It's Catholic Schools Week!

This week Brian is joined by Jimmy Mitchell, the current director of campus ministry at Jesuit High School in Tampa, FL, which has repeatedly made national news for its growing culture of conversion. He's also the founder of Love Good, a resource that helps you bring beauty to the forefront of your life and build a culture of conversion within your family, church, school, or organization.

Purchase Let Beauty Speak here.

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Music: Wildfire by Mary Kate Westrich. Used with permission.

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Oh good, yeah, it's low latency compared to Zoom, so the conversation's a little more natural than if you're Zooming or whatever, so it's been good. All right, shall we pray first? All right, in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. Lord Jesus, we just thank you for the gift of faith, just for calling each of us just to know, love, and serve you. We ask that you would just continue to pour out.

Let's do it.

Your grace is on us and just draw us closer to your heart, Lord, that we might be the witnesses you call each of us to be. You might just conform us closer to your image so that what we present to the world is nothing of ourselves, but truly only you living in and through us, Lord. Continue to help us to understand and use the gifts that you've given each one of us.

help us to just continue to respond each and every day. And we really pray for those that we work with day in, day out, Lord, for the priests, pastors, the archdiocese, the St. Louis, for the students and faculty of Jesuit High School in Tampa, Lord, that you would just continue to open hearts just to your mission to go and make disciples, open hearts to receive your great love.

Jesus, we just love You, we praise You, we thank You for all the good gifts You give us. We pray all glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

I'm just going to dive right in here. How's that sound? Great. All right, welcome back to the next edition of Go and Make. It is Catholic Schools Week here in the Archdiocese of St. Louis and all across the country. And with that, you know, sometimes it's easy to get discouraged by the fruit we see from our Catholic schools. I know, you know, we've mentioned here on the podcast a few times, just, you know,

Sounds great.

when we have these ministries all across the archdiocese, whether it's Catholic schools or things we've been doing in our parishes, and we say we're putting a lot of time and effort and energy into them, and maybe we're not seeing disciples raised up out of that. We know that Catholic schools are good, we know that Catholic schools can raise people out of poverty and give them an education, and really there's a lot of conversation right now in the archdiocese amongst pastors, amongst people in the parishes, of how do we make our schools the most authentic?

witnesses of the Catholic faith that they can be. How do we help our schools really help us live that go-and-make mission to make disciples of all nations? So, I'm really excited for this week's conversation. I love Catholic schools. I have my kids in Catholic schools. That doesn't mean it's without a challenge, but today we're going to talk to someone who works full-time at a Catholic school, not here in St. Louis, but someone I've gotten to know in ministry the last, what, gosh, what, 10, 15 years, probably.

It's Jimmy Mitchell, who is the Director of Campus Ministry at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida. So, Jimmy, great to have you with us today.

Thanks, Brian. It's great to be with you and all the good people in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, man.

I know we've had you here many times for Steubenville conferences and different things in and out of the Archdiocese. You're a familiar face to many, I'm sure.

Yeah, no, it's great because obviously we reconnected recently and I'm still surprised that I ended up in Catholic education. So much of my life up until COVID was itinerant ministry, whether that was retreats, conferences, summer camps. So, it really is cool to have this conversation with you today, especially given that we're in such a wonderful week, a kind of appreciative and kind of celebratory week for Catholic schools all over the country.

Yeah, talk about that. How did you end up in first itinerant ministry? So one of the questions we ask everyone on the show is just to tell us a little bit of your own faith story, your own journey of how the Lord first captured your heart, and then maybe about how that led to ministry. But first is where did you meet the Lord and how did you say yes?

I grew up in Atlanta and had a pretty wonderful experience of both Catholic parish life and Catholic education. But I'll say that there was certain formation missing in that. When I went off to college, I was a very, we'll say Irish Catholic, stubborn Catholic. I was never going to miss Mass on Sundays. I at least knew how important that was. But my spirituality became pretty evangelical.

more in the Protestant sense, because I developed this zeal for souls, this love for the person of Jesus Christ, this love for scripture, all things that are very much a part of our Catholic faith as well. But the way that they would often express themselves were in Protestant Bible studies, an amazing Christian fraternity on campus, but one that was very much Baptist, kind of in its root system.

Eventually, you know, spending a lot of time, you know, in and out of youth conferences, praise and worship type of events all over the city of Nashville and beyond, and I was often the only Catholic in the room. I share that because I learned and frankly grew so much in that time and my personal love for the Lord and my ability to speak to Him in prayer as a friend.

For some reason, by the grace of God, I never stopped going to mass on Sundays. But it wasn't really until I was doing some pretty intense missionary work in a third-world country, halfway through college, and then eventually studying abroad in Europe, where I fell in love with the church and all of her beauty and all of her history over there, that things started to really get much deeper. And before I knew it, by the time I was a junior in college, I just had this real natural desire to...

to go to daily Mass. Actually, I suppose that's a supernatural desire. I mean, it was a grace that God gave me. I know, I know. And it wasn't one of these things that anybody told me to do. I just felt drawn to it. But it was while I was studying abroad. It was while I was showing up in all these beautiful cities with their basilicas and cathedrals, unlike anything I'd ever seen up until that point. And that was coupled with a love for the rosary that eventually opened me up to the possibility of a vocation.

Yeah, that's not normal. I wish it was more normal.

Next thing I knew, I was graduating from Vanderbilt with a degree in business and going off to seminary for the Diocese of Nashville. And I didn't spend much time at seminary, but that was easily the most formative time of my entire life. And it set me up to really spend the next decade traveling as an itinerant missionary, working back in Nashville as a bit of an entrepreneur alongside Catholic artists and musicians whenever I wasn't traveling. And because my life was so event-based,

you know, up until COVID, you know, it didn't really occur to me how my even livelihood depended on events. And then suddenly all of that screeched to a halt and undergirding all of that travel and all of that, you know, apostolate for those 10 or 12 years was a deep love for the Lord, of course, and a real desire to help young men in particular grow.

and faith and grow in prayer and grow in virtue and help them discern God's will. And this often would take the form of the kinds of breakout sessions that I would lead for young men at conferences and the kinds of discipleship groups that I would lead back home in Nashville. And eventually this sort of kind of culminated in an opportunity to be a campus minister at this all boys school down here in Tampa. And I'm just to this day surprised by how much I love it, by how much the Lord

work through it. And I'm, you know, certain that we're going to get into it. But, you know, I feel like God has given me this opportunity to imitate one of my heroes day in and day out. And that's Saint John Bosco, whose feast day we celebrate this week. He's obviously one of the great patrons of Catholic education, but specifically he's a great patron for young men. He dedicated his entire life to forming and fathering orphan boys, many of whom went on to become saints themselves. And that's my great

desire, that's my great calling, to help boys become virtuous Catholic men and help them strive for the kind of holiness we're all made for.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think you talk to a lot of people, especially young people, as they're coming to know the Lord, and they have these powerful experiences at conferences, and they hear these amazing talks, and they say, like, I want to be the guy up on the stage, right? And they want to do the, not necessarily the rock star ministry, because it's not necessarily about that, but they have that kind of inkling and desire. And you go and you do that, and it's good, and it can be powerful, but to do the day in

day out hands-on ministry that you get to do in a high school. I mean, it's way cooler than being on stage in front of a lot of people, isn't it?

I obviously agree with that, although I would have never known it until I was in it. Most people start in parish youth ministry or high school campus ministry and then they hope to kind of move towards maybe the Diocesan level and then if they're fortunate enough or have enough opportunities opening and presenting themselves, they'll do the national thing and they'll travel and they'll speak. Well, I kind of did it in reverse. I didn't intend to become an itinerant missionary or a Catholic speaker.

I'll just say providentially, and I loved every opportunity that the Lord ever gave me, every young person I ever met on the road. There was so much love and continues to be so much love for them and for that kind of ministry because I'm still traveling a couple of times a month and most of the summer doing that kind of work. But now suddenly 10 months out of the year, I'm in the trenches of Jesuit high school. I'm in the hearts of young men that I have the privilege of accompanying.

day in and day out. It's not like, okay, we get to the end of the Sunilville Conference on a Sunday, and I'm saying goodbye knowing I may never see them again. We run close to 20 retreats a year at Jesuit, and there's always this wonderful gratitude at the end of them when I realize, oh yeah, guys, I'll see you on Monday, and we'll pick up where we left off. And that is a powerful, much more sustainable work of evangelization and formation when you're just, like I said earlier, in the trenches.

accompanying these young people day in and day out, rolling up your sleeves, getting dirty with them, and kind of walking through even the mess of their lives with them and being Christ to them through that. It's such a privilege. The other reality is, you know, not only is there more joy in this, there's also more heartbreak because you're invested at such a more deep and emotional level that you can't help but care, and you can't help but.

worry and have much more of a kind of fatherly heart for them when you see, especially them going astray and then very much broken and hoping for more out of life, but not always knowing where to turn or having the strength to come back to the Lord. And you have to sometimes just watch that process unfold because there's only so much – I've learned this the hard way – there's only so much I can do.

in the cases of some of these young men that I love them and I so want their happiness and their holiness, but I've also had to learn some hard lessons in detachment along the way too.

You know, you guys have had some pretty unique success in campus ministry there at Jesuit High School. And again, one of the things where we wish it wasn't unique, but it is, you guys have had, well, you said 15 to 20 guys a year coming into the church, joining RCIA, becoming Catholic.

from your high school, isn't that right?

It's pretty amazing. I mean, just over a hundred guys in the last several years. So on average, 15 to 20 every school year who decide to become Catholic. And it's a big decision. I mean, for a 15, 16, 17 year old young man to decide that he wants to get baptized once and for all, or received into the church once and for all. And that of course comes with, you know, their

First Holy Communion and their confirmation and the case of the guys who've already been baptized, they're making their first confession. It's just a big decision to make basically on their own. Now, many of them are being raised in families that are full of, we'll say natural virtue and a lot of love and support, but not very much faith and therefore not a ton of formation. So when they show up in Jesuit as freshmen and they're basically walked through the full deposit of the faith in their freshman theology class,

walking into a basilica-like chapel every day for what we call convocation, which is a talk and a time of prayer that's meant to really set them up for the day before they go off the first period. And from there, you know, they've got endless opportunities for mass and for confession. We have all-day adoration every first Friday of the month. They'll make at least one annual retreat per year. And by the time they're seniors, that annual retreat could either be a pretty intense father-son.

experience or even a silent retreat very much built off of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. So the school really puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to Catholic identity and mission. The campus ministry office is probably the best supported and best funded department at the school. And the boys know that, the parents know that, even the coaches know that.

and they rallied behind it in a way that really surprised me from day one.

Well, and it's not just the campus ministry department, right? And I think that's a really important thing about the success you guys have had. It's that, you know, you were telling me this as we were talking earlier in the week, that the Jesuit is probably the top academic institution in the city of Tampa and the top athletic institution as well. So it's not just a bunch

from the start, you know, who are like, oh yeah, come be weird and Catholic with us, like, you know, like we might want to do sometimes, but it really is, like it seems to be the kind of institution that's just excellent from top to bottom, and it's the vision of the administration that the Catholic identity of that school will kind of permeate every part of it, not just come out of the campus ministry office.

That's right. In my second year at the school, which was 2021, 2022, we were well out of COVID at that point, especially down in Florida. We won three state championships, football, wrestling, and baseball. We had 20 converts in our RCIA program. And frankly, you know, this shift in the culture of the school, where even this pursuit of virtue, this pursuit of holiness, wasn't even...

Thank you.

this subculture that people respected anymore, it felt like it was more and more becoming normative, sort of a part of the school culture at every level. And I would give, first and foremost, the Lord all the glory for that. The Jesuits, especially the priests and the scholastics we have on campus, the bulk of the credit for that. But then also our devout Catholics who are teaching English and teaching math and giving credibility to the faith.

and other departments, you know, like our head baseball coach is revered for his faith. And, you know, the guys won three or so state championships since he showed up at the school nine, ten years ago. So there's just a level at which the faith is integrated across, you know, school operations, school culture, certainly, you know, how we prioritize, you know, the hiring of faculty and staff with mission in mind.

And that level again of integrating the faith across the board it just brings I would call it a culture of Conversion to the boys because you're right the vast majority of them and by vast majority I mean 90% of them are probably only going to the school Because the athletics are the best in the state of Florida because the academics are some of the best in the city of Tampa You know, there's a very small minority who are choosing it for its Catholic identity

nobody graduates without being deeply impacted by the school's Catholic identity.

Yeah, and I think that that's really, I mean, you used a word there that is huge for me, and I know it's huge for you, and it's the word culture, that evangelization isn't simply just an activity that we go and do. It's not, you know, we can go knock on doors, we can make invitations, we can do all these things.

really, evangelization, you know, Paul VI talked about that it's our deepest identity as a church, that we exist to evangelize. And when we have these institutions, and we've talked a lot about the Christendom to Apostolic Mission idea here in the archdiocese, and people are starting to unpack that and figure out what that means, what it means is that from top to bottom, this idea of every single part of our organization, every single person in our organization,

coming deeper in their relationship with the Lord and asking the Lord what he wants from them and what his plan is for them, and then just freely responding to that.

The true evangelization starts to happen when we have that in community, that we can't just go out on our own and do it. We can do that sometimes, and it's never as fruitful as if we go out together as a community and set an ideal and say, this is who the Lord is calling us to be, and we can look at one another and say, how's it going? And are we pushing and challenging together to live that excellence? So it's got to happen in that context of community and culture.

Amen. And I think that's something that our school is striving to live, you know, more and more every year. So for example, Thursday and Friday of this week, you know, all 120 of our faculty and staff will be on a two day retreat together. And oh, by the way, everybody looks forward to it. It's not only a tremendous opportunity to, you know, slow down the pace, enjoy the beauty of God's creation, because we go to this epic retreat center owned by the diocese.

It's not only an opportunity to bond with one another and deepen those friendships that we have on campus, but most importantly, it's an encounter with the living God. We bring in a Jesuit who preaches these retreats every school year, and it really moves the needle in the interior lives of our faculty and staff and bonds us together as a community on mission. And our mission is the formation of these young men.

here in Tampa. And so we'll all come back from that retreat on Monday of next week with such love in our heart, you know, for the Lord, for the mission and for each other. And that's the gift of community and that's building culture from the top down. And there's so much more I could say about, you know, the way that our culture is so clearly embodying, you know, beauty and truth and goodness and brotherhood, things that are, you know, very much

ideals in a good Jesuit education. Rigor, excellence, it's beautiful to watch. I've just never actually seen it in the kind of full color that I get to see it every day down here in Tampa.

Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a principal of an intermediate school, so I think she's got grades four to six at her campus. And

She said, at one point she said, you know, I just thought it would be easier to evangelize in this job. Well, you know, you get the big job and you have all these plans and ideas about what you're going to do and how you're going to create this Catholic identity in this Catholic school.

And then all the distractions set in and all the hardships, and you know, it's like when you talk to pastors, we don't realize, and I don't even realize, and I know more than most people probably, but we don't realize the kind of stuff they have to put up with on a day-to-day basis as far as the distractions, you know, and whether the roof's leaking or the furnace is going out, the boiler needs to be replaced, like whatever it is, they've got all these things coming at them from a million different directions, right?

and they struggle sometimes, these different folks, to really find a way to take the vision that's there in their head or in their heart and really make an impact on that culture. So, I mean, as you're going, it's very clear that it's not just a vision, but there's also a structure behind how it happens. And I think that, you know, here in the Archdiocese, we're really getting a better idea of some of the evangelizing vision that we need. So, we're trying to create kind of a

So we're trying to help people imagine what's even possible. What comes after that is, I have the vision, I have the ideal of what I'm trying to do and who we're trying to be. Now, how do I create structures that support the ideal and that vision? It sounds like that's something you guys have done a good job of down there at Jesuit.

I really like that approach, to allow your imagination and ultimately a vision that God puts on your heart to guide obviously the kinds of structures that you build to support that vision, the kinds of people that you hire to embody that vision.

I will say this, that Jesuit High School down here in Tampa didn't become what it is today overnight. Rome really wasn't built in a day. I think it's been the last 15 years in particular under the leadership of our current president, Father Hermes, and the vision that he brought to the table, and then patiently, and perhaps even strategically, but certainly prayerfully allowed to unfold over time, incrementally,

beautiful, beautiful chapel in the heart of campus where we begin every day in a slow renovation of all of our academic buildings, the brand new construction of a fine arts building.

that we've never had anything like on campus. So there's vision that's been sort of building over time and affecting facilities, affecting landscaping, architecture, the beauty of our campus. But I think most importantly, and we all know this, culture is ultimately about people. It's about a way of life.

more and more we've been really very blessed to hire people, faculty and staff, but especially our administrators, the people who really run the school at every level, who have great faith, who bring that into their leadership, who don't think twice about opening and closing meetings or class periods in prayer, who have a willingness to share their own.

testimony, which includes their own joys and struggles in living the faith themselves. Maybe the best example of this right now is our Mission Corps. This is a program for young men right out of college who want to spend a year on mission at Jesuit down here in Tampa. And so they live in community, to use that word again, they have an intense prayer life.

They all teach one or two sections of various disciplines that they're passionate about or have a background in, but they coach, they moderate clubs. They're all involved in campus ministry, which means they help lead all the retreats. They're doing full-time relational ministry every moment they can in between classes, lunch periods, before school, after school, sporting events. So they're a really great kind of embodiment of our mission right now, bring in.

you know, who we are as an institution, really to the fringes of campus and everywhere in between, everybody in between. And that's really exciting that again, there's a school willing to invest in a program like that and has a vision for bringing in, you know, credible 22 year olds who are cool, former college athletes who are also on fire in their faith and are gonna have an immediate impact on a student body like ours.

When I think about culture, I think about culture is really what we hold in common. And then how do you create culture? You create culture by having a common vision, which I think is something again, that that's a little easier for us to latch onto.

then common experiences too. And that common experience, you know, we can't take anything for granted. So sometimes in our Catholic parishes or Catholic schools, we kind of assume that people are at a certain level or a certain place. So I'm not going to ask them about their faith because I know they're good. I know they've got it covered. I was just at a presentation with my daughter last night. She's in eighth grade, and it was on Eucharistic Miracles, and it was a good little presentation. She's like, Dad, did you know a lot of that already? And I said, yes.

Rose, I did know a lot of that already. I've heard some of this before. I said, but one of the things I try to keep in my mind in my job is that I always have something to learn, and that it's like when you do Alexio Divina on a passage you've prayed with before, that the passage might be the same and the words might be the same, but I'm different and I'm changed. And so to assume nothing of myself every day when I wake up, that I have to wake up and I have to give my life to the Lord in prayer that day. And I think that sometimes in our parishes, in our schools, in our institutions,

We kind of assume too much, and we don't take the time to create the culture by asking the questions, and by talking about having the common vision of where we're going, but also looking inside of ourselves and creating some common experiences along the way, where we can really like grow our roots together and intertwine ourselves together. It's like that piece of rope where it's like, okay, you've got all these different pieces, and when you wrap them around each other, their strength is just exponential compared to those individual pieces along.

Yeah, well said. And that's obviously true of a family. It's true of an institution like a parish or a school. But it's true of the universal church. Even this conversation, which is obviously made possible by the miracle technology, does a great service to remind us that we are in this together. We're not alone. And first and foremost, our identity is beloved sons, which is like why I can look at you, Brian, although I have not seen you in person.

very much over the last 10 years. It's been like, every few years, we're seeing each other at an event, but I can look at you and say, you're my brother. Because we have the same Father in heaven because of what Christ did for us on the cross. He saved us and He adapted us. And that's something we're celebrating. And I think the church right now is often fraught with, obviously its own struggles and its own...

divisions and I think we do a great disservice to each other and of course to Holy Mother Church when we don't like constantly look for the very things that most unite us and that frankly are the source of all peace and joy anyways. Again, you know the love of God that dares to dwell among us, adopt us, and call us His very own. That's something I think all of us can celebrate, especially, you know, on a week like this.

Well, and earlier you talked about, you said, truth, beauty, and goodness, which I know for you is like right in your wheelhouse, the transcendentals and how that incorporates into our vandalization. And I think that's actually a great place to start a lot of times because we have these, these concepts, truth, beauty, and goodness, which are

Obviously, they're very Catholic in their nature and their origin, but they also speak to people beyond their own Catholic sensibilities, right? Truth, beauty, and goodness speak to us just at a very human and a very raw level, so you don't have to know the theology or the doctrine of the Trinity or all the Catholic nerd stuff to recognize truth, beauty, and goodness in the world. So, can you talk about, I know you've got a book coming out, I think, with Ignatius Press, is it Let Beauty Speak? Is that right?

Yes, well done, that's it. That's it.

All right, so maybe share a little bit about just those transcendentals in terms of the work you've done in the Catholic school, but how you've kind of seen those things be able to penetrate beyond maybe just the surface level and have that recognition of truth or meaning in things. We can use that to kind of shape our vision of evangelization.

So I'd like to begin by just briefly looking at the culture that we have inherited, a culture that many of us have contributed to building. And I'm just referring to, you know, Western culture, maybe specifically American culture.

You know, Benedict XVI famously coined the phrase, you know, dictatorship of relativism. I think we can all say we're very much living in the wake of that dictatorship, meaning, you know, it's hard to have reasonable conversations about what is true or even about what is good, right? Because you have your truth and I have mine and we're just supposed to agree to disagree. And any sort of mention of goodness feels like an imposition, you know, of your morality upon somebody.

And we could go on about noise. We could go on about loneliness. The things that are real epidemics of our cultural moment. But the thing that nobody argues with, at least very few, and the thing that has this power to unite us is beauty. Beauty.

breaks through the noise. It has a way of at times bypassing the intellect and going straight to the heart and really humanizing people, giving them a sense of what it really means to be happy, to be alive. And we could talk about sunsets and mountaintops and newborn children, but to bring it down to reality, I just had a student very recently come into my office in tears.

He was a senior and he couldn't believe this sudden urge that he had to pray.

And he felt silly about it because he really feels like even in his senior year, a school like ours, he still didn't know how to pray. And I said, well, man, let's just break this down for a minute. Where did this desire, this urge come from? He says, well, Mr. Mitchell is when we installed those new statues, these are beautiful statues of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that now sort of encompass, you know, the highest points, the alcoves of our beautiful chapel. And they were all commissioned in Florence.

They were obviously flown into Tampa. We had this beautiful blessing of those statues before they were installed. And the whole thing really struck this senior in a way that he couldn't put into words. He'd been in that chapel every day for three, three and a half years, and suddenly it was the statues that really, really transformed his heart and opened him up to this desire for God.

And that's really what my book, Let Beauty Speak, is all about. It's a reminder, you know, that it's not just architecture, music, art, all the things that we would normally associate with the word beauty, even God's creation. It's all those things. But most importantly, it's the beauty of the saints. It's the beauty of holiness that captivates every generation. And so the book is a battle cry.

And really a reminder that in living our humanity well, we can captivate this culture of noise. And the book is divided into 10 principles. I actually use this book as part of a curriculum now in my senior theology class. And we break each of those principles down, wonder, freedom, friendship, all the way to work, leisure, community, suffering, mission, culture, and help these.

you know, young men at Jesuit, and I hope anybody who reads the book as well, integrate those principles into their day-to-day lives in a way that can't help but captivate others with the beauty of a life well lived, ultimately a life in imitation of Christ, a life that mirrors the saints.

I think, yeah, one of the ones out of those chapter titles you ran through real quick that really strikes me is the idea of wonder.

Because I think that we live in a culture that wants scientific answers, right? We don't want to take time to think and ponder the big questions. And everyone's so busy, and we're walking around with our heads down, looking at our phones, instead of looking up at the stars, and wondering about our place in the world, and having genuine awe of creation. And I think that when we think of school, we think of learning definite facts and knowledge, and things that you can know very easily. And I don't think that our...

Sometimes our modern conception of education leaves a lot of room for wonder. And I think that really through the arts and the humanities, and I've been on this kick lately where I'm doing a lot of great books, a lot of great audio books, some real 40, 50 hour slogs. It has finished Les Mis on audiobook. It was 62 hours. But this is an idea where this idea of wonder, and again, it's creating that imagination for...

Who am I? What is this world? Is there something bigger than just this?

Beautiful, so well said. And that is very much why it's the first principle and the foundational principle of the book. But I'm really struck by that image of a modern man looking down at his phone compared to, let's say, a man even 50 or 100 years ago who couldn't help but look up at the stars. There would have been nothing more mesmerizing at night than the night sky.

These phones are pretty addictive. I'll be the first to admit it. It's been years of tweaking and given and taken before I really felt like I've found a right relationship with technology myself. But there's no doubt that beauty has this way of awakening wonder in the heart, pulling us out of ourselves, reminding us that actually there's a heavenly homeland.

that we long for and that this world will never ever come close to. And I think that's the gift of childlike wonder, of awe, of imagination, particularly in a world that just kind of gets more cynical by the day and more locked behind the prison of self and the screens that we carry in our pockets. And so when we take our guys on retreats, we collect their phones and they don't even complain about it anymore. They're so glad.

to just remove the distraction from their lives for two or three days at a time. And I really believe that it's gonna be this generation coming up, Gen Z who was raised in a world with technology integrated everywhere. I could see them having a bit of a holy rebellion here against the enslavement that technology has led so many of them to. I've got right now 35 students doing Exodus 90, another 25, and it's a different 25 doing a program called The Augustine Way.

Exodus 90 obviously being a really intense three month program of prayer and fraternity and fasting. And a huge part of that is the giving up of technology. But the Augustan way is for guys who are trying to overcome addictions to pornography and other sexual sin. And they are all serious about breaking free. So that's, you know, 50, 55 out of 850. All right. That's at least some progress. That's seven or eight percent of our student body. And many of them are student leaders.

So imagine the trickle down effect of that. I could see this happening on a cultural level at some point in the next five, 10, 15 years. And if it doesn't, we're gonna lose so much of who we are and what we've been about as Western civilization, obviously for these last many, many centuries.

It's really, yeah, it's a challenge. And culture doesn't happen by accident. I think that's something we have to think about as we go to shape the culture of our schools and institutions. It's culture is shaped by those who decide to shape it. So instead of...

running around with our hair on fire or just responding to put out the fires that are around us, we have to be proactive to make time for the things that we don't think we have time for, and to really intentionally build and shape the culture in our institutions, in our Catholic schools, in a way that is going to help them to go and make disciples, to be disciple-making institutions. So, one of the things we like to do on our podcast here each week is just to ask and get some ideas for practical tips.

people can do. So, if you were talking to someone who is in leadership at a Catholic school, or a teacher at a Catholic school, or even just a parent at a Catholic school, what would you say to them as far as helping to shape the institution and to shape the culture to be one that helps make disciples and is not just this private institution that's just, you know, maybe sometimes the view of our Catholic schools is they're just, they're not secular, and they're not public, and we're trying to hide from some of those things or retreat away from the culture. So, how do we help?

really intentionally shaped the culture to be around discipleship and disciple making in our schools.

I think first and foremost, we've got to get on our knees. We've got to relearn the art of the interior life. I think that begins with the administration. So imagine if the principal, the president, the assistant principals, perhaps other key leaders in the business side of a major Catholic high school, were to gather once a week for a holy hour. And maybe the first half an hour was just sort of personal prayer, mental prayer.

And maybe they need a little bit of formation on knowing how to maximize that time and its fruitfulness. But then imagine that the next half an hour is interceding for the entire student body by name in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Our team in campus ministry already does that every week. We pray for the entire student body every week by name in front of our Lord in the Eucharist. But also a built in expectation of our team is that we're all going to daily mass and praying a half holy hour a day.

So I'm just really convinced that prayer really is the soul of the apostolate. So first and foremost, we've got to get back on our knees. We've got to be people who are contemplatives first. You know, it sounds really nice to say contemplatives in action. But do we take the contemplative part seriously? And I'm really convicted about this today more than ever. It really. It is, it is. It's also very different than checking a box with a program or a curriculum.

Yeah, that's very different than checking a box with prayer.

or a mission statement, all of which matter, all of which matter greatly. But if our leaders of Catholic schools can't first and foremost commit to being true disciples of our Lord in prayer every day, then it's going to be impossible for them to impart that upon students. The next step in my mind is building a culture of accompaniment where the most senior leaders in the administration all the way down to the rookie teachers who have never taught before.

are accompanying students, standing shoulder to shoulder with them and really building a culture of mentorship on that campus. What the Jesuits call the cura personalis, a care for the individual person. One of my favorite examples of this is again Saint John Bosco. You know, he loved each of those young men as sons. And granted, many of them were orphans. This was their only hope for a future, you know, was Don Bosco. But his love

which was so rooted in prayer and that overflowed into the hearts of these young men was so powerful that it just had this evangelizing effect everywhere that he went. And so when we go about the work of loving other people, the way that crisis first loved us, the conversion just kind of happens because suddenly, you know, the 14 year old freshmen who has been, let's say, you know, fatherless for 10 years, you know, um,

struggling to kind of make sense of life and maybe, you know, is finding his place in the school, you know, academics, but is really struggling in sports or vice versa. You know, let's just take like a classic kid from a broken home or a family that's experienced a lot of suffering. You know, the school might be the most stable institution in their lives. And that's a tragedy in a way, but it's also a huge opportunity. So if the school, you know, meaning

the teachers and the priests and the administrators can love that kid better than anybody's ever loved him up until that point and give him such a profound sense of belonging, back to that word community. How could he not begin asking the question of, where's this love coming from? What am I made for? Maybe this is real what they preach, you know, every month at our all school mass, or what I keep hearing Mr. Mitchell droning on about at the next retreat, you know, maybe it is real that this love of God.

is not just a concept and a nice theological idea, but actually something that can penetrate my heart and change me forever. And I think that's the beauty of education, especially when you have them for the long haul, you can really work with them and accompany them and pray for them without being so hurried about it, because you know that actually the grace is dripping, and at any point could lead to that tipping point.

that really brings about the lifelong conversion.

Yeah, that's amazing. I think those are very good practical tips. You know, pray and be personally involved. Don't assume that the institution is going to do the work for you, that you've got to be in the trenches, walking with folks, trying to ask the hard questions and be there in the highs and lows, and just that accompaniment we've been talking a lot about as a church. I think this has been a really fruitful conversation. Hopefully the first of many.

If that book comes out after I get a chance to get the book and read it, I'm going to have you back on and talk through that even more. It'd be great.

Yes, in fact, it is out, believe it or not, it came out earlier this year. I guess actually, now that we're in 2024, it came out earlier last year. And it's really easy to find for anybody who wants to check it out. Just go to letbeautyspeak.com. It's also available on Amazon and I think pretty much everywhere books are sold.

No.

All right, I'm gonna have to go on there and order myself a copy right after this. Each week we close in prayer. Would you mind taking us out with a prayer?

Absolutely. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the great gift of Catholic education, especially in this week in which we celebrate it all across our beautiful country. We thank you and pray in a very particular way for school leaders, for teachers, for staff, for all that make our school what they are. And we pray for our students and their families and for all of their needs. Lord, we pray for just a greater receptivity to your love.

in their hearts than ever before. We pray for a greater fervor and commitment to faith and to following you on the part of, again, all those faculty and staff and school leaders that we just prayed for. And God, we thank you for this great love that you continue to reveal to us day in and day out through the sacraments, the teachings of the church.

but also through our concrete circumstances. So for all of us, Lord, we just pray that you would maximize our receptivity to your love and that we would be just real wellsprings of that love.

for our world that we know is in such desperate need of you. And blessed Mother Mary, we consecrate the work of Catholic education, especially across the United States, to your immaculate heart, and beg for your powerful intercession as we say. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Saint John Bosco, pray for us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of death. Amen. Pray for us. Amen. Go and make disciples.