Conference attendees encouraged and inspired to live as 'Men of Christ'

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PROVIDENCE — On Saturday, April 22, the annual Men’s Conference was held at the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul. Organized by the Office of Faith Formation, the theme for this year’s conference was “Made For Sacrifice.”
The day’s events began with Holy Mass celebrated by Bishop Thomas J. Tobin, followed by a breakfast and presentations by two keynote speakers. In attendance were roughly 50 men, including laity, deacons and priests, ranging from young adults to seniors.
Chris Mueller, a native of Murrietta, California, is a public speaker, youth minister, writer, and blogger. He regularly gives talks at the Steubenville Youth Conferences and hosted the television show Everyday Catholic with EWTN.
Mueller spent most of his first presentation describing his journey of faith. The son of a Catholic deacon, he was one of many children raised by a devout Catholic family. While in college, he studied acting; unfortunately, it was also during this time that he began to experience a crisis of faith, feeling that he was living out his Catholicism in an overly mechanistic and shallow manner. Due to the positive influence of his family and an in-depth study of the faith, Mueller realized that the core of Catholicism rests in a living relationship with Christ. It was this realization that anchored him to the faith.
One major lesson that Mueller said he derived from his experiences, which served as the core of his lecture, was that to live in accordance with a genuine understanding of Catholic masculinity is to be a “sign of contradiction.”
“As Catholics in America, in the world, in the modern world, there is something where we’re constantly fighting the current of our culture. It is difficult to be in the world but not of the world, as we say. We have to tap back into what it means to be a man in Christ in this culture,” Mueller said.
Mueller went on to note that genuine Catholic masculinity lies in realizing that the core of our authentic sense of self-identity lies in our relationship with Christ, and that the main way in which the devil attacks us is through blurring our understanding of God and tempting us to define our sense of self-identity in terms of something other than Christ.
“He [the devil] takes and he tries to twist, he tries to undermine who God is and who we are in God,” Mueller explained, noting that sin creates a false narrative of who we are and who we are meant to be.
Mueller began his second lecture, providing some specific details on how to better live out the Catholic view on manhood, something that he stated was rooted in an adherence to the beatitudes and taking time out of our day to develop a robust prayer life. This leads us to not make our own agenda the motivator of our actions, but a desire to do the will of God.
Following lunch and opportunity for the Sacrament of Confession, the second keynote speaker, Michael Cutone, began his lecture. Cutone is a former Green Beret who has served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a former trooper for the Massachusetts State Police. He developed the “C3 method” of policing, encouraging officers to develop close relationships with the local community and to discern root causes of crime.
As a practicing Catholic, Cutone also takes an interest in the intersection of Catholic theology and various broader moral and leadership-related issues, even publishing a book titled “The Leadership of Jesus: Ten Fundamentals of Leadership.”
Cutone, like Mueller, began his lecture by discussing his personal spiritual journey. Raised in a Catholic family, Cutone enlisted into the military at the age of 17. It was during his time in the military that he began to fall away from his faith, only occasionally attending Mass.
After 20 years away from the Church, he attended the funeral Mass of a relative, during which he began to have a profound experience of the vastness of God’s mercy. After returning to a tour of duty in Kosovo, he began to feel a strong urge to get more deeply involved in the Church, and after returning to the United States he attended confession for the first time since childhood. In the aftermath of this, he began to attend Mass weekly, and began to study the faith more in depth.
Cutone explained that growth in holiness requires us to admit that the spiritual life of man is a perpetual battle between good and evil.
“If you are not willing to admit that we are in a fight,” Cutone said, “then guess what gentlemen? You just lost.”
The fact that we are surrounded by forces attempting to take us away from our faith should not create within us sadness or fear, but rather should embolden us.
“We have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Cutone stated.
The best tools we as Catholics have to maintain and strengthen our holiness in the midst of spiritual combat are the sacraments. Cutone emphasized how the Church believes that the sacraments are means by which we participate in the life of Christ, with the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist being the strongest tools available.
Many present spoke of how the conference talks anchored them to the reality that their relationship with Jesus is something concrete, which in turn motivates us to live lives centered on evangelization.
“Be active in our relationship with God. Jesus isn’t some being far off in some picture or movie. He’s a real person who wants to have a real relationship with us,” said John Tuturice, who frequently attends St. Mary Parish in Providence.
“Our two speakers were absolutely excellent,” said Deacon John Silvia, of St. Barnabas Church in Portsmouth. “They were totally different, but also gave us some really good, warm abilities to be better men in our parishes and also in our families,” Deacon Silvia noted, going on to state that the speakers offered good advice for how to better present the faith with boldness to our larger community.
“The talks were incredible. I really felt the Holy Spirit working through the speakers,” said Nick Rodrigues, a parishioner at St. Patrick Church in Providence. “The biggest lesson is to sacrifice and to remember that there are other people out there like me who are striving to be saints.”