By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

Jesus’ presence was proclaimed in various ways at the men’s conference at Assumption University in Worcester Saturday.
“We want him here,” said emcee Father José A. Rodríguez, pastor of Holy Family of Nazareth Parish in Leominster, explaining that a eucharistic adoration chapel was set up in Assumption’s Plourde Center.
“There are 700 people in this building right now,” he said. “Jesus is here. So cherish him.”
Father Rodríguez, a planning committee member, also encouraged participants in the 22nd annual Worcester Diocesan Catholic Men’s Conference to enjoy each other’s presence.
They applauded for Msgr. Thomas J. Sullivan and Angelo Guadagno, previous conference organizers, who retired from that ministry after years of service.
“We thank them for setting the foundation for this awesome experience of faith,” Father Rodríguez told The Catholic Free Press.
The experience included Mass celebrated by Bishop McManus, talks, confessions, music, and time to meet with other participants, speakers and vendors.
Bishop McManus preached about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and freeing us through faith.
“We will, if we live and die in faith,” spend eternity in God’s house, he said. He urged worshippers to “look at the host and the chalice” and think of Jesus’ words: “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?”
“The bishop gave a nice homily,” said Deacon Christopher Conley, from St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Alton, New Hampshire. He said the Diocese of Worcester should keep offering the conference, and it is; next year’s is March 16.
“We look forward to it every year,” said Scott Carpenter, also from St. Katharine’s. “We wish they had something in New Hampshire like this. I don’t know that they do.”
“It’s always uplifting,” said fellow parishioner Edwin Aldarondo. “Everything is Class A.”
“I never met a bishop before,” said Ronald Cohen, after talking to Bishop McManus.
He said he attends St. Bernard Parish in Fitchburg and appreciated seeing people with traditional values at the conference.
“If you stay alone … you feel like the world’s turned against religion,” he said.
Preceding Mass was a talk about “Being Eucharistic Men,” by Father Chris Alar, of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge.
He told about eucharistic miracles, where scientific studies found human tissue and type AB blood in consecrated hosts.
Type AB+ is a universal receiver, he said; people with that blood type can receive from donors of any blood type.
Father Alar asked why Jesus would be a universal receiver rather than a universal donor. He answered: “He receives you into his body … the Church.”
He also showed a video of a monstrance with a host beating like a heart under stress.
“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “And only 30 percent of Catholics believe this?” Satanists believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, he said, adding that, to become a high wizard, one must be able to pick out a stolen consecrated host from among unconsecrated hosts.
Catholic priests must be men, like Jesus, Father Alar said.  Jesus is the groom, the Church is the bride and the Mass is a wedding. A man gives life-giving seed and a woman receives it, and nurtures it so she can give life.
“You are to be Christ in your family,” Father Alar told the men. “When you are another Christ, you are a eucharistic man.”
Adam Minihan and David Niles, of St. Michael Catholic Radio in Oklahoma, told of ways that men can serve their families.
“Children are the fruit of marriage, but they’re not your vocation,” Mr. Niles said. Your wife is your vocation, God’s path to lead you to heaven. Children need to know their parents love each other.
Men make a mistake when they talk badly about their wives, whom they vowed to honor all their lives, Mr. Minihan said.
Spiritually, men are heads of the house and must pray daily for their wives and children, and fast for them, Mr. Niles said.
He asked, “How do I give a relationship with Jesus” to my children? “I want them to get into heaven. … You want them to know that you pray.” Listeners applauded.
Mr. Minihan talked about teaching children about saints. For the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, he buys his sons tools and shows the boys how to use them, he said. This communicates the dignity of work and the importance of finishing a project and inspires conversation about St. Joseph and Jesus.
Mr. Niles talked about the purpose of a home’s rooms, and said a living room is a space to be with people – so he doesn’t have a television there.
Work also needs to be done, without expectation of reward, so Mr. Minihan leads his sons in “mom missions” – doing chores so their mother can relax or do something else. His daughter came up with a “Daddy mission” – bringing her hard-working father and brothers water to drink.
Jesus became vulnerable and emptied himself, Msgr. James P. Moroney, pastor of St. Cecilia Parish in Leominster, said in his talk about confession. To confess, we need to admit our littleness and surrender to God’s will, he said.
Conference participants reiterated lessons imparted.
“The conference is great, especially during Lent,” said Deacon Peter Richardson, of All Saints Parish in Haverhill. “It challenges us to be the spiritual leaders of our families as men.”
John Viola, of Holy Family of Nazareth Parish in Leominster, spoke about “getting closer to the Lord … I need to talk to him every day.”
Thomas Ferrazzano, of St. Boniface Parish in Lunenburg, said he has attended for years – except during the pandemic. He said that this year there was so much – “the personal presence, the speakers, you get to participate.”
Peter Ingemi was collecting participants’ prayer requests for the radio show “Your Prayer Intentions” on WQPH 89.3 FM.

Editor’s note: To buy conference CDs, DVDs or flash drives contact George Willett at gwillett1812@gmail.com or 781-849-0406.

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After years of pain he heard the words ‘welcome home’

By Maria LeDoux
Special to The CFP

Jeff Joaquin’s hope of joining the NFL was ruined by alcohol, drugs, and abortion, but by God’s mercy he lives to tell the tale. 
Mr. Joaquin grew up in a loving home in Dartmouth and his parents taught him to “love, serve, and fear God.” After his older brother had a “shotgun” wedding, he knew he could never do the same or his mother would “castrate” him, Mr. Joaquin said half-jokingly. 
He suffered from addiction to porn, alcohol, and drugs at a young age. At 17, he received a phone call from his girlfriend at the time who informed him that she was pregnant. He hung up the phone and called her the next day with his plan. Without asking her how she felt or what she wanted to do, he drove her and his unborn baby to an abortion clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, where he wouldn’t be recognized. 
Instead of “thanking God for the greatest gift he could bless humans with, I was more interested in football … my heart was broken,” said Mr. Joaquin.   
He stayed in the car without air conditioning in the hot summer heat on the third Friday in July of 1987. “What a coward,” he thought of himself after the fact. “I couldn’t even go in with her.” He remembers looking up to God, or the roof of the car, as he recalls, and asking, “Is this what hell is going to feel like?”
He broke up with his girlfriend the next day. He started studying at Worcester Polytechnic Intitute, played football like he planned, and was destined to go to the NFL. However, instead of waiting in the locker room for the NFL recruiter who was “taking too long,” Mr. Joaquin left, without meeting him, to do drugs with friends. 
A few years after graduating from college, Mr. Joaquin had hit his lowest point.
It was at 1 a.m. in the den of his parents’ home when Mr. Joaquin called his brother in despair thinking he was dying from a cocaine-induced heart attack. When his brother said he was going to call 911, Mr. Joaquin declined and said, “if God is real then he’s going to come visit me. And if not I’m going to see him and probably not for very long.” It was that evening that he felt “Jesus enter into [his] life.” He woke up the next morning pleading for God to “put the pieces back together.”
Mr. Joaquin got married at 30 years old and carried the wounds of his past with him. After getting married, he and his wife tried to conceive a child, however, they faced negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test. They went to a fertility clinic and were able to have one child, a daughter.
At this point in his life, instead of an addiction to drugs, he became a workaholic. He recalls one day sitting in church with his wife and daughter when a man got up to speak about “authentic male leadership,” about men who “pray with, eat with, and sacrifice for their family.” After one look from his wife, Mr. Joaquin knew that this was a program he had to participate in. The program was Paradisus Dei. He exclaimed that it “single handedly changed my life.”
Mr. Joaquin went to confession after many years. He confessed to the priest about the abortion when he was a teenager. After an hour and 15 minutes, Mr. Joaquin recalls tearfully exiting the confessional and giving the crying priest a hug. This priest said, “Welcome home son.”
He spent much more time in church and praying. He acknowledged how hard it was to conceive a child. He asked God, “Why can’t I have a son?” The answer was like God “hit” him and he knew that his aborted baby was a son, and named him Jonathan Andrew. “I fell on the ground and cried for two hours,” said Mr. Joaquin.  
He knew he had to share his pain and abortion story with his wife – a 5-foot-4-inch, 120-pound woman who he was “scared to death” of – but who “helped carry the burden.” 
The next step was to call the high school girlfriend and apologize. After nearly 30 years, he called her. She forgave him. 
“What’s next?” Mr. Joaquin asked himself. Knowing it would be hard, he knew he had to go out and tell the world his story. He wanted to connect with people who may have had an abortion to help them heal in their journey. 
He stated, “This is God’s love story, and I am a broken pencil.”
The love story he told was appreciated by men at the conference.
Mr. Joaquin “spoke very much to the men, the way men think,” commented Leonard Pacek, of Christ the King and Our Lady of Czestochowa parishes in Worcester.
“It touched me very much as a parent, advising my daughters,” Gabriel Muiruri, of the African community at St. Andrew the Apostle Mission in Worcester, said. “I have tried to counsel some men” about how to talk to their daughters.
He said that, at the school in Kenya where he taught, two pregnant students, his neighbors, died when they had abortions.

– Jeff Joaquin’s YouTube channel is  www.youtube.com/@JeffMJoaquin/featured.

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‘Bear’ Woznick: Don’t apologize for manliness

By Maria LeDoux
Special to The CFP

From John Wayne to C.S. Lewis to St. Augustine to the book of Psalms and the Gospel of John, “Bear” Woznick’s talk, titled “12 Rules of Manliness,” opened the Catholic Men’s Conference in Worcester Saturday morning.
Mr. Woznick holds many titles. He is a husband and father of four, a world champion surfer, a CPA, and a current student studying for a master’s degree in theology. Additionally, he is also a Benedictine Oblate in Hawaii, a television and radio host with programs airing on EWTN, the Armed Forces Network, Amazon Prime, and Sirius FM, and the author of the Amazon best seller, “A Surfing Guide to the Soul” and “Deep Adventure: The Way of Heroic Virtue.”
Speaking to hundreds of men, Mr. Woznick offered tips and ways for men to live up to their potential and “be men” with the foundation of the theological (faith, hope, and love) and cardinal (temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude) virtues.
One of the first rules of manliness is to “be a cowboy.”
“Stop apologizing for your manliness,” he stated. Mr. Woznick referenced John Wayne, an actor best known for his role in “old Westerns,” by quoting him saying, “you were born a boy, you got to become a man.”
Mr. Woznick asserted that men must become servant leaders.
He repeated the words of St. Augustine, “We make the times,” referring to the social culture of particular societies and the world as a whole. “Tough times make for tough men. Hard times make for hard men. Hard men make for soft times. And soft men are made for hard times,” he continued.
Acknowledging the balance between being tough and loving, Mr. Woznick told the crowd about his wife’s love of Starbucks and said, “I bet Jesus would be there doing a poetry reading … he will say, ‘I won’t be your truth, I will be the truth.’”
Speaking to the men directly, Mr. Woznick said, “Tough men, you’re made out of mud. You are meant to be tough to soften your heart … to be a real man is to be a gentleman.”
Another rule of manliness is to treat women with dignity. Mr. Woznick asserts, “to know about a man is to know how he treats women.” According to Mr. Woznick, the “free love” movement that made living together and the birth control pill a social norm was a trap for women, “cheapening” their dignity. He continued, “What makes for a feminine man? One who gives in to his desires.”
Mr. Woznick discussed the unique role of a father.
“What higher calling is there than to make someone who will live forever?” he asks the crowd. Because God’s will and love are connected, when you are “really in God’s will you can be a part of what God is doing,” he said.
Mr. Woznick called upon the older men to teach the younger men. He used the analogy of an eagle that has tattered wings as it ages but molts those feathers becoming weak and vulnerable but then grows new ones and the eagle’s “youth is renewed.”
More rules of manliness, according to Mr. Woznick are to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, know your faith, be physically and spiritually fit, be dangerous with a moral ground to stand on, don’t be a lone wolf - have a pack, and pray.
He concluded by asking the crowd of men to stand and repeat in a boisterous tone “Viva Cristo Rey!” - Long live Christ the king!

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