As a student at Oxford and an instructor at Harvard, he tried living by the maxim, “Preach always, and when necessary, use words.” It didn’t work. Then he started talking about Jesus, and people responded. Some by coming into the Church. Now, Dr. Tommy Heyne is on a mission to get Catholics talking openly and confidently about the Lord.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic Faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host. What about this one? What about the advice we sometimes get that we should preach the gospel always, but when necessary use words. I know you’ve heard it because people say it all the time. As much as there might be some truth in the fact that our lives should constantly be sharing the gospel with others, even when we’re not speaking, we should be demonstrating the gospel. Is it really true? Is that an effective strategy, as far as sharing the faith goes? Especially given the conditions of the world today, is it enough just to preach the gospel with our lives and then only on those occasions when it’s necessary to use words?
We’ve got a wonderful guest here to help us evaluate that. He’s gone through a conversion in his own life about whether or not that’s an effective strategy. Dr. Thomas Tommy Heyne is our guest. He’s an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Like his wife, Dr. Nancy, he’s double board certified in internal medicine and pediatric and works primarily as an adult hospitalist, which I think if you don’t know what that is, Dr. Gregory House. I think that’s basically what it is. I’m going to ask him, but I think that’s what it is. He cares for patients admitted to the hospital.
Before his medical training, he completed a master’s in early church history from the University of Oxford. He’s done multiple mission trips, visiting more than 15 countries around the world. He’s passionate about pro-life causes and Catholic apologetics, and he’s completing his formation as a permanent deacon with a planned ordination date in the fall. I know that’s kind of a come down. It’s Harvard, it’s Oxford. We’re usually trying to operate at a higher level here, but we’ll settle for it. Dr. Tommy Heyne, thank you for being here with us.
Tommy Heyne:
Thank you so much.
Cy Kellett:
Is that what you do? Are you a Dr. Gregory House type character?
Tommy Heyne:
That’s funny, it’s the first time I’ve heard that as a comparison, but for the layman, that’s probably the closest. I mean House is infamously not very medically accurate because they do everything. They needed a brain biopsy and they do the neurosurgery, etc, but the overall idea that yeah, there’s six patients in the hospitals and we try to be a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Mother Teresa, providing both good science to figure out what’s going on and compassionate care to help them in a time of trial. So yeah, the hospitalist is similar to what Gregory House does, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Very nice, except that you don’t make as many mistakes. Except it’s a one-hour show, they’ve got to make those mistakes. You don’t get points for making mistakes in the actual hospital.
So by the way, we want to make a quick that you’re not speaking on behalf of Harvard or Mass General or anybody else. These are your own ideas today.
Tommy Heyne:
Exactly. Usual disclaimer, I’m not speaking for my employer or my academic institutions, thanks.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so if I could, you studied church history first. Maybe you could give us just a little bit of your bios and then we can talk about this when necessary, use words idea, which let me just give a spoiler. You say it’s not a good idea, it’s a terrible idea, as a matter of fact. So how’d you come to that conclusion? What’s the story of how you came to that conclusion?
Tommy Heyne:
Well, first of all, just thanks so much for having me and just God bless you guys for the good work you guys do on this podcast and otherwise in Catholic Answers. But yeah, I’ll be honest, it took me the better part of my life to realize that just how terrible that strategy is. Basically, be a good example, be a loving person, be a nice guy, and then hope that basically everywhere around you, people will start turning to the faith and receiving the Eucharist, for example.
So just to give some background, I grew up in a wonderful Catholic family, number six of eight kids. My dad’s a pediatrician, grew up in a very warm Catholic household, daily mass, all the wonderful things. As a testament to my parents and just the great education that they gave, I’ll talk about that later, is an important retention strategy that we’re not doing very well as a church, but we went to very good Catholic schools. As a testament to that, two of my sisters, one is a consecrated virgin, the other is a religious nun, and everyone’s still in the faith, which is rare these days, of all my siblings and now the grandkids. So a very Catholic upbringing.
But the intimation all the way along was just, well, preach always, when necessary, use words. It was attributed to St. Francis of Assisi who we all love. Of course, he’s not the one who said that, he’s the one who preached to the sultan and birds and everybody else who would listen. But that was the milieu that I think many of us grew up in, that basically we’re not evangelicals, we’re not going to knock on doors. So that’s how I grew up.
Including, I went to a high school at a school run by Cistercian Monks, wonderful, very learned men who I learned theology very well, but I recall, as I was transitioning from high school to college, there was a Christian Muslim debate. This is just an example of the preaching strategy that we’re not doing very well. One of my most revered mentors who speaks all these different languages and has written all these sorts of books was paired against the local imam. I just recall that basically the Cistercian monk, when the mom started bringing up attacks, it was supposed to be an ecumenical debate, Christianity and Islam, so forth, ecumenical dialogue rather. The Imam kind of went more on the attack and said, well, we’ve got these proofs that Christ wasn’t truly divine and blah, blah, blah. The Cistercian monk, how to speak, try to rise above and refused to engage a little bit and said, well, we’re trying to do ecumenism here.
Those Objections have been dealt with. But I’ll say as a young man, even with all that bringing I had and tuition for Catholic schools, my parents had paid for, that. I walked out of there and I was handed, there’s a big table with Muslim volunteers from the local mosque handing out basically why you should be Muslim and parts of the Quran and so forth. I will say for years, I thought afterwards about becoming Muslim because of the materials I received from them. Okay, so that’s just one little Snapshot.
But otherwise I went to my undergrad, it was University of Dallas, a wonderful liberal arts school. I was surrounded by good Catholics and so forth, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I went and did this masters in early church history from Oxford, and while there was this culture shock and that all of a sudden I was in a very, very small minority, not just as a Catholic, not just as a Christian, but just in general as a religious person.
I lived in-house with seven other people from many different countries and none of them were Christian or really people of faith. Just an example, two of them from China, very intelligent, coming to get a master’s in economics or something from Oxford. They weren’t sure that Christ had existed. They just knew from the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown. They said, did he really exist? So I thought, well, here’s my moment. I’m going to preach always, when necessary, use words. So I tried to be this loving example in our house and people knew that I was studying theology and so forth. It was just novel to them. They said, you’re studying neurology? No, theology. Oh, are you religious?
So basically fast-forward a year towards the end of my master’s program, but nobody’s become Christian. Nobody becomes Catholic around me and I can’t really say that… Maybe they know a little bit more about the faith, perhaps if a conversation came up once or twice or so forth, but in fact, one of the Chinese housemates I mentioned about who only knew the Da Vinci Code Jesus. Well, I had learned towards the end of my master’s that Jehovah’s witnesses had come a couple months before and knocked on the door and sure enough, she was becoming a Jehovah’s witness and being accepted in their church and so forth. I thought, here I’m living with this person having meals with this person and I’ve failed. Whereas some Jehovah’s witnesses who hardly know them have done much better.
Continue to fast-forward, I taught in a seminar in Spain for a year and so forth. So I thought, okay, well I need to be a little bit more active. So in medical school we started a Catholic medical student group. We had different talks on campus about stuff like God and psychiatry, or the soul and science, stuff like this. We had people come including from other faiths, but again, I can say [inaudible 00:09:07] medical school, I don’t know that again, just trying to be a good example and even trying to have talks and encourage people to come to talks. I can’t say it was quite working, as far as people who previously were not practicing now becoming more practicing and so forth. It was again, another little snippet of revelation, is that spending time with some Baptist evangelical physicians because they had a pretty active ministry on that campus.
For example, hearing one strategy that many Catholics are hearing and saying, oh, that just sounds crazy. So the two older evangelical doctors, what they would do is whenever they fly somewhere for a medical mission or whatever, one would sit in the airplane in the aisle and the other would sit on the window seat. So there’d be seats A and C, and someone sitting in seat B would be the poor, unlucky soul or lucky soul who basically would get evangelized to. Essentially, one would sort of talk about, well, what are you doing with your life? What happens next? What happens next? At the end, well then what happens after you die? And they’d say, well, I don’t know. They say, well, this guy in seat C, he’s going to tell you and they’d evangelize him. They had this really high “success” rate of people accepting Jesus as a personal Lord and savior. Which again, I think the average Catholic would say, oh, that sounds very superficial and phony and whatever and hat’s not a real relationship, but certainly got me thinking that, well here, and I looked at in my own life, my own wonderful parents who’ve been working in medicine for decades and decades and preach always, when necessary, use words. Again, the Lord knows how souls are moved, but that just seeing what seems to be effective and whatnot and what not so much.
I think finally the revelation came to me in, well, basically during the pandemic. Everything was locked down, we were still working, but I was working in a different way and many other responsibilities kind of disappeared and we weren’t obviously able to go to mass. So it was honestly listening to Bishop Barron, first, his homilies because shopping around those were some of the best homilies on the internet. Then really diving into more of his podcast and Word on Fire, that for me, the pieces connected that… We can talk about this a little bit more, but basically the huge, huge problem, it wasn’t just me in Oxford, it’s not just what I see around here as far as the huge number of Catholics who have left the faith or are no longer practicing their faith and the lack of reverse flow of people coming back or coming in the first place and reasons for it and so forth.
So it was really, I think, Bishop Barron and that revelation in the last few years that made me rethink my own life strategy, which I’d inherited from, I think, very well-intentioned parents and religious educators growing up that made me realize, okay, preach always, when necessary, use words, where I think words are basically necessary. All these other religious groups I encountered, including on lots of medical mission trips, just have better stats and they seem to have more success.
Cy Kellett:
I think that you articulated it extremely well, but I don’t think that that is an insight unique to you in this sense. It does seem that in the last 15, 20 years, Catholics are looking around going, what happened? There’s a devastation of Christianity certainly, but among Catholics where young people who maybe in the past, the family structure that they had would’ve been sufficient to retain them in the faith, no longer retains them. We’re losing people at a really shocking rate and we’re not bringing people in. There isn’t a sense of vitality that people are coming in.
Tommy Heyne:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Of course I’m not, you guys are living this, breathing this, and you’re preaching it, so thank you so much for what you do. I can think of other groups, Word on Fire, Focus Missionaries and so forth, that are really re-realizing, you know what? Maybe in the first few centuries of the church it was sufficient. Tertullian says, look how they love each other. So the idea is, Christians weren’t doing infanticide and they were taking care of the sick, and that was a really beautiful thing.
Well, fast-forward today and basically because the west is ingested, digested, and now lives basically to some degree, a Christian Agape, the vulnerable are being taken care of and so forth. So being a nice doctor, I mean, most of my colleagues are nice doctors. They care about the sick and they are compassionate and so forth. So yes, it’s clearly… And then I say on the flip side of that is that just the onslaught, whether that’s made accelerated because of the internet and TikTok and all these things, but just of a counter-Christian, a counter-Catholic message, and a very vehement one, obviously a new atheist, but whatever it might be. Then it seems like almost any Hollywood movie that has a nun or priest in it, it’s a very negative portrayal.
So you have on the one hand, what used to make Christianity very attractive is in many ways no longer unique to it. On the other, you have all these contra-Christian messages that are out there that I think just for the average young person going to college, it’s like, well, I mean the church is… Everyone’s telling me it’s homophobic and it suppresses women, it does all these terrible things. I mean God, if he’s out there, well, knows that I’m a nice person. That’s probably enough so I’m probably okay.
So I mean it’s funny, I went to mass a few months ago and a bishop who will not be named, not my bishop, but basically said, mentioned some of the stats which are just so shocking and mentioned after it, and it’s kind of a mystery, kind of a mystery why this is. I just put my head down in the pew and said, it’s not a mystery. I didn’t say that. I thought your, excellency. Even if it were, then look, the church and science have gone well together for millennia. Let’s do some surveys. Let’s get our social science people, our epidemiology people, and figure out why they’re leaving, what we can do about it.
Cy Kellett:
This is one of the things I like about your approach and I’d like to take you through it if I could, that you do. That you apply your medical training to this problem.
Tommy Heyne:
Yeah, and I don’t-
Cy Kellett:
So will you take us… go ahead. Yeah, please.
Tommy Heyne:
Please, yeah. Again, with the caveat that I’m not an expert, you guys are the experts. But I will say, and then the other caveat being I love the quotation from pastor, who is it? D.T. Niles who says that evangelism is just a poor man who’s found bread trying to share bread with someone else. So that’s what we’re doing here. We found something that we think will really transform someone’s life. Of course, we want to share the good news because goodness gracious, people are out there very loudly proclaiming everything about their political views, sports views, views on humanitarian crises, college kids getting arrested left and right. So people have the guts to do that. Certainly we can try to have the guts to preach for eternity, but yeah, so I think maybe I was inspired by Bishop Barron, and I’m not sure if he’s the one who coined it, but the idea that we’re hemorrhaging Catholics, where the church is hemorrhaging its members.
So using that modality of, okay, I’m a physician, I take care of hemorrhaging patients not infrequently. Well, anytime there’s a problem, well, in medicine, what you do is first you get the vital signs, you perform your physical exam, you get the history, and then you try to get your diagnosis. So what’s causing these vital sign changes? Then you do your treatment. So it’s not enough to say, oh, antibiotics won’t work. Well, for what? What is the diagnosis and what led to that diagnosis? So in this case, I’m saying that preach always, when necessary, use words, as a overall church retention and recruitment strategy doesn’t seem to be working, let’s work backwards.
So I think the vital signs, and again, there’s lots of ways you could think about this, but if Christ told us in John 6 that unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. Again, we can splice exactly what that means and that obviously God offers mercy to everyone and so forth, but the idea is for sure seems that Christ want people to receive the Eucharist to be part of his body, unless you believe in… Anyways, he wants people to believe in him, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Tommy Heyne:
All right, so that’s the overall, if our goal is that, that’s basically health, that’s one vital sign anyways. Obviously our vital signs are very poor. So let’s quickly looking at an exam, some of the stats that you guys know, but for every convert to Catholicism, more than six are leaving it. So that both tells us that we’re doing poorly on recruitment and in retention. P.S., that number is worse than every other religious group per the Pew study back in 2015, such that now 50% of young Americans, basically millennials who were raised Catholic, are no longer Catholic, just so sad. The numbers are worse for the young. We know that over 8 million people are estimated to leave the Catholic church in the next 10 to 20 years. That’s per the DMI. So just thinking, that’s 8 million people, that’s someone’s son, it’s someone’s grandson, someone’s wife, etc. Then, so that’s just the overall numbers of who’s there. So that’s the one vital sign.
Then the second vital sign within it is, and then who’s actually participating? We know those numbers, and here in New England it’s seeing and empty parishes left and right, but that only 24% or so of Catholics go to mass on a given Sunday and it’s much worse among the youth. Then if you look internationally, and I’ve done some of these medical missions, but it’s just as bad. The large numbers of Catholics in Central and South America are no longer Catholic, they’re something else, Mormon, evangelical and so forth. Basically, I think everyone over at Africa, our numbers are doing really, really poorly. We’re basically hemorrhaging members, and those who are staying aren’t receiving that bread that Christ offers. So that’s the vital signs that we know are bad.
Honestly, I wish that every parish meeting, every whatever starting with, okay, that’s what we’re up against. This is… And Jesus wept and not that we… So anyways, and then, so what’s the diagnosis? It’s not a mystery, with all respect to that bishop. To me it seems pretty clearly I’m not a marketing guy, but, that and if you look at other religions who are doing much better, who’s both their number of members who identify as such on surveys as well as those who identify as going to church with some frequency or a synagogue or a mosque or so forth, are doing much better. We can take a clue of what they’re doing, what we’re not doing. But basically it’s a recruitment strategy on one hand, retention strategy on the other.
So maybe talk about the retention strategy and that’s what you guys and other groups are doing. But the reality is that most parents sort of think, well, I bring my kids to the first communion class, to confirmation class and then hope that magically this is going to work so that when they go off to college that they’re going to be protected against the 5,000 onslaughts against their faith. So basically, we’re not forming very well.
One thing that I just, a quote from Brandon Vogt’s book. Brandon Vogt I think has done great work in this, but his book, Return, how do help your child come back to the church, is the subtitle, that he quotes a parent as saying, “One of my daughters went off to college and was given a pamphlet explaining 10 reasons the Catholic Church is wrong. She read it and left the church forever.”
Cy Kellett:
Goodness.
Tommy Heyne:
And that was it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. That child-
Tommy Heyne:
But that’s-
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so-
Tommy Heyne:
But that makes sense to me and I mentioned this and it was funny, Benedictine Abbott came, I gave a talk about this topic and he basically, and I mentioned the Muslim pamphlets for my own life, and he basically said, you know what? I became Muslim for several years because of the pamphlets. So anyways, and I can just finish my thing briefly, but in brief, the diagnosis is, we’re not doing a good job of retention or recruitment. We’re basically not recruiting. We’re just hoping that a good example suffices again, plenty of data that they surveyed, Catholics, Catholics of all religious groups, were the least likely to be, even if you asked, it was a Pew study that if you encounter someone who disagrees about your religion, what should you do? And only 2% basically said you should try to evangelize. Almost everyone said agree to disagree or avoid discussing it.
Cy Kellett:
Oh wow. That’s a Pew study?
Tommy Heyne:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
I haven’t seen that one.
Tommy Heyne:
2014, well, if I get to… So 67% said agree to disagree, 27% said avoid discussing, and only 2% of Catholics. Again, that’s the lowest of every group. So the way I like to think of it, this is maybe a fun metaphor, but if anyone who likes beer out there, but Trappist Chimay Ale is arguably one of the best beers and it’s made by Trappist, so that’s nice too. It’s like the Catholic church is offering Trappist, Chimay, Ale, just like the beer of beers, this wonderful, exquisite, wonderful thing. We’ve got the sacraments, we’ve got the saints, we’ve got the Mozart, we’ve got Michelangelo, etc, etc, all these beautiful things. But basically we don’t market at all. We don’t talk about it. In fact, if we put up a billboard, it would say Trappist, Chimay, Ale. Actually, it’s pretty expensive. So if you want to try the other beers, that’s okay.
Then meanwhile, the other beers pick whatever it is, are saying, oh, by the way, Trappist is made by pedophiles and they suppress women and so forth. So this non-existent or anti-marketing strategy, it’s like the idea, and honestly this is why I thought my whole life that if I’m a good guy, somebody’s going to come up to me and say, wow, why are you such a good guy? Then I’m going to pull a rabbit out of my hat, some magical two sentence proof of, well, because I love Jesus and he’s the reason. They’ll say, really? Wow, I want to be Christian too, and it’s just not how it works. So we imagine that basically and not preaching that we’re going to have any impact. So that’s the vital signs and the diagnosis.
Cy Kellett:
Give us the treatment, you’re the doctor, we need a treatment for all this.
Tommy Heyne:
Yeah, so I think again, look a little bit at other religious groups that are doing better than us, and not that we need to restructure things, but for example, our Mormon brothers and sisters. Their Sunday at school lasts all day. They’re in there basically eating and drinking the Book of Mormon all day, all in community together. Their retention is very good. Oh, P.S., they’re required to do two years of missionary work somewhere, oftentimes in a Catholic country where the Catholics aren’t putting up any sort of a defense. So, and if you go to Salt Lake City and have a long layover, what I’ve heard, I’ve not experienced this, is that there may be Mormons in the airport who will offer to drive you to essentially their Vatican, give you a tour, and afterwards, they hand you a Book of Mormon and the back is a photo of a family that is praying specifically for you. That’s a retention and a recruitment strategy.
I think of Muslims, for example, they were required to go on a Hajj pilgrimage. You can imagine if every Catholic was required to go to St. Peter’s or required to go to Jerusalem, the prayers that are required, not to speak specifically in Islam about let’s just say relatively strong pressures for people not to leave the faith and certainly in some Muslim countries, if you look at the Pact of Umar in the seventh century and onwards, pressures to come with it, but even outside of those pressures, there’s a strong community. There’s required prayers, and there’s a very active evangelism. I can’t tell you the number of places, including doing the Via Crucis in Jerusalem, there’s a man out there handing pamphlets out to the Christian pilgrims right across in the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest site in all of Christianity there’s basically a big banner in the mosque essentially saying, I’m a law and I don’t have a son. Basically, anti-Christian propaganda, if you’ll say that.
So we need to be a little less apologizing and more apologetic. That’s what you guys do. So again, I’m not an expert in this but some things that come to mind for me are, I mentioned a few examples of pamphlets. I think of myself and it’s hard, and I’ve got little kids and I have strong friendships and hanging out and going to the pub or whatever. So it’s hard for me to have some of those conversations. But what’s not that hard for me to do? I’ve talked to a couple of pastors in the area and we’ve got our little kiosks and I’ve filled them up with pamphlets, 10 reasons to be Catholic and 10 answers to common objections, and why does the church teach X, Y, and Z? Because even 0.1% of those pamphlets reach someone and help them come back or otherwise, it’s the moment of the logos, the divine logos, reaching them through these logo idea, the written words.
So rather than just have a good… Right? Because I can at least point to a few anecdotes of people of this Benedictine Abbot who formerly was Muslim, because myself, a well-educated, spent, who knows how much on really good high school education. So I think pamphlets is something I wish that everyone in their parish could have pamphlets. It used to be CDs, but now nobody does the CD players anymore. But whatever the equivalent there of, something that someone can take home with them, you can share with a friend.Book, even better. Obviously you guys with Catholic Answers Press with the Trent Horn book, Why Be Catholic, what a great book. It’s not very big, it’s not very expensive. So something like that, maybe offer with a friend, hey look, what’s one book that you want me to read? Then you read this book and let’s discuss.
So I think, and as just maybe an exclamation point on that, the more touristy the church, the more I feel like this would be helpful. 10 million people visit St. Peter’s Basilica every year. How many walk in and walk out and take their pictures and have the same preconceptions about the Catholic church they have before?
Cy Kellett:
That they came in with, yeah, right.
Tommy Heyne:
Right, and there’s no table, ask a priest, there’s no… I’ve been in Baha’i, the Baha’i faith is one as seen as very tolerant and more eastern in this way. I remember going to the Baha’i Temple in Delhi, India, lovely, lovely building and that’s fine. I didn’t have to be anything. So when I came in and they shut the door and basically say, sit down and we’re going to preach to you about Baha’ism for a while, I didn’t object. All right, that’s your prerogative, I’m in your building. But here we are ashamed of talking about religion or even preaching within our own building. So I’d say we already have the marketing structure, we’re just not doing anything within it.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Tommy Heyne:
So I’d say pamphlets, books. For myself, the one moment or whatever was a couple years ago, again, getting fired up by Bishop Barron and realizing, and I think also reading the book Brandon Vogt’s Return, was a very helpful thing. That’s another book, if every parish could have 100 copies in the back, I think even if only one helps someone.
Cy Kellett:
That’s a wonderful… I’ve read his book, What to Say and How to Say It, but I have not read Return. So thank you for that recommendation.
Tommy Heyne:
There’s overlap, but a lot of what I’m talking about here, which is, all right, what’s the problem? How to actually… right? Because we’re not trained. Our evangelical, our Mormon, our Muslim brothers and sisters from a very early age, they’re trained to have these conversations and they don’t feel awkward standing there handing out pamphlets. We get flabbergasted by this. So I think as it doesn’t seem like training is likely to happen in your parish, although that’d be a great thing, read a book or any number of Word on Fire Institute, other things that people could do.
But what got me fired up with, I did social media posts. So for Lent, couple of Lent’s ago, I basically swallowed my fear and said, you know what? Every day of Lent I’m going write a basically a post. So 40 reasons that I’m Catholic and answers to objections. Pretty public, I mean, I’ve got a lot of Facebook friends. God be praised, basically the first time in my life, one of my friends who had been at Oxford with me, basically that was the start. So she converted, her husband, who’s a big time lawyer converted, their daughter converted, loves Mama Mary. Daily communicants as they’re able to, but it was only basically from stepping outside my awkward like, oh, this is posting about religion on Facebook, but it worked, it reached somebody.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Tommy Heyne:
So I think social media can be a powerful thing and there’s just so much, I’d say you mentioned the last 10, 15 years. I think we’re coming to a realization that, I’m sorry, but with all due respect, the old boomer approach isn’t working and we can look at the data and clearly we failed, as far as 8 million, whatever number you want to use. So we need some sort of fresh approach.
So there’s other ones. Maybe start a book club and read books that could start nice conversations in that way. Maybe you invite someone to a retreat with you. How many people have come to the faith or come more deeply into their faith because of a Corsillo retreat or some other retreat like that? My own wife rediscovered Christ through basically when a parish priest is like, we’re starting a youth group and come on the retreat. That’s what did it for her.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Tommy Heyne:
I’d say maybe most importantly, twofold. One is, I mean this goes to the retention bit, but we need to evangelize our children, our families, first and foremost. So if you’re more worried about the kids’ soccer games than you are about church and catechizing and realizing that they need armor when they go out there because they’re going to get pelted with arrows, then you have your priorities wrong. So first and foremost, it’s our responsibility with God’s grace, cooperating with him, we’re not Pelagians, but to try to get ourselves and our family to heaven. My spouse is my number one priority.
But I’d say as a corollary to that and talking about this evangelization, I’m a nerd, I’m an academic, I like to write, I like pamphlets, that sort of thing. But I think the more normal, whatever approach would be one-to-one friendships. Again, I think Brandon Vogt’s, both the books you mentioned, and there’s others, but giving examples of how to bring it up. There’s one, I think it may be his evangelist who basically says, if I had an hour with a non-Christian, I listened for 55 minutes, then speak for the last five. That’s counterintuitive. I think if I’m going to try to “convert” someone or be an instrument of conversion, I need to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. No, we need to learn better strategies, which is to listen, to hear they’re coming from, because you might think, oh, this person’s not Christian because of whatever, and it might be a totally different issue. So listening, what’s your experience with faith and was it ever important to you? Or have you heard proofs of God’s existence? What’s the best one? Why does it not convince you, whatever it might be, but starting with a friendship, starting with that philia and then letting this grow out of it. But the point is actually putting, starting that somewhat awkward at first conversation.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right, but there are people that are doing, like you mentioned Brandon Vogt, you mentioned Bishop Barron. I can think of all the folks at St. Paul Street Evangelization who have wonderful training materials. You can come here to Catholic Answers, you can go to the Augustine Institute. There are people who are doing, I mean Father Spitzer, another one, EWTN. The materials are beginning to be developed to help people go from… I take profound offense that you blamed any of this on the boomers. I mean, just stop. But to move from what you might label a boomer approach to an evangelical Catholicism, not in the shallow sense of evangelical but in the deep sense of it, that we have that beer, we have the bread, we’ve got to get it to people.
I have to say, Dr. Heyne, this is one of the easiest interviews I’ve ever done, and I think it’s because there’s two things that we love here, people who are fired up for the faith, but also have content that can help people in sharing the faith. You gave us both of those today, I’m very, very grateful for that. Thank you for doing the interview with us.
Tommy Heyne:
Absolutely, and again, thank you for all you’re doing. Thank you for mentioning all those resources. Maybe I can just close and just remind everyone, this is hard and it takes guts, but in the end of the day, we’ve got the 10 talents and we can’t bury it in the dirt. So you look at the early church and look at what they went through and look what many of the best evangelists went through. Obviously be prudent, you heard my disclaimer at the get-go. There’s certain issues that I don’t think we need to go waving in people’s faces, but there’s just so much treasure. There’s so much in the Trappist beer that’s so good. The Mozart, the Michelangelo, and the Flannery O’Connor and so forth, that it’s not something to be ashamed of. Yeah, it’s awkward and it inspires a little bit of fear, but anxiety is not from God. The evil one would love if we all just shut up and try to be nice. So yeah, we just pray for the grace to be courageous.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you so much. Our guest has been Dr. Tommy Heyne, also the Gregory House of his generation. But I just feel like you’ve done us such a great service and I’m very grateful. I hope we’ll get to talk with you again and God bless you on your journey towards ordination in the fall.
Tommy Heyne:
Thank you so much. Pray for us.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you to our listeners. We appreciate that you take the time, if you’ve got something you’d like to say about this episode, maybe you’ve got an idea for a future episode, you can always get in touch with us, focus@catholic.com is our website, excuse me, our email address, focus@catholic.com. If you’d like to help us grow the podcast, you can do that by giving us the five stars and a few nice words wherever you listen to the podcast. You can support us financially, help us keep the lights on, get microphones working by going to givecatholic.com, give catholic.com. That does it for us. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.