Patrick Lencioni talks about asserting his Catholic identity whenever he gives a talk at any event, from Protestant megachurch services to business conferences, and why almost every reaction he receives is a positive one.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Rosa in Lowell, Massachusetts, listening on the Station of the Cross. Rosa, you are on with Patrick Lencioni, what’s your question?
Caller: First of all I wanted to say thank you to Patrick. I listened to a conference of his once and he said, “I am Catholic,” and I was ecstatic because I’d never seen anyone in the business conference talk like that, so thank you so much, Patrick. My question is, how do people take that from you when you say that? When you come out of the conference, do people say anything to you?
Patrick: Yes, in fact– thank you very much, Rosa–they almost always do, and usually they come to me and they say, “Thank you for doing that.” I’ve had people say, “I’m not a Catholic and I appreciate that you do that;” I’ve had people say that “I used to be and I really like that you do that;” and a lot of Catholics come and say, “Thank you for doing that.” More often than not, because we all feel afraid to do that, when somebody does that publicly, it gives people hope and courage to do it themselves.
You know, I’ve started doing a lot of speaking at the evangelical churches and at leadership conferences, and I always decided that I would come out and I would announce that I was Catholic. And I will tell you a story: I once actually was–there’s a megachurch that asked me to be their preacher. Now that’s not something I can do at a Catholic Church because I’m not a priest, and I called a priest, and I said, “Am I allowed to preach at a Protestant Church?” And he said, “Yeah, absolutely.” And so I went there and I got up there, might have been 5,000 people in the congregation, and the the the minister introduced me by saying, “Pat’s a Catholic, and you’ll never guess that he actually went to church before he came here!” And that’s the first time anybody has ever done that. Now these were Protestants. They broke out into applause, because they knew I was Catholic and I’d gone to Mass.
And so I think we Catholics, and Christians that are not Catholic, have to, you know…they say, “Go out and preach the Gospel, and occasionally use words;” it didn’t say “never use words.” Just declaring “Yes, I’m happy being a Catholic and I’m proud of that, and now let me be a good consultant, a good marketer, or whatever else.” I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with saying that, especially today when people are afraid.
And so, yeah, I will tell you Maria, only a few times have I gotten punished for it, and it was not very hard to be punished for it. I’ve never had it be what I thought…I will tell you, I did have a company tell me not to mention God in one of my talks, and they said, “You can’t come here if you mention God,” and I said, “Well here’s the deal, I’m a Christian and a Catholic, I’m not there to proselytize but I can’t promise–yeah, I am who I am.” And they said, “Ok, that’s ok.” And in my talk I said, “Well, I don’t think God made us to to have to hate our jobs,” because I was talking about that, and at the end I said, “God bless you.” They never complained, and employees from the company came up and said, “Thank you for witnessing. We don’t do that here.”
So Rosa, I think we can do it more, and you know what Jesus said in the Beatitudes: when they do persecute us for it, let’s rejoice, because our reward will be great in Heaven. Now it’s not always easy for me, but I’ve always found it to be not as bad as I thought.