Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#684 God Doesn't Hate Me After All; with Greg Willits
Love to hear from you; “Send us a Text Message”
What if the love you’ve been searching for has been quietly pursuing you all along? That’s the heartbeat of this conversation with Greg Willits—author, award-winning media producer, and co-founder of Rosary Army—who opens up about childhood abuse, early exposure to pornography, depression, anxiety, and a late-stage collapse that forced him to seek real healing. Greg doesn’t offer platitudes. He shares how a priest’s advice to go to weekly confession, Catholic therapy, and daily fidelity to the rosary set the stage for a breakthrough guided by St. Louis de Montfort’s The Love of Eternal Wisdom.
If this conversation moved you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review to help others find the show. Then grab free chapters at rosaryarmy.com/wisdom and start your own journey toward Eternal Wisdom today.
Read "Directing Our Passions and Desires to a Love that is Beautiful" Here are the links to Jack's Substack and X https://x.com/JP2Renewal
Check out the Podcast on YouTube
Contact us: info@jp2renew.org
Welcome to the Become Who You Are podcast, the production of the John Paul 2 Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. Special shout out, as I usually do, to these young guys from Claymore coming back in, searching. You know, we have these great desires of the heart, huh? For the truth. What how should I live? What is the truth of things? I'm very excited to have Greg Willitz on the show today. Greg is the founder and executive director of Rosaryarmy.com. And we talk about the rosary with our Claymore battle plan, pray in the rosary. We want to introduce you to Louis DeMontfort, if you haven't heard of him already. He had a devotion to our blessed mother, to the rosary. And Greg has a new book out now, God Doesn't Hate Me After All. And it's his story along with Louis de Montfort's The Love of Eternal Wisdom. So I'm very excited to have him on. I'll tell you a little bit more about him before we make a formal uh introduction. He's an award-winning media producer, author, and the creator, and co-host of the Rosary Army Catholic podcast with his wife Jennifer. Together, they have reached global audiences through Sirius XM, EWTN, Catholic TV, Relevant Radio, and more. They also lead online formation to the schoolofmary.com. I'll get all those in the show notes, of course. Greg and Jennifer live in Georgia. Are the proud parents of five children? I'm glad you're proud of those kids, uh, Greg, and one grandchild. So congratulations. Hey, welcome to the show. So good to have you. Appreciate it, Jack. Good to be here. I, you know, I when I first uh came across your name, I thought, well, we're always trying to share the rosary with these with these guys. I know when I was a young guy, we we learned how to pray the rosary when I was a kid, and I got away from it very quickly. Wasn't until uh later on in life I started to pick it up again. It's such a blessing in my life. But then I saw eternal wisdom, eternal wisdom. Seeking the truth, Greg, trying to figure out our lives, trying to figure out a path. Is God really in my life? And you you combine all that. So say say hi to our audience with you, and then tell them a little bit about how you how you came about this book. I and the last thing I'll tell you is I saw a video of you unpacking the book. So when you first got the book, you're unpacking it. You know, I'm gonna make sure I link that in the show notes to it. It's kind of a fun way to be introduced to you and the work that you do. So uh again, welcome.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I'm so glad to be here. We we my wife and I, we've been so incredibly blessed for over two decades now to be promoting the rosary. That's the main thing that we do with Rosary Army and encouraging people. The motto is make them, pray them, give them away. If you've ever, like, you know, you've you've seen these knotted rosaries. Mine's I use two pieces of twine to make mine, but if you've ever seen these knotted rosaries, you go look at the back of Naderation Chapel, there's normally like a basket of these, right? So that someone's made. Um, there's a high likelihood that someone learned how to make them from Rosary Army, or they learned how to make them from someone who knew someone who knew someone who learned how to make them from rosary army. We uh we started making those uh in 2003. We didn't invent the idea that you know that they've been around for years, but we we certainly popularized it. And our motto, make them pray them, give them away. People go to our website. We've been doing this ever since then. They send us a form, they request the rosary, we put it in the mail and we send it to them wherever they are. We're happy to send you a free rosary. And the idea is that we hope that you'll start making them as well, praying them, and then you start giving them away. And so we tell people that when you start making them, you're gonna get addicted right away. Start giving them to every your friends and family, everyone that you know, give them to your priest, start putting them in the Adoration Chapel. And when your pastor says, Listen, uh, you've given me more than enough rosaries, I have more than I can give away. That's when you can start sending them to us. And then that goes into our supply and how we start distributing them. And it's been a it's been like truly a miracle of loaves and fishes over the course of all these years that we've always had enough roseries. We've, you know, we're a 501c3 nonprofit, so we've always had the funds to be able to keep doing this. Uh, it's a been a pretty amazing thing for us. And in the in the middle of all of this, total consecration to Jesus through Mary has been at the heart of what we do, of being at service of Mary so that we can be at service to her son. And so St. Louis de Montfort, who's very well known for popularizing that, he wrote true devotion to Mary. He wrote The Secret of the Rosary, Secret of Mary, a lot of books that are really well known. Uh, a few years ago, I discovered a book hidden in the middle of all of his more popular books called The Love of Eternal Wisdom. And it was right in the middle of basically a lot of the things that I did in my teens and my twenties finally catching up to me mentally. Just the collapse of my mental faculties. I ended up being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of a lot of the things from my childhood, from my young adulthood, and even from my my adulthood after becoming a dad and a father or a father and a husband. All these things catching up, as they often do, right? You know, we if we don't, if we don't take care of them, if we don't give them truly to the healing hand of Jesus Christ, uh, and a lot of these things I was just holding on to and it and it kind of collapsed. And in the middle of that, that's where I discovered this book, The Love of Eternal Wisdom. And so the story is really the the all the sinfulness of my teens and twenties, um, trauma, sexual child abuse when I was a kid, uh, physical and mental abuse of other kinds growing up, and and trying to deal with these things and the whole, my whole life seeking, seeking, seeking God. Where are you, God? Where are you God? Not feeling like I really am experiencing God the way that I'm supposed to, and how de Montfort's book mapped up against my my own story of 50 plus years, um, truly started to bring healing and the allowing me to experience the love of God in the way that I was supposed to all along.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So this journey led you here. How how how so this the love of eternal wisdom by De Montfort? So you you discovered this later on. You had been on this journey for a long time already.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I've already loved him. I already had a great appreciation for him, and I had a collection of his books, and so I'm kind of reviewing the other books, and then in the middle of it, it's like, oh, uh, what is this one? The love of eternal wisdom. I've never seen this before. And I started reading it, and then I'd read it again, and I'd read it again. It's a short little book, um, but the entire book of his is I don't know if you can see it on the video, but uh, wherever there's dark pages, that's actually De Montfort's book. And so we got permission from the Montfort missionaries to republish his entire treatise in my book. And so it's literally like an essay from me mapped up to a chapter from de Montfort. Because when I started reading it, I I I'm not kidding you, Jack. I probably have read it. Well, I say I've been saying a dozen times. I'm probably in the 20s by now of the last few years. His, I mean, De Montfort's can be hard to understand. You know, he's he's very dense. He wrote it 300 years ago. Some of his vocabulary is hard to read. And so my hope was that.
SPEAKER_00:We're used to John Paul II, so he's pretty dense too.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, yeah. But you know, and he read De Montfort, and he had to struggle sometimes to read De Montfort, right? And so, you know, and that's a great point. John Paul II, and I and I talk about him a lot in the book too, because he had a great love of de Montfort, and it was his encouragement in like Rosario and Virginis Marier, of he pointed to De Montfort multiple times in that document. And, you know, going through and and reading this book from De Montfort, I'm like, how can this is so important? It's it's like it's opening up so many areas of unhealed woundedness for me. It's helping me see how I can finally overcome the shame that I feel about sinfulness that I long ago confessed, but still lingers with me, right? That this book, The Love of Eternal Wisdom, started to finally, it felt like surgery in many ways, Jack. It was just like reading through this book, I started to see these points in my life. And I'm like, that's like that's at that time in my 20s. That's when I did this thing, that's when I did this thing. And and started to finally see Jesus' presence in all of those times where I at first thought he had been absent.
SPEAKER_00:What what was it? You were on this journey for a long time. You were you in your 50s, you said, when you started to read this book or when you discovered this book? Okay, so if you could sum it up, uh, what was it? What what's look at you've been on the journey, you're you're praying the rosary, you're you know, things are starting to to to heal, obviously. You're on this path for a long, long time. What was it, what was it that struck you here that all of a sudden uh another light bulb goes up? Look at this is a journey, right? So it's it's not I I understand it's a process, but the way you just articulated it, Greg, was something there, ooh, it it even hit you deeper. Did do you remember what it what it was?
SPEAKER_01:Or it was at the time in your life, and it was a series of things that culminated really in late 2017, early 2018. So, as I mentioned, you know, briefly, as a child, you know, four or five years old, I don't know the exact age. Um, I I was sexually abused by a couple of neighborhood boys. Uh there had been some physical abuse uh in my house. There had been some mental abuse. Uh there have been multiple things that how old were these boys?
SPEAKER_00:Because we we speak about this a lot. I mean, I I don't want you to unpack anything you don't want to unpack with those things.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, Jack, one of the one of the things writing this book was, again, looking at St. Augustine and his confessions, uh, that was so motivational to me. I'm like, listen, if I'm gonna write this book, I'm gonna swing for the fences. I'm gonna be 100% transparent right now. This is not gonna be, I'm I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna coddle myself or others. There is too much woundedness in the world right now that uh we're going to address this. It's I I feel so passionate about people reading De Montfort's books so that they don't carry these wounds anymore. That they don't carry this anymore. So how old were those boys is a great question. I was too young to know, right? They were older than me, but I don't know. And I, you know, I find myself again, and De Montfort has helped me with this. I find myself being able to pray for them. I mean, like desperately praying for those guys. I have no idea where they are, haven't seen them probably since first or second grade, uh, moved around a tremendous amount. Uh, you know, I talked about that in the book of just these, you know, even having solid roots, you know, to lean on. I didn't have that. I started in Atlanta, where where I live now, went from Atlanta to Columbus, Ohio to South Carolina to Florida, to South Carolina to Florida, to Ohio, California, uh, back to Ohio, back to Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, and back to Georgia again. That's my what what's the catalyst behind all those moves? Well, a lot of it was with my father's employment growing up. And then, you know, I felt like I was giving our kids some stability, but uh in 2012, my my wife and I used to host a radio show on Sirius XM. We were on the Catholic channel for about four years. And when our show ended in 2012, I got hired by the Archdiocese of Denver to run their office of evangelization and family life ministries. Wow. And so we moved to Denver, and then that lasted for about three and a half years.
SPEAKER_00:What year did you when did you move to Denver?
SPEAKER_01:We moved to Denver at the beginning of 2013, and then we left in 2016. That's a strong diocese out there. It's a very strong diocese. Yeah, I mean a lot of good stuff was happening.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But the devil also, you know, whenever great things are happening, the devil shows up, right? And and and so it really was what's interesting, and I and I think that's Aquila still the bishop then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He was there when I got hired. Um, and and when when I we went out there, really I I look at, and again, I unpacked this in the book, all the stuff that I just talked about of you know the childhood. Well, a lot of the things that that dysfunction that was introduced early on led to more dysfunction. And so in teenage years and early 20s, there was a lot of promiscuity and a lot of you know drinking and drug and experimentation and just whatever the world was introducing that could that could alleviate some of my worldly pain I was imbibing in, right?
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna just interject right here and don't and hold that thought because we are dealing with the whole cadre of young men that their innocence was stolen from them, uh, Greg, e either by sexual abuse and if if not that, a hundred percent of them by pornography. So what you're talking about will strike deeply to them. And and for your honesty and coming on, I'm very excited, uh Nett, you know, I mean, about your book and about being able to share with them because they are they're all going through this and they think something's wrong with them, and and now they're looking at at a at a woman as a young guy and and they can't get these images out of their heads, and and this is doing some profound things. They're almost saying, like, do I even deserve to be in the church? One out of every four women, adult women today, has been sexually abused as a child. One out of every six young men has been sexually abused as a child. And again, a hundred percent of them, uh, you know, they they heard something in school, Greg, and they googled it. They learned about sexuality from hardcore pornography. So these issues speak very deeply to the heart. So thank you again for uh having the courage to to reach out because this is exactly what these these people uh that we're working with, these young guys, they really need this. And and this is the way we're in the book, Jack.
SPEAKER_01:Uh I that you know, so I grew up before before the internet. Uh but somehow in even in the 70s and 80s, pornography was nefarious even then. Um in Columbus, Ohio. I don't that this I don't tell this story uh in the book, but in Columbus, Ohio, in the late 70s, early 80s, the early cable system was called Cube, Q-U-B-E. And if any of your viewers are in Columbus, Ohio, and they're our age, they'd remember Cube. And they're gonna remember uh something that they probably already know what I'm about to say. This cube box, it looked about the size of my journal, okay? And and it had 30 channels. So you could you had the main channels, and then there were 10 channels, and then the secondary channels, and then the third 10 channels were pay-per-view channels. The last one, very uh notorious when we were in grade school, P10, that was the porn pay-per-view that was available. And ever and people in Columbus knew that there was a way of hacking those boxes. If you cracked the side of them and suck a pay per clip in just the right spot, you could watch all of the pay channels without paying for them, without the system even knowing that you did it. And so you'd go to a friend's house and they had cube. We didn't have cube in my house, but I had lots of friends that did. And you'd walk in and you'd see a paper clip in their in their cube box. You knew what could be available in that friend's house. And and so even then, that was something. I had a paper route, I delivered papers for the Columbus Dispatch, and this is the story I tell in the book. I was finishing my route one fall day, and where we lived, uh, you could just rake your leaves up to the the curb, and then they had a big leaf truck that would come and suck up all the leaves. And so I'm approaching this last house on my paper route, and they had all these leaves pulled up to the curb. And from a distance, I could see something on top of it, and I couldn't, I couldn't quite tell what it was. And this was actually after um, you know, those those boys had sexually abused me. And I walked up and laying on top of these this huge leaf pile right in the middle was a porn magazine. And it wasn't just Playboy or Penthouse, it was it was raw. It was stuff that as a grade school kid, I didn't I couldn't have even imagined existed. And in my head, I'm like, I'm going to get in trouble just for seeing this. And so I immediately just, I just assumed I'm in trouble now. And so I grabbed it to hide the evidence. And I had it in my in my wagon. But at the same time, I also had this feeling, is this a trap? Is there a neighbor? Did a neighbor set did one of my the people on my paper out set this out for me? And I got down the street and and I saw enough in this, but my goal was to throw it into a sewer as fast as possible to hide the evidence. But I still, it got in and the images seared like retinal burn in my brain, even to this day, all these years later. So I get it, what these guys are dealing with right now. I can't even imagine having to combat the internet pornography. But the but you know, taking that as one of the stories in this book was where was Jesus at that moment, right? I I look and go, where I got these images, and then those images led me to other behavior, and and that other behavior led me into deeper sin.
SPEAKER_00:Where was Jesus? You know, the the point you're making here, and again, Greg, I don't want you to go too fast because you're making some great points. Some young guys, when we first meet them, will say, Well, what's wrong with porn? I mean, they really don't know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:When you have those images come in, when you open that door, lust is a powerful thing. Lust is a powerful thing. You know, it's the essence of who we are, is our sexuality meant to express authentic love, actually Trinitarian love. So if the devil, if Satan or, you know, whatever you want to call this evil force comes into your heart, right? On this battlefield of the heart, that's why we have the sword. If you don't attack that right away, if you don't uh uh move away from those images right away, it can ruin a whole life, can't it? I mean, these we're we're talking about power here, aren't we, Greg?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolute power. And and to the point where, you know, again, all of these things that I ended up doing later on, and I I I had to I wrote this in the acknowledgments to my children. I I you know, I j I joke and I say, you know, if my kids ever read this, uh, then they're gonna learn something about their dad that they never knew before, but I don't have really anything to worry about because my kids don't read anything I write. So but I've you know, I I have they will allow. Yeah, I have four sons, and then my my youngest uh she'll is a daughter who'll be 17 in January. I've had to have conversations with all my kids and say, listen, you know, you have grown up watching your dad work for the Catholic Church in various capacities. You've you've seen me do all these things. There's a lot that I am now admitting that I did in this book so that it can help other people and it can help even you. The idea that there is nothing that you can do in life that God won't forgive if you turn it over to him is so massively critical for our uh culture to understand. And I think that people have this erroneous sense that it's like, well, okay, I just stopped doing it and so therefore I'll be okay. And that's not how wounds work, right? I mean, if you have a deep wound, uh if I if I shatter my leg and go, well, if I'm just gonna leave it, it's okay. It'll get better over time. If it's shattered, it won't. You need to bring that to the surgeon. It's you need to bring that to God.
SPEAKER_00:That's good and you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's critically important that we don't try to just heal these things on our own. And what's even more critically important is to, and again, this is uh sort of the whole thesis of the book. It's there are certain things that the world takes, are phrases that we use and turns them, makes them trite, makes them cliche. And when they become cliche, they start to lose their power. And so what I love about de Montfort's book, and and I love the fact that that we tie the gave the subtitle, it's not not just God doesn't hate me after all, the subtitle is Discovering Louis de Montfort's Love of Eternal Wisdom. It's critical for us to know just how deeply God loves us. It's not just a cliche. What I love is that de Montfort De Montfort gives a a new phrase that combats the cliche. God loves, you know, Jesus loves me, this I know because the Bible tells me. So, you know, it's like you just want to slap your head because it sounds so silly, right? It's like, well, I don't want to be, I don't want to be uh uh uh related to that phrase. I don't want that phrase to be a part of my life because that sounds silly. But what about the love of eternal wisdom? What about eternity? What about what you know, de Montfort says wisdom, if you obtain and pray for the the virtue of wisdom, you will obtain all of the virtues because you can't have prudence if you're not wise. You can't have temperance if you're not wise. So if you pray for wisdom and if you pray for divine wisdom, if you pray for the wisdom of Jesus Christ, eternal wisdom, then you will possess all of the virtues you need to be able to live the life that you're called to live. There's that's not at risk of becoming a cliche right now to say I am in pursuit of the love of eternal wisdom. And speaking to the men who watch this, I mean that is that's a powerful battle cry. Right?
SPEAKER_00:You see you you see it today in the culture, we can all see it. We say, Why do does that person act like that? You know, they they you know, what why why would they say something so irrational? Yeah, and you realize that our reason is seeking the truth, but we need to be enlightened by this wisdom. You can see Godz, Greg, number 36. When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible. We no longer know who we are. And you see this split happening right now in our culture. What you're speaking about. What number was that? Uh 36. 36. And I just love that. And uh it and and it's just so um it's it's it's just so relevant today in today's time, right? So what you're talking about is being enlightened by wisdom. So what was it while you were reading Louis de Montfort's uh book, right? The love of eternal wisdom. What was it at that point of your life that struck you and said, uh-oh, I'm bringing I'm uh maybe I'm going to a whole nother level here or or deeper, another level deeper into my heart. And this is a connection. Somehow you you you found a connection here.
SPEAKER_01:It was it was the gift from God of complete collapse. I didn't have anywhere else to go but up. After Denver, I accepted a job in Indiana uh for a Catholic publisher. And it it lasted less than two years before I was kind of in a place where I didn't I had to resign. I couldn't go back to the job. It it just got really bad. And part of it was all the things in my past had started to catch up and they were starting to be relived in some of the conversations and and things that were happening around me. It was like a lot of the you know, you there's a book called Um The Body Keeps Score. It's a psychological book, and it and it really does. The wounds that we experience, your body remembers them, right? There's a a form of therapy and it's Catholic approved, and it's something I've been going through for the past several years called EMDR, which it's very much re-experiencing senses, right? We we feel things on the right side of our head. We'll, you know, this is the emotional side of our brain on the right side. We'll feel things. When we think about certain memories, our stomachs might start to churn in a certain way. Or some people will even experience, you know, if they got injured uh, you know, physically at the same time as sexually, then if they injured their knee when they got sexually injured, every time they might be in an intimate situation, their their knee might start hurting or something like that, right? The body remembers. And and again, this is God's design, right? God made our bodies uh amazing miracles. So a lot of these feelings came up all at once during my job situation in 2017. And I ended up going on short-term disability. Now, as a result of the things from my childhood, I have fought depression and anxiety my whole life. I've been on medication at certain points, and I've just dealt with it at certain points. I felt some healing from God at certain points, and other times God allowed me to carry the crosses of the mental health issues. And this is another reason why I decided to write the book right now, is because of the absolute epidemic of people dealing with depression, anxiety, and trauma issues. It's coming to the surface like a flood. You know, you if you see a movie about a tsunami, the wave goes out and everything seems calm for a while, and then all of a sudden the water comes in and it is just an unstoppable wave that destroys. And I feel like we're experiencing a mental health tsunami as a result of pornography, as a result of trauma, as a result of just the way that our world has turned completely away from God and turned towards the world itself. And what happened was my life caught up to me when I was 47, 48 years old, ended up going on short-term disability, ended up being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Of all the traumas of my life, what had caught up. And that's that's ultimately what made me realize I had to resign from that job because there was no way I was going to be able to go back into what was a traumatic experience for me. We decided to move back to Georgia, focus on Rosiery Army, trust God to take care of things. But it wasn't like a snap and I was healed. It it was a start of a healing. So that was in 2018, 2019, we moved back to Georgia. And in 2020, we all know what happens, and COVID hit the world. At the beginning of 21, I actually got COVID, ended up in the ER a couple of times for uh for uh pneumonia and breathe respiratory issues. COVID is diabolical in another way, in that it created a brain fog for a lot of people too. And I that was one of the you heard about long COVID and people just kind of had foggy heads in. And so I already had issues with trying to parse out what was happening to me, what just happened to me, this horrible situation that just happened in Indiana and in Colorado and Georgia. This, this, you know, I ripped my kids out of their roots just like I had been ripped out of mine. And what have I done as a dad? What have I done as a husband? All of this, all of these just things that I'm just fighting against. We come back to Georgia, and then in 21, after I got over COVID, I went to confession one day and I just I'm pouring my heart out to the priest. And I share the story in the book.
SPEAKER_00:Now you have five kids and you're trying to, you you gotta still make a living. Yeah. And you gotta so so that stress is adding on to everything else, right?
SPEAKER_01:And at the same time, at the same time, I I know what I've done in the past, and I've and I'm doing Catholic ministry for the last 15, 20 years. Who am I, right? Who am I to be doing any of this stuff? Because I I know very well what I have done. And I know what I've said, what I've done, what I've failed to say, what I've in my thoughts and in my words, right? I I know that I'm not worthy to be doing any of the things that God has called me to be doing. But now I go to the confessional and I I'm just pouring my heart out to the priest once again. And he took a deep breath and he said, So here's what I want you to do. And this, I'm not telling your viewers to do this. This is what the priest told me. He said, I want you to go to confession every week, at least for the next few months. And he asked me if I was in therapy, and I said I wasn't, because I want you to seriously pray about getting back into therapy. And we're blessed here in the Atlanta area. We have a Catholic therapy um office that it's it's Catholic therapists, they're very faithful. And so I was able to get into uh one of the therapists there who I've been seeing for the last four years on a weekly basis, and we started revisiting the traumas. We started diving into them one at a time. And that's something that in all of my years I never did, where I allowed myself to go back and be that kid who was being abused by those boys, to go back and be the kid who, you know, the day after my sixth birthday, I had cough medicine poured on my head and rubbed into my hair. And you know, it's just the the the psychological trauma and all of the difficulties throughout the course of my life, and then my own sinfulness, and to be able to just process why did I do it, what brought me to those points, the use of pornography, the use of drugs, the use of alcohol, the use of sex, all these things that I was so ashamed of. And to process them with a therapist, but also with God. And it was in the middle of that to answer your question, that God gave me this book that I discovered, the this book, The Love of Eternal Wisdom. And it was almost like, Jack, it was almost like God said, Now you're ready to accept my love. And here's here's here's the map for accepting it. Here's your journey ties directly to this book from DeMont for it's time for the world to know this as well. For a world that's so wounded from sin and from trauma and mental health issues. And and the amazing thing, you know, you threw out some stats of those who have been sexually abused, but the amount of people who have experienced trauma in different areas. The amount of mental health issues right now. If it's not you, it's someone you know, right? It's someone in that probably lives under your roof. And so my Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's everybody's feeling this there's something different about today. We saw this, you you mentioned COVID. Uh was a was a an accelerator. It was like throwing acceleration, but but this evil was just under the surface, and you just saw it come up, right? You saw, you know, the the what what man can do to man. Yeah. You saw the evil come out. You saw that we were not as free as we thought we were free. You know, John Paul would say, you want to talk about freedom uh you know versus license to do anything you want. But he said the number one liberation we need is liberation from sin. And then John Paul II would introduce you to to somebody like uh De Montfort, uh Sister Faustina, because we need to know that God is a lover who's bringing us through this, and and all of these things you're describing, it's not so we can feel shame. We want to open this up to grace, don't we, Greg? We need to open it up to grace.
SPEAKER_01:And I wouldn't have written the book if I didn't think that it was needed. Um I have not I don't know many people who have an interest in sharing their dirty laundry in this way, right? It's like, I mean, it's it's all out there now. It's I'll be honest with you, Jack. It's been it's been a tough few days just knowing that my book is showing up on people's uh doorsteps from from Amazon or Sophia or wherever they ordered it. And now they're sitting down and they're opening it up and they're saying, Oh, I just bought a book from an absolute sinner, and they're absolutely right. They just bought a sinner's book, yeah, and the sinner's gonna lay it out. But the hope, the hope, the hope is that by looking at my sin, you'll start to look at your own life and realize that the love of eternal wisdom has been pursuing you. And if there could be a movement, I truly believe that that right now, this book from De Montfort, it is net he wrote it 300 years ago, but it's now it's the most needed. And so I was willing to write the story of all this pain and agony and sin so that people would discover, like I did, the love of eternal wisdom from De Montfort.
SPEAKER_00:It's beautiful. And and the way you did this is in my understanding, it is you share your own story, and then you you put that with something that with the is it a chapter that the De Montfort or at least a section of his book? Yeah, you just chapter for chapter all the way through.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we talked about different ways of doing it, right? We thought about maybe we do all of my essays and then we do all of De Montfort, but then I really felt like it worked better. And in in my essays, I I've you know, I kind of prime the pump. I quote De Montfort liberally in my own stories. And what's really interesting, and what's interesting about talking to you, Jack, in particular with your your focus on young men who might be watching, is I did not anticipate when I started writing, I I thought a lot more time was going to be spent sharing the story of the later 20 years of my life. And what God kept doing was having me really hone in on the time of like 15 to 25 was is the biggest chunk of the book. Those years really where the greatest amount of brokenness occurred that needed to be healed later on by eternal wisdom. The greatest amount of woundedness, right? And the greatest amount of sin and stumbling and all those kinds of things. I was really surprised. I I kept I kept wanting to move away. I'm like, I don't want to write about this anymore. I want to get I want to get to the stuff that you know is more uh right now in my present, but God kept me there and kept revealing different ways that He was present to me.
SPEAKER_00:I would, now that you said that, I I found the same thing. I'll uh just bring this up briefly, but I just wrote a handbook for uh young men called Claymore, Militus Christi, but it's a battle plan for young guys. And so the reason I think uh, Greg, is because it's unjust what's happening to these young people. And I think that God, and I just say this because you just shared this. I think that God is calling us specifically because it was unjust those guys. You know what happened, uh Greg, and why it's so important what you just said? These young people, many of them have come from dysfunctional families, first of all, fatherless families in a lot of cases. They have not brought any faith into them. If they did get it, if they did go to church at all, it was to a watered-down gospel that, you know, it's all kumbaya and let's do light bonfires, but that was not helping these guys. I'll tell you, you know, I just was was talking to uh the family uh uh uh of a father of a young uh boy, and he's going to uh youth ministry, he's about 17, going to youth ministry and having sex with a girl that he's he met there. And so there it's a my point is it's a disconnection. Yeah. So when you bring wisdom in, we're you know, it's a not, you know, John Paul would say, don't impose, but propose. And I think that's what you're doing. Here's brokenness, here's a proposal, think about this, think about how we get out of these things and how we bring grace into our lives. I I think you're right on. I I think that you were called, just like we are here at the John Paul II Renewal Center, to say, hey, you can deal with all kinds of age groups, Greg, but you know what? These young people really need this. They really and they need somebody that's gone through it and says somebody like you that says, hey, I'm gonna share what happened with me. Maybe you'll you'll read you'll you'll read something into that from your own life. Now bring that into Louis de Montfort's wisdom and see, you know, you're bridging the gap for them. As I'm reading you, something's gonna click in my own mind. Ooh, it wasn't exactly that, but it was this. I bring it into to Louis de Montfort's light. He shines light on this and brings me into mercy, huh? Into the story of grace. So I love it. Yeah, spot on. Anything anything else you could say with these young guys as we're winding down? We got just a couple minutes left. What what what would you say to uh these people, these young people, old people healing from these wounds? Look at it. We know marriages, you know, good Catholic marriages that are breaking apart after 10, 20, 30 years. What what brought you to that encounter? What you're really talking about when you're talking about eternal wisdom is Jesus Christ, as you mentioned. What at the end of the day, Benedict, as Pope Benedict the Sixteenth would say, you know, it's not going to be an ethical decision that brings us into our faith. It's not going to be a lofty philosophical idea, it's going to be an encounter with an event, an encounter with a person, and that's Jesus Christ. And that encounter will give you a new horizon and a def definitive direction for your life. I mean, that's what you're doing here, isn't it, uh, Greg.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I oftentimes lament that I can't point to a single Jesus encounter. Uh but I see very clearly it now, and this was a big part, you know, that came alive for me as I was writing this book of how much God has been in pursuit of me throughout my life, even when I didn't realize it. So I may not have had that one moment, right? I didn't have this, I didn't have the Holy Spirit come down out of the sky and you know, flame above my head, and you know, and a charismatic experience of of Christ in that way, but he's been there all along. He's constantly pursuing and that that acknowledgement now, I think, is something that will help people to realize like the the the moments of great impact, scripture tells us very clearly, God speaks in whispers. And the more we s the more we seek out whispers, the more that we'll hear them. The more we're looking for you know huge signs and wonders, we won't see those. But if you want to see God, he's always there in the whispers.
SPEAKER_00:Tiny whispering signs, tiny whispering sounds 19 if everybody wants to read that, huh? Yeah, we have to be in silence, don't we? Okay, give me just a couple more minutes here because I want to just bridge the gap also with the rosary. You know, the rosary is going to bring you into that that silence, you know, and it's so good for these young guys because they just sitting in pure silence is very difficult. But the rosary bridges that, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01:It gives you almost I would say that it, you know, and that's one of the big things is like praying the rosary every day over the course of many years. It hasn't been an easy thing. Especially when I was like, where are you, God? And yet I'm still praying my rosary. When we meditate on, when we pray the rosary, we're meditating on the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ. We're meditating on the moments where we know Jesus walked on this earth and what he was doing, and we could try to place ourselves there with him. Like ongoing conversations, right? You and I are talking for the first time today. If we talked again and again and again on a daily basis, a year from now, I'm going to know you a lot better. If you pray your rosary talking to Jesus, reveal yourself to me, Jesus. Show me where your eternal wisdom is in my love in my life. Show me where your love is in my life. Day by day by day, you'll start to grow in a greater understanding of that. And the rosary, DeMontford says this because it unites both vocal prayer and mental prayer. You're meditating on the life while you're saying these prayers. I give guys the example of like if you watched the movie Star Wars, but there was no soundtrack by John Williams, Star Wars would be a pretty boring movie. You got a lot of great images, but that music, man, really revs it up. And when you're praying the rosary, that's like the John Williams music score as you're meditating on the images, right? Yeah. And so doing those two things day by day by day, don't, don't demand huge, miraculous signs and wonders, but ask for small whispers and you'll get them in abundance.
SPEAKER_00:That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And and, you know, just like these young guys are working out, Greg, they're starting to eat better. Uh, and and the same thing, you know, we are what we put into our brains, isn't it? You know, what we consume. And so with the rosary, with this wisdom that you're talking about, it's gonna change. You're it if nothing else, your anxiety levels are gonna go down. You are gonna feel this mercy uh uh from God. Greg, where do where where do we learn more about you? Uh where do we buy where do we buy this where where do we buy this book? And and give us the title one more time, give us the websites one more time.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Well, if your viewers want, they can get the introduction in the first two chapters absolutely free. You can go to rosaryarmy.com slash wisdom.
SPEAKER_00:Rosaryarmy.com, one word, rosaryarmy.com slash wisdom.
SPEAKER_01:Make sure you put that slash wisdom at the end. It'll take you to a special page on our website where you can sign up, get the the introduction, first two chapters. But you'll also get some behind the scenes stuff, some extra prayers, some other things as well that I've made available for for uh for readers. Um RosaryArmy.com is a great place. The book is available wherever you buy your books. So Sophia Institute Press, of course, but you can also go on Amazon, uh Soon in Barnes and Noble. I'm I'm clicking refresh on a regular basis. It's gonna be on Audible. I already recorded the audiobook version of it. So if people prefer that, you know you mentioned guys uh lifting weights and working out a lot. If they need something to listen to while they're working out, they can get the uh the audio book from Audible and listen that way.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. The only thing I would get the audio, the audio, and the and we're trying to get some good books in their hands because you know what, with the AI stuff, Greg, and all this. Here, here, hold that up. You know, when I edit this, I'll I'll make sure I have this behind us. God doesn't hate me after all. I I want them to have those books in their hands because you know what? Once you have that, you know, nobody can change the story, man. It is what it is right there. Now I also listen to it at the gym, you know, or on my exercise bike, but I like to go back and underline all those things.
SPEAKER_01:So hey, God bless you. My wife almost always, when she's reading a book, she gets the audiobook and the paper at the same time. I love it like that. She does it all the time. That's what I do.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, God bless you. You're a gift, and thank you for sharing that. Thanks for pouring out your heart. We're gonna keep you in our uh our prayers, uh, Greg. I appreciate it. Yeah, and and please keep keep the John Paul II Renewal Center in yours, will you? I'll do that, Jack. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.