Finding St Anthony Among the Lost Items

Michael Jones, a member of St. Columbkille Parish in Papillion, said he came to the third annual Heartland Catholic Men's Conference August 4 in Omaha to meet others in fellowship and learn more about the faith of the church. Such opportunities for inspiration and formation were lacking when he was raising children, said Jones, 63, noting that although ages of participants varied widely at the conference, many who had gathered there were about his age. "Maybe we just all got hungry (for spiritual growth) at the same time," Jones said. Similar sentiment -- a strong desire for sharing in faith formation -- appears to have been the spark that more than a dozen years ago ignited what has become a growing Catholic men's movement in the United States, said Peter Kennedy, administrator of adult faith formation in the Omaha Archdiocese's Office of Evangelization and Catechesis. And the movement is being fueled in part by concerns about a loss of male spiritual leadership in the midst of declining morals and a secularization of society, he said. "There's a genuine spiritual hunger," Kennedy told the Catholic Voice, Omaha's archdiocesan newspaper. Many men now being schooled through men's groups that concentrate on spirituality and teachings of the church say things like "I never heard this before," Kennedy said. Some aspects of Catholicism -- the centrality of the Eucharist and the church's insistence on social justice -- were taught well over the past 40 years, he said. But other aspects of catechesis often were insufficient, such as church teaching on baptism and penance, the dangers of contraception and the importance of marriage and family life, Kennedy said. At the same time, many Catholic men pursued success in the workplace and left the spiritual formation of their families to their wives, Kennedy said.