Men are struggling with their spirituality. Can the Catholic Church help?

On a bright morning in Melbourne last December, Patricia Faulkner, A.O., chair of the board of Jesuit Social Services in Australia, stood before a room filled with press and members of the community and shared a simple message: “Men and boys need help.”

Since 1977, J.S.S. has been working for social change in Australia through a combination of delivering services to marginalized groups, like refugees and prisoners, and in-depth research and advocacy on their behalf. As part of the agency’s 40th anniversary, Julie Edwards, the group’s chief executive officer, asked the organization to “sniff the wind,” as she put it, to reflect on what they were seeing on the ground and consider what new efforts might be needed today.

“And what people kept coming back to,” says Michael Livingstone, executive director of The Men’s Project, which came out of that year of discernment, “was that the issues of boys and men persist. They’re overwhelmingly the people we see in our criminal justice programs and the perpetrators of family violence; they’re also a higher percentage for other issues around mental health, risk-taking and drinking.”

As former deputy commissioner of a state commission looking into family violence, Ms. Faulkner was intimately familiar with these problems and also the broader human web within which they exist. “It’s not just a matter of an individual,” she told the group. “Society has to change.”

From the #MeToo movement to the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, from remembering the kindness of the children’s television pioneer Mr. Rogers to examining the leadership of Pope Francis, the last year has witnessed the rise of an extraordinary international conversation around gender and power even as it has inspired an at-times vituperative pushback from some.

In this watershed moment, when it is so clear that thinking about men and masculinity is evolving, where is the church? And how can it help?

The Problem of Christian Masculinity

The Catholic Church in the United States has long promoted notions of Catholic masculinity and offered groups and movements for men. Recent decades have also seen the rise of an entire industry of Christian men’s self-help books, with titles like Act Like Men: 40 Days to Biblical Manhood, Manual to Manhood and Catholic Manhood Today. Many are bestsellers. John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (2001) remains No. 1 on Amazon’s list of titles about Christian men’s issues 17 years after its publication.

From the #MeToo movement to the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, from remembering the kindness of the children’s television pioneer Mr. Rogers to examining the leadership of Pope Francis, the last year has witnessed the rise of an extraordinary international conversation around gender and power even as it has inspired an at-times vituperative pushback from some.

In this watershed moment, when it is so clear that thinking about men and masculinity is evolving, where is the church? And how can it help?

These books tend to follow a similar course. They begin with a declaration of the problem: “Men are in deep trouble with sin” (Act Like Men). Society is in crisis: “The conditions we find ourselves in have put us on a steady decline as a culture” (Catholic Manhood Now). And recovery depends upon a return to a “genuine masculinity” (Catholic Manhood Now), to being a “quality man” (Act Like Men).

What generally follows is a mixture of straight talk and encouragement. “When we lay aside our selfishness out of commitment, we arrive at a place called contentment or joy,” writes Raylan Alleman in Catholic Manhood Now.

“If there is anything ‘Olympic’ about us, it’s our ability to lie to ourselves,” says James MacDonald in Act Like Men.

These writers typically speak with familiarity; these are their struggles too. “I have never met the dude who didn’t at some level want to be a quality man,” Mr. MacDonald says. “But for some reason in the pressure of the moment, we often cave in to behavior we despise.”

“Deep in a man’s heart are some fundamental questions that simply cannot be answered at the kitchen table,” writes Mr. Eldredge. “Who am I? What am I made of? What am I destined for?”

But within these quests for goodness a shocking degree of misogyny can lurk. The first subsection of the first chapter of Act Like Men is entitled: “Act Like a Man Means Don’t Act Like a Woman.”

Men are there to protect their women, Mr. MacDonald explains, and to oversee the family.

“We lead our families and instruct and advise our wives and children of what they are to do,” Mr. Alleman confirms.

“‘Where are all the real men?’ is regular fare for talk shows and new books,” Mr. Eldredge writes. “You asked them to be women, I want to say.”

If you want to know how the diminishment of women continues, look no further.

Spirituality books may genuinely try to help men, but they can function as Trojan horses, inserting cultural, political or social agendas that are neither pastorally helpful nor consistent with the tenets of Christianity. 

Notions of “the genuine Christian man” are likewise riddled with stereotype and anxiety. Men are good with their hands; sports lovers; outdoorsy. Mr. Eldredge claims they have an “innate love of maps.”

And they are “real men”: “What would happen if we had effeminate or juvenile men in charge of national defense or police protection?” Mr. Alleman wonders. “These are the roles filled by genuinely masculine men.”

“We all know the guy who gets a pedicure and frosts his tips, but most men think that guy is wacky and only talk to him when forced,” writes Mr. MacDonald.

Even as these books may genuinely try to help men, they can function as Trojan horses, inserting cultural, political or social agendas that are neither pastorally helpful nor consistent with the tenets of Christianity. Such problematic themes are so prevalent, not only in the literature but within Christian and Catholic men’s movements, it suggests that using masculinity or some notion of “the Catholic man” as a starting point for reflection could be a serious and potentially dangerous error.

Walking Toward a God of Love

About a half hour outside the Twin Cities in Minnesota, a retreat house tucked away in woods overlooking a pretty lake has charted a very different course. The Demontreville Jesuit Retreat House has run “preached retreats” for men for 70 years. It seems like an idea out of another era of the church, but at a time when retreat centers around the country are struggling to stay solvent, Demontreville welcomes 70 men every weekend; 3,000 men a year. Many have been coming for decades; some are the third or fourth generation of their family to attend.

Patrick McCorkell, S.J., director of the retreat house, believes some elements of Demontreville appeal specifically to men. “I think men deal better when there’s a predictable structure and a certain discipline to it,” he says. The retreats, which begin on Thursday night and go until Sunday dinner, involve four or five talks a day, meals on a set schedule, strongly maintained expectations about silence and no computers or phones.

The retreat director Paul Lickteig, S.J., wonders if the amount that is asked of the men is not itself part of the attraction. “It almost seems like a spiritual feat,” he says, of doing the retreat. “You end up sitting there for eight hours of your weekend listening to someone talk to you, and they’re asking you to get to some spiritual depth. It’s an invitation, but I think there’s also something in the challenge of it.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a spiritual marathon, but it’s certainly a 10K.”

“A good retreat begins with knowing that you are the beloved son of God and helps you find that. It doesn’t start with saying, ‘You’re pretty bad and we’re going to help put a clamp on that.’”

But the essence of the retreat house’s effectiveness, says Father McCorkell, is its attention to spiritual fundamentals. Demontreville takes seriously the notion of being a retreat: “We have a place that’s physically separate from all of the commotion of everyday life.” Even the most simple gestures matter. “We put as many cars as we can in the garage, so they’re out of sight,” Father McCorkell says.

“We say, ‘Let’s create an atmosphere of silence, but more than silence, solitude.’ You come here and there isn’t going to be anybody telling you who you’re supposed to be. We want you to be able to sit with yourself and listen to God tell you who you are.”

These retreats also include a strong emphasis on stability. “You get the same room every year, the same menu in the dining room,” says Father McCorkell. “The furniture is always in the same place. The guys even tend to sit at the same place in the chapel. It creates an environment that’s in some manner timeless. It creates a sense of security, and you tap into your own history of retreats just automatically.”

“The rigidity of it all becomes a connector to the past,” says Father Lickteig.

Chris Francis, 53, has been going to Demontreville for 30 years. “I’d just gotten out of high school and my dad said, ‘It’s time for you to come and check this out.’

“I had no idea what a silent retreat was all about,” he says. “And it was not what I was expecting; it was a lot more enjoyable. I loved the structure.”

Central to the retreats are the 14 talks given by the retreat director. And those talks, Father McCorkell notes, “are not about being men, but about being human.”

“There is a sense that we’re all on the journey. I happen to be up here giving the talks because I have slightly different training and experience, but the fact of the matter is we’re all on the same journey.”

“Jesus is not going to change you. He’s going to reveal you to yourself.”

Mr. Francis agrees. The best retreat directors, he says, have shared the wisdom that “everybody makes mistakes, and you need to put that behind you and go forward, try to do a better job tomorrow. They’ve given me compassion, [the reminder] to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

The Catholic writer and editor Tom McGrath, vice president for product development at Chicago’s Loyola Press, has been involved with men’s retreats and spirituality and written about them for decades. “A good retreat,” he says, “begins with knowing that you are the beloved son of God and helps you find that. It doesn’t start with saying, ‘You’re pretty bad and we’re going to help put a clamp on that,’ or ‘Jesus is going to change you.’

“Jesus is not going to change you,” he says. “He’s going to reveal you to yourself.

“It’s not about taming the guy because he shouldn’t be left to his own devices too long,” Mr. McGrath says. “It’s really saying inside of you there is this really great man. It’s about transformation.”

Father McCorkell agrees. Demontreville’s preaching, he says, “comes down to the director communicating a lived love for the Lord. That makes it attractive and possible for the retreatant to do the same.”

Of Dying, Rising and Community

Meanwhile, other prominent voices in the church work to create Catholic spiritual experiences that are both specifically for men and resist the entitlement and misogyny of others’ agendas. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., has spent decades developing, teaching and leading rites of initiation for men, helping them to face both their willfulness and their fragility so that they may know new freedom and life in Christ.

“The whole notion of initiation,” he explains, “was to critique the male power journey. The discovery of culture after culture is that if the young male doesn’t make the journey of powerlessness, [he], and therefore the middle-aged male and the older male, will always abuse power.”

He finds support for that insight in Scripture. “You go back to Jesus’ initiation rites for his Twelve; he’s always trying to get them to come down and they always want to go up. It’s all about power. If you take his own initiation rite in the desert, the three temptations in my opinion are all temptations of the misuse of power.”

Of course, the journey into humility and trust is hardly limited to men, a point Father Rohr acknowledges. “The Paschal mystery, that’s true across the board. That’s the shape of Christ, the shape of reality.”

Mr. McGrath, who has gone through Father Rohr’s “rites of passage” retreat, agrees: “Every man and every woman is going to face these times of descent in their life when they’re knocked off their horse, or they have an illness or lose a job or a relationship or a family member.” The rites of initiation retreat, he explains, offers a “dying before dying,” a place in which we can experience that essential fragility of our life and also “experience the redemption—God rushing in.”

But Father Rohr resists the notion that gender should be discounted. “Symbols, stories, archetypes are entrance points,” he explains. “There are different stories and symbols that open the male soul, the male psyche, than open the female.”

He sees in the church oftentimes a lack of serious attention to what speaks to men. “Just take liturgy,” he suggests. “The whole liturgical style is too verbal for most men, is too priest-centered and also too feminine, ironically, in the sense that we try to make it so pretty with our vestments, with our colors and candles and incense and all the things we Catholics use.

“I’m not saying they all need to be thrown out, but it’s pretty apparent to me this whole symbol system does not engage the typical male. He’s bored by it.”

“I think men want and crave ritual,” says Mr. McGrath. “They want ritual that speaks to their guts. And what do we give them at Mass? It’s like the teacher in Peanuts: ‘Wah wah wah.’” He thinks the fact that many men spend their weekends watching sports instead is no coincidence. “Watching a football game, I’m offered a noble vision of life and challenges that echo the challenges that I face at work. The fight that’s going on in a football game, the strategy, that’s real to me.”

Andrew Hennessy, O.F.M.Conv., understands the problem in terms of community. “There isn’t as much social space for guys,” he says. “You don’t have the Elks Club or Knights of Columbus as much anymore.”

“I think men want and crave ritual that speaks to their guts. And what do we give them at Mass? It’s like the teacher in Peanuts: ‘Wah wah wah.’”

And the Catholic men’s groups filling the gap today do not always seem to be thinking about the men themselves. He recalls one such parish group: “The whole thing was: ‘We’ll have a monthly meeting, an hour of adoration and confessions.’ It was flat, nothing creative about it at all, just kind of ‘Men, let’s get together and do this stuff that Catholics keep saying that we should do.’”

Mr. Francis agrees. The Demontreville retreat is effective, he says, because it provides a space for men to share in “nonverbal camaraderie.”

“You’ll have 71 guys sitting there in silence [between sessions], someone’s taking notes and somebody’s reading Bible verses and someone’s really in tune with one of the readings. It’s a very unique opportunity.

“I don’t think you’re going to find another place that has nonverbal bonding like that. It’s not going to happen at your local Mass, your local church.”

In his work with young adults in southern Indiana, Friar Hennessy has organized unusual events like taking a group to an axe-throwing range in nearby Louisville or running an afternoon of wiffle ball, in each instance followed by some sort of experience of prayer and conversation. “A friar who works in H.R. once told me the thing that brings men together is working together and playing together,” Friar Hennessy explains. “I think for guys you need to have enough activity, so people can get comfortable. If you ask guys to be real too fast, you won’t get much.

“I don’t think you sell the faith to people,” says Friar Hennessy. “I always try to tell myself, I’m not going to pretend that I’m interested in someone’s salvation unless I’m interested in them as a person first.”

Masculinity Built on Tenderness and Friendship

One other topic that comes up frequently in discussions about the church and men is modeling. So often the church promotes priests and bishops as examples for other men to emulate. And yet consider a typical Sunday Mass, says Father Rohr: “We priests dressing up in sometimes elaborate clothing; it differentiates us from every man in the room. [It says]: ‘I am special; I am a unique man.’”

Such differentiation not only separates priests from other men, it diminishes their effectiveness as role models. Margaret Guider, O.S.F., associate professor of missiology and chair of the ecclesiastical faculty at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry, says the priesthood “becomes kind of the exemplar of a virtuous masculinity that other men can’t really embody or embrace. ‘I could never be like Father so and so; he’s such a great guy.’”

Meanwhile, she notes, “we can’t seem to get traction in the mainstream press with the kind of Catholic men informed by Catholic social teaching, by a commitment to the Gospel and a sense of collaboration.”

Historically, the church has long wrapped itself in images of male assertiveness and power, laying the groundwork for many of the issues we now confront. “In recent centuries, the pope has been both symbol and cipher for an authoritarian ruler,” wrote Paul Elie in The New York Times last year. “As Western governments became more expressive of the will of the governed, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has been seen, by contrast, as a figure vested in bulletproof pre-modern absolutes, immune to electoral or popular pressures, accountable to God alone.”

Pope Francis, says Mr. Elie, offers the church a fresh alternative. “Francis has acted on his conviction that Catholic faith is less about the use of power to shape the social order—the stuff of present strongmen and past popes—than about straightforward efforts of kindness and generosity.” He is “the anti-strongman,” who resists “the ‘Rome has spoken’ approach of his predecessors.”

Mr. McGrath likewise sees in the pope a model of a man who has faced his own dark side and allowed himself to be transformed. “If you’ve been on top all along, what are you going to say? ‘Toe the line.’ But if you’ve been to the bottom, in the mud and the ashes, then you’re going to know the mercy of God.”

When it came to the consistory that elected Francis, Sister Guider muses, “I think it wasn’t that we wanted a new kind of pope, but we wanted a new kind of man as pope. We were looking for another way of being man and priest.” In particular, she says, “we put a primacy on being a man in the sense of being a friend, being somebody worthy of trust.”

Amid the larger social conversation about toxic masculinity, Sister Guider wonders if the church could not promote conversation around this more “tender” or “virtuous” masculinity. “What kind of reflections can the church offer on friendship,” she asks, “on brotherhood, on what it means to be a neighbor and a companion with others. If you scratch the surface, in every man’s life you’ll find those relationships, maybe not lived perfectly, but experiences they can hang onto.

“Those relationships are there in the infrastructure of a virtuous masculinity.”

Mr. Francis sees that experience of friendship come to life on retreat. “You’re focused on the guy next to you; he’s a guy like you and you’re going through this together.

“There’s a bonding that goes on…that makes the group believe and become better men.”

Many who work with men in the church want it to provide spaces where men can be honest even about the messiest parts of their lives. In that sharing lies the key both to men’s own transformations and a healthier society for all.

The Men’s Project conducted by Jesuit Social Services gives women, men and children a chance to share their experiences and struggles in relationship, so they can learn from and help one another. And Julie Edwards wonders if it might be a model for church and society too.

“Any system that doesn’t have equality in terms of governance,” says Ms. Edwards, “is missing out on the insights, the wisdom, the intelligence and the gifts that could be exercised.

“And we know in these sorts of systems that the more gendered roles are, the more violence often there is, too. You don’t see your own privilege because you’re experiencing the world through a completely different lens.”

Many who work with men in the church want it to provide spaces where men can also be honest even about the messiest parts of their lives. In that sharing lies the key both to men’s own transformations and a healthier society for all, they say.

“What do we do in a culture where there’s no place for men to work with those aspects of ourselves we have not integrated yet?” wonders Father Lickteig. “It seems like the one option available to us is to ratchet things down; watch your behavior. If you’re religious it means you’re all buttoned up.”

“The church can help us see our lives in the most noble terms of all,” says Mr. McGrath. “But we have to get real.”

He proposes one further model for the church to consider—Greg Boyle, S.J., founder of Homeboy Industries, an antigang initiative in Los Angeles. “That guy gets so real,” Mr. McGrath says, “that he gets guys who have been taught their whole lives to be tough to share their real life. Their sadness, pain and anger—all that stuff can come in. He doesn’t say, ‘Keep that outside.’

“And I know Jesus didn’t either.”

This article appears in May 27 2019.