Catholic priest Fr. Pat Schultz on masculinity, receptivity and spiritual fatherhood. Pastor of St. Bartholomew Parish in the Diocese ofCleveland — one priest to roughly 2,000 families — he sits down with Modern Man in a closed coffee shop in Centerburg, Ohio, for the fullconversion story, the seminary discernment, the altar servers, the Holy Name Society, and the argument that most men's ministry has itbackwards. Two hosts, one guest: Noah and Brad. Sam Halligan is out this week.The man who now stands at the altar is the same nine-year-old who heard a priest say "Behold the Lamb of God" from the back row, answeredhim out loud with a farm animal noise, and got hauled out of the building by his father. Fr. Pat tells the whole thing. Parents who married inthe Church because that is simply what you did. A religious education career that ended in second grade over felt banners and a Dixie cup ofmilk that was never enough milk. A physics-class crush he lied to about how seriously he took his faith, who invited him to a retreat planningmeeting anyway. And the night the lights went down, the monstrance came up the aisle, and a sixteen-year-old with no category for any of itprayed the first prayer of his life in four sentences: God, I think you're real. I think this is real. I don't know what this is. Whatever it is, I wantmore of it, and I'm ready.Then the cost of it. A father explaining that faith is one slice of the pie and his son was making it the whole pie. A letter from a priest tellinghim to consider the seminary, intercepted by his mother, torn up, thrown away, followed by a phone call telling that priest never to contact herson again. A best friend who swore an oath with him not to go, and then went first. Acceptance letters from Notre Dame, Georgetown andCatholic University landing in the mailbox on the same day as the seminary packet — one of them framed by his dad, the other one in thetrash. Then years of sitting in an ache he could not resolve, looking around a seminary chapel thinking none of you look like husbands, noneof you look like fathers, and begging God for permission to leave that never came. Wanting to leave and being told to leave, he says, aredifferent things.The argument underneath all of it is what the hour is actually for. Men get told to protect, to provide, to do the hard thing, to beat their chest.Fr. Pat's claim is that none of that is what the wedding feast asks of a man — you wear a wedding garment to it, not chainmail — and that thething almost no man has been taught is how to receive. Receptivity, he says, is simply the recognition that you need something. Which meansthat if the pinnacle of masculinity is no longer needing anything from anyone, then the pinnacle of masculinity is also a working definition ofhell: a definitive state of self-exclusion, and a thing a lot of men are practicing right now, one man and one business and one screen at a time.Also in this conversation: the lion you would rather keep behind glass at the zoo than meet in the wild; the angry fourteen-year-old stilldriving the bus of a grown man's life; why making altar service harder produced more servers instead of fewer, down to which thumb goes ontop; a parish men's group that grew by thirty in a year because somebody finally called them higher; what it costs to be the only priest for twothousand families when the phone rings at the hour of somebody's death; marriage as a remedy for your wretchedness rather than a reward foryour virtue; Gethsemane and the olive press; a police officer with pink toenails under his steel-toe boots; a purple pinwheel riding in the frontseat of a truck; and the closing instruction — make a list of ten things that pierce and move your heart, and have the courage to tell one personabout them.
