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Arena Ablaze comes from Luke 12:49-51. “I have come to bring fire down to the earth. I wish it were already ablazing! I have a baptism to go through. How troubled I am until it is over! Do you think I came to bring peace on the earth? I tell you, no! I came to divide."
I, a repentant sinner, renew and ratify today,
in your hands, O Immaculate Mother, the vows
of my baptism.
I renounce Satan and resolve to follow Jesus
Christ even more closely than before.
Mary, I give you my heart, please set
it on fire with love for Jesus.
Make it always attentive to his burning thirst
for love and for souls.
Keep my heart, and your most pure heart,
that I may love Jesus and the members
of his body with your own perfect love.
Mary, I entrust myself totally to you, my
body and my soul, my goods, both interior
and exterior, and even the value of all
my good actions.
Please make of me of all that I
am and have whatever most pleases you.
Let me be a fit instrument in your
immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest
possible glory to God.
If I fall, please lead me back to
Jesus.
Wash me in the blood and water that
flow from his pure side, and help me
never to lose my trust in this fountain
of love and mercy.
With you, O Immaculate Mother, you who always
do the will of God, I unite myself
to the perfect consecration of Jesus as he
offers himself in the Spirit to the Father
for the life of the world.
Amen.
Welcome into the arena.
This is the Arena of Blaze podcast, and
I'm your willing host, Marco Sandoval.
I'm joined, as always, by my fellow son
of Mutt, Todd Powers.
Today, we have the privilege of being joined
by Father Kearney.
Father Kearney is the priest walking the streets
of Wichita, Kansas, and preaching on the devotion
of the Holy Face to the Holy Face
of Jesus.
He's a prolific author.
I didn't realize how many books you had
written.
He's written Walking the Road to God.
He's written The Remedy, a book, The Secret
of the Holy Face, The Devotion Destined to
Save Society, The Consecration to the Holy Face,
The Cassock, Meekness, and 365 Days of Reparation.
So we'll be talking two of those books
we have on display of the shelves.
I've read the Holy Face Devotion book, and
then I'm in the middle of The Consecration,
excellent books.
I thought a good place to start today
would be the Sacred Heart of Jesus, since
it's We were talking about tenderheartedness and hardness
of heart.
I did a confession at the cathedral, probably
within the last year, maybe a year or
so ago, and something I had noticed about
my heart is that it just felt like
a rock that had been fractured.
And I felt like the light, if you
put a rock in light that's fractured, there's
shadows in your heart.
And so I took that to confession that
there are things in my heart that are
deformed and I can't get to them, I
can't see them, that are causing me trouble.
And the priest, the good priest at the
cathedral, he gave me Ezekiel 36, 26.
I will give you a new heart and
a new spirit I will put within you.
I will remove the heart of stone from
your flesh and give you a heart of
flesh.
I just thought that scripture was very impactful
to me.
I took that to prayer and it's been
kind of in my mind.
So the question for me would be, men,
and when we're looking to build an army
of men, what's the importance of the Sacred
Heart in that process?
Yeah, when I was praying Mass today for
the Sacred Heart, before the Gospel, you have
a gradual, and I've read this probably a
hundred times, but it said, a man's meekness
will allow him to find my path.
And it just struck me, meekness is one
of the two virtues that Jesus wants us
to have in the Sacred Heart devotion.
He said, be meek and humble of heart
like me.
And so we usually focus on humility because
it's a very important virtue.
It's not the most exalted.
That's the queen of all virtues, which is
charity.
But meekness is the gateway to all the
other virtues, and virtue means to do a
good thing over and over again.
So we don't focus on meekness much.
But meekness is that virtue where we have
righteous anger.
We need to, to protect families, to call
something out when it's wrong.
But sometimes that anger gets inordinate, and that's
where meekness curbs that.
And so if we want to be spiritual
men and women today, there's a lot of
people attacking us, and so we need meekness
so that when we get too angry, that
meekness curbs it, and then we'll know the
path to take.
And so the path to heaven, Jesus said,
is very narrow.
But it's easy if we try and focus
on the virtues.
And so to me, at least, that meekness
is key.
In fact, I've written a book, which is
in my publisher's house right now with Sophia
Press, and I think that meekness is going
to form the heel of the Blessed Virgin
Mary that will crush the serpent and bring
about a hastening for the triumph of the
Immaculate Heart.
So you can never separate the Sacred Heart
from the Immaculate Heart in this devotion to
the Holy Face.
Jesus told that to Sister Maria de St.
Pierre.
So those are some thoughts.
Meekness leads us to the path that Jesus
wants us to get on, brings us to
heaven.
I noticed that you had a book, Meekness,
coming out, and that caught my eye.
I have a story of meekness.
I think meekness is very difficult for men.
I remember Father Uroch gave a sermon, and
he had mentioned meekness, and I went up
to him afterwards and I told him, I
hate meekness.
I don't want to be meek.
Meek is weak.
I mean, help me, because I don't under—meekness
is difficult for me.
And so he was new at the parish,
and he said, I got an article, I
got a book for you.
And he came and he handed me Uroch's
copies of some writings of Brother of Agrius,
the Desert Fathers.
And I thought, man, I'm special, because I
have Father Uroch's writings, and he's got notes
in the margins.
And so I went and read that, and
it was very interesting.
It just started me on a path of
thinking about meekness.
I did further study, and I found an
article, which it kind of shapes in my
mind what meekness truly is.
It said, you know, the Romans used to
go and find horses, they'd go round up
horses, and the most—they would be looking for
the most spirited of horses.
And so they would round up the horses
and they'd separate them, and the most spirited
horses would be their war horses, and they
would take them to training.
Now, they had to be meek, so meek
meant basically that they would be bridled and
that they would be spirited, they would run
into battle with fire coming at them, arrows
coming at them, but they had the fortitude
and courage to run into battle, but yet
they were perfectly docile under the reins of
whoever their rider was.
Their master.
Yeah.
That's my problem.
I have the ability to be a literal
killer, but, you know, winning takes me putting
my personal feelings aside.
I remember my first wife one day on
the way home from Mass asked me if
I was happy, that I know it was
a loaded question that was leading down a
path of, she wasn't happy.
My response was, what do you mean am
I happy?
If I thought about that before I got
out of bed every morning, I'd never get
out of bed.
I have duties, obligations, and responsibilities as a
man.
I don't think at all about any of
that because it keeps me from my goals,
goals of Todd Powers.
We've talked about this a lot lately, the
burning bush, I am who I am.
I am existence itself, but when I'm asked
to say who I am, I have a
name.
Why is that?
God is not in my heart when I
say my name.
I feel my ego, my in, my being
demands that I put those feelings aside.
I don't quite know how to incorporate the
sacred heart and the meekness aspect when I
feel like my physical and psychological survival over
much of my life has trained me to
harden the heart, if that makes any sense.
So how can we get meekness?
One way I like to tell people is
pick up your rosary and pray a decade
for certain virtues.
So maybe a homework project is to pray
a decade of the rosary for meekness for
a month, starting today.
The rosary is a very powerful vehicle of
allowing us to have what we need, not
what we want, but what God wants us
to have.
So you may be thinking, well, this rosary
is a little different.
So I'm going to plug here the Carmelite.
This is the Bridgetine rosary.
It also is a Carmelite rosary because it
has six decades instead of five.
And so Martino made it for me in
California, and it's got brown and blue, which
are the colors of Carmel.
So we have a third-order Carmelite here
in Wichita that's been around for two years,
and we're going to all have a Carmelite
rosary.
So you may be asking, well, Father, what
are the extra decades?
Because there's six times three, you know.
The old mysteries are given in this.
And so for the glorious mystery, the extra
decade is the patronage of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, Queen and Beauty of Carmel.
I love that.
And then for the joyful mysteries, the extra
decade is the conception of the Blessed Virgin
Mary.
And then the last one, joyful, so sorrowful,
would be the body of Jesus being placed
in the arms of the Blessed Virgin Mary
at the foot of the cross.
So God has given us the means by
which we can become tender to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of
Mary, and it's the rosary.
You told me a story about that rosary
that you have.
You want to share that with us?
So I went to Blessed Sacrament, and in
the second grade, I was received first communion
with my class.
I still have that class picture.
And I believe we were all given this
rosary by the pastor of Blessed Sacrament, Bishop
Father Gerber.
And I just happened to keep this, and
Pope Paul VI was the pope at the
time, and the reason I kept this was
because I was enamored with the fact that
my priest gave me a rosary that was
blessed by a pope who happened to be
beatified recently.
And I just happened to keep this, and
it's one of my most prized possessions.
And that's neat you told me that, because
I have another story today.
I was talking to one of our Carmelites,
tertiaries, which is a third order, so a
layperson.
We were talking about what name I'm going
to give her, because I'm going to pray
about it and wait for that name to
come into my heart.
But I needed to know if she had
any other names or devotions that could help
me.
And she said, part of her story was,
when I was getting baptized, I'm a convert,
I wasn't born as a Catholic, Father Gerber
baptized me and said, Therese will be your
name.
That's a very popular saint.
And then she told me this beautiful thing,
every day, it seems like every day, she
said, I get a rose, either it's a
rose comes to me or I see a
picture of a rose, and it happens to
her every day.
It's amazing.
So the reason I brought that up is
because it's no coincidences that you have a
story and I have a story from someone
I talked to today that was about Father
Gerber before he was consecrated as a bishop.
And I told Todd, I haven't heard any
stories about Father Gerber for like, I hear
them maybe every five years.
But today I heard two stories in the
middle of the day.
So I love stories and people love stories.
So I'll stop talking.
He was the bishop that introduced stewardship to
our diocese.
And I was at Capon.
My dad came to me in eighth grade
and said, where do you want to go
to high school?
I said, well, I thought I was going
to Capon.
He said, well, you can go to Southeast
because I can't afford to send you to
Capon.
Well, I was 13, going to be 14.
I'm not getting a job.
He says to me, they have a yard
crew at Capon and you can work for
eight hours a day all summer for $3
.15 an hour and they will take that
money that you earn and apply it to
your tuition.
That's $900 a summer.
And I worked prior to my freshman year,
prior to my sophomore year.
It was the beginning of my junior year
and all of a sudden my dad says,
you don't have to work on the yard
crew this year because the diocese is changing
this.
There's no more tuition that you have to
pay to attend that high school.
And I was on the cutting edge.
Now all of a sudden I'm working at
Edgemoor Pools, a lifeguard, or I'm framing houses
and I get to keep that money.
And I wouldn't have been able to educate
my five children in Catholic schools.
I don't know what would have happened to
my kids.
They're just soft hearted kids like their dad
was until he is hard hearted and they
got to go to Catholic school.
I have a whole stewardship story I wrote
about that.
It all started with Bishop Gerber instituting that.
Only diocese in the whole entire country that
does that.
So many places to go with that.
I think what Todd brought out is something
that men struggle with.
That's why I feel like we have been
trying to build this Men of Blue Army.
It's difficult to get men engaged.
I think a lot of it is because
of that mindset of, I mean, we're the
provider, we're the breadwinner, their time is so
valuable.
I try to tell men your time is
so valuable if you sacrifice one hour of
your time to do something with other men
for the benefit of other men.
We were talking earlier about catching each other's
hearts on fire.
We have to be in close proximity for
that.
All the relationships that I have today that
I'm close with other men are only with
guys I played basketball with.
They're only through people that I know under
duress, how they're going to be.
We sweated, we lived in pain, we had
the same coaches.
I have a couple friends.
They called me in the middle of the
night and asked me to bring some lime
and a shovel to a field.
I wouldn't go.
I'm kidding, of course, but you get the
idea.
This all came about because our home parish
had a men's group.
We went and I was excited.
All they wanted to do was drink.
I introduced, I thought, I know that we're
not going to have a formal discussion, but
can we introduce an informal, like here's a
thought.
What are you men doing with your kids?
What's your biggest struggle as a Catholic man
in your daily life?
I was immediately shut down.
Oh, we're not doing any of that.
I was like, he noticed I immediately took
myself out of it.
I was like, no.
If I want to go with other men,
I can go to a bar and sit
at the end of the bar and we
can talk.
This is ridiculous to me.
I don't even understand what we're doing here.
This is an opportunity for people to share
details of their life to help each other.
That's how that works.
Not to socialize.
And we have an opportunity to fight, like
you said, and be under duress because we're
in a spiritual war.
And so I've always tried to help men
that were athletes to transfer that drive into
the drive of being the best Catholic we
can be, the best adorer of Jesus Christ
and the blessed venerator of our Blessed Virgin
Mary and the saints.
And so we have this procession that we've
been doing for about six months now and
chanting the rosary in Latin, starting at Seneca
Park in the heart of Wichita, Delano District,
and walking across the river on the bridge
on Douglas to Master Park, where the old
Eaton Hotel is.
And the reason why we have this candle
burning is because I love show and tell.
And we haven't used this banner yet.
And I had a lady in Lincoln, Nebraska,
who's been working on it for months now.
And it's the most beautiful thing.
We're going to put it on a pole,
but I want to display it.
Is that OK?
Absolutely.
So I said, make something unique.
And she did that.
She said, this has like a curtain.
And you take these strings and you just
tie it around.
It opens up.
Because this is a copy of the Vow
of Aaronica.
Underneath, we had a local print shop here
in Wichita print this on linen.
And then we had the help of Cardinal
Burke write a letter to the cardinal who
was in charge of St. Peter's Basilica.
And we had 200 of these taken there
by a few cannons who had to go
through a few codes to the Swiss Guard
to get in.
And I wasn't allowed to be there because
the Vow of Aaronica in Rome is such
top secret security.
And they touched each one of these to
that.
And so she put this on here.
And so men can come and chant the
rosary and do something beautiful because in true
devotion, we talk about being totally consecrated to
Jesus through Mary.
And St. Louis de Montfort wrote about true
devotion to Mary.
And he said about the saints in the
latter times will carry a crucifix in their
right hand, a rosary in their left.
And I can't do that because I got
to hold this up with my left hand.
Todd's going to help me.
So and then he said.
And they will carry a bloody standard.
And I really never paid attention to that.
And then I've known these this passage for
like 10 years.
And then I started to think, what's that
bloody standard?
And I think at least for me, this
is a bloody standard of the face of
Jesus.
And when the Bell of Veronica was in
Rome, which it is now, it was used
to consecrate the Pantheon, which is a pagan
circle church.
It was nicknamed the Rotunda.
And one of the popes in the 7th
century took the bell out from the catacombs
and wagon loads of relics from the catacombs.
They were the martyrs of the Colosseum.
And he decorated this church with this veil.
And that church was consecrated on May the
13th, around 610.
And each year on the anniversary of that
dedication, they took the veil out in procession
to beg the Lord to stop the revolutionary
men like the nuns to come and attack
Rome.
And so we have the world attacking Jesus
right now.
The church, us Catholics, some of them are
getting martyred over in the Middle East.
And so when there's this evil sin going
on publicly in the world, we need to
make public reparations.
So this is for men to rise up
and to carry this standard.
Because I can't only carry the cross and
the rosary because I'm trying to chant.
So I need men to come and carry
this.
And so we're looking for strong men to
carry this for us.
So what do you all think of that?
Bravo, Father.
I love it.
I can just speak from experience of carrying
that in a procession.
And the first time I did that was
the Saturday preceding Easter.
And I just remember thinking at one point
it hit me.
I started to sweat.
My arms started to get a little tired.
I was giving something to hold the face
of Jesus up.
And it was just my heart was getting
tilled like a field.
And I just remember thinking, wow, I'm actually
working and sweating as Jesus was sweating on
his way of the cross.
Like I envisioned myself as like Simon Sarinian
there helping him carry the cross.
And it just really had a strong impact.
And now I can't miss it because I
just love going so much.
I almost started crying just looking at it,
just the unworthiness that I feel when I
really think about myself.
You know, I go to face-to-face
confession for a reason because one day I'm
going to be judged by Christ face-to
-face and he's already going to know me.
Why would I hide behind a screen to
talk about my evil doings?
And it helps me a lot in the
dark depths of temptation.
You're going to sit in front of another
man.
You're going to look him in the eye
because I like to have that.
And you're going to tell him you did
this.
And if I do that sin after thinking
that thought, for those that don't know, that's
one thing.
For those that know and yet do it
anyways, there's that.
And I don't want to be that person.
Well, my dream is that men like you
will come on this procession.
We're averaging about 25 people once a month.
What is it, on the second Saturday of
the month?
That's correct.
Yeah, we plan on being there tomorrow.
At 10, 15, we meet at Seneca Park,
and then we march down to Eaton Hotel,
and then there's the queue line.
It's free.
You park your car at Seneca Park.
You can come back.
But my dream is that we have about
500 men marching through the streets where we're
required to get a permit from the police
department every month because that's what Catholic men
used to do in Christendom is they would
stand up and defend the rights of Jesus
Christ.
And so that's what we're about right here.
So I'm hoping that more and more men
will come out, and the women will come
when the men come.
And so this is a call for men
to rise up.
Don't be afraid.
St. John Paul II said we need to
go out into the streets and don't be
afraid to bring Jesus out there with us.
And so if you all want to come,
I know you two are coming.
You're going to have a priest there, and
you're going to have some other people that
have been coming.
And maybe it can become a good habit
for parts of the Catholic Church here in
Wichita because when people blaspheme or they don't
respect God on his day of rest, he's
offended by that.
And so we need to make public reparations
so that souls that would be going into
sin actually have the grace.
God can put that grace in their hearts
because we're going out and sweating.
And tell me, wearing this cassock out there
and you talking about carrying the banner, it's
sweating.
People are looking at us.
You can kind of get mindful of being
a witness, but we're fighting against those spirits
that they don't want us to be out
there, the evil ones.
And so that's becoming courageous.
And all the other virtues are at work
here.
So I don't know what you all think
about that.
Well, I love that you brought up the
rosary, and Todd keeps talking about the burning
bush, and I am who I am, and
it makes me think of that whole situation.
You know, Mary's been so important to me.
My wife witnessed that to me, and she
became Catholic when we got married.
And for a year, she was praying the
rosary for me, and she would tell me
she was praying the rosary for me.
And I've been a Catholic since I'm five
years old, knew about the rosary.
It's always something that's in our mind, but
I never practiced it.
And so I thought, if my converted wife
can pray the rosary for me, then surely
I can pray the rosary for her.
So then I picked up the rosary and
started praying it, and it definitely has this
type of effect.
But more to back to the burning bush,
I'm curious, because it's a bush that's ablaze,
but it's not being consumed.
I've heard it said that's an image of
the Blessed Virgin Mary.
God's voice is emanating from the bush.
Moses, a murderer, God tells him to remove
his sandals, so he's close to the earth.
He's humble.
It's in humility that he approaches, and it's
almost like a confession.
You're talking about confession.
It brings those visions to mind.
It's intimate.
God knows him and knows what he's done.
It's an intimate conversation.
So I'm just curious what your thoughts are
on that.
As we have this conversation, I'm always thinking
about how to get men engaged and how
to bring the barriers down to really catch.
The barriers need to come up.
Fissures of man.
Barriers need to be higher.
The world is so soft.
That's why more young people are converting to
Catholicism in Eastern Orthodox churches.
They're discerning because they want to do hard
things.
It's almost impossible for me to walk.
I'm two blocks behind you guys in this,
and I'm offering up.
It's not real suffering.
It hurts.
I just can't do it.
But I'm praying in my own time, offering
up my prayers, hoping that I can make
it another few steps.
I don't think we need to lower the
barriers.
I think people need to be called, suck
it up, buttercup.
Let's go.
Yeah, because Father Ripker talks about it all
the time, is we need to find discipline
again.
Yes.
When my father was born in 1948, he
was raised by the men who had fought
in World War II, and they were taught
how to be soldiers.
And so there were some beauties about growing
up in the 50s that we've lost.
There was a culture of Catholicism that Blessed
Elect Archbishop Fulton Sheen would talk about.
So I think we can lower the bars
by getting the men in, by praying for
them so that they can suck it up
and come to a disciplined prayer activity.
And then the men, I hope, will be
inspired to say, wait a minute, this is
authentic.
I can't find many authentic things in my
life anymore, except for going to confession and
going to Mass.
But I need to do more of this.
This is something that's in the public square.
And one part that I like about it
is there's the protesters that are in the
city.
When we walk on Douglas around Broadway or
Main Street, they're doing their stuff.
And then when they see us, some of
them are curious.
Some of them are deferential.
Yeah, and they want to know what we're
doing.
One man took his hat off.
They know.
Yeah.
They know.
And now we're going to have this image.
I mean, that's just something that you give
to a king.
That's the royal colors and the tassels.
And as St. Teresa of Avila would call
him, she called him all the time, His
Majesty.
That's for a king.
And he is Christ the king.
And so let's get the world back.
Let's make this world a Catholic cultural world
where Christ will reign as king.
And the popes from 1850s to about the
1950s talked about the social reign of Jesus
Christ and the devotion that Jesus gave to
us way before that before his social reign
was what?
You got it right there on your notes,
right on the top.
What is it?
Sacred heart of Jesus.
That's right.
On this feast day, may he become our
king in our hearts and in the world,
not just in our hearts, but in the
world.
And so we have an opportunity to defend
him and to make reparation for the blasphemies
against him.
So you say this is the devotion that's
destined to save society.
And I think there are a lot of
men out there that have angst and are
just frustrated to the point of you can
talk about politics, people vote a certain way
and they expect a certain result and then
when they don't get it, just different things
going on in the world.
I think there are a lot of men
who are very frustrated.
You hear people talking about we need to
have a civil war, we need this or
that.
So I'm just curious your perspective on why
this devotion is destined to save society.
Yeah, so when Pope Pius IX was attacked
twice by the Freemasons, they tried to take
his life because the prime minister of Italy
was killed in cold blood by these guys,
these Freemasons.
And he exiled himself to Gaeta to preserve
his life and he commanded all the churches
of Rome to do public reparation.
And that's when the Veil of Veronica was
put out in 1849.
This is when it all happened.
And the veil started to have a miracle.
There was like a movie picture.
Before we had movie pictures, the veil was
actually moving around.
There was a glow coming as if there
was a light behind it, but there wasn't.
And the Vatican notary certified what he saw.
They rang the bells and the Romans came
and saw this miracle for three hours and
were gasping, oh, wow.
And blessed Pius IX said, reparation is destined
to save society.
And society has gone downhill ever since then
and before then, starting with the French Revolution
and even before that.
But reparation is destined to save society.
And this devotion is all about reparation.
It was given to us by Jesus Christ.
It was approved by the Archbishop in Tours.
And this is a remedy and a blueprint
to stop the World Revolution.
And so we have the playbook right here
that is contingent on us men getting out
into the public square and defending the name
of God with official prayers.
Praying the Rosary will be prayed, chanted in
Latin.
And the Chaplet of the Holy Face, we're
going to pray it in the sacred language
of Latin too.
And so I have one more thing show
and tell before I close my mouth here.
But this is a little chaplet of the
Holy Face.
And it has sextets.
So there's six decades instead of decades, it's
sextets.
So there's six beats between the big ones.
And so basically the Chaplet of the Holy
Face is for the triumph of the Catholic
Church.
The Sacred Heart is for the triumph of
the Sacred Heart and for the social reign
of Jesus Christ.
And the triumph of the Immaculate Heart is
something Our Lady Fatima predicted would happen eventually.
So we have the three triumphs converging into
this devotion.
And so this devotion makes reparation for the
five senses of Jesus Christ.
And it prays a prayer from Psalm 67,
verse 2.
Arise, O Lord, and let the enemies you
defeated and let all that hate thee flee
from before thy face.
And so St. John Christendom was exercising a
demon.
And the Ergomen, as we call the demon,
the possessed person, under obedience, tell me what
scripture do you hate the most?
And the demon said, Psalm 67, verse 2,
that one.
Arise, O Lord, and let the enemies be
defeated and let all that hate thee flee
from before thy face.
So we're going to chant that in Latin.
It's like a minor exorcism for lay people
because the minor exorcism that was written by
Pope Leo XIII has that Psalm verse in
it too.
Psalm 67, verse 2.
So when a priest is diagnosing someone to
see if they have oppression, obsession, or possession,
they will pray that prayer.
And it's no coincidence that Psalm 67 was
used in that.
So this is a powerful weapon that comes
from the manual of the Archconfraternity of the
Holy Face.
We have the playbook here.
You know how in football or coaching basketball
you have a playbook?
Well, this is ours, men.
This is ours.
So just a word on, you know, these
days God doesn't want death of the sinner.
He wants conversion of sinners.
And I know you've mentioned, I believe it's
in Leviticus, where it talks about the scripture
about one praying for sinners.
It's an exponential.
Yeah, so it's Leviticus 26.
I think it's verse 8.
The Holy Written Word of God basically says
this.
I'm just going to paraphrase.
Five of you will pursue a hundred.
A hundred of you will pursue ten thousand.
Your enemies will fall by the edge of
the sword.
Okay?
That's the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, this devotion, we don't
want the death of the sinner, Jesus says,
but their conversion.
And so let's go to the numbers.
Five pursue a hundred.
What's the common denominator?
Five.
You got one to 20 odds when you
divide both of those numbers by five.
And then you got a hundred and ten
thousand.
What's the common denominator there?
A hundred.
And then you divide those all by a
hundred.
You got one to 100.
So what happened?
You got one to 20 odds goes to
one to 100 odds.
You have exponential growth.
And so the Blessed Virgin Mary also in
the devotion to the Holy Face talks about
exponential growth too.
And so what does that look like?
Take a hockey stick.
The top of the blade is flat, but
when you get to the handle, it will
spike up.
And so at the beginning, there's going to
be a few men that will fight.
But as more and more come, more and
more men will be inspired because of the
prayers of those first men.
So what's the key here?
Get in now while the blade is still
flat because you'll get merit for all those
men that come in later.
So my goal is to get a million
people to sign up into this confraternity.
There's six conditions we talked about in an
earlier episode.
And so we don't want the death of
the sinner, but his conversion.
So the sport here is there's many souls
going to hell.
And so if we can rise up and
give this devotion some thought and discernment and
live it and pray it, we can help
turn those men around from going head over
heels into hell.
Like Our Lady Fatima said, they're falling in
hell like snowflakes.
She said, pray the rosary for poor sinners
because there's no one to pray for them.
And then we have this devotion too.
And so we have the combination of Marian
devotion and devotion to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus and the Holy Face of Jesus.
They're powerful.
And I have miles to go before I
sleep.
Miles to go before I sleep.
There's a couple of things you've said recently
that have really been excellent for me.
I have been praying for a long time,
teach me how to pray for my enemies.
I have enemies that I am trying to
love, trying to forgive, trying to pray for.
And I've been praying that prayer for a
while.
And recently I've heard a couple of things
that you've said.
One is if it were not for the
prayers of the Blessed Mother, we wouldn't have
a St. Peter.
And if it wasn't the prayers of St.
Stephen, we wouldn't have a St. Paul.
Those things have really touched my heart, given
me new fertile things to pray over.
And when it comes to these reparation prayers,
it's kind of given me a new mindset
as far as how valuable your prayers are
for others as really as a way of
growing this army.
Jesus called us to love as he loves,
and he forgave his enemies from the cross.
What did he say?
Father, forgive them for they know not what
they do.
And so whenever we're tempted to be reminded
of past hurts, we can either get better
or bitter.
Archbishop Sheen used to say that.
And so how do we overcome that bitterness?
Asking in the rosary for meekness.
And so when we ask for that meekness
and that temptation comes, that is a bell
to say we need to pray for our
enemies.
And Jesus told us those who pray for
the enemies, that's a sign they're going deep
into the interior life.
I mean, he didn't say it exactly like
that, but that's basically the point.
And so this is spiritual 101.
Spirituality is every temptation can be transformed into
a prayer, and that's the temptation that we
would have fallen into becomes the virtue that
we grow in instead.
And so it's a beautiful thing to be
part of the church militant and think like
that instead of just getting bogged down in
our sins, which brings about despair and hopelessness.
But to have a prayer for our enemies
that they convert, that's a beautiful thing, and
I'm challenging that every day because I have
enemies too as a priest.
But when they do bad things, that's an
opportunity for us not only to pray for
their conversion, but God gives us great merit
when we overcome those temptations and we get
stronger, and that's what virtue is, doing a
good thing over and over again.
And it comes from the root word virtus,
means strong, and vir in Latin means man.
So men, man up, become virtuous, and that's
what you guys are here for.
You're spending an hour of your time to
reach people out there, especially some men.
Maybe you can tell me more about the
Blue Army and what your goals are because
I haven't heard much of it, but I
love what you're doing here.
It's nice to have this opportunity in my
hometown where I was born and raised.
Yeah, the Blue Army men.
It's just a comes from Our Lady of
Fatima, so this will be part of my
kerygma that we do, but it's really the
school of Mary, total consecration to Mary.
One of the first fruits of that for
me was all the apparitions.
I had never thought much about the apparitions
of Mary.
I mean, familiar with Our Lady of Guadalupe,
of course, being in the Americas, but really
reading those accounts and focusing on the words
that were spoken in those accounts, it's amazing.
And so Our Lady of Fatima really captured
my imagination, and so I had talked earlier
about during COVID when I was trying to
transition and make my life more intentional, doing
the true and good always, even when it
wasn't easy, and I first decided to turn
my softball team into something different that was
faith-focused.
I went out there and was like, okay,
Our Lady of Fatima, what am I?
I thought about being a militia immaculata was
very interesting to me at that time, another
military-type thing, but the Blue Army apostolate
kind of struck me, and so it was
not really an active thing, so I kind
of took that name, and really to me
very succinctly what it is is I feel
like it's on my heart to try and
fish and gather as many men as I
can and bring them to the foot of
the total consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate
Heart and let Mary do the rest.
And I think, I believe that Mary is
the key and the path to taking men,
piercing their hearts, and bringing them on the
way to the Sacred Heart and the Holy
Face devotion and the Carmelite way even.
Let me sum that up because you overthink
things.
I'm the engineer of the group.
I'm 58.
I've never been 58.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm making my life up as I go.
I live my life for most of my
life spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually in a
vacuum.
Only things that I get, it's so homogeneous
that my draw to this is I feel
your words imprinted upon my heart because you're
so different than me, and I never get
fed this.
I'm being fed.
When we're around young men that are fighting
temptation, okay, when I was young, everybody was
doing what I was doing, and that was
nobody was telling me, don't go have sex
with that girl.
Don't go to that keg party.
We were all doing those sort of things.
Therefore, I never received the graces by denying
myself the temptation.
As an old man, my sex drive has
gone down.
It's very rare that I find my wife's
in Rome.
Why when my wife travels do I feel
a desire for her?
Well, because there's temptation afoot.
It's not like it was when I was
18, 20, 25, but these young men don't
understand there are so many more graces in
the thick of mind-numbing sin, the denial
of that, the embracing of God's will over
mine.
There's so many graces, and I want to
impart upon them, and we have a couple
young men that come and talk about their
lives, and I want to say, please, please,
please just think about these things.
Deny yourself this.
There's power.
There's power for you in this that you
receive from our Lord.
Nobody ever communicated that to me at all.
So I tell my kids, I've been 20.
I know how to be 20.
I've been 30.
I know how to be 30.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I have
some answers.
But when I get up in the morning,
and I've been married twice, and I'm the
common denominator, the difference is the one woman
I'm married to now is a bit older,
much more mature, much more long in her
faith, and is much more willing to deal
with me than the other one.
But I am the common denominator.
I still bring to the table the same
problems, the same sins, the same, and most,
when I go to confession, most of my
sins are towards my wife, because she's the
closest person towards me.
She's the closest person to me of all
the things in the world.
My reason for wanting to discuss this with
other men is I live that life in
a vacuum.
I made it up as I went.
I have no idea what I was doing.
There's got to be a better way.
Our Catholic parishes, we show up, we go
to Mass, we leave, we fight in the
parking lot, we flip somebody off for cutting
us off right after receiving the Eucharist.
I've done it.
I've seen it happen.
There's got to be a better way.
There's got to be a better way to
bring men together where they're not saying, hey,
wife, I'm going to go on Thursday night,
and it's an excuse for me to get
a solid buzz on, with, oh, I'm going
to the church.
I'm in recovery.
I know how this works.
What a great opportunity, if you're a drinker,
to do that.
Words made for so much more.
You read the accounts of the saints and
all that they did in such short lives
and how they were doing so much more
in their 30s and 20s, and it's because
this world just beckons us into such a
low grade.
Like as you were saying, we need to
raise the stakes.
The pathway to destruction is so easy and
smooth, and it's like, young man, you were
made for so much more than this.
Do hard stuff.
Suck it up.
I wish somebody would have told me that.
I had a coach that picked me out
of a crowd.
A man picked me out of a crowd,
not because I could play basketball, but he
saw that I had a spirit about me
that I could compete, and he developed that.
And I was a good basketball player that
put myself through college on a scholarship, but
my life had nothing to do with that.
He taught me.
He developed that competitive nature, and that is,
we don't have that in our world anymore.
You brought up something recently that there are
different levels to heaven, and I didn't know
this, and you can be closer to the
Lord or you can be far away from
the Lord, and after walking away from that
conversation, I thought I'll just be lucky to
get in.
If they just give me a seat inside,
I'll be happy.
It never occurred to me that there's levels
to this, and I just want to be
part.
I've almost died many times in my life,
and for whatever reason God's keeping me around,
I don't want to be on my deathbed,
dying of an ingrown toenail.
Nothing glorious, something simple, and not have tried
to participate in the lives of those around
me.
That's all.
Perfect.
Yeah.
I would just like to give a blessing,
everybody.
Please.
Amen.
Amen.
Thank you, Father.
Wonderful.