Why Catholicism Is Growing and Shrinking at the Same Time

Curtis Martin on conversions, disaffiliation, and why young people are showing up to Catholicism again.

In the weeks leading up to Easter, headlines pointed to a surge in Catholic conversions across the United States. But the broader data tells a more complicated story: long-term decline, ongoing disaffiliation, and a Church still losing more people than it gains. So what’s actually happening?

Curtis Martin, founder of the FOCUS, argues that both trends are real. While many cradle Catholics continue to drift away, a distinct and unexpected movement is emerging: young people, often college-educated, are discovering the faith for the first time and entering it with intensity.

In this conversation, he reflects on nearly three decades of campus evangelization, the changing cultural conditions shaping belief, and why he sees this moment not as a contradiction—but as a turning point.

At the center is a contested idea: evangelization. What it is, what it isn’t, and why—despite renewed emphasis from Church leadership—it remains widely misunderstood, even within Catholic institutions.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The role of college campuses as a strategic “entry point” for revival

• Whether political polarization is driving religious interest

• The influence of figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan on religious curiosity

• Internal tensions within the Church over how explicitly to propose the faith

• Whether this moment represents a durable renewal—or a temporary spike

This is a conversation about competing narratives, institutional uncertainty, and whether or not the Catholic Church is witnessing the early stages of a genuine revival.

Transcript

Robert Duncan: Curtis Martin, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Curtis Martin: Great to be with you.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to frame this conversation around the alleged rise in interest and in conversions to Catholicism. The New York Times reported in the run-up to Easter that there were many new converts across American dioceses. However, there are other studies, for example, a Pew survey that also found that the general trend still held true. In other words, people who were raised Catholic, cradle Catholics, are still disaffiliating. So, it seems like two things can be true at the same time. There are new converts, but at the same time, Christianity and Catholicism is becoming less popular. So, what’s going on?

Curtis Martin: I think two things can be true at the same time, but not in the same way. And there are two things that are very much going on. Those who have been raised Catholic are disengaged, as they have been for decades now, and they’re drifting away. And that’s been a real trend. What is unique and is also true is a re-engagement, both of those who drifted away a while ago and are returning, those who were never Catholic but may have been raised Christian, and those who were never Christian are now becoming Catholic. And it’s a significant trend. I mean, we’re talking about our work on college campuses, and college campuses — just to go back, we’ve been at this for 30 years. They’re not the place to go to become Catholic. It was the place to go to leave the faith. But we’re talking dozens of campuses with hundreds of converts. Texas A&M breaks the record with 500 this year alone. But it’s taking place all over the place. And it’s not just FOCUS. It’s not just the United States. It’s a global phenomenon. But we’re seeing a large dose of it in the United States. And through focus, both in parishes and on campuses, there’s a very real trend that is trending towards the young and trending at a higher percentage than usual towards men. So young men in particular, young women, and then people of all ages are all coming in. And it’s extraordinary to see. I think there’s some fun things we can talk about.

"We’re talking dozens of campuses with hundreds of converts. Texas A&M breaks the record with 500 this year alone. But it’s taking place all over the place. … It’s a global phenomenon.”

Robert Duncan: Just for people who don’t know who you are, tell us a little bit about FOCUS. You mentioned that you work on college campuses.

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I founded focus about 28 years ago. We’ve been working on college campuses all that time. About 10 years ago, we started experimenting in parishes as well. What does work mean? It means we send live missionaries onto campuses, into parishes, and they start to work with the people and engage them. The average priest in a busy parish doesn’t have time to do a lot of outreach. So we keep doing outreach, welcoming new people in. So we like to say we can’t make a parish or a campus a great ministry. But if the priest does, we can make it big. So we’re able to invite people in. And it’s been extraordinarily fruitful. 28 years of consistent growth year over year. And in the last few years, explosive new momentum to even greater growth.

Robert Duncan: Great. So one interesting intersection is there’s a religion analyst, Ryan Burge, who said that an important segment of the new converts are people who are from maybe higher-income families or the college-educated, which is sort of the opposite of what’s happening in Europe. The more college-educated you are, the less likely it is that you’re going to continue to go to church when you graduate.

Curtis Martin: No, I think that trend is true on both the United States and Europe. And it was true in the United States until maybe post-COVID, where all of a sudden this swing started to happen. And I think Europe, in talking to friends, I think that it’s happening probably first in Eastern Europe and then hopefully in Western Europe, where this trend is going to take place, where people are returning, even those with education. But let’s be honest. I mean, the universities have been loaded for bear against the church for decades. And so to recognize the attack in the classroom through deconstruction, radical theories, the attack in the lives of students through student life programs and kind of the free love activities that are on campus, all of this undermines the faith. And yet in the midst of all of that, almost like salmon beginning to swim upstream into fresh water. It’s kind of a weird thing. Who would do that? We’re a saltwater fish. These young people are swimming against the current of the culture and surprising the Church and Church leaders by their interest. I actually think it presents a tremendous challenge to the Church. Are we ready to welcome them? I don’t think we are. So what can we do to welcome them? Because they will need to be welcomed personally, graciously, or they will drift right into the Church and right through the Church, and hopefully not, but right back outside of the Church. So it’s a tremendous opportunity and challenge for us who have faith to recognize now is the time. The fields are ripe for harvest. Jesus said that 2,000 years ago, but it is uniquely present in my life. I’ve never seen anything like what we’re living through.

Robert Duncan: To what extent do you think this sort of cynical read of this trend, which would say that this revival is in part a proxy for political polarization, that as people are more divided politically, conservatives are more likely to embrace sort of a hardline religious take or perspective?

Curtis Martin: I think that cynical read, as is often the case, is half true. I mean, there’s a certain sense in which pressures are absolutely at work. It doesn’t mean that necessarily people are functioning with the same level of despair as the critics have. And so I think what’s happening is that the young people today have drunk deeply of the culture and are wildly dissatisfied. That doesn’t mean they take their dissatisfaction and move to the church. I think what we’re seeing in talking to them, they find Christ, He satisfies, and then from a place of satisfaction, they move into the church. So there’s a shift in experience and temperament and personality that people are experiencing first that are Christ-centered, these experiences, and then they’re finding a home. The skeptics would say, well, I’m a grumpy liberal, and now you’re becoming a grumpy conservative. Actually, the grumpiness is the part that’s changing. When you meet these people, you were at NYU, you were in New York, I mean, these people live differently. They’re filled with joy. You don’t find a lot of joy in the culture. And to take the joy out of this journey would be to miss the entire point completely.

Robert Duncan: So do you feel that FOCUS is there to catch this new wave of converts that maybe many of them have discovered Catholicism on their own? Or is FOCUS part of the agency, the causal explanation for why this rise is happening in the first place?

Curtis Martin: I think it’s both and. I mean, the reality of the matter is it’s the opposite of a vicious cycle. It’s a cycle of grace. And so God is working first, and then we go out into the field. But our presence in the field also increases the energy that draws people to grace, and then the grace returns. And so it’s this wonderful cycle that we see. And so oftentimes our missionaries are working very, very hard. They’re spending hundreds of hours with people, and the response rate is relatively slow but real. Other times people just fall into our lap. We showed up in Ireland. The first person we met walked up to us and said, “What are you guys doing?” “Well, we’re Catholic missionaries.” “Are you kidding me? I was just hoping that I could meet some Catholics.” A divine appointment. So sometimes it’s super, super easy. Sometimes they’re knocking our door down. Our job is to go out and befriend people. Because God loves us. He loves them. And to befriend them, period. But in the midst of those friendships, Christianity comes up. Catholicism comes up. And so we’ve seen momentum for 28 years. But there is something different going on right now. And it’s not just in the first world. It’s going on throughout the world. But excitingly enough, in the first world, which has been the part of the world that’s been so devastated by the lack of faith in North America, Western Europe, and we’re seeing France. FOCUS doesn’t have a presence in France. But articles are being written about a return to the faith there as well. So we’re a very small player in this much bigger work of God. But I grew up in Southern California surfing. And when the waves come, when surf is up, go surfing. And the waves are up. The waves of grace are up. So it’s a great time to be out there working with people.

Robert Duncan: I want to talk more with you about the reasons for that. But before I do, can you just give me a clearer sense of what FOCUS missionaries do? And if somebody came to you and wants to be a FOCUS missionary, what do you train them to do? What are the specific sort of …

Curtis Martin: Yeah, so they’re trained in the Catholic life. So they’re praying. They’re praying a holy hour every day. They’re going to Mass every day. It’s the foundation of everything, the relationship with Jesus Christ. You can’t give what you don’t have. And so they’re living a life of deep faith. And then from that overflow, they go out and do their work. I remember I was playing volleyball one day with a group of FOCUS missionaries. And a guy walks up and says, “So what do you guys do?” And I said, “We go out and live with college students and share a life with them.” And I’m waiting to cycle in on the volleyball court. And he goes, “Well, you just hang out with them?” “Yeah.” “And they talk to you?” “Yeah.” He goes, “I don’t think that’ll work.” I said, “It’s working right now. You came up to me and asked me what we’re doing here.” You know what happens at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at USC, at Harvard, when people are together, particularly when they’re radiating joy, people are attracted to it almost like a moth to light. I mean, our hearts were made for joy. We live in a world with not much joy.

When you see a group of people living in joy, we just find ourselves gravitating. We have a gal who just left our staff after about seven years. It’s her first day of college. She saw a group of people that were joyful and happy, all by herself, desperately alone, thinking, what am I going to do? And she just kind of gravitates to the group. The group opens up the circle a little more. And they’re laughing. And she said, this is interesting. She finds out, well, they’re Catholic. That’s interesting. She wasn’t Catholic. And they’re all involved with FOCUS, either staff or students. And she goes, interesting. They invite her to dinner. She went. She didn’t have any other friends. And she said, it was interesting. She had been raised Buddhist in Asia. She had no concept of Christianity. But these friendships made it so that by the end of the first semester, by Christmas, she wanted to be a Catholic. And by the end of the second semester, she was Catholic. So these people are converting from all walks of life to Christ because other people who know Christ live friendship and joy right in front of them.

Robert Duncan: So one thing I remember from my time at NYU and my encounters with FOCUS missionaries there was that the FOCUS missionaries would not only organize prayer groups and facilitate Bible studies, but also that they would approach people sort of randomly, and in our case, Washington Square Park, and just strike up conversations with people they may not have known if they were Catholic or not. So how do you train people for that kind of cold call, so to speak?

Curtis Martin: No, the primary work is friendship. And so it’s activities like that. But we also do train our staff to be able to start a conversation from nothing. And what’s surprising is most people think, well, that’s weird. That’s going to be awkward. And it does feel awkward. But people are desperately lonely, more lonely than at any point in time in history. And when we lean in in a friendly sort of way, it never goes really badly. People never say, ah, get out of here. They never call the police. They never start a physical altercation. Some people say, you know what, no thanks. And that’s fine. We respect that and move on. But frequently, we’re met by people who are intrigued. I was just flying out to Rome on the plane. The woman, I was traveling with one of our priest friends. And the gal next to him said, I just came into the Church last week. And they started a two-hour conversation on the airplane. Just trying to be present. We like to think of the model of Jesus, who didn’t sit in heaven, but rather took flesh and came down and shared life, first with Joseph and Mary, but then later with the apostles. This radical attention. I mean, it’s crazy how much time he spent. Think about it. He was 30 years old when he started his public ministry, which means he had the biggest job in the history of the world. And he was 30 years old and living at home. Most people say, really, he probably ought to get a job. But think about where, it sounds like my house, where he was living. He was living with the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the greatest place on earth since the Garden of Eden. No rush to get on with it. And when he got on with it, he really got on with it. But he did the same thing. He just went and lived a radical relationship with 12 men for three years. Didn’t get on an airplane. He could have come when there were airplanes. Didn’t use a phone. Could have come when there were phones. Didn’t even travel outside the Middle East or the Holy Land as an adult. It was a crazy, deep dive. And that’s what we’re offering. Deep dive first with God, love Him, and spend lots of time with Him. And then deep dive with a few other people and spend lots of time with Him. And it’s changing lives.

Robert Duncan: I’m sure you get this a lot. Some people listening may think, oh, gosh, that sounds more Protestant than Catholic.

Curtis Martin: Right.

Robert Duncan: Well, what have you learned from the way Protestants, evangelicals do outreach?

Curtis Martin: No, I mean, the evangelicals and the Protestants are great. I mean, they do a wonderful job. But I was asked one time to go back and give a talk to Campus Crusade for Christ, or CRU as it’s known now. I said, why did you leave CRU? I was away from the Church for a few years, formed by CRU. Why did you leave CRU and return to the Catholic Church? I said, well, you taught me to memorize Scripture. And it was one word in one of the verses you taught me, the Great Commission. Go teach them to observe all that I’ve commanded you. As an evangelical, I believed most of what he taught. But as a Catholic, I believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. I believe in Marian devotion. I believe in bishops. And to be able to see this is all that he taught. And so we have the encouragement by the example of our evangelicals, but we’re bringing an authentically Catholic Gospel. And the Church is very clear about this. So not all Catholics read all the Church documents, but St. Paul VI said the Church exists in order to evangelize. It’s her deepest identity. By the very nature of that statement, you can’t make that statement about a lot of different things. A lot of things aren’t your deepest identity. But according to St. Paul VI, in one of the most beautiful documents on evangelization, he says the Church exists in order to evangelize. It’s her deepest identity. So when people say, well, that sounds Protestant, I would say, I think you’ve got a memory problem. Our deepest identity is that we would be evangelizing. We should be inspired by them, just as we should be inspired by the fact that they read their Scriptures regularly. We should, too. We should understand it within the heart of the Church. And that’s a beautiful thing about being Catholic.

Robert Duncan: Great. So let’s talk about evangelization and what works and what doesn’t work. The company I work for, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, their 2025-2028 Mission Directive is to “equip bishops, clergy, religious, and the laity in evangelizing those who are religiously unaffiliated or disaffiliated from the Church with a special focus on young adults and the youth.” To some extent — first, I mean, you may want to react to that. That’s the mission priority. If that’s our deepest identity, why is it now a mission priority?

Curtis Martin: Well, I had the good fortune of serving the bishop’s conference and the committee on evangelization. Bishop Barron, that’s his language. He was referencing the nones, those who have no religious affiliation. It was a strong emphasis that was coming about. And it took a while to get there for the national priority. But I remember sitting in the committee meetings, I served for six years, and I think it’s just this, we have to return to who we are. I would argue that in some ways Catholics have a memory problem. We need to remember who we are. In fact, memory problem can be quite serious. If you have Alzheimer’s, it will kill you, and it’s a memory problem. So knowing who we are is critically important. And, in fact, the key, the first sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church talks about knowing. It quotes Jesus. There are 2,865 articles in the Catechism. The first three sentences are quotes from Jesus, Paul, and Peter before Article I. The first sentence, Jesus says, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent. To remember, to know. And so we want to awaken Catholics to this knowledge that it’s important to know things about God, and Catholics do. We know when he was born. We know that he died. But do we know him? Do we talk to him? It’s actually easier to be in relationship with him now than it was 2,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago, you would have had to get to Palestine to meet him. Because of the resurrection, he can meet you in prayer at any moment and at every moment of your life. He’s radically present to you. But do we take the time, or do we allow ourselves to be distracted and then forget who we are and why we’re here? So I think the bishops are wisely calling Catholics to remember who we are, maybe more important, whose we are. We’re God’s. We were created by him and for him. And then to get on mission. And so I love the emphasis that the bishops have. I think it’s also true in the Universal Church. I serve and have served on the Dicastery for the Vatican here on evangelization. It’s gone through a couple of name changes. But I was a founding member of the council when it began for the new evangelization, and it’s kind of morphed, and it’s now the Dicastery for Evangelization. But this is the Holy Father’s effort on a universal level to evangelize. And I’m hearing very similar things. I actually think that in some ways the U.S. bishops are quite a bit more clear than the international bishops. And that’s not a criticism of the international bishops. Evangelization means something very different. I served at the Synod of Bishops here in Rome with Pope Benedict. We were together with the Holy Father for three and a half weeks. And in the first few days, I realized evangelization means one thing in Western Europe, the United States, kind of waking up comatose Catholics, if you will, and then getting them on mission. And that’s a great sense. But in Asia and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it means finding resources because people are coming by the hundreds of thousands, and there’s just no resources. But in Islamic countries, it means if I baptize this person, they’re going to burn the village down. How do I welcome people without setting off cultural chaos? Those are very different questions. And so it makes sense that the international bishops would be a little more disjointed because they’re actually answering parts of that question differently. U.S. bishops are highly aligned on the realization that the Catholic Church needs to become an evangelizing force. It’s who we are, and we’ve forgotten who we are.

Robert Duncan: So that’s a really interesting global sort of view of how it can mean different things in different contexts. In the U.S. context, you’ve said on some of these meetings, that this language was developed by particular bishops. But speaking to you now, it seems very plain what evangelization means in the U.S. context. But nevertheless, there are meetings that develop. And so I wonder, what are the different shades of perspective as that language is crafted and the specifics of how that priority sort of come to fruition? What are the different perspectives or considerations that could take place?

Curtis Martin: No, I think it’s a great question. I would say it’s clearer, but I don’t think it’s clear. In fact, I would say that you mentioned this a little while ago, but 28 years ago when we were announcing, hey, we’re going to do this with FOCUS, the typical response was, “I don’t think that’s Catholic. What do you mean you’re going to evangelize?” And there was a resistance to the notion of evangelization. Thanks to the great work of the Holy Fathers, the American bishops, the work of God, hopefully to some degree the work of FOCUS, there’s an openness to evangelization that is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago.

Robert Duncan: What would explain the resistance?

Curtis Martin: Well, I do think the only experience they’d had of evangelization were evangelicals or Mormons, you know, going door to door and knocking, like, we’re not kind of the — nothing wrong with going door to door, but that’s not the typical mode. And so there was just kind of this stiffening in the back. Even I would say the same thing was true 30 years ago when we said, we’re going to do small group Bible studies. And a response that you’d hear from Catholics is, I don’t know if we should be studying the Bible, because that’s what Protestants did, and Protestants, God bless them, would come up with wrong conclusions. The Catholic Church isn’t the true Church. And so there was a nervousness, and to be able to lead by example, not get into the argument, I don’t think explanation works nearly as well as demonstration. So we just demonstrated, you can study the Scriptures and evangelize young people, and they will come to faith. I mean, now FOCUS, by the grace of God, is the largest vocational resource in the Church. More men in seminary, more women in the convents, more young people getting married and really intending what the Church intends when it talks about marriage.

That’s all happening through evangelization and Scripture study. And so I would say today the idea of evangelization would be met much more warmly, but not much more clearly. You get into a conversation, people say, yeah, I’m in favor of evangelization. Well, let’s talk about that. Well, you know, I think it’s important to be welcoming. Okay, that’s hospitality, that’s not evangelization. Well, I think it’s important to be forgiving. Okay, that’s forgiveness, that’s not evangelization. Evangelization is in the midst of this relationship to be able to share with somebody clearly that there’s a God who loves them, and that we are separated from His love because of sin. Adam and Eve sinned first in our sin, and it’s a big problem. It’s an insurmountable problem. We sinned against an infinitely good God. We have an infinite debt that we can’t pay. And Jesus Christ, the only one who could because He was God and man, came and took our sins upon Himself and reunited us with God through His passion and death. But it’s not enough to know that. That’s the gift. But you have to open the gift and receive it. And do you want to do that and accept Him as Lord and as Savior? And our experience is as Catholics make these decisions explicitly, even though implicitly was already kind of there, when it becomes explicit, it changes everything. You can imagine being in a relationship with a girl, and it’s nice and you’re getting to know each other, and all of a sudden it comes to the point where you say, I love you. Now, you must have loved her two minutes earlier, or you couldn’t have said it. You’d be a liar. But you hadn’t said it yet. And when you declare your love, it changes a relationship. And most Catholics have never had an opportunity. I have a priest friend, and he said he was talking to his dad. He goes, Dad, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? I’ll clean it up for the podcast. But he said, What the heck? (That wasn’t) the real word. What the heck are you talking about? I go to Mass every Sunday. It’s just, he’s a good guy. He goes to Mass every Sunday. His son’s a priest. But the idea of a personal relationship with Christ just isn’t a category that Catholics were comfortable with. And that’s a tragedy.

Imagine if somebody said, Well, Curtis, do you have a personal relationship with your wife? And I said, Well, what the heck are you talking about? I have dinner with her every night. You’d say, There’s something weird about that marriage. Of course I have a personal relationship with my wife. And our relationship with God should be reflected. God created marriage as an icon of our relationship with Him and His relationship as a blessed trinity amongst the three persons of the trinity. And so this relationship piece is critical. And we’re getting the word out, and people are hearing it. But when people talk today about evangelization, they’re not as clear about that. They’ll frequently replace it with something. Well, you know, I teach catechism. Okay, that’s catechesis. That’s not evangelization. If we know what it is, and I’m seeing a dramatic swing. We’re in Denver, and we just got a new archbishop, Archbishop Golka. And he preached the Gospel at his installation Mass. It was just Easter Sunday, a couple days later. And the priest who was involved with FOCUS as a college student is now a priest. He’s our pastor, Father Greg. And he got a lot of people there on Easter Sunday that don’t come all the time. And he just preached the Gospel and invited people to make a decision for Christ. And then kind of jokingly at the end said, By the way, I hope to see you next week. We do this every week because a lot of those people, the church was packed, standing room only. And there was a second Mass going on in the hall because so many people were there for Sunday. That should be every Sunday.

Robert Duncan: Yeah, what is going on with Denver? I mean, Denver is seen as, you know, for decades now, a home of so much of this Catholic life. News agencies have been founded there, FOCUS.

Curtis Martin: Absolutely.

Robert Duncan: So what’s going on in that diocese?

Curtis Martin: Well, I don’t want to oversimplify, John Paul II came there for a week in 1993, World Youth Day. And it was extraordinary. I would happen to be there. I didn’t live in Denver at the time. And I don’t know that I ever had been to Denver, but I was there. I’m traveling this week with Dr. Edward Sri. Dr. Edward Sri and I were there. Tim Gray was there. Archbishop Chaput, at that time he was the Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, was there. And it was amazing. I remember being at a youth rally and the emcees said, who was at World Youth Day in 1993? And none of the youth raised their hands because they were all too young. But everybody backstage raised their hand. Like, oh, Jeff Cavins. It was a massive impact. And within a couple of years, the Pope had appointed Archbishop Chaput to Denver. He had become a dear friend by that time. I met him the week of World Youth Day. And he asked me to come and move FOCUS to Denver and move my family to Denver so we could launch FOCUS. And it just became this gathering place. And I do think we’ve been blessed. Cardinal Stafford was there before Archbishop Chaput, then Archbishop Chaput, then Archbishop Aquila, and now Archbishop Golka. We’ve had great leadership. The seminary’s gone through tremendous renewal. And so there’s lots of stuff going on. Endow is there. The Catholic Biblical School is there. Camp Wojtyla is there, again, named after John Paul II, his baptismal name, Karol Wojtyła. All of these things flowing to some degree from an inspiration that came from, I would argue, the greatest man on earth at that time coming and sharing a week with people in Denver. It’s a great place to be.

Robert Duncan: So maybe to get into a bit more of the specifics with regard to helping the bishops do this work of evangelization, if a bishop doesn’t feel, or a person or their staff doesn’t feel that they’re equipped to do evangelization, maybe they reacted the way you described, saying, this feels weird. What do you tell them?

Curtis Martin: Well, I always think that our strategy from the very beginning has been coalition of the willing. I’m not trying to convince anybody. We’re out having conversations, and some people lean in and say, that’s very interesting. Other people sit back and cross their arms and say, that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince you. I want to go with those who want to talk. And so, and FOCUS has grown. And it was actually Pope Benedict, before he was pope, I had an opportunity to meet with Cardinal Ratzinger in the early formative days of FOCUS. And on this issue, I said, the meeting was arranged, and I said, “Your Eminence, we have a limitation we’re placing on ourselves, and it may kill us before we even get started. And that is, we don’t want to go anywhere where the local bishop doesn’t bless us. And we really think it’s important that, you know, the Church is the Church. There’s one Church, and it’s built on bishops. And we want it to be functioning under their authority and with their blessing.” And Cardinal Ratzinger, he’s a very soft-spoken man. He leaned forward and said, “Do you know 10 bishops?” And I said, “I don’t know if I know 10.” And he goes, “If you go to the bishops you know, and God blesses what you’re doing, they will tell their friends, and you will never have a shortage of bishops.” And I think that’s the brilliance. We don’t need to convince the skeptics. Over time, they will either age out or their hearts will soften. But there’s no sense in spending a lot of time with them. Go where you’re wanted, and there’s never been a shortage. We’ve never not grown in FOCUS because of a lack of bishop support. And so it’s been wonderful to see, not only have they supported us in the sense of sending missionaries to their diocese, but they support us in a way we never would have anticipated. They put some of their best, most faithful, most talented priests in the venues we serve, whether it’s a campus or a parish. And that’s an unbelievable gift because one of the things I can testify after 30 years is the priesthood is real, it’s powerful. And I don’t want to oversimplify, but in some ways what we’re doing are bringing people who don’t go to church already, either they’re not Catholic or they’re not practicing, back to the church, to the sacraments, which are offered by the priest. And so that’s powerful. If the priest doesn’t love his priesthood, if he doesn’t love people, if he doesn’t know the Scriptures, if he’s not clear about Christ, they’ll walk away again. And so it’s been amazing to watch this real clarity. And I think the renewal in the lives of the bishops and the lives of the priests has been something that’s been extraordinary to watch for the last 30 years. It’s real, it’s very noticeable. And as a layman, I have no control over it whatsoever, but I can rejoice in it. I feel like I have a front row seat. It’s like you get invited to an athletic event, an NBA game or whatever, and somebody says, you can have the front row seat. I’m not playing the game, but I’m really close to the action. And to be able to see the amazing things that are going on in the lives of the priests and the bishops and the young seminarians will be at the North American College this week and it’s just amazing to see. I’m filled with hope when I see these young, bright, talented, but more importantly, faithful men who are studying and will be the priests of the future very, very quickly.

And because of the nature of the North American College, these men are from all over the country. They’re getting to know each other, but they’re also getting to know leaders in the Church. And so statistically, they’re more likely to become bishops if they’re here than if they were at another seminary back in the States. So the leadership of the Church, not just the priests, but the leadership in all likelihood of the next generation are passing in a very unique way through the North American College for the United States. And it’s just so encouraging to see the quality of these men. And as I travel to the seminaries, we do a lot of work with seminarians now, and absolutely amazing. Not only are the seminaries getting more full, but the quality, and really, quality’s so important. People talk about growth. Well, you got to talk about quality first. If I came home from the doctor and said, I have a growth, that wouldn’t be a good thing. That’d be a bad thing. Growth of what? We’re talking about growth of vibrant, faithful, joyful men in the seminary, but men and women who are pursuing God’s will wherever He’s leading them. And it’s extraordinary, but it’s because of the quality of what God’s doing individually in their lives that makes the quantity something you’d want to count.

Robert Duncan: Earlier, you said that mercy and welcome are not, these are not, this is not what evangelization is. If I were going to steel man, maybe some of the arguments that bishops who may be more skeptical of your approach would be to say, okay, as a pastor, there are a lot of people who feel alienated, actively alienated by the Church and the Church’s attitudes in the past towards people who have been excluded, the LGBT community or migrants. And so actually evangelization needs to be, before you can do the work of evangelization, you actually have to prioritize welcome and mercy.

Curtis Martin: No, I absolutely agree with that. I’m not saying that welcome or mercy aren’t important. They’re absolutely essential, but let’s use words the way they’re intended to be used, and that is not evangelization. If I hand you a cup of water, that is a corporal work of mercy, and it’s beautiful, and Jesus tells us we should do it. But to say that’s evangelization would be to misuse words. Let me give you an example from your old hometown. So we got to, folks got to NYU, and you know the community well. I mean, the LGBT community is very active in that part of New York, and so we were there, and there was a lot of concern. We were committed, faithful Catholics, and there was actually a town hall meeting to consider whether we should be expelled. And so the meeting starts to happen, and it’s not going well. The folks who are agitating for change and for our removal are making the classic arguments that are made. Catholics are judgmental, blah, blah, blah, and all of these things can be true. I don’t believe they are true, and what happened next demonstrates the truth. A young man got up and said, “I just want to testify as a homosexual that I know these people, and they’ve never been bigoted to me. They’ve been kind and loving. And as a Catholic, I live in a gay community, but I experience bigotry from my gay friends because I choose to live chastely. So the only bigotry I’ve experienced is actually coming from the gay community, not from the Catholic community that you’re concerned about.” And the meeting was over, and defensiveness was dropped, and we’ve developed wonderful friendships with people who are living alternative lifestyles. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you go on a college campus, everybody’s sleeping with somebody. Chastity is not happening on college campuses very often. So it really doesn’t matter, but we’re not a chastity program. We’re an evangelization program. My hope is to introduce you to Jesus Christ. He will call you to chastity, whether you’re heterosexual or homosexual. But that’s secondary, again, really important, but different than evangelization. My hope would be that you or anybody we work with would know that God loves them, because I do believe the world thinks that God doesn’t love them, the Christian God doesn’t love them, and that Catholics don’t love them. And that’s just simply not my experience. We’re all sinners. We all make mistakes. But my experience is that, I mean, I worked in an AIDS hospice sponsored by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity for dying AIDS patients. That is primarily a ministry to homosexual men and some intravenous drug users who also would not be perceived as living by the rules. But that was never the issue. The issue was you need to know that God loves you. You may have lived in a very broken way, but we’d love for you to die knowing God’s love and mercy. And that’s the Catholic heart I know in the pro-life movement. And we just have to live it because the culture would say, we’re judgmental, we’re bigoted. No, we hold ourselves to higher standards because God’s called us to it. But we love people regardless, because God loved me when I was, and still am, a terrible sinner. But St. Paul says, God demonstrates his love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God goes first in the work of reconciliation. So we, as his followers, should go first with other people. So these other issues, which are not unimportant at all, forgiveness and mercy, hospitality, are essential. Joy, peace, patience, kindness, these are essential to evangelization. But we have to be clear about what evangelization is or we’re messing with words.

Robert Duncan: Pope Leo is renewing Pope Francis’s emphasis on listening and welcome. Did FOCUS change as a result in any way, as a result of Francis’s papacy and the emphases that he made on the things we’re talking about?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I mean, I wrote a book called Making Missionary Disciples and begin with a quote from Francis about imagining a Church filled with missionary disciples. And so I think that Francis’s pontificate was incredibly moving in the sense of watching him care for the poor, stopping motorcades to reach out. Very, very compelling. I think his document on the Joy of the Gospel, spectacular. And we read it, studied it together and shared it. So absolutely, I mean, we certainly want to listen to the popes throughout the time. They’re given to us by God for a reason. So now we’re trying to attune our ears to the pontificate of Leo and there’s continuity, which is beautiful and necessary, and there’s also uniqueness. And so Leo is different than John Paul or Benedict or Francis. And at the same time, you can start to chart a line, a trajectory through these pontificates and our hope would be to be aware of that line and trace it all the way back to the pontificate of Peter. We like to talk about a living tradition that we’re right here, right now, alive and faithful to the Church of today. But the Church of today invites us to be faithful to the church of 33 AD, the Church of Pentecost. And so that’s a wonderful tension to live in, of the timelessness and the timeliness of what it means to be a Catholic in the modern world.

Robert Duncan: At the beginning of the conversation, you brought up that many of these new converts are young men. There’s maybe a disproportionate number of men who are interested, again, in religion. You wrote a book called, Boys to Men, and I want to know what your message is to young men and to what extent are you concerned about these fears of toxic masculinity in the religious space?

Curtis Martin: Well, certainly toxic masculinity is a real threat, but I would argue also not what I experience. It’s out there, but the majority of men are striving to be godly men, which is not toxic masculinity at all. For the record, we did write Boys to Men, Tim Gray and I wrote it together. Our dear friend wrote Woman of Grace at the same time. We just felt that the audiences needed to be appealed to differently. In the book for women, the examples are from the scriptures, as is the case with our book, but they’re of the women in the scriptures, and ours are of the men. We weren’t excluding the women in any way, shape, or form. The reality of the matter is what I’ve found is that historically, this is a little bit different the last couple of years, that men are just a lot more work. They are resistant in ways that women aren’t. Women tend to be more open and responsive relationally. If you say we’re going to have a small group discussion group or a small group Bible study, women are like, oh, okay, that’s interesting, and men are like, “I’m not going to sit in a small group. What, am I supposed to share my feelings?” And so you’ve got to approach it differently. But in some ways, I’ve joked that working with women on the college campus is like playing with matches in a dry hay field. I mean, the fire starts and it goes out of control, whereas working with men is like trying to light a big log in a rainstorm. It’s really hard to get things going. And that’s an overstatement, but there’s a certain truth there. On the college campus today, 60% of the college students on college campuses are women, so you’re already outnumbered 60-40. By the time you add any religion, it goes to 67-33, so it swings pretty dramatically. What we’ve seen is not that the men have eclipsed the women, but that that imbalance has been righted. And so for the first time in more than a decade, we’re actually able to hire, for example, enough male missionaries to pair them with women. We’ve had struggles because we’ve not been able to hire all the women who wanted to be missionaries because we didn’t have teams to put them on.

Robert Duncan: So what message are the men responding to?

Curtis Martin: Well, they’re responding to two. First, it’s a message, and it’s funny, and this is overly simplistic. There’s a lot more going on here, but I would say that there is a secular voice out there that is Christian-friendly, but guys like Joe Rogan, who just guys like. He’s a broadcaster of cage fighting, and there’s argh, but Joe Rogan is asking questions, and he’s challenging men. He doesn’t have great answers, but he’s got really fun questions, and then you can kind of move down the spectrum there of different people that are speaking into the lives of men, and you start to see more and more of a Christian message, and then more specifically a Catholic message, and men are leaning in and saying, you know, I’ve been told that I’m a pig, that I’m worthless, that I’m lazy, that if I were to even try to be a man, it’d be toxic. So I sit around, and I play video games, and I look at pornography, and I gamble online, and I’ve been doing that for five, six, seven years, and I hate my life, and Joe Rogan is saying, get up and go do something. And so they’re listening to voices that are not anti-Christian, but not Christian, and then there’s Jordan Peterson, and there’s other people that are speaking into their lives, and I would say that that’s the broader cultural conditions that men are saying, wait a second. If you just look at television, men are portrayed as bullies or stupid wimps all the time. Where are the great examples of men? I think The Chosen does a great job. Jonathan Roumie does a great job of manifesting Jesus as a real man, but as a virtuous man, and to be able to see these examples. And so I think men are tired of the stereotypes. And let’s be honest, the women aren’t interested in the men that this culture is producing. You can see not just in the United States, but in places like Japan, marriage is evaporating. Young people just choosing not to get married because they’re not attractive. And so these men are responding to those broader social and cultural issues. And then I think your podcast, I think lots of different things that are out there, the podcast, the different messaging, that people can go, well, if I’m interested in this, where should I go? There’s never been a better time in the history of the world to learn the truths about Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. The information is there. And once you get on that track, you can feast like never before. I mean, as a young adult, when I was coming back to the Catholic Church, the Internet didn’t exist. Things were hard to gather. I discovered by accident, because I was working on a paper for grad school, I discovered the Fathers of the Church. And I wasn’t really looking for, I was just looking for old Christians. What did old Christians say about the Church? And all of a sudden, I found the Fathers of the Church and realized there’s a whole collection of these guys, and they’re wildly Catholic. I mean, they believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. They have Marian devotion. They believe in a Church that has bishops as an evangelical, fallen-away Catholic evangelical. I didn’t have any of those things. I thought, well, wait a second. And so I think the Catholic Church, in an era when questions are being raised, the Catholic Church has the best answers. So this is great for us. It’s the perfect time to be able to sit back and say, I want to know the truth. Well, the Catholic Church has the fullness of truth. We’re not here to be arrogant about it. That’s not it at all. We’re here to be, welcome to the buffet. I mean, we’re all hungry. The best meal in town is being served by the Catholic Church, literally the Eucharist. And so men are experiencing this. The culture has failed them. The Catholic Church is there, quietly waiting to answer questions, and now they’re coming.

Robert Duncan: You mentioned certain podcasters like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. When some of these young men may discover Catholicism, they may, as you say, go looking for places they can learn what it means to be a Catholic man. And there are certain podcasts out there. I think of maybe Timothy Gordon’s podcast, where there are very specific messages about women and men that are controversial. People can look that up if they don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you see any trends that concern you among the young men that you interact with? And what cautions would you...

Curtis Martin: Well, I mean, the trends are there. Let’s be honest. I mean, I think it’s certainly... Fine, I’ll date myself here, but there was a cartoon called The Flintstones, cavemen. And a couple of times in the scenes, you’d see Fred trying to... The door’s locked. He’s trying to run, and he would run so hard, he’d run in the front door and right out the back door. And I think it’s certainly possible to do that at the Catholic Church. You can run right through Christ and into problems. I think that the Internet, the podcast world, is filled with lots of people asking lots of questions. I talked to my... I have adult sons. I’ve got... I’m blessed with nine kids. Eight of them are boys. And I’ll sit up, you know, until 1 o’clock in the morning talking with my adult sons. And they’re listening to a lot more of this stuff than I am, and they’ll sit back and say, what do you think about this? I say, well, first of all, I think these are great questions, but I don’t think you’ve got great answers here. And again, I think this is where it would be helpful to have some maturity out there that’s speaking into this and saying, let’s... We don’t want just knowledge. We want wisdom. And so where are the limits? You can push so hard on something that you actually fall off the other side. The devil doesn’t care if you drive off the right side of the road or left side of the road. He just wants you off the road. And so the mistakes are there. Our goal would be to live virtue, which is in the middle, and to be able to recognize there are extremes on both sides. We want to avoid those extremes. And then we want to live love. Love is the one virtue that you do live in extreme. And so it moderates all the other virtues. And so to be able to recognize that, I think this is, again, a great moment. I think what you’re doing is so important that we’re having these conversations. But I do think right now we’re at a very vulnerable place. There are many more men and women wanting to come into the Church than there are people who are willing and capable of welcoming them. And there are lots of people asking questions. And there are too many false or half-true answers. And we’re not made for half-truths or for error. We’re made for the truth.

Robert Duncan: Is there anything that men or women that are coming into the Church that are interested in what you’re doing, responding to the message of FOCUS and the Church, but that because of the culture that they say to you or that you hear a lot in group settings or in discussions that just irritates you or concerns you. I mean, any specific thing that’s emerging?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I would say you’re raising great questions. And I would say no and then yes. This is not my experience. The reality is that we are gathering people in FOCUS within the framework of friendship. And within friendship, somebody can say, dude, you’re out of control. Mellow out. But you do hear of extremes with regards to you mentioned the controversies about comments about men and women or the exclusive, I’m only Traditional Latin Mass, these sorts of things that people push towards. And we’re aware of those. It’s not our experience within FOCUS that that’s happening because you’re sitting down talking with people. There are norms that help to guide us. And if people are aware of that, and that’s also informing. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one of the greatest gifts, it’s just this is what the Church teaches. It’s remarkably similar, although I would argue even more beautifully stated than the Catechism of the Council of Trent, written 500 years earlier. Same structure, same outline. Really, really wonderful teaching. But it just, okay, what does this say? And how does this guide us? And then do we have access? One of the things that Jesus calls us to do in the Great Commission is to go make disciples. Well, disciples are people who are being mentored by people who are a few steps further down the road. And it’s a sharing of Christ-centered wisdom. Well, it’s in that Christ-centered wisdom that you’re going to be able to say, hey, that interpretation is completely out of bounds. The corrections are frequently right in the same text. You could sit back and misquote Paul about the differences between men and women, and then you could go to Peter and say, it’s very clear we’re equal in dignity. What are you talking about? This is the same Bible saying the same thing. You’ve got to interpret Scripture in light of the rest of Scripture, and you have to interpret Scripture from the heart of the Church. Well, those guidelines make the Catholic Church the best place on Earth to have this wrestling match. The cool thing is, we’ve got momentum. We did not have momentum 20 years ago. Now, you still have to steer a car in the right direction, but you can’t steer a parked car. It’s just impossible. Even God can’t steer a parked car. It has to be moving.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to talk to you a little bit more about the work you’ve done here at the Vatican, and one possibly controversial prism to talk about that would be the mascot of the Jubilee that we had last year. This was controversial online because people at the Dicastery that you consult for, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said, I have the quote here, that the use of this Japanese cartoon — for people who don’t know — is “inspired by the Church’s desire to live even within the pop culture beloved by youth.” Other people online maybe have a more conservative or traditional bent, said, you know what, this looks ridiculous. This is not the way I associate in my imaginary space an image of my religion. So what are the challenges and the contours of trying to find a way to talk to young people that maybe is epitomized by that image?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, well, I mean, to be disrespectful to start, I mean, in a certain sense, it looks like a pile of poop in some ways. It’s a silly image. But let’s also go back, and Archbishop Rino Fisichella has been very, very kind to me over the years. It’s World Youth Day. By the way, I don’t hear a whole lot of young people talking about this on either side. It’s older people who are upset. And I get it. I can understand. I mean, FOCUS has a, in our logo or visual identity, we have a symbol that looks a bit like the Eucharist and has a path, and there’s a crucifix. It’s subtle. I believe in all those things. I think the traditional ways of communicating are the best, but they’re not the only. And so I think people should not take themselves so seriously. Yeah, we should do the best we can. And when we don’t, come on, this has got to be, this can’t make the top 50 list of most important things in life or in the Church. It just isn’t that important. And okay, when it’s your turn, if you want to do more, I mean, I’m reminded of young men I work with on college campus. They’re like, well, liturgical abuse. Well, if you want to address liturgical abuse, become a priest and offer Mass reverently. Otherwise, as a layperson, it’s not your game. If you’ve got a friendship with the priest, go talk to him. But if you don’t, don’t criticize him. That won’t make anything better. We have to pray and fast and love our way into this. And when we’ve got friendship, yeah, we can talk. I had a priest friend of mine who we became friends, but it was years in the making. And he said, you know, Curtis, I don’t like to wear my clerics. And I said, well, you don’t have to wear your clerics. But he goes, I don’t like it because people treat me differently. I said, well, Father, they’d treat me differently if I didn’t have a wedding ring on. But I am married. And so they ought to treat me differently. And I think it’s super cool. I’m not telling you you should wear your clerics. That’s between you and God and you and the bishop. But I can tell you as a layman, I love it when I see a priest in clerics. And that was the end of the conversation. But it was in a framework of friendship. And we could have that. A lot of times we’re pushing people around. Well, I don’t like this and you should do it this way. You know what? I can tell you one thing. Young people are not going to be attracted to Christ when they watch you fight about these things. These are not the most important things.

Robert Duncan: Well, the reason I bring it up is I think it’s interesting that it reveals a debate maybe in your circles or more broadly on the internet about to what extent do we look at cultural forms as Catholics in order to reach people. So do you have an answer on that? I mean, this is not only true for logos but for music and concerts. To what extent should the Church be taking its cues from the forms that work in the secular space?

Curtis Martin: I think it’s a great question. I mean, really it’s the $64,000 question. So, I mean, evangelization is building a bridge, right? So you’re building a bridge from the heart of the Church, from Jesus Christ to a person. Well, a person is out in the culture so you have to make some connection or you have a peer. It’s not a bridge. It doesn’t connect. But I would say this. I founded FOCUS. We were working on it when I was even in my 20s. But by the time we had missionaries I was in my late mid-30s, I think 37. I could have done two things. I could have been hip and cool and got an ear piercing and maybe got some ink and been relevant. And I would have been relevant for about five years. And then I still wouldn’t have been relevant. So I have not. I mean, I’m very much a 60-year-old man. And I’ve always been that way. So relevancy, I think, is important in that I take your relevancy seriously but I don’t have to imitate it to be relevant. I don’t have to imitate it to be relevant.

I just have to be a part of it. In fact, I would argue that when a person steps into another person’s life, seeing a difference rather than a similarity actually can be a really good thing. Not difference for its own sake but I’m a married guy. I have nine kids. I’m in my 60s. I act like that. And we’re working with literally 100,000 young people. It seems to be going okay. So when these people come to me that say, I can’t speak I can’t be a Church interpreter because of the way they think. Do you feel like your role has transitioned and it happened because you were such a strong leader that you elevated the general volatility of everything that’s going on? Look, that’s why people don’t see you as having a FOCUS conference because they’re afraid they’re not getting that made sense to his homily, quotes from modern pop stars. And it was electric. So a certain amount of that, that I hear you, that I’m aware of that, I think you don’t wanna be distanced from relevancy, but to make yourself pretend to be relevant, I think is an exercise in futility. I joke with by the people we work with, it changes so quickly. I mean, the 22-year-olds that tease me about how old I am are perceived as very old three years later when they’re 27 by the new 24-year-olds, it’s just crazy how quickly it shifts. So I wanna appreciate you and what you think is relevant. And that’s super, super important. But I don’t need to live in that world and have those same loves in the same way. I’m inviting you to the greatest love, love of Jesus Christ. And I should love the things you love. JP II did this as a priest. Slightly different way, but I think it’ll make sense. And we say this to our staff all the time. Whatever college students love to do, go do that with them, as long as it’s moral. I mean, there’s certain things college students do that you shouldn’t do, but go hiking.

Robert Duncan: I was about to sign up for FOCUS.

Curtis Martin: Yeah, exactly, there you go. And go be with them. JP II did this great as a young priest. He was out kayaking and hiking and writing plays and performing them. He was with young people doing the things they love to do. And in the midst of that, he was sharing his love for Jesus Christ. And so we wanna go and love people, and people love stuff. I don’t know how to play video games. I’m just a little too old for it. But we’ve got some young priest friends who are over our house and they’ll play video games for a couple hours with our kids. It’s super cool. But if they were playing video games a couple hours every day, I’d say, you probably have a priority problem, Father. And I would say the same thing to my sons if they were playing a couple hours every day. And they probably are. And so try to walk that balance. I don’t think we should be, pride ourselves in being irrelevant. And there are some who think we’re gonna stand up on a mountaintop and preach and we’ll see who comes. That’s not what Jesus did.

Robert Duncan: You are a pretty animated speaker, but I feel like on this subject, the relevancy question may be particularly more animated. Is this something that frustrates you in your work with the Dicastery or just generally in the conversation about evangelization?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, again, I will speak about the frustration of the Dicastery, but I want to be clear. I’m not saying that I’ve got a better perspective. I do think I have a unique perspective as we sit back and talk. And so at one point in time, there was a conversation at a meeting maybe two years ago, and they said, this modern culture won’t accept truth claims. I disagree with that. But I said, but when it finally came around to my turn, I said, I think one truth claim that they can’t refute is, “I think you are amazing.” Because it’s a truth claim, but it’s also based in me and you can’t really argue with that. And I could go on, I believe that you’re amazing because I believe that Christ thinks you’re amazing. And so I think we can start this, it’s kind of John Paul II’s personalism. But my sense is that in some of the Dicastery, at least there can be a tone of discouragement of actually winning people to Christ, of having people convert to Catholicism. And there’s kind of a desire of, well, can’t we all just get along? And again, just getting along is really important. We shouldn’t be fighting. I mean, why? But that’s not evangelization.

Robert Duncan: It just sounds mysterious. I think people listening who don’t know much about the Vatican may think, “why in the world would the Vatican not want more Catholics?”

Curtis Martin: Right, well, I’m sure everybody in the Dicastery does. But I think that we have a very different history in the United States than they do in Europe, for example. And so wars and cultural issues have been a real, real issue and led to millions of deaths in the last 125 years here on the continent. And so I’ll give you an example. I was here in Europe talking to a friend of mine who was a religious sister, and they were talking about a political figure here in Europe who was an integralist. I actually had to go look up what integralist was, but essentially, oversimplifying, this is a person who wants their faith life to inform their politics. As an American, that’s the ideal candidate. But we’ve had religious fanatics in Europe and in Latin America who have abused that in the name of God, and it can be a horrible thing. And so I think, again, we have to look at the context and sit back and say, what are we doing? And to the degree that we’re imposing belief, we should all agree that that’s wrong. But to the degree we are proposing the faith, I would like for people to see that that’s a good thing. The difference is, for example, let’s say I found a great restaurant, and we’re friends. Should I tell you about it?

Robert Duncan: Definitely me, yes.

Curtis Martin: Yes, should I force you to go? No, so I don’t want to impose my new restaurant on you, but I should propose it. “Hey, you should check out this place, it’s awesome.” I think that evangelization says, let’s propose with joy and friendship, not impose. If people choose to say no, or maybe that no is just a wait, that’s between them and God. No judgment. My job was to make the invitation, not to get you to go to the restaurant. My job is to make the invitation to Christ, not for you to make you a Christian. And I think those tensions are in some of the work of the Dicastery. These are good men, selected, I’m sure, very wisely. But from my limited experience, at times I’m like, there’s so much work to be done. Can’t we just be a little bit more clear? And I have experienced that in the work with the USCCB, the US bishops, in the committee that I served under Bishop Barron, and then also under Bishop Cozzens, the same committee, different chairs. Just wonderful leadership and real enthusiasm. You mentioned it earlier that now the bishops, this is kind of their battle cry at this point in time, is hey, we really need to be evangelizing, as bishops, as priests, as religious, as laypeople. That’s beautiful, and I think that clarity is something that is inspirational, not only to the rest of the world, which I did an interview yesterday with a gentleman from Eastern Europe. He said, what’s going on in the United States, I think, could be a model, not one-to-one, but an inspiration, we could learn, for the rest of the world. Not to make the rest of the world American, that would be a terrible mistake, but to make the rest of the world more evangelical. Well, that would be great, and this was the interview. And I think that that’s true. So I like where we are, I think what’s going on in the Church universally, from my very limited perspective as a layman, is it’s wonderful. And what God is doing in the church in the United States is, I think, an extraordinary moment. We have to be humble. We are in the community of nations, a younger daughter.

We’re a young nation, and we can come across as arrogant sometimes as Americans. So we have to be humble, but I don’t think that that means we should step away from the many blessings. We are a generous church, we are an entrepreneurial church. There are things that are really, really wonderful that we should not be embarrassed by, and at the same time say, it’s all a gift. And we don’t deserve any credit, but we do want to give the glory to God.

Robert Duncan: I just have a couple more questions if we have time. So at the end of last year, there were articles saying that, correct me if I’m wrong, you were stepping back from FOCUS, or I’m not sure if you were retiring. What is going on now?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, so I’ve been serving as, the titles have changed over time, but always as the founder. My wife and I founded FOCUS 28 years ago, and so I’ve served as president or CEO. So I’m maintaining the founder role. I’m continuing to serve. They’ve asked me to stay. Actually, I was thinking three to five more years. They said, we’d love for you to sign a seven-year contract, which I’ve done. So I’m not going anywhere, but as we continue to grow, the administrative responsibility of the CEO is what I’ve stepped away from. And, you know, any stepping away can be hard, but I can tell you, sitting in administrative meetings all day long didn’t bring me joy. I love my job, I love the people I work with, but to be emphasizing the mentorship piece, the vision casting piece, to be out working with the bishops, whether it’s at the Vatican or at the USCCB, these are the things that I’m most passionate about, and those are the things we’ll continue to do. We’re working out the details. The board’s actually here in Rome right now. I had lunch and dinner with several of them, and so, in fact, I’ve been with them most of the last week. We had a meeting in Miami earlier in the week. And so we’re working out the details of that and praying hard, but no, I’m not going anywhere, God willing, and very much want to continue to move forward. I think this is an exciting time. I think God has shown us some things within focus that can apply to many organizations and groups like parishes that we’d like to share with the early adopters. And we’re seeing this explosion of conversions that we’ve been talking about most of our time together. There is something extraordinary. Whatever is going on, and I don’t understand it completely, was not going on 15 years ago, 25 years ago.

Robert Duncan: So this might seem like a non-sequitur based on your apparent passion, enthusiasm, and the good news that you are describing about the explosion of conversions, but in every life of faith, there’s got to be discouragement. So what gets you down? What discourages you in the current moment?

Curtis Martin: Well, the thing that discourages me most is my own personal sinfulness. There’s no doubt about that. I mean, it’s just, I have been following Christ as an adult Catholic for 35 years or so, and I would like to have made more progress than I have. So that’s very discouraging. Things that foster despair — this might sound redundant — discourage me. I think the virtue of hope is so essential. St. John Paul II was a witness to hope, as his book title states, and he gave reasons for hope. And I think that where the Church, and Church leadership in particular, can be subject to challenges is despair. When you don’t have hope, you won’t strive for the great good because you don’t think it’s possible. And so we have been tempted to be in a maintenance mode within the church.

I remember, what facility or activity do we have to shut down next? And consolidation of parishes. And I’m not saying those are wrong necessarily. They are painful. And they might be wrong. The reality of the matter is that if we were an evangelizing church, we would probably be building churches. And this has been an experience and focus, that more than a quarter of the campuses we serve have actually gone through capital campaigns to build bigger churches. That’s 25%. And it’s not happening in most places in the church right now in the United States. Most of the churches being built are because of demographic shifts. There is no demographic shift on the college campus. There’s just more people believing in Jesus. And the churches are being, sometimes beautiful ones are being torn down and bigger, more beautiful ones are being built. Sometimes they weren’t so beautiful. But bigger ones, and frequently one of the complaints I hear is, I don’t think we built a new one big enough. And so it’s just this really exciting thing. And I think that when somebody’s functioning with hope, they’ll be able to achieve what God wants and they will be attractive to others. Just as we are drawn towards joy, we’re drawn towards hope. We’ll never separate those from faith and love. Those are the theological virtues. But I would say my own personal sinfulness or a sense of despair drive me nuts.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to conclude the conversation by going back to the New York Times’ coverage of all of these matters. And Ross Douthat, writing an op-ed column, mentioned something that I also raised with you at the beginning, which was that many of the new converts are especially in this college-educated camp. And he concludes his Easter analysis here saying, “Jesus did not say,” I’m going to quote Douthat, “Jesus did not say, blessed are the agentic. Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers. And any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a sure reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.” So what is your reaction to that?

Curtis Martin: To the degree it doesn’t reach everyone, then there’s a real problem. But it’s gotta start somewhere. And Ross, come on, this has been going on for what, 24 months? This is not a long time in resurgence. So people who criticize, this would be exactly one of the things that drives me crazy. Why do you have to picket this right now? And I realize he’s got a job to do, and I like him, I like his reading. But I think the criticism is like kicking a two-year-old because it hasn’t gone out and done more. When FOCUS first got started, I was giving a talk. I mean, we were months old, and there was a guy in the front row rocking back and forth. The longer I spoke, the more he rocked. And we were talking about evangelizing and winning young people to Christ. And finally I said, any questions? And he couldn’t control himself. What about the poor? I’m like, who do you think’s gonna care for the poor? Christians care for the poor. That’s what we’re known for throughout history. Christianity’s dying. We need more Christians. FOCUS is the largest mission-sending organization in the United States. We send thousands of college students to dozens of missionary places. And that’s just second and third world. When you talk about evangelization as a mission, we are the largest. I mean, we send missionaries out all the time. But you needed to have believers before you could have missionaries. And to not understand that process, it’s gotta start somewhere. And Ross, if you were gonna start it, my argument would be this. If everything in the culture was broken, and I believe it is, everything, marriage, family, law, politics, education, everything, if everything in the culture was broken, including all the people, where would you start? I would start at the college campuses in the United States.

“If everything in the culture was broken, and I believe it is, everything, marriage, family, law, politics, education … where would you start? I would start at the college campuses in the United States.”

They gather people by the thousands. How many second grade classrooms would you have to go to to get to 1,000 second graders? You can go to hundreds of campuses and find 1,000 freshmen, 10,000 freshmen, some of them. So they’re gathered more effectively than anything else at the very beginning of their life. And so if they made a decision for Christ, they could live that for the rest of their life. They could live it right away. We could work with second graders, but you’d have to wait 15 years for them to be able to go to seminary or to get married. Work with college students, it happens right now. If you wanted to work in geriatric hospitals, and we should, those people won’t be able to serve for very long, they’re in their 80s. So I would argue the place to start are universities and American universities, because there’s more international students studying in American universities than anywhere else in the world. All universities, but American universities. Now, if they don’t care for the disenfranchised, if they don’t serve the people over time, but give them some time, if they don’t serve them, then everything in his criticism is dead on. Christianity must bear fruit in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Jesus made that really clear. My experience is that this generation of young people, and some of them who have been down 20 years, they’re not so young anymore, are wildly generous, greatly faithful, overflowing with joy. Are they perfect? No. Are they tired? Yeah, I mean, one of the things this group tends to do is they get married, they have kids, and they tend to have more kids than they have culture. Well, kids are exhausting. And so if you’ve got three or four kids under the age of six, you’re probably not doing a lot for the disenfranchised, but you are clothing the naked every day, your own children. You are feeding the hungry every day. And as they mature, they will take their children, as we have and as my friends do, on mission to the disenfranchised. And so if he still wants to make that accusation 15 years from now, I agree. But he wants to make it right now, cheap shot.

Robert Duncan: To be fair to him, I’m not sure it was a criticism more than a word of caution. But in any case, you bring up something we didn’t get a chance to talk about, and I’ll raise it, and if you have time to answer, that’s great. If not, we can wrap it up. But the children of these highly motivated converted couples — there is a question, and we don’t have the data yet, will their children remain in the faith?

Curtis Martin: No, 100%, and I’ve talked to Christian Smith about this, who works out of Notre Dame and really probably knows more sociologically about this than anybody on earth, and it is too early. The reality of the matter is, though, that I have nine children, and each of them, I have a 28-year-old with autism, he has not, although he is a faithful Catholic, but each of them have come on mission. John Zimmer and Barbara Zimmer were the first FOCUS married couple that we hired. Their eldest son was a FOCUS missionary and postponed med school to become a missionary, is now in med school. Their daughter is married to a young man who works for EWTN. They’re on mission. Ed and Beth Sri are the next married couple. Their eldest daughter and her husband work for FOCUS. They’re on mission. There is the reality in the Protestant world of PKs, preacher kids, who rebel, and I’m sure there will be some of that, but the reality of the matter is all of the fruit that we can measure so far would indicate that they are staying in the faith and frequently staying on mission. The sample size is too small, and the sample window is too short to have any kind of scientific sense, but I was with, now Archbishop Carlson, at the time he was Bishop Carlson, and he turned to me before FOCUS put a missionary on campus, and he spent a couple days with me looking at what we were hoping to do to give me advice and counsel, and as we were leaving, he turned to me, I didn’t know him very well, he turned to me and he grabbed my shirt and twisted it. He said, “This may work, but I want you to know if this works, even amazingly, and your kids don’t practice the faith, you are gonna go to hell.” He’s right. Whatever we do as a vocation small V has to be subordinated to what we do as a vocation capital V. I am a married man, a husband, and a father. Anything that I do that undermines the faith of my wife or my kids is sin, and so to be able to recognize first things first, it’s from a place of centered in Christ that I can love my wife and kids, it’s from a place of loving my wife and kids in Christ that I can do other work, and so we don’t know yet. What I do know is there’s a lot more of them. That’s very clear. The family size is four plus, and that trend’s small because the marriage is trend young, so they will have more children, the ones who are younger. I think we’re probably done. We have nine, our youngest is 12, but the reality of the matter is what the average will be 15, 20 years from now when there’s some stability, we will see. In fact, there won’t even be stability if we maintain our growth because the majority of people involved in our program are young because we keep reaching more people. It’s like a pyramid. The most recent things are at the bottom, the big end of the pyramid. We graduated, I think, six people our first year. We’ll graduate 20,000 this year. It’s amazing to see the momentum, and so I like what we’re seeing. I wouldn’t want to make any predictions, and I would never wanna be arrogant about what God’s doing, but I would make this claim. Evangelization works. When God comes into people’s lives, their lives just get better, not just for themselves, but for everybody else in their life.

Robert Duncan: Curtis Martin, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Curtis Martin: Great being with you.