You want to really understand you got to pick up the book you got to pick up
If you wanna really understand, you gotta pick up the book, you gotta pick up the book and read about this.
This is how we talk death.
Talk about something that you don't understand. Everybody got their own master plan. You ain't got a master plan, you can't talk to God.
God speak at you? Oh, you ain't ready for that.
God's gonna make you do everything you're supposed to do.
This is why we have to master.
Sit back and walk about that.
moment of grace for them for that whole day or maybe even for the whole month
you never know so we want to give them the fullness so we need to be filled up
ourselves focused ready to go
God, please let me do the right thing.
We sell drugs, we zip it up, we smoke weed, we do all this stuff.
All the brothers in the book, this is how we give it up.
Brothers want to try to do the right thing.
We was all backwards. We was all forwards.
Sometimes we don't understand
because we don't want to talk.
We talk and I meant to. I meant to was God.
Where are we in Miami right now?
Should I come to Miami?
Uh, actually, the water is good.
Sometimes when we find somebody who doesn't have a home,
we give them our business card for the shelter.
And we tell them to come and see us and sometimes they do and it's we love it when we see a man here
Then he comes to our shelter and he stays with us. It's like
beautiful beautiful, so when a guy leaves
As soon as the room opens up three o'clock that afternoon the first person to call gets the room
So call any day, but you know if you want to just keep calling every day if you really want to get in there
Typically, we stop at this place, especially in the summertime, there's many people in
this corridor because many people travel to the train station through this area.
People who are in need know that and there's many people to beg from, so they come here.
So we stop here first and then we go right to the train station.
After college, I wound up getting a job in Manhattan,
and I worked down by Wall Street for ten years of my life.
I was in the World Trade Center every day for ten years of my life,
and I became a very successful businessman.
So much so that I was able to retire when I was 32 years old
I had every gadget you could imagine I own limousines and Porsches had all the money I needed and
I decided that I really wanted to pursue a music career
I had already had my own recording studio and I was writing rap and R&B music with a friend of mine and
We were flying out to Los Angeles quite often
Hanging out with movie stars and I had everything
God was for people who were like down on their luck.
He wasn't for guys like me. I didn't need God.
Just go tell Michael that you have everything.
You have to get some of that stuff, so...
So to appease my mom and to take a nice little vacation in Europe,
I decided to go to Medjugorje.
Thanks be to God.
Because here in Medjugorje,
through the heart of the Blessed Mother.
I met Jesus for the first time in my life
and I absolutely fell in love.
How do you say this again?
Eji.
Asila.
Doi.
Viya.
Pia.
Mi.
Se kundo.
Or two.
Now, may you take it off?
No.
Oh, you're waiting for the booth.
It's been thinking.
I'm going to go.
All right.
And look, look here.
Can you believe it?
An actual phone book for back in the day.
That's just in case I got to hop in there.
I got to hop in there.
Extremely.
I'm super proud!
Stir it to the left, stir it to the right, fries in the kitchen, they cookin' it nice.
Yeah, do you want to be good?
I hope you guys have some more fights.
How many more is that?
Please feel free, there's a number of guides, it's going to be seven, we've got a number of volunteers, including the fries.
You need something to drink, or a few moments of food will be served.
Lunch will be until one o'clock, and there's a vital study from one to one photo,
which you're welcome to join us for as well.
Come along, she'll pray for me
Hold me close and I'll be on the scene
Drive away the darkness, clean me peace
With the lovely look in the light of your face
And it was while I was there in seminary that I read the life of St. Francis and when I read his life I said wow
This was a man that that lived the gospel, you know radical just
completely for Jesus and
I remember I went to see a priest who was like my spiritual father and
He asked me what book I was reading and I told him I was reading about France of Assisi
And he said, well, how does it make you feel?
And I said, well, father, I could never live like him.
And he said, why not?
And then not long after that, I read a book about the
friars in New York.
And I thought, gosh, they live.
a bit like Saint Francis. What is the goal
of the Capitians who are a form
of the Franciscans and
its goal was to follow Christ
through Saint Francis. Saint Francis
is one of the unique geniuses
of religion in the world.
a simple, direct, basically uneducated man, who somewhere or another, because of his extreme
holiness and love for Christ, the world at his time, and ever since people have seen him,
as a mirror of Christ.
Not just Catholic, not just Christians.
Sometimes, people who are writers, who are very critical of the Church, they will write about St. Francis.
One of the things that I love about Saint Francis is that he didn't have a big plan.
It wasn't like, oh, I will start off and I will have a big religious order.
He just tried to respond to Jesus.
And I think that's the thing I love about Saint Francis, he's authentic.
He's always trying to be a genuine person, you know?
And that's a challenge.
He never wanted to be somebody different on the outside than he was on the inside.
And so he struggled like anybody.
So when he building the church and he realized after a while, God is doing something greater than me.
You know, God is doing something that's bigger than me and I don't know what to do about it.
So I need to find out if this is from God.
And the only way he knew, and that's what I love about St. Francis, very simple.
You know, I have to go to the Pope.
But he's a little kind of scraggly guy, you know, in like the year 1209, going to see
the Pope who was probably one of the most important people in the world at that time.
Besides the Emperor.
And so, he gets in to see the Pope, which in itself was a miracle,
and he asks to see him, and the Pope just kind of dismisses him because he looks terrible,
and eventually he approves the rule because he has a dream of this little guy
You know in in kind of ragged clothes
Holding up the church
Francesco's gone crazy, you know, he's gonna deliver in the country. He's got nothing. He's begging for food and
Yeah, he's happy. He's building a church
Why? I think the gospel is a provocation.
Why would somebody choose in 2014 to give up everything and to look like this, you know,
and to not get married and to not have material things?
Because Jesus is enough.
It's the same reason St. Francis could do it.
Because Jesus is enough. His love is enough.
Otherwise, how's it possible, you know?
Our community began in 1987. There were eight of us. All of us were finely professed
Franciscan friars, Capuchin Franciscans, and our desire was to
to live a life which is more faithful to the inspiration and to the rule of St. Francis.
So Father Benedict Rochelle, who many people knew, was one of our group, and quite frankly,
perhaps it would not have happened without him,
When I had told him this about that we probably wouldn't have done this without him, he says he wouldn't have done it without us.
And so all eight of us, we needed one another.
And it was somewhat challenging and somewhat frightening in the sense that we were leaving something quite large.
But we had great conviction.
that this was necessary for the renewal of the church
and the renewal that at then Pope John Paul II,
who was still young in his pontificate, was calling
religious back to the original inspirations of their group so
we believe that we were following really the
ultimately the call of the Holy Father to do this.
Hey Sal.
Hey, how are you?
Good.
Five times a day the friars will come early in the morning, six in the morning we start
our prayers, then we have the holy sacrifice of the mass later on in the morning at noon.
and in the evening and at night before we go out.
Some of the people that may even come to our soup kitchens may even have an apartment,
may even have enough money to go out and get something to eat themselves.
But they're lacking socialization and sometimes they'll come to the door asking for a cup
of coffee but they really want to have a conversation and a number
of our people come to the door and they always make it a point of asking that the brother
say a prayer with them.
I just prayed a little bit, because I had a few days where he was going to be out in the street because he was in the house and his family has to leave.
So I just prayed with him, but more talk is going to help a lot better. You know what I'm talking about.
It's $17 million, $17 million worth.
May I kiss?
To receive power and riches
Wisdom and strength
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
I knew the King of Angels was victorious.
Similar to the Cappeshans, our community would emphasize contemplative prayer.
So we have two hours of quiet prayer during the day, one in the morning,
and then in the afternoon, a holy hour of adoration before Jesus and the Blessed Sacrament.
and also that our life would be characterized very much by our service of the poor.
In 1987, when the community began here, it was the parish that had closed.
And this area of the South Bronx was very devastated at that time.
All of the buildings around us now are newer buildings.
When we moved in here 20 years ago, 23 years ago,
it was just mostly empty lots and burnt-out buildings.
Even the St. Anthony's shelter next door was just a shell of a building, no windows or anything.
And so we've seen the neighborhood transformed a lot, eight friars living here.
We are the hoods in the hood.
It's a neighborhood that has changed a lot but is still marked a lot by drugs and by violence.
We have a number of works out of the friary here besides the homeless shelter.
We have a food distribution helping about 100 families each month.
And many of the families in our neighborhood would be people who...
Just need a little extra help to get by.
Many of them would be helped by the government.
But the little bit that we're able to help seems to make the difference for me.
Thanks for watching!
We're at Our Lady of the Angels Friary, which used to be a convent of sisters that ran this school,
this parochial school for St. Adelbert's Parish.
And when our community started, the friars took over this whole complex.
So the rectory became St. Crispin Friary.
the convent became Our Lady of the Angels, Friary.
And the Friars eventually, when the school closed,
they started running the school as a youth center
that invited the children from the neighborhood to come in
and to have a place to do their homework,
to have a place to pray, to have a place to have fun.
I think the program actually started, Legend says, is that we got a donation of a bunch
of mattresses and they just put the mattresses down on the ground and the kids came in once
a week and jumped on the mattresses and that's how the program started. Now we have this beautiful
chapel that we built.
And we have a Bible study on Tuesday night and all these things.
And so being here has been amazing as a young priest
because it really has been teaching me what it means to be a father.
And not a physical father, but a spiritual one.
So what do we do here for the children?
We try to...
encourage growth within them.
These kids are so smart, but often they don't know it.
Often nobody's ever really encouraged them to learn
and to really bring out their full potential.
And so two times a week, we invite the kids.
to come in. We have one friar and one layman who are excellent tutors. We're
just like cheerleaders. We just tell them they're doing a great job and that's
really all we can do. If they have a question about algebra or something, we
just send them to Brother Seraphim because we don't really know what we're
talking about.
The question is how many things are there in here?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, that's 36 numbers.
So there are 36 possible outcomes in your old two dice.
But at least we create a place where they can come and have some quiet time.
You know, a lot of times their homes are somewhat loud or there's no good place to study.
So that's we try to encourage the growth of their intellect.
And then, of course, we also try to encourage the growth of their spiritual life, that they
might come to know God, know how much He loves them, know that and all the difficult things
that they deal with.
But these kids deal with it a lot.
I mean, there's broken families, there's incest, there's all kinds of sexual sins, unfortunately.
Sexual deviancy.
of adult people in their life and their children's life that ends up affecting them.
It's something you hear about in private conversations, in confession, that breaks
your heart.
And there's nothing in a way there's not much you can do about it.
And that's maybe the most violent or horrific thing that I hear about is this kind of taking
advantage of innocence.
the blessings of this past year and maybe the grace that we need for the summer that lies before us.
I'm saying, I really, I heard one boy saying to another, I really need the chapel time.
I need to get in the chapel, you know, I need that time.
And I was really amazed by that.
Sometimes people ask me, oh, you worked at the youth center in the inner city.
That must be really tiring and difficult work.
And I'm like, I don't know, I played basketball the other night, you know, we were throwing
footballs around.
I mean, like, it's fun, it's more than anything else.
And I get to pray and hang out with kids and have a good time.
And then on top of all of that, to see God working in our life is really quite beautiful.
Yay!
You can be enough!
All right, so we've got some ice cream out there for the last night.
Whoo!
I don't know that one's on small terrain.
That's how it was back.
I really love it.
Oh, shit!
This is my day one bro. We've been in China since middle school. My man Big Sean
Stain's making hit, like, what?
And this is the girl, this is the girl named Maya.
We seen her in the show Maya Miguel.
Maya, look at that.
Anchor is joined.
Let's go, let's go, let's go.
Maya, look at that.
This is a little cheetah, I can't believe it.
What are you saying?
You call me what?
What's that?
Oh, she does have a...
You still haven't said why you had the spoon in your bag.
That doesn't, that doesn't, that doesn't, you never know what you need to do for a change, but don't, you got to, why, why I have it, I mean, I know that, that's,
because they gave it a
All right, thank you.
All right, man, support mayonnaise.
Support mayonnaise.
Don't forget.
The bus riding north of Chicago
The Catholic Underground is...
Yeah, it's a part of our carrism and yeah, and the whole point of Catholic underground is to bring once again people closer to Jesus
Through adoration and through prayerful music. That's the first half of the Catholic underground. The second half is
Where there's a group downstairs and they play Christian or Catholic music to kind of help those who are
In a setting to find some way shape or form to to find something positive to listen to or are just
Partaking and positive Catholic culture
Well, at night it's only slow to stay
Like a slow, when it first hits the ground
And it's only as a mountain bed
To my tall, no I wouldn't be bound
It's a half-drawn fist in the face
It's a love and candy of a throne
You want to run to each end
When the moon goes dim
And the day of the night
So young
I woke out into the street with short shadows from the moon
where my electric lights are off
And the girls, girls, girls,
Pop the cowers and the cold
And a few of third shifters crossed the street
to fix the causing.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Woo!
That was awesome, that was awesome.