February 25, 2025 // Bishop

Speakers Challenge Men at Annual Conference

Scott Warden

Editor-In-Chief

On Saturday, February 22, in the Expo Hall at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, more than 600 men gathered for the 14th annual Rekindle the Fire men’s conference, where the day’s speakers challenged those in the audience not only to grow in their own faith but also to be strong leaders who inspire their families to walk with Christ.

Father Brian Isenbarger, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Garrett, and Father Jay Horning, pastor of St. Bernard Catholic Church in Wabash, served as the day’s emcees, cracking jokes and keeping the program moving.

Father Isenbarger reminded the men that it was crucial that they don’t just show up, listen to the speakers, and return to their families unchanged.

“I’ve seen enough of you do this at Mass,” Father Isenbarger joked before encouraging the crowd to “take one or two key things that you’ve heard today and make sure to implement them in your lives.”

Along with the day’s speakers, more than a dozen priests came to the conference to hear confessions. Eucharistic adoration was also available throughout the day, which concluded with Bishop Rhoades celebrating Mass for the conference attendees.

‘Just Come Home. Be with Him’

Father Andrew Budzinski, pastor of St. Matthew Cathedral in South Bend, who introduced Mark Hart, the day’s first speaker, echoed Father Isenbarger’s challenge, telling the audience that the conference “is not just for you. [Hart] is going to give you something that’s meant to be shared with someone else. That’s called evangelization.”

Hart, who has spent nearly 30 years in various roles at Life Teen International, a nationwide youth ministry apostolate, is an internationally known author and speaker. He spent four years in the diocese while studying at the University of Notre Dame (where he was friends with Father Budzinski, a fellow ND alum).

Originally from Arizona, Hart joked that he made a great personal sacrifice to come back to the diocese – in the teeth of February, no less.

“Do you know how much I love Jesus?” he asked. “It’s 78 degrees in Phoenix today,” he said, “that’s how much I love Jesus!”

He began with a personal story, sharing with the audience about his hard-working father, with whom “we never prayed together, never read Scripture together. I heard the Lord’s name more in the car ride to Mass than I did in the church,” Hart joked. “My mother prayed; my dad provided.”

Catholic fathers today, he said, need to know better – need to do better.

“My kids gain nothing if I put them in my will,” he quipped, “but they gain everything if I introduce them to the Father’s will.”

Most importantly, Hart focused on the mission God gave to men: “To protect and to serve your wives and your families.”

He challenged the men in the audience to be more like David in the First Book of Saul, when Israel was at war with the Philistines. David, who was being used to deliver food to Israel’s soldiers – “he was essentially the army’s DoorDash,” Hart joke – stepped up to fight Goliath, who had come into Israel’s camp unchallenged and had been insulting God’s people for 40 days. Furious about the treatment of God’s people, David told King Saul that he would battle the giant.

When Goliath saw the young, slight, “ruddy” David, he taunted him. But David was undaunted, responding: “You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have insulted.”

Hart reiterated that we all have giants whom we’ve allowed to set up camp in our lives – money, alcohol, pornography, and so many others.

“Most of the men I know are in the Israeli army,” Hart said. “They let their pride, their greed … allow them to surrender. They allow those false Gods to set up shop. But if we don’t deal with our giants, our giants will come deal with us.”

The remedy for this, Hart told the men in the audience, was prayer.

“Prayer doesn’t help your relationship with God,” Hart said. “Prayer is your relationship with God.”

It can also be the spark that strengthens your relationship with others, he said, bringing the story back to his own father.

Hart shared that in his final semester at Notre Dame, he had agreed to take a good paying job after his graduation. Shortly after committing, though, he received a call from the pastor at his parish back in Arizona asking if he’d consider becoming a full-time youth minister. After a period of prayer, Hart decided to accept. The first call he made was to his pastor; the second call was to his father, who chided Hart, saying, “You can pray all you want, but it’s damn stupid. Mark, why would you piss away all your brains and all your talents to work at a church?”

Hart told his dad, “I also have a heavenly father, and I can’t dishonor him to honor you.”

Hart said after that conversation, their relationship became tense. Through the years, after Hart left parish ministry to work at Life Teen, after he published his first book, after he became a well-known speaker, he would consistently ask his dad, “Can I pray with you?” His dad, he said, would always respond, “No, just pray for me.”

Through it all, Hart knew his father was proud of him. “He would buy my books and pass them out to Catholics that he knew,” he said, adding, however, that as far as he knew, his father never read the books himself.

Several years ago, Hart said, his father had fallen and was in a group home. “He was fading,” said Hart, who added that he went to watch a football game with his dad – Notre Dame vs. USC – in October of 2019. “We finished the game, and I was getting ready to leave, and I asked him one more time, ‘Can I pray with you?’ He nodded that it was OK. I put my hand on his head and prayed over him; I thanked God for him.”

Then, Hart said, before he left, “I scooped my dad out of his wheelchair and put him into bed, and he never woke up. It took 28 years of praying for my dad every day, and God gave me the greatest gift of my life. Because I was willing to be man enough for him, he knew the love and mercy of the Father. I saw that evolution.”

Hart said that a couple of weeks later, he was helping his mom move out of her house, “And I went into Dad’s office, and in a drawer, he had all of my books highlighted, underlined, dog-eared.”

Mass, he said, is simply staying connected to your Father in heaven, who wants to see His kids every week. “He even wants to feed us with the Eucharist,” Hart said. “Just come home. Be with Him.”

Hart closed with a challenge to the men in the audience.

“Who is that person in your life that you need to pray and fast for? How far are you willing to go? Who are those people in your life that you need to have this conversation with? Who is that person that God is putting on your heart? And ask yourself, what’s one thing that I can do right now, starting today, that can make me more whole, that will strengthen my faith life? Once you figure this out and do it every single day, that’s what it means to be a man.”

‘We Must Turn to Jesus Christ’

The next speaker was Mike Gormley, who had spent 17 years in parish ministry and is now the mission evangelist for Paradisus Dei, which produces and distributes content for the Catholic men’s apostolate That Man Is You.

At Rekindle the Fire, he asked if anyone had heard of That Man Is You, and a couple of tables to the left of the stage gave a resounding cheer. “You guys must be from South Bend,” he said. “There are a couple of big groups in South Bend.” Indeed, Holy Family Parish, Christ the King Parish, and St. Pius X Parish each have active groups.

In his talk, Gormley warned the men in the audience that, more and more, the culture is actively trying to strip away the importance of men and masculinity, saying that “we’re being filled with a million different schemes and messages that say that men mean nothing.”

He warned that too many men have outsourced their roles as husbands and fathers, leaving the work to “strangers who have different goals and agendas” – including teachers, nannies, and others. When this happens, Gormley said, home no longer feels like a place of warmth and security. Instead, he said, “Home becomes this bizarre place where you simply eat and sleep – it’s become a hotel.”

One culprit is that many men feel “like we’ve done enough once it’s clear that we’ve provided for our families,” Gormley said. “But the reduction of fatherhood to mere providing has been tragic.”

Instead, Gormley said, the “priestly duty” of a man is to “guard the garden” like Adam was tasked in the Book of Genesis – “to guard the home and protect it,” Gormley said.

Too few men today, he said, are taking this task seriously, and the key component that is missing – that men are withholding from their families – is time. Men are too wrapped up in their careers, in sports, in their phones, in providing for their families to pay attention to the people who need them the most.

He told the story of a man whose wife told him he needed to spend more time with his children. So, once a week, he would leave work early and take his kids to the park. He noticed right away that the park was littered with trash, so he began making sure it was all picked up. He organized neighbors to help him clean up the graffiti and renovate the playground. Soon, the park was immaculate in a way that it hadn’t been in years.

“But,” Gormley said, “the man still wasn’t simply playing with his kids.” He continued: “We think that our kids, our families, want stuff, and we strive to provide it. But what our kids really want is us. … And stuff,” he joked.

These decisions, he said, are not set in stone. We are not doomed.

“Where can we find hope?” Gormley asked. “We must turn to Jesus Christ – to emulate Him. We have to see that there is a way out of this mess. Each of us is called to be strong, to be the watcher for our families, to stand in the breach.”

Gormley continued: “What I see as I travel all across the country is men, by and large, who are absent from the faith and moral formation of their families. That’s the most important thing you and I do, but it’s always the last thing you and I do. We allow our wives to do it all. The number one complaint of women is male passivity. When Eve wanted to eat the fruit, Adam didn’t do anything. He’s the paradigm of male passivity.”

Gormley closed with a challenge, saying: “What if we stood in the breach? What if we are the men who stood between our wives and the world who wants to harm them? What if we became that man – those of us in this room? Fort Wayne, South Bend, this diocese – none of them would be the same, and God would be glorified for it.”

‘Jesus, We’re Going to Change the World’

If the men attending Rekindle the Fire thought they might get a post-lunch nap in during the final speaker’s session, it’s clear that they had never been preached to by Justin Fatica.

Fatica, an internationally known speaker, is the executive director of You’re Amazing Fitness and Hard as Nails ministry. And it’s abundantly clear from the tone and volume of his speaking voice that he’s also a longtime basketball coach. He might have used a microphone while motivating the men in Fort Wayne, but he didn’t necessarily need it.

During his 45-minute pep talk, Fatica told his story of growing up as a troublemaking kid and having a profound conversion to Christ when he was 17. (He also made it clear that his 106-year-old grandmother is tougher than any of the men in attendance.)

Fatica grew up in New York and went to an all-boys Catholic prep school in Erie, Pennsylvania. He said he grew up as a “cafeteria Catholic” with a good mom and dad, but the faith wasn’t important in his family.

“I was getting F’s and D’s, and I had all these friends,” Fatica said. “I had more friends when I was getting F’s and D’s than I did when I gave my life to Jesus.”

He continued: “I was struggling with who I was as a person. I had no mission or purpose,” he said.

At the beginning of his junior year, Fatica said he walked into class and a teacher – “a priest with a unibrow,” he joked – challenged him. Fatica pushed back.

“I kept messing with this guy,” Fatica said. “I walked in and took my shoes off, and I put them on his desk. He comes in and says, ‘Get your shoes off that desk right now, Fatica!’ I said, ‘You say please!’ He grabs me by my neck and puts me up against the wall, and he is saying things that I can’t say to you right now, because he was speaking in tongues that day,” Fatica joked.

Fatica told the priest that he was the reason people don’t live for Christ. “I got another detention for that,” he said.

The priest later told Fatica that he would go to the school’s adoration chapel to pray for all of his students. “And he’d get to my name, and he said, ‘I’m not going to pray for him!’”

Eventually, God began softening the priest’s heart, and he invited Fatica to a weekend retreat.

“He wrote me a letter that said, ‘I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but I pray for you every day by name, and I want to let you know that you have so much potential if you give your life to Jesus Christ.’”

On the retreat, Fatica said he went to reconciliation, “And for the first time in my life, I didn’t lie in confession. I get out of confession, and this priest is there, and he picks me up and says, ‘Welcome home, son!’”

Later that day, while in adoration, Fatica said, “I prayed from my heart for the first time.” Before going on the retreat, Fatica said he had been having a hard time. He had gotten a girl pregnant and was facing the possibility of getting kicked out of school. “I said, Jesus, if you get me through this, I’ll give you everything. … I looked at the cross, and I said, ‘Jesus, you died for me, I’m going to die for you.’ That was a horrible prayer,” Fatica joked. “I didn’t know what that meant! But I said, ‘Jesus, we’re going to change the world!’ And I meant it!”

The priest who changed Fatica’s life was Father Larry Richards, a well-known radio host, speaker, and author.

Since that retreat, Fatica said, he’s been all in for Christ, traveling the country to speak to men, boys, and families. His story of mentoring and coaching kids through AAU basketball has been produced as a six-part docuseries called “In the Paint” – the third time his story has been told on film.

“One of the greatest things happened to me coaching basketball,” Fatica said. “We’d be in the car after I just got jumped at practice by some kids. I’d have kids swearing at me, and my son would ask, ‘Why do you even do this, dad?’ And one day I said, ‘Son, I know that if I can love them and you can watch this, then I’ll know that you know that I’ll love you no matter what you do.’ Through my son, through that team, it’s been miraculous. There are seven of them who are playing college basketball, but they don’t care about that. They want to be a dad. They want to make the world a better place.”

He continued: “The reason they wanted to tell this story is that people in this country are looking for men like you. Don’t doubt it; believe it. If you do, you’re going to walk out of here and pour all of your love into your family.”

“We’ve got to make a decision,” Fatica said. “I’m asking you to make a decision today: Are you going to design a plan for life? Are you going to set aside prayer time with your family? Are you going to start catching people who are doing what’s right and celebrating that? Are you going to find a young person whose life you can change?”

Heads nodded throughout the conference as men silently accepted Fatica’s challenge.