(captivating music)
- One in three Catholic men
that have been baptized have left the faith.
Imagine you're in a battle
and one-third of the soldiers go AWOL.
There is a serious man crisis.
- We wanna be a hero, we wanna fight
for someone, for somebody, for a cause.
- Authentic masculinity is living for excellence.
Ideally this is living virtue.
- I would define authentic masculinity two ways.
One is in the image of Christ crucified.
That is masculinity.
Second is the embracing of responsibility,
and not running from it.
That is what it means to be masculine,
is to embrace it and do your absolute best
to live it to its highest purpose.
- To meet the needs of others oftentimes
means saying no to self.
And that's what separates the men from the boys.
(music intensifies)
(pensive music)
- Boys think about themselves and men think about others.
Ephesians 5, it says, "Husbands, love your wives
"like Christ loved the church."
Male spirituality is this call
to lay down our lives for our bride.
For married men, of course, it's for your wife and children.
For priests, it's the same thing.
I'm called to lay down my life for my bride the Church,
and all my spiritual children.
- I think when we don't believe in God,
and all of a sudden, why live above our base self?
You know, women aren't calling men to be better.
So for millennia, a woman called you to be faithful,
she would call you to be committed,
she would call you to be open to being a father
and to being a good husband.
And without that call, we're not being called to be better.
We lack good men to follow.
You know, we live in a fatherless generation.
- Equality does not mean sameness.
All those things that search for equality is something
very good, but not to the diminishment
of the unique attributes of women.
And so women have these incredible gifts,
and when they're nourished, they can flourish.
- This is something we have to understand
as Catholic Christian men right now,
is the disconnect that our culture's trying to make
between the unity of our body and soul.
God himself took on a body and joined himself
fully to our human nature in a human body.
So the first thing we have to do is reclaim that reality
and say, no, the body and it alone
makes visible what is invisible.
The body reveals the person.
- We have images of the strong man
from antiquity, conquering other peoples.
Contrast that with the Christian tradition
where God becomes a baby, a helpless child.
He is protected, guided, fostered by Saint Joseph.
It's an integrated masculinity that finds its expression
in care, in service, in defense, in loyalty,
in guiding and protecting.
- I love Saint Joseph, his model speaks volumes
because he doesn't say anything.
I would much rather watch a man and see his actions,
because that's gonna tell me who he is.
And he was the one who trained the Savior
in living, in being a man.
- Christian masculinity is always gonna take
as its most basic point of reference
the mystery of Jesus Christ who gave Himself unto death.
He's making that gift as the perfect man,
but he's also making that gift to the Church.
He's also showing us what it means to be father, husband,
and he's showing us the kind of love that God has for us,
a love that seeks communion, a love that seeks
and serves the good of the other in a fruitful union.
- Grew up in a very strong Catholic family.
My father was a deacon since I was age six.
My father was a wonderful man, tremendously busy.
There was a lack of direct fatherhood during that time.
There was a lot of peer-on-peer education,
and for me, I was too easily influenced by it.
I did have the question, "What does it mean to be a man?"
and I tried several experiments as a college athlete,
trying to live male-female relationships
in a typical knucklehead college athlete way.
And the question "What does it mean to be a man?"
did not have a super clear answer.
And then I met my wife at the Newman Center at ASU.
I saw her across the chapel,
and she was an extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist.
Just looking at her smile, I felt the pure love of God.
Meeting her focused my life on becoming the kind of man
that was worthy of building a life with her.
All of a sudden I was encountering better friends.
All of a sudden a priest came into my life
who got a group of us together as men
and started teaching us how to pray.
Those experiences came together to move me and to make me
open to the instruction on what it means to be a man.
Authentic masculinity would be a man
integrating all of his God-given powers
to become someone who brings life,
someone that lays down his life for others,
someone that becomes a provider for others, and someone
that is, in the spiritual realm, an important leader.
One of the prayers I pray is, I drive up
into the parking lot, I just say "self empty, self empty,
"Lord, help me to be empty of what I'm carrying right now
"so that I have room for my family."
(gentle music)
- I think you see it every day, kind of in the culture,
trying to make us the same and yes,
equal in dignity, of course we are, but different.
God made us male and female
and that we are a complement to each other.
And when you bring those two forces together,
then there's no stopping us,
but we have different strengths, we have different gifts.
And we are called to use them
in different ways in our family.
And when my husband is leading in that place
where their souls can really develop,
then there's just this beauty in the family
and that's when he's most himself and most manly.
- In a dance between two really talented dance partners,
it's not super apparent who's leading.
But if the man doesn't lead, there's no dance.
And that's kind of where society is, there's no dance.
We want this question answered in our lives.
What does it mean to be a man?
And real relationships will lead us
to the answer to that question.
And that means you've gotta put your phones away,
that means you've gotta put the screens away,
and God will put all the people in your life that you need.
Seek the question to be answered and become a man.
- The Christian faith has been watered down
to make us think that love is allowing
anyone to do whatever they want.
We need to recognize that that's not what Jesus did,
that's not what discipleship is about.
We have to be willing to stand up, to bear responsibility,
to proclaim truth, but to do it in love.
And I think we take that and we think
that Christianity is weak.
But when we look at what Jesus did,
they strike Him in the face.
He stands up, confronts the man face to face,
stares him in the eyes and says, "Why did you hit me?".
- A man is defined by the ability to act.
The opposite of manhood in the Catholic
tradition is effeminacy.
And what is effeminacy?
It doesn't mean to act like a woman.
Has nothing to do with being feminine.
There's a genuine virtue to femininity,
and effeminacy is not being feminine,
it's a softness of the will where I become habituated
to wanting to be entertained and to be
basically more and more passive.
We've taken the masculine, fatherly, paternal images
of love out of the equation, and we have
only half the vision of what authentic love is.
And we end up with a soft Christianity.
Our masculine nature means something
because it's for something, and the fact is
that God wanted that reality to be so obvious
that he stamped it into our bodies.
You see that God wrote into our physiology
that calling, that end, that purpose,
and then we ask ourselves, well then what's the fullest
and most integrated expression of that reality?
Authentic masculinity is found in fatherhood, right?
Like, fatherhood is the end of masculinity.
And so within that context, then masculine love
takes the form of being a protector,
being a provider.
- We still need to be providers and protectors
of our families, because it might not be a physical enemy,
it might not be a soldier or a burglar
who's trying to break into our homes,
but it might be the internet.
We are called as men to protect our family.
We have to attack Satan.
We don't sit back and just try to ward him off,
but we go forward with our faith,
we put on the armor of God and every single day,
try to slay that dragon.
- You hear terms like "domestic church"
or to be provider, protector, spiritual leader.
It can be a little intimidating, the temptation can happen
and can come which says, "I'm not, like, qualified.
"I'm not one of those super Catholic guys
"or one of those strongly spiritual men."
And that's definitely not of the Lord.
Every man is called to face that demon there,
that intimidation demon, or that lie, head on.
And to say, "Lord, is this, have you made me for mediocrity?
"Have you made me for nothing, no big deal?
"Or have you made me to bring greatness into the world?"
- First thing I would say to a guy that thinks
this is too big for him is, it's not.
Like, you're made for this.
You are made for greatness.
You're not God, and don't think of yourself as God,
but you are made in His image, and you are made
in the image of the Father in a particular way,
so you are made for this fight,
you are made for this battle.