Hours to Live: How Matthew Christoff's Near-Death Diagnosis Forged a Message for Catholic Men
Matthew Christoff says Christ’s Gospel “strategy” is tougher than you expect. Credits his work to helping his father die well and facing his own near-death diagnosis.
Matthew Christoff’s new book says happiness for Catholic men starts with taking the Sunday Gospel seriously. He frames Jesus as the “lion of Judah,” and reads the Gospels as a sustained campaign to overthrow “the kingdom of Satan,” marked by constant threats, confrontation, and Christ’s refusal to back down.
Christoff traces his own decade-long devotion project to helping his father through a slow death after 47 years of sobriety, then surviving a medical crisis that forced him to face his own near-death without flinching. He aims to help young men (and, if possible, priests) with tools to make Catholic masculinity a parish priority.
Matthew Christoff arrives with a new book and a simple premise to revive the hearts of men.
“The new book, it’s called Becoming a Happier Catholic Man. And the idea really is that we can become happier by meditating on the Sunday devotions one Sunday at a time,” he says. “And so the book does that for 2026. It’s based on Jesus.
“Jesus is the ultimate hero,” Christoff continues. “He has changed what it means to be human, and he does it under the most difficult and trying circumstances.”
He pushes back on what he calls a softened image of Christ.
“We tend to see Jesus as this man with a beard and rosy cheeks, cuddling a little lamb,” he says. “But he is the lion of Judah.”
For Christoff, the heroism isn’t only in what Jesus accomplishes, but in the method.
“What he does to fundamentally recreate humanity through his incarnation and his passion is absolutely mind-boggling,” he says. “And it’s not only mind-boggling by what he accomplishes it, but how he does it and how sophisticated his strategy is to do this.”
“Jesus comes to overthrow the kingdom of Satan — that’s what our church teaches — and establish the kingdom of God,” he says.
He describes a life lived under threat.
“From the moment he’s born, he’s under a death warrant. Herod’s after him,” he says. “He has to escape through St. Joseph and Our Lady to Egypt.”
Then, he says, the pressure only increases.
“As soon as he goes public, people are trying to kill him,” Christoff says. “Over and over and over again. There are people that are trying to spy on him. There are people that are scheming against him. And despite all this, he never quits. He never backs down.”
Christoff keeps returning to confrontation — and what he sees as repeated victory.
“Every time he gets in any kind of confrontation with those that want to attack him, he wins,” he says. “He never loses a debate.
“We confuse meekness with being harmless, unable to defend yourself, and often just confused with humility,” Christoff says. “Humility is very different than meekness.”
He circles back to what he calls the source of that restraint.
“That meekness comes from immense power,” he says. “Divine power.”
‘A heroic leap of faith’ that took 10 years
Asked about a heroic decision in his own life, Christoff begins with a conviction about purpose.
“Every single man is uniquely created by God for a very specific mission to build the kingdom of God,” he says. “I don’t care who you are. You have been created on purpose, with purpose.”
His answer turns personal.
“I helped my father die over a period of nine months and it was a slow, agonizing, difficult death,” Christoff says. “And he was an alcoholic.”
His father, he says, had been sober for decades.
“He had become sober through one of the 12-step programs and had been sober continuously for 47 years,” Christoff says. “Show me somebody who is able to abstain or completely control their controlling vice for a long period of life. I mean, it’s amazing.”
During those months, Christoff read to him from a small daily book.
“I’d be reading him his little day-at-a-time book,” he says. “It was this little book… like three by six inches. It’s all broken. It’s scotch tape… brown scotch tape and rubber bands.”
After his father died, that book haunted him in a new way.
“As I’m riding the plane home, I’m just thinking to myself, man, I just wished I had something like that as a Catholic man,” Christoff says. “Just for a Catholic — to help me draw closer to Jesus and learn the faith.”
He says he prayed, then made it public.
“I prayed about it for three weeks and then I just jumped in,” he says. “I did it on my website and I’m gonna write a daily devotion for Jesus — every day of the gospel.”
The work, he says, cost him a decade.
“In retrospect, it was just like, oh my goodness,” Christoff says. “That was just — that’s such a leap of faith because to do this took me… 10 years to get it in final form.”
‘Inside baseball’: Commentaries, Aquinas, and the Catechism
When asked why it took so long, Christoff points to rigor and loyalty.
“To present a daily gospel devotional that is not my own ideas, but the ideas of the church takes a tremendous amount of work,” he says.
He describes the scope.
“There were 15 different commentaries — going back to Aquinas and the fathers before him, and then even modern ones — that went into distilling down to what each one of these devotions meant,” Christoff says.
He also describes a structural choice he calls “really unique.”
“If you went through the whole devotional… you would be exposed to every paragraph of the Catechism,” he says. “The Catechism is integrated… on a just-in-time basis… You’re getting just the snippet… you need to understand that particular passage in the gospel.”
He admits the explanation can sound technical.
“It’s a lot of inside baseball,” Christoff says. “It’s kind of like somebody goes, ‘Why do you buy a Mercedes?’… really what you want is a great car.”
But for him, the engineering matters — and explains the years.
“That’s why it took 10 years,” he says.
‘You had hours’: A call from Mayo
Then he mentions another pressure point — a near-death moment that threatened to end the work.
“I’d finished the manuscript. I was polishing it,” he says. Then he started to feel worse.
“I ended up going down to Mayo Clinic and drive home after all these CAT scans,” Christoff says. “And I get in the driveway and my wife and I get the call… ‘You need to come back down here soon.’”
He tried to negotiate a timeline.
“It was Friday night. I’ll be down there Monday,” he recalls telling them.
The answer, he says, was immediate.
“‘No, no, no, no. You got to be down here tonight.’”
The doctors had found widespread blockage. “You’ve got a massive thrombosis,” he says. “Your veins are plugged. The blood’s not flowing.”
He describes what was blocked.
“My portal vein was completely blocked. All the veins that went to the intestines were blocked. The vein that went to the liver was blocked,” Christoff says.
“And it was a matter of hours before all my body, my organs went into death,” he adds. “They said, ‘You had hours.’”
Christoff says the experience was oddly clear.
“I’m like, okay, I guess it’s lights out here… and I’m ready,” he says. “And it was beautiful.”
He describes family and the church’s rites.
“The family rally and it was amazing,” he says. “Everybody prayed. I had anointing of the sick, last rites and all that kind of stuff.”
He survived.
“It’s four years later,” he says. “It allowed me to finish the book.”
He attributes the event to what he calls a “COVID injury,” adding, “Probably from vaccine,” then adding, “There’s no other explanation… It’s a one in 2 million thing.”
Learning to accept death — after a darker diagnosis
Asked how he reached a point of readiness, Christoff describes a long arc.
He says he had a successful business career — “very senior levels in corporate America, around the world” — and then cancer.
“It was very dark and things didn’t look good and God preserved me,” he says.
He says survival came with chronic illness.
“He preserved me with chronic illness, which has made the last 25 years of my life very difficult,” Christoff says. “I struggle every day, but he’s also given me the strength to go on.”
When he couldn’t return to a demanding travel life, he says he made a decision.
“I just said, I’m going to dedicate my life to Jesus because he saved me,” Christoff says.
He describes working without the motivations he once knew.
“I work for the glory of God,” he says. “I don’t work for any kind of recognition or financial incentive.”
He says he’s preferred to remain out of view.
“I have worked behind the scenes and tried not to draw attention to myself because… that’s not my personality,” Christoff says.
But the work has pushed him outward.
“Because this work needs to be taken public, I’ve started to speak more,” he says. “Not what I envisioned for my life at all.”
‘This is going to make you squirm’: Heroes besides Christ
Asked to name heroes beyond Jesus, points to Cardinal Raymond Burke and a moment that brought unexpected attention.
“I had a chance to interview him… 10 years ago, and when I interviewed him, the interview went viral,” Christoff says. “The weight of the world came down on my head. It was unbelievable. He knew what he was doing. I didn’t know what he was doing.”
He recalls a line that triggered backlash.
“He said, ‘The church has become feminized,’ and that just… holy hell got broke loose,” Christoff says. “It was on the BBC. It was all over the place.”
Christoff says Burke’s defense of the Latin Mass stands out to him.
“Not everybody’s cup of tea,” he says. “But the fact is he does defend that… is important… in the life of the church.”
He names Bishop Thomas Olmsted and a specific text.
“Bishop Olmsted who wrote Into the Breach,” Christoff says, calling it “foundational” and pointing to its use in the Knights of Columbus series.
He names Jeff Cavins.
“Another guy… who could do anything with his life,” Christoff says. “And yet he spends all of his time helping people understand the Bible and he reaches millions of people.”
Christoff also names Robert Tunmire, Kevin O’Brien, Father Larry Richards, and Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, describing them as men dedicating experience and resources to Catholic men’s renewal.
Who he wants to spend heroic effort on
Asked who he wants to be a hero for, Christoff answers plainly.
“The short answer is young men,” he says. “We’re living in a time of such great crisis of masculinity and crisis in the church.”
He describes what he sees as a core confusion.
“Men don’t understand what it means to be a man,” he says. “And they don’t have a clue that the ultimate key to thriving and being happy is to be a zealous Catholic man.”
Pressed on why young men, he describes conviction — and urgency.
“I’m so convinced of this,” he says. “I believe it. I know enough men who live this life, and I know they’re happy, and I know it means something to them.”
He frames his work as something meant to outlive him.
“I’m going to be gone soon,” Christoff says. “It’s not to build a legacy for me, but it’s to say, hey, Catholic men are important and we need to evangelize them.”
He wants the tools to seed more work.
“My greatest desire would be that people that read some of the work… are inspired to do the same thing and write better work,” he says. “To reach men in ways that I can’t conceive of.”
He adds one more audience: priests.
“If to some degree I could inspire priests… to actually make men a priority in their parishes,” Christoff says, “to build an ethic of Catholic masculinity… if that happens in some small way… I’m going to die with a smile on my face.”
How he hopes men use the new book
Christoff says the new book is built around Sundays and feast days.
“The idea is that you can become happier by looking at and engaging in the gospel from the mass on Sundays and feast days,” he says. “We have a liturgical rhythm… built around our Sundays.”
He places it inside the church’s current emphasis.
“We’re called by our bishops to a national Eucharistic revival,” he says. “This book is specifically designed to help men do that.”
He describes the time commitment.
“Once a week spend 15 minutes,” Christoff says, “and really get the inside baseball understanding of what’s happening in the gospel.”
He says men should leave with wonder and practice.
“You can walk away with one or two things that will awe you about Jesus… and mission,” he says. “And then you’re to get two practical things that can help you grow in happiness.”
“We don’t get to heaven without ingraining the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit,” he says. “And the average Catholic guy cannot tell you what they are.” This can help with that.
What’s next: Lent, the four Gospels, and more
Christoff says several projects are in motion.
“The first, which will launch in January, is called Becoming a New Man in Jesus Christ,” he says, describing a Lent-focused system that ends with “the seven habits of the new man in Jesus.”
He also describes commentary volumes on each Gospel.
“Commentary on the entire Gospels — Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” Christoff says, “organized not by liturgical year or by Lent, but by… Matthew 1 through Matthew 26…”
He mentions another planned title.
“Becoming Awed by Jesus Christ,” he says, “deep dive meditations into the divinity, humanity, and mission of Jesus.”
And, if time allows, a fourth:
“The Life of Jesus in a Year,” Christoff says. “It takes men through the life of Jesus… through the first 325 days.”
He describes the final stretch.
“Then the last 40 days are a consecration of Jesus Christ, Savior of man.”
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