreat, at our first break, one of the inmates asked, since my eyesight was an issue, could he get me some coffee?

When I thought I could do it, he said he would come with me this time since the pots didn’t always cooperate and he didn’t want me to spill everywhere.

These Were Beloved Sons of God

I learned quickly that these guys were just that—beloved sons of God—and they were pouring out their hearts and efforts to get everything they could to build their friendship with Jesus.

They instantly accepted us, trusted us, and they were desperate for brotherhood.

That weekend shook me to the core.

Given the two years I avoided the call to serve, now I felt unworthy. God was showing me how much He loved them—and me too.

I felt ashamed, and I worked like crazy to hide how overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit I was.

I went into the retreat only looking at the cost and the other things I could be doing with my time. I realized quickly that God gave me a front-row seat to His plan of love and mercy to some of the most despised people on the planet.

Fifteen Years Later, They’re Still My Brothers

Fast forward 15 years. Several of these inmates continue to be some of the best Christian brothers I have met.

That includes that guy who offered to get me coffee on my first retreat.

When we aren’t on retreat, our ministry goes into the prisons twice a month, and we spend 90 minutes in praise, prayer, Bible study, and testimonies. We often bring a video series in and teach and lead small groups to keep them engaged.

I am loving the ministry and can’t see myself not involved.

We get regulars and new guys who hopefully return. Their relationship to God and each other endures despite the reality that these guys are in cells for most of the day, for years, and are lonely and afraid.

They live in conditions and with other violent inmates challenged by mental health issues and hate in their hearts. Despite all this, the REC men have built a brotherhood and are rising above the terrible stuff that goes on as normal every day.

God somehow allowed me to be part of this.

RECOMMENDED READING

FEATURE

You Aren’t Being Recruited to Work in a Prison

Why am I telling you this?

You aren’t being recruited to work in the prisons.

But our world has need for men like you to say “yes” to reaching men who have created a prison of their own making.

The men’s crisis of isolation and loneliness has them bound.

Lonely and alone is not how God created us to live. It’s not healthy. Studies show the impact of this crisis is hard on our physical and mental health. It increases premature death by 30%, increases dementia by 40%, and affects the body in other ways to the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

So What Are Men Doing With Their Time?

Sports viewing and gambling are up dramatically, as is video gaming.

But the greatest addiction of all is now to pornography. It is estimated that 70% of church-attending men regularly engage it, and it’s even higher outside the Church.

What is worse, less than three in 10 Catholic men attend Mass weekly. That certainly means they aren’t leading their families and handing down the faith.

These isolated men live in convenience, but I believe they hunger for a more purposeful life.

They are like lost sheep that need a shepherd to bring them back to the flock.

Just like inmates, God isn’t giving up on them even though they are addicted, wasting time on screens, and worse.

These men need a brother like you to say “yes” and invite them back.

Your “Yes” Can Start With the Heroic Pledge

We’ll make it easy with the Heroic Pledge: Be one in a million by 2033 who prays daily, then once a week invites a man to meet, and then invites a man to also take the Pledge once a month.

Men, resist the temptation to blow this off as an interruption.

Many of you are already doing these things, and the Pledge won’t add more.

Instead of cost to you, think of the investment and your obedience to Christ’s call to build His Church.

Agree to take the Pledge, and I trust you will experience, as I did, that God is moving and He will do the work.

We only need to say “yes” to the invitation.

Take the Pledge by going to Heroicmen.org. Open the red Pledge banner on the top of the home page and complete the form.

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Alan Webb once held the American record in the mile.

For years, speed gave him something measurable. There was a clock. A finish line. A result. Put in the work, suffer through the training, and eventually the numbers told you whether you had succeeded.

Fatherhood gave him a harder test.

Webb, a Catholic convert, track coach and father of five with a sixth child on the way, says raising a family forced him to reconsider what masculinity means when there is no stopwatch telling you whether you are getting it right.

“Being a father with women around most of the time in our house, I think it’s actually enhanced my masculinity,” Webb said during an episode of Heroic Stories. “Because it challenges you to really understand your role.”

For Webb, that role begins with leadership.

And leadership, he argues, becomes meaningless unless a man knows where he is trying to take people.

“What Does It Mean to Be a Man?”

Webb lives in a household filled with daughters. Four of his five children are girls.

Host Dominic de Souza asked the obvious question: How does a highly competitive male athlete stay connected to his masculinity in a house dominated by women?

Webb’s answer went in the opposite direction.

Fatherhood had made the question more serious.

“One of my jobs is to be the protector and leader of the family,” Webb said. “So that role has caused me to ask that question. Well, what does it mean to be a man?”

His daughters, Webb said, are watching.

They are watching how he practices his faith. They are watching how he goes to Mass. They are watching how he speaks. And perhaps most importantly, they are watching how he treats their mother.

That creates a frighteningly practical standard for fatherhood.

If his daughters marry someday, Webb said, he wants them to marry good men who treat them with respect.

But where will they learn what such a man looks like?

“They’re looking at you,” Webb said. “They are looking at you, and they’re going to imitate you.”

That realization changes masculinity from an identity a man claims into a life his children observe.

The inheritance he hopes to leave them is faith.

“I want to give all of my faith to my children, to my family,” he said. “That’s what I want them to inherit from me.”

A Man Has to Know Where He Is Going

Asked directly to define masculinity, Webb returned to leadership.

“A real man can lead,” he said.

But a leader can possess enormous influence and still lead people toward destruction. Effectiveness alone cannot make leadership good.

“Maximilian Kolbe was a great leader because he led people to the greatest place, which was heaven,” Webb said.

That distinction sits at the center of Webb’s definition of manhood.

“True manhood, true masculinity is knowing who you’re leading,” he said, “setting the destination, and then doing the things that you have to do to get there.”

Leadership, under that definition, has little to do with dominance.

It carries responsibility.

The Loss That Deepened His Faith

The conversation took a heavier turn when Webb was asked about one of the hardest experiences of his life.

His wife, Julia, suffered a miscarriage.

“I would say that’s probably the most difficult thing that I’ve had to endure,” Webb said.

The loss remains painful. “It’s still tough,” he said.

Webb described mourning his child while also becoming more conscious of what he believes about the value of human life.

“I was so grateful to have my own children that are alive,” he said.

The experience could have produced resentment toward God.

For Webb, it did something else.

“I actually thought it increased my faith,” he said.

He struggled to describe the experience in ordinary language. There was no easy explanation for the loss, he said, but there was a sense of God remaining present within it.

“I could feel the Holy Spirit talking to me,” Webb said, describing it as a “mystical sense.”

The experience also exposed the limits of control.

That can be especially uncomfortable for men accustomed to measuring effort against outcomes.

The host raised his own experience of miscarriage and described the instinct to internalize the loss as failure, as though a husband should have somehow created enough safety to prevent it.

The question became larger: What happens when a man does everything he can and the outcome remains beyond his control?

For Webb, faith provided the destination even when he could no longer control the course.

The Mile Eventually Stops Mattering

Webb knows something about achievement.

His high school mile record survived for 25 years. He once held the American record in the event.

Yet discussing those accomplishments now, Webb offered an unexpectedly dismissive verdict.

“Who cares?”

The comment was less an attack on athletic excellence than a reordering of its importance.

Webb spent years worrying about how fast he could run.

Eventually, he began asking what any of it meant beside the ultimate goal of his life.

“Are you going to sacrifice what should be your long-term goal, your ultimate goal of being with God in heaven forever?” he asked.

The training still mattered.

The discipline still mattered.

The achievement still mattered.

But none deserved to become the destination.

That lesson now shapes his work as a coach.

Sports Can Train the Soul

Webb sees athletics as a laboratory for virtue.

Training teaches discipline. Competition teaches accountability. Athletes learn that habits produce consequences.

“If you have the discipline and put in the work, then you get a result,” Webb said.

The danger comes when those lessons remain trapped inside sports.

“I think sometimes the separation there between what you’re doing in sports and then your spirit, what you’re doing in your spiritual life, if you lose that connection, that’s where things go wrong,” he said.

Webb said he experienced that separation himself.

Today he wants athletes to ask the next question.

“Now what?”

You learned discipline on the track.

Now where else does it belong?

“Let’s apply it to our spiritual life, too,” Webb said.

For a former elite runner, the imagery comes naturally.

There is a destination. There is training. There are sacrifices.

There are people running beside you.

And eventually, every accomplishment has to answer the question of where it was taking you.

The Conversion That Happened Slowly

Webb entered the Catholic Church nearly a decade ago.

His conversion was gradual.

He had been baptized Protestant and attended Mass with Julia, who had been raised Catholic. Over time, he said, questions accumulated.

So did regrets.

“I would get these little moments where I’d look back and be like, ‘Oh, well, that wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have done that,’” Webb said.

Eventually, the evidence reached what he called a tipping point. “I don’t know everything, but I’ve heard enough,” he remembered thinking.

The Eucharist and confession became central. “You can’t argue with the truth,” Webb said.

His athletic instincts surfaced again. There was a direction. “I want to go up towards God,” he said. “So let’s go towards God.”

The People a Man Leads

“Apart from God or your family, who are you here for?” de Souza asked.

Webb chose his athletes.

He coaches men and women, and he sees the position as larger than producing faster runners.

“I’m definitely here to encourage and nurture the faith of the athletes on my team,” Webb said.

He holds authority as their coach, but he said the influence travels both directions.

“It’s reciprocal,” Webb said.

He tries to encourage their faith, and their faith strengthens his.

For a man whose life once revolved around crossing finish lines faster than almost anyone else in the country, the goal has grown considerably larger.

Fatherhood, marriage, miscarriage, conversion and coaching have all pushed Webb toward the same conclusion.

A man is leading somebody.

His children are watching.

His athletes are watching.

His wife experiences the consequences of his choices.

So the question becomes less about whether a man sees himself as strong.

It becomes much harder: Where are the people following him going to end up?

Catholic men are living in the middle of a spiritual battle, Dr. Dan Schneider says, and one of their greatest vulnerabilities is failing to recognize that a battle is taking place at all.

Schneider, an adjunct professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Gulf War veteran, former Army helicopter pilot and amateur boxer, joined Tom Honercheck and Dean Patterson on “Men Answering the Heroic Call” to discuss masculinity, pornography, spiritual warfare, prayer and the discipline he believes Catholic men desperately need.

“Everybody wakes up in battle every day — the world, the flesh and the devil,” Honercheck said.

For Schneider, that language is not metaphorical.

“The Lord is a warrior,” he said. “The cross of Jesus Christ is where we find our victory. Men are made to bear that cross and to bear under it and do whatever they have to do for the salvation of their own souls and those that God has entrusted to them.”

From Army Aviation to Scripture and Spiritual Combat

Schneider grew up in a blue-collar Catholic family in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a union electrician and his mother worked as a secretary for the church.

“My dad really pushed us in academics,” Schneider said.

He earned an ROTC scholarship to the University of Notre Dame before entering the Army, eventually flying Cobra gunship helicopters. He also trained in combat sports and boxed as an amateur.

“I was Catholic my whole life, never missed Mass,” Schneider said. “That doesn’t mean I was a perfect guy. I was not necessarily the nicest guy in the world, but God in his grace continues to work on me and all of us.”

A conversion experience in Iraq was followed by what Schneider described as a continuing series of conversions after returning home.

His interest increasingly moved toward Scripture.

“I loved reading the Bible,” he said. “It was kind of my passion. It’s what I like to do, and it’s where the Lord really speaks to me.”

Schneider pursued a master’s degree in theology while operating a business and raising a family.

“It took me seven years, running a business and raising a family, getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning or staying up late at night doing my studies,” he said.

That eventually led to Greek studies and a doctorate in biblical studies through Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England.

“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Why would I ever do this?’” Schneider said. “But the Lord just kept pushing me.”

Today, he teaches, guides doctoral students, writes and speaks about Scripture, the Church Fathers and spiritual combat.

“The Lord has a sense of humor,” he said. “He made a big shift in my life about five or six years ago, and I started working full-time in teaching and evangelization and writing books and traveling and speaking and doing what I can while I’ve got breath and strength.”

‘It’s OK to Be a Man’

Patterson asked Schneider what he is seeing among men at conferences and in Catholic circles as concerns grow about declining participation in the Church and confusion surrounding masculinity.

Schneider said straightforward language about authentic masculinity continues to resonate.

“Men need discipline. They need order. Men need ritual. Men need accountability and brotherhood,” he said.

He argued that authentic masculinity and authentic femininity are complementary rather than competitive.

“Authentic masculinity recognizes authentic femininity,” Schneider said, citing St. John Paul II’s emphasis on the dignity of women.

But Schneider believes modern culture frequently treats traditional masculinity with suspicion.

“It’s OK to be a man,” he said. “It’s OK to like to get on the gun range. It’s OK to go hunting. It’s OK to be athletic. It’s OK to be masculine and do combat sports.”

Those activities, however, are not what ultimately make a man masculine, Schneider said.

“Authentic masculinity bears under the cross,” he said. “Authentic masculinity knows how to endure. Authentic masculinity takes very seriously responsibilities to provide and to protect for our families.”

A Warrior Christ, Not a ‘Sugary Jesus’

Schneider said one obstacle for men is what he considers an incomplete image of Jesus Christ.

“I often use the phrase ‘sugary Jesus,’” he said.

The popular image of Jesus as simply agreeable, harmless or sentimental, Schneider argued, does not capture the biblical presentation of Christ.

“You want to see the Lord? The Lord is a warrior,” Schneider said.

He pointed to the Exodus, the title “Lord God of armies” throughout the Old Testament and Christ riding into battle in Revelation 19.

Schneider compared Christ’s cross to an ancient battlefield tropaion — a monument erected at the place where an enemy army broke and turned.

“I saw this spot as we were the lead cavalry unit in the lead tank division in Iraq,” he said. “That spot where the enemy first turns — once the first enemy turns, and then the next and the next, that’s when victory is brought about.”

The early Church Fathers, he said, interpreted the cross in similar terms.

“They saw the cross of Christ as the tropaion,” Schneider said. “They saw the cross of Christ as prefigured by David, who cut off the head of Goliath. The cross is where we find our victory.”

Wounded Men Can Point the Weapon at Themselves

The conversation turned toward trauma, sexual abuse and pornography.

Schneider recalled a conversation with podcast host and former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, who told him privately that a significant number of elite military veterans interviewed on his program had disclosed childhood sexual abuse.

Schneider said those wounds can profoundly affect identity.

“There’s a lot of wounded men out there that don’t know what to do with their wounds,” he said. “They don’t know how to bring that trauma and link it with the sufferings of Jesus Christ.”

To explain the danger, Schneider used the image of a Claymore mine.

The weapon bears a famously simple instruction: “Front toward enemy.”

During the Vietnam War, Schneider said, enemy sappers sometimes infiltrated American defenses and turned those mines around, causing soldiers to detonate the weapons against their own positions.

Schneider believes wounded men can do something similar emotionally and spiritually.

“That Claymore mine, that ‘front toward enemy,’ they put it towards themselves, or they put it towards their wife and their children,” he said.

The result can be self-destructive behavior, emotional distance or abandoning responsibilities at home.

“A lot of guys are very wounded,” Schneider said.

Pornography and the Collapse of Interior Freedom

Schneider identified pornography as one of the most destructive forces affecting men.

“The pornography, the filth and scourge and wicked evil of pornography, is afflicting men in a really negative way,” he said.

He said widespread exposure is reshaping the imagination, distorting sexuality and leaving men spiritually vulnerable.

“This scourge of pornography is destroying our minds,” Schneider said. “It’s destroying masculinity. It’s deranging the way we think.”

He told the story of a man who contacted him after suffering sexual abuse at age 15 and struggling for approximately 25 years with pornography, masturbation and intermittent alcohol abuse.

The man followed Schneider’s Liber Christo prayer discipline through Lent, including scheduled prayer, a media fast and restricted spiritual reading.

According to Schneider, the man told him afterward that the addictions had finally broken.

“I realized what I had in my life was a lack of discipline and just ignorance, a lack of knowledge,” Schneider recalled him saying. “God has given us the resources in the Church to fight back, and we just were ignorant about what the Church offers for men to find healing.”

Schneider added a simpler diagnosis.

“Most men lack discipline,” he said. “Let’s face it.”

Swagger Is Not Strength

Schneider contrasted modern masculine aesthetics with the deeper toughness he believes Christian discipleship requires.

“We might look cool and have a cool beard and cool tattoos and smoke cigars and have all the swagger, but that’s not what it is to be a man,” he said.

He recently helped a woman transition from active religious life into the life of a hermit. When he saw her living quarters, he noticed a stark sleeping arrangement — a simple mattress with no pillow — alongside a life centered on prayer, penance and hours before the Blessed Sacrament.

“A warrior,” Schneider said.

The encounter sharpened his conviction that masculinity cannot be reduced to appearances.

“Being a man is something that’s rugged on the inside that can bear down, that can suffer, and that can make sacrifices like Christ,” he said.

How Schneider Entered Exorcism Ministry

Schneider’s work in deliverance ministry began after a priest friend was asked to serve as a diocesan exorcist.

The priest asked Schneider, with his military and fighting background, to attend a presentation and potentially assist the team.

Schneider initially had little interest.

Then he attended a minor exorcism.

“I was expecting Hollywood and all that,” Schneider said. “What I saw was something very beautiful.”

Instead of spectacle, he saw what he described as the authority of the Church confronting darkness.

“It was incredibly beautiful, liturgical, sacramental,” he said. “It was the power and weight of the Church and the authority of the Church coming down and bringing the light of Christ into the kingdom of darkness and snatching souls back.”

He joined the team.

Over the following years, Schneider said he sometimes participated in three or four cases or prayer meetings a week while simultaneously completing doctoral research in the early morning.

The work changed his understanding of Catholic theology.

“It really purified my vocation, purified my ecclesiology, how I view the priesthood and the office of the bishop,” he said.

It also deepened his understanding of Mary, the guardian angels and St. Michael.

“This cosmic view of the battlefield began to take shape in my understanding,” Schneider said.

The Liber Christo Method

That experience eventually contributed to Schneider’s book, “The Liber Christo Method: A Field Manual for Spiritual Combat.”

The method begins with prayer discipline and proceeds toward confession, deeper prayer and identifying areas where a person may have surrendered ground spiritually.

“It was just from my experience working with cases on how to identify areas of our lives that we’ve given strongholds to the enemy, and then how to reverse that,” Schneider said.

He later co-authored “Spiritual Warfare Q&A for Priests and Laity” with Jesse Romero and wrote “Sins of the Father,” addressing generational curses from a Catholic and biblical perspective.

“I’m just going to keep writing and researching and do what I can to try to inform the next generation of Catholics on spiritual combat,” he said.

Why Order Matters

For Schneider, one of the central discoveries of deliverance work is deceptively simple: order itself matters.

“We’ve discovered that the demon responds to the imposition of order as much as to the prayers themselves,” he said.

That helps explain why men often report major interior changes through demanding spiritual disciplines such as Exodus 90 or St. Michael’s Lent.

“They’ve discovered, ‘Wow, I’m finding liberation. I had no idea that this freedom, this interior freedom, was possible,’” Schneider said.

Scheduled prayer, fasting from media and focused Scripture reading can help strengthen the will and restore control over the imagination, he said.

“The imposition of order is critical because it begins to strengthen the will,” Schneider said.

Pulling away from social media and unnecessary stimulation can also help men develop what he called “custody of the mind” and “custody of the imagination.”

“That’s where most men get beat,” he said. “It’s in the imagination and the mind.”

Fight Temptation While It Is Small

Schneider drew another lesson from the monastic tradition and the imprecatory Psalms — biblical prayers containing violent imagery against enemies.

Rather than applying those passages literally to human enemies, Schneider said early Christian tradition often understood them spiritually.

The enemies are vice and temptation.

“They see the little stirrings of lust, the stirrings of anger, of shame, of vanity, of pride,” he said. “These things stir up in the heart, and while they’re little, this is the monastic tradition, you crush them before they gain strength.”

Waiting allows the temptation to become stronger.

“If you let that guy get up and get to full stature, you’re now facing a giant,” Schneider said. “But you’ve got to crush him while it’s little.”

The “rock,” he said, is Christ.

“It’s invoking the name of Jesus Christ,” Schneider said. “It’s crushing these temptations through prayer while they’re small.”

Mental prayer allows men to recognize thoughts without automatically accepting them as their own.

“When these temptations rise up, you’re like, ‘Hey, that’s not my stuff. I’m not going to appropriate that. I’m going to let it move on,’” he said.

‘The Church Has Failed’ to Equip Men

Asked whether ordinary Catholic men are adequately prepared to understand spiritual warfare, Schneider offered a sharp assessment.

“I think the Church has failed. At least they’ve neglected,” he said.

He praised generations of Catholic women who remained engaged while many men became spiritually absent.

“We had a generation of older women that have been holding the Church up while men have been largely absent, just like Adam,” Schneider said. “They’ve been silent.”

The danger, Schneider said, is not necessarily denying the devil’s existence. It is assuming spiritual evil has no immediate relevance.

He cited the film “Nefarious,” in which a character is told he is losing a war he did not know existed.

“I believe the devil exists, but I just don’t think he’s after me or my family,” Schneider said, describing the attitude he sees among some Christians. “In which case, that’s why you’re losing.”

Pornography Is Reaching Children Earlier

Honercheck raised concerns about children gaining unrestricted access to smartphones and pornography.

Schneider agreed the consequences are increasingly serious, particularly when early exposure follows young men into vocational discernment and seminary formation.

He described working indirectly with seminarians struggling with pornography and sexual problems rooted in years of exposure.

In one case, Schneider recommended a structured prayer protocol and complete restriction of unnecessary media.

The seminarian initially resisted.

He was given another option: Exodus 90.

“No coffee Wednesdays and Fridays, cold showers — you get your choice,” Schneider recalled.

The seminarian chose Schneider’s protocol.

After several weeks, Schneider said the priest accompanying him reported significant progress. Within several months, Schneider said the underlying pattern broke and the man eventually returned to seminary.

“This works,” Schneider said.

His larger point was that Catholics do not need to invent new forms of spiritual formation.

“Tap into the tradition of the Church,” he said. “Benedictine, Augustinian, Carmelite, Ignatian. These are the doctors of the Church that have given us our patrimony on how to pray.”

Not Every Problem Requires an Exorcism

Schneider also warned against assuming every unusual spiritual struggle requires direct intervention from an exorcist.

He told the story of a woman with cancer who approached him at a conference. She had already received prayers from multiple priests and an exorcist but continued experiencing disturbing sexual temptations specifically when looking at a crucifix.

After asking about her history, Schneider discovered she had spent 16 years in religious life before leaving.

“You’re not possessed,” Schneider told her. “You don’t need a priest to pray over you.”

Instead, he encouraged her to reconsider her suffering through her former identity as a consecrated woman and to offer her cancer prayerfully for other women suffering from sexual abuse or sexual temptation.

“Offer your body up, as St. Paul says, a living sacrifice,” Schneider said.

Her response stayed with him.

“This is the first time in my life that I can remember having hope,” Schneider recalled her telling him.

That experience reflects a broader principle in his ministry.

“Ninety percent of the time, we found that we can self-deliver,” Schneider said. “Most people, 90% or more, can just deliver on their own with some discipline work and a reorientation, a return to sacraments and good confession.”

Men Need Brothers Who Will Answer at 2 A.M.

As the episode closed, Patterson tied Schneider’s message back to the wider mission of Heroic Men.

“We need brotherhood,” Patterson said. “Jesus formed men as disciples. We need guys we can count on and go to war with.”

He said every man needs another man who would answer his call at 2 a.m.

Heroic Men’s pledge asks men to take three recurring actions: pray daily for three men, connect personally with another man every week and invite one man each month to make the same commitment.

“This isn’t a pledge that’ll cost you money,” Patterson said. “It’s going to cost you a bit of time and the strength of your faith.”

The goal is to create a brotherhood of 1 million men by 2033.

Schneider’s message throughout the conversation offered a similar challenge.

Men do not become strong because they look masculine, talk tough or avoid suffering.

Strength grows through order, responsibility, prayer and sacrifice.

“Being a man is something that’s rugged on the inside,” Schneider said, “that can bear down, that can suffer, and that can make sacrifices like Christ.”

Written by Andy Sonnier
Executive Director, Christ In You - CMC

The New Frontier

When we hear the word frontier, we may picture untamed land, distant settlements, and courageous men stepping into the unknown. Today, however, the new frontier is not found on a map. It is found in our homes, workplaces, parishes, neighborhoods, and within the hearts of men.

Men Are Searching for Something More

Many men today are spiritually restless. They are surrounded by information but lack wisdom, connected through technology but often isolated from genuine friendship. Some struggle to understand their purpose as husbands, fathers, sons, workers, and disciples. Others carry wounds, addictions, anger, loneliness, or regret in silence. Our culture often tells men either to dominate others or to become passive and harmless. Neither reflects the Catholic understanding of manhood.

Jesus Reveals a Better Way

Jesus Christ reveals a better way. He shows us that true strength is found in self-giving love. He was courageous without being cruel, compassionate without being weak, and obedient to the Father without losing His authority. Christ came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

RECOMMENDED READING

FEATURE

A Massive Missionary Opportunity

This spiritual landscape presents serious challenges, but it also offers tremendous missionary opportunities. Men are hungry for brotherhood, meaning, discipline, and a cause worthy of sacrifice. The Church can meet this hunger by inviting men into a real relationship with Christ and into communities where they can pray honestly, serve faithfully, and hold one another accountable.

Every Catholic Man Has a Mission Field

The Catechism teaches that all Christians are called to participate in the Church’s missionary work because the Church is missionary by her very nature (CCC 849-850). Missionary outreach is not limited to priests, religious, or those who travel overseas. Every Catholic man has a mission field. It may be his marriage, his children, his coworkers, the men at the gym, or the neighbor who has stopped believing that God cares.

Courage. Creativity. Conviction.

Stepping into this frontier requires courage, creativity, and conviction. Courage means speaking the truth with love when silence is easier. Creativity means finding new ways to reach men who may never attend a parish event. Conviction means living the faith consistently, especially when no one is watching.

Be Courageous. Be Strong.

Saint Paul challenged the early Christians: “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14).

Our Nation Needs Holy Men

Our nation does not merely need more successful men. It needs holy men—men who pray, repent, protect, serve, forgive, and lead others toward Christ. The frontier is before us. The question is whether Catholic men will have the courage to enter it.

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Brandon's Website

Brandon Powell has a simple test for masculinity: What are you willing to give up when the people you love, or the truth you believe, require something costly from you?

For Powell, a father of six and former Protestant pastor, that question stopped being theoretical years ago.

He spent 17 years preaching in an evangelical denomination, part of a family tradition that stretched across four generations. His father had served as a pastor. His social world, career and future all grew inside that tradition.

Then Powell became convinced that the Catholic Church was true.

“I had to leave behind a lot for that,” Powell said. “Left behind my career, left behind my social net, left behind a lot of friends and left it all behind to become Catholic.”

He resigned as a pastor in September 2018. He and his wife entered the Catholic Church in 2019.

That experience now sits near the center of how Powell thinks about manhood. Masculinity, in his telling, is less about projecting strength than accepting responsibility when responsibility carries a price.

“We constantly have this spiritual battle within us between complacency and courage,” Powell said.

A Father Starts Asking a Harder Question

The conversation began with a story Powell heard through his work in parish digital media in the Diocese of Dallas.

A woman he knows fled a communist country as a teenager with her sister. The two girls crossed seven countries in search of safety, leaving behind their family, home and everything familiar.

Powell kept returning to the risk.

“As a father, I have six kids,” he said. “The older you get, the more you start wondering and worrying about the unknown at times.”

For a younger man, courage can look like adventure. For a father, courage carries names, faces, bills, children, a spouse and consequences.

Powell found himself asking whether he could uproot his own family if circumstances demanded it.

“Would I have what it takes to move my family, to take my family from one country to another place to be in a better situation?”

The question reaches beyond migration or war. Most men will never lead their families across a border under threat. Yet Powell sees the same conflict on a smaller scale whenever comfort competes with duty.

“The love you should have for your family and the love you should have for God should be greater than the love that we have for comfort,” he said.

That may be one of the harder definitions of masculine courage because it leaves little room for theater. A man can look formidable while remaining deeply attached to ease. He can talk about sacrifice while arranging his life around avoiding it.

Powell’s own conversion forced the issue.

“What Am I Going to Do About This?”

As a Protestant pastor, Powell cared deeply about giving people answers that could survive real suffering.

He became increasingly troubled by disagreements over Scripture and authority, especially when those disagreements carried consequences for marriages, spiritual lives and moral decisions.

“So as a pastor, you’re trying to provide answers for people,” Powell said.

The deeper he studied, the more he believed early Christianity differed from the form of Christianity he had inherited.

Eventually, study became decision.

“You do have to kind of condense it down to a question of like what I’m going to do about this,” Powell said. “When you face that realization that what you are preaching, what you are saying, what you are leading people in doesn’t really reflect what God laid down, I mean, you have to do something with it.”

The choice, as he saw it, was to harden himself against what he had found or leap.

“In that case, that leap cost me a lot,” he said. “But, you know, I still jumped.”

The host pressed him on the point.

“What was it that was in you?” Dominic asked. “You find a problem, like you get your teeth around, you can’t let go of that thing, right?”

Powell traced part of that instinct to his father, who encouraged him to ask theological questions. He traced another part to college, where he studied political science and philosophy under professors who regularly challenged Christianity.

One professor, Powell recalled, openly described himself as a militant atheist and told students his job was to destroy their faith.

The environment forced Powell to decide what he believed and why.

“If you only have easy answers, you either give up or you dig deeper,” he said.

Masculinity Without Harshness

Powell’s models of manhood include martyrs and historical figures, though two of his strongest examples come from men he knows personally.

He named Jamie Apt and Dennis Grendel, older friends whose generosity and humility changed the way he understands masculine strength.

“Masculinity can be strong but at the same time gentle and generous,” Powell said.

That distinction matters.

Much of modern conversation about masculinity can become trapped between caricatures. One side treats masculine strength as dangerous. Another can answer by making aggression itself a virtue.

Powell offers another model: strength governed by love, sacrifice and self-command.

Historically, he points to figures such as Thomas Becket, the English archbishop who entered a lethal conflict with royal power.

Powell admires the willingness to draw a moral boundary and accept the cost.

“Here’s the line,” Powell said, describing the principle. “And if you push me back past this line, then you also kill me because this is the line.”

He also points to Blessed Stanley Rother, the Oklahoma priest and missionary who returned to Guatemala after leaving amid escalating violence. Rother was murdered in 1981.

Powell sees something powerful in men who go back.

They could remain safe. They return because another duty has become more important than safety.

Heroism at Work, at Home and in Small Irritations

Most masculine sacrifice, Powell said, arrives with far less cinematic lighting.

It arrives through coworkers. Or children. Or neighbors.

Or the person whose problem lands in your lap at the least convenient moment imaginable.

“Can I respond with generosity and with gentleness,” Powell asked, “or do I respond with agitation and annoyance?”

He sees inconvenience as one of the most available forms of sacrifice.

A coworker needs help. An elderly neighbor needs the lawn mowed. A family member needs patience. A child interrupts the plan.

The act may be small, but the spiritual question remains serious: Will a man place another person before himself?

Powell’s masculinity is therefore demanding in an unglamorous way. It asks a man to become dependable when nobody applauds, merciful when retaliation feels satisfying and reverent toward responsibilities that have become familiar.

Even fatherhood can become familiar enough to be handled casually. So can marriage. So can prayer.

Powell’s recurring question is whether a man recognizes the weight of what he has been given.

Prayer Without Performance

That question eventually leads Powell to prayer.

He grew up in a pastor’s home, yet he said nobody sat him down and taught him a personal method of prayer beyond mealtime prayer.

As a Catholic father, he wants to give his children something more deliberate.

He uses structured prayers, including prayers from the St. Gregory Prayer Book, and teaches his children a simple framework of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and requests.

Yet his strongest advice for men is even simpler.

God cares more about honesty than elegance.

“God cares way more about our honesty than he does about our elegance,” Powell said.

For Powell, masculine prayer has little use for posing.

A man angry with his wife can say so. A man disappointed with God can say so. A man who feels weak, resentful, afraid or overwhelmed can bring that reality into prayer rather than trying to sound polished.

“You can’t be honest with God until you’re honest with yourself,” Powell said.

Then comes the harder part: listening.

Powell described pouring everything out before God and then leaving space for an answer.

“I’ve had my turn,” he said. “Here’s your turn.”

The Measure of the Man

Powell’s story moves from teenage refugees to conversion, from Thomas Becket to coworkers, from martyrs to bedtime prayer with children.

The theme beneath all of it is responsibility.

A man receives people, truths, duties and gifts. Then he decides what they are worth.

Will he defend them?

Will he sacrifice for them?

Will he choose mercy over revenge, generosity over irritation, courage over complacency?

Powell has already made one enormous leap. He also knows yesterday’s courage provides no guarantee for today. We keep going, one day at at time.

Men of Christ did not begin with a massive budget, a professional staff or an elaborate national strategy.

It began with a handful of Catholic men sitting around a dinner table.

“They were talking about how to grow in faith and to build virtue as men inside of their families and inside of their friend groups and their neighborhoods,” said Pat Masterson, one of the ministry’s current leaders.

That conversation eventually sparked the idea of bringing a larger group of men together for a Catholic men’s conference.

The first year, roughly 700 men showed up.

“Our very first presider at Mass at the very first Men of Christ conference was Cardinal Timothy Dolan,” Masterson said. “At the time he was based here in Milwaukee and was a great advocate and supporter of us as we started.”

Twenty years later, Men of Christ has become far more than a one-day conference.

In 2026, the ministry celebrated its 20th conference, drawing more than 3,000 men to downtown Milwaukee.

But Masterson and fellow leader AJ Garcia say the size of the conference is not the real story.

The real story is friendship.

‘Five of Us Are Going to Go for This’

Garcia said the early history of Men of Christ contains a lesson for Catholic men who see a need in their parish but do not know where to begin.

“You see a group of friends that are ready and willing to go for it,” Garcia said. “I love hearing the stories of the origins of this conference and many like it. We’re like, ‘Hey, five of us are going to go for this. We’ll invite our networks. We’ll see what happens.’”

The response to the first conference exceeded expectations.

Garcia recalled hearing how organizers were “scrambling, running out to Subway to buy more sandwiches because so many guys showed up.”

For him, that story illustrates something deeper.

“It really is just about the camaraderie, the community of a handful of guys and then the prayer and sacrifice behind it,” he said. “Seeing the need and just going for it.”

That same approach continues to shape the ministry today.

Men of Christ provides videos, promotional materials, bulletin inserts, flyers, posters and other resources that parishes can use to host their own gatherings or stream the Milwaukee conference remotely.

But Garcia said the tools are secondary.

“Whether you use our resources or not, just get something started.”

Men Are Hungry to Be Together

Garcia has been involved with Men of Christ for about five years and attended conferences before joining the leadership team.

He watched the ministry adapt during the COVID era, transitioning from gatherings of more than 2,500 men to virtual events and distributed host sites.

In 2026, more than 3,000 men returned for the 20th conference.

Through those changes, Garcia said one reality became increasingly clear.

“I’ve just seen this hunger and desire for men to be together,” he said.

The conference gives Catholic men an easy opportunity to invite a friend, brother, son or family member who may have fallen away from the faith.

“There’s not a lot of risk, not a lot on the line,” Garcia said. “Men of Christ just provides a great conference experience for them.”

Sometimes those invitations lead to profound moments of conversion.

Garcia said some of his favorite stories come from men returning to the sacrament of reconciliation after decades away.

“I think two years ago, someone said 50 years. I mean, at least 40,” he said.

Confession lines are among the most striking sights at the conference.

“It’s pretty much always flowing and at different points backed up,” Garcia said.

More than 30 priests may be available to hear confessions.

“One of the biggest gifts and most inspiring moments of the conference every year is seeing those guys in that long line and knowing somewhere in there this is the first time they’ve returned to this in a long time.”

One Invitation Changed Pat Masterson’s Life

Masterson’s connection to Catholic men’s ministry began before he joined Men of Christ.

About 2011, a young associate pastor, Father John Burns, and one of Masterson’s best friends, Bob Simi, started a men’s group at his parish.

At the time, Masterson said he was “a very lukewarm Catholic.”

“I was not really praying, not really studying my faith, and I think I was just kind of going through the motions,” he said.

Then came an invitation.

“It was literally like over a beer at a bar after playing pickup basketball,” Masterson said.

His friend became a mentor, and the men’s group helped draw him deeper into his faith.

Masterson has since heard variations of that same story repeatedly.

“The game changer in people is when someone else cares enough to invite them,” he said.

That invitation requires vulnerability.

A man may have to tell a friend, “‘Look, I’m going to be a little bit vulnerable here and share: My Catholic faith is really important. My love of Christ is really important.’”

“I think that makes all the difference,” Masterson said.

He has watched men make dramatic changes after re-engaging with the Church.

He recalled one married man who gave up recreational drug use and pornography. He and his wife began practicing natural family planning and went on to have a large family.

Before that, Masterson said, the man had been “very, very far away from the faith.”

“He re-embraced his Catholic faith through the invitation and coming back to the sacrament of confession.”

An ‘Apostolate of Friendship’

Garcia has a phrase for what Men of Christ is trying to create.

“An apostolate of friendship.”

The ministry’s commitment to prayer and the sacraments comes first, he said, but closely connected to that is a commitment to other men.

“It is to one another,” Garcia said. “It’s to friendship, to encouraging one another.”

That might begin with an invitation to a conference and eventually become an invitation into a parish men’s group.

“Just knowing that other men need support, offering that to others, and all the while also benefiting from that as you’re making those invitations,” he said.

Masterson said those relationships have become deeply personal.

“The group of our Men of Christ leaders, our regional leaders, they’re my best friends,” he said.

During recent family struggles, members of the team prayed for Masterson daily.

“I’m not sure you can put a price on it,” he said.

There is a difference, he added, between someone saying, “I’m thinking about you,” and knowing other Catholic men are offering Mass, adoration and the rosary for you.

“They’re not just friends here on earth, but they also care for your soul.”

More Than 200 Parishes Represented

The reach of Men of Christ has grown considerably.

At the 2026 conference, about 3,100 men attended in person.

Masterson said 143 parishes from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee were represented, along with another 87 parishes from outside the archdiocese.

The ministry has even drawn international interest.

Two priests from Bermuda flew to Milwaukee for the conference after their bishop contacted Men of Christ.

The priests heard confessions, spent time with ministry leaders and asked questions about building a men’s group at their cathedral parish.

Their bishop had effectively told them, Masterson recalled, “You’re going to Men of Christ this year.”

Garcia admitted the first email seemed unusual.

“A bishop emails us and is like, ‘Is this real? Is this legit?’” he said.

Once the ministry confirmed the request, the answer was simple.

“Send them up. We’ll take care of them.”

Supported by the Archdiocese

Men of Christ has also benefited from long-standing relationships with the leadership of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

Garcia pointed to Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop Jerome Listecki and current Archbishop Jeffrey Grob as part of the ministry’s history.

Archbishop Listecki, in particular, regularly met with Men of Christ leaders.

Those meetings were not only opportunities for the ministry to share success stories.

They were also a chance to receive direction.

As Men of Christ considered expanding nationally, Garcia said Archbishop Listecki offered a simple instruction:

“Take care of the people here. Take care of the people in this Archdiocese.”

The ministry took that seriously.

“We’re always trying not just to get more men for the sake of filling seats at the conference,” Garcia said, “but more men who are engaged in living out this apostolate of friendship and a life of prayer in their parishes.”

The Conference Is Only Part of the Mission

Men of Christ describes December through March as “conference season.”

But the ministry continues throughout the year.

Ahead of the conference, Men of Christ hosts three Saturday leadership meetings, typically in December, January and February.

The gatherings may be held at a parish, the cathedral or the seminary.

About 100 to 150 men attend.

They begin with Mass.

The men pray for the conference, receive formation, hear speakers and work through practical planning.

“They are the parish captains,” Masterson said. “They are the leaders at their parish.”

Some run small groups. Others oversee broader ministries to men.

Over time, those leadership meetings helped generate additional events, including retreats, rosary walks, pilgrimages and an event called Aiming for Christ, which combines trap shooting, Mass and a chili cook-off.

Other gatherings may be as simple as a baseball game, a cookout or several men sitting on a back porch sharing bourbon.

The goal is the same.

“Making sure that the isolation, that idea of separation, we break that cycle,” Masterson said.

How Men of Christ Pays for It

The conference and broader ministry are supported largely through private donations.

“We’ve been blessed in a lot of ways,” Masterson said.

Benefactors who have either seen or personally experienced the impact of the ministry help fund the work.

The conference charges what Masterson described as an affordable ticket price that largely covers food.

“The budget for the conference is significantly bigger than the ticket admission that we bring in,” he said.

Men of Christ also makes its remote conference available free to parishes and groups wishing to stream it on the day of the event.

Several years of recorded talks are also available online at no cost.

For smaller parish events, Garcia recommended looking close to home.

During the years when more parishes hosted streamed conferences, local businesses frequently stepped in to help.

“Would you donate the coffee? Would you donate sandwiches?” Garcia recalled leaders asking.

No matter the size of the gathering, he said, men should not be afraid to ask for help.

Start With Two Men — Then Find Four or Five

For parishes interested in hosting a satellite conference, Men of Christ has created a playbook based on years of experience.

But Masterson said one principle matters more than almost anything else.

Do not try to do it alone.

“Doing it alone is really hard,” he said.

Add one other man, he said, “and the success rate’s going to go up by 100%.”

Build a core group of four or five committed men and “your results are going to be a 1,000% different than trying to go it alone.”

The same applies when working with a pastor.

Instead of bringing the pastor another major responsibility, Masterson recommends forming the team first.

Tell the priest, in effect: We have a core group. We will run it. We want to bring 20 men together. We will attend Mass and handle the logistics. Join us if you can.

“You just have to do it,” Masterson said. “You have to pray about it and then you have to just try.”

There will be rejection.

“Put aside the fear,” he said. “Yes, you’ll get some no’s along the way.”

From Satellite Sites to Full Affiliates

Some groups simply stream the Milwaukee conference.

Others eventually grow into something larger.

Men of Christ Joliet, for example, began as a satellite-style relationship but eventually became an affiliate.

Its leaders established their own nonprofit serving the Diocese of Joliet.

In recent years, the group has drawn more than 400 men to its gatherings and has moved from streaming Milwaukee’s speakers to hosting its own live national Catholic speakers.

Men of Christ can support either model.

The important thing, Garcia said, is recognizing a need and acting on it.

“A guy seeing a need, asking for it, a little bit of planning and bringing men together.”

The Future Is Not About Bigger Numbers

After years of national outreach, Men of Christ has recently placed renewed emphasis on Milwaukee.

Masterson described the vision in three parts: build strong fathers, help form holy families and create “the most vibrant parish possible.”

That kind of parish is built through invitation.

“You have somebody new join the parish, invite them,” Masterson said. “Go talk to them. Make them feel welcome. Ask how you can help them.”

He called that “a very small version of evangelization.”

The ministry would like to reach every parish in the archdiocese.

But Masterson said that does not mean the goal is simply increasing conference attendance.

“We’ve gone back to basics,” he said.

The question is how to reach the man on the fringe — the parishioner who comes occasionally, the man who has drifted away or the father who has never been personally invited deeper.

TAP: Touch a Person

Men of Christ has turned that personal invitation into a simple principle called TAP: Touch a Person.

Masterson said it is often the hardest part of the ministry.

“The resistance is there,” he said. “It is easy to say someone else will make that invitation.”

Some Men of Christ leaders personally invite hundreds of men.

“They will literally pick up the phone and go down their phone list in their iPhone and one by one invite: phone call, text, phone call, text.”

The math is not always encouraging at first.

“We say to get 20 guys to the conference, you have to invite 100,” Masterson said.

And some of those men may require repeated invitations.

“They need to be tapped three, four, five times, maybe 10. Maybe over the years.”

Sometimes nothing appears to happen.

But the invitation may still matter.

“Maybe you’re planting a seed for something that might come to a bloom 10 years from now.”

‘Evangelize, Catechize and Unify’

Garcia said Men of Christ ultimately wants to keep its mission simple.

“Evangelize, catechize and unify.”

The goal is one man.

“Encourage that one man to come back to the faith and then that ripple effect it will have on, God willing, his family and then the parish community.”

TAP is bigger than an invitation to a conference.

“It’s an invitation to an intentional conversation about what Jesus is doing in your life,” Garcia said, “or just the encouragement you need to take that next step closer to him.”

Again, he returned to the same idea that has fueled the ministry for two decades.

“The apostolate of friendship.”

The Next Mission: High School Boys

One significant new initiative is taking shape ahead of the next conference.

Men of Christ is placing a new emphasis on high school-age young men.

“Our goal is for a man to bring his sons or to bring his grandsons, his brothers, his uncle,” Masterson said.

The ministry tested the idea at Catholic Memorial High School in Milwaukee.

Leaders worked with the school’s faith formation staff and teachers to invite young men to the conference and provide discounted tickets.

Afterward, Masterson returned to the school to give a talk on virtue.

Then he made the boys another offer.

“I invited all of those young men to come back to next year’s conference for free, and we would find a sponsor to pay for all of those young men.”

That could mean roughly 250 boys from one school.

Now Men of Christ hopes to make a concerted effort at about 12 Catholic high schools in the archdiocese.

The plan is to identify fathers and school leaders, partner with presidents, principals and faith formation directors and bring busloads of young men to the conference.

The ministry has already seen similar momentum with college students.

About 50 students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison attended the 2026 conference through the St. Paul Catholic Center.

Those college men went on stage and prayed the rosary together.

“Think about those grade school boys or high school boys looking at 50 college boys up there praying the rosary together,” Masterson said. “It was great.”

The message to the next generation is straightforward.

“We want to make sure they know that they are invited,” Masterson said, “and that there are great, strong male leaders who care about their faith and care about God and care about them.”

One Spark Can Become a Fire

Near the end of the conversation, host Tom Honercheck pointed to Luke 12:49: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled.”

For Honercheck, the verse captures what happens when one Catholic man invites another.

“You have no idea — we have no idea — when we talk to another man, invite another man, and he comes to a conference, or these high school kids, or these college kids, the spark that ignites that blaze of faith and the difference it makes.”

Men of Christ began with a handful of men willing to act on that spark.

Twenty years later, thousands of men gather each year, hundreds of parishes participate and men who have been away from confession for decades are finding their way back.

Still, the strategy has hardly changed.

Pray.

Build friendships.

Pick up the phone.

Invite the next man.

Written by Adam Carlisle
Secretary for Evangelization and Communication
Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey

Something Was Missing

Good afternoon gentlemen,

A while back, I started noticing something in our parish. We had strong families, committed parishioners, and good men- but many of us were trying to live our faith alone. We came to Mass, we fulfilled our responsibilities, but there wasn’t much fraternity. There wasn’t a place
where men could be honest about struggles, grow in virtue together, and challenge each other to holiness.

We Didn’t Need to Reinvent the Wheel

Last year I was part of the planning committee for this conference. Peter introduced us to Dean Patterson and Heroic Men. What struck me immediately was that it didn’t water down our faith. It spoke directly to men about leadership, sacrifice, prayer, virtue and spiritual battle. They presented authentic Catholic teaching in a way that was clear, practical and challenging. But more than the content, it gave us structure.

Instead of asking,” What should we study?”:” Or who is qualified to lead?: We realized we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. We simply needed to invite a few men, press play, and begin the conversation. Heroic Men provides faithful information rooted in Scripture, the Catechism, and the lives of the Saints. It gave us confidence that what we were sharing was solid and authentically Catholic.

We Started Small

We started small, just a handful of men meeting regularly. We committed to show up. We prayed together. We had real conversations- about what it means to really be a man, about marriage, fatherhood, purity, discipline and what it means to carry the cross in daily life.

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FEATURE

Then Something Began to Change

And something began to change,

Walls came down. Brotherhood formed. Men who had never spoken openly about their faith began leading their families more intentionally. Confessions became more frequent. Prayer became more consistent. We began holding one another accountable- not in judgement, but in encouragement.

Men Are Hungry for Depth

What I learned is this: men are hungry for depth. They want to be challenged. They want a mission. But often they just need an invitation and a path forward.

Heroic Men provided that path. It gave us a common vision of authentic Catholic masculinity not domination, not passivity, but sacrificial love modeled after Christ.

When Men Step Up, Everything Changes

Today, what started as a simple step of faith has grown into a brotherhood within our parish, and I’m convinced that when men step up spiritually, families grow stronger, parishes become more vibrant, and the whole Church benefits.

This Is Your Invitation

If you’ve ever felt like there should be more- more depth, more brotherhood, more purpose- this is your invitation. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Just be willing to show up.

That’s how ours began. And God has done the rest.

SPECIAL SPONSOR

FROM HEROIC MEN

Take the pledge | Learn more

A Prisoner Who Found His Purpose

Chuck Jansen remembers meeting a man in prison who did not seem to belong there — at least not in the way Jansen expected.

The man, Orman, had been incarcerated for about 35 years. Yet when Jansen met him through Brothers in Blue Reentry, where Jansen’s Forgiveness 101 course had been adopted, he encountered someone strikingly joyful.

“The minute I met him, I could tell he was different,” Jansen said. “There was something about him, and he was so happy and he was so joyful.”

Jansen asked him how long he had been in prison.

“About 35 years,” Orman replied.

“You’re happier than half my golf friends,” Jansen told him. “What’s your secret?”

Orman’s answer stayed with him.

“God, use me for good.”

Over time, Jansen learned that Orman believed his years in prison could still serve a purpose. Many of the men entering the prison knew little about Jesus or how to live differently, he said. Orman believed he could help them.

“You have done an amazing job of finding purpose in a rather difficult situation,” Jansen remembered telling him.

But that sense of purpose came after profound trauma.

Orman told Jansen that when he was 12 years old, he encountered the body of a Black man hanging from a tree beneath a racist sign.

“I didn’t know it then, but I was traumatized,” Orman told him. “Do you understand now why I hated white people for many, many years?”

Yet decades later, Orman said he had learned to overcome that trauma.

“I now see that God is working through me,” he said, “and I’m just here to help other men find Jesus Christ.”

Jansen was stunned.

“You humble me,” he told him. “It’s astounding.”

For Jansen, Orman became an example of what forgiveness could look like when it was no longer an abstract religious idea.

“He’s like a hero to me,” Jansen said.

“God Speaks to Us in Our Joy, but He Shouts to Us in Our Pain”

Jansen later taught Forgiveness 101 inside a cramped prison cell.

The space measured roughly 10 feet by 11 feet. Ten men crowded inside.

Orman joined them, watching Jansen teach so he could eventually help lead the program himself.

Jansen divided the men into pairs and gave them four quotations. Their assignment was simple: discuss which quotation resonated most.

Three minutes later, the room was loud with conversation.

One prisoner raised his hand.

“Can I go first?”

He stood without being asked. His face was covered in tattoos.

“God speaks to us in our joy, but he shouts to us in our pain,” the man said.

Then he began telling his story.

“Eight years ago, I hit bottom.”

As the prisoner spoke, Jansen looked across the cell at Orman.

“This is what we have to do,” he thought. “We have to get them teaching the class.”

For Jansen, the moment reinforced a conviction that has shaped his ministry: the answer is often already present in the room.

His task is not simply to lecture people about forgiveness. It is to help wounded people recognize what God may already be doing in their lives.

The Problem Behind “Yeah, But”

Jansen believes unforgiveness remains widespread, even among practicing Christians.

During one Bible study visit, he asked six women who had been meeting weekly for four years to answer a question.

How many people were in their lives whom they had not forgiven?

Two said none.

Two said between one and four.

Two said four or more.

“Why do we allow a lack of forgiveness to be prevalent in our lives?” Jansen asked.

For men in particular, he believes one major obstacle is justice.

He illustrates the tension with a drawing: “forgiveness” written in cursive, separated from the word “justice.”

When people are invited to forgive, Jansen said, the response frequently begins the same way.

“Yeah, but.”

“You haven’t talked to your dad for six years,” he said as an example. “I invite you to make peace with your dad.”

The response comes quickly.

“Yeah, but you know what he said to me? You know what he said to me on my birthday six years ago?”

Jansen said justice itself is necessary.

“Justice is important. Justice is crucial,” he said. “If you don’t have justice in a society, how’s it going to get along?”

The problem comes when a demand for justice becomes the reason a person refuses forgiveness.

“It’s not right. They don’t deserve to be forgiven. It’s not fair,” Jansen said. “We’re grabbing hold of justice.”

Forgiveness, he said, requires something different.

“To forgive is a choice. It’s a heroic choice,” Jansen said. “And it’s a decision that leads to a habit that leads to a virtue.”

People who learn to forgive, he said, often become noticeably more peaceful.

Those who refuse can remain trapped in resentment and anger.

Hurt People Hurt People

Jansen did not originally set out to build a forgiveness ministry.

The work began after Father Tom, his spiritual adviser of 15 years and a priest he has known for three decades, challenged him with an assignment.

“We have a parish of 3,000 people,” the priest told him, “and half of the people have somebody not talking to somebody else in their family.”

He told Jansen to study forgiveness for a year.

Jansen was not enthusiastic.

“Father, the rectory is in need of painting and there’s a lot of dry rot,” he replied. “I’ll paint the rectory. I’ll be done in three weeks. Please don’t make me study forgiveness.”

But he did.

A year later, Jansen returned with three conclusions.

First, he said, people who forgive tend to be happier, more content and closer to Christ.

Second, he could not find an existing program that walked people through the common elements he repeatedly saw in successful forgiveness.

His third conclusion became foundational.

“It all has to do with pain and suffering,” Jansen said. “Hurt people hurt people.”

Before a person can move toward forgiveness, he said, the wound itself has to be confronted.

His framework is simple: acknowledge, own and process.

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Jansen said of suffering. “Everybody experiences suffering and pain.”

The danger comes when a person refuses to deal with it.

“You have to acknowledge, own and process the hurt, or the hurt owns you,” he said.

He has seen that pattern repeatedly in prison.

Jansen recalled speaking with a man incarcerated for child sexual abuse who eventually revealed that he himself had been sexually abused as a child.

“He didn’t process it, so he acted out his emotions,” Jansen said.

That does not excuse what the man later did. But it reinforced Jansen’s conviction that untreated wounds can shape future behavior.

“A lot of us men have to ask, what wounds do we have, especially with our dads?” he said.

Some men may need counseling. Others may begin with a trusted friend, spouse or mentor.

But secrecy, Jansen said, allows a wound to maintain its power.

“If you have a secret that you haven’t told anybody, that secret is controlling you.”

From Management to Surrender

Jansen spent the first seven years of his ministry trying to create what he called the perfect forgiveness class.

His background had trained him to manage.

He had spent 12 years teaching high school religion and coaching varsity soccer. He later ran a real estate office for three decades.

His instinct was to study harder, prepare more and control the outcome.

“I’ve got to come up with the perfect class,” he remembered thinking.

Eventually, he said, the Holy Spirit began breaking that instinct.

“The Holy Spirit slowly but surely — I say hit me in the head with a 2-by-4,” Jansen said. “Sometimes I don’t listen carefully.”

He began praying a short prayer.

“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. God, use me.”

The lesson that followed was uncomfortable.

“Shut up, Chuck. Just take notes.”

Jansen stopped trying to manufacture a flawless method and started paying attention to what wounded people were teaching him.

“If you steal from one, it’s called plagiarism,” he joked. “If you steal from 12, it’s called research.”

Over hundreds of encounters, he began seeing the same process.

First, acknowledge, own and process the pain.

Second, make the decision to forgive.

Third, surrender what remains to God.

Jansen summarizes that final step with another image.

“Where I put a period, God put a comma.”

A drunk driver killed my daughter. Period.

My father was an alcoholic and beat me. Period.

A business partner cheated me. Period.

Jansen said those wounds are real. But people can become so attached to their conclusions that they leave no room for God to continue the story.

“God is inviting us to have a comma,” he said.

That requires surrender.

“Get out of management and get into sales,” Jansen said. “Dear God, how can you use me for good?”

Why Men Struggle to Let Go

Jansen believes surrender can be especially difficult for men because men often want to fix problems.

“Don’t you think men want to fix things?” he asked. “A lot of times when we talk to our wives, they just want to be understood. But men, we want to fix things all the time.”

Forgiveness confronts that instinct because the past cannot always be repaired.

Some injustices cannot be undone.

Some relationships cannot be restored to what they were.

Some wounds remain painful even after a court case is finished or an offender is punished.

That is where surrender begins.

“‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord,” Jansen said. “The Lord’s going to take care of it.”

He often reminds Catholics that forgiveness is embedded in one of Christianity’s most familiar prayers.

“The Our Father is not a multiple choice,” Jansen said.

Christians pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

But Jansen said people often live as though the prayer means something closer to: Forgive us as we forgive most people — everyone except the one person who hurt us most.

“I Want What Allison Has”

For years, Jansen’s study of forgiveness was largely analytical.

Then he met the family of Mike Darby.

Darby, a well-known Kansas City business owner, was walking his dogs early one morning in 2017 when he was shot and killed.

A few months later, Jansen was teaching a one-night forgiveness class.

He stood at the back of the room welcoming people when Darby’s daughter, Allison, arrived with her mother.

“My God, I’ve out-punted my coverage,” Jansen remembered thinking.

Then he prayed.

“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. I don’t know what you’re going to say tonight, Jesus, but please work your magic through me.”

Something from the class connected with Allison.

They became friends.

Over the next four years, Jansen accompanied her through the painful process of forgiveness.

“You have to hold the hand of the wounded as you lead them to the freedom of forgiveness,” he said.

The phrase eventually became guidance he gave to other forgiveness facilitators.

“If you don’t hold their hand, people will not move off of that first step,” Jansen said. “How do I deal with my suffering and my pain? Somebody shot my dad. My poor kids won’t experience grandpa.”

Then came a moment Jansen still remembers.

He and his wife were sitting in church praying before Mass when a woman turned toward him.

“You don’t know me, but I’m Allison’s mother,” she said.

She thanked him for helping her daughter.

Then she said something else.

“I want what Allison has.”

Mercy for the Person You Do Not Want to Forgive

Working in prison forced Jansen to confront the limits of his own mercy.

When he first became a mentor, someone asked whether there was anyone he would struggle to work with.

Jansen prayed about it.

“I’m going to have a rough time working with somebody who had sex with a child,” he answered. “That’s a tough sin.”

The woman overseeing the program replied, “Chuck, you’re not the Lone Ranger.”

Jansen quickly discovered that even prisoners often isolate people convicted of abusing children.

But Christianity’s teaching on mercy forced him to examine his own judgment.

“Mercy teaches us that all sins are forgiven,” he said. “If you come to Christ and you’re sorry for your sins and you’re repentant, you can be forgiven.”

He does not pretend the questions are easy.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Jansen said. “This is a tough journey.”

His role, he concluded, is not to erase justice or pretend evil is harmless.

It is to encounter the person in front of him without appointing himself that person’s final judge.

“My job is to understand them, hold their hand and introduce them to Christ,” he said.

Justice Cannot Heal Every Wound

Near the end of the conversation, Jansen recalled another encounter.

He had spoken at an all-day men’s retreat when one participant approached him afterward.

The previous day, the man said, he had spent four and a half hours in court.

His granddaughter had been sexually abused.

The perpetrator had finally been caught, prosecuted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

The man returned home that night expecting something to feel different.

“The pain is still there,” he told Jansen.

He had spent years seeking justice, only to discover that justice had not healed the wound.

“I tried to get satisfaction through justice,” the man said. “You can’t. The pain won’t go away. It’s only through forgiveness that it’ll go away.”

He was not yet able to forgive the man who abused his granddaughter.

But Jansen’s presentation had given him something.

“At least I have a map now, Chuck, of where to go,” he said.

He planned to begin praying and moving in that direction.

For Jansen, that is what the ministry is meant to provide — not instant emotional resolution, but a path.

“Empty Me of Me. Fill Me With You.”

Jansen said one of the men who deeply shaped him is John O’Leary, whose childhood story of surviving burns over his entire body became the subject of the film “Soul on Fire.”

Jansen met O’Leary years ago through a real estate convention, before O’Leary became widely known as a speaker.

“John O’Leary lives Jesus Christ,” Jansen said. “He’s closer to Christ than most people ever realize.”

O’Leary also helped give Jansen the prayer that has become central to his ministry.

“Use me for good.”

Jansen has now spent years repeating it.

The prayer reflects the broader transformation he sees in his own life: away from controlling outcomes and toward trusting the Holy Spirit.

“Don’t be married to an outcome,” Jansen said. “Don’t think that Dominic is all the world or Chuck is all the world, that I’m going to do this. I’m going to just kind of be the vehicle in which the Holy Spirit uses to bring something about.”

That does not mean doing nothing.

“When you pray, move your feet,” he said.

Jansen continues taking forgiveness programs into prisons, churches and retirement communities. His Forgiveness Institute now includes facilitators around the country, along with online courses and resources through yebut.org.

But he insists the ministry does not ultimately belong to him.

When people praise its growth, his response is simple.

“Isn’t God wonderful?”

Getting Out of Our Own Prisons

Jansen believes some people live behind prison walls without ever entering a correctional facility.

They remain imprisoned by resentment.

“Half the people in America have no trouble forgiving and they’re free,” he said. “The people who hang on to resentment and anger and justice and ‘it’s not right,’ they’re living in their own prison.”

The freedom he describes does not require denying evil, abandoning justice or pretending wounds no longer hurt.

It begins with acknowledging the wound.

Owning it.

Processing it.

Choosing forgiveness.

And surrendering what cannot be controlled.

Jansen said he hopes men will begin by asking God to create peace within them.

“Help me forgive everybody in my life,” he said. “Let me be an instrument of peace where I’ll hold the hand of the wounded.”

And then return to the prayer he has learned to repeat when control, anger or judgment begins taking over again.

“Empty me of me. Fill me with you. Use me for good.”

For Paul George, the challenge facing Catholic men is not simply that too many have stopped going to church or stepped away from spiritual leadership.

It is that many men have forgotten that holiness and masculinity belong together.

George, a husband, father, author and speaker from Lafayette, Louisiana, joined Tom Hornichek and Dean Patterson on Men Answering the Heroic Call to discuss the ideas behind his book, Holy Grit, and the search many men are making for purpose.

“The genesis of the book is a heart and a desire to help men connect their own desire to know God and yet their own authenticity to be masculine and to be fully human in their masculinity,” George said.

Too often, he said, faith is treated as something separate from manhood.

“We’re not a man over here and then we live a faith over here,” George said.

Instead, Holy Grit argues that God created men both for holiness and for difficult things.

“God created us to be men of faith, to be holy, yet not exempt of our masculinity,” George said. “We have grit. We’re built to have virtue and to do hard things.”

For George, a man begins discovering his purpose when those two realities meet.

“Our greatest purpose in our life is when we merge those two things together — our faith and our grit together.”

Why Men Retreat

George pointed to several reasons men can become disconnected from the faith, including broken families, absent examples of faithful fatherhood and a lack of mentorship.

“A lot of men, young boys, come from broken homes, maybe not a father who lived their faith and kind of showed them how to live that faith,” George said. “And so they’ve kind of been sent out into the world just isolated, alone, trying to figure it out.”

Men need more than instruction, he said. They need other men close enough to watch.

“The way Jesus taught was not just from the pulpit,” George said. “He rubbed elbows with his disciples. He walked with them. He taught them by the way he lived and acted and lived out his faith and virtue.”

That model matters because men often learn through participation and example.

“Men learn hands-on,” George said. “They learn by doing. They learn by being with other men.”

Without strong examples, men will still look for something to imitate.

“If I’m around a bunch of men who don’t live their faith and live sinful lives, I’m more apt as a man to kind of learn that behavior,” George said.

The deeper problem, he said, is not that men lack a desire for meaning.

“Man’s desire to find purpose is at the core of his heart,” George said. “They don’t always find it in the right places.”

The Fear of Going All In

One of the themes of Holy Grit is the danger of allowing the bare minimum to become the standard for Christian life.

George believes fear often keeps men standing at the edge of a deeper relationship with Christ.

“There is a certain fear in men of like, what would happen to my life if I just totally went all in with Jesus and my faith?” George said. “What would I have to let go of and leave behind?”

The irony, he said, is that men often become most alive when confronting fear.

“I think men come most alive in conquering and overcoming fear,” George said.

But in faith, that same man may hesitate.

“When it comes to faith, it’s sort of like, if I go all in, what does that look like?” he said. “So men kind of stand on the edge oftentimes and just do the bare minimum.”

That hesitation can have consequences inside the home.

“When a man doesn’t take his rightful place as a spiritual leader, what ends up happening is usually the wife or the girlfriend takes the place spiritually, kind of takes the lead,” George said.

The man then begins retreating further.

“Men, I’ll use this word, feel inadequate,” George said. “And when a man feels inadequate, he kind of retreats back and pulls back instead of taking the lead.”

Saints Were Real Men

George did not grow up immersed in Catholic devotional life.

He was baptized Catholic, but his parents divorced when he was young and his family stopped attending church. He said he knew little about the saints, Mary or the rosary.

That changed through his own conversion.

As he studied the saints, George became convinced that their humanity makes them especially important models for men.

“The thing that I think is most interesting is that they were human,” George said. “They’re not divine. They’re just like you and I.”

The saints struggled, suffered and grew.

“They grew up. They had original sin. They had a life of suffering, pain, joy, conversion,” George said.

In Holy Grit, George intentionally tells the stories of male saints in a way designed to make their lives recognizable.

“What was their story like growing up? What was their conversion like? What did their life look like once they really kind of gave their life to Christ?” George said.

He also deliberately included married saints.

“I tried to find married saints as well just to make it more relatable to men,” he said.

The point is not to make saints less heroic, but to remind men that sanctity was lived by actual human beings.

“They’re not mythical characters,” George said. “They’re real people.”

Men Will Search Until They Find the Answer

George believes every man carries a desire for peace, joy and purpose.

“I’ve never met a guy, young guy or old guy, who says, ‘I just want to be a horrible human being. I just want to do horrible things,’” George said.

“There’s a deep desire for purpose.”

The question becomes where a man searches for it.

“We are seekers and hunters and gatherers, and we will seek to discover what it is inside of us that is aching,” George said.

That search can lead through careers, sports, hobbies, relationships and countless other pursuits.

“We will do that with work and sports and hobbies and women and whatever things that can just satisfy this deep longing in our heart,” George said. “And the search is endless. It will keep going until we find the answer to it.”

For George, the turning point is an encounter with Christ.

“When men finally do find the Lord, they encounter Christ, just like you did, I did, it opens up this, ‘I finally found the answer. I finally found what I was looking for,’” he said.

But conversion is not the conclusion.

“It begins a journey and a path of discovery that is really the greatest adventure of all time.”

Virtue Without Christ Is Not Enough

George said he is encouraged by what he sees happening among Catholic men.

Through conferences, retreats, parishes and men’s groups, he sees men beginning to understand their vocation and responsibility.

“Men are really just stepping up and having real encounters,” George said.

But he cautioned against reducing the solution to self-improvement.

“If we’re just living a life of virtue without Christ, we eventually end up on this road of self-sufficiency,” George said. “I can do all things on my own instead of all things through Christ who gives me strength.”

George said his own life has repeatedly shown him the limits of self-reliance.

“When I try to do things on my own, I end up failing pretty bad,” he said.

The result can be exhaustion in marriage, fatherhood and work.

“When we don’t rest in Jesus and we’re constantly going, we end up relying on ourselves a little too much.”

The Enemy Wants Men Alone

George strongly believes that sustained brotherhood must follow moments of spiritual inspiration.

“We are who we hang out with,” he said. “That has a real effect on us.”

He has seen that principle play out across generations.

Recently, he joined a men’s group in Michigan using Holy Grit, spoke by video with a college-age group studying the book and received an invitation from a small group of high school boys.

“To me, that is amazing,” George said. “Cross-generational, just seeing men desiring to be together and journey together and know that they need each other is extremely important.”

There is also a spiritual battle behind that need, he said.

“The enemy seeks to isolate us,” George said. “That’s one of his greatest tactics.”

Isolation takes many forms.

“Isolation can be, yeah, I’m living in sin. Isolation could just be I’m detached from good relationships. Isolation can be I’m lonely. Isolation could be I’m just living mediocre, apathetic. I’m not fully engaging.”

A man does not have to completely leave the faith to become vulnerable.

“As long as we’re sort of just a little bit away from the flock, that’s where the enemy wants us,” George said.

The image of the Good Shepherd, he said, offers the answer.

“It’s not only to save that one, but it’s to bring it back into the flock where it’s safe — where it’s together with the others.”

Christ Does Not Erase Suffering

Coming to Christ did not remove the pain from George’s life.

His parents’ divorce and other wounds remained part of his story.

“What I didn’t realize is some of the suffering, maybe pain, trauma, wounds that I’ve experienced in my life were undealt with,” George said.

Christ begins bringing those wounds into the light.

“Jesus says, ‘I’m the light of the world.’ I’ve come to bring light into the darkness,” George said. “Shine the light on places in our hearts that need healing, restoration.”

One misconception, he said, is that faith will make suffering disappear.

“The myth is if I come into my faith or relationship with Christ, all my troubles and sufferings will go away,” George said. “But the reality is all our sufferings begin to make sense because of the cross.”

The suffering remains, but now it has somewhere to go.

“I have a place to bring my sufferings, my pain,” George said.

That is one reason the crucifix remains so important to Catholic life.

“Although Jesus rose from the dead, we’re reminded of the crucifixion because our sufferings don’t go away,” he said.

Christ does not pretend that his followers will never hurt.

“All of us can relate to pain and suffering in our life, and we have healing through Jesus. We have purpose in that.”

Nothing Is Lost in Christ

George recalled a lesson from his spiritual director, Father Bob Usilio, that became central to his understanding of suffering and regret.

“With God, nothing is lost. It’s all for gain,” George said. “God uses everything for our good.”

George used to replay his own life through a series of “what ifs.”

“If my parents wouldn’t have gotten divorced and I wouldn’t have experienced this broken family, I would be much better off,” George recalled thinking.

Then came the other regrets — choices, mistakes and relationships he wished had unfolded differently.

His spiritual director continued pointing him away from regret.

“The Lord takes all that and uses it for your good,” George recalled him saying.

George said men must understand that their past does not place them outside the reach of redemption.

“No matter where they are in their life right now, nothing that they’ve done up to this point can keep God from redeeming them and using their whole story for his purpose.”

St. Joseph and the Discipline of Waiting

Holiness, George said, also requires patience — something he readily admits does not come naturally to him.

“I’m not a very patient person,” he said. “I love things very immediately.”

That is one reason St. Joseph has become such an important example.

George focused on Joseph not simply as a saint, but as a husband and father who repeatedly obeyed God without receiving the entire plan in advance.

“God speaks to him in his dreams and through angels, and Joseph is obedient,” George said. “That’s a virtue. Do what God asks you to do.”

When Joseph was told to take Mary and Jesus into Egypt, he was not given a detailed timeline.

“Joseph just gets up and goes and does the next thing that God asks him to do,” George said.

For men who want certainty about careers, finances, marriages and the future, Joseph offers another model.

“There’s times and seasons of waiting, of patience, of just doing what God asked me to do today and trusting that when the Lord wants me to do something else, he will open the door and he’ll let me know,” George said.

Even seasons that feel unproductive may be formative.

“If I’m in a season of waiting, I’m in a season of suffering, if I’m in a season of, man, I need a job change, I need a breakthrough financially, I need a breakthrough in my marriage — sometimes that season of waiting is exactly the season that God wants to teach us something, prepare us for the next step.”

Mentorship Is Simpler Than Men Think

Men often complicate the idea of mentorship, George said.

They imagine that being a mentor requires a formal program, special expertise or the perfect words.

“I think in reality, put yourself out there to rub elbows with other men and we learn from each other,” George said.

Some of the most important lessons he has received from other men came through observation.

“I’ve learned a lot through just watching godly men — just how they act, just how they live, how they communicate,” he said. “I didn’t really ask them questions. I just was around them.”

Years ago, George and his wife, Gretchen, regularly opened their home to college students and young adults for Bible studies.

Years later, George met one of those young men again while traveling to Virginia.

The man thanked him.

George assumed he was referring to the Bible studies.

He was not.

“The thing that I appreciate the most and I learned the most is just being around you and your family,” George recalled the man saying.

The young man told George he had watched how the family lived and interacted.

“It was the first time I ever saw a family, and it gave me a deep desire to be a husband and a father,” George recalled him saying.

George joked that none of his teaching had apparently registered.

“He’s like, ‘No, I really didn’t pay attention. I didn’t pay attention to the Bible studies. I was just observing how y’all lived life.’”

For George, the story captures something fundamental about evangelization.

“What does it mean to live a life for Christ?” he said. “That’s sort of the missing thing.”

The answer may be less complicated than Catholics sometimes make it.

“Let’s just live life together with Christ,” George said. “And in that, we really learn the art of living, what it means to fully live.”

The Evangelizing Power of an Open Door

That kind of mentorship naturally leads to hospitality.

George pointed to the life of Christ as a model.

“If you look at even the Holy Family, the manger was open to the public,” he said.

The same pattern continued throughout Jesus’ ministry.

At the wedding feast at Cana, Jesus was simply present among people.

“That sense of just authentic love of the human person is what Christ does,” George said. “And that’s what opens up a person to receive the Gospel oftentimes.”

Hospitality does not require turning every gathering into a sermon.

Sometimes it begins by opening a house, sharing dinner, lighting a fire or sitting with neighbors.

The relationship creates space for something deeper.

Wives Can Encourage Without Shaming

George also addressed the difficult situation of a wife who desires a stronger spiritual life for her husband.

There is a role for women in encouraging men toward faith and brotherhood, he said, but the approach matters.

“When a wife is wanting her husband to really come around to the faith, a lot of times in her own hurt or frustration, she can really be accusatory or shaming her husband,” George said.

Statements such as “You’re not a spiritual leader” may contain a real concern, but George said they can produce the opposite result.

“What that does is it rejects the man and the man pushes further and further away,” he said.

Instead, he encourages wives to pray and encourage.

“Just be someone who is an encourager for them,” George said.

Encourage him to attend church. Encourage him to try a retreat. Encourage him to join a men’s group.

“Don’t shame them or accuse them or reject them,” George said. “When you leave the door open, I think eventually it just really opens the man’s heart.”

A Husband’s First Mission Field

For married men, George said the first responsibility after loving God is not career, ministry or even children.

It is their wife.

“Your first priority and vocation is to your wife — to love her,” George said.

He encouraged men to lean intentionally into that relationship.

“The more that you can lean into that and love your wife unconditionally, the more that her heart softens,” George said.

He described a wife’s desire as being seen, loved and known.

“When that begins to happen by the love of her husband, she begins to receive her husband in a way that she’s never received him before and then therefore encourages him to be fully who he is.”

Men can easily get the priorities backward.

“I’m going to love my kids, my work. I’m going to provide,” George said.

But children eventually leave home.

“One day your kids are all going to be gone out of the house and you two are going to be staring at each other,” he said.

That reality makes the marriage itself essential.

“At the end of our life I think what we’ll be remembered for the most is how we love the people in our home,” George said. “How we sacrificed and loved those people first.”

Career achievements eventually fade.

“We’re so replaceable,” George said.

Then he made the distinction.

“Where we’re not replaceable is in the family.”

There Is No Retirement From Purpose

George believes that message is especially urgent for older men.

Retirement can create a dangerous vacuum when a man’s identity has been built primarily around his work.

“One of the saddest things that I come across are men who are close to retirement age or in retirement who have no purpose,” George said.

His message to them is simple.

“You have purpose until your last breath.”

Decades of experience are not meant to disappear when a career ends.

“How is the Lord asking you to use your life, all your wisdom of your whole life, to give back to the world until you have nothing left?” George asked.

That could mean serving a parish, mentoring younger men, joining a men’s group or finding another way to give.

“There’s so much to be done in the world,” he said.

A Christian man, George said, does not expire when his professional usefulness ends.

His vocation continues.

Take the Leap

Near the end of the conversation, George returned to the basic message behind Holy Grit.

Men do not need to have everything figured out before moving closer to Christ.

They need to move.

“Just take the leap into your faith,” George said. “God’s got great plans for you.”

The path will require patience.

It will include suffering.

It will demand relationships, sacrifice and courage.

It may force a man to confront the places where he feels inadequate and the failures he would rather forget.

But for George, that is precisely where holy grit begins.

God does not ask men to abandon the strength, courage, competitiveness or desire for purpose he placed within them.

He asks them to surrender those things to Christ and allow them to be transformed.

Holiness and grit were never meant to be enemies.

They were meant to become one life.

Faith on the Open Road

Where does one begin when reflecting on a week and a half of riding (so far), prayer, brotherhood, and the breathtaking beauty of God’s creation?

An Unexpected Beginning

Our journey began with an unexpected delay. Bishop Scott was awakened at 4:00 a.m. with news that the Canadian Armed Forces had issued a document directing chaplains and military personnel to take a secular humanist approach in public-event reflections, excluding references to God. The bishop spent the morning working with his counterparts across Canada to discern an appropriate response, and we eventually departed about three hours later than planned.

That delay, however, became part of God’s providence. Later that day, we stopped at the cabin of one of our board members. There, together with his family, we celebrated Mass and shared the Eucharist. They then welcomed us to lunch. It was a beautiful gift—and a powerful reminder that the road is made richer by the people God places along it.

The Mass Gave Meaning to Every Mile

As we continued along the road less travelled, winding through beautiful landscapes, we celebrated daily Mass. Day after day, the responses became more unified. Even with my singing, our voices began to sound like a genuine offering of worship to our holy God. The Mass gave shape and meaning to every mile.

We spent two nights at a vineyard, where we were reunited with a man I had met at the Kelowna men’s conference. He had hoped that his son would be with him at the conference, but illness had prevented him from attending. It was a blessing to spend time with them again and to celebrate Mass at their vineyard.

A Rooster Crowed During Mass

There, the words of the liturgy seemed to come alive with the words fruit of the earth and work of human hands was present right before us. As Mass was being celebrated, a rooster crowed in the distance. I could not help but think of Peter—and of the many times I have denied or failed Jesus. Yet Christ continues to come to me, offering Himself even though I am unworthy to have Him enter under my roof.

Through Smoke, Mountains, and 99 Miles of Curves

Our ride continued through some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable. We passed through winding roads and wine country, making our way toward Hope, British Columbia, where First Blood, the original Rambo film, was shot. Although we were able to avoid the fires, smoke surrounded us for much of the journey.

We then travelled through the Cascade Mountains of Washington, along some of the most beautiful roads a rider could experience, before arriving at Palouse Falls. A recent fire had passed through the area, leaving behind a landscape that looked almost post-apocalyptic. The following day, we rode the Lolo Pass, with more than 99 miles of curves and some of the most extraordinary scenery on the road.

You Never Know What’s Around the Next Bend

All those curves and corners brought a deeper reflection on life. We never know what is waiting around the next bend. The road can change quickly, and the future is often hidden from view. Yet riding with brothers who have your back gives new meaning to the promise: no man left behind.

If one rider has a problem, the entire group has a problem. He is not left alone. The same must be true in the journey of faith. Every man needs brothers who will stand with him, support him, pray for him, and help him keep moving forward.

RECOMMENDED READING

FEATURE

The Gift of Genuine Brotherhood

The trip included slow traffic, construction, delays, gravel roads, and unexpected challenges. But every delay was easier because we were travelling with men who cared for one another and watched over one another. That is the gift of genuine brotherhood.

Carrying Your Prayers Across the Mountains

One of the great highlights of this journey has been carrying your prayer intentions with us. We have also gathered new intentions along the way by speaking with waitresses, fellow travellers, and the people we meet, praying for all those affected by fires; evacuees and those facing loss of home and means to make a living. When given the opportunity, people are eager to share what they would like us to bring before God.

Each day, we offer these intentions at Mass. It is a powerful experience to know that your prayers are being carried across the highways and mountain passes and placed before the Lord at the altar. We have also been praying rosaries and the St Joseph, Terror of Demons - DECEM Novena, asking his protection and intercession for all these intentions.

Keep Your Eyes on Jesus

Recently, two Scripture passages have accompanied our journey. One reminds us that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. The other recounts Peter stepping out of the boat to walk toward Jesus—and then beginning to sink when he took his eyes off the Lord.

These readings speak directly to the road of life. We do not know what lies around the next corner. We cannot control every delay, danger, or unexpected turn. But we can choose where we place our trust.

Have faith that the Lord loves you, protects you, and watches over you. And have faith in the strength that comes from travelling with brothers who are committed to walking—and riding—the journey with you.

The Heroic Men Pledge

That is why we invite every man to take the Heroic Men pledge:

Every day, I will pray to draw closer to God and lift up three men by name.

Every week, I will connect with one man.

Every month, I will invite one man to join me in this pledge.

This is how brotherhood grows. This is how men are strengthened. This is how no man is left behind.

Trust Him Around Every Corner

As we continue down life’s winding road, may we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, trust Him around every corner, and remain faithful to the brothers He has placed beside us.

Prayer Request on Motorcycle Ride

From July 30 to August 18, a segment of our team will traverse thousands of miles on motorcycles through Western Canada and the western United States. We would be grateful to carry your prayer intentions with us.

Please send us your requests, and we will lift them in daily Mass with Bishop Scott McCaig and Fr. Mariusz, praying rosaries as we ride along the open road.

Share my prayer request

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