Catholic men are living in the middle of a spiritual battle, Dr. Dan Schneider says, and one of their greatest vulnerabilities is failing to recognize that a battle is taking place at all.
Schneider, an adjunct professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Gulf War veteran, former Army helicopter pilot and amateur boxer, joined Tom Honercheck and Dean Patterson on “Men Answering the Heroic Call” to discuss masculinity, pornography, spiritual warfare, prayer and the discipline he believes Catholic men desperately need.
“Everybody wakes up in battle every day — the world, the flesh and the devil,” Honercheck said.
For Schneider, that language is not metaphorical.
“The Lord is a warrior,” he said. “The cross of Jesus Christ is where we find our victory. Men are made to bear that cross and to bear under it and do whatever they have to do for the salvation of their own souls and those that God has entrusted to them.”
From Army Aviation to Scripture and Spiritual Combat
Schneider grew up in a blue-collar Catholic family in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a union electrician and his mother worked as a secretary for the church.
“My dad really pushed us in academics,” Schneider said.
He earned an ROTC scholarship to the University of Notre Dame before entering the Army, eventually flying Cobra gunship helicopters. He also trained in combat sports and boxed as an amateur.
“I was Catholic my whole life, never missed Mass,” Schneider said. “That doesn’t mean I was a perfect guy. I was not necessarily the nicest guy in the world, but God in his grace continues to work on me and all of us.”
A conversion experience in Iraq was followed by what Schneider described as a continuing series of conversions after returning home.
His interest increasingly moved toward Scripture.
“I loved reading the Bible,” he said. “It was kind of my passion. It’s what I like to do, and it’s where the Lord really speaks to me.”
Schneider pursued a master’s degree in theology while operating a business and raising a family.
“It took me seven years, running a business and raising a family, getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning or staying up late at night doing my studies,” he said.
That eventually led to Greek studies and a doctorate in biblical studies through Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England.
“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Why would I ever do this?’” Schneider said. “But the Lord just kept pushing me.”
Today, he teaches, guides doctoral students, writes and speaks about Scripture, the Church Fathers and spiritual combat.
“The Lord has a sense of humor,” he said. “He made a big shift in my life about five or six years ago, and I started working full-time in teaching and evangelization and writing books and traveling and speaking and doing what I can while I’ve got breath and strength.”
‘It’s OK to Be a Man’
Patterson asked Schneider what he is seeing among men at conferences and in Catholic circles as concerns grow about declining participation in the Church and confusion surrounding masculinity.
Schneider said straightforward language about authentic masculinity continues to resonate.
“Men need discipline. They need order. Men need ritual. Men need accountability and brotherhood,” he said.
He argued that authentic masculinity and authentic femininity are complementary rather than competitive.
“Authentic masculinity recognizes authentic femininity,” Schneider said, citing St. John Paul II’s emphasis on the dignity of women.
But Schneider believes modern culture frequently treats traditional masculinity with suspicion.
“It’s OK to be a man,” he said. “It’s OK to like to get on the gun range. It’s OK to go hunting. It’s OK to be athletic. It’s OK to be masculine and do combat sports.”
Those activities, however, are not what ultimately make a man masculine, Schneider said.
“Authentic masculinity bears under the cross,” he said. “Authentic masculinity knows how to endure. Authentic masculinity takes very seriously responsibilities to provide and to protect for our families.”
A Warrior Christ, Not a ‘Sugary Jesus’
Schneider said one obstacle for men is what he considers an incomplete image of Jesus Christ.
“I often use the phrase ‘sugary Jesus,’” he said.
The popular image of Jesus as simply agreeable, harmless or sentimental, Schneider argued, does not capture the biblical presentation of Christ.
“You want to see the Lord? The Lord is a warrior,” Schneider said.
He pointed to the Exodus, the title “Lord God of armies” throughout the Old Testament and Christ riding into battle in Revelation 19.
Schneider compared Christ’s cross to an ancient battlefield tropaion — a monument erected at the place where an enemy army broke and turned.
“I saw this spot as we were the lead cavalry unit in the lead tank division in Iraq,” he said. “That spot where the enemy first turns — once the first enemy turns, and then the next and the next, that’s when victory is brought about.”
The early Church Fathers, he said, interpreted the cross in similar terms.
“They saw the cross of Christ as the tropaion,” Schneider said. “They saw the cross of Christ as prefigured by David, who cut off the head of Goliath. The cross is where we find our victory.”
Wounded Men Can Point the Weapon at Themselves
The conversation turned toward trauma, sexual abuse and pornography.
Schneider recalled a conversation with podcast host and former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, who told him privately that a significant number of elite military veterans interviewed on his program had disclosed childhood sexual abuse.
Schneider said those wounds can profoundly affect identity.
“There’s a lot of wounded men out there that don’t know what to do with their wounds,” he said. “They don’t know how to bring that trauma and link it with the sufferings of Jesus Christ.”
To explain the danger, Schneider used the image of a Claymore mine.
The weapon bears a famously simple instruction: “Front toward enemy.”
During the Vietnam War, Schneider said, enemy sappers sometimes infiltrated American defenses and turned those mines around, causing soldiers to detonate the weapons against their own positions.
Schneider believes wounded men can do something similar emotionally and spiritually.
“That Claymore mine, that ‘front toward enemy,’ they put it towards themselves, or they put it towards their wife and their children,” he said.
The result can be self-destructive behavior, emotional distance or abandoning responsibilities at home.
“A lot of guys are very wounded,” Schneider said.
Pornography and the Collapse of Interior Freedom
Schneider identified pornography as one of the most destructive forces affecting men.
“The pornography, the filth and scourge and wicked evil of pornography, is afflicting men in a really negative way,” he said.
He said widespread exposure is reshaping the imagination, distorting sexuality and leaving men spiritually vulnerable.
“This scourge of pornography is destroying our minds,” Schneider said. “It’s destroying masculinity. It’s deranging the way we think.”
He told the story of a man who contacted him after suffering sexual abuse at age 15 and struggling for approximately 25 years with pornography, masturbation and intermittent alcohol abuse.
The man followed Schneider’s Liber Christo prayer discipline through Lent, including scheduled prayer, a media fast and restricted spiritual reading.
According to Schneider, the man told him afterward that the addictions had finally broken.
“I realized what I had in my life was a lack of discipline and just ignorance, a lack of knowledge,” Schneider recalled him saying. “God has given us the resources in the Church to fight back, and we just were ignorant about what the Church offers for men to find healing.”
Schneider added a simpler diagnosis.
“Most men lack discipline,” he said. “Let’s face it.”
Swagger Is Not Strength
Schneider contrasted modern masculine aesthetics with the deeper toughness he believes Christian discipleship requires.
“We might look cool and have a cool beard and cool tattoos and smoke cigars and have all the swagger, but that’s not what it is to be a man,” he said.
He recently helped a woman transition from active religious life into the life of a hermit. When he saw her living quarters, he noticed a stark sleeping arrangement — a simple mattress with no pillow — alongside a life centered on prayer, penance and hours before the Blessed Sacrament.
“A warrior,” Schneider said.
The encounter sharpened his conviction that masculinity cannot be reduced to appearances.
“Being a man is something that’s rugged on the inside that can bear down, that can suffer, and that can make sacrifices like Christ,” he said.
How Schneider Entered Exorcism Ministry
Schneider’s work in deliverance ministry began after a priest friend was asked to serve as a diocesan exorcist.
The priest asked Schneider, with his military and fighting background, to attend a presentation and potentially assist the team.
Schneider initially had little interest.
Then he attended a minor exorcism.
“I was expecting Hollywood and all that,” Schneider said. “What I saw was something very beautiful.”
Instead of spectacle, he saw what he described as the authority of the Church confronting darkness.
“It was incredibly beautiful, liturgical, sacramental,” he said. “It was the power and weight of the Church and the authority of the Church coming down and bringing the light of Christ into the kingdom of darkness and snatching souls back.”
He joined the team.
Over the following years, Schneider said he sometimes participated in three or four cases or prayer meetings a week while simultaneously completing doctoral research in the early morning.
The work changed his understanding of Catholic theology.
“It really purified my vocation, purified my ecclesiology, how I view the priesthood and the office of the bishop,” he said.
It also deepened his understanding of Mary, the guardian angels and St. Michael.
“This cosmic view of the battlefield began to take shape in my understanding,” Schneider said.
The Liber Christo Method
That experience eventually contributed to Schneider’s book, “The Liber Christo Method: A Field Manual for Spiritual Combat.”
The method begins with prayer discipline and proceeds toward confession, deeper prayer and identifying areas where a person may have surrendered ground spiritually.
“It was just from my experience working with cases on how to identify areas of our lives that we’ve given strongholds to the enemy, and then how to reverse that,” Schneider said.
He later co-authored “Spiritual Warfare Q&A for Priests and Laity” with Jesse Romero and wrote “Sins of the Father,” addressing generational curses from a Catholic and biblical perspective.
“I’m just going to keep writing and researching and do what I can to try to inform the next generation of Catholics on spiritual combat,” he said.
Why Order Matters
For Schneider, one of the central discoveries of deliverance work is deceptively simple: order itself matters.
“We’ve discovered that the demon responds to the imposition of order as much as to the prayers themselves,” he said.
That helps explain why men often report major interior changes through demanding spiritual disciplines such as Exodus 90 or St. Michael’s Lent.
“They’ve discovered, ‘Wow, I’m finding liberation. I had no idea that this freedom, this interior freedom, was possible,’” Schneider said.
Scheduled prayer, fasting from media and focused Scripture reading can help strengthen the will and restore control over the imagination, he said.
“The imposition of order is critical because it begins to strengthen the will,” Schneider said.
Pulling away from social media and unnecessary stimulation can also help men develop what he called “custody of the mind” and “custody of the imagination.”
“That’s where most men get beat,” he said. “It’s in the imagination and the mind.”
Fight Temptation While It Is Small
Schneider drew another lesson from the monastic tradition and the imprecatory Psalms — biblical prayers containing violent imagery against enemies.
Rather than applying those passages literally to human enemies, Schneider said early Christian tradition often understood them spiritually.
The enemies are vice and temptation.
“They see the little stirrings of lust, the stirrings of anger, of shame, of vanity, of pride,” he said. “These things stir up in the heart, and while they’re little, this is the monastic tradition, you crush them before they gain strength.”
Waiting allows the temptation to become stronger.
“If you let that guy get up and get to full stature, you’re now facing a giant,” Schneider said. “But you’ve got to crush him while it’s little.”
The “rock,” he said, is Christ.
“It’s invoking the name of Jesus Christ,” Schneider said. “It’s crushing these temptations through prayer while they’re small.”
Mental prayer allows men to recognize thoughts without automatically accepting them as their own.
“When these temptations rise up, you’re like, ‘Hey, that’s not my stuff. I’m not going to appropriate that. I’m going to let it move on,’” he said.
‘The Church Has Failed’ to Equip Men
Asked whether ordinary Catholic men are adequately prepared to understand spiritual warfare, Schneider offered a sharp assessment.
“I think the Church has failed. At least they’ve neglected,” he said.
He praised generations of Catholic women who remained engaged while many men became spiritually absent.
“We had a generation of older women that have been holding the Church up while men have been largely absent, just like Adam,” Schneider said. “They’ve been silent.”
The danger, Schneider said, is not necessarily denying the devil’s existence. It is assuming spiritual evil has no immediate relevance.
He cited the film “Nefarious,” in which a character is told he is losing a war he did not know existed.
“I believe the devil exists, but I just don’t think he’s after me or my family,” Schneider said, describing the attitude he sees among some Christians. “In which case, that’s why you’re losing.”
Pornography Is Reaching Children Earlier
Honercheck raised concerns about children gaining unrestricted access to smartphones and pornography.
Schneider agreed the consequences are increasingly serious, particularly when early exposure follows young men into vocational discernment and seminary formation.
He described working indirectly with seminarians struggling with pornography and sexual problems rooted in years of exposure.
In one case, Schneider recommended a structured prayer protocol and complete restriction of unnecessary media.
The seminarian initially resisted.
He was given another option: Exodus 90.
“No coffee Wednesdays and Fridays, cold showers — you get your choice,” Schneider recalled.
The seminarian chose Schneider’s protocol.
After several weeks, Schneider said the priest accompanying him reported significant progress. Within several months, Schneider said the underlying pattern broke and the man eventually returned to seminary.
“This works,” Schneider said.
His larger point was that Catholics do not need to invent new forms of spiritual formation.
“Tap into the tradition of the Church,” he said. “Benedictine, Augustinian, Carmelite, Ignatian. These are the doctors of the Church that have given us our patrimony on how to pray.”
Not Every Problem Requires an Exorcism
Schneider also warned against assuming every unusual spiritual struggle requires direct intervention from an exorcist.
He told the story of a woman with cancer who approached him at a conference. She had already received prayers from multiple priests and an exorcist but continued experiencing disturbing sexual temptations specifically when looking at a crucifix.
After asking about her history, Schneider discovered she had spent 16 years in religious life before leaving.
“You’re not possessed,” Schneider told her. “You don’t need a priest to pray over you.”
Instead, he encouraged her to reconsider her suffering through her former identity as a consecrated woman and to offer her cancer prayerfully for other women suffering from sexual abuse or sexual temptation.
“Offer your body up, as St. Paul says, a living sacrifice,” Schneider said.
Her response stayed with him.
“This is the first time in my life that I can remember having hope,” Schneider recalled her telling him.
That experience reflects a broader principle in his ministry.
“Ninety percent of the time, we found that we can self-deliver,” Schneider said. “Most people, 90% or more, can just deliver on their own with some discipline work and a reorientation, a return to sacraments and good confession.”
Men Need Brothers Who Will Answer at 2 A.M.
As the episode closed, Patterson tied Schneider’s message back to the wider mission of Heroic Men.
“We need brotherhood,” Patterson said. “Jesus formed men as disciples. We need guys we can count on and go to war with.”
He said every man needs another man who would answer his call at 2 a.m.
Heroic Men’s pledge asks men to take three recurring actions: pray daily for three men, connect personally with another man every week and invite one man each month to make the same commitment.
“This isn’t a pledge that’ll cost you money,” Patterson said. “It’s going to cost you a bit of time and the strength of your faith.”
The goal is to create a brotherhood of 1 million men by 2033.
Schneider’s message throughout the conversation offered a similar challenge.
Men do not become strong because they look masculine, talk tough or avoid suffering.
Strength grows through order, responsibility, prayer and sacrifice.
“Being a man is something that’s rugged on the inside,” Schneider said, “that can bear down, that can suffer, and that can make sacrifices like Christ.”