Heroes and Saints
In this Cor session, Michael Philpott—military veteran and Director of Parish Operations at St. John—invites men to reflect on the difference between worldly heroes and the true Christian model of greatness found in Christ and the saints. Tracing heroism from ancient myths to modern culture, he contrasts self-reliant achievement with the humility, surrender, and God-centered virtue that define sanctity. The session concludes in prayer, grounding the call to holiness in the example of Mary and the witness of the saints.
MC: Adam Hohn
Presenter: Michael Philpott
Deacon: Rick Freedberg
Brought to you By: The Knights of Columbus
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participantOne:(1200-23640): CORE is this, it's not just a thing. The Knights of Columbus, they focused for, they did a study for a few years, and they noticed that, one, Catholic men were not associating with each other. They did a study, it was...
participantOne:(23880-51040): close to 80% of men in the pews didn't know another, or maybe didn't know a Catholic man, maybe one Catholic man on a first-name basis. And then from there, it just gets more staggering, two, three, four men on a first-name basis. Men are just focused on, I show up, but then I have to show up at home. And then, but I don't have anybody to talk about the things that are going on in the world.
participantOne:(51320-81160): Things that, you know, that maybe I have questions about my faith and who do I turn to. So CORE is prayer, formation, fraternity, love of God, love of self, love of neighbor. That if you know another Catholic man, invite him to CORE. Because our formation didn't stop when we got confirmed or if we went to Catholic high school or...
participantOne:(81380-105200): maybe maybe explored the realm of seminary if you ask any priest they're still continuing to be formed so we as men still need to continue to be formed so that we can be that right arm of the church to help and Joseph talked about that we talked about that last month about the role of the laity of what our role is in what the role of the priest is not
participantOne:(105679-126360): That it's our job if we're going to create groups like this, additional small groups, Bible studies. It's not up for the priest to decide when we can do those things. We can do those things right here, right now. So I wanted to make sure for the new guys in the audience to understand what core is.
participantOne:(126780-164160): So at this time, I would like to welcome our speaker. He has a military background. He's also the director of parish operations at St. John. This time, I would like to welcome my friend Michael Philpott, who will be speaking about heroes and saints. All right, good morning. Morning. Okay, so we prayed, we sang a hymn, but I'm going to ask you just real quick at the beginning to switch from the religious and put your head into the secular. So...
participantOne:(164660-198799): I'll start with questions, everybody's warmed up and woken, so at least maybe one or two responses. So what is a hero to you guys? What traits does a hero have? Courageous. Courageous? Honored? Selfless. Selfless. Good character. Good character. Spiritual. It's a secular though. What do you think about a hero is in the broadest sense of the word? Courage. Courage. Courage.
participantOne:(200960-228780): He gets the point. Right, so selfless, brave, honest, inspirational. Very often he's a leader of some kind. People look to him, follow him. He's strong. He protects. Protects, provides. We hear that a lot these days about the ideal of a man. He's loyal. He's loyal.
participantOne:(229200-270820): Loyal to his king, loyal to the people who follow him, loyal to his nation. Okay, another question. What are some examples of heroes? Again, secular thinking. James Bond. James Bond, okay. Yeah, fictional or real? Athlete crime. Athletes, very, especially here in Michigan. Comic book characters. William Halsey, Admiral in the Pacific in World War II. Patton, kind of his counterpart. Yeah.
participantOne:(271200-302780): I'd be your born to. Sorry? Henry Ford. Joan of Arc. What's that? Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc. Okay. Audie Murphy. Audie Murphy. I think I have more, more, most decorated soldier in history. Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Okay. Well, we're just doing secular right now. We're just doing secular right now. Yeah. What? What?
participantOne:(303880-336120): So, these figures embody these different, these kinds of virtues or attributes that we had mentioned. Not always perfectly so. So, like James Bond was mentioned, very flawed hero, right? But he did, he got the job done, and he served king and country. And he got the girl. Not always in the most Christian way. Every time. He was fast. He was stupid.
participantOne:(338180-371340): And so even when there's maybe a Christian-like virtue in those heroes, it's kind of secondary. It's downstream. It's a result of the culture. So, okay, so let's go a little further back in time, okay? So where a lot of our ideas of heroism come from are from those ancient days, those heroes Hercules, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, Roman heroes like Aeneas,
participantOne:(373140-399700): Even the Middle East, there you have the Epic of Gilgamesh. Northern Europeans, you may not have heard of this one, Sigmund, but he's kind of the original dragon slayer from the German and Norse cultures. Beowulf, I think we probably all had to read it in high school at least. Real life Julius Caesar, right? He was a conqueror, he was a leader, his soldiers loved him.
participantOne:(399920-432080): People asked him to come in and take over. But then he had his famous enemy, which I'm not gonna even try to pronounce, but the Gallic barbarian general, who was very difficult for Caesar to defeat. And then even later in the post, and when you get into the Christian era, we have this period in the early Middle Ages where that pagan ideal of heroism blended with some of the Christian ideals, so you get King Arthur.
participantOne:(432320-459280): You get real life figures like Charlemagne. And these are very conquering kind of heroes, but there's also explorers like Leif Erikson, right? The Viking who discovered the new world in some tellings. So whether you refer to these guys or not, they embody these attributes. They were strong in battle. They were also very clever.
participantOne:(459580-483480): So when Hercules had to, in one of his labors, had to defeat the Hydra, the Hydra every time he cut off one of its head, tuna grew. So this was a problem that he had to solve. And he solved it by figuring out if he got something hot and cauterized the wound after he cut the head off, then the new tuna heads wouldn't grow.
participantOne:(483640-512340): And so he was able to eventually overcome his enemy through cleverness and thanklessness. They inspired other heroes to follow them, and other men. You know, Jason and the Argonauts, right? So you've got all of the Greek heroes, the Hercules and Perseus and all these guys on the ship to go find the golden fleece and overcome a lot of adversaries on the way.
participantOne:(514000-551960): These heroes were not perfect and they had foibles, and they sometimes were defeated and fell. Whatever the outcome was, they succeeded or failed based on their own capabilities. So these tales are told around the campfire for ages, whether they were the old Greek heroes or whether they're the superheroes of today as these models of inspiration,
participantOne:(554380-583560): And we still have these heroes that live with us in real life. We look to history, kings, warriors, and generals, soldiers, policemen, firefighters. Somebody mentioned Henry Ford. In America, business leaders are heroes. They're often guys who hold themselves up by their bootstraps. They have a vision, an ideal. They go for that goal. They get people to follow them, and they become great successes.
participantOne:(583800-611740): I got to do the super heroes, or the starship captains. And even when there are Christian ideals and inspired virtues, such as compassion or humility, where we, in the very modern moment, we psychologize them. And we put a lot of emphasis on those moments of self-doubt and vulnerability.
participantOne:(611939-646580): still see that they are able to triumph. They remain examples that stand apart, but are bound to the worldly here and now idea of success. So the last thing I'll say about the hero thing, before we move on to saints, is that there is an idea in ancient times that it was important to be heroic to achieve eternal life, but not the way that we think of it.
participantOne:(646800-676460): So when the Greeks thought about when you died, the average person like us, we would go to the underworld, and it would be this gray, lifeless miasma. It wasn't Elysium, it wasn't the fields and drinking mead, because that's where heroes went. The average person just kind of faded into a faceless existence.
participantOne:(676819-712980): But the hero could last forever. And why? Because people remembered the hero. And they lived on in the memories of their countries, their nations, their families beyond their death. And that was the best way to achieve immortality, was to make sure that people remembered you. Now, when the Son of God incarnated, he gave us a new kind of hero. He is the example.
participantOne:(714939-762120): Christ is fully a man, and he does conquer the enemies of death, the devil, the flesh, but he did it with a surrender. He was always pointed to the will of the Father. He humbled himself in front of his own creations, gave us an example for our entire lives, that every act and every thought should in some way be pointed to the Father. And in doing so, that is how we are redeemed into eternity.
participantOne:(763640-802720): So he turns the very idea of the hero on its head. He doesn't erase it, he doesn't demolish it, but he lifts it up and shows us a different way. And it's a way where each one of us can imitate him and be that hero. We are not faceless beings in the afterlife. So we see that our modern, our secular idea of heroes are just, they're not bad, they're just incomplete, right? So there's nothing wrong with
participantOne:(803199-841300): looking to Abraham Lincoln or General Eisenhower or name your hero and getting some good examples from that. But there's something missing. Now following Christ's example is very hard. We all know that. Christ doesn't promise us anything in this life except for the cross. So sometimes it can feel impossible. So then we can look to the true heroes of the Christian age, which are the saints. And so I don't think it's
participantOne:(841520-870100): necessary to define too much of what a saint is to this group. And we all know that there are models of virtue, there are models of Christian loving. But there, so let's look at the parallels to the idea of hero. They have the virtues, they have strength and courage and perseverance. You can't, found a religious order, you can't, like Saint Teresa
participantOne:(870300-906000): of Calcutta go halfway across the world and serve the poor for an entire life without those kinds of virtues. But they're very real people and they're weak and they're flawed. Like I said before, the secular hero may have weaknesses but somehow through their own effort overcomes those weaknesses or maybe they end in tragedy in our examples in cautionary tales. But the saints don't rely on themselves.
participantOne:(906839-934620): They submit their weaknesses to God, and with that perseverance are able to grow in those virtues even more, and find redemption and sanctity. I think one of, I mean there's a lot of great examples, and you know St. Augustine for instance wrote a confession, we all know about his whole flawed life, but I like to think of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was a soldier in Spain, who lived a very secular life,
participantOne:(934959-964240): was wounded in battle, and then his recoveries took a very long time back then without modern medicine. And when he was in his recovery, he started to go into his mind and try to figure out what's the right way to live, and then he put the Bible in, and eventually he founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, who became very important missionaries in the post-Reformation period.
participantOne:(973040-1005560): So the saint is always oriented to God, and we can look at these examples of how to follow Christ, of how to be the hero that Christ is through how other weak and fallen human beings did so, and did so very well. And we can learn to rely on God and not ourselves. So while we build virtue, we always do it with humility. And so, like I said with...
participantOne:(1006120-1037660): The idea of how to live on eternally in people's memories was an ancient ideal. It's a pre-Christian ideal. Unfortunately, some people still think that. But being a saint means truly living with God forever. So we're not going to Mount Olympus to drink ambrosia, or to Valhalla and drinking honey mead. You know, these are just...
participantOne:(1039099-1071360): not even comparable to being able to experience the life of the divine itself in our hearts for eternity. And one last point, one thing that you can't do with any other hero that you can't do with the saint is that we can talk to them. Right? And so that's why we have patrons in them saints, whether it's a patron of a thing, you know, of a profession, or it's our namesake, or it's just a saint that really calls out to us.
participantOne:(1073879-1110840): So, that's it. I think I made a pretty good time, Joseph? Yeah, you did. So, that's Heroes and Saints. And so, I'll close here. Oops, I have these little weird things here. Alright, so, we'll pray a decorative rosary. Before we do that, we'll start by just praying Psalm 1. And so, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
participantOne:(1112460-1146120): How blessed is anyone who rejects the advice of the wicked, and does not take a stand in the path that sinners tread, nor a seat in company with cynics, but who delights in the law of Yahweh, and murmurs His law day and night. Such a one is like a tree planted near streams, it bears fruit in season, and its leaves never wither, and every project succeeds.
participantOne:(1146980-1182440): How different the wicked, how different. Just like chaff blown around by the wind, the wicked will not stand firm in the judgment, nor sinners in the gathering of the upright. For Yahweh watches over the path of the upright, but the path of the wicked is doomed. Amen. Alright, so we'll pray the Decade of Rosary, and we'll pray the Assumption. So Mary, who is kind of the ultimate saint,
participantOne:(1182700-1191800): who always had her, she surrendered her will to the will of the Father, was rewarded by being assumed into heaven.
participantOne:(1193200-1215340): Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
participantOne:(1215680-1242780): Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, in the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, in the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
participantOne:(1243000-1261800): Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
participantOne:(1262160-1289580): blessed are thou among them and blessed is the fruit of thy womb jesus holy mary mother of god pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen hail mary full of grace the lord is with thee blessed are thou among them and blessed is the fruit of thy womb jesus holy mary mother of god pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen hail mary full of grace the lord blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb jesus
participantOne:(1289879-1316900): Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
participantOne:(1317540-1344020): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.
participantOne:(1343760-1366760): as it was in the beginning, and it is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Amen, Jesus. Forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you, Michael.
