Catholic men are bored. Sam Halligan says they need a mission
Ssacrifice, struggle and service can awaken men. A convo about men who feel underused in the Church and unsure what is possible with their lives
Men once lined up for the chance to cross Antarctica under conditions that promised danger, miserable pay and an uncertain return.
Today, many men struggle to get out of bed without reaching for a phone.
Sam Halligan believes the contrast reveals something important about the modern man. Men still hunger for adventure, responsibility and sacrifice. Yet few hear a compelling invitation to spend their lives on something difficult and meaningful.
“People have to decide: What am I going to give my life to? What am I giving my time to?” Halligan said.
Halligan, who works with Forge in Des Moines, Iowa, joined Dominic of Heroic Men for a conversation about masculine leadership, spiritual struggle and the stories that call men into action.
He began with an explorer trapped at the bottom of the world.
Shackleton and the burden of leadership
Halligan has been reading “Endurance,” the account of British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition.
Shackleton assembled a crew of roughly 25 men for a dangerous journey during the early 20th century. According to a famous recruitment story, his newspaper advertisement warned applicants about low wages, bitter cold and a doubtful return. Men still crowded around the block for the opportunity.
The expedition soon became a fight for survival. Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice. The crew spent months stranded hundreds of miles from inhabited land.
Halligan sees Shackleton’s ordeal as a lesson in masculine leadership.
“To be a leader can be very, very difficult,” he said. A leader must “paint a vision” and hold it through “highs and lows and hills and valleys.”
When Shackleton realized the ship could no longer save them, he ordered his men to abandon nearly everything. Each extra possession would become a burden during the journey ahead.
Shackleton led by example. He discarded valuable personal items and kept only a few essentials. His men followed.
“How much of that is the call to us as Christian men?” Halligan asked. “We’ve got to cut the dead weight out of our life.”
The lesson reaches beyond physical possessions. Habits, distractions and private compromises can consume the strength a man needs for his actual responsibilities.
“There are things in our life that are going to weigh us down,” Halligan said. “Those things have to go.”
Men need a story large enough to enter
Heroic Men defines heroism as stepping beyond personal needs to serve someone else.
That service can take a practical form: daily prayer, weekly contact with a brother and a monthly invitation for another man to enter the same commitment. These small actions turn heroism from a distant ideal into a repeatable way of living.
Dominic asked Halligan what behaviors could help ordinary men recover greater boldness at home, at work and in their parishes.
Halligan began with sacrifice.
“A man who is living fully alive, there has got to be a deep commitment to sacrifice,” he said.
Halligan first encountered that choice during his senior year at Benedictine College. He could spread his remaining courses across three semesters, or take 23 credits in the fall and 21 in the spring to graduate on time.
He chose the heavier course load.
“I want to do a hard thing right now,” he remembered thinking. “I want to engage in suffering and I want to engage in sacrifice because I believe that this is actually integral to my heart as a man.”
That choice became a reference point during later trials: marriage, fatherhood and growing professional responsibilities.
“Because of that moment, there is a ripple that occurred throughout my life,” he said. “I’m willing to choose the hard thing, choose the sacrificial thing.”
Sacrifice, Halligan said, is more than a temporary exercise during Lent or a burst of enthusiasm in January. It is “a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual act of self-gift to another person.”
It requires a man to give beyond his baseline.
Are churches asking enough of men?
Halligan believes the wider culture often treats masculine strength as a problem. He also believes many churches fail to give men a demanding alternative.
“We don’t ask enough of men,” he said.
Men frequently attend Mass, hear announcements requesting volunteers and leave without understanding the larger mission of their lives.
“Most men in the pews of a church sometimes look more like a corpse,” Halligan said. “They look like they don’t want to be there.”
The deeper problem may be boredom.
“Men are bored,” he said. “This is why people watch like two hours of TV a day, or people’s screen time is literally like seven hours a day on their phones.”
A fish fry, committee assignment or parish fundraiser can accomplish real good. Yet these activities rarely tell a man why his strength, initiative and courage matter.
Dominic argued that men need a better story. They need to understand their parish and community as a mission field filled with families to protect, friendships to rebuild and problems to solve.
Halligan agreed.
“We have to understand life through the lens of mission, like the lens of adventure,” he said.
A man who reaches one struggling brother may also affect that man’s wife, children, relatives and friends.
“One man’s life touches so many others,” Halligan said, recalling the central lesson of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “The gravity of your life has an eternal impact.”
Leaving the life he helped build
Halligan’s own sense of mission faced a severe test during the past year.
He and his wife had spent about a decade away from their families in Iowa. They had three children, with a fourth expected, and Halligan felt an increasing desire to raise them closer to their grandparents.
Yet leaving Ohio meant walking away from Damascus, a Catholic ministry he had helped build over 10 years. He had strong friendships, a stable leadership role and a community centered on prayer and the sacraments.
“On the surface, it was like, why would you leave this?” he said.
Halligan wrestled with the decision for months. He experienced guilt, doubt and periods he described as almost depressive. During a fundraising trip to Des Moines, someone introduced him to John Bishop, the founder of Forge.
That meeting eventually opened a path home. Halligan and his family moved to Des Moines in February, where he began serving men through Forge.
The outcome gave him a new view of the pain that preceded it.
“Our suffering is never unto nothing,” he said. “When we suffer, when there’s moments of hardship or moments of trials, these things come into our life for a purpose.”
Asked what he would change about that season, Halligan said he would resist wishing it away.
“When you’re in suffering, one of the most common human experiences is the avoidance of pain,” he said. “I would really love to not wish the particular spiritual moment away.”
No man wrestles with God and walks the same
Halligan compared spiritual struggle to Jacob wrestling with the angel. Jacob refused to release him without receiving a blessing. He received one, along with a wounded hip that changed his walk.
“No one can wrestle with God so intimately and walk the same way again,” Halligan said. “We have to look different. We have to walk different. We have to talk different. Our perspective on life has to be different.”
That struggle gives men an alternative to boredom and apathy. Their trials may represent a decisive chapter rather than a meaningless interruption.
Halligan pointed to the biblical life of David: shepherd, warrior, musician, fugitive and king. Each season ended, and another began.
“Where am I at in this story?” Halligan asked. “How do I have a great story to tell through the gift of my life?”
A man may feel defeated while living through the most important confrontation of his life.
Dominic reduced the warning to one unsettling question:
“Are you sleeping through the climax of your life and you don’t know it?”
Halligan believes the answer begins within a man’s immediate circle: himself, his wife, his children, his friends and the brothers entrusted to his care.
“I want to be a brother to you,” he said. “I want to come alongside you.”
The heroic mission may begin far from Antarctica. It may begin with a prayer, a phone call or an invitation.
But it still asks a man to leave something behind, enter the fight and spend his life for someone else.