On a chilly, rainy Saturday at St. Louis in Clarksville, more than 600 men filled most of the pews and spent March 25 reaffirming their faith at the Catholic Men’s Fellowship of Maryland’s 2023 annual conference.
The conference, which included morning Mass celebrated by Archbishop William E. Lori and midday confession time for attendees, featured guest speakers Neal Lozano, Curtis Martin and Nathan Crankfield. They celebrated the love of the Father and Jesus and urged the crowd to live a strong faith and help the Catholic Church to grow during a time when the church is trying to reverse its shrinking ranks.
“We have lost tens of millions (of Catholic worshippers in the U.S.). We are hemorrhaging,” said Martin, who in 1998 founded the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
Martin added that FOCUS has produced hundreds of full-time missionaries serving tens of thousands of college students on campuses throughout the country. Martin delivered a call to serve, stating that the male audience needed to strengthen its daily relationship with the Lord through prayer and Scriptures and live their faith deeply every day.
“Getting women engaged in their faith is like walking through a dry field with matches. Boom, boom! Fire everywhere,” Martin said. “With guys, it’s like trying to light a log in the middle of a rainstorm. But once you do start burning, you burn all night, you glow.”
“College campuses are not friendly to Christianity. They don’t like us, and they think we don’t like them, which is not true,” Martin said. “We do disagree, but we don’t see them as the enemy. They are the prize. We’re trying to win them, not beat them.”
Timothy Baldwin, a parishioner of St. Patrick in Havre de Grace, said he was raised as a Protestant before converting to Catholicism many years ago. Baldwin recalled the “total peace” he felt while attending his first Catholic Mass. He prays each morning before listening to Bible verses driving to his job as an English teacher at Edgewood High School. He meditates often.
“This (conference) gets us into thinking about who God is and who we are and how to live out our Catholic faith,” Baldwin said. “Everything flows out of our love of Jesus Christ. Coming here is like going to the mountaintop. I’m single, but I’m learning to be a spiritual father to others, like my students.”
“We’re all here to try to get to know God better, to come back to the Father and get to know Jesus better. With all of us doing that together, it’s powerful,” said Jonathan Talbot, a St. Louis parishioner who attends Mass nearly daily and has come to Catholic fellowship conferences for about a decade.
“It’s not hard to practice my faith, but I think it’s getting harder (to worship) in our society,” he added. “I feel like we’re targets, believing in God the way we do, especially with the Catholic faith.”
Steve Oursler, a member of St. Mary of the Mills in Laurel who was attending his “seventh or eighth” conference with his father, said the variety of consistently excellent speakers will continue to bring him back to Catholic Men’s Fellowship events.
“Like Curtis Martin said, my wife is on fire. She is the motivator, pushing me to do better in a gentle, encouraging way,” Oursler said. “I’m like the wet log that needs to glow more and stay focused on marching toward that goal of practicing my faith to the fullest.”
Lozano, the executive director of Heart of the Father Ministries, emphasized seeking and embracing the “Father’s love” in his presentation. Lozano said that the core of the human experience is the fear that God has abandoned us, and that every parent represents God the Father in a child’s heart.
“Jesus talked about the Father and the kingdom all of the time,” Lozano said. “The story of the Prodigal Son is that of the Father’s love, told by the eternal Son. The Father’s heart is broken, and it is full of joy. Living out your faith helps people set themselves free, so they know the feeling of being a child of God.”
In his homily on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, Archbishop Lori pointed to the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who answered in the affirmative when the angel Gabriel asked her if she would become the mother of Christ. Following Mary’s example, the archbishop said, men are called to be receptive to God’s love, “know what the stakes are” and do God’s will.
“We need to pray every day,” Archbishop Lori suggested. “We need to read Scripture prayerfully. We need to listen to God and respond daily, especially when the going gets rough: ‘Let it be done to me according to your word.’”
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