John Chick put a question to Catholic men gathered for the Heroic Men 2026 convocation: A father may be willing to die for his son. But what is he willing to do every day?
“How many will live righteously for his son?” Chick asked. “And that’s the heroic man. That’s the heroic journey.”
Drawing on his years in football, his upbringing in Wyoming and his work in prison ministry, Chick described a familiar gap between the inspiration men receive at a conference and the habits they return to at home.
“We’re here fired up for a few days, but then I got to go home to my own devices,” he said.
Alongside John Mark Grodi, Chick outlined an approach to Catholic men’s formation built around four words: prayer, virtue, vocation and brotherhood. Their presentation connected spiritual growth with physical discipline, service and the accountability of men who expect each other to show up.
“You’re the hero of your story through Christ,” Chick said. “And you’re also the first one that’s going to let yourself down.”
A father’s faith beyond the church walls
Chick said his earliest memories of the Holy Spirit were tied to his father’s works of mercy.
Growing up in a devout Wyoming family, he accompanied his father to a soup kitchen, a nursing home and a jail. When someone needed help on a ranch, his father volunteered.
“Those were the encounters of the Holy Spirit that I remembered that impacted me beyond the church walls,” Chick said.
That faith also brought a sense of community. Wherever he competed in Wyoming, he said, someone who knew his father through the faith would be there in support.
Leaving home for Utah State University brought a question that followed him into adulthood. He pointed to the communal life described in Acts 2:42 and asked where Catholics experienced it during the rest of the week.
“Where is that between Sundays?” he asked. “I struggled to find that for most of my life.”
Football provided a form of brotherhood. His Catholic upbringing kept him going to church on Sundays, where his future wife, who had been raised Mormon, accompanied him while exploring the faith herself.
“She was already a better Catholic than I was,” Chick said.
As she went through RCIA, he began learning more about Catholic apologetics. He listened to Catholic radio during long drives and encountered teammates returning from missions with a strong commitment to their faith.
An injury season in 2008 brought another opportunity. Chick said he fell in love with Jeff Cavins’ Bible Timeline study. He and his wife began hosting it in their home for teammates as his career took them to different teams.
“Come here and let’s go over the Scripture together,” he recalled telling them.
Coming to know Christ through prayer
Grodi described a different path toward the same questions about faith and daily life.
His father, Marcus Grodi, had been a Presbyterian pastor. John Mark recalled his father being asked at a hospital whether a dying man would go to heaven, then recognizing that ministers from different churches might give different answers.
The question of teaching authority eventually led his father into the Catholic Church and into ministry supporting other pastors exploring that journey.
John Mark grew up around converts, hearing his father’s story and attending conferences with him. As a teenager, however, he began wrestling with what it meant to put his faith in Christ.
He studied philosophy and theology to address his intellectual questions. But he described a decisive experience in simpler terms.
“It was simply being with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and listening to him that I rediscovered what I had always hoped and believed was there,” Grodi said.
“Faith is a response to God reaching out to us, and we can come to know him.”
That understanding changed how he approached prayer.
“We expose ourselves to God. We listen to him, and we come to know him and be known by him,” he said.
Grodi described prayer as a journey that requires time, commitment and a place on a man’s calendar. Vocal prayer remains part of that life, he said, while men are also called to listen and come to know God intimately.
“As you go through life, exposing yourself to God, listening to him, you change,” he said.
When a men’s group keeps repeating the same struggles
Years later, after marrying and having children, Grodi was attending a men’s group that met regularly and read books together.
One morning, a member observed that they came every week and said the same things. They had failed to pray as they intended. They had given their wives too little time. They had spent too much time on their phones.
“We say the same old things,” Grodi recalled.
The conversation stayed with him. He began studying the virtues through the catechism, St. Thomas Aquinas and Josef Pieper, seeking to understand the habits the men wanted to break and those they wanted to build.
He described the Church’s teaching as “a coherent spiritual psychology helping us understand who we are through the cardinal and theological virtues.”
“Deeper than that, the Church calls us to build these virtues, these habits of your soul,” he said.
For Grodi, the four pillars of their work fit together around that interior transformation.
“Prayer is our relationship with God. Vocation is our relationship with the people that God has given to us and called us to minister to,” he said. “But that middle point of virtue, that’s who we are becoming in the process.”
Ordinary actions carry both an outward act and an inward motive, he said. Eating breakfast, exercising, working or kissing one’s wife all raise a question about why a man is acting.
“Is it because this is the right thing at the right time?” Grodi asked. “Is it out of love?”
Chick called the alternative “autopilot.”
Bringing urgency to the heroic life
Chick said men readily respond to images of heroism. Rocky and Braveheart can get them fired up. The harder task is acting on that desire.
“That is more than knowing the thing but acting on the thing,” he said.
Football had given him a structure that made preparation urgent. Whether a player practiced hard or failed to prepare, a game was coming.
“It was urgent, so you took care of it,” he said.
Chick described applying that sense of urgency to spiritual formation and physical training through the process of becoming an Iron Saint.
“Virtue combats vice. Vice weakens all men. We all got vices,” he said. “How do we make it urgent?”
The purpose, he said, is to help men answer the responsibilities God has already given them.
At the time of the presentation, Chick described himself as director of prison ministry for the Diocese of St. Augustine in Florida. He said the practice of undertaking monthly missions had led him into that work.
When he invited men into prison ministry, he heard competing explanations. Younger men were working and raising children. Older men were retired, tired or dealing with physical pain.
“The heart of what we do here is so that we can show up to the call God has given us,” Chick said.
‘There’s no neutral territory’
Grodi said their approach challenges men to bring every part of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
“There’s no neutral territory in your life,” he said. “There’s no neutral time. There’s no neutral money. There’s no neutral decisions.”
That includes eating, drinking, phone use and care for the body, he said. He connected physical stewardship with a man’s ability to give himself to God and to others.
“When you pray, you pray with your body,” Grodi said. “When you embrace your wife or play with your kids, you do it with your body.”
“Caring for our body is part of how we do justice to God and the people around us.”
Chick connected that teaching with Romans 12:1 and the call to offer one’s body as a living sacrifice. He described exercise dedicated to another person’s needs as a form of active prayer.
“How we define active prayer is inspired action dedicated to intentions greater than self,” he said.
Prayer intentions are central to the brotherhoods they lead, Chick said. Training serves the stewardship of body, mind and spirit.
“My commitment as a brother coming in here is to steward what God has given me,” he said.
Progress, presence and men who show up
Chick described three training tracks: one for men with more experience or gym access, another using equipment such as bands, dumbbells and kettlebells, and a third requiring equipment-free movement.
The coaching principles emphasize incremental progress and participation.
“One percent better every day,” Chick said. “Progress over perfection.”
“Presence over performance,” Grodi added.
Chick recalled a priest who joined because he wanted to become faithful to moving his body. Seven months later, the priest was still sending photographs and reporting weight loss of 55 to 60 pounds, Chick said.
The priest had developed his own workouts. What mattered to Chick was the continued commitment, supported by the brotherhood.
“Having the brotherhood to help him stay obedient to what he wanted for himself allowed him to show up,” Chick said.
He also described a man in Ontario who initially rated his fitness at zero or below. Four months later, Chick said, the man was sending photographs and updates as he worked toward small daily improvements.
“Those are the stories that make my day,” Chick said.
A weekly rhythm of prayer and accountability
The speakers described a fraternity that combines prayer, formation, physical training and shared goals.
Grodi said men have three weekly meeting options and commit to attending one. Meetings include prayer, a formation segment and a “lightning round” covering the past week’s major win and loss, followed by a resolution for the coming week.
“What’s your main resolution that God’s calling you to this week?” he asked. “The main task or habit or change that God’s calling you to make.”
Members share long, medium, and short-term goals, update them monthly and use an accountability channel to ask brothers to follow up on specific commitments.
Chick described a training week with build days, sustained exercise, mobility and preparation. A sustained session might include a rosary walk. Friday brings shared prayers, petitions and penance alongside a physical challenge.
The program also includes a live workout by Zoom. What each man undertakes, Chick said, depends on his starting point.
Grodi described the aim as “training the body and training the spirit together,” with men supporting one another in bearing fruit in their vocations.
Chick encouraged participants to bring three or four men with them. He said a nearby brother provides a particular kind of accountability: someone who expects a man to arrive, and whose own commitment depends on that meeting.
He knows that dependence himself. Men arriving at his home to train give him a reason to get up early.
“Have I wanted to stop? Yes,” he said.
Giving from what a man has received
Chick returned to the responsibilities of husbands and fathers through a teaching he draws from Father Larry Richards: “I am third.”
He described that as an order of priorities: first fruits to God, then to his wife and children, while also caring for the gifts he needs to serve them.
“I have to give fruits to myself,” Chick said. “And that’s through spiritual and physical discipline that allow me to show up as a better husband, father, brother, son, friend and neighbor.”
Grodi brought the presentation back to grace, action and the support men owe one another.
“God’s grace, taking flesh in our free cooperation with that grace,” he said.
“We have to be men of deep prayer, but also men committed to action and supporting each other in action.”
The fraternity’s work, Chick said, includes helping each man develop a personal rule of life and providing brothers who help him remain accountable to it.
“Men grow in collision with other men,” Grodi said, “in challenge and accountability and encouragement.”
This talk is one of many from the Heroic Men: Future of Catholic Men 2026 Convocation. Get the replays and the PDF ebook free, here.