Bright Stars

Many Franciscan University alumni seek to shine the light of Jesus Christ in the world and positively impact the Church and the culture. Some, like Curtis Martin MA ’93, Dr. Tim Gray MA ’91, Jason Evert ’97 MA ’98, Chris Stefanick ’98, and others, have become internationally renowned for their ministries (page 17). But many more have only just begun to shine their brilliant lights, and others, while seasoned evangelists, have recently launched new ways to share the Catholic faith. Franciscan Magazine spoke to seven of those alums.

Each of these bright stars credits Franciscan’s dynamism, rich theology classes, and vibrant spirituality with stirring the fire of faith within them and giving them the tools to share the Gospel. But Franciscan credits them for the compassion, creativity, and hard work they put in to found ministries that evangelize in such innovative and moving ways. Here are their stories.

Real + True

Unlocking the Catechism in a new way.

Edmund Mitchell ’11 flipped over a Dr. Scott Hahn book and saw that he taught at Franciscan University, so he called the Admissions Office and told the counselor, “I think I want to be Scott Hahn.” The counselor replied, “That’s not a career path!”

Admissions recommended Mitchell pursue a catechetics and theology major, and so he broke the news to his parents that he wanted to leave his biomedical engineering program at Georgia Tech and study at Franciscan.

Edmund Mitchell ’11

“My parents were like, ‘Why do you need a degree in theology or catechetics? What could you possibly do with your life?’” he recalls.

A degree in catechetics and theology set Mitchell up for edifying work in parish ministry, but after several years, he had the idea to evangelize on a grander scale. He joined forces with Emily Mentock and Edmundo Reyes, who work for the Archdiocese of Detroit, and Our Sunday Visitor to create a nonprofit digital evangelization ministry called Real+True (realtrue.org). The mission of Real+True—named after the real and true God—is to make the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) more relatable and “[t]o pass down and pass along the gift of our faith by creating beautiful, captivating, and relevant content inspired by the Catechism,” per realtrue.org.

In September 2021, Real+True—translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and French—released its first faith-building videos and podcasts based on the CCC. Mitchell writes the scripts and helps produce the videos, which are available for free on realtrue.org and YouTube.

The videos can stand on their own but build on the previous video if watched in order. The content includes creative animations, found footage, and playful antics to motivate people to think indirectly and directly about Church doctrine. The units address questions such as “why Catholics believe in life everlasting” and “how to forgive,” providing ways to apply them to real life.

“The point of Real+True was not to create a curriculum but to provide jumping-off points or conversation starters,” he says. “To reach people in the digital continent—especially to reach people on the fringes.”

Eden Invitation

Helping Catholics who struggle with their sexual identity to live holy lives.

“In the Church, we need to talk about same-sex attraction because if we don’t, then the secular culture defines the narrative,” says Anna Carter ’09. In 2017, Carter co-founded a doctrinally orthodox movement called Eden Invitation. It’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that walks with Catholics experiencing same-sex attraction and gender discordance and helps them to live holy lives.

Recipient of Franciscan’s 2022 Outstanding Young Alumni Award for her innovative efforts to uphold the teachings of the Catholic Church, Carter explains the secular culture has already begun a compelling job of defining the narrative. They encourage community, tell stories, and offer spaces for people living with same-sex attraction. Faithful Catholics need to play catch-up.

“If we want to have any hope of helping people with these experiences to encounter Christ—fall in love with him and want to give their lives to him—then we have to talk about this, and we have to be invitational about it,” she encourages.

Since the four Eden Invitation staff members and Carter have experienced same-sex desires and/or gender discordance, they offer personal witness to their approximately 350 members active on the nonprofit’s online platform. The website (edeninvitation.com) provides access to retreats, book clubs, gatherings, local clubs, inspiring testimonial videos, and more. Eden Invitation, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, has accompanied many more persons dealing with same-sex desires, but not everyone chooses to join the movement.

“We’re not just for people who are sold out for Church teaching,” she says. “We try to accompany people on the fence, and not all those people decide to stay—Jesus faced that same thing.”

Those who join Eden Invitation’s online community are asked to commit to a statement of belief, including chastity and virtuous living. Community members receive mentoring and encouragement for living in virtue and Christian discipleship.

“It’s a place where people, if they’re struggling, the community will hold them accountable,” she explains. “There’s someone they can call who will lift them.”

Carter adds that her struggles with same-sex desire have impacted her spiritual life, but not in ways people in the pews might think. Her cross has become an avenue to grow closer to the Lord.

“My experience with same-sex desire is something that’s brought me to my knees and brought me to the tabernacle more than a lot of other stuff in my life. It’s a way that I’ve encountered Christ’s mercy and his love for me.”

One member’s conversion story stands out to Carter. A Franciscan grad had a close friend who pursued same-sex relationships. The Franciscan grad modeled Christ-like love, and her friend reached out to Eden Invitation and came to one of their retreats.

“Two years later, the person converted to Catholicism and is an active member of the community,” she shares.

Carter says this story not only highlights the importance of her ministry but also the need for friends and family to be present for their loved ones grappling with same-sex attraction.

“You might think that your loved one who has had an LGBTQ experience, whatever that looks like, is antithetical to the Church. Often, the person is seeking the same truths— beauty, goodness, and love—as everyone else,” she says.

Made for This Birth

Embracing God’s design for expectant mothers and childbirth.

Mary (Foley ’02) Haseltine, best-selling author of Made for This: The Catholic Mom’s Guide to Birth, continues to break new ground in the culture of life for her vision of a holy, confident, and safe birthing experience. Haseltine, who has worked as a certified doula for over 11 years, saw a broken healthcare system, especially regarding fertility, pregnancy, and birth. Knowing women and babies deserved better, she set out to make a change for Catholic mothers who deserved more reverent, respectful, and dignified care during and after birth.

Haseltine, from Buffalo, New York, says, “My greatest goal for Made for This Birth [book, website, and app] is to help as many women as possible embrace the design of God for birth.”

Mary (Foley ’02) Haseltine

In the United States, the culture surrounding birthing is impersonalized and considers birth a pathology. Haseltine says, “Birth is not just a vehicle for getting humans into the world. It was intentionally and intricately designed to be far more than that. It’s meant to transform women— physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.”

After the 2018 release of Haseltine’s book, she received hundreds of messages from women sharing their horror stories of disrespectful, impersonal, or even harmful care. The mother of seven children desired to help women struggling to find providers who aligned with their beliefs.

“During what should be the most sacred and reverenced moments of our lives, so many of us instead have had to navigate condescending or downright insulting remarks regarding our family size, NFP, unborn children with disabilities, callousness during miscarriage, and more,” she says.

In response, in 2021, Haseltine created the Made for This Birth website (madeforthisbirth.net), which provides support, information, and resources. It also includes the Made for This Birth Directory (madeforthisbirth.net/directory), a state-by-state database of midwives, doulas, and obstetricians who are Catholic, Christian, and pro-life.

“It is a blessing for mothers when they find support that offers not only respectful, dignified, evidence-based care, but also someone who will pray with you and acknowledge the sacredness of life,” she explains.

In 2022, Haseltine released the Made for This Birth app, another resource to help Catholic women prepare their minds, bodies, and souls for birth and feel supported during pregnancy. A vital component of the app includes the Made for This Birth Album: a series of audio tracks of prayer, Scripture, affirmations, and relaxation practice for use before and during the birth.

“There’s a void in the birth space where the vast majority of resources available to women during this time are either from a secular perspective, which treats pregnancy as a disease and birth as an emergency, to the opposite end that comes from a very New Age and pagan perspective,” she explains.

Haseltine has many future dreams for Made for This Birth, which she operates with the help of her husband, Brian Haseltine ’02. She envisions offering a comprehensive childbirth education program, developing a Catholic doula training program, and providing resources for fathers—so sign up for email updates to get the latest news (madeforthisbirth.net/ resources and Instagram: @madeforthisbirth).

Project Xavier

Following a missionary’s heart.

Shannon Walsh ’98 discovered her missionary’s heart the summer before her senior year at Franciscan. It all began when she spent five weeks in Calcutta with Mother Teresa’s sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, tending to the poor, caring for orphans, and teaching street kids in a school.

“I fell in love with service to the poor, the missionary life, and caring for orphans,” Walsh says. “I cherished that, in Calcutta, we began every day with Mass and ended each day with an hour of silence before the Blessed Sacrament— giving everything from the day over to Jesus.”

Walsh felt God calling her to become a missionary. After graduation, she immersed herself in mission work in Mexico and later in Asia, where she spent over 20 years serving the poor and unwanted. Her missionary endeavors have been mantled in pro-life work. While in Asia, she cared for orphan infants for several years and opened a hospice for terminally ill orphans.

“Caring for the dying was such a gift because these kids were abandoned—throwaways,” she says. “Though not valued by society, we loved these babies and miss them.”

At the same time, Walsh sheltered pregnant moms experiencing crisis pregnancies. She formed a lasting relationship with one mom named Grace, 20, whose mother insisted she abort her baby. At midnight, dressed only in a hospital gown, Grace—three months pregnant—fled the hospital, which had scheduled an abortion for her the next day.

“Grace walked out the hospital, having left one little note for her mother [who was sleeping next to her daughter’s bed],” Walsh recalls.

Through a network of Catholics, Grace found Walsh and lived with her during her pregnancy and afterward. The two formed a lasting bond, and Grace’s daughter is now a teen.

While helping dying orphans and moms in need, God sent Walsh a particularly evangelizing task. In 2005, an Asian woman came to work with her. It turned out she had ulterior motives, though.

Shannon Walsh ’98

“She wanted me to prepare her for baptism,” Walsh recalls. “I was very busy running a hospice and taking care of women who were in crisis pregnancy. I would try to sit down with her and have Catechism class, but instead, mostly, I was bringing her to my own holy hour. As we worked together, I would also share with her throughout the day about Jesus and prayer.”

She adds, “Those daily holy hours were impactful because now she’s a monastic nun.”

Walsh currently mentors and teaches Asians curious about the Catholic faith, but from afar. Now living in California, she spreads the Gospel virtually through her nonprofit, Project Xavier (projectxavier.org), despite many foreign governmental obstacles. Her ministry, founded in 2014, evangelizes through teaching theology, philosophy, Theology of the Body, and English. Walsh’s mission is to evangelize Asians and help them grow in their faith so that they, too, can become missionaries.

She credits the dynamism of Franciscan University for preparing her to become a missionary.

“Everything about being at Franciscan stirred up the flame within,” says Walsh.

Holy Family School of Faith

Immersion, meditation, and friendship.

In 2005, Dr. Mike Scherschligt ’95 founded the Holy Family School of Faith in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas to teach and hand on the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the Catholic faith. The Holy Family School of Faith (schooloffaith.com) has since blossomed and offers additional initiatives—a daily Rosary podcast, international pilgrimages, retreats, and immersion experiences, and fostering spiritual friendship—among other spiritual resources.

In 2010, Scherschligt led his first pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and since then, the Holy Family School of Faith has visited 40 holy sites, including Rome, Poland, and all the Marian shrines worldwide. The Holy Land pilgrimages especially immerse a person in the lives of Jesus and Mary because they “profoundly put a person in contact with the Holy Family,” says Scherschligt.

He calls visiting the Holy Land “a sacramental,” explaining, “A sacramental—holy water, a crucifix, for example—disposes a person to open up to encounter God. But the whole land is sacramental. When you go to the Holy Land, you step into the Bible, see it, hear it, smell it, taste it.”

Scherschligt has often witnessed how visiting the Holy Land changes people. One memory that stands out involves his daughter, Sarah, who took the pilgrimage as a teen.

“She said to me, ‘I read all kinds of stories, and the Bible was just another story, but then I went to the Holy Land, and it’s real! It’s not a story. It’s not a myth. I placed my hand on Calvary. I’ve been in the empty tomb of Jesus. I’ve been to every site. No matter what anybody says to me for the rest of my life, they cannot take this experience away from me.’”

Dr. Mike Scherschligt ’95

Another pillar of Holy Family School of Faith’s ministry is the Daily Rosary podcast, which has gained more than 40,000 subscribers since 2018. The idea for the podcast grew from Scherschligt’s desire to help his children learn their faith and fend off distraction while they prayed the Rosary. He decided to compile a short reading from the Gospel, the Catechism, or the writings of saints to accompany each Rosary decade. Praying the family Rosary with meditations from the Deposit of the Faith caught on with friends.

“I noticed they were captivated by having more to meditate upon from the fullness of our Catholic faith during the Rosary,” he says.

Then Scherschligt began recording podcasts of his Rosary meditations, interest snowballed, and the Daily Rosary podcast was born. The reflections walk through the life of Jesus, the whole Catechism, the virtues, and more. There are more than 1,500 meditations to pick from on their app “Daily Rosary Meditations.”

He says, “The Mother of God does not want the Rosary to be a rote saying of words while our minds wander. She wants it to be a meditation on the Word of God. So, we broke it down into daily, bite-sized, digestible portions that we weave into the Rosary so you can learn the whole Catholic faith while praying the Rosary. And we send it out as a podcast.”

Expanding their ministry, in 2022, Holy Family School of Faith began the Take Back Sunday initiative because too many people are busy, overwhelmed, and lonely.

“We live in [an era of ] friendship deficit syndrome. People are overwhelmed and busy, so they’re lacking friendship,” he says.

Taking back Sunday includes delighting in God’s goodness in the Mass, family and friends, the goodness of creation, and inviting those who suffer from loneliness and isolation.

“We’re trying to spread that movement through our whole audience, which is now in 110 countries,” he says.

Catholic Counselors

Guidance for marriage and families.

The day after Dr. Gregory Popcak ’89 and Lisa (Morgan ’89) Popcak graduated, they were married on campus in Christ the King Chapel. Ten years later, they released their best-selling book, For Better… Forever: A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage, and Catholics from around the country began contacting them for marriage help.

Greg Popcak, a resident of Steubenville, Ohio, says, “[People] were seeking a faithful place to turn for help with marriage and family struggles and other problems. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, at the time, Catholics could either seek secular or evangelical sources of support.”

In 1999, the Popcaks formed the Pastoral Solutions Institute—now called Catholic Counselors—to provide Catholics with an authentically faithful place to get advice and counseling. Their CatholicCounselors.com website offers pastoral psychotherapy services via telephone to Catholic couples, families, and individuals worldwide. The couple’s ministry naturally flowed into radio; first, in 2001, with their Ave Maria Radio program called Heart, Mind, and Strength, and second, a call-in program called Fully Alive for The Catholic Channel on SiriusXM. Then in 2012, they rebranded their Ave Maria Radio program, calling it More2Life.

“We wanted to focus more explicitly on providing Theology of the Body-based answers to marriage, family, and personal problems,” Greg explains. “We were picked up by EWTN a few years after that.”

Over the years, the couple has witnessed many fruits from their radio ministry. One caller, in particular, stands out to them. A young college student called into More2Life because recent news had him reeling: His girlfriend was pregnant.

“He was terrified and upset, confused, guilty. He didn’t know what to do next,” Lisa Popcak recalls. “We gave him our encouragement and advice as we prayed about how we could best help him.”

The Popcaks felt inspired to ask people to call in and share their experiences. For the entire hour, listeners shared stories about choosing life for their unborn babies.

“Embracing parenthood became the thing that cracked open their hearts to God … to life. How, in their experience, the struggles they went through were more than made up for by the blessings of the child,” Greg says.

In July 2019, Lisa and Greg and over 50 Church leaders gathered for a Symposium on Catholic Family Life and Spirituality at Notre Dame to explore ways to regenerate Catholic family life. The symposium led to the development of the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life—a framework to strengthen Catholic families through family-building practices.

“Most of what we think of as Catholic spirituality comes from the monastic or clerical traditions. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t fit neatly into busy family life,” Lisa says. “Catholic families need and deserve a spirituality of their own.”

The Liturgy of Domestic Church Life, which the Popcaks presented at the Vatican in June 2022, “offers a way for families to encounter Christ more meaningfully at home and experience their faith as the source of the warmth in their homes,” Greg explains.

To invite families to live the Liturgy of Domestic Church Life, the Popcaks created a platform called CatholicHOM. com—Catholic Households on Mission. Their CatholicHOM app offers podcasts, moderated discussion groups, creative resources, and pastoral accompaniment.

“Our team of pastoral counselors and CatholicHOM coaches are there to give daily support to our members,” they say. “If a member has a parenting question, a question about living their faith at home, or about building a stronger, more loving Catholic family life, our team is there with faithful guidance and ongoing support.”

The CatholicHOM app is just one more way the Popcaks have been helping families remain faithful to God in an ever-increasingly faithless world.

Dr. Gregory Popcak ’89 and Lisa (Morgan ’89) Popcak