Fr Casey Jones is a super bad (i.e. awesome) priest, who is a friend of outcasts and a strategist in the Youth Ministry game. He has a degree in the school of Hard Knocks, as demonstrated by his copious amounts of tattoos (usually hidden from view under his clerics) . He is currently working on his Licentiate in the New Evangelization, and is knee deep in youth ministry. He is a chaplain at a school in Florida, he preaches Camp Hidden lake (Lifeteen’s middle school camp), and he has a lot to say on the topic of evangelization that I think is incredibly relevant to us as innovators/creators.
Notes from Marcellino:
Father Casey and I go way back. He was actually my RD at Ave Maria. Fr Casey celebrated my sister's wedding this summer and he killed it.
Part of the reason I’m bringing Fr. Casey on is because we both were also friends of Fr. McTeigue whilst at Ave Maria. Fr McTeigue wrote an article on Aleithea called “Beware the Juvenilization of American Christianity (HERE). We wrote a response to that article (HERE) but I felt like the issues he brought up started a conversation that deserved deeper thought.
The Story:
Before we get into that though, some of you know that Fr McTeigue preached against one of my marketing efforts whilst at Ave, I promised I would tell the story
I ran unopposed as SAB president my sophomore year, believed that good events could dramatically affect the trajectory of the school’s culture, and started going for it. My team put on concerts, dances, lip syncing competitions, it was a blast. One weekend we invited the Afters & Between the Trees to Ave Maria, but unbeknownst to us the history department had assigned term papers that were due the following day. In an effort to rally the student body, I got up on a table in the middle of the cafeteria and announced that this was totally worth pulling an all nighter for.
The next morning I received reports that at the 7am mass, Fr. Mactigue had delivered a sweltering homily on how we are not at school to have fun but to study and not to be led astray by other students who are attempting to co opt our educations and lead us down the path to culture of mediocrity. As you can imagine, he used the word vocation many times. That was the 4th homily I had preached on something I did.
There you go.