The Church calls Saint Joseph the Terror of Demons. A carpenter. A foster father. A man who speaks not a single word in Scripture. And hell is terrified of him.
In this episode, John Heinen sits down with Devin Schadt, executive director of the Fathers of Saint Joseph, to unpack the four reasons Satan hates Saint Joseph. These are the virtues that send demons running. The same virtues every Catholic man is called to build.
Most men feel it before they can name it. That slow, quiet sense that life is just happening to you. Work has become a treadmill, marriage a parallel operation, faith something rote and obligatory. John Heinen and Devin Schadt go deep on what's actually behind male drift and why the standard diagnosis misses the real problem entirely.
They trace how the invention of adolescence quietly dismantled the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, why 59% of men between 24 and 29 don't actually feel like adults, and how men have been inheriting that deficit ever since.
Today we unpack the distinction between vocation and occupation and why a man who has traded the first for the second will always feel like something is missing, no matter how much he achieves. We discuss Aquinas on the order of charity, what it means to have solid convictions versus just ambition, why hope requires something genuinely difficult to be real, and what St. Ambrose meant when he said the man rightly called a king is the one who makes his own body an obedient subject.
We know the temptations that hunt us, the ones we can't seem to outrun no matter how serious we get about our interior life. In this episode, John Heinen and Devin Schadt walk through a practical four-temptation framework with the corresponding virtues that combat each one. From lust as a disordered desire rather than a foreign attack, to the "respectable sin" of greed we praise as ambition, to the pride we cannot see in ourselves, to the sloth hiding inside our busiest days.
What did Jesus mean, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”
Could our Lord, by means of this haunting cry, be admitting defeat?
Furthermore, Our Lord appears to be saying that He believes that God His Father has left Him.
However, Jesus, to be a perfect sacrificial offering to God, was intent on identifying Himself as sin, though He had sinned not.
Our Lord willed to embrace the experience of abandonment that the sinner experiences when separated from God.
Indeed, Jesus deemed it necessary to endure the abandonment caused by sin for the purpose of fully redeeming all sinners.
John Hienen, owner of The Catholic Gentleman, said that often men treat Lent as though it is “extra credit,” as though we are being kind to God by offering Him a little extra. How nice. Lent is not an add-on feature, a bonus segment on a liturgical app, an extra rep, or an extra lap around the track.Lent is essential.You will only have so many Lents—perhaps seventy or eighty for those who are granted a longer life. “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10)Indeed, how many of these Lents have we embraced to the fullest?
John Hienen, owner of The Catholic Gentleman, said that often men treat Lent as though it is “extra credit,” as though we are being kind to God by offering Him a little extra. How nice. Lent is not an add-on feature, a bonus segment on a liturgical app, an extra rep, or an extra lap around the track.Lent is essential.You will only have so many Lents—perhaps seventy or eighty for those who are granted a longer life. “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10)Indeed, how many of these Lents have we embraced to the fullest?
John Hienen, owner of The Catholic Gentleman, said that often men treat Lent as though it is “extra credit,” as though we are being kind to God by offering Him a little extra. How nice. Lent is not an add-on feature, a bonus segment on a liturgical app, an extra rep, or an extra lap around the track.Lent is essential.You will only have so many Lents—perhaps seventy or eighty for those who are granted a longer life. “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10)Indeed, how many of these Lents have we embraced to the fullest?
Pride among Catholic men rarely looks like arrogance. What men don't realize is that it surfaces as control, self-reliance, withdrawal, or even habits that appear virtuous on the surface. In this episode of The Catholic Gentleman, John Heinen and Devin Schadt are joined by Patrick O’Hearn to examine why pride is so difficult to recognize in ourselves—and why it quietly blocks growth in the spiritual life, marriage, and leadership.
They unpack why the Litany of Humility remains one of the Church’s most demanding prayers, and how it exposes attachments that many men don’t realize they’re carrying.