Catholics Are Leaving… But Something Else Is Happening w/ Fr. Ambrose | The Deep

We are seeing this sort of resurgence in adult conversions to the Catholic faith. People feel isolated and alone, and people are looking for a communal experience that they're lovable and that they're loved. The church is a community, and they say, wow, here's a Catholicism that I didn't even know existed. You also have this phenomenon since the 1960s of a sort of bleeding out as well. We're running on the fumes of Christian culture up until just 20 or 30 years ago. We're going to have a much smaller church, but a much more faithful church.

So, what finally pushed you over the edge, and you said, okay, this is what God's calling me to do? That experience of winning a prestigious scholarship and then going to Oxford University showed me not only how restless my heart was, but also how fleeting the joys of this world are. The Norbertines in particular are taking on this challenge of the total fracturing of education. People are... grateful when we don't treat them like children, but when we treat them like adults who are worthy to hear the fullness of the truth.

And you think, well, Catholics know that. Well, do they? Father Ambrose, welcome to The Deep. Thank you very much, Erika. Nice to be here. It's so good to have you, and I'm excited to get into this to talk a little bit about your story, where God has led you in your life. Who are the Norbertines, and how are they different from Pope Leo's order? I'm going to drill you on that one a little bit, Augustinian in roots.

We're also going to talk about Catholic education. Is Gen Z returning to the church? And, of course, how are the Norbertines? What are your initiatives? ...toward this renewal of the faith in our time, in our nation, specifically the Evermode Institute, and I'm very excited to hear all about this, and yes, we'll get into it. Great. All beautiful topics, things I'm excited to talk about, Erika, so this is perfect. Excellent, excellent. So, you're a Colorado native, and you grew up in Mile High City.

Are you near Denver? Where in Colorado? I was born in Fort Collins and grew up in Denver, yes. One of the suburbs of Denver, but the address was Denver, so I'm a Western man, for sure. And were you raised in a Catholic home? Were you raised in the faith? What was your childhood like? Very much so. Both of my parents, in fact, when they were young people, discerned religious life, each of them in their own right, and obviously ended up not following that particular book.

So, I was raised in a very pious Catholic family home, both sides of the family Catholic, as far back as any of us knows, and went to the Catholic parish elementary school. I went to a Jesuit boys school, and so very much raised with Catholic education and raised as a faithful Catholic young man. So, thanks be to God. So, my parents... Right. Thank God for holy parents, and yeah, we all aspire to this. He came to that vocation later in his life, so he was ordained a deacon a month before I was ordained a deacon.

That's kind of cool. A hierarchical family. That's really neat. Yeah, but you originally were on a very academic track, right? So, you went to Colorado College, is that right? Colorado College, correct. Which described that for, it's not like one of the big Newman Five. Certainly not. No, it's a 19th century liberal arts college, sort of after the model of the Ivy League. So, it was a Western, obviously, it's in Colorado Springs, founded in the 1870s by the Congregationalists. So, it began as a Congregationalist liberal arts college, and by the middle of the 20th century, had no religious affiliation at all.

So, very secular, very progressive. Well, I was very happy to have a small community of Catholic young people there who were friends of mine at the college. We kind of took care of each other, and I have to say very providentially, I met the Norbertine Order as a result of my studies at Colorado College.

Academic mentor, who is still a very dear friend of mine. We collaborate in academic work still. Her name is Carol Neal, Professor Carol Neal. She is the English-speaking expert in the medieval history of the Norbertine Order. I had never heard of the Norbertine Order, but studying medieval history with this wonderful professor and through my studies there in this wonderful little college, very prestigious and very academically proficient.

College, I learned about the order and fell in love with the idea of the canonical life, the life of the canon regular, which is this beautiful combination of the priesthood with monasticism. So, it is because of my time there at Colorado College that I even met the order that I ended up joining providentially. So, God is good. He is good, but it wasn't a straight shot from college to the Norbertines, right? You took a little detour over the pond, I believe.

I did. I took a little detour. I was, as you said, exploring mostly a kind of academic career path, and that took me to Oxford University, where I began a degree after I finished at Colorado College, and so I spent some time there across the pond. I had also spent a year of my undergraduate studies in Florence, Italy, as well, so I had spent a couple of periods, significant periods, across the pond, as you said.

So, what finally sort of pushed you over the edge, and you said, okay, this is what God's calling me to do. I'm not going to run over the pond anymore. I'm going to surrender myself. So, was there a particular experience, or was it more of a slow, steady call for you? I intuited, while I was an undergraduate, I intuited that God might be calling me to the religious life and to the priesthood, especially to the religious life. That was kind of my first vocation.

And I was not a very good young man. I was a bad young man, and I was a wayward youth, and I was running away kind of hard and fast in the other direction. And that experience of winning a prestigious scholarship and then going to Oxford University, that I think showed me how restless my heart was, like St. Augustine. I knew a good deal about his story and had read a lot of St. Augustine.

And also, not only how restless my heart was, but also how fleeting the joys of this world are. So, I finally stopped running. And decided to explore the possibility that I might have a religious and priestly vocation. And that was a gradual process, but I could take you to the place in England where I decided to stop running. It was a very kind of grace-filled moment on the banks of the River Thames there in Oxford. And I was really at a kind of crisis point in my interior life.

And I finally surrendered. I stopped running, is the way I describe it, and I decided that I would put away my scholarship and come back to the United States and explore a small handful of religious communities that I knew of to see if one of those might be the right fit for me. Right. So, what about the Norbertines in particular, other than the fact that you lived an Augustinian life, perhaps before you entered? It sounds like. What about the Norbertines and St.

Michael's Abbey in particular drew you? This beautiful combination of monastic discipline and priestly ministry. So, canon's regular. So, there's a little bit of history, if you don't mind, a little tamponade. I don't mind at all. History's my thing. Please. Yeah. In the 12th century, up until the 12th century, there were really only two ways that a man could be a consecrated man in the church. He would either follow the rule of Saint Benedict as a monk, and that was a way of life for laymen.

So, the vast majority of monks are not ordained ministers. The Benedictine tradition ordains enough men in each monastery to care for that monastery, but it is a vocation of consecrated life. For a layman, and that is half of the way you could be a consecrated man. The other half is a way of monastic life for clerics, and St. Augustine wrote a rule for clerical monasticism. He wrote that in the fourth century. In fact, St. Augustine lived as the bishop of Hippo, Regius, in North Africa with his ...priests of his diocese in a monastery, and he was their superior.

So, that is what we call the canonical life, the life of a canon regular. So, either the Benedictine life for laymen, or the canonical life, the rule of St. Augustine, for clerics, priests, and the other clerical orders. And I was intrigued by this beautiful combination of active priestly ministry, service to the church as an ordained priest. And the monastic discipline that goes along with the consecrated life.

Both of those ways of life underwent a reform in the 12th century. That is the famous Gregorian reform movement of Pope Gregory XII, Pope Hildegard, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux reformed the life for the Benedictines in the movement, what we now call the Cistercians, in the Abbey of Citeaux, and Saint Norbert reformed the Augustinian canonical life at the Abbey of Premontre, which is why we're called Premontretention. They knew each other. They corresponded. They were part of this wonderful 12th century reform movement of both halves of male religious life in that period.

So, I met also, in addition to that professor I told you about at Colorado College, some other beautiful providential connections put me in touch with a living and breathing Norbertine canon from the Abbey of Daylesford, which is outside of Philadelphia. He came to give a retreat to the Catholic students at my college.

I ended up visiting Dalesford Abbey a few times, so I got to see the life, the Norbertine life lived, and that was in the back of my mind when I finally stopped running from the Lord. And so, I knew about the lived experience of Norbertine canonical life already a little bit.

Yeah, so just a point. This was a question that came up when I was talking to some colleagues about, I'm going to interview Father Ambrose, do you have any questions? And so, there are many... communities that use the rule of St. Augustine. So, we have got your own, the Norbertines. I think of the Dominicans, too, I believe. They use the rule of St. Augustine. And then, of course, the Pope, Pope Leo, famously is an Augustinian. So, what is the difference? What is the Norbertine difference?

How do those all differ? It is a really good question. So, St. Augustine wrote this rule in the 4th century. And there were communities of Augustinian canons all throughout the Christian world up until the 12th century. The canons regular underwent a few different kinds of reforms. One, Crota Gang of Metz tried to reform the canons regular. There were So, many communities of Augustinian canons joined the Norbertine movement of reform in the 12th century, but not all, and there were then 100 years later when St.

Dominic and St. Francis and the Carmelites all began this, what we call the mendicant movement of taking the religious life out of the monasteries, there were groups of What we call Augustinian friars or hermits, so an expression of Augustinian life following the rule of St. Augustine, communities of men, consecrated men, who then came into a kind of Fraternal union and formed the Augustinian Order of Friars. That was much later, about 200 years later. I think it is the 13th century or early 14th century.

I am not sure on the date specifically, but the Augustinian Order, Augustinian Hermits or Augustinian Friars, came a couple hundred years after this 12th century reform movement, and that is the order. Sort of amalgamation of lots of different Augustinian houses in one order of Augustinian friars. That's the order that Pope Leo belongs to. So you're more ancient than Pope Leo's order? Yes.

Our order is more ancient, that is right, by a hundred years or two. So, St. Dominic, interestingly, he also is part of that same mendicant movement of the 13th century, and there is some debate in the scholarship whether or not St. Dominic was a canon regular in Spain before he founded the Dominicans, and much of the scholarship says that he was in a house that was a Norbertine house of canons regular in Spain, and when he founded the order of friars preachers, he took The rule of St.

Augustine, which he learned from the canonical life of the Norbertines, and he also took the first statutes of the Dominican order were the Norbertine statutes. So, we are very closely affiliated, kind of like cousins, like first cousins in religious life, and we feel the same way about the order of St. Augustine that Pope Leo comes from. So, all of us are Augustinian consecrated men. Who have these different historical trajectories about how we come onto the scene.

That is really cool. That is so beautiful. Our life tends to be a little bit more of a 12th century monastic expression of Augustinian life, whereas the order of St. Augustine that Pope Leo comes from is much more mendicant out in the world, serving the people of God without the monastic discipline in the same way.

Yeah. Yeah, and I've shown my kids a few videos of yours that you've done on, like, Ascension Press and everything, and they'll often be like, oh, it's a Dominican, because I think the white, they get confused. So, that ethos of preaching definitely shared among all the brothers there.

Yeah, to kind of look at the ways that you've served the church, and I'm sure under obedience to the order, you're out in the world a lot now. You're kind of like a face for... So, evangelism for the order, which I'm sure not all of the fathers are on camera all the time like you are. I did want to ask you about sort of how you personally... How do you balance the, I don't know, the spiritual life with being a personality, right?

Because this is a personal question for me, too. It can be a struggle to have people come up to you and be like, oh, I recognize you from this. You're the face of something. How do you see... The mission of, I guess, Catholic evangelists who are in this digital world that you inhabit, and you're sort of the face of for your order. How do you think about that spiritually? How do you bring it to prayer? What are the challenges that you face?

Thank you for asking that question, Erika. I have a very strange priesthood. The first 14 years of my priestly ministry, just shortly after my ordination, I... I took over the job of the novice master in our house, the director for the formation. That is my next question, yeah.

My priestly life was very much inside the monastery, forming the young men, the very, very many young men who joined our monastery, and that was a beautiful work. I miss it, I have to say, to a certain degree. And now I have, as you said, this kind of public, this sort of public priesthood, and yet that is a bit of a chimera because I have to say, to a certain degree, that is a bit of a chimera because I have to say, Actually, I have a very quiet life.

I'm speaking to you from our little priory in Springfield, Illinois. There are six of us canons here. It's a very quiet house. When I'm not on the road with public speaking or filming things that you see online, I have a very contemplative life. I pray the hours of the divine office with my confreres, and we have a tiny little congregation that comes to mass, and I make a holy hour every evening. So, it's a very quiet monastic life. In my lived experience of my priesthood right now, And yet, it's very public as far as what people see online, and that's strange.

It's strange. You know, a consecrated religious, part of the reason we wear a habit is that our profession is a public profession. We are meant to be a sign, a witness for the whole church of the world to come, of heaven. And we're supposed to be, in fact, St. Norbert gave us this white habit so that we're supposed to be like the angels of the resurrection, proclaiming the risen Lord to the whole world and reminding people that this life is not all there is, you know, that there's an afterlife and that we're destined for eternal glory and for heaven.

And so, we wear a habit, and we have a public profession of vows so that the whole church can look at us. And it doesn't have anything to do with the man or the woman wearing the habit. We are serving a very important eschatological purpose of reminding people of the next life, and my personality doesn't matter.

Two beans. So, that's a good, that's, in a way, it's an easy thing for me to remember, that people recognize me in the airport, or in conferences and things, and they want to take selfies, and that's always really, I feel honored, and yet I have almost nothing to do with it, because I just proclaim the gospel. I try to, and talk about the beautiful life that St. Norbert gave to us, and St. Augustine gave to us, and I talk about the great ministry that my confreres And I try to do in service of the church, and really, it doesn't matter who I am.

So, the life of prayer and the contemplative life, which is the reality of my life, I think sustains me in that. Yeah, that's a really beautiful answer. Yeah, thank you. I think that can apply to anyone who has a public persona, too, that by virtue of our baptism, we are priest, prophet, and king. We have made a public witness to the truth, and yeah, that it's not about... It's not about us. It's not about glorifying ourselves, but God, and yeah, that's a great reminder.

We have a little team of people who work on our media production. A very close assistant of mine is a layman, and another young man who's our cameraman, and basically just those two men who do all of the work you see online with some help from other people when we need that, and I remind them all the time. I say, listen. None of this is about me. It's about us as a canonry, the canonry of St. Michael's Abbey. It's about us as the church militant.

It's about us as the Norbertine Order, the American church, the Catholic witness to the world. If this ever is about any individual man, We have a problem, and we're doing the wrong thing. We're doing the wrong work. So, our whole job is to proclaim Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and then to fade into the background.

Yep, great reminder. So, you mentioned that you'd spent many years as the novice master and sort of fostering the young vocations in the order. So, I wanted to just ask your insight. The big headline story, even for the last two years now, but more so this year, that we are seeing this sort of resurgence in adult conversions to the Catholic faith, and especially among young people. So, as someone who has Had that experience of very intimate relationships with young men especially, where do you think that resurgence is coming from this?

In some dioceses, we're seeing 50% increases year over year of Easter vigil conversions. We're seeing 40%, 130% down in Florida, one of them. What do you think is driving that now at this moment? In history, what did you hear from young people, or do you hear from young people who are seeking that something more?

I think young people are, well, they tell me that they're looking for a number of really key things that the church offers. One is community. That people live in isolation, and I think the technological age that we inhabit right now is one that's extremely isolating. You know, the internet is funny. We do all these conversations, you know, virtually.

My living, yeah. And people feel isolated and alone, and they're looking for authentic community of like-minded people, but people who love them. People are looking for... A communal experience that they're lovable and that they're loved. And, of course, religious life is a supreme incarnation of that. And so, young people, those who have the supernatural vocation to the consecrated life, they find their way into strong community life lived authentically by orders and congregations that are serious about that. So, they're looking for community.

There also, but that applies to everybody. I think that is part of the reason why there is such a huge increase in conversions, because the church is a community. We are the body of Christ, the mystical body of Christ. You go there, not just to the building, but you go there for the people who are there when you go to Mass, and when you are receiving the sacraments, and when you are in a Bible study, and when you are undertaking charitable good works together, the St.

Vincent de Paul Society, or whatever that is. People want to be with other people in authentic community. People are looking for authenticity and meaning in a world that is very, very slim on both of those things. What kind of meaning is there in my life if there are no ultimate answers to the questions that my heart asks? wants me to ask, where do I find a reason to get up in the morning and to go to work or to be with my family or to marry somebody and all of these things?

Where is meaning to be found? And the church obviously has always provided the ultimate answers to those ultimate questions. I think that as our culture, such as it is around us, becomes more and more secular, And as it becomes less and less integrated, I think that we were running on the fumes of Christian culture up until just 20 or 30 years ago. Right. So that even if people weren't professed Christians or professed Catholics or practicing... There was still a cultural remnant of community, of expectations for family allegiance, of a kind of sense of duty to my state in life and things like that that were built into the culture that has eroded almost so completely now that the only place people can find it is by coming into the church.

So, I think those are some of the answers to that question. The truth is compelling, and people are looking for beauty. They're looking for beauty and truth. They're looking for the transcendentals, and they find those in Catholicism. Yeah, I think it's interesting that you offered both positives, like what's drawing them to it, but also what's pushing them in a way. So, there's that both and that seems to really be bearing fruit right now. It's very exciting, although you'll see online. So, anytime I'm on my online world, I'm on the Twitters or whatever.

Whatever it's called now, you post something like, Gen Z returning to church, and you get five people jumping on the post saying, but you also have this phenomenon over the last, I mean, basically since the 1960s, of a sort of bleeding out as well. So, we'll look at rates of cradle Catholics leaving the faith, and some stats for Gen Z, as many as, I think, nine out of ten is the worst one I've seen, usually between seven and nine out of ten.

And, you know. Raised Catholic, cradle Catholics no longer attend Mass weekly or have left the faith completely. So, not to get all dark and stuff, but I think to have a clear-eyed vision, what do you see as what went wrong there? In a way, that sort of dovetails a little bit into another topic that you suggest that we might discuss, and that is Catholic education. Yeah.

I am going to answer your question, but a little bit in a roundabout way. Take your time. There is a horrible statistic that I cite sometimes when I speak about the failures of Catholic education, or some of the indications of the disaster area that is Catholic education in America right now, and that is that it lines up with those statistics that you just cited. If a young person is in Catholic school through 12th grade, Well, if they're in Catholic school through eighth grade, it's something like 67 or maybe slightly over 70% of them will, above their own admission, leave the faith by the time they leave Catholic school at eighth grade.

If they stay on through 12th grade, through high school, 87% will leave the faith. It's an 87% failure rate. That's the shocking, horrible. That's the people who are raised in not only Catholic homes or baptized Catholics, who by the time they're 18 years old, have left the faith of their own accord, and by their own admission.

That's awful. I think that that kind of horrible bleeding out comes from. Only nominal Catholicism, not fully engaged, fully lived, fully understood Catholic life. Some of those people are those folks who are the victories, the success story of them coming back into the church in their 20s, when they discover maybe through a great campus ministry program with Focus, Machineries, or a great Newman Center, or a great Newman Guide College, or someplace where they see, for the first time, The full Catholic identity lived in a way that it wasn't in their family or in their parish or in their parish school.

And they say, wow, here's a Catholicism that I didn't even know existed. This is compelling. This is what I want to affiliate myself with now. And so, they come back to the church. Maybe they're confirmed or someone who hasn't seen that at all. So, there is this deep contrast. Deep and wide contrast between Catholic in name only and authentic Catholicism well-lived.

We see that also in the religious orders. You know, those that are faithful to their charism, wear the habit, live an authentic and rich and exigent religious life, they are bursting at the seams with vocations. Right. Those that gave up the habit or compromised with the secular world began to live in the 60s and 70s and 80s like worldly people.

They haven't had vocations in 40 years, and they're not going to, because why would any young person who wants to be a saint and who wants to be a hero, why would they join something that's mediocre or that's barely Catholic? So, what does that contrast mean, Erika? I think that we will see in the next… 20 years, probably less. We're going to see this great winnowing. We're about to go off a demographic cliff. So, many parishes have the support of the baby boomer generation who are, in a certain sense, Catholic in name only, but they're there every Sunday.

They support the parish. They pay for the parish school. They keep the roof on. They keep the lights on. And they didn't have children, or they didn't have enough children. They, many of them, contracepted their children. They complained about the locations crisis, but they didn't, they only had one or two children, and they didn't, and they were willing to give their only son to the church. That wasn't even a live possibility. Thanks be to God that those people still come to Mass on Sunday.

Amen. But what are we going to do when they're gone? We're not going to have nearly the numbers. We're going to have the ones who will be there. All of these converts you're talking about, all the people who have discovered the fullness of our faith, who are having families, who they're there because they want to be there on Sunday, not because they're duty-bound to be there on Sunday. That's a great difference. So, I think, like Pope Benedict XVI said, we're going to have a much smaller church.

But a much more faithful church, and we are watching this contrast play out. We are watching this war between the attrition and the huge numbers of people coming in. We are watching that play out before our eyes, and it is very difficult to know what to make of it.

Of all of the people who entered the church this last Easter, I hope that they find authentic Catholic community and authentic Catholic worship and authentic Catholic doctrine so that two years from now, they are still there, because there is also this problem of attrition that the people who come into the church a year or two later are no longer attending, because there is not that fullness of the identity and the fullness of the truth and the fullness of worship.

We have to sustain all of these converts with the full-fat, full-meal deal, as it were, not the accommodated version, not the secularized version. Right. It's the cultivating of the roots, right? You think of the parable of the sower and the seed.

We don't want them to have fallen on rocky ground, rocky soil, but we need to somehow make sure that they're falling on good soil and cultivating those good roots. So, I just want to go back a minute to the Catholic education and what you were talking about with elementary formation and then high school formation. So, if you were talking to this, I mean, the Boomer Parish that you described is New England, like this is where I live, so I'm just hearing you right there.

So, if you were confronted by one of these... Boomers in the pews, and they're just kind of confused. What elements in particular do you think have been missing from Catholic education at the elementary and then the high school level that have led to these drastic statistics? Yes. I think that we have failed to pass on the faith, the catechism, basically. We failed now for about two generations to communicate the faith in its fullness.

In its challenges and its beauty from one generation to the next. So, those boomers, of course, we speak about them now like that, but those wonderful people in there. Our parents, yeah. Those wonderful people, when they went to Catholic school, they were taught by the religious sisters, mostly, who were very heroic, generous women, mostly women. ...who gave their lives for Catholic education. I mean, the American Catholic educational system is a marvel of... It's incredible. It's really incredible, really kind of unmatched in Western history.

And they learned really well what it means to be a Catholic. They learned all the doctrine. They learned all about the sacraments. They had memorized the Baltimore Catechism front to back. I mean, really, they knew the faith. When the sisters evacuated from the convents, and when many of those very generous women in the parish went and taught in school, they weren't trained educators, they failed to keep that rigor of Catholic doctrine in the school.

Parents then thought, well, if I send my kid to the Catholic school, they are going to learn the faith. Teach them at home. This was certainly the case when I was coming of age, when I was born in the early mid-70s. In the 80s, parents did not worry about teaching the kids the faith. You go to Mass on Sunday, and you go to the Catholic school. You will learn the faith there. That is it, right. In fact, we did not learn the faith there.

We did not learn anything about the faith there. We played with felt. First communion, right? Really. We did not learn the first thing about who is Jesus, what is sin, why is it a problem, why is the church necessary? I learned recycling.

Yeah, you learned recycling, right? The wokery that was incipient, you know, that was just coming on to the scene. We learned about, you know, the church had begun to conceive of herself as a benevolent NGO. And it's all about justice and peace, which are good things, but that has to be built on top of authentic Christian doctrine. Otherwise, it's just a benevolent NGO, and who cares? Who cares, you know, about the rice bowl during Lent? If you don't know why Lent even is a thing, or why Jesus, why do we, just nothing, nothing.

So, I think that most Catholic schools... Have a very shallow, if any, Catholic identity, and the students, because the teachers don't know the faith, so how can they teach the faith? How can you give what you don't first possess yourself? So, I think that now there are many, many places we could sort of attack. The challenges of Catholic education. This is one that I think is fundamental and foundational, which is why my conference and I put together the institute that I hope we talk about at some point.

To invade the faith, to teach the faith to those who are supposed to be teaching it to others. That is not just in religion class. You know, the gym. Coach and the principal and the school nurse and the school janitor and the social studies teacher and the English teacher and the Spanish teacher, all of them in a Catholic school are teachers of the faith. Right. All of them need to have that full Catholic identity.

Which was what existed a hundred years ago in a school when you went to, whatever, in Connecticut there. Your little town, I'm sure, was probably mostly Catholic. The parish school was, everybody in that neighborhood was there. They had this whole.

This whole Catholic was a subculture then. From the janitor to the principal to the pastor of the parish to Sister Mary Amarantia in first grade, they all would have had a complete Catholic education, a complete Catholic identity that they were conveying to the students.

Whether they knew it or not. And then the whole structure fractured and kind of fell apart. But I do want to talk, I want to move now to how the Norbertines in particular are taking on this challenge of the total fracturing of education. And the good news is you must think it's worth saving, and that it can be saved, because here you are starting new institutes about it. And I know they're in Springfield, Bishop Paprocki. I invited the Norbertines to come to Illinois, the land of Lincoln, and found a couple of different initiatives, one of which is a trade school, which is very cool.

But you're involved more in this Evermode Institute. So, talk to us about Evermode Institute and how you are. Helping to turn this around. Or at least trying to. So, yes, Bishop Paprocki, Thomas John Paprocki, a number of years ago, he had been courting our Abbey community, which is well-known in the country. It is a large monastery in Southern California. So, he had been courting along with other bishops who court us. So, can you please come to the diocese and set up a house, set up a shop, and send some canons and help me with some projects in my diocese?

So, Bishop Paprocki intuited that you could help me with that. He needed to do something about the situation of Catholic education in his diocese, and he invited us to come and help him with that renewal of Catholic education, and we eagerly accepted that invitation. My own canonry of St. Michael's Abbey has been involved in Catholic education for a long time. We come from a mother house, our mother house, which was founded in 1180 in Hungary.

Ran and continues to run an important secondary school. A gymnasium is how it is called in Central Europe. So, basically a high school for boys and other educational institutions in Hungary. And so, we also had a boarding school at our Abbey until very recently. We have We have two parishes with parish schools. We help to run a parish high school in the Diocese of Los Angeles. So, we have some familiarity with the landscape of Catholic education, and the Evermote Institute is basically to address this problem, which I just elucidated, and that is teaching the faith.

To those who are responsible to pass on the faith to young people. So, that is teachers, administrators, and parents of families, and that is a K-12 project. So, we realized that it would be very difficult to get the whole demographic of Catholic educators in central Illinois in this diocese to come to our Priory for education, so we developed an online curriculum to help with that, and there is some in-person component. It is named for Evermode is not just a name we invented.

It was actually, the name was suggested by the bishop himself. Okay. Saint Evermode, well, it was suggested by the bishop himself who got the suggestion from one of my other confers, Father Sebastian. Saint Evermode is a 12th century saint who was One of St. Norbert's first companions in the project of the renewal of canonical life in the 12th century. He was there at Montreux for the founding of our order in 1121. He was at St. Norbert's deathbed in 1134. He's usually depicted crying or with a bowl of tears of his own tears, weeping at the death of his best friend, St.

Norbert of Zanton. So, St. Evermode Along with some other early Norbertines went to the edge of Christendom, the edge of the Holy Roman Empire, the edge of where the faith had been proclaimed, to the tribe called the Wends, the Wendes tribe, which is now up in the kind of the northeast of Germany, the Diocese of Ratzeburg. He became the bishop of Ratzeburg in Germany, and another Norbertine succeeded him, St. Isfred.

There were Norbertine missionaries right from the beginning who were proclaiming the gospel, educating people in the faith, right from the beginning of our order in the 12th century, and so St. Evermode being this evangelical missionary witness, it was the right name for this project, which is an evangelical and missionary project of the renewal of Catholic education. So, it has been a fun project to work on. It is spreading around the country now. Other dioceses are interested. And again, we're not trying to solve all of the problems of education, of Catholic education.

You know, where do you find the best teachers? Where do you find the best principals or superintendents and dioceses? Where do you find, how do you help parents who don't know the first thing about our faith? So, how do you convey the faith into the home? We're very laser-focused on, let's just see what we can do to impart the faith.

To the people who are working in Catholic education, that is kind of what we are laser focused on. We cannot solve all the problems, but hopefully we can help to do this. It is what priests do. We preach and teach, and hopefully we can do some of that in this little corner of need as well. Well, that is certainly a keystone element in renewing Catholic education, because if you do not have formed formators, how are they going to pass on? So, it is definitely like...

Going to the heart of one of the major issues here. So, if someone's interested in Evermode and they log on, what sort of first things first? Like, what's Evermode 101? What are they going to learn? How are they going to learn? Yes. Well, first of all, there is a website. It's evermode.com.

It requires being part of a school or a diocese that are already collaborating with the Institute, that are enrolled in the Institute. So, there is a way for individuals also to access that, and that is through the Abbott's Circle, which is another little wing of St. Michael's Abbey, which is our media production kind of wing and cultivation of what is happening online. So, what they will find is it is a curriculum that we are just finishing the fourth year of this.

Online curriculum. It is basically everything you need to know about what it means to be a Catholic. The first two semesters are what we call back to basics. What is sin? Why is it a problem? What is the solution to the problem of sin? Who is Jesus? Why did he found a church? What is the most basic things? And you think, well, Catholics know that. Well, do they?

Ask somebody, you know, what is that percentage about people who believe that Jesus is really present in the Holy Eucharist? Right, maybe 34. Yeah, 34 percent. Right. How many Catholics do you know, if you ask them, is it a moral obligation to go to Mass on Sunday? You know, how many people know that or believe that, right? The most basic things, you know, if, you know, if someone dies with unrepentant sin and not baptized, what happens to them?

Most people say, oh, well, God is, you know, if they're a good person, they go to heaven. Well, do they? That's not what the church teaches, right? That's not why we need a Savior, you know? What does it mean to need a Savior? Things like this. Redemption, all of it. Yes.

That's great. So, what has the response been? I mean, it's been out there for a little while, but what's the interest level, and have you talked to anyone who's gone through any of the program? Yeah, so we're three years in, in the Diocese of Springfield. That's about 1,200 people following the curriculum. Wow. Beginning in the Archdiocese of Denver, that's going to be another, I think, 1,500 people. There are other places where, so we have a fair demographic of people who have begun or are well on their way through the curriculum.

It's interesting. It's very interesting, Erika. The first year here in the Diocese of Springfield, there was a little bit of this kind of... I don't know, you know, that sort of, you know. Yeah, sixth grader in the back of the room, like. Not the sixth grader, the sixth grade teacher, because of course, this curriculum is not for the students, actually. You know, it's the teachers and the administrators, and there's some of that, well, you know, I've been doing this for 35 years.

Yeah. I don't really need this, but then after a couple years, you know, we try to make it accessible and warm. The videos are interesting, and they're brief, and they're. They're beautiful. And we hope, and so what I have seen is over three years, there is a little bit of a relaxing from this to kind of like, oh, you know, interesting, like tell me more. And so there is a greater buy-in, I think, as the process goes on. No one wants to be told, especially us middle-aged adults, you've been wrong about some of these things, or you were ill-formed, or you don't actually know what you don't know.

People don't want to hear that, but if we invite them to consider the truth, And to consider how much God loves them, and how beautiful our faith is. People soften to that, and they're grateful for that. So, a great deal of gratitude we've seen, and a great deal of interest, and a minimum of resistance. Although, I understand why there's resistance. Yes. You know? Yeah.

Because what is our faith? Our faith is an invitation to conversion. And that means we have to die to the old man or to the old woman, and sometimes that death to the old man or the old woman is hard. Yeah, it's a suffering. It's a suffering, you know. When someone hears, like I said, I gave that example of the Sunday Mass attendance, something like that, we're just very direct about that. You know, we're obliged as faithful Catholic believers to attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, and if you don't, that's a grave sin, which means that if you die, You're going to go to hell, you know?

And if you go to Mass after missing Mass through your own fault, you can't just go receive Holy Communion. That would be sacrilege. And the thing is, that's all true, and we try to proclaim that with love and with mercy, but it's still true. And someone might have been living for the last 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years thinking, I can go to Mass whenever I want. I can walk back in and receive Holy Communion whenever I want. This is the watered-down Catholicism that we've been given for 40 years or 50 years now, and people are grateful when we don't treat them like children, but when we treat them like adults who are worthy to hear the fullness of the truth.

So, what are your hopes for the Evermode Institute? Like, what would be your success story, and to know that it's doing what you hoped, what God called you to do through the Institute? I would love it if every diocese in the country used the Evermode Institute as a resource to help with the ongoing formation of their teachers and administrators.

I would love that. That would be the easiest thing in the world for us. We have created the curriculum. We have created the online platform. We can have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people follow this online curriculum, and that would be success. If one more diocese or one more school comes on board, that is also success, because I believe deeply that in the fact that our faith Is what sets us free. Our Lord promises that. You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

So, whatever we can do to give that truth, the fullness of the truth, our holy Catholic faith, and the fullness of the Catholic identity that comes along with it, to as many people as we can, that would be, I think, building up the kingdom of Christ for his glory. So, When you're talking about renewal of the church, there's a lot of programs, right? There's Augustine Institute has programs, Word on Fire has programs, Focus. There are so many programs. I think of Aquinas 101 has programs, and I do think that part of the The loss of souls in the church can be an over-reliance on programs and the step-by-step.

So, for you... When you are thinking about, okay, we are going to develop another program, we are going to have another curriculum, and we are going to send it out there, what makes the difference between, okay, here is another step-by-step, follow online, and something that is truly evangelistic and reaches people in their hearts, so it is not just one more program that a diocese can pay for and write it off? Well, I believe deeply in the power of the Norbertine canonical life.

Our priestly ministry flows from a very deep experience of liturgical life. Canons regular are creatures who pray the divine office seven times a day and celebrate the mass very beautifully. The nature, the foundation and heart of the life that we live is a liturgical one, and I think that is really what Our program offers, so we're priest canons, priest monks who are the instructors of this curriculum. That is something that sets us apart. You mentioned, you know, Aquinas 101. Those are Dominicans who are also religious priests.

That's not to say that lay folks can't do this. They can. They can do it very, very well. Those other institutes and programs that you enumerated there, and there are many of them, they're very good at, from the lay person's perspective, A layperson speaking to another layperson and instructing them. I think that the fact that this ministry is born out of a 900-year-old tradition of education and religious life, that is something that I think can give it some oomph, but also the fact that we are not trying, we are very clear about what we are doing.

A lot of those programs that you enumerate are about what is happening in the classroom. We are striving to form the heart and mind of the teacher, of the Christian. We are trying to get that beautiful work of Christ, of the grace of Jesus Christ, and the conversion of souls, and the winning over, the setting free of the mind and the heart. That is kind of what we are aiming at, and that might be different. It is not just information.

It's transformation, it's formation of the heart that comes through this catechetical instruction. So, I think, I mean, that's a difficult question to answer. It is. I had to end it with a tough one. But, yeah, I think, too, that...

The programs, and this gets to what you were saying there, programs and institutes that have been successful in bearing fruit that lasts. You talked about all of these new converts and hoping that, you know, within two years, they're still going to Mass. And also, we're talking about forming the next generation of cradle Catholics. Like, I'm a convert. My kids are cradle Catholics, and I hope they do better than what the statistics say cradle Catholics do.

But part of all that, of having programs and people who help to till the good soil where the roots can go down deep, is that authenticity that you're pointing to. And not that the other programs don't have that, but that the men and the women, if it's religious women or laywomen.

Writing these programs and presenting them have that authenticity of life and that true conversion of their own souls, but finding a way, too, that you can walk alongside people who are going through maybe this study and making that personal connection. I think that is also one of the attractions of the church that you might have alluded to, that the church is, unlike everything else in our world, You have to be in person. The sacraments are not digitized. You cannot have confession online.

So, maybe you can listen to a lecture on confession online, but you have to actually go get absolved. A guy has to be there, an ordained man with his hand, saying the words to you. Yes, and I tell people all the time, actually, the way that the faith is communicated, yes, you can study all kinds of things online. But each of us can point to concrete people, individual people, my mother, or my friend, or my father, or a close friend, somebody who showed you what the Christian life looks like in such a way that you wanted to be that too.

However else you learned about it, it is an individual-to-individual communication of this life that goes all the way back to Christ and the apostles that comes down to us. You became a Catholic. Because of some person or persons who witness to you that life in Jesus Christ, right?

Right. And you're right that online instruction is never enough. It's never going to be enough. It has to have that authenticity that comes from real-life interaction with real living and breathing Christian believers. Yeah. It's incarnational, sacramental, all the things. Absolutely. Yeah, and I do love, I've seen a couple of the videos from Evermode, and I love how Christological, how... Rooted in the transcendentals, they are. They're truly beautiful, and I would highly recommend anyone who's watching to go and check them out, especially if you are in church leadership position, if you run a school, and you're like, how do I get from this staff that doesn't know their faith?

Maybe we hired for mission for the religion teachers, but we didn't for, like you said, the gym teacher, the chem teacher. This is a great way to start, so I'd highly recommend everyone check that out. Father Ambrose, it has been delightful speaking with you. I feel like we could dig really deep on all things Oxford politics classics, but unfortunately, the Lord has ended our time. Well, maybe so.

Yeah, maybe so. Well, one note, we are going to be together in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and that is going to be a very exciting event. Cardinal Burke will be there, Michael Knowles, but you, Father, you are coming as well, and I will be there, so maybe we can grab a beer. At the end of one of those beautiful, long Wisconsin summer nights, and I'd encourage everyone watching to also check out Ticket Sales for that, because we'd love to see you as well.

So, thank you once again for coming on The Deep, and may God bless the Evermote Institute. God bless you, Erika. Thank you so much, and God bless The Zeal and The Deep.