Steve rocked gently in his chair as his giant hands, scarred and calloused by years of laying pipe across the Midwest, dug into his thighs. A barely audible moan escaped his clenched teeth.
In that moment he seemed more like a fatally wounded old lion than an enormously successful, self-made man.
Steve had always been a faithful Catholic, he promised me, almost pleading. He always went to Mass, prayed the rosary and paid for the expensive Catholic school tuition, from Kindergarten through college, even when he didn’t really have the money.
But now his beloved little girl had rejected the faith, and him along with it.
“How could it come to this?”, he asked. “How is this possible?”
I wanted to tell Steve that his situation wasn’t unusual, that it wasn’t his fault, that there was a crisis in the Church, not just among the laity but among the priests and even Bishops. I thought about telling him about the millions of parents who had done their best and still watched with horror as their adult children left the faith and rejected the values they’d been taught.
But at that moment, it felt wholly inadequate. Nothing I could say would change the fact that Steve felt a raw, aching pain that left him feeling…empty.
Steve and I sat alone in a deafening silence that afternoon before praying together for wisdom, healing and encouragement.
Those of us at Dynamic Catholic talk with men like Steve every day. Husbands and fathers who woke up early and stayed up late for years in order to provide for their families and set an example for their children, only to one day find that where they had labored to sew virtue in the garden of their daughter’s heart, walls of cold stone had spring up, seemingly overnight.
Of course, it’s not just men who suffer.
Wives and mothers grieve silently, too, watching the children they carried in their wombs, held to their breasts and cuddled, stray from the faith that had once motivated them to read stories of the saints, sing hymns without abandon and serve on the altar.