The following article is condensed from a 2024 The Choices We Face interview between Kevin Wells (KW) and Ralph Martin (RM). You can watch the original interview here.
KW: When I turned forty, I went on a retreat. I was fed up with malaise and sloth. I wasn’t in mortal sin, but I felt like God expected more of me.
On the last night, I was on the banks of the Potomac River. There was a driving wind, and waves were slapping against the dock. The Holy Spirit convicted me to say, “God, You sent your Son into the world to endure violence and redeem all of humanity. I think I need to be struck down. I need to be awakened to the reality of your will for me. So, strike me down. God, make it violent.”
RM: That’s a very brave prayer.
KW: It was inspired, because I had never had the thought before in my life. A month later, almost to the exact second, I had a brain aneurysm. I was struck down. God kept his end of the bargain.
I should have died. I had a failed invasive brain surgery, and blood was drowning my brain. Something miraculous happened. A priest and his assistant prayed over me, asking for the intercession of my Uncle Monsignor Thomas Wells. And I’m with you today. After that, everything changed. When I finally got back on my feet—it took a while to walk and get it back together again—I began to see that comfort was not part of the equation. The least comfortable person in history was Jesus Christ, the starved man on the cross. The poor man of Nazareth, who had no place to lay his head.
I said, “If I’m comfortable as a husband, or a dad, or a proclaimer of my Catholic faith, then I’m no good.”
I began looking more interiorly at my own self. I began seeing in a way I didn’t want to see that priests seem to be comfortable behind the ambo, contracepting the truth of the proclamation of the Gospel, afraid to tread into certain places. I said, “This doesn’t make sense.” They’re Jesus Christ—in persona Christi Capitis—why would they not want to live as Christ ontologically asked them to? To sacrifice, to negate their worldly comforts. They are not bachelors; they are servants of the Lord.
RM: I think Archbishop Chaput said the time of comfortable Catholicism is over. Comfortable Catholicism isn’t going to be able to stand against the culture that’s coming against us, against hostility to Christ and the Church. Everybody’s called to leave comfortable Catholicism and become a convinced Catholic.
KW: There is no more standing on the wall. I think more Catholics are wanting to give themselves fully and completely to the Lord and to be bold, but they don’t know how to do it.
It was arrogant for me as a sportswriter to write a book about priests, but my book The Priests We Need to Save the Church was really a pleading, a thirsting for priests, a cry to “please tend to my soul.” I studied the great priests who were saints, because I couldn’t write a book unless I knew what the paragons did. Monsignor Tom Wells was my father’s brother. He had a magnanimity, a joy and a love for the Eucharist that was explosive. He was very well known in the DC area for twenty-seven years, before he was murdered in his rectory in 2000. He had been sent to that parish to break up active homosexuality in the rectory in the four priests before him. A year later, my uncle was found dead.
My uncle is a casualty of Satan’s wrath, but I had seen for almost twenty-five years what a magnanimous priest does: he saves marriages, he’s unafraid to proclaim truth to friends. My friends would question him on something in the faith, saying, “I don’t believe this, Father. I believe that I can do a certain thing with a girl.” And my uncle would say, “That’s fine, but you’re on a path that’s taking you to hell.”
RM: He wasn’t afraid to tell people the truth, because he really loved them.
KW: It was all about souls and about asking, “What did Christ want him to say?” People consistently responded by knocking on the rectory door weeks later, saying, “Father, thanks for waking me up to the reality of my sin.”
RM: Tell me about your newest book, Priest and Beggar.
KW: Venerable Aloysius Schwartz was a startling American priest. He raised his hand in 1957 and asked to go to the worst place in the world—post-war Korea. That’s where he started his priesthood. And within fifteen years, this devastated land was brought back to health. He built Boys Towns, Girls Towns, hospitals, hospices, and homes for those with leprosy and tuberculosis.
Father Al cared for twenty thousand of the most hurt children—the poorest of the poor—in six different countries. He founded the Sisters of Mary, who take these kids in for five years, usually starting at age twelve. Then, they go out into the world as some of the greatest Catholic missionaries we have.
They don’t have earbuds, video games, or popular music. It is pure catechism. It is teaching from nuns who love them, who get into the wound, take it out, and say, “Now let the graces come in.”
Between three- to four-thousand children graduate each year and go to universities, workplaces, and their old villages as full Catholic missionaries. You can visit www.worldvillages.org to help these sisters and learn more.
The sisters go into the most dangerous villages in the world. Two by two, they’ll walk up mountains and past drug runners, traffickers, and murderers. They have no fear, because they’re protected by Mary’s mantle, Fr. Al’s intercession, and Jesus Christ. They go into villages and lean-tos, and they walk into rooms. It’s like lifting the lid of a coffin. They’ll look down at a twelve-year-old child and say, “It’s time to come down this mountain.” These sisters are heroes because they don’t care if they die. They’re in a state of grace.
RM: There is no better way to die than doing God’s will in God’s time, under his control and providence.
I know you’re also very concerned about what’s going on in the world and in the Church. What do you see happening, and how you are encouraging people to respond?
KW: What’s happening from Rome, from the Vatican, is deeply confusing. It troubles me when I hear words like backwardism or rigidity or questioning the Creed. It’s travailing. There seems to be a purposeful desire to soften or re-engineer two-thousand years of something radiant, transcendent, and true. It’s deplorable. It simply can’t be done.
We need to proclaim the Good News untethered, with a missionary zeal. It’s accepting that you will be uncomfortable. It’s proclaiming your faith to the person next to you in an airport. As the forces within the Church come against the truth, we need to push back through Jesus Christ and beg the Holy Spirit to give us the right words to say.
RM: Don’t we see that major Protestant churches have tried this already? They’ve tried to say, “People will like us more if we de-emphasize our teaching on sexuality and allow divorce and don’t talk about heaven, hell, repentance, or sin.” Every church that has done that has gone into radical decline.
We have prominent leaders in the Catholic Church saying, “Let’s take that path. The world will like us more.” No, the world will laugh at us for imitating them. Why be a Catholic if it’s no different than the world?
KW: Jesus and the saints and the martyrs did not genuflect to the world. They stood up to it. They proclaimed the blazing furnace of truth.
RM: Jesus is only asking one thing: “Come follow Me, abide with Me. Let my Word abide in you.”
KW: Everything we do must come from prayer. And I think many of us, including priests and bishops, have stopped praying. Once you stop receiving the Holy Spirit through a devoted prayer life, through going to Mary, through placing yourself at the foot of the monstrance and saying, “Please speak to me, Lord”—once you do that, you begin to make compromises with the Church and the world.
I always bring it back to that one word: prayer. Prayer is essential, the root of everything we do as Catholics.
Prayer is work. But the centerpiece of my identity or a priest’s identity should be Jesus Christ spread out on the cross, bleeding out. He was not comfortable doing that. So, if I’m going to reject prayer because I’m comfortable and I’d rather watch ESPN, or look on my cell phone, then shame on me. Shame on anyone who rejects prayer. We must pray for boldness, for fearlessness.
Kevin Wells is a former Major League Baseball writer, an award-winning journalist, and a best-selling author. He is a freelance writer and an active evangelist who speaks on various Catholic topics. He is the president of the Monsignor Thomas Wells Society, dedicated to the promotion of strong priests and seminarians, and to the practice of the fullness of the Catholic faith. His most recent book is The Hermit: The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a Marriage, and a Family. Kevin lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.
This article originally appeared in Renewal Ministries’ October 2024 newsletter.
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This is inspired by the Holy Spirit and the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“Go out to all the world and tell the good news…”
We are praying for you, your family & ministry .
This is what all the priests need to live & preach, then they will be true shepherds of Jesus Christ to the flock.
“Feed my lambs, Feed my Sheep, Tend my Sheep…..”
Keep the faith ALIVE!!!!
Well Done!!!!