The article below appears in the Weekend supplement of The Irish Times.
Much of it already appeared during the week in the newspaper; why print it a second time?
The long article tells the reader little or nothing about who Fr Mike Schmitz is, about his understanding of church. Did Fr Schmitz at the evening in the National Stadium say one word about synodality or Pope Leo's encyclical Human Magnificence? But Patrick Freyne did tell us Fr Schmitz wore a roman collar, black suit, was handsome and athletic looking.
Did Freyne talk to Schmitz? If so no sign of it in the two-page spread. He never explains the significance of Schmitz saying Mass in St Kevin's Church on Harrington Street.
What was the core message from Fr Schmitz's message. Worth noting Patrick Freyne's ticket cost €49.75. Were the gallery seats more expensive. After all it was showtime.
The word flock in the headline immediately set alarm bells ringing in my ears.
Below is the article; it's left to the reader to decide whether it's worth reading or not.
Fr Mike Schmitz, the social media star, digital evangelist and Catholic chaplain, attracts youth groups, culture warriors and people seeking healing to the National Stadium
Inside the National Stadium on the South Circular Road in Dublin, 1,600 people are here to see 51-year-old Fr Mike Schmitz: a social media star, digital evangelist and Catholic chaplain at the University of Minnesota Duluth in the US. Some of his videos have millions of views.
Outside there’s a queue. There are a lot of young people here, many with youth groups. My ticket cost €49.75.
As we wait inside there’s triumphant crescendoing liturgical music on a loop and I go around talking to people. The people here run the gamut from what might be termed culture warriors (one woman talks about how badly she thinks Enoch Burke has been treated) to resolutely apolitical people seeking some form of healing.
Many acknowledge the Catholic Church’s history of abuse unprompted. At least two tell me about their “same-sex attracted” friends, in a conversation about how the Church has changed, though they both still disagreed with gay marriage.
Twenty-six-year-old Francis Doole tells me his friend joked that he was going to a “cult meeting”. He laughs. He has long been a believer. “My faith is rooted in bereavement. When my wee brother died, I was five and my daddy he passed away suddenly when I was 12. So God has always been at the heart of everything that I’ve done.”
He’s a Religious Education (RE) teacher here with a youth group from Antrim. He thinks that in a world of TikTok and youth unemployment, young people really need to feel like they belong, to know that “God loves them for who they are because He made them so beautifully”.
A lot of young people are hostile to the Church and he says it’s his job to face up to that. “The institutional Church made mistakes in the past. And at the heart of it all, the Catholic Church comes back to one man, Christ.”
It’s not a political thing, he says. “It’s not like ‘go out and protest’. It’s ‘go out and stand up for the unborn. Go out and stand for life’. It wouldn’t be party political. But it would certainly encourage young people to go out into their schools, workplaces and be proud of their identity.”
How did he explain it to his friend? “I explained that it’s like going to see a celebrity and the celebrity we’re talking about is God. Fr Schmitz is only pointing to God and helping people understand.”
Eighteen-year-old Ruairi Anthony has a T-shirt with an abstract image of the Virgin Mary on it. He’s here with a friend, Ethan Nowo. Both weren’t particularly religious growing up, but found an interest in faith online. Is it like being “born again”? Anthony laughs. “I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to be born again.”
They are an anomaly among their friends, he says. “There are three of us on a WhatsApp group. We’re trying to encourage more.” They go to Mass every week, but it’s largely older people there. “I recently heard of a place in town doing adoration for 18- to 30-year-olds.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Basically, they get the consecrated holy bread and they put it on the altar and you pray to it.”
Why does Catholicism appeal to him? “It just makes sense. When you look at it from a more scientific standpoint it just makes sense. It explains a lot of questions I have.” He adds: “And say if none of it is true; it gives me a good way to live my life.”
I take my seat. Sitting behind me are Ivana Pehar (34) and Ivana Dzodzuashvili (33) from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pehar works running an apartment complex and Dzodzuashvili is a healthcare assistant. They both use the Halo praying app and learned about Fr Schmitz and this event there. They arranged to leave work early to come here. “His words and his way of talking are like amazing,” says Pehar. “And how he like connects things and the way he thinks, it was just beautiful.”
“He’s very down-to-earth,” says Dzodzuashvili.
Religion is taken much more seriously back home, they say. At her wedding, Dzodzuashvili says, the priest chastised the women for not covering their limbs. When she told her Irish sister-in-law she was appalled. “In Ireland people come to the church in shorts. They’re like ‘You can’t tell me what to wear.’”
Do they understand why Irish people might be suspicious of the Church? “We understand why people distrust the Church,” says Dzodzuashvili. “But it’s not God [who] did that. It’s the humans in the Church that did it.”
The MC for the night, EWTN Catholic TV network presenter Colm Flynn, takes to the stage and stirs some audience rivalry about which county is best. There’s a short speech from Bishop Fintan Gavin, the bishop of Cork and Ross, who speaks of a need for more missionary zeal in a country where Catholicism has lost its centrality in Irish life.
And then Fr Schmitz comes on stage. He has just come from saying Mass at nearby St Kevin’s Church. He’s a handsome man in a black suit and shirt and a priest’s collar. He has the build and swept-back hair of Mad Men’s Don Draper but the earnest, slightly goofy, delivery of a kindly children’s TV presenter.
He asks us all to ask the person next to us the following questions: “What’s your name?” “Where are you at in life?” “Who is someone that you absolutely love? If you had one last thing you could say to them, what would that thing be? . . . You have 45 seconds. Ready, set, go.”
Helena Byrne, an RE teacher heading towards retirement, turns to me and tells me about her husband and two daughters and 92-year-old mother. I tell her about my wife and job and my assignment today.
She’s very nice to me even though she’s sceptical about mainstream media. Why? She is “pro-life” and “anti-masks” she says. She would like to see more clear communication from the Church in the style of Fr Schmitz. “They’re afraid on the pulpit to be honest . . . And young people sense the hypocrisy. There’s a hunger for the truth. I know as a teacher. The curriculum is not giving the answers It’s watered down too much,” she says.
Fr Schmitz gets on to the main act, a discussion of the parables, specifically: Luke 15 (about the shepherd looking for his lost sheep); Matthew 13 (the Parable of the Sower); Luke 16 (about the dishonest steward); and Matthew 25 (the Parable of the Wise Virgins and Foolish Virgins).
He breaks these up with references to Baz Luhrmann, Forrest Gump, Pixar’s Up and self-deprecating stories from his own life and ministry. Much of it is about Jesus’s love for humanity.
He encourages “amens” from the audience, but the audience often respond without prompting. They throw out answers to liturgical questions. Women around me say “aw” spontaneously when Fr Schmitz expresses doubts about his abilities. The man next to me says “yes” softly to himself frequently.
This is not a religion built on metaphor. In Schmitz’s worldview the Devil, aka “the enemy”, and his hosts are real but he brings that up just twice. “I think sometimes we forget that there’s an enemy . . . Here’s the deal, Jesus is more powerful than the enemy. But there is some being out there. In fact, there’s a number of beings out there that actually hate you. They do not want you to be happy. Do not want you to know joy. Don’t want you to know God’s love.”
At the end, Colm Flynn hosts a question-and-answer session during which Fr Schmitz uses Irish slang such as “savage” and “class” to great amusement. There’s a QR code on-screen via which audience members can submit questions. Some are jokey softballs: “Do you colour your hair?” (short answer: no). “Is there any wiggle room on the whole premarital sex thing?” (short answer: no).
Others are theologically complex: “Fr, if God does exist, why do things like childhood cancer exist?” His answer is long and gets into what he sees as the absence of meaning in a Godless universe and ends on Jesus’s choice to experience suffering.
“So even the suffering of the old person, the young person, it’s not meaningless. It’s not wasteful. What we believe about God is that God can do something with it, even if He doesn’t take it away.”
Some questions prompt more hardline answers. One person in a long-term relationship with a Muslim asks for advice. “Scripture is really, really clear. It is not a wise choice to yoke yourself to someone who does not believe in Jesus,” Fr Schmitz says.
Some questions lead to something more welcoming. When a new churchgoer asks how to get rid of his sense of “impostor syndrome”, Fr Schmitz says: “[The church is] not a museum for saints, it’s a hospital for sinners. And if you find yourself a sinner, come right in.”
At the end, people in the audience hold up Bibles and rosary beads to be blessed. They mill out to waiting buses.
Twenty-six-year-old Brendan Gillespie is a youth leader with a youth group from “the Glens of Antrim”.
He had an intense spiritual experience in Lourdes when he was younger, but he left faith behind in early adulthood. “I was ‘living the life’ the way maybe young people think is the ideal life, but I just wasn’t happy. I came back to when I knew I was happiest.”
He started going on pilgrimages again. “Now I get a lot of peace when I pray. And I get peace about the things I can’t control. And then in the things where I have a remit of control, people come into my life who help me. I have a group of people. That’s what young people are looking for.”
Is it different from the Catholicism he grew up with? “Probably. In the generations before [they] prayed to the saints and to Mary. They prayed the rosary. But they didn’t pray to Jesus and read the Bible. There’s a new energy.”
Rachel Fitzpatrick, a 35-year-old singer, didn’t know about Fr Schmitz until her friend Paula Konior, a 23-year-old teacher, told her about the event. “I didn’t know anything about the lad.” Fitzpatrick and Konior met on a pilgrimage to Lisieux. Fitzpatrick is just back from Lourdes. She “came back to the faith three years ago”. Her mother, she says, was “very anti-Church”.
Fitzpatrick got interested in Jordan Peterson and one day she was watching a video in which his wife, Tammy Peterson, at least partly linked her healing from an incurable cancer to praying the rosary.
“I said, ‘Okay, God, if you’re real, send me a set of rosary beads’. And three days later, my grandmother gave me a set of rosary beads.”
She started going to Mass every day, praying the rosary, going to adoration in a church. She gravitated towards charismatic Catholicism, the more mystical wing of the faith. “It is a little bit scary. I didn’t know that people could get ‘slain in the spirit’ ‘Slain in the spirit’ is when somebody prays over you, and you fall over with the power of it.”
She thought they were faking, she says, until it happened to her. “For me, the first most important thing is a relationship with Christ and developing that every day. I grew up without a father, so for me, knowing that I have a loving father in God is beautiful.”
Above and above right: Fr Mike Schmitz speaks to a sold out crowd in Dublin’s National Stadium. Top right: Fr Mike Schmitz leaves Saint Kevin’s Church in Dublin 8 after saying mass.
Photograph: Enda O’Dowd
Fr Schmitz comes on stage. He’s a handsome man in a black suit and shirt and a priest’s collar. He has the build and swept-back hair of Mad Men’s Don Draper but the earnest, slightly goofy, delivery of a kindly children’s TV presenter
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