But in all cases, grace is a result of our responding to God’s inner presence within us or God’s assistance in living our lives as Christians. Grace is the dynamic action of God within. As believers, we try to live out Gospel values to which Jesus calls us each day of our lives. We know that none of us live perfect lives. And it is good to know that perfection is neither a requirement for salvation, nor a possibility. It is good also to eliminate “nearly perfect” from our vocabulary as a precaution, lest we get carried away with our attempts to be good.

Full of Life

When we realize that God’s presence within us is dynamic, we begin to realize that there is more going on between God and ourselves than we can imagine. The word dynamic means that something is energized or in a state of action or movement. Sometimes we have the idea that unless we are doing something, nothing is happening between us and God. The opposite is true.

As believers, we are always growing in union with God. Indeed, we seek to live Christian lives and follow Jesus’ Word, even when we are not conscious of that fact. We can say that, even in the midst of temptation, our intention is to be faithful to God and live a good life. That intention has nothing to do with our lives of ups and downs. Intention lies in the human heart. And that intention opens us up to the working of God within us.

We can say that our intention causes us to always respond to the graces God is giving us. Remember, grace is dynamic, alive.

It is not a matter of “carrying God inside us.” That would be too mechanical. It’s better to say that we are filled with God’s presence within us—along with our weaknesses and imperfections. We experience this most acutely within the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We can feel grace working with us and around us. What this means is that the Lord is always touching our hearts. For example, we may not always remember the Scripture readings at Mass, but our intention to be there will still allow those words to have an effect on us.

The goodness of God’s Word has an effect on us, too. We receive Communion and, as it can happen, we discover that we were distracted during those sacred moments. We need not fear that nothing happened during that time. We do not make grace happen in us. We intend each moment to be with God, to live good lives, and to allow God to be active and dynamic within us. We may not feel its effect, but God touches us nonetheless.

While watching the evening news, I realized how my ignorance of Islam hindered me as a United States citizen and as a Catholic.

Becoming a Roman Catholic deacon led me into Islam, not by embracing Islam itself, but by embracing it as a sign of the Other whom the deacon has come to serve. The path has been so full of surprises that I can truly say, “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

Yet it’s not only as a deacon that I speak of Islam. I also speak of it as an ordinary American who one day realized that he knew nothing about this “foreign” religion: nothing of its holy book, the Quran, nothing of its teachings, the people who embraced it, their languages and cultures or even the countries where Muslims live. For example, I couldn’t at that time have found Iraq on the map.

The change began in February 1991. I had been watching with horror televised reports of our first Iraq war, Desert Storm. As a recently baptized (1983) Catholic Christian, I had absorbed Thomas Merton’s writings on nonviolence; I had been inspired by the U.S. bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace. I also felt deeply that Desert Storm was portrayed unjustly: as a triumphant exercise of American goodness over the darkest evil and a war that had been cleansed of its violence through “surgical strikes” and “smart bombs.”

Educating Myself About Islam

Much as I wanted to, however, I could not demonize the war makers. What restrained me was a painful consciousness that I was complicit in my ignorance. This war had been allowed to go forward, I believed, because people like me, who ought to have known something about Islam and the Muslim world, knew nothing. Because of that, we were easy victims of the propaganda that made killing Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, a smoothly justifiable action, almost a sacred duty.

To ease my conscience, I said out loud as my wife, Peggy, and I watched videos of American missiles presumably hitting precisely focused Iraqi targets (while avoiding all civilians): “I’m going to learn Arabic.” I said these words a bit braggingly, as if just saying them aloud would make a difference. But I said them fearfully as well, because something warned me that fulfilling this promise would change my life.

I delayed as long as I could. But finally, one fall day in 1993, my excuses and evasions dried up. When I began a course in Arabic at Rochester’s Islamic Center, I entered a different world. As I had feared, that short step changed me.

I became different, first of all, because within the space of five minutes I left behind a world where Muslims had been a scary, undifferentiated mass and entered a new world where Muslims were human beings with distinct names, bodies, personalities and histories. Moving beyond a world of stereotypes, I entered flesh-and-blood human reality.

The change began once I had taken off my shoes, put them in a cubbyhole and padded upstairs to the classroom. From knowing no Muslims for the first 50 years of my life, I suddenly knew 30 class members gathered on that fall day to learn Arabic.

Only one fifth of Muslims are native Arabic-speakers. The rest have to learn their faith’s language slowly and painfully, just as I was doing. My new Muslim friends and I were suddenly linked together in a common struggle. Besides sharing a desire to learn, we shared a common humanity.

A Changed Understanding of God

In a related but different way, a way that took longer to develop, I too changed, especially in my understanding of God. That understanding had perhaps been too sure, perhaps even complacent. Now God began to overwhelm me with the breadth of God’s compassion for all God’s human creatures: not only Christians but also those who experienced God’s presence through a faith both different from mine and often in conflict with it.

I gradually desired not only to learn Arabic grammar but also to immerse myself in the Quran, the Holy Scripture of Islam. At this point, I no longer feared change but rather that change would not go deep enough.

Once my Arabic class finished, I timidly asked the imam, Dr. Mohammed Shafiq, if I could study the Quran with a Muslim, explaining that I was not seeking to convert to Islam, that I had come to the Center out of what I saw as my baptismal calling to be present to the Other. To study the Quran meant deepening my own faith, and to do so not by triumphantly discovering the Quran’s supposed “faults” or “insufficiencies,” but by entering as fully as possible into the experience of people for whom the Quran is the vehicle of God’s presence.

Dr. Shafiq readily accepted my request. As the Quran says, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Sura al-Baqarah 2:256). For Muslims, religious conversion is a matter of individual conscience, not of compelled assent. He and I had by then become friends. He knew that I respected Islam and Muslims. For him (and for the great majority of the Muslims I have met in the years since), that was enough. Once Dr. Shafiq found a teacher for me, my immersion began.

Siddiq, my teacher, and I spent Saturday afternoons sitting cross-legged at the back of the prayer area at the Islamic Center, working through the Quran word by word, line by line. He drilled me on correct pronunciation and on melodious phrasing. In time and after considerable effort, I could recognize the great beauty of the Quranic voice, which for Muslims embodies a divine reality analogous to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

The Historical and Moral Context

Siddiq also insisted on clarifying the historical context of Quranic verses. Because they were revealed to the Prophet Mohammed between 610 and his death in 632, this context ranges from the rejection by Mecca’s elite of these revelations to Mohammed’s triumphal, nonviolent return to that city two years before his death.

In those years, he consolidated the faith among most Arabs. Mohammed always considered Islam not a new religion but the true reform of the only religion, the ancient, primordial religion of monotheism. Its two main tenets are worship of God alone and love of neighbor. Siddiq’s presentation of Mohammed’s achievement went beyond history by conveying the supreme importance of Mohammed as the moral exemplar for Muslims. Just as Christians are urged to imitate Christ, Muslims are urged to imitate the Prophet.

The key difference is that, in imitating Christ, Christians are entering into the very life of God. In imitating Mohammed, Muslims are conforming their behavior to that of the most perfect human being who ever lived: “perfect” not in an inhuman, unrealistic, cold-blooded sense, but in the sense of “authentic,” true to the best in human nature. Christ’s injunction, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect,” catches this understanding.

Grasping clearly the Islamic moral pattern, I realized how some of my Muslim acquaintances seemed to do very well while others seemed to fall short. I was not shocked or scandalized by this disparity because I was now seeing Muslims as people, with just as many faults and imperfections as I or other Christians have. Muslims were neither gods nor demons, but rather children of God, just like myself.

I gained confidence in the rightness and value of my immersion in Islam after absorbing Thomas Merton’s correspondence with the Pakistani Sufi Abdul Aziz. (Sufis are Muslim mystics.) Merton’s openness to Islam deepened his Christian faith instead of diluting, confusing or weakening it.

The Way of All the Earth, by Notre Dame theologian John S. Dunne, persuaded me that “passing over” to the faith of the Other was a necessary step in returning to my own faith with fresh and open eyes.

Sharing Those Discoveries

Growing confidence awakened my desire in the mid-1990s to let other Christians know what I had learned about Muslims and their religion. I longed to challenge stereotypes of both that my fellow Christians had. I wanted them to know that Muslims were just as human as they were, no more and no less; that Islam carried the same message Jesus did when he affirmed the key teaching of the law and the prophets (to love God and neighbor); and that immersing oneself in Islam, as I had done, could enhance one’s Christian faith. Through my writings and talks to church groups, I shared these convictions.

_{“Isn’t Islam a religion of violence?” she asked. “No,” I responded. “Islam has nothing to do with violence. In fact, it is just like Christianity in asserting love of God and neighbor.”}

My growing confidence about my immersion and my speaking about it reinforced another inner current, a desire to find a way to express my baptismal commitment to serve the Other more fully and rigorously. The permanent diaconate seemed to offer such an opportunity, and in 1999 I began my formation in the Diocese of Rochester, New York.

This challenging and liberating process highlighted the risk of identifying with Christ the servant. I also experienced, however, the joy of finding myself in solidarity with the Other, looking at the world through his or her eyes, in order that I might see better through my own.

A Rude Awakening

During my last year of formation, my relations with Islam and the diaconate were forever changed by the events of September 11, 2001.

That beautiful day, suppressed hostilities smoldering on and off for centuries between the Muslim world and the West erupted in flame, smoke and murder. Although my original step toward Islam had been a response to violence, the scale of the violence darkening the sky on September 11 dwarfed the dust clouds of Desert Storm.

No longer could I speak about Islam in theological terms to audiences who listened appreciatively, as if to a well-meaning professor. I now had to deal directly with my audience’s fear and anger. People who used to listen quietly as I explained Islam’s Five Pillars now could barely restrain themselves before jumping up to ask, “But what about the terrorists?”

My immersion in Islam and solidarity with Muslims raised very direct questions from my friends: Was I a simple dupe? Had I gone over to the “enemy”? I then realized that my immersion had not gone deep enough, that I had been satisfied with experiencing and describing only Islam’s personal and theological challenges and benefits. I had not fully understood the social and political consequences of where this path was leading.

After September 11, those consequences loomed tragically. I saw how ignorance of Islam and of Muslims fueled hatred and scapegoating by otherwise well-meaning Christians (and other non-Muslims). I saw how certain forces can take advantage of people’s ignorance and panic to manipulate them for political advantage. Crossing over the Islamic Center’s threshold had led me into the angry divisiveness that even today threatens to shred national identity.

The Path Forward

Yet I have never felt lost or unsure of the path Baptism pointed out for me. My own strength or courage has contributed little to this security. My struggle with anti-Muslim prejudice since September 11 has sustained my commitment to interfaith dialogue that many people in the Rochester area and throughout the country share.

These good people include Muslims and Christians of all denominations, working hard and peacefully to bring understanding amid the shouts and clamors of those who see Islam as a monolithic force spreading out over the United States like a giant cloud from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor. But the most sustaining effort for me has been that of my own bishop, Matthew Clark, who in 2003 helped create a formal accord of solidarity with Rochester’s Muslims. This was the first such accord between Catholic and Muslim communities in the United States, and perhaps in the world.

Because of it, I and others could face with some firmness, equanimity and even compassion the hostility of people for whom Islam represented incarnate evil. We could respond pastorally to those who were bewildered by irresponsible media reporting.

As a deacon, I now see myself immersed not so much in Islam as in our national psyche’s current agony as we battle our Jekylls and Hydes. Muslims are not the only people being scapegoated. Migrant workers in this country likewise face fierce scapegoating. African-Americans and Native Americans have long suffered scapegoating and still do. Public employees and union members are now experiencing it.

Who is next? As a deacon, I have to stand in solidarity with all such victims, all such Others or with whoever will next be made into an Other. Baptism has led me through Islam on the road to a Jerusalem where many besides Muslims are being crucified. I have to walk that road toward them all. Not all such stops along that road are scary ones. The other day I received a call from a Catholic woman whose adult son had just announced that he was converting to Islam. The woman sounded hurt, confused and frightened.

“Isn’t Islam a religion of violence?” she asked. “No,” I responded, “Islam has nothing to do with violence. In fact, it is just like Christianity in asserting love of God and neighbor.” Then I asked the woman, “Am I right in guessing that your son has been brought up in a caring home and that he has been taught good values?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Well,” I said, “you and I are sad about his change of religion and we wish it hadn’t happened. But we can have hope that he’ll be associating with Muslims just like himself. They are far and away the great majority, just as good people are far and away the great majority among us Catholics. Let’s let God do the rest.”

Loving his wife, being father to their children—these are moments of grace for a prayerful man.

Well, my first prayers as a parent were before I was a parent because my slight, extraordinary, mysterious wife and I had been told by a doctor, bluntly and directly and inarguably, that we would not be graced by children, and I remember us walking out of the doctor’s office, silently, hand in hand, and then opening the passenger door to our car for my wife, as my mother had taught all her sons to do or else she, my mom, would reach up and slap you gently on the back of the head for being a boor, and I helped my wife into the car, and bent down to escort the hem of her blue raincoat into the car before closing the door gently, and then I started to walk around to the driver’s side, and I burst into tears, and bent over the trunk of the car, and sobbed for a moment.

My first prayers as a parent, those tears.

Then we prayed for a long time in all sorts of ways. I prayed in churches and chapels and groves and copses and hilltops and on the rocky beaches of the island where we lived at that time. I would have prayed to all the gods who ever were or ever would be except I know somehow deep in my heart that there is one Breath, one Imagination, one Coherent Mercy, as a friend of mine says, and that everything that is came from and returns to That which we cannot explain or understand, but can only try to perceive the spoor, clues, evidence, effect, the music in and through and under all things.

I have never thought that prayers of request can be answered; I do not think that is the way of the Mercy. Yet we do whisper prayers of supplication; I think we always have, since long before our species arrived in this form. Sometimes I think that beings have been praying since there were such things as beings; I suspect all beings of every sort do pause and revere occasionally, and even if we think, with our poor piddly perceptive apparatus, that they are merely reaching for the sun, or drying their wings, or meditating in the subway station between trains, or chalking the lines of a baseball field ever so slowly and meticulously, perhaps they are praying in their own peculiar, particular ways. Who is to say? Who can define that which is a private message to an Inexplicable Recipient? So that he who says a scrawny plane tree straining for light in a city alley is not a prayer does not know what he is saying, and his words are wind and dust.

The Target of My Prayers

Three children were granted to us, a girl and then, together, one minute apart, two boys; and my prayers doubled, for now I knew fear and trepidation for them, that they would sicken and die, that they would be torn by dogs and smashed by cars; and I felt even then the shiver of faint trepidation that someday, if they grew up safely, and did not suffer terrible diseases, and they achieved adulthood, that they would be heart-hammered by all sorts of things against which I could not protect or preserve them; and so I did, I admit it, sometimes beg the Coherent Mercy, late at night, for small pains as their lot, for relatively minor disappointments, for love affairs that would break apart but not savagely, for work that they would like and even maybe love. In the end, I remember vividly, I boiled all my prayers as a parent down to this one: Take me instead of them. Load me up instead of them. Let me eat the pains they were served at their tables.

I don’t think I ever fully understood the deep, almost inexplicable love of the Christ for us, why he would accept his own early tortured death as a sacrifice, until I had been a father for a while.

Miracle of the Virgin Mary

Somehow, being a father also slowly but surely changed the target of my prayers over the years. Before we were granted children, I chatted easily and often with my man Yesuah ben Joseph, a skinny gnomic guy like me, a guy with a motley crew of funny, brave, hardworking, boneheaded friends, a guy who liked to wander around outdoors, a guy who delighted in making remarks that were puzzling and memorable and riddlish, a guy—I felt like I knew him pretty well, what with us both being guys and all, and I had confided stuff to him not only as a child, but again after the years during which every Catholic boy in my experience ran screaming and shouting away from the Church, away from authority and power and corporate corruption and smug, arrogant, pompous, nominal bosses issuing proclamations and denouncing dissent.

You tiptoe back toward religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and poetry and power and wild miracle in it, that it is a language you can use to speak about that for which we have no words; and in my case, as in many others I know, this was so, and I saw for the first time in my life that there were two Catholic Churches, one a noun and the other a verb, one a corporation and the other a wild idea held in the hearts of millions of people who are utterly disinterested in authority and power and rules and regulations, and very interested indeed in finding ways to walk through the bruises of life with grace and humility.

So when I tiptoed back into Catholicism, and began taking it seriously, and began exploring and poking under the corporate hood, curious and fascinated by the revolutionary genius under the Official Parts, it was because I was a father, and knew that I needed a language with which to speak to my children of holiness and prayer and miracle and witness and hope and faith. I found, as my children grew from squirming lumps to toddlers and willowy young people and now almost men and woman, that it was to her that I turned, both in desperation and in cheerful, silent moments when I chanted the Hail Mary to myself while waiting for the coffee to brew.

Why? Because, I think, she was a mother—is a mother. He came out of her. That was a miracle. It is a miracle when a child emerges from his or her mother. I had seen this miracle not once but twice, with my own eyes, from very close to the field of action, and I think something awoke in me after that, something that knew she was there, available, approachable, patient, piercing. Not once in the days since my children were born have I ever felt her absence. I do not say this in a metaphorical way, or as a cool literary device, or as a symbolic hint. I mean what I said. I feel her near us.

I have no opinion about visitations, other than to grin at the ones where people see her face in tortillas and on stop signs, and to wonder quietly about ones like that which occurred to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, long ago, that poor man who had to return to the hill for proof to offer the ecclesiastic authority, who gaped when a shower of roses fell to the shivering floor. Perhaps most reports are hallucinations; perhaps all of them. But perhaps hallucinations are illuminations, and there are countless more things possible than we could ever dream.

One thing I know at this age: If you think you know the boundaries and limits and extents of reality, you are a fool. Thus we pray.

A Prayer for My Children

I still pray for them every day. So does my wife, in the morning, by the bed, on her knees, in her pajamas, with her face pressed down upon the blanket of the bed, abashed before the light of the Lord. I have seen this, though I try to be out of the bedroom so that she can pray in private; and every time I see it I get the happy willies, that she believes with such force and humility. But I pray on my feet, by the coffee pot, while walking, while waiting for eyeglasses, while stirring the risotto, while washing the dishes, while brushing my teeth, while scratching the dog. I pray that they will be happy.

I pray that they will find work that is play. I pray that their hearts will not be stomped on overmuch—enough to form resilience, but not enough to crush their spirits. I pray that they will live long and be blessed by married love and be graced by children and maybe even grandchildren. I pray that their minds hum and sing and do not stutter and fail. I pray that they will not be savaged by illnesses, but be allowed to live healthy and happy for years beyond my ken and my own life. I still pray to die before they do. I still say thank you, every day, every single day, for being granted children at all; for I am a man who was told, bluntly and directly and inarguably, that my extraordinary bride and I would not be graced by children, and we walked out of the doctor’s office, silently, hand in hand, and we wept. Our first tears as parents.

I pray on my feet, by the coffee pot, while walking, while waiting for eyeglasses, while stirring the risotto, while washing the dishes. I still say thank you, every day, every single day.

We have cried many tears since, for many reasons, and our children have been tumultuous, and troubled, and in great danger, and our marriage has been wonderfully confusing, and troubled, and in great danger. But even now, all these years later, every few weeks I will find myself in tears for what seems like no reason at all; and I know it is because we were blessed with children, three of them, three long, wild prayers; and they are the greatest gifts a profligate Mercy ever granted shuffling, muddled me.

When I am in my last hour, when I am very near death, when I am so soon to change form and travel in unaccountable ways and places, I hope I will be of sound enough mind to murmur this to our three children, and perhaps, if the Mercy has been especially ridiculously generous, our grandchildren: It was for you that I was here, and for you I prayed every day of your life, and for you I will pray in whatever form I am next to take. Lift the rock, and I am there; cleave the wood, and I am there; call for me, and I will listen; for I hope to be a prayer for you and yours long after I am dust and ash. Amen.

“A solution lies not in one side versus the other, and not in running away from today’s lepers.”

There are three giants in the earliest years of Franciscanism: Sts. Francis, Clare, and Anthony. Francis and Clare, of course, were founders. In the broadest sense, one could think of Francis as the heart of the movement, a heart profoundly engaged with the world, seen through the lens of poverty. Clare, as Franciscan scholar Ilia Delio, OSF, describes her, was a woman who coupled her own engagement in the real world with contemplation found in poverty and in a lifelong struggle against men to fulfill her radical calling.

What Francis and Clare were showing in deed, St. Anthony of Padua brought to the booming movement in word. Yes, he was a Franciscan in his poverty and in his radical lifestyle. He brought, though, intellectual formation both as a tool for evangelism and as a foundation for ministry. Interestingly, all three were from well-off families.

Anthony had been a trained priest in Lisbon, one who was moved by the witness of friars to join the Franciscan movement. He sought to follow the friars, possibly in martyrdom, engaging Muslims in Morocco. Instead, he wound up in Italy, called to bring his intellectual formation to bear on the rapidly growing Franciscans. The little group that had followed Francis into poverty outside Assisi’s walls had grown wildly, in a short time, to thousands of friars.

Anthony joined the friars at a time when they were sorely in need of his skill. Friars knew simplicity, but there was a war of ideas happening around them too. Anthony took to preaching Scripture and, with Francis’ approval, teaching the friars sacred theology. In granting permission to Anthony to chart this new Franciscan course, the founder said Anthony could teach the friars “as long as you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion with study of this kind.” As scholar Dominic Monti, OFM, notes, St. Francis may well have granted this permission begrudgingly, realizing both that the Franciscans needed more formation and that more formal education would introduce a worldly temptation.

A Faithful Path

That’s all very interesting—or boring, depending upon your take. But it’s relevant as we consider the Franciscan spirit today. There are foundations of heart, spirit, and intellect in each of these Franciscan heroes, and we need to retain all three as we consider how to be modern followers of Francis.

For Anthony, understanding Christianity correctly involved not only deep knowledge of Scripture (and, of course, sharing that knowledge) but also establishing social justice. In Father Dominic’s telling, it was reconciliation among warring political factions and relieving the poor of unjust debts. Sound familiar?

Today’s society is as fraught as Anthony’s with warring ideologies, violence among competing political interests, religion mixed in with politics, struggles for power, injustice against the poor, and more. Especially in our country, it’s also competing religious visions—some see religion as something disengaged from the world, while others see religion as justifying one or another political cause.

Like the earliest Franciscans, we can see that a solution lies not in one side versus the other, and not in running away from today’s lepers, but in finding a faithful path among the factions and maintaining a fruitful presence among the poor.

We know from our Catholic tradition that a faithful path includes seeing our social reality through the lens of Gospel values. That means advocacy for life “from womb to tomb,” one that includes protection of the unborn and the dying, without a doubt, but also includes protecting the vulnerable who are somewhere between womb and tomb. Beyond protection for the powerless, it also involves the work of justice, of helping people get on their feet and utilizing the power that human dignity gives to each of us. We not only ensure that our newest little ones are born, but also that they live in economic security. We advocate for a dignified death just as we have advocated for a dignified life along the way.

Flowery as it may sound, it all gets real and challenging as we practice this Gospel sense. We actually work to protect the unborn. We work to provide shelter and dignity to homeless people. We use our vast resources to provide opportunity rather than barriers to immigrants, to pursue alternatives to for-profit prisons, to judge our social policies and our elected leaders against the measure of justice.

Along the way, in the spirit of Francis, of Clare, of Anthony—of Jesus himself—we seek joy. But ours is not some kind of plastic joy, ignoring the pain of the world so that we can be ever-smiling but unconcerned Christians. We seek the joy that comes from being who God wants us to be in the world. It’s not the joy of empty fervor; it’s the joy of standing with people weak and strong, doing the work of justice, praying the prayer that opens our hearts, walking the talk of Christianity.

It’s the joy of digging in with Anthony and doing our homework so that we can speak not only with the authority of personal witness, but also with the authority of spiritual formation. Book learning is part of the package. That, perhaps more than anything, is the spirit of St. Anthony, inspired by the spirit of St. Francis.

Addiction, depression, music, and faith—all are part of this popular priest’s journey.

In 2015, when Father Rob Galea stepped onto the stage for Australia’s version of the popular competition show X Factor wearing his Roman collar and black Converse gym shoes, he certainly didn’t fit the mold of the typical contestant—or the typical priest. Still, he wowed the judges with his performance and earned himself a place on the show. Not bad for someone who says he was kicked out of his school choir in elementary school.

He entered the competition, he tells St. Anthony Messenger, because he saw it as a perfect opportunity for evangelization. And that, says Father Rob, is his goal: to spread the Gospel message and a message of hope in whatever way possible.

His time on the show did not last long, though. During the early “boot camp” phase, which required him to be away from his parish and other responsibilities, he made the decision to drop out of the competition.

“It was just getting to be too much, and too much about me and about success,” he says. “They were asking questions like, ‘Isn’t this the best thing you’ve ever done in your life?’ and I’m thinking, No, this is wonderful, but there’s more.”

Of his time on the show, he says, “It did the good it needed to in Australia, and then I stepped away.”

So how did someone who says he never wanted to be a priest and couldn’t sing or play the guitar end up on that stage? Well, for the answer, you have to go back to the beginning.

A Dark Time

Father Rob grew up in Malta, which is just south of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, where he lived with his parents and younger siblings, Rachel and Joseph. He says he had a comfortable life surrounded by family and a menagerie of animals. “Some of my happiest childhood memories are set in that home with our animals,” he recalls.

During his teen years, though, Father Rob found himself in a dark place. He became rebellious and often fought with his parents. He would sneak out at night to go to clubs, and by the time he was 16, he found himself hanging out with a rough crowd of people, some of whom were dealing drugs. He grew his hair long and pierced his ear. He began drinking excessively, smoking, and experimenting with various drugs, as well as stealing—just for the sake of the thrill. Over time, he fell deeper into his addictions, but says, “I didn’t know how to get out of it.”

The lowest point, he recalls, was when he got caught in a lie about one of the guys he was hanging out with. The group was well known for violence and Father Rob’s lie put him right in their crosshairs. They came looking for him, and Father Rob, fearing for his safety, retreated to his room where he spent most of the next six to eight weeks. During those weeks, he struggled with severe anxiety and fell into a deep depression, even considering suicide.

That rough period of his life, though, “is greatly instrumental in my work,” he says.

A Ray of Hope

When he was 16, Father Rob was invited to a local youth group meeting and says, as a result, he had a conversion that changed his life.

“Actually, the invitation wasn’t even for me; it was for my sister, Rachel,” he writes in his autobiography, Breakthrough. “I wasn’t particularly religious at that point, but I was insulted not to be included and said so.”

He left the sanctuary of his room to attend the meeting and recalls hearing the youth minister talk about having a personal relationship with God, where he could talk with God just like having a conversation with a friend. The concept seemed foreign to Father Rob at the time, but intrigued him. He remembers thinking that he wanted to have that type of relationship. So he went home and tried to find it.

“I put an empty chair across from me and talked to it as if someone were sitting there. Day after day, I talked. Day after day, nothing happened,” he says. On one particular day, though—December 2, 1999, to be exact—he says he encountered Jesus. Father Rob recalls releasing all of his pain and anger at God for his struggles. After laying it all out and breaking down in tears, a great sense of peace came to him.

“I could see that [God] understood my pain. He was perfectly aware of all my sin, my darkness, my mess, and my shame, and he loved me anyway,” he says.

A Change of Heart

That is when things began to change. Suddenly, Father Rob began to feel joy and hope for the first time in a long while and says he couldn’t get enough of it.

“I wanted to share the hope that I had experienced.”

The youth group that he had at first reluctantly attended became a constant in his life. It also introduced him to the world of music. The band for the group needed a guitarist, so he decided to step up.

“I simply picked up the guitar, watched MTV, played the chords that they were playing, and then played church songs on the same chords I learned,” he recalls. His mom, who played guitar, also offered help.

For the next few years, he spent time traveling, playing music, and growing in his faith. Despite his deepening faith, though, he never even considered the priesthood. In fact, he had a girlfriend during that time and says he used to pray: “‘God, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll sing, I’ll dance, I’ll go around the world. But please, Jesus, don’t let me become a priest.’ Because for me, the priesthood was something cut off from reality—far away from the world that I knew. It seemed so countercultural, and there were never any priests that I could associate with.”

But, as so often happens in life, God had other plans. While performing in Italy, Father Rob met Padre Giovanni, who exhibited the type of energy and joy in his priesthood that Father Rob had not witnessed. He went home that night and prayed, “Lord, if I can be anything like this man, I will consider the priesthood.”

The road to his ordination had different stops along the way. One of those was when he started the Stronger Youth program in 2008 with the late Bishop Joe Grech on the heels of World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. The program consists of a series of youth retreats, rallies, and small groups, which are run throughout the Diocese of Sandhurst in Victoria in hopes of reengaging young people in the Church.

Two years later, Father Rob was ordained and says: “If I had a thousand lifetimes, I’d choose to be a priest in each one. I love being a priest.”

Ministering through Music and Media

Currently, Father Rob holds down quite a few responsibilities. He is an associate pastor in a parish two hours from Melbourne, Australia. When asked how he got to Australia, he jokingly says, “an airplane,” before answering that he first went there during a gap year while in seminary and served at a parish in the bush. His heart, he says, is for the young people of Australia, pointing out that the country is largely secular.

In addition to his parish responsibilities, he works full-time as director of youth for the Sandhurst Diocese. And then there’s FRG Ministries, which supports new and engaging means of evangelization, from music, social media, and video production to mission trips and outreach events. It also provides educational programs and resources for schools and Catholic parishes.

“I go into classes, I go into schools, and I have a thousand students in front of me. I go and speak, and I’m a priest. They ask, ‘What’s this priest going to do?’ But then I go grab my guitar and sing a current pop song—a song by Skrillex or a song by Sia—and they think, Wow, he speaks our language. That’s what music does. Music is a universal language. It transcends the mind and goes to the heart. I go out and preach the Gospel, and I do that through music,” he says.

“I do this around the world as well. I get to speak to about 200,000 teenagers a year, and it’s an honor, such a privilege,” he says. The goal of his ministry is to spread the faith “one step at a time, one soul at a time. These young people need a sense of hope, a sense of purpose, a sense of excitement for life. Many people believe that their purpose is in doing something. But, ultimately, your purpose is in being something, and that is a child of God.”

He does so through the six albums he has released, as well as his popular YouTube channel, which has over 16,000 subscribers. On the channel, he posts videos for many of his songs and performances, as well as videos addressing various questions regarding the Catholic faith, such as “Five Ways for Christians to Deal with Stress” and “Tattoos and the Catholic Church,” in which Father Rob discusses his own tattoos.

Tired Yet?

You might not think that Father Rob has time for anything else, given his parish work and various ministries. But that wouldn’t be true. This year, he released his autobiography, Breakthrough: A Journey of Desperation to Hope, which tells his story. He says he wanted the book to be more than just that, though.

“I go to schools and then I leave, not having a good follow-up. So I thought, Let me write this down so they can take it to their schools, take it home, meditate, pray, and apply it to their own lives. Because it’s one thing to tell a story, but another thing to give the story to the person who’s listening.”

He wants readers to realize that if he can find hope and a relationship with Jesus in this darkness, then anyone can.

Coming Soon

But his journey doesn’t end there. Next year, Father Rob’s story will reach even more people when a motion picture based on his life will be released. The Singing Priest is currently in pre-production.

He says he was a bit scared when he first found out about the movie, but also excited. “I’m excited that it is going forward, at the same time recognizing this is also making me vulnerable because people know very intimate parts of my life. But I don’t think we have time to worry about ourselves. We need to go out and share the Gospel.”

He says: “I will use anything I have, everything I have to evangelize, to give people this joy and this trea-sure that I have found. If it’s through film, through music, through books, whatever it takes. I’m not interested in fame. I’m not interested in influence if that influence is not entirely focused on glorifying Jesus.”

How does he do it all? He attributes his ability to accomplish so many things to being surrounded by a great team of people, as well as pillars he has in his own life. Those pillars are daily exercise, daily prayer and meditation, and taking time out, which he says he takes unapologetically because, “What use am I to people if I am broken?”

No Regrets

Looking at where he is now and thinking about how far he’s come since his troubled early years, what would Father Rob say to his younger self?

“I often think about that,” he says. “I probably would put my arm around my shoulder and say, ‘Rob, it’s going to be OK. You’re gonna have an awesome future. You’re gonna see so many great things in your life. Look at God and just trust God.’ I think I would have saved so much heartache if I would have just trusted God earlier.”

Still, he says he doesn’t have any regrets. “I’m grateful even for the mistakes. I don’t like the fact that I’ve hurt so many people on the way to where I got. But, at the same time, I’m grateful for even the negative experiences because through that I’ve grown to understand humanity, to understand myself, and understand the mercy of God.”

The prayers we learned in childhood don’t have to be left there.

Earlier in my life, I was wary of formulaic prayer—the Catholic prayers I’d grown up with. I’d listened to Protestant friends who condemned repetitious prayer based on the line from Jesus in Matthew 6:7: “In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words.” Or, in other versions: “Don’t use vain repetitions.”

I’d observed people who seemed to use standard prayers as magic—in a superstitious sort of way. They seemed to worry that they might not get that house or promotion or cure because they were short one Hail Mary.

I’d prayed, I thought, from the heart, in my own words, and also silently. I felt as if I’d reached a deeper level of sincerity than I had with traditional, recited prayers. On some level, I considered this kind of traditional prayer outdated, something that might fade away with the older generation. I felt that truly spiritual people outgrew this kind of approach to God.

I can’t pinpoint exactly the moment all this changed and I returned to the prayers of our tradition. I do know that I attended informal First Friday mini retreats at the parish I went back to after decades away from the Church. And partly to be respectful and polite, I learned to participate again—in the Divine Mercy Chaplet, in the prayers for Holy Hour. And I loved it. A couple of rosaries fell into my hands. My hands, more than my mind, remembered the way around the beads. The words came back; they just followed my fingers. And I loved it.

More recently, after a few years of the habit of daily Mass, I found myself going in the middle of the day rather than in the morning, now and then. Just before noon, I’d find myself on my knees with everyone else, saying the Angelus. It came back to me from childhood, across decades, across centuries.

And so today I put down a few words to defend, encourage, and promote the use of our traditional Catholic prayers.

The Prayer Connection

First, they are not only prayers that lift our minds, hearts, and souls to God when prayed thoughtfully and sincerely, but also prayers that connect us. They link us to all the saints who have prayed these prayers, all the faithful who have prayed these prayers, all the priests, religious, Catholic educators, and parents who taught us these prayers. We’re connected to all in our parishes and throughout the world who are saying these prayers in a multitude of languages today.

Many of us, in saying these prayers, are layering our voices and hearts onto those of our own grandparents and our ancestors before them. This is what tradition is. This is what tradition does. In addition, all our internal and external voices are continuous, much like the Mass or the Liturgy of the Hours, in offering our united lives, thanks, praise, petitions, and contrition to God.

I love that connection.

I also think about the depth of these prayers in terms of their application at various stages of our lives. I think about how the very connections mentioned above are anchored in childhood when a child is taught to pray like this. I think of the comfort and love children can experience during regular prayers with parents, and I like to think of children absorbing, like a seed absorbing nutrients or an embryo absorbing nourishment, things that they need to grow spiritually—things that will take them to the very heart of the mysteries of these prayers, of God—all below-the-surface “babbling.” I think of the meanings of the words unfolding over the course of childhood and young adult years, and into middle and old age.

I was probably in my 40s before I experienced the cumulative shock of a sincerely prayed, thoughtful Hail Mary, the never fully grasped rightness and truth contained in a Glory Be. All of the desires of God and the needs of our souls—and a blueprint for the unfolding of the world—are present as the words of the Lord’s Prayer are voiced.

It was during a normal babbling of the rosary that I suddenly began to appreciate the mysteries. I think of a babbling brook becoming a creek, flowing into a river, and finally pouring out into the great, vast sea. The water babbles all the way, gaining force, and suddenly a mystery opens. Or at least we get a glimpse of it and can stand, stunned, at its unknowable expanse and depth.

Prayers That Sustain Us

These prayers operate in our subconscious. And that’s why memorization is so important. That’s why it’s not a bad thing that we learn these prayers to a point where we can say them mindlessly. During dark times, during times of trial and fatigue, when our own words are perhaps silenced or we don’t find our own thinking trustworthy, we might not be able to come up with sincere expressions of thanks, praise, trusting petition, or contrition.

When we’re so dog-tired or stressed we can’t even sleep, we might not be able to spontaneously pray or meditate. Or we might have trouble, say, in anger, in traffic, or at a sickbed, when it’s hard to express the conflicting love and everything else we might feel. I have found that there is something I still can do: I can cling to my beads and say those repetitive rosary prayers and invite all of heaven—and sometimes others on earth—to join me. And God does something with that, under and above the place of thought.

I am living with a father who is in the early stages of dementia. I know some others who are in more advanced stages. So I have been reading about it. One of the things I’ve tried to think about is how spirituality is connected to all of this. How does a person lift a mind that isn’t fully there to God?

Research indicates that these people function best when anchored in repetitive things from the past: old songs, old habits, old prayers. The farther back the songs, habits, and prayers go, the deeper they are ingrained, and the more likely it is that they will not be completely lost. They will retain value for the person and for God.

When prayers are automatic—when our whole subconscious has been steeped in them for decades—there is a greater likelihood that they will provide us a spiritual connection to reality even when other things are failing and fading. They can be a lifeline at the end for some people, sending them on, drawing them over: a chain of beads, a chain of connection, a chain of love to simply hold on to—a chain that links heaven and earth, person and God, as we pray our way around it. I find rosaries in my father’s pockets when I check them before doing laundry. I find them under his pillows when I make his bed. He still knows the prayers.

I believe the meanings of the words grow and unfold as we ourselves do. Maybe we say our childhood Hail Marys. Maybe we read something or hear something and consciously learn to go a little deeper with the Our Father as a young adult. Maybe we get down some more Marian prayers, adoration prayers, or saints’ prayers in middle age. Maybe links are discovered in the words of our old, memorized prayers and new ones we may happen upon and choose to learn.

But sit at a deathbed sometime and say a silent Hail Mary. Say “now and at the hour of our death” and realize that this is a lifetime-deathtime prayer. Say an Our Father: “Thy will be done ” and “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Understand that these are prayers that accompany us, that grow with us. We need to make a point of continuing to give them to the young. They wrap gifts that can evolve exponentially as we age or as we need them.

Prayers for Midlife and Beyond

I think I was in my early 50s, in my car, when it came to my awareness that I really had a guardian angel. It was a complete surprise. And I might have dismissed it, except for my immediate, unthought-out response. It came to me across decades, my voice together with my mother’s: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom his love commits me here, ever this day be at my side—to light, to guard, to rule, to guide.”

It is a different thing to ask for light, guarding, rule, guidance at 50 than it is at 6. But the same words work. I almost had to pull over to consider my lack of appreciation—my lack of submission and cooperation with light, with a being to guard me, to keep me in line with God’s rule, to guide me. The silliness, the ridiculousness of this moment hit me, of course. But all the saints believed in guardian angels.

When my mother was dying, I remembered her praying with us before we went to sleep at night when we were young. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul.’

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches their existence. And I was inexplicably happy behind the wheel. I decided to hedge my bets. I now truly believe that such an angel exists for me, for each of us. “My guardian dear.” Who knew? Well, it turns out that I did, all along, the knowledge buried under that early prayer.

When my mother was dying, and I was praying silently beside her bed, I remembered her praying with us before we went to sleep at night when we were young. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul.” I hadn’t heard those words since childhood bedtime prayers. But I didn’t have to think about them. I knew them. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, be with me in my last agony. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with thee. Amen.” I hope this prayer is so ingrained in me that I can say it as I near my own death, God willing. Again, this is a prayer that spans a lifetime.

God, Ourselves, Others

There are so many of these prayers, different ones special to different people, different needs, different occasions. Of course, we can’t just sit around saying all of them. And, of course, there are other forms of prayer. But steady reliance on a handful of our most treasured Catholic prayers will put us in good stead.

These prayers are concentrated. There is great spiritual power in them. There is great potential for us to grow in them and for them to evolve in us during the course of our lives—connecting us to God at deeper and deeper levels. They help us converse with him, hear him, communicate with him in more and more meaningful ways. They help us lift our minds and hearts to God.

Finally, about those vain repetitions. That babbling. Well, first it was gentile, or pagan, babbling that was condemned. I don’t know what that was—maybe some kind of chant or mantra, maybe just lots of empty words.

At any rate, the words were empty, vain, because they were addressed to idols. There doesn’t have to be anything vain about formal, traditional prayer. It was clear during his temptation in the desert that Jesus had the Scriptures memorized. On the cross, Jesus was repeating, perhaps even singing, lines from a psalm.

If I’m blessed to live for a couple more decades or longer, it will be a comfort to know that younger people carry on our traditional prayers. I pray now that parents and parishes make a point of ensuring this. It is a matter of joy, of peace, to think that another generation will be reciting the familiar prayers of a rosary, for example, repeating, babbling, sending out many words, maybe for souls in purgatory—for me, for all of us.