Deacon Eric Paige
Director of Deacon Services, Archdiocese of Seattle

“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ”

“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”

(Romans 13:14)

The Mile That Almost Broke Me

After my first wrestling season in High School, I discovered I needed to boost my endurance. So I resolved to go to the track and run at least three miles each day over summer break. The track at my old Junior High a mile away and the route there was partially downhill so that wasn’t hard. Running that mile back wasn’t a problem either.

There was proximate motivation. I would be running home where there would be food. No, my problem was the mile in the middle. Running around the track over and over again, my mind kept devising justifications to cut the run short and the more I thought about quitting, the harder it was to keep going.

The Trick That Changed Everything

One day, however, I discovered something that helped: reverse procrastination. When I got tired, I would tell myself that I would just finish the particular lap that I was running, promising myself, ‘when I got to the gate that leads to the route home, then I will stop running.’

Then, when I got to the gate, I would tell myself, ‘let’s just do one more lap. Then, we can quit.’ As soon as the gate was out of view, I could renew the self-deception. Using this ‘reverse procrastination’ method, I was able to keep at the running until my endurance improved and I found I enjoyed it.

St. Paul Was Teaching This Long Before Me

This was no original discovery on my part. St. Paul thought of this method long ago. In his letter to the Romans he tells them to “put on Christ and make no provision for the sins of the flesh” (Romans 13:14) St. Paul knew that Rome offered his friends many temptations.

Living a Christian life there was like a long distance race. These new Christians would have to ignore the voice of doubt telling them ‘this is too hard, the race is too long, let’s quit today, maybe we can try again tomorrow.’

St. Paul ‘flipped the script’ on this temptation telling the Romans to use their own version of reverse procrastination by making “no provisions for the sins of the flesh.”

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How Reverse Procrastination Defeats Sin

To defeat gluttony, the sinner simply neglects to buy that piece of cake while they are at the store telling themselves, ‘if I really need it, I can just come always come back later.’ Then, when tempted at home, they procrastinate getting the cake by saying ‘it’s such a hassle going to the store, I will just have some fruit tonight. There will always be cake tomorrow.’

Then, when tomorrow comes, the sinner can once again defer gratification knowing they can always misbehave the next day.

Like our wrestling coach who, after we had done what felt like a million pushups at practice would yell, ‘just ten more’ only to yell ‘just 5 more’ after we had done the ten and then ‘just five more’ after we had done that five, St. Paul was leading these new Christians into lives of virtue with repeated small commitments until virtue came naturally.

Why This Matters More Than Ever Today

In a time when smart phones make distraction, overspending and other sins a continual temptation, St. Paul’s ‘reverse procrastination’ technique can be invaluable. We can delete the distracting game from our phone and tell ourselves, if I ever need to play it, I can always reload it.

But today I will do my homework and visit my friends. If going to Mass on Sunday seems like a hassle, we can just tell ourselves ‘I’ll go today, if it’s really too burdensome, I can always skip next week.’ If we are mad at our brother or sister and we really want to tell them off, we can just tell ourselves ‘I will let it go today.

I can always lose my patience some other time.’

Small Decisions Become Lasting Virtue

Of course, this method is just one tool among many to live a virtuous life. But it can sometimes be very helpful. St. Paul’s ingeniously uses it knowing that virtue is more habit forming than sin.

Our Lord designed us to live in grace and will help us to so. When those voices of doubt and fear tell us ‘a life of virtue is too hard, the race is too long’ we can take St.

Paul’s advice neglecting the bad while attending to the good.

Deacon Eric Paige
Director of Deacon Services, Archdiocese of Seattle

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On Heroic Hotline, host Sean Lynn welcomed Dominic de Souza, the creative voice behind much of Heroic Men’s visual identity and messaging, for a conversation about Catholic masculinity, story, evangelization and the next seven years of mission.

De Souza described himself as a younger man looking toward the “gray beards” around him for wisdom.

“I’m a young man, kind of walking in your footsteps, Sean, looking to the gray beards around us for how to get through life, how to pass the torch without fumbling,” he said. “When I learned of the chance to work with Heroic Men, I liked the vision.”

That vision, he said, is ambitious by design. “We’re trying to tackle solving a continental crisis for an era of the church. I love the idea that we can try to make a dent in the universe, our own dent, do something good.”

Lynn connected that urgency to a broader Catholic focus on 2033, including PAC27 and other efforts preparing for the anniversary of the Resurrection.

“Our lane is men,” Lynn said. “As I explained to the men at my men’s conference, it’s probably the toughest lane to be in.”

Lynn said youth can often be easier to reach because their hearts are still being formed, while men may carry “a crust on them.” But he said the command of Christ was comprehensive.

“Jesus didn’t say evangelize the easy people,” Lynn said. “He said all nations. And that includes men.”

“This is a once in a millennia event for the men who get to experience this jubilee, that won’t come around again for another thousand years,” De Souza said. “So what kind of world are we leaving for the future? What kind of world am I leaving for my child? What kind of world are we leaving for the next generation?”

He said the present moment demands movement.

“What kind of men are we going to be walking up to that Jubilee?” De Souza said. “We’ve got seven years to figure it out. We know right now that it can’t stay the way it is. We’ve got to do something.”

We need a better story. De Souza said his own instinct is to approach the crisis through storytelling.

When he looks at the current cultural crisis, he said, one need seems clear.

“We need a better story,” De Souza said. “We need better stories to live in... If we’re going to get Western culture back on any sort of track, we need a better story, which means a goal and a plan on how to overcome obstacles so we can get to that goal,” De Souza said. “Can we unify ourselves around that?

Heroic Men has an epic story here,” De Souza said. “We routinely think men don’t get involved in stuff because it’s hard. But if something’s astronomically hard or busy, that focus that we’ve got can be a good thing. It keeps us in our lane. It keeps us serving the people who matter most.”

Good men, he said, often have little margin. Their time is tied to family, work and obligations. That makes clarity essential.

“They’re not going to change and risk everything they have for some interesting ad in the newspaper or somebody who’s really passionate on a podcast,” De Souza said. “It’s got to be a cohesive story. There’s got to be a plan and a clear outcome for them to get involved. If you can tell a better story, we’ll line up for it.”

Lynn said the organization hopes its shows and videos can act like a modern call to mission.

“Our hope is not that we’re merely creating something for guys to listen to,” Lynn said. “We want it to be that Shackleton advertisement in the newspaper that called men to that mission and to that adventure.”

De Souza said stories from other men help prove the call is real.

“If you’re trying to inspire or call someone or challenge someone to something, you need a bunch of other stories that prove it’s not only smoke,” De Souza said.

De Souza said Heroic Men has recently returned to its simplest and clearest identity.

“We’ve been testing and trying all kinds of things over the last many years, trying to figure out what people need from us, what we want to do, how we can be the most helpful,” he said. “I think we came back to the idea that we need to stay stuck on heroic and heroic masculinity, heroic men. These need to be our core ideas.”

The central questions, he said, are basic but demanding.

“What does it mean to be a hero?” De Souza said. “And what does it mean to be a man? Let’s have a lot of conversation around that because I think the culture, inside or outside the church, doesn’t know what to do with that conversation.”

What do heroes do? “First of all, it’s showing up and doing the thing that you’re called to do, no matter what happens,” de Souza said. “That’s what good men take pride in doing. That is our honor, to show up and sacrifice and do the thing that we’re called to do, so others can depend on you. Your word is your bond.”

But Heroic Men, he said, is plural for a reason. “Our brand is not like heroic man,” De Souza said. “It’s Heroic Men, which is an important clue.”

He pointed to films such as “Gladiator” and “The Last Samurai” as examples of the heroic pattern of men in teams, brotherhoods and groups.

“They work together,” he said. “You have a shield wall. You have a brotherhood. You build each other up because you can’t go it alone. You go it alone, you end up with a face full of arrows. You go with a brotherhood, you can make the shield wall, and you survive longer.”

That vision, he said, leads to the need for a shared identity and shared practices.

“We need to fix our country,” De Souza said. “We need to help men. We’ve got to reach out and empower all men everywhere. We need a shared identity. And what does that mean? It means we do similar things together.”

The starting point, he said, should be higher than a fitness challenge or political checklist.

“Why don’t we start with prayer?” De Souza said. “And what if the prayer that we start with is not about you? What if you start with returning to prayer for the men you care most about? Pick five, pick three. And you’re going to commit to that every day, whether you tell them that or not.”

The goal, he said, is to move men from prayer toward friendship, and from friendship toward brotherhood.

“At some point, you’ll invite them to join you in some kind of brotherhood, some kind of friendship or an actual get together at your local parish,” De Souza said. “That’s when we decided we’re not starting Heroic Men groups. We need to help other men start all the groups they want to do. Then we’ll train and certify and inspire them and give them the content to make all that easier.”

You are called, you matter, you belong. Lynn said De Souza’s words echoed the motto adopted by his diocese: “You are called, you matter, you belong.”

“That’s what we’re trying to message men,” Lynn said. “You talked about them feeling like they don’t matter and don’t belong, and yet they are loved by God and chosen for a mission... So many think they’re afraid to do it because they don’t think they have the tools,” Lynn said. “They do. They need to be encouraged.”

That, he said, is one reason de Souza values Heroic Men’s approach.

“It starts with prayer and then tries to invite men into conversations and coffee and friendship,” De Souza said. “If you’re starting a men’s group, start with maybe beer and axe throwing, or maybe a movie night. Do something that makes men feel good about being men, because it is good to be a man.”

Father Larry Richards opened a new season of Heroic Hotline with the bluntness that has made him a longtime voice in Catholic men’s ministry.

Richards, spiritual advisor for Heroic Men, said modern men still respond to challenge, discipline and direct correction when it comes from love.

“I thought Jesus was love,” Richards said. “And he is. And sometimes love is a kick in the butt.”

Richards said men often misunderstand discipline as harshness, when the Christian life demands formation, correction and sacrifice. He pointed to Hebrews 12, saying God chastises those he loves because he wants them to become holy.

“Sometimes to be holy, it’s a gentle thing,” he said. “It’s a thing that, OK, if this is what God wants of me and he’s going to challenge me, then I got to do it.”

Heroism begins with laying down life

For Richards, the word “heroic” has little to do with displays of strength or conquest. He said a heroic man gives himself away.

“A heroic man is one who gives up their life for others,” Richards said. “A hero is usually very humble, knows he could die, knows that life is about giving away your life for other people.”

That sacrifice, he said, begins at home.

Most men, Richards said, would imagine themselves ready to take a bullet for their wife or children. Fewer are ready to die to themselves in daily moments of service.

“The two of you are sitting in the living room and you’re watching TV,” he said. “You take that remote control and you hand it to her and say, ‘We’ll watch anything you want to watch.’ You died for your wife. That was heroic.”

Richards said a man cannot claim heroic leadership while refusing prayer, Mass, service or love for his own family.

“The main job of any man is to be the leader,” he said. “And the leader is one who serves.”

Jesus as the model of authentic masculinity

Asked how he would define authentic masculinity, Richards answered with one name: Jesus.

“God comes and shows us what it is to be a man,” Richards said. “If we’re going to be authentic men, the more we are like Jesus, the more authentic we are. The less we are like Jesus, the less authentic we are.”

He said Jesus revealed masculine strength through the cross, humility, service and concern for the poor. Christ washed feet, challenged the Pharisees, defended the condemned and refused worldly power.

“Jesus Christ came to tell us what a man is and to show us what a man means,” Richards said.

Richards contrasted King David and Christ, saying David represents a more natural form of manhood, with courage, strength and sin mixed together. Jesus raises manhood into supernatural love.

“Am I more like David or am I more like Jesus?” Richards said. “I better be more like Jesus.”

Sons before soldiers

Richards said Christian manhood begins when a man hears the Father speak his identity over him.

He pointed to Jesus’ baptism, when the Father says, “You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

“If it began that way with Jesus, it must begin that way with us,” Richards said. “We in our prayer and our walk with the Lord must hear God the Father look at us and say, ‘You are my son whom I love.’”

Men often define themselves by sin, failure or shame, he said. God defines them by sonship.

“God the Father knows our sin, but he calls us by our name,” Richards said. “The devil knows our name and he calls us by our sin.”

That identity, he said, undercuts pride, which Richards called the core sin of men.

Support priests, encourage vocations

Richards also called Catholic men to support priests rather than judge them from a distance.

“Jesus sent them out two by two,” he said. “He didn’t send any lone rangers out.”

Priests need friendship, encouragement and honest support, Richards said. Men can begin with simple gestures, such as inviting a priest out for a beer.

“Once a priest knows he’s loved by his people, he will listen to his people more,” Richards said.

He said a priest who loves his people and his priesthood becomes a living invitation to younger men. Vocations grow through stability, relationship and visible joy.

“A priest isn’t an employee,” Richards said. “A priest is a father. You don’t get a new father every six or 12 years.”

Richards said he has urged boys and young men across 37 years of priesthood to consider the priesthood.

“Be a priest, be a priest, be a priest,” he said. “There’s got to be from the priests themselves the encouragement that this is a great life.”

The call to holiness

Richards said every Christian faces one ultimate call: become a saint.

“Be a saint,” he said. “God bless. Or go to hell. That’s the only option we have. We become saints or we go to hell.”

Holiness, Richards said, is far from religious performance. It means uniting the human will with the will of God.

“Holiness is when God’s will and our will become one,” he said. “I have one purpose in life: to go to heaven, to be a saint.”

He urged men to begin each morning with Scripture before the demands of the day take hold.

“You go to God and say, ‘What do you want me to start this day with?’” Richards said. “Now you’ve started by listening to God, not the world, not the flesh, not the devil.”

For Richards, that daily surrender is where authentic masculinity begins: a man who lets the Father name him, lets Christ form him, and gives his life away in love.

The leader-to-leader gathering delivered roundtable strategy, ministry resources, filmed presentations, brotherhood and the launch of the Million Man Pledge.

Heroic Men built the convocation around a clear goal: gather Catholic men’s ministry leaders as participants, give them room to work together, capture the strongest ideas, and send them home with tools to multiply the mission.

The gathering became a working brotherhood where brief talks, breakout conversations, Mass, adoration, meals, ministry presentations, prayer and late-night fellowship gave men something many said they needed: honest relationships with other men carrying the same mission.

The convocation also gave leaders practical outcomes they could use immediately.

Leaders compared ministry models. They wrestled with common problems in formation, growth, retention, leadership pipelines, parish engagement, diocesan expansion, fundraising, conferences, speakers, pornography, ministry gaps and reaching younger men.

Ministries presented their missions. Heroic Men filmed sessions. The team captured presentations. Leaders left with recorded assets, stronger relationships, practical ideas and a clearer sense that they belonged to a wider alliance rather than carrying their work alone.

The weekend also launched the Million Man Pledge, giving the convocation a concrete next move: bring the pledge to Catholic men’s conferences, parishes and dioceses across North America.

A Gathering Built for Men Who Lead

Robert Tunmire, co-founder of Heroic Men, said he had reflected on the weekend and came away convinced that the workshop model carried the event.

“I think this was the strongest of all the conferences that we have done,” Tunmire said. “I was reflecting on it. The personal workshop focus is really the right approach.”

Heroic Men designed the convocation for leaders rather than spectators.

Men came from national ministries, regional conferences, dioceses, local groups and alliance partners. Each brought his own experience, problems, questions and hopes for strengthening Catholic men.

Roundtables, Breakouts and Practical Work.

The structure of the weekend gave men several ways to engage.

Brief talks kept the main sessions focused. Breakouts let leaders choose the conversations that matched their own work. Roundtables gave men a chance to speak face to face instead of sitting in rows as an audience.

“The talks were brief,” Tunmire said. “So it was a lot of activity. And then the breakout sessions gave guys a chance to pick to go hear what they thought was important to them. And we gave a lot of time for social time, where they could really gather in community. I mean, we had to really herd them back in.”

A Platform for Ministries

The ministry presentation format gave the convocation one of its most practical benefits.

Each ministry had space to explain its mission, show how it serves Catholic men, and connect its work to the larger alliance. These presentations gave leaders a way to understand one another’s strengths, avoid duplication, find partners and identify resources they could bring home.

Heroic Men recorded the strongest insights from the weekend to multiply them on video beyond the men in the room.

Men Connected as Equals

Sean Lynn of Heroic Men Canada said the tone of the sessions helped the weekend succeed.

“We were there as equals,” Lynn said. “We weren’t talking at them. We were discussing together, and they had a voice. I think that’s why they liked it so much.”

Many men came with serious leadership experience. They lead ministries, organize conferences, serve regions, speak publicly, guide parishes and discern how to serve Catholic men more deeply.

The convocation gave them permission to talk as brothers in the same work.

Dean Patterson, regional leader for the Midwest USA, said he watched relationships forming in real time. “The level of engagement was solid,” Patterson said. “A lot of these guys came together and didn’t often sit together by day two, because they’d made new friends.”

Bill Moyer, president of the board, said the event felt less like a formal conference and more like a reunion. “It felt like a family gathering,” he said.

Prayer, Meals and Late-Night Brotherhood

Heroic Men built Mass, adoration, prayer, reflection, meals, networking and unstructured time into the schedule. The informal moments became some of the most important parts of the weekend.

Moyer said the Friday night pub gathering became “way more of a hit than I thought... I expected maybe 10 men to show,” Moyer said. “And that place was hopping.”

Lynn said the same energy carried into the weekend. “On Saturday, we probably had 30-plus men out there, having whiskey and cigars,” Lynn said.

Men left with practical leadership ideas. Several leaders said the weekend gave them specific ways to strengthen parish, diocesan and ministry work.

• Nick Weis said the convocation gave him trusted input on “fundraising, communication, conference ideas, speakers” and called the pledge “huge” because it opened his eyes to “the possibilities to connect more men to Christ.”

• Jeff Popenoe said the weekend reinforced the need for more active outreach to parishes, men’s ministries and Knights of Columbus councils.

• Scott Hadwin said the convocation gave him “multiple paths forward.”

• John Lund said one of his biggest takeaways involved asking permission to speak truth to another man and going deeper into hard conversations.

Men saw the need to reach younger leaders. Early feedback showed strong concern for the next generation.

One attendee said leaders “must focus on building the next generation of leaders” while doing what they can now. In six months, he said, he hopes to report that he has encouraged younger men in his sphere to recruit more men their age and stop trying to carry the work alone.

Men wanted even more working sessions

Participants also named the next round of practical needs.

They asked for more discussion on evangelization stories, recruiting men where they are, fundraising, conference operations, pledge communication, growth, post-abortion healing for men, pro-life engagement, new ministry materials and ways to help men commit to groups or conferences.

“I see now what is possible coming out of a conference, said Jim, an attendee. “An event is good, but we want to help men change. That means more is needed after the event is over. A conference is really a gateway to building something more.”

Future sessions could include “training on the nuts and bolts of running a men’s conference for beginners.” Some wanted more focus on reaching men beyond those already involved in church. A Deeper Need for Raw Honesty. Feedback began arriving soon after the convocation ended. Joe Halsell, a public speaker and attendee, messaged the team after the event.

“What an amazing weekend,” Halsell wrote. “Can’t thank you enough for the invite, the decades of experience in that room… The raw, authentic relationships I got to build, the leaders I was able to engage and help come to grips with… Even at the leadership level, there is a deep need for raw honesty with a brother.”

Another attendee, Matt Aujero of Fight Club, described the gathering more simply. “This is the annual event that feeds me,” he said.

The convocation strengthened ministries, and it strengthened men.

The Million Man Pledge Becomes the Next Move.

The weekend also launched the Million Man Pledge.

The pledge gave the convocation a simple next action that every leader could understand and carry home.

“One thing that was clear to me sitting there is the men are very hungry, and the Million Man Pledge is a very powerful tool,” Tunmire said. “I don’t think we should underestimate that.”

Moyer said he challenged leaders to bring the pledge to other gatherings. “Our goal is that every man takes the pledge to their conference.”

One attendee said he had already written three names in his journal on each of the past two Mondays, and saw a way to introduce the pledge into his mentorship program.

Several others said they had taken the pledge or planned to take it, and most named at least one man they intended to invite within 30 days.

Chris Mann, regional leader coach for the Western USA, said the first signs of momentum came quickly. One man had already asked for 1,500 pledge cards for a conference in August.

A Successful Model for the Future

The convocation showed that Catholic men’s ministry leaders want more than famous speakers. They want trusted brothers, proven ideas, useful tools and a shared mission.

Heroic Men has a clear next step: gather leaders, strengthen brotherhood, capture wisdom and send men home ready to reach more men.

Men across North America are being invited into a pledge built to be simple enough to repeat from memory.

Pray every day. Pray for three to ten men by name. Connect with one of them each week. Invite one new man each month.

That is the Heroic Pledge, an initiative from Heroic Men, founded by the Catholic Men’s Leadership Alliance. Its organizers say the pledge was created as a direct answer to loneliness, addiction, isolation and cultural decline, with a long-term goal of reaching 1 million men by 2033, the 2,000th anniversary of the Resurrection of Christ.

The pledge begins small by design.

“It literally starts with 30 seconds of prayer a day,” said Dominic De Souza, from Heroic Men. “That’s it.”

Take the Pledge

Simple gets it done

Chris Mann, who joined De Souza in presenting the pledge, said the point is to give men a way to begin immediately.

“This pledge is designed to be so simple to draw men in who are ready to do something,” Mann said. “You start orienting yourself toward the things that are truly going to make you happy and make a difference in your life.”

Pray daily, connect weekly, invite monthly. The organizers describe the pledge through three simple movements: prayer, brotherhood and outreach.

Men are asked to write down the names of three to 10 men important to them and pray for them by name each day. They are encouraged to connect with one man each week, then invite one new man each month to take the same pledge.

“Return to prayer every day,” De Souza said. “It could be a single Our Father, but it’s a return to the Father so that we’re not trying to solve these problems on our own.”

Mann said the pledge is meant to move men out of isolation and toward deliberate friendship.

“We can’t be connected by ourselves,” Mann said. “You have to go out and invite other men.”

The simplicity is central to the mission. A man does not need to start a group, attend a conference or become a formal leader before beginning. He can start today by praying for the men already in his life.

A response to loneliness and decline. Mann described the pledge as a response to widespread cultural distress.

“We are the best off that we have ever been as a species,” Mann said. “America is ridiculously wealthy. Food, shelter, water, yes, there are people who have challenges with those, but when you look at the macro level, we’re better off than we’ve ever been. And at the same time, we’re somehow more depressed, more lonely, more addicted, more medicated and more suicidal than we’ve ever been. It’s not working.”

The pledge, organizers said, gives men a way to answer that crisis through daily prayer and regular contact with other men.

De Souza said Heroic Men is looking for an “accelerating solution” to problems he believes are accelerating around men, families and culture.

“If we have an accelerating problem of the culture collapsing and falling apart, and families falling apart, and men unable to step up and be who God created them to be,” De Souza said, “well, we need an accelerating solution.”

Build your shield wall

A shield wall of men. De Souza describes the men named in the pledge as a “shield wall.”

“When you take this pledge, these three to ten men, they’re your shield wall,” he said. “You’re locking arms with them. You’re standing shoulder to shoulder with them. You’re proactively stepping up on their behalf before the Father. You’re offering them up, and you’re daily asking for help and guidance and support for them, and their families.”

After practicing the pledge for two months, De Souza said he began seeing deeper conversations among the men he prayed for.

“They have been more confident to share the fact that they’re going through something difficult, a loss, family difficulty,” he said. “Suddenly they start saying things like, ‘I don’t feel so alone.’”

Mann said even hearing that someone is praying for you can matter.

“When you approached me and said, ‘Hey, by the way, you’re one of my guys,’ I’ve known you for years,” Mann said. “It was still meaningful. It meant something to me.”

He said the pledge is about identity as much as action.

“It’s saying, ‘Look who I am. I am a son of the Father. I am a man who looks out for my brothers,’” Mann said.

An alliance rather than a competitor. Heroic Men leaders said the pledge is meant to serve existing men’s ministries, parishes and apostolates.

“There’s a ton of groups out there who are doing great work,” Mann said. “This isn’t business, this is ministry. Why would you try to get somebody to stop doing something that’s working so they can do your thing? We’re workers in the same vineyard of the Lord.”

Mann said groups such as the Knights of Columbus, That Man Is You, Men of Christ and Man Up already do important work. The pledge is meant as a common commitment that can strengthen those efforts.

“What if we all took this pledge?” Mann asked. “Whether I’m part of any of these groups, what if we all came together on this central theme and made this commitment in our personal lives?”

The three traits of a hero

De Souza said Heroic Men has studied why some ministries thrive while others struggle, especially since the pandemic.

“We think we’ve distilled it down to the three that matter most,” he said. “Daily prayer, building a brotherhood, no man goes through life alone, and then regular outreach.”

Heroic Men offers a downloadable pledge form, a 30-day email series, video content and training for men who want to strengthen or begin local ministries.

“We’re here to serve and support you to build up your ministries,” De Souza said. “We’re not asking you to come and build up Heroic Men.”

One man, then one million. The organization’s goal is to reach 1 million men by 2033.

“To go from one man to a million men, it’s only six steps,” De Souza said, describing how one man praying for up to ten others could eventually create exponential growth, if those men also take the pledge.

Mann said exponential growth begins slowly, then builds.

“It’s one of those beautiful things where we can feel like the weight of the world’s not on our shoulders,” he said. “Just own this pledge, but you’re going to see an avalanche of difference.”

For many Christians, the year 2033 carries deep meaning.

“As we head toward that year, 2,000 years after the Resurrection of Christ as it’s traditionally held, there’s a lot of energy, a lot of momentum,” Mann said. “What are we hoping to be able to say once we’re there? Let’s start working toward it now.”

De Souza invited men to imagine the long-term fruit of the pledge.

“What is it going to be like seven years later after you’ve been praying for men for years, every single day?” he asked. “What kind of friendships are you going to have? What happens to your parish?”

The pledge, he said, is only the beginning.

“Every hero has a journey, because we do believe that life is an adventure,” De Souza said. “Here’s where you start.”

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Learn more about Brandon

For Brandon Hall, the first lesson in heroism came through two people who kept showing up when life turned brutal: his parents.

“Both my parents, alive and well today, but both were diagnosed with cancer when they were both fifty,” Hall told Dominic De Souza on Heroic Stories. “It was both shocking but awe-inspiring to see them both battle through cancer.”

Hall was 21 or 22 when his mother pulled him aside after he came home from college. His father was in Pittsburgh. He had leukemia. The news landed with the force of disbelief.

“My dad, he’s only fifty. He’s young,” Hall said. “My dad’s a Superman.”

A son watches stress take its toll

De Souza asked about the fear. “Were you afraid you were gonna lose them?” he asked.

Hall said yes. His father had asked a doctor whether he was going to die after an infection complicated his hospital stay. His mother later faced breast cancer, and Hall saw both parents keep providing, keep parenting, keep carrying the family.

“That for me is kind of what defines heroism,” Hall said.

The deeper wound was the stress underneath it all. Hall said his parents had lived “hectic, chaotic, stressful lives,” and he began connecting their suffering with his own anxiety from sports, school and work.

“I was never taught how to deal with it,” Hall said. “I never really talked about it.”

That absence became part of his calling.

Science, faith and the missing language of stress

Hall spent 18 years in medtech, selling pacemakers and defibrillators. He describes himself as “a science guy through and through,” adding that he has seen medical technology “literally save people’s lives.”

But he said science and faith belong together.

“I don’t by any means separate science from faith,” Hall said. “I think they’re intertwined.”

Hall began studying wellness, positive psychology, emotional intelligence and stress management. Then he found himself returning to Catholic practices with fresh eyes: lectio divina, adoration, stillness, prayer, confession and the Mass.

He connected cognitive restructuring with St. Paul’s words about being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” He saw stillness and breathing as more than trendy mindfulness. He saw them as ancient Catholic wisdom with measurable brain benefits.

“You don’t have to separate the science and the faith,” Hall said.

The convenient Catholic comes home

Hall said he had been a “convenient Catholic” for years, attending Mass and praying while chasing career success and financial goals.

In his early adulthood, his life began to look like the version of success many men are told to pursue. He had a loving wife, three children, a beautiful home and professional achievements. Yet the ache remained.

“Still felt like a pit in my stomach,” Hall said. “Still felt like an emptiness.”

De Souza asked whether a moment came when Hall saw he could no longer be “the money hunter.”

Hall said the answer came through pressure stacking from every direction: career changes, family demands, his wife’s stress, money concerns, children’s activities and his growing work with Catholic Well.

“Everything is coming to a head at the same time,” Hall said. “I said, man, Lord, I give up. Like I need help.”

He began going to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, attending confession monthly, adding Mass during the week and praying the rosary. Peace followed, along with practical changes. He eventually moved into full-time work from home, which let him give more time to his wife, children and ministry.

The pressure men carry

De Souza asked about how men feel like failures, when responsibility piles up and masculinity itself is challenged. “You wonder if you can hack it as a man, right?”

Hall’s answer was bluntly Catholic, practical and physical. Men need exercise, sleep, nutrition and health. They also need Scripture, vulnerability and prayer.

He cited the spirit of “power, love, and self-control,” then tied it to daily masculine life. The goal, he said, is courage: facing hard things, speaking honestly and asking for help.

“Be vulnerable and open up to people and tell them what you’re thinking,” Hall said. “Tell them what you’re struggling with.”

He returned often to the Sermon on the Mount, calling it “the playbook.”

“We’ve had it for 2,000 years,” Hall said. “Leverage that.”

(So yes, the answer was in the playbook the whole time. We men, famously, still prefer skipping the manual.)

Teaching children to breathe before they break

Hall’s mission now centers heavily on students, especially young people facing stress and anxiety. He and his father, a retired educator, developed a Catholic student curriculum aligned with educational standards.

Hall said children need simple language for what is happening in their bodies. He teaches the difference between the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational decision-making center, and the limbic system, where stress and emotion can flare.

When children feel anxiety before a game or challenge, Hall reframes it.

“That’s your brain getting your body ready to do something exciting,” he tells them.

Then come the physical practices: stillness, breathing, eyes closed, slower exhales, awareness of thoughts and a return to God.

“Close your eyes and relax and let the emotions pass,” Hall said. “Thoughts come and thoughts go.”

The point is formation. Hall compares it to working out.

“We need to work out our brains, our minds, and our spirits,” he said.

His heroes begin at home

When De Souza asked Hall who his heroes are, Hall started with his wife.

“She is the love of my life,” Hall said. “She comforts me, she calms me, she’s always there for me when I need her.”

They met at Lafayette College after Hall’s football path took an unexpected turn. Injuries derailed big recruiting dreams, but they also led him to the woman he married. Hall sees providence in that.

“Things happen for a reason,” he said. “Divine providence is real.”

His father also remains a defining model. Hall described him as a former small-town athletic standout who grew into humility through education, service and faith. His mother, a nurse, helped identify his father’s cancer early.

“She jumped in right away,” Hall said.

Together, his parents modeled blue-collar effort, sacrifice and love. They gave their children stability, even when life behind the scenes demanded more than the children knew.

The children he hopes to serve

For the closing question, De Souza asked who Hall seeks to serve beyond God and family.

Hall answered: kids.

“My passion’s kids, honestly,” he said. “Especially those struggling with mental health challenges.”

He wants to help students understand their brains, strengthen their faith, develop resilience, build virtuous habits and face challenges with practical tools.

Hall said the pressure facing young people is real, and parents are often carrying their own unhealed burdens. That means communities, schools and ministries all have a role.

“I wanna be that example of Christ for kids out there,” Hall said.

For Hall, the path through stress is surrender, practice and formation. Cancer taught him heroism. Career success taught him its limits. Catholic faith gave him a way to breathe, confess, pray, serve and begin again.

The man who once had everything and still felt empty is now trying to hand younger people a playbook before life starts swinging.

Visit myforge.org

Less than half of American children reach adulthood with both parents in the home. And it’s usually dads who leave. Approximately 80% of single-parent homes are led by mothers. At this moment, 19.5 million children live without a resident father.

That equates to the entire population of New York City, including suburbs, full of fatherless kids.

American fatherlessness has risen in lockstep with American contempt for masculinity. And that’s an accident. In the last four decades, our culture has developed contempt for all things masculine. This contempt has ultimately produced the very thing that it seeks to destroy, that is, toxic men.

How so? Well, there’s an old saying that goes, boys will be boys. But that saying overlooks an even more deep-seated desire in young boys.

Boys want to be men. Held within the mind’s eye of every wild-eyed young boy is an image, a picture, a sense of the man that he wants to become. The trick to ensuring that boys become good men is making sure that they have the right picture in mind.

Unfortunately, today’s culture doesn’t give boys a positive picture. Instead, our culture seems to reject masculine pictures and masculine role models altogether.

In his 2021 article published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal for the Psychology of Men and Masculinities, Brian P. Cole notes that the majority of research conducted on male psychological traits implicitly treats those traits as negative.

Specifically, Cole notes that in the 20-year history of perhaps the most globally influential psychological journal on masculinity, only 15% of the articles published took what he classified as a positive view of masculinity. Most articles treated masculine traits as negative things.

Of course, negative references on masculinity aren’t only limited to academia.

In any given month, negative allusions abound in the entertainment industry, in popular media, in politics, both in academia and in society at large. Masculinity has a bad reputation.

And the problem with treating all masculinity as a bad thing is that doing so denies young boys the positive models of masculinity that they need in order to become good men and good fathers.

Fatherhood doesn’t simply happen. Sure, biological procreation, that happens quite easily. But committed, faithful, intentional fathers, they don’t arise out of thin air. They’re forged by positive culture.

They come from cultures that give young boys a road map for what masculinity looks like.

Culturally speaking, if we do not give our young boys good masculine role models for what it looks like, for example, to be a good father, then we’ll get exactly what we asked for. We’ll get a world full of boys happy to procreate, but wildly deficient as fathers.

We’ll get a fatherless world. And to state the obvious, that is a painfully bad thing.

As illustrated by groups like the National Fatherhood Initiative, the presence of an involved father positively correlates with a child’s success in almost all relevant sociological metrics, including educational success, psychological stability, and future job performance.

Conversely, the absence of an involved father does the opposite, correlating with things like poverty, infant mortality, and prison.

So again, to deconstruct masculinity is to deconstruct fatherhood. And to deconstruct fatherhood is to hurt children.

The work at Heroic Men matters.

The crisis of men and masculinity is bad in our day. But the current crisis is even more problematic when one considers what it might mean for future generations of the Church.

Why?

Numerous studies across diverse populations have demonstrated that a faithful father is far and away the strongest predictor of what faith will look like in the next generation.

One of the most rigorous examples is a four-decade longitudinal study published by Oxford University Press, Vern Bengtson’s faith and family study, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations.

In this study, researchers followed 350 families and over 3,000 individuals across five generations, seeking to uncover the secret to successful religious transmission, to getting the faith from one generation to the next.

The findings of the study showed that there is a stronger correlation between the faith practices of children and their fathers and grandfathers than with their mothers and grandmothers.

In June of 2023, the Communio Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships revealed that the collapse of marriage and the resulting decline in resident fatherhood may offer the clearest explanation for the decline in Christianity throughout the whole of the United States.

These conclusions are drawn from the results of a nationwide study of over 19,000 Sunday church attendees conducted during worship in 112 evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic congregations in 13 different states.

And the same results were corroborated in a new study from the Institute for Family Studies, released only three weeks prior to this Heroic Men’s Convocation in June of 2026.

I cite all of these studies to demonstrate that there are academically sound reasons to believe that it is the father who plays the critical role in passing the faith on to his children.

Fathers are critical for rebuilding society and rebuilding the Church. We must emphasize men.

Rebuild the man, you rebuild marriage. Rebuild marriages, and you rebuild families. Rebuild families, and you rebuild the Church and the culture.

The work being done at events like the Heroic Men’s Convocation is critical and will resound for generations to come.

About two and a half years ago, I left my previous work in campus ministry to devote myself full-time to the fight for men. I founded an organization called Forge, and you can find out more about it at myforge.org.

The basic idea of our organization is this.

Satan attacks the Church and the culture by attacking the family. And he attacks the family by attacking men.

So at Forge, what do we do? We reverse the strategy.

We build exceptional men to build strong families to renew the Church and the culture.

How do we do that? Forge is known for large events and high-quality curriculum. Those things matter because they build identity and provide solid formation.

But small groups lie at the center of our organizational strategy. Why small groups? Well, in part because it’s what Jesus did. More personally, it’s what I’ve seen work.

Small groups aren’t complicated things. If you gather men consistently, engage some strong content, and create space for honest, candid conversation about real challenges in life, growth happens.

Give it enough time, and you will see conversion. That’s why so many fruitful ministries around the world are built around a small group model. It’s rocket science. Jesus did it, and so we do too.

Since founding Forge on January 1st of 2024, we have seen tremendous fruit.

We started in Des Moines, Iowa, with regular events, a conference, and a methodically growing network of small groups.

About 18 months later, a talented man from Wichita, Kansas, left his career as an aerospace engineer, fundraised his support, and launched Forge in Wichita.

I’m happy to report that we have two more cities and men in those cities who, in the next six months, plan to leave their careers and launch Forge in their Midwestern cities as well.

We’re excited about what God is doing in Forge cities, but we also want to serve men all across the country, even outside those cities.

Early on, Forge was blessed by a very generous group of benefactors who collectively invested more than half a million dollars so that we could collaborate with world-class scholars and an outstanding production team to create resources for men’s small groups.

Today, we offer four video-based courses.

One is called Fathers and Sons, and it addresses the question, how do we raise sexually healthy sons in the midst of a sexually toxic culture?

Two of our other courses, called Home Church and Patriarchs, respectively explore how fathers and grandfathers can pass the faith to the next generation.

Our most recent course, called Men and Work, explores what it looks like for a man to be a saint in the workplace, providing not only financially for his family, but also emotionally and spiritually.

Forge also wants to collaborate with men’s conferences throughout the country.

And if any man at the Heroic Men’s Convocation would like to have me out to speak at a local Catholic men’s conference, we would be happy to open up our entire content library for every single attendee at your conference to access for free on the occasion that you have me come speak.

This provides a launchpad from the conference to an empowering post-conference experience for your men.

I couldn’t be prouder of the work that Heroic Men is doing. Thank you, and God bless all of the folks at Heroic Men.

John Bishop
Forge founder | MyForge.org

I was not opposed to Mary at all, but I just didn’t see her as important to my journey.

After being Catholic for about 2 years, a friend of mine gave me a gift certificate for an overnight retreat for a place in Houston. It’s a religious order, and they have a convent.

I had never been to a convent before, and this was for an overnight silent retreat. I decided to go.

I drove down early on a Sunday afternoon. They had made half of their convent into a retreat center. Once I arrived, one of the Sisters showed me around, showed me where I’d be staying, and where I would eat. It was on a Sunday afternoon and there was nothing going on at all, so I just spent my time reading and praying.

I found it very, very peaceful. The few Sisters I met were very kind. As the day turned into night and after dinner, I continued to pray, read, and just being alone with God.

They had this beautiful church there with a small chapel. About 11 o’clock that Sunday evening, I decided I would go down to the church and just pray and just sit there with Christ.

I’m sitting there and have my journal with me. There’s no one there since it’s 11 o’clock on a Sunday evening. As usual, there is a statue of Mary on the left side and a statue of Joseph on the right side.

I was up toward the front of the church, so I thought, “Well, I’m going to go kneel in front of that statue of Mary and just pray.” So I go over to the statue of Mary and kneel down, and once again, I’m the only one there.

So I kneel down, and I say, “Mary, I don’t understand you. I don’t get you. If you have something to say to me, just go ahead and say it.” I was talking out loud.

All of the sudden this thought comes into my heart and my mind. It was not audible I don’t believe, it could have been, it’s hard to say.

Here’s what Mary said: “I want you to say this prayer. Holy Mary, Mother God, may I look upon all of your daughters with the purity that your love is for me.”

I’m kneeling there, and I’m like, “What?!?” Not in a million years could I have strung those words together on my own.

I was shocked.

It was very, very real. I grabbed my journal and wrote the prayer down exactly as she had quoted to me.

I sat there in the church a little while, just taking in what had just happened.

I didn’t tell anybody about it probably for a month or two. I was meeting with my spiritual director a couple of months later – he’s a great priest. I told him about it and he busted out laughing. He said, “That’s just like Mary!”

I was like, “Really?!”

So I call that my purity prayer and I’ve shared it with thousands and thousands of men.

It’s a very, very powerful prayer. It was given to me by Mary through the Holy Spirit, I guess.

So that’s how I met Mary.

Whenever someone asks me about Mary, especially a protestant brother, I explain to them how I met Mary, and how real our relationship is with Mary, the Mother of God.

I hope this is useful to all men in their relationship with Mary.

God bless.

Onward and upward.

Robert Tunmire
Co-Founder, Director of Mission Advancement

ABOUT THIS SERIES: Chris Mann and Dominic de Souza are two movie-loving young dads, who work fulltime with Heroic Men. The ‘mind of Christ’ is not a sermon for smart people, but a mini-series for men who want more out of life. Get a practical adventure into a heroic identity, a heroic call to action, and a summons to heroic brotherhood. This 3-part conversation challenges you to clear out the stinking thinking between our ears.

By the end of each episode, you’ll be inspired to try the simple prayers we pray, and test out the simple practices we follow. More than survive: we must learn to live as men fully alive. Let’s seek heroism like the saints and stories that matter most, and let’s step up to think and act like Christ.

Men cannot live well in the world until they know what kind of world they are living in.

“What if reality is way more loaded than it looks?” Dominic de Souza asked at the start of the conversation. “We’re walking through life seeing maybe 1% of what’s actually happening, and the rest is this massive, invisible layer of meaning and grace you’ve been trained to ignore.”

For Heroic Men, that changes the call of manhood. Men have received a world that is alive with God. Their work is to notice it, receive it, work with it and turn it into something better.

“As men, we’ve been given a world that is alive with God, and our job is to notice it, work with it, and turn it into something better,” de Souza said. “Because that’s what heroes do.”

Seeing the world like Christ

The episode builds on the first part of the series, which focused on divine friendship and the identity of a man as a son of the Father. In this second conversation, de Souza and Chris Man turned outward.

If the first movement is vertical, heaven to earth, sacramental imagination is horizontal, they said. It is about how men see, imagine and act in the world around them.

“A sacrament, as defined by the Church, is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace,” de Souza said. “The key here is that it is that outward sign. It is something that doesn’t happen in our minds. It doesn’t happen in our hearts. It’s something outward. It’s visible. It’s tangible. And that matters.”

Mann said imagination does not mean pretending something false. It means becoming conscious of realities that are present but unseen.

“When we say imagination, we simply are talking about the exercise of making conscious that which is invisible,” he said. “When I encounter the world, there are things that I see, I hear, I touch, I smell. But there are things happening in the world that are not available to my senses.”

That imagination, de Souza said, determines how a man acts.

“If you imagine that your story of the world is, ‘It’s an awful place, and I’ve got to fight my way up, and there’s nobody going to carry my water for me, and it’s all on me,’ well, if you think about the world that way, that it’s harsh and difficult and against you, you’re going to push your way up against it the whole time,” he said.

But another story is possible.

“If you interpret it as St. Francis does, where everything is alive with the glory of God, and I’m here to bring the Gospel to everything, to the bees and to the moon and to every plant, now that doesn’t mean life’s going to be easier,” de Souza said. “It’s going to be as hard as it is for everybody else. But you’re now completely able to interpret everything in a new way.”

The call to adventure

The story a man believes about the world changes who he notices, who he protects and who he serves.

De Souza said men need to ask what story they are living, because their decisions come from that imagination. A man who sees only danger may become defensive. A man who sees only pressure may become exhausted. But a man who sees the world as gift can begin to act like Christ.

“What Christ does, he takes everything that happens at him, and he’s careful about how he chooses to reply or how to take action,” de Souza said. “So that when he does take action, something better happens, something better is introduced into the world that is going to heal people, strengthen them, give honor to them, give honor to God, orient life in the right way, build a better life.”

That is the call to adventure. Men receive life, gifts, talents, relationships, work and suffering. Then they decide what they will do with them.

Mann pointed to the Old Testament “wave offering” as an image of that pattern. The priest would lift the offering before God. On the surface, it can look strange or useless. But Mann said it reveals how men are made to respond to God.

“You give your kid a coloring book for Christmas and some crayons, and they make you this beautiful picture, and they want to come and show it to you,” Mann said. “That’s what a wave offering is. Lord, you gave us this beautiful weather. You gave us this grain. Look, I turned it into bread.”

The point, he said, is relationship.

“It’s not about function,” Mann said. “It’s about showing God, ‘I’ve received your gift. I have done something good with it, and let me show you because you’re my Father, and I love you, and I want you to see and love me.’”

Talents, pressure and becoming who God made

The conversation turned to the parable of the talents and the pressure many men feel when others define their gifts for them.

De Souza said many men grow up hearing that they have talents, but that can become a burden when they do not understand what they are called to do with them.

“I think we can really struggle with that, especially when other people are defining for us what our talents are,” he said.

Mann said God’s vision is larger than productivity.

“God does not need me to be a doctor to be pleased with me,” he said. “I’m his son. He loves me.”

That distinction matters in a culture that prizes output and measurable achievement. Man said men often reduce gifts to practical use, while God delights in the person.

“I think God the Father knows that we love climbing trees, and he sees us climbing trees, and that is the gift,” he said. “That is the talent at work.”

For men, the call is not to perform for God, but to become the sons God made them to be.

Glory as a way of life

Mann said the command from 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God,” is broader than many men imagine. “God is glorified when I recognize that the world is a gift and when I bring myself to that truly,” he said. “When I try to make it a better place.”

That can happen in small, concrete acts. Mann described playing bingo with his 4-year-old son, even though the game itself does not interest him.

“When I sit down and I say, ‘Buddy, I’d love to,’ and I sit down and I play bingo with him, I am being a father to him,” he said. “I am paying attention to him. I am showing him that he is beloved.”

Glory, he said, is not a spiritual layer added on top of ordinary life.

“Simply by trying to be who God made me, I bring him glory,” Man said.

Men as signs of grace

De Souza said men themselves become signs in the world when divine life becomes visible through their actions.

“There is a divine life inside us that is not ours, that was gifted to us, that we have to cultivate and then convert into the decisions and the actions and the life-building and the life-making and the safe-making and the healing,” he said.

That is why men need brotherhood, he said. One man alone cannot hold the line. “You hold the line with your brothers.”

The call to adventure becomes practical when a man can name the people in front of him who need his strength.

“Who are people who are suffering that you can sacrifice or go to work for?” de Souza asked. “That makes it real. That makes it not about you.”

Giving the world back to God

Mann closed the conversation by returning to the cycle at the heart of sacramental imagination: God gives, men receive, men work, men offer it back.

“We receive the gifts of God, and then what do we do with it? We offer it back to God,” he said. “God creates us. We engage with the world. We take what we engage with in gratitude and openness. We improve it. We give ourselves to it so that we can then present it back to God.”

That, he said, is the mind of Christ.

“It’s to see the world as an opportunity to love the Father,” Man said.

For de Souza, even the sign of the cross can remind men of that whole vision: heaven to earth, friend to friend, the man himself standing where the lines meet.

“You wake up one day and suddenly realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a son of the Father. I have divine life coursing through my veins, so I can’t phone it in,’” de Souza said. “I’ve got to actually get to work so that this life continues to stay in me and then radiates out for me to help other people.”

The adventure is not abstract. It begins with the world in front of a man, the people beside him and the Father who gave it all first.

“Be grateful for what God has given you,” Man said, “and do your best to give it back.”

Armstrong says men live near “the ever presence of death,” and that purpose, care and brotherhood may explain why sacrifice matters so deeply.

A conversation that began with one line from The Queen’s Code became a meditation on men, death, shame, purpose and the ache of wanting one’s life to count.

Alison Armstrong, whose three decades of work studying men and women have made her a distinctive voice on relationships and masculine identity, joined Heroic Men for an informal interview centered on a sentence that has carried deep meaning for many male listeners: “the soul of a man is a hero.”

For Heroic Men, a Catholic ministry built around prayer, brotherhood and outreach, that line lands near the center of its mission. The organization calls men to pray daily for other men, stay in living contact with them, and invite them into the same pledge. It is a simple pattern: one man praying for 10, those 10 reaching toward more, a spiritual shield wall formed one name at a time.

But Armstrong’s answer opened a deeper door.

“Honestly, I have been studying men this month for 35 years, since I found out I was bringing out the worst in men,” Armstrong said. “And I had to find out how I was doing that because I believed the worst in men is men.”

She added, with characteristic frankness, that her earlier view was harsher than suspicion.

“My perception equaled what I thought was the truth of who men are,” she said. She said she had even questioned whether men had souls.

The cave behind the cavern

Armstrong said that after more than three decades of studying men, she believed she had mapped the terrain. She had named patterns, conflicts, needs and reactions. Then a sentence appeared in her mind: “the ever presence of death.”

The phrase, she said, altered the entire map.

“So I had it all mapped,” Armstrong said. “And then the ever-presence of death drops into my head and it’s like… there’s a cave behind the cavern, and I’ve never seen it.”

She began asking men whether the phrase rang true. According to Armstrong, it did.

One man told her he often went to bed thinking he could have died that day or might die the next. Her own partner, when she finally brought him the phrase, answered simply that death was “sitting right here.”

Dominic pressed the question: “When you say this, is this something that women don’t in the same way, or men do in a different way?”

Armstrong’s answer became one of the conversation’s central contrasts. Women, she said, live more directly “present to life.” They monitor emotional, relational and even spiritual vitality around them. A hurt feeling can feel, to women, like an alarm in the body. Men, in her emerging view, carry a different field of awareness: the constant proximity of risk, loss and death.

That insight, Armstrong said, made male behavior less strange.

“Everything that’s mystifying to women about men, it now makes sense,” she said.

Shame as a sign of honor

The conversation returned often to the idea that men carry immense internal standards. Armstrong said men need brotherhood partly because they need to discover that other men live beneath the same impossible expectations.

“The standard you hold yourself to is extraordinary,” she said, adding that “all men experience shame from failing.”

Then she turned that shame into a moral clue. “Shame is actually the biggest indicator of an honorable man,” Armstrong said.

In that frame, shame becomes evidence that a man knows he was meant for something better. It is the bruise left when a heroic soul collides with weakness, selfishness or fear.

(Which, honestly, may explain a great deal about why men can hear a compliment and look around for the nearest exit.)

The paradox of men

Armstrong described men as “the walking resolution of paradoxes.”

A man, she said, may evaluate whether he could defeat a rival, even while being capable of dying for that same man. A soldier may assess danger in one instant and sacrifice himself in the next. A leader may prove his strength through combat, then earn loyalty through honor.

Dominic brought in an older Robin Hood motif: in some tales, men join the band only after facing Robin Hood directly. They follow him after seeing strength, but also after entering a deeper bond than fear.

Armstrong agreed that such stories reveal something old and durable in male life. Men weigh danger, measure one another, and yet may bind themselves in courage, loyalty and friendship.

That paradox, she suggested, sits near the center of masculine heroism.

The cost of caring

One of Armstrong’s more striking claims concerned the word “care.”

She said many women hear a man say “I care about you” and wonder why he did less romantic phrasing. But when she asked men what caring meant, the answers were far heavier.

“Caring means I’ll organize my life around you,” she said, recalling the responses she heard.

For men, she said, caring is among the largest expenditures of energy. It binds a man to purpose, responsibility and sacrifice. To care is to become vulnerable to need. To care is to be summoned.

From there, Armstrong named a second paradox. Men may dream of being carefree. Yet men also need purpose.

“When a woman I love has a problem, I have a purpose,” Armstrong said, repeating what a man once told her.

For Heroic Men, that purpose becomes concrete through prayer and brotherhood. The man who prays for 10 men every day may never be applauded. He may never lead a massive movement. But he has a post. He has names. He has men to guard.

What is my part?

As the conversation widened, Armstrong described a question that guides her own life: “What’s my part?”

It is a humbling question in a culture addicted to scale. Impact often gets measured by reach, numbers and noise. But Armstrong argued that a life’s purpose may be smaller, closer and more particular than a public platform.

She spoke of motherhood, of raising children, of people whose greatest contribution may be the good men and women they form. She spoke of her husband, whose part included noticing a lonely person in a coffee shop, sitting down and listening until something in that person came back to life.

Purpose, in that sense, may arrive less like a spotlight and more like an assignment.

The need to mean something

The deepest thread returned to death.

Armstrong said that when men speak of living near death, they also speak of refusing a meaningless death.

“They don’t wanna die for nothing,” she said.

The host answered, “It’s gotta mean something.”

“Exactly,” Armstrong replied. “It’s got to be for something. It’s got to provide something. It’s got to make a difference. It’s got to have an impact.”

That line may be where Armstrong’s theme and Heroic Men’s mission meet most directly. Heroism is meaning under pressure. It is care turned into action. It is shame transformed into honor. It is the man who feels death nearby and chooses life-giving responsibility anyway.

The soul of a man is a hero, Armstrong says. The conversation suggests that heroism begins when a man finds his part, gives his care, and refuses to let his life be spent for nothing.

ABOUT THIS SERIES: Chris Mann and Dominic de Souza are two movie-loving young dads, who work fulltime with Heroic Men. The ‘mind of Christ’ is not a sermon, but a practical adventure into a heroic identity, a heroic call to action, and a summons to heroic brotherhood. This 3-part conversation challenges you to clear out the stinking thinking between our ears.

By the end of each episode, you’ll be inspired to try the simple prayers we pray, and test out the simple practices we follow. Let’s seek heroism like the saints and stories that matter most, and let’s step up to think and act like Christ.

This first episode of The Mind of Christ for Men, Dominic de Souza and Chris Mann challenge at Christian life like a superhero origin story.

Christ does far more than offer advice like a kindly rabbi. He introduces a new life into the human person. A new set of instincts. A new center of gravity. A new way of being a man.

“There’s a point where something is introduced into his life, and he can no longer be the same,” Dominic says, thinking about Spider-Man, Captain America, and Batman. “And every instinct in them fights against all this change because he knows who he was is going to have to grow, die, or become different.”

There it is. Christianity as disruption. Christianity as the end of business as usual.

The call to heroism arrives at the worst possible time

What does it mean to cultivate the mind of Christ? The hosts head straight into the male panic response.

Men hear the call. Men sense the summons. Men then immediately begin calculating the damage.

• What will this require?

• How exposed will I become?

• How much of my current life survives?

A man reaches a point where he senses he must lead, take a stand, pray, serve, heal, rebuild. But he has zero interior maps for any of it. So he stalls. Or blunders. Or hides behind competence and safety.

“We routinely retreat from this,” Dominic says. “We don’t have a plan because we’ve never had to do any of this before.”

Many men are not apathetic. We often feel outmatched, unconvinced, or on the brink of a path that leads to meaningless pain.

Christ does more than teach ideas

Dominic describes Christ’s arrival in human history almost like a transfusion, or a graft, or a divine bone marrow transplant. Human instincts can get us man as far as survive, protect, provide, avoid stupid risk, keep food on the table, stay breathing.

Then Christ enters the human family and says: there is more. There is life beyond survival.

Chris compares it to The Matrix. A man discovers reality is larger, stranger, and more demanding than he thought. He also discovers he cannot return to the past.

Men inherit a broken script for fatherhood

If men are called to think as Christ thinks, we run straight into the problem of the Father.

Every man arrives with a lived story about fatherhood already lodged in his chest. Some had faithful fathers. Some had providers, ghosts, or tyrants. Some had men who were physically present and spiritually out to get milk.

Chris tells a story about adopted children, each carrying severe trauma around family, standing in church and hearing the words Our Father. “When they hear that God is a father, what on earth goes through their heads?” Chris asks.

What could those words possibly sound like to a child, whose earthly father meant prison, abandonment, chaos, or absence?

We bring our fathers with us into our prayer lifes. Or we bring the wound where a father should have been. Or the pressure to perform for love. Or the long training in earning approval from a man who kept moving the target.

Then we project all of it on God.

The ‘provider trap’ enters the spiritual life

Chris lays out a lesson he learned from his own father: love meant hard work. His father worked hard to provide. Therefore love equaled effort, accomplishment, doing.

“But God doesn’t need me to provide in our relationship,” he says.

Men attempt to pray hard enough, perform hard enough, improve hard enough, suffer hard enough, show up hard enough, until spiritual life becomes another production environment. Another test. Another place where worth must be proven. Another arena where love depends on output.

And then, infuriatingly, Scripture keeps presenting a God who moves first.

“This is the God who comes to us when we don’t have anything to offer,” Chris says, later adding, “My effort determines my worth… and that can be a trap in the spiritual life.”

The prodigal son becomes the measuring rod

If a man wants to know what the Father is like, he must read everything through Christ. Through Christ’s words. Through Christ’s actions. Through Christ’s revelation of the Father.

“If your conception of God does not mesh with that, your conception of God is wrong,” Chris says.

This point of view prevents men from building their spirituality around the image of God as a harsh judge patrolling an ethical obstacle course. Chris shares a comment someone told him: if life were merely a moral test, the most merciful act would be to wait outside the confessional and shoot people on the way out, sending them to heaven before they sinned again.

Which is absurd. But also perfectly logical inside a badly formed theology.

Prayer begins by replacing the noise in your head

How to start fixing this for busy men with budgets and back-breaking daily work?

It doesn’t involve grand spiritual theatrics.

• No heroic productivity schedule.

• No chest-thumping regimen for elite religious operators.

• No fantasy league of masculine holiness.

We all need to start smaller, Chris and Dominic agree. Start with the prayer Christ actually gave us.

“The Our Father,” Dominic says. “You’ve got to pray that one.”

Pray it slowly. Pay attention.

Then add brief, repeatable lines through the day. Chris offers a compact litany he uses when overwhelmed: “God, you are my father. I am your beloved son. You love me and nothing that’s about to happen is gonna change that.”

A prayer like this exposes how much male behavior is driven by fear of failure, fear of exposure, fear of making a mistake and catching catastrophe.

Instead, act from trust you are a beloved son who matters. Act because the Father loves you.

The final note: you loved me first

Dominic describes kneeling after Communion and realizing his prayer had often become a form of self-attention, an inward monitoring of his own feelings. Then he tried something else: picturing Christ before him. Addressing him directly. That created an immediate crisis of shame and unworthiness. He felt unable to look up and meet Christ’s gaze.

A line came to his mind that he uses to get past himself: “Jesus, You loved me first.”

He repeats it until the mental inflammation goes down. Until the false judgment goes away.

As men, we spend immense energy trying to go first. First to prove. First to earn. First to fix. First to become worthy. Christ offers us something far better: the Father has already moved first.

Like our favorite stories, a hero turns around and realizes something new is at work in him. A chance to do something greater. Now the question is: what will you do?

What kind of man will you be?

Next: we look at the world you live in, and how we go to work in it.

Behold, How Good It Is

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity” (Psalm 133:1).

It sounds obvious. If you’re reading this, you probably know and agree that unity is good. But the psalm isn’t just describing some kind of comfort. It’s deeper than that. The psalmist is describing something prfound enough to be worth singing about.

Unity Is Not the Absence of Conflict

Real unity among men isn’t the absence of tension, or even conflict. It’s not just a room where everyone agrees and nobody gets challenged, and everyone sings kumbaya. That’s not unity. That’s avoidance in disguise.

A Unity That Comes From Above

The psalm goes on to compare this unity to oil running down a beard, and to dew on the mountains of Zion. These aren’t images that we’re familiar with, so we have to pause a bit. Both images point to something poured out, something that descends and covers. This shows us that the deepest unity isn’t created by effort or force of personality. It’s given. It flows from above, from a shared source, down onto the men who receive it.

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Brotherhood Built on Christ Endures

That matters, because any brotherhood that is merely built on personality, shared interests, or even shared struggle will eventually crack. Men change. Seasons shift. Everything earthly is subject to change. What doesn’t move is Christ. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” (Heb 13:8). When brothers dwell together because of Christ, not just alongside each other by shared circumstance, but truly oriented toward the same Lord, unity has somewhere to come from besides themselves. Unity transcends mere happenstance.

The Cost of True Brotherhood

This is why real brotherhood asks more of you, not less. It means showing up when you’d rather not. Speaking the truths you’d rather avoid, and always in charity. Staying when it would be easier to drift. Unity isn’t soft. It’s costly, and it’s exactly that cost that makes it good and pleasant rather than just convenient.

Where God Commands His Blessing

Where this kind of unity exists, the psalm says, there God commands a blessing, life forevermore. Not because men engineered it, or did or said the right things, but because they let it descend on them together.

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By every modern metric, the older Catholic world seems brutal when it comes to fasting.

Men worked construction sites through Chicago winters while fasting. Families structured calendars around abstinence days. Laborers stayed hunger through entire workdays during Lent. Children woke before sunrise for Mass while following the Eucharistic fast from midnight onward.

And somehow, amid all that hardship, those communities built families, parishes, schools, hospitals, trades, and cultures with astonishing resilience.

During a conversation with Heroic Men, Catholic author and researcher Matthew Plese described that older world as far more disciplined, duty-bound, and spiritually serious than modern Catholic life. His work centers on forgotten Catholic customs, fasting traditions, and practices that once shaped daily life across Christendom.

“When Christianity reached its apex during the High Middle Ages,” Plese explained, “about half the year involved mandatory abstinence, and roughly a third of the year involved fasting.”

That reality sounds extreme through modern ears.

For centuries, Catholics accepted it as ordinary life.

Lunch Breaks… Without Lunch

One story especially stayed with the interviewers.

Plese recalled hearing a priest describe Italian Catholic workers during the 1930s and 1940s. During fasting days, many laborers arrived at work carrying no lunch.

“They couldn’t eat,” Plese said. “So they sat during their lunch break, rested, then returned to work hungry.”

The image feels almost impossible within modern American culture, where convenience drives nearly every habit. Yet Plese argued that earlier generations viewed sacrifice differently.

Duty mattered. Duty toward family. Duty toward community. Duty toward God.

“If the Church says you fast and abstain, they did so,” Plese explained.

That mindset created communities capable of enduring hardship without endless complaint or negotiation.

Where modern culture often treats discomfort as failure, earlier Catholic life treated sacrifice as formation.

“Things Can Be Hard”

Throughout the discussion, Plese returned repeatedly toward discipline. “Things can be hard,” he said, “but that doesn’t make them bad.”

He pointed toward modern fitness culture as evidence that many younger men hunger for challenge again. Cold plunges, endurance training, saunas, and intermittent fasting all reveal a growing fascination with voluntary hardship.

Plese believes traditional Catholic fasting fits naturally within that renewed search for discipline.

“You can take intermittent fasting and layer it onto what the Church traditionally required,” he said. For him, fasting serves far more than physical health.

• It trains focus.

• It strengthens discipline.

• It redirects attention toward prayer.

• It weakens compulsive appetites.

• It reminds people that suffering can be meaningful.

“Our Lord said some demons are driven out only by prayer and fasting,” Plese adds.

The Three Purposes of Fasting

Drawing heavily from St. Thomas Aquinas, Plese outlined three historic reasons Catholics fasted.

• First, fasting bridles bodily passions.

• Second, fasting frees the mind for contemplation.

• Third, fasting offers restitution for sin.

Plese emphasized that fasting without spiritual intention becomes little more than dieting.

He also described practical effects that emerge from disciplined fasting.

Men struggling with lust often benefit from greater bodily discipline. Families develop stronger habits around prayer. Many people discover greater mental clarity.

From Pandemic Boredom to World Marathons

Ironically, Plese never saw himself as being athletic.

Before 2020, distance running played little role within his life.

Then came the pandemic. “I was getting bored,” he recalled. “So I thought I’ll go on some runs.”

Those runs eventually became marathons. Then more marathons.

His first race involved the Chicago Marathon itself.

Since then, he has completed major races across several cities worldwide, including Boston, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and upcoming races across Australia.

Endurance running, he explained, revealed the same lesson fasting teaches.

“The mind is really the limiting thing in so many instances,” Plese said.

Long-distance training became a school of persistence for him.

St. Patrick and the Easter Fire

When asked about heroic figures, Plese immediately named St. Patrick.

Modern culture often reduces Patrick into green decorations, parades, and novelty shirts. Plese described a far fiercer figure.

According toward him, Patrick entered a pagan Ireland shaped through druidic religion and human sacrifice.

Patrick’s famous Easter fire carried enormous symbolic force.

“It was almost like declaring war on the Druids,” Plese explained.

Patrick endured slavery, violence, assassination attempts, and relentless hardship during his missionary work.

Plese especially admired the saint’s life of penance. Ancient accounts describe Patrick praying the Psalms through severe physical austerities, including long hours kneeling and praying within freezing water.

A Forgotten Inheritance

Modern Catholics inherited a massive spiritual tradition that many barely understand anymore. Plese described discovering widespread confusion even among clergy regarding older fasting customs.

Many Catholics, he explained, struggle even imagining practices once considered ordinary:

• Christmas Eve fasting.

• Wednesday abstinence.

• Forty-day preparation before Christmas.

• Extended Eucharistic fasting.

• Seasonal vigils.

• Ember Days.

Many disappeared gradually across generations.

Plese believes recovering even portions of those practices could reshape family life, discipline, prayer, and spiritual seriousness.

“You can be much more than you think you are,” he said.

For earlier generations of Catholics, fasting was part of ordinary life.

Plese believes modern men still hunger for it.

Dr. Marcus Peter grew up in Malaysia believing that success could be measured by wealth, status, and achievement. Raised without a father and immersed in a culture that prized performance above purpose, he eventually embraced atheism, became a public defender of it, and built a successful career in music. From rock bands to breakdancing and public speaking, he had everything the world told him should make him happy. Instead, he found himself deeply empty.

Everything changed in 2008 when a simple invitation to play bass guitar at a Christian prayer meeting led to a dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ. That single night transformed the course of his life. Today, Marcus serves as a Catholic biblical theologian, husband, father, and preacher, helping men rediscover authentic masculinity rooted not in performance, but in sonship.

“Really all I am is a son of God, a husband, a father, and a preacher. That’s really all I am.”

The World’s Definition of Success Creates Empty Men

Marcus described growing up in a culture obsessed with material success. Men were expected to accumulate wealth, own impressive property, drive expensive cars, and climb the social ladder. Questions about life’s deeper meaning were ignored in favor of career achievement.

Unable to find satisfying answers, Marcus embraced atheism during his teenage years. Influenced by prominent atheist thinkers, he became skilled at defending a worldview that rejected God while secretly wrestling with profound emptiness.

“I had all of the success the world had to offer,” he reflected. “Interiorly, I was tremendously broken.”

His story echoed what many men experience today. Society encourages achievement but rarely teaches identity. Men learn how to perform, but not how to become sons.

Men Don’t Need More Comfort. They Need a Battle Cry.

Marcus believes one of the greatest problems facing modern men is spiritual immaturity. Many appear successful externally while remaining deeply wounded internally.

He argued that today’s culture offers men countless distractions—career, entertainment, pornography, gambling, social media—but very little that calls them into authentic purpose.

“Heroic men are virtuous men. Just be virtuous, and you are heroic.”

Drawing from recent parish missions across the United States, Marcus shared how men consistently responded when challenged with the full demands of the Gospel instead of a watered-down version.

Many approached him in tears, grieving years spent pursuing the wrong things.

One man broke down sobbing as he confessed the damage his choices had caused his marriage and family after finally hearing authentic preaching about discipleship.

Marcus believes men aren’t looking for softer messages.

They’re looking for truth.

Jesus Wants Every Part of Your Life

Central to Marcus’ message was the biblical idea that Christ’s “hour” did not simply refer to a moment in history but to the ongoing reign of the Messiah today.

Because Christ has already given everything on the Cross, Marcus argued that the only fitting response is total surrender.

Not just Sunday mornings. Not just prayer time. Every area.

“He wants to be God over every facet of your life.”

Marcus challenged listeners with a simple but piercing question:

What is the one area you know God has been asking you to surrender?

Most people already know the answer.

The issue isn’t hearing God’s voice.

It’s responding to it.

Cotton Candy Faith Won’t Save Men

Perhaps Marcus’ most memorable analogy came when describing much of modern Christianity.

“We’re excellent at giving people a cotton candy faith. It looks attractive, but when people bite into it, there’s nothing there.”

He argued that many men have grown tired of shallow spirituality that avoids sacrifice, struggle, and mission.

Instead, they long for a Gospel that calls them into battle alongside Christ.

Marcus pointed to Jesus not merely as a comforter but as the victorious Commander leading His people into the greatest battle of all—the battle for souls.

When men discover that mission, they finally begin living as they were created to live.

His challenge was simple:

1. Run to Christ.

2. Run to the Eucharist.

3. Lead your family.

4. Call other men into the fight.

5. Because the world doesn’t need more comfortable men.

It needs heroic ones.

Dear Friends,

This year marks a significant milestone for the Central Texas Fellowship of Catholic Men (CTFCM) as we celebrate 20 years of ministry, discipleship, and service.

Since our founding, CTFCM has remained committed to its mission of helping men become stronger disciples of Christ. Through parish-based men’s groups, conferences, retreats, fellowship opportunities, and faith formation, we have witnessed countless lives transformed, families strengthened, and communities renewed through the power of Christ.

As we reflect on the past two decades, we are filled with gratitude for the many leaders, clergy, volunteers, sponsors, donors, and participants who have supported this mission. Your prayers, generosity, and dedication have helped build a ministry that continues to impact men throughout the Diocese of Austin and beyond.

We also extend our deepest gratitude to our founders, Robert Tunmire and Bill Moyer, whose vision, faith, and commitment to Christ laid the foundation for CTFCM twenty years ago. What began as a calling to help men grow as disciples of Jesus Christ has become a thriving ministry that has touched thousands of lives. Their leadership and dedication established a legacy that continues to inspire and guide our mission today.

Together, we have worked toward a shared vision: ensuring that no man is left behind in his journey of faith. What began as a small effort to bring men together in Christ has grown into a vibrant ministry that continues to encourage men to lead with faith, courage, and virtue in their homes, parishes, workplaces, and communities.

While we celebrate this milestone, we also look forward with excitement and hope. The need for strong Catholic men and vibrant men’s ministries remains as important as ever, and we are committed to continuing this mission for years to come.

As part of that mission, we invite you to join us next month at the 17th Annual Central Texas Catholic Men’s Mass, celebrated by Bishop Daniel E. García - Diocese of Austin. Come experience the strength of brotherhood, prayer, and fellowship that has been at the heart of CTFCM for the past 20 years. We also challenge you to bring a friend, son, brother, coworker, or neighbor who may need to experience God’s love and the support of a faithful community. A simple invitation can make an eternal difference.

We look forward to gathering with men from across Central Texas on Saturday, July 18, 2026, at 9:00 AM at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Round Rock as we celebrate our faith and continue our commitment to ensuring that no man is left behind.

Thank you for being part of our journey. We are deeply grateful for your support and partnership over the past 20 years and look forward to all that God has in store for the future.

May God continue to bless you and your families.

In Christ,

The CTFCM Leadership Team

The Battle You’re Already In

St. Ignatius of Loyola describes our Christian life as one among the battle of the Two Standards: “the one of Christ, our Commander-in-Chief and Lord; the other of Lucifer, mortal enemy of our human nature” (Spiritual Exercises, 136).

Ignatius reminds us that “Christ calls and wants all under his standard, and Lucifer, on the contrary, under his” (ibid. 137). He doesn’t describe it as a battle between two equal armies squaring off in a gentleman’s game for dominance (sorry, Hollywood!). Jesus’ victorious Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection is a crushing trifecta to Lucifer and his minions. However, like an animal writhing in its death throes and desperate to take you down with him, Lucifer will tempt you with the shininess of wealth, prestige, and pride … knowing that these snares are the gateway to “all the other vices” (ibid. 142).

The Enemy Doesn’t Need You Evil—Just Comfortable

His aim, however, isn’t solely our Salvation.

Lucifer’s plan for your life includes the Big, Comfy Couch of Mediocrity. He will be doubly pleased if he can impede your spiritual growth, quench your zeal, and make you any less than living to your fullest potential and completely consumed by the fire of God (Hebrews 12:29).

An Ancient General Understood Something We Often Forget

Sun Tzu was a Chinese thinker and military man who lived around 400 BC. He was convinced that comforts (big or small) can distract us from victory.

“At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him … he burns his boats and breaks his cooking pots” (Sun Tzu, Art of War, 38-39).

When faced with insurmountable odds, Sun Tzu understood that the only possible movement toward victory is unrelenting forward motion.

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Burn the Boats. Break the Pots.

Christians have a duty to kick away the ladders toward sin, to burn the boats that carry us back to the old ways, and to destroy the cooking pots that stifle forward motion. God asks us to surrender ourselves completely to him and to plunge deep into Love’s Crucible: the Living Flames of his Sacred Heart.

“No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).

You Have One Job

The Second Vatican Council remind us that we have one job to do: to proclaim the Gospel with a zeal more intense than that of the early Church. You and I have been tasked by the Father to Proclaim the Gospel with the power, anointing, and fire of the Holy Spirit (see Vatican II’s “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity”).

Say “YES!” With Everything

You only need to surrender to the Holy Spirit and say, “YES!” with every iota of your being. Hold nothing back and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus in the miraculous might of God.

The Same God Who Created the Universe Wants to Empower You

The God who created every molecule is ready to give you all of his creative might to empower you to burn your boats and carry out your one job: to Proclaim the Gospel (Acts 1:8).

Kevin Phillips
Boats on Fire Catholic Ministries
https://boatsonfire.net/

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Book Deacon Wally

Deacon Wally Calabrese has a blunt diagnosis for the shortage of priestly vocations and weakened Catholic homes: the domestic church is failing.

Calabrese, a deacon from North Carolina and former Marine, said heroic Catholic life begins less with grand public gestures than with fathers, husbands and mentors who model prayer, service and courage inside the home.

“If he’s going to Mass, the kids will continue to go to Mass,” Calabrese said. “If he takes his faith seriously, if he shows his sons what it means to be a man,” there’s a chance they will be better men.

Dominic De Souza asks Calabrese what story of heroism “lights you up.”

Calabrese’s answer came fast: the ordination of a priest. “Without the priest we don’t have the sacraments,” he said. “We don’t receive Jesus. And we need Jesus.”

For Calabrese, modern seminarians and newly ordained priests face cultural suspicion, family pressure and public mockery. Their “yes,” he said, is an act of courage.

“These young men are fighting society,” Calabrese said. “What does society say about our faith? What does society say about priests? But yet they still stand strong.”

‘A Shepherd Must Smell Like His Sheep’

Asked what makes a priest great, Calabrese pointed first to service.

A priest, he said, cannot act aloof, distant or above the people. He must imitate Christ, who “came to serve, not to be served.”

Calabrese cited the phrase often associated with Pope Francis: “A shepherd must smell like his sheep.” He said the idea has also echoed through recent popes: priests belong among their people, at sickbeds, homes, parish events, emergencies and family crises.

“You can’t hide behind a desk,” he said. “You have to be out there with your people.”

He named Father John de Guzman, a recently ordained priest in his diocese, as an example. Calabrese said he met de Guzman during seminary formation, when the young man was discerning whether he could continue.

“I knew he was going to be a great priest,” Calabrese said.

He recalled telling him, “I think you’re really going to be a great priest one day. And you have to stick through it.”

Years later, Calabrese said, de Guzman’s priesthood has become a sign of joy, especially because he connects with younger men while drawing older parishioners as well.

Parents, Vocations and the Domestic Church

Calabrese saved some of his sharpest comments for parents who fail to support religious vocations.

“Mom and Dad, look in the mirror,” he said. “It starts with you.”

He said many parents speak warmly of faith while quietly preferring worldly markers of success for their children. Some want grandchildren, career achievement or athletic glory before priesthood or religious life.

“The domestic church, if it’s flourishing, if it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing with the man as head of the church, head of the domestic church,” he said, produces a different culture.

Calabrese clarified that a father’s leadership is neither domination nor control. It is Christlike service. A father prays. He attends Mass. He provides. He teaches sons how men live the faith.

He warned that young men considering the priesthood already face ridicule. Without encouragement at home, their vocations can wither before they are tested.

“They need to have strong leadership at home,” he said. “They need to have strong parents and mentors.”

What a Deacon Does

When De Souza asked a simple question, “What’s a deacon?” Calabrese laughed at the confusion many Catholics have.

“Nobody knows!” he said.

The deacon, he explained, is ordained for Word, altar and charity. His identity is Christ the servant.

He can baptize, witness marriages, preside at funerals and assist at Mass. Yet Calabrese said too many people focus on tasks rather than identity.

“The calling is to be Christ the servant for the church,” he said.

That service, he added, happens largely outside the church building. Deacons meet people in homes, businesses and informal settings. They explain the faith, build relationships, bring people toward the church, then help hand them into sacramental life.

“My biggest thing is I love meeting people and talking about Christ,” he said.

Men Need Brotherhood, Not Another Bible Class

The interview turned to masculinity, and Calabrese returned to his Marine Corps experience.

“I used to tell my Marines it’s a lot harder to be a man than it is to be a Marine,” he said.

Being a Marine, he said, had structure: meals, housing, orders, work and routine. Being a man requires integrity “24 hours a day, seven days a week,” whether anyone is watching.

That is where men’s groups matter, he said. But he warned against turning every men’s gathering into another class or video series.

“That’s not a men’s group,” he said. “That’s faith formation.”

A real men’s group, he said, gives men a place to speak honestly about anger, temptation, fatherhood, doubt, identity issues in the family, pornography, addiction and confusion. It should be a place where a man can say, “I need help,” and receive counsel from other men without performance.

“It should be a safe spot for men to be men,” Calabrese said.

From Marine to Deacon

Calabrese said his hardest decision was accepting ordination to the diaconate.

His path began during a strained time in his marriage, when his wife urged him to attend a retreat called Christ Renews His Parish. He resisted, expecting “a bunch of old guys getting ready to meet Jesus.”

He went anyway, partly after a fight that left him sleeping on the couch.

At the retreat, Calabrese encountered men who were honest about their struggles. He returned to reconciliation after years away. He also experienced adoration.

“I distinctly remember hearing, ‘You’ll be my servant,’” he said.

His first response was disbelief.

“You got the wrong kid here,” he remembered thinking.

Later, while stationed in Okinawa, conversations with a priest brought the diaconate back into focus. He pursued pastoral theology, returned to North Carolina and entered formation.

Even then, he and his wife wondered how he might get out of it.

“Why is he picking me?” Calabrese said. “He’s got his wires crossed.”

The Apostles as Models for Ordinary Men

Asked who his heroes are, Calabrese named the apostles.

They matter to him, he said, because they were ordinary men chosen by Christ for extraordinary work.

“What do we know about Peter?” he asked. “Peter’s first pope, that’s great. But we know the name. We don’t know the person.”

Peter denied Christ three times, yet received the keys. Thomas doubted, yet became a witness. James and John carried ambition and zeal. Judas showed the danger of pride.

Calabrese said men can study the apostles and recognize themselves.

“All their stories, they all struggled,” he said. “And yet somehow or another we feel guilty when we struggle.”

Asked what he tells men who feel guilt over struggle, he answered: “Welcome to humanity.”

Weakness, he said, does not erase masculine responsibility. A husband still leads. A father still protects. But men also need support, including from their wives and brothers in faith.

Serving Other Men

In the final stretch, De Souza asked whom Calabrese puts heroic effort into serving, with God and family ruled out as obvious answers.

“Other men,” Calabrese said.

Men owe each other example, correction and witness, he said. Even older men can learn from younger men. A healthy family strengthens the church. A healthier church can transform the culture.

De Souza summarized the Heroic Men framework this way: “Strengthen the man. If you do that, you’ll strengthen the family. And if you strengthen the family, you’ll strengthen the church. And if we can strengthen the church, we’ll transform the culture.”

Calabrese ended with a direct appeal.

“Come to know and love Christ as a person,” he said.

Faith, he said, begins like a relationship. Conversation. Time. Attention. Love.

“Fall in love with him again,” Calabrese said, “and allow him to transform you to be more like him.”

The Problem I Couldn’t Fix

My mom lives in an assisted living facility and has been working hard to recover from a stroke she suffered more than two years ago. The stroke left her dependent on caregivers for many of her basic needs. She requires assistance transferring in and out of bed and on and off the toilet.

What makes it even harder is that the help often arrives late—or, in some cases, not at all. Her medications have also been administered incorrectly. I know she isn’t the only elderly patient experiencing these challenges, but she is my mom, and I am one of many who believe she deserves better.

The facility is chronically short-staffed and shows little sign of addressing the problem. I could write a book about employees failing to meet even basic standards of care, but I won’t. After witnessing the same patterns repeatedly, I followed the usual channels to voice my concerns and advocate for better care. When promises were made but nothing changed, I let my anger get the best of me. I went straight to the top and demanded accountability, determined to fix the problem once and for all.

For a moment, it felt empowering.

But before long, things returned to the same cycle of inconsistent and unmotivated service. There are occasional good days, but not much has changed. The care my mother receives still falls short of what most of us would want for our own moms.

I won’t stop advocating for her. But even if I am right, I am not in control of this situation. Admitting that brings up all kinds of emotions—frustration, anger, helplessness—that I can only try not to sin over.

The Man Who Had to Lose Everything Before He Let God In

National men’s ministry leader, speaker, and author of Power Made Perfect, John Edwards shares a powerful story of addiction, brokenness, and surrender. His life spiraled downward through drug addiction, eventually leading to separation from God and devastating consequences. His story resonates with many men who try to overcome life’s pressures through self-medication, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and worldly solutions.

Like most things in life, we make choices and ignore the consequences until we find ourselves facing problems we can no longer fix on our own.

John was driven by the need to appear strong—a good provider, a man who could handle every problem himself. He humbly admits these traits are often signs of a man operating apart from God. What began as one secret addiction eventually became four, all while his family life and professional success appeared perfect to outsiders.

But God loved John too much to leave him there.

After being arrested and hitting rock bottom, he cried out to God for the first time in years. Alone in a jail cell, he surrendered his life to Christ.

Spoiler alert: that moment began an incredible ten-year journey of transformation. As John surrendered control, he watched God use his life in remarkable ways.

This month, we hosted John on our “Answering the Heroic Call” podcast. After reading his book and interviewing him, I’m convinced his story offers practical steps all of us can use to invite God to take the reins and reveal His purpose for our lives.

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Jesus Could Not Be More Clear

In John 15:5, Jesus says, “Remain in me... and you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

Could God’s Word be any clearer?

Jesus is waiting for us to surrender—to trust, obey, and abide in Him.

Why Surrender Feels So Unnatural

God created men to protect, provide, and lead. Those responsibilities come with pressure. We often feel it is our duty to control outcomes and solve every problem affecting us or the people we love.

At the same time, while we naturally make life about ourselves, God is working out His plans for billions of people He loves equally. Sometimes we cannot see how He is moving in our jobs, marriages, finances, or homes.

Success Trains Us to Trust Ourselves

Many of us are exceptionally good at taking charge and driving toward desired outcomes. If you’ve worked for a large company, you’ve probably been rewarded for delivering results on time and under budget. It’s easy to trust our own plans and simply ask God to bless them.

In those moments, I forget that God—not me—is ultimately in control, and His plan is always bigger and better than mine.

What Surrender Has Looked Like for Me

I’ve been working on my own ability to trust God and surrender control. Unlike John Edwards, I didn’t end up in a jail cell. But I can absolutely relate to trying to do life my own way.

That struggle hasn’t been helped by a comparison-driven, performance-oriented mindset I’ve carried since childhood. Through experience, I’ve learned that I truly can do nothing apart from Christ. Looking back, I can see God’s hand throughout my life, even when I thought I was the one in control.

The truth is, God’s control isn’t something to fear—it’s a source of peace.

The Prayer That Keeps Bringing Me Back

For the past twenty months, I’ve been praying the Surrender Novena. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the prayer was given by Jesus to Father Dolindo Ruotolo (1882–1970), who faithfully recorded the nine-day novena.

Its message is so practical and relevant that after finishing Day 9, I simply start over again at Day 1. As I continue praying it, I see growth in my faith, trust, and peace.

One recurring theme throughout the novena is Jesus’ promise that He will take care of everything we place in His hands. Whatever the outcome, He promises us His peace.

As it turns out, my mother’s care is one area I have had to surrender. Every day, I place it before Jesus and acknowledge that God has a plan for her and for those caring for her—a plan I cannot accelerate, especially through anger and frustration.

A Challenge for Every Man Reading This

If you sense God calling you to release control in some area of your life, I hope you have a men’s group, pastor, or trusted Christian mentor with whom you can talk and pray.

Consider praying the Surrender Novena as well. It is easy to find online, and I’ve even purchased copies printed on cardstock to share with others.

While John Edwards wasn’t ready to surrender until he reached rock bottom, you don’t have to wait for a crisis. Spend some time in prayer and honestly examine what your need for control may be costing you.

Control shows up in many places: our children, careers, finances, marriages, and future plans.

I’ve seen firsthand how my desire to “fix” everything myself has led me into pride, frustration, and sin. That has never been God’s plan for me.

And I suspect it isn’t His plan for you either.

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There are moments that split a life cleanly into before and after. For Chris Mueller, one of them began with a lump on his small son’s neck during Holy Week, while an animated Easter story played on YouTube.

At first, it looked manageable. Children get lumps. Families watch and wait. Parents tell themselves there will be an ordinary explanation. Then the lump kept growing.

Mueller was far from home, alone in a hotel room in Ontario during a speaking tour, when the news hardened into something far darker: his son Ben had cancer.

“It was a very helpless feeling,” Mueller said, recalling the distance between himself and his family, and the fact that there was nothing he could do with his own hands to make it stop.

His son, still only 3, had been diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. “You’re so far away from home, to know that he’s dealing with that, to be powerless to do anything.”

That helplessness became one of the central themes of his conversation on Heroic Stories, where Mueller spoke with host Dominic De Souza about fatherhood, suffering, faith and the long, grinding hope to endure.

The prayer that came first

Mueller did what many men do in crisis: he reached for the thing he had trained himself to reach for before emotion could consume the room. He turned toward prayer. More specifically, he turned toward praise.

“My first impulse was to turn to prayer,” he said. “I turned to worship.”

That response did emerge from nowhere. In the interview, Mueller traced his formation through the example of his father, a onetime dentist whose life changed after a charismatic prayer meeting.

The elder Mueller, Chris said, had possessed the courage to follow God wherever truth led, even after physical pain ended his dental career and sent him into a different form of service, eventually as a deacon and media minister. “When you have that encounter with God,” Mueller said, “to have the courage to say, wherever this leads me, I’m gonna go.”

That pattern, taking “the next logical step” without demanding the whole map, became how Mueller faced his son’s illness. Children’s Hospital Orange County emerged as the path.

A family friend connected them with an oncologist who began praying before she even became Ben’s doctor. The years ahead would be brutal, yet Mueller kept describing each step as both practical and providential. It’s a strange combination, but it’s familiar to people who have lived long enough to see crisis and grace share the same hospital hallway.

The crying place

Mueller never tried to romanticize the suffering. He called it “three years of awful.”

One of the bleakest images in the interview came from the hospital parking structure. Inside the hospital, he and his wife stayed strong for Ben. Outside, the parking structure became, in his phrase, “the crying place.”

One parent would leave, get to the car, and “bawl your eyes out on the way home,” then return to the work of being strong again for the child and the other children waiting at home.

There is the public face of courage, and then there is the parking garage.

De Souza asked what it was like to receive the diagnosis and then “start to make sense of such a dark period.”

Mueller returned to praise as the family’s lifeline. Songs played in the background while breakfast was made for the children. He remembered lyrics about God moving mountains. He stopped and worshiped. “That was our lifeline,” he said, “to know that God is God.”

“We saw it all along the way”

Mueller’s does believe life contains trouble. He quoted Christ’s words plainly: “In this life, you will have troubles.” Even so, God remains faithful, and works for good even in terrible circumstances.

At one point, a drug Ben needed was caught in an international shortage. The backup drug triggered an allergy. Yet Mueller said his son received every required dose. Ben became the first patient at the hospital to challenge that allergy, and although the challenge failed for him, what doctors learned helped other children receive treatment. For Mueller, even that became evidence that suffering, while still suffering, was never empty.

“How do you live like that?” De Souza asked, referring to Mueller’s language of expecting miracles.

Human beings, he said, face a choice between two stories: one in which God is withholding, and one in which God is faithful.

“Do I look for God’s moving or do I?” he asked, framing the decision almost as a discipline of sight. In his view, faith does erase none of the brokenness of the world. It does, however, determine what a man searches for while walking through it.

What a child taught a father

Ben, meanwhile, became one of the strongest figures in the story. Mueller described him as “the happiest little cancer patient you’ve ever met.” That line could sound sentimental in lesser hands. In context, it felt earned.

There were ugly steroids, intramuscular injections, hospital routines, fear and pain. Ben hated the taste of the medicine. Early on, he declared with toddler logic, “Cancer’s good,” because the steroids were worse.

Then, once his father explained that the painful interventions were there to make him better, something in the boy settled. He would tense up for the injection, growl through it, and then ask, “Where are my Legos?”

Mueller read in that response a kind of masculine clarity he associated with St. Joseph. No speeches. No display. The hard thing arrives; the man does the hard thing.

“If something’s hard, I just do it,” Mueller said, describing both Joseph and, by implication, the man he wants to become. “That’s why I was given strength.”

Act. Never react.

Mueller named other men who shaped him, including his brother-in-law and a longtime pastor, Father Jack Barker. From Barker, he said, he learned a practice that has followed him through ministry, fatherhood and years leading real estate brokerages: “I never saw him react. I always saw him act.”

For Mueller, strength is less about force than restraint ordered toward truth. In family conflict, in ministry, in business, surface behavior can tempt a fast response. The deeper task is to pause, ask what is happening beneath the anger, and let the Holy Spirit into the room before speaking.

De Souza asked whom Mueller hopes to serve apart from God and family.

Mueller’s answer returned to place, commitment and the long arc of vocation. He spoke of Murrieta, former students, volunteers, parishioners, people from decades of ministry who still reach out.

Reading Rick Warren years ago, he said he felt his heart “well” at the idea of making a lifelong commitment to a place. “That is exactly it,” he said. “That’s what I feel like God is calling me to do.”

Several months ago a young man from our parish approached me and asked if I would be willing to serve as his sponsor. I was both honored and surprised by the request. His parents arranged a dinner for my wife and me, giving Joseph an opportunity to interview me for his confirmation requirements.

A Decision I Almost Put Off

On the eve of the confirmation, I attended the Friday-morning Mass at our parish. I was considering taking the sacrament of confession, but with so much on my plate I told myself I would postpone it until next week. Joseph was in Mass with his father and two younger brothers. I noticed them lining up for confession after communion, and I realized I needed to go that day to demonstrate to the young man I was sponsoring that men must attend confession and to support him as he did.

Confirmation Day Brought an Unexpected Question

The next day was confirmation day. We arrived early to rehearse for the 50+ young people who would be confirmed. While speaking with the sponsor beside me, I learned that he was the uncle of the young man he was sponsoring. It made me wonder why Joseph had chosen me, especially since he had an uncle who was a priest and another uncle from Kelowna who was present for the confirmation.

When I asked him who had suggested me as a sponsor, he said he was the one who had chosen me.

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The Reason He Chose Me

After the ceremony, we all went to the family home for a celebratory lunch. I spoke with Joseph’s grandfather, who told me that Joseph had seen me at church services, Masses, and BBQs, and that was why he had asked me.

It reminded me of the work I had done with youth at risk of falling into gangs. I had long realized that what I did and how I lived mattered more than what I said. I also recognized one of the men at our recent men’s breakfast as that quiet servant who always helps, and that I saw his example!.

Young Men Are Watching

So, men, my message to you today is that young men are watching you.

Make sure that you see them and greet the young people with a smile and let them know they are loved at church.

The saying goes, “preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.”

We are reminded at the end of Mass with the instruction: “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.”

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