“Go Home and Live as Missionary Disciples”
Adapted from a talk I gave at the Men of Christ Madison Conference in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on October 24, 2026.
A Faith That Costs Nothing
I travel to parishes and retreats around the country as a mission evangelist for Paradisus Dei, the apostolate that runs That Man Is You! I love the work. One thing I have learned from it is that men rarely hear the Gospel preached as a summons. Too often it is reduced to a story about being nice to one another, and a story like that will not wake a man up or convince him to join a mission. Our Savior did not die and rise from the dead so that we could become nice boys. The English word "nice" comes, through Old French, from the Latin nescius, which means ignorant. A nice man, in the oldest sense of the word, is a man who does not know.
We have been called to a mission. When I look around many Catholic parishes, though, I do not see men on a mission. I see boredom and exhaustion. We have come to think of piety as the death of life, as if a pious man were simply a quiet and tired one. Christ said something very different: "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:49). Fire spreads. It carries light and heat into places that have neither.
If your faith feels humdrum, the likely reason is that you have not entered the mission. You are not doing anything that risks something of you or asks something of you. I know this because it described me about six years ago.
The Prison as a Monastery
Then I volunteered for prison ministry at a maximum security prison in Texas, working with violent offenders, many of them former gang members. I am a chubby homeschooler with a theology degree. I had no business being there, and I knew it.
I partnered with Kolbe Prison Ministries, a Catholic apostolate that brings three-day retreats inside prison walls. If you have never done prison ministry, I recommend partnering with an experienced group like this one. The work is real, and it gets serious quickly.
On the first morning I arrived late, which is on brand for me. The men were gathered outside to pray, and a volunteer named Jerry handed me a prayer card. It was a deliverance prayer, and it unfolded to the length of my forearm. I asked him why we needed something so heavy. He told me that a group of Satanists had learned we were coming and had been cursing us for a week. My only thought was that my wife must never hear about this, and that we should probably pray the card sixteen times in a row. She had already been frightened that I was going at all.
The fear lasted about thirty minutes. Then I looked around the room and saw men at round tables in small groups, and the scene was exactly like every other retreat I had ever attended. Half of one table was falling asleep. One man would not stop talking. Two others were waiting for a chance to speak, and a table leader was trying to draw out the quiet ones. What shocked me was how normal it was. That is often how the spiritual life works. When we risk our comfort, God meets us in the ordinary.
Risking our comfort means being willing to become a victim. The Latin word for victim is hostia, the same word we use for the Host. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote the hymn O Salutaris Hostia: "O saving Victim, opening wide the gate of heaven to man below." Jesus is the only priest who is also the victim. He is both the one who offers and the one who is offered. We share in his priesthood, and so we are also called to be both, in imitation of him.
In the midst of that ordinary setting I saw extraordinary things. On the second day, one of the inmates who helped run the retreat walked up and said he had heard I was the nerdy Catholic guy. I told him the correct term was academic genius. He asked if I could help him find books for the chapel library. He wanted primary source texts of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, because he already had plenty of the post-Nicene Fathers and the earlier ones were hard to find. A man serving a long sentence for violent crime was looking for the writings of the Church Fathers who came before the Council of Nicaea. That was exactly as nerdy as I needed the place to be.
The prison itself is a terrible place. When I park and cross the street, I see high brick walls, guard towers, barbed wire, and chain link. The noise never stops. Cell blocks are called out over loudspeakers all day long. I remember thinking that the Lord had chosen to work miracles in one of the worst places I had ever seen.
I had one message for the men that weekend. When you entered prison, you felt that your life was over. It is not over, and it is not even on pause. You have a new mission. Your decisions brought you here, but God writes straight with crooked lines.
Inside, a man is addressed by one of two names. He is either "inmate" or he is called by his prison nickname. On a Kolbe retreat, the volunteers form a tunnel at the start, and as each man walks through, we announce his full given name. Men have told me that it was the first time they had heard their full name since their sentencing. Others have said it was the name their mother used, and that their mother has since died and they could not attend her funeral. I hear that story often. These are men serving twenty or thirty years.
I asked them to consider seeing the prison as a monastery. They already call their rooms cells. They have time, and they leave the cell only for specific purposes, one of which is work. That is the Benedictine rule of ora et labora, prayer and work. The walls that keep them in also keep out much of the noise of the world, including the pornography, the violence, and the endless pursuit of money. What if the men who made Kolbe retreats became known throughout the prison as men who could be trusted? What if their part of the prison became a place of refuge?
I watched mindsets change quickly when men stopped looking at their limits and started asking what God could do with them.
Painfully Obvious Grace
My friend Dave VanVickle, who co-hosts the Every Knee Shall Bow podcast with me, has served as a lay assistant at many exorcisms. I make him tell me the stories, and then I do not sleep that night. He told me about a case in an old farmhouse that uncovered evidence of crimes from years earlier. He told me about a crucifix that was torn from his neck and snapped. I asked him how he sleeps at night. He said he sleeps like a baby. When I asked why, he said that he feels sorry for the many Catholics who have never seen the Lord's hand work in such painfully obvious ways.
That was exactly how I felt about prison ministry. When we place ourselves where we have no business being, we see God act in ways we would never see from the comfort of our living rooms.
Fatherhood Is Spiritual Before It Is Physical
Not every man reading this is a father or a grandfather. Some are unmarried, and some are young. Catholic teaching on fatherhood applies to all of them, because God the Father is the source of the life of the Trinity, and that generation is entirely spiritual. Fatherhood is first a spiritual power to give life, and only secondarily a physical one.
The perfection of boyhood is manhood, which is everything a boy is, grown up and matured. The perfection of manhood is fatherhood. Fatherhood is the spiritual capacity to be strong for others and to lay down one's life for them.
I have been speaking and writing for some time about initiation rituals for boys becoming men, and about how American society has lost them. Many tribal societies still keep them. After one talk, three men from Kenya, Nigeria, and Chad came up to me and described the initiations they had gone through. One of them told me he had been circumcised with a flint rock at the age of nine. My own initiation was learning to drive and change a tire.
A friend who lives near Madison took me to breakfast and described what he does with his five sons. When each son turns thirteen, he wears a heavy rucksack and has to climb to the top of a hill. At the top stands his uncle, a former soldier, holding a heavy pad. The uncle charges down the hill at full speed. If the boy is hit, he has to go back to the bottom and start again. Just before the uncle reaches the boy, the father steps in and blocks him, and the two men fight so that the son can reach the top. My friend told me his heart was ready to burst, because he is not a former military man and his brother took the job very seriously. Still, the uncle never touched the boy. The father wanted his son to learn one lesson from the climb, which is that you do not fight your battles alone.
The Attention Economy
Our culture is engineered to isolate us from the people who can make us stronger and better. We live in what is called the attention economy. Companies earn their revenue by drawing our focus away from what matters most and toward what they want us to see. Their metrics are eyeballs on screens and active users per day, per week, and per month. Those metrics are robbing our children, and they are robbing us as well.
You may not use Instagram, but perhaps you open your news app of choice and take in your daily two minutes of hate. Afterward you are difficult to be around. Adult children who visit parents who keep cable news on all day do not enjoy those visits, because their parents cannot switch off emotionally. The screen has trained them to keep reporting what is wrong with the world, and it has taken the place of simply being human with one another.
The numbers show how deep this goes. In June 2025, Microsoft published an analysis of activity on its workplace software. Among its most heavily contacted users, a meeting invitation, email, or chat message arrived on average every two minutes of the workday, and about 275 times across a full day. When I became a manager, the first rule I gave my team was not to open email until they had finished at least one hour of real work. They were relieved. I asked them what they had been doing all day if they were not doing their jobs, and they told me they had been answering email.
Content Without Context
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han helps me understand what is happening. He was born in Korea, now lives and teaches in Germany, and is a Catholic. He is not easy to read, because his German prose is dense, but he is worth the patience. In The Disappearance of Rituals, he argues that rituals are what hold a community together, and that modern life is dissolving them.
The Mass shows how this works. We do not make the Mass so much as the Mass makes us. Saint Paul writes, "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). When we receive the Eucharist, we become one body in Christ.
Families have their own rituals as well. Bishop Hying described this at the conference when he spoke about his own childhood. His family prayed the Rosary after dinner and kept holy pictures in every room, because that was simply what a Catholic family did. He added that his parents did not think of themselves as saving Western civilization. Their rituals passed on more than information. They gave their children context, and they formed them as disciples.
We can get content from a screen. Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire videos are excellent, and they give you a great deal of content. They cannot disciple you, because no video can look at the learner. The speaker's gaze is on the camera, not on you. Books, videos, audio series, and podcasts can increase what we know. We live in an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Catholic content. Our poverty lies elsewhere. We are poor in community and in context, and we are short of men who refuse to let the architects of our world divide and conquer them.
Men without roots are weak. Corporations and governments alike benefit when we are rootless, because rootless men can be moved, manipulated, and sold an identity. We are more than consumers. We are sons of the living God, and none of us should sell that birthright, as Esau did, for swipes and likes, for clicks and shares, or for the comfort of a screen's glow late at night.
The difference between older media and the algorithm matters here. A newspaper or a book sits on the table and does nothing until I pick it up. I act on it. The algorithm acts on me. It decides when to send the notification, and it calls me back to the screen.
Which Liturgy Will We Have?
Han makes a comparison that every Catholic should take seriously. He describes the smartphone as a devotional object, and he says it functions like a rosary, a small object we hold in our hands and return to again and again. Han himself has written that he prayed the Rosary daily as a young man in Korea, so he does not make the comparison lightly. Surveys suggest the comparison fits. Reviews.org found that Americans checked their phones about 205 times a day in 2024, which is nearly once every five waking minutes.
The repetition of the Rosary is its strength. The repeated prayers become a stable platform on which the mind can rest while it meditates on the mysteries of the Incarnation. The Rosary is a vocal prayer that leads into meditation and finally into contemplation. Pope John Paul II wrote that to recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, 3). The phone also trains us by repetition. Many of us feel a phantom buzz in a pocket when the phone is in another room. That is what a liturgy does to the body.
The devil does not need to attack your wife and children in some overt and dramatic way. He only needs to move your gaze. The world, the flesh, and the devil can accomplish a great deal by putting a connected device in your pocket that never stops calling for attention.
When my children were small, they were constantly asking me to look at them. They wanted me to see what they drew, what they built, and what they could do. I would give anything to have that back. My youngest is eleven, and now he asks me not to look at him. Children want their father's gaze because it gives life. It steadies them, encourages them to create, and gives them strength.
So the question is not whether we will have a liturgy in the home. Every home has one. The question is which liturgy we will have. In the garden, Adam was told to till and to keep it, to work and to guard. Our task is the same. A little pleasure, a little reassurance, and a little hit of dopamine are enough to take our gaze off our work for just long enough that the serpent can enter.
Learning to Love the Rosary
For years I did not like praying the Rosary. It felt boring, repetitive, and long. Then I joined That Man Is You!, and those men pray the Rosary more than they send email. Since the pandemic, about five hundred men have joined an online Rosary every Friday at 6:30 in the morning. The leaders taught me to offer the first decade for my wife, the second for my children, and the third for my extended family and godchildren. I realized that I have a wife and four children, which makes five people, and the Rosary has five decades. A prayer that had felt difficult became something I now do every morning.
I have never been a morning person, but I learned that the early morning is the only time I truly have. If I stay up late, I waste the time. If I get up early, I do not want to waste a minute of it. I drink a glass of water, take my rosary, and walk for about forty-five minutes while the sun comes up. I take a photo of the sunrise and send it to a priest friend to tease him for still being in bed.
I have ADHD, and my mind wanders constantly. I will be halfway through a Hail Mary and notice a leaf changing color. What brings me back is the name of the person I am praying for. I am praying this decade for my wife, who had a hard day. I am praying this one for my daughter, who is traveling to Dallas to cheer. I am praying this one for my son, whose last basketball game is today. Saying the name pulls my attention back every time.
What began as something I did out of duty has become something I do because my sanity depends on it, because my holiness is worked out in it, and because my family needs it. Fatherhood, before it means begetting children, means giving my strength so that others may live.
Sent From the Altar
The Mass is the strangest thing on earth. In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the God of the universe transforms bread and wine into his Body and Blood, soul and divinity. We come forward, receive him, return to our pews, and a few minutes later we are told to leave. For a long time I thought Communion ought to come in the middle of Mass, with time afterward to think and pray about what had happened. Instead, the Church gives us the Eucharist and then dismisses us with Ite, missa est. The Catechism explains that the name "Mass" comes from that sending forth (missio) of the faithful at the end of the liturgy (CCC 1332). We are sent so that we can carry Christ into the world as living tabernacles. Whenever we leave the church, we are entering mission territory.
When we refuse the false liturgies of this world and embrace the liturgy of the domestic church, we are doing what Bishop Hying's parents did. We may not think of it as saving civilization, but it is how civilization is saved.
A Refuge for the Weary
Years ago we lived in Conroe, Texas. Our next-door neighbor was separated from her violent husband and had a restraining order against him. One afternoon I came home from a walk, went into my garage, and heard a man yelling and swearing next door. I assumed it was an argument, so I turned on the lights and made some noise. Most people lower their voices once they know someone else can hear them. He did not, and that worried me. Then I heard her beg him to stop because he was killing the dog.
I walked out of my garage holding a bottle of Topo Chico, which was not much of a weapon. He had the family's large dog lifted off the ground by its twisted collar and was choking it. He was holding picture frames he had torn off the walls. He had his face pressed against hers and was laughing at her and cursing her while she cried. I asked what was going on. He turned, threw down the frames, tore off his shirt while still choking the dog, and charged at me.
I am more of a lover than a fighter, and my wife would tell you I am not much of either. I backed up with my hands raised and told him that this was not what we were going to do. He was clearly high. Within a couple of minutes the police arrived, because some neighborhood kids had called them, and he went to jail.
Two days later the woman knocked on our door. My wife and I stepped outside, and she could not look us in the eye. She told us that the next time he came, we should just let him kill her. She explained that her husband belonged to a gang and that they would retaliate. She could not live with herself if they came after our family.
I did not know what to say. This was the most frightening thing anyone had ever said to me, and it was her daily life. My wife spoke first. She asked the woman whether she believed she had any value, whether she believed she was worth dying for. She asked whether she knew who Jesus Christ is. She told her that God loved her into existence, that Christ died for her as if she were the only person on earth, and that he wants her to be happy. I had never heard my wife preach the Gospel like that. It was pastoral and it was perfect, and we could see a little hope come into the woman's face.
Then my wife said something that shocked me. She asked the woman whether she thought my wife would have married a man who would let an innocent woman die to protect himself. She told her that both of us would gladly lay down our lives for her.
On my own front porch I heard the Gospel stated as plainly as I have ever heard it. All I could add was amen. Christ asks every one of us to be ready to lay down our lives so that people who are suffering can know the love of God. To know Christ and to make him known means helping people fall in love with God by first helping them see that God loves them all the way to the cross and beyond it, through the shame and the death and into the resurrection. God can rescue us from the prisons we build for ourselves.
After that conversation I took my children's sidewalk chalk, which they used on everything from the sidewalk to my car, and went to our front door. Above the Epiphany blessing with the year and the initials of the Magi, I wrote, "The Refuge." Every Catholic home should be a fortress against the powers of darkness and a refuge for the weary. It should have a bed ready for a guest and a hot meal ready to share.
The Sign on the Lawn
My friend Dave VanVickle lives in the first house you see when you turn into his neighborhood. He ordered a metal yard sign announcing a weekly Rosary on Thursday nights for addicts, people in recovery, and people who love an addict. Neighbors began knocking on his door. Some said they were not Catholic and did not know how to pray the Rosary. He told them he would have pamphlets. One woman said she had been Catholic once but had not prayed in years. He told her that was fine too.
Then a man knocked and said he had just finished ninety days of court-ordered rehab. He asked whether he could come. Dave pointed to the sign and told him it was written for him. The man was sleeping on a friend's couch in the neighborhood. When Dave asked about his family, the man said his mother was alive but that he had not seen her in decades. He said he hated her and blamed her for his addiction, and he did not even know where she lived. They talked for about an hour, and Dave told him to come and that there would be extra rosaries.
About thirty people came on the first night. People were making coffee, moving around the house, and helping themselves. The man arrived and asked again whether he was really welcome. While they were talking, he heard a woman's voice in the kitchen. It was his mother. She was the woman who had told Dave she had not prayed the Rosary in years, and she lived on the same street. They embraced and went into another room to talk. He now lives with her, and they came to the Rosary together every week.
Dave's wife died of cancer after a three-year battle. He has five children, two of whom have special needs and cannot walk, so he lifts and moves them himself. He is the only adult in the house, and his vulnerability could hardly be higher. Even so, his children see it as their family's mission to pray with addicts, with people in recovery, and with the people who love them. Miracles happen when we open our homes and accept the risk.
Begin With Yourself
My suggestion is to order your time at home around ritual, starting with yourself. I know my own tendency. I watch one YouTube video and suddenly I have a new religion that I want to preach to everyone. Resist that. For one month, without announcing it to anyone, adopt a morning ritual of prayer.
I recommend the Liturgy of the Hours first thing in the morning. A single-volume edition saves you from flipping through ribbons, and if you use an app, put your phone in Do Not Disturb mode first. I read the morning prayer in my backyard at six o'clock and sing the psalms, poorly. If you prefer to walk, pray the Rosary, because trying to juggle a breviary while walking will end with you on the ground.
My son sees me do this, and that matters. One of my favorite memories of my father is opening his bedroom door when he was about sixty-five and finding him kneeling beside his bed, praying like a child. My father was not a childish man. He was a great man, and his example formed me. He taught me the Rosary with his Knights of Columbus beads and a small scriptural Rosary booklet. You knew you had arrived as a kid when he handed you the beads and you got to lead the Apostles' Creed. Those rituals gave me a love of Scripture, a knowledge of the lives of our Lord and our Lady, and the doctrine of the Church. They taught me to apply Scripture to my daily life and to raising my own children. One of the best gifts he ever gave me was his own copy of that booklet, inscribed in 1965, so that I could carry on the tradition.
My father grew up in inner-city Philadelphia and was born in 1947. His own father was violent, unfaithful, and eventually abandoned the family to start another one a few blocks away. He never came back to see his children. My mother once told me that her family had been poor, but that my father's family lived in poverty. He ate a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and another for dinner while attending Catholic school and working a full-time job.
We lost my father this year. My brothers and I all share the same middle name. My oldest brother is Brian Joseph, my other brother is Christian Joseph, and I am Michael Joseph. When we asked our father why, he told us that because his own father had been a bum, he did not know how to raise boys. So he asked the greatest father he knew, Saint Joseph, to watch over us. He also said that when he was angry with us, saying our middle name reminded him to slow down. His own father had hit him, and he did not want to repeat it. Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, taught my father to pump the brakes. My own sons are Noah Joseph and Thomas Joseph.
My father handed me rituals, and now I hand them to my children. He gave me more than the faith. He gave me a way of life.
What Monday Will Look Like
A conference like this one is a joy. The question is why it has to be the exception. Men can do life together and build communities on shared rituals and habits. I take part in That Man Is You! because I need it, and because it helps me resist a spirit in this world that wants to divide and conquer us through isolation. The remedy for isolation is the Body of Christ.
So I leave you with one question. What ritual will you begin on Monday morning, practice in your own life, and then, like a good father, pass on to others? Even if you are not married and have no children, the spirit of the Father can live in you and radiate outward through you. What radiates is not you. It is the fatherhood of God.
A Closing Prayer
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Lord Jesus, the phone has become like a rosary for us, a ritual that calls to us two hundred times a day. You have put a challenge before us. The question is not whether we will have a liturgy in our homes, but which liturgy we will have.
You have called every man here to be a priest who lives an ordered life of prayer. You have called every man, whatever his age or vocation, to be a prophet, so that in the noise of a thousand competing voices the Father's voice may sound in us and through us. You have called us to be kings who watch over our kingdoms, so that the Father's gaze may steady our communities and turn our houses into homes.
There are people who feel unseen and unheard, and you have sent us to them. You laid down your life so that we might live, and so that we might learn to lay down our lives so that others may know you and love you. There is no greater adventure.
Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. In your matchless name we pray. Amen.
Sources
Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (Polity, 2020).
Byung-Chul Han, In Praise of the Earth (Polity, 2021), on praying the Rosary daily in Korea.
John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002), no. 3.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1332.
Microsoft WorkLab, "Breaking Down the Infinite Workday," Work Trend Index Special Report, June 17, 2025.
Reviews.org, cell phone usage survey published January 2025 (2024 data).
Kolbe Prison Ministries, Kerrville, Texas.